How to Make CX a Team Sport

Summary

In this webinar, Andrea Paul, Head of Content and Research at Kustomer, and Ian Mapp, Chief Customer Officer at More Than Enough Ltd, discuss the importance of a customer-first mindset and how insights from customer interactions can improve not only customer service, but also the business as a whole. In their conversation, Andrea and Ian talk about the process of analyzing data from customer interactions and satisfaction surveys, the importance of paying attention to repeated comments or concerns from customers, which they refer to as “the quiet voices,” and the emotional impact of customer experiences. Both participants share anecdotes to show how these points play out in real-world situations.

Key Takeaways

1. Customer-First Mindset: When businesses embrace a customer-first mindset, insights gained from customer interactions can be used to improve not only customer service, but also overall business operations.
2. Data Analysis and Customer Feedback: Paying attention to repeated comments or concerns from customers can provide valuable insights for improving products, services, or processes.
3. Emotional Impact of Customer Experiences: Businesses need to understand and address the emotional needs of their customers to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Expanding Impact Through Teaching: Companies can expand their impact by teaching others their methods or practices. In the case of More Than Enough Limited, the founder expanded her impact by teaching others her therapeutic methods.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to this econsultancy and customer webinar. My name is Ben Davis. I’m editor at econsultancy.

If perhaps you you don’t know about Kustomer there, a customer service CRM platform we’ll hear a bit more about them. In a moment, as you’ll probably know the title of this webinar is “Why a customer experience or CX is a team sport.”

And we’ll be discussing whose responsibility is customer experience and perhaps exactly what is customer experience and how does customer support and customer service get integrated into an organization’s CX strategy.

Just to let you know the format of this webinar will be a fireside chat between Andrea Paul Solerner, who’s customer’s director of content and research and Ian Matt, who is chief customer officer at more than enough which is that the business founded by the hypnotherapy trainer and misappear. And I’ll hand over to those two in a moment, but I’ll just let you know a bit of housekeeping at the top.

The webinar scheduled for an hour, we may not go on that long. We’d love to see what we get into. But there will be a recording sent on follow-up, I believe, over email. So if you miss anything, you can rewatch on demand.

Please do ask as many questions you wish, particularly as this is a as a chat and we’re talking to somebody from the client side as it were, it’d be good for you to ask whatever comes into your head in the in the q and a box there and I will ask those at the end. It won’t be visible to everyone else and I won’t use your name or job title, so just please feel free to put whatever you like in that. So I’ll I’ll cover the q and a at the end.

So yeah, I guess I’ll hand over to to Andrea who so give you a bit of an intro to to what she does and introduce Ian as well. So thanks for joining us, Andrea. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us, Ben.

And thank you to everyone tuning in for joining us today as part of this conversation.

I hope it’ll be a really wonderful, productive conversation all around why CX is a, quote unquote, team sport, as we call it.

So as Ben said, my name is Andrea Paul.

I head up all of our content and research here at customers. So essentially, my job is to keep my finger on the pulse of all things customer service and customer experience.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with customer, we are a CRM for digital customer service so we enable some of the world’s leading brands to deliver really fast and personalized and efficient customer experiences. And today I’m joined by Ian, Ian Mac, as we already said, he is the chief customer officer at more than enough limited.

The next half hour, forty five minutes, we’ll just be talking about how Ian’s organization embraces a customer first mindset and uses insights to not only improve customer service, but the business as a whole. So without further ado, will kick things off. I’d love, you know, Ian, if you could just give us sort of a high level overview for those that might not be familiar with more than enough limited and MERS appear as to what the organization is, what your role is within the organization, and maybe a little bit of background on you and how you got to where you are today. Yeah.

Sure. Of course. Thank you, Andrea. Yes. So Marissa Pierre more than enough limited very few people in the world have ever heard of us.

So there are no reason to suppose anybody on this call have ever heard of us. We are a new company, a very young company, Marissa herself, has been a therapist for more than thirty years and very successful has been on various TV programs has written five or six bestselling books. On the subject and has obviously developed a wealth of experience. So about five, maybe six years ago, she was persuaded that she could only be in one place at one time, could only help one client at one time and that really what she should be doing is teaching other people her methods.

And so we developed the school and a methodology called rapid transformational therapy, which is one of the things that we now sell to students around the world. So five years on, we now have around twelve thousand, more than twelve thousand people who trained in our therapeutic techniques or based as Ben said on hidden therapy at the core of it. And alongside that school part of business. We have another side of the business, which is for personal development.

So people with issues in their own lives that they maybe want to self manage, from straightforward things like stopping smoking, through fear of flying, and those those level of things due to much more complex problematic things like infertility and weight management and some of those things we have personal excuse me. Personal development products in an area too. So interesting company, but different to your usual manufacturer or retailer or wholesaler type company. We’re all digital. So everything is done online except some of the classes at talk in person around the world for some of the courses. And we have an e commerce store and we have customer service people around the world.

We don’t have offices. So we are remote company have always all worked remotely.

So in some ways, the pandemic has endorse the business model that we’ve been using for a number of years and and now lots of other people in the same position we’re in. So that’s a little bit about us. My role in the company is look after both the technology infrastructure because we use a lot of platforms. Obviously, customer in this example, as well as other online systems.

And I also am responsible for customer service, specifically in the personal development product area.

So my team takes all of the incoming mostly emails, much about what we do is email and live chat, and we deal with up hundreds of thousands of of customer inquiries. Now one thing which makes us slightly different other people is the nature of the products that we provide because people don’t come to us if they’re living a happy fulfilled life and everything is wonderful. They come to us because they’ve got issues or problems that they wish to address. So as well as the average day to day I’ve lost my password, kind of get a copy of my invoice, kind of straightforward inquire as we also get obviously much more emotional situations and involve people with mental health issues and all sorts of things. So we have to be very cognizant of how we respond to people and empathizing with their situation and making sure that the service that we provide is geared towards them as human beings rather than just a customer.

Yeah. I think that’s huge, and that’s something that, you know, we noticed those significantly across the board shift during the pandemic.

Know, you work in an organization where that is central to the business itself, but I think just about everyone in the last two years had moments in time when you know they mentally were not doing well or maybe hadn’t talked to other human beings for extended periods of time. And customer service took on quite a different role where you did sort of fill this gap and you could do more than just solve a simple problem. You could make someone’s day. You could brighten their spirits, you could build relationships.

And when we did research during the pandemic, consumer research, we did see that empathy had shot up to the top of the list of preferences in terms of customer service interactions during that time period. You know, for a very long time, it was speed speed speed. I don’t want to be on hold for hours and hours, but empathy really moved up those charts during the pandemic, so I’m sure that you see that on a day to day basis.

Absolutely. And I think actually, just to pick up on that, Andrea, I think it’s something we lost sight of. You can maybe tell from the gray hair I’ve been in customer service a long time.

And I think it was always true. That people want to be treated like people, and I know we’re perhaps touching on this a little bit later. But I I think we kind of lost sight of it in a rush for technology and efficiency and automation and self-service. I think we did lose sight to some degree of actually how important the emotional engagement with a brand and product is.

And the pandemic forced it back into everybody’s forefront of everybody’s mind. I think that actually, that’s a critical thing you need to look at. From a service point of view, but just simply from a human relationships point of view, actually trying, as you say, to make brighten people’s day, that’s a pretty good objective if I started out my day saying, I want to brighten a few people’s day today. I think I’d have a good day.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. It’s a motivating thing too, especially in customer service can oftentimes be not a very forgiving job, so thinking that you have that opportunity is huge.

Something that I was thinking about and I know we’ve had this discussion before Ian, but the terminology of customer service is constantly changing. I’ve heard it referred to in so many different ways whether it’s customer service, customer support, It used to be contact centers. Now it’s customer experiences sort of an umbrella term that people use. A lot of companies that we work with a customer, we’re seeing a lot of titles of Director of CX versus Director of customer service.

And the customer experience really does hit on every single part of an organization.

So I’m wondering what your philosophy philosophy is there. What do you think is most important and impactful today when it comes to customer service and the and the larger customer experience? Or do you think those two functions are strongly connected?

I think they’re strongly connected and certainly a kind of, you said, it used to be called the help desk and then it began to contact center and customer service, customer support, customer care. Everyone’s got a million different names for it.

I have a slightly jaundiced view about this, which is that actually customer experience is a name, a marketing organization invented probably a consultancy. To resell services. Probably repackaging things they’d already sold the year before as customer service.

And I think my view on customer experience is that everything that our company does impacts on the customer experience. So everything, not just marketing terminology, some marketing materials, but not just the advertising.

Simple things like if you’ve got company vehicles, are they clean?

If you’ve got employees that turn up to do work on premises, are they smartly dressed? How do they represent the company?

Even even go to the finance department if you send out invoices or statements, the way they look and the way those are dealt with all part of the customer experience. And all of those things inform the context when a customer comes to a company with a question or a query or request for information.

There, the context in their mind has been generated from all of those previous touch points.

And and I think that we we do sometimes forget that not only is it personal arriving with their own personal circumstances, but as organizations that does brand, we have set expectations but just everything that we do. So their experiences are very much informed by that, and and I have a little saying which I use and that you’ve seen me use before in my avatar customer service is a state of mind, not a department. Yep. And I think that’s a really really important thing from the way that we view within more than enough is that it should infuse everything that we do.

We used to call it customer centric.

And we have folk customer focus all of those wonderful terms. Actually, bring it to life is really hard, but we we try to say, well, actually it’s the attitude of the people It’s not so much the processes, not so much the procedures. It’s the attitude that we have, so I say, customer services, state of mind, not not a department. Because so many people oh, this customer service silos, silos, silos, and often customer experience that people report to marketing.

Mhmm. Which is great because marketing obviously have a lot of those touch points, but not not all of by any means. So if customer experience customer service lives inside the marketing area, then you’ve got to reach out to other parts of the organization and share what you learn because customer service is the front line of the business in very many ways. And generally speaking, the front line of business when things aren’t going right.

Very few people get in touch with customer service say, you’ve done a wonderful job. Thank you. Just so much. It only.

It does happen. We do get it sometimes. We have a wonderfully engaged albeit, so we do occasionally just get praise and thank you, which we’re very grateful for. But it’s not most of the communications that we get, the conversations that we have tend to be about a problem or an issue or something that needs to be resolved. And so I think that that understanding what’s motivating people to get in touch is something which can really help other parts of the organization.

And Yeah. I know I know we’re going to touch on that in a bit, so let’s not rush into that. But just just just just before we get there, we want to just talk maybe about just some things which are going on in this this environment whereby if people are getting in touch, yes, you’re right. Speed was critical factor that has been ameliorated to some degree by the pandemic. People are a little more forgiving and more understanding than they were. And that’s good. But the I think the thing here is I want just want to go back on what I’m talking about is treating people like people.

Mhmm. If you’re a customer service freshenal running and all got a customer service organization, then, yes, you’ve got a balance to be struck. I need an efficient organization. It needs to be cost effective.

It needs to work well for the company and the company’s objectives and whoever owns the companies or the shareholders, whoever is one of our, you know, stakeholders that we need to deal with internally. So we’ve got to that but we need to balance that with the customer’s perspective. So — Yeah. — how do how how do we personalize all very well having automatic replies automated chat bots and all those kind of things.

They can only go so far. And I think one of the things which is very hard to do in customer is judge the point at which you say this should be handed off to a human. Yes. Huge.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, I would echo just about everything you said. I think it’s really interesting. You know, a lot of customer service organizations historically have been a little bit short sighted in my opinion when it comes to metrics.

So, you know, things like reducing handle time cutting costs, completing a higher volume of tickets in a shorter period of time.

As you said, it isn’t to say that, you know, there isn’t value in that. I think that a lot of people, especially for very simple questions, just want a quick instantaneous response and to be done with. But I also think that businesses are, you know, they’re starting to realize that just because problem is solved quickly. It doesn’t mean that it’s solved well or that you used it as an opportunity to, you know, build a relationship with a customer or reflect your brand values.

And I really do think that it is putting that customer first mindset in place throughout an organization that can ultimately lead to a standout experience across the board no matter what touch point in the experience it is, So I guess would you say that your company has been successful in establishing that customer first mindset or your department itself?

Yes. Certainly, department. Absolutely. We we spend a lot of time talking about how to personalize our interactions with people to make it relevant to their context to try and just feed back to them.

If they’ve yeah. If we have an incoming email, for example, or a conversation starts with some personal information and we often gather, we try to reflect that back in the answers that we give.

Mhmm. So if they say they’ve been having a tough day and they can’t get their password to work, We will answer the question about the password, but we will also reflect back something about their tough day and try and empathize with those to give that personal piece.

Because I think Yes. There’s places for automation chat box we talked about help centers self-service. A lot of routine things can be dealt with in that way. But I think as soon as a customer is upset about something, you’ve then got to say, okay.

We need a human in this conversation. When someone in here who can empathize and and give back not just the factual information, resolve the issue for the customer, but actually have a personal interaction and, you know, we talk about personalization in in talk about in marketing as much as anything addressing emails to people, which may be broadcast to a hundred thousand people. To try and make it feel a little more personal and things.

But on a customer from a customer service point of view, every interaction is an individual one. With what we try and do with our team with my team and other people in the company is to actually say, remember, you’re dealing with twenty, thirty, fifty conversation today, whatever it might be, and yes, we want you to be efficient about that. But for the from the customer’s point of view, it’s the only interaction they’ll have with our company today. So for them, it’s a hundred percent of their experience with our company today. So every single one must be treated with respect and and would do attention to make sure that that customer feels valued. And that they also get the information resolved the problem, but also make them feel there’s a little bit extra we’ve done a little bit more. And yes, I agree that point about standout experiences.

You can’t be can’t give stand out experience to everybody all of the time. And I think many organizations actually, their average is too low. They have occasional high peaks but they do fantastic things.

But the ninety nine other percent of the time, you’ve you we always try and raise the average. Overall, I’ll be getting better. I’ll be getting post, are we getting more empathy? When we do our customer satisfaction surveys, are we getting improved feedback from customers to say we’re doing job because alongside efficiency, we spend a lot of time thinking about how does the customer feel. What’s the feedback? What can we learn from the customer?

And yes, and department go back to your point. We try and spread that through the organization. So things that we learn through feedback we share with other people.

We’ll share with our marketing colleagues a lot because obviously we’ve got things. Maybe we get reactions to emails that they send out and things where we can say, actually, we some feedback from these people that have told us it was good or it was bad or particular comments about it to help them refine what they’re doing. But also, we we also try and feedback the bait comments sometimes. We sometimes we get sometimes very glowy feedback from people. We try and share that to make everybody in the organization for actually, we do a good job. We’re, yeah, proud to be working here, but we also share the the negative ones when they happen because they’re equally useful in terms of learning from the organization’s point of view.

Yeah.

And I think that, you know, as you were speaking to earlier silos can really be damaging to a business. And especially in a as you were saying, you know, your entire organization is remote. It’s digital first.

So, in that sort of scenario, it is even more important, you’re not shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues to ensure that any insights as the frontline workers that you receive are shared with the appropriate parts of the business throughout the organization.

And as you said, you know, the customer experience is a very broad term. It’s used to describe marketing. It’s used to describe shopping experiences.

But because that role of creating a great experience is so interconnected, I think it’s more important than ever to sort of work with other parts of the organization ensure everyone’s on the same page working towards the same goal, sharing those insights.

And I do think it is important as well to ensure that that comes from the top down, right, to ensure that that customer first mindset is embedded throughout the organization starting the top because if the top is concerned mostly with cutting costs at the expense of a customer’s experience or opinion of the brand, then at the end of the day, that’s never going to be successful.

No, that’s true, but it’s also true to say that customer service and a good great customer service can contribute to the growth of the business. So it’s never it’s never a hundred percent about cost cutting or whatever, but you’re absolutely right. Culture inside organization starts from the top.

And if if if it’s not embraced across the business, then you have got a problem because in what it means is you may be doing a fantastic job here in your little silo, but if the rest of the company isn’t living up to those expectation, then the customer won’t you know what? Customer service is great at custom. More than enough, their customer service is brilliant. Every other department is rubbish. For customers because the end customer doesn’t see that. All they see as the company. So their perception is is the is the sum of all their experiences good and bad.

So I think that that is true, and it’s hard to keep because one of the things is that, obviously, all all functions within organization have their own objectives and their own agendas and what they’re trying to do to improve their own role. So with their own performance. And it can be hard for them to remember, actually, it’s all about the customer. Without the customer, there is no company. So if you’re a good mistake, pay attention.

And am I okay to share my story about my life insurance? Okay. Yeah, please.

A great example. In in my career, amongst some things I have been a consultant and worked on a consultancy project for a UK based life insurance company. And was dealing particularly with the complaints department and the manager complaints a big organization. So there’s quite a few people just in the complaints here. And she was really struggling to get traction inside the business.

The things that they were learning in terms of feedback from customers, things that they you know, regular complaints, things that could be fixed, and she had to do a presentation every, I think, quarter to the board. Of how the plates were they were going up or going down look. Like, probably a PowerPoint slide or might actually have been a paper report. I don’t remember the details. But so the numbers went in front of the board, every quarter.

Great. Number complaints are going down. Good pat ourselves on back. Move on. Come back next quarter and see how it’s doing.

So what she decided to do in the end was actually was kind of face them up to actually how critical this was for some of the customers when things went wrong. They’re talking about life insurance. So when a claim is made on life insurance policy, something has gone terribly wrong. Somebody has just passed away.

So it’s going to be hugely emotional for the customer at that point to have to deal with this. They’ve got a million other things to think about. And how that life insurance company was dealing with that customer was critically obviously, financially, probably, but also emotionally, trying to leave them with a good feeling. And so she got so fed up in the end with not being able to get traction or any of the things that she thought were self evident.

That should be improved.

That she decided to gatecrash the board meeting. And rather than just do her presentation, she actually brought a customer they’re a real customer. And I actually said, I’m not doing my report this quarter. Just listen to this lady’s experience.

And April was shocked that it happened at all, but sat in stunned silence when they heard actually the emotion from this woman in terms of how badly she felt that she’d been treated in one of her most desperate moments. Yeah.

And I won’t say it changed overnight, but suddenly they were jerked into the reality of it’s not numbers in the spreadsheet. It not reports on the pages, not graphs. What it is is real life people with real life experiences of our organization.

And over a period of time, it got a lot better and it’s not fair for me to try and name the company because that’s not right. But they are now one of the one of the best performing NPS customer satisfaction type organizations in the UK. And I I truly believe that this shock tactic that said Yes, it is a team sport guys. Look, it’s not just us in the complaints department. This affects all of us. Actually, made a huge difference for that a particular company and more importantly for their customers.

Yeah. I mean, it is really huge when you don’t have to face face a customer yourself when you’re looking at numbers and aggregate. And, you know, that’s what we said from the very beginning when you’re treating every conversation with a customer as a ticket number or a transaction number, it’s much harder to approach the situation, thinking that this is a real human being with real wants and needs and preferences and issues, and it can be such a huge opportunity. And I think it’s, you know, it’s also in terms of all of the departments being interconnected, you know, as you were saying before, it’s sort of getting ahead of issues too, right? So typically when someone contacts customer service, it isn’t about something like customer service. Has done wrong. They’re contacting about, you know, an issue that they ran into or, you know, a service offering or an you with a transaction or a question about a marketing promotion.

It’s nothing that’s within the realm of customer service that has kicked off this inquiry. So it’s critical to be not only aware of what’s happening in other departments, but also to do that knowledge sharing on both sides, right? Because, you know, you could see a huge spike in inquiries because of something that another department has done.

That’s causing issues with your customers. So it really is critical to go both ways and share that knowledge. Does your team have a formal process for that? Do you analyze data or you were saying you you, you know, when you’re putting out satisfaction surveys, you get direct responses that you share with other departments.

What does that process look like on your end? Okay. So like, I guess, every company, we’re relatively small, but I’ve worked with large corporations just to say. We have our reporting cycles.

So we report our numbers and and and and we always try and annotate our numbers, so it’s not just it’s a set of numbers. It’s here’s some interesting comments. So this is things that we’ve noticed. And one of the things we try and use that for is something which in other sentences, I used to call the quiet voices.

So if you’re working the front line, if you’re a customer service agent or you’re interacting with the customer for whatever reason, if you hear something repeatedly several times. Maybe you just pay attention to that.

Classic example, new products been released.

Customer service may be the first people to start to hear their issues with the product. And so long before the manufacturing on design or engineering people get any any a clue of it from their reporting, the chances are customer service will have an awareness of it. They won’t know how big a problem that might be. They might even notice a problem. Unless you’re sharing that data across the organization, say, look, we’ve noticed this. This has happened five times today. Happened three times yesterday.

Maybe it’s something you ought to be aware of and try and take early action to correct it before it becomes a crisis.

And that is an informal process as much as a formal process. Yes. There’s reporting and we do report. And we share that with other people, but it’s also about a feeling.

We think this begins to look something. Maybe you should pay attention to this. And we’ve just heard this a a few times too many. Very difficult to do just working the numbers.

So if you’ve got a thousand agents in the call center, you and you’re doing a hundred thousand conversation today, it’s very hard to say there’s four or five conversations in here that are critical if you’re just running numbers. Average handling time was this and the response time with that, the service level was met or all those things. What you need is some kind of commentary, some kind of around it that says, you know what? This this feel it doesn’t feel right.

It’s really feels like something and what we try to do is we try and make sure we’re involved prior to launches prior to marketing initiatives — Mhmm. — from a customer service point to try and give our perspective of what we know from the front line that can inform that before it happens, try and be proactive. So actually, the chances are we’ve looked at this, I don’t know, sign up page. And we think it’s confusing because we know previously other customers complained about wording not understood or something isn’t quite right.

Maybe you should think about changing that before it goes live next week before we start pushing out because we know full well if it goes out, it goes wrong, it comes back on customer service. It’s in our own interest to do that, but also in the interest of the of the customer that we get it right for them. Yeah. I think, you know, that’s hugely important and we touched on this previously.

But customers don’t think of customer service in a bubble, right? They don’t care they’re talking to someone from customer service team or the marketing team or the CEO of a company, they don’t care if it’s online or in person, they want that. Consistent experience. They want to make sure that, you know, everyone is on the same page and giving the same message and reflecting the brand in the same way, so I think sharing that verbatim feedback, making sure everyone is informed is incredibly impactful to create, you know, this consistency.

We actually, a customer just did some research surveyed about one hundred and twenty CX professionals on sort of their predictions for the next three years in CX, which shocking to me because of how much has changed in the last two years. I can’t imagine what’ll happen in three. But we asked them sort of what what was most important for them to accomplish over the next three years, and the second highest answer that we received was creating consistency across channels and across touch points because it is such a challenge for so many organizations right now.

So, I guess, My last question for you would be sort of around, at least in my opinion, the growing importance of customer service for organizations as a whole. So, you know, as we were saying, traditionally, customer service is oftentimes meant thought of as a cost center. But those lines I feel like are really blurring now, and customer service can be really used as a growth driver when it’s when it’s done right.

Do you think that through gathering these insights sharing them throughout the organization, and delivering these empathetic quality interactions with customers, do you think that your team has the capability to really, you know, help the business’s bottom line?

I’m sure we do. And to some extent, we do. We have more to do as an organization. We’re not yet — Yeah.

— perfect to that by a long way. And certainly, a point you’ve made really important is that it’s becoming more complex because of multichannel. And trying to get that brand experience to be consistent across the channels is is more complicated complicated than it ever was. And one of the things I think which also is making that more difficult is that expectations are raising all the time.

Customers are expecting more and more and more from their suppliers, which is great. That’s always been true, but I think multichannel has accelerated that rate of growth.

And so look look at one of the reasons we use customers, we can be multichannel in there and keep the conversations in in one platform. But it is very difficult across a diverse organization if there are people having conversation, sales teams, operating teams, customer service teams having conversations with customers in various different ways to bring that into a single view has always been the ultimate goal in the forty years I’ve been in customer service is to have a single integrated view of the customer. How many times have you ever heard that phrase?

Yeah.

And it’s still hugely difficult to achieve. Not least because, particularly with things like social media, people are expecting instant answers. Mhmm. If I’m on a if I’m on a conversation on a cast on a social media, I’m expecting feedback fast.

Why do people use Twitter? Because they get faster responses than if they send emails or try and sit in a queue in a call center. So yeah. And customers are getting very smart at working an organization.

They figure out what’s the best of this organization. Actually, if I if I go to Twitter, that will work in this organization. If I send them an email, that will work. And they’re very smart at that and and what you find is that within a category of organization, you’ll be compared with the best in your category.

So it’s no longer this is more than enough and I kind of view them in isolation. I’m now looking at this category of online companies. Do they match up with other people? So not only are we scrambling as individual companies to do better. And try and meet those expectations and sometimes exceed them. Those expectations are going up at a huge rate, and we’re now being compared with other companies within with our online category.

So you have huge organizations like Amazon operating in the digital space, and you inevitably get compared with them even if it’s not a fair comparison because you’re a tiny organization.

They’re a huge organization. But from a customer point of view, I’m having a digital experience makes no difference. Yeah.

So thank thank you, mister Bezos. We’re all competing with you at least on the customer service level.

So yeah. And and and I think that the point about growth is true is that the there is a huge wealth of knowledge in the front line of a little organization. Which can be used to grow the rest of the business because there’s two things in my view that customer service done. One of which is deliver happy customers, the other of which is protect the brand. So if you’re looking at trying to promote the brand, it’s it it it’s one of those interesting things and when we are actually looking at some metrics at the moment. Is there is there something that we can measure that says, I’ve had a conversation with a customer today.

Is there is there a time line which I can say if a customer buys something in the next two or three days or five days or ten days or where, can I actually say that influence that decision, as a customer service organization, as a very direct measurement, as opposed to the indirect measurements that say, We know we get customers happy? We get good CSAT results. We deliver them within the service levels we’ve committed to and they expect. And we’re doing a good job Therefore, we must be doing a good job for the company and helping the company grow.

Is there actually direct things that we can measure that says that there was a real correlation between this event and that event. And that’s one of the things that we’re struggling with at the moment is there a way that it’s a bit like if you advertise on Facebook, then a customer comes to buy something, can you say the Facebook advert influenced that customer’s decision?

Customer services a bit like it’s an indirect relationship, but we’re trying to make it as direct as we can just in terms to demonstrate to the rest of the as I hey, look, here’s another reason you need to listen to us.

Actually, it’s not a problem in our organization. The CEO is very much on board with this customer centric idea.

But actually to prove to other people that maybe are a little more skeptical to say, look, here’s a direct relationship we can show if we do and we have one particular area we can prove it, we can show that live chats on our website lead to sales.

Fantastic.

That’s huge. Yeah. Yeah. So and and we do it in the customer platform, which you’ll be happy to hear.

So it’s it. And then that’s what we’re trying to in other customer experience here. Is this actually are there things that we can maybe not a cause, but at at least a correlation between the

Exactly. So, yeah, that’s that’s where we’re going, and I absolutely understand that we can’t do that without a multichannel these days.

And and personalization and speed of response and all those things we’ve talked about. At the end of the day, a person talking to a person trying to get some trying to make somebody’s life better. That’s what we’re about. I love to hear that.

And it very much is true and I think that the pandemic probably had a lot to do with this as well.

But, you know, previously, oftentimes, customer service organizations were thought of as, like, post transaction problem solvers. Like, especially when you think of it from a retail lens like, oh, you know, my shipment was damaged or it’s the wrong size or I need to make a return, all of those sort of simple, support tasks that happen after the fact of buying. But I think that lines have blurred so significantly where, you know, we did probably about a year ago, we did a consumer research survey about how often customers are contacting customer service throughout the buying journey.

So pre purchase during the purchasing process and afterwards, and it was almost completely evenly split. So that pre purchase consultative support conversation can actually very directly lead to, you know, business growth in general. Obviously, as you said, keeping the barriers high in terms of competitor entries is huge.

If you have a very good experience oftentimes, you know, you’ll share that with a friend. One of our research reports said I think it was ninety three percent of consumers said they would recommend a business to a friend after a good customer service experience. So it really is this free marketing as well that you can get from this. So rethinking the the role of customer service for that that growth driving of the business I think is huge and a really large opportunity.

And and I’ll offer you one stat just to pick up on that, Andrea. I’m not sure the exact numbers, but it’s something like if if customer has a good experience with customer service, they’ll tell one person. If they have a bad experience with customer service, they’ll tell twelve people.

Totally.

Yeah. And we, you know, we see that too. And our research ninety percent of consumers said that they would never do business again if they had a bad customer service experience.

Never purchase again from the company, so it is very much, you know, make or break it, and people tend to shut on the rooftops about bad more than good as you were saying previously.

Yep. The good news is the good news is not news. Is it harmful, sorry? Yeah.

Well, this has been a great conversation. I absolutely love what you’re doing at the organization, but what more than enough limited immersive peer are doing and the experiences that you’re creating for your customers. So thank you so much, Ian. That’s my pleasure.

Thank you both and joining.

I suppose we should see what questions we have and it may be good to direct some of them to both of you just to to mix it up a bit. Let me have a look. I mean, this is one of those areas for me whether you’re sort of an expert in customer service or CRM or if you want to say customer experience, I mean we all have so many stories of like you say, in probably more bad stories come to mind than good ones for custom service.

I wrote something about this a few years ago where I was making a car on topic of insurance. I made a car insurance claim and I remember providing some information and then ours sort of contacted an to provide some of it again, you know, the same photos again, which I was mildly annoyed, but then I sent them. And then I got another reply saying, can you provide our order claim reference and it was them contacting me. So they obviously were using some kind of ticketing system or email system or or something that had some of my details in, but not the the the reference they needed which I thought was fairly unique that you’re using me rather than you know remembering a password or going to a colleague in another department or perhaps

I’m missing some, you know, perhaps in there was something regulated that they couldn’t do, but anyway, I think it’s an interesting part. And you you said in about the idea, I think of that integrated view of the customer and whether it is is ever possible.

But, yeah, it’s certainly it’s good to to at least move towards that, isn’t it? And let’s see what some of the questions were from the audience anyway. So one, I think you touched on marketing and getting ahead of what marketing are doing in order to sort of better prepare for customer service. I mean somebody asks about the impact of external comes on the customer experience journey, but also about particular departments that you’ve seen benefit most from customer service insights.

Is it hard to put your finger on a particular department?

I I think I think that the one we site most often, which is marketing, I think is true because that’s a kind of living area, which is constantly changing anyway so you can influence there rather more quickly.

Not in our organization because all of our products are digital, but in other other organizations. I have seen customer feedback and customer service have a great impact on products in other organizations.

Actually, yeah, they come feeding back and saying, this is always a problem. You need to fix this. We’ve had this hard time. And I’ve dealt with Sky broadcasting for example in the pastor’s consultant and their office, they’ve got a physical product, which is the box and the and the dishes.

Plus, obviously, the service, the digital content that goes on it. So in their case, they were certainly using good feedback from customer experience customer service to say, actually, what should we doing from a product point of view? Where are we seeing people complaining that there’s a feature missing or something which they’re not working? It’s too hard to find this five menu layers deep in the in the in the in the settings to actually get this and it’s people contacting customer service because they can’t find.

So I think product areas and that’s certainly some things where I’ve seen to move. And actually in other organizations, again, not my own current organization, influence on legal, actually improving contracts in the wording or contracts or terms and conditions, things where there’s feedback from customers say, We don’t understand this. We’re always asking questions about this. We can’t agree to that yet.

So that I think there it’s a team sport. Every every department I think can benefit by listening to the front line and too few departments do.

Sure. One anecdote that I can share from another one of our customers that that use the customer platform.

I’m not sure if either of you are familiar with them. They’re beauty brand, but it glossier is one of our customers, and they shared an insight with us at one point, where they started tagging conversations they were having with customers requesting specific products that maybe they had not yet developed or specific colors for lipsticks or blush or things like that that did not yet exist, and they share that information with their product development department. And in one case they ended up developing a specific product based on how many requests their support team. They call their support team something more, you know, beauty experts or something like that.

But they ended up developing that product and they because they had all of that tracked within the system, they were able to proactively reach out to those customers that had requested it.

And say, hey, you know, we actually develop this thanks to your feedback, and that is a very obviously correlation to something that the customer service team had tracked and then they were able to develop. But I think also, you know, e commerce experiences is a huge one as well.

If you’re noticing, you know, people falling off at certain points or asking for sizing information on specific pages, things like that. There’s a lot of ways that you can sort of optimize the online experience or the checkout process or things like that when you notice different areas. I think, you know, Ian was talking about this previously of specific copy that’s written on certain pages that might be confusing to people that that needs to be optimized. So, yeah, I think that the options are endless and really you can get insights for just about any department from a customer service organization.

Maybe I can pick up them because when you talked about sort of glacier tagging conversations.

I was looking at this I think it was a survey from Gartner they were talking to customer support leaders and they asked them to rank their priorities for twenty twenty two.

And just the top one was grow the business which is fairly self explanatory, but the second one was improved operational excellence. And I I I suppose I wanted to ask you Andrea about you know, working on the customer side.

What what typically do you see are the guess you might call it low hanging fruits as when you’re going with a new customer. So you so you mentioned sort of how you might use it for for product insight.

Are there particular things that people are looking to tick off first of all when they when they sort of are onboarding as a client?

Yeah. I mean, I think that what Ian was speaking to previously about aggregating all information about the customer in one central view is really the biggest benefit and and differentiator. And it really enables a lot of personalization as well. If you can see everything, it’s the exact experience you were just talking about of needing to repeat information and ask the same questions over and over again to a customer, essentially putting the burden on the customer instead of being able to already have all that information, know customers’ previous experiences, or maybe what they how they’ve interacted with you before, or what channels they prefer to be contacted on things of that nature.

So being able to see everything and then actually on it in one specific area, I think is an immediate benefit.

But then as we were speaking about before, being able to aggregate all that data, see, you know, maybe trends and things that that your customers are reaching out about being able to tag all of that and and and garter insights is also very, very impactful for businesses.

Yeah.

I hope you might have a few questions about the sort of agent side of things in a minute, but just wanted to ask about So you touched on I think the word Ian, you said that you talked about struggling with how you measure success of the customer service in the longer term.

And it does seem like an interesting business for I mean, you can probably correct me if if I’ve got the wrong impression. But I guess you might, you know, you could say that for some of your customers, you might not want to keep them. Right? Is that is that the case as of, you know, especially if if you’re in a therapy product. So is that I mean, you mentioned word-of-mouth.

Is it it’s such a such a long term play that it’s difficult to put your finger on those those metrics beyond sales from from chat and that type of thing. And it’s it’s not so much that that we’re looking at. It’s it because you’re right if someone has got a personal development problem, they have one issue. We solve it for them.

They’re not going to buy from us gay. So we don’t have a repeat pattern of customers in the way that lots of organization do have. Many of them do come back and buy other things from us, meditations or or challenges of air set things. But yeah, we’re not looking we’re not we’re not in the weekly shop.

Let’s put it that way. We’re not going to be that kind of repeat customer.

So we are looking at how how how often do customers get in touch with us prior to a purchase, and how are we seeing that presales engagement coming in and maybe asking questions off the back of the website. More live chat or something. So some kind of interaction that we are within influencing the sale within a few days, a few weeks, whatever that might be. On the therapy side, as we train a therapist, we have effectively an ongoing relationship with them.

We train them. We help them set up their business. We keep in touch with them. They keep in touch with us because they’re part of the community of our therapist for a client of a therapist what’s different about our therapeutic technique, it’s called rapid transformational therapy for a reason.

It’s two or three sessions and the job’s done. It’s not a comeback every Friday at four PM for the next truly is, which might be great and relaxing. That’s not the business that we’re in. So again, what we’re looking at is, in both of those cases, both sides of the business is personal recommendation.

So if we can give the stop smoking person a great experience, like, and we solve their problem and we have they could have good beneficial interactions with us, they might just mention to other people who maybe are struggling with the same thing or maybe have got a different problem that we can we can help them with we have people who are very successful therapists who recommend other people to us to become therapists. So word-of-mouth works in both of those situations, very different The rhythm is very much longer because it takes at least six months to train to be a therapist. So, yeah, once you’ve they’ve established their business, that’s a kind of a year probably before their fully productive.

So what we’re trying to do is, in the case of the therapist much easier because the rhythm is much slower, we can see therapies.

Helen has recommended therapist Sully. Also, thou Sully to become a therapist. That’s a very easy relationship. Much more difficult on the consumer level with people are just buying audio products from us because we don’t develop that kind of same one to one relationship with them over a long period of time to know what’s going on. So that’s what we’re struggling with at the moment is that the contribution to the growth of business that we could directly measure as a result of customer interactions.

Sure.

Maybe I can ask I mentioned the agent experience. Maybe I can move to Andrew on this.

Because whatever your view on the term customer experience, I suppose, there is also the the sort of, you know, the Yangnez employee experience as well. And and gather there’s a term customer service of agent experience, and I suppose it’d be interesting from both of your points of view.

As to I mean just from from my experience in marketing there’s obviously a massive increase in the amount of tech that people have to use at interfaces they have to use on a daily basis as the Mar tech five thousand as it is now.

What is it like in terms of what role does this type of software play in well, so it’s one improving that agent experience.

But also how how does it Is there is it a long journey to sort of bringing bringing everybody up to speed with with using it? Because I know that CRM is one of those things over the years. Where half of the battle is getting people to keep on putting data into it. Right?

So is that something that’s just still sort of the battleground for these these systems? Who wants to take that first. Yeah, I mean, I can start, but I think Ian would probably have a better perspective of this using the his team using the software every day. But I do truly think just at a high level that a better agent experience correlates so strongly with a better customer experience if your agents are struggling day to day to find the information that they need or juggling a million different tasks, not knowing how to prioritize, having to do a bunch of low level menial tasks, that can become very tedious and unsatisfying.

And it’s a very easy way to, you know, feel the pain of customer complaints much more strongly so the easier that you can make their lives, the better they will be able to service a customer.

So, you know, I think from my perspective as we were speaking about before, just aggregating all of the customer information in one single view no matter what channel is being used, whether it’s email or live chat or social, so you’re not toggling between a million different systems, even simple things like intelligently routing conversations to the most appropriate agent or prioritizing, you know, we have some customers that for instance, they’ll prioritize VIP customers that have spent enormous amounts of money with them or for instance, a travel brand.

If someone’s flight is happening in the next thirty minutes, they will be popped to the top of the queue versus someone who doesn’t have a trip till two weeks from now. So there’s a lot of different ways that that can be optimized and ensure that, you know, you’re delivering a good experience without having to do everything manually and, you know, dig through the ticket queue and and all of that. So I think really having everything in one place is very impactful. But

I’ll punt this question to Ian.

I suppose the question is, are you are you the sole power user of customer having to to sort of get everybody else on board or is it easier than that? Well, no. I’m I’m not here to champion customer necessarily, but I have to say learning the interface customer is very straightforward.

We give people very little tuition. They’re very adept at it very quickly.

It’s and and again, the ambition is to bring more richness into that environment so that an agent can see more at a glance to understand the perspective of the customer because one of the things that we’re looking at is agree absolutely with Andrea saying, if there’s something urgent or very important, it needs to flow to the top of the list and get dealt with promptly. But also we want to make sure that even if it’s a very straightforward transaction that we’re working with, that the agent has access to information which can help enrich their feedback.

So even as something as simple as, oh, yeah, here’s your password, and I see you’ve just bought something. Thank you very much for purchasing. To just be able to enrich that for the agent without having to switch systems.

Contravue to that says I have some We have some agents here and certainly in my past experiences that love being masters of twenty seven thousand different systems and love being the kind of guru adept so I can switch systems at lightning speed and don’t take it away from me because I’m now an expert in that. So there are some contributes here. But I think your your point is very true, Ben, is that the text stack is changing all the time, and one of the things we need to try and do is make sure that we can give a consistent experience to the agents because the tool isn’t the point of their job, and it can’t get in the way. It can’t be a barrier to what they do.

Otherwise, it needs to be changed because if they’re focusing on the tech, they’re not focusing on the customer.

Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. And challenge with a lot of what you’ve both said today, you know, don’t want people focusing on closing tickets within certain times and such and as you said in. It’s a it’s a state of mind.

I guess we’ve got a few minutes left to I mean, I usually close webinars by asking people about the future of a particular area. I mean, it may be a bit sort of facetious as we talk about the future of customer service because I guess your thoughts, E and R, that you know there’s nothing fancy about sort of serving customers. But what I’m interested in, I suppose, is Andrea, you talked about triage of an interesting ways that can be done and and I see lots of automation in the area I’m also interested in over the pandemic, there’s been this massive rising people using chatbots, but obviously a lot of that maybe that there’s just more and more people online.

There are more there were fewer people in in stores and such. But I just wondered if they’re how you see do do you see so particularly on chat box, do you do you see that as an area that had too much hyper? Is it is it still sort of the future of customer service?

From my perspective, it has to be done right. And we have done a lot of research. I know I’ve referenced it throughout this webinar, but we did some consumer research in twenty twenty one and looked at different preferences by generations.

And when you’re looking at the data for Gen Z consumers, they don’t want to interact with human beings unless they have to interact with human beings.

They prefer self-service hugely they prefer quick answers.

Obviously, there is a time and place where that’s not possible or appropriate.

But it does seem to be moving more in that instantaneous direction, whether that’s via self-service and FAQs, whether that’s via chat bots. So, you know, they grew up with Google in their pockets. They expect instant answers to everything as Ian was saying on social media. So I think that those tools will become essential.

However, you know, they can oftentimes have a very bad experience if people you know, are trying to ask them complex questions that really only human beings can do or more consultative conversations.

So biggest thing for me is ensuring that handover happens to a live agent if it is needed and instantaneous instead of making people jump through groups, I think a lot of people feel as though chatbots right now are barrier to getting help versus help itself.

So it’s really ensuring that, you know, chatbots are able to answer simple questions quickly, but that handover is instantaneous to a live agent when it’s needed. Yeah. Sure. I can definitely remember It’s difficult to get right. I I remember having handovers where we’re talking to an automated chatbot, and then you get handed over into a queue system where you are sort of you are thirtieth in the queue and waiting and, you know, perhaps not the most annoying thing, but it is it’s difficult to get seamless, isn’t it?

And perhaps you can sort of close the show with your idea of if you think where the future is headed perhaps in your organization for customer service.

Okay. Thank you, Ben. Yes. So I think one of the things which I think is true is that, yes, agree absolutely what Andrea is saying, lots of people still want fast service and are prepared to accept self-service.

As a as a best route, maybe the fastest route to do it. Some people will go that way reversed, and other people will fall back to if they if they found the call center in your eighty fifth in the queue or maybe I’ll look online then, is some reaction as opposed some people look online first and only as a laughter’s or or call the call center. And and part of I think the future is more I I don’t want to say personalization, but more contextualization to understand what it is that particular consumer or customer is wanting, how they want to interact. So meeting there where they want to be if they want to be on social, you meet them on social. If they want to be on the phone, you meet them on the phone. But in all of those cases, the tech should then be able to give the agent or the customer and equivalent experience the same kind of richness.

And I think there’s still a lot to learn there. I I still think we’re aiming for the corner store experience.

I think we have that’s where we’d really like to get back to. It’s very hard to do when you’ve got millions of customers, but actually that that relationship, I think, is something that we we we certainly are focusing on. How do we build one to one relationships with our customers in a world with us? Tenths and hundreds of thousands often.

Yeah. No. That’s interesting.

And I guess there are if you look at mobile first sort of countries a lot in APAC where I suppose that they’ve had a longer time to develop customer service cross channels like messaging in particular and I think, yeah, that’s definitely everybody’s watching that.

Currently as opposed to just email.

Well, thanks so much both of you. It’s been a been a great hour. I hope everybody watching us enjoyed it and we’ve got to most of your questions.

As I said, we will be following up on email.

This will be available on demands. You can send it on to people. But thanks for your time. Thank you again to to under your Paul from customer and to your Matt for more than enough.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the hour, and thanks for watching.

Thanks so much. Thank you.