Explore every episode of the podcast CX Conversations

In this episode we talk about improving the customer experience and reducing risk through operational excellence, so we brought on Michael Popa. Companies can often go wrong in their strategy when structuring their teams and compensation. So it comes down to aligning on the responsibilities of sales all the way down to what are the metrics each one’s accountable for and how are they compensated for that. Michael gives his method for looking over and assessing business processes responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed (RACI). Make sure your different departments are communicating well so that customers don’t have to repeat themselves. The handoff is an important part of on-boarding customers.

• Michael’s background 1:00
• Helping companies get to excellence 4:27
• Where companies often go wrong in strategy 6:07
• RACI 8:16
• Guiding more of the process and strategy 11:42

“That’s where I typically start is understanding the objectives of the company. Understand where we wanna go, where we wanna take not just customer success but the entire customer life cycle and how we build a strategy in conjunction with sales and operations so that we’re investing in the right building blocks, the right milestones, in the right sequence.” 5:20

Today we talk about the power of identification to build employee and customer connection, so we brought on Aaron Painter who is the CEO at Nametag. He explains what makes good customer experience and that comes down to how employees are treated and how they treat customers. Companies need to help employees feel and understand that their opinions matter, which will help create connection with the company and even create culture as these employees interact with the customer.

• Aaron’s background 1:00
• What makes good customer experience? 4:40
• Building culture of happy employees 8:13
• Why is customer support such a hard job in today’s world? 11:44
• Benefitting both employee and customer and why he build Nametag 15:54

“It’s crazy that in today’s world so much can happen from your mobile phone except actually proving who you really are, so it led me down this path of something I’ve been on a lot, which was cyber security and privacy and this intersection with identity and just understanding who customers are because we all know in our field of marketing more broadly, the better we know our customers, the better we can tailor the overall customer experience.” 2:06

www.linkedin.com/in/aaronpainter/

In this episode we talk about building customer focused organizational processes with Ali Ghumman who is the Global VP of Customer Engagement and Innovation at SAP, a company that engineers solutions to fuel innovation, foster equality, and spread opportunity across borders and cultures. Companies have baggage of history, of technology, of positions, of growth, which can ultimately hold companies back when they’ve been around for a long time and are stuck in the old way of doing things. It can be hard to get shareholders and organization executives to want to adjust or shift how things are done to keep up with modern trends.

• What it means to build customer focused organizational processes 4:45
• Why organizations don’t get the customer in mind, or don’t innovate right away 7:07
• Key factors to achieve alignment with your organization 8:40
• Advice for achieving some of these goals 13:06

“Think about in retail organization that exists in today’s world. It’s trying to understand what the impact would be of running a marketing promotion on the traffic that they’ll get in their stores as well as on their site and what that means for the amount of product that they should have so that the customers don’t go empty handed when they’re there.” 6:16

www.linkedin.com/in/alighumman/

Today we’re going to talk about transformation and how to really focus and align your business to this idea of experience. To do that, we brought on Cristin Thompson who is currently the Vice President of Sales Enablement and Customer Engagement at QSC. You always want to make sure you’ve captured what was said, what was written, or what was conveyed. Now, do we need the faster horse? Or do we need to build a car? That all comes back to what your strategy is for your company or organization. Whether to take the advice of your customers really depends on what type of business you’re running and where you’re wanting to go.

• Crispin’s Background 1:00
• Where he goes when starting these initiatives 5:22
• Deciphering when to know that your way is better than what the customer thinks they want 7:25
• Why aren’t companies able to turn feedback into action? 11:11
• Final thoughts 16:29

“If you’re thinking more about an outcome driven type exercise, meaning ‘I wanna help people get faster from point A to point B,’ I don’t necessarily care about the means of locomotion, that frees you up to interpret that as ‘Oh they’re saying faster horse, but guess what. This brand new thing I’m thinking about is gonna help us close that gap. It’s gonna change everything, and we’re gonna have to help them get there.’” 8:24

www.linkedin.com/in/crispinthompson/

In this episode we’re going to talk about how to relate to customers in a way that’s unique and in a way that’s scalable, so we have Owen Robinson on the show today, who is currently the Vice President of CX Strategy at Water Filled Tech. The key to a successful modern customer engagement strategy is not the old school, bullhorn corporate experience for a million people, but it’s about hand crafting a million experiences for one customer. It’s earning customer loyalty at the individual scale with a handcrafted customer experience conscious of their behavior, their priorities, and delivering what they want, where they want it, when they want it.

About Owen’s background 0:52
Have customers changed? 4:07
Where to start and measuring 7:16
The data we have matters 9:44
Having the right technology 11:41

“The advent of cloud technology, which has been around for a long time and other technical spaces really came into its form in customer experience within the last decade. What that allows us to do is really consume super sophisticated applications and technology like artificial intelligence and big data analytics, and natural language processing, and all these really cool things that in the past we could kind of do, sorta, in a premise environment if you had enough money and time to put into it, but now midsized and even small businesses can consume these sophisticated capabilities for a couple hundred bucks an agent a month. So it’s a really cool time.” 4:40

www.linkedin.com/in/owen-b-robinson/

Today we’re gonna be talking about good customer experience and how that can improve your digital presence, and to do that we brought on Hannah McNaughton. She is an award winning founder and currently the CEO of Metric Marketing, a recognized thought leader in a lot of digital aspects and overall digital marketing. She has trained a lot of professionals from startups to fortune 500 in different marketing strategies and is currently a member of the Forbes Agency Panel.

About Metric Marketing 1:14
How to grow and take the next step 4:16
Algorithms 9:06
Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines 12:22

“There are over 200 factors that Google says they use to rank websites, so knowing where to start can feel really difficult, but really what everything comes down to is user experience. Everything that Google recommends from the kind of content you create to the experience that people have on your website with the navigation, with the functionality, everything revolves around user experience.” 4:44

Today we have a fun talk track and we’re gonna be talking about personalization journey mapping with a little bit of a functional twist as we dive into healthcare and pharma, and to do that we brought on Chris Brogan who is currently a grower of healthcare and Chief Strategy Officer of Predictive Health. He does a lot in the CX space, so we hope you can tune in today and gain some great insights from this interview.

Chris’s background 0:54
Personalization 3:38
Some tips in helping companies jump into this head first 5:43
Bringing the horse to water 8:29
Don’t do personalization for personalization’s sake 12:28

“If we’re able to sort of engage them with a personalized experience when they get to that site, so I hit a link, my experience is different on the website initially, and then going even further, personalizing some of the content there to meet the needs and barriers, and sort of myths maybe that your audience may have in mind.” 7:45

Today we’re going to talk about how to build a brand strategy that drives your customer experience and to do that we brought on Bettina Papirio-Faerber, who is the VP of Strategy and CX at One and All Agency. Bettina’s purpose at her agency is to support purpose driven brands in their missions, which goes from for profit to non-profit, and working with them and guiding them through connecting their mission and purpose with their customers. CX plays a huge role in that, knowing who you’re talking to, and also how that flows with your brand, so it’s a great topic to discuss today.

Structuring and framing brand strategy 2:56
Helping brands stand out in the market 8:31
Do companies find success when they incorporate these strategies? 11:16
A quote to live by 15:32

“I always say ‘Do you know that you have a gap?’ And I think that most brands, and when they develop brand strategy, don’t really recognize that there is a gap between what they think they’re doing in customer experience for their customer and how the customer perceives it.” 3:23

@bettina_says

We have a special guest with us today, Rhonda Rothstein, who is currently the President of the North East region of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals. They do a lot of good work in our space, but more importantly Rhonda has been in the customer experience space for a long time focusing a lot on outsourcing. With about 15 years of business development and operations, I’m really excited to talk to her about some of her experience in thinking about outsourcing.

What is outsourcing? 3:10
Leading edge technologies 7:05
Coaching organizations on where to start with outsourcing 7:53
What to look for 11:15
Having control 16:43

“ There’s a lot of risk that gets mitigated by outsourcing. Obviously you’re not hiring those people in house, you don’t have to pay unemployment tax and health insurance benefits, manage them, and hire them. The list goes on and on, so it’s great to be able to just take that piece off of your plate and outsource it to a company that specializes in all of those things.” 5:47

www.linkedin.com/in/rhonda-rohtstein

Today we’re discussing something that is becoming even more important today, which is how to use data to transform your customer journey. We can’t stress this topic enough and we found an amazing guest to discuss it, Biren Fondekar, who is currently the VP of Customer Experience over and Digital Strategy at NetApp. The only way, especially in today’s digital world, to truly understand the customer and what they’re experiencing is to capture as much data as you can as the customer is working their way through their customer journey.

Why is data so important? 4:57
How to become a more data driven organization 7:06
Data ownership 13:41
Using the customer experience governance board 14:51

“When I think of a customer journey, it’s everything from when a customer first hears about you as a vendor and as a product, all the way until they buy from you when they use your product and need support on it and so on. Being able to capture all those data points as the customer is progressing through that journey really helps us pinpoint friction points, pain points, and so on, and drive a much more kind of focused and specific customer experience for that given customer.” 5:39

Today we’re talking about how one to one marketing is transforming companies. There’s so much interesting dialogue in the market about commerce and care. Marketing and CX, and how that’s all coming together. I came across somebody that has enormous experience in this space of personalization marketing customer experience, and his name is Chuck Moxley. He is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Blue Triangle and an Advisory Board Member of the Customer Experience (CX) Program at University of California, Irvine.

Why personalized marketing, or 1-1 is so important 3:07
Channels that are becoming more modern 7:37
Consumers now control the value of your product 10:10
Do you have the data? 13:28

“I was having these same conversations going ‘Oh my gosh, they still think of mass media and they still think of it the same way, and they’re using a playbook that’s a decade old.’ They don’t get that the world has changed, so the first step in all of this is a big mindset change. You have to realize the way things were 10 years ago just don’t work. And there’s other factors and other consumer realities, like the fact that the power is shifted. Consumers can now go read a thousand reviews. So it doesn’t matter what you put out there on the TV commercial, they’re gonna read the reviews, and if the reviews are crap and say the product doesn’t work, you’re not gonna make the sales.” 10:51

www.AudienceofOne.website

Today we brought on a special guest, Matt Abrahams, who has quite the background. Currently he’s lecturing at Stanford University in the graduate school of business. In addition, he is a book author of a book called “Speaking Up Without Freaking Out: 50 Techniques for Confident and Compelling Presenting.” He also hosts a podcast called “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” and finally, he is a coach and a consultant, helping many people optimize and strategize around the best ways they can communicate.

His passion for communication 2:20
His book 4:22
Setting the stage for great communication in your business: confidence 8:10
Overcoming nervousness, fake it ‘til you make it 11:18
Getting in the right mindset, or next play mindset 13:15
Dealing with tough or negative communication situations 16:04
The delivery and communicating that you care 17:27
Helping managers and leaders communicate better 19:22

“There are 3 things that I think are most important. 1 is you have to start with confidence. You have to understand the situations that make you nervous and figure out how to manage them. 2nd, you need to think about your content. How do I make my content relevant, specific, and useful for the people that I’m speaking to? So it’s really about honing that content, and 3rd, delivering in a way that really shows warmth, connection, and helps your audience to see that you’re there to collaborate and partner with them. So those are really the 3 foundational principles in all effective communication.” 8:14

nofreakingspeaking.com
www.linkedin.com/in/maabrahams

Today we have the Vice President of Customer Experience at Instapage, Elizabeth Birch. We discuss how you can help your company be more recession proof through customer experience and Elizabeth says you need to ruthlessly prioritize. This involves knowing your audience and prioritizing them without freaking out and being reactionary. Companies struggle to prioritize when they dilute portions of their company, such as their team and message. Be intentional by picking one or two things and putting all efforts and focus into that thing. “In order to know your audience, you have to speak to them.”

Her background and what she’s been doing at Instapage 0:52
Making companies feel more recession proof through customer Experience 3:47
Why companies struggle with prioritizing 6:00
Know your audience 9:08
Tech and efficiency 12:03
Retention and delighting your customer 15:53

“When we’re faced with uncertainty, we all go into this reactionary mode and we don’t have to do that. Let’s keep it simple and the first point really is just prioritize. That involves knowing your audience. If you don’t know your audience, you’re probably in trouble, so keep it simple, but take a look at what your customer segments are, and then prioritize them.” 5:00

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-birch-a4806315/

Today we’re going to talk about keys for CX Transformation and we brought on a very special guest, Siri Osthed who is currently the VP of New Customer Experience at Weave. She talks about how to start thinking through the transformative approach to CX starting with your goals and understanding what you want to achieve. You want to create strategies of how you’re going to achieve your goals and maps, and then move on to the technology next.

Where to start in thinking through this transformative approach 3:33
What causes companies to miss the first step 5:05
Onboarding 1,000 customers 7:07
Getting to where you can have the meaningful conversation 9:39
Requirements 14:28
People 17:57

“You have to think about it from the outside in. How is the customer engaging with the people involved in those different departments as well? So you don’t only have the inside process of how you engage with the customer, but you gotta think about how does the customer engages with you? And there you have marketing like emails. What emails do they get from what team, at what point, with what message? Does it all align? 8:55

https://www.linkedin.com/in/siriosthed/

In this episode we brought on Isaac Major who is currently the VP of Customer Solutions at Quantanite. Outsourcing is very useful and an important step in expanding a business beyond certain bounds, but there can be many questions and misconceptions about it and how it works. Isaac says you gotta have someone to manage the relationship with your outsourcing partner/teams, and then from your partner’s side you want to have a business manager as well.

About Quantanite 2:57
Some of the trends they’re seeing in outsourcing 4:00
Staying in control 5:43
Technology they tend to use 7:51
Where does the outsourcing occur? 10:30
Customer retention 13:29
If you’re considering outsourcing 16:44

“In the present, the number one thing your customers care about the most when it comes to your support staff is time. How long do they have to wait to get this resolved?” 9:12

Today we’ve got a fun talk track and we’re gonna be talking about all things design, UX, CX, service design, and to do that we brought on a special guest, Saroni Kundu, who is currently the AVP of Service Design and CX Strategy at Equifax Workforce Solutions. Saroni explains how she is able to get the various teams working together in order to keep everything running smoothly and picking up the slack where certain reps may struggle, even if you have a new or small team that’s just starting out.

What is UX and Service Design? 2:09
Helping companies in Service Design 5:19
Breaking down silos 8:30
Lessons learned 9:39
Starting out as a newer organization 12:49

“Having a team that says ‘Hey I need to talk to these teams and bring them together as stakeholders for this service or product.’ Believe me, they are completely open to collaborate because it’ll make their lives easier.” 7:40

https://www.linkedin.com/in/saronikundu

We have a great guest today named Jason Guidetti who joins us as the Managing Director at Blueprint. We discuss the concept of delivering superior customer experience through this enterprise focus and alignment. Everything in the enterprise plays a part in CX and your company’s strategy needs to take into account every aspect of the company to create the best course of action. When you’re really serious about doing CX and you’re really serious about digital, it requires an upfront investment, which often we can see companies that are hesitant to really invest because you won’t get immediate returns when doing this. You have to invest first, bring everything together and optimize it, and then you’ll start seeing those exponential results.

Where to start and get this concept of great CX through enterprise motion 4:19
Where does CX strategy sit on your corporate strategy? 7:15
Cross functional aligned objectives 8:47
Creative in commerce 10:49

“In today's day and age with the push for digital, and also an evolving demographic consumer that’s evolving, their interests and needs and expectations are changing. They want more, they want more for free, they want to feel like the brand is relevant, like they’re a part of it. There’s just this newly invigorated sense of proximity that customers want from brands and companies that they do business with.” 7:26

We have Saari Gardner joining us today, who is currently the Vice President of Advisory and Managed Services at Walker Information, a company that helps organizations leverage XM capabilities to deliver amazing experiences and achieve differentiation in the marketplace. We talk about navigating the idea of the Age of the Individual, which was a real fun, kind of pre-session that we’ve been going back and forth on.

Her background and role and Walker 0:53
The Age of the Individual 3:24
Organizations are still sitting in the age of the customer 5:58
Navigating values and avoiding offense 11:20
Listening 13:17
Helping CX leaders adjust 17:49

“A Boycott’s really an extreme expression of being a detractor of a brand, and so again thinking about a person’s values. They color everything that they do, all of the decisions that they make and it impacts who they’re gonna spend their money with, and I think in the great resignation we’ve really seen it also dictates who they’re gonna work for.” 6:40

Today we’re going to talk about how exactly a CRM will power omnichannel customer support in the future. Companies that are really achieving success are building an omnichannel customer experience and they’re not doing it empty handed. They’re utilizing the most impactful technology solutions to steer their customer service in support with a CRM capability. I give some advice on what companies can do to make the transition to a more omnichannel support model.

True Omnichannel support 1:03
What is omnichannel support? 3:13
Making the transition 4:57
Remote work 9:16

“True omnichannel support ensures seamless transition and consistent experiences from one channel to the next. I think companies providing effective omnichannel support are collecting and harnessing information gained through each and every action. That’s different than just talking on a couple of different channels.” 1:03

Today I’m talking about 5 examples of proactive support you can follow and I wanted to talk through some of the things of modern support and how it has shifted in recent years. In order to keep customers happy and loyal, companies should think about proactive customer support in order to stay ahead of the needs of customers so that they don’t even have a chance to be dissatisfied. Reactive support deals with people who are already angry or dissatisfied, and it can often be hard to get them back to being a loyal customer/raving fan. Proactive support will nip that issue in the bud and keep them on the right track.

Proactive vs reactive support 1:36
CSAT 4:26
FAQs 5:38
Anticipating resources 7:58
Support statements 9:58

“Customer support is no longer a nice-to-have feature. It is this piece of any business and oftentimes there’s a direct correlation between the success and excellent customer support. Customer expectations are always heightened these days. The faster, more conveniently brands can resolve customer issues, the more satisfied customers are with their experience.” 1:41

Today we’re talking about how consumers want to be contacted, which sounds like something we all know, but that’s not always the case. In this post-pandemic world, consumers have undergone this shift in mindset and expectations surrounding the customer experience. I think today’s consumer finds a huge benefit in a hybrid experience that combines this idea of a spark of human communication and the convenience of digital assistance. The hybrid model is the future of customer experience and meeting customer expectations.

Today’s consumer 1:10
Conducting research in the trends of customer experience 1:50
Creating your hybrid model 6:30

“In order to keep up with this increasing consumer expectation, companies need to invest in a modern customer relationship management tool that has multi human support, it’s got AI technology, it has that personalized hybrid customer experience.” 1:29

In this episode I talk about why chatbots are so important and how your business can gain from this useful service. The chatbot, or virtual agent, will fill in for those mundane tasks that often drain the life of customer reps, making everyone’s life so much better and free up agent time so that they can focus on the bigger issues customers are facing. Chatbots can get rid of all the filler time that is used for gaining general information that agents waste so much time on, making each customer interaction that much more efficient.

Virtual agents 0:58
Chatbots can shift focus to more complex issues 2:14
Handing off chatbot conversations to real agents 3:50
How to get going on this 5:35

“We surveyed over 525 US based consumers over the age of 18 trying to understand how this need for speed, if you will, translates into customer experience preferences. And the results, yeah, they were 90%, a whopping 90% of respondents think contact in customer service should be easier. 85% of respondents think customer service should be faster.” 2:51

Today we’re talking about mapping to management and I always like talking about journey mapping, but this has a slightly different twist and to do this I’ve got on Jochem Van Der Veer, who is currently the co-founder and CEO of TheyDo. He has a lot of experience and understanding of the whole journey mapping process and the various dynamics and angles you have to look at and understand to create a useful and productive map for your business.

His background and what he does at TheyDo 0:56
The continued problem with people mapping 4:53
How to move from mapping to managing 8:34
It may get more complex as you go 12:45
Where to go once your framework is established 13:55
Keeping the map active and advice to stepping up your game with journey mapping 18:06

“Their life cycle is basically time based, right? From left to right, but when you look at it vertically, you can look at it from different dimensions and one of them is, for instance, regions. So think about how different regions like Europe vs US go, or different customer types. New customers vs existing customers, or maybe even different dimensions that are relevant to your business.” 12:03

@joch_m
www.theydo.io

Something that we all want and could all use is the knowledge and ability to turn the customer into an ambassador of your brand. I’m taking here from a post that Grace Lau, Director of Growth at Dialpad did for Kustomer. It was such a great summary of this topic, that I wanted to give you a little bit of an overview of some of the takeaways I had on it. To see more about that post, you can check it out on the Kustomer blog: www.kustomer.com/blog

The most trusted source of recommendations 1:30
What a brand ambassador is 2:25
Communication needs to go both ways and provide omnichannel customer support 5:07
Customer experiences in digital marketing can really help build trust 8:27

“I think to retain customers you don’t just want contact deals, you gotta engage with them. That means communication must go both ways. Competitions, freebies, promotions, or limited edition products, great ways to start to reward your loyal customers and keep that mailing list engaged.” 5:07

One of the biggest shifts over the last few years has been to live chat because of the digital first mindset. Live chat allows consumers to get their questions answered without having to phone in or Phone support is not going anywhere, but when you force them to switch platforms in order to get their questions answered, ultimately you give them a reason to abandon their purchase or even potentially generate a negative feeling. Only ¼ of surveyed customer service organizations are currently using chat.

What is live chat for business? 2:09
The massive disconnect between businesses and their customers 7:13
A few reasons why chat might not be right for you 9:05
Benefits and issues with chatbots 12:04

“Only 9 percent of customers that have a low effort experience display any kind of disloyal attitude or behavior compared to, get this, 96 percent of those customers with high effort, difficult experiences. And chat does a great job of delivering this effortless, quality customer service experience.” 5:00

Today we are talking about some research we did about the future of customer experience. We regularly go out and survey professionals and consumers to understand trends in the space, so we want to dive into our latest research report. We surveyed over 100 CX professionals, gathered research, and now will be sharing it with you to reveal some of the interesting findings we’ve gathered through these surveys.

Will the role of customer service become more important to fuel business growth over the next 3 years? 1:53
Which channels will grow more in popularity over the next 3 years? 3:32
What percentage of CX professionals are preparing to service through live video/VR? 5:26
Top 3 priorities for CX organizations to achieve by 2025 7:22
Where will CX organizations be investing their money in the next few years? 9:17
Will personalization become more important? 14:27

“81% of CX organizations report that reducing wait times is an extremely important priority to achieve within the next 3 years. No doubt, I mean waiting on hold with customer service is a tale as time, isn’t it? And it’s one that provides a surefire way to create a ticked off customer.” 8:07

Today we’ve got a great guest who’s got a book out there called Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance, which has been highlighted in the Wall Street Journal’s best seller list and Forbes put it as one of its top business books in 2021. His name is Howard Tiersky and is the CEO of FROM, a digital transformation agency he created that helps companies transform from where they are now to where they need to be to succeed with today’s digital-first customers. “The goal of digital transformation is to catch up to the customer.”

How to win the digital consumer 2:03
Setting the stage of the consumer 4:17
Digital transformation 6:13
Map the journey 14:02
Should you revisit the journey map over time? 21:01

“If you’ve done research like that in the past, if you haven’t refreshed it in the last 12-18 months, it’s really obsolete because customers’ digital needs have changed so much during the pandemic, they’ve accelerated so much that you have to take a fresh look because your customers’ transformation have been faster than usual.” 9:58

Even during the best of times businesses have to strive to be more efficient and there are always things to improve upon, customers to service, and proactive outreach to do. Sometimes I find when circumstances shift somewhat quickly and businesses are asked to do more with less, it really brings to light the importance of this idea of efficiency in overall customer service.

Being efficient and effective isn’t always optional 1:13
Having a customer service efficacy strategy is essential 2:20
How organizations are adapting 3:50
What CS teams need 4:56

“It’s essential to have a customer service efficacy strategy and really the correct technology in place to handle bursting activity and enable productive remote work for tools that leverage AI and intelligent automation to power self service and low level information gathering. Those ones become extremely important.” 2:20

Support agents are often on the front lines for businesses. Dealing with frustrated customers while working through repetitive tasks can be daunting. Tasks pile up, which leaves agents with a backlog and in situations like this, the danger of burnout becomes pretty real. Research at Cornell said 87% of workers reported high, or very high levels of stress in call centers. Are employers doing enough to combat burnout?

The top driver of burnout 1:28
Signs of burnout that managers should look for 3:15
Things you can do to manage and prevent burnout 4:54
Showing support and gratitude for your team members 6:17
Provide variety 7:18
Create and communicate career paths 8:36

“Strong onboarding programs are critical to the success of all agents on our teams. I think it’s important to establish what the essential tools, foundational skillsets are for agents to be able to deliver that type of customer experience.” 5:19

Today we talk to Jay Hinman, the Vice President of Marketing at Lily AI, the customer intent platform built to power the present and future of e-commerce. We talk about how much search results need to be adjusted for what people are looking for to avoid the frustration that can come from getting way more search results than you need and hardly any apply to what you’re looking for. Companies are making the digital transformation in order to keep customers interested and satisfied with their internal search systems. Focusing on the visual of what customers see rather than the description will really help retailers improve their sales.

What’s going on in the e-commerce world 3:02
Helping companies adjust 7:11
Recognize that a lot of products have more facets than you might think 12:55

“94% of consumers say they usually get irrelevant results when they’re searching on a retail website. This is from IRC Research last year. Or 76% of consumers say they will abandon a retailer after failing to find what they’re looking for.” 8:31

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhinman/
https://www.thredup.com/looks

In this episode we discuss the issue of customer neglect with Daniel Rodriguez, the Chief Marketing Officer at Simplr. He just co-authored a book called “Experience Is Everything: How to Win the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets in the Era of NOW CX.” There are a lot of strategies companies use to gather customer data, but often company leaders will stick to the metrics that make them feel good about what they’re doing rather than actually showing what customers are feeling about their experience. We also discuss the different types of neglected customers, one of which is those who have a large social media presence. They can go on their profiles and blast their whole following about the terrible experience they just had with your company, causing possible revenue loss from all the lost customers that can result.

About their book 0:36
Why customer neglect is such a pressing issue 6:14
The different types of neglected customers 13:34
The late night browser 17:52
The negative networker 19:42
How to address these issues as a leader 21:50

“When you then try to understand ‘Where are we with our customers?’ You realize that there are a bunch of different things that are happening with customers, and they’re feeling many different ways that you are not actually capturing with data.” 7:39

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drodriguez4/

Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Christopher Stark, the VP of Customer Experience & Business Value at Khoros. He worked at Nike for 5 years where he learned the importance of branding and one of their mottos was “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” From there they decided they would focus on and represent the voice of the athlete and pay attention internally, which helped them understand better who they were and how they could better help their customer base. A lot of traditional programs that have been used for a while are now on the chopping block because of where things are at now and will have to be cut from what companies use.

Christopher’s background 0:41
Tying CX to business value 5:53
What’s not working right now 13:07

“Chat wasn’t even really around 20 years ago. How can a metric that came out during that time, now with an era of TikTok and Linkedin, and text messaging now to communicate with customers, the metric’s just outdated and I tell everyone, ‘You know what? It could lead to growth, but you need to actually prove that out. Find the metric. If it’s not NPS, go find the metric that does lead to growth in your company and use that.’” 9:46

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophertstark/

We had the pleasure of speaking with Elizabeth Dominicci, the Vice President of Customer Experience Operations at TriNet. Her background in industrial and systems engineering brings a very unique perspective to the CX space. She talks about a few things you should know and understand when starting out, such as where to find the data, where to house it, and how to bring it all into one place. They started looking at how customers think about and feel about certain things as opposed to just looking at the traditional, more mechanical data.

Where to start 4:30
Leaning into the data 9:29
Looking at processes to automate 16:37
The final step 22:16

“I wanted to see different work moving at an increased velocity and really the goal was to get the customer who’s on the phone or sent us an email that needs something, get them to the right resource that has the answer faster, and really be able to increase the quality of the experience that that customer was having.” 17:43

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethdominicci/

Today we’re talking about engineering customer success by diving into using data to drive success initiatives in your business. We brought on Joshua Moskovitz who previously worked at Google as a Customer Engineering Leader, and is now an angel investor in the same area. He talks about what you deal with as a leader in customer success and the changes that a business will go through, requiring you and your departments to adapt and evolve as time goes on. Joshua tells about the two metrics you use to measure data, one being vanity metrics, which can show you how many users you have and thus understand how much you’re growing, but then there are clarity metrics, which you use as operational guideposts that show you how often people are using the product, for example.

Where Joshua came from and where he’s going 1:23
Coaching future leaders on similar problems he’s dealt with 7:11
Working with multiple technologies 12:10
Using this data 14:02
Once you have the data 19:30

“You’re gonna need to know from a vanity metric perspective how many daily active users you have, or how many new signups you have, or just how quickly you might be growing over time, but it’s really the idea of clarity metrics. The ones that you want to be tracking because they drive the right behavior, or they measure the right experience for your customers. Those are the ones that you definitely want to build out, understand, and be able to iterate on.” 14:17

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamoskovitz/

Our guest today, Jon Picoult, the founder of Watermark Consulting, helps companies impress their customers. He’s a leading expert in customer-employee experience and has been featured in dozens of media outlets including the Wallstreet Journal, the New York Times, NBC News forums, fortune 100 CEOs, and he’s been working with small entrepreneurs. He’s been helping people across the business manage this concept of customer and employee experience and is joining us today to talk about this idea of loyalty-enhancing strategies. You can save money and future hassle with customers by getting rid of issues before the customers even face them. Every time you say no to your customer, it saps their loyalty to your company.

Is customer satisfaction key? 4:51
Jon’s definition of customer service 6:21
Quantify the customer experience and understand where they’re coming from 13:17
The most universal problem/challenge in customer experience 15:21
How companies can make it easy to do business with them 19:19

“If you are doing things better in the experience upstream, for example making products that are easier to assemble, or providing sales materials that are easier for people to understand and more accurately set expectations. If you’re doing things like that, what you actually end up doing is obviating the need for downstream customer contact. You’re basically pre-empting dumb, avoidable reasons why customers reach out to you.” 9:49

Today we share audio from the Kustomer Now conference hosted by Matt Chabrier, Regional Sales Director at Kustomer, and he speaks with Aziz Razakov, Associate General Manager at MoneyLion, a FinTech startup. We discuss his role in customer loyalty and what changes the past year and a half have brought his company, such as a 24/7 support line, increased channels customers can contact through, increasing the visibility of how customers can contact them, and creating a more seamless internal complaint process. Response time is super important to customers and the quicker you respond, the higher customer service scores will be. 5 things to improve the customer experience: Response time, proper tools, self service functionality, partnership, and data analysis.

What he has seen change while at MoneyLion 3:35
What role he plays in product and customer loyalty 6:19
Changes the last year and a half have brought 7:26
Using AI and chatbots bots 9:47
Advice for rolling out this process 16:41
Responsiveness and channel type 20:35
Other tools that CX leaders ought to know about 23:50
What the future looks like 27:07

“We’ve taken the time to continuously improve the chatbot by adding more content, adding more functionality where the chatbot is not just spitting out FAQs, but is actually dipping into the database, making changes, and servicing the customer, and it’s been a huge success. I’d say through our chat channel we’re able to mitigate at least 50% of our contacts, which is huge.” 10:56

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewchabrier/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aziz-razakov-0673b793/

Today we have the privilege of speaking about CX transformation with Erika Putinsky, the Vice President of Customer Education at Mailchimp. She shares her 4 pillars to be successful in CX and what companies are looking for when they work with her. Showing up for your customer is necessary to maintain a good relationship with them because they’ll feel understood and appreciate the amount of care you show by listening to them. Focus on customer education and feedback to understand what the customer wants to both improve the company and cause the customer to stick around as they feel like part of the process.

What Erika does 1:03
Necessary pillars to be successful 3:17
The main thing people are trying to accomplish with them 5:23
The 2nd pillar 7:16
Empowering the underdog 9:29
The 3rd pillar, Process 11:11
The 4th pillar, culture 13:15
Something important to remember 17:38

“It kind of goes to what you were saying, Gabe, it’s that effort of showing up. Obviously in our current world you can’t do customer visits, or that kind of thing, but it’s about making the extra effort. So don’t hide behind emails. Mindfully listen to your customer’s unique experience … listen with two ears and one mouth.” 7:16

https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikaputinsky/

Today we revisit a previous episode of Kustomer when we talked with James Dodkins, known as the Rockstar Customer Experience Expert. Before becoming a specialist in customer experience, James toured the world performing in a rock and roll band. He now takes what he learned from that and applies it to customer experience. We talk about this and how we can frame our customer experience similarly. We also talk about how to structure our team in a way that rewards direct value to customers. We often reward our employees for doing things that don’t actually lead to greater customer satisfaction.

About James 1:21
How to Give Rockstar Customer Experience 5:01
4 Step Framework 9:27
Team Structure 13:24

“Only 4% of dissatisfied customers will complain and the large majority of the rest will vote with their feet. They’ll just leave and go somewhere else. If you are only fixing problems for the 4% of people that complain, you are missing a massive opportunity.” 11:00

Revisiting one of our previous episodes, we talk with Jeanne Bliss, founder and CEO of Customer Bliss. We talked about her book that explains her philosophy on customer experience. Too often we are watering down or over complicating customer service. Jeanne explains her thoughts in a way that can help any company no matter size. Jeanne also offers a link to the first chapter and quiz to her book for our listeners.

Would you do that to your Mother? 2:14
How to start Enabling Employees 7:53
Don’t make me feed you Soap 11:58
Pillars 3 and 4 14:10

“Do you allow for human error? If you return that rent-a-car 3 minutes late, are you get dinged for half a day?...Put people above process.” 15:31

We are revisiting one of our favorite episodes today with Dan Gingiss. Dan has worked for 4 Fortune 300 companies: McDonald’s, Discover, and Cubana in marketing and customer service roles and after becoming somewhat of a specialist in this, he now is a professional speaker and consultant on the topics.

Introduction to Dan 0:48
Intersection of Customer Experience and Marketing 2:09
How to Focus on the Customers 8:49
How to Contact Dan 17:20

“ If you want to change the sentiment in social media, the way to do that is not to bombard people with more marketing talking about how great you are. The way to do that is to have your customers talk about how great you are.” 4:47

Today we’re revisiting one of our previous episodes with Matt Dixon. We talk with Matt Dixon from Tethr about some of the latest and greatest trends in customer experience at the time of this recording. Matt is known for his statements on how we shouldn’t try and delight our customers. He explains this further and how we need to redirect our focus to reducing effort for our customers and make it easier for them. So rather than focus on putting out fires, prevent the fires altogether. He also gives direct advice on how to apply this, false myths of customer experience and what kind of people to hire.

Intro to Matt 2:22
Don’t Delight your customer 4:22
How to Start Applying it 16:12
Tethr 29:18

“When something’s gone wrong and the customer reaches out and they're trying to get a problem fixed, those customers whose expectations are exceeded, are actually no more loyal than those whose expectations who were simply met.” 6:11

In this episode we have Randall King, the President of Commercial Solutions at Conduent. As the Group President of Customer Experience Management, Randall has responsibility for 25k customer experience professionals who deliver best-in-class service globally to millions of customers on behalf of their clients. In this role, Randall drives strategic transformation, stronger client relationships, and service excellence. He works in close collaboration with business and technology leaders to bring innovative solutions to their clients, while delivering an integrated and seamless experience to their customers.

Advice for someone starting out in the customer space 2:38
Priority and balance 6:54
Good and bad lessons learned 10:41
Exciting trends in the market 18:57
Working from home 21:41
A summary statement for transforming your business 26:33

“Perfection is the enemy of done and it’s hard to turn a ship that’s not moving. In my career I’ve had so much more success if you just get under way and of course things like agile methodologies really help with that with sprints, but just get out there and get going. Course correct as you go. You’ll learn, you’ll get better, and as you have progress, people get excited, and then they want to achieve more and before you know it, you’re really driving out some great results.” 3:34

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rking2002/
randall.king@conduent.com

We know the customer experience is important because without happy customers, our businesses will fail and our customers won’t be happy, but what truly creates standout brands is this idea of an exceptional experience. This means no hurdles, no drawbacks, and nothing to jump through. CX, whether you like it or not, is a team sport that touches every part of the organization. I give 3 steps to follow in order to prioritize a customer first mindset.

What creates standout brands 0:42
The responsibility of creating exceptional customer experience 1:38
3 steps to follow in order to prioritize a customer first mindset 2:52

“The responsibility of creating exceptional customer experience, it bleeds throughout the entire organization and it starts with that idea, this customer first mindset. A customer first mindset means you put the needs of your customers first. Hopefully that’s obvious.” 1:38

In today’s episode, we have Jarvis Harris, the Vice President of Global Customer Success at Visier, joining us. Visier is a cloud-based analytics application that delivers fast, clear people insight. With best-practices expertise built in, Visier asks the right questions and promptly identifies opportunities and risks within your organization so you can confidently take action. Jarvis tells us about the Driver, the Dreamer, and the Doer 3D model that helps them create the best experience and the most success.

Jarvis’s background and what he does 3:22
Driving the experience/3D model 4:30
A different experience for each of them 7:00
Process 11:28
Systems 14:01

“It’s about getting introduced before the deal is complete, getting that document filled out, and being prepared ahead of time, and you hit the ground running, but it’s essential that you know before. Don’t get assigned when you’re at 100% of their close, assign it before they’re closed because you want to get your ideas percolating early.” 10:32

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarvisharris/

We wanted to chat with two special guests, Gordana Warga, the Director of Global Support at Kustomer, and Chad Horenfeldt, customer service and customer experience leader also at Kustomer. We discuss customer service week, what it is, and why it’s important to really show appreciation for everyone that works hard in making this often difficult part of business a better experience for all involved. The little things are super important, such as recognizing someone’s birthday on the floor and taking the time to celebrate that person as an individual. If you care about your own people, they’ll care about the customer.

Thoughts on customer service week and its importance 1:21
Impacting long lasting client relationships 3:58
Encouraging customer obsession 7:22
Celebrating customer service 12:03

“We all take the time to recognize the small wins and to really recognize when we’ve helped each other and when we’ve helped clients. So we’ll do a lot via Slack and via other channels where we really just give shoutouts and reward all of the positive things we see throughout the day.” 5:43

We have a special guest today, Phil Irvine, the Vice President, Audience Intelligence at RPA. We’re going to be talking about how customer interactions and signals can fuel optimal marketing experiences and we wanted to get Phil on to see a more broad view of the customer experience, not always the service, but how marketing plays a role there. Marketing has evolved a lot over time where in the past it was less personal and a lot more over the top oftentimes, but today people are very aware of cheap marketing techniques and can always tell when you’re not being genuine.

About Phil and his experience 1:25
Relevant marketing 5:08
Personalization 7:00
Coaching people with the right tech stack 11:00
CDP platforms 15:38
Marking and customer service working in tandem 16:47

“You wanna have your North star of what the optimal personalized segmentation experience will look like, but the thing that I like to preach and what I’ve personally pursued in roles that I’ve had is exhibiting small wins along the way to show that these investments are worth it because they’re expensive at the end of the day.” 12:36

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pirvine/

Today we have special guest Danilo Pozo, the Vice President of Customer Experience for Latin America at Cisco, to discuss lifecycle management and making the best of your customer experience. Your company will go through a culture shift and you have to be able to adapt in order to keep up with your customers’ needs. The developing world provides many opportunities for companies to branch out and find better, more diverse talent that’s also more economic.

Lifecycle management 3:41
The culture shift 5:37
Bring your customer into one place 9:40
How it can be different in less developed regions 11:34
Advice and lessons learned for newer companies 13:37

“Another thing that I think is really interesting about now is talent, right? There is so much talent around the world that you don’t have to be in one place now. You can gather talent from different places in the world for one common factor and that would allow emerging markets to be more attractive to main companies, and we’re trying to see that, how you get the best talent from different places in the world for one company.” 12:47

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danilo-pozo-vp-cx-cisco/

We have with us today the Senior Vice President of Marketing over at Ada, Ruth Zive, to talk about having better brand interactions. Back when ATMs were becoming popular, everyone thought they were going to replace the bank teller and kill bank jobs, but those kinds of jobs have only increased since then. There are 18% more bank teller jobs now than there were back in the year 2000, showing that automation and machines will actually help job growth. We discuss how companies can maintain personalization as they grow and scale their company, which often is a struggle for growing businesses.

What they do at Ada 1:01
Automation and the agent 2:32
Is automation sacrificing personalization? 9:15
Collecting data 14:41
Why we’re not proactively reaching out 20:33

“When automation and human resources are working in lock step, those human resources have a better job experience, they are able to deliver a better experience to the customer, it’s much more efficient for the brand. So really it’s a win-win for everybody.” 4:18

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthzive/?originalSubdomain=ca
ada.cx

Watch the CX bootcamp on demand here: https://www.ada.cx/cx-bootcamp-ecommerce?utm_campaign=ecommerce&utm_medium=partner&utm_source=kustomer

In this episode we are discussing the future of CX and artificial intelligence with Dan Watkins, President of Forethought and Rose Wang, Head of Customer Experience also at Forethought. Forethought Technologies, Inc. is a Silicon Valley software company founded by a team of Dropbox, Palantir, and Autonomy alumni in 2017. Their mission is to enable everyone to become a genius at their jobs. They are the makers of Agatha, an answer engine for the enterprise, which searches your company’s knowledge bases to generate the most accurate answers.

What is Forethought? 2:45
What is broken in customer service? 7:12
What’s keeping people away from AI 11:08
AI implementation 14:28
How can AI add a personal touch? 20:46
What steps companies can take now to ready their organization to use AI 25:33
Taking AI to the next level 28:19

“Kustomer brings such an interesting perspective I think on a foundation of core platforms, bringing systems together: omni-channel, CRM, those types of words, and adding on layers of artificial intelligence. I think Dan, I think I had a similar conversation as you had with your CEO when you first told me you jumped. I said, ‘Oh you guys are just a chatbot company?’ You’re like, ‘No, look there’s more to it than that.’ And I think this AI piece really is needed and it’s something that the market really, really wants.” 6:21

https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-watkins/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosewang20/

Today we are talking with Kenny Middlebrooks, the Director of Customer Service at Mckesson. We discuss how Kenny has been able to handle customer experience transformation with the right people and getting them to go in the right direction, and then we talk about balancing that process and empowering the agents to be able to grow and even fail in order to experience growth, or helping them know when to break a rule when they need to break a rule. Recording new things and issues your teams run into will help things improve greatly as you’re able to go back, figure out what’s wrong, and resolve those issues.

About Kenny’s time with Mckesson 1:51
Customer experience transformation with the right people and direction 5:29
Balancing process and empowering agents 9:11
Technology 14:01
Phone trees 16:21
Artificial Intelligence 17:49
Don’t make it too complicated 21:47

“If you don’t feel so comfortable doing something, we have different variables of assist, whether it be chat, assist lines, those kinds of things that will give them the benefit of having that extra expertise along with them when they wanna do certain things. But a lot of it has to do with how do they know when to break a rule when they need to break a rule?” 9:57