Empowering Customer Choice with Micah Sampson, Head of Customer Experience at Intuit

01/04/24 • 36 min

This episode features an interview with Micah Sampson, Head of Customer Experience at Intuit, a powerhouse in the FinTech space with sub brands like TurboTax and QuickBooks and Credit Karma that drives revenue close to $30 billion annually. In his role at Intuit, Micah spearheads customer experience management, investing time working directly with product managers, developers and partners to identify and solve customer problems, optimize business processes, and foster customer loyalty and retention. His team is truly customer obsessed. Their mission is clear: constantly improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn and drive revenue growth for Intuit's formidable portfolio of brands. So in this episode, Micah and host Larry Fleischman discuss setting a high standard for CX across multiple brands, getting employees to take extreme ownership of the customer experience across the company, and empowering customer choice through AI, data and technology.

Quotes

*”One of the things that we talk about at Intuit is extreme ownership. It's no one person's role to ramp for peak season. It's all of us. It's all of our job to make sure that the voice of the customer - the things we're hearing feedback from the call centers, feedback from the product surveys - it's all of our job to collate that and share that back to the business so we can get better every year.”

*”Saying, ‘We need to delight our customers.,’ I hate the word delight. And the reason I hate that word is because it's very subjective, right? Delight for me may be different from delight for you. And so you can't solve for that.”

*”There were agents who were very technical and could solve for the customer, but they weren't very empathetic. And while they would have short call times and probably solve for the customers, their CSAT scores were very low. Versus an expert who maybe is not the best technically, but talks to every single customer like they're their neighbor and would perform extremely well.”

*”The only commodity that we can never get back is time. And so if we waste your time, we're taking away a commodity that you can never get back. And so we really focus on effort. What's the level of effort that our customers feel they have to go through when they're interacting with the product, when they're interacting with an agent, all those things?”

*”It's up to the customer. I think that is one of the things that we often lose sight of. So I think for us, it's about choice, right? It's really like, what are our customers saying? What's important to them? And how do we serve the needs of all those customers?”

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Micah Sampson, Head of Customer Experience at Intuit

[2:18] How did Micah’s background as a financial advisor shape how he thinks about CX?

[3:01] What patents did Micah work on to improve the CX at Intuit?

[10:57] About Micah’s career path at Intuit

[11:30] What are the challenges to leading CX at Intuit?

[15:23] What are the benefits to having multiple sub brands?

[18:51] How does Micah think about CX?

[21:49] What has Micah learned about CX along the way?

[24:43] How much of the customer experience is automated at Intuit?

[26:36] What does the future of CX look like at Intuit?

[28:14] How does Micah’s experience as a Six Sigma Black Belt shape his approach to CX?

[31:36] What’s an amazing customer experience that Micah has had personally?

About our guest, Micah Sampson

Micah Sampson is Head of Customer Experience at Intuit. He has been with the company for over 13 years, having started in October 2010 as a Sales and Support Rep. Prior to Intuit, Micah served as a Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch and A.G. Edward & Sons. He has also been a Project Manager at Market Central.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. HGS is a digital customer experience leader dedicated to delivering winning customer interactions at scale that are prompt, personal, and positive. We continuously transform, optimize, and grow enterprises to exceed ever-rising customer expectations. HGS provides our clients with the right talent and technologies needed to champion every moment. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links

Connect with Micah on LinkedIn

Learn more about Intuit

Connect with Larry on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

Quotes

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Micah Sampson, Head of Customer Experience at Intuit

[2:18] How did Micah’s background as a financial advisor shape how he thinks about CX?

[3:01] What patents did Micah work on to improve the CX at Intuit?

[10:57] About Micah’s career path at Intuit

[11:30] What are the challenges to leading CX at Intuit?

[15:23] What are the benefits to having multiple sub brands?

[18:51] How does Micah think about CX?

[21:49] What has Micah learned about CX along the way?

[24:43] How much of the customer experience is automated at Intuit?

[26:36] What does the future of CX look like at Intuit?

[28:14] How does Micah’s experience as a Six Sigma Black Belt shape his approach to CX?

[31:36] What’s an amazing customer experience that Micah has had personally?

About our guest, Micah Sampson

Thank you to our friends

Links

Connect with Micah on LinkedIn

Learn more about Intuit

Connect with Larry on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

Previous Episode

Driving Change: Turo’s Trailblazing COO, Julie Weingardt

This episode features an interview with Turo’s Chief Operations Officer, Julie Weingardt. Julie brings with her 30 years of operations and contact center experience and has held executive operational roles at Startek, Sitel, and Sykes. Her expertise is in transforming customer touchpoints into powerful relationship- and brand-building tools through the use of highly efficient business practices. And in this episode, Julie and host Larry Fleischman discuss having a mindset of continuous improvement, fostering a customer experience that doesn’t require contacting support, the importance of female mentorship and much more.

Quotes

*”As things mature, there's always opportunities to challenge what's being done and to ask, is there another way, a better way, a smarter way to do something? Just because it's been done that way over and over again doesn't mean that you can't challenge it and see what other ways there might be to do it better or smarter.”

*”Let's face it. Consumers just want a product that works. No matter what it is, you don't want to have to contact support. So first and foremost, keeping that as the mission, when we continue to release new features and things, it just needs to work. And we need to test for that all the way through.”

*”Being a female in a male dominated world, so much of mentorship and business conversations at that time happened on the golf course. So, when we went to corporate events, while a lot of spouses who were female went and did spa days, I went to the golf course.”

*“It’s not only females who need female mentors. Males need female mentors too. How else are they going to understand the differences in what's needed in the world of business from a gender basis? Not only are females not good at asking for it, they're not good at offering it up to be mentors either. And so we have to continue to foster that type of mentorship and make sure that all of our young professionals are getting a good relationship from both males and females in their professional careers.”

*”We really know that how we're going to continue to win and dominate as we've been doing in this space is to just continue to win one customer at a time. It is always about iterating and reiterating over and over again on what we do and how we do it because it's about making that next customer experience even better.”

Time Stamps

[0:39] Meet Julie Weingardt, Chief Operations Officer at Turo

[2:31] How did Julie get her start in CX?

[7:41] How did Julie’s experience in ranching shape her leadership style?

[14:47] What was it like working for a BPO in the early days of CX?

[17:06] How did Julie become COO of Turo?

[21:47] What is the customer experience like at Turo?

[26:48] How do they solve a CX issue at Turo?

[28:15] How did business change through the pandemic at Turo?

About our guest, Julie Weingardt

Julie Weingardt is an operations executive who believes the most important customer interaction is the one that happens next. Julie strives to transform customer touchpoints into powerful relationship- and brand-building tools through the use of highly efficient business practices. With 30 years of operations and contact center experience, she is particularly skilled at developing and executing omni-channel operational solutions using combinations of internal and outsourced teams. Julie’s career background includes executive operational roles at Startek, Sitel, and Sykes. She attended the University of Northern Colorado and holds a certificate from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management in Executive Leadership.

Thank you to our friends

Links

Connect with Julie on LinkedIn

Learn more about Turo

Connect with Larry on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

Next Episode

HubSpot's CX Evolution: A Conversation with Nicholas Holland, VP of Product

This episode features an interview with Nicholas Holland, VP of Product and GM of Marketing Product Lines at HubSpot, a leading CRM platform that provides software and support to help businesses grow better. Nicholas shares insights from his eight-year tenure at HubSpot and his entrepreneurial journey, emphasizing the importance of empathy, observation, and adaptability in CX. The conversation highlights how CX evolves in diverse environments and the necessity of innovating and reimagining customer interactions in a digital world. They delve into the dynamics of customer satisfaction versus loyalty, the transformation of HubSpot into a multi-product, multi-persona platform, and the impact of AI and data on future CX strategies. Nicholas also reflects on personal anecdotes, illustrating how CX principles translate into everyday life and the lessons learned from entrepreneurial endeavors.

Quotes

*”The whole gist for all CX people would be, ‘Are they happy at the end of it?’ And then ‘Are you flexible enough to kind of understand the audience and ebb and flow with them?’”

*”If you ever watched The Matrix, I love the little kid who’s like, ‘The trick is there is no spoon,’ which is like a fancy way of saying, ‘Stop thinking in the constraints that you have and start thinking about the why behind the why, as Simon Sinek would call, ‘What's the big picture?’ And I think those kinds of things really become powerful ways to look at CX.”

*”If your job is CX and you're just happy punching eight to five every day, and you'll make incremental changes, that's fine. But you'll wonder why you didn't get your senior CX promotion or why you're not a director yet. But whenever you realize that there's no spoon, you realize what you're trying to do is really push that higher ROI. You're trying to make a real impact there. Some neat stuff can pop out. So that's where it started to happen for me.”

*”CX is happening, whether you're conscious of it or not, whether you curate it or not, whether you're actively involved or not.”

*”Mind the gap. We make all of these big, intuitive assumptions that people know what we're talking about. So when you say, ‘Mind the gap,’ you're walking people through very, very specific steps. So what I often tell people to do is just start somewhere, and start to walk through every step. ‘I think they'll do this, I think they'll do that.’ And when you do that, you start off with who it is, a persona, you start somewhere. And then you have a fascinating question: What came before, what came after?”

*”I think right now, what we're trying to balance is as you get to a certain size, how do you basically get PMs with their PDs to be very dedicated to the experience of their customer? But also how do they look up and have connective tissue that shows them, going back to the mind the gap, what came before and what comes next? And that's going to be the challenge, I think, for a lot of companies.”

*”You have to get close to the product yourself. You then get to look at some activation and usage data. You then get to look very specifically at the most important flows with CSAT. And then you get to go look at a variety of listening posts to see what is the world at large saying on social media? What's your sales team saying? What's your service team saying? And that gives you a good sense of how the product's doing.”

Time Stamps

[0:53] Meet Nicholas Holland: HubSpot's VP of Product

[1:16] The Essence of Customer Experience

[5:27] Nicholas's Journey from Finance to CX Innovator

[6:02] Entrepreneurial Insights and the CX Mindset

[14:53] The Complexities of Customer Experience Design

[17:41] Nicholas's Entrepreneurial Ventures and Lessons Learned

[25:06] Unveiling the Essence of Customer Needs: A Real-World Story

[26:19] A Wake-Up Call: The Importance of User Experience

[27:00] Lessons Learned: The Journey to Customer Loyalty

[28:46] Embracing a New Chapter: Joining HubSpot

[33:24] The Evolution of Customer Experience at HubSpot

[43:57] The Future of CX: Innovations and Challenges Ahead

[46:37] Personal Insights: Learning CX from Everyday Life

About our guest, Nicholas Holland

Nicholas Holland is VP of Product and GM of Marketing Product Lines at HubSpot. He has been with the company for over 8 years, having started in October 2015 as Director of Labs. Prior to HubSpot, Nicholas served as President and Founder of boutique consultancy CentreSource Inc., providing product management & custom web/mobile applications. He also founded startup Populr, which allows users to create trackable, secure, & highly engaging micro-sites in a matter of minutes. Populr was then sold to Nashville-based nonprofit, Kindful.

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