What has been your business/work highlight of 2024 so far?

Last summer, we acquired a digital asset management company, and since then we have been working on how we integrate our companies and products to create maximum value for our customers. We just united both companies under the name KeyShot. I’m excited because this change is more than a new name – it signals our combined vision to reinvent the way products are brought to market.

This integration has been a big step forward for us and it’s been a huge highlight to see all these changes brought to fruition after an immense amount of work from our teams across the globe. Our unified solution is going to change product design and how our customers work!

Who is your business hero and why?

Tien Tzuo, the founder of Zuora, is someone I really admire. Zuora really drove the subscription economy, which has transformed how all of us work with our customers. Zuora’s award-winning monetization suite powered subscriptions and freed us to think about what solutions fit customers best instead of how we can bill for it. I really admire Tien’s thought leadership in subscription and what it means for customers, and highly recommend his book “SUBSCRIBED: Why the Subscription Model Will be Your Company’s Future – and What to Do About It.” Zuora has done so much to drive innovation in the subscription industry, and its think tank, the Subscribed Institute, is just one example of modern customer experience. Customer experience isn’t just about renewals, it’s really about supporting customers to do better work, lead better initiatives, and change their organizations for the better.

What’s the biggest business mistake you’ve made and what did you learn from it?

When I first moved into a leadership role, I was very free with my feelings. Everyone knew what I was feeling, whether it was positive or negative. One of my mentors pulled me aside and told me that I needed to get my emotions under control. Not that you can’t have feelings or show your feelings, but your team takes their cues from you. If you’re acting upset, they will lose confidence. I really took that to heart and focused on maintaining my calm.

Not too long ago, one of my employees commented on how I never get angry and always stay calm no matter what happens. That comment made me realise how much I’ve changed, and how grateful I am that I got that feedback from my mentor – no matter how hard it was to hear at the time.

What’s the most inspirational book you’ve ever read and why?

In “Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts,” Neil Hoyne, Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Senior Fellow at the Wharton School, discusses how to use data to understand who your best customers are, what they need, and where to find more customers just like them. In CX, we want to find and form long-lasting relationships with customers, but we often struggle as to how. This book helps you understand what data you have and how to put it to use to drive better relationships with customers – and if that isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what is!

What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role in 2024?

For any leader, communication is always a significant challenge. As you progress in your role, so much of your time is spent sharing news of upcoming changes, assuaging employee concerns, and ensuring alignment between teams and departments. Add in a global organisation, and communication becomes even more vital. Communicating vision, strategy, values, and our direction – and making sure everyone understands and aligns – is my biggest challenge, and I’d bet it is a challenge for other CX leaders too!

And, of course, making sense of data, unifying disparate sales and financial systems, and building a total picture of the customer, but I think that’s every CX leader’s challenge.

What technology will have the greatest impact on your business this year and why?

Our customer success platform, ChurnZero, will have the biggest impact on our business this year in terms of reducing churn, increasing adoption, & finding upsell opportunities. As we continue to grow our company, we need to be able to manage more customers with greater precision and personalisation. Our Customer Success management platform gives us the power to rapidly scale without the need to add more customer success managers. By automating to-do lists, calendars, customer journeys, and plays based on key events and behaviours, we can boost personalisation and performance and help our CSMs focus on the work that matters.

I’m particularly excited because of ChurnZero’s built-in AI that’s trained specifically on customer success content. ChurnZero’s Customer Success AI™ is customer-success-specific, generative AI. It’s engineered to generate ideas, strategies, responses, summaries, and content for CSMs. CSMs can generate follow-up communications from notes, instructing the CS AI to refine content, add details, adjust the tone, personalise with customer data, or summarise key points. Using these built-in AI tools will help our customer success team create content, synthesise customer touchpoints, and improve personalisation and automation.

As an additional benefit, ChurnZero has my favourite newsletter, which always provides excellent content on customer success as a part of the overall customer experience.