Jeannie Walters: 0:10

It's another Experience Action podcast, and today is our special episode, CX Pulse Check, where, once a month, we check in to find out what's happening in customer experience and what we can all learn from it. I'm so excited that you're here. My name is Jeannie Walters, I am founder and CEO of Experience Investigators and today I'm thrilled to have a special co-host with us. David Sakamoto is a name many of us already know. He has been well known in the customer success space and I was lucky enough to do some work while he was at GitLab. David, welcome to the Experience Action Podcast and to the CX Pulse Check. We're so happy you're here.

David Sakamoto: 0:52

Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm super excited. I've been really looking forward to this because I really admire what you do and the thought leadership you bring to the industry and educating a broad range of us in different functions and areas, and so it's super appreciated and I'm thankful and grateful for the opportunity to connect.

Jeannie Walters: 1:09

Thank you, you're literally making me blush. I don't know if you see that. So, David, I would love for you to share a little bit more about your career, your background. You have such an interesting, diverse journey. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

David Sakamoto: 1:25

Yeah, I have this very eclectic background. I always laugh for the customer success because you kind of need that demand of how do you build things to scale, having great product-led value, adoption type of methodologies, collaborating across broad groups. But it's been super helpful and so I'm grateful for customer success because it's helped me leverage that diverse experience that I built out.

Jeannie Walters: 2:02

Yeah, well, if our listeners and viewers have not already started following you on LinkedIn, I recommend they do that, because you're always sharing good things too, there. So thank you for that. And I'm excited to jump in because I think a lot of times when we talk about customer experience, we often are kind of bringing that one angle, and I love that you're bringing a slightly different angle with the background and customer success. So can you share a little bit of your definition of customer success as it? Fits into customer experience.

David Sakamoto: 2:32

Absolutely. You know, I think ultimately customer success is helping customers achieve their desired outcome with your solution. And I really think about it as kind of two ways. It's one you're driving customer value through adoption of the solution, building a, you know, designing an engagement. That's just your team, but really across the organization. How do you deliver value to the customer? How do you deliver those outcomes? But then the second part of that is on the interest of the business, right? So ultimately it's there to drive, you know, revenue growth and minimum revenue protection, gross retention, but ideally you're going to be driving growth. So I always think of it as that two view is you know, driving that value, but on the same part I'm using that value to drive growth to the business.

Jeannie Walters: 3:14

And I think it was kind of born out of the whole B2B tech industry and that those products. But the exciting thing I'm seeing is now people are applying these same kind of CX organizational structures and principles or CS, I should say, customer success principles to other types of businesses, mostly B2B. But they are really exploring like how can we make sure it's good for this one account, this one client, and what can we learn from that and pull across to make it successful for everybody? Right, Because we're learning all the time in B2B. It's more of a partnership, I think, than sometimes we give it credit for.

David Sakamoto: 3:52

Yeah, absolutely and it's one of those things that's constantly evolving right. I think of perpetual software was kind of, hey, high CSAT, we got to support renewal, right. But then when SaaS came along, we realized that the customer is not, doesn't own the solution, so you have to provide that continuous value. But yeah, it's really great. I mean the, the basic principle of you know, driving growth through value delivery can be applied everywhere. I'm just figuring out what is the appropriate approach, given the economics of the solution your customer needs and so kind of. How do you design that? Whether it's B2B or B2C, you know the same principles can be applied, but you have to think about thoughtfully and very specifically to that customer set and product.

Jeannie Walters: 4:34

Yep, exactly. Well, I'm excited to dive in. We have a couple of articles media to share, because this is all about kind of finding out what are we talking about right now, and it's July 2024 and people are talking about shocker AI.

David Sakamoto: 4:54

Isn't it everywhere? It's great.

Jeannie Walters: 4:55

It's everywhere and so I wanted to start with this article. It's actually from. I wanted to start with this article from Glossy, and this is really where we are looking at the state of AI in fashion, how AI is transforming design, marketing and the next generation of CX. And what stood out to me and I should say this is a sponsored article, so there was a report sponsored by BASIC slash department, I think is how you say that. But what was kind of interesting to me was that a lot of the things that we talk about with how AI can personalize the experience, make the experience better in general, fashion is kind of waking up in a different way, and so they're applying some of those things but really making sure that they are kind of customizing for the customer, and there's this whole other kind of retail and seasonality aspect to this. So what did you think here? What did this bring up for you when thinking about how fashion is leaning into AI as well?

David Sakamoto: 5:57

Yeah Well, first, I just love just how many different applications that AI is being applied to.

David Sakamoto: 6:04

So, there's this huge diversity of industries that people are using AI for. But it's funny. When I read through it I was thinking, wow, there's also a ton of commonalities, right? So you think about retail. They're driving revenue, they got supply chain optimization, inventory management, they have customer service and ideally, you know, what we're discussing is's there's all these kind of broader things, but ultimately, at the end of the day, you're you're buying fashion for an individual need or purpose. So like, how do you, how are they using AI to customize that specifically for for you and your, your taste and their fit? So it was super interesting to kind of. You know, it's always delightful to see the applications there, but it was great. I alignment in terms of what we're trying to do B2B and what they're trying to do in fashion.

Jeannie Walters: 6:54

Well, and I think one of the things that I'm kind of watching as well is that there's been this whole movement around kind of personal values as well, and so one of those might be sustainability, or how is the workforce treated, and people are starting to buy based on their values in bigger and bigger ways. The next generations coming up are very focused on this. So one of the things that struck me about kind of how we customize the experience could be around that right Could be around saying we want to be as transparent as possible, so we're going to use AI to really show you where does this supply chain lead. How are the suppliers providing workforce enablement and things like that, so that people can feel really good about their personal purchases as well? And the article didn't dive into that, but I'm starting to see that in fashion in different ways, especially around sustainability and kind of making sure that we have a circular economy and all of those things. So it just like opens up all this possibility around scale, around some of those very personal choices.

David Sakamoto: 8:00

And especially there was a funny SNL skit about that. What's the thing where it's called that kind of speed junk fashion?

Jeannie Walters: 8:09

Oh, yes, I know exactly the skit you're talking about.

David Sakamoto: 8:12

Yes, but like having that visibility to know that the products you purchased were done with labor that's treated fairly, that's paid fairly, that's working reasonable hours and reasonable conditions. But oh, talking about AI, my phone just turns on automatically. So there we go. But yeah, it's interesting how that would be applied um there. But there's there's so many alignments in like B2B of like customization and how we look at digital um, you know, turning contraction in terms of the return rates for those products, so it's very cool.

Jeannie Walters: 8:48

So, and I think the other thing that AI can open up is, there are times, I'm sure, like in customer success, that you start to see patterns, but it's not because the data is telling you necessarily. It's because you have two customer success managers who are talking about clients, right, and they go oh, they said no because of this. Oh, my guy said no because of this, too. Right, they start finding patterns before they become data points, and I think AI is going to allow us to recognize those trends and patterns in an earlier way too. So your point about returns, I think that's a huge opportunity.

David Sakamoto: 9:24

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's funny. I'm kind of a CS nerd, if you haven't figured out already, so I'll think in my free time of like, oh, what if I could do all these things? What if I could customize, give you exactly the right thing, exactly the right time, exactly the right person. Literally it's serving just-in-time content or engagement, but ultimately it's always been constrained by how much data can you consume and manage? Because you're looking at adoption data you consume and manage Because you're looking at adoption data. You're looking at sentiment. You're looking at different personas. They're all different levels in their journey. They all have different issues, different specific needs, and so you know the data management aspect of AI. And being able to do that and not resulting from a fixed analyst project is super fascinating.

David Sakamoto: 10:16

Like I think you know it's, we're just at the front end of it. We're still trying to figure out how to. I mean we're very nascent in terms of the technology and how do we manage that, but it's really exciting.

Jeannie Walters: 10:26

Yeah, I think so too, and I think that's something that the more we learn about what AI can do there, the more we're going to lean into it and the more we're going to, the faster we're all going to get on it and everything. So, and speaking of customer success and software, and hey, why not AI too? Let's talk about it. Yeah, this was really I. This is really about kind of the software market. This is from OpenPR and the headline is Customer Success Software Market Looks to Expand Its Size in Overseas Market, and while that's the headline, this was really just about the growth of the market for customer success software and how there's so much demand right now for really figuring this out. So I thought it would be interesting to get your perspective on kind of where are we in this journey and what should our listeners and the people who are leading their customer experience and customer success efforts, what should we know about kind of this drive, this demand for customer success success?

David Sakamoto: 11:27

Yeah, I guess. Jeannie, can I ask you a question? Am I allowed to answer that question without talking about AI, because it seems like AI is the big elephant in everybody's room. I know you are allowed to do that question without talking about AI, because it seems like AI, is the big elephant in everybody's room.

Jeannie Walters: 11:37

I know you are allowed to do whatever you want here. David, you just said you were a CS nerd. You are our people, yeah all right.

David Sakamoto: 11:44

Okay, we got to put on our nerd caps. You know, I think the AI piece is going to be, and we talked a little about just harnessing all that data yeah, which will be. You know, if you think of customers, very similar customer experience. Like you have an immense amount of data sources in which you know we're in the front end of that maturity cycle, right, and so it's. You see cool things like, hey, I can, you know, like probably everybody, independent of their function, knows, like you summarize your Zoom meeting, right, and actions and stuff like that.

Jeannie Walters: 12:09

There's a bunch of productivity. Isn't that so cool?

David Sakamoto: 12:10

That's like one of my favorite features.

David Sakamoto: 12:13

You know it's like, hey, you know auto-respond to emails, which you know I think there's still a little touch and go of how to do those, the quality of how much time you're saving there. You know you're seeing better digital engagement. You know you're seeing much better chatbots and things like that, you know, helping you customize your content in a more dynamic way. Predictive analytics have been around for a while. They're just getting better. Sentiment analysis is always one that I think is better for, like technology, rather because you can cherry pick qualitative feedback to kind of tell whatever story you want. So I like the fact of kind of abstracting it for technology. To summarize, but I think those you know get on the front end of the cycle Moving forward.

David Sakamoto: 12:54

I think there's some really fascinating things around.

David Sakamoto: 12:56

How do you get more sophisticated on just your view of customers, like segmentation, whether market-led, you know what region are they in, what vertical are they in, what's the maturity of engagement with your solution, attribution, like what activities drive the right results. So it's about getting that right thing at the right time. What is the right thing? Like our ability to kind of understand and harness that A-B testing, all of those cool things. But you know, what I'm seeing is it kind of gets back to the. You know, the customer success platforms are kind of taking that front end, that productivity stuff, which is great. I mean it's saving a ton of time. Efficiency, especially in a market where companies need to be more efficient, right, and that's super helpful. But I think really in the future, correlating activity to result and being able to predict that in a very dynamic real-time way and drive the right action, whether it's a CSM or whether it's digital engagement, there's a really fantastic opportunity, not only for the again going back to customer success, not only for the customers, but also for the company.

Jeannie Walters: 14:07

Right, and I think there are two things that kind of made me pause, I guess, and think about this, when I saw there's all this worldwide activity right now around this, like everybody's trying to adopt AI, everybody's trying to figure it out, everybody knows that it is the solution to something, we just don't always know what the problem is yet right.

Jeannie Walters: 14:29

And when I saw that this was such a worldwide demand, one of the things that struck me was you know, we talk a little bit about inclusive customer experience, and some of that means speaking the customer's language. Some of that means understanding their region, their life experiences, where they are from, and so we've been limited, because not every human speaks every language, right, so we can only have so much. But now, with AI, we're able to get closer to that. But, going back to what you said about the autoresponder, we have to make sure it's actually human enough, right, we have to make sure that we have guardrails.

Jeannie Walters: 15:06

You know, my older son is in college now and he's taking an English course right now and he said one of his teachers dinged him for AI language and he had written the whole thing. So now he takes his draft and puts it into the AI checker and changes it if it says it's too close to AI, and so I'm like we're literally in like bizarro land. So I think we're going to like really have to think about that as the leaders in customer success and customer experience, about when we just flip the switch and we think like, oh, ai knows the language. We can just do this. We have to be really cautious about that and make sure that we're taking the right steps to really show up the way we want to show up, because otherwise, just like it can lead to organizational success, that could be a disaster for an organization.

David Sakamoto: 15:58

I think we've all gone through our kind of discovery cycle in AI, because it was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And I had plenty of late nights playing around, chat to GTP, asking him questions, and you're like, oh, I'm going to start deploying this and I think a lot of us personally, but also in our organizations Well, wait a minute, this is there's a. It brings up a lot of questions. I'll I'll pick the simple one right.

Jeannie Walters: 16:22

Um, you know, write my email here's my bullets and writes email and I'm like, Whoa, that's a, that's a lot of work.

David Sakamoto: 16:27

And that's not how I would write it and it, you know, it's using very flowery language and it's you know, kind of edit and I got it. I didn't. I don't know if I spent. I don't know if I saved time or spent more time there. Yeah, it's just a basic, commonly understood example. But I think all organizations they look to apply the technology, they're going through that discovery cycle around. You know privacy and is it producing the right content? Is line with what we'd want? Is it actually correct? Right, right.

David Sakamoto: 17:00

Because I can make some things up, sometimes too right.

Jeannie Walters: 17:11

Yeah, yeah, for sure, and I think that's the.

Jeannie Walters: 17:12

I think right now we're going to go through kind of the rocky middle of this journey, where we're going to figure out a lot of things just by mistakes happening and by people maybe making the wrong choice and then learning from it and all of those things. So I think we have to both have those guardrails for our teams. But then we also have to have some grace for, like, yes, we're all figuring this out and we're all experimenting. So, and speaking of teams, I had the privilege of working with GitLab a little bit and yeah, thank you for that.

Jeannie Walters: 17:40

Well, oh my gosh, thank you. It was such a fun thing to do, but one of the things that just impressed me to no end was the transparency there. Like it is at a whole other level, and when people talk about transparency they don't, they are not talking about what you all do, and I just thought it was such a great way to build trust and and really the team embraced it in such a powerful way and and so one of the last article here that I have I think it kind of goes into that team dynamic a little bit and how important it is to show up with trust and transparency. This is from Business Insurance. You never know the sources I'm going to bring on, but, this said, focus on core values improves comp disability outcomes. And this is from a risk manager.

Jeannie Walters: 18:28

And the basic gist of this is that a company was having a lot of workman's comp claims, and not only that, but once people have a workman's comp claim, they often will just not come back. They will have permanent disability and just not be back in the workforce. And so what this company did they're called Overhead Door Corporation they figured out. They said, well, what if we treat people differently when they're entering into that workman's comp journey, and that meant assigning somebody who personally really checked in with them, helped them navigate, helped them with the medical stuff and really just showed up with a lot more empathy, and what they found was all of their stats improved, including the return to work.

Jeannie Walters: 19:14

The number of workman's comp claims actually went down, people were more likely to stay with the company all sorts of great outcomes, and I think so much of this relates to that idea of like let's be authentic and transparent and build trust within our organizations, because, if you think about what this does for the customer experience, of course you want somebody who's been there a while, who knows what they're doing, who is able to come back, who is loyal to the company, who knows the rules, all of those things you and I have both been through where, when you hire somebody, it's an expensive process, it's expensive in time and effort and everything, and so this is just something that I thought was like a great case study of when we talk about trust and transparency and building on values. This is what it looks like, and I know you did that at GitLab, so I'd love your perspective here.

David Sakamoto: 20:05

Yeah, and I always think from a CX perspective, you can't have a great customer experience without a great employee experience.

David Sakamoto: 20:11

Amen, yes, and so I think, ultimately, investment in having a strong set of core values that are operationalized, that are communicated, role modeled, are really critical. And it's not, you know, it's. It's funny I gave a presentation on how to scale you know, a company to some early stage companies and I and I included values Like you wouldn't think of, like develop strong set of values, like it seems kind of squishy human stuff, but, like you said, it's it. It has. You know, you're going to scale the organization as you get bigger, larger teams, you're going to have that commonly shared set of values that, above the hundreds or maybe thousands of micro decisions you may make a day, they're going to be made in directional alignment, right, yes, and ultimately, if you can retain people, you can attract people.

David Sakamoto: 21:01

These have hard, you know, positive, have hard positive impact on cost savings. And I'll give an example when I first started GitLab, we were smaller, right, so we had a company meeting every day. The new team members get introduced and one of the questions was why did you come to GitLab? And over 90% of the time people would say the values.

David Sakamoto: 21:23

I love that, I love that and it was funny On top of that, our CEO said hey, by the way, do you know why I asked that? And he says I want to remind you all why people are deciding to join the company, so to make sure we preserve these things. So yeah, it was interesting values and I, if we got too big to have a company meeting every day. I still ask all new team members that, and they would inevitably almost say that every time.

Jeannie Walters: 21:50

You know it's a great example of. It kind of goes back to what we were talking about with even the purchase choices People are. We want to live our values as people. I think that has just that's an inherently human part of the experience of being on this world and so aligning that in the right way with both where you shop and where you work and the people you work with, I think that just enriches people's lives in a really powerful way.

David Sakamoto: 22:19

Totally. You nailed it, in fact, I would. People would oftentimes ask me what makes somebody successful at GitLab and I would always say you know, there's a different operating principles but, like one of them would be, if the core values of GitLab align to your core values, that's great, right, that's a good foundation. If they don't, then this is not the place for you. Like, I saw people kind of come in and that person rejects the system or otherwise. It's because, at the end of the day, oftentimes they didn't have alignment to those values like transparency and collaboration and diversity. So, yeah, we spend so much time at work right, you don't want to be somebody else and we spend so much time at work right, you don't want to be somebody else.

David Sakamoto: 23:01

You want to be authentic to yourself.

Jeannie Walters: 23:03

That is so, so true. And, like I was talking about with the transparency at GitLab, that impressed me so much because it also allowed people to show up as their authentic selves and kind of not apologize for it. And everybody was because there was kind of nowhere to hide. Right, there was no need to hide there was. It was just about like, hey, we're all trying to go after this common goal, we're all trying to do our best work and we're going to do our best to get there. And so it was really. It's a powerful culture.

Jeannie Walters: 23:35

And then you know, I I am not quite as big as GitLab, but we are scaling my business now, not quite at the same scale, but one of the things we do is we have a quarterly meeting and every time we go over our values and it's because I don't want people to forget, I don't want them to forget that we are committed to certain things. And part of that is I always think of values as it becomes what you do. But it's really about who you are and how you show up, and I think that's where we, as CX and CS leaders, have a dramatic impact on that, because these are people who are showing up not just for one another in a powerful way, but also for our customers. So they have to align with all of these ideas.

David Sakamoto: 24:22

So, yeah, that was, that was cool. A lot of times I tell people it's not like you have to do this whole like major thing, like just the I love the fact. Just by talking about it, you know, as a leader of your, of your business, it tells people that it's important, right, I was at, I got, I was lucky enough to stay at the St Regis one time and their experience was phenomenal. Every single person was very consistent, from a CX, like everybody went above and beyond. And I asked I caught the GM one time. I said what do you do? And he funny thing, what he said was every day we take out one of the values and someone brings up examples of how they leveraged it. Just a simple conversation.

David Sakamoto: 25:00

And I used the transparency. One was one that came across it at GitLab. When I first started I thought I was transparent, right, and so everybody's in software and once in a while you have a problem in software. What? Once in a while? Right. And so I think of the big customer, that big problem, and you come and you go. Oh, you have the meeting with engineering and you're like, okay, what do you do? Here's the information, and then you go, what's the next step, Okay, great. And at the end of the meeting we'd go okay, what are you going to tell the customer, right, yep, at GitLab we would just tell them everything. In fact we had a couple of times we had a pretty big problem we thought there was.

David Sakamoto: 25:34

Luckily it didn't come about, but we practically went out to customers and told them, actively went out to customers and told them hey, if you, we, we're aware of this thing may happen, if it does, and we give them all information, to even our biggest customers, and I'll tell you, when I first started it made me super nervous, like, oh, are we really going to say that?

David Sakamoto: 25:49

And what I learned from that experience was it ultimately built a lot of trust because customers knew we would tell them everything, we knew we would never hide things from our customers, and so very much it helped build a brand and some, you know, and not only helping existing customers. Sometimes prospects would come because we know during the sales cycle we didn't tell them make up things Right, and I always got asked, like when customers say things get oversold right and I'll go. I didn't really have that problem because we were saying this works, works, this doesn't work, that we had maturity, we'd openly tell customers. So it's, I totally think, as you think about scaling your business with values like. It does not only help internal, it helps economics, but also provides you know your brand and what customers should expect and how they engage you.

Jeannie Walters: 26:37

Yep, exactly Exactly, and that's something we talk about with our clients is this idea of you have to know who you are first before you can show the customer who you are, and that means that you have to have alignment around that, and if you don't, then everybody's coming to the table with their own life experience and judgment calls, and it's not that either one is wrong.

Jeannie Walters: 26:59

Right, like you and I might have a different opinion about how to handle something. They might both be correct, but then they create that inconsistency for the customer and lowered expectations and all of that. So it really is something that I think we have to weave into everything we do and how we show up, both inside and outside our organization, and I know you've been leading the way. So thank you for that, and but overall, this was a great conversation. I feel like we could keep going, but people probably have things to do other than listen to our podcast, but this was so great. David, thank you so much for all that you're doing, and if our listeners are interested, how can they connect with you?

David Sakamoto: 27:41

Like I said, linkedin. Linkedin is probably the best way. Feel free, I'm active and responsive there. I'm also on Twitter Papa Power at Twitter but LinkedIn is probably the best one. Linkedin or Twitter are probably the best ways.

Jeannie Walters: 27:53

Awesome, and we'll put that in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for being here and thank all of you for being here with us. I am so thrilled that you are on this journey with us to learn more about customer experience. As you know, you can leave me a voicemail at askjeannie. vip and I will respond on the Experience Action Podcast. So don't be shy. You can leave that with your name or anonymously, and once a month we'll bring you CX Pulse Check so you can keep your finger on the pulse of what's next. Thank you so much for being here and we will talk next week.