Building All-in-One Customer Insight & Action Platform | Dave Rennyson

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #274, we welcomed Dave Rennyson, President & CEO at SuccessKPI based in the Washington, DC area. 

SuccessKPI is an on-demand insight and action platform that removes the obstacles that agents, managers, and executives encounter in delivering exceptional customer service.

SuccessKPI is trusted by some of the world's largest government, BPO, financial, healthcare, and technology contact centers in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

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

**Episode #274 Highlight Reel:**

1. Why the best organizations & teams invest in constant training efforts
2. How music and business are wildly similar
3. Leveraging & investing in AI over the next 1,000 days
4. Understanding the power of your data architecture 
5. Tomorrow's leading tech-companies will bring solutions, not headaches

Click here to learn more about Dave Rennyson

Click here to learn more about SuccessKPI

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

For all of our Apple & Spotify podcast listener friends, make sure you are following CXC & please leave a 5 star review so we can find new members of the "CX Nation". 

You know what would be even better?

Go tell your friends or teammates about CXC's custom content, strategic partner solutions (Hubspot, Intercom, & Freshworks) & On-Demand services & invite them to join the CX Nation, a community of 15K+ customer focused business leaders!

Want to see how your customer experience compares to the world's top-performing customer focused companies? 

Check out the CXC Healthzone, an intelligence platform that shares benchmarks & insights for how companies across the world are tackling The Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback & how they are building an AI-powered foundation for the future. 

Thanks to all of you for being apart of the "CX Nation" and helping customer focused business leaders across the world make happiness a habit!

Transcript

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:00.672)

All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady -Cesana Super pumped today, guys. We have an awesome guest joining us. Dave Rennyson the president and the CEO of Success KPI is joining us. Dave, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend.

Dave Rennyson (00:14.819)

Hey, hello. Thank you for having me here today. Really appreciate the invite.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:18.182)

Absolutely, Dave, I'm pumped, man. I absolutely loved our first conversation. Just listening and learning to how you've gone about your journey, how you've gone about building Success KPI, even some of the stuff that you were doing before Success KPI that led to what you're doing and the business that you built. But I'm pumped, man. Let's just jump right into the show. Before we get into the four pillars and the fun stuff, why don't you take a couple minutes just to introduce yourself to the CX Nation and maybe, Dave, give even pre-Success KPI, maybe a couple of the...

Give, spend a few minutes kind of talking about the stepping stones, which led you to where you are today and which led you to building and getting into the, into the whole business space that you and the awesome team at Success KPI are building in today.

Dave Rennyson (00:56.067)

Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. So I, started my career, you know, more in operational roles, actually ran a bunch of contact centers and some of my earlier, you know, first line and second line management positions in the telecom industry, working for what was formerly BeltLand and now Verizon. But through my career, I've moved into sales. been in marketing, operations, product development, you know, all sorts of different roles across different businesses.

I eventually kind of moved into the software space more on the vendor side, providing tools and technology to, to large enterprise companies. And I've been very fortunate to, to run two different SaaS software as a service companies through their growth stage. some cases from very early stage all the way through to, you know, being acquired by a billion dollar entities. So I've been, I've been on a few really, really interesting product journeys focused on this enterprise contact center space.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (01:51.404)

That's awesome, man. I mean, just to to just kind of look back at Dave's background guys like spending time at companies like Verizon and spending times at company companies like Spirit or Genesis. Dave, like, come on, Genesis is one of the giants in our in our space and our business and super, super cool, man, just to be able to kind of number one, you spent years honing this craft and refining the subject matter expertise space. But what were some of like the

Dave Rennyson (02:05.167)

Fabulous company.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:17.568)

In those businesses, when did you kind of start getting the early thoughts of, a minute, I might go, I see certain areas of opportunity. I think there's things that we could do better. When did you kind of start thinking about like, when was the infancy of success KPI? When you start kind of new around with, I think I can go build something in this space.

Dave Rennyson (02:32.365)

Yeah, I mean, it was almost, you know, decade ago when we started talking and thinking about some of these things. Ultimately, you know, none of these great ideas are ever your own idea. Any founder tells you they came up with something from scratch.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:45.198)

100%. Absolutely. Like any great song, man, any great song is a song from some other band before.

Dave Rennyson (02:51.545)

There you go. And I think, you know, first of all, we had, you know, many of us, probably two or 300 folks that worked at Angel. We had this really special culture of people that just worked well together, peaceful, you know, not as it's almost a political environment focused on doing things for the customer and having fun at it. And I mean, there's plenty of conflict, right? When anytime you get a group of people together to work on something, but it's creative conflict, you know, it's hard work, very strong work ethic group.

Um, and it was about 2015 to 17 timeframe when I ran into a couple of my former colleagues, um, a couple of whom are now on my founding on our founding team. Yeah. And they had like this bug that I had to do something new and different. And we actually talked about creating another CCAS, but when we looked out in the market, Genesis cloud five nine, Amazon connect Cisco, you know, there's there's in contact. They've been acquired by nice.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:27.917)

Awesome.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:36.12)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:40.876)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Rennyson (03:45.657)

There's plenty of tools in that space. What could we do different? And what we felt was that the space that was occupied by Nice and Berendt and Calabrio and others, they were doing things kind of in a robotic automatic way, right? And by the way, great companies, like some of the top players in our space. But we felt like we could reinvent it, ground up with a different strategy centered on data, centered on AI, centered on easy to use customer.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (04:00.994)

Yeah, sure. Sure.

Dave Rennyson (04:15.169)

software, because the audience in the contact center, you know, you're talking about supervisors, quality managers, analysts, and executives, right? You know, these folks need tools that are easy to use. They've got hundreds and thousands of agents to manage and it's got, it's got to be simple. We think we could do something different here. And so we set about building this, what I would consider it's what's called workforce engagement management, but building a platform that unified all the data and tools in that space to help people make contact centers better.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (04:20.472)

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dave Rennyson (04:43.427)

So rather than compete with the CCAS players, we wanted to sit on top of these great new cloud platforms and make customer experience better, help people drive automation and fix problems in the underlying business of whatever they're in serving their customers at the context of their level.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (05:00.462)

I love that. mean, Dave, you're right. Like, so number one, you and your founding team were already, you already knew this whole landscape. You already knew what worked, what worked, which, which solutions worked well, which solutions worked well for certain instances. And you guys decided to, let's just go build something on top of these, a couple of things, build on top of giants. Cause they were already giants at that point, right? Dave, they were already behemoths at that point. And then the other thing too is like, you guys knew that these systems work well.

But maybe they don't give the best on-demand insights. Maybe they don't make it easy for those leaders, those contact center leaders to have CTAs, calls to action, just put up right in front of them every morning or every afternoon or every end of day, whatever your call center, whatever your calling strategy looked like. And it was really about removing some of those obstacles that made it probably clunky at the time to get some of that reporting or to get some of those insights and make it easier and automate it and put it right in front of people. I think that's...

Number one, super cool. But number two, that's probably why you guys had immediate success. was there was strategy into what you were building upon. There was strategy to the why. Super duper cool, man. Super duper cool. Daniel, let's jump into the first pillar team. Talk about the team. and go about this however you'd like. like, what were some of the first players that you knew you needed to bring into the pitch? Just a minute ago, you talked about some of your founding, your founding leadership members that helped you build success KPI.

once you guys had it laid for the land and you knew what you were sort of going to build and how you're going to try to go to market, what were some of the first like roles or what were the first areas of offensive midfield defense that you knew you needed to put together to start building the initial success KPI team?

Dave Rennyson (06:36.335)

Yeah. Well, when you're in that sub $10 million space, the very first thing you need is a product that does something unique and different, right? It was product and engineering and technology is all the money went. And, you know, I was fortunate that I was comfortable doing a mediocre job in marketing, a pretty decent job in sales. think I'm pretty good at solving customer problems in a very, you know, consultative way, you know, as an independent contributor and also even helping on the delivery. Cause a lot of the

Adrian Brady-Cesana (06:41.991)

You need something that works that you can sell.

Dave Rennyson (07:03.439)

stuff we did on the client side was made to be so easy that I can even handle some of the early implementations of things that we were doing. The third pillar was bringing in the professional services teams and members. And what we found was we need people had strong analytical minds and able to process lots of data and configure and do data discovery differently. But they also needed to have an understanding of the contact center. Like not everybody understands how to build up A-H-T from scratch.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (07:08.45)

Nice. Yeah.

Dave Rennyson (07:30.903)

And what we found is even across the CCAS platforms, they're not necessarily all given out the correct answer. It may not be wrong, maybe a slightly different interpretation, but we've seen a lot of folks that are moving, let's say from a Viya to Genesis Cloud or from Cisco on-prem to, you know, one of the, you know, Amazon connect instances. And, and all of these migrations take a lot of attention to detail on data. This can have regulatory implications for folks serving federal government or healthcare or financial services clients.

and some governments have oversight of these things. It can also have payment issues, right? The VP of sales or the VP of customer success has paid on these metrics. And if they're not summing or calculating correctly, you're affecting people's income. So you have to get this stuff right. So we needed to have people that were truly intimate with the machinery of how a contact center works. to some degree, we trained some of these folks to some degree, we took one skill and added the other, but these two things were needed to make things happen.

I'll get to a little bit. talk about processes about where that's evolving next. Next. The next bit was then to make the sales team or independent. And I brought in players from my past life. In fact, almost I would say 80 % to 90 % of the company, the employees either work for me previously or one of the other founders. Um, and there's this fabric and rich community that you get when people have a decade long relationship with each other. Right. And there's also a bit of, know, in a work from home, you know, we're fully remote environment.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (08:53.909)

Absolutely 100%. Yep.

Dave Rennyson (08:59.951)

around the globe, even though people are getting to work and get stuff done, right? So, you know, most of the folks here, we know their work ethic. They are people that will go above and beyond for customers and for each other to get things done. So we built that out. But yeah, so it went product and technology, then professional services delivery, helping customers succeed with the product, then sales. And kind of where we're now finally coming around to is marketing. We haven't spent a lot of money on marketing. Everything you've done has been due to great partnerships with the CCAS players.

due to word of mouth of folks hearing what we're doing and the things we're doing for different customers. And so now we're starting to build up a marketing engine this year and we'll actually announce our CMO joining here before the end of December and beginning to build out marketing in earnest for demand gen programs independent of our partners.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (09:46.67)

That's fantastic. Couple bits. For our listeners, Dave, go back just for a second to when you say like some of this organic growth and overnight success, right? 10 years, Overnight success, right?

Dave Rennyson (09:59.151)

Yeah, I mean, about the ideas, you know, maybe 10 years old, but the actual first like fingers on keyboards was 2017 product market. It first customer 2019 like it took us a year and a half to get something worthwhile. And then our explosive growth phase, you know, started in 2020. So really only five years at it, you know, growing growing in the market and an exciting.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:07.982)

That's, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:23.182)

I see, appreciate that, man. And some of what you were sharing with me last week when you were catching up, like, listeners, like, this is like, guys, this is like the thing that people forget is that I was joking, obviously, with David overnight success, but like, this stuff takes a while. It takes time. then even if you're already a subject matter expert and you're an individual with a team of other individuals that knows the space intimately, this stuff still takes time. You still have to figure out.

There's the testing, there's the iteration, there's the going to market piece and seeing what the hell does stick? What can we actually convert into dollar bills? Which guys, that's always gonna be the hardest part of any business is figuring out how to crack that code. I love that you're finished on marketing too, by the way, because this is the other thing. How many companies, Dave, do this ass backwards where they don't have any of their shit figured out? Nothing is actually tightened and bolted together. Spend a shit ton of money on marketing early, they sell a bunch of wrong stuff, churn goes up, customer satisfaction is low, employee satisfaction is low. So I love just like,

the hearing it done well. then, and then I hate to say it, but guys like things that are well built things take time to build and they're done very thoughtfully and strategically. And I just think I like that you're calling that part out, Dave, cause like, this is the stuff everyone wants to say overnight. Yeah, right. This stuff takes a long time to even get to the place where you have that, that, that, that, that success that, that, you know, you eventually yield.

Dave Rennyson (11:26.753)

It's not the same.

Dave Rennyson (11:40.737)

Absolutely, absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (11:42.91)

Dave, let's jump into the second pillar of tools. Spend just like a couple minutes kind of talking about as you guys built Success KPI, what maybe, and share what you can. know that everyone who are guys has a different ability to talk about this, but what was some of the primary technology that you guys invested in? So said specifically, what CRM, what issue resolution management, were you guys building your own stuff and using your own technology? What did that early tech stack look like? And then what are your tools and your technology?

solutions kind of grown in today as the business and as the team has grown at Success KPI.

Dave Rennyson (12:15.213)

Yep. Great, set of questions. And by the way, coming, riffing off of your kind of this iterative approach to making things work, the image I have of both a SaaS, SaaS company, as well as, of SaaS product is, you know, when you're building, it's kind of like the winding of a nautilus shell, right? It starts with one grain of sand, right? And it's kind of works its way around. And eventually you have this beautiful shape that's complex and intricate. you section a nautilus shell and look at it, it's, it's amazing how it grows over time. Right.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (12:33.998)

Yeah.

Dave Rennyson (12:44.545)

You need to get those early vines correct and you need to build on top of things. And if you have the right strategy and the right approach for us, the very center of that was the data strategy. We believe that one of the fundamental differentiators for us long-term would be to get the data models right. And what I mean by that is there's data from WFM, there's data from quality management, there's data from the agent activity, there's data from the conversations themselves. There's data that happens after.

in systems like the CRM system or billing systems, depending upon what kind of contact center it is. And all of this data typically is in silos. And even in the best CCAS platforms, their teams work independently because these are hard projects to build, but they don't have a unified data strategy. And what that creates is a lot of difficulty in getting to the answer of what's actually happening inside and around the customer experience, especially if it's across channels, et cetera. So I think the first thing I'd say is we went to work

creating a unified shared metadata layer, using some big words, right? But what's basically means that all the data structures are joined and we have an intelligent way of operating across channels, across platforms and unifying that data. And we did that initially, by the way, for the reporting layer. So first, that was the first decision. Our team then took the products that we needed to build and there were five of them. We needed quality management,

you know, at the core, you know, coaching agents making things work. We needed speech and text analytics to get inside what was being said and what was being felt. We knew we needed a data lake house to have structured non-structured data joined properly together, a business intelligence layer to report on and analyze this data, workforce management to do forecasting and scheduling agents, and ultimately some type of real time stream to help supervisors, which we call supervisor assist.

and to help agents, which we call agent assist live in the conversation. All of those things in one place, that's a lot. And we didn't try to tackle them all at once, but we tackled the data model at the core. And then we began building the tools over a period of, like I said, five to seven years. And we now have all of those components complete and they're all working. As far as infrastructure for the business, we went with all SaaS tools, tools like Rippling for HR management, tools like

Dave Rennyson (15:07.435)

Salesforce for CRM tools like, and our support runs through there. JIRA for the engineering management system. So everything's cloud-based, so we could incrementally grow those tools as we grew the business. And as far as the actual operational infrastructure, we chose to sit on top of Amazon. They've been a great partner, by the way, helped us grow, super supportive. And it's kind of funny, we compete with Amazon sometimes on certain deals, and we collaborate with them on others.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (15:32.579)

Yeah?

Dave Rennyson (15:34.959)

and we help each other out. It's a big ecosystem and, know, co-op petition, right, is part of the name of the game in this space. But ultimately, the great little sub-components that Amazon makes that are hardened, highly available, you know, available across the globe. We're now in 20 different, you know, geographic locations around the world. So being able to be in Singapore, be in London, you know, to serve UK customers, be in Frankfurt.

You know, be in Sao Paulo, be in the US, be in US government. All of those locations are made possible by this great platform as a service infrastructure that runs underneath what we do.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (16:12.11)

Dave, really quick, I love that you're sharing this. had the pleasure of having Pasquale DeMaio he the vice president of customer experience at AWS on episode 262. And it's funny, I didn't even know you were gonna bring this up, but let's just go back to that episode if you haven't listened to it, because it's awesome. But Pasquale basically tells an incredible story about AWS. When they built AWS, they literally built it because they knew downstream.

Dave Rennyson (16:19.853)

Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (16:37.614)

what some of these hosting costs were going to be for a company the size of Amazon. So they actually built AWS for internal usage. They realized, holy shit, this works exceptional. And if it works for Amazon and it's exceptional, let's go sell it to every other big business out there. And so anyway, super cool story. And listeners, if you don't know a lot about what Dave just said, his spot on go back, take a look at AWS P 60, uh, two 62, there's so much that small businesses can gain from this Dave. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. I everybody knows.

how Google can help them. Everyone knows how some of their primary SaaS solutions like their Salesforce or their HubSpot can help them. But AWS, man, incredible features. And one last thing, I remember one of the big...

Dave Rennyson (17:17.389)

And by the way, these guys are some of these guys, like a decade from now, we're going to look back, you know, Pasquale, Olivier at Genesis, Vinod at Cisco. Like there's a champion behind these great C-CaaS platforms of someone who's keep beating that drum and building out their own go-to-market and product and making something amazing happen. And, know, those guys are one of the reasons why this cloud generation of products has really worked because they've been

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:37.806)

100 %

Dave Rennyson (17:45.281)

singular champions to make make their products come to life and have built great products that are some of the best.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:49.614)

It's, mean, it makes a ton of sense. Dave, I remember when I was getting ready for Pascuale Show 2, it's like 110 billion annual? I was like, what? So like guys, like some of this stuff, you know, and then Dave, going back to you, going back to Success KPI, and then one of the things that selfish, I just, find super interesting, fascinating, and look to you guys as a model for what we're building here at CXE is like, go find, if you can become a master or a subject matter expert or a, just a supreme navigator.

Dave Rennyson (17:59.599)

It's happening. It is.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (18:19.702)

of some of these types of solutions that ain't going anywhere and they're only growing by X every single year at these ridiculously large numbers. That's a beautiful place to build a business guys, right? Like standing on the shoulders of giants is a beautiful way to build a business and it makes things a little bit easier than starting something from absolute scratch out of nowhere and trying to build a whole new marketplace, right? All together. Dave, let's jump into the third pillar process. I know you had a couple ideas you wanted to bring forward in this. Okay, number one.

Dave Rennyson (18:40.345)

Sure, for sure.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (18:49.198)

in your career, has there been like a living playbook that Dave Rennyson has been building as he's gone through company to company, company? That's one way of asking the question. Or as you've been building success KPI over the years, over the decade, how have you kind of gone about wrangling process or managing tribal knowledge or chronically the things that people need to know so that if somebody gets hit by a bus or somebody leaves the company or somebody goes away or things change, that institutional knowledge?

it's there and then it's able to be picked up by the next guy or gal online and continue to be brought forward. Have you really kind of thought about processes you've gotten deeper into your career?

Dave Rennyson (19:26.797)

Yeah. Well, there's, kind of three big questions here. And first of all, no, I'm not some like brilliant guy that sees the future. I need to figure that out. I do have a bit of a system, but it's really focused in two key areas. All of business and operational strategy is centered on having a good appraisal of where you're at, what I call your SWAT, right? Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And then picking your market and going after that market with a aligned mission, vision and values. And so if anything, I'm building a values built

Adrian Brady-Cesana (19:32.633)

Yeah

Adrian Brady-Cesana (19:47.032)

Yep. Yep.

Dave Rennyson (19:56.623)

culture, you know, our number one value, by the way, is you would probably not be surprised as we solve problems for our customers. Right. Another one is, you know, we, we, we support innovation and creativity. No, number, number three is, is that we work hard, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. Right. There's a humility and hard work ethic that I know goes into making some of these things, wait, et cetera. I could go on to all of them later, but our team reviews those values and our mission and vision at every one of our all hands presentations at the beginning.

Our vision is to provide insight, collaboration and action for everyone from the agent to the CEO, which means we are in the market of serving agents, serving quality managers, supervisors, vice presidents, et cetera. We're not in the business of creating telecom systems or creating IVRs or creating ACDs. We know that. We're in the business of making those businesses better by serving those folks that work in those contact centers. And kind of having that there helps everything hang together.

In terms of the second part of my strategy, other than having a strategic thinking about how we go things and reviewing those mission, vision, mission values and reviewing our SWAT and reviewing our strategy around that SWAT as it changes and adapts over time, is, is, is a methodology if you will. But the second part is about the team. am constantly working to add to the team, upgrade to the team. And you started off with a great question about.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (20:55.534)

you

Dave Rennyson (21:18.543)

How did you bring all these folks in? Well, I bought people in that were excellent at that phase of growth for their thing. And sometimes we had to bring in a new person on top or a new person to support them. Some people can grow to fit the business. Some people have to change and modify. As an example of what we're doing in marketing and bringing in a CMO, or we brought in a true chief revenue officer last year to the firm that has been someone that's worked with me at two different companies and we've got a 20 year track record together, 15 year track record together.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:23.682)

Guys, absolutely, absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:31.246)

100%.

Dave Rennyson (21:48.173)

The team and this approach are what make it happen. I'm here literally as the guy that builds that team, supports that team, drives them a little bit, right? Keeps them accountable, but keeps bringing them back together and making the harder decisions where there's a conflict across different organizations. If there's anything, that's the methodology for running the business. I don't know if you want to talk about the methodology on the customer front or not, because that's the second thing, but I'll pause there and see what other questions.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (22:14.668)

do, but before you, okay, but before you move in, so a couple things. I'm just thinking about Dave, so guys, I'm a huge music fan. I found out last week Dave's also a big music fan. It really is like a band, dude. It's very much like a band, meaning like, when you think about team, you think about process, you think about a band coming together with their perspective instruments, being able to produce not just sounds, but fucking great songs together.

and they continuing to evolve. I'm thinking of The Beatles. The Beatles is the most natural example to anybody. You think about The Beatles first album to Sgt Pepper's band, totally different, right? And then you literally can hear the evolution of all of these things working in concert. guys, know it's a stretch example, but it's an easy one to picture where businesses are the exact same thing. It's the men and women that come together that understand how to make good tunes. They like making good tunes.

Good tunes sell by the way. So then if you're good at making good tunes that sell them and you figure out sort of what your niche or your listenership or your audience is, your ICP, same damn thing, man. So I really like how you kind of paint that picture, Dave.

Dave Rennyson (23:09.997)

Yep.

Dave Rennyson (23:20.591)

That is such a beautiful metaphor. And it's funny though, because being in a band and being lead singer and what I consider the world's worst mediocre guitarist, this is great metaphor is because my band pretty much doesn't let me play guitar much, right? I'm mediocre and they know it. But the point is,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (23:33.206)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (23:38.552)

Nice!

Dave Rennyson (23:43.215)

There's a time even when the kind of leader and the guy bringing everyone together has to take some coaching that this you're not good at this. You need to get out of this part of the activity. And the second part is, you know, getting the drummer to show up on time is a problem that I now think about. I know, I know. Yeah, that's right.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (23:48.343)

Absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (23:55.918)

Hey, whoa, whoa, drummers are always that time. Come on. That's what we do, Guys, I'm a drummer. That's why Dave said that. But, no, but you're right. And then said another way, it's funny. This just came up on a recent episode, David just was telling somebody a story of the first time I got 360 feedback, like the first time in my career, my management career, my leadership career, that I got a 360 report. And don't get me wrong, 80 % of it was great. 90 % of it was exactly what I expected to see in here.

But then it was the first time in my career, the 20 % of it, was like, whoa, I thought you guys, I thought I was good at this stuff. I thought you guys, I ask you every week, what can I, what do we need to do more of? What do we need to do? How can I support you? But what do you need me to do? What do you need me to go push them to do up there in the C-suite? And it was, it's interesting that you're right. Like the best businesses, the best bands, the best teams, period. Football, baseball, music, business, all of it's the same. That feedback, that candor.

Dave Rennyson (24:30.575)

Hearthstone.

Dave Rennyson (24:48.943)

You got it.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (24:52.204)

That level of letting people know exactly what the hell they're doing excellent and what they're terrible at, what they need to stop doing or change immediately, that's the championship stuff, man, or that's the platinum album, or those are the businesses that go on to be extremely successful, both fiscally and with their customer and their employee experiences.

Dave Rennyson (25:09.603)

Absolutely. And in fact, I even in interview questions, when I'm talking to folks that I haven't met before, I like to explore what their offline interests are to find out whether they have a team oriented thing like music or, or sports in their background or played at a high level, or even performed at high level in chess, let's say, you know, it doesn't matter. It's that they've taken the time to be curious enough to work hard to get something to work for them outside of just school or work, right?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:25.763)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:33.898)

Some of the best house people I've ever worked with, all the companies I've been at in my 25 years now doing this wonderful game, typically former athletes, they at least played college ball somewhere. Or sorry, whether it was college football, college volleyball, softball, hockey, whatever the hell, doesn't matter. Because you're right, number one, just perseverance, commitment, dedication, discipline, those are like, hate to say it, man, but it's always action. You don't have to be that smart, guys. You do have to take action every freaking day of the week. So that's the one thing. And then you're right with the creative side. So specifically with

Dave Rennyson (25:53.763)

That's you. That's you.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:03.22)

Some of my best development engineering friends, some of more technical friends, they were doing cool shit when they were kids with like computer camps and like competitive like analytics stuff. For example, I was listening to an episode the other day, Dave, Jesse Zhang CEO of Dekagon. He was like a mathematics champion. And then a guy like that 15 years later goes on to build a company like Dekagon. So like, you're right. There's something about

Another level of interest the ability to dig in drill in master something like or Set off on the journey of trying to master something because that it's 10,000 hours plus right, but I love that Dave I don't want to drop the question that you asked you said do you want me to go into the customer side of process your call? Or I'll tee you up for as we as we kind of move into the fourth pillar of feedback Maybe another way of you answering this and teeing you up is can you spend a couple minutes kind of talking about how?

Dave Rennyson (26:42.275)

Yeah. Absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:02.42)

over your career, over your journey, building success KPI, how you guys have thought about really kind of not just managing, collecting and act upon customer feedback, but also for employee feedback. So you can split that up however you'd like, but I'd love to just kind of hear you talk about how you've really kind of built your playbook around customer feedback and employee feedback as you've gotten deeper into your career.

Dave Rennyson (27:24.471)

Yeah, great, great questions. And interestingly enough, we just did an entire engineering and operations product leadership kind of 360 degree view, anonymous survey, building up all the feedback of where we need to go next level. Cause we're getting to the point where the core products are all built. They've all been infused with generative AI. They've all been infused with this unified data layer. They've all been infused with all the capabilities and the primary kind of pillars of the

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:39.629)

Nice.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:49.166)

.

Dave Rennyson (27:54.297)

product strategy are now to the point where it's like where to go next is perfected. Right. And so we wanted them to get honest with themselves and kind of get dirty and asked a bunch of questions. That feedback was so valuable. It was just, you know, there were things in there, like, like you said, when you get in the person, you're like, man, I wish I knew that I wish I'd asked this question before. And then, but there was also a unification in the information that a clear path became, you know, about what we needed to do.

And interestingly enough, when you have all these capabilities that come up, even though we unified the data, one of the things that we've done is while we built all these capabilities, we haven't necessarily made it as easy for people to identify a path of something they want to do. I want to drive an automated quality management strategy. I want to solve a customer experience problem. I want to improve automation. want, and so while we can do all of these things, these use cases are clear. It might cross against different product segments.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (28:42.648)

Nice.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (28:50.839)

Absolutely.

Dave Rennyson (28:51.221)

One of the big thing that's coming out of this is some more customer journey mapping to the things and how to run these paths to the product. I'm super excited about that. The second part, you know, in terms of market feedback is starting a process where senior executives are checking in with customers and what you know, consider a red, green, yellow, but not just across how your operational.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (29:08.43)

Okay?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (29:12.674)

Start just checking in with reds or checking in with all greens, yellows, reds. Okay? Okay?

Dave Rennyson (29:15.627)

all customers, but not just on high level stoplight, right? But down communication, how are we doing? Performance, how are we doing? know, latency, how are we doing in, know, and so you might find different things. You know, one thing that came out of that, we found that there was some latency for folks that had BPO's before in market markets accessing data. And there's multiple solutions to this problem. But if you didn't know about it, it would be a big problem, right? Because you got someone logging in through a VPN or a Citrix.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (29:40.493)

Right, right.

Dave Rennyson (29:45.679)

in another country to get to data through a corporate server that's then connecting through to our platform. And there's ways to work around that, but you wouldn't know about that that was causing a problem that someone in the Philippines was having difficulty supporting as a BPO, their end customer or a large healthcare client. So you got to constantly be listening to this feedback and gathering it and then integrating it into the roadmap and the change. Another big area came from

Our folks out in the field that a lot of our customers are not just struggling with WEM issues. They're struggling with broader business issues. I have talked to three CIOs in the past six months who are either on their journey to migrate, let's say from a via to Genesis or from another on-prem platform to Amazon connect. And they're struggling with organizing their team to just get the like for like working, let alone get advantages out of this new platform.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (30:40.238)

Interesting. Interesting.

Dave Rennyson (30:42.927)

And so that's opened up a whole new concept for us, what we call expert services, where we bring in folks that have 15, 20 years experience in contact center and technology skills, but also may have adjacent skills in Genesis or Amazon or Cisco, then provide Alvaria and provide migration coaching and project management acceleration capabilities. Not taking over the whole thing, but being an active participant.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (30:57.358)

Nice. Nice.

Dave Rennyson (31:11.341)

and helping form that bridge because you've got two audiences here. You've got the CIO who's got the technology of responsibility of making this migration happen. But then you've got this whole operations team and the people who do the actual work of managing this contact center and these agents and dealing with customers every day, both have to be managed to make these migrations work. And so we've helped a number of folks out on that journey. And while it's not like our core business, it may seem like a distraction. It puts us in this position of living up to that value of solving problems for our customers.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (31:39.52)

Absolutely. Dave, I love that man. And as I was telling you last week, that's a big part of what our team here at CXC does with our clients. like, it's the navigation or helping to support the migration of where you are to where you want to be. And I got to be honest with you, brother, as we've had the pleasure to work with more and more more companies across the world.

Oftentimes the calls to action that are identified and arise or whatever you guys want to call it. If you're pushing stones, if you're setting OKRs, whatever you're doing for your strategic goal setting, the things that need to be done. So the calls to action, the action items that got to be done, whether they're going to be done by the CEO, whether they're going to be done by your most junior salesperson, those calls to action. Man, even for super smart, sophisticated, badass teams, man.

What I've kind of learned, and I know you know this from all the companies that you've worked with today, but it's very easy for that insularity to creep in. Let's say when, for example, maybe you're a VP who has spent eight and a half years at a company to get to your VPC. And now that doesn't mean nothing against you, nothing wrong with you, but to have an outside expert who has seen multiple applications, multiple use cases, multiple scenarios, right? Around what types of obstacles are common or.

what type of CTA is often gone unidentified that are frankly very easy and they're low hanging fruit and it's easy to get done, it's easy to bang out. It makes everybody feel good. There's money involved in the ROI of every CTA if you know you're doing your math. That's a game changer, brother. And I think, you know, I think we would mean you talk about this last week, but like, this is where I'm the most excited about what AI is gonna do to the world. Artie is doing to the world, but, and I'm sorry to keep pontificating on this, but like.

I think it's going to be crazy the next thousand days, Dave. And for people like us, for people like Dave, Adrian, Success KPI, CXE, there's going to be a massive need for customer focused business leaders across the world. They're going to need more navigation, support, coaching, guidance along that migration than ever before. And I won't, I don't want to sound super pessimistic, but like reality is guys, we're going to all be asked in the next half of a decade to do

Adrian Brady-Cesana (33:56.814)

way more with way less. So the parade or the 20 % that might be asked to carry the 80 % in your future, guess what, Dave, those people are going to need education. They're going to need coaching. They're going to need support. They're going to need training, all that stuff along the way, man, that helps them get to where they want to go. And it's super cool that we're in a space where we can have some type of impact on that.

Dave Rennyson (33:59.535)

Mark Sawyer.

Dave Rennyson (34:17.519)

It's funny because you know, the folks that are that remain, you know, let's say you have a 10,000 agent contact center footprint and you think AI is going to replace 80 % of that. I don't believe that by the way, very quickly, right? Just, just so we're clear. I believe that it will chip away at it. Like all the other previous technology, but the folks, and we may get there to the 80%, but the folks that are still working in that contact center need to perfect their experiences. They're going to be working on the harder stuff and they need tools that don't bring them headaches. So.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (34:33.272)

chip chip away. Yeah. Yep.

Dave Rennyson (34:46.863)

I call it invisible, invisible AI, right? Bring AI in, especially generative AI into my process in a way that I can get more out of what I'm doing today. know, previously generation tools, speech analytics, we had to create phonemes to make people understand, make the machine understand the words that people are saying, right? Then a half a click back, you know, just three, four years ago, we were still forming topics, some somewhat manual, but at least we just write the word in plain English, the machine knew how it was pronounced. Now,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (34:46.926)

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:03.798)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:12.908)

Fair. Super fair. Yep. Yep.

Dave Rennyson (35:16.483)

We don't even need to create the topics, right? You know, our speech analytics tool, you turn it on two days later, it's like, all right, here's your topics, here's the keywords associated with them, what do you want to know more? And now we're like, well, do we even need topics? I still think you do by the way, because now you can ask open-ended questions such as, know, was there a upsell possible on this call? Yes or no. And the machine knows, and you don't need to coach it on, it knows what an upsell is generically. We've trained it on contact center technologies, then say at what moment,

you know, did this sale take a turn for the good or the worst? And it's like, well, at this, at this point in the conversation, this is where we think that buyer started raising objections, right? It's like, wow, now I can, I don't have to listen to a 15 minute phone call. If I'm a sales coach, right? can zip to the 14th minute and hear the sale emerge. The problem that gets identified that I can zip to minute 20 and find out when the objections occurred and listen to that reflect on it say, does our training materials cover that? And if not, how do I fix them? And if they do, did the agent miss the opportunity to any coaching, right?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:51.96)

Yep, yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (36:13.762)

Yep. Yep.

Dave Rennyson (36:14.317)

Or maybe I want to go listen to two or three more calls and get another point of view. So I can then ask the machine, give me three more calls, just like this with the same agent, right? There's so much more we can do now, but you don't want to have your folks having to be tied up in managing the AI, right? You want to be able to imagine their business, they need to manage agents, customer experience, operational improvement. So you need to make the tools very approachable, easy to use and make them work in plain language, right? And so that's a, that's a key part of this evolution is yeah, AI is going to change the world.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (36:29.4)

Right. Right.

Dave Rennyson (36:44.377)

But it's not gonna change the world if we don't make it easy for the folks to do the day-to-day work, be able to use these tools.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (36:50.478)

You know what you just made me think about is electricity. When electricity arrived, right? I'm sitting here in Buffalo, Dave, so the city of lights, as they call it, right? The lights were turned on at a Pan-American exposition back in the day here in Buffalo. Who had electricity for the first decade or two, to your point?

Dave Rennyson (37:09.635)

Yeah, like not a very lot of people and really only major cities, right? Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:11.99)

It was public, it was public entities and it was rich people. That was it. Nobody had it for, to your point. It took a long time. It took a long time for electricity to go in every single cabin and every single shack in the country, right? So good point. And I do think there will be something like that.

Dave Rennyson (37:25.749)

And don't forget there were two vendors fighting for the standard back then because one of them had a way to make money one way. Another one had a way to make money the other way. And the winner ended up being the one that was safer, by the way, which is interesting. But an entire industry had a little stagnation period where that competition was holding things up and there was a lot of political control held by those big companies. But ultimately, when it becomes ubiquitous and just

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:39.064)

Yep. Yep.

Dave Rennyson (37:54.383)

plug it into an outlet, it's you don't even think about it. Yep. Another great metaphor, Adrian.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:55.896)

Done your game, game on. Yeah.

Thank very much. I'm on a roll today, Dave, this has been absolutely awesome. But as we wind down, I'm going to throw a curveball at you, What's one thing that you're super, what's the one thing that you were the most excited for, for you and the team at Success KPI, is you guys move into the new year? What's the one thing that you were the most excited about for 2026, for the Success KPI team?

Dave Rennyson (38:23.567)

I think the first thing I'd say on this is that the data architecture we built, which was built to allow you to do data discovery and to join all these different product levels together in one unified engagement management lever, was very thoughtful. It had an accidental side effect. Generative AI eats data for breakfast, right? And so because all this data is structured from

Adrian Brady-Cesana (38:47.512)

Yep, yep, yep.

Dave Rennyson (38:50.719)

from unstructured sources like the conversation, its transcript, the sentiment that came out of that, topics that were detected, keywords, et cetera, as well as the structured data, like how long was the call? Who took the call? Was it a chat? Was it a phone call, et cetera? All of that information being already joined and curated and properly and sitting in one place, the way our platform works, and the fact that we've done all the plumbing to these major CCAS platforms, all of that has set us up to apply our

Gen AI capabilities in an invisible way across all these products and tools and know that our machine is not going to get lost in the data because if people get can get lost in the data, the machine is going to get lost in the data. And I think we got very lucky on that. I'm excited about the potential that brings out and complimenting that is we began working on what we call the CX AI maturity model, which is allowing companies to reflect on where they are and how they can move up the stack, kind of like a software.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:31.436)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:43.842)

Nice? Nice?

Dave Rennyson (39:46.755)

development, lifecycle, you know, maturity model. And we're creating this concept to allow folks to approach their business with a thoughtful way and say, where do I stand on the stack of using AI to drive a better CX or to drive a better operational performance? And what would be my steps to take to move up that in a methodical way so it doesn't overwhelm my organization? I think the combination of our tools.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:48.43)

Sure, sure.

Dave Rennyson (40:12.271)

with introducing this process level thinking about how to move up the stack of operational performance and leveraging of web tools is next. The last three or four years largely have been about cloud migration. The next three or four years are going to be about leveraging generative AI, invisible AI to drive business process improvement, to achieve some of these automation benefits, but also to improve customer experience while working hand in hand with the day-to-day folks that do the hard work of managing agents in the contact center.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (40:42.07)

And then that's where it's EX and CX to combine, man. Like, you're spot on, right? If we're not making it easy for the guys and guys that are on the front line to do this shit extremely well in an easy fashion, in a seamless fashion, you're not gonna get the CX that you're asking. You're not gonna get that leading CX you're asking for. You gotta have the team equipped to be able to do that to deliver that CX. So I love that,

Dave Rennyson (41:01.807)

And remember, a happy agent equals a happy customer. Right. so, you know, the experience is at the center of a lot of this too. So it's not just the supervisors that the agents that we need to empower, provide information to make their lives easier, make them more successful, make them more effective, coach them up. Right. You know, I always say even, even messy needs a coach, right. You know, in the soccer field.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (41:05.197)

100 %

Adrian Brady-Cesana (41:16.77)

Yep. Yep.

I was gonna say like every the trainer it goes back to the championship stuff that we were talking about earlier every band has even the Beatles had master musicians and producers that like could show John Lennon how to play something better than John Lennon could play it I hate to say this pains me because of a Buffalo Bills fan Tom Brady and Billachek for all those years that they were winning all the Super Bowls they had championship trainers they had championship scouts out there finding the next group of guys that was gonna

So, then every business is interesting. A business gets is the best business leaders, man. They've got their trainers, their therapists, their strategists, the whole nine yards, baby, because it makes better results.

Dave Rennyson (42:02.383)

Father, I know you're a sports guy, if you haven't watched quarterback, it's such a compelling series. The one where they had Car's Marriott and Mahomes in one season, three different levels of operational performance, all being coached every day, all reflecting on the performance, all working to get better every week, right?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (42:06.808)

I have, man, I have. What a show.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (42:19.256)

Yeah, every day. And then across everything, not just throwing, the playbook reading, the defense schema, like it's everything. It's preparation for going into a 70,000 person stadium. Noise. Literally they practice noise, So David, okay, this has been an absolutely fantastic, brother. I'm to, number one, pumped to see what you and the team at Success KPI do moving forward. I can't wait for our next conversation. Before I let you go, where can people...

that want to learn more about Success KPI? Where can they get in touch with you guys and where can they learn more about Success KPI?

Dave Rennyson (42:52.227)

I mean, the quickest, easiest thing, course, hit the website at, know, www.successkpi.com and hit us up there. Hick, you know, request a demo or find out more information. you're always willing to reach out to me at rennyson @ successkpi.com. I'm open to any and all conversations all the time. I'm extremely available, to anything. In fact, I, I sometimes just work and help coach people on their CX strategy outside of working with success KPI.

And sometimes it leads back to us, et cetera. I'm a big, big resource in terms of being able to connect you with different types of things and help make difficult decisions. I was actually helping someone decide between two competitors that do a lot of stuff that we do, but it was the right thing to do. And that'll come back someday. Because being a trusted advisor to our customers is one of our primary jobs.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (43:35.694)

100%.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (43:41.134)

I love it. Well, Dave, look, it's been my absolute pleasure, brother. Thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your story, sharing the journey that you've been on. And I can't wait to our next conversation, my friend.

Dave Rennyson (43:49.795)

Thanks for having me on. Great talking to you.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (43:51.832)

Thanks, Dave.