The CX Nexus Podcast: Building Bridges in Business

Welcome to CX Nexus, a podcast for customer experience professionals who wanna level up their careers and their business. We're here to explore how collaboration, cooperation, and community can help your organization thrive. Each episode, we're gonna have a lively conversation with professionals across a wide variety of roles to explore what they do, where they've found success, and to share the best lessons they've learned so that you can too. And who are we? We're 2 experienced community professionals who believe that collaboration is the key to success.

We worked at companies large and small, building user communities and connecting with teams and users across the business, and we wanna bring the conversations that we've had with our partners to you. Okay, Chris. So that was our official fancy intro, but you and I like to have pretty down to earth freewheeling conversations. So let's talk about this podcast that we're doing a little bit. What are we gonna talk about on this show?

Hi, Nicole. I'm very excited about this kinda new podcast and the podcast we had before, and you were on it a lot over this last year, 2 years, really. And, here's over beers. We talked a lot about community and programs with community and how to build community, but we still wanna talk about community, but we also wanna change it up a little bit. We wanna start talking to more experts around a product company, whether it's customer success or product or maybe even engineering or marketing or those kind of folks.

And and understand when we think about cross collaboration, things like that, We wanna know how community fits into that, but how they all work together and could be a part of that.

Yeah. Exactly. I know that you and I have talked a lot about how we've had a lot of success when we've partnered with other parts of the business and that the best solutions that we've found when we're working are the ones that serve multiple teams or multiple departments. But it can be hard to identify those opportunities. You have to know, like, what other functions in the business do, how it all fits together, and identify those moments where it's like, hey, you and I have a common goal.

Let's work together on this project. Let's share resourcing. Let's make a pitch to leadership to to bring it all together. And so I think it's gonna be really interesting to unpack that, interview some folks, understand, really, what is your job about? What is your role?

What are the goals that motivate you? And how can we connect those dots and bring all of those ideas to life?

Yeah. And I think, like you said, we'll be bringing up some different guests on the show. We'll sprinkle in, again, occasional community experts. We wanna go deeper and further and and talk to the customer success leaders and sales leaders and product marketing heads and all of those kind of folks, customer experience teams. So, Nicole, I have a question for you.

Do you think, why do you think people should listen to this podcast?

Like I said, I think that we're gonna be exploring the different ways to identify cross collaborative moments, to build those relationships, to work across the team. So it's applicable for a lot of different people. Really, anyone that works in customer experience. So that could be go to market roles like sales and success. It could be marketing.

Yes. It could be customer support, even product managers or people that work with voice of the customer. My hope is that we can really help people see those opportunities. And I think that we're gonna have great conversations for folks that are building their careers. Maybe they're starting to try to move out of the silo of their role and wanna grow laterally and eventually be able to move up the ladder.

But I also think it's gonna be applicable for a lot of leaders who are thinking about strategy and need to open their eyes up to, like, how do I connect the dots from the top down across the business?

You know, I think you hit the nail on the head is it's all about cross collaboration, probably any company app, but also with with product companies that you and I work for. And we work with all of those places that we've seen and actually getting their point of views, the leaders of sales or customer success or chief customer officer, chief marketing officer, chief product officer, those kinds of people we wanna bring on and talk about how their roles pollinate or, or, or help each other, how they help each other to make these business decisions. And I think that, you know, this podcast is is the goal of this podcast is to really bring that to life and have those hard conversations or just those conversations to, like you said, help folks grow.

Totally. So we should probably tell people who we are and why we're always in this podcast. Do you wanna go first? Tell people a little bit about you.

Yeah. So my name's Chris Detzel and I run online communities, but I also run engagement for all of Realtio. And I've been doing this for a lot of years at different companies. And we think that this is gonna be important and a lot of fun as we move forward. How about you?

I'm Nicole Saunders. I'm director of community at Zendesk currently. I've been working in the community space, gosh, for probably a little over 15 years since before we even maybe called it community management. I've had experience at early stage start ups, obviously, bigger companies like Zendesk. I've seen communities of all sorts and all scales, and we've moved around our team a couple times.

I've worked in support. I've worked in marketing. I've worked in communications. So, hopefully, we can bring that breadth of experience to the conversation here today and and really, really help some folks

out. Yeah. I think that really sums it up. So our first episode is gonna be out in a couple of weeks, and you can expect a new one every 3 weeks or so. So subscribe to cxxesspodcast.com or wherever you get your podcast, whether it's Apple, Spotify, Google, I don't know the desktop.

I see a lot of people do that. Follow, our show and page on LinkedIn.