In this insightful panel discussion, speakers explore the various organizational approaches to VoC initiatives, examining how different companies integrate customer feedback into their decision-making processes and the challenges they face in maximizing the impact of VoC programs.

key topics discussed:

• Comparison of VoC practices across companies

• Trade-offs between different VoC approaches and their organizational placement

• Balancing product management decisions with customer feedback

• Strategies for elevating organization-wide customer understanding and avoiding over-pivoting on individual feedback

• Techniques for reconciling tensions between different teams' VoC insights

• Methods for maintaining alignment between VoC practices and leadership priorities

• Concerns and challenges for VoC teams in the near future

• Role of VoC in crisis management, including detection, response, resolution, and mitigation

• Balancing immediate crisis mitigation with long-term roadmap priorities

To delve deeper into the panelists' perspectives and experiences, the complete recording of this discussion is available for viewing on YouTube.

Speakers:

Guest speakers:

• Behzod Sirjani

• Kristen Swanson

• Chloe Wu

• Curtis Stevens

To learn more about Monterey AI, check our website and LinkedIn page.

Transcripts

Behzod:

Awesome. Well, I'm going to sit over here since I'm definitely the least important part of this panel. We are going to talk about where VOC sits in our organizations because all of us are from very different teams, very different parts of the company and there are probably lots of tensions and trade offs that all of us have navigated as we do the work that we are doing.

So, I have three incredible panelists with me and I'm going to have them start by introducing a little bit about themselves, maybe sharing their name, their career journey just so a sense of like where they are coming from.

Kristen:

Hi, everyone. My name is Kristen Swanson, but everyone calls me K Swan. And I currently lead research and design at Okta.

Prior to that, I also worked at Slack with Bazod. And let our customer insights function. My whole life I've just been trying to learn as much as I can from people, from customers. And that's what brought me here today. So excited to be with y'all.

Chloe:

Hi everyone. I'm Chloe Wu. Currently I am a product manager at Forma.

Previously I was at Gusto. I spent most of my career in HR tech businesses in the B2B SaaS world. And today I'm really excited to talk about how cross functional VLC really is. In driving you know, product roadmap and business strategies.

Curtis:

Hi, I'm Curtis Stevens. I'm the director of, I feel like I'm just yelling at you.

I think I'm too close to the director of experience strategy over at Tinder. I've Been working there since late 2022 trying to build or building a culture of customer centricity there. It's been an amazing experience and a busy one. Prior to Tinder, I was at Qualtrics where I led large scale implementations as well as implementation teams.

So practice leads, engagement managers, technical consultants. I also overhauled their own internal CX program there, which was kind of like eating your own dog food, I remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah, I was, and I was a member of the DEI council, which was really amazing. At Amazon, that's where I cut my teeth on customer experience.

I spent the last three years, three of my six years there. Sorry, that's a little long. Building the customer experience program for third party Prime. At Amazon, as well as third party sellers, eventually. That was amazing. Thus, to give you a sense of scale we started off with six customer service associates and like a couple of pages of policy.

And when I left, we were at 135, 000 with hundreds of pages of policy. So, yeah. Amazing. Amazing.

Behzod:

Yeah, it was fun. Yeah. Well Chris, why don't you start and give us a sense of like maybe a tinder and then a quick comparison, how the term VOC is used in your organization. Like when you say voice of customer, what do you think of?

Curtis:

That's a good, I got all these notes because I kept kicking this thing around and I was like, how do I think about voice of customer? I, so here's, here's, Honestly, you can call it whatever you want. When I think of voice of customer, Intuitively, I think of voice of customer, voice of process, voice of business, voice of agent, right?

And so, it's a Oh, you can't hear me. Darn it. Okay, thank you. So you, you have to, to me, voice of customer is a discipline that's very fundamental. focused on just that, is understanding everything you can about your customer's experience, how they're feeling, what they're thinking, saying, doing, how is the support model, things like that.

And then customer experience in general, I think of a center of excellence. So a center of excellence is like, how do you what are your best practices and enterprise standards that you put in place? Ways to understand your customers. And so designing a customer journey workshops that are reputable where you can train somebody and hand it off.

So to me, I don't want to do journey workshops forever. I mean, I like them, you know, but to me, success is if every product. Leader in our org knows how to run one of those. So, so that's how I think about the differences. Awesome. Clara?

Chloe:

Yeah voice of the customer definitely. At Forma, I think we also include both the installed base and also the future prospects.

So we do talk with you know, prospects who are hopefully in the future our customers as well so that we can keep innovating to meet the needs of future customers. We also take a deep look at the competitive landscape. We also do a lot of internal customer analytics. So we try to combine both qualitative and quantitative data into producing that voice of the customer report.

Kristen:

I mean, think looking out at all of you. You probably have a slightly similar, slightly different answer from the two that you just heard. And I'll layer another one on top. There's like this wonderful music that is accompanying me. Oh, it's amazing. I feel like I'm in a movie or something. Yeah. So, I would just ask, like, take a moment and think about, like, what does it mean to you?

And it probably means three variations on three things. Like, one is, like, some form of input from the customer. Two is, like, some way of making that impact the organization in a positive way. And three is, like, the Systems that are needed to make that happen, even when you're not there. And when you get those three things and they come together, it can be magical, and to the point Bayzad just shared with us a few minutes ago, it can also be a huge mess.

And so your job is figuring out how those three things can be magic and not a mess. But sometimes messes are magic, so that's okay too. I think some people like mess. Maybe we can start, actually, there because I know for those of you who aren't maybe aware the customer experience team at Slack are what we call customer support, I'd say customer support plus.

Behzod:

Incredibly respected across the company and with a lot of partner organizations that I've worked with. When I started at Slack, we had something called everyone does support where we would spend like a day or a week even just like going through support tickets and really getting an understanding of what people were feeling.

So I'm curious for someone who like helped architect a lot of that now. runs a different shaped practice at Okta. How do you think about some of the trade offs between, like, where those behaviors or activities live, and, like, how much, how similar or different do they end up looking based on their home?

Kristen:

I think that that's just, like, a very context specific question, but the first thing I always ask whenever someone comes to me and says, like, well, we're doing this.

But they're doing this, too. It's like, are we really having, like, the can we all just get along moment, right? And it's like, what would it look like for you if it was all working? And sometimes people will say, oh, well, I should be able to control all of it. And you'll never be able to control all of it.

Somebody's always going to talk to a customer and have an opinion. And so, the thing that I really focus on is like, what are the goals that we have for this learning? It can't just be learning for the sake of learning. What are the things we're trying to uncover to pass them forward? And then it starts to make a lot of sense why the themes in the support tickets don't match what the CSMs are hearing, don't match what, you know, Stuart heard when he was talking to one of his buddies.

And so, when you can start to say like, Oh, we're really focused on the end user experience for small teams that are just getting started. Then you can say, Oh, well we want to hear from this person, this person, this person on the insights they're hearing. Versus going, support just told us these are the three most important features and CSM's just told us these three things that are completely opposite.

Now we, we're gonna throw all of it out and just do whatever we want. So I think it really all comes down to like, recognizing that people do want to get along, but that they're all looking at data that's coming from different places and answering different questions. Getting really crisp on what those questions are first.

Easier said than done, I know.

Behzod:

I'm curious, Chris, either At Tinder or maybe even thinking about the experience like a bunch of friends at Amazon and know how matrix that is and Qualtrics Obviously being on the service side like how do you help teams wrecking reconcile that tension based on where those VOC?

behaviors or centers live

Curtis:

Yeah, by the way, well said I don't think I can say that any better. Tension is, I actually kind of like it. I like, you know, it's like an interesting mix between triggering self preservation and just enough tension. So, I personally don't like owning anything. I don't particularly care for being territorial in any way.

So, for me it's about the power of a good idea. Being able to show the value. So so right now, for instance, at Tinder, I currently roll up to the CEO. Right? And so that could remain forever or not. I'm not really sure. Right? But when I when they brought me over, the idea was I like to start as close to the customer as possible and and work backwards.

It's an Amazon thing, right? Like and so the people, the people that are talking to the customers every day. Talking about the customers every day. If it's a brick and mortar, who is in the store doing that work? I go out and I talk to them. Those are my people. They know where the bodies are buried. They know what policies are working.

They know which ones they work around. And so if you ever want to get a good sense of what's happening on the street, that's, that's essentially where you start. Then I come back and I look at the data. I'm a little bit weird when it comes to that. Like I, it's not uncommon to see me in a conference room with 40 feet of whiteboards that are completely full.

Is, I like to understand the relationships with data, which is where I think, sorry, I totally spaced on, did I answer your question? Yeah, I think that like the, the thing I'm taking away is if you, if you have more of a, I want this to be successful approach. Yeah. And less of, I want to be successful. Yeah. It ends up being bad.

Behzod:

I don't think like figuring out where do you start, who's doing this work. I love your question of like, If this were working, what would that mean? And there's a big difference between, Oh, I'm doing this, or the company has this action. Yeah. Sorry, one more. No Luke Skywalker's or Princess Leia's, right? It's a team sport.

Curtis:

It's a team activity. Everybody wins. Winning is infectious. Once people start to win, They start to want to become part of what you're doing. So like customer journey workshops being cross functional, right? Cross divisional. All of a sudden, you've got people who are generally see each other as kind of like, Hey, don't tell me I can't launch this thing, you know, a QA, whatever.

You have these people who are starting to work together to understand a common problem and come to a common agreement on what a solution looks like, or at least what reality looks like. And once you start doing that, you're breaking down silos and you're getting people to build their own networks instead of victims. So.

Behzod:

I like that. Chloe obviously used it in product. So there's like, we were talking about this before. I'm like almost feeling this, how do you counteract your own bias? It's like, well, I'm the product manager. So like, I think we should do this, but also like, I want to make sure that I'm representing the customer.

I want to make sure that I'm talking to our sales team and our CS team. Like. How do you balance that tension for yourself, given that, like, you have kind of the power in a certain way?

Chloe:

No power. We're just messengers. But yeah Only every PM talks about it. I think I love this question of where does VOC sit, because there's truly no right answer.

At Gusto, VOC sits within product operations. At Forma, it actually sits within user research slash design. But For each organization that I've been at I've observed that the owner actually, they are the DRI, but they actually consult a lot of people, so they go and get inputs from teams like engineering, product design to ask, like, what are some assumptions that you want to validate for your next quarter and then they go and ask customer support and dive deep into the sales close loss reasons or NPS comments.

And then they come back and then they try to match how, they try to match patterns. So for us, I think the ownership matters less as long as you are trying to be cross functional and getting inputs from everywhere. There are two pitfalls that I do see where insights are brought. But they don't get to the last mile AKA, actually fitting into the product roadmap or changing the business strategy.

And so far I've observed like two pitfalls. One is you didn't get the right audience. So the people who are actually decision makers didn't get to hear your insights. Or you didn't bring them in early where the questions that they want answers to, you didn't do that research. And then the second pitfall is Sometimes the insights are staying at too high a level or that they lack certain elements for the people to make the decisions.

For example how often does this happen? Is this truly what the root cause of the problem is? Have we talked about other trade offs? Like, all of these, you are helping the decision maker make a business case. So the more full fledged the insights can be, the more useful it will be.

Behzod:

I'm building off that a little bit.

Curtis and Kristen, questions for you specifically. As you have these more kind of open practices, you have a lot of people who are engaging with customers, who are hearing things, you know, see a person who gets a ticket, someone who goes through this workshop, and they're like, oh, this is really important.

How do you kind of elevate the literacy or like, fluency of the people in the organization, so that they're not just over pivoting on, you know, One customer said one thing or like this is a problem and actually Zooming out a little bit to think more of like how do we take a holistic view on this pattern or this trend?

because I think that That tension between like this one thing is an outlier but really important versus this one thing is like one unhappy person Can be really hard to navigate

Kristen:

Yeah, I mean this This happens all the time. And so, just to give context, maybe when we were about 4, 000 or so people at Slack Rough, there were maybe 300 or so agents.

And those agents would spend all day answering tickets that would come in. And they would be like, we hear this, It's dozens of times a day, every single day. This must be the most important thing. You should be able to turn on all notifications for every thread in Slack. People out there have asked for it, I know.

And this must be the thing that we build. And they would be like, And then you'd be like, did you know that less than 1 percent of our user base has submitted a ticket in the last year? So it's like, yes, this is a very, very strong signal, but who is it from? It's from our most engaged end user base on teams that are from this size to this size.

It's like, that's a very good insight. But if you're like, is the number one thing we should prioritize something that is wanted by these people? And then they go, Well, I don't know. Maybe we should build that SSO connector. All right, you know. So I think it's really about helping people understand, like, what is How does this particular piece of data relate to the world of customers?

And that requires you to have, like, a lot of fluency on who your customers are in ways that require you to partner with, you know, engineering, data science, all of those folks. Because it is very, very easy when you are a human to get biased by the things that happen around you. And just helping people check that bias can go a really, really long way.

Totally.

Curtis:

Amen.

Kristen:

Did you ask for notifications for all threads? Oh yeah,

Curtis:

I did. I was the one. I knew it. I'd like all of it. Yeah, you're totally right. Sorry, did you want to? Okay. You're totally right. You know, part of it is like, scale. Like, what's your population? What's your sample size, right? And, and, and how is that sample derived?

Like, Is that skewed toward one Democrat one segment or whatever, like you really have to be kind of more random. Right. And then the other one is freshness, like, how fresh is the information you're looking at, like, everyone's all come across and somebody will be presenting a study and I'll be like, I'm sorry, when, when did we, when was that before COVID, you know, and you're like, Oh, yeah, the freshness of the data because things do change post COVID world, especially in dating is a very, very different place.

It's weird, you know, I thought it was going to be bored when they, when they brought me over. I was like, I don't know, man, this sounds like a year, you know, and it's like very fascinating. Right. But looking at what your sample size is, is really important. Conversely randomly selecting 25 of anything is a really good rule of thumb.

When I was at Amazon, we discovered that we launched third party prime without a refund button, but it wasn't until like four months later after we launched it that we, I randomly selected 25 contacts and what do you know, 20 of them were about refunds. And yeah, that was not good. That was the next day.

Viewer of my life.

Kristen:

So when is the like post panel discussion about the post the The worst stories.

Curtis:

Yeah, I Yeah so, one anecdote like about covid and dating was one thing we saw and you'll see this in our quarterly earnings, right is like the user The active user numbers were off covid and if you think about it, right We were all isolated and lonely and frankly bored, right?

And so what we were seeing was a lot of people using these dating apps as a means of connecting with one another and talking. And so that's something that we're still reflecting on and trying to learn from because it gets at kind of the core mission, right? Which is helping people make real connections, right?

So yeah, it's, I'm happy to share that with you. Off mic.

Behzod:

One of the things that we, we talked about come in prep for this was I think related to your point, Claire, like, you want to share things with the right people at the right time. And I think getting executive buy in is really important. There's, I've definitely done projects where, like, I didn't think about what leadership cared about.

I was like, oh, this is interesting. I'm going to go do it. And I'd share it and they're like, yeah, okay, fun. I'm curious. Like as a product manager or thinking about some of the places y'all have worked What are some of those rituals to make sure that you are in sync with leadership and really focused on listening?

Or maybe not just listening at the right time, but like getting them things at the right time

Chloe:

So I can give some examples of format how we currently do in All these intake sessions, so we do have a weekly intake we call that universal intake, where we host 30 minutes every Tuesday and Thursday for CSMs and salespeople and operations to come and share what they think are really important for them.

And then we have we go through this process of triage, and then PMs or designers For engineers going to discovery mode where we figure out, is this a pattern? And and then we try to size it. If it's a small sprint, quick win, we try to fit it in so that real time feedback can actually be acted upon.

But then there are all these larger products. initiatives and then that goes through quarterly roadmap planning. So in there, we also do the same process of triaging, sizing the opportunity, figuring out patterns, and like making trade off decisions. And usually these are larger tech debt or product debt initiatives.

And then for annual planning, that this is where we make Some changes to long term vision, so we make some big bold bets, like entering a new market or launching a new, complete new product line. These are usually require a lot more research, a lot longer time to validate demand, to figure out what's the prioritization of use cases to segment the personas, etc.

And that usually is a concerted effort between multiple functions. So yeah, we try to make quick wings, and then medium task, and then longer term lung. That's

Kristen:

One of the things that I've found with my teams, I don't know if you see this, is that they're like, they're very, you know, they're plumbers, gardeners, in a lot of cases, and so they'll be like, I collect all these insights.

I reported it out. It's going to be on the next roadmap. And I'm like, it doesn't mean you failed if it doesn't get on the roadmap. And sort of telling them that even if you share an insight and it doesn't, you know, that thing doesn't make its way onto the roadmap in the way you expect it. It's still influence someone and change their mind.

It might just not happen for like three months or four months or maybe even a couple quarters later. Because what, what's happening in the business has a way of shifting thing. What people think is important. So kind of I've always tried to reframe for people like it's not a linear process, because sometimes they can be very disappointed if they're like, this is a slam dunk.

Behzod:

I'll give a shout out to Michael because him and I were the ones that were having a lot of this conversation. But the plumbing metaphor really came from this, like, when I was working with Figma, they had a lot, like, you know, you'd have a product launch and Figma is a very loved product. And so there'd be all this feedback coming in.

And the PM's like, all I care about in the next five minutes. Fixing any bug that is broken. I don't want feature requests. I don't want anything else. Like, can you just put this somewhere else? And we realized that this is kind of like having this reservoir, right? Like, it's not that you want the water all the time.

It's that you want to be able to turn the water on and off when you need it. And like, you need a way to store it somewhere. And so that's why building those kind of pipes matter. Because you're going to gather that feedback. And you want to collect it so that when it's necessary, it's there. But the expectation is not just like water is flowing in all the time and flooding things out.

Given that we're getting close, maybe two rapid fire rounds would love to hear from all of you. What are you, like, thinking about your teams, your practices, kind of voice the customer generally? What are you most concerned about in the next, like, year or two? This could be, like, wildly personal, like, I don't have any staff.

Chloe:

Well, so Forma is a pretty small organization, and we don't have architects, we don't have writers, we don't have playbooks. Everyone is trying to do different things to make this work. And there's just so much user feedback coming from all different sources, and we're really overwhelmed because we do have a huge member base but a really small team.

So, for me, I think the biggest challenge is really how do we triage all of the different user feedback coming from different sources. And I'm so lucky that I found Monterey. ai. This is not a paid ad. Not a paid ad. But actually, I was trying a bunch of different tools, like, on the int, but yeah, when Mongo A.

when I tried it out, it was really solving this problem for PMs to not have to manually tag every single product feedback to a project area that we're focused on. Yeah.

Q&A:

Thank you.

Kristen:

I think for me it's really as we sort of enter this era of increased budget awareness that people don't Put the ability to build things that can directly be tied to revenue ahead of the ultimate customer experience because you might not be able to justify every little piece that makes a good customer experience, but it has like multiplicative effects.

So helping the organization not get distracted.

Curtis:

Yeah, I love that. I'm just going to hang out with you. Yeah, I think, I think that as well, I really like what you said about it. Not, not necessarily always leading directly to revenue, which is a hard one for me to remember sometimes. But I think understanding the relationships between the qualitative mindset and experience and the quantitative one, right?

So like, yes, revenue is great, you know, so is, you know, your NPS, right? Likely good to recommend grant loyalty. overall satisfaction with your relationship, right? Like those things eventually do lead to money. And if you can build an understanding of the relationships between the qualitative and quantitative data points, the long game is to pay attention to how the behavior, how that sea of data changes over time.

Once you land something and you can see the changes, then you can start communicating that and that keeps back in.

Behzod:

Last question for y'all. What advice would you have to someone who's like starting to build A voice of customer practice, or however you would be defining it. Or anything that, like, you want to get out before we go to Q&A.

Curtis:

Alright. Before anything, listen. Learn how to listen to people. And validate what they're saying. But build a coalition of support, which is part of listening. Learn the business deeply. Learn the business. And that means going and talking to the front line staff.

Show the value. So your short, medium, and long term wins is a great, great win. As soon as you get one over the finish line, It's infectious. Everybody wants to be a part of it. And then give everybody credit. Have a plan. You know you're either going to build a Prius or a Rivian, right? Don't get territorial.

Give everything away. If you want people, if you want people to talk like you and think like you, that's when you know you're making a difference is when the culture changes. And then it's okay not to know something. Just be the person who's willing to find out.

Chloe:

That is so well said. I don't have anything to add, really.

Yeah, no, I just want to plus one to something that both of you had touched on earlier, which is like bringing your stakeholders early and speak their language, and figure out what they want, what their motivations are, and then that would help.

Kristen:

Definitely everything that was said here and tell stories.

No one sees a Google spreadsheet and they're like, That changed my life! I mean, maybe some of you do. But really, like, when you're talking to executives, and you tell them a story, and the story sticks, that's when, when you'll start to get the wins.

Behzod:

Alright. I think we have time for, like, maybe one question from the group.

If you want to say it, I can repeat it back.

Q&A:

Hi, I'm Jordan, head of product at SoftBank Robotics. We've got 20,000 robots deployed live automating commercial real estate. But my question is more so around where does voice of customers sit when it comes to crisis management? I think maybe Okta might have a play in this, Tinder might have a play in this, because I have a rule of detect, respond, resolve, respond, and then mitigate.

And where I get stuck on is how long and how far do we go with mitigation? As it waits on the broader road map and what we need to prioritize and reframe our business.

Behzod:

Yeah one of my best friends runs trust engineering at Discord and has worked at a number of financial institutions and his framework is typically like everyone on quickly and then roll off after.

And so like, I think Kristen's framework of knowing what are the categories and who's paying, like everyone activates and then they can opt out quickly and say this isn't my area as soon as you start realizing that. Because. I think part of the goal of the mitigation is who still needs to be around to start to fix these things.

And you get everyone around because I think very often I've seen it. We did this, we had this problem at Facebook a couple times where like we didn't get enough people activated. And then you needed other expertise. Or we spent a weekend doing an investigation. If we had called the right product manager, they'd be like, this is what we changed, this is what is broke.

So I think a little more of a swarm for the high priority role of the consumer.

Kristen:

Hashtag deploys channel. Favorite place to hang out.

Behzod:

But yeah, the framework there I think becomes really helpful because it sets that expectation. Awesome, well thank the three of you for joining, this was great.