Breaking the CX Barrier: Fresh Tactics for Executive Buy-In

Transcript

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We have a very special guest on today, Jaakko Jutila. Now Jaakko, you are the Vice President of Customer Support at Basware and you’re a SaaS company. And I’m gonna ask you in just a minute if you could expand a little bit more on your background.

[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: You’re an avid sportsman, you’re a father, you have a beautiful family. We’re gonna be focusing today though on your experience, specifically in customer experience and really helping break through the CX barrier, which is a lot of time the way the rest of the company and the C-suite perceives us and who we are, what our role is, and specifically.

[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: Not just a cost center to be contained, right? But a support center that supports not only every different customer but every internal customer, the different departments, and actually aligns with the growth objectives and revenue objectives of the entire business. So we’re gonna start to unravel all of that in a second, but what I’d love to do is I’d love to give you an opportunity, if you wouldn’t mind, just give us a little bit more on your background.

[00:01:12] Jaakko Jutila: Yes, Steve, very pleased to be here. Thank you for inviting. Yes, as I said, I’ve been working with Basware for seven years now in customer support and all the time there. I’m in different kinds of roles here within support all the time. Of course, focusing on the customer experience, which as you said, is really, really important. I would say every day is becoming more and more important, and I’m very lucky really to work in that area. Before that, of course, I also worked actually in customer interface very heavily. I was working at Accenture for 10 years in different kinds of roles there as well.

[00:01:47] Jaakko Jutila: So I mean, I think throughout my career I’ve been lucky to be able to work with, let’s say, the three key things I find very interesting and important: people and leadership, and then of course working with customers, so customer experience as well.

[00:02:02] Steve MacDonald: So people’s at the core of all of this, right? I mean the high-performance teams are what make great companies, and meeting the needs of our customers is what ensures our future. But that is an equation that everyone will nod their head at. In fact, there’s never been an executive at a company that said, “We’re not customer obsessed.”

[00:02:23] Steve MacDonald: Right? But it’s to the degree that we execute on that, and that execution, we play a big part in it. But there is a mindset that we have to shift too often, and that mindset is that we’re a cost center. And with that then comes all these KPIs about managing costs, reducing costs, reducing average handle times, reducing everything, right, where we know that’s not necessarily the right thing to do, to create the relationship, maintain the relationship, nurture that relationship, and therefore have long-term happy customers.

[00:03:03] Steve MacDonald: That which every C-suite executive, we get this, impacts NRR (net recurring revenue). Right? We have to have customers that are happy and want to stay with us. Mm-hmm. And we’re at the forefront of that. So I’d love to just kind of hear your perspective on what is that mindset that can kill growth, right? If we’re looked upon as a cost center, you know, and we’re required and we’re compensated as a cost center, we’ll be a good cost center, right? But we need to grow beyond that. Why do you think it’s this way to begin with, this mindset?

[00:03:39] Jaakko Jutila: That’s a very, very good question, Steve. I mean, it’s from the past. I mean, it’s coming from the very distinct or siloed, let’s say, culture in the past. And, you know, as you said yourself, the customer experience is very, very important here. Yeah. And, you know, support, many times I’ve seen it as well happening. Support is considered just support, right? So your task is just to make sure the customer can use our products. If they have some issues, they reach out to us, but that’s it. And that results in cost savings or let’s say squeezing and focusing heavily on it as a cost center. So minimizing the cost, and it results in situations where we optimize our efficiency, optimize the performance, but only from the internal perspective. And we kind of forget the customer there.

[00:04:22] Jaakko Jutila: And then we are, you know, squeezed up to a point where we can barely keep our nose above the border so that the customers don’t complain too much. Right. So it’s still at a level which is acceptable, but obviously there would be so much more to achieve if we would look into it from the perspective, “Hey, customer support is by far, I think, a function in an organization which has the most daily interactions with customers.” And if you think about how much we could, if we invest a bit more in those interactions or invest a bit more into our people, how much we could actually identify areas which could accelerate growth but also, of course, improve the customer experience.

[00:05:22] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. It’s interesting. So basically there’s a big internal mindset or perception barrier that we have to address. We never got into this part of the business because we thought we had to be salespeople, but we need to sell ourselves. We need to advocate for ourselves. If we’re gonna gain more resources, we’re gonna help the company even better. We need to be our own best advocates, which means we need to sell ourselves internally, which means we need to speak the language of the different departments and what’s important to them and how to position ourselves.

[00:05:57] Steve MacDonald: We think about that with our external customers. What are their needs and how do we talk their language, right? But we have internal customers that are equally as important because that’s the entire experience, all departments working together to serve the customer. So tell me a little bit about, for executives, it lots of times comes down to the dollar sign. Right. You know, and I think you called it the dollar sign dilemma and like quantifying the customer experience impact on the business. How can we even think about starting to do that?

[00:06:37] Jaakko Jutila: Yeah. This is the one thing I constantly keep getting to when I discuss with my peers in other companies, in similar roles. I mean, I myself don’t yet have a perfect formula of converting customer experience improvement to a dollar sign, which obviously our leadership and especially CFO understands. What we’ve seen, of course, at Basware is that when the customer satisfaction has increased, it’s of course many aspects, many activities that have improved or significantly contributed to that. But of course, a big part is played by support. We have improved over years very much, and we’ve seen the correlation in the retention rates of our customers. And of course, for a SaaS company, retention is absolutely critical.

[00:07:27] Jaakko Jutila: Right. Absolutely. And I think when the leadership and executive suite sees that, hey, there might be some correlation between support satisfaction and retention, even though you haven’t kind of cracked exactly the formula if you like, but there is a correlation and that starts to be seen there. And that is one way, in my opinion, to help raise the awareness that, hey, maybe you might want to start considering support not only a cost center but actually something which would be an engine for growth as well.

[00:08:00] Steve MacDonald: So, you know, it’s interesting. I like where you’re going there. I think you used the word translating. Like we’ve gotta translate what we do into information in the way that they’re gonna understand it. And here’s the thing. To be these internal advocates and internal salespeople, there is a world of research out there. If you went on to AI and talked about the incremental impact on revenue, increased CSAT scores or increased NPS scores, you know, there’s a ton of information out there that correlates those two. Like, we don’t have to make these numbers up, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:08:32] Steve MacDonald: But the story can be told, and it’s really interesting. I read this recently in a Harvard Business Review article. We remember things 22 times better if it’s told to us in the form of a story. Yeah, yeah. So tell the story, right? And use industry stats and industry studies that are coming from the biggest consulting firms in the world that are irrefutable. If we do this, every 1% increase in our CSAT scores should impact our net revenue retention by this amount. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:09:15] Steve MacDonald: And so that way it puts it into a, oh, okay, this is a revenue-driving function. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We’re very rarely associated with revenue creation, but we are. We’re directly tied to it.

[00:09:30] Jaakko Jutila: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:30] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. Right. Yeah. So like that’s what I took away from what you’re saying here. We gotta work as hard at making the case, building the templates, the communication, the knowledge base with our external customers. We gotta work really hard to do that. That means researching, that means putting the case together, that means telling the story well. Right. So I love where you’re going here. You talked about something called a seamless journey architecture in our previous conversation.

[00:10:03] Jaakko Jutila: Yeah.

[00:10:04] Steve MacDonald: And what I loved about this is we’re kind of moving now from, okay, we gotta make our case, we gotta be able to communicate it well, to basically identifying the critical integration points that the organization often overlooks. Mm-hmm. So you can tell the story, you can say this is how we impact it, but then you gotta translate it to specifically what we are doing inside of our company. And you talked about these critical integration points, the seamless journey architecture. If you could just explain what that is and what you do, that would be great.

[00:10:38] Jaakko Jutila: Yeah. Let’s see if we have enough time for that. No, of course. I mean, I think there are two layers there. Of course, the customer journey, the customer-visible journey, is the most important. So it needs to start from the very first discussions with the prospect customer to understand their business drivers or those metrics that they’re looking for. If they decide to invest in our services, right? And it needs to start from there over to sales, then the professional services, when the implementation is being done, all the time the same metrics. We are working against, towards the same metrics. Then it goes to production. Support takes over. Support needs to be aware of those. What are the key business KPIs for this customer? And of course, eventually at the same time, the customer success as well, which is then responsible for renewing, helping the customer to realize even more value. So that’s the one layer.

[00:11:40] Jaakko Jutila: But then the other dimension I would say is all the functions which are not in that customer interface. And in support, it means, for example, being very closely connected to R&D because they are the ones actually, if there’s some significant issue with our products, a bug, for example, new feature coming out which is not fully working or something like that, that needs to be, I mean, close collaboration with R&D, for example, and other functions as well.

[00:12:03] Jaakko Jutila: This is, in my opinion, building devoted seamless customer value and seamless customer experience as well.

[00:12:14] Steve MacDonald: So you painted a very vivid picture there of not operating in a silo. We get tickets, we answer, we keep the customer happy. Leave us alone. We’re doing a good job. I got a very vivid picture of collaboration.

[00:12:32] Steve MacDonald: Right, and everybody agreeing on the same direction that we’re headed and how we can all support each other. There’s gonna be a lot of people that are listening in saying, “I’m having a hard time getting the attention of the other departments, R&D or whoever it is, right?” Yeah. What kind of advice would you have for them in order to create those cross-functional relationships that last? Like you’re not saying this because it only comes around when we do a new product launch.

[00:13:04] Steve MacDonald: This is like a continual collaboration, right? This is a constant motion that you’re doing. How would you recommend, if you’re talking to an audience here, and saying, here’s how you can start creating these relationships?

[00:13:18] Jaakko Jutila: To be honest, we had quite a long journey with that, but I think we have achieved something here at Basware as well. So first thing is to find those people who have the mindset in the other function that, let’s say R&D for example, when you get some key people, the critical mass, to understand that we are here together. Actually, of course, support has their own targets and R&D has their own targets or priorities.

[00:13:47] Jaakko Jutila: But at the end of the day, what we are here for, everyone, is the customers. And if we together can make the customer experience good or make the customer happy, everyone wins. But it takes time. You need to find a person. I think that’s one key thing here. You need to find that or those persons in the other function who have that kind of influence there, that they can start shifting the mindset in the other function.

[00:14:12] Jaakko Jutila: That’s one thing. And of course then sharing the credit when there is some success. For example, at Basware, again, we initiated this kind of case reduction approach a couple of years back where we, together with R&D, tried to identify those areas that generate a lot of customer cases and together work to eliminate them by fixing a product, certain feature, making it better, improving the self-service opportunities.

[00:14:40] Jaakko Jutila: And then when we achieve something meaningful, obviously we celebrate it together. Then it kind of feeds itself to a next win if you like.

[00:14:52] Steve MacDonald: So kind of like the picture you’re painting here is that you pick the place where you think you could have the biggest win to start out with.

[00:15:02] Steve MacDonald: Create a win, create a cross-collaboration, get them singing your praises, and that’s gonna make it so much easier to roll out to the next department, the next department, and so on. So kind of pick and choose your battles and where you can get the most traction to begin with.

[00:15:20] Steve MacDonald: And you’ve mentioned R&D a number of times. Mm-hmm. So many organizations have no connection between R&D and the product roadmap, product planning to address the concerns that we get every day. Right. Yeah, that’s a great place to start. A great place to start.

[00:15:37] Jaakko Jutila: It’s a great place to start, for sure. In the past, we needed to squeeze ourselves into those tables with product management where new features, new significant functionality are being designed. And many times when it was in production, when we got to know enough about that and then we saw that, hey, there might be this and that, that could have been thought through a bit better from the customer and from the customer support or supportability perspective. Now we are invited to those tables, which is making it again much, much easier.

[00:16:12] Steve MacDonald: Yep. So every conversation these days has to have an AI component to it, right? And so, you know, I want to talk a little bit about AI, and you called it, I think, smart automation without alienation. Yeah. Because a big part of adopting AI is to serve the customer better, but serving the internal customers should be a part of an AI implementation too. Mm-hmm. Right. In learning, we have the opportunity to learn in a way, at a scale, that we haven’t had before. So give me your thoughts internally about kind of like how you’re thinking about AI and adopting it.

[00:16:53] Jaakko Jutila: What I like about AI is that you can really start small with very low risk and then expand. And yeah, I definitely wouldn’t start from the customer interface directly, but exactly as you said. How do we harness the AI to serve our internal needs first? Of course, in support, it’s straightforward.

[00:17:15] Jaakko Jutila: You can use AI to provide more meaningful content for support agents in the form of knowledge base articles or something that they don’t take that much time to search for. Also, you can use AI to improve the quality and still that the AI is not exactly in the customer interface.

[00:17:34] Jaakko Jutila: Again, what we are using in Basware is we have an AI alerting if there’s something, some cases likely to be escalated, and then we can still address that before the customer actually escalates. So when something is going slightly south, AI will help us get back on track before something tangible happens in a negative way.

[00:17:54] Jaakko Jutila: So all of those are obviously improving the customer experience, but they are behind the customer interface, and that’s a good place to start because if you screw up something with AI, it’s still not directly exposed. There’s still some person in between who will obviously then just ignore those weird hallucinations of the AI and still provide good customer experience.

[00:18:17] Steve MacDonald: Well, I like the direction you’re going here—kind of wading into AI carefully. Because all of us get tons of vendors calling us all the time, right? With the latest AI solution. And it’s overwhelming. It feels like it’s going to take over everything. But you talk about not only testing it internally first, but also about the importance of having a strong foundation in your processes before making big changes and introducing AI. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that—why building that process foundation is so important.

[00:19:02] Jaakko Jutila: Yes, and Steve, I think it can be started from two directions. But the main point, in my opinion, is that you need both components at some point. What we did at Basware was first build the foundation. We created a global process for the entire support organization—unified tools, consistent ways of working, everything standardized. We made the “machine” consistent across all customers, all products, and all regions. That makes it much easier not only to scale when needed, but also to implement new capabilities such as AI. Because when everyone is already working with the same processes and the same tools, scaling AI on top of that becomes much smoother.

[00:19:54] Steve MacDonald: Yes, exactly. You need that foundation before you can start layering optimization or AI on top of it. AI is the shiny object, but without the foundation, it’s “garbage in, garbage out.” It doesn’t matter how advanced the tool is if the data underneath isn’t right. So let me ask you this: none of us thought we’d end up being salespeople or data people when we got into this business. But now we’re constantly advocating for ourselves, and we’ve all become “big data people” by necessity. On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is having a strong data strategy as part of that foundation—not only for optimization today, but also for scaling AI in the future?

[00:21:07] Jaakko Jutila: I would place it close to 10. Maybe not a full 10, because I think you can reach a certain level with AI even if your data structure and governance are only average. But you’ll quickly hit a ceiling. At some point, you’ll have to step back and invest in better data governance and structure. Without that, your AI potential is capped. So yes, you can start without perfect data, but if you want “sky’s the limit” opportunities with AI, your data has to be in order.

[00:21:47] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely.

[00:21:48] Jaakko Jutila: I didn’t give you a precise number, but you got the point.

[00:21:51] Steve MacDonald: I heard it—sounds like a 9.2 to me.

[00:21:55] Jaakko Jutila: Something like that, yes.

[00:22:00] Steve MacDonald: Sometimes the most important question I can ask is: what haven’t I asked? What haven’t we covered that you’d like to share with your peers today?

[00:22:14] Jaakko Jutila: Good question, Steve. I think we touched on it, but I want to emphasize the importance of mindset. That’s really the foundation of great customer experience. No matter how strong your processes or ways of working are, if your people—and not just those in customer-facing roles, but across the company—don’t have a truly customer-centric mindset, you’ll only get so far. So it’s worth highlighting: mindset is everything. And the real question is—how do you build that mindset across the organization? I have my own experiences, but I’d also love to hear from you: in your experience, how do you help others get to the right mindset?

[00:23:03] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, you know, the mindset shift is often shaped by preconceived notions and lingering perceptions. We come in knowing we have to dig ourselves out of that before we can make real headway. And that’s one of my biggest takeaways from our conversation. Because everyone nods their heads—we all agree we need to rise in importance, we need to be seen as more than just a support function. That leads me to my last question. We’ve talked about so much today, and our brains are really only wired to retain two or three key things at a time. So if there’s one takeaway you’d want your peers—the executives watching or listening—to walk away with, what would that be?

[00:24:09] Jaakko Jutila: I’d go back to the idea of spotting those people across the organization who already have the right mindset. Use them as change agents and bright spots to expand that mindset to the broader company. Some people naturally have it, some can learn it, and some may never adopt it. Success depends on how well you harness those who do. They might be hidden in surprising roles, but once you spot them, you can always put them to good use. Leveraging those bright spots—that’s the key takeaway.

[00:24:56] Steve MacDonald: I think that’s phenomenal. Because we all need a place to start, and those internal champions and allies are exactly it. And here’s one thing I know: people are going to have questions after hearing this. Would it be okay if we share a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can connect with you directly?

[00:25:18] Jaakko Jutila: Yes, absolutely. That would be great. I’m looking forward to the collaboration—please do.

[00:25:25] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. You know, the mission of this podcast is to bring in different perspectives and insights from around the world. You’re in Finland, I’m in the United States, and we talk with people everywhere who are wrestling with the same challenges. If we take those challenges head-on and share how we solve them, it really does become the rising tide that lifts all boats. And I think you were a very important part of that tide today. So Jaakko, thank you for coming on.

[00:25:56] Jaakko Jutila: Thank you very much—it was a pleasure being here.