Chris Bishop is accountable for renewals revenue, with line responsibility for professional services and customer success teams, Chris also owns customer experience analytics, which enables him to bring the data, human, and strategic perspective into achieving Conga’s customer and financial goals.

We delve into the pivotal role of Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) and how they shape the success of enterprises. Our spotlight falls on Chris Bishop, Conga’s CCO, who epitomizes the essence of this critical position

Richard Owen
Chris, thanks for joining me. Let’s start talking a bit about your role within the company. So, Chief Customer Officer, how do you think about that as a set of responsibilities?

Chris Bishop
I think at this moment in time, Chief Customer Officers are having their moment in the sun. Revenue is more important than ever. The markets are tough, and working with your customer base has become critical for most enterprises. My role within Conga and as a Chief Customer Officer is to serve as the champion for the customer, to bring their voice into the room when we’re making decisions on strategy, and on investment priorities.

Richard Owen
But it’s not just a cheerleading job. I mean, to some extent, you talk about representing and being the voice of the customer, but there’s a hard set of metrics attached to this.

Chris Bishop
Oh, I wake up every day with a hard set of metrics attached to what I’ve got to do. We are responsible for both the leading indicators and the lagging indicators. Think about the output metric of Net Revenue Retention or Gross Retention. I own those. When those are going well, I’m breathing easier. When I see trouble with those, I’ve got a CEO talking to me about what are we doing to improve. Underneath that, it’s CSAT, it’s NPS, those indicators. We wake up every day in thecustomer success organizations with a real set of metrics. It’s not just about shaking hands, kissing babies and making sure you’re happy. It’s about driving real business value that drives incremental opportunity for us.

Richard Owen
In some ways, in a tougher economy, some companies shift focus and acquire their way out the problem. So naturally, the customer base becomes a bit more of a target. And that sounds like that’s been the story of Conga.

Chris Bishop
It’s absolutely been the story of Conga. We have very aggressive growth ambitions for the company, and new customer acquisition is important to us. But we can’t continue losing customers at the same rate, and we actually think that we should be growing the footprint within most of our customer base. And in fact, we are, given the value we’re driving in their revenue operations.

Chris Bishop
Almost any company you look at is going to have some formal mission around the topic, champion the customer or we love our customers, whatever that’s going to be. It’s real at Conga. The first thing is it’s real in terms of every person at this company, every ‘Conganeer’ has some form of their compensation tied to the idea of customer
success. So that’s very real for every colleague. The opportunity though is for us within the organization to connect the dots so you understand if I’m on finance, how am I actually impacting the customer? We spend an inordinate amount of time connecting those dots. And at almost every all-hand meeting, I tell I always tell the company that happy customers do three things: they refer, they renew, and they buy more software.

So we measure it, and we pay on it. And the last thing we do, is we celebrate it. We do a lot of work within the company to celebrate when we’re successful with a customer, whether that’s an initial implementation in a go live, or whether that’s a new use case we’ve
unlocked for a customer, we celebrate that. And every month, we have one individual that wins a really cool jacket. We call it the CX champion award, and we use it to celebrate the individuals that are demonstrating our core value of championing the customer.

Richard Owen
In many companies, there’s a there’s a real risk that customer focus becomes entirely negative, right? You’re going to lose customers. There’s a natural tendency for companies to say, why did that happen, which is a legitimate question, and it can very quickly turn into a blame game or create a climate of negativity. So it seems really
important to focus on what goes right, and find examples of people doing the right thing, to put them up on stage and make a customer initiative seem entirely positive.

Chris Bishop
Absolutely. And that’s actually what we’re trying to do with this celebration. Through the Champion the Customer program, we’re highlighting these individuals and trying to demonstrate and bring to life those stories where somebody’s done something really amazing, beyond the normal course of action.

We’ve got one really, really cool story where we had an individual over in Asia Pac who was on vacation. He heard about one of his key customers who was in trouble that happened to be in the Philippines. And so, during his vacation, he managed to book a flight, jump over, and actually saved the account for us. The account was going red, and by this individual showing up at their doorstep, going out of their way on their vacation to solve this issue, we created an impactful statement of who we are as a company for that customer.

As you mentioned, we have a lot of data, but there’s a lot of noise there. And so analytics is providing us the opportunity to look for patterns, to identify patterns, and that pattern recognition then becomes very helpful to us in determining where we want to spend time to solve some of these issues. Right? Now I’ll use technical support as a primary example.

Through the use of analytics, we were able to identify not just that we had a problem in support. We knew that, right? We could read the surveys and understand something is not working as expected from a customer perspective, but it was really hard to identify what that was.

Through analytics, we were able to look and see a pattern evolving of consistent themes, consistent time to resolution, consistent quality. And so we were able to develop three key themes in our technical support organization and over the eight past eighteen months, we’ve been laser focused on those.

And the results have been dramatic. The improvement in that area is probably one of the the most dramatic turnarounds I’ve seen in terms of an organization that really, I don’t want to say it was a weakness for the organization, but certainly wasn’t a strength, to now really something we celebrate and talk about and that differentiates us from our competition.

Richard Owen
Conga was one of the earliest adopters of Customer AI based technology; predictive analytics technology. What was it that you saw in that that encouraged you to dive in for something that was, at least a couple of years ago, quite embryonic?

Chris Bishop
Yeah. Candidly necessity. We mentioned before that we make decisions with a fairly tight lens here at Conga the idea being that decisions have to lead to profitable growth. I just didn’t have a lot of resources at my fingertips, but I had a fairly significant set of challenges in my customer base. I just couldn’t see them all, but I knew they were there, and they were just coming out of the woodwork at me. So I needed some help initially to help identify things that I wasn’t seeing. It was a very reactive position.

But I also knew as we grew the company, we weren’t going to be able to scale in line or grow in line with our top line growth. And so I needed to be able to be more predictive. I needed customer intelligence to be at my fingertips. And so the idea of working with, OCX Cognition and a customer AI solution was the idea to move from a reactive to a predictive position where I could begin to really have the data tell me where the challenges are going to be, and now we’re moving into a position where there are opportunities. It really started as a fire suppression opportunity, and now is really an ignition switch for us for growth, or will be. We’re meeting with our colleagues across the company to show them the power of the data that we have, and you can see the light bulbs just popping off all about. Wow! We can really, for example, build targeted marketing campaigns to customers that we think are ready to take the next step based on what this predictive analytics engine is telling us.

Richard Owen
So when we imagine a year or two further down the road, how do you how do you see that in terms of your aspiration for how you think this could change the way the company operates?

Chris Bishop
Well, I think it becomes core to our investment thesis. As we talk about markets we want to be into, as we talk about sales efforts that we want to run, as we talk about where opportunities are in the base. I think this becomes sort of central, a set of data or intelligence that allows and guides our decision making. And so I think my vision is for this to move beyond just a tool that we use to predict, happy or sad with a customer base, and really becomes an opportunity for us to forecast the business and to predict revenue for the business.

Richard Owen
We were talking yesterday about change management, which I think is a really interesting topic here. As you start to introduce data to employees who are used to making decisions based less on data and more on gut feel, it seems like there’s going to be a need to sort of shift in the way people think about using data to do their day to day jobs.

Chris Bishop
Absolutely. And we’re on that journey right now at Conga. We just launched a business intelligence and insights group within the company to help us with that. Because, candidly, for a lot of folks, that’s not their natural motion. Right? But, again, we want to use data, because we have limited resources to really inform us where to go to, where the opportunities are. And so, we’re building a team within the company to help serve as a center of excellence for the rest of the organization to answer the questions they have, and maybe to actually prompt questions they haven’t even thought about yet.

Richard Owen
Essentially you say that a lot of the challenges are that people don’t know what questions to ask. Right? They’re not familiar with data rich environments. And so in some ways, we’re having to generate new ideas that just previously didn’t exist because of the data didn’t exist.

Chris Bishop
Yeah. So let me take a step back for a minute and tell you why our value, what we call the Conga Way, is important. I had mentioned that Conga today is really two companies that came together during COVID, almost coinciding with the advent of COVID. So, because of that, we’re going to take two companies, two very distinct cultures, bring them together, and we’re going to do this all remotely. You can imagine the challenges.

And so, it became really important as we thought about how we were going to bring the company together, to redefine the set of cultural values that the entire company could embrace, that both teams could really identify with. And after a lot of time thinking about who we are and who we want to be, we landed on the idea of what we today call the Conga Way, which is comprised of three concepts: Achieved Together, Entrepreneurial Spirit, and Champion the Customer.

And really, that’s that, you know. That has become something we lead with in every conversation with our colleagues and with our customers. We want to be clear about who we are and how we show up every day. It’s a critical, almost tone within the company that has become very important. And all of our colleagues, I can tell you, truly embrace that.

Within the three component concepts, the idea of championing the customer is really easy. We’ve talked about that and it’s critically important. All of them though, have equal weight, and you asked about Achieve Together. The idea of Achieve Together is equally important in driving customer success as Champion the Customer. At Conga, we’re using a pretty well known formula of customer success as being the combination of both outcomes and experience.

But Achieve Together means every individual needs to understand how they deliver an experience or unlock an outcome. You know, whether you’re in finance, and that’s how you treat a customer during a collection process, or whether that’s being acutely aware in engineering of the impact how your product is being used in the field, and when there’s a challenge working with the colleagues in her tip of spear or front of customer, to solve that issue.

So Achieve Together is really not about individual departmental goals, but aligning at the top level with those company goals. We see it across the company every day, and similar to Champion the Customer we try to identify opportunities to achieve together, where teams come together to identify opportunities, whether that’s innovation we’re going to put in front of a customer, or whether that’s, you know, actually driving an outcome for a customer.

Richard Owen
I think it strikes most people as extraordinarily difficult to bring two different companies together. To start with, as you said, doing the pandemic when all the sort of natural instinct is, let’s put everyone in one room, let’s socialize, let’s do all the important things that we need to. You couldn’t do any of that. And so the executive team comes up with these fundamental value sets. As a practical matter, obviously, there’s ‘walking the talk’ all the time, but how do you reinforce that across the company on a regular basis and make it real for employees?

Chris Bishop
So I think the first thing is being incredibly consistent about who we are in the Conga Way. I would tell you, you could walk around this office and talk to an employee that’s or a colleague that’s been here for five years or five days, and ask them about the Conga Way, and they’ll be able to tell you about it, what that means to them and how it actually practically applies to what they do.

And I’m so confident saying that and challenging you to do that because almost every interaction we have with our colleagues begins with reinforcement of the Conga way.

Every all hands, and we do them monthly here even though we’re a fairly large company, every month we get together to align on our strategic objectives. But before we start with that, we start with the Conga Way. And then we celebrate those moments. I mean, we’re really, really big into the idea of celebration as a way to highlight things that we hold dear at Conga.

You know, I think you are what you measure. I had an opportunity once to spend some time with, Frank Blake, who is the former chairman and CEO of Home Depot. And I think he’s now chairman of Delta Airlines, And I asked Frank one of those eager questions, you know, about his management principles. And he said, look, one of the things I hold dearly is you tell me what you celebrate, and I can tell you who you are. And, you know, that really struck me, and it struck the management team, and we really do try to celebrate those achievements, whether it’s Achieved Together or Entrepreneurial Spirit or Champion the Customer.

Richard Owen
That’s a really memorable way of framing it. You know, I was always taught myself that it’s the family rules. They’re not necessarily written down. They might be, but what are the family rules at the dinner table? And everyone knows what they are, and that’s really how companies behave. And it sounds to me like, Conga’s leadership team has worked very hard to establish a set of family rules here around the values. And people operate by that. And and so, it becomes self-reinforcing across the whole company, ideally.

Chris Bishop
It it absolutely does. Noble Goggin, our CEO believes deeply that culture is really the foundation that we’re going to build this company on. And so, from day one, he’s been he’s been very firm in his, position that we are going to set the family rules. We call that the Conga Way.

We’re going to live by that. We’re going to model that as a leadership team and we’re going to expect it of everybody in the organization. And I can provide you plenty of examples where we can be in a meeting having a discussion and we might slide out of bounds a little bit on one of those principles and somebody will say, well, that doesn’t feel very Achieve Together. And it’s a real great checkpoint to say, you may be right, let’s rethink the problem or rethink our position on something.