CXChronicles Podcast 183 with Aye Moah, CEO at Boomerang

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #183  we welcomed Aye Moah, CEO @ Boomerang based in Mountain View, CA.

Boomerang is the leader in thoughtful email productivity software that empowers people to focus on what matters on the world’s top email platforms. Since 2010, Boomerang has helped its customers be more productive by analyzing the context of work and adding value on top of it.

Today, Boomerang enables millions of Gmail and Outlook users around the globe to schedule & prioritize their inbox and be more productive.
 
In this episode, Aye and Adrian chat through how she has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout her career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for her across her own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #183 Highlight Reel:**

1. Building Boomerang and helping millions of users with productivity hacking 
2. How setting clear expectations early can drive CX & EX success as you scale
3. Leveraging product & services "employee wish-lists" to drive innovation
4.  Curating content focused on FAQs & common questions from your users
5.  Writing, documenting & teaching all of your customer findings & learnings 
 
Huge thanks to Aye for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring her work and efforts in pushing the communication and process optimization space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Aye Moah

Click here to learn more about Boomerang

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

CXCP #183 with Aye Moah, CEO at Boomerang

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited for today's show, guys. We have a, an awesome guest that's gonna be joining us today, Amo C at Boomerang. Welcome to the C Chronicles podcast. 

Aye Moah (00:00:23) - Thank you for having me, Adrian. 

Adrian (00:00:25) - A hundred percent. I'm excited. Mo, I, I wanna, number one, I I, I told Moga the first time that I met her, I remember vividly the first time that we used Boomerang at one of our startups that we were building in New York City. And um, it was so funny. There was, there was all of these benefits that that, that we were able to get because at that time a lot of the CRMs and a lot of the, um, some of the different customer information tools we were using, they didn't have some of the stuff that you guys were building most. So, like I was really pumped to get you on the show cuz it was, uh, a product that I'd used for many, many years and I already knew personally some of the benefits that you can get from it. So I'm pumped to have you here today. I'm pumped to hear your story and I'm pumped for you to, to share sort of your, your own customer focus, business leader journey with the CX Nation. Um, why don't you kick us off, uh, give us a couple minute elevator pitch for how'd you get into this whole space. How did you figure out why this space? Why boomerang? How did you start to get the, get the bonfire built as you were building the company? 

Aye Moah (00:01:18) - I think if you go way far back, I was always a kind of a productivity geek, even as a kid. Um, I'm the type of kid who time herself getting ready for school <laugh> and see how to improve the efficiency, the routine, right? So for me it's always about how am I getting more out of my day and it's not just about working hard, right? So that I need to do what I need to focus on. Um, so when we started Boomerang, it was kind of a roundabout way in a, if you think about it, what we wanted to build was something else. And we were three technical co-founders who didn't have the founder market fit for that product that we weren't going to bill. And, but we kept running into the problem of, you know, forgetting to reply to an email or forgetting to follow up on an email that you need to follow up on or you get an email that you don't need right now, but you need in a week in two weeks, right? 

Aye Moah (00:02:24) - So a lot of that was like just our own pain. We were scratching our own edge that hey, email is a, you know, 30 year old technology when we started and there was not much innovation happening in that space, but a lot of our business communication just doesn't matter what your role is, it was all centrally flowing through email. So we decided to build it just so that we will have something that will solve our problems. And that kind of took off, right? We realized that hey, when we show it to our friends, we build this litter, you know, script to make these things easier for ourself. They're like, Oh, I want this, can you give it to me? <laugh> from that to spread it out to, you know, non friends. And then we got covered by a few kind of the life hacker crowd to articles. 

Aye Moah (00:03:17) - Nice. And a movement. So yeah, and you're right, like when you guys were probably first saw Boomerang, you know, snooze wasn't a thing, right? The concept of snooze was a new like concept that nobody was like, why would I wanna snooze? And then when we show them why and how it became, of course this is a no brainer. Everybody needs <laugh>, right? Right. And that kind of moved forward from, you know, the initial like just remembering messages and emails at the time that you needed to. We kept innovating in the sense that like, but how of it from customers requests and customer like demands. Hey, we need a way to track if an email is open or read or things like that to, hey, we can actually tell you how you write your email has an impact on whether you get a response or not and how can we use this data and analysis that we have to teach you how to write better responsible emails. 

Aye Moah (00:04:21) - So then that became a product. So we have this little bit of half of it is driven by customer, half of it is driven by our own need. Half of it is driven by kind of the data technology and you know, new computing powers kind of collide together to solve the problems we always have but now can solve. So our latest thing is to, for you to be able to schedule meetings without leaving your inbox on the both sides. Yeah. You never have to click a link, go find the slots that are available, overlay with your calendar, type in all the things we are making it so that you click two clicks, it shows you all the times you're available, making sure you're never double book and pulling from all the calendars you want to consult.

Aye Moah (00:05:07) - And from the recipient side, you saw yourself when we booked this, right? When we first book our first conversation, you can just pick a time, click it and it's book. 

Adrian (00:05:16) - Yep. Yep. Number one. So all incredible things. I think number one, I just think that you, it's interesting the space that you guys tackled and you said this yourself. You said you were a bit of a, a productivity nerd yourself. A couple things. Number one, I know for a fact that people that are listening to this show, oftentimes the guys and gals that are leading up CX and CS teams, they are asked to be the organizational productivity nerds, right? Where it's so common for them to be leading the charge or leading like the, the hub, if you will, of so many things. Go through customer experience, customer success, customer support teams. And I love, I love that you call that part out because like this is a crowd, this is an audience where we're constantly looking for productivity hacks, new potential tools, new potential processes or ways that we can get a whole team of customer facing individuals to be able to make their days easier, make their jobs easier, be able to increase their pro productivity, hopefully all in the name of trying to give them more time to be able to work with the customers, work with the product, the things that can really make a big, you know, a big bang at so many companies. 

Adrian (00:06:15) - But, um, such a cool space for you guys to, to give. 

Aye Moah (00:06:18) - Yeah. I think the main spot is that, you know, a lot of customer success managers and CX leaders, their job is the meetings and the emails, right? Like that is mostly what they are having to drive, especially for, um, you know, frontline level CS people. The number of emails and meetings they have to handle per week is astronomical. Astronomical, definitely. They determine how smoothly these interactions go determine their success, right? Because making sure your customer know the expectation of when you're going to respond and actually responding on the time that you promise. Yeah. Right. The content that you send them, is it targeted? Is it responsible? Is it actually on point? Do you get the right tone? Do you get the right politeness? All of that impacts how the customer experience your product and the interaction with your company. 

Adrian (00:07:15) - Hundred percent. And it's funny cuz once, once a company gets, um, to this stage in their business evolution or their business life cycle where they start to see scale, they start to see volume, they're starting to do, uh, the repetition of all these things that you're kind of laying out for esmo. That's 

Aye Moah (00:07:30) - Where one, you need to stop building a playbook to hire new people, expanding out to new area. 

Adrian (00:07:36) - Yep, hundred percent. And I was gonna say, you know, you jump right to playbook and you're spot on with that. That playbook is where these companies, as they scale, they get uniformity, they get consistency, they get some of that brand voice or that, that brand consistency that you, you read about and that you hear about. That's where it comes from guys. It's, it's, it's an awesome way of kind of laying it. Um, well, before we dive into the pillars, I, I do wanna ask you, where did you guys start this? So I know I, I know I know a little bit about your background, but I'd love for you to, where did you guys start? Like testing or where'd you, you start vetting what, what, what, like boomerang, uh, you know, 1.0 would've been all those years ago. How did you start getting this into people's, you mentioned sending it to friends, sending it to family, but how'd you get this thing out there in the world to start getting some of that initial user feedback to figure out how to bring it to market and to figure out how to kind of get that first, that first boomerang product out of the market? 

Aye Moah (00:08:25) - We started out in Boston because, you know, Alex and I were both out of mit. We worked for a few years, you know, paying off student loans and we couldn't get into starting a company yet <laugh>. But as we were starting out, we went out to a lot of Boston startup events, right? Cool. Okay. And they went us, like probably prolific as it is now, 12 years later. But there were some, So we want, I remember taking a bus, going out to Walham for a mess in the night. I don't know if you remembered those, um, is, you know, small, maybe 5,000 people. Uh, different startup showcase there products we go when we get a slot or we still go even when we don't, we didn't get a slot to pitch. We still with our laptop and you know, basically like, Hey, you wanna see something cool? Yeah. 

Adrian (00:09:14) - Right, right. 

Aye Moah (00:09:15) - The people who were there are there because they wanted to see new stuff from, you know, tiny startup. So yeah, that's, that's how we got started is just being scrappy and kind of hustling 

Adrian (00:09:28) - <laugh>. I love it. Hey, like, and I'm glad you called it out and I'm glad that you're owning it cuz that is the bottom line, right? You wanna get anything to market, you wanna get anything to scale, you wanna get anything into not just a couple customers hands, but many customers hands and, and even to be able to allow you to start building a team, it takes that hustle and it takes constant iteration and listening and learning and then rebuilding to get these things into the place and to the space where they're ready. They're ready for a larger user base, they're ready for scale, they're ready to really start to, um, make some incredible, impactful, uh, changes in different businesses and different users' lives. So I love that. Um, well, let's dive into the first CX pillar of, of team. Um, I'd love for you to share with the CS nation. Tell us a little bit about how you and your team actually started to build at the team as the business started to work, as you started to get new users and customers.

Adrian (00:10:13) - How'd you guys think about sort of building out that first pillar of team? 

Aye Moah (00:10:17) - So even before right, we got real paying customers. Boomerang started as a free, tr free tool. And even back then, we have committed to responding every single customer email. So we had three co-founders with no employee. We still answer every single email, right? Then we started to raise a little bit of seat round. We hire somebody, the first person is the customer support, and we grew from there. And the whole team, our whole team is trained on customer support as part of their, um, onboarding. Okay. Because regardless of your role, we expect you to be able to help out our customer and handle support tickets. 

Adrian (00:10:58) - Nice. I love that. 

Aye Moah (00:10:59) - Uh, so that, that, you know, customer orientation and listening to customer and respecting their needs and respecting what their feedback is, is like ingrained into the entire team. Yep. Um, for Christmas, Thanksgiving, major holidays, we actually take turns. So everybody sign up for a shift. So the customer support team gets a break. Um, and now that we have got a grown bigger, we, you know, have a CS team that are dedicated customer support team, but we also have a customer success team that is separate from customer support because before customer support agents were handling both and that was okay. Stressing them out, <laugh>. And we were also getting a lot more inbound enterprise than team inquiries that we weren't handling it perfectly. Yeah. We wanted to expand. So now we have customer success and customer, um, support as a two different team, but they both report to the same manager. 

Adrian (00:12:03) - I love it. I, it's funny, I'm glad you brought this up because it's, there's this constant debate of whether or not you can have like an all encompassing customer success position. And some companies do, and some companies can do it really well. Maybe there's specific products or specific services or specific industry types that you can get away with that, and that's awesome. But there's a lot of companies that don't necessarily feel that and they do need to figure out that pivotal moment in their business's journey where you kind of need to break the two things apart. There's, Yeah, I think one part is blocking, 

Aye Moah (00:12:32) - There's a point in the volume of inquiries and things that nature of, you know, requires that are repeating for customer success, that we realize specializing is necessary for both business function and also like kind of the wellbeing of the support and success people because they were starting to feel like they were being split too far apart and they can do their job. 

Adrian (00:12:54) - Yeah. I believe that. I, I, I believe that. And then the other thing too is depending on what type of business or space you're in, there's, there is wildly different time, time, time spent activities for those two different functions, right? Like support is, again, you're, you're trying to come up with black and white answers to either remediate or solve or, or, or respond to the, the inquiry success side is a bit more, it could be more, more strategic. It could be almost more, more like selling involved, right? Or relationship involved, or like trying to really understand someone before you even get to the, get to the next step around the product or the service needs. So I, I love that you guys found that out early. Um, Mo what question, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are thinking about how they can kind of get better at building their teams, growing their teams, running their, their onboarding. 

Adrian (00:13:38) - What will be like one, one or two major lessons over the years that you've kind of really sort of grabbed as like a, as a main focus point from as you built your team and as you built the team at boom ring, What's like one or two things that you're constantly thinking about when it comes to team? Is, is there, is there an activity? Is there an ongoing training? Is there, um, uh, what is like a major activity that you're always thinking about as far as how you can make sure that your team is feeling super engaged, motivated, and, and, and aware of what the assignments are that are coming down at them on a day to day basis? 

Aye Moah (00:14:09) - So everybody gets involved in our quarterly planning and we have a very clear quarterly planning meeting that goes through less quarter understanding of what we accomplish. So, you know, it's very good for every team to know what everybody else is working on, what they're deliverable are and how they did. Um, but they also know what they're going to deliver for the next quarter and is with their input, right? So there's very, I think for me, everything is like back to clear expectation and knowing what timing things are coming down the line for the team. Yep. Um, and we have a very, I wouldn't say there we are doing a, you know, the most top 1% excellent job of it, but we have a very, um, 

Aye Moah (00:14:58) - Clear expectation of the product team to respect support team for both input. Okay. In terms of what they are seeing, what they are listening. So we have, uh, support office hours every week with product and engineering and support get together to talk through what are the things that are coming up and any kind of tricky stuff that they are looking at. Um, so that kind of, you know, space for support to always advocate for the customers and the problems that they're seeing. But at the same time, we also have this every time that we are planning for the product roadmap and what is coming up, we involve support early on, Hey, this is what we are thinking, What do you guys think? Also, one is Bill, we have a very detailed walkthrough for support team to here's what's coming out. This is what is going to, you know, the experience is going to be for the customer. 

Aye Moah (00:15:59) - Here are the potential questions that customers might come up because of what, how we design it or what this feature is doing. That level of empathy for the customer that carries from, you know, planning the product, designing the product, building the product, and training the support team. We have that top of mind. What are the customer gonna be thinking and asking and, you know, interacting with you when we release it. Sometimes what you don't want is, hey, a new product is out. Yep. And the customers are interacting with it and asking these questions and support is completely taken back, having no idea why this is here or how this is supposed to work. And we don't want that to happen. Yes. So, and that, you know, consideration of what are the questions that might come up pro proactively thinking through? And we do it collaborative. So the product managers start, you know, thinking through and writing it up as the support is interacting with the new product. Right. They are also helping and writing and thinking through, Hey, what are the, and we actually have it part of a product checklist. Nice to have, anticipate what questions customers are gonna have. Yep. And how often would it be like sometimes we can kind of estimate everybody's gonna ask about this, let's prepare the answer Yep. And make the screenshots and things that you need. Yeah. Even before we go out to the customer. 

Adrian (00:17:28) - I, I love that. I think it immediately makes me just think about the general notion of how for any business and any team and in, in any product, in any service line, proper planning can always prevent poor performance. No doubt about it. Right. If you take the time to sharpen the ax and if you take the time to think about, um, proactively what's gonna come, Right. Build your break while before the waves start to even come. Right. That type of thought. Yeah. But there's another piece, um, mo that I love that you called out here, which is you guys baked some of that CX and that ex thinking into the dna. And the minute that a business does that, it becomes number one becomes normal. Right? Just becomes a normal process. And, and people expect that to be part of it. But then the second part is you're, you're certainly setting yourself up for, um, an improved, uh, level of success, Right? 

Adrian (00:18:13) - Because the reality is like, I can't tell you how many times we've worked with businesses where they'll literally do full blown product releases and nobody on the success of their support side has even seen the thing. And it's like, yes. How do you expect these incredible guys in gal to be able to have awesome conversations with your customers or with your partners if they didn't already have time to think about it, react to it, Right? Ask questions, maybe even tee up some of the, the downstream operative pains or product pains that are gonna hit you anyway. Right? And a lot of times the folks that are looking at this stuff on the front lines, they already know what those waves are gonna look like before they ever hit the break wall. So, like I love that you guys kind of took that early on in the game. I'm sure it probably was a huge part of why you guys have, have been so successful, but, um, I just, I I love hearing that. Um, yeah. 

Aye Moah (00:18:59) - I think sometimes we are part of being, you know, small and scrappy and being focused on very optimal operation, kind of help us out with like a lot of better experience and better product for everybody. 

Adrian (00:19:13) - Totally. 

Aye Moah (00:19:14) - And we sometimes, like we know we cannot, they're going to come up with this request, so this questions, but we don't know how much, Right? Like we don't have the resources to build everything a customer might need under the sign. Yeah, 

Adrian (00:19:28) - Yeah, 

Aye Moah (00:19:28) - Yeah. So we will say, Okay, let's build up this, you know, form or for the support team to fill out every time you see this request. Right. But even before the product is released, we know that they may be asking for why, and we put a spot for the customer support to know, one user ask for why this is what you need to do. 

Adrian (00:19:45) - Yep. Yep. And again, it's just so helpful too, cuz this job, any type of customer facing role is hard enough as it is. Right. Anything that you can do to give us a leg up or anything that you can do to give us a bit of an advantage, please guys do it. And again, for our listeners.

Adrian (00:20:00) - This is easy. You can think about this with your business and go back tomorrow and start thinking about what are some of the downstream pains that we're seeing again and again and again. And work with your, work with the team of people that are working with customers to think about what some potential solutions could look like. It's super, super simple way of getting started. Um, well I'd love to dive into the second CX pillar of tools. Um, so outside of the Boomerang tool and outside of the awesome tools that you guys are building, I'd love to just hear you talk for a couple minutes about what were some of the tools that your team needed as you were building the business and, and what were some of the tools that really, as you look back on the evolution of the business, became really kind of paramount for you guys to be able to build not only the customer portfolio that you have today, but to keep all this stuff in track and to keep all this stuff in line. You mentioned process a couple times, but what were some of the tools of the technology that you guys really invested in to build your business? 

Aye Moah (00:20:50) - At first, <laugh>, we ran the entire support from GMO inboxes because when we were follow up, you know, we know how to run that and it, it's great to asserting extent maybe, maybe two to two agents or so, right. But then we couldn't scale that. There were things that are getting missed. So we moved to a support tool. I forgot what it was. I think if, I think I block it out cuz it was not so I don't want to remember it. We are now at Help Scout. We are pretty happy with it. Awesome. He has been and the best part is we can kind of tinker and add some of our own, uh, scripts and things that we wanna build. Um, also we have a support manager that the person who leads our support team once to be more technical. So we give him a lot of rope on and support to learn about scripting tools and you know, we're, we're productivity geeks so of course we help him kind of customize Hub Scout just the way they want it. 

Aye Moah (00:21:55) - So all the links that they need is, you know, so there's a lot of like modifying what we have Okay. With out of the box and then getting into their APIs and integrating it with our own support portal. Yep. We build quite a extensive in-house kind of account customer account management portal. Okay. That is separate from like the subscription and billing portal that's just kind of, you know, part of the payment system. Um, and there's a lot of like custom hacking to put these tools together to make sure, um, what we have in HubSpot we use Hub support for customer success and then Hub Scout for customer support. But there are little glue things that none of them just does out of the box. Yeah. And we try to make sure that either a developer resource or our support manager has time to customize it. 

Aye Moah (00:22:59) - And then we also have kind of a support to wishlist <laugh>. Okay. Um, and it's mostly for like if we have new engineer onboarding or if we have interns or an engineer just needs like a small tangible test for him to go work on or you know, for them to take on something. Yeah. That, that like support to wishlist has been helpful cuz they're like, Oh, I'm have, you know, three hours to write a small script for somebody. Oh, this is what you need. I can write it for you. So that Yeah. Yep. That type of process is really good. And then we are a very, very checklist driven company. Okay. Because, um, I don't know if you read atu, Onei another Boston, very, very sharp doctor at hbs, uh, no. Harvard Medical School ATMs. Yeah. And he wrote a book called Checklist Manifesto. Yeah. 

Aye Moah (00:23:53) - Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is, you know, we are a business that's been running for a while and we have to scale to a certain size without all the resources. So for us, like anything that is gonna be repeatable, we start to think of it as is it a, a thing that we'll do more than once? And even if we do it one off things, we try to keep our learnings and making sure that next time when we do this we're gonna do, you know, we are gonna remember X, Y, and Z. So that habit of learning from our past selves Yep. Has like gotten us so far with the resource limited resources that we have. It also help us when we move from in person to remote overnight when Covid started, because we had this habit of documenting and like making everything a process and a procedural playbook. Yeah. Right. As a dna. So like moving from in person to.

Aye Moah (00:24:53) - Completely remote was pretty smooth. Yes, we know how to communicate, we know how to learn from ourself. We know how to like, Hey, we did this, you know, three years ago, how did we do this? What are the learnings? Now that we are doing it again, how are we gonna do it again? 

Adrian (00:25:10) - Yep. Okay. So number one, thank you for sharing all that. That's tons of awesome ideas there. Um, real quick, real quick, um, shadow love that you guys are leveraging. HubSpot and Help Scout, those are two of our strategic partners here at cxc who are intimately familiar with them. Awesome tools. Definitely two of the best in class solutions for any customer focused business leader to think about once you, especially once you get to the point where your business is starting to scale, you've got lots of customers, you have lots of customer interactions, there is a, a tremendous amount of customer information that theoretically could start to be, um, stratified and stored so that you can start to make better decisions. So, number one, I love that you're calling that part out. The second thing, the checklist, I love that you got into this because, um, I number, I just, I think this is another thing that I enable. 

Adrian (00:25:54) - I think a lot of CX and CS professionals, I think we're really good at Checklisting too, because like right when you, so many people, they look at high performing individuals and they go, Man, you know, Mo how she is so great? How does she get so much done? Or Adrian, how does he always get, how does he always remember we're building checklists, Like we're, we're documenting all the things that need to happen in some way, or all of us have different ways and styles and tools, but like checklists and your ability to create all of the different things that theoretically need to get assigned, um, delegated, um, uh, reviewed and then, and then ensuring that they're actually being completed. And then a lot of times iterating on too. Cuz a lot of times you start building your first set of checklists, oftentimes that's simply fueling what innovation's gonna look like or that's fueling what tomorrow's products or tomorrow's feature sets are gonna look like. 

Adrian (00:26:41) - So I love that you call that out. But there's one, one last thing that makes me think about for our listeners is like, whether you're thinking about tasks, checklists, or goals, it's, there's something really interesting about writing a thing that needs to get done down, looking at it as a human and then somehow people are like, Oh, they're just really good at goal setting. That's why they get everything done. There's something about when you write that down, you look at it, you're thinking about it, it's, it's also kind of like stored in a secure place where you know that at a time you will get to that task or you will get to that goal. But guys, this is one of the biggest ways that successful people get things done. It's as simple as that. It's not actually like rocket science. It's about documenting, uh, prioritizing creating times or creating the available time sets for when you're able to act upon those goals or those tasks. 

Adrian (00:27:27) - So I love that you call that out cause I think that's such a golden nugget that our listeners can really kind of take back to their team or take back to their business tomorrow. And this fits on the customer side really well, right? Cause whether you're a customer support rep, a customer success rep, whether you're head of CX or CS at a big company with thousands of, of of customers, that ability to, to, to, to, to, to manage all of the tasks or all the different things that have to happen is gonna be one of the biggest ways that you're gonna be able to set yourself apart 

Aye Moah (00:27:51) - For 

Adrian (00:27:52) - Success. 

Aye Moah (00:27:53) - One of the features that we like really prioritized early on was when you boomerang a message, you come back, we wanted to make sure that you can write a note because there is always something you may forget, right? You might be like, Hey, a customer said let's check back in with us in Q2 of 2023. 

Adrian (00:28:12) - Yep. 

Aye Moah (00:28:12) - You wanted to come back in six months, but how are you gonna remember exactly what you talk about? Yep. And all the details. So when we build things like that, we're like okay. Notes so that you can actually <laugh> Yeah. Pick up the conversation where you left off. Yeah. Instead of, you know, you like as a customer, you know this, right? Like when you both deal with a support success and they make you retell your story. Oh 

Adrian (00:28:35) - My god. Crazy though. It 

Aye Moah (00:28:37) - Drives the craziest thing. Yes it is. So we make sure that, you know, keeping notes is part of our culture and is a sign showing respect for customers both, you know, time and like basically effort, right? They already put in the effort to tell you what they need and then you're just going to throw it away and ask them again. 

Adrian (00:28:57) - I totally, I totally agree with that. And then the last piece too is from a team perspective, it's how you can build tribal knowledge too, right? It's how you can share tribal knowledge with your team. It's how you can easily kind of pass along the note or pass along learnings or pass along the findings. And to your point, productivity. Cuz now Mo and Ader don't have to have a five minute debriefs. Mo can just read Adrian's notes that he just had with the customer and then she can arrive at her own conclusions around what next steps might look like or what potential solutions might look like or opportunities lie outside of that. So, um, I love that. Last thing is this, I love that you call that the covid piece. You know, mo full candor even with what me and my team at CX year building Covid, we were already really doing an awesome job of kind of helping our customers with customer journey mapping and living playbook curation and essentially, um, helping them with like not just their learning management, uh, content, but with their customer side.

Adrian (00:29:49) - So the FAQs and the knowledge base items that are required for customers to be able, modern customers to be able to go self-serve, right? To take a look at all the different assets that you have and maybe just arrive at their own answer before they ever even have to think about reaching out to your support side. And I love that you call this out because you're right. I think even with the experience that we've had over the last two plus years now is a lot of companies did need help with this. They needed help with thinking about how to do remote documentation. They needed help with thinking about how to do remote, um, team coaching and performance management. Cuz some companies were really built mm-hmm. <affirmative> extremely well to like kind of walk the floor. You'd show up at the office downtown. Yeah. You'd have your pods. I 

Aye Moah (00:30:23) - Like to change my own management style and you know, the whole team kind of the leading before you were right. We, you know, we eat lunch as a team together every single day. So, you know, ask us to like the exact teams what we are thinking, what we are planning is always accessible Yes. To the team. Right now we don't see each other. So we have to make like real space for the team to get kind of visibility into what's going on as a business, what's going on as for each other department, right. Cross functional meetings and we have this, uh, habit of doing our daily standup and that's the only, uh, zoom call that we basically make a mandatory, everybody has to show up and the video has to be on because Nice. You have to remember that these are people instead of just, you know, characters on a screen and voice on <laugh>, literally voice on a black boss. Right? 

Adrian (00:31:21) - I a hundred percent. Yeah. 

Aye Moah (00:31:22) - So everything else, like other meetings, other Zoom meetings, we don't require videos to be on. It depends on person preference, but daily standup, everybody has to show up and everybody has to have their video on. 

Adrian (00:31:35) - I like it. I think it's smart and I think on top of it, it does give some of that connectivity that you still have to push and that you still have to help flourish within your business. In a remote work as great as it is, you still need to figure out how to help that. Um, well I'd love to dive into the third CX pillar process. And you've kind of hit on this a little bit, but I'd love to have you spend a minute or two talk about how you and the team really kind of thought about, um, you mentioned playbooks, you mentioned some of the standard operating procedures. I just brought up the idea of like FAQs. I'd love to kind of spend a minute or two talking about how did you guys as boomerang evolved, as you brought more customers onboard, as you started to expand your product offers too. Cause that was the other thing. Every time you a new product offering, you have this whole new wealth of knowledge that needs to be somewhere. Someone needs to know where to find the answers, whether it's internally with your, your employees or externally with your customers. What, what were some of the lessons or what some of the things that you did with Boomerang, uh, along your journey to help sort of manage, um, um, process and to, to kind of keep the train on the tracks as you guys were growing forward into the future? 

Aye Moah (00:32:35) - I think we have this fundamentally very like bottom line level. We actually has this document called boomerang's guiding principles. And that guiding principle talked through our core values, which we developed pretty early on that we all agree on. And then the guiding principles are actually our way of working. So things like better is good, right? Is it a value? I don't know, but it's the way we work. So that kind of helped everybody align around how we work together. And then I actually got into how we want to work for, uh, weekly meetings, um, how to set up a Zoom one-on-one. How do you set up a one-on-one? Those type of like, details on what's slack good for, what is actually a Wiki page versus one you should just make a meeting, um, the expectation of a meeting, how you're supposed to run it, the fact that you must send a agenda and kind of like making sure the details of, you know, how we operate. 

Aye Moah (00:33:52) - And it's not just for success team, it's not just for support team, it's for the whole team. And new hires get walk through along with their job offers because we want to make sure that people who are joining us are totally aligned on our core values, our mission, and how we work. Cause I think how we work, and the way we put it in the, you know, in the, in the ground, like this is how we work as a flag is because we don't wanna make value judgment. There are other people with different ways of working, different ways of communicating, different ways of documenting, and that's fine. That's their choice, but this is our choice. This is how we want to do it. And do you, are you gonna be on board with that? Right? So I think that helps a lot. So that kind of fundamentally shape who we hire, who joins to the team. And our way of working is always, hey, a new project. And I I have this another phrase, what's the point of this, right? And that's a common question, is a question for anybody to ask is why are we doing this? What's the point of this? So creating that team nomenclature really helps. And that kind of propagate like marketing is implementing their own way of how to document new knowledge for everybody. Um, product has their own way, but it all stands from the, the basic guiding principles of how we work. 

Adrian (00:35:22) - I I think that's so smart and I think it's crazy that there isn't more companies that have adopted some, some version of exactly what you just laid out because so number one, like even just this, this notion of starting and starting with wise is that's super smart. Why, why do we need this? Or the, uh, five wise, right? Going five layers deep and typically when somebody asks even a super smart person why five times in five different ways, typically you arrive at like whether or not the thing is even critical in the first place or priority 

Aye Moah (00:35:50) - Or 

Adrian (00:35:51) - Not. Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Or if you just figured out, nope, now we understand that let's move forward into life and move forward into the universe. Now that we understand that. Um, the other big thing that I think that you just nailed is like customer focused business leaders, CX and CS executives are constantly thinking about and talking about this, this exhausted phrase of like omnichannel focus, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative> omnichannel also is, is incredibly important for employees too, right? Because technically your employees have all of these different preferred mediums and modalities that work the best for them to understand something or for work the best for them to learn something or work the best for them to be able to figure out how they can collaborate or how they can kind of connect with the other members of different subject matter expertise areas in your business. And so that's so smart. 

Adrian (00:36:35) - And I think like one of the reasons why, I mean, I'm a huge, uh, fan of playbooks in general is it's one of the easiest ways that theoretically whether you have a, whether you have a 10 person team, a hundred person team, or a 10,000 person team, some of these playbooks allow for the documentation of that knowledge across different silos or different teams or different departments. So that if there are, let's say, even if it's smaller clip guys, maybe it's a, maybe it's only, you know, 10% of the organization thinks that they need to know all of this stuff. They need to have a holistic view of it, right? CX people are probably some of those people. Um, DevOps in engineering are definitely those people. They wanna understand the whys before they're gonna go build something that they're probably some of the, the biggest people in every business where they wanna understand what people even want before they even think about coding something. Um, sales may be different. Sales is is a little bit different cause sales bit different. Yeah, they should, although they want to, they, they wanna know just enough to be able to, you know, make sure that they understand how to bring the right types of customers in, do qualifying and make sure that they're setting up successful deals that are gonna close, but, 

Aye Moah (00:37:31) - And answering the customers questions, right? If the customer is asking questions about, Hey, we want this, or why can't you do this? They will having a good understanding and knowing where to find the knowledge that they need. Yep. It just enable them to be much more effective salesperson and 

Adrian (00:37:47) - Hundred consultative selling, having answers and helping, 

Aye Moah (00:37:49) - Like I didn't focus on the like knowledge base and stuff. Like yes, we have knowledge base, we have things for customers to go find the things, right? We have videos for people to go learn how to use those, but those things exist as the manifestation of our habit of teaching and writing and documenting as a team. 

Adrian (00:38:06) - Yep. Yep. I love it. I love it. Mo these are, these are awesome ideas. Um, let's dive into the, the fourth and the final pillar. So I'm, when you look at the Boomerang website, there's, there's, there's a couple things that jump out at me that I, I wanna call it. So number one, 2 million plus active customers and then 500 million messages delivered and counting. So growing every single day. I'm saying that before diving into the fourth and final CX pillar of feedback, because that's a huge number. You guys must have been able to get so much incredible feedback from that type of scale of activity. Spend a few minutes talking about what are some of the ways that you guys have, um, leveraged your customer feedback and it leveraged your employee feedback as you've grown the business and as you've scaled into the future. 

Aye Moah (00:38:49) - We have always been getting feedback, not just post launch and when people are getting their hands on the product. We always have involve our customer in thinking through the problems that they want us to solve and also the way that, you know, we solve them. And typically, what I believe as a, so my, I my original training is in UAS design, right? So I know that is you wanna listen to the customers, well, what problems they want to solve, but not necessarily the solution that they want, they say they want because that's not Exactly, Yeah. 

Adrian (00:39:26) - It doesn't always work that way. 

Aye Moah (00:39:27) - Yeah, exactly. So we, we have, um, series of, you know, product market fit surveys, user surveys, usability testing, all of that is bake into our product team even before we build a product. And then when we go out again, right? I mentioned we answer every single customer email, whether you are a free customer, free trial, pro, premium enterprise, every single person who emails in with feedback.

Aye Moah (00:40:00) - Question issues, we respond to you. So every piece of touchpoint and feedback that we are getting is going somewhere, being logged, being tagged. And there are points where we would be like, product team is thinking about this segment of the product. Or maybe just like, oh, maybe like just activation and how we just wanna know about activation, or maybe we only wanna know about a bookable schedule and that's the only thing we are looking about. So then product and support typically work together to get the data out of the support portal and that inform everything else. Okay. And then we have this very, almost a fanatical habit of closing the loop. So if you ask for something, we are like, Hey, we can build this right now, or it's not a priority right now, Two years later, we build it, we go back to the customer and say, Hey, you ask for this, we build this. 

Adrian (00:40:57) - That's awesome. 

Aye Moah (00:40:58) - And a lot of it is like, you know, we don't build all kinds of automation and crazy instrumentation until we need them. And some of it is very manual and we do a lot of things that don't scale in the name of having a better experience for our customer. 

Adrian (00:41:17) - I I love that. I love this idea. So two things just guys, I don't care what your business is or what you're really aware is closing the loop is so easy. And I know that look, scale makes it harder, but not necessarily because like when you think about some of the tools that we're talking about in the front of this episode, there is literally automated response mechanisms baked inside of every major piece of SAS technology out there. So like you can at least do the, Hey, hey, hey Mo, we heard you, we heard that you reached out. We're working on it. We'll get back in touch with you. That's technically temporarily closing it. But then the other thing that you made me think about is like when you have those perfect examples where someone says, Hey Mo, I want you to build X, Y, Z. 

Adrian (00:41:52) - And even if it takes 12 or 18 or 24 months for the team to actually do that entire life cycle, taking the, taking the potential opportunity and then building it right, and then bringing it into the product, that is the stuff that customers, uh, not only do they love it, that's what makes promoters from your customers. That's the type of thing where they go from thinking that your company's fine or it's good, or Yeah, I like it. It's fine to like, No, they're awesome. I actually gave them an idea and it took two years, but they literally got back to me and told me when they got it done and when it would fix and how it's impacting all these other customers. That's like such an, that's such an incredible way of being able to like include the CX and the ex focus that we're constantly talking about in this world. 

Adrian (00:42:30) - But the other thing too is Mo you and I are chatting about this the other day, um, but like modern customers, it's almost become new expectation. Like right? It's almost become like a, if I'm gonna take the time to buy something from you and then I'm gonna take the time to give you some feedback, I want, I want loop clothes. I wanna know that minimally you're gonna do something with it or that you received it and then I wanna be kept up to date, right? Like companies mm-hmm today that are crushing it on the CX site. They do a brilliant job of keeping their customers coming along with the story. Whether it's like monthly shoutouts for hey customers, you know, here's the three things that we worked on this month from, from direct, from customer feedback or direct from employee feedback is, is another cool thing that companies can do. But these are awesome ideas that I think all of our listeners can easily start kind of building their own, be versions of them tomorrow in their own companies if they're not already doing it. Or start to look at some of the companies that do it extremely well. And it kind takes 

Aye Moah (00:43:18) - Note you surprise how many times we get, um, customers responding to our response with surprise. You're like, Oh my gosh, you actually respond to me. I didn't to respond to me. I, because nobody ever does. 

Adrian (00:43:33) - That's the thing is like, talk about such an easy way to differentiate so many big businesses that consumers are already, are already kind of like groomed into just filling out their generic quick and dirty mps or csat you know, zero through 10 or one through five when you get a company that actually responds and then they give you some of the, some of the additional color on what they've done with it to better their business and to better their offering. Most customers are blown away by that and they, and that will be something that they go and tell to to their friends about by the way. So that's another easy, easy thing to think about. Um, well this is awesome. So number one, thank you so much for coming on and, and sharing your story and talking about the incredible things that you and the team at booming are building. Before we let you go, before we wrap up, where can people find out more about you or where can people get in touch with you and your team and where can people find out more about booming if they're interested in trying to figure out how this tool can help, uh, boost their productivity, um, immediately? 

Aye Moah (00:44:21) - Uh, I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. Uh, my name is pretty unique, so just type in amo and you'll find me. Um, for our team and the company, boomerang app.com, we have tools for Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, Android, so you can make sure you get all your meeting schedule as you're on the go. 

Adrian (00:44:41) - I love it. Well, look, it's been our absolute pleasure having you. We're gonna look forward to seeing what you and the team do next. And, um, thank you so much for joining the CX Chronicles podcast. 

Aye Moah (00:44:49) - Thanks me.