The total experience theory | Mary Poppen

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:12)

You know what, Robbie? Happy cows that listen to music, they make better milk. And I was like, oh, is that right?

He swears by it. That happy cows that listen to music. Not even a farmer, just eating.

No, no.

[Dillon] (0:21 - 0:32)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Rob, with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:33 - 0:33)

What's up, people?

[Dillon] (0:34 - 0:37)

And we have Mary with us. Mary, can you say hi, please?

[Mary] (0:37 - 0:38)

Hey, everybody.

[Dillon] (0:38 - 0:44)

Hello, and I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Mary, thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Mary] (0:44 - 1:09)

Yeah, absolutely. So Mary Poppen, it is a Mary name in case anybody listening is wondering. I've actually, I've been a chief customer officer for more than a decade.

I can't believe I'm saying that. Mostly in B2B technology, mostly in HR tech. So it's been really quite a journey.

And I also am a professor at Michigan State University in the master's degree for customer experience management.

[Dillon] (1:10 - 1:30)

Very cool. I didn't know that existed. That's so cool.

Yeah, we'll have to talk more about that either on. Let's find out what your topic is before I say we should invite you back for another one. Mary, you know what we do here?

We ask one single question of every single guest. And that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success. So please tell us what that is.

[Mary] (1:31 - 2:06)

So this has been on my mind for a really long time. I'm using a term now that I'm calling total experience. So for those of you listening, you've probably experienced a complete siloing of experience from the customer experience to the employee experience, partner experience, et cetera.

And the fact is they're all interrelated, right? So to get great customer success and customer experience, you have to have all of these things. And I think organizations should take a look at how do you combine and leverage all experiences across your company.

So that's total experience top of mind for me.

[Dillon] (2:07 - 2:35)

Yeah, go figure that all these pieces are interconnected, right? Like there's not one piece of the watch or the clock that does everything. They've got to work in unison and they've got to be aligned properly.

Rob, you can't see yourself because you've put a Post-it note over your face while we're recording, but you're cheesing like a goofball. Why don't you tell us why and what this is making you think of? I imagine you agree.

Is that right? Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rob] (2:35 - 2:43)

Well, so I'm thinking about those different experiences. Mary, could you share back what those different experiences were that you reflect on as being siloed?

[Mary] (2:43 - 3:29)

Yeah, absolutely. When you think about employee experience, right? It's typically owned by HR.

Then you've got customer experience, which could be owned by customer success. It could be owned by marketing. It could be owned by operations or a combination of the above, right?

Which makes it even worse. You've got user experience and product. And then you've got partner experience in many organizations, which is either owned by marketing or by sales or sometimes a partner management team.

So we've created structures that focus on all of these interrelated things that have different experiences, different measures, right? Different focus, different priorities. And at the end, they all affect each other and ultimately the growth of the company.

[Rob] (3:30 - 3:51)

So interesting. Yeah, I'm thinking of a couple of things. I mean, the earliest memory I have on this is my uncle saying, you know what, Robbie?

Happy cows that listen to music, they make better milk. And I was like, oh, is that right? He swears by it.

That happy cows that listen to music. Not even a farmer. He just eats.

No, no, no.

[Mary] (3:51 - 3:53)

I feel like we should try that.

[Rob] (3:53 - 5:07)

Lives in the New York City suburbs. But the other thing I'm thinking of is one of my clients right now, all of their revenue departments report to the VP of people. And how interesting is that?

I don't see that org chart often, but it creates such harmony between the departments. There's this collective respect and really positive culture between departments because they understand the fundamentals that are just treating each other, which then extend to how they treat customers and how customers have their own experience. Things like just sharing feedback, right?

That's a topic that comes up a lot. And they've got that really dialed in. KPI alignment between departments, all of which give employees so much more clarity and direction in their roles.

And one of the cool exercises we did to kick off the engagement was we did a customer success charter development exercise. We're like, what is this customer success entity that we're building? Why does it exist?

What are we doing with it? And everybody in the whole company was aware of this is the purpose of the customer success team. So I really like the examples you shared, Mary.

[Dillon] (5:07 - 6:19)

Rob, really quickly. It does sound as though a VP of people would be uniquely positioned to do that, right? Because they think in those sorts of terms more often than other leaders do.

But I might challenge the notion that their title is still VP of people because once you start controlling other aspects like that, sure, you may have been the head of HR or whatever you want to call it previously. But now you're more like, I'd say, like a COO type. I don't know their org structure, and I don't know who else sits in seat or who has what titles.

But there's a certain point where the work you do and the departments you lead change your title more than your title changes the function of those departments. But Mary, I have a question for you. You mentioned something within that explanation.

You mentioned this idea of measurement. And I'm struggling to think of a single universal measurement that doesn't become this amorphous, ambiguous, God, I hate that I'm going to say it, like satisfaction, like happiness, like in the airport, the three buttons, the frowny face, the straight line face, and the smiley face. Like, how do you feel today?

So I wonder how you envision this working in an organization.

[Mary] (6:19 - 8:03)

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, right? And we think a lot about the easiest things to measure, sort of where people go to show that they're creating value within their company, right? To prove that they're doing a good job.

Things like a one to five satisfaction rating, right? Or product adoption is another one. It's an important metric, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

So really, you need to start to take a look at those types of measures plus sentiment data, right? Which also has huge impact in determining what's working and what's not. But the biggest thing, and I would argue, probably the hardest thing is to marry all of this data to business outcomes.

So when you can do that, and you can start thinking about measuring attrition of your employees, churn of your customers, right? Product adoption, volatility, you know, things like that. And you can start to then find the signals in the data that can start to predict those things.

That is magic. But the only way you're really going to get a holistic view is if you look across these user experiences, right? You get the employee feedback, you get the customer feedback, you get the partner feedback.

Now you leverage all of that in what's working or what's not working in our organization and what's leading to those business outcomes. And if you can pinpoint those things, now you can start to make improvements across the whole organization that are going to see significant impacts for not only the growth of the company, but better customer experience, better employee experience. So that's kind of how I see total experience and being able to combine measures.

[Dillon] (8:03 - 8:26)

HOFFMAN Is this a challenge you experience today? Or do you speak about this from a perspective of, as a CCO for over 10 years, like, is this what you bring into an organization? Is this theory?

And do you try to help the many different contributors to realign in this way?

[Mary] (8:27 - 9:50)

GARRETT So it has been, this has been my journey for many years. And being inside a company, really large software company that had multiple business product lines, multiple business units, and multiple sort of roles across the organization, this problem became even worse. And so what I did was start to craft and hijack roles and hijack things that I needed to be able to put this together in the way that I needed it to run my part of the organization.

And then I was able to share this across the company. So you could see the impact once we had shared data, once we had shared metrics, right? The results across all the business lines started to shift.

And that was only a limited amount of data, by the way. So huge returns could be gotten if it were even more holistic. I do think though, that the biggest challenge is being able to identify the right structure and tell the story and get the buy-in from all of the leadership, right?

And because this is a big undertaking, it isn't something you can switch on overnight. But you need to have somebody that can interact across functions, understand the importance of measurement and really raise their hand to start this journey, because it is, it's challenging.

-: 10:11

So you mentioned this enormous sort of rock to push up the hill, which is the persuasive factor. Do you have any like tips or tricks about what to speak on? Is there like a particular pressure point that you found great value or success in pushing on?

[Mary] (: 10:12

So the linkage of customer-specific outcomes to business outcomes is always a really good starting point. It's also more public data than the employee data, right? So when you talked about Rob, the VP of people, being able to sort of lead this charge, I think that's true.

I think those leaders have the type of knowledge. The difference is so much of their data is private and so confidential. So actually being able to take the customer data, partner data, et cetera, and feed it to HR and having that type of operational structure allows you greater insights and greater data management than trying to go the other way.

But I would say starting with more public data and linking it to the business outcomes that are the most important right now, gets you the buy-in, gets you the ear of the CEO. And when you can show that linkage, you'll start to open up, right? Resources and focus and priorities.

And then it starts to become not just a push up the hill, but more of a top-down initiative.

[Rob] (: 11:15

ROB FITZGERALD Rob, anything to add? No, I don't think I have anything to add, really. I guess the only anecdote that's coming to mind that might help close things out, I remember there was this moment I met, my first time I met like a people ops leader.

And we were talking about like, what is success to each other? And I was like, describing like engagement and satisfaction scoring and that kind of thing. She and I looked at each other and she explained her metrics.

And it was like the Spider-Man meme where we're just like both pointing at each other. Like, wait, we're talking about the same things here, just with a different audience. And it just does help me see that like, it's people working with people, right?

There are fundamentals here. You know, the same, even like when you look at scale, you run into the same sort of challenges and pitfalls as well. But no, I think this was a great topic, Mary.

And it's a very good holistic way to view the work that we're doing.

[Mary] (: 12:11

Thanks for the chat, guys.

[Dillon] (: 12:12

Thank you, Mary. I think it was great. You started with this idea of silos and that's where I wanna end is this like reminder to always be zooming out and understanding how your function touches all these other pieces of the business or your customers.

I think we get stuck in these whirlwinds and we wake up in the morning and we're like, I gotta send that email or I gotta get this QBR out the door. And we often forget to ask why or who else that's impacting. So this is a fantastic reminder.

But that is our time, Mary. I'd love to have you come back in the future and talk about this work that you do as a professor. I think that is fascinating.

Rob beat me to the punch, but it is very cool. But until that time, we have to say goodbye.

[Mary] (: 12:52

Perfect. Thanks so much. Look forward to seeing you soon.

[VO] (: 13:00

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