From the Navy to Twilio

About the guest

Glenn represents the voice of the customer, with responsibility for Twilio’s technical support, customer success, customer experience, professional services, and systems integrator partner teams. Before Twilio, Glenn was co-founder of Appirio, a leading cloud consultancy and top global partner of Salesforce, Workday, and Google, and he has also led consulting and support teams at numerous public software companies. Glenn received a BS in Computer Science from the U.S. Naval Academy, and an MS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Key quotes

*”There’s no fast path to admiral or general in the army. The value of that is not just the respect you get from peers and teams, but also confidence. I would never wanna start my career in a position [that’s] too high… You’ve gotta keep your eye on the goal, [which] is to build experiences and build confidence. The career ladder comes. it will come by you excelling at your job, being a good teammate. But you don’t want to come in on day one and be like, ‘How do I make my way to level 3, 4, 5, 6, 7?’”

*”Where automation makes people’s lives easier, you want it and you wanna push it. You shouldn’t have to do anything other than text a message to a number to accomplish something. That’s good automation. Then there’s bad automation, which is annoying, which is marketing driven and non-consensual. When you’re forced to talk to a chatbot instead of a human, because you can just tell they’re trying to cut costs. That’s an unnatural level of automation. It’s not a customer experience-centric way to build.”

*”One of the things Twilio talks about all the time is conversations with customers that start out as an automated conversation should be able to seamlessly drift into a live conversation and back, and be recognized as a single thread. That to me is one of the ultimate manifestations of customer engagement, where it crosses channels and feels like a continuous conversation. That’s one of the things we preach at Twilio. Customer engagement, meeting customers where they want to be met, not where you want to meet.”

*“I kind of think of this as like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs translated into technology or for any company. This is a theory that says that if you don’t take care of someone’s basic needs, you haven’t really earned the right to their attention for some higher order stuff. For humans, the basic needs are shelter, food, and oxygen. And now you can start talking about higher level things like fulfillment and satisfaction. So at Twilio, the version of that is the basic needs of our customers. Their messages need to reach their recipients. Their messages need to comply with requirements so they’re not blocked or filtered by carriers. You need to be able to send the volume of messages… If we don’t take care of those basics, we haven’t earned the right to talk about improving your marketing strategy, improving your ROI on customer engagement. All that stuff comes later. And that’s really a lot of the Twilio value proposition, but we don’t have the right to talk about that until we handle the basics.”