CXChronicles Podcast 188 with Ken Peterson, President CX at QuestionPro

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #188  we welcomed Ken Peterson, President CX at QuestionPro based in Austin, TX. 

Ken has over two decades of experience in the customer experience research space with industry experience in retail, technology, hospitality, financial services, automotive and transportation with a recent focus on financially linked business insights, SaaS deployments, and CX consultation. 

This ties in with his long history of P&L responsibility and detailed understanding of improving business operations. With a background in Mathematical Operations Research, he’s eager to find ways that companies can be more profitable through truly actionable insights into data.

In this episode, Ken 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 own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #188 Highlight Reel:**

1. Bringing empathy closer to your numbers to drive massive innovation
2. Focusing on what you can control for your customers vs. what you can not
3. Celebrating "the wins & the good stuff" happening within your business
4. Keep it simple with your customer feedback -- "how did we do?"
5. What you can learn from gathering fan feedback at a pro-soccer match
 
Huge thanks to Ken for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Ken Peterson

Click here to learn more about QuestionPro

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 #188 with Ken Peterson, President CX at QuestionPro.mp4

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 guys. Ken Peterson from Question Pro is joining us. Ken, why don't you say hello to the CX Nation? 

Ken (00:00:20) - Hey everyone, or should I say aloha? 

Adrian (00:00:23) - Aloha. Ken. Ken's joining us from Hawaii today, guys. So for, for those of you that are listening to the podcast, um, and, uh, you'll see that Ken has got the beach in his background. So for those of you that are watching on the YouTube channel, you'll actually be able to see that. Just told Ken, I'm sitting in Buffalo where we're expecting three to six feet of snow sitting on the beach in Hawaii, and I told him I kind of wish that I was on an airplane heading towards him right now to have this conversation <laugh>. But, 

Ken (00:00:47) - Uh, and good CX would have you down here, you know, showing you the, the ropes, shall we say, and talking about the three foot foot swells that we're gonna have with the weight 

Adrian (00:00:57) - <laugh>. That sounds way better than the blizzard of 2022 in Buffalo can. But, um, but Ken, thanks for joining us, man. Why don't, I'd love for you to kick off the show that we kick off all these episodes. Take a couple minutes to set the stage for the listeners. Ken, you have this incredible customer focused, business leader background. You've worked at all of these incredible companies across the world and you've had all these incredible positions. Why don't you take a few minutes to kind of share your story and talk about some of the stepping stones that you really were able to, you know, have the privilege of, of having early in your career. And then, and then definitely tell us how you landed where you are today as the President of CX at, at Question Pro. 

Ken (00:01:29) - Yeah, absolutely, and I, I, you know, I've probably taken, like most people, no one wakes up, uh, when they're seven years old and says, wow, I wanna be a future CX leader. <laugh>, no, my mine was, um, uh, I was actually not a great student. I mean, I, I got good grades, I just didn't like that whole school thing going, you know, having to wake up and go, like most teenagers didn't wanna wake up in the morning, uh, but somehow thought I was gonna be a teacher someday despite that. Um, so went out, got a teaching degree in mathematics, secondary education, um, taught for about a year. Didn't really enjoy <laugh> that, uh, worked in retail for, uh, better part of a decade. Uh, I managed, um, you know, I, I, my graduate degree is in operations research management sciences, so I was managing, you know, sales forecasts, product planning, and I always say, you know, I, I, I, I sort of jokingly tell it, but it was a true story. 

Ken (00:02:26) - They'd come around with the market research reports every quarter, and they were in these big thick binders I know, a long time ago. And I'd always put a right on the shelf right above my desk so that when a manager would come around say, have you seen the latest market research reports? I'd say, yeah, they're right here. And I didn't even have to leave my seat. I could just point to it and never really read them because I was only concerned with the, you know, the numbers behind, uh, the operation. Uh, I wasn't concerned with, you know, how someone felt about 'em, whatever. I did labor planning, things like that, did need, didn't need the emotional side of it. Um, friend of mine said, I need your help. I want you to come work for me. I'm, you know, and he worked for a market research firm and he needed help sort of getting reports out the door, basically. 

Ken (00:03:14) - It was an operational issue. It had nothing, you know, I knew nothing about market research. Um, but he said, you know, I need your help getting these reports out the door. You're the right person for it. You know, the technology, you can help us speed up this process. They were taking six weeks to get 45 reports out the door on a quarterly basis. And it doesn't take long to figure out that, you know, you're, you're giving people data, you know, two and a half, three months, four months after the first point data point is collected. And this was all customer experience work. They called it CSAT at the time, but, you know, um, so I joined them. I figured I was gonna do that for two years and then moved back out to Colorado and I joined, and within, you know, the first quarter we had the reports out the door within a week, and I wasn't even happy with that. 

Ken (00:04:01) - And they upped the number of reports to like 1100 per month. And I was like, right, challenge accepted. So I went ahead and I, I, I'll never say it was the first, um, but you know, it was one of those first web reporting portals that I just, you know, all I cared about was getting the numbers from the, the, the data centers and pushing it into, you know, pushed it into sequel. And the sequel rewrote the website every six hours and the website crashed every six hours because as I'm loading the numbers, every one of these 1100 managers was like, it's time to log in <laugh> and see what's going on. Um, so, but yeah, I, I, I started there, uh, and I was completely operational and when I decided to move, they said, you know, well I'm, I'm a, a revolutionary in this sense. Uh, 22 years ago when I moved back to Colorado, they said, why don't we let you work remotely? Cuz we need to <laugh>, I.

Ken (00:04:58) - I started working. 

Adrian (00:04:58) - You've been doing a remote game for a long time, Ken. 

Ken (00:05:00) - Yeah, I was, I was gonna do this for two years and be done and then find, you know, something else to do in Colorado, a new adventure. And the more I got involved, the more I really liked it. And I like to, you know, I started to see, you know, the, the flip side of it. The, you know, the part that you have to have with the empathy and things like that. So, you know, tying, you know, just putting numbers against a spreadsheet and saying, this is what, you know, this is our plan. You know, there's a whole nother emotional element that I got to see. And so over the years, I got to work with some of the biggest and some of the best clients. I mean, just, you know, if you think of the Fortune 50 I've probably worked with 

Adrian (00:05:36) - That's awesome. 48 

Ken (00:05:37) - Of 'em probably. Um, you know, so spent a lot of time there and my career transitioned into deploying these, um, deploying these technology systems as technology improved. I, you know, I worked with the big names, uh, including Question Pro, where I eventually joined a few years after that. So, um, I sort of ended up here and, uh, I was always on the services side of it. And now I'm on the sort of the software side of it. And I, I like doing it because it, you know, I get to bring some of that, uh, innovation that I always felt was lacking in a lot of the bigger companies. And we're a slightly smaller company, so we can move really fast. And I wanna be able to bring that, that empathy part closer to the numbers part and make it work for everyone. 

Adrian (00:06:22) - I love it. Well, Ken, first of all, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for giving us that background. Um, and you know, it just makes me think about what we were talking about the other day, which is like, um, some of the work that you guys are doing at Question Pro. And then I want, I, I certainly want you to be able to kind of give our listeners the, the, the high level for, um, you know, who Question Pro is and some of the things, some of the incredible work you guys are doing. But like, you know, Ken and I were talking about this the other day, guys, where there's so many businesses out there that think we need custom-built feedback solutions and we need to be able to blast all of these different types of surveys and we need to be able to see all this different visibility. 

Adrian (00:06:57) - And then they, they don't realize that there's so many different solutions, number one, but there's incredible solutions of Question Pro out there. We've already done this stuff for you. They've already kind of figured out what's gonna work. They've figured out different potential paths they've got, they've got different templates, they've got different, you know, um, um, um, methods that work. And then most importantly, they've already got a community of experienced users who kind of are, who can kinda help that, that, that path. And they can help business owners and other executive teams with thinking about how they can rinse was and repeat, not build, build a, you know, a wheel from scratch. And I think that's one of the really interesting things that I've picked up around, along our last couple conversations. That's one of the incredible things you guys are doing with your customers. A question problem. 

Ken (00:07:37) - Yeah. And I, I like to, I mean, there's, there's no, uh, I'm not trying, attempting to shed any negative light on any of our competitors, cuz I've worked with many of 'em and I, you know, I have friends with all of them, uh, people that I consider good friends even. And, uh, they all have their approaches. And I, I think what I like to bring, bring together is that idea that, you know, the customer is going through a journey. They're not, they're not hitting one touch point that you can measure and then add 50 questions to that survey to, so it, it is about bringing those little pieces of the business together because we still talk. I mean, I remember when web started becoming a dominant force in purchasing, whether it was researching your product or maybe, hey, I can wait five days until it's shipped to me. 

Ken (00:08:24) - That kind of thing. There was, you know, there was an element that was always, well that's the web team and this is the stores team and you know, they brought some of those pieces together, but they certainly as organizations don't view 'em as the same thing. They still see 'em as different thing. And so, you know, we, we talk about being able to measure every touchpoint in the journey and not having 50 questions about, you know, how is your, how was your online order? Well, I clicked, I paid it, got here. When it's <laugh>, you don't need to ask me how I feel about the organization as a whole, you know, like, you know, keep it simple, keep it simple. Keep it to what's relevant in that touch point. And so we, we talk about root causes behind everything, and that's the one thing that you can sort of tie together with everything is those root causes, is being able to bring them in and say, Hey, I've got, you know, I've got a problem with payments on my payment journals in a location. I've got problems with payments on my, you know, website. I've got problem with payments when I'm doing remote popups. Maybe the common theme is payments. You know, maybe we need to pull in finance, we need to pull in our controllers, we need to pull in the technology operations and fix that problem rather than just saying, oh, sorry, every time it goes wrong. 

Adrian (00:09:41) - A hundred percent. I love that you're immediately jumping to today's podcast talking about the journey because, um, number one, it is, first of all, it's the easiest way of getting the blueprint or getting all of the pieces laid out onto a piece of paper or onto a, onto a digital asset where everyone can see all the.

Adrian (00:09:58) - The good, the bad, the ugly, the complexity, right? Just to even see the complexity and see how, uh, it's a web, it's a web of teams, it's a web of tools, it's a web of data, it's a web of actions. It's a web of all these different things. It's super complex, right? That's the, that's the first part. But then the other piece too, man, is like, I love that you start off with this, and then it'll set us up to jumping in a team. But let, this is, this is another easy way that every company, whether you, to your point, whether you're a small scrappy startup or whether you're a top 50, you know, fortune 500 global company, you get to see and have a visual sense for how customer experience, customer success. It's a team sport. It is not just not a C Cs individuals, and I love that you called this, right? 

Adrian (00:10:38) - Which is like, this is where you start to show your marketing folks, your sales folks, people are putting the leads in, the opportunities in the top of the funnel. Your onboarding folks, your conversion folks, um, your account management and your customer retention folks, your DevOps folks, your finance folks. This is where you start to see all the different pieces of the puzzle around, oh, literally every one of us has some ownership around making sure that this journey's incredible. But the other piece too, I say this all the time with our clients at c can, you're starting to tee up areas of accountability, responsibility, and authority, right? You're, you're like, you're, you're starting to streamline some of the marching orders around who owns what and who's going to have to be a stakeholder, who's gonna have to be aware of what's going on, who's gonna have decision power, right? 

Adrian (00:11:19) - And I, and I think it's like a lot of people, man, they, they might roll their eyes when we start talking about customer journey mapping. Those people have never done it really effectively, and they probably haven't had a partner come in who knows how to do it extremely well. To be able to also leverage it as an opportunity to have some really difficult conversations in your business with your team, probably in your leadership team, around how you're gonna make those bets and how you're gonna make those investments as your, as your business scales in the future. 

Ken (00:11:41) - And I'll, I'll say this much building that first journey map is a painstaking experience. 

Adrian (00:11:46) - Oh, <laugh> 

Ken (00:11:48) - So worth it. Because when you have that map, you can go back to it once a month, once a quarter, even once a year, and say, okay, we, we see how these things change. And you know, we all, we all think of it as, you know, I, I've always seen the, you know, oh, the, the funnel, you know, our marketing funnel, our sales funnels nowadays aren't this linear funnel. I mean, there's bouncing all over the place. There's decision points that we never, you know, like traditionally we never thought about. But those decision points may, Hey, if I'm, if I'm a technology buyer, I may come to you and say, Hey, I trust your opinion. Yep. Gimme some information about this company. And you say, oh, well I never worked with it, so talk to this. And now I'm not talking to a friend of mine that knows something about the business. I'm talking to a friend's friend, and then I'm going on to reviews. I mean, reviews are just about <laugh> as important as, I mean, I, I, uh, when we were doing our presentation, uh, at our conference a couple weeks back, someone said, uh, someone from Google said, yeah, reviews. 90% of people would listen to a review before they would ask a friend. 

Adrian (00:12:55) - Wow. Yeah. Yeah. 

Ken (00:12:56) - And if you think about that, so that's so influential on that funnel that now when we look at the funnel, there's so much that we can not control versus what we controlled. I mean, back when there were three channels, uh, you pretty much believed what those commercials told you. Definitely. And then they had a doctor at the end saying, Oreo cookies are good for weight loss. 

Adrian (00:13:17) - <laugh>. I wish that, Hey, I wish that was the case, Ken. 

Ken (00:13:21) - Yeah, exactly. 

Adrian (00:13:23) - Um, wait, so one thing that I wanted jump upon before we dive into team, but is I, I feel like I'm constantly telling people, you know, your customer reviews or your customer feedback, if leveraged accordingly, it is gold, it's currency, it's modern currency. Think it's equally as valuable as as money in some cases, because you're right, the the modern consumer, they're gonna, and let's talk SAS for our SaaS SAS listeners. You're gonna go to a G2 Capra, Gartner, first and foremost, before you even think about what couple of entities you might reach out to and get into the sales, the sales process with. The other thing too is you, is just like, depending on the quality of the reviews, and depending on the way that different companies sort of position reviews, man, you can literally start to kind of show people what types of, who's gonna be optimal or who your ideal customer profile is, or what your usage is, or maybe even what expectations alignment look like, right? 

Adrian (00:14:16) - And you could start to almost qualify or disqualify just based on the way that you're, you're asking customers to leave that reviewer, to leave that feedback. And the last thing is put it in public man. Like, I think that, um, you know, companies like Google and Yelp and just so many other industry specific review sites, it's where people start the customer journey. A lot of times when you're thinking about how does somebody become aware of a business or a service or a product in the first place, or how do they even think about considering as an option? They're looking at reviews. They're looking at the first, the first, you know, 10 reviews that pop up on the screen in front of them. And that's kind of how they're starting to decide who they're gonna put into their short list of op, you know, of opportunities and options for them to start thinking about shopping. So I love that you call that. 

Ken (00:14:57) - I mean, if you're, if you're gonna shop somewhere, I mean, if you think, when was the last time you opened the Yellow Pages <laugh>? It's been, no, it's been a long time. First thing you do is, you know, you know, Hey, I need a tire repair shop. What do you do? You go to Google, you type tire repair shop near me, it probably auto fills it for you. You press enter, and then there's, you know, 6, 7, 8 listings that they'll show you right away. And then the star listings right below this, and the first, I mean, if that first one, no matter how much they paid for the advertising or the promotion, if that first one has two and a half stars out five, you're probably going, ah, I'll skip that one, this one. Definitely. Then the other part is, you know, oftentimes that gets owned by marketing. 

Ken (00:15:40) - Yeah. And we talk about that a lot. It, you know, marketing owns that and they analyze it and they bring it in. They tell people our reviews are bad. And, you know, then they try to do things to pump up reviews. I mean, I've seen businesses say, oh, you know, hey, we'll buy you a cup of coffee if you give us a good review for your, your hire purchase, that kind of thing. People forget to respond to the reviews. Definitely another one of those areas where, I mean, from a customer experience perspective, when we talk about responding to the data that we get in, that's data that you're getting in. You need to respond to it. You need to go on there. Don't put a templated response of your review. And global warming are the most important issues in our company right now. You know, you gotta go in there and say, we have a heartfelt apology for you. And if you want to, you know, say it, please call me. My number is Dave, I'm the manager. Call me. You know, how much of an impact that would make if someone sees a one star review, but then immediately blow it, they see the manager saying, Hey, please call me. We'll fix this and make it right. Absolutely. That whole onestar review. 

Adrian (00:16:42) - Hundred percent. I think like for, I know for, um, you know, some of the organizations that, that we work with at c, one of the biggest recommendations we make when we get to this feedback piece is really around like, okay, promoters. And for, for people that are going out of their, out of their, out of their way to leave you an incredible review, promoters, they better minimally get a thank you so much, minimally, a thank you or minimally, I thank you so much for taking the time to leave the feedback. Better yet, thank you for giving us this incredible feedback that's like, that's awesome. Your passes and your detractors. I love that you bring this up and you call us out right now, guys, somebody better be escalating that like your neutrals and your passives or, or sorry, your, your detractors. Those are people that are, they went out at a time to kind of tell you, yeah, you're right, or worst case you suck. 

Adrian (00:17:27) - You're not good. Like this is, this is not okay. I had a bad experience, et cetera. Those people are like, that's one of the easiest ways where you have somebody on staff, somebody on the team immediately following up. That's a huge opportunity. I like what you said too, Ken, where it's like showing the, the public, uh, recognition of this stuff too. I know that I'm a CX nerd, so this is probably why I look at some of this feedback very differently than others. But like, I'm literally looking for responsiveness, meaning I'm looking for, and, and you can kind of see through the, see through what's on versus what's human based. But I'm like looking to see whether or not they understand some of those other basic rules of responding and thanking and circling back, closing the loop. If there's, if there's, if there's a call to action and a piece of feedback, so's gonna close the loop, even if it's a, a promoter or detractors, right? 

Adrian (00:18:09) - So I'd love that you're kind of calling some of the stuff right outta the gates. Ken, I'd love to, I'd love to jump into the first pillar of team. Can you spend a couple minutes kind of talking about your team, a question pro and, and kind of give us a sense for the lay of the land in terms of, uh, what types of different teams or departments or roles that you personally get to work with every single solitary day? And give us a sense for some of the, some of the ways that you've had to kind of think about managing a team, leading a team, optimizing a team at all the different companies that you've been a part of. 

Ken (00:18:38) - Well, and it, it's very exciting for me at Question Pro because I manage all the teams <laugh>, which is, you know, it's fun. You know, I'm, I'm working in the CX group. I mean, we of course have our market research team, we also have our employee experience team, and they have their teams. And you know, it, it's, it's exciting and it's fun because it's, it's what I preach in that everyone has a role in customer experience and then everyone has a role in question pro customer experience, customer experience. So yeah, great. I'm, you know, I, I get to, you know, I'm, I'm leading the marketing, I'm leading the product development, uh, which is exciting for me because, you know, now we're building things, shall I say, in my image, which, you know, some people would say that's a bad idea. <laugh>. Um, I, I love, you know, I have great people, great team around me that contributes to it. 

Ken (00:19:26) - So I'm, you know, I've always been a little more technical so I can jump in with developers on some evenings and say, Hey, let's, you know, let's, let's find a hack for this. Let's solve this one customer's problem. And it's, it's that full cycle. So my, you know, I'm, I'm very fortunate now that I'm working with marketing, sales, client management, account management, and <laugh> the product and product development teams. And it's, it's a lot of fun to pull that together. And I think one of the most meaningful things, um, I, I, you know, you always say you like to brag a little when your boss does.

Ken (00:20:00) - You know, you've been preaching for a while. Yeah. And I saw an email, it was yesterday or the day before, he sent out an email and he basically said, everyone is accountable for our client retention. Love it. And he said, even, even, you know, if you think you're just a developer and you're in the back at no, you're developing a feature, you're developing a tool. And if you develop it wrong, by the way, they'll have a complaint. You know, someone will be submitting a ticket. And so having a team like that is just amazing. And I, you know, I've worked with some big teams and, you know, my prior role at Ifso, such a vast organization, I managed six departments, I think 32 functional areas. That's a huge team. That's lot. But I will, I will admittedly say sometimes they didn't all work together, even though they all reported up one direction, they didn't all work together. 

Ken (00:20:52) - And that, that, that's something you can actually, I actually see the difference in how our clients respond. And I had some great clients in my prior role, didn't have tons of complaints at the same time. They weren't going out like my clients are nowadays and going, if you haven't used Question Pro, you should really use them. Yeah. And it's, it's that big difference between the promoters, passives, and detractors. We didn't, I've never had a ton of detractors. You'll always have some, but you know, they were sitting in that passive category. So with the teams working together the way they do now, all of our clients are promoters. All of 'em are sitting out there going, this is, this is a great team to work with. And I, you know, it's, it's great to have that kind of feeling working on a team like that. 

Adrian (00:21:37) - It a hundred percent is man, the majority spend the bulk of our time at work with our teammates and with our coworkers instead of our friend, our friends, and our family. I know I say it all the time, but it's true. And when you're at a company where you've got the majority of your customer base or your customer portfolio in a promoter state, man, it's fun. Cause like, number one, it's less, it's less the negative stuff. Um, number two, it's less of maybe some of the more, um, some of the more fueled passionate customer, uh, engagements and activities that many of our, our listeners probably are managing on a daily basis when you're dealing with a lot of detractors. But the other piece is this, man, it's like there's a tendency in the CX and the CS space to really kind of focus on some of the bad, right? 

Adrian (00:22:19) - Like, you want, you almost wanna extract all the detractors and the passive data for the month and just kick it up the ladder to how bad everything is and how, you know, how you need to fix this. And that product sucks and this process isn't good and that team's unresponsive and all those things. But the reality is, is like we need more CX and CS leaders, more customer, future customer focused business leaders. Think about the wins, man. Celebrating the wins, talking about the, what the promoters are talking about. Cause again, like I'm, as I've gotten deeper into my CX and CS career, Ken, as we've worked with more and more customers around how to think about building an incredible customer experience, Ben, doubling down on your wins, uh, sharing the good stuff that all of these existing customers are already loving about your business or loving about your product, it's fuel for fire, number one. 

Adrian (00:23:03) - And then number two, on the ex side of the game, people love working with customers that are, are, are, are pumped. Like it's hard working with the customer base where you've got, you got a really bad nps, you've got a really bad CSAT rate and everything's negative. And every day you're showing up and it's like, oh my God, we're gonna talk more about the same three things that we've already known about. And so it's, it's, I'm just trying to call out that there's something about the CX and the ex piece or two together, Ken, where it's like, that makes a big, big difference for building a company that's kind of really poised for success in the future and poised to have an incredible team of employees that are gonna stick around. They're gonna get promoted, they're gonna come up with the next 10 different revenue lines for your business, and they're gonna keep growing the business, right? They're gonna keep putting you in a position to win and to find new things that you can help the customers with every single ary day. 

Ken (00:23:49) - Yeah. And that, I mean, I remember when I first got in the, in the, the, the model was to service profit chain, and it had, you know, oh, well, you know, you have the product, you have the people, you have the, the service people are providing, and then the customer, and you know, that whole, and, and the reality is, I mean, back in 2004, 2005, I, I was working with one client, a retailer that had the ex and the CX with us. And we were, you know, they said, there's no relationship. We're just running correlations. I'm like, well, you're running the wrong correlations. First of all, 

Adrian (00:24:20) - <laugh>, 

Ken (00:24:21) - You know, start looking at, you know, first, I mean they're, you know, they, they were a retail store, so they had these mega stores where, you know, they were crazy busy, things like that. And then they had these smaller, can't call 'em boutique shops. They were still pretty big stores, but they were the smaller low volume. And, you know, as soon as you started, like, let's split those variables out, there were a couple of things that popped out right away. 

Adrian (00:24:42) - Yes. 

Ken (00:24:42) - Or that had the most delighted customers. And I mean, delighted. I'm not talking promoters, I'm talking top point on the scale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Had the most delighted employees. Yep. And you know, was it, we definitely know it was correlation. What was the causation? Well, I think it, it feeds into it so.

Ken (00:25:00) - It's just, it's a cycle. I mean, you get the delighted customers, they're happy to be there. They're, they have fewer complaints, and then the employees are happy and, you know, and then they can focus on, I mean, it's one of the things I say, even in my business, I can focus on innovation now instead of fixing problems. Like if you have a bunch of software bugs, it's like you're focused on fixing problems, eliminating in tractors. Now we have happy customers. And even if those customers come back and say, it would be really great if we had, we don't view it as a complaint. It's a delighted customer that's helping us innovate. And your customers can do that for you too. They're more than happy to tell you your business would be better if you did this. I remember, you know, years and years ago when I was still with that retail, they said, why don't you have coffee shops in your stores? Now? Every store has a coffee shop. 

Adrian (00:25:51) - Yep. I love that. Um, Ken, I'd love to love to jump into second six pillar of tools, man. So number one, question Pro has just got a plethora of different incredible tools that, that, that your customers, um, can utilize and really can help to transform their business and transform their customer experiences and their employee experiences too, by the way. But I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes kind of talking about how you've sort of approached, uh, thinking about number one, how to build a tech stack, and number two, what tools to invest in as you're growing and scaling a business in a team. I know this is one of the biggest challenges that many CX and CERs out there struggle with. What tools do I need? What tools can I afford? What tools do I need to put in front of my team to make sure that I'm gonna get the biggest bang for my buck and I'm gonna get the highest level of output? I'd love for you to spend a few minutes kinda talking about some of the things you've learned along your own personal journey around how to think about the tool, the tool piece, and the, and the, and the tech stack management piece. 

Ken (00:26:44) - Yeah, and, and of course I come from that, that background where, you know, a spreadsheet was more than enough to get me through and make my decisions. So it's amazing how much my, my, I've evolved, uh, in that sense. Um, we joking, I have a demo where I show up. Um, uh, it's jokingly, we show scores for the employees and when you click on the employee, it brings up three different scores and one's the empathy score. And mine is always in red. And even though it's a demo, everyone says, oh, that's so true. You really need <laugh>. But it is one of those that when you think about the tools that you need, um, when I started it was, I, I just need to measure something. I need measure and I need outputs. But it really is, you know, that was very central looking, that was very looking at myself. 

Ken (00:27:35) - It's beyond that now. I mean, we, we talked about customer journey mapping. You need something that you can work on. And sad to say, I mean, there's, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of people out there that will say, I'm gonna put up a big poster and I'm gonna put post-it notes on there, and guess what? It's gonna get lost, it's gonna get crumpled, whatever. You actually need a technology that supports that. And I, you know, I would've, if you'd asked, asked me that 10 years ago, I'd like, Nope. You just need a piece of paper with the post-it notes. But nowadays, as big as organizations are, and let's face it, you're working from home today. I'm working from home today, hundred percent. We need something that we can log into and we can add onto it. And preferably one that you can start linking back to your touch points, whether it's a, an internal KPI or an external kpi. 

Ken (00:28:21) - And so, you know, having that, that way to manage the journey or think about the journey or bring awareness to the journey to all the people is huge as a starting point. I mean, whether you're talking CX or just business in general, <laugh>, like, do you know what your customers are going through? Um, so even, you know, I worked with one shipping company. They had a customer journey map just about the IVR system. Wow. Granted a little complex IVR system and the whole, the whole goal was to make sure they don't talk to a rep, which I sort of didn't like. But, uh, at the same time, they had an entire journey map around, you know, where you'll get to where you'll point at when they do this, or if they're looking for that, what they should be offering and what should be offered first as a menu item, all that. 

Ken (00:29:13) - I mean, like, it's amazing how much they thought about that particular piece. So you need to have that. I think the second part is you need to have measurements. And I, I'll say I'm from a operational background, um, if you can't measure it, you can't change it. And I'm not just talking about CX scores and surveys, uh, you know, I mentioned reviews. That's all that also in there, if you can't measure how you're doing there and bring it in, and then even on the business side of things, I mean, why would you not tell your employees how you're doing in sales? Yeah, totally. Let them know. Yeah. Have a tool where, you know, when they have that moment and they're thinking, how can I help this company more.

Ken (00:29:57) - Give them the tools to be able to say, I know where we are on sales and you know, we, we have a tool, uh, that we recently acquired called Sweet cx, where you can actually look at that journey map and actually pull those numbers in there. And that, you know, that's great for an employee if they understand the journey and that not everyone has that, but at least give them something where they know how the business is doing, how they are doing, how the company views them, some of the initiatives that the company is gonna do. So when you're talking in e r p, you're talking employee experience measurement. I mean, I know I'm going through a lot of things here, but the reality is, if you want to be successful in today's business world, you need all of these things just to be successful on the CX side of things, believe it or not, that's, I mean, that all I'm talking about is being successful for cx, you still have to have a good product, something that people want and willing to pay for. 

Ken (00:30:52) - So, I mean, that's, that's the whole other side that I'm not even addressing here. But all of these tools really need to be integrated and then pull in the right tool. Uh, you know, and I'll, I'll speak, you know, to myself, I mean, we are customer experience measurement platform. We are, we base our measurement on touchpoints. We want you to measure various touchpoints. We don't want you to put 60, 70 question surveys together that you're sending out to every, every time that you stay in a hotel. That kinda thing. You know, or nobody likes those. Nobody likes those. You, you can have a once a year relationship survey and I'll say maybe 30 questions. Sure, sure, sure. But everything else should be just how did we do? And so that you can actually assess those touchpoints. And if that's not where your business is, if you're not ready for that, we're not the right tool for you. 

Ken (00:31:42) - Yeah. I'll just say that. Make sure you're getting the right tool for your needs. And I've seen businesses that said, you know, they've gone with one of our competitors where they say, we just need to measure this one touch point. Cause 90% of our customers go through this touch point. We need to measure it, assess it, and that's all we're doing. And then it turns into, well, we need to add a few more questions to it, and suddenly the transaction becomes, you know, huge. But they wanna measure, assess. If it's a negative feedback, they wanna be able to respond to it. That's what one of our competitors, if that's where you're at, great. You're, you're not as long, far along on the maturity scale, but that's the tool that you're gonna need. And so being able to assess those tools in a, you know, an upfront way, it doesn't come from a spreadsheet. By the way, I, I love when you get those spreadsheets. Like, do you do this? Do you do this? Do you, you're not gonna be able to assess it, just ask someone like, how do you use it? And this, you know, I will, I will freely admit that you use ours if you wanna measure. So being able to look at those tools and get the right tools. Um, I know Salesforce was like the talk of the town for like 15, 20 years. Definitely not every tiny business needs Salesforce. 

Ken (00:32:53) - I've seen companies do very well just getting HubSpot marketing and HubSpot sales and says, that's our crm and we're gonna operate like that. So when you look at the tools, don't try and buy a tool through a spreadsheet. Yep. Buy it <laugh>, you know, buy it based on this will fit my company. Um, and it's tough to do sometimes. Sometimes you get those little, uh, purchasing departments that get in the way of all that. But, you know, if you do your research and if you go look at the reviews, then you'll know what the right tools to really bring your cx you know, I call it mature cx, uh, as most of us do. But that's what you're looking to do if you're, if you're just starting out or if you want mature cx, the tools are not just a CX platform. 

Adrian (00:33:37) - Yep. I love that, Ken. Super awesome ideas there. Um, Ken, I wanna jump into the third six pillar process, because you already started to kinda lay some of this groundwork, but we've talked about the team talked about the tools side process. A lot of people, lot of guests on, on the ccp, they, they refer to the process was like the glue or like the, uh mm-hmm. <affirmative>, the stickiness keeps all this stuff together. I'd love to kinda hear how you think about process and, and let, lemme expand on it. So like, at a company in the question pro, right? Um, you're working with, I mean, two and a half million different users across 40 countries. There's all sorts of different types of companies, uh, all sorts of different types of use cases. How do you and your team, or how have you and your team kind of unpack that third pillar process? So like, uh, standard operating procedures, living playbooks, FAQs, community sets, where you could theoretically leverage the two and a half million users to give some good gold or some good calls to action around how to, how to do something, how to fix something. I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes talking about some of the things that you and the team have really kind of thought about with wrangling processes. Question Pro has scaled and and grown into the future. 

Ken (00:34:40) - Yeah, and I think the first part is recognition. Uh, and you, and you alluded to it a little bit. Uh, I I will say in, in my career, I've probably implemented thousands of programs and there have been no two that are alike. I, I, I remember one, you know, one, one of my roles. They said, let let's just build a, a CX platform that can encompass everyone and everything. And you know, it's, you know, you have a standard questionnaire and you have standard outputs and stand. And I'm like, there is no one and nothing like that. They rolled it out, they got a few because it was a lower cost, they got a few hotel chains on it, and then it was like, oh, it doesn't really fit for our growth. So, you know, the process has to be first recognizing, you know, that each client will be different. 

Ken (00:35:29) - Um, and as soon as you recognize that, then you can start to put together that thinking behind, you know, first make sure it's the right fit. And I've had to, you know, walk a contract back that a sales rep has, you know, offered and say, I'm sorry, we are not the right fit for you for what you're doing. Yep. Um, so, you know, make sure it's, you know, the tools that you're putting together are the right fit. And then again, because we're sort of, you know, talking about the touch points and the journey, let's, let's do that inventory. You know, when we talk about the process, we start with the inventory. What do you wanna measure? What do you think we should be measuring? And what are you leaving out on purpose and why? <laugh>, you know, like sometimes you'll like, oh, well we're not measuring, uh, you know, our, our drive through satisfaction cuz we're, we're terrible <laugh>. Like, well that's a bad reason, but it's 

Adrian (00:36:23) - Always, that's the best reason to avoid measuring it, right? Yeah, 

Ken (00:36:25) - Yeah. We want the scores to be higher, so we're not gonna measure that touchpoint. It's like, yeah, that you're not improving. And then from there, you know, it really becomes a lot easier because we, we think about the deployment in that, that touchpoint approach. And you know, I mean it's amazing how many clients come back and say, you know, oh, well you've made this so easy. We have one that's rolling out 28 surveys. But it felt to them like, hey, this just rolled out really smoothly and it's because we're, we're, we're bringing them together. We're, we're looking at the ways we can link them together, um, and we're looking at the ways we can report them together. And so as soon as you get past those, those first two big humps of recognizing that each client is different, and even though, you know, I say it every time I still go, oh, it's like this client <laugh>, you know, I still do. 

Ken (00:37:12) - And then, and then being able to then say, what do you measure? What do you wanna measure? What do you don't wanna measure? And what should we be measuring? Uh, and asking those three questions. And it's great because everyone get behind it and start now, you know, now we can go through our standard process of setting up surveys, setting up the deployment, setting up the data feed, setting up the close loop feedback and boom, it's done. But those first two steps are so important and if you pass 'em over, you're, you're in for the next six months of, uh, shall I say, not always a dissatisfied client, but I call 'em the growing patient. When you have that client, you haven't quite, you know, cuz you haven't quite gotten their goals and your goals aligned essentially. 

Adrian (00:37:59) - Yeah. It's the, look, there's, the reality is there's a ton of companies out there that are killing it, that when you look at their customer portfolio, they wonder why. And I'm just gonna generically kind of use like a green, yellow, red type of explanation. Like you got a ton of customers in the yellow and the yellow might not be bad, right? Cause they're still paying and they're still using, and there's still all these signals that show things are okay, but yellow's not green, right? Green is great, green is awesome, green is upsell, cross sell expansion, sell like partnership, right? You're a partner. Yellow is like, I don't know man, like we're dating and I, I'll keep showing up poor dates, but like, 

Ken (00:38:38) - Get married 

Adrian (00:38:39) - <laugh>, right? And then, and then the other thing is this, let's call it what it's, and, and this is again the CX and the CS nerd in me. The migration pattern of cohorts that, um, come from the yellow and move into the red are typically that's what you're looking at guys, right? Where simpler way of thinking it is like the more yellows you got in your portfolio, there's more opportunity for migration to the red side. Once you get to the red side, now you've already proven and validated. There's leading indications for churn or for maybe thinking about one of your competitors or just thinking about maybe they validated they don't need this thing at all. Right? It's not about you, it's not about the competitors, but they've just valid the time to value and the return for the value. It's just not high enough to make the investment. 

Adrian (00:39:12) - Right? So all awesome ideas here, Ken. Um, Ken, I wanna dive into the fourth of the final CX pillar of feedback. And obviously you are, you're an expert at feedback Question Pro is an expert, uh, uh, you know, leading solution on feedback. Let's break this into two parts. Um, I would love to hear you kind of think about some of the things that have worked really, really well for you in your career around collecting and acting upon customer feedback. And then definitely spin up spending a minute or two talking about some of the teams that you've led, man, and especially if you wanna keep it about art specifically. Some of the things that you guys are doing at Question Pro. Love to kind hear you think about employee feedback as well. 

Ken (00:39:46) - Yeah, and I, I, I think the feedback tools, I mean long, long life lesson, I mean, when I jumped in, um, to the industry a few years later, uh, Rahel wrote the, you know, the ultimate question, the only question you need to.

Ken (00:40:00) - And, and it is funny because, um, he said, all you need is this question and this open end and people jumped on board and, and I completely understand why it's simple. It's a, i I like to call it an unbiased, it's sort of a standardized, I guess, really view across the organization. So you can ask that same question on different touch points and say, you know this, you know, how would you recommend us? And it wasn't really intended for transactional, but it turned into that. So you, you, you sort of learn and adapt. And you know, at the time we sort of was, you know, our, our organization at the time was like, no, we don't do this NPS stuff. We don't believe in it. And so you've, you've sort of, it's evolved and evolved and evolved. And what we found through research is it doesn't matter what your overall KPI is. 

Ken (00:40:50) - You can say it's nps customer effort score. You can say it's csat, you can say it's any one of these scores. What matters is that you're doing better than your competition. <laugh> ultimately in the eyes of that individual customer. So when you were talking about the green, yellow, red, that's exactly where we sort of landed when I came to Question Pro and I was thinking about, you know, how do we differentiate what we're measuring in the, how we're getting the feedback. And it came down to that exact fact. We, we built a question type called NPS Plus where, you know, despite, you know, with NPS you have that closed end, we have that open and all the open-end feedback that we're getting is sort of like, eh, even with sentiment analysis, it's like eh plus <laugh>, you know, it's like it's grouping it, but you're really not able to sort of fill in the gaps really. 

Ken (00:41:39) - And, and so you, you end up asking now these attribute questions, so we can do a driver analysis so we can say what's most important based on a derived analysis. So what we added in between was a root cause where, and it's interesting cuz you talked about green, yellow, red, green, they're your advocates. They're the ones that say they would recommend you, they're the nine or 10. So we have one set of root causes for the nines and tens, the greens as we would call them. And then another set of root causes for anything below that, the yellows and reds. And everyone keeps saying like, why don't we have a different group for yellow or and a different group for red? And it's quite simple. Those ones see some area where you can have improvement. Absolutely. And so now when we have the root causes and we start looking across the organization at root causes, you can see what's making people happy across the organization and what, where the opportunities are for improvement. 

Ken (00:42:32) - And since we've started doing this, it's amazing. It was like sort of, I talked about it a lot for a couple years and now I have clients like going out and telling other clients like, oh you should use this. And you know, the other day someone said, oh, I found it in one of our competitors survey now. So, ok. So one of our competing organizations has suddenly said, oh well this is, you know, this makes an impact enough of an impact that they've tried to copy it, they haven't quite done it, but you know, and we 

Adrian (00:42:58) - Always, you were talking about the yellow and red, we're able to look at that in the root cause and say, okay, here's some immediate areas for improvement without asking a battery of attributes, here's some immediate areas of improvement. Cuz they stand out in a little chart what root causes stand out and customers will tell you what stands out. Yeah. We keep trying to like place psychology and use analysis and no customer will tell you that's, and then when we give that open end, you know, we, we actually can let them, you know, we have a tool that lets them vote on other customers open ends so they can go, oh yeah, no, what they said, and we, you know, it's not gonna work in banking, but you know, we, we work with a lot of sports franchises and it works great there fans saying, Hey, you know, bring back this mascot. It was so cool when we saw the, the little kid mascot. Things like that, you know, so those things, you know, pop out in these innovation things. But the, the last part that we added to it was this turn risk. And you know, if you're, if you're a detractor, you're a turn risk, like exactly what you were saying, passives can be a turn risk too.

Ken (00:43:59) - If you are having a problem with a payment system that we example, we used it before and it keeps popping up, that passive is gonna go to a tractor detractor eventually. Yep. Yep. Maybe not this time, maybe not next time, but eventually. So hundred percent. You know, and then the second part that you talked about, working with some of the teams, I mean, I just brought one up. We worked with a national independent soccer association. Oh, cool. And that was a fun collaboration and you know, very happy, uh, with us and what we're doing. And, you know, we're, we're measuring their fan feedback. And one of the things they had us do is we innovated and we actually increased fan engagement. You know, you know how soccer matches are. You go 45 minutes without a commercial. Yeah. 

Adrian (00:44:42) - I'm a soccer, I'm a soccer fan. Can my, my dad came from Italy, so I grew up watching soccer. But you're right, sometimes you got a 90 minute match, you're waiting for the one point of activity that changes the whole event. Right. That's what it's, exactly. 

Ken (00:44:54) - And, and so what we did is we actually, we, you know, QR codes became popular during, again, during Covid. Um, their broadcasts actually flash up QR codes and in the stadium they do it so fans can vote on things. That's cool. At the beginning of the match, they were voting on who they think they would win. Um, and during the middle of the match, who, who do you think will score the first goal? Which team? And so you're, we're, we're throwing some interactivity. What was cool about that is we were capturing their email address. So the first thing they do is enter their email address so we don't get duplicates. And, you know, we could follow up with them. And at the end of the season when we followed up with them, I have never seen this happen where we followed up and we sent them this, you know, sizable relationship survey and at the, you know, the comments that were, they were providing in our NPS Plus and we're the, it was the third most upvoted comment is, I'd like to the opportunity to participate in more of these fan polls. 

Adrian (00:45:47) - That's really 

Ken (00:45:48) - Cool. They wanna participate in more research because we made it engaging. So, um, I love working with, you know, teams like that, you know, I mean, it's a team of teams, so it's, it's, yeah. Yeah. Appropriate. But, um, you know, we're, we're very fortunate to get to work with some really great groups like that. 

Adrian (00:46:05) - Ken. That's awesome. The, the, it's, it's almost like we are in the super interesting world, not just in the CX and the CS space, man, like we're in this interesting world where the democratization of data, the democratization of feedback and polling and what people think, it's like, it's at our fingertips. An awesome example where like people, and especially people, if people can jam on an answer right now and then see the results, forget about it, you're gonna get really high engagement rates. People would love to kinda get three, four different options or three things that you're thinking about right now, and then you can zap your answers in and then see what the poll just thought. People love that stuff. That's like a, it, there's it's involvement, it's engagement, it's um, it's education. You're kind of learning what a sample thinks really quickly, right? Which is not just CX and CS nerd. Is that like that people are interested in that stuff. I mean, people wanna see what the, what the crowd thinks, right. So I love it. Um, Ken, this has been an absolute pleasure. Before we wrap up the show, where can people find out number one, more about Question Pro and then where can people get in touch with you and your team, sir? So if they do wanna learn more about Question Pro, they know where to find, find you folks. 

Ken (00:47:06) - Yeah, it's actually very easy. First of all, you can learn more about Question pro@www.questionpro.com easily. Okay. And then if you wanna get in touch with me, just add that slash can on it and uh, you can actually connect right with me right there. You can actually click Meet now or schedule time with me. So very easy to get ahold of me. And of course you can find me at LinkedIn, at uh, LinkedIn slash Ken Peterson, 

Adrian (00:47:29) - So I love it. Well, Ken, look, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining the CH Chronicles podcast, sharing your story, talking about the incredible things you guys are working on at Quest. Bro, I will look forward to, uh, keeping in touch with you moving forward, man. And uh, and again, thank you so much for chatting with the CX Nation today. 

Ken (00:47:43) - Yeah, thank you for having me.