Hi, Vidya.
Hi, Dani. How are you?
Daniel Guardans:
I’m good! Nice to see you. First of all, thank you so much for accepting to be a guest on our show. So today, the show of today, we want to go through a couple of questions that we think that are very interesting to talk to you about. And the idea today is to kind of like break it down into three parts. It’s basically to get to know you and because our audience is very eager to learn about your experience, then navigate there into what we might look into like what the importance of customer experience. And then we want to end up with combining that experience that you have into this book that you’re soon to be publishing and that we want to offer our audience later when it’s published the possibility to read it. So.
The idea, as I said, I wanted to start today with like kind of going over like your journey, right? You’ve worked at great companies as Amazon, Deliveroo, Skyscanner, and you’ve also been an advisor to several scale-ups and now soon to be published author. Can you share a bit like a bit about your journey and how you’ve ended up here?
Vidya Murali:
Sure. Thanks a lot. And thanks for everyone who’s listening.
So yeah, so my journey, I grew up in India and I graduated in engineering. At that time there was a lot of this IT boost going on. Lots of people were moving from India to the West to work in IT companies. I also followed that and I came here. My first job was an application support manager. And at that time I realized I was more interested in the business side of things.
So I took a year off, I did an MBA from Cambridge and after MBA, I joined Amazon. So my experience at Amazon, it was amazing. Amazon is the most customer centric-company I’ve ever worked for probably in the world, I could say. Customer obsession is a key value. So I was working there as a senior product manager in books to start with, which was more of an analytical consultant plus like, a project management, revenue management type role. So I was responsible for pricing strategy, a lot of customer projects. Then I went on to lead my own category, kind of buying back used products. And that was super exciting for me because it’s when I kind of saw the holistic view of really working backwards from customer, like, how do you create the experience? How do you make it so easy, so frictionless for them?
And then do marketing and pricing. Also on the operations side, how do you kind of get the inventory with the merchants? It kind of gave me like a 360 degree of a business. And by that time I was six years into Amazon, I was thinking, what if I can move on and do this kind of a business type role in a scale up environment? And I joined, I’ve worked in a few successful scale-ups, including Deliveroo and most now I’m with Skyscanner. So… all of these experiences, I think, were quite different, but one common thread was I was definitely looking at the customer experience, working back from customer experience side of things. Be it in Deliveroo, how do you deliver a frictionless peak? When you have the peak months in Deliveroo, we have to make sure that we have enough riders to deliver the food on time. So how do you plan for it? How do you have the right tooling for it?
Or, you know, in Skyscanner now, I look after building trust, mainly after the users land on the partner side. How can we build trust? How can we continue to keep the experience going? So yeah, I would say my experience strategy, customer experience, and that’s kind of the one side of my experience.
The other side is also, as you mentioned, I advise, I’m a trained coach and I’m writing a book now. Just signed a contract with a very popular publisher. I’m very glad with that. So the book, the idea came when I mentioned somebody that, I’ve worked in so many scale-ups, I could almost write a book. And that person asked me like, why don’t you? And I was like, yeah, I really can because they are working in scale-ups is a very unique experience. It’s super exciting.
But also it’s super chaotic. It’s like somebody told me it’s like a teenage business. You know, if you move, especially if you’re moving from a big company like Amazon or some company like that and moving into scale-ups, it’s quite, it’s a quite challenging space to work in from an emotional point of view. Somebody from a big company might come with this assumption like: Hey, I’m smart, I have all the experience I need to succeed in this job. But what they don’t realize is there is a lot more softer skills that’s required because they have to influence a lot more stakeholders. Rational approach might not work always. There is things changing all the time. So you’ve got to be like constantly reinventing yourself. You’ve got to make your allies. You have to, you know, create that space for yourself and keep changing and moving. And that requires not just smarts and skills. You need to have a lot more influencing skills, a lot more resilience, ability to learn from your mistakes and continue to grow and learn. And that’s the skills and techniques that I’m addressing in my book. And it is mainly through stories. So I brought my own experience, but also I interviewed a lot of successful people in scale-ups, people who face challenges and have case studies and learnings from them and tools from those stories that people can apply in their real life.
And regarding those stories, like, is there moments that you’ve seen throughout your career, which is quite impressive, any like notable achievements or initiatives that you’ve seen that you’ve potentially done or you’ve advised that have like been transformational? Yeah, sure. I think from my own experience, be it Amazon or even my recent experience, the most notable achievements would be when I take something completely new, for example, establishing a new function in Skyscanner like trust or driving a new business to profitability in Amazon. How do you actually take something really new and get people on board, influence them that is important and then make them also work towards common goals. So that would be like my key achievements in my career.
When I started in Skyscanner, for example, why do we need to have trust? Why should that be a team? Why should we need to focus on this? Then slowly from that to, yeah, this is a really important thing. We are looking at these metrics on a day-to-day basis. We need to create automation. We need to drive this. And that’s not just me telling everyone, but it’s everyone telling me now because it’s more embedded. So my achievements are not necessarily my achievements. My achievement would be how I get other people to, you know, become part of the journey and own it. And that will be the point I go in like, hey, that’s great. And I have several such experiences where I go, they’re speaking my language. This is exactly why, what I want people to do. So, and building a team and coaching them and seeing the team members succeed is very satisfying. So, yeah, I wouldn’t want to call out a specifics, but I think overall these kind of driving change through people, coaching them and, you know, learning continuously, learning those would be the threads.
Daniel Guardans:
And Vidya, it sounds like you, you’d like to challenge kind of like the status quo, right? It’s kind of like the entrepreneur. You also bring that value in a bigger corporate setting, right? Is that I’m reading that correctly?
Vidya Murali:
Yeah. Yes. I think transformation I like to come and change.
Introduce new things, make it like the business as usual, embed it, and then I move on to something else. So that’s kind of my, you know, mode of operating. That’s where I really enjoy. That’s my strength. Here at the podcast we like to split our conversation, usually in like two important, like connected topics, right? So it’s like driving that customer experience, which is linked to your career experience, as you talked about, and also making it happen with those scale-ups and that book that you’re launching out.
So one of the things we like to look into is how do you influence those stakeholders to focus on these transformational aspects that you were talking about to make that their main focus? First of all, like when you talk about customer experience, customer experience is everybody’s job. So that is in any of the roles I have taken. And my title might be Head of Customer Experience, Head of this, that, that. I always say this is not, customer experience is not my job. It’s not my responsibility. It’s everybody’s job. That’s my good, my approach. I’m here to help. I’m here to support you, facilitate these things and put the threads together. But putting that role into one person is setting somebody up for failure and the role for failure as well. So I think anybody who is doing tasks with the customer experience need to understand that their role is to embed it across the organization, make it everybody’s job, not trying to hold it and try to be this one person who’s carrying that on the shoulder. That’s kind of not gonna work.
The second thing I would say, which is very important and it’s worked for me is you need to have a sponsor at a senior level. So an executive sponsor. And this can be anybody. It doesn’t have to be a Chief Customer Officer. It could be a Chief Commercial Officer, it could be a CEO, it could be a CMO. But somebody who has a voice at the board level at the senior meetings who can bring the value of customer in those important discussions. Because, you know, with all the good intentions, you put the smartest person in a role and I know senior middle management level or even a bit more senior, it’s not going to be working unless they have an exec sponsor. So that is, you know, transformation requires that level of seniority. Once these two things are there, I think then there are what I would say two things, which is like hard and soft approach.
The hard approach, both of them are equally important. The hard approach is data, like having a North Star metric, having a KPI, having like inputs and outputs that you track from a customer point of view. So the data speaks for itself. So making it a part of everyday conversation, the meetings, review, challenging and, you know, highlighting when things are changing, why they are changing, making people interested, engaged in the data of it. That is super important. And… If possible, and this is probably the hardest thing, which is to link how customer experience affects revenue or any outputs, right? People like that. That shouldn’t be like it should be a given that we need to improve our customer experience for sustainable revenue, but it could be really powerful if there is some data on retention. This longer term metrics that in the long term LTV, the long lifetime value, those kind of metrics can be really powerful.
Like, for example, Amazon Prime, know, the Prime customers spend more than the average customer. So driving a Prime program, even though the program might serve, by itself might not be super profitable overall, the lifetime value of the customer is great. So those kind of metrics can be super useful as well to drive that engagement.
And in terms of soft, softer approach is not weaker. Softer is that powerful as well. When I say soft, it’s about getting the customer feedback more visible across the organization, bringing them to the meetings, running like hackathons or what I say, internal dog fooding, which is basically getting your own employees, try your own product from a customer angle, give feedback. That can be very powerful in terms of getting the culture and the transformation, getting people on board. So yeah, I would say start at the top and then engage everyone and then bring them to a journey together.
Daniel Guardans:
Following that, what you just mentioned, which is, think it’s very, very interesting. Startups usually with our experience and I’m sure as you, as you advise them, they get a lot of inputs, right? Like a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of things. How do you make sure that you might have a thousand ideas, how do you focus on like, okay, let’s focus on these and execute them, like identify the right person and not get distracted through like the different currents because I’m guessing that’s a common issue.
Vidya Murali:
Yeah, absolutely. There is a trap of getting everything perfect and not getting anything done, right? So perfection is opposite of done. So we need to be cautious of that. The way I do it is, so I would normally, when it comes to customer experience initiatives and problems, for instance, I would go with a red, amber, green type classification of issues.
Red is really bad. You shouldn’t really be having these issues. If you’re having these issues, you’re like really letting the customers down. So those need to be fixed. And that is not a negotiable. Then amber, would say like, yeah, nice to have. It’s something that we improve, we’ll see a benefit and that, you know, we need to prioritize them. We need to kind of get them on the roadmap. And then green, they are already good. We need to kind of protect those, you know, those experiences. That would be my first level of, you know, getting focus and bringing focus on like, let’s move all the red to amber or, you know, try and get amber to green.
The second filter obviously is also, you can look at impact and complexity and prioritize issues. Like you can take like, I don’t know, say if you’re introducing your new functionality for your customer, what’s going to be expected impact, you can test it and what’s going to be the complexity of implementing it and try to pick the ones that have high impact, low complexity. And you have frameworks to do that.
But yeah, I to keep it simple. Like what is the three things I want to fix in the first six months or one year from a customer point of view and kind of keeping that going, repeating and getting teams to buy into it, why we need to fix it. And then I spot the stakeholders are not fully bought into that. I try to really influence them, try to understand. So why do you think it is not important? What else are you doing that is more important then this? And try to connect that to this piece like ‘hey, by the way, you’re working on this, but if we don’t fix this, your revenue might not like’, for example, I’m talking to commercial person, you go like, okay, your revenue is super important, but this customer experience, if you don’t fix it, your partners might not be happy with it and longer term, your revenue will be impacted. So really getting those threads together and help people see why this is important. And sometimes you have to agree, like maybe there are other priorities as well. So it’s not kind of, this cannot be if your ask is not so important in the scale of things, you might have to agree with that. But yeah, I would really put myself in the shoes of the customer and go with that level of prioritization.
Daniel Guardans:
And there is, there’s a specific key metrics or data that you typically usually recommend tracking as part of this whole experience?
Vidya Murali:
Yeah, I mean, it depends on the businesses. So I worked predominantly in B2C businesses. B2B, I’ve worked in a few as well. So things can be different between B2B and B2C. But what I try to do and track in terms of metrics is very much Amazon approach, which is inputs and outputs. Amazon tracks all the metrics, classifies them as input and output, which is very useful. Inputs being from a customer point of view, how many customers are visiting, that could be an input.
How many of them are going to the next stage could be an input. How many of them are actually buying is kind of an input and an output. Then you have like revenue retention, how many of them are coming back to you? That’s an output. And you might ask some satisfaction, CSAT surveys, run like surveys on your website or it could be also surveys after a customer service agent has actually spoken to your customer. So those are all the metrics.
It’s important to have a North Star metric. I would highly recommend a CX metric to be a North Star metric for the entire business. And that way you kind of align everything, everyone’s priority into that metric. I don’t know, it could be NPS, it could be whatever metric that you might be tracking, which is equivalent of NPS type metric. But that is really important and that’s something every, you know, initiative need to… make sure it’s improving or at the worst not damaging. So do no harm to that metric. So that’s really important to have it.
Daniel Guardans:
Right. And also one thing that we’ve also noticed is a lot of other startups that I’m sure you’ve seen as an advisor and you probably have pieces of really valuable content in your book about this is that a lot of these startups are now being shifted from like crazy growth, into like this very intensive revenue path profitability and very metrics driven. One of the things we’re exploring also is like, how do we create a customer centric culture in such a, I wouldn’t say the word maybe is not complex, but a very demanding times. Like how do we create that and what’s your experience in that aspect?
Vidya Murali:
Yeah, I can, can understand that, but I think the whole myth, the premise that goes with this, which is your revenue focus and profitability focus is in opposition with customer experience focus, but it’s actually not. They are very much in congruence. Maybe the business and people are not able to see that. So obviously, because the metrics and data is not like so immediate, because sometimes when you improve your customer experience, it takes a while for it to flow through into your revenue and repeat rate and things like that, which is why it’s really important to understand that. So one way of doing this, doing experiments, you can do experiments that track your attention over a longer term and kind of help people understand actually improving this is important for my revenue in the future. Also profitability, the better the customer experience is, the less cost you have in dealing with unhappy customers as well. So actually taking those numbers and then showing to your broader stakeholders how customer experience actually aligns with their goals rather than work in opposition. I think that’s probably the crux of it. If it is not aligned, if you’re pushing something that works in a position, you shouldn’t be really pushing for it. I can’t think of any…customer experience improvement that will damage revenue in the longer term, the longer term being the keyword. I know that it could be in the shorter term, short term, you might be doing some tactics that might be winning you a lot of customers in the short term, but the longer term, they would realize that. And if it’s a bad customer experience, they won’t come back to you. So when you have the right longer term metrics and data and experiments and… view a perspective, what you’ll find is the improving customer experience is actually a positive thing for both revenue and profitability. Of course, there’s demands in the business that would require the businesses to prioritize some immediate profitability and revenue initiatives, sometimes not super customer friendly.
That needs to be done very cautiously. You need to have what you call do no harm. So you have to have some metrics on that you measure and make sure that it could be as simple as getting feedback from your customers going like, okay, what do you think about this initiative? We put the price up. So what’s the result of that increase in price? Are we losing data? Are we losing customers, and to the competition? Are customers actually coming back to us? How do they feel about it? How does a price compare to a competition?
Is this a short term thing? Is that a way for long term reducing? So, we need to kind of when anyone does something that is borderline impacting customer experience negatively, it has to be done very, very cautiously with a lot of gates in place, do no harm metrics in place.
Daniel Guardans:
Yeah, one thing, it’s very interesting to ask you about this Vidya is as as an advisor of startups in different stages of the as they grow. How do you maintain in that sense, one thing you pointed out at the beginning of the podcast was this idea of everybody has to believe in this customer experience and be part of this customer experience. It’s not my title. It’s the company as a whole.
As scale-ups potentially grow quite significantly. How does that values and that like way of thinking transpire across that journey? How do we make sure that from the founder until the employee number 500, that thing is instilled?
Vidya Murali:
Yeah, that’s a good question. And I cannot again. One way of doing it is having values. So customer first value, giving people awards when they do a great job and put the customer first. That could be one very good way of getting the customer culture in the organization. Again, as I mentioned, not throwing metrics and tracking those customer metrics and making people responsible for those metrics. And it’s also a way for you to create the culture and make it more across the organization, not just with a few people.
And then in terms of working day to day, taking these approaches like working backwards, which is again a very Amazon approach. Before Amazon launches anything, they write like a press review, which is very much a customer-centric document. Okay, this is what customers are going to get from this. And then working backwards from it, going like, okay, this is what the customer experience we need to do. So what are the capabilities we need? What are the teams we need? What are the skills that we need? So, you know, start… with the customer always, anybody is coming up with a proposal, an idea, always having the process of starting with the customer. The first section of every document or a PowerPoint or whatever, however you present could be like, what’s in for your customer here? Why do we do this? And what is the benefit of this for the customer? So that, those kind of…
practices and rigor and data and values and culture owns the embed. It’s very much possible, I mean, big company that have amazing customer centric companies where everyone lives and breathes and it becomes very much part of their day to day focus to be customer first.
Daniel Guardans:
And looking ahead, is there, are you seeing, because we’ve lived over the past few years, quite a crazy and disrupting time pandemic. The whole market for raising money has changed quite dramatically. Do you see any trends shaping the future of startups that you’re potentially advising within Europe? And is there any advice you want to share to like other customer experience leaders that want to make an impact in this ecosystem that we’re living in?
Vidya Murali:
Yeah. So I think of course, the buzzword being AI, everyone’s on AI and using it and bots and stuff, which is all very useful. I’m super excited about it. It’s a great tool for analyzing, summarizing, getting more insights and also helping customers. But I strongly believe having those customer first principles, having those values in place, having those North star metrics and data to track those are still going to remain the same regardless of whatever trends. The way to look at these trends and tools are like how they actually help you do these things better. Can I have a tool, can I make AI help me respond to my customers better so I can get a better CSAT rating or my North star to improve? So you think of those as a drivers for what you’re trying to drive, but the solid foundation basics remain the same regardless of what goes. I guess with a lot of pressures and the cost of living across the world, the expectation of customers are getting increasing more because they’re charging, being charged more. it’s even more important and businesses will focus on customer experience, can be sustainable for the longer term and focus on employee culture as well, which is very important. To provide a good customer experience, you need to have happy employees.
Yeah, and especially also like we’ve seen a lot of startups that have risen very highly and then dramatically fell off the cliff. So this it’s very important to make sure that that sustainable growth aligned with the customer experience is matched.
Daniel Guardans:
Right. I’ve pointed out throughout the interview that it’s very important to make sure that everybody is aligned in that sense and that sometimes we miss this idea that it’s just focused on the growth and we forget that our existing customer base or upcoming is as important.
Vidya Murali:
Absolutely. It’s always like this, the virtual cycle. We might be in one part focusing on one part, but there’s always other things linking to it. So you just look at it as a big picture.
Daniel Guardans:
And for me, the most exciting part of the interview is about your book. You have an upcoming book. Can you tell us a bit about the upcoming book, like a little maybe trailer or something that like a snippet about it that’s useful for us.
Vidya Murali:
Yeah. So as I said, I wrote this book because I found working in scale-ups to be exciting but challenging from an emotional point of view. So I wanted to give people a toolkit that they can use. So they can use all their skills, they’re smarts and still like thrive in the scale-up environment using this skill set. So the book is called: How to Thrive in a Scale-Up Business.
The title is tentative at the moment, it might change, but I think more or less will be the same. And the way it is structured is how the part one is more about how do you, like even when you’re interviewing for a scale-ups, what are the things that you should look for? The first 90 days, how do you kind of set yourself for success? How do you build your allies? How do you kind of understand the dynamics in the business? Where is the loyalty? Where is the power? Where’s the influence?
I know what’s your role. And then it moves on to stories of thriving and stories of challenges, obstacles, and then learning from them. It’s very practical. So it comes to the story and then goes into like, this is the tools you can use. These are the questions you can ask yourself and how to practice those questions. And then there is a focus, part three is about focusing on you, how you can build your own emotional capacity, like your resilience, some of the tools you can use like mindfulness coaching, for example. And if you’re different, a bit different, you’re an introvert or a highly sensitive person, you have ADHD or you’re kind of a minority person, what strengths you bring in the scale up environment and what support you need. And then it kind of pulls everything together in the conclusion on the action, call to action, what you can take from it. So it’s very insightful. It builds on lots of… successful people’s experience and I have been grateful for lots of people reading it and giving me feedback and many of them have commented like I really wish I had this book before when I transitioned to scale up. It is for people looking to transition to scale-ups or in scale-ups or working already in scale-ups would like to improve their emotional skills. Maybe even also HR team or leaders would like to create a better culture and address some of these fundamental patterns in scale-ups that can improve.
Daniel Guardans:
Yeah, as someone like me that has ADHD for sure. I’m going to be a reader of the book. Do know roughly when this might be coming out?
Vidya Murali:
I don’t know the exact date, but publishing is a bit of a long process, but I think it’s definitely going to be 2025. We’ll have the book. I write a lot on LinkedIn. I post a few things on my LinkedIn.
I will definitely update in LinkedIn. So, if people listening are interested on the post, follow me on LinkedIn and yeah, you will get to know when the book is going to be out.
Daniel Guardans:
Right. Cause that was exactly the question I was going ask. So whilst the book is being published, where can we find more about Vidya and all those insights that you were giving us today? Yeah, everything on LinkedIn. In fact, a lot of snippets and excerpts from the book also I post on LinkedIn. I’ve also interviewed some people on LinkedIn. So, yeah, follow me on LinkedIn. I post a lot of content there and hope you find those content useful.
Daniel Guardans:
You also are a coach, right? So I think in your website, some if we have these C level executives that want to potentially join a startup can actually reach out to you in your website right?
Vidya Murali:
Yes, they can. They can reach out to me. I can coach them. You know, if that, that’s of interest to them. Yeah, it’s all it’s all LinkedIn is my gateway.
Daniel Guardans:
Nice. Perfect!
And to finalize, we usually ask this to all of our guests. Like what are like those top three tips to our audience that you want to share with us today?
Vidya Murali:
So if you’re responsible for customer experience, I think for me, as I said, get an exec sponsor. That’d be my first step. Make customer experience everybody’s job. That would be your job embedded across the organization.
That’ll be my second tip. And the third tip would be always think long-term and help people in your organization think long-term because many of those pitfalls in customer experience comes when people think short-term and they think they’re boosting their revenue, but actually long-term they’re hurting it because of not doing the right thing for the customer. So yeah, those will be my three tips from a customer experience point of view.
Daniel Guardans:
Perfect Vidya. Thank you so much for your time today.
As Vidya has pointed out, find her on LinkedIn. We’ll also share a link with Vidya’s LinkedIn. Yeah, once again, thank you so much for your time. As always, it’s been super insightful and see you next time.
Vidya Murali:
Thanks, Dani. Thanks for the opportunity.
