The Trust Equation: Why Loyalty Breaks Across Teams (and How to Fix It Together)

Hi everyone, thank you so much. Like you said, I'm Christina Garnett. I am a massive classic rock fan, as you can probably tell from the name of my dog. And this is going to feel a little bit like going back to school.

Another fun fact about me is I was a teacher in a former life. I was an English major, but I wound up teaching math for five years. So if you ever took any of those BuzzFeed quizzes to figure out if you're a left or right brain, I always got balanced. And so you're going to see a little bit of that math, a little bit of that English major in me today.

You have, first off, I was a little bit of a book fairy, so there are four copies of my book spread across the room. It's finders keepers. Whoever grabs it first, that's yours. If you want me to sign it, if you don't hate this talk and you want me to sign it afterwards, I can do that for you.

Otherwise, there are bookmarks and there are handouts, what you'll be working on throughout. If you are more of a tech person and you don't want to use a pen, then you can use that QR code to pull up the worksheet. So you're basically going to get the exact same worksheets, but you'll be able to pull it up into a Google Doc. So if that's more of your preference, I believe in differentiated instruction.

So whatever is going to be best for you, what's ever going to be more applicable to how you work today is going to be fantastic. The main thing we want to talk about is it's very easy to come up on stage and say, "We have silos, and silos are a problem, and we should be talking to each other." I'm not reinventing the wheel by making any of those statements. The problem is that we don't get past those statements. We don't move beyond them.

We don't create action plans. We don't create follow-through. We don't create infrastructure that's actually going to make collaboration necessary and for us to actually look at the symptoms and the root causes of what's happening to our customers. And so with that, I want to talk about trust.

And I'm not talking about trust because it is probably the second buzziest word right now behind AI. It's because we have a major issue. If you follow along with Edelman Trust Barometer every year, and if you don't, you absolutely should read it, you'll see that we are having a trust crisis or a trust recession across the board. This isn't just in B2B.

This isn't just in government. This isn't just in industry. This isn't just in the United States. It's absolutely everywhere.

We're seeing trust collapse. And so we need to, as leaders, think thoughtfully about what we can do on our end to be able to repair and build trust infrastructure. So important thing to note is that if you work in CS, you probably feel beaten up most days. You probably feel like you've lost a fight with Ali and you never had a chance.

You didn't have resources. You didn't have the ability to change anything. But you took the brunt of the force. The thing about this is that this is a flawed system.

CS gets the brunt. When they're fixing something, they didn't break. They're trying to assuage somebody who is mad when they have no power to actually fix it. And so in order for us to save CS, and I don't mean automate all of it, I mean actually save CS, we need to think about how we are actually looking at this problem, how we are working together and how we are building the infrastructure to make sure that our customers are thriving, our CS team feels empowered and doesn't feel burned out, and they feel important.

They feel like they have a role to play. Because your CS team is held responsible for a lot of your customer retention and churn, but they are not the people that are solely responsible for creating the instances that make that customer want to leave. They're the one holding the end of the straw. They're the ones last standing.

And it's not fair to them, but it's not fair to our customers. And we've relied on this system long enough to know that it is not working. We need to do something different. Because customer loyalty is not a CS problem.

It is a systems problem. And without a system to fix it and to really look at the root of this, we are not going to be able to fix things. So this is what we're going to talk about. We are going to talk about the variables of the customer trust equation.

We are going to talk about how you can identify where friction builds before it becomes churn. We're going to talk about human moments where you can identify what parts have to have a human touch, you have to have that human in the loop. And then there's a diagnostic tool that I'm going to leave with you so you're actually able to break down and leave with something that you can show to your team. So if you love this worksheet and you're like, I'm going to be writing all over it, I'm not going to be able to give it to my team, then we can make sure that you get the QR code from the beginning so that you can share that with your team.

The last thing I want you to do is to fill this out during the session. And then you never look at it again. You never share it with your team. You have no idea what to do with it.

So there's going to be questions in that worksheet that you literally do not have. You're going to have to talk to somebody else. You're going to have to basically share notes. You're going to have to look at your CRM, you're going to have to look at your data, you're going to have to look at your dashboards, you're going to have to look at all of these different places to make sure that you actually have all the things that you need so that we can build this off.

So let's start with shared language. Product talks one way, marketing talks another, CS talks another way. Meanwhile, they all just don't want the CEO to lay them off tomorrow. We have to start talking the same language.

If we can't talk the same language, we can't work together. If we can't work together, the customer's experience is not going to improve, period. So we need to talk about sales. They define a successful customer differently than CS does.

They're successful because they converted. They're not talking trash about you on Twitter. They're not trying to escalate all the time. Product is going to define value differently than the customer does.

Is this helping our roadmap? Is this making us feel more impactful in our market? Is this making us have a mode? Do we have significant advantages because of these specific features and the way that our customers use our product?

Marketing defines loyalty differently. That customer could absolutely hate you, but if they're on social media saying how great you are, you don't care. It's just what happens outside. So we need to be making sure we're talking the same thing.

Because without a shared language for trust, every team is solving a different problem and calling it the same thing. So we get to the customer trust equation. This is something that I've been working on my second book. If you read the first book, you'll notice I mentioned trust about 200 different times.

And that's not hyperbole. I mentioned it 200 times. Because it is crucial to building customer brand relationships. We want these people to love us.

We want these people to be loyal to us, but we are not giving them anything that's worth loving or worth being loyal to. So if we want trust, we have to think about it in a relational way. And when I looked at the research that was academically available, there's tons of trust research that people are not actually reading. The practitioners, the people in the trenches that are hitting a wall every time, like, I don't know what to do here, that actually lives in a lot of academic literature, specifically literature about 100 years ago.

If you study sociology at all, you'll find a lot of nuggets that pay close relationship to how we build relationships, how we understand human feelings, how we understand what makes someone want to leave, want to escape, want to stay, want to stay loyal, all of these things. But there is also a trust equation. It's done by a group of three advisors. If you look up trust equation, that's what's going to come up.

And I kept trying to use it for a customer. I kept trying to use it outside of its normal reason. And it couldn't work for me. It just always made it feel more complicated.

And I couldn't get it to simplify. And I was like, I've got to make it easy. If I can't make it easy, I can't make it work. So how can I make it simple?

So I thought about the work that I've done. I've worked in support. I've worked in social media. I've worked in community.

I've worked in community advocacy. I've worked in teaching. I've worked in all of these different facets. And I kept seeing that as we sat at different tables, we had data, but we weren't talking to each other.

And so what was broken over here, I didn't know about until it was a red flag on my side, until it was impacting my metrics. And so I had to think about what are the key variables that I keep showing up as a worker but also as a customer myself. How do I become someone who trusts you? What is necessary?

What are the pieces that are necessary in order for that to happen? And what I kept coming back to was these. Consistency, response, connection, value, minus friction. You can do a fantastic job with one or two of these variables.

But if you don't have the strength to increase that trust value with other variables, or frankly you do a great job in one place but you have way too much friction, your marketing can be great but it's so hard to work with you, then it undoes it. So when we talk about trust, it's very easy to say I trust you or I don't trust you. But think about your friend groups. You don't just trust or not trust.

You have a scale. You have a depth. There are people that you know that if you killed someone tonight and you had to hide a body, like I know the one person that would be like which car are we taking? I know another friend that I would never say anything like that.

I wouldn't even get drunk in front of them. It's a scale. Trust is a scale. So when we think about our customers, it's the same because we're all human.

So when we think about this, we need to break down the equation. So what does that actually look like? What do these variables play into our work and how does that look? All of these are pretty self-explanatory but it really breaks down how are you showing up?

How are each of these pieces showing up? Because we as CS teams, as CX professionals, we keep looking at our metrics. We keep looking at NPS thinking our NPS is good, our CSAT is good so we must be doing a good job. And then people leave and you're dumbfounded and you're like I miss the signals.

Maybe they disengage, maybe they stop responding, maybe they unfollowed us on social media. We are spending so much time trying to look at signals that we cannot track instead of looking at our own houses. We need to clean up our own house. Those are the signals that we need to be looking at because that we can monitor, that we can measure, that we can identify.

And what you're doing is you're fixing it so that they don't have a reason to go silent. They don't have a reason to go quiet. They don't have a reason to I'm not going to do this NPS anymore. You never listen to me.

You never do anything I ask for. Why am I still doing this? You're looking for signals you cannot quantify. So we need to look at our own signals.

And how are we signaling whether or not people should trust us? Because when we look at all the work that we're doing, friction breaks it. How many times have you created an automation that makes your life significantly easier but it has absolutely no impact on the customer? Or even worse, it makes your friction their friction.

We optimize everything into oblivion and we do it from our POV. This is automated because this is how I'm seeing it from my end instead of this is how the customer is seeing it. And so a lot of what we're going to talk about today and some of the worksheets we're going to do is you're going to look at your automations and you're going to say is this optimized for us or is this optimized for them? Is this having any impact on CX whatsoever?

Works great, works fast, but it's deeply like inhuman. It's deeply cold. It's deeply efficient in a bad way. So who owns it?

All right, Kristina, we're down to this, but I need to have a leader. I need to have someone that I can fire when this doesn't work. Who owns it? Well, depending on what the variable is, everyone kind of owns something.

Your team owns a piece. So consistency, it's your operations and your tech. How are you showing up? What are your guidelines?

I'd also say marketing also owns consistency because you need to show up the same way. Response. That's obviously customer success, but I would actually argue that it's more than that. I would argue that leadership also has a massive role to play in your response.

How many times has a C-suite or someone said something in an interview and you as a customer are like, "Nope, canceling." Nope, don't like that. That's a response. Customer support had absolutely nothing to do with that, but you made a choice immediately based on this aligns with how I feel, this aligns with what I'm doing, this aligns with the work that I want to create and the companies I want to partner with, therefore I'm not going to do this anymore. And then you have connection.

Now we are at GainSight Pulse and we have a lot of community builders in here. And I'm going to say something controversial, but in every community builder's heart you're going to know this is true. You can create the community and you can launch it and you can have people in there. That does not mean you have belonging.

It does not mean you have connection. You just invited people into a room. It's what they do in the room that makes that a community. You could have that party last night, which I didn't go to because I went way too, I'm not a party girl as you can probably imagine.

But for the people who did go, I had friends who were there and they had an amazing time. Because for them that was how they wanted to connect. That was how they wanted to really kind of celebrate this moment. But you could have also invited the wrong people to the same event and them not want to be there.

Or them show up and be like, oh my God, this is not for me. Or I'm here but I have no one to talk to. Launching the community feels like the hard part. Getting the people in that community to actually talk to each other, connect, feel something, become a third place.

And I mean that like unironically. That's the hard part. That's the magic. That's the stuff that you can't teach.

That's the stuff where like I find out how emotionally intelligent you are pretty quickly. Because you know it's not about opening the doors. It's about the environment you're creating. It's about the psychological safety that you're offering.

It's the connection that you make easier to happen. And then value, that's product pricing. Friction whoever created it. And I find that everyone's creating friction whether you realize it or not.

Everybody. There's no single thing. There's no here. There's no galahad.

There is just friction, friction everywhere. So we need to figure out how do we break this. Because there is a famous statistic where I can find it somewhere but it was like 90% of CEOs think their customers trust them. 30% actually do.

That's a massive gap. That's a massive gap that you don't acknowledge until they've left. Until that revenue is no longer coming in. And you don't know what happened.

So we have to get past that. And we have to realize that satisfaction does not equal trust. One of my least favorite words in all of CX is satisfied. Because I cannot like you at all but I'm satisfied.

It's fine. It's fine. I don't know about you but I don't want to do anything where someone's like it's okay. It'll do.

I'm satisfied. I want you to love me. I want to change your life. I don't want meh anything.

Leave meh somewhere else. So why are we acting like meh satisfaction is great? It's not great. If satisfaction was great, you'd call it love.

Satisfaction was great, you'd have a cult-like brand. That's not what's happening. We have got to move past this. So we need to think about the entire journey.

And we need to think about where friction and where all of these different variables come to play throughout the entire journey. So as you're thinking about your customers, as you're thinking about your clients and you're walking through what their day-to-day life is like, you need to think about where this lives. I'll give you an easy target. Friction.

Your handoffs without looking at your company at all, I'm going to assume, not the best. I'm going to assume right off the cuff. Because very few companies get it right. Especially if you're big.

Because what you've done is in order to scale your company and to grow to the next level, to the next level, to the next level, you've created infrastructure which has everything more specialized so that it goes through a process. So we call it a handoff. Which we also refer to in relay races as the baton. When was the last time a customer told you they loved being manhandled and being tossed around like a baton?

From person to person to person. Meanwhile when they cross the finish line, the customer gets absolutely no praise, no medals, no fanfare, but the people who toss that bad boy all the way through the race get praised. They were fast. They were so fast.

They were the fastest. Meanwhile the customer is just like, dude, I am beaten up and bruised and I have nothing to show for it. I just got tossed. We have to be thinking about this.

So if you're like, Christina, I know stuff's wrong, but I have no idea where to start, look at your handoffs. Immediately look at your handoffs. Who's talking to them? How are they talking to them?

Does part A talk to them the same way as part B does? Does part B talk to them the same way as part C? Do you make it seamless? Do you make it easy?

What happens if I'm with part C but I wish I really liked part A? I really like that person. That person connected with me. That person got it.

And now you keep passing me along to these strangers and I have to reconnect. Start with your handoffs. Now I, like many people who were presenting this week, are not going to be able to get through their presentation without talking about automation or AI. I'm not going to try.

I'm just not going to make it my entire personality. So what we need to do is we need to understand I'm not going to say how pro AI am or how anti AI am. I am going to stress that I am very pro human experience. I am exceptionally pro human experience.

And there are parts of your journey that feel and need to feel as human as humanly possible. So when we're thinking about that and we're trying to figure out, okay, well, this is where AI and automation and all of this tech stack can live and here is where we need humans. We need to be able to identify where the human needs to show up. So first thing, I want you to start thinking about your customers and start thinking about the moments of your experience with them where it needs to feel human.

If you are unsure, the easiest thing to think about is where emotionality is peak. I am an Oregon trail millennial, geriatric millennial, if you will. And I am old enough to remember when you would have a house phone and it would probably be on a wall in the kitchen and have a squiggly little tail and it would like go on for a mile. That's not the cool part.

The cool part is if you said something on the phone with me that made me very angry, I could hang up on you. I could slam the phone down. And not only did it feel good on my end, it had a click, like a very definitive click on the other side so that you know I hung up on you. That is a human moment.

If I am hyper angry, hyper happy, hyper whatever, if I am in a deeply emotional state, I need a human. Because I need a human to understand and feel the emotion that is coming out of me. Either to empathize, to enjoy it with me, whatever that looks like. I don't want to celebrate with a chat bot.

Cussing out a chat bot does not hit the same either. It doesn't. I am so sorry. Try it.

Like apologies to chat GPT and Grock and Claude. But like, oh, you are right. I am so sorry. I shouldn't have said that.

I made you angry somehow. No. I need something else. That is not hitting it for me.

That is not taking care of it. So we need to think about emotional complexity. Next we need to talk about context and nuance. If you know the three biggest problems your customer has, automation and chat bots are great for that.

But if I have anything more complicated and I don't have something with context and nuance to help me, then I start spiraling. And so what you have as a customer who was kind of upset, kind of curious, kind of trying to figure it out, you have taken that person into this company does not care about me and they don't want me to fix this. I keep going in circles. They keep telling me how to fix this problem, but that is not the problem I have.

Or that problem is lower and deeper than what I have. And so it goes from you didn't have my answer to you don't care if I get an answer very quickly. That is a problem. That creates relationship risk.

So if you have ever worked in CS and you have ever worked in partnerships, you will understand that we take escalations very seriously, especially if it is a VIP customer. All of a sudden we circle the wagons. All of a sudden there is a triage plan. All of a sudden there is a deck for how we save this relationship.

The problem is that by the time you usually have that, it is a band-aid on a really big problem. If instead you know exactly which customers are struggling right now or might have an issue, maybe there is a ticket increase or they have new leadership, knowing signals that will change your relationship with brands, incredibly important. Great case of point. I have a layoff tracker, Google Alert, for every single client I have and every single client my clients have.

And though it has absolutely nothing to do with our work with them, it may absolutely snowball into our relationship. So in our health tracker for that client, if there is a layoff from a client, I note it because that is a signal. It may not signal that something is going to happen with our relationship, but it signals that there is a change that could down the road impact future change that we directly impact. So you need to be looking for signals that have absolutely nothing to do with you because they will eventually have to do with you and you don't want to catch it too late.

And then obviously high impact. You know or someone in your leadership or sales team knows there is like a magical number where like everyone magically cares. Everyone magically gets a concierge. Everyone magically can talk to a VP.

They should have a human experience. And I think what you are going to see is as we are seeing tokens get more and more expensive, it is going to get to a point where enterprise are the only brands that are able to use AI at the level that they are currently churning things out at. And so they are going to have to bring the human back, but they are not going to bring the human back the way that they did. They are going to treat the human as a premium.

So like if you are a VIP customer, you are going to get a human. So we need to think about that and think about what that looks like. And so for yours, thinking about your examples, what needs to stay human? Why does it need to stay human?

There could be a reason that you think that you have that has nothing to do with this, but it works for your use case. Make sure it is on there. And then we are going to move to the trust audit. I want you, and you don't have to do this now because you are not going to have all this information, but I want you to think about the last five customers that you lost.

And I don't care how you lost them. Five last ones you lost. And then we are going to break down where any of these link to a variable, where any of these link to something that, yep, now that I look back on it, we said this, or we couldn't help them, or we wouldn't help them, or they asked for a feature for three years, and we kept saying it is on the roadmap, and then finally agreed it is not on the roadmap. Whatever that is, break those down.

And then who is the owner of that? And when I say owner, I mean who has the power to actually fix it? Because saying you own something and saying you have the power to fix it are two totally different things. We get in a lot of trouble when we try to create ownership.

If I have a metric that I am the owner of, but I don't have the power to fix the things that would fix it or make it better or improve it, then you are just assigning blame to me without giving me the tools necessary to actually fix it, to make it better. So we need to think about that. So take a couple of minutes, start pondering. I will give you like one or two minutes and we are going to keep going.

But is there a pattern? Once you start looking at these? It is like, yep, we are doing a great job with consistency. Response is not good.

Or we do a really great job of building community, but no one knows how to talk about their value. No one knows why we are good. They just say we are great, but they could not refer me to somebody else because they do not know how to speak about me. They do not know how to say what they could get from us.

So think about what those look like. Look for patterns. A lot of what we want to do here is look for pattern recognition. That is huge for us.

Because once you start seeing a pattern, that is a root cause. Then I can start figuring out, go deeper, how can I make this better? How can I actually fix it so that instead of looking for signals I cannot find, because they just went off the grid, instead I can look for our signals. What are our signals telling people?

Are they signifying that you can trust us? We are reliable. You can trust us. We care about you.

Look at your own signals. Look at the signal that you are giving. When you look at your company and you look across all these variables, are you telling the story you want to tell? Are you creating the trust infrastructure that you think you have?

Because chances are there is at least one variable. You are like, yeah, we are just not knocking that out of the park. That is just not a good job. We are just not doing what we need to do.

So next is you are the first people to see this. I haven't even put this on LinkedIn, and I yap on LinkedIn all the time. So like, this is new. I created a custom relational trust canvas.

And so imagine if there was a CX dashboard that operated like a business model canvas. If you ever follow Steve Blanks or anyone from Stanford, they love the business model canvas because it basically takes an entire business model, and instead of it being this like oodles and oodles of pages, it bears it down into one specific page where they can break down all of these main elements. But I don't want that. I need a CX version that is going to really break down everything that we need, everything that we are building, and what does that look like?

So this is the customer relational trust canvas. This at the end of the day, after you have done all this work and after you have talked to your team and you have all consolidated your data and your qualitative and quantitative notes that you are able to come to the table and say this is what we are actually looking at. Some of this stuff is going to be soft and warm and fuzzy and some of it is going to be revenue specific and impact percentages because I can be warm and fuzzy all I want. If I can't talk to leadership about money, it's moot.

So it's going to be a lot of these pieces. So you are not going to have all the answers to this, but we are going to break down how to actually build this and use this for your use case. So how do we use it? I want you to fill this out, and then any major team that you either want to work with or are currently working with should get a copy of this.

So they can start filling it out on their own and see if they are seeing the same friction problems as you, if they are seeing the same variable problems as you, if they think we are doing something great at something but you think you are doing something bad, that misalignment is going to show up. You are going to have your own version to independently input, make sure that you are going in there. We don't want groupthink. We don't want everybody to be like, well, consistency, we are all great.

I don't even need to ask. Nope, we are not doing that. We are individually inputting this so we can figure out. And then looking for gaps.

Is there anything you agree on? Is there anything you disagree on? Those are going to be huge things to hyperfocus on because that is going to give you something to really start thinking about. If you are misaligned in something, then you are looking at your company's work from two different perspectives and two different ways.

That is something you need to get your eyes together on. How can we get this so that it is more aligned? If you do agree on something, that should be a red flag that like, oh, we all think we suck at response. Great.

We need to make sure that we are doing something to actually start implementing what good response looks like. Now, here we are going to set it up. So you have your trust maturity, your trust signals, your trust goals, and your stack gaps. So for trust maturity, that is the scale.

Where are you at in terms of trust maturity? Your trust signals. What does it look like? What kind of behaviors both internally and externally can I look at to figure out if we actually have trust or we have trust that is something that can happen?

That is something that we can build. What are your trust goals? What do you actually want to do? Because we can just say we are going to fix this, but we need goals to make sure that we are actively working and making positive momentum.

And then your stack gaps. A lot of companies love talking about their tech stack and what tools they need, but once the tech stack is together and all assembled, then you have to look and see, all right, well, is there anything in this tech stack that is going to make it harder for people to trust us or is it going to make it easier for people to trust us? That could be where does their data go? Is there privacy parameters over what happens?

If my data is in your CRM, what happens? If there is a breach, what happens? Who has access to this? All of these things.

So your trust maturity level. This is something that I want your gut instinct. So looking at these levels, where would you rank your company currently? Gut instinct.

Immediate, like, instinctual thought. And if you are generative, I want you to talk to me because I doubt it. A lot of people are preventive. They are just good enough.

They care about their customer, but they are not going above and beyond. They are not doing anything extra. They are filled with good intent. But they are not doing the groundwork.

They are not doing the infrastructure. They are not doing those things. Some of the best companies I have ever worked with, proactive. Even they are not getting to generative.

And that is our goal, is to get them there. Is to get them where they can get to that point. Extractive is, and every single person in this room has an extractive relationship with a customer, or with a company. If you have ever got an email from a company and your first thought was, ugh, what do you want now?

That is extractive. You have an extractive relationship with them. You don't trust them at all. Every time I email you, it is like, what do you want from me now?

How much money do you want this time? What events do you want me to go now? What hoops do you want me to go through? That is extractive.

Our goal should be to get towards the end. We should want to be proactive and generative. And then trust signals. I am a massive fan of social listening.

Massive, massive, massive fan. It is underutilized. It is understudied. It should be at the forefront of anything that you are doing.

If you want to do a rebrand, if you want to do a launch, if you want to talk about a new feature, if you want to talk about anything. There is a goldmine in people talking about you online. That is messaging you can copy. That is signals you can amplify.

That is customer stories that have not been activated. But they are out there in public. People are already being influenced by them and you are not capitalizing on them. So think about what customers currently praise.

So what are you good at? What do people say? Are there any patterns there? Is there anything you are really good at?

And then how are you amplifying that? If at all. If you are the best company for blank, I need it to be everywhere. And not you saying it, your customer saying it.

The people who are repeatedly saying it in surveys or repeatedly saying it online. I want to see that over and over and over and over again. That needs to be amplified. Because that is a trust signal that you can, I didn't even ask you to say that.

You just said it about me. And that is amazing. So let's push that out there. Let's get that going.

So what are the top trust signals you want to amplify? And then how are you going to amplify them? Is that a customer story? Is that a brand campaign?

Is that a hey, we see you talk about us all the time. We have a cab. Would you like to be a part of that? Hey, our CEO saw what you were saying on LinkedIn and it meant the world to him or her.

Do you want to talk to him for 30 minutes? They would love to learn more about your experience. We get into the trap of I can't do this because of budget. As someone who has done community and advocacy work, let me tell you abundantly, it always costs something.

But if you don't have budget, you have time or you have access. So if you can't make up the time and you can't make a budget, who can you give access to? Is that a VP? Is that a hey, while you are at Pulse, we would love to see you.

We would love to take you out for breakfast. It doesn't always cost money, but it's going to cost something. Figuring out what you have access to. Figuring out what you have the ability to spend, whether it be access, whether it be time, whether it be budget.

It's going to be huge in making sure you are able to amplify each signal and make these people feel better, make them feel alive and human and respected and appreciated. And then your trust goals. Where are you at maturity wise? Where do you want to be?

You want to be in six months. Because this is not a Christina, I did everything you said and ten days later we have no churn. I'm so sorry, that's not how this works. I wish it was, that would be amazing.

I would be booked for like every second of my life. That's not how it works. It's going to be a slow roll. It's going to be the work that you know you need to do but you don't want to do.

So what does it look like in six months? What does it look like in 12 months? And what does that success look like? Is it people stop talking trash about us on Reddit?

We have a social listening plan. Our churn is down. We have more advocates. All of these things.

And then your stack gaps. Looking at your tech stack, you may not be able to know this now, but where are the problems that are making people feel, I don't really trust you. You're not reliable enough to me. I don't feel a relationship here.

I don't feel connected. I have questions. So privacy, ethics, accessibility, the foundational gaps, especially with the world in a world with AI, privacy and data management is a massive, massive question your customers have whether they are asking you or not. You're using AI?

Great. Well, which part of my data is being fed into that LLM? Is it open or closed? What does that look like?

That is a stack gap that you need to be thinking about. And then from an operations perspective, we are really good at sending out surveys. We are really bad at closing the feedback loop. We're really bad at saying, hey, we saw that you filled out the survey and you had the specific feedback and we absolutely agree with you and because of that we're going to fix this or we're going to add this feature or we're going to do we are so bad at closing the loop.

If you're using a tool for all of that, does that tool do that? If so, how can we start implementing that into your practice? And then intelligence gaps. What are you actually looking at to determine if your customers are happy or not?

And I'm going to go and tell you right now, if there's only one number that you look at, you're already getting it wrong. There is no one magical number that's going to fix you and tell you how good you are. There is no magical number that is a litmus test for this customer is happy or this customer is sad or this whatever. It's not true.

We are very complex creatures. So to say that this number identifies who we are and it dictates how you feel about us in our sentiment, it does the human a disservice. Looking at that, after you pull all those, what are the top five critical gaps to address? Which one's got to happen now?

If privacy is one of your top five, it needs to be number one. It just has to. And then those human touch points. Going back to the other thing that we talked about.

What are the parts that you already identified? What does that look like in terms of onboarding? What are the human moments that happened during onboarding? What about support?

What about high value? And then you're going to assign owners to those key points. How can we get that going? What does that look like?

And I'm going through this because there's a lot. Automation score. Something you're not going to be able to do right now, but I need you to do it when you get home. Talk about your top five automations that you use.

It could be a drip campaign. It can be a survey loop. It can be whatever. But I want you to look at each individual automation and I want you to figure out what is it doing?

Is it actually neutral? It doesn't hurt trust? It doesn't help trust? Is it actually eroding trust or is it actually helping people trust you more?

And be honest. And what is the customer sentiment around that automation? What does that look like? Nope.

I don't know what he did. Black up. Okay. Cool.

Sorry. Had a bit of a coronary. All right. And now we're going to talk about moat.

When you put all these things together, what we wind up having is we talk about something is the moat. Something is the moat. And with AI being added into everything, fewer and fewer companies have moats because the AI is creating tech parity. Someone can very quickly replicate this feature you have because they can vibe code it.

They can make something stand up very similarly very quickly. So the tech is becoming less and less likely to be the moat. So you need to think about what your moat is. And I'll be honest with you, in a world where no one trusts anybody, for me, trust is a massive moat.

You're going to get my money every time. It doesn't matter how expensive you are. Because I know you understand me and I know that you are reliable and I know that I can trust you. So for this, we need to think about what is our moat strength.

So from a relationship perspective, how close do our customers feel about us? If our competitor dropped their prices tomorrow, would they immediately leave? Or would they stay because there's something else here? That's going to dictate your strength.

Then your data and integration lock-in. How easy is it to migrate? How easy is it to work with you? How easy is it to be a part of your ecosystem that you're building?

And then the emotional switching cost. And this is where connection, I think, is the most important. Because I was, I'm a former HubSpot. And I created our HubFans community and HubFans Council and Advocacy Program.

And I built the inbound correspondence program. And my goal was, I want you to feel so loved and returned that you don't want to leave. Because when you leave HubSpot, you're not leaving HubSpot, you're leaving HubSpot, you're leaving the community, you're leaving your friends, you're leaving your peers. You're leaving all the stuff that actually makes you want to stay.

So it no longer becomes a business decision. You now have loss aversion because of what is going to be a part of it. So when you create connection at such a level, I don't want to leave for another vendor because they're cheaper than you or because they have a new feature. I'm willing to work with you to get you that feature that I need so I can stay with you.

Because I don't want to lose this community. I don't want to lose these events. I don't want to lose these people. I don't want to lose the opportunities I get.

I can't lose that. That makes your moat exceptionally strong. And then when you factor in all those together, what would you say your overall moat strength is? How hard is it for someone to actually leave you?

That's important. We need to really stress that. And then speaking of advocacy, how many people love you? More importantly, how many of them feel loved in return?

One of the first things I did when I joined HubSpot was I did customer interviews. And I knew because I lived on the Internet, I knew a lot of the big players and a lot of the bigger fans that we had. And I walked them through what I wanted to build. I wanted their advice.

I wanted their feedback. But I asked them, when was the last time you felt loved by us? I have no doubt you love us. You're a fanboy, fangirl all day.

I see it everywhere. But when was the last time you felt like we loved you in return? And they thought about it. And they not only told me when, they told me their love language and how they did it.

Because there are some people who love that swag hoodie and laptop stickers. There's some people who think that's dumb and is not reflective of anything. But they would love to have a meeting with a VP or they would love to have a meeting with your product team or they would love to be able to give early feedback or be a beta tester. But you need to know, if you want to build advocacy, you need to know what's currently there and then go deeper.

What is their love language? We know they love us, but how are we loving them in return? And then that stack build plan. You know what your gaps are?

How do you fix them? How do you get to the next level? How do we build it? How do we get stronger?

How do we improve it so that our tech stack talks to each other, works together, does everything that we need? And then your target outcomes. This is what leadership cares about. We've done a lot of spreadsheets, lots of worksheets, but this is what leadership cares about.

And we have to have something leadership cares about on the canvas. So if we look at our retention numbers, we look at our NPS, we look at our advocacy rate, we need to figure out what that does in return and how we are building that. And you're not going to have all this data, but it's something that you can start building out with your team. And then business impact.

What does that do to retention? What does that do to support costs? What does that do to the all-important bottom line? Because like it or not, it has to feed to the bottom line.

And how are we doing that? Because in the end, CS has all this data. It is an intelligence function. It has everything it needs to share with the team so that we can fix a lot of these problems.

So I hope you take this back. I hope you ask these questions and really break down what it looks like. Because if you truly want customer brand relationships, we need to understand that it's going to take all of us working together with the data, with the understanding that something is broken, but we can fix it. With that, thank you.

And I'll open the floor to any questions.