How To Build An Unstoppable Alliance With CX Feat. Courtney Leblanc

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In this episode, senior customer experience leader, Courtney LeBlanc, reveals the ideal partnership between CX and experimenters and shares invaluable insights on: Forging powerful partnerships between CX and experimenters Navigating the daily demands of a CX leader Simplifying CX workflows with customer insights … and so much more! Don’t miss out on this enlightening conversation from an expert in the CX game!

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How To Build An Unstoppable Alliance With CX Feat. Courtney Leblanc – YouTube

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(00:00) your willingness to inve like not only to listen to me but then to invest the hours and have those reciprocal conversations where we could give each other insights it felt really good because not everyone will show up for you in that way and it goes both ways yeah totally totally um I totally just booked this

(00:16) episode so that we can just compliment each other back and forth is it working cuz I I feel very complimented right now hey experiment Nation it’s Tracy larand Joe and today’s episode is not an interview with an experimentor but our guest does have a lot of amazing information about how we as experimenters or optimizers can

(00:39) really build an Unstoppable alliance with customer support or customer experience teams so check out this episode you won’t regret it and I hope you enjoy okay Courtney hello before you make me laugh again hello hey Tracy I am okay so for anyone listening to this uh I am just I’m dying of laughter right now Courtney and I uh

(01:08) we’re good friends uh personally and professionally and uh just the thought of interviewing together is just a lot of fun so yeah this is uh this is Courtney Courtney say hello hello everyone So Courtney you have quite a bit of customer support and CX experience uh I worked with you in one of those experiences and uh you have

(01:34) been a phenomenal Resource as someone who does conversion optimization but yeah could you tell our audience just a little bit about you yeah so I have pretty much all my professional experience has revolved around things that have to do with the customer you know starting out in a retail environment um leading teams

(01:54) there and you know being on that front line with the customer moving into to more customer experience focused and inside sales sales Ops adjacent um working with teams and helping them through softwares and Order management and things like that and then into my most recent experience which is where Tracy and I met um at wilful um there I

(02:13) was the first person hired dedicated to any kind of customer service customer facing related role at the team at the company um and scaled their support operations from basically nothing you know a Gmail a Gmail inbox at one point and the founder cell phone um you know right up to at one point you know we had a a

(02:35) temporary contract team of about eight folks who were working with us for a brief period you know but generally around two to three full-time staff managing you know support programs experience programs virtual witnessing programs um across all different channels managing our content logs our chat bot and all of that and building

(02:56) that out all from scratch um um in the tech space so needless to say if there’s anyone who’s going to know what’s going on in the mind of the customer it is you yeah and even like even at times when we did have you know a team sometimes I was responsible for helping coverage right so even as a manager you know a taking

(03:15) escalations as needed but b sometimes especially in small teams you got to be Scrappy and you got to get on the front line so you know there was some weeks where I was in the inbox every day and that was just how it was and so definitely was able to really put those stories to those customer insights and needs too totally

(03:35) yeah and that is going to be a huge part of what we’re going to be talking about today so just to kind of go rewind Blast from the Past a few years ago we were working together about uh 2020 21 21 okay yeah one of the worst years uh in a while uh not a great year the world but so it goes uh great year

(03:59) for us to meet each other uh that was definitely a highlight but I remember when we were working together I was uh doing cro which is what many of the individuals listening to this podcast do and uh I found that we were able to create this neat little Alliance in which you were a constant source of uh

(04:20) feedback from the customer for me and then I was in turn able to actually act on a lot of the things that customers were begging us to try out or to test or to look into further so that is a huge part of what I’m hoping that uh our listeners can get from us today yeah don’t discredit don’t discredit the work

(04:44) that you did to get customer insights back in the day I will never forget when you I don’t know how long you spent on it but when you did all the live chat transcripts yes to get insights um and we exported those and you spent a pretty hefty amount of time digging through those to get those customer insights so

(05:01) it’s always it’s cool having this conversation now with someone who’s such an advocate for the customer voice as that person who tries to provide that customer voice too yes absolutely and anyone who’s listening to this who’s a good experimentor or good Optimizer can see the value in having that information

(05:19) and being able to act on it and test using it so that’s the thing is how do we as experiment MERS and optimizers create this kind of this like Unstoppable alliance with customer support so that both parties win the customer wins everybody wins really yeah and uh yeah that is definitely something that I struggled with in the past uh

(05:44) aside from obviously we killed it Som and I know that this this is something that uh other individuals also struggle with like how do I get um how do I like essentially make friends with the CX team so that they are a constant source of information for me and I can put uh you know the customers needs first in in

(06:06) my own work yeah I think the biggest thing that initially comes to mind is I have never met this is Romo Santiago from experiment Nation every week we share interviews with and Conference sessions by our favorite conversion rate optimizers from around the world so if you like this video smash that like

(06:24) button and consider subscribing it helps us a bunch someone in CX who doesn’t want to feel heard yes um and I know you know you’ve you’ve kind of alluded to it as well like getting that bridge built initially can be really hard but I can assure you like it would be pretty Dar surprised if I ever met like a CX

(06:45) manager or someone who’s at a point where they’re like actively working with the data even the Frontline reps if we’re being honest yeah because that was something that was always really interesting at willful is like we would have these experiences where we have all these customers reaching out with this

(07:00) issue um and we would find that sometimes it would come in waves like one month we would get all of these inquiries about you know Clarity around the specific package um that we offered and then maybe it would taper off a little bit and like the next month would be something specific to this other partnership that we had and it would EB

(07:16) and flow yes and so it would create these situations where we’d have these very high proportional amount of tickets that were related to a specific issue and you can feel a little helpless if you don’t feel like anyone’s listening to these issues um and you know I’m really fortunate to have worked with folks like

(07:36) yourself and some folks who are on the willful team who are very you know opened for the most part in trying to identify and understand and work on fixing these things I’ve also worked at other organizations where there was so much rigidity in the policies and procedures that even if people wanted to

(07:52) listen there wasn’t much they could do about it so I think the biggest thing is like that empathy and like desire to be present and not just like in one ear and out the other yes right like showing up with like an enthusiasm and an engagement for whatever CS is telling you and I think the other thing is

(08:12) that understanding what’s valuable to you as an experimenter in that moment as well because if you can’t convey you know the types of insights that you’re looking for what you’re trying to validate or you know understanding what you need in a way that might not accidentally pigeonhole you into confirmation bias or

(08:35) something like these are all really important elements if someone can come to me with an ask and says hey you know I really want to understand this particular bug or this particular issue and how often we’re getting a contact about it great right um that’s really easy to do but if it’s just the generality of I want to

(08:53) understand the different topics that people are reaching out about great I can provide you that but if you don’t know what you’re wanting to do with that it’s also not very valuable to you right and so I think that there’s a couple different pieces I think there’s that like showing up and wanting to listen

(09:05) yeah there’s that you know I was actually completely irrelevant to the like product working but was talking about this related to my board work with someone who’s about to go into a really big meeting with you know the president of the University of Calgary and like other really important stakeholders of like understand what

(09:24) outcome you’re looking for but also try if you can to have a road map of like how are you going to a figure out what the outcome is and B figure out how you’re going to get there like I think there’s a lot of moving pieces but showing up and being friendly and listening and trying to and like having

(09:39) an idea of what you’re looking for is a really good starting place when working with these CX or CS teams totally and I hear this a lot from CX teams just in general just this feeling of you know not being heard and it’s so frustrating because you’re sitting on all these opportunities but other things get prioritized and

(09:59) then you you’re the one that has to deal with the customer complaining and you’re just you’re on the receiving end of that and it goes nowhere so I agree I think that it is very important that individuals like myself someone who is in more of a product or data or marketing type role that we come to the

(10:17) table first with genuine curiosity not just kind of going through the motions and being like hey tell me in five minutes or less like what what do you see on your end and then just never revisiting it ever again so true you brought up another thing about how you know those things change those topics

(10:34) change so true I’m sure new issues come up all the time or once you resolve one of them there’s like a new thing that’s like we got to take care of this so it’s not a oneandone situation it’s no it never it never is and that’s I think one thing that frustrates me is when teams are looking for support with like ideation

(10:56) they kind of just go through the motions they do it once and then is like whatever it’s okay I did it the one time so I check off that box but like things always change so so true you know there’s you know depending on like what a team is able to accomplish in terms of like experimentation and roll out there

(11:15) may you know be things that get addressed but even if you address everything that’s on the list when you you know have meeting a say in q1 if you address all these things those things may lead to new things you can’t just get to the end of the year and say okay it’s Q4 we dealt with that entire list yes and just think that you’re done

(11:35) right like your work that you’ve done well yes is great and it sure has accomplished many different like improvements and additions to um you know the product or whatever you’re working on the website what may it be that you’re optimizing it could cause different issues right there’s been sometimes where you know we think we’ve

(11:55) solved a big issue and turns out that that you know snowballed into something else and like yes we’ve solved this big issue but yeah if we’re not coming back and having these conversations on an ongoing basis the it’s as much about building the relationship as it is about creating that Loop because it’s never

(12:13) going to be done yeah totally and you’re kind of bringing up all these different types of pressures that you deal with but we may not actually be privy to or see on our end and what are those things that you brought up is um you know you can’t just come to your CX team and be like oh uh what are what are customers

(12:34) thinking what are customers saying because it’s so vague and unhelpful whereas let’s let’s kind of use an example if you’re looking for more of a general look of you know what are visitors or customers struggling with in general um I feel like it’s the responsibility of the experimenter the optimizer whoever to ask you you exactly

(12:56) like for exactly what we’re looking for but maybe not necessarily um closing the door to other potential data sources that you might have at your disposal so I can ask you hey can I see a uh CSV export of everything that customers said in CX tickets from the last 30 days and anything else that you think I should

(13:22) know about customers that um are not reflected here specific what are customers struggling with uh what are some of the things that they love about the brand that we can use in like copy and messaging so so true I totally agree it is really important to kind of come to the table with something that you want to learn and being clear

(13:44) about what it is that you want to learn and then working through it together to find out where’s the best data source for this and um like personally for myself I like to do the actual analysis once I have the data so I don’t know about you but I feel like that might also kind of alleviate any work on your

(14:02) end to analyze the data when you’re probably on calls all day or chats with customers all day so just like trying to make it easy for you as well yeah I think that’s that’s an interesting point and kind of a bit like twofold um so like I I have so many different thoughts circling in my head from what you just said the first one is

(14:24) like other great data points um that you know sometimes we would include and provide to folks here at the business depending on what they’re looking for is review related information Google reviews trust pilot reviews whatever platform a company’s using you especially if you’re looking for like positive sentiment

(14:42) related framing from customers those are a great spot to look equally can be a great spot to look for the opposite with that negative sentiment right you know blessing and a curse usually when it comes to a customer satisfaction survey you know NPS net promoter score um or you know reviews things like

(15:03) that we’re going to see those really passionate people on either end of the scale and so there’s a lot of really like good nuggets in there usually that can help um something else like on the analysis side of things and like how granular we may or may want data to be is that I you know for product and

(15:22) marketing teams have set up dashboards that convey these very high High L categories right so at willful specifically set up these dashboards that would say you know in a given week there was some area graphs there was also some like isolated period so if you wanted to filter six months you could see the aggregate for that six-month

(15:39) period um you know you could see the quantity of people who are reaching out looking for pricing clarity as a general you know subject right people who are reaching out specifically about this feature partnership that we have called the Canada will registry um you know things around account management and

(15:57) each of those get a lot more granular than just what that statement is but we provide that on an ongoing basis to those teams where they immediately have access to it they can go off and do their own analysis if they want that goes deeper you know we built out the data in a way that it can get more granular and I can build out those

(16:13) charts on request for a team if they’re asking for it um you know it is really great when you know product or um marketing or experimenters can go in and do some of that analysis and maybe like come back and have a conversation about it at the level that you know I was at with wilful being in a senior manager

(16:31) role reporting into the sea Suite there was an expectation of me to show up to meetings in leadership with my own version of analysis done to discuss so like there is an amount of that still happening but I also think that there’s a lot of value when two people go off in their own Corners kind of look at what

(16:47) they’re looking at and come back and have a conversation about it and you know everyone thinks differently and will come to the table with different ideas even looking at the same information and there’s a lot of value in that too totally and that happened with us when you know when you brought up that I did this analysis based on CX

(17:02) tickets uh back when we were working together at the time you were still starting to uh Define the tags for customer support tickets so a lot of what was exported was still you know it was not categorized you didn’t know what the general no offense to you no off it was messy that’s not offensive I I had

(17:24) inherited I had inherited what was there and I hadn’t really figured out how we wanted to do things yet I’m not offended it was messy it was it was like that’s what you inherited and you built a good database of tagging and categorization from that point on but I think part of what made our uh like our relationship

(17:46) mutually beneficial was that you know I W I go through all of these responses that you exported from I think it was zenes all of the tickets and I went ahead and I manually coded every response into a general theme and those themes started to come to light and that’s something that I passed on to you

(18:08) as oh this is a tag that you probably want to create because it keeps coming up and then it’s just like a back and forth of you’re giving me great information and I’m going to give you information back and make your life easier I think that is so important to any sort of Alliance as it has to be mutually beneficial not just give give

(18:29) give take take take so I think that was one area in which I I feel we did that really well um totally so yeah there’s that that thinking back to that period is just so wild um because that was I mean you were you were probably doing the live chat transcript analysis if we’re being honest it was probably like

(18:52) exactly three years ago um at that point I had been about 3 months into my time at willful I had just kind of started getting the ropes of how we were managing all the different channels walking into this you know effectively being an IC for what’s normally a department because we were still a fairly small business at the time we

(19:10) were maybe a team of 12 I think you know we had survived launching in Quebec at that point yeah and I just remember you know feeling like we’d weathered the storm and kind of made it to a slower season and yeah you and I had built this really cool reciprocal relationship and situation where we could connect and

(19:27) have these conversations and it also felt very validating to have and like validating and valuable almost to feel like there was a person who was invested in what the customer was saying and what they were looking for and what they you know needed from us in order to provide them the best value yes yes here yeah and like for you to come

(19:51) to me and be like hey you know look at this pie chart I’ve built out because of all this information that we have and you know here’s some things to consider and I look at this pie chart and I’m like the conversations I have with customers feel very reflected in this chart and I don’t I because I think at that point too um you

(20:09) know we had started having conversations about you know some package Clarity things and um you know at the whole business level right yeah you know I had started to see a lot of a specific type of question I’d brought it up with everyone and said hey like I think that this is a gap and I think we should talk

(20:25) about it and going through that exercise with you and then later building out the tags that accompanied that um so we could segment the data in that way it was just like oh yeah like I I feel very seen this this is like if a there’s a person who’s advocating for me and what I’m saying the customers are saying B

(20:43) we’re now getting a data point that shows this because that’s another thing if we have experimenters who are watching this back who work with small businesses yeah you might not have the data built out yet you might not have those graphs and those things yeah when I started working at willful three and a

(20:58) half years ago we didn’t have kpis for the Cs team because it was so new right support didn’t have quite like a specific expectation on them at that time it was just we need someone to take care of our customers and we need to know what our customers are saying and so you and I were really the beginnings of how do we approach

(21:19) that and your willingness to inve like not only to listen to me but then to invest the hours and have those reciprocal conversations where could give each other insights it felt really good because not everyone will show up for you in that way and it goes both ways yeah totally totally um I totally just booked this

(21:37) episode so that we can just compliment each other back and forth is it working because I I feel very complimented right now good I’m glad that was not my intention but like I’m not bad about it neither am I neither am I but yeah think um there’s also that element of you could be giving me totally new

(22:03) information like customers are complaining about oh I’m unable to do this specific thing in your tool to which I’m like whoa I had no idea let me go into uh our Google analytics or our product Analytics tool is there a large amount of drop off in that particular area of a customer Journey so the first

(22:24) kind of light bulb moment can come from either party and the other party can have the data to kind of say oh I’m really seeing that on my end we got to fix this as soon as possible or I’m not seeing that on my end but I want to keep a close eye on that I think there’s also that element of um you know sometimes I

(22:45) would get kind of stuck in the numbers side of things so the quantitative and then you were just surrounded by the qualitative so like how what is the best way to get that merged together I think there’s so many different ways we can do it which leads me to the next question of what does the ideal partnership

(23:05) between CX and experimentation or cro look like yeah so I think and you’re right there’s like so many different ways and there’s so many different answers and I think that you know for more established organizations having a voice of customer program can be really important yes um and what that looks

(23:28) like for different companies is going to be very different right it could depend on the product it could depend on the structure of your organization um one of I haven’t run a voice of customer program we weren’t quite there yet in my previous role um but we were kind of working our way towards having enough data in actionable

(23:48) ways that we could have move that way I think the biggest thing is like identifying your key stakeholders yes and this like this goes those on both sides of the cscx and the experimenter product whoever you want to put in that other bucket that’s working with CX is that you both need to identify your stakeholders and understand what

(24:09) needs to happen here right and it could be something like you know I’d imagine based on my previous role at willful it would be you know myself probably Sarah who was the product leader maybe one or two members of her team if desired um and maybe one or two memberships of the leadership team depending on you know who’s running what

(24:28) teams and what that looks like and showing up to the table with dedicated insights that folks can review and discuss and look at what those opportunities may be um I think there’s you know in terms of Ideal partnership it’s ongoing conversation right whether that’s you’re having a weekly or a bi-weekly or whatever depending on how

(24:49) fast you’re trying to move as a team and what you’re working on and what you’re looking for right and how much you value the voice of the customer too also that right I mean that’s that’s a big asterisk in this whole conversation right and kind kind of what we LED with right is if you don’t care about the

(25:07) customer voice you’re not going to be looking at fostering this relationship anyways um but yeah like depending on how much weight you want to put into that customer Insight you know are you pairing it with customer interviews or other kinds of qualitative data understanding how you want to weigh the quantitative versus the qualitative

(25:27) yes that was something I was always very interesting at wilful and kind of alluded to earlier was just like proportionally how many folks reached out for every sale that we made you know and how that so you know I think if you looked at new visitors versus tickets it was like 0.01% of traffic reached out and

(25:44) submitted a ticket to CS if you looked at how many tickets we got per sale it was much much higher um you know usually like I think it was like one in three customers who purchased reach out for CS support now asterisk that with don’t have the relative data of when the ticket was submitted relative to purchase right there were some

(26:07) instances where customer reaches out CS answers question customer purchases or it could be customer comes back six months later with a question because they’re trying to you know sign their legal documents or something like that and they just want some clarity um it’s like those ratios look very different

(26:23) and depending on what part of the funnel you’re trying to do May impact how much weight you want to put on the customer voice in that situation yeah but also you know understanding that CS is a snapshot of the whole picture and there is so much value in what you know CX can provide and advocate for but it’s not

(26:41) everything and we need to mix it with other sources but the CX or CS team especially depending on how connected they are to the front line you know they see Barb who’s 67 who just lost their partner and is mourning and they’re not very computer literate and they’re trying to figure out how to navigate

(27:03) willful because they can’t afford to go to a lawyer and they don’t have a complicated situation and they just want to get their documents in place but they’re not comfortable with the computer and they’re finding it very frustrating they’re also you know emotionally charged because they’re grieving yeah you know you have that

(27:16) interaction and those things they sit with you and they stick with you and especially if you are an empath you have this deep desire to advocate for Barb or for Susie or John or you know these people that we have names and voices for instead of them just being a data point and yeah you know it was definitely a

(27:36) big learning for me in my time at wilful was understanding how to you know maybe this is a note for the CX folks who may end up watching this podcast how to effectively like communicate the weight of these qualitative stories and these people that we carry with us yes you know beyond the ticket closing and being

(28:00) solved in a way that still punches with that emotional weight that we’re feeling of having dealt with that person when we’re bringing that to other teams in a way that other people understand why it’s important you know yes yes Barb May literally like she’s a drop in the bucket but there’s a reason that her

(28:25) story is important totally there are two things there that resonate so hard there’s the showing and not telling so instead of just kind of giving the numbers at a high level like you don’t really see you don’t see the person behind a lot of these messages so you want to put it in their words I’m sure and when you’re working with a

(28:48) leadership team especially they have so many different priorities they have their own agendas and yeah sometimes the customer like come second unfortunately we want to believe customer always comes first even in organizations that say we’re customer first no they’re they’re shareholder first and then customer

(29:07) second so like sorry I’m just I mean not for it’s not for every brand I’ve worked with but like many many are like that and it’s so much more impactful to actually show what they’re saying instead of just saying oh you know like 18 people in the last month said so and so it’s like actually showing their

(29:31) their experience I should also clarify willful is a platform where you create your will online so there’s a lot of like sensitive um like subject Matter’s a lot of talk of death and grief um so even it’s even more important for to get that insight and and really get things in the customer’s own words at least in

(29:52) my perspective I know I know you agree with this yeah actually something I mean I didn’t directly oversee this but you know I’ve definitely provided some insights in this way and it was after seeing someone else format this the person who owns the analysis of The NPS data at willful um one of the things

(30:08) that I found really really helpful in what they did is when they were analyzing a months worth of NPS data they would segment by um promoters the passives and then the detractors they would have the quantitative summaries of like the key themes and stuff that they found but then they would go and pull

(30:26) one to two literal like trans like copy paste from the MPS surveys of whatever the customer may have said assuming that they left more than just like oh it was great um and include those so we did have some amount of customer voice and that and then you know same thing if product team is looking into a very

(30:46) specific um you know issue or you know subcategory from that list of big themes that I talked about it would often involve pulling a list of tickets and going in and you know a providing that quantity of data but B looking for what kind of poignant excerpts can I grab from these tickets that really convey you

(31:08) know either you know potentially the severity you know maybe if I’m trying to make a case for like some bug to be fixed depending on what it is um or potentially why we should be considering implementing a new feature or things like that we did have specifically so fun fact Tracy completely reworked that

(31:27) entire tagging system in the last six to eight months or so um so that’s that’s all that’s all gone now it’s different it’s better which is great um good okay that’s good but one of the categories that we built out as a part of this new system is like we have a product section yeah and we have one that is product

(31:45) existing feature and then a breakdown of all the different sections in you know your willful account that a user may be reaching out and having questions with or providing feed back on and we also had a product new feature section if folks were reaching out about things that we hadn’t implemented but we

(32:02) probably aware of and also in other category for each of these if it didn’t quite fit um and you know was able like have graphs that go out to the product team that they can check whenever they want because they have access to these freely um it’s not an export every Monday morning anymore and you can’t get

(32:17) into zenes to go see it they have the ability to go view these live and like manipulate the data with filters that we’ve set for them and that’s so helpful right the the fact that you know we I was able to go in and Empower those teams to go like go play with the data yourselves like here here’s the base of

(32:32) your information but like go play with it by date ranges go play with it you know if you want to filter it by province um we had a province filter um you know who took care of the ticket um what channel did it come from um so there’s all these different you know things that they could look at and manipulate the data with and then if it

(32:50) still wasn’t giving them what they wanted they wanted something more granular they could make a request for it and I was happy to build that um but empower ing them to take care of that I feel like I’ve gone totally off the rails if you have more questions on that side of things we can get into it I do

(33:04) have like a second kind of thought and sidebar when we are done with that thought around the ideal partnership between experimenters in CX though so I just wanted to like I captured all that totally yeah no that was that was great too because it also kind of shows everyone listening whether they’re from CX or from kind of the

(33:23) experimentation or cro side what this looks like tactically and not just oh like we’ll get in a meeting and talk like no like this is you’re telling us there’s a dashboard with these kinds of filters and it’s gonna have these kinds of tags so that’s that is really helpful the one other thing that I wanted to

(33:41) call out uh before you can go on your next Spiel just do my Spiel uh course is uh you know every every user counts every visitor counts and true I think it’s so easy to disregard and idea just because one person said it but you don’t see the nine other people who didn’t say it so true so personally I believe every every

(34:06) piece of feedback counts every visitor counts and uh I do you feel the same I do so I it’s funny that you said the the choice of words that you made is very interesting to me so I don’t know if we’ve talk this before I I’m like did you and I talk about this God only knows it’s been you know we’ve known each

(34:29) other for three and a half years now um but I’ve definitely read it somewhere and I can’t I don’t know where to attribute back the quote but it’s effectively like for every person that reaches out you have nine people that don’t right like literally what you said you know out of every you know for it’s the whole principle of how many

(34:45) people just say it’s not worth it yes and they you what are the yeah depending on what what the issue is what the stakes are they may just leave right right or you know in the case of wilful depending on what it is they may not finish their documents they may have paid for their documents from willful

(35:06) and they never finish them which is another massive issue right and we know that you know especially for estate planning like there’s no the deadline is you pass away um which is really unfortunate right like the deadline with your Powers of Attorney and your will is you’re in a situation where you need

(35:24) them and you don’t know when that’s going to be and because of that people don’t think there’s a timeline they don’t get it done and how many people just say whatever I’m frustrated with X issue I don’t want to deal with this right now I don’t have the time to deal with this right now I don’t want to and

(35:38) shouldn’t have to reach out to CX to get assistance with this and they just leave and whether that’s you know maybe this is an interesting call out depending on what people are experimenting with just because someone purchases doesn’t mean there’s things post-p purchase that should be looked at or taken care of of or experimented with or

(35:57) dealt with yes um so I think that there’s a lot in there to think about and consider and right like again how many barbs are there and is Barb the only one that reached out yeah because they you know maybe the nine other people didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with it and how many of those did or didn’t purchase

(36:16) depending on what the question or the issue was yeah and how many of those even if they did purchase you know in the context of willful didn’t finish their documents yes right like there’s a lot of different spots where you can lose people and like optimization and trying to create that incredible customer

(36:34) experience is everyone’s job yes it is it is it’s like that’s something that CX and cro have in common too is it’s not just one person it’s a group of several subject matter experts plus like uh not not optional leadership buyin yes so true yeah you know and I have been through you know at least in both of my more office focused

(37:01) jobs like several changes in leadership that I was reporting to and even you know various periods in my time at Fox Racing you know we had an inside sales manager that I was working with directly but there was also periods where we were reporting into national sales managers or the GM of the country and things like

(37:19) that um and like working with those folks who are in that very very Senior Management right like VP or seite level roles and making sure that we’re communicating in ways that gets them invested is important but like there also has to be a level of interest and desire to be there in the first place and if that doesn’t exist you can’t move

(37:42) that forward yes um just because I know we’ve been chatting for quite a while and I want to make sure I get this other thought like please do yes discuss I think you’ll think this one’s really interesting um and we have talked about you know there can be different approaches to experimenting and like

(37:58) data validation and amount of data to drive confidence and things like that which all are going to lean into this next topic is also especially depending on the nature of the customer experience team that you’re working with because customer experience can be a bit of an umbrella term that can cover you know

(38:14) customer service support which are quite similar um as well as customer success or any like customer facing programming that your team may be managing there’s definitely a lot of different buckets here under the CX umbrella um is like the communication around experiments is the big one especially you

(38:37) know understanding how many folks something’s being rolled out to um you know what we’re trying to accomplish from that what are the risks how long are we running it for like providing those visuals understanding any customer facing documentation that may not be consistent yeah if someone is getting the variant of a test

(39:01) yeah um and also like especially you know obviously you don’t want to run several tests on like a single section of something right like on a single page or something because that’s not effective from what I understand um in in that like you and again this is coming from me as someone who only knows

(39:20) about experimentation through others um I’m not super versed in experimentation um but like it is important to control kind of what you’re showing to whom and when and if there’s any overlap so yeah you do have a point there like you don’t want to change from what I understand the entire copy of a page everywhere

(39:37) everything right like you don’t want to do that and then like change a menu button and then change this other CTA and like do that all at the same time because you’re not going to understand what actually drove the change yeah um and so when you think you know but if you have a very large complex website or

(39:52) product you may be doing things in different areas of the funnel at the same time and so making sure that there’s communication yes and like points of reference that your CX team can appropriately support users who have become a part of whatever experiment that you’re running um and understanding what capacity your CX team has depending

(40:16) on how big they are how many teams they have who all might have work that’s impacted by experiments that are being run yes um making sure they’re equipped with the resources and understanding in how to support those folks if they come with an issue related to an experiment that’s happening so that’s a really big

(40:35) one and the understanding how fast your CX team can move compared to how fast you want to move right like and again this comes with that reciprocal ongoing conversation in Bridge and just like having those conversations and making sure everyone’s on the same page because if you come into the office on a Monday

(40:52) morning and you’re whoever’s running your experiments is like hey we just rolled out 15 things this morning yeah yeah me as a CX person running a team yeah is like crap I need to now communicate this to anyone who reports to me I need to go and do an audit of all of my documentation and understand where a customer could end up they’re

(41:15) going to be confused depending on how big the experiment is and you know how visible it is to folks so there’s definitely like I think that there’s the part around the relation ship the voice of the customer and working together to create those actionable insights and opportunities for the business but I

(41:33) think there’s the second piece of once we’ve gone through and had these conversations and worked through these opportunities and looked at what we want you know what experimenters or product teams or whoever it may be is wanting to work on and for a lack of a better term play with because I feel like we said

(41:53) experiment a lot and it’s experimentation um like let’s make sure that the conversation’s ongoing that we know when things are being turned on and turned off and that folks know how to support users who may be experiencing a variant um understanding you know making sure there’s communication if a Varian is

(42:15) becoming permanent yes um you know things like that right like there’s the there’s part one which is the pre-experiment and then there’s also the rolling out an experiment and post experiment relationship that’s very important between these two parts of the business yes I think it’s so important that CX or customer support

(42:32) is involved in that communication or they can see that communication and it’s you know it’s spelled out very clearly for everyone what is it going to look like this experience why why are we running this experiment are there any data points that led to this experiment and when it’s implemented you know where

(42:51) is this where is this going live how is this going to change the customer experience in general so I think that’s super important as well um there was something else that you said that was really smart and I just wanted to are you saying not everything I say is really smart no everything you say is smart and that’s why I’m struggling

(43:10) right now oh my goodness but yeah no it’s like it is true and um I think anyone listening to this just really try to create that healthy communication back and forth with CX show what you’re doing the reasoning behind it uh ultimately like make your life easier I think that’s a really important part of any sort of Alliance is making

(43:34) the other party’s life easier um and yeah I mean is there anything else that you would want uh our listeners to know about how to become that that best ally of the CX team honestly I feel like we’ve covered a lot I think the biggest thing is really the curi like the genuine curiosity piece like I’m just I’m sitting here

(43:59) kind of thinking around everything that I worked on and built and provided insights for over my three and a half years at wilful and I actually think one of my favorite moments specific to that kind of work was when two members of the product team reached out to me and they’re like hey can we grab like an

(44:16) hour of your time we just want to sit down with you and like ask you some questions about different like demographic profiles of users and like we just want to get your thoughts and had a notion page and they had written out kind of these very general different user profiles um right so one could be like older

(44:34) Millennial married plus kids um it could have been like person this age common law relationship um you know folks in this age group who are new to Canada um all these different profiles and we literally just sat and they had a handful of guided questions but for the most part and maybe this is terrible but I’m sure

(44:58) folks listening to this can tell I love to talk especially about CX stuff is like they just let me like ramble within the the bubble of whatever user profile we were talking about for over an hour and they just listened and they took notes and they asked questions in a really thoughtful and curious way and I just think that

(45:17) was a really cool thing and I then you know later saw a lot of those things that we talked about you know in some ways depending on the situation like work to validate them with some extra data and stuff versus me just anecdotally being like this is what I’ve seen in the last three years talking to customers here um and what my team has

(45:32) seen it was okay let’s talk about how do we explore these deeper how do we fix these pain points how do we communicate these things differently and you know let’s look at the data and figure out how we’re going to quantitatively prioritize these things um and that was a really cool moment because it really

(45:52) felt in that moment that the two people that I sat down with were super curious super invested they prepared yeah prepared is great because if I’m being honest there’s so much information in CX if again going back to what we talked about at the beginning if you don’t know what you want from me or from a CX

(46:09) team I’m just sitting on this like yeah pile of data and I’m like okay I guess here you go right like I’ll I’ll gladly give you all of the data and information that I have but it’s not going to be in a format that’s probably very great or very usable for whatever ever you’re trying to achieve and I think that you know if we

(46:28) both come to the table with insights and prep in mind and a bit of an idea of what we want to talk about there’s so much that can be achieved when those two teams get together in a way where they want to collaborate and they want to push each other in a positive way um as there’s also pushing in a negative way right and we know that

(46:52) everyone has limitations either you know from like a literal like time perspective or from you know our software can’t do that there can be a lot of different things there but yeah I think like preparedness and genuine curiosity and investment and like an ongoing agile Loop of communication are really those key things to making that a

(47:11) great strong ongoing relationship and also just fostering that throughout your whole team right not everyone has time to meet with CX and that’s totally fair we’re all busy I get it um but also making sure that that attitude of value of what the CX team can provide yes extends through your team and vice versa

(47:32) right like CX may feel the pressures or frustration if an issue isn’t getting addressed that they feel is really poignant and frequent and that they’re seeing a lot of and just like trying to have that empathy and desire to show up and maintain those conversations and that everyone on the team understands the

(47:53) value of that relationship versus just you know the handful of people if it’s just two people like back in the day it was with you and I meeting on whatever Cadence or you know if it is a VOC program making sure that everyone understands the value of that meeting in that relationship yes one million

(48:10) percent I know you’re just you’re preaching to the choir right now but this is going to be very helpful for people who are maybe new to cro and their minds are just starting to open up to the fact that there is a lot of voice of customer that’s involved in cro I like I wish I had this conversation when

(48:30) I first started so yeah I’m I’m very grateful that you were able to first of all prove that I have friends uh to to anyone watching this uh but also just sharing like what you’ve learned over time as a CX leader what we’ve learned both from our uh Alliance together and just yeah I’m really grateful that you

(48:53) were here this is this has been really cool I think that this has been a very Pinnacle moment for us again like yes thinking back to where we were in our careers when we first met and not saying that either of us were bad at the work we were doing but there has been so much growth well I was as long as as long as

(49:13) you know you’re throwing yourself under the bus and I’m not throwing you under us um but we were both newer to what we were trying to do right like I had a lot of CX experience but I’d never been that person responsible for all the decisions at that point yeah um and to think of where we’ve both kind of come from and

(49:35) where we’ve grown to I there’s a part of me that almost imagines us watching this conversation back then yes and thinking about how you know people who are where we were like you said could benefit from this conversation and understand what you can get out of it because not it’s not immediately obvious to a

(49:55) lot of people and the bigger the organization the harder that is to know that that’s an option yes when you’re a team of like 10 to 12 it’s pretty easy you message me on slack and you’re like hey I have questions yes right you’re a team of 500 as a business it those folks might not feel as accessible but trust me they want

(50:15) they want to listen and they want to you know share and be heard totally on that note Courtney thank you so much for joining me and is there anything that you want to share about what you have going on with our listeners not specifically I think I think everything is pretty okay right now I’m on a bit of a Hiatus which I’m

(50:37) you know more or less happy about and just enjoying taking some time to reset and figure out what’s next so I guess if any listeners ever want to chat or learn more like my doors open and I’m always happy to have those conversations but yeah I’m so glad thank you for inviting me on this has been a really great time

(50:56) yes of course thanks so much Courtney thanks Tracy this is Romo Santiago from experiment Nation every week we share interviews with and Conference sessions by our favorite conversion rate optimizers from around the world so if you like this video smash that like button and consider subscribing it helps

(51:11) us a bunch

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