How to Design and Ensure a Great Customer Experience with Sean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift

How to Design and Ensure a Great Customer Experience with Sean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift

ean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift

In this episode of OpsStars Podcast, Rachael McBrearty is joined by Sean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift, a conversational marketing platform that combines chat, email, video, and automation to remove the friction from business buying. Sean started his career in customer success and later led a sales development team. It was there that he learned how important operations were to all the GTM teams’ success. Sean has spent the last four years in operations at Drift, leveraging his experience across the customer journey, working across all the different parts of the operations spectrum — marketing ops, sales ops, and CS ops.

Sean is also the host of the podcast “Operations with Sean Lane,” where he goes under the hood of how hyper-growth companies operate and gives operational tactics needed to scale growth and drive results at your company.

Sean shares how operations can play an instrumental role in designing and ensuring a great customer experience.

Key Highlights:

05:27 – 07:19 – Defining Revenue Operations – Sean defines revenue operations as the processes of the three go-to-market teams: marketing operations, sales operations, and customer success operations. While there are pros and cons of centralized versus decentralized models, the most important thing is that each person understands and cares about what happens across the entire customer journey, even the parts they are not responsible for. This is because changes in one part have ripple effects on the others.
07:20 – 12:22 – Designing a Customer Journey – When designing the customer journey, consider you have both internal and external customers. A great place to start is looking at those milestones or handoff points where you might find some friction, or you can anticipate where things might break. Start simple and think about how you want to measure each of those core milestones. Also, it’s crucial to try to find the root cause of any problem that you see inside of your funnel or inside of your customer journey. Keep that in mind and keep those two sets of customers in mind. That’s a good starting point to design a customer journey in the first place.
12:23 – 15:22 – Skillset of a Great Ops Team – The North Star at Drift for the operations group is that they are there to build a predictable, understood, revenue engine. They bring in people who are curious problem solvers. And, they partner closely with the internal customers they serve, allowing them to better understand and ultimately better design with them in mind.
16:06 – 20:40 – Automation vs Human in Customer Experience – Be smart and balance automation and human. Look at the ways to leverage each component. Let humans be good at what humans are good at, and let systems be good at what systems are good at. But in delivering a great customer experience, you have to understand where the customer is at in the journey and meet them there.
20:41 – 26:45 – Watch Out For the Pitfalls – When designing and operationalizing the customer experience, don’t overcomplicate things. Starting simple is the key. Also, try looking for role models at companies that are a few years ahead of you in maturity and learn from them – most problems in operations have been solved by other companies. Before you throw technology at a problem, try to articulate or solve it manually. Then if you do decide you need a solution, match the complexity of the tools that you’re assessing with the maturity that your company is at.

Who Would Sean Like to Take For Lunch in the Ops World?

Claire Hughes Johnson, Corporate Officer and Advisor at Stripe

Episode Resources

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“Be incredibly curious. Be the person who wants to solve the problem. One of the ways that you can quickly carve a place for yourself as an operations person is to become an expert in something.”

Sean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift

“Regardless of who you report to, as long as you can take a step back, look at that entire customer journey and care about what happens in those other parts of the customer journey, that is the most important.”

Sean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift

“At the end of the day, the workflow is not the thing that’s going to impress executives. It’s the movement of this conversion rate or the way it freed up this person’s time on my team. Those are the outcomes that executives are looking for, and so making sure you’re spending time to put business metrics around those initiatives, I think is the last thing that I would say because then you’ll know whether or not the work you’re doing is actually moving the needle or not.”

Sean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift