Fran Brzyski is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hark, the leader in video and audio-driven customer feedback. He has over a decade of experience working in CX and Voice-of-Customer at companies ranging from startup to Fortune 50. In addition to his role at Hark, he is a portfolio advisor at Hatch Ventures. Prior to founding Hark, he worked in sales and CX for both B2B and B2C companies, including biotech, risk and compliance and e-commerce.
Questions
- Could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, how you got from where you were to where you are today?
- So, can you tell us a little bit about Hark, and what exactly do you do?
- Can you share an example of how Hark has helped an organization transform by leveraging the voice of the customer, based on your original strategy?
- Can you also share with us what’s the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely can’t live without in your business?
- Can you also share with our listeners maybe one or two books that you’ve read, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you’ve read recently, but it has had a great impact on you.
- Can you also share with our listeners what’s the one thing that’s going on in your life right now, something that you’re really excited about, either something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people.
- Entrepreneurship can be a tough journey—how do you stay motivated, especially during challenging or slow periods?
- Where can listeners find you online?
- Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you’ll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, the quote kind of helps to get you back on track.
Highlights
Fran’s Journey
Me: Could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, how you got from where you were to where you are today?
Fran shared that it’s a messy one, as these things usually go. He came out of school thinking he’d work in finance, and when he worked at a big bank, realized very quickly he did not like the bureaucracy, and he was very much somebody who was trying to not only strategize but execute. And at larger companies, there’s a lot of red tape, and that works well for some people, others, not so much. So, he took a large pay cut and went into more of the startup world, and he realized very quickly, that’s where he belonged.
His passion was to innovate really fast. He’s really enjoyed getting the peek behind the curtain toward upper management and seeing how things were done or decided or strategized. And he got a lot of great experience, went through a few up and down a few exits, and ultimately landed in software, specifically because the feedback loops are so quick and you can innovate so fast, that was exhilarating to him.
So, he was at a travel startup right before the pandemic, he met his co-founder there, A+ team, incredible culture, got to see what best in class looked like. Went to a seed stage startup, that didn’t work out. And after all of that, his wife, he’s been incubating this idea of Hark as she knew he was destined for entrepreneurship.
He knew this is what he wanted to do, and decided to take a second mortgage on his house and go for it. And he thinks a big thing through that entire journey was the support system. When he left the big bank and took a pay cut, his mom and dad were so proud that he believed in himself versus what other people thought. When he decided to start Hark, my wife, very quickly, was like, “Let’s go. Let’s do this.” So, he thinks that’s a huge piece of it. It’s hard enough the journey, and finding those around you that will support you through it is massive.
About Hark
Me: So, can you tell us a little bit about Hark, and what exactly do you do?
Fran shared that he started Hark with the idea that customer communication was changing very rapidly, as we saw on socials, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and people loved sharing their stories, not only with their friends, but much more broadly, which was quite surprising. And when he went to get in touch with a brand, he was relegated to a form or a question-and-answer text survey, and it just felt so inauthentic. Felt like he was never actually heard. And he thought there was a new way to think about like, really voice of customer.
So, they start a Hark to see, would people engage differently when they have intent to reach out to the brand.
Would they enjoy a multimodal experience, audio, video, text, screen share?
And they got a resounding yes, like customers really love the opportunity to add that context and feel heard.
And then they took it to the next level and started to incorporate a whole new customer feedback insight solution, not only giving you trends and topics to what people are talking about, but sharing stories behind each one.
Very often what he found is a voice of customer and customer feedback data shared often, but it falls flat and it’s hard to get cross departmental collaboration. So, just like we love to consume on socials as consumers, how do we turn that into consumption for brands and for operators? And that’s been unbelievably eye opening, because they impact feedback loops, they impact efficiency, but they also impact culture.
Like that employee experience really starts to change, and it creates a new bond between the brand and the consumer. So, that’s what they’re up to at Hark. They’re really trying to change how they think about voice of customer, customer feedback, and they have an entirely new spin on it.
Customer-Driven Organizational Transformation by Hark
Me: Now, you spoke about voice of the customer in terms of what Hark does. I’d like for you to maybe give us a use case, an example, you don’t need to call the customer’s name, but just give us an example of how your company has helped to transform that just based on your initial, I guess strategy in mind when you started Hark, how that has been able to materialize, and what does it look like for that organization?
Fran shared that there’s two different examples he’ll give. The first is when they started Hark, he remembers vividly, they knew that this was a new communication method, but they weren’t sure about the efficiency gains through offering this, that was completely unknown, green field territory.
So, they had a few companies take a chance for them, and he remember when they first went through their business review, he and his co-founder spent a weekend going through all the data, and really weren’t sure what it would show.
And the data was resounding yes.
When people can share their story and feel heard and you can guide them through a bit of a journey, they’re going to give you everything up front possible.
And the reason why there’s so much back and forth in email and chat, they don’t know what to share, they’re like, “Oh, my thing is damaged, what do you need from me?”
And there’s too much unnecessary back and forth with them, it’s like, all in the moment. So, that was very much eye opening to them.
The other parts of that is, they found they get about 30% more context for interaction, people will talk more. They’ll say, “Oh, I love your brand. I tried X, Y and Z, hey, this time, this is what happened. It’s a little bit different.” So, it changes right like sentiment is very different versus chatting with a bot and saying, “My product is damaged” that was really eye opening for them.
On the back end, when they launched the insights on the platform, the feedback loops, they found that they could often cut out an entire step. So, if the customer experience team noticed, he’ll give you one example.
They have a beauty brand, they noticed that one of their pumps was defective, and instead of putting up a macro and saying, if you send in the pump, we’ll replace it. Create a great customer experience, we’ll take care of you. They decide to share it with not only the product team but the fulfilment team, and they realized the product wasn’t defective, it was being filled inappropriately.
So, they were able to save tons of money and also ensure that their customers had a great experience by getting in front of that very quickly, where before they might have shared a product and product said, “Well, I don’t really know. You have to go back and ask more to your customers. Well, I don’t really know which customers to ask. Do we even want to really bring that up.” Like that’s what we’re solving for, and we see a lot. So, that’s more on the support side.
Outside of support, they have an eyewear company that has these NPS swap meetings, they take it so seriously, they meet every two weeks, and since they bought on Hark, it’s completely changed that whole narrative. Like they used to go and dig the data this way and that way. Now they have it mapped out by customer cohort, but they can see what customers are saying, and they’re finding ways to turn their promoters, I guess, from an NPS perspective, into champions to help convert other customers, which is fascinating. Like getting that brand loyalty out of your customer base is so interesting, and that never happened before Hark, so, he guesses those are a few examples.
App, Website or Tool that Fran Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he can’t live without, Fran stated that he hates to say this, but it’s ChatGPT. What he can do with AI from a brainstorming perspective, it can change who it is all the time, from a marketing consultant to a business operations consultant, to a product leader, it’s amazing. And it really, really helps him. One of the challenges as a founder is you’re always ideating, and you’re thinking, how can we make this better?
How can we create efficiency?
What’s going wrong here?
And now he has somebody on demand to do that with all the time, and that person is usually a lot smarter than he is.
So, that’s been unbelievable for him. He uses it all the time, and he speaks to it like it’s another human all the time.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Fran
When asked about books that have had an impact, Fran shared that there’s certainly a few. And it’s interesting, these books you read hit you at different moments through what you’re going through personally. A big one for him was The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. It’s very much about sometimes we think everybody else in life cares about us, and they really don’t, like they’re so infatuated with their own lives, and it really helps you center and lean into yourself a little bit more and get really in tune with what drives you. He’s a big believer that happiness comes from within, it’s not about buying things or doing things in that regard. He thinks it’s really understanding what drives you, and when you’re happy with yourself, then you’re sort of untouchable, and that book was like the first lens in he had towards that.
What Fran is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Fran shared that he thinks everybody is just very excited with how fast things they’ve done for so long are changing every single week. They just got off a lunch and learn call talking with their development team about what they can do with AI and how they can change testing and shipping product and ensuring they can move faster, while also being smart about it. He just thinks they’re at such a sort of like Renaissance period in all of this, and it’s very interesting to watch people sort of adapt or die.
What’s fun for them is there’s a lot of obvious paths you can go with adding AI into your product, and they usually put a lot of thought into that, and take a path less travelled. So, that’s been really fun for them, ensuring that they stay different. But they’re top of mind.
The other thing personally is, he’s got three kids under six, and watching them all like starts to become like little people is really fun. So, he’s seeing a lot of change all the time in all aspects of his life, and it’s great.
Entrepreneurial Resilience and Motivation
Me: So, I know you said you ended up into entrepreneurship, not as a planned career move, and you got a lot of support. And entrepreneurship can be a hard journey, because you literally have to be constantly thinking about how do you stay relevant, what’s the next thing, recruiting the right people, ensuring you have the right talent on board, and just getting everything working in accordance on a continual basis. How do you stay motivated every day? What are some things that you do to keep yourself motivated, especially during periods where you may have a lull?
Fran stated that to your point, it’s hard. There’s a lot going on. He thinks if you’re solving a problem that you’re deeply passionate about, that sort of comes. But it’s not like every day he wakes ups out of bed and he jumps up to the ceiling to say, “I’m changing how feedback is handled.” I think it’s something that compounds over time, right? He doesn’t do something every morning then all of a sudden flips a switch in his head that he’s going to be motivated. It’s like he knows he’s got a big week, and he’s going to say no of things over the weekend so that he can focus on his sleep and what he’s eating and how he’s prepping for that, so that his mental space is there and he’s not feeling rushed through it.
He thinks it’s things like separating space where you can go focus on, like, every morning now he does his workout and he does things like that, or he does have time with his kids right after work and putting them to bed, and he’s learned to enjoy that versus rush through it and get back to work.
So, he thinks staying motivated is just like really understanding again yourself and giving yourself the capacity that it’s okay to switch mindset here and there, like you don’t have to be in front of your laptop. 24/7, otherwise you sort of burn out.
The other thing is, he’s worked with a coach which has been unbelievably helpful, not only for running the business, it’s very hard, and it’s nice to have somebody to spar with on some things, who’s been through a lot, but also for mental clarity, getting into meditation and getting into things that help him specifically, has been unbelievable, so it helps him be more present in the moment that he’s in.
Where can listeners find Fran online?
LinkedIn – Fran Brzyski – https://www.linkedin.com/in/fbrzyski
LinkedIn – Hark – https://www.linkedin.com/company/send-hark
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Fran Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Fran shared that he has a few things he’s cycled through, but one that’s been constant is his mom his whole life would say, “This isn’t a dress rehearsal, this life.” and that always really helps him, because, again, going into entrepreneurship, there’s definitely a path less travelled, and that really helps him, we have one chance to be here and everyday things could change.
Me: Well, thank you so much, Fran for taking time out of your very busy schedule to jump on our podcast, shared the insights that you’ve gained as an entrepreneur, as well as about your company Hark. All of the wonderful things that you’re doing in the space of AI and providing feedback, and just really tapping into things that customers may not have had access to before and trying to, as you mentioned, travel the path less travelled, but doing it in a very unconventional way, but yet memorable way that your customers will want to come back again and again to do business with you and tell your friends and family. So, I think it was a great conversation. I just want to say, thank you so much.
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