Podcast

Episode: 270 |
Jeremy Bieger:
Customer Insights:
Episode
270

HOW TO THRIVE AS AN
INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL

Jeremy Bieger

Customer Insights

Show Notes

Jeremy Bieger is the co-founder and CEO of Pulse Insights, a voice of the customer platform that takes a new approach to collecting and leveraging customer feedback.

In today’s episode, Jeremy discusses how online voice of the customer feedback technology has evolved, and how Pulse Insights works with enterprise clients to capture insights from customers at the relevant time.

To learn more about Pulse Insights, visit their website: https://pulseinsights.com/

One weekly email with bonus materials and summaries of each new episode:

Will Bachman 00:00
Welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which connects you with the world’s top independent management consultants. And I’m your host Will Bachman. I’m so glad to be here today with a longtime friend of mine, Jeremy beger, who’s the co founder and CEO of pulse insights, really cool company. And looking forward to hearing about what they do. Jeremy, welcome to the show. Hi, well, great to be here. So Jeremy, first, just for our listeners, give us an overview of pulse insights.

Jeremy Bieger 00:34
Sure, so pulse insights is software that helps enterprise clients listen to what their clients and their users want and need and helps them capture preferences so they can make better decisions in their business.

Will Bachman 00:48
Okay, cool. And this is primarily those, those surveys that pop up occasionally when you’re on a website.

Jeremy Bieger 00:54
Yep, we collect feedback and a elegant way in emails and web sites and also in mobile applications.

Will Bachman 01:04
Okay, so talk to me about some of the kind of use cases for that or, you know, and some of the you don’t have, you can sanitize it if you don’t need to keep confidentiality. But talk to me about the types of clients that you’d serve.

Jeremy Bieger 01:20
Sure, so we work mostly with enterprise clients. And the interesting thing about enterprise clients is, by definition, these are clients, these are companies that have been successful, they’ve been able to grow, and, you know, become bigger and bigger companies. But the irony is that as you get bigger, it gets tougher and tougher to understand what your customers want. So, as you know, I grew up at American Express, and that is a perfect example where very, you know, you, there’s so many people that so few are able to directly interact with customers. And of course, that is what allows you to be a better, you know, continue to be a better and better company. And so our our company effectively helps solve the issue where it’s, it makes it easier to get in touch with what your customers are wanting, needing, and thinking so that you can make optimal decisions.

Will Bachman 02:16
Okay, so give me some examples of where in my web experience, would one of your surveys pop up?

Jeremy Bieger 02:24
Yeah, let me let me actually, it’s probably easier to start with, what where the industry came from, and then where it’s evolving to?

Will Bachman 02:32
Yeah, that’s cool. Let’s do that.

Jeremy Bieger 02:34
So and this actually goes back to when I was at Amex, we would often if you did my team manage the Digital Service servicing area, which means when you go into login, and check and pay your bill. And sometime before my time, there was a program set up that if somebody logged in, and say, paid their bill, a percentage of those users would get an email survey 24 hours later saying, Hey, what did you think of the online experience? Would you recommend us to a friend, and that was billed as getting customer feedback, because you’re now able to measure what customers think. And if things start getting worse, you know, you basically are able to measure that, that, hey, something’s going wrong, we should do something. And then furthermore, a lot of times when you if somebody were to given a negative score a bad score, there’ll be a follow up question that said, okay, you know, what, why did you give us the score, and, and so then you would also sort of capture the things that went wrong. So we call that pulse insights, scores and friction, because at the end of the day, you get a score, like, result of an NPS score, website satisfaction score, and friction, which is that you get some open ended feedback or responses about what things didn’t go well. And if you aggregate those, then you can kind of get a sense of people are struggling with x, whatever it is. Okay. So that’s, that’s sort of where we came from. And we don’t think of that as bad. You think of that as good. But we also think of it as not enough. So I guess the, the issue is that seeing a score go down doesn’t really tell you why, in fact, this would happen a lot when I was running this team. And I would just get an email on a blue like, hey, our score dropped, you know, 8%, this month, what happened? see at the top level score, and and so then basically, our team would drop all of our projects and trying to figure out like, did we do we is something broken? Did we launch a test to be launched some new feature that’s not working well, or people don’t like, and we’d really try and draw connection between this falling score and any work that we’ve done, and Oftentimes, we’d be like knee, it was this thing, but we’re not sure it’s really tough to create this linkage between a fallen score and specific work that our team did. And so then you would go through the comments, he’s like, oh, let’s see if there’s anything in the comments. And a lot of times it comes to scoring give you that much The comments are thin, there’s not a lot of data. And the data you do get, it’s not all that strong. So that’s sort of where this this approach falls down. Which is, it’s not a bad thing to have a score to know what people are thinking overall, is it going up or down. But the fundamental flaw is that there’s not a strong linkage between an individual contributor or even a team’s work and, and that score. And that’s kind of where a pulse insights gets involved. That’s what we try to solve. Okay. And so I’ll give an example. Yeah. And I also imagine

Will Bachman 05:50
that if they’re sending an email 24 hours later, you know, only I bet a really small percentage of people fill that out. And yes, people that fill it out is probably not necessarily very representative. So it’s only if you had like a maybe a bad experience, you fill it out, you’re really upset about it still.

Jeremy Bieger 06:07
That’s exactly it. So we kind of kind of have coined about four or five things that are wrong with the approach and being out of context is one of those things, what happens when you’re out of context? Is that, like you said, Your response rates will drop. And even more worrisome is that sometimes people are answering a different question than you’re asking. Alright, so like, imagine that part of the, you know, let’s say payment payment of Bill, going back to that example, is the transaction that somebody fulfilled that triggered the survey to come 24 hours later. By the time somebody gets that, even if they respond, they’re probably not answering about the payment specific transaction, they’re they’re answering something much broader than what you’re asking. They’re asking, maybe answering about the digital experience as a whole. Maybe they’re answering about the brand as a whole. And so Meanwhile, you think you’re getting data about this transaction, but because it’s out of context, you’re actually getting that data? So not a lot of it and not that good. Alright. So, which kind of leads up to Okay, so then what is the better way? Yeah, well, first of all, it’s not a bad a bad thing to capture this kind of data. But it should be in context. So at the moment, that you complete a payment, if that’s what you’re interested in understanding whether you’re doing optimally, that’s a good time to ask. And so that’s what our technology allows you to do. It allows you to easily in certain micro surveys, or just one little question, one click to get quick feedback that doesn’t get in user’s way. And that’s sort of the other the other problem with the old approach is that you tend to get these long surveys. And, and so like, Scott freeze, and actually, we’ve been talking to him coined a great way to think about it, which is, instead of asking a few people a lot of questions, you flip that on its head, and you ask a lot of people one or two questions. And by doing that, you get a lot more data. Yeah. And therefore you can understand what’s actually going on at a much more broader level, and you can go deeper.

Will Bachman 08:12
Cool. So what types of what types of parts of the experience? Are companies interested in having your tool pop up? and ask them a question about?

Jeremy Bieger 08:24
Yeah, that’s a great question. So in the digital world, you often will think about key, either key events that you want to have on your site, or key events that are important, sort of an important part of your service. And the, there’s opportunity in any of those. So give some examples. If you are starting with the on ramp to revenue, if you will, the acquisition flows, the signup processes, or the purchase processes, there’s all kinds of friction, and most of our clients because they’re, you know, their enterprise companies. And oftentimes, that means they’re the mature, and when you’re mature, that means you have the older technology in your stack, and it’s sometimes tougher to make some changes. And meanwhile, you also have high volume. And so if you can make incremental improvements in the the signup flows, it actually results in a lot of revenue, a lot of incremental revenue with, you know, minimal incremental investment. And so optimizing the onboarding, or checkout or signup flows, is one of the first places we often will focus. Okay, and there’s some great examples of our clients getting incredibly into people’s heads about why why they made certain decisions, are they struggling with anything? What almost made them fail, or it almost made them leave, you know, or they make a decision on there, they have to choose between two options. And then after they choose one of the two options, just a little thing pops up. It’s like hey, what why did you choose that option? And what that allows you to do is really get inside your users heads, every step on the RV field of the way, if you will, so that you can create a better and better user experience for them and just systematically remove friction from the signup experience.

Will Bachman 10:16
So tell me some examples of some things that your firm pulse insights has helped discover, on the signup process that then companies have changed?

Jeremy Bieger 10:26
Sure, I’m gonna not give client examples, but I will give generalized examples, right. So we’ve had clients come to us and say, Hey, on our mobile experience, so just mobile, on step three of the checkout flow, we’re seeing huge drop off, you know, so on step one, between step one and two, we’re seeing 5% between step two and three, we’re seeing 6%. And then step in between three and four, we’re seeing 50% drop off on our mobile. And so we’re about to start this huge project to optimize our mobile experience. We know there’s a problem here. And, and we want to help, you know, we want you guys to help us figure out what’s wrong with the mobile experience. So that’s sort of the hypothesis going in your, it’s based on some data, we’re going to fix it, we’re going to invest in some technology to fix it, you help us figure out what specifically we need to fix. What’s interesting is sometimes you wind up learning more than you intend or so in this case, I’m thinking of one of the questions we asked, in addition to, you know, sort of is anything preventing you from continuing, what types of things are wrong? What’s missing? One of the questions that this client asked is, Hey, where are you in your purchase process? I think you’ve kind of early on just sort of checking to see what’s out there. Are you kind of mid funnel where you’re actively comparing options? Or are you here, you’re ready to buy. And, and this was sort of the insight where, what they learned is that people on mobile were just happened to be high funnel, they weren’t there to buy anyway. In other words, you can have the world’s most perfect and frictionless mobile experience, and they wouldn’t be ready to buy, you know, just because of the Remove friction, you’re not going to suddenly make them low funnel such that they’re gonna convert right now. And so what was so interesting about that is it completely changed the investment strategy from let’s have technology builds to reduce friction to Hmm, that’s great marketing content that helps pull users down the funnel. more along the lines of let’s answer questions that they have. Let’s give them the information they need. And so completely change their investment strategy by asking one simple question in the checkout flow. So there’s a kind of a good example of how listening actively

Will Bachman 12:58
will help create optimal decisions. That is so cool, because it really is about asking the right question, if you had just focused on how do we reduce the friction at this stage? You could put all this work into it, but not really move the needle. But that’s exactly it. Yeah, it was more like don’t worry about the friction at all, like do something totally different. Totally different.

Jeremy Bieger 13:19
Yeah. That’s sort of in your previous life. You know, you effectively learn how to interview people, you learn how to ask the right questions to get to the heart of the matter. And I think there’s some element of that in what we do as well. Yeah. So would you recommend this to a friend? Do you think I can get that, but you’re not gonna get bad data, but it’s just not sufficient. You need to actually get to the heart of the matter of what will help you make the optimal decision?

Will Bachman 13:45
Yeah. So in your process, when you’re working with a client on something like this, do you first try, you know, do you first sort of actually try to really understand what’s going on? Maybe try it out yourself actually see all the different wireframes or see all the different screens or test it on different, you know, Android, iPhone, different technologies to see if it even just works? And is there a bit of a kind of a diagnostic process before you recommend? Okay, yeah, fine, we’ll just execute a survey for you.

Jeremy Bieger 14:14
Yeah, you know, what, a lot of times we find that clients have a sense of where they want to look, you know, sort of a sense of something that’s not working optimally, and they want to figure out how to optimize. And they even have a sense of the hypothesis. Like I mentioned before, there’s a hypothesis that the mobile experience is bad because it has a high drop off rate. And so a lot of times clients will come to us with that level of like, the current problem there’s are is this area, this channel, and this particular thing. And then on our side, we actually do do a diagnostic. And a lot of times, a lot of times there’s the hypothesis or give an example of where the hypothesis was wrong. A lot of times the hypothesis is right. And it just reads have the data to support making an optimal decision. So a lot of times a large company having the answer is not necessarily enough, you need to answer and sort of the story and organizational support to do the right thing. It’s a lot of times we’re helping to create the organizational support to do the right thing. I, here’s the data, this percentage of people are saying that this is the problem and you’re on x wouldn’t make it better.

Will Bachman 15:28
That’s fascinating. Can you send it sort of sanitized an example and share with us a case of that, where they kind of had a idea that they should probably do X, but they needed some data to back it up? And then you help? You know, kind of confirm that?

Jeremy Bieger 15:43
Yeah, sure. We think of one that will not give a client away. Okay, so one of our clients, gives offers to their clients, their customers. And it was sort of a semi orphaned project, you can imagine, like, this is a story I’ve created, like, exactly, no, this is actually the story. But, you know, some number of years ago, there was this idea that somebody had, that we should give our clients this loyalty program and offers, and it will make everybody happy. And they launched this program years ago, and it sort of sat there is like semi abandonware. After that. And, and the internal team kind of knew that, but there’s sort of like factions in the company that still think it’s worthwhile having and those that don’t think it’s worthwhile. And, and so the team that is our clients sort of knew the right answer, but needed, needed the data to show whether to either invest in it and make it better, or whether to kill it, and basically focus on, you know, like a smaller set of things and do those smaller set of things. Well, and so, you know, so they, our team had the answer, if you will, but they needed the data to support that decision, and then got it and then made the decision. In this case, it was to invest more to make it great, as opposed to leave it as sort of this middle ground abandonware.

Will Bachman 17:15
That’s pretty cool. So you’ll look at weed. So we talked to him about the signup process? What are some other places that are these moments of truth or important places in the whole digital process that you’ll be asked to, to weigh in on?

Jeremy Bieger 17:32
Yeah, okay. That’s a great question. And so, increasingly, it’s important digital touch points. If you think about important touch points within a customer’s journey, signup is certainly the first. But then right after sign up, there’s this really, you know, risky territory where clients can become, you have a great experience, become the active users and loyal, or just sort of like never quite get the habit. And then, you know, despite the fact you got to sign up, but it doesn’t turn into a high value customer. And that’s sort of a world of early engagement, and seamless onboarding. And so if you can do those things, well, basically all this hard work to get the customer in the door, you can sort of have them be on the right path versus the wrong path. And so optimizing the early engagement process or onboarding process, is the next place that we tend to focus, okay, then after that, it’s about loyalty. So you have a customer, and, and you need to understand what makes them happy what their preferences are. And so we focus very much on the loyalty areas within companies. And someone that tends to be also a little bit more transactional. So we work heavily with digital transformation teams. And a lot of times what that is, is taking processes that used to be on paper, or, or just more like transactional, like turning off paper statements and getting clients to use email statements. And, and trying to understand how to make that process go faster. How do you make digital transformation, transformation happened faster? And so as you see you, you know, even just here, we’ve talked through about four or five functions within a company. The other two that we work very heavily with is product. So how do we build the right features and make the right product that our customers love? That’s a perfect place for customer feedback. And capturing that kind of ID and context is the perfect time to capture the feedback. You know, when someone’s using the digital product or you know, interacting with it. That’s the time to ask. And so that’s what we help our clients do in terms of optimizing their products, and then hand in hand with product is marketing. So what questions do people have as they’re shopping? How do we help answer those questions? How do we help differentiate from our competition and so getting a large base of users to To say what they think helps our clients optimize their marketing. And then I guess I’ll also just say that channels is also important. So we’ve talked a lot about web. But every company we work with doesn’t have their interactions with their clients in one channel. It’s a cross channel. So the same user will interact via app, sometimes, and then via a website. And then of course, they’ll get emails and interact via email. And, and so being able to collect feedback, cross channel is also key. So you’re optimizing different channels as well as the overall function.

Will Bachman 20:38
And I imagine social media as well like social media as well, better. Yep. All right. Talk to me a little bit about how your firm goes to market. So how does your firm go out and develop these large corporate clients?

Jeremy Bieger 20:56
So enterprise, enterprise software is very much a sales driven process, with a little bit of marketing support, to help help educate clients in the sales process about what they can be doing. And ways two ways to think about customer feedback, there are perhaps a little bit new or different than what they’re used to, and why those ways are different. So that’s the marketing support. But the reality is that selling enterprise software is a hand to hand one to one relationship building process that helps match where we match our solutions and software with needs of our clients. Yeah, so very self focused.

Will Bachman 21:43
And can you share anything about that, like what you’ve learned over the years about how that works? Do you, you know, proactively identify within a big cable company or telecom or something? How do you identify who the buyer is? How do you get in front of that person? Do you? You know, just email them? Do you try to call them? Do you connect them on LinkedIn? Like, how do you how do you get in front of the right buyers?

Jeremy Bieger 22:05
Yep. So our process, so growing up, three of our co founders grew up at large companies and sort of understood the buying process from the other side of the table. And the key thing that we learned is that something being a good solution is not enough, it really is about organizational buy in. And the cost is not just the monetary cost of paying the check, and paying the invoice, but rather the cost of switching and taking, you’re taking your team’s limited bandwidth off of something else and putting it on this. And so we really focus on the fact that there’s multiple stakeholders, and they all have slightly different needs. And we tried to help sort of both either satisfy concerns or at least, or show the upside for multiple groups in the sales process. But what they get out of working with puleston sites versus what they’re doing now. And then in terms of the process, it’s a, I don’t know what percentage maybe 40% of our current clients come from existing relationships, people that we’ve worked with in the past and worked well together, and are now at a different company, and, and basically say, Hey, this is part of my, we have some clients that have brought us into three different companies. And so like, you know, that person leaves and joins a new role. And they have a toolbox of things that they know works well, relationships that you know, people that can trust, and you know, like firms they work with, that they will help level up their new company. And so we’re now part of that toolbox that companies bring in to new companies, but it started at the original deal started from personal relationships from working together for maybe about 40%. And so the other, you know, 60%, that we do do some email based outreach to the types of roles that would buy person sites.

Will Bachman 24:06
So email based outreach, and, you know, I’ve seen some people try to get fancy with that, they’ll maybe send it a custom video message or something highly. You know, it’s, it’s so hard to break through on the email, have you developed any, any techniques, or maybe even use your own knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, in terms of that, that approach?

Jeremy Bieger 24:28
Yeah, to some extent, we’ve tried a lot of things. We have some active test and learn, you know, sort of sort of baked into the way we do things is test and learn. And so we’re constantly trying different techniques, and you know, like frequencies and content, and we have done some video content, like you mentioned. And so we’re always trying to inch up our open rates and meeting rates from emails as well. But I don’t know if I have an answer. For what works, you know, nothing so clear that, like, it’s a, you know, it’s a form of selling enterprise software, here’s what you should do. I don’t think I have anything that’s quite that concise. Yeah, or,

Will Bachman 25:11
but it’s interesting that, you know, such a large percentage of your of your business has come from existing relationships shows the importance of that. And then, you know, imagine that the other junk, it’s also probably was really important that you had those use case or those cases to show, you know, that you had, you know, absolute samples to show.

Jeremy Bieger 25:32
Yeah, I mean, understandably. So, if you’re, when you’re sitting on that side of the table, which are, you know, those are the table, which I recall, clearly, you get a lot of, you get bombarded. And, and so your guard is up. And one of the things that can let the guard down is positive experiences in similar industries, from people that you trust, or respect. And so that’s probably one that is really important for us. Yeah. Good clients, we get good clients, you know, but it’s not just the logo, it’s creating value for those clients. And basically saying that we can also help your company that be more customer centric, which is really what we’re trying to help them.

Will Bachman 26:11
So for our listeners, who may not be, you know, necessarily digital marketing experts, but maybe, you know, it’s a consultant who’s serving a company. What are some things, just some basic questions that we should be asking ourselves and asking our clients about their whole digital, you know, their digital world? They’ve created their website, and you mentioned the email and so forth? What are some questions to think about that might suggest opportunities or might suggest challenges? You know, what are the metrics to look at the questions to ask? Sure to kind of start to start discussions on on areas of opportunity?

Jeremy Bieger 26:50
Yeah, okay. So we often will start, depending on how mature our client is, we will often start from ground zero. And Ground Zero is very quickly, just getting a baseline for, say, on let’s just pick website for now, on site. Who are you? Like, you know, what, are enterprises? By nature, being enterprise serve multiple audiences? Are you a consumer? Are you a business? And then within that, what do you what are you trying to do here? What? And then, furthermore, were you able to do that, let’s just let’s just get a baseline and say, you know, this group is struggling, this group is pretty happy. And that tells you that within a couple of weeks, you understand where your opportunities are, then that is really step one, so you can know where to start digging further. And we do similar things in app as well. You know, like, What are you trying to do today? Were you able to do it, and then you find out which things are working well, and which things are working as well. And that really is pretty much as much as you need to get started. Because after that, what happens is, it’s self creating, you know, like, you get some feedback, you learn some things, and then you layer in a little bit of curiosity, which is, Hmm, I wonder if we should ask this or that or learn that. And from there, it takes off like wildfire. Because then you we find that it’s almost addicting to be able to very quickly understand what people want almost any question in your mind. And so we on the consulting side on a professional services we really help do is help guide the learning such that you take all the excitement about all the things you could learn, and we help prioritize it to link it to what do you have control and budget to invest in so that when you learn this thing, you can actually optimize your business you can actually execute? Because a lot of times one of the other challenges, which is sort of outside software, but definitely a challenge in our industry is that having information about what people want is one thing, and being able to execute well with that information and make you know, an optimal decision or, or do the right thing with that data is quite a bit tougher. You know, like, sometimes you got a company’s like, yeah, you know, this stinks, you know, but you need to actually be able to do something to execute, to be a better company. And so we try to help figure out to help learn things where there’s appetite and ability to actually execute to improve the company.

Will Bachman 29:24
Where do you see this whole space evolving? In terms of being able to measure what customers feel about a website? Do you see it continuing to be sort of the one question surveys or are there other things that might even just be monitoring where people’s mouse cursor is, and then you kind of know, based on their behavior, where do you see the space evolving over time?

Jeremy Bieger 29:52
Yeah, sure. So yeah, there actually is a lot of the last thing you just mentioned, which is the linking of data between what you can observe, which is sort of more much more mature. Digital Analytics is a pretty mature space. And you can see what’s happening in great detail. And what’s missing is the context for what you’re looking at. So I’ll give an example. Every marketer that runs paid media looks at, say, a landing page conversion rate. So if you’re b2b, are you what percentage of people that land on the page will submit a lead? If your consumer, what percentage will buy sort of a buy conversion rate or not to cart conversion rate? And so that’s set up in every company in the world has that? What they don’t have is? It’s a 5% lead rate. But should it be? Who is? Who is the 5%? That submit? Who is the 5% that aren’t submitting? So it’s all the context around that number that is missing. And it’s the context around that number that tells you what you should do. If you just know that 5% of people convert and you want to be 6%? You’re like, Oh, I don’t know what to do, like, What am I supposed to do? You know, it’s just, it’s just a number. But when you learn that, that people that are price sensitive, or that say the price sensitive are submitting a lead rate at 1%. And people that say that they are like premium service sensitive or converting 10% boy all the sudden, that becomes a bit more actionable. Because then what you could do is say, oh, I’ll invest differently, I will, I will tell our agency that drives media to our page, I will tell them that they need to start sending more premium service focus users and stop at these price box users. And I will be able to measure them. And I’ll tell them, which campaigns are sending the people we want versus which campaigns are selling, sending the people that we don’t want or want less. Or maybe it basically helps you say, Oh, I get it. Price focus users are converting at a much much lower rate than average, then what if we created content that actually describes a rational value of this product. It’s all of a sudden that this 5% number, which is not inherently actionable, just sort of tells you what’s happening, when you link it with what’s inside people’s minds. And like literally like it, not just run them in parallel simultaneously, then that 5% number becomes way more actionable. And so I think that is one part of where this industry is going, which is much more closely linked. And that’s effectively how we’re built, we’re just gonna have a fundamental thesis for our company, which is voice of customer data is not very actionable as exactly as it stands today. And our job is to make it actionable. So that linking data is one of the key ways to do that. Yeah, finish your Where do I see things going? More and more companies are doing this three levels of learning approach, first is passively allowing users to give feedback if they have it. There are companies that were based on this, like whole companies that were that only did that. And that’s now becoming more of a feature than a company is just one of many ways to listen. There’s that hypothesis driven approach that I’ve been talking about, which is sort of our pulse insights is a sweet spot. And then there’s the measurement and friction part that we started talking about, which is sort of we described as the old way, but it’s not, you know, very careful to say it’s not the bad way, it’s just not sufficient. So we still think that companies should be trending key metrics that they care about over time. And so we tend to do all three of those things with our clients now. And that is what gives you a full picture of what customers want.

Will Bachman 33:42
I think there was a New Yorker article years ago about those little happy buttons that you see in bathrooms at airports and so forth. Like, how was your experience today? What you know, and you occasionally see those at other places as well, maybe at the carwash or something. Tell me what’s your perspective on those? It’s, it’s, it’s, it seems sometimes, like, just very trivial, like you wouldn’t get anything out of it. But I remember that New Yorker article talked about how, if you monitoring in real time you end there’s a spike in the angry face, you can say, Oh, you know, go go dispatch someone and see what’s wrong with the bathroom. Like, tell me about you can have that kind of measurement in real life. Where you see that going?

Jeremy Bieger 34:23
Yeah, well, I think that’s actually I love those things for exactly that reason. It’s very in line with our philosophy and our worldview, which is it takes, you know, users just leaving the bathroom and it takes two seconds, hopefully after they wash their hands to tap the button. And, and it’s not so much about any one person, but in aggregate, you really can see the spikes and you can you can know where to look quickly. And that’s pretty much exactly what we do. Now we’ll say that that’s closer to the score and friction, you know, that you’re only doing you’re only getting a score and you see the score go down. So that’s a piece of what we do, but it’s a really But it uses that micro survey approach where you get a lot of people to give you a little data. Yeah. So we think that works great. Now on web, you have, you know, in a bathroom, you’re not going to actually write something in the kiosk on the way out. So it’s appropriate for the channel. But for web, we can get more, you know, we can ask, you can ask more detailed questions that really get inside people’s heads better, because of the environment because of the channel that these reason.

Will Bachman 35:25
Now, before pulse insights, you started another firm Uber tags. And what what led you to start pulse insights, what you got into interested in this space?

Jeremy Bieger 35:38
Yeah, sure. So actually, both Uber tags, and pulse insights were driven by patterns and needs that I saw at Amex. So when I was at Amex, running the chunk of the website, tags were a huge pain point, we didn’t try to integrate a new vendor. And it would take something like 60 or 90 days to get a simple tag or tag is just a code snippet of JavaScript that’s pasted into a page. So it’s super easy, ostensibly, to to get this live. However, what actually happened was you had to schedule it and wait like 90 days. And what that meant is, if you had this vendor that was going to improve your performance, a whole quarter out of the year, you just had to sit there and wait, despite the fact that it’s the workers, effectively pasting the code snippet. And so over tags allowed you to take that 90 day process and turn into a 92nd process. And it was early days before Google Tag Manager existed. And it’s but basically that that concept is now ubiquitous across the entire web. And so that was it were tags was sold to x plus one Mac, exactly one. And then at the same time, I sort of mentioned that when I was running a product team, at MX, we wanted decisions to make the investment decisions based on customer need. But we didn’t quite have the tools that allowed us to really do that. We had tools to say that whether people were happier or less happier than last month, but not so much about exactly what we should build. And so that really was the genesis for false insights, we basically made a bet that we weren’t alone. And others would also value having large academia access to data at scale about what their customers want and need. So kudos to Amex for is inspiring to companies.

Will Bachman 37:33
That’s awesome. So I mean, that’s a really cool example of how, you know building a company to satisfy a need that you felt yourself. Pretty good strategy. So I guess it’s worked. Yeah. So Jeremy, where if people wanted to reach out, find out more about pulse insights? Where would you like to direct them if they want to find out more about your company?

Jeremy Bieger 37:56
Sure. But they can go to pulse insights, calm, and see some examples and read a little bit about our products, and also all there they can, if they’re interested in seeing a demo, they can just submit a form and we’ll reach out and show off what we built. Awesome.

Will Bachman 38:12
I feel that for this episode, we should you know, ask reader, you know, ask listeners here, you know, if you would recommend this podcast to a friend, you know, you can email me or Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Or what do you want more of what do you want less of when you’re even better? Yeah, that takes it from sort of the friction points to the more context like what what do you want more of what do you want less of on the show? and email me at Unleashed at Umbrex comm Jeremy, it was so much fun hearing about your business. Thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me.

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