Today we’re going to talk about the strategies for driving customer-led growth with Elisabeth Zornes, Chief Customer Officer at Autodesk. We’ll explore how converging customer-facing departments enhance customer success and the role of technology in shaping these experiences.
Elisabeth Zornes is a visionary Go-To-Market executive with a distinguished career defined by her strategic prowess in commercial strategy and digital transformation. Known for her unwavering commitment to excellence, Elisabeth has been a catalyst for innovative growth, bringing dynamic change and innovation to organizations she has served. Her leadership experience ranges from large multinational corporations such as Siemens, Cisco, and Microsoft to pioneering roles in dynamic startups. She is a driving force behind customer-led growth and a visionary advocate for digital transformation.
Currently serving as Chief Customer Officer at Autodesk, a global leader in 3D design software, Elisabeth plays a pivotal role in shaping the organization’s customer-centric initiatives. Her responsibilities encompass a wide spectrum of customer-facing functions. She oversees a substantial portfolio, including managing a $2.5 billion software renewal business and a $80 million Professional Services P&L. In addition, Elisabeth leads the Voice of Customer program, an initiative integral to shaping Autodesk’s customer experience strategy.
Resources
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited.
Greg Kihlstrom:
Today, we’re going to talk about the strategies for driving customer-led growth with Elisabeth Zornes, Chief Customer Officer at Autodesk. We’re going to explore how converging customer-facing departments enhances customer success and the role of technology in shaping these experiences. Elisabeth, welcome to the show.
Elisabeth Zornes: Thank you so much, Greg. It’s delightful to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this topic with you. Definitely top of mind for a lot of people out there. So before we dive in, why don’t you give us a little bit of your background and what led to your role as Chief Customer Officer at Autodesk?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, happy to do that, Greg. So throughout my career, there was one ongoing theme I’m really passionate about, and that is the customer and leveraging technology and customer engagement to drive a better CX. So throughout my career, I’ve led global teams focused on that customer experience and retention. in a number of high-tech companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Zendesk, and now Autodesk. And it’s really about focusing on creating that irresistible customer experience and creating a customer-centric culture for our customers.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great. So yeah, let’s dive in here. And first, I want to talk about defining customer success. But to do that, I’d love to hear, you know, what is your definition of customer success? And you know, what does that mean to you and at Autodesk?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, absolutely, Greg. And it starts with that my belief is customers don’t just buy products, they buy outcomes, and they buy experiences. And when we remember this, we build those lasting trusted partnerships. Now, at Autodesk, it all starts again with a customer. When we look at our customers, these are some of the most advanced designers, builders, and we are helping them to achieve the best outcomes by leveraging highly advanced technologies. So that means you start with the customer and you start with the outcome. You want to really deeply understand what are their needs, what are they focused on, what do they need to accomplish, and then building those experiences to get the most value out of their engagement. And that’s really what customer success at Autodesk is all about, is understanding those outcomes, listening to the customers, and then helping them to get the best value.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and so building on that definition, how does that guide the strategies and initiatives that are implemented across the company?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, great question, Greg. And it starts with deep listening. We have a whole practice that is focused on the voice of the customer and pulling in information through a number of different listening posts. And that could be actual engagements with customers, could be surveys, could be anything that is mentioned on social, email, chat, and so forth, and then driving analytics from that. So that is one of the key pillars. The second one is the understanding that CX really is a team sport. So it’s not just one organization accountable for customer success or customer experience. It’s really about crafting those experiences in a thoughtful way and then engaging the various teams. And that can be across marketing, customer success, the sales team, anybody who has an engagement with a customer needs to be part of it. So it’s really a team sport that we are focusing on.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. So, and I love the emphasis on the team part of that too, because too often I think I hear about companies that are, you know, the customer and, you know, whether it’s customer success, customer experience, whatever it may be, okay, that’s their job, you know, that’s, it’s not my job. So, You know, in addition to that, or even like building on that, you know, what are the what are some of the key elements of delivering an irresistible customer experience that fosters this kind of customer led growth?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, absolutely. And there is some art and science in that. I would say today’s customers are so much more sophisticated, empowered and informed, and they will compare you with the best experience they ever had. So for that, it’s really important that we do understand and are thoughtful on what is that experience in crafting that and building that. personalized and seamless some attributes that jump to mind to really helping address the customer where they are in the journey with the content and the information they are looking for. The other attribute would be empathy and understanding those needs and the outcome that the customer is looking for. And then I would say continuous improvement. So that’s the fun of customer experience. It is a topic that is evolving pretty quickly and gives us the ability to do innovation, agile engagement, agile testing, and innovating jointly with our customers. And that’s a lot of fun.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so to deliver on this, I mean, you mentioned several things there, several components of it. One pretty big component of being able to deliver personalized experience and even even better understanding our customers is having the right data and not only collecting it, but being able to use it. And so, you know, I want to talk a little bit more about that as well and get your thoughts on, you know, what is the role of collecting and managing the right customer data in delivering and creating those effective customer experiences?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, Greg, you’re hitting on one of the core topics that really helps us to create an irresistible customer experience. I often think of data as liquid gold. You want to gather as much as good data as possible, but it only gets the real value once you coin it into currency. And that is the insights, the actions, and the goals. So for example, there are several aspects of data we want to think about for a customer experience. One is data about the customer. So the who, who is the customer, the account, you know, what type of, how are they planning to use your product? In our case, the software, what is it and what do they need? The second part is the how. How do they engage with your product, with your software? And then how do they use it? And both pieces of the data together can actually give you deep insights not only on a reactive side to say, you know, what is it that happened and what could have gone better, but also on a proactive side. So it’s really that art and the science, the science of capturing, aggregating, analyzing the data, and then the art of asking the right question at the right time to really, you know, coin that data into currency.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love that metaphor there. That’s a great… I may borrow that at some point. So just thank you for that. And I think with data, you touched on some interesting things, and I’m going to get back to some of the other parts as well. But I find it’s not difficult to collect data. In fact, I think most companies are swimming in data. They’re just not necessarily it’s not necessarily the right data that they should be collecting, or is useful, or there’s barriers to accessing it and all that. And so how do you know, when you have the right data in place? So you know, how do you measure and assess the effectiveness of the data that you have?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, and that, you know, goes back to the art and the science, right? There is the science of capturing and making sure that you’re thoughtful around the different dimensions and all the pivots of the data you want to collect. And, you know, the usual methodologies one would deploy and, you know, data cleansing and correlation, all the rest of the good stuff. But then there is the art and the art will lead you then to asking the right questions. So for example, it’s helpful to identify out of your data common problems and answers, right? That’s pretty basic, right? So these are the questions the customer asked or these are the areas where they get stuck and what are some of the answers we would provide the most you know, commonly asked questions and the answers to it. That’s, you know, helpful, but it becomes spectacular if you can guide a customer through their learning journey, knowing, you know, what the profile is of the customer, what type of user is it, what are they using the software for, and what is it likely that they would want to do at their next steps of the journey. And then as you do that, you know, delivering insights, that are really game-changing for that customer and then measuring the output of it. For example, if you guide them on a learning journey, are they taking you up on it? Are they taking the insights you provide to them? Are they really making that next click on that learning asset? Are they consuming it? Do I find them more proficient after they do that? So these are some of the ways where you can then measure the impact and say, hey, not only did I collect good data, but I coined it or converted it into insights that really are effective in making a change.
Greg Kihlstrom: collecting and being able to tell a story rather than just saying, okay, we got, you know, this many people logged into the app or, you know, clicked on the button or whatever. It’s like actually telling the story of this customer was able to accomplish this important task. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Elisabeth Zornes: I think it’s, you know, it goes from collection, to analytics, to insights to action. And you want to go the whole you want to be able to make that full swing. And then, you know, really proving to say, you know, along along your digital thread, that, that you created, you were able to get all the way to the action and the impact.
Greg Kihlstrom: So when you look at things like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, what are the tools and the metrics that you consider essential there?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, no, a great question, Greg. And I would say they are obviously the usual suspects, right? Net promoter scores, transactional satisfaction service, and all the rest of it. I consider them as data points on the journey that give you particular insights and that are some of the tools in your tool chest. We are going beyond that because we really want to understand what is the value we are creating for our customer and does it really make an impact to them. So we have a metrics for our enterprise account or with our enterprise accounts. We’re calling it customer verified value. And what that is, is we are establishing at the beginning of the journey with our customers some goals, for example, productivity goals that they want to achieve by leveraging Autodesk software to design more effectively or to drive more effective projects. So we want to be able to establish that jointly with our customers. And once we do that, then we go back in our quarterly reviews, in our QBRs with them and say, how much progress have we made? How much have we moved the needle on a customer verified value perspective? And we are looking at that on a customer by customer basis. It’s a very effective tool to have a conversation as well like, how much are we contributing to you? Which makes it so much easier when you then talk about renewing and expanding, of course. But also as an organization, we aggregate it up. And there are goals and targets I’ve set for the team for that enterprise segment. It’s a $1.2 billion number of customer verified value that we want to generate this year. And that means a value that customer basically underwrite and say, yes, Autodesk, you created that value for me and for my business. And that’s very powerful. As an organization as well, you’ll never have to go back and question like, you know, what’s our contribution? It’s very much there and underwritten by the customer.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and of course, that customer is not just on a single platform either and probably interacting, whether it’s, you know, interacting with customer service or the application itself. And so, you know, the omni-channel customer presents some challenges to a lot of organizations to really make sure that, you know, all the teams and departments and silos kind of know what’s going on where and building that integrated experience. How do you think about, you know, engagement with customers across all those different channels so that they don’t feel like you know, they, it’s a disconnected experience?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, I would say, Greg, this is really the holy grail, right? So to create a digital thread, a digital engagement with a customer that allows them to choose on how you engage or allows you to choose on how to proactively engage. You know, the industry, I think, I would say, is still working on that. So this is a, you know, a work in progress, even in excellent B2C experiences, which sometimes are further ahead than our B2B experience, there are still improvements to be made. For example, you know, I have to log back into the account, into my account to get anything done or to find information and things like that. It doesn’t necessarily seamlessly recognize me. But what that is really is we want to create the same experience, recognize the customer through different ways on how they reach it and pick up that thread and preserving that. And that’s different than multichannel. Multichannel just tells us the customer can use multiple channels, but the omnichannel experience really ties it together. I would say that’s a work in progress across the industry, and we are experimenting and exploring. on how to do that best.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I think a lot of companies are right there as well. And to that end, a lot of times making that seamless connection internally is just, there’s works in progress. Many organizations are undergoing transformations to make that more seamless. But sometimes in the meantime, cross-team collaboration, you know, kind of the people doing some of the stuff behind the scenes can make a big difference. In your experience, you know, in the companies that you’ve worked for, how have you seen ways to improve some of these disconnects from the customer end with just better cross-team collaboration?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, it’s an excellent topic and one I have a lot of passion about. I mentioned earlier, I’m thinking about CX as a team sport. One great example you could compare it with, it would be in the racing sport, a pit crew, right? The racing car comes in, we change the tires. They are different team members with different tasks and different crafts. that all come together seamlessly and rally at the right time at the right place and get the job done and get the race car back on the road. I think it’s an excellent analogy for what we need to do. Similarly, why do pit crews get so great? Because they have aligned goals and they practice together. And then they celebrate their successes. There’s that big celebration at the end. I think all of that is needed. So we need the alignment of the goals. We need the practice. And then we need to also celebrate the passion for the customer. For us in real life, we’re not always a pit crew in one place. So we need that data thread as well that allows us to come together at the right time and capture the information, pass it on, you know, when sales has a conversation with a customer, customer success, for example, wants to know it when customer success identifies an opportunity with a customer, you know, maybe marketing, you know, wants to follow up. And that is that data thread that we need to pull through for our real life pit crews as we engage with our customers.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And I like that the the pit crew analogy as well. And, you know, that that kind of brings to Every member of the team obviously needs to work with one another, but they also need motivation of their own. They need some intrinsic motivation to make the customer first and all that kind of stuff. What strategies should you employ to make customer experience and customer success a central part of every employee’s job?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, that’s such a great point, Greg. And there is nothing more powerful than direct customer feedback. When you think about situations that you might have experienced yourself and then you hear it directly from the customer, what works for them, what doesn’t work for them, that is really dynamite. There is a lot of power in that. So we are trying to, wherever we can, bring customers into the fold, might it be for all-hand meetings, for testimonials, for things like that, and allowing more people, even if they’re not frontline customer engaged, to hear feedback from the customer. The second piece, I learned that during my time at Microsoft, They invited and actually was a mandatory part of your onboarding journey for the product teams, for all of the executives to sit with customer support and listen in to customer calls. So that was a firm part of the onboarding journey. And that allows to really create that empathy. So because when customer call in in that situation, they’re struggling with something in the product. They don’t necessarily call you to congratulate you how great your software is, but there is something that they actually need. And that creates the empathy and the connection to say, what I do as I write the code really matters in the daily lives of my customers. So that is very powerful and that is a technique which is simple to do, but people talk about it and it really is ingrained in their memories on how they felt when they listened into that customer conversation.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I definitely think that I’ve heard that a few places that do that. And I think it’s so such a powerful way of building that, that empathy and building it quickly, especially if it’s part of your onboarding experience. So yeah. So I want to switch topics a little bit here. I always make the joke of I feel like it’s a requirement to talk about AI in every conversation. So we’re going to do just that here as we’re starting to wrap things up. But I wanted to talk AI has a lot of potential. Certainly, there’s a lot of hype, but I believe that it also has a lot of potential. We talk a lot about, on this show and my other show, we talk a lot about how it enhances efficiencies and even helps with some creative endeavors and stuff like that. But I want to focus more this part of the conversation on using AI to build better customer relationships. And so, you know, how do you look at AI being integrated into an organizational strategy to enhance not only the customer insights that help you understand them, but also the recommendations and things that actually make that better experience?
Elisabeth Zornes: Yeah, and it’s, I would say AI is definitely, you know, a rapidly evolving topic. And personally, you know, I enjoy it quite a bit to, you know, explore what we might be able to do with it. The lens we are looking at it is really to enhance human ingenuity. So to empower more people to do better work, to design and make anything to enable the humans to focus on the most strategic, creative and impactful work. And that’s true for our customers and that’s true for our own teams. So, we are using an agile experimentation approach with regards to AI in two areas. One is improving our own productivity and the second one is improving customer outcomes. And what we do is we have actually we did a hackathon with our teams to say come up with ideas on how we might be able to improve our own productivity or enhance customer outcomes. And then there was a list of different projects that came to the forefront that we are now taking with a team of the innovation hub that is taking an active experimentation approach. And there are a number of things that kind of roll through that pipeline and then they are being deployed. And it’s actually a beautiful thing because the team is participating in that process. We’re not doing AI to them. We’re doing AI with them. We’re doing it together. And coming up with those great ideas, they are part of, you know, the ideation that then we have the testing and then the ideas that come, you know, turn out to be successful, we roll it out, we implement it. And that has created a really positive dynamic where people want to come, you know, they want to do more. There’s a hunger to do more and to do more experimentation.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love that. Because I mean, exactly what you just said, it’s, it’s not this, like, top down, like, do AI, and that, you know, and, and people are kind of, you know, or or there’s some, you know, somebody buys a product and that has AI in it. And like, everyone just needs to, again, do AI, whatever that means, but, you know, really involving people in the process. So, yeah, I mean, I would imagine, you know, that also, more quickly shows some of the areas worth exploring more and maybe some of the areas to avoid. So yeah, I mean, that’s that. So how long have you been doing that?
Elisabeth Zornes: So we started about, I want to say, a year ago when we had the first initial AI capabilities. And we did the more basic things initially to say, OK, include AI capabilities into our chat to move from providing content to having a conversation and providing answers. So that in itself was a lot of fun and we continue to build on that. And now we are using AI in a number of other experimentations, for example, leveraging real-time language translation in new and different ways, providing AI insights to our customer success managers to prepare them for the best conversation they could have with a customer, with the right information across so many different data sources. you know, making recommendation about the conversation they could have all the way to providing customer outcomes and value where we give customers insight to say across all the projects, you know, you’re doing in Autodesk or with Autodesk software, where are the areas where you could optimize? And these things are super valuable. We have a lot of momentum around that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that’s great to hear. Well, Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you, maybe two questions for you. I’ll ask two at once here. Looking ahead, what do you see as far as some major trends that are influencing customer experience and customer-led growth? And how are you preparing to adapt?
Elisabeth Zornes: So I would say we see and continue to see customer expectations grow exponentially. And that gives us a beautiful playing field to continuously innovate with new technologies, with AIs and jointly with a customer and do that and having fun while doing it.
