Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Navigating Leadership Challenges in Customer Success
What if you could transform your business operations and customer success strategy simultaneously? Join us as we sit down with Sandeep Dube, the dynamic Chief Operations Officer and Chief Customer Success Officer at Intuit Mailchimp. Sandeep shares his unique career journey, offering insights into how a customer-centric approach transcends functional roles and drives financial success. Discover the challenges he faces in aligning operational execution with customer needs and learn how customer success professionals can gain senior leadership's buy-in for their initiatives.
We also dive into the strategic importance of Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) at Intuit Mailchimp, established in 2022. Sandeep explains how these CABs, composed of 16 diverse customers and partner agencies, play a pivotal role in guiding product development to ensure market readiness. You'll hear practical advice on building effective CABs, including the value of incorporating potential customers for unbiased feedback. Lastly, explore Intuit's innovative use of AI through their platform, Intuit Assist, aimed at enhancing growth opportunities for small and medium businesses. Get ready to learn how AI-driven automation, or "automagic," can save time and money for customers while providing a glimpse into future AI innovations.
If you're part of a leadership team, that's maybe revenue management versus, in this case, customer success and COO. The hat that you wear, which is basically you're in the customer's camp and thinking about customer needs, is the same, and I would say that's what we do really really well at Intuit Mailchimp and Intuit Broadly, which is our leaders. While they might, at a given point in time, own a function, they are all extremely customer obsessed.
Mike Giambattista:Sandeep Dube is Chief Customer Officer at Intuit MailChimp. It's worth just letting that hang in the air for a moment, because that's a big company and Sandeep has a giant remit over an awful lot of functions that that company does in dealing with millions and millions of customers across many, many different business channels. So there's a lot we're going to attack in this conversation. But first of all, sandeep, thank you for joining me. Been looking forward to this for some time.
Sandeep Dube:Mike, thanks for having me here. Talking about customers and how we obsess over customers is close to my heart, will always be close to my heart, so super excited to engage with you on this topic.
Mike Giambattista:Can you you know, perhaps you can do a better job of explaining your role there at Intuit Mailchimp, and then I think it would be good to just for a moment talk about all the different business lines that you have to kind of oversee in terms of customer interactions.
Sandeep Dube:Yeah, absolutely Mike. So, mike, my official title at Intuit Mailchimp is Chief Operations Officer and Chief Customer Success Officer, so I wear two hats. One hat is that of an operating officer, which essentially means ensuring that we execute on our financial plan, ensure that we execute on our operational plan and, most importantly, ensure that we are extremely customer obsessed and customer centric as we execute towards all of the goals that we have as an organization. The other hat that I wear is that of a chief customer success officer, and what that essentially means is my job is to ensure that we take care of our customers, and so we have a lot of various functions that basically are in the job of taking care of our customers and ensuring that we deliver the right service. Ensuring that we truly are going above and beyond in taking care of our customers basically falls on my shoulders.
Sandeep Dube:That's a lot of weight. Can you bring a little bit of context to the quantity of business lines that you interact with and then maybe just the number of customers that you interact with? So our main product is the MailChimp product. That's the business line that I'm associated with and that's what I oversee, and in that business line we have over a million paid customers that we deal with and we service, and that's across the globe. So our product is very well known and very well served, serves our customers across the goal. That being said, intuit as a company has multiple business units and our customers' needs are not just related to the MailChimp product, they're actually across the company, and so part of my job and job of other folks working within Intuit Mailchimp is ensuring that more and more, we come together and serve our customers across all of our business lines and all of our products, versus a single unit.
Mike Giambattista:I have a series of what might seem like odd questions for you. Many of the chief customer officers or similar positions that I talk to tend to have come up through the CX space or customer service space. But I'm looking at your CV, the boiled down version of it. You were chief commercial officer at Activision Blizzard and you're chief SVP of revenue management at Delta and I would be. Those are just different portals, I would say, to this place where you find yourself, to this place where you find yourself. Can you talk a little bit about the journey, your journey specifically from those positions and those kind of mindsets, if you will, to doing what you do now for Intuit Mailchimp?
Sandeep Dube:Yeah, it might seem. It's an interesting question and it might seem like those are like two different worlds. Like revenue management might seem like a very analytical, very numbers focused and almost devoid of what the customer is focusing on as a practice from the outside, from the outside, but in reality, if you talk about, at the end of the day, a customer valuing your product and ensuring that they, at the end of the day, they choose to vote for your product with their pockets, it comes down to meeting your customers' needs and making sure you meet them the best in the best possible way out there in the market. So it's no different of a, I'd say, thinking process. There might be some elements that are different in terms of what you own from an execution perspective, but if you're part of a leadership team, that's maybe revenue management versus, in this case, customer success and COO the hat that you wear, which is basically you're in the customer's camp and thinking about customer needs, is the same.
Mike Giambattista:And I would say that's what we do really really well at Intuit, mailchimp and Intuit broadly, which is our leaders. While they might, at a given point in time, own a function, they are all extremely customer obsessed. One of the common refrains I hear from people who again similar positions, maybe a layer or so lower, is a constant battle to get senior leadership to understand the value of customer centricity. You know, sometimes it's hard to pin a direct ROI on that. You know, oftentimes it's very, very indirect and hard to track and trace. And I think you know, listening to some of their struggles, I think they would love to be working with somebody like you who has gained that perspective, but gained that perspective through a kind of a financial lens. So you understand what the financial implications of a great customer relationship seem to be.
Sandeep Dube:Yeah, I've actually worked in business units and companies where that was not the case, where most of the conversation was around financials. Most of the conversation was almost to the tune of how do you extract from the customer?
Mike Giambattista:How do you?
Sandeep Dube:extract revenue from the customer, and what I experienced in those business units was, yes, you could make traction over a short period of time in terms of your business performance, but in the long run again I'll go back to what I said earlier on the customer votes with their pocket and they vote for the product, the service and an experience set that best meets their need. And if you take two different organizations, one focused on extracting out of a customer versus the other focused on meeting the needs of the customers, I would guarantee nine times out of 10, or some high proportion, the latter is going to succeed as an organization.
Mike Giambattista:Yeah, I'm thinking back to my own personal experiences with some of Intuit's products.
Mike Giambattista:I'm a happy MailChimp user, by the way, but Intuit has spent a lot of time, and probably money, certainly energy, optimizing the user experiences for products over the past four or five years. Experiences for products over the past four or five years, because I can remember, remember when several of these products and I won't name any names uh were were. You know, if you ran into a hiccup, it was tough to find your way out of it A lot of times. Um, you know, perhaps it was a hiccup of uh created of your own doing, doing, or perhaps it was just some sort of you know uh ui function that hadn't been well thought out. But either way, it had at times become tough to deal with. And I have to tell you that, uh, so many of those things have kind of been optimized out of the way. You know, it's no longer a matter of how do you handle the complaint if it should happen, because those complaints just simply don't happen anymore. So props to you and or your predecessors if they were the people behind all that.
Sandeep Dube:Yeah, and Mike, I actually want to provide some character to what you described in terms of some of the behaviors we have as an organization to support that kind of progress that you just mentioned. It is the number of I'm going to use the term listening mechanisms that we have within the organization. It is incredible. It starts with a metric called net promoter score, very well known, sure, and we are maniacal about that. I wake up every morning and that's the first metric I see. I literally watch that on a daily basis and that's so important because that's all of our customers voting and saying do I truly recommend your product, love your product and recommend your product to others or not? So that's just one metric.
Sandeep Dube:But beyond that, we have things like a customer advisory board where we talk to a set of very dedicated customers and partners on an ongoing basis to help with product development as a leadership team. Another mechanism we do Gemba walks. We basically look at, we pick, a given experience a customer is going through in our product and the whole leadership team is on there on a video call reviewing the product experience and providing feedback real time in terms of how we could improve the experience. So those are just two examples, but I can actually provide a laundry list of listening mechanisms. We have to keep providing input into improving our customer experience.
Mike Giambattista:Let's talk about one of those a little bit. Improving our customer experience let's talk about one of those a little bit. Your customer advisory boards. First of all, I don't think there's ever an argument, a legitimate argument, against having one. Yet so many customer-facing organizations within a larger company might recognize the need for those kinds of interactions and advice and guidance, but nobody really has it. I can't say nobody. There's a very limited number of companies that are legitimately pursuing that kind of a listening model. Can you tell us a little bit about how Intuit MailChimp kind of sets that up, how you select the participants, what happens there, what kinds of insights you might expect to derive?
Sandeep Dube:Absolutely, mike. We are very passionate about our customer advisory board. It's a set of 16 customers. First of all, we kickstarted the concept of a customer advisory board in the year 2022. So it's been there for roughly the last two, two and a half years and the way it's constructed at Induit Mailchimp is it's a set of 16 customers. They come from various geographies and they represent various customer segments that are part of our product experience and they're also both customers as well as partners, partner agencies, who then go on and serve customers who use MailChimp and the way.
Sandeep Dube:So that's the constitution, the way we leverage that customer advisory board. Really it's in there in the name. It's an advisory board, and so when we think about how do we make the product better, they are a great set of minds and almost guidance counselors who work with us and tell us, hey, here's what I'm thinking, here's a way to look at what you may need to develop next. But also when we develop a concept and we say we are ready to go to market, or when we are somewhat ready to go to market, they are a great set of partners for us to go out and actually have that conversation and say, hey, here's what we have thought as a solution. Help us understand does it truly meet your need or not, and where should we tinker with it to actually deliver even greater value back to our customers? So that's the overall concept.
Mike Giambattista:Picture your organization as a solitary island amidst a vast churning sea of opportunities. On the horizon lie other islands, relationships waiting to be built, partnerships waiting to be formed. But between your island and those distant shores stretches a turbulent expanse filled with uncertainty and risk. Stretches, a turbulent expanse filled with uncertainty and risk. You're going to need a bridge or bridges plural to span this divide, connecting you to new horizons. Those bridges are strategic partnerships.
Mike Giambattista:Yet building bridges and partnerships is no simple task. They both require careful planning, precise engineering and a deep understanding of the terrain. Careful planning, precise engineering and a deep understanding of the terrain. Missteps can lead to collapse, leaving your business stranded on its island. Tectonic builds strategic partnerships, helping organizations navigate the treacherous waters, ensuring that those bridges are strong and resilient and scalable. There's a reason why some of the largest, most progressive companies in the world are retooling their revenue models and investing in partnerships. Find out more at tectonicco. That's T-E-C-T-O-N-I-Qco. If you were to give advice to other people in your position as to the best ways to manage and lead and derive benefit from a customer advisory board, what would you tell them?
Sandeep Dube:Probably two things. Make sure, when you're thinking through constructing your advisory board, let your advisory board be a representation of your customer segments, your various customer segments. And the second thing I would advise on is pick people and our customers who are absolutely invested in your success and our customers who are absolutely invested in your success. You can see that passion. You can see their level of engagement while you're doing your recruitment process, because you'd want them to be really, really close with you. You'd want them to be proactive, you'd want them to be in your camp always.
Mike Giambattista:My own very limited personal experience in that regard. One of the challenges we faced was that I think we picked very good people for our customer advisory board, but we had a hard time getting around their tendency to want to say yes and agree with everything we wanted to do. When we presented something, we were looking for their genuine, unbiased, unvarnished opinions, and I think what we got a lot of was great enthusiasm and cheerleading. What we really needed is something a little bit more objective.
Sandeep Dube:So I think the other points you're making, mike, are probably you want a set of customers on there who are extremely opinionated, right, and also a set of. I would also say it's important to have a mix of people who know your product really well and like your product a lot, but to my point of representing various customer segments, also a set of customers who maybe are not on your product and can be good voices around why they're not actually on your product today and what would make the product more attractive to them. We actually, in one of my prior roles within Delta Delta has a customer advisory board as well, and one of the really high value actions they used to take was basically ensuring that there was a healthy mix of customers who actually weren't customers yet.
Mike Giambattista:Okay, interesting.
Sandeep Dube:That's invaluable Okay.
Mike Giambattista:To hear you know why they had not selected Delta or were not customers. Yeah, interesting, very interesting, Are you. Can you, without giving away anything you shouldn't, can you tell us about any of the insights or directions positive or minus that have come out of your customer advisory board interactions?
Sandeep Dube:I can't be extremely prescriptive or detail-oriented around that and I'm happy to delete that question.
Mike Giambattista:I certainly don't want to go somewhere. I shouldn't.
Sandeep Dube:No, I think maybe one way, mike, we can talk about that question is like how do we actually maybe not directly related to the customer advisory board, but we actually what we do is we have a very high value partner agency who's very vocal and knows our product in and out, and actually we've been partnering very closely with them, and they're based out of the UK. I'm not going to take names, they're based out of the UK but they've almost become the agency that we lean on first for advice.
Mike Giambattista:Interesting Okay.
Sandeep Dube:Because you can clearly see they're such an expert and they're such an expert and they're so just objective about where we need to improve and get better that we find that incredibly valuable, incredibly valuable. So part of creating the right customer advisory board is it's almost similar to, I'd say, like a process, interview process, where you're finding the right candidate, right. You might go out and create a customer advisory board and over a period of time, you might get better. Once you start the act of interacting with the customer advisory board, you might figure out hey, there are a certain set of advisors who are awesome and you want to keep them on the board and the others where you know, for whatever reason, it doesn't work out best for both of your interests and you want to keep refining that. So that's another point that's important. Your customer advisory board probably shouldn't be static. Ours isn't static. We change it every year, All right, and it's to get that fresh thinking in?
Mike Giambattista:Yeah, Just to get a little deeper in the weeds here. What is the cadence, the pace, frequency of those meetings? What do you find to be optimal? Is it yearly, quarterly, monthly? What seems to work? Is it yearly, quarterly, monthly? What seems to work?
Sandeep Dube:What we find most optimal is actually, instead of forcing a given mechanism of interaction. It's around value right, and there are certain advisory members where our interaction is more frequent because, again, they have so much feedback to give and it's very constructive and it helps us be better. But at times there are also features and functionality we are rolling out, so it's timed around that and then you can have broader participation across the customer advisory board. For us, it's about making sure that there's value exchange, so it's not a forced interaction, but there's a meaningful reason why we are meeting with our advisory board members.
Mike Giambattista:Interesting. So it doesn't necessarily have to take place in a group setting. It can be in your version of this, it could be as necessity, dictates and schedules allow, and your initiatives kind of lay that out. Absolutely Very interesting, very interesting, very interesting. Um, there's so much more I want to, I want to pull apart there, but I wanted to talk a little bit more about a subject we touched on earlier which has to do with your kind of journey to get here. I know we talked about the, the lenses that you've built up through your various jobs before this one, and how they impact the way you do your job at Intuit MailChimp, but it's a long journey, it seems like, but also a really high level journey. So I'm wondering if you could just tell us a little about that. You know from Activision Blizzard, your role there, what you think that experience might have added to or affected your job now and even through revenue management at Delta.
Sandeep Dube:Yeah, actually I'd love to talk about my experience at Delta, and the reason why I bring that up is the airline industry is one where you have so many different touch points with the customer, and so it's an incredible training ground for any leader in better understanding a customer's needs, motivations and emotions, and I was part of the.
Sandeep Dube:I ran five different businesses and shared service functions at Delta before I became the head of revenue management, and as I immersed myself in whether it was the loyalty program or running digital for the company or running a business unit called Delta Vacations the thing that I always tried to do was put myself in the customer's shoes and so ensuring that I, and I did that in many different ways, whether it's experiencing the product myself, whether it's sitting with customer service experts who basically try to solve needs of our customers, or whether it's going to website forums where loyalty members are talking about our product and sometimes not in the most positive way and learning from that.
Sandeep Dube:And so it goes back to having the right listening mechanisms, irrespective of the function you are in, irrespective of the role that you are in, being so close to the customer, dedicating that time across multiple different avenues that are available to keep fine-tuning your understanding of your various customer segments, and then you can use that as an overlay to basically drive your strategy and your tactics. And so that's why, while I worked at an airline, while I worked at a gaming company and now I'm working at basically a tech firm, the approach in terms of being so close to your customer is the same.
Mike Giambattista:That's really interesting, but I know that in the gaming world there are, by virtue of the technology that powers it, there are a million different ways to understand your customers' interactions and their sentiments Again by virtue of the technology, because it's so sophisticated and it's built on first-person touchpoints In the offline world, and you could make a strong argument that airlines are, yes, a huge online component, but it's really a high-touch physical environment and physical service, physical product that you're selling. It seems like you would have to think harder about how to devise those listening mechanisms, because it's not just a function of data feeds in that case.
Sandeep Dube:It's not always a function of data fees, but you can actually, if we think about the problem the right way, we can actually, in many cases, turn it into a data-based solution. I'll give you a quick little example Stress. One of the major drivers of customer experience is the amount of stress somebody feels during the travel day, right, when you pack your bags all the way till you reach your destination. And so how do you quantify stress? And, as a company, what we did was we actually recruited a whole bunch of customers and put heart rate monitors on them through the travel day, and then you could see the change. You could basically monitor stress and you've got hard data now across multiple customers that said, hey, these are the places where stress spiked and that's where we need to focus on first in improving experience, right? So we have to be a little creative as leaders in saying how do we take something that looks like something subjective and turn it into something objective, and then, as we learn how to do that in one industry, you can take that and use it in another industry.
Sandeep Dube:I'll give you a quick little example in gaming, you launch a new game and sometimes it's successful and sometimes it's not, and then you ask the question well, why did so many customers start a game and they're not finished? And if you look at all the data, there's actually a win rate in the first week of play. That's really important. A customer has to go through a level somewhere between 60 to 70% of win rate. Higher than that, it's too tough, it's too easy. Lower than that, it's too tough and the customer gives up.
Sandeep Dube:So data is incredibly important, is the central theme. It's not the only thing that's important, but it's incredibly important in understanding customers and ensuring that we meet their needs. By the way, we do that at Mailchimp really, really well. We launched a new feature around SMS and while we were launching this feature, the one thing we wanted to do was ensure that our customers are getting value out of it, and so, as an example, a local Atlanta coffee shop called Perk. They took on the functionality and they use it for flash sales of their coffee products, and when they did their first splash sale, I think it had an open rate about 50% and then a sale rate amongst those 50% of 91%.
Mike Giambattista:Wow.
Sandeep Dube:And so we do that. We monitor our customer, how we meet our customer's needs at Intuit, mailchimp, using data as well, and we use it to iterate.
Mike Giambattista:So that's a perfect segue into my next question, which is looking forward at Intuit Mailchimp. What are some of the ways that you see customer touch points evolving, the way you're understanding customers' intentions and friction points? Is there anything you can point to that you can talk about without giving away the secret sauce?
Sandeep Dube:Yeah, One thing that's incredibly important for us is ensuring that when customers have jobs to be done, that we're incredibly as an organization. First of all, we are incredibly focused on customers' jobs to be done and then ensuring that we put our organizational resources towards that. If you look at small and medium businesses, their number one job that they're interested in is driving growth of their customer base, and for us at Intuit, one of the ways we're doing that is leveraging AI, leveraging the power of Intuit Assist, which is our basically AI platform to deliver even greater growth back to our small and medium businesses and so driving customer growth, saving our customers time and money and making sure we can make their jobs easier. And in many cases, automagic we use the term automagic is a big, big focus for us, so keep looking out in the horizon for more and more that comes our customers way from an AI perspective.
Mike Giambattista:Yeah, I'm personally very close to it, as I mentioned as a MailChimp user, so looking forward to that.
