>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE, covering COMCAST Innovation Day, brought to you by COMCAST. >> Hey welcome back here ready Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're at the COMCAST Silicon Valley Innovation Center. You know there's innovation centers all over Silicon Valley we hadn't been to the COMCAST one until we came to this event, it's very very cool, I think it's like five storeys in this building, where they're developing a lot of new technologies, partnering with technologies, but today the focus is on customer experience, brought together a panel of people to talk about some of the issues, and we're excited to have a representative from a company that's really out on the edge of defining customer experience, and measuring customer experience, joined by Ganesh Subramanian. He is the senior director of product marketing for Gainsight. Ganesh, great to see you. >> Great, happy to be here. >> Yeah, so I'm a huge Nick Mehta fan, I've interviewed him before I've been following Gainsight for a long time and you know, it really struck me the first time that, that Nick said you know CRM is you know, basically order management. It's not customer relationship management, you know customer relationships are complicated, and they're multi-faceted and there's lots of touch points and you guys really try to build a solution to help customers manage, actually do manage that relationship so they have a great experience with their customer. >> Yeah that's totally right, and not to say that CRM isn't an important ingredient when you make that cake, but there's a lot of other touchpoints right? How are people interacting with your digital products? What is that customer journey across sales, services, support? How does all of that come together? So what Gainsight does is really provide the customer cloud to bring all of those solutions together so that businesses can really operate in a more customer-centric way. >> So you, you said an interesting thing earlier in the conversation about customer success being measured just by revenue, again kind of the CRMy kind of approach to worth versus measuring success and measuring lifetime value and measuring so many other things that can define a great relationship. What are some of those things that people should be thinking about? What are some of those other metrics out there beyond you know, did I get a, you know, a net increase value of my contract? >> Yeah absolutely you know one way we think about it at Gainsight is the two-by-two of customer experience and customer outcomes. So, you can think about experience just as how happy are people on a day-to-day basis interacting with you, your products, your organization, your team? The flipside's also true though. You can have the happiest customer, that isn't getting what they want out of their product or service. In a B2B context we think about it as tangible ROI or outcomes. So at Gainsight we're ultimately trying to make sure our clients are delivering on both of those vectors. They want happy, successful clients, ultimately that's going to lead to the recurring revenue cycle: retention, growth, adoption and advocacy. >> So where does that kind of tie together? 'Cause I'm sure there's a lot of people that think those are in conflict right? That if I bend over backwards and I provide this great experience and these great services and all these things that this is going to negatively impact my profitability, it's going to negatively impact my transactional value. How should they be measuring those things? How should they be balancing, 'cause 'cause, you know, you can sell dollars for 90 cents, have a really happy customer, not going to be in business very long. >> Yeah I think that's kind of the secret sauce right? True innovation, what we talked about today at COMCAST, a lot about, how do you take that next step forward? How do you improve your products and services in ways that make customers, customers for life? Right, and if you make the right investments, you actually find out that maybe it's, it's minor change, maybe it's process change in your call center or call service, maybe it's implementing AI in an appropriate way, so that you're able to deliver more value with less time, or maybe it's transformative, maybe it's something that's a new service you're offering all together, that's making customers get outsized or unrealized returns on their investment. Well, it doesn't matter what that investment was, if it's going to long term drive your company to higher valuations and greater competitive differentiation. So we don't think about customer experience on kind of below the line, what's going to get me the incremental ROI, we really think about it as a fundamental differentiator for your business. >> Right. Now you're in charge of, of kickin' off new products. >> That's right. >> And you know one of the things I think is really interesting about the COMCAST voice, which has had a lot of conversation today, is I still get emails from COMCAST telling me how I should use it! Right 'cause it's a different behavior, it's a different experience that I'm not necessarily used to. As you look forward, you know introducing new products, what are some of the, the kind of trends that you're keepin an eye on, what do you think is going to kind of change and impact some of the things you guys are bringing to market? What are some of the new things we should be thinking about in customer experience? >> Yeah absolutely. So one thing at Gainsight, one thing we've learned leading the customer success movement is that to be customer-centric is more than a given function, or a given team, customer success managers kind of took the mantle in B2B and started leading the charge, leading the way towards being more customer-centric but that team on their own can't do everything. Nor do they want to, or can they, right? So, one big change and one big innovation that we're leading the front on is how do you bring all those different teams together? Which is why we launched the Gainsight customer cloud. So what we're doing is we're bringing disparate data together, that used to be silohed in functional specific software, bring that into a single source of truth, to truly provide an actionable customer 360, one that provides meaning to different teams with the right context, and then drive action off of that. So whether it's an automated email to get, improve product adoption in the COMCAST example, or maybe it's some kind of escalation effort, where you need a cross-functional team to get together on the same page, to improve a red customer, or maybe it's something that's in the product itself, by just making the product easier to use or a little bit more intuitive, the, all of your end users will end up benefiting from that. What Gainsight's tryna do is to try figure out, how can we break down these walls across these different teams, make it easier for people to collaborate to improve the customer experience. >> So Ganesh I got to tease you right, 'cause everyone's eyes just rolled out when you said 360 view of the customer right, we've been talking about this forever. >> Yeah. >> So what's different, you know, what's different today? Not specifically for what you're tryna do with your product and share that too, but more generally, that, that we're getting closer to that vision. >> Yeah. >> That we're actually getting closer to delivering on, on the promise of a 360 view, and information from that view that will enable us to take positive action? >> I love that question, and I think whenever you hear the word 360 view or digital transformation, you're going to get a couple eye-rolls in the crowd right? And, I actually totally believe that, that, you know, to date I think we've done things in too much of a waterfall methodology. Let's spend three years, get a unified idea across all our disparate data sources, and then we're going to be customer-centric. I think we've learned our lessons over the course of time that, hey you know, the end result doesn't really materialize in the time frame and ROI you expected, so why don't we start with the other end of the spectrum? What are the gaps that customers are perceiving? If it's just, let me, go back to that example of product ease of use. Are we identifying that as a major gap? Then how do we go solve that? How do we reverse engineer that process? And by the way that doesn't just fall on the product team to make the product easier, services need to onboard customers more effectively, you need documentation so that they can access and understand the key aspects of your product in a more concrete way. So all of that needs to come together. So I think the biggest difference between what we used to talk about, with 360s and digital transformation, to where we are today, is really the context and the outcome you're trying to deliver, and then reverse engineer the 360 that's most meaningful to you. So to make that a little bit more clear, what does that mean at the grassroots level? If you're a services team member you're working on projects. Does a 360 view about the next opportunity from a financial or commercial perspective really matter to you? How far down in that 360 view do you have to scroll before you start seeing information that's relevant? So at Gainsight what we're trying to do is use a many-to-many relationship mapping so that if you're a services team member, or a sales member, the view you're accessing is curated to what you need to actually do. >> Right. >> And that'll drive adoption of the digital transformation efforts within your organization. >> Right. Which then obviously opens up the opportunity for automation and AI and ML to, as you said, context is so important to make sure the right information is getting to the right person at the right time for the context of the job that I have and building that customer relationship. >> That's right. Yeah we think about AI all the time how's that going to improve the customer experience? It starts with that data foundation and understanding hey what should we own and what should we leverage? And being very conscious about what you're about to do, and then second, thinking about those point problems and, again, reverse engineering how can we staff augment, or make the experience better, maybe make the lives of our employees a little bit better, when they're engaging with customers. Ultimately it's got to be in service of people. >> Right. Well Ganesh thanks for sharing your story. Again I think what you guys are doing, and Nick and Gainsight is so important in terms of redefining this beyond order management, and to actually customer relationship management. >> So, >> That's right. >> Thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Awesome. >> My pleasure. >> All - >> All right. >> Thank you. >> He's Ganesh I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE we're at the COMCAST Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back, get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, here in Sunnyvale, California. They had a really cool thing today, it was a customer experience day, brought a bunch of Comcast executives and a bunch of thought leaders in the customer experience base. We're excited to come down and sit in and talk to some of the guests, and really excited about our next guest, 'cause he's an anthropologist, he's Brian Solis, digital analyst, author, analyst, anthropologist, futurist, Brian, you've got it all going on, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. >> Course, this is a really great conversation, so, I'm happy to be here. >> So first off, just kind of impressions of the conversation earlier today, talking about customer experience, the expectation, consumerization of IT is something we talk a lot about, where people's expectations of the way this stuff is supposed to work, change, all the time, and what was magical and almost impossible, like talking on a cell phone in your car, suddenly becomes expected and the norm, so how do you think of this, as you look at these big, sweeping changes that we're going through? >> Well today's conversation I think has been sort of, a spotlight on what's most important, which is innovation not for the sake of innovation, but innovation for the sake of pushing the customer experience forward, changing customer behaviors in a way that's going to create a new standard for experiences, and that way you become the leader in engagement. Everybody else has to catch up to you, and what was so important is that we're here at a company with all the love that wasn't the best in customer experience several years ago, and now they're sort of one of the pioneers in what customer experience needs to be, from a technological standpoint, a customer service standpoint, and an overall experience standpoint, right? >> I want to jump into the voice capability specifically, because I don't think there's really enough accolades as to what Comcast has achieved with the voice remote, I think if you don't have it you don't know it's there, and the ability to migrate across hundreds or thousands of channels, multiple services, to find the show that you want with just the ask of your voice is amazing. What's even more amazing is trying to teach people to actually navigate that way, so changing people's behavior in the way they interact with devices is not a simple thing. >> So, it's come up, and it's an expression shared in many UI and UX circles, which is the best interface is no interface, and in many ways, voice was the next frontier, that's a frontier that was pioneered, I think at a mass level by Amazon and Alexa, Apple and Siri, Google and Ok Google, we're really starting to see that voice as a UI is much more natural, what makes it so complex is all of the back end, I think Comcast has done a really nice job in the simplistic linguistic engagement of saying the name of a TV show or a genre of shows or movies, and then the back end to be reimagined in order to bring you something that's not just this long list of stuff, that is much more intuitive and helps you get to what they call time to joy, much faster. That's game changing, right, but that isn't just something that Comcast looked, for example, to just Alexa, or anything specifically, it looked, and also, especially not to other cable companies. They looked to the best-in-class experiences in every area, to pick those parts and build something altogether new that becomes the new standard, and I think voice, one of the things that you and I were talking about, Jeff, earlier, was kids, there was a time when they would walk up to a screen and they still do to some regard, where they want to do this, but I have a three year old at home who has a toy remote control, and I had to record video from afar of just watching her talk into her toy remote, "Mickey Mouse Club, Mickey Mouse Club," and just sitting there, with all the patience in the world, nothing was happening but expecting that something was going to happen. And it's just a new standard. The other thing, though, is that we're not done, we now live in an era of AI, machine learning, automation, so personalization now is really going to start to build upon voice experiences where it's just simply turning on the TV is going to give you instant options of all of the things you're most likely going to want to watch all on one nav. >> Right, it's just, we say that and yet we still have qwerty keyboards, right, which were specifically designed to slow people down and yet now we're not using arm typewriters anymore, and we still have qwerty keyboards, so changing people's behavior is not easy, and it's interesting to see kind of these generational shifts based on the devices in which they grew up using, kind of define the way in which they expect everything else to work. But it's, I still get the email, maybe, or even, they talked about here at Comcast, where instead of just saying NCAA Football, it knows I like to watch Stanford football, it suggests, maybe you should just say Stanford football, so there's still kind of a lot of education, surprising amount of education that has to happen. >> Yes and no, if you think about the conversation, I often talk about it in terms of iteration and innovation, iteration is doing the same things better, innovation is creating new value, and if you look at the evolution of the remote control, I mean just go back 50 years, it has gotten progressively worse over time, in fact on average, today's remote control has 70 buttons on it, and if you think about iteration in that regard, we've completely started to fail in the user interface, I don't know that anybody has mastered their relationship with the remote control except for some geeks, so I think if anything, voice is going to change the game for the better. >> Yeah, I was in the business for a long time, and now I know what killed the VCR, right, was the flashing 12, nobody could ever get their flashing 12, and for all the young people, look it up on the internet, you'll figure out what a VCR and a flashing 12 is. So you talk about something called Generation C, what is Generation C, why should we be paying attention? >> Look, I think voice is a good example of Generation C, so anybody who uses, you mentioned qwerty, right, I don't know that I've actually even used qwerty in a sentence in a really long time, but I'm old enough to, I trained on a manual typewriter back in the day, so it doesn't mean that I don't get it, it means that my behaviors and my expectations as a human being have changed, because of my relationship, my personal relationship, so for example, in consumerization of technology and IT, my personal relationship has changed with technology, and so what I had found in my research over the years was especially when it comes to customer experience, if you study a customer journey, and you look at demographics of these personas that we've created, you can see specifically that people who live a mobile-first lifestyle, regardless of age, will make decisions the same way, they're increasingly impatient, they're demanding, they're self-centered, I call 'em accidental narcissists, they, time, convenience are really important, they want personalization, their standards are much different than the personas that we've developed in the past, and so I gave it a name, which is Generation C, because it wasn't one, where C stood for connected, it wasn't one bound by age, or traditional demographics, education, income, it was defined by shared interests, behaviors, and shared outcomes, and it was a game changer for all things, if you're going to point innovation or customer experience or whatever it is, and you're going to aim at that growing customer segment, then they're going to have a different set of needs than your traditional customer, right? >> But it's so bizarre, again, how quickly the novel becomes expected baseline, and how the great search algorithm that we get out of Google, which is based on lots and lots and lots and lots of data, and a bunch of smart people and a whole bunch of hardware and software, suddenly now we expect that same search result if we're searching on, pick some random retailer or some other random website, when in fact, that is special, but we have this crazy sliding scale of what's expected and how can companies stay out in front of that, at least chase close behind, 'cause it's a very different world in how fast the expectations change. >> I'm sorry, I totally spaced out 'cause my attention span went away. I'm just kidding, I'm kidding. >> Well I didn't even get to the attention economy question yet. >> It's, you're competing at a much different level today, and I think that's what so disruptive for companies, is that they're still thinking that momentum and progress and experience and performance and success, I have to say that success is the worse teacher when it comes to innovation because you're basing your decisions on the future based on things that you did in the past. So what do companies need to get, is that the customers change, I'll give you an example. I think in many ways, companies compete against Uber, right, because Uber has changed the game for what it takes to get a service brought to you, and to give it to you and take you where you need to go, where time and convenience are big factors of that. So for example, one of the things I studied was how long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open Lyft in certain markets, and the reason that I wanted to do that was I wanted to show that the number went down every single year. Now, for example, Uber will advertise in Sydney that the average pickup time is three minutes and 39 seconds, because it knows it adds a competitive advantage over everybody else, because it's important, because once that experience happens to you and you get something your way fast, you're not going to suddenly realize, when you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles, that "Well, I understand that this isn't Uber, "and therefore I shouldn't expect "to have things done at a much more efficient "and personal manner." You take that mindset subconsciously to everything you do, so while it's a threat, it's also an opportunity, but you got to break that executive mindset to say, "How can we take "best-in-class experiences across the board, "and how can we apply it to what we do?" >> Yeah, again, an interesting concept in the conversation earlier today, where there was a question about ROI, and you threw it back as ROE, return on experience, so how should people start to adjust their thinking, because the thing on, return on investment implies almost a very small kind of direct impact, kind of one to one benefit, where really, return on experience implies a much broader, kind of accidental benefits, benefits across a lot of parameters that you may or may not necessarily be measuring, it's a very, a much better way to measure your investment. >> Look, it's almost impossible to get away from the ROI conversation, it's important, executives have to make decisions based on what they know the outcomes are going to be, a lot of this is, you don't know what you don't know, and so if you can tie some types of rudimentary metrics that are going to show progress and also return, it helps, but at the same time, I always say, what happens in the ROI equation if I equals ignorance, what's the return of ignorance? What's the return of not doing something, and so what I tried to demonstrate in a book I wrote about experience design, which was called X, it was, let's break it down to what we're actually trying to do, the word experience actually means an emotional reaction to a moment, and so for example, in a high sales pitch situation like a dealership for an automobile, that's not a good experience. If you have to call customer service, you've probably not had a good experience, and all of those things are emotional, so if you can design for emotional outcomes, where people are going to feel great in the moment and feel great afterwards, that is a metric that you can have a before and after state. The likelihood of attaching that emotion to things like loyalty, customer lifetime value, growth, then you can get to your ROI in a different way, but you have to first do it with intention. >> Yeah, Brian, fascinating conversation, we could go all day, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for joining today, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Thank you, thank you, it was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)