Curated Experience

Your mission as a leader of a contact center is pretty simple. Make work more meaningful for your employees to do that do these 3 things.  

Why is persuasion in such a high demand from a business perspective? Jeff says that we all live or die based on our ability to persuade. That's a bold statement! If you think about Customer Service, the vast majority of interactions start with the premises that something has gone wrong, which is why customers call. How the Support Agents should deliver the news that the solution the customer is calling for won't be delivered today? How to say "no" to a customer or deliver bad news?

I want to talk about Quality Assurance specifically in contact centers. I want to give you 3 reasons to rethink QA. 1. Sample size. You'll be making a conclusion over a small size of data, and you might be biased on the interactions you decide to listen to. 2. The entire premise of QA was created several decades ago. Is it still relevant today? 3. If you cannot link directly QA efforts to the ROI you're looking for, you have to rethink it Quality Assurance.

I want to talk about the call center agent because I have a passion for improving the agent experience. Being a contact center agent sucks because of the leadership in the organization, but it does not have to be this way. Let me focus on one particular area. We schedule, regulate and punish agents for going to the bathrooms at the wrong times. Most of the managers speak to me about the needs of the business and that if bathroom breaks were not scheduled the agents would go whenever they want, which would harm the productivity and the numbers. I call Buillshit on that!

I want to discuss why we have difficult customers and what to do with them. 1. You are creating difficult customers. So do a self-evaluation on why customers are "difficult." Identify these frequent accidents with the customers, address the issues and solve them. 2. Fire some of your customers. Sometimes you just don't need certain people to be your customers, particularly when there isn't a match with what they are looking for and what you've taken a strategic decision to offer. 3. Upskill your folks with better tools. I don't mean (only) tech tools, but rather soft skills. Tools and knowledge that helps your team deal with complicated human interactions.

Customer Experience needs to be personal and copying other crappy industries isn't the way to go.

- Remember the paper- less office - How will we screw up this whole AI thing in service - What happens when all the humans in the contact center get eliminated - What happens when every call in the contact center is a tough one - Federal prisoners have more freedom than call center agents -Healthy culture - who do we hire is the most important decision to make - People in HR will be super busy -Value people

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about analytics a few weeks ago about analytics software. We talked about AI and advanced analytics but I digress. I want to talk about what service leaders measure, particularly in the contact center or service centers. What are you measuring? Do me a favor, bring out your scorecards and lets evaluate what you are measurin. I will wait. Let us start at the top of the organization. Most of your metrics tend to be financial, then it filters down to whoever the leader CCO, over the CX organization. Let's start there. What is on that scorecard? This isn't rhetorical. Please share with us. So I suspect that scorecard has some efficiency metrics and some for effectiveness. So like most organizations you probably pretend to care about customers, who doesn't at least pretend to be into CX right? Let's stay there for one second how are you measuring that all important metric. NPS? CES? CSAT, WOM? Why are you interested in measuring customer sentiment? Really why? I s

We worked in 70 year old company, I wanted to run customer service like a start up right after a B round. He ran IT like the KGB. We were a match made in hell. I had a running list of initiatives in customer service and he always said no or it will happen some day. So I found the cloud, I didn't have his patience. He hated the cloud because he read somewhere that the Cloud will never be good enough for enterprises. "I will chain myself to the servers before we ever move to the cloud". He had a flair for the dramatic. Fortunately, I was armed with an 8 figure budget, and a team that could deliver on ROIs I signed them up for. I started moving the contact center technology to the cloud. I was an early adopter to the cloud because I loved to go fast. On this episode I talk about the next transformative movement powered by Artificial Intelligence. We have the prognosticators predicting how it will go. Put your bullshit meter on high alert.

I got a check in the mail, it was from my cable company, they reimbursed me (without my asking) for all the times my service went out. I was happy they did this until of course I woke up and realized it was a dream. Getting customers to a place where there is emotional trust doesn't happen by accident, there is a way to begin building trust.

I have said it before, most customer surveys are a waste of time. I had a bad experience at Best Buy, so I decided to share some free feedback with their CEO - didn't ask for anything, just wanted to share my suggestions as a customer. My email got forwarded to someone, who proceeded to offer me a gift card to Best Buy - I was offended, and hurt that they think I am so easily bought. Then I got over my hurt feelings and used the gift card to buy a new headset. This is a short episode, listen, share and start improving the experience in meaningful ways.

7:11 the problem with NPS is that it is antiquated. 8:00 Lack of imagination. Ingenuity is lagging behind: you already know your customer better than you think. 9:10 do you have a loyalty card? 9:27 I have no fucking idea what it does

8:17 Customer experience is a product 11:11 nuke the competition 12:05 CSAT, NPS is no longer cutting edge

Why we are so disconnected in the age of Facebook and why it matters

It's never been a better time to have opinions - especially if you are a customer, everyone wants your opinion. How do you feel about the delayed flight? Give us your ideas on how to improve our clusterfuck of a service. On and on. The idea is you create a "Voice of the Customer" program that will inform how a company might improve it's experience. Problem is the "Voice" you are hearing from the customer is uninformed and misleading.

"If I can only clone my best employees". Think about your best employee - the one you are always creepily talking about cloning. The one who seems to connect emotionally with customers, says the right things and customers love. Instead of cloning, the goal should be thinking about how to influence their thinking.

I got to stop watching the news, it is messing with my worldview - I am pro-human being, I am decidedly optimistic about the inherent goodness of humans. Whether you are bullish or bearish on the goodness of humanity is beside the point. The thing is at some point in your business you have to put two human beings in a room or on the phone who have never met each other - correctly predicting how well that ends is nearly impossible. This is why I was pretty stoked to talk to Luke, he is focusing on that very thing, how do we improve the Human to Human interactions in Customer Experience. There are all kinds of models that can predict how a Rocket will launch into orbit...there's not a model that can predict how two human beings how have never met will interact"

"Jumping over the dollars of tomorrow for pennies of today" concludes our guest Michael Furman. Customers are not loyal to the best product, so what are they loyal to? Even though the price point is important what customers care above all, is a great experience. One of the main mistakes companies make is believing that customers think the same the company managers think. Listen to the whole (very insightful) episode to hear the essential takeaways Michael shares from his 30-year-long experience.

You don't need more training. Training is not the reason your experience stinks. Most training programs and processes are awful. But if you've had a great training program, it's still not equipped with what it takes to help you build an emotional connection with your customers. You need more contextual coaching to learn how to say "No" to a customer or to say bad news to a customer.

This is an episode about the anatomy of a painful customer experience. We have a real end consumer on this episode who shares his experience with one of the leading phone companies. There's all of this effort to wow people when people just don't want to go through all the hassle. As a customer I just want you to take care of my problem and make me spend 30 mins on the phone and put me through all of your departments. In the episode, we discuss how all this process can be re-engineered.