This episode features an interview with Carol Carpenter, CMO at VMware. In this episode, Carol talks about understanding your end user, how CX encompasses what customers see, think and feel, and how to enable customer success through a delightfully simple experience.
This episode features an interview with Carol Carpenter, CMO at VMware. In this episode, Carol talks about understanding your end user, how CX encompasses what customers see, think and feel, and how to enable customer success through a delightfully simple experience.
Quotes
*”I define customer experience here at VMware as what do we make our customers see, think and feel? What do they see, think, and feel as they experience the company, our products, our people, our support? How do they feel in that entire realm of experience? And that's why customer experience is much more than just a function.”
*”We're in a multi-cloud world. 70 to 80% of businesses are using more than one cloud. As a company, part of our brand promise here at VMware is we're going to simplify and help you decomplexify all the things you need to do across your application and infrastructure stack. It's pretty complicated when you have multiple clouds, you have multiple solutions. And our goal was to be the Switzerland, and frankly, the connectivity to help companies transform and move to the cloud and take advantage of all the cloud offers. So long way of saying that at VMware, we're looking for, how do we create the simplification? How do we make it so that customers have the security, the management, the resiliency, and the ability to move fast?”
*”At VMware, we're really committed to communities. A lot of people don't realize we actually have several open source projects. We have the founders of Kubernetes as part of our team. So we believe in the communities and the bottoms up approach, and that's a different type of experience and engagement that's required. So that's also an area where, as CMO, I have some influence and work with those teams pretty closely. Cause you can't market to those communities. You need to engage with them.”
Time Stamps
*[3:13] Carol’s journey to CMO at VMWare
*[12:08] How to stay ahead of the curve on CX
*[15:30] Partnering with customers to drive innovation
*[22:17] Advice for navigating change as a leader
*[27:07] Deciding what CX initiatives to pursue
*[28:29] Building trust with customers
*[30:25] Getting a 360° view of your CX
*[40:38] Predicting the future of CX
Bio
Carol Carpenter joined VMware in June 2020 as Chief Marketing Officer. As CMO, Carol is responsible for leading all aspects of the Global Marketing organization, which includes Corporate Marketing, Partner, Segment and Field Marketing. She brings to the role more than 25 years of technology sector experience. Most recently, she was Vice President, Product Marketing at Google Cloud.
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Links:
Connect with Carol on LinkedIn
Carol Carpenter: We're in a multi-cloud world. 70 to 80% of businesses are using more than one cloud. As a company, part of our brand promise here at VMware is we're going to simplify and help you decomplexify all the things you need to do across your application and infrastructure stack. It's pretty complicated when you have multiple clouds, you have multiple solutions. And our goal was to be the Switzerland, and frankly, the connectivity to help companies transform and move to the cloud and take advantage of all the cloud offers. So long way of saying that at VMware, we're looking for, how do we create the simplification? How do we make it so that customers have the security, the management, the resiliency, and the ability to move fast?
Producer: Hello and welcome to The Customer Experience Show! Today we’re talking with Carol Carpenter, CMO at VMWare. Carol has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry and leads all aspects of the global marketing organization in her current role. Before VMWare, she was Vice President of Product and Marketing at Google Cloud. There, she helped guide the transformation of Google Cloud to lead in the cloud space.
In this episode, Carol talks about understanding your audience, how CX encompasses what customers see, think and feel, and how to enable customer success through a simpler experience.
Phil Dillard: How do you enable your customers to do their jobs better? How do you make things easier? More efficient? How do you save them time? For Carol Carpenter, it’s all about providing a delightfully simple customer experience. Carol is Chief Marketing Officer at VMWare, a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps. And she knows how moving to the cloud and providing the right connectivity can literally transform a company. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Customer Experience Show. I'm your host, Phil Dillard. Today, we are blessed to have with us, Carol Carpenter, the CMO of VMware. How are you doing today, Carol?
Carol Carpenter: I'm doing great, Phil. Thanks for having me.
Phil Dillard: Thanks so much for making the time. It's really a really exciting to have you with us and really great to have a conversation about what you're doing in the world. When I look at your bio, I'm so excited to see the all the amazing things that you've done. And and what I hope to hear about what you're doing in the space. It's really exciting for a number of reasons to have you with us. And I'm curious how you describe yourself, your journey and how you came to be CMO of VMware.
Carol Carpenter: I feel really grateful. I've had some terrific mentors and supporters throughout my career. And I can't point to the, Hey I had a 15 year old, a 15 year old year plan coming out of business school or undergrad. That, that set me on my path. My career has not been linear. I have followed people. And it all started at Apple working for an incredible leader, a woman named Barbara who really taught me the value of customer experience and the value of customer promises. And they go very much hand in hand is as you probably know. And that really was some of the foundational way that I have approached marketing, that I've approached business. A lot of it started there and I've been very fortunate to work for so many great technology companies, small, large mid-size, I've played many different roles from marketing to general manager to CEO, and I think it makes me in particular, a stronger, better business-oriented, product-oriented CS.
Phil Dillard: And I totally agree. And that's why I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. I think you have a unique perspective, the way you described, a product oriented CMO who is leading into the customer experience at a very important company in the cloud space and the industry that you're in. And I think the product focus component is a lot. The different experiences are a lot. Can you just talk about your connection to the customer experience at V VMware? How do you see yourself in the role in the practice of that we're trying to permeate across an organization?
Carol Carpenter: Customer experience, as you and other guests have pointed out, it's about it's something everyone. In an organization needs to be responsible for. And I think we've done ourselves a disservice, frankly, by having customer success teams or specific, you know, they are the customer interface team or the CX team. 20 years ago, there were internet marketing teams, like how, you know, silly does that seem now? And I think we're going to look back and say, you know, that was really silly to have one dedicated team when it was everyone's responsibility. And I define customer experience here at VMware is how do we make our customers? What do we make them see, think and feel? What do they see, think, and feel as they experienced the company, our products, our people, our support, how do they feel in that entire realm of experience? And that's why, you know, I heard you say like, you know, customer experience is much more than just a function.
Phil Dillard: Sure. Absolutely. You know, I think lots of people, if you think about it in a linear way, it makes sense to go from customer service. We're solving problems to customer success, to we're anticipating problems, but we're putting that over there. Cause we don't do that. We're in sales. We don't do that. We're in product, right? That's for them to take care of, we make the product work. You take care of the customers, And then that, that evolution makes a lot of sense. But what's tricky, we found, is in the organizational culture. and in breaking down some of the barriers and the silos along the way. So, what I'm curious about is when you came into customer experience as a practitioner, how did you first get in get involved? And like, how the different roles that you had prepare you to knock down some of these silos a, in a pretty established organization?
Carol Carpenter: Yeah. So, I just got to tell you a quick story. So when I mentioned Apple and Barbara Cardello, this woman who was she was the VP of product marketing. And she, and apple at the time, this was, is before Steve jobs came back and the company was revived that's old days, but there was still this very strong culture of, "How do we delight our customers?" And there was also a strong culture, which I tend to disagree a little bit with around not asking your customers for, what they want. That customers are not able to tell you always, they can't always articulate what they need going forward. So you need to kind of anticipate. That there are two things here. So one is about how do you delight? And that comes down to, well, everyone now understands with SaaS products that you have to create an experience that they are going to, it's going to be sticky. It's going to be, create expansion, is going to create ongoing positive, you know, network effects. Everyone was so excited about like, oh, we land and we expand. Well, a lot of that was built in to the way that Apple really approached customers, which is, if you don't delight them - and this is with a P you know, think back. I mean, this is mid nineties, like piece of hardware. But if you don't delight them, you will not get that 12 X positive word of mouth. You are not going to get them to come back. and these were purchases, this wasn't like SaaS, where you're paying every month. This is, you know, you buy a new computer. I don't know, every five years, every four years. But I think that concept of delighting through the experience, and the experience being everything from how you buy it, how you open the box, how you set it up, was so important and proceeded all of these, a SaaS business models. And it's something that I have found has served me well, particularly in more of the product roles I've had, which is how do you make products to delight your customers? That, that surprise them in a positive way? And that, that there's something very powerful and magical there. So here at VMware, you know, we're, we as a company, we're in what we call our chapter three. And chapter three is, you know, that we're in a multi-cloud world. 70 to 80% of businesses are using more than one cloud. As a company, part of our brand promise here at VMware is we're going to simplify and help you decomplexify all the things you need to do across your application and infrastructure stack. It's pretty complicated when you have multiple clouds, you have multiple solutions. And our goal was to be the Switzerland, and frankly the connectivity to help companies really transform and really, you know, move to the cloud and take advantage of all the cloud offers. So long way of saying that at VMware, we're looking for, how do we create the simplification? How do we make it so that customers have the security, the management, the resiliency, and the ability to move fast, right? That's something we have spent time thinking really hard about what, which is our core brand promise is around the "and," that you can run your applications wherever you want. You can have the flexibility and choice. You can run them on premise. You can run them in the cloud. You can use virtual machines, you can use containers, you can develop at speed. You can run a waterfall process. That we are really trying to give customers that. And I think our articulation and focus on that flexibility and choice for customers has driven across the whole company how we think about customer experience. And I can just one quick example we have some products that are SaaS products. And we're a company that historically has sold predominantly licensed software. Which think, think, you know, you sell it, you know, you're kind of done. So it has really changed. And we have been working really hard on our SaaS and subscription products and overall customer experience to the point where we have not only do we measure net promoter score, and we also measure the experience as customers move through those SaaS products. And so that's been really fun. It's been really fun to work on that here at VMware and see the transformation for our customers and internally around mindset.
Phil Dillard: Well, Well now that's a really interesting question. The transfer of the mindset of the customers, I'm going to come back to that one because I think that's really interesting learning. You've had a number of different roles. And as the CMO driving customer experience, is it harder? Is it easier? How is it different than other roles that you've had when you think about trying to deliver that, that, that experience? Because some might say, okay, customer experience marketing, they still think external, but they if you're not a marketing-driven organization, It could be hard to drive back into product or a technology or service or support if they're already existing silos. So I'm curious how you tackle that as a CMO and how you think of that as a different perch from which to lead the CXO charge.
Carol Carpenter: It is a little bit harder for sure, And Google is a very engineering-driven company as well. Apple was a very engineering-driven company and that's great because you need the innovation. What's changed in my many years of working in technology is there is high recognition that the customer viewpoint, the customer experience, how they buy the product, how they use the product, that is now for almost every single function, every single company. So I feel pretty lucky that coming into VMware it's widely recognized that what made us successful in the past is not necessarily what's going to make us successful in the future. So some of the awesome breakthrough technology with virtualization, amazing. What's going to help us going forward is delivering a holistic customer experience. So from the perch I sit where I sit as CMO, I have to two major levers to drive customer centricity. One is I'm fortunate. I get to talk to a lot of customers. We have, you know, you know, some of the obvious areas like product marketing customer references, customer stories, brand, they all require customer stories and authenticity. So I see, number one, I have to bring those stories into the company on a repeatable basis and just remind everyone like why we're here and who we're serving and why it matters. It's a little more complex in B2B because there are so many different buying groups. So you have to be really careful to distinguish who we're talking to and which customer experience is a decision-maker versus a practitioner and how you deliver. The other thing I would tell you is VMware we're really committed to communities. So a lot of people don't realize we actually have several open source projects. We have the founders of Kubernetes as part of our team. So we believe in the communities and the bottoms up approach, and that's a different type of experience and engagement that's required. So that's also an area where, as CMO, I have some influence and work with those teams pretty closely. Cause you can't market to those communities. You need to engage with them.
Phil Dillard: That's great. Okay. You're like, you're staying two steps ahead because you're setting me up for great stuff. What I heard is there's both internal and external marketing, right, that you have to do. This customer stories and authenticity tells the teams in real practical ways, why they need to think about doing things differently. And if you set that in front of them, it gives them the opportunity to do that. And I'm curious how much of that is is chapter three, right? How much of that is carrot versus stick? How much of that is, is, is talent development versus talent acquisition? If you say, you know, what made us successful in the past is not what make us successful in the future, then that means people need to change. And you then need to be a bit of a change agent internally. Am I hearing that correctly?
Carol Carpenter: For sure. For sure. It's complex. And it requires. All of us across the leadership team and the whole company to drive that transformation. Here's, what's hard is we're humans and inertia and changes is hard. And the way we've done things historically is, okay, you build great product you launch, and that drives a market. Here's a great example. We had a customer recently, a very large financial institution who took our Tanzu service mesh and came and showed us a demo of how they took one of our products and utilized it to create a cross cloud management plane for security and management of multiple applications across clouds. It was amazing. Because We didn't paint that use case. We didn't push that it was a customer coming and showing us. And I have to say, I was really A, you know, excited that's a great example of how customers are leading us and where we need to lean in and listen. Now it helped that it was a large financial institution. It helps that, you know, they carry a lot of weight. But people listened across the product teams, the marketing teams, sales teams, like that carries weight when a customer is coming and saying, look at what you could do with your products and services. Look at what we could accomplish together. Hey, maybe we should co-develop. And that's another, so powerful and that's even better than me and my team going out and saying, here is company X, they had this problem. We help them solve this, right? Which is very, a little bit backwards mirror. I'll give you another example. I just was on a call we have built from the ground up some solutions around blockchain. Again, we're working with, it's an incubation project. We're working with five companies and the in co-developing and they're leading the way. So I think when you talk about customer experience, it, it impacts our entire go to market, our entire, how we build products for great experiences. as you, you said earlier, like those frictionless SaaS type experiences, consumer like experiences.
Phil Dillard: So you were talking about co-development, which I think is so critically important today, because if you're in a B2B setting with a SaaS client, you want to be able to develop SaaS that works for everyone, but you also needed to be, you need to be sticky and you want to have walk that balance between some level of customization or product development, but still having a SaaS product, which has got to be challenging. Especially when you come from a culture of build a product, put it out there, change the market and then build the next product or the next version or iteration. Can you comment a little bit about when you talk about the open source communities how are they different? I heard engagement not marketing to make, to empower or to connect with communities in similar way. \How are they similar to the SaaS clients and how are they different?
Carol Carpenter: Well, it's, it goes back a little bit to what we talked about earlier, which is the customers. You can't use the term customer broadly when you think about the open source projects. There are there, you know, the communities are primarily composed of practitioners, users, developers, creators. So think we just launched in at VMworld, something called Tanzu community edition, and it's a way for developers and DevOps to play with our application development framework, our products. And it's all based upon Kubernetes and containers. That, that community they're not necessarily looking to buy in the near term. They want to play, they want to create, they want to run projects. They want to talk to others. It's a really important community because they are the thought leaders and influencers for broader communities. And we want them to just take their time and experiment. So what's important to them in terms of their experience is that frictionless experience, like, let me get it quickly, please don't nag me. Please don't try to market to me or sell to me and give me lots of good, relevant content. And that's where I think marketing does play a role, which is more around the discovery of really good content. Some of the content around the documentation, other projects, you know, facilitating communication among that community.
Phil Dillard: Right. So if I'm hearing you right, a community may not necessarily know that they need a little bit of curation or support. There may some be some great information and insights therein. And if you, as a marketer, can help bring that richness to life for the community, it gets stronger. It has a better experience in Tanzu community, edition or whatever tool they're using. And thus the whole experience becomes better. The productivity becomes better. The stickiness comes becomes, comes better and it's not something that's that's manipulative. It's something that's adding value to the community because of your presence there.
Carol Carpenter: That's right. That's right. Exactly. You said it so much better than I did. It's full featured, for example, Tanzu community edition. So we're not trying to say, Hey, in 30 days it's going to disappear. And we want people to experiment and learn how to manage their Kubernetes platforms and it's community supported. That's the other part, right? Any questions you have, it's the community answering and helping support one another. Like think about, you know, th this is where people who are working in small scale on small-scale projects or pre production want to be able to play and learn to manage their K eights, so their Kubernetes platform. So it's a place where from a customer experience, we try to think really hard about, how do we make it authentic? How do we make it, I call it marketing free, sales free? And it's a different experience. It's ironic. It's like my team is working really hard to not show up.
Right, right, right, right.
Phil Dillard: But it also must help with that understanding of how they need to operate differently to go in a space that they, you know, to be successful in the future, because the future is different than the past. Which is pretty exciting. It seems like there are a lot of great lessons that come out of this. I mean, at this point for where you've come so far, can you share like a couple of great lessons that you've learned for people who might also be navigating this transition?.
Carol Carpenter: Well, you know, this is what comes back to, you know, all good marketing stems from two things, one, understanding your core. And that's your core value proposition at all levels, functional, economic and emotional. And the other part is around understanding who your audiences are. Great, good segmentation. And you know, the big lesson is getting really fine about your buying groups and your influence groups to drive those outcomes for your business. And, you know, in our situation, and what I'm just describing is we've done a lot of segmentation around our application portfolio of the Tanzu portfolio. There are decision-makers, you know, the C levels, the C minus one and it's okay to have, and in fact, it's almost mandatory. You need to have different messages and different customer experiences for the different segments.
Phil Dillard: That sounds tricky, right? Now it's probably a little bit easier in a B2B environment, but it sounds like, a lot of work to make sure that clear messages get right to the target audience. Can you share a little bit about technologies maybe that you use to help do that, or is it all in the process? Is it all secret sauce?
Carol Carpenter: We use lots of technologies. Well, number one, it comes down to, you know, you have to have the right products for the different audiences. Right. You know, before we launched Tanzu community edition, we didn't have the best fit for for smaller projects and for where people wanted to manage, Kubernetes with with an, a free solution and a community supported solution. So I think you have to have the right products, number one. Right. And what appeals to a buyer is often a little more of the reporting, analytics, control, management, right? That's often what buyers of large organizations want. What the users want is something different. That segmentation, it's not just the message. It's what we've been talking about. It's having a clear customer journey for those folks. And it's not actually that hard, cause you, you just have to prioritize that your segmentation, you can't go after 20 different types of segments for the same product. That would be complex, right? This is a little more like, you know, you said it sounds more complex than consumers. Think about something like, a Coke, Coke can in the fridge. And I was thinking about it. like, yeah, they do a really good job of segmenting. There's Coke, there's diet Coke. There's a cherry Coke and they're segmenting their audience. And there's a slightly different message for each. Th that kind of a segmentation, messaging, and then journey. Like the community folks, the more user practitioners are, they don't want to see a sales person. They don't want to come to some events at the at the Ritz Carlton. They want to be able to learn and try and play with it online in their own confines with other peers. Versus, you know, when we go out to talk to our enterprise customers, in fact, I was just at an event, you know, where we're sitting down at a table. Well, you know, the virtual table, so to speak with COVID and we're engaging and building relationships at a C level.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, absolutely. You know, It makes sense. It's it says that the organization has to be smart and nimble and and you have to have different skill sets to work with a, you know, with a traditional corporate, for example, versus a community. But I also started thinking, well, well a wise man once told me a simple, different definition of economics, right. Unlimited wants, limited resources, right? So, if you have limited resources to bring to bear on this, how do you avoid or manage the potential conflicts between the two organizations? When I saw this in the large corporate, it was, you know, I was running budgeting for a large corporation. There were three big parts of the business. And the one that generated the most revenue said, I should have the most budget, but the other said, well, hold on. Not so fast. We provide different value to the organization and there is always this inherent fight over what the organization valued and where to allocate limited resources. It seems like there might be an automatic tension shear. How do you think about the difference of the growth rates of say a big financial services institution versus one of the 30 open-source projects that could, you know, go viral at any point?
Carol Carpenter: We run you know, several in our, as part of our planning process and prioritization process. We do a lot of you know, strategic importance, return customer value, like trying to understand like where we are going to get the most, you know, return over a three-year period. So we do a lot of that. We use Zone to Win, the Geoffrey Moore book. I'm a big fan. There are lots of other frameworks out there that folks can use. But we have to prioritize for sure. We can't and we have a broad portfolio and we have a broad and deep portfolio. We, we S we have products like, you know, our infrastructure products that have large installed bases, where it's easy to say, let's just talk to our existing customers and build what they need. And then they're the future customers and where we believe the future is going, which is around multi-cloud and cross cloud services that we need to put energy towards. It's a, it's an ongoing trade off that we all have to make.
Phil Dillard: So internally and externally, I'd wonder how much people will see or feel from the trade-offs, but there's also has to be a belief a trust factor that the organization is going to take everyone, I guess seriously is the right word I'm looking for. How do you build trust in an environment where you have to make a trade offs?
Carol Carpenter: Well, I guess there are a few things and this goes for trade offs, it goes for, you know, how do you build followership? How do you build relationships? You know, one transparency. Like being transparent about what the priorities are, being courageous enough to tell people sometimes that, "Hey, you are not in the top five," that "Your project is much further down." I'm sure we all face that transparency. And number two, communicate and over communicate. And this goes for, by the way, when we have to tell a customer that there's going to be an end of life, which, by the way, you know, all tech companies, we do it and everyone does it at different points and a product maturation. Being transparent, over-communicating, giving everyone enough time. I think time is a big factor to adjust and adapt if they need to. And that is something we try to do as a team that, that prioritization. And here's where I think we do a pretty good job around customer experience, Ragu and our CEO and everyone on down puts the customer first. Like I said, historically, we were a little more inside, out. We led with our tech and what struck me, I've been here 20 months. And what has stuck with me is how customer focused everyone is here at all levels.
Phil Dillard: Okay, so I'm going to, I'm going to give you a tough question and but I know you're prepared for it cause we seen it coming. So, you talked before before our conversation about feeling beholden to numbers as a marketer, right. And then, you know, you mentioned that you have to put customer experience first, so it's tricky, right? So how do you put how does putting energy into experience get reflected in the numbers? How do you balance those two?
Carol Carpenter: Well, here's the good news. It has come together over the past few years for marketers, right? So for SaaS products, It is very much in the, how many people are trying them, how many people are engaging and those numbers speak to the customer experience, right? They're not going to engage. They're not going to keep using if they're not having a successful experience in some way, shape, or form. And I've been in lots of companies where we show the net promoter score and everybody goes or yay. Or, and then we all go back to our day jobs. Right. And I, what I think has changed, and it certainly has here at VMware, is we take it very seriously across the company, not just in one group. It's something everyone takes seriously. And we dissect it. We dissect it in terms of, well, which part of the experience are they not happy with? Where could we have done better? And so it's a methodical breakdown and that's where the numbers and the experience come together. Not just in NPS, but in that, in the SaaS products where the numbers reflect the experience very tightly, the engagement numbers reflect it very tightly.
Phil Dillard: Because of what I'm thinking I'm hearing you say is that it can help you pinpoint that discovery, right? If you have great trial and you have great engagement and at some point engagement drops off. But NPS stays at a certain point and you're like, wait a minute, there's a disconnect here, but you're actually able to dig into and not only do you have the data, but you have the desire of people, the desire and the practice of getting into it. Which sounds pretty cool. Can you share a campaign or project or implementation where you saw something like that come to light?
Carol Carpenter: I'll give you a great example. We saw some NPS scores around one of our end user computing products that wasn't where we wanted it to be. And we dissected it and it turned out it was the onboarding. I mean, Th that the onboarding wasn't as clear as it could have been. And so we ran a campaign for all new users to improve the onboarding. And what we did is we had a campaign and it was around education, and, you know, here are the top five things you can do. Here's how to get started. Here's how you think about different use cases. And it was purely an educational campaign and it had a great impact. But it's great to hear though. Right? Cause What that example shows is all the elements that you talked about using the data to pinpoint an issue that it's not necessarily the product, right? It's not necessarily the marketing. And it's not necessarily something that someone would always see. In a silo or be able to communicate in a silo, but you need a team to be able to break down the different components of onboarding that don't work and the ability to communicate with communicate and over communicate and give time for that to develop, to see all those things happen. Well, thank you. Thank you. And that is why it doesn't have to be the CMOs team, it can be another central team. But in this world where you have different businesses, lots of different products, you need a few teams that can sit across and look at everything that's happening because customers often use multiple products. And being able to look across and say, "Hey, what are some of the best practices? What's working?" And to your point, you know, drive that analysis and exploration to pinpoint problems.
Phil Dillard: It seems like an opportunity for cross pollination amongst teams in an intentional way to to bring lessons from one to the other, which sounds pretty exciting, which leads me to the last question before we get into the super fun lightening round. What's one thing that you do that most positively impacts customer experience at your organization?
Carol Carpenter: We start every internal marketing meeting and this is spreading by the way to other internal meetings, with a customer story. What was unique about them? What were their struggles? And tell us how we were a part of it and what we could do better. So it's storytelling. Look, people are moved by stories. People want to understand, like, what is the arc? What was the tension? What was the resolution? And we try really hard to model within our own org that storytelling.
Phil Dillard: I kind of wonder if like, is that organic? Is there a curator of stories? Sometimes it can be easy and sometimes it can be hard to pull out a bunch of great stories, but I love that approach.
Carol Carpenter: Well people remember them. They'll remember a story. They're not going to remember a case study. Right?
Phil Dillard: Yeah, that's right. And they remember names and faces and how they people felt and how it made someone's day That's really great because you're now connected with people at multiple levels so they can understand that it's, you know what, I might be a cold product person or an engineer. No, I'm I'm a key part of someone's experience and I'm not divorced from the customer. I found in the lean innovation work, for example, the more diverse, t more breadth of the team that you could put in front of the customer to understand how a little, tiny thing to them is a major thing to the end user. Okay, so, lightning round. Okay. We do this all the time. Top three questions. And just a quick response in the last few minutes that we've got. So, number one as a customer, what's an example of one of your favorite experiences?
Carol Carpenter: Can I give you two?
Phil Dillard: Sure.
Carol Carpenter: One is going to date me, which is, I still remember as a child the first time my father bought a Honda Accord. Okay. Remember those Honda Accords. And on the left-hand side, there is a place to rest your foot, your left foot, the non-driving foot. And I still remember as a kid, my father being just blown away that a company would think about the comfort of his left foot. And that has stuck with me, because that's the example of where a customer probably could not have told you in advance that's what they needed, but that's what they developed based upon a perceived need. Okay. Now, a more modern day example is I literally just was ordering a whole bunch of wine as holiday gifts. And of course, you know, click buy, click, click buy, over ordered and clicked buy three times, you know? Cause we're impatient. I clicked buy three times. Anyway. Great example of like without getting on the phone, without lifting a finger, I got an email from the company, the wine company saying, "It looks like you bought, this was a mistake. Is this a mistake? Do you want to confirm it?" Boom. I didn't have to call them. I didn't have to reach out. They identified, there was something strange and anomalous and contacted me, digitally.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. Great. Right. And they didn't just shut down your account and they didn't just invalidate your order. They reached out to you, right?
Carol Carpenter: Exactly. Exactly. Proactive experience.
Phil Dillard: That's great. I appreciate both in there and they're very visual and visceral experiences that, but I'm not surprised by it based on the things that you've shared in recently. Okay. Number two, if there's one thing you could change about people's perception of the role of customer experience at a company, what would it be?
Carol Carpenter: It's what we started talking about, that this is everyone's role. This is everyone's responsibility, that we all touch customers in all of our different organizations, every day and it's on us to ensure that, you know, we deliver the optimal customer experience. I didn't say the best, cause sometimes the best you don't want to necessarily over-service. But the optimal customer experience.
Phil Dillard: Okay. Super last lightning round question that I actually might have a bonus one, if you have a few seconds. For our listeners, what one lesson would you want them to take away from your experience as a CX leader?
Carol Carpenter: The details matter. The details matter. So my very one of my very first projects when I was at Apple was to work on the energy saver. Do use a Mac by any chance? I do okay. That whole energy saver, the way it shuts down, how long it takes and the way you can adjust before it sleeps, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of that. I can't believe it. I look at it right now. I'm like, oh my gosh, they haven't changed it that much. I worked on that. Like, but the detailed, the details of, and the thought of the hundred different ways people might use their Mac, and how they want to turn it on and shut it down, all those details, like they matter for customers. And so I, I really think getting very detailed on what your customers are experiencing is critical.
Phil Dillard: Sure because the ideas great. If it's not executed in a way that a bunch of different people can use it in a very easy way, then it could be a nightmare for many, right? Or in so many different ways, right?
Carol Carpenter: Well, and yes, and that's what you were saying earlier. And I just want to put a punctuation point on it, which is that's where diversity really matters. Because the hundred different ways that you can not anticipate how someone would use it. You need other viewpoints and ideas and experiences to develop the optimal experience.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. It's every time we see it and people will say, wait a minute, what about this? Would you, it just boggles the mind and be like, I didn't even see that. So, one last question I've got, and this is kind of a bonus, but if you have a moment we're thinking about the future of customer experience in 2022, about things that matter in a hopefully post pandemic world, but definitely a changed one. When we're thinking about what matters in CX in 2022, is there anything on the horizon that you think matters in your, in the discussion of customer experience going forward?
Carol Carpenter: Yeah. I I think the one thing around the whole pandemic that we've all realized is these 2d experiences are not sufficient. And the customer experience, while digital today can try to replace a lot of the experiences, whether it's, you know, again, through asking for help or getting started or trying, trialing software, or even, you know what we're doing right now, talking over Zoom I think our expectations are higher. It just, you know, all, everybody I talk to says, "Gosh, I can't wait to see people again. I can't wait to be in a room and be in a meeting again." Like there's still something missing. And I think we have to remember. And that's why, when you asked me to define customer experience, I said, it's how we want our customers to see, think, and feel, see, think, and feel. And we cannot forget about the thinking and feeling parts of customer experience.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, that's great.
Carol Carpenter: I know it's going to be a lot of work. We're not there are we're not there in terms of, how do you create those experiences that deliver upon an exceptional customer experience across that see, think, and feel?
Phil Dillard: Well, it's great food for thought. And great fodder for hopefully the next conversation we have, if we have the opportunity to follow up down the road. I'd like to thank you again for your time. It's been really great chatting with you.
Carol Carpenter: Oh, thank you, Phil. It's been a lot of fun. Take care.
Phil Dillard: Absolutely. And thank you everyone for joining us on this episode of The Customer Experience Show. It's been great talking with Carol from VMware, and I look forward to seeing you guys next time. I love that Carol brings it back to the customer experience encompassing how customers see, think and feel. She’s completely right when she says,that consumers today have higher expectations for an exceptional customer experience across the board. Today, people miss that human connection that’s so intrinsic to a top notch customer experience. As practitioners, we can’t lose sight of that fact, and have to keep striving for creative and engaging ways to connect with our customers.