CXChronicles Podcast 212 with Tom Martin, CEO at Glance

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #212 we  welcomed Tom Martin, CEO at Glance based in Wakefield, MA. 

Glance makes it easy to provide personal, human-to-human customer experience in digital environments.

Glance's in-the-moment web and mobile cobrowse, screen share, and video solutions increase customer satisfaction, ensure brand loyalty, and drive revenue. 

The world’s largest enterprises trust Glance to empower their customer-facing teams and deliver frictionless, at-the-exact-right-moment customer consultation. 

With integrations with Salesforce, Twilio, Genesys, ServiceNow, and more, Glance fits seamlessly into even the most sophisticated CRM-CX tech stack.

Discover the power of Glance guided CX at https://www.glance.cx/cxchronicles

In this episode, Tom and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback and shares tips & best practices that have worked across his own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #212 Highlight Reel:**

1. Bringing human & digital worlds together to create world class customer experiences
2. Prioritizing customer conversations & identifying solutions to find new customers
3. Creating an omni-channel tech-stack to meet your customers where they already are
4. Building a cohesive, understandable and repeatable story to engage your customers
5. Leveraging feedback to drive growth & continuous improvement out of the gates
 
Huge thanks to Tom for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Tom Martin

Click here to learn more about Glance

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today.

You know what would be even better?

Go tell one of your friends or teammates about CXC's content, CX/CS/RevOps services, our customer & employee focused community & invite them to join the CX Nation!

Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused video content & short-reel CTAs to improve your CX/CS/RevOps performance today (politely go smash that subscribe button).

Contact us anytime to learn more about CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com and ask us about how we can help your business & team make customer happiness a habit now!

Huge thanks to our newest CXCP sponsor Glance. Visit their website today at https://www.glance.cx/cxchronicles

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast - #212 with Tom Martin, CEO at Glance.mp4

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady-Cesana. Super excited, guys. Today, we have Tom Martin from Glance joining us. Tom, say hello to the CX Nation. 

Tom (00:00:21) - Hello, everyone, and thanks for having me, Adrian. 

Adrian (00:00:24) - Absolutely. So, guys, Tom has got a super cool story. First of all, he's got a super cool business that he's built. Number two, he's got a really, really cool story. He's worked with all sorts of incredible companies across the world. And he's here today to kind of share a little bit about his journey as being a customer-focused business leader and hopefully give us a bunch of different nuggets of wisdom from his experience and his journey. Tom, why don't you start today's show? We can start off all these episodes, my friend. 

Adrian (00:00:48) - Give the CX Nation a couple-minute story for your stepping stones, man. What were some of the early things that you got into in your career that led to you starting a business like Glance and doing all the incredible things you've been doing over the last several years? Sure. 

Tom (00:01:02) - I have done a lot of different things from starting an Internet service provider way back in the early days because I was like, gosh, this seems like a pretty good idea, and getting into things back when most people don't remember, like 14.4 modems. And then we went to 28. But realizing that the idea of connecting people was a really interesting piece that I had. 

Tom (00:01:25) - And going into the business of really recognizing that all the different areas that I spent time in, from then working for a company called RecSpeed in the early days in New York City, we were doing wireless, and it was all about getting people connected. And we're doing Wi-Fi inside of old buildings in New York City, and realizing that what if you actually used a Wi-Fi signal? People probably don't remember Orinoco that was bought by Lucent, but they developed the 802.11 protocol, and suddenly you're like, oh my gosh, like a patch antenna. 

Tom (00:02:01) - We can get connected, and we don't have to have wires, and this idea of connectivity to be able to bring people together. But so much of what I've always thought about is, through all of these things, is that people want to be able to communicate with other people, and the community is really what brings people together. And when you think about the Internet, which is, to me, the loneliest place on the planet, what are the things that draw people in? Gaming, social media. 

Adrian (00:02:31) - Why? 

Tom (00:02:31) - Because you're there to interact with other human beings. Maybe not all of it is productive, but the idea of community and bringing people together is really important. And so as we get to the story of Glance, this idea of recognizing that more and more things have been able to move into the digital world, and as people become more comfortable, like you and me, here we are, using technology. We're probably only maybe 300 miles away from each other, but we're using technology to get together, and you realize that we've become more digitally native. 

Tom (00:03:03) - More things can be done over this. 

Adrian (00:03:05) - Why? 

Tom (00:03:06) - Because it's more convenient. I can do it when I have time and I'm free. I've got 24-7 access. Instead of thinking about me adapting to the company, then the company can really be more adapted towards their customers. And so this idea of bringing the human and digital worlds together becomes much more powerful. And as these workflows become more complex, you realize that if you and I were going out and trading and we're just starting our investment career, we're like, well, let's use Robinhood. 

Tom (00:03:36) - Look, I know how to trade, but then it boils down to what's the best things to buy? Like, what's the best stock to buy? What's a good allocation-based portfolio for my needs? And my needs are probably a little different than your needs. And so as we start to really delve into the experiences that people are looking for, it's not necessarily help with digital, but they're looking for advice and expertise on how to live their best lives. 

Tom (00:04:02) - And so as companies start to really think about what they're doing, how do they expose what may be the most powerful tool and asset that they have, which is the advice and expertise that they can provide to help their customers be wildly successful with whatever product or service that they're providing. So when we were starting Glance, it was about being able to simply show people stuff. But today, we've built an in-brand collaboration platform. 

Tom (00:04:32) - Here we are using collaboration, but it's to be able to connect people inside of a digital space that a company has, their website, their mobile app, to be able to provide that personal connection at just the right moment and realizing that, hey, I'm doing my taxes. I'm trying to fill out a mortgage form or buy a car and I need some assistance. Why do I have to leave that channel? 

Tom (00:04:53) - So what if we create a way, no matter how the customer comes in, to be able to connect them to the right people, knowing full well that oftentimes when I ask you, Adrian, like, tell me an experience that you've had, and oftentimes you're like, I had a great experience with another human being. That's the attachment.

Tom (00:05:12) - It's not like, oh, I bought this great tool. It's like, I had a great experience with another human being. And that emotional connection is what drives my loyalty, drives me back to that company. And you realize, you're like, that might be our greatest asset because today you can buy the same thing from 25 different locations. 

Adrian (00:05:31) - Yep, I love it. I mean, you're spot on. People do business with people that they like. And it's funny, we live in this world where everything is about technology, digital, and online. And it's all true. And it's made our lives so much better. And there's all this great, positive gains that have come from it. But at the end of the day, people do business with people that they like. Tom, that's super duper helpful, man. And thank you for kicking us off. One quick thing that I wanna follow up with you. I love it. I'm on the glance.cx website right now. 

Adrian (00:05:59) - And you guys have a piece that says, great customer experience is no longer negotiable. With Glance, you can take your CX from table stakes to game changing. And I love that because I think like, number one, every business leader and every executive team and every customer facing professional out there right now is thinking about ways that they can get a little bit better, a little bit sharper, a little bit tighter. 

Adrian (00:06:19) - Many of us have, you know, this year has been, let's just say it this way, the last couple of years has been very interesting for the whole planet, right? There's been a lot of change. There's been a lot of ups, a lot of downs, a lot of what have you. But I love that notion of, from table stakes to game changing. Because I think that we've seen time and time again, companies that really truly believe that, that sentence, they are doing big things. They are working with incredible companies. They are also finding new companies to work with. 

Adrian (00:06:46) - So all of the incredible stuff. Tom, I'd love to, I'd love to jump into the first pillar of team, man. Tell us about your team at Glance. How, number one, give us a sense for some of the different roles and some of the different departments and some of the different folks that you had to bring onto the team as your business was growing and as you were finding more and more awesome companies out there in the world to work with. Spend a few minutes kind of talking about team. 

Tom (00:07:06) - Yeah, it's been an evolution. And when you're starting a small business and you have just a handful of people, you're literally looking for people that are talented at wearing multiple hats. This is like what everyone knows. And I think what we've really moved into, here we are pushing 85 people. You know, we've really started to like hire people for functional roles. 

Tom (00:07:28) - And so we have on the front end of the business, you know, we have a sales team, we have a partner team, and we have a deep marketing team that also has a really strong product marketing team. And so part of what we've recognized going into this space is that the ability to tell stories and to talk about how we drive things. And you realize most companies sell something. And I like to use one of these silly analogies is like people don't wanna buy hammers, but they buy them all the time. 

Speaker 3 (00:08:04) - Why? 

Tom (00:08:04) - Because they realize that the best way to join these two pieces of material with a nail is to buy a hammer to do it. And so when you think about like technology, it's like, what's the best way to bring these two people together to resolve a question, to help them through a process inside of a digital space so they don't like abandon the journey. And you're like, aha, we have something that can help you out. Because you realize it's like, what's the most effective, simple, frictionless way of bringing people together. 

Tom (00:08:31) - So being able to tell those stories about those types of outcomes, we ended up really focusing deeply on building out that level of expertise around storytelling and about building good use cases with a product marketing team and a marketing team that can tell those stories, but also to be able to bring that level of depth and understanding to our sales team and our partner team. And that's really been the front of the house. 

Tom (00:08:57) - On the back of the house is having, we recently in the past year and a half brought on people that could really take the ideas that we had for like, where is the world going? What does the promised land look like in CX, in this digital plus human world? But really finding someone who had the vision and the strategy to really start to think about all of these things and where we play. Because when you think about like.

Adrian (00:09:28) - eating at a good restaurant. There's so many ingredients that are used to create that meal that you enjoy and so thinking about good CX that you have or anybody has, it's a recipe and oftentimes it's a dynamic recipe because what works for one person or customer may not work for the other one. So the idea of like creating the right recipe which includes the right people, the right training, the right processes, the right tools you know that create that experience that people have. 

Adrian (00:10:01) - So having that ability to understand like where what type of an ingredient are we, how do we fit in, what does that recipe look like and then you know thinking about the engineering team on the backside was really starting to think about like how do we are we building a product that someone's gonna unwrap you know untie the bow take off the wrapping paper pull out and be like look I can use it or are we really you know an API first you know module that gets plugged in to our you know an experience that a company is looking to create. 

Adrian (00:10:35) - I think number one it's it's it's right that's why this is just such an interesting space to be in and some of the some of the work that you and your team at Glance are doing so the customers that you guys get to work with none of this stuff is there might be similar things that you're kind of talking about similar challenges and similar problems but every company is unique there are certainly similar ways that repeatable ways you can go about solving some of those problems or going about tackling some of those issues but you're right all these companies are different and most customer bases have slightly different nuances right so every business that's out there that might need some help with this type of work is like they do have a little bit of different challenges there isn't some personalization that's required to dig in. 

Adrian (00:11:15) - Tom one question for you as you were building Glance and getting it off the ground what were like what was the first team investments you had to make and I always I asked this question because I love hearing some of the differences but was it sales was it marketing did you have to go straight to finding someone that could help with with delivery what was like some of the early the first early team investments that you really had to make and you had to bring people in to help you kind of get things done. 

Adrian (00:11:38) - The things that we did early on was we started to invest in the engineering side we started to also do some stuff in sales but you know one of the things that I can tell you is like if the people that know the vision the people that know you know the product and the environment like myself like one of the things that I realized was that the sooner I could put some people in place to do my job to do my job in the office allows me to be out in front and talking to the customers and realizing that getting people who are on the leadership team out in front talking with people is so helpful like thinking and assuming that you can hire people to be like okay you're gonna do the sales job you're gonna do these jobs is I think it's a little bit of a short-sighted to think that you can just sort of step out of it and realizing that you know there's a piece in the sales process that I've realized and and I can validate this through a whole bunch of work that we've done is I might not be opening the door and I might not be closing the door but in that middle part of the sales process where they're like do I is glance a company that I want to work with and doing that validation at the highest level of like you know is glance a company I don't work with you know they might be a smaller company here we are selling deep into the enterprise space and they're like or we're used to working with the SI's and you know the IBM's of the world and now enterprises are looking at much smaller innovative companies why because they're looking for that edge they're looking to create that edge and so thinking about some of the things that we did early on I can't impress enough on you know people that are early leaders starting their own businesses is to make sure that they stay involved in the business to not suddenly find themselves you know buried behind stuff and not getting out of the office and I think the the other side is is you know investing in the product marketing side you know earlier than later because storytelling to me is one of the most powerful and one of the most important things and so you know there's always time to get some of the digital marketing like right but being able to tell the story and be able to go out there and do it consistently with everybody is really important. 

Adrian (00:14:04) - I love it Tom one the biggest thing that you're making me think about right now for our listeners I want you to literally hit pause and go back and rewind and listen to this again because Thomas now that for our founders or for some of our for some of our executive executive leaders listening right now it is so common to get away from the just getting in front of customers or getting in front of customer our potential customers listening to the wins listening to the losses listening to challenges listening to solutions that they love listening to solutions that they despise like that listening is the constant learning and then that listening and constant learning equals your ability to eventually with whether it's by yourself or whether it's with an incredible team to build future downstream solutions to build future downstream connections to build the right types of partnerships so I love that I think the other thing too is this is just it keeps you in the game right for lack of a better term it keeps you in the game and then I would argue dude I know with my experience here at CXC Tom like with all the different customers and all the different leads and the opportunities we've chatted with over the last three four years.

Adrian (00:15:06) - I would argue that this is how I've gotten better at storytelling about why CXP or about how we might be able to help about why you need to learn about how our strategic partners can help you. So, like, it almost, like, helps to build the storytelling muscles or the storytelling skills when you're constantly hearing all of these different iterations of what people are going through. So, I love it, man. I think that's an incredible way of thinking about it. 

Adrian (00:15:32) - Tom, I'd love to jump into the second CXP Explorer tools, and you can answer this one however you like. I'd love to learn a little bit more about some of the tools that Glance is building, for sure. But I'd also love to... You've worked with all these incredible companies across the world. 

Adrian (00:15:43) - Spend a few minutes kind of talking about what are maybe a short list of key focus areas or key investments that you've seen some of the best companies or some of the best clients or even your team really kind of make as it relates to the technology or the tech stack that every one of us needs as business builders to really be able to push our business into the future. 

Tom (00:16:03) - Yeah. I'm going to start by just making a comment about when we think about CX, a lot of people think about CX, and this might be just an overgeneralization, but it's the idea of like, we have to do this. We have to do this. And to me, the opportunity that CX provides and what we're seeing with many of our customers is they're suddenly realizing like, this isn't something that we do to just like help the customers out. What if we really think about this and we productize? 

Tom (00:16:39) - We're going to productize CX. It's going to be a product of ours and we're going to treat it like a product. So we could be a manufacturing company that makes real physical things. We could be a software company. But what if we productize the experience that we're going to have with our customers because we realize that's the difference. That is the difference. 

Tom (00:16:59) - Not many people buy cupcakes without icing and you realize that this layer of icing that you're putting on your product or service, whatever it might be, becomes the most important piece that you do. So if you think about it as a product, as a service, there are some of our customers that have taken it from not just like productizing it, but to monetizing it. And so a good example is like Intuit TurboTax. They're a tax and accounting company. Intuit has QuickBooks TurboTax. That's what they do. 

Tom (00:17:34) - But they realize that there's real human beings that are using their software and they need help. 

Adrian (00:17:39) - Why? 

Tom (00:17:40) - Because your life changes and the tax code changes and you're like, every year something's different. And so you realize, what if I was able to get connected with one of those people? So when you start to think about it from that standpoint of like, are we just doing it because we feel like we need to support our customers and we're doing it as a reactionary? 

Tom (00:18:02) - Or if you start to sit and think about this in a much bigger perspective, what we're starting to see is companies really change the way customers are engaging with them and realizing that some of the things that they're doing, and I'll start with like AI, because I think we've seen AI. It's in the news. It's on every page of the newspaper or the journal, whatever you're reading, it's everywhere. But what we aren't seeing is it like replacing the need or the desire that customers have to connect with other human beings. 

Tom (00:18:34) - And where we're seeing some of our best customers do is to really think about changing the journey. So it's not like support the existing journey. It's actually changing the journey so that there's intentionality to be able to create intersections to connect with someone. Because it could be like, you're doing something on your own and now we're going to start to use AI to make suggestions, to be able to say, hey, you know what? This is the hard part. Do you want to connect with Adrian? 

Tom (00:19:03) - And then to recognize that once you're connected with an agent, AI becomes the ability for us to be able to make an agent or a specialist a super specialist.

Adrian (00:19:14) - Why? 

Tom (00:19:14) - Because it's working in parallel to grab information. It could be using natural language translating to be able to pull information and go into a knowledge base and do that work that typical agents or specialists might be doing a lot of, we'll call it swivel chair, back and forth between applications. Hey, can I put you on hold for a second while I look something up? What if technology is doing those types of things? 

Tom (00:19:38) - And recognizing that, you start to think about these things is you start to design in multiple pathways to be able to drive very specific things. 

Tom (00:19:50) - So here we are working with a company that has decided to say, you know what, we're gonna bring the call center, we're gonna bring the product marketing assets that we have, we're gonna bring those all into the journey so that as the customer is going through it, they have the ability to seamlessly jump from one channel to the next, to get information, and all along the journey they're like, how are you doing? Do you need any assistance? 

Tom (00:20:16) - And so you start to think about how you're able to bring in product marketing assets that could be just plain information all the way to interactive videos, to some level of training, into using other types of knowledge base that suddenly connect them through some level of AI that's helping them generate a better journey into making an offer to connect them with a real person. Most journeys today that you can probably confirm is who's in the driver's seat? The customer. So the customer has to drive the experience. 

Tom (00:20:53) - And we're talking about the idea of what if the business drives the experience so it reduces the friction, reduces the level of effort that a customer has to take. Because right now you're like, you start in a channel, it works till it doesn't, and then what do you do? You shift, you know, put the clutch in, shift, boom, you're in another channel, you work that one, up, shift, you know, clutch into another channel, and oftentimes what do you do? You get fatigued. That's a lot of work. 

Adrian (00:21:23) - Yep, 100%. I completely agree. I think the piece that you made at the end there, or the comment you made at the end there about like the omni-channel shifting and having to clutch over into different mediums. Number one, it's important to have all of those different mediums depending upon what your customer expectations are for how they want to communicate. But you're right, we live in an interesting world where it's, depending on the customer, depending on the day of the week for that specific customer, things can change. 

Adrian (00:21:49) - How many times have our listeners started like, maybe you started to reach out to a company when you're at your house, and by the time you're, let's just hypothetically say for some of our large company friends out there, takes them 10, 15, 20 minutes just to get us on the damn phone. Let's say by the time you start the conversation, you're in the kitchen with the kids, and then by the time you actually get to the support rep, now you're in your vehicle driving the kids to school. 

Adrian (00:22:09) - So you went from thinking you're starting this whole process on a desktop, now you're in the car with the kids, and you've got them on speaker where the kids are in the back yelling, and you're trying to talk to the agent. All of us have been there, but we're in this interesting world where you need that fluidity, you need to be able to allow your customers to kind of move through this. 

Adrian (00:22:27) - I also think like, your comments here just about like, man, every business has got different tools that allow them to be able to remain flexible and to be able to serve whatever they're trying to serve their customers on. I think that's just so important for our listeners is thinking about how to build some of that flexibility into your business, build that flexibility into your customer success strategy, build that type of flexibility into the way that you're going to manage your customer support as your business scales. All incredible ideas. 

Tom (00:22:54) - Tom, one question I think, before you ask that question, I think just there's an underlying question people have, which is, how do you create that flexibility? I think one of the things we're seeing is, you know, the idea of like going into one large platform that's going to deliver it all has a lot of shortcomings. 

Tom (00:23:15) - You know, people have realized that they're like, you know, you buy something that it's like an all-in-one versus really thinking about cloud digital first, you know, cloud native, which, you know, the idea of being able to plug and play a bunch of things together so you get a best of breed approach so that you can take things that you want to be able to snap together. And in that sort of cloud first model, you have the ability to work with companies that can sit there and be like, oh, I can integrate this and I can integrate this. 

Tom (00:23:44) - And it's not that much effort to do so. Yes, there's effort, but the idea of being able to create something that meets your needs versus like, yeah, that's going to be close enough and realize that I'm stuck with that platform or that product that I bought. 

Adrian (00:23:59) - 100%. Tom, one quick follow-up question in the tool section. For you, man, when you were getting your business off the ground, I guess like...

Adrian (00:24:09) - Was it like, was one of the biggest investments you had to make really around the customer relationship management software? Was it really figuring out some of those early engineers that you brought onto the team to be able to serve your early customers? Was it some of the tools that they needed from a product and development perspective? 

Adrian (00:24:23) - I guess, to be more pointed, my first question is like, or my question is, what was the first big tech investment you guys had to make at Glance that you knew to be able to bridle all the growth and to bridle all the exciting things that you were seeing on the sales front and the storytelling? What was like the one big tech investment that you had to make to start your tech stack? 

Tom (00:24:42) - We did so many things when we were just all like sitting in a room, because we could all talk to each other. So here's some, just the basic obvious ones. We selected an office platform. So we ended up going with like Google Suite, the G Suite. This is something where like calendaring the ability to share and realizing that I had used Microsoft most of my life, but the idea of having docs that were in the cloud, recognizing that everyone could have access, co-create, work together. 

Tom (00:25:13) - Sometimes we'd jump in the same document and we're on the phone, someone's from home, and we were able to like rapidly do work. Why? Because we're like working in the same document or the same slide deck or spreadsheet and realizing, wow, you know what? That was like game changing. The second was we decided to actually get into a CRM. And so we've done some things with both Salesforce and HubSpot, realizing that both of them are different. And we knew that we were gonna be selling into the enterprise that was using Salesforce. 

Tom (00:25:51) - So we were like, that makes a lot of sense to be able to be really comfortable and knowledgeable with that platform. So there was some alignment around understanding what is some of the tech that our clients that we're trying to sell to use? 

Tom (00:26:04) - And is there some advantages for us to be sort of like eating that same technology so we're familiar with it and doing integrations into it, but also realizing that there's things around digital marketing that we really wanted to be able to have a level of control and also just from a cost standpoint, using the right product. So we started into Salesforce and then we jumped into HubSpot. And then we've also started getting deeper into, as we built out our teams, there was a whole layer of like needing to communicate. 

Tom (00:26:39) - So then we decided we tried a lot of different products, but we ended up landing on using Atlassian. Why? Because on the engineering side, we could use Jira and that allowed us to have people on the product side could be like creating an Epic that suddenly would get created for the whole engineering team to start to be able to do. We realized that we're doing a ticketing system on the customer side, and we could have that connected to Jira. 

Tom (00:27:08) - So there was continuity between engineering and the front end of the house to be able to see that level of detail. And then as you started to get into, oh, we're hiring more people, communication and we're hiring people outside. How do we create sort of an internal website? So we started using Confluence to create that intranet. And then one of the things that we use and we use it all the time is the EOS, which is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. 

Tom (00:27:40) - Just a, it's sort of a methodology for running your business about how you structure like five-year goals, three, one year, break it into quarters and then break it down into rocks and then you have structured meetings and realizing that you can take that framework and build it into Trello. So you have Trello boards. And so you've got rocks that become cards and issues that come up that you need to discuss and realizing that all of these tools are cloud tools. They're not tools that run on the desktop. 

Tom (00:28:13) - And so that's kind of like looking at the tooling inside of our business, that became really important for us to be able to run the business because when the pandemic hit, just before it, we had to move offices. And in the process of moving offices, we also made some other changes because we realized we still needed access to all the stuff and realizing that we didn't want to have stuff that was in the office. So we took that next leap to add some of these other tools that I discussed so that we could run and operate really well as a virtual company. 

Tom (00:28:47) - Then the pandemic hit, we're like, oh, we're kind of ready for this. Now we're gonna put it into practice. And then it really became, okay, what are the processes that we can start to build on on how we do things? And processes are like hygiene. It's like, you have to shave if you're gonna have a clean face regularly. Otherwise, it grows hair. And you start a process, that process is gonna grow hair and it's gonna get long and tangly. And so you constantly have to trim it, keep it tight and neat for the business to operate. 

Tom (00:29:21) - So there's a commitment to recognizing that everything is kind of a living, breathing ecosystem that needs maintenance, that needs care and feeding for it to continue to deliver value for you.

Adrian (00:29:35) - I love that. In a perfect segue, because I wanted to dive right into the third pillar of process, but you already started to kind of nail this, like process, it's funny, when you think about team, you think about tools, you think about process. Process might be one of the most unsexy part of four pillars, but it's glue, it's cement, it's rebar. And you were literally just starting to get into this where like, the bottom line is if you want a clean face, you got to do the shaving, right? That's a step in the process period. 

Adrian (00:30:01) - So if you want the outcome to be X, you need to be able to take Y activity to produce X Y outcome. And I've always thought, it's funny, I love asking this question to all of our guests too, because like everyone's got a different way of thinking about process. Everyone's got a different way of thinking about really kind of how to wriggle it, but you just said something that I, the way that I constantly think about process, it needs to be a living, breathing thing. 

Adrian (00:30:22) - I say that every single daytime, I promise you, on every one of our calls, I'm talking about living playbooks and living, breathing FAQs and living, breathing process documents and living. And the reason why I say this is like, if your business isn't changing on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis, something might be wrong because businesses change constantly. Customer expectations change constantly. Employee expectations change constantly. 

Adrian (00:30:49) - My comment a little bit earlier in the show about like, just look at what we've seen in this wild world of ours over the last few years. You don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. You don't know what next month's going to bring. And by the way, we've got a lot of really interesting things coming downstream in the upcoming months ahead. So like, things are, we're living in this really incredible time to be human where like, we don't know what is going to happen in the future. 

Adrian (00:31:12) - Volatility continues to be relatively high in a variety of different places, technology, our global markets financially, education, all of these different things. But process is this way of sort of being able to at least keep a beat or a pulse. I always, with some of our clients at CXC Tom, I'll talk about process almost as that of like, at a minimum, keeping your news organized. Meaning, let's understand what we're going to want on the front page of the news. You mentioned Confluence for your intranet, for example. 

Adrian (00:31:40) - What do we want as front page stories? What do we want in the sports section? What do we want in the weather section? What do we want in national and what do we want local? Because process becomes a way that at a minimum, you can begin to aggregate all of the things that are going on within your business, within your teams, within your customers. But the other thing too is most customers, employees, they want to know where they can find answers. They want to know where they can find information. They want to know where they can kind of dig in. 

Adrian (00:32:07) - So question for you though is, as Glance has grown, as your team has grown, you mentioned earlier, you guys are almost up to a hundred teammates now, like I've, from all of my years of work, I feel process can get more complex as the team grows and as the customer portfolio grows. What have you kind of seen at Glance as far as the way that you all have managed that evolution of process and maybe what are some tips and tricks that you have for our listeners for what you've gone through in your own journey to kind of keep a grasp on it? 

Tom (00:32:35) - Yeah, there's a, there's sort of a view that I have of as you ascend to your career, your job is to be able to knit together a whole bunch of things into a story that becomes cohesive, that becomes understandable and becomes repeatable. And there's another part, which is like leaders distill and simplify. And when we think about information and process, I go back to a time when I worked for someone and I had to build this process, I had to build this whole sort of flowchart and like, we're going to sort of architecture this. 

Tom (00:33:16) - And I spent all this time and brought it to them and they looked at it like, wow, this is like amazing. Take a step out. I'm like, what? They can take a step out. Okay. Go back, take a step out and then hand it back to them and like, well, so what do you think? This is even better. They're like, oh man, this is even better. Take another step out. I'm like, what? Like take another step out? Yeah, take another step out. And I do it again and this is suddenly repeating itself. 

Tom (00:33:42) - And I realized like, you didn't even look at it like, oh no, I did take another step out. And I realized that you start with something that you get really enamored with and you realize that let's go back to the customer. And you know why humans are around and have been around for so long is we have this sixth sense.

Tom (00:34:02) - We've got this sixth sense when we know something isn't right. We might not know what it is. 

Adrian (00:34:07) - But you know what? 

Tom (00:34:08) - We're like, you walk into this open field and you're like, something's not right. And so you run back into the cave and you realize there's the saber-toothed tiger running for you and you just missed it. Someone else is going to get taken out. And you realize there you are in the middle of a sales process and you're like, something doesn't feel right. So you abandon the journey. And so let's go back to internal processes that when you think about what you're doing, one of the reasons that people do business with you is that it's easy. 

Tom (00:34:39) - They're trying to buy this product or service and they realize that how they do business with you, the way they interact with you is just as important, if not the most important thing that you do. And you realize it's not the product, feature, or price. It's the experience. And so the process that you have, one is to start with one. And then you have to sit there and be like, you know what I'm committed to? Is every quarter, we're going to make this process easier. We're going to make it and we're going to simplify it as much as possible. 

Tom (00:35:12) - And so the idea of like sort of the Saint Exupery, which is like perfection is not created by how much more you can add, it's by how much, when there's nothing left to be taken away. And that's what brought it down to its essence. And look at Amazon OneClick. Why do people buy from Amazon? All the information has been put in behind that button so I can order toilet paper one roll at a time. It shows up tomorrow. Click. I don't need to order a lot. I can just order one at a time. And you realize, oh my gosh, it's that level of ease. 

Tom (00:35:46) - I can do it on my phone. I can do it on my desktop, wherever it is. We've taken all those steps out. And so as you think about your business and you think about the process, you really have to sit there and be like, are we making it easy for our customers? What can we automate? What do they need to follow this? What if we remove it? What if we do something that suddenly says, do this once or through that process, could we collect information that removes the need to do something more? And I think this is a mindset. 

Tom (00:36:14) - It's a mindset that you as a leader have to infect the rest of your team to sit there and be like, it's good today. We know it's not going to work tomorrow. So we're going to constantly be thinking about how we're going to improve process. 

Adrian (00:36:28) - I love that. I think you just nailed it, which is like, there's a million different ways of going about building your process. I love your comment. If you could literally have a one page, you could have a one page doc that gives the quick and dirty for all the things that your team or that your employees need or that your customer base needs to know. Or you can have a full blown, fully populated confluence knowledge with a hundred different pages of incredibly awesome information with graphs and charts and the whole nine yards. 

Adrian (00:36:52) - But the first thing is just getting started, period, right? Get something started. Second big thing that you call it that I'm constantly talking about with our clients at CXC, it's the controlling and monitoring, right? How will you, and when will you, what will be the agreed upon cadence for the team to do the controlling and the monitoring of the refinement piece or the perfection piece you talk about, which is whether it's once a month, once a quarter, once every six months, maybe once a year, please. 

Adrian (00:37:16) - Once a year, take time for select members of the team to go in and to slice and to dice and to perfect or to update. That's the other thing. Things are constantly changing. Sometimes, you know, your process set today might have a different tool substance tomorrow or maybe the way that you wrote it today for certain services that are your leading sellers are going to be different in 12 months when all of a sudden you got a brand new thing that out of nowhere takes over and it becomes your hot. 

Adrian (00:37:43) - So like just controlling and monitoring and thinking about how you're always sort of entering. I love it, man. Tom, I'd love to dive into the fourth and final CX pillar of feedback, and I'm going to give you a dual-sided question as I always do here, but like I'd love for you to spend a minute or two kind of talking about some of the ways that you and the team at Glance have really been able to not just collect and assess, but act upon your customer feedback. 

Adrian (00:38:04) - And then I'd love for you to save a minute or two to talk about some of the same ways that you've done that with your employees and with your team to leverage your employee feedback. 

Tom (00:38:11) - So let's start with feedback. 

Adrian (00:38:14) - Yeah. 

Tom (00:38:15) - I think feedback is probably one of the most important things that anybody can focus on. It's just not always that easy because you realize that you're like, oh, feedback. It's something we bolt on versus design in. And as we've evolved as a company, the idea of like designing in feedback into the product.

Tom (00:38:36) - So that we're able to get it ourselves, you know, so part of this is thinking about like observability of like, what's happening with the product and what are people doing and all this type of stuff. So getting feedback that is, we'll call it machine, you know, and, you know, session activity based, and then there's the feedback, which is the person who's actually using the product and getting that, you know, subjective, you know, and objective, you know, feedback of like, did you have a good session? Did something work or not work? 

Tom (00:39:08) - And so getting that feedback to say, wow, like, we actually have a bug here or, or these buttons aren't as clear, but getting that type of feedback is really important. And so I think the things that if I could go back, and do some things differently, it would be to look at how feedback can be designed farther and deeper into the product, you know, from the get go, so that you have that loop. And I think the piece that I'm talking about is, I think everyone gets feedback, but sometimes it's too late, like, the loop is like, super big. 

Tom (00:39:45) - And, you know, part of what you as a team need to really ascertain is like, what's, what's the right cycle? Like, what, how big and how tight, you know, should the loop be, you know, too fast, you know, you just get too much information that spools up, and you're like, I can't see the forest through the trees. 

Tom (00:40:03) - But there's another piece, which is, you know, just trying to get the right loop, so that you get feedback, and also starting to categorize feedback that you're, you're trying to ascertain, because sometimes you're looking for feedback on product design, product functionality. And there's also feedback that you're trying to, to get, which is, are people achieving the value from the product that they're using, like, you know, I'm buying something to drive a specific output, you know,... you achieving it now are you over or under indexing those goals? 

Tom (00:40:38) - Because, you know, many times people are like, buying, and using glance, why to improve conversion, conversion rates, completion rates, to drive things like season, lifetime value, you know, all that type of stuff will increase wallet share, attach rates. And so you're like, how do you measure those types of things? And that's on the, on that side of the house. 

Tom (00:41:03) - And I think it's really important because one is there's things that you can control, and then there's other pieces of feedback that you kind of have to design with your customer to make sure that you're getting enough information from them, you're giving enough information to them to really understand the value of that relationship and the solution that you've built. Um, on the internal side, you know, to me, there's a, there's a piece which is you can have meetings and as a company grows, there's all the different ways to get feedback. 

Tom (00:41:36) - And so we've started doing all kinds of things with having, um, uh, we do things with like morning, um, morning huddles every week. So we have a Monday morning huddle. We have quarterly meetings. Um, we have all kinds of other standups. And so we do, uh, feedback surveys of our teams, you know, for each meeting, not the huddles, but quarterly meetings. And we do feedback on a regular basis. Uh, and so we started using, um, different systems from like survey monkey. 

Tom (00:42:09) - You know, we also do some things where you think about how you do feedback, but you start to go, uh, into how you manage people and teams. And so we're using, uh, platforms like 15, five, you know, it's a way from an HR standpoint to be able to provide reviews of people, but there's also a way to provide, you know, you know, um, kudos to people who are doing good work and, and to do levels of surveys inside of those to just understand like, where's the pulse. You know? Um, and you know, in the 15, five world, you know, we call it a check-in. 

Tom (00:42:47) - And so, you know, each team is doing a check-in and then you can sit there and be like graphing it out, like, oh, this team's going down, this team's going up, what's going on, let's dig in. And so getting feedback from people, uh, at different levels, you know, which is one is just getting a pulse of your team. Um, it can be getting feedback on presentations that were made, um, getting feedback on like the health of the company when we do quarterly updates. 

Tom (00:43:11) - And so, um, nested in there is three different types of feedback that we're getting from the team, as well as multiple types of feedback that we're getting, uh, that informs us about the product, you know, the performance, the value that our customers are getting. 

Adrian (00:43:27) - I love it. 

Tom (00:43:28) - So just said a lot. 

Adrian (00:43:30) - No, this is, it was all fantastic. The first thing, uh, let's start with the customer feedback side. Absolutely. Love what you said about thinking about, and listeners can pause this, go back and listen to this part right here. Thinking about ways that you can actually embed the feedback.

Adrian (00:43:46) - part of the process or part of the loop creation earlier on, earlier, earlier on, don't, and Tom, me and you were joking about this the other day, but there's so many companies out there that are like global leading companies that they ask so damn late that I don't even know why they ask it. And they probably have troves and troves and troves of survey responses on this, but like, think about your customer journey. 

Adrian (00:44:07) - Think about your product or your service journey and think about where some of the milestone moments are, some of the pivotal places in a user or a customer journey where you could be asking or starting that feedback loop even earlier on in the process. Number one, you're probably going to be able to find some really easy ways to embed that. Number two, be strategic about the journey in and of itself, right? 

Adrian (00:44:26) - Sometimes the things that a customer or a user is going to go through the first 30 days, they're going to have totally different feedback response sets for the onboarding and the familiarization phase. And then let's say for some of your high LTV customers who've been using your service, your product for years and years and years, right? So like, think about that. I love, I love that idea. Start your feedback looping even earlier and make sure that you've got somebody thinking about how to really kind of see what the ups and downs of that. 

Adrian (00:44:52) - So I love that piece. The part about the E-X, man, you just, you just, a couple of things. I don't know why more companies in the world aren't doing what you guys are doing over a glance of doing regular E-X based surveys on the meeting time, dude, I would argue one of the biggest problems that we see with so many of our clients at CXC, they spend too much time in meetings, period. And that's a fact. And oftentimes there's no rules of engagement for meetings. 

Adrian (00:45:14) - And I know a lot of the companies we're working with, Tom, are going to be some of these venture capital backed startup companies, growth companies. So maybe they haven't been around long enough to figure out how to get mature and how to evolve and how to sort of refine things. But there's still big companies out there where you see, you see one of the biggest grievances with employees is mismanagement of time, right? So too many meetings, same types of reoccurring meetings, not enough gained or gleaned out of the meeting. 

Adrian (00:45:38) - I love this idea of like, hell, I'd be doing this on a weekly basis about best meeting of the week, worst meeting of the week, which meetings do we want to get rid of today? Which meetings do we want to add more of the village into? Because it's such, it's showing such positive high feedback yields that we should get everybody. If everybody's feeling this way, let's get the whole, talk about storytelling and talking about motivating your entire team and your entire company around storytelling. Like, then let's bring people into that meeting. 

Adrian (00:46:04) - Let's figure out how to make everybody a little bit better at storytelling just based off of what we're kind of learning in that. There's not enough companies doing that. I love these ideas, Tom. Tom, it's been an absolute pleasure. Before I let you go, my friend, where can, number one, where can people find or get in touch with you or your team at Glance? 

Adrian (00:46:20) - And then number two, anything that you want to call out that you guys are working on, any big updates or any big events or things that you guys are doing, anything that you want to call out to the CX Nation, my friend? 

Speaker 3 (00:46:31) - Yeah. 

Tom (00:46:31) - Anybody who wants to reach out and talk to me, I'd love to have a conversation. You can reach out to me at TomM at Glance.CX. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm a big LinkedIn user. And one of the big things that we just launched was a really cool update to our mobile SDK. And the idea of thinking about the bigger world outside of the U.S. is all mobile. It's all mobile. And here, we're slowly getting into being able to really think about how the mobile can be kind of like the central point of how I engage. 

Tom (00:47:08) - And just imagine thinking about if you're a bank or a business to sit there and be like, I have a local branch in my pocket. Everything I need can be in my pocket. It goes back and harks back to the days of when Apple was like, Samsung is like, you've got a 20 gig hard drive and blah, blah. And Apple's like, 5,000 songs in your pocket. You're like, which do you want? And like, I'll take that. 

Tom (00:47:35) - And so the idea of having a mobile experience that can bring customers to them, wherever they are, in their pocket, to be able to bring that digital and human world together. So it's not just like, I've got a mobile app that can do these things. It's like, now you can bring the human into that digital experience on the mobile app. That's the big thing we're working on and have launched a couple weeks ago. 

Adrian (00:48:03) - I love it, man. And lastly, where can people, so people can get in touch with you on LinkedIn, where can people find out more about GlanceCX? 

Tom (00:48:10) - Yeah. If you go to glance.cx on our website, you'll find tons of great information. We got some great videos and information for people to consume. Check us out. 

Adrian (00:48:22) - Awesome. Well, Tom Martin, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us on the CX Chronicles podcast, and I'll look forward to keeping this conversation going in the future, my friend. 

Tom (00:48:29) - Look forward to it. Thanks, Adrian.