Nate Brown is a first-timer on the podcast but was on an interview with me last year. He is always focused on the experience created no matter where he is or what he is working on. Nate is passionate about the people he works with and knows how to build engaging teams of employees even when those are distributed across the map.

We cover how to manage those distributed teams, what it is really like to work in some of those beehives of offices and really, what this virus might just bring all of us - improved customer experiences.

Interview date: 27. September 2013

Paul Dunay loves marketing and has his own unique approach to it. He also has a nose for data and has been looking closely into how data and the customer experience play a role together. This is why he made an ideal interview partner on this CX404 show. Paul is a well known and recognised B2B marketer and is Global VP for Marketing at Maxymiser who specialises in web optimisation and analytics.

Here some of the points covered in the interview:

Kate Nasser is "The People Skills Coach" and makes it a point to not let us forget how important those skills are when delivering customer service. In this wonderful exchange with Kate we discuss how these skills extend into the digital world of services.

Russel Lolacher and I have a similar illness, we see every interaction people have with companies and think about how it could have been done differently or better. Sometimes, we are surprised at what we see. A previous girlfriend got tired of listening to his analysis and so he decided to start blogging. The Upsell is his place to capture all those experiences but also share them with the rest of us.

In this episode of the CX404 we talk to Russel about the customer experience and particularly how situational awareness plays a role in the whole experience.

David McQuillen has spent almost 18 years in the customer experience frontier; from the dot com to major financial institution like Credit Suisse and OCBC running their customer experience programs. He shares with us his experiences of what challenges those companies have in addressing the modern customer as well as how this prepared him to run his own digital business.

This episode came from a video interview of Shai Berger of Fonolo. We talk about how they are able to add a layer into the fabric companies already have to improve the customer experience. Plus some hope for 2013 and scoop on their upcoming new customer.

Berger: There is this growing gap in what is seen as the norm on one side but has not been met from the other. Many companies are hobbled by legacy call center equipment. Customers today using their phones, their smart phones it must seem like something from another era when they finally come through to an agent and have to repeat their answers to multiple agents. There is a huge potential here.

Berger:There are 3 main problems; phone menus, waiting on hold & repeating information to agents. We are working to solve these main problems across the web no matter how they approach the companies.

Berger: We build on top of those processes already in place. There is a huge investment already in place and we place ourselves on top. the key to make that work is the simple callback. Fonolo sits in the middle to manage that process. One way this is done is by placing a widget on the website. the customer sees the contact us page and the visual interface  let s the customer chose how they want to interact with the company and ask for a callback when they are ready. Behind the scene is Fonolo making the inbound call to the call center. The call center sees the call like any other inbound call.  We navigate the IVR and wait in queue. The agent gets a regular inbound call, we place the callback then to the customer, bridge the two together and the customer has this great experience and nothing had to change on the call center side.

Berger: Right, people have set up Fonolo in a matter of days. The customer adds the widget to the website and Fonolo navigates the IVR as a gateway to the call center. The same is the case for mobile apps. Lots of companies have mobile apps. This is a huge trend in customer service. You can add a Fonolo component to the mobile app it does the same process. It is a visual representation of the IVR. They tap the choice they need and some time later a callback is made to the customer.

Berger: It is a cloud based service which makes it easy to deploy and makes pricing very low. We have companies with 5 agents which use our solution at $100/month. This is nothing really new. There are solutions from Avaya "Callback Assist" and Cisco has "Courtesy Callback" but these have been totally out of reach for smaller companies. These are much too expensive for them and here at Fonolo we wanted to make this the "norm" for them as well.

Berger: There are a few macro trends playing here and one of the big ones is the smart phone revolution. We've hit a tipping point with just a few months ago we've passed 50% smart phone penetration here in the US. So, when a platform becomes so ubiquitous it is hard for companies to ignore the kind of advantages you can have for your company by using this platform. I always cringe when I got to a mobile app which has all this functionality and then there is a "contact us" tab and they just have their regular phone number. You are throwing away all the functionality that platform is giving you. So my vision is that within a few years there should be no smart phone apps doing this anymore.

If you have a smartphone app it should be a lot smarter than just displaying the 1800 number

Berger: We need a change in attitude among the larger companies. The bigger banks, airlines, retailer need to recognise this value, We have had a long trend of looking for the cheapest way to serve customers. We need to see a change to invest in the technology and enable the agents to better serve the customer.  

How we can find out more about Fonolo.

http://fonolo.com/

Customer Experience 404 with Andrew Maher is a podcast series that brings to light the challenges of delivering excellent digital customer service. We invite industry leaders from around the world to share with us their secret hot sauce - their secrets to solving the digital divide.