00:02
Ciaran
Hello and welcome to Customer Friendship Conversations, the show where we bring you the latest trends, tools and insights into delivering customer experience as it’s meant to be!
I’m Ciaran Nolan and I lead relationship management for Dixa.
It’s a brand new year and we’re excited for all the things we have planned for 2024 at Dixa. Of course, there’s no better time for introspection than the start of a new year. That’s why, on this episode, we’re going to stop and take a look back at some of the best insights we’ve heard on Customer Friendship Conversations so far.
On this episode, you’re going to hear from everyone from Cherina Rosand, the Head of Customer Care at Sinful, to Matt Dixon, bestselling author of books like The Effortless Experience. In fact, let’s kick things off by hearing Matt explain why we should value our existing customers above everything else…
00:49
Matt
The recent I think the math on this has always been true, that it’s cheaper to retain a customer more profitable than it is to acquire a new one, but I think that’s especially true right now. Ciaran, to your point, acquisition costs have never been higher for organisations. Customers are bombarded with offers. We hear like, I was talking to a B2B sales organisation the other day and they found that their response to outreach, so literally, emails, phone calls they place to try to get sales visits has never been lower, because customers, again, are bombarded by every make and manner of supplier. And most of the outreach is kind of spammy, right? It’s sort of generic and it falls on deaf ears. It’s really difficult to get face time with customers and to sell products and services makes it even more important that we’re retaining our customers.
01:32
Matt
A couple of other thoughts that your comments kind of brought to mind for me. One is, I love that idea of the proactive outreach, right? So how are we taking those moments of friction? So it could be, as you’re saying, that you’re not seeing the progress, the customer’s progress on the website, or they put a lot of items in their shopping cart and never did anything with them. Or they filled out a survey and said, boy, you guys really did a poor job on this service interaction, or in this sales experience, or, no, that when you get the pop up on the website or the pop up after a chat and you say, you know what? No, that was actually a really difficult experience. It didn’t do what I thought it was going to do. How often is that going into a black box? Which does two bad things?
02:19
Matt
One is you miss out on an opportunity to improve things in general and then improve the situation for that customer. The second bad thing about not responding and putting this feedback into a black box is it teaches the customer that you don’t care about their feedback. And so the next time you offer a survey, if they gave you really poor marks and took the time to write in there, you guys really did a bad job here. I expect more from you. Blah, blah, blah, and nobody reaches out, then what incentive do I have as a customer to do that again next time I wasted my time effectively giving you that valuable feedback. You’ve done nothing with it. And so I think that’s a brilliant strategy. And every CX leader listening to the show should absolutely have a response team, right? So you’re taking those negative comments, whether it’s negative tweets, it could be LinkedIn or Facebook messages, it could be survey scores, what have you, and creating a moment to reach out to those customers to say, can we get some feedback?
02:54
Matt
Clearly, this didn’t go as well as either of us would hope. Please give us some feedback. What could we have done better? And more importantly, what can we do to make this right for you? Now, that is a really powerful moment for the customer, and that really cements the loyalty, because that’s teaching them. This company cares about my feedback, and they care about making it right, and they care about improving. Those are companies I want to do business with. The other point I’d make, Ciaran, is that I would encourage CX leaders to think even I remember before I talked about a broad based measurement approach. I think many CX leaders are wedded to surveys as an instrument that they use to get this feedback, whether it’s pop up surveys, email surveys, IVR surveys after spending time on the phone with an agent in the service department.
03:31
Matt
But what I would encourage CX leaders to think about is predictive measures. So think about all your call recordings just as an example, or email exchanges or chat interactions. What percentage of those customers are taking the time to fill out a survey? Most companies would say it’s around 10%. For some companies, it’s lower than that. Some companies, it might be a little higher, but it’s around 10%. That means 90% of the people you interacted with gave you no feedback whatsoever. But every company out there is recording those interactions, those phone conversations, those email exchanges, data that’s sitting in platforms like Dixa, right? Chat interactions, SMS exchanges. We’re capturing all this data. Are we able to use modern technology like AI and ML to actually extrapolate from the unstructured data what we think the customer’s experience was? Right. So, for an example, think about a phone conversation.
04:33
Matt
Maybe I call into a company and I have a frustrating interaction, but I don’t fill out a survey. But we can use a model that can go through the call recording turn it into unstructured text. Mine it using machine learning and surface up that. You know what? This customer was quite unhappy. He was quite frustrated. It didn’t sound like he had a great experience. And then score it and then feed it into that queue for the CX team and say, hey, this customer didn’t file a survey, but the model says and our analysis says he had a really bad experience. So put him in the queue to reach out to now, that’s an even more powerful moment. Think about that. Where I didn’t take the time to fill out a survey, but you listened to the interaction and you knew it was a bad one and you reached out to me to say, hey, we listen to all of our interactions, we study them and based on our understanding, this did not go very well.
05:11
Matt
What can we do better and how can we make this better for you? Worst case scenario, the customer says actually, I don’t know what I said that made you think it was bad because I thought it was great. No harm, no foul, but these models are pretty accurate and chances are you’re going to get a customer says thank you for listening, I appreciate that you picked up the frustration, my voice, I was quite frustrated. Here’s why. Here’s what you guys can do to make us better. That’s just gold for a CX leader to be able to fix these problems at scale and again, get on that path towards an easy experience at every touch point for your customers.
05:57
Ciaran
One of the most important things to remember when it comes to keeping your customers happy is that they’re all individuals who require an experience tailored to their situation and expertise. Christina Martinez is the Senior Director of Customer Experience at Whisker, makers of highly technical pet litter robots. She explains how at Whisker, they have to ascertain if a customer is technically minded enough to attempt to repair a product or if they should take an alternative path…
06:22
Cristina
It can get a little difficult if the customer may. Not be technical and the customer, if we ask them to possibly have to fix, because we do, right, in a troubleshooting situation, we may ask them to Can you take off the bonnet of the little robot? Can you look to see if the motor is on properly?
Right? Where there are some people in my own household that wouldn’t even think to do that. They wouldn’t disassemble a little robot. That’s not their wheelhouse, right? But then there are others that would take it apart, put it back together, no problem. And so as a specialist in our business, you really have to learn to gauge your audience, really understand is this.
07:03
Cristina
The type of individual who is going to be able to do that kind of troubleshooting and then be able to
reassemble the unit properly and not have more issues because they reassembled it incorrectly. And so you have to be able to really gauge that and speak with your customer to really understand are they iffy about it, are they not? So that’s where the challenge comes in.
And so I think for us, it’s understand the customer, listen to the customer, really understand where they’re coming from, and let’s make sure that we resolve the situation one way or the other.
07:50
Ciaran
How have you been able to train your teams and keep your teams up to date and working at their best when working with a product that is technical and the answers might not always be obvious.
08:07
Cristina
Oh, wow, yeah, that’s been a challenge. That’s always a challenge. I will tell you that for us, identifying those gaps is definitely something that everybody learns at a different pace and not everybody with a technical piece such as a little robot, anything you can’t plan for at all. And so you can train to a very high level and say these are the most common things that could possibly go wrong.But then you get anomaly here, an anomaly there. So you have to kind of float those things to the top as they come up. We realized the importance, especially as the group started getting larger and the products started getting more complicated as it develops. Right. We understood the importance of really having a dedicated trainer, and so one of the steps that we decided to take was making sure that we hired a dedicated trainer for our team. And so we’ve done that. We took those steps last year to ensure that we hired somebody that was this is their skill, this is what they do, it’s their career to train, and now that’s what this individual does. Right. Not only do they make sure that.
09:57
Cristina
Our brand new people joining us are very skilled and get the smart groundwork in so that they’re ready to take on our customers, but look for the gaps in refreshing our tenured employees and what new trainings they may need. So as things come out and we notice things, we share that communication with the rest of the teams and say, okay, here we’ve noticed that this is starting to come up, this is something you all should know. And we try to create jobs really quickly so that we can share that and distribute it amongst the teams. So it’s definitely a challenge. You just never know what you have to share, what you have to train. Jim and Bob over here may already know about that, but Sally, Mary and Sue may not know about that. And so there’s so much oversharing and not sharing and then making sure that you’re removing old information and then sharing the new information is always a quick balance that you have to make sure that you’re keeping up with, because the last thing you want is to have inaccurate information floating around out there that people then are kind of sharing themselves.
10:44
Ciaran
Of course, there are other ways to keep your customers feeling valued. One way is to turn your product into a community that they’re a part of. That’s Kasper Tvernø Hartvigsen’s approach in his role as Head of Customer Success at Hobbii, sellers of yarn and knitting paraphernalia…
10:57
Kasper
So we have built this universe. So, yes, we have an app now where customers can browse our products, our patents, they can make a purchase, they can get answers to some questions in there as well. And that’s cool, but it’s just the beginning. We want to build this universe where customers similar to Instagram, Facebook, other social media, so we want to make, like, a platform where customers can, as I said before, be inspired by each other, figure out a way to deal with a pattern. If they have issues, why not ask the community to help them out, right? And yeah, that’s the idea, to build this place where customers can go and be inspired.
11:27
Ciaran
Kasper one thing I found really interesting, and also quite a great way to do community engagement, is that Hobbii. You launched your own bingo online, bingo for your community.
11:40
Kasper
Yeah. So a few years ago, we had this idea that we wanted to do more, we wanted to interact more with our customers. And we want to get out there and show our customers and new customers that we are authentic. We are a real company. We act and we speak as we are. It’s not just a charade. So what we did is we introduced bingo in Denmark to begin with, and we have quite a big crowd following. Now, every week, I think we have around 50,000 every week following our bingo sessions in Denmark, Germany, and the US. So we’re going live three times a week with bingo. And the idea came because, of course, we have a customer base at a certain age. I think the average age, sorry, is around 55 years. And we just know in Denmark, at least, there’s a history for bingo.
12:27
Kasper
So we thought, why not try bingo and have fun with that? So it’s a whole thing now. And yeah, as I said, now we have a lot of people following our bingo sessions every week, and basically, they just have to turn on their phone and then they participate. They don’t have to do much, they can make comments and they can win prizes and, yeah, it’s great fun and I have quite some great colleagues who are the faces of bingo.
12:58
Ciaran
I personally just think that’s one of the most bespoke things to do for a customer base that I’ve come across. I think it’s really inspiring. It’s really nice to see you creating community amongst your customers as well. And obviously they definitely enjoy winning too, I guess, because I think the prizes are nice yarn prizes. Whatnot?
13:20
Kasper
And going back to the passion I talked about before, they are very passionate, right? So they want to win least like free skins of yarn, these patterns, these accessories, whatever it is, and if they don’t get it, we will hear from them in customer success, of course.
13:33
Ciaran
The way that you approach your customers is also uniquely tied to the nature of your business or the products that you sell. As Northern Europe’s largest online adult toy retailer, Sinful Group is the perfect example of this. Here’s Cherina Rosand to explain…
13:47
Cherina
I think what I didn’t think I would experience so much was how much our products can impact on people’s lives. I mean, for example, when we reach Christmas, we sell our Christmas calendars. Last year we had six different kinds, so there’s really something for everyone. And reading the comments and the feedback from customers, either on the products or on trust pilot it really warms my heart seeing how this one thing can make people get so much closer to each other again. And just seeing people write that were all drifting apart and this just got us communicating, this got us back together. Thank you so much. That couldn’t do for the rest of the year. So it’s really something that’s special.
14:43
Ciaran
That’s a really nice story. I really like that. Excellent. So let’s turn to the future. And I know you are an innovator. You’re somebody with an eye on the future. You’re somebody who’s always thinking ahead and maybe thinking four or five steps ahead, which is great because you’re working in a very innovative business. What’s next for customer experience at Sinful?
15:08
Cherina
Of course, we need to keep up with new features and new technologies. It’s growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up. And that’s why it’s also nice having a partner like you guys that are also keeping up to speed so you can help us and guide us, but we of course need to understand, learn and implement these processes. And here I’m talking AI, Chat GPT all of these features also just to keep up with the customers expectations. But at the same time, we can’t forget the customers that are just not there or just not ready yet. So we really still want to be available on all the different channels to make sure and make sure to tell them that we are there for them. And it’s not just self service or a chat bot or whatever they can get help from. We still have the human person behind and the human interaction really is generally still so important.
16:11
Ciaran
I love that. I really like the way you’re thinking of your entire customer base because I think with all the excitement of AI Chat GPT of course here at Dixa, we’ve always been working on that it’s just become more to the foreign eye for all consumers. But you also want to make sure that those people who aren’t there yet also don’t feel left out or don’t feel like they don’t matter to your customers. So I really, as always, I love your thoughtful approach to these types of technologies and how you evolve the business. And I guess this is a nice lead on question, I guess what challenges do you foresee in maintaining your really strong level of customer service?
16:56
Cherina
Again, as I said, we need to keep up with this technology and not see it as a threat. But find out how can it help us, how can it help our department, and how can it maybe heighten the customer experiences in some ways and make sure that we can provide a faster service, but also just make sure that our staff can use it. And figure out how can they have this as a helper and not as something coming in and wanting to take over their job, because that’s not going to happen. We really need to make sure that they figure out the best ways to use these new technologies and features to support them in their work. I think that’s the most important thing.
17:47
Ciaran
And that’s something, and I’m sure I think you’ve already seen this already, but for our listeners, we are already working on a tool belt as such for agents to be like their amazing sidekick, to really harness the power of AI and make their lives that bit easier. Because, Cherina, this is a discussion we had as well. How can you allow your agents to have maybe 20, 30 seconds more on the phone with somebody and what does that look like and what could you do in that time?
18:19
Cherina
Yeah, exactly. And the more time they can have spending on really valuable conversations that are meaningful, the better it is for the customers in the end as well, not having to wait for their inquiries.
18:38
Ciaran
Yeah, amazing. So, Cherina, let’s move on to our quick fire round. Three questions. I would love to get your thoughts on these. The first one is what do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your customer experience journey?
18:54
Cherina
Good question. I think for me, just it’s so important to listen to your team. They sit with so much knowledge and so many good ideas how to enhance customer experiences, internal processes. It’s really important to just see them as your help and not people you just need to control around, but just really use their knowledge and the things that they have for ideas for improvement and just take them forward. That’s really important.
19:29
Ciaran
Cherina brought up AI there and it really was the topic everyone was most excited about in 2023. At Dixa, we have some really exciting things in store for the future relating to AI so let’s hear what our other guests thought about the subject, starting with Harriet Treadwell, Customer Love Director at Butternut Box…
19:46
Harriet
And it’s not about kind of like removing the human element of it, we want to be able to work alongside it and customers will very quickly, I think, start bossing and recognizing when AI is used. It’s obviously very good at what it does, but there are going to be things where it doesn’t pick up on and we’re going to still need our team to step in and manage that kind of conversation. And also just being able to make sure that we’re still learning from our customers. And if we’re implementing something that takes away any of that learning or insight or rich data that we get, genuinely just being able to have fun with our customers, we don’t want to lose that. And so I think that the future for us is going to be finding the balance of making sure that we’re using something that makes us more efficient, better at what we do, faster at what we do, but also maintains that what we like to call our opponents to how we speak to people and also the human touch and insights that we get from interacting with our customers. It’s important that doesn’t ever leave us.
21:23
Ciaran
I love the tone of bark. It’s so fitting and gives me a good laugh every time. Really what you’re looking at is maintaining that amazing level of service but perhaps using some technology and automations that are really coming to the fore in the market right now. And I know our team are working on significantly to really balance that up.
21:43
Harriet
Yeah, and I think I’ve been speaking to quite a few of my peers. It’s something that can potentially be seen as scary for people or causing some anxiety, I guess, take over people’s jobs, just basically make what we do entirely redundant and that’s just not. The case. I think what it means is that she will all just upskill and make ourselves better at what we do and whether that’s us actually spending more time on more value add things that we can do for our customers. If it’s able to help those that are just very simple queries who just need to find the answer very quickly, and are those customers that aren’t asked about having a long conversation with you, then great. And we can be there more for those customers that do need that level of conversation, that level of help, and that next level of friendship as well, which I don’t think something like Chat GPT is going to be able to offer.
I wouldn’t best friends with a robot.
22:46
Cristina
I do like the AI. I think it’s very beneficial in a lot of ways, but for me it’s interesting because our product is so different. And so I’m just curious because I’ve read a lot of articles about AI and just how it can take the tone of some of the things that you do and it learns off of the interactions that you have already built in from how you interact with your customer. And I’m thinking I’d love to see that happen. But how does it work with such a technical product? Will it learn could it learn how to handle some of these more difficult conversations that we have with our customers? Would it actually be able to figure it out like our normal product specialists would?
And if it could, wow, that would be amazing. Because in those kind of situations when our team is asleep and our team is resting to start the next day, could that AI then provide a situation where our customer, who had a situation at 01:00 a.m. Doesn’t have to wait until 08:00 a.m. The next day when our specialist will then receive that email? They could get answer right then and there. So I’m very curious about that piece of it, that AI that takes the tone of your specialist and can resolve a situation, I’m thinking, but. Can it maybe for? I’m looking for a Blouse, looking for a new pair of jeans or A pair of hiking boots or what’s the best paddle Board that I’m looking To Purchase. But our Product is so Technical, so o’m very curious to see if that’s something that would even venture into the technical side of The Business.
24:25
Ciaran
I am too.
I’m a data guy so I’m very analytical and I’m trying to figure out how do we prioritize the issues our customers are facing with the idea that if we neutralize those issues we will see fewer conversations in dixa. So what we did was, as mentioned before, we wanted to build this place of information where customers can find information. So hence using the FAQ, hence using a chatbot now where a lot of the you can say generic questions are answered. So the idea was to make sure customers can find answers to the in quotation, mark easy questions and give and liberate my yarn heroes from answering these generic you can say boring questions, straightforward questions and instead focus on the more technical questions like product questions, yarn questions, patent questions.
25:27
Ciaran
So really through this self service capability that you’ve built out, it meant that your yarn heroes were working on things that were where they could add the most value for your customer base. Is that fair to say?
25:40
Kasper
Good example was the biggest issue for our customers when I came and for a long time was tracking. So customers had an issue understanding what happened to their order after they placed it. So what happened in our warehouse, what happened with the carriers? When could they pick it up? There was a lot of communication there that was not proactive. Meaning an abundance of customers reached out to us and asked what’s going on with my order? Right? Because they placed an order, they paid some money so of course they want to know what’s going on and we fixed that with various initiatives. Customers could track their order, they get an email if there are delays in our warehouse, they get an email when they can pick it up, they get emails if there are issues on the carrier side now. So we try to proactively inform customers about this just as an example and then we kind of like that big issue.
26:29
Kasper
We took that and made it a smaller issue, meaning that we liberated our clever yarn heroes from answering these generic questions, being able to spend more time on questions where they bring value in terms of products in terms of accessories, in terms of patterns and actually helping and enhancing the customers knitting crocheting journey.
27:29
Kasper
Yeah, so it’s no secret, I think, that last year we all saw this Chat GPT going live and had to understand, what is this about the hype around AI, at least within customer service or customers, who says is unbelievable. I have never seen so many invites for events or companies who wants to talk to me about selling a certain solution. So I can definitely say that the next step for us is to embrace what’s coming. We’re not afraid of AI, we’re not afraid of new technology. I think we are a tech company, so we embrace those changes because it can definitely help us. I see AI as more of a colleague and a support than it’s a robot taking all our jobs. But I also think that you have to embrace it. And if you don’t embrace AI, I think as a customer success, you’re probably going to lose in the long run because it’s going to change the way we perceive customer service.
I’m quite sure of that.
28:12
Cieran
for a lot of people in customer experience. They, I think, are at a point of also being a little bit overwhelmed by the possibilities and not really sure how do you use AI, what do we do with it, et cetera. So what is your thoughts on how AI is going to influence the customer experience space? I personally think it has the ability to make things a lot more effortless, but there’s a lot of work to be done there. What are you thinking around that?
28:39
Matt
Yeah, I agree with you. I think there is still a lot of work to be done and I think there is this, using my wireless provider example before, there is this kind of learned behaviour effect in customer experience. Because I had such a bad interaction with the virtual agent last time, I was very unlikely to go back. And so now that’s a learned behaviour with this provider, I know they’re virtual now, what’s unfortunate is they probably improved it in the three months since I used it last time. But for me, as a customer, I got burned once. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So I’m not going to spend my time with it again. You know what? Unless somebody I know says, you know what, I actually did try the virtual agent. It was amazing.
29:19
Matt
It was really easy. I didn’t have to wait in queue, I didn’t have to talk to an agent and get frustrated about being fed the generic answer. But it actually allowed me to get my issue solved in a seamless way. Unless I hear that from somebody, my default posture, especially with this company, is I’m just going to pick up the phone and call, because I know they’ve not perfected the virtual agent technology. Now, I think what’s interesting here we think about AI is some of these behaviors. Also, these learned behaviors kind of translate over. So I think one of the things that’s tricky about technology, like gen AI, or think about Chat GPT, is it’s a little bit of a garbage in, garbage out problem. So you really need to deliver quite accurate and effective prompts to get quality information back. And short of teaching our customers how to do that, I think what is likely going to happen for a lot of companies is that their customers go to their gen AI.
30:01
Matt
Let’s say, for instance, we want to create a natural language interface that sits on top of our knowledge base and all of our content and allows a customer in natural language to query the knowledge base and to get information back. If you don’t get good prompts, you’re not going to get good information back. And when that happens, the customer won’t blame themselves, they’re going to blame you. And so then they’re not going to try it again. And so I think my recommendation for a lot of companies is before you put those tools out there to your customers, use those tools internally. Because I think what’s really powerful is because you can train your agents and you can train your managers and supervisors on prompting and on using these tools effectively. And I think what you’re going to see is that those teams and those agents and those organizations that make heavy use of gen AI are more productive, they’re more effective, they can wrap up calls faster, they can resolve issues and they can handle more customer issues than a team that doesn’t.
30:40
Matt
And so my general guidance here is to think about internal first. So think about how do we use this to reduce the effort of the employee experience before we use it to reduce the effort of the customer experience. I think customer-facing applications will definitely come. They will be a fast follow. But I don’t yet know that we’re in the place to deploy these technologies to our customers and for them to get value out of those tools. And if they don’t again, they won’t blame themselves, they’ll blame you and they won’t try it again. These will become learned behaviors in a bad way, same as my interaction with the virtual agent. It probably was my fault, but I’m not going to try it again.
31:42
Ciaran
I absolutely love the way you’ve talked about the learned behaviors because in a lot of my conversations I’m saying to clients, I know your executive team is putting you under pressure to rush out these things, but please make sure they’re high quality. You don’t want to be in a situation where your customers kind of in their first piece are kind of like, this isn’t that good, it’s not answering my question, it’s not working. And what I love about what you talk about there is here at Dixa, we’re actually building right now our own chatbot. It’s actually based off the knowledge base, but that same knowledge is being used right now within the agent interface to really, as you say, help the agent answer questions, help the agent find the right knowledge article, wrap up the call quickly, fix spelling and grammar, language translation. So, super interesting stuff.
32:35
Ciaran
So I know that was probably intentional from you, but that’s exactly how we’re thinking about it at Dixa, which is really good to hear.
32:40
Ciaran
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of Customer Friendship Conversations! If you’ve enjoyed the show, then make sure you’re following us on your podcast platform of choice. It means that you’ll get notified each time we release a new episode, so you won’t miss out on any of the other amazing customer friendship heroes we’ll be showcasing in the coming months!
Of course, a rating or review is a huge help to the show, so we always massively appreciate those, as well. And if you’re interested in learning more about customer friendship then head to dixa.com to discover everything you want to know about customer experience as it’s meant to be.
I’m Ciaran Nolan and another huge thank you to all of the guests featured on today’s episode – Matt Dixon, Christina Martinez, Kasper Hartvigsen, Cherina Rosand and Harriet Treadwell – for helping us ring in the new year!
Until next time! Wishing you a really happy 2024.