Taking your customers to infinity and beyond.
The Space Race was a time of exciting development in science and technology. Did Neil and Buzz actually land on the moon? Who are we to say? (Kidding!) But what we do know is that the push to leave Earth’s atmosphere drove huge advancements in the technology of the time. One of the key lessons we can learn from The Apollo Missions is that with wildly important goals come impressive feats. And that extends to your customer experience philosophy.
Today, we’re hearing from Abakar Saidov, Co-Founder and CEO of Beamery, about how huge goals can launch your organization’s CX into the stratosphere. He shares insights on how to reframe talent acquisition, having data-backed CX, addressing CX fringe cases, and much more.
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"What our business has been doing is not just building much better workflows for the organization, but actually equipping them with the AI and the skills to be able to do that." - Abakar Saidov
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) Neil’s one small step for CX
* (5:13) Beamery’s north stars (not a space pun)
* (7:09) Talent acquisition during the pandemic
* (8:20) A new way to look at hiring
* (11:35) Beamery’s stance on data-based CX
* (14:20) Focusing on the CX outliers
* (15:34) Transforming your company’s CX
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Connect with Abakar on LinkedIn
Listen to The Talent Blueprint Podcast
Narrator: Consider the moon. It is, on average, 238,855 miles from Earth. That’s a 76 hour spaceship ride. At 25,000 miles per hour.
The moon is far. Very far. Much farther than our youth science textbooks led us to believe. This is an audio podcast, so it’s difficult to visualize it to scale. But just imagine…distant.
And yet, when John F. Kennedy looked up at the night sky, the moon seemed so close he could almost touch it.
Maybe he and Jackie O. had watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” one too many times.
CLIP [0:03-0:07]: “You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.”
Or maybe a dog and a guy named Yuri were in his head. Whatever the case, the 35th President had the moon in his sights.
And that worried James Webb. Webb was the Administrator for the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. His concern was less with the moon, and more with the science and technology needed to get there: …solar physics…lunar and planetary science…astronomy…space biosciences. The type of stuff JFK didn’t really care about.
“I’m not that interested in space,” JFK famously told Webb and his NASA colleagues during a White House sit-down on November 21, 1962. Just two months earlier, the President had delivered his iconic “moon speech” at Rice University.
CLIP [0:19-0:27]: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
And five months before that, he proclaimed during a special joint session of Congress, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."
So this revelation was news to them. However, organizations need people like JFK. He may not have been pragmatic like Webb, but he was a visionary. Granted, he was politically-motivated but a visionary nonetheless. He rallied the country, and against all odds, the country responded.
How did he do this? Up to that point, America had only 15 minutes of human spaceflight experience. As one NASA official put it, they didn’t “know a damn thing about the surface of the moon,” let alone how they were going to build a module to land on it.
Well, time to put on your space suits and prepare for blastoff, because today we’re shooting for…ya, you guessed it.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about putting a WIG on your CX. That’s “wildly important goal,” for the uninitiated. Today we’ll hear from Abakar Saidov, CEO of Beamery, the talent lifecycle management company. He’ll share with us how they are creating more human experiences across every stage of the talent lifecycle, as well as making CX a priority. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
Narrator: You know how this story ends. Or rather, the heights it reached. On July 20th, 1969, astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were the first humans to step foot on the moon.
CLIP [0:41-0:48]: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
It was the culmination of The Apollo Program that JFK had set into motion eight years prior. And it was the result of a direct challenge to focus on a single, wildly important goal. James Webb’s valid concerns did not get pushed to the side in the intervening years. However solar physics and space biosciences were never going to propel America to the moon. They were not going to be, as JFK put it, the “dramatic evidence” that proved America’s preeminence in space.
Sometimes, in the face of competing objectives, organizations need to narrow their focus and rally around one galvanizing mission. And Abakar Saidov, CEO of Beamery, knows this.
Abakar: we run our company, what we call four north stars. So, you know, our guiding principles and those are, uh, building a winning team, uh, creating a category to product, making our customers wildly successful and, uh, in, uh, growing the business for the long term. And making a customers wildly successful with something that, uh, is actually currently the, the biggest north star that we, that we run around.
Narrator: It seems we’re all looking to the cosmos for inspiration. So, who is Beamery and what do they do?
Abakar: So Beamery is a enterprise software company, uh, where a talent lifecycle management platform that helps some of the world's largest companies deliver. No much more human experiences for, for talent. And, uh, what we really focus on is unlocking the skills and the potential for, for the global workforce.
Started the company, uh, at the beginning with, uh, my brother Sultan and a friend of ours. Uh, Mike, the three. Bright eyed and bushy tailed. We had, uh, this idea, this, this mission, uh, that, uh, we wanted to really solve, uh, what we think of as the, the passport lottery problem, uh, you know, where you're born as the biggest impact on your earning potential and your livelihoods.
And we thought ourselves as, as immigrants to the UK from Russia, we, we saw firsthand how our parents struggled. Uh, it's really hard to create opportunity and that actually, everyone doesn't have equal access to opportunity. Everyone doesn't have equal access to the careers that they want and deserve.
And we set out on this mission to essentially make the career opportunity, something that was a basic human right. And, you know, rather than pounding the table on protesting, we thought let's, let's think about changing how businesses operate. Let's create something that fundamentally, uh, makes. Experience for humans and for talent, a much more customer centric.
Narrator: As we know, the last two years have changed how we work dramatically. Call it the “The Great Resignation” or “The Great Reevaluation.” Beamery is poised to meet those changes.
Abakar: where we are at with, uh, with talent acquisition, uh, at the moment is, uh, there's been a, a big shift, uh, especially in the last couple of years with, with COVID, uh, where, you know, up until really about three years ago, organizations were excited to just move to the cloud.
So all of those, uh, HR processes that's, uh, he knew and loved, uh, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, all that had happened historically is they were just now done in the cloud, but they weren't any different and people were not better equipped.
The last two years has focused and forced, uh, businesses to really think about their approach to talent, but specifically around technology and data.
And so what our business has been doing is, uh, not just building a much better workflows for the organization, but actually equipping them with, with the AI and the skills to be able to do that. So when say that recruiter. Uh, logs in and says, Hey, I'm looking for X. Uh, technology is now able to help them to say, well, X can look like this.
We can look like this. And actually the people you're talking to, uh, even though they look different, actually are both able to do this, this, this role that you're.
Narrator: When it comes to hiring, sometimes companies don’t realize the skills available under their own roof. Abakar and Beamery have a solution.
Abakar: So for example, you know, I love starting with what if questions, for example, if you said, Hey, As a sales leader, you've come out of a meeting with your CEO and they say, we need to grow a hundred percent next year and you go, oh my, I need a hundred sales reps.
And what if you could go into something that. would say, well, good news. Uh, well, we can tell from your current, uh, talent pool is that you've got a whole bunch of sales development folks that within 12 months we'll be ready for promotion given that development and 30 of those sales reps that you need to hire, you're actually already going to be able to promote from internally.
So you only need to hire. Well, we can also tell you is that, uh, you can, there's a whole bunch of people in marketing that actually have the right skillset. So you can do 20 of those two internal transfer and internal mobility. So now you only need to hire 50 and you thought you were going to be hiring in Boston, but the talent intelligence we can provide you is that it would be much faster for you to hire New Jersey because there's much bigger talent pool available.
And the time to hire in New Jersey is, you know, 30 days faster. Wouldn't that be amazing? Well, obviously, yes, but that's never been available before.
Narrator: “Before” seems like a long time ago. And I’m not even talking the 1950s and 60s. Back then, HR was all about administration and getting payroll & benefits right. Or later, when recruiting was putting out classified ads and collecting hardcopy resumes.
Abakar is referencing modern HR. Think more a couple years ago, with large companies still using first-gen applicant tracking systems.
Abakar: when we first started the company we did about 20 or 30, uh, interviews with ch rose VPs of talent acquisition. And we just asked him, you know, what, are you doing? And, you know, what are your biggest things that you're trying to solve?
And this is where I was a real revelation because you know, at the same time, uh, Self-driving cars, we're building all these amazing technologies and the things we were hearing or things like, Hey, can you tell me what skills are touching my company? And like, I don't even know my employee skills. I have to look on LinkedIn to be able to even tell that because it's not captured anywhere like the existing kind of HR tools only tell you the employment records, you know, the benefits and payroll and things.
And then we said, okay, well, tell us how you, you feel when you roll. Like, let's say you want to hire someone. What do you do? Walk us through this process. And the answer was, well, we created the job and then we tell the recruiter to go start looking. And we then said, then you just fill this job six months ago or a year ago.
Surely you have like thousands of candidates and the answer was, oh yeah, but that's not searchable. And that data is old and it's easier for us to just go and find more rather than look at that and you'll go. Okay. Interesting. And what happens before somebody applies for a job? Where are they? And the answer is they don't exist.
And so there was this like interesting set of problems that we saw, uh, and then a couple of out with, oh, but if somebody internally is really good for that job, surely you should be reaching out to them. And the answer was, oh, that's a different team. And those teams and talk to each other and you're like, oh wow.
There's a, there's a lot of problems. We, we had literally moved from, you know, people resumes to just online resumes and nothing had really changed about how we interpret and how we work
Narrator: Beamery is helping companies make incredible talent experiences and unlock their workers potential. Their customers are among the most innovative, forward-thinking businesses in the world.
Abakar: we tend to work with in a market leaders, pioneers innovators, uh, really forward thinking companies, uh, uh, like. It's very broad on the industry side. So it could be anything from technology to bank, into retail, to consumer goods and infrastructure.
I think the, what we're really proud of is being able to solve really complex problems for the world's biggest organizations. You know, the likes of Amazon AstraZeneca, Disney, Uber, uh, the. We, we, uh, tend to think of, of, you know, our clients and organizations is talent needs to become a strategic priority.
It needs to become something that they're willing to invest in. You know, if, if a customer comes to us and says, Hey, I've 200 employees, can you, can you help me fill 10 jobs? That's not the right mindset. If the mindset is, Hey, I want to put in. Amazing processes and amazing experiences. And I want to make sure that.
talent acquisition, talent retention, talent development are actually strategic advantages for us.
That's the, the right type of client for us.
Narrator: Beamery’s onboarding process begins with a data ingestion and a data audit.
Abakar: So one of the things that we do when we start with, uh, with a customer is we do a, um, a data ingestion and a data audit, and then align that to, uh, you know, their core goals and priorities. And we had a couple of customers where they were, they were shocked to learn that, uh, for example, they had a, this is now maybe seven, eight years ago, a huge push towards hiring female.
And they weren't able to find any or that many. And they were having to pay recruiting agencies to go and help them find talent. And then the data audit showed that they had like 3000 engineers who met all of their criteria that applied for jobs and no one even responded at all. And the ability to even like, do that better of like here?
are people that are relevant, that you should talk to that for, even for getting the good experience.
Even if you were able to do that well, uh, compared to the experience of, I applied for a job and didn't hear back for two weeks versus, uh, I applied for a job and then, uh, the next day, or even the same day, I get a text from somebody saying, uh, Hey, I want to talk to you.
You get an opportunity to speak to your hiring manager the next day. And the, the speed at which we now have to operate has changed dramatically. If we're buying things online and we're expecting this amazing service and, you know, maybe this touches on, uh, the workforce and, you know, gen Z and millennials, like we expect instant feedback and instant gratification all the time.
And some organizations and their, um, and their teams are going to give us that the ones that aren't are going to get left behind,
Narrator: When it comes to CX, Abakar and his team like to focus on the edge cases. The outliers. For them, ensuring customer satisfaction is about executing at a high level across the board.
Abakar: we did a piece of work, uh, last year where we looked at. You know, our support experience is amazing.
Our, uh, average time to respond is super way better than our SLS. Uh, but are there any customers that weren't happy? And of course every organization has some. And so we said, okay, when a customer is unhappy with their support experience, whatever. And you quickly realize that in those edge cases, what happened is, uh, it took us way too long to come to them with a solution.
And then you start unpacking, well, why did that happen? What broke down, you know, the, the five whys and, uh, what you realize is that some process broke and, you know, maybe it was the response wasn't tagged very well or somebody was off-road and they didn't get a respond and that it was missed. And so w we believe, uh, is.
Critically important to provide providing, uh, a good customer experience is not being good on average. It's actually never being bad. And if you're never bad and you really focus on those, uh, your average goes up automatically.
Narrator: But there’s been a priority shift at Beamery. They’ve set their next Wildly Important Goal. It was a company-wide decision that has narrowed their focus on something they want to significantly improve: …CX.
Abakar: So right now, uh, we, one of the way that we manage the, the organization is, um, we use this framework called 40 X, which has four disciplines, Alexa.
Uh, which basically they get the core principle is you have your business strategy and you're doing all these things and you're growing revenue and building product. But if you were to turn one, dial two 11, which dial would that be? And we actually, they decided a number of quarters ago. We wanted the customer experience style to be the one turn to 11, which means it's not just the customer experience, team's job to do it.
It's the whole company's job. And so what we've actually done is every single team in the company, uh, uses something called wigs, wildly important goals to create a school board of how am I in how's my team impacting that customer experience. So for example, you sit down with an engineering team and you say, you're building all these parts.
But what do you think you can do specifically to impact customer experience? And they say, oh, actually we know these five customers that have been nagging us about these bogs and, you know, they're really unhappy. And you're like, great. So this becomes the thing that you do not with all of your time, but you're allocating 20% of your time to something that is wildly important, which is making that customer experience better.
And so that's something that we've, we've really invested in as well.
Narrator: And the investment has yielded results.
Abakar: we've had a huge shifts in all of the metrics we just talked about, uh, even ones as hard to shift as, uh, as MPS. Uh, I think we've had. 30 point increase in NPS over the last couple of quarters. And so it's definitely working. Uh, we're definitely not there yet where we want to be, but as he said to me, you know, we, we have very, very ambitious goals.
Uh, but I think we have, um, Uh, and that's actually some, the last thing I've mentioned is it's so important to celebrate that success because I think that's in, in, uh, running a fast growth company, it's always next play and explain next play. Right. And so something that we think about a lot is how to make sure that even the little wins that you were celebrating really well with the team
Narrator: As JFK would’ve said, “ask not what your CX can do for you, but what you can do for your CX.” Our advice is to put a WIG on it. The day-to-day work will always be there, and should not be overlooked or undermined. But when leaders channel their efforts towards a singular focus - be it impacting CX or lunar impact - it’s amazing to see how we’re able to reach our goals.
One more thing I wanted to note, that Beamery launched a new podcast, “The Talent Blueprint” to share stories of their amazing customers and world’s top talent leaders who are attracting, engaging, and retaining world class talent.
Whenever you make a Wildly Important Goal, you need to make sure that you spend time to promote the results!
Imagine if JFK never did any speeches?
Never underestimate the power of the human voice.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, written by Ben Oddo, and produced and edited by Mackey Wilson, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Jon Libbey. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com.