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The debate rages – should you have human-led, low-touch, self-serve, product-led or any number of other customer experience models? In this episode I'm joined by Con Cirillo to explore how he thinks about how to prioritize human-led and self-serve customer experience design.
Happy Customers is about why making customer successful - and ultimately happy customers is more important than ever before.
Over the course of this series we’re going to explore what people inside some of the world's top companies are really doing everyday to go beyond the metrics and numbers on the balance sheet, collaborate across their entire organization, and truly invest in making their customers successful.
Stuart Balcombe (00:09):
What makes for a great customer experience and how can you be intentional about making sure that every touchpoint is amazing when there's so much happening and so many fires to tend to at a growing startup? Today's guest is Con Cirillo, director of customer experience at Carro. Con joined Carro in 2021 after leading CX Teams, building conversational experiences at HubSpot, a company making a name for itself when it comes to producing happy customers. I was curious to hear the lessons Con was bringing with him and applying to his new role. This is Happy Customers, the show where we're exploring what people inside some of the world's top companies are really doing every day to go beyond the metrics and numbers on the balance sheet, collaborate across their entire organization, and truly invest in making their customers successful. I'm Stuart Balcombe, and I'm excited you are here. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. On with the show.
Con Cirillo (01:15):
The way I would describe my job is knowing which fires to fight and strategically looking across the company and saying, okay, how are customers interacting with us? How are they interacting with the humans inside our company with the products, right, that's more of that day to day interface. And just knowing where is the right place to deploy? Where is the place that I could have the most leverage or try to help unstick a problem, right? And that maybe is some days it's trying to reduce friction somewhere and some days it's trying to add force in another place, but it's really just saying, okay, where, and this is, I think, such as the role of a customer experience as that becomes more of a more common title, it's really just knowing where to fire fight. And so I think that's kind of my day is saying, okay, where are the places that I can make the most impact? When I came on board for the first few months, it was how do we get brands to message each other more and actually drive more engagement with one another?
Con Cirillo (02:04):
And in the last few weeks it's been, how do we help onboard higher touch customers that are complex enterprises? No two days look the same, but it's really waking up every day saying what do customers need today and where can I firefight? That's probably what I'd say, no two days look the same. That's the general theme.
Stuart Balcombe (02:22):
Yeah. When you think about where to deploy resource, yourself, time, what are the things that you look at that like, oh, this is a problem over here. Is there a constant metric or a constant sort of thing that will surface a problem that you could look at? Or is that just... How are you doing the discovery into which problems to solve?
Con Cirillo (02:43):
I mean, for me, it is, and one of the first things I did was come up with the flywheel wide metrics of okay, across the company, what are the things that we're doing well, we can see that in one clear statistic and if we're not doing well, we can see it in another one. For me in the flywheel, I kind of know what our attract, engage and delight really most core metrics are. And that's kind of how I evaluate where it makes sense for me to spend my time is looking at okay, based on where the business is and where we need to be in the next month or quarter or whatever we have coming up, I try to look at it in the lens of one of those metrics and try to say, okay, at the highest level, if I was to go work on this thing, where does that ladder up?
Con Cirillo (03:19):
I do think that is potentially... The mobility of one of these kinds of CX roles can be really great in the sense that you get a great operator's vantage of this whole company. And that's awesome. What can be tough though, is if you don't prioritize right or know how you're going to tell the story of the work you've done, you can do a lot of really cool things. And then if the board, or the CEO goes, Hey, you've been doing a lot of customer centric initiatives, how'd they go? Right, if you don't know what those metrics are early on enough, you may end up being like, I did a lot of things, but I don't know where you're going to be able to see them. For me, it's always looking at, okay, how do we help onboard and activate more brands on the platform?
Con Cirillo (03:58):
How do we help them engage deeper with the platform sooner? And how do we help them make more money? And so everything I try to do, anytime a problem comes across my proverbial desk, it's okay. Which of those three things does it ladder up to? And even if it's a second degree thing, that's okay, of all right. If I do this, I know long term that's going to help with this other thing, that's fine. But it's really saying, does this add value to customers and which of those three biggest buckets does it kind of lever up into or ladder up into? And that's generally how I think about where to spend my time next.
Stuart Balcombe (04:28):
Yeah, for sure. It's really interesting to define those metrics early, rather than being the sort of, well, we did some stuff now, we expect to see it or we hope to see it in six months, whatever, from now. And we'll see where it shows up type thing. I'm curious. You came from HubSpot, obviously much bigger company than Carro is today. Customer-centric company, lots of focus on CX at HubSpot. How would you compare the structure of, and maybe just you at Carro, versus all the different roles and sort of specialties that exist in the CX org so to speak, CX isn't really an org, but. How would you compare the structure of how you go about things at Carro versus how things operated at HubSpot?
Con Cirillo (05:09):
I'd say one of the things that is most similar between Carro and HubSpot, and it was one of the most encouraging things that you're at a company where people know the logo and they hear your ads on Pivot with Carro. It's a well known company. And so, potentially walking away from that is hard. And you go, okay, if I'm going to go somewhere, there has to be a compelling reason. And it can't be that I'm just walking away from things, I have to be running towards something. And so at Carro, the thing that made me feel one of the strongest signals of yeah, I think this is it let's go, is how deeply embed that caring for the customer has been in the entire company. And that was one of the things that HubSpot did really, really well is you go to anybody in the company and you say, how are you impacting customers?
Con Cirillo (05:53):
And what can you, or we be doing better? What's an idea another team can take? There was just this collaboration. It was all of us versus the problems our customers had. It wasn't like, oh, well, services is dropping the ball so those guys suck, but sales are doing a great... It was never that competition, it was never zero sum. And so I think one of the things I've enjoyed the most is at Carro, everyone has that DNA and they may not have called it being customer centric or CX mindset. It's just, do you care about your customers? And the answer has been a resounding yes. And so what's been interesting from an org chart side is we are a 50 person company, whereas HubSpot was 5,000 when I left. And so you just have orders of magnitude of different looks of the org chart.
Con Cirillo (06:36):
And so for us, it's been we have a couple frontline success folks that are really doing the hand to hand reactive stuff when customers need help, they are the folks kind of jumping on those right away. And that's mainly through chat and email, the two channels we kind of use the most for those. And then we have the folks that are really leading onboarding, and like most small scrappy organizations right now, that's our account managers that are also our onboard specialists, which are also big customer advocates. We are not strangers to wearing many hats. And I think that ends up serving us well, particularly in the small stage that we are. We don't have the luxury of bloat, and what I mean by that is people can't afford to just kind of bury their head in just their metric and okay, if it's not my thing, I don't really care about it.
Con Cirillo (07:17):
Again, everyone has that DNA. When our support reps are taking chats, they are funneling that feedback back to the product team and keeping a really detailed, organized sheet of, Hey, these are all the things we're saying, here's how many times we're hearing them. And everyone I think has that mindset of, okay, how do we all, regardless of what our title says, regardless of what LinkedIn calls us, we care about customer and how do we make sure we're kind of sharing all that stuff around? And I think that's been something that has been consistent both when I was at HubSpot and now at Carro, both companies do that really, really well. And I think that's also one of the things you can't teach. That's something that really the DNA's there or it isn't, it's hard to get people to care.
Con Cirillo (07:56):
It's hard to change that intangible. And so I do think that that's one of have appreciated the most is that despite not having tons and tons of resources or more intelligence tools and analysts that I know what to do with, the DNA is there. And so that's the most important thing. And we are scrappy with the org chart as we need to be, but everybody cares about doing the right thing, everybody cares about helping and everyone knows it's a team effort, which is always the nice thing to see.
Stuart Balcombe (08:20):
Yeah, totally. It's been pretty interesting as I sort of have more and more of these conversations with leaders in and sees and sort of other related functional areas is just how much of a culture thing caring about customers is. And if you don't have that culture by default, it's really hard to make a shift either sort of retrofit a larger org or get buy in for smaller projects that you want to do that are sort of that way inclined. What are some of the habits or rituals, the things that you think Carro does particularly well sort of on a day to day type level that keep that loop really tight and keep folks... You mentioned the support team, obviously very close, they're very customer facing, they're talking to customers all the time. How do you keep that loop short and effective so that everybody in the company who isn't necessarily always talking to customers, still is close and has sort of that built in?
Con Cirillo (09:15):
The biggest thing I think has been, we have this table and it first started as more of just say an ideas tracker. What used to be the sticky notes on your desk of ah, we should totally build that at some point or ah, someone's struggling with this, don't let me forget. That has really evolved for us into this nice thoroughly thought out board of issues customers see, the pain point that someone feels on the team, oh, this is a critical thing or this is ah, be nice to have. And the frequency count the last time they heard it. Again, DNA that has been so great for me to inherit and walk into is they already were doing that. And so you go, great. Everyone has already cared from the start and that's a board that's democratized. Obviously I'd say pretty much everybody's still a remote company right now, whether you planned to be, or you were, you're going to be, right. Right now, that's what you are.
Con Cirillo (10:01):
And so for us, that has been a way that we have democratized access to those insights. And so every week, teams, anyone can put stuff in there. I see account managers throwing things in there when they're on onboarding calls, I see sales throwing things in there that are objections during prospecting calls, our support team throws a ton of stuff in there when they're reactive in solving issues. Even engineers throw stuff in when they're like, Hey, I was building this thing and I kind of thought about this other thing. It is really good that the company kind of has that as our holy grail. It's all of us versus the issues that those things create or the problems that those things create for customers. That's a hum of the business. And again, I think in the spirit of culture, there are some things you can put on the calendar and make a weekly ritual.
Con Cirillo (10:44):
And there's definitely value, we have some of those. I do think it's the hums, it's the things that no one really tells you to do, it's what you do when no one's looking, right. That's, I think, what really says do you care about customers or not? And so for us, that's the thing that makes me the most proud is just seeing how everybody knows that they take part in that and that board is greater than themselves in a way. And so I think that's a really exciting thing to see. We also do things like churn review, right? Is that every month or every couple weeks, we will sit down and look at who churned and why did they churn? And we'll do kind of postmortems and premortems, and that's something that across the board, executives will be in that meeting.
Con Cirillo (11:20):
And frontline support folks will be in that meeting. And it's one of these things where nobody is too good for that meeting. And it's something where everybody has an innate curiosity to learn more about that stuff. And so, I think those are things that we really are trying to do to make sure we are hearing from brands and that we are learning from them, understanding pain points. And again, it's one of those things where no one tells us we have to do it, and just everybody knows that that's something to do. And so, again, as a hum of the business, that board, I'd say with all the ideas and things that customers have asked for or things we've observed, awesome. I do also think when we have structured meetings, that's like, Hey, let's talk about a customer. This is a brand that unfortunately churned, here's why, here's what we think we could do to remedy it.
Con Cirillo (11:59):
Here's other patterns we're identifying, right? But that is just such an easy thing to do. It costs you nothing to do, right, and it's one of those things where it is democratizing so much of the insights and the knowledge that maybe folks who are closer to customers have and making it so more go to market folks or back office folks can have that same empathy, which I think is really hard. An engineer, generally, isn't talking to customers as much as your support team is, they're probably not. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be able to feel and learn and know and love your customers like everyone else does. It's important to kind of make sure you're pushing that back to the back of the office. And again, I think that's something we do well.
Stuart Balcombe (12:36):
Yeah, that's a great point that the sort of going beyond like, okay, we have this board where everything lives, how do you actually take it a step further and go apply that, or go start a discussion around what does this actually mean for the business? What are the things that we're going to go do now that we learned something? And I think it's interesting thinking about how companies capture the voice of the customer, how they sort of share feedback and requests and things from customers. It's one thing to log it, but the goal is not to build a library that you need a librarian to go tell you where everything is.
Con Cirillo (13:13):
Yeah. Success is not that we put 100 things on this list again this week. Yeah.
Stuart Balcombe (13:17):
Exactly. Tell me a little bit about those meetings. What is the sort of the connection between things enter this border or put on this border, anybody can add them there as they're having conversations, as they're noticing things. Take me on the journey of an insight. How does that become something that ultimately impacts customers on the other side?
Con Cirillo (13:37):
And I think that's where our product team does a good job of caring. And I think that again, this all comes out to how much do you care? And if you care, all the other stuff comes after it. But for us, it's like, okay, so there is an issue that crops up and it seems to be the frequency, it's getting reported more. I mean, our product team does a good job monitoring that. And when they're seeing trends or when they have that innate trust with the support team and support teams, like you need to look into this now, again, we are a smaller company, we kind of have that luxury of it's flat enough being like, Hey, trust me on this one. This is not noise, this is signal.
Con Cirillo (14:11):
Our product teams really good at saying, okay, let's unpack it. And I've seen plenty of times like, let's meet just to talk about this one thing. Or can you send me over all of the examples of this, send me the support tickets, send me how this is impacting a customer. And it doesn't have to be this really formal 92 step JIRA intake form, but just help me as a product manager or a designer understand what's going on here. And so I've seen plenty of times we're or someone will identify that issue, product and design will kind of say let's unpack this a bit more and really sit down and say, okay, who is this person? What do they need? Let's make the case why this would be something that could be good for somebody, again, what metric does it actually ladder up to?
Con Cirillo (14:50):
If we do this thing or we don't do this thing, where is that going to show up and really saying, okay, how do we slot this into the backlog? And this is something where as a team that tries to operate an agile of, again, everyone can do agile to some flavor. And are you capital A agile or you lowercase A agile? I think that's a whole nother discussion, but for us, just try to make sure we are always iterating and listening. Okay, this doesn't seem like it's a huge thing. Let's get this in in the next couple weeks. And so it's really trying to do horse trading and have the art and the science of all right, there's issues impacting customers. Once we know what we think we're doing here, how do we try to, in our case, let's try to do bigger feature development and have that probably be 80% of our time.
Con Cirillo (15:29):
And then maybe with the 20% of our time, let's make sure we're solving those quick hit things. Just because something isn't going to move all of the metrics all at once, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. And so for us, it's kind of that concept of paper cuts. We know if there's a thousand little things that are heard in customers, that's going to become something bad, right? And so for us, if we know we can chip away at a couple of those things on an ongoing basis, that's just a muscle of ours. We know that as we're building new things, we're shoring up existing products and features. And that I think is a process we really try to iterate and run on. Every couple weeks, we know that we are fixing lots of little things as we are pushing the track further ahead.
Con Cirillo (16:08):
And so, I think that's something where again, it is you can't just harden the product for a quarter and you can't just build new stuff for a quarter and never look backwards. And so for us, it's trying to find that balance, but generally saying, we got to spend most of our time learning and building new things and make sure we are carving out deliberate time for shoring up and kind of like, let's get that list of all 100 things or 10 things, let's make sure we're bringing that down or that every week we know we're closing off new ones. I think that tight loop, that's so important. And again, I think that you just got to bake that into your process with the product org.
Stuart Balcombe (16:39):
How do you think about sort of with that said, you're shipping these bigger features and sort of making sure that you have that time for avoiding the paper cuts and sort of solving for some of those quick hit things. How do you think about closing that loop with the customer? On the other side of this, it sounds like this is all relatively qualitative sort of input, so to speak. How do you think about A, measuring the impact of the things, is that a thing that you care about at the feature level? And how do you sort of close the loop with the customer? Oh, this is a thing that was requested or was our most frequent request. How do you think about getting that back and making sure that the customer isn't just like, oh, they did my thing, that it actually is having the impact that you want?
Con Cirillo (17:23):
Yeah. And that's where identifying, okay. If we fix this, right, what is the large level part of the flywheel this is going to ladder up to? How is this going to help, right? That's something we have to define from the outside. What we don't do is we ship features and then go, eh, how would we know if this was good or not, right? We really make sure from the beginning, if we're going to tackle something, we know where it ladders up. In the sphere of closing the loop with customers, if we're trying to be customer centric and build things for customers, if we're not really talking to them, then we're probably not building the things they want or at least considering their perspectives. And so a lot of times it'll be, Hey, you're telling me about this issue. Okay, I get it.
Con Cirillo (17:58):
Who is this impacting? Great, I'll go reach out to this brand and say, Hey, help me unpack this more. Or if we thought about it, X, Y, or Y way, which of these would be easier for you to get through it, right? We're trying to make sure that we are always as part of the loop of not just listening to customers, but consulting them. And I really think for our case, when you're an early stage company and you're growing and you have customers who really love you and everyone has that power user base of customers who really love you, leaning into them and having them effectively be our strategy for folks of, Hey, we're thinking about this, you said you're having this issue. I think if we do this, we could help you accomplish this thing more. Help us understand if we're on the right track or how you might expect this to work.
Con Cirillo (18:38):
Who else does this well? It really is internally understanding what the problem is and making sure we're talking to brands and saying, okay, we think we're going to go act on this now. I've seen plenty of companies who do a good job of having a public facing change log of here's just the release notes. Here's all the little tiny tweaky things that aren't worth a blog post, but we just fixed a bunch of stuff, here you go. I've seen some companies do that well, I don't think we're at that stage yet. But it's more for impacted brands, making sure that we have the relationship with them, which again, at a growing series B stage, you often still do have those relationships. And so saying, Hey, you told me about this, I listened, here's what we're doing to kind of remedy it.
Con Cirillo (19:15):
I think that's important. And for us making sure that we know, again, it may not be that we release one tiny tweak feature or we fix one part of the journey and oh my God, everything's better. But we know that, okay, it's going to be a series of lots of incremental steps. And if we do maybe 10 things that are related to this larger level metric over time, you're going to see that. And so it's being able to have the foresight and the trust of, okay, in a few months, we are going to really see this show up, but everything we do here is part of a reason. And it's okay if we don't see results day one, we know we did it for the right reason, we controlled everything we could, and we believe this ladder's up to something greater. Eventually you start to see that at stuff pay off and it's one of those you have to just trust and go forward. And once you do see it pay off, I think it really pays off. And so, that for us has been a muscle that we've really tried to hone in on and saying, okay, how do we trust and know where this is going to show up and when? And how do we make sure that all the brands that had this issue before, or whose life is now better because of this? Or how do we make sure we're talking to them?
Stuart Balcombe (20:11):
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think that's something that is, I mean, A in a recurring revenue or a recurring usage model, the ability to continue improving the product over time, sort of building on wins, sort of compounding, the value is huge. But also knowing that for a lot of customers, their use of your product is part of some bigger strategic initiative or they are trying to hit a metric on their side, too, right. And they're probably not expected to hit that metric day one either. Building that relationship and making sure that you are tracking in the right direction with them, not just defining success by what is success at Carro, but does the way that you track that actually line up with what your customers are trying to get to, is critical. One thing that I'm curious about, you mentioned sort of a recent focus being sort of high touch onboarding with larger customers. How did that come about as the place to focus and how does the approach there sort of differ than whether it's more product led or less high touch with other segments?
Con Cirillo (21:16):
Yeah. I mean, I think that starts with again, defining, okay. How do you know if the company's in a good spot? How do you know if you're doing a better job this month than you did last month? And again, if you can't manage which you can't measure, I think that obviously becomes a true addage here. For me with the onboarding stuff, I really was looking at okay. First few months in a roll, again, unpacking, who are our customers? What are they doing? How do they think about us, right? You got to do all of that. Basically empathy, drink from a fire hose to start, right. And then you're in month four and you go, okay, got it. I really get it now. And for me, one of the things I noticed is that when you're an eCommerce company or you're selling on Shopify, you're doing millions of dollars in revenue potentially, you have a complicated tech stack.
Con Cirillo (21:57):
And so, okay. How do you make sure that any vendor you're bringing in, any vendor you bring in has to be additive to your point about your customers have goals. This is one of those, sometimes it's a very sobering thing for companies in particular to realize that you are not the hero of your customers today, right? They might use you a bunch, they might log in a bunch, but they're not going to bed being like, gee, I hope Carro ships something cool tomorrow. They don't care, and that's okay. Their job is not to care about your stuff, their job is to care about their stuff. And so that's a sobering thing, I think frankly, for a lot of companies, but it's important because that only makes usability more important in reducing friction of if they're only going to use you for part of your day and they hired you to solve one or two problems really well, if you don't do those one or two things really well, it doesn't matter how shiny your website is, right?
Con Cirillo (22:45):
Usability piece comes more important. And for me, the way that manifested is looking at, okay, if you have a complicated eCommerce company doing millions of dollars on Shopify every month or every year, they have tools they need to integrate it with. And product led growth I love, right. Coming from HubSpot, I watched that shift and I was part of that shift, moving from an inside sales model or lead model and a little PLG when we could get it, really flipping it to say, it's PLG and then there's inside sales as a compliment. Having seen that shift, I kind of saw at Carro okay. The product led stuff's super important. You need to make it easy for folks to get in, easy to sign up, easy to get started. How fast can you get them to see value?
Con Cirillo (23:23):
And oftentimes not having a human in the loop is the right way to do that. It totally makes sense, I'm a big PLG guy. There are cases though, when it's like, Hey, you have a NetSuite ERP that needs to integrate with your three PL and the barbecue, your BBQ, they're all your acronyms out there. You have all these systems that have to work flawlessly. And there are just times, no matter how good your technical writing team, AKA me, is, there's just going to be cases where you need more, right. And you need human involvement and consultation and strategy. And it takes a little bit of time. And so for me, I kind of realized, okay, there is a need for customers who have that complicated system, we got to help them be successful. And for those folks, that cohort, maybe product like growth alone isn't enough.
Con Cirillo (24:05):
And it's time to compliment that with once they're in the door, once they're seeing some value, once they're okay, I get this now, I'm oriented. Let's bring in a human at the right time to help them really get more value out of it. And knowing that there are cases, and this might be a bit of a hot take, or some frictions actually a good thing. There are times where like, Hey, I need you to get on the phone with me is not... As a sales rep, I'm just trying to sell you on more as a support rep, I'm just trying to artificially get in your way. There's sometimes where it's like, look, in order for you to be successful, I need to talk with you about some stuff. And that's fine. That's a good thing if you do it for the right reasons and you frame it the right way.
Con Cirillo (24:41):
And so, I've been thinking a lot about how do we build a process around helping brands be more successful sooner and see more success in the cases where there's things to integrate. In our case, if you're adding products from our network to your store, you have to think about how are you going to promote those products, right? And if that's not something you've done before, selling other people's stuff, you may not think about a separate promotion strategy. And so it really came down to there were all of these pain points that I was seeing and hearing from our teams of why onboarding is painful now or why it's not super scientific right now. And it laddered down or laddered up to or down to there just needed to be more structure. And so I really felt that by building structure and building transparency and guardrails and building good communication between customers and our teams, it would be easier for everybody to get where they wanted to be sooner.
Con Cirillo (25:30):
And it was one of those things where introducing that process really came into, okay, we know these are the customers that can make more of an impact for us. We know we can make more of an impact for them. And by having high touch onboarding and kind of introducing humans in the loop and introducing them in that process, it's actually going to help everybody get where they wanted to be sooner versus if we just made it PLG. And it was just, you click around and there's widgets and there's Clippy in the corner, right. If we just did all those things alone, we know a lot of customers wouldn't get live and yeah, they wouldn't hear from a human and there's all the stats about nobody wants to talk to humans anymore. I get that, I built bots for a long time, I totally get that.
Con Cirillo (26:05):
There are cases where humans can do things really well. They can offer strategic support really well, and so knowing that again, it is maybe controversial to build that so early on as look, this is the way that folks are successful. And it's always possible to take the things you learn in a high touch onboarding model. And how do you build that as a product led growth or an onboarding kind of experience, but we felt that it was time to build a good, codified process around it because that's going to just give us more leverage in the future.
Stuart Balcombe (26:32):
Totally. Yeah. I think I want to dive into this because I'm sure you have some spicy takes there too, but when it comes to PLG, you mentioned that there's all the stats out there, the numbers of customers who don't want to talk to a human in the sales process seems to be ever increasing, which that's consumer behavior, let alone the PLG trend. PLG, the company implementation is just adapting to sort of consumerization of the enterprise and the people doing business want to do the same things that they do when they use Netflix.
Con Cirillo (27:05):
Right. I don't fill out a 30 minute call when I'm downloading an app on my phone, right. I think people are just like, well, why would I do that for my business?
Stuart Balcombe (27:13):
Yeah. But I do think it raises a good point about when to put the human in the loop because PLG is an acquisition strategy, right? As part of that acquisition strategy, there are some tactics that you can apply. You mentioned getting people to value faster is a good way to get them to continue to use and adopt your product. But sometimes the value that people want to get out or need to get out of your product for it to be worthwhile investment because people are always investing time, attention, and the one that people always jump to, but money right, is often not the most expensive thing for a company that can do a million things. When to put that human in the loop just sort of can change the equation when you mention you're adding that sort of strategic level of support.
Stuart Balcombe (28:00):
How do you think about the difference in onboarding, and I guess with this segment, but how do you think about the difference between we need a human in the loop to get you to do a thing that is sort of functional, upload a file or add a product or that kind of thing that could be done. Maybe it's more difficult and people sort of fail at it more often when you do it in a PLG motion, but they could do it versus is this is actually strategic, we are giving you things that the product just doesn't do by itself.
Con Cirillo (28:31):
My framework is generally, if something is a repetitive and standardized task, you should try to automate it or try to enable it as a self-serve thing. But the more variability there is in something, or frankly, the more likely someone is to screw something up or the more painful is when that thing gets screwed up, that's when I start going, ah, okay. More of a human thing. And so our case, it might be yeah, sure. Sign up, you don't need someone to hold your hand to sign up, sure. You don't need someone's hand or to hold someone's hand as they're clicking around the first time. Yes. But when it's okay, you're now adding a product from somebody else's Shopify store to your Shopify store and orders are going to go from one supplier, the moment where it starts going yeah, okay.
Con Cirillo (29:10):
I can't really explain this cleanly in a single one liner. Even a well documented knowledge based article, there's just going to be nuance it misses. And then really the bigger question you ask is from a strategic side, how do you do this right? It is not one of those things or in the case where it is not just to be out A to B of oh, click this button and click that button, but it's more about there's actually thought you have to put into this when it's not really tasks, it's strategy. That's where I feel introducing humans is the right time to do it. It is not just about introducing humans again, to add friction, but introducing it when it's the right time, when you feel that it is no longer in your customer's best interest to go at it alone. If you ever play video games like The Legend of Zelda, right?
Con Cirillo (29:49):
You do have assistance that pop in to help you when it's time. Having that kind of consultative help can really be a good thing when you do it at a deliberate moment. I will also say, if you are in an earlier age company and you haven't really found product market fit yet, or you think you have it and you just want to iterate quicker, if you're at a scale of your onboarding folks and your onboarding experiences to your customers, if that ratio works out where you can have more conversations, it may be in your best interest to do so. Automating things too early, yes there's a lot you could do to get good structure, qualitative and quantitative insights out of automation, right? Again, if you build really good onboarding tool tips and have good tracking, you can do a lot with understanding where your customers are in the product. But nothing beats that conversation, nothing beats the like, Hey, let's talk.
Con Cirillo (30:35):
What are your goals for this quarter and how... Again, we are some part of it. How do we help you? And the more you can have those conversations, again, if you have the luxury of you can afford from a bandwidth perspective to do those, I really like doing that. And for us, it is all of those things, and then, okay, how do you strategically help someone get to where they want to be? And knowing that it is not just step one, do this, step two, three, do that, right. But, okay. Let's take an approach or let's be that strategy person that we are your expert and we're here for you. There's no substitute for that. And there's no amount of automation that can empathize in that way. And so for us, there are just times where for some folks, once they reach a certain point, it's better off to bring a person in, because that person's going to help them get where they want to be.
Stuart Balcombe (31:17):
Yeah. I think that's such a great point that business, ultimately, as much as we may want to make it or if it's convenient to make it this way, doing business is not a checklist, right. Nobody gets prizes for task completion, right. It's only impact that you drive and that's ultimately where the value is that your product, using product loosely because we're talking about humans in the loop here as well. But yeah, ultimately that's the goal right, is make customers successful. I'm really curious from your perspective in a CX titled role to sort of tie this back. How do you view the difference between sort of people doing customer success things, right? You mentioned you have an org that has different roles in it that are in sort of quote unquote customer success roles versus making the customer successful, which is sort of exactly what we just talked about, right? How do you think about those two things and how do you sort of explain the importance of doing that as it rolls up into board meetings or the CEO?
Con Cirillo (32:22):
Customer success is where I think you have at that more micro KPI level. You might see common success metrics of how long did it take us to close a ticket or how many calls did we get? What's our conversion rate of booking meetings? I think there's that more micro level metrics and to boil it down, that could be customer success. When I think of successful customers, that's where it's time to value, in our case, it's the impact on your revenues that we had, right. I do think knowing how to look at the micro and the macro that what's that ground level view you have to have, it's really important to still know how are all these little activities laddering up to something greater and then being able to zoom out 30,000 feet and saying, okay, there's a lot of things going on.
Con Cirillo (33:01):
A lot of tasks, a lot of activities, a lot of stuff, right. But how do you know big picture that's getting where you want to be? And it's okay again, and this probably isn't unique to us, but in the size of a company where everyone's pitching in and everyone is yeah, you have a title, but everyone's kind of leaning in different ways and helping in different capacities, knowing again, what is the larger thing that that rolls up to? And so for me, the biggest thing from an executive perspective that I can do is communicate that and say yeah, people are doing a lot of things. Again, what is the thing that that ladders up to and understanding that there is a bigger picture here. We can't just look at, okay, did we do the five things today or the seven things today, but really this is all part of something greater.
Con Cirillo (33:44):
And in our case, over four weeks if we're onboarding customer, look at how all of these things are going to add up and really be one of these oh, wow. It's the sum of a lot of little things well, and it becomes one plus one equals three. And again, storytelling, I think, is a really effective thing you can do if you're in one of these CX or CS or C whatever roles is helping folks who maybe care about customers, but don't have that approach to it or that discipline around it to understand how... There's going to be a lot of moving parts and a lot of departments and a lot of teams are going to do a lot of things. Here's how that helps folks get where they want to go. I have yet to find a founder or an executive team that doesn't like that story or doesn't care about that story when you frame in the right way of, again, there's automation, there's humans, there's things that both are doing. What is that really doing for customers at the end of the day? They're generally pretty receptive when you can tell the story of at the very least, we make more money, customers are happier. If you do those two things, I've yet to see an exec team kind of scoff at that.
Stuart Balcombe (34:43):
Exactly. Tell people about the things that they already care about, right. I guess final question for you. We're recording this right at the end of 2021, there's Kara Ray's series be relatively recently, you are relatively new in the role. What are the things that you are most excited about, or I guess sort of tied up in that? What is the big thing that you want to address in 2022 on the CX side of Carro?
Con Cirillo (35:08):
Make it easier for folks to learn and love and make money with our product. I think that's at the highest level. I guess if my answer was anything other than that, we'd have bigger issues. I think that's at the highest level. One of the things that I want to do is democratize access to a lot of the information again, and not uncommon for a series B company. You have lots of people who know the customers really well, they know the problems really well, they know the product really well. Most people just think of content around that as an afterthought where it's like, oh, I can have that conversation with a customer and I can answer this really detailed thing, or here's the secret way to get this thing done, right? But if you're not creating content around that, you are limited to the amount of people you have and the amount of time they have and hoping that they're not taking vacation, which they should as we record this before Christmas, you become limited.
Con Cirillo (35:54):
And so for me, one of the things I wanted to do is create content that democratizes access and enables folks to get where they want to be sooner. My ultimate goal is that every day that someone at Carro spends in the company or one of our customers spends talking to us, every day and every moment is something high leverage. Anything that can be answered and automated and documented, let's go do that. And let's free up all of our human time, particularly customer time, the time we have in front of customers should not be spent walking them through checklists, but more consultative, strategic. The biggest thing, if I could wave a magic wand to make one Christmas ask for Carro in 2022 is, we really become known within our customer base and with our customers friends as a company that cares and a company that is here for you, right?
Con Cirillo (36:40):
There's a lot of strategy that goes into it to be successful. And so we want to be that partner, we want to be known as the folks who get the space, who have operators, who are on staff and can be that trusted advisor. Everyone can sell you products, right? No matter what you are selling, someone else sells something similar with the same or similar kind of react design. It all looks pretty similar, but it's those values that you can add that are not commoditized, that's really where the difference is going to be. And so for us, how do we build a great product that's easy for folks to get in and love and how do we use all of our human capital to make it easier for folks to get where they want to be? And again, continue to establish ourselves as a company that cares and can be that trusted advisor, that's my 45 seconds of a Christmas present. Stuart, if you want to deliver that or you have any advice I'm always here, but I think it's continuing to care and continuing to build processes around it to help folks get where they want to go. If I do that, it'll be a good year.
Stuart Balcombe (37:35):
I love it. That's a great sound bite to end on. Cool. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. It's been really awesome. We'll hook up all the links to Carro and all that great stuff in the show notes, but yeah. Thanks so much.
Con Cirillo (37:48):
Stuart, thanks for having me.
Stuart Balcombe (37:54):
Thanks so much to Con for joining me and giving us an inside look at how he thinks about designing customer experiences. Let's go back to our big idea from the start of the episode. How can we be intentional about every interaction we have with customers? By starting with what customers need from us instead of what we can give them, starting with the customer anchors everything we do in their context and their challenges. As we explored with Con, having a single easy to explain metric that shows off progress towards making customers successful is a great way to get buy-in across the company, even when individual projects might not have an immediately measurable impact. My biggest takeaway from this conversation was Con's intentional focus on putting people in the loop when the next step towards the customer's goal requires strategic thought or had complex components baked in. Things that humans are great at problem solving, but at the same time, he's aggressively automating repeatable, predictable tasks free up that proactive human time.
Stuart Balcombe (38:57):
We talked a lot in this episode about identifying the right places to intervene and improve the customer's experience. And in our next episode, I'll be chatting with Mary Poppin, from Involved.AI, about how to leverage customer insight to go beyond static models of behavior and segmentation and give customers what need when they need it, even at scale. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd really love for you to reach out to Con on LinkedIn and let him know. If you have any feedback or questions, I'd love to hear from you too. Let's do it at arrows.to. See you next time.