CXChronicles Podcast 166 with Bill Staikos, SVP Industry Solutions at Medallia

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #166 we welcomed Bill Staikos, Senior Vice President of Industry Solutions at Medallia. Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in experience management. 

Bill leads the Industry Solutions team globally,  they work each day towards bringing deep domain expertise across industries, and in specialty areas including. Analytics/AI/ML, Employee Experience, Digital and Contact Center to help their clients win through customer & employee experience, no matter their level of maturity.

Bill is also the host of the award winning podcast "Be Customer Led" a show that explores how organizations are developing and nurturing customer-led cultures on their journey to create customer and employee experiences that keep their people engaged and coming back for more.

In this episode Bill  and Adrian chat through how  Bill has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback in his career + he shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for the team at Medallia as they've built & grown their customer portfolio & revenues.

**Episode #166 Highlight Reel:**

1. How helping to run the family diner built Bill's foundation for customer experience success
2. Communicating your values & expectations to help you better understand your customers
3. Why the best CX rock-stars are well-rounded players with a diverse skill & knowledge set
4. Constantly sharing learnings with your customers & team to improve your performance
5. Leveraging team & department scorecards to keep your company's compass aligned

Huge thanks to Bill for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his team's work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Bill Staikos

Click here to learn more about Medallia

Click here to listen to the Be Customer Led Podcast

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future customer focused business leaders to tune into our weekly podcast. 

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel with all of our video episodes & customer focused business leader content!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #166 -- Bill Staikos, SVP at Medallia

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:00) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CXChronicles podcast. Super excited as Bill Staikos is joining us today. Bill say hello to the CX nation, my friend, 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:00:08) - How do you do in CX nation? How y'all doing good to be here. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:11) - So this is gonna be, uh, doing, I we're just talking about again before we jumped into this one, but it's gonna be a fun one. Bill has number one, he's got a, a ton of Austin, uh, you know, relevant customer experience, customer success, employee experience, um, experiences that he's going to talk about today, but number two, and selfishly, I think this is probably the coolest part bill. Bill's got this awesome podcast, um, that probably many of you frankly have been listening to called be customer led and, you know, very similar to the stuff that we get into every single solitary week. Your guys at cxchronicles bill is talking with incredible subject matter experts from across the world and all these cool companies. He's got his own amazing style of kind of breaking down, what are they doing to build, curate and create more of those types of experiences. So this is going to be a fun one bill. I feel like I'm talking to another fellow CX, uh, you know, ninja 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:01:00) - Brother and man, we're a CX brother and you know 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:01:03) - Exactly man. So Bill, why don't you start off and set the stage? Um, I'd love to kind of just start off with your background, man. How did you get into this whole wild world? What were some of the stepping stones in your, in your personal career and your personal journey that got you to where you are today? My prep. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:01:17) - Yeah. So I'll take it way back to like six years old, if that's cool. I'll land the plane really quickly. Um, I, you know, my, my parents immigrated from Greece in the, in the late sixties and you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna totally generalize here, but w a lot of Greeks owned diners, right? So, um, they did, and I worked in that diner from a super young age. So I got this sort of like really great, like foundational just service mindset, just ingrained from a really early age and not only just service mindset from a customer perspective, but also service mindset from an employee perspective, you know, fast forward then I'm like 26 and I was working at JP Morgan, um, and investment banking. I was like, I've got this all figured out. This is what I want to do. And I, if I read like another bond, indenture, I thought I was going to jump, you know, like, that's it like, this is the enemy. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:02:08) - Um, cause they're really long and really boring. Um, not to disparage anyone who does that for a living, but, um, I read Joe pawns book, the experience economy in 1999. And it, it literally was like, it connected my life growing up with that service mindset with like an actual job. And I was like, this is it. This is what I got to go do with my life. And I quit. Um, you know, my boss at the time looked at me like I had three heads, um, you know, like you're 26, you're making a really good living for a 26 year old, frankly. Like I was probably being paid more than I should have been. Um, but then I went into go work for like a small like market research based consultancy and started cutting my teeth there. And then it just grew to evolve. I started getting, you know, out of market research into consulting and strategy then kind of more into the design side and then bringing together, you know, VOC insights, analytics with design and with, you know, culture, um, and seeing the power of those three things working together. And that's really where I've tried to focus my career. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:03:09) - That's awesome. So, I mean, um, bill, the first question I have for you too, it's I guess more of a common, but like growing up in, um, a family that owns a diner runs a diner has customers, every single solitary day has wildly different sets of expectations walking into your door, solitary. They have different flavors, different appetites, all that fun stuff. Talk about an incredible grooming ground. My friend, to get into the world, just understanding of how the hell you going to have to listen to people, um, pay attention to signals, pay attention to things that are experiences that are going really, really well versus experiences where you can tell from the first conversation, the time that the waitress shows up at the time, the waiter shows up at the table. Um, but I love like to kind of just understand like how, how did you know at an early age that that was the type of thing that like excited you enjoyed you or was just a product of an environment where it was, what your family was doing. It was where you probably spend a lot of your time when you were a kid. I just have to ask. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:04:03) - Yeah, it was a little bit of both frankly, right? I mean, I really enjoyed that time. I thought that I was going to open up a diner. At one point, I told him that my dad wants, he's like, don't, don't go into this business, go do something better with your life. Um, which has really good counsel. Um, I, it just really, it's an, that is an incredibly difficult business, um, one and then two to be really successful as a restaurant tour or even just owning a diner. It's really, um, it's stressful work. Um, and you know, for me, it was about, and, and, and diners are really interesting metaphors for businesses generally, right? Because you've got back of the house or like operations in the kitchen, you've got front of the house, the servers and the, you know, and others and being able to explore both of those. And everyone goes to the, see the diner, the CEO goes to the diner, the trucker goes to the diner, right. So like, you really do see like a really interesting breadth of customers as well. Can you understand the importance of.

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:05:03) - Yeah, this is why I'm not a big fan of personas, frankly, because everyone is so different. Everyone, you know, not everyone comes in and gets scrambled eggs and bacon. Right. So, you know, I learned from early on that the different tastes different attitudes. The way people sat in their seat with their families, like what they liked, what they didn't like, and really tried to create an experience for them to have them keep coming back, whether that was just every Saturday. Cause that's what they did, Whether that was like every morning before they would go to work, we had folks come in every single morning at the, at the same time I'm going to get my sandwich. I'm gonna get my coffee and that's what I'm gonna do. Right. So, you know, really being able to pivot and re truly understand your customers and get deep in there and create relationships. It was just such great. Just for a little just learning. Uh, I was just awesome. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:05:50) - I can imagine it makes me think about a lot of the founders that come on the show bill and they're constantly focusing. They have to be there. They're focused on revenue curation. They're focused on revenue acceleration and they're focused on revenue retention, right? Yeah. But what you're making me think about is like even you're right, the diner, the diner is an incredible business metaphor because thinking you just, you just laid out this awesome line of like when you're, when you're thinking about lifetime value and you're thinking about customer retention and repeat customer visits and repeat customer bias. Talk about your dailies versus your weeklies versus your monthly spokes. That just, you know, it's the, it's the one Sunday after church that they pop in per month or whatever, if that's what they can kind of afford. That's kind of cool, man. That's a really good, good, uh, foundation that you kind of laid out for yourself there early on in life. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:06:34) - And you know what, we didn't, we didn't have MPS. We didn't have customer sat scores. Right? Like we didn't do any of that stuff. I mean that technology, I mean, no one would do, like, I mean, they didn't want to put out like a questionnaire and a card or anything either, but like, you know, it was just really just get being there, observing, understanding who your customers are and then tailoring your behavior to meet those needs. And then the revenue would come. Right. And it did, they were, they were fairly successful, which we're really fortunate for. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:07:02) - Love it, man. That's awesome. So then build later on, as you, as you kind of move forward into the career, you mentioned you had to make a big change, make big, big pivot, early many folks. Do I feel like this is not this becoming, this is, this is an interesting part of today's episode. I want to feel free to, like, I think what's interesting about some of the stuff that we're doing bill. You've got a lot of these same types of incredible stories, journeys, these different walks of life. And I think we both try to call out in our shows, just like guys, there's a million different paths to becoming an incredible customer focused business here. Every one of us had to go through a different, a different set of obstacles, a different set of, um, just things that we preferred about our own lives or decisions that kind of brought us to different doors. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:07:40) - But I'm with humans when you made that big change in you and you took kind of a risk leaving a great job. Um, what were the first couple of years like after that? So like what, what, what was it like leading up? And I'm trying to lead us up to like the, the, the amazing team that you're running today in Medallia, but like, what were some of those couple of years, like kind of learning at a research insight company trying to, you know, maybe, maybe it wasn't as good of a job or as consistent as a job, but what were those first couple of years, like, did it feel like you made the right decision to immediately feel like you had some, some regret? What, what was that like? 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:08:08) - I felt like I was home, man. I, you know, I really did. It was like, you know, I had to get to understand like, you know, how do you know then it was like SPSS and doing analysis and SPSS, right? So like I was learning new tools and growing that way, I think, you know, being able to put, you know, sort of my customer lens on and really understand, try and understand and go deep, deep, deep on that data to understand like, what is really happening here. So we can create these great research reports. And we were doing like work for like HP, Microsoft, you know, particularly at that role in the small and mid-market business space. So they were targeting small and mid-market businesses that were using us to do work around, like help us understand the space that we can penetrate better. Um, one of the, one of the cool things, I, you know, I did conjoint analysis on the first Palm pilot and helped price that out kind of dating myself pretty badly right now. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:08:55) - But, um, you know, that kind of stuff, I was like, this is what, this is it. I made the right move. It was just the hardest part was just learning the, you know, the new toolkit, right. And the new kind of lingo. And, um, you know, that was the hardest bit, but I was just, I was really dedicated to it. Like, you know, when you kind of find your calling your purpose, you're like, this is it, man. I I'm all in now. Right. So, um, and it was, you know, it got to a point where I was like, okay, been there, done that. I want to evolve. I want to grow when I'd see where else I could take this space. And you know, I've worked for a couple of different consulting companies along the way. And then I went to the client side and there was when the light bulb really went off for me because I, I wanted to go back. I wanted to, I wanted the client side because I, I just thought I would never be a great consultant without walking a mile in my client's shoes. And there I realized how little I actually knew about sort of operationalizing customer experience. It's very different than dropping a presentation or giving one and saying, here's where you should focus. And here are the four things that you should do now.

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:09:56) - Very different as, okay, we're going to take these for now and we're going to actually put them into practice and what that entails. And that was another eye-opening experience for me. Um, and that, that was just a whole new level of fun. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:10:06) - Well, I'm super, I'm super happy that you just open that can of worms, because I think you could probably go on for hours and hours, hours, But just that I was going to say, bill, it's the art of operationalizing customer experience and customer success. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:10:19) - He's, uh, it's absolutely math and science, primarily math and science driven. But I say art because there's the old, the whole other world. You have to get humans to do things at certain times, it's dance, man. It's like trying to figure out how to make all these different moves happen at the same time. The other thing too, let's call it, let's call it what it is, every business and every executive, um, team within that business has got different goals. They've got different ambitions. They've got different drivers may be, it's all about. Maybe it's all about just simply driving profit valuation, maybe other folks. They actually did pick a business that they built where it's like, no, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. So like whether I'm a billionaire or whether I'm barely paying the bills, like this is what I'm doing, but that becomes another part of the art and the dance, which is like getting the, getting the tools that you need, getting the team in place, thinking about how you're going to orchestrate the processes. So that's like a, a whole other world that we could literally go on and on and on about, but it, it, it, it must've been eyeopening for you. And I also, I, I, my question is what are like the two or three, two or three things that you kind of came away from knowing, you know, as you get deeper into your career, you going to have to be really, really good at figuring out that art or figuring out that song and dance. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:11:30) - Well, one, you know, you've got one, I think the ability to communicate value from a customer perspective and make it relevant for a business owner is super important. So like your communication skills, you got to work on them all the time. Um, I actually think that my communication skills are better because of those days and the diner and understanding how different folks talk. Right? So like, right, that CEO talks very, very differently when they're ordering food than the truck driver is. Right. So not, no one's better or worse, but they're just, they're talking differently. Maybe. Um, number two is being able to understand where people's, uh, w w w what kind of value drivers they have, and really knowing them very, very well. So you can then connect the dots between what you're saying and what you want to do, and then to your point, and it's a great one is sort of like what those objectives are. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:12:24) - So what are the business objectives? And then how do you tie the work and the team and the capability that you've got and the toolkit you have to help them achieve those business objectives. I've every, every business person that I've walked into, I've always said, I'm here to help you achieve your business goals. So let's start there. Right. And then I think about, okay, what are, what are the outcomes that we're trying to achieve? And then I back into, okay, here's the toolkit. And here's how we can use it to help you achieve those goals. You have that conversation, right? No, one's going to say, I don't understand what you do. They might tell you, I thought you were about surveys, right. Or NPS or customer satisfaction scores, but that's a very different conversation to be having. And that's where CX becomes really real. And people start to really understand the power of it. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:13:07) - Yeah. I, and I like to you add that part in, I only laugh because it's amazing how often, when you, either you either meet with a new group of individuals or a new business that you're working with that does not have a ton of experience or a ton of exposure to some of the things that people like us are doing inside of customer experience, customer success, optimization, service optimization. I would argue even, um, some of the, some of the best companies in the world that are growing rapidly right now, they've already introduced all of this into the way that they think about inside sales. So it's already made its way into revenue, curation, and revenue optimization, and the way that companies think about how they can get really, really good at scaling demand and scaling growth. Right. But, um, but you're right. There's just, so there's so much more to this world than just the survey or to the MPS or to the, that I love you. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:13:53) - You're so similar to me, bill, where you're constantly talking about, like that stuff, doesn't really truly matter. There's all these other components to thinking about building an incredible leading customer experience, roadmap or strategy when frankly surveys and, and feedback and focus groups. Yeah. There, there are chapters in the book, no doubt. There are things that are there that you can eventually, you know, kind of stroke those cords when you need to, but it's a whole other game, man. And, and getting a team around a common set of bulls and mission and direction is a big, big part of it. So, um, bill, I'd love to jump into the first CX pillar of team. Man. I'd love for you to kind of spend a couple of minutes just talking about, um, number one, you've been a part of all these different companies, and now you're at this incredible company Medallia where you guys are, do all these, you're helping all these other businesses think about how they can look at their signals, look at their insights, understand what's what type of, uh, areas for optimization are ripe out there. Right. But I'd love to hear you kind of just talk about some of the things you've learned along your journey, uh, around team and some of the ideas or some of the major activities that have always kind of, uh, Ben you're you're, you're you're front and center focused as you've been building, leading and managing some of the teams that you've been a part of building. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:14:59) - Yeah. It looks all right. I, I prescribed to the philosophy of hire great people and get the hell out of their way. Right. Um, I, I don't have all the answers. I mean, it's like you like speaking to, you know, folks who've been in customer experience for a long time, weekend and week out, you realize quickly that you do not have all the answers. It's like, it's a great exercise in humility actually. And, you know, uh, I'll give you a great case in point. So when I started at Freddie Mac, there, there was no team there. I mean, it was four people that were doing some qualitative interviews and, you know, we had to create a vision and a mission. We could all stack hands on. And we did that collectively as a team, we hired, you know, we had someone in the design space, um, a VOC leader was just hired before I started there. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:15:42) - Um, and you know, ultimately we built out those teams more, but then we're like, you know what? We need change management people. We're going to bring in change management folks to help us really perpetuate this sort of philosophy throughout the organization. And, you know, there it's about, you know, finding the best talent, not just from a technical perspective, but again, those soft skills are like super important and they're different from a design perspective than they are even from like the VOC or analytics perspective. Right. Um, on the design side, typically you're going to get really, you know, folks who are doing like facilitation and that sort of stuff, typically like great communication skill is gonna engage an audience on the VOC and analytics side. Traditionally, I found personally that the, maybe the communication skills or being able to, um, communicate the value. Right. Cause they're so in the weeds on data, isn't something that's strong. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:16:30) - So it's, it's about being able to find that purple squirrel sometimes and say, okay, you've got both, you can talk about it, but you can do the work and you can kind of help your team. Um, we were lucky to find just an absolutely amazing leader in that space. And then on the change side, once we added just like, okay, do you have the, the technical capability to actually do this work? But again, if you're doing change management, it's not just following an ad car model. Right. Awareness down to like, you know, you know, uh, you know, through that, through those stages, you are, you need to influence an entire organization. So those soft skills you really got to test and learn, um, um, and, um, and bring on the type of talent that's going to energize an organization. Um, and when I look at sort of team members, you know, personally, I look for three things like, you know, outside of the technical stuff, I think is really important. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:17:16) - You know, I like to dig deep on how do you manage and lead teams? How do you manage and lead yourself, um, where you get your motivation from. Um, and then, you know, as well, like, you know, how do you deal with like difficult situation? Cause you know, as well as anybody in this work, you're going to hit a lot of roadblocks. People are going to say no, and you've got to, and you've got to keep on pushing until like, you know, you know, there's an old saying don't, don't take no from someone who can't tell you. Yes. So, you know, you got to keep on pushing until you find that person who can tell you yes and listen and you know, and drive some action around the customer. And that's not easy work. A lot of people don't have the stomach for that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:17:55) - Uh, well, 100% agree with you. There's a, there's a few media thoughts that I want to poke on, which is number one, like when you're inside of some of these companies and you're leading their voice of customer taskforce or the you're listening, their customer, their customer centers, who has whatever, you're calling it in your business use. Now the bill you, I would argue, you have to, as I think it's personally one of the coolest roles in any business or job, mainly you get tentacles into every single part of the business you're involved in sales. You're involved in service here, but you're, you're involved in marketing. You're involved in ops, you're involved in product. If you're doing your job really well, by the way you're involved in every single one of the data is, uh, you know, analytics has to be, you probably have your best friends sitting inside of that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:18:35) - They can, they can show you windows or they can show you potential paths of what we're seeing across trends or themes or different dif different types of data points that we're, we're getting better at collecting. But the other part is I say a little bit different because you almost have to be like a rock star to be able to make that type of group of who are probably number one, some of the, some of the, some of the brightest people in your organization, if they're running those, those different, those different roles in those different areas, but like anything else in life, you need to be able to command attention, command, respect. You do need to be phenomenal at being able to socialize the learnings and the findings. And then you also have to do it in a way where let's just call it what it is built every single business in the world. So she has the bigger politics are involved and people are involved, feelings are involved and then there's all these other rules that really kind of come into the, into the mix. As the business gets bigger, you need to be able to balance all of those variables. It's not an easy job and it's definitely not the type of thing that, um, you can do without, without really kind of mastering a deep playbook, uh, from an IQ and an IQ perspective. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:19:36) - Uh, yeah, look, I T uh, you, you mean, you said it really, really eloquently and perfectly. I think that, you know, for CX leaders today, I think, you know, you've got to have sort of like multiple kinds of hats, right? Like you need, you need a technician, you need someone who's like a good influence or a good people skills. Um, you need someone who kind of.

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:20:00) - A little bit visionary to say, this is where this is going here from a company perspective, the strategy and where we want to go as a company. How does that tie into where we want to go from a customer or an employee perspective? Um, there are a lot of different hats that you do need to master and work on. And I, and that's why I said before, it's, it's not really for the faint of heart. I don't mean to like put like, you know, six people for me are like, are on a pedestal, frankly. Um, because they do, um, have to engage so many different parts of the business versus like a marketing versus like a, you know, like an operations or maybe a sales role leadership role. But, you know, I think that's where like the fun of the role comes in. I will say 1, 1, 1 important thing to this though, you know, you do have to get involved with all these other businesses, but the, the, the folks that I've seen really successful in this space come at it from that, you know, just might just like, you're like, Hey, I'm trying to come at it from the customer's perspective. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:20:57) - You need to come at it from their perspective, because if you're going at it from the perspective of here's, our, here are our scores, here's the work that we do. We're going to give it to you. You're going to create, you know, we'll create more visibility. Like that's all well and good, but I think we're a lot of folks kinda fall down sometimes is when they don't try to understand their business deeply and then say, here's the toolkit I have. Here's how I can help you be successful. Versus I'm going to measure, I'm going to, I'm bringing together all these signals, et cetera. There's, that's important, but you still need to come at it from their perspective. And if you're not doing that, if you're not being empathetic and, um, and you're not helping them think about how to achieve their business goals and the overall sort of vision of the company and be a creative to that process. I think that, um, I think that's where a lot of teams kind of break down. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:21:43) - I think you're absolutely right. And I think, you know, uh, one of the, one of the simplest waves that I've tried to kind of do what bill is saying, even, even in, in, in, in, in my own career. And then certainly with all the clients that we work with at cxchronicles, but it's almost a c'mere bill. It's like, you got your, you just now that you gotta be taking, yes, you're understanding all of the customer drum beat the customer heartbeat, the customer calls. You got to understand all that stuff. No doubt about it. But if you want to get actual change and you've actually want to get actual buy-in and you want to get things built, you want to get things implemented. You want to get things rolled out throughout an organization. You almost have to be spending the other half of your time doing the exact same thing in the employee experience the employee journey side, because what I've learned, especially as I've gotten deeper into, into my own career, it's exactly what you're saying. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:22:26) - Bill is if you're not spending time with the employees, understanding their processes, understanding their challenges. I mean, think about it. Like even it's easy for people sitting back in headquarters to say, why is it sales doing this? And why is local ops doing that? And why are these different geos doing? And then you get on an airplane and you go fly out and you get to spend a week or two with those people in the field, seeing how difficult their jobs are, how hard it is to get a customer on the other end, how difficult it is to input everything into the CRM, how your own tool actually probably sucks a little from a user from a usability perspective. And then it's, and it's funny, cause you write the best CXOs in the world, the best CX leaders in the world that are thinking about this stuff. They're almost building two different journeys and two different playbooks that they bring back to HQ. And then you do this like reflective, um, assessment of all the different, you know, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and how you could actually start to make some impact. So I love that idea. I mean, it's a really, really good idea for our listeners to be thinking about and kind of bring it back to their own team and their own businesses today. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:23:25) - Cool. I, you know, and that's, I think that's a big look and obviously if you're leading a CX team while you're small, I don't know if the balance is even 50, 50, I think you gotta be doing like 80, 80% 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:23:40) - Out 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:23:40) - There in the business, understanding them and talking about the value of the team and then seeing, Hey, here's how we can use the toolkit to continue to drive growth, continue to find operational efficiencies, to continue to improve culture like those three primary goals. And then 20%, maybe you're kind of getting in the weeds with your team or, you know, et cetera. Um, I think that's indicative of any leadership role, but I think the influence and the constant buy-in and a constant selling as a CX leader is way more, um, way more enhanced, uh, maybe than other roles that I've been partnering with or I've seen. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:24:12) - Yep. I love it. Love to jump into the second CX pillar tools. So number one, across your journey, you got to work with a bunch of different types of toolkits. Everything from whatever software is required to run a, you know, a diner all the way up to huge CX and CS teams that are like working with some super impressive global badges. I'd love to just kinda hear how, um, you know, take a couple of minutes to talk about tools. Some of the things that you've either learned across your journey that have been really difficult as a co as a company grows or as a company scaling. And then some of the things that just, frankly, if you can just pinpoint your focus on tools, some of the handful of things that, you know, that any leader could really kind of, uh, kind of shine just by focusing on a couple items as it comes to toolkit optimization and just general tool usage. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:24:54) - Yeah. So cool thing. So, and you know, not a pitch for my current company, although, you know, Medallia is a great company. I'm not going to discount that at all, right.

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:25:02) - I think that the modern CX team cannot be successful unless they have an experienced management platform in place. And, you know, a lot of, lot of that has to do with, and this is, you know, our philosophy at Medallia is we want to democratize insights to the entire organization. So they can then take that and act on it on behalf of the customer, like putting this into the hands of operators every single day as a CX leader, that that's gotta be like a really just a primary goal and objective. Um, and the reason for that is one, you know, if you are focused on things like C-SAT or NPS, it's going to invariably it'll start to increase your scores over time. More importantly, though, in what I've observed is that these platforms are cultural drivers, right? If you're an operator, you might actually have a tough time trying to figure out how does my day to day impact the customer, but then when you have data to actually show you how that's happening, right? 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:25:57) - You fundamentally find purpose in that role, and you're able to make that connection and measure your performance. That really is transformative. So I think from a tech stack perspective, I think that's really, I think one, having a platform, um, uh, is really important. Number two is I was always a big believer in fewer the better, and just making sure that, you know, the integrations between the two work really, really well. One, I, you know, from a pure risk perspective, you don't, you don't want four different platforms, right? You just one, it's tough to manage two it's risky to your organization. Right. Um, and managing that risk, I think is something that a lot of companies these days really do care about. So taking that lens to it, I think is really important. Um, number three, I was always like, I want to consolidate as much as possible. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:26:45) - Um, I know it was a customer of Medallia's for five years. Uh, before I joined the company, I wanted to consolidate so much into one platform because I wanted the analysis and the view to really be able to come together into one, into one place versus having multiple different spots and then having to go do the work outside. Cause that's, that requires a whole new one that requires a new platform. Two, it requires new resources that you got to go sell the business on. Right. Which is never easy to do. And number three, like, you know, at some point, like you start looking at different platforms and saying, why are these, why, which one is more valuable to me than the next, right. So finding a platform that can do multiple things for you, understanding what's happening with your customers through the journey, um, is super, super important. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:27:31) - Um, and, and that integration piece with your MarTech stack with your contact center, you know, whatever that is. I think that is a really critical piece because at the end of the day, um, you need data flowing through different systems, right? Whether that's Salesforce, whether you know, whatever that is, and you do not want to be burned in your it organization with workarounds and manual processes, you want that flowing as easily as, as humanly possible. Um, and then finally, like you look for good people who actually like, are practitioners working there, like you want them to know what your pains are, right. Um, you want them to know the types of questions where you are in your own journey from a maturity perspective in CX or edX and say, Hey, you've been there and done that. Like, what obstacles did you face? Right? What were your pain points? Because they could be different, but like, what can we learn as a team, you know, from that company? I think those are three really important things to be looking at from a technology perspective. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:28:29) - I love it, man. I think it's so a couple, a couple of points that I, I hear this all the time bill from, from, from some of our guests, but like one of the first ones I just want to call out is this idea of take a minute to look at or get better yet, have a handful of your, your SMEEs are kind of around the table and take a minute to do a toolkit audit, whether it's number one, just listing out every single one of the pieces of software. This helped me to drive or grow or scale or operate your business today. That's number one, then take a few different cuts on it. Look at what, which of those tools or which of those, those SAS solutions are being utilized at a high clip, a medium clip, a low clip. Then after that, then somebody else, and maybe it's not everybody on the team, but then somebody a little bit higher up in your company needs to take a look at some of the backend economics of that. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:13) - How much are you paying for? How much are the licensing fees? How much are you spending every single solitary month for all these tools? And then immediately do a cross-reference to see, okay, the tools that aren't being used at all, but are costing X amount of dollars. But here's the other thing that you just said that I love bill and I talk about this constantly with our clients is there's almost like an opportunity cost. Every time you add a new piece of technology or a new tool into a company's purview, and the opportunity cost is around, it's almost like a distraction, right? So if all you really need them doing is spending 80% of their time in either their CX experience management platform or their CRM, or maybe it's their issue resolution management system. But every time you add a new piece of technology, you're essentially throwing up another, uh, neon billboard on a highway that kind of draws people's heads away from where you want the phone.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:59) - And so many companies, even these brilliant companies build that are doing these ridiculous things. They miss this on a, on a regular basis. So, and then the second thing is this is just this idea of like context switching or context mitigation, I think is one of the biggest things that CX and CS leaders need to really be thinking about. And you just said it in a slightly different way, but like, what are the two or three tools that you need your team to be able to understand from pop to bottom east to west, understand everything about it, understand what's expected of them from usability perspective. But then the other part is like, get them almost addicted to the form of that's where your morning and your evening news is going to be forever. Right. And you bring them there on a regular basis. So that then you caught, you have utilization, you have adoption, you have familiarity with the product or with the solution. And then you start to tell your story in those places. And even as companies get really, really big the companies that do well, they're constantly doing the, the, the morning, the afternoon and the evening news in those spaces. And I think a lot of companies need to think about that though. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:30:56) - Yeah. And that, and that democ democratization that I mentioned, that's not just for like operators day to day, right? Like your CEO, if like they're invested in the customer and EV no CEO will tell you, otherwise you really like getting the technology to them in a digestible way, not just sending like a PowerPoint deck. I mean, like actually having like an app on their phone where they can see what's happening with the customer every single day and be able to drill down and say what's wrong here. Um, you know, I realized that, um, some CEOs, well, every CEO is really busy, but giving them the capacity to be able to look at that every day and create conversation and dialogue with their own leadership around it on a regular basis, I think is insanely important. It's just different, different formats to be able to digest it. Right. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:31:41) - Um, 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:31:41) - So, you know, that's one more thing just to be able to add is just like, when you think about the technology, does it have something from the top of the house all the way down to the individual operator, um, and be able to create some kind of platform or view that will support them in their day-to-day? 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:31:57) - Yep. Couldn't agree. More bill, bill. I'd love to dive into the third CX pillar of process, and we've kind of hit on some of this a little bit where I'd love for you to go, as you mentioned, change management earlier in the conversation, but I'd love to kind of hear what are some of the ways that you've thought about sort of wrangling or optimizing, or just managing the way that a business has to think about his process, whether it's living playbooks, whether it's SOP, whether it's different types of, um, you know, content guides, what are some of the things that have worked really well for you and your teams as you, as you've kind of thought about wrangling process? 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:32:27) - So, um, um, I'm a big framework person. The thing that's really worked for me over the years has been, um, essentially just thinking about it, like a pyramid where, you know, you three pillars, I know you have Forman. Uh, but my, my three pillars, um, have always been insights, design, experience, design, and culture, and being in that culture piece, largely as sort of a change management component, and then being able to identify what are the behaviors, um, from an employee perspective, but also what are the capabilities across those three that you start to see as you start to evolve and grow as a business from, from a CX maturity perspective? Um, I've actually laid these out. Um, this is going back to my days, like way back at, at credit Suisse, the team. And I, we lay these out. We were able to score the business, um, on this sort of maturity model. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:33:23) - And we use that as a basis for, okay, you're this business is over here. This business is slightly more mature and here's why, and then being able to work with those different business lines to align them and kind of bring them all up to speed and, and being able then to say, okay, based on business outcomes and results based on customer outcomes and results, here's what we're seeing, right. One business versus another. So if you want their metrics, right, you need to start putting these things into place. And I think that, you know, making it just grounding people in like real, like, okay, behavior and capability just makes it very real for people. So I've always used that everywhere I've gone and I've, I've switched it up here and there, but like, you know, depending on the business, um, but that has served really, really well. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:34:07) - And I think that's important to be able to establish, um, not only credibility for you and the team, but also a process for you and a path for that business to go down together, uh, with a shared understanding and vision of, okay, where are we going to go? And then what it's, what is it going to look like when we get there? How's it gonna feel? Um, and you know, when you get to that top of the pyramid, like what should our customers be saying, like, what's, what's gonna be, or employees even what's gonna be different about this business. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:34:33) - I love that bill. What are some of the ways that you've been able to kind of include your teams in the way that you cause, cause I hear you loud, that's a phenomenal way of approaching it, but how do you get the teams involved in terms of that sounds like a lot more, you made that sound very simple. It sounds like it's a lot of work for some, what are some of the ways that you've been able to kind of use your teams, leverage your teams, leverage some of the awesome book guys and gals that are on these teams to be able to kind of come around that idea and to be able to create that, that, that, that, that story and create the way that you can actually start to show that there are these different paths forward for any given business or phrase, or maybe it's a project, maybe it's a specific initiative. Yeah. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:35:11) - I think it's just getting people look like any kind of classic leadership kind of lesser. And I think it's just making sure that everyone on your team is clear on what their role is and the impact that they are having on the business and can have that matter. Right. Doing, like having a scorecard for your, for your team, right. Not for the business, but for your team, like how are we engaging? Like, are we engaging the right people through like, you know, you know, eat some of your own kind of dog food, right? Like ask people how you're doing. Like, you know, are you aligning to their businesses and objectives? Are you having an impact on the, on the, on the, on the strategy of that business, like others in the organization are having, um, so constantly having those conversations and, and measuring, you know, just what's your own yard stick and like, how do you want to evolve and get better every day? 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:35:54) - Um, but like, you go, if you, if you're hiring good people, you got to let them go do the work to. Right. Um, but again, just being really clear with everybody and like, here's our team, here's what we do. Here's your role in that success. Right. And here's what my expectations are as a leader, but go do it. And you know, anyone worth their salt is going to, I hope, you know, is going to look at that and say, I'm running my own business here. Right. I'm going to treat it as such. So if I'm on the change management side, what are the things that I'm doing to get help people understand what CX is, help people understand what the value is, being able to promote sort of CX wins as well as CX learnings, like, or, you know, I called know losses, learnings, right? 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:36:37) - Like where there are bad experiences, what are we learning from them? How are we changing, evolving the business as a result? And how are we leveraging insights, analytics, put into a design thinking process to be able to go drive and effect change. And you know, those three things coming together, it can be really, really powerful. Um, and you know, you get some bumps and bruises along the way, just like anybody else. Right. But like, you know, just look okay, what did we do wrong? What did we learn? What are we gonna do differently next time? Right. And keep going. Yeah. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:37:09) - I think one, one of the, one of the things you made me think about it, I think every single solitary, one of our listeners should be pausing right here and writing this down and adding it to this week schools. But this idea of team or department based scorecards and swats just kind of slapped me right in the face bill with what you said, because there's, for a few reasons, number one at big companies, even not even big companies guys at well-funded, uh, startups and growth companies who are hoping to be tomorrow's leaders in the mid-market and the enterprise side, some of the folks that are running these teams in these departments are paid a tremendous amount of money on an annual basis. That should almost be a table stake in today's leadership. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:37:45) - It's not, it's not though, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:37:46) - And it's not on, I get, look, this is why there's companies like cxchronicles that are thrilled to come in and help companies do scorecards do work in assessments, do quantified views of how your different teams or different leadership folks are stacking up. But, but when you say it like that bill you're right. It's almost like how does any team or department leader actually have a compass? How do they know what's north with south west? If I would argue on a quarterly basis, maybe, maybe, maybe we give it a little leniency, but like on a bi-annual basis, every six months, it should be relatively easy for a bunch of really smart people to give their executive leadership team a proper scorecard, a proper SWAT analysis, a proper directional, because I imagine what I'm thinking is when you lay that out across sales, marketing, ops, product analytics, et cetera, bill, you can immediately see gaps. You could immediately see where resources are required to build bridges. And you could immediately see where certain folks are different parts, different, uh, different positions on the pitch are requiring a little extra oomph to get them over the Humper D get them to the next level of the game. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:38:46) - Yeah, totally. Right. And like, and you know, I, like I said, like, it's, it's one thing to have that for the business, but a, a complete, other thing to have your, oh, turn that on yourself as well. And just honest in terms of, you know, are we having the value that we were hoping to have, um, on this organization and just being open and honest about like, here's what we didn't do as well as we wanted to do. Here's what we're going to do next year. That's going to be different and better, you know, here's where we had a lot of success and we're able to impact and drive like real change for the company and the customer and the employee. So, you know, getting a real understanding and have someone on the change management side, like really own that, uh, and be able to constantly showcase the impact that you and the team is having, I think is super important, you know, in not just in sexual. I think you got to do that in every role, but, um, I think in CX more than any other role, because it's a little bit more fuzzy to folks. So if you can quantify that value and revenue efficiency, whatever that quantification is not hard, real numbers. I think you need to spend a lot of effort on that side. Um, you know, cause you do, unfortunately you do have to justify the work that you're doing every day. That's part of the role. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:39:51) - Yep. Yep. Couldn't agree more, um, bill, let's jump into the fourth and the final CX pillar of feedback. Um, so, and, and, and, and, and feel free to kind of bring.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:40:01) - Uh, in whichever direction you think makes the most sense, but I'd love to just kind of hear some ideas or some of the lessons or some of the things that you've learned along your journey around we, that you can be really, really thoughtful about your customer feedback in ways that you can be really, really thoughtful, um, about your, your employee feedback. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:40:18) - So, well, well, there's, there's one way to do both, you know, it's act on the feedback at the end of the day. So like, you know, people come to me and say like, Hey, I wanna, even after this podcast, I'm talking to someone about someone whose like MPS system isn't working the way that they wanted to do. And I might, I can guarantee you, um, they're not acting on the feedback as a business right. In the right way. Um, without even knowing what the problem is. Um, so I think acting on feedback is really important, whether that's employees, whether that's customers, number one, number two is I think feedback like direct feedback through a survey, or someone's taking notes somewhere and it's captured in Salesforce. And you're analyzing that feedback. I think that today, as we talk a lot about signals at Medallia, right, and a signal is a survey for sure, but a signal is also someone on social media saying this was a great experience, or this is a poor experience. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:41:08) - And here's why right. Financial data, our signals, operational data, another signal, et cetera, being able to piece those, those signals through the journey is now really the, where the work is going because only then can you then get away from, I've got my six personas and I'm going to kind of design towards those six and really start to drive towards personalization at scale. Right? And again, that's, that's very action oriented and driven, right? So how do I, how do I change the experience while a customer is going through it using using technology to automate and automate that process, to keep them, you know, down sort of that path, whereas a business, we achieve our goals, but we also make the experience better for that customer. I'll give you a real example. Um, you want to go get a new, more, you want to go refi your mortgage? 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:42:00) - Okay. A lot of people are doing that today. Kind of given where rates are, everyone's kind of rushing to refi or even buy homes. You go to a bank's website and you go to the mortgage site and you look at a rate and you're like, well, I'm not paying that rate. And you kind of bounce out, right? And maybe that's your bank. Maybe you go into your checking and savings kind of look at balances by like journey orchestration is about servicing a new rate because that, that platform understands who you are and understand that you dropped out because that rate wasn't sufficient enough. So you actually might, they might surface a lower rate for you that makes you click and makes you go down that, that mortgage journey path, right? So the business achieves its goals. You get actually a better experience because you're able to accomplish a task that you went to that site to do. Um, and everybody kind of wins. And I think being able to think about how do I act in different ways, not just in, I've got survey feedback, I'm going to give it to the banker down in the branch and they can go make a change at some point. That's also important, but really at scale understanding like how do we, how do we act in different ways through the, uh, through the doors that our customers come through every day, whether that's the contact center in app branch, you know, whatever that might be. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:43:11) - Yep. I love that. Um, it's, it's some of the, some of the things that we're doing with our clients are at CC bill. It's exactly what you're talking about will actually help to build customer feedback, roadmap, uh, views. Because a lot of companies, they don't actually, no one takes the time to just draw the map. So, like for example, we have sales and marketing using these three tools to get a bunch of signals, a bunch of insights and a tremendous amount of data. And then they just live in their own little tribe over there using a tag. Then you move down the line, you get into, you get into customer success and you get into your, your customer facing team. They have loads and loads and loads of information about all the activities that are happening to service that portfolio. They've got the phone calls, they've got the emails, they've got text messages, they've got tickets, they've got all this fun stuff to work with. And then nobody. And then they, that tribe, they play with that information. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:43:59) - And 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:43:59) - Then you go down to product and usability and you see the same thing. It's like the people literally using your app, using your website, using your product, using the thing that you're selling. And they've got all that information and it's you're right, man. It's like the faster you can just stitch together the story on a journey on a holistic journey, and then start getting those, those same folks kind of looking at that holistic view. That's where there's so much opportunity for optimizing, uh, not just the customer experience, but most employees and most of the smartest people in the world that like showing up at work every day, they prefer to be at a, at a place that's kind of having that type of, uh, collaboration in that type of socialization and that type of intimacy or.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:44:38) - Being able to see what other teams and other departments and other roles under the leaders are doing within their space. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:44:42) - Absolutely. Right. When people look, you want to work for a company that's winning, right? Oh, you, no one wants, we're a company that's losing. So creating that horizontal view, I think is the next kind of like two, three, maybe even four or five years where not just the horizontal view is, is created in, is visible, but also as an organization, you're not changing the way structurally you're organized horizontally, but you are, you're starting to bring people together horizontally to see that full picture. I mean, even at Freddie Mac, we, we started putting, um, you know, you, you had sort of the agile and the agile function. We started giving them sort of customer data and said, okay, you know, when a portfolio of product teams, you're essentially a journey owner, we created, um, a really, uh, it's a Forester concept. It's called a journey Atlas. And there, we had six primary experiences, I think 36 underlying journeys. And we use that sort of as, as a roadmap and a guide to help us understand what's happening through these primary experiences and all these journeys. And how does it hit me as you go through those experiences as a client, like what's happening as you're going through, 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:45:48) - You know, you're, if you're looking at classic servicing kind of, um, you know, mode as a customer, like the stuff that happens upstream is still really important and you've gotta be able to manage that. So, you know, we lit it up red, Amber Green, like a Christmas tree. It was really cool visual, um, a lot of great work happening there. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:46:05) - I like that bill before we wrap up, I'd love for you to spend a minute. As you talk about your show, man, you got an awesome podcast. I'm definitely a huge fan of learn. Learn, learn a ton. I hope that the folks that are listening to this show every single week, I hope that they're getting the same thing, but like with bill show, he's got these incredible folks, incredible stories, incredible lessons. Take, take a minute or two, just to tell us the story about how you built your podcast, how you built your community, and just certainly where people can go find out more about it so that we can continue to cross-pollinate and, and show other CX and CS. There's all the different information and awesome stories that are out there. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:46:38) - Well, I appreciate the question because I don't get asked that question a lot. Um, I started the podcast because there's way too much like thir theory out there, um, from, you know, CX and ex perspective and not enough, like real, just tactical, like how do you do this stuff? You know, much like the stuff you're doing, right? The conversations that you're having every day and being able to bring that to people so they can learn and grow and do better at their jobs. That is what is important to me. I was really lucky in my 20 plus years doing this work that I had some really interesting people that would help me along the way I could raise my hand to ask questions and they were always there. And I wanted to bring that out, um, to, to folks. And hopefully, you know, hopefully we're doing that today. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:47:17) - So, um, you know, the show, the show has listeners in over 90 countries, I think we'll hit a hundred countries this year, which is possible pretty cool thing. Um, and, uh, we just got nominated for best business podcast. We won best business podcast last, last year and the  ...  podcast awards. Um, and, um, you know, much like your show, right? Like it comes down to two things. It's like, it's the guest and their depth, but also the questions that you're asking and every show is not the same and keeping it fresh for listeners. And, um, more than anything, I will also add though, I'm probably the same for you. I'm gonna venture is like, it's been an incredible, just learning and growth hack for me Talking to different people all the time, getting to understand how they did it and how they were successful. And like, just knowing you don't have all the answers, it's just been an eyeopening experience. And just one, that's just been really incredible for me personally. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:48:06) - I love it. Well, look, keep up the incredible work and congratulations on those on what you just mentioned. Cause you deserve a mat. It's an awesome show off content. Great, great substance. Um, and, and, and you just, now that same thing with me, man, it's for folks out there that are thinking about what's, whether you can continue to get deeper or further ahead or, or, or mastering your craft or massacre, mastering your trade, whatever it is, guys, literally, whatever it is. Take some time to go talk to other incredible folks who have done. If not, if not the same, you better double or triple the amount of work and that bats and time and hours and energy thinking about a specific thing and you will be blown away at how you learn so much more than you ever thought you could learn about a specific space or a specific topic. So it is absolutely incredible life hack. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:48:51) - Yeah. And look in the shows on you can go to be customer led.com B E customer led.com. Um, reach out to me on LinkedIn. If, if you ever want to just chat about what you're doing and how you can do it better, like I'm always down for that. I have plenty of those conversations each week, just new people just reaching out and saying, Hey, I saw what you put out there. Can you talk more about it? I'm willing to spend 30 minutes or whatever time people need, like in this space, like all day long. So feel free to talk about, 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:49:16) - Well, bill staikos thank you so much for joining the cxchronicles podcast is better. Absolute pleasure. And I definitely look forward to keeping the conversation going forward with you in the future. My friend. 

Bill Staikos, Medallia (00:49:24) - Yeah, it's been an honor. I appreciate you having me on the show.