CHURN FM
CHURN FM is the podcast for subscription economy pros. Every Wednesday we hear how the world’s fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention & engagement to fuel their growth.
CHURN FM
E286 | Humanizing Feedback: Hark’s Vision for Customer-Generated Content with Fran Brzyski
Today on the show, we have Fran Brzyski, CEO and co-founder of Hark, a platform that helps brands build loyalty and achieve efficient growth through customer-generated content.
In this episode, Fran shares insights into transforming customer feedback by leveraging the power of video and audio. He discusses the importance of capturing customer intent, the challenges of shifting from traditional feedback methods, and how to drive engagement by making feedback actionable.
We also dive into strategies for integrating feedback across departments, using customer stories to fuel growth, and the future of human interaction in an AI-driven world.
Mentioned Resources
Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.
[00:00:00] Fran Brzyski: I had become obsessed with overall customer feedback throughout that journey and I became obsessed with the way humans were interacting with each other. If you look at the most prominent social channels, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, everybody is very comfortable with asynchronous voice, asynchronous audio. And I was going to a brand's website and I was finding email, forms, phone, the same old thing. And I just thought there's so much inefficiency here that customer stories could alleviate.
[00:00:37] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth. How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.
[00:01:02] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.
[00:01:13] Andrew Michael: Hey Fran, welcome to the show.
[00:01:15] Fran Brzyski: Hey, thanks for having me, Andrew.
[00:01:16] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Fran is the CEO and co-founder of Hark, allowing brands to build loyalty and achieve more efficient growth through customer generated content. Prior to Hark, Fran started his career in sales and held various roles across industries.
[00:01:32] Andrew Michael: Fran is also portfolio advisor to Hatch Adventures. So my first question for you today is at what point did you know you wanted to make the switch from a career in sales to founding your own company?
[00:01:43] Fran Brzyski: I think I always had it in me. I think there's a spirit behind entrepreneurship where certain people just seem to have that and always gravitate toward it. My journey certainly yielded that. I mean, when I came out of college, I thought I had made it working at a massive bank, in the private bank. My family was happy. My friends are happy for me. I was pretty miserable.
[00:02:05] Fran Brzyski: And I left that pretty shortly after and went into the world of startups. And like you said, I've worked in a bit of a go-to-market motion. A lot of entrepreneurship is finding the courage to take the jump. I think there's a lot more people smarter than me out here who should become entrepreneurs, but it can be a very risky endeavor. And luckily, I've got a great support system. I have an amazing wife, amazing family who believed in pushing me to do it.
[00:02:30] Fran Brzyski: And I'd incubated Hark for a while throughout my journey and a few things led to me finally saying, "Okay, it's time to do this and really go after it." And I couldn't be more thankful than I did. It's absolute chaos. It's a roller coaster, but it's where I want to be.
[00:02:44] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Amazing. And you mentioned you incubated Hark. What does that mean? What was the process like for you to make that leap to get started?
[00:02:53] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. It was a bit chaotic. I was at a business travel startup where I found my co-founder. We became friends there. The pandemic came and nobody was really traveling for business anymore. So I went to a seed stage startup that had a lot of ups and downs very quickly and dissolved. And those two experiences specifically, not only gave me the courage, but I think a lot of the knowledge to really get started, met some of the right people to get started. I come from a very humble upbringing.
[00:03:21] Fran Brzyski: I had become obsessed with overall customer feedback throughout that journey. I became obsessed with the way humans were interacting with each other. If you look at the most prominent social channels, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, everybody is very comfortable with asynchronous voice, asynchronous audio. And I was going to a brand's website and I was finding email, forms, phone, the same old thing. And I just thought there's so much inefficiency here that customer stories could alleviate.
[00:03:54] Fran Brzyski: So you take that and that's where Hark really sparked and started. When I talk about the incubating, it was doing the research around what would brands do with this information? So you think about voice of customer and customer feedback, everybody's like, "Yeah, it checks the box. It's fine. We do NPS. We do these things." But it doesn't really move the needle. And I thought, "Hmm, you're getting all your customer feedback over plain text. What if you get more context? What if you get storage? What if you could humanize that data?"
[00:04:21] Fran Brzyski: And I thought that could be an incredible growth lever for brands. So that's where Hark really started. I raised a pre-seed to validate the concept, like would people do this? Would they interact over video? Would they engage that way? And it was a resounding yes. And we went and raced a seed round to build out the larger part of the platform, which is how do you make that data actionable?
[00:04:41] Andrew Michael: What was that like going out to raise your seed round then as a first timer going into this? You mentioned you came from a humble background as well. How did you find that process for you?
[00:04:53] Fran Brzyski: There's a guy, Neil Capel. He's a mentor, he's one of my best friends at this point, but he was the first investor in Hark and he was the only one I called saying, "Hey, I have an idea. Do you think this could go anywhere?" He founded Sailthru. So he's very, very successful. And he got on a call with me and he was like, "I'm wiring you money and you're doing this." So it was a little bit of that like, "Okay, if this person believes in me, then I think I can do this."
[00:05:15] Fran Brzyski: And he said something to me that was very interesting. He also comes from a humble background. He said, "You're not going out and you're not asking people for money. You're not putting your hand out there and saying, would you give me money to get started? You have to take the mindset of, I'm giving you a chance to 10X your money. I'm giving you a chance to get in very early and something that's going to be quite big." And I remember he told me that.
[00:05:36] Fran Brzyski: It's hard to change your mindset as you're going through it, but you get to a point where that clicks and you really start to feel it and you have that conviction. And that was a big turning point for me in that first round. I mean, I was raising May to June when all of the markets started to change back in 2022. That was a very weird thing to go through, but I had a lot of faith in myself. I had a lot of conviction and thankfully there's a lot of people who shared that and want to still be involved even without with the rockiness of the end of [inaudible].
[00:06:08] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think that mind shifts, which is incredibly important when raising capital for startups. Cause I got - myself, as well, raised a couple of times. The first time, I really had the other mindset of like, "Please give me money." And then I realized after a while, there's not that many really good teams. So you actually become a commodity if you've managed to, at least at the early stage, put together some really talented people.
[00:06:32] Andrew Michael: Cause I think that's mostly what you have at this seed stage. And then also, this is actually a real opportunity. Instead of [inaudible - overlap], it really what turns things around as well when you're pitching investors, when you're going into meetings. It really makes a difference.
[00:06:46] Fran Brzyski: For anything. Growing up, you go to do a hiring process and you're thinking there must be a hundred people applying for this role who are smarter than me. Now being on the other side of it, it's so hard to find really, really good, strong people for the right roles. And I think sports, all of it, it's easy to have imposter syndrome. It's easy to think there's so many other people, but then you think, "Why not me? What am I actually lacking?" And you start to that conviction. And it's a really powerful tool if used appropriately.
[00:07:15] Andrew Michael: I think it goes back to what you said, that you always felt that you had it in you. And I don't think there's many people that feel that they have it in them. And that's why, I think, it's almost like a rare breed. I think people that have this bias for action and will go out and take the risk and do it and realize that thing's also a superpower.
[00:07:33] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. To that point, it's a bit - it can be glorified, but it's a journey. You've been on it. I mean, it's Friday, Saturday night, I'm not watching shows. I'm working. I've got three kids under five and I've got this. That's my life. And that's exactly, like I said, where I want to be, but not for everyone.
[00:07:52] Andrew Michael: You have three kids under five and building a startup. Yeah.
[00:07:57] Fran Brzyski: Chaotic.
[00:07:59 Andrew Michael: Wow. Yeah, my brother-in-law actually, he says like - cause he has two kids and he's like, "If you have three kids, it's just irresponsible." He's like, "What do you do?" It's like, "It's fine. I have two kids now. If one kicks off, my wife can take the one I can take the other. If there's three of them and they all going nuts at once...
[00:08:16] Andrew Michael: Who are you going to save? He's like, they're all in danger. It's irresponsible. That must be a journey as well. I've also just had a second child now as well. Still adapting to two.
[00:08:25] Fran Brzyski: [overlap] Congrats. Amazing. Yeah. Best thing in world.
[00:08:29] Andrew Michael: It is, but I think it's like a huge step. From one to two was, for me, a big shock. I think now we're only getting into the rhythm now after about 10, 11 months. Nice. So talk to us a little bit about the product then as well. So my understanding as well, as people leave feedback through the site and then essentially instead of filling in a form and dropping notes there, they can actually leave audio and visual video feedback through the sites.
[00:08:57] Andrew Michael: And then you're using that feedback as well to drive growth for companies by actually leveraging those clips or those videos as product placement on the website or as educational material. Did I get that right?
[00:09:09] Fran Brzyski: Yeah, mostly. It's a pretty big swing, but my thesis is that where everybody, especially generative AI is taking large amounts of data and structuring it to be actionable, I don't think that's enough. I think the data coming in needs to change. So we're very focused on, like one of my customers calls it, putting tiny little mics out the journey.
[00:09:29] Fran Brzyski: Customer gets an email saying, we value your feedback. Would you take five minutes? No, no one's going to do that. No one has the time. And if they do, they're probably not the right customer that you're trying to get feedback from. I think survey fatigue is way too real. And a lot of these companies keep investing in that. It's not the future.
[00:09:44] Fran Brzyski: I think us as consumers have more choice than ever and a very finite amount of attention. So when we are intending to reach out to your brand, we're intending to give you feedback, I think we need to maximize that engagement. And that's why we do video. That's why we do audio. We do plain text. We do screen sharing. How can I give the power to the customer to say, tell us what's going on? Give us that unstructured feedback. We're smart enough to tell the right stories. We know what the brand probably needs to know. We give that information and move on with our day.
[00:10:13] Fran Brzyski: That's where it all comes to life because voice of customer too often is like, here's the MPS score, here's the CSAT score, here's this, here's that. And it's just words on the slide at the end of the day, where with us, it's much more dynamic and we do a lot of topic modeling and trend analysis, but we get a lot richer context. We can do a lot more with it and we can make it actionable by saying, here's the trend, here's what's happening, here's 25 of your customers telling their story of that.
[00:10:39] Fran Brzyski: That's going to drive back. That's going to get product to lean in. That's going have marketing say, wow, the way they just talked about this could influence our next campaign or wow, this person gave us a 10 NPS score. Let's make them our next ad to convert our customers. I think we need to tap into the customer base more versus focus groups and market research, I guess like the status quo standard way of doing things.
[00:10:58] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Interesting. And how is it going for yourselves then as well? Maybe that's the first question. Then the second question, how are you using your own product to improve the product?
[00:11:10] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. I mean, how's it going for us? It was great. We brought on a lot of customers early when we were only collecting the data coming in, collecting the feedback. We didn't have the full platform built. And we found a ton of efficiency with that from the support angle. So people reaching out, you get in touch with a rep and eliminating a ton of back and forth there. Those early adopters stayed on with us and have adopted more of the platform now, taking that data, harnessing it and sharing feedback internally way that drives real growth and makes them look like a champion.
[00:11:44] Fran Brzyski: On our side, we use the product for how people get in touch with us on our Contact Us page and things like that. So they can talk through the product and see what the experience is like. And we use it consistently for when we're collecting feedback on product releases, when we're collecting feedback on beta features that we're putting out and we need feedback on.
[00:12:05] Fran Brzyski: We'll have people send in Harks. We had a customer last week at a skin company tell us how the hard platform alerted her of something that she would probably just put a macro together and said, "Oh, your pump is broken. We're so sorry for that. We'll replace it." But because of the video evidence behind it, they were able to send that to the manufacturer, streamline it, realize that it wasn't being packaged properly and get ahead of it. And she was like, I just wanted to give a shout to the team that saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:12:31] Fran Brzyski: When I shared that internally, the engineering team, the product team, that gets them very excited versus somebody leaving a five store view saying you helped me with a feedback workflow. That's the impact that we're driving. So yes, a lot of customer experience, but the empathetic layer it brings to the employees back at the company is a huge value driver as well.
[00:12:51] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I find that to be incredibly, incredibly powerful is when you can actually share these stories directly with the team. And I've helped quite a few different companies to identify the ideal customer profile and one of my general always go-tos is including video clips of customers describing the problems and how the product saves it from interviews. And it just resonates so much more that way than a slide that mentions this is the persona and what they do.
[00:13:15] Andrew Michael: Hearing from themselves, letting them describe how they experience the problem and how your product sells for is incredibly, incredibly powerful. And so obviously then you're working with quite a lot of different brands as well. I see a lot of e-commerce brands. I'm keen to sort of understand what has been some of the most interesting ways that you've seen people use your product that perhaps you didn't even expect yourself?
[00:13:40] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. Social has been - I shouldn't say the word surprising, we saw it coming, but not a of people request the feedback over social, but social to answer DMs and things like that, which is hard because it's very noisy. Putting up posts by leaders or influencers of the company or creators saying this company really cares about your feedback, click the link and give feedback on product drops or whatever it might be has been interesting to see the engagement side of it.
[00:14:11] Fran Brzyski: It's much more than email because people are already intending to engage with your brand. But the other side is taking a lot of these people that are lurking around your social profile. They may have never purchased from you and now you're getting their data. You're getting more information about who they are and you're able to target them so that could increase conversion. That's one way.
[00:14:29] Fran Brzyski: Another way is when somebody comes in and they are either extremely unhappy or extremely happy, using a trigger to go capture that likeness and say, either we missed a mark, we'd love to hear more, this is going straight to our C-suite, or we're so glad we're doing great, would you give more information? Would you become an ad for our next campaign? It's quite fascinating.
[00:14:49] Fran Brzyski: I think going out and just saying send us videos is one thing. But when you capture the intent behind it, and you catch people in the right moment, the completion rate, the satisfaction rate, it's much, much higher. And that's where, we talk about brand loyalty and retention where people feel like you're hearing them and feel like you actually care enough to solicit their feedback in that way makes them more brand wellness.
[00:15:12] Fran Brzyski: It's like, Oh, they took my feedback and they actually implemented something or they actually asked a follow up question versus going into the void or the unknown after you fill out a survey that took you five minutes and it was just very structured question and answer that might not even apply to you. So I think the personalization piece is key too.
[00:15:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah. All right. So what would you say has been one of the most challenging aspects of building the business so far?
[00:15:36] Fran Brzyski: I think when launching, we started in support and moving from a support function to a full customer feedback platform has been challenging in the sense that it's quite new. It's quite different. People are used to doing things in a certain way. So in those early days, you need people who are willing to take that risk because they see the bigger vision down the line. We have a lot of those people now. Tons of customers were fantastic.
[00:16:04] Fran Brzyski: So now we have the proof points where it's not so risk. It's like, look, these are what these other brands are doing. This is how you could do it too. But I think starting in support for one thing, proving people want to engage this way was one piece. Branching out and getting marketing involved, getting leadership involved and saying, we're going to overhaul how we've done things that the rest of the industry is doing it this way and you're telling me to do it that way was pretty difficult.
[00:16:25] Fran Brzyski: But now that the proof points are there, it's sort of like, "Hey, here's what other people are doing. Here's how they're growing. You're going to be left behind if you don't do it that way." So it's sort of flipped a bit.
[00:16:35] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And how did you go about then finding those first early adopters and customers to get to the point now where you're at a tipping point?
[00:16:42] Fran Brzyski: A lot of LinkedIn video where I reach out, I do some research and so just sending them a generic message. I would send a video of me and what I'm about and what I'm trying to do. Again, humanize the message, humanize the data and people responded quite well to that.
[00:16:57] Fran Brzyski: We found some adopters who really want to try it, specific use cases. And instead of trying to rope them into a big contract and lock them into something - allowed them to try it in a small capacity and prove our worth and expand thereafter. And that's been a resounding piece of who we are as a company. We have no ego, we're humble, and we really believe in what we're doing. And we're willing to let people try it because once we do, when somebody gets a piece of feedback, they see a trend and they share it internally, that's our leading indicator.
[00:17:29] Fran Brzyski: That's the magic. And that's where they reach out to us and say, Oh my gosh, I was in all hands and people were praising me about this. Or I shared this with the product team. They're like, how did you get this data? Where did this come from? And when you can make people look really, really good in their roles for doing something a little bit different, going against the grain and solving a bigger problem, making a bigger impact. That's a huge win and I think that's why we're such a loyal customer base.
[00:17:53] Andrew Michael: What has been then maybe the biggest barrier for adoption then? So one is in the beginning, literally just convincing people this is a new way. But second, what for you on your end has been the challenge in getting people to actually adopt and activate into your product or service to get to that point where they're having these stories and they're sharing this feedback with you?
[00:18:13] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. Where most people are using AI is to solve things faster, trying to get through a human conversation faster and drive efficiency that way. With us, it's been, let's try to take advantage of those moments and be just as efficient. So I think thinking through that of like, "Okay, where do want to place it?" We want to adopt it. We want to try it. We offer these channels to reach out to us now, which ones do we want to replace? Which ones do we want to compliment? How do we want to measure that?
[00:18:38] Fran Brzyski: On the support side, there's KPIs like one touch resolution, back and forth, which is fine. But when you go into the full customer feedback solution, you start looking at LTV by cohort. You look at retention increases. You look at different swings of the business that are much, much more impactful. And they might not be so black and white or white cut and dry. But more of culturally, how is this working? How are customers engaging with it? Is it driving more feedback that we can close feedback loops faster? So that one takes a little bit more of a committee who's involved and just sees a brighter future through customer feedback.
[00:19:13] Fran Brzyski: I guess the last point is customer feedback. The last 25 years or so, guess since 2003, everyone has done it the same way and they're expecting different results, but they're getting the same results. So why they're really eager to try something new, they're just like, "Will the feedback be that powerful?" And we have enough case studies now where it's like, "Yeah, it will." But I think people just look at it. They're like, "Yeah, what we do now is fine. Checks the box," like this isn't a priority. We want to do it. We're looking at X, Y and Z. And then they bring it on and they're like, "Oh wow, this has changed our," - we had one person say this changed our culture. So a little bit that.
[00:19:49] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think it's interesting as well, the cultural aspect that you mentioned around feedback, because I think there's different types of organizations and then the way that they view feedback. One is like, we know everything internally and we know what's best for the customer. The other one is like, the customer is best and they know everything. I think the truth really lies somewhere in the middle of having a really good sense of what the customer wants, but then also having a really good product sense of showing them what they don't even really know that they need yet.
[00:20:17] Fran Brzyski: And spending the time. I mean, there's a few leaders in voice of customer who do it really well will tell you like, "I don't need a tool to come in here and make me do it 20% more efficiently. I care - the more I actually know the data, the better. What I'm trying to figure out is, are the trends that I'm looking at true? Is the data I'm sharing out internally salient? So that when I say to a marketing leader, this is what's driving X demand, or this is what's driving people to cancel, we can take action on that, what I'm saying is true." That's a really, really big piece of it.
[00:20:47] Fran Brzyski: I think to your last point, it's the time to put in any of your customer feedback program is the benefit you're going get out of it. Like anything, the time you put in is the reward you get.
[00:20:55] Andrew Michael: How have you seen companies adopt feedback most effectively? So how are they really taking advantage? One thing, just setting up a tool like Hark and starting to collect feedback, but then it's another thing actually acting on this and then making sure that that flows throughout the organization. And so what are some of the best companies doing when it comes to acting on the feedback itself and actually making sure that the customers end up seeing the results of the time they spend giving it?
[00:21:23] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. You need to make it engaging and you got to personalize it to each department. So I actually just wrote a LinkedIn post about this. We did a 20 page voice of customer playbook written by some of the experts in the industry. And what the common theme was is you can have all the data that you want, but if people aren't actually in one, if they don't care, then it's obviously worthless.
[00:21:45] Fran Brzyski: And that's a huge tipping point for many CX leaders. So what I find the best people to do is go around, ask leadership, ask marketing, ask product, what are the pieces that you care the most about when it comes to customer feedback? So when we're showing things internally or you're logging into the platform, you're not seeing a bunch of support data that's irrelevant around wisdom. Who cares?
[00:22:05] Fran Brzyski: It's more you're seeing product defects, you're seeing SOS signals. We tag each piece of feedback that comes in with heartfelt stories, brand champions. And we can personalize that to the different departments.
[00:22:13] Fran Brzyski: When you do that and you make it engaging, you've got these customer stories behind every data point, people lean in. They see the benefits of their work or not benefits, what do you need to correct? So I think it's what do people care about within your organization, get that data to them, and then also let them see the impact of what they're working on.
[00:22:30] Fran Brzyski: Marketing might have had an ad campaign that crushed, they get to see the feedback from that. It's incredible. Product might have - based off of feedback, created a V2 of a product, like we have a coffee company that did that and then it gets to see what a better user experience that is during onboarding. That's very fulfilling from an employee standpoint. So I think it's making a personal them. We're all consumption based as consumers. We're scrolling all the time. Why would that be different internally at work? It wouldn't.
[00:22:58] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think, definitely that is an engaging aspect. I think one of the things that I worked with a previous colleague and I've actually since adopted it myself, I find it pretty powerful is just taking the feedback for the month and then feeding it through something Notebook LM. And you can actually create a podcast episode of it. And then I found the team just gets really, really excited by just listening to it.
[00:23:20] Andrew Michael: And then obviously, you're taking that step further with actually the customers speaking and sharing. Just extracting it from that plain text view where it feels like a chore to actually go out and review the stuff to something that's actually relatively interesting and something you can actually plug in on the way to work or if you've got for run and stuff. And I think that's definitely one those aspects.
[00:23:43] Andrew Michael: The other thing though, as well, from a product perspective, is that often we have feedback and it's not only coming from a channel like Hark, it's coming from other sources like customer success or sales. And how do you see companies dealing with these mixed signals that are coming through? Because I think, typically when they're coming through from different departments, there's also that bias from the different departments flowing through.
[00:24:06] Andrew Michael: And then products, they're trying to figure out these signals now. Is it sales asking for the specific feature because they know that this is going to increase ARR and it's going to help them close more deals? Is it CS because they have their own goals and focuses? So is this something that the product looks into? Are you looking to yourself maybe internally because collecting feedback on the site is really only one source of feedback.
[00:24:30] Fran Brzyski: Yeah, that's absolutely right. It's consolidating the data sources and bringing them to one repository, which we do, and we can apply our topic modeling across from it. A change up the conversation. Let's use the one that you just said. Sales is asking for this feature request and it's going to increase ARR by this amount.
[00:24:49] Fran Brzyski: What I found, and I've been part of the companies that have done this really well, product getting in a room with the sales team and being able to show them and map out, I know this is going to increase velocity over this quarter where we're trying to get quick wins for X, Y, and Z. I'm also looking at all of this other feedback and how if we do X, Y, and Z things, that's going to mitigate churn in the long run.
[00:25:10] Fran Brzyski: Now, sales is tough because people are commissioned toward a goal and they are incentivized to make noise around helping them achieve those commissions. But I think when you bring people into the bigger picture and you have one repository that can make the data stand out and say, here's what we're battling overall as a company, it drives more of that one growth effort. Like, okay, I can understand why my thing is being prioritized. Yeah, as a company, we need to work on these things. That makes sense. And then, okay, we'll put this on the roadmap for the next quarter or four sprints from now.
[00:25:41] Fran Brzyski: Very different conversation than just saying, “No, can't do this right now. We're swamped." Well, that's going to annoy people. So I think having a holistic view of the data allows you to come in and show the bigger picture to other departments and help people start to get in the same page and understand the why rather than just telling them yes or no, because your department has final say.
[00:25:58] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think bringing everybody together, I think, is - typically as well, the feedback's actually coming from sales and it's coming from CS and it's coming from different departments. And then they may be producing a report, like you mentioned, and their reports has inherent bias in it. And it's not just the actual feedback. So having a central repository removing any of those biases from the teams themselves, and then being able to objectively decide, I think, is definitely the way.
[00:26:25] Fran Brzyski: The other thing, I mean - sorry, the other point on that, it's a good point is when you're - let's take an e-comm company and the Head of CX says that people are having trouble during the onboarding process. They're troubleshooting here all the time. It's also a good time to go through that and show the data so that the engineers of the product team can say, "Oh, can't we just fix this by doing that? Oh, we didn't realize this was even happening."
[00:26:51] Fran Brzyski: I think a lot of the frustration from the customer side is it happens again and again and the companies don't listen well enough. I think being able to, again, give that user evidence behind the trend happening will bring these other departments together and want to fix things and prioritize things more and get more buy-in. So on the inverse side, instead of you reacting to other departments coming at you, it's much easier to productively go together, go out and get a win from you, but also the customers.
[00:27:18] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. The one aspect then obviously from the feedback side is really how do we improve what we're doing, how do we make our products or service better. One of the things, I think, looks very interesting from our perspective is how can you leverage this customer feedback to actually be driving growth? And what are some of interesting ways you're seeing customers leverage this feedback data to actually acquire new customers or to build brand loyalty on the other side?
[00:27:43] Fran Brzyski: Yeah, it's bringing them into the company and making them feel they're a part of it. So a lot of the very member centric member driven companies have these communities now. And rather than spreading out to the community and saying, we have a new feature launching or we're dropping a new product in 2 weeks. Here's what it is. Get excitement. It's like, guess what our new product is? Based on all the feedback you've given us, guess what we're coming out with next? Send in a video testimony or what you're excited about and you'll be in the drawing to win one.
[00:28:14] Fran Brzyski: It's like, how do we engage our community to get more feedback like that? And then after that drops, we really care about... We just launched this. We want to make it better immediately. Put in a QR code in the unboxing and be like, share your unboxing experience. What did we miss? What could we do better at?
[00:28:30] Fran Brzyski: So I don't think it's rocket science. I think it's just taking a step back and saying, we've got a really engaged community. They really like our brand. They like interacting with us. How do we invite them to do that more so we can grow? And that's got cascading benefits. You can have them agree to have their testimonial used for promotional purposes. We do that. We have customers that leverage that all the time. They're talking about the product in a way you might not have suspected. So when marketing is going out to creators on Instagram or TikTok, they can be much more informed as to what's driving the needle for this specific cohort.
[00:29:01] Fran Brzyski: I think we look at customer feedback a lot around the negative, but there's just so many - there's a lot of incredible stories that I see get shared all the time that clearly, clearly influence a lot of that behavior internally like how - okay, they're saying this, how can we grow more from that? Or the way they said that, it's just so interesting versus plain text. It's hard to analyze sentiment on that. It's hard to understand inflection and tone, seeing what other people are seeing, feeling what they're feeling.
[00:29:27] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Talk me through a little bit more about that process of going out and collecting the feedback as well. So you mentioned people go to TikTok or marketing teams will go out to different channels. how are they collecting the feedback other than the obvious through the websites and through the app itself? And I think obviously a lot of these products then are e-commerce products themselves. So what does that process look like? Is this maybe not the typical SaaS app where people, the supports directly there and you can just hit a button and reach somebody.
[00:29:59] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. Yeah. It's, again, instead of getting an email saying we care about your feedback, take five minutes to share the survey, especially with brands nowadays. There's usually people that are assimilated with that brand or when I see the celebrity, I know that they work with this brand or whatever it might be influencers, same thing.
[00:30:19] Fran Brzyski: So when you can get those people to engage and go on social media and post a story or do a post and say, "Hey, I love working with this company. I've given them feedback before. They actually really care about it. Here's what they do with your feedback. Click this link below. And you can give it straight to that team. And it's not your traditional survey. It's almost welcoming it as we care about you and we just want to hear from our most loyal customers. Click here, we made it really, really easy for you to do so."
[00:30:43] Fran Brzyski: And when people click in and you see this [inaudible] pop up and they're like, "Oh, wow, I can just talk to this thing. I can show... We don't need a selfie, but I can show what's going on and describe it at the same time." Something new. They haven't really seen that before. They're also on social. There's an intent to collaborate. There's an intent to reach out or do something with that brand if you're on their page.
[00:31:07] Fran Brzyski: So that's been a huge lever for us. And we've seen a lot more adoption from that versus a social campaign over email - sorry, an email campaign for feedback that gets sent to all their customers because inboxes are flooded. It's like, “Oh, there's another email.” It's hard to bring that to life. But if you can meet them in these different parts, if you're on the site and it says, "Hey, Andrew, we saw you just bought this. Join the conversation about X. We're not asking you to do more. We're saying our communities are talking about it. We want you to come into that too." It's how do we invite more versus ask, ask, ask.
[00:31:40] Andrew Michael: And more organic. Nice. You obviously then speak to a of people about collecting feedback and feedback programs and so forth. What's one thing that you wish more people would ask you when it comes to collecting feedback, but they don't.
[00:31:55] Fran Brzyski: That's a fantastic question. I don't think I've ever been asked that question. What do I wish they'd asked me more, but they don't. I think a lot of it is how do we start? How does this change departments outside of mine? I think that's probably the biggest one. We're doing our jobs day to day and we're very siloed and focused on what we're doing. So it's always - as we're looking at vendors, we're looking to how does this help me? How does this help what my OKRs are attributed to or whatever it might be.
[00:32:24] Fran Brzyski: And very seldomly do people say, well, interesting, if this could get the product department more in line with the monthly meeting that we have or something like that, how would that impact that? I think taking it a step further and going about it that way, a lot of people don't. I think it's either they put up on their all hands, a slide talking about their voice of customer or here's some feedback, here's some high level comments and they don't get much engagement. Or they have a very robust program and there's a very structured way that they share that, but they're not thinking differently.
[00:32:54] Fran Brzyski: Well, how could I do that more dynamically over time? It doesn't have to be a once in a month thing. How can this become a fluid lifeblood? So yeah, as I'm talking through that, I think it's how can I get more departments involved and really care about this data that I'm sitting on? And how can that help change our culture toward a customer-centric culture versus how we operate today? If we did that, what would the benefits of that be? If I got that question on a call - wow. I'm talking very personally. This is amazing. I know that person is going to be a big champion.
[00:33:23] Andrew Michael: Nice. I see we're almost up on time. So I want to make sure I ask you a question that I ask every guest that joins the show. What's one thing that you know today that you wish you knew when you got started with your career when it comes to churn and retention?
[00:33:36] Fran Brzyski: Yeah. I mean, I think when it comes to retention, I'm very bullish on leaning back into the human aspect of things. I've tried... I've looked out and saw how other people were doing things and would try to use those. I've tried automated messaging for like - let's use my company. New user onboards and I tried automated messaging and stuff like that because it worked for some other brands, but it wasn't part of our ethos. It wasn't part of our core.
[00:34:05] Fran Brzyski: I think as you're scaling and you're trying to build, you're looking out and you're seeing how other people do things and you're always second guessing how you do it. But I think always leaning into what you're best at and what makes your company you, especially in today's world with AI. Yeah, they're buying the software but they're buying the relationship with you as well. That's such a key element.
[00:34:26] Fran Brzyski: So as I think about retention, leaning into that, finding ways to scale that always wins and we see it with brands that we work with. When you see another company is taking off with a subset of a new product line or launch or shade or whatever, you can try to replicate that, consumers see that. They're quite smart. It's not that easy. I think it's leaning into the harder things of what makes you you, that special magic, what got you here. How do you scale that and take it to the next level for the next phase of growth?
[00:34:55] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. I think definitely, as you mentioned, this next wave with AI, bringing that personal approach to it and, I think, brand becomes a critical component of retention because if anybody can build anything, then you really need to be able to figure out how you stand out.
[00:35:12] Andrew Michael: And for me, it's three things. That's brand distribution and then the user experience overall and that's in product, but also outside, are the things that - you can still fight and have a chance to differentiate on. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with today before we wrap up?
[00:35:31] Fran Brzyski: As you just talked about AI, I think we think about AI a lot on brands using it to communicate with our customers. I'm already seeing customers use AI to communicate back with the brand and we're going to be sitting on top of a lot of synthetic data. So for me, obviously for what I do, I'm biased.
[00:35:47] Fran Brzyski: But I think the companies that leaning into human interaction and leaning into those relationships with their customers are going to have a very unique competitive advantage from a brand loyalty perspective, but also just from a data perspective of mining more insights out of that data and being able to grow faster in a world where customers have tons of choices. It's very easy for them to leave. How do get them to stay? I think leaning into that is a huge piece.
[00:36:11] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think that synthetic data is going to become more and more of a problem. I see, you have agents now that are answering support tickets and questions coming from customers. At some point, you're going to be having agents asking those questions and then having responses from them. And then eventually humans outside of this loop. [overlap]
[00:36:26] Fran Brzyski: The whole feedback loop is built on synthetic data. It's fascinating.
[00:36:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah. That's going to be interesting thing to follow and see how it progresses. Yeah. Very nice, Fran. Well, it's an absolute pleasure chatting today. Again, thank you so much for joining. I wish you best of luck now going forward.
[00:36:41] Fran Brzyski: Man, I've listened to this podcast for a while. So honestly, it's an honor to be on it. Thanks for asking me to join and have a lot of fun chatting. Thanks man.
[00:36:48] Andrew Michael: Nice. And for the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes so you can pick that up there. Thanks a lot. Cheers, Fran.
[00:37:02] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm.
[00:37:22] Andrew Michael: Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to andrew@churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.
