Experiment and Explore

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Pat:
Like any other business practice, you have to be willing to test new ideas. So how is that done with customer experience?

Gabs:
First, we need to go really broad, to go narrow, to really understand what are we going to experiment with. So we hypothesize and it's all about being backed by data. We need to understand what is it that we're actually going after. Um, we also then focus on a leap of faith assumption. And that's focused on what must be true for our experiment to be a success.

Pat:
We'll dive into experimentation on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Pat:
Hello everyone! I'm Pat Gibbons, host of this episode of The CX Leader Podcast, and thank you for listening. You know, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader and on this podcast, we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you develop great programs and deliver amazing experiences for your customers. You know, while there is some historical debate on this, Aristotle is widely considered one of the early inventors of the scientific method, the way which we observe, hypothesize, experiment, and gather data. Experimentation is key to logically understanding our world. And just like any other business practice, experimenting with CX can help you gain insights on what works best for your organization in delivering those amazing experiences. Our guest today leads an award winning program and is going to tell us more about how they experiment with CX. Gabs Dracopoulos is the head of global Customer Success at Intuit, the global financial technology platform. Gabs, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Gabs:
Thanks for having me, Patrick. Excited to be here and share my experience.

Pat:
Well, we're really excited to have you. And I want to start off with congratulations, because Awards International is probably the premier group that gives out awards in the CX community. And for several years, I think you guys have been an award winner. Is that right?

Gabs:
We we have been super proud of my team and the work that we do at Intuit. Uh, my team was CX team of the year with the international um, awards, we've also won gold in Best Customer service. And just recently, a few months ago, won bronze in Best customer experience strategy.

Pat:
That is it's really impressive. And, you know, full disclosure, we're a partner with Awards International. We support them. And it's not you know we have no influence on the awards first of all. But we just think it's really a good thing for CX. It really is aligned with what we try to do on the podcast is we want to get good stories out in the CX community that people can learn from each other, and that's that's what we do here. And that's what Awards International is doing, is to try to hold up those companies that are really doing it right. So I'm glad to see that you guys participate in that and are willing to share your story by garnering awards and being on podcasts as well. So, you know, we always like to give a little context, and I think you've got a terrific background in CX. Tell us a little bit about the steps of your career and how you got into CX.

Gabs:
Sure thing. I started in a contact center, so I started my career on the front line, at the cold face of customer service at the time, many, many years ago. And I moved into software development. And the reason why I moved into software development, because there was a real opportunity for me to take the voice of the customer into how we build software. I'm not a software engineer, but the impact that I was able to make was around bringing the voice of the customer into the development life cycle. Having spent so many years in the software space, developing software, I moved over to the commercial side of the business around sales and marketing, which was absolutely brand new for me. It was a different way of seeing the customer experience. And so I was given a magic wand. At that time, I didn't know what customer experience was, but I was given a wand in a technology company to say there's this new thing called customer experience. We want you to bring it to this company and help us understand what we need to do. Here's two headcount. Off you go. So that was my real start into becoming a CX practitioner. And that was around ten plus years ago, and I have not looked back. It's been such an amazing ride.

Pat:
Yeah, I love that. And I have to kind of, you know, chuckle because we've had plenty of people in close to 300 episodes that we've had. Of course, you know, as we were saying before, you know, we started the interview, nobody comes in here and says, well, I studied it for four years, and then I got a graduate degree in CX. No they either were were asked to head it up, which sounds like your case. You know, or in some ways they got a taste of it through being in a contact center or being in a research group or whatever, and aspired to it. And but whatever it is in this industry, it's it's just great to see the energy because most of those people do look back and say, man, I have found my place. And so and it's great to have that kind of energy amongst the leaders in our, in our program. So, you know, today we're, we're talking about experimentation in CX. And so it's kind of a, you know, an interesting approach because I think for so many businesses, not just in CX, but many departments, speed is a big thing, like we're trying to get things done and we're trying to, you know, understand the customer. And too often we probably go on gut feel and so forth. So I was hoping you could kind of frame it up for us a little bit at Intuit. And in your role, what does experimentation mean? How does that apply to your role in CX?

Gabs:
It's, it's a great question. And Intuit is a place that really nurtures the design thinking mindset. And we can go and learn design thinking. We can learn other methodologies and frameworks around Lean Startup and how to really move with speed by thinking about how we solve problems differently. Design thinking really comes from the heart as well, because you need to apply deep customer obsession into whatever it is that you choose to do. And at Intuit, I've really found my home here with the way of thinking of design thinking. Intuit is embedded and founded on a methodology called Customer Driven Innovation and Design for delight. And our customer driven innovation framework really ensures that we identify a big, hairy problem that needs to be solved and we're equipped to be able to solve it. And then that's going to bring durable competitive advantage. And so that's the looking for the problem. And then it's the approach on how we solve problems which is generating that deep customer empathy. It's then going really broad to come super narrow on your ideas, which allows you to move super fast. And then it's rapid experimentation. And the rapid is really, really important. And why I go through that framework is because every employee is empowered to drive innovation through design thinking with our methodology of CDI and D4D.

Pat:
So it is clearly a part of the culture, right?

Gabs:
It is embedded. Our founder, Scott Cook who's also sitting on our board 30 plus years ago really developed this company based on this framework. And it's lived through the company through that whole time. It's evolved over time, but it's not wavered. And that's what it has allowed us in order to drive great success for the business through customer experience and customer obsession.

Pat:
So it sounded like kind of at the beginning of the framework. Part of it is kind of looking for those issues, looking for problems. How do you go about that? You know, what are the methods that you use to learn from your customers or learn internally or learn from competition? Um, can you give us a little detail on those?

Gabs:
Sure. We take the typical usual fashion that we all learn around competitive benchmarking. Keep an eye on your competition. Uh, measure your performance. Continue to look at your operational metrics. But the key differentiator for Intuit is that we have this process called Follow Me Homes. It sounds really creepy, I know, and yes, at times we actually do follow customers home because what we want to do is we want to see customers in their own environment. And our customers being small businesses, run their businesses from the garage, from the kitchen table, run their businesses while they're in bed on their mobile phones as well. So we're not following customers home to bed on their mobile phones.

Pat:
Okay.

Gabs:
Um, but we are following customers home to observe them in their own environment. There's so much a survey can actually tell you. But it takes away observation of behavior. And that's the key with our Follow Me Home methodology, is that we want to observe behavior and we make decisions and rapid experimentation based on behavior, not data that we observe in a survey.

Pat:
Yeah. So I find it really interesting. We've had some other guests on the podcast that have used kind of the ethnographic approach of, you know, we want to watch customers use our product, and we've had hospitals and we've had the manufacturer of faucets from Delta Faucet. They have a really interesting approach. Are there things I'm just curious if there are things that when you saw the way customers were using your solutions that were just flat out surprises, and you give us an example of something where you're like, I never would have thought that that was being done.

Gabs:
Yeah. So we're an accounting software platform, and we're here to solve accounting problems for customers. And so when we observe customers in their environment using our platform one of the follow me homes that I did very early when I started was with a customer who had our QuickBooks platform for quite a long time, but through observation, managing their books, still through Excel, whilst having software that allows them to do that, and they're paying this money for a monthly subscription, they're still defaulting to what they know best and that for this particular customer was Excel. So that was a real highlight for me of, well, why are they doing that? It's because they defaulted to what they knew. Why did they default to that? Because using the software was new for them. They were older. So software generally and the digital environment was something brand new for them. So they moved to the cloud, but they didn't know how to break through to the cloud with their behavior. So through a number of other follow me homes, we actually found that learning our software was a big barrier to drive adoption and usage in our software. And so through that process, we ran a rapid experimentation on how do we make it easier for customers to use our software. And that spiraled into an onboarding program that we run successfully today.

Pat:
Oh, wow. Okay. So and I can get it because it's, you know, sometimes, you know, they always say anytime you have a platform, you use a fraction of its capability. And sometimes you look at things and say, I know there's an easier way to do this, but I'm just used to this. So you've identified that's kind of one of those big hairy problems. And so then in going through the rapid experimentation, I mean, it makes it sound like you're just cranking out ideas, but I'm sure there's more to it than that. Can you tell us a little more about how that works?

Gabs:
Yeah. So with our rapid experimentation, first we need to go really broad, to go narrow, to really understand what are we going to experiment with. And we use a number of frameworks in order to get down to the 1 or 2 ideas that we're going to experiment with. So we hypothesize and it's all about being backed by data. We in our hypothesis it needs to be data backed. We need to understand what is it that we're actually going after. We also then focus on a leap of faith assumption. And that's focused on what must be true for our experiment to be a success, or for us to measure whether the experiment failed. And so in this particular situation around onboarding and driving adoption in our product, we really focused on a couple of different things. So how do we offer a a guided setup session with a customer and take them through our software, really break it down for them with a hand-holding piece? Through this. Our leap of faith assumption was that customers want to spend time with us to learn our product. That was number one. So we approached this by going through an onboarding document with them. It wasn't interactive. It wasn't engaging. It was a little bit by death by PowerPoint, and customers were not engaged. And we saw that adoption was not actually happening based on our hypothesis. So we had to go back to the drawing board. So what we did is we tested demand. We went back to, well, we're actually trying to solve the problem before we understand the quantity and qualify the program itself or the demand. And so we've got in our rapid experimentation, a fakeo test and a fakeo test is when customers are in our product. You can put a fake web page or a fake link up to say, would you like to learn more about how to use the software? And by clicking that link, we're testing behavior, which tells us we're testing demand. So we were able to quantify the demand for people wanting setup and from there we then continue to build out the program.

Pat:
Um, really interesting.

Announcer:
It's that time of year where CX professionals can earn the recognition they deserve. Applications are now being accepted for the 2024 US Customer Experience Awards. Finalists and winners will be named in 22 different CX categories celebrating a particular aspect of CX excellence, and you could submit an entry in multiple categories. This could be the chance for your team to finally get the recognition they deserve. To find out more and submit your entry, go to usacxa.com.

Pat:
So I'm curious. And as you take on, you know, this experimentation process I guess I'm wondering, does it get frustrating because it's it's not like you, you know, every one of your hypotheses works out just as you plan. In fact are there times where you kind of celebrate something where it either fails or succeeds just because it's narrowing down the options?

Gabs:
Yeah. Celebration of failures is as important as celebrating success. And so one of the failures for us in, in this process is we went down the path of we need to contact customers. So we'll get a list of customers that are ripe for onboarding and we will contact them. We found a very low percentage of these customers were actually picking up the phone. We thought this was going to be the next great thing. We're going to call them. They're going to go through a session with us on the phone.

Pat:
Who wouldn't want to help you, right?

Gabs:
Yeah, exactly.

Pat:
Who wouldn't want to help you?

Gabs:
All right. Um, and because they weren't picking up the phone, we weren't able to make an impact through our sessions. So we we unpacked. Why are they not picking up the phone? They're disengaged. They're not using our product. They don't want to talk to us because they're disengaged. So that for us was a failure point. And we needed to go back to the drawing board. Calling customers wasn't working, and we needed to celebrate that because we learned that that didn't work.

Pat:
Yeah. So yeah, I don't want to keep focusing on failures, although I think our audience loves it because we all go through it. What are some times where you set a hypothesis and then tried a few things and had a success or, wow, you know, this really made a difference. Do you have an example?

Gabs:
Yeah. So sessions these are all continue on the theme of the guided sessions and, and setting customers up with on onboarding.

Pat:
Right.

Gabs:
The next approach that we looked at is how do we then add guided sessions to our marketing material through our first time use email series? So those other moments where customers are engaging with us. Let's get a link and some information and make it available in the first time use email series. We thought it was going to be amazing. We thought we're going to drive a great click through rate. Um, we also saw that the engagement in the potential clicks that we were hoping through this email series was also extremely low. Customers are also disengaged. They're not getting the emails because it's going through the spam filters or they're not reading the emails either. So for us, that was another failure point where we learned that very quickly, in a short time, boxed, rapid experimentation. We were able to throw it in the bin, celebrate it going in the bin and move on to another piece of work. So what we then did is we learned we need to maybe not look at calling, not look at emails. We need to put something in the product. And so as customers were actually signing up to our product, not already a customer, they were coming through to buy our product. That's where we put the option to choose a guided setup session. We captured them at the time they were signing up, and that is our highest percentage of channel bookings for our guided setup session now.

Pat:
Wow. That's interesting. And at the beginning of the process, would would you have thought that that would be the best solution?

Gabs:
No, we went straight for um, they have to be a customer using our product now. Right. And where we landed is going all the way to the start of the funnel at the time that they sign up.

Pat:
Yeah, I assume too, with your team, there probably has to be a discipline just mentally about not going into this with a bias. You know, you can't go in saying, okay, we've come up with ten ideas, but really, I know this is going to be the one. I mean, how do you mentally prepare yourself for that process?

Gabs:
We we have a motto around not falling in love with the solution. And it's really hard at times because you can become attached to your own idea. And so through the process of design for delight we encourage everyone to approach it in an open mind and challenge each other. Why do we think that's the case? And it can't be gut feel? We need to be data backed and that helps us take the bias out of our thinking and ensures that we don't fall in love with the solution.

Pat:
Yeah. Have you found… Are there certain technologies, whether it be, you know, AI is of course, the big, big buzz now. Um, you know, other technologies that have helped you in that process, either with speed or accuracy or, you know, any factors that have helped you implement your your framework?

Gabs:
Yeah. So AI is a really interesting one, and we're all still learning on how that can help us in our every day. It can help us from getting an aggregating and sorting through data. It can also help us with our own productivity and efficiency as well how we're looking at it at the moment. Um, in Customer Success is that we are working with our analytics teams to build a number of machine learning and AI models that are going to help us get access to the data that we need faster, so we're able to go narrow even quicker and get things out to customers sooner. It's the filtering through the data that actually takes a lot of time and energy. And that's where we're finding AI and machine learning really being powerful for us.

Pat:
You know, obviously you've got a culture and discipline around this, you know, for other CX leaders that may say, oh, you know what? We we don't have the time for that. You know, we've I think we have a good idea of what our customers want. And besides, we do a lot of surveys and things. Um, so we we kind of know the ways to improve. What would you say to them?

Gabs:
Surveys have a time and place. And so it's customer behavior that we really need to focus on. I think for myself, CX leaders can get really stuck seeking perfection in the customer experience. And so we need to make sure that we don't let great get in the way of good, because that can slow us down even if we're trying to move fast. Iterating, learning, failing is what's most important. And my motto with my team is progress over perfection. Don't seek out perfection. Perfection comes with iteration.

Pat:
Yeah, yeah. You know, this has been a fascinating discussion, a great framework. But now we are at the point of our podcast where we always ask our guests to give us some take home value. And that is, you know, one tip or, you know, a summary, it might be something you've already mentioned, but one thing that you would suggest that a CX leader might be able to use in their business in pretty short order.

Gabs:
Yeah. As, as CX, I mentioned before that it comes from the heart. And yes, it can bring a lot of bias. Data is key. When presenting anything around the customer experience. Removing that bias and personal opinion is really important. And you always need to put the voice of the customer or the employee at the table. And so, in the words of our founder Scott Cook, we mustn't be scared of obsoleting ourselves and stuff that we actually do. That's how we're going to innovate. So we always must think about the customer and be obsessed about the customer in everything that we do. But the key take home for me is that has to be backed by data. If it's not backed by data, it's someone's opinion.

Pat:
It's excellent advice and obviously great wisdom that has set a great culture at your company that I just love how it applies to to customer experience. So so really appreciate all your insights and how you've taken us through the framework. If you know, it's likely that there may be listeners that would like to continue the conversation or have some more discussion with you, is it okay if they reach out to you? Would LinkedIn be the best way?

Gabs:
Linkedin is the best way. I'm always open for a chat sharing experiences but also learning new things where forever learning so completely open.

Pat:
All right. It's great. And just for clarification, I better do a spelling for them so they can find you. So the last name d r a c o p o u l o s. Right?

Gabs:
That's it.

Pat:
Okay. Well, again Gabs, thank you so much for being on The CX Leader Podcast and for sharing your story.

Gabs:
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Pat:
Gabs Dracopoulos is head of customer success at Intuit. And if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email us at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember, give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review because your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listeners. And check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com. You can subscribe to the show. You'll find all our previous episodes. We are now approaching 300 episodes. You'll see our podcast series, a link to our blog which we update regularly, and of course contact information so you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader and we'll see you next time.

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