Eric Vermillion is the CEO of Helpshift, a San Francisco based company that develops mobile customer support software that helps companies provide better customer support in mobile apps. Before Helpshift, Eric was instrumental in advancing BlueCat to one of Canada's most notable software exits, and also helped grow revenue at NICE Systems to over $1 Billion. He has also held sales and leadership roles at PTC, Tecnomatix and Triad Systems Corporation. Eric holds a Bachelor’s degree in management from Purdue University.
Questions
Highlights
Eric’s Journey
Eric shared that he spent his entire career in the world of software, pretty good chunk of it on the sales end of things. He kind of got lucky coming out of Purdue University, when all his friends were taking jobs at places like John Deere and Caterpillar and Anderson Consulting, I found the Bay area software company to join and kind of fell in love with technology and software. So, he’s spent his career helping people use technology to create value. And he’s spent a big chunk of it in the world of customer service, he was at NICE for 8 years and got to be a part of things when kind of this whole omni channel trend happened. After he left NICE, he did a couple of other software plays in the world of identity management and IT security with blue cat, he found his way back and spent the last 3 years in Helpshift trying to really redefine what good customer service looks like for mobile apps and using more mobile devices more effectively.
What Does Helpshift do?
When asked about what Helpshift does, Eric shared that if you think of the your mobile phone, you probably engage with a lot of mobile apps on a day to day basis. Most people do and that's a trend that is rapidly increasing. They help brands use that mobile app to create essentially an orchestration tool for consumers to drive a very elegant customer experience. So, when you're in the mobile app you got typically it's the mobile app knows who you are, there's some context to the situation. And so, their customers are able to really provide their consumers with a much more elegant logical flow within the mobile app, allowing them to really self-serve much more effectively and by the time they actually get to an agent or human if they need to, because it's a more complex problem, or they’re a blue-chip customer. A lot of the problems already been solved, the context is there for the agents, so they can become a bit more like a concierge or a personal assistant than then the traditional view of what we would think of as a customer service agent.
Mobile Applications Advancing to Develop Customer Experience
Me: Do you see mobile applications advancing even more in the whole development of customer experience on a global level? Or do you find people are looking for more opportunities where they can have more face-to-face interactions and less interaction with the digital or the technological side of things?
Eric stated that those are two separate interesting questions. He thinks after what we've all been through in the last couple of years with COVID, he'd be surprised if there's anyone in the world that isn't craving a little bit more face-to-face interaction. So, he does think people want that, but he’s not sure that customer service is the place where they're striving for more kind of face to face, human to human interaction.
People are busy, people's schedules have changed and evolved a lot over the last couple of years, people tend to do a lot more working remotely, they tend to have schedules that are not very standard and typical, so they want to be able to find resolution to their problems whenever they want, wherever they want, at whatever time of day they want and that's something that he thinks companies are going to have to continue to adapt to.
And one thing that we know is true is that there were 2 million mobile apps that were created last year and there'll be more than that that are created this year. People tend to carry their mobile device with them, all the time 24/7, for most of us it's sitting next to our bed even at night. And so, it is this tool that's on our person 24 hours a day and when used properly, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for accessing support and creating a support engagement that really fits your needs and your schedule as a consumer, whenever and wherever you want.
He also thinks that when you think about some of the other trends that are going on in the world, like the emergence of this thing, everyone's calling the metaverse, other kind of distributed commerce technologies, like blockchain and web3, and other digital commerce trends that are happening in the world, most of those actually are accessed through mobile devices and through mobile apps as well. So, it's a trend that he thinks would be hard to find any reason that it's not going to continue to grow and kind of grow exponentially.
Metaverse, How Can People Adjust to it Feeling More Comfortable Because It’s So Different
Me: I'm glad you mentioned the metaverse, because there are a lot of people who still have a little bit of apprehension in relation to that whole emergence of that, what it represents, how to interface with it. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it's something that will become the norm? How do you think people can adjust to it feeling more comfortable because it's so different and generally speaking, human beings just don't adjust to change very readily.
Eric stated that all very good and fair points. He thinks that a lot of people's view of the metaverse is driven by the images, or the headlines that they see about broken virtual reality experiences, they think the metaverse as kind of a 3D VR kind of gaming environment and to a certain extent, it largely is in 2022, but the evolution of it is happening very, very fast.
And for him, he envision this world, not so many years from now, the technology is there to make this happen right now, where maybe he has a meeting with someone who is sitting in Japan, speaks only Japanese, someone who's in Brazil that speaks only Portuguese, someone in France who speaks only French, and himself in a room having a meeting, in a virtual environment in real time collaborating on some project where they all understand each other, and they can effectively communicate and collaborate in a way, that's just not possible today, and kind of a purely physical world.
And so, he thinks there's just so many applications for it like that really impacted us in a positive way, in a professional environment, in an educational environment, from a healthcare perspective that gets taken granted a lot today when people just think of the metaverse is kind of this scary 3D video game. And all of those things that he just described, of course, are also going to have commerce that comes alongside of them and ownership and digital rights that around and a lot of that is being handled today or will likely be handled through blockchain technology.
And so, you have this kind of parallel digital existence that happens with all of this commerce, would be naive to think that that's not going to create a lot of support issues and a lot of support challenges. And jumping from that world, out into the more physical world to pick up the phone and make a phone call or send someone an email is highly impractical when you think about it. So, he thinks support tools are going to have to evolve as well to be able to handle some of those changes.
App, Website or Tool that Eric Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Eric stated that it's probably pretty boring, but he spent a big chunk of his day in G Suite, from kind of managing the calendar to all the collaboration that happens over the tools. So that's a pretty boring one because they spend a lot of time talking about mobile apps, he would maybe add a bonus that he travels a lot and he'd really struggle if he didn't have his American Airlines app, that's kind of how he gets from place to place anymore. So that's one that he tends to use a great deal as well.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Eric
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Eric stated that he’s a big fan of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins, that's just that's one of those timeless books, the concept of the whole hedgehog principle and really having that one thing that you're laser focused on, and the whole organization is laser focused on, that you want to be known for. As well as the concept of having the right people on the bus, even if you don't know where they will sit. Those are just concepts that resonates with him very well with him, and philosophies that he tends to use and in his own management style.
On a more kind of non-business level, he’s a big fan of Bob Goff as well. He's got a very fascinating story. His first book, which is called Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World, is still his favourite of the ones that he's written. He's written a few since that he thinks that was probably 10 years old at this point. But he tends to really love experiences, he thinks Bob does a great job sharing interesting experiences and the lessons you can take from each one in an extremely interesting way.
Advice for Business Owners and Managers to Have a Successful Business
Me: We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers, who feel they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. If you were sitting across the table from that person, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business?
Eric stated that you know that you're a coach, you're not just a manager. He saw this clip in the last few days of Nick Saban, the Alabama football coach that's highly regarded and very well known. He stepped in and prevented a player from sharing a piece of cake with another player. So, they have this spring game every year, where they play against their own teammates, and the losing team gets beans and franks and the winning team gets a steak dinner with chocolate cake. And the winning teammate wanted to share a piece of cake with his really good friend that was on the losing team and Saban saw it and shut it down.
And he just loves that because losing hurts, and it should hurt and that's how you know you don't want to do it anymore. And he thinks people sometimes need to realize that they have an obligation as a leader, as a manager, to also be a coach and not just a manager. His job is really to help everyone who works for him to perform at a high level, and to help prepare them for their next job or even help them get their next job. And he thinks too many managers forget that often. And you can't buy your way out of that responsibility no matter how much you're paying for someone.
And then in this world where human capital and good human capital is very hard to come by, and often very expensive, losing sight of that responsibility to really coach and help a person be prepared for whatever's next, it's one of those things you take for granted if you're just trying to sometimes pay top dollar for people because you think that'll automatically make them the best at things, which is not the case.
Me: I totally agree. One of the things that we talk about a lot as well as a customer service trainer is that the most important role of the leader is to grow and develop people because as you mentioned before, you want to have people around you who are robust, who are efficient, who are intrinsically motivated to do what they're employed to do, but at the same time, they feel like they have some purpose and for them to feel like they have some purpose, they have to feel like they're a part of a bigger goal other than collecting a salary. So, I do quite agree with you that leaders are coaches even though a lot of them may not look at themselves as a coach, I like that phrase that you put it as.
What Eric is Really Excited About Now!
Eric shared that from a people perspective, the pandemic has created a lot of confusion around what work looks like and you hear a lot of companies talking about they're going to be remote only or they're going to be office only or they're going to be hybrid or like lots of different things that people are calling this thing. He spent most of his career as a remote employee and it's hard, it is not something that there's a kind of a playbook or a handbook out there to do. And it was harder before Zoom and messaging and always available internet, but it's still hard.
And he believes very strongly that companies need to have a framework for expectations and that's something that they've been continuing to work on a lot as a company. Expectations on what's expected of you as an employee, and that is independent of physical location, that is just what's expected of you as an employee, he doesn't really care where you sit, if you're doing those things, he doesn't care where you sit. He doesn't care if you're physically in an office or remote. If you're following those guidelines and principles of what they stand for as an organization and using the technology to do that, if you're doing it like that, he doesn't really care where you work from. He thinks a lot of companies think that they can kind of hand you a bag of cool technology and software, and it will make you a great remote worker but it just unfortunately doesn't always work that way, you have to teach people what's expected, inspect it regularly and then drag them back into the office when it's too hard or people are just not able to kind of cope with that very unstructured environment that you have at home, not everyone can do it. And frankly, not everyone wants to and so that's professionally.
On a personal level, he did get a Peloton a few months ago so he’s been loving that and trying to take off his own COVID-19.
Where Can We Find Eric Online
Website - www.helpshift.com/
LinkedIn – Helpshift
LinkedIn – Eric Vermillion
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Eric Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Eric shared that his favourite quote is the Wayne Gretzky quote, or at least he thinks it's widely attributed to Wayne Gretzky, which is “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.”
Me: All right. And that's a good one. How do you think people can apply that in this whole environment that we're operating in? As you mentioned, we're emerging out of this global pandemic, even though we're not fully emerged out of it, people are trying to just kind of get their life back into some form of semblance. So, with all of that in play and there's also I think a lot of people are still experiencing a lot of fear and anxiety because they don't know what to expect. How do you think that quote can help people to really raise the bar?
Eric stated that he thinks it can be a motivating factor for you. He’s definitely a person that's fairly easily amused and he’s very much an experience person, he doesn't particularly care about stuff and things, and he thinks for a lot of people over the last couple of years, they've had to figure out more interesting ways to entertain themselves versus going out and kind of buying stuff and looking more for satisfaction through material things. Every day is really a new opportunity to learn something, pain tends to create intelligence, practice creates perfection and that kind of galvanizes you.
He thinks that every person that he meets is a new lesson, every person that he has had an opportunity to help in some way is literally currency for him, it makes him feel wealthy, even if it doesn't add a penny to his own bank account. And every time he gets a chance to experience a new city or a new restaurant, or make a new friend, it makes him feel wealthier than the day before. And he think that's one of those things that every one of us can remember, every one of us that's above ground and breathing has all those opportunities every single day to like add those experiences, add those things that do make you wealthier in a non-monetary way, and never miss a chance to take one of those shots and being aware of that he thinks is an incredibly motivating thing.
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Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Ernie Harker is a creative branding mastermind. He recently published “Your Brand Sucks,” a book that reveals why most companies get branding wrong and reveals the step by step formula he has used to assist dozens of companies define a clear image and personality for their brands. One of his greatest successes was to help revitalize an old-western retail chain into a $3 billion high-energy adventure brand. He leads workshops, gives presentations, and offers an online masterclass to help organizations define and develop remarkable brands.
Self-diagnosed with Hyperactive Productivity Disorder, Ernie loves to draw, trail run, compete in triathlons, wake board, do yoga, lift weights, camp, mountain bike, watch movies, eat junk food, and spend time with his family and 7 brothers. Asked him what his real life allergies to exercise on the TV travel show he hosted.
Buckle up because his dynamic personality and passion for brand development will have you racing to build your brand. His friends call him Ernburn, so call him Ernburn!
Questions
Highlights
Ernie’s Journey
Ernie shared that like most of our guests, they always start on the path that never seems to be like, if I were to rewind my life; I never would have thought I would have ended up where I'm at. He wanted to be an illustrator or an animator when he was a kid. And so, he was an illustration, he drew all the time, and studied illustration at the university. And when he got out of university, he got a job for an Ad agency. And he was doing concept development and that's just pre visualization of either TV commercials or print ads, or online ads or whatever. He would sketch out what a creative director or an art director would have in mind and then they would show those drafts, those pieces of art to the client.
And what he learned is that he learned to become really good at visualizing language. He wasn't a writer and so he had to clearly communicate and very quickly communicate an idea visually. And so illustration led to storyboards, which led to TV commercials, radio commercials, interactive design, then print design. And so, now he was all over the place doing all kinds of creative development stuff. But that led him into brand development because branding is such a visual experience, we often think of branding as like colours, and logos and graphic design and things like that. But it's also a lot more personality conveyed through language, visual language, and verbal language, tone, vocabulary and things like that. And so, that's kind of how he started as an illustrator, and developed into a branding guy. So it took a while.
Three Important Things a Company Needs to Have That Gives the Impression a Brand is For Their Customer
Me: Now, branding is very important to customer experience and your brand as you said, it's not just from a marketing perspective, the image that comes out in your advertisements, or any form of posts that you put up on any social media platform, but could you maybe share with us three important things you think a company needs to have in order to really have, at least give off the impression of being a brand that is for their customer?
Ernie shared that he’s so grateful that Yanique is championing the customer experience because so many businesses focus on their business and not the customer experience, their business will be fine if they just focus on the customer experience. And so, congratulations and thank you for doing that.
There's a singular lens. Every brand should have a singular lens that they use to focus the customer experience and those are all the touch points that a customer would see, hear, read, notice, anything like that. So, those are all touch points. Well, the customer experience is a conscious decision to filter all those touch points to reinforce a specific personality of the company.
So really, we're trying, with all these customer experiences, we're trying to engage and attract a customer, make them fall in love with a business, you can't make anybody fall in love with the business unless there's a personality associated with that business. And so, defining what your brand lens or personality is really about, will then help you choose the visual elements, the pictures, colours, textures, all those kinds of things.
And the verbal elements, the language, vocabulary, the tone to give that customer the glimpse into the organization's personality, they go, “Oh, my gosh, I love this company,” not just “Oh, I recognize the company.” which is a lot of branding oftentimes, as he can differentiate between one company and another company, visually, but it needs to be more than that, it needs to be more of a personal, emotional connection, like “I really am attracted to this company.” And that's done like for a convenience store chain.
He was in involved a convenience store chain business for a long time. And what's neat about the convenience store business is that it's one of the very few businesses that have customers come in on a daily or multiple times per week. Like banks don't do that, retail locations don't do that. Even McDonald's, well, maybe some people that go every day, but convenience stores like they're buying fuel, customers are buying fuel, they're buying snacks, they're buying drinks, whatever.
And so the environment needs to be inviting. What is it about the walls, the floors, the interior design, the extra design that reinforces the personality of the business? And then of course, you have the person behind the counter, that Maverik, the convenience store that he was developing a brand for. They called them adventure guides because they had an adventurous personality; they wanted to make it feel like people were going to the great outdoors when they would come to a store. And so, they'd call them adventure guides.
So titles, the way customers were greeted. So you have this visual experience when people come in and then you have the vocabulary of like a greeting and you meet somebody who is an adventure guide instead of a clerk, or a teller, or a whatever. And then of course, all the marketing and advertising goes on top of that customer experience. I hope that answers the question in a roundabout way.
Three Personality Traits an Employee or Leader Needs to Have in an Organization in Order to Develop a Brand
Me: Oh, definitely it does. So there are quite a few things that you mentioned that I am definitely 100% on board with. I think sometimes also when people hear the word brand, it's like brand is highly associated with marketing, not necessarily customer experience. Are there maybe two or three personality traits that you think an employee or a leader needs to have in an organization in order to really develop a brand that is highly associated in a positive way? Because your brand can have a negative image and your brand can have a positive image. But what are some key things that you would need to ensure or would you say it should be linked to your core values? And if that's the case, what should be your strategy where recruitment is concerned?
Ernie stated that there are 3 things he’s going to say off the top of his head. One is Humility. And what he means by humility is oftentimes organizational leaders or employees think they know best. They have their own personal opinion and they think their personal opinion is stronger than anybody else's opinion or research. So, humility.
Curiosity is the second one. Like he wants to know what their customers really think. He wants to learn as much as he can. So, humility gives us opening in our brains and our hearts for change and curiosity leads us to find the material to fill in that empty space that's relative, that's applicable.
And then the third thing is, he thinks Passion. There's so much boringness going on in the world today. He wants to be surrounded by people who are enthusiastic about what they do. It doesn't matter what they do, he could care less, but he cares about the enthusiasm and the passion by which they're engaged. So, there's too many retail locations or retailers, with employees who are completely disengaged, they are there counting the minutes between breaks, can't wait to get home and so the customer experience is a huge, like empty space in those locations, those businesses. So enthusiasm, he just wants to feel some love, some passion. He doesn't care if he’s ordering a Big Mac, he wants someone to be excited about it for him. So those are the three things humility, curiosity, and passion or enthusiasm.
App, Website or Tool that Ernie Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Ernie stated that Photoshop. He’s learning to use HubSpot because he’s been terrible as a CRM guy. He needs to do a better job with that. But he does so many things in Photoshop, because he’s image oriented, whether it's illustration or even graphic define online, banners, video thumbnails, and all those. If he didn't have Photoshop, he'd be a stick in the mud.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Ernie
Ernie shared that the book that has had one of the most profound impacts on him is The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss, and he has referenced it so much that his wife gives him a hard time about it. On his nightstand, he has a set of Scriptures, the Bible, this is his go to, that's his big go to book. So, he got his scriptures, and he’s a faith based person, very religious. But next to that for years was Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek and so he would wreck ideas from The 4-Hour Workweek and his wife would say, “Oh, are you quoting brother Ferriss again?” Because it's like he's almost like a prophet. But some of the things that he talked about that are profound to him is the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, becoming more efficient with your time.
He also talked a lot about multiple careers instead of retirement, and working for the future, we're designed to be very creative people. So, why do we work like crazy in one career, and then hope one day we'll retire and not have to work, that's crazy. He doesn't ever want to stop working; he wants to keep doing fun, cool stuff. And so, the idea of multiple careers and mini retirements. Well, he could talk for a whole hour about Tim Ferriss and his teachings. But that was the most profound book.
Advice for Business Owners and Managers to Have a Successful Business
When asked about advice he would give to business owner or manager to have a successful business, Ernie shared that he would love to be able to incorporate employee compensation with customer experience so that the employees are rewarded, their compensation is structured on how much the customers enjoy their interaction, how much they appreciate the interaction. So that instead of like sales based, like always commissioned based, play the long game of, “I want to hire people that are compensated when customers or potential customers have a really good experience with them.” And then also provide that employee with the resources to wow their customers. Like being able to send a note, being able to send a very small inexpensive gift, things like that. So they're empowered and they're compensated based on their customer experience, because he knows that there will be people, that the customers will always come back to a really good experience.
What Ernie is Really Excited About Now!
Ernie shared that he has been going bonkers over a YouTube channel that teaches kids to draw. So he created a YouTube channel, he spends way too much time on it. But he gets to produce, he gets to do the drawing, he does the lesson. And then he edits the video. And so all the fun things and creative production that he enjoys, as well as kind of inspiring and igniting the excitement of drawing which is affordable to everybody. It's within the reach of the poorest of poor people, get a piece of charcoal and a log, and you can draw. Pencil and paper, it's super, super inexpensive. But the ability to express creativity with pencil and paper, and an iPad and procreate or whatever is just so empowering for him. And so, he’s done 100 episodes in the past 2 years and the channel, it's like 4000 subscribers, it's not very big but it has been so much fun to make these videos and just have fun being creative in the YouTube world.
Where Can We Find Ernie Online
LinkedIn – Ernie Harker
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Ernie Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Ernie shared that he was writing his book, Your Brand Sucks, which was very, very hard for him, he has ADD and so kind of staying focused on that was really, really challenging. And he'd often want to give up. He’d been involved in multiple businesses, a lot of entrepreneurial businesses, and none of them met the financial goals that he had, like he wanted to build these businesses and have it sell millions of dollars worth of product or whatever, but most of the time, they just kind of broke even.
And while sharing his disappointment, his frustration with a co-worker of his, an executive with him. He was listening to him (Ernie) talk about like his TV series didn't work out; he took longer to run his iron man than he thought he should, his children's book didn't sell very well. He like looked at him like, “Dude, you get credit for trying.” “You get credit for trying.” And what he thinks is impactful to him about that little mantra is that it kind of reshapes his definition of success, of not relying on success of things he can't control.
Like, for example, if he wrote a book, he has very little control whether or not it sells a million copies, if it gets popular, if Oprah loves it. But he has 100% control whether or not he finishes writing the book. So, if he were to focus his success, his definition of success on things that he can control, then he could be very productive, he can write the book. Because the temptation is he’s going to give up because nothing that he’s done so far has met his definition of success so why even try? Instead, he did that. And so, he can do it again. Even though the sales or whatever, the financial numbers aren't spectacular, he can look back on his life and go, “I did a lot of really great stuff that I was passionate about whether or not it made money or not.” So, you get credit for trying.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Anyone working with customer journeys will deeply resonate with a struggle to align everyone around a shared understanding of the customer experience. As Co-Founder and CEO of TheyDo, the customer journey management solution for enterprises, Jochem van der Veer is pushing the boundaries of modern CX management, enabling true cross-team collaboration in today's increasingly virtual world.
Having worked in interaction and UX design for 10+ years, Jochem is well-versed in the power of truly walking in your customer’s shoes and passionate about helping companies transform towards a customer-centric way of working. His latest SaaS venture, TheyDo, is a platform that enables companies to visualize, standardize, and scale journey management so that their business goals align with customer needs.
Questions
Highlights
Jochem’s Journey
When asked about his journey, Jochem shared that it ties into what we brought or speak about when we talk about customer experience. He has a background in interaction design, UX design and before they started TheyDo, they were consulting services, and basically helping big companies and Fortune 500 kind of like size to transform their way of work and really bring customer experience, which usually happens or was an add-on for customer service. But bring it to the front and allow everyone to see how their work impacts the customer experience and set up processes like design thinking or instill the way of working around journeys in a company so that everyone can participate in customer experience.
And what they noticed was there wasn't a good solution out there to turn journey maps, or insights that you got from let's say, customer service or your voice of customer programme into all your journeys and make sure that everyone could stay aligned other than journeys that are usually created as flat maps to understand part of the customer experience.
So, that's when they started to build something on their own, for them, for their little consulting firm, which they use to do for helping their customers until some of those larger firms like today, they have Johnson and Johnson, NCR, those big firms that really want to deliver a great customer experience across the board, wanted to license their product. And today, they are an enterprise solution and they are just getting started on their growth trajectory.
Key Performance Indicators for a Company to Find Out What is the Journey for Their Customer
Me: Now, customer journey mapping is very important for any business. It's definitely something we talk about all the time. Could you tell us maybe one or two things that are key performance indicators if a company is trying to let's say, do a remap or maybe they've never done it before they're trying to figure out what is the journey of their customer? What do they want the journey to be?
Jochem stated that in terms of performance indicators, he likes to think about like what is the maturity of an organization as a whole, how they can actually work, let's say journey centric or customer centric, but customer centricity is really like a no brainer today, it's really about how to set up a process that works for you as a company and they typically see that comes in stages, you start with like, there's a bunch of teams doing some journeys, figuring out the customer experience through the lens of a customer journey, on a project level, but at some point, to start to bring these things together and start to align across different teams using journeys as the way to do that.
And that's the early sign of, hey, the company is starting to get ready to get basically reorganized around the journeys, around the customer experience and that happens naturally, and that's the moment that they start looking for tools like them or platform like them. But the performance indicator really is about we want to deliver a great customer experience, whatever that means, like Amazon has maybe speed and low prices is their differentiating customer experience where others might go really into the feeling, the part of the experience. So, that is the highest strategic goal of a company, then you need a process and a way of working around your journeys that unifies everyone to work as one.
Things that Your Company is Doing to Help Organizations to Emerge out the Global Event
Me: Have you found that things have changed a lot, especially in terms of customers’ expectations since the pandemic? What are some of the things that your organization is doing that helps to help organizations kind of emerge out of this global event we all had to experience.
Jochem shared that a funny story is that they incorporated, or they started TheyDo right before news started hitting, they are based in Europe. But before the news started hitting there, so they weren't really aware of what this was going to be and they were building a journey management solution to align across the silos in the organization, and across the different teams and keeping everyone in sync with the customer journey.
So, in one way COVID was a great opportunity for them to understand if they were on to something, because if there's one thing that happened in a lot of organizations that the silos that typically are because they have divisions, and each have their own KPIs and focus areas. And we all know that and don't want to work like that, but they do.
But the pandemic showed that within those silos, there were islands, people were forced to work from home if they weren't doing that already, and found it even harder to stay aligned and use more meetings, more PowerPoints, more dashboards, more whiteboard collaboration to stay in sync.
And they actually saw was that lucky for them, this problem became so apparent that it propelled them into a more rapid growth than they expected because people understood that to stay in sync, they needed better tools to align around the customer experience then their dashboards or their whiteboards could offer.
Helping Clients to Master Their Customer Experience and Increase Customer Loyalty
Me: Okay, so we were kind of talking about the KPIs as it relates to customer experience and the journey mapping process. So, I was about to get into asking you what would be some of your recommendations, if a company really wants to, you speak about in your bio that your organization TheyDo, focuses on that whole journey mapping strategy and standardizing. Could you give me an example, you can use any random industry, but just give us an example of what are some of the things that you do as an organization that can help your clients to master their customer experience and increase customer loyalty?
Jochem stated that let's take banking as an example and they believe like the best and the modern companies of the future, they will work journey centric, and to work as one focusing on improving the customer experience. And what that basically means is that they're providing a platform so you can not only map out all their journeys, design them, maintain them, manage them, basically. But also create a unified framework where all these journeys add up to the customer experience, and then start to work from insight to implementation. And he'll get to that in a second. But let's take banking for an example.
So, let's say you’re a big bank and you have all these different products, you have mortgages, you have personal loans, you have bank accounts, of course, and you have all these different financial products.
So, looking at the customer experience, you can imagine for all the different products, there are so many different journeys that you can understand or try to understand how people, customers, non-customers are trying to solve their problems by products or in the case of a mortgage, for instance, get a mortgage. But as you would understand, you want to build a system that actually is scalable, and the customer experience should really be something that you can do together. So in any product the bank offers the user, the customer, the non-customer becoming a customer probably needs to identify herself. So, who are you and what are you doing?
So, let's say they do that digitally so the journey of online identification, that's a little journey, it has a few steps, do this, do that, customer experience this, they confirm, they upload a passport, and they feel happy that they've achieved something. It's a very basic example but it's a journey. But in the customer experience, from the bank perspective, whether a team is focused on mortgages as a product or on personal loans, they're typically not talking to each other, not even connected. But as you can understand the journey of online identification impacts the customer experience in all these different departments.
So, if the bank can then set up a journey framework, unifying all these journeys through the lens of the customer experience, but also dissected through all the different products or domains, or maybe even the regions they are servicing, you can actually create that unified framework. And they're basically providing you with the building blocks and the frameworks to set up a journey management system, and then basically, manage your journeys the way you manage products.
Me: Thank you so much for that example. I think it's important for us to give practical examples so that our listeners can really navigate and marry what you're saying into their own businesses so they can get a better understanding of how this works.
App, Website or Tool that Jochem Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Jochem stated that that's a very good one. He’ll be a little bit transparent here. So, what they're doing is they are the core users of data; they have a journey management setup on their own. But they're actually building a tool for the largest organizations across the globe, enterprise. But they are scaling, so, they're a little bit smaller than the enterprise. Now they're the core users of their own platform. So, they have their journeys mapped out, their journey hierarchy, they prioritize within them.
But they also use Notion and he thinks that is like the shared brain in their team where they document align on a more granular level, then he would say on the journey, really go into details of certain aspects of what they're building, how they're building it, their processes live there, way of working, part of their HR, their company handbook, all that stuff that's living in Notion, and that's the place to go for a sync communication for them when it gets more detailed than the opportunities in a customer journey.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Jochem
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jochem shared that there's a few that comes to mind. So, what has very big impact on him or had a big impact on him, and it was when he was still a student, he was like, 19, or 20 years old, and he read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Mordern Classics from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And even though it might be a little bit outdated today, there are so much new theories about getting into that flow state and what it means and how to experience that or how to get into that flow state.
For the first time in his life, he realized like, hey, there's this mind of mine that is like a muscle and you can train it to focus it on specific parts and really enjoy the process of doing and as a designer, and today, as a CEO of a company, he still believes that getting into that flow state and really enjoying the process of making, of manifesting, of creating is something he learned from that book and he holds very dear. So, that is one that comes to mind a little while back.
And more recently, he’s really into productivity as a leader of a company you have to manage so many different things, juggle a lot of balls at the same time, also have a family of two kids, maybe there will be a third at some point in time, so a lot of balls in the air. But all the getting things done or other productivity methods seem to fail, take into account that there's always more to do and time feels as there's more time available to do more things. So, he’s reading now Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Morals by Oliver Burkeman. And that basically takes a different status as you have basically 4000 weeks to live give and take……weeks to live in your life.
And it's okay to let go certain things and really enjoy the moment and take a different stab at productivity. And he really likes to read that because it gives him peace of mind. So, that's another one, it's doing good for him today.
What Jochem is Really Excited About Now!
Jochem shared that the most exciting thing that's going on right now is making the transition from being a designer, he loves to observe how people behave, especially in a large organization, how they collaborate and how we can improve that, especially from a customer experience standpoint that has been his focus for the last he would say more than a decade almost. But for the first time in their company, they now have a full fledged product team that also includes a designer, product designer, and his role is not in the product anymore, it's really on the business itself, more than it was ever. And he’s transitioning in that role, learning, trying to become that support for the whole team, for not only the managers, but also for everyone in the company to say, “Hey, we're going to do this together and I have your back.” And that role is entirely new to him. So, figuring it out as they go. But that's the exciting part of creating this journey management business.
Where Can We Find Jochem Online
LinkedIn – Jochem van der Veer
Website – http://www.theydo.io
Website – http://www.theydo.io/podcast/
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jochem Uses
Jochem stated that he’s not always thinking about quotes, but one that comes to mind often is and he thinks it was Picasso, it's attributed to him most is like, “The meaning of life is to find your gift, and the purpose of life is to give it away.” And he loves that phrasing.
Me: The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away. It's really profound. What is your interpretation of that quote?
Jochem stated that you can say it in the altruistic way but as everyone is today, also working in business, he takes it a little bit differently. He really enjoys being good at some stuff and he also knows his own limitations. But bringing out what you're really good at to the world is such a nice way to enjoy your days, instead of being only goal oriented. We have to perform, we have to deliver, we have to drive revenue, we have to create customer experiences that people love and enjoy is actually the act of doing every day waking up, getting to do the work, whatever the work is you do and enjoying that, enjoying the process of doing that is amazing. And if you found your gifts, whether you're working in CX or customer service, and you really love what you're doing, then basically you are giving away your gift. And he thinks that's an amazing way to go about your day.
Me: It's like you're living a life that is filled with passion. And you're passing that passion on to others.
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