HubSpot's CX Evolution: A Conversation with Nicholas Holland, VP of Product
03/28/24 • 49 min
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.
Thank you to our friends
This podcast is brought to you by HG...
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.
Thank you to our friends
This podcast is brought to you by HG...
Previous Episode
Empowering Customer Choice with Micah Sampson, Head of Customer Experience at Intuit
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.
Thank you to our friends
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
Next Episode
Delivering 18 Years of Bold CX: Christian Mitchell's Journey at Northwestern Mutual
This episode features an interview with Christian Mitchell, EVP & Chief Customer Officer at Northwestern Mutual. Christian works to elevate the customer experience and deliver bold solutions to set Northwestern Mutual ahead of its competitors. And over his 18-year tenure at Northwestern mutual, he has served in a variety of leadership roles, including as president of their Wealth Management Company when he managed $129 billion in client assets. Host Sohaib Ahmed discusses with Mitchell his journey and various roles at Northwestern Mutual over 18 years, alongside his insights into building memorable customer experiences. They delve into how Northwestern Mutual integrates technology to enhance customer experiences while maintaining a human-centric approach. Mitchell shares his perspective on the evolving customer expectations, the future of customer experience (CX), including the potential impact of generative AI, and the significance of consistency in delivering great CX. Additionally, the importance of data privacy, the challenges of implementing new technologies, and the role of storytelling in reshaping company culture towards more client-centric values are covered.
Quotes
*”The financial services marketplace is complex. I really think you need to understand that holistic landscape in order to take all of that and fashion it into an incredible client experience. If you don't have that holistic understanding of the system and how we create value and what clients need, it's easy to default to designing experiences indexed on efficiency, or maybe client experiences that index on regulatory adherence, but not actually creating something that's really incredible and delightful for the client.”
*”On metrics, it's really evolved. When we started the CX journey, it was really focused on CSAT, NPS, those really big aggregate numbers that are easy to compare across companies. As time has gone on, I've become less and less enamored with those aggregate metrics. We still need to calculate them, we need to track, we need to benchmark, etc. But I think CX telemetry is best done at a more granular basis where you're actually measuring things like individual interactions and satisfaction.”
*”I think at times you can find a metric and seek to maximize it, and then kind of lose the storyline a little bit. So I think you always have to kind of come back to this foundation of what are we trying to do strategically? What are we really solving for holistically?”
*”In terms of the media stuff that we do, the planning and progress study, a lot of the talks that I give internally, to our advisors, to client groups, it's about this constant drumbeat of storytelling around the client. And I think that constant drumbeat of storytelling is incredibly important for long standing incumbent financial services companies because historically we were very focused on financial performance. We might have been very focused on recruiting of advisors, and those things are very important. But by constantly storytelling around the client, incredible experiences, things that we want to do, it's part of shifting the zeitgeist, the mindset of the organization to be more client centric.”
*”One of the interesting areas where we debate a lot is instances where the client may have a preference for self service, but we somehow want to inject a human to make sure that the best client outcome occurs. The poster child example would be, we have a big market correction, the client gets scared, wants to liquidate his or her portfolio, and might prefer to do that in an automated way via the mobile experience. Now, if the client really wants to do that, of course we will help them do it. But that might not actually be the best long-term decision. So in instances like that, we actually want to insert some human friction, for lack of a better word, to at least gut check that client, to really make sure that we're helping that client not only have a good experience today, but really achieve their financial goals long term.”
*”A lot of the experiences that we create in financial services or financial planning, it's more at pulling the heartstrings than the math. It's about the emotion, the psychology. How do you harness that in such a way that the client makes the right decisions and is better off long term?”
*”Sometimes we think about the peak moments of the client experience. That ‘You can retire moment,’ or ‘Your family's protected’ moment. But I actually think real trust, real client experience comes through consistency of interaction, predictability, and high quality communication that plays out over really, really long periods of time. So I think consistency is really the name of the game and one of the unsung heroes of great client experiences.”
Time Stamps
[2:38] Christian Mitchell's Journey in Northwestern Mutual
[5:16] The Evolution of Customer E...
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