Creating Contact Centers that Directly Impact Company Performance

Transcript

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the contact center perspectives podcast. I’m Steve McDonald, your host, and we have a very special guest today, Lauren Volpe. Lauren, you’re not only a chief customer experience officer, but you’re sharing with you a point of view that every single one of us needs, it doesn’t come from your background as a golfer, although that’s interesting to know.

[00:00:30] Steve MacDonald: Let’s discuss our last few conversations here. You said things that are just incredibly important. You can get lost in that bill. Every month, you look at the cost of the contact center—the CEO and the CFO- and everybody’s looking at it. You’re thinking, how do we reduce cost?

[00:00:48] Steve MacDonald: If we could change our perspective and have a process where for every dollar we put in, we got $1.50 or $1.75 back, and we’d do it all day long, right? Today, you will discuss creating content extenders that directly impact company performance. So, no longer should they be looked upon as this is a cost to contain, right?

[00:01:12] Steve MacDonald: This significantly added value to our organization. I love that you said a couple of other things that can be looked upon as like a black hole, right? But if there was ever a place to invest in your business, wouldn’t it be with your customers? Is it a conversation you’re having with your customers, or is it your customers’ experience with you?

[00:01:33] Steve MacDonald: If you look at it from that perspective, not one board member anywhere would say, ‘No, I don’t want to invest in my customers.’ 

You’ve got a whole contact center that you’re constantly trying to reduce costs on, which can have ramifications that can go wrong. But before we get into that kind of conversation, you could tell us more about your background, and then we’ll get right into it.

[00:01:54] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Sure. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. It’s probably weird to be excited about talking about contact centers, but I can’t help it. That’s my jam. I’ve been doing customer experience for my entire career, even way back the paper route, babysitting, always making sure I had the best crayons and coloring books and things. Still, it was the early beginnings of understanding how important having happy customers was.

[00:02:23] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Early net promoter or CSAT meant a lot and customer lifetime value. I didn’t have to go scrounging around to get those new customers because I had really good and happy customers who were probably telling the whole neighborhood about me and how great I was. I have a tremendous amount of empathy for customers.

[00:02:39] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I’m not just talking about people using my product or services when I say customers. I’m also talking about my agents. I want my agents to work for me, and I want them to know that they’re working for a brand and a company that really cares about them and views them as the arm, probably the only arm, that is touching a customer.

[00:03:02] Lauren Quinn Volpe: We have to trust them. We must put much trust and energy into ensuring they have the best tools and training. That’s what I focus on every day. 

[00:03:14] Steve MacDonald: That’s a perfect segue into what we want to discuss, starting with the agents. It’s perfect because, in the past, you said agents saw the AI trend and were worried about their jobs.

[00:03:25] Steve MacDonald: Yet we want to make sure that they also understand how important they are to the organization and that it’s almost criminal sometimes that we look at acceptable levels of underperformance like agent turnover. That’s just a reality. We just have to deal with it.

[00:03:40] Steve MacDonald: There will always be turnover in every organization at any employee level, right? But should we accept what’s going on if they’re that important? Absolutely not. How do we continually reinforce their value? Not only to the organization up to your level on the board but to them daily? It’s a good segue here to talk about AI in a more modern context.

[00:04:06] Steve MacDonald: How would it impact the contact center? How do you see it impacting the agent experience, the customer experience, everything? That’s a big question to cover, but if you wouldn’t mind taking a crack at that. 

[00:04:17] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Sure. One of the biggest mistakes in AI right now is clearly the shiny object syndrome.

[00:04:24] Lauren Quinn Volpe: People chase after every potential application, thinking it will majorly impact every aspect of their business. But if you focus on one problem you’re trying to solve and then go in that direction and hone in on it, it will have a major impact.

[00:04:43] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I’m really excited to see where it goes. It’s still a little early, and many SaaS platforms out there are, ‘Oh, we’ve got it all figured out.’ No. It’s developing every single day. Another missed opportunity is that nobody’s taking the time to explain your intentions to the agents.

[00:05:02] Lauren Quinn Volpe: What do you want to use this tool for? Why are you using this tool? Is this going to affect me, the agent? Is it going to be a good effect or a bad effect? A good example is, let’s say you want to do auto QA using AI. It’s not perfect, but it’s got a lot of potential and promise. The agents didn’t understand what was happening.

[00:05:23] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Why do you need this? Why is this thing overlaying everything I do? You have to do that. It needs to learn. However, when we explained to the agents that we just wanted to use this tool to remove the manual processes that a human was doing, it didn’t give a huge return to the business. If you can flip that and explain to the agent that we will initially use this for auto QA, we can take our findings from that and provide them with popups.

[00:05:54] Lauren Quinn Volpe: We can give them the script right then and there, so they don’t have to search for that knowledge base article. If we understand where you’re getting hooked up and the conversation with the customer, chat, or whatever, we can give you the tools to elevate your work and make it easier.

[00:06:11] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You’ll probably get some buy-in. The agents need help understanding. If you talk to any agents, they will need clarification. They need to find out what it is. They see it as ChatGPT and bots just clickety-clack, taking away their chats so they won’t get them anymore. If you can explain to them that you will use this to enhance their training, you’ll be able to see quickly, ‘Oh, wow. I had 25 of my agents all get marked off on this particular type of interaction.’

[00:06:39] Lauren Quinn Volpe: What are they missing? Does the article need to be included? Is the script lacking? Is the training lacking? Every little improvement you make helps with your average handle time. So even though you’re pouring money in, ultimately, that will return—not only with better interactions for the customers but also with better retention with the agents because they’ll feel supported. 

[00:06:57] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They’ll feel like they have a voice and a cheerleader in the background. It’s hard to explain it that way, but that’s my position. 

[00:07:05] Steve MacDonald: Well, you mentioned something just a minute ago about some testing you were done. I know that you were published with some of these results.

[00:07:15] Steve MacDonald: You can tell us without revealing anything proprietary or similar, but what were you testing? Give us an idea of the results and, most importantly, what you learned. 

[00:07:26] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Sure. Well, we didn’t get credit for it. However, the articles were published, and if you read through the summaries of the interactions, you can pretty quickly tell what company they were testing.

[00:07:36] Lauren Quinn Volpe: We learned that AI has a hard time determining small talk, and when agents are trying to build that bond and that connection, it doesn’t get it. It sees it as filler words, buffering, and stalling, but it doesn’t understand that it has a huge value.

[00:07:55] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You may only talk to that customer once or twice a year. Don’t you want to exchange one or two quick pleasantries? You want to avoid dragging it on and hearing about their entire family tree, but to exchange a pleasantry or even know how to exchange a pleasantry. That’s a gap. One of the use cases we wanted to do was auto QA.

[00:08:16] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I want to free up my team to look at those interactions that could make a huge difference in our business. For example, if we had a new product, I want them to focus on that. Let’s put everything else through AI. Let’s assume it will do its job and give us a good, bad, and ugly sampling of where we must focus.

[00:08:35] Lauren Quinn Volpe: That would be a great use case. We were able to get some stuff there. One of the other significant use cases that we were super fixated on because we were under the gun to get this done was to generate a summary at the end of the interaction without the agent having to sit there and go, ‘Customer said this. I did this. The customer said this and that the case was resolved or the case wasn’t resolved.’

[00:08:54] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You’re eliminating a minute or two of your after-call work. That helps the agent because they can beef up their volume if they choose, but not all of them choose. It also gives me a mountain of data. You can feed this back through the machine repeatedly, looking for those little needles in the haystack that would be impossible for a three or four QA analyst team to find.

[00:09:26] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They will do 3% of all the interactions per month because that’s the max they can do and that’s it. What happens to the other 97% of the interactions? Let’s call it AI, the machine, or whatever you want to call it, to skim the surface and pop out those troublesome interactions to train, correct, and support the agents and provide that intense coaching and understanding because I know it’s not easy to deal with customers who are screaming and yelling at you. But then conversely, if you look at yourself and say, ‘That article sucks. No wonder all of my customers are contacting me about this.’ 

[00:10:09] Lauren Quinn Volpe: The article is just generic. It doesn’t tell the customer what they need to know, forcing them to contact us. Those are the two biggest, immediate use cases, but I’m very interested in many others. 

I can’t wait to see what happens with IVRs. It’s a huge opportunity. Imagine if the customer speaks a one-word: refund. Then, the IVR automatically knows and ships it to the super-trained team that knows everything about refunds to handle that customer rather than going into the pool.

[00:10:40] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You can also take your most complex and problematic interactions, like dealing with fraud. No customers will ever come out happy after a fraud interaction. You should ensure those get popped to the top. They don’t sit on hold for 20 minutes.

[00:11:00] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They go right to the head of the line and to a team trained and empowered to resolve those issues versus the customer saying to the first agent, ‘Well, this is what the issue is.’ The agent can’t handle it and says, “Okay. I have to escalate you. Hold on.’ The customer gets transferred again. ‘Oh, wait a minute. Hold on. I need to check into something,’ and gets put on hold. The agent has to read through all the notes and figure out what’s happening with the customer.

[00:11:18] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Wouldn’t you like to eliminate that? So, personally, I find it very exciting, but in the CX space, you have a very mixed bag of really excited people like me and others who are like, ‘Oh man, this might take my job.’

[00:11:36] Lauren Quinn Volpe: If I don’t harness this and figure out how to use it for my business, I could get left behind. I’m seeing that happening right now in the industry. If you don’t know or understand how you can use AI, ChatGPT, or any of the applications to your benefit, it will be problematic.

[00:11:58] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Wait six months, and you’ll be left in the dust. So, attend those webinars, listen to the podcasts, and learn how to use them to benefit your company, customers, and agents. It covers everything. 

[00:12:15] Steve MacDonald: It’s motivated, right? And yeah, I took away two things from what you’re saying there.

[00:12:19] Steve MacDonald: First, AI is an incredible and brilliant traffic cop saying, ‘No, you need to go this way to get to the right places, to get to the right experience, the right outcomes.’ Second, over time, agents will realize that they’re not going away because there will always be people who want to talk to a live agent.

[00:12:38] Steve MacDonald: There will always be things that are too complex, and we need to understand things in ways that only humans can, as well as the empathy you said. So, those are huge things. You also talked about all this data you can analyze at the beginning. This incredible data is coming from direct interactions with your customers, whether that’s interaction about a set of problems, interactions about a new product launch that just came out, interactions about everything about your business, harnessing the potential of this and making it easier to look at that bill at the end of the month, right?

[00:13:16] Steve MacDonald: Understand how it impacts the business’s performance. You’ve got a continuous opportunity to learn, gain knowledge, and make new decisions that affect the performance of the business. How important is this layer of data that you can analyze that we didn’t have in a more of an analog kind of a world where we were just having agents typing up afterward the call summaries? They will tend to say many of the same things because it’s easier that way so it gets blenderized.

[00:13:45] Steve MacDonald: How important is having AI take over the whole ability to analyze? 

[00:13:55] Lauren Quinn Volpe: It’s critical. You don’t have to use every bit of data you get, but wouldn’t it be nice to know in six months that, ‘Well, maybe we missed a trend. Let me go back. I have all this rich information that I can drill down into.’

[00:14:13] Lauren Quinn Volpe: There’s no limit, and you can run it through a hundred different ways to find the information you’re looking for. For example, you launched a new product, and everything’s going great for a few days. Suddenly, you start seeing some nasty grams on Instagram, Trustpilot, BBB, or whatever the case may be, and you’re blindsided, right?

[00:14:39] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You’re like, ‘Oh my God, I thought everything was great,’ because a human can’t sit and go through 50,000 interactions a week but use the machine to go through it and serve up this information to you and say, ‘Oh, red flag. I think we have a problem here.’

[00:14:58] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I saw a hundred contacts about this issue in two days. Give me a couple of those cases, then let me go to my team and say, ‘Guys, I think we have an issue here. Let’s pull some live calls. Let’s start listening to some live calls. Let’s look at those chat transcripts and see what’s wrong.’

[00:15:19] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Did we not give the agents the proper scripting or training? What does the knowledge base article look like? Is there a defect with the product? Did something get through QA? You test and test and test, but sometimes things might slip through. Who’s going to know that first? The agents.

[00:15:37] Lauren Quinn Volpe: If the agents don’t have a path to report this information to you, you must rely on something else. Something quick, AI goes into it. You’ll just say, ‘Please review 200 chat transcripts from XYZ and serve me 10 cases needing review because customers all mentioned this, this, and this.’

[00:15:59] Lauren Quinn Volpe: How much time would that save? That’s money and that’s also agent frustration. No agents don’t want to get yelled at. You don’t want to talk to customers who are upset. They want to talk to those customers who need a little help. ‘Hey, I’m confused about the app. I missed a window. I don’t know what to do.’

[00:16:17] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Those are amazing opportunities to build that relationship. Many of these other ones are just complete frustration drivers with customers because sometimes agents need the right answer or be given the proper empowerment to use their brains and solve the issue outside the box.

[00:16:37] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Okay. The customer says this. This is what the script says. It didn’t work, but I talked to a customer 10 minutes ago, and they had the same thing, and this works. So, even though it’s not on the script, I will tell them to do this. Empower them. Trust them a little. I’m big on trust but verify. 

[00:16:52] Steve MacDonald: Fort Worcester raised one issue about money being left on the table: managers trusting agents. It’s precisely what you’re bringing up here right now.

[00:17:04] Steve MacDonald: This brings me to something I wanted to ask about the overall importance of an agent. Before we hit the record button, we talked about the big issues with agent turnover in the industry and the acceptable level of underperformance, such as massive levels of turnover.

[00:17:21] Steve MacDonald: It’s been around so long that we can all say that’s just the case, right? But it’s extremely high. If you could put it on a scale from one to ten, how important is that agent turnover factor since we’re talking about the overall impact on company performance? How vital is agent turnover to overall company performance on a scale of one to ten?

[00:17:46] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I won’t give it a ten. I’ll give it an eight and I’ll tell you why. Time to efficacy is a huge thing that companies do not look at. We can hire a batch. We’ll get them in training in two weeks and then they’ll hit the floor in two weeks. But that doesn’t mean that they’re effective.

[00:18:03] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They still lean on the scripts. They’re not going quickly. They may be frustrating the customers because they are hemming and hawing a bit. So yeah, even though the stated time to efficacy is six weeks to seven weeks, every company is different. 

[00:18:23] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I have been in the contact centers when agents are getting trained and the looks of, ‘Oh my God, I got my first call about this,’ and they’re in panic mode because they’re still trying to figure out what sounds right. What will I say to a customer that will get them to take it down a few notches and trust that I can help them solve their question?

[00:18:50] Lauren Quinn Volpe: It goes back to trust verification with the agents. That turnover factor does many things. It ties up your trainers and causes frustration and concern with their coworkers. Let’s say you are a tenured agent, and because you’re doing such a great job, you always get stuck on the training bay.

[00:19:12] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You put your heart and soul into these agents, and they’re gone after eight weeks. Then, guess what? In two weeks, you’ve got to do it again and again. If I were that agent, I’d wonder what they were missing. What is wrong? What are we not telling the agents when they’re going through the training? Maybe I can help.

[00:19:31] Lauren Quinn Volpe: In one of my former roles, I had a really bad turnover problem. My team was located in a very tall building in downtown Manila. Every floor has a different brand of contact center: Concentrix, Telx, TTEC, blah, blah.

[00:19:51] Lauren Quinn Volpe: If they didn’t like what was happening on my floor, they check the elevator, they go up on their floor, they put in their application, and they’re gone. That’s how quickly it goes. So, if you’re not in touch with those agents, you could lose an entire batch of agents—say 10 to 15 agents in a day. It happened to me, and I could not understand why.

[00:20:11] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Nobody was telling me the truth. I couldn’t understand why the agents were so exasperated with us, my company, that they were just going to walk out. How could they do that to me? I was almost taking it personally. I started digging in and was connected with a couple of them in a Facebook group for customer service week.

[00:20:34] Lauren Quinn Volpe: We created this whole Facebook group with people who will work on it, and I started asking them what the actual problem is. Why are you guys leaving? It can’t be for 5 cents an hour. Yes, that is common, right? A couple more dollars a week might make a big difference to some people.

[00:20:54] Lauren Quinn Volpe: But when I listened and was open to the feedback, they were frustrated because our scripts limited how they could explain things to customers. They had to use the second and the third because they used the first script, which didn’t work. They will lose ten points if they don’t follow this exact process.

[00:21:16] Lauren Quinn Volpe: The frustration was, ‘Listen, we already know that the third script will fix it. Why are you making us read script one and script two? You’re not listening to us. We’re telling you we can fix it quicker.’ 

[00:21:34] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I made a commitment to them right then and there: Listen, we’re going to do a trial. We created this small team of 15 agents, letting them go off-script. If you know what the customer is asking and how to solve it, you don’t need to read scripts one and two just to hit the box. I won’t penalize you for that.

[00:21:53] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I will tell you one thing. I had zero turnovers on that team. They were the proudest team. They would go out to the Starbucks break room in the little cafe where they were recruiting for me and I didn’t have to do anything except empower them to do what they knew. For me, that was a huge lesson.

[00:22:17] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Listen to your agents. They know where all the bodies are buried, all the trade tricks, how to calm an upset customer, how to quickly get customers off the phone when they know it’s a dead end, and how to wrap it up. Why am I going to penalize them for that?

[00:22:34] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I shouldn’t. That should have been a successful interaction. The customer got what they needed, and the customer went on their merry way. I saved four minutes of our channel time and always try to do that. I’m not perfect. You get wrapped up in things, and sometimes, you forget to listen, but I always try to remind myself to remain humble and listen to the agents.

[00:22:56] Lauren Quinn Volpe: It doesn’t always feel good to hear, ‘Wow, I gave them a crappy script. How could I have done that?’ I didn’t mean to do that. Like, ‘Oh, I didn’t give them a proper knowledge-based article.’ I didn’t do the right thing the first time, but I’ll learn from it and never do that again. 

[00:23:08] Steve MacDonald: You went from saying they’re all going to leave to saying they’re recruiting on my behalf.

[00:23:14] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They’re recruiting for me. We created this special little jacket for them; they are so proud of us. In the Philippines, Starbucks is everywhere. They would go down to Starbucks wearing their members-only jackets, and people would say, ‘Where did you get that jacket? Oh my God. I want that jacket.’

[00:23:31] Lauren Quinn Volpe: We’re getting agents flooding in, filling in applications because they want to be part of that team. So, it’s little things like that. You don’t know it coming out of contact center school, but you figure it out over time. By the way, agents love swag, any swag. You want to give them a lanyard, a pin, a button, a sticker, and they’re really happy. They love swag.

[00:23:54] Steve MacDonald: Here’s my overall question: You went from teams that were deserting you to teams that were recruiting you. How does that impact the company’s performance? That’s where we started this section. We get to the bottom line because now you’re not telling that just on a podcast; you’re only revealing that in a board meeting, right?

[00:24:14] Steve MacDonald: You’re talking about that for a specific reason. 

[00:24:17] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Being honest counts for something. I am not perfect. By the way, there was no AI, no fancy computer. You must use your intuition and experience and humbly admit, ‘Hey, we missed something here.’ Not only did I miss it, but my whole team and my PPO partner missed it.

[00:24:38] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They didn’t tell me. Why do I need to do that? My BPO partner needs to do that for me as well. Over many years of trial and error, I have learned that if you do not have a trusting working relationship with your BPO partner, you’re flying blind. You’re trusting, but you have no way to verify when things go wrong.

[00:25:05] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You are the one left holding the bag because the BPO partner is doing what they’re contractually obliged to do. They’re meeting their handle time, service levels, volumes, etc. But, there’s a lot of subtleties that come with that relationship, that trust, where they can call you and expose something that’s going on in the contact center, knowing that you’re not going to kick them in the butt and say, ‘Okay, that’s one strike against you.’

[00:25:32] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You must have that trust and willingness. It meant saying, ‘Hey, this batch that we hired, we did not use the right profile. These agents are not good on the phone. Something went wrong with the hiring crew. We’ve already talked to them, looked at the applications, and refined our hiring profile, so this shouldn’t happen in future batches.’

[00:25:52] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Instead, you’re just sitting there like, ‘Oh my God, I just lost 15 agents!’ Do you know what losing 15 agents costs versus a couple of seconds of handle time? It’s very expensive, ruining your reputation and eroding your trust in the BPO partner.

[00:26:12] Lauren Quinn Volpe: If that happened to me multiple times, I would 100% question my relationship with this BPO. Wow. We’ve been partners for a while. Something’s wrong over there. There’s new management, and quickly, the blame goes to the leadership team. It’s not on the agents anymore. Agents are scot-free.

[00:26:30] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Now I’m looking at the directors and the VP. I’m looking at the recruiters. I’m not looking at my lovely agent sitting there and doing the rest of trying to help my customer.

[00:26:40] Steve MacDonald: You eloquently talked about the importance of the agents. Trust in the agents, trust in your BPO partners, right? You also talked about what that can do that will ruin you if you have agents walking out on you. It will increase the performance. Every metric is important if you have a team that’s dedicated to you. When we first got online here today I said, ‘This is going to be my favorite part of the podcast.’ We haven’t even gotten to it yet. 

[00:27:10] Steve MacDonald: You talk about focusing on the middle customer because that’s where the greatest revenue gains can come from. Can you explain what that middle customer is? 

[00:27:24] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Sure. So you can view middle customers as consumers who used your product or bought something from you who are just like, I’ll give you a seven. That sucks because I needed that eight to get you into the promoter category. 

[00:27:33] Lauren Quinn Volpe: What would it have taken to get that customer to an eight? Maybe getting off the phone quicker with an agent or servicing a chat widget in more places will make it easier for a consumer to ask a quick question so you won’t need to interact fully. 

[00:27:54] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Maybe it’s your bot, and they didn’t ever get to a human being, and those customers want to talk to a human being. But then you can also do it in the other direction and look at those middle customers as your middle performer agents or your middle engaged agents.

[00:28:18] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They gave you a six on the engagement survey. ‘Oh, they don’t have enough or we don’t get swag.’ They don’t talk to us. They don’t listen to us. What would it take to invest an hour for four or five company leaders to sit on and ask me anything and let the agents pelt questions at you?

[00:28:37] Lauren Quinn Volpe: What’s the harm in it? Then, all of a sudden, you have agents who feel engaged, listened to, trusted, and valued because I listened to what they said to me and now do one step further. Tell them you’ve heard what they said and prove it to them by making the changes. 

[00:29:04] Lauren Quinn Volpe: It doesn’t have to be overnight, and some can’t be done, but if they give me valid points like ‘Do you know what? Our tool sucks. I get logged out every 30 minutes. Do you know what a pain in the neck it is to be in the middle of an interaction and because of our security protocol, I’m getting logged out every 30 minutes?’ This happened at one of my previous roles. We didn’t know. How will we know when we’re not sitting in the agent’s shoes?

[00:29:22] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I’m not using AirCall and Zendesk, and I don’t have 20 windows open, but the agents do, and they’re all getting logged out. They’re trying to help a customer and will use that tool to say, ‘Oh my God, I’m logged out again.’ I didn’t know. We fixed that right away. The agents felt so proud. They provided us with this bit of information that drastically improved their work life. It improved.

[00:29:44] Lauren Quinn Volpe: The customers saved handle time for me on my bill at the end of the day, and those customers were probably leaving a little more satisfied. That is really about focusing on those middle people. What can I do? That one little extra push that I can do to get them over the line that they will give me that good score?

[00:30:06] Lauren Quinn Volpe: If the opportunity presents itself, they’ll either write a nice review or talk to their friends about, ‘Wow, I’m using this product. It’s amazing. Check it out.’ 

[00:30:15] Steve MacDonald: So the takeaway is that this middle customer segment is the largest segment.

[00:30:20] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Untapped. 

[00:30:22] Steve MacDonald: Explain that.

[00:30:24] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Nobody cares. I’ve tried this many, many times. Nobody wants to hear what those middle people are talking about. They want to hear those ones and twos, the detractors. They want to hear the complaints. They want to listen to the verbatim and find ways to fix the problem. Then, they want to go right up to the top and listen to what the tens are saying cause they want to feel good about themselves.

[00:30:41] Lauren Quinn Volpe: But nobody’s asking, ‘Hey, can you send me twenty calls with five and six ratings? I just want to read what they’re saying. Nobody cares. That would be probably the least exciting white paper ever, but I don’t view it that way. I view it as a huge pool and they’re probably the customers who send in the most surveys.

[00:31:03] Lauren Quinn Volpe: They took that time. They want to love you. That’s what I mean by those middle customers. It’s a huge opportunity and nobody’s getting involved with them now. Too bad. 

[00:31:16] Steve MacDonald: It’s amazing, right? The bottom line is that we’re all in business. We’re in business to show a return. We need to show a return.

[00:31:23] Steve MacDonald: Ultimately, that’s what the board wants, what the CEO wants, and what the whole C-suite wants, right? It’s what everybody needs to do. Then, you’ve got this biggest revenue opportunity because it isn’t exciting, and it’s not talking to the best promoters or turning the worst, right? It’s the people, the average and the middle, but that’s where the opportunity lies.

[00:31:46] Steve MacDonald: I love the way that I call it reframing the conversation because what you’ve done is you’ve said, ‘No, this is an area that we can’t afford to focus on as the business.’

[00:31:56] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Everybody wants to be a superstar, a Zappos or a Chewy. In reality, we all have products or services that are not always perfect, but we want them to be. It’s all in the eyes of the customer.

[00:32:06] Lauren Quinn Volpe: You also spent a lot of money trying to bring that customer on board. Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn that middle-of-the-road customer? ‘Nah, you know what? Next time, I’m going to use Visa instead of MasterCard.’

[00:32:26] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Wouldn’t it be great to put a little effort into refining what happens in those interactions to get those customers into that top bucket? It’s very worthwhile. 

[00:32:37] Steve MacDonald: We’ve discussed many important things on this podcast. If there was a single takeaway that you have that you want to leave everybody with, what would that be?

[00:32:48] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Listen to your customers and agents and be humble. We’re not always perfect. If you are going into things thinking that you’re launching the most perfect product in the world, you are kidding yourself. There are always bodies buried so just do your best by the customers.

[00:33:07] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Do your best by the agents. Give them the tools to make their job frictionless. Give the customers self-help options because I would rather cut off my hand before I pick up the phone and call for help. I will search the help center far and wide before I personally want to call somebody.

[00:33:29] Lauren Quinn Volpe: I know many people like me out there. I’m also very honest in my surveys. I will get feedback, and that is a gift, and it’s free. Take it. You don’t have to do anything with it but take it in and listen to it. You’ll often realize it six months down the line, ‘Wow, we did see this trend and didn’t have the bandwidth to do anything with it then, and now we’re really in a big bucket of you-know-what. We’ve got to fix this right now.’

[00:33:53] Lauren Quinn Volpe: But if you picked up on those little things as time accumulated and tried to cross them off one by one, you wouldn’t be in that big bucket at the end. You would be like, ‘Okay, we had these issues, and we’ve done A, B, and C, and the rest is on Sprint 12. We’re getting to it.’ Then, you share it with the agents. Talk to the agents.

[00:34:18] Steve MacDonald: If there were folks who had additional questions about all these things we’ve been talking about here today, would it be appropriate to give them a link to your LinkedIn profile? 

[00:34:28] Lauren Quinn Volpe: Yeah, sure. I get LinkedIn constantly, and I respond to people who are not trying to sell me something.

[00:34:35] Lauren Quinn Volpe: If you want me to collaborate with you, that’s different. So, hit me up on LinkedIn. I’ll be happy to collaborate or help in any way I can. 

[00:34:43] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. 

[00:34:44] Lauren Quinn Volpe:  Thank you. This was fun! I love talking about this stuff.