This episode features an interview with Mary Poppen, Chief Strategy and Customer Officer at involve.ai. With over 2 decades of experience in customer success, executive leadership, and business consulting, Mary is dedicated to advancing the next generation of CX leaders. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Mary to discuss how a great customer experience can lead to happy employees and how to measure employee and customer satisfaction.
This episode features an interview with Mary Poppen, Chief Strategy and Customer Officer at involve.ai. With over 2 decades of experience in customer success, executive leadership, and business consulting, Mary is dedicated to advancing the next generation of CX leaders.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Mary to discuss how a great customer experience can lead to happy employees and how to measure employee and customer satisfaction.
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“Early in my career, I realized that our most happy customers had a really strong relationship with an employee or employees in our organization. Whether it was sales services, exec relationships, it didn’t really matter they just had a strong bond. And the least happy customers were those that really saw us as a vendor. Those of you listening that do know me, know I hate the v-word. If you can be called a partner, a strategic advisor, that’s much better. But, I realized that those customers who were unhappy were the ones that saw us as a vendor. Just a transactional, reactionary solution. So, that’s what struck me as a differentiator where relationships and therefore, engaged and happy employees, really do make a difference in building a connection and providing value to customers. So, when you have happy engaged employees and happy engaged customers, there’s this crazy contagious enthusiasm that exists. And then the company benefits because what results is growth, expansion of customers, and referenceability. Talent out there wants to work for your company. So it’s just a lot of goodness that I call the ‘All In Zone’.” – Mary Poppen
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:44): Mary’s background
*(04:22): Segment: Story Time
*(06:41): The link between employee experience and customer satisfaction
*(09:32): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(11:19): ROI when connecting employee and customer experience
*(19:13): Best practices for tracking employee and customer satisfaction
*(21:46): What involve.ai is doing to keep employees and customers happy
*(24:22): Segment: Asking for a Friend
*(27:48): Biggest challenges of connecting the customer and employee experience
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Links:
Amanda Berry: Mary, how are you today?
Mary Poppen: I am doing great. Amanda, how are you?
Amanda Berry: I'm doing really well, thanks for asking. Thank you for joining me today. It's really great to meet you and chat with you.
I want to first start off understanding your background. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to be chief strategy and customer officer@involved.ai?
Mary Poppen: I have spent pretty much all of my career and customer delivery and working on improving the customer experience. And so over time, I've been looking for ways to leverage technology, to really create a differentiating experience for customers and enter involved at AI, which is focused on customer intelligence.
And providing voice of customer and customer sentiment and behavior across the entire organization. So now you can align priorities across sales, customer success, support marketing, and everyone can use the same customer intelligence to be able to align across the company, which is a really exciting place to be for the customer, because it means we can now truly put the customer at the center.
Amanda Berry: All of a sudden showing your background, as in, where did you start in your career?
Mary Poppen: Yeah. I actually got a master's degree in industrial organizational psychology. When I got out of grad school, I was going to change the world through consulting, which was really fun, focused on organizational effectiveness, process improvement, but realized fairly quickly that as a consultant, you could make recommendations that weren't, they weren't necessarily going to be followed.
Right. Plus you didn't always get to stick around and see. The outcome. And so I decided to take my consulting internally and went into a software company. It was an HR software company and my first. Priority was to redo the talent management and leadership development within the organization. And that's when I got introduced to a new type of software software as a service.
So success factors had just launched the performance and talent management. SAS solution. I implemented that at my current organization and it was game changing. We went from 30% completion of employee appraisals to 98% with the very first launch of that solution. And it was really eye-opening because it was an opportunity to put the.
At the center of a process that used to be HR and manager driven. And so that was kind of my first taste of SAS joint success factors. And from that point forward just focused on customer experience and improving customer delivery across all of the software. This.
Amanda Berry: I'm going to move into our first segment.
Mary, called story time.
I want to first ask just about your name. People are going to see your name and it's going to harken some good, positive, strong feelings for a lot of us who watched who know no of the character, Mary Poppins. Do you have any stories about that? People calling you Mary Poppins, or where does that come from?
Mary Poppen: Oh, my gosh, I have so many stories. It is a married name. I like to say that I met prince charming and became Mary poppin. We did not get one umbrella for wedding gifts, which was surprising. Even friends of ours still spell my name wrong. So they still it's P O P V E N a, but we get the. And when family does it, it's kind of funny cause you think they would know better.
It's been really fun to have a name that people remember, right. Because, and hopefully with a positive connotation, for the most part, probably the most interesting story I was at the airport and they paged me to come to the desk where the agent was and everybody looked around and thought it was some sort of code for something.
Yeah. So it's been
Amanda Berry: fun. That's pretty funny. When you were getting married, did you have that moment? You were like, my name's going to be Mary poppin.
Mary Poppen: I did actually, when I met, who is now my husband, we met through friends and I didn't know his last name. And once I asked my friend with what's Jim's last name, she said pop-in.
And then she looked at me and I looked at her and just dawned on both of us, right at that moment that I could become married. Well, thank you for
Amanda Berry: sharing that there you are. When I ran across your name, I found myself humming spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. I was like, she's
got to be on this show.
Mary Poppen: I know there's so many jokes, right? Especially being in like customer where I've gotten, oh, just bring your spoonful of sugar and wave your magic wand or bring your big carpet bag and all the tools meaning you to be successful.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Well, the good news is I feel like people, like I said, when they see your name, unless it's a really strong, positive
Mary Poppen: feelings for those of you listeners that want to connect.
And you've got a really good joke. I am all ears. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: Oh, well, there you go. Opening for that. I'm going to think of some I'm really good with puns. So my pun game is pretty strong. I know you're pretty vocal. About the customer success influences on the employee experience. I want to get into that, but talk about when you had that realization, that employee experience has a direct link to a customer satisfaction
Mary Poppen: early in my career, I realized that our happy customers, our most happy customers had a really strong relationship.
An employee or employees in our organization and whether it was sales services, exec relationships didn't really matter. They just had a strong bond and the least happy customers were those that really saw us at the vendor. By the way, you'll get to know me, those of you listening that do know me know, I hate the V word because it's a very transactional.
Tactical type of, I won't even say relationship. If you can be called the partner, strategic advisor that's much better. But I realized that those customers who were unhappy were the ones that saw us as a vendor, just a transactional reactionary solution. So that's what struck me as a differentiator where relationships and therefore engaged in happy employees really do make it through.
In building a connection and providing value to customers. So when you have happy engaged employees and happy engaged customers, there's this crazy contagious enthusiasm that exists. And then the company benefits, because what results is growth expansion of customers and just referenceability talent out there wants to work for your company.
So it's just a lot of goodness that I call the Olins.
Amanda Berry: The all-in zone. I like that. I feel like some of this might be rooted in your HR sort of backgrounds. Do you feel like that had a big influence on you coming to this realization? It's
Mary Poppen: really interesting because you're right. I spent the majority of my career in HR tech focused on customer experience.
I, I do think I've always gravitated towards people first mission and the outcomes that come from. Programs that are put in place for employees and then seeing the impact that that has on customers and the customer experience. I think for me throughout my career, that it's just been there. There's been this realization that I happened to pay attention to and get excited about.
And so I've been able to get. Think about the linkage and the drivers and the measures that occur between employee experience and customer experience. And there is a lot of overlap. So programs that you put in place for employees, you could think of the same for the customer, maybe a great example. Voice of customer and voice of employee programs.
The outcome of both of those is really to be able to leverage at the insight and the feedback to improve your organization. And so the parallels between those programs and several others are pretty prominent.
Amanda Berry: I'm going to move us into our next segment, getting tactical,
Producer: um,
trying to figure out tactics and it'd be prayerful honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much.
Here I am in charge and driving to see why didn't you sleep some tactics, tactics.
Amanda Berry: I want to keep digging into this. Cause I think this is such an interesting idea. I mean, we're hearing so much about employee experience. We want to keep good employees, a great reshuffle and great resignation, right? It's for the sake of employees, right?
Retaining good talent, which is to me in and of itself, a good reason to create a good employee experience. But I love how you're taking this further and saying it will have a direct impact on customer success and grow. We are focused on employed programs that maybe would have some correlation there. If you work closely with HR and maybe benefits folks and who else to help bridge that gap in your current
Mary Poppen: role?
In my current role, I don't get a lot of exposure to HR. But in my prior companies and roles, I did, I had direct access to the C HRO and to their them direct reports and the programs that we were supporting through our technology. Really allowed us to be able to guide the customer around how to optimize the solution, to get the results that they were hoping to get, which resulted in employee engagement, retention, employee referenceability and ultimately productivity gains.
So it was really fun to work with HR to establish those. And then to put our technology in place to support that, and then actually see the return and the attribution of what we were helping the customer with actually provide significant outcomes for the employees. Talk more about that
Amanda Berry: return on investment when you're connecting the employee experience to customer satisfaction.
What are some good measures? I know you mentioned retention. How are you doing that? What does that look like?
Mary Poppen: We could chat for hours actually just on this particular topic, but she think about the customer experience. There's two kinds of measurement that should be done. One is internal measures of success and the other is external.
The internal measures of success revolve around gross revenue, retention, net revenue, retention, advocacy, referrals, NPS, and customer satisfaction. Right. And measuring those things are really important to see what are the leading and lagging indicators of the work that you're doing on having the impact on the customer.
But more than that, and this is the hardest part is measuring it from the customer perspective. So what is the actual customer value? And these are measures that should be paid attention to, and it really comes down to defining the goals. And the success criteria with the customer at the beginning of the relationship, and then tracking that jointly with the customer.
So you can always point back to the specific customer value that they're getting. And that's the part that I believe has been the most challenging. It gets dropped the most as companies are looking across their customer experience because it's a lot easier to just measure revenue growth and refer.
Than it is to measure specific customer outcomes. So that's on the customer side, the internal side, measuring employee engagement and retention numbers, overall onboarding experience or satisfaction with onboarding. And then here's the really interesting part. Take all of those measures and start to correlate.
So now you've got internal customer measures of success, external customer measures of success and employee measures of success. When you start to look at the relationships across those measures over time, you can start to see what has the most impact on each of those drivers. And that helps you. You start to focus your organization on a better customer and employee experience.
Amanda Berry: So as customer value trends out, we would expect some employee satisfaction engagement also to trend up. Is that what you're saying? That would
Mary Poppen: be ideal, but it depends on what's driving the customer success and the employee success in measuring that in determining if there is a relationship and then making sure you're targeting your resources and investments on those things that are most.
Amanda Berry: Have you seen any change in this sort of methodology since this idea of working from home? I think, I think it's very interesting that this employee experience is now happening within my house. Sure. You have a similar experience, but so the employee experience is happening within my own home and not just going to an office.
And I'm wondering, have you seen any difference in how this should be measured while people are working from home or remote?
Mary Poppen: It's so interesting because I do feel like soccer as a service was the beginning of allowing people more flexibility and where they worked, because you didn't have to go onsite and code something at the customer, or you didn't have to go onsite necessarily and whiteboard, but you could do these things remotely.
So I think that was the beginning. I think. COVID sort of figured out how to rely on the tools that have been advanced, like zoom teams, slack, where you can do white boarding and you can do a breakout calls, which it's been kind of fun to see those, uh, technologies advance over time. But I think people have just figured out how to be more resilient and optimize the technology to be able to continue to be successful.
I think the measures ultimately, or the. What drives engagement for employees, I think is still the same. The one thing I forgot earlier is work-life balance. I think everyone has been seeking that in terms of satisfaction. It's just become more prevalent. Over the last few years as like a key measure and a key focus.
So I don't think so much has changed as much as people just shifting and optimizing the way that
Amanda Berry: they work. I was going to also ask if there are any programs. I know you mentioned a work-life balance, but what are those programs or key components of employee experience that tend to have the most pull we've heard of companies we're going to offer a maternity in fraternity.
We're going to offer unlimited PTO. Are there any specific programs that have a direct impact or better culture leaders being more transparent that you've noticed that would have more of an impact on the employee experience?
Mary Poppen: Actually, it's so interesting that you asked that because now you've got me thinking back, w we did measure that at Glen in terms of the changes pre COVID and post COVID.
When people were working from home and companies got a lot more. Structured around more frequent feedback gathering because people weren't in the office, the pulse of the company was harder to assess from a leadership level. And what we saw is that managers and leaders were actually taking more time to do one-on-ones and more time to interact directly with their employees, which we saw.
And employee happiness and satisfaction with their direct managers, as well as with the company and the intent to stay with the company. In terms of length of time also went up.
Amanda Berry: Do you have any ideas, any guess as to why that is?
Mary Poppen: I think it was the opportunity to be seen yes. Feedback from the manager more often.
Align on the goals. So they felt like they knew where they needed to contribute better. They felt more visible. And so all of those things combined really led to an increased feeling of engagement. And it was interesting because it wasn't investing more money and giving employees things. Okay. Time manage your time, which didn't cost the company anymore, and actually created a better relationship between the employee and the manager, and also created those feelings of importance in the.
Amanda Berry: Wow. That's so interesting. I would have guessed like free lunch every day, living in a fate time off, you know, those things would have an impact. It's very interesting to hear that one-on-one time with managers has been a big draw though. You do hear a lot that people want to be recognized by their managers and get more feedback.
And so that, that's a very interesting correlation. Yeah. Let's take your current company out of it, involved on AI. Can you give me an example of companies that are doing this really well? Or do you know of any who said they have a great employee experience and that's clearly having an impact on their customer satisfaction and sales?
Mary Poppen: I can think of one in particular. That's a retailer who. Did target and actually fed us the customer satisfaction information. On top of we were already capturing the employee engagement and drivers, and we were able to do linkages between each of the engagement drivers. To customer satisfaction. And it was really interesting because for this particular company, it was feelings of empowerment, understanding the mission, being, feeling like they understood the mission of the company, access to leadership and manage direct manager satisfaction.
Those are really the four kind of key ingredients that were driving the highest correlation or relationship to customer satisfaction. And then they could, they could narrow that down by store. So across the globe, essentially, they'd be able to target best practices, then recognize individuals that were driving the most productivity and results for the
Amanda Berry: company.
Do you have any good luck? Must do this to get a good result and stop doing. Kind of advice or best practices for our listeners who might hear this and go, well, maybe this is something we should be tracking internally as
Mary Poppen: well. I think a few things transparency and frequent communication is really linked strongly to employee engagement and customer experience.
For that matter, I'll translate it there as well. That I would say is a must. Do I think giving recognition on a schedule is far less meaningful and impactful than giving recognition genuinely and sort of real time. So I think for leaders to keep in mind, everyone likes to be recognized in a different way and really understand.
Your employees light something like public recognition, some prefer private, some want an email from the manager's manager's manager, some would never even want to be seen by that person. And so part of it is I think, making sure you understand what is important to your team and then. Trying to differentiate your leadership based on that.
So I would say, definitely start doing that and stop doing recognition in the same way for everybody, like on a schedule, pulling your team together to ask for input. I think one of the most powerful things that I saw, one of our customers, the CEO would stand up at his leadership meeting and he would say, if you have not been into your employee voice dash.
Yeah, you need to basically leave the meeting because they were getting feedback quarterly, but he would share all the results transparently with the leadership team and then with the company. And he would say, here's what we're doing about it on a company level. And all of his leaders would share what they're doing on a functional level and so on down the chain.
And they did it every quarter. And that's the participation in the survey process. Increased from 74% to 95% quarter over quarter. So people felt that they had the opportunity to give feedback. They were heard, feedback was actually being leveraged and they knew how. And so that increased the participation and also the engagement scores.
Amanda Berry: Do you do a quarterly engagement to start to measure for some of them? Definitely. Can you talk at all about what involved on AI is doing to keep customers and employees happy and they're creating a good positive experience for
Mary Poppen: both. We are really big on listening for our employees. We actually have a company meeting for a half hour on Monday and on Friday.
Okay. Every week we share top priorities and OKR to the week progress. We ask about weekends, um, in one word, how are you feeling this week? We have that opportunity right now, the size that we are getting bigger, that will break out and managers can do that with their teams, but having those meetings, any, keeping people engaged.
To know what's happening in the company to be able to give input really important. We have a customer advisory council and we have our CSMs meet weekly with our customers. We actually asked for feedback every week on what's working well, what's not, we do quarterly ROI assessments. So we actually do an ROI analysis and review for.
The exec sponsor and the project team in our customers. So we can make sure we stay aligned on the value proposition and then any changes that we need to make. So those are some of the key things that seem to be working really well for us, keeping a pulse on what's happening and keeping both employees and customers engaged.
I ask you, do you do anything
Amanda Berry: like a real-time feedback? Let's say you work at an Acme company. It's going to change a big policies, or when you get feedback from our employee to see how they feel about and how they're going to react to it, or do you wait for that quarterly survey?
Mary Poppen: A lot of our customers going back to Glint focused on employee engagement experience actually asked about very specific company changes.
So they would send what we call that an ad hoc pulse to. Employees. He has to be careful cause you don't want to over survey and you have to make it really brief and meaningful. But for those kinds of things that were ad hoc, where they really wanted the employee input, it would be outside of that quarterly program and very impactful.
And actually with COVID that was an opportunity for awhile. Some of our customers did we get. Assessment. And it was just five questions. How are you doing, what do you need? Do you feel like the company is supporting you? And then I think there were a couple of questions about the manager that is helpful for a while.
You wouldn't want to necessarily keep up a cadence like that ongoing, but in the short term to pivot and be able to really listen, especially during times of big change is very much.
Amanda Berry: Let's move into our last segment called asking for our friend was
Producer: destined for a friend.
Mary Poppen: Hey, asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: Let's say we have a leader in front of us who. It doesn't really believe in the correlation between a good employee experience and a fantastic customer satisfaction experience. What would you say to them to convince them that this is really important and to be focused on creating a better employee experience because it directly impacts your customers?
Mary Poppen: I would probably ask them for a time where they had a really poor experience with a company. And ask them specifically, what was it about that experience that was so poor. And then on the flip side, ask about the time where you had just a phenomenal experience, you told your friends about it and what made that such a great experience.
And it's really interesting because. In most cases, what you would probably hear is it had something to do with the employee that they interacted with. And a lot of times when you have poor experience with employee it's because they're not empowered to meet your needs depending on the situation.
Whereas a positive experience when it comes down to it, the employee was empowered or went above and beyond to meet the needs. And that's where that, I think you could make the shift of if you kept your employees happy and they were impacted. Your customers would be able to get what they need in a more dynamic and real-time way then to be sent to a manager or just flat out be told no about something because of a policy.
So I think that's where I would start. If
Amanda Berry: I were to spend this up at a company I worked at who would ideally own this process
Mary Poppen: today, they definitely are, are separate. The employee experience is owned by HR. The customer experiences is either owned by the chief customer officer or potentially rolls up to the CRO or even the COO right.
And operations. My ideal is that there's so much awesome data. And when you look at the data science behind. Being able to look at patterns and what drives both employee and customer satisfaction really at the CEO level is where this should sit, but practicality having a COO or similar own both is a phenomenal way to bridge the gap between the functional focus and the overall organizational.
I feel like
Amanda Berry: I hear that with a few different topics. When I say who should own this, if it's something that comes up, we hear that a lot with the Dean. I have programs where the CEO needs to be really focused on this. And this does seem like a similar topic because that person would then direct and say, we need to get these more aligned.
Mary Poppen: It comes down to the things that are cross-functional, where there needs to be alignment, really move the organization forward. But the realization is to move the organization forward. It's the employees and the customers that are known that are the ones that will do that. So if the focus is at a broad company level for both.
You'll start to see amazing results just for the entire company as a whole.
Amanda Berry: What do you think the biggest challenge is her really beginning this journey of focusing on the employee experience and the customer success. I
Mary Poppen: think in my own experience, if you don't start with the end in mind, so to speak and define the ideal customer journey.
Or if you're talking about employees, the ideal employee experience, but let's stick with customers. If you define that ideal customer journey it's, then that you can define what are the roles, skills, responsibilities, your metrics, deliverables, all of that to go along with the journey. And I find a lot of times that companies jump in.
Yeah. In a siloed way, sales is doing their thing and then post-sale does their thing. And what happens is you end up having to backtrack a lot or put band-aids on things that you didn't think about before. But if you think about the holistic journey upfront, you're able to think about the people, processes and systems.
As you go in order to scale, that would be my recommendation is definitely start by defining that ideal journey. And then you can start to plug in and what your team should look like, what your structure should look like, resources, handoffs, all of those things. And before long, you'll have this amazing customer experience with.
Amanda Berry: Um, that's fantastic. This has been a lot of fun before I let you go. Is there anything we didn't cover today that you would like our listeners to
Mary Poppen: know? Just say don't be happy with the status quo. There is no, I think final destination when it comes to customer experience or satisfaction or. Experience with satisfaction.
So keep trying new things, keep innovating, keep working on differentiation and don't be afraid to take some risks to make change.
Amanda Berry: And this is such a good time to do it when a whole lot of stuff has just been changing. A lot of executives are looking for new, better ways to do things. This is a really great time to start that.
Well, thank you, Mary. Let our listeners know where they can
Mary Poppen: find you. You can find me on LinkedIn under Mary Poppen, P O P P E N. Or you could also email me at Mary at involved on AI. Thank you so much
Amanda Berry: for joining me today,
Mary Poppen: Mary. Thanks, Amanda. Great to chat. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the cohesion podcast brought to you by Simpplr the modern internet software that simplifies the employee experience.
Producer: Learn more about how Simpplr can help you. You dove a futures, your employee experience@Simpplr.com. That's S I M P P L
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