CXChronicles Podcast 181 with Tom Goodmanson, CEO at Calabrio

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #181  we welcomed Tom Goodmanson, President & CEO at Calabrio based in Minneapolis, MN.

Calabrio's products and services help their customers maximize agent performance, exceed customer expectations, and boost workforce efficiency using connected data, AI-fueled analytics, automated workforce management, and personalized coaching.​ 

In this episode, Tom and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for him across his customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #181 Highlight Reel:**

1. Dividing and conquering your way to growth and scalability 
2. Ideas for how your team can master the debate of "Build it or buy-it?" 
3. Creating CX/EX focused "story tellers" within your business to grow & scale
4. Putting your developers in front of your customers early to expedite innovation 
5. How Workday's Peakon Employee Voice platform drives Calabrio's EX success
 
Huge thanks to Tom for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the employee experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Tom Goodmanson, President and CEO at Calabrio

Click here to learn more about Calabrio

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

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

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

Transcript

CXC 181- with Tom Goodmanson, President and CEO at Calabrio

Adrian (00:00:08) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited for today's guest, Tom Goodmanson CEO at Calabrio is joining us folks. Tom has got an incredible, um, customer focused business leader journey that he's gonna share with us plus him and his team at Claro are building some incredible, uh, solutions for the future of CX the future of customer success. And he's here today to share that with all of us. So Tom, number one, thank you for joining the show. I'd love for you to start off the episode, man. Why don't you take the first couple minutes, give us a sense for how you got into this space, man. I love hearing how all these different leaders and all these different folks kind of found their way into their little niche, their little pocket of, of, of customer experience and, and of experience transformation. But how did you get started in this space, man? What were some of the stepping stones in your career that, that kind of got you into the position that you're at today? Leading the charge over at Calabrio a? 

Tom Goodmanson (00:00:56) - Yeah. And thanks for having me, Adrian, it's been, uh, it's, it's great to be here and, and love what you're doing. Um, you know what, it's been kind of a fun journey. It's been, I love, I just celebrated, we just had our 30th reunion from college and so it's a, a monumental year. Uh, but from that time, it's, it's been an interesting journey. It's been one of, I, I came outta school as a CPA actually, um, and spent the first 10 years practicing at a, at a big firm. Uh, but what I did there was all technology. And so I've been in the B2B software space really for 30 years. Um, first as a, as you know, a service, uh, guy that, that helped companies in all kinds of ways, uh, grow through acquisitions. IPOs had had a great journey with that, uh, in Minneapolis and San Francisco and, and really I got the bug, uh, to, to be more inside of a company. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:01:50) - I loved what I did, um, but I really wanted to be inside of the company building stuff. And so I took a finance and operations, uh, role, uh, outside of the firm in a, in a software development firm. Uh, and, and from there just kind of blossomed to, uh, then the entrepreneurial bug hit me. Uh, and as I thought about, you know, okay, now I've seen how people do it. I've, I've worked with people who do it now. I want to try it. And so I've had the opportunity to jump in, uh, at Calabrio ative and, and really, uh, build something really cool over the last 15 years. I can't believe it's already been, you know, it's, Mark's half of my career has been here. Uh, it, it feels like two minutes ago. 

Adrian (00:02:31) - I was gonna say time, time flies when you're having fun. Right. And when you're with an awesome team and when you're with an awesome customer base time can go, can go even faster than you'd ever believe, man. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:02:40) - Yeah. You, you, you wouldn't believe, you know, starting off, like I say, 15 years ago, you kind of you're NAS it. And I woke up this year, kind of took, took some inventory of where we're at as a company, we've got 4,500 customers. That's awesome. 1.1 0.2 million users and 700 employees. <laugh> how the heck did that happen? 

Adrian (00:03:00) - <laugh> I love it, man. I mean, look, it's funny, you don't sometimes when you get into building these companies and building these teams and building these products, you don't know where it's gonna take you over time, but the, the, the reality is in what so many folks often forget even successful folks is like showing up every single solitary day, taking action every single solitary day, uh, building from awesome ideas from your employees, your customers, specifically every single day, you turn around 15 years later, all of a sudden you're gonna have those numbers, Tom, right? You're gonna, you're gonna have that type of success. And you're gonna have that type of incredible work that, that you can kinda look back on and be really, really super proud of. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:03:34) - Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's, it's amazing. Uh, and, and it is really about the, and I know we'll talk about the whole feedback loop, but it really, uh, taking, taking that feedback constantly, uh, and just showing up every day. I, I tell that I have six kids and, and from 26 to 16, and it's literally, uh, they don't know any better than to just show up every day. 

Adrian (00:03:57) - <laugh> well, I was gonna say, so what, which part is harder having, um, your 4,500 customers, your 700 employees and that whole world, or having six kids? That's a basketball 

Tom Goodmanson (00:04:06) - Team. Tom <laugh> it's, it's certainly more expensive to have six kids than 700 employees. 

Adrian (00:04:12) - Right, right. No, that's good though. Um, Tom, I'd love so awesome. Thank you for setting the stage and thank you for giving a success for sort of how you kind of started to get into some of this world. Let's start with the first CX pillar team, man. I was super excited. I'd love for you to share, um, a bit about the Calabrio ative team. Talk about some of the things over the last 15 years that you had to think about, or that you had to really kind of dig into with the team to number one, figure out what roles you needed, what type of talent did you need? What type of things were presenting themselves to the early Calabrio ative business that required awesome people to figure this stuff out and to build for your customers and to build for your product side, spent a few minutes talking about kind of how you built the team and what the team of looks like today. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:04:50) - Yeah. It's nothing like it did 15 years ago. Um, it, it is pretty it's, it's.

Tom Goodmanson (00:04:56) - Amazing. When, when you think about back, you know, you were kind enough to send me a couple of these ideas and, and it does make you think about, okay, who are all the people who walked through here, you know, to, I'd like to say that it's the first people and it's only 700 that have been here, but people come and go in their careers and, and for different reasons. And, and so as you think about how everybody leaves their, their fingerprints on your business and, and making sure that it's the right fingerprints. Yeah. So if you think back early on, we really wanted to be a product first company. Okay. We wanted to make sure that the product was, you see so many software companies say, I'm gonna go sell an idea and then I'll build it. I'll figure it out. Yep. We've really taken the opposite approach. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:05:38) - I think that's been one of the reasons. And so going back to that, the product people were the first people, the product and development people. Okay. Um, and we just started and it was funny. We just started dividing in concrete, Adrian. Um, so if you think about, and, and it's funny all every now and again, lecture at the local colleges and stuff about what leadership looks like and what you have to do. And I always describe leadership to me was always giving up something you love as you divide and let other people do it. Yeah. Right. Uh, you know, I could still be a CPA today. Uh, had I not said, you know what, I'm gonna give up that, which I'm good at, and I'm gonna focus on product. I'm gonna, you know, and you learn these different things. And so the early team was, you know, we were Jack of all trades, we were mopping the floors and doing the, it was, it was the journey that you, that you see. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:06:29) - Yeah. And so what we've done is we we've taken each of these people and, and some of them have grown and, and, and the hardest day is when you go in and say to my very first product person, Hey, I need you to take care of customer success. I'm gonna bring in a different marketing and, uh, product person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, oh my gosh. And then they realize, oh, that is what I'm really good at. Cause I'm good at listening back to the customers. Yep. And then you take those people and you think about it, we've divided those jobs and change those jobs. We're still doing it today. Yep. Uh, in, in making the company better and more successful. Um, and so we're constantly driving that behavior and we drive it down into the organization. Even the people that are growing up inside the organization. One of my proudest things as I step up in front of the people of the Calabrio every single January for the kickoff. And I say, raise your hand, if you're not doing the same job that you were doing last kickoff, or if you're new, it's over 50% every year. 

Adrian (00:07:29) - Wow. Wow. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:07:30) - And that's, that's really a, a proud moment for me because it means there's a career path here. It means there's something to do.  And so making it meaningful every day, trying to make it meaningful every day that people can succeed. 

Adrian (00:07:43) - I love that town in order to immediately makes me think about too. Talk about what an incredible way organizationally, to really, really leverage the tribal knowledge, right? When you're thinking about marketing and sales and operations and product and finance and support and all these different things, when you have that type of movement and you have that type of like aggregation and assimilation of all these different, not just subject matter expertise areas, but people like people build businesses. I know that even the best products in the world, they're built by people and they're, they're sold by people. They're serviced by people, but that's a game changer. That's a major, uh, competitive advantage where you theoretically have built a team where people get to do many different things. People probably become experts in multiple facets. It creates a more, um, uh, it creates a, almost a, a much more diverse workforce. 

Adrian (00:08:30) - But when you start thinking mean, we are gonna get into some of the ex and the, in the employee engagement side, but this is another thing that a lot of executive teams time they miss, which is like, if you don't have movement mobility, upward, uh, opportunity in a business, it's hard for a players, people that are dynamite and what they do in the respective areas, it's easy to get bored. It's easy to get stagnant. It's easy to maybe not feel as motivated as you were on year one from your year five, that to think so that ability to move folks around and really let them, um, explore other parts of the business, explore other parts of the customer portfolio, the products set. That's huge, man. That's I love that you guys are doing that. I love that you really kind of, um, celebrate that. I think more, more, more leadership teams need to think about it that way. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:09:10) - Yeah. I'll tell. And I'll take it up one notch too, Adrian, because we're as old as we are. Some of my, uh, early developers who were instrumental in us building the company like five, six years ago said, you know what? I gotta do something else. I'm gonna try something else. Blah, blah, blah. Yep. I've had four of those in the last year that I picked up the phone cuz I had a problem to solve. And I remember them solving that problem for me 15 years ago and all four of 'em I've been able to talk into coming back to different roles. Uh, and so a little bit of the old, sometimes you need a little bit of the old infused with the new, uh, and that's been some of the most exciting is getting these guys pumped again about the new collabo one that they didn't even leave. They don't recognize it, but they love it. 

Adrian (00:09:54) - That's super cool. It's and it's building on top of all of these wins. It's building on progress. It's building on things that were working. Maybe they still work. Maybe they needed some iterations to continue to work in the, in the current market climate. It's I love it. I think that's super, super cool Tom, before we move forward, I I'd love for you spend a minute or two talking about, give our listeners a sense for so awesome, awesome ideas around the team.

Adrian (00:10:15) - Give us a sense for some of the major solutions and the major products that the Calabrio ative team is working on with your customers every single day. Just to give people a sense for some of the awesome things that you guys are doing. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:10:24) - Oh yeah, for sure. Because it's unique cuz we're, we're really enabling, uh, the CX journey, uh, inside of companies. And so the tools that we're building every day are, are an end to end suite that that takes in it's built for the contact center, but used outside the contact center all the time. And it's, and what it is is, is a set of QA tools. So you can record all the interactions that are going on with your valuable customers. Yep. And then, but we take that another layer and we're trans, we call it capture, transform, and analyze, love it. We're capturing the interaction. We transform it. So if it's a voice, we turn it into text. If it's, if it's a chat, we put it into the engine. Nice. We're we then start making predictions about what might happen next. But all throughout that journey, we, we, we also schedule all the employees to be in the right place at the right time. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:11:15) - Um, and, and throughout that journey, the real, we, we make sure the human is at the center of the transaction. So we could easily turn this into an all technical discussion, Adrian. But really what we do is we've always talked about the human centricity of our software. Yeah. And what that means is making sure the humans are, are given the tools to do their job in a way that makes them feel valuable about doing their job, but all throughout giving the company that awesome. I, I call it the front door of the new front door. The pandemic has treated us that taught us back. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Right. As you've got, my front door is closed. My contact center is the only thing stand between me and a angry customer, 

Adrian (00:11:57) - A hundred percent. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:11:57) - And I'm able to take and give those tools and start to give clues as to why they're upset, how they're, how they're doing will they may turn, but furthermore, will your contact center center agent churn because they're stressed out. Totally. So giving you clues on both sides, a great contact center, agent's gonna be a great customer service route. Yep. And, and they're gonna take care of your customer. So it's, it's really a, we, we feel like we, we've got a really nice tool set and it's only increased in value over the last three years. Of course, 

Adrian (00:12:31) - I love it, Tom. It's it's we talk about this all the time, but you, you just laid something out there for our listeners that I just can't emphasize enough, which is like the minute that, you know, companies really start to think about the importance of triangulating on not just customer experience and employee experience, but then their product experience, huge things start to happen because you're, you are building, um, you're building multiple passes. All, all of us business, you know, leaders are constantly do. We're always building in a variety of different ways, but like when you can try angling on those three things, you are literally amplifying your probability for success. But more importantly, it's that age old of right? Happy employees working with a tool and a product set or a solution set that they love and they know is gonna be dynamite for the customers. 

Adrian (00:13:14) - It keeps everybody happy, keeps everyone align. It keeps driving innovation. It keeps driving positive change. And it's just engagement, man. It's, it's, it's the easiest way time that both customers, employees, builders of the, of all of all those sets can really remain engaged. So I think it's, I think that's awesome. That's super, super cool. Um, Tom, I'd love to dive into the, into the second six pillar and you already said this, we could talk about tools and technology all day let's let's. I'd love to have you spend a couple minutes talking about there's two things here. Definitely want to hear some of the different, um, new things that you guys are working on with the Calabrio ative tool sets, but I'd also of no, the last 15 years, Tom, you and the team must have had to use a variety of different tools internally to build the business, to build the customer portfolio, to build the team up to 700. Can you spend a couple minutes talking about some of the things that you've kinda learned along your own journey with in terms of tool management, technology optimization, and maybe some of the ways that you've and the team have had to invest in tools and in technology as you've grown and scaled the business? 

Tom Goodmanson (00:14:09) - Yeah, that's, that's such a hard one because I, I I've always lived a fine line in building the company between, uh, can I have another tool or can I have another developer? Yeah. Can I have another, you know, it was always 

Adrian (00:14:21) - Build it or buy it, that type of idea type of debate. Yeah. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:14:25) - Yeah. And so it's like, okay, I can make that Excel spreadsheet work one more year, but we gotta keep it up to date. I can make that right as, and so, um, but the lesson as we've hyper grown in the last three years, um, is it's never too soon to put in great systems and really take care of them. A great, and we talk about it in our software all the time, you know, and, and, and the old shoemakers kids have no shoes. Uh, you know, we, we put, you put in a CRM, are we put in ours 10 years ago, we've had to blow it up and put it back in. Sure. Use the same tool, but blow it up and put it back in three different times. Cause we've kind of transformed into three different CU C 

Adrian (00:15:05) - Yep. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:15:05) - Right. You, you, you have to acknowledge that your company changes in the journey. Yep. And so, as we think about those tools, think about the accounting systems, right. Is again, Excel to great planes to, uh, you know, a, a robust enterprise, uh, type, uh, journey mapping 

Adrian (00:15:23) - <laugh> yeah. Yeah. It's 

Tom Goodmanson (00:15:25) - Unbelievable. The kinds of things that we have to do. And so we're constantly on the lookout and, and if I was to give any advice, kind of the, in the advice side is always be looking doesn't mean you have to buy, but you better be ready to pull the trigger. Uh, when it's time, it's kind of back to the people. Yep. In order to have the people do the things that you need 'em to do, they need the tools in 

Adrian (00:15:46) - Front of hundred percent. Yep. Hundred 

Tom Goodmanson (00:15:47) - Percent. So I, I, I've seen a lot of frustrated employees over the years because we haven't invested in the tools and, and, and then you, you end up paying one way or another. And so get in there and know what you want to do and do it. 

Adrian (00:16:02) - I, I love that you call out the, the employee consternation that can come from a subpar tech stack because, you know, Tom, it's funny. I just thinking about some of the work that we do with, with our clients at CXC, like one of the things that we do inside of some of our journey mapping is we will align some of the existing tool technology that are bringing the employees through how they manage the customer experience. And it is wild how often you're not even done with the journey maps. And you start to pull out all of these tool or technology based consternation points where some of your best in your brightest guys and gals that are building the business, building the journey, managing the journey, they're calling out the fact that this tool has never worked. This tool will, will never evolve this tool doesn't have. 

Adrian (00:16:44) - And it's funny when you start to unpack some of that stuff and you start to even just think about projected ROIs or, well, what would happen if we did go through the painful process of changing that one tool? Well, then we think that we could, our conversions would double, or we think that our retention would go up by 20%, or we think that we could mitigate turn by X and all these different ways that CX and CS leaders are thinking about this stuff. But it's funny. It really often does come back down to that tool and it makes sense. Great, awesome people. I, I, I know I use a lot of sports analogies on the show guys, but like you think about the New York Yankees and whether you love 'em or you hate 'em think about some of the, the people, the tools, the training, the coaching that they've been able to slam into that organization over the last hundred years. 

Adrian (00:17:23) - And no wonder why there's, you know, 26 world champion, like there's, it's things like that. So like, I love that you call that out. I also think that here's the other thought we're living in a wild time where best in class technology changes rapidly. So what's best in class even five years ago, may, maybe they're still dominating, cuz they've probably figured out how to build the sales machine. And they've built, figured out how to build a nice big chunky portfolio, but it doesn't always mean that that's the same best tool that's working for a company that's going to market in a wildly different space, five years down the road. So like, there's this idea of also to your point of like someone in the business better be looking at their horizon, constantly thinking about what are the new tools, what are the new process? What are the new things that we should be thinking about? So if we do have to pull that trigger to your point time, we've already at least got our information, we've got our ABCs and we kind of know how to connect the dots around what makes the most sense for our business. So I love that you call that out early. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:18:13) - No, and I will, I will, uh, let the Yankees thing slide. <laugh> the shadow, the shadow behind me, Adrian is actually target field for the 

Adrian (00:18:21) - Twins. Okay. So maybe I should, maybe I should have used another sports analogy, but 

Adrian (00:18:26) - I thought that I didn't know exactly what that was behind you, but so Tom is clearly a big twins fan guys. Um, but so, so Tom, I love that. Um, 1, 1, 1 last question, before we jump off of tools, um, over the 15 years with some of our listeners who are building tomorrow's leading companies, um, you know, so, so looking on the horizon and always being aware of what tools are coming down, I love that. But what about the investment piece, Tom, if you had to give like one or two ideas for how today's startup founder, today's customer focused business leader, especially if they're working with a small budget, they're not at the point yet where they have 4,500 customers or big, awesome team, what would be like the one or two places that you would urge people to, to start with, or maybe one of the key areas that they, they think about what their biggest initial technology investment might need to be aligned to so that they can actually grow into the future. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:19:12) - Yeah. I'm, I'm a whatever can, whatever you want to use. And there's a million tools out there that are, and we're again, I'm gonna get a little ahead of you, but we're gonna, is that gives you the feedback. Yeah. So if I was gonna invest in any one thing, so, and normally that's the CRM, uh, let's face it, right? Yep. Uh, and so knowing, because if you don't have a single place where your customers and, and we happen to use our CRM through our CU through our, uh, CS organization, customer support. Yep. It then goes into the repository of who's there. Yep. And it is our forward looking pipeline. And so you're able to do a, a journey as they come through us. Yep. Uh, and, and so if you're gonna invest in something and it doesn't have to be elaborate at first, but it is worth every nickel in, if.

Tom Goodmanson (00:20:00) - Constantly tuning it and driving it, uh, uh, forward, because it, you just have to know what your customers are. You have to have a feedback loop, uh, in order to particularly if you're a product organization like ours. Yep. Uh, if you don't know what your customers are saying, if you don't connect the CS organization with the sales organization, to know that a customer's frustrated to know that they're or, or even wildly happy to be able to get the next reference. Yep. If you don't know that you're gonna just kind of chug along. Yep. 

Adrian (00:20:30) - Could couldn't agree anymore. Super well. Sub Tom, let's dive into the third seeks pillar process and you kind of hinted on some of these, but so you, you said earlier, like the team that we had for example, 15 years ago, versus today's different. I gotta imagine the processes and some of the playbooks and some of the knowledge or the FAQs or the, the internal, not, not just the internal stuff that your employees and your 700% team needs to think about, but I get 4,500 customers that need to understand how to interplay with collabo or what to expect, or what process sets spend a few minutes talking about sort of what the evolution of, um, your team has had to go through with building those playbooks, building those, those confluence, knowledge bases, building some of the executes. What has it been like over the last 15 years of just thinking about how to manage that third pillar of process? 

Tom Goodmanson (00:21:16) - Yeah. It's, you know, I could do go on with each of the pillars of my organization, right? Development, sales, marketing. It's you have to be, again, I think a theme you're hearing me say is you have to be on a constant awareness of what's going on in your organization. Totally. And by having that awareness, you can, and, and driving it down, driving responsibility down as far as you can, because I'm not gonna, I used to be really good at process mapping. Uh, the things that you guys do, I'm terrible at it now, because I don't see, I'm not sitting at the accountants desk during the debit and credits. I'm not sitting in the sale. I'm we all sales a little bit more, but I'm not taking the call on customer service anymore. Yep. And so listening again, listening is a big, big one is making sure we're listening to the employees and where are their pain points, listening to our customers? Where are their pain points? If I'm getting an escalation, why am, why are they able to escalate to me? Or why do they feel they need to it's because they didn't have a front door to us. Yeah. And so it's time to, and that's changed, right? You used to come, I mean like, gosh, people called the front desk to get help. Yeah. 

Adrian (00:22:25) - Right, right, right. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:22:26) - And then you go to a one 800 number and then you go to international one, 800 numbers. You just have to keep listening to where our choke points and fix those choke points, but fix them holistically. Don't, don't stop at where you think, you know, there's a great book. Um, I'm, I'm gonna not, of course be able to recall it right now, but talks about bottleneck analysis. Okay. Yeah, sure. And, and it's a story of bottlenecks and it's just like the, the company that just goes and picks the next one picks the next one picks the next one. Yep. Well, that's a, that's a really hard way to go about it. You have to predict your next three bottlenecks. Uh, otherwise you're constantly stopping and starting. Yep. Uh, and we do a lot of that work here. 

Adrian (00:23:05) - I, I, I love that. I think number one, that's a brilliant idea, which is just this idea of like part of the benefit of having dialed process or having, and I love that you call this out, having the right sneeze inside of your business and inside your team, owning that process. Cause I, you know, Tom, there's not enough executives to call out what you just said, man, which is the, the reality is you hire excellent, great, smart, dedicated, driven people cuz they know some of these pockets and corners of a business better than anybody, right. Especially if you're hiring world class people. And then the other thing too is like those, those same folks, like to be able to own some of those different process sets and then more importantly, to be able to be some of the pioneers or some of the, the chief storytellers within the business that can kind of get up on a stage or get up on a, on a platform and make sure that other folks understand where they can find that knowledge or how they can understand that knowledge or how they can become diversify their own knowledge. 

Adrian (00:23:54) - That's not just with their product, but maybe with like, like for example, it's, it's amazing how many companies don't necessarily spend any time having say ops understanding some of the main facets of sales or sales understanding some of the main facets of support. I think we're getting better with that. I think that, yeah, there's a lot of work being done in just the modern business world where I think, um, just the way that even executive leadership teams are being built in format or a little bit different, you've got ownership areas. A lot of people think about either funnel or journey based leadership and journey based analytics and view so that we can actually really start sticking math in numbers from day one, which hopefully we should, we should all be doing. But I think, um, the other piece to it is like that I just wanna call, this is something that, you know, at C that some of the work we're doing with our clients, we view this as a massive ex and employee engagement function that you're do that you can build right into your CX optimization. 

Adrian (00:24:42) - Meaning like when you have the right people owning this stuff and really feeling empowered to be the authors, the creators, and then the storytellers of all the great things that you're doing within your, your granular process sets in any business or on any team that stuff's huge. Man. People love that stuff, the right type of leaders that are gonna run with that stuff. They love it. They own it. They do it 10 times better than the Toms and the agents can do it cause we're doing all these other things. Yep. And then lastly, it's just like.

Adrian (00:25:05) - And again, CX Chronicles. I, I don't maybe say this on the show enough, but like having someone in a business who's chronically all of the things, keeping track of the history, keeping track of what's worked, what hasn't worked. What's great. What's the next best opportunity. What's the next 10 revenue streams. That's how you can really build upon history and really start to set your set yourself ahead and really set yourself up for success as you scale your business into the future, regardless of the industry and regardless of what, what products or services you're selling to your customers, right? 

Tom Goodmanson (00:25:31) - Yeah. You got it. And just the employee base changes. Think about the, the, uh, think about the generations that have come through, uh, the doors, the way, you know, a bunch of Xers like me coming through lead and wanna be led differently than the whys and the Zs and the millennials and you name it, right? Yeah. Yeah. And if we don't embrace and take that feedback, uh, you're gonna crush under the weight of, of things that are antiquated. Uh, and, and some of that's pure leadership. Some of it's the way we use tools, some of the way, it's the way we interact with those tools. Uh, you know, the digital natives, uh, are, are becoming, it's funny to watch them inside the organization. I'm, I'm working on a little bit of study around millennials of, you know, they, we, they were supposed to be the original digital natives and, and they could have all these tools around them. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:26:21) - And what we're seeing is we go out and survey our customers. They wanna get on the phone with people. They don't want to be digital. There's, there's this weird, you know, phone. I don't think phones are gonna grow in the way people interact, but it's certainly not shrinking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. People had said that we're just gonna, we're gonna get on our screens and not, and not interact with one another. And I think that's huge in the tools that you have to remember that in your tools, uh, as you're thinking about your CX journey, yeah. 

Adrian (00:26:49) - Hundred percent 

Tom Goodmanson (00:26:49) - Companies, I'm sure you've seen it out there. People say, oh, I want ignore phone. Let's go, let's go just a hundred percent digital. Totally. And, and they're, they're struggling when it comes to customer service in most cases. Um, and we, and we think about that all the time here. 

Adrian (00:27:07) - Awesome idea. And, and what it makes me think about Tom is like, for our listeners, like if you're already taking time to think about how to break out your customer segments or how to break out the different personas that are using your products or services. Well, you just made me think about is if you're not adding a, some form of a component into how you're doing that exercise with your team around preferred modalities or preferred mediums. Yes. Huge man, because think about even, and you're right now that you say that out loud, like that, I'm thinking about even someone like me, who's on a computer from basically seven 30 in the morning until sometimes 10 o'clock at night. And to your point, like pretty good with picking up tools and figuring out softwares without there's some things that like, I would a hundred percent rather pick up the phone and talk to Tom, or even better yet, especially in today's world with what, with all of us getting pushed into this new comfortability with video chat and video messaging, by the way, short term and long term. 

Adrian (00:27:57) - So I'm not just talking about a 30 minute clip, but like, you know, some of the asynchronous awesome stuff that the leading companies are doing, where Tom, can I leave you a 62nd video message? And then maybe your team can field it from there. Like, this is, this is some of the stuff that modern consumers and modern customers, they at least want options. And it's funny, we, we hear this all the time, too, Tom, where, um, you know, a company will say, well, we only wanna do everything through our SMS. Okay, cool. But like, you have a thousand customers in like only 20% of them have even told us that they like communicating in SMS. So what about the other 80% of your portfolio that prefers phones or chat or, or, or zoom. So great point here, which is like, thinking about, make sure you're keeping intra keeping in mind, like who your end users are, what their key preferences are and how you're gonna keep coming, bringing them back again and again, and get in the future, plus bringing promoters with them. Right? Yeah. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:28:43) - And then you take it one step further, Adrian, and, and you take these different modalities and what people also miss. And I'm sure you see that this in your customers all the time is the ones that go away from voice, which is 100% synchronous. Yep. Yes. I like to chat, but if it's not synchronous, I hate you. <laugh> right. It's so it's everybody sudden thinks digital is all asynchronous. Yeah. And, and so you have to know two levels, deep voice, you just know they pick it up, you have a handle time, you answer it on the other side, you would better know, do they expect an email back in four hours and hours, 24 hours? And like I say, chat's the worst one that people get themselves. Totally, 

Adrian (00:29:26) - Totally hundred percent agree with that. Um, awesome ideas here, Tom, Tom, let's jump into the, the fourth and the final seat, pillar feedback. And I know you're ready to rock and roll on this one, but, um, I love so like when I say feedback, I'd love for you and feel free to go deep and wide in this man. But I think when I, when we think about feedback in the show, I love asking our guests about tell us how you and the team at collab have really been able to unpack and think about the way that you're thinking about customer feedback. And then absolutely feel free to think about some of the ways that you guys have learned over the, over the years, how you can really leverage employee feedback to build and drive innovation and future product offerings and future product optimizations.

Tom Goodmanson (00:30:04) - Yeah, that's that is two great points, right? Is on the, on our customer side. It's, it's interesting how that's evolved over the years. Right? As, as a small company, uh, myself, the product, even the developers take the feedback all the time. I think about my, my first enterprise customer was a big shipper down, uh, down in the Southern United States. And, and we would, we would, they would call me directly and say, Hey, this such and such isn't working. I would literally find the person that wrote the code that was broken. We'd get on a plane and go there and listen for a day. We wouldn't just, we, this is very early on. We would take the call and, and fix that one piece. We go down and listen for a day and make five changes. Love it. Uh, and it was so cool. And so, but I, it just doesn't scale anymore. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:30:55) - Sure. Um, and so you can imagine that's evolved into our CRM. That's evolved into a hundred people sitting in my CS organization. That's evolved into a whole bunch of things, as you can imagine. And frankly, it's evolving again for me, right? As literally as we speak, uh, the post pandemic we've changed from, uh, this, this industry is, is slow to adopt really cutting edge technology, as you know, um, and we built, I built a cloud multitenant, uh, solution eight years ago, and about six years ago, we sunset our single tentative that goes on prem, but we still sold the multi-tenant on prem. So about 20% of our customers were really embracing the cloud and going 80% within one quarter after going, uh, entirely remote with this pandemic, 90% of our customers take the, the cloud model. Wow. Wow. We can only imagine what that does to our C our first putting it in service wise, then you have to support it. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:31:59) - Totally. It has just fundamentally, the last two years have been hair on fire growth, but also learning. Yeah. And we honestly right now are in the process of rethinking that because as a cloud company, you think about the, the customer success books that gain site have written sure. Other, you know, some of the stuff that Benoff wrote. Sure. There is a different way that people want to be taken care of a hundred percent. So we've had to shift our entire CS organization to a more forward looking, you know, it's like on 4,500 customers in an old prem business. Yeah. You might actively talk to 400 of 'em and the rest are, you are, are more on a, a pull model. Right. Okay. Uh, or, and, and, and so now I need to be on a push model on all 4,500 customers, if I wanna be successful hundred percent, a big change in this company. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:32:51) - And so we're really going through some transformational change right now. Um, and so what are the, so those are the kind of the tools and things we're thinking of. So in, in that hits on, okay, you've got a chin in the armor. We need to be closer to our customers. Again, like we always were, well, employees are then frustrated because, okay, what do we do? How do, so I have a change management issue here. Um, and 700 in the old days, it was a 45 person round table. Yeah. Right now it's 700 in five offices globally around 12 time zones. Yep. How do I do that? So we've actually implemented, uh, we're, we're using, uh, Workday as our, uh, our HR system. Yep. And we've, I don't know if you've seen pecan on that P K O N uh, and we've just literally just implemented. So we think we do a good job of having department meetings and we listen, but there's no holistic survey tool that drives out this survey tool is doing predictive analysis of around different groups. Awesome. It rolls up, gives us NPS scores across the organization all the way down to any manager that has more than five people, because that's the, where they consider an gonna be to be. 

Adrian (00:34:09) - Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Tom Goodmanson (00:34:10) - Yeah. It is so cool. I wake up every day and look at it right now. It's, that's awesome. Two weeks in and, and it's gives giving us the chance, but here's where the real, and I've, I've made it really clear to the man, my leaders, my managers, and HR, for sure. Who's driving. This is the second we appear to not be looking at it and listening to it. Yep. Doesn't mean you have to give them just because they make a comment that I want more coffee in the break room, which we have plenty of, by the way. <laugh>, uh, the, the, uh, uh, the second you don't at least acknowledge that they've made a comment. Why ask the question? Yep. That's been a mantra at collabo from day one is you don't ask any question. You're not willing to stand up and either say yes, great idea. We're moving. No, we can't move. And here's the five reasons why yep. And being very open around that, and that can, that gets perverted in a company as it grows very quickly. And so we're working really hard because we need to, we need all 700 of these people to drive us into the next phase of growth. 

Adrian (00:35:13) - I love it. Uh, Tom there's there, there's, there's a bunch that you just laid a bunch of golden nuggets that you just laid out there. Um, let me start with the first piece, which is just on the, um, on the actual customer side. So number one, having, um, visibility, having the ability to get to, to furnish some of that feedback, but more importantly, having the ability to act upon, sorry to categorize it, prioritize it, and then effectively act upon it is just so massive. And, and another short way that, you know, we think about this, I think a lot with CCC is like even guys today, folks listening, if you're not in a position where you have the ability to get that tool or to get that extra technology, or frankly, just to have the person or the knowledge, to be able to start thinking about some of the stuff at scale for your business, think about how you can at least minimally built out a voice of customer task force, where at least you Knight the right types of, uh, subject matter experts across the business to at least be able to provide that pulse or that drum beat that Tom's talking about. 

Adrian (00:36:10) - Cause on the customer side, even just having a regular daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly view of what the pulse or the drum beat is potentially suggesting, that's a fantastic start. I'm not seeing, you're gonna figure out how to build a world class, you know, feedback loop overnight, but understanding what's even being said and what the pulse and what the drum beats saying. That's an awesome start on your, on your employee side, same thing for voice of employees. So you sounds, you guys have some awesome technology. You've got process, you've got all these great ways that you're sort of capturing categorizing and even significant suggestions or calls to action around it. But like folks, if you, if you don't have, if you're not in that position today with your business and with your teams build a voice of employee taskforce, it's another very easy way that at least you can get a drum beat, uh, or, or a Paul's check on what people love, what people aren't, maybe aren't so happy about, but there's another thought, the last thought that I wanna stop it with, this is like the minute the company start to again, align those different things, Tom. 

Adrian (00:37:04) - Right. And they got the good and the great that comes from the VOC and the good and the great that comes from the voice of employer. The VOE typically that helps with prioritization. Typically that helps with showing your leadership team what two or three things you're gonna be able to focus on for the next quarter, that you're gonna knock outta the park and you're be able to make a big impact on it in a short period of time, or at the very least, it starts to plot out some of the granular, some of the specific, uh, action items that you're gonna have to think about and put on a roadmap. And I'm not saying you're gonna get it done in 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, but by getting it on the roadmap, at least it's on people's visibility that people know that it's, it's being thought about. 

Adrian (00:37:36) - It's being talked about, obviously you need time just to talk and think before you even get some of that good stuff going, but I love those ideas, man. And then again, I think post COVID and you, and I clearly both completely agree upon this. The best companies on planet earth are going to invest in this stuff. And they're not just gonna give it, uh, uh, um, they're not just gonna give it like, like, like talking value stuff. They're gonna act on this stuff and they're going to invest in it. And they're gonna have incredible people who are really helping their business, their organization, and their customer base, like, like charge steam ahead into the future. So, awesome ideas here, Tom. Um, Tom, before we wrap up, I wanna take, give you a couple minutes, any big things that are going on at collab that you want the CX nation to know about things that are going on, your team, things that you, that you're excited about, uh, you know, uh, bringing to market in the up events, anything that you wanna call out that you want to seek nation to know about for some of the things you guys are doing at Calabrio a? 

Tom Goodmanson (00:38:26) - Yeah. I, I appreciate that. There's a couple of things and there are actually feedback loops for us. So, uh, great, great commercial for us. <laugh> uh, one is we, we do a big voice of, uh, the customer service industry. We do a contact center research report every year. Awesome. And that's, that's launching a September, uh, a little later this month and we're really excited about this. I, I threw out a couple of nuggets, uh, uh, if you didn't notice from that report that I've been reading, uh, and, and really it's exciting and we'll be, uh, launching that and that will be available on our website. Um, and then, then our biggest feedback loop and it's the first time back in person in three years. Nice. Uh, so we call, uh, Claro customer connector, C3, uh, that's September 26th through the 29th in Orlando. Oh, sweet. And, and we also have a virtual version of that. And again, you can go to our, uh, claro.com and, and see all of it. Uh, but it is, we will have, uh, over 2000 people, um, both virtually and in attendance. And we, we just hammer, uh, feedback loop in that, love it. We have experts, we have voice of experts. We have, uh, executive sessions. We do it all because we PA we wanna pack a ton into those couple of days. 

Adrian (00:39:38) - I love do that's. Number one, that sounds like a blast. And the CX nerd in me is obviously very jealous, but that sounds fantastic. And then Tom, here's the other thing for our listeners, we'll make sure that we put some of those show notes out there. So people know where they can find out more about C3 and then, and most importantly, where they can find out more about some of the awesome work that you and the team over at Calabrio ator are doing Tom. But, uh, this has been an absolute pleasure, man. I'm thrilled, thrilled to have you on the show, thrilled to have you sharing your story and, and learning about collab. Uh, Tom, it's been our absolute pleasure having you on the CGE Chronicles podcast. 

Tom Goodmanson (00:40:04) - Thanks a lot, Adrian.