Delighting the Enthusiast: Kristine Chin

12/01/20 • 40 min

Kristine Chin, VP of Customer Experience at Twilio, talks about how understanding “Enthusiast” customers empowered her to build great experiences. She discusses her education in political economy, with stories of how systems thinking helped her develop her problem-solving approach. She shares what she learned from losing her home in the Oakland Firestorm and how a semester in Slovenia helped her better understand herself and her career interests. She talks about her leadership roles at eBay, Ten-X, and Twilio.

Kristine shares her perspective on what it means to be customer obsessed and about collaborating with customers to build a strong marketplace. She shares her philosophy of being “delightfully persistent” and creating a customer-first culture. She shares key things she learned about setting up a successful customer experience program.

How do you attract customers to a new platform or marketplace? How do you set up a new customer experience program? How do you influence change in a company? How do you create back-office changes to support a strong customer experience?

Guest Bio:
Kristine joined Twilio in 2018 as Vice President, Global Customer Experience. She is responsible for optimizing the end-to-end customer experience. This includes spearheading a company-wide effort to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and raise awareness of their needs.

Kristine previously spent 3 years at Ten-X (formerly Auction.com) as SVP, Customer Experience and 12 years at eBay, where she ultimately served as general manager of the $4B eBay Motors category and ultimately lead eBay’s North American Partner Strategy & Operations. She holds a patent for features to display inventory to the right buyer – and has four additional patents pending related to matching sellers and products with interested buyers.

Kristine’s experience also includes work with enterprise, SMB and consumer customers. She began her career in strategy consulting to the telecommunications industry. She holds a BA from University of California, Berkeley and a Harvard MBA.

linkedin.com/in/kchin/

Building Blocks:
A CX leader's most important role is to help other teams discover the customer. Who are they? What are their behaviors, needs, attitudes? Where are they satisfied, and where are they stuck? The only way you can deliver that consistent end-to-end experience, the one you draw up on that journey map as an ideal state - the only way you can execute it is to have teams across the company locked in on the customer, and then collaborating, to take action - to either design NEW experiences or address parts of the experience that need to be fixed.

Think about what opportunities you have in your role to collaborate better across teams to give your customers a better experience. Maybe you're a marketer looking at customer feedback on the product all day long, but you don't know that much about your company's next feature release or product roadmap, and spending more time with the product team could help out. Or maybe you're on the engineering team and you've got a backlog that seems exciting, but you think you could build even better if you knew the emotions and associations that customers have with your current product. Whatever it is, write down ONE OTHER TEAM, and the names of TWO SPECIFIC PEOPLE, whom you can reach out to in the next week to start to start to do some silo spanning, and get to better outcomes for your customer.

Helpful Links:
“ROI of Customer Experience 2020” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/roi-of-customer-experience-2020/
“Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/creating-and-sustaining-a-customer-centric-culture/
“Where Net Promoter Score Goes Wrong” by Christina Stahlkopf; Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/10/where-net-promoter-score-goes-wrong

linkedin.com/in/kchin/

Previous Episode

Learning to Infinity: Farhan Thawar

Farhan Thawar, VP Engineering at Shopify, believes learning is an infinite game. His narrative illustrates this philosophy in diverse, compelling ways as he shares early influences that helped him discover a love for math and computers, his academic and professional evolution, and his desire to surround himself with people who will help him learn. He tells stories about how this desire to learn created opportunities to build companies and communities.

Farhan shares how he thinks about career moves in terms of learning compensation instead of monetary compensation. He comments on the power of “looking stupid” and a willingness to be wrong. He shares his perspectives on community building, personal decision frameworks, and how to maximize “kilojoules per minute” to maximize professional and personal utility.

How do you maximize learning and personal growth in your career? How do you choose between good career paths? What is your connection between personal growth and community building? How does your community contribute to your success as a builder? How can asking stupid questions make you a more valuable member of your team?

Guest Bio:
Farhan is an engineer by training, everything else by experience. The desire to always be learning has driven Farhan’s career from technology giants like Microsoft through to small startups, running a tech incubator, and ultimately to his current role at Shopify. Farhan is a prolific writer and speaker, and loves to share what he is learning with other people.
Farhan is currently the VP of Engineering at Shopify, an advisor to 3 startups, and an angel investor for over 20 companies. He has been published in Wired and TechCrunch magazines, was honored in 2010 as one of Toronto’s 25 most powerful people, and has spoken at a number of conferences including TEDxToronto. Farhan lives with his family in Toronto.

Twitter: @fnthawar
Medium: @fnthawar

Building Blocks:

In this episode, Farhan framed Learning as an Infinite Game. He contrasted it with other pursuits that he labeled Finite, like getting that next job or a promotion. I think we can all agree that we're never done learning. But sometimes it can seem like we don't have time - to pick up that new book, to take that class, to have that conversation - and we lose the chance to learn as a result. What Farhan has done that's both elegant and efficient is to use learning, rather than something like advancement or money, as the organizing principle for his decisions. And I think that's something I could do better at, and I'm guessing many people want to do better at.

In the spirit of Farhan's message, write down two things: First, what is something that you would really like to learn? It can be a new language, a way of sleeping better, a even just some things you could do to keep your life more organized! And it can be a long- or a short-term thing.

Second, what are 3 things - 1 tomorrow, 1 by next week, and 1 by next month - that you can do to move yourself along on this learning journey? Get specific. What exactly will you do? Who can help you? What will your goals be? Maybe you have a bunch of ideas. Jot them down, and run them by somebody. And get some input. Be ambitious, but be practical and honest with yourself too. And remember that Farhan, like Robert Chatwani in episode one, talked about the importance of a framework for knowing who you are and your purpose, and building around that. So if you need some inspiration on that front, go back and check out that episode too.

Helpful Links:
Farhan’s TED Talk: “Refining Mobile Application Technology”
Farhan on making decisions: “Do it. Most things are reversible anyway.”
Farhan on asking questions: “Why looking stupid is my superpower”
Farhan’s Wired Magazine article on pair programming
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
Range: Why Generalists Succeed in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Next Episode

Previewing Next Week: Kim Malek, CEO and Co-Founder of Salt & Straw

Back in the Trailer for this season, we promised that you’d meet the Founder and CEO of one of the most innovative ice cream brands in the world. Well, we’re dropping this mini-episode today to let you know that, on December 9, our Guest on the show is Kim Malek, the CEO and Co-Founder of Portland-based Salt and Straw. For those of you that know Salt & Straw, the brand needs no introduction. For those that haven’t yet been to one of their scoop shops or ordered the product by mail, let’s just say that once you experience it, you won’t forget it! Kim and her team build connections and communities, and cultivate relationships with local farmers, artisans, and chefs to fearlessly explore and create some of the most distinctive flavors of ice cream you’ll ever come across. And it tastes absolutely incredible.

Join us next week to hear what inspired Kim to build Salt & Straw, how she did it, who she looks to for guidance and support, and how she and her team navigated the pandemic to set up the business to grow and open five new stores in 2021.

Looking forward to having you!