The Predictive Power of VOC: Navigating Beyond NPS

Revenue Rehab

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Lihong Hicken, Chief Executive Officer at TheySaid.

Lihong is the co-founder and CEO of Theysaid (Theysaid.io), a company that is disrupting the customer engagement space to drive business growth. With a background in user experience and B2B revenue growth, Lihong is transforming the way businesses interact with their customers by leveraging the power of journey pulsing and advanced analytics.

Fun fact: Lihong started Theysaid when her daughter was just 3 weeks old, demonstrating her passion and commitment to innovation in the industry. Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director at General Catalyst, describes Lihong as 'a Force of Nature,' recognizing her unwavering determination and drive to transform the customer engagement space.

In this episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Lihong will tackle the belief that it is customer value VOC (not NPS) that is a leading signal of churn.

Bullet Points of Key Topics + Chapter Markers:

Topic #1 Tech Leader Insights: Churn and Upselling [07:06] “The first biggest learning I got from interviewing these 50 tech company CEOs and COOs, is that when I ask them ‘how does your team know if your customer is about to churn?’ And 80% of the companies say, ‘Oh, we look at their product usage or login section’…When I asked them, ‘Okay, so how does your team know if a customer's ready to buy more?’” Lihong says, “100% of the companies said that we talk to our customers in the form of customer reaching out to us.”

Topic #2 Critical Shift: Customer Insights and Timing [09:52] Lihong explains how the typical customer journey gathers data too late to prevent churn. Communicating frequently with your customers to gather good data is key to preventing churn and being successful in upselling she explains. “Depending on who you are, and where your journey is, the frequency and the questions sent to you will be different,” Lihong says, “and these questions are curated to find risk and growth opportunities.”

Topic #3 What Does Good Data Look Like? [24:35] “I think there's three different levels of the goodness. Typically, in the short term, like within a month, you may find some [dissatisfied] customers who you may be lucky enough to catch them before they make the change is layer number one,” Lihong shares. Layer number two is picking out where there is opportunity for cross sell deals. Layer three is identifying growth opportunities of your existing customers.

So, What's the One Thing You Can Do Today?

Lihong’s ‘One Thing’ is to identify insights you wish you knew about your customers. “Add a few questions that, you know, that's something that you wanted to know, maybe a little bit uncomfortable to ask customer face to face,” Lihong advises, “write them down, and then ask them either on the next call with them, or in the NPS survey.”

Buzzword Banishment:

Lihong’s Buzzword to Banish is ‘synergy’. “It's funny, I didn't know what that it meant,” Lihong says, “[but] ever since I got to business school at Berkeley it was everywhere…it is too overused.”

Links:

Get in touch with Lihong Hicken:

• LinkedIn
• LinkedIn Live
• TheySaid

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