CX Revenue Engine: How to Delight Your Way to Growth

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We’ve got a super interesting conversation today with Sri Vellimore. Now, Sri, you’re with Workiva, and what we’re talking about, you’re the VP of Global Support and Product Enablement. I love the combination of support and product enablement.

[00:00:21] Steve: Support, CX, we should be support to all different departments in the organization. But we’re going to talk about specifically today is the CX revenue engine. And how do we rev that engine up through delighting our customers into growth. And how that can be a competitive advantage for us.

[00:00:40] Steve: And you’ve got some great stats. You’ve got some great stories. So I’m really excited about getting into this. But what I want to do is, I give a little bit of background on you and then give you a chance to expand on that and what you’re doing currently today, but not only have you been in roles in SAS companies in [00:01:00] CX for around 15 years.

[00:01:02] Steve: But you’ve previously been in sales and business development roles. You’ve played on both sides of the fence. And it’s important to know because the recommendations you’re making here today are ones that truly will feed that revenue engine from a sales perspective. But you’re also advisory member on the Harvard Business Review.

[00:01:21] Steve: So there’s a lot that we could just unpack and get into here. Maybe expand on that just a little bit and then we’ll get into that CX revenue engine. And how do we create that? 

[00:01:30] Sri Velamoor: Absolutely. Thank you, Steve, first of all, thanks for having me on the podcast. Super excited to be here and super excited to talk about the topic of customer experience and customers in general.

[00:01:41] Sri Velamoor: I would say that while I have been in the SAS industry and been in the technology space for a while, I’m also a part time student of human psychology, I’ll say. I’m very interested generally to explore what makes people tick. What drives them and customers at the end of the day are people.

[00:01:59] Sri Velamoor: And we are [00:02:00] dealing with people in businesses, people dealing with people. So, I think it’s very important to, double click on the aspects of how those interactions go. And what can you do to really, unlock better outcomes by understanding the dynamics of that behavior. And that’s where understanding the dynamics of customer needs, I think is very important, especially in the customer experience space.

[00:02:21] Sri Velamoor: But I think as you already pointed out, it spans the full spectrum of what a company does with its customers all the way from marketing to post sale. And I’m excited to get into that and dive into some observations, perspectives, stats, and what I would love to see in the industry happen more.

[00:02:39] Steve: I like that because, overall what you’re going to talk about today, very much transitions like a contact center from perceptions of a cost center, a necessary evil and over it. Obviously we need to have people to answer our customers questions, but there’s a lot of C-suite and a lot of boards that look at that as one of the largest overhead costs in the company.

[00:02:59] Steve: And [00:03:00] the KPI that they’re looking for is how do we reduce those costs? Instead of looking at it as hold on. This can be a real accelerator for our entire business. We shouldn’t be thinking about how do we reduce? We should be thinking about how do we feed this engine, and gain growth.

[00:03:18] Steve: And so your perspective is around meeting the needs, a customer needs hierarchy and how that’s connected to this revenue growth engine. If you could start there and connect those dots for us, that would be fantastic. 

[00:03:32] Sri Velamoor: Absolutely. So when we think about revenue for any company, and especially if you look at an existing customer base it comes down to three things.

[00:03:42] Sri Velamoor: A customer stays, a customer spends more, or a customer recommend. And these would be the three avenues by which a customer or a company actually realizes more growth. You want to make your customers stay and not churn. You want them to spend more through your cross sell, upsell and wanting to have [00:04:00] them buy more of your products and offerings.

[00:04:02] Sri Velamoor: And then you also want them to recommend. So you not only want them to, use your product and get value from it, but you also want them to become that channel that is recommending your products to their peers, colleagues, and associates. So the stay, spend, recommend, trifecta is, I think, very important in terms of a company realizing growth.

[00:04:23] Sri Velamoor: And the way that connects with the customer hierarchy of needs and feelings is there actually studies that have been done by both Deloitte as well as Forrester, and I’m happy to send you links that you can post into the notes for the podcast later on in terms of, the studies and the findings.

[00:04:39] Sri Velamoor: But what they found is that customers are 76 percent more likely to stay with the business. They are 80 percent more likely to spend more with the business as well as they’re 86 percent more likely to recommend that brand or business to others. Based on how they feel about having business with that [00:05:00] brand.

[00:05:00] Sri Velamoor: So there’s a very direct connection between emotional and attitudinal loyalty and dollars. In terms of how customers actually behave from their stay, spend and recommend perspective. So there is absolutely a connection. And so I think the next question you have to ask yourself is, do you really have a way to understand Whether you’re meeting the needs of the customer, both from a behavioral as well as an attitudinal loyalty, and we’ll get into that more, but there is an absolute connection there between those two things.

[00:05:30] Steve: And is this, would your perspective be that, at the beginning, you stated that there’s an opportunity for change in the industry. And then that change is more on that emotional connection. Is that where the industry is missing out right now and how they feel? Is that one of the takeaways that we should be having from the podcast as we get into this?

[00:05:49] Sri Velamoor: Yeah, 100%. I think once we get into the hierarchy of needs there’s this idea that a lot of companies today are over indexed on the feature functionality and the [00:06:00] trust and safety of their products, vis a vis how the customers view them. Some companies have transcended into the next layer.

[00:06:07] Sri Velamoor: Which is the community and sense of belonging. So you hear a lot of companies talk about our purpose, our vision. The reason we exist is to do X, Y and Z. Because they want to create this idea in the customer’s mind that you’re part of a larger cause, hey, we are doing this because we believe that this is good for the earth, or we believe that this is the right way for humanity to do X, Y, and Z.

[00:06:30] Sri Velamoor: So that’s the most near term evolution of how customers, or sorry, companies are thinking about how they present themselves in the eyes of the customer. But there’s still opportunity beyond that, that I don’t think a lot of companies have, which is how do I make my customers feel from a self esteem or self actualization standpoint in terms of doing business with me.

[00:06:50] Sri Velamoor: And I think that’s the opportunity where, there is clear evidence that companies who have done that, and done that well have had a disproportionate degree of success [00:07:00] relative to their peers who are focused still on the bottom layer. 

[00:07:02] Steve: And now that you brought that up, I’d love to hear some of those customer stories.

[00:07:06] Steve: And then after that, actually get into what are then the new KPIs? Around what you can track, around how customers feel? But if you wouldn’t mind telling us some of those stories I’d appreciate it. 

[00:07:18] Sri Velamoor: So first and foremost I’ll talk about Apple as a company and then I’ll give another software example, Apple being, let’s say that they’re producing, consumer retail products.

[00:07:28] Sri Velamoor: If you look at Apple sales marketing campaigns, they’re focused less on what the product actually does, and they focus more on what the customer is able to achieve and what that would make them feel. So this whole idea, or even the phrase of Apple fanboy fangirl that has emerged, has come out of the fact that Apple has decided to focus on what is the feeling of self-esteem and self-actualization that their products are able to drive in the consumers that are using their products.

[00:07:59] Sri Velamoor: And [00:08:00] when people, once they latch onto that, they care less about the product spec sheet of the things that Apple is putting out and they immediately wanted because they know that what they’re able to achieve and how they feel by owning that product, is a certain thing and they want more of that.

[00:08:16] Sri Velamoor: So they’re chasing that sort of feeling again, with the new products and services that Apple puts out. A more sort of SAS or software example a company that I can think of is Canva. So Canva is a company out of Australia that creates a product that enabled anybody to become a designer.

[00:08:33] Sri Velamoor: And this is in their tagline where they say, hey, you can be a designer. And first I’ll talk a little bit about the success of Canva relative to other companies that have attempted this, but Canva today is about a 2.3 billion dollar ARR company. They have grown 60 percent year over year, pretty much for the last seven years, which is unheard of, even in today’s world of 12 to 20 percent growth in SAS companies, they’re still maintaining this clip of 60 [00:09:00] percent growth.

[00:09:00] Sri Velamoor: And when you look at Figma and other competitors of this company, All the other big four combined, their revenue and customer base is smaller than what Canva has achieved to date. Just purely in terms of numbers, they have been a runaway success. Now why I bring them up is because their entire focus in terms of how they market, the way that they’ve designed their product, the workflows that they do, the onboarding that they do is all tied to how the customer feels.

[00:09:29] Sri Velamoor: And one of their marketing campaigns or emails, once you sign up to say, I would like an account, is they send you an email and they basically say, hey, this is your day to be a great designer. And they talk about how you can create a new design, for example, of a t-shirt or a mug in three easy steps. And they say, did you know that you could, a degree of design capability or that you were able to do this easily and oh, by the way, it’s our secret, we won’t tell anybody how easy we made it for you.

[00:09:59] Sri Velamoor: So they’re [00:10:00] locking into that self esteem self actualization layers of the hierarchy that been their principal driving focus and you can see the outcome in terms of results in terms of revenue and customer growth and whatnot. So, that’s I think a relevant example to what we are talking about here and don’t take my word for it, go look up Canva and use the product, read about their success and you’ll see these things to be factual. 

[00:10:25] Steve: So, tell us now we understand how important it is. Some of these stories and that makes perfect sense. Now I want to do this and I want to track it. What are some of the ways that you track the KPIs that how you measure how people feel? 

[00:10:40] Sri Velamoor: Yeah, I think measuring how people feel is obviously a difficult thing because that is in their head.

[00:10:45] Sri Velamoor: You have to boil this down to tangible things that are under your control to measure. Now, the ultimate measure of how a company or a customer fields going back to what I talked about in terms of the buy, spend, recommend metrics. [00:11:00] Those are, I would say, The lagging indicator. So the recommend metric, you obviously have NPS in the spend metric.

[00:11:08] Sri Velamoor: You have NRR and GRR, the the net revenue retention and gross revenue retention metrics, which are an indicator of you started at X. Are you spending more or not? Are you spending less? And then your usual churn metrics are the stay metrics, right? How many of the customers that I signed on are actually staying or not.

[00:11:26] Sri Velamoor: So those are lagging indicators, but I think the industry needs to move more towards effort score metrics, which is for any given core action in my platform. And or your product. First of all, you have to boil down to what is your core action, which is something that takes a while to do. But you have to this.

[00:11:47] Sri Velamoor: You have to distill this without any unambiguous or an ambiguity or doubt that is the core action in your platform. For example, in YouTube, they spent a lot of time analyzing this, and they understood that [00:12:00] the core action of a YouTube user is the amount of subscriptions that they sign up to.

[00:12:06] Sri Velamoor: Where they subscribe to a channel or a YouTube poster, because what that’s telling them is that is an indication of loyalty that you’re getting value from the platform and you’re willing to come back and view more videos. Otherwise one might have said, Oh, it’s the amount of. Minutes of video viewed per day, but they spent enough time to understand their users, that the core action actually that demonstrates behavioral and attitudinal loyalty is this subscription action.

[00:12:36] Sri Velamoor: So for each of, for your own software, whoever you are you need to really spend time to understand what is the core action that I’m trying to get my users to do in my platform. And really. Once you understand that tracking that. And making sure that you’re really lowering the bar in terms of the effort to do that would be a way to increase the happiness and delight and the attitudinal loyalty.

[00:12:59] Sri Velamoor: [00:13:00] And then you can look at those along with these other stay spend recommend metrics to get the full picture of, am I driving both delight and attitudinal loyalty as well as the downstream sort of financial metrics that tend to be more lagging, but are equally important to track. 

[00:13:16] Steve: So you spent a lot of time talking about attitudinal, emotional, and I think it’s fascinating, our first conversation, you related everything to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

[00:13:26] Steve: You said, hey, customers are people too, and that’s what Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is all about, our needs as humans, as people, if you could break it down and like upper levels and lower levels and how that works, I think it’d be really helpful for all of us. 

[00:13:41] Sri Velamoor: Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all just to baseline everybody on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

[00:13:46] Sri Velamoor: So think of it as a pyramid with five layers. The very bottom layer is physiological needs, this is the concept that humans have some basic needs in terms of air, water, food, shelter and so on. Then there are safety needs. [00:14:00] which is the next layer. Then the third layer is this need of love and belonging, of feeling like you’re part of a larger community or that you have others that make you feel like, hey they want to be part of your life and that you want to be part of their lives. Then there’s the fourth layer, which is the esteem needs, which is you want to feel like you are respected that you have self esteem and that you have status and so on.

[00:14:23] Sri Velamoor: So it’s those types of needs. And then lastly, the fifth and the top layer is called the self actualization layer, which is this need to feel like you are living best possible life that you can live. So obviously a lot of these bottom four would contribute to that. But that ultimate need is, hey, am I serving the purpose that I was put on this earth for?

[00:14:45] Sri Velamoor: You hear a lot of people talk about that. That’s that self actualization need layer. So if we take that as the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and those five layers in the customer hierarchy of needs, there are equivalent parallels to this. So at the [00:15:00] very bottom, I would replace the physiological air, water, food, shelter needs with feature functionality, basic kind of does your product or service do what it promises to do.

[00:15:11] Sri Velamoor: That’s the customer’s absolute basic need as they look at a product or a service. Then there’s the trust and safety needs, which is a parallel or analogous layer, which is customers are going to ask, hey, does your product, is it safe to use? Can I trust my data? Am I going to be doing any harm by using your product to myself or others?

[00:15:30] Sri Velamoor: So that next layer, which is analogous. And that third layer is again, community and belonging, which I talked about this a little bit where more and more companies are focused on conveying their purpose and their vision and mission for existence. Which is talking about, hey, we’re doing this for the good of the earth, or we’re doing this to eliminate this human problem.

[00:15:50] Sri Velamoor: So they’re trying to create this community where by being a customer of that product or service, I can, check the box of this belonging need. [00:16:00] Because I’m part of a larger cause . By being a Tesla customer. I get a great product that has amazing, self driving capability, but I’m also doing well for the earth by trying to reduce the carbon footprint and dependency on that, on fossil fuels for humanity.

[00:16:15] Sri Velamoor: So that community layer is something a lot of companies are latching on to and are being more vocal about conveying that so that customers can identify with that and say, okay, yeah, that meets my need of community and belonging. The next two layers of esteem and self actualization is where I think the opportunity is for a lot of company in the products and services that they create.

[00:16:38] Sri Velamoor: in the way that they interact with their customers, in the way that they sell to them, the way they market to them. Because that is where I think the differentiation can occur. Because if you just treat your customer as, hey, you’re just any other customer here, focus on my feature functionality. And this is why you need to pay me a lot of money.

[00:16:56] Sri Velamoor: I don’t think that story is going to land that well and [00:17:00] customers or companies that have, really honed in on how to craft their message to convey the esteem and self actualization story to their customers are doing really well. Where customers now feel like, hey, I feel proud, about doing business with this company, or I feel proud about wearing that brand.

[00:17:20] Sri Velamoor: Because today, if a brand makes a misstep, the cancel culture basically says done with you. And that’s evidence of the fact that matters to customer, that is a need that matter. So that’s how those two things, I think, come together, same five layers. I think a lot of analogous layers at the very top in terms of community esteem and self actualization.

[00:17:41] Sri Velamoor: But the bottom two. Are slightly variant to the physiological but in the context of products or services. 

[00:17:48] Steve: You made a big deal earlier about, as an example of this, I could absolutely see, you can be a designer too, purpose of belonging.

[00:17:55] Steve: You could be a part of this community of designers, and then you can actually do a [00:18:00] really good job of this and feel really good about what you’re producing and how it reflects back on you. The steam, the purpose of belonging, the steam and the actualization. I can actually see how it translates directly into that customer story that you were talking about.

[00:18:15] Sri Velamoor: Yeah. And when they put a message on the screen in their software that says, this is amazing. Guess what? You did that. That is not an accident that they’re doing that. They They’re exactly honing in on this esteem need to say, yeah, you use my product and let me reinforce the fact that.

[00:18:33] Sri Velamoor: I’m going to pat you on the back in a way and make you feel good about yourself for using my product and creating something. And customers love that and I don’t think it can be overstated. 

[00:18:43] Steve: Tell me about how that, cause you also talked about how, product feature and functionality. I wouldn’t necessarily say that anybody’s beating Canva in terms of product feature functionality, But certainly that’s not where they’re competing the most.

[00:18:59] Steve: You can’t [00:19:00] have a technology lead, a product feature function lead, and expect today that’s, what’s going to take you into the future. But that feeling that they’re creating, how hard is that to recreate? How much of a competitive advantage are you creating for your business in addressing these higher, layers of the customer deed, so you said self esteem, self actualization is like really where the heart of the opportunity is, talk a little bit about that if you could. 

[00:19:31] Sri Velamoor: Yeah, absolutely. So let me tell a story first. I was on the phone the other day. I was calling a small bank about some transaction and just most phone calls to banks you are put through an IVR.

[00:19:42] Sri Velamoor: I was given this menu option of, hey, click one for this, two for that, and so on. I was going through the menu options and then I was on hold waiting for a human to basically become available to answer the phone. Right then, I got another phone call that I had to take. And it was a work related one.[00:20:00] 

[00:20:00] Sri Velamoor: And I cringed because I was like, Oh my God, I invested all this time. I was so close to speaking to a human. And now I have to hang up and take this call. I did grudgingly, and then I was done with that phone call. And then I said, Oh, great. Now I have to call this back and for all those numbers and so on.

[00:20:16] Sri Velamoor: But I called the bank back and immediately instead of the original menu that I heard of press one for this, two for that, it said, hey, looks like you recently called and had to hang up. Would you like us to put you back where you were in queue before? And my mind was blown. I was like, yes, I’d never heard.

[00:20:36] Sri Velamoor: Of course. Yes. I had never heard of that type of an experience or experience it myself in any IVR of anything that I called before. And it got me thinking, I’m like, I love that. And here I am talking to you about it. This podcast, maybe, listened to by thousands of people, they’re going to hear about it.

[00:20:55] Sri Velamoor: And I am talking about it. So I am, it did three things for me going [00:21:00] back to the revenue engine. It’s going to make me want to stay with this company because of how they made me feel and that they’re thinking about me and my experience. When I call back, they went down to that level to think about the customer experience and how does one feel. 

[00:21:14] Sri Velamoor: Of course they feel frustrated and impatient when they’re calling. It will make me want to spend more with them because, hey, I love how they make me feel, and here I am recommending them to everybody. I’m talking about them. I’m not using their name for, obviously, privacy purposes here, but I’m happy to share the name later on.

[00:21:32] Sri Velamoor: But I’m telling this story to everyone I know because I’m in the customer experience world and this has nothing to do with the banking product of the bank. At the end of the day, what does a bank offer you? Savings, checkings and interest rates and returns, right? How much arbitrage is there in that space to get a competitive advantage?

[00:21:51] Sri Velamoor: Probably not a lot. You’re pegged to the interest rates of the government and whatnot, and there’s only so much you can do. But this company has [00:22:00] intelligently. understood that their opportunity in competing and in making me stay, spend and recommend is, in how they make me feel in those little interactions.

[00:22:11] Sri Velamoor: So, I tell this story because for every company, no matter what service or product you offer, you have to look at those moments of how your customer interacts with you in those little, even seemingly minutiae and minute moment of interactions and say, how can I eliminate complexity? How can I introduce simplicity?

[00:22:33] Sri Velamoor: How can I introduce delight? And that is what I will remember. I won’t know what the feature functionality of Excel is, in terms of its full stack, right? I know how it makes me feel. It’s not sorry, Microsoft, but I’m fairly neutral in terms of my experience of Excel. But, this story about the bank that I shared, I think is a classic example of a company thinking through the interactions in extreme detail, putting yourself in the [00:23:00] shoes of the customer.

[00:23:01] Sri Velamoor: And then saying, how do we simplify this? How do we eliminate complexity? And how do we deliver delight, self esteem, and then let this person be on their way and enjoy their day instead of sitting on the phone with me, which is the self actualization. 

[00:23:13] Steve: Right before we started recording, we talked about a great book, of classic. The blue ocean strategy, where everybody’s typically competing in a very red ocean, which is red from the battle, the blood from the battle of competition. And what that bank has done is said, we’re going to do maybe some simple things, maybe some, they’re a little bit different, but we’re going to have a perspective that we’re going to delight our customers.

[00:23:36] Steve: And that’s going to be. A competitive advantage for us because the product itself right the demand deposits the rates everything we’re talking about They don’t have the ability. They’re federally regulated, right? They don’t have the ability to even have that differentiation in the product. So, this is a competitive advantage going back to the revenue growth engine, if beyond product that’s actually being offered a SAS [00:24:00] environment, if you can create a significant competitive advantage, by delighting your customers, that’s the opportunity the majority of the industry isn’t taking advantage of.

[00:24:09] Sri Velamoor: 100 percent. And having been in the sales function, I was on this side of trying to sell something and I saw all of the things in our contracts, the terms of service, how the negotiation goes, where we’re not really putting ourselves in our customers shoe. A lot of that gets negotiated and put into contracts.

[00:24:26] Sri Velamoor: for a rainy day and for, the worst case scenarios, but it does a tremendous amount of damage in terms of the customer experience of how easy is it to buy from you. So going back to the growth engine, one recommendation I would give sales enablement, or even revenue operations teams is, think about your, look at your contracting process in detail.

[00:24:47] Sri Velamoor: Look at your terms and really boil that down to the things that you really care about. Because the more you simplify that, the more delightful it is to actually go through a contract signing and negotiation process with you. It starts [00:25:00] there. And I gave this example of a bank with the IVR, but everything from the moment of moving funds into the bank to somebody being responsive in returning my phone call was all top notch.

[00:25:13] Sri Velamoor: And this was yet just another example of the fact that they’re thinking about the experience as being the differentiator to doing business with them. Could I go to another bank that offers, 0.05 percent better interest rate on a deposit, probably. But would I want to No because of the experience that I’m having and the experience that I’ve had from beginning to end, this is overlooked, I think, by a lot of companies and it’s in your hands. It is a process design choice and a simplification of a process design. I’m not telling you to go buy hundreds of millions of dollars of software or third party tools or make investments in your CapEx or OpEx that are not justifiable.

[00:25:56] Sri Velamoor: It can come down to simple process change. 

[00:25:58] Steve: So we’ve talked about a [00:26:00] lot. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure that we get into this episode and get communicated to the audience? 

[00:26:09] Sri Velamoor: No, I think we covered it for the most part. I like that this conversation was not just about customer experience.

[00:26:14] Sri Velamoor: And I think we most recently touched on the aspect that, if delighting your customers and invoking feelings of delight in your customer base is important, there’s opportunity across the full spectrum of functions that your company is operating in, whether it’s product, whether it’s sales, marketing customer experience is not just a customer experience.

[00:26:35] Sri Velamoor: job. It’s a team sport that spans the entire company and it includes your CEO as well. Yeah, I’m glad that we were able to convey the point that this is a broader spectrum opportunity than just simply for a CX team. 

[00:26:49] Steve: I love the way that you made that point in terms of that it’s a team sport, customer experience. Right down to like with the sales department and going through terms of service in the contract, [00:27:00] the more that you can add delight into simplify, make easier, the process, the onboarding, the contract signing, it quite, it is a team sport.

[00:27:10] Sri Velamoor: So another quick example I’ll give in the contract terms is we often focus so much on the termination clauses, termination for cause, termination for convenience. Focus less on that and focus more on delivering a great product that work.

[00:27:24] Sri Velamoor: Then you don’t have to go back and forth for days and hours negotiating a termination for convenience. You should actually offer that if you can stand behind your product because if you keep your customers happy and it works, they’re not going to, terminate for no reason. But that adds a delight layer, adds a simplification layer, and it also signals to the customer that you will focus more on delivering the product than to try to lock them up with the term that’s sitting in some contract, and that itself is a small example of how to shift your mindset to, delivering delight and putting yourself in the customer’s shoe than [00:28:00] trying to, hold them hostage with legalese.

[00:28:02] Steve: So I’m going to put you on the spot here for a second, and I’m going to ask of everything that we’ve talked about. If there was one most important thing that you wanted people to take away, what would that be? 

[00:28:14] Sri Velamoor: Yeah, customers are people and people have feelings. and how you make them feel is a lot more memorable.

[00:28:21] Sri Velamoor: It’s a lot more disproportionately impactful in terms of whether they stay, spend and recommend with you as a business. Not to get all touchy feely and say feelings matter, but feelings actually matter a lot. So the one thing I would, ask anyone watching this, listening to this take away is that the feelings of your customer matter and look at your processes and your interactions across the board with the lens of how would this make me feel if I were on the other side?

[00:28:50] Steve: There is one more thing, because everything that you’ve talked about here to me means. There’s greater and greater importance, even though this is a team [00:29:00] sport, but there’s thousands of interactions that are handled by the agents in the contact center. And the training, the agent, the quality, of the agent, the importance of the agent in this process for creating a feeling that is a competitive advantage to me means, issues like agent turnover, which is high in the industry is a grave issue to address, if you could just even on a scale of 1 to 10, just give me like, how important is the agent, like the live agent in this whole process for creating feelings, positive feelings and getting all the benefit through the revenue engine? How important is the agent to this process? 

[00:29:45] Sri Velamoor: Extremely important, going back to my point that customers are people I will say employees are also people. So I’m going to take this broader than even just the agent, but employees are people. And there’s study after study that has shown [00:30:00] that happier employees mean happier customers and therefore more revenue growth and better stock performance and stockholder returns.

[00:30:07] Sri Velamoor: There’s plenty of studies on that. So How your employees feel also actually matters and understanding. What are the incentives and motivations of your employee? How do they view these hierarchy of needs in terms of esteem, self actualization? Are they living the best possible life they can live in your company, in the role?

[00:30:28] Sri Velamoor: How do they feel about occupying that role? Do they feel frustration? Do they feel disappointment? Do they feel stuck? Or do they feel empowered, purposeful, and there’s growth? For managers, it’s the same message, focus on how your employees are feeling, because if you can make them feel empowered and positive about where things are headed, then they will do magic for you.

[00:30:50] Sri Velamoor: And that will result in great outcomes for customers. I think it’s a similar message. In this case, the customer is the direct reporter the employee that you’re managing. And [00:31:00] Same hierarchy of needs can apply there as well. 

[00:31:02] Steve: So many words of wisdom. If there’s a follow up questions from the audience, would it be appropriate that we gave out a link to maybe your profile on LinkedIn, they could reach out to you? 

[00:31:11] Sri Velamoor: Yeah, 100 percent. I’m available on LinkedIn. And I believe I also published my email there, or just message me on LinkedIn. I would love to have a dialogue. I always love connecting more dots and collecting more dots. That makes me feel great. 

[00:31:25] Steve: Perfect. Sri, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of these insights. We truly have all benefited from it. I appreciate it. 

[00:31:32] Sri Velamoor: Thank you for having me. It was a wonderful conversation and I really loved the way that you structured it and took us through the discussion. So thank you.