Beyond the Numbers: How Data Reliability Transforms Business

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspective podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a really interesting conversation with Marcia Daniel. Now, Marcia, you are the Chief Client Officer at Ferrilli, and you work in the higher education industry. You’ve done that for a number of decades.

[00:00:21] Steve MacDonald: And survived, by the way. So congratulations to you on that. That is a very large accomplishment, especially in today’s day and age and what’s going on in higher education. But what I’d love to do is, we’re gonna talk today about moving beyond things that have started to take over in terms of our focus.

[00:00:41] Steve MacDonald: We have more numbers, we have more data than we’ve ever had before, but what really transforms businesses are the stories that we tell out of that, the connection, the experiences that we create for you, your students, or in the broader business community, our customers, our clients, right? So that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today.

[00:01:04] Steve MacDonald: But before we do that, I would love just to give you an opportunity to expand a little bit more on your background before we get started.

[00:01:12] Marcia Daniel: Well, I did start in higher education and worked for 31 years in higher ed administration. Ran the gamut from workforce development all the way through Executive Vice President, went into the other world of higher ed, which is technology, and was able to be responsible for the implementation of an ERP system in 58 community colleges in North Carolina and not being a technical person.

[00:01:44] Marcia Daniel: That’s something that I loved. Joined the world of higher ed with technology and higher ed technology after I left the actual physical brick and mortar and have spent the last several years with companies in ed tech.

[00:02:01] Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. I mean, what’s great is that you’re at a company that actually has a Chief Client Officer. Not every company does, and that shows the focus on the client, who is the highest authority in our business.

[00:02:15] Steve MacDonald: Right? There is no higher authority than that. And I’d love to just kind of have us start out our conversation with your client-first or customer-first philosophy. And you talked about it, how it literally drives everything, and I just love to get your point of view on that.

[00:02:33] Marcia Daniel: Well, it does drive everything. From a college or university perspective, it is the student. Yeah. From the industry, whether it’s microwaves, whether it is technology, AI, it doesn’t matter. It’s your client, it’s your customer. And if the customer is telling you something repetitively about your product or your people and you’re not listening, then you’re not doing your job.

[00:03:00] Marcia Daniel: And unfortunately, Chief Client Officers are not the most popular people in their environment, in their world. And sometimes we are the first expenditure that can be cut because people say we won’t impact the bottom line, when in fact we should be the first hired and the most listened to.

[00:03:19] Steve MacDonald: Well, I’m gonna underscore that in a rather big way because McKinsey did a study recently, and they talked about how not only CX is the number one differentiator in the market, but talking to our customers — for you, students; for any of us that are listening here, our customers — having a voice of the customer program, a deep understanding, leads to a better customer experience.

[00:03:47] Steve MacDonald: Which is the number one differentiator in the market. So the idea, and I cringe when I hear it because I talk to executives all the time that are in support and CX, and we feel like we’re a support department, that we don’t have a seat at the table, yet we represent the highest voice of authority in the business.

[00:04:09] Steve MacDonald: How do you combat that? You’ve obviously had time, and you have the stature and the position to do that. How do you prove our value internally, or how do you even start down that path?

[00:04:21] Marcia Daniel: Steve, I think from a prior conversation we had, you know, any and everything I think and say goes back to data. And it’s one thing to talk about personalities.

[00:04:34] Marcia Daniel: We can talk all day long and that’s not gonna get us anywhere. But you know, I think if you’re in customer experience, client experience, you’ve got to have your data. You’ve got to know what — is there an area that you always hear is problematic? If so, pull the data together with your Net Promoter Score, with your help desk, your CSAT.

[00:05:00] Marcia Daniel: Begin to pull that information together. If you want to undertake, which is a big undertaking, do your own individual survey. One of the things that I do at Ferrilli, with the help of some really great technology people, we do an end-of-the-year survey. It’s not enough that at the end of the project or in the middle of a very long project that we send out the NPS.

[00:05:23] Marcia Daniel: At the end of the year, would you do it all over again with Ferrilli? And would you recommend us? Yeah. That tells me, and I look at who responds. I don’t get a name, but I can see an institution, and oh my gosh, you know, we had so much pain with them. By golly, they’d do it again. Yeah. It’s kind of like a marriage — at the end of each year when you celebrate that anniversary.

[00:05:52] Marcia Daniel: Do you look at one another and say, I’d pack my bags and travel with you all over again? I think it’s the data and working with people. You’re not trying to get someone; it’s not a personality trial or a personality pageant, but you really want to make your product, whatever it is, better.

[00:06:12] Steve MacDonald: You know, this constant access to feedback from the customer. We have so many data points that aren’t customer-driven that we can become in this illusionment that we are getting their feedback. But what you’re talking about is specifically the world of customer data, right? And understanding their feelings, their input, their feedback.

[00:06:39] Steve MacDonald: In the world of higher education, it’s not a lot different. There are some internal politics. There are things that get in the way sometimes of what we feel is doing the right thing. How do you navigate internal politics? People call it internal alignment, basically. We’re not all on the same page.

[00:07:02] Steve MacDonald: No, and we have competing objectives and end points in mind. How do you use your position as the Chief Client Officer and understanding of the student to help navigate that?

[00:07:16] Marcia Daniel: If I had to think of a word of the day, when we used to get a print paper delivered to our home each morning, somewhere in that paper there was a word of the day.

[00:07:24] Marcia Daniel: My word of the day would be adaptability. And it’s adaptability in the workforce and of the workforce. If I please the clients in 2025, if I don’t change the way I am doing it, the way I’m delivering the training, if I don’t change that in 2030, I’m not going to be pleasing anyone.

[00:07:48] Steve MacDonald: Yeah.

[00:07:49] Marcia Daniel: And I think I go back to our pandemic when we were all shut down and we couldn’t get haircuts, and we couldn’t go anywhere, and we all got used to being remote employees. Well, our clients, especially if you’re in a human capital environment, our clients got used to — we weren’t on their campus, we weren’t in their industry.

[00:08:08] Marcia Daniel: And so price was a little lower. Now, after we opened everything up, three and a half years later, they want us there, but they don’t want to pay the price of all that travel. So both the client and the company have to be adaptable. How do we deliver the same quality, and how do we please you and not break the bank?

[00:08:33] Steve MacDonald: I think so. That really gets into an interesting point because the common things are funding in your world. Our resources overall will go up and down. But we have to maintain a really, really high level of service for our students, for our customers. Yeah, exactly. But there’s constant uncertainty of the resources that we have to do that, the internal politics around that, as you were just talking about.

[00:09:02] Steve MacDonald: That’s not easy to navigate. How have you, over your career, how have you navigated that? Because especially in the world of higher education, you’re living in funding uncertainty all the time.

[00:09:14] Marcia Daniel: Absolutely. I think you have to know history, and you have to know the history of your company.

[00:09:19] Marcia Daniel: And for me, as a student of higher ed, I’ve gone back into since the late 1800s, early 1900s, and when there is an event in the country or the world, when that event occurs, what has happened both politically as a result and what has happened to higher ed nationwide as a result?

[00:09:45] Marcia Daniel: And what you begin to see are patterns, and you will see after each war, you know, we formed CC Camps. We built North Carolina’s beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway that runs North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. We saw that the GI Bill — when our Vietnam veterans came back — each time we’ve had a major disruption around the world.

[00:10:09] Marcia Daniel: We have seen higher ed have to change, and we’ve seen the way we deliver it change. Well, that’s not any different from our cars, our washing machines, and everything else that we see, because what we are doing is we have to adapt to and meet that customer, that client demand — whether it’s delivery, it is speech pattern, it’s the mode of operation for so many companies.

[00:10:37] Marcia Daniel: The one thing they have in common that parallels higher education — how do you afford the equipment to produce new and better and smaller? Yeah. And that’s exactly what higher ed faces. So there are so many parallelisms.

[00:10:55] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because we need to constantly look for efficiencies. We need to constantly look for ways to do things better. AI is making massive inroads in that area. But where this all comes together, and you talked about data before, and now, you know, working in times of uncertainty and then technologies that help bridge that gap. You mentioned something in our last conversation about data reliability.

[00:11:24] Steve MacDonald: Yes. I doubt you or me or any of us on the call here got into this industry thinking — or the industries that we’re in — thinking we’ve got to be really astute about our data. We have to be data analysts in a way, like we have to worry about data reliability. But why is that so important today?

[00:11:45] Marcia Daniel: I think it’s important because whatever industry you’re in, there is a direct correlation to customer satisfaction. And that includes your delivery of whatever you’re delivering to your sales and to your bottom line, to your profit, to your profitability. Yeah. And if you’re beginning to see an industry that’s continuing, or your company is continuing to decline, only your data will tell you why.

[00:12:17] Marcia Daniel: Not what you read in USA Today or in Forbes. Great, but it’s your own data. You have the answer, and you just need to make it granular enough that it’s capturing what you need. 

[00:12:32] Steve MacDonald: And I think you mentioned also that it’s not only capturing what you need, but if there are inconsistencies in that data, it just creates chaos.

[00:12:42] Steve MacDonald: If you could explain a little bit more. Yeah.

[00:12:45] Marcia Daniel: How are you gathering your data, and are you gathering it in such a way and asking the question in such a way that it’s apparent you are open-minded and you’re on a search, you’re on a mission? Because I’ve read surveys, and I immediately thought, oh my gosh, why are they after so-and-so’s division?

[00:13:08] Marcia Daniel: Why are they trying to frame this division? And so it’s taking the personal out and really dealing with capturing the information that you’re asking for.

[00:13:21] Steve MacDonald: I’m gonna dive even deeper into this data area because I know higher education — you are one of the bigger targets for hacking today, right?

[00:13:30] Steve MacDonald: Mm-hmm. So in terms of cybersecurity and the data and the protection and the reliability of that data, I guess the question here is, this is all underscoring the importance. You talked about the importance at the very beginning of data giving us the ability to make the right kinds of decisions and serve our students, our customers, create the right kind of CX or the experience, and it all comes down to all these different layers of working with the data, even down to cybersecurity. So I haven’t talked to too many Chief Client Officers about cybersecurity, but you brought it up.

[00:14:10] Marcia Daniel: It’s one of my loves. Yes.

[00:14:12] Steve MacDonald: Yes. Tell me a little bit about why, just to begin with, you’re involved in that and its importance.

[00:14:19] Marcia Daniel: Well, I think you mentioned it early on — higher education is number two on the target list of the most hacked industries.

[00:14:28] Marcia Daniel: Mm-hmm. Health education is next, or health — the entire health industry. But we have a strong and growing cybersecurity division at Ferrilli, and it’s something that we understand that a lot of companies, a lot of colleges, can’t afford their own Chief Security Officer. And it was with that idea that we started pulling it together, saying, how can we help not only the large R1 universities, but how do we help our small independent colleges, our faith-based institutions, our community colleges? What can we do for them, and how do we train them to do it themselves? That’s where our interest is.

[00:15:09] Marcia Daniel: But regardless of what industry you are in, if you aren’t protecting your data — and especially if you’re relying upon donors, even if you are putting information into whatever your product is — if someone can hack into that, that’s a security issue. It is synonymous with “I don’t trust that company.”

[00:15:35] Marcia Daniel: People do not forget; they don’t forget those company names when that happens.

[00:15:42] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like in our industry, right? One bad experience and we lose them, right? Mm-hmm. So that’s one of those kinds of experiences. The last part of this conversation on data is you were very, very eloquent about saying the data itself, on its own, is important, but if you don’t turn it into the right story to influence and, you know, weave through those politics and get the job done, then you’re not doing service to that data, right?

[00:16:21] Steve MacDonald: Tell us a little bit about — in higher education — what’s the story that needs to be told, right? That your data has that is even registering, you know, with the provost or associate provost, the leaders in the institution?

[00:16:28] Marcia Daniel: Your data will tell you — and this is not popular — but your data in higher ed is going to tell you where your students are coming from, what their background is.

[00:16:39] Marcia Daniel: Your data’s going to tell you if your curricula — are you on the right track with what you’re offering? What makes up that degree that you are going to be awarding? It’s going to tell you who you’re weeding out and how do you change that, all the way through to the consistency in your data.

[00:17:00] Marcia Daniel: That’s an important thing, and that brings Ferrilli back in when we’re looking at training new registrars and new people in the higher ed industry. We need to make sure that they know what they’re doing, that they’ve been trained on their ERP, their technology solution, so institutions are getting that consistent data.

[00:17:18] Marcia Daniel: I think the cybersecurity comes back full circle with the data because if a college is hacked, then every single person, from employees to students to donors, they’re all going to get that letter that you have to send out that says, “Our system — we got into it.” That becomes a marketing nightmare, a trust issue, and we go back to our data.

[00:17:47] Marcia Daniel: What if we can’t go to our system and pull that data of who all of those donors were? Then we’ve got another nightmare. So it’s all cyclical, but it’s so important that — it’s like that car or anything else — it’s got to run every time we want it to. 

[00:18:06] Steve MacDonalds: Yeah. You know, sometimes one of the most powerful questions I can ask is the fact that I don’t necessarily know the right questions to ask from your world.

[00:18:16] Steve MacDonalds: And what haven’t we covered that you would really want to make sure was a part of this conversation for the audience?

[00:18:26] Marcia Daniel: I think regardless of the size of an industry, probably with a Chief Client Officer — anyone in that realm — the hardest part they will ever have are those phone calls, that information they get, those office visits where they hear, “We are really messing up, and we are disappointing our customer daily.”

[00:18:48] Marcia Daniel: And let me tell you what we’re doing, but now you can’t tell anybody I told you this. Yeah. Yeah. It’s brushing your teeth every morning — maintaining that credibility that you want to maintain to go into a CFO or CEO office and say, “I’m gonna lay something on you, and I’m not telling you where I heard it — and I won’t.”

[00:19:14] Marcia Daniel: That is the number one hard thing to do. And we’re all faced with it.

[00:19:17] Steve MacDonalds: Oh, oh, absolutely. You know, I wanna focus for a minute on some of the positive things that you’ve been able to do and how you’ve impacted the overall client experience. And so I just wanna ask you — if you look back over your career, what are you most proud of?

[00:19:35] Marcia Daniel: I think it’s the integrity that I brought to higher ed, to every role I had — to bringing in an $82 million statewide project, to what I’m doing now. Even in my last position with another company for almost a decade, I managed our lobbyist. But I was always me — just like I can’t change this North Carolina accent.

[00:19:57] Marcia Daniel: I’m not going to change the message I’m delivering. And people count on that. That’s what I’m probably most proud of.

[00:20:06] Steve MacDonalds: Well, we’ve talked about so much that our poor human brains — we can only remember about two or three things at a time. If there was one takeaway that you wanted to make sure that the audience had that’s watching here today, what would that one takeaway be?

[00:20:25] Marcia Daniel: Be yourself. It’s hard enough to be yourself and be successful. But to have to be someone you’re not with every job you have — is impossible.

[00:20:37] Steve MacDonalds: I love that. It’s so succinct. You wouldn’t believe how many three-, four-, five-minute answers I get. It’s so true. If we’re not true to ourselves, then it’s inauthentic — and the experiences and the relationships we have, because we are all in a very much relationship-based business here, right?

[00:20:46] Steve MacDonalds: So, being ourselves is the foundation to that relationship.

[00:21:00] Steve MacDonalds: Absolutely. I just wanna say that I know one thing — people are gonna have questions. If they had questions, is it appropriate that we gave out a link to your LinkedIn profile as well?

[00:21:13] Marcia Daniel: Absolutely. Yes. Yes. If we don’t do that, then I think we failed today.

[00:21:20] Steve MacDonalds: Yeah. Yep. I agree a hundred percent. And you know, the mission behind this podcast is that we take all of our years of experience and perspectives and insights, and we share it with each other.

[00:21:32] Steve MacDonalds: Right? And if we do that, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And I just wanted to say thank you — thank you for coming on and being a big part of that rising tide today.

[00:21:44] Marcia Daniel: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it.