PeopleMetrics Turns 20! 3 BUSINESS LESSONS From Customer Experience Entrepreneur Sean McDade PhD
i just want to thank every employee who's ever partnered with me at peoplemetrics and every client it's been my greatest privilege next to having children this is my the greatest honor of my life is to work with you and serve you as clients and help you it's been 20 years i never could have imagined it here's to 20 more hi everyone welcome to peoplemetrics live today is peoplemetrics 20th anniversary to celebrate our founder and ceo cx entrepreneur sean mcdade will be taking us on a journey through time to talk about business lessons he's learned over the last two decades and we'll be joined by several members of the peoplemetrics team here to reflect on how the cx industry has evolved over the years and talk about what we see on the horizon for the future if you've got questions for our team please drop them in the comments below and we'll be sure to answer them so before we dive in let's just do some quick introductions my name is madeline and i am the marketing manager here at peoplemetrics and i joined the team in 2017 uh just about four years ago and our panelists today are of course sean mcdade our founder and ceo and then kirk lohbauer audrey squareskyi and ripal patel from the team here at peoplemetrics so why don't we go around and have you all introduce yourselves to everyone and say what what year you joined the team all right i'll kick it off hi everybody sean mcdade founder and ceo i joined in 2001 when i started the company on january 26 2001 so it's 20 years today the company was founded and i'm really happy to be here today and uh hopefully this will be a fun peoplemetrics live i'm audrey squaresky uh i'm the director of customer experience here at peoplemetrics i joined in 2017 the same year madeline joined so about four years here hi my name is ripal patel i joined peoplemetrics in 2011 so i'll hit 10 years milestone at peoplemetrics very soon and i'm really happy about it i join as a system analyst and currently i'm working as a security professional as well as the developer of the peoplemetrics hi everybody i'm kirk lohbauer i joined in 2012 and i first started as an intern and then as an analyst on our projects then as a project manager on our projects and now i'm on the business development team so i'm here to talk about everything we do all right so sean you have been here from the very very beginning in 2001 why don't you kick off our celebration today yeah i mean this will be a little bit of a different peoplemetrics live i'm going to be sort of more of the emcee today and i'll take us through some different key events in peoplemetrics history and we're going to we're going to do some visuals today which we usually don't do although every once in a while we do this but it's 20 years and so much has changed in both the world and the customer experience employee experience industry since 2001 so we thought we'd we'd sprinkle in some some kind of nostalgic pictures of peoplemetrics um with some of the great people that have been at the company and you know that's the first business lesson i'll share with everybody whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you know you're you're heading a team for cx or ex like people are really everything with the business um having great people and there's there's four of my colleagues on the line here with me in the zoom call which are incredibly great talented people but i think the first entrepreneurial lesson i learned and i started this with nobody like it was just me in an office and i think we have a couple pictures of that office yeah that was the first office on 12th street uh that was me in our first office uh that's when i had hair you know back in the day but you know you can't do everything yourself if you're an entrepreneur and i think entrepreneurs grow when they start oh you know allowing great people to do their job and you encourage them you give them goals you help them whenever possible but at the end of the day that's the key to any business and that's that's believing in your people recruiting good people keeping them keeping them challenged keeping them engaged and you know that's just not things we say to our clients around employee experience and engagement that's something we live at the company every day um here's some pictures of our first office on 12th street um that's me again there's deanna which was the first employee at peoplemetrics um sanjeev who's who is a long-term time employee at peoplemetrics and uh now is at our uh sister company reason research um that broke off from people's metrics five or six years ago and does custom market research work and pharmaceutical industry and we're still you know friends with all of them there and say hello to all of them they're they're watching this today um so in the beginning starting this company it was it was very different than today you know i came for more of a traditional market research background um you know when we did a study for a client it would you know there'd be a lot of good design work in terms of questionnaire design we'd put it out in the field it was telephone interviewing it took a while to get the interviews done you know weeks and then once we get the data back you know we had people creating crosstabs and then i'd get the data back and i would you know look through all these crosstabs and write up a report you'd probably be six weeks after the study fielded that the client would get any results and and you know i started peoplemetrics because i felt like that was probably going to be too long and the world was going to converge in terms of real-time data and insights um that was our first website that we have here and that that's what we were doing like we were doing i thought really really good market research as good in terms of design and analysis as anyone but we were getting the preliminary results to clients in real time like as soon as they responded hit submit we would get the results to our to our uh to our client and at the time that was really really different and now that's kind of expected a lot in a lot of ways um but it's certainly gone that was the beginning of what some of the things that we can do today in cx is based on like when we talk about operationalizing you know customer experience feedback and getting it to every member of the organization it started there when we were just able to figure out okay we can get results to people in real time now we're getting you know granular results to specific people in the organization based on their data in real time every single day so it's really it's it's evolved as an industry and it's obviously become much more technology driven and we've certainly followed that and invested a lot in technology um here was our first kind of landing page for folks we called it e-survey and we had you know we had a qualitative offer um but it's really but what hasn't changed i think and it's what what our clients i think value still and and i think many clients do is you know how do we ask the right what are the right questions to ask to the right people at the right time so we can get this great you know operationalized cx data to all of our our people and they can take action on it that still hasn't gone away although it's been de-emphasized and i think you know it's not as i think it's something that i i still always found my fist on like hey you have to be able to design good studies even if technology is carrying a lot of the heavy weight these days right then we evolved to 1600 market street this is kind of a journey in time and nobody here on the on the uh zoom meeting has been at peoplemetrics yet so i'll take this one um here are some folks who who were with the team then and uh there's another recent research person heather um we've got sanjeev who was one of our long-term employees and now is at vanguard and it's really rewarding by the way to see people who you helped uh you hired as very like entry-level people and see them grow and evolve into incredible professionals and you know in in some cases like doing unbelievable work um beyond what the work i'm doing it's just it's it's very very rewarding to see that happen it's and it's the most rewarding part of this job for sure is to see people develop and whatever path they take is fine and it's great and i'm really happy for all the people we're seeing here hi it's madeline thanks for joining us for peoplemetrics live if this is your first time watching peoplemetrics live is a weekly live webinar session where experts from our team answer your questions about customer employee and patient experience measurement and management we've been doing this for two decades now and this is a great way for us to share our knowledge with you you can sign up for upcoming sessions of peoplemetrics live at www.peoplemetrics.com events and bring a friend this was our one of our first uh looks at the reporting that we had in the application um if current clients know that it looks a lot different now um it certainly was something that was good back then but uh it sure does look dated today doesn't it folks yeah that old internet explorer is uh ancient our application only worked on internet explorer for a long time okay then then we actually went to to art street it was a long long journey and a couple of you have joined me on this journey right kirk and ripple were both in that office right so um there's there's murley again we go keep going there's a bunch of people there's gary and kate two of my favorite people uh gary runs recent research kate is is heading culture diversity and other things at lincoln financial group incredible people incredible talent we would not be here today without both of them that's for sure um and just an amazing group of people in these pictures as well so i'm going to ask you guys a question so i'll start with you kirk you know you joined peoplemetrics in what 2012 you said 2012 yeah what when you when you joined the company and you were getting into this industry of you know customer experience employee experience and some market research that we were doing back then what what did you expect it to be and then what has it what has it evolved into yeah well i'm not quite sure i had any expectations coming into it i think you know at the time when i started my only understanding of customer feedback was as a customer of i i take a survey and then at the time my only thinking of it was this goes into a void and then i don't know what happens with it starting peoplemetrics was learning what happens with it if you're actually serious about it so i think the biggest change in my understanding and what i learned the most was how much work goes into you know those three things that you just said of uh asking the right questions to the right people and kind of getting it in front of the right hands to take action on it and uh you know when i started kind of a lot of what i did was reading through individual comments kind of doing some of that really heavy work and analysis that then builds up into larger and larger reports and that was something that you know i think that i understand now today after all that time and work is that what the best companies do is spend a lot of that time understand your customer feedback and then put it back out there that i read it i made changes and here's what we did because that's the thing that's me prior to getting customer feedback i didn't fully understand you know one other thing that i'll say that's dramatically changed since i started in this industry just building all what you said kirk is you know technology definitely has changed the whole industry without a doubt but the acceptance i would call it of individual feedback individual customer feedback being revealed not anonymous and followed up on is a huge change like when we first started doing this like you know my market research friends were telling me that i was i was like violating every every single like you know standard of market research of of respondent anonymity and i was arguing back then that as long as we had the permission of the customer to have a follow-up that we're doing the customer a service and this is not market research what we're doing this is customer experience management we're measuring after a touch point hopefully a moment of truth we're identifying what that moment of truth is when we're empowering the client to understand how that moment of truth is going and following up on customers who have had a poor experience and not just following up managing it through a specific process that we call case management that we've always had in our in our product that's that was radically different and i had i had like debates with people for the first 10 years of the company even while we were at arch street even in this phase that that's you can't do that i'm like well people are are now you know social that's back when myspace and some the initial social media was going and then we had twitter and facebook and people were sharing what they had for lunch and everything else and i'm like you really don't think people want to want to follow up when they have a poor experience i think they do and now that is not i don't even think that's controversial anymore right team like we don't we don't have conversations about whether that's something that can happen that just happens um so i just want to point that out that this was still going on in this phase of of the industry yeah and and one last thing i'd piggyback on that that you mentioned as far as just awareness you know at the time you know when i first joined we were having a lot more conversations with clients about customer experience is not customer service and that's that's much better understood now just generally folks understand that experience extends across every it is the experience it's everything that we provide to customers it's not just when something goes wrong how do i fix it and that's uh that was a mindset mindset shift that that's that's been a long time coming so and there's a you know here's a shameless plug in in my book listen or die there's a chapter that is specifically called the difference between customer experience and customer service that i think madeline's one of the more popular chapters in the book and something we've gotten a lot of good comments on yeah yeah we'll definitely link here to the uh we actually did a peoplemetrics live all about this too um so we'll link to that so you can watch it too ripple i have a question for you ripple you joined right around and now it's 2021 10 years later how what what was the this and i've said that that customer experience world has become more and more technology driven what are some of the changes you've seen since you got you first got to peoplemetrics in terms of our product compared to what it is today um shall i say that during my tenure at peoplemetrics the most important lesson which i learned is that the technology is accelerating at such a speed that we have to keep up to date with our product as well as ourselves so there are many to keep up to date with changes and some of them are like you can be a part of the community membership or podcast books training courses and all that stuff the reason i talked about keeping ourselves up to date first then the product is if we keep up to date up to date with the technology trend then we direct the product in the right direction and that's what exactly we did at the peoplemetrics as we are seeing through the slides previously we used to use like asps and darkness and that all kind of technologies instead of that nowadays we are using like cloud services and the newer technologies which which like exactly matches the current trends and that's what making our product successful i mean audrey i want to get you in the conversation like you joined you know in 2000 in our current current office which we no longer are at by the way we are remote because of kofi but this is where our office is um you've seen the product come a long way right from the from the days that you came in versus today what what are your insights on that yeah even in just the last four years there um has been so much evolution of the product um and and features added so it's been pretty exciting to be a part of but yeah when i started even my knowledge of customer experience was pretty limited i i was familiar with surveys but more on the market research side of things and i knew about focus groups but i hadn't i didn't know about e-focus groups things that we do here so um it's been a great learning experience to kind of get up to speed on customer experience and how everything works and um and and really i work directly with our clients so i have a lot of you know knowledge from from things they've done and how the programs have impacted their bottom line and and changed things um at their companies which is really exciting to see and be a part of did you know that you can watch past sessions of peoplemetrics live right here on our youtube channel by simply clicking the link above be sure to check them out for answers to dozens of questions along with stories tips and best practices from our team of experts you can click the bottom right corner of this video to subscribe to our channel so you never miss an update yeah and i'd say that this phase of the the the customer experience world has really shifted into you know text analytics machine learning you know analytics on the fly within the platform like those are things like we've invested in and a lot of the industries invested in and you know it would it would have been unheard of 10 years ago or or longer to be able to see open-ended comments that could be at least made sense of in real time by a machine not as good as a person right it's not what it's meant for but at 80 85 percent of what a person can do and identify trends at scale it's just it's really amazing really what what things like that can do and the fact now it's really easy to see show statistical significance within for instance our platform where before we would have to shift it into you know spss or sas and run run it and then get it back to the client it's like there's so much more that you can do now on the fly than you ever could previously and audrey you've seen that right even involved over the last few years yeah i mean the big thing with text analytics is being able to do it at scale um you know most of our clients have analysts who can read comments but nobody can read them in real time at scale we have um clients get that get thousands of responses a day and our text analytics um allows them to to kind of pinpoint what is important and then be able to focus on that rather than just trying to comb through comments um and same thing with the statistics uh feature that we have they can easily see if changes and numbers are statistically significant or not uh without having to pull the data out and do a ton of analysis so i think our platform has really helped people streamline um get things done more quickly and then get to the heart of what's important in their data without a doubt madeline you joined here around in this time right up there's some pictures of some folks what what were your expectations when you were entering this industry and and how are they different than kind of what what actually happened i would say my my um thoughts about customer experience or similar to kirk's i didn't really have any expectations coming in i of course knew like you know you could take surveys on the bottom of a receipt or you know that kind of thing um but this was for me learning about customer experience and um survey feedback and closed loop processes and all that kind of stuff really it suddenly like put words to experiences that i have been having my whole life and continue to have as a consumer um that i didn't i i kind of was able to put um vocabulary words in and and with things that happened to me all the time so um you know able to see oh when i i had a bad experience at that restaurant and here i am saying telling all of my friends that it was terrible and and learning about how that is you know word of mouth and how you want to prevent that and how that can be prevented by following up with a customer after they indicate that they've had a negative experience just all those kinds of things i think similar to kirk i didn't have the um i didn't know that there was such a process behind survey feedback that actually is operationalized and used to improve the experience so that you're avoiding those kinds of conversations happening um on the consumer end and you are getting more of the opposite which is people going to their friends and saying oh my gosh the customer service person i just talked to like was so cool and they solved my problem and i feel like we're friends and you know the kinds of experiences that that you remember when you've had a great great experience with a brand i just didn't know that all that stuff was uh was behind surveys and i think yeah to this day i just continued to experience that myself just as a consumer so that was i love it yeah i think the cool thing about you know customer experience management or experience management in general is you know it still has the good parts about what market research does and that's identify systemic issues that a company needs to focus on and fix in order to have a wide impact among all of their customers and that's you know a really great thing about what market research does but it also allows companies to understand what madeline's personal experience was understand if it was poor you could follow up on it right away and that provides kind of a dual benefit that i think this has that you know a lot of other types of research just does not have and it's i think it's a it's it's an amazing business benefit and it's why it's become a category you know fort forester gartner for courser gartner are covering this there it's a category and there's reasons for that because companies are getting a lot of value out of these programs definitely i think the other side that i didn't realize either was the employee experience side of it and how tied great employee performance is tied to great customer experiences um and and being able to you know hear almost immediately or immediately that you have delivered a great experience and here's why um that's so that's just great to hear as an employee and you're able to continue delivering great experiences like that and um yeah that was a part that i didn't have vision into until coming here there's a good picture of our launch official launch of the new platform um you know i'm sure some people probably don't know this but we we have rebuilt our product from the ground up um we had a we had a what we call a legacy product um that had a little bit of old technology which ripple was talking about in a moment ago and we decided to rebuild it with a modern technology stack and that that uh picture on the bottom left of the blue shirts was when we launched that product officially and that's really been the spark in terms of where we are today with great team and this is our this is our website today where we're helping you know companies improve the customer employee and we have a really you know specific focus on pharma cx we call it which is helping pharmaceutical companies improve the experiences of their customers which our patients hcps you know caregivers and other stakeholders so you know we're super excited to have focused on the experience economy we think that companies don't launch products anymore they launch experiences no matter what industry you're in experiences are about the only thing that differentiates companies these days for the most part unless you have some sort of monopoly power over over customers and you know it's everything and and measuring those and managing those and improving those is is kind of what we do this is the product now it looks very different than some of those pictures we had in the past right ripple it's a it's like a completely different thing yeah it's it's completely different it's a new of the peoplemetrics as well as i will say that it's a more real time than the previous product we had you know like you get the real-time analysis you can dynamically create a matrix you can response immediately to any alerts over there so no it's it's a really great product yeah and it's a privilege to get this data in the hands of our clients and their people every day to see their data so they can make better decisions on behalf of their customers clients patients um whomever their their key stakeholders are and that's really what it's all about this is all done to help our clients do a better job for their customers and ultimately that makes the world i think a better place to live and certainly a better place to do business in and that's that's some of the current team today we did a holiday video for some of our some of our clients all of our clients i guess and uh that's us waving at that point all right so we're at uh about five minutes left should we madeline should we tackle some of the future stuff now sure yeah um let's let's just go around and and sean i'll start with you on on what do you think you know we just spent this this half hour looking back at the past 20 years and how things have changed obviously change is accelerating as we go into the future so what do what do you think will be um trends for the next 20 years i'll throw out a cup i'll throw in a couple um and this one is counter intuitive maybe given all the emphasis on technology in the space but i think i think highly specialized vertical knowledge is going to become more and more valuable so i think you know pharmaceutical companies are going to want to buy from companies that know that industry and telecommunications companies are going to want to buy from somebody who knows that industry and the reason is is at the end of the day you know maybe somebody's technology's a little better or looks nicer than another but if you're not asking the right questions to the right people to get the results that you can act on in a language that your customers can understand and relate to then the technology doesn't matter right so i think that's a huge trend that's going to continue and i think we're seeing that already i think highly specialized vertical knowledge is absolutely key our founder and ceo sean wrote an amazing book about customer experience measurement called listen or die 40 lessons that turn customer feedback into gold it's a deep dive into best practices for cx measurement based off of his years of experience in the space and you can easily read it front to back on an airplane ride you can pick up your copy today it's available now on amazon i think we're going to see more and more non-survey data get attached to the products so operational data whatever you want to call it i think you're going to start seeing true 360 views of customers with with data not just on their survey what they said on the survey but sort of how they've behaved over time from data that the client has collected so i think those are two things that i would point to that that will shape the industry going forward audrey kirk ripple what do you guys all think kirk you want to kick it off yeah i'm happy to kick it off and i'll say kind of one for me that we've been seeing in in recent years and i think will continue to develop is more and more industries understanding that they need to to to measure and define their customer experience and i think you know back when i started in 2012 you really just have these core industries that said you know i'm hospitality i'm a restaurant i need to measure the customer experience since then that's really grown into everyone understands if if my product is getting to an end customer which every product is i need to have some understanding of the experience throughout that uh you know specifically i i spend more my time now working with pharmaceutical companies where their understanding they need to make it as easy as possible for their patients to get access to their medication that was never something that was a defined uh understanding for them before and it's even growing to just how our clinical trials going not just how what is your experience with medication so i i would suspect and if you're on this call as a cx operator today that's something that you need to be mindful of for the future is am i collecting the full range of customer experience because probably you're not thinking with the full lens of how the customer gets to your end product so that's that's where you should be thinking ahead how about you audrey what are you thinking about the future um i think that we're going to continue to see more and more people with access to this data within um companies that are collecting it i think probably the history of it was that it went to a core team of people who analyzed it and and worked with it but um you know something that we've done at peoplemetrics is is allow unlimited user licenses to access our platform so that everybody is able to see this data and understand what's going on um so i do think you have to have a targeted um loop closing process and and know what you're doing with it but i think the more people that have access to it within an organization the better off you are um even you know the call center rep should should see what customers are saying that the site leader should know um and so i think we're going to continue to see that trend with more people looking at the data and understanding why it's important would you ripple anything you want to you want to add to what we were talking about definitely i'll say that the text analytics or we can call it a machine learning that's a really important part going forward as it's going to analyze the results of the feedback very quickly in real time that's really going to help out to understand the whole 360 view of the of the experience definitely and i i would add to that that that is certainly because the present and future um and it's it's something that that will only get more sophisticated in terms of identifying you know themes from open-ended comments as well as you know identifying trends even from quantitative data that's coming in so madeleine we're a little bit over i think we have one question shall we try it yeah definitely um so the question here is how do you start a customer experience business in a culture that has serious issues with customer experience and service that's a great question first of all and in fact it's such a great question it was number one chapter in my book listen or die and that was titled everybody wants to be customer-centric but nobody knows what that means or how to do that uh so here here it and i would recommend reading that chapter for sure in the book um but the way companies turn around an organization that may not be performing the way they want to with regard to customer experience is they need to take a step back leadership it's really important to start there has to believe that the customer experience is important if they believe that's important then that solves a lot of issues and then the next step always in my opinion is to set up a listening program around a key moment of truth or a touch point that matters a lot to your customers and that data that customer feedback doesn't sit in a silo it sits across the organization everybody has visibility to it the data gets put in the hands of people who can change the experience for those customers or clients and you systematically work up there's there's no like magic bullet on this but there the magic bullet really is if there isn't one it's identify that number one moment of truth start listening and start following up and acting on that feedback and then things will start to slowly change you'll start delivering better customer experiences you'll have less problems people will start seeing wow this part of the organization is really performing well and it can make a difference and then that's kind of that that will spread across the organization um but audrey kirk i'd love to hear your thoughts on that one as well yeah i i think what i'd add to that i think that that that is a great question uh as far as sean's right we need you need to start with leadership buy-in i think it's it's that's also i think a very easy place to start because you can there are so much information out there about how customer satisfaction relates to customer return it relates to customer spend it relates to loyalty so making that that case is very clear because we could say we need to know this we need to improve it and also i would suspect if you have a bad or use if you suspect there's a poor customer experience or poor customer service today you've probably heard some of that from customers you probably have an email or some feedback from customers or you can say this is why customer satisfaction matters xyz and also we're hearing kind of nuance or aspects of this from customers today so we need to measure it and then from there you go into that point where you show and prove you start with a program at a key touch point show how then you know where our scores are improving we've identified items and we're taking action and that's that's how you grow from there yeah the first thing i thought it was identifying a moment of truth that really impacts your business uh and i think using that to get leadership by and will help you if you can like kirk said figure out where people have already provided some sort of feedback and said there's a problem um and and go to your leadership with a solution with a suggestion for how to improve it you know you're already part of the way there yeah and i would say that building an roi case based on that moment of truth or even beforehand is huge in terms of getting leadership i am so that's probably the first thing i would do is i didn't and you know there's a bunch of data and listen or die and you can you can listen or you can go on the internet and find stuff too on terms of roi data in terms of listening and taking action but you know it's nothing like doing it yourself and showing an roi right so there's probably two levels to it but that roi case is is absolutely huge and that's that's certainly where i begin all right well this has been such a fun session going and looking back at where we've been and and uh looking ahead at where we're heading just want to thank every employee who's ever partnered with me at peoplemetrics and every client it's been my greatest privilege next to having children this is my the greatest honor in my life is to work with you and serve you as clients and help you it's been 20 years i never could have imagined it here's to 20 more and on behalf of everyone here at peoplemetrics thank you for joining us for peoplemetrics live if you liked this video make sure to subscribe right here so you never miss an update and have you checked out other sessions of peoplemetrics live yet you can click right here to watch them all i'll see you there
2021-01-31 05:06
