Niheer Patel:

• “So good to have you here today. Thank you.”
• “My name is Niheer Patel, director of product management at a company called Real Time Innovations. We do real-time communication software for intelligent edge systems such as medical, robotics, and self-driving cars. My team of product managers oversee a portfolio of products and services contributing to our 25% year-over-year growth at the company. And aside from leading the product management team, I have in the past driven growth for our automotive, aviation, and security products. We focus on customer experience. So we drive customer experience across the customer lifecycle, from discovery of the product through renewals. And we do track the customer delight with metrics such as net promoter score and even things as deal closures. So these are all leading indicators for a big metric of net retention. So these are the metrics we track for our growth.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “That’s great, Niheer. That sounds like a lot of strategic areas for some cutting-edge, innovative products that your company is delivering. Tell us, why is customer experience important and why should it matter?”

Niheer Patel:

• “Customer experience itself is the journey a customer takes through all the sets of interactions with a particular brand. So if I take a simpler example, such as purchasing a cup of coffee from Starbucks, the journey will actually start from something like an advertisement or a mobile app notification, as opposed to starting in the store or drive-through. So companies that are focused on driving good customer experience are going to make all of these interactions as enjoyable as possible to engage their customers and see repeated purchases and potentially more frequent and larger purchases.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “How do you quantify something as simple or as complex as customer experience? Especially with the human element involved.”

Niheer Patel:

• “As a director of product management at RCI, we drive the metrics based on net promoter score we talked about. This is a real good indicator of how engaged and how delighted your customers are because they’re that much more likely to refer your product or service, or in our case our product to their network. But we look at other metrics as well. So I mentioned deal closure and the net retention, and that really demonstrates the outcomes of having a really good customer experience. But we look at other metrics as well. So we look at customer satisfaction, CSAT scores, how satisfied our customers are in a particular scenario with our product or customer effort score. CES is a great way of seeing how much effort a customer has to undergo to get value from our product.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “Tell us how your product management leadership is empowering customer experience in your company.”

Niheer Patel:

• “Absolutely. So as the director of product management, my team and I work to build delightful products, delightful features that engage customers. So these are as simple as a nice navigation, an intuitive navigation to our product, or an easy way to get value out of our product. So that’s the most obvious way. There’s product managers, we build delightful products, but we do much more than that. We work with our field teams, we enable our field team. So this is sales marketing support. And we enable them with the tools and knowledge they need to service their customers, the people they’re in touch with directly, and deliver them a delightful experience as well. And then we work with those teams and the customers, of course, to gather more insights, observations about what the customer’s problems are, what we can do to solve them, so we can evolve the product and keep up with it customer expectations and drive that loyalty and repeat business.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “Yes, I think those are some very critical areas for companies to both become aware and also have a pulse of those areas using the metrics, some of the metrics that you talked about, such as NPS. So if you were to advise senior leaders at a company, what would be the steps you suggest they should take to pursue service excellence?”

Niheer Patel:

• “So really looking to build a customer experience engine. So feeding it with the most important thing, the insights about the customers, deeply understanding your customers, taking that information, bringing it to the organization, and aligning the organization around a single view of what the customer needs, what are their functional needs, what are their emotional needs. Making sure everyone in the organization, even the internal stakeholders, are working towards the same goal. And then finally leveraging technologies, leveraging processes and practices to keep up with the demands, the growing expectations, staying ahead of competition. So automating a lot of these touch points and being able to then even personalize a lot of those touch points to individual customers based on their needs, that’s very powerful. When you think about it, that has so many touch points and to be able to have a single pane view into those would be so critical. Social, everyone sees the same thing, marches to the same goal.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “Tell us about what things, what areas you would suggest companies should invest in in this era of AI, because everybody thinks technology is a means to the end. Is technology the means to the end or is it the end? Tell us about that.”

Niheer Patel:

• “I’d say there’s a little bit of both in there. So certainly leveraging technology again, first and foremost, the most important thing is understanding your customers. And technology can help with that. Automating customer inputs, tracking what matters to customers, how they’re interacting with the products. So a lot of that can be automated. A lot of it can, you can capture lots and lots of data points and process it very, very quickly. So that is using the technology. But then customers like to see innovation. They like to see something new and exciting. So putting that in their hands so that they can experience it themselves is part of driving that experience.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “And it sounds like starting with a customer and then working backwards.”

Niheer Patel:

• “Exactly. Not the other way around. In many cases, you start out that way, but you have to get out of that mindset. So the best way to just break it is to talk to customers, figure out what matters to them, and be okay being wrong and that the customer is right.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “Tell us about your breakthroughs you had with the Academy of High Achievers program.”

Niheer Patel:

• “Well, much of what we just talked about, listening to the customer. So not just customers, but colleagues, friends. Just having that ability to listen is so powerful to unlock the value I have within myself and help them unlock value that they have. So they can either do something with a smile on their face or be able to make something easier for someone else and drive that sort of positivity. And that delight, I love that word, delight is making sure that we can work together and everyone can operate in that delightful way.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “That is so powerful what you said, because you can never make a customer happy unless you are actually doing this or practicing this or living this.”

Niheer Patel:

• “Exactly. So you put an unhappy person on a customer support call, there is a very low chance they’re going to come out with a high NPS score. It’s not going to happen. So just like what you said, having that open approach, that open heart approach, to be able to connect with colleagues and friends and listen to them deeply add value. And that is basically a similar mindset that you take when you’re connecting with customers. No matter what stage of the deal they are, the beginning or existing customers, their older customers wanting to get back to you, depending on whoever they are. It’s about deeply listening, connecting, and then adding value.”

Mahesh M. Thakur:

• “Great. Thank you. Niheer Patel. Great to have you.”

Niheer Patel:

• “Thank you.”