 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. You know, there's innovation centers all over Silicon Valley. We hadn't been to the Comcast one until we came to this event. It's very, very cool. I think it's like five stories in this building where they're developing a lot of new technologies, partnering with technologies. But today the focus is on customer experience brought together a panel of people to talk about some of the issues. And we're excited to have a representative from a company that's really out on the edge of defining customer experience and measuring customer experience. joined by Ganesh Subramanian. He is the Senior Director of Product Marketing for Gainsight. Ganesh, great to see you. Great, happy to be here. Yeah, so I'm a huge Nick Meta fan. I've interviewed him before. I've been following Gainsight for a long time. And you know, it really struck me the first time that Nick said CRM is basically order management. It's not customer relationship management. Customer relationships are complicated and they're multifaceted and there's lots of touch points. And you guys really try to build a solution to help customers manage, actually do manage that relationship so they have a great experience with their customer. Yeah, that's totally right. And not to say that CRM isn't an important ingredient when you make that cake, but there's a lot of other touch points, right? How are people interacting with your digital products? What is that customer journey across sales, services, support? How does all of that come together? So what Gainsight does is really provide the customer cloud to bring all those solutions together so that businesses can really operate in a more customer-centric way. So you said an interesting thing earlier in the conversation about customer success being measured just by revenue. Again, kind of the CRME kind of approach to world versus measuring success and measuring lifetime value and measuring so many other things that can define a great relationship. What are some of those things that people should be thinking about? What are some of those other metrics out there beyond did I get a net increase value in my contract? Yeah, absolutely. One way we think about it at Gainsight is the two by two of customer experience and customer outcomes. So you can think about experience just as how happy are people on a day-to-day basis interacting with you, your products, your organization, your team. The flip side's also true though. You can have the happiest customer that isn't getting what they want out of their product or service. In a B2B context, we think about as tangible ROI or outcomes. So at Gainsight, we're ultimately trying to make sure our clients are delivering on both of those vectors. They want happy, successful clients. Ultimately, that's going to lead to the recurring revenue cycle, retention, growth, adoption, and advocacy. So where does that kind of tie together? Because I'm sure there's a lot of people that think that those are in conflict, right? And if I bend over backwards and I provide this great experience and these great services and all these things that this is going to negatively impact my profitability, it's going to negatively impact my transactional value. How should they be measuring those things? How should they be balancing, because you can sell dollars for 90 cents, have a really happy customer, not going to be in business very long? Yeah, I think that's kind of the secret sauce, right? True innovation, what we talked about today at Comcast, a lot about how do you take that next step forward? How do you improve your products and services in ways that make customers for life, right? And if you make the right investments, you actually find out that maybe it's minor change. Maybe it's process change in your call center or call service. Maybe it's implementing AI in an appropriate way so that you're able to deliver more value with less time or maybe it's transformative. Maybe it's something that's a new service or offering altogether that's making customers get outsized or unrealized returns on their investment. Well, it doesn't matter what that investment was, if it's going to long-term drive your company to higher valuations and greater competitive differentiation. So we don't think about customer experience on kind of below the line, what's going to get me the incremental ROI. We really think about it as a fundamental differentiator for your business. Right, now you're in charge of kicking off new products. That's right. And one of the things I think is really interesting about the Comcast voice, which has had a lot of conversation today, is I still get emails from Comcast telling me how I should use it, right? Because it's a different behavior, it's a different experience that I'm not necessarily used to. As you look forward, you know, introducing new products, what are some of the kind of trends that you're keeping an eye on? What do you think is going to kind of change and impact some of the things you guys are bringing into market? What are some of the new things we should be thinking about in customer experience? Yeah, absolutely. So one thing at Gainsight, one thing we've learned leading the customer success movement, is that to be customer centric is more than a given function or a given team. Customer success managers kind of took the mantle in B2B and started leading the charge, leading the way towards being more customer centric, but that team on their own can't do everything, nor do they want to or can they, right? So one big change and one big innovation that we're leading the front on is how do you bring all those different teams together, which is why we launched the Gainsight customer cloud? So what we're doing is bringing disparate data together that used to be siloed in functional specific software. Bring that into a single source of truth to truly provide an actionable customer 360, one that provides meaning to different teams with the right context, and then drive action off of that. So whether it's an automated email to get improved product adoption in the Comcast example, or maybe it's some kind of escalation effort where you need a cross-functional team to get together on the same page to improve a red customer, or maybe it's something that's in the product itself by just making the product easier to use or a little bit more intuitive, all of your end users will end up benefiting from that. What Gainsight's trying to do is try to figure out how can we break down these walls across these different teams and make it easier for people to collaborate to improve the customer experience? So Ganesh, I got to tease you, right? Because everyone's eyes just rolled in and you said 360, you're the customer. We've been talking about this forever. So what's different today, not specifically for what you're trying to do with your product and share that too, but more generally that we're getting closer to that vision, that we're actually getting closer to delivering on the promise of a 360 view and information from that view that will enable us to take positive action. I love that question. And I think whenever you hear the word 360 view or digital transformation, you're going to get a couple of irels in the crowd, right? And I actually totally believe that, that to date I think we've done things in too much of a waterfall methodology. Let's spend three years, get a unified idea across all our disparate data sources and then we're going to be customer centric. I think we've learned our lessons over the course of time that, hey, you know, the end result doesn't really materialize in the timeframe and ROI you expected. So why don't we start with the other end of the spectrum? What are the gaps that customers are perceiving? If it's just, let me go back to that example of product ease of use. Are we identifying that as a major gap? Then how do we go solve that? How do we reverse engineer that process? And by the way, that doesn't just fall on the product team to make the product easier. Services need to onboard customers more effectively. You need documentation so that they can access and understand the key aspects of your product in a more concrete way. So all of that needs to come together. So I think the biggest difference between what we used to talk about with 360s and digital transformation to where we are today is really the context and the outcome you're trying to deliver and then reverse engineer 360 that's most meaningful to you. So to make that a little bit more clear, what does that mean at the grassroots level? If you're a services team member, you're working on projects. Does a 360 view about the next opportunity from a financial or commercial perspective really matter to you? How far down in that 360 view do you have to scroll before you start seeing information that's relevant? So again, say what we're trying to do is use a many to many relationship mapping so that if you're a services team member or a sales member, the view you're accessing is curated to what you need to actually do. And that'll drive adoption of the digital transformation efforts within your organization. Which then obviously opens up the opportunity for automation and AI and ML to, as you said, context is so important to make sure the right information is getting to the right person at the right time for the context of the job that I have in building that customer relationship. That's right. Yeah, we think about AI all the time. How's that going to improve the customer experience? It starts with that data foundation and understanding, hey, what should we own and what should we leverage and being very conscious about what you're about to do. And then second, thinking about those point problems and again, reverse engineering, how can we staff augment or make the experience better? Maybe make the lives of our employees a little bit better when they're engaging with customers. Ultimately, it's got to be in service of people. Right. Well, Ganesh, thanks for sharing your story. Again, I think what you guys are doing and Nick and Gainsight is so important in terms of redefining this beyond order management into actually customer relationship management. So thanks for spending a few minutes with us. Awesome, my pleasure. Thank you. Ganesh, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.