Trey Hoffman on Building out a Customer Experience Team

Welcome to be customer led, where we’ll explore how leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors employees and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host, bill Stagos.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of B customer experience. I’ve got a wonderful guest for you all this week. Trey Hoffman is Vice President of Customer Experience for a really interesting company called Fleet. We’re gonna talk a little bit about what the company does, and today’s conversation is really gonna be centered around building out and building on a customer experience team.

And Trey’s experience just really squares nicely into this, and I’m so excited to. Trend show. Trey, welcome to be customer led. Thanks so much for joining us.

Uh, it’s an honor to be here, uh, enjoy the content and excited to be a part of the show.

Cool. Uh, well, let’s get right into it. So, Trey, we ask every guest before we kick off just to share a little bit about your professional journey and background.

And, you know, maybe what are, what were some of the differentiating factors in your career? And you’ve got a pretty cool story about how you even joined Flut two when we, uh, when we first connected. So maybe

even. Yeah, absolutely. So I originally, uh, in high school learned a program, which, um, with my age is, is dates me a little bit, this is sort of four train days, but I really enjoyed it.

Went to college, got a degree in computer science and ended up, uh, working with my first company, which is a consulting company. And there I played all kinds of roles. I mean, I did qa, I did developer. Project manager. I ended up being sort of a project manager, a project managers, and sort of what kind of, uh, came to light in those four years is that I really enjoyed bridging, uh, the gap in communication.

I enjoyed talking to business, I enjoyed talking to the engineers and really helping them understand and work together and, and meet the needs and that. Fantastic. Four years. I worked a ton. I learned a ton. But like, one thing about being a consultant is you have to sell a new deal every year, . So after four years, I was like, man, wouldn’t it be cool if I had a product, like I could sell the same thing twice?

And that was my second jump, which is a, I worked at a company called Intel, which was a entertainment ticketing company that was based out of the uk. We actually had offices in Australia, uk, and we, um, started, I was the third hire in the us. And that’s where I got my first experience, not just on the tech side of the technology and the servers.

Back then, we still had to have our own servers. It was my first like really support and onboarding team. Mm-hmm. And the INSA platform was a, you do whatever you, you, we will work however you wanna work. It was very configurable. It ran more than half the theaters in the West end at the time. Wow. In London.

And so we would do these week long engagements of onboarding customers and what do you name this? What do you call this? What does your venue look like? And it was. This huge complex system. Uh, and so I was with that company for four years, learned a ton about ticketing, but Mona, as, as a kind of small world thing, one of my, uh, friends here in Birmingham, where, where I live, Birmingham, Alabama, uh, was running another ticketing company called Ticket Biscuit.

And uh, they were much smaller, more streamlined solution. And so after four years at Intel, I joined the guys at Ticket Biscuit where I proceeded to put together 11 years in entertainment ticket. But we were so much quicker. We were streamlined. We could scale sell quickly, we could scale quickly. People would jump right in, put an event on, and even halfway through that journey, we kind of had a pivot.

I was like, okay, whatever. Bucket ticket, three grand, 30 minutes, we’ll get this thing done. Right? Yeah, no kidding. They crashed our servers completely crashed our servers next weekend. All the dance parents got my cell phone. Right. I’m, I’m in charge of everything, right. They’re calling me a Why King Sex Weekend cto.

We’re gonna do it, we’re gonna be fine. We’re gonna make it next. CTO week. They crash our servers. Oh no. Uh, it was a really crazy moment for us that this, uh, dance recital sort of had, had, uh, crashed our servers where we had just done a Jack White Ons sale. We had just done all these major on sales. They were pushing more volume than your standard, uh, rock and roll sort of legend.

Well, when we were doing that, we, we had these like busy seasons cuz recitals all, I don’t know if you have a daughter, but all of the recitals sort of happened in April and May end of school. And so I was out there trying to figure out who else in the service industry has these problems where you have very little volume and then you have essentially like Amazon’s Christmas.

Yeah. And that’s where I met, um, our current ceo, the CEO of Fleet, Tony Somerville. I met his wife, was at these service groups where we would talk about, you know, our challenges. And we always joked that me and Brittany, uh, would work together one. And so after we sold Ticket Biscuit to EICs a company outta Raleigh, and we had that sort of successful exit, I was looking for my next opportunity.

I ended up getting, uh, to go to lunch with Tony Britney’s husband who’s running Fleet. And that was a really exciting, uh, time for me. And I found everything I kind of wanted at Fleet EO with a really group of incredible people with a huge market and, uh, really full SaaS. So ticketing is a very services heavy.

It is a platform. It is, uh, web and cloud. But’s still lots of services. And here at Fleet we’re really fully SaaS. So this is my first time in that game of, you know, 30 day contracts and managing pure CSMs, people that are fully proactive and running proactive playbooks. Mm-hmm. . Uh, so my time at Fleet now, almost four years has been really, uh, my first step into and living the life of true, full.

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I love that story. So essentially you are working with his wife on some level, right? Because you’re part of this quarter Family, fleet family. Exactly. Talk a little bit about the company, right? Because, um, it’s not like, uh, I mean it’s a full size platform, but like, tell us a little bit about the business.

It’s a pretty interesting business actually.

Yeah. So we’re really a simple alternative to spreadsheets and legacy fleet software. So we’re fully cloud-based. We only have one version that all our thousands of customers use. And they use it to track and, and keep their vehicles and equipment and everything just running smoothly.

If you wanna know like who a customer of ours could be, an easy way to think of it is it’s any vehicle with a logo. If you’re driving down the highway, you’re just gonna see vehicle after vehicle after vehicle riding by you with a logo. And any one of those, uh, could be our customer. Anyone with vehicles on a job site, really any moving asset, drones, boats, anything like that, they’re, they’re managing and keeping track of that maintenance.

Right? And then the thought experiment, I like to say is like, okay, if you are are single, right, and you have one vehicle, you have to get an oil change. And then to say, okay, well you get married, you gotta have two oil changes. Okay, now you gotta have some kids. Now you have like maybe three or four, let’s say a big family, six vehicles right now, all of a sudden it’s costs, how much gas are going in, how much?

Yeah. And then now just do that 10, like make that 10 vehicles now make it 50, a hundred, a thousand. Right. It gets quickly outta scale, and that’s where our software really comes in to help you understand your cost, help you understand how you’re operating and where you can be more official. And it’s just a huge tam, like total addressable market.

Mm-hmm. , there’s fleets all over the world using our technology since it’s cloud based. So, yeah, it’s just a, it’s a really exciting industry with a tremendous amount of technology and change and, you know, even during the, we just got through the covid or working our way through the Covid pandemic, if you will.

Yeah. And, uh, you know, vehicles were one of the core things that kept the, kept us going,

right. Yeah. I know. Well, not a lot of, uh, well, I guess I should say at some point in the pandemic companies figured out that they can be delivering Right. Still or going back to delivery. I mean, they changed that process.

I mean, the trucks didn’t really stop on some level, right? I mean, maybe they stopped for a little bit, but they kept on going pretty quickly after.

Um, yeah, there were months there where you would only see, uh, heavy trucks on, on the road. That’s it. And then couriers and last mile vehicles in your neighborhoods.

Yeah, it was, it was an interesting

time. It’s bizarre. When you took over the role at Fleet Trey, there was a couple people on the team, what were some of the things like that you were looking, were thinking about or looking for? In those early days when you know, they brought you on, you know, clearly you had ambitions.

I’m assuming you had ambitions like, Hey, I’m going to, obviously you’re gonna do your best work, but like, you know, we’ve got opportunity to grow this team, scale it, et cetera, as the business grows. What were those things that you were thinking about early on as, as you looked at the team, you know, you were thinking about sort of value, you know, maybe they were reactive, going to pre proactive playbooks, et cetera.

Like what were some of the things that were really on your mind?

Yeah, absolutely. We had this like great inbound motion. Even today, our marketing is fantastic. If you Google fleet, you’re gonna find phileo. Mm-hmm. . So a lot of people were coming to us and we had this great product market fit and our sales team was closing deals.

But we had a very common sort of business to business problem, which is change management, right? Change management is really hard. Uh, further you can use the sort of vitamin painkiller analogy for us. Uh, you aspirationally wanna take vitamins, but you’re never gonna miss a pain killer. Right. You’re never gonna miss the pain killer, but you know you want to take your vitamins every night.

Well, with fleet management, a lot of times we can be in that world where people really want to do all the proactive maintenance, but it’s difficult to sort of do. So what we realized is that there’s a lot of customers that needed to sort of successfully configure and then roll out our platform. And if you don’t have success there, uh, even though you’ve got the, the great inbound marketing engine and you’re closing deals, if you, if people aren’t adopting and rolling out and configuring your system correctly, it’s gonna lead to churn.

Right. So initially we really tried to laser focus on that retention mm-hmm. and, and trying to figure out how to help people adopt later as we got better, right? We, we switched more to N R R and expansion, contraction, turn in reactivation. And even in in the future, we’re gonna even specialize teams even more around those sort of four moments.

But in that initial moment, it was like, okay, like we’ve got this great thing going, but let’s not create some sort of leaky bucket situation that everyone at SaaS talks about. Let’s focus on getting value to the customers.

Define the leaky bucket for listeners who are not in a SaaS business to find.

Sure. So, uh, n r R or Net Revenue Retention is this idea that if you start with a hundred dollars, you want to end with at least a hundred world-class business ends of the month with 130 or ends the year or 130, right? That’s like one 30 n r. But a leaky bucket is, is that you go and you, you get a hundred dollars business at the end of the year.

You only have 60. 40 30 left. And it’s different in B2B and b2c. So in in, in business to consumer, you see much larger churn ratios and B2B business to business. You would see potentially like a little bit, little bit better there. But it is the, uh, ultimate killer of a lot of SaaS companies cuz you’re CAC or your cost to acquire.

If you spend a thousand dollars to get this customer, you need to make a thousand back. If they’re churning too fast, you’re not gonna make your thousand back and you’re essentially upside down on those

customers. Yeah, I appreciate that. Uh, I’m, I work for a SAS company as you know, so those all that is very near and dear to my heart.

But, uh, for a lot of our listeners and even maybe even for, uh, some of our listeners around the world where that model is not as prevalent. Right. It’s always good. So I appreciate you kind of laying that out for our listeners when you were thinking about sort of the team then and how the team is structured now, Trey, like, is there, have you focused anywhere differently?

I mean, the team I think is bigger now. Like, how do you think about the team then and, and the structure of the team now? Yeah,

so when I joined we really had support and we had a hand, like a couple CSMs. So that was our proactive. And then the, the one role that I think we invested early in that was very wise was a documentation specialist.

So it was, it was about case deflection. I can’t say ticket deflection cause I worked in entertainment ticketing for 11 years, so I can’t say the word ticket, but, so case deflection was really important, but as we grew, we had to add sort of net new roles. Mm-hmm. and probably one of the biggest ones was when we made the jump to make a quote, professional services team, although we don’t even call them professional services here, I think that’s more industry.

We really talk a lot about onboarding services. So when we took the leap to get that onboarding services team up and running, And then we actually have now two foot one focus at our core product and one focus at a more disruptive part of our application. Mm-hmm. . And so those onboarding teams, when we made the jump to actually focus on smb, so we implemented analysts, so not a customer success manager.

Which trip typically runs a portfolio or owns accounts? An analyst is like one verse a thousand. They don’t own. Mm-hmm. customers, the analysts are there to help all of our long tail smb, small to medium business customers. And then ultimately investments in things like enablement and helping us onboard our custom, our own internal resources, making sure our own resources are great.

And then of course, right in the prep, we’re still continuing to specialize. Now today as we are rolling out specific CX operations roles, we’re gonna be launching an account management function soon too. So we just, I think the evolution is from a very straightforward. Two CSMs, you know, three CSMs and a support team to now all these specialized roles that are injecting themselves at the right time to get the right value to the

customer.

What is, I might, maybe I’ll put you on the spot if you, if you don’t mind. Yeah. Um, what has been sort of, if you think about that evolution, what have you been most proud of? And like, if you can dial it back a couple of years, what might you change?

Yeah, so I mean we’re definitely, I’m really proud of, of the relationships we’ve built with our CSMs and the way that we’ve been able to help our customers sort of accomplish their own goals.

If we had to do it again, I think one of the things, uh, especially as a technology company built in the south is we’re fairly conservative. We don’t have quite the venture in the southeast like we do everywhere else. Right. And so you see a lot more bootstrapped companies and boots stamp companies can be very leaned, right?

And so we leaned heavily on team lead, model team. Labelings defined by your leader also has a portfolio. Maybe it’s a reduced portfolio, but they’re also running a portfolio. So if I had to go back and sort of like , think about it more, it would be more in investments in management, right? And trying to figure out when can we spend time with our people and really invest in them and, and do that sort of work earlier and sooner

really interest.

I reflect on my career and things that I’ve done a lot, a fair amount actually. And uh, each year I go through the exercise just personally. Have I focused on the right things? What were those things that should have not been sort of in on my plate and like how do I make sure that I don’t focus on those things again and get off Right.

Always a good, always a good, um, always a good exercise to close out the year on. When you think about measuring for success for the team, obviously, you know, we talked about a lot of different numbers, you know, net revenue retention being one. How do you think about team success? Like what are the things that you measure that is on your dashboard, the team dashboard and how they’re kind of managing, uh, the work that’s

going on?

Yeah, so we use the OKR system here and I think of the OKR system a lot as at the sort of top level more, you know, some of the bigger objectives are more. Trailing indicators, large metrics around the company. So I’ll talk a little bit about that. And then at the sort of bottom, we think a lot about drivers, right?

Mm-hmm. , so top level OKRs are really around these trailing indicators of N R R, but also, you know, we think about adoption. What is the total health of our customer base? Mm-hmm. , how many are daily active users? Turning into weeklys, turning into monthlys. We spend a lot of time in trend data there, looking at adoption of, you know, value added features, but also how are they trending?

When we get into an onboarding rhythm, right, we would ask, what are you interested in doing? We are gonna document that. We’re gonna now look at that side by side. So I wanna do inspections of my vehicles. Now I’ve got that flagged and I’m looking at the adoption of the inspection of vehicles. I’m watching and waiting.

To see if that adoption goes up to the, what we would think based on the number of vehicles they have as mm-hmm. as a correct level for their industry. And now we’re watching that trend to see if it ever goes down. So I think, you know, those trailing, uh, indicators of adoption, but there’s so many proactive activities you can do in there.

And then the, the sort of third wing, if you will, the first is N R R, and the second is adoption, is we think a lot about customer advocates. Like how can we build these advocate. What is it? Uh, we can measure there? When we measure things like nps, net promoter score, csat, customer satisfaction. Mm-hmm. , we look at things like escalations to the product.

How many escalations do we have? How long does it take for escalations to move? And then we also look at things like what is our product delivering in terms of impact? So we have. Uh, a word here we use called challenges, and this is built directly into our crm and it flows right into a product board, which is our, um, product, uh, road mapping tool and does a lot more than that.

But that’s, uh, . You go to their website for their marketing, it’s a great tool, right? And, uh, so every time we get a story or a challenge, we don’t think of things in terms of product feedback. We log it in our CRM and that pushes it on the product board. And then as we’re delivering product, we go back and follow up with those customer.

And maybe it was something you asked for last week, or maybe it was something you asked for two years ago. We have been around a lot of time, so we have a lot of great feedback. And so in that customer advocate, we measure product impact. How much of our product are we shipping is driving customer impact?

So you can look at those sort of, uh, sort of trailing indicators, I guess, of, of customer advocacy, whether it’s nps, e status questions, these kind of things. And then the drivers is the other side of it, right? So those are, those are activities that we do to provide value and ultimately build the relationships.

So what activities are we doing to educate and inform? What activities are we doing that are value driven, like roadmap meetings or qbr, these kind of things. And then, uh, you know, on the support side, we look at things like times to respond. How quickly are we getting back to customers? Uh, we don’t retarget trying to reply to everything within 30 minutes.

Maybe not the answer, but we want to make sure we’re responding. And honestly, we’re well below that majority of the time because we just. Believe that if we’re there for our customers, then we can, you know, work together and we can figure out, and ultimately it’s our customers who have helped us get to this point by, you know, helping us learn everything about Fleet.

Right. , that’s awesome. H tell me a little bit about, if you can, how you’re getting that customer feedback into sort of the, the product board. Cuz that is something that I think really differentiates. This is my humble. I think really differentiates companies that really can deliver a better experience to their customers more quickly, versus product teams that still kind of operate almost in a silo, right?

And are not looking at feedback whether quantitative or qualitative, anecdotal. How did you kind of, you know, maybe not describe the process, but like how did you guys kind, was that always embedded from a company culture perspective and way of working, or did you guys like figure that out and like create that?

Because that really is, again, that’s not something I see in my work a lot, but when I do see it, it’s typically a marker of companies that are further along a maturity curve, uh, around the experienced maturity.

Right. So like any company, we’ve evolved through tools, but it was at our core, like even in the old, in the, um, prior to us sort of implementing our CRM and implementing product board.

We would even just in a task management tool, every time we’d get feedback, we’d just add tasks, right? Eventually we evolve to a modern c CRM and a modern product roadmap mapping tool. And so, you know, use Zapier and we connect them up and we push, you know, push data back and forth. So it’s really pretty easy lift for us to connect them.

But the more important thing is a, what’s this, uh, sort of product, one of the nicest parts of product board is that we. It allows you to see a story and then isolate the different parts of impact. Hmm. And so I try to tell my team all the time, don’t, if the customer calls and says I wanted to do an inspection, but I didn’t have cell service.

What can Lidio do to impact self-service? Well, nothing We, we we’re not in the cell tower business. Yeah. But what if we track that, then we can lead to our offline inspection feature where we need to be able to do inspections offline. Right. So I try not to get people to say, I don’t want this to be this color.

I want this column and this report. I try to say like, tell the customers story. And then, you know, the nice thing is as that story flows in, you can highlight this, you know, ties back to this outcome that we’re trying to drive for a customer. This ties so in one story, you may have five to six pieces of feedback that ultimately drive six or seven different outcomes, right, that you could ship in the future for your

customer.

I love that. That’s such an important learning and takeaway here, folks, listening because that really can create an environment where your customers are looking at you every day and. Fleet is a company that’s listening to me and acts on my feedback, maybe not directly right, color, shape, whatever you wanna call that, but they’re figuring out ways to at least be able, even tangentially support me in my business, uh, and help me be more successful.

And I think that really is the bigger differentiator and helps you prioritize, helps you, you know, create greater throughput, you know, for those development teams, right? If you’re focused the right way. I just think it’s, it’s awesome that you guys are doing.

The feedback you get from I shipped your feedback is some of the best feedback you’ll get.

Because when you actually send ’em an email, and man, we used to do some of these manually, right? I would personally send out emails, Hey Jim, you said this on this date and we shipped it. And then you know, hey, I get this email back. And so Sally says, that’s great, but did you know I need this? So like it’s just a very virtuous cycle, right?

Yeah, it’s a very virtuous cycle.

But customers will keep coming back because they, they know that you’re listening to them. Right. And you’re responsive and you’re doing something about it. I love that. Such, just, just so core and foundational to the work. Uh, generally, how do you think about, we’ve talked now about like how you think about measuring success of the team and the company.

How do you measure the success of your customers? You talked a little bit about customer satisfaction and nps. How does this marry up to the business outcomes, like NR or, you know, are there, are there growth metrics? Or even, maybe even like efficiency gains. How do you start to

connect the. Yeah, so we think about things in a, a couple different ways, so we’ll just dig into a couple metrics.

Um, one is the sort of keep it simple, stupid, right? And one of the books I really like around product led growth is West Bush and chapter fifteens around churn. And he actually says, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got gross churn, you’ve got your churn logo, churn. But he also sort of outlines this idea of activity churn.

So keeping it simple, if you just have a usage metric and you can look at your usage, right? How many people are not using your. , whether it’s weekly, daily, monthly, and you can attribute directly to that, their revenue. And do you have large customers that aren’t using it? Is it all smaller customers that went through a sales and, and actually, you know, with a sales motion, you’re gonna have increased CAC or cost to acquire, or did they self-serve and buy themselves?

And so analyzing that usage and that sort of third churn number, that activity churn number is, is really important. Something we spend a lot of time on as well in the onboarding journey, we look at. When a customer comes, what are they? And we kind of have a bunch of different terms for this. Like, do they want to do something forthcoming as a word we use, enticing?

Is it an opportunity that we could have in the future? So we wanna flag those things as, yes, they’re gonna onboard it right now. This is something they’re thinking about, something that’s in the future. Make sure that we follow up with them in the future. But looking at that is the value that initial value that the customer’s looking for, and that can definitely tie right back to their ability to.

We talked a little bit about the trend data in the past, but one of the things about trend data is it allows you to flag customers, right? And flagging customers makes it easier for CU CSMs to, with, especially with large portfolios, to gain insights as to here’s my customers who are at risk and go, uh, have conversations or two with them.

Around, um, value, and that ties right back to your retention numbers. And then finally, one of the things we do is we have a, we have a monthly churn insight meeting where we sit down and look at every customer who churned. And it is at the highest level with all, basically every executive invited. But one of the things we do is we track feature usage and we use four terms, adopted, invested, and unused.

So it’s adopted. If they used it for a period of time, it’s abandoned. If they got to adoption and then quit. And so that we kind of take that personal, why was it working for you and it didn’t investigate is when we can see data trends that they tried. They went and configured some things. They set it up.

They didn’t use it consistently for three months maybe, but they tried something and then unused a straight flat, unused, right? So we, we. Deeply about this. Like what is our brand promise? And not every customer, because our platform is large enough, is gonna follow the same journey. Some are gonna follow a unique journey, and, and we, we recognize that, but we do want people coming in and using our core value propositions.

And so spending a lot of time analyzing whether it’s just usage, the onboarding journey, their trends, or even just how they adopt or abandon features, can really tie back to your revenue. And even make your employees more efficient. I kind of like to use a principle analogy. You don’t, um, wanna spend all your time just working on the F students.

You wanna spend some time working on the A students too. Sure. Right? So it’s how efficient can we be When we look at the trend data, we don’t wanna just look at the trends that are falling off. We wanna look at the trends that are increasing. Those are our best customers. How can we help those people? To potentially a new segment, a new CSM relationship.

Maybe they could earn a csm, like an enterprise C sm. So we want to be there for both our customers who may be having issues adopting. They wanna, they wanna take their vitamins, . Yeah. And we wanna be there for the ones that are, you know, growing so fast that they’re even struggling to acquire vehicles at the moment.

How do you think about the, just, you said something really interesting to me, just the principle model. How do you think. , is there like a ratio you try and hit in terms of focusing on the churn customers versus sort of the, the customers that are continuing to grow and, and the company really wants to invest in?

Yeah, so this is a really tough thing when you get into SaaS, which is proactive efforts a lot of times because you create a great relationship. You know, the tendency of the customers to turn you into like a personal assistant or something . So we, it is a real fine line, right, of what is a proactive activity versus what’s a reactive activity.

Mm-hmm. . So I think the one thing that’s important is knowing that in my portfolio I have these high-touch customers. Those not, may not be my best customers, those are my high-touch customers, who are my best customers that are getting a lot of great value, and then what’s my relationship with those customers and measuring my relationship with those customer.

And then understanding, of course, my customers that are flirting with this activity churn metric, right? Where they’re actually not even active in the system. So it’s a real balance. You’re right, it’s a real challenge to keep your high touch customers, training them to use the support team when they need to use the support team versus you can be, be proactive and help them understand, like one of the things we like to talk about is what are your outstanding goals?

Like what are the things you as a customer are working on and that’s tied to their mission. That’s not tied to our mission. They want to be the best plumber in the world. They wanna be the best construction company in the world. They wanna be the best long hauler in the world. So how do we tie our ability to make you the best at your mission?

And so, you’re right, those are, it’s difficult to, to measure and keep customers, uh, understanding what you’re there to do and who the right role at your company is when you’re engaging.

But you know, you said it, not in these words, but you just said it like you’re as a b2b, like you’re there to help that plumber deliver a great experience.

And if they can’t do it cuz their fleet isn’t operating the right way, or they’re not managing it the right way, it will impact their business negatively.

Exactly. If you have two fantastic plumbers side by side and one’s fleet is running well and the other’s not, who’s gonna win? Yeah, absolutely. All if everything plumbing is, is equal, right?

So that’s what we wanna do. We actually, we’d prefer both of ’em to be using Fleet Air to be cleared. But ,

where do you see the discipline going over the next couple of years, or where might you wanna see it go? Not necessarily just that fleet, but like what are the, some of the things that like you wish for in

the.

I think what’s really fascinating in technology is just again, how cheap it is to now store data, right? Mm-hmm. , and we use all kinds of tools, whether it’s full story, gong, heap, snowflake. So you’ve got all these internal tools and there’s essentially so much data. Now, it used to not be that way, but I mean the interview you go specific to our industry, a vehicle five years ago generated on us know data.

And that’s just gonna go nuts with modern vehicles and modems. Right? So we think about it as like there’s data, right? And for the longest time it’s just hard to, and then there’s insights. That’s that next level, which is you can look at the data and you can extract an insight, but we’re moving towards guidance.

Both fleet and I think in customer experience, guidance is the next step, right? Mm-hmm. , with all this data, all this stuff coming in from full story gong trend, your platform usage, hitting your health center, all this data comes in. How do we guide people, right? Mm-hmm. , and that’s the exciting thing on the forefront, right?

Is humans are fantastic at the relationship and, and hearing each other and providing value. We’re not, everybody’s great at sitting down on a huge chunk of data and trying to decide the where should I spend my time next? What’s the insight I’m looking for? Right? So guidance seems to be the, the thing that everybody’s trying to really, really

crush here.

Yeah, and I mean, certainly with just the proliferation of ai, machine learning, right? Like. That’s really where a lot of this is gonna come. You want to be able to proactively deliver that in real time in the moment as the kind of machine sees it almost, and then maybe have the human back that up with a sort of an empathetic kind of view of, okay, here’s how I, I think we can help your business.

That’s awesome. Trey. One of the things I’ve started to do on this podcast, um, at the top of the year is I ask each guest to ask a question of my next. And my previous guest asked the question for you, and as someone I have a ton of respect for, uh, as the c e o of a consulting company based out of San Francisco, they’re actually a customer experience consulting company.

So the question for you is, can you point to a brand experience? That has been relevant to you and proactive in giving you what you need. He just sees those as very different things. So, and if you have an example of a brand that is both relevant and proactive, you also have one that tried and failed. Not a trick question.

If you don’t have an answer, that’s all good, but that’s

your question. Yeah. I feel like I’m gonna cheat here because in the SaaS business world, there’s uh, one, there’s a, the gorilla, right? So Salesforce and Yeah, I think when I think about Salesforce, cuz they created the original success, like they pioneers in a lot of ways.

But when I think about being proactive and giving you what you need, maybe it is their purchasing of data platforms to create the customer. 360, maybe it’s, they just bought Slack, right? They have their own chatter platform, but they know the communications platform. But I’ll tell you that the one feature that I loved, um, that I thought was really interesting was Trailhead.

And if you haven’t spent time, Salesforce has a, uh, automated learning system called Trailhead and allows you to go out there. And it’s, it allows them to have created essentially a Salesforce ecosystem of, of people who know their platform and then can go service it out there. And I thought that was a really interesting approach that they.

To meet, uh, the customers where they needed to be so that if you wanted to be a career and there’s all these great stories of people that’ll go out there on this free training platform, learn how to become a Salesforce professional and inject the themselves into the markets. I felt like that, that push of Trailhead, and I was sitting with one of their executives at one of the Dream forces one time, and he was like, we had 5,000 new people in my work.

This. And so if you think, oh, how are you gonna train 5,000 people? Right? Well, Trailhead, but they, they commercialized it, they made it a product and they gave it away for free. It was a very, I think, interesting approach to creating an ecosystem for themselves and providing their customers with an empowered, uh, admin community that can then, You know, just make it grow on itself.

Right.

I love it. That’s such a great example. When I heard the question, I was like, Hmm, I, that’s a, like, I can’t wait for that answer. That’s a great answer. Would do you have any on the other side of the flip side that maybe have tried and failed you? Okay. Like, uh, if

I have to, you know, you don’t have to.

Let’s be honest. Let’s be honest. Like, uh, cable companies.

Yeah, any cable,

right? cable. Look, you have a dominant position in the market and in some cases you even have a, a monopoly, right? You’re the only person that’s allowed to play. But I think their customer experience suffered. If I ever think about, uh, calling a cable company, I don’t have, uh, rosy feelings, right?

And then the product offering never evolved. This sort of physical box, a piece of hardware that shows up and you can’t, it doesn’t connect to your phone. You, it’s like you can’t watch a show in another room. And then, you know, services like YouTube TV just came along and it’s a fantastic service that’s on your phone.

It’s on any device you want it to be on. Everything’s recorded to the cloud. You don’t have. Manager recording. So I think, you know, maybe I’m dating myself a little bit, but, uh, the fact that I don’t give any money to cable companies anymore, uh, at least not for cable services. Yeah. I feel like that customer experience was a pretty good example of how you can fail to, you can have a monopoly and fail to innovate, essentially have to change your whole business model in the future.

I’ve had a YouTube tv. I love YouTube tv. Uh, it’s worth every penny. Yeah. But I, when I was thinking about this question, I was like, Spotify is probably like my go-to for this question cuz it’s both relevant and proactive. I mean, they’re just giving me great music, new music that I can hook into all the time.

Uh, but I love the Salesforce example. Hey, before we wrap up, one last question for you, uh, Trey, and thanks so much again for being on the show. This has been a great conversation. Where do you go for

inspiration? So, I mean, I really do enjoy reading. Uh, I think, uh, there’s like a really good little Tim Ferris, uh, blurb about there, about how to take notes and I love that.

I love like reading and taking notes, and then I try to find like experiments in books, right? So whether you get great quotes, great other books you should check out. But if, like, if I can get a book and I can get, come up with a couple experiments, And then I love the, I love the Creator economy. Like this is fantastic podcast, right?

Influencers like a reit, and it’s just what she publishes around. I just love this. Anything I can get in the creative economy around best practices, metrics, and really expand my feeding. But, um, I think the way I really fill my cup is one-on-one. Like, you know how I met Brittany who led me to my, my current job, but it’s like, uh, you can pick your favorite quote on learning.

They all basically evolve around you have to fail, right? Like, how do you convert intelligence to wisdom, right? Mm-hmm. intelligence, you think, you know, you think you know, but you don’t know till you sort of try. And what’s really nice about one-on-ones with your peers, They will share and we will laugh and we will talk about all the things we do poorly,

And so, you know, whether it’s local lunches with groups, whether it’s it’s meetups, uh, via Zoom. And we actually, I, I really enjoy, um, now with, you know, the VCs, our, our partners in this business, they connect us even with their portfolio companies. Awesome. And so I’ll have jams all the time with just CX leaders.

Where are you at? What’s your next hire? What’s your next hire? Yeah. What are you thinking about? This is like nothing feels, uh, my cup, I guess, more than just, you know, those are one-on-ones and just hearing those ones, yeah, hearing the other people’s learn is just fast forwards you in a way that you can’t, you can’t do otherwise.

Really.

I love that. It’s why I do this podcast every week. I get to learn from amazing people like you, and I mean, gosh, I’ve met you. Over probably 120 people that I never would’ve gotten to interact with UN until, unless I had started this thing, you know, o over two years ago now. So, Trey, thanks for so much for coming on the show.

Lot of just great learning today. Great takeaways. I appreciate you, you sharing your knowledge, uh, with our listeners and um, yeah, I’m looking forward to following your success and fleet

success. That was my pleasure and I can’t wait to hear the the next episode drop and the next, and the next and the next.

I appreciate everything you do to to help us.

Thanks so much. I appreciate it. All right, everybody, another great show. We’re out. Talk to you soon everyone.

Thanks for listening to be customer led with Bill Stagos. We are grateful to our audience for the gift. To their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com.

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