Hi, founders and fellow VC Friends!
I hope you're all happy and healthy. Quick update on the Awesome People Talent newsletter —
It's been quite a journey, right? From a humble BCC newsletter sent to 30 close friends to a bustling Substack with 4,500 awesome people 🤩, it’s grown beyond what I imagined.
When I launched the newsletter, my goal was to help my friends find jobs, contribute to the community, and spread good vibes.
If I'm honest, it lost its spark for me somewhere along the way. It started to feel more like a chore than a joy. After some soul-searching, I've decided to hit the reset button and bring the newsletter back to its roots.
Here's the plan: I'll send it out whenever inspiration strikes and when a trusted community member is looking for their next adventure.
I know it's breaking all the newsletter rules—no set frequency, no business goals—but sometimes you have to shake things up to rediscover the magic, right?
I want to set expectations moving forward: this newsletter will be less frequent but equally thrilling 🙏. In my spare time, I’m working on a fresh content project that I hope to unveil by EOQ 😉.
And with that, please meet my friend Lauren.
Please meet Lauren Wood, Your Customer Experience Consultant 👩💻
I met Lauren through a bestie, Alana Podrx. Before Lauren started consulting, she was the US Head of Customer Success at Too Good To Go (global B2B2C climate tech), where she grew and led a 25-person team to cut churn by 50% and 2x-ed B2B engagement. Throughout her career, she has worked to retain, engage, and grow customer accounts at hyper-growth companies like Compass and early-stage health tech, prop tech, and ed tech startups. She’s also the host of the Salesforce-sponsored CX podcast, Experts of Experience. For fun, Lauren nerds out about organizational psychology and how to overcome obstacles to unleash our maximum potential.
You can hire her to drive business growth in a variety of ways:
Customer Success and Customer Experience consulting
Team workshop facilitation to up-level client-facing teams
Leadership Coaching to increase employee engagement
Want an intro to Lauren? Respond to this email, and I’ll connect you!
She was gracious enough to share some pro tips with us here ✨
Customer experience tends to be a misunderstood field, so let’s start by defining a few key customer experience functions:
Customer Experience Team: Manages the overall customer experience strategy, often including customer service. Commonly referred to as CX.
Customer Service Team: Handles immediate customer issues.
Customer Success Team: Common in B2B SaaS, focuses on customer retention and growth post-sale, often managing the customer experience strategy.
While I specialize in B2B and B2B2C, the following tips apply universally to enhance revenue through an improved customer experience.
1. See Customer Teams as revenue drivers.
A McKinsey study found that “leaders who focus on customer experience achieve not only higher shareholder returns but also up to two times higher revenue growth than those whose customers are not as happy.”
Customer Experience and Success teams offer untapped revenue potential. Retaining and upselling existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
Empowered with the right KPIs, customer teams can unlock significant revenue.
When I joined Too Good To Go, we lost more customers than we gained. The 3 person CS team was spread in too many directions. We were asked to reduce churn, scale the team, increase upsell rates, and expand to new markets simultaneously. But you can’t upsell churned customers. Everything else is secondary to churn.
We prioritized our KPIs and focused on reducing churn. We redesigned every customer touchpoint, from introduction to cancelation, and in 6 months, cut church by 50% and, in turn, increased revenue.
2. Make customer experience a company-wide focus
I recently interviewed the VP of Customer Experience at Univar, the global leader in chemical distribution. Their CX team has won awards for their B2B customer engagement approach. There’s no surprise why, their company motto is We Are All CX.
Here are a few key ways to instill customer-centricity throughout the organization:
Make customer satisfaction (Net Promoter Score) and retention (Net Revenue Retention) shared KPIs
If a team impacts these numbers, they should have related KPIs. For example, how a product is introduced to a prospect affects the long-term retention of that customer. At Too Good To Go, we added a 1st 30-day retention metric into Sales quotas to acknowledge their contribution to overall retention.
Have every employee (even C-suite) work in customer service
Doing 2 x 3-hour shifts provides first-hand experience with customer issues and creates empathy for the end user and the customer service team. It breaks down barriers to customer-centricity and is 100% worth the investment. I promise!
Talk about the customer every chance you get
Returning to the Univar example, they open every meeting with a customer story. While at Too Good To Go, I did this in all hands and at each leadership meeting. This refocuses the team on the customer, the customer perspective, and why we’re here - to satisfy our customers' needs.
3. Make Employee Engagement a Priority
Employee engagement is “the level of employee commitment to helping their organization achieve their goals.” Engaged employees are intrinsically motivated to help the customer succeed. Disengaged employees hinder efforts to improve the customer experience.
In my interviews with top CX leaders on Experts of Experience, the #1 piece of advice I’ve consistently heard is, “engage your employees, and customer engagement will follow.”
Here are 3 steps to improving employee engagement
Gather feedback: I suggest a simple employee engagement survey and a conversation to ask follow-up questions. I posted an example of a survey on Linkedin the other day.
Share findings and co-create solutions: The team must contribute to the solutions. This creates buy-in and is a growth opportunity.
Do it every 3-6 months: Employee engagement is ongoing and ever-evolving, so keep a pulse on how everyone feels.
I recently worked with a growing healthcare company to address increasing client complaints about their customer service team. After interviewing the team, I found they didn’t feel adequately trained, and bulky processes slowed them down. We collaborated on the following solutions:
Implemented a quality assurance matrix - managers would review calls based on key attributes and coach the team on improvements weekly
Soft-skills training - to improve communication and de-escalation skills
Simplified workflows - to reduce employee effort in their day-to-day
As a result, the team was happier and more engaged, and customer feedback improved. Listen to your people and they will help you to win.
If you found this helpful or want to chat about any of the above, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or via my website!
Want an intro to Lauren? Respond to this email, and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions or want an intro to Ben!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Want an intro to Lauren, Brian, Ben, or David? Respond to this email, and I’ll connect you!