Live At XDay 2024 With QuestionPro Founder & CEO Vivek Bhaskaran

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #245 we were live at the Thompson Hotel in downtown Austin, TX at XDay 2024 with Vivek Bhaskaran, Founder & CEO at QuestionPro.

Vivek Bhaskaran is the founder and CEO of QuestionPro, one of the industry's leading providers of web-based research technologies. His life motto is simple - “The two things that drive me every day are motorcycles and client success!” 

In 2008, his startup made Inc. Magazine's list of the fastest-growing private companies, ranking 25th among business-service providers. Since that time, Vivek has never looked back by spearheading both the product and global expansion of QuestionPro.

In this episode, Vivek and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that John and his team at QuestionPro think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #245 Highlight Reel:**

1. Changing the landscape for shopping for car insurance
2. Getting user feedback back to your product team as soon as possible
3. Leveraging AI to improve your agent & employee experiences
4. Building "break-walls" for your customer support team at scale
5. Creating chat-bots that actually help your customers from the get go

Click here to learn more about Vivek Bhaskaran

Click here to learn more about QuestionPro

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

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

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Transcript

CXChronicles Podcast #245 with Vivek Bhaskaran, Founder & CEO at QuestionPro

Speaker 1 (00:00:05) - All right guys, so number one, thank you so much for joining us We are and thank you for having us this incredible event because this is this is Somebody who is a big part of why we are all here today. Why don't you introduce yourself my friend? 

Speaker 2 (00:00:17) - Absolutely Uh, so I I'm the founder here at question Pro. I started question Pro back in 2005 Actually ran it for about four years then took a break did a couple other things I love the startups didn't work came back to run question point to them 15. I've been running it since then It's awesome, you know 20 years or so I gotta ask you what back in 2005 what made you think about helping companies With getting feedback understanding what what both customers employees thought what people needed to do more of what made you get into this space? 

Speaker 1 (00:00:47) - What was the draw at the time? 

Speaker 2 (00:00:48) - I mean, I mean, you know, I'm gonna be super honest with you I'm gonna really be honest. It was not like, you know, look it was it was after the dot-com bust Okay, and I was you know, I really wanted to do something on my own. I did a lot of consulting work back Okay, I was doing tech consulting. 

Speaker 3 (00:01:05) - Yeah consulting. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:05) - Okay, I really want to do something on my own and in consulting Look at the end of the inconsolably you make a lot of money. Yeah, totally. You don't know you don't own anything Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're kind of like, you know, you're hired. 

Speaker 3 (00:01:14) - Yeah, right. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:14) - You're hired good Yeah, so but I really want to build a product. So my my passion was product okay, like I want to build something that I can think of and build and and And and actually surveys online surveys is where we all started So my surveys how you know, so I figured like look, you know We wanted to build a self-service product that anybody could create a survey any time They wanted I cannot collect feedback and so our core passion at the time at least was anybody Anybody who wanted feedback could get it done. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:40) - Yeah, really you have to hire an expensive market research consultant Yeah, it's just like a disrupting the kind of the kind of quite frankly disrupting the market research business itself Yeah, but like you think about it in 2005 if you wanted to understand any kind of consumer behavior anything you'd pay You know, it's a scant or Nielsen $100,000, right? Yeah, so we were disrupting that was there any tools? Was there any tool there was a monkey was there a monkey was there? 

Speaker 2 (00:02:01) - So because I came in a little bit a bit about 40 or 50 actually a lot of tools right there at the car And any of that this point you could argue like most of them have gone I Look at it. Yeah, obviously we survived Yeah all these years, but we were like super super kind of like focus on tech really, but that was our thing Yeah, because that was my background. Yeah The easy one so that's how we all got started What what were in the early days? 

Speaker 1 (00:02:32) - So you mentioned tech and you mentioned some of these some of the competitors are out there some of the solutions that people could actually Go use tell me about like some of the first handful of customers that you oh, yeah Just pin that like what was that? Like and then how did that lead? To some of the things that we're doing today. So these incredible customers that you've got here in Austin today with us Participating the next day and listening and learning and being part of all the action you guys built over these last 20 years now Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:55) - Yeah, so I mean look You know, I am NOT my background is not in market research. My background is in software engineering You know, that's why I went to school for it, right? So a lot of what we've built is using our customers with our customers just out of need Yeah, look at me. I don't understand, you know, I don't you know, I don't understand I know conjoint glasses for example, but our customers actually knew what yeah, right, but I knew I knew I could I knew I could Build software. Yeah, really? 

Speaker 2 (00:03:23) - So that was like grace great collaboration So I used to you know And you talked about like what was the original kind of like earlier on earlier on like look, you know customers Like like we just want to get these things done. Can you help us? Yeah, right, right, right I would look at it and say like look what I'm really good at is looking at a problem and building it into a product Yeah, that's kind of my yeah, I would say core proposition. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:43) - Okay, if you look like you told me a problem I could easily tell you how I could build a product to solve that problem. Yeah, that's kind of my so I you know Used our customers and customers used me like they wanted a solution there. They don't want to build a custom product Yeah, right. 

Speaker 3 (00:03:57) - Okay. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:57) - Look I have this problem. I'm not gonna go both pay Accenture, you know a couple of million bucks To do this And I was there like, well, okay, you know, you could pay me maybe maybe not ten grand but maybe you know, 50 grand Yeah to solve this problem Right, so that's the collaboration that we had with a lot of our customers and that's how we build the product So I'll talk to somebody and say like hey look this is the problem and I'll say oh I can I can enhance Question Pro to solve this problem.

Speaker 2 (00:04:21) - of this problem, right? And then you can buy Question Pro through that process. So what ends up, it's a win-win because now I improve the product, obviously, right? And you get a product at a kind of product price as opposed to going to Accenture, Deloitte, or anybody for that matter, and say, hey, custom build this for me, right? And that's a minimum price tag of half a million bucks. Some large number, right? And so that's how we built Question Pro for the first three or four years. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:46) - And then we became big enough where we were like, okay, cool, now we have a game plan. Now we have what to build. And today, guys like Ken are my inspiration to build the next generation, right? So I'm super passionate about it. I've assembled, frankly, all these guys are helping. They are helping me. I'm not in a position to say I know what's going on. Ken knows more about CX than I ever did. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:10) - Ken knows a tremendous amount about CX. To your point of what you were gonna answer, from where you started to where we are today, Ken and I were talking last night at the kickoff party about just this notion, too, of companies don't just need help with collecting feedback anymore. And by the way, let's be real clear, guys. We're not just talking about customer feedback. We're talking about customer feedback, employee feedback, product feedback, service feedback. This ain't just CX anymore, right? This goes way, way, way deeper. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:39) - There's many layers to the onion here. But the thing that Ken and I were talking about last night, as two CX nerds would be doing at a half hour, talking about CX, this is what we do. But it's talking about also helping many of the folks that are here today, many of these awesome customers, and many of the folks that are on your team, like thinking about the journey, thinking about the customer journey, the user journey, the employee journey, the patient journey, enter whatever the X is before it. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:04) - And then it's starting to really kind of help extrapolate not just what's going on, but like tying data to these, or signals, data or signals, whatever you wanna call it, to the different cuts of the journey. That's where all of a sudden you can start cooking with some gas, and you can start to do things more in real time than ever before. Traditionally, think about a survey, you wait for an entire journey to happen, and then you go get, instead of like. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:26) - No, you have different points in the journey, and we are, and Raj has helped me, Raj Sivaramanian, he's kind of helping me kind of like convert from journey, kind of journey management, think of it as journey management, really, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:06:38) - And the journey management model is really kind of like, and I think Ford is doing it, couple of our customers, every time there's a new initiative, they have to go to the common CX team, that is the center of excellence, they've created a new center of excellence within Ford, so think about it, in any large business, or even media, hey, let's do this. And then they go pitch for money. That's the way it works, right? Like, hey, let's go do X, let's go pitch for money. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:02) - But customer centric companies, they're saying like, look, yes, you can come pitch us, pitch the CFO money, but go to the CX team before that, model out what this will look like, model out what this will look like from an end-to-end perspective. Don't come and say, hey, let's do X, right? Hey, because that's a point of time problem, right? They want even the people who are pitching them, saying you can continue pitching us, but think about pre-X, post-X, think of the journey for whatever you're pitching. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:33) - And so we are helping Ford, for example, with like, every, the common, the CX team has a, within that, there's a center of excellence that does only journey management, really. So they kind of work with the business teams to say, hey, we want to launch this, we want to launch, let's say a subscription service for whatever it is, it doesn't matter, really, right? So they can say, let us think about the entire journey before you launch the subscription service, really. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:58) - As opposed to like, because in a large company, you are launching the subscription service, you're launching, I don't know. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:03) - You're getting pre-feedback, early feedback. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:04) - Early, and I have a process around that, and I have a process around kind of new initiatives and how to improve initiatives. So we, I mean, I really think that's the big reason why I kind of, you know, got Raj on board, Raj works with Ken and all of us, is like, not just measurement, but actually kind of putting the journey together, and just not getting us, a lot of people go into journey mapping, I'm like, journey management is what we need. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:23) - Yeah, journey management, I like that, that's a good point. It's not just like, it's not like pretty pictures. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:27) - Yeah, it's not like pretty pictures on a, you know, post-it notes and all that stuff. Yeah, that's great, that's a great start. That's the thing, everything's gonna change over time. Absolutely. The pretty pictures that you had is outdated after, I don't know, six months, really, right? The way, the speeds of which we are operating, you know, CarPlay used to be cool for Ford. I mean, CarPlay is table stakes now, are you kidding me? 

Speaker 1 (00:08:47) - You need it, you have to have it. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:48) - You can't walk around saying, hey, I got CarPlay, bro, and then be like, shut up. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:50) - I wouldn't buy a car if I didn't have the ability to, it's, even if it was, of course, great. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:52) - Boom, but four or five years ago, people were like, oh my God, CarPlay's so awesome. And today, it'll be like, dude, are you shitting me? 

Speaker 3 (00:09:00) - It's true. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:00) - So now, if your map says, hey, I'm gonna do some tech integration, like, okay, now, why are these things not integrated with my calendar? 

Speaker 1 (00:09:06) - Yeah, right. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:06) - You know, so that, you know, the car, and all of us have busy lives, we have a calendar. 

Speaker 3 (00:09:10) - Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:11) - I don't know, you know, why is, why is my car not integrated with my calendar so it knows where the, where am I gonna go? 

Speaker 1 (00:09:15) - Where you're going, or how to tee up your music, or how to have all the things you need. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:19) - Exactly, a lot of these things, a lot of these integrations scenarios open up if you start looking at journey, rather than, hey, I'm gonna do X for you, I'm gonna drive your car, yeah, you're gonna, yeah, your car, I get it. These are like, you know, beautiful computers on wheels, really, like, you don't think about that. 100%, that's what it is. That's why a lot of the CX feedback for Tesla.

Speaker 2 (00:09:36) - is better than the traditional car companies. If you think about it, because they are thinking of this... you get into the car, it says like, I know where you're gonna go. You have a meeting in eight minutes. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:46) - Everything is teed up for you. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:48) - Exactly, it's like the default navigation on Tesla. If you have the calendar integrated, for example, you walk into the car, it knows, it's not that complicated if you think about it, right? I mean, your calendar is there. You know what time it is. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:00) - And it knows, it knows everything about you. It knows so much about you already. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:02) - And you give it the permission, right? You're giving permission for the car to say like, look, this is my car, you know? And if I walk into the car and it's like, okay, the first thing is the nav to the calendar event that's there, that's gonna happen one hour from now, I just tap on that and I'm done. I don't have to worry about like, hey, search for it and da-da-da-da-da, all this stuff. It's a simple, I'd say simple journey mapping, things like that. Doing those exercises helps companies think about it. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:32) - I love that. Question for you. You've just mentioned all these incredible people that you are so fortunate to have on the team. How did you start to think about what types of people or what types of roles or what types of SMEs, however you wanna answer it, as things started, as the bonfire started getting bigger, started bringing on more customers, Question Pro started expanding, it was working, people are getting that, how'd you start to think about what people you needed to bring on or how you needed to develop the team? 

Speaker 2 (00:11:01) - Great question, dude. So, the one thing my friend Kodo, who's also my COO and CFO, told like, look. I rode the elevator down with Eric this morning. Kodo is a very dear friend of mine. He's been with me forever. You know, I'll tell a very personal story. He told me like, when I was trying to pitch him to come on and join us and be part of this journey with me. He's like, bro, I don't give a fuck about how much you pay me, but don't make me work with idiots. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:29) - That's my mantra, simple mantra. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:32) - You wanna work with... people. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:33) - Yes, and I look at it from a perspective of like, dude, if I put an amazing, smart people together and they like working with each other, we're gonna fucking crush it. You're gonna kill it, you're gonna kill it. That's it, that's all. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:42) - 100%. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:42) - No, that's the way I look at it. I'll give you a very personal answer. Like, look, yeah, you could have done a bunch of things, but dude, you're smart, you like working with us, we all love working with you. That is super important to me. right? Ultimately, look, you know, Ken has worked at Ipsos for 20 plus years, right? I guarantee you, Ipsos pays him more money than I do. Actually, I know Ipsos pays him more money than I do. Let me give you a very personal. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:09) - Let's make sure he's not too close to the studio over there. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:12) - No, they tried to recruit him after I hired him. Did they really? Yeah, and I said, Ken, what'd you say to him? He's like, dude, I love what I do. I don't give a shit about this. See, at some point, people are like, look, we've all heard this. If you can create an environment where people love working with each other, and why do people love it? Because they're intellectually stimulating. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:33) - Totally, 100%, yeah, you enjoy the time together. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:35) - All that. Exactly, enjoy the time together, right? And I'm a strong believer in that, right? So if we can create, so you asked the question. I figured, like, look, if I can create an environment where people love working with each other, right? Instead of shitting on each other and doing all this drama, right? And that requires certain things, it requires transparency, you know. And they have to believe that the person right next to you, their colleague, is actually smart. 

Speaker 3 (00:12:58) - 100%, yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:00) - You know, and is contributing to the game, really, right? 

Speaker 3 (00:13:03) - It's a team. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:03) - Look at these things as a team sport. I don't look at this, a lot of people say, "Look, a company's like a family." I don't believe that. Because what's the first thing that comes to your mind when it's a family? It's dysfunctional. You know, at least mine is, let me tell you That. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:18) - I understand. I'd say most of us agree with that, you know? You think about it, right? I think most of us agree with that. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:24) - But it's a team sport. I look at it as a team sport. I mean, team comes the right thing, right? Look, we're all in this, we have a season, we're going to win. And everybody's going to work together. you know? And we've got to put a team together. That is, like, high performance. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:38) - Viv, there's not enough business leaders to say what you just said, though. I talk about this constantly in the podcast, which is, you think about some of the greatest championship teams that have ever existed. Those teams were like brothers.

Speaker 1 (00:13:51) - They were brothers in in arms man, like they found a common mission or they followed a process or whatever you want to call it, whatever the mandate for that season in that year that club was. But then they in the second off, then they all bought in to whatever that looks like. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:05) - They bought in,... each other. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:05) - Then you get to... then, the most important thing, they enjoyed the shit. Yes, out of the time, whether it was the practices, that games, the chip, they enjoyed the shit. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:17) - And that is what, bringing people close like that, that's where the magic starts and then the machine starts right. I mean, okay, Ken works very closely with Sonia. She runs the EX business, he runs a lot of coalition and they have a great bond together. Yeah, they are. They're pushing each other's and you can see it. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:34) - You can see, by the way, here today. And I've gotten, I've been very, very fortunate to get to know your team up. You could see it with your team because enjoy each other, you like each other's company. Everybody gets along. There's joking, there's laughing, there's fun. We didn't blast the blast last, they were having a blast today. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:50) - Short to be, you know bitching and morning all day long. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:53) - It is- I'm glad you say that- because most people literally spend more time at work than they do with their best friends. Exactly, you better enjoy the time. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:03) - Literally I work my ass off. 

Speaker 3 (00:15:04) - Why? 

Speaker 2 (00:15:05) - Because I love what I do. Yeah, yeah, I mean, okay, you can say like look, I'm, I'm kind of like in a different position. I'm actually not like I, whatever work I do, yeah, but like that's what could have told me like look, just because you pay me double doesn't mean I work vice as hard. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of a marker for progress. Yeah, in for a company perspective. Yes, I could sell the company. It's a marker for progress. Yeah, we need to make more money tomorrow. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:26) - Yeah, but what I won't care, why I do passionately care about, I do give a shit about- is like all of us have to work together. Yeah, no bitching morning, less politics, you know, no fake backstabbing, all this dumb shit. 

Speaker 3 (00:15:39) - Yeah, right, yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:39) - And and I'll tell you, like one of the reasons I start my own company way back right, it's like: look, I used to do all this work and people used to backstab me and this that's what I don't want. Yeah, I cannot like if somebody leaves me because of that, I fuck. Yeah, I think, yeah, I want to create an environment where people come in and say, like, look, performance matters. Yeah, team, you have you have to be on your a-game. Yeah, and we are all in our game. Yeah, and that's the reason why we're together. Yeah, not this backstabbing, nepotism. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:10) - There's that all the drama, and we try to do that with, like, massive transparency. Everybody in this company, by the way, everybody in this company, can tell you at any point of time how much we are making. Yeah, 100%, but it's public dashboard, like it's like now we have enough people- it's kind of almost a public does. Yeah, right, thank you you, you can ask, and how much exactly you clearly down to the, down to the set, yeah, how much have we made? 

Speaker 1 (00:16:29) - Yeah, in the last month? 

Speaker 2 (00:16:30) - Yeah, yeah, it's a public dashboard. Yeah, right, it's about internal. Yeah, but it's because that gives, that's, that's, that's the target. You talk a little bit about the team. The team's gonna have a target. Yeah, I asked you. We are aligned to the target. Yeah, I mean, you know, in our case, as revenue, as a target is what we've said. Yeah, say like: look, we go, you know, that's how we measure we are making progress. 

Speaker 1 (00:16:51) - Love it. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:51) - So that's gonna be my no bullshit answer. 

Speaker 1 (00:16:53) - No, it's a bit of number one. Thank you so much for doing this last question, for I let you off the hot seat, my friend. Yes, I know you're busy man today, but it's all right. What's what's like the one big thing? You're as we, because we're almost we're in October, man, we're already getting in the home stretch for the key for 2024. Yep, What's like the one huge thing that you're excited about to close this year, for that, you know, is gonna set a question for on set up the team for a massive 2025? and I know it's a hard question, man. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:17) - I know it could be new, new customer segments you're going after. It could be some of this incredible stuff that cameras talking about with the expansion of the products and services. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:25) - So we've done, we've expect our goal. I mean, I'll have a tough time answering that, partly because our goal earlier this year was like: we expanded our power portfolio, we've expanded up our product portfolio and we've expanded our geographic portfolio too. Okay, so I need these things to work together. Yeah, right, so that's my game right now. So I need the geographic and the product portfolio to work together to blow up. Think of it. I have multiple products and multiple geographies and leaders that run your products, leaders that run geographies. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:53) - Yeah, I need those guys to really work together. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:55) - Yeah, to create a big pot. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:57) - Let's expand. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:57) - Okay, babe, number one, thank you so much for doing this, thank you. Thank you so much for being in, for letting us be here, and and we're pumped for what's more to come today, man, but it's our pleasure, man, thanks for coming, thank you, thank you, yes.