Elevate Customer Experience with AI and Intuitive Leadership

Starting the conversation:

Technology integration provides an undeniable benefit to companies, and the organizations which keep customer experience integral to the way they do business will have a competitive advantage. Krishna Raj Raja, Founder & CEO at SupportLogic, shares the necessary elements to be BOLD and design customer experience into the integration of new and emerging technologies.

The delicate balance between optimization and deep connection to customers is where today’s marketplace will separate companies that succeed today from those that succeed in the long run. It is time to ensure you are flipping the script to include prioritizing experience and the convenience of customer buying paths into strategic growth decisions.

In this program, you will hear what it takes to design your tech stack for user experience, that big data is less important today than thick data (and what that means for your company), and that creating your company’s future relevance requires monitoring customer relationships in new ways.

Jess Dewell and guest Krishna Raj Raja, Founder & CEO at SupportLogic, discuss AI and Intuitive Leadership, and why it is BOLD to future-proof your business by elevating customer experience.

Host: Jess Dewell

Guest: Krishna Raj Raja

What You Will Hear:

04:30 Companies must prioritize experience over technology as a differentiator in today’s economy.

• Technology (like the cloud and big data) is becoming a table stake rather than a unique differentiator.
• AI will soon be as common as the cloud; long-term differentiation will shift to customer and user experience.
• The example of autonomous vehicles illustrates how industries must innovate around experience, not just technical features.

07:05 Support experience is a core element of the overall customer and brand perception.

• Poor support undermines even great products and brands, making support experience crucial.
• Investment in support experience boosts overall customer satisfaction and acquisition, even if a product isn’t perfect.
• Companies often ignore the impact of support experience in favor of product or digital experience, missing its central role.

12:50 Serendipity and discovery are lost when digital experiences rely only on algorithms.

• Recommendation systems show users more of what they already like, reducing variety and spontaneous discovery.
• Physical environments, like bookstores, allow for accidental discovery that digital platforms struggle to replicate.
• Even leading digital companies like Amazon are experimenting with retail stores to bring back discovery.

14:50 Drawing insights from unrelated fields can transform business thinking.

• The analogy of dark matter in physics highlights unused, unstructured data in business as a source of hidden value.
• Most organizational data is unstructured and historically has been ignored due to lack of technology.
• Recent advances allow businesses to process unstructured data and leverage these hidden insights.

22:20 Past-focused big data can blind companies to emerging signals and future trends.

• Using only historical data risks missing small but important emerging trends that can change business direction.
• Over-reliance on what customers have said in the past led companies like Nokia to miss disruptive innovations.
• It’s essential to pay attention to “thick data” and qualitative signals alongside big data.

25:40 Companies increase customer insight by fostering more authentic, ongoing engagement.

• Reliance on surveys is flawed due to bias, low response rates, and limited, structured questions.
• Frequent, natural communication channels (including chat and AI) yield richer, more actionable insights.
• Monitoring the language and patterns in these interactions helps to identify surface issues, opportunities, and risks earlier.

30:00 Intuitive thinking is as important as rational analysis for leadership and innovation.

• Engineers and business leaders often rely on intuition, which is built on extensive pattern recognition over time.
• Instincts function like a personal machine learning model trained from lived experiences and data.
• Trusting one’s gut is critical in uncertain situations where there isn’t enough data to make a purely rational decision.

36:50 Experimenting with new business models — even if unproven — can lead to industry leadership.

• Transitioning to usage-based pricing in SaaS was a bold move before it became an industry norm.
• Adoption of this model was challenging internally and with customers, but ultimately aligned with market evolution.
• As AI grows, this type of pricing reflects how customers interact with services, not just how many users they have.

46:25 It is BOLD to look forward and design customer experience to stay competitive.

Resources

• Krishna Raj Raja on LinkedIn
• Book: Support Experience

Transcript

Jess Dewell 00:00
We can try this, but if it’s not working for us, it’s okay to let it go because there’s going to be another way or the time just isn’t right for us because of our unique solution that’s actually making a difference in our customers’ world.

Krishna Raj Raja 00:13
The velocity of change has increased dramatically and it’s only going to go up. Even small trends, when they seem insignificant right now, can become really big trends in a short span of time. So being in the forefront and looking at those trends are going to be very important for business leaders.

Jess Dewell 00:28
I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for stopping by at the Bold Business Podcast. We are normalizing important conversations.

Yes, there are tips. Yes, there are ways to solve problems. More importantly are going to be, what do you need for yourself to be able to solve those problems and make the most of the education, the training, and the programs that you are already using?

This is a supplement to that. It can sit on top of it, fuel your soul, fuel your mind, and most importantly, regardless of where you’re at on your journey, maybe you’re starting out. Maybe you’re ready to scale.

Maybe you’re going through reinvention. The conversations we are having will help you at each of those stages. So hang around, see what’s going on, and I look forward to seeing you engaging with our videos.

Announcer 01:20
You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast, where you will hear first-hand experiences about what it really takes to ensure market relevance and your company’s future.

Jess Dewell 01:32
I’m excited for you to hear this conversation with Krishna Rajraja, who is the founder and CEO of SupportLogic. This is the world’s first AI-driven support experience platform. I will tell you that there are some things that we talked about that underlie really great strategic positioning, help you understand the importance of what’s going on and the patterns that you know that may or may not be reflected in the data and information that you’re collecting.

And the first is, there is a real sacrifice when we choose a technology to use and how important it is that we choose a technology that helps us maintain that customer expectation and that customer relationship as we are integrating and changing. Another thing is that it’s important that we now know the difference between big data and thick data and the difference. So what we’re using, how we’re using it, what we really need to understand and find patterns that are actually useful to us that can influence what we have control over to maintain our relevance going into the future.

One of the things I appreciate that Krishna brings to the table is that we monitor for so many things in our business and our life too, that few have actually decided to monitor the customer experience, to tap into that true customer voice. And here’s the thing, that is something that by changing, you can add more information for the sake of validation, but also for the sake of finding emerging trends as they’re showing up instead of catching up later. Now, this is something where when he was hired at VMware India, he spent time reading every single customer support message to proactively solve problems that were coming in.

As the company grew, less and less connection to the customer happened and the customer experience was hurt. And that was something that had to be overcome unexpectedly. It felt like a surprise, yet the path was all there.

The clues were all in place that you can deliver exceptional customer support at scale without experiencing those typical growth issues. So support experience, his book, is a result of decades of experience in the support industry. I’m excited to have you listen to this conversation that I’m having with Krishna Raj Raja, so that you can change and integrate and think about more proactively what you’re doing with your customer service and customer support.

If I think about the top three things a company that’s going through change has to face for customer experience, what would you say those are, Krishna?

Krishna Raj Raja 04:31
I think we are living in an experience economy or we’re moving into an experience economy. Primarily, that’s my thesis. And the way I see this is, for a long time, every company was using technology as a differentiation factor.

So many years ago, we said, hey, every company is a cloud company. You have to have a presence online, right? It doesn’t matter whether you’re a technology company or a non-technology company, you need to have an online presence.

And then that changed, and then companies said, you know what, our differentiation is big data. Oh, we all have lots of data, and we’re going to do something very interesting with the data. That big data became the differentiation.

Now I would say it’s table stakes. Nobody today says that, oh, we are going to be the cloud, that’s a differentiation, it’s given. Same goes to big data.

Right now, the buzzword is AI. And again, I’m going to argue that every company is going to be an AI company, if they’re not already, right? Every human being is using AI right now, if they’re not already.

So I think AI is not going to become the long-term differentiation for companies. So the differentiation is going to move towards experience. And the analogy I’m going to give here is, if you look at autonomous driving, and there was a car show that happened in Germany a few years ago, and Mercedes-Benz had a concept car.

And the concept car was, this is a fully autonomous car, and therefore, you don’t need to face the road. So they designed the seats, inside seats, facing each other. It’s almost like you’re in a coffee station or somewhere like that, right?

And the focus bent towards experience, what kind of experience we can craft inside the car, because driving experience is no longer the differentiation when it’s autonomous cars. It’s the passenger experience, that’s what’s going to differentiate. I think that’s a good analogy for where the industry is going to go.

With all the automation, with all the AI, companies that’s going to deliver compelling experiences are the ones going to win in the long run.

Jess Dewell 06:36
Which means we have to change our thinking then. So tell me about that. How does a company’s thinking change, or what is that first step to start shifting how we look toward experience, so that we can be like everybody else with all the technology that’s coming, and yet have something compelling and unique that is going to help us grow and stay Break down experience as an overall category.

Krishna Raj Raja 07:03
There are so many types of experiences we can talk about. You can talk about your digital experience, your website experience, your product experience, your employee experience, your support experience. And my focus is all about support experience.

And what I’ve noticed is that for a lot of companies, support experience becomes the customer experience. It becomes the brand experience, right? You can’t have a great product and have poor customer support.

You can’t have a great brand without having great support experience. So this concept of support experience has often gotten lost in all this experience stuff. People are only talking about customer experience and brand experience and digital experience, and they conveniently ignore there is a big gorilla in the room, which is support experience.

If you just invest in support experience, you can lift your product experience. Even if your product is not perfect, great support experience can transform that customer experience quite significantly. That becomes a brand experience, and that becomes your customer acquisition channel.

Jess Dewell 08:09
That’s the reason people come back. It’s the reason they feel good. It’s their first stop and their last stop with a company.

Krishna Raj Raja 8:14
Correct. People don’t remember what you did to them or what you said to them. What they’re going to remember is how you made them feel.

Right. And I think that is so relevant in today’s world.

Jess Dewell 08:26
Being in this space and recognizing that there’s so much focus on other technology. Are we data gluttons? How do we have our security?

What is all of this? That tends to take up a lot of the brain space, which means it takes up a lot of the reaction space, gut space, and what we’re feeling about things. Where is that pressure at?

Our heart space. And I find it fascinating that you’re taking this other approach because I like when we look at not the mainstream topics to actually impact our mainstream things. And when we think about what you’re sharing so far, and we think about AI coming in, and we think about whatever that next technology is, and how we’re going to have to do it faster than we’ve ever done it before.

And we have to understand this. I appreciate the perspective of this is what we’ve got to focus on. And every change we make, every technology we bring in, how we leverage what we’re doing actually depends on can we keep the experience that we have said we’re going to give to our customers, that actual experience that they get.

Krishna Raj Raja 09:33
I think it is very challenging for organizations to deliver consistently great customer experience simply because of the points you raised. There’s so much technology glutton that we have to deal with. And often we sacrifice customer experience because of the limitations of the technology that we have.

And we force our customers to go through the pain of your technological limitations, as opposed to designing it completely the other way around. Let’s focus user experience as the primary metric. And then what else are technological barriers we need to remove?

Let’s go think about it. I think that is happening right now. I think AI is definitely going to play a very important role in that aspect.

If you don’t deploy AI in the right way, you’re going to sacrifice experience for the sake of just implementing a technology. I think that’s what my company’s focus is, what my book is all about. I talk about the importance of experience.

Increasingly, we’re living in a more complex, interdependent world. And what I mean by interdependent is all our technology talk to other technology. All our services are interconnected with other services, right?

So even if you are making your product perfect, your services perfect, it’s still going to fail in the real world because you’re interacting with lots of changes that’s happening in the ecosystem, which means somebody has to own and provide great customer support to solve those issues. And that’s the challenge. Oftentimes, product leaders and engineering leaders tend to think, oh, my product is perfect and therefore I don’t have any issues.

Yeah, that might be true. Rarely it’s true, but that might be true. But then you’re still interacting with other imperfect ecosystems.

Jess Dewell 11:22
Okay, this is making me think of something that came up in conversation with one of my clients recently. They were talking about wanting to integrate something new, but all of the changes that they were going to have to make to integrate this technology. And I said, I have a personal experience here.

And this was a long time ago in 2016. I don’t know when the Remarkable came out, right? One of the first pads, there were a couple of them and I had a Remarkable.

And I was really excited because I could get away from paper notes and I could put it digitally. Guess what I found out? Paper notes not only help me remember, but paper notes also give me something like a mind map in my brain so I can go back in time and find what I needed.

The Remarkable, even though it didn’t have color and I do like multiple colors, I was going to get over that. I would upload my files and then there was no way for me to go back and know what was in them unless I basically put it in the title of the file. Technology has now caught up and I can throw things up and technology can now read that.

To your point earlier about designing, right? So try it out, play with something, but what do you think about doing it in an experiment style? If everybody else is doing this and I feel like I have to, how can I, we can try this, but if it’s not working for us, it’s okay to let it go because there’s going to be another way or the time just isn’t right for us because of our unique solution that’s actually making a difference in our customer’s world.

Krishna Raj Raja 12:48
I think this also reminds me of the experience of online bookstores versus retail bookstores. There’s always an accidental discovery. You are browsing through the store, you’re discovering something that you normally would not have discovered.

That is very difficult to replicate it in an online experience because we have AI recommendation systems that recommend things, but there is a mystery element, there is a serendipity element that is getting lost in that process. For example, when you go to Netflix and you watch a few Adam Sandler movies and it’s all they’re going to recommend you is Adam Sandler movies. I don’t want to watch Adam Sandler movies rest of my life.

You want the variety, you want that different experience and that gets often lost in recommendation systems because they’re recommending more of what you already like as opposed to recommending what you may like that you may not know about. Accidentally discovery is so powerful and I think that’s why even Amazon was experimenting with even retail stores. Amazon went and squashed all the bookstores and they started having their own retail stores now.

Jess Dewell 13:51
There is something to be said for discovery and I know we share something in common about, and I actually found my giraffes can’t dance book by walking through a bookstore one day. I saw it in the, I actually had to go in for something else and it was on one of the stands when you walk in before you even get to the rest of the books. Here was this awesome book called giraffes can’t dance and at the time my child was very young and so we read it all the time.

For those of you who don’t know, go just look it up online. Somebody will tell you the story on YouTube. So let’s say when we find this, right, I went in for something related to business and I came out with stuff for my family in addition to business and then I read this book and it actually changed the way I thought about some of the things I was consuming for business.

We need inspiration as founders, as owners, as leadership teams to look at things in new ways. Is there a scenario that you’ve looked back on and said I never thought I’d have to deal with that in business, but hey this is really interesting and cool and it made you have that kind of a shift?

Krishna Raj Raja 14:50
I think you get great ideas from completely fields that are not related to your space. I always look for that inspiration and you’re not constantly seeking for that inspiration but the inspiration just clicks when you encounter them, right. So I think that’s super important.

That’s why I always say to business leaders, don’t be inward facing. Lots of challenges you’re facing in the company and then you’re doing navel gazing and you’re not really looking at the world. The battle is external, it’s not internal.

If an energy goes into internal battles, you’re losing the external battle, which means constantly put yourself out there in the market, but in front of customers, in front of other founders and other CEOs and learn from what they’re doing. That’s the biggest thing you can learn from. Yeah, so there are examples where I’ve learned from other fields like even things like I watch theoretical physics videos during my spare time on YouTube, completely unrelated to what I do for business.

But lots of concepts that are discussed in theoretical physics, some of their fundamental truths, applies to your business.

Jess Dewell 16:06
Yes! Okay, give us an example.

Krishna Raj Raja 16:08
There is this concept called dark matter in theoretical physics and the whole idea of dark matter is we don’t fully understand what it is as a physicist. We know it exists, we don’t know what it is and what’s also crazy is dark matter and dark energy constitutes almost 95% or more of the universe. So the entire knowledge of physics that we have is studied from a small fraction of known matter that we know.

So what I’ve learned is that’s a challenge for businesses. What’s the challenge for businesses? In the history of computing, we’ve been only focused on metadata and machine data, which is like three to five percentage of your data.

The vast majority of data that the company possesses is unstructured data. So unstructured data is your dark matter for business. Until now, we didn’t have a technology to process unstructured data.

We conveniently ignored unstructured data, only relying on metadata to understand your business. Now we can process things like videos and audios and emails and unstructured form of communication. That’s where lots of signals are buried.

What organizations are missing, they need to focus on dark matter.

Jess Dewell 17:24
It’s true and that actually ties back to the experience I had with The Remarkable. I was like, I know what I needed to do, I can’t do it yet. And so it’s okay to set it aside knowing that’s going to be something that people are still going to be working on.

It helped me stop. Now to your point though, it actually helps us go. It actually can be an inspiration and as you were speaking there, I’m thinking, oh, that’s also true about the quantum side of things where just because we’re looking at it, we’re making something else happen.

We’re influencing the outcome just by our attention and our focus. And there’s so much that we’ve done over, probably even the last three years, let alone the last 20 years when I started getting excited about this particular topic of quantum physics and seeing all of the different things of how quickly it can come together and how everything can click. You were talking, it just clicks.

Can we recognize that spark and bring it to the problem or the challenge or the opportunity we’re working with right now?

Krishna Raj Raja 18:22
You’re talking about uncertainty principle in quantum physics. I actually used this uncertainty principle 20 years ago for, I used to be a performance troubleshooting engineer, like software performance troubleshooting engineer. And I talked about if you are trying to troubleshoot a performance issue, you’re actually impacting the performance issue.

And that’s uncertainty principle, basically. When you’re trying to investigate a performance issue, the issue disappears. The notion of you investigating it, and then when you let it alone, the performance problems happens.

Jess Dewell 18:54
It’s elusive. It’s like the whack-a-mole thing, but in reality, so how do you address those? Now I’m curious.

20 years ago to today, the way you would address it today would probably be…

Krishna Raj Raja 19:04
I think you from speaking from a support perspective, when you’re trying to support a customer, when you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue, often the issue is non-replicable because you’re trying to troubleshoot it. You’re actually looking at it and it’s not replicable. But you let it alone, the issue will happen.

So you need to find other ways to investigate that issue. That was the lesson I was teaching to the support folks that I was dealing with.

Jess Dewell 19:30
It reminds me of, I was having a conversation recently with a company and they were talking to me about how one of their biggest issues is when they deploy something before it goes live, they want their clients to test it out. And that whole reason, underlying all the words that they said, was what you just said. Whoever’s looking at it is going to test it in a certain way, which means the way it’s actually going to be used by the people using it will be different than the people that made it.

So until the people that are going to use it, you really don’t know if it’s quality. You really don’t know what the bugs are. You really don’t know because you have to see it in that real experience.

Krishna Raj Raja 20:08
I think that’s the chaos theory as well. And that’s another fundamental concept in physics is that even really simplistic systems can become complicated down the road. I think the three-body problem is one of the examples of that.

It’s very difficult to predict. And I think another difference I find fascinating is there’s a difference between predictability and complexity. You can have a completely predictable system, but because it’s too complex, it makes it computationally very difficult to predict it.

It’s a deterministic system, but not predictable. That’s the difference. So often, we tend to confuse that determinism and predictability are exactly the same.

That doesn’t have to be. You can be a perfectly deterministic system, but computationally, very expensive to predict because of all the permutations and combinations you have to factor with.

Jess Dewell 21:05
You’re listening to The Bold Business Podcast. I’m your host, Jess Dewell. This is your program for strategizing long-term success while diving deep into what the right work is for your business right now.

Announcer 21:20
You’re listening to The Bold Business Podcast, hosted by Jess Dewell, a nationally recognized strategic growth consultant. She works with business owners and executives to integrate just two elements that guide business through the ups and downs of growth. Number one, know what work is necessary.

Number two, do all the work possible. Schedule a complimentary consultation to find out more at reddirection.com.

Jess Dewell 21:48
We’re talking with Krishna Rajraja, founder and CEO of SupportLogic, the world’s first AI-driven support experience platform. Now back to the program. Let’s go back to big data being accessible by the everyday person.

We all have this data. We’re all told to collect all of this data. If we’re not using the data, we probably shouldn’t be collecting it for a variety of reasons.

But for the data we are collecting, how can we use that to help design, reinforce, mold, and evolve the customer experience?

Krishna Raj Raja 22:22
So I think the challenge with big data is by definition, you’re looking at the past. You’re not looking at the future. And we’re trying to make decisions about the future using past data.

Now in lots of cases, that might be sufficient. Past is a good predictor of the future for a lot of cases. A lot of emerging trends don’t have a lot of volume of data.

Emerging trends by definition are a small amount of signals emerging from your data that can indicate a completely different direction and trend the industry is heading towards. Lots of great businesses, if they over rely on big data and historical data and lose sight of the emerging data, they can lose business opportunities or they can become irrelevant. In fact, I talk about this in my book.

One of the chapters goes into that. I talk about Nokia smartphones, why they lost its smartphone market to Apple. And one of the reasons is that Nokia had lots of data about traditional phones.

Their customer base was only asking for, I want a phone that is compact, a keyboard, more battery life. Nobody said, I want a phone which has poor battery life, bigger screen and no keyboard. But that was emerging data and they had access to the data.

But from the quantity of data they had access to, they focused on the bias towards big data. And they lost the signals from emerging data. So it’s very important for organizations to pay close attention to what I call as the voice of the customer.

Or Tricia Vang, who did the research for this Nokia project, calls it as thick data. Not big data, but thick data. And so today, natural language processing plays a very essential role in extracting that thick data.

Jess Dewell 24:21
I want to stick within the bucket of experience that you’re working with, designing that consumer experience, that customer experience, since it’s the first and the last, that makes the brand. It elevates the product. It actually decides in a lot of ways.

It’s an influence in where they are in market share also. If we think about thick data versus big data or all the data we have, what are the questions or concepts that a company needs to take to their next retreat, their next strategic work session to go, are we doing this right right now? And if not, how can we start shifting that?

The data importance of emerging trends, what the customers are saying, not saying, but indicating.

Krishna Raj Raja 25:06
I think the number one challenge companies face is over-reliance on customer surveys to understand the voice of the customer. The challenge with surveys is, first of all, it’s biased. Biased in the sense, the most unhappy customer responds back to a survey.

The most happy customers respond back to their surveys. The customers who are indifferent don’t respond. Second is, survey means you have a structured question in the survey.

You’re not searching for the unknown. You’re not searching for emerging trends. You’re asking known stuff, right?

And so it limits you and boxes you in terms of the feedback you can collect. Third of all, surveys response rates are pretty poor, so you’re not sampling true voice of the customer. A better way to approach this is basically encourage customers to engage with you.

Have more frequent communications with your customers, whether it’s with human beings, with the chatbots, or whatever. It’s just have the more engagement data. Then monitor that engagement data using technologies like AI, which can extract signals from those communication patterns and the language patterns.

And that signals can indicate what problem areas, pain points, what business opportunities, what relationship risk that you have. All that can be extracted purely from observing the language patterns the customer use when they communicate with you. So that’s where I think there’s an opportunity for businesses.

So the way I would say, today we don’t run infrastructure without monitoring in place. We are monitoring for everything. We monitor a house.

We monitor our credit score. If we’re running a data center, you have data center monitoring in place. We are monitoring for everything.

What about monitoring for your customer relationships? We don’t have anything for monitoring for customer relationships. This is the problem that we solve.

It’s support logic. We basically believe that the most valuable resource any company has is your customer relationships. You want to monitor that continuously, identify which relationships are at risk before it turns into a major risk.

Jess Dewell 27:15
I wonder what your take on this, because I’m listening to this and I’m thinking about the conversations that you’re having, the conversations I’m having, the ones that are related to strategic growth, the ones that are related to scaling, the ones that are totally unrelated but spark an idea with strangers on the street or people we see at the library or the bookstore, whatever it is. If it’s easy to quantify, it’s easier to grasp and integrate. We lean in that.

In my opinion, this is something I strongly believe in, is that when we stick with the easy, we are missing so much. I think you’ve been articulating that, right? Are we just doing it or redesigning it?

What you’ve been talking about, emerging trends versus known trends. That means we have to be a little more courageous. We have to be willing to be in this, I’m going to call it the messy part of business, this chaotic gray area.

How have you overcome some of that chaotic gray area and said, yeah, we’re willing to work here at SupportLogic. We’re willing to be all in and understand this and model for other companies to do the same.

Krishna Raj Raja 28:26
Yeah, I think we all have quantification bias, right? If we can quantify it, we think it’s actionable. I think it also stems from what I call engineering thinking versus design thinking.

In engineering thinking, you’re working backwards towards a problem, right? In engineering thinking, you’re saying, I need to build a bridge. The bridge needs to carry a thousand cars in a day and needs to withstand the weather conditions and whatnot.

This should be the length of the bridge. The problem is very well-defined. You’re working backwards, saying, okay, in order to build that, I need this much concrete, this much steel.

I can complete the project, which is what we’re trained from a very young age to do a lot of engineering thinking. A lot of real life problems are design thinking problems, which means you don’t know whether you need a bridge, you’re doing the helipad, or you need a boat.

Jess Dewell 29:17
By the way, that’s my favorite solution. When we can get there, I will cheer those on all day long. Look at all the time and money and effort you saved.

Go put it on the other things. Yeah.

Krishna Raj Raja 29:27
That’s the challenge every business person faces on a day-to-day basis, because you don’t know what the end solution is. You don’t even know what the right solution is. If you know what the right solution is, then you can apply engineering thinking and you can solve it.

But not knowing which solution to design or which solution to go after or not even consider that to be a problem to focus on, that’s the most difficult thing to work on. So I think that data doesn’t really help in that case, because data brings you this quantification bias. And sometimes you don’t have enough data, but you know that you need to work on this.

So I always say this, as I used to be a software developer many years ago, I always say this, that in Silicon Valley, in the IT landscape that we’re all living in, we tend to overemphasize rational thinking and underrate intuitive thinking. Even some of the best engineers that I know write code with intuition, not necessarily with rational thinking. So I think that’s very important for us to recognize as business leaders, that trust your gut instincts.

Your gut instincts are your own machine learning model that your brain has created from thousands and thousands of data points and pattern matching you’ve done in your entire life. We all carry a big machine learning model in our brain. Trust that instinct.

Jess Dewell 30:52
Do you feel it in your heart? Or is it like, I got this because it’s in my gut. I know it now.

Krishna Raj Raja 30:57
I was an engineer and I was working for some other company. I was trained to follow instructions and guidelines that somebody has set for myself, right? Which means I’m curbing my instincts and not really focusing on what my brain tells me or what intuitively I’m trying to do.

And all your life you’re trained to work like that when you’re working for someone else. When you’re the leader, when you are the final authority and the decision maker for the company, you really don’t have a lot of data to make decisions on. So you have to go with your gut instincts.

There’s a one movie example I actually quote here, which I think was Commanders and Ships or I’m forgetting the exact name. It’s a Russell Crowe. And the movie is in the warship.

It’s in 1800s or something. And it’s a foggy environment that is in the middle of the ocean. His crew’s all tired, exhausted.

They don’t have any water. They all have diseases. So they need to find a lab.

Otherwise the crew will be dying. And so he’s desperately looking for help. He don’t know which direction to go because it’s very foggy and everything.

In a little distance, he sees a ship coming in. And he has his telescope and he’s looking through the telescope. He has to make a quick decision whether the ship coming, is that a pirate ship?

Which means you need to sail away from it or do we need to sail towards it? Because it’s a help that ship could rescue you. But you have to make the decision in a split second.

It’s a life and death situation. This is the face every entrepreneur faces every day. You don’t have enough data.

Jess Dewell 32:33
And it feels like life or death. Ours probably aren’t that way, but we still make decisions like it is that way.

Krishna Raj Raja 32:39
Some of them could be life and death situation. The point is that you don’t have enough data and you have the same visibility like this going through this. Let’s go through a foggy environment and you have to make a split second decision which direction to go or not.

If you made the right decision, you are okay. If you made the wrong decisions, you have to pivot and make the consequences. Exactly.

Jess Dewell 32:59
Don’t tell us the outcome because if people don’t remember the movie, they should just go watch it.

Krishna Raj Raja 33:04
The movie is called Master and Commander.

Jess Dewell 33:06
That is actually something that I talk about just in general. As leading a company, you don’t have a lot of data. And being in the world of data, it’s what are people bringing to work today?

What are the things that are happening that are outside of our control? What have we given up control of that we actually do have some influence on if not complete control over? And making sure that those things are just known because it’s everything outside of that, that next level out where our instinct can kick in.

And then it’s even one more level out where that’s, in my opinion, where the most potential is. We really have to tune in to be able to understand what those patterns are. And I would counter that every single business owner, to your point, has probably been conditioned to not listen to all the patterns.

And I completely agree with that. And so this is actually a skill that will make or break the longevity that you have in the role you are in right now in your company. Where will that ceiling be hit?

When is the right time for you to step down? And if you want to keep going, you got to keep growing. And if you don’t, lean into what you got and then hand it off.

Because I’ll tell you what, all of those are great paths and everything in between those two. To be able to make a difference, solve a problem, and be able to support your customers on their path too.

Krishna Raj Raja 34:27
And a lot of good business leaders sometimes make absolutely counterintuitive decisions during tough times.

Jess Dewell 34:34
And they’re right.

Krishna Raj Raja 34:36
We’re absolutely right. One example of a big company, if you want to talk about, is Apple. In the early 2000s, dot-com era, everybody thought retail industry is dead and everything is moving online.

Apple comes and makes a decision, we’re going to start retail stores. Completely counterintuitive. And the market didn’t understand it.

But Apple’s intuition was their product needs to be felt and experienced. You cannot replicate that in an online e-commerce. Online e-commerce is good for commodity products.

For products where you want to feel it, touch it, experience it. Retail store is the right strategy, right? So they went with a strategy.

They’re doubling down. That’s one of the most successful strategies they’ve done. And also they turned their shopping centers into an education centers.

You may go for fixing a phone as a support incident and turn back and convert that into a shopping experience. You come back and buy something because you’re at the store. They’ve done cross-sell, up-sell very well at the store.

They’ve done brand experience, support experience. All of that, they merged into the store model. And then Microsoft and others started replicating that, seeing that success.

So again, that’s where companies need to go with their gut instinct. You need to know about your business much better than your board members do, than your competitors do. So you have to go with your gut instincts.

Jess Dewell 35:59
I’m your host Jess Dool and we’re getting down to business on the Bold Business Podcast. This is where we’re tackling the challenges that matter most to you with actionable and achievable advice to get real results that lead to your success.

Announcer 36:16
Focused on growth? Listen to more programs like this, which support the challenges and opportunities you are working with right now. Search Bold Business Podcast for the key terms at reddirection.com or your preferred podcast listening app.

Jess Dewell 36:32
We’re talking with Krishna Rajraja, founder and CEO of SupportLogic, the world’s first AI-driven support experience platform. Now back to the program. Is there a time that you can share about that you had to go against what was perceived as the right path because your gut said otherwise?

Krishna Raj Raja 36:51
Oh, all the time. I think the most notable experience is, like there was a phase, I think it was post-COVID, where you have to make a decision on pricing model for the company. And we made an experiment to, let’s go with usage-based pricing.

And usage-based pricing is not something people have really explored in the SaaS business model. It’s more common in the infrastructure business models, but not for the SaaS business. I have to go with my gut instinct and required a lot of changes, selling the concept internally within the company to my board, to our customers.

That transition was not an easy transition to do. And the reason to do it is, again, now we actually better hang it at the time when we did it. Now the entire industry is catching up to usage-based pricing.

The reason is with AI, seat-based licensing doesn’t work for SaaS businesses. You’re not selling seats to individual people. And so it’s now, it’s more about the units of work done, which basically means usage.

So I think that’s where the world is heading. And we were ahead of the time to understand that trend and we went with that.

Jess Dewell 38:05
I think that’s cool you brought that up. I’m looking forward to the next 24 months to see how SaaS changes with the integration of so much. We’ve always tried to automate things as companies, and we’ve always been successful in some way.

AI is going to be a big part of that to unlock more creativity. And how do we get to look at problems? And maybe we can actually then unleash this counter-intuitive thinking.

Constraint do we actually want to have on the roles that we have within our company? Because we need them to be in that second level out and that third level out of ambiguity and uncertainty to really listen. And just think of what the potential is if every single person had the opportunity to have some sort of an instinct and to understand all the things that they’re seeing in patterns that are not reflected in data yet.

Maybe we ought to be tracking that to just see to your point about why aren’t we? Why aren’t we monitoring our customer service relationships? And I hope that’s one thing people take away from our conversation today.

Everything we’re talking about comes back to what’s important to your company for it to survive and thrive and be relevant tomorrow. And your point is that we’re doing this through designing a customer experience and how that actually interplays and then weaves into all the other aspects of business.

Krishna Raj Raja 39:23
Listening to voice of your customer is so important. It helps gives you insights into what is working or not working in your current business. You can give your indications into which is the weakest link in your business.

Is that sales? Is it marketing? Is it post-sales function?

Is this customer support, customer success? Is it product defects? Your voice the customers will give indications on your business problems are.

There are two kinds of business leaders, right? One will look at P&L sheet, balance sheet, and run business from numbers. And there is another kind of a business leader who can look at the voice of the customer and make the business decision based on the voice of the customer.

I would argue need both. You cannot just do one. Both are interesting data points.

You marry them both, it gets very interesting. Really see where you’re under-investing or over-investing, where you’re inefficient and how that translates into voice of the customer. So that’s very important.

Also, identifying new business opportunities. And this is another example. This is Disney.

Disney parks, theme parks, they all have all these people who service you in the theme parks, right? Some of them are wearing Disney costumes that you know you’re talking to and all of that, right? And the theme park assistants who are working there, they noticed a pattern that a lot of people who are coming to Disney theme parks are not just coming there for their rides.

They’re coming there for the experience of living into the Disney world and the Disney characters. Some of them will even dress up as Disney characters when they show up at the theme parks. So they have all these conversations with those theme park people and then realize there’s potentially a business opportunity for Disney to construct a hotel where people can take their experience outside of the park and continue living that in a Disney hotel.

Listening to these conversations, and these conversations are not done by your execs in the company. These conversations are had by your frontline folks who are interacting with customers. I think that’s where connecting this frontline folks who are interacting with your customers, getting that signal and taking that to your business leader can be very transformative to business.

Jess Dewell 41:33
That makes me think of something, and it’s tangent to this, which is I want to know about a business book or a specific book to your industry and where you’re specializing that you read at least three years ago, maybe even 10 or 20 years ago. We were talking about some of that with physics that is still lasting and that you use as an influence to make sure that you are being as thoughtful and as curious as possible.

Krishna Raj Raja 42:00
I think a couple of books that comes to my mind that still stays with me that I read probably 10 years ago. One is Built to Last. That book is one of the seminal books in the business industry.

The other one is How to Measure Your Life. What I liked about How to Measure Your Life is that book basically introduced a concept that your personal life and your business life are not two separate things. They’re one and the same.

It’s the same brain that makes decisions. So the mistakes you’re likely to make in your personal life are the ones you’re going to make in business life and vice versa. I personally learned a lot from that because it made me a better person in my personal life and vice versa.

Some of the lessons I’ve learned through personal relationships, I understood my patterns in decision making, how that impacts my leadership skills.

Jess Dewell 42:53
Oh, I’m telling you there is something there. I have always been focused on the energy even before it became a thing. In the last few years, it hasn’t even been really five where that has come.

That’s actually something that I have found where the energy leaks through. When we would make change that actually was lasting and generative, the people that I was working with within companies would come back and they would say, this is changing in my house too. This is changing in my most special relationships too.

Holy cow, I actually know myself better than I thought I did. And so I have not read how to measure your life. I’m going to add that to my reading list, Krishna, because that sounds like it’s a great way to be able to recognize what you’re already working on and leverage it while all of this other learning is happening.

I want to know how much time do you take to do strategic work and reflect with all of the information that you’re gathering with all of the conversations you have and all of the just work and life that there is. How and what does your reflection time, strategic work time look like?

Krishna Raj Raja 43:57
I think this is a common mistake a lot of founders do, a lot of leaders do. Initially, if you’re a first-time founder and a first-time CEO, is just pack your calendar with meetings. And you really- Been there.

Yeah, you’re just reacting and context switching and context switching. And you really don’t have time for deep thinking and deep work. So I quickly realized that and I realized the importance of having gaps in your calendar.

The issue is that we’re just inundated with information, even as a regular person in the world, not as a leader. You go to your social media, your newsfeed, your personal life, your emails, there’s shopping emails, marketing emails, we’re just inundated with information. Multiply that by 100 times in the leadership position.

Everybody has an opinion. Every employee has some inputs for you. Every customer has some inputs for you.

Your board members have inputs for you. You’re looking at market trends and patterns that is telling you something. Lots of data.

Where’s the time for digestion? Where’s the time for processing? So I think quiet period of reflection where you don’t do anything or you do completely something that is not focused on business, right?

Being in a flow state outside of your business is super important. That’s when breakthroughs happen. That’s when you connect the dots.

Your subconscious brain connects the dots. Your machine learning algorithm starts to work because we’re all training data, you’re inputting data for your machine learning model in your brain, but you don’t have time for inferences.

Jess Dewell 45:34
I know I use Mondays as that day and sometimes I will take a walk. I call it forced bathing because I’m just walking through a local forest here with no other purpose, but then to be around the trees and to be out of an office and to be on a computer. And that’s different than exercise.

That’s different than those other goals, which both of those are so unrelated to being in front of a computer, having meetings, that it’s amazing what will show up. Taking care of yourself time too. I think that’s why ideas in the shower are such a common thought.

It’s a place where we’re not doing anything about business and we’re away from all the tools. I know I take 20% of my work is done.

Krishna Raj Raja 46:08
All the ways to drive and walk in the woods is one of them. Driving for me, car driving is one of them.

Jess Dewell 46:14
Being on a spa.

Krishna Raj Raja 46:15
You need a spa and a massage chair, which means you’re not looking at your phones and everything. And when you’re in a bit of a relaxed state, your brain works much better in pattern matching. So I think self-care is so important as for leaders.

Jess Dewell 46:28
What makes it bold to look forward and really design a customer experience to stay competitive in our quickly changing world?

Krishna Raj Raja 46:38
I think we covered some of it already. I think the fundamental notion that customer support is a cost center needs to die. Customer support is absolutely a revenue center.

It’s a strategic center and which needs to be under the radar of CEOs. A lot of times CEOs tend to think, especially product CEOs and technology CEOs, they think, okay, support is something we have to do. They really don’t think about it as a place for us to get new business ideas, a place for you to fix your organizational problems.

It’s a place for you to identify competitive threats, right? If the voice of the customer is truly reflected in the boardroom, not just quantifiable data, but thick data, don’t subject to quantification bias. Focus on true voice of the customer and emerging trends, or which you don’t have a lot of data.

By definition, emerging means you don’t have a lot of data yet, but it’s going to change the trajectory of the company. It’s super important now because the velocity of change has increased dramatically, and it’s only going to go up, which means even small trends, when they seem insignificant right now, can become really big trends in a short span of time. So being in the forefront and looking at those trends are going to be very important for business leaders.

Jess Dewell 48:00
Every single time I have a conversation, I take away something that I want to share with 25 people. When you’re listening to this podcast, you’re also listening for that and will have something that you want to share. In the comments, what is that thing that you want to tell 25 people from this program?

It’s important because, yeah, there are going to be how-tos. Yes, there are going to be steps. You’re going to be like, oh, I wish I wrote that down.

I wish I wasn’t doing this, and I could actually take action on that right now. But guess what? That one thing you want to share with others will be the thing that you can figure out how to incorporate in your business, in your workflow, in your style tomorrow.

Announcer 48:44
Jess hosts the Bold Business Podcast to provide insights for building a resilient, profitable business by deeply understanding your growth strategy, ensuring market relevance, and your company’s future. Get more information about how to drive solutions and reset your growth mindset at reddirection.com. Thank you for joining us, and special thanks to our post-production team at The Scott Treatment.