In today's fast-paced business landscape, truly understanding and serving customers is more critical than ever for driving growth and building lasting relationships. We had the privilege of speaking with David Karp, Chief Customer Officer at DISQO, a customer experience platform that helps businesses connect with their audiences. Our conversation delved into David's core pillars for success, how DISQO leverages data and AI to gain deep customer insights, and the importance of cross-functional collaboration. Here are the key takeaways from our discussion:
Q: You shared three foundational pillars that guide your approach to work and life: faith and family, competition and commitment, and a passion for technology. Can you expand on how those pillars influence your leadership style and the culture you try to foster on your team?
David: Absolutely. First and foremost, faith and family are my foundation. Commitment matters - whether that's spending time with family, keeping promises to yourself, or being better at keeping promises than making them with customers. I think if you want to authentically be in the business of taking care of customers, you have to have that commitment mindset.
You also have to recognize that customers are people just like us. What do we all want? We want to look good in front of our peers, help our companies win, get promoted, make more money, and then go home and have a great meal with people who matter to us. If I remember that's who they are, and focus on keeping promises to help them achieve those things, everything else falls into place.
On the competition and commitment side, I'm a lifelong athlete and sports fan. I'm very competitive by nature. But I've learned that the key is channeling that competitive drive to motivate and engage your team. For example, right now we're running an Olympics-themed learning and development program, with teams competing for medals and prizes as they upskill to better serve our customers. We made silly videos with the executive team carrying a "torch" to kick it off. The point is, let's have fun, let's win for our customers and our business - because when you're winning and growing, you don't burn out.
And then the technology piece - I've been a tech nerd my whole life. I got my computer science degree back in the '80s building assistive technologies. So I've always been passionate about harnessing technology to solve real problems for real people. That's at the heart of what we do at DISQO.
Q: You mentioned using AI not just to drive productivity, but to truly listen and understand customers at scale. Can you share more about how you're applying AI and what kind of insights it's uncovering?
David: This is so critical and it's been a game-changer for us. The hardest thing to do in a role like mine is listen to all of our customers. We're having hundreds of customer conversations every month. In the past, some of the biggest mistakes I've made were focusing on the easiest things to measure - lagging indicators, reactive metrics based on what already happened. Those are important, but they are not predictive.
The real challenge is understanding what customers are actually saying in all those interactions, uncovering the themes, and identifying how to act on those insights to drive the business forward. That's where we're using AI to listen to every single customer conversation.
For example, I kept noticing that our CSMs were spending the majority of some client calls explaining the same confusing product feature over and over again. These were hard-won meetings with key stakeholders, but we were squandering that precious time on repetitive, low-value conversations.
So I took those call recordings, shared them with our executive team, all the way up to our CEO, and had them listen. It was eye-opening. Our CEO was up all night taking pages of notes on how we could improve. It galvanized the entire organization around investing in better training, tools and product enhancements to make that feature more intuitive and seamless for customers.
But we never would have connected those dots without AI surfacing that insight from hundreds of hours of calls. It wasn't a lack of effort or skill on our CSM team's part - it was a systemic opportunity that only became clear when we could zoom out and see the pattern across all those conversations.
Q: That's a powerful example of using technology to uncover actionable insights. But insights alone don't drive results - you have to act on them. How do you partner cross-functionally to turn those "aha" moments into meaningful change for customers?
David: Such a great question. To me, there's no greater privilege in an organization than having the entire company trust you to represent them in front of customers. That's what our CSMs do - the product team is saying "I trust you to showcase the features we've built." Marketing is saying "I trust you to reinforce the stories and value props we're putting out there." Sales is saying "I trust you to deliver on the promises we made to win this business." It's an enormous responsibility.
But with that trust comes an obligation to take everything you're hearing from customers - the good, the bad, the ugly - and bring that back to the rest of the organization so we can activate on it together. That's the hardest part of my job, but also the most rewarding - contextualizing those insights so other teams can act on them.
At DISQO, "Team" is one of our core values. But it's not just your department or function. Your first team is the company. Your second team is whatever product you work on that helps customers succeed. That's what customers care about - not our org chart. So that means if I'm in a meeting and I realize there's a key stakeholder missing who's critical to solving the customer problem at hand, it's my responsibility to go track that person down and pull them in.
We're all on "Team Customer." It forces that constant cross-functional collaboration from product to engineering to marketing to sales, all in service of delivering better outcomes for our clients.
Q: As we start to wrap up, can you share some of the measurable results you've seen from this approach of combining empathy, competitive spirit, and technology to drive customer success?
David: Absolutely. There are the classic lagging indicators like NPS that will naturally improve as you build true customer centricity and organizational empathy. But the more exciting leading indicators for me are pipeline growth, deal velocity, and net revenue retention.
We're starting to leverage these insights to inform new product packages and features that are driving double-digit net expansion rates in the segments where we've been most engaged with customers in this way.
I'll give one other example from earlier in my career. We built a health scoring model using two simple but powerful leading indicators: one, were we consistently collecting verified proof points of the tangible outcomes and value customers were getting from our partnership? And two, did we have strong engagement and advocacy from a decision-making sponsor in their organization?
By focusing our model on just those two predictive measures, we were able to forecast renewals and expansion with over 90% accuracy across 1,000 customers. We knew where we stood and could take action in time to move the needle.
So when I think about the metrics that matter most, it's our ability to predict the future and proactively drive the right outcomes. It's our ability to acquire customers faster and keep them longer. And ultimately, it's our ability to have a direct impact on the metrics our board and investors care about most. Do we have a growing, profitable business and are we in control of our own destiny? An empathetic, competitive, and data-driven approach to customer success makes the answer a resounding "yes."
Conclusion
Our conversation with David underscored that while technology is a powerful enabler, the real key to customer success lies in a deep commitment to understanding and serving customer needs as if they were your own. By combining that authentic empathy with a fierce competitive spirit and the savvy application of tools like AI, companies can unlock unparalleled insights that drive measurable business impact.
David's advice serves as a roadmap for any leader looking to build a truly customer-centric organization:
- Ground your work in empathy, recognizing that behind every data point is a real person with goals, aspirations, and challenges just like yours.
- Channel your competitive drive to unite teams around a shared scoreboard, celebrating wins and learning from losses together.
- Harness technology to listen and understand customers at scale, using those insights to proactively shape your playbook.
- Build a "one team" culture where cross-functional collaboration in service of the customer is the norm, not the exception.
- Relentlessly measure what matters, focusing on leading indicators that predict customer success and bottom-line growth.
As DISQO continues on its mission to help businesses connect more authentically and effectively with their audiences, David's leadership philosophy offers a compelling blueprint for any company seeking to put customers at the center of everything they do. With empathy, healthy competition, and data-driven insight as its North Star, DISQO is well positioned to continue raising the bar on what it means to be a true customer champion.
