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EESTI ELU reedel, 19. juunil 2020 — Friday, June 19, 2020
Excelling in the Midst of Adversity (part two): Interview with Kia Puhm A collaboration between Chaordic Design and Estonian Life Following on from last week’s article about coping as a strate gy for success in life, we were able to speak with Kia Puhm. Kia is the founder and CEO of DesiredPath, a company that has facilitated Customer Success in the IT sector for 25 years. She is the inventor of the Intelligent Framework™ model, and this discussion was a chance to hear about the practi cal application of concepts mentioned last week. How do you define yourself as a professional and commu nity leader? I’d say I’m a pragmatist. My engineering background lends itself to being a problem solver. I’m a thought leader in the space of Customer Success and Customer Experience, having held chief customer positions since the birth of the industry. As part of the executive team at Day Software (Adobe) and Eloqua (Oracle), I led those companies through successful IPOs and subsequent acquisi tions. Today I help companies grow revenue and scale in a smarter, faster way, predomi nantly in the Software-As-AService (SaaS) or “cloud” envi ronment. For readers who aren’t familiar with Customer Success as a concept, what’s the most succinct way to describe the field?
Migratory birds and their travels through Estonia
The most succinct way is to talk about it in the context of “how do you ensure enterprise customers successfully leverage technology to achieve their desired business outcomes? And how do vendors scale their businesses accordingly to suc cessfully support the growing customer base?” In a busi ness-to-business (B2B) environ ment, when customers achieve their results, software vendors retain and grow the revenue of those customers. So how do vendors drive enterprises to be successful with software so that they keep using it? And how do the software companies scale operations to protect and grow customer revenue? These are the challenges the field of Customer Success grapples with. How can businesses cope with losing customers and benefit in the long run? In subscription-based busi nesses, customer churn (the loss of customers) is a regular and problematic course of business. If customers do not realize value and see a return on in vestment, they will leave. The practice of Customer Success was created to address this very problem. My answer to this question is therefore based on my cumula tive experience over a 25-year career. When I was at Eloqua. The company was doubling revenue year over year but at $60 million in recurring revenue, churn was becoming an issue. What had worked in previous
trees and discrete natural areas with shallow water nearby. It’s thought that this difference in activity has contributed to the black storks’ lack of mates, and therefore, decreased population in recent decades. Estonia is Vincent Teetsov one the most northern regions Summer is a potent time for where mustad-toonekured (black avian wildlife in Northern storks) migrate, and there is an Europe. Birds have flown effort being made to not disturb thousands of kilometres their nests and increase their north, some coming from as population. far away as South Africa, to Their search for food is aided mate and nurture their by the wetland environment of clutches of offspring. From Estonia. Storks will march care late March and April on fully through water, surveying wards, you’ll see these birds under the surface with their making themselves comfort bills. They use sight and sensi able wherever they can. Even tivity to changes in movement on utility poles, as you may to identify their prey and quickly have seen a valge-toonekurg swallow before it can get away. (white stork) do on the side of Ornithologists have tagged the road in Estonia. and observed several white White storks love high up storks and noticed them making nests and are not so afraid of the Baltic region a recurring people. Black storks, on the summer destination. One parti other hand, prefer to nest in cular old bird, who hatched in 1988 in Varbevere (not far from Peipsi järv – Lake Peipus), was discovered again in 2015 in Matsalu Nature Reserve in Läänemaa, in western Estonia. The tag they applied to this bird in the late 80s was how they were able to identify the stork later on. In fact, over the years, this stork has also been identi fied travelling through the Photo: Santiago Lacarta Middle East, on one of the two
years was no longer sustainable or scalable. I was hired to run the Customer Experience orga nization, expand customer re venue by $25 million the following year and lead the company through a transforma tion to become a customer- centric organization. On paper, the change was planned out like an MBA textbook success story. But when we launched, customer retention was not increasing and we had disastrous product re leases making matters worse. We had predicated our business model on what we thought product adoption should look like, not what the actual, holis tic, customer journey ex perience was. I realized that using the customer journey as the proxy for the success path of customers, and aligning the business model accordingly, is by far the most impressive way to retain customers, grow reve nue and evolve as customers do. So I created the Intelligent Framework™, which borrows on the principle of human centric design to help compa nies become customer-centric so they can keep more customers and grow revenue faster. In ar chitecture there’s a term called a “desire path” which refers to a path created as a consequence of human footfall traffic. In business, the desired path is the successful customer journey. In other words, companies cope with losing customers by con tinuously improving and adapt ing to minimize future losses. How do you balance
major bird migration routes to Europe. The other one being over the Strait of Gibraltar between Morocco and Spain. The association that storks have with babies comes partly from ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek mythology. In one story, Hera, Queen of the Greek gods, was jealous of another queen, Gerana. In re taliation, Gerana attempted to steal Hera’s son. Also of in fluence is the understanding that storks mate with one part ner for life. Storks will find dif ferent locations to nest in the summer, but hover around the same general area, even when they are beyond the oldest breeding age of seven years. Barn swallows are another species that migrate long dis tances. Like storks, they have become a notable fixture in written history due to nesting close to humans. The tops of their bodies are a rich blue, and their back feathers diverge in a “forked” shape, projecting back wards from a white stomach. While their colours make for a natural choice of Estonia’s national bird, their consumption of mosquitoes has made them an easy friend with people. But it’s the sentiment of long journeys, of finding a safe home, and their connection to the coming of warm weather
Photo used with permission from Kia Puhm
moments of order and chaos? Prior to my work career, I was an international competitive swimmer, on the national team. And then I’m an engineer. I don’t believe that I can solve every problem, but I never go in with a mindset that a problem cannot be solved or an alterna tive can’t be found. I rely on my swimming days of per sistence, hard work, and train ing. Then I rely on my engi neering skills and education of problem solving. Do you feel that being a woman gives you a unique perspective on coping as a leadership strategy? I think my aggregate life experiences and being me – a female, former elite athlete, an engineer, a senior executive and living and working abroad – gives me a unique perspective. Things have opened up so much more now for women in the last few years than it has for the majority of my career. In swimming, I was training with guys in the faster lanes. I was in engineering, a male dominated educational program. Then I was in software, a male domi nated industry. I’ve had very frustrating moments. I have felt at times that it was exhausting
Eha Naylor… (Continued from page 16)
ing work for the Parliamentary Precinct Branch on the federal lands in Ottawa and for climate change action plans in several municipalities. Her skills include public en gagement and facilitation to find consensus around complex environmental issues. She has taught and lectured on environ mentally-based planning and sustainable community design at a number of universities. She is a full member of several professional associations in cluding the Canadian Institute of Planners, Ontario Pro fes
and sun that resonate most deeply with us. Migratory birds return to the same places again and again, exchanging conti nents as the weather changes. This allows them to survive in the most favourable conditions for their species. We have swal lows and other migratory birds here in Canada, too. Just as the Estonian Ornithological Society has recommended households with barn swallow nests to be mindful of their nesting areas, let’s be mindful of all of these creatures we share space with.
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to be a woman in a man’s world, so to speak, because I wasn’t thinking, behaving, and acting like a man. What’s nicer now is that that has changed a lot. That may also be because I’m running my own company. But I do think that women tend to, perhaps, be more empathetic. I do think that they may have a more inclusive perspective. It’s often said that women are better at multitask ing and wearing multiple hats. I think that seeing a broader per spective is also really helpful. I don’t want to stereotype in the opposite direction either. I’m not saying that men don’t do all of those things as well. They certainly do. There should just be a balanced perspective. It shouldn’t be so much that it’s all a male perspective or that it’s all a female perspective. I think everyone brings in differ ent perspectives. That’s what I do with customers when I bring them all together. Before we conclude, is there anything in particular that you’re working on right now that you’d like to pro mote? Yeah! My website is www. thedesiredpath.com. I predomi nantly deal with B2B (busi ness-to-business) enterprises. If there are people out in the com munity that run or are working at companies that need help in driving their revenue growth or dealing with retaining custom ers in this environment, I’d love for them to check that out and contact me. I’m also on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/ in/kiapuhm). This interview has been edited and condensed.
sional Planners, the American Society of Landscape Archi tects, Lambda Alpha and the Urban Land Institute. Eha has served on many pro fessional committees and has also appeared as an environ mental planning expert witness at hearings. Since 2004 has been a member of the Uni versity of Toronto Faculty Council for the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Eha served for eleven years on the federal govern ment’s National Capital Com mission Advisory Committee for Planning, Design and Realty, including three as the Chair. As the Chair of the OALA Practice Legislation Committee, she continues to ad vocate for landscape architects at all levels of government.
I am interested in purchasing Estonian art that was created prior to WW II. Artists of interest include: Ants Laikmaa, Eerik Haa mer, Konrad Mägi, Oskar Kallis and Eduard Wiiralt. If you wish to discuss a possible sale, please write to me at laurihillar@gmail.com or Hillar Lauri, 9 Baker Ave., Toronto, ON M4V 2A9.
