This episode features an interview with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting. Janelle is a CX leader and strategist who has authored white papers and articles and spoken at industry conferences like Turing Fest. Before UserTesting, she worked for UX pioneers the Nielsen Norman Group.
This episode features an interview with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting. Janelle is a CX leader and strategist who has authored white papers and articles and spoken at industry conferences like Turing Fest. Before UserTesting, she worked for UX pioneers the Nielsen Norman Group.
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Key Quotes:
Bio:
Janelle is UserTesting's Chief Insights Officer and an expert research practitioner fascinated by human behavior and intrigued by data insight. She brings over 15 years of experience conducting large-scale customer research initiatives with both B2C and B2B companies across a variety of industries to help them transform their customer, user, and brand experiences.
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Janelle: The ones that I think of as visionary are anticipating needs and solving problems before customers even know their problems. Those are the people that are understanding their customers as human beings, because that's the insight that you need to be able to relate to your customers on a deep enough level to build empathy for them. So you can go ahead and create the experiences that they need and desire.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to The Customer Experience Show! On this episode, we talk with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting. Janelle has over 15 years of experience as a CX leader and strategist. She has conducted large-scale customer research for B2B and B2C companies to transform their user experience. Janelle has also authored articles and spoken at industry conferences like Turing Fest. Before coming to UserTesting, she worked as a senior consultant for UX pioneers the Nielsen Norman Group.
On this episode, Janelle talks about how to exceed customer expectations, improving customer churn, and creating an organizational shift towards being customer-centric. But first, a word from our sponsor.
Phil: If you think your company is customer-centric, think again. Do you know what your customer wants? Do you understand what they care about? Are you really listening to them? When it comes down to it, many companies should realize there’s plenty of room for growth here. It can be helpful to think about your favorite companies. What do they do to get you to come back? How do they make you feel? And how can you learn from them? There are so many ways to listen to your customers, and so much you can learn about what they want and need. When customers feel considered, valued and cared for, they’ll come back. They might even recommend you to someone else. Today we’re talking about getting customer-obsessed.
Hello everybody. And welcome to another episode of The Customer Experience Show. I'm Phil Dillard, your host I'm here today with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer of UserTesting. How you doing today?
Janelle: I'm well, thanks. How are you, Phil?
Phil: I'm pretty good. Pretty good. It's um, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. I know you're joining with us from the east coast. I'm here in San Francisco. I always like to ask people in their own words, you can tell me a little bit about your role at UserTesting and how you got started in it.
Janelle: Sure thing. my role at UserTesting and my title is a unique one. I always say, you know, if you're looking on LinkedIn there's maybe like two other people with the title Chief Insights Officer, so it's obscure. but the way that I like to think about it is, and I think about my role in a few different ways. The first way is by spending time in the industry. So learning about trends, representing user testing in the industry at large. The second way I think about my role is spending time with our own customers. Um, And the third part of my role is thinking about how I can take what I know about our industry, which I've been in my entire career and what I know about our customers and their pain points and their needs, and feeding that back into UserTesting. And I do that by meeting regularly and strategizing with the product team, the go-to-market teams and I even represent our own customer at the executive level. You know, the company has a team of operators that I've run in and scaled a SaaS organization before. But no one that really understands the space the way I do given I've spent my entire career in it. And so, you know, I feel fortunate to have the opportunity and fortunate that UserTesting has invested in what I do to be a critical role for the company.
Phil: And when you say the chief insights officer roles are hard to come by that you've spent your whole time. Do you mean in this career, do you mean in user experience in in insights research? How would you define that space?
Janelle: Yeah, it's a good question. when I say that, it's an obscure role, I mean that you typically don't see this type of title at the C level. you sometimes see chief experience officers. You sometimes see chief customer officers, but this is a little bit different in that the insights role is really around making sure that we are taking an approach where it's for the most part an outside in where we're looking outside of our own company and using information and insights that we know about the industry, the customers what's happening in the market and using that person to sort of bring that back into the company itself.
Phil: Yeah, sure. It's that you're, you're not sitting there saying let's go out and talk to customers and see how they're experiencing our product. You're going out and saying what's going on. What's going on in the market. So then we can have a real good feel for the market. Real understanding about the technology, the state-of-the-art, where things are going and use your depth of industry knowledge and experience to actually have better intuition and insight about where the market's going and what you can do to actually lead in the right direction.
Janelle: That's fair, but it only covers about half of what I do because I do in fact, actually spend a ton of time with our customers. And that's actually my, one of my most favorite parts of the role. I work with our customers that are working to move towards a more customer centric culture and organization. And How they are using UserTesting and other types of technologies to move to be more customer centric. And so I spend a lot of time with our customers, particularly the ones that are moving beyond just a single license or two of, you know, user testing, which is a platform that allows you to connect direct directly with your customers and get feedback from them. Um, moving from that model of just a couple of people doing it to one of this organization, organizational shift, where maybe teams are doing it, business units are doing it. Entire companies are shifting towards this mentality of, Hey, if I'm building customer facing experiences, I should be talking to customers. And so working with companies that are going through that transition is one of the most rewarding parts of my role.
Phil: Sure. and completely understand. And I think I was describing more of that first part where you said in the market talking to industry when I was making my comments. And it also sounds like when you're talking with customers, that it is a different type of interaction than say the chief revenue officer would have. can you talk, I'll talk a little bit about how the interactions are different and like what it allows you to do from the perspective of the chief insights officer?
Janelle: Sure. Yeah, so one of the first things that I do when I'm working with our customers is just to really understand from their perspective, what they're actually trying to do. What's the outcome that they're looking for. Oftentimes it will be something around, you know, we need to shift our culture to be more customer centric. Other times it will be around things like, our customer satisfaction is really low. Our NPS score is not where we want it to be, or we're seeing a high level of churn in our customers. And we know that we need to perhaps improve the customer experience to see that lift or that improve. And so when our customers come to us, like I said, they're coming at it from different ways. But ultimately what I do is I work with them to unpack, how do we help you improve or meet your goal? How do we help you shift to a more customer centric culture? How do we help you improve your customer churn? And we do that by making sure that these teams have very close contact to their customers so they can learn from them, make smarter better decisions and ultimately deliver experiences that exceed hopefully need, but, and hopefully exceed their own customer's expectations.
Phil: Yeah, sure. that's always the objective. Right? Cause then you're trying to come back. As you said, the third part to feed insights back into UserTesting. So can you talk a little bit about how your unique background helps you create a great experience then by feeding those insights back in so it then turns into a great experience for customers?
Janelle: Yeah, Yeah, I mean, so. Let me maybe give you a little bit of history on, on how I landed at UserTesting. And I've been here for well, it'll be seven years in August, which is crazy to say. But before I was at user testing, I was at a small UX consultancy called Nielsen Norman Group run by Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen who have been in this space and sort of consider themselves to be the founders of many of the things that people in this space think about and talk about every day. Usability testing, discount usability testing, UX, the power of customer listening. They've been. exploring this and promoting the importance of it for decades. and so I was fortunate enough to spend almost seven years with them as well. And in my experience doing that, I was able to really learn and understand the rigor around how you actually talk to customers, how you through the noise to find the signals and then how you take that back and do something meaningful with it. And so when I joined UserTesting and I ended up making the leap, because I saw this transition happening in the market where we were moving away from these in-person sort of customer interactions and more towards remote ways of conducting. The same type of research to gather these insights. And so as fascinated by UserTesting, it's the first SaaS company I've worked at. I trained our professional services team. We have an internal research team at UserTesting that works on behalf of our customers. And, they deliver projects and they drive initiatives for our customers. And so, I spent some time training that group. And I started to get pulled into other parts of the organization like sales and product and marketing because of my deep level of understanding of our customers and what they were trying to accomplish. And so fast forward, you know, seven years. And here I am in this role where essentially all of these skills that I've learned as part of my career, How to listen, how to take that information and synthesize it and come back with recommendations for a team or an organization. It's almost amplified in this role. It's like I get to... I am actually doing research if you think about it and I'm researching how other companies and other teams do research or collect insights. So it's like this really meta experience to have. and I find it fascinating because I'm basically able to see at a very high level, the trends that are happening across different customers, across different industries. You know, you asked me the question and when we first chatted, who owns insights at your company? Well, I can tell you how it works at UserTesting, which I did, but if you look at other different segments company size industry, like it varies so much, and being able to see that at a really macro level is it makes me nerd out a little bit.
Phil: Well sure. It gives you the ability to see things that very few others people can see, right? Because you're a company that provides services around user testing and user experiencing experiences. And you're understanding, trying to understand how people interpret those words and how they use them and what sort of trends you see, you know, what sort of patterns you see? Very few people are going to be able to have that pattern recognition. And then they'd be able to take that pattern recognition back and to put that into a product that's going to be a superbly powerful and empowering and fun as well, just because it's something that you you care about. Right. That makes it makes a ton of sense. And it seems like, given the background of the depth of experience, you have a a really good opportunity to kind of, take that along the way. So as we do this, I'm always trying to look for opportunities for the listeners to grab some nuggets. So you've been around a long time. Someone saying, okay, I want to figure out how to harness some of that wisdom. What would you say is one of the in, in getting to this point, one of the most important lessons you've learned about customer experience.
Janelle: I look at this in a couple different ways. One of the most interesting things I've learned about customers like, Customers are human beings. Customers are people, customers do interesting, strange, unpredictable things like there's that sort of learning, right. That I could certainly share. There's also the learning of like, how do you make customer experience relevant within business? Within your teams. And what I find is that many companies and many executives will pay lot, a lot of lip service to the importance of customer experience. Like you see it everywhere. It's like the differentiator. This is how we're going to differentiate from our competitors. This is how we're going to show up in the marketplace. But when you actually lift the hood and you talk to people that are on teams that are responsible for building experiences, and you ask them how customer centric are you? They're like, not so much. And so what I found that is fascinating around that whole scenario is that we all have good intentions. I am not positioning this as executives are saying one thing, but they have ill intent and they're not following through with their word. It is actually the exact opposite. They believe in the importance of it. It just that no executive is going to tell you customer experience is not important. They're not going to say, oh, no, we don't want to listen to our customers. It falls down when they're trying to figure out how to actually do it. How do I fold this into my everyday decision-making. How do I get my teams to listen to customers regularly? That's where it falls down and. I guess I would say that, that's certainly an interesting learning for me. I'd also say there are some organizations that are still working to become more mature in their CX practice. And there are some teams, there are teams of one at companies that are saying, we need to be paying attention to our customers more. And I would say one of the most important learnings that I've seen in our own customer base and that I've learned personally in different roles is that whatever you do tie it to customer experience and whatever kind of change you're trying to drive or any sort of initiative you're trying to get buy-in on, you have to relate it to something that the business cares about.
And that's the challenge with customer experiences that although you see all these studies that say customer experience leads to more loyalty, it leads to happier customers that recommend your company to their friends. Although you see all of that when you're on the ground and you're practicing this and you're looking at something and you're getting customer feedback without a strong connection to something the business cares about like revenue or efficiency or loyalty .It's really hard to get buy-in because that direct connection isn't there. And so I always tell people that they're like, I'm struggling with getting my boss to pay attention, or we really need the head of product to buy into what we're doing. It's get inside their minds. Like you almost do customer research on your stakeholder, right? Get inside their mind, understand what they care about, what are the words that they use? What's the language that they are speaking every day and figure out how you show up there to provide value to them that way. And I guess, that's taken years of experience to figure that out,
Phil: And I'm sure now that you see it and you it's one of those moments where you go, oh yeah, of course. It's so obvious, but it's not so obvious to people for a number of different reasons. It's, to me, it sounds like the example of the type of a entrepreneur, a technology entrepreneur who talks about everything, a product can do. All of its features and functionalities, but not so much about how it delivers real value to the consumer, in a way that's, draws them or feathers real value to the business in the way that it's worth the investment. So what I'm hearing you say, and I think that's a really strong point, right? Your customer experience initiative must be tied to a challenge that the business cares about the business unit owner cares about and. that way you can tie it to outcomes. So, that leads me to actually to two questions that are related to that. One is about innovation and the other is around awareness. And let me start with the innovation question first, because I think these are, I think there's a two important corollaries about what you just said. And I'd like to dig into that before we move into the next phase of the interview. And it's. Okay. If you're in a part of a business that knows it's known as a horizon, one business, it's the profit generating part of the business, you know how it operates, right. You know, all these different things about the customers, but it's different if you're trying to be innovative because you may not know as much about what the business cares about because people are trying to explore. How can you use that insight? The customer experience muscle. I guess I would say to help yourself when you're in the innovative space.
Janelle: You know, you're right. When you're in that first zone, it's pretty easy. Right. You know what people care about? You know, what they're trying to accomplish. You're really just trying to optimize. And that is very easy to tie to the work of everyday customer experience professionals. When you're in the innovation zone though. I mean, to your point, sometimes the business is still trying to figure out or even define what areas that they, where they want to innovate. and essentially it comes back to, even though you might not have specific goals, like I think of You have a marketing funnel. and I'm talking about when you're in that first zone, that efficiency kind of performance zone when you have a marketing funnel, like you're constantly, you're looking at metrics like, conversion rates and click throughs and you know, the number of times they've gone to the website or engage with you as a company. these are all things that are very sort of, Micro, and you can do that at that level, but ultimately all those micro metrics kind of roll up into something bigger, which is really around growth. and getting more customers faster. And I think you can apply that same mentality to any sort of innovation zone. I mean, ultimately innovation is about disruption. And disrupting by way of meeting a need, perhaps it hasn't been solved yet. maybe taking a new approach to something that has a, maybe an outdated or tired solution. But really when you think about innovation, the whole point of innovation is to get more market share, get more people to engage with you to grow your existing customers. So I think a lot of the metrics that apply to performance, particularly around growth and revenue applied to the innovation zone too. It's just that in the innovation zone. You don't have those micro metrics which is actually freeing in some sense, right? Because you don't have to live and die by these dashboards.
Phil: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's interesting. It's a different discipline of analyzing customer experience. One where I would think that your intuition is sharper, right? Because we're used to talking to people and having them say one thing and do the other, or having said that they love something about a product and then not use it like, which is the challenge that the innovator has, but because you're trying to you're you or your clients are trying to figure some things out. So, thanks for that. That's, it's really it's really thought provoking to think about How do you apply these insights to the innovative space versus an optimization space? You know, the other side of the, that thing that I was going to talk about was the awareness. A thought popped in my head as you were talking, I said, I wonder how many folks, how many of these leaders did you talk with are not aware that they're not listening to customers and they think they're customer centric. They think they're walking the walk, but everybody else feels like the emperor has no clothes. Can you share any sort of thoughts or anecdotes about how someone can tell if they really aren't as customer centric as they think they are and how, and if they're really using customer insights to drive their business?
Janelle: Yeah, that's super thought provoking. The way that I think about this is that your customer is so at the end of the day, customers are people. They're humans. And when you look at the ways that businesses measure customer experience today, you see things like net promoter score you see things like big data and analytics that tell you all the things people are doing with your product. You're able to make decisions around something like AB testing, right? And you can start to see how your actions as a business can start to shift some of these metrics, right? So if you run an AB test, you get to see which one was the winner. You're looking at all these dashboards and datas. You're inferring why one version won over the other. When you're looking at NPS and you see it low, or it's trending not in the right direction, there are things you can try to do to improve it. Maybe based on the feedback that you're getting. When you're looking at big data and analytics, people dropping off a certain part of your product, you can make some assumptions about what's happening and then fix it and hope to see the right result. And I think many companies live and die by these, these metrics like NPS and other sorts of KPIs that are really tied to what the business cares about. And I think that's, you have to have that data. that's how data that, that is how companies are run today. They're run by, they are run by big data. And by all these analytics. The challenges with all of those things that you're tracking is that you often don't have the real customer perspective. On why they might be dropping off the page, why they're giving you a really low NPS score why they are converting on one version of a design versus another. And I think about that as sort of like this customer perspective that's missing from the view of many companies today. And that's, it's really about how do I see the world through my customer's eyes? How do I understand what they're thinking, what they're feeling, so I can make better informed decisions. So when I go change something on my website, because I don't like the conversion rate, that I'm confident that change is actually going to do something. And so to your question around leaders thinking they're customer centric, but maybe not so much when you actually look under the hood, I think there's just a misconception that customer centric means you're tracking NPS and you're looking at data about what your customers are doing and how they're feeling. I believe that's just one part of the puzzle and many companies today actually, aren't doing those things very well. And so it's like the middle of the road companies are the ones that are looking at all these metrics and the ones that are really kind of what I like to think of as visionary that are anticipating needs and solving problems before customers even know their problems. Those are the people that are understanding their customers as human beings, because that's the insight that you need to be able to relate to your customers on a deep enough level to build empathy for them. So you can go ahead and, create the experiences that they need and desire. I mean, You talk, we just talked about the innovation zone. That's a perfect example of the need to really have that close understanding of your customers beyond dashboards and data.
Phil: I love that answer because you really You really crushed an important part of this. The part that really jumped out to me was like scores don't always tell you why. Ask yourself, how can I see the world through my customer's eyes? And you said the E word, right? You said the the empathy word, because lots of people talk about customer empathy. And I don't think lots of people really know how to get there. And I actually think I think I have a series of questions that maybe help us start to really expose that for folks a little bit. So. you said consumers are, people were both people. Can you tell me as a customer or as a as a researcher, because you go out and talk to some of these people in these organizations, can you share an example of one of your favorite experiences and more specifically, like at one of those organizations that you think sees customers as human beings and gets it.
Janelle: There are so many examples, ones that I've had personally, and then ones that I've seen referenced that I think are really powerful. So Chewy's a pet supply food store. And as part of their services, you can sign up for a subscription for pet food. And you can imagine when a pet passes away, you need to contact them and maybe cancel your subscription. Right. Cause you don't need the food anymore. maybe until you get your next pet. And what ended up happening was this pet owner, his dog passed away and he had forgot to contact the company. It was just something he had forgot to do. And so he received his food. As part of his subscription at the regular date of that month and he no longer needed it. So he contacted the company and he said, you know what I need to return this or send it back instead of, you know, perhaps saying, oh, we can't accept it or. Whatever sort of thing that would be not optimal for this situation. They told him, you know what, we're going to have to cancel the subscription. We're not charging you for this bag. We want you to keep it and actually donate it to a local pet shelter. So that's something that this person did. And then perhaps a couple of days later, I'm not sure of the length of time. He actually received a sympathy card in the mail, signed from the rep from chewy and something about that it's just really powerful and personal and it just They've clearly put themselves in the shoes of their customers. And they're able to understand what that feels like and also act with compassion. I think there's a difference between building empathy and understanding your customers empathetically and and then it's what you actually do with the information and how you act and how you act is how is acting with compassion more than anything. Another example of share with you. We We did our own research study a little over a year ago, where we were talking to some of the big brands some of the customers of big brands that always get recognized for great experiences. So we're talking about Target, Apple, and another one on there was USAA and USAA is very well known for their great experiences. And for those that aren't familiar with USAA is like a banking slash insurance slash financial services company for people who are in the armed forces, military and for their relatives as well. And there was a woman in our study and we asked her about, you know, how loyal are you USAA? She said, oh my gosh, I'm so loyal. And we wanted to dig into like, why, like what causes that level of like crazy loyalness. And she said, you know what? I can actually pinpoint a moment. It was when my daughter was in a car accident and I called them up to file the claim. And you I got on the phone with a representative. I told them what was going on. And the various, the first thing that they asked me was is your daughter okay? And that interaction alone got her to flip a lot of her other financial services, products that she had with other providers over to USAA because she felt like she was being treated like a person, like a human, like a mother whose daughter was just in a car accident. So instead of jumping right into, you know, what's the date that it happened and what part of the car is damaged? It was really about connecting with them as just a person. Like, are you okay? Is she okay? You know, I hope everything is okay.
Phil: Yeah, those are great. great visceral brand experiences that could be really, really helpful, and they showcase a bit of great not only great experience that you can either hire for, or train for coach for, but also that sort of empathy, empathy that sort of connects people with the organization and delivers the sort of stories or loyalty that businesses, business owners want people to walk away from the experience with their brand, with that actually lead to something else and lead to something better. So thanks a lot for sharing those. it leads me to like a question for you and you can take this for yourself or for the customers you work with, because it goes both in both directions, really. What's the customer experience vision for your company and how do you create empathy?
Janelle: Given we are a company that is all about customer experience we pride ourselves very highly on focusing on and investing in our own customer experience. And we do this by having this cross-functional investment in alignment, around all the things we do for our customers and not just our customers, but our employees, because we recognize that there's a tie between happy employees and happy customers. if your employees aren't happy, probably not motivated to create great experiences. And so, you know, looking at both of those angles is critical. And, it's interesting in terms of how we think about customer experience and the vision for the future. and then just given our product is one that actually delivers the ability for you to connect empathetically with your customers. We have an initiative at UserTesting called UT at UT. And UT is short for user testing. It's kind of like what we call ourselves internally. Um, and so we've programmatically gone through the different business units within UserTesting. We started with our marketing team. We've moved through our product and engineering organization. We are working with our people team. And we just started engaging with our IT team. And what we're doing is we're empowering these teams to connect with customers, to build empathy for them. And also building it programmatically into what they do. So for example, the product and engineering team has a specific workflow that they use. And there's 200 people on this team. We're a six to 700 person company at this point. so they make up a good chunk of our organization and they are building products and making decisions every day that impact our customers. And we believe that they should be able to get the feedback that they need in the moment. And that's what we've empowered them to do. So we've integrated ourselves into their product design and development process. So at each stage, they have options. If they're vetting an idea or a concept, they have a way that they can go use UserTesting to go get feedback on that idea. If they've just launched a new feature, they have a way to go connect with the customer to go get feedback on that and make sure it's working well. And they can optimize it. That's sort of the obvious kind of place where we fit. We fit in with a lot of product organizations, but then we also do like, for example, marketing. So marketing, our marketing team just released a series of advertisements. Like video ads. And we worked with an agency to create them. And before we brought them to market, we actually made sure that they hit the mark with viewers. And in some cases it was really interesting. We had one ad in particular, that was perhaps on the line, if you will. we weren't sure how people were going to react to it. We weren't sure if it was like too racy or not. And for more context, just so you know, it was the commercial was around how a speaker designer could get feedback on an actual physical speaker and it showed in the video, one of their customers in the shower with the speaker. And the researcher or the person, the product owner that was designing the speaker said something like, you know, kind of peaked her head over the side of the shower. Didn't look all the way in, but peaked your head over and said, you know, tell me a little bit more about what you want from a speaker. And he's like, oh, I definitely use it in the shower. And she's like, okay, it's gotta be waterproof. And like that interaction, some felt were like, is this is this appropriate? And so we're able to like gauge. From our prospects and from our customers, by putting that commercial in front of them, we learned that it was actually out of the four or five we created, it was one of the ones that they liked the most. And so it's just an interesting sort of angle on, you know, you're launching a campaign, you're launching an advertisement and you're looking at impressions. You're seeing how many people go to the website. Like you're capturing all these metrics, but don't forget before you do all that, like you have opportunities to vet whether or not this is going to land appropriately. and you do that by getting feedback from people.
Phil: Yeah, sure. So it sounds like you're saying not to use a Chewy reference too much, but each round dog food, right. Use the data and metrics and those sorts of things. True. But remember that people are, are, are people that you have them there to speak with and to use that, you know, lean innovation sort of. The story to get out of the building, talk to the, talk to the people, get in the bathroom, watch them, how they use something in the shower, listen to them how they interact and, however much they let you see who they are. Let that tell you how to figure out if it fits for them.
And that makes sense.,
Janelle: We say drink your own champagne at UserTesting
Phil: Oh, there you
Janelle: go.
Instead of eat your own dog food, but
Phil: I wonder where that one came from.
Janelle: Just a UserTesting ism perhaps.
Phil: Yeah, I guess dog food has maybe cause some people has not the premium impression that , uh, sorry to any dog food manufacturers out there. Maybe it doesn't sound like the premium thing , like, but drink your own champagne and it gives it a nice, a nice ring to it. I like it. I like it. I think. you answered a little bit of the question that I was going to get into about central organization is there's no central owner of UX. How do you do it? And I think it's in that part of it is in that cross-functional activity, but that you do other ways that because different, some organizations have a customer experience officer who everyone reports to it, so I'm safe, no one owns it, then you know, if everyone owns it, no one owns it. But. I've seen other companies who've gone the exact opposite direction. And that seems like where you've gone. And is that it seems like you described one really good example of how to make that work.
Janelle: Yeah, I think that that's fair. And I think it's also very true that there are many different ways that companies do this. And I find this actually one of the most fascinating parts of the evolution of what we do. And there are a couple of different models I see. I see the model like we have at UserTesting, which is there isn't really a central owner. Everyone should be empowered. Everyone should have a sense of ownership in creating a great experience. You also see other organizations where to your point, there's a sort of central organization, maybe a leader that drives the initiative and will empower other teams or individuals to do it, but most of the work either runs through the bad organization or maybe they are distributed in a way, but maybe everybody reports up back up to that leader. I don't think there's any right or wrong way to do it. and quite honestly, I think the most successful companies are the ones that integrate this and kind of adopt this from day one. You know, we work with a lot of startups at UserTesting. We also work with a lot of big enterprise and global customers and in the enterprise and global space, you tend to see more of that centralized ownership. I think you just get to a place of size and scale where you do need somebody that oversees what's happening across the business. With the smaller organizations that we work with, we don't usually see consumer insights or like, you know, CX researcher. We see product owners who understand the power of doing this and realize that it's part of their job, that they're not going to hand off to somebody else so they can go research it. And then that person can share with them their perspective of what they think the customer wanted or said. It's just ingrained in what they do. Something that senior leadership and entrepreneurs or CEOs, founders they believe is important from day one. And I can tell you that I see it. in some companies where it is like the number one most important thing we do is, we listen to our customers every day. And then I see others that go more towards like gut or intuition and, maybe touch base with their customers once in a while. But it's those companies that are really about pulling that customer perspective into every decision they can that I see as being more innovative and successful. That's how you look at Amazon. I know everybody likes to use the Amazon example. They're customer obsessed. Jeff Bezos has been customer obsessed since he started the company. If you read isn't one of his initial like letters to the company from decades ago, that was his core tenet. Like we need to understand our customers deeply and authentically to be successful. Look where they are now.
Phil: Yeah, I would say that they're moderately successful. Yeah. Um, but I like the way you break it down. Right. And the trends you see of bugs bigger and smaller at some of the best practices. Right. And it's me, it sounds like at the best companies, it's a little more art than science. It's something that fits with culture and that people find a way to figure out what works best for them, but they stick to some core principles. Are there any other tips or tricks and things that have like clues toward what works best or common things that, that, that work or don't, or is it all about experimentation to figure out what works for your team?
Janelle: I think there's some experimentation that has to happen regardless. Like you've got find what's right for your team and what's right for your culture. But at the end of the day, you do ultimately need, you do need leadership buy-in and leadership. They have to believe in the power of doing this. And they have to enable and empower their teams to actually carry this forward. And like going back to actually how we started this conversation, right? Like you often see executives saying this is really important. And then you say team saying, but wait, we're not really doing much about being customer centric. It's like, how do you see it's all, it's almost like a little bit of a gap right. Between what companies are saying, and then what is actually happening. And that's the space where you have to figure out, like in order for you to be boots on the ground are, you know, empowered and talking to customers. You've got to like that. That's the place where you figure out is this a central organization? Is this a way that we empower everybody across every business unit? Are there certain people or certain roles across the organization that are our change agents that are going to go drive this stuff forward? Like that's the challenge and kind of the and it's a fun challenge when you're in the space and you're looking at all these different companies and what works and what doesn't, is that there's no right, answer. And you have to you have to try and experiment and adjust as you go. Wow.
Phil: There's no right answer, but you have to try and you know what buy in. Is one thing. I like how you said that but belief and enablement is really putting time and resources and thought into figuring it out and people really need to do that.
Janelle: it's not a check box. People want this to be a checkbox. And even when you're you're working within a team and maybe you have protocols where you can't release anything to the market until you've gotten customer feedback from it. Like when you do it that way, you are basically just adding another thing to the plate and you are encouraging that checkbox mentality of yep, going to do it. Just did it. We're good. And when you don't have that that really strong belief within your employee base, within your teams that like, this is something that's actually really important that we should be doing even maybe when it's not part of a mandate that's where you really get the teams to dig in and really adopt this as something that is part of, their every day work in decision-making.
Phil: It becomes then even more of the culture like at places like Zappos or places like the Ritz Carlton, Where it's Schultz, it gives people a budget to fix a problem. All right. Every employee has a budget for solving a problem right there on the spot. So I mean, that, that's an amazing way of empowering people to do that sort of thing. , so, yeah. Awesome. I have the feeling that we could do this all day. I'm sure it's something that, that you love to talk about, but it's also it's also really important. But unfortunately, we only have a few more minutes and I know that I can't take, I can't take all of your day. So I just have a few more questions to ask. and really, I I want to I guess we'll get into our lightning round in the last three questions. I really quick answers for a couple A couple of things. As a customer, as a consumer, what's an example of one of your favorite experiences.
Janelle: I think it was two years ago or so I decided that I wanted to. spend a little bit of money on. investing in stocks and by money, I mean like $500. Like I was like, people talk about this or I've never done it before. So I went through one of the banks that I already use and because I could just open an account really quickly. And of course, as soon as it was open, I was like, I looked at looking at this landing page and I'm like, oh yeah, I have this isn't for me. Like, I don't, I don't, this isn't working. Like, it just didn't understand it, like my mental model. So beginner, no idea what I'm doing. And so I just decided I'd forget about it. And a couple months later I had been hearing a lot about Robinhood and I know that they haven't had the best sort of press coverage as of lately. But I downloaded their app. And it is a beautiful, easy experience that is captivating. I will say that. You know, there are little parts of that experience that are so delightful. Like when you when you actually purchase, maybe a stock. I invest, I think I bought four shares of Zoom. I think that's what I ended up doing. It was the beginning of the pandemic. And as soon as I hit the buy button, it was like these little, like this little celebration screen, came over my mobile device and it was like just really thoughtful. but I, yeah, I appreciate that experience a lot.
Phil: That's great. thanks for sharing that. it also reminds me of a, another interesting point that I like to share with people is that you can learn from things from all different types of experiences, all different types of customers and products and things. And just because it was good at one point. Yeah. And it's, maybe it's not so great now right now, for another thing, it doesn't mean that the user experience team didn't do a bang up job in making that experience for you if somebody in finance did something that got the company in trouble, Or something of that nature. So, I mean, you know, to the listeners, I would often say, yeah, let's make sure that we don't throw out the baby with the bath water and that sort of thing. Second question. if there's one thing you'd change about people's perception of the role of customer experience at a company, what would it be?
Janelle: It very easy for me to answer this customer experience it's not an afterthought or an add on that you do later. It is arguably the most important part of your business.
Phil: Because without customers, what kind of business do you have?
Janelle: Exactly.
Phil: Sure. Okay. And finally, for the listeners, what one lesson would you want them to take away from your experience as a leader in customer experience?
Janelle: I would say that one of the sort of most important things is that to consider is that you might be involved in lots of different initiative, lots of different projects that have sort of a, a shelf life if you will. Maybe you're just running to answer a question about something related to a small part of your experience. But recognize that all of those opportunities that you have to speak with customers, all of those places where you are gathering information about what they're doing, how they're feeling, what they expect that is helping you build up. A very strong knowledge base of your customers. And if you are in the role for six months, two years, five years, and you look back and you think about all the things that you know about your customers, like that knowledge grows over time. And so I guess when you're in the moment, sometimes it can feel like, you know what, I'm doing this and in the grand scheme of things, I'm not sure how this is going to impact the world or my business or how I understand our customers, but all those things add up over time and you need to consider yourself as the customer expert, if you're spending a lot of time with your customer.
Phil: That's a really great point. It can be very easy to lose yourself, lose the forest for the trees they say, right? I didn't use understand that, that thing for, because I was like how could you lose the F you see the trees, they're all around you. But if you're focused in on just one thing, you forget to zoom out and see the whole picture and see the whole beauty of the whole thing. The fact that you've learned so much and so much more huh, I know a lot more than I thought I did. You know, When you realize that you are the person that knows that for your company, for your business, then you should take yourself and the insights more seriously, and the responsibility to those consumers that to the customers, all of that becomes much more relevant and prevalent in your mind.
Janelle: Absolutely. Like it's your responsibility to represent and advocate for the customer.
Phil: And other people that other people won't see it. Other people can't see it, they don't have your accumulated experience to see it. And then it, then the responsibility becomes, individually. And in your company's case cross functionally, right? a collective responsibility of the organization that could shift culture. That's powerful.
Janelle: Yes, it is a super power.
Phil: That's super. Well, with that, hey, we might as well end on a win.
Janelle: It's a wrap.
Phil: Thanks so much for making the time to talk with us and really appreciate you.
Janelle: Yes, thanks for inviting me. It was a good chat.
Phil: Glad to have you. And we will keep our eye on UT. Thanks again for joining us for another episode of The Customer Experience Show. We'll see you later.
Janelle’s right - knowing your customer that well is a super power. You become the customer expert because you’ve spent so much time getting to know them. And when you create that culture shift in your company to better serve them. It can be transformational. So consider spending more time on getting to know your customers. Like Janelle says, customers are the most important part of your business, and without them, you don’t have a business at all.