March 6, 2025 • 42 mins
Are you on LinkedIn?
Ever wondered how LinkedIn keeps its users engaged and loyal?
Join us for an insider's view of the platform that drives business networking.
Unpacking Value Creation:
Sam Stern delves into the importance of distinguishing between LinkedIn users—members versus customers. He explains how this differentiation impacts the value each group gets from the platform, ensuring a balance between the needs of paying customers and non-paying members.
Continuous Evolution:
LinkedIn is committed to continuous research, aiming to understand user pain points and iterating solutions based on direct feedback. This approach helps uncover underlying issues and experiment with ways to enhance user experience.
Aligning with the Power Core:
Drawing on Jeanne Bliss's Power Core concept, Sam illustrates how aligning with LinkedIn's core strength as a product-driven organization has revolutionized their ability to influence change and elevate the customer experience. This alignment underscores the importance of understanding and working within the organizational power structure.
This episode promises a deep dive into the strategies that make LinkedIn a powerful networking tool!
Meet Sam:
Sam Stern is a customer experience expert with more than 20 years in the field as a speaker, community builder, practitioner, podcaster, and researcher.
Currently, he leads the Service Design team at LinkedIn, helping to design and deliver delightful experiences for the platform’s 1 billion members and customers. Sam has also created three LinkedIn Learning courses on customer experience, and hosts his own weekly podcast, CX Patterns.
In past roles, he started a customer experience team for the footwear company New Balance, and worked in research and consulting roles at Forrester Research. While there, Sam helped launch Forrester’s CX Certification training curriculum, and he started Forrester’s popular “CX Cast” podcast.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Today's episode is brought to you by Achieve Unite, a global
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(00:22):
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Achieve Unite is the partner you need for success.
Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast. I am so
(00:45):
glad you're here. We challenge conventional thinking about
customer experience because I believe that improving experiences isn't
just good for business, it's it's a powerful way to make a meaningful
difference in people's lives. Each week we feature thought
provoking conversations with industry thought leaders from
a variety of backgrounds offering unique perspectives and
(01:07):
actionable insights. Get ready to sharpen your
leadership and transform your approach to customer experience.
Let's dive in.
Well, in today's episode of Delighted Customers
(01:27):
Podcast, I have a bucket list company and a bucket list
guest on my show today. LinkedIn was one of
those companies that I wish I could get somebody from
CX to visit or make make the turn
on our show and it took a about 125
episodes but we finally did it. Today we have on the show
(01:49):
Sam Stern, who's a customer experience expert with more
than 20 years in the field as a speaker, community
builder, practitioner, podcaster and
researcher. Currently he leads the service design team at
LinkedIn, helping to design and deliver delightful
experiences. Gotta love that for the platform's
(02:10):
1 billion members and customers. Sam has also
created three LinkedIn learning courses on
customer experience and hosts his own weekly
podcast, CX Patterns. In past
roles he started a customer experience team for the footwear company I'm sure
you've all heard of and I'm wearing on my feet right now, New
(02:32):
Balance and worked in research and consulting roles at
Forrester Research. While there, Sam helped launch
Forrester's CX certification training curriculum
and he started Forrester's popular CXcast
podcast. Sam, welcome to the Delighted Customers
podcast. Thank you Mark. It is great to be here.
(02:54):
Excellent. So today we're going
to kind of hit two aspects of
cx, one of which is sort of an external view
of our customer experience, your customers at LinkedIn.
Another one is for those people in the world of change
management, change leadership in particular, which is near and dear to my
(03:17):
heart, what you've learned, valuable, some
valuable lessons that maybe you can share with others. So
perhaps you know I always say the best. The best way
to learn is from other people's mistakes. And to
be fair, you've done so many things right that it's hard to call it a
mistake. But it's. When you said it, it was like, aha. Yes. That's
(03:38):
something we've gotta share with the audience. Yeah,
absolutely. Excited to share and to talk about what
we've learned and what we've learned in building customer experiences at
LinkedIn. So when we talk about
designing value, Sam, a lot of people, I don't
imagine there are too many people who are gonna be listening to this show
(04:00):
who are not only familiar with LinkedIn, they're on the
platform, and on the platform on a regular.
Yep. So there's a lot of questions. Probably the biggest
one is, you know, what's the algorithm secret?
I'm waiting to find out too, by the way, on that one, it's tightly held,
right? Yes. And it makes sense. And I
(04:23):
know it's probably always evolving, but
beyond that, one of the things that
is critical not only for people to kind of, you know, it's like
anything else, that people could be on the platform, but really not
engaged, not engaged and also
engaged and also participating in the many different products that LinkedIn
(04:46):
offers. So first, let's start about
defining. When we say defining value,
give the audience, let's do a level setting for people and
what we mean by that. Yeah, sure. So
I think the first level set I'll offer is
that everyone who's listening to this, I'm guessing just about,
(05:09):
is a member of LinkedIn. But most of the
people listening to this are probably not customers. And that's a really
important distinction to make. I've been a
member of LinkedIn, you know, for probably going on 20
years, but maybe only a customer
intermittently in that period, and maybe not even aware that I was a customer, that
(05:31):
my company, say, had a LinkedIn Learning Enterprise License and I could access
the learning courses or, you know, I've never been in sales, but if you're in
sales, you can use Sales Navigator, then you become a customer. And
I think that's where the value equation starts to become really interesting, but
also really complicated, because when you're a member, it's about building your
network, it's about maybe finding open jobs, it's about sharing content or
(05:53):
accessing content from others, connecting with people, you know,
when you're a customer. And let's say, let's go to that
idea of you're trying to hire someone, you want your open positions
to reach as Many high quality job candidates as
possible. But on the flip side of that, those
members who are potentially candidates for your open job and certainly would love to
(06:16):
see that position, if they're currently not working,
they would like to see that job. But people who have a job maybe don't
want that to be what fills up their feed. All of these open jobs that
aren't relevant to them. And so there's really difficult balance of creating
value for our customers who are paying, but also value for
our members who are not paying. But their presence on the
(06:37):
platform creates the community, their activity on the platform creates
value. You know, we can put ads against it, to be literal about it, but
creates value for other members that brings people in, that brings engagement that we care
about. And so there's a balance to strike there. And it's difficult
because anytime you have a platform business where you need to serve the needs
of multiple users, sometimes when those needs are in opposition to each other,
(06:59):
you have to be very careful about balancing it. The good thing for LinkedIn is
every customer is a member. And so they can kind of
internalize the importance of providing a great
member experience. Even while they understand they want to reach as many
people with their content, with their ad, or with their open
hire position that they're hiring for, they also have been on the other side of
(07:21):
that knowing, yeah, but I want the feed to have valuable content, not just
ads. I don't want to just see open positions that people are hiring
for. So we can kind of balance that need, but we also have to think
about the value that everyone is trying to get
from using LinkedIn and also to create by being on LinkedIn.
Okay, thanks for level setting. And I never really even
(07:44):
thought about that as people are members and people are customers and
you shared a couple of the different products that LinkedIn offers. I know
there's more, but yeah, there's a huge
difference. So now
we know. Why should that be a big deal? You alluded to
it, but people in the C suite,
(08:06):
why is that such a big deal? Yeah, so first of all,
other companies have this kind of challenge. I remember when I
was at Forrester, I would talk to health insurers all the time and they say,
who do we care most about? The people we're insuring
or the benefits manager at their employer. And those
folks care about different things. And again, it's one of those
(08:28):
situations where the benefits manager is probably your
primary customer and yet they're also being insured by you. So they do
care about coverage. But there's that trade off of lower cost to the
company of that health insurance plan, but better, better
quality of care, higher quality of care offered to the people you're
insuring or higher coverage. And so a lot of companies have these kinds
(08:50):
of trade offs between different roles,
different types of engagement with that company. And
so that's something to think about. I'll even offer another example. You know, you think
about, you go back five, 10 years and take
a, take a fast food restaurant chain or take someone like
Chipotle, pretty straightforward. They provide
(09:11):
food, customers come into the store and get it. But now
think about the additional complication of a
lot of their food is delivered by third party app delivery
drivers. And what's the best experience to those folks that they're going
to want to pick up Chipotle orders they're going to want
to deliver to Chipotle's customers versus some other product that they could
(09:33):
pick up and deliver, maybe a competitor of Chipotle's. And so now you're again
complicating that picture of the value delivery ecosystem in
that equation a little bit. And so I do think like thinking about the different
roles that people can embody, sometimes you're eating a
Chipotle burrito that someone delivered to your house, sometimes you're delivering it to somebody else.
How do you think about all those different roles that people in your value
(09:55):
network can embody and how do you ensure there's
balance, that no matter which role someone takes on an individual, they'll
get the value they want from that equation?
Yeah. So the bottom line is you have
to first kind of take and outside in approach to it and think
about almost reverse engineering who, who is the customer in that
(10:18):
moment and what do they value?
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And you know, I know you
had my former colleague, still friend Maxie Schmidt on the
podcast before I listened to her episode, knowing we
would talk about value. And she's an expert in this. And you really
do want to think about what is the value going to be to that individual
(10:39):
in whatever role they embody, whether it's customer, whether it's member, and
what are the different forms of value that they care about. And then this
gets to the next layer I think about. On LinkedIn, there's reputational
value for an individual. Is the content that I'm putting
out enhancing my reputation, my credibility as an
expert in this area, Is it leading to business? But is it also
(11:02):
signaling to people that I'm not too forward or too pushy
with reaching out to people you can Kind of now you can start to see
how you modulate different forms of value and
think about how do we help them create value? But also
think about, and I think Maxi always frames this very well. We're not delivering
value to them, we're part of creating value
(11:24):
with them. And the value is a perception that they
have of that interaction, but also other interactions that
we're just a small part of. So we have to think about it in that
larger network and in those larger terms. And that's where, you know, my team
in service design, we get to do a lot of that research and really try
to understand the larger context into which we fit into
(11:45):
that customer's life, into that member's life. And we do a lot of internal research
with our employees and into our employees lives as well.
One of the, one of the things you alluded to was they don't consider
that customers buy.
You've got different customers and then you've got customers. The same
(12:06):
customers may be in different modes that they're in. So what
are some of the mistakes that, you know, you imagine people get into or leaders
get into? Yeah, so first of all,
one of the simplest ones that's coming to mind immediately for me is that
we will take at face value what a customer
tells us they want. They said they wanted
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this. And it is very difficult
for a individual to tell you what they want, especially if
that thing doesn't exist. You know, and there's, there's famous
quotes from Steve Jobs and going back all the way to Henry Ford
right about, you can't just ask a customer what they want. And now I think
a lot of times those are positioned as, so we don't ask customers and I
(12:49):
don't think that's what they meant even at the time. And I don't, that's not
how I interpret those, those statements of, you know, they just want a faster horse
or they, you know, they would, they wouldn't be able to tell us about the
ipod. Instead what they're saying is you have to listen
to what they're saying and read in between the context of
a service that they can't articulate because it doesn't exist, or they don't even
(13:11):
imagine that you could deliver it to them and think about what their
unmet needs can tell you about the things that are possible
for your organization to deliver. And so then this is when
we, I'll give you an example. We at LinkedIn, we're looking a
lot at LinkedIn Learning, which is one of our products, a service we
offer, you know, the learning courses you, you highlighted in my intro,
(13:33):
so it's something that I'm creating. But a video learning course
on customer experience is nice, but how do we
connect that to other ways to learn, other ways
to deepen your knowledge? How do we connect it to, overall a
company who would be the customer, thinking about what skills their
employees are going to need and how do they acquire those skills? And what
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other parts of a value equation can we offer
beyond just video learning courses that would help
employees acquire those skills? And they would also, you know, what's important with
knowledge and with skills is that you can certify and you can demonstrate
that you actually have that expertise. So
that's a way to think about. Now, would they tell us they want a certificate
(14:16):
from LinkedIn? Maybe they could say that, because that thing exists. But does that really
demonstrate that you have expertise or just that you completed a course and got a
certificate? And so we need to think about it is what they want is to
know that the employees have expertise and can apply it in their
work. What are ways to show that? And now we can
explore different ways to create that kind of value where not
(14:38):
only did employees get trained and learned something new, but they
demonstrated that they actually have the expertise
and the mastery of that skill to apply it in their work and that they're
working differently. That would be value beyond what
LinkedIn Learning is delivering today. And we're working on that. But that, that would be
something that would take it further. And that would, to me, would be indicative
(15:00):
of avoiding that pothole, of saying, well, they said they want a certificate, so we
delivered a certificate and stopping there, if that makes sense. Yeah, no,
it makes a lot of sense. So you're, you're going deeper,
you're going deeper into, you know, just what's on the
surface, just what people are saying.
Like, the certificate might be something that the end
(15:22):
user is anxious to get. Maybe it'll help them get a job,
help embolden their resume. But the
employer oftentimes is the one who's subscribing to
LinkedIn learning, and the value for them is not
only do we get the functional aspects
of the value done right, yes, they did complete the
(15:44):
course, they did get their certificate, but the application piece of it is
really where the value comes in. That's right. That's right.
Yeah. So, so we talked
about, you talked about
Maxi, and I was going to bring her up as well. First of all, let's
just set the table. You didn't just work at Forrester, which is one
(16:06):
of the most respected research companies in general, but
specific to cx, probably arguably the most
respected company in terms of research.
And you worked there for 16 years. Yeah, yeah. So make
a lifetime. Yes, that qualifies as expert in,
in my book. Now youw're at LinkedIn. We've had Megan Burns and
(16:28):
Maxie Schmidt, Dr. Maxie Schmidt on the show as well, Bruce
Temkin, who got his start there.
And the reason I bring up Maxi is she talked about this idea that you
alluded to, which is co creating customers, co creating the
experience with you. I can think of no
better example of customers co
(16:50):
creating value and the product or service
that you are offering than LinkedIn.
Because every day when, when you push out a
post that may include an article or a video or a
document, the end user, the member or
hopefully the customer is creating
(17:11):
something along with what the platform offers,
right? Yes, absolutely. And you know,
it's a classic social media platform in some ways
in that respect because without the user generated content,
it's nothing. Now you know, we have a news organization, we post some
of our own content. But like it's a very, very small percentage
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and my guess is if you asked our members, it would be a small
percentage of the value they get or they find in the
content on LinkedIn. And it's also a classic case of
where every member is having a slightly different experience, has a
slightly different feed because they follow different people and they're focusing on different, a
different sort of set of topics that are of interest to them. And
(17:56):
so yes, we are 100% CO creating that content and the
value that it creates with users. And we focus
a lot on those creators and their needs and how we can
add new potential for them to create in new ways. Whether
it's recently we had a big focus on video
because we know that more and more content is being
(18:17):
consumed via video. I think YouTube might be
the place where people listen to or view podcasts the most now
which it was created as a completely audio format and here it is being
consumed on the ultimate video platform. And that's
something where LinkedIn wouldn't have anticipated that audio content,
that video content would be, would be so prominent on LinkedIn. But that's where we
(18:40):
are and so that's where we have to expand to help creators meet their audiences
with the, with the expectations those audiences have. Now I'd
like to turn to some of the solutions, some of the
strategies and some of the approaches that LinkedIn's taking to
make the members and customer experience
better. And then I'd like to tackle this concept that we teased
(19:03):
up called the Power Core, which our friend Gene Gene Bliss
coined. So first, let's start about, you know, how do you
approach creating more value for
LinkedIn members and customers? Yeah.
So first of all, we do a lot of research,
and my team does it. We have a huge user experience
(19:24):
organization as well. We do. We
have market research and customer insights teams, lots of
teams collecting data, you know, sort of working
through inbound data and platform data, a lot of surveys,
a lot of qualitative research. And really, the idea
is we want to start with
(19:47):
hypotheses, start with some of the pain points and some of the problems, and
then just stay curious and stay open to
discovering new aspects to that pain point
or that problem. What's causing it, the root cause of it? How might we solve
it? How are people reacting to some of our solutions
and some of our pain points? And, you know, the classic thing, when you solve
(20:08):
one pain point, it just exposes the next one. Because now, you know,
I always used to joke about this, but. And I still talk about this at
LinkedIn, we'll never get our customers to stop complaining. The goal is to
get them to complain about new things because it means we've solved their old pain
point and they can move on to the next thing about us that they are
less than happy with. And that's, that's great because they care enough to
tell us and we now know the next thing to
(20:31):
solve for them. So we do a ton of research, we stay curious,
and because of the potential,
with a primarily digital experience, we can push
out changes to the experience all the time. We can experiment and see how those
changes are received, and we can get almost
instant feedback from people when they don't land well. And, you know, you were joking
(20:53):
about it at the start and I was sort of echoing your
frustration, perhaps with it. It's like the algorithm seems to
change. Like, you know, I have posts that blow up and like, okay, I think
I figured it out the next week, try something similar and, you know, crickets.
No, nobody's. Nobody's there. And that's something we get
feedback on all the time, as you might imagine from, from our, our members, from,
(21:16):
from the creators, because that's, that's another example of where, okay, we have to experiment
with ways of surfacing new content to people,
but also not making it feel to creators like, there's no point in
creating on this platform because no one's seeing it and, but other people Saying, well,
I'm getting so many posts from that person, why do I have to see every
single one of their posts? So again, that that sort of multi sided
(21:38):
stakeholder marketplace comes back to the fore. But that's really how we sort
of look at it, is understand the problems at
as nuanced and as deep as a level as possible, primarily
through data and research, and then experiment and iterate
and see how our customers and members react to those
changes we make and keep going.
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Got it. Okay, so there's. Then
you come back and you measure. You have some, I
imagine there's some set of metrics that you're looking at. What
are some typical metrics you're looking for? Yeah, so I mean as a
classic platform, we want
regular active use of the platform. So we're tracking
(22:22):
that, we're looking at engagement, so how many people
are regularly visiting and engaging with the
platform. And then we look at
membership count itself and we want that to grow. We look
at things like revenue and for our
products, especially for new products or new offerings.
(22:44):
And then another big one, and this is one
that, you know, my team and a few others are really
responsible for reinforcing is trust. Trust in
LinkedIn, we, alongside
Pinterest, I'd say, are the last two social media platforms that
have user trust. And we're always 12
(23:05):
with Pinterest in terms of trust in social media
platforms. And that is everything to us as a professional
network, as you can imagine. Why would
you post about your company getting funding or
about open positions at your company, or trust us with
your data if you didn't trust us?
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And so we have to work hard to maintain that
and the quality of our experience
reinforces or undermines the trust that we've
built as a brand with the platform. So if things
don't work well or if we don't get back to you, or if we don't
set good expectations, that can
(23:48):
undermine trust. And so the quality of the experience, we believe this very
strongly. We see evidence for this is part of our
equation of being a trusted brand and a trusted
platform. Really fascinating. And I think
you're spot on to, to weigh trust. So,
so important. How do you measure it? Do you
(24:10):
flat out ask people, do you trust us? What's your level
of trust? Or are there some specific components of trustworthiness that you
ask? Yeah, so there are. So we're lucky in that
there's external benchmarks of trust. And so that's where I'm sort of citing
that data Us in Pinterest Being trusted. Those are,
I can't remember the actual sources. If it's like the Edelman, you know.
(24:33):
Trust. Trust, yeah, one of those. But that's where we
often, we're tracking that data carefully. And
then I think of, there are components of trust.
You know, things like customer advocacy.
Does the brand do what's in the interest of its customers, even when it's
not in its own interests? Those types of measures are
(24:55):
often good predictors of trust as an ultimate
outcome. And then things
like, does the platform work? Is it reliable?
Does LinkedIn respond quickly to you? Do our products
and services work the way we said they would and the way you would expect
them to? Are you getting the value back to value we were talking about before
(25:17):
from the interactions that you thought you would? Those
are elements of trust. So perceived value is
a big part of the trust equation because they want it
to work. And then if it does work or if they perceive that
it works, then, then that reinforces trust because it,
the expectations were met. And so setting expectations and
(25:40):
meeting those expectations to me is a big part of building
trust. And so we track that. Right, the perceived value of
LinkedIn. Yeah, that, that, that makes sense.
Can you share maybe one or two examples
of something that your team picked up
on and maybe changed for the better to improve
(26:03):
the experience for customers? Yeah, I'll go back a few years
to one that I think is a good example of this. But
we did research and journey mapping work
for people who were first time users of
LinkedIn's Campaign Manager. So where you'd field an
online marketing campaign. And we were
(26:26):
struggling with having those users in their first campaign
field a good quality campaign that delivered leads and got value.
And what we found is, and I think this was a really good insight from
the research that was not obvious immediately at the time
they, almost all of those users were regular users of
Meta and Google's ad platforms. Those are the big
(26:49):
guys in this field in the online marketing, advertising
space. And so they had a mental model and
a frame for how LinkedIn should work. That was like Google and
Meta and it's just a fundamentally different value equation.
We are expensive relative to them. But you don't, you shouldn't
come to LinkedIn to sell consumer packaged goods the
(27:11):
way you could on Meta, the way you can on Google. If people search for
the right search term on Google, you should pay whatever it costs to get that
person because they were looking for your brand. Frankly,
LinkedIn, you are reaching high value
decision makers that cost a lot to reach, but are worth
A lot to reach. And so you as a brand should be thinking through your
(27:32):
value equation differently to advertise. And we hadn't done
enough to make that really clear to people who would
advertise and we, we hadn't been conscious enough ourselves of their
different, of their mental model that made them think high quantity
of leads at a lower cost, whereas we're lower quantity of
leads that cost more, but they're worth, each one is worth so much. The value
(27:55):
equation is still very positive, but you have to have
a, you have to be able to convert that high quality lead into a high
value sale or it's not worth it to you. So if you are selling
$20 blankets, you shouldn't advertise on
LinkedIn. And we just hadn't done enough to create an understanding of how it
would be a different value equation on LinkedIn. And so then what, what
(28:17):
change did you prices? Well, no,
prices were already high and those people were like, I'm not getting any value. This
costs way too much. Yeah. So there was a lot we were not doing enough
to guide first time users and guide is
the important word here, into what we're, what was going to be a
good campaign in terms of how many users are you
(28:39):
targeting? How many facets and parameters have you got? What's your target
market? Here's, I'll give you another example. It's one of my favorite examples because this
is, this gets into the intricacies of
the mind of, of a customer, of, of a user. We
had a minimum daily spend threshold already that we were guiding
them on. So you know, you, on this ad, you need to spend at least
(29:00):
$50 a day to, to reach enough people to make it worth it, whatever that
is. And you know it. 50 is just an example number. It could have been
any. It would, it would vary depending on the type of campaign you were doing
and how many people you want to reach. And we were seeing people
consistently go under that on their first campaign. And so in the
research we said, well did you see that guidance? It was pretty prominent. Maybe we
(29:21):
need to make it more prominent or have it flashing. What's wrong? And they said,
oh, I did see that this was a test campaign
to see if we should devote budget to LinkedIn. And
so we were calling it their first campaign, they were calling it
their pre first campaign, like their beta campaign,
their zero campaign to see if they should do a first campaign. And so
(29:42):
the paradox here, that's a bad one at the time for LinkedIn was
they were never going to get to their first campaign, at least what they defined
as their first campaign, because they were going to spend too little, prove that it
didn't work, go back to the budget decision maker and say, yeah, we tried it,
it didn't work. Whereas if they'd spent a little more in that first campaign or
taken more of our advice, they might have been successful and gotten the
budget to spend on LinkedIn. And so we had to reinforce some
(30:06):
of those expectations with them to say, you know, explain it a little more.
Not just this is a minimum amount, but even if you're testing it
out, you should devote this much to it so that you can see how
it works when you get some leads on the back end and what you do
with them and how it, you know, our system integrates so well with your CRM
or whatever we were going to say as the next part of the sale. So
(30:26):
that was another example of like some of the changes we had to make to
really stop them in their tracks and arrest their mental
model before they got into the campaign. What a
great story and what a great lesson learned. And I love to pull out gems
when our guests share them on the show. And there's, there's a great, great one
is really understand, you know, what, what are your customers, what's their
(30:48):
mindset when they're engaging with you? Are they
testing you out or they, are they, what does that test
look like for them when they're first courting you?
Is it a full, full blown effort or is it just a partial
effort that really isn't a good proxy for what a
relationship would look like? Yeah, absolutely.
(31:10):
No, it was really eye opening for us and it took
us a while with that research to understand what the dynamic there, what was happening.
We had to keep asking and keep probing until we finally
sort of had that epiphany that they didn't call it the first campaign or at
least they weren't thinking of it that way in their minds. Yeah. So another
great one there is, and this is
(31:32):
from a research expert, Sam, is
the research is first of all, it's ongoing, it really never
stops. But also, you know, don't assume you've got it all,
all the, all the facts in and you've got all
the, at the right level, you know, the depth of
understanding from customers. Yeah, yeah,
(31:53):
absolutely. I find that over and over again,
usually especially after we complete research is
inevitably that's when the next set of questions come to mind
and from our, oftentimes from our colleagues in product. And
I love it, by the way. But they'll say, oh, this is great. This is
really helpful. This answered this, this and this. So now what happens? And then what
(32:16):
do you think they'll do? And then if we change this, what would happen?
I'm like, oh, we didn't ask that and we couldn't ask every
question, but this is great. Now we know what to go look at next. And
maybe we won't do it right away, but you've given us our next set of
questions to explore and you've actually established for
yourselves and for us, this is what we still don't know. So as we put
(32:38):
this out there and we see things happen that we weren't expecting,
it can start to point us to some of those hypotheses in those form
of unanswered questions that we maybe are more interested in exploring
in the next round of research because they're seeming to be the ones that are
coming to the surface now in the area where we were still ignorant
about understanding the customer and their motivations. Yeah,
(32:59):
well, great segue. You mentioned product. Because
I really would like to share this other concept of the Power
core as we talk about change management, change
leadership and what it means.
And our friend Gene Bliss, who wrote the Chief Customer Officer
and Chief Customer Officer 2.0 and was
(33:22):
the co founder of CXPA or Professional association,
she had done some work with me when I was at Sandy Spring bank
and we hired her to help us launch the programs close to
15 years ago. And when she came around to write the second
book, we did some work around
building engagement with the executives and were included
(33:44):
in the second book. Oh, that's great. She asked me to write a little
vignette, which we did. But part of the book
included this concept of align yourself with the Power
Core. So could you share with the audience a little bit
about what we're talking about? Level set that and also like
what you learned as your role evolved at LinkedIn.
(34:06):
Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so I have a, I have a very
vivid memory of reading the Chief Customer
Officer book sitting outside at a Disney World resort where
Forrester was having an event back in like 2006 on
a lounger at the pool, thinking I'm kind of a nerd
for reading this book at the poolside. But I was just, you
(34:28):
know, I was consuming it and I. So that's kind of my association
with her first and that book and that idea of the Power core
that every organization is
sort of has one element that really drives it. Is
it a product driven organization, a marketing driven Organization,
engineering driven organization. And I think if you stop and think about this, you
(34:52):
can answer this for your company. If you just think about it for a moment.
Where do we really center what we do, what makes us special
as a company on? You can answer that question.
And LinkedIn is a product driven organization. Our
CEO came out of product. It's really the beating heart of
the company and it's, you know, it's a product with engineering,
(35:14):
very strong engineering backbone, but they're working together.
And I remember talking to my clients when I
was at Forrester and always crediting Gene Busk because I think it was such a
beautiful, well articulated idea. But saying, you really
tell me where you are in the Org and then let's figure out how do
you and Gene called it this dance with the Power Core. If you're not
(35:35):
in the Power Core, how do you at least interface and collaborate and
work with them so that you are influencing where change
really happens and where things really happen in your organization?
And that was all conceptual to me until I got to
LinkedIn because we were not
in the power core of the organization when I started.
(35:57):
We were in the member and customer success part of the Org, which is
not unimportant, but it was customer support and CSMs and customer experience
teams from other insights teams and we weren't
influencing product, we just weren't. And then
my team was reorged and moved into product
and it's just changed our relationship fundamentally with product,
(36:20):
with engineering. It's changed who we're talking with,
who we're working with inside of the company. And we're
influencing things now that we had known were issues or problems
before, but just weren't able to be effective in
getting and understanding from the people who were in positions to make a
change. We weren't reaching them and now we are.
(36:41):
And so I went from understanding in
quotes the concept from Gene of the Power Core to
feeling it viscerally because I'm living it in the before and after at
LinkedIn. That's another great gem is get a sense
of where your Power Core is and your organization and
align. And even if you're not in it, you could do the
(37:03):
dance as Sam suggested. That's right. That's right.
Sam, this has been fascinating. I love talking to
you. I hope at some point you would come back on the
show again at some point and share with us
what is new and exciting in the world of LinkedIn because it's
a place where we visit all the time. Those of us
(37:26):
in business, in the Business world. But before we end, I want to ask you
the question that I started asking just a couple of episodes ago to
my guests, which is what delights you as a customer?
Okay. So I have a very specific example that
delights me, and it's. I call it the Enterprise
Pause. So it's Enterprise Rent a Car. And
(37:49):
they, I saw them do this thing at several different locations. So I know
that they're doing it intentionally, which is when you get off the Enterprise
shuttle and go into their office, they'd have one or two
people behind the counter and a line would form and you'd all
be like, oh, here we go. This is going to be a long wait. And
then suddenly a door would open and like, six more
(38:11):
smiling employees would pour out. Man all the other computers at the
front, at the desk. The line evaporates and you
go from hope that there won't be a line to
disappointment to relief and elation in
about 20 seconds. They don't let the line build up too long. They don't want
your disappointment to curdle into anger. And I just
(38:32):
think moments like that are so magical. And
I think they're. I think companies can design them. I think they're mostly
delivered by humans, and they can be done at scale if you get the training.
Right, if you get the permission, the empowerment and enablement for the employees. Right.
I've studied, when I was at Forrester, I studied a lot of companies that had
these types of programs in place. And so when I see evidence of these moments
(38:53):
out in the real world, I just, I want to, like,
jump in the air and pump my fist because it tells
me, you know, we've, we've talked a lot in the last few years about the
declining customer experience scores and the struggles that we're having as
a discipline. Right. But I just still see the
possibilities for going beyond just more efficient or
(39:14):
easier or more effective or whatever to these moments that will live in your memory
forever. And I just, I collect those. I look for those because I just think
they're so special and is why I got into customer experience in the first place
is, is for that possibility of that kind of delightful moment that you'll never
forget. Yeah. And to your point, and to your point, I think
there's a myth among C suite leaders that in
(39:37):
human intervention is just on the cost side
of the income statement. And the reality is that,
you know, used correctly, the value
deposit is so large that the return
is way more. That's very well said. And I do think, I actually
think the way I tried to tell the story at LinkedIn, we have so much
(40:00):
emphasis on self serve and on engagement directly with the digital platform. As
we should is as you do more of that and we
should and customers tell us they want it. Yeah. Each
remaining human moment becomes even more important.
And so you can optimize both
more self serve and then nailing the fewer and
(40:22):
fewer moments with humans because they take on added importance. They live
longer in the memory, good or bad. And so you have to get them right.
And when there are fewer of them, that means you have fewer opportunities to save
experiences. Fewer opportunities to be prominently featured in
your customers memories when they have memories from other companies too. So it's not just
you in there. And so getting those human moments right
(40:43):
is as important, if not more important as you move more things to
self serve because there's more parts of your experience that aren't that memorable.
Yeah. Well, well said. Another gem. Just
jam packed with gems in this episode. Sam. You know it's
funny when I asked guests at this point as we get ready
to sign off is how can we best reach
(41:06):
you? Most people say you can just reach me
on LinkedIn, right? Yes, I hear that so many times on podcasts.
It makes me happy. And it's, it's, it's true for me too. Right. I'm on
LinkedIn, I'm posting regularly. You can find my
LinkedIn learning courses on LinkedIn learning if you have
access. I had a new one go live as we're recording
(41:27):
this the day before we're recording. So it's, it's new content out
there for you. And yeah, I get lots of ideas from engagement on LinkedIn
for podcasts, for newsletters, for the next LinkedIn learning course. So if
you see me on there, connect, I'd love to chat with you.
Excellent. Sam, thank you so much for being on the delighted customers
podcast. Thanks for having me. Mark, this was great.
(41:52):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of. The Delighted Customer
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(42:14):
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Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast. I am so
(00:45):
glad you're here. We challenge conventional thinking about
customer experience because I believe that improving experiences isn't
just good for business, it's it's a powerful way to make a meaningful
difference in people's lives. Each week we feature thought
provoking conversations with industry thought leaders from
a variety of backgrounds offering unique perspectives and
(01:07):
actionable insights. Get ready to sharpen your
leadership and transform your approach to customer experience.
Let's dive in.
Well, in today's episode of Delighted Customers
(01:27):
Podcast, I have a bucket list company and a bucket list
guest on my show today. LinkedIn was one of
those companies that I wish I could get somebody from
CX to visit or make make the turn
on our show and it took a about 125
episodes but we finally did it. Today we have on the show
(01:49):
Sam Stern, who's a customer experience expert with more
than 20 years in the field as a speaker, community
builder, practitioner, podcaster and
researcher. Currently he leads the service design team at
LinkedIn, helping to design and deliver delightful
experiences. Gotta love that for the platform's
(02:10):
1 billion members and customers. Sam has also
created three LinkedIn learning courses on
customer experience and hosts his own weekly
podcast, CX Patterns. In past
roles he started a customer experience team for the footwear company I'm sure
you've all heard of and I'm wearing on my feet right now, New
(02:32):
Balance and worked in research and consulting roles at
Forrester Research. While there, Sam helped launch
Forrester's CX certification training curriculum
and he started Forrester's popular CXcast
podcast. Sam, welcome to the Delighted Customers
podcast. Thank you Mark. It is great to be here.
(02:54):
Excellent. So today we're going
to kind of hit two aspects of
cx, one of which is sort of an external view
of our customer experience, your customers at LinkedIn.
Another one is for those people in the world of change
management, change leadership in particular, which is near and dear to my
(03:17):
heart, what you've learned, valuable, some
valuable lessons that maybe you can share with others. So
perhaps you know I always say the best. The best way
to learn is from other people's mistakes. And to
be fair, you've done so many things right that it's hard to call it a
mistake. But it's. When you said it, it was like, aha. Yes. That's
(03:38):
something we've gotta share with the audience. Yeah,
absolutely. Excited to share and to talk about what
we've learned and what we've learned in building customer experiences at
LinkedIn. So when we talk about
designing value, Sam, a lot of people, I don't
imagine there are too many people who are gonna be listening to this show
(04:00):
who are not only familiar with LinkedIn, they're on the
platform, and on the platform on a regular.
Yep. So there's a lot of questions. Probably the biggest
one is, you know, what's the algorithm secret?
I'm waiting to find out too, by the way, on that one, it's tightly held,
right? Yes. And it makes sense. And I
(04:23):
know it's probably always evolving, but
beyond that, one of the things that
is critical not only for people to kind of, you know, it's like
anything else, that people could be on the platform, but really not
engaged, not engaged and also
engaged and also participating in the many different products that LinkedIn
(04:46):
offers. So first, let's start about
defining. When we say defining value,
give the audience, let's do a level setting for people and
what we mean by that. Yeah, sure. So
I think the first level set I'll offer is
that everyone who's listening to this, I'm guessing just about,
(05:09):
is a member of LinkedIn. But most of the
people listening to this are probably not customers. And that's a really
important distinction to make. I've been a
member of LinkedIn, you know, for probably going on 20
years, but maybe only a customer
intermittently in that period, and maybe not even aware that I was a customer, that
(05:31):
my company, say, had a LinkedIn Learning Enterprise License and I could access
the learning courses or, you know, I've never been in sales, but if you're in
sales, you can use Sales Navigator, then you become a customer. And
I think that's where the value equation starts to become really interesting, but
also really complicated, because when you're a member, it's about building your
network, it's about maybe finding open jobs, it's about sharing content or
(05:53):
accessing content from others, connecting with people, you know,
when you're a customer. And let's say, let's go to that
idea of you're trying to hire someone, you want your open positions
to reach as Many high quality job candidates as
possible. But on the flip side of that, those
members who are potentially candidates for your open job and certainly would love to
(06:16):
see that position, if they're currently not working,
they would like to see that job. But people who have a job maybe don't
want that to be what fills up their feed. All of these open jobs that
aren't relevant to them. And so there's really difficult balance of creating
value for our customers who are paying, but also value for
our members who are not paying. But their presence on the
(06:37):
platform creates the community, their activity on the platform creates
value. You know, we can put ads against it, to be literal about it, but
creates value for other members that brings people in, that brings engagement that we care
about. And so there's a balance to strike there. And it's difficult
because anytime you have a platform business where you need to serve the needs
of multiple users, sometimes when those needs are in opposition to each other,
(06:59):
you have to be very careful about balancing it. The good thing for LinkedIn is
every customer is a member. And so they can kind of
internalize the importance of providing a great
member experience. Even while they understand they want to reach as many
people with their content, with their ad, or with their open
hire position that they're hiring for, they also have been on the other side of
(07:21):
that knowing, yeah, but I want the feed to have valuable content, not just
ads. I don't want to just see open positions that people are hiring
for. So we can kind of balance that need, but we also have to think
about the value that everyone is trying to get
from using LinkedIn and also to create by being on LinkedIn.
Okay, thanks for level setting. And I never really even
(07:44):
thought about that as people are members and people are customers and
you shared a couple of the different products that LinkedIn offers. I know
there's more, but yeah, there's a huge
difference. So now
we know. Why should that be a big deal? You alluded to
it, but people in the C suite,
(08:06):
why is that such a big deal? Yeah, so first of all,
other companies have this kind of challenge. I remember when I
was at Forrester, I would talk to health insurers all the time and they say,
who do we care most about? The people we're insuring
or the benefits manager at their employer. And those
folks care about different things. And again, it's one of those
(08:28):
situations where the benefits manager is probably your
primary customer and yet they're also being insured by you. So they do
care about coverage. But there's that trade off of lower cost to the
company of that health insurance plan, but better, better
quality of care, higher quality of care offered to the people you're
insuring or higher coverage. And so a lot of companies have these kinds
(08:50):
of trade offs between different roles,
different types of engagement with that company. And
so that's something to think about. I'll even offer another example. You know, you think
about, you go back five, 10 years and take
a, take a fast food restaurant chain or take someone like
Chipotle, pretty straightforward. They provide
(09:11):
food, customers come into the store and get it. But now
think about the additional complication of a
lot of their food is delivered by third party app delivery
drivers. And what's the best experience to those folks that they're going
to want to pick up Chipotle orders they're going to want
to deliver to Chipotle's customers versus some other product that they could
(09:33):
pick up and deliver, maybe a competitor of Chipotle's. And so now you're again
complicating that picture of the value delivery ecosystem in
that equation a little bit. And so I do think like thinking about the different
roles that people can embody, sometimes you're eating a
Chipotle burrito that someone delivered to your house, sometimes you're delivering it to somebody else.
How do you think about all those different roles that people in your value
(09:55):
network can embody and how do you ensure there's
balance, that no matter which role someone takes on an individual, they'll
get the value they want from that equation?
Yeah. So the bottom line is you have
to first kind of take and outside in approach to it and think
about almost reverse engineering who, who is the customer in that
(10:18):
moment and what do they value?
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And you know, I know you
had my former colleague, still friend Maxie Schmidt on the
podcast before I listened to her episode, knowing we
would talk about value. And she's an expert in this. And you really
do want to think about what is the value going to be to that individual
(10:39):
in whatever role they embody, whether it's customer, whether it's member, and
what are the different forms of value that they care about. And then this
gets to the next layer I think about. On LinkedIn, there's reputational
value for an individual. Is the content that I'm putting
out enhancing my reputation, my credibility as an
expert in this area, Is it leading to business? But is it also
(11:02):
signaling to people that I'm not too forward or too pushy
with reaching out to people you can Kind of now you can start to see
how you modulate different forms of value and
think about how do we help them create value? But also
think about, and I think Maxi always frames this very well. We're not delivering
value to them, we're part of creating value
(11:24):
with them. And the value is a perception that they
have of that interaction, but also other interactions that
we're just a small part of. So we have to think about it in that
larger network and in those larger terms. And that's where, you know, my team
in service design, we get to do a lot of that research and really try
to understand the larger context into which we fit into
(11:45):
that customer's life, into that member's life. And we do a lot of internal research
with our employees and into our employees lives as well.
One of the, one of the things you alluded to was they don't consider
that customers buy.
You've got different customers and then you've got customers. The same
(12:06):
customers may be in different modes that they're in. So what
are some of the mistakes that, you know, you imagine people get into or leaders
get into? Yeah, so first of all,
one of the simplest ones that's coming to mind immediately for me is that
we will take at face value what a customer
tells us they want. They said they wanted
(12:28):
this. And it is very difficult
for a individual to tell you what they want, especially if
that thing doesn't exist. You know, and there's, there's famous
quotes from Steve Jobs and going back all the way to Henry Ford
right about, you can't just ask a customer what they want. And now I think
a lot of times those are positioned as, so we don't ask customers and I
(12:49):
don't think that's what they meant even at the time. And I don't, that's not
how I interpret those, those statements of, you know, they just want a faster horse
or they, you know, they would, they wouldn't be able to tell us about the
ipod. Instead what they're saying is you have to listen
to what they're saying and read in between the context of
a service that they can't articulate because it doesn't exist, or they don't even
(13:11):
imagine that you could deliver it to them and think about what their
unmet needs can tell you about the things that are possible
for your organization to deliver. And so then this is when
we, I'll give you an example. We at LinkedIn, we're looking a
lot at LinkedIn Learning, which is one of our products, a service we
offer, you know, the learning courses you, you highlighted in my intro,
(13:33):
so it's something that I'm creating. But a video learning course
on customer experience is nice, but how do we
connect that to other ways to learn, other ways
to deepen your knowledge? How do we connect it to, overall a
company who would be the customer, thinking about what skills their
employees are going to need and how do they acquire those skills? And what
(13:55):
other parts of a value equation can we offer
beyond just video learning courses that would help
employees acquire those skills? And they would also, you know, what's important with
knowledge and with skills is that you can certify and you can demonstrate
that you actually have that expertise. So
that's a way to think about. Now, would they tell us they want a certificate
(14:16):
from LinkedIn? Maybe they could say that, because that thing exists. But does that really
demonstrate that you have expertise or just that you completed a course and got a
certificate? And so we need to think about it is what they want is to
know that the employees have expertise and can apply it in their
work. What are ways to show that? And now we can
explore different ways to create that kind of value where not
(14:38):
only did employees get trained and learned something new, but they
demonstrated that they actually have the expertise
and the mastery of that skill to apply it in their work and that they're
working differently. That would be value beyond what
LinkedIn Learning is delivering today. And we're working on that. But that, that would be
something that would take it further. And that would, to me, would be indicative
(15:00):
of avoiding that pothole, of saying, well, they said they want a certificate, so we
delivered a certificate and stopping there, if that makes sense. Yeah, no,
it makes a lot of sense. So you're, you're going deeper,
you're going deeper into, you know, just what's on the
surface, just what people are saying.
Like, the certificate might be something that the end
(15:22):
user is anxious to get. Maybe it'll help them get a job,
help embolden their resume. But the
employer oftentimes is the one who's subscribing to
LinkedIn learning, and the value for them is not
only do we get the functional aspects
of the value done right, yes, they did complete the
(15:44):
course, they did get their certificate, but the application piece of it is
really where the value comes in. That's right. That's right.
Yeah. So, so we talked
about, you talked about
Maxi, and I was going to bring her up as well. First of all, let's
just set the table. You didn't just work at Forrester, which is one
(16:06):
of the most respected research companies in general, but
specific to cx, probably arguably the most
respected company in terms of research.
And you worked there for 16 years. Yeah, yeah. So make
a lifetime. Yes, that qualifies as expert in,
in my book. Now youw're at LinkedIn. We've had Megan Burns and
(16:28):
Maxie Schmidt, Dr. Maxie Schmidt on the show as well, Bruce
Temkin, who got his start there.
And the reason I bring up Maxi is she talked about this idea that you
alluded to, which is co creating customers, co creating the
experience with you. I can think of no
better example of customers co
(16:50):
creating value and the product or service
that you are offering than LinkedIn.
Because every day when, when you push out a
post that may include an article or a video or a
document, the end user, the member or
hopefully the customer is creating
(17:11):
something along with what the platform offers,
right? Yes, absolutely. And you know,
it's a classic social media platform in some ways
in that respect because without the user generated content,
it's nothing. Now you know, we have a news organization, we post some
of our own content. But like it's a very, very small percentage
(17:33):
and my guess is if you asked our members, it would be a small
percentage of the value they get or they find in the
content on LinkedIn. And it's also a classic case of
where every member is having a slightly different experience, has a
slightly different feed because they follow different people and they're focusing on different, a
different sort of set of topics that are of interest to them. And
(17:56):
so yes, we are 100% CO creating that content and the
value that it creates with users. And we focus
a lot on those creators and their needs and how we can
add new potential for them to create in new ways. Whether
it's recently we had a big focus on video
because we know that more and more content is being
(18:17):
consumed via video. I think YouTube might be
the place where people listen to or view podcasts the most now
which it was created as a completely audio format and here it is being
consumed on the ultimate video platform. And that's
something where LinkedIn wouldn't have anticipated that audio content,
that video content would be, would be so prominent on LinkedIn. But that's where we
(18:40):
are and so that's where we have to expand to help creators meet their audiences
with the, with the expectations those audiences have. Now I'd
like to turn to some of the solutions, some of the
strategies and some of the approaches that LinkedIn's taking to
make the members and customer experience
better. And then I'd like to tackle this concept that we teased
(19:03):
up called the Power Core, which our friend Gene Gene Bliss
coined. So first, let's start about, you know, how do you
approach creating more value for
LinkedIn members and customers? Yeah.
So first of all, we do a lot of research,
and my team does it. We have a huge user experience
(19:24):
organization as well. We do. We
have market research and customer insights teams, lots of
teams collecting data, you know, sort of working
through inbound data and platform data, a lot of surveys,
a lot of qualitative research. And really, the idea
is we want to start with
(19:47):
hypotheses, start with some of the pain points and some of the problems, and
then just stay curious and stay open to
discovering new aspects to that pain point
or that problem. What's causing it, the root cause of it? How might we solve
it? How are people reacting to some of our solutions
and some of our pain points? And, you know, the classic thing, when you solve
(20:08):
one pain point, it just exposes the next one. Because now, you know,
I always used to joke about this, but. And I still talk about this at
LinkedIn, we'll never get our customers to stop complaining. The goal is to
get them to complain about new things because it means we've solved their old pain
point and they can move on to the next thing about us that they are
less than happy with. And that's, that's great because they care enough to
tell us and we now know the next thing to
(20:31):
solve for them. So we do a ton of research, we stay curious,
and because of the potential,
with a primarily digital experience, we can push
out changes to the experience all the time. We can experiment and see how those
changes are received, and we can get almost
instant feedback from people when they don't land well. And, you know, you were joking
(20:53):
about it at the start and I was sort of echoing your
frustration, perhaps with it. It's like the algorithm seems to
change. Like, you know, I have posts that blow up and like, okay, I think
I figured it out the next week, try something similar and, you know, crickets.
No, nobody's. Nobody's there. And that's something we get
feedback on all the time, as you might imagine from, from our, our members, from,
(21:16):
from the creators, because that's, that's another example of where, okay, we have to experiment
with ways of surfacing new content to people,
but also not making it feel to creators like, there's no point in
creating on this platform because no one's seeing it and, but other people Saying, well,
I'm getting so many posts from that person, why do I have to see every
single one of their posts? So again, that that sort of multi sided
(21:38):
stakeholder marketplace comes back to the fore. But that's really how we sort
of look at it, is understand the problems at
as nuanced and as deep as a level as possible, primarily
through data and research, and then experiment and iterate
and see how our customers and members react to those
changes we make and keep going.
(22:00):
Got it. Okay, so there's. Then
you come back and you measure. You have some, I
imagine there's some set of metrics that you're looking at. What
are some typical metrics you're looking for? Yeah, so I mean as a
classic platform, we want
regular active use of the platform. So we're tracking
(22:22):
that, we're looking at engagement, so how many people
are regularly visiting and engaging with the
platform. And then we look at
membership count itself and we want that to grow. We look
at things like revenue and for our
products, especially for new products or new offerings.
(22:44):
And then another big one, and this is one
that, you know, my team and a few others are really
responsible for reinforcing is trust. Trust in
LinkedIn, we, alongside
Pinterest, I'd say, are the last two social media platforms that
have user trust. And we're always 12
(23:05):
with Pinterest in terms of trust in social media
platforms. And that is everything to us as a professional
network, as you can imagine. Why would
you post about your company getting funding or
about open positions at your company, or trust us with
your data if you didn't trust us?
(23:27):
And so we have to work hard to maintain that
and the quality of our experience
reinforces or undermines the trust that we've
built as a brand with the platform. So if things
don't work well or if we don't get back to you, or if we don't
set good expectations, that can
(23:48):
undermine trust. And so the quality of the experience, we believe this very
strongly. We see evidence for this is part of our
equation of being a trusted brand and a trusted
platform. Really fascinating. And I think
you're spot on to, to weigh trust. So,
so important. How do you measure it? Do you
(24:10):
flat out ask people, do you trust us? What's your level
of trust? Or are there some specific components of trustworthiness that you
ask? Yeah, so there are. So we're lucky in that
there's external benchmarks of trust. And so that's where I'm sort of citing
that data Us in Pinterest Being trusted. Those are,
I can't remember the actual sources. If it's like the Edelman, you know.
(24:33):
Trust. Trust, yeah, one of those. But that's where we
often, we're tracking that data carefully. And
then I think of, there are components of trust.
You know, things like customer advocacy.
Does the brand do what's in the interest of its customers, even when it's
not in its own interests? Those types of measures are
(24:55):
often good predictors of trust as an ultimate
outcome. And then things
like, does the platform work? Is it reliable?
Does LinkedIn respond quickly to you? Do our products
and services work the way we said they would and the way you would expect
them to? Are you getting the value back to value we were talking about before
(25:17):
from the interactions that you thought you would? Those
are elements of trust. So perceived value is
a big part of the trust equation because they want it
to work. And then if it does work or if they perceive that
it works, then, then that reinforces trust because it,
the expectations were met. And so setting expectations and
(25:40):
meeting those expectations to me is a big part of building
trust. And so we track that. Right, the perceived value of
LinkedIn. Yeah, that, that, that makes sense.
Can you share maybe one or two examples
of something that your team picked up
on and maybe changed for the better to improve
(26:03):
the experience for customers? Yeah, I'll go back a few years
to one that I think is a good example of this. But
we did research and journey mapping work
for people who were first time users of
LinkedIn's Campaign Manager. So where you'd field an
online marketing campaign. And we were
(26:26):
struggling with having those users in their first campaign
field a good quality campaign that delivered leads and got value.
And what we found is, and I think this was a really good insight from
the research that was not obvious immediately at the time
they, almost all of those users were regular users of
Meta and Google's ad platforms. Those are the big
(26:49):
guys in this field in the online marketing, advertising
space. And so they had a mental model and
a frame for how LinkedIn should work. That was like Google and
Meta and it's just a fundamentally different value equation.
We are expensive relative to them. But you don't, you shouldn't
come to LinkedIn to sell consumer packaged goods the
(27:11):
way you could on Meta, the way you can on Google. If people search for
the right search term on Google, you should pay whatever it costs to get that
person because they were looking for your brand. Frankly,
LinkedIn, you are reaching high value
decision makers that cost a lot to reach, but are worth
A lot to reach. And so you as a brand should be thinking through your
(27:32):
value equation differently to advertise. And we hadn't done
enough to make that really clear to people who would
advertise and we, we hadn't been conscious enough ourselves of their
different, of their mental model that made them think high quantity
of leads at a lower cost, whereas we're lower quantity of
leads that cost more, but they're worth, each one is worth so much. The value
(27:55):
equation is still very positive, but you have to have
a, you have to be able to convert that high quality lead into a high
value sale or it's not worth it to you. So if you are selling
$20 blankets, you shouldn't advertise on
LinkedIn. And we just hadn't done enough to create an understanding of how it
would be a different value equation on LinkedIn. And so then what, what
(28:17):
change did you prices? Well, no,
prices were already high and those people were like, I'm not getting any value. This
costs way too much. Yeah. So there was a lot we were not doing enough
to guide first time users and guide is
the important word here, into what we're, what was going to be a
good campaign in terms of how many users are you
(28:39):
targeting? How many facets and parameters have you got? What's your target
market? Here's, I'll give you another example. It's one of my favorite examples because this
is, this gets into the intricacies of
the mind of, of a customer, of, of a user. We
had a minimum daily spend threshold already that we were guiding
them on. So you know, you, on this ad, you need to spend at least
(29:00):
$50 a day to, to reach enough people to make it worth it, whatever that
is. And you know it. 50 is just an example number. It could have been
any. It would, it would vary depending on the type of campaign you were doing
and how many people you want to reach. And we were seeing people
consistently go under that on their first campaign. And so in the
research we said, well did you see that guidance? It was pretty prominent. Maybe we
(29:21):
need to make it more prominent or have it flashing. What's wrong? And they said,
oh, I did see that this was a test campaign
to see if we should devote budget to LinkedIn. And
so we were calling it their first campaign, they were calling it
their pre first campaign, like their beta campaign,
their zero campaign to see if they should do a first campaign. And so
(29:42):
the paradox here, that's a bad one at the time for LinkedIn was
they were never going to get to their first campaign, at least what they defined
as their first campaign, because they were going to spend too little, prove that it
didn't work, go back to the budget decision maker and say, yeah, we tried it,
it didn't work. Whereas if they'd spent a little more in that first campaign or
taken more of our advice, they might have been successful and gotten the
budget to spend on LinkedIn. And so we had to reinforce some
(30:06):
of those expectations with them to say, you know, explain it a little more.
Not just this is a minimum amount, but even if you're testing it
out, you should devote this much to it so that you can see how
it works when you get some leads on the back end and what you do
with them and how it, you know, our system integrates so well with your CRM
or whatever we were going to say as the next part of the sale. So
(30:26):
that was another example of like some of the changes we had to make to
really stop them in their tracks and arrest their mental
model before they got into the campaign. What a
great story and what a great lesson learned. And I love to pull out gems
when our guests share them on the show. And there's, there's a great, great one
is really understand, you know, what, what are your customers, what's their
(30:48):
mindset when they're engaging with you? Are they
testing you out or they, are they, what does that test
look like for them when they're first courting you?
Is it a full, full blown effort or is it just a partial
effort that really isn't a good proxy for what a
relationship would look like? Yeah, absolutely.
(31:10):
No, it was really eye opening for us and it took
us a while with that research to understand what the dynamic there, what was happening.
We had to keep asking and keep probing until we finally
sort of had that epiphany that they didn't call it the first campaign or at
least they weren't thinking of it that way in their minds. Yeah. So another
great one there is, and this is
(31:32):
from a research expert, Sam, is
the research is first of all, it's ongoing, it really never
stops. But also, you know, don't assume you've got it all,
all the, all the facts in and you've got all
the, at the right level, you know, the depth of
understanding from customers. Yeah, yeah,
(31:53):
absolutely. I find that over and over again,
usually especially after we complete research is
inevitably that's when the next set of questions come to mind
and from our, oftentimes from our colleagues in product. And
I love it, by the way. But they'll say, oh, this is great. This is
really helpful. This answered this, this and this. So now what happens? And then what
(32:16):
do you think they'll do? And then if we change this, what would happen?
I'm like, oh, we didn't ask that and we couldn't ask every
question, but this is great. Now we know what to go look at next. And
maybe we won't do it right away, but you've given us our next set of
questions to explore and you've actually established for
yourselves and for us, this is what we still don't know. So as we put
(32:38):
this out there and we see things happen that we weren't expecting,
it can start to point us to some of those hypotheses in those form
of unanswered questions that we maybe are more interested in exploring
in the next round of research because they're seeming to be the ones that are
coming to the surface now in the area where we were still ignorant
about understanding the customer and their motivations. Yeah,
(32:59):
well, great segue. You mentioned product. Because
I really would like to share this other concept of the Power
core as we talk about change management, change
leadership and what it means.
And our friend Gene Bliss, who wrote the Chief Customer Officer
and Chief Customer Officer 2.0 and was
(33:22):
the co founder of CXPA or Professional association,
she had done some work with me when I was at Sandy Spring bank
and we hired her to help us launch the programs close to
15 years ago. And when she came around to write the second
book, we did some work around
building engagement with the executives and were included
(33:44):
in the second book. Oh, that's great. She asked me to write a little
vignette, which we did. But part of the book
included this concept of align yourself with the Power
Core. So could you share with the audience a little bit
about what we're talking about? Level set that and also like
what you learned as your role evolved at LinkedIn.
(34:06):
Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so I have a, I have a very
vivid memory of reading the Chief Customer
Officer book sitting outside at a Disney World resort where
Forrester was having an event back in like 2006 on
a lounger at the pool, thinking I'm kind of a nerd
for reading this book at the poolside. But I was just, you
(34:28):
know, I was consuming it and I. So that's kind of my association
with her first and that book and that idea of the Power core
that every organization is
sort of has one element that really drives it. Is
it a product driven organization, a marketing driven Organization,
engineering driven organization. And I think if you stop and think about this, you
(34:52):
can answer this for your company. If you just think about it for a moment.
Where do we really center what we do, what makes us special
as a company on? You can answer that question.
And LinkedIn is a product driven organization. Our
CEO came out of product. It's really the beating heart of
the company and it's, you know, it's a product with engineering,
(35:14):
very strong engineering backbone, but they're working together.
And I remember talking to my clients when I
was at Forrester and always crediting Gene Busk because I think it was such a
beautiful, well articulated idea. But saying, you really
tell me where you are in the Org and then let's figure out how do
you and Gene called it this dance with the Power Core. If you're not
(35:35):
in the Power Core, how do you at least interface and collaborate and
work with them so that you are influencing where change
really happens and where things really happen in your organization?
And that was all conceptual to me until I got to
LinkedIn because we were not
in the power core of the organization when I started.
(35:57):
We were in the member and customer success part of the Org, which is
not unimportant, but it was customer support and CSMs and customer experience
teams from other insights teams and we weren't
influencing product, we just weren't. And then
my team was reorged and moved into product
and it's just changed our relationship fundamentally with product,
(36:20):
with engineering. It's changed who we're talking with,
who we're working with inside of the company. And we're
influencing things now that we had known were issues or problems
before, but just weren't able to be effective in
getting and understanding from the people who were in positions to make a
change. We weren't reaching them and now we are.
(36:41):
And so I went from understanding in
quotes the concept from Gene of the Power Core to
feeling it viscerally because I'm living it in the before and after at
LinkedIn. That's another great gem is get a sense
of where your Power Core is and your organization and
align. And even if you're not in it, you could do the
(37:03):
dance as Sam suggested. That's right. That's right.
Sam, this has been fascinating. I love talking to
you. I hope at some point you would come back on the
show again at some point and share with us
what is new and exciting in the world of LinkedIn because it's
a place where we visit all the time. Those of us
(37:26):
in business, in the Business world. But before we end, I want to ask you
the question that I started asking just a couple of episodes ago to
my guests, which is what delights you as a customer?
Okay. So I have a very specific example that
delights me, and it's. I call it the Enterprise
Pause. So it's Enterprise Rent a Car. And
(37:49):
they, I saw them do this thing at several different locations. So I know
that they're doing it intentionally, which is when you get off the Enterprise
shuttle and go into their office, they'd have one or two
people behind the counter and a line would form and you'd all
be like, oh, here we go. This is going to be a long wait. And
then suddenly a door would open and like, six more
(38:11):
smiling employees would pour out. Man all the other computers at the
front, at the desk. The line evaporates and you
go from hope that there won't be a line to
disappointment to relief and elation in
about 20 seconds. They don't let the line build up too long. They don't want
your disappointment to curdle into anger. And I just
(38:32):
think moments like that are so magical. And
I think they're. I think companies can design them. I think they're mostly
delivered by humans, and they can be done at scale if you get the training.
Right, if you get the permission, the empowerment and enablement for the employees. Right.
I've studied, when I was at Forrester, I studied a lot of companies that had
these types of programs in place. And so when I see evidence of these moments
(38:53):
out in the real world, I just, I want to, like,
jump in the air and pump my fist because it tells
me, you know, we've, we've talked a lot in the last few years about the
declining customer experience scores and the struggles that we're having as
a discipline. Right. But I just still see the
possibilities for going beyond just more efficient or
(39:14):
easier or more effective or whatever to these moments that will live in your memory
forever. And I just, I collect those. I look for those because I just think
they're so special and is why I got into customer experience in the first place
is, is for that possibility of that kind of delightful moment that you'll never
forget. Yeah. And to your point, and to your point, I think
there's a myth among C suite leaders that in
(39:37):
human intervention is just on the cost side
of the income statement. And the reality is that,
you know, used correctly, the value
deposit is so large that the return
is way more. That's very well said. And I do think, I actually
think the way I tried to tell the story at LinkedIn, we have so much
(40:00):
emphasis on self serve and on engagement directly with the digital platform. As
we should is as you do more of that and we
should and customers tell us they want it. Yeah. Each
remaining human moment becomes even more important.
And so you can optimize both
more self serve and then nailing the fewer and
(40:22):
fewer moments with humans because they take on added importance. They live
longer in the memory, good or bad. And so you have to get them right.
And when there are fewer of them, that means you have fewer opportunities to save
experiences. Fewer opportunities to be prominently featured in
your customers memories when they have memories from other companies too. So it's not just
you in there. And so getting those human moments right
(40:43):
is as important, if not more important as you move more things to
self serve because there's more parts of your experience that aren't that memorable.
Yeah. Well, well said. Another gem. Just
jam packed with gems in this episode. Sam. You know it's
funny when I asked guests at this point as we get ready
to sign off is how can we best reach
(41:06):
you? Most people say you can just reach me
on LinkedIn, right? Yes, I hear that so many times on podcasts.
It makes me happy. And it's, it's, it's true for me too. Right. I'm on
LinkedIn, I'm posting regularly. You can find my
LinkedIn learning courses on LinkedIn learning if you have
access. I had a new one go live as we're recording
(41:27):
this the day before we're recording. So it's, it's new content out
there for you. And yeah, I get lots of ideas from engagement on LinkedIn
for podcasts, for newsletters, for the next LinkedIn learning course. So if
you see me on there, connect, I'd love to chat with you.
Excellent. Sam, thank you so much for being on the delighted customers
podcast. Thanks for having me. Mark, this was great.
(41:52):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of. The Delighted Customer
podcast. It would mean so much if you would take a moment to
subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click on the plus sign or follow
button and that will ensure that you don't miss an episode and it helps. Get
the word out to others while you're there. I'd love it if you leave
(42:14):
a five star review. I look forward to seeing you back here
next Thursday.
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