How to Get 10x Savings & Results From Employee Feedback

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage----https://www.varisource.com

Transcript

Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.4s Hello everyone. 

This is Victor with varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did You Know? Podcast. Today, excited to have one of our new partners, Dex Insight, with us. Nick Coulson, who is the CEO and founder, has been in this space for quite a while. But Dex Insight essentially helps streamline business systems with in the moment feedback to improve user experience with software tools. Welcome to the show, Nick. 

U2

Hello, thanks for having me. 

U1

Yeah, excited to chat with you. So why don't you give the audience maybe a little bit of kind of the background and founder story would be great. 1s

U2

Sure, yeah, happy to. I'm a Chicago guy, so I took about a 15 year detour out in New York for school, worked on Wall Street for a couple of years doing like mid market M and A. But I was sort of looking at my friends in Tech and they were telling me about how they were making more money than I was, at least per hour, and how much more fun they were having. So I made that leap into Tech back in 2015, it I was at the fastest growing SaaS company in the country. They had like the Ink magazine cover and all that, but I knew I wanted to go earlier stage, so I got connected to these Dutch founders that were just opening up an office stateside. They had like 30 people in Amsterdam at that point. It was a company called Usabilla and it was focused on collecting in the moment feedback and triggering micro surveys primarily on production websites. So, like Ecom, that was their sweet spot. They started doing a lot in travel and then over time, we sort of, with the SaaS boom, got into helping product managers get feedback on the production, like enterprise apps that they were building. So individual apps 1.1s took about four years to scale up the operations here. We got it to, I guess mid seven figures in revenue here in the states, which was about half the business. And then SurveyMonkey acquired us back in 2019. So nice exit there. We were bootstrapped. So the Duchies got a big check and we're able to go off to Ibiza to celebrate. And I started working closer with the SurveyMonkey folks to help them 1.4s understand how to scale the sales of this little Dutch startup they had acquired. So did like a post acquisition tour duty for two and a half years or so and started Dex Insight shortly after, 2.3s about a year and a half ago now. 1.4s

U1

Yeah. No, this micro survey concept is amazing. I love where you guys are applying it, which we'll talk more about in this kind of SaaS world. But obviously, Maybe, what did you see at SurveyMonkey, which they're one of the pioneers, I think one of the larger players in the space, well known brand. But what did you see that Maybe was missing that made you wanted to start Dex insight. 1.3s

U2

Yes. 1.9s It's all about user experience, which is broad. Right. 1.5s User experience 1.6s oftentimes spans everything from mobile apps and even the experience that you have inside of an email, in your email app, on your phone, all the way to legacy on prem enterprise applications that are still in Cobalt. 1.2s But that user experience, what we learned was it ties into things like productivity. So when usability was getting going, 1.6s our whole thing was increase conversions with user feedback because we were selling to ecom. And productive users on an ecom site are ones that have a higher likelihood of making a purchase, increasing your return on ad spend, and all sorts of nifty stuff that helps you outcompete your competition when you're bidding for ads. Right. 1.2s And we got really good at that. 2s Because what we were competing with in most cases was if you ever been shopping and you see like, hey, after you're shopping, take five minutes and take the survey to tell us how your experience was. And that usually pops under the browser window and you forget about it. Especially these days where computers have 32 gigs of memory. So you have 100 tabs open and you never really close your browser unless you're updating it or you're restarting your computer. 1s So because we were, in the moment, we were able to get more feedback, had a really nice user experience where it wasn't like a pop up in a new browser window. And that led to a continuous stream of insights for the folks managing these ecom websites that ultimately led to finding the long tail usability issues and the most frustrating parts. They resolved those issues and it generated millions and millions in revenue. The Pumas and the Choice Hotels and eventually the Home Depots of the world that we started work with. And from an enterprise app perspective. 1.5s

U1

Yeah. And again, on the software space, 1s we have this concept of shelfware, which there's a lot of really crazy stats, right? Just about how on average, 1.1s most companies I'm not even talking about the enterprises, but on average, companies have hundreds of software tools. Yet shelfware is a big problem. Shelfware means you buy the tool and you don't use it. Right? And I think we have that even our personal lives. We buy little softwares and you just forget it. And you don't use it because software is so easy to buy, right? You put in a credit card, you initially saw some maybe usage, and then you buy it and then you forget it. Or you don't use it. And that actually is a big problem for all companies today. And part of that is because they don't have feedback. Part of that is finance keeps paying for these software, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. But then if they actually ask the user if they use it I've seen cases where they're like, yeah, we use like half the features. We don't even use all the features. Right? That thing is terrible, right? Yet you're paying millions of dollars and it's like you're investing so much money into these tools, yet you have no idea if people even use it, if they like it, or what they even like about it. Can you kind of talk through that with your experience? And is that maybe one of the reasons you're kind of creating, you know, survey platform before kind of the software software space and. It. Exactly. Yeah, 1.3s we did a lot of research on our Tam before diving headfirst into this and what we learned is that about 55% of enterprise software spend is underutilized. And that's coming from Gartner 2.7s today with SAS, Sprawl and average spend of the enterprise, that's about 430,000,000,000 in waste on underutilized software. So like you said, that's shelfware that folks have access to and don't know it or have access to and simply don't use because they have insufficient training or enablement, that's applications that are misconfigured. So folks don't want to use it software avoidance because it's easier just to do it manually, have a meeting, have a phone call, do it the old fashioned way in a Google Doc or a spreadsheet. So that's what we're going after. That's what we're looking to help with. And. 1.9s

U2

Part of the problem is that SaaS sprawl by our research it's 16 x increase in SaaS usage since 2015. The average company has more than 130 apps now 2s and it's tough to enable folks on all those apps because you have limited resources. So identifying the apps that are of the highest value that are the most frustrating, it using something that gets a much higher response rate so better than an email survey will allow you to allocate those enablement resources towards the apps that are valuable and need the most help. And even the individual users who might either self identify with a response to a pop up survey or the old way is like an email survey that someone says they're unhappy with or a ticket that maybe it's a workflow you just finished and someone's submitting a ticket I don't know how to do this. That's kind of the old way. Now 1.8s you have options to create like a Google Analytics. 1.4s Type view of the user behavior in your enterprise applications, giving you the ability to see how behaviors correlate to unhappy employees who aren't doing their best work because they aren't able to, or they're frustrated with it, and they're doing it the old fashioned way. So that's what we're going after. 1.2s

U1

Yeah. I see so many use cases. 1.1s Obviously, we talked about software reviews or during renewals, potentially getting feedback from the users. 1.9s How should we approach this renewal? Right? And then two things, like, even from, I think, internal software development, right? Like, how do you create surveys to get feedback from users on even internal projects? I think it's like you said that internal google analytics love that concept. So why do you think is it so difficult for companies to get user feedback right now? And you talked about I think a lot of companies still utilize email, right? I email you and say, hey, what do you think about this thing? And then you're like, you're reading my email, but you're not in the moment. Like you said, you're not at the tool. Right. And maybe you thought your feedback was days ago. You don't even remember anymore. You're just writing me back an email of random thoughts. 1.6s Why is it so difficult for companies to kind of get that feedback today? 2.2s

U2

Yeah, I think it's sort of the evolution of how folks treat their email inbox these days. It's kind of a to do list, right, with the different categories and tabs, and a survey isn't very high on that to do list, right? 1s It's sort of why slack and teams and others have, in a way, displaced email, for better or for worse, depending on how you think about it. But it's difficult to get because surveys typically get ignored 1.2s or you have to follow up many times to get the responses. And if you're as busy as anyone, the last thing on your to do list is a survey. And when you do take it, you're not likely to give it a lot of protein in those open text fields because you're in a rush and you want to take your kids to soccer practice or go out to dinner. You want to live your life, walk your dog. So that's one thing where the response rates and the quality of the data collected through things like email surveys and forms is suboptimal. Plus, at very big companies, getting permission to send a survey can be really difficult because oftentimes marketing will own the survey tool or internal comms will, and they already have a calendar and your survey about It tools oftentimes isn't a priority for them either. So that's a tricky part. 2.2s The other option is like, one on one interviews. You get your team together or you spin up a trial of a tool. You've looked at G Two crowd, you read the Forrester review and the Gartner review, you've looked at competitors, you've had a bunch of demos, and you've picked two or three to trial. Then you have to get the people that actually use the tool, once it's installed to give you feedback on it. And it's just difficult to we call it experience resolution decay. And that's our fancy way of saying, as more time passes between the actual experience that you had inside the application and when you're asked about the experience that you had using that application or staying at a hotel or whatever, 1s you're less able to communicate the emotions that you felt about that experience because it decays with time. So those interviews at the end of a trial oftentimes don't get you the information you need about the details you need about the experience folks had while they were using those tools. 

U1

I love one of the first kind of problem you talked about just now, which is, it's not a priority. Again, everybody are so busy, and filling out surveys isn't the funnest thing to do or kind of a priority. So how do you guys approach to kind of solve that differently, then? How do you because a lot of that is user behavior and just time and focus and all of these things. So how do you see Dex kind of solving that? You think, 

U2

Mmhmm. 1.1s And what we discovered in the ecom travel and eventually web app world was that being able to trigger a survey in the right moment, that's very specific and contextualized, that also collects information about the respondent provides much deeper insight and higher resolution of insight than then something that's triggered batch and blast emails that get low response rates. For example, 2.5s we built like half the business on this one play. It's common now, but when we were getting started, it was a home run. So an example of triggering a survey at a behavior for ecom was we called it an exit survey. So when a user on an ecom site was on a page where it had like cart or checkout in the URL, and they were on that page for at least like ten or 15 seconds. So they weren't just like going and looking at the price and shipping and bouncing out of there. Maybe they were filling out a little bit information. And then when their cursor gestured up above the top pixel of the browser frame, we would trigger just a little slide in or like a pop up. Not a new browser window, just like an overlay. A really fast, clean user experience. Asking instead of like, hey, we all get these exit surveys now, or exit email capture. Instead of offering a promotion or sending an email afterwards with a promo, we would just slide in, say, what's the reason you're not checking out today? And we would get between like a five and 20% response rate on that behaviorally triggered micro survey. And for folks that were volunteering, one of the categories oftentimes was like technical issue was the reason they weren't checking out. And it was like crowdsourcing QA at very high intent users on these ecom sites, finding the long tail technical issues like broken coupon codes or those sort of things. And then these companies spun up strategies. They took action on it because it's super actionable. High value suddenly gets high priority. And this microservice became a new revenue stream for a lot of these companies. It was really cool. 1.5s

U1

Yeah, 1.2s I can totally see that. And maybe thanks to you guys, I'm always getting these pop ups now. But no, it's smart. I think, in the moment, 1.3s to me, it's just an evolution of just a smarter way to do kind of these surveys. Right. So, no, that totally makes sense. And I think that kind of goes into the next topic that we wanted to cover with you, which is what are some use case that can generate ROI? Because in this economy, everybody's looking for ROI. What's the return on investment if I decide to use a tool like this? You talked about, obviously, ecom, you talked about these type of websites where that's actually becoming a revenue. But when you're talking about SaaS tools, right, let's say it's SaaS tools that you have renewals are coming up, or you're looking to buy new tools. Can you give us a couple use cases on how ROI can be achieved? I guess using dex. 2.3s Yeah. One of the challenges being a founder with blinders on and being deep in the space for a long time is that you sort of think everyone needs feedback. So it can be difficult to focus on ideal customer profile and ideal account profile. So 1.1s we think coos have an opportunity to optimize their SaaS spend by identifying the tools that have the highest satisfaction and the lowest satisfaction and looking at usage metrics, not simply like how many times did folks log in? In the last month with monthly active users but actual features inside of tools and session time and increasing the granularity to then tie that back to. 1.8s SaaS budgets and productivity improvements. So it's getting higher resolution data on the second highest spend for most companies after people technology. So that's a big one, especially today as tool consolidation and app rationalization is a higher priority for operations. Making sure you do that in a way that nobody loses their business critical tools and you also are, you know, ripping and maybe not replacing or replacing the tools that folks are least satisfied with that are driving the least value as one of them. 1.6s

U2

When we think about the frontline folks, so we're going from the C suite now to the business systems managers. I think of these folks as like the equivalent of the product managers or the optimization folks for e comm websites or like web applications, right? They're the ones who you bought salesforce or workday or I don't know, gong or your latest and greatest tool and they're configuring it. They're making sure the users have access, they're making sure it's integrated correctly with the business. And a lot of times what we found was that it's really difficult to get valuable and actionable feedback from folks while they're using the tool to help inform the product manager that business systems the analyst who's configuring these tools and setting them up. So by getting that feedback in the moment, what you're going to do is reduce the friction of completing tasks inside of those applications. One, by reconfiguring that workflow that you might have just configured in the new tool as a business systems person. Or two by finding the folks who didn't take the training and are saying hey, this is really hard. Meanwhile, you spent a day and to have creating documentation on these different tasks and you need to be able to point those folks so they can self enable or get with department head and set up some enablement sessions with them. 2.8s

U1

Yeah, those are actually really I mean, I can think of so many and we can talk for hours about this. I think getting feedback, it's like imagining 1.3s you spend a lot of money on ads, right? Ad spent Facebook, you know, whatever, Instagram and TikTok ads, and you have no visibility on how the ad is performing. You'd be like, that's like, we spent so much money, and we should know how these ads are performing, right? So we can adjust our strategy. So that concept, if you apply that to ad spend, everybody, it would make sense to everyone. But then you look at the SaaS spend, which, like you said, is a top three spend, and yet they have no visibility on how those apps are performing internally and all of these things. So no, that's why I love what you guys built. I think there's a lot of great use cases, is you guys obviously talk about different reports. I think customer always love to know what kind of reports data they can receive. I think through your platform, you guys mentioned eight reports. We don't have to get into all eight, but can you kind of give us a couple examples of reports and maybe the ROI and value that people get from those reports? 1.5s

U2

Yes, the reporting has gotten really cool with the advent of the large language models. It's allowed us to 2s be able to quickly analyze this user feedback, user behavior and the metadata that we're collecting automatically with every survey response to quickly spit out custom reports that allow you to identify the most frustrating workflows in your tech stack. So like the pages inside salesforce, the folks are taking the longest time 1s to interact with. 1.6s Session time inside of XYZ pages is a good indication of frustration or confusion. Redundancy Report is another good one. So every time it seems like every time you hire a VP, they want to bring in their own tools. And a lot of times that means you have three different tools for project management. You have a CRM and a half the way that the gongs and those types of tools are expanding with feature sprawl and. 1.3s Being able to make a call that is not exactly what one of your VPs wants is tough. Unless you have data that says, hey, man, your tool is really frustrating for folks. The satisfaction is 2.5. We have a duplicative tool where the satisfaction is four and a half out of five from the users. 1.3s We got to make a call and we're picking the one. We're are more satisfied with it because everyone knows the importance of customer satisfaction in 2.5s the consumer world. HR will tell you the value of employee satisfaction with retention and productivity and happiness. We don't hear a lot of folks talking about tool satisfaction, which is where most of us spend our time these days. 2.3s

U1

Yeah. I love these reports, and obviously there are so many other ones that you guys provide that are super useful. I think, like you said, it's another data point that nobody's really thought about tracked. And even when people look at SaaS management, which is they know there's a problem, and SAS management gives them that. Again, like you said, some of that usage and some of that visibility. So to me, that's like, better than nothing, right? That's better than not having visibility, but that's not enough. It doesn't tell you their true feelings about these tools, which should, because these are the people utilizing the tool. It's just not how many times they log in or not log in, because not every tool requires you to log in every day, right? 1.2s Yeah. I think this is such an innovative way of 1.3s collecting data. So with all these kind of tools, sometimes, especially these new ideas, people can be worried about how long it takes to implement these kind of things. So what's the typical time frame if a customer is interested 1.1s to implement, and how simple is it and how long does it usually take to where they can start just getting feedback and getting data and getting surveys done? Thank. It. 1.7s One of the things we always like to say was it takes minutes, not months. And that comes from my past life of being the underdog, going after the big enterprise systems and the legacy survey tools that had lots of consulting and professional services. So that sort of 2s tattooed into my my SaaS strategy brain at this point. So when we built Dex, we knew that it couldn't be something that you had to install inside of every tool. And most third party tools that you're buying also will prevent you with their content security policies, from implementing any or injecting any JavaScript into their tools. They'll just block it. So the delivery method that we chose for we have a desktop based apps and we have browser based apps because we're trying to get as close to the end user as possible, the employee, the folks who have their opinion, because we need it quickly 1.1s and. 

U2

It's for the desktop apps. Use any MDM mobile device management tool, and you can install it silently in the background. If you're on a Mac, you probably see a number of different logos and tools just to the left of the clock on the right side of the screen at top. It's just one of those little guys that sits there like a grammarly or a loom or a zoom, even. And it's just installed silently in the background. Quick and easy for the browsers. It's a browser extension, just like grammarly or Apollo or any of the browser extensions that your team probably is installing themselves inside of every It admins. For Google. It's called workspaces. You can force install and pin or not pin browser extensions on your employees with just a click of a button, so there's no real devlift. 1.6s

U1

Yeah, again, I think all those experiences, I mean, minutes, not months, I love that. That's hard to say for most tools, but it sounds like you guys really thought about customer first. And yeah, you can get ROI quickly. I think that's the amazing part. So as we kind of wrap up here, and one of the last questions I want to kind of go into your multi year experience in this space. 1.2s How do you think companies can leverage the feedback from users? Obviously, throughout the conversation, you've been giving examples. We talked about different use cases, but if you were talking to executives, 1.1s you how can they best leverage user feedback? 1.9s If you were to kind of consult, let's say executives, it. 1.9s It. 

U2

Yeah. It's interesting because 2.2s not very often do folks 1.7s search for feedback. Vendors, like senior folks. We didn't really have folks coming to us too often and saying, we need feedback on everything because we're customer centric or employee centric. That just wasn't how it worked. It'd usually be like a specific project or like a website redesign and say, we need some feedback for a couple of months because we're relaunching this and we want to make sure we didn't screw it up. So we want to be agile. Right. What I think executives are learning is things are evolving from feedback being kind of a negative term. Right. I'm learning sometimes that when you ask for feedback, it's only constructive, or you do the feedback sandwich where it's like positive, constructive, positive, to kind of mask or blunt the impact of the constructive stuff. So I think changing as executives think about it, feedback should really be woven into everything that they do. And it's hard to do that when you're afraid of things like survey. Right. We already send enough surveys. We already send email surveys. We send a quarterly. 1.3s That's usually what we hear. Or to your point, like you mentioned, Nick, you're the reason for the pop ups. I get all the it's like yeah, partially because there's a lot of folks that really don't do it well. They're too disruptive, they're too lazy. They just want to pop it up as soon as you land on a website, because the juice isn't worth the squeeze of being smarter with the strategies to collect the email or collect the survey data. 1.3s So there's just a lot of fear, I think, of getting feedback. What if they call out a big mistake that I didn't realize, and that creates a ton of work and it makes me look bad? And it's just something that I subscribe to mr. Rogers philosophy of if it's mentionable, it's manageable. And part of what we've is to hopefully. 1.5s Get other folks thinking that way by making it quick and easy and non intrusive and a really nice user experience to collect feedback data. Because it's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes happen. Bad news early is good news, right? So let the users tell you when something's not right and then go prioritize it and make it better. It's like going to the gym. Another one, right? It's terrible going to the gym when you have even been going. It's painful. You don't see results. It's a lot of work, takes a long time, but over time, as you're getting stronger and better, you're going faster, you're lifting better weight, you're moving on to different exercises. I view feedback the same way, man. 1.6s It's been a secret weapon for so many. But getting over that first hill of the fear of annoying users and survey fatigue and making mistakes and creating work, once you get past that, it's a whole new world, man. 

U1

Yeah, it's very cultural. I think what you're suggesting is, and I think all the examples you gave, I can totally see that, because a lot of times survey getting feedback again, depending on who's sending out the survey, may not want the feedback. Right. Maybe the feedback is not good or impact. It's very much a cultural type of approach. And so with Dex, who do you see as is it procurement? Who would be the right stakeholder to kind of drive that? Maybe adoption or from a company perspective, you think. 1.1s

U2

What we learned is that's sort of cultural too. 1.3s In some cases, it doesn't care at all about what the users think of their stack there's like, we bought it, you're going to use it. If you don't use it, then you're going to be less productive, and we don't care. 1s Others employee satisfaction from technology is a high priority, and they have specific centers of excellence based around digital employee experience. You can go on LinkedIn right now and search for folks with digital employee experience as their title, and that'll give you a good sense for the more progressive organizations, technically on where they're going. 1.1s We have other depending on the industry, you might have a COO who just, holy smokes, I just want to cut as much as I can, and I don't really care. We just need the bare bones, and that's someone where the usage is really helpful. When you don't have your tools or you had folks swiping credit cards for tools, it's really difficult to find out what those are by looking through your finance systems and your expense reports. It's time consuming. It's difficult to look in your single sign on vendor to see who's logging in and who's not. 1.9s We track. We're like the Google Analytics, so we're actually tracking the time people are spending on websites. And then you can search which tools have session time and which ones don't to see what's being used and what's not. And we just got our sock two done so you don't have to worry about security. We're in the Chrome store. Like all that's good. 1.1s And then we've had the frontline. Folks that get really excited are the progressive ones that want to be agile, the configuration of their systems. So like business systems has been a good one for us, where folks want that feedback and they want to take action and they're tired of living inside their ticketing system trying to find insights to deliver their quarterly report. 1.6s They need help with that. 1.2s

U1

Yeah, no, this is amazing and we're super excited to partner with you guys because I think everything that you just mentioned and talked about today helps us, but also helps customers identify potential savings, potential optimization, 2.7s which is kind of critical right now. So the last question we always love to ask our guest is you've seen a lot, you've done a lot. Nick, if you have to give one personal and or business advice that you're passionate about, what do you think that would be? 2.9s

U2

If it's mentionable, it's manageable. That's been something that's really changed how I do business. And I think you build a lot of trust by being able to bring up difficult things. And the faster you bring them up, the faster you can come up with a solution. 1.3s So that would be my advice. 1.1s There's no use in hiding anything. Be transparent, direct and collaborative and you can accomplish just about anything. 1.9s

U1

That's a great way to end the conversation. But thanks for being on the show, Nick, and excited for our partnership. 

U2

It's been great. Thanks, Victor. 1.4s

U1

That was an amazing episode of the Did you know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.