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 1:00Helping companies get to excellence 4:27Where companies often go wrong in strategy 6:07RACI 8:16Guiding 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 1:00What makes good customer experience? 4:40Building culture of happy employees 8:13Why is customer support such a hard job in today’s world? 11:44Benefitting 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.” 2:06www.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 4:45Why organizations don’t get the customer in mind, or don’t innovate right away 7:07Key factors to achieve alignment with your organization 8:40Advice 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.” 6:16www.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 1:00Where he goes when starting these initiatives 5:22Deciphering when to know that your way is better than what the customer thinks they want 7:25Why aren’t companies able to turn feedback into action? 11:11Final 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.’” 8:24www.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 0:52Have customers changed? 4:07Where to start and measuring 7:16The data we have matters 9:44Having 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.” 4:40www.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 1:14How to grow and take the next step 4:16Algorithms 9:06Search 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 0:54Personalization 3:38Some tips in helping companies jump into this head first 5:43Bringing the horse to water 8:29Don’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 2:56Helping brands stand out in the market 8:31Do companies find success when they incorporate these strategies? 11:16A 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? 3:10Leading edge technologies 7:05Coaching organizations on where to start with outsourcing 7:53What to look for 11:15Having 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.” 5:47www.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? 4:57How to become a more data driven organization 7:06Data ownership 13:41Using 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 3:07Channels that are becoming more modern 7:37Consumers now control the value of your product 10:10Do 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.” 10:51www.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 2:20His book 4:22Setting the stage for great communication in your business: confidence 8:10Overcoming nervousness, fake it ‘til you make it 11:18Getting in the right mindset, or next play mindset 13:15Dealing with tough or negative communication situations 16:04The delivery and communicating that you care 17:27Helping 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.” 8:14nofreakingspeaking.comwww.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 0:52Making companies feel more recession proof through customer Experience 3:47Why companies struggle with prioritizing 6:00Know your audience 9:08Tech and efficiency 12:03Retention 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.” 5:00https://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 3:33What causes companies to miss the first step 5:05Onboarding 1,000 customers 7:07Getting to where you can have the meaningful conversation 9:39Requirements 14:28People 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? 8:55https://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 2:57Some of the trends they’re seeing in outsourcing 4:00Staying in control 5:43Technology they tend to use 7:51Where does the outsourcing occur? 10:30Customer retention 13:29If 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? 2:09Helping companies in Service Design 5:19Breaking down silos 8:30Lessons learned 9:39Starting 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.” 7:40https://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 4:19Where does CX strategy sit on your corporate strategy? 7:15Cross functional aligned objectives 8:47Creative 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 0:53The Age of the Individual 3:24Organizations are still sitting in the age of the customer 5:58Navigating values and avoiding offense 11:20Listening 13:17Helping 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 1:03What is omnichannel support? 3:13Making the transition 4:57Remote 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 1:36CSAT 4:26FAQs 5:38Anticipating resources 7:58Support 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