CX Champions

This episode features an interview with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, an on-demand human insight platform that quickly gives companies a first-person understanding of how their target audience behaves throughout any experience and why. Janelle has over 15 years of experience in customer research for both B2B and B2C companies to help them transform their customer and user experiences. She has also held UX research consulting roles at Nielsen Norman Group and Forrester Research. In this episode, Janelle talks about understanding your customers as human beings, engaging them in the feedback and development process, and embedding the customer voice in your business.

Quotes

*”Customer experience is really about people, and serving your customers as people and human beings.”

*”Without the context of understanding your customers as humans and hearing from them [about] why they might have given you a low NPS rating or why they're leaving a particular page, you can't make an educated decision of what to do and how to fix it.”

*”The interesting thing about people and customers is that while they don't wanna be tracked, they wanna be heard… You've heard the phenomenon, like everyone hates surveys, nobody fills them out, only a small percentage fill them out because they're tired of them… What this study and research uncovered was that people aren't fatigued by taking surveys. They're actually fatigued by taking surveys and then the company not actually doing anything with the information.”

*”Don't try to change everything at once. Don't try to boil the ocean. Find one or two places in that product development flow that you really want people to talk to customers and then find a way to embed it there.”

*”How do we get to a place where we're not just over indexing on all the things people are doing and where they're clicking and what they're saying on all these different platforms? What if we just reintroduced the customer as a person that is next to us every day or provides intelligence to us on an ongoing basis? To me, that's the future. And that's what gets me super excited about what we have in front of us.  And I think there's so much room and opportunity for us to  reintroduce the human into the business conversation.”

*”The really interesting thing about personas to me is that we tend to think that everybody who falls into that persona is the same, but there's so much variety within personas. And so imagine if you could go talk to five people that fit into the profile of your key persona. You're gonna meet five very different people.”

Time Stamps

*[0:04] How to better understand your customers as humans and support a more diverse UX

*[0:28] Introducing Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting

*[5:55] How UserTesting helps organizations connect with customers

*[8:34] What is a customer experience narrative?

*[10:51] Finding inspiration from your own best customer experience

*[11:30] The revealing metrics behind customer behavior

*[16:35] How UserTesting engages customers in their own experience

*[25:49] Where to begin when wanting to better understand your customers

*[32:32] Why it’s critical to talk to customers who fit your ideal guest persona

*[34:21] Debrief

*[35:21] HGS Pub

Bio

Janelle is an expert research practitioner fascinated by human behavior and intrigued by data insight. She brings over 15 years’ experience conducting large-scale customer research initiatives for both B2C and B2B companies across a variety of industries to help them transform their customer, user, and brand experiences. Janelle is responsible for stewarding the future of Human Insight and translating that into opportunities to evolve the UserTesting platform. Prior to UserTesting, Janelle held UX research consulting roles at Nielsen Norman Group and Forrester Research.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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This episode features an interview with Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-Founder and CEO of Rocketlane, a high-growth customer onboarding software that lets you collaborate with customers. Sri has over nine years of experience growing and scaling SaaS companies. In this episode, Sri discusses how to speed up employee communication across silos, the critical customer onboarding timeline, and developing accountability with customers so they take some ownership of their own experience.

Quotes

*”We figured out what [our customers’] biggest time sinks are and automated some of those. [Then] built a beautiful experience that makes those people look good in front of the customer. It [was] like [an] aha moment for them to say, ‘Hey, wow, this is where I spend a lot of my energy wastefully. And the product is doing all this for me. And it's not one more tool. It’s the tool that I'm going to use with my customers during this whole engagement. It's getting rid of multiple tools and making it one singular experience.’”

*”From an efficiency standpoint, there's a lot of ways in which you can see the benefit of better onboarding. Firstly, if you get everyone to execute in a coordinated way on time, it gets your customer to value faster. And that's super important for SaaS because very often churn happens because it's been six months since you bought a product. You have some sort of an implementation that happened, but then you're not truly live yet. Your team hasn't adopted that software yet. And when it comes up for renewal, you're gonna be like, we didn't see [the] value.”

*”The more you control [onboarding] and actually get the customer live in three to four weeks, you're more likely to have that successful partnership with them and build upon where you start.”

*”Especially if you're selling to mid-market or enterprise, you're never truly done onboarding the customer. You're done with phase one. You're gonna start phase two next. So there are ongoing initiatives that you want to run collaboratively with the customer, where you wanna hold the customer accountable as well, and deliver a better experience on both sides.”

*”Is my customer success team playing offense or defense and why? By playing offense, we mean, are they focused on expansion and focused on going after more use cases, doing more with the customer, setting up more integrations, et cetera? Or are they on defense saying, ‘Hey, sorry, but we are not able to deliver on this yet’?”

*”If you do a great job during onboarding, then automatically you are more on the offense than on defense with those customers. If you do a sloppy job, you're on the back foot from the get go. You can't talk renewal. You need to first win back trust from the customer again before you go that direction.”

Time Stamps

*[0:11] The Case of Slow Customer Onboarding

*[0:30] Introducing Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-Founder & CEO at Rocketlane

*[1:21] Get to know Rocketlane

*[9:50] Evidence #1: Employee communication is siloed

*[15:56] Evidence #2: Customers are left to conduct their own orientation of the product

*[26:14] Evidence #3: Customer onboarding is standardized

*[19:19] Debrief: Review takeaways

*[30:05] HGS Pub: Lyssa and Sri celebrate cracking the case

Bio

Srikrishnan (Sri) Ganesan is a co-founder of the fast-growing customer onboarding platform Rocketlane, a SaaS product that helps businesses by replacing generic project management and document collaboration tools with a unique, unified workspace. Sri has spent his last nine years building and scaling SaaS businesses. His last startup was acquired by Freshworks (NASDAQ:FRSH) in 2015 and went on to become their fastest-growing product (Freshchat). He is passionate about all things CX and startups.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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This episode features an interview with Tom Martin, CEO at Glance Networks, a software company that provides in-the-moment web and mobile co-browsing, screen share, and video solutions that help increase customer satisfaction, improve brand loyalty, and drive new revenue. In this episode, Tom talks about the key to brand loyalty, removing friction points in the customer journey, and how the best technology is invisible.

Quotes

*”The loneliest place in the world isn't the desert, it's the internet. And people wanna do business with other human beings that they know, like and trust. And when you realize that the world has gotten really complicated and then you have to do everything digitally, we realized that this human piece, this human component, married and brought together with digital suddenly is like the winning combination to really deliver the outcomes that businesses are looking and seeking to achieve.”

*”When you can be a business that can help people achieve [their] goals by providing that level of expertise in the middle of a journey, you realize [that] we can actually get more people through that journey and have the outcomes that we're looking for. And that's why people stay in touch. They have a great relationship and suddenly you're the face of that company. The technology needs to be there, but suddenly it's that emotional connection that binds you to that company, into that product that suddenly makes you that lifetime or higher loyalty customer.”

*”Humans take the path of least resistance. They're like water. And so if you can remove steps and reduce that friction, that might be the biggest reason why people choose to work with you versus someone else.”

*”I think about technology, and if you can make technology create an experience that allows two people to engage and communicate, and they never have to know how the technology works, it's never really present, and it works in the background, suddenly you're like, we've achieved Nirvana.”

*”I.M. Pei, the great architect, always said, 'Simplicity is the art of design.' And so, you look at Japanese woodwork and you realize it's so complex, but on the outside, it looks so simple. And the beauty is so apparent. But behind it, it's all these little widgets and connections and joints to create this experience. And I think that to me is what most companies are attempting to achieve. Not all actually achieve it, but how do you create simple experiences knowing the technology is the enabler of the experience?”

*”I think you start with the customer journey and you also try to start with how customers are also buying and consuming other things, not just within your own environment. Because today, businesses are really competing against other experiences.”

*”When you can have an experience [where you] order something and it shows up tomorrow, you then have to ask yourself, Why is it so hard to buy a car? Why is it so hard to apply for a mortgage? Why is enrolling in healthcare this hard and it takes so long? My expectations have shifted, not because my expectations of healthcare have shifted. It's because I'm having better experiences elsewhere.”

*”The best companies have organized around saying someone needs to own the journey, the experience. What is our face to the customer? Knowing full well that they're gonna need to interface with different parts of the business to make it happen, to make it be realized. But you can't sit there and have different parts of the organization be like, ‘No, we're gonna do it this way and we're gonna do it this way.’ It has to be a unified approach.”

Time Stamps

*[0:10] The Case of Implementing Invisible Technology to Power Great Customer Experiences

*[0:24] Introducing Tom Martin, CEO at Glance Networks

*[6:35] Facilitating conversation and collaboration using embedded technology

*[8:53] Where to begin your technology journey

*[10:51] Finding inspiration from your own best customer experience

*[14:42] Creating a unified approach to CX

*[21:59] Personalizing the future customer experience

*[23:42] Creating an affordably luxurious experience for your customer

*[31:46] Extending your brand through the experience

*[33:10] Debrief

*[34:15] HGS Pub

Bio

Tom Martin serves as chief executive officer of Glance, and oversees the company’s strategy, product development, and go-to-market activities. Tom is known as a customer experience and contact center strategist, product lifecycle expert, and partnership builder. Tom has led Glance through a successful “pivot,” transitioning from a small business screen share tool to a provider of omnichannel visual engagement solutions for some of the largest enterprises in the world. Since that pivot, Glance has experienced multiple years of 70 percent of Year over Year growth. Prior to joining Glance in 2013, Tom spent over a decade at Verizon building and managing strategic partnerships. Outside of the office, Tom is an avid backcountry skier, mountaineer, and competitive cyclist.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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A brand new season of CX Detectives is coming. HGS is excited to bring you insights from top customer experience leaders from B2B and B2C companies. We’ll hear from leaders at companies like Glance, Rocketlane, Onriva and more about how to make your customer experience truly exceptional. Join us as we team up with some of the greatest minds in customer experience to solve the toughest challenges yet. Welcome to CX Detectives.

This episode features an interview with Venu Gooty, SVP of Digital Strategy and Transformation at HGS, a global leader in consumer engagement, digital CX, and business process management. Venu has over 18 years of IT experience. And at HGS, he’s helping global brands optimize their operations so they can give customers a world-class experience. In this episode, Venu discusses how using a fit index in the hiring process improves employee retention, making sure employees have the best tools for the job, and tracking employee sentiment using analytics.

Quotes

*”Businesses really need to think about how to support customers in the channels of their preference. Customers are becoming more demanding in terms of how they would like to be responded to and the kind of experiences that they would like to see versus the experiences that you think you would want to provide to them.”

*”Fit index allows us to better understand and engage the candidates on various parameters and criteria. We're also leveraging AI in order to truly identify which are those individuals who have higher likelihood of joining us and not attriting, because attrition is a huge problem within the contact center industry. The technology is enabling us to say a person with this kind of characteristics and these kind of attributes are the right fit based on the past employee behaviors, or based on the characteristics that we've used for previous screening of employees.”

*”The hiring process is extremely challenging and it's also pretty time consuming. So that process is something that we have significantly streamlined using recruit bot application. It allows the applicant to get hired within two hours of their application, if they are interested in streamlining and fastening up that entire process. That also has enabled us to actually reduce the amount of back and forth that happens with the agents because previously, the amount of back and forth that we used to see was almost two to three weeks just from apply to hire time frame. But right now we have cut it down to an average of less than a day and as fast as less than two hours at this point.”

*”How do you capture the tribal knowledge that is there among the employees and bring that knowledge and institutionalize it so that it's not just dependent on one individual who has all of that knowledge, but among that entire team, among the organization, so that anyone can respond to those queries and anyone can refer to the knowledge on a real-time basis and get those right answers during the client conversations?”

Time Stamps

*[0:09] The Case of Leveraging Technology to Improve the Employee and Customer Experience

*[0:31] Introducing Venu Gooty, SVP of Digital Strategy and Transformation at HGS

*[7:30] Evidence #1: High employee churn rate

*[21:20] Evidence #2: Employees are working with disparate tech tools 

*[34:27] Evidence #3: Doesn’t know how to measure employee sentiment

*[39:18] Debrief

*[40:24] HGS Pub

Bio

Venu Gooty is a passionate and accomplished executive with over 18 years of IT industry experience. His deep expertise in data-driven marketing, digital transformation, digital customer experience, AI and big data analytics, is helping leading global brands improve customer engagement, optimize their operations, reduce costs and increase revenue.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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This episode features an interview with Bruce Temkin, Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute, the leading experience management platform in the world. Bruce is also known as the “Godfather of Customer Experience.” In this episode, Bruce discusses how to move from insight to action more quickly, focusing on sensing change, and how to thrive both personally and professionally in the year of agility.

Quotes

*”What we realized is this year, and probably even going farther out into the future, the organizations that succeed are those that can do that faster, learn faster, propagate insights faster, adapt faster. And so that's why we called it the year of agility. And we've been helping the organizations and the people that follow us try and think about how they can build agility into everything that they do.”

*”Move away from an obsession of focusing on trending. A lot of the work happens in experience management and customer experience is around trending. How are you doing over the last year? And moving into an obsession with sensing. So what are you doing to listen and understand and sense those changes? That was a big shift.”

*”If you step back and go, ‘Our customers are going to be asking for things differently. We're going to have different segments of customers and we're going to have employees who have a different view of work.’ In that environment, it's ripe for disrupting through a really good experience design. So these are the moments when you want to step back and say, ‘Okay, we might have been successful. We might still be successful in this moment. But there's enough changing that we can take advantage of that change by doing something substantially different and new.’ And those are a couple of the practices I think come into play during the year of agility.”

*If we look at the business school, people trained in finance and people trained in making sure we hit our numbers, they're trained to be defensive. Like, demand shifts, so what do we do? We cut back our costs to reflect it. But this is a moment where offensive moves can be equally and maybe even more profoundly valuable.

*”I want leaders to spend less time asking about numbers and measurements. I don't care if you have a dashboard. I don't care if someone's coming to present numbers. I want you to ask two questions: What are you learning? And what changes are you making based on what you learned?” 

*”Even when we're talking about technology in this space, ultimately we're doing it in the service of people. We can talk about data, we can talk about insights, we can talk about design. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is to create experiences for human beings that helps them achieve the thing that they want to achieve. And hopefully do it in a way that satisfies the goals of an organization. And so if we're not ultimately thinking about what it's doing to each and every human being there, then I think we're missing the point.”

*”How do we center ourselves so that we can be the best of who we are even in an environment of change? I think there's the organization stuff that's really important. But, you know, maybe even more important is how we think about ourselves as professionals and how we think of ourselves as human beings, and how we deal in that world of chaos that we're in.”

Time Stamps

*[0:09] The Case of Tackling the Year of Agility

*[0:31] Introducing Bruce Temkin, Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute

*[8:34] Evidence #1: Needs other ways to listen to customers

*[15:03] Evidence #2: Wants to shift internal culture, but worries about change management

*[24:34] Evidence #3: Doesn’t know how to adjust to change personally

*[30:32] Debrief

*[31:43] HGS Pub

Bio

Bruce Temkin is an Experience Management (XM) visionary and is often referred to as the “Godfather of Customer Experience.” He leads the Qualtrics XM Institute, which provides thought leadership and training to help organizations around the world master XM and is also building a global community of XM professionals who are radically changing the human experience. Prior to Qualtrics, Bruce led Temkin Group, which provided research, advisory, and training that helped many of the world’s leading brands build customer loyalty by engaging the hearts and minds of their customers, employees, and partners. He is also the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. Prior to Temkin Group, Bruce spent 12 years with Forrester Research during which time he led the company's B2B, financial services, eBusiness, and customer experience practices and was the most-read analyst for 13 consecutive quarters. Bruce has a mechanical engineering degree from Union College and a master’s in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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This episode features an interview with Alexandra Morehouse. Alex is Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health, a health system with hospitals and facilities in six states. In this episode, Alex talks about addressing data deprecation in the cookie-less future, integrating disparate systems after an acquisition, and the “Know Me” principle.

Quotes

*”Marketing used to be seen as the people who issued the invitation to the party. And now it's come to mean you better have the chips and dip and the drinks ready. Because if you stimulate all this demand, people either show up online, in a call center, or in your retail location. If you don't have this integrated experience, then your brand looks disorganized and of lower value.”

*”Healthcare in particular is under tremendous financial pressure. So digital transformation is simply taking transactions that used to be done with expensive people and moving them to technological self-service. And when you get that self-service in place, the customers are way happier.”

*”Baseline is, know who I am. So if I go into Urgent Care over the weekend because I sprained my ankle, and then they tell me, ‘Hey, you need to go and follow up with your primary care next week,’ when I show up next week, they better know that I was in Urgent Care over the weekend. And I think that's probably more important. That's what builds trust. And it's that continuity that says, all right, no matter where I show up inside your system, you know it's Alex and you're not going to treat me like a stranger. And because the whole industry has grown through acquisition, that is the challenge on the CX side.”

Time Stamps

*[0:13] The Case of Bringing Digital Transformation to a Highly Regulated Industry

*[0:39] Introducing Alexandra Morehouse, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health

*[9:29] Evidence #1: New tech systems from acquisitions don't mesh

*[19:05] Evidence #2: Not prepared for data deprecation in the cookie less future

*[26:04] Evidence #3: Unclear how much information to collect from clients

*[30:36] Evidence #4: Call center is slammed

*[37:51] Debrief

*[38:54] HGS Pub

Bio

Alexandra Morehouse is an experienced board member who brings digital transformation experience and strategic focus to her board assignments. She's worked with companies through M&A, turnarounds and growth efforts.

Alexandra additionally has deep leadership expertise focused on Diversity and Inclusion. She's managed global teams of over 2,000 FTE and P&L’s up to $10B. She has led decentralized global teams at organizations including American Express, Charles Schwab, AAA, Kaiser Permanente and, currently, Banner Health.

Her board committee assignments include compensation, governance and audit. Her background in DEI has been instrumental in pursuing ESG work on her boards.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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This is a special episode highlighting key takeaways from past cases. In this episode, host Lyssa Myska Allen discusses tips for the best customer experience, from in-person to virtual, from top industry leaders.

Quotes

*”There's no easier audience to sell to than people who have already bought from you, know that you exist, and like the product. And so if you want to sell more to your existing customer base, you can increase their lifetime value, either through your core offering and doing a subscription service, or you can continue to launch new products that are complementary to whatever you're selling.” - Orchid Bertelsen

*”When you're designing an [educational] experience, you have to get out of the learner's way as much as possible. And anything you do that adds a little bit of cognitive load or unnecessary cognitive load, the learners feel it, and you'll see that in the churn.” - Ori Ratner

*”If you do it really well, you have this nice flow between an intelligent virtual assistant and an agent. If it needs to hand off for context, that's going to make or break an experience.” - Melissa O’Brien

*“The most important thing to me is the symbiotic nature of technology and customer experience. In this day and age, you can't really have one without the other. Or you can, but it just won't be a great experience.” - Boone Putney

*“I think the best thing that has come out of the blended world is really seeing how much we're able to do without having fans actually come to the building, and how much we've been able to engage with the community and help in other ways, besides from the hockey standpoint. We have great ownership that allow us to do that and have given us the ability and the resources to be able to do that. And so it's just a testament to our foundation and our DNA that's within the brand.” - Keren Lynch

*“You need to have focus and say no to 98% of audience expansion tactics. And then you have to have a super clear origin myth that almost acts like a magnet. A brand is not that visual styling you put on at the end. It's your brand voice and your attitude and your very reason for being. It's the mission. And that's what millennials and others will get attracted to. Nobody wants some generic corporate thing. It's very forgettable. So you have to have a narrow focus and a clear appeal to those people based on a deep understanding of their needs and their larger context. You may be just a small, transactional part of their life, but if you want to attract them, you should still resonate for them.” - Tim Ash

*“We really should be the guide along a customer's journey, not the hero of their journey. Like they are the hero, right. We're just here to make their lives better. And so much of it is listening to their pain points, listening to what brings them joy, listening to the words that they say, and then writing them down and then saying them back to them. I mean, that's literally what we do. We do a lot of case studies with our customers and we'll take the exact words that our customers say about why they like Transect, some feature that's helpful for them, and we'll regurgitate it in a marketing campaign because we know that that's what their peers are used to hearing.” - Robin Laine

Time Stamps

The Case of…

*[0:43] Scaling up a DTC Brand with Orchid Bertelsen, COO at Common Thread Collective

*[1:42] The Move to Mobile with Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Quantic School of Business and Technology

*[2:30] Balancing Automation with Human Interaction with Melissa O’Brien

*[3:08] Leveraging Technology to Meet the Needs of End Users with Boone Putney

*[3:58] The Pandemic Pivot with Keren Lynch

*[5:17] Getting Inside Your Customer’s Head with Tim Ash

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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This episode features an interview with Orchid Bertelsen. Orchid is the Chief Operating Officer at Common Thread Collective, an eCommerce growth agency. In this episode, Orchid talks about the three ways to grow, developing strategic partners, and how to do it all without losing the soul of your brand.

Quotes

*”There's no easier audience to sell to than people who have already bought from you, know that you exist, and like the product. And so if you want to sell more to your existing customer base, you can increase their lifetime value, either through your core offering and doing a subscription service, or you can continue to launch new products that are complementary to whatever you're selling.” 

*”There are some products that people just want to experience in person. There is a certain way to expand into the brick and mortar experience while still utilizing and connecting the digital experience to it, whether it's something simple, like your transactions in store being tied to your account online, and you get an email receipt. I think that is the challenge, is that retail space is obviously expensive. A lot of flagship stores in major city centers are loss leaders. That retail footprint isn’t actually generating a lot of revenue per square foot, but it’s just another marketing expense, having a physical manifestation of what the brand is beyond the website.” 

*”There was a boom in e-commerce overall during COVID. When you have different partners like Shopify or Sub Stack, you can bring your business idea to life very easily. What happens then is that you have a community that's just really focused on single-channel DTC. And they probably created a solution to solve a personal problem. But at a certain stage of growth, they’re like, ‘Hey, I can no longer sell to people like me with the same exact problem, because I've already reached all of them,’ which is a good problem to have. So over the course of the last two years, you've seen more mature e-commerce businesses try to go omni-channel.”

Time Stamps

*[0:05] The Case of Scaling Up a DTC Brand

*[0:32] Introducing Orchid Bertelsen, COO at Common Thread Collective

*[10:45] Evidence #1: Sales are single-channel

*[17:40] Evidence #2: Hasn’t developed strategic sales partners

*[20:44] Evidence #3: Has already saturated market

*[34:16] Debrief

*[35:28] HGS Pub

Bio

Orchid is the Chief Operating Officer of Common Thread Collective, an agency focused on helping ecommerce brands grow profitably, and entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams.

Prior to joining CTC, Orchid Bertelsen was the Head of Consumer Experience Strategy & Innovation at Nestlé USA, where she evaluates and tests emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, voice assistance, AR/VR. She has a varied portfolio, made up of 40+ brands and includes beloved brands like Coffee-Mate, Toll House and DiGiorno. Nestlé is also a majority stakeholder in Blue Bottle Coffee and owns and operates Starbucks at Home.

She lives in Hayes Valley with her husband and daughter, and loves to travel back to Taiwan, where her family is from.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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This episode features an interview with Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner. Alexie is the Chief Product Officer and Ori is the Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology. And they are also both Co-Founders. In this episode, Alexie and Ori talk about keys to designing an engaging UX, challenging learners with real-world scenarios, and how to leave students feeling like they’ve made meaningful progress in their studies.

Quotes

*”At the time the buzzword was ‘The Attention Economy.’ When we were identifying what was missing in education, we quickly zeroed in on the fact that motivation is a big part of it. And to solve that motivation problem, you're competing with non-education products. In the early days, when folks would ask us about our competitors, we would joke that Facebook and Twitter were our primary competitors, not the schools. So we just recognized that mobile is where students were living at that point. And so we had to be there, too.” - Ori Ratner

*”When you're designing an [educational] experience, you have to get out of the learner's way as much as possible. And anything you do that adds a little bit of cognitive load or unnecessary cognitive load, the learners feel it, and you'll see that in the churn.” - Ori Ratner

*”We create standard learning lessons that walk the learners through the material. They're very interactive experiences, so every eight seconds, the students should be interacting with the software in some way. And then we quiz them on the material we want them to learn at the end. And the lessons are designed to be story-based, focusing on what does it really look like to be working as a data analyst or someone in finance?” - Alexie Harper

Time Stamps

*[0:08] The Case of the Move to Mobile

*[0:38] Introducing Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology

*[8:53] Evidence #1: Format of material is outdated

*[20:40] Evidence #2: Visual design is clunky and cumbersome

*[27:05] Evidence #3: No incentive to motivate users

*[37:27] Debrief

*[38:30] HGS Pub

Bio

Alexie Harper is the Chief Product Officer and Ori Ratner is the Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology. They are also both Co-Founders. Alexie was previously Director of R&D and a senior researcher at Rosetta Stone, and a travel writer and editor for Let's Go Inc. And Ori was previously a director of software development and the software architect at Rosetta Stone.

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This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

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Connect with Alexie on LinkedIn

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Check out the Quantic School of Business and Technology

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