Transparency, Community, and the Human Touch When Selling Products

James Kemp:
Hello, welcome to another episode of Woo Product Chat. I am James Kemp. I’m the core product manager at WooCommerce and we’re here today to talk about transparency in software. I’ll pass you over to Katie to introduce herself.

Katie Keith:
So, yeah, I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2 plugins. So we’re here today with Miriam Schwab, head of WordPress and at Elementor. Hey Miriam, thank you so much for coming on.

Miriam Schwab:
Hi, thanks for having me.

Katie Keith:
So could you, for anybody who doesn’t already know, you just explain a bit more about what you do at Elementor and more generally in WordPress.

Miriam Schwab:
So I’m head of WordPress at Elementor. What that means is that I act as a kind of liaison between Elementor, the company and all of our activity and the broader WordPress community. And that refers to a range of different relationships, connections, partnerships, et cetera.

Katie Keith:
Wow, nice. Yeah, so. And I know you very much as an integral part of the WordPress community. See you everywhere, both in your own right and as a representative of Elementor. So that’s why we thought you’d be the perfect person to talk with us about transparency in software and particularly the decision of how much to share with your community.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting topic because I think there is a line with like how much you should share or how much you can share even. I know at WooCommerce, one of the things that we try and do, or that I try and do a lot is share as much as I can, which is very helpful, I think. Miriam, why do you think community thinking matters and what it kind of means to you in your role?

Miriam Schwab:
So I think that all businesses have to consider how transparent they are. In all industries, transparency engenders trust and just generally a clearer relationship, I think, between the company and their customers and end users. In the case of an open source industry, I think transparency takes a different, it has a bit of a different angle perspective on how A company operates. I mean, that’s how I see it. And that often takes a community orientation as well. Our CISO head of security at Elementor, he describes our business as B2C, but the C is community, not customer. Obviously we care about our customers, but the vast majority of our end users are not paying customers and even those that are still very much part of a community type of culture. So we have to think about how we engage and communicate with all of those users, paid and otherwise, in a way that is suitable for our business model and the open source industry that we’re in.

James Kemp:
So they’re not paid because they’re using the free version?

Miriam Schwab:
Yeah. Our free version of Elementor has over 18 million active installs.

James Kemp:
Wow.

Miriam Schwab:
Our paid version has less. And so most of our users are using our free version and that goes for our other products as well. So we have. We now have like a kind of almost like a suite of products with more to come. And a lot of them, or all of them have a freemium model. So a lot of users will start using them, just stay on the free version. So there, as well as how it works out. All of the plugins are in the repo and freely available and fully open source, so. So the vast majority of our end users are actually not paying us.

James Kemp:
Wow. I think one of the things that it helps with being open with the community and having as much community involvement as you can is product market fit. Really understanding what the community wants from your product and working towards that as best you can and I think is very valuable. I know in the past at WooCommerce, potentially the stuff that goes on behind the scenes and the stuff that is going into the roadmap didn’t necessarily happen in the open. I wouldn’t say it was a secret, but it wasn’t talked about out in the open as much as it is now. And I think it’s very valuable. Like, it’s really good to have all of that input from people. I have found that the community of WooCommerce specifically is mostly the builder community, I think, contacting and connecting with the merchant community. So merchants that, you know, set up WooCommerce by themselves and they don’t have a builder to assist them is a harder challenge. I find there’s more of a direct approach that needs to happen. You have to reach out to them. Whereas the builder community, and that’s the community you tend to find at wordcamps and events like that, are very open with their feedback. I personally find it very useful.

Miriam Schwab:
We definitely find it useful from our perspective. Perspective and experience. When we have open line of communication, open relationship with our end users, then we get a very strong feedback loop on our product products. Multiple. Yeah, plural. So we put something out there and then we immediately start getting feedback from them, whether it’s through our GitHub repo or otherwise. It also can include, you know, through just tickets to us with people explaining things that aren’t clear to them and that helps us improve our products. So we have that very tight feedback loop. And also we have a. I’m sure, you know, I think most of the open source products have this, but we have a beta release phase which is fully available in GitHub and we communicate quite thoroughly around that. So in GitHub itself, with every beta release there’s already like kind of like a post with all of the information about what is included in the latest in the upcoming release. People can test it out and already start opening issues and reporting anything, giving feedback. We also have a developer’s blog, so that gets more technical, but that already is posted during the beta phase so that users can dig in there. And basically, unlike maybe businesses and other industries, we’re saying here it is fully open in all its glory or not glory because it’s in a beta and please use it and try it and let us know what you think. And users can opt in to be beta users as well. You can obviously install it in, you know, staging sites or whatever locally, but users can opt in to be part of the like kind of automated beta process. And we highly encourage it. And then like I said, it helps us make better products. Obviously not everyone is always happy with everything that is done or not done. You know, we get not only complaints about, let’s say, how we, let’s say rolled out, let’s say we’ve heard a lot about people wanting a particular feature. They’ve submitted a lot. There’s a ticket or an issue in GitHub that’s got a lot of engagement and then we roll out what we think they want and then they’re like, ah, we didn’t mean that. Or people will be asking for something for a long time and we won’t do it. And then they are upset about that. But like with every product there’s something, you have to weigh a lot of different things around features. What, you know, just because some people want it doesn’t mean it’s actually good for everyone. And also there’s priorities. And the priorities are often related to other, you know, needs or the strategic Roadmap. Speaking of roadmaps, so we always had a roadmap, but we. It wasn’t like super organized in terms of how it was shared. But now you can go to elementor.com roadmap I think that’s the URL, and see what’s coming next. And then people can also be in the loop about that, like in that way and keep an eye on the roadmap in terms of, you know, features that we’re planning on rolling out soon. And then we also started doing over the last year and a half. I don’t remember exactly when we started it. We have this live roadmap show with the goal of it being here’s what’s Coming next. So we have one that kicks off the year, so that’s kind of like a broader one. But then like every quarter, ish, there’s another one that says this is what, like kind of what was done, A bit of what was done, and here’s what’s coming next. So people are always able to be aware of what’s down the road and that helps our users feel more confident and prepared and also tightens that feedback loop, which, like I said, is super valuable.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think that’s particularly important, all of those things for Elementor, because it’s in such a competitive market, being a page builder plugin, there are so many out of them out there and I think it makes a real difference. Elementor out there in the community, you see them just all the time at wordcamps, at online things compared to even other page builders. So I think that can help a product to really stand out amongst the competition.

Miriam Schwab:
I agree. I think products are about a few things. One is obviously what the product is, right? Is it something that people like, value and bring some value, which is something that Elementor is always aspiring to. We want Elementor to be our user’s, like, power tool. That’s how they describe it to us. But then it’s also the sentiment towards the company that’s creating it, like, because of many reasons. But one of the things about elementary is that the founder story is our founders ran an agency and were looking for something that would help them do their work better. And they felt like there was a need for this type of tool and felt it. And so all and I had an agency and many of us here had like, you know, delta in the agency life. So we’re actually. We see ourselves as being in the trenches with our end users and we want to be out with them, you know, in their work in their processes, in their workflows, in their challenges, and hopefully helping them overcome them so that they can do what they love and do it better. And so through like kind of more transparent communication, we think and hope that it creates a stronger connection to us as a company, to us as people. Right. Some of us are pretty familiar faces and us as a brand.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I’d agree with that. And I think as well, being kind of transparent and open and even saying no to things that people want is better than not saying anything and just not being open. I think people just appreciate that, that understanding of where the product is going and what you are and aren’t working on. Yeah, I think that’s very valuable.

Miriam Schwab:
I’ll just expand on that if that’s okay. We mentioned no, which is kind of like a negative angle. Communication isn’t just about communicating around the good things, the shiny things. Right. It’s also communicating transparently around challenges. So challenging things can be saying to someone clearly and transparently and empathetically. This isn’t happening now and that’s important. You can’t leave people hanging also around security issues, which hopefully none of us ever have, but you know, we do and thank God we haven’t had anything major for quite a while actually. But when we have had like sometime after I joined there was a big security issue at Elementor and I actually got involved around the communication side of things. I felt like we could do better and creating processes around how we own the issue. Say we are aware we and that we’re on it and we’re fixing it and then how did we fix it and why did it happen? And all of that stuff needs to be communicated like brutally, transparently to also be. Everyone has issues. So like what the question is, do we sweep it under the carpet or do we own it? And so owning it in the long run rather than trying to hide it is a much better strategy. It’s better for everyone. It’s more straightforward, it’s more transparent, it’s more in the spirit of open source. And I know it’s hard, but in general it’s worth doing.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I mean, it’s like you say everyone you know at some point will have some sort of security issue. And it’s why we have security people, right, to prevent these things and deal with them when they do arise. But.

Miriam Schwab:
And even our end users, right, they can often spot things and let us know. I mean, we have a bug bounty program like a lot of people, so we have those types of eyes on it, but we often get reports from user end users who are, let’s say, more savvy and notice something. And we really appreciate that they take time to report to us and sometimes even our partners, other plugin companies and things like that, who, you know, their product integrates with ours, they’ll also report to us and we’re very grateful that they feel comfortable doing that and letting us know in a responsible way so we can, you know, fix things, roll out patches, et cetera. So in this type of environment it can come from a lot of different types of people completely.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, definitely.

James Kemp:
Yeah.

Katie Keith:
I think it’s really important issue is not just for the security team, as you say, it’s for the community facing team. And it’s like a lot of things, often people say that if a company receives a complaint and then makes the customer happy, the customer’s actually happier than if there had never been a complaint in the first place. So you can kind of turn things around to some extent by being open and honest about negative things because that really shows who you really are as a company.

Miriam Schwab:
Yeah, totally.

James Kemp:
Yeah. I think as well people on the outside that haven’t experienced a negative thing, but see how you react to the negative thing gives them more in you as a company as well. I think specifically around like, you know, negative reviews, for example.

Miriam Schwab:
Oh yeah, we get those.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think everyone does. We’re all used to it. I’m interested in where your community lives. You know, there’s a few places where community can happen. So you’ve got obviously the in person events, you’ve got Twitter X, you’ve got Facebook groups, you’ve got GitHub discussions and things like that, have you found any one of them to be the most active place?

Miriam Schwab:
So when it comes to our connection with the WordPress community rather than necessarily our end users and the WordPress community is very important to us, then Twitter is a really good place. And obviously also the Slack communities like post Status and make WordPress Slack are super valuable for staying in touch and connected to the WordPress community when it comes to specifically the Elementor ecosystem and Elementor users. So I would say our strongest community is probably our Facebook community. It’s called the Global Elementor something group, something like that. I just go there, I don’t remember what it’s called, you know, Global Elementor something. And it’s very active and very engaged and so we are active there in terms of keeping our community updated and responding to questions. Our team gives a lot of support to people there. We also have a discord community, which is going quite well for people who prefer that for various reasons. And so the community’s there as well. We used to have in person meetups like Elementor, meetups around the world. And then that kind of stopped around Covid and other things. But we’re restarting local communities now. We actually are hiring local community kind of leader managers. It’s not just about the community, it’s also about localization. So the. So we now have two people who are starting with us in one person who will be our Greek, German, sorry, German manager, and someone for Spain. And hopefully soon we’re going to have someone in Italy and France and they will lead the elementary community there, both in terms of like, you know, what you assume as community activity, like meetups and things like that, but also on the localization front, speaking to our users in those particular locales, not only in their language, but also culturally. Like, what holidays do they have? You know, let’s talk about your holidays, let’s maybe have campaigns around your holidays, let’s have events around your holidays. Like we don’t, we can kind of know, but like, you know, we don’t live their cultures. So, so that’s, that’s starting now. We’re super excited about that.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that’s interesting, the idea about going local in that way, because a lot of us, we see it as a, a global business. But when you’re at the scale of Elementor, I suppose it does make sense to reach out locally and also things like prioritizing local events and getting that presence in a way that people will connect with more, perhaps because it’s in their area.

Miriam Schwab:
You know, when you, when you become, I think when you reach such a global scale like Elementor, you still want to have a personal touch, but it’s really hard at that scale. So then in a way after scaling, you get back to your roots like grassroots kind of thing, which is actually kind of how Elementor started, and connect more tightly with the local communities. Also, one of WordPress biggest strengths has always been its localization and the fact that it’s been translated into many languages. WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in Japan, for example. Probably a lot of it has to do with the fact that it was trans localized into Japanese. People in Japan feel much, much more comfortable using a product in their language. The same with Germany, from what I understand, and France and Italy and Spain, I’m assuming as well. I just know that those two kind of stand out. So if you want to go global, you actually have to in some ways go local, to really become a tool that people in certain locations feel comfortable using.

Katie Keith:
Interesting.

James Kemp:
How do you handle? So we had a tweet earlier today actually about someone was looking for more invoicing functionality within WooCommerce Core. And then someone else, Marco, who I believe is in Spain or Portugal, Portugal replied saying that actually in the EU or where he is in Portugal, invoicing has to go through like very specific accounting or software that handles it in a very specific way and it wouldn’t be helpful to have it in core. And I think that’s the kind of local things that you’re not necessarily aware of. I know, for example, like California has its own set of rules with regard to subscription products and you’ve got like the EU VAT rules and all that kind of stuff. So it’s definitely one of the benefits of being community based is that you get all this input from different places. But it’s also one of the challenges, like how do you serve all of these different cultures and communities that all have different laws and rules and work in different ways, but without the community you wouldn’t have that input. And you might put something into a product that doesn’t serve everyone in the best way. So I think it can be quite valuable.

Miriam Schwab:
I think it’s very easy for all of us to take the easy route, which is just serving people who are like us. But if we want to be more global and have more of an impact, and if we want our products to help more people, then we need to go outside of our comfort zones and learn the ropes of different places, compliance and that type of stuff. Like this type of financial thing with invoices. Oh, it’s like kind of. It’s really the worst. So, you know, WooCommerce being like a product related to buying and selling specifically, I guess, you know, that’s something that you have to think about. You know, Elementor obviously has a lot of WooCommerce users as well. I mean, we have to think about these types of things to a certain extent as well. Like, you know, we localize our pricing and currencies that we can receive and all that kind of stuff. But in the end, yeah, it depends what we want to achieve and how we prioritize that. Obviously some locales are like much more challenging. So, you know, maybe you don’t prioritize that. Every business has to look at what, you know, what they’re trying to achieve. But. But it is interesting and it’s exciting. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about WordPress the community, which is that I get to go outside of my bubble and meet people who live different lives than me, of different cultures, you know, different backgrounds, which makes everything much more interesting and I learn a lot and so I think we can apply that to business as well. That just doing things the same way for everyone. Kind of boring.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, absolutely.

Katie Keith:
About the product side of things, things how community can inform the development of our products and how we communicate that. So let’s move on to being transparent about business. Because my approach to being open with the community is kind of a bit different to yours. Because our plugins are so niche, nobody, not that many people, actually care about the decisions we make about specific products. We are open about our feature requests, for example, when customers request something, we give them reasons if we’re not going to do it. For example, like we might tell them how many people have requested that versus something else to help them understand our reasoning. So we are open with products, but in terms of a public forum, our plugins don’t necessarily lend themselves to that at Barn too. So what I’ve done instead is be very open in terms of how I run the business. Again, that’s more with the builder community rather than necessarily the end user because they’re the people that are likely to be following me online. But I share a lot about how I run the business, decisions I make and why. Some of that’s about product, some of it’s just business stuff. And the benefit for me is not necessarily direct sales, it’s more learning and sharing. And I learned so much from other business people in WordPress because I have shared and then they will share as well. So by having that openness with the WordPress community particularly, I find that it brings opportunities which wouldn’t happen otherwise. Do either of you do anything like that in a more business sense?

Miriam Schwab:
I just want to say that I love your tweets and what you share. It is very interesting.

Katie Keith:
Thank you.

Miriam Schwab:
Yeah. Seeing like, the behind the scenes of how business runs. Anyone who’s interested in running business. I had two businesses. It’s just. It’s interesting too. To learn from you and hear how you’re making the decisions. You’re very transparent. I think you’re very unique in that. I don’t. I think most businesses aren’t. I think it’s a strength for you and your business. It. You stand out and you also. Your business is very transparent, which I think is appealing in terms of how we approach it, the stage that Elementor is at. So I think we reached 400 employees. So we’re not at all as big as automatically say, but we’re not small and we’re managing many products and strategies and initiatives. We don’t share all of the things that are happening behind the scenes. We. I think it would be too risky for us to be like, hey, we’re considering doing this kind of product or that kind of product. Like, if we consider building a new product, then it’s based on a lot of research and analysis that is done by teams here. A lot of it does include speaking to end users, but not in a public format. We learned kind of the hard way not to promote a product that’s not 100% going to be launched. That happened.

James Kemp:
Yeah.

Miriam Schwab:
I won’t say which, but when that happened, we were like, okay, it’s disappointing. I don’t think it creates more trust with our users. That kind of. I guess you could say it’s kind of a failure. It. I’m not a big believer in failures. It was a learning experience. And, like, we learned how to decide what products we’re going to develop next, but we shared that with our community to a certain extent. And then people were disappointed or, you know, wondering what happened. So we want to share as much as we can, which is a lot. When it’s pretty concrete. I think that’s for our users. It’s just. That’s where the value is for them to know that we’re thinking, because everyone here is thinking all the time about a million different things and different angles, and then there’s a lot of discussions until something is finalized and things like that. So I don’t think our end users need to know that. What they do need to know is this is coming when we know it’s actually coming. This is what it’s going to do for you. You can be an early access user and then even when we have a new product called Send. And so the early access users got access to the product leaders and they could have conversations with them. So that’s like a level of transparency and access, which I think is really nice, especially at our scale. But that only happens when it’s actually like we’re like 100% or 99.9% sure that it’s going to roll out. We just don’t want to disappoint our users on that in that way. I don’t know. That’s how I think how we approach it.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I know what you mean. I wonder about that. So, for example, I announced that we were expanding into Shopify a good six months, at least six months ago. Now we still don’t have an app, but I purposely waited until we were further along with our first app before I announced what that was. So I talked a lot publicly about the move to Shopify. I never said what the app was until actually I wanted some very specific feedback and we were getting towards the end of that journey. It may still never be launched because Shopify could turn it down. We don’t have that control. But I did want to start consulting about certain decisions, like the designs, for example, and I was aware that was risky. But people don’t realize what you don’t share. So, for example, people think I am super open about revenue because I share our top level revenue numbers, but I very rarely share numbers for specific products. And one advantage that we have at Barn too is that we have 19 premium products. So if I share revenue, I’m not actually giving competitors anything useful for specific products. Whereas if, say you told people what Elementor Pro generates in revenue, that is about that one product. So people can ascertain the size of the market, for example. So people think I’m super transparent, but there are still decisions to be made about what not to share.

Miriam Schwab:
That’s interesting. That’s a good point. I think we’re all transparent to the point where it isn’t too risky. And I don’t think that it’s admirable to risk a business by being overly transparent. That doesn’t help anyone. The business needs to continue to function and be healthy to help the users. The users want a healthy company. So whatever can be shared within the confines of those requirements is amazing. And everyone. And then there’s definitely a range of what can be shared. Like we, we don’t share our revenue ever, as far as I know. Like, that is totally internal information that will not be shared externally, you know, and there’s. I’m sure there’s other numbers that if we talk about it, I can think of that we don’t share. We share our scale a lot. A lot of those types of numbers anyways. People can kind of ascertain through different tooling, but yeah, it’s just not something that the company feels comfortable about. But the bottom line is that we’re serving our customers in a way that brings some value, so it shouldn’t really matter. And if you’re looking from the outside, it looks like we’re doing well, which we are, thank God. So hopefully that’s enough information for our users to feel comfortable from that perspective.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think we’re very similar to Elementor, I guess. I think you make a good point about sharing potentially too early. Like, you know, this is what we’re working on and it will be released in a year and then things change and that doesn’t happen. That’s definitely a challenge because I like to talk about what I’m working on and I also like to get the community input on, you know, things that we’re not necessarily working on yet. But I want some input to see what people think about certain features or, you know, projects within the WooCommerce ecosystem. I don’t think I’ve tripped up yet, but there’s always time.

Katie Keith:
Well, you don’t make promises. You say should decor and then it may or may not happen. You haven’t said we are adding this decor.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And it’s mainly to gather the input and, you know, get an understanding of what if what I’m considering is something that people would actually want. And oftentimes it’s not even related to anything we’re actually working on. I’m. I’m just, you know, like you say, I’m just thinking about 100 different things at the same time.

Miriam Schwab:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
And just want. What do they call it, like rubber ducking in development.

Miriam Schwab:
I think if a company has a public roadmap, that people can view that. So let’s say on our roadmap there’s stuff there that we haven’t necessarily released in beta, but it’s there because we know we are. So we can already start getting a feedback loop around that. And then of course, once it’s in beta, then we can get lots of feedback around it. And I guess because we have like a pretty good ecosystem in terms of communication, we get a Lot of feedback on our products, like, consistently. It’s an ongoing feedback loop of, we like this, we hate this, can you do this? So we always have what to work with. We don’t ask, like, maybe we could and should, I don’t know. But like, that seems to keep us busy enough, that loop.

James Kemp:
I don’t think we have a public roadmap yet, but I know we are working on something along those lines. You mentioned a feedback loop. What does that look like? Do you kind of feed all the different sources of feedback into a single place and then deal with it there, or is it just as it comes?

Miriam Schwab:
So there’s a few, like, signals, a big one and a helpful one is CX ticket. It helps us identify if there are any issues that can be improved either. Like, let’s say we’ve released something and like, a lot of people are saying like, hey, the button’s gone. Then we’re like, oh, button’s gone, we better fix that. Or I mean, we do a lot of qa, but you know, things can happen. Or like saying, how do I back up my site? I don’t know. Just an example. Like, let’s say for our hosting, how do I back up my site? Well, then clearly we haven’t made it clear how to back up your site. So then, you know, we’ll consider adding to our roadmap or pipeline and some kind of UI improvement that helps people figure out how to back up the site so that we can reduce the tickets and make a better experience for them. Like that kind of stuff. There’s the complaints in the communities. It’s not all complaints. There’s constructive feedback. We call it that. And then our GitHub is great. It’s really helpful for aggregating. You know, we often send people there and say, like, please, open issue. And then people can comment or refer it. And that helps give an indication of the weight and importance of something. And then, you know, that can play a factor.

James Kemp:
Are you using any AI tools to help you with that feedback?

Miriam Schwab:
It’s a good question. I don’t know specifically that we are, but I imagine that we are. Elementor’s all in on AI, so it’s being used across all departments, so I imagine it’s being used there as well. It’s really helped everyone become more efficient.

James Kemp:
Yeah, it’s super helpful. I wrote a post about it the other day, actually. Just kind of like seeing patterns that you as a lousy human brain can’t comprehend because of all the different sources that are coming in. All at different times as well. You don’t have this data store of feedback in your head, whereas AI can help you see those patterns and interpret them, which is really helpful.

Miriam Schwab:
I mean, AI is amazing and disappointing all at the same time. That’s how I experience it. It’s like, that’s the thing. You’re like, oh, that’s so cool. And then you’re like, okay, now do this. And it like fails spectacularly and you’re just like, oh, whatever. Hopefully it will get to the point where it just is amazing and not disappointing.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, it’s the cleverest and the stupidest person you know. Yeah. I’ve been pondering how to use it to collate our customer support data. Because the other factor is that you have multiple support agents working on things and however well trained they are to be feeding that. Feeding back things. Customers ask for things like UX issues, they may well not be feeding back. My team is trained that a feature request does not have to be an explicit request. It can be just something the customer’s struggling with. But in reality, I don’t think they think that creatively all the time. So it would be nice for an AI to be able to read all tickets and summarize. I haven’t quite figured that one out technically, and there’s some privacy issues and so on, but definitely something I’d like to explore.

Miriam Schwab:
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Often people aren’t exactly communicating what they want. Right. They don’t necessarily know what the end result is, they just know what they want to achieve. Or with an AI, could help extrapolate that and turn it into something actionable. It’s interesting.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And that kind of relates to what I mean about finding these patterns as well. It’s not going to be 10 different people saying the same thing. They’re going to be saying slightly different things. Especially when you consider language barriers as well of people trying to explain in your support language, you know what they want.

Miriam Schwab:
Absolutely.

James Kemp:
So, yeah, definitely helpful for that.

Miriam Schwab:
Sure.

James Kemp:
I think we’ll see a big shift towards. There’s already tools available that kind of, you know, ingest support and feature requests and stuff like that and make AI available to it.

Miriam Schwab:
I think. Yeah. I think the CX tools will have to wrap AI into it, rather than us wrapping, finding AI, integrating into their tools. It’s just going to have to be part of it. Especially as company scales grow, like Elementors and Charmatics. You know, you got that number of users humanly impossible to keep on top of everything.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Miriam Schwab:
Yeah.

Katie Keith:
I think Help Scout particularly is being very slow with AI. It’s adding AI tools, but not in the deep way that is required. For example, their built in bots only search the last hundred tickets. Will we get that in a day or something? So that’s no use. I want it to look at like the last year or two years and really see all the different topics that come up. One day’s worth of support is no use at all. Particularly if you’ve got 19 products that people are supporting.

Miriam Schwab:
Wow. For sure.

James Kemp:
Yeah. That’s crazy. What do you think in terms of community and transparency? Do you feel like there’s opportunities to stand out against competitors? I guess in terms of how you approach transparency and community, it’s an interesting question. It’s definitely a challenging one because you’ve got to. There’s so many different ways to approach it. I have found, particularly when I was running my company before Iconic, that just being open and available was always something that our customers valued. Even if potentially our product may not have had as many features as a competitor. People valued that we were responsive and, you know, open with the community and what we were working on.

Miriam Schwab:
I think that’s true. And I think another angle is the human connection. So all of our companies have people who are accessible and recognized and engaged with the community. It’s kind of like what we were talking about with localization where you know, you go global but then you have to go back to grassroots. And we want to scale but then like really the human elements matters almost as much as anything else, I think. So if companies can have people like that who are really out there and engaging with their communities, their users showing up in different ways, whatever that means. Obviously a person can’t be everywhere. My sense that helps the company stand out. I’ve always felt in business that people really want to connect with people. Like on. On the company side, they don’t connect with a product or a website. It helps them. But what is more meaningful for them is connecting with an actual human being. And if companies as they scale can somehow sustain that, you know, I think there’s a benefit to it. I mean I know that even like huge companies. Well, okay, we, we’re most familiar in our industry with Google and Google has people who show up and are developer advocates and this advocate, you know, and all this kind of stuff. They show up and then we get to know them and connect with them. Amazon does as well at my startups use AWS for our infrastructure. And so I’m you know, somewhat active in the AWS communities and they have these evangelist type people who are very accessible. Advantage of that in a big company is that when you’re like just a user. Right. And you’re like, you know, you’re like a startup or an agency, it’s hard to get the company’s attention when you need it. But if the company has these types of people out there, then those smaller organizations also can get attention. I see that a lot and I think, you know, it’s not scalable. But on the other hand it makes an impact. I don’t, it’s not, I don’t think, or anything like that. But if we’re talking about ways potentially to stand out, then that’s my theory.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I’m worried that will actually reduce in the future the face, having a face, a real person that you can talk to because of AI, specifically in the area of customer support, because more and more companies are introducing first line chatbots to replace the need to contact a human. And there are so many inefficiencies from that. But it does mean that fewer customers are talking to a real person and I’m not there yet. We’re working on things like chat bots to write a draft for the support team to save them time. But if you really do abstract that Support to an AI, say that, say 75% of your queries are being answered without a real person, then you’re losing that opportunity to connect. And I was talking to one WordPress company owner last week who said that 75% of their support tickets are answered by AI, but the customer doesn’t know it’s AI. So what does that mean for personal communication?

Miriam Schwab:
Well, I think with AI, what it does is it delays where you need like the value of human input means like that’s for web builders. Right. And well, everyone is doing everything so like the kind of repeat wrote stuff that like we’re doing, but like maybe that’s not where we bring the most value. Offloading its AI, I think can make sense. The question is, do these people really not know that they’re communicating with an AI or not? And how far does that go? At what point do they start to be like, hey, that is not a person I’m talking to. Maybe they don’t say it, but I think we need to be very careful about that like and think very carefully about where we want to make sure there’s still a human touch. Yeah. So people don’t just get funneled into like systems and processes and then potentially not get what they need and not get the attention they need. If AI can do it, then great. But I have a feeling that there’s like a limit and at some point the human has to come into the picture or be ready to come into the picture and hopefully we’ll continue to do that.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think the nicest approach I’ve seen is like you say the AI assists you and solves the problem or there’s an obvious path to connect with someone real. I think that’s valuable and I think it’s important that you know that you’re not talking to a real person.

Miriam Schwab:
Transparency is important. We’re all living in a world of AI where we’re leveraging it and using it to help us out in many ways. It’s super helpful and we’re fine with that. So it’s sponsored ads versus like organic content being labeled. I think what you’re saying is right. I don’t know for sure, but I think. But my sense is that we should be transparent about that. Like you’re talking to an AI and then that way the person, if they get frustrated with AI, they can say, hey, AI, hand me off to human, you know, because they know what’s going on, they know the context. I don’t know.

Katie Keith:
Well, I think that’s been really interesting and we’ve covered all sorts of different angles of how transparent to be with the community. Miriam, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been great. Now where can people find you online?

Miriam Schwab:
So I’m on LinkedIn. Miriam Schwab Twitter, Miriam Schwab Post that a Slack make request. Slack, yeah, all the places, everywhere.

Katie Keith:
As a community person, you have to. You’re everywhere. Of course. Well, thanks again. Bye bye.

James Kemp:
Thank you.