CX Isn’t a Department, It’s the Business Model

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today we have on a very special guest. We have on Jackob Alaluf. Now, Kobi, you are the VP of Customer Experience at Bridgewise, which is a really interesting AI-powered FinTech startup, which I’d love to hear a little bit more about, but we’re gonna be talking today.

[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: About CX as the number one differentiator in business, and that came out of a McKinsey study where they looked at over 400 highly profitable B2C and B2B companies. And they came out with it—CX was the number one differentiator in the marketplace. Not product, not price, not our technology, but CX. So we’re gonna talk about the differences. You played so well in both worlds, B2C and B2B, that we’re gonna talk about that a lot more today.

[00:00:53] Steve MacDonald: And you’ve been in the business for a long time. We both have the gray hairs to talk about our tenure in the industry, right? But I’d love to turn it over to you just for a minute here, and maybe explain a little bit more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:08] Jackob Alaluf: Thank you, Steve. Happy to be here. My name is Kobi.

[00:01:11] Jackob Alaluf: I’m in the CX business for the last, 35 years. Started back with some technical background. I came, with an engineering background, so started there, but, very quickly started to understand that my passion is really working with people, working with customers, making sure that customers are satisfied and happy with what we develop and what we, provide.

[00:01:34] Jackob Alaluf: So I found myself, very quickly starting to, switch over to, the Customer Experience side. Did many years actually in the, telco industry, mostly in, tech companies, of course, in different roles—from project management to account management, all the way to sales and customer success. Thirty-five years, mostly global companies.

[00:01:58] Jackob Alaluf: Out of them, 16 years I lived in the States, so, had the experience in also working for U.S.-based companies. Back now in Israel most of the years. As, as you mentioned, I did the B2B companies. At some point I decided that I need to have some exposure and also understand the world of the B2C. This is when I stepped, aside and joined a gaming company where I actually managed also customer success in, one of the games for that company.

[00:02:24] Jackob Alaluf: A few months back, I decided to go back to the B2B world and, joined Bridgewise, an amazing startup company in the FinTech industry. We do have a very sophisticated and innovative solution based on AI that helps investors actually make the right and smart decisions. I’m now in the process of building a Customer Experience organization and starting a new and really interesting journey.

[00:02:49] Steve MacDonald: Well, I’d love to get your point of view on this. To begin with that statement that McKinsey said that CX is the number one differentiator today. In your mind, what elevates CX, the customer experience, to that kind of level? Because over time we’ve thought about product and price as the competitive differentiators in the marketplace, but—

[00:03:13] Steve MacDonald: In your mind, why is CX the number one differentiator today?

[00:03:19] Jackob Alaluf: Yeah. At the end of the day, I’m a big believer that behind every business, whether it’s gaming or it’s FinTech or it’s telco or anything else, you are interacting with people. People get exposed to the, product, to the solution that you offer.

[00:03:35] Jackob Alaluf: The most important part, in my view, is that whoever is adopting the solution is looking at the vendor or the provider to be the one who’s actually making them satisfied with what they’re receiving, making sure that the product is being adopted by the company. At the end of the day, the Customer Experience representatives are the ones who actually—

[00:03:57] Jackob Alaluf: Responsible for taking the product or the solution and making sure that whoever is taking this, product or solution is satisfied with what they received, what they purchased, what they’re using. If you look at the market now, again, no matter what the industry is that we’re talking about, competition is huge.

[00:04:16] Jackob Alaluf: I mean, you will find with any product, with any solution, you will find competition and you will find similar solutions, similar products. The difference will be with the people behind these products and the solutions. In my view, again, it is a key differentiator. I mean, you need to be the one who actually complements the product or complements the solution with the right people, with the right service, with the right experience, ensuring the right level of satisfaction. It’s not a surprise that this, research came with these findings.

[00:04:47] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s interesting because you talk very eloquently about the role of the importance of CX to the organization, yet most of us in the industry, in, like, customer support, customer experience, contact centers—

[00:05:02] Steve MacDonald: We feel more like a support department than we do somebody that has more conversations with the customer than anyone, that has more to say to help any department in the company, whether it’s product or sales, or marketing or operations. Why do you think we struggle to have that level of respect or that seat at the table?

[00:05:28] Jackob Alaluf: It’s a very good question. First of all, it varies between companies. I can tell you that I’m lucky enough to be in a place where, when I joined, I joined when the company started realizing and, adjusting to the idea that that’s becoming a critical part of the process. And I’ll explain. When you have, you know, a really amazing solution—

[00:05:48] Jackob Alaluf: You have an amazing product, which gets huge attention from the market and everybody wants it, and everybody, wants to get a taste of it. And I’m lucky to be in a place like that. This is where you’re coming to the point that you’re starting to understand—I’m gonna sell, you know, day after day. I mean, the demand is gonna be amazing and everything else, but what’s next?

[00:06:08] Jackob Alaluf: I mean, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna offer that, I’m, companies are gonna purchase my product. Now I need to make sure that they are adopting the project, they’re adopting the product, they’re starting to use it, they’re satisfied with it, ’cause otherwise, I mean, the churn is gonna come very soon, and then there is no value in, you know, in, in the fact that you have an amazing product at that point.

[00:06:31] Jackob Alaluf: When a company realizes that, it’s not only about the product, but it’s also about utilizing and adopting the product, this is where you start to understand that the part of the Customer Experience is becoming critical. Now, why it is so hard to get a seat at the C-level table—many companies are very sales-centric, revenue-focused.

[00:06:54] Jackob Alaluf: We can understand that. But when you start to realize that it’s, not only about making the revenue, but keeping the revenue and keeping the growth and expanding, this is where you understand that the Customer Experience becomes a key part in the chain. And this is where you start to realize the importance of that function in the company.

[00:07:14] Steve MacDonald: Those are some of the things that the C-Suite really, really thinks through, right? They’re gonna think about growth and revenue metrics. They’re gonna think about things like customer churn and how costly that is for an organization. Things like NRR (Net Recurring Revenue)—things like that, that I’m sure you’re right in the middle of.

[00:07:31] Steve MacDonald: Super important. And if we can start to focus what we do to how it aligns with the C-Suite and the board and how they’re looking at growth in the company, then they’re gonna look at us as business advisors as well as customer advisors. And it was interesting because you mentioned that companies can be very sales-oriented, which makes perfect sense.

[00:07:56] Steve MacDonald: I was just talking earlier today with a chief sales officer, and he said that most companies have an alignment problem, but none of them should. Because if you’re focused on the voice of the customer, it aligns everyone. I just wanna get your opinion on that, because it seems like we have an opportunity to take that voice of the customer and represent it to the entire company.

[00:08:27] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. And if we do that, like, that’s an amazing opportunity to align everyone behind their needs. Over your career, you’ve had a lot of at-bats at this, right?

[00:08:39] Jackob Alaluf: Absolutely. I’ll be honest with you, I’ll tell you one of the things that I keep telling every Customer Success Manager in my departments—in the current company and previous companies—one of the things that I keep saying, I mean, the Customer Success Manager is kind of a double agent.

[00:08:53] Jackob Alaluf: From one side, he’s the one who actually represents the company at the customer’s side, and he’s the representative of the customer at the company’s side. He’s the one who actually needs to voice the customer’s needs, challenges, complaints, whenever, and make sure that the company listens, understands, realizes, and takes the required measures in order to make sure the required changes, the required adjustments, and everything else.

[00:09:20] Jackob Alaluf: On the other side, he needs to be the one, he needs to be the company’s agent in front of the customer and make sure that we represent the company in the right way, ensure and, encourage the growth and adoption and all these things. The Voice of the Customer is definitely a critical part, ’cause again, a company which is not going to be customer-centric and will continue to develop whatever they believe they need to develop or deliver at the time that they think they need to deliver without listening to the other side will find themselves continuing to develop for themselves rather than for the market. That’s key.

[00:09:54] Jackob Alaluf: So absolutely, Voice of the Customer is definitely one of the key KPIs, and I would say key, requirements for any Customer Success Manager to put on his list.

[00:10:04] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting. We’ve talked now about how all of this really applies across B2C and B2B industries, but you’ve played on both sides of the fence.

[00:10:12] Steve MacDonald: What are the biggest differences between being in Customer Experience on the B2C side versus the B2B side?

[00:10:23] Jackob Alaluf: That’s a huge difference. I would say that’s a really, really big difference. On the B2B side, some of the rules of the game, I would say, are very clear. You have a contract, you have SLAs, you have a very simple and easy way to understand what are the requirements, what are the expectations, what is the timeline for the, delivery—

[00:10:42] Jackob Alaluf: Phases of delivery and, and all this stuff, they’re very clear. On the other side, the customer side, usually it’ll be people who actually understand the technology or understand the industry. The dialogue is very professional. There are very clear rules against this part. When it comes to the B2C, it’s a completely different thing.

[00:11:04] Jackob Alaluf: I mean, there is actually no contract. There are no rules to the interaction with the customers. Specifically, in my case, when I was with the gaming company, you deal with a very, very different kind of audience. Some of the challenges are, you understand, for example, the technology behind the product and you understand where the challenges are and what leads to those challenges.

[00:11:27] Jackob Alaluf: When the end user, in most of the cases in the B2C, doesn’t necessarily know the details of what is the technology behind it and why he’s experiencing, you know, specific situations in the product and things like that. It’s different again—different experience, different way of handling things. Other than that, volumes are very different.

[00:11:48] Jackob Alaluf: Again, when you are in the B2B industry, you are dealing with companies. So the number of companies you deal with is definitely smaller than when you are in the B2C side. In the gaming industry, for example, you deal with hundreds of thousands of users on a daily basis. When I moved from a gaming company, which is B2C, to the B2B, I kept saying, I mean, it’s a different game.

[00:12:11] Jackob Alaluf: It’s a different game. One of the things that I was happy about is to get the taste of both of them because right now where I am, for example, in Bridgewise, the solution is in most of the cases B2B2C. Because at the end of the day, it’s a solution that we are selling to all businesses, but they’re offering it to their end customers.

[00:12:33] Jackob Alaluf: The understanding of the whole chain of B2B and then from the B2C is very helpful to get the wider view of how things are working and what the C at the end of the chain is expecting, and the experience of the end customer. It gives a much broader and a much clearer picture of how you need to drive your customer experience actions in order to make not only the B2B part, but also to make it all the way to the last mile of the end customer.

[00:13:02] Steve MacDonald: Well, I know that you have to have been playing on both sides. You have to learn things that you’re like, oh, in the B2C world, I could see how that applies to B2B, and in the B2B world, I could see how that better applies to B2C. What’s an example of a couple of ideas that, because you played on both sides of the fence, that you think you could share with the other side or cross-pollinate?

[00:13:26] Jackob Alaluf: Yeah, I mean, I can tell, it’s an interesting question. I remember in the first week in the current company, one of the things that we talked about is how do we measure adoption of a product by the end customer. For example, in the gaming industry, measuring adoption or measuring actually the active users of the game on a daily basis is critical because that’s the main measurement.

[00:13:49] Jackob Alaluf: How many people are logging into the game on a daily basis. Yeah. To take the mechanism of how do you measure adoption or how do you measure actually usability of a product in the B2B side when it is a product that actually goes all the way to the end customer. It was a very nice experience to see how to take the mechanism that I learned in the B2C and apply it into the B2B.

[00:14:17] Jackob Alaluf: Because there are users that their regular habit, for example, is to log into the game every day. And there are users that the regular habit is to log into the game once a week. A user who actually used to log into the game once a week, and if he didn’t log in for two days, it doesn’t mean that he just stopped playing or that he left the game.

[00:14:36] Jackob Alaluf: Because that’s his usual frequency of logging in. So you need to develop mechanisms that measure adoption based on the regular habits of the user. One of the things that we wanted to see is to check how do you measure the adoption of this application, the investment application, by the end users. And the idea is to check, first of all, what’s the regular habit, and based on that, to make the measurement and see whether you have some challenges of usability or not.

[00:15:05] Jackob Alaluf: There are definitely some metrics and some ways of doing things in the B2C, which are applicable, and you can take them and use them in the B2B2C areas.

[00:15:17] Steve MacDonald: So I’m sure when you came into the new position that you’re at, one of the questions was, Kobi, what’s your point of view on AI and what it’s going to do for our organization, servicing our customers, helping grow our revenue base?

[00:15:34] Steve MacDonald: What’s your point of view on it? Because everybody has a point of view on AI, right? What’s your point of view on AI and what it can be doing for us today?

[00:15:44] Jackob Alaluf: Yeah, great question. You will hear about AI everywhere, every time, with every product, to the point that in a lot of cases, you just put the AI sticker on everything, whether it’s… but I think one of the things that I really loved when I started the whole dialogue with the current company is that it’s the first time, or it’s one of the first times, that I see the exact place for AI suit and where it really makes sense. Because at the end of the day, we are talking about a human being needing to make a decision. You want a decision to be based on an educated decision based on a massive amount of data. AI is the right place to do that. Think about an investor that needs to make a decision to buy or sell a stock or fund or whatever, and he wants to make an educated decision and he wants to base it on a huge amount of data, which is available in different sources, in different places.

[00:16:43] Jackob Alaluf: And you want to take all this data and somehow digest it and make this decision. And obviously, a human being, with limitations, cannot make this decision without the right tools that allow you to take this massive amount of data from all these sources and make the decision. So AI is the perfect place where it can help a human being to make such a decision.

[00:17:06] Jackob Alaluf: You hear about AI everywhere, every time. There are some specific places where I say, okay, that’s the right utilization of this amazing thing called AI. And that’s what I saw in the current company that was really what attracted me. And then I said, okay, that’s a good place to be.

[00:17:21] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, AI is at its best almost when it has vast, vast pools of data that it can analyze and bring together and serve up and help give options for recommendations and things to go on.

[00:17:34] Steve MacDonald: I clearly see how, like in Bridgewise, it’s helping make financial decisions. It’s also doing that on the customer service side as well. There’s talk about all the different conversations. Like you had said, you might have, what, a hundred thousand conversations in the gaming company a day. No one person or team of people could ever even analyze that kind of information.

[00:17:56] Steve MacDonald: Without AI capabilities, how is it helping you think today to serve the customer better? What is AI doing that helps us elevate our CX game?

[00:18:09] Jackob Alaluf: I mean, there are many areas that we are starting actually utilizing AI also on the customer experience world. One of them will definitely be the support side.

[00:18:21] Jackob Alaluf: The ability to actually take the information that comes from the customer, whether they’re tickets, customer support tickets, or questions, or anything like that, and be able to analyze, or using AI, analyze the content of those tickets or questions and be able to produce responses to them, actually allows you to handle a much bigger volume, which is something that was very much applicable.

[00:18:48] Jackob Alaluf: Again, when you go to the B2C world, this is where you are starting to get massive amounts of tickets or requests coming from the end customers, and it’s almost impossible to respond to them manually one by one without breaching your SLA. So the ability to use an AI-based solution that knows how to take those requests and be able to respond to them in an intelligent way is a huge capability. This is one area where you can definitely see AI stepping into the customer experience.

[00:19:08] Jackob Alaluf: Other than that, many tools are out there that help you with timelines and planning your projects and optimizing them in the best way possible.

[00:19:30] Jackob Alaluf: Back then, I still remember we used to build those Gantt charts, you know, with the projects, and now it’s much easier to develop those timelines, optimize them, and make sure that you are able to track them in the right way. It’s a huge change from where we started, and this is where you can see AI becoming a major improvement to the AI customer experience process.

[00:19:58] Steve MacDonald: You know, we’ve talked about so much here and kind of the premise of the learning experience from being on both sides, from B2C and B2B, and our poor human brains can only remember about two to three things at a time. If there was one thing that you wanted other customer experience, customer support, or contact center executives to take away from our conversation today, what would that one thing be?

[00:20:24] Jackob Alaluf: If there is one thing that I would say that should be taken from here, it’s retention. I’ll keep talking to people again about what are the main KPIs that we need to track—satisfaction, growth, expansion, all this stuff. In my view, retention is the one thing that we need to keep and make sure that it’s high on our list, because getting a customer is one thing, but keeping them, that’s the key.

[00:20:49] Jackob Alaluf: First of all, for the expansion, eliminating churn, which is huge. Especially in the market now, you lose one customer, and it’s something that you never know what will be the outcome of losing that customer. You find the consequences of that at a later stage, and that’s something that you must prevent.

[00:21:08] Jackob Alaluf: So retention, I would say, is the one thing that in my view now is a top priority.

[00:21:13] Steve MacDonald: Well, here, I do know one thing too is that people are going to have questions, and would it be appropriate if we gave out a link to your LinkedIn profile so that people could reach out to you and ask questions?

[00:21:27] Steve MacDonald: Sure, absolutely. When we have time. The whole mission of this podcast is to bring people from very different experiences and backgrounds under the CX umbrella and share insights and ideas and our experiences. If we do that, it’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. I just wanted to say that I think you were a really important part of that rising tide today, so thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.

[00:21:51] Jackob Alaluf: Thank you, Steve. Thank you for the opportunity. I’m happy to be here.