Today’s interview is with Elaine Richards, who is the COO of 37signals, the makers of Basecamp and HEY. She joined 37signals in 2021 and joins me today to talk about customer service and customer experience in small to mid-market companies, customer success and the role of community, leadership and remote work and their EoS (everyone on support) initiative amongst other things including satnavs and legendary sandwich shops around the world.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Even CX champions are struggling to keep up with rising customer expectations – Interview with Adrian McDermott of Zendesk – and is number 450 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Calendly for sponsoring my podcast this month.

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Here’s the highlights of my chat with Elaine:

• Many people talk about building relationships and building an emotional connection with their customers but they sort of forget that customers have jobs to be done.
• Large companies are always trying to figure out how to be more nimble, more agile and quicker like a smaller company. And, small companies often look to large companies for insight on how they do things. They could learn a lot from each other. 
• The solution needn’t be complex. It just needs to be effective.
• We fundamentally know where our customers come from. We understand what it means to have a small team, we understand what it means to have to make really difficult choices about where you put your resources. And so I think that influences both the features that we choose and don’t choose quite frankly, because any software company will tell you there’s an unlimited number of requests and things that you can do. And I think that’s often how a lot of the places end up in sort of a technology bloat kind of situation.
• That really informs how we think about success and informs how we think about pricing.
• We’ve built a customer community that is a big part of our customer success efforts.
• We did this because we realized that we know a lot about our product but we don’t know and are not experts about every type of company and industry. So, we thought maybe we should get out of the way of our customers and let these folks who have more in common and expertise connect.
• It’s a bit like organizing a party. You don’t know who is going to show up. So, we took a fairly conservative approach and we invited around a couple of dozen customers in the beginning. 
• We invited them and, in the beginning, we were spending a lot of time trying to seed conversation and moderate and facilitate.
• We still do some of that but now the community has taken over and has shown that they are interested in sharing and meeting each other. 
• It’s been a great place for us to preview new functions. 
• People who are in there are very excited to see the new things before they become official. 
• It’s becoming a bigger part of the sticky experience that is basecamp.
• Basecamp is one of the pioneers of remote work.
• Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37signals, wrote the book on it. 
• First and foremost I would really encourage companies, particularly small ones, if they’re not remote already to look at it because of the competitive advantage it gives you from a talent perspective is really meaningful. 
• I think about remote work in two different ways. One is functional, you’ve got to have the tools and technology to make the thing work. I think that’s fairly well understood at this point.
• What I think is still a work in progress is the cultural element. So from the leadership on down (and we benefit from this given that Jason and David wrote the book), you have to ask yourself: What do you truly believe in and what kind of relationship do you have with people up and down the organization? 
• Much of the struggles we see about productivity and whether teams should be remote or in the office…..much of it it comes down to relationship between the team and the leadership and the management. 
• My advice to management broadly is that is that people will impress you greatly with what they can do when you trust them. And, they will also impress you differently with how little they can do when you show that you don’t trust them. 
• So, the question has to be: how do you build those relationships that get everybody what they’re actually looking for?
• I wonder if the executives who come out most strongly against remote work themselves find themselves to be unproductive if they are not in the office and their opposition is really a reflection of their own neurosis and anxieties.
• Do you trust people? 
• Have you hired the right people to do the right jobs? And, do you trust them to be able to do that? 
• If you don’t, then there’s something intrinsically flawed in in your organizational setup.
• We have an EoS (Everyone on Support) program where everybody does a turn in the support queue for a day or a couple of days a couple of times a year. 
• I don’t think it’s really unique. I’ve seen it elsewhere. What is really unique, I think, is that literally everybody does it. Everybody.
• I did it, the first time, when I was maybe 3-4 months into the job. I found it quite intimidating and was worried I would do us more reputational damage than help. 
• But our support team is fantastic and they have this great way of setting it up so that there’s a lot of help and a lot of guardrails around you and it really helps you in the course of a day, get up close and personal with the different kinds of customers that come in with their different kinds of questions.
• It’s tiring but rewarding and insightful and gratifying.
• It really helps with the connectedness throughout the organization.
• Plans are useless, but the act of planning is invaluable.
• No plan can survive contact with the enemy.
• Yes you have to figure out what you want to do, how you want to operate, what you stand for and how you want to work together but you’ve also got to respond to an ever changing environment.
• It’s a bit like a modern satnav that is constantly updating your route in real time.
• Elaine’s Punk CX words: Obvious, Human, Bespoke.
• Elaine’s Punk XL brand: I don’t think there are great ones at scale. Legendary sandwich shops around the world. There is one in every in every city, state, province and town.

About Elaine

Elaine Richards is the COO of 37signals, the makers of Basecamp and HEY, who she joined in 2021. In this role, she leads customer operations, marketing and administrative functions. For two decades Basecamp has been helping small businesses manage communications and projects so that they can focus on the work they actually want to do. HEY joined the lineup in 2020 as a fresh approach to email, putting privacy and inbox control first.

Prior to joining 37signals, Elaine served as the president and COO of Wyzant, a pioneer in online learning, and EVP of Cars.com, a leading online automotive marketplace in the U.S.

Check out  37signals, Basecamp and HEY, say Hi to Basecamp on Twitter @basecamp and feel free to connect with Elaine on LinkedIn here.

Photo by Samuel Foster on Unsplash