Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
In getting ready for this episode, I read an article that came out earlier this year authored by today's guest, UserTesting CEO, Andy MacMillan. He was writing about the company's founding 15 years ago and somehow that placed me the reader back in the year 2007, and that took a second or two to absorb. A decade and a half feels both like yesterday and also a long, long time ago. Andy, the author, chose two different touch tones to set the scene. He wrote that the year marked the debut of Mad Men. The all time great series created by Matthew Weiner and starring Jon Hamm that was set in the 1960s.
Tells the story of the nascent days of targeting the hearts of consumers with carefully curated photography and copy and juxtapose to this nostalgic gazi view of American life that appeared on screen 2007, also introduced us to the iPhone, which with a very different screen ushered in a new era of connectivity and data collection that's now used to hyper target consumers. Our finger movements, our geographic movements, the sounds in our environment around us are all now used to inform others about our likes, habits, and interests. And while Andy doesn't explicitly connect the two. As we're about to find out, the company he leads today was born of that moment by seeing the delta between those two views of the world.
Since then, UserTesting has grown into a global provider of insights with a roster of clients made up the biggest companies in the world. Many of those clients now trade beside UserTesting right here at the New York Stock Exchange following the company's IPO in November of 2021. Our conversation with UserTesting CEO Andy MacMillan, I'm using human insight in an increasingly technological world, the importance of empathy and how UserTesting is giving clients a first person understanding of their target audiences. That's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
Connecting the opportunity is just part of hustle.
Speaker 4:
Opportunity is using data to create a competitive advantage.
Speaker 5:
It's raising capital to help companies change the world.
Speaker 6:
It's making complicated financial concepts, seems simple.
Speaker 7:
Opportunity is making the dream of home ownership a reality.
Speaker 8:
Writing new rules and redefining the game.
Speaker 4:
And driving the world forward to a greener energy future.
Speaker 9:
Opportunity is setting a goal.
Speaker 10:
And charging our course to get there.
Speaker 11:
Sometimes the only thing standing between you and opportunity is someone who made the connection.
Speaker 12:
At ICE, we connect people to opportunity.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Andy MacMillan, is the CEO and chairman of UserTesting, that's NYSE ticker symbol USER or U-S-E-R. Prior to joining UserTesting in 2018, he was the CEO of Act-On Software, held several executive positions at Salesforce, that's NYSE, ticker symbol CRM and Oracle, our ticker symbol, O-R-C-L-E. Welcome Andy inside the ICE House.
Andy MacMillan:
Excellent. Thank you for having me. Love the intro and the juxtaposition. So excited to talk about how those things come together.
Josh King:
Let's get right into it, but first of all, I saw your tweet about the changing nature of Starbucks coffee cup lids and I feel exactly the same way. Do you think that Laxman is going to be able to fix the problem? How would you go about testing that?
Andy MacMillan:
I think this is one of the big challenges with running a global company now is so much of those interactions are not directly with even your employees in the frontline store. I thought about that moment where I was complaining that they have these new lids that just don't stay on the cup. I mean, I've dumped some coffee on myself, which is a frustrating way to start the day. And I absolutely love Starbucks. I use their mobile app daily. I think they've created a great experience in of the order and pick up in the store, but you don't really talk to anybody when you do that. I say hello briefly to the baristas, but when you have these issues you wonder, "How do they get raised? How do they get resolved? How does the company connect with end users of that coffee experience to understand what's not working?"
So I don't know the answer. I don't know that they pick up every signal on social media. I don't know that every person that spills their coffee on themselves registers back at headquarters that there's an issue. I missed the days where maybe there was a feeling that there was a regional manager or something that was hearing from employees in the Starbucks experience that would be flagging it into headquarters. It's a strange world we live in for that feedback loop.
Josh King:
The problem is for our listeners who can't quite visualize what Andy and I are talking about is you get this venti cup of hot coffee. The baristas put the lid on, you take it out of the store, you put it in the coffee holder of your car or you're holding it around and it just isn't tight. And then five, six minutes later you see this dark stain of coffee going down the seam and you wonder, "Boy, did they just miss getting the lid on?" And yet once as sporadic, twice as happened, stance three times there's a real problem. And Andy, there's a real problem.
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah, every time right now. I think there's some kind of... I give them effort. I think it's like an eco-friendly lid. I think they've made it out of some different material but it does feel like the core job of keeping the coffee in the cup isn't really working. So while it might be a little bit better biodegradable, I'm going through a lot of shirts right now that are also having to be pitched, so maybe we're losing ground.
Josh King:
So the core job of keeping the coffee in the cup is what Laxman needs to do with Starbucks taking over for Howard Schultz. What was the value prop and problem that needed solving that brought Darrell Benatar and Dave Garr together back in 2007 from that piece that you wrote?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah, I mean Darrell and Dave were our founders. They are amazing people, really built a great company and culture and I love their founding story. The two of them were running a different business, almost like a Web 1.0 business call it 15, 16 years ago. And what Darrell and Dave were constantly doing was trying to understand what they should put on the homepage of this website that they were building. And the way that Darrell and Dave would solve this problem of figuring out what should be on the homepage was they would go across the street to a grocery store that was near this little office they had rented. And they would find people that were trapped in line with their groceries on that little conveyor belt, when you're waiting for your turn to check out and there's nowhere to go. So these folks were trapped and they would hold up pictures, printouts of different versions of their homepage and ask these people standing in line at the grocery store, "Which one of these do you like better and why?"
And they said the and why was the really important thing where they learned a lot about what people were looking for in that site, that experience. And at one point they said to each other, "This exercise of getting the information is really fun and interesting and maybe more fun and interesting than the site we're building. Could we use technology to help people that are building any experience get this feedback." To really get feedback from their direct users on which things they like and why?
So they set out to start a company which became UserTesting. And the idea was, "Can we use all these connected devices that people have to reach out to them and ask them to share their experience of what it's like to go through so many of these experiences, often these digital experiences where maybe you're not able to see that person shopping at your store, going into your bank, browsing different car choices, whatever that might be. How do you understand what it's like to be that user?" And that's the mission we've been on now for the last 15 years.
Josh King:
Yeah. So one can appreciate exactly how you feel with a onsite tester with two shopping bags in a store. I spent some time when I was working in DC at Penn Schoen & Berland, one of the original big polling companies. We started doing A/B testing both in person and then online. But certainly to figure out how to scale that is the golden ticket there. What did Darrell and Dave do before we get too deep into UserTesting's story, how do they define human insight and how does the company use technology to actually go out and collect it now when you're not two bags in a store?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah. The idea of human insight is that while it's nice that we collect so many data points about our customers. They have human insight is what's it like to actually see someone go through an experience. And there are so many great businesses where when you listen to the founder of that business, talk about the thing they've created, they talk about this focus on what it's like to be a customer. There are these great stories about Walt Disney just sitting in the park observing what it was like to be a Disneyland with your family, what worked and what didn't work. One of the observations that's famous from Disney was realizing that if people wouldn't walk more than about 15 steps to throw away garbage before they would just set a cup down. So when you go to Disneyland about every 15 feet or so, there's a garbage can and that's why the park is so clean.
And that was because people would sit and observe people's behavior, that was not a data point they gathered in a database, that was observed from seeing people. There's a great story about the founding of Home Depot where the guys that started that business said they would sit out in the parking lot and if people left one of their early stores without a shopping bag, they would go ask that person, "What did you not find in the store? What did you come here for today that wasn't met as a need inside our store?" How do you do that if someone's just leaving your website? So this idea of that human insight is caring about what it's like to be a customer, understanding that you are not your customer, Your customer has a different set of expectations, different set of life experiences, a different set of behaviors than maybe you might have.And understanding what those things are is really important.
And I think ultimately it's what leads to the intuition that amazing companies have about how to build things that maybe their customers never imagined. Those aren't data points about what happened in the past. That's an intuition about needs for your customer in the future. So I think human insight is this complimentary concept that analytics is really important. I'm not an advocate that people should stop doing analytics. You should absolutely have a really strong analytics strategy. But I think this idea that the best brands, the best companies, the best leaders understand their customers as people and have an intuition and a sense about them is really important. And that's really what we call human insight.
Josh King:
When you joined the company, Andy, in 2018, how had it matured over the decade from that startup? You were now basically 11 years into the story.
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah. The company was originally founded as a website. You went to, you'd go to usertesting.com and you would get one UserTesting video back from one user at a time. Think of it, you're a small startup boy, wouldn't be great if we could have two or three people go through this thing and share it with us. Part of the beauty of the platform is how fast that feedback happens. Most of the videos come back in 20, 30 minutes timeframe, 80% in two hours. So you go to the website, you get one at a time. So that was the way the business was built initially. And what happened a couple years before I joined was companies started calling up our business, calling up our founders and saying, "Hey, I don't want to buy one or two of these. I want to wire this into how we're building experiences. I want my development team every time they're doing something to get this feedback. Every time I'm launching a marketing campaign."
So we were of pulled from a product market fit into the enterprise software space, so people wanting to make this a platform that were running internally. So the team leaned into that. But it's interesting, the DNA of a company can sometimes be different than the product market fit direction. We had a DNA of a company that was a website building company that was getting pulled into being an enterprise software company. So the company had started that transition. The founder, Darrell Benatar, again, just a wonderful person, one day I said, "I didn't really set out to start an enterprise software company. We've built an amazing enterprise software company, but there are probably people that run enterprise software companies that know how to have a demand gen and have a field sales team and all these kinds of things." So Darrell talked with our board and through some connectivity that he and I had, we got introduced and we were talking about what to do next with the company and how to continue to grow it. We started talking about maybe if this is something that might be interesting for me to come do.
Josh King:
I read about, I guess one of your first entrepreneurial efforts in Bath, Michigan. You were I think at 12 trying to build a DJ business and most of us know of DJ D-SOL, the performing name of Goldman Sachs's CEO David Solomon. Do you remember your DJ name and any regrets about leaving the record spinning career behind as you joined your new career?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah. I think my DJing was a lot less artistic than maybe DJ. So I was really hired by... We were in a rural school district outside Lansing, Michigan, and we were going through our student council budget trying to decide how many school dances we could have and the biggest expense was paying the DJ. My dad is a bit of a techie like I am and so we had probably overly large stereo at home because one day my dad and I were sent out to buy a new VCR and we came back with a giant stereo system. My mother was not entirely impressed with our purchase and I thought I could bring my dad's stereo into the gymnasium and I got a lot of CDs and people on student council had a lot of CDs, I'll be the DJ. So I wasn't like a record scratching DJ, I was maybe an actual CEO DJ. I was just running a business that played tunes so that we could have a few more dances.
And interestingly, it turned out to be a common problem in the area where a lot of the school districts, again it was not a very wealthy area, had the same, "Hey, we just need to hire a relatively cheap DJ." I really enjoyed doing it. So I started just DJing around at local schools and high schools and things like that, just showing up and eventually bought a bunch of professional stereo equipment and ran a business through college actually, doing weddings and other things. I wasn't exactly at New York nightclubs with glow sticks, scratching records. I was just making a little side cash and enjoying getting to buy really cool stereo equipment.
Josh King:
So you're sitting around there at the outskirts of Lansing, Michigan, you eventually go to the local school, a lot of us know it as Michigan State. You studied telecommunications during the height of the.com boom. I'm not sure exactly how old your kids are now, Andy, but what do you see in business today that represents for them the same inflection point for growth that Web 1.0 offered you when you were looking at it?
Andy MacMillan:
I think the thing right now that I find so fascinating is the speed of change. The rate at which somebody can create a brand, create a business, create distribution. Your ability to assemble a business right now is fascinating to me. You see these rocket ship companies that are able to create a presence, identify a market need, fill that need quickly. So I think a lot about this not quite creator economy. I know unfortunately a lot of my sons friends and stuff, when they ask what they're going to do for a living, they say they want to be a YouTuber. But I think a little bit bigger than that.
The idea that you can create a brand now, a global brand and service a whole bunch of needs around that brand and do it really quickly, I think that's really fascinating. I think that's very different than when I came up through the college world and I was thinking a lot about going like working for a big company and learning how it works. You can create a big company now if you know how to create a brand and really engage consumers. I think that's a really different world that they're coming into than I went through.
Josh King:
That world that you went through, Andy, after getting out of Michigan State, your career took you across the world after gaining an appreciation for travel while studying abroad. Did your experience of the World Cup in 1998 also give you an appreciation for both football and the upcoming games in gutter?
Andy MacMillan:
I was lucky enough to be doing a study abroad program in 1998 that was based in Paris, France, and for those of you that are soccer or international football fans, that is when France hosted the World's Cup. And I happened to be in Paris the night they won the World Cup in '98. It's pretty magical to win the World Cup while hosting the World's Cup. I think there were something like 6 million people on the Stade de that evening. I was one of them. It was really amazing and the games, we watched a lot of them just that were going on in and around the city was magical. So it both gave me the travel bug. So early in my career I spent a bunch of time on the road traveling around the world working with customers, but I also really have a love for World Cup soccer as well. So I'm excited about the games coming up.
Just this summer when my family and I were over in Scotland, we have an office there, we went and saw local derby between the two Edinburgh teams. Really enjoy European soccer and will be rooting for the US team when we go into the World Cup.
Josh King:
Do you see a correlation between the conversations and sports about the impact that data is having on the human element of gameplay and what you see happening with companies who are interacting with their customers?
Andy MacMillan:
I do. I think one of the interesting things with sports and stats is I think advantages really get closed quite quickly. I mean we see it in so many areas where a new young pitcher comes into the major leagues and they're amazing for half a season and then everybody seems to figure it out. And I think a lot of that's data driven. We start to figure out what are the tendencies, what are they doing that other people aren't doing? I think it's a really interesting way to see the competitive levels of accelerating. You think of how records are being broken so fast now and I think there's a lot of data to learn how to do things in a different more effective way. I think the same is true in business.
A bit as I was saying earlier about what my kids are going to wander into, the ability to build an amazing business can happen so quickly, but the ability for somebody to come in and compete for that business also happens so quickly. So I think gaps get opened and closed more quickly and I think that's the dynamic that we live in that I hope ends up being great for consumers. I mean I think that's part of what is maybe is exciting is getting to see market needs met more quickly.
Josh King:
You said in one of the interviews that we found that you put your headphones away during the Clinton administration, ironically to take a job at EDS founded by Ross Perot who ran against him and former President Bush in 1992. How did you get that first opportunity and how did your career progress from there?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah. I was interested in IT and I did a minor in computer science at Michigan State and so I was a mediocre Java developer maybe at best, but really found technology to be interesting. But when you're in Michigan, the auto industry is a big part of the ecosystem. I grew up in a GM family and EDS was really the IT supplier to General Motors. They were owned by General Motors at one point and then spun back out. So I joined EDS was after the spin out had happened, but I worked on the General Motors account essentially building large scale web applications for General Motors in the very early days of chevrolet.com and gm.com and things like that. So that was where the IT world was at when I came out of college was joining one of these big global SI and getting to work on these really fascinating technology projects or really about how to take a previous generation of technology and make it available on the web so consumers can access it directly.
In some ways, maybe one of those first digital transformations. We were writing applications that would help you do things like configure and find a vehicle online, which now seems like simple obvious thing you could go do, but in and around 2000, the idea that you could actually go locate your next Chevy pickup truck online and know which dealer it was at and what was on the car, was actually pretty hard tech to go build and wire into all these legacy systems. So that was the early part of my career was getting to go in and work on these interesting technology problems.
Josh King:
When did you first become attuned to the maybe problem that companies were over-reliant on data at the expense of getting real hard human customer feedback?
Andy MacMillan:
Well, I think even those first websites we were building were really interesting. We were building all of these new web applications for General Motors, but all the constituencies deciding what we should build didn't really include the end customer. We had our legacy IT teams telling us what was possible. GM works with a bunch of creative agencies, I'm sure they still do. We have these big almost Mad Men like creative agencies and advertising agencies that were telling us what these experiences should be like. You have the intricacies of these dealer networks. Before the web, the only way you bought a car was you went to a car dealership and so you had this vested interest of this previous model for building or buying a car. And all those folks were getting on a table trying to figure out what these experiences should be like.
But at no point in time did it seemed like we were going out to prospective customers and saying, "How would you want to shop for a car if you could do it online and how would that work?" So a lot of decisions that were made in those early days and to GM's credit, I think they have a very customer centric model now. So again, we're talking 20 years ago at this point. But there were little things like the first thing you had to do in that first iteration of those websites was enter your zip code so they could tell you which dealership you would buy from so that dealer could tell you what the price of every car was like.
How fascinating is that? No matter where you logged in, you had to put in your zip codes, they could tell you what the cars cost in your neighborhood versus the idea that, "Hey, it's a global market now." So I thought that was really interesting and it really felt like we were relying on the constituencies around the table and a lot of legacy data about how people bought cars was driving how we thought they would buy them online. And I think we were a little naive that the model would stay the same but have a website on the front end versus the world we live in now.
Josh King:
One of the great lessons that one of my prior CEOs taught me, his name is Joe Plumeri, he'd get up on stage and he'd say, "Our job here is to do two things, get new customers and keep the customers that we have happy." And I'm sure that dovetails into UserTesting's mission to bring both the human perspective to the digital environment. In both of those jobs of getting new customers and satisfying current customers, what products do you offer to help with both aspects of running a business?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah. I mean the real core capability that UserTesting provides is this idea that you could log into a SaaS platform, which is our core product. Pick an audience of people that you want to go speak to. So who are your people? In the example of our Starbucks cup earlier you might say, "I'm looking for Midwesterners who maybe get coffee every morning and to get the drip coffee, whatever it is. Some demographic of people and most product teams or marketing teams use audiences, and the ability to then target that specific audience very quickly with an experience you want them to walk through and they opt in to recording themselves and he would do that very quickly. Most of the feedback is in an hour or two.
And then we use a whole bunch of machine learning to go through all these high powered videos, we call them customer experience narratives that come back to see the moments of insights. You can actually see real people showing you the experience of what it's like to maybe mobile order that coffee on the way to work or what it's like to put the coffee in the coffee holder or whatever that might be.
In my case of General Motors, it might be somebody who is in the market to buy a car who doesn't maybe live near a dealership who wants to go through and configure a pickup truck and you want to see what that is like. Maybe you're looking for somebody who's not very technically savvy to go through that experience. And the value of that is you get to then walk a mile in the shoes of your customer, much like you would've done in the old days of how we ran more in person businesses. That used to be people came into your bank every day and talked to your employees and told you what they liked and didn't like and you'd build an empathy with your customers of understanding what they're going through.
I was in a dinner recently with a customer in Europe and they were telling us about one of the things that they do is they create highlight reels, video clips on our platform of their commercial banking customer talking about the decisions they're making for their family while they're in their banking app in these challenging times, like the choices that they're making. And they're able to take those videos and show that to their executive team and their board and it just connects them with the empathy of what people are going through when they're a banking customer. That not everybody is managing their high end portfolio stock assets. Some people are just diving between food choices or what they're going to spend their money on.
So the ability to really understand that, and I think that's part of what these digital experiences done is we feel in some ways we're so close to our customer. You can go to any conference and somebody will hold up their phone and say, "Our customers have never been closer to us. They carry us around in their pocket." But the reality is also, it's a little bit like being on the freeway next to somebody. They're right there but there's two panes of glass between us and I don't actually interact with that person. And that's what's happened. We've been disintermediated from really seeing our customers, from really knowing what it's like to be them. So our main product is the ability to capture that experience using that same technology that separates us.
Now imagine every one of your customers is connected with technology where if you asked them, they could share with you and show you what it's like to be them using your product. To be them making that decision while they're in their banking app. So what we're really providing our customers is really empathy at scale. The ability to build that intuition, to get back to that idea of human insight, to really understand your end customer and their needs and what it's like to be them.
Josh King:
What's the customer's incentive reward compensation for participating?
Andy MacMillan:
So we have a large network of folks who have put their hand up and said, "I would love to give feedback to brands." We call that our contributor network. Anyone can go on usertesting.com and put their hand up and say, "I'd like to be one of these contributors." You go through a little practice test and tell us a little bit about yourself. If you do that and you're on our contributor network and you answer these questions, again you have to be the audience people are looking for. We provide a gratuity of about $10 typically for a 15 minute or so session that you do giving feedback. That can vary based on how long the feedback is and style and things like that.
We also have the ability for our enterprise customers, the users of our product, not the ones giving the feedback but the companies looking for feedback. They can also do this with their own customers if they want. So if they wanted to send an email out to their top flyers and say, "Hey, we're building a new mobile app for our top flyers, we'd like your feedback." They can do that and use our technology to capture that feedback as well.
Josh King:
I was at an event over the weekend attended by a lot of members of the law enforcement communities. Certainly my eyes were open looking around at their uniforms, many of them now wearing body cameras. I looked at them and say, "Boy, those are looking smaller and smaller than I remember from the first police equipped body cameras that I saw." Where is wearability and going beyond the phone but whether it's glass affixed or body affixed, wearability to making the technology go to the next level.
Andy MacMillan:
As we continue to see technology accelerate and I think that's a good example of some of that acceleration, our goal is to really say how can we use this technology as a feedback loop to help companies? So I think that will help when people maybe say want to buy online but pick up at the store. Well, how do I show you the store experience, the in person experience right now? A lot of our customers will use their camera phone. So they'll go into the store and they'll show our end customer like, "Hey, here's what it's like to walk into the pickup line." Or they'll do an unboxing video, what's it like to have it arrive at my doorstep? And they'll use their camera phone to capture that. I think some of these wearables will make that real world experience collection a lot easier.
And one of the things we do focus on that I would want to call out is all of the feedback on our platform is 100% opt-in. The people that are sharing their experience, they know that they're recording themselves and that they're giving this feedback to someone. So while that might seem obvious to some, I know that some people are like, "Are you recording people when they go through an experience? It's like, "Well yes," but they're recording themselves in an opted way. So I think of the body camera or the glass camera being the same mindset but we would very much want to take an opt-in approach to like, "Hey, would you like to show us what it's like for you to, I don't know, cook a meal at home using a meal kit that's been delivered to you?" Using glasses might be a really helpful way to do that, to see that experience, but that user would then again still be saying like, "Hey, I'm going to turn on and record this experience to share it with, for example, this meal kit company of how I prepare a meal."
Josh King:
In 2018 as you were looking at the company and getting ready to come board, what did you see as the biggest challenge to scaling it and why was going public here at the New York Stock Exchange always the ultimate goal for you and the board?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah. One of the things that we feel really strongly about is that we are largely awareness constrained. Now every business, I'm a huge fan of theory of constraints. Maybe that's because they came out of the auto industry world and everything is a constraint management strategy there. But I'm a big believer in theory of constraints. And for us, I think the main constraint is awareness. I think UserTesting and getting this feedback is obvious in retrospect. Once you sit down with a design team or a marketing team and you say, "Hey, wouldn't it be helpful if at the speed of agile development you could get feedback from your users on the thing you're going to build before you use it to build a better thing for them?" Everyone says yes and then they say, "How do you do that? How can I get that feedback so quickly and how can I analyze it? How can I share it?" We answer all those questions. People say, "Okay. I should be doing this."
So I remember thinking, if I can take this company and help brand it and market it and talk about it and tell this story, I think there's a really important capability we can bring into the market. So that's been our mission. I think being a public company helps with some of that visibility. So that was part of the reason that we looked to take in the company public last year.
Josh King:
So the company comes public last year, at the same time, the company's rapidly scaling up and the issues that you were just mentioning earlier about opt-in and data privacy become all that much more of a focus for folks. The concerns around data collection is due to this overzealousness of companies that are often looking to mine information as much as the risk of bad actors. How do you view data privacy and decisions being made by governments and companies to move away from the all powerful cookie? We're heading toward a cookie list future. How does UserTesting view that?
Andy MacMillan:
I view it in two ways. One is I do think there's a regulatory aspect and a privacy aspect and I think there's a bunch of people involved in doing that. And some of that I think is just about transparency. People want to understand what's happening with their data and things like that. But I think a bigger one, it's of the second thing I would think about is I think we've reached a trust tipping point. I mean, Apple was leading on this with the iPhone I'd say a year or two ago where they weren't marketing privacy because the regulators said they had too. They were marketing privacy because as consumers we started to lose trust with these brands tracking us all over the internet.
I don't want to shop for a pair of shoes and then have it follow me around the internet. That doesn't grow brand affinity for me. I feel in some ways violated when that happens. So I think companies are looking for a way to build real meaningful relationships with their customers. I think it goes back to that core issue we talked about initially, which is I don't actually interact with my customers anymore. They don't come into my store, my bank, my auto dealership, whatever it is, how do I build a real meaningful relationship with them? And I think we just went too far. We thought like, well, we'll collect all this data and we'll personalize their experience. And I think as consumers were like, "I didn't give you all this information expecting to have this relationship. It doesn't feel like it's building trust."
So what we've tried to do is say, is there another way to build that trust? And it might sound a little old fashioned, but part of the idea is if you want to know what people think of your experience, if you want to build a great experience, maybe ask people for their feedback and then listen to them. And there's this strange debate now in the cookie world about moving from what's called third party data to first party data.
And again, I think it's slightly misplaced. I don't know that as a consumer, my main concern is who's collecting all this data about me? It's not like I'm saying to the brands, "I'd be happy if it was just you were collecting all the data versus you getting it from somewhere else." I think the question is why are you trying to collect all this data about me? What experience are you really trying to build? For me, if you're using the data in a way I expect you to and it creates a great experience, I'm on board with that. If you're using the data in a way I didn't expect you to, and it's not overt and it's not really part of my experience, it's just for your marketing efforts, I'm really less interested in that.
So I think there's a real opportunity for brands to step forward and be privacy first, but to be customer first. And again, I think that to me is an exercise in listening to your customers not tracking your customers. And I think that distinction's going to become very important.
Josh King:
Go out and listen to your customers. After the break, we're going to listen more to Andy MacMillan, the CEO of UserTesting. We're going to talk about the role of empathy on the bottom line and managing a post COVID workforce. That's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 14:
When you hear the word sustainability, you think too big. When you feel you have to do something you think, too complicated. Hold on, think about your decisions, get closer. Those that are big or small for you, your decisions and other people's decisions. Those that have to be made every day. Step back a little, think of the decisions that add up to many more. There are millions of decisions that change everything little by little for the better.
Now think about who can help you make better decisions and there we are. So that what you save the planet saves too to keep moving forward without leaving anyone behind. And now when you hear the word sustainability, you think opportunities. At BBVA, we're putting new solutions at your fingertips in order to build a greener and more inclusive future. BBVA creating opportunities.
Josh King:
Welcome back for the break. I was talking to Andy MacMillan, the CEO of UserTesting about his career and the growth of the company. Andy, the one year anniversary of UserTesting's IPO is fast approaching. Curious, what was your biggest learning this year as a public company CEO?
Andy MacMillan:
I think a lot of our learning this year has really been about our customers and what they're going through. I mean, we're in a challenging market dynamic right now and a lot of companies are thinking about pricing changes, they're thinking about distribution changes and we're really just leaning into how do we help them do that? So a lot of what we've been doing is creating templates and capabilities to help people collect that feedback. I think a lot of it is about walking the walk, which is we say listen to your customers. We're very focused on listening to our customers and trying to help them manage through this current environment.
Josh King:
One of the new developments in your first year as a public company CEO is the publication of your book User Tested. What was the process of writing it with Janelle Estes? Was the content itself tested and what have the results been from having it on the shelves?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah, we did test the content. So that was a fun use case for us getting some feedback on the concepts and some of the things we're putting in there. It's been a really amazing experience. I'm very thankful to our customers. We have over 30 customer case studies in the book from amazing companies who allowed us to tell their story of how they listen to their customers and get this feedback. The reason we wrote the book was because Janelle and I... Janelle's amazing, she's our chief insights officer. She's been in this industry quite a long time and really understands how companies can collect this kind of feedback and what they can do with it and what success looks like. We felt like a lot of companies were telling us there's now this platform where I can go get this feedback quickly, how do I make it part of my company? How do I make it part of the ethos in the company that we're listening to customers, that we're building this empathy?
So we had started trying to write some articles and things and it just turned into a book. We're like, "There's a book here of how do you do this?" And most importantly, how do people do it well and what does that look like? And that's why again, these customer case studies were such an important part of the book. I think it's nice to hear Andy and Janelle's opinion on this as people who work in the industry. It's a lot more interesting to hear how real companies do this at scale. So that was the genesis of the book.
Josh King:
I'm not sure if this is in the book Andy, but among the many case studies that I found when I was cruising through your website, is the work that you've done for entertainment companies like NBC Universal and Fandango in that space, is there a solution that you found to help companies like Fandango sell more movie tickets and get moviegoers back into theaters after COVID?
Andy MacMillan:
Yeah. A lot of what we learn when we work with our customers is that their markets are always changing and some of these changes are disruptive like COVID into the entertainment industry. Some of these changes are just disruptive from the outside. So a lot of the media companies we work with have been going through this digital challenge and distribution challenges and it's easy for companies that are going through those challenges to get insular that the problem is internal. And a lot of the problem is often just what do customers want? How do you take the assets that you have available to you and organize them in such a way that is most valuable to your customers? And if you can get organized around that strategy, you can often win market share.
So I think for these companies that are going through either a digital transformation, they're driving internally or they're managing a disruption that's happening externally, it can be quite comforting to have a vehicle to just get out and understand from customers their point of view. And that's the role we try to play. We did this a lot with folks through the COVID period where we had airlines asking customers about what would make them feel comfortable booking an airline ticket in the future. We had hotels testing their safety messaging to make people feel comfortable that when they stayed in a hotel, that the hotel cared for their wellbeing. We had fast service restaurants testing their DoorDash experience because all of a sudden 90 plus percent of their business was being delivered through an app that they don't build or control. So what does their menu look like and how do people...
So this idea that you can take comfort in decisions, even hard decisions, if you can hear from your customers, if you can look them in the eye and understand that this is where our customer's going, this is where we need to take the business, I think that's really powerful. So that's what we try to stay focused on for so many of these companies.
Josh King:
A lot of companies, as we've been talking about some of them, Andy, have this overreliance on big data to fill in the missing information that to create the complete image they have in their customer. Why do you think most companies are getting it wrong by not adding humanity to their marketing efforts?
Andy MacMillan:
I think there's a couple reasons. One is I think in many cases they don't know that they have other options. Again, if I don't talk to these folks anymore, all I have is this data exhaust I get from the things they're clicking on. Well, then I better go find some gold in there. So there's a lot of people mining for gold in the data exhaust of their customer base because they don't know that they have other options. I think there's the challenge that in many ways the data profiles you're building about your customer are often about what they've done in the past. Spreadsheets are not particularly good at predicting the future and where things go and again, outside impacts and competitive landscape changing.
So I think there's a reliance on it because it feels like what people have. It feels futuristic. It's like, we have all this data. Data's the future. We're going to do machine learning on the data and we're going to learn what people are going to do. People are strange. They don't always do what the machine learning thinks they're supposed to do. People's attitudes and preferences change. So I think one of the things we tell folks is again, don't shut down your big data strategy. Don't turn off your analytics. You should care about those things. But when you see things start to happen, you wonder why are people doing that? Go find out through talking to some of them. When you're trying to understand how people view some market messaging, you need to dig in and find out why people feel that way.
One of my favorite examples was we were working with a customer that was telling us about running A/B tests and they're like, "When we run A/B tests and it's close, we were really interested in why. But more and more often we're getting interested when it's not close." So if 85% of people prefer message A, we better really dig in and find out why did group B not like message A? Is there a message that for a certain audience just doesn't resonate? Are we accidentally offensive to a group of people that are maybe or a minority that people we sampled? But we definitely want to know that before we go out with message A.
So even in things where you have clear cut winners and the data tells you A is going to perform better, you might want to know why. You might want to know what is it about beta didn't connect with people? Why did B connect with a certain audience? That might be really interesting. There might be a there. So the ability to really go in and talk to people, and again, understanding your actual customer who's different than you, I think is a really important piece of the puzzle. Even if the data is leading you to that conversation and great, go find out why.
Josh King:
Understanding your customer who's a lot different than you. In other words, empathy. And you've talked a lot about the importance of the chief empathy Officer. Andy, empathy typically considered a soft skill, but why do you believe it has real world value to companies?
Andy MacMillan:
I think more and more were finding that hard and soft skills come together and they're both important and that companies that build great products, great experiences, great consumer loyalty, have both the incredible operational excellence that we think of as hard skills, but they also have the empathy and soft skills of building trust and understanding and connectivity and belonging. And I think that's true when you talk about connecting with your customers. I certainly think that's true in building a company. People want to work today in a company that's mission driven, where people feel like they belong or they feel like they're part of something.
We have so many choices on where to work on which brands to work with on who to buy from. No longer is it the days of talking about growing up in of a smaller part of Michigan. The ecosystem of perspective jobs was relatively small. The choices of where I could go shopping and what I could buy was relatively contained and that's just not true anymore. I can buy from almost any brand in the world with a few clicks of a button and have it sent to my house. I can hire people from all over the world. Those people can pick to work at companies that are all over the world.
So people get to make different choices now and they're going to make choices that reflect on where they feel like they're going to be treated well, where their values line up with those folks. So I think those things are really, really important now and I don't know that enough leaders are thinking about that. That really comes back to empathy. It comes back to acknowledging that not everybody's like me, but I can try to understand their perspective and think about how to create space for them to also feel comfortable.
Josh King:
As we begin to wrap up here, Andy, you've spoken about the post app era first. What defined the app era and how has society begun to leave that behind?
Andy MacMillan:
Well, I think the app era is this idea that everything had to be an app. I mean 10 years ago it was like every company was like, "I don't know what digital is, but we need an app. We need to be somewhere on your phone with our logo and it's an app." And I think that's changed. I think now a lot of companies are thinking about what's the end to end customer experience? And that again might include a physical component. It might be coming into a store. It might be picking up something in the store or whatever that might be. It might be in an app that you don't own. It might be that you're connected into another app. It might be that they're using the Expedia app to buy their flight but they don't have to be using your app.
So I really think it's about laying out a customer flow that's customer centric, that thinks about the way that our customer wants to go through that experience, that thinks about what's the right vehicle for getting the job done. That might be a different app that you don't own. That might be a website. It might be that they're in person. It could be any channel that makes the most sense for that customer. I had a whole interaction recently with my healthcare provider, it was just over text. They didn't ask me to install their app. It was great. I don't thankfully spend an inordinate amount of time in my healthcare provider. So that was a really great digital experience. But it wasn't about their app. It was about them interacting with me in a way that made the most sense for me and it was actually quite convenient.
Josh King:
I think what you're describing, and a lot of companies are wrestling with it, we see headlines about it, we see companies completely renaming themselves around it. We're talking about Web 3.0. How do companies need to reimagine the customer experience to be successful in a Web 3.0 world?
Andy MacMillan:
I think of Web 3.0 as being this opportunity to have very immersive experiences to go beyond this idea of simply one pane of glass where you're interacting. And again, I think there will gimmicky approaches to doing this. I think that's natural in the adoption curve and kudos to people that are working to be innovators. But I think it's really then rethinking those experiences. I'll give you an example. I read an article a couple months ago about a grocery store chain that was building an entire metaverse experience and the metaverse experience was that you're basically walking through a grocery store. I don't love walking through the grocery store. I don't get up on Sunday and go like, "Big moment today, I'm going to get to go walk through the grocery store."
So there's probably some immersive experience around getting groceries. It might be more like I want to understand something about a product. Maybe there's a way for me to of see it in a more immersive way before I buy it. But I don't know that I want to feel like I'm walking through my neighborhood grocery store but just with doggles on in my kitchen.
So I think it'll be early attempts to take what we already know and turn it into immersive experiences. But I think as we work through that adoption curve, there's going to be really interesting use cases that emerge that is like, "You know what? I'm trying to, I don't know, fix the fence in my yard and I've got this thing I'm trying to figure out if it would work on the fence. Maybe there's a way for me to sort augmented reality overlay that onto the thing I'm working on." And go like, "That would work or it wouldn't work." And maybe I'm still going to go pick it up at the store because I need it right now, but I'm not going to drive over with the part in my hand and try to figure out if this would work.
I think those are really interesting use cases and I think the companies that, again, do this from a customer perspective who think through, what's it like to be somebody who's, I don't know, at home working on their fence and might need something from the hardware store? How would they value getting to go through an immersive experience to understand a product or an option that they might have? I think that's a really exciting use of technology when we can of flip it around and drive customer value.
Josh King:
This episode is being recorded as UserTesting is preparing for its Human Insight Summit in New Orleans. What are you personally looking forward to about the summit?
Andy MacMillan:
I think there's just something special about getting together with folks and so we're going to be doing our first ever global user conference. We did a few regional user conferences the year before COVID and we find that our customers love getting together and just sharing the things you're doing on our platform. We have such a flexible platform that lets people do so many interesting things to see and understand their users and they really benefit from just talking to each other. So I think in a lot of ways, we're always excited about product announcements and things like that at big events. And I'm a product guy so that's certainly true of me.
But ultimately, I really enjoy getting to see our customers just sit around a table together talk about what they're doing, everything from what they're doing with our product, just what they're doing in their jobs. I mean, that's emerging area of being either a UX researcher or a designer or a marketer that really cares about getting this feedback. It's just really rewarding to listen and talk about what they do and how they're doing it, and share best practices and tips with each other.
Josh King:
Well, Andy, it's been great talking to you. Enjoy the big easy and let me know what feedback you get from the Human Insight Summit.
Andy MacMillan:
Sounds great. Thank you. I appreciate it and really enjoyed the conversation today.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Andy MacMillan, the CEO and Chairman of UserTesting. That's NYSE ticker symbol, U-S-E-R, USER. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweeted us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash with production assistance in engineering from Ken Able and Ian Wolf. Marina Stanley is the Director of Programming and Production for ICE and the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offered to sell. A solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
