In today’s competitive market, putting your customer at the heart of everything you do is no longer optional—it’s essential for sustained growth. In this webinar, Berni Fisher shared the details about how to leverage a customer obsessed mentality to drive both loyalty & revenue. You’ll learn:
- What it means to build a customer obsessed culture
- Practical strategies for success
- Common challenges to be prepared for
Bernadette Fisher is the former Vice President of Product Management at ButcherBox, a direct consumer meat brand. She has held various product management and leadership roles at companies such as Apple, TripAdvisor, M.Gemi, and Amazon.
Transcript
Thank you all for listening in, whether it’s live or after you’ve had some time to listen to the recording. I really appreciate you being here. Today I’m going to be talking about fully embracing a customer obsessed mentality. This is a version of a presentation that I recently gave at eTail Palm Springs last month, but has been adjusted to broaden beyond just e-commerce because as Keith just gave a perfect example, being customer obsessed really is
industry agnostic and so really glad you’re all here. So my goal of this session is that you walk away with an understanding of the importance of the customer and how to be successful at bringing that into the culture of your company. But a little bit about me before we get started. My career thus far spans 25 years in the consumer tech space, 12 of those years as a product leader, six years in e-commerce, most recently as the vice president of product at ButcherBox, which is a meat delivery subscription service that you may be familiar with.
My career began in operations as an entry level digital mapping technician at a really small company called GDT, which is now known as TomTom. I held roles in data sourcing, quality assurance, project management, and ultimately sought out my first product management role there where we launched an online geocoding service, which was the first SaaS product ever launched within the company. And really where I really was inspired by product and by customers was initiated there.
From there, I went on to Apple as part of the original Apple Maps team, more on that later, and to TripAdvisor where I was the product leader responsible for digital content such as reviews and points of interest. But I’d been in the mapping space for a long time. I got an itch to try something other than mapping related products and moved to e-commerce, working for first a small DTC startup called M.Gemi. And learning about a different side of customer obsession.
And what I mean by that is like an app user versus someone who’s buying consumer good are two very different perspectives of customer obsession and very different on product led organizations. So that was really eye opening and helpful. But then COVID hit, I went to Amazon to have a more secure role owning the Alexa local search product and eventually the Halo nutrition app. Amazon is absolutely a place and we’ll talk about this soon where they are 100 % customer obsessed.
with techniques like working backwards from the customer and having clear operational planning and strategy sessions. But I left Amazon to head to ButcherBox to work with my former boss, Leslie Matla, who’s a well-known product leader in the Boston area, where I spent the last two years migrating a platform and embracing customer data and growing the subscription business. I recently opened my own career coaching and consulting background as a way to pay things forward. And I’m excited to be here with all of you today to talk about why I love products so much, which is the customer and the importance of building and iterating for them.
So let’s get started. As you’re thinking through these slides, just think of a time when a brand exceeded your expectations and think about what made it memorable and just hold on to that.
All right, so what does customer obsession even mean? We got to start there. So in my mind, customer obsession is really about having a customer first mindset, which means thinking about the customer in every single decision you make, prioritizing customer needs and satisfaction in every aspect of the company’s operations, from the product to the price to the shopping or user experience. And of course, that ever important post purchase, post use experience, whether that’s onboarding onto an app,
or a software as a service or customer service from a consumer goods perspective. Mapping out the customer journey is critical and embedding this into the entire company culture is essential. And we’ll talk more about that as we go because I do believe company culture is where you have to plant the seed and help the customer obsession grow in order for to be effective really at scale.
I’ve been lucky enough to work for many companies where customer obsession was embedded in the culture as we’ve talked about. Amazons are in their leadership principles to start and ButcherBox, for example, is part of their core values. We’ll talk a little bit about that moving forward. So why does it matter? So, you know, if you’re in the e-comm space, you’ll hear oftentimes that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one. And I think that goes beyond e-comm into any industry, frankly, whether it’s your sales team working really hard to sign that contract deal,
whether you’re working hard to get people to download and engage with an app, or whether you’re selling a product online, the marketing team is working really hard to acquire that customer and probably paying a lot of money for it. And so the worst thing that can possibly happen is that you acquire them and forget about them. And so when you obsess about customer obsession, you’re going to drive loyalty to the brand. You’re going to foster deep relationships with your customers. You’re going to drive innovation simply by understanding their needs, whether explicitly or implicitly.
and which will ultimately lead to higher revenue and a sustainable business model. If I can, I’ll share an example of how ButcherBox focused on existing customers and retention over acquiring new ones in a time when the demand was incredibly high. When the COVID pandemic hit, people were looking for food delivery services and ButcherBox was a perfect product fit for those customers. ButcherBox already had, though, hundreds of thousands of members and given the uncertainty of the supply chain, was really reluctant to add new members at the risk of disappointing
their existing members. And we ultimately decided to put new subscribers on hold until we were sure our existing members could be orders could be fulfilled. That was a tough choice, right? As a business owner, as a CEO, you see an easy way to grow, but you have to think about the long-term impact and loyalty to your brand on existing customers who’ve been with you from the beginning.
So what is the cost of ignoring customer obsession? What happens when a customer feels unheard or unseen? They leave. And when they leave, they spread the negative experiences to other prospective customers, slowly eating away at your brand. And that leads to lost sales and decays brand trust. So when I asked you earlier in the presentation to think of a brand you love, I imagine that brand demonstrated very clear customer obsession in some way or another. Now think of a brand that falls into this category.
where they did not obsess over you as their customer. What did you do as that customer? Are you still their customer or did you leave?
So let’s talk a little bit about kind of more of the how this all works. So four pillars of a customer obsessed culture. There’s four clear pillars. I have slides for each of these moving forward. So we’ll just kind of high level this first slide. Number one, you have to know your customer. Like first and foremost, data and feedback. Do you even have the mechanisms in place to collect data on your customer, to collect whether it’s qualitative or quantitative feedback? How do you even know what they want if you don’t have the mechanisms in place? So build in the mechanisms.
start gathering the data, create a baseline, and then set goals and targets against that baseline. Two, proactive engagement. You have to really anticipate what your customers need before they tell you they need it. So a really great example of this is as we were building out an a la carte model with ButcherBox. So as you know, it’s a subscription business. And we had been talking to our customers about potential
like reasons for cancel rates. And it was because they kept saying they couldn’t commit to a subscription. And so while this wasn’t like incredibly innovative or, you know, rocket science to come up with this idea, the point being we listened to our customers. They did not explicitly ask us to allow them to shop a la carte, but we knew that they would if we built it. So we took, you know, a few months, we built a very scrappy MVP. We got it in front of those canceled customers and they immediately started purchasing again because we removed that.
friction of a subscription and built something that they couldn’t quite yet tell us clearly they wanted, but we knew they would want. Third, company-wide commitment. And as I mentioned earlier, I think this is one of the most critical pieces of the puzzle. How does your leadership team show their commitment to being customer obsessed? It is everyone’s job, and frankly, it has to start at the top. So where is this in your business? Is the top down giving you
KPI is associated to customer satisfaction or is it an afterthought? At ButcherBox, member satisfaction as they call it is a key company KPI. It’s literally one of the five business goals that we set every year to help us achieve greatness. And it’s important because it’s something that’s looked at weekly by all people in the company at all hands meetings. And so it’s constantly in the forefront. It’s championed by the CEO and the entire executive team. So it’s literally, it’s embedded in the culture.
And then lastly, empowered employees. So now that you’ve set up the mechanisms and you have the commitment, you need to train your employees on how to really think and act like a customer. And we’ll get into some details here shortly.
Okay, so digging a little deeper into knowing your customer. As I said earlier, how do you even know what your customer wants and do you have clear KPIs that will measure success so that you know that you’re achieving the right results? There are two types of data that you really need to help like understand your customer. One is qualitative data and one is quantitative data. So in the case of qualitative data, there are things like focus groups, customer interviews, user surveys. Those are all things where you’re going to get non-numerical data points back.
usually open format or aggregated survey results of ratings that help you understand what your customer is feeling and how they are using your product. Then there’s quantitative data, and that’s numerical. That is things like usage data, whether it’s site analytics, app analytics, or something else like that, digging into market research, and of course, having critical mechanisms to measure customer satisfaction like CSAT or NPS, which is Net Promoter Score.
At MGME, we leveraged focus groups to discuss the idea of launching a new product outside of shoes. For a long time, we were strictly handmade Italian shoes. We had been considering handbags. And what was really great about this is that we brought in people to our offices. They felt connected to the brand. They felt heard. And they were excited to be able to give us their feedback. And we asked them various things between types of handbags, price points they would be willing to pay for them, and so on.
And I just remember them leaving and feeling really excited that a brand they loved had invited them to be a part of the process. At ButcherBox, we leveraged survey data and site analytics to understand our customers better. As I mentioned, we leverage MSAT as a key metric to measuring satisfaction. And we dug into this a bit more under one of our sub-pillars was called value. And it was rating lower than we would have liked. And so we sought out and reached out to our sub.
sub data under that, as well as talking to our customers to better understand what they meant by value. And it turns out that they didn’t really understand what else they were getting from ButcherBox. They felt like they were giving us all their money. despite the wonderful products that we were delivering, they didn’t really understand what would be the reason for them to keep coming back and shopping with ButcherBox. And so we ended up building a loyalty program in response to that. We dug in, created an MVP in 10 weeks, launched that and saw an immediate increase in engagement to our site of 32%.
and interaction within the loyalty program itself. So, just goes to prove that when you listen to your customers, good things will and can happen. And lastly, at Amazon, the customer data that we really leaned into was we held weekly business reviews, reviewing critical customer data, whether that was engagement with Alexa Local Search or at the time, Halo Nutrition app. And that really held us accountable to the customer and to the business. We also leveraged qualitative data like voice of the customer.
and to really try to understand at a more aggregated level some of the top trends that customers were experiencing within our product. And then we leverage that to really drive the roadmap and sprints moving forward to adjust as necessary. The long and short is there’s a time and a place for all of these mechanisms. And that would take probably another presentation to dig into that, but happy to answer any questions if there those online who might have those at the end.
Proactive engagement. So what do we mean here? Again, how do you anticipate what a customer needs before they need it? We talked a little bit about the different shopping model at ButcherBox, but another example would be at Amazon, we anticipated our customers needs again during the COVID pandemic. I think a lot of businesses really had to pivot and try to find value for their customers in ways that they weren’t experiencing. And as you can imagine, with something like Alexa local search, the whole point is that you’re out and about.
locally looking for things to do, but nobody was going anywhere. And so we really couldn’t offer a service to those customers that had any meaningful impact on them or the business. And so we started to pivot and we knew that the progress of the COVID vaccine and COVID tests was coming along. And so we started partnering early with our biz dev team to get those resources in-house and be able to launch a new utterance on Alexa. Where can I get a COVID vaccine? Where can I get a COVID test?
prior to a customer ever even asking for it. And this in and of itself drove a significant increase in engagement for the Alexa local search team at a time when there was a lot of uncertainty.
All right, company-wide commitment. So how does your leadership team show up? How do you actually embed this into your culture? And I think there’s a couple key points here. Think about embedding it into the overall operating principles and your core values of your company. So as I mentioned earlier, at Amazon, there are things called leadership principles. There is one that is literally called customer obsessed. And then there are mechanisms in place to help you think and act like a customer.
And I mentioned one of those being working backwards with a customer where you really take the time to kind of think through research and understand the customer problem and then pitch that essentially as a startup and kind of then start to really build only when the entire team is really integrated in understanding what the value is to the customer. And that was something that you also got measured on in your performance, right? Like if you were going through your performance review, one of the leadership principles was always brought in.
customer obsessed and how do you show up and how do you present as a customer obsessed employee. And similarly at ButcherBox, we have a work called core values. And again, one of our core values is customer obsessed. And within our operating principles, we have a principle that’s really focused on making sure we’re solving the right problems. And the way I would present that to my product team is really what are the right customer problems we’re trying to solve. And it’s something that we consistently asked over and over again.
And then as I mentioned, embedding it into your goals, like create a customer success metric and actually make it a goal for the entire company and not just the product and tech team or not just customer service, but something that everybody can be held accountable to. And then most importantly, I think is the hiring practices within those companies. So we actively hired for core values and leadership principles over skill. And if a customer, if a candidate, excuse me, was not capable of demonstrating
how they obsessed over a customer, then it really did count against them in the interview process.
And lastly of the four pillars, empowered employees. Like once you empower your employees to really, know, once you have a company wide commitment and you give the employees the empowerment to be able to go in and live and breathe, a customer obsessed mindset is really when you start to see things change. So as I alluded to earlier, one of the things that I’ve encouraged and enforced almost with my product teams, wherever I am, is to really start with the customer problem we’re trying to solve and not the business metric.
And that can be challenging. We’ll go into some challenges in a minute because in any business, the metrics do matter. But I would argue that starting first with the customer and aligning to business outcomes will produce better results than the opposite. And so I would train and teach my product managers to do that and then work collaboratively with other stakeholders to really explain that process. Of course, the team needs the tools. We’ve talked about the mechanisms in place and you need a way to gather that data and to be able to analyze that data, of course.
And then lastly, which I think is a really cool way to really empower employees and to build this culture is to really applaud those who champion the customer. And so for example, if you have an all hands at your company, by all means, if you’ve seen someone the previous week who’s clearly demonstrated the customer obsessed core value, then let’s give them a spotlight for a few seconds and just explain what they did. Because the more you do that, the more you’re going to reinforce that it is something people have to do versus should be doing.
And then lastly, just emphasize that customer obsession is a mindset, not just a department. And so this is something that has to be like something everybody in the company is really embracing. So a good example here, as I mentioned, I was part of the Apple Maps launch back in 2012. If you recall, it wasn’t necessarily a great reception from our customers. There were many reasons for this, but one that stands out in hindsight is that I don’t think as employees, we’ve really felt empowered to say, wait, we aren’t ready.
And we haven’t really touched on this at all, but it is a clear case of empowering employees. think we felt, you know, because we had announced that Maps was going to be launched, we announced it at the WWD that it would launch in September. I think we felt compelled to hit that date. And I’m sure many of you have been in this situation where you’re not ready, but there’s top-down date pressure. And the unsaid assumption was that, you know, we would deliver the highest quality product. But at the end of the day, we were a small team. We didn’t necessarily have all the mechanisms in place yet to test and assure that.
level of quality. And we did have a working map and that was great, but the pressure just really was, you know, get this out the door. And so we launched and you could go and Google how that went. It was seen as a failure, but the good news is it was a huge learning from that, not just for us as employees of the Apple Maps team, but for leadership at Apple. And it really turned everything around and we picked up our heads. And as you know, like Apple Maps has come a long way, but it really kind of helped fuel that need to really be customer minded.
and make sure that we were thinking through all of the potential things that could go wrong.
OK, so all that sounds great, but here are some more practical strategies perhaps for success. optimize the user experience. I think this goes without saying, but when you’re customer obsessed, the first thing you want to do is make it easy for them to do whatever it is that the problem you built for is trying to solve. In the e-commerce world, make it easy to check out. Have a fast and seamless checkout. In the SaaS world, if you’re solving for a specific customer problem, how do you, one, make sure you solve the right problem.
do it quickly and then two, make sure it’s incredibly easy for the customer to use and adopt. Secondly, personalization and engagement. I mean, that’s obviously a hot topic in anything that you read about now. So how do you personalize the user experience, whether that be, you know, in the key e-comm world with marketing or their shopping experience, whether that’s in an app, for example, one of my favorite apps is Ladder. It’s a workout app and I definitely feel like they’re speaking to me.
when I log in and get ready to start my workout from the time that I land on the home screen to the team that I chose from a personalization quiz to all the way through the workout as I’m engaging with a recorded coach. And of course, you know, and getting cheers from my fellow folks working out with me and to the end where it tells me like the PRs I had that day, whether it be weightlifting or running or what have you, it’s an incredibly personal experience and that will keep coming me back.
keep bringing me back to that app as just one example. Post-purchase retention. Purchase is probably not the right word here, but post-use case retention, depending on your industry, you have to provide the best-in-class customer service, whether that be the human touch of a person making a phone call with some issue with their product, or whether it be AI enabled, of course. We’ll talk a little bit about AI shortly.
It’s one thing to do all the hard work to get them to use your product or to buy your product, but then to abandon them once they receive it is a surefire way to, one, not show customer obsession, and two, to lose that customer that you just worked really hard to acquire. Think about things like other things besides customer service, too, that could be helpful to them, whether it’s loyalty programs, whether that’s incentivizing them to be able to come back and reward them.
whether it be through workout apps, for example, for their behavior. But there are many ways to engage with the customer once they’ve already said, yes, I really want your product. And then lastly, within company culture, we’ve talked about this ad nauseum, but it’s important, right? Embed it into your values, embed it into your operating principles, and hire for it.
So as I mentioned, you’re definitely going to come across some challenges. Here are some common ones. We talked about listening to the customer and the ways in which you can gather data throughout this presentation. And the feedback isn’t always going to be great. But it is important that you turn that feedback into an opportunity. Not only does the product get better, but the customer feels heard and is more likely to continue working with you or purchasing from you. After the e-tail conference, I had a gentleman come up to me who basically was like, I have this customer service team.
who is incredibly negative about all the customer feedback we have and really just dismisses their feedback, what do you think about that? And we talked about this particular point of turning it into an opportunity and a practical tactic that he really needed to hear was if he had someone within that team who really was a champion of the customer to like kind of give them the responsibility and empower them to think differently and start turning these negative feedbacks into an opportunity.
Scaling customer obsession, right? Leveraging data and tech where it makes sense. So as I mentioned, like you have to get the data, but then, you know, parsing through hopefully what will be hundreds of thousands or millions of data points of data for you is not easy. And so I think, you know, the best thing to do is try to figure out like as we’re reading on this orange box here, how much do you want to automate? How much do you not? I know AI is a huge topic right now and there’s a great use of AI in many ways. I think one great way is
scaling and aggregating the results of all that data you’re collecting. You can even do things like turn it into product journeys or, you know, stack rank and red, amber, green, the results of the feedback that you’re getting. You can leverage it to better analyze, you know, site analytics. There’s so many AI tools out there and I am not yet an expert on them, but some of the ways I have used them are just that, to be able to like take a whole bunch of data, structure it, summarize it, and bring the most important things to the top, which is incredibly time saving.
But there are other times when AI may not be the best choice. And I think from a customer service perspective, depending on the thing that potentially went wrong with the product for the customer, talking to a human really is the most important connection they could have. So I think it’s just a matter of within your company, within your culture, which things can be operationally efficient with technology and which things do you think have a better chance of success with human touch? And then lastly,
you know, business business resistance, right? Metrics at all costs. I alluded to this a bit earlier in the presentation, but at the end of the day, for example, like if the executive team’s job is to really, especially CFO CEO is to is to like hit the numbers and we all want to hit the numbers. You know, everybody in the company benefits when you hit the numbers. And so what I’ve encouraged people to think about is it’s not an either or. I do think starting with the customer outcome you’re trying to achieve, the problem you’re trying to solve for.
And then working collaboratively with your stakeholders to tie that to the business metric that you want to move is like the most pivotal way to bring all company, all parties of the executive and leadership team together to really drive change that is less about just the numbers and more about a comprehensive approach.
Okay, so that’s a lot. Now what? So I think the big takeaways that I think you all should hear right now is start small. Like I just threw a whole bunch of things at you. It probably feels really daunting, but I do think it’s important that you just like start little, right? If you don’t even have the data yet, then like find the best tool for you to start collecting the data. Even if it’s a Google forum user survey that you send manually to like 15 people if your company is small or a hundred people.
to like more scalable technologies, but start small and then grow and use the outcomes of being customer obsessed, the results of being customer obsessed to continue to drive that in your culture. actions always speak louder than words, outcomes speak louder than words. And so we know that customer obsession drives loyalty, revenue and growth. So use those results to continue that flywheel of pushing
more more customer obsession throughout the business.
And that is it. Thank you so much. Appreciate you listening.
