In this fireside chat hosted by Kuldeep Kelkar, Senior Partner, UXReactor, interviews Becky Staker, Vice President of Customer Experience at Actian. They discuss the intersection of user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) and how they work together to create a holistic customer journey. They explore the roles and responsibilities of UX and CX professionals and the importance of cross-functional collaboration. Becky shares insights on how UX professionals can build relationships and influence within their organizations, as well as the value of speaking the business language and understanding key metrics. She also emphasizes the importance of communicating the impact and value of user research to stakeholders.
Dive into insightful topics including:
- User experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) are closely related and should be considered together to create a holistic customer journey.
- Collaboration between UX, CX, and other teams is crucial for success, and cross-functional alignment is key.
- UX professionals should build relationships and influence within their organizations by understanding the business objectives and connecting their work to those goals.
- Speaking the business language and understanding key metrics is important for UX professionals to communicate their impact and value.
- Communicating the value of user research and championing the voice of the customer is essential for driving customer-centric decision-making.
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Full Transcript
Kuldeep Kelkar
Today we have a special guest, Becky Staker, Vice President of Customer Experience at Actian. Welcome, Becky.
Becky Staker
Thank you, Kuldeep. Really happy to be here today. Thanks for the opportunity.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Absolutely. Looking forward to this conversation. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Becky Staker
Yeah, happy to. I’ll walk you through a little bit of my background and my current role here at Actian. So just to walk you through the journey of my career, if you will, as we all talk about user journeys and customer journeys here today, my journey actually began in marketing. I actually started my career working for companies like Deloitte, EY, like you mentioned before. And my role started in various leadership roles on the marketing side in regards to industry point of view, but also practice consulting point of views. And so I had the opportunity to really learn about the buyer journey, if you will. And how do they interact with the brand? How do they make a decision? How do we find the right solution? And a lot of my role was focused on customer programs, buyer programs, thought leadership. And one of the things I really enjoyed about that part of my career is I loved learning from our customers, hearing from our customers and working with our customers. In fact, I got a chance to work on a number of programs, such as our customer story program at Deloitte, our Client Spotlight program, as we called it. And so I intentionally made a pivot in my career to move to more of the customer side, working with customers directly. And that’s leading me to where my second half of my career has been, working for companies that are like Sapient or other startups to really work in that post-sale journey around customer success, implementation, training, enablement, and helping our customers find success and outcomes for the business that we’re working with them on.
So that’s been my career overview. My role here at Actian is as the VP of CX. This is a new function for Actian as we go to market as a leading cloud solution provider around the data management space. And my role is to architect our CX strategy and looking at that overall end-to-end journey and how we can really help our customers and our users find the moments in matter of interacting with our business and our brand. And then ultimately that also leads to UX, which is also part of my team here at Actian. So no one dig into that further, but hopefully that gives you a pretty good overview of how I think about UX, CX, and really my journey here at Actian.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, amazing. I mean, many of our listeners are user experience professionals, user experience designers, researchers, leaders, managers, directors. And at many companies, there are user experience teams, and then there are customer experience teams or customer insights teams and customer success teams. There’s a whole different way of organizing teams at various companies. So tell us a little bit about what user experience and customer experience means to you.
Becky Staker
Yeah, absolutely. So here at Actian, we actually bridge those together into one functional team that supports the overall customer journey, which is why I’m the head of CX here at Actian, and also why UX is part of my team as well. So we look at the total picture of our customer experience. And that includes UX in mind.
But really the differences that I see between UX and CX is, CX is looking at the overall customer journey. How do we interact with your brand when they’re seeking a solution to maybe engage with your brand about identifying their need and finding a solution to their problem. And that starts even before they’re in the product experience, right? And that also leads to when they are onboarding a new customer that’s part of their CX experience, if you will. User experience is much more focused on mostly product, which can build an ecosystem of support around that. But usually it’s that user, right. Once they engage with your product, your service, they’re actually engaging with you, your product, your brand at a deeper level to actually identify and really solve their problem by using your product. So here at Actian, we blend those teams together and we intentionally have a team called the Experience Strategy that’s looking at that total customer journey. And then we have a team experience design that’s looking at the design experience of our products to help meet the needs of those users.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, so that’s very interesting. The world of UX and CX certainly is combined, sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct. So how would you differentiate between Customer Experience versus User Experience from a roles & responsibilities standpoint? At the end of the day, the end user, the end customer will have that journey. But how are the roles a little bit different? You alluded to it a little bit by saying product experience was a… tell us a little bit more, how do you see them? Are these two circles that fully overlap? Is there some distinction? Are there things that are unique? Where do they overlap?
Becky Staker
Yeah, absolutely. So maybe a simple way to think about it is a Venn diagram with the customer at the center, right? You’ve got CX and UX that are bringing the customer point of view and the customer voice is the center of what we do. And that includes that user voice. So in terms of the roles overlap, our teams that are on the strategy and the design side worked very closely together. In fact, they co-define the roadmap for new experiences we want to build for our customers and our products specifically.
So it’s everything from understanding the customer point of view, the research, what are the key personas, right. Here at Actian, we call it the User, Chooser, and Approver. We actually have three distinct personas we’re solving for. So we look at the User, those are the hands-on keys, using your product, interacting with your product experience. The Chooser, who’s helping identify the need for that organization, that’s ultimately trying to understand, you know, what their needs are and find that solution. And then the Approver, who’s ultimately your champion for the work you do together. So we look at those three personas as distinct with some overlap between, usually, for example, a user can also be a chooser, but not necessarily always an approver. So we look at those as distinct journeys in how they interact here at Actian, and then we help solve CX opportunities for them and experiences for each one of those core personas. So they work very hand in hand, the CX team and the UX counterparts right around strategy and design, but ultimately all comes back to the customer and what their needs are.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I had to jot this down because I’ve heard variations of this, but not exactly the way you framed it. And it makes complete sense after I heard it. The User, the Chooser, and the Approver, and then each of them has their own journeys. There are experiences that might have to be crafted to make sure that there is collaboration across those three roles. And especially in enterprise software, the distinction of the user versus the chooser versus the approver makes complete sense to me. Awesome example. So when it comes down to the activities or jobs to be done, those that are within the UX field, those that are designers and user researchers, versus CXers might be strategists, customer success, various different roles. So how does all of this manifest together? Who does what to make sure that the end product is really what the persona needs and that and their jobs to be done. So how does all of this manifest internally within your organization?
Becky Staker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the keys that is so critical is that cross-functional collaboration and alignment on all of these programs and initiatives that support the overall user experience and the overall customer journey.
So I mentioned those three personas. We work really closely with our marketing counterparts, our CMO, I meet with her pretty regularly to talk through concepts and ideas of how we’re looking at the buyer journey. And then I meet with our product and engineering counterparts very frequently and also customer success, right? That voice of the customer, the feedback from the field, if you will, what our customers’ needs are. So we have to bring this together cross-functionally. That’s what we’re here for. We’re all working together to help serve the need of our customers and our business. So that’s the first thing, right? We work.
I’d say very well, I’ll give us an A here at Actian around cross-functional collaboration. So that starts there. In terms of the drill down from the CX team, we work together collaboratively to develop a quarterly roadmap of what we want to deliver in terms of value back to the customer and value back to the business. So for example, leading into next year, we’re looking at, we have to prioritize what are the objectives we’re trying to meet from a CX strategy perspective. But ultimately, how do these connect back to the business objectives that we want to achieve? And ultimately, our customer goals, right? Are there customer outcomes we’re trying to achieve through this new strategy or this maybe new deliverable we’re working on? So we lock arms as a team around what the priorities are, right, in terms of what we want to deliver, in terms of research projects, right? Maybe design concepts, maybe new innovation areas that we want to invest in as a business. And we prioritize the research that’s needed on the front end, right, from a customer research perspective, and then how does that translate to early prototypes or maybe some concepts of what we could deliver to a customer and that ongoing design process, right? End to end, GA, right? To GA process. So we try to look at that quarter over quarter, and make sure we’re agile, we’re looking ahead, but also incorporating this cross-functional alignment, but also the customer feedback and everything we do.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Nice, nice, nice. That’s amazing. And when we talk about designers, and right now I’m talking about UX designers and UX researchers, I’ve heard a lot from the community where they want to cross-functionally work with everyone. They do want to do amazing work and awesome job, like everyone else. But many of them ask, hey, how can they influence executives within their organization? How can they build a trusting relationship within their organization? The questions are not so much about the craft of design or research but more about organizational influence, up, down, sideways. What recommendations would you have for the design community or the research community?
Becky Staker
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. And certainly, you know, you want to expand your knowledge, right, beyond your core projects to the business objectives that you’re trying to solve for, right. And get that empathy and understanding of what we’re trying to solve for, as a business. So that’s where I usually start. I encourage even my team to build those relationships cross-functionally, seek out champions for the work we do; people that give us feedback, be a counterpart to an ongoing relationship and dialogue, right. Understanding what those needs are. For example, maybe from the UX side, maybe it’s the web manager for your company’s website. And we very much connect with our web director to understand how do we connect that to the broader story we’re trying to tell to our potential buyers, right. Or anyone seeking out information on our website. So we have a great relationship there that we make sure we have ongoing dialogue. So seeking out those champions for the work and the value of research around the UX and design, and also building those cross-functional relationships. And it takes time, it’s not easy, especially in very large matrix organizations, which I’ve been a part of.
You have to create your plan for the right stakeholder relationships you think are important, be empathetic to the business needs, understand the business drivers, understand the business success, what success looks like for various teams, and how you can connect your vision to their vision. So it’s definitely a concerted effort.
There’s a great book that I’d recommend. It’s more of an onboarding book for a lot of people that are joining your organization. That’s called ‘The First 90 Days’ by Michael Watkins. And he has an excellent framework in that book called The Star’s Model. And basically what he’s doing is, as any new employee is joining an organization, he’s giving you a roadmap to understand the business systems, right? The systems, if you will, the connectedness, the matrix of the organization, so you can understand where you can make an impact.
That’s an excellent book for anyone, not just on going into a new organization, but also just trying to find a way to really break into how do I understand that organization structure, the systems, the factors that influence where the business is heading. So, highly recommend that book.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, thank you, Becky. I mean, I just made a note, ‘First 90 Days’, right? Michael Watkins. Well, in the summary, we’ll certainly add that link to that book. So great recommendation. Love it, right. I mean, and I might be oversimplifying and generalizing here, but many of the designers and researchers that I’ve known over the years are more introverted, and they find it hard to reach out, to open those conversations, build those relationships. I’m oversimplifying and overgeneralizing here, but you kind of know what I mean. People have to be outside of their comfort zone to reach out to a broader organization. So that’s not a natural tendency for many. So any specific recommendations on how they should approach this? Who should they engage with and how should they approach this topic?
Becky Staker
Yeah, for sure. So one opportunity that you can be thinking about is how do you take the time to understand the broader organization initiatives and how your work can connect to those, right? And hopefully a lot of information is shared through All Hands Meetings within the organisations, and maybe their 10K report, right? You know, you can really lock into… even public trading companies have that pretty public, in terms of the annual reports and quarterly reports. So taking time to understand, right? What are the key initiatives for the business, and how does UX play a part in that, right? What are some proactive things that the UX team can be thinking about to connect opportunities to the broader vision for the organization. So one example could be maybe there’s an initiative, right? Or some sort of program that’s in place and maybe they just need some creative thinking. Maybe someone that can come in and, you know, work on a mini workshop, if you will, to maybe brainstorm some design thinking concepts to help solve a need. Right. But some maybe design talent is a part of that as well, or design concepts. And so it could be almost like an offering, right? Internally to your colleagues around how UX can play a part, really champion the value of UX, and the research. So, it is definitely proactiveness on your part, but it’s also just taking the time to learn about your business and your organization, the drivers of that business, you know, the revenue drivers, the customer retention drivers, and really finding a way to bridge into those initiatives that are existing.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, so clearly you talked a lot about the UX and CX, a lot about what I’ll call here KPIs, the ‘drivers’ was the key word. So I had a question around, should designers and researchers speak the business language? Based on your comment, it sounds like the answer is yes, but then what type of business language? What are some of the things that community… Let’s say, I’m a designer working within a large organization, and I want to understand how the company is doing, where things are related to my business, what numbers to look at.. Any recommendations on how to get started with and understand these concepts?
Becky Staker
Yeah. Absolutely. So I’ll bring from a technology point of view, right? And depending on the industry, there’s different metrics they look at. So I’m going to bring it from a more Tech SaaS point of view, but it varies depending on your industry. So keep that in mind. There’s a lot of great information, even publicly on websites, on YouTube, around the top drivers of success and metrics from a SaaS perspective. But some of the things that we directly connect in the CX team are things like customer satisfaction, right? NPS, right? The Net Promoter Score, CSAT, right? Those are more very commonly known CX metrics, even across many different industries. But in the technology space, some of the key metrics are things like ARR, so Annual Recurring Revenue, right? Which is another very common SaaS term. Or retention rates. What is our customer retention rate? And even getting down to maybe segments of those customers, understanding the customers that are growing, right? And what types of offerings are we presenting to them, right? Why are they growing with us? Are they cross selling or are they upselling? So you can actually get access to quite a bit of that information through your CX counterparts, customer success, obviously the sales team. But those are the more commonly broader business metrics. But I think if you can understand those quarter over quarter goals, and what the company is trying to achieve and those more common metrics that your company’s tracking, it gives you a perspective on how can my work connect to these broader success metrics, such as NPS, right? Or CSAT. Are they satisfied with our product? Are they satisfied with our team, our service, the overall experience? And if they’re not, if they have a lower NPS, you know, on average, why and take the time to understand that and where can UX can play a part of that. So it is macro level, right? But there’s also opportunities to get to that micro level where UX can have a direct impact, maybe at a smaller level, but that also leads to macro level impact too. So there’s a lot of opportunities.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, that’s very interesting. And you have this unique experience working across sales and customer success and marketing and design and research and how to bring all of this together. And that’s usually not the case in the industry. In the industry, there are functional silos. Everyone wants to break down those silos, but the reality is that so much work happens within those silos that people get exposed to just their portion of the work, generally speaking. And there were lots of recommendations, steps, how to reach out, what types of KPIs to look at. Any thoughts or recommendations around: hey, how should sales, marketing, customer success teams work closely together with UXers, designers, researchers, UX leadership? So what are some of the things that they should do to work better with the design community?
Becky Staker
Yeah. So I think one thing maybe broader is to start with the voice of the customer, right? Because at the end of the day, the user voice is also included in that or should be, right? It should not be representative just, you know, there’s a lot of VOC metrics that are very commonly known. Like you mentioned a couple of those, NPS and CSAT.
But I’m a big proponent of looking at the total picture of the customer voice, right? You know, from the metrics I mentioned earlier, but also the user side, right? The user data that, you know, we use Pendo, for example. We have a lot of great behavior data around the user experience. And so bringing that and championing that data to the forefront of those that work with our customers directly can be really powerful to connect our work to their goals. From a sales, marketing and CS perspective. So we’re a big proponent of bringing that all holistically, but also presenting in a way that we can help evangelize the customer as well, like their voice across these various teams. So that’s one aspect, you know, there’s definitely more, but I’m a big believer in VOC (Voice of Customer) beyond your CSAT type metrics and really that comprehensive voice of the customer. And that could be things like the ideas they submitted to your product idea center, right? That’s always a great input around, especially the product experience. There must be something they’re challenged with, or maybe trying to find a solution for if they’ve got these ideas or submitting. That could be a signal, around new opportunities, maybe on the sales side. So championing this data more broadly to these different functional groups can be really powerful to connect your work.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, so data-driven decisions. I generally talk about people within the design and research community.
The more fluent they [designers and researchers] are in data, the more they can speak the business language, the more respect and influence they have within the organization.
And everybody has to learn and start somewhere. You might not get all your facts and proportions and ratios and acronyms right the first time around. But the second time around would be better than the first. The third time would be better than the second. And so just getting started somewhere and understanding, in this case the SaaS metric or the non-SaaS metric, or lots of data that is generally available within the organization. So, absolutely agree with the recommendation.
Becky Staker
That’s right. And I think you bring up a good point to keep it simple, and to build upon that. And I also guide my team to do the same. Start with a point of view, right. Create that point of view that’s data driven, you know, get feedback on that point of view. We iterate that point of view with additional data or feedback internally. And then we get a more comprehensive point of view. If we’re maybe testing a hypothesis, for example. But I think getting started is the first step. That’s certainly keeping it simple.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah. And so since you have within your organization broad skill sets, people with a variety of different skills, for user research, and user researchers in specific, I assume you have to communicate the value of that function to a broader organization. It could be your peers. It could be your leadership.
At the end of the day, all of us have to justify the resources and the outcomes, and we’re all driving towards that business outcome. So any recommendations on how research leaders, especially the user research leaders should communicate their impact, communicate the value, sell their value? How do you do it, and what recommendations do you have for others in the community?
Becky Staker
Yeah, communicating the value ongoing is absolutely very important for any UX researcher or any UX leader. So we certainly make sure that we continually bring new insights and ideas to our counterparts. What I mean by that is if we have a research we’ve concluded and maybe there’s a couple of really interesting things we want to explore further, we want to share that across many different teams for input or maybe validation. Are we hearing the same from the field, for example? And if we are, we should go explore that further. Maybe that’s an opportunity for us.
At the end of the day, it also starts with that cross-functional collaboration that I mentioned earlier, and making sure that we’re aligned with our product team, our engineering team that’s building our products, ultimately the roadmap that we’re all working towards, and also champion a thoughtful process around making sure before we develop too much of new concepts, new features, things like that, that we are taking the time to bring research to the very beginning. Because if we don’t, sometimes we get into a situation where we have to maybe rethink a concept or maybe redesign a capability we’ve built and that’s too expensive in this day and age.
We have to remain agile, but also responsive to customer needs. Those customer needs are grounded in research.
So we want to make sure that we take that time to hear their voice, but also bring that ongoing research to our counterparts that are building our products. So it does take kind of a multi-channel approach, if you will, around that collaboration cross-functionally. But also we want to be in the forefront of bringing new ideas, new concepts, right? How can we champion what we’re hearing to maybe bring a new feature that we think would be valuable to our customers? And I tell my team to put a business case together around that, why should we do that?
Kuldeep Kelkar
Be the loud speaker.
Becky Staker
Like how many customers will this benefit? You know, let’s show the data of how this could benefit the customer.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, quantify it.
Becky Staker
Exactly. Right. We put ACV against it, Annual Contract Value, right. This is at stake for retention next year, but these types of customers can find value in this new feature. So let’s make sure we take the time to research and validate those needs. So there’s again a multi approach. But again, I always go back to that cross-functional alignment, and to making sure we’re all connecting to the broader vision for the organization.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, that’s fabulous. I mean, Becky, there’s so many tips, tricks here involved. I certainly took down some notes. And I’m sure we can talk for another hour more on a bunch of these topics. But we need to land this plane somewhere. And so it’s wonderful to hear your background from a CX-UX standpoint, how teams work together, the value of user research. And so I know I found this very inspirational. Thank you very much. I appreciate you being the guest on this podcast. Any last words before we wrap up?
Becky Staker
Yeah, no, I just want to just emphasize to the entire UX community. First of all, you know, UX is actually a new area for me over the last 12 to 18 months So, you know, we’ve intentionally connected UX to CX here at Actian, which is pretty unique. And so I’ve learned a lot about that, especially with my amazing colleagues and my team that are incredibly talented. I’ve learned a lot and partners like UXReactor. So I just want to thank my colleagues and you all, UXReactor as well for teaching me along the way. But I’ve never been more of a champion than now. I feel like it’s such an important area for any company considering the customer experience. UX is a critical component of that strategy and thought process. And so the work you all do is so important to the customer and to the organization. I just want to say thank you all for the great work you do and I’m happy to come back at another point and chat about some other topics. Thanks for the opportunity.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Thank you, Becky. This is all music to my ears, and I know the UX community would absolutely appreciate all the tips, tricks as well as all the great words that you had to say. Thank you, Becky.
Becky Staker
Thank you very much. Bye bye.
