Today we have special guest Aarde Cosseboom, Senior Director of Technology and Product for Global Member Services for an E-Commerce company called Textile, and Vikas Bhambri, SVP, Sales and CX at Kustomer, 20 year CRM Contact Center Lifer. We discuss how AI and self-service bots can be utilized to solve issues in customer service. Bots are evolving and they need to be able to move from one platform to another, such as from your website to email, whatsapp, facebook, etc. The new term for this type of bot is IVA, Intelligent Virtual Assistant, which is an omnichannel bot experience. We discuss the importance of letting your customer know they’re talking to a bot so they don’t get frustrated when they ask more complex questions, and when to hand off the customer from a bot to a live agent. We wrap up the conversation with the role agents play in helping improve this technology. Listen to the full conversation for more insights.

https://www.kustomer.com/guides/how-pandemic-affects-customer-service-organizations/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=coronavirus

Aarde and Vikas intro 0:31
What do AI and Self-service bots solve? 1:05
How should one acquire an IVA? 7:01
What are best practices for a hand off from a bot to a real person? 14:17

“People will say ‘Look, AI’s gonna put everyone out of a job. We won’t need sales people, we won’t need marketers, we won’t need customer service people.’ No, because the role will change. Because the technology is great, but you still need people that will go and will optimize the program behind it.” 17:51

Find Aarde Cosseboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarde-cosseboom-99755546/

Vikas Bhambri
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikasbhambri/
https://www.kustomer.com/leadership/vikas-bhambri/

The COVID-19 pandemic is fast-tracking the digital transformation and has changed the way customers interact with businesses, forever. Today, we welcome Andrea Paul, Director of Research at Kustomer, and Vikas Bhambri, SVP sales and CX at Kustomer with more than 20 years in the CRM Contact Center world, to discuss the effects of these challenging times for customer service organizations. Andrea and her team went out and surveyed CX professionals across a variety of industries to understand how their businesses and teams are being impacted, how they are adapting, and what customers are expecting. Join the full conversation for hard data and an in-depth discussion on how businesses can succeed and the role technology plays to achieve efficient customer service.

What 80% of Customer Service Professionals Need 6:49
Is automation the answer? 12:18
Remote work 18:31
What else is holding people back from being effective? 19:55
How Andrea would coach customer service leaders based on her research 26:53

“Almost every company that we surveyed did say that the vast majority of their employees were fully remote now, which makes sense where a lot of states are still in this lockdown. But 34% of the respondents were reporting difficulty working remotely and 23% did say they didn’t have the tools in place to actually do it, which is huge. It’s like 'I’m being forced to work remotely, but I physically cannot do it.’” 18:58

How are organizations keeping up with the spikes in demand while maintaining high levels of customer support? Today’s guests are all about allowing leaders to focus on their business and giving them the ability to hire state-of-the-art sales and customer success support teams, on-demand 24/7. CloudTask CEO, Amir Reiter, and VP of Marketing, Tom Jerkins, help other businesses scale and grow through their outsourced sales organization. The biggest question in scaling customer support always comes down to outsourcing the service center versus keeping it in-house while delivering on customers’ expectations. Find out whether or not you should outsource and the importance of hiring a partner that’s going to bring in the training, processes, and technology that are going to save you money and represent your company the right way.

Why would I, as a company, want to outsource my customer service? 8:40
State of the art training 12:02
What separates BPO’s 15:25
Where People can find them 17:00

“Everybody is looking to each other to create more community and the more community you create, the better it’s gonna be for your business. That’s not why you want to do it. You want to do it because we’re human beings, because we want to support each other. The more human you are, the more everybody’s gonna benefit, in business and in life.” 5:44

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

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomjenkins1/?locale=de_DE

Today’s guest has been in sales and tech for more than 20 years and started her own business, Inside Sales by Design, 5 years ago to help organizations build and scale their inside sales infrastructure. Dionne Mischler turns cost centers into revenue centers through The Art of the Conversation. Her insights on ‘What can we give’ vs ‘What can we get’ are at the root of building a team of conversationalists that listens and understands the needs of the customer. Listen to the full episode to learn how to coach your organization to manage The Art of the Conversation.

The Art of Conversation 6:40
Key Principle in customer outreach 13:39
Brief Summary 21:25

“I was talking with a colleague of mine and he says that we live an experience economy at this point. And here’s my bold prediction. If you as an organization are not investing in your customer success team turning that corner from an order taker to a ticket taker, cost center to a profit center, your company is going to die and wither in the dust.” 2:37

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dionnemischlerhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dionnemischler

https://www.insidesalesbydesign.com/

https://insidesalesbydesign.wordpress.com/

https://www.salesclass.ai/

Today, we talk with Sergio Frias, the president and CEO of The Federation of Canadian-Brazilian Businesses and Chief Customer Experience Officer at The Chartered Institute of Marketing Management of Ontario. We begin our conversation with Sergio sharing his career path, he highlights how he developed his passion for customer experience, no matter where he worked. He shares how he developed a unique customer experience program, NICE (Nurturing Insights about Customers Expectations), and we talk about it more in depth. We break down the 8 components of NICE: Context, Benchmarking, CX Mapping, the Essence of NICE, the Dream of the Customer, Triple Organization, Knowledge Sharing, The Right People at the Right Place, and The True Meaning of Service. Listen to the full podcast episode to understand what are the key underlying principles to improving your customer service and why customer service should be the focus for companies as they recover from the COVID-19 crisis.

Sergio’s Background 0:58
The “Why” and “How” of Sergio’s CX Program 4:50
The 8 Components of NICE 9:20
Implementing NICE 18:34

“ If you want, the job is yours -- you’re going to be the owner of this business. So you buy, you sell, you do everything. All the logistics, distribution, everything. That was a great opportunity for my career. I was not really thinking about CX, but the more I got into that, I realized that I know how to do it, because of the many years working with customers and always being concerned about how to get the customers what they needed, I realized that that was an amazing thing.” 2:41

Reach out to Sergio: [email protected]

In this episode of Customer Service Secrets, we talk with Steve Richards, co-founder of ExecVision. Throughout his career, Steve has been committed to helping companies understand the data behind customer service calls and developing strategies for a continuous improvement around the actual interaction that is happening with the customer. Listen to the full podcast for his valuable insights on the steps to an effective customer service call and how to make sure your agents have the resources they need to improve their performance.

Steve’s Background 1:04
What is Broken in Customer Experience 2:15
How are People Thinking out of the Box? 8:08
How to Be Successful with Calls 14:30

“Why do you measure a sprinter? Why do you time a skier? And the answer is to improve performance… It’s funny, I’ll get caught in this, where you start measuring to measure and you’re not actually looking at how it can affect the ultimate performance.” 3:45

In this episode of Customer Service Secrets, we get a chance to talk 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

In this episode of Customer Service Secrets, Al Hopper, principal consultant at Nagurra Networks, joins Gabe Larsen to talk about how businesses can benefit from working on a tiered customer service model. In this thorough conversation about how it works, you’ll also learn why your organization should practice having different levels of service based on different groups of customers, how to apply it, and which types of businesses should have a tiered customer experience.

More About Al 0:43
Tier Customer Service 3:02
Who Tier Customer Service Right for? 7:28
How to have a successful Tier Model 10:07

“The biggest challenge is forgetting that you are a service organization to begin with. They start focusing on the tiered customer service get away with anything.” 15:58

In this episode of Customer Service Secrets, we are talking about journey mapping with Annette Franz. Annett is the founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc. She is an expert in this area and has a wealth of experience in applying it. Oftentimes people don’t know where to start journey mapping or they think they are doing it when in reality they aren’t at all. Annette talks through the steps she typically goes through, what journey mapping really is, how to do it effectively and how to use it. Sometimes it needs revisiting every so often and we discuss this as well.

Annette’s Background 1:07
What is Journey Mapping 2:55
How to Do it Right 6:12
What to do WITH a Journey Map 14:46
Revisiting Journey Map 17:49

“A lot of companies... try to just identify things in the current state map... but they don’t get at the root of the problem, which is something internally.” 12:39

In this episode of Customer Service Secrets Podcast, we are going to be talking about journey mapping. To help us out with that we brought on Bob Thompson, the founder and CEO of Customer Think and author of the book Hooked on Customers. His career and company are built on the idea of customer centricity and he’ll be explaining what customer mapping is, why companies should do it, and how to create an effective, uninterrupted flow from beginning to end.

About Bob and Customer Think 1:10
Journey Mapping in General 2:32
How to Journey Map Well 6:54
Information based Journey Map on 12:59

We think of journey mapping as, “walk in your customers’ shoes and then take pictures as you go and read their mind.” 3:09