PREVIEW:
“I'd say, you know, there's two things that I think we see out in the public that are no-nos, or mistakes, that people make all the time and that we can avoid. First one is just hiding what you are doing, right, not being transparent or backpedaling later, and then the second is not taking accountability for mistakes.”
– Kirsten Newbold-Knipp
INTRO:
You're listening to CX Confessions brought to you by Khoros. I'm Spike Jones, General Manager of Khoros Strategic Services.
And I'm Staci Satterwhite, Chief Customer Officer at Khoros. In each episode, we'll share the customer experience stories and insights you need, straight from the sharpest minds in CX, so you can better connect with your customers
And make them customers for life. Let’s start the show.
SPIKE JONES:
Hey everybody, welcome back to CX Confessions. New season, who dis? New season, season two, episode one, and I got a treat for you. I am joined by a brand new co-host. It's none other than our own Chief Customer Officer here at Khoros. Her name is Staci Satterwhite, and I'm going to tell you right now, she has done some things and we're going to talk about them real quick.
She comes to Khoros with more than 30 years of tech experience. So she started working when she was five, which is awesome. I mean, there's child labor laws in Texas, but I don't think they apply here. But she's done a lot in that time. She's worked in programming, consulting, sales, customer success — am I missing anything, Staci?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
There's a couple others, maybe healthcare first and vignette, but probably not more than people really care about. It's a lot. I'm old, Spike.
SPIKE JONES:
Well, I don't know, and it's well relative, don’t do that. And you’ve worked for some small companies too, like Microsoft, Dell. I mean these little startups that I don't even know if they've made it, but you’ve worked for some huge freaking companies which is really cool.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Some big, some small.
SPIKE JONES:
Well also IBM's in there, and that's, I think, where you worked before you came to us, right?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Indeed, right before Khoros, IBM was home. Yeah.
SPIKE JONES:
So you've been through two IPOs, one private equity exit. Super cool. Background in electrical engineering. Look at that. And now you’re our chief customer officer. That's a, that's a little bit of a career change.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Ah, it kind of is, kinda isn’t. I mean, engineering is all about problem solving, and that's what I get to do all day every day here too.
SPIKE JONES:
Wow. That's super cool. And then also software programming, which comes in very handy for your role now.
You're right down the road from me in Austin, in Houston, Texas. You're there with your husband, your two adult daughters and your new granddaughter. Congratulations.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Thank you. It's very exciting being grandma.
SPIKE JONES:
And then there's something here about the Chicago Bulls and Phil Jackson, you went to school together. What — tell me about that.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
So Phil Jackson actually went to the same university I went to and on one particular distinguished alumni brochure, I got to be on the page next to him. Unfortunately, I don't think he knows exactly who I am. But hey, it's a thing.
SPIKE JONES:
He should be so lucky. Well, I am so excited that you are co-hosting. We're gonna have a lot of fun this season. We've already got some great folks lined up. So you know, why don't we get to it?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Spike, I'm super excited to be joined today by Kirsten Newbold-Knipp. She's an experienced technology marketer, sales and product executive who blends leadership, communication and even analytical skills — that's key, I think — to deliver and execute powerful go-to-market strategies. Her background includes 20 plus years in tech and SAS, and she has lots of experience with companies like PubSpot, Intel, and BigCommerce. All brand names I'm sure you've never heard of, Spike.
SPIKE JONES:
Who? Who? I don't even know.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Exactly. And Kirsten has experience in doing those for those brands, has a unique perspective of the total go-to-market requirements from someone in her position. It's not just about marketing or maybe even “smarketing.” She has a broad range of experience across technologies. She's currently the CMO at FullStory, where she's building a world-class marketing team that spans customers from SMB to enterprise.
Some of the things I'm looking forward to with Kirsten is she might have some thoughts on category creation, its validity or not, and I think maybe she has a little bit of background in food, cooking, and travel.
SPIKE JONES:
So we are so thrilled to have Kirsten join us today, so welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Thanks so much, Spike and Staci, for having me. Excited to be with you today.
SPIKE JONES:
Absolutely. Always good to talk to a local here in Austin. So we're gonna jump right in, start hitting you with the questions. We’ve got a lot of things we want to talk about.
FullStory is doing some very cool things with data and helping out customers in so many ways. We were all over your site and saw some of the testimonials of your customers, but for you, this is more about you—not about Khoros—let's talk about your passion for bringing great products to market. Where does that come from?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Yeah, it's actually really funny. As I was thinking about this dialogue, I thought I might take you into the archives of my career, but very, very briefly, and it's that before I was ever in technology, I was a hotel professional.
So I went to undergrad thinking I wanted to be the general manager of a hotel, and I went to go do that. So for four years post undergrad, I worked in hospitality both at the Ritz Carlton and at the Breakers in Palm Beach. And what that means is like a very service-minded individual. And a lot of times I would be working with — it was at one point I was in charge of our VIP program. So that means that customers like Steve Forbes or Harry Connick Jr, or we even had The Judds, they were really fun. But these are people who, they were expecting something really outstanding from us, and they expected things to go seamlessly, right. They sort of had this like — you know when stuff goes wrong because you get complaints. When it goes really well, you might hear nothing. And I think that sort of experience that I had around being service-minded has really translated into how I think about customer experience today.
The translation into technology became one that I was actually the beta user for a software product in our hotel when I was at the Ritz. We were essentially rolling out a new email system and I was helping figure this out. And I met these people called product managers and I was like, ah, what you do is so interesting. And that is ultimately why I went to grad school and decided to go become first a product manager. Eventually I made my way into marketing.
But the short answer there is, I love this idea of creating software and experiences that actually make an impact on how people live, work, and play, right. In the hotel, I can make an impact on one customer at a time. Maybe a handful. In software and technology, I can make an impact on tens of thousands of people, hopefully for the positive, so that's a little bit around how I got to the place I am today.
SPIKE JONES:
I love that because you hear stories about Ritz Carlton and just the story after story of the amazing customer service and how they know their customers so well, especially repeat customers. But that's fascinating to make that connection especially when it comes over to product. That's really cool.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
I also think it's interesting to hear the connection between the service level that a hotelier like a Ritz Carlton would provide and taking that to a digital type experience. So maybe we'll get into that here in a second.
One of the questions I have for you next is at FullStory you help companies make use of customer data to drive growth, something I'm sure many of our listeners are interested in doing.
What's your perspective for fostering the solid foundation of trust with those consumers during the process that allows you to then proceed with it?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Yeah, this is both a very interesting and very timely question. Actually, it's funny, I was on a CMO panel yesterday, more of a roundtable where we talked about things together, and it was about privacy and trust. Because the topic is so hot right now and really complicated. So I think the way that we actually think about trust is first and foremost foundational to both our offering but also our ethos. If you were to visit our blog today, you would find that we actually introduced trust as our fourth official watchword, or one of our values, about two months ago. But what was funny about it is it didn't come as a surprise to anybody. We didn't have to do a whole sort of change initiative. It was more that most of our team members or employees said, thank goodness, we finally codified the thing that we've thought all along.
And our belief is that other brands should be doing that too. Because it is incumbent upon us to not only hold sacred and protect but be really transparent about what we do with customers’ data, right. In a Ritz Carlton one-to-one situation, I might have known that The Judds actually like to take their coffee this way in the morning, right. But in a programmatic environment, it's less important that I know who exactly is doing something, but that I can help them achieve their goals in a more meaningful way.
As we talked about this with a bunch of other CMOS a couple days ago, someone said something that I loved and I sort of have now framed it into a hierarchy in my mind that I thought we could talk about, because there is what you must do, right. There's the compliance piece of privacy, and we've all got GDPR, CCPA, all the things, fine. That's what we must do. And I consider that the bare minimum, but that's just the starting point. It's not what consumers expect.
There's, what do you choose to do? I firmly believe that actually, marketers today, product leaders today, have the opportunity to create a moat around themselves to choose to go beyond what is the baseline required. Certainly like Apple is doing this themselves today and making a lot of noise about it. But what could we do as marketers? Well, you go from compliance to then maybe the next level up in this hierarchy could be transparency. So I'm compliant by telling you that I'm using some sort of cookie. And for clarity, we are a first-party only cookie, we do not share data across any other applications at FullStory. But all marketers use all sorts of other tools.
So there's, there's the compliance piece: what do I have to tell you. Then there's the transparency piece: what am I going to choose to tell you, right? Might I, might I go a little bit above and beyond to tell you something, and then maybe even might give you a value exchange? I as a consumer know that when a company uses my data, maybe it's to give me a better experience. Maybe I'm willing to give up that information. How can we actually have a dialogue around this as consumers? Can you offer me more options? Even if you don't have to say sort of right to be forgotten in the state of New York? You only have to do it in California. Why not offer it anyways, right? Why not make that something, if your infrastructure supports it, allow your consumer to engage with it, but make it really, really simple?
And then finally, right, some folks are even going so far as to think about incentivization around trust. How might I get you to be willing to give me more data if I provide you loyalty or engagement or the like, but I think it comes down to: bare minimum is compliance. From there, we have to build trust. And a lot of that is about the value exchange that we have with our consumers being as transparent as possible and that as we can.
What are you seeing with customers that you work with or with other brands as well?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Oh, I'm actually going to ask Spike to answer that first, if you don't mind.
SPIKE JONES:
Well, I mean it's, you see the word trust a lot, and people's values a lot, the company values, but it's also a poster, on a poster on a wall and that's probably as far as it goes. So even just, I recently was digging into some of the Salesforce values because for some of the state sustainability stuff that they do and the quality stuff, there's some beautiful content there. But you click on trust and it takes you to their uptime on their website. And that's it. Like, oh, our product has been up, you know, it has only gone down blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, that's interesting, but you really don't talk about it, but to see and to hear you talk about the manifestation of it. That's something that I don't see very much. People talk about trust, sure. They talk about transparency even, but like really putting your money where your mouth is. That's rare, from what I've seen in my career.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
You know what’s interesting, I'll share this, and this is selfish, so feel free to do with this content what you will, but we actually think at FullStory, within the context of DXI, digital experience intelligence, we think that there is an opportunity to sort of lead with trust.
So we're actually talking about it more than our own competition. But we're also publishing training materials on it in a way that we think is really important because what is sensitive data, what's like, and while we can't tell any one brand, we can't tell a customer, hey, this is exactly what you should and should not include as you capture insights and data and sessions.
But we can say, here's what's legally the minimum. Here's some yellow. So red, yellow, green. In the yellow zone? Like these are sensitive things, you may want to choose to omit all of this and still get a ton of value. And this stuff’s pretty green, right? But if you're in a healthcare situation, you may have to fine tune that, right. You might be more conservative or not, but by creating sort of helpful guidelines around that I think we're hoping to stoke a conversation, because to your point, Spike, many people are essentially leaning on their legal team and just saying, hey, what do I have to do? And I don't think that that will serve us in the long term. I think that's fine for today, but it's not gonna serve us in the long term as consumers expect more from us as they demand more transparency. And as we as marketers have the opportunity to build more of those one to one relationships, right? We're going to have less third-party data. How do we make sure that we get the most data from our customers because they trust us to take care of that information for them?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Actually, I wanted to ask a follow up question. You’re giving a lot of thought to the things you are doing, and especially above and beyond the legal must haves. I love that. Do you have any experience with the things you absolutely are not doing, or the things you've done and had to stop that you mind sharing with our listeners that might benefit from, hey, we tried this didn't quite go over so well.
Like maybe an example of where the transparency was too much? Does that resonate at all?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
I think as a concept it resonates, and I think we are all, maybe for lack of a better word, we're probably more paranoid in that sense than we need to be. We have yet had to roll back something with transparency. Now I will tell you, we actually have had conversations internally about hey, would we ever share this much information? And we've said maybe we would not, let's hold off. So we have gone conservative, we haven't yet hit that wall, which is good. So maybe it means we need to be pushing the envelope a little bit more.
And say you know, there's two things that I think we see out in the public that are no-nos or mistakes that people make all the time and that we can avoid. First one is just hiding what you are doing, right, not being transparent or backpedaling later, and then the second is not taking accountability for mistakes. I can say I have definitely been in companies where we've made a mistake, where something has leaked, where something has happened, where some of our unsubscribes didn't work the way that we expected.
This happened, not too long ago, it was one account where some people were signing up for something that didn't actually make sense. And it was like wow, thank you. We apologize, it won't happen again. And here are the process steps we're taking to make sure that it never happens to anybody else. But it's a one-time thing. And I think that that accountability is so important, because it is the way that you build trust, but it's not always going to go right, and identifying ways to fix it and be transparent about it when it doesn't, I think builds that trust.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, actually Kirsten, since I'm the chief customer officer, very near and dear to my heart, the accountability when we don't do things right, because clearly we're all human, that stuff happens. It resonates a lot with me, that particular thought of we're not going to get it right always all the time. And when we don't, we apologize and we put in the processes it takes to fix it. That's what we can do. So appreciate that, Kirsten.
SPIKE JONES:
So Kirsten, besides the Ritz, you've worked at little startups like HubSpot, Intel, just tiny little, they're gonna make it, I think they might make it, but you’ve had some really great positions at some really great, huge tech companies.
What are some of the key customer experience lessons you've learned in those roles?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
The biggest one for me is around I would say team interlock, and then eventually, data interlock, but team interlock comes before data and the data informs the improvements that you create in team interlock. And I think Staci, right, in your role as chief customer officer, you span multiple, but many companies aren't organized that way right.
Many companies, FullStory included, we have a sales organization, a marketing organization, a CX organization, a product organization. We call our sales, marketing and CX, we call ourselves the go-to-market council, and we actually added partner as we just recently added an SVP in our partner arena. And the four of us are like a subset of our leadership team that sort of tries to stay in interlock. Are we perfect about it? Absolutely not. Are we having the conversations to say, hey, there was a really interesting one not too long ago, we talked about verticalization.
For instance, I passionately believe verticalization is a great investment. I also believe it is more than a data sheet and a case study because what happens when you start to actively go after a vertical in a meaningful way, not only are you marketing more actively, but when they then come in, they might expect some different capabilities in your product. They might expect that you have partners in your ecosystem that are experts in their specific unique use cases. They might expect that their CX person actually knows something — you might verticalize the CX team. And if we're not having those conversations early, I think we're missing the boat. So as we were starting to have these conversations it eliminated, oh, okay, so if we want to be serious about verticalization in a certain way, we do need to think what's the baby step? What's a medium step? What is full verticalization? And how might we evolve as an organization to really make sure the customer has the best experience?
So team interlock I would say is the first, and data and systems interlock is the next, and we're fortunate right? Born digital, we're natively digital. Many of our systems share data well, but not all. When I was at Gartner, I worked with a lot of blue chip companies that were 50, 60, 70, 80 years old, and man, the data messes that they had to try and you know, combine these things and understand that customer that was just really hard. It was spaghetti. So yeah, I feel fortunate that we’re in this natively digital world.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, that's so true. I too come from some enterprise organizations that had massive data silos and trying to get it to connect across all of them is a challenge that we certainly all have. And then obviously, at some point, you have to give up perfection in the data and go with it tells me what I need to know. Because at least from my standpoint, that's one of the things we're working on at the moment, is the data has to be believable and high integrity and directionally correct. But it honestly will probably never be perfect, unfortunately, you know, maybe that's a misconception in my leadership, but that's where we're at at the moment, is not perfection in it.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Staci, I actually agree with you. I think one of the things that teams can often do, and certainly I've been fortunate to be in the kind of, the high growth startup zone for a while, but you might get someone who wants to build the Taj Mahal when a perfectly good like, mid-level house will do. What do we need right now? Right? If we're doing our jobs, right, the thing we built today will probably serve us for 6, 12, maybe 18 months if we're really lucky, but we're probably going to need to break it and rebuild it. And that's okay, because we're in a scale up right now. So folks who are in that stage that looks different than folks who are maybe already at scale growing slower and really have consistent systems that they just want to sort of roll on. So yeah, 80-20 rule. I'm very much in agreement with you.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
And a totally different experience from that stage versus an enterprise one. More fun maybe if you can, you know, build it with the visibility to break it in 18 to 24 months.
Okay, I'm gonna change directions a little bit. You coined the term “smarketing” in a previous position of yours, at least we believe you have. How do you see that sales and marketing partnership? You talked a little bit about GTM, your GTM group, so maybe it's expanded there a little bit, but how does that play into your ability to execute a successful buyer journey and customer experience?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Yeah, great question. And I will say, it's very generous to believe I've coined it. I will give credit where credit's due. My colleague, Dan Tire, who is just an amazing guy from my time at HubSpot, maybe one of the most energetic sales leaders I know. I think he may be actually the one who coined it, but at HubSpot, we certainly promoted it and I've taken it with me everywhere throughout my career.
Fortunately, actually two roles since post-HubSpot, I led sales and marketing, which was just a wonderful journey into both learning things I had not done before, but building empathy for my peers on the marketing side. I mean, truly actually, the role I have the most empathy for is the SDR or BDR role. That is the toughest job in almost any company, right?
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yes. In every way. In fact, almost everyone should have that job once in their life so they can appreciate how hard it is.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Yes, so you can appreciate the challenges, and also as it goes to the customer experience piece of this, and also what's it like to be on the other side of that phone call, that email, that LinkedIn, that whatever the method of outreach is, making sure that it is something of value that you give. So the sales and marketing partnership is both so, so valuable, but it is also really crucial to be able to have the tough conversations and talk about where and how, where are there handoffs, where are their breaks in the process, where are people doing the great thing or the inappropriate thing? Calling those out.
I think sometimes I am considered a very direct person. Sometimes that works in my favor and sometimes that can be a little much for people. But I also am like, I have done this job. I know that you could spend a little more time personalizing. Not only would you get a better result, but the customer on the other end would feel better about this interaction.
So right, calling those things out as they are but then also looking through both from a systems and a process standpoint, hey what are we all doing right? Are we hitting a customer 27 times? Nobody wants that. Are we trying to target the right message? What does that feel like? How do we make sure that we're respecting the assets that they have of us and again, providing them something of value? I think that the HubSpot era experience that I have, too, around content marketing is really suggestive to, if I want to share content with you, gosh, really, it should be something that's relevant to your business and there's enough information for me or a seller to do out there right now. To tailor that very, very well whether we're doing it manually, or through systems and tools that allow us to sort of get the insights and do things that are a little bit more programmatic fashion. I do think people are leaning very heavily into very programmatic personalization that I think can miss the mark sometimes. So finding that balance is, I think that's unique to every —
STACI SATTERWHITE:
A little overdone, maybe?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
A little overdone. Yeah.
SPIKE JONES:
So speaking of being direct, there's a question that we like to ask all our illustrious guests, and that is what is a commonly held belief in your industry that you just don't agree with?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Yes, probably the most popular one that I've talked about a lot with friends and CMOs and sometimes leaders, CEOs, board members. Sort of this idea about category creation. I think it's very de rigueur. Everyone's read “Play Bigger.” Everyone's like, yeah, you gotta go big! Category creator. And I don't disagree that some people have the right to go create categories because they really are creating categories, and that others are disrupting existing categories, or improving and growing categories.
And I think those things are totally okay, too. So, right, like Uber truly did create a category around transportation in a way that no one had ever conceptualized. But when people say Slack is a category creator, I’m like no, there was chat messaging everywhere. It just wasn't as good as Slack and Slack approached it differently. They disrupted, right.
So this idea, I love to debate category creation because you come into almost any conversation, oh, are you creating a category? Are you creating a category? Oh we're creating a category. And I think at least 80% of them are not. And they should look that in the eye and say, it's okay, that I'm not creating a category. It is totally fine that I found this category. And I think the TAM should actually be doubled because we're going to innovate and make it better. Let's go do that.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
I mean, one of the things actually on my mind, it may be in that category, maybe not, but I think a little bit about duopolies, right. So in an era, I don't know that there are in many categories monopolies, but moreover duopolies, meaning, so to your point about the TAM, can the TAM be served quite well and quite successfully by multiple organizations? You don't have to be the category creator. You might need a little different twist, but there isn't necessarily one winner or loser by category. At least, that's kind of my viewpoint.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Yeah, I agree. I think there's not necessarily a winner-take-all, there's usually two to three leaders. And then after that, we'll see. It's hard to be seventh. Seventh’s not great. But one, two, or three is pretty good.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, yeah, totally agree.
Okay, I'm gonna switch directions just what maybe one last time before we get to some fun rapid fire stuff here at the end.
Do you have a particular type or kind of data about your customers that's most important to you? And again, with my chief customer officer hat on, we're super interested to see the things that you look at with your CMO hat, may be the same or different than my CCO hat.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Totally. Goodness, there are so many and some of them I have easy access to and others I have less easy access to. But I would say first, when we think about the early stage before someone becomes a customer, engagement level data and account level. We are, though we are a PLG heritage company, product lead growth company, who serves the SMB, we have been rapidly moving up market and for the last four years, we've been serving enterprises. So we have leaned a lot into more of an ABM style model, and the ability to really understand for our top 100, top 200 accounts, gosh, how are we engaging them? What does that look like? How are they progressing through a journey with us?
That is one set of information that's really, really important. But when I think then about the customer, for us, we're actually in the process of building our own what we might call an internal customer love score. And we can debate whether or not —
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Interesting.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
— Implies love or not, but it really comes down to a number of different sort of attributes of behavior that our customers engage with us around, right. It's how often and how many users are engaged in the platform itself and which areas are they using? How much data integration do they have, right? How much of a part of their ecosystem are we? Are we a siloed tool? Are we part of a suite that they actually rely on day to day? What types of users and personas are engaged? Is it just product managers? Or is it product management, UX engineering executives, marketing? Is it that whole swath of personas that's getting value from the solution that we have?
There's this idea of customer health that spans many different things, and even includes not just integration, but like ecosystem partners. We partner with folks like Qualtrics and we have a great way of integrating. We know our customers get more value when they leverage an integration between one of our joint partners and what percentage are doing that? Do we have customers who actually have Qualtrics but aren't integrated? Goodness, that's a miss. How can we help that customer both get more value, and then ultimately, hopefully love us more, become more sticky? So those are the, I would say, the two big areas that we think about. Tons of micro metrics within there that we could talk to but those are probably the biggest right now.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Love it. One final thought on that is, as you as I'm sure you're seeing and we're seeing in our world too, is just that continuation of a customer journey for a pre-sale to a post-sale. So that experiential component and the measurement of the engagement and satisfaction, or health or love, really, in the end, is kind of one continuous thing. It's not like a level before there's a sales moment and then a level after. So, interesting, that sounds like you're seeing some of the same things.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
For sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a continuous loop, too, right. We, I think we all have opportunities and desires to say hey, we've engaged in this way, there's more value we could deliver. Can we both give you more value but extract more value at the same time and just keep the sales and servicing and loop going and keep that relationship growing.
SPIKE JONES:
And customer love score. I love that. So I hope that replaces net promoter. So you heard it here first folks. Customer love, coming to a dashboard near you.
So Kirsten, this is CX Confessions. And one of the things we do ask all of our guests is to share with us a hard lesson that you have learned throughout your career, or in your career, doesn’t have to be a FullStory. It could be somewhere else. But just a lesson maybe you learned the hard way.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
I would say I've learned this the hard way at several companies and so it's a drumbeat that I use in a lot of areas. But I think the lesson is that we are often very bad at articulating value to our customers and ensuring that we're always on the same page with them.
So if we think about this continuum, Staci, that we just talked about, right? Like there's the pre sale, there's the sale, there's the service and there's, and hopefully it becomes a virtuous loop. Also often, in sales, there's an ROI calculator. Yeah, we got you. You're gonna save a million bucks. You're gonna make 10 million bucks. You’re gonna, whatever the thing is, 50 million bucks. Who knows? Right? So we had an ROI calculator, and then a hand-off happens into a CX organization. And the ROI calculator goes out the window, a totally different set of people are engaged, and you start working on some problems. And then you fix a little thing. You did this, you did that. And six months later, one person quit, something else happens and, and lo and behold, we can't share, prove, discuss the value because we didn't really align on, hey, were the ROI metrics that we agreed on in the beginning, are these really the ones? Okay. Let's agree to figure out how we're going to track them together. And then let's come back and judge ourselves. Did we do well? Did we do poorly? Even if we change gears, that's okay. Let's just be articulate and agree on it.
So that when it comes time to decide if we have proven the value to you that we promised, that we're all on the same page and you can go back to your leader and say, I need FullStory in my life, or I need Convey, or I need BitCommerce, or I need whichever place that I was at. I think that all of us tend to let that fall by the wayside. And we get very much into the nitty gritty of like, let's get the software up and running. Let's just make sure it works versus delivering value and really coming back to making sure that we're hitting on the most important problems our customers can solve.
So hard lesson learned. It happens almost everywhere. So it is something I harp on quite a bit. And one of the ways that I think about solving it is not necessarily to have an ROI calculator for everything, but to an extent, whatever calculations you're using on the sales side, should number one have stemmed from the reality of what CX problems we solve. And then it should be circular again. If you sold it, now let's start holding ourselves accountable to it. If it was wrong, it's okay, we can fix it, but we can find an additional way to add value. And then you start to fine tune that.
But if you use those and QBRs, if you check in with your customer and you're making sure that you're delivering value, it makes it so much easier. Both for them to advocate for you and for you to identify where and how it is or isn't working over the course of that customer journey.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Kirsten, I don’t know if you ever wanted a future as a CCO, but you have one. That is all I say, all day every day: nobody ever buys software because they want software. They buy it to achieve value and outcomes, value and outcomes, value and outcomes. So wow, near and dear to my heart, that answer. Thank you, Kirsten.
SPIKE JONES:
But as we do come to the end of our podcast we want to get to know Kirsten the person.
So we have what we like to call quickfire confessions. So we are going to pepper you with some questions and just let her rip. So I'll go first. One of my favorite questions we ask: what was your first concert?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Erasure, when I was 13. It was amazing. Here, it was in Dallas, which is where I grew up, and just so fun and so energetic. And by the way, I saw them in concert again three years ago. Same two guys, and they are still rocking it. So I recommend everyone go see a Erasure. It's uplifting.
SPIKE JONES:
Fantastic. Fantastic. That's a good one.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
That's a good one because I'm right there with you. Won't ask you any information about your age. We'll skip that.
Okay, here's the next rapid fire question: What's your favorite ice cream flavor?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Oh my gosh, I have a new one. So I just got back from our first real vacation since the COVID years, and we were in Italy and we had something that was called pistachio cubed, or pistachio tre or trio. And it was like pistachio cubes. It was three different types of pistachio flavored goodness in one ice cream flavor and I have now been spoiled forever. I need to find it in North America. I don't know if it exists here. Any Italians out there, if you know where I can find this gelato flavor please, please, please let me know.
SPIKE JONES:
Sounds like a good business opportunity.
If you couldn't do what you're doing now, if you could have another career, profession, what would you do?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
I have an answer at the ready for this because I know what I want to do, I just don't know if someone will pay me to do it. But it's, I would like to be a travel food writer, or vlogger, whatever. Whatever you want. But I speak a number of languages, travel is my passion, and I love food.
And Staci, I said earlier, as we were prepping, I love to cook. Cooking is kind of one of my contributions to the household. So I love experimenting with new recipes. But clearly there are people who have this as a job. I've just never quite gotten there.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
There's a theme here with the ice cream in Italy and gelato and cooking. Okay, got it. We're certainly getting to know you. I love it. Okay maybe there's a connection here to an app.
What's the app that you use the most that you can't live without? We're gonna see if it's attached to the theme.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Ironically, it is not. This is just nerdy: LinkedIn. I use LinkedIn so, so much. It's really silly. Whether that's from actually recruiting and hiring people, trying to build connections into business development, doing research, keeping up on marketing best practices and all. So, I think outside of things like email and Slack, which we'll put by the wayside, I think LinkedIn is the one I use most.
After that, you'll giggle, it's the step counter. Because I'm obsessed about getting 11,000 steps a day. This year it's 11,000 steps a day. So maybe one way it is tied is that in order to enjoy all the food, Spike and Staci, I have to take all the steps.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
So that is actually an extension of the theme.
SPIKE JONES:
It is.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
I’ll take it. That’s a package right there. That’s a package.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
We'll get there together.
SPIKE JONES:
And finally: what was your first job?
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
First job. This one’s nerdy. My first real paying job besides babysitting was working at the Eckerd pharmacy in Dallas.
SPIKE JONES:
Yes.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Which, I don't think Eckerd exists anymore. They got bought by maybe CVS or Walgreens, I can't remember.
But it was a cool job in that I was a pharmacy tech which meant a lot of responsibility for a 16 year old. Like, they let me count medication, including controlled substances, but supervised. And then on weekends, it was interesting. I never took abuse of that. No, no, no funny shenanigans there. As a as a nerd, an avid reader and someone who's like an honor roll type of person, what was great is on the weekends when the pharmacist was not there, before the hours of pharmacies were really extended, they would let us basically man the pharmacy, but you might only have somebody come by once every 30 minutes and you couldn't leave because the drugs had to be supervised. So you did your homework. I got paid to do my homework. It was awesome.
SPIKE JONES:
That’s fantastic. That is fantastic.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
That sounds like a great life lesson right there.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Yes, two birds, one stone.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Similar to your desire to get paid to travel and eat and write. So there we go.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Always. My husband calls me an optimizer.
SPIKE JONES:
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, Kirsten the optimizer.
Kirsten, thank you so much for joining us today. Some really valuable insights. I took a lot of notes that, there's a lot of stuff to think about that I'm going to share with my team too. And we know our listeners appreciated your insight.
So again, thank you for spending some time with us today. This is CX Confessions. I'm Spike Jones, along with our CCO Stacey Satterwhite, and we'll talk to you soon.
KIRSTEN NEWBOLD-KNIPP:
Thanks so much for having me.
SPIKE JONES:
Man, that was a great conversation. She's a natural. She's good, man. Lots of great nuggets in there.
One was that idea around team interlock as a foundation. And I know because the customer journey spans multiple departments, Staci, I'd love to hear your thoughts about some of the causes of breakdowns across teams.
STACI SATTERWHITE:
Yeah, actually, what she said resonated with me, again, with my chief customer officer hat on, a lot. Where we tend to see challenges in customer engagement and experience specifically is at the seams. When a customer goes from one function to another, one group to another. It's the seams where we tend to actually have our customers experience maybe a less than ideal situation.
So I think her perspective on team interlock internally and making sure everybody really understands what that holistic journey is like, is so incredibly important to lessen that kind of bumpiness in seams. I loved it. I loved her team interlock foundation.
So one of the things Kirsten talked about that I found really fascinating is the concept of privacy and trust. Obviously we all have legal boundaries that we need to hold ourselves accountable to, but one of the things I'm curious about, Spike, is your thoughts on how do we hold ourselves accountable to going above and beyond that? Where do you find the ability and drive within your organization to the customers we work with, to maybe do a little more than what's just legally required?
SPIKE JONES:
First of all, I loved her part about how they're teaching their customers to be more transparent. I mean, that's thought leadership stuff right there. That's how you establish yourself. Super, super cool. That’s a different subject.
But I think, this reminds me of the early days of social when we used to have to convince brands to get on social because they're like, well, what if someone says something bad about us? We're gonna give away ,you know, our brand voice. And you know, these conversations like, no, you have to put yourself out there and be part of that conversation, but it's going to be scary. So you got to loosen your grip on that control.
And this is what this question reminds me of too. And so I think it starts with hard conversations. What are the little things that we can start doing to get people more comfortable, right. It doesn't have to be a huge sweeping reform inside your company. When it comes to transparency, you're going above and beyond. But what are the little things that start to get us comfortable that we can, that lead to the bigger things?
OUTRO:
Now more than ever, your customers expect to be understood on a personal level. Their likes or dislikes, their history with your brand, and their communication preferences. But so many companies struggle to connect the dots of interaction across their own teams and channels, which can lead to customer experience challenges and disasters. That's where Khoros can help. The award winning customer engagement platform was built to turn those siloed interactions with your customers into enterprise value.
Khoros works with more than 2,000 of the world's leading brands powering more than 500 million digital interactions every single day. Learn more @khoros.com.
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See you next time.
