eTracy Mahnken of NerdWallet — The faster we know whether or not something works, the best we can learn.
Tags: Apps, Health, Customer Service, Experience

As part of my series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing… Tracy Manhken, Vice President of Product at NerdWallet.

At NerdWallet, Tracy leads a diverse team of product managers and business development professionals, focusing on data-driven problem solving to power our holistic product experience and drive business results. She has over 20 years of product management, marketing, research and sales operations experience in the real estate and CPG industries, including as the Senior Vice President of Product Management at Realtor.com. Outside of work, Tracy enjoys spending time outside with her three teenage Boy Scouts. Her ideal Saturday night includes board games with friends — glass of wine in hand! Tracy has a BA in Economics from the University of Washington.

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Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I have 20 years of product management, marketing, research and sales operations experience in the real estate and CPG industries, and currently serve as NerdWallet’s VP of Product. Prior to joining NerdWallet, I was with Move, the operator of Realtor.com, for almost 19 years. I held a variety of roles focused on product management, sales and business operations, and B2B marketing, and served as Senior Vice President of Product Management for seven years.

I graduated college with a degree in economics and spent my first eight years working for Information Resources, a leader in Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) marketing analytics. This role turned out to be better than business school — it was essentially a master class in the power of brand, product differentiation, packaging and price. My primary focus was helping CPG companies deliver meaningful products to consumers according to the needs of their real customers — including grocery, convenience-store, and big box operators. It was fascinating to sit at this intersection of consumer demand for products being designed, packaged and sold to a completely different customer. On the marketing analytics side, you have this product that’s designed to resonate with consumers — but your job is to make it appealing to the grocery and big-box stores, while accommodating factors like pricing schemes, linear shelf commitments, limited availability, upfront commit requirements and more.

Overall, my experiences in CPG and real estate taught me how to create products that deliver across business strategy, consumer expectations, and brand promise. Today I get to apply these learnings in developing consumer-first products at NerdWallet.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

My first job on the web was in 1998 with apartment rentals startup AllApartments.com, which was ultimately acquired and rolled up into Realtor.com. After spending eight years in CPG where I had fingertip access to rich data cut almost any way you could imagine, I joined a company that had well…. nothing. During the first week in my shiny new role buying traffic (known as performance marketing or search engine marketing today), I waltzed up to my boss and requested a username and password to the analytics system. The blank look I received was hysterical. We had no method to know what banner ads were running on what sites with what creative (e.g. “Leap into Your New Pad”, “Find Your Perfect Place”). There was no URL tracking…nothing.

What did I learn? Get scrappy! In CPG, you measure and test every variable because every single decision — even seemingly minor packaging changes — can have major financial ramifications. With this mentality, I sat down with an AllApartments.com engineer, who taught me about URL structure. From there, I wrote a spec system to tag URLs and track my creativity. At the time I didn’t know it was a spec — it was a document that outlined my problems; solutions; and a system to create a code for type, creative and placement. Today, that might not be the approach I’d counsel a NerdWallet product data manager to take with our team, but it worked well at the time!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I’m particularly grateful for my mentor, Steve Berkowitz, former CEO at Move, who gave me a chance to step away from product management to become his chief of staff. With that experience I learned:

How to break down a company into “enterprise assets” as a way to think strategically about what must receive continuous investment versus what might be partnered or bought. This helped me understand SWOT (business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) through the lens of a company and its composition. The importance of culture and its strong influence on business outcomes. I discovered what it takes to uphold a company culture across both location (e.g. British Columbia versus Phoenix, Ariz.) and function (e.g. sales versus product) while still leaving room for localization. I also discovered the art of supporting a localized culture under the umbrella of a company’s larger cultural norms — which has come into play often at NerdWallet! The value of being a “learner” versus a “knower.” Learning requires trying something new, feeling awkward and clumsy, looking less than good and failing repeatedly before attaining initial competency. Being a constant learner versus a knower makes me a leader who asks a ton of questions — and I have to be careful to make clear I’m seeking knowledge, insight, opinion — not questioning to dismantle someone’s point of view. As a learner, I also tend to “think out loud” to test logic and validity of a hypothesis, which typically leads to better outcomes.

Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?

I spent almost 20 years working with real estate agents. Let me be clear, real estate agents are people people, not internet technology experts. If I wanted them to buy prospective homebuyer or home seller internet leads from me, then I needed to make that easy — but I also had to be willing to talk to them — in this case via a call center that operated seven days a week across four time zones. Their business depended on fast resolution of their clients’ (home buyers and sellers) problems and therefore my success depended on fast resolution as well.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

For a long time, delivering products on the web also became an excuse for dialing back reactive customer service resources. Companies introduced FAQs and self-serve knowledge bases, accompanied by “Contact Us” information — which often leads consumers into an unresponsive black hole. The justification was that these solutions were good enough, and operationally cheap.

Then the advent of the native app, and more importantly the rating system within the various app stores, introduced a fundamental change. Suddenly, the quality of a company’s customer experience and service were exposed. Star rating and the accompanying comments matter to an app’s ability to rank (pragmatically), but they also provide amazing signals of companies’ strengths and weaknesses. This system presents a real-life, ever-updating focus group right in front of you, every day. Listen to it!

Consider NerdWallet’ Google Play store app reviews. Example after example demonstrate that although we occasionally get it wrong — or the partners we depend on for credit scores or connection to consumers’ bank accounts get it wrong — our users can count on easy, fast access to our customer service team, which works very hard to solve their problem. Often, we gain an extra star as a result of our stellar customer service.

Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?

Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned previously, I think app stores are an excellent example of an external pressure that can force a company to give more consideration to customer service.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided? Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

At Realtor.com, our core product lead generation experience connected consumers looking at homes for sale online with real estate agents who could help them. Often, the agent was looking not only to represent that consumer as a buyer, but also hoped the consumer had a home to sell; thus, the agent could look forward to a selling commission as well. The volume of such leads that Realtor.com could produce dwarfed that of other marketing channels an agent typically relied on, so agents started to form teams that specialized in cultivating real estate internet leads.

Working with one of our top sales people, I spent a lot of time with two of the earliest innovators of this model, and it turns out that, for months, they had been looking to identify changes in our lead format that would enable the lead data to flow seamlessly into their CRM system. We added it and solved the realtors’ problem.

In return, these realtors became brand ambassadors for us. They were willing to join us on stage at major industry conventions. They recorded video testimonials that we could use and even co-produced a training to help us teach fellow agents how to engage with these prospective customers. This was valuable on two fronts: not only did we secure customers via word of mouth, we also improved our consumer experience — home buyers and home sellers reaching out to agents through Realtor.com were far more likely to get a response and be connected with an agent who could truly help them.

Finally, by essentially co-marketing with these realtors, we helped their business as well. They were able to recruit more agents to be a part of their team, growing their commission volume substantially.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a founder or CEO should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.

While I can certainly develop a list of five, I think it really boils down to just three crucial elements needed in order to create the best possible customer experience, which are:

The CEO is not the customer. The customer is the customer. Making product experience decisions based on your own preferences is a cardinal sin. It’s essential to know who your target customer is and build for them, not for you. Some of the most successful brand and product managers I’ve worked with were those who simply could not put themselves into the equation — for example, consider male brand managers representing feminine hygiene products. Feedback loops matter. You need to be able to listen to your customer, measure their reaction to your product, and take action in response. Investment in measurement and testing pays off. At NerdWallet, for example, we approach every challenge or project with the same mantra: “Hypothesize, Build, Measure, Learn.” This ethos encourages employees to get to a viable hypothesis and get right to work iterating and tweaking. The faster we know whether or not something works, the more we can learn. Great leaders model their key values, like the ones upon which NerdWallet was built. These values flow into the customer experience and should be reflected in it at every practical touchpoint. For example, our NerdWallet value of “consumer, company, team, self” is applied frequently in our consumer experience. The ability to sort and compare reviewed financial providers by NerdWallet’s star rating is a clear expression of “Consumer,” even though some financial providers with lower ratings might actually want to pay us more.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Wow, utilitarianism. You are tweaking my inner social economist geek now! Well, the standard go-to would be increasing taxes to end world poverty but really for me… I’d ban the production and use of consumer plastic. Its impact on our environment is indescribable and reasonable alternatives exist — from glass to paper. Argh.