Summary
- High quality interactions that drive revenue and lifetime value are the future of CX
- Intelligent brands look at CX as a decision maker sitting on top of a goldmine of data
- Build the process with change in mind and iterate, iterate, iterate
Speakers
- Ben Segal (Pair Eyewear) - Sr Director of CX
- Brian Kale (Novo) - Director of CX
- Rose Serafini (Zendesk) - Sr Solutions Architect
- Brianna Reedy (Lang.ai) - Head of Platform Success
Introduction
“Brands are struggling, customers are getting frustrated with automated responses, and costs are going through the roof… So if you only get one phone call with the customer a year, that phone call is going to be the most valuable phone call in the world.” - Brian Kale (Novo)
That’s just one of the lessons gleaned from a whirlwind hour with our panel of customer experience (CX) experts. For our inaugural webinar, we invited Ben Segal, Senior Director of CX at Pair Eyewear; Brian Kale, Director of CX at Novo; and Rose Serafini, Senior Solutions Architect at Zendesk to discuss how scaling a modern CX organization can be both a challenge - and an opportunity.
With our very own Head of Platform Success, Brianna Reedy, as emcee, our panelists touched on from changing customer expectations to making the business case for CX, and everything in between. Here, we are going to uncover three key takeaways from our conversation with Ben, Brian, and Rose.
#1 - Enable meaningful interactions
Empower your agents to solve problems, not create them
The shift in consumer expectations - and the technology to address them - is undeniable. Still, companies need to balance the tools available with the human touch that customers expect from the brand. “When you have the opportunity to speak with a customer,” Rose Serafini explained, “they’re looking for a connection, and I think that connection has to be hyper-personalized.”
Ben Segal went further, adding, “I think that where AI works, it’s great, but there’s always going to be a need for human interaction.” Automate where you can, Ben says, “but when the customer does need to reach us by phone, let’s ensure that we’re doing that with the least amount of headache possible.”
This balance of AI and agents will transform the future of CX, turning what Brian Kale describes as “a very difficult and monotonous call in, call out job” into “true customer relations,” with agents “who are going to be very sophisticated, very understanding, and personalized to your needs and account.”
What exactly does that future look like? Brian thinks companies will eventually stop prioritizing one touch solutions and empower agents to build relationships. To stay competitive, Brian said, agents “need to know the brand, speak the brand, and the customer needs to believe it’s the brand. If you answered 20 tickets today and every single person continues to be revenue generating, great, you did it.”
#2 - Leverage your data
Drive decisions with tech-enabled insights
Make no mistake about it, your CX organization is a gold mine of data. “CX departments are sitting on millions, if not billions of dollars of data,” Brian said, “and the best brands will understand that feedback loop and incorporate CX functions into the brand.” Ben agreed, labeling CX as “the most important data that the company has.”
Given that more than half of consumers who switched service providers in the past year did so because of poor service, leveraging CX data is a massively important revenue opportunity for startups. “There’s gold in those interactions with our users,” Ben said. “What’s frustrating them? Why are they returning? Why are they not purchasing?” This data-driven approach, in turn, helps CX leaders like Ben make the business case for CX tools. “I think about it as an investment in relationship building,” Ben said. “And that's been a change of mindset for senior leaders at [Pair Eyewear and Freshly].”
This data-driven approach will increasingly set the standard of customer engagement and loyalty. “The best brands will understand data as a feedback loop and incorporate their CX functions into the brand,” he said, adding, “I think you're gonna see brands be super transparent. They're going to tell customers: this is our current exact to-the-minute response time. This is the exact expectation resolution of this type of question. The best brands will just say, ‘That is messed up. We are sorry, this is what happened. This is how long it's gonna take.’ And that's very difficult. It is very vulnerable.”
#3 - Stay Scrappy
Build your process with change (and scale!) in mind
Building a successful CX organization means starting with a solid foundation - even if your first iteration doesn’t last long. “I have this conversation almost every day,” Rose explained, “and as soon as you create a process, it’s going to change. You just need to start building the process with that in mind.” Likewise, Ben recommended establishing a foundation early as a bigger CX organization. “Then as I hire the team and we do decide to grow, I know I'm putting them on good tools with good foundation with processes in place, because those processes are going to change all the time and we're going to need to iterate”
As they scale, companies also need to beware of creeping compartmentalization. “If you keep things in disparate channels, you’re losing millions of dollars worth of data,” Brian explained. Ben and Rose concurred. At Pair Eyewear, Ben asks, “How can we ensure that agents have everything they need in one pane of glass?” so they don’t waste time or lose track switching between multiple tabs or screens.
Tools like Lang, Ben explained, help solve this problem by keeping the team connected, “routing more intelligently and sharing out metrics widely so that agents know how they’re doing, [and] how they stack up against the team.” Or, as Rose put it, “Do we get a person, or do we get Lang because they’re developing the trends as we answer them?” Effective teams learn to balance tech with talent, keeping everyone on the same page in the process.
Conclusion
Before the close, we asked our panel for some final words of wisdom for our CX community. Their response? “Never think you have it solved,” “document your process,” “always ask why,” and, of course, “pay your agents more.”
But wait, there’s more! If you enjoyed these insights, you can click here to watch our panelists discuss the merits of live chat, the best way to manage your CRM, and much more! Or, sign up on our mailing list to get updates about our next webinar in August!
Looking for more? Check out ‘Top Three Reasons to Invest in CX in 2022,’ or read about how Pair Eyewear saved over 200 hours per week with Lang automation.
Want to try the best-in-breed CX automation and insights? Cruise over to our demo page to see how Lang can help you unlock the power of no-code AI to supercharge your CX.
