Bridge the Empathy Gap: From Surface Requests to Deep Needs

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve had a very interesting conversation with Daniela Linero. Now, Daniella, you’re not only the Chief Customer Officer at Ontop, but you’re an entrepreneur. You started out a very successful company at a number of rounds of funds. You exited, you sold the company, you’ve moved your way up inside of Ontop. I love your background and your passion, and specifically what we’re going to talk about today, because you’re going to talk about bridging the empathy gap, and we don’t really talk about that enough inside of the industry.

[00:00:40] Steve MacDonald: You don’t goto the latest conference and hear people talking about this, but the way you are framing it is so important, and it’s really about getting away from surface level needs and getting into a request and getting into really deep needs, and so we’re going to start unpacking all of that. But what I’d love to do is just [00:01:00] turn it over to you first and maybe explain a little bit more about your background.

[00:01:05] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Thank you Steve. Thank you for inviting me. I’m really honored to be here. Yes, I’m Daniela Linero from Santa Marta, Colombia. Santa Marta is a really small town in the Caribbean, in north part of Colombia. So, I study industrial engineering in Bogota there, and as you mentioned, I started my first startup, it was my thesis degree, like the college final project, and it was a marketplace in construction connecting builders with suppliers. So, for almost six years, I love it. I was so passionate about it. As CEO, you are everything. You go and talk to investors, you talk to clients, but you also clean the office if that’s necessary. So, I think that helped me to understand a lot about the business, a lot about the culture that I want to build in my startup, and that helped me also understand where I want to head like where I want to go. So, that’s [00:02:00] when I made the decision to join Ontop. I joined as customer success lead as well, always focusing on clients. But, as an entrepreneur, I have had so many areas at Ontop. I have compliance. I don’t know anything about compliance, but at some point I manage compliance, payments, but always the clients have been in the center. So, right now, I’m the Chief Customer Officer like giving clients experience and turning them into like lifetime advocates. 

[00:02:29] Steve MacDonald: That’s our job is to create lifetime advocates. They drive all the key KPIs, and I love your background as a CEO because you have a much broader perspective than a lot of us that come up within a vertical, within a company. You have a broad perspective of what it takes to create long-term sustainable success.

[00:02:48] Steve MacDonald: So, let’s tap into some of your expertise here, and I’m going to start out right away, and we all know the importance of customer relationships, but you talk about breaking through the price [00:03:00] value paradox, and I’d love you to just peel the onion back on that and those big words, “price value paradox” and what does this mean and what do you want us to know?

[00:03:10] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Yeah. So, often in my works, I have found like that problem between the price and what the client is expecting about the product, and sometimes they want to pay a renewal for it, but they are expecting a variety, but no ones tell them that’s not compatible and there’s a mismatch there. So, as an entrepreneur, when we start from scratch and from zero, we need to set a lot of plans, and it’s fine if you do a lot for your clients, even if it’s under price.

[00:03:41] María Daniela Linero Gámez: But when you scale, there’s a moment that you need to put boundaries and you need to put limits, and you need to set clear expectations with the client that for this price, this is what you get. What I have found in my team is that they don’t want to say no to a client. But [00:04:00] it’s better to say, “Hey, this is not in the scope. You want to renegotiate with me? That’s fine. I renegotiate. But you will not have this service. You’ll not have this feature,” and help them understand where you coming from is very important for them to understand the value that you’re providing rather than centering in the price. 

[00:04:20] Steve MacDonald: I had the opportunity to interview a woman who is a C-suite executive that actually had a PhD in pricing, and I didn’t know you could get a PhD in pricing. He said in Germany, here you can. So, we talked a lot about it and the word value, it’s so overused that it’s almost meaningless these days. But your price is one of the most important strategies in your business because it’s a signifier of value. So, breaking it down and making sure that they understand the different components of that value, super important. So, I just want to underscore that.

[00:04:54] Steve MacDonald: I love starting out this way. You have another paradox and you [00:05:00] called it the hospitality revolution, but you’re not in the hospitality business. Just to be clear, Ontop is not in the hospitality industry, but what is the hospitality revolution that you’re talking about here? 

[00:05:12] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Yeah. So, at one point on Ontop, I figured out that maybe we don’t have the best product, and that’s fine. But what we have is humans that understand and knows deeply the need to work with clients and deeply, I mean, not only in a professional space, also in a personal space. 

[00:05:31] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Once, I had this problem that sometimes I wanted hospitality to become a competitive advantage with my clients, and I changed my name. I was VP of Customer Success, I changed to VP of Customer Happiness. I want you to be happy. I want you to have a real, real connection with me. I want you to have a great time. So, sometimes naming things different do all the difference, and not only for my clients, but also for my team. I need to make my client happy and happy client upsells, use [00:06:00] referrals, they turn into advocates. 

[00:06:03] María Daniela Linero Gámez: So, we design like a whole guide of what a hospitality means. I’m going to give you some example. My client, my ICP, is a remote worker. They hire remote. That’s why we help them hire remotely.

[00:06:19] María Daniela Linero Gámez: We created guides of different restaurants that most people visits in the major cities of the world. So, if I’m talking with you and you’re telling me that you’re going to visit Bogota, I’m from Columbia, I can give you the best local recommendations that I can, like you can never imagine. But that’s not my job. That’s not what Ontop does. That is going beyond and is connecting with your personal interest for me to generate some connections, some experience with you. So, I guide my teams that these are guidelines of what hospitality means. Sometimes it’s going beyond SLAs, sense of urgency. If your [00:07:00] client call you and ask you which is the best pizza in Bogota, you’re going to give him the answer of which is the best pizza in Bogota. Like going beyond, and sometimes having little gifts, like I have a lot of clients, they are startup, so they do a lot of fundraising. Each time they have a fundraising, I am going to send them a gift, I’m going to send them a message. Maybe the person is his or her birthday, I’m going to send him happy birthday. 

[00:07:23] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s so important the cumulation of these little things, but with the right focus. So, you talked about a hospitality focus. So, all, everything that you just talked about, it made me think of a concierge at a hotel. They’re going to ask, you might say, “I want tickets to the game tonight,” or whatever it is like, that’s not their core business. They’re a hotel. But they’re going to help you and they’re going to make you feel really good and they’re going to make you feel catered to. So, the little things, even like customer success almost makes me feel like a number. There’s no emotion [00:08:00] to that.

[00:08:00] Steve MacDonald: Is it your success for me as your customer or mine like, Head of Customer Happiness? I want to talk to the Head of Customer Happiness. That it just sets a different tone, a different set of expectations. I love it. Part of this framework or philosophy that you have is a hospitality focus, but you also spoke about something that I think is equally as important is vulnerability. You talked about that as a superpower actually, and I’d love to just hear how does this weave into the story that you’re creating here?

[00:08:35] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Yeah, because part of that hospitality is always being transparent with your client because I don’t want to give you the best experience, but in the end, I’m giving you some like over promising or giving you something that is not true. So, I always, as I mentioned before, set expectations with the client, and sometimes because I’m managing a lot of clients, I’m not the one directly managing them. It’s my team. But when I’m involved with a client, it’s [00:09:00] because there’s something happening. Sometimes I say, “Hey, I will be really upset if I was you. I will be going to another provider at this point because we screw up, and I recognize that.”

[00:09:12] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Even if the other person’s super mad and he’s super upset, just with me recognizing and having empathy of what she or he’s feeling, his mood or feeling is going to change completely. If he or she was mad, I’m going to be more in a position, “Okay, let’s see what she’s going to offer. Let’s see what she’s going to say. She acknowledged that they are not performing as expected,” and sometimes I say, “I cannot promise that this is not going to happen again. I wouldn’t love it to happen again. But if it happens, you can count on me. I can give you my personal WhatsApp. I don’t care. I’m no one. I just want you to be happy. So, I can give you my personal WhatsApp.

[00:09:52] María Daniela Linero Gámez: I’m going to give you this protocol and I will guarantee that if it happen again, we’re going to operate in this manner for things [00:10:00] to go right or to solve it quickly,” and that just change completely the conversation, and the other side saying they are trying. Maybe they are not like in the best position, but they are trying and they’re committing to my success.

[00:10:16] Steve MacDonald: You know how I think about this, so I had a conversation with a gentleman, Chief Customer Officer, that came onto the podcast and he was recounting a conversation he had the day before with his customer, a CISO, a Chief Information Security Officer. That gentleman had just made a purchase, hired an outside company as part of their tech stack, and they put out an RFP, and all 14 companies that answered the RFP, he said they all checked every single box. 

[00:10:47] Steve MacDonald: They all said they could do absolutely everything that we asked. He said, “Here’s the one thing that I wanted to know. I want to know what the experience is going to be like working with you afterwards.”

[00:10:57] Steve MacDonald: Everything that you’ve been saying [00:11:00] up to this point has been creating an experience for the customer that they don’t expect. Being vulnerable, hospitality, even breaking down value for them in a different way that they can clearly understand it. Be real, being authentic. There’s, unfortunately, in the world today, trust is on a deep decline. You look at like the LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer all over Europe, all over the United States, four decade decline.

[00:11:35] Steve MacDonald: So, our goal is to build trust and to create the kind of experiences that you’re talking about there, and the thing is there’s a huge business reward for it and I want to ask you this question because there was a study that I think Forrester did that said 73% of new annual revenue should come from existing clients. We put so [00:12:00] much time and effort on getting new logos in. You’re talking about massive time and effort on existing customers because it’s good business. Is that been your experience from CEO to Chief Customer Officer?

[00:12:15] María Daniela Linero Gámez: 100%. I think, like our current clients are everything out Ontop right now and we really appreciate them and that’s why we treat them as we treat them, and I know that a happy client that is upselling opportunities, that’s renewals and that is referrals, because they are so happy with us that it’s not only their role, but the other roles. If my sister is working on your company, I’m going to refer them to you or sometimes that POC is moving companies like the HR manager is moving to another company and the first thing he or he’s doing there is saying, “I need to work with Ontop because they are not just a payroll platform or a FinTech platform. They provide me all these experiences.” So, of course, this is really like something [00:13:00] that is not only emotional. It brings results because, as I mentioned, people want to feel, people want their work to be fun, to have conversations. So, think about talking with a provider. Like for my clients, I’m a provider. They don’t have time for me.

[00:13:18] María Daniela Linero Gámez: They have a lot of priorities. Their core business is another thing. They’re trying to sell another thing. So, that time that they’re giving to me, I want them to be memorable. I want for them to talk to me. I want for them to think that I’m a trusted partner. 

[00:13:33] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Sometimes clients come here, ” Hey, I have this situation. Have you managed this?” and like, “How can I help you? Do you have any recommendation?” and that can become an upselling opportunity or can become me connecting this client to another client and helping them do business together. Of course, this bring results.

[00:13:54] Steve MacDonald: So, you just made me think differently than I have in my entire career, and I got a few gray hairs. [00:14:00] We don’t necessarily think about, we really have such a small slice of their time and their attention, their focus, and when we have that time, whoa, we better make the most out of it, and that can be right down to the individual agent that they’re talking to that day, and there’s ways to do it. 

[00:14:19] Steve MacDonald: AI today can be looking at and saying, “Hey, of the agents that we have working today, they can look at not only the sentiment analysis of the conversation, but they can look at the sentiment of that agent today. Are they having a good day? Are they doing a good job or should we maybe route some of the tickets to the conversations to somebody else?” It’s that important. That small amount of time can kill our relationship with them. It can also take it to a whole new height, and I hadn’t quite thought about it that way. Thank you. 

[00:14:49] Steve MacDonald: But I have a question like creating this kind of an experience, what happens in a global remote world where maybe when your team members are all over, you’re working with BPO [00:15:00] partners that are in different locations and around the world, how do you maintain this kind of customer excellence in that global, remote world?

[00:15:11] María Daniela Linero Gámez: That’s a really good point, and it happened not only with the clients, but also with the team because we have team all over the world. So, one of the things, as I mentioned before, is set clear communications, and the first thing we do with when we receive a client from sales, that handoff call is, how do you want us to communicate with you?

[00:15:31] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Like, where are your preferred channels? Where are the times you want us to contact you? So, yes, it is like setting expectation and of course it’s better because there’s a lot of cultural difference. If someone from Argentina manage the Argentinian clients.

[00:15:45] María Daniela Linero Gámez: If someone from the US manage the US clients. We try to do it this way, have local people in the regions where we have more clients. But sometimes we couldn’t do that because there are some clients that we have three or four in a specific country that we don’t have [00:16:00] people there. So, we need to understand like who am I talking with. 

[00:16:05] María Daniela Linero Gámez: For example, I learned in the US, the communication is 100% by email. In Latin, via WhatsApp. There’s a lot of information about WhatsApp. So, if you go and text to a US company by WhatsApp, they don’t have WhatsApp.

[00:16:22] María Daniela Linero Gámez: No, never going to reply to you. So, you need to understand, and we also have guides per their countries where we have the majority of our clients where to communicate, how to communicate, which is the style that you should be using, because that’s important on that customer experience that we were talking about.

[00:16:40] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely, and it has a bottom line impact. I think part of what a lot of customer support, contact center leaders suffer from being looked upon as a support department, not a seat at the table. You’re a cost [00:17:00] center and we try to contain costs. So, instead of saying, “Wow, how do we pour more resources into this to do more of everything that you’re talking about here today?” lots of times we’re looked upon from the opposite direction.

[00:17:13] Steve MacDonald: From a perspective of a CEO that you’ve been, from the perspective of the C-Suite, a Chief Experience Officer overseeing contact centers, what’s your perspective on the cost center support role versus, “No, we actually have direct line to bottom line growth of the business.” How do you think about that?

[00:17:35] María Daniela Linero Gámez: I think for me, there are two different things and I have managed both. There’s that support that it’s solving tickets and it went, in our case, that is a platform, the platform is not working, the receipt is not uploading and this worker doesn’t receive the money. That’s their job. They troubleshoot and make everything work as expected. But we have an exception. That is our customer success, [00:18:00] our happiness team, putting dedicated 100% of their job, and that’s part of educating our clients as well, because some of our clients, they come put our customers success for tickets or for solving problems. But we need to redirect them to the support channels because they have the tools. They are the ones managing these in every single way. So, it’s not that I don’t want to solve the problem, it is that in this channel there’s more efficiency because that’s their job. Here, I’m their advocate, I’m that one helping you. Of course, if you give me a ticket number, I’m going to advocate for you here and I’ll make things happen. But I cannot solve it.

[00:18:40] María Daniela Linero Gámez: So, separating the team for me, it’s very important because thing gets tricky when like a whole team do both. If a whole team do both, in my experience, they’re going to be solving problems all day, and they are not going to grow the account network. 

[00:18:57] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because the excellence at [00:19:00] every level is what we have to strive for, and I remember in our conversation from before, there was one element of knowledge that you felt was so important to whether you’re an agent or whether the Chief Customer Officer or the CEO, and it was knowing your ICP, your customer better in your competition. But that takes effort. So, I just love to hear your philosophy behind that.

[00:19:29] María Daniela Linero Gámez: The ICP is everything and the data in your company talks about it. You can go and see who is your user, where are they located, which is their industry. How many, like the age that they have, the range, and you can create in your mind a profile of who is that user because if I’m talking to someone, even in a support chat or in a call, I need to understand who is in the other side, which are the pains, which is the desires, which are they interested.[00:20:00] 

[00:20:00] María Daniela Linero Gámez: For example, for a HR manager, what is their professional goal? They want their workers and the people that work for them in their company to be happy and to be successful. 

[00:20:10] María Daniela Linero Gámez: So, it’s very important that the ICP is in the data, and of course it’s always in the conversation with the clients. Even if you’re in support or in field, the company, you cannot stop talking to clients and ask directly, what is your objective? What we want to achieve? Even your personal life, what is your objective?

[00:20:30] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Do you want to go to a master degree? Do you want to go early home because you have kids? Having that and understanding that makes really the difference, and there is when you can have hospitality incentive and initiative with that person because you understand what they are trying to achieve.

[00:20:47] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, it just you have customers that in the end are saying, “You get me. You understand,” and I want to tie this back to the beginning and we talked about the empathy gap. [00:21:00] Tell me everything that we’ve been talking about here today, how does that address the empathy gap? And maybe even restate what you think that empathy gap really is, again, for us.

[00:21:13] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Yeah. I think maybe it makes us a little bit more conscious that our relationship between a client and a provider, that’s a human connection, and that we are human. We have emotions and we have things that we are looking for. So, what I think and what I have seen in the market is a lot of us in customer success, we are so central in the metrics.

[00:21:33] María Daniela Linero Gámez: What is the lifetime value? What is the cost of the client? What is the NPS? What is the CSAT? is what you need to measure. I’m not against it, but sometimes that NPS would not tell you anything. Maybe I can send you report, but then I don’t give you any referral. For me, it’s better a referral than NPS with the best grade. Of course, we need to have things. We cannot see progress if we don’t know where we were and where we are right now. That’s something we need to do but, in [00:22:00] the meantime, you will get surprised of how this little initiative and little details will move your numbers, and you don’t think that’s the thing.

[00:22:09] María Daniela Linero Gámez: You think that is more calls, more emails, blah, blah, blah. Don’t get me wrong, that also needs to happen. But what I’m saying is that this is going to leverage the activities that your team is also doing. Let’s think customer success, like something holistic. Something good that is helping the client that the metrics are important, but being transparent, vulnerable, setting your expectations, is going to boost the customer than numbers. 

[00:22:34] Steve MacDonald: I have to say we’ve talked about so many important things here, and our poor brains can only take in about two or three things at a time. So, I want to ask you, this is the most important question for everybody who’s on and consuming this podcast today, if there was one thing that you wanted them to make sure that they took away from our conversation, what would that one thing be?

[00:22:58] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Customer success is not [00:23:00] customer service. It’s more than that, and if you include vulnerability and authenticity in the conversation with your clients, you will get surprised with the results that you’re going to have.

[00:23:12] Steve MacDonald: I love it. You wouldn’t believe how many people talk for five minutes when I ask that, what’s the one thing. So, thank you because it’s easy to retain that now. It’s more powerful, and I just have to tell you, you’re a fireball. Like, I just feel your passion coming through. I’d love to be a client on the other side of our conversations.

[00:23:30] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I know is going to happen. People are going to have questions. Would it be appropriate that I hand out a link to your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out and contact you?

[00:23:40] María Daniela Linero Gámez: Yeah, 100%. I’m going to tell you something. We didn’t plan this, but because I’m so passionate about vulnerability, about mental health, about authenticity, I have a podcast as well. It’s in Spanish. Before my community in Spanish, but it’s called The Mindset Journey because I’m really passionate about this, and I believe that everything’s taught [00:24:00] here. It’s about mindset.

[00:24:01] María Daniela Linero Gámez: It is nothing more. So, yes, of course you can share my LinkedIn profile. You can share my podcast for the ones that talks in Spanish. So, yes, of course.

[00:24:09] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. We’ll be sure to do that, and I just wanted to say the mission of what we’re trying to do here on the podcast is to bring together just different perspectives, different insights, with different people, with different experiences in different parts of the world and different businesses. But if we can all learn from each other, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats, and you were an amazing part of that rising tide today. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on.

[00:24:34] María Daniela Linero Gámez: No, thank you very much for inviting me. It’s an honor for me.