Crafting the Ultimate Customer Experience in the Digital Age
In today's digital landscape, the customer experience has become a make-or-break factor for businesses. Join us for an engaging discussion as we dive deep into the realm of crafting the ultimate customer experience, fueled by data and technology.
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All right, ready to rock and roll here.
Excited for this one, this is gonna be fun.
Today we're gonna be talking about this idea
of kind of a data-driven delight.
Seeing how we can craft this ultimate customer experience
in this digital age and some of the keys to do that.
For this session, I've got a friend of mine.
Now I feel like I've known him for,
you have these business friends that you know for a while,
but it's been a long time since we've seen each other person,
but his name's Jordan Katz.
And he can talk a little bit about his background,
but formally of Qualtrics,
and at Qualtrics he was running
all of this employee experience strategy,
which the employee side I definitely wanna touch on today.
But we actually worked together at Gal.
So Jordan, really excited to have you on
and how you doing, man?
- I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me on Gabe.
I really appreciate it.
Excited to talk about the intersection
between understanding as much as you can
about your customers and linking that
to how you influence and understand
how your employees behave,
because ultimately that's the key.
- Love it, love it.
And Gallup's been a while, man.
When we were there to get,
that's not like 10 years ago, 12 years ago.
Wasn't it 2010, 11, something like that?
- You're making me feel super old right now,
but it was, first of all, Gallup was a great place to work,
a great place to train, really invested in who we are
and the ultimate science around how do we predict
what's happening now versus what's happening in the future.
And I just found it to be a great place to be
and it was really great working with you.
I actually left Gallup and worked at Insight Partners,
which is a large VC fund that invests only in technology.
And from there, they moved me into the portfolio
to work for a company called Qualtrics,
which I, hopefully a lot of people are familiar with
where I really, you know,
productized a lot of the stuff that we, you know,
spearheaded when we were at Gallup,
which is the intersection between customer
and employee research and customer and employee performance.
So I'm excited that we've come full circle back
to work together, back to be together,
and we can talk about it more today.
- Yeah, man, I appreciate you jumping on.
So let's hit this topic, just big picture.
What's kind of going on with this whole customer experience
in the world today?
Trends, thoughts, big kind of, big topics there?
- Yeah, so there's a couple of things.
First of all, customers, whether they be B2B customers
or B2B2C customers, they know what great looks like, right?
We've all been out in the world,
whether we, in our personal lives are in business
and had phenomenal experiences,
even in places where, that surprised you, like the DMV.
I'll tell you a story about that sometime.
But we know what great looks like,
so that when we see something or we experience something
that's mediocre or even bad,
whether it be with a live agent or a face-to-face person
or a chatbot, like that hits extra hard.
You know what I mean?
On the negative, right?
And so the trend towards personalization,
towards consumer-grade types of experiences,
even in the business world, even in business to business,
is rapidly picking up speed.
And it's, I think, very valid,
because if great exists and we're running a company
and we're having interactions with our customers,
we want to hit great.
We don't want to settle for mediocre.
And our customers know that,
and luckily, the data plays out
that while it can be inexpensive or resource-heavy endeavor,
the greater experience on the positive a customer has,
the more likely they are to increase wallet share,
usage, retention, right?
They pay you back in time.
The issue is, at the same time,
we're also moving more towards automation, right?
A myriad of reasons, scale and volume and cost and all that stuff.
But oftentimes automation, chatbots,
you know, technological solutions,
they don't always have, make, you know,
a fully satisfactory experience occur.
And we've already, I've already just touched on how negative,
you know, a non-optimal experience can have.
So the blending and the melding of
how do we understand what's going on in the minds
of our customers with how do we craft
the most optimal automated solution
while still layering in a person-to-person solution?
Is like the golden path,
but it's also the hardest thing to do
'cause there's too many variables to control, right?
- It really is, it's like, that's nice to talk about,
but to do, that's pretty tough.
No, but I like that, that's a good framing.
And let's dive into that then,
because I know as you were at Qualtrics
and some of the stuff you were doing,
the clients you've experienced,
and truthfully at Gallup,
it's probably been the last decade or so,
but you've had this unique opportunity
to see and coach consult aid,
these different companies trying to kind of find
that balance using technology and data
and the right personalization.
So I'd love to hear some of the things
maybe you found helpful as these companies went on this journey
to try to get to that ultimate customer experience.
Where did you typically start?
What was one of the keys you found
to help those companies do that?
- That's a great question.
So first of all, I always start with the outcome
in mind, the end of mind.
And I think that's something that we're trained on at Gallup,
which is where do we wanna go with this?
Is the goal to take share from our competitors?
And so it's like wallet share or whatever from the customer.
Is the goal to increase usage?
Is the goal to convert non-customers, right?
So starting with the end of mind
and understanding the KPIs which we're gonna hit
is critically important.
And most people then go back to like here,
which is like what's going on with our customers?
What do we know about our customers?
Hopefully they also say,
what do we know about our non-customers, prospects
and things that are lost customers?
But that's like half the story.
You know what I mean?
That's like a half measure.
The key and why I was successful at Gallup,
why I think you were successful,
why Gallup was successful in that time period
where we were there.
And then subsequently why Qualtrics is successful
is because the real answer is going all the way
to the front end of the organizational lifecycle,
which is the moment of potential candidate
looks at a job advertisement.
And is that job advertisement
fishing in the right pool of talent?
Is it attracting people who are more like your best people?
Is it repelling people who are less likely
to be top performers?
And the way we define that is,
are these people that we're investing
and bringing into our business family?
Able to do the things that our customers ultimately want,
love and will delight them, right?
And lead to that optimum performance.
And then when we get them on board,
are we managing them to optimum performance,
helping them work, learn and grow,
reach the heights and deliver on the promises
that we've made to both them and our customers?
And I'll tell you what, there's hard ways to do that
and there's easy ways to do that.
The hard way is to get in a room and think about like,
"Hey, what ideas do we have as a leadership team?
"Who are we gonna hire?"
And all that's the easy way,
it takes a little bit of work on the front end,
but the easy way is to leverage data.
To understand the recurring patterns of thoughts
and feelings and behaviors that people have
on the employee and the customer side,
match that with like transactional data.
Did our employees reach their quota
or hit their customer service targets,
are they retained, et cetera?
Are customers spending money with us?
Not being super angry or that high-end bs.
And then trying to find the key correlates
or the key drivers between or behind great employee
experiences and performance
and great customer employee experiences and performance.
And where those things overlap,
those are the things you can hang your hat,
allows you to create that profile
of the great type of hire, nowhere to fish for talent,
no how to manage people.
But then also leverage technology and data
to know exactly what's in the minds of the customers,
the metadata around the customers,
not just how they transact or what they transacted,
but what they prefer, what their sentiment is,
how they're interacting with you or your chat bots
or whatever, and serving that up to your employees,
that allows you great people that you've hired
and worked so hard to get to execute
on the best possible performance.
So yes, it takes some effort on the front end
to gather that data and smush it together
and have good thoughtful people who can run those analyses.
But then once you've got that going,
it's that flywheel of great experience
and great information that allows everybody
to do their best work.
- I love that framing.
It is challenging though to get the data
and kind of get into those details.
Is there any advice, I mean,
you actually gave some pieces of info
you might want to garner,
but any advice on companies trying to take this data
to the next level because it's in disparate systems.
It's sometimes hard to not need it.
It feels like the army of people to manage, you know,
ways you found people to kind of start that down that journey
to make it simple, easy and actually impactful.
- Absolutely, so yeah, that's a great call up
because there are a couple of elements
that make it harder and a couple of elements
that make it easier.
So on the one hand, you know,
listen, Qualtrics is a great company,
a great place to work.
And one of the things that made Qualtrics so great
and allowed us to have such great performance
was a focus on the key outcome metrics.
Like what truly drives our business forward
to reach 40% growth or whatever, you know,
the growth targets are.
And every company should know what their key metrics are.
The final outcomes, like why are we in business?
If we don't, you know what, that's an effort worth
engaging it.
The other thing that you mentioned
is all these disparate systems,
but they also have disparate owners, right?
People who are in charge of maintaining those systems
and making sure that data is good
and making sure it works properly.
And so there's an element of culture too
that you can leverage within an organization.
And the cultural element there is really of like cross-pollination
and teams that maybe they're not in the same vertical,
but they work together and collaborate.
And if the culture is of collaboration,
you don't have the situations that we've all experienced,
which is like you call somebody up and say,
"Hey, I am running this analysis.
I wanna create this strategic initiative.
I'm working on X, Y, and Z project.
I could use some data out of your system
and you can either get the no problem,
let's go through it and pull it out
and integrate it with what you're doing,
or I'll put it on the roadmap for three months from now.
You know what I mean?
- Totally.
- And so if you create a culture of transparency
and cross-vertical collaboration,
then you're much more likely to have that answer that is,
"Yeah, let's figure out how to make this work."
And that oftentimes is something that gets,
you lead from the top in that regard.
- It does, I mean, it makes a big difference
having that leadership aspect really focus
on what you wanna do and what you wanna be.
Do you feel like you obviously specialized
a lot of this employee side of the house,
how it drives the customer engagement?
And look, there's a lot of focus on AI
and there's a lot of focus on tools,
and we've just talked a little bit about those,
but sometimes we forget the people side of it,
and ultimately customer service in a lot of cases does,
and will always probably require some version of the human
to intercept in some form or fashion.
How will you coach companies on that aspect
to find that balance between technology and employees,
but also to make sure that the employees are ultimately
engaged and ready to rock and roll
so they're delivering that kind of world-class experience?
- Yeah, great call out.
I mean, if I see technology as an accelerator, right?
We're nowhere near the point where technology
is a replacement, right?
We do have--
We're just not, we all, they clickbait articles.
It's like AI will replace the president
of the United States.
Probably not, that's probably not good.
- And you know what, if, listen,
if AI can replace me, that's great.
I'm tired, I wanna relax, that's right.
You know what?
- About what I want to know.
- That AI is never making it to the beach with me.
You can't do that, I got two legs and a beach towel,
I'm gonna fill out.
Anyway, no, but it's really an accelerator.
And, but having said that, it can be a decelerator as well.
And what I mean by that is employee technology experience
is equally important as customer technology.
We've got UI people, user interface and experience,
people who focus so hard on customers
and make just these beautiful apps and portals
and interactions and like, going to a website now
is a completely different experience with 3D and, like also,
but if we don't, so every person, every human being
knows what that is, right?
And knows how good it can be.
And then you sit down in your chair at work sometimes
and you like open up a green screen from 1988,
you know, and your Matthew Broderick playing more games
and you're like, why is this so slow and bad?
And I swear, if another customer service rep
puts me on hold while their computer unfreezes,
I'm going to scream.
I mean, I know they're working on other customers stuff
and that's not really, whatever, that's a digress.
Anyway, the point is, if we can turn our focus,
if we can be selective in the technology that we acquire
and administer internally, it doesn't have to be
consumer grade necessarily, but it can't be 1988
green screen anymore.
That said, we're at a point now where you have the ability
and as technology acquires, you have the ability
to select tools that really, really help employees crush it.
I mean, just having the appropriate amount
and automatically served metadata about the customer
that you're about to talk to, puts you so far
beyond most experiences that customers are going to have
and surprises and delights them in a way
that it feels like they're having an interaction
with someone they actually, that they know
and that knows them, right?
And like, I'm very fortunate to, I'll give you two examples,
I'm very fortunate to get to travel a lot for work
and so I have top tier United status.
And when I call United, right, because of that status,
they pick up and they, without a long hold, they say,
"Hello Mr. Katz, are you calling about your flight to Seattle?
"Are you, it looks like you have a middle seat,
"can I get you an aisle seat?"
It's like, before you even ask them questions, right?
'Cause I'm probably calling about something else entirely,
they're already providing like strong personalized service.
Yeah, right?
And I'm using United Airlines as an example,
'cause like traditionally airlines have low end customer service.
Then the other one is like the DMV.
No one talks positively about going to the DMV,
but my daughter turned 15.
And so it went to go get a driver's permit,
or learner's permit, right?
And you expect to, I was like, girded everybody like,
"Okay, we're gonna wait a line for an hour,
"they're gonna like not care about you."
No, that was exactly not the thing.
They found out that she was there for their learner's permit,
they like made a big deal about it, took the picture,
like a grandulator, you gotta take a little test,
you took the test, they applaud it.
Like it was a completely different experience
that I expected, right?
And that most people probably expect
from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
But the culture there must be something different,
and the leadership must be something different than you expect.
And because I was expecting such a bad experience,
and it was so good, it made it so much better, right?
And there's like these places where,
you know, unexpected surprises occur,
make things great, and let's say you have a company
where you already make things great, that's fine.
Just keep serving up the great insight,
keep personalizing, and like the more you surprise
and delight people, the better.
And you know, the employee element of that
getting up and feeling good about that activity
is like, you know, pretty key to the backbone of that.
- I love it.
So Jordan, to kind of wrap on this,
you know, a lot of companies trying to find this balance,
you know, that you kind of framed up perfectly at first.
We hit a bunch of different topics,
what would be kind of that summary or that thing
you'd leave behind for,
it's obviously a tough environment,
people are trying to find this balance,
yeah, they do need to win,
'cause ultimately, you know,
companies gotta grow to succeed.
Anything you'd kind of leave them with as we close.
Yeah, so like, just as much as you need your company to win,
you need your employees to win,
or feel like they're winning.
And nothing feels less good to an employee
than ambiguity and uncertainty.
And nothing feels worse in that regard
than being yelled at or being challenged by a customer
or having customer ask tough questions
and you're completely unprepared, right?
And you're not unprepared because you're not preparing,
you're unprepared because you're not given
the resources that are at the level
that you could have at this moment.
And right now at this moment in, you know,
Q4 of 2023, you absolutely can have technology
that catalogs all the information
and intelligence about every customer,
synthesizes it up in a way that gives your employees
the right tools and right information
so that your employees can execute
on the best form of promise between your company
and your customers.
Appreciate your time.
Fun top track about customers and employees
and with that we'll kind of wrap
in which everyone a fantastic day.
Thank you.
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