Brianna leads the Platform Success team here at Lang and brings extensive CX experience to Lang ranging from Agent Efficiency to Quality Assurance. She’s passionate about all things related to the customer and recently sat down to chat about the current state of customer support, how consumer brands are leveraging technology to scale their CX functions, and the impact AI can drive for CX when leveraged in the right ways.
How would you describe your role at Lang?
My role at Lang is to guide my team and our users through the platform to successfully reach their goals. For some, this is discovering a new data structure, for others, it is empowering their CX team to automate tickets in a way that wasn’t possible before. In addition to helping users reach their goals, my team also advocates for them when it comes to product feedback and development to ensure we continue to deliver new features and products that our customers are asking for.
As someone who has held several different positions within a fast growing CX organization what does Lang’s mission mean to you?
It means a lot to be a part of a company that is building AI specifically for users who are not engineers or data scientists. While the perspective of the customer can be one of the most important ones in the room while making a business decision, there is often not a lot of visibility into what exactly the customer is saying. In addition, there isn't typically a lot of engineering/data resources, if any, allocated towards CX teams. As a result, these teams struggle to find a way to not only support their team, but advocate for the needs of the customer. Lang's mission to empower these teams makes the overwhelmed agent in me smile.
From your perspective, how have you observed the role of CX evolve within consumer brands?
When people typically think about customer service, they picture rows of desks filled with uninvested employees who can only assist via a script with unhelpful answers. As soon as a story starts with "I had to call customer service", you expect it to be a negative tale. However, the world of customer service, now more commonly referred to as customer experience, has changed to focus less on just solving individual issues in the form of unnamed buyers, and is now geared towards analyzing the Customer Journey, and advocating for making it as pleasant as possible. The Voice of the Customer has been given a seat at the table, and every department, leadership included, wants to know what the customer is saying about the business to constantly improve their services and offerings.
How has technology changed the way brands interact with their customers? What role does software play in the overall CX process today?
Technology has become the first way we contact support. Previously, most businesses were brick and mortar; you had an issue, you went to the store and spoke with the salesperson. With the growth of e-commerce businesses, even fully online banks, there is often a lack of opportunity to speak with a human being face to face. That being said, we still crave that humanized interaction, even when using technology to contact a support team.
Along comes inventions such as chatbots and telephony bots, and the stigma that none of it is really personalized and is just a black hole where requests go to die. But as the tech has evolved, we’ve gained that humanized connection back, and empathy becomes ingrained in these tools. With agents being focused on the experience, and tools like Lang facilitating a personalized touch, buyers are given the opportunity to create connections with companies, just as they did before with their local shops.
How does a platform like Lang help CX organizations scale effectively?
With all the different channels that customers use, it can get tricky to keep track of the topics that are trending for different kinds of customers. Lang can not only help decipher what different kinds of customers are talking about, but it can also make sure these customers are matched with the right support. Through granular tags that match distinct customer issues, Lang can reply right to the customer, or route and prioritize the ticket to the correct team of agents. In addition, Lang supports QA and training teams so real time tips and SOPs can be relayed to agents. When data can be structured without a human touch, it becomes actionable and CX teams can make well-informed decisions, no matter how fast they grow.
What are some trends within CX that you’re tracking? How do you see the role of CX changing over the next couple of years?
The biggest trends that I see are businesses realizing the value of the voice of the customer, and the impact that CX has on every department. For example, you can spend thousands of dollars on a new marketing campaign to get customers reengaged, but if the real issue is the delivery service that they’re getting, a new marketing strategy isn’t going to give the people what they want. Instead, businesses are focusing on empathizing with their customers and seeing how they can improve the overall experience.
What advice would you give to CX and operations leaders within fast scaling organizations?
It’s never too early to set yourself up for success. When your company starts to grow fast, it’s exciting, but also becomes too easy to spend your days playing whack-a-mole and putting out fires with different issues instead of taking the time to set up the infrastructure that is going to help you scale. There are many types of software out there that solve specific problems - this includes workforce management, training, quality assurance, chatbots - but leaders should strive to select the tech that is going to make the biggest difference in your agents and customer’s day to day lives. We’re seeing that Lang is becoming the next piece in that stack after selecting a help desk platform because it is able to handle many of the most time-consuming and monotonous tasks for agents, and over time allows CX teams to scale without needing to hire nearly as aggressively as their brands grow.
