Gal Oron on Content as an Asset

Gal Oron on Content as an Asset

With a comprehensive dynamic publishing solution and analytics platform. It’s something like I’ve never seen before. So as soon as I said, I was like, I’ve gotta have gal on the show and gal. Thank you so much for being a guest on B customer led so excited to have you here, bill.

Absolutely. So, gal, we ask every guest on the show, tell us about your journey and you have a really interesting journey from the last time we spoke and I just would love for you to share. With our guests and how that kinda led into zoom in. Okay, great.

I grew up in Israel. So I’m sure that somewhat part of the audience have been there. And part of not, I strongly recommend you visiting there. grew up serving in, in the military as, as a, as an air force pilot for quite a few years. And then like many of the other Israelis started in tech. initially from more of a customer facing roles and, but the technical roles of presales and QA, which is where I think I, I devote a lot of where I am today to, to those, initial roles.

I really love being with customers, talking to customers and being in front of, of customers. So most of my position were very much customer facing roles and, always been involved around enterprise software, and spent a lot of time here in, in the us, in New York throughout the years. And then, five years ago, or a little bit more than five years ago realized that my next big thing is gonna be around this overload of information that we’re all experiencing, and specific around content.

And that’s when we started the zoom in. And we’ll probably elaborate on this

Were you seeing the world that led you to start zoom in? And then I love this question because some of the names of companies are just so amazing, but how did you choose the name of the company? Yeah, ,

As I say, even my parents understand the pain that, that we solve. It’s not that complicated. And it’s around companies creating great products, great features, great through X great modules. Great. Everything is great, but it’s not enough for the customer. So, so around this great product companies are creating a whole world of information.

So customer can know how to use the, the product, the greatest. and, and what we saw in the market is that companies are creating this whole world information, but bill is a customer of DocuSign or McAfee mm-hmm or a buyer, all of our other customers, whenever, however, you’re engaging with that. It’s just an experience.

It’s just not good enough. And then you go home and, and you watch Netflix, or you buy an Amazon, or you are an Uber and that gap of bill being a consumer at home and enjoying your life, and then going to. And needing to find yourself in those enterprise product, that gap is too big. And we wanted to close this gap, eh, by providing much better experience around how people interact with technical content, with manuals, guides, training, materials, knowledge articles, community discussions, support tickets.

That’s in general, that’s the gap that we saw. And we had a, we assumed at that time we had Anis that, One we can help end users like bill. And provide them really stellar end user experience, really like Netflix, that just like having at home, we believe that we can provide that stellar end user experience.

And if we’re gonna provide, build that great experience, those companies it’s gonna help them in the areas of reduction of support costs, higher NPS, more sales. I mean, we can actually monetize, that thing a hundred percent. And, and, and that’s how we started this and, and another layer, which was very important from the beginning.

And, but we didn’t know at the time if it’s gonna work or. We said, if there is so much consumption of technical content, there is so much data around this. I’m sure there is a lot of interesting stuff you can learn from just collecting the data around this. So that was the original pain, and it relates to the name of the company.

The idea was not about zooming in. The idea was zooming. We’re gonna do it all fast and simple, and we’re gonna allow bill to go smoothly through all those obstacles and this frustration and make it very, very easy and fast for, for everyone. That was the name around, that was the background around the name zooming and, yeah.

And later we’ll talk about a few years after. Well, we, our, our assumptions do they, were they right or not, but that’s, that was the initial pain that.

tell us a little bit about sort of the maybe early stages in starting up and then kind of now transitioning to where you are and you’re, and, and the company’s doing so much great stuff, particularly around the CX community as well. I mean, it sounds like you guys are really coming at this from a broader end, end to end journey perspective, but really coming in, in one part of that journey too.

That was the big thing without it has a big dollar sign over it and big value to big companies. And that was the big thing that we wanted to start with. . But initially we said let’s in order to get data, interesting data around, we have to deliver that content so we can start collecting data. Once we started delivering that, that, that content and that experience, we realized that that’s where the big pain is that customers are suffering.

Customer are suffering and companies are just desperate to improve that experience. So the first few years were all around how to take existing content that companies have manuals. And bringing you all into one place and deliver it to bill in all those different disparate places that you’re looking for it in a website, in a portal mm-hmm, in a support site, in a, in product, in the call center to provide you really stellar end user experience.

That was the, the beginning. And that’s what we did, in the first few years, and then realizing the value that that companies see from it, from reduction in support. And higher NPS and more leads and all kind of very, a lot of very, very important KPIs that are improved from just delivering that, that seller or like experience around the technical content.

So the whole monetization aspect and actionable insight aspect that was from day one, the big thing we got to it a few years later than what we wanted now, it’s, it’s very much part of what, what we do, but we got to it a few. After, where, when we wanted to start with it. But as I said, I think it was a, for a good reason because we just identified that the pain was a little bit in a different place than what we initially anticipated.

Right.

Yeah.

Every company now is a tech company, whether you’re a software company, a bank or a, or a bank or a hardware company, we have. I’m not allowed to give the names. I, one of the two big burger companies in the

world’s not technical content. Right. But they have a lot of franchises and every, they send tons of operating manuals and menus that require authorizations and personalization. And then exactly the same pain as the customer that I mentioned in DocuSign mm-hmm or McAfee or Avar, all the other. And you mentioned banks exa a technology company.

We also have some of, one of the biggest credit card companies in the world. Okay. Sounds like they create credit, but it’s a technology company. Yeah. And when you’re a technology company, you create products and around this product, you create tons of content with APIs and API documentation and manual and guides, and then customers start using it and you have knowledge articles, and you create communities.

Every company today, almost every company that, if you ask yourself which company doesn’t, you’re not gonna get a lot of companies without yeah. Technical company. And that basically makes that pain that we’re dealing with applicable to almost every company that you know. And now when you dive into every specific company, the more technical the product is, the more traffic is around technical information.

And the, the most surprising figure, I, I mean, We anticipate that there is a big industry here. There is a lot of traffic, but we didn’t know how big it is. And what we see today is that on average, for almost every company that that is tech related, 70% of the traffic is around product information around manuals and guide and training materials.

So why and why is that? Because if you think about let’s take the last part of the customer journey, onboarding support, it’s all technical, obviously. Mm. But even when you buy a technical product statistics, I, to say 90% of the buyers go through technical information before they buy an enterprise product.

So marketing and sales is also very, very technical. I mean, nothing against the marketing people that make our life much easier. But when you buy, it’s not about the marketing fluff, you, you, it’s very, very technical. So what’s happening is you have an asset that every company has it. And a lot of. Let’s say it takes around 70% of your traffic.

It has a huge impact on your customer. Huge impact on churn on up sales, on lot of huge impact on your customer, but still not being perceived as strategic asset. And some company just, they put it somewhere and they hope for well, and, and we are changing that, all that because we see the impact that it makes on, on customers.

They don’t view it as an asset, but it absolutely it is. Right. And to your point, it can make or break a relationship. If I can’t find what I’m looking for to use this product in an effective way, particularly in a B2B space. Right. I’m just gonna go look elsewhere. Why do you think that is? Why is there been more focus maybe on the product development on the marketing side and not really viewed, it’s almost viewed as an afterthought.

Like we’re gonna produce this and they’re gonna use it and then we’re done right. Is it because the solutions like yours, haven’t been there to be able to help people think differently about it. Is it because it was traditionally not thought of as part of the journey for a customer? Like, I I’d be curious to, of your perspective there.

Yeah.

How less churn? Where do I know specifically? Because my content is not built well or is not consolidated or is not being, delivered in a great, in a great. Where does it get bill stuck in the customer journey? Mm-hmm there weren’t enough, there wasn’t enough technology. And there wasn’t enough focus on showing exactly the relation between this and real business KPIs that matter to people and companies and especially to sea level people.

so that’s one big thing and the other big thing that happened, and, and I think it’s only became bigger and bigger over the last two years with COVID. We got used to standard as consumers. Okay. As cons. We’re just not gonna settle for less than this. Just like again, you’re not gonna watch videos with experience, which is not as good as Netflix.

So this gap between,as I said, bill is a consumer at home and at work, bill is not okay anymore with that gap. I mean, and then, and it goes to, to the companies you’re working with and, and, and it forces them to, to do something. And then by the way, in many ways it makes like our life easy because we’re basically trying to.

Replicate what the consumer world is already having and just bringing it to the, to the B2B world. But that’s what we’re trying to get to.

I think now more, obviously more and more B2B companies are starting to realize that. cons their buyers or their consumers, sort of the B2B companies that they’re selling, the businesses that they’re selling to no longer want that gap between what I can experience on, using my apple TV, remote, how simple that might be to something that, why make it complex for me in a business setting.

One of the features that I really, I love about zoom in’s platform. Particularly as a former CX leader, myself is the insights that you guys provide and deliver to clients to identify where there is friction in the product experience and complexity and product content. Talk to our listeners about that.

And, you mentioned at the top of the show a little bit, but talk to our listeners about this feature. And why was it important in the context of the overall product offering?

And then many, many places where customers are consuming that, that content mm-hmm, , it’s a big ecosystem with tons of traffic. and as I said, in those 70% of the traffic that’s in general, that’s the average and relating it to your second question. If this is not being perceived as a strategic asset, and you’re, you’re not collecting this data.

You’re basically blind, spotted to 70% of what’s happening with your customer. Okay. That’s a lot of, a lot of stuff that you’re just not, not being aware of. And then things like where does bill spend most of his time around the customer journey? Where does it get stuck? And as you said before, if you get stuck today, you can move to another company very, very easily.

I mean, because you think you can resolve everything by yourself. If this company doesn’t allow you, the ability. To resolve things yourself, I’ll go for, look for somewhere else. Sure. So where does bit get stuck in the customer journey, which features and areas in the products are not working or are working?

How can I put a dollar figure around case deflection? Because I know that the content is there. I mean, by the way, All the content is there, but they’re still not finding it. Maybe I’m not investing. Maybe I’m not delivering. Right. Maybe I’m not investing in the right pieces of content. We know, for fact, there are pieces of content for companies that no one read the last 15 years.

Okay. And they’re still updating it

so this freshness of content, And when is built. I mean, if you think about technical content who is consuming it, I mean, people don’t just browse Google and download manual for fun, right?

These are all things that they, by collecting data and understanding what led bill to open a ticket, what led bill to call the call center? What led bill to buy something? These are all kind of insight that can actually drive more business to a company. And they’re very, very, very appealing to sea level.

I’m telling you as a CEO, sure. Someone here in the company will tell me gal, you wanna know more stuff about their customers? I’m not gonna say no, I don’t care. Of course, ring it, ring it in. So in essence, we identified here an, a, an asset that was completely overlooked, but can drive very, very smart insights.

And, and to your previous question about, experience and I think companies and, and C level people realized today. It used to be about pricing and features and, and now it’s about the heart of the customer. Mm. And, and, and we’re trying to provide a lot of insights about how to get to, to, to the heart of the customer.

Mm. And maybe a question to you as, as a, as a CX leader. Yeah. how do you see the, that transition from CX being perceived as a, I would say is a nice to have thing to something that companies should say. I mean, it, it’s all about this. The rest of the stuff can.

One, I want to answer in terms of the product, the platform and the certain, and that you’ve created and delivered two, I’ll answer your question from how maybe, the, the perception of CX and businesses. So one as a former CX leader, working at Freddie Mac, right? It’s a massive organization at the front end of the mortgage space.

They’ve got credit policy. Like thousands and thousands of pages of credit policy that underwriters and other people at banks will go to to understand is Freddie Mac gonna buy this loan from me, chase. Right? I’d have to go to like the call center documents and say, okay, help me understand and figure out through text analytics.

What is, what policies are causing the most? right. And then maybe it can figure out, like, I actually thought, like when I first came up, came in, was introduced to, to, to zoom in. I was like, gosh, this would’ve been a great product to have for us to look at. It’s not technical documentation. Like, we’re a software company, but it’s technical documentation from a credit and a lending perspective.

Right? Yeah. I’m like it would’ve been really powerful to actually to have that software. So if Freddy Mac is not a client, there’s a great prospect for you and your company. Yeah. Yeah. But to help us understand one, how are people using that credit policy? Where are they kind of. Stumbling where else in sort of the ecosystem of content and materials that they’re gonna look for, how does this all fit in and where, where what’s working and what’s not, I think that it really would’ve opened up the eyes for our legal team, for our marketing organization, for our operations folks, certainly the contact center as well.

How to talk maybe better, where you can find different content or better information and probably help probably would’ve helped the company kind of. Shed some of the stuff that no one was going to anyway. Right. And there’s a cost savings there.

technology wise, it wasn’t really possible that thing it’s when people consumed mostly PDFs. Mm. It, it, it could have been much more higher level. I mean sure. Because all, all we could know, they bill downloaded in a PDF, a PDF and, and that’s what we know. Now we can tell exactly how many seconds it spends on each paragraph and each word with each page.

That wasn’t possible.

A lot of customer experience teams and, and, given my role at medal, I get to talk to a lot of different teams. There are a lot of teams in this VOC, customer satisfaction, NPS kinda lane, right? Producing reports, giving those, executive leadership reports and getting them out onto the business.

And I think a lot of teams are there. My guess is probably between 40 and 50% teams. That’s kind of what they’re doing. And that’s how they’re defining customer experience. When I’ve defined customer experience and I’ve left big companies because it was too siloed. You really have gotta bring together the VOC, the voice of the customer and the insights and analytics is a really important component to that.

But once you start to bring design under that same roof, and once you start to bring change management under that same roof, you start to get this really great flow of impact. Your, your insights teams are giving these insights to the design teams. The design teams are working with your product developers, employing design thinking and human center design to put into the agile process and developers have this stuff, they’re going through not scrums anymore, but they’re going through design thinking, workshops, creating incredibly rich and powerful user stories.

Right. Cuts down technical debt improves the product experience. they see the metrics that the, you’re not, you’re doing RO work all day, but all of a sudden now you see the impact of the customer. And then you’ve got change management following up to say, here’s culturally how we can use all this to drive change, and really start to get people thinking about the customer in the organization.

When I see, and I, a lot of banks, a lot of retail companies, you name it across every vertical. When I see just a team focused on VOC or insights, I’m like, this company is not from an experiential perspective is gonna get very far, unfortunately. And I really do try and counsel these organizations to bring together other functions and disciplines in a way that helps that business.

Not only create more awareness around what’s happening for a customer perspective, but also. Employ teams that drive real business outcomes on this stuff. Yeah. Cause it’s one thing to just say, okay, here’s the insight I’m gonna give it to a banker. And the banker’s gonna call the customer who isn’t happy through a survey and I’m gonna, I’ll close the loop.

That’s easy. That’s important work. It’s foundational, but the real magic starts to happen when you’re starting to put this information in the hands of other people in the business that are really creating for the. Yeah. And they’re using that as a foundational basis to create. And I think that’s, there’s an inflection point there that I think a lot of organizations are grappling with.

And when I talk to some CEOs and like, I’m not getting the value outta my CX team. And I say, well, what are you getting? They’re like, well, I get reports from them every month. I’m like, well, there’s the one mistake, right? Yeah. This isn’t just about reporting. So that, I hope that answers your question. But I think that to me is one of the biggest differences.

Right. Test and learn. Right. Yeah. And it became something very amazing. I mean, it it’s, CX executives and, Obviously there is a, there is other CX communities. That’s a community that basically meets once every month. Okay. In a very intimate way. Mm-hmm and, and we found this to be very useful. It’s very, it’s very multidisciplinary.

We talk about CX, challenge that they feel, they feel very, very comfortable sharing and being vulnerable with one another. And, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s been built over the last few years. So a lot of the challenges are exactly what you’re describing now, how to take this and, and put some more business and ROI on this and not just a nice to have thing.

And it’s, yeah, we see it a lot in those discussions. I learned a lot from those discussions that we have in flourish.

so I see when I think about the company gal, I see a really clear connection to someone who is heading up CX or a CXO, maybe chief customer. Why invest in the CX community specifically, cuz it feels like maybe the COO might be more of sort of the buyer for you guys or maybe the head of marketing.

Mm-hmm . And we, we came here with, with, as you said, with an asset that didn’t even think that has impact on end users. And we thought, initially, we thought that’s what we wanted, that these are the people we wanted. Are we really making their life easier? And then when we started talking to them, we just realized that there is a group of people here who need like a.

Group help here and then group therapy together, including us. And, and we felt like this is a, a group of people that are growing, building their roles and can teach a lot, one another. And then, and then our product is very much around the experience to, to those end users.

Yeah.

But that’s primarily, yeah,

Like the, just the, the curation of technical content accessibility. How do you see that evolving?

Just do it because of compliance purposes. There is gonna be a big element of clear ROI on this. And when it started from knowledge people and content people, and support people. It’s gonna be more and more the C level people who are gonna deal with it. and it, and it relates to the other, point that I see as a big trend.

it’s gonna have a big impact on marketing. we already see now the technical content plays a big part in I’m sorry, in reduction of support costs and, and other ways it’s gonna be more and more around not just saving costs, but making more money for their, their organiz. So if technical con use has been a lot around saving costs around support costs and, and, and, and improving experience, we see it more and more getting into what I see higher in the pyramid, which is driving revenue and business to, to company, which for me is, is more marketing and more up sales and cross sales, meaning more, more sales mm-hmm and specifically marketing.

Without mentioning names of companies here, one of our medium sized company we’re hosting for hosting for them 500,000 HTML pages. And add if you consider the juices that it adds to Google. Sure. And, and how quality, how much quality there is in that content. So we see more and more marketing people think, how can this drive more leads the top of the funnel?

and, and the results are amazing by the way already. So we’re seeing this is gonna become more and more. And we think that they, in our case, the marketing people are gonna become more and more the driver of the, of the content world and the technical content world. Because right now they were a little bit aside of it.

I’ve got two more questions for you, from a business perspective, who do you look up to? Do you have any folks that are, that, that, you look up to as like great business leaders.

I, I, there is two areas that I, I, I get a lot from Netflix, from the Netflix people and the net and the Netflix, CEO

Now mm-hmm and now snowflake. And this whole MPPI up approach. That’s built on very, very high standard feed and focus that triangle of those two, three things drive a lot of how I think, I think about business and drives a lot about how we operate, in our company. So these are like two business people that I, I look after I read a lot.

I learn from them. there are also non-business people that I learn a lot from, but these are the business people that I,

So

It’s about having a coach that, that, that helps everyone gets better. Yeah. Sometimes you also need to replace some people and, and bring better, better team players to, to the team. So whether it’s the last dance of Jordan that I learned a lot from or in the last year or so, I, I, wasn’t a huge fan of it, but became a huge fan of formula one, for example, I dunno.

If you see that you saw the Netflix series about net, about formula one. I actually just gave our leadership team kind of lessons. My lessons learned from formula one, which is very interesting in my opinion, if you want, I can, some of the things are one, you have one person that you have like 300 people behind that person who behind and, and even us, we have a sales people or a project manager who is in front of the customers.

And you have so many people around that per hundreds of people in our company who are behind and all they do is so that person can jump on a. And that customer success person can jump on a call teamwork and how they work the engine throughout the year. That’s exactly an MVP. You start the engine, but it’s not the same engine that you have at the end of the year.

You work the engine every day and every day. And, and the pit stop used to take two pit stop. 50 seconds on average in the nineties. Now I saw that the, the record is 2.5 seconds. Yeah, that’s about, so many learn. You can so many things you can learn from. Sports analogy.

Is just funda is almost fundamentally different in many ways, right? Cause they’re cutting little corners, they’re tweaking this, they’re getting maybe new, trying to think about new, new, new ways of looking at data and metrics to better, to better think about, how to, how to tune and position the car better.

It really is a sport that has invested a lot in science, frankly, right. While relative to what they even had access to even 10 years ago. But it’s a fantastic sport and it’s exhilarating. So, and I love, I love. The stuff that Netflix is putting out there, gal where, where can people find you the company if they want to get in touch?

Thanks so much for coming the show. It was such a pleasure. One to see you again, but even more so to have you have you join us and, and share some knowledge with our listeners today. Thank you. Thank you very much,

Oh, I’m so jealous. I’m so jealous. all right, everybody. That’s another great. We’re out. Bye. Talk to you soon, everyone. Thanks