Monica Deal - Director of Customer Experience at Lexis Nexis [Customer Success]

Monica is the Sr. Director of Customer Success at LexisNexis. She talks about:
· Journey Mapping
· Moments of Truth
· Ideal Experiences
· Empowering Employees

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Nick Glimsdahl 0:03

Welcome to the Press 1 for Nick Podcast. I am Nick Glimsdahl. And my guest this week is Monica deal. Monica is the director of the customer experience at LexisNexis. Monica, welcome to the Press 1 for Nick podcast.

Monica Deal 0:15

Hi, thank you. Nice to be here, Nick.

Nick Glimsdahl 0:17

Yeah, it’s so I always try to find a nugget of things that people might not know about you. And so there’s I found two things. And so the first one is that you were actually the Auto Attendant voice at LexisNexis. How did that happen?

Monica Deal 0:36

Yeah, I guess I’m thankful to people who suggested that I

Nick Glimsdahl 0:40

do it.

Monica Deal 0:41

I don’t know if I should be thanking them at this point, right? It really ran into they needed somebody new and they needed some messages recorded right away. And so they asked me to do it, and it’s kind of stuck around.

Nick Glimsdahl 0:52

Hmm. And so now you are kind of the voice of LexisNexis. But anytime that somebody needs to make a change, it’s Hey, hey, Monica.

Monica Deal 1:01

Yeah, I record I record a lot of this for them. So it’s kind of fun when people realize it, because certainly we have employees that call in to that number all the time to reach customer service and things like that. And every now and then I’ll just get an email. It’s like it’s a you on the Auto Attendant.

Nick Glimsdahl 1:17

Yes, it is.

Monica Deal 1:18

It’s me.

Nick Glimsdahl 1:20

Money. So the only the other one that I found out is that you have a healthy obsession with Disney.

Monica Deal 1:26

I do. I don’t know if it’s healthy. No, I just and you know, I probably being in customer experience was destined for me because I’ve always admired Disney and the amazing experiences they put on, and just the level of customer experience they’re at. So that’s, that’s my obsession. You know, I love everything. Disney. I’m not like a collector or anything. I just really admire how they run their business, especially in the theme parks.

Nick Glimsdahl 1:51

Yeah, but you you may or may not have gone to Disney, what 25

Monica Deal 1:57

somewhere in the 20 ish range. But I mean, most of those raise a child. So yeah,

Nick Glimsdahl 2:01

less than 300. But over 20

Yeah, that’s a good range.

Okay, perfect. So the main topic I want to talk about today is onboarding. And I think it’s an interesting one, because on the call that we had, you talked about customer success. And there’s so many organizations that are trying to figure out how to go from customer service are from sales, and say, Hey, we promise everything and we’re going to give you the world and then they give you over to customer service or onboarding. But there’s not true a customer success department. So was there already a department for you when you had this role?

Monica Deal 2:43

No, not at all. So when I was originally hired, it was actually the stand up the onboarding organization. Okay. So that organization did not exist, it was brand new, it had really been something that they’ve been trying to work on getting stood up for over a year. But what it had really required was a lot of organizational change. And not necessarily realignment kind of change. But change around the way people saw the customer. I think it was very difficult to, you know, make sales feel comfortable, that they were handing off a customer for 90 days, in our case over, you know, to the onboarding organization. And we were really ferrying them through that time, and ensuring that they had a great experience. And so there had to be a great deal of trust that was built within the organization as well as a really solid program to make sure that they felt comfortable during that time.

Nick Glimsdahl 3:36

And so a question I have for you is, what happened? Like why change in that moment to was there? Was there some sort of spot where you noticed that customers were falling, falling away from the organization or not getting that? Well? Yeah, I

Monica Deal 3:52

think you have two points of magic that come in. You know, it’s absolutely it’s absolutely leadership driven. You know, you have to have leadership that really believes in customer experience being important, you know, so it absolutely starts there. The other thing that we were seeing was through our NPS surveys, we are seeing that customers had one of two experiences, either they were brand new to LexisNexis. And they had so many different groups that were touching them, either calling them on the phone or sending them emails, you know, marketing emails, and such that they really weren’t sure who they were supposed to be connecting with. Because they had a lot of different contact people. Or they were having the exact opposite experience, which was they were brand new, and they hadn’t heard from anyone. And that wasn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. It was more of just the circumstances, you know, in a sales organization, especially in the retention organization. They were so busy trying to maintain those customers trying to grow those customers trying to get renewals done, that there wasn’t that high level of focus on new customers that were coming in. Yeah,

Nick Glimsdahl 4:55

yeah. And so it was important for you guys to kind of fill that gap. Yeah. to kind of create that, that the magic experience throughout that process in the 90 days, making them feel nice and warm, and then say, Hey, here’s, here’s my little my, my family member after those 90 days, I know him as much as my kids. But, you know, how did you go about building that process, though? Because it can’t be like, hey, today, we don’t have a process tomorrow we do. It’s actually, you know, understanding the customer’s needs before you can kind of go through that process. So yeah,

Monica Deal 5:29

absolutely. We spent a long time doing some journey mapping, really looking at what the process was currently, it’s very, I think it’s impossible to jump into an organization and say, This is what, you know, what the ideal onboarding experiences without really understanding what the customer is going through currently. Yeah, you know, so doing a lot of that journey mapping, understanding what happens pre sale, you know, once they sign that contract, what was occurring, what were those moments of truth for them, you know, where they really knew that they had either made a good or a bad decision, based on switching to LexisNexis. And, you know, it wasn’t all when we did that dirty math, it was all Hey, all this needs to change. It was more looking at those pieces that that were inconsistent. Some customers were having a great experience. And when they went through the journey, you know, it worked out really well, you had other customers where the path was a lot more Rocky. So in developing the onboarding program, we looked for those moments of truth combined with what we wanted the ideal experience to be. And then we mapped that out and made that happen. Ours in particular, is based on 90 days. And that’s kind of based just on how LexisNexis bills, we wanted to make sure we got them through their first billing period, and that they felt really comfortable with any sort of billing or reporting. So that’s how we arrived at that length of time. But certainly, when you do that journey map, it really points out, you know, where it makes the most sense to insert yourself? And then when it makes the most sense to transition away from that.

Nick Glimsdahl 6:54

Yeah. And then did you need updating your processes important? But did you need to update technology? Or did you were able to kind of grab the nuts and bolts from other departments and make it work.

Monica Deal 7:08

So in the beginning, we did grab the nuts and bolts from other departments, that was the fastest way to stand it up. I was hired in November, and we started the program in January. So there wasn’t a whole lot of time to, you know, procure a new program, or look for a way. We were really scrappy in the beginning, it was how do we get it done, make sure that we’re tracking the metrics that matter, and then kind of grow from there. So we started off kind of nuts and bolts borrowing from our current CRM and seeing how we could insert ourselves into that process. And then just as of last year, we actually built our own tool. So right now we’re using an end to end bpms system that houses the whole onboarding program. So it allows us a lot more flexibility. And the reason we did that is that, you know, we want to in our program, we connect with every single end user, we didn’t need to flood the CRM for sales to wade through like every single attempt we made to every single end user. And that way, you know, it was important for them to see when we talked to them and what we talked about. So by building the system ourselves, it made us a lot more flexible. We were able to automate things that were taking longer, we were able to make checkboxes and an easy to fill in pick lists for things that were more routine tasks when we talked to the customer to really speed up the process and gain efficiencies.

Nick Glimsdahl 8:25

Yeah. And so there’s, you mentioned on the question prior about journey mapping and moments of truth. Why do some companies struggle with that and don’t take the time to understand the pain points for the journey map or the moments of truth and understanding their customers ideal experience?

Monica Deal 8:44

Well, I think there’s always two reasons and one, you already said, it’s time, I mean, it you really do have to have the commitment to be able to step back from the current process, and take the time to look at it. I think the other reason probably is that they just don’t feel that they have leadership buy in to make the changes that need to be made. And and you’re really kind of stuck. If you don’t, you know, you can do the best dirty math in the world. But if nobody cares to make the change, then it’s completely useless to everyone. You know. So I think that that’s why a lot of companies get stuck. I think in everyone’s mind, you know, what experience you want the customer to have. You know, I also see in companies though, where leadership doesn’t actually know the experience their customers having, you know, so that’s one of the things that we’ve always driven through every level of our organization, is that we need to stay close to the customer. And what I mean by that is, I was in sales for 10 years at Lexus, I still want to go hear sales calls and listen to people because I want to stay close to the customer. And I think as you grow in leadership, people start to get further removed from that. And it’s really important to do those journey maps and to actually go and hear their customers and see their customers and know what what’s actually taking place. And I think that that provides A lot of people because they assume and make a lot of assumptions about what happens that when you start pulling the curtain back, you start to find things. Yeah,

Nick Glimsdahl 10:07

yeah, I’ve heard of other customer experience lead or customer centric organizations that take the time and have executives even spend a day, a year inside the call center contact center space to hear what they’re going through what the pain points, they have what the customers are saying, because then they have a better pulse. But if you don’t, then you kind of keep it at arm’s distance. And, and, you know, if you put the horse blinders on, it’s, it tends to have a different experience well, and

Monica Deal 10:34

it’s also about driving empathy through the whole organization. You know, we do a lot of the onboarding specialists going and sitting with CS and sales people with customer support and sales people, with people who process orders, because we want them to understand everyone’s role, and that no one’s role is more or less important than anyone else’s. When I switch from the sales organization over to operations, you know, you always have that sort of like, heads head butting between, you know, the business and operations, you know, the business is like, ah, they’re trying to keep us from making sales and operations always like, oh, why did they make sales this way? I mean, it happens by way of every company and everyone I talked to. So one of the things that I’ve tried to do is really build that bridge, you know, to make people understand more about what drives and motivates and makes other people successful, so that they can help them more in their role instead of preventing up presenting obstacles.

Nick Glimsdahl 11:25

Yeah, so inside that does that. It’s obviously the important part to build the trust in between those two departments. Because if somebody says, Hey, why are you taking away my sales? And or, hey, why? Why are you the middle person? Now when I create that experience, and if you bring it back to the customer, it probably drives a different experience or a different reaction from the employee. But, you know, is that important from what you guys see?

Monica Deal 11:51

Absolutely, it is. I mean, I think everything we can do to connect our departments together better, and really weave that that customer into everything always makes, it makes the experience better all the way around. I mean, people should always be thinking of the customer. You know, I think back to, you know, the the examples where people have left a seat at the board table, you know, for the customer that’s sitting there. But really, that mentality makes a difference. You know, how is this actually helping the customer? How is this making us better?

Nick Glimsdahl 12:20

Yeah, yeah, it does the customer actually say they want this or is this just a really cool whiz bang technology that the IT department wants?

Monica Deal 12:28

Yeah, or somebody’s just checking a box. Right? You see that a lot to that GPO? To me? Yep.

Nick Glimsdahl 12:34

Yeah. Because that’s what they’re measured on.

Right? Right. Yeah. Yeah,

it’s so the one the one thing that I had a question two is around hiring the right people for that specific department. So Customer Success is probably not the easiest to find, hey, there’s just got to go online and look for Customer Success people. But, you know, maybe what are some attributes or some of the things that you were looking for in a new hire?

Monica Deal 13:00

Yeah. When we first originally built the team, we build it very strategically. And that was by drawing resources from all the other departments, we wanted to have a little microcosm of problem solving. So once we kind of had identified those skills, we were really looking for people who were conversationalist. I mean, at the end of the day, you have to actually like customers, and like talking to people. Yeah. And that’s pretty easy to sort out, you know, we wanted people that were curious people that could hold a conversation, you know, people that could develop relationships really quickly. Since then, obviously, we’ve grown throughout the years, a lot of our hires have come from industries, you know, like banking, or where they’ve worked in retail, or, you know, really people that had been in sales, but didn’t necessarily find that sales was such a good fit for them, you know, that they really loved being close to the customer, but didn’t want to have to have sales quotas and sales goals behind them. So that’s been where a lot of our talent has come from.

Nick Glimsdahl 13:58

Yeah, that’s it’s always interesting doing

Monica Deal 14:00

it. I mean, liking Disney as a plus.

Nick Glimsdahl 14:02

Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great transition, I think is, is besides, you know, I guess you could put Disney but what are the companies doing that? Well,

Monica Deal 14:12

what other companies do well, yeah, customer service? Gosh, I think that there’s a lot out there that are doing it. Well, I look at companies outside of Disney, I think of things. I think of like Zappos and stuff like that, you know, it’s interesting to me, because I think prior to COVID, I would have answered this question a little differently. Because I think it’s really difficult to hold. And I’m sure there’s a lot of these companies that are still doing good, but we’re in a completely different kind of way of doing things. We’re in a different way of marketing. You know, we’re a different in a different way of reaching customers. So when I look out there like I think even things like peloton I think they do really good at when I look at that the culture that they build around their product is super impressive. You know, so that’s some of the stuff that I that I look at now that I may look at a little differently than I did you know, a year ago, if you asked me.

Nick Glimsdahl 15:06

Yeah, yeah, it’s actually really interesting on some of the organizations that how you’re able to adapt in that moment around the craziness that’s gone on in 2020. So being able to figure out what works for you, but still pay attention to the foundation and what what’s important to your customer? So

Monica Deal 15:25

absolutely.

Nick Glimsdahl 15:26

You know, when it comes to your employees, how do you empower them to make the right decision for their customers,

Monica Deal 15:34

I think the best way you empower employees is letting them know First off, that they can make mistakes, that it’s not going to be the end of their career. Because of that, I think there’s nothing more empowering that knowing that you can do what you think is the right thing. And if it turns out to not be, you know, we’ll talk about that and figure out how we would handle it differently next time. Our employees in particular, they have a lot to do when a customer is new. And a lot of times that can be doing someone else’s job because something wasn’t done right or something was sold incorrectly. So we try to give them the power, where they can make corrections, we give them the power to try to make a customer feel like we heard them. And we know that they’ve been unhappy through being able to give them what we call a humble pie, gift card. And then we also give them the power to be able to know where to go for the answers. That’s another very empowering thing is that we make it really clear that they have the ability to reach out to product to reach out to people in in the technical groups and to actually get problem solved for their customer.

Nick Glimsdahl 16:41

So did you touch Did you just say humble pie?

Monica Deal 16:44

We did? Yeah, you explain that? Sure. So it’s a program that a colleague of mine developed a couple years ago. And you know, that’s really what it is. It’s a saying and admitting, hey, we made a mistake, and we’re gonna send you a gift card. So we send them an Amazon card. for that. And it’s, um, I think it’s important for two reasons. Number one is, is I don’t think it’s all wrapped up in just the gift card. It’s the idea of admitting that we made a mistake. You know, I think I had said before, we’re all consumers, and we don’t expect everything to go right every time. But it’s really how you handle it when it doesn’t go, right. So that’s one of the things that the humble pie allows us to do is say, Hey, we made a mistake. We were Moses, like, This shouldn’t have happened for you this way. This doesn’t happen this way for other customers. Yeah. So here’s a gift card, just to say that we’re sorry, it doesn’t make up for the fact that it happened. But we also try to send a handwritten note to them as well, with that usually follows up after the gift card. And we have some customers that, you know, other than just getting rave reviews on surveys, you know, or just over the top that somebody just took the time to just say, Sorry, sorry that this happened to you. And this, we know this is not ideal,

Nick Glimsdahl 17:52

right? It’s an opportunity to improve that moment, because it probably just doesn’t happen for that individual person. But it could potentially be happening across the board. So it’s an opportunity to improve. I love that program. I was honestly hoping that you were actually sending people pies, like

cookie cakes,

yeah, or like a triple berry pie, or like an apple pie. That’d be so awesome. I would just call him to complain just to so I could receive a pie. So when it comes to customer success, how are your employees measured today.

Monica Deal 18:29

So we have a couple things that are really important to us, the number one weighted metric is behind connection, right. So we make a big effort to connect live with all of our customers, because every other metric flows from there. I mean, if we connect live with them, we’re getting them trained, we connect live with them, they’re more satisfied. According to the surveys, they have a higher tmps, transactional NPS, they transition into the business with a higher, true NPS. And then we also see that they have lower cancel rates long term on that. So when I look at my team, those are the main drivers for them. They also have things around professional development, because I take very seriously that they’re continuously becoming better as a professional in the customer service world. So we read a lot of books on our team. And you know, we’re constantly kind of tweaking processes and performance to try to get better. Wow. Yeah,

Nick Glimsdahl 19:23

I love the fact that you guys are reading it as a team too, because that means you’re growing as a team. It’s not like one person is doing the work. And you’re saying, hey, hey, Monica, will you just tell us what the book says? So that we can implement that in the future? Because everybody’s gonna have a different perspective on that book.

Monica Deal 19:40

They do. And it’s interesting. We used to do it where people would just get chapters. And I found exactly what you were saying, you know, that people you were only getting that one side of the fire view of the book. And now we do small cohort cohorts that people can sign up for, and it’s more like a book club that everybody reads and it’s just so interesting. The things that people pull out as being very important to them, either because of their own experience, or just they just saw it in a completely different way.

Nick Glimsdahl 20:07

Yeah, I love that. Um, so you mentioned earlier about how you have those three months to kind of take care of the customer, can you give us a little deeper dive of what actually happens inside maybe a sneak peek behind the curtain?

Monica Deal 20:23

Yeah, of course. So you know, the very first thing my team does is what I like to call just the Lexus love call, I it’s basically out to the account to whoever’s the main point of contact, just thanking them for choosing us as a company, you know, really ensuring that they understand what next steps are as far as when their account will be set up when they can start using it. The next set of calls we make is out to every single end user, which can be quite daunting and some of our larger accounts. But we really want them to know that they have that personalized onboarding specialist to work with them in the beginning. So we’re looking for things like getting them trained, getting them signed in really making sure that we’re taking steps that they see value early part of onboarding, and part of that reaching out to every end user is to really make sure that they feel really good about switching to LexisNexis as their provider, and they feel really comfortable in the content that they’ve picked, that those things are critical when somebody first begins because you know, otherwise, they’re going to have that sour taste in their mouth. And as somebody who used to be in sales and renew accounts, I can tell you that when you have a rocky experience in the beginning, it goes through the whole account, they remember it a renewal, people try to use it as a negotiation tactic about how bad that start was for them, you know, two years ago. So it’s really, really critical that you know, you really, for lack of a better word, indoctrinate them into like the Lexus way right from the beginning, what their role is as a customer, and you know, how they can reach out to us, you know, what sort of resources we have for them. After reaching out to those individual users, we have a call on their first invoice goes out. So we make sure that the billing or invoice person understands the invoice if there’s any billing reports, we have a lot of specialized billing reports that sometimes people require. And then at the end, our last touch is to transition them back to the retention account team, and just to thank them for being a part of onboarding. So all of that takes place. those are those are our prescriptive calls over the first 90 days as their first point of contact, though, you know, we handle all kinds of things, from technical issues to needing to add additional content to connecting the back to the sales teams. We handle all of that. Sorry, my cat just knock things over.

Nick Glimsdahl 22:34

Yeah, no worries. It’s a cat life, right? Yeah, no, um, what is? So the whole goal is to ensure your customers have an effortless and consistent experience. You know, how do you ensure that?

Monica Deal 22:50

Well, we do a lot of measuring to make sure that that’s happening. Yeah. So after that initial touch with all of those end users, we send out a survey. And that survey is really just based on two questions. We specify it to their onboarding specialist to personalize it a little bit more, and ask them number one, how satisfied were they with that experience? Why did they choose that satisfaction level? And then we asked the transactional NPS question. So if they were willing to, you know, recommend us based on that experience, to their colleagues, we get some great things via really the verbatim comments. I mean, I always say sometimes the surveys are great, and the scales are great. But man, the meat is in the verbatim comments, yeah. Where you can really get a lot more about what’s going on in the experience. We also do a lot of, you know, really listening to calls, as well as cross coaching amongst the team, to make sure that everybody’s delivering an experience that’s more up to par. It’s a little more challenging now that everyone’s home base right now. But we found ways to work around it, so that we can continue to really engage people that and make sure that they’re kind of using all the best practices.

Nick Glimsdahl 23:56

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s really neat. So you have so much insight that you just pulled, right you have all of this information that you’re continuing to get from the customer and these 90 days, how often are you going back to the sales and product teams and saying, Hey, guys, this is what we learned, here’s some things that we think you guys can improve on. Or here’s some, even, you know, here’s some good news. Maybe they don’t hear the good news, that often either half the you guys are communicating back to those teams.

Monica Deal 24:24

So we have a pretty solid feedback loop in two ways. You know, certainly there’s a lot of errors that we catch that we have other parts of the business uses coaching opportunities, so that we can try to prevent those further. We also do share good news though, you know, our product teams, there’s someone I don’t want to say they’re somewhat siloed but product always is looking at customers but they’re only looking at certain customers, you know, and not everybody can be involved and not everybody even wants to be part of an experiment with product. You know, it’s always great to share with them when a customer is just raving you know about a feature you And something that we constantly, you know, sometimes, sometimes to your point earlier, there’s features that are built up and are hyped a lot, because, you know, they’re really excited that they did this. And it’s like, oh, like, customer seems to be really excited about this over here, just kind of letting you guys know, like, this is the thing that people, you know, geek out about when we showed them. The other side of that, too, is that, you know, we also tend to, because we’re working with the customers and in the product so diligently, that we tend to see patterns of things with customers, you know, or, you know, customers seem to be seeing this a lot or saying this a lot, or, you know, even since COVID, you know, we’re hearing a lot more of this from customers. So we share those insights back to the business quite frequently, both through formal and informal channels. And I think that that’s really important that you have the ability to pick up the phone and call one of the sales VPS. But that you also have more of a formal Reporting Program, you know, where you can highlight trends and things like that, that you’re seeing.

Nick Glimsdahl 25:58

Yeah, that’s it sounds I love the I love the close feedback loop. Because if you’re not doing it, then you’re kind of, you know, putting you’re putting your arm behind your back saying, aha, this is great. I have this perfect apartment. Yeah, but I’m key I call it the Heisman, where you kind of keep them at arm’s distance. And yeah, they got that I got this. And now, now the information is mine. But and I didn’t prep you for this question. But I’m really curious, like, what advice would you give somebody else who was trying to start out a customer success department? Now that you’ve done this for a while?

Monica Deal 26:32

Yeah. So I think I would, you know, first, get all my ducks in a row, about what I really thought the advantages were. And I mean, there’s just, there’s so many great places to go for that information. But number two, you really need to get a champion executive wise, because if the business is not in a state to want to move that direction, it’s going to be a lot of wasted energy on your part, trying to push something through that just does not have the meat behind it, or the buy in. We could have never stood up this program, unless we had executives that were like, no, we’re doing this, you know, to challenge the status quo a little bit. So I would say start there. I think also, once you have somebody that’s willing to say, okay, you know, check it out, then start with a journey map, because we are all about data driven decisions at LexisNexis. Yeah, so the more data you can get behind it, as far as this is the experience our customers are having, and this is what percentage are following this route versus that route, it makes it a lot easier to tie into that. The third thing I would say is that when you start out, it’s really important that you’re looking at what some of those leading metrics are, as well as what some of the lagging metrics are. So all the metrics that we talked about earlier, those weren’t metrics we could start with. Because you know, those were things that we were gonna see further down the line. You know, after three months, we know what the connection rate was with that particular account and things of that nature. So we really backed it up to things we knew we could influence on a daily basis. And so they were very simple metrics in the beginning so that we could show traction with the business. And they were as simple as can we get people to log in faster? And could we get people to search faster? Now, I don’t think that those are really sexy metrics for the long term. But they’re metrics that on a day by day basis, we could say we’re making progress against. And so it’s I think it’s important to identify both of those those kinds of metrics so that you can keep showing the business that you’re doing good work, while the long term metrics play out.

Nick Glimsdahl 28:25

Yeah, no, it’s great advice. Because if you can’t measure it, then you can’t improve it. And then you can show I’m making I’m making that traction. Right? Yeah. So I wrap up every podcast with two questions. The first question is, is what book or person has influenced you the most in the past year? And then the second question is, is if you could leave a note to all the customer service and all the customer experience professionals, and it would reach everyone? What would it say?

Monica Deal 28:53

Okay, so the book that’s probably influenced me the most, which I’m having my team lead, and my senior onboarding specialists read right now is Bernie Browns dare to lead. I think it’s just a really powerful look on leadership overall, it’s not specific to customer experience. But I come from the school of thought that your employees being taken care of takes care of your customer the best. So I’m all about everyone in our organization, learning to lead better, and that’s even from their own individual contributor positions. So that book has been a huge influence on me, like I’ve always loved her. And I think this is just another great book. The team also just started think like a rocket scientist. So I’ll check back with you later to see how we’re influenced by that. I first the note goes that I would leave to everyone is, you know, I really would like people to think more about their customer in general and not about metrics. I think that people get way tied up into what their individual goals are and what their metrics are, and I wish more people would push to their organizations to Do the right thing. And we’ll change the metric. And you know, that’s the culture that I’ve built the team in and allows people to feel more empowered. Because they don’t need to worry that, oh, gosh, we’re changing direction, or we’re doing an A B test to do something different. That’s gonna really impact my number at the end of the year. It’s like, no, throw that out the door, do the right thing for the customer. And we’ll adjust the metric if it needs to. And people probably hear me say that once a week, not because they’re worried about it. But because I want them to know that at the end of the day, just always do the right thing for the customer. If we need to change a process, if we need to change the way we go about doing it, then we’ll do that. And we’ll adjust everything else along the right along the way. Because that will play out to always be a win if we’re just keeping our eye on that. And not on the metrics.

Nick Glimsdahl 30:49

Some great advice, what is the best way for people to get ahold of you?

Monica Deal 30:54

Yeah, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m out there. I love to connect with people. So very, very happy to talk to anyone who wants to reach out.

Nick Glimsdahl 31:02

And it’s Monica do m o n, I see a space deal. And d e a l correct? Correct. All right. So reach out to Monica on LinkedIn. Talk about her cats or her Disney experience or customer success one

Monica Deal 31:18

cat and he looked very unapologetic about knocking things down.

Nick Glimsdahl 31:22

I fully expect a picture so I can I’ll post it along. But, Monica, thank you so much, had a blast and learned a ton and look forward to learn more about customer success in the future.

Monica Deal 31:35

Awesome. Nice to talk to you, Nick. Take care.

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The Press 1 For Nick podcast is both educational and engaging, and each episode offers listeners a dynamic blend of insightful stories, best practices, and invaluable lessons.

Nick’s guests – each with a unique wealth of knowledge – include leaders from a variety of backgrounds and industries. Some of his guests include:

Customer service & customer experience leaders
A hostage negotiator
Award-winning authors
Home Depot’s Senior Director of Customer Care
Former VP of Disney’s Magic Kingdom
Lyft’s Head of Partner and Customer Engagement
Deputy Chief Veteran Experience Officer from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs

On every episode Nick asks his guest two questions:

What book or person has influenced you the most in the past year?
If you could leave a note to all the Customer Service and CX professionals, what would it say?

You can find all the podcast guests’ answers under their episodes below.

If all you want is the guests’ book recommendations, you can go here.

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