Alex  00:00

Hello, and welcome to another cloud podcast, podcast designed to bring you stories from the smartest minds in it, operations and business and learn how they're using cloud technology to improve business and customer experience.  Welcome to another cloud podcast. We're excited today to have Ryan Bellard on our podcast. Ryan, welcome to the show.

 

Bryan  00:24

Thanks for having me. 

 

Alex  00:26

Absolutely. And just a quick background, you know, VP of customer success over at CB insights. Great to have you on Aarde Good to see you, buddy. My my co-pilot. 

 

Aarde  00:38

A pleasure. As always, thanks, Alex, for having me on.

 

Alex  00:41

Absolutely. So Ryan, usually what we do to kick things off is just ask our guests to give a quick background right of where you know how you ended up at CB insights kind of your journey in this customer success world? Because it's newer, right? The concept of customer success and what that looks like for a lot of organizations now. Why don't you just give us kind of that, that journey and how you got here? And then we'll get right. And then what a little bit about what CB insights does as well?

 

Bryan  01:06

Sure, yeah. So CB insights, were a market intelligence platform, provide data research, and analytical tooling to help companies make sense out of, you know, technologies that are going to affect them and, you know, and their future and make decisions on what they want to do about that. My background, I started my career in sales coming out of school. And, you know, I made the transition over to customer success after a few years in sales, doing radio advertising, sales, doing local advertising, sales. And, you know, I, there was something missing for me in the sales world where, you know, you didn't really get to see the the connection of your product really having an outcome or an impact for the customer. That wasn't, you know, I wasn't getting fulfillment from it. And so, I had an opportunity to join an organization called work market, which at the time was, you know, completely, you know, beta, you know, products company that didn't have any live product didn't have any customers yet. And I got a wonderful experience of being able to grow with them over the course of about six years, you know, helping, you know, just starting off by just, you know, doing everything that I could, inside the organization, a lot of hands down with a product and thankfully had the opportunity to start managing their first customers, as customers started to come on board. As time went by, I was able to grow the team there. And after about six years, there, we had built up a small team of about eight or nine Customer Success managers. And decided to move to CB insights at a point where, you know, I had I grown at work market, I had done a lot they were, you know, in the kind of final stages of preparing to transition the company either go public or be acquired, and they ended up being acquired privately by ADP. And I had had some good conversations with the leadership and CB insights. And thankfully, they had an opportunity for me to come on board and build out the team here. And so now we've got a manage a team of about 25 Customer Success managers of about seven, seven strategic account managers support and onboarding.

 

Alex  03:28

That's great. How do you see you know, so you got to come in and like actually build the team out? Was there anything there before you got to CB insights as far as like a structured team or structured way of doing things on the customer success route?

 

03:43

Yeah, when I had joined, they had about five or six CSM, they had very large portfolios or a couple of 100 accounts each. And they were, you know, it was, you know, they were just kind of doing the firefighting, you know, customer success style that most companies kind of start off in. And, you know, we really kind of focused on building out, you know, process and scaling the team bringing portfolio sizes down verticalized, the team installing, you know, different processes and new technologies to help map out the customer portfolio and understand the business better.

 

Aarde  04:18

Now, Ryan, let's talk a little bit about how your customers contact you. Do they normally contact you over the phone? Is it emails ticking, ticket driven? Do you have chat today? And is there any sort of self service that your customers can do? Or are they just reliant on customer, customer support or customer success? agents helping them?

 

Bryan  04:40

So a little bit of all of the above? We have, we have a Help Center where customers can self support. We have a live chat that we offer, where they can chat with the support agents and file tickets through an info at email, you know, box so that our support team is the kind of the frontline monitoring, answering customer questions triage, and if they are running into any kind of an issue, the customer success managers and strategic account managers are more there for the consultative aspects of the relationship. So ensuring that, you know, we understand, you know what outcomes they're looking to achieve, and, and helping them kind of drive those forward. So their main communication is both over the phone, zoom, a lot of lot of zoom meetings, some pretty weird hours to even international customer base. So my team will get on the phone, literally at 11 o'clock at night or six in the morning. I don't know how they don't yell at me about that all the time. But they're their total troopers. And so yes, zoom, email, and, and phone predominantly.

 

Aarde  05:45

And was it easy for you guys to transition to work from home? During the pandemic? Or was it something that's still still a challenge today?

 

Bryan  05:54

I think for the most part, we transition really well, you know, from the team's productivity, you know, and, and performance, you know, I didn't see any drop off in productivity there. You know, the, I think the biggest, you know, challenge was making sure that you're keeping culture, as you Everyone, you don't have the opportunity to slap hands in, in the hallway anymore, you know, you've got to try to create different ways to keep that team environment going. So that was probably the hardest part of the transition. But all in all, I think we Yeah, I think we've managed it very well.

 

Alex  06:33

Going into a little bit into like, you know, RDS thing, like technology and things like that, like, where do you see it having the biggest impact in, you know, in this in the customer success world, right? Whether it's AI or, you know, natural language, you know, programming and things like that, like, where do you see the technology being changing for you guys, and leveraging what's coming out?

 

Bryan  06:54

Yeah, I see technology having a big impact on where Customer Success is growing, and the direction that they're headed. And I think you have a lot of the technologies, like you mentioned, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, they have a lot of application to what we do in customer success. You know, I think, you know, where chatbots, you know, are being used now is probably going to further, you know, be ingrained into a customer lifecycle. as we as we see that the tech on that side is getting better at really understanding what the customer is asking, being able to write, you know, back sentences in a structure that sounds like it's being written by a human and not by a robot, then, you know, I think those are areas where you'll see that really continue to, you know, be ingrained in the in the customer success technology stack. You know, there's some really interesting, interesting stuff, and even that, you know, can mimic human voice in voices right now. And so I can see, you know, a future where a lot of what, you know, we expect CSS to do now today can be handled with AI. Now, I don't think it will ever completely remove the need to have someone in a seat that you can actually face to face connect with, you know, between the customer and your product, but a lot, a lot of the AI advancements gonna have a big impact for us.

 

Aarde  08:23

Now, obviously, you guys are a data driven company. Talk to us a little bit about the KPIs that you look at on a regular basis, the metrics you look at, you know, it's since you're in customer success, are you looking at time to average response or ticket closer times? Is that top of mind? Or is it more around the experience? So things like Sisa, or NPS, those types of metrics?

 

Bryan  08:49

Yeah. On this on the support side, I mean, time to response and ticket resolution, you know, are important to ensure that we are, yeah, we're answering our customers, our customers questions rapidly and getting them getting their issues resolved. on, you know, what we're I kind of fall, you know, on KPIs is that the most important thing is to really understand why you're measuring something and having a clear articulation of how what it is that you're measuring, impacts your ability to support, you know, serve your customers and ultimately retain them. When you have touch points that have a clear scope and that you can, you know, identify and that they drive particular customer value. Then in those cases, you know, the my approach is you measure it, you monitor it, you you roll you roll out initiatives to improve those things over time. And so I went for my customer success managers, we don't necessarily put KPIs around like how many calls are you going to have? Or how many, how many emails are you sending a week because that doesn't necessarily equate to quality and doesn't necessarily equate to a good customer experience. What we have is certain touch points that we've we've better codified in what we want To obtain from those customer touch points. And we've seen from our data that when we have these certain touch points, that those customer that the CSM is who do those more frequently with their customer portfolio, have a higher, much higher retention rate than those adults. So we can very clearly articulate, okay, when we do this, we do a better job of retaining our customer base, and then then we roll out KPIs around those particular touch points. So that's where, you know, my, my motto is just, you know, the measure for the sake of measuring isn't great, it's when you have, you know, a clear thesis around what you're measuring, and how it impacts your customer team, your team's performance, then it's really strong, I do, you know, we do put a lot of work into, you know, analytics, versus KPIs, and, and, you know, those are your, for us, it's really important, you know, on the customer side to constantly have, you know, a measurement and to instrument how you're evaluating your customers usage of your products. So that way you can understand, you know, what behaviors are indicative of retention? And, you know, I think they're important for decision making. I mean, that's really where the analytical side of things comes in is, okay, how do we want to drive a better customer experience? What are the things that is resonating for customers, what's not, where do we need to spend more time as a team, but the big thing that you have to do is be careful of is that, you know, analysis, paralysis is a thing. So you have to know when you know, you have enough data to make a decision to move forward.

 

Alex  11:32

Yeah, and one of the things you mentioned before, when we chatted not too long ago, is that there's just, there's this balance between data and like the art of being will interpret the data, right, or not just relying 100% on whatever's coming out of it, but really using your experience. And, you know, being able to decipher like, okay, what's really going on here with with this data set that I came back, you know, explain a little bit just how you approach data and like, the thought process behind like, pulling out those, those golden nuggets that you can then implement with with your team?

 

Bryan  12:07

Yeah, we're so we will look at predominantly what we call positive deviance, right, which is where you have, you know, a certain set of data points that it uniquely stands out, typically from a retention standpoint, compared to you know, the rest of your customer portfolio, right. So, you know, if we see that, you know, customers that take a certain action happened to then you have a higher level of activity than other customers, then we will look at that and say, Okay, what is this action? That's when we go to the customer? This? Yes. And we say, Okay, we have this portfolio of customers that do this thing very frequently. Why are they doing that? What is it that's making them do that? What's the use case behind it? What is the value that they get from that? And then and then that way, you can kind of use Yeah, their their knowledge of their customer portfolio, in tandem with what the data is showing to create maybe a better hypothesis of why you may want to drive customers to take a particular action. And also like, which customers is not relevant for, right, like, that's as important to know, because, you know, if you're, yeah, it's a waste of time, if you're trying to drive a particular behavior that just doesn't fit for a certain portion of your customer base.

 

Aarde  13:20

We,  just did a podcast episode where we were talking about customer success managers, and they wear multiple hats, you know, they are the retention specialists, they are the adoption specialists, they are the people who have to answer support questions, sometimes sometimes they have to train some on new areas of the product or new areas of how they could support them as an agent. So what where do your CSM or your Where does your team really fit into that? Do they? Do they still wear tons of different hats? And if so, what are the different things that they're doing on a regular basis? And then, as a follow up? How do they have to communicate internally with other departments or other teams help support them with whatever their customer needs?

 

Bryan  14:07

Yeah, so I think our team is most focused on, you know, that the middle portion of the customer lifecycle and the renewal so the the thing that they're doing the most of is, is certainly the renewal, you know, discussion and negotiation with their customers. But more importantly than that is ensuring that the customers are engaging with the platform that they're getting what they need out of the platform, and being experts at taking the customers objectives and turning that into, you know, the how our how our solution is going to help drive that objective. And so it's I think the most important hat is, you know, as is strong consultation and product expertise in the way that they interact with other teams across the the customer base, I mean, I'm sorry, across our internal organization. Customer Success. I've spent eight years of very unique Cross collaborative roll on. So I think that you have to be effective that, you know, having those internal conversations and marshaling resources for, for your customers when needed. We have a close relationship. So with CBN sites, part of our products, as I mentioned, was research. So that's a really close relationship, that our CSM tab. And we've created a verticalized alignment between pods and CSM and pods of research analysts so that they can have a weekly touch point, discuss what's resonating with the customer base, what type of research are we not, you know, doing as much of that we should do more of, we get ahead of what's coming down the pipe for the next 30 days that they have an opportunity to inform the customers and make sure that they're they're prepped for reports that might be particularly relevant, particularly relevant for them. From a you know, from a product perspective, it's really important that we keep a strong feedback loop there, we've nominated you know, product champions in our organization that work with them directly. And that product is a super difficult job, because you hear a ton of customer feedback, and you have to synthesize, right, like what the what the actual needs are, they're gonna move the needle for the customer base across the across its entirety, versus you may be the one or two accounts that raise your hands a lot and are wowed. But, but their, their, their needs might be more nature specific. So we try to, you know, create an aggregated way of taking that feedback to the product team. You know, we do submit tickets through JIRA, you know, and make sure that, you know, the the feedback is consistent, but we have, you know, you know, cadence meetings, both bi weekly and monthly to, you know, essentially just sit down with the team and say, Okay, here's everything that we've submitted, here's all the stuff that we've submitted previously, you know, based off of our prioritization scale, here's the, these are the themes that we're consistently seeing. And also, you have to have a healthy dialogue around, you know, are the specific asks that our customers that are coming from the customer base, the right asks, or is there a better way to get them to the end result that they are hoping to achieve? via whatever asked they're making. So it's kind of a consistent conversation that always has to happen, and you have to be ready and willing to essentially pre, you know, reprioritize, When, when, when things come up. The other part of that is having a healthy prioritization system and understanding what the pair's prioritization system is, right, so that you have a product and CS team that both know, and generally agree on? What are the things that are most important that when they arise that those are the things that we're going to put, you know, to the front of the funnel?

 

Alex  17:42

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, cross collaboration that we hear time and time again, about how your teams need to be able to communicate with each other. And like already was saying a past podcast where they talked about, it's not just a cx leader over here, that's leading everything for the organization, it's really a combined effort of a lot of different departments having a voice and saying, okay, what's our Northstar? Was this customer experience going to look like? What's the process from pre sales to sale, you know, implementation, and then ongoing, right? So it really takes all departments to really collaborate together, how's it been for, you know, for you, and your team and your, your colleagues and your peers, and that collaboration and the executive level, and then for the CSM, like you're mentioning?

 

Bryan  18:27

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, we've gotten through waves of it in terms of, you know, doing it really well. And then you get, you know, objectives that can come in and, or your company just grows, and, you know, your teams grow, you know, the, the processes that were working previously, you don't don't necessarily work anymore, and you've got to, you got to re architect that, you know, I think, you know, we are right now, at a pretty healthy place where we want to ensure that, you know, retention is known throughout the organization, you know, as a team sport, it's not the work of the customer success manager, right. It's, it's the total sum of the experience that a customer gets with our product, starting from the very initial marketing messaging, they read, through the conversations that they have with, you know, our sales executives and the right expectation setting that they have there in terms of what they're going to achieve with the platform, the actual delivery of the product itself, the experience, you know, from a relationship standpoint, with the customer, success managers, all that kind of goes into it and has to be aligned. So I think that we have a good you know, healthy acknowledgement, organizationally that, you know, we we kind of have to have all hands in the pot if, you know if we're going to continue to drive a great experience.

 

Alex  19:44

Yeah, and the follow up with that really quick, sorry, Aarde, is, you know, we have a lot of clients, you know, that we talked to as well you know, they they're these great CSM, they've got a great knowledge base from just their experience of learning. And we want to wrap them and keep them in or you know, bucket over here to make sure that they're they're not going to leave and go into other parts of the organization. But for employee growth for career progression, that's just naturally going to happen. How have you managed around that from growing, growing the people that you've that work with you to other spots to the Oregon and how to, you know, manage that, that disruption? Yeah.

 

Bryan  20:20

Yeah, it's, it's tough because it is like, you know, as people grow and develop, you want to see them flourish and go in the direction that they're that is that they're passionate about, but it does leave you with, you know, you have to have the right capacity plan in place. And when that happens, we are, you know, uh, you know, I believe in cross promotion, I do believe that, you know, when with, you know, customer success managers, a lot of times, they're, you know, they're, they're gonna move on into other parts of the organization. And so I accept that that's going to happen. And we, you know, we have a pretty good conversation with our people team and ensuring that there's acknowledgement on you know, when and where that could happen, we have to have a good dialogue with other parts of the organization where people are going to be moving to, and have an understanding that, you know, in customer success, you know, the, the real key is that you have a customer portfolio that you're managing, and we need to know that, you know, in that in the process of transitioning out of our part of the organization, that the that we have a backup in place before that can happen, right. So you need to have a backup, you need to have the knowledge transfer shared, you need to have, you know, the the portfolio communications message, and then one on one strategy that we've employed, as you know, a way of helping ourselves there is creating a pod based dynamic with our customer portfolio. So our customers know that while they have an assigned no CSM, who's the manager in their account, they also have that CSM is part of a pod. And we ask our customers to include that pods, you know, email when they email us, and that they could expect that that pods gonna respond back from time to time those pods make those pod members may jump on a, you know, a portfolio review or a PVR with a customer. So the we try to build a relationship with other parts of the organization. So that if that particular CSM does transition out that it's not the only person that they have a relationship with. And that also includes getting, you know, executives involved in the accounts where appropriate, as well, and just ensuring that more Yeah, more and more, they're not hearing just from the customer success organization, they're hearing from other parts of the reputation as well.

 

Aarde  22:37

I think that that pod example is a great, great way for our listeners to hear how you guys have successfully done something to change the customer experience. Our viewers are also here to listen about advice, lessons learned, or basically just learn from each other around customer experience customer success. So do you have any other areas of advice, things that you've done, things that you've done that have worked, maybe things that you've done that have not worked? And maybe advise not to do? for our audience?

 

Bryan  23:12

Yeah, I would, I mean, what's most important for me, you know, and when you're thinking about, you know, the customer experience, I think, what makes a really great experience is, you know, a lot of informational, clarity, upfront expectation setting around with the customer around, you know, both what your platform or your product can deliver. And in a really clear understanding of what their goals are, and how you know, what objectives they need to achieve with the product. So I think informational clarity is super important. And, you know, part of that is understand is making sure that you have a value proposition that, you know, is resonated that resonates with your customers, that is clear from your, you know, across the go to market funnel, and the messaging is continuous from marketing to sales to, you know, onboarding, implementation and ultimately into the customer success organization. We went through a process there of, you know, evaluating what that value proposition was for our customers, and then matching them to what we call measurable outcomes. And so we did a lot of interviewing a lot of customer interviewing of Okay, what do we do that's resonating for you? What problems are we solving for you? You know, what was the pain that you had for that, and through this interviewing, we were able to come across, you know, a set of different value patterns and measurable outcomes that we could align generally across the board. And once we learned that, we were able to take that to and train the entire go to market organization on this, okay, this is from our customers, these are the things that we do. This is what resonates with them, you know, and we were aligning our messaging, totally across that funnel to to those value parents and outcomes. So we've internally called it the value burger, which gets a lot of smiles and laughs internally, but if you envision kind of like, you have got your button, your meat in the middle and your and your bun on the bottom, the top layer is the value patterns, it's what you know what your customers need to see, to, to get value. And to, to achieve those outcomes. measurable outcomes is how we're going to measure that the value has been achieved. And then the bottom layer is engagement activities are what are the activities that drive the outcomes that help prove the value? So you have kind of this interrelated three layer, you know, approach to understand and customer value. And that's, and so that's the value burgers is a big internal favorite. And then, in terms of things that I have, that we've I mean, you know, we certainly went through failure sometimes, you know, things that we've done that haven't resonated as well. You know, I said, a lot of it, I'll actually equate to hiring actually, and ensuring that you have, you know, good thesis on, you know, what the right experiencial you know, cultural and, and skill based fits are for your team. And really, you know, having a hiring profile that, you know, that resonates with the team, that you ensure that it's going to align the right those right pieces are going to be a fit for the people that you bring into the organization.

 

Alex  26:32

Yeah, there's always lessons learned, right? I think hiring is such a big part. And we've talked to other people too, right? Is you hiring for culture, you know, make sure they fit, not just, you know, there's, what personality you're trying to hire for, and all those different things, but it's a it's definitely that the human aspect, that's, that can definitely be tricky. How has that shaped, you know, how How's that, you know, hiring people, like just the leadership side of, of your of your career with people that have kind of helped get you to where you are today, like any, like, mentors and how that's advanced? And how you looked at that, with your the employees that you manage?

 

Bryan  27:09

Yeah, I mean, my mentors, you know, from my earlier part of my career, were, you know, a big part of helping shape, you know, my success for sure, including on the hiring front, I had got some good advice on how to hire from prior managers that my time at work market. You know, I think, you know, one of the learnings for that it was actually from, I think the book is called the ABCs of hiring. And it was, you know, it describes a process of I think, I believe it's called top grading, hiring, which is really a core focus on performance with a central thesis that, you know, the past history is the best predictor of future performance. And so how to evaluate that and ways to question and ask about that were good lessons for me, I think have have certainly sharpened my ability to determine where we're going to see, you know, people are going to come in and be immediate impact adds to the team. What, uh,

 

Aarde  28:11

What is the future hold for CB insights and your team? Do you guys have some big, hairy, audacious goals for the next three, five years? Or do you have things that you want to accomplish before end of the year? I know, it's, it's crazy. That's already may of 2021. But there's still plenty of time for us to complete some, some pretty large transformational projects, anything that you guys have in the works coming up the next next year? A couple years?

 

Bryan  28:37

Yeah, there's a ton, I probably can't speak to some of them, or most of them, but what I will, one project that we're about to kick off is, you know, it's more of customer success specific, but it's around segmented customer journeys and customer life cycles. And, you know, we right now, where we need to evolve further is around how a first year is customer experience with our, our, you know, our product and our services is different from a legacy customer, right, you have different needs, their different levels of knowledge, different ways that they want to be interacted with, you know, your first year customers, I think, and most or almost all products are going to be the most important because they're the, they're the ones who have to really, you know, have a high you have a high burden of proof on you got to show them that the product is is worth retaining for a long, long term and, and we even see from our data that once you get past your first year, you're much much more likely to renew for subsequent years after that. So, so that's what we're really focused on right now is, you know, what, how do we, you know, how do we codify a differentiated experience to ensure that we understand, you know, what they need to receive from us and how we're going to drive that?

 

Aarde  29:54

Yeah, we we had a podcast with Brett from sun basket who's in a month from delivery of foods, you know, food in a box to your door actually week to week or month, month or, or every other month. And he said that after he did his segmentation project that they found more value in answering the customers who had just ordered first ahead of the people who have been with them for years, even though the people who have been with them for years have a high lifetime value, they're their most elite customer like they're their bread and butter. It's actually easier and better to service the customers that they just onboard it because they know that they have the potential to have a long lifetime value. So but very interesting, very intrigued to see what the outcome of your project is. Where you guys take from it. 

 

Bryan  30:46

Yeah, well, we'll share the learnings once done.

 

Alex  30:50

Yeah, one of the other things that things that Brett was saying that he learned too, is like the the drop off point right there in utilizing the data, like we were talking about earlier, where it was like, you know, day 31? if, you know, that's when they found out that most people were canceling, right? And then how, and the reasons why behind it. And it was really interesting just to learn how they're using data, to figure out that that key spot like, Okay, well what's happening at this at this key moment? And then how can we put processes in place to fix that to be able to get those people going, and I think it was, once they do their six order, then they're like, they're in that spot where they're going to continue using the services, those getting that customer journey to that spot. We talked a little bit of before, when we talked before this podcast, Ryan about just books you've read, like, I know, there's a lot of thought leaders that are out there, is there any one specific or book that you've read that has really helped kind of craft, how you look at customer success, or the customer experience?

 

Bryan  31:50

I wouldn't say there's any like one particular book, I mean, it's, you know, I've read a lot of the customer experience Customer Success material out there. And I would say I guess if I if I pointed at anyone that was probably most impactful for me, there was a gentleman named Lincoln Murphy cleaver was from 16 ventures, he did a lot of work early on around customer success. And, you know, the ideas of required outcomes and how to how you should think about, you know, the customer experience with the product as different from, you know, the the core, you know, end result of what the product is driving, and you have to kind of marry those, those two things to have, you know, to have a great customer experience. So that was one that stood out early on. For me, you know, more recently, a book that I was reading, it's called the power of moments. And it was about it's about, you know, just how you create a, you know, a delightful, you know, customer moment that is memorable, and, and will last with your customer. And so it goes into some of the, you know, a little bit on some of like the science of like how people remember things, right, they usually will remember the very first and last parts of an experience, and pretty much everything in between gets lost. So they talked a bit about that. There's this great example of, of a hotel on the West Coast that has something called the popsicle hotline. So it's like the hotel, everything about the hotel is is generally you know, it's a nice hotel, but it doesn't stand out necessarily, in terms of its competitors. But one thing that they do is you when you go to the pool, you like pick up this red phone, it goes to the front desk, and there's a waiter comes out and like you know, white gloves, and a silver platter just brings you a popsicle, and like it's free, you have to pay for it. And just like that experience in and of itself. It's surprising. It's delightful for the guests, and they remember it and they were at the hotel very highly because of that experience. So it goes into like how you can craft that type of a moment for your customers.

 

Aarde  33:59

No, I love that. I love those little hidden. We like to call them secret services. You know, it's a secret, little service that that allows you to remember a powerful moment. So we're coming up on time. We've hit a lot of different topics. But we always like to end with one of our favorite questions. We're all consumers of products. So oftentimes, we have some pretty good and bad experiences with companies that we use. So putting putting you on the spot a little bit here, but we'd like to ask, When was the last time you had a good experience with a company or brand? And what was it and what made it such a powerful moment.

 

Bryan  34:42

I've got a good one. It's just recently happened. There's this new service in New York called taste. And what they're doing is they're bringing new york Michelin quality or very, you know, high quality restaurants into kind of the delivery scene. And where I live, I live out on Long Island, our local restaurants are okay. They're not very good. And so that was we used to my wife and I used to live in Queens. And that was the one thing that we love meant was like this loss of this really high quality food and restaurants. So when we saw this service, we were really excited about it, we signed up fully expecting that nowhere they're going to bring food out to Lynbrook on Long Island. And so we're probably outside of the territory. Thankfully, a couple of weeks back, I'd gotten a text saying, Yes, they are, in fact serving, serving our area, I got my first order. We had an Easter brunch from a restaurant in the city. It was it was awesome. And within about a week, I had gotten a text from their CEO, just saying, hey, like, how's the experience? Give me all the feedback, he wanted to jump on the phone with me. But like was purely, you know, happy to have a text conversation about feedback on what what how do they feel about the products? Was it you know, what, what stood up? What didn't? How would I think about them then versus their competitors in the market and things like that. So it was great. It was just like getting that like that personal touch from someone, you know, very, very shortly after the actual product was consumed, and you know, with what was genuine care for how the experience was. And so I thought that was that was pretty unique. And and then one thing that I will say is that textin I think is becoming a much more popular or and will become a much more popular method of communication with your customers even in, you know, a b2b format, you know, obviously, in this case, it's you know, as a consumer, but I think that there's an application for it and b2b and my CSM, you know, do consistently text tweet, and then we chat if it's overseas, you know, they will go beyond the phone and email when and where, you know, appropriate you have to obviously see that it's, it's, you know, accepted by the customer but, but that was but anyway so that was that was a really good experience for me.

 

Alex  37:04

My big follow up question is How was the meal was a really good meal is great because they pulled up to that standard.

 

Bryan  37:10

Yeah, it was it was very quality it was you know, there's only minor reheating of the the food itself, but food was super high quality instructions were really good. I would definitely recommend the service to everyone in the New York City area.

 

Aarde  37:29

Yeah, that's a that's a fire to it. For the people who have never been to New York City or Long Island. That's a pretty far trek from getting in the city food delivered all the way to Long Island and Long Island is pretty, pretty long. Yeah, no pun intended self. So just getting out of the city could take you a long time, let alone getting across to to its delivery point. So that's, that's a huge testament to a company that's trying to master the five star mission, you know, the Michelin star flight club service delivery service for food because there's lots of companies out there that are commoditizing that that space and you know, they're they're cheapening it a little bit. It's like the free delivery or sign up to become a member and you get $10 off your next order that type of stuff or refer 10 friends and you can. And that's, you know, it's good to hear that there's a white glove service that's out there. But Ryan, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today. This has been an amazing episode. Once again, Alex, thank you for hosting. And, you know, looking forward to everyone joining us on next podcast.

 

Alex  38:33

Yeah, Ryan, thanks for coming on. We've really enjoyed it. And it's, we can go for hours when I was talking about all this stuff. But we appreciate you taking the time out of your day as a lot of fun.

 

Bryan  38:45

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much again, for having me. It was great.

 

Alex  38:48

You got it. Well, that wraps up the show for today. Thanks for joining. And don't forget to join us next week as we bring another guest in to talk about the trends around cloud contact center and customer experience. Also, you can find us at Adler, advisors.com, LinkedIn, or your favorite podcast platform. We'll see you next week on another cloud podcast.