Balancing Self-Service and White Glove CX

Tom Studdert: That individual experience of that customer are how I think we're gonna meet the needs of each customer, as opposed to just saying, we offer a best in class customer experience. We do, but we offer a best in class customer experience for this customer, which is different from this customer, which is different from this customer.

Kailey Raymond: Hello and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host Kailey Raymond, and today, we're digging into strategies for uplevelling customer experience, from mapping customer journeys, and delivering self-serve and white glove experiences, to leveraging quantitative and anecdotal insights. Understanding customers requires accurate data to make informed decisions and create delightful, frictionless experiences. On today's episode, Payscale's Tom Studdert discusses the parallels between education and customer experience, mapping the customer journey and maturity curve and strategies for measuring adoption.

Kailey Raymond: Today, I'm joined by Tom Studdert, the senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Payscale. Tom has extensive experience in customer experience education and leadership development. Prior to Payscale, he led leadership roles at ZoomInfo and DiscoverOrg, overseeing customer onboarding, education support, and employee training. And prior to his corporate roles, Tom also worked in higher education at Texas Christian University, and the University of Southern California, focusing on student development and orientation programs. Tom, welcome to the show.

Tom Studdert: Ah, thank you very much. I'm excited to be here to talk about really my passion of customer experience.

Kailey Raymond: I am stoked. I am in particular curious this career journey, taking you from education, and now into customer experience. I can see some of the commonalities there, absolutely. But I wanna hear in your own words about your career journey and how you got to where you're today at Payscale.

Tom Studdert: Yeah, there are a lot of commonalities, which a lot of people don't recognize right away. Orientation and onboarding are essentially two leaves on the same tree, right? It has a similar sort of structure and feel to it. We operate under sort of the same sort of paradigm, but I did, I spent 20 years in higher education, and I loved it. I loved every minute of it. I got to work with college students, but the field of higher education was becoming very different than what I had initially gone into, right? A lot more legal aspects of it that weren't really what I wanted to do. I reached out to a former student of mine who was the CEO of DiscoverOrg, and he was looking for somebody to come in and build their employee training, sales training program. The company was about 150 employees at the time, and he said, Hey, I would love for you to come do this. And all the cards sort of magically worked out. And I wound up being at DiscoverOrg, and then over time inherited customer education and then customer support. Then we bought ZoomInfo, and changed our name and sort of continued down that path. And then about a year ago, I left ZoomInfo for a great role here at Payscale.

Kailey Raymond: I love that. You're so right that there are so many parallels of making sure that somebody is feeling really well adjusted and oriented and coming into a new place. Same thing coming into a software product, you really don't know what's happening. The paths are a little bit different, probably more in-person activities as a student versus more click paths in software. But that's really interesting.

Tom Studdert: Yeah, I don't have to monitor football games anymore, which some of me misses, especially during football season. I'm a huge college football sports nut, but the past are similar. You're using the same theoretical framework when you're educating people about new things.

Kailey Raymond: I am very interested to hear about some of those frameworks you're applying. First, I wanna kick off and learn a little bit more about some of the trends that you're watching in the customer experience space. Obviously, we're in a time where there's a lot of new technologies that are kind of taking over the world, and inserting themselves into pretty much everything that we do. I won't say it, you can say it first, but tell me about some of the trends that you think are impacting customer experience today.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, I think there's sort of two buckets. There's the customer experience trends that we look at sort of from a software industry, and then there's the trends in my industry that impact customer experience. And so I sort of wanna dive into a little bit of both of those buckets. Let me start with Payscale is a compensation software, right? So the trends in compensation affect how I do my business. And quite frankly, because compensation is a people-based industry, right? Like when we talk about compensation, we're talking about people's pay, that's very much at the heart of what we do. And so things like the job market and layoffs and labor shortages and unionization and inflation, right? Like what the economy looks like all impacts the Payscale business and the industry of compensation, which then impacts how we think about the customer experience.

Tom Studdert: All that to be said, there's also this layer on top of it, which is the legislation around pay that's happening sort of state by state, country by country. And so how that impacts, like what I do from a customer experience perspective, which sort of, you could, It crosses boundaries, it crosses different industries as the link between the employee experience and the customer experience is one of them, right? How do we foster a customer-centric mindset in the employee side of the house to really impact the customer side? 

Tom Studdert: We're seeing CX as a competitive differentiator, right? In the past, it's all about net new, all about sales. And now there's much more of a focus on reducing churn as the economy has changed. There's an emphasis on a pay for play, which is so funny to me 'cause as a former sports coach, like Pay for Play had a very different meaning, but now it's very much. Our customers will pay for certain levels of a customer experience, right? They're willing to dish out tens of thousands of dollars to have a handholding experience as opposed to maybe what we used to do. And then of course, sort of the big two are AI and predictive analytics, and how that feeds into personalization and creating those personalized experience for our customers using AI very much sits at the heart of everything that we think about on a daily basis now.

Kailey Raymond: Yes. That's really interesting, and I love that you're kind of talking about how a lot of these industry trends and macro trends are impacting some of the trends that you're seeing in customer experience and customer engagement. That's exactly right. Especially something that is deeply impacted by those, like pay is either intrinsically intertwined in a way that in other industries, perhaps, they aren't as much. And so AI, I know that you mentioned is kind of like one of the ones that you're thinking about. It is this gorilla that everybody's talking about. It's in the air, in the space. And I'm wondering, tell me about some of the ways in which you're using AI machine learning, predictive analytics at Payscale.

Tom Studdert: Yeah, the primary way in which we're doing it right now is within our products, right? Our customers are expecting that of us, and we have to rise to that challenge. A great example, we have a product called Job Description Manager, which nobody likes writing job descriptions, right? Like nobody. And especially if you're in HR, trying to collect thousands of, potentially thousands of job descriptions. And so the AI built within our JDM product allows our customers to use AI to write job descriptions. And I'll be honest, when I put together my resume, one of the first places I go to is ChatGPT to be like, how do I say this correctly? And so that's the primary vehicle right now where we're using AI, but we are investing in new technologies in CX.

Tom Studdert: I literally had calls this week with AI companies to assist with our customer support and our education efforts. Like adding a chat feature, using machine learning to update and write new knowledge center articles, federated searches between multiple databases, in order to secure the right answers for our customers when they need help. We're seeing more of a trend for self-service requests, and that's where AI can really help us both, because it gets the customer a faster response, but it also allows us to divert resources to sort of higher end requests or higher end project needs that our customers may have.

Kailey Raymond: That's interesting. I'm glad that you brought up self-service, because it's something that, you're right. I do think that this trend of personalization, and I think kind of one of the reasons for this is that everybody just kind of like wants what they want. They want it now, and it's theirs. Amazon has made it so easy for everybody to have everything at their fingertips, so it's this kind of like catalyst of this behavior of, and I deserve everything to be personalized for me, which obviously increases conversions, makes people more trusting of your brand, et cetera. Tell me about self-service and some of the ways in which you've seen it kind of rise in customer experience over the past couple of years. When do we do self-service? When do we hand it off to white glove? What are some of the ways the processes that you know you're building to make sure you're enabling the right handoffs, the right places in the right time? 

Tom Studdert: Yeah. Self-service is a really unique balancing act, because your customers are paying for a certain level of both product, but also a certain level of service. And you've gotta figure out like where do you handhold them and where do you say like, you can get this on your own, the fish mentality, right? We're gonna teach you to fish, so that you can feed yourself for the rest of your time as a customer. To me, the balance is really around what does a customer need immediately, versus what is more complex? Like things like password resets, right? Like that's so self-service. And if it's not, why are we not? Why is it not? 

Kailey Raymond: Question, why not? If you are still handing people over passwords manually, ask the question.

Tom Studdert: Exactly. For me, it's really about, and I sort of bucket this under sort of an umbrella of education, right? So even though it's a lot of support work, it's very much under the education. Like what can we provide to them in sort of a YouTube style video? 20 seconds, quickly watch this. I always go back to like, when I was young, I wish I would've had a video of somebody teaching me how to change my tire, 'cause I would've picked it up much faster. And so those are the things, right? Like what can we give them in a 20 second clip to educate them on how to get over a potential hurdle that they're struggling with? That's the self-service sort of balancing act, and where I think we should lean heavily on.

Tom Studdert: The things that shouldn't be self-service are the more complex projects. And in the compensation world, that's doing a modeling project, that's doing a job architecture project, that's doing a benchmarking project, right? And those things are complex, require a little bit more of an input from a seasoned professional or an expert in the field. The quick how to within a product, that's where we should be doing more self-service. Anywhere where a customer feels like it's gonna take them more time to reach out to us than it is to just do it on their own, that's the line, right? That's the question that we have to ask. And if it does take them more time to call us, we should figure out a way to enable that as a self-service option within the product or within the service.

Kailey Raymond: People are using phones more nowadays. Are you seeing that, Tom? 

Tom Studdert: It's interesting that you say that, because when I arrived at Payscale, we don't really have a phone support channel, right? Unless they're paying for a TAM or a Technical Account Manager. And that was my first question when I inherited the support team. I was like, why don't we do this? Because I know like when I have a struggle with whatever, I just pick up the phone, 'cause sometimes it's easier. But I think part of it is we have to re-condition our customers of, no, you can get this faster if you don't call us. You can get this faster by quickly doing a lookup on our support center. And if we have AI included in that, it's actually going to be accurate and fast, which is the threshold that our customers need. It's my opinion that it's our job to re-educate after COVID, where everything was phone, right? Like you just picked up the phone because nobody was interacting in person. We have to re-educate everybody to be okay with, oh, I can get this article on my own without having to pick up the phone. Because it's gonna take you longer to pick up the phone and call nowadays than it is just to do a quick search on our website to get the answer that you need.

Kailey Raymond: It is interesting. It's like whenever you think that you fully have an understanding of what's happening, something changes. Like you always have to be able to adapt to the needs of the consumer today, and the preferences today and the channels that they're really gravitating towards. One of the things that you kinda mentioned is one of these trends, which I fully agree. I think that there's kind of this backbone of net new is harder to get in the door. If you can serve your customers and you can grow your customers, then that's maybe an easier path to revenue. But churn in contraction is obviously one of the things that's getting in the way of that leaky bucket. So I'm wondering if you have any examples of those programs that your team is putting in place to make sure that you're having happy customers that are retaining and adopting and coming and going down these paths that you're creating for them.

Tom Studdert: Yeah, I think the first thing that we've done is we've mapped out our customer journey, right? So I was hired at the same time as our VP of customer success and mapping out the customer journey is hard. It's not an easy task. People come and they're like, we're gonna map this out and it's hard. But doing that allows you to make data-driven, educated decisions about what your customers are experiencing. And it shines a bright light on where the gaps are immediately. If you're not doing something between months three and six, that's a huge gap that you have to figure out how to fill. And if you're sending out 100 emails in the first 10 days that they're a customer, that's not a gap. That's a problem that you have to solve for.

Tom Studdert: And so really figuring out what that customer journey is is really important. So that's one of the things that we're doing and that I encourage anybody who's listening, like map it out and don't just map it out in a vacuum. It can't just be the customer success or customer experience teams. It has to be your marketing teams, your demand gen teams, anybody that's reaching out to the customer or is working with the customer in any point in the lifecycle. So that's the first one. The second one is since moving into this role of overseeing our CX teams as a whole, it's figuring out what services should be offered based on the maturity of the customer. So you've got a customer lifecycle, but now you've got a maturity curve of a customer as well. Not all customers are the same, not all companies are the same, right? Like what I need as a startup is very different than what I may need as an enterprise company.

Tom Studdert: And so the services, the consulting that we offer for somebody who is a one person shop HR team versus a global enterprise HR team are very different. And so we wanna be more prescriptive with what we offer, particularly to the HR teams that are a little bit more fresh, a little bit more new, maybe have only one person. And for the teams that have 100 people in their HR team, that may be a little different what we offer them. So mapping out the customer journey and then overlaying what the maturity curve is of that customer, and that individual experience of that customer are how I think we're gonna meet the needs of each customer as opposed to just saying, we offer a best in class customer experience, we do, but we offer a best in class customer experience for this customer, which is different from this customer, which is different from this customer. That's hard to do, especially when you lack bandwidth. And so you have to figure out the ways to sort of truncate that into segmentation. And it's not customer segmentation like we think about it like small, medium enterprise, et cetera. It's more what's the sophistication and maturity level of each of those customers.

Kailey Raymond: That's a really, really interesting insight. One of the things that we think about here at Twilio Segment is exactly that. We have this roadmap called the customer data maturity curve. And so you can be as sophisticated as you want with where you wanna go in terms of your use cases, real time, one-to-one personalization. You're probably gonna have to have baby steps before you get there. So I'm wondering, what are some of the inputs and indicators of maturity that you're kind of looking at or what could people look at to make sure that they're understanding the maturity curve? What question should they be asking themselves when they're doing some of this diagnosis? 

Tom Studdert: Right. I think a lot of the inputs are quantitative inputs, right? That's the first bucket. At Payscale, obviously being a compensation based platform, we're gonna look at your HR team. We're gonna look at how many people work in HR. Do you have one person that does recruiting and compensation and L&D, or do you have multiple roles? Do you have a compensation person that's dedicated to pay into compensation? We're gonna look at sort of the size of the organization as a whole. Does it have 100 employees? Does it have 20,000 employees? What's the tech stack that they're currently using? Do they have an HRIS? Do they have an Excel sheet? There are companies that still have to do that just based on where they are in their maturity and where they are in sort of their growth trajectory.

Tom Studdert: So you're gonna look at those types of inputs. So it's very, yes, no quantitative black and white inputs, and you can get that information from your customer. You can get it from a variety of different sort of sales intelligence programs. And that helps you sort of quantify bucket one. Bucket two is when they are a customer asking the right questions during a discovery call, right? What are you trying to accomplish with your compensation strategy? Actually, do you have a compensation strategy? And then what are you trying to accomplish with that strategy? Do you have knowledge about the legal pieces, the legislation that's happening in your state, in your county, in your country, et cetera? Do you have sort of a system of record that you're using to track compensation over time? So you can get to sort of the conversations around pay equity and pay fairness. That's the second bucket.

Tom Studdert: Those are the buckets that we're gonna use at Payscale, right? Each industry is gonna be a little different. Those quantitative buckets should be relatively similar though, like how many employees in their sales department, if you're selling into sales, how many employees in marketing, et cetera. That generates sort of level one. And then level two is sort of taking those questions during discovery to find out, okay, where are they and what are they doing? And really hoping that your customers are truthful with you because that allows you to then be more prescriptive in the customer journey that you're gonna provide to them.

Kailey Raymond: I really like that, it's spot on in developing these cohorts to make sure that you can build the right programs off the back of that, and you're not necessarily putting a human against somebody that might be well suited to go to your help center or vice versa. So it's a really smart way to do that.

Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering if you have any definition around, a lot of what we're talking about right now has to do with a lot of these data inputs, getting good, clean data, some of it's anecdotal, some of it's not, some of it's coming in and ingesting from vendors or elsewhere. But you're bringing together a lot of these sources to make sure you're having this ability to track that health and that maturity. Do you have a definition around how you might define good data

Tom Studdert: Yeah, it's so funny because I knew you were gonna ask that question and so I really spent some time thinking about, I spent seven years at essentially a data company, I spent seven years at ZoomInfo and now I'm at PayScale, which at its core is also a data company, right? 

Kailey Raymond: It's a data company, for sure.

Tom Studdert: Yeah. We have data, we built a software platform on top of data, but the data really funnels it and so dirty data in, dirty data out, right? And so data to me, good data is data that is accurate, data that is relevant, data that is timely, data that is reliable. I almost think about it in the same vein as I think about smart goals, right? You've gotta have these very specific things for your data to be good, and then the data set that you have can be used in an analysis that informs your decision-making process, right? So you've got all these data points and we have millions of data points at PayScale that sort of drive how we help our customers figure out what to pay their employees. But you pull all that together in sort of a data set that makes sense and then that allows you to sort of provide the analysis. But really key is that there's a strict set of guidelines that's used by your teams in data and in data management. That ensure that consistency and accuracy 'cause if you don't have that, you just have a bunch of numbers and letters.

Kailey Raymond: Process is everything, making sure you have those definitions.

Tom Studdert: Yes.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, it's the really boring stuff, honestly, that a lot of the time makes all the difference in being able to get outcomes that you're looking for. We talked about this maturity curve, which I'm excited to hear about from your side. I'm wondering if you have examples, whether it's leveraging this maturity curve information or kind of other aspects of this good data that we just talked about, some of the ways that you're actually using this data at PayScale? 

Tom Studdert: Yeah, yeah. So as I mentioned, we're essentially a data company, our software platform is built on these data points. We have different data sets that we sell our customers, and our data is really our differentiator for us, right? In the marketplace. The approach that we take really ensures this sort of precise view through a variety of data methodology and validation, right? Like really a scientific approach. And so we have three data sets that we use that sort of can pull together, so employee reported data. You can go on our website right now, anyone who's listening can go on our website right now and enter their information and it's gonna spit out based on what you tell it, what you should be making. And then of course, we collect that data, right? It's sort of our proprietary machine learning model. We have peer data that's HRIS and player sourced aggregated data.

Tom Studdert: And then we have survey publishers, right? So we have relationships with the major survey publishers in the space, in this compensation space that allow us to sort of pull all that data together to really inform our customers on the compensation strategy that they should have. In CX, what we're doing is we're using clean data to drive all of our decisions. I've been the SDP now since April, and one of our strategic themes is around being data-driven, and that's really important to me 'cause I'm a numbers person. I pride myself on being sort of metric focused, but those metrics include things like how do we decrease time to value? How do we decrease time to resolution of support tickets? How do we build the APIs for our customers to link their HRIS to PayScale, and how do we do that in an efficient way? The CX model really is or the CX question that we should be asking is how do we do all of this in this space that allows our customers to get value? So the data translates to value for our customers, whether it's through the product or through the experience that we're providing in the services area.

Kailey Raymond: Let's take time to value. I love that example because I do think that that's a lot of the place where companies might get stuck. SaaS solutions, you're purchasing one, lo and behold, it becomes shelf where we never intended for that to happen, but the implementation went wrong or whatever happens, right? People are people and it can happen to us. So I'm wondering, how are you enabling that time to value? What are some of the things that you're making sure that a lot of your employers are seeing so that they can say like, yes, I feel fully confident in how I'm leveraging PayScale and that it happened in X amount of days? 

Tom Studdert: Yep. That's such a great question and it's the area that I feel like I have grown my career in the most. And I think, honestly, it's because I come from the orientation, the student orientation world, right? Where orientation was just the thing at the beginning, but really it was the graduation event, right? That's what we were aiming for, our goal was to get that student done in four years. And so the lens that we have at PayScale and that hopefully I've brought is, implementation is, yes, a check off box, right? It's a portion of what we're doing as of this larger umbrella of onboarding, but onboarding doesn't stop when implementation ends, onboarding "stops" when adoption has been achieved. Meaning what are the things that we need a customer be doing in the product that show that they're using the product, they're getting ROI out of the product and they're successfully achieving their goals.

Tom Studdert: That means we need to find out what their goals are, right? We need to ask what their pain points are. Why did they buy this? What's the underlying reason? And it's not always the reason they give sales, we're not talking to the buyer, we're talking to the compensation analyst who's like, yep, I'm the one implementing this because my job is hard. And so let's find out what those are and then let's match those up with adoption points at the end and let's track to that progress. So the goal of onboarding is no longer about check done, it's about them using the product at the end in a way that makes sense. That's when we can finally hand it off to customer success and that's the time to value, right? When they're doing that. For some companies, they can do that instantly, they can literally get their data in and start using it right away, five days and they're getting value out of the product.

Tom Studdert: Sometimes it takes a little longer depending on what it is that they're trying to achieve. But our goal as a CX team and as an onboarding team is to make sure that, that time to value crunches down just a little bit each time we work with new customers. So that they're not spending three months going through onboarding and that means three months of a 12 month contract that they're maybe not getting value. Because then it's like, okay, well I spent $10,000 on this product and I really only got $7,000 worth of value out of it.

Kailey Raymond: It's gonna be a way harder renewal conversation on the back end of the year.

Tom Studdert: Exactly, exactly.

Kailey Raymond: Totally. In my previous role I was running customer education. So we have that love in common. And one of the things that we started doing was figuring out a product adoption score and figuring out what are those things that make them stickier in a certain timeframe to be able to convert them to yeah, renewal essentially. And so I'm wondering how you do it, how are you measuring adoption? Is it the same for everyone? Is it different for everyone? Is it time bound? Walk me through that.

Tom Studdert: Yeah, it's great. I love that you did that in customer education. So that is one of the first things that I did at PayScale and when my first role at PayScale was overseeing just the onboarding and education team. And that was one of the first initiatives that we did was, let's look at what our adoption metrics are. So what we did is we went to our BI, our business intelligence team and we said, okay, internally, what are the things that are most correlated to renewal and to retention, right? What are the in-app actions that should be taken that a customer should be taking? We ran those, we figured out what are the top five for each one of our products. Those were automatically built into our adoption scoring, right? It's like, have they hit this button? Have they gone to this tile? Have they done this setup right? Have they established a pay market, et cetera.

Tom Studdert: Then we add that to the three to five things the customer tells us that they wanna do as a part of either the handoff process from sales or the discovery process on our kickoff call. So we take those two buckets, we add them together and while we don't have an adoption score, we have a Tableau report and we literally track all of these different things. So if a customer tells us this, our goal is to do X, we likely have that somewhere in our Tableau report and we just pull that into the specific customer's view and we show them on every onboarding call, which we do weekly until they're complete. This is where you're tracking, this is where you're tracking, this is where you're tracking. So they know, okay, I need to do this, I don't need to do that, et cetera. That allows us to feel like when we pass them over to customer success and customer support, we've got them in a place that the baton is ready to hand off and it's not gonna drop.

Kailey Raymond: Interesting. Cool. So it's like part product driven metrics and then part anecdotal use case driven, this is what the compensation managers are telling me. Check the box. So like a adoption plus like almost like a health, like an anecdotal health score. Yeah.

Tom Studdert: Yes, yes. Exactly. And so we do have both of those, right? Like we have the product adoption sort of tables that we can show a customer, and then we have the health score that we can show from a customer success perspective and we marry those together. We do have an onboarding score, it's a conglomeration of product adoption of did they do the onboarding tasks that they were supposed to do? Did they do their check-ins? And we can feed that back to the customer on a weekly basis to say, this is where you're tracking. And then we can say that's where you're tracking in comparison to other like companies as well.

Kailey Raymond: Nice. That's always a good catalyst for people to say like, oh.

Tom Studdert: Yes.

Kailey Raymond: Man, somebody is doing.

Tom Studdert: You're behind.

Kailey Raymond: Better than me.

Tom Studdert: Exactly.

Kailey Raymond: Totally.

Tom Studdert: Exactly.

Kailey Raymond: Onboarding score. I'm getting really in the weeds with you Tom.

Tom Studdert: Totally fine. Love it.

Kailey Raymond: I really appreciate you answering all my questions. When somebody doesn't hit their onboarding score what interventions do you run? Are there interventions that you run before you hand them to CS or does CS kind of like pick up the load here? Like what's that handoff look like? 

Tom Studdert: Yeah, it's a great question. So you asked earlier about time bounds. We are not "time bound" during onboarding until we hit a certain day, right? And at a certain time it's like, okay, we need them to be able to move over to customer success because we also have a block during onboarding that other entities of the company can't communicate with them. So like there's no upsell motion, there's no try to get them involved in other things while they're in onboarding 'cause we want them focused on onboarding. But there's a point where, okay, we gotta be able to like do the other things from a business perspective. And so while we've got the interventions that are happening during onboarding, the once a week check-ins the reviews of the data, we give them access to their project inside of our online community. After that, if they still haven't gotten everything that they need to do, we have a softer handoff with the customer success and customer support team to continue to monitor them.

Tom Studdert: We can be pulled back in at any time, so that's sort of the overarching theory. We can pull onboarding and the implementation and the training team back at any time, but we need the CSM to now start managing the account to figure out like where the holes that might exist. We have a very low number of those that are handoff without sort of what we call onboarding achieved, but there's going to be those just based on competing demands of the account, competing demands of our teams, et cetera.

Kailey Raymond: You have like a really interesting cool setup because you also, you manage support too, right? 

Tom Studdert: I do, yes.

Kailey Raymond: So tell me where this kind of fits into the whole kind of cycle of success for you. Is help center chats, like where and when are folks leveraging kind of support in their customer life cycle in their journey? 

Tom Studdert: Yeah, our customer support team is really unique at PayScale, I'm sure everybody says that. But I come from a model where customer support was very much the call in when you have a technical problem, right? Our customer support team almost acts as quasi customer success managers, 'cause our customer success managers also handle renewals. And so they've got different priorities 'cause they've got a revenue number to hit. So our customer support team winds up taking these accounts and continuing through not implementation, but sort of the best practices, the continued conversations around their strategy. And so the support and our professional services team sort of work hand in hand to do that. It's why so many of our accounts have technical account managers because it's again sort of an assigned person that allows them to continue that relationship. So it's an interesting sort of dynamic.

Tom Studdert: When I say we hand off to customer success and customer support, we're literally handing off to both of those entities from the onboarding perspective. But we do have the self-service, right? We do have the help center, we actually have a, It's a online community called Connect that essentially houses our help center, our community, our online learning, et cetera, all in one place. And so we try to drive folks into that. We're getting ready to install an AI chat bot on that, that's the conversation that I've been having this week so that we can employ more of that AI pieces. But it is interesting sort of overseeing sort of that full customer journey but I don't oversee customer success, but I oversee sort of the experiences that the customer is going to have.

Kailey Raymond: Very interesting. Yeah. The model they have support in multiple different ways all the way through, whether it's person to person, whether it's self-serve, and it's making sure that you're doing right by each individual customer. That's really, really smart model you've developed.

Tom Studdert: Well, we have a unique thing and maybe it's not unique, but I feel like it is, employee compensation data changes daily, right? Like you could hire somebody tomorrow and now your file is different. And so our customers need to upload their new data on a regular basis. And so our support team helps with that and so without that it's not just troubleshooting, it's also like making sure that the data is constantly updated. Reaching out to customers to say, Hey, you've reached a three month mark, we need to get your new file added. So that come time for your compensation, your annual compensation planning process that happens usually in like January you've got all of the right data points in the system to make the right decisions.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, no. And it's such a high stakes industry.

Tom Studdert: It is.

Kailey Raymond: That making sure that you're kind of fully on top of it and not missing any of those important data points and not putting your employees in a bad place is essential. I'm wondering if you've ever learned anything surprising about your customers based off of some of the insights that some of this data and investigation into the journey has told you? 

Tom Studdert: Yeah, so as I mentioned, I'm relatively new to the HR tech space, I came from sort of the sales intelligence space, spending seven years at ZoomInfo and even before that worked in education. But like I said, both companies are data companies at their core. But a couple things I've learned, one, HR tech is really nuanced, much more so than the sales intelligence space. 'Cause you're dealing with the people team who deal with people, right? And people are more nuanced. And so what my title is at PayScale may be a completely different title at ZoomInfo, yet we're doing the same thing and we're probably compensated in the same type of bands, but we have very different titles. And so sort of marrying that together is different. And if there's 10,000 companies in the world, there's 10,000 different approaches to compensation. How we approach it, how you approach it, how company XYZ approaches is gonna be different.

Tom Studdert: And when I first started at PayScale they said that to me a lot, they're like, "There's a lot of different philosophies out there." And I was like, "How hard can this be?" And then you dive into it, it's like, oh, actually it is hard because people are hard, right? People are different, you take in not only sort of differences in people, you take the fact that a remote company has employees in 50 states where an in-person company has employees in one state. And then you think about like, what's the legislation in Alaska versus Texas versus Ireland. And so all of those things really come into play when you're developing your compensation strategy. And then sort of the output of that is what we do at PayScale. So it's very nuanced and it's harder to learn than I thought it would be.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, no kidding. I have full empathy for that. My wife is a recruiter so she feels this literally every single day of her life. And I used to work at a company called Hired quite a few years ago, which also was really transparent with salary information. You basically sent out a request with salary information upfront for any of the roles that you were hiring for. And with that information we did a lot of reports on the state of salaries in kind of different cities across North America. And you're exactly right, a lot of the output of that was conversations around the nuances of whether you're a series A or if you're a public company. Those are gonna be extremely different, whether you have some sort of benefit program associated with this, the laws around transparency of salaries in different states was different for quite a long time. Is it across America now? I'm not even aware.

Tom Studdert: No. Every state is different and some states have paid transparency laws and some states don't and some countries do and some countries don't. And some have passed the lower chamber and some are waiting on an upper chamber and we have a whole someone on our legal team that that's what she's dedicated to. Is like making sure that the legislation, we are knowledgeable about it 'cause we have to then inform our customers. It's crazy, the patchwork of 50 states is, you love it 'cause you live in the USA and then you hate it 'cause you live in the USA so.

[laughter]

Kailey Raymond: Say that.

Tom Studdert: Yes, exactly.

Kailey Raymond: Absolutely. And then the also the really interesting heart wrenching sometimes insights, I'm sure that you find out about like pay discrepancies for different groups. And the value that that can have and actually educating your employers about how to go about fixing that and putting right policies in place. And so the work that you're doing is really powerful and I absolutely have so much empathy for you, 'cause it changes every single day.

Tom Studdert: It does.

Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering if you have any companies that you look to for inspiration that you think are doing it right and building really great customer experiences? 

Tom Studdert: Yeah, so there's a few that I love. So I think Starbucks is one of the best at it, and I know Starbucks gets a bad rap for sort of how they treat their employees. But one of the things that they do well is they treat their customers pretty well. Their loyalty program is great, if I go into, and when I did a cross country trip from Portland, Oregon to Washington DC I probably stopped at 20 different Starbucks and what you order in Starbucks and Idaho and what you order in Starbucks and Ohio and in DC it's the same. Like you get the same experience. When you walk into a Starbucks, everybody says, welcome to Starbucks, everybody sort of screams it out. It feels like the old show cheers, like hi, Tom, when you walk into the Starbucks. It feels like a customer experience that that is right. So I think that they do it right. I think Nike does it right.

Tom Studdert: I think how they brand to the different types of Nike wearers, whether it's a runner or somebody who is doing hiking or somebody who's just looking for sort of athletic apparel. I think Nike does it really well, the way they design their stores, the way they have their app and their loyalty program. I also say that like Disney is amazing, right? Like we all know the story of Disney customer service and the imagineers and how they sort of make the Disney parks and the Disney experiences come to life. It's hard to recreate that, it's also Disney is a massive conglomerate, but when you step foot into Disney World you don't see a piece of trash on the ground 'cause they've got people behind the scenes making sure that that doesn't happen. And so there's definitely a customer experience to Disney even though it's really, really expensive nowadays to go.

Kailey Raymond: It sure is, but honestly a lot of things are really expensive nowadays.

Tom Studdert: It's true.

Kailey Raymond: To go, times are changing. Those are really great examples. And I think some of the through lines of those are kind of back to that idea around personalization that we talked about at the very kind of beginning of the show is, when you're walking into a lot of these, they feel like they're meant for you to be there. They're building this experience in mind of building a loyalty app for you. You Tom as a person and they're building that app where you can build your own day of the rides that you wanna go on. And I'm sure the next time that you go they're gonna say, "Hey, you can actually get a fast pass to this one." So they're really building in a lot of those recommendations to make it tailored to you, even though they are these massive conglomerate companies.

Tom Studdert: Yes, exactly.

Kailey Raymond: Tom, I have one last question for you today, and that's if you have any recommendations for somebody that's looking to uplevel their customer experience strategies, what would they be? 

Tom Studdert: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's four things that I would say. One, understand your customers, know them, if you're starting a CX, if you're coming into a new role, whether you if you oversee CX, like dig into your customers. I made a point when I first started in this role to talk to a 100 customers in a 100 days, because it was important for me to sort of hear directly from the people that we're here to service. Then as we've talked about, like map out that current experience and overlay it with the future that you want them to have. That customer journey mapping is really, really important. And so many times it's either like, we have it, it's not great, or we're not gonna do it because it's so hard or we don't know how to do it. Just sit down and start working, just build out on paper and pen, just like what are our customers experiencing if that's what it takes.

Tom Studdert: I think you also have to invest in the right people and the right technology for your programs, right? What works at one company may not work at another, right? Like Gainsight may work at this company, it may not work at the other company, ChurnZero may work at this one, it may not work at the other one. So figure out what works well for your business and then hire the right people. Make sure you've got the right people to do that. And then finally, like the kiss motto, right? Like, just simplify things, keep it simple, don't overdo things. Especially when you're first getting started, we have a tendency to think like, oh, I got like 800 things that I wanna do. Like what actually is gonna be the most impactful for your customer experience and what is going to lead to that ultimate goal, which is renewing them. And if it's not, get rid of it, don't do it because at the end of the day, like we're probably one of 25 pieces of tech that our customers have to deal with on a daily basis.

Tom Studdert: The fact that we're not reaching out to them every day is probably okay with them, because if we're doing our job, it's just running. It's not necessarily causing issues for them. And if we're constantly bombarding them with things, it becomes overly complicated for them and then it's like, okay, well and it's time to cut their tech because maybe they need to tighten their budget we might be the first one that they look at. 'Cause it's like, oh God, they talk to me all the time. So those are the things that I would recommend.

Kailey Raymond: I love that, simplicity and focus is really key. I love a 100 customers in a 100 days, that must have been such an insightful tour.

Tom Studdert: It was. And it was at the time when I was brought into oversee onboarding and it was great to hear what our customers thought and what they want. And we were able to make changes not just based on what I thought was necessary, but what our customers were telling us. So again, data-driven decisions.

Kailey Raymond: Keep the customer at the center of your decisions Tom.

Tom Studdert: Yes.

Kailey Raymond: Thank you so much for being here. I learned a ton, we went in the weeds and I really appreciate that.

Tom Studdert: Oh, I loved having this conversation. It's always fun to talk about CX.