“Elevating the Customer Experience” with Nick Noel, CCO at PointClickCare
On this episode of Journey Map, we’re speaking with Nick Noel, Chief Customer Officer at PointClickCare. We discuss his experience growing up in the West Indies, what it means to be a leader, and the importance of accountability.
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Transcript:
Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Today’s guest graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Management from the University of the West Indies, from there he went on to get a Master of Business Administration in Information Technology from McMaster University. He started his career as a Business Analyst at the Dominion of Canada General Insurance, he continued to work as a Business Analyst for companies including Manulife and Nurun. From there he went on to work as Director of Consulting service for Questra Corporation, then holding another consulting position before becoming the Senior Vice President of North America Professional Services for NetSuite. It was in 2015 that he joined the company that he works for now first as Senior Vice President of Customer Operations, and now as Chief Customer Officer. The Company is PointClickCare and our guest today is Nicholas Noel. With more than 20 years experience in system implementation and business process improvement, Nick firmly believes that great leaders are force multipliers, making the people around them better through leadership, coaching and example. He is certainly an example of this, Nick Welcome to Journey Map!
NN:Thank you Dave it’s wonderful having the opportunity to chat with you, and I’m interested in getting into it.
DH: Well what I’m most interested in getting into is, I’m assuming that you grew up in the West Indies is that a fair assumption to make?
NN: That is correct some people may recognize from my accent I’m a bit of an island boy. So I grew up in the islands and for some reason I wanted to leave the warmth to come to sunny beautiful warm Canada (laughter).
DH: Can you walk me through what life was like for you growing up as a young man living in the West Indies?
NN: I had an interesting childhood in that I grew up in a middle class family. My dad was a police officer, my mom was a homemaker. I had an opportunity to go to one of the better schools, St Mary’s College and I think you know that really opened my eyes to look at things beyond just the island. But like anyone else who grew up on the island it was a lot of fun, it’s a different environment slower paced at times I tend to associate that with the weather. It was just that balance of you know getting an opportunity to experience things.I was lucky enough to come from a family with a wide cultural background so I had exposure to different ethnic groups and many different situations, including coming from a very large family. I have some sisters who lived in Canada and then just visiting Montreal and Toronto over a number of years for some summer vacation primarily you know really opened my eyes to move there possibly, eventually.
DH: So you graduate and then you migrate to Canada where you did your MBA at McMaster. Was Canada chosen as the destination for the MBA because of the program? the school? or because you had been visiting those times on vacation?
NN: It’s a bit of both. At the time there was not an MBA program with any of the University of Western campuses, they have three campuses one in Jamaica, one in Barbados, and one in Trinidad. They did not have an MBA, and I didn’t want to do a Masters in Accounting which was the only master’s business program essentially. I kind of scanned the environment, and having family in the Toronto area made it a comfortable choice in that I know there was a bit of a support system for when I did move to Canada. It was a combination of you know having family here but largely it was driven by the desire to do an MBA and be and not having that program available in Trinidad.
DH: Just fast forwarding to today quickly and you’ll see where I’m going with this. Your role is Chief Customer Officer, if you were to define what that role means to you how would you define it?
NN: What I do in my role today is anything from a customer experience perspective with PointClickCare’s customers that happens post-sales is primarily privy of my team. So it’s largely about customer experience and customer satisfaction, you know driving in a lot of those points of interaction that all customers have once they become a customer of PointClickCare. I have two large groups, I have the implementation capacity at PointClickCare as well as a customer success team, as well as our technical support group. So really and truly if you look at it as a typical SaaS organization once you get past the sales process this is where the bulk of the interactions with our customers lie, and it’s really ensuring that our customers are effectively using the application, and are happy with the experience. That’s what I see as my mission and goals for my team and myself.
DH: So how do you think that experience of coming to a new country, experiencing a new culture, a new climate for sure. How do you think that experience has helped translate into your day to day at PointClickCare. Is there any connection you can draw there?
NN: Yeah, one of the things that I think in my experience is I’m able to shift and look at the customer experience. Many people use the cliche of “Put yourself in the customer’s shoes”and that’s a very difficult thing to do if you’re not dealing with them every day. But there are ways to envision yourself essentially off the island right? Invision yourself having success in a new environment. There are so many different things after you spend twenty plus years growing up in Trinidad, and I think that ability to do that is something that I believe allows me to succeed in my current role because I’m able to make attempts to put myself in the customer’s shoes to actually critically assess the experience they’re having with us and to do it in a manner that is objective and balanced. I think having that ability and then really encouraging your team and the folks around you to do it has a tendency over time to elevate the customer experience,and elevates how we actually drive towards the objectives of the organization. So that’s where I think that experience has helped me in my current role and throughout my entire career is that ability to put yourself across the table from the person that you’re dealing with.
DH: You know I think of it as the role of a great experiencer whether it’s customers. or users, or employees it’s about having empathy for their perspective, or empathy for their situation and what they’re going through. You talked publicly about force multipliers and believe that great leaders are those force multipliers, and you talk about a lot of making the better through leadership and coaching and being a positive example. Is there a mentor or adviser or someone who you looked to in life that was able to provide that to you and inspire this way of thinking for the teams you manage and the people you manage today?
NN: Yeah, you know there’ve been a number of folks, a couple bubble up right now. One is a partner I worked with when I was at CapGemini, a gentleman by the name of Michel Brazeau who really opened my eyes to what an effective leader can be. Because you know he was someone who built a new practice, he started Capgemini Canada’s public sector practice essentially, and then we started from zero and we made it something real and material for the organization. That’s an individual who showed me that as a leader it’s not just about yourself but about bringing your team with you, bringing the organization with you and being almost a leverage point. The second individual that I think really stands out is actually my former boss at NetSuite who is the Chief Customer Officer there a gentleman by the name of Tim Dilley, he was a similar type of mentor, and coach who was about the team. He showed me that as a leader you don’t have to try and do everything, you need to remove obstacles for your team, you need to make your team better through culture, through mentoring, through development, and invest in your experience. The more you do that and the more you build a team that is as good as you are, or in some cases better than you are, then the more effective you become. That’s something that I learned from both of those gentlemen because it is okay to have that A-team around you of people that you can coach, develop, mentor, and grow and have them be your champions, have them be the ones that actually move the organization forward.As you scale you grow, you get beyond one, two, ten people in your organization, you need those people right? That message is something that they reinforced, reiterated and drove home for me. I think that really allowed me to build that similar cadence, and similar approach throughout my entire career as a leader.
DH: That’s funny, I don’t know if you’ve listened to the episode but we interviewed Evan Goldberg and CEO of NetSuite but then obviously now EVP at Oracle NeSuite. Evan talked about how the same year he founded the company his daughter was also born. So there’s a real innate sense of family from the very beginning of that and it’s so interesting to see your perspective kind of come in where it seems like that culture of top down caring and treating people like family, in terms of giving them the tools necessary to grow in life and the platform to do so really seems that it’s rung true for you. What do you think Nick of today would say if he could go back to Nick in the West Indies right as you’re preparing to take your first day as post-secondary down there. You’re either walking off of public transit or out of your dorm room or whatever you did, and you can pop up and give yourself one piece of advice. What do you think that piece of advice would be?
NN: If I had a time machine I would go back and the thing that I would say is focus on technology. I came to technology late my initial path was to potentially become a financial analyst or an accountant. I think I probably lost a couple of years from a career perspective, and a development perspective trying to go down that path and then finding my way into the technology game. The reason I would have given that younger Nick that advice is that it’s great to go out and to discover but you sometimes lose opportunities to do things and have to move at a quicker pace that you don’t like. To really drive home and to give that young Nick that insight into the rapid change and impact that technology has had in the last two decades or so in everyone’s lives, and across borders, and just how much of a key component of life it has become. I would open the eyes of that young guy and say ignore the accounting, ignore the finance, find your way to technology as soon as you can and really leverage that experience.
DH: I think that’ll be the title of this episode “Ignore the accountants”.
NN: I’m okay with that.
DH: Your accountant is going to love when they listen to this episode. Taking that same train of thought and extending it out five to ten years into the future, what are you trying to learn today skillswise to arm yourself or where you think Nick needs to go?
NN: That’s really interesting. What I’m looking at right now and you know this is somewhat defined by my current responsibility and the experience that I’ve had in the last ten fifteen years. I do believe that this concept of SaaS and subscription based businesses is here to stay, the thing that really is evolving in that domain becomes about how much can you attune yourself or get attuned with the needs, the outcomes and the value of your customers, and the how you can drive yourself everyday to ask yourself “Am I really brining it for my customers?”. Being comfortable being self critical, being critical of the good and the bad. I think in this world that we’re living in today especially with regards to business technology you have to win that customer every day, it’s a very challenging environment, and honing that skill it’s something that for a lot of folks it is not natural. You have to have consistency in a manner that is somewhat artistic in order to drive success and drive satisfaction. I actually think It’s a skill that no one will actually perfect. I think it’s something that as I look forward and I look at where technology’s it’s going to be something that we all have to get better at, because that’s going to dictate the folks that do really well, it’s going to be by their ability to really have some type of empathy as you said with customers and balance that in empathy with the goals of the organization. So that is a skill and a muscle that I continue to hone. I do believe that will differentiate successful leaders from those that are not so successful in all aspects, you know hiring, winning customers, driving success. In all aspects for any leader that’s important. I think that is a key skill at a key thing to develop.
DH: I can’t agree more. We were talking before the episode started, you got a couple of children six and eight years old. How do you apply these skills that you’ve learned through your professional career into your most important job of being a parent to these two people?
NN: To be honest Dave that’s a work in progress, mainly because I think every day we learn from each other. It is almost like a high wire act as to how I can apply the things that you see in the workplace to shape and influence young minds and hearts. One of the things that I remind myself is that raising the kids is not like being at work. I need to find ways to temper it, to bring it along, to morph it into what’s important, and the thing that I’ve been trying to drive with my young ones is really one aspect of my personal life which is a sense of accountability. It is bringing together a level of accountability for the family, for school, and for friends.I think that’s one of the things I’ve brought from my professional life into my home life to ensure that they understand that there are repercussions and expectations that the people around them have, and drive them to meet or exceed those expectations.
DH: Well I think that is a wonderful message to end off on. Sir thank you so much for joining us and sharing some sage advice on a bunch of different topics both personal and business today on Journey Map. Again I really appreciate you taking the time and I hope we can do this again sometime, it was a lot of fun for me!
NN: Thank you very much Dave, I enjoyed it immensely and if it works well I’m sure we’ll find a lot to do to do it again.
DH: Wonderful, have a great day!
NN: Thank you!
