Chief Customer Officers: How to Get Out of Our Own Way to Be Growth Accelerators

Transcript

Afshan Kinder Podcast Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we have a very, very special conversation and guests here with Afshan Kinder. Now, Afshan, you’re not only the CEO of Switchgear and Elevate to Great, but over the last number of decades, and I won’t say exactly how many, but you’ve worked with some of the largest brands in customer engagement, employee engagement, customer success. 

[00:00:27] Steve MacDonald: You have created an entire business that you now train organizations and help and support organizations and all of that. You’ve written 4 books on the subject, including call centers for dummies and you’re writing a 4th book because the importance and introduction of AI and how that’s impacted the business has created the necessity for that.

[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: But before we get into the subject today, which is how to get out of our own way to be growth accelerators in our business. I’d love to have you just maybe explain a little bit more about your background and then we’ll dive right in. 

[00:01:02] Afshan Kinder: For sure. I kind of got out of university without really having any direction. So, I ended up getting a job in a call center and I had a passion for customers. Our CEO at the time was so customer centric and a passion for the employee experience. And when you have that passion, you just organically grow in that environment and learn as much as you can.

[00:01:26] Afshan Kinder: I have to say, having been a senior vice president VP, like lots of senior roles with lots of autonomy and strategy, the hardest job I had was an agent. I have so much respect for those people who are on the front line, being able to think on their feet, being able to make a connection in 20 seconds, having to be consistent in every single interaction, like that to me is a very difficult job. 

[00:01:50] Afshan Kinder: I don’t know if we actually demonstrate that in senior roles. We get our moments, but I have to say my hat is off to every frontline customer facing team member, whether they be retail or a contact center or any other type of channel that customers visit.

[00:02:05] Steve MacDonald: Well, thank you. We’re going to dig into all of this in terms of the importance and what are the growth accelerators and how do we pull the right levers. But I want to just start out here and say, it was really interesting because in our first conversation, your point of view was that some of the biggest growth accelerators, the challenges to creating those growth accelerators were actually internal and I wanted to give you just a chance to start out here and just kind of explain your point of view and what you’re thinking on that.

[00:02:32] Afshan Kinder: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been going to my clients and my CEO, or the C-Suite are saying, put AI in your organization and they’re looking at me like where, how, when? So, there’s a lot of buzz around AI creating a great deal of efficiency and certainly it does but without giving a clear vision as to how you see technology be introduced, how you see certain goals being achieved, that’s where that lack of clarity causes confusion within an organization and therefore, almost pits one department to another as each one of them are trying to achieve the goal, but not working together to achieve that goal.

[00:03:10] Afshan Kinder: So, I think there’s a focus on numbers. Understandable. We’re here about making money. However, it’s a loose direction for the lower levels and that’s how we get in our way. We don’t have that agility that we’re looking for in organizations through the lack of clarity and sometimes what we say when there’s low clarity, there’s high resistance, there’s a new shot people, just don’t know what to do so they do nothing, or they do the wrong thing.

[00:03:34] Afshan Kinder: So, I really feel that the C-Suite if I was to give some advice is not to be prescriptive, but to have some clarity in terms of strategy and design and those kind of streams between people, process and technology and how do they all work together.

[00:03:49] Steve MacDonald: I mean, here’s what I think is great about you being a third-party voice for your clients is we’ve all been in those C-Suite or board meetings and we’re talking about how’s this quarter doing? How are we going to be doing next quarter? It’s a very short-term focus and we talk about what’s in our way? What’s the go to market plan and how are we accomplishing this? 

[00:04:08] Steve MacDonald: The challenges to that go to market plan usually, we point outside. We usually point to external things. We don’t go into those board meetings saying what the greatest challenge is ourselves. We’ve got to get out of our own way.

[00:04:22] Steve MacDonald: So, I think that having a third-party voice that comes in and says, look, I’ve worked with lots of different organizations and that internal clarity is one of the biggest challenges. How is this received when you’re talking with your clients? You’re talking about this internal clarity and what we need to do. Is it well received? Do they acknowledge it or is it something that you have to educate them on? 

[00:04:46] Afshan Kinder: There’s two things that most people say, and one of my clients coined this really very well. She said, you know what Afshan, I’m glad you came at this time, because if you came a year earlier, we would have never said our baby was ugly until there’s some understanding that we have pain points here that we need to really solve for versus looking at things with rose colored glasses saying, we’re fine. We’re doing great. Look at our numbers. We’re doing fantastic. There’s nothing to fear.

[00:05:14] Afshan Kinder: You know, I’ll give you a quick story. I used to work for a very large global bank, and we were a digital bank, so it didn’t have bricks and mortars. So, everything was all digital and we were the only digital bank at that time back in the early 2000s. We go, no one’s going to come in because it’s very hard to get a license. Well, within a year of us saying that, we have three competitors. 

[00:05:37] Afshan Kinder: So, sometimes, to be forward thinking, you’ve really got to be transparent, and you don’t have to necessarily tell everybody your sins, but you need to be clear about what’s working and what’s not working without pointing fingers. Work together to say, okay, what are the solutions? 

[00:05:54] Afshan Kinder: So, we never come in to say, “Hey, this is wrong, that’s wrong because that doesn’t help anybody.” This is what you’ve done well and here’s how you can do something differently and how this will actually enable you to be prosperous in the future. Because people have done a lot of good work in organizations to get them to that point. So, you shouldn’t disregard that at all. I think we should celebrate that, but we also need to look forward to say, hey, this part could use fine tuning. This part needs to revamp.

[00:06:22] Afshan Kinder: This last conversation I had with a client just before I get on and said, we need to disrupt your paradigms and that is a very important part that we’ve got to help people with and it’s not a flash cut. It’s a gradual kind of development of that disruption. 

[00:06:38] Steve MacDonald: Now, I imagine that when you just disrupt paradigms, there is a message for middle level management. There is a message for the employee base.

[00:06:48] Steve MacDonald: But there’s a message for leadership and a buy in of leadership. Everything tends to work better when you have the support of leadership. So, how does that sell in process work? Do you start with leadership? Do you start with middle management? What’s the best way to create that paradigm shift?

[00:07:08] Afshan Kinder: It starts at the top. It always starts at the top because if the people at the top don’t believe it, they can’t actually support the actions and the activities of the people that are in the middle, or even at the bottom. It’s a trickle down. And where it’s a bottom up is the feedback. So, the bottom up saying, hey, it’s working. It’s not working, I’ve had this issue and that’s where the bottom up goes back to the C-level, but the C-level, like, when we bring our programs in, we always want to make sure that COO, the CFO, the CEO all buy in because what we do is a cultural change. Whether it’s making an organization customer centric and efficient at the same time or helping them through change as they implement AI because AI doesn’t come out of the box as we all know. It has to be trained, but there’s a whole people component to it that people aren’t understanding in terms of the skills that will be needed in the future. 

[00:07:58] Afshan Kinder: So, all of this wrapped together really has to come from the C-Suite with some clarity and some direction and then we help with what are the techniques? What are the strategies used to bring this change into the organization? And I’ll just say one last thing is that I see a lot of companies with change management teams and when I see these teams, and I work with these teams, it’s all about the communication of what needs to change and not so much on how it needs to change. It’s the how that really is where the rubber meets the road, as they say. 

[00:08:29] Steve MacDonald: So, you know, from Deloitte to McKinsey, Booz Allen, all these big consulting firms, they have big change management groups. It’s a big, big deal. But you focus on the people. You focus on the employee, the engagement, and the customer.

[00:08:43] Steve MacDonald: What is different, and do you have a story? We remember things 22 times better when it’s told to us in the form of a story of how the change management focused on the people works. 

[00:08:54] Afshan Kinder: Absolutely. So, let’s talk about what change actually is defined as and I think that’s gonna be helpful because a lot of times, especially at senior levels, you know, let’s push this change through. We send an email, we have training sessions, we have one-on-one sessions, and it’s all one way tell as to why it’s great for the company, why it’s good for the customer, and some notional thoughts about why it might be good for the employees. But often, it’s not quite there.

[00:09:22] Afshan Kinder: What we’re really asking our frontline people to do is to change what they say or what they do. That’s different from what they did the day before. So, you’re asking people to do something completely different than what they’re used to, and what you’re doing is you’re breaking a habit, you’re creating new habits. 

[00:09:40] Afshan Kinder: So, if we really understand what change is, which is creating new habits, we probably will do things differently and if you want to create a new habit, you got to really connect it to what’s important for that individual and personalize it. So, think about yourself. If you want to have this habit of going to the gym, that’s a new habit you want to create because you don’t go to the gym.

[00:10:02] Afshan Kinder: You want to go to the gym so that’s what’s in it for me there, but it’s not a habit for you to do that. So, that’s where your leader comes in, works with you to collaborate on what might be different ways that we can build that habit, and that’s the change part and whether it’s a small change or a large change, that’s the strategy around change is really helping people to make that actual behavioral change.

[00:10:25] Afshan Kinder: So, that’s what we do. Our programs do that and that’s why we get such great results. 

[00:10:30] Steve MacDonald: Now, I also know that you don’t just come in with preconceived notions. Same playbook for everyone. You actually do quite a bit of listening. You do a lot of interviews and I’m bringing that up because this is important for all of us.

[00:10:44] Steve MacDonald: We have to learn from the voice of those that are our employees and the voice of our customers. How do you bring that voice into the process here? 

[00:10:55] Afshan Kinder: Well, it’s so important to bring the voice of the customer and the voice of the customer facing employee into the conversation, because that’s where all your KPIs live. Between that interaction. So, you have to satisfy the needs of the customer and the employee, making it easy for them to satisfy those needs. 

[00:11:13] Afshan Kinder: So, we really speak to that level, but we also go to the first line leader, the second line leader, and up to the executive, because we need to solve something for everybody. It’s not just one group of people and so it’s very important. 

[00:11:26] Afshan Kinder: I’ll give you an example. We have a program called creating a customer experience blueprint. It’s a library of skills that needs complex skills as well as basic skills at the agent level and so, when we build it, we don’t build it top down. We actually build a bottom up because your agents know the most as to what works and what doesn’t work.

[00:11:47] Afshan Kinder: So, we really coin it built for agents by agents in order to drive that change, because even at that level, they’re always saying, hey, what is so and so doing that I could do because I see that they get really good results. Well, let’s bring all that in and plus our expertise as to what great services and the techniques that we have really make a very robust model and it’s a very simple model. When we bring it in, agents love it, and leaders love it because they have something to coach to very specifically and the senior leaders love it because they get results immediately. 

[00:12:22] Steve MacDonald: So, anybody can within their own organization be interviewing their own agents, their own customers, garnering that voice and that feedback and then making changes. Why isn’t that happening naturally, just on its own organically? 

[00:12:37] Afshan Kinder: It’s a little bit of politics. It’s wanting to look good in front of your boss. Not being the person who’s upsetting the apple cart, so to speak. So, when a third party comes in and we call it collective wisdom. We’re not going to name anybody, but we’re going to look for themes and we’re going to pass those themes on because at the end of the day, when we do focus groups with frontline agents, we do with say, first line leaders, their own leaders.

[00:13:03] Afshan Kinder: They all want the same things; they just say it differently and it’s so interesting to see. Agents will say, I want to be treated fairly. I want my leader to really understand my situation, and leaders will say things like, I really want them to be engaged. I want them to come into work. Well, they’re saying the same thing, but they’re looking at it with two different outcomes and the solution is the same.

[00:13:25] Steve MacDonald: How important is listening, collecting the voice as a part of implementing a paradigm shift, a change, any of this change management we’ve been talking about?

[00:13:38] Steve MacDonald: If I said, you can’t go in an interview, you’ve just got to bring your wisdom and your knowledge and your playbook in. How important is it, that interview, that voice of the employee and customer in implementing the change? 

[00:13:54] Afshan Kinder: It’s huge. At the end of the day, as I said, they’re the ones who have to say and do something differently.

[00:13:58] Afshan Kinder: So, we need to ask them, and we listen to a lot of calls, and we want to listen to everybody because everyone has a different lens and different perspective, and we want to make sure that the solution actually satisfies all of the folks from the customer all the way up to the C-Suite. But if you don’t employ the voice of the employee, who’s actually doing the job, it’s a really big disservice to the organization, because they’re the ones who have to make the change.

[00:14:23] Afshan Kinder: So, you really do have to listen to them to figure out what’s motivating them. What is the what’s in it for me for them, and sometimes it’s not the paycheck. People will say they’re just here for the money, but that’s really not what it is. You have to go a little bit deeper than that.

[00:14:39] Afshan Kinder: What does money do for me? Security? Status? It could be, I’m saving for a house, whatever. So, we really need to understand individual motivations and that’s what we teach the leaders to be personalized. Because once they’re personalized, that’s how you build trust and relationship.

[00:14:55] Afshan Kinder: So, I know I’m going a little bit off on a tangent here, but as I said, that’s a hard job at the frontline agents’ level and I have a great deal of respect for it. So, their voice has to be really a strong voice in the overall solution. 

[00:15:09] Steve MacDonald: Now, I know a lot of organizations work with outside partners. There are strategic reasons why we need to have BPO partners involved in our customer support or call centers. When you’re doing this kind of a change management, how do you account for the outside partner? How does the outside partner a part of this change management process? 

[00:15:31] Afshan Kinder: They’re part of the family and I’m glad you’re calling a partner, not a vendor, which is part of the family. 

[00:15:36] Afshan Kinder: So, we work with a lot of BPOs because we work with the clients, and I find that working with BPOs, sometimes it’s a little bit easier because they dedicate time for the change. They dedicate time for coaching. It’s part of their MSA or their style. 

[00:15:52] Afshan Kinder: So, they have the dedicated time, and they actually fall into line a little bit easier. You don’t get as much resistance because they want to please their clients.

[00:16:02] Afshan Kinder: Usually in internal organizations, there’s a little bit of arm crossing, and why are we making this change? At all levels, it’s not even just at the agent level and especially at frontline team leaders, they’re kind of the vessel for everything in the company. It seems like if marketing needs something, go ask someone in the call center.

[00:16:21] Afshan Kinder: If HR needs something, if IT needs something, all kinds of roads lead to the contact center, because I guess they think there’s so many people there. They’re probably someone available to do this work. But frontline team members are overwhelmed, and they need to have their role really well-defined, and people tend to be a very small part of it.

[00:16:39] Afshan Kinder: They do a lot of stuff, but it’s all in HR, performance management, writing people up, but in really developing people, that’s the challenge. They’re not spending enough time doing that and if they did that, then they wouldn’t be doing the other.

[00:16:52] Steve MacDonald: I want to go back to you and affirm that I call them partners, like BPO partners and there’s a lot of views. There’s a widespread use of outside partners for call centers. There’s also a widespread kind of perception that looks, I want you to help me save costs, cover the hours that I can’t. You’ve got to affirm our brand and our culture and don’t hurt our CSAT scores. That’s what I need from you. 

[00:17:19] Steve MacDonald: But when you and I talked before, when you call them a partner, they’re a strategic asset for the company and I just wanted you to be able to explain what you see and why they are a strategic asset and should be looked upon that way.

[00:17:32] Afshan Kinder: Absolutely. They’re an extension of your brand and they have to be not looked at as a vendor because we’re saving money. We’re working together to achieve these common goals and the challenge is that, remember back in school when we were learning all about computers, it was garbage and garbage out. A lot of our processes aren’t perfect, and we pass them on to our partners in an imperfect way, or we pass on training in an imperfect way, or we pass on how you guys coach. 

[00:18:04] Afshan Kinder: Then, some BPOs have good programs, and some people don’t. And what is coaching? That’s the whole thing is a lot of people have different definitions of coaching, and I won’t get into that rabbit hole, but remember I was saying the lack of clarity at the C-Suite and it’s trickling down, it’s a lack of clarity from corporations to their BPO, and they’re not setting their BPO for success because of the lack of clarity. 

[00:18:28] Afshan Kinder: So, the BPO has got to figure out what does the client really want, and they do X thinking that’s what the client wants when that’s not what they’re looking for like even a benchmark of what good sounds like in a customer interaction, as an example.

[00:18:40] Steve MacDonald: That’s a great example and would you also agree that these outside partners, they work with many organizations, so they have best practices outside of your organization in our paradigm of how we think about doing things, but they bring in best practices, they bring in benchmarks, they bring in a fresh third-party perspective.

[00:19:01] Steve MacDonald: Is there a value in looking at an outside partner as a strategic asset more than just continuing on the programs we have in place but helping support us in ways that we haven’t thought of before in ways that we can’t because we only see our data. We only know what we know from our purview. Is there validity in that?

[00:19:25] Afshan Kinder: Absolutely, but it depends on the partner. There are some people who get into being a BPO because it’s profitable for them and they don’t have all the mechanisms in place and the process in place. So, you get that kind of BPO. Then you get the global BPOs, the big guys who are very, very structured. Too structured that they’re not nimble enough for a specific requirement for a client, and I’m speaking from experience. 

[00:19:48] Afshan Kinder: I’ve worked with some of the big BPOs with big corporations and when we bring in what the role of a leader is, it’s not the role that they have, because they’re in organization where we just tell people what to do, and they should just do it versus being in a collaborative environment where you work together to create a strategic plan for you to develop and then we measure how well I did at first in supporting you and then how well you did in implementation. 

[00:20:13] Afshan Kinder: So, I think there’s a variety of things. One of the things that we always recommend is the champion challenger model. So, have at least two BPOs. Do not have more than three BPOs. I think one organization, they have seven. It was like I don’t know what you’re doing in seven. It’s a lot to manage. But having two or even three at the most allows that innovation to occur because there’s that friendly competition to innovate and to better the client’s business.

[00:20:42] Steve MacDonald: I love that. So, I want to take a step back and go more global for a moment. Get your opinion on something because a little over a year ago, McKinsey came out with a study, and they looked at very profitable organizations that had the greatest return on shareholder value across B2C and B2B organizations and what they found was that the number one differentiator in the marketplace was CX. It wasn’t a product, it wasn’t priced like the bastions of how we differentiate ourselves as companies that on the technology side with rapid ChatGPT, writing code and everything like product performance, product differentiation is more fleeting.

[00:21:21] Steve MacDonald: It is not a long-term, sustainable way that we’re going to grow and sustain that profitability in our businesses coming from the perspective where you work on employee engagement, because better aged employees mean happier customers, more engaged customers. So, this idea of CX as the number one competitive advantage for companies today, I just want to ask your opinion on that. What did you think of that?

[00:21:45] Afshan Kinder: Absolutely, but I think it goes beyond employees. It also goes to technology. How easy is it for me as a customer to be able to go online and be able to do what I want to do? We just finished doing a benchmarking study across North America, Europe, and Australia on digital adoption and best practices of that and we’ve got customers who are very digitally oriented, but they’re calling us. 

[00:22:10] Afshan Kinder: Why are they calling us? They’re calling you because at that moment in time, they happen to be in the car, not in front of a computer, and they can’t use their cell phone because they’ll get a ticket. So, they’re gonna pick up the phone and call. So, I think the customer experience, or the digital experience has to be simple, has to be easy to use. 

[00:22:28] Steve MacDonald: We’ve talked about quite a bit, and what I’d love to do is I’d love to ask you if there was one takeaway that you wanted people to have from this conversation here, what would that be?

[00:22:40] Afshan Kinder: So, this comes from my banking experience. So, we have disaster recovery plans, every company does and we may have a customer recovery in the moment, but what we don’t have is a proactive customer recovery plan and I think it’s really important and when we think about random change and predictable change, you have to have a conduit to have that change take place right down to the minutia where you’re asking someone to say, or do something differently.

[00:23:08] Afshan Kinder: And I really feel that having that strategy in place will really change that whole customer experience, where it becomes a bit more consistent and it will reduce your attrition because attrition happens when, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing.

[00:23:23] Afshan Kinder: I don’t know why things are happening. It creates that calmness cause, I’ll give you a quick story. I used to work with a guy from the military a long time ago and one of the things he taught me was that in the military, everybody knows their role. 

[00:23:37] Afshan Kinder: So, if a particular line gets taken out, the one below and the one above know how to connect. Things keep on going, regardless of who’s not there. That’s how well the military works and so I think when you think of that kind of strategy for your business, in terms of role, clarity, having an ecosystem for change and making sure you understand what change is. 

[00:23:58] Afshan Kinder: Saying something different, doing something different, and being proactive in knowing what changes are coming up, predictable or unpredictable, I think it’s a winning formula. I know it’s a lot, but it can be done. 

[00:24:09] Steve MacDonald: I love it. Thank you, Afshan, for everything. It’s eye opening to think about, we need to be thinking about change management all the time, because it’s the moment that we think we’ve got it all figured out is the moment that starts to come unraveled.

[00:24:25] Afshan Kinder: I would just say one more thing. I would just maybe change it to saying change leadership. We lead change, we don’t manage it, and I think that changes how we go about things because I really feel strongly that we need to lead our changes more than we need to manage them.

[00:24:41] Steve MacDonald: If people had additional questions, which I know they will, would it be appropriate that we had maybe a link to your LinkedIn profile that people can get ahold of you? 

[00:24:49] Afshan Kinder: Absolutely. I’m always open to people asking me questions. I love to help people so if someone has questions for me, I’d be happy to help.

[00:24:58] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing all these insights. I really appreciate it. 

[00:25:04] Afshan Kinder: You’re very welcome, Steve. I so appreciate you taking time with me and I’m very grateful to have this time with you.