#11 Elizabeth Maughon: The Future of Customer Experience in Ad Tech
37:01 Share

So we can teach anyone to do what we do, but we want to find people who have that servant heart that want to make an impact on their clients. And they're driven by making sure that they are delivering good results, that their clients are happy, and that client satisfaction is the win for them.

It's okay to say you don't have an answer as long as you say you don't have that answer, but here's what I'm going to follow up with you or when you can expect the next piece of information or even a plan of what we're going to do next. Just solving those basic things that you as a customer want to have when you're interacting with an organization is hugely important.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm speaking with Liz Mahan, the Chief Customer Officer at Simplify, an ad tech company that provides programmatic advertising solutions and workflow software to over 2,000 media teams, agencies, and brands. I

I'm really excited for this conversation with Liz because we're going to dive into how this innovative company is simplifying and optimizing advertising workflows with AI and how Liz is leading the charge on ensuring her clients are satisfied. So Liz, thank you so much for coming on the show. We're so happy to have you. Thank you, Lauren. I'm pleased to be here. Great. So you're the chief customer officer at Simplify. Tell us a little bit about what that role entails.

Well, as the Chief Customer Officer at Simplify, it entails a lot of different aspects. We're covering the client experience all the way from their initial introduction to the platform after our sales team has reached out to them.

reached out, educated them on our offering, and then determined that we're ready to move forward. We take those clients, we help them learn specifics of how to execute their goals on our tool set, as well as ensure that everything that they do from speaking with the customer service team members or

Getting optimizations on their campaigns, pulling reporting, and then their post-campaign wrap-up reports are all exactly what they need so that they can, in turn, generate great results for their clients. That's great. And I love that there's a dedicated C-suite role to that customer promise and that customer mission. It always makes me happy when I see a CCO in a seat. Yeah.

Yeah, we're thrilled to do it. And it's something that our co-founders believed in right from the beginning. As we grew the organization, we wanted to make sure that our customers were the main focus of what we do. And so the tool sets that we create from a technology perspective, the workflows that we use all come from what is the best customer experience that we can provide. And so because of our co-founders vision for this platform and our customers'

and how we could impact them. That's why they wanted to have a specific role dedicated to this. I love that. So tell us a little bit about your customer approach. We'll start high level and then I'll drill in in different areas.

Yeah. So when you think about a customer, essentially, we all want the same things. We all want to feel like we have knowledge of exactly what's coming, what to expect, and that we are clearly communicating with our counterparts, whether we are the customer or we are the service provider, to ensure that our goals are met. And so any decisions that we make are coming from that point of view.

But one of the foundational practices of that is what we call servant leadership. And this is a widely used term coined in the 70s, and many organizations use it. And servant leadership allows our teams to do what they do best.

So when we're working at Simplify, we are aiming to give our team members all of the tool sets that they need, the education they need, the exact teams, workflows, softwares, all of those kind of things to ensure that they can give their strategic knowledge

their assistance in campaign builds, reports, analytics, anything of that nature to make sure that our clients are reaching those goals. And so we're taking care of our internal team to make sure that they're able to take care of the clients. That's great. And it's something, you know, I've built and led client facing teams in a number of different companies. And that's

The thing I ultimately came to was if we're not really helping our people serve the client, then the client won't be served. Right. And we really need to empower and engage the people on our teams in order to really drive those end customer results.

that we really want. Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. Our client success teams have incredible knowledge, foresight, and I mean, the institutional knowledge that they have built together over the course of the last decade really enables them to be creative in solutions and to make sure that even if a customer has a bit different story from something they've experienced before, they're

that they're able to meet those needs and construct a solution for the client, even if it's not something out of the box, that we can be creative and drive towards greatness for that client or their end brand.

Great. I want to shift gears a little bit into your client relationships and how you approach each client. I mean, I assume each client is quite different in what it is that they're bringing to the table. How do you approach supporting a variety of customers?

We have a few different ways that we support our customers. And of course, it starts with our service levels. With our managed service, we provide our clients a variety of different support. We have clients who come to us with years of expertise in programmatic advertising that basically need us to...

take their assets for their campaign, build it, and hit those KPIs. They want the reporting, the insights, and they're good to go. They require little explanation or education. We also have managed service clients that are new to programmatic advertising that need extra help in understanding what we do and how we do it.

And so our approach to those variety of clients is to meet the clients where they are in their journey. And we have clients that come from all different verticals, whether it's automotive, healthcare, real estate, big agencies with national campaigns, small local agencies that are working with even mom and pop shops that are down Main Street for us.

So with those different experiences, it's about really listening to your customer to understand what their needs are, what their goals are, and what they need to turn around to that end advertiser, brand, agency leadership to make sure that they are hitting their goals so we can support them in that way.

With our self-service clients, we offer the same mentality, right? Meet them where they are. Our self-service clients want to come in and they want to build campaigns in the platform, pull their own reporting, things of that nature. We'll provide them with all the training that they need up front and as they move through their journey. When they begin with us, they may not use all of the tool sets and features that Simplify offers, but

And so if there's new features that come out or other things they want to use, we're going to help them with that. We're also going to reach out with suggestions along the way to help our self-service customers know, hey, you've selected this particular tool set that we offer. It's working great. Here's ways to augment the campaign, drive more performance, hit your personal goals that you have for the campaign, and make sure that we're available to talk to our clients if they have additional questions, things of that nature.

We offer ad optimization support to any client of any service level, no matter what. We want to make sure that if our clients ever need our help, no matter if they're managed service or self-service or any type of service in between, that we are going to help make their campaigns work for them. So we'll go in and we will optimize the campaigns ourselves.

or we will offer our suggestions to a client. So really it's about meeting the clients where they are in their journey and helping to work with them in the way that makes the most sense. And again, that then creates those very strong relationships that can withstand challenges that come across, whether it's a campaign that doesn't perform well, particular delivery issues that you might come across, or other bigger challenges that we've all experienced in our tenures, right?

For sure. Meeting the client where they are is such an important statement. And it's also easier said than done. How do you go about really understanding where the client is? Like you've been, you've been at Simplify for a long time, so I'm sure you've seen many evolutions of this, but I'm curious to know how, how have you approached meeting the client where they are?

Well, when we get started with the client, our sales team has a wealth of information. And so we ask our sales team to have an internal call with us and do a handoff of the information that's available. And at that point, then we also do a call with the client to make sure that we're going over all of the information that's been gathered and executing on whatever the right next step is.

With that, we also have a culture where we share information between the individual pods that we have. So there's never just one person assigned to your account at Simplify. You may have a lead person who's your main account manager or your main person that you communicate with on your weekly calls or monthly calls.

But also, there's a variety of people that know about your account and they can read the documentation on the specifics. And we keep incredibly detailed documentation to make sure that if someone is sick or has an emergency and needs to step away or they're going on vacation, that they can do so with knowing the rest of the team can come in and take care of that account in the same way they would.

That information is not just what is the KPI, but how does our client want to be communicated to? Do they prefer a phone call if there's a challenge or an email with detailed information? How quickly should we be reaching out to clients at the end of a campaign? When are they expecting to have a particular report communicated?

And of course, like any organization, we have standard operating procedures, but we also have clients that have requested changes to those for whatever the reason is. And so there's vast documentation that allows us to support our team members in that way.

We also make sure that throughout the conversation with our clients from the beginning into the campaign execution stage, the campaigns running and then the wrap up reports that we have our team members communicate not only that pod, but also our leadership of the client success team. We keep our sales counterparts in the loop.

We make sure our ad optimizations team is in the loop with what's going on. So we really function as like, I would say a quarterback, if you will, making sure that everyone understands the plays. Everyone's on the same page. There's a lot of communication there. So really it's about making sure that you're listening for those facts that are important to your client. You're documenting those, you're communicating them clearly. And that's how we make sure that we're hitting the goals. That's great.

Right. I'd love to get into some tangible examples if you're open to it, just for our listeners around how do you go about actually implementing the mindset of servant leadership within an organization, which I know is a big question, but if you can entertain us with a little bit.

For sure. I think it starts with a few different aspects. One is the leadership of the organization. And I can tell you that our CEO, Frost Prelo, leads with a servant heart. And that goes towards our clients, our internal team members, and our impact on our community. So that's one way in which it starts. Everything, decisions that we make, relationships,

new processes put in place, new tool sets that are delivered. All of those decisions are made with a servant mindset. The other thing that we do is we have, um,

We look for those soft skills, I'll say, from our client or from our client success team members. We want to make sure that they have empathy, that they can communicate well, written and verbal. Because I always say we can teach anyone to do what we do. When we first started this company, there weren't college courses that talked about programmatic advertising and auction-based buying.

transparent data, all those other types of elements. And so we taught, we have a whole program when our client success team members come in where we teach them the ins and outs of what we do and help make sure they're educated not only on our platform, but also the ecosystem that we work in. And so we can teach anyone to do what we do, but we want to find people who have that servant heart that want to make an impact on their clients. And they're driven by making sure that

that they are delivering good results, that their clients are happy. And that client satisfaction is the win for them. It's about both the process of getting there as well as the goal. But I find when you hire more empathetic people, they're not just looking at, did I check the box and win the KPI? They're thinking about how is this actually feeling all the way through and really intuiting what this customer is going to need at any given moment.

which I fully agree empathy is such an important skill. How do you...

really nurture that within an organization? Because I find it can be difficult sometimes where, you know, we're really KPI driven. And I would imagine in programmatic advertising, it's kind of what it's all about, right? It's like, are we driving the results? But how do you keep that sense of empathy and the importance on empathy within the organization so that people are kind of thinking about the path as well as the end goal?

There's a few different ways in which we think about empathy and its impact on the KPIs. So yes, you're absolutely right. In programmatic, those KPIs, the campaign measurements, that's the end goal, right? But it's also about relationship building, right?

And we start that with the organization internally. So we have built pods that have a team leader who's the account director, as well as other levels of team contributors, all the way from senior account managers to account coordinators.

And these individuals partner as a team with our sales counterparts, with our ad optimizations team in order to drive an internal sense of community. So when you're working with a partner and they have a campaign, whether it's hitting the goals out of the gate or struggling and need some additional assistance, our teams work together as this unit where we make sure that we're doing everything possible for the client.

We also like to anticipate the next question for those clients so that we can give one-touch resolutions. So, for example, if we are sending out a report to the client on how the campaign did, we're trying to also ensure that we're giving all the insights that are necessary for that client.

as well as answering additional questions. So if I can tell you that a particular store drove 50% of your sales, what's the next question that you're going to ask me? One of those could be how much more money can we spend in advertising for this location?

Or if there are certain keywords that drove particular actions for the KPIs, then how can we extrapolate on those to continue to drive better performance, right? When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is simply not an option. That's why their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, are available to help you succeed with expert guidance and implementation support.

every step of the way. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services.

We also have a non-punitive environment. And this is something that's been big since the creation of our company. When people make mistakes, and they will, we always try to learn from those mistakes as a team. And so there are other organizations that I'm sure all of us have experienced or heard about where you make a mistake and it immediately results in a write-up or a termination.

And I always tell this story how in my first three months at Simplify, when we were a baby startup and not profitable, I set a campaign live with no...

data attached to it. So essentially, I just bought the open internet for five minutes. And our development team happened to see that campaign go live in the spike in spend. They shut it down and told me... I told Frost, our CEO, what had happened via text on that day because it was a weekend. It

And having not known Frost for more than three months, I was quite nervous that my job was on the line at that point. Because to spend $20,000 in five minutes when you're not profitable, I mean, $20,000 in five minutes anyway is a big deal, right? And so I came in on Monday and, of course, immediately went to Frost and apologized and told him, you know, I won't do X, Y, Z processes again. And these are the changes we'll make and things like that.

He's like, well, what did you learn? And I'm like, well, obviously not to set a campaign live without this data attached to it. He's like, no, I mean, did you pull reports? Did you look at like the domains we served on what the click through rates were, and you know, just various elements that we could gather from this mistake.

And that really sets the tone for the type of organization we are. And it's a fun story that we tell to a lot of our new hires, which, you know, lets them know mistakes are going to happen. But we're here to ensure that we learn together and that any process changes we need to make, whether that's documentation or limitations on the software or other things like that,

We're going to make those as a team and we're going to learn and move forward because anybody can make a mistake. They all happen. And it's those responses to those issues.

I now say that the team has Liz-proofed the system so that nobody can make those types of mistakes before. So the team's all set on that front, but making sure that we have an environment that's supportive of our internal team members and also allows them to respond in kind to our clients is important to an impactful experience. I would also say that it's important to be mindful of what our clients are going through.

So we saw this particularly when the pandemic hit in the summer of 2020. We had quite a few agencies and other partners who were experiencing layoffs within their organization. And of course, as these companies needed to still maintain their advertising, we offered our services to make sure that we could fill in the gap for those clients.

so that their campaigns could keep running, their brands could keep experiencing the benefits of the advertising we were delivering for them. And what we found by that goes back to my relationship comment earlier, where...

Our clients felt that trust because they were put in a situation where they had to trust us and they had to ensure that we could pick up what was left from the reductions in force that they were experiencing through no faults of their own. It built strong relationships that also helped to withstand any issues, challenges, even mistakes that happen on campaigns. Because again, people are going to make mistakes, but it's how we respond to them.

Oh, you just said so many important nuggets that I want to underscore, I think.

The first one being the way that internally, the internal value of collaboration and empathy is clearly seen externally as well. And that's how it ends up going. If you have an environment where people are supporting one another and showing empathy to one another and accepting that mistakes will happen and all of this internally, it's

it really sets the tone for how we're going to communicate with clients externally. And I think we have to start with those values on the inside in order for them to show up on the outside.

The second thing I want to just highlight is one like props to you for really putting yourself on the biggest mistake ever pedestal and having everybody, everybody see because it's true. Mistakes can be made. Sometimes they're really big and sometimes they're small. And I think that non punitive mindset really helps to make people feel safe and

You know, I'm, you have probably heard of the study around psychological safety. Have you? The Google study? Yeah. If you haven't, if you haven't read it, just Google psychological safety at Google. And there's this whole beautiful report about this concept. But I think what's so important is that you can make mistakes. We can feel comfortable taking risks and doing things with the knowledge that we will always learn from it. And we will have support in learning from it.

And I think it's just such an important thing because, you know, earlier I was telling you that I've been painting this weekend and it's this massive lesson in trying something and making a mistake and then learning, okay, well, I'm not going to do that again, but I'm going to paint over it and try it all over. And it's really this good practice of practicing.

And knowing that this is part of the human experience. And I think when organizations say this is not part of the human experience, we need it to be exactly right all the time. You're really just putting people out and putting them in a place where now they're afraid to come up with new ideas and be innovative.

So I, it's, it's such an important thing that I think, you know, we really need to have a shift around and it's great to hear that Simplify is really leading the charge in this way. It's like, I didn't think of myself as an ad girl, but I don't know, like I want to get a job there. It sounds amazing. I think you just said something else that is really a selling point, let's call it, to, you know, the, the culture of empathy and, and,

acceptance of mistakes is that if we can accept our mistakes and share our mistakes without feeling afraid to do so, everybody can learn from it and the organization will progress. Like the fact that these guardrails come from the mistakes that we've made, if no one's willing to say the mistakes they've made, those guardrails don't get put in place and more mistakes happen, which just becomes more complex as you grow. So yeah, that's, it's just so important.

It's true. And adding to that, if you think about an organization and the psychological safety that you can provide to your team members, um,

If you don't have that psychological safety within your department, it's going to take you a lot longer to find the source of an error, right? So if someone doesn't feel free to share, these are the three clicks that I made that led to this error, you can't easily go through and fix that. If you have to mine that data through...

a process of days and weeks, it's going to take a lot longer. And that really prevents the innovation within your own company. So I think it's important to let people know mistakes are going to happen and that's okay. Most people don't aim to make mistakes on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. But we can all come together to learn and then make changes so they don't happen going forward. Yeah. Again, another reason why empathy is so important, right? Listening to all those things that really matter. Yeah.

And I'd love to talk a little bit about tooling because the documentation piece can be heavy. What tools do you use to do that? And then I'd love to ask some questions around AI as well.

Sure. So there's a variety of tool sets that we use to communicate with our clients and keep this documentation. And, you know, one of the great ways that we started with this process was Google Docs, because this is an environment where you can share information freely. And we've augmented templates over time that show what pieces of information are vital to collect.

and roll those out to the teams. We also do periodic reviews of all the information that we collect as well, making sure that there are no other changes that need to be made. Is there a better way to communicate this information or record this information? We also utilize various Slack tools to ensure that we have documentation and communication in the right places. So

There's a lot of different processes, but regardless of what we're using, it's important. And I want the listeners to know we still go through our processes at least twice a year to make sure we are efficient. We are using the right information. And if there's changes to be made that we send those out, we also engage our team members with the collection of that information.

Because our team members will come up with some really cool, innovative ways to communicate and capture information. And we allow them to share those with the team, having the leadership support and say, hey, this is a great new way. You know, we should try this and see if it works. We found a lot of success from our team member innovations. Mm hmm.

Can you tell me a little bit more about how you're going through and auditing your processes? Because I think this is such an important thing. You know, as we grow, we bring on new clients, more learnings, processes can get more and more complex. That actually drags the team down. So I'm interested to hear kind of how do you approach that bi-yearly audit of your flows? Yeah.

I have some wonderful experts within my department that do the heavy lifting. And I can't say enough about my teams. Right now, we have a client success education team that

That team in particular will work with heads of various pods, right? The team leadership, the senior account managers to see what they are doing, how the processes are working and listen for challenges that they're experiencing. And then they bring groups together to problem solve those types of issues.

And then we can roll out trainings department wide over Zoom, in person, or just have the documentation provided so that team members can utilize and replicate any changes that need to be made. We also track everything. And of course, you can't track everything.

track literally everything, but we track as much as we can. And we look at metrics over time to determine how our clients are changing their communication styles, their needs to ensure that we augment our workflows to meet that demand. Our customer base has changed quite a bit over the last 12 years, and we've seen ebbs and flows in different ways. And those different types of changes mean that we have to make

responsive workflow changes. So it's being open to change. And I will tell you that anyone on the client success team that you talk to will say, we change all the time, whether it's changing where we sat back in the day, we would change seats every once in a while. We would change the makeup of the individual pods within our teams, um,

We would change processes. I mean, the whole gamut. And really, that helps us be responsive and stay nimble to make sure that we can respond as necessary. So it's a process of mindful dedication to ensure that we are crowdsourcing the right information and also looking at things from a high level business perspective to making

Make sure that the workflows that we have are appropriate and efficient, not only for our internal teams, but also our clients. Customer and employee effort are really big things to think about. How much effort are we making our customers go through to get the result? And I think it's important to also think about that from the team side of things.

I wanted to talk a little bit about AI because I know we're talking about change and AI is the hottest topic when it comes to that. So how are you harnessing AI within the Simplify realm? You know, AI is a sensitive topic for a lot of teams. And I think the first thing that you hear when you think about AI is

Will I still have a job? And so when we approach AI at Simplify, we make sure that we are creating safety for our teams. And so one of the first things that I've addressed when talking to our teams is AI cannot replace the human element of what we do. AI cannot build relationships with our partners. AI cannot understand the inflection in the voice of

of our client who is in crisis or who is elated because of the results that we've provided. So we need all of our team members, their expertise and their knowledge. We at Simplify are approaching AI from a standpoint of how can we make our clients' experience easier and our team members work easier.

So there's a few different tool sets that we've used, whether it's been a plugin into a CRM system or other types of tool sets that we've overlaid into our processes. But to figure out how to get clients quicker responses...

And so even if we have a client that sends us a question, AI tool sets could say, here's a suggested response. We may use that and then augment it. And then we also go through and create shortcuts for responses for frequently asked questions so that we can add those things in quickly, right? So I think it's really looking at the available tools that you have as an organization and figuring out what clients need

from you and how can you utilize and leverage your resources in order to get it. I also think that there's a lot of AI tools that are generative AI right now, meaning they can deliver text information fairly quickly, but you have to review for accuracy at some points, depending on what you're using.

but we are still very early in the development of advertising assets, if you will. So AI tools delivering video creatives or display creatives, things like that are still very new to the organization and the industry as a whole, I would say. So really at Simplify, we're looking at ways that AI can help our customers have a better experience.

better insights, not only into their campaign, but also their process and life cycle within Simplify, how they can utilize more tool sets quickly and easily. And then also, of course, the same thing for our internal team members. How can we make their jobs better and easier? Every job is going to have daunting aspects that not everyone loves.

And so if there's ways to utilize AI to make those things a little less painful, those are the things that we're looking for. So we're excited about AI and innovating around what we can offer our clients and internal team members as we move forward.

But we always know and say AI is never going to replace the human element of what we do. And it's so critical to our teams. You still need that person who's going to pick up on all those little things that you've been documenting, right? And AI can help and it can assist. But it's still so much of what you had shared is your business is based on relationships. And...

We can't have relationships with computers, unfortunately. Or maybe we can. Who knows? We'll see what the future holds. But I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. What's an example of something that you've rolled out that you found to be really helpful for your customers? It's okay to say you don't have an answer as long as you say you don't have that answer. But

Here's what I'm going to follow up with you or when you can expect the next piece of information or even a plan of what we're going to do next. Just solving those basic things that you as a customer want to have when you're interacting with an organization is hugely important. Oh my gosh, I can't underscore this one enough. I work with a lot of organizations on helping them to optimize and up-level their post-sale teams. And literally it's the simplest one. And I find people will

make the problem a lot more complex, but people just want a quick response. They just want a quick response.

And we need to, that's like the lowest hanging fruit of how do we make sure that our response time is fast, that we're doing what you said around really setting expectations so that people know when should I start waiting? Like we all want to know this. And it's, it's the, in my opinion, one of the lowest hanging fruit on the, on the tree of potential things you can do to increase your customer experience. This one is like you said, a basic human need. We

We are all moving way too fast in this world. And if we feel like we're waiting and we feel like things are being slowed down by someone else, it is the most aggravating thing. Time is our, is the only resource that you cannot really change or increase. So let's respect our customers. That's great. And then one last question for you, Liz, what is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? That's a great question. Um,

I would say you really need to make sure that you are listening to those around you. Build yourself a team.

of experts who have different experiences who can come to the table and be innovative in their ideas. Because while we would all love to think that we're right most of the time, we rarely are. And so I always say to my team, I love to crowdsource information. I love to get a team together to solve a problem.

In the end, though, sometimes you as an organizational leader do have to make a tough call. And so while you want to crowdsource information, you have to be comfortable with also knowing that you have to make the right decision for the business at the end of the day. So build yourself a team that are experts in a variety of things within your industry that are going to be able to support you.

a wider team. And as you grow your organization, it's exactly what you need to lean on. I have the most incredible team at all levels within our client success department, and they are the magic. We have incredible technology, cutting edge technology that has changed the industry in a

But we also have a wonderfully robust set of knowledge, experience, expertise within our client success teams. The way that they approach a challenge, the way they come together to work through any obstacle,

is something to marvel at. So build yourself a really great team of people who care. They care about the clients. They care about the organization. And from there, you really can take on any challenge. We never would have known 12 years ago the things we would experience today with all the changes in our industry and in technology. But when you have the right team around you, you can meet any challenge.

Hmm. That is such wonderful advice. Thank you so much, Liz, for coming on the show and sharing so much knowledge around servant leadership and customer centricity as well as AI. I think this is, I've learned a lot. I think this has been a great conversation. So I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all of this. Of course. Thanks for having me today. Awesome. Well, I hope you have a beautiful day and we'll talk soon.

You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force, and it is bright. Getting there?

It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more about Salesforce CTOs, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.