BLOG

Introduction  0:00  

 [Un]churned as presented by UpdateAI.

Eduardo Camacho  0:07  

Stop talking about customers as logos and really start talking about customer service people, right not just also the generic personas but putting the faces putting the names and then also working a lot on, you know, the the emotional intelligence piece of which listening is just one.

Introduction  0:28  

Welcome to [Un]churned a show about the leaders and innovators of companies who have forged incredible customer relationships and stories you can use to advance your own career. Here’s your host, Josh Schachter,

Josh Schachter  0:41  

Hello everybody. I’m Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI and host of [Un]churned. Joining me today is Eduardo Camacho, Chief Customer Officer of BMC. BMC is a multiple multinational IT services and consulting company, Eduardo is going to tell us a little bit more about exactly what what types of services BMC offers, but they’re huge. They have 6000 employees across the world reported over $2 billion in revenues in 2021. And, Eduardo, it’s an honor to have you on the show.

Eduardo Camacho  1:13  

Thank you, Josh. It’s a pleasure being here and coming to you from sunny Lisbon. It’s great to be here and looking forward for a great conversation.

Josh Schachter  1:21  

Well, I am jealous right off the bat, because I’m in rainy New York. So sunny Lisbon. Sounds really nice to me. Okay, so I did a pretty mediocre job of introducing a very well established and successful company up front their BMC. And so I would like your help in this. So I we all know that the name brand BMC. We know it’s a large well established company. But what exactly do you guys do?

Eduardo Camacho  1:46  

So think about you know, BMC, our our mantra, our vision is really to help the some of the biggest companies in the world, most of the BMC customers are really in a fortune 500 type customers across banks and finance and many other sectors really transform into what we call an autonomous digital enterprise. And what is that is really leverage the power of technology to transform, you know, everything you do in the company with a few key objectives in mind if you do this successfully. And obviously, the IT spectrum is pretty broad. If you are able to leverage technology and deliver on a better customer experience for your customers, you really leverage data analytics everywhere to take the right decisions and evolve your business model. So you have those insights you can put into action, and you have the agility, you need to adapt to different circumstances in the market and your competitive landscape. That means you’ve been able to achieve a certain state where technology has helped you, as a company, be able to do that be better in terms of delivering services and products to your customers, leverage data analytics and insights in a better way and pivot when you have to pivot have that agility. And it’s really interesting to see BMC doing that, which is a company that is over 40 years old, and has all of that fantastic heritage, but hasn’t been able to really invest in innovation. So you can, you know, come along and help our customers in that autonomous digital enterprise journey. You know, a lot of the customers that I go and see, right, it’s, it’s very interesting how everyone talks about the same of the need of agility, the need of you know, not letting systems and processes getting in the way of delivering new services to your customers. So we have pretty much at the core of all of that, which is a great place to be.

Josh Schachter  3:47  

So you’re turning large companies, fortune 100 companies, 500 companies into autonomous digital enterprises. So you’re replacing humans with bots, I get that, right?

Eduardo Camacho  3:57  

We are allowing the humans to spend their time doing the stuff that we all like to do, right? Instead of, you know, doing unnecessary work that can be automated. Isn’t that what we all want to spend our time in a in a better in a better way? We want to be busy work. We want the busy work to go away. We want the non creative work to go away, we want to be able to do more with the same, right. So that’s why we are helping companies to do and to you know, it’s very important. So you’re supporting digital

Josh Schachter  4:26  

transformation. It sounds like in many ways, you’re helping to build that infrastructure. And with that, making sure that all the plumbing is there, all the metrics are set up and and there’s that control tower change management sounds like is the main use very well. So that sounds like sounds like customer relationships in your world is really important. You’ve got a lot of juggling parts in changing an organization and transforming an organization and making it autonomously digital as we say. So tell us a little bit about like what that looks like in the world of BMC like you’re the chief customer officer What what is what is your org?

Eduardo Camacho  5:02  

Sure, so I joined BMC, actually not so long ago. So it’s now a month, I’m still counting in months, months, 13 going to 14. And, you know, I really have, you know, what traditional companies would call all over the customer service or post sales function. So think about all of the type of services implementation, the running the applications, running the infrastructure, education, all of those services also have customer support, which is really interesting, also, how that evolves, you know, as, as the business models evolve, you know, we moved to SAS, you know, a 40 year old company coming from supporting customers on premises mostly, and the customer success management and very important, and also, an organization focused on transforming the customer experience, which is a lot of where, you know, the work across 6000, almost 6500 employees at BMC, which is, you know, how do you get 6500 people to do something different and better every day to improve the experience that your customers have with you. So that’s the piece of the customer experience. So obviously, biggest stakeholders, like in any Chief Customer Officer role, you know, the product organizations, the sales organizations, and then obviously, you know, I see myself as the advocate for our customers and being, you know, ultimately their voice within BMC. As for what, you know, what their experiences, what they need, you know, what they’re struggling with what’s going well, and really provide that voice in, in, in a structured way. But I think, you know, this is very important for me in a way that people that it resonates, right, it’s not just a logo, or it’s not just some amorphous entity, it’s like, real people at our customers that are doing something very important with our technology. And how do you bring that voice back to the company,

Josh Schachter  7:00  

you’re a numbers person, I’m a numbers person, kind of, give me some numbers. So you got over 6000 people at the company, over $2 billion in revenues last year, you you own post sales, effectively, anyways, it sounds like

Eduardo Camacho  7:14  

my 12, from 1200 to 150 people. So I would say, products, obviously. And then the go to market organization and my organization are the three biggest organizations and that my organization is pretty split between the services team, obviously, as running a p&l, the support team, the customer success management, team support, and the end services are obviously the largest organizations, especially also Gaussian, which complex enterprise software. So it’s very normal, that it becomes a bigger part of the organization versus then your parts such as customer success, management or experience. So we talking, you know, 450, each of those two big organizations, and then smaller 150 to 200 people for the other two organizations.

Josh Schachter  8:07  

So how many customers are you guys supporting

Eduardo Camacho  8:09  

with? We have we support 3000 customers, approximately worldwide, of which, you know, again, a big majority of the Fortune 100, fortune 500, and really around banking, finance, retail, a lot of different types of organizations that we support.

Josh Schachter  8:31  

So about 3000 accounts, but within that a lot of customers a lot of stakeholders, I’m sure it sounds like a lot of different types of stakeholders. Yeah. Which I’m sure it has its challenges and nuances.

Eduardo Camacho  8:42  

telcos, you know, many, many different types of companies. Yes. different verticals.

Josh Schachter  8:46  

Yeah. Okay, so so to say the least, it’s a very prestigious role that you have. And I know you’re just there a little bit over a year, you were a PTC for almost 25 years. 24 years. I’m wondering why you didn’t stay for 25 to get like the Rolex. Yeah, to get the watch, right. But but but that’s, we could say that for a separate time. So you have a role that many on this, what listening to this podcast, are aspiring towards or aspiring for. And so what I’d like to do is I’d like to step back, the name of the show is [Un]churned, because we want to go rob, we want to get the real view. So I want to try to get into that now. And then we’ll go into some more of the the blocking and tackling of post sales experiences. Tell us your story. That’s a broad question. But what’s what how what parts of your life leading up to where you are today have defined you in a really meaningful way that add up to your story.

Eduardo Camacho  9:41  

So let’s start where I am now. So I grew up here in Lisbon, and I when I when I was growing up when I was studying, I really never even thought about technology. It’s interesting, you know, in India, in the 80s it just specially also in a country like Portugal, maybe Different from the US, right? That’s not was not like the number one thing people think about. And I wanted to be, I wanted to be a journalist or a writer. And it was like, I had a romantic view of what that would look like. But anyway, you know, life happens. And I ended up getting into a company has an internship where I was fortunate to learn technology and learn how to design molds. In toolings, we started word

Josh Schachter  10:25  

I’m gonna I’m gonna, I’m gonna stop you for a second. Okay, I’m gonna stop you say you want to be a journalist and a writer. But life happens. That sounds like the interesting part. What did you want to write? And what happened that then as they say, today, pivot to you into the corporate world?

Eduardo Camacho  10:40  

Yeah. So you just

Josh Schachter  10:41  

you just you just yatta yatta? Yatta? Yatta, yatta yatta? The most interesting part?

Eduardo Camacho  10:47  

Okay, so I want to do Yeah, so I wanted to be a journalist, and I want to, or I wanted to be a writer. So I wanted to go and study communication science to get there. And the last year of high school, I actually was doing high school in the evenings. And I got into this company, why are you doing high school? Again, your high school evenings, that was just a normal thing you did like the last year of the high school, maybe the US was different. But here, it was very normal that your last year of high school, you know, which is the preparation for university or college, you actually do it in the evenings. And supposedly you do something, you know, meaningful during the day in order to get to prepared for university. So my doing something useful was getting into this internship that I found in a local employment office that I had no idea what I was going to get into. And basically, it was a fact it was like a manufacturing company that was close to my home. And they produced like electrical appliances, which has nothing to do with journalism or anything else, but gave me some money and just got me there. So in that internship, it was like, four hours, you had like to learn something. So you had like classes within the company. And then for hours, you did some work. And the I was lucky that my, you know, the mentor that was taking care of me as an intern, actually decided that I was going to learn computers, and you know, everything from you know, a command line to you know, how you did everything. And they were very technology advanced in the sector of using 3d CID tools to create the designs of molds and tooling to produce the plastic and the metal part. So from having never used the computer, I started learning how to use possibly the most advanced technology there was in terms of workstations, you know, to design very complex 3d cad tools and models, and learning how manufacturing processes work, you know, I was 18 at the time, you know, working in a place full of older people that, you know, work their whole lives in manufacturing processes. And just, it was such a great learning experience. I learned the technology, I learned how to work in a corporate environment, I worked how to manufacturing processes work. And then you know, I ended up doing that and studying and getting into the university, but I did university while I was still working in that company, because I decided I liked it, and I was not going to stop. So you know, my university days were a little different from what most normal people University, those were right, I was doing the classes, you know, as I could, I was going after work. So I actually studied my science, communication science career while I was working in this company. And, you know, it took me a little longer to get to the, you know, the study and get my degree, but I did it. So I really, for five years, I did both, I was working there, and I was doing my communication science studies. And then I got into journalism and Portuguese version of Fortune Magazine, I’m sure that everyone still knows 14 magazine. And what’s really interesting is obviously, my early days as Freelancer of working at Fortune Magazine, were not the romantic version of journalism that I had in mind, but it would be journalism. So one day is Job never that first job never is right. So I was writing about stuff that it wasn’t really that romantic and, and I just got so much into you know, the working environment. And one day, a PTC sales rep calls my company. I knew him from some demos and literally the Uh, you know, the person tells me a, we are hiring somebody for joining our pre sales team in Porto, which is about 200 miles north from Lisbon, would you happen to know somebody? And it literally took me about half a second less than that to say yes, me. And that’s really how I got into the technology worlds. They hired me because I knew how to use technology to design molding tooling, honestly. But that was it. That’s how life happened.

Josh Schachter  15:31  

This was your side job that you’ve done through school that you were still had that on side while you were while you were just getting into journalism. You answered the phone for like, like a cold call is that am I getting this? Correct?

Eduardo Camacho  15:43  

I answered the phone from a cell stripe that was from PTC. And the reason he called me is because he had been to my company doing some demos, we were using a competitive software to design, you know, molds. And so he knew me, right. So actually, now that you’re thinking, you know, I’m thinking about it, I called him because I wanted to give him a lead of a company that needed to buy some cattle. So I called him and then he said, Oh, thanks for the lead. Do you know somebody? And I said, Yes, that was it.

Josh Schachter  16:15  

And that’s it. And then you were there. 24 years, almost 20 years? Yes. Yeah. And then, and you never looked back and made the switch over a little over a year ago to

Eduardo Camacho  16:24  

say, I did a few more of those changes. You know, during my TTC career, like somebody asked me if I would go to Japan and run Asia? And I said, Yes, and then talked about it at home, you know, things like that. So I’ve been a bit impulsive in some of the decisions that have given me. I don’t know, I think my mother is exactly like me. So I guess I’m exactly like her. So that’s where I learned it. You know, if we think something, if it feels right, I’m very intuitive. Very, very, very intuitive. I think we both say that we have a little bit of which, like we are, we know what, you know, what people are thinking. And so it’s intuition is very high. So when something like this happen, I think I just I know, it’s the right thing. And I don’t think about it too much. Great. Well, me well, so I don’t have a lot of regrets because of my, you know, intuition. Intuition based decision making process sounds

Josh Schachter  17:22  

like it sounds like it. Okay. All right. So let’s turn the conversation to post sales engagements, customer experience, customer success, you and I sat down during gain sites pulse a few months ago, and we were talking about this and we were talking about the topic, this was right after you on stage with the legendary and by the way, upcoming guests on our podcast. Yeah, he is like my business idol. Thank you. And so but we’re talking about humanizing your customer success approach. And and I found this really interesting topic, just to add a personal interest, quite frankly, that, you know, why is, let’s say, let me let me phrase it like this, how does empathy play a role in customer experience at BMC, and the way that you’ve set the org up?

Eduardo Camacho  18:04  

In a few, I think in a few areas, first of all, I think one of the biggest characteristics of a successful customer facing individual is I would extend that not just to the CES function, but others is the ability to truly listen and, you know, really understand, you know, put yourself in the other person’s shoes and really listen, I would say that’s valid for many things in life. But that’s specifically valid for customer facing and especially for customer success. So for me the the ability to understand the individual that you’re working with, at your customers, you know, what they’re striving for, what’s their challenges it and making your customers successful is not an abstract thing. It’s not, you know, making up data AI and just want to use your company is successful. It’s about making jobs, successful writing in what you define as success. So one of the big things that I did a PTC but we are BMC was actually already in that path and we reinforced this unionizing, that customer, right, stop talking about customer service as logos and really start talking about customer service. People, right, not just also the generic personas, but putting the faces putting the names and then also working a lot on, you know, the emotional intelligence piece we have which listening is just one so I recreated, you know, we use like LinkedIn learning and other ways of creating learning paths for our employees to go through and work through their emotional intelligence skills really gave space to the people to come and tell customer stories. in all of our events, like all hands, meetings, you know, my monthly reviews, communications out to the whole company. So for me, that is a big part of it, because we, you know, I think in the business, we are all number of people, but at the end of the day, unknown numbers are a consequence of something else, right numbers are a consequence of, in this case, understanding the needs and being able to deliver on the needs to make people with real names at our customers successful. So it’s maybe a little bit of, you know, a lot of people think of it maybe as that’s kind of too soft, or it’s not. It’s touchy feely, but it’s not. I mean, you know, it’s proven also in the business, like, if you can deliver to the needs of the concrete people at your customers, you’re gonna be much more successful also, from a financial point of view. So for me, that is why these humanisation you’re putting the human face and putting, like the real stories, you were talking about stories, you were asking me to tell one story, while everyone at our customers doesn’t matter in which company they work for. They have real stories, right. And I think that’s, that’s the difference, like you have, especially for the CES function, get a little bit outside of obviously, we have to drive for for our KPIs drive for results. But you know, it’s it’s a little bit of a different rights and rights, especially as you compare with with the go to market functions, where you have to step back and be able to put that in the context of the needs, the objectives, and the definition of success of the people you work with everyday. So that’s my view of CES.

Josh Schachter  21:49  

It’s really interesting to me, though, because, okay, at my level, as a startup, I can put a name to every face and every customer, every individual is incredibly meaningful to me. But you’re you’re you’re working at an org that has 3000 customers and probably, and these sounds like big transformation projects, so probably 50, stakeholders, 100 stakeholders 1000? I don’t know, right, but a lot of stakeholders on each one at varying levels. So how do you do that? Like systematically? How do you draw out personalization? What the what success is to each individual, but do that at scale?

Introduction  22:26  

Is the drag of taking notes after back to back customer meetings slowing you down? Or even worse, did you miss something your customer asked for three meetings ago, update AI, the latest investment from zoom Ventures is here to help featuring the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence to detect action items, update AI, joins your zoom meetings, and in real time, delivers your follow ups and next steps from customer calls, save hours of busy work, stay more present in your conversations, and make sure your team is always on track. Sign up for your trial of update AI.

Josh Schachter  23:06  

Hey, guys, it’s Josh. If you’re like me, you buy the doggie poop bags on amazon.com that have the most ratings and reviews. So please give our podcast a rating or review. It’ll help others discover us go ahead right now. I’ll be here when you get back.

Eduardo Camacho  23:21  

Yeah, I mean, we obviously you have we have like everyone, I think that is in a company like BMC you have different approaches to your more, you know, strategic customers tend to the rest. But we have Sure, no combination of technology and viewmont very intense playbooks and coverage, right for the top 50 of our customers, and they’re pretty complex customers, right. So you may actually end up having, you know, 10 of the stakeholders that you really focus on. And then you know, have for, for example, a customer success executive. And then you have specialized, more focused on individual product, people that you know, like they focus more on the operators that run a certain one of our products. And it’s a combination of those two things like one you run more out of business sponsorship level, and the other one runs out the specialization level. And then obviously, you complement that with all of the personalization that technology can bring in terms of Account Based Marketing in terms of digital campaigns. And I don’t think the fact that you have 3000 or 30,000 should take away from how you engage having that feeling of being personalized. But again, it’s it’s hard to do when you’re in naughtiness, pure SAS environment and so in BMC it’s very next right of customers that have started still, you know, with purely on premises software and customers that are on the SAS version of our platform. And when you have, you know, this combination, the MCS, mostly on the large enterprise scale, right. But, you know, we also have smaller, smaller companies that are equally important. And you know, we want to make them equally successful. But you have to try to balance your approach with those different tiers, like I’m sure many other companies do, right. But it’s, it’s a very, it’s the most of a high touch model, as compared to, you know, other companies that can do a more digital touch.

Josh Schachter  25:25  

Yeah. So it’s setting the expectation and the framework of high touch, it sounds like you set up the proper formation of roles within your org to be able to segment out and touch each of the different types of stakeholders that your your customer accounts, it’s not just one person as an umbrella, talking to

Eduardo Camacho  25:41  

just one person, right? Because just do that, then you stop having consistency. And it’s also very hard to really go to the place where you can have an impact, right? Because these are pretty complex organizations.

Josh Schachter  25:54  

And you mentioned Account Based Marketing and some of the tooling that you use to help scale that that personalization. Can you mention, can you reference anything, specifically, some of these these systems that you’ve put in place, the technology stack that you’ve put in place to help scale that personalization,

Eduardo Camacho  26:08  

combination of, you know, what we have in in Gainsight, in Alec, why not other technology that two teams are using to really drive both the digital and the Account Based Marketing, Marketing? You know, I would say those are likely the two biggest ones. And then there’s some other stuff that is getting put in place, both by the go to market teams, as well as the as well as the customer success team. But those would be the two big ones. I don’t think we are, you know, I don’t want to misrepresented, I don’t think we are yet mature as in PTC was similar, right? Because when you have this companies that have been around for so long, and have this complexity of portfolio and the complexity of the customer base, the the transformation where you have the human and the digital in parallel, it’s actually pretty hard to do. Because you don’t have the need, you know, the instrumentation of the product done by default. And, you know, you’re, you have the complexities, the data and the systems that became a little stale, right? of, you know, 4020 3040 years. So it’s, it’s an ongoing process. I don’t want to represent this also of having it figured it out. But as I said that both when I was talking with Jeffrey Moore, I think, you know, my advice for anyone listening would be don’t let that block you either, right? It’s not perfect, but you can make an impact.

Josh Schachter  27:36  

Yeah. Let’s, let’s move on Eduarda, and talk about customer experience, and the relationship that it has with product. I’m myself a former product owner, Product Manager. And so this is something that’s pretty sacred to me as well. So what does that relationship look like at BMC, between customer experience and product experience product management,

Eduardo Camacho  27:57  

it’s interesting, because I had a very different my own personal experience, you know, PTC and then coming into BMC. And I think part of that is just my personal journey, right. So I was at ptc for 24 years, but only the last four in the corporate headquarter, which is very much where all of the product and all of the decisions get done right, and where a lot of the organization is. And I found it very interesting coming into BMC, how close and I would say relatively easy it was to establish the relationship between myself and the CPO and really add two or three different levels of the organization, really, with a partnership that I find super healthy, and was very interesting also to get some of the framework from Jeffrey Moore around, you know, product and see us coming together. And I would say, at different levels, there’s the feedback, or I would say the operating rhythm, if you want to call it like that, where you have the product managers or the engineering leads, on weekly calls with my CSM leads with my support leads or professional services to really review what is happening in customers in the onboarding in the project in a What’s the feedback, here’s the three main issues that we have found, you know, with this type of product in this customer base, you know, that operating rhythm, that willingness to listen, going back to the listening, right and then acting on it is really there. So, you know, that’s for me, that’s a great start and then technology and process help meaning you know, we have implemented or in the process of rolling out you know, the Gainsight px side we have it, you know, the CX side of it. So how those two start actually bringing more of the, you know, scale visibility to what’s really happening in the install base. Obviously that allows for that feedback loop to happen more at scale, right, not just human based,