Cyara's AI-Powered CX Transformation Platform Helps Businesses Evolve To Meet Customers' Expectations | Rishi Rana

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #253, we welcomed Rishi Rana, CEO at Cyara based in Redwood City, CA. 

Cyara revolutionizes the way businesses transform and optimize their customer experiences. Cyara’s AI-based CX Transformation Platform empowers enterprises to deliver flawless interactions across voice, video, digital, and chatbot experiences. 

With Cyara, businesses improve customer journeys through continuous innovation while reducing cost and minimizing risk. With a 96% customer retention rate and world-class Net Promoter Score (NPS), today’s leading global brands trust Cyara every day to deliver customer smiles at scale.

In his role as CEO of Cyara, Rishi is dedicated to driving customer-centric innovation, expanding their global reach, and positioning Cyara as a leader of GenAI-powered CX assurance. 

Rishi has over 25 years of experience in scaling businesses and striving for excellence at every turn. Rishi leverages his love of technology and passion for serving customers and assisting companies along their journey to grow and deliver flawless interactions.

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

**Episode #253 Highlight Reel:**

1. Building one of the world's leading AI-Powered CX transformation platforms
2. Why mission & values become strategic anchors for growth & scale
3. 100% focus on accountability while building high performing teams
4. AI is forcing new expectations on resolution times & cost per resolution 
5. How the power of focus drives organizational transformation & success 

Click here to learn more about Rishi Rana

Click here to learn more about Cyara

Huge thanks to Rishi 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.

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #253 with Rishi Rana, CEO at Cyara

Adrian (00:00:00) - Alright, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CXChronicles podcast. Super excited today, guys, cuz. Number one, we are kicking off another brand new year and another brand new season of of CXCP. But, number two, we've got a pretty awesome guest that's gonna be kicking off the year with us, Rishi Rana, CEO of Cyara. Say hello to the CX Nation, my friend. 

Rishi (00:00:22) - Hey, Adrian, good to good to be here, good to be talking to the CX nation and good to get our word out for Seattle and what we do over here. 

Adrian (00:00:29) - I love it. So, number one, guys, just a quick background, I'm gonna let Rishi set set the stage and do his stepping stones, where Rishi is an incredible customer focus business leader who's been thinking about customer transformation and customer journeys, not just by himself, but with literally some of the biggest and the best and the brightest companies on planet earth working with a number of different fortune 1000. So this is gonna be a good one, guys. 

Adrian (00:00:53) - So some of our, some of our listeners, make sure you hit pause and you, you take notes for some of the golden nuggets she's gonna throw at us today. But, number one, Rishi, let's jump right in. Man, um, I love to start to the show that we start off all these episodes- it's been a couple minutes just talking about how you got into this space, what, what made you kind of gravitate towards this whole world of customer experience and thinking about customer journeys and customer transformation. 

Adrian (00:01:15) - How did you get into this whole space and how, certainly, how did you get into this incredible role and position in this opportunity that you got with Ciara today? 

Rishi (00:01:23) - Yeah, I think first and foremost it's: I take every role as a privilege. I mean this is this role is a privilege to me. Look, I think my mantra and life has been for a very long time: workers worship for me. So I want to make sure that anything that is given to me I take it with that level of gratitude, but at that level of intensity as well, in order to provide back. Now, look, I think I'm a technocrat at heart. I'm a computer science and a math major from college perspective started my journey with Microsoft. 

Rishi (00:01:53) - That's where I spent good half 50% of my career so far. I've been in the industry for over 25 years of my life, all in the computer areas. Of it, 50%, as I mentioned, about half of it- comes out of Microsoft. Learned my way in, accidentally happened to be and actually graduated from A&M, moved to Seattle working for Adobe. When I got to Adobe is when I realized that half the city works for Boeing and the other half works for Microsoft. 

Rishi (00:02:22) - Adobe was a was a small unit and those days this is on, so it was not not well known, and so I switched to Microsoft and there was no process of elimination and there was no thinking I'm like, okay, I know I want to work for Microsoft and but you know what my? It changed my career in a very large way, learned a lot of things all the way- I'm talking from 1996 onwards to to the entire journey. We did a lot of thing: worked in Visual Studio, worked in languages division, worked in office, worked in the services areas, marketing, sales. 

Rishi (00:03:03) - So I think giving that complete round picture and to end, of how to run businesses is then when I stepped into into running smaller businesses of that magnitude- and I love my current journey and that's what I'm doing- which is to take smaller businesses between 100 to 150 million and scaling it up to that next level of growth. With that, either either you go IPO or you go and exit, you merge with a larger company, making sure it's the simple, again, philosophy of life to follow, where rivers flow from the mountains and they merge with the sea. 

Rishi (00:03:43) - So making sure that you know, take the small river, I can meander with it, I can work with it. I can I have my hands dirty with it, so I love to do that and- and this is my fourth run- of taking that smaller River to Mars, that's awesome. Yeah, and as part of this, again, why did I I mean from us- I think you asked the question in terms of customer experience? Because he running all these organizations has given we all do it for what we do it, for creating the products that help our customers with that. 

Rishi (00:04:17) - We want to make sure that the customer journey, understanding that with, but that maniacal focus to make sure that you're understanding what the journey is- a journey is how how that customer satisfaction is- and because that's what we work towards- and now get to be part of this wonderful organization called Siara, which has some awesome customers of all the largest of the banks, the largest of the technology companies- microsoft's and Google's and Apple's of the world- and getting to learn their customer journeys and making sure how are we going to make an impact to that is just awesome. 

Rishi (00:04:57) - So learning what I had, but continuing to learn a lot more and making sure that that gets into our platform and products so that we can provide that service to. 

Rishi (00:05:07) - Our customers. 

Adrian (00:05:08) - I love that. Rishi, number one just like talk about an incredible set of opportunities and experiences that you got to go through throughout your career. Talk about some of the biggest businesses on planet earth, too, in terms of everybody knows some of the companies you just talked about now today at CRI, like you just said, you guys are literally serving some incredible- you know- global businesses. 

Adrian (00:05:29) - That when you talk about not just understanding the customer journey or understanding the user journey, but talk about the scale behind some of that, many of our listeners, Rishi, they're guys and gals that are building tomorrow's emerging companies and they might be living in a world right now where they're still in the bonfire building phase. 

Adrian (00:05:45) - Right, you mentioned 100 to 250 million to IPO state A lot of our listeners they're just thinking about maybe they just got product market fit, maybe they just raised their series A or B and they're just starting to really kind of figure out the scaling. And how do you bring this thing up into the right and how do you keep quality on the customer journey and how do you keep quality in the way that you're continuing to provide your deliverables or manage your customer expectations. 

Adrian (00:06:06) - That stuff's hard, so like people are going to love some of the stuff that you guys are doing at Cyara, and people are just going to genuinely love hearing from somebody like you who's now done it not just once, not twice, but multiple times and then again, I think you know- for me- I mean, you and I talked about this on our last chat- but, like you, start to talk about the volume and the scale and just the abundance or the pure value of some of those customer communications or some of those customer touch points when you start to get to the big leagues, right, man, that's huge. 

Adrian (00:06:37) - That can literally make or break a business, or it can be the difference between how they continue to maintain their market share or how they continue to remain, you know, a leader in their vertical or in their industry as it relates to how they serve the customers. It's a, it's a, it's a big deal, man. So I'm really kind of- I'm personally- pumped to kind of dive into this and kind of learn some of the things you guys are doing. Let's, with that being said, let's dive into the first pillar team. 

Adrian (00:07:01) - I'd love for you to spend a couple of minutes kind of just share their listeners number one, sort of how the CR team is built today, or number two, since you've been really kind of running or running the business, I'd love for you to spend some time kind of thinking about how you think about that first pillar of team, in terms of what types of people do need on board, what types of roles or departments are critical to make sure that you're you're really kind of creating that balance and creating that you know that, some of that extra magic that we kind of talk about with serving some of these clients. 

Adrian (00:07:32) - But a few minutes just kind of talking about the CR team. 

Rishi (00:07:34) - Yeah, no, a good question. And I think, look, I think, from from your viewpoint- I think you mentioned about if you're a business which are, you know, sub million or sub 10 million, et cetera, or sub 5 million, the number one focus on scaling up is to actually understand these functions and teams and and, and if you're a CEO of that business, the one question you need to ask yourself is: hey, are you doing? Are you doing everything? 

Rishi (00:08:03) - List out the functions, list out marketing, list out customer success, list out sales, list out solution architecture, list out R and D, list out product, list out HR, list out finance and list it out and put a name against it. Most of the entrepreneurs that I've worked with, they put their name against each one of those functions, and that's rightly so. 

Adrian (00:08:28) - Yeah, right, right. 

Rishi (00:08:28) - In order to scale up: if you're doing everything, then something is amiss. So the functions that you need to think about at a broad brushstroke level is marketing within marketing. You need to have certain focus. Then you have sales: pre-sales versus post-sales, versus actual account management. Then comes in services: if your product is providing services on top of it, what is the professional services structure? Look like net support. Very, very critical piece of it. 

Rishi (00:08:57) - Then comes in – and people say that, hey, my product is self-standing, it does not need services. Net support. There will always be some need. Some customer is going to come across and are you prepared for that? That's all. And then comes in, obviously, a very, very important piece: 75% of the cost of any business is people, HR. What are your HR values? It's very important to know who you are, what are your values, because those are the strategic anchors you can hook your business on. And then comes in finance, obviously. 

Rishi (00:09:32) - But look, if you're putting your name across all these functions and teams, so then you need to look yourself in the mirror and say, okay, where do I have my next level? Who can help me scale? Because that's the team you need, that's the functions you need to lift it up. 

Adrian (00:09:47) - Yeah, I love it. It's funny because obviously we spend a lot of time talking about customer journeys and user journeys and understanding the intricacies of any given map. When you say it like that man number one, it's amazing how many companies that we work with at CXC that will start an engagement and will say: look, it's really great. Can we see the most recent customer journey maps? Or the most recent user journey maps or the most recent partner journey maps or even employee journey maps? 

Adrian (00:10:16) - Right, like going through all these different things and you got people say, no, no, no, that's not important, that's not important at all. But when you're building a business, 

Adrian (00:10:23) - understanding some of the caveats or the granular pieces of ownership and just general touch points and just areas of maybe user or customer consternation versus employee consternation. And that's what most importantly, measures of management. Like everybody, you gotta remember that you can only truly measure what you manage. 

Adrian (00:10:45) - So even if you're building some of those early sets or if you're a big business like CRN, you've got years and decades of data and you're working with huge companies, but the idea of being able to understand across a journey, how does a customer become aware of the business altogether? How do they consider even thinking about them as a potential solution or a potential future partner? How do you convert them? 

Adrian (00:11:07) - How do you bring them into the funnel, bring them down a little bit further where you can convert them and make them a customer that's ready to maybe get moving and maybe either buy or start to at least engage with a proof of concept? And then the fun stuff that many of the folks on this show, the... folks that we have coming on, how do you keep them in the hopper forever? How do you keep them retained for the longest period of time with the highest customer satisfaction? 

Adrian (00:11:32) - And then think about what other areas of opportunity, downstream opportunity come from future products or future service needs or future offerings that you can start to kind of stack up in your product roadmaps or your OCARs. This stuff's hard, man. And I love how you said, look, start with the team. Have areas of accountability, responsibility and authority because the faster any exec or founder can do that, just like you said, now you start to understand who kind of owns the different layers of the land within your business. 

Adrian (00:11:57) - And then the last thing I want to just hit on that you said so well, guys, if you don't have a mission or a vision that's crystallized and socialized across the business on a regular basis, you're not always teeing up your employees and your customers to understand if that's a ship that they want to get on to go out on that voyage, right? So Arisha, I love all of that, man. Before we jump off this one, you've worked at all these incredible companies and now you guys are serving all of these incredible companies. 

Adrian (00:12:23) - If there's like one or two key traits or characteristics that you've seen along your journey of just the highest performing teams outside of the clarity and knowing who owns what, what are like one or two things you've seen across your journey that just kind of jump out at you? Maybe even examples of things you guys have had to do at Ciara as the business has grown and scaled on the team front. 

Rishi (00:12:45) - Yeah, no, I think, look, I think there are, that's the beauty that I like, whether you look at these smaller companies or larger ones, there are a few common things that come across. The one part is having a 100% focus on accountability. I think you mentioned that word, which is to say very simply put, if I'm passing the ball to you and you're scoring a basket, I trust you and I pass it to you and you trust it back to me. If you're not able to score it, you're still on my team. You're still wearing the same jersey that I do. 

Rishi (00:13:20) - And I got your back and you got my back. So I think the highest of the performing teams look at accountability and take that very seriously. I've stepped into work today. I am, here is my role. Here's my definition. I'm going to deliver X, pass it on to the other one. The other person can fail. I might go ask that other person, hey, how can I help you? 

Adrian (00:13:45) - Yep. 

Rishi (00:13:46) - And making sure, but still holding the other person accountable. The next time when I'm going to pass to you, don't have those greasy fingers. Make sure you are- I like that, man. 

Speaker 3 (00:13:57) - I like that. 

Rishi (00:13:58) - Making sure, I've seen that work very well. Then you hold people accountable. Alignment in my definition of structure is okay. It is not accountable is higher. Alignment is a step below, but you need alignment in order to get to accountability. 

Adrian (00:14:18) - I love that, man. I love that. Such good ideas and you're right. If you think about it, like so many areas of both customer and employee consternation, regardless of the business, the vertical, the size of the company, it comes because accountability isn't necessarily cemented and rebarbed into place yet maybe, or over time it's gotten rickety. 

Adrian (00:14:37) - And then number two, to your point about just like before you even get super, super tight on the alignment piece, that's almost going to be impossible if the folks that are running your business, running your customer facing teams, really thinking about the ownership and the general management and the optimization of that given customer journey, it's all going to be a little bit hard from that point. So I love some of those ideas. Rich, I'd love to jump into the second pillar of tools. Now, a couple of things. 

Adrian (00:15:05) - And I have a feeling you could talk about this one for go on and on and on, because you guys have some incredible tools that you're building at Cyara, plus you work with some of these global leading businesses. So you guys have this view into tools at a different level, right? But feel free to kind of answer this in an open way, but number one, I'd love to understand some of the tools and the primary tech that you folks have built at Cyara that you're providing to your customers every day. And then number two. 

Adrian (00:15:35) - Feel free to kind of like, go into some of the other things that you've seen with either your Siara customers or your past businesses and companies that you've built and scaled and grown to a different place. Just spend a couple minutes kind of thinking about how future business leaders need to think about tools and tech stack management and understanding how to, because this is complex. Now, let's call it what it is. This is one of the hardest parts of the business. Shouldn't be, because technology supposed to make all of our lives easier, right? 

Adrian (00:16:02) - But someone like you- you've probably seen the good, the bad, the ugly. I'd love for you just to spend a kind of a couple minutes kind of talking about this, this second pillar of tools, right? 

Rishi (00:16:11) - So so look, I think our platform, what we are, what we are solving the problem- and we are not fully there. I want to admit to that because we're still working towards it- which is to say there as omni channels- when, when you say omni channel, it's a super. We have your end customers of all the companies come through phone, come through browser, come through chatbots, come through any social media. You can do whatsapp, you can do other, so there are multiple places when you come to. 

Rishi (00:16:46) - Yeah, whether you're a bank, Citibank, Bank of America sector, you are. I mean, by the way, all of them are our customers as well. Point being is that they need to have is a simultaneous, seamless experience, no matter what you're using. I could be today using an iPad and I'm contacting my own personal bank account. I'm not gonna name you which bank account it is, I'm just kidding that that I should. 

Rishi (00:17:14) - I, if, for some reason, my iPad or my laptop had an interruption, I should be able to pick up the phone and continue my conversation with the person I was talking to or conversing with a chatbot. If the chatbot is not able to answer my question, I should be easily be able to seamlessly be able to transfer to my phone and I should be able to get that because it's he's a fuse, it's the ease of interruptions to customers should not be there. That's why I go back to maniacal focus of having eradicate bad customer experience. 

Rishi (00:17:46) - That's what I keep telling all my employees and and everybody at Ciara. Hey, we are here, we wake up every morning because we are going to eradicate what is bad customer experience. Within that, we are building all the products that help stitch all of that together where we are able to test, automate a large portion of it. We are investing into a very large way from a generative AI perspective, into all the products and tools, and then we monitor it. 

Rishi (00:18:16) - We monitor it so we go all the way from development to post-production, end-to-end DevOps cycle and we make sure that the same same journey has been tracked. We can, we, we know where it broke, where it did not wear- maybe it was a voice issue where there were a lot of gaps in the middle. Your call started from: let's take, I am in Austin, Texas. I started from Austin, but it went to maybe New York. From there it got transferred to Mexico and from there it got transferred to Philippines. 

Rishi (00:18:51) - But towards the end of the day, no matter who answered that, there was seamlessness in that and there was quality and and and receptivity and all that. So we, we go deep, we go wide, we have our networks across actual monitoring, not just simulation. We don't simulate when we test it. We have actual service sitting in 80-plus countries and we make sure that you're well covered for global businesses that we are serving. 

Adrian (00:19:20) - So I love that. I think you know one of the big things that every one of us can think about when you say, like that, this, this notion of having a seamless, omnichannel experience, number one, like that's thanks to our friends at amazon and- I hate to say this, many of the customers that you guys are working with at CR today- this is becoming, this has become expected. It's not an, it's no longer a nice to have, this is becoming a need to have. 

Adrian (00:19:46) - You think about, literally, Amazon and eBay and you think about Salesforce, zoom 18 to all these, these insurance. Really, this is like all of us have gotten used to work, where, like you're saying, regardless of which medium we prefer, regardless of which medium maybe we start a conversation or start a potential inquiry with, or a conversation with them- the ability to be able to bounce across, starting on the phone or the email or the chat bot, or being able to then bring it back to a text and all of us are on the go. 

Adrian (00:20:14) - This is like this is becoming expected. And then for some of our listeners right now, you know I get it. So you got to start somewhere and you got to build MVPs and you got to prove product market fit and you've got a. Then you've got a proof: product market fit and scale that make sure that ain't just a couple, but rather it's a lot of folks that actually have that need or that you're serving something for them. 

Adrian (00:20:31) - But this becomes something that almost immediately needs to start to move into one of the top goals or one of the top- oh cares- one of the top areas of focus on your product roadmap or on your customer experience from that, because this is what modern consumers are coming to expect. There's one other piece here and I'm- and I know you're gonna get into this because I'm- pumped to kind of dive into the whole- a AI piece. But then, guys, all this AI, AI, AI- that all of us are talking about it. 

Adrian (00:20:57) - Some people are sick of it, but the reality is, guys, like this is like a 

Adrian (00:21:01) - This is the equivalent to electricity, man. This is like the equivalent to, this is huge. 

Adrian (00:21:05) - Like this is gonna be something that, you know, tomorrow's business leaders and tomorrow's winning companies, they're already way ahead in terms of how we're gonna leverage artificial intelligence to be able to stay ahead, but also this notion of real time voice of customer or real time customer experience management happening based off of, we already have a view of all these different mediums and then to your point, Rishi, we already know what the user journeys or even the inbound journeys are looking like from where they start to where they end, to resolution, et cetera. 

Adrian (00:21:37) - This is a game changer, right? And I think like, it's one of these things that for our listeners, you don't necessarily have to be, you know, where Rishi and some of their customers are today at Cyara, but you better be thinking about it. 

Adrian (00:21:50) - And then the other thought is this, is like, Rishi, I'm still blown away by some of the clients that we work with at CXC that they've done a brilliant job of maybe getting to the 10 or the $25 million mark, but now they've got across their phone calls, emails, text messages, SMS, in-persons, in-person interactions with customers, and then just general transaction information and data. They're not doing anything necessarily with how to aggregate it, synthesize it, compartmentalize, then socialize. 

Adrian (00:22:20) - To your point, when you were talking about team and making sure you've got your marketing, your sales, your success, your product, your finance. Guys, this all can be done today. And most of you already have the tech stack that you're sitting on and using every day. You might need a little bit of support. You might need a little bit of help because I'm not saying this stuff's easy. 

Adrian (00:22:38) - There is a level of sophistication to it, but like being able to just aggregate and then understand exactly what market wants and needs and consternation points are is where everybody's gotta be going. And if you're not, you gotta hit pause and you gotta kind of rewind and listen back to why this is gonna be so critical. In terms of just like, I guess, Rish, I gotta ask you, and I told you, I was pumped to ask about just some of the things that you've learned from some of these customers you guys served today. 

Adrian (00:23:04) - But is there maybe like an area or two that you're seeing on a regular basis in terms of technology or maybe technology pains or challenges around utilization that you guys see again and again and again? You must simply put, are there specific tools or specific parts of a tech stack that part of why Cyara's able to come in and kind of provide some insta-value folks are struggling to utilize different parts, whether it's the CRM or maybe it's the ticketing solution, or maybe there's issues. 

Adrian (00:23:32) - Like, I'd love to kind of understand, is there a few key areas of pain that you guys are seeing again and again and again that you're really jumping in and helping to support your clients with? 

Rishi (00:23:40) - Yeah, I think, look, I look at it this way from a, again, from a technology perspective, we all have followed what is the Moore's law, which is technology shifting every 15 months, 18 months. And that's where it is. I mean, to your point, it's like electricity. I want to, look, I think there are three sort of, in my mind, there are three sort of phases we all have seen in our life. The life was when PCs came about. The second one was when internet hit. And now it is the AI piece. 

Rishi (00:24:11) - Now there has been technology improvements all the way from PC to internet to AI. But what has happened in the last 20 plus years was the Moore's law. Again, going back to my point number one, which is to say every 15 to 18 months, there was a shift in technology and everybody had to adapt to it. We had data centers and we had people moving to cloud and making sure. All of them were curves taking us up from a technology, but was not exponential. 

Adrian (00:24:44) - Yeah. 

Rishi (00:24:45) - Exponential points for PC was internet, like that was a hockey stick curve. 

Adrian (00:24:49) - Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Rishi (00:24:51) - Gen AI is that hockey stick curve that is going to take it up. So now if I term it as scaling laws, so Moore's law is no longer relevant. We now do scaling laws. The scaling laws is that our technology impact, especially in machine learning, natural language programming, and AI, not to say machine learning and NLP is not AI, that is AI, but making sure that the generative AI or the modern AI pieces of it is scaling at a much faster rate than six months, or maybe even less than that or three months. So we're going to start seeing that changes. 

Rishi (00:25:29) - Because of that, all folks who are solving a customer problem using or creating your tools, even CRF for that matter, we got to be with that race and we have to continue to put on that scaling mode because that's the mode we are working in. And hence, I mentioned that we are integrating generative AI across the entire platform. We're making sure that we are part of that scaling laws.

Rishi (00:25:58) - and sort of walking away from the Moore's law of 18 months to 24 months. 

Adrian (00:26:04) - I love that. It's funny. What you make me think about is there's a couple of big industry events that we've been to over even just the last couple of months. And you're right when you specifically talk about AI involvement in resolution expediency and or AI involvement in price per resolution optimization. 

Speaker 3 (00:26:25) - Right? 

Adrian (00:26:25) - And a big example would be our boy, Mr. Benioff, a couple of months ago, he was on all the big podcasts talking about how even Salesforce is getting ready to move into this cost per resolution type of world. That's it, man. Rishi, that's huge. And it's tough because I think for smaller businesses, they're so focused on growing and getting the bonfire going and figuring out the whole song and dance that they forget like, this is still important here. It's still important to be following and paying attention to all these other market trends. 

Adrian (00:26:53) - And even though you might not consider yourself to be at a competition with a company the size of an Amazon, following that lead or using those types of companies as a model is a pretty darn easy way of at least kind of making sure that you're doing some of the right things along the way. So I love it. Rishi, I'd love to jump in to the third pillar of process. Spend a few minutes. I know I always joke on the show and I say this, I know most people think this is the least sexy. It's one of my favorites because it's the glue and the cement. 

Adrian (00:27:19) - And then as someone like you, you're a scaling master and you've now done this four times in terms of taking a business and really being able to probably lever process into it hardcore to be able to achieve some of that scale. Spend a couple of minutes just talking about how you sort of built your own playbook along the years at all these different companies. 

Adrian (00:27:37) - And maybe even if it's just a few minutes, some of the things that you really mandate or expect from your executive leadership team when it comes to making sure that whether it's marketing, sales, operations, product, those folks, those executives have a playbook that's really kind of outlining and calling out and minimally chronically, hence the name, chronically and all the things that are happening every damn day of the week or every single month or every single quarter to achieve some of that increase in speed that you just referred to. 

Rishi (00:28:07) - Yeah, no, very good question. And let me think through this. There are a couple of pieces that come to my mind. So look, I think the first thing that comes to my mind is Tyson's quote that you have a plan until you get punched in your face. 

Speaker 3 (00:28:21) - I love it, man. 

Adrian (00:28:22) - One of my favorites, man. 

Rishi (00:28:24) - So I think looking at what happened with the Bills and Chiefs game last night. 

Adrian (00:28:30) - It's still sore, Rishi, remember, I'm in Buffalo. It's still a sore, sore, sore topic, my friend. 

Rishi (00:28:34) - So I would say, look, I feel for Josh Allen on that note and I feel that he deserved to be in New Orleans from my standpoint, but that's it. 

Adrian (00:28:47) - Thank you, I appreciate that. I'm sure he does too. 

Rishi (00:28:51) - But look, I think it was a perfect playbook. Bills had a perfect playbook. There was nothing wrong in the playbook, but the playbook can get punched on your face at times and you can still lose, is my point. 

Adrian (00:29:05) - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Rishi (00:29:08) - So playbooks are good, but you've got to always have a mitigation plan in place. So taking that up, I think coming back to it every time I start a new organization, I get in, it has three things. One is people, we already touched upon it. 

Adrian (00:29:23) - Yeah. 

Rishi (00:29:23) - Two is strategy. And number three is execution. 

Speaker 3 (00:29:28) - Okay. 

Rishi (00:29:28) - Strategy is all about who you are or who you're not, rather. It's very important to know who you're not versus who you are. 

Speaker 3 (00:29:37) - Yep. 

Rishi (00:29:37) - And where are you going to go? And in this day and age, coming back to that Moore's law and scaling laws, you have to only look at it from six to two years intervals with six months intervals in between and make sure you chart your path out. Last but not the least, the execution piece. The execution piece is bolstered on processes, is bolstered on playbooks for each function that needs to be done. As a simple example, you need to have a rhythm of the meeting. What cadence of meetings are you going to do? How are you going to do it? 

Rishi (00:30:13) - What is prioritization? Prioritization is a very easy word. You cannot have more than two to three priorities in any business, any business. And if that priority is not set right correctly and it is not prioritized in thoughtful prioritization, not just rushing to it, but thoughtful prioritization, how do you go about it? So again, having a playbook and our understanding of it. A deal strategy. You're scaling up your business. You mentioned you're smaller, you're getting the bonfire going, and you need to go scale up. 

Rishi (00:30:47) - What is, as a simple process, what we have is a deal desk every week. Every week, any salesperson, any part of the global company, we're in Europe and Australia and Asia Pacific and certainly a large portion in North America can raise their hand that they need help. There's a large deal they're attacking. Here's the plan. Here's what they're thought through. Can somebody help them? Holistically, yes, there is a manager and there are other people in place and we have the tools to help and all of that, but they need help.

Rishi (00:31:19) - So what is that you can help? So we have that. We have what is a heal desk. If somebody is, a customer is in pain, we should not see that, we should make sure. And that's where we learn the most because that information comes in and you get your playbooks better. So I walk in with what is a ready-made, should I say, frameworks. 

Adrian (00:31:41) - Yep, yep. 

Rishi (00:31:42) - And then frameworks are adapted to the business so that that playbooks can be created by marketing, by sales, by customer success, by services and is a very clear process to follow because it's very important that everybody's rowing the boat in the right direction. 

Adrian (00:32:00) - Yep. 

Rishi (00:32:01) - And one of my pages of that execution strategy is from, I have to say from Patrick Lancioni's playbook, which I read and talk about, which is about the rally cry constructs. What is a rally cry? What are the defining objectives? What are the standard objectives? What are the strategic initiatives? And strategic initiatives have to be, again, those three priorities, one, two, three. It can't be more than that. What is that you're trying to accomplish? Sometimes the entire company, you're set needs a rally cry for, say, just one quarter, three months. 

Rishi (00:32:40) - For the next three months, maniacal focus, I'm only going to do this one thing. 

Adrian (00:32:45) - Yep. 

Rishi (00:32:46) - For the next month's rally cry, I'm only going to do these two things, maybe one thing still for the first six months. That's it, the entire company. No matter what, this is the non-stop. Everybody's just working towards it. It needs to be what time zone you're going to accomplish, what you need to have, what is the outcome? Because towards the end of the day, anybody in the company, and that means anybody, it's me, my executive team, everybody can look at it and say, did we fail, did we pass? 

Rishi (00:33:14) - And that process, but the process to enable that piece is very important. Everybody understanding that piece is very important. So multiple playbooks from that angle collected over periods of my, you know, working with other organizations, but making those, I call them as frameworks, and then you apply them on the, and I still lose some, and I still win some, but I lose and I learn a lot. But I win and I enjoy, and we have high fives and everything, so. 

Adrian (00:33:49) - I love it. So Richie, a couple of things, man. Number one, all just spot on, bang on incredible CTAs and advice for our listeners. Number two, I think could not agree more about just the general power of focus. Companies that get maniacally focused, to your point, on a short list of things tend to do extremely well, are they're able to increase velocity, to your point, whether it's over a month, a quarter, the full damn year. But those are the companies that can take major strides in a few areas. 

Adrian (00:34:21) - The companies that try to just have, there's like top 10 rocks for marketing, sales, ops. And then we both experienced what it's like to work at those companies. So you talk to an employee who's living in that whole world, and they've got the thing where every damn day of the week, there's some new curve ball getting thrown at them by either their direct report or their executive leadership team. Man, humans only have such a long tolerance for that because it becomes hard, it becomes confusing. Even smart people get confused with that. 

Adrian (00:34:52) - One last thing is this, it's hard, to your point, humans love to see wins, man. Humans love to see, like I go to the gym or I go to train for something, or I'm a golfer or I'm a bowler or whatever the hell your activity is. But you see certain areas of your game, for lack of a better term, getting better in a short period of time, you get a little bit more hooked, you're a little bit more interested, you're a little bit more engaged, you're a little bit more excited to show up to the damn thing. 

Adrian (00:35:17) - And we both know that the companies typically that are dominating or excelling and creating world-class customer experiences, more often than not, they've got pretty damn good employee experiences. And some of this stuff that you're talking about where it's socialization, prioritization, ongoing training and education of why the top one or the top two is so paramount, and then you're connecting results backwards. 

Adrian (00:35:45) - You're showing, look, if we focus on this one big thing this quarter, guys, look at some of these downstream variables that minimally we know that will begin to create positive. That's game-changing, man. And most A players out there in the world, they wanna work for executive leadership teams and they wanna work at organizations that have that type of thought. So I absolutely love it. Awesome points here on the process side. 

Adrian (00:36:06) - Guys, for some of our listeners, click rewind and go back and listen to this because there was a bunch of things that you could apply literally to a small business or to a public billion-dollar market cap business that is still struggling with some of this type of prioritization and general communication optimization in both their customer and their employee ranks. Rich, I'd love to jump into the fourth and the final CX pillar of feedback. And you know how I like to tee these ones up, man. 

Adrian (00:36:30) - I'd like for you to spend a minute or two kind of talking about some of the things that you and the team at Ciara do on the customer feedback side, ways that you're levering customer feedback, ways that you're really kind of utilizing it to be able to make Ciara service offerings or maybe even potential future partner opportunities or maybe other businesses out there that you know that could complement the Ciara offerings really well. 

Adrian (00:36:53) - So I'd love just a minute or two on the customer feedback side of things and then maybe an example or two around how you guys think about employee feedback.

Adrian (00:37:02) - Yeah. 

Rishi (00:37:03) - Very, very, very important part of the business, by the way. So customer feedback and customer impact. Look, I think our, my one thing is that about each and all our products on our platform have a customer impact and a business impact and an ROI, three things that we say we promise in our product. So, number one is making sure across the 12-month cycle, making sure that monthly, what was the ROI, what was the customer impact, what was the business impact? That is already documented in our CRM system. 

Rishi (00:37:35) - So anybody in the company, whether you're in support, whether you're in services, sales, you can go look at it. You can look at an account and say, where do I fall on these three parameters? That's number one. Number two, we have a meeting with the business users who are like, that's quarterly done with the users of the product who are using our products. And then we have what is an executive business review, EBRs. 

Rishi (00:38:01) - So we work with the executives of the company to make sure that, hey, are you seeing the same results that the users of the products are seeing? Because sometimes the users see between the trees, the executive sees the forest. So we can't get feedback from both perspectives. Are we missing the forest? Are we not missing the forest? Are we able to traverse the users through the trees in the forest? So those are the two parts to it. The third aspect of it is what we run is what is certainly a customer advisory board on a quarterly basis. 

Rishi (00:38:38) - So we have executives, we are reviewing our roadmap, we are reviewing our investments with them. Here's where we are investing. This is what we're seeing in the market. This is how things are changing from a product perspective. Is that in? And last but not the least is we have cohorts of customers that we sit with and we understand like how do you work and use our products daily. Like we got to learn from you every time. It's not that it's one and done. I know about it and I'm able to just escape. No, I review it and then learn from that. 

Rishi (00:39:09) - And then suddenly we notice a gap. You find a jewel right there. Oh my God, we missed it in our product. I think here's what will make your life easier. So we bring that information back and then we feed that back into the product roadmap, change it so that we can help promote it further. 

Adrian (00:39:29) - I was gonna say before you even jump off that, customer listening, what you're talking about, customer listening tours, customer listening task force, customer listening focus groups. Guys, it is such an easy way of unpinning some common misconceptions or things that you thought the user wanted X, Y, Z because of X, Y, Z. To your point Rishi, you sit with them for 30 minutes and you say, oh my God, they don't care about X, Y, Z at all. They want these two things. What a game changer. And then customers appreciate that as well. Yep. 

Rishi (00:39:58) - Yep. And we are able to pivot that. I think being nimble footed, changing that, I think prioritization goes back to the process piece of it comes in very, very critical. How do you prioritize now? Because often if you have an engineering team, they'll say, oh, I'm already doing this part of it. 

Adrian (00:40:17) - You've never heard that before Rishi, right? You've never heard that from your product teams, right? 

Rishi (00:40:24) - So yeah, I think it's how do you continue to march that forward? I think that's from the customer perspective. And similarly, from the employee perspective, oh, I forgot to mention one more thing on the customer piece, which is to, we certainly do our NPS surveys. We do customer surveys as a targeted service by our segments of tiers. We have four tiers, tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four customers. So we get feedback. We try to make sure that we are also listening in through that. 

Adrian (00:40:53) - Do you have a preferred cadence on that Rishi or through all the companies that you've helped to scale and build, has there been an optimal cadence that you've noticed with some of those CSAT efforts, whether it's NPS or customer side or different for every business, different for every market? I'm curious as to what you found kind of has worked the best for you. 

Rishi (00:41:12) - Yeah, I think it's the latter. It's different for every business and different for every market. In our case, currently for Cyara, I divide them by customer segmentation is very important because the feedback I get from my tier one customers is very different from the other. And we have to absorb it and comprehend it to marry the feedback together. So this cadence that we are following, I think, look, I think I have seen it work every three months. Every six months. Like I mentioned, it's with the scaling and the change. 

Rishi (00:41:49) - I don't think anything works, which you do just once a year. So that would be my only recommendation based on how things have been evolving. And similarly, on the employee front, look, I think there are things that we have changed significantly, because I feel that we cannot sit for the full year to get that feedback as well. Same goes for the customers. So it has to be quarterly goals.

Rishi (00:42:15) - that are being, again, very clearly measured, time-bound. Here's the outcome is being measured, just like a business outcome. It's an employee outcome. These are the outcomes. These were the times that were supposed to be done, done, not done. And now, if it is not done, that's okay, because you have to understand the reason behind it and make sure that you get carried over next quarter and are able to accomplish it. Because look, there can things that can happen to everybody in personal lives as well. And we have to be conscious about it. 

Rishi (00:42:48) - We have to be pragmatic about it. But then we also have employee feedback surveys as well. E, what we call is ENPS scores. 

Speaker 3 (00:43:00) - Yeah, sure. Employee score. 

Rishi (00:43:00) - And we rate it by managers. We rate it by different level of people. So we get a good score going. 

Adrian (00:43:09) - I love it, man. So a couple of things. Number one, thank you for sharing all this. These are all incredible ideas, incredible CTAs. And guys, I think it's important. As you hear Rishi talk about this, there's a million different ways you can slice it and dice it but the bottom line is, if you're not constantly on the hunt for how you can collect it, how you can compartmentalize it or synthesize it, how you can normalize it sometimes. So to Rishi's point, don't send a blanket outbound survey to your most valuable to your least available. 

Adrian (00:43:39) - They're using your products and service for different things. Number two, for some of our builders, some of our founders, Rishi, they're listening right now. The faster you understand how to get to ICP or the faster you understand how to get to bullseye target, ICP or ideal customer profile that's going to be able to allow you to do all the things that you're trying to do in your world for the problem that you set out to fix for the world. Man, that's a game changer. 

Adrian (00:44:02) - The last part is this, and I'm going to go back to something you said a little bit earlier, Rishi, but spending time on the front line. Spending time on the front line is something that I'm telling you, Rishi, to this day, it doesn't matter what type of customers we're working with at CX Chronicles, some of our executive champions will say things like, no, no, no, you don't have to spend any time looking at the way that my team does tickets. 

Adrian (00:44:24) - Well, yeah, we do because there's 25 of them and they manage X number of tickets a year and then we're here because there's a retention problem or we're here because somebody's turning because they're not loving the way that we're supporting whatever the remediation is required. So yeah, we're going to spend a little time there just to understand it. Number two, going back to the mapping that we kind of talked about earlier, and again, guys, there's a million ways you can map. You don't have to spend a month doing a map. 

Adrian (00:44:49) - You could get some of your best and brightest, get some of your subject matter experts from the right groups around the table. You could bang these things out quickly to have the high level, but you also begin to see some of the journey-based feedback, right? Maybe you're crushing it pre-sale. Maybe your sales team and your marketing team is nailing it and they're spot on. Maybe once you get to onboarding and account management or post-sale, things ain't so good. 

Adrian (00:45:13) - So the idea here is just constantly socializing and just talking about it, making sure that there's one area in some of these things that you're going to get maniacal folks on. This is awesome, man. So Richie, number one, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these ideas. Super pumped to kind of see what you and the CR team do moving forward. Before I let you go, my friend, you know the deal. Anything that you want to shout out to the CX Nation for things that are coming up this year or maybe even this quarter for Ciara? 

Adrian (00:45:39) - And then number two, where can people get in touch with you and your team if they listen to today's episode and they want to learn more about how Ciara might be able to help their business? 

Rishi (00:45:47) - Ah, no, thank you. First and foremost, I mean, reach out to us anytime. 

Adrian (00:45:50) - It's ciara.com. 

Rishi (00:45:52) - You can reach out to me, Richie Rana on LinkedIn. You can absolutely let me know if you're using, if you're a Ciara customer and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. I think you can reach me out on Twitter. It's Richie Rana. Twitter is very straightforward. One word. I think, again, making sure that we, I think what is coming up, I think for us, the biggest event, we host a yearly event. 

Rishi (00:46:19) - We attend a lot of other events of the industry, certainly in the CX space, but our biggest one is coming up, which is here in Austin in my hometown, is our exchange event. It's in April. It's our yearly event. We're expecting all our customers to be attending that. We have awesome keynotes. We are having some of the industry leaders from AI who have been our advisors in our journey to also step in and provide their view as to how AI impacting CX, what is going to happen? How's the world going to be changing around us? 

Rishi (00:46:53) - And more importantly, what me, Ciara, the team are doing about it as well. 

Speaker 3 (00:46:59) - I love it. 

Adrian (00:47:00) - Rishi, thank you so much for doing this today, man. I really do appreciate it. Super excited to see what you and your team do moving forward and folks, I'll make sure that I put all of these, these upcoming events and where you can contact Rishi and our show notes as always. Rishi Rana, thank you so much for joining the CX Chronicles podcast. It's been my pleasure, my friend. 

Rishi (00:47:16) - Thank you, Adrian. Thank you for the time.