Facebook reminded me that it’s been exactly 1 year since we (Nathan and I) moved from New Zealand to San Francisco! It’s the third time that we are coming to California to live for an extended period of time, but the first time for more than 3 months at a time. Having been through YCombinator, raised VC funding and with a growing number of happy customers, we can afford to live here for the next few years. The unfair…

“We recently launched a new way of delivering our product and customer churn is a major pain!” — a concerned friend. Since I co-founded customer feedback company Thematic, friends who work on software products often ask me how to effectively use feedback to identify, fix and prevent customer churn. I can relate, churn is what hurts founders the most! In this post we describe how you can use your customer feedback surveys to perform churn…

Interview with Arianna McClain, Director of UX at Cruise Alyona: Arianna, you’ve had an amazing career in such a short time. You worked for IDEO and led user experience and customer insights at DoorDash and Cruise, two of the most successful YC companies. How did you get into this exciting field? Arianna: How did I get here? It was definitely accidental. When I grew up, I really thought only three careers existed. I thought I…

– “Hey, aren’t you the creator of Maui?”– A few months ago, someone I didn’t know approached me at O’Reilly’s AI conference. – “Yes, I am”, I said, excited that someone still remembered my project, and a little sad too… It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve published Maui’s open-source code repository at the end of my PhD, and approximately 5 years since I stopped participating in its community forum. This is a story of…

What do Chief Customer Officers have in common with YCombinator? They are both driven by creating products and services that people want. Last week, I attended the Chief Customer Officers & Influencers conference in Atlanta. I got a chance to give a keynote on how companies can disrupt themselves through customer insights and this post summarizes some of the key points I made. Disruption Silicon Valley – way Coming to Atlanta from a YCombinator startup…

Last month, I had the pleasure to speak with Jeff Toister (CPLP, Author of “The Service Culture Handbook”) on his webinar on how to improve customer service with unstructured data. Contact centers often miss out on many opportunities on how to improve their team’s performance and deliver critical insights to the rest of the company, simply because the analysis of mountains of data they collect may seem daunting. As a result, strategic decisions are based…