 Good morning everybody wonderful to see you all we're thrilled to be here My name is Linda McDonald I am the vice president of our learning and development group for our global product managers at MasterCard Of which there are many and I am thrilled to be moderating the panel this morning acting as your customer-centric spirit guy As I rely on these four esteemed leaders in product to take us through what do we actually mean when we talk about using data-driven tactics to build a Customer-centric culture so without further ado, I'd love all my fellow panelists to introduce themselves My name is Joe Drummond. I lead design and research for Pendo Pendo is the only all-in-one application experience platform So what that means is if you're looking to acquire new customers you're looking to grow accounts You're looking to retain them. You're trying to capture their feedback or share back what your plans are Pendo has tools for all of those aspects and We recently have been introducing new updates like replay, which is a way where you can view How customers actually act in product so you don't just see the feedback they're submitting you can actually see what they were doing at the time and we Use our analytics to help you understand which we place to watch because there might be hundreds of thousands in a given week And you want to focus on just the one that makes a difference and creates that inside that that you need to drive your roadmap Some of the upcoming work for us one product is called discover where we're changing the feedback model from getting The deluge of customer inputs that you're not sure how to fit into the roadmap and instead you share your plans Customers give you specific feedback on those items and then you can use validate to test quickly whether your solutions resonate with customers Also AI driven outcomes where we use our analytics to identify Where you can make the biggest difference in your business for example for retention or growth and then we suggest the guides that will lead you there Yeah, so hi, my name is Jake Knaan. I lead the global sales engineering team for quantum metrics So I'm kind of more on the commercial side Quantum metric being very much a kind of a b2b company I'll save you the pitch on quantum, but you're welcome to meet us out at the booth here. I Guess from my perspective kind of where I come from as I work with all the folks in the room basically or folks like you Helping you make data-driven decisions for your companies, but I also do that myself internally So I kind of act as the voice of the field Of what we see in the market in terms of what our prospects and our customers need and trying to leverage that data to help make our own customer-centric decisions Then I'm Sarah local. I'm an experienced research consultant a user testing user testing is a video based platform That helps you connect with your customers and get insight to make better decisions as an experience research consultant Or what that is? I think it says UX researcher a little bit different I work with a lot of our customers to help them up level their research practice And so I kind of get this backstage pass to see what our different organizations doing so can bring that perspective today Good morning, everyone. I'm only focus. I'm the vice president of product in glass box Which means that I basically lead the entire product department in two weeks And what glass mug does is glass box is a platform for digital experience intelligence Where we put a huge emphasize on data so we collect 100% of sessions data User interactions technical events feedback and using that data we generate insights for our customers You know throughout the journey of analysis from the single interaction to user journeys to product insights and user-level insights And I'm actually pretty excited to be here because I'm both the leader and this topic is about culture So I have the opportunity to influence from the top to bottom But also have the opportunity to influence from the bottom up because I'm a data geek So a lot of times in my company I actually do hands-on data analysis and kind of try to install culture using that mindset and With regards to data we put a lot of emphasizing glass box on data So one of the things that we just uncovered is our new solution. That's called the voice of the silent We're basically imagined and most of your customers But when you run VOC campaigns, you got freedom limited amount of feedback We utilize our data to actually extrapolate and infer what would be the feedback of a person that did not provide it So you actually get a true sentiment gauge of your market and your users and understand and act with confidence on that data Great. Thank you everyone. So if we start from the top data-driven tactics to build a culture a customer-centric culture What does that mean Joe? Maybe maybe you take a stab at breaking that down Yeah, I'll start with saying that data-driven isn't the phrase I would use I would use data informed because you don't want to cut up the judgment of people as their Understanding what they're finding So first of all just being customer centric I'll focus on because that it means you're building a culture that cuts through any infighting to focus on your source of Growth as a business, which is your customers. This is the people who? On board and help you grow or grow existing accounts I think to start with you want to create a shared understanding across your business of what customers are actually doing and That goes from analytics through customer journeys for their feedback my suggestion is you Find a way of building a dashboard for example that you can start every planning conversation with from executive planning, quarterly planning all the way down to sprint planning and Have everyone who's involved in it See that as their baseline so that you share You know the evidence from which you start to keep yourself honest as you then do the planning you move forward and you introduce changes I think it's also really important in that to combine both the kind of evidence of scale that you get from an analytics solution And something like the empathy that you get from watching customers in product or the conversation the feedback you get from them Absolutely and and to sort of build on that a little bit further if Sarah, maybe I could ask you you know Why is that so critical in today's environment? I think to add on slightly to Joe's point I think yeah, whenever I think about customer centricity. What is that? How do we see that manifest in organizations? I think it comes from Leaders and building that culture from the ground up so excited to hear kind of what you have to say there But I think yeah shared understanding we collaborate with that shared understanding. We have discussions and push and engage with each other We have this belief that we don't make decisions that are just assumptions our opinions And even if it comes from an executive has to be discussed and backed with data And also I think you mentioned it like we have analytics and we have data, but what's the human behind it as well I think that's a key thing Hearing from booking earlier of what are the unmet needs? What's that human experience outside of the product? And so why why are we talking about this? Why does this matter? I think there's a stat from I want to get it right for Gardner 84 percent of products and experiences don't meet customer expectations So in a hyper competitive world, there's this need right we're competing with each other's we're competing with time We're competing with other products And so we need to be on top of it from a customer experience to maintain loyalty to acquire new customers and from an efficiency perspective I think we we see that and kind of what we mean whenever we talk about customer centricity is how are we using? data and insights to make decisions all across the the development process, so Hypotheses are driven by data. We're really understanding the problem. We're incorporating that along the way Because another reason why it's so important is I think there's like 2.4 billion dollars in software spin That's kind of waste essentially and so if we can embed insights across that we can cut down on that waste One example, I'll just share is I work with a very large Customer very big business and this team's focused on content in the help center So their whole goal is to reduce calls to the call center They have a lot of analytics. They actually have a lot of data in analytics But one thing that was missing is they weren't understanding the why and the person behind the analytics and how to make improvements and decisions based on that So what they did was they understood the problem a bit more in that early on phase Use those learnings to Do how might we you know, how might we improve this solution? And then they they launched it and were able to see 15 percentage point improvement in their experiments over time When they adopted this data centric mindset So yeah, long way of saying sorry rambling Customer loyalty retention and then I think efficiency from a business perspective is why this is so key So, I mean the rationale is there and is compelling. I mean those stats alone I think speak to that But I think all of us appreciate that this is not an easy thing to do and that there are Barriers and challenges, you know, I think to be overcome So I'd love to hear from from some of you some of your experiences and you know Maybe Mooli if I could put this to you What are some of the barriers that you've come up against when trying to work in this way? Absolutely So, um, I think one of the things that we have to realize is that you know The culture doesn't stands for it for its own right The purpose is to create delightful customer experiences But in reality, especially in big companies, we have a lot of different stakeholders different disciplines different groups And they have different metrics goals processes. They're measured differently and they were operating silos Like consider digital experience. You've got product managers. They care about adoption or maybe revenue You've got it people. They care about application performance or marketing people care about conversion Some operating sprints some operate and you know, according to a specific Campaign cycle so that by essence can create fragmented experiences for our clients So what's really really important is to solve the internal alignment first and I see kind of three different levels to treat it One is about organizational structure or teams. The second is about your process and the third is about your tools So if we start with teams, it's about building cross-functional teams like agile squads that actually have multidisciplinary Professions in them and leading those teams with a product person and a technical lead But it's not only about having those two people It's about measuring them with a metric that's customer centric and actually even incentivizing them To act on that so that creates internal alignment for them a lot of our clients by the way use Glassbox struggle score, which is a measurement of identifying how easy it is for a user to complete an action And that's actually their metric to align those teams and they operate according to that metric And then when you go to process, I think the key is to create recurrent processes That have to serve two purposes one is to bring those people together on our current basis and create the collaboration And the second is to weave into the product Life cycle those inputs from the field and actually influence what you're developing, you know with the customer centric mindset And it needs to be simple enough, but powerful. So Um some clients for example of us use our session replay capabilities and they hold what's called movie nights Where they watch sessions together They sec them and kind of come up with insights that they then bake in back into the product And that creates that stickiness factor. That's the process that Basically boosts up their ability to operate as a highly functioning team And then lastly when we talk about tools So obviously you got to have the data platform that enables you to connect everyone together, right? So each persona each discipline have their own Metrics and their own angle, but you they also got to be able to work together and look at things holistically and kind of tie That different pieces together And in essence, I think that we should strive to not measure the traditional metrics for example Marketing campaigns, it's not about conversion to a specific landing page What if we think about could we measure a marketing campaign? Does it by the fact that it leads a user to their aha moment, then that makes them convert, you know to a paid customer Um application performance, it's not about did I improve the loading time by x amount of seconds It's about does it correlate with customer satisfaction, you know And similarly obviously product people to incorporate feedback from the field continuously into their product roadmap and into their development Which we know that we all want to do but sometimes it's really hard And Jake maybe if I could look to you to to share some of your experience and that I feel like barriers are one that There are many of Yeah, so um from my personal observations both externally and internally so with with my customers as well as even The decisions that we make internally I think the the two biggest challenges that I Personally witness are kind of the the hippo problem and then just the fact that I think data is so much harder than We give it credit for I think we kind of expect everyone to be these amazing data experts and it's just really really challenging Um on the hippo side if you're not familiar with the term you probably most most are but Um Is the deadliest one of the deadliest animals in the in the world But it's also one of the deadliest ways to end a productive meeting Um, it's just the highest paid person's opinion, right and we kind of struggle with that constantly um On the hippo side, you know, I personally find that a lot of times that they're backed with probably a mountain of evidence and data that could Uh possibly prove that their opinion is actually quite good. It's just not been formulated and it's not been distributed and I think um, one of the things that we can do with hippos is Um, we can kind of try to lean into their opinions the same way that we lean into our own with a bit of optimism And try to remove as much bias as we have and see if we can use data to help inform those opinions Um, don't try to immediately go to see how we can tear them down and destroy them But actually how we can build them and I think when you do that um You can you know series of 84 percent of products don't meet customer expectations You know when somebody has a really great opinion, it could be a really great opinion But um, if you don't bring the data into it and kind of shine the lights on things that um are kind of hidden You will end up putting out a pretty mediocre product So you can take these opinions and you can evolve them and you can shape them and um Make them something pretty beautiful. Um, and when you do that when you bring that value to those opinions I think you kind of put a little political capital in the bank so that you can come back and do that with your own opinions in your own team, so Um, I would say there's a lesson somewhere in there about hippo taming. Um Which is probably something i'm going to put on my LinkedIn after this um On the data being hard, um, I pride myself in being kind of a more of an engineer So in my title there's sales and engineering and depending on who i'm talking to i'll lean into one of those but um, but on the engineering side i'm i'm Pretty good at tech. I can build most things. I can kind of figure out any technology, but I think data is incredibly hard I've been in some sort of analysis or data for 10 years and Moogly you and I were talking earlier that it's um, it constantly lies to you or we find ways to lie to ourselves with data Um, and if you think that data is not hard, unfortunately, you are probably under thinking it Um, and um, I think some of the tactics that i've seen work really well Is that instead of kind of forcing everybody to be in this kind of data driven mindset? We should at least have an appreciation for it, but um, we have to find the people that are extremely passionate extremely capable Um, and uh, we'll stop at nothing and interrogate every hypothesis Uh, and show the value in being data driven and so um, so Um, I think hippo taming helping evolve those hippo opinions and then from a data driven perspective Which is maybe it's on those agile teams or uh, those cross-functional teams It's kind of finding the digital heroes as we call it to be the beacon of data driven tactics I think is something that works well So I think you know we've we've set the stage, you know pretty well for defining Okay, so what do we mean when we say to you know build a customer-centric culture? Why is that important and what are some of the challenges for for those in the room? Maybe that are only starting out on this is there any advice maybe joe I'll look to you for the any advice you can share on how to begin where do you start? Yeah First of all Sarah made a good point for the scale of the problem that we're trying to deal with here So, uh, I hope you took this panel already a second the um the impetus to start and try it today And pretty much all of these products have free trial So I'd say just a good start and try it out The first stage for me is to start building a way of tracking Your customers in a way that you can share with your entire team So maybe you start with the dashboard you put the analytics in you put the customer feedback in maybe that's a few replays So you're starting to build the evidence and the empathy and you share that across your organization And then I said this earlier you start with every planning meeting So think of whenever you set out a new plan just ground yourself and the evidence and the latest insight One of the particular tricks that I like is You can ask anyone else who takes part in this to share the data This doesn't always have to be you as a product manager So whether it's design or engineering or research or another group and ask them to interpret it because what they're going to find Is they need to familiarize themselves with the data and they need to understand that check their own understanding And you might get to a place where You get a new kind of challenge that maybe you're not familiar with You'll all have different relationships with how it works with your engineering organization, for example But sometimes they want to build a thing because it's really interesting and a big and a complex problem But that doesn't always solve the customer's needs to what you've already heard today Now when you have the shared understanding one of the early ways that you know that it's time to work Is that maybe when you go into a sprint refinement? Some of my challenging engineer my challenge and say hey, I saw this customer feedback I see this drop-off in this funnel over here And you've talked about this other thing that is not addressing these problems Now i'm not suggesting You need to immediately pivot and change your plan and do that every time But it's the kind of culture where there's a little bit of push and pull around the right goal And that's what you want like you want an engineer to be engaged enough understand the customer well enough So they will actively challenge the plan and then you can have a good conversation around Hey, we're not acting on that today because it's not the right segment It's another customer who's looking to grow at the moment Overall is going well for them or yeah, you're right. We do need to lean to that We hadn't you know integrated in the plan yet. Do you have ideas? How do we actually now go about doing that? So I think if you if you get to a point where you have a shared understanding and you create some of that challenge Focus on the customer. I think you've been a really good spot Great great point And then for those organizations that are maybe a little bit further ahead So maybe a bit more mature and are looking to elevate their approach Maybe mooly if I could put this to you. What what might you suggest or offer? So I think you know To elevate to a 2.0 Level basically means to make customer centricity a strategic asset of a company versus just a culture And to make it strategic means that it actually needs to influence business results now You know, we all do planning what companies are measured for is business success Which you know is manifested in revenue in metrics like net our retention as an example and It's not always that clear. How do customer experience relates to those metrics, right? More than that. You actually you have a lot of noise meaning you might have Feedbacks measurements that reflect a certain sentiment of customers But you have a lot of those which one do you want to act on? So, uh, for example in my In my career a lot of the planning techniques that I used Utilized what's called an okr framework an objective and Q result Which is basically a framework that enables you to plan on a year the according to the basis. What do you want to do from the? top level of the business outcomes down to each and every team right but then Actually drawing that dotted line is super important because I'll give an example You know, we might say as a company. It's super important for us to improve net dollar retention this year, right? So Okay, so how do we make users? You know be retained more well first of all not all user segments are equal quite honestly You got users that are more aligned to your revenue mechanism and users that are not And secondly not all user flows are aligned to what you want to achieve on a business level So if we take that example of net our attention We might do some analysis and find out that it's mostly influenced by a certain user segment and also What is best correlated to net our attention retention? Which is the business metric is stickiness right and stickiness is measured by you know The recurrence of of people getting into your platform So now you start zooming in on a specific user segment on their stickiness And you're saying how am I going to increase the adoption of that user segments? And I will prioritize that higher than another segment Now the next thing is also at the company level. There are sometimes way too many goals So to operate successfully you actually need a highly collaborative cross org process in that Planning cycle and what that means is that you don't only go from top to bottom But you also go bottom off meaning you cascade goals from the company level To the individual departments and eventually people But then you want the people to voice their opinions from the field And get those feedbacks and kind of elevate them to the company goals and see do they intersect And if they're not sometimes you would actually disqualify some of the goals that you put for yourself As a company and that makes every participant in the company every employee a key strategic asset and makes their voice be heard Um And actually, you know your answer to it. I'm a data geek. So I'm I'm thinking a lot about how to use data To generate technology that actually helps our clients elevate to that 2.0 level Right. So for example, you know with machine learning and gen ai one of the opportunities that we're now building towards is Well, could we for example, uh, create an ai assistant that actually talks to a business stakeholder that's in charge of a business result a business metric But assist them throughout the journey of pulling each and every employee that's relevant to solve an issue or to tackle an opportunity And also drive the process of execution and basically utilize technology to tackle those two pillars of Of strategic alignment and empowerment of people and collaboration In closing, I feel like we could we could take over the stage and I I promise we won't I promise this will be our wrap up But in closing if each of you could maybe share For the audience today, what's the one thing that you would urge them to take away with them from from today's panel? Sarah I might start with you One thing I think we're talking about customer centricity and we all probably in the room like no, it's good, right? We've talked about the why up here, but I think really focus on your why Why do you want to push for more data? Why do you want to push for focusing on the customer and make that why very clear? So it's an easy story to tell internally as well I think One of the kind of key metrics and a change framework because this is big change management. We're talking about here Is um a line on your vision and build your coalition So what's your vision of why you want to get to this point and have that nailed down so you can then communicate that with others Really? Yeah, um, so I think It's a very long journey to get to a highly operating system of customer centricity that creates business value, right? And you don't want to get um Kind of sworn off in different directions as you go at it So I would recommend to focus on one thing that you feel isn't really working well right now It could be one metric one process, right and start small and iterate and almost like Measure how you're going to measure meaning measure your effectiveness in driving a data driven customer centric culture Doesn't work for you and then learn from that and then scale out because if you're not doing that you potentially You know, you're just you're going to lose yourself in that journey Yeah, so I think um to the extent that you're thinking like organizationally and like you said big change management and coalition um agree with what molly said it was really starting small but from the perspective of uh with your people so um You know don't just go buy a technology and drop everybody's email address in it and think that you're going to change your culture It's not going to happen. Um, it doesn't happen until you meet it with the right people in process And so I think if you can find those individuals that are kind of accelerators or um Yeah, I don't know they have a cascading effect to the organization Find those people build them as kind of digital heroes and digital champions and and so that they can kind of be your surrogates and Coalition They're all really important points and I want to just underline that you cannot be successful unless you follow these paths So I'll add the last component that we haven't mentioned which is the the tools that you're going to use to do that You'll want to look for one that Covers all the different kinds of insights you need and in a way where you can get the insight when you need it Not after a few more weeks of changes and then establishing a baseline that it takes too long, right? You need to make quick decisions Well, look, thank you guys so much for those fantastic insights. I think you know the key message for me in this anyway is To really create a customer-centric culture. It's the sum of the parts There is no one metric no one tool no one leader who can do this All of these things need to be aligned and cohesive to really drive change So I'd like to thank you all for your expertise and your insights And just to remind everyone in the audience if you'd like to dive deeper with any of the panelists They'll all be available in the expo hall later on today for a conversation. So thank you and thank you