CCOs: Turning Contact Centers into a Competitive Advantage

Transcript

[00:00:08] Steve: Welcome everyone to the contact center perspectives podcast. I’m Steve McDonald, your host. Today, not only do we have an incredibly special guest, but we have a topic of utmost importance to your organization. It’s about turning contact centers into a competitive advantage, not just being perceived as a cost center.

[00:00:28] Steve: You look at the bill monthly and think, ‘Ah, yikes.’ But how does that play into your organization’s long-term growth and opportunities? Now, Tracy Virtue is the chief customer officer at NEOGOV, but that just scratches the surface of who you are and what you do.

[00:00:46] Steve: I will say a few things here; let you expand on them. Through acquisitions, you have just completed merging not only the NEOGOV contact center but three different contact centers—four coming together as one. You’re the president of one of those new acquisitions, and you’re in charge of all P&L. Expand a little bit on what you’re doing there.

[00:01:08] Steve: Then, we’ll discuss how to turn those contact centers into a competitive advantage for the organization. It’s important for everybody to understand that you are an expert in thinking holistically throughout the organization and how the different departments function together. I’ll let you explain that a little bit more. 

[00:01:28] Tracey: Thanks, Steve. Maybe to help people understand why I am the way I am, let me give you a little background in my early life because that laid the foundation. My father was a diplomat, promoting trade between Canada and other countries. So, I’m originally from Canada.

[00:01:43] Tracey: This meant that I moved a lot of different places as a kid. So, if you’re moving a lot and want to have friends, you must know how to adapt to change. When I was little, I moved to the Island of Trinidad in the Caribbean. I was the only Canadian little white girl in school. How did I make friends?

[00:02:00] Tracey: Totally different cultures from all across the world were there. So, you must learn how to communicate, connect, and understand others. As a little kid, I had to learn to have friends. It actually laid the foundation for all that I do in my career.

[00:02:17] Tracey: I make friends in other departments. I understand what they do, and then I can connect the dots. So, it gives me a good holistic picture of an organization. It’s all about making friends and getting stuff done. 

[00:02:31] Steve: It is. One really strong skill set is the ability to influence people. You have to influence how they work together, why they should work together, and how they benefit themselves. I know you’re not just making friends, but you’re a good salesperson, too, because you have to be.

[00:02:49] Tracey: Yes, I had that job too.

[00:02:50] Tracey: One of the things we were talking about off-camera was how many different roles I’ve played in an organization. When I started out in my career, I was going to be a chemist. I wanted to create and innovate, so the scientific method is very important to me. What’s your hypothesis?

[00:03:03] Tracey: Let’s go and test it. Did it work or not? These are how you also adapt to change and come up with innovations. Then, I became a programmer. ‘Okay, let’s make the software work.’ Technology is a theme for me. How do you make software work? Then, how do you improve the user experience?

[00:03:19] Tracey: How does that system work with other systems? And then how do you sell that stuff? How do you market that? How do you do consulting? How do we do HR? I’ve done all those things. Then you get into operations. How do you make things more efficient? How does a contact center relate to returns, fraud prevention, marketing, or upselling? All of those pieces of finance: How do we collect the bills? How do we ensure customers are paying for all those pieces connected? By playing roles in all those different departments, now as the executive, I understand what happens in each.

[00:03:56] Tracey: Where are the barriers between them and how to break down those silos because if you can get your team all working in harmony, you can scale mountains. 

[00:04:04] Steve: Oh, absolutely. One of the things I said is that I wanted to make sure we properly introduce you as an expert at the beginning.

[00:04:11] Steve: And I think you have just done that. 

[00:04:13] Tracey: Yes, sometimes it’s an experience of hard knocks, but overall, using your curiosity helps you discover new things, and adapting to change enables you to figure things out. How do you use that to make business processes better? Better people, better. 

[00:04:28] Steve: Let’s get into this. I’m sure everybody’s now read to understand how we are making contact centers specifically in the agents and the operations there, into a competitive advantage. Still, you wanted to lay the foundation for just how important the customer experience is. If we’re going to talk about a competitive advantage, we want to start with the experience itself. You have a story that you wanted to take us through. 

[00:04:51] Tracey: I do. I will tell you why your contact center can be a customer advantage and a competitive advantage. My husband is an avid cyclist. He can be outdoors, but the weather doesn’t always let you go outside.

[00:05:04] Tracey: So he’s got these earbuds. They’re Jaybird earbuds, and he listens to music or watches a movie or something. This is a guy who’ll do 76 miles on a stationary bike. These earbuds need to work. He’s listening. Then one of them stops working. I don’t want to have just one earbud in. So, what am I going to do?

[00:05:18] Tracey: He goes online because everyone will go online first. All right, what do I have to do? I reset it this way. This isn’t working. It’s not working. It goes on to forums, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to have to call. I don’t want to call the call center, but I don’t know what else to do.’ So he finds a phone number.

[00:05:32] Tracey: Yay. They had one. He called up, and he thought the agent was so nice. He was like, ‘How can I help you?’ He already had immediate empathy. So, the agent immediately empathized with them and asked him what he had done so far.

[00:05:48] Tracey: He says we don’t need to go through those steps again because of what my husband was dreading. ‘This guy will make me go through everything I’ve already done.’ But no, ‘Hey, customer! I hear where you are in trying to solve the problem. I’m not going to make you repeat that journey. Let’s go to that next level.’

[00:06:01] Tracey: Then, they went back and forth, trying different things. The agent had to go and get different tools on his side for resetting. It took 15 to 20 minutes before they solved it. Now you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, 15, 20 minutes?’ What’s my speed to resolve?

[00:06:16] Tracey: All your metrics are going through. Here’s what happened at the end. He hangs up the phone and says, ‘Tracy, your contact center needs to be like this. I will never buy another type of headphones. I don’t care if they’re wrong again. This guy made it right. He made it fixed. I feel great. I’m excited. Everything works.’

[00:06:31] Tracey: This happened years ago, and he still tells the story today. So, here is an agent who’s on the phone. He’s just trying to solve a customer’s problem. What does he get? He’s got someone busy telling everybody about the service and not even caring that the product didn’t work how he wanted it to because the service was so great he would return.

[00:06:51] Tracey: So, he’s got a customer for life, referrals, word of mouth, reputation, all of that. 

[00:06:55] Steve: We talk a lot about product differentiation in business. What you just explained there is equally, if not more, important than the product; a parody product with a better experience behind it will win every time. 

[00:07:10] Steve: I’m not knocking product differentiation at all, but what a powerful story. I’m sure he’s in cycling groups and forums and raves about it. Your net promoter score for Jaybird just goes way up. 

[00:07:23] Tracey: Your customer satisfaction score is 10 out of 10, 5 out of 5.

[00:07:28] Steve: What’s interesting is that it didn’t do anything great for your KPI and average handle time. We did a podcast a couple of weeks ago about how sometimes the goal is to have average handle times, key KPIs, and even CSAT go in the wrong direction.

[00:07:47] Steve: For the right reasons, sometimes the harder things AI can’t handle are sudden media and subject flow-ups that take longer to resolve. But you want your live agents to be able to handle those correctly at different levels. Sometimes, you want KPIs to go in different directions.

[00:08:03] Steve: We always say different things when we report to the board: ‘Yep. CSAT is going up. Average handle times, the first-time response is going down.’ But you can be strategic about it.

[00:08:11] Tracey: Sometimes, you must flip it on its head. We want our average handle time to go up. Why do we want it to go up? Because we’re solving the customer’s problem and learning more about our customer. I want to stay calm, but this is where we can gain some competitive advantage. They’ve got a captured audience right there on the phone with them.

[00:08:27] Tracey: How much information can you get about your customer? How much can you tell them about your products and the added advantage of your service? Let’s think about it. 

[00:08:34] Steve: The devious side of Tracy is coming through. I love it. We mentioned up front that your experience is holistic, but the impact of the contact center is also holistic. Explain how that all works. We lightly got into it in your introduction. 

[00:08:52] Tracey: We can think about it this way. When you have a product or a service, you must first create it. So, there’s your product and your engineering. Then, you need people to know about it; that’s your sales and marketing.

[00:09:01] Tracey: Then, depending on your product, you need someone to deploy it or deliver it; that’s your delivery side. Then, you need someone to help when things go wrong, or people have questions. Then there’s the glue that we need to talk about, the piece that keeps it all together: finance and internal operations.

[00:09:17] Tracey: All these pieces are like a car. You’ve got an engine, you’ve got transmission, you’ve got wheels, you’ve got a body, and you’re not driving a car without wheels. You can have a great engine, so all of these have to work together for the company to grow and for it to be successful; they each play a role and play into each other because they all have pieces of information about the customer journey.

[00:09:42] Tracey: The customer journey is the customer experience. If you think about a customer, they first hear about you from marketing. They may engage with your website or get a call from a salesperson. They research, ask other customers, look at the price, and then decide to buy, but now they have to get it.

[00:10:02] Tracey: If it’s software, because I’m in the software industry, you have to implement your software.  Sometimes, you just download it from the Apple or Android store, and it works, but you must get it in place and configure it. You’re going to have to learn about it. You’re going to have to configure it. The more complicated it gets when you get into enterprise software, the more there is to learn the customer’s journey. Look at all the different departments that customers just touched, and then you’re thinking about all that, not just one thing. 

[00:10:30] Steve: Give me a story about contact centers working with marketing contact centers working with product development.

[00:10:37] Steve: You’ve been doing this a while. Give us some realistic examples of how the contact center impacts those other departments, and then the value can be reciprocated. 

[00:10:46] Tracey: At NEOGOV, we acquire other companies and bring them in.

[00:10:52] Tracey: I’m the president of one of the acquisitions. We bought this company, and it’s a complicated payroll HR, time, and attendance-type system. It was a standalone system, but we sell multi-tenant software as a service. So, we must take that product and have our engineers create it into multi-tenant software.

[00:11:10] Tracey: It’s not exactly easy. What do we do with customers on the old system to get them to come to the new system? Sometimes, you need to start slow. So, we only took some of the features of the original one. Not all of our customers could just come over. So, our contact center is now working with our customers.

[00:11:27] Tracey: They have the ear of the product folks say, ‘Hey, this is what they’re trying to do. This is a use case that you can have to test. Are you building it the right way? This is the problem that they’re trying to solve.’ So they can get it without having to interview customers because it’s hard to get people on the phone and take their time. They can just go and talk to the contact center and tell me the story the customer gave you about what they’re trying to do with our software and what can happen. The contact center could test it. ‘Hey, could you go and do what your customer told you about and tell me if it worked right for you?’ QA can understand more of the scenarios that they have to be able to go through to make sure the software is working as expected.

[00:12:04] Tracey: So, you wouldn’t necessarily think your contact center will help with product and engineering, but yes, they can. 

[00:12:08] Steve: So, I can only imagine how the feedback on expectations set by marketing campaigns or similar things and collaborating with the marketing department.

[00:12:17] Steve: This raises the bar for what we should expect agents to do, how they should be trained, how they interact, and how they report. You’re evolving quite a bit—the traditional contact center model. 

[00:12:36] Tracey: Correct. In my view, it’s not a cost center—it’s a value center, but you have to set it up correctly, and it doesn’t happen immediately. It’s an evolution. As companies grow, so can how they use a contact center. I think that as you mature, and if you can move fast and fix things, you can leverage your contact center much more than I think most companies do today.

[00:13:01] Steve: One of the points that you wanted to make on this podcast was why you want to invest in your frontline people. You’ve explained why you should explain more and how you invest in the frontline people.

[00:13:18] Tracey: Yeah. If you’re in a call center, whether email, chat, or phone, why are customers calling in? Are they calling to say thanks? They’re not calling because they’re happy. They’re calling because something’s not right. It’s not working. They need help finding information.

[00:13:35] Tracey: The people who receive the customer call deal with customers who are not at their best. So, they need to know how to de-escalate an irate and frustrated customer, turn a negative situation into a positive one, and create a positive environment for their customer. Remember the Jaybird thing I was talking about?

[00:13:53] Tracey: My husband was so mad. This hardware was not working, and I was like, ‘How’s your day going? What do you do with the earbud?’ The people in the call center are quite social, so that they will engage with the customer. They’ll talk to them like real people because they’re there to help, right?

[00:14:10] Tracey: They want to be of service, customer service. You’re getting a negative customer, but you will create that environment if you want to be helpful. What are we, as an organization, doing to make sure that the mental health of our team members who are getting all of this negative flack coming in? Don’t take that home. Don’t own it and wear it, then become depressed, sad, and not happy when customers call.

[00:14:34] Tracey: You want to create that positive customer experience. You’ll likely have a customer for life if you can turn a negative into a positive. Then, if you’re just grumpy and get them off the phone, and I need two minutes on my average handle time, you’ve got to get off the phone from there.

[00:14:47] Tracey: We think about their mental health, but we also think about whether they’re wearing headsets. Are they comfortable headsets? They’re probably wearing them for eight hours a day. Do they have glasses like me and headsets pushed on the arm, so you get a headache? Can you get different ones?

[00:15:01] Tracey: Maybe that’s more of an earbud-type thing. Is it noise-canceling? What’s happening around them? What environment do you have for them? Do they have multiple monitors? They can have their level two research over here, and they’re frequently asked questions here. Then, their customer information is here so they can access everything they need to provide service and help the customer.

[00:15:21] Tracey: As an organization, what are we doing for that? Wouldn’t it be terrible if you had a mouse that didn’t work and were trying to go through three screens? Get them some good mice. But think about it: If you say contact center, you guys are the most important because you’re a frontline with the customers, but we won’t invest in getting you good keyboards or mice.

[00:15:44] Tracey: Wait a minute. You just said I was important, but I need the right tools to do my job as efficiently as possible. It’s like the cap on the toothpaste—when people get divorced because you can’t put it back on it.

[00:15:55] Tracey: You told me I’m important but didn’t give me a good mouse. So, am I really important? 

[00:15:59] Steve: Your actions speak louder than words. You can say you’re important, but if you need to do the things and follow up with the actions that say you are important, that makes a big difference.

[00:16:09] Tracey: The other thing to consider is career mobility. Many people come into a company; their first role is in the contact center. You have a fantastic training ground. This is like AAA baseball for the major leagues. People are coming in, and they will learn all about your product because they will support it. 

[00:16:28] Tracey: They’ll learn about your customers because they’ll interact with them. They’ll also learn about other aspects of the organization because they need information from them, or those other aspects, like sales, are coming to the contact center.

[00:16:40] Tracey: ‘Hey, if customer XYZ calls, let me know because I’m trying to sell them this other product we have. So those folks, if you talk to them about career mobility, we want you to learn these skills so that you could maybe go into sales or customer success, which is like the outbound trying to make sure customers are happy, orderly business reviews, all that versus the inbound.

[00:17:00] Tracey: How do I react to somebody calling in? But they could also get into the product. They may become business analysts. They could become QA folks here. You’ve got a group where you have engaged employees if you can help them with their career mobility and they grow. They’re bringing their A-game to work every day.

[00:17:17] Tracey: They’re bringing their A-game to the customer, and you don’t have to go and hire more people. They’re already there. 

[00:17:23] Steve: I’ve talked to many chief customer officers and experienced officers. Everybody talks about career mobility to address the agent turnover issue.

[00:17:35] Steve: Give them a place to go. It has yet to be discussed as the best training ground for employees. For a benefit and, again, a part of that competitive advantage. You’re building as an organization how the company benefits from it—a training ground for the best employees that you could have.

[00:17:57] Tracey: It’s a competitive advantage because you’re not fighting [00:18:00] for that same next QA person or that same next product person. You grew them. And if you’re investing in your employees, you get loyal employees. You get employees who have different ideas. And I understand there’s a balance between wanting outside ideas and not just someone who’s always been in the same.

[00:18:15] Tracey: But you’ll have that balance naturally because not everybody in your contact center will move to the next role. They may not have the right education—they didn’t take a computer science degree—so they won’t be your next programmer. But you want to have inclusive ideas, so holistically, it’s really important to think about the company overall.

[00:18:34] Tracey: It would be great if you could have folks from product or sales come and sit in the contact center and listen to what goes on. There is nothing better than a product person having to listen to what customers are calling in. How about the emotion that comes with it? If you think about the emotion of the person, just yourself, my husband’s emotion when he called about the headset, they’re upset.

[00:18:55] Tracey: If you were that product person who designed that product, you’d be like, ‘Oh, my gosh, what an impact I’m having on someone.’ It’s personal. It’s real. Your customers are people, and they’re not just numbers. 

[00:19:05] Steve: I’m dying to ask you this question. You talk so eloquently about this, focusing on the agent and its importance to long-term competitive advantages in many ways. Yet, throughout the industry, there are unbelievable agent turnover rates.

[00:19:22] Steve: most companies have said that’s a necessary evil. We’ve lived with it for so long. It’s just one of those things we have to deal with, so it becomes an acceptable problem. If I were to ask you, on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is the agent turnover issue, not just to NEOGOV?

[00:19:44] Steve: Regarding your perspective on the industry and its overall impact on company growth and sustainability, one, it doesn’t have any impact on growth and sustainability. Ten, the agent turnover issue is vital to supporting the overall growth and sustainability of the company. Where would you put that on a scale of 1 to 10?

[00:20:06] Tracey: Part of it depends on where your organization is and its maturity, right? If you are very beginning, you’re a startup; it’s probably a one because the people who built the product are the ones who are supporting it, the people who are selling it, or the ones who are doing everything because you’re small. Everybody’s doing everything.

[00:20:22] Tracey: So it’s not as important because you need dedicated specialists, but it becomes more important as you grow. Then, if you start to grow rapidly and are experiencing hyper-growth, that thing jumps to an 8. If you’re at the maturity level, it should be a 10. If you’re mature and established, that matters. Do you know why?

[00:20:40] Tracey: Because that’s the consistency. It’s most important in the scale-up side because this is where you can set yourself up for a long-term win. You’re scaling quickly. You’re in hyper-growth. Set your contact center up as a competitive advantage because that supports your hyper-growth.

[00:20:58] Tracey: You can immediately remove somebody from that contact center and put them into another role in the company, and you don’t miss a beat. The farm team continues to bring in new talent and move that new talent to other roles. If you’re in hyper-growth, people already understand your culture, which is paramount for moving fast and fixing things.

[00:21:18] Tracey: You’ve got trust built within the organization. They understand where it’s going. You can foster collaborative creativity where saying this isn’t working is okay. What could we do differently? Let’s look at it from different perspectives. If someone else has a computer science degree, they will be looking at it from a different perspective.

[00:21:35] Tracey: Get that perspective. It will inform you in a way you never thought about, and that’s where innovation really happens. 

[00:21:51] Steve: You mentioned rapid growth in our earlier conversations. You now talk about scaling up. One of the worst things in a scaling-up environment is that you keep doing things wrong and don’t have those early warning indicators. The faster you can find the problems and fix them, the more of a competitive advantage you have as an organization. Tell us a little bit about the agents and, as early warning signs, holistically, the impact on the rest of the organization. 

[00:22:18] Tracey: Oh, that’s probably one of my favorite values in the contact center: the early warning system. When customers are upset, they email, call, and chat.

[00:22:28] Tracey: They’re telling you why they’re wrong. An agent who understands your culture and has been with your organization for a while will have that spidey sense. They’re like, ‘Oh, wait a minute. This is going to be a big deal. This will have a major impact if we don’t address it quickly.’

[00:22:43] Tracey: So, they would have to quickly determine whether it’s product, engineering, sales, or marketing. We’re saying the wrong thing. Our product doesn’t do this, but our new brochure says we do. Quickly fix it. They’re the ones who can be that early warning of problems. The product is broken.

[00:22:59] Tracey: The marketing and sales pitch are wrong. We’re not responsive enough before hundreds of customers call you. They’re going to get it when they first start calling, but you need some longevity and tenure for them to know that’s a warning sign that this is a critical part of our product that is going to cause other issues.

[00:23:18] Tracey: You have to teach them a little bit. Understand the customer’s journey with our product. Where do we want it to be? What’s the ideal? So that when they hear from a customer that they’re off that ideal journey, they can take action. But you have to empower them to take action. If they’re like, ‘Yeah, but I tell everybody, and nothing happens, then they can take action. So why should I bother?’

[00:23:37] Tracey: In those environments, you’re getting fast agent turnover. The agents can’t help the customer, and nobody listens to them. 

[00:23:43] Steve: You also want to emphasize the need to interact with agents regularly. Tell us a little bit about how that’s part of your plan.

[00:23:54] Steve: That’s a part of the strategy. How do you do this interact with the agents? 

[00:23:58] Tracey: Let’s consider it from a product perspective. A product team often has a customer advisory board. The board selects specific customers to give them feedback on changes or feedback that they want.

[00:24:08] Tracey: We have an internal advisory board where our customer call center, customer success, and delivery people meet with our product folks and say, ‘Hey, look. We just implemented our product for 200 customers. Here are the things that aren’t working. Maybe the 5 to 10 customers on your advisory board aren’t telling you because they’ve had the product for a while. Here’s what the new customers are doing.’

[00:24:31] Tracey: We set up specific, regularly scheduled meetings where the purpose is to come and tell the product team what’s not working or what’s awesome. Customers love this feature. Don’t change it. They love this feature. This is what they’re trying to do. So, we have this internal back-and-forth.

[00:24:50] Tracey: We then have a second layer where we bring in sales and marketing. So, now you’ve got the product, customer service, operations, and sales and marketing all together, talking about what’s going well and what’s not. The call center agents have an equal footing when explaining what’s happening.

[00:25:09] Tracey: There’s the value. They’re at the table with folks generally seen as more senior in the organization. 

[00:25:15] Steve: Gartner came out about a year ago, and they said that we need marketing people and salespeople to be more like chief customer officers. The whole reason was that these other departments needed to have their fingertips on the pulse of what was going on and the customers’ feedback. I want to accentuate how important what you’re saying here is. They are at the table because they represent the customer, and they’re at the table at the same seat level as everyone else.

[00:25:48] Steve: How many organizations do agents have anywhere near the table, let alone at the table with an equally important voice? I want to accentuate that because it’s phenomenal that you’ve put that into your company culture, how you work together, and how you facilitate working together holistically.

[00:26:08] Steve: It’s fantastic. 

[00:26:09] Tracey: One of the key things we do is talk about culture, which is very important. One of our core values used to be maniacally customer-focused, but now it’s passionately customer-focused. Sometimes, people ask, ‘What does that mean?’ We’re so passionate about our customers.

[00:26:24] Tracey: They need to be front and center of the decisions that we’re making. How is this going to impact the customer? ‘I don’t know.’ We’ll ask somebody who talks to customers all day long. They’re right over here on this. If you’re a remote, just hit them up on a video meeting like we’re doing. Ask them how it’s going, record some calls, and listen to them.

[00:26:40] Tracey: I would tell executives to go and meet your frontline employees. They’ll let you know what you need to hear, different from what you want to hear. I know they often get intimidated, but if they’ve never met you before and you just walk in, ‘Hey, I work over in this other department administration.’ What’s going on here?

[00:26:58] Tracey: Just sit and listen to them. Go have lunch with them. First of all, the fact that you, the executive, are spending your time with them matters. It shows that there’s value in that organizing. It doesn’t take much to just check-in. How are you going? What’s the most frustrating thing for you? What problems are you having the most trouble solving for our customers?

[00:27:19] Tracey: Why is that? What do you think? What would you do differently? Be curious and ask them. They’ve got so much information and so many other ideas because they often come in with fresh eyes. You have joined my company. You have fresh glasses. Great. Tell me all the stuff we’re doing wrong or that you don’t understand why we’re doing it because we’ve been doing it for so long.

[00:27:37] Tracey: So, as they get customer input, it’s like fresh eyes every day. 

[00:27:41] Steve: If I were to do a keyword analysis on this entire conversation, I’d remove frontline or agent, but the other word you’ve repeatedly said is culture. Why are you so focused on culture if you were just to answer for us on this podcast?

[00:28:01] Steve: Why is it part of the organization’s competitive advantage? Can you paint the picture or tell a story about that for us? 

[00:28:10] Tracey: Let’s follow this path. If you don’t have a good culture and are in charge of telling people what to do, a situation will happen, and you’ll not be there. Can they solve it without you?

[00:28:20] Tracey: No, because you’re the one who makes all the decisions. But if your culture empowers people to understand what matters, what’s my North Star, what’s my guiding light for all the decisions I have to make, you’ve suddenly decentralized a whole lot of decision-making, and it’s going to be right. It’s going to align with your culture.

[00:28:37] Tracey: If your culture is passionately customer-focused and stronger together, be the change. You take just those three core values as part of your customer focus, your culture, the people who get into situations where you’re not there, and they’re going to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to keep those three things in mind.’

[00:28:54] Tracey: I will make my decision aligned with those. Most of the time, they make the right decision that is aligned with what you’re doing. This is why culture matters: if you’ve got a toxic culture, remember what I was telling you? ‘Oh, I want to give ideas, but nobody’s listening to me from the contact center, so why should I bother?’

[00:29:10] Tracey: That’s a toxic culture. You have so much information to give about your customers, about what’s happening, about the problems, and about the customers’ ideas for making your product even better, but you must foster that in a positive environment, a positive culture.

[00:29:25] Tracey: People aren’t engaged if you don’t have it. They’re bringing their C and D game, not their A and A plus game. They’re not engaged. Qualtrics put out a study in 2023. I think the number was that after one negative customer experience, 53% of customers stopped using your product or decreased their spending.

[00:29:46] Tracey: Get a culture where people want to create a great customer experience because you can turn a negative into a positive by solving the problem. If you don’t have the right culture where that matters, you will have more of those negative customer experiences. 

[00:29:59] Steve: [00:30:00] I’m inferring from this that an agent should be empowered to not only feel like my voice matters but also to take more time with that customer. If I don’t want to use script two and want to jump over to script four or just go off script because I understand what they’re saying and thinking, I’m empowered to do that.

[00:30:21] Steve: I have the choice to handle the customer in a way that I feel will create the best customer experience, and I’m not going to be dinged for it because I need to meet certain criteria or rules. I use this to ensure I do what’s right for the customer.

[00:30:37] Tracey: Yeah, we have this one agent with a fairly long tenure in the role, so much so that he could put his headset on and walk around the room without looking at the computer. He sees the program in his eyes, and he’s listening to the customer, and I’m watching him.

[00:30:54] Tracey: It’s over on the left-hand side of the screen, you know, right up at the top, and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, and he was so calm, just walking around the office in his Zen state.’ It was so loud, you could hear the customer on the outside of the headphones, and they just came down, and how angry they were. 

[00:31:11] Tracey: They say, ‘Oh, Rob, thank you. That was great.’ ‘ By the end of the conversation, they were talking about how great the weather was. The point I’m trying to make here is that Rob wasn’t looking at a script. He was walking around the office.

[00:31:25] Tracey: He was empowered to know and do whatever he could to help this customer solve the problem. He got through it with them, making sure they understood it and having them do it themselves all in a very calm and positive state. He just followed our core values and didn’t need a script.

[00:31:41] Steve: We have talked about so much here, and I think we could probably do four or five or six more of these podcasts, but out of everything that we’ve said, if there was one main takeaway that you wanted people to leave with, that you wanted them to remember from this podcast, what would that be?

[00:31:58] Tracey: Invest in your frontline people. Get to know them. They can be your competitive advantage. If it’s simple, you’ll do it. If I make it complicated, you won’t. Go and get to know your frontline employees.

[00:32:12] Tracey: Consider them value-added, not cost incurred. 

[00:32:17] Steve: I love it—words of true wisdom. Tracy, I cannot thank you more for sharing all your experiences. If people had follow-up questions, would it be appropriate for us to give them a link to your profile on LinkedIn? Would that be all right?

[00:32:33] Tracey: Absolutely. I’m happy to talk about how you can do what I’ve done and how you changed culture because we acquired companies. One of the things I did was to help their culture become like ours. How do we evolve our culture based on the great benefits that they bring?

[00:32:49] Tracey: We can discuss culture, contact centers, and competitive advantage. Please share my LinkedIn profile. I’m available to swap ideas and innovate. 

[00:32:58] Steve: Fantastic. Once again, thank you. We really appreciate it. 

[00:33:01] Tracey: Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me on, and good luck with the podcast.