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
Seeing Through the Customer Lens for Enhanced Revenue
Ever wondered how AI is set to reshape the world of Revenue Operations (RevOps) and lead to explosive growth? Tune in as we engage with Shane Evans, the Chief Revenue Officer at Gong, who peels back the curtain on the transformative power of AI and strategic partnerships in revitalizing revenue growth. Shane’s insights will revolutionize your understanding of how businesses can shift from outdated methods to innovative strategies that prioritize creativity and adaptability, even in the face of challenges like the pandemic and economic shifts.
In our conversation, Shane takes us behind the scenes of Gong’s journey, revealing how the company collaborates with over 250 partners to enrich the sales technology ecosystem with AI-driven insights. Discover how Gong’s strategic partnerships, such as those with Sandler and Medpix, facilitate real-time coaching and feedback, while also providing a unique advantage to CFOs by aligning with financial priorities. Shane also addresses a common myth about AI replacing jobs, presenting compelling evidence that businesses embracing AI are actually expanding their teams, showcasing the responsible integration of AI in boosting productivity and growth.
Finally, we explore the necessity of adopting a customer-centric mindset to unlock new revenue opportunities. Shane explains how businesses can realign their strategies by understanding customer needs and preferences, turning what used to be a long-winded process into a swift, ongoing engagement. This episode promises to arm you with fresh perspectives on aligning business priorities with customer expectations, paving the way for innovative solutions and enhanced revenue growth. Get ready to rethink how you approach RevOps and discover the potential that lies in seeing the world through your customers' eyes.
Now we have the ability to train the technology to listen anytime those methodologies are being harnessed or leveraged. A question is being asked around one of those methodologies and automatically capturing what the response is from the customer and then giving coaching back to that revenue professional on how they could do better.
Speaker 2:Today on Customer Land, shane Evans, who is CRO at Gong there's so much to talk about as the chief revenue officer from a RevOps powerhouse Sitting in a hotspot of revenue stuff. So first of all, thank you for your patience in coordinating this, because it's been a little bit of a roundabout, and thanks for just joining me, because I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you for having me, mike. I love what you were doing, with the voice that you have in the market and the way you're bringing new thought leadership and helping folks realize there's different angles and opportunities to attack, and definitely worth the wait to get this together, and so I'm excited to join you today.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. So one thing this is an audio medium, but you can't tell. Shane and I are dressed exactly like today. There's something in the air. I think we both blame it on failures on our wardrobe departments, but it's one of those weird things.
Speaker 2:So I've been trading emails with your teammates for the past several weeks on some of the things that are going on at Gong and also, even more broadly, in the world of RevOps. So what I would love to do is kind of pick your brain a little bit, because you're in a really unique position. I think you sit at if you'll forgive me for pandering just a little bit, because you're in a really unique position. I think you sit at if you'll forgive me for pandering just a little bit, but you sit at a pretty high level within RevOps and then, I think, because of your position within Gong and even higher level. So I think your perspective is going to be really valuable here, if I have that right at all, and maybe what you could do is validate or invalidate what I just said by just telling us a little bit about your role there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you bet. So my official title with the company is Chief Revenue Officer. I think it's a fancy way for saying that. I get the opportunity to work with all of our customers, so the easiest way to think about my role is any individual team process that touches the customer. That's where I really have to basically take responsibility and accountability for all the good stuff as well as all the bad stuff that ends up happening, and so it's a fun opportunity to sit in this chair.
Speaker 1:One of the things throughout my career that's been a treat is, as I've gone on my career journey, really starting to understand that the buck stops with me, and it's regardless of where I sit in the organization. So if there's customers that are having issues with how we're delivering product or how we're providing solutions out in the market, it's my job to get involved and figure out how we get to a better outcome. On the fun side of that, it's the first time in my career that I've been able to work for a company, that I actually live inside the tool every single day, and I've lived in this world for 25 plus years throughout my entire career, and so I tell people all the time it's such a treat that I have the opportunity to have a direct line to the research and development team that is trying to figure out how to make my life easier and development team that is trying to figure out how to make my life easier, and so we've actually added all of these folks to all of the internal meetings that we have. Fortunately, at Gong, we capture every interaction that we have with customers so they can see in real time what's important to folks, what's actually happening, and so you nailed it. I'm in a really unique position where not only do I get to work with folks like me every single day, but I have an opportunity to bring that feedback back in real time and let our teams know like this is what I'm seeing and hearing.
Speaker 1:In addition to that, this is what I'm living through, and it's been a chaotic time. You know. We've been through a pandemic. We've been through incredibly challenging financial situations. A lot of organizations have had to shift their entire strategies on the fly, and it really feels like we're entering into another phase, shift where what's being rewarded in the market right now is not so much about efficiency. It's about which companies are finding ways to adopt new ways to get things done, and it's not only about doing it in the most efficient way, but how do you find creative ways to grow the company that you're responsible for and find new ways to get back to growth, and so it's a really exciting time to be at Gong for me personally.
Speaker 2:So maybe we could just take a few steps back, take a really high level view of RevOps and where it has come, because you referenced the pandemic. You referenced, you know, a couple of major inflection points that we're walking through right now. But you know, since you said you've been doing this for 20 plus years, you've seen the changes, you've seen the differences in how people and companies are approaching revenue, how they're tracking revenue, how they're forecasting revenue and the tool sets that have been. Look, you know, say, six or seven years ago the tool sets were really different. I mean, you couldn't see a big chunk of the stuff that you can now see. So you know, without going too deep in the weeds, can you give us kind of a walkthrough of the past, say whatever the major moments in RevOps that you've witnessed that have kind of brought you and Gong to this point of what you're doing in the marketplace?
Speaker 1:You bet I mean I'll take you back to just my purview here. Early in my career I started in sales and I remember I would actually go to the printer and print off sheets of prospects and customers that I could call, and this was, I think, just a little bit more advanced than opening up the yellow pages and starting to like just smile and dial. But early in my career I don't even remember having a what I would label as a RevOps function. We had CRMs and databases. That were tools like Goldmine, where there wasn't really anyone to set it up. You would kind of like grab this tool and start figuring it out. And then it feels like we went through a phase where there might've been like one or two individuals that would help you try and organize that data into some form of an online Rolodex or an online system. And then it got to a place where there was this promise of what CRM was going to deliver. It was going to basically digitize all of that mundane work that we had to go through as revenue professionals. And there were a lot of ops folks that were put into these areas to try and figure out how to organize systems that would make our lives easier.
Speaker 1:And now you look at what's happened, I'm going to jump, I'm going to skip ahead.
Speaker 1:We, as revenue professionals, in a lot of ways have become slaves to these tools, and I meet with a number of revenue leaders where there's companies right now that have 150 plus different tools that RevOps folks are trying to keep track of, and we went through this explosive growth able to deliver on this promise of making our lives easier.
Speaker 1:You see things like exchanges and marketplaces and companies that are built on individual features, and so it leads to this really disconnected environment with all of this tooling.
Speaker 1:And so today, what started out as really no RevOps has gone through this evolution of now it's really hardware. You're trying to find a way to deliver as much efficiency as possible with as few tools as you possibly can, and it's hard because sellers come to the doorstep of these RevOps leaders and say, hey, I need X and Y tool to do my job and you end up with these onesies, twosies, but trying to drive that consistency across the entire organization, it's a really big challenge. And the other piece I'll offer up here as a RevOps leader, you typically have other peers that you're trying to work with, whether it's enablement, whether it's post-sales and customer success, or pre-sales in marketing, and one of the things I've lived over and over again is what I label for people as data wars, where each silo, each functional team or department comes to the table with their own view of the world and their own set of data, and everyone wants to argue that their data is the right data.
Speaker 2:And so there's or worse, not even show it to you because it's house data Totally.
Speaker 1:Totally. Just trust us. The metrics are what they are, so we're entering this environment right now. It's a really good time, as you think about what AI could do, the ability to knock down functional silos and to make our lives easier, not just from a tools proliferation standpoint, but even from a source of truth and being able to drive more consistency end to end, and it really is. How do you get outside the company and look at your company from the outside? In is what your customers are experiencing and, instead of going to multiple windows to get their problem solved, being able to have one window, one team, a unified group that is thinking about them, and so I think that's that. I believe most RevOps leaders have to be able to take more control and ownership and take the customer outside-in view on how to make their lives more efficient in how we operate.
Speaker 2:You bring up a couple of really interesting points. In all of my conversations virtually every single conversation I have with a technology provider or a company that's implementing new technologies everybody says and talks about at length the problems of siloed data. You just brought it up. What it tends to come down to if you can get past that language are cultural problems. You know it really is. There's a lot of protectionism, there's a lot of incentives in place to do things certain ways that you know it precludes, or at least puts roadblocks up into those kinds of changes. It seems to me, though, that maybe more so than MarTech, maybe more so than a lot of CX functions and RevOps, because it is so financially focused, has an opportunity probably greater than most to break down those barriers. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Am I just imagining that? Not at all, or how do you see it out there?
Speaker 1:Not at all. I think I'm biased because I've been in the revenue org my entire career. The thing I love about being a revenue professional is it's incredibly measurable. You can measure and track pretty much everything that we're trying to do today, and with that, it allows you to quickly put together business cases and justification around ROI on why you should or should not be doing something, and so I do fully agree with you that I know in the companies I've worked in, I usually feel like the RevOps individual or team is in such a unique position to be able to harness that data and be able to build the business cases and the business justification on why certain decisions should be made and where you can really drive impact and have a meaningful outcome on the organization as a whole.
Speaker 1:And you hit on something that I talk about quite a bit and that is look, tools and technology are only going to take us so far. We still are in a world where people matter immensely. I'm spending the majority of my time on interviewing, onboarding, developing talent, and people are still the ones driving change inside my business, inside most of the businesses that I'm working with today. Now we have a lot of potential with AI and helping our team members become smarter, to become more effective and to make their lives easier. So they're not doing all the mundane tasks. But at the same time, we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is still a people game and people matter immensely, and we need to make those investments in team members and make certain that they're getting what they need to be as effective as possible.
Speaker 2:So we talked a little bit about earlier some of the inflection points, and you just mentioned AI. There's so much to talk about right now, right at this very moment, with how AI is affecting so many aspects of business. But it's clear from going through your materials that AI is a huge component of how AI is affecting so many aspects of business. But it's clear from going through your materials that AI is a huge component of how Gong is approaching the near-term future, and I'd love to talk about that a little bit. There are predictive aspects of AI as utility that you couldn't even really think of a year or two ago. You couldn't think in those terms, and now you know we've got forecasting ability. That's really smart, um, really adaptable. And anyway, I I would rather just like prompt that conversation and hear you talk about, uh, some of the ways that Gong is thinking about AI.
Speaker 1:So let's first put the context here around. The two biggest investments that every organization is going to make is, first, it's people, and then, if you look at tooling, after that, the next biggest investment is likely going to be either your ERP or your CRM system, and the challenge with that is that today, 77% of revenue professionals' time is spent on mundane tasks on entering and updating systems, entering data into and updating systems. And then we just did a survey globally of about 600 professionals and found that only 12% of revenue leaders feel like their CRM system is delivering actionable insights. And so here's our two biggest investments. And we're spending all this time updating those systems, and yet we're not getting any output that's really giving us guidance and helping us move the puck and the ball forward. And so AI presents this incredible opportunity to really reimagine and modernize our revenue flows, and the first step in that journey is capturing all the fuel, all the data that we're going to need to drive that transformation. And so when we start talking to revenue leaders and executives about transforming their business, it starts with data and the ability to harness and capture that data and bring it in in a way that allows you to do more with that, and I'll give you an example that illustrates this point very powerfully.
Speaker 1:Typical revenue professional has a 30-minute call with a customer or a prospect. They're going to exchange about 5,000 to 6,000 words After that call ends. The expectation is that they will go and they will actually log a note or an activity into a system. And if you look at those records, most companies have about 500 to 600 of those fields that need to be manually updated and in those fields, on the open ended note area, you're going to see, on average, about 50 to 60 words. Now that represents 1% of the interaction that they have with those individuals. And the even worse part, if you go look at the substance of those notes, it typically is hey, customer loves me, the deal is going to close the last day of the quarter. Now, when you try and then automate or run AI on your business, I'm going to go set up an agent now that's going to magically take care of everything. The reality of it is the substance, the quality of the data. Only 1% of what you need is actually there. And so what we're trying to help educate folks on today.
Speaker 1:If you want to become an AI company, if you want to have a better way to revenue and deliver results. The first step in that journey is being able to capture the interactions and the actual contextual information that's out there. That then gives you a huge bump in productivity. We're seeing a lot of companies right now give 25 to 30 percent of the time back to individuals to spend with customers because they're not manually entering data into systems.
Speaker 1:And now, as we go and try and run an action like we've got these incredibly powerful AI to-do lists or AI next steps that looks at everything you've done over the past few weeks and actually tells you, hey, this is the next best action you could take on this deal, or it's Monday morning. These are the deals and the opportunities that you want to focus on. That would give you the best possible outcome. So it's not that AI is replacing people. It's not that AI is replacing like really critical and strategic work. It's that we're giving people the guidance and the assist that they need to be more effective in their day-to-day routine, and that's where we think the low hanging fruit is. So think of it as like more productivity all the productivity gains that could be realized by simply capturing the data that's available that most companies are not harnessing today.
Speaker 2:It seems like somebody should have thought of that a while ago, not harnessing today. It seems like somebody should have thought of that a while ago. So your team had sent over your state of revenue growth report for 2025, and there were some really interesting data points in there and I'd like to talk about one or two of them here. I'll just use your language, so I'm accurate here. Overall, sales appear to be returning to growth, with 19% growth rate across all organizations surveyed. Revenue teams using AI plan to hire more aggressively than those who don't, dispelling fears that AI will replace salespeople. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 1:So there's a myth right now in the market that AI is going to replace what we're doing day to day. And if I go back in time, I remember when commerce came to the internet and everyone was all fearful that we're going to lose all our money in our bank accounts, because everything was out there in the ether and what we realized is that it really helped us advance to a whole new market, a whole new economy. Right now, one of the myths that's available is that AI is going to replace people and what we're seeing as we look out into the market. If you're a company that is embracing AI, if you're a company that is embracing AI and then we look at what your hiring plans are, you are much more likely to be hiring and growing if you are embracing AI, and so we're actually seeing an increase in headcount, an increase in the opportunity for those organizations, as opposed to the reverse of that.
Speaker 1:So there's a little bit of negative media, negative hype circling around AI and I'm not saying that it isn't dangerous and that we shouldn't be cautious in how we want to apply it.
Speaker 1:And I go back to if you don't have the right data and you're trying to apply AI, even for simple things like rewriting emails or creating follow up notes after a call, if you don't have the right revenue AI technology, it can be dangerous and it can put you in a situation where you're going to make mistakes and those can be avoided if you get the right tooling and the right technology. But the data that we're seeing and if you look at how Gong is performing right now, we just went through an exercise where we significantly grew both our engineering and our go-to-market teams over plans. Like mid-year we were ahead of our plans. We're like, hey, we need to accelerate. And so it's another example of a company where, by embracing AI, making it part of every part of your revenue market, go-to-market organization, it's allowing us to actually add more people and make more hires, as opposed to it having the reverse effect. So we would call that a myth that we're working feverishly to find a way to debunk.
Speaker 2:There's about five or six big jumping off points from what you just said, so I'm going to have to be choosy here. But let's talk about Gong's growth a little bit. There were notes in some of the materials that we tossed back and forth with your team that had to do with Gong's partner ecosystem. I'm a big believer in partnerships and building out efficient partner ecosystems for revenue growth. But talk to me about the structure and how Gong sees that playing out, because there are a million ways, different permutations, to build out partnerships different reasons, different strata, different functions. How does Gong see that kind of working? How are you building yours out?
Speaker 1:Anyone paying attention right now to what's happening with a lot of the Gen AI companies. They've been very vocal and clear that if you are simply a bolt-on provider, if you're just going to go grab LLM models and bolt them on top of your product, you're really going to struggle because all that automation will actually be delivered automatically to consumers of information. And so where Gong has been focused and it was almost in a way I'm not a big believer in luck, but you could call it that I believe luck is an outcome of hard work and creativity comes together and then people say, oh, that individual got lucky. If you look at our founders and the premise they had for starting the company, the whole reason Gong was created is you had a CEO that had gone through a challenging time where they had made certain predictions about how the business was going to perform, and then it missed targets. And as our founder went on this expedition to figure out what happened, he uncovered the fact that nobody had the answers, or at least they were hiding them from everybody else, and he said, hey, the answers are out there. I should start capturing the data. And so, as we think about what the future will be and how this is going to play out and you talk about.
Speaker 1:Like the Gong Collective, which is the ecosystem that we've created for our partners, we believe that by having that revenue data layer, that a lot of organizations can actually harness their data more fully, and then there can be solutions and applications built on top of that, and so we've got more than 250 partners and customers. Today we're encouraging them to integrate into Gong to actually harness and leverage that data that's available. What you find is that by incorporating that AI Gong data, it now makes every other tool that you have in your sales tech stack more valuable, because you're actually getting the right information in there, as opposed to just generic company names, contact names. You're getting the contextual data that is missing in the majority of the sales tech stack today. So now any dollar that you're putting into your sales tech stack can be much more harnessed and leveraged more fully because you're getting the right information in which leads to the right information and the right answers coming out of those tools.
Speaker 2:So I'm kind of a partnerships evangelist, if you will, just because it's how we've grown, it's how everybody I know who's doing well with their organizations are growing, largely because they've understood the network effect of smart partnerships. Can you talk a little bit about some of the kinds of organizations you're partnering with? Can you talk a little bit about some of the kinds of organizations you're partnering with who you're looking to broaden those relationships with other kinds of companies? Who may be listening to this, who are going hey, wait a second, that could be me. Maybe we should be talking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, customer lifecycle. And it starts all the way in awareness and how you make people aware of what your product offering is to how you then go and create demand and build pipeline, how you advance that pipeline, how sellers work with customers to get alignment between the solutions, how they implement that, how they make sure that the outcomes are connected all the way through. And so you think about some of the partners that we're working with today. There's a lot of partners that have created this incredible content and frameworks around methodologies. So think of like sales methodologies. They got the old school organizations like the Sandlers, the Medpix, the value selling. In the past they would indoctrinate and train organizations how to enact and drive that forward and then they would show up and leave or check in with them from time to time. But it was really hard to put that into practice. Now we have the ability to train the technology to listen Anytime those methodologies are being harnessed or leveraged. A question is being asked around one of those methodologies and automatically capturing what the response is from the customer and then giving coaching back to that revenue professional on how they could do better and taking it a step further and sharing that game tape across. So that's an example of like consultants and like methodologists that are out there with these incredible frameworks that have a hard time making sure that it sticks, that it actually changes behavior, and so we have the ability to look at the game tape before, during and after, as well as automating all the data captures so we can really see what's happening, and that's for any strategic initiative around a new methodology. That's one area.
Speaker 1:Another area that I would point to would be on the awareness front.
Speaker 1:There's so much opportunity to determine and detect when signal is occurring, so sometimes sellers miss cues around when new requests come in around.
Speaker 1:Hey, we sure could use help in this area, and the revenue professional may be so focused on what they want to offer them that they miss that cue of a question around a new product.
Speaker 1:And so think of that as like early pipeline identification around awareness. We now have the ability, through trackers and through technology, to signal back to marketing teams, back to partners, and we have a whole plethora of organizations in our partner ecosystem that are assisting with driving market awareness and detecting when signal comes up around either products or certain messaging that they can then take and more fully accelerate the pipeline on by just knowing, like, when and where it's coming up and then playing that back on. Ok, let's now get the ideal customer profile nailed in who's asking for that, who's the persona that's interested? So those are a couple of examples around consulting partners, as well as, like early stage marketing automation technology partners that have great tooling and, again, with that data coming in and being able to identify that in real time and act on it, is where we see a lot of impact happening on the backend through that Gong collective medium.
Speaker 2:Interesting Thinking through some of the sales processes that a lot of the other technology providers in, let's just say, broad MarTech, ad tech and CX have to deal with. And you can start the sales process anywhere in the organization but sooner or later you end up in front of the CFO, who's got to say yes or no to that purchase. And I'm just wondering I mean, you speak the CFO's language, you kind of show up understanding what that person typically is looking for out of a purchase. It's got to shorten your sales cycle, but you know what does that process look like for you? You know, um, because you, you know you're starting at various end points. You're you're transversing all kinds of hurdles and personalities and departments to get there. But, um, your product is a revenue, is a financial product. I would think that would think that the CFO would fling the door open and say, hey, we got to talk, come on over here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's two interesting developments here. The first one is with the CFO and the second one is now, most recently, with the CIO, and so let me speak to both of those and then how that's played out in our business. I'll use we talk a lot about gong on gong meaning I talked earlier about the fact that we want to drink our own beer, eat our own dog food type analogy and then how we play that out. And so, if you look back on the history of gong, the company went through explosive growth where we weren't as focused on necessarily having to work with CFOs, partly because of market conditions and partly because of the novelty of what the technology afforded to companies. When the macroeconomic environment shifted, all of a sudden, the CFO scrutiny went through the roof and it was almost like this new persona had inserted themselves into buying cycles. And a lot of companies are still reeling from that development because they weren't able to identify when that persona entered in and, most importantly, they didn't know which of their revenue professionals actually was successfully navigating those conversations and how, and which ones were struggling and why. And so what we're able to do now is look at, anytime we engage with the CFO, what are the typical questions that are coming up and then which reps are getting to a successful outcome, which ones are not able to navigate that talk track. And then we can look at the game tape and the themes and the discussion points and the objections that are coming up and how they're being overcome or how they're not navigating that successfully, and then we're able in real time to redeploy the training, the coaching and help give that guidance both before the call and even as a follow-up after the call to help improve that behavior. So if we were to look at CFO interaction as a sales stage or a sales play that needs to be run by any go-to-market team, we can bifurcate which individuals do that successfully versus those that do not, and then usually get the frontline manager involved in a way that helps provide that guidance, that coaching. But the most powerful piece is I'm going to call it the game tape.
Speaker 1:I'm a big sports enthusiast. I love watching film. I've got boys that play football and the ability to dissect film and see exactly what happened, not just trying to show up on the field of play and explain it to a player, but be able to show them like, hey, here's how this is supposed to be run successfully so they can see it visually. It's so much more powerful. And so now taking when revenue professionals have done that successfully and playing that back for them, and then you can track the successful follow-up activities on those individuals and they can see on their own how they're doing. That's kind of the CFO view.
Speaker 1:Most recently, what's interesting, with AI becoming front and center, cios are now getting heavily involved, as they should, ensuring that companies are doing things in a secure fashion, that they're thinking broadly about the entire revenue orchestration and every other product.
Speaker 1:We've run into a number of situations where a larger organization will buy an AI solution from a big tech provider that they think they can just slap on and then it's supposed to somehow understand those revenue use cases, which are very different than the everyday interaction that you and I might have as colleagues inside a company. And so we're seeing now CIOs have an active role in buying cycles for any type of go-to-market solution and we're having to figure out how to help organizations and individuals navigate through that persona and helping them make a good decision and get the information that they and helping them make a good decision and get the information that they are interested in, because a CIO is going to be very interested in different criteria than what a CFO, and so it really illustrates the need to figure out when new personas are entering into the sales process trying to make a good decision, and then what's the criteria that they are focused on to help the company make a really good decision in that process.
Speaker 2:As an aside, I've had conversations recently where it's not just the CFO and CIO that are going to be involved in some of these decisions, but because of AI and the hesitancies and the hurdles and some of the potential problems, now legal and compliance are getting involved saying wait a minute, it says AI on the label. Here. Let's make sure that we're not doing anything that's going to put us at risk, which is an entirely different ballgame. Talking to those people about it, it's a different language altogether.
Speaker 1:Well, listen, your podcast is Customer Land. I think that we're hyper-focused on how we can help customers have better experiences, and in a previous life I was heavily involved with a company that was at the forefront of experience management and what it meant to deliver great customer experiences. We're seeing a lot of companies today take that gong data and put the customer experience lens over that data. So if you're now a product developer or if you are a customer success professional, instead of having to rely on a survey or basically input the customers will give you. Having the lens of just watching and being able to monitor all the interactions in real time and then extracting that information and the themes and what's important to them, I think is another good use case and an example of if we want to focus on customers, whether, regardless of where we sit in a company, some of the best data that you have available is this customer interaction data that actually allows you to see in real time not just what they're talking about, but what's the level of sentiment they have Like, is there problems, are there opportunities? And so if we can build our businesses focused on our customers and find ways to better serve them by extracting what's important to them, I think we're all going to be in a much better place.
Speaker 1:I think too often we start to focus on what's good for us and what will help me get to the outcome I want to get to, versus flipping that around and taking it from the customer's view, kind of outside in, and, once we can get inside their four walls, really understand what's important to them. I think there's a lot of unlocks that companies are starting to recognize, and so it's allowing companies to think completely differently about where they get answers, how they ask those questions and giving them like a front and center. It's almost like having a full-time view into a customer research lab that it used to take months of preparation to get to that point and know like, hey, what questions should we ask and how do we see how they're going to respond to that? Well, shane, this is huge.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate this. I'm glad that your team stuck with all the scheduling stuff.
Speaker 1:Mike, I appreciate you making the time, thanks for what you continue to do, and it's been a great discussion, so thank you.
