[00:00:19] Sebastian: Thanks for tuning in to a special episode of Insightful Connections. Today's guest is Lena Hesselgrave. Lena is head of product marketing at AskNicely. AskNicely is the customer experience platform built for multi-location service businesses. Unlike traditional survey tools that just collect feedback, AskNicely turns customer insights into daily habits for frontline staff, helping businesses improve retention, grow referrals, and deliver consistently great experiences. In addition to her role at AskNicely, congratulations, Lena is a recently appointed board member at NextMinute, a fast-growing startup for project management in businesses that deal with tradespeople, construction, all that good stuff. Prior to joining AskNicely, Lena held product marketing roles at Xero, in addition to past roles in public service media and other work in SaaS companies. Lena, thanks so much for being on the show today.

[00:01:09] Lena: Thanks, Seb. It's really nice to be here.

[00:01:10] Sebastian: So, Lena, I'd like to start with this context-setting question, and if it doesn't fit you, feel free to let me know. But I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about how you started your journey in insights and how that sort of accounts for where you've come in the years since.

[00:01:24] Lena: Yeah, so a confession up front. I'm not an insights professional per se, not technically a market researcher. Research is really a critical part of my role in product marketing, and I've been really fortunate to work with really amazing, talented in-house research teams, and also with great agencies along the way, both at Xero and at my current role at AskNicely.

[00:01:46] Sebastian: So, Lena, for the benefit of some of our listeners who may not be familiar with product marketing and the idea of product marketing, what does that sort of role involve in most organizations?

[00:01:57] Lena: Yeah, definitely. I feel like it is an often commonly misunderstood role as well. It has both the words product and marketing in it, which can mean such different things, and then when paired together, it can create a whole lot of confusion. So, it's really about making sure that the right product reaches the right customer with the right story. Really sits at that intersection point of product development, of more your campaign and brand marketing teams, and then sales as well. It's really translating across those teams, bringing insights and research about what's happening in the market, as well as training sales teams, getting them really clear and crisp on the story, as well as bringing information from them back to the product team to help evolve what the product is and how it really stands out in the market. So, it's a super interesting role because it is very cross-functional. It's very based on being able to talk to customers, talk to a lot of teams internally, and get to really high quality decisions ultimately.

[00:02:58] Sebastian: So, where do the things we might classify under insights or market research tend to fit into the product marketing role, generally, but also for you specifically at AskNicely?

[00:03:09] Lena: Yeah, so there's a few different places it fits in. Definitely when we're about to make any kind of big shift in our positioning or in our product direction, research is really, really important for us. So, at AskNicely, we really leverage a lot of qualitative research. So, speaking a lot to our customers or to prospects about what are the key needs that we could solve for in the future? What is changing for them? That's one really important piece that can help shape the product decisions that we're making next, and figure out interesting ways to solve those that aren't being catered to by anyone else in the market. So, I'd definitely say at that point of any kind of transition, when you've got some kind of new technology or shifts in the market coming in, it's especially a really critical point. The other key part as well is when you've built the product, you've built some new feature, and you're ready to launch it to customers. There's also a really interesting point there around how you position it, how you talk about that product, how you shape that story. So, doing that testing with different customers and being able to gauge that before you go into a big full-scale launch, those are probably the two main areas where I've got the most value out of doing really robust customer research.

[00:04:26] Sebastian: It sounds like, from an outsider perspective, that the role really involves kind of bridging the product and the market, right? Almost building the elusive idea of product-market fit. Would you say that's an accurate description?

[00:04:39] Lena: Yeah, I would say definitely bridging the product and product team in the market, but also right through to the end customer through sales teams as well. So, looking at why are we winning and not winning? What are those reasons, especially if they relate to product? So, using those signals both internally and externally.

[00:04:58] Sebastian: So, zooming out a little bit, I'm curious to know more about what AskNicely does.

[00:05:03] Lena: Yeah. So, AskNicely, it's actually got roots as a market research platform. We started 10 years ago initially as the simplest way to run an NPS or a CSAT survey to your customers and get a good gauge of what's happening. And 10 years ago, making that super easy and super accessible was a real game changer for a lot of businesses. Over time, we've pivoted into this space and we really did it through talking to a lot of our customers about what do they need beyond just an NPS score or CSAT? Because what we started to find is that insights are really great, but if they end up just stuck in a slide deck or stuck in an executive team meeting, and they never actually really see the light of day beyond that in terms of getting to the frontline teams that are actually delivering services daily, that's where we really saw the disconnect was this research is really amazing, but if it's not actually getting to the people that are making change, it kind of stalls. Because I really strongly believe that insights are only valuable if they can drive an action, if they can support you to make a change. And so that was really the gap that we saw with our customers. It was more that change management side of things. So once you had the insight, how did you then make that a reality or something that you could do, especially for multi-location businesses? If they've got 50 branches across the US, how do you know what the challenges are from a customer experience perspective at each of those locations? And then how do you get them to change that thing? Or how do you get them to improve on very specific things that those customers are telling you about?

[00:06:47] Sebastian: So that kind of actually touches into a similar sort of question, which is in your own role at AskNicely, how do the insights that your team's responsible for surfacing and understanding feed into product and strategy decisions in the organization? And how do you tailor insights to make them more actionable and more useful to stakeholders within your organization?

[00:07:15] Lena: Yeah, so research at AskNicely for our own product within AskNicely is very collaborative and cross-functional. I think that's something at the start that you've got to have a really clear brief upfront to make something usable. You've got to really know why are we doing this and what are the decisions we want to make off the back of this research before we start recruiting customers or going any further. So having that really clear upfront, those expectations baked into that brief upfront and ensuring that you've got those partners, whether it's in product, sales, the exec team, lined up around what that's going to look like. So I think that's the first kind of key piece and sometimes one that internal teams can get tripped up by is just having that really clear upfront. And then I think when you have those insights available, it's making it super digestible in small chunks. So what we tend to do is break out lots of small quotes and embed it in every place we kind of can. So rather than it just living in a single slide deck or a big PDF report, embedding that into lots of different places. And we're using Dovetail in our last research tool that we used to give us lots of little video clips as well. And we'd play lots of those at all hands meetings. We embed them into our sales training. So it's really making it live through each of the teams because it's one thing to make the decision and say, okay, here's everything that we've found. But if you don't have that information distributed throughout all of the business, it really doesn't have the impact it could. So I think that's such a key part of my role again, because I have those existing relationships in the business with those teams. And I also really enjoy that, you know, making the research come to life in lots of places and really live on throughout the business.

[00:09:05] Sebastian: I love that. So what it sounds like you guys have been doing at AskNicely is in particular leveraging video, but using that as a tool to have your insights from your customers, your voice of your customers sort of permeate the organizational culture at all levels sort of outside of the organizational silos that might be responsible for developing the research. It's sort of permeating everywhere. I think you mentioned at all hands meetings.

[00:09:30] Lena: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we live and breathe it because we are a feedback platform, ultimately, and a market research platform at our roots. So we've really built that culture from very early on. We have a Slack channel in our business, which just has all sorts of different bits of feedback coming in from various places from customers. And that's one of our most favorite and most high traffic kind of parts of Slack. It's really great having that always on kind of view of feedback and what customers are saying about us and giving us that constant stream as we make decisions like smaller decisions day to day. So it's not just to make that one big decision that you're using research, but it's that constant building knowledge and empathy for customers throughout your day.

[00:10:15] Sebastian: That's so interesting. So walk me through that. It's like a Slack channel where customers are giving feedback on AskNicely, and everyone in the organization just gets notifications. But I guess where does the feedback come from? This is like customers fill out a survey or what?

[00:10:33] Lena: Yeah, so we do either some companies call it dog fooding or drinking your own champagne. We use our own products for ourselves as well and get customer feedback directly from our customers. And then with our product, you can then pipe that directly to a Slack channel or to Microsoft Teams or any other place. And you can also have like a TV display as well that shows a live feed of feedback coming in. So at each of our office locations, you can see that and a new piece of feedback will come in and sort of ding and you'll see that. And again, that's a really nice moment of being able to see what customers are saying and it really just keeps that alive all the time.

[00:11:15] Sebastian: What's the most interesting customer Slack notification that you feel like you've gotten?

[00:11:20] Lena: I mean, it's so varied because we have a wide range of businesses that we serve. So we are looking after large dental practices across the US or in medical or in home services. We do a lot of work in professional services. It is honestly so, so varied. I can't even think of a specific one. I've never seen a culture that has so much focus on feedback and really using it day to day, which I mean, makes sense considering what we do as a product as well.

[00:11:52] Sebastian: You've kind of sketched out almost a culture that's driven by or oriented towards customer feedback. How does that help AskNicely kind of tighten the feedback loop between customer feedback and action or decisions within the organization?

[00:12:09] Lena: Yeah, I think even just having it so much more accessible is like the first piece. Like we see in some businesses that it's really hard to get access to insights. So kind of the first piece is unlocking feedback and making it just radically accessible throughout the business. So literally every employee has full access to customer insights and all the feedback coming into those various channels. So I think that first piece is access. And then the second piece is really, how do you make that usable in terms of chunking that down into themes and trends and, you know, being able to zoom out and see the slightly bigger picture versus the latest piece of feedback that's come in. So again, we're using our own product for that. We have really great theme analysis and ways to look at trends over time. And of course, you kind of have AI summaries, which really read all your feedback across the last, you know, six, 12 months and are able to give you very clear recommendations on, you know, what is and isn't going well. So we really use that to look at what improvements are we going to prioritize in our product to make? You know, what are the things that, you know, customers are bumping up against? What are they looking for more of in the future? So it's really a way for us to, once we have those themes, literally every week in our product meetings, it's using those to look at, okay, does our roadmap that we've got still make sense? Are we, what are we doing? Like, is there a way that we can adapt to solve this faster? So I think it's really first that getting the access, making it clear in terms of themes and broader trends, and then just using it in those weekly meetings to actually make those quick decisions. So yeah, it's super powerful for being able to stay close to customers, but to make better daily product decisions.

[00:13:59] Sebastian: Sounds like what you've described is a really fast moving culture that's permeated by customer feedback at every level. And you've painted a picture of very low barrier for insights to kind of pass through to various elements of the business, right? How can the partners or suppliers that you deal with in the insight space, you know, help kind of match that culture and deliver in a way that meets the standards of that insights culture?

[00:14:32] Lena: Yeah. So I think, and I've been really fortunate to work with a lot of great insights partners over my years. And I think in general, it's, it's again, not just having the output as, as a single slide deck or a single report, I think providing multiple opportunities for people beyond just that exec team and those exec stakeholders to kind of come in and ask lots of questions and come in from their context and positively interrogate kind of, you know, what you found out. So I think it's, you've really just got to have those kinds of more workshop style sessions where you've got different stakeholders, different people coming in that, you know, they might be a developer or they might be a designer or someone in the business that just comes at it with quite a different lens. And that might've also had a lot of experience with speaking to customers. So I think it's, it's collaboration across those teams and really as a research partner coming in and being super open to that. Generally, I've found most that have, have been really successful in that space. So I think it's probably investing a lot more in that end phase. I think there can be the bias to like, Hey, like get all the, you know, qualitative and the big quant studies done and completed, get the report done. Oh, okay. We're done now. Like there can be a bit of that, I think, versus that last phase of embedding it, bringing it to life in the hearts and minds of all the employees is, is probably a whole separate phase, which yeah, I think sometimes can be a little bit overlooked.

[00:16:04] Sebastian: I wanted to ask you another question. So we've talked a little bit about this idea of tightening feedback loops between insights and action. And this isn't necessarily just a practice within AskNicely. It's also something that you view yourselves and your product as enabling for your customers. And I'm wondering if you can walk me through a little bit, you know, kind of the common philosophy between those two things and how you guys are enabling those sort of tighter connections between insights and action, both within AskNicely, but also outside AskNicely with your customers.

[00:16:40] Lena: Yeah, definitely. So with our customers, we, we really found, as I mentioned before, that, that real missing piece was the change management. They had plenty of insights, plenty of data. They knew what should be happening. They knew what they needed to improve, but the actual, you know, getting that to the right teams and the right people to actually action that was what they were finding challenging. So our philosophy is really that, you know, insights are only really worthwhile getting if you can take action, if you can make them make an improvement in your business. So within our product, what we've delivered for customers is the ability first to capture really high quality feedback, which is super important. So we do that with short chat style surveys that are dynamic to every single customer. So we use AI to customize questions based on that customer and, you know, what interactions that they've had with you to date. So first getting that really high quality feedback is critical. And then what we do is we make that available to all the frontline teams as specific recommended actions and focus areas. So we say that one location in a business, Hey, the most important thing your team needs to focus on is, you know, making sure that the treatment expectations are really clear up front. So you might've heard from a bunch of customers that, and say, this is a dental practice example. You might've had a bunch of customers saying, yep, everything's okay, but I feel like I didn't really know what was going on. I didn't feel at ease. So it's basically looking at all the feedback and saying this specific location, this is the top thing that they could do to improve their customer experience. And that might be different across every single practice or location. So rather than just using really generic kind of, Hey, we all need to improve on, you know, friendliness, each location will get very tailored focus areas and improvement areas right down to, Hey, when someone comes in the door, you should greet them by their first name. You should, you know, do this, this and this. It's very specific on how you can improve based on what every customer has been saying about your business. So it's that specificity and that focus, because what we find is that frontline managers who are, who are running the practice or in that business, that's so overwhelmed that, you know, managing staff there, you know, there's fires to put out left, right, and center. So for them to just say, Hey, this is the one thing that your team could focus on this month. And that would improve your customer experience. It's giving them that level of focus. And we've found that is so much more impactful than giving someone so many broad themes and things like that. But the second part of that is, so once they're starting to make that single one focused change, we then tailor all their future customer surveys to ask about that thing. Hey, when, when you came in the door for this dental practice, did they greet you by your first name? Did they explain the treatment really clearly? So we're validating, has that change actually made an impact? Because that's the other piece is like, how do you just make sure what you're doing is actually changing things that they're actually happening on the ground. So this approach we've found to be really, really exciting. And we've just launched it this year. So it's been a, it's a big change for us. And it's so far delivered some really great results in terms of much happier customers and just really incredible improvements throughout the business. And also making end employees feel much more ownership over that experience as well. The other piece is we've also found it's a great way to surface when things are going really well. So when someone's had a really great customer experience and often that frontline employee doesn't really get the kudos that support from their team, especially if they're in home services, they're going out to people's homes and maybe their boss isn't there to see that great experience happening. So it's a way for us to surface those really positive customer stories and reward those employees who are doing a great job. And there's even more that we're going to be doing in this space to provide rewards and incentives to really deliver better customer experiences. Because the one thing that all of our customers really agree on is that customer experience matters and is super critical to the sustainable growth of their business.

[00:21:16] Sebastian: Lena, last question for you. What keeps you motivated?

[00:21:19] Lena: I'm just so passionate about learning new things. I think that's why research and insights is something that I've always been super fascinated by. So whether it's learning a new skill or a new hobby, I've recently been learning to ski, which has been a very fascinating and humbling journey.

[00:21:35] Sebastian: Is there good skiing in New Zealand?

[00:21:37] Lena: There is in the South Island. So I'm down in the South Island, just outside of Queenstown. And there are some beautiful mountains around here, very gorgeous part of the country. So yes, I'm 30 minutes drive from door to chairlift at my house, which is very, very privileged place to be. So yeah, love learning new skills and meeting new people. I think that just gives me a lot of energy and keeps me motivated.

[00:22:02] Sebastian: Awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show today, Lena. It was great chatting with you.

[00:22:06] Lena: Thanks so much, Seb. Likewise