Delighting the Enthusiast
Kristine explains how a focus on core Enthusiasts enables teams to design and improve customer experiences.
How do you attract customers to a new platform or marketplace?
How do you set up a new customer experience program?
How do you influence change in a company?
How do you create back-office changes to support a strong customer experience?
Episode Notes
Kristine Chin, VP of Customer Experience at Twilio, talks about how understanding “Enthusiast” customers empowered her to build great experiences. She discusses her education in political economy, with stories of how systems thinking helped her develop her problem-solving approach. She shares what she learned from losing her home in the Oakland Firestorm and how a semester in Slovenia helped her better understand herself and her career interests. She talks about her leadership roles at eBay, Ten-X, and Twilio.
Kristine shares her perspective on what it means to be customer obsessed and about collaborating with customers to build a strong marketplace. She shares her philosophy of being “delightfully persistent” and creating a customer-first culture. She shares key things she learned about setting up a successful customer experience program.
Guest Bio
Kristine joined Twilio in 2018 as Vice President, Global Customer Experience. She is responsible for optimizing the end-to-end customer experience. This includes spearheading a company-wide effort to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and raise awareness of their needs.
Kristine previously spent 3 years at Ten-X (formerly Auction.com) as SVP, Customer Experience and 12 years at eBay, where she ultimately served as general manager of the $4B eBay Motors category and ultimately lead eBay’s North American Partner Strategy & Operations. She holds a patent for features to display inventory to the right buyer – and has four additional patents pending related to matching sellers and products with interested buyers.
Kristine’s experience also includes work with enterprise, SMB and consumer customers. She began her career in strategy consulting to the telecommunications industry. She holds a BA from University of California, Berkeley and a Harvard MBA.
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/kchin/
Building Blocks
A CX leader's most important role is to help other teams discover the customer. Who are they? What are their behaviors, needs, attitudes? Where are they satisfied, and where are they stuck? The only way you can deliver that consistent end-to-end experience, the one you draw up on that journey map as an ideal state - the only way you can execute it is to have teams across the company locked in on the customer, and then collaborating, to take action - to either design NEW experiences or address parts of the experience that need to be fixed.
Think about what opportunities you have in your role to collaborate better across teams to give your customers a better experience. Maybe you're a marketer looking at customer feedback on the product all day long, but you don't know that much about your company's next feature release or product roadmap, and spending more time with the product team could help out. Or maybe you're on the engineering team and you've got a backlog that seems exciting, but you think you could build even better if you knew the emotions and associations that customers have with your current product. Whatever it is, write down ONE OTHER TEAM, and the names of TWO SPECIFIC PEOPLE, whom you can reach out to in the next week to start to start to do some silo spanning, and get to better outcomes for your customer.
Helpful Links
“ROI of Customer Experience 2020” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/roi-of-customer-experience-2020/
“Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/creating-and-sustaining-a-customer-centric-culture/
“Where Net Promoter Score Goes Wrong” by Christina Stahlkopf; Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/10/where-net-promoter-score-goes-wrong
+ Episode Transcript
Kristine Chin [00:00:07] Don't get caught in siloed behavior. One of the magic pieces of customer experience is a capability to see an end and customer experience through the lens of a customer journey map. And it is very hard to choreograph that into an experience unless you actually continually go back to the customer and not let the different silos impact that experience.
Jesse Purewal [00:00:52] From Qualtrics Industries, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal today on the show. How an early setback persuaded Kristine Chin to review her career plans and how she's used her talents for spanning company silos and deeply understanding enthusiast customers to create remarkable experiences at Ebay and Twilio.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:34] I am here with Kristine Chin. Kristine, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
Kristine Chin [00:01:38] Thank you, Jesse. Glad to be here.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:39] OK, so take me back to the start, Kristine. I think you're the oldest of four and a native of the Bay Area. So tell me where you grew up and what things were like in the early years?
Kristine Chin [00:01:48] Well, I grew up in the East Bay and it was cornfields and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. So my dad was a computer scientist and my mom's an artist. So we had very much a left brain, right brain, kind of a dinner table growing up.
[00:02:05] And really kind of just interesting conversations, because my father would bring home all kinds of house guests and my mom would be telling us about her art history. So you always with that kinds of different topics, you just have to be curious. And so my my three younger brothers and I had a lot of time to ask lots of questions.
Jesse Purewal [00:02:27] I can imagine. So you end up staying pretty close to home for college. You got to Cal for undergrad. And while you're there, you discover this course of study that becomes your major called political economy. So what's political economy and what compelled you to gravitate to it?
Kristine Chin [00:02:44] So political economy is actually it's a group major at UC Berkeley and it's a combination of political science and economics. I couldn't decide between Poly Sci or Econ. Hey, why not just you both? And the main thing that was so fascinating for me was that it was all about systems thinking. If you have a political science environment, it's going to influence the economics. And so how do those two areas kind of influence each other and create with a society is going to be like and how quickly something might advance. And so that was just a fantastic way to get introduced into thinking about what if I squeeze the balloon here? What happens on the other side? And you can actually see it in this development of a technology.
Jesse Purewal [00:03:35] So systems thinking and innovation. If I hear those attributes, I might have made the assumption if I combine that with the fact that you grew up where you grew up, but of course, you went right into technology and you took your degree and a Silicon Valley or to an equivalent place, but you actually had a different plan originally coming out of undergrad. Tell us about that.
Kristine Chin [00:03:56] So I wanted to be a lawyer. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer getting into my senior year at Berkeley. But a couple of things happened in the meantime that just made me realize that actually really, really wasn't what I wanted to do. I was a senior at Berkeley when there is Oakland fire storm that destroyed a bunch of apartments and houses. And my apartment was one of them. And I spent my first and second semester of my senior year basically trying to recover from that. But it also kind of gave me a couple of lessons learned. One, you can recover from anything, right? You you know that you can be stripped down to almost nothing. And then it's on you as a person to kind of figure out what your next move is. The second one is the most valuable things are not. The things that insurance can buy is all the other stuff. It's the people you meet. It's the things you want to do with your dreams. And so at the end of my senior year, I took off and I went to Slovenia and I worked on a project for a newly privatized insurance company. And while I was there, basically you take this this this kid from California who has been doing a little bit of stuff with computers, but seeing a ton of examples of automation and bring them to a situation where it's a market where they're trying to they're going from a totally manual environment. And I felt so amazed that I could actually help them. And that the system thinking of how do you automate some of the insurance internal processes, my advice was actually valuable. So what I realized is I really didn't want to be a lawyer anymore. And so I went on to I called my dad from Slovenia and told him that I wasn't going to go to law school, and that was that he actually couldn't choke me from that far away. So it was all good. And I came I came back and started looking for jobs in tech and found. A role in a consulting firm that was focused on telecom, so that was the beginning of a business career.
Jesse Purewal [00:06:17] And talk about the role then that systems thinking played for you in that part of the journey. I mean, if I think about telecoms today, perhaps no better set of technologies and business models better typifies the idea of systems thinking. Did you experience it that way?
[00:06:34] I, I think systems thinking is what I was practicing in hindsight. But when I was in it, it was like, OK, there's all this change. How do you absorb it when you're in it? You have to be open to what is next, what is what is the market telling you? What are the customers telling you? And that was the difference, I think, between the the telcos who are focused on continuing their voice lines and plain old telephone service and not wanting necessarily to invest in the Internet and higher speeds. They weren't actually looking at what are these new trends that are coming up and what are customers demanding. And so as a customer, I was in product marketing and I was in strategy. Both roles were focused on customers and trying to learn more about what are the new trends. So you have to be open to listening to the signal to figure out where the next thing might be coming from. And so I think that's the beginning of systems thinking. But then I think following into the systems thinking components, then asking yourself, OK, what comes next, deciding what captivates you personally and then go, go keep going into that.
Jesse Purewal [00:07:57] And you had no shortage of people around you and in your network that were captivating you. I think somewhere in the arc of your first few years in your career, you go and you get your MBA, you meet some incredible classmates, cohort mates, and at some point you're in conversation with one or a few of them and they start talking about a different company outside of telco that they're at. And it gets you excited.
Kristine Chin [00:08:20] Yeah. So I after after business school, I actually worked on two startups, small startups. And then and then I was in a situation where I felt like, OK, I've learned I'm learning a lot of things, trial and error. But the next step, what what do I need next? And what I need next really was about going to some place that was known for having tremendous training and also going to some place where the curiosity could keep going. So my friends told me about Ebay and that was fascinating because not only was I kind of going up the stack in terms of communications right then websites and now people are doing things on websites like Marketplace, they're exchanging goods and there was no other marketplace that was of that size. And so when you're in those kind of situations where you are the market leader and you are scaling super fast into an area that nobody knows about, it was amazing because we had to listen to the customer. Who are these buyers, who are the sellers and what do they want or what do they see as the most important thing for them to offer the marketplace? And only by focusing on the research and listening to these customers can we actually figure out how to shape the service.
Jesse Purewal [00:09:52] So, Kristine, I want to go back to something you said at the start of that, which was that you felt like you needed to go someplace that could train you. What was it at that particular stage of your career seven, eight years into your career that you said to yourself, I've got to go get good at.
Kristine Chin [00:10:08] What I hadn't done yet, was said, how do I create products that people wants and how do I actually take the is there a methodology to do this in a in a best practices way? And that's what Ebay was known for, is building this product management best practices and helping people think about how do you build a winning product, what are the ingredients and then in what order do you execute them? So for Ebay, it was customer first, then you do develop some ideas about what are the gaps of the customer has. Then you develop concepts. That sounds familiar, right? And then you actually start executing, you test your way into it. The very last thing you do is code at the end. So that was the perfect place for me because I needed to think through, take the strategy part that. I had been working on early on in my career and then pull it through to the actual tactics and implementation, and here's what's interesting to me.
Jesse Purewal [00:11:19] So after working in consulting and working in telecom, you had the almost law school and the insurance stint in Slovenia, and you've done all these incredible things. You find yourself gravitating to the motors business at Ebay Motors like cars. So talk a little bit about that business at Ebay and what you found cool about it.
Kristine Chin [00:11:40] Well, I've always been one who keys off a customer and gets excited about learning how customers think about things. It's incredibly informative and you have to be open to hearing that and thinking about it and and asking lots of questions. And so I spent a lot of time talking to buyers. Auto enthusiasts are basically the bread and butter of the Ebay Motors franchise. They were very frank with us about what was working and what wasn't. They also were the original influencers. These folks were seen as experts by their friends and family. They were seen as the go to guy or girl if someone was going to buy a car or repair a car. They also had lots of really cool friends with that were involved in car forums and car rallies. And so they were the core, the the enthusiasts. So it was very contagious to to hear from them. That's where crafting a business around how do we take this this core persona and build to help them prosper on Ebay is Ebay Motors the story of Ebay Motors.
Jesse Purewal [00:13:04] Kristine, can you abstract for me your point of view about the business decisions and the business models associated with market places you mentioned earlier? And I love the visual of kind of heading up the stack that you went from, you know, the network to the website to the software and what the software does. In eBay's case, it does the marketplace. And I think I've heard you say that you have to make some pretty tough decisions when you've got a two sided marketplace model. Can you talk a little bit about that philosophy?
Kristine Chin [00:13:34] When there is a two sided marketplace, there are three major stakeholders. One is the buyers and they are the purchasers. The second one is the the suppliers or the sellers. And the third one is the company that sits in the middle and makes the market that brings them together. So it was really important. Inside of understanding the marketplace is what dynamics you need to have, because if you only have buyers, you don't have anything. You need to be able to attract buyers and sellers. Which one do you do first and then how do you help that marketplace grow? And ultimately it starts first with the buyer. You have to be able to say this fire would be interested in X, Y, Z kind of inventory. And this kind of comes back to the auto and the classic car enthusiasts that I was talking about earlier. They were interested in finding classic cars and parts and accessories to fit those classic cars. So we needed to make sure that we could deliver that to them on the supply side. And so some of the things that as a as a marketplace, the buyer experience has to be slightly higher than everybody else, because if you continue to attract the buyers, you win.
Jesse Purewal [00:14:57] And Kristine, was that made easier, the decision to elevate or your philosophy around elevating buyers, maybe slightly over sellers just because of the history of Ebay that when you went back to the old C2C business models, kind of buyers felt like sellers and sellers felt like buyers. So it was a little like, well, we're stewarding the original kind of DNA of Ebay I'm because I could imagine somebody running a two sided marketplace or being at a company like Airbnb where you could really have an honest debate about do we focus on the hosts because of a certain set of circumstances at this time in this country? Or do we continue to focus on the guests or, you know, any number of those kinds of marketplaces? But is that point of view specifically related to the brand or the origin story of any given company?
Kristine Chin [00:15:45] That's a really interesting question. So let's step back and look at the origins of both marketplaces Airbnb and Ebay. They both started in this consumer to consumer basis where, yes, the buyers were the sellers and vice versa. That's how trust got built because it was readily obvious from others outside that that well there's a lot. Interesting places to stay or a lot of interesting cars to buy, and people are offering very strong testimonials about what a wonderful place this is to find either a neat vacation spot or discover a car or some inventory parts inventory that they didn't think they could ever find. When you start growing, that's when managing that buy and sell side becomes more importance. And to your point, I think that that the sell side, there is a time when the sell side needs more attention. The suppliers need more attention. And so right now is a really interesting time for Airbnb, because oftentimes what happens is the consumer, the CDC suppliers have really interesting, unique inventory. But it's the the larger suppliers that bring the mass amount of inventory. And so it's equally important to make sure that they stay on the site and that they're engaged and they're getting what they want out of their business. And so I think that that Airbnb is move to try to help the host was is really important now, because later on when things start to open up now, they're going to have loyal hosts in a competitive marketplace, environments where those hosts can choose to throw their allegiance in with any marketplace.
Jesse Purewal [00:17:40] And Kristine, looking back on it, now that you're a head of customer experience, would you say that the recipe for a lot of the success you had as the GM for the consumer business of Ebay Motors and then as the GM for all of Ebay Motors really was about designing and delivering a compelling experience?
Kristine Chin [00:17:59] I laughed because customers are everything. And so when I first got a had a customer experience title, it was kind of like, well, I'm everything and nothing specifically. So the really important thing for a customer experience leader is, is to help other teams discover where the customer lies. Like, what are the who's this customer? What's their profile? When are they having an easy time or a hard time working with your company and interacting with your company? Customer experience is in everything we do. And this is also why I leapt from product into kind of a GM role on the customer experience, because truly there is a thread you can pull through. My last three large companies is that the customer, if you pay attention to the customer, you'll be able to take those insights and drive them into your systems.
Jesse Purewal [00:19:02] So then you've been at Ebay 12 years and at this point you're heading up strategy and ops in North America for the partner program and Ebay and things take another very interesting and cool turn. Tell me about that.
Kristine Chin [00:19:14] I had an old friend who called me up one day and said, Would you mind talking about the lessons learned at Ebay Motors? And I'm thinking, yeah, sure. You know, he's head of a startup. And so I'm thinking 10 people in a room ask me anything. It's all cool. And it turns out that it's actually 60 to 70 people in a room. They videotape it and they broadcast it all over their company. By then it was too late. And I but I just got up there and started telling stories that. The interesting thing is that at Ebay Motors, right. Your car is your number two most expensive thing that you'll ever buy, but your house is your number one most expensive thing that you'll ever buy. And his company was focused on residential real estate. So it was it was almost uncanny how similar these these two pans were and the kinds of things that their customers were asking. And so at the end of a 90 minute just riffing and answering questions, it turned out that their chairman was in the audience and it turned into a few weeks later. A few months later, actually, I was there.
Jesse Purewal [00:20:33] And so you're you're there at Ten-X running experience. You're across like ten different brands in the company's portfolio. You stand up your first CX program. And what you do there sounds like it only ought to have been possible to do if you had an enormous amount of CX specific experience, like you build capability and UX research, core analytics, AB testing, even design thinking in addition to the call center and NPS and voice of the customer kind of standard parts of the CX program. Was it your. Experience that got you there, was it your systems thinking that got you there? How were you able to accelerate so quickly?
Kristine Chin [00:21:15] There's a lot of similarities between Ebay Motors General Management and Ebay Partners strategy and real estate that you never imagined. So it's all about skills, what kind of skills you start to develop. Right. What was it really important to driving customer experience at 10X? It was a curiosity around the customer. It was customer research that starts to put the themes together. It was also passed product experience, looking at customer flows and saying, oh, now what happens? OK, then what happens? And then whereas if something goes wrong, where does the customer end up? And being able to have a point of view, ultimately product people are asked to have a point of view. And so being able to have a look at all this data melded together and say, hmm, the customers are asking for X, Y and Z, let's try to figure out how to make it. So really was customer experience equals product analytics, UX design, thinking, things that came from the toolset, the toolkit that I developed that Ebay.
Jesse Purewal [00:22:31] So tell me about your framework of leading with data, following with process and finishing with infrastructure.
Kristine Chin [00:22:39] The data will tell you the shape of the problem in the scope of the problem. Then it's up to you to figure out how do I solve it. People process and infrastructure are the three things that I like to think about, because you can test your way in by changing the behavior of a person or a group. Make a little adjustment. You start to see, OK, did that work or not work? You don't have to code anything. Then the next thing up would be, OK, let's change the process that requires a few more teams probably to get involved. And the very last one is about building infrastructure and building products and features. And those are the probably feature component, though, is the long pole. So you want to get to that point and drive that investment when you are more sure that is the right thing to do. Before that, you have a lot of flexibility at a low cost. And so this is a customer experience. Take the data, check it against possible changes, people, process and infrastructure and get increasingly more sure about what you need to do and where you need to drive the investment. The other important thing is also the types of customers that you have, because you can if you're a consumer based company. It will not be scalable to focus on the people thing for very long, because you're just loading more people at throwing more people at a problem. Eventually you will need to code it in order to get leverage on the expense. And so that will also drive the experience and it will also drive the experiments a lot faster.
Jesse Purewal [00:24:27] Let me ask you specifically about the role of design thinking, all of the other elements of the program that you mentioned, that you stood up, make a significant degree of intuitive sense to me, just listening from the outside, the design thinking one sounds unique about that one.
Kristine Chin [00:24:44] If we kind of boil it down to the scientific method, really, that's what it is like. What is define the problem? Well, then try to do some experiments and then figure out if it made a difference. So ultimately, that's the backbone of design thinking. Now, how open you are to feedback from customers and from internal people to come to the decision and possible concepts is the magic that is design thinking. I think that bringing forth people from different functions to get in a room and hear all the different parts about customer challenges helps a company to accelerate their solve. I think design thinking in itself is, you know, the scientific method, but it's the collaboration underneath it that comes from breaking down the silos across different teams, getting them to talk to each other, and also being willing to accept points of view from all over the functions. Some of the best ideas I ever got were from account managers who are talking to our biggest customers. They got feedback from customers who were telling them, hey, this thing doesn't work. Could you do X, Y and Z? And you start hearing that a few more times than you realize. Oh, the shape of the problem is different than what I thought. And so we need to be open as as leaders in order to move fast. We need to be open to hearing ideas from all different places.
Jesse Purewal [00:26:21] So, Kristine, what compelled you to make the move to run customer experience at Twilio, which you did about two years ago, and which is where you are now?
Kristine Chin [00:26:30] I loved the whole concept of this idea of developers who can basically design whatever they would like. There were three real big reasons. One is this customer focused? Right. I love the idea of these like core enthusiasts driving the Twilio story. That's so much like the Ebay car enthusiast driving the Ebay Motors story. The second one, it was just communications focused on my career has been about making connections via telecom or web or marketplaces. And so here's a company that's all about how do we enrich that customer engagements. And then the third piece is it was a rapidly scaling company. Some people really, really like this and thrive off of companies that are are going super high growth rate. And Twilio, I can see the same kind of things. It it looked like just a really fun challenge.
Jesse Purewal [00:27:34] And on the face of it, Kristine, somebody could say, wow, those moves are really tricky to go from running an automotive business to real estate to developer software. But I think you see the customer bases across these businesses as in some ways more alike than different. Can you talk about that view?
Kristine Chin [00:27:54] Yes, absolutely. They're at the heart of all three companies, is an enthusiast inside of Ebay. It was the Motors classic car enthusiast. There were also fashion enthusiasts and others, the collectors, but that was Ebay. The second one was a real estate enthusiast who literally was looking for places to invest money. And then the third one is a developer. So if you can focus on the customer and what makes them excited, that's what makes me excited is to try and unlock that, to figure out, OK, so oftentimes if we think about the customer maturity, you have early adopters and these enthusiasts are early adopters. But then as the company needs to grow, how do you go farther and farther to the right with more mature customers that might need a bit more help? So you start with the enthusiasts learn about what are those similarities and with these newer customers and and then build on it.
Jesse Purewal [00:29:05] Well, Kristine, you stood up your first end to end CX program in a highly capital intensive industry in real estate. And then you switched into Twilio, which is a digital business. How do you think about the difference?
Kristine Chin [00:29:21] Well, I think it's a lot about the touch points that the customer has with you as a company, define the customer journey early, have a hypothesis. Maybe it isn't right, but that's OK. Just have have a thought about what this journey looks like and then try to identify where the customer sentiment is up, down and where they struggle the most. Because once you can identify those touch points, then you're able to figure out which ones are the highest priority and which ones might be attacked initially with people. And then you can test your way in the process and infrastructure. So there is a formula somewhat to this by building that that framework, even though, like the developers have this set of touch points in the real estate, agents have the sanitized points, ultimately the framework is very similar. And so a CX person can actually pivot fairly quickly in terms of thinking about the different businesses and they might be working with.
Jesse Purewal [00:30:27] I love that your reflection is to be hypothesis led and start with the end to end journey. I think there is a temptation in a world where data is the business to just let behavioral data and let signal that we experience bottoms up, guide the decisions that we make as opposed to saying, well, what's possible and where are the gaps that we need to fill. So I'd love to. I love that you went there.
Kristine Chin [00:30:49] Well, I think just just to that point, though, is, is sometimes when you first start out in a CX role, there's a fire somewhere. Usually that's why they brought you on and so could put the fire out and then go back and figure out the best answer you have. I mean, that's that's the other thing that's important is because I also believe that when CX people are brought in, there is usually something warbly that or some idea that the executive team has in mind. So go put the fire out first and then go figure out this customer journey in the in a in a more studious way.
Jesse Purewal [00:31:30] OK, Kristine, I want to move into a little bit of a lightning round here for some questions on CX. You ready? Yeah, let's go. OK. Biggest thing CX leads are doing wrong today that if they got it right, would have outsized positive impact on the business.
Kristine Chin [00:31:45] Customer journey map. So think about customers from a holistic point of view. It's an end to end perspective because that's going to create the big picture that allows you to figure out where the upstream root cause of the problem is.
Jesse Purewal [00:32:01] Craziest customer truth you ever discovered at Ebay Motors?
Kristine Chin [00:32:05] I think I have to come back to enthusiast. Customers are the core of the business. Go find them, hear them out, learn from them and use their experience to figure out what comes next.
Jesse Purewal [00:32:20] Is customer experience fundamentally more about the part of the experience the customer is having or more fundamentally, about what goes on behind the scenes?
Kristine Chin [00:32:28] You really need to consider both its yin and yang, and it's so important to deliver a impressive customer experience with impressive backstage work. So it's really, really key to have the right discipline and chops to deliver the systems and processes at scale. And so for that, I'm going to say that what goes on behind the scenes is important by half a step higher. But you still need to focus on the ultimate customer experience.
Jesse Purewal [00:33:01] Kristine, what is your secret sauce?
Kristine Chin [00:33:04] Well, my team would probably say curiosity, coupled with delightful persistence and CX, is all about the business of change management. And sometimes you have to help other teams discover the opportunity in front of them. And so it's delightfully persistence in ensuring that again and again and again and helping implement the change.
Jesse Purewal [00:33:33] One company in tech whose customer experience you admire.
Kristine Chin [00:33:37] Airbnb, no doubt because you think about Airbnb, they made it just safe and exciting to stay in a stranger's house. And these are this is all about embracing the adventure,.
Jesse Purewal [00:33:50] The role of brand in B2B technology companies, overrated or underrated and why.
Kristine Chin [00:33:56] Underrated, No doubt Brand sets the expectations for what will happen next to customers. And so B2B still needs to deliver a stellar customer experience. And brands will help those customers figure out what they will get when they work with that company ten years from now.
Jesse Purewal [00:34:16] Is the CX industry as locked on to NPS as it is today and why or why not?
Kristine Chin [00:34:22] I actually think that there will always be a metric that is the shorthand for the customer sentiment. But I'm increasingly a fan of this customer effort score. How easy is it to do business with the company? Customers have higher and higher expectations for what they're going to get and how easy it is going to be delivered. So the intelligence needs to be in the network, if you will. It needs to be in the process and customers expect to be able to have a frictionless experience. And those companies that deliver that will win.
Jesse Purewal [00:35:02] OK, thank you for providing the lightning round. One final question for the builders listening here. If they wanted to know what the most important piece of advice they should take from you, given the world as you've seen it, the world as you've experienced it in the world as you've helped build it, what would that advice be?
Kristine Chin [00:35:19] Not surprisingly, start with a customer and then you can work back into your people process and infrastructure components. Find those customers that will be engaged but candid with you and tell you what you're doing well and also will tell you what you're doing not well. Those folks are going to be your biggest supporters as a customer experience expert, and it's going to be really, really easy to kind of get going with this customer idea. But I think another piece of advice is also don't get caught in siloed behavior. It's one of the magic pieces of customer experience is a capability to see an end and customer experience through the lens of a customer journey map, and it is very hard to choreograph that into an experience unless you actually continually go back to the customer and not let the different silos impact that experience.
Jesse Purewal [00:36:30] Well, Kristine, I must say thank you. It has been such a treat. I could keep talking to you about this stuff all day. I appreciate your time and your energy and your wisdom and your candor, sir. Thanks a ton for the time and for the conversation.
Kristine Chin [00:36:42] Thank you, Jesse. Been a ton of fun.
Jesse Purewal [00:36:55] Thanks so much to Kristine for coming on the show. She has an incredible humility and a great confidence, and she's had so many cool experiences tied together by this thread of focusing on the enthusiast, that customer who's at the bull's eye of the bull's eye, the customer she learned to learn from about what's going well and what needs to be fixed. Keep on keeping on.
Jesse Purewal [00:37:15] Kristine Twllio is lucky to have you. All right, let's get to this shows building blocks. It's going to be about spanning silos in this world where it can sometimes be hard to reach across aisles or drive the collaboration we need. Kristine offered a common talisman of sorts that we can all identify with and rally behind. That talisman, of course, is the enthusiast customer. For Kristine. One key reflection she shared was that a CX leader's most important role is to help other teams discover the customer. Who are they? What are their behaviors, needs, attitudes? Where are they satisfied and where are they stuck? And she talked about how the only way you can deliver that consistent end to end experience, the one you draw up on that journey map as an ideal state, the only way you can execute it is to have teams across the company locked in on the customer and then collaborating to take action to either design new experiences or address parts of the experience that need to be fixed for this building blocks. Here's what I'd like you to do. Think about what opportunities you have in your role to collaborate better across teams to give your customers a better experience. Maybe you're a marketer looking at customer feedback on the product all day long, but you don't know that much about your company's next feature release or product roadmap. And spending more time with the product team could help out. Or maybe you're on the engineering team and you've got a backlog that seems exciting, but you think you could build even better if you knew the emotions and associations that customers have with your current product, whatever it is, right down at least one other team and the names of at least two specific people who you can reach out to in the next week to start to do some silo spanning and to get to better outcomes for your enthusiast, for your customer. If you want some templates and tips and tricks and how to get started, check out the show notes right here in the app that you're listening to this episode on or over on our website, Breakthru Builders Dotcom, that's Breakthru hyphen builders dot com. You can contact us through the site, too, if you want to go ahead and share any of your reflections. I would love to hear from you. Take care of breakthrough builders and bewell.
Jesse Purewal [00:39:29] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio, part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.