CX Leaders: Driving Aligned Plans for Success in Your Own Advocacy

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We have a very special guest on today, Matt Hartley. And Matt, you are the Head of Pixel Customer Care at Google, and that does not define Matt, though. Matt has a lot of interesting facets about him. I learned that you’re growing your own fruit trees to make your own wine, that you’re actually a musician, and you’ve recorded. You lived for years because of Google in APAC and had all kinds of incredible experiences. So I want to hear a lot more about how that all makes the perspective from that come to fruition. But what we’re going to be talking about today is driving aligned plans for success in our own advocacy.

[00:00:44] Steve MacDonald: And why? Why do we have to be our own advocates? Why isn’t everybody saying, “You know what? Customer support, customer care is doing fantastic. We couldn’t do this without them.” You guys are on the front lines of all the conversations with our customers. The insights you have drive everything in the business.

[00:01:01] Steve MacDonald: Every department should be hanging on your every word. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Lots of times, we’re treated as a support department. And so we have to do—we have to fight. Even inside of Google, I’m sure you fight for resources and advocate for your team and what you’re doing.

[00:01:18] Steve MacDonald: But before we dive into that, which we’re going to in just a second, I’d love to have you just maybe expand a little bit more on your background, and then we’ll dig in.

[00:01:26] Matt Hartley: Thanks, Steve, so much for that intro. I’ve been working at Google for about 13 years, all that time in the customer care organization, but across many different roles.

[00:01:37] Matt Hartley: I’ve done things like implementing technology platform roadmaps, leading scaled support channels, driving some of our next-generation support solutions, customer loyalty, and retention efforts—so across many different parts of the business. Like you mentioned earlier, I spent five of those years living in APAC, across Tokyo and Singapore, where I was leading our APAC region support for various products—some of our newly launched ones for the region, and also part of our hardware business.

[00:02:08] Matt Hartley: But prior to Google, I was doing my MBA, and prior to that, I was doing consulting for a number of years in Washington, D.C. And yeah, so that kind of rounds out the area. And then when I think about the work that I do, there’s a couple of things that I really love about it.

[00:02:23] Matt Hartley: I get to solve really big problems and work on some big challenges. One of the things that really excites me about my work is just working on these sort of multi-year, complex problems that require vision. And at the same time, a little bit more of the day-to-day: What are we going to do based on that vision that we’re trying to achieve over a number of years?

[00:02:44] Steve MacDonald: That’s a big job. That’s a big role. So here’s what I want to do—let’s set it up at the beginning, right? This is internal advocacy. And if you could maybe—what’s the landscape there? How do you think about this and the role of our own internal advocacy and the reasoning behind it?

[00:03:01] Matt Hartley: Look, everywhere you would go, in every organization of every size, I think there will be resource constraints. There’s never enough people to do all the things you want to do. There’s always more opportunity than what you can get done. And that’s a good thing. I also think looking inward first, and at your own teams, it’s actually really important to be thinking about:

[00:03:20] Matt Hartley: Where am I going to place my bets? Where are the things where I must win? What do I want to do? Mistakes that I’ve made before—and that I see people make—is trying to spread too thin and do too many things. And I think first, it’s looking at what we as business leaders are trying to set out and do within the constraints we have and where we’re going to go out to win.

[00:03:41] Matt Hartley: But then within that, I think it’s really important to just think about: What is our role in the broader business? As much as we live and breathe CSAT or other key metrics in our own business, there’s a really important role that customer success organizations, customer support, plays in the business.

[00:04:00] Matt Hartley: We help make the product and the business successful. We are the face of that product to customers. And so, in many ways, the way that we perform helps the overall business to perform well. And I think as we frame it that way and start to think about how we want to influence within an organization and how we want to set our own strategy—

[00:04:23] Matt Hartley: —if we tie it back to that, then we’re already on the right path with that journey.

[00:04:29] Steve MacDonald: So I’d love to know—the start of the conversation was internal advocacy, and then it ended with, “We are vital to this organization.” So there are interesting ends of the spectrum here.

[00:04:43] Steve MacDonald: Do you have to fight for that inside of Google? Is that something that—like your role in working with the different departments—is that well established? Is that something that you have to fight for, the seat at the table with all the different departments? And how does that work?

[00:04:59] Matt Hartley: Yeah, that’s a good question. Google is a big company, and I’ve had the privilege of working across many different parts, many different products of Google’s over the years. And I guess what I would say is that customer support can have a very big or small role depending on some of those individual product teams. And even over the evolution of Google’s existence, I think we’ve moved more and more into a place where we’ve recognized that customer support is a very critical part of a product dynamic.

[00:05:33] Matt Hartley: But I’ve worked on products where things are generally running relatively smoothly. The engineers, product teams think, “Hey, if I just build it better, then what’s the need for support?”

[00:05:41] Matt Hartley: And then we’ve worked on others where we’ve said, “Hey look, we want our product managers and others really engaging on the front lines with customers. Help us facilitate that.” So there’s always been a balance between a push and a pull dynamic. I’ve been working on Pixel for the last six or seven years now.

[00:05:51] Matt Hartley: And what I would say is that there’s been a journey there of how customer support interacts with the product and the role that it plays. And I would say it’s somewhere in the middle. We’ve built really great partnerships across the broader organization. Nothing is ever given.

[00:06:05] Matt Hartley: We have to earn that seat at the table. We have to make sure that we’re showing up and meeting folks where they are, and showing the evidence to the business that what we are doing really matters. And I think we’ve been able to do that in a number of really important ways, actually.

[00:06:17] Steve MacDonald: I’d love to hear that because I think it’s cathartic for a lot of executives to hear you say, at Google, we’ve got to earn our seat at the table. It’s not just gifted to us. And I’m sure Google, like every organization, nobody ever says, “We’re not customer-focused. We’re not customer-obsessed. We’re not customer-driven.” Everybody is, right?

[00:06:35] Steve MacDonald: But it’s to the point that it’s a part of the culture. It’s to the point of how you then work the relationships with those product teams. And it’s not just product, it’s marketing, it’s sales, it’s—right—it’s across departments here.

[00:06:53] Steve MacDonald: So I’d love to know, how do you connect the dots, right? The metrics across product and pricing or cost—and is there a direct line to actual revenue that you see in what you do and how you work with these departments?

[00:07:09] Matt Hartley: Yeah, it’s a great question, and you mentioned a couple points there. There are systems that I think need to be set up, and if they’re not, you set them up for yourself around how you work across an organization. So that might be, what are the regular touchpoints that you have with other teams?

[00:07:29] Matt Hartley: It’s hard to influence and have joint priorities if you’re just throwing something over the fence every now and then. So things like the systems of how you set up business reviews or meetings or one-on-ones, even with other departments, other cross-functional stakeholders, I think can’t be understated. That’s really important.

[00:07:51] Matt Hartley: Thinking sometimes even expansively around who your stakeholder map is—it’s easy to think about the first order of, “I work very closely with product.” It’s sometimes harder to think about the more indirect connections with folks in marketing or in some of the other operations teams, things like that.

[00:08:08] Matt Hartley: As you have those conversations and those meetings, you’ll inherently learn more about their priorities, the things that they care about. You’ll see, hopefully, the connection back to what you do. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to make the company, the product, successful.

[00:08:24] Matt Hartley: If you distill it down enough, what is the reason that we do what we do? Well, we’re trying to make the product successful. And so you’re able to then tie the work that you do back to some of that vision and goal. You communicate that more generally with these different stakeholders, and then suddenly you’re identifying common areas.

[00:08:51] Matt Hartley: If our goal is improving product retention or loyalty, or if our goal is reducing product quality issues, what is the role that we each play in that? Maybe we are coming with voice of the customer that helps enable that.

[00:09:00] Matt Hartley: Or, “Hey, we are the face of the product to the customer, so how do we play a role in that?” And then you can really have fruitful conversations around how do we work together to drive some of those outcomes.

[00:09:04] Steve MacDonald: So a number of things you said in there, right? So maybe we represent the voice of the customer, and it’s pretty hard to say the voice of the customer isn’t the highest authority in the business.

[00:09:14] Steve MacDonald: So there’s one school of thought. It’s like, “Okay, Matt, when you’re in a meeting with another department, they should be, like, hands down on the table—What is Matt gonna say?—because Matt represents the voice of the customer.”

[00:09:31] Steve MacDonald: Now what’s interesting though is, you get a lot of data, right? And data helps fuel information, knowledge, decision-making. How much are you data-focused? Like when we’re talking about voice of the customer, how do you articulate voice of the customer, I guess is the question.

[00:09:45] Matt Hartley: That’s a great question. It is great to have data—I think that’s important. And in some conversations, you’re dead in the water without that. Certainly at a company like Google, we love data.

[00:10:00] Matt Hartley: Being able to point to and say, “Look, customers are literally coming. They’re telling us what they want, what they need, what they don’t like. Here’s the data. Let’s cut that by market, let’s cut that by—you name it.” So that we can drill down and say, “Look, these are the parts of the business that we think maybe need the most focus for a customer experience improvement.” That can be powerful.

[00:10:18] Matt Hartley: Data supports those conversations, and it’s like the table stakes, I think, for having some of those conversations.

[00:10:33] Matt Hartley: To take it a step further though, I’ve always found it very useful actually to also look at the individual—the story. Be a storyteller with this.

[00:10:33] Matt Hartley: Sometimes getting a customer quote, putting an executive on a call with a customer, or letting them listen in—like describing that customer experience, the one customer’s experience—can really highlight the frustration or the love or whatever it is you’re trying to get through.

[00:10:49] Matt Hartley: It puts a color to it that the data just won’t have. Sometimes we’ve had meetings where you get product managers, engineers, others who say, “I get this now. I understand why this is  important.” And so the marriage between those two—bringing data, but then also making sure that you are representing that voice and literally bringing the voice of the customer, the literal—get that recording, bring it to the meeting.

[00:11:13] Matt Hartley: That can be really powerful. That can change hearts sometimes and move direction. And so bringing both of those is actually really important.

[00:11:19] Steve MacDonald: There’s actually been studies done by Harvard that say when we hear things in the form of a story, we actually remember it more than 20 times better than if we came in and said, “18% of customers are identifying this as an issue,” right?

[00:11:33] Steve MacDonald: And it’s like, okay, here’s a bullet, a stat—and those are very meaningful. But yet, telling that story really brings it to life, and they’re gonna remember that. So that’s the idea of representing the voice of the customer. There are stories that are individual stories, but then there are stories that are broad. There are themes that happen all throughout these customer interactions.

[00:11:54] Steve MacDonald: How important is, like, the role of emerging—like the role of AI, right? Using Gemini, right? On your own products and your own customer base and all those interactions. Has that become a really big tool and opportunity to tell that story or tell the data?

[00:12:12] Matt Hartley: AI is transforming how we approach these things.

[00:12:16] Matt Hartley: And, as I’m sure it is for everyone—and everyone who’d probably be listening to this podcast—especially from the perspective of insights, I think it unlocks so much more value out of the insights. We can move so much faster. Just to give you an example, I remember if we wanted to really deep dive on a certain issue, and we maybe would have—hey, we’re gonna take a hundred or a thousand cases that we’ve received—and we’re gonna have some agents go through and manually classify them X, Y, or Z. That would take a week or more, and it’s prone to error.

We will now get that in seconds feeding it through AI. You’re able to use AI to better cluster and find the insights—especially maybe the ones that are not the top-line ones. The things that maybe would be lurking beneath the surface—that are somewhere in the middle of the pack or longer tail—that you wouldn’t have otherwise found.

AI is also able to do better issue detection in real time. It’s tough to be always on as a human and checking all things, but that’s something that AI is really good at.

[00:13:12] Matt Hartley: In many ways, we’re just getting started with that. I think it’s really powerful—certainly from a voice of the customer perspective, it’s powerful—and it’s democratizing how we think about this. The truth is, it’s not just the customer support organizations who have these powers.

[00:13:26] Matt Hartley: So it allows many other parts of the business to come into that picture and into that narrative. And we see a lot of folks coming through and wanting to look at our own data and run their own kind of analysis on it. And that’s actually great.

[00:13:38] Matt Hartley: Like, we then are able to have people pull from us instead of us pushing out. So I think these are all benefits that I’ve seen just on the insights side of AI.

[00:13:45] Steve MacDonald: I wanna marry what you just said there with something you said earlier. When you were talking earlier about working with the different departments, you talked about understanding their needs, right?

[00:13:55] Steve MacDonald: As a business, we’re very focused on our external customers and completely understanding their needs. But you have internal customers. You have internal consumers of the service that you put out, right? All this knowledge that impacts all of them.

Now, if you had a thousand agents and they were manually pulling these reports and everything—like in marketing, personalization is everything, right?

[00:14:19] Steve MacDonald: So the data and the story and how it’s told—if you’re talking to sales versus product versus marketing, right? Are you able to tell that story differently depending on the individual needs of the internal customers that you’re talking about or talking to?

[00:14:39] Matt Hartley: Yeah. I think it is important to think about that in any conversation—whether you’re talking about data or not. What does this person care about? Like, what will resonate?

[00:14:45] Matt Hartley: And so some ways that might look is just like—what are the different cuts? What would they be interested in looking at? For example, in our product teams, we will often pull together data around device contact rates, and we’ll look at that at the issue level. We’ll say, “Look, from the Pixel 4 to 5, to 6, to 7, what is happening on the contact rates for Bluetooth issues or for connectivity or for—you name it—camera?”

[00:15:12] Matt Hartley: And that tells a compelling story of, “Look, year over year or gen over gen, if you compare, we have a really positive story,” or “Maybe we’re not improving as fast as we should be,” or “Hey, maybe this got worse. We made a design decision change. Here’s some data to show you how that’s played out with customers.”

[00:15:29] Matt Hartley: That has been effective, I would say, for kind of them seeing some of the downstream impact of decisions that they make, and then us jointly driving toward solutions.

If we’re gonna go talk to—I don’t know—some of our other operations teams, like, they care a lot about some of the efficiency metrics, right?

[00:15:47] Matt Hartley: It’s not just, “How great of an experience are you bringing customers?” but, “How are you doing that better and better?” And AI has a key role to play there in how we automate and drive better customer experiences.

I think it’s thinking about what will resonate, bringing that message to them, and ultimately iterating on that.

[00:16:03] Matt Hartley: These are not like one-time conversations. But you have that dialogue, and you see where there’s some common ground, and then you build on that.

That contact rate example I gave you is a good example where we evolved over some cycles around how we were presenting that [data] to get to more detail and more granularity that was actionable for product teams.

We may have thought, “Hey, when we show you Pixel 8 versus 7 or 9 versus 8, that’s good enough,” and we got the questions: “Give us—like—tell us more. We want more.”

[00:16:31] Matt Hartley: So we kept cutting it down till it got to where it’s, “Hey, they know exactly which PM or engineer to point that feedback towards.” And that then becomes really powerful.

[00:16:41] Steve MacDonald: And I would imagine then that fuels relationships internally, right?

[00:16:49] Steve MacDonald: Like, how important are those relationships? Because it’s not just pushing data out, right? You’re trying to create a relationship with these teams that they rely on you. How important is that?

[00:16:59] Matt Hartley: In general, I think relationships are important for how we do business. I think about that even within my own team.

[00:17:04] Matt Hartley: I’d much rather drive relationships than just have cold exchanges around what comes next. But I think in the world of working with cross-functional folks, there’s a lot to say about building up credibility.

There’s a lot to say about—you build some of those relationships sometimes in the trenches.

[00:17:21] Matt Hartley: Some of the best partnerships I have are because of things that went wrong, where we’re all rolling up our sleeves and coming to the table about what we do.

And part of the way that you build and maintain those relationships is by being intentional about that.

That could be you dropping a ping to folks about a chat—I guess we call it “ping” internally. You drop a chat to folks around, “Hey, this is an update from what’s going on on our side,” or “Hey, like, how’d that thing go?”

[00:17:38] Matt Hartley: But also just the regular one-on-one meetings outside of the context of maybe quarterly or monthly business reviews. I think that becomes increasingly important.

[00:17:55] Matt Hartley: And in many ways then, that’s not going to seal their approval on your ideas. I don’t think that’s how you necessarily get work done, but it may make you more comfortable when you step into that room with 30 people and you have some pretty friendly faces around the table. It may also help them to understand a little bit more of the context and the things that are going on and why it’s important—things that you just can’t always convey in a 30-minute pitch meeting or something like that.

[00:18:18] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that we talked about when we met before is driving internal change, and what you paired with that conversation was the need for consistency in messaging. Tell me what you meant by all that.

[00:18:37] Matt Hartley: A lot of us have heard of the rule of seven—you need to hear something seven times for it to stick. And that’s generally true, especially when we’re not talking about areas that are the day in and day out of what somebody does. If you want to go talk about what’s happening in the customer support world, and you’re talking to cross-functional partners, they are not living and breathing that—they’re doing their own things. And so there’s actually a really key importance to driving consistency in some of that message and restating things.

[00:19:03] Matt Hartley: People have a lot going on. Mindshare is difficult. So I think, even people with the best of intentions, that consistency is important. But there’s also this element of, I think, consistent advocacy does also build credibility. It can show, “Look, I’m not just here to try to change one thing or to try to give you a nugget of insight. I want to build an enduring partnership.” Like, we are stronger together—let’s build a system that is self-reinforcing, where we both succeed. Then it’s less about kind of one-off influence and more about, “Hey, we’re building joint plans; we’re setting joint goals together.”

[00:19:44] Steve MacDonald: That’s important—like driving alignment on a strategic level, right? Goals and vision and what we’re trying to do. That’s different than reporting on data, right?

[00:19:56] Steve MacDonald: Tell us a little bit about—because what’s interesting is in these cross-functional, across different departments and internal teams—how much of that conversation is keeping on track, on alignment with the shared goal and vision, versus reporting on what’s happened?

[00:20:19] Matt Hartley: That’s a good question. I would much rather be much more of the former because, in an ideal world, being on track with what’s happening in the data—that is hopefully performing well—is, ideally, the most boring part of that conversation. It’s not always. And as we know, we get all kinds of shocks that hit the system that support orgs deal with.

[00:20:40] Matt Hartley: But I actually think where you really unlock the value—and certainly when you think about where a team is going this year, over the next few years—it’s those broader conversations around strategy. That’s what gets you there. And I can give you an example that kind of ties back into your last question as well.

[00:20:58] Matt Hartley: A number of years ago, I was going to a number of our VPs in the business and pitching this proposal around this integration between the product and the support that I thought we were well positioned for. We really needed to do it—it was going to be impactful for users. And coming with a vision that’s not just, “Hey, change this one thing.” This was, “We want to organize around this, and we think it’ll be impactful.”

[00:21:12] Matt Hartley: And the great news was everyone at that table generally was like, “We agree, let’s do this.” It then took me another year—almost a year and a half—to get real movement on it, because even though people agree, resources are tight. It takes time to get the inertia moving on some of these things, maybe especially in a big company.

[00:21:41] Matt Hartley: So what was really important there was not to count that as a win, but to keep following up—keep having those touchpoints across those teams to align: “Okay, how do we set this up? What’s going to be needed? What does this look like in the timelines of your business? What would you need to be successful?” And we were then able to get all the right pieces set on the board to make it happen. And it actually is now, I’d say, a core part of our multi-year strategy. We’ve been working on it for some time. I see runway ahead for a number more years, and it’s transforming part of how we do our business here.

[00:22:14] Matt Hartley: But some people will look at that and say, “Wow, this is great. You’re doing this this year,” and they don’t know that, hey—we’re standing on the shoulders of previous years of sowing these seeds and getting the alignment and following up and making it work.

[00:22:29] Matt Hartley: And I think that consistency actually is really important when you’re trying to do big things—when you’re trying to move the ship.

[00:22:36] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because you could say that the relationship is very transactional—about the data and the themes that are coming out and the stories we want to tell. But working on that alignment and that vision—what I took away is you never stop working on that. That’s like an effort.

[00:22:58] Steve MacDonald: So I would love to know—because we’ve talked about a lot—if there was one thing that you wanted to leave the audience with today that they should take away, what would the one thing be?

[00:23:11] Matt Hartley: I guess there’s this proverb that I use with my team sometimes, and I think it’s valuable and sums up a little bit of what we’re talking about. It’s, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I believe that. And there are times when we want to go fast, and there are times when we want to go far. When we want to go far, we need to go together.

[00:23:29] Matt Hartley: So that is—think about what are the common problems and goals? Who do we bring into this? What is the collective narrative? How do we go far together? I think that’s really important. And so I would just encourage folks who might be listening to think through that. When do you want to go fast? When do you want to go far? And who do you bring into that discussion? And how do you approach it—as you said—in an ongoing way, not as a one-off, to make sure that you are running that marathon, not just the sprint.

[00:23:58] Steve MacDonald: I love it. Thank you. Thank you so much. The whole mission behind this podcast is to get expert opinions and perspectives and insights as we all learn, right?

[00:24:08] Steve MacDonald: We learn all throughout our careers, and we should learn from our peers. And if we can do that—that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And I think you did that big time today, Matt. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you very much.

[00:24:19] Matt Hartley: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it, Steve. It’s been great connecting and chatting. I appreciate the opportunity to come on.