CX Conversations

On Today’s episode we have Steve Richard, the Chief Evangelist and Co-founder of Execvision, to discuss the importance of call recordings and why this ought to be incorporated into customer support. Plenty of people thought the phone, or calling in to companies for customer support would die out, but if anything, especially with the pandemic over the last year, customer phone calls have increased and this continues to be a necessary tool for companies to have in order to work with their customers.

What Steve does at Execvision 0:45
Why call recordings matter 1:58
Predicting email would die out 6:54
How people are using the data to change 12:17
Scorecard/best practices on collecting data 16:34

“So I think there’s a lot that now companies are able to do that technology has improved, but they can take thousands, millions of calls, do their analysis on it, and actually make business decisions and those business decisions aren’t limited to the enablement of the agent. It’s change in policy, change in product, change in marketing offers. That richness of data is something that’s now available to the business at large.” 11:14

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

In this episode we have Vikas Bhambri and Kyle Coleman, the VP of Growth and Enablement at Clari, a company that transforms revenue operations to be more connected, efficient, and predictable. We discuss a mistake that many companies end up making without realizing it and what the interaction is that causes customers to struggle a little more in trying to learn about the product. Often looking up and learning about physical products online is pretty easy and there is a lot of information about it, but when it comes to software, specifically individual software used by various companies, the information is usually inadequate.

How Tom has become an influencer on LinkedIn 1:31
Presales interaction that makes things difficult for the customer: the demo request process 3:10
The role of the SDR 6:29
B to B vs B to C interactions 14:46
How does the buyer want to buy? 22:30

“Make it as easy as possible for people to find out as much as possible about your product so that when you have those conversations, they’re as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible. Buyers want to do research themselves. They are frustrated when they can’t find answers.” 9:28

https://www.linkedin.com/company/clari/

Today we’re going to talk about customer service research and what more than one million phone calls tells us what you’re supposed to be doing to be successful in customer service and to do that we have on with us Vikas Bhambri from Kustomer and Matt Dixon, the Head of Product and Research at Tethr. We discuss how they have gathered data of over a million customer service phone calls and the useful things we’ve learned to improve the customer experience.

How writing “The Effortless Experience” has affected Matt’s career 1:49
The latest research 6:06
Takeaways from the data 17:43

“If you’re a product person and you don’t realize, ‘Wow, my contact center gets real-time feedback on a new feature, or a new service that I’m providing.’ There’s a lack of understanding about the richness of the data that resides in the contact center environment.” 16:10

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

In this episode we speak with the Director of Customer Experience and Employee Engagement at Schindler Elevator Corporation, Stacy Sherman, and Vikas Bhambri, Head of CX at Kustomer. Vikas tells us about the 3 pieces to an effective program: People, process, and technology. We discuss having executives getting involved on the front lines to see and understand directly what’s going on with the customer, and then making sure your employees are feeling valued and heard.

What’s not working 1:32
3 pieces to an effect program 2:13
Bottoms up feedback 7:17
Tactics to drive the employee and customer experience 10:35
Strengthening employee relationships 15:05

“I’m seeing more and more companies put the executives or new employees in the chair of their front line as part of their onboarding. So as part of your onboarding, go sit with your support team, hear your customers, feel their pain, understand their challenges, and then rotate your executives into that on a regular basis.” 8:32

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

In this episode we talk with the Director of Multifamily CX, UX, and Human-Centered Design at Freddie Mac, Kris Featheringham. He emphasizes on the importance of a human-centered design to provide the ultimate tailored customer experience. Kris and I discuss the process and lessons he has learned throughout his CX career, and then go into getting executive sponsorships and what you can do to work with your people to understand more their needs in relation to the needs of your customer base.

Kris’s background 0:47
Process and lessons learned 5:08
Executive sponsorships and process 8:12
Define 12:26

“A lot of times when you sit there and interview someone, they’re just going off their most recent recollection or their most recent experiences. But there are a lot of things that will come out that they would never even have thought to bring up as you watch them. And you’ll come back to them afterward and say, ‘I saw you do this and this. Talk to me about that.’ and then all of the sudden you’ve opened up a whole new can of worms and it’s powerful.” 11:59

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

Today we’re going to be talking about customer success and how to do that on a global scale and to do that we brought on Balaji Gadicharla, who is currently the Global Head of Service Support and Success at CipherCloud. He explains some of the ideal trends and practices he has observed while traveling around the globe, such as having someone go to the customer in person, and then establishing dedicated teams. Balaji explains that the best way to become a trusted partner is by understanding them and how their ecosystem works, and then you will be allowed to join that system and move forward with them.

Balaji’s journey 0:55
Trends he has seen as he’s traveled the globe 3:40
Advice/best practices observed 5:46
Why companies don’t understand the nature of their customers 9:12

“We should be able to provide a unified experience to our customers–to all our customers across all incidents. So it should not be transactional–somebody picks up the phone, and then calls your boss, then everything starts falling in place. That’s not how it should be run.” 4:00

https://www.linkedin.com/in/balaji-g-8a3b076/?originalSubdomain=in

In this episode we speak with Sami Nuwar, the Senior Principal Consultant at Medallia, which is a customer experience management platform that helps you manage CX in your company and make things easier. We discuss why people lose focus and stop trying operational excellence, and then where to go and what to do when this happens to your business. We talk about optimizing your data collection in order to analyze it and thus improve various aspects of your customer interactions and experience.

Sami’s background 0:37
Why do people get lackadaisical on operational excellence? 2:59
Where to begin to become more operationally tight 4:13
How to avoid being misled by your data 7:41
Advice for the audience 14:17

“The other, I think, overlooked channel for data is the internal knowledge base within the business. The operational data. We all have systems and machines that capture data from our interactions with customers and our daily business, and that is typically a treasure trove of information.” 7:55

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

Today Vikas Bhambri, Head of Sales and CX at Kustomer, and Josh Neckes, currently the co-founder and president at Simon Data, are joining us to dive into market trends, specifically on the data side. We discuss how companies can better know what’s going on with their customers and Josh tells a funny story about when a company kept contacting him about his marriage that had been called off, but the company didn’t know, so contact from the company kept coming, causing some annoyance for Josh. Companies need to put something in place that analyzes the data coming in, or at least gives auto responses to customers when they have inquiries about issues they’re facing.

Simon’s company 0:50
How data plays a role in D to C 6:07
How it’s possible to bring the formula together 12:55
Where people should start if they are lost 21:01

“Maybe you’re not in an emotional space like weddings or dogs, or we work with a lot of financial services companies, but guess what. Most spaces that are not sellings socks on the internet actually are very emotional.” 14:31

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jneckes/
[email protected]

Today we are going to talk about how to build and scale a CX program even during a pandemic, and to do that we have joining us the Head of Customer Experience and Strategy at ServiceNow, Matt Lombardi. He tells us there are 3 critical needs CX leaders need to embrace. The first one is getting executive buy-in early and often. The second one is track and report on the value that your team is creating for the business, which ties in to number one. Number three is continuously adapting and improving to stay relevant, which is especially true today when our customer’s needs and wants are changing so rapidly.

About Matt 1:30
Three critical needs for CX leaders 3:04
How he worked with his people on this 7:52
How number 3 affects his business 11:27

“Lots of unstructured customer feedback is ideal to understand what levers can be pulled to improve the customer experience. And then when you put those two pieces together, you can really start telling a compelling story about how to drive long term growth to your company. It’s at that point that the power of experienced management becomes clear.” 6:42

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

In this episode we talk with the User Experience Architect at Pitney Bowes, Nitya Pannala. We discuss this idea of design thinking, which is a mindset, or ideology of approaching every problem in a human centered way. Nitya gives 3 easy rules to put design thinking into practice. Number 1 is empathize and put yourself in your end user’s shoes. Number 2 is go broad before you go deep by considering multiple options before narrowing down. Number 3 is to experiment as much as possible by testing many different ideas so you can nail it before you scale it.

What Nitya does at Pitney Bowes 1:07
Why it’s important to talk about design thinking 3:50
What is design thinking? 4:51
Putting this into practice/3 easy rules 10:34
How people should get started 20:35

“Contrary to popular belief, this mindset isn’t really about design. It’s about helping companies and individuals think differently about strategic options and system impact. It is most powerful when you combine it with strategic context and that’s where design meets business and the most impact happens.” 6:25

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitya-pannala/