The Technical Content Benchmark Report 2024

You’ll learn:

- Take the feedback and customer data you have at your disposal to create a personalized CX approach

- Self-service has to have a human-centered design at the heart of it

- Even if your business is siloed, CX has to be front-and-center

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‍Listen For:

‍[02:32] Bundt cakes and half-baked CX approaches

[03:45] Rachel’s CX pet peeve

[07:58] Addressing heightened customer expectations

[11:43] Making the reward greater than the effort for self-service

[15:42] Understanding customer pinch points

[18:58] Getting the right information to the right people

[21:14] Using metrics to get to predictive analytics

[25:24] Rachel’s CX advice for CEOs

Rachel Lane:

It's having that single strategy. It's then collecting relevant data across that customer journey. And then once you've done that, you can start analyzing that and creating customer journeys, profiling customers into cohorts. And then from there, being able to use all of that data to provide predictive analytics for the business, personalized marketing, all of that good stuff.

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Speaker:

Flourish CX, the only show helping CX leaders do one thing, empower their customers. Each episode democratizes best practices while leaving you feeling both inspired and equipped to take action. Let's get to it.

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Ciaran Doyle:

In today's episode, I'll be talking to Rachel Lane, Contact Center Principal at Medallia, about how organizations should think about CX metrics and the three steps they need to take to prepare for the next wave of customer experience expectations. I'm Ciaran Doyle, your host for this episode of Flourish CX. And as you listen today, ask yourself, how are you asking customers for feedback and is that data getting to the people who can use it. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you tell us about what you do and about Medallia.

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Rachel Lane:

For those that are listening that don't know Medallia, we are a CX software vendor. So we work with all types of brands right across all of those vertical sectors. And my role within Medallia is a Solution Principal, which for me, is a beautiful role. I'm a conduit between customer, product, sales, marketing, product marketing, all of those key business areas. So I have a very cross-functional role. The part of my role that I spend the majority of time is with customers and working with them, understanding what their challenges are and then looking how we can help them unlock some of those challenges using software and the governance and process around that software because ultimately we all know that software is the enabler.

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Ciaran Doyle:

Definitely. So one question we like to ask all our guests is, if you weren't in your current role, what would you be doing?

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Rachel Lane:

Well, you may be surprised about this. If I weren't in CX, I would like to be a celebrity baker and I've been baking cakes for years and years. And it's a real passion of mine. I bake particular type of cakes. I bake Bundt cakes and I collect the Bundt pans. So I've got about 150 of these Bundt pans now, and I've got a whole recipe book of different recipes I've created. And I would like to show people how to make Bundt cakes easily at home, no packet mixes, from scratch and just have some fun baking. That would be me.

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Ciaran Doyle:

That sounds amazing. And I think one of the issues that I see with customer experiences is their approach is half baked. So hopefully we have an expert like yourself in both the culinary arts and customer experience guiding us today. So another question we like to ask early on is, what is driving you personally crazy about customer experience, either in how you are interacting with a business as a consumer or in your professional experience in what you're seeing with companies and how they're handling customer experience?

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Rachel Lane:

This is a great question to kick off with because everybody's got their own beefs, haven't they? It doesn't matter how long you've been in customer experience. And I've been in CX, now I think about 17 years, but I'm still a customer too. And I guess I'm a picky customer in as much as I can understand where the service is poor and it annoys me. However, I'm also a hopeful customer as well. Now, I'm an understanding customer because I know how challenging it can be at times for businesses to create great customer experience. That being said, the big beef that I have is still that so many companies are not analyzing their customer data correctly. And that's resulting in lack of personalization and things like lazy persona building. And I will give you what I think is a really good example and this example has never changed throughout my whole experience of car buying, right?

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Rachel Lane:

Everybody's got a car buying story and being a woman car buyer for the last 20 years, I can tell you, has been woeful. Probably started with being woeful and now it's just anger some, if that's even a word. And that's because there's some generic persona out there about female car buyers, it seems to me that when I walk into a showroom and to be fair, I know exactly what I want to buy. I spent a lot of time specking out exactly what my expectations are of a car. I may not be a typical female buyer, but I think we understand cars. We spend a lot of time in cars and whether that's ferrying kids to school or whether that's going to work and back, we're pretty much looking for the same things that the male drivers are too. So when I go into a garage, knowing exactly what I want, and then they say to me, no, you don't want that.

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Rachel Lane:

Come with me, madam, let me show you onto the fore court and show you a gleaming car that will perfectly suit your needs without having asked me a single question. That's what drives me mad. Whereas, the brand of vehicle that I've bought across these years hasn't changed. So if they'd analyzed my buying behavior, they would know the type of car. They don't even know what car I arrived at the garage in, they don't ask. They've got the data about me. They understand everything about me. They know service records, vehicles, how long I keep cars and all that good stuff, but they don't use it when I step in to the showroom to buy another car. And there's lots of other verticals, lots of examples, but things like that really stick out for me.

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Rachel Lane:

And when we think about how we apply customer experience in today's world, there's still a lot of catching up that lots of vertical sectors have got to do. And that's just a single example of that and probably quite a poor example, but I would say representative, equally in that same experience is how they drive that customer experience through. So once you've had this fairly horrific car buying experience at the end of it, you get the sales guy saying to you, oh, and you'll get a survey and please make sure I get a 10 because if I don't get a 10, I won't get a bonus. That kind of thing is insanity inducing.

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Ciaran Doyle:

Yeah. And it brings up something, this survey that came out about a year and a half ago, Arizona State University that showed that in June of 2020, I believe, about two thirds of customers said they were fed up with customer experience. And when they did the survey three years prior, it was only about 56%. So a little more than half. So the question there is, is customer experience getting worse with all the investment and focus that companies are putting on it or is our perception or our standards getting higher?

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Rachel Lane:

I think it's the latter. I think the consumer expectation has changed fairly dramatically, particularly over the last two years with the pandemic where we were all thrown into a digital only world for some time, our expectation is a real need for immediacy. We want it and we want it now. And I think there are some businesses that perfectly lends, having that immediate fulfillment model perfectly lends into their business. And there are others that don't, there are legacy businesses that don't fit into that model yet. They've got those same customers that have that heightened expectation. So I think it's natural to expect, given what we've been through, a general decline in metric because of that service expectation. I would also add, I think businesses are trying harder than they've ever tried before to get it right, to really understand customer experience and really become more customer centric in their organization.

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Rachel Lane:

And they're certainly hiring more people. They're putting more budget into the whole process. However, it does take time. So some of these businesses that are relatively new to CX or have not had a great experiences of it, and they're resetting, it takes a while to really get into the rhythm of understanding what great CX looks like today, but also how do you get ahead of your particular customer? How do you really understand how your customer has pivoted over the last two years and will continue to pivot over the next two years as we progress? So I think it is a combination, but I do think it's front loaded in terms of customer expectations. And we've always been chasing the fire truck to a large degree in customer experience, but never more so now, where there's some businesses that are able to create these beautiful omnichannel seamless experiences, not that many, to be honest, but still, those that do are being held up as champions and the level that many consumers are expecting.

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Ciaran Doyle:

So omnichannel and 360 degree view of the customer and digital transformation are terms that have been around so long, you think we'd be there by now? But it's still really aspirational for most companies.

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Rachel Lane:

Yeah. I didn't think we'd be at omnichannel by now. I think digital transformation, I've seen huge leaps forward for digital transformations for businesses to the point now where we're seeing government organizations, for example, really starting to motor in Self-Service, those types of things. So I do think we're seeing progress, not as fast as we would like, but still, given what we've just all been going through, I'm happy with where we are for digital transformation on mass. I think the omnichannel piece was always going to be tricky because in order to do great omnichannel, you have to do great multichannel and most businesses don't even do great multichannel quite yet. So that's always going to be a tough ask.

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Ciaran Doyle:

One thing you mentioned was around Self-Service and Self-Service is a very, maybe controversial is not the right term, but some organizations see Self-Service as the end all be all what we should be pushing everyone toward. And others think my customers will never go for it, it's not for us. So what role do you think Self-Service should play in the overall customer experience?

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Rachel Lane:

I think in today's world, it's really hugely important. And even this morning, I tried to book theater tickets on three different devices before I finally gave up and called the contact center to make a booking. And even when I explained to the agent that the booking system was down, I know that nothing's going to happen about that because it's a disjointed service in terms of Self-Service or the digital team are not connected to those agent calls. They don't record those calls either. So things like that really highlight how the simple tasks being done by Self-Service is front and center for many, many customers. When we think about it, Self-Service is the very best way to get those simple tasks done. However, we need to have that human center design at the heart of it and personalization so that when we're looking at the amount of effort that a customer needs to put into Self-Service, that the reward is greater than the level of effort they've put into it.

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Rachel Lane:

So I think Self-Service is and will continue to be hugely important. 10 years ago, we were talking about Self-Service and that point, many organizations had their customer demographic was not as savvy as they are today. So certainly the majority of organizations that their customers are embracing Self-Service on mass. And if you're going to survive, you've got to nail that because potentially, that could be for fits of your customers.

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Ciaran Doyle:

And I think it gets back to your car buying example, that whether you're buying a car, a house, enterprise software, or a cell phone, you're doing your research and you know perhaps even more than the people selling to you, what the competitive landscape looks like. And of course you know much more of what your needs are. So, one thing you talked about earlier was the disjointed nature of the customer experience. So in an organization, who should be owning the customer experience? Who's responsible?

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Rachel Lane:

It is a team sport. It's a cross-functional core requirement and businesses that don't look at it that way have been struggling to get to that seamless omnichannel experience. And they will always struggle because the customer is really desperate for this seamless experience. We've always talked about who owns the customer and the customer touches every part of an organization. So whether that's the immediate customer interaction, when the customer calls into the contact center to get an insurance policy, or whether it's that backend process that goes on behind the scenes that's not engaging and interacting directly with customer, that is also affecting that customer because that customer's waiting for something.

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Rachel Lane:

So to have CX at the heart of every business is vitally important. You've got an organization that's siloed in terms of its business units, whether it's Go or whether it's product driven or however that business is siloed, we still need to have that CX practice front and center, it needs to be the heart of that organization. So yes, everybody has a role to play. They need to understand what the overall objectives are, but they also need to understand what their role is in delivering that. And it needs to be measurable as well. So everybody needs to feel that they are not only responsible for, but that it's their number one goal.

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Ciaran Doyle:

And on that measurement piece, is there a metric that wins them all or is there a metric soup that you see as more optimal for measuring the customer experience?

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Rachel Lane:

I work with many different organizations and many of them come to me. They've already got their metric of choice in place within their organization. And sometimes they have a metric that runs right across an organization. By a large, there's not one central metric that I would say you have to have, we talk a lot about NPS in the business, don't we? And NPS is a good metric for B2B, for example, to really understand overall satisfaction and loyalty. And I do agree with Fred Rachel that the primary purpose of a business should be to enrich the lives of his customers, like we've just been talking about and that's because when customers feel that love, they come back for more, they bring their friends. That's the whole loyalty piece around the NPS that generates good profits. And that's true of B2B, but of course it's true of B2C as well.

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Rachel Lane:

But B2B generally has high stakes. For example, there's a lot of focus on customer attrition across B2B. If you lose a customer, the likely value of that customer is going to be much higher in B2B than in B2C, for example. So some of those metrics like NPS run across organizations, they give you overall loyalty, but then you need to think about actually, if you really want to embrace the omnichannel and really understand that customer journey, you need to understand those moments of truth along that journey. One of those pinch points, those areas that service expectations not being met, customers are falling out. You need to understand those as well. And for that, CSAT is a great measurement. It measures that customer sentiment that's related to a specific type of interaction at the point of delivery. So it's really terrific at identifying those failure points. So we see lots of examples of using NPS and CSAT hand in hand.

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Rachel Lane:

And then of course we talked about digital and digital transformation, Customer Effort Score is huge, for the reason that I talked about earlier in terms of time, time is the measurement of customer currency, I would say. So in a customer's mind, they'll add the cost of an item plus what's the personal cost of time for them in order to get that item, in order to service that account. And that's why customer effort scoring is so important. It's a critical aspect of CX, for any digital engagement. So if you're going to make customers spend their time, they'll be thinking about how wisely they're spending it and having measurement around that. And you've got additional measurements to help you in terms of understanding your digital metrics. So you can see points that where customers are struggling or where they're dropping out, but actually you need to understand the impact of that as well.

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Rachel Lane:

And really, having Customer Effort Score gives you some great indicators of the impact of a portrait digital experience. So there's no one metric that I would say this fits all. And you may think to yourself, yeah, but actually let's assume I'm using all three of those metrics. And many of my customers are using all three of those metrics. It doesn't necessarily mean you need to amalgamate those three metrics to come up with a single number to take to the board. They've got different purposes. And whilst ultimately they should be driving the same behavior and that's one for the ultimate customer experience, but they are giving you different indications along the way.

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Rachel Lane:

And then you add to that your service metrics along the way. So if you're in your contact center, you'll be looking at things like core quality and then some of the standard metrics on top of that, I honestly think there is room for all of it, but what we need to be really careful about is making sure that data doesn't just become noise. It needs to be that the key thing is getting the right information to the right people in the organization and having great dash boarding. And that can be key in terms of making sure that those metrics that are being measured are understandable and that you can use them to the best effect

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Ciaran Doyle:

On that note, it's very clear to draw a straight line between Customer Effort Score and Self-Service. So how are your customers, for example, using some of the other metrics in order to inform their customer experience strategy, whether ways to improve or ways to remove friction from the customer journey. One that has come up a lot, especially when we've spoken to people better in customer success or net revenue retention. So not only are my customers staying with me and not churning, but they're expanding. So it's sort of a different way to look at customer experience of not how the customer is telling me they're feeling, but how their activity is telling me what they're feeling. The other interesting one, which you probably have a perspective on as well as, not only what are they saying in a CSAT survey or an NPS survey, but also, are they not responding? And if they're not responding, that is equally, if not more telling of how they're feeling about the organization.

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Rachel Lane:

I'm glad you mentioned that because this is top of mind for me. So many days when I'm working with customers and we're an organization that enables businesses to harness and analyze lots of data at any given time. And so, as I said earlier, it's about where's the gold and how do you push the noise aside to really capture what's going to be important for your business. I used to work in retails in retail for about 15 years before I came into the CX and software world. And one of the things for us was, we get customer feedback from the customers that buy from us, but what about those that walk out the door and there's more of those that actually buy. So how do we learn from those? And I think these are growing use today of predictive analytics. We're able to get to that predictive analytics by analyzing those key customer points, those moments of truth that I mentioned earlier, analyzing those, gathering metrics from those, making sure that we're really understanding who our customers are.

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Rachel Lane:

And if they're authenticated, then building a picture of those particular customers, creating cohorts of those particular customers. This is going to be really key to us going forward, much more so than metrics is really understanding our customers so that we can personalize that experience. But perhaps even more importantly than that, we can create dynamic experiences for those customers. And the reason why I'm going down this path is because when we get to predictive analytics, what we're able to do, by having those cohorts of customers that have similar goals and behave in a similar way, we're able to bring together those that have engaged with the business and let's say, they've given us a feedback score. We've got website tracking, we've got core quality scores from a customer. So we've got lots of data on these customers. If we add those customers that haven't engaged with us into that cohort, then we've got what we call a synthetic NPS or a synthetic metric, that enables us to be predictive in terms of what's the next best action for that customer.

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Rachel Lane:

What's the next likely solution or product that customer's going to need, which is going to help us get ahead of that customer in terms of the service expectation, but also enable us to be really relevant and personalized in any marketing along the way as well. So I think what we're going to see in the future is, the metrics continue to be important, but actually we're bringing in that cohort of customers that are not leaving a feedback trail with us and that metric trail into that predictive analytics piece. So we're able to get a much better understanding of where our overall customer experience level is as an organization with all customers, not just those that have left us a feedback score or a cool quality score.

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Rachel Lane:

And of course, those other metrics that you talked about and things like customer lifetime value, they're all still really, really important, but we can apply those to a wider cohort if we really accurately monitor those points on the customer journey, whether that is in terms of the customer life cycle. So whether that is at the point where a customer inquires, the point where they buy, a point where they need service or support or indeed when they leave, if we're gathering all that data across this customer journey and customer life cycle, that can be really powerful data. As we move more holistically away from a single feedback score for a single customer to understanding cohorts and business success, risk and financial planning for the year ahead.

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Ciaran Doyle:

So if you are advising a CEO, a chief customer officer, they're looking three to five years down the road, they agree with this approach, what steps can they take today in order to not only set the foundation, but also to align their relatively disjointed organization around this idea?

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Rachel Lane:

That's probably a long conversation, but let's just kind of prey it a little bit. We started at the outset of this conversation today talking about having that CX strategy in the first place, that is enterprise wide. So that's where everything sits on. And then on top of that, it's all about data. It's about understanding what channels your customers engage with you and making sure for each of those channels, you are gathering data and you are able to understand customer behavior and collecting measurements if you can, along the way, but equally, it's not an opportunity to get an NPS, a CSAT or CES score, that we understand some impact analysis right across that customer journey. So that's where many organizations are at now. So they're adding feedback signals across all of their channels, because unless we've got feedback signals across all of their channels, we're not going to be able to create cohorts and really understand what are the preferred channels.

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Rachel Lane:

What are the channels that the organization is making it difficult for customers to engage. It's having that single strategy, it's then collecting relevant data across that customer journey. And then once you've done that, you can start analyzing that and creating customer journeys, profiling customers into cohorts. And then from there being able to use all of that data to provide predictive analytics for the business, personalized marketing, all of that good stuff. So it's a big journey, make no mistake about it, but that's where everybody should be planning. There's very few organizations that are planning five years ahead, but certainly three years ahead, that's where I would be planning.

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Ciaran Doyle:

You actually just did a fantastic summary and gave some free consulting. So thank you for that. But anything else you want to leave our audience with before we close?

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Rachel Lane:

Bill's in the pose. Thank you. We're in a really interesting time. And it would be remiss if we close the conversation today without thinking about our employees, wouldn't it? Because in terms of delivering great service, that's one thing. But having the workforce, the employees engaged and empowered to deliver that is right now, more difficult than it's ever been before. We've seen employee attrition flying higher than I certainly have ever remember it.

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Rachel Lane:

So I think what I would like to see businesses doing right now is really reaching much deeper into the employees that they have. And instead of having annual employee surveys with those, start to create pulses with those, so that any given point you understand the pulse of the employee, because one of the biggest effects on customer experience is an employee that's not engaged, that's not being correctly coached. That is great, but has not got any power. So I would say aside from everything else that we've talked about today, and it's been some great questions. So thank you for that. I would add on to that. Let's secure the future of great customer experience by making sure that we keep our employees engaged and loving what they do.

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Ciaran Doyle:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Flourish CX. To learn more, head over to zoominsoftware.com/podcast and follow along wherever you get your audio.

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