This episode features an interview with Robin Laine, CEO and Co-Founder of Transect, a SaaS company providing automated environmental compliance solutions for the built world. Robin talks about advocating for the customer, making a product 10 X better than the competition, and the life cycle of a startup.
This episode features an interview with Robin Laine, CEO and Co-Founder of Transect, a SaaS company providing automated environmental compliance solutions for the built world. Robin talks about advocating for the customer, making a product 10 X better than the competition, and the life cycle of a startup.
Quotes
*“We really should be the guide along a customer's journey, not the hero of their journey. Like they are the hero, right. We're just here to make their lives better. And so much of it is listening to their pain points, listening to what brings them joy, listening to the words that they say, and then writing them down and then saying them back to them. I mean, that's literally what we do. We do a lot of case studies with our customers and we'll take the exact words that our customers say about why they like Transect, some feature that's helpful for them, and we'll regurgitate it in a marketing campaign because we know that that's what their peers are used to hearing.”
*“We make money to control our destiny as a startup. The more that we can control our revenue, the more we have choice over who our future investors are, among other things. We're making money so that we can all continue to enjoy this really awesome culture that we've built and continue to build what we want to build and do what we want to do on our own timeline.”
Time Stamps
*[0:07] The Case
*[1:20] Introducing Robin Laine, Founder and CEO at Transect
*[5:08] Evidence #1: Mis-identifying the target customer
*[12:27] Evidence #2: Solving for the wrong problem
*[19:12] Evidence #3: Product is too similar to others on the market
*[21:30] Debrief
*[22:30] The HGS Pub
Bio
Robin Laine is the CEO and Co-founder of Transect.com. She has spent over 15 years managing natural resources compliance and permitting projects across the U.S. Along with navigating federal, state, and local permits for her clients, Robin established in-house natural resource compliance processes for oil and gas companies and gave presentations across the U.S. educating various industries on how to best manage federal and state environmental regulations.
Thank you to our friends
This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.
Links:
Connect with Robin on LinkedIn
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Lyssa Myska Allen: Come in, have a seat. We’ve caught a case. I was in my office the other day when a client came knocking with a tough CX challenge.
Client: Hey CXI, I need your help. I recently started my own company, but things really didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. We’ve had trouble retaining customers, and my customer service team has been working overtime to address complaints. It’s become clear there are some major issues with our customer experience. Can you help me understand what’s gone wrong?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Troubleshooting her customer experience - that’s a big task. But I knew just the person to team up with on this case. My good friend and co-detective, Robin Laine. Robin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Transect, a VC-backed envirotech startup. In other words, she had to design her own customer experience from scratch, too. And now, Transect has helped companies save hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of dollars. I’d say her customers are happy. Together, we’re going to crack this case. Because we are CXI: Customer Experience Investigators, solving your toughest CX challenges. I’m Lyssa Myska Allen, VP and Global Head of Marketing at HGS. Let’s get started.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Well, thank you so much for joining us on Customer Experience Investigators, CXI.
Robin Laine: Yeah, happy to be here.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Awesome. Well, so why don't you introduce yourself? My co detective to our listeners.
Robin Laine: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Robin lane. I'm the CEO and co-founder of transect and we are a online environmental compliance solution, uh, solving problems between the natural world and the built world. Um, so the easiest way to think about it is there's a ton of environmental regulations in the. And anybody who's building something has to abide by those. So big utility scale, wind farms, um, oil and gas, commercial real estate. They all have these environmental regulations that they need to abide by. And the traditional way of abiding by those regulations involved, uh, consultants, and a lot of billable hours hasn't really changed much since the seventies, when, when some of our nations landmark environmental regulations were passed and transact is innovating on the entire environmental compliance process, bringing solutions to a traditionally very billable, inefficient process.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That is awesome. So is your background as a consultant?
Robin Laine: Yes. So yeah, I've been an environmental consultant for about 15 years now. Started. Hiking boots, snake guards, a compass walking around in the field, looking for holes in the ground at the time, which had some water quality issues and dangerous salamander issues. It's actually where the name of our company came from walking, collecting information in the field between point a and point B is called a transect. Of course. Now we just do it using.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That is so cool. And so how did you come up with your technical.
Robin Laine: Um, like I said, I was a consultant for 15 years and my last position before I started transect, I was national program manager for the natural resources department at a nationwide consulting firm. So I had staff all over the country, working in a lot of different industry. On some pretty compressed timelines and just really started to see the inefficiencies around how we were delivering solutions to our clients. It was very labor intensive, very inefficient to do a lot of this research permitting kind of reporting back to our clients. And I knew that there was a better way. And so that's why I started.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I think that's a perfect segue because you are on a customer experience, podcasts into how much of your consulting career was built around customer experience. And then I really want to dive into cracking the case of how you built the customer experience for the app, kind of from the ground up. That is not a naturalist joke. Was it?
Robin Laine: But it works. I'm here for it. Yeah. So that first question about how customer experience really played into kinda my previous role as a consultant, you know, being a consultant is interesting, but really one of the most important things about being a consultant is. You really have to put your customer first. And this is true in a lot of different industries. Right. But, you know, I think that I got to where I was and my team got to where we were, because we were always advocating for our customer as a consultant. It's easy to maybe advocate for yourself a little bit because we're the ones that have relationships with government agencies. They're the ones that hear from us over and over again on behalf of our clients. Right. And so. Tempting to try to kind of pander to government agencies when we're working on some of these permits and some of these projects, but really the key is to always advocate for the customer. And, you know, whatever that means for kind of your relationship or my relationship with the regulator.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Now that we know more about Robin’s credentials, let’s take a quick break and then we’ll get into the case. So today Robin and I are working together on how to build customer experience from the ground up. Let’s get into it. First we need a little more background on the case. I asked her what was going on with her new company. What was the evidence that things weren’t going well?
Client: Well, we went to market and I thought I knew who our product was for, but we drastically missed our sales projections. I dove into the numbers and I think we mis-identified our target customer. We’re not getting our brand in front of the right people. And the people who do buy aren’t turning into repeat customers.
Lyssa Myska Allen: So it sounds like she was trying to sell to everyone, which means she was selling to no one. Robin, how much did you know about your target customer when you started Transect?
Robin Laine: So I know a lot about our customer actually, which I think is what helped me. If we're going to talk about how to crack this case is that you do have to have some sort of empathy and understanding of who your customer is and what their persona is. And very specifically, what problems they're trying to solve. That's a huge part of it. Unfortunately, I had been solving these problems for them, kind of the hard inefficient way. For many years. And so it was a natural progression to try to build a product or to build a product that could solve for that automatically. We already understood their problem, but we're always iterating, right? We're always talking to our customers. We have a customer success team. That's constantly commuting. We catering with our customers. So we're always building on that too.
Lyssa Myska Allen: So, how did you know kind of where to start? So you started with their problems. How do you translate that into their experience?
Robin Laine: The first problem that we solved here at transect is how do customers start their own project? How did you have a customer that wants to build a utility scale solar farm? How do they pick the right site to build up? That meets their environmental risk profile. How do they understand everything that could go wrong with that project is something that we call due diligence. How do they do their environmental due diligence on their site? And so that was the question that was the problem that we were trying to solve. And because I had been in the industry, I had a general idea of how to do that, but I went back to a lot of my clients when I first started transect and said, this is what I'm thinking about. What's important to you guys. And a couple of things that came up were, were cost and time. Um, and since then, the, the speed at which we can deliver this information has really, um, become priority over cost to these guys. Um, you know, we can get this information to them and, you know, 90 seconds or so, and that's kind of what we've continued to focus on is making sure that we can get them best available in a short amount of time. And we do. You know, at the beginning through customer interviews and, you know, continuing to survey our customers.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I would love to ask you about when you talk about automation versus billable hours, do you layer some human interaction still in some of that. Work on top of the automation or is there the ability to use, um, the technology just completely without human interaction?
Robin Laine: Yeah. So we have options for both. Our customers can go through the entire process themselves and many of them do, but we do understand the importance of that customer experience and that, you know, my team is recovering consultants and we have a lot of institutional knowledge that our customers still want to tap into sometimes.
And so we have a couple of ways that our customers can interact with us. Um, we give them an option when they're ordering their due diligence report to S to ask for one of us to give it a review. Right? And then the second way is we always have a chat button where me or someone from my team is always sitting on that chat line or someone from customer success, responding to those questions. So, and we get a lot of really great feedback from our customers about our customers. Processes. I mean, uh, we're, we're very quick to respond kind of thinking about like lessons learned earlier on in the, in transact. We did not have a customer success. And we lost a pretty big client because they signed up for a big contract and we just never talked to them. After that, we just kind of let them use the app. We were new, it was just a handful of us. So we didn't really think about calling them and seeing how things were going and they ended up churning. And that was when we learned a very good lesson about customer success and always talking to our customer. So we do interact with our customers all the time. Uh, we definitely don't just let them flounder on the app or just use it kind of in a vacuum. We always are checking what they're doing and making sure that they can get.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, it sounds like you do some of that leading by example. I mean, I, I, when you say that you're the CEO and you're on the chat, just like waiting to talk to people on the website. I think that's pretty incredible.
Robin Laine: I am. Yeah, I was checking the chat feed earlier. This. Well, and, you know, as, as head of product, you know, aside from being CEO, I'm also had a product cause I'm the technical co-founder here. It's really important for me to be seeing what my customers are struggling with, because then I can change it from a product side. And so I love talking to our customers. They always give me really good ideas and not just, you know, what problem are you having if they're chatting in, I. You know, what were you trying to accomplish? And what's important to you about the solution. That's really where we help make the product better is where we really understand their motivations and what problem they're trying to solve. Not just that they want some certain widget that might solve their problem for today, but they probably have some larger thing that they're trying to do some big work around. And, uh, so talking with them about that is always super.
Lyssa Myska Allen: In the iterations of transect, I feel like there's been a couple of different, um, audiences that you've focused on and, uh, and or industries has changing kind of who is doing environmental doodle. Yeah. Change the way that you look at customer experience for those different populations, or is it kind of they're similar enough because their problems are similar enough that they have a similar experience.
Robin Laine: Yeah. So we serve a lot of different industries, uh, from renewable energy, traditional energy, commercial, real estate, private equity government. We've got a lot of different user personas that use transit on a daily basis. The thing they all have in common is that all of the same environmental regulations applied to all.
So that's helpful, but each one of them does use slightly different terminology. So where a solar group might call our due diligence report, a critical issues analysis engineers would call it a feasibility study and oil and gas group might call it a desktop report. And so we do have a second. Requirement to understand these different personas from our customers and really speak their language. I think that helps a ton. And so that's a huge part of what we do in design and in marketing, in our, in any of our messaging to our customers, we'll send out five different emails for every new feature that we send out, because we do have to tweak that language a little bit to really state their problem and try to, you know, use words that they would write.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I love that. Okay let’s hear more evidence about what might be going on with our client.
Client: We thought we had the perfect solution to our customer’s problems, but when we rolled it out, we missed the mark. We were solving for a problem that they didn’t actually have.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Robin, I know you put a lot of work into figuring out what functions customers needed on Transect. So that meant you had to personalize tools for your customer personas. How do you get to that level of personalization?
Robin Laine: So much of this goes back to talking with our customers. I mean, we hear them say words and we write them down. I mean, we record everything that we do with our customers. You're laughing. I'm not quite sure why.
Lyssa Myska Allen: We hear them say words and we write them down is like my favorite thing they use.
Robin Laine: I mean, that's it right? It's so much of it is listening to our customers. I mean,
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, but anybody could do that and know, and not enough people hear the words and
Robin Laine: That is so true. That is so true. Yeah. I mean, it's this thing, you know, it's real tempting to be, to kind of shove something in somebody whose face, you know, like this is the product that you need. Here's how it works. This is going to solve all of your problems. Right. That's not helpful. I mean, we really, as, as any sort of product, we are really, we really should be the guide along a customer's journey, not the hero of their journey. Like they are the hero, right. We're just here to make their lives better. And so much of it is listening to their pain points, listening to what brings them joy, um, listening to the words that they say, and then writing them down and then saying them back to them. I mean, that's literally what we do. Uh, we do a lot of cases.
Uh, with our customers and we'll take the exact words that our customers say about why they like transect some feature that's helpful for them. And we'll regurgitate it in a marketing campaign because we know that that's what their peers are used to hearing
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, so smart. I mean, everything that you just said, like, forget it. Let's end this podcast. It's over. That's that's. That's how you do CX cracked. Okay.
Robin Laine: done and done going home.
Lyssa Myska Allen: yeah. So
Robin Laine: go get another dog.
Lyssa Myska Allen: me some more about what didn't work. So you, you lost your major client. What else didn't work for you guys?
Robin Laine: Yeah. So I'm trying to over anticipate or over solve a problem is another place that I feel like we, is it a failure? Maybe not, but I probably wasted some time and money and effort. Right. So, um, when you hear, you know, we get a lot of feature requests from our customers. We get. You know, we wish we had, wouldn't it be nice if we had kind of things from customers, but running with that too quickly and not iterating on that. And I'm getting a little bit product to here, but not, maybe not fully vetting the problem and not fully vetting the solution and running it by them. It has meant that we've built a couple of features that nobody uses, which is a waste of time and money it, and you know, like it's frustrating for everybody, especially for engineers. It's frustrating for me. So there are cool tools that, that rarely ever get any use. And I think that's because we didn't do a very good job of communicating with our. And really understanding the problem we were trying to solve. We got a couple of feature requests that I was like, oh, well this is the natural solution. It was not, I was trying to be the hero of my own story in that case and not, uh, taking the time to talk to my customers. And yeah, so that's, that's us when that happens. And you're like, well, we're really excited about this feature. And nobody's using it because nobody understands it. So, yeah. That's and that's fine. That's we chalked it up to lessons learned and you know, it's, it's why, it's why we are here, where we are today. Like we just launched a couple of new features a few weeks ago and we've gotten nothing but really awesome feedback. Right. So we we've learned from our mistakes.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's so awesome. You're learning to iterate better. You're iterating on your iteration.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's awesome. Obviously. Talking to your customers. That's very clear. That's, that's a big part of your business, but how do you think about where the product, where the transect is going to be in the next six months? Year, two years. So on. So on.
Robin Laine: So when I first started working on a product roadmap, I had. Image that I was supposed to know what I was going to build 12 to 18 months from now. And I have some really awesome advisers and my engineering team is really great. And they've worked at some really awesome companies before. And it did not take me very long to settle into this fact that we really cannot run on more than about a quarter of anticipating what we're going to do. Honestly, six weeks, things changed so quickly and, you know, going back to this concept of what do our customers really want. I don't even know that they know what they're going to want 12 months from now. And, you know, you just identify weird problems like permissions issues or something started running slowly. So you've got to like take a minute and deal with some tech debt. I mean, there's so many things that could go wrong and so many things that could go so right. If we just had the flexibility to pivot quickly and so. Yeah. I mean, it, it feels weird to not have a huge long product roadmap sectioned out in everything. We generally know what we're going to do over the next two years. Right? Like we, I have a vision for where this, where this product is going to go and how we're going to continue to. Processes process issues along multiple phases of the environmental compliance process. But what are we going to build next quarter is something I'm just now figuring out and it's, you know, it's already the quarter. So being super added iterative, I mean, this is something that, that came out of a lot of the, a lot of the unicorn companies, this, this concept of, of being agile, um, being able to pivot quickly on product. And for that reason, our true product roadmap is really only looking six weeks to.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Wow. I think there's a lot of people that would be surprised to hear that and, and uncomfortable with that level of ambiguity.
Robin Laine: Yeah. I mean, I get that, but you know, that's the great thing about being a startup and is we're not a cruise ship. It doesn't take very long to run a, to turn this ship, you know, I mean the, if you take a quick. In the, in the life cycle of a startup is like a year or maybe two years of life in a, in a big, huge company. You know, I mean, we can move so fast, we can move so quickly. We can get stuff out the door, we're listening to our customers. We can just move a lot faster. And we have to decide in this, in this timeframe, what we want to spend time on, what do we have an appetite for, for each of these different features in each of these different tools that we want to build. And if it's, you know, more than six or eight weeks, we've got to really decide if we want to do that. Cause that's a lot. In kind of the lexical of a, of a startup it's kind of like dog years, you know, like it's just things, things go really fast and it started out.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Totally. Well, and I think that's why so many larger, more established companies are looking to startups to lead the way in customer experience. I think you've touched on a, quite a bit of the relationship between technology and that personal interaction. And I love that. Let’s get one last piece of evidence of what was going wrong with our client’s new company. I asked the client if they did a competitive analysis to see if there were similar products out there in the market.
Client: There are similar products out there, but we did our best to differentiate ourselves and come in at a lower price point. But I’m starting to get worried we’re not as differentiated from the competition as we thought. I need help positioning my brand to stand out.
Lyssa Myska Allen: When you started Transect, did you think about creating a unique product, and in other words, solving for a specific challenge?
Robin Laine: So I remember early on in my journey, I read a book called exponential organizations by Salim Ismail, and he has this whole concept of 10. And how something has to be 10 X different 10 X better in order for somebody to make a change. And so I have thought about that from the very beginning. How can we make sure that our project is 10 times faster, 10 times better? You know, is it also going to be 10 times cheaper? You know, there's always that balance of having, you know, which one, which, which of the three are you going to have, but that's always been, it's like, how do we, and even in today, when we're talking, like our sales folks are out there, like how can we express to our customers? How can we get them to explain. This process 10 X better than the process that they, that they're using right now. And, um, that drives that drove me back then. And that, that concept still drives every decision we make today. If we're going to release a new feature, if we're going to release a new product, is that going to ultimately contribute to our goal of being 10 X better so that we can incur so that our customers want to make that business behavior change?
Lyssa Myska Allen: That is awesome. That's a great frame to look at that through. Do you have any last parting advice for customer people looking to make better customer experiences, 10 X better customer experience.
Robin Laine: Yeah, well, I mean, we've talked about listening so much, writing down everything that your customer says and going back and regurgitating it to them, but. You know, going back to that, being, making sure that you are not freezing yourself as the hero of their story. And that goes, that's everything. That's your emails. That's your website. That's when you're talking to them. I mean, every little time that you're interacting with our customers, it's, it's got to be. How can we help you? How can we help you solve your problems? And that has so many ripple effects in product and an engineering and your overall company culture. I mean, here are, you know, here at transact, we're very thoughtful in the way that we do things. And that's where it comes down. You know, from that like 10 X, we're very strategic in how we build things. But every time we think about a feature, we say, well, How will this help our customers and what will this do for our customers?
Lyssa Myska Allen: I’ve learned so much working with Robin today. Lets debrief. A few things that I’ve taken away from our conversation...First, get to know your customer. Figure out what’s important to them, what kind of problem they’re trying to solve, and even what brings them joy. In other words, have conversations with customers every day and learn to speak their language. And like Robin says, write down everything they say. Second, be the guide, not the hero … let the customer be the hero of their own journey. When you’re designing the customer experience, put the customer at the center by thinking about what they need to solve their problem, not what you want them to do. And third, make your product 10 X better, 10 X faster and 10 X cheaper than the competition. That’ll give you the best chance to acquire new customers.
Client: This has all been so helpful. I feel like now I have tangible ways I can improve my business. Thank you so much!
Lyssa Myska Allen: Let’s celebrate cracking the case! We’ll head to the HGS pub, have a couple of metaphorical drinks and cover some light hearted ground.
Lyssa Myska Allen: All right. I want to know what projects are you working on outside of your startup, knowing that startups, um, take up your time. How do you keep your life balanced?
Robin Laine: So, yeah, I kind of had like, uh, earlier this summer, as we all did during, COVID kind of like a momentary crisis of like, what, what is, what is the purpose of my life, right? Like I just go to work. I come home, I social distance, you know, all that. Um, but, uh, you know, I really realized that I needed to take a moment to care about something bigger than just my company. It's very easy to get in the weeds and kind of get stuck in the, in the stress and kind of the roller coaster of stress that it is of being a startup CEO and co-founder. And so one of the things that has brought me a lot of joy lately is I was like, I'm going to go volunteer. Some old people. So I actually signed up for meals on wheels and I do that every other Tuesday in the middle of the day. I mean, I block out part of my Tuesday to go deliver meals and that's been really awesome cause it's, you know, it's delivered to the same people every time. And so you kind of get to know them and all, but it's really interesting to, to take, to see my team, to be that example to my team of like prioritizing mental health and prioritizing things that are bigger than. Um, and it makes me prioritize too, right? Like if I have a meeting that wants to get scheduled during that time, I have to be, I have to be intentional and be like, Nope, that, that is a time where I go do something that's good for me and for other people. Um, so that's, that's like something that's been hard because it's in the middle of my Workday, but it's an important thing to do. Um, but other than that, let's see, what else do I do? I garden, I love gardening. Uh, I'm really big into growing okra right now. Just. And tomatoes.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's how you.
Robin Laine: I have a bumper crop learning how to pickle things, therefore, because I have so much okra. Um, and, uh, yeah, fun fact about something that I do also, which has been a little slow because of COVID. So our studio is closed, but I tap dance, um, which is it's hard, you know, dance my whole life. Um, but tapping into. You know, at this age takes all of your mental capabilities and facilities. And so, uh, it's like the one time of week, I literally cannot think about work or else. I won't know what I'm doing with my feet.
Lyssa Myska Allen: All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this interview. It's been so much fun. You have such great insight on creating customer experiences. I love everything you had to say about, um, kind of building from the ground up and how much you're paying attention to the customer and their needs and kind of putting yourself and he goes aside. So thank you. This interview has been awesome.
Robin Laine: Yeah, this was really fun. I was really glad about.
Lyssa Myska Allen:Thank you for listening to CXI: Customer Experience Investigators, brought to you by HGS. If you liked what you heard today, tell a friend. And don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.