(lively music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto studios of theCUBE, I am John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and also the co-host of theCUBE. We are here with Blake Morgan, who is the futurist, author, speaker, around the concept of customer experience, and has a great new book out called, More is More. Blake, Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks for coming in. So I love that it is a hard cover book, the book is great, it feels good, the pages, it's a really good read, but it's got a lot of meaty topics in there. So let's just jump in, what's the motivation for the book? Why the book? Why More is More? >> So I have been in the contact center space for over 10 years and basically everyone under the sun is a customer and we all know what it feels like to have a bad customer experience. Have you had a bad customer experience ever? >> John: Oh yes. >> Yeah, right. >> So there is no shortage of work to be done in this space. I think now it's a great time to be in customer experience because there is more awareness about what it actually means. So, I wrote the book to basically provide some kind of definition and to really help people understand, What is customer experience?. Is it customer service? No, it's not. So what does it mean? How can businesses improve customer experience and what do they need to know to get started? >> How about the evolution? Because you know digital has really changed the game. You are seeing cloud computing, machine learning, AI techniques, bots certainly. I mean Twitter came out over ten years ago. I remember when Comcast Cares came out, you know that was a revolution. It was this one guy who decided to be on Twitter. We saw that beginning of that, that trend, where you can now serve and touch folks with customer service and experience, but then again, the blinds between customer experience and customer experience is blurring. Now those multiple channels, do you send them a Snapchat? Do you Instagram? All kinds of new things are emerging, so how do you define, as a frame, the customer experience in this new context? >> Yeah, you're right, there are so many channels. It's really overwhelming for a lot of businesses. So I think it is important to really cut out the noise to think about, Who are you as a business?, and Who is your customer?. What does your customer need? And I really encourage businesses to make their life harder to make it easier on the customer, because in so many situations, companies make it easier on themselves and make it harder on their customers. For example, say you do tweet a company, they might tell you, Hey, now you need to call us and repeat yourself or Now you need to send us an email. Well that's not easy for me as the customer. So it's really all about making customers' lives easier and better. That's the name of the game. >> So what was the findings in the book, when you did the research for the book, what was the core problem that companies are facing? Was it understanding customer experience? Was it the re imagining of customer experience? Was it just a strategic imperative? What was the problem that you uncovered that was the core to this new customer experience equation? >> So a lot of people equate customer experience with customer service and that's a big problem because for most companies, customer service is a cost center. It's not a revenue generating arm of the business. It's not exciting, it's not a money maker, it's not marketing or sales, and so that is really what people think of, when they think of customer experience. But the book is based on this DO MORE framework and DO MORE is basically represents as an acronym. Each piece of the six piece framework represents a different piece of where customer experience lives. So the first D is design something special. The second, I'm not going to read you every, I'm not going to bore you every single word, but the second is about loving your employees, so that is a part of it too. So culture, modernizing with technology, obsessing over your customers, having a culture of customer centricity and embracing innovation and disruption. So these are all varying pieces of DO MORE, which really helps companies understand, it's not simply something that sits in the contact center. For example, let's say you've got your laptop here, and you love your laptop, but your experience of the laptop is not only shaped by, say you have to contact the call center, it is also shaped by how that laptop was built and how about those people who built the laptop. Were they fighting at work with each other? Did they like their jobs? Did they like their boss? Honestly, that's going to impact your experience. >> Yeah, was it a sweat shop. >> Was it a sweat shop? There you go. >> I mean there's all kind of issues about social good too kind of comes into it with that. >> It actually does, I write a lot about social good in my book and some really great CEOs today get that social good is important, like the CEO of Patagonia or Marc Benioff. I mean you can just rattle off so many examples of stuff that he's doing, whether it is equal pay for woman, or his huge house in Hawaii where he's housed monks, to help them when one of the monks had cancer actually. Salesforce is constantly doing good for it's employees and for the community at large. >> Take me through your view on how executives should think about customer experience with all the digital transformation, because a lot of business models are shifting, you are seeing mobile apps, changing the financial services market, because now the app is the teller. So you have three kinds of companies out there, you've got the customer service oriented company, like a Zappos, or you've got a tech company like Google, but they are all about product innovation. Then you've got companies like Apple and others, that are like the big brand and culture personalities, so you've got these three different kind of companies as an example, each one might have a different view on customer experience. How do you tie, how does an executive figure out how to match the more into their DNA? >> That's a fantastic question. I think it's important to have somebody accountable to it, whether it's a Chief Customer Officer or your CMO, because the CEO is ultimately responsible, however, the CEO has their hand in so many things, it's not scalable for them to be so involved on a granular level, on customer centric metrics and so on and so forth throughout the organization. So I would encourage a company to actually hire somebody who is accountable, who creates even tiger teams across the organization with these customer centric metrics in mind, so everybody is working together and they know their job, no matter if they are HR or finance or marketing or customer service, that their metrics, their performance metrics, are tied back to the customer satisfaction. >> I know you do a lot of talks and you do a lot of speeches out there and events, what's the common question that you get? I mean what are people really struggling with or what are they interested in, what are some of the things that you are hearing when you are out on the road giving talks? >> I think it's hard to actually put some of these practices, I think it's actually hard to put some of these ideas into practice. For example, I recently gave a talk at a large technology company down here in San Jose and I presented some pretty wild ideas about actually the energy for influencing change. So how do we keep that high level of stamina with our employees when it's just quite hard to sometimes even keep up. I remember I gave this speech, I talked about a lot of very eccentric ideas about self-management, like when you are a worker you need to take care of yourself because the corporation is never going to give you a pass to let's say, rest, or do what you need to do to feel good, to be good at work. I noticed some of the people in the audience were all texting each other and afterwards someone came up to me and said, you know we are all texting each other because you say these things and the speech was purchased by the leader of the company, however, when it comes to actually working here, that is not really the vibe here, that's not the culture. So I think that a lot of, even the best companies today, still struggle every single day with some of these ideas, because when you DO MORE, when you work harder than others, it's tiring, it can take it's toll on employees. So how do you keep people fresh? >> So fatigue is a huge issue. >> Fatigue, yes. It is an issue. >> So how do they solve that? Because again, that is an experience and the employees itself represent brands. >> Yeah. >> So what are some of the solutions for that? >> Yeah so it's normal that people in these big companies feel fatigued when they are working harder for the customer, but it is really important for people to just manage themselves because no one is going to give you permission to take ten minutes to go for a walk, take ten minutes to go meditate, so it's really about management providing the room for employees to breathe and also modeling it as an example, if leaders just worked 24/7, it's all about the grind, the grind, the grind, that's not a healthy culture, so they need to push their people, but also give them some kind of safety that they can take care of themselves as well. >> So talk about the book target. Who is the ideal candidate for the book? Who are you writing the book for? What do you hope to accomplish for the reader and the outcome? >> So I write for Forbes and Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres Magazine, I have a lot of different types of readers because customer experience really affects everybody in business. So it could be the CMO, it could be the Chief Customer Officer, it could be the CEO, in fact the CEO of 1-800-Flowers wrote the foreword for my book, Chris McCann. So this book is really relevant for a wide variety of people who are interested in making their company more competitive. >> That's a great point, so let's trill down on that, customer experience just doesn't end in a department, we've seen this in IT, information technology, it's a department that becomes now pervasive with cloud computing, you see social media out there, so customer experience has multiple touch points, hence the broad appeal, how should someone think about being the customer experience champion? Because you always have the champions that kind of drives the change, so you've got change agents and you have kind of to me, the pre-existing management in place, what's the human role in this? Because remember, you have machines out there, you have bots, and all those machine learning technology out there, it's important that the human piece is integral to this, right? I mean what's your view on the role of the person? >> Yeah I'm not anti-technology, I'm not anti-bot, I am excited about the Amazon Go cashier-less stores, Amazon Go stores, but I do feel that technology can help us without totally replacing us. I think that we need thoughtful people in charge of these technologies to lead us, to make smart decisions, but you can't just let the technology go. I think that can be really scary. We've definitely seen so many TV shows about this, you can't blink without seeing another TV show about robots taking over the world. >> So it's a concern. What's the biggest thing you've learned from the book? What was the key learnings for you, personally, when you wrote this book? >> Well, writing a book, there is a lot of learning. I actually had my daughter, I was pregnant while I wrote this book and so I think for me to be totally candid, it was a lesson in patience and working through that period for me being pregnant. So I was like giving birth to the book and an actual baby. To be totally truthful, that was my learning. >> You got a lot more than the book. >> Blake: Laughing >> Well, congratulations, how old is the baby? >> She's sixteen months. >> Congratulations, awesome. >> Thank you. >> Well thanks for coming in and sharing about More is More, Blake Morgan, futurist author on the customer experience, More is More, it's theCUBE Conversation and really an impactful thought because customer experience transcends not just a department, it really is a mindset, it's about culture, it's about a lot of things, and it's certainly in the digital revolution, it's really going to be fundamental. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. >> Blake: Thanks so much. >> Appreciate it. I am John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios for CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in Downtown San Francisco. Actually, out on the wharf. It's called Pier 27, never been here before. Pretty cool venue between Pier 39 and the Bay Bridge. We're excited to have a very seasoned Silicon Valley veteran, Nick Mehta. He's the CEO of Gainsight, but look at his LinkedIn profile. He's been on startups, he's been at venture capital companies and now we hear you might may be growing a little unicorn thingy out of your head after that last round. (Nick laughs) >> I don't know about unicorn-- >> Nick, great to see you. >> But a gray hair, for sure. Seasoned, I think just means gray hair, so. >> Absolutely. >> That's growing in my head for sure. >> For people who aren't familiar with Gainsight, give them the basic overview. >> Sure, Jeff. At Gainsight, we really believe that almost every business model is shifting to ones where customers have more power. Therefore, you can't afford to just sell a customer and move on, and for a long time, businesses, the vendors had all the power. You sell a software product or hardware, you sell a device, and once the customer has it, it's up to them whether they get value. Gainsight, we're trying to help enable a shift to this concept we call customer success, where companies have to own whether or not their customers are getting value, whether they're getting the outcomes they want, whether they're using the stuff they buy, and we build a software product, a SAS application, that helps companies make sure everyone in your company is orienting your customers towards getting more value, and in the process, get them to stay with you longer, spend more money with you, and become bigger fans of your company. >> Right, I imagine a lot of people might confuse it with CRN. >> Right. >> Customer relation management and there's a big 60 storey building going up. >> I've seen the building, and we love those guys. Think of us as an adjacent product to what you might do with a Salesforce automation product like salesforce.com. We actually integrate very tightly with Salesforce, as an example, they're an investor in Gainsight. As you're managing sales with your Salesforce, you're managing your support team, you're managing other systems. How do you manage your customers and make sure they're getting value, make sure they're going to stay with you and grow over time? That's what Gainsight does. >> It's really interesting, 'cause people have been talking about the 360 degree view of the customer forever, but that's the challenge you guys went directly after with your application. >> Yeah, it's funny. That's right. I think, for a long time, people were trying to solve 360 view of the customer, but what they were really solving was 360 view of the deal, 'cause it was all about the sale, and the sale is important, it's still very important, right? It was about marketing leads and who I'm selling to and who has power and those are all really important things but now if you think about a world where the customer has power, you've got to look at 360 view of the customer. Are they getting the outcomes they're looking for? Are they adopting and using what they bought? Are they having a good experience? It's a totally different pivot on the world. It's about the customer, not the deal. >> It's interesting too to parallel that with just SAS and Cloud, because when you have a SAS relationship with a client and an ongoing subscription revenue model, you have to keep delivering value, you have to make sure they're going to pay you next month and the month after and the month after. It's not just a sell it and walk away. >> That's exactly right, Jeff. As you know, first of all, it's way cheaper to keep and grow an existing customer than to go get a new one, and because of that, the SAS business model depends on actual high retention rates. People talk about gross retention rate, basically, "Are you keeping the customers you've got?" And then also your net retention rate, are they spending more money with you over time? And the most successful SAS companies, the highest valued ones, are keeping their customers and getting them to spend more money, so that's one of the most important value drivers in SAS. >> I'm curious, when you guys deploy into a new company, a new customer, what are some of the early a-has that you just see over and over and over again that they just miss before they had this view? >> Totally, so number one is almost every company feels today like they're reactive. They find out about things but very late. A customer leaving them, somebody unhappy, a missed sales opportunity, so number one is just getting your organization to be more proactive. Number two, how do you get everyone in the company aligned around the customer? You might have somebody that cares about that one customer, but that customer is talking to support, they're working with your services team, they're going through training. How do you get everyone aligned around the customer and really have a good view across your whole organization so they're all marching for that? Number three, the third a-ha, is how do you scale that? You might have 100 customers, you might have 1,000, you might have a million. How do you scale the right approach with the right customer, whether it's a human outreach or whether it's a fully digital experience, which we can do both, of course. >> What about, there's customers that are in your sales book as a company, but then there's individuals, right, that you're interacting with. >> That's right. >> And in a big company to (mumbling) a relationship, it's not just two companies. It's thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people that are interacting at a bunch of different levels. >> I'm so glad you said that. >> How do you integrate that in? >> Yeah, totally, it's funny, because if you have a big customer and somebody says, "Is your big customer happy or not?" There's no one answer to that question. There might be one part that loves you, another part that doesn't like you, one part that's rolling out, one part that's using some new stuff, one part that's not using anything, and so you have to be able to break up that company in a lot of little pieces, we call those relationships, and then measure each of those differently and be able to drive each of those forward. So, you're totally right. It's not about one company, it's about a lot of little customers within that big customer. >> Right, now you bought into Cloud early in. I think you were actually at a VC firm looking at Cloud and obviously you're at Gainsight and SAS Application. As you look forward, you just got off a panel, what's next? Where do you see the next big evolution or revolution, if you will, in the way IT services and software are delivered? >> Totally, I think the biggest thing that's happening right now is that Cloud is just a delivery vehicle, I think everyone knows that. SAS is kind of table stakes. Mainstream companies are saying, how do I reinvent my core business by shifting to these business models that are digitally enabled? People call that digital transformation. That's what this panel we just did was all about. That's happening not just in Silicon Valley, that's happening in manufacturers and retailers and financial services companies. When they do that, they're rethinking everything about what they do, how they manage product development, how they actually sell, and also the customer experience, which is where we come in. We think the biggest thing is kind of obvious, it's digital transformation. Underneath that, you can leverage all kinds of new technologies whether it's artificial intelligence, machine learning, bots. But the transformation of mainstream businesses is happening at a rapid speed right now. >> I want to get one last point before we let you go, the impact of social, direct social back to these big companies. My favorite one is Comcast Cares. Every time my internet goes down, I jump on and I tweet-- >> Nick: Oh my God. >> Give my internet back! >> I feel for those Comcast Cares social people. They deal with a lot of mean words. >> No, this is not Xfinity Cares, this is Comcast Cares. But it's a really interesting paradox for companies, because people can reach out directly in kind of a semi public forum, which it wasn't, you know, just calling the 1800 number. How are they integrating that into this customer relationship management? >> Oh my God, we talk about the fact that customers have more power and they have bigger voices. One customer has a much bigger voice than they ever did, and so you have this amazing opportunity to either create a great advocate who could bring you new customers and new sales, or create all these detractors. I think that that public voicing of customer experience has made CEOs much more aware of why it matters. Before, a customer has a bad experience, they type up a letter and mail it to some office that nobody ever reads, and now, this CEO is seeing on her or his Facebook or Twitter feed or LinkedIn the customer upset, and I think that's making them much more aware of customer experience being really important. >> Right, right, and are you seeing, it's interesting to me, there's some senior executives, Michael Dell, Beth Comstock, just picked two out of the hat, that are super active on social-- >> Nick: Oh my gosh, yeah. >> Directly engaging with their community. There's other big companies, which I won't name, where people don't even have a LinkedIn account-- >> That's right. >> Much less a Twitter account. Is there a direct correlation that you're seeing between embracing a direct engagement with your community versus, "Eh, I don't want to say anything bad," which I think, it's either or the other. >> Yeah, I empathize with the fear, because I think people worry about saying something bad, so I get it. I think it's definitely misguided and kind of backwards. You can't stick your head in the sand anymore. Take somebody like Marc Benioff, who's so great at this, and he's on Twitter, he's advocating for causes. He's taking, maybe, controversial stands in some cases, but he's putting himself out there and he cares about his customers. Same thing with Michael Dell, same thing with Beth Comstock. There's so many great CEOs out there, so honestly, at this point, if you're not out there, you look like you have something to hide, right? (laughter) Which is not good. >> Which is not good. Alright, Nick, thanks for taking-- >> Thanks so much, Jeff. >> A few minutes, and congratulations. I saw you were a Top 50 SAS CEO of 2017, and continued success at Gainsight. >> I don't know how I made that list, but I felt honored, so thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> I really appreciate it. >> We'll see you next time. He's Nick Mehta, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit 2017. Thanks for watching.