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In this episode I talk about why chatbots are so important and how your business can gain from this useful service. The chatbot, or virtual agent, will fill in for those mundane tasks that often drain the life of customer reps, making everyone’s life so much better and free up agent time so that they can focus on the bigger issues customers are facing. Chatbots can get rid of all the filler time that is used for gaining general information that agents waste so much time on, making each customer interaction that much more efficient. Virtual agents 0:58 Chatbots can shift focus to more complex issues 2:14 Handing off chatbot conversations to real agents 3:50 How to get going on this 5:35 “We surveyed over 525 US based consumers over the age of 18 trying to understand how this need for speed, if you will, translates into customer experience preferences. And the results, yeah, they were 90%, a whopping 90% of respondents think contact in customer service should be easier. 85% of respondents think customer service should be faster.” 2:51

Today we’re talking about mapping to management and I always like talking about journey mapping, but this has a slightly different twist and to do this I’ve got on Jochem Van Der Veer, who is currently the co-founder and CEO of TheyDo. He has a lot of experience and understanding of the whole journey mapping process and the various dynamics and angles you have to look at and understand to create a useful and productive map for your business. His background and what he does at TheyDo 0:56 The continued problem with people mapping 4:53 How to move from mapping to managing 8:34 It may get more complex as you go 12:45 Where to go once your framework is established 13:55 Keeping the map active and advice to stepping up your game with journey mapping 18:06 “Their life cycle is basically time based, right? From left to right, but when you look at it vertically, you can look at it from different dimensions and one of them is, for instance, regions. So think about how different regions like Europe vs US go, or different customer types. New customers vs existing customers, or maybe even different dimensions that are relevant to your business.” 12:03 @joch_m www.theydo.io

Something that we all want and could all use is the knowledge and ability to turn the customer into an ambassador of your brand. I’m taking here from a post that Grace Lau, Director of Growth at Dialpad did for Kustomer. It was such a great summary of this topic, that I wanted to give you a little bit of an overview of some of the takeaways I had on it. To see more about that post, you can check it out on the Kustomer blog: www.kustomer.com/blog The most trusted source of recommendations 1:30 What a brand ambassador is 2:25 Communication needs to go both ways and provide omnichannel customer support 5:07 Customer experiences in digital marketing can really help build trust 8:27 “I think to retain customers you don’t just want contact deals, you gotta engage with them. That means communication must go both ways. Competitions, freebies, promotions, or limited edition products, great ways to start to reward your loyal customers and keep that mailing list engaged.” 5:07

One of the biggest shifts over the last few years has been to live chat because of the digital first mindset. Live chat allows consumers to get their questions answered without having to phone in or Phone support is not going anywhere, but when you force them to switch platforms in order to get their questions answered, ultimately you give them a reason to abandon their purchase or even potentially generate a negative feeling. Only ¼ of surveyed customer service organizations are currently using chat. What is live chat for business? 2:09 The massive disconnect between businesses and their customers 7:13 A few reasons why chat might not be right for you 9:05 Benefits and issues with chatbots 12:04 “Only 9 percent of customers that have a low effort experience display any kind of disloyal attitude or behavior compared to, get this, 96 percent of those customers with high effort, difficult experiences. And chat does a great job of delivering this effortless, quality customer service experience.” 5:00

Today we are talking about some research we did about the future of customer experience. We regularly go out and survey professionals and consumers to understand trends in the space, so we want to dive into our latest research report. We surveyed over 100 CX professionals, gathered research, and now will be sharing it with you to reveal some of the interesting findings we’ve gathered through these surveys. Will the role of customer service become more important to fuel business growth over the next 3 years? 1:53 Which channels will grow more in popularity over the next 3 years? 3:32 What percentage of CX professionals are preparing to service through live video/VR? 5:26 Top 3 priorities for CX organizations to achieve by 2025 7:22 Where will CX organizations be investing their money in the next few years? 9:17 Will personalization become more important? 14:27 “81% of CX organizations report that reducing wait times is an extremely important priority to achieve within the next 3 years. No doubt, I mean waiting on hold with customer service is a tale as time, isn’t it? And it’s one that provides a surefire way to create a ticked off customer.” 8:07

Today we’ve got a great guest who’s got a book out there called Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance, which has been highlighted in the Wall Street Journal’s best seller list and Forbes put it as one of its top business books in 2021. His name is Howard Tiersky and is the CEO of FROM, a digital transformation agency he created that helps companies transform from where they are now to where they need to be to succeed with today’s digital-first customers. “The goal of digital transformation is to catch up to the customer.” How to win the digital consumer 2:03 Setting the stage of the consumer 4:17 Digital transformation 6:13 Map the journey 14:02 Should you revisit the journey map over time? 21:01 “If you’ve done research like that in the past, if you haven’t refreshed it in the last 12-18 months, it’s really obsolete because customers’ digital needs have changed so much during the pandemic, they’ve accelerated so much that you have to take a fresh look because your customers’ transformation have been faster than usual.” 9:58

Even during the best of times businesses have to strive to be more efficient and there are always things to improve upon, customers to service, and proactive outreach to do. Sometimes I find when circumstances shift somewhat quickly and businesses are asked to do more with less, it really brings to light the importance of this idea of efficiency in overall customer service. Being efficient and effective isn’t always optional 1:13 Having a customer service efficacy strategy is essential 2:20 How organizations are adapting 3:50 What CS teams need 4:56 “It’s essential to have a customer service efficacy strategy and really the correct technology in place to handle bursting activity and enable productive remote work for tools that leverage AI and intelligent automation to power self service and low level information gathering. Those ones become extremely important.” 2:20

Support agents are often on the front lines for businesses. Dealing with frustrated customers while working through repetitive tasks can be daunting. Tasks pile up, which leaves agents with a backlog and in situations like this, the danger of burnout becomes pretty real. Research at Cornell said 87% of workers reported high, or very high levels of stress in call centers. Are employers doing enough to combat burnout? The top driver of burnout 1:28 Signs of burnout that managers should look for 3:15 Things you can do to manage and prevent burnout 4:54 Showing support and gratitude for your team members 6:17 Provide variety 7:18 Create and communicate career paths 8:36 “Strong onboarding programs are critical to the success of all agents on our teams. I think it’s important to establish what the essential tools, foundational skillsets are for agents to be able to deliver that type of customer experience.” 5:19

Today we talk to Jay Hinman, the Vice President of Marketing at Lily AI, the customer intent platform built to power the present and future of e-commerce. We talk about how much search results need to be adjusted for what people are looking for to avoid the frustration that can come from getting way more search results than you need and hardly any apply to what you’re looking for. Companies are making the digital transformation in order to keep customers interested and satisfied with their internal search systems. Focusing on the visual of what customers see rather than the description will really help retailers improve their sales. What’s going on in the e-commerce world 3:02 Helping companies adjust 7:11 Recognize that a lot of products have more facets than you might think 12:55 “94% of consumers say they usually get irrelevant results when they’re searching on a retail website. This is from IRC Research last year. Or 76% of consumers say they will abandon a retailer after failing to find what they’re looking for.” 8:31 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhinman/ https://www.thredup.com/looks

In this episode we discuss the issue of customer neglect with Daniel Rodriguez, the Chief Marketing Officer at Simplr. He just co-authored a book called “Experience Is Everything: How to Win the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets in the Era of NOW CX.” There are a lot of strategies companies use to gather customer data, but often company leaders will stick to the metrics that make them feel good about what they’re doing rather than actually showing what customers are feeling about their experience. We also discuss the different types of neglected customers, one of which is those who have a large social media presence. They can go on their profiles and blast their whole following about the terrible experience they just had with your company, causing possible revenue loss from all the lost customers that can result. About their book 0:36 Why customer neglect is such a pressing issue 6:14 The different types of neglected customers 13:34 The late night browser 17:52 The negative networker 19:42 How to address these issues as a leader 21:50 “When you then try to understand ‘Where are we with our customers?’ You realize that there are a bunch of different things that are happening with customers, and they’re feeling many different ways that you are not actually capturing with data.” 7:39 https://www.linkedin.com/in/drodriguez4/

Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Christopher Stark, the VP of Customer Experience & Business Value at Khoros. He worked at Nike for 5 years where he learned the importance of branding and one of their mottos was “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” From there they decided they would focus on and represent the voice of the athlete and pay attention internally, which helped them understand better who they were and how they could better help their customer base. A lot of traditional programs that have been used for a while are now on the chopping block because of where things are at now and will have to be cut from what companies use. Christopher’s background 0:41 Tying CX to business value 5:53 What’s not working right now 13:07 “Chat wasn’t even really around 20 years ago. How can a metric that came out during that time, now with an era of TikTok and Linkedin, and text messaging now to communicate with customers, the metric’s just outdated and I tell everyone, ‘You know what? It could lead to growth, but you need to actually prove that out. Find the metric. If it’s not NPS, go find the metric that does lead to growth in your company and use that.’” 9:46 https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophertstark/

We had the pleasure of speaking with Elizabeth Dominicci, the Vice President of Customer Experience Operations at TriNet. Her background in industrial and systems engineering brings a very unique perspective to the CX space. She talks about a few things you should know and understand when starting out, such as where to find the data, where to house it, and how to bring it all into one place. They started looking at how customers think about and feel about certain things as opposed to just looking at the traditional, more mechanical data. Where to start 4:30 Leaning into the data 9:29 Looking at processes to automate 16:37 The final step 22:16 “I wanted to see different work moving at an increased velocity and really the goal was to get the customer who’s on the phone or sent us an email that needs something, get them to the right resource that has the answer faster, and really be able to increase the quality of the experience that that customer was having.” 17:43 https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethdominicci/