CX Leader Podcast: "Listen, then make it better": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Download the “CX Leader Podcast: "Listen, then make it better" audio file directly.

CX Leader Podcast: "Listen, then make it better": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Your company has been evaluating and fine tuning their products, making sure they meet your customers expectations, but are you utilizing customer feedback?

Myles:
Anyone from our team can all go into one Slack channel and post ideas they hear from customers. We look at that feedback every day and then we can press a button and send it over to product board, which is what we used to manage everything that happens up until the planning phase on the engineering side.

Steve:
Incorporating customer feedback in product decisions on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at Walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. On The CX Leader Podcast we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. As a CX professional, you're often called upon to provide data or insights for several areas of the business. One area that is critical for many companies is their product. How can it be improved? Is it meeting customers expectations? Does it function the way customers expect? Customer feedback can play a critical role in how designers and engineers develop and improve a product, so it's important to gather the right data. Well, my guest today on the podcast has some tremendous insights on using data to inform product design. Myles Grote is the co-founder and head of Product and Integrator at Upper Hand, a provider of full suite sports and fitness management software. Myles, thanks for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Myles:
Yeah, it's great to be here, Steve. I really appreciate the invite. Looking forward to chatting.

Steve:
Well, Myles, we were talking a little bit offline there. You know, we're both basketball nuts. And so this is a great time of year with the March Madness going on and going from the field of 64 down to 16 and eventually the final four. But I know a little bit about you and your company. But why don't you just for the context, give us a little bit more on kind of your background and then how you came to found Upper Hand and really what Upper Hand is doing. Just to get some context before we go into more detail.

Myles:
Definitely. Well, it certainly is an exciting time of year, one of my favorite times of year. And here in Indianapolis where we're headquartered, it's obviously very exciting since we're hosting all the games. So it's been it's been a fun, fun weekend. But, yeah, I mean, Upper Hand really at the intersection of sports and technology. So it really kind of melds two of my passions together, which is a big reason why I co-founded the company with my business partner, Kevin McCauley. But yeah, we started both of us at IU. Kevin and I both met there and we started a not for profit called Circle of Life. And we created a the first ever collegiate hosted Half-Marathon in the country, which was a fundraising vehicle for the first ever or the largest scholarship for cancer survivors in the country as well. So that was how we kind of developed a working relationship together. I went into software at a company called FactSet, which is a fintech company up in Chicago, and then he went into sales and marketing at a company called Corporate Executive Board. Both of us live there together. He went off and started a company with his brothers called Class Watch, taking on the class ring space. And that took him out east where he started to coach Little League Baseball eventually. So he's your kind of quintessential visionary that's always coming to me with a million ideas a minute. And I'm your kind of quintessential operator that shoots down ninety-nine percent of them and tries to weed out that one percent that we should run with. And so, you know, over the years when we were both in the corporate environment outside of the startup world, he would come to me with a lot of business ideas. And eventually he came to me with the idea of what was eventually became book a coach, which is a marketplace to connect private sports coaches with parents and athletes. I saw the need for it about six months before when I was looking for a marathon coach in Chicago. I went to Google. I search for marathon coach in Chicago and nothing, no central location showed up to find sports coaches. So when he came to me with this idea six months later, I was like, Yeah, I definitely think this has legs. It's what's wrong with this? Let's validate that. It's a potential business. And and off to the races. We went we launched MVP product on like January 2013. And what we found was that the unit economics for the marketplace was really difficult to make sense. And so but we did find in looking at data and usage data, was that we had a subset of customers that were coming back often in repeat purchasing, which is kind of the holy grail for a marketplace type environment. So we did customer discovery on that subset of customers by calling them, interviewing them, literally going to the facilities and meeting with them in person. And what we found was they were they were a different type of customer that we thought we were going to have. They were really looking they were brick and mortar facilities that established businesses that just wanted something to run their operations more smoothly from a tech technological standpoint, just to make their lives easier, make them more efficient so they can spend more time coaching and less time doing back office admin work. So that was really where we we kind of realized that the bigger opportunity was was going in this different direction: less marketplace and more B2B software, and so we rebranded the company in about 2015 time frame and then completely rebuilt the software and relaunched as as Upper Hand. So that that brings us to this current business model. We've been doing this for about four years now, five years now. And the current model and it's been a been a lot of a lot of fun building it to where it is today.

Steve:
I love the story and I had not heard it in quite that fashion before. But it's a great example of how you iterate on an idea and get feedback from the market. So congratulations on on getting to this stage. You also threw out a buzzword that I'm familiar with, but I think for the benefit of our CX pros: MVP product.

Myles:
Yeah, yeah. Minimum viable product.

Steve:
Exactly. That's a concept that is more engineering based, right?

Myles:
Yeah, yeah. It's basically getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible with as least development work as possible, but still solves the core problem that you're trying to, to really go after.

Steve:
Yeah. And then it gives you something that you can put in front of customers and prospects and have them play with it. And it's very consistent with kind of an Agile technique and Agile development kind of concept.

Myles:
Yeah, absolutely.

Steve:
Well, we really wanted to talk to you about today, Myles, is how do you incorporate customer feedback? You've already given us a kind of a little bit of a window into that as you evolve the company. But you know what got you started on this customer feedback and how did you kind of land on that? And then how have you internalized that in terms of how you've developed the product for upper hand?

Myles:
Yeah, I think the the biggest thing for me professionally is just starting. I started out pretty much on the on the support desk. I was working at the company FactSet that I mentioned before. And pretty much everyone who goes to that company, or at least it used to be this way, I'm not sure if it still is today, but everyone we went into like kind of the sales and the account side of the business would start on the support desk. And that was that was the best place to learn the software. And I think that's one hundred and ten percent true to this day, no matter where you go, and eventually started to become what you call a good customer success rate. These days, we supported financial managers, investment bankers that would use our software to make really, really big decisions for their for their clients. And we would kind of consult them on how best to leverage the software. And so I kind of I found myself in between the customer and the product and the engineering teams, and I would kind of relay the feedback. And we had what we call RPDs, which are like research and product development notes. So we file these requests when we tell them what the customer wants and send it over the product team they would track client interest in and then make decisions on what to build next based on that. I didn't end up pivoting into a product until about three or four years ago, and I took basically the same kind of elements of what I learned it, fax it and brought it. It brought it here to its Upper Hand and that was talk to as many customers as possible and and help them allow you to drive product decisions. And so we set up infrastructure here to be able to seamlessly track that information as best as possible using different products such as Pendo Product Board. We use Slack for our internal team to to process feedback from customers. But that's really I mean, that's really where I learned it and how I ended up bringing that type of customer first customer driven product mindset here to Upper Hand.

Steve:
So it sounds like you use multiple channels to collect this information in the feedback from the customer. Are those kind of already integrated or is it sent with a separate link or survey type of approach?

Myles:
The different software that we use talk to each other pretty well. It relates to product software, like, for example, anyone from our team, whether it's a sales person, marketing person, they can all go into one Slack channel and post ideas they hear from customers very easily by just by typing a couple a couple of sentences. Our product owner or myself is kind of a pseudo product manager. Will we look at that feedback pretty much every day and then we can press a button and send it over to Product Board, which is where we use, or what we used to manage, kind of like everything that happens up until the planning phase on the engineering side, like pretty much the entire discovery piece is is all done through there. You can attach an actual customer to that particular piece of feedback and then you can track the feedback in there. And it gives you this user impact score based on the number of people are asking it. We also have product portals which are external facing using product board, and they the customers can go in there at any point and access the software put their own feedback in there and it automatically attaches to the to the features that we're kind of looking to to get some feedback from.

Steve:
So as you aggregate all that feedback, how do you decide what you're going to do and add to the product versus the stuff that's just doesn't doesn't get to that point?

Myles:
Yeah, it's I mean, that's what we kind of call the discovery process. It's like we you get all these ideas, you see kind of what's catching steam. And and really, we I mean, we we try to to to marry both qualitative and quantitative tracking of these. You know, the qualitative stuff is you just you go out in the industry, you get beyond our walls, you go to the facilities, you talk to the business owners, and you get a feel for what's actually needed, especially if you just go sit at the front desk at one of these facilities. You can quickly understand where the the gaps in our product are and you can quickly understand what's most important for that particular user just by going out and spending one day at a facility. So we like to make the qualitative stuff. We're actually talking with customers with quantitative. And the quantitative piece of it is we have a proprietary scoring system called the Up Score, and we look at certain elements of user experience in a couple of other different things that kind of combine what we think is unique about our product to score the features. And then we kind of use that quantitative aspect. There's a little bit of like a North Star when it becomes very, very difficult to make, you know, to choose whether or not to build this feature of that feature. So, yeah, we measure the two qualitative quantitative and that's up helps lead our our decisions.

Steve:
And I guess I know a little bit about the software as a service business, but you can't do every single piece because then you you start to lose kind of your platform approach. But what are some of the pitfalls of using customer information or what types of customer feedback is valid versus that which might be nice to have, but also kind of derails you from the the intent of the the platform you're trying to build?

Myles:
Yeah, I think the I mean, especially to the people who are starting out like early on in the development process of trying to to solve a problem out in the market. I think the biggest thing is just trying to stay as true as possible to the I mean, really get it down to the personas that you're going after within a particular business segment and do nothing but build for that persona out of the gates. It's really, really hard to do. We certainly did not do it extremely well out of the gates because you start to get different customer types that want different things. And it's hard to turn down money when you're less than a hundred customers. But but the thing ends up being way more costly if you if you don't do that. So that's definitely a big piece of advice I would give on that. I think when customers tell you they want something a lot of times and it's fine that they're I'm a customer of a lot of other products too. And I can be very opinionated about what I how I think that they should do that, the way that we approach it. And again, we haven't always done this. It's just been it's been a learning experience, is that we try to peel back the layers of the onion to understand the core problem that the customer is having. And it doesn't have to be a problem like a user experience problem within the software. It could just be a core business problem. And we start with the problem. And what we do is we take it to our engineering and product team and we present the problem. We have what we call problems to solve meeting. And it's really just a brainstorming session to to try to to whittle down the best possible solution to the problems that our customers are having. So that would be the second piece of advice. And I mean, both of them are equally important. But I think you just really have to try to understand the problem and not so much the proposed solution from the customer, because the proposed solution from the customer is not always going to be the best solution. You've got to really trust your team that they're going to be able to take these problems and at least come up with some sort of MVP idea of how to solve it. And then you can go out and start validating the potential solutions as a part of the discovery process to kind of gather feedback directly from the customers who brought you the problem in the first place.

Steve:
I want to take a break here and tell you about Walker's newest report, Deliver More Value with X- and O-Data, which provides a practical framework for integrating experience data and operational data to drive better decisions. You can download the report for free at cxleaderpodcast.com\xoreport.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Myles Grote. He's a co-founder and the head of product integrator at Upper Hand, a provider of a really fascinating software platform that helps sports and fitness folks manage all the aspects of their business. Myles, your customers, the folks that use your software, they're coaches, they're fitness, personal trainers, those types of folks, right?

Myles:
Yeah, yeah. Our biggest power users are probably like the the GMs general managers and the owners of the facilities. But we do have a lot of instructors that use our platform and that we also have the parents in the athletes engaging on our platform as well via e commerce, usually to purchase services.

Steve:
So I think most of us can kind of we may not use a personal trainer. Maybe that's why I'm not in very good shape. But, you know, it's one of the reasons, you know, when you have kind of a third party, it makes you more accountable. But could you could you just give us an example of some things that made it into the platform based on customer input or maybe some other things that didn't and what the decision making was?

Myles:
Yeah, so I think this is probably probably a good example of some of the we're we're building right now. You know, when it comes to reporting, reporting can be a very, very loaded and loaded term and can also present just kind of like some some traps in terms of like what to build. And so what we've seen some of our other competitors do that I don't necessarily love is you can tell that they listen to their customers and the customers say, I want this report and they go off and they build that report and they put it into the platform. We've tried it. We've gone really slow in terms of our our reporting development. And we haven't built a ton of reports because we've been working on solutions that are going to be way more flexible and dynamic that allows the customer to build, say, 10 of the reports that are on our competitors in one single report. So one of the one of the examples where we actually are going to build a specific report that a customer has asked for has to do with memberships. And the reason that we're we're building that particular one out of the gate is kind of like out of the box report because it's such a critical element to so many of our businesses and most of them are membership based businesses. And that's where a lot of their stable kind of reoccurring revenue comes from. And so having a dedicated report that really drives a lot of value, we decided was something that we would build versus some other reports that have been requested by us. We've decided to scrap those and come up with a different solution that's going to eventually allow them to do that. But but it's not going to be a million report stuffed into one section.

Steve:
It's really interesting because most of our listeners are the folks in their organization that are trying to provide this customer feedback to the various users. And you're so focused on the the product piece of this. And I think software is a good example, but you could apply these same principles in a manufacturing sense or in a service business sense. I guess where I'm going with this is it's interesting in your background, you came out of the kind of the customer support where a lot of the deficiencies end up coming to light. Right. You know, the product won't do what the customer thought it was going to do and then they call support. Right. You know, thinking about kind of the audience of our podcast, you know, these are people that are tending to provide you with the kind of feedback you would use as the product champion. What advice would you give for those pros, just generally in terms of dealing with kind of the more the engineering or the product design side of the business, how can they be valuable to people like you?

Myles:
Yeah, I would say just be be honest, open and loud. I mean, I like we always talk about how we don't want we're never going to build for the loudest customer. But that doesn't mean you can't be loud. Like we want to hear the feedback. So open, honest, loud and respectful too, because like, you know, we get a lot of frustrated people, you know, rightfully so. You know, it's like they're running a business and they depend on your software to effectively run their business. So it's like we have complete empathy, complete and total empathy. When someone comes to us frustrated, you know, it's like we want to hear it, although sometimes it's hard for people to say your baby's ugly. It's necessary as a part of the development process to really make sure that you nail it and you get the best possible solution out there for for your customers. And then I would say to as I understand it, there is no perfect software. I mean, I've been doing this for close to 15 years now in software and going all the way back to the days where I was local, local download, you know, on your computer you download software is before cloud software existed. Even as technology continues to develop, it's extremely difficult to nail 100 percent of the use cases. And I think a lot of product people. Understand that, but a lot of consumers of products that have never been on the products, I don't understand that, like we can't solve 100 percent of problems. If we do, we'll go out of business. I mean, that's I think you kind of alluded to to that kind of piece. It's like you got to you've got to strip out a lot of stuff and get to the you know, get to the meat and potatoes of what needs to be delivered, the core problems that need be solved. And it's a really, really difficult thing to do.

Steve:
You know, as you've grown this business, you've got tens, if not hundreds of thousands of users now that are interacting with the software. You've talked a lot about how you kind of personally engage in getting that feedback with the folks that run the fitness facilities and that sort. But when you're really at scale now with so many users, how do you incorporate the feedback from tens or hundreds of thousands of people that are using the software? How have you approached that at Upper Hand?

Myles:
Yeah, great, great question. When you hit on two points, the first one, we're a business to business to consumer. a B to B to C platform, which they've definitely grown a lot more popular over the past decade as a kind of the the gig economy has exploded. But we have we don't have the relationships with the parents that use our platform to consume the services from the businesses like the the baseball facility. We don't know them. We don't see them on a day to day basis. The businesses had the relationships with them. And so getting feedback from them is a lot more difficult. So the key, I think there is building something in your platform. We use we use Pendo, where you can survey people based on what we call we call them key task completions. So an example of this would be going through the checkout process and signing your kid up for a baseball lesson or you as a consumer are going to Orange, here is an example, and registering for a class like that would be that whole process would be a key task for us. And so we you know, we survey people using an NPS survey and we ask them one question at the end, what can we do to raise the score by one point after they give us a score? And we we look at that every single week, the NPS scores on really the user level for clients for what we call staff admin staff. But we do that. And then for, call it like a staff member, they create events. It's something to do all the time in our platform because they're always putting product out there for the consumers to go and register our purchase. And so we all we ask them or we started asking recently, you know, similar to when you get off a Google call or a Zoom call, they'll ask you how that how the experience was, how would you rate the experience? We do the exact same thing in our platform and look at that data. The best part about that is getting the qualitative data, like the feedback of like how we can improve the experience because it's really, really eye opening. But you can do that at scale. You can you know, I threw up a survey last week and we had, you know, I think about well over a thousand responses within a couple of days. And I was able to export that out into CSV. And taking a step further, if you got data scientists on staff, we don't, they can do some really cool stuff with that data to look for key terms that are mentioned and stuff like that. But that's been something really, really key that we've done is leveraging Pendo to to get mass scale data from from our users.

Steve:
Hey, Myles, we have reached that point of The CX Leader Podcast where we ask every one of our guests to provide our listeners with their take home value. So what is the one key idea or tip that you would leave our listeners with today in terms of how they can help provide feedback to drive product development inside their own organization?

Myles:
Yeah, I think kind of going back to what we talked about before, I think it's just, you know, just being being as honest and and open as possible with whoever you're providing the feedback to. And don't be afraid to be loud. We got tough skin on the product side and you have to be in order to to build amazing products. So be open, honest and loud with your feedback. And and we'll do our best to make sure we we take it in stride and deliver the best possible value too.

Steve:
Myles Grote is the co-founder, head of Product Integrator at Upper Hand, a provider of full service sports and fitness management software. Myles, thanks for being a guest on the podcast this week.

Myles:
Yeah, I appreciate it, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, and if people want to check it out a little bit, you want to give us your website or how people might be able to get in touch with you if they want to continue the dialog?

Myles:
Yeah, definitely. Our website, www.getupperhand.com. So, yeah, just go on there. There's a little chat bot that pop open and that'll put you directly in touch with someone from our team to to reach out to us.

Steve:
And are you personally on LinkedIn.

Myles:
I am.

Steve:
Can you on LinkedIn. So. Yeah. Myles Grote. G, R, O, T, E.

Myles:
You got it.

Steve:
Myles, M, Y, L, E, S.

Myles:
Yes.

Steve:
If there's anything you want to talk about more about this podcast or anything about how Walker can help your business' customer experience, feel free to email me here at a podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes. We also have them arranged by series and we have our contact information out there so you can let us know how we're doing. Drop us a line. Give us an idea for a future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker, we're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you again next time.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your wav files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including automated translation, upload many different filetypes, collaboration tools, share transcripts, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.