Essential Insights on the Contact Center Nudging Strategy

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the Contact Center Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we’ve got a really exciting guest, Christian Hornebrant. And Christian, you are the Customer Experience Manager for all of Telia. For anyone who doesn’t know, Telia is the largest communications provider, like Verizon of the United States, and you handle all of their customer experience.

[00:00:27] Steve MacDonald: We’re also going to talk based on some of your experience, and you’ve been deeply involved with sales for several years. You’ve been accused of having constant ideas—a trail of always ideating and innovating. And so what I’d love to do is have you maybe just explain a little bit more about your background before we get into the topic today, which is essential insights for what you call the contact center nudging strategy, which none of us have ever heard of before. But when I heard that, we wanted to have it on the podcast, so we’re going to get into that quickly.

[00:01:04] Steve MacDonald: But if you could explain a little bit more about your background, that would be great.

[00:01:07] Christian Hornebrant: Thanks, Steve. That’s a great intro. It might be a bit of an overstatement that I’m the sole person responsible for a multi-billion-dollar company’s customer experience, so let’s just call that a grand compliment.

[00:01:20] Christian Hornebrant: I’m involved in it, but I wouldn’t be able to take credit for it. My background is I’ve always loved sales, and I started as a tech geek, working while I was doing the equivalent of high school. I just spent all my days in the computer room, learning stuff and handling stuff.

[00:01:38] Christian Hornebrant: Then it always turned into sales. Whatever I did, it turned into sales, and I just love the aspects of it—where you’re learning something, you’re chasing something. And it’s also because I’m a very open person nowadays, and it hasn’t always been like that.

[00:01:55] Christian Hornebrant: As a young teenager, I had every insecurity that you would have, as probably most people, concerned about what people think about me, how I should look, what I should do, what I should say, should I talk now, should I be silent now—everything that you can imagine. And then it’s been a process of working with myself as well and just trying to learn.

[00:02:17] Christian Hornebrant: I think I was in my 20s when I finally understood that if you don’t care so much, life gets so much simpler. I fell off a stage in Oslo, Norway. I could either mope about it or run away from it, or I could just stand up and say, “That wasn’t unexpected; let’s continue.” That’s also led me to one of my greatest powers in life.

[00:02:39] Christian Hornebrant: I dare to state my ideas. So if we’re doing something, I will always have 10 ideas about anything, but I don’t know what’s brilliant or not. And I don’t think anyone knows if their idea is brilliant or not unless they vent it. And if you censor yourself, the brilliant idea is most likely something that you’d censor.

[00:03:05] Christian Hornebrant: So you need to be able to speak them, get the reactions, and four of the ideas will be utterly, completely stupid—the worst ideas you’ve ever heard of. But if you don’t speak them, no one’s going to know. And you won’t even know. And you will find one or two nuggets that are pure gold that you can tweak and work on.

[00:03:28] Christian Hornebrant: And that’s what I try to bring to any project that I’m working on—just narrating what I see, what I think, what I reflect on. And then together, we’ll work on that and make it into something.

[00:03:40] Steve MacDonald: So, now I’m intrigued because I’m sure this nudging strategy is one of the ones that wasn’t stupid. Perfect segue. I’d love to have you define, in the notion of customer experience and specifically in a contact center, what a nudging strategy means.

[00:03:58] Christian Hornebrant: Think of it like this: if you have kids and you want them to do a chore, if you tell them, “Hey, do this now or I’ll [something],” you’re just going to hit a brick wall of resistance, and it’s going to be fighting.

[00:04:14] Christian Hornebrant: And as soon as you command something, or demand something, or order something, if you’re in the army, then you’ve trained it for two years that you’ve got to do it right now. If you don’t do it, as we said in this second, someone’s going to die. There are cases where you need strict orders, but usually, most of the time, you need to transform something and get something somewhere, and you can’t make the giant leap in one go.

[00:04:44] Christian Hornebrant: I can do an example. We worked on a case with a large bank in Sweden, and people were having pension insurance where you’re locking your money away from age 20 until you’re 65. And you’re combining pension and insurance and old age into one package. So it’s probably the most boring thing a person can think of besides going, maybe, to the dentist or something. The bank wanted all of its customers to make a change, and they had tried for two or three years to make people do this change. They wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t hear, they would forget about it. Then they came to an agency that I was working at, at that time.

[00:05:28] Christian Hornebrant: So we thought if we’re going to have them do this, we need to rethink this. And this was maybe 15 years ago. So you needed to sign a physical paper and mail it in. So how can you get 100,000 people to sign a form that they don’t understand, don’t want to do, have no interest in, and, if they can, they’re just going to push it aside?

[00:05:48] Christian Hornebrant: So we had to create some kind of nudging strategy for this. So we segmented it into maybe 15 small steps, where we just slowly moved the customer toward the desired results. And it started in a kind of classic way—they get an email informing them about something, and in the email, it said, we will send you a postal mail in the coming week.

[00:06:14] Christian Hornebrant: Please look at it when you get it. The day it was sent out, they got a text message: We finally sent you the postal message. Go find it. Two days after it was supposed to have arrived, we called them: Hey, this is us from the bank. We just want to make sure you’ve gotten our postal message. Could you put it on your kitchen table?

[00:06:36] Christian Hornebrant: What time is a good time for me to call you? Okay. Thursday at two o’clock. I’ll hold you to that, Steve. Perfect. And then they got an email confirmation saying that we had a meeting. They got a text message: In two hours, it’s your meeting. We called them again, and probably half of them had already lost their papers, so we had to resend a new paper, a new document, etc.

[00:07:02] Christian Hornebrant: And all of this time, we had to explain the benefits of the choice, but they had to make a choice. Small baby steps, pushing them slightly further until they were in a position to make a choice.

[00:07:16] Steve MacDonald: I love how you said the baby steps because that’s exactly what I was thinking of. But then you combine that with those individual small steps; they were also opportunities to reinforce the benefits of why they were even doing this because I don’t know why, and I’ve never had to do it before, and it sounds complex. I’m going to push it down the road continually. So you just gave them a reason to only have to do a little bit at a time.

[00:07:44] Steve MacDonald: And every time they did it, they had a reinforcement of why that little thing they were doing was a big, important thing. So now I get the nudging strategy. Tell me, how does this nudging strategy come into the world of customer experience, customer support, contact centers, and like even down to what an agent can be doing?

[00:08:05] Christian Hornebrant: One crucial thing is to build familiarity and awareness. So we did a big test a year back when you had linear TVs. Maybe it was the last millennia; I’m not sure anymore. But, the idea still here is, if you run a TV ad and on your website, if the contents don’t match, then you lose track of it.

[00:08:29] Christian Hornebrant: And also, when you’re then engaging with the customer service, somehow it’s got to stick there as well. If we could do it in 1998 with the technology that existed back then, we had a TV ad with some person who was the spotlight hero of that ad, and then we had another person on the website when they came to the website.

[00:08:53] Christian Hornebrant: Or if we change the website to the person that was the hero, there was a kind of a 15 percent increase in conversions. And if you incorporate that also into the contact center role, while you’re waiting in the queue, you get a message from this person saying, I agree that they’re calling us; we’ll be with you shortly.

[00:09:11] Christian Hornebrant: So everything you could do to reinforce that it was the same context. Yes. And now if you work in the age of hyper-personalization, there’s no excuse for not starting to implement this. But it’s a pinball game now. Before it was a linear motion. Now it’s a chaotic quantum pinball game in five dimensions; it’s become increasingly hard. But if you can work this out, you can find all of these little components and you need platforms, of course, for this and et cetera. So it’s a big undertaking, but if you get it right, you’re going to see a massive improvement in customer satisfaction and conversions because you’re giving people what they want and when they want it.

[00:09:55] Steve MacDonald: Do you have a story, an example of how this came to life? Because you’re leading us along, you’re nudging us along, by the way. But we remember things 22 times more when we hear in the form of a story. Like, how do you tell us a story about how you put this, maybe tele or wherever, into action and what happened?

[00:10:13] Christian Hornebrant: Every story starts with a why, so you need to find first a root cause. Why excursion, the five whys, or whatever method you want to use to figure out what’s in it? If I’m trying to pitch you a new watch, so why would you need a new watch? To figure out what the time is. Okay, that’s not very sexy at all. So why do you need to figure out what the time is? So I know when to start my journey home. Okay, so why do you need to know when you want to start your journey home?

[00:10:43] Christian Hornebrant: Because if I’m not home in time, my wife’s gonna get angry. Okay, so why don’t you want your wife to get angry? Because I don’t want to sleep on the couch, or whatever.

[00:10:52] Christian Hornebrant: It’s that if you do the five whys along the way until you figure out the real reason behind it, so you need the watch because you want to have a happy marriage.

[00:11:03] Christian Hornebrant: And then I have the starting rounds for my why. And then I can start building up the story around that. And then we tap into emotions. Do you remember when you were just falling in love, and life was great, and no kids were yanking your clothing and saying Daddy, or whatever?

[00:11:19] Christian Hornebrant: And then you build that story up, you get some familiarity, you get some rapport. Then you come to the twist where it leads the way to how things aren’t in that way. And then you come back to it. And then you end on, if you just had this watch, it’d all be fine. So if you can find that story and adapt that to your business needs, or your business processes, or to get your son doing his homework, or whatever, that would be my perfect or easiest way to explain this.

[00:11:53] Steve MacDonald: So that makes perfect sense. Now I’m going to ask how in a business model it gets applied. So, like I told you, you have large organizations and an ABM marketing model and sales model that you’re following. You have individual customers that you’re marketing to and you’re nudging. So does the nudging strategy work at both ends of that spectrum?

[00:12:17] Christian Hornebrant: It does. You don’t always call it the nudging strategy. As we said before, most of us are doing it in everyday life without thinking about it. You won’t get someone to make a life-changing choice or a small choice—just deciding what to eat for dinner, deciding what the TV package is, or what the phone package is. How many gigabytes of surf do I need?

[00:12:39] Christian Hornebrant: You always have to find the essence and the need. A great way of doing that is just staying curious and trying to listen in. So, if you turn it into a contact center world, if you train your agents to listen to the customer, ask a few questions to the customer to have the customer clarify the need and the whys behind that need.

[00:13:07] Christian Hornebrant: Then you find out exactly how to take care of that customer, how to help that customer, and get them what they actually need. And if you’re in it for the long term, you will give your customers what they need and not maybe what’s best for your two-week profit.

[00:13:25] Steve MacDonald: It makes perfect sense and to the point where I want to break down your strategy a little bit. And you have five core elements that you say are elements of kind of leadership and this nudging strategy. Take us through these elements and why they’re important.

[00:13:43] Christian Hornebrant: We train managers, we train staff, and the first thing you need to develop is some kind of self-awareness.

[00:13:49] Christian Hornebrant: We usually always start with a self-awareness approach, where you need to reflect on yourself. You need to be able to ask yourself, why did something happen? How did I react when it happened? So, we do lots of training with feedback, and you could argue that—

[00:14:07] Christian Hornebrant: Why would you spend time digging into people’s values, their purpose in life, or how to address feedback if you’re just a contact center staff? But, in essence, they are one of the most important branches of your organization, because that’s where mostly you can prevent bad experiences.

[00:14:31] Christian Hornebrant: It’s not always about giving great experiences. As soon as a person turns to the contact center, there’s usually an issue. So, you have a great outcome if you prevent the bad experience. That’s a huge positive, and you need to remember that. So, to facilitate that, one thing that you could do then is have each staff member be able to be comfortable and safe within themselves.

[00:14:57] Christian Hornebrant: So, if you understand—there are lots of studies to be done—if you understand the company’s values, or if you understand your values, what gives the biggest boost is understanding your values. Because that makes you feel safe as a person; it makes you feel anchored and grounded. And that also means that you can handle the conversation without it becoming about you because it’s about the situation, it’s about the customer, it’s about how we interpret the situation, how we live in a situation. It’s not about, “You’re a bad person, Steve, and I hate you.” It’s about, “In this situation, in this context, I said something that you interpreted as something that made me respond to that.”

00:15:45] Christian Hornebrant: And that has nothing to do with you or me. It’s just the situation. So if our contact center staff can come to that realization, it’s usually hard because they’re mostly 18- to 25-year-old people, so in the beginning of their life journey. That’s why you need to work on that, and you need to give them the opportunity.

[00:16:06] Christian Hornebrant: You need to empower them so they can succeed. So if we then go back to what you started with, we first have an envisioning part. Go on the four E’s. First, you need to envision. And as we said before, if I don’t understand why I should do something, I’m not going to do it, because I’m just going to think, it doesn’t matter or whatever.

[00:16:26] Christian Hornebrant: We have this example saying that you’re a stonemason in the 12th century, and I come to you and say, Steve, I need 100 white bricks that are 12 by 12. And you say, fine. And you gave me 99 and a half bricks that were kind of 10 to 12-ish, and you’re happy with your results because you didn’t expect much. You didn’t understand the context. If I instead said, hey Steve, we’re building up this new school building here, and we want it to look really good for our community—it’s for students.

[00:16:59] Christian Hornebrant: It’s for kids. So for us to build it, we need 1,200 square bits of these white marble stone slabs, and they need to be 12 by 12 to fit. The effort you’re going to make and the precision will vary greatly between these two steps.

[00:17:19] Steve MacDonald: I love that. So you’re giving the context is what you’re doing. You’ve done a lot of analogies with your kids, and I have four teenagers, and I know that it helps to explain why it’s so important to have your chore done on time—not just, oh, this is another nagging thing I got to do. If you give context, there’s greater understanding and also a little explanation of the benefits for them as well. I love this. Here’s what I want to ask because we’ve covered quite a bit, but I want to make sure you have the opportunity for me to ask you: what haven’t we covered?

[00:17:54] Steve MacDonald: What’s important about this nudging strategy that we’re talking about here that we haven’t talked about yet?

[00:18:00] Christian Hornebrant: Let’s just break it down. The first thing is you have to be curious. I think we spoke about it, but I want to just reiterate this. If you’re not curious and you don’t follow up and learn at every step, because life is not a strategy for you as well.

[00:18:14] Christian Hornebrant: You have to be curious and ask questions, and you have to want to understand people. It’s not enough to, if you’re in a meeting, just wait your turn to speak, because then you’re not listening. You have to listen actively and understand what you’re trying to communicate and read.

[00:18:31] Christian Hornebrant: That’s the only way for you to understand where my opposing party is at. So if I’m gonna nudge you somewhere, there’s maybe a line of 50 steps, or it’s a branch of trees with infinite amounts of variables. If I start in the wrong position, I’m always going to fail because I haven’t met you where you’re at.

[00:18:54] Christian Hornebrant: And then it’s also about the storytelling, as we spoke about, but it’s also at least the illusion of safety. Even if it’s not perfectly safe, or even if it’s not crystal clear, at least you need to have the illusion or the feeling of safety. Illusion is at least having the feeling of safety; then you can dare to venture a bit outside your comfort zone. So we need to have the element of safety to prevent retaliation or having our guards up. So that means also that when you have that, then you also have to back off and allow the space.

[00:19:32] Christian Hornebrant: I’ve understood where you’re going, where you’re at. I’ve tried to make you understand where we are going, why this is important. We’ve used storytelling to paint the new perfect world. Where would we get to if we can do all of this? With that said, you also need to decide, should this person know the outcome or not.

[00:19:54] Christian Hornebrant: That also depends on where you’re going and what you’re doing. And then when you’ve done that, you transfer the ownership back to the other party, and you back away a bit, and allow them to try it and to grow. And if they’re doing something great, you can encourage that and push them a bit higher along this.

[00:20:16] Christian Hornebrant: So you can help people win. Everyone needs to win. If you’re building trust, if you’re working with a big organization, I usually work with big companies that, when you always have to have a quick win to gain trust. So that it’s working. Let’s have them try the next step and the next phase.

[00:20:34] Christian Hornebrant: And also when it comes down to the execution of everything, you need to set the priorities straight because you will never, ever in life have time to do everything that you want to do. So you just need to decide what’s most important, what can and can’t do, and then all barriers are only imaginary illusions.

[00:20:56] Christian Hornebrant: Because the barrier doesn’t exist if you’re dead set on getting it done. It’s just a temporary hindrance that’s in the way of your path. There’s always a way around, through it, over it. If you were ever to listen to a Swedish song, you would listen to Mora Träsk. They have a song where they’re going about, it’s probably a version in English as well.

[00:21:19] Christian Hornebrant: We can’t go through it, we have to go over it. We can’t go over it, we have to go under it. We can’t go around it, we have to go, etc. Just continues and continues. There’s probably an English version somewhere on that concept. So that would be, I think, the sixth time that I’ve tried to summarize this.

[00:21:34] Steve MacDonald: So, I have a very practical question for you.

[00:21:36] Steve MacDonald: Obviously, we’re all buying into that the more that you can listen, the more that you can understand. The more you can meet somebody where they’re at, you can explain the benefits, create the context. This sounds like it takes a lot of time. And, like, at a very practical level in a contact center where you’re trying to minimize costs and you’re tracking average handle times. But this sounds like you want us to spend more time. And there is a very large trend to de-prioritize things like average handle times and focus more on spending time and creating—maybe it’s not a first-time resolution. Maybe you’re not gonna be able to handle it the very first time.

[00:22:18] Steve MacDonald: So, how does this play into the typical metrics of how we’re judged in a contact center?

[00:22:24] Christian Hornebrant: First of all, you get the outcomes based on what you measure. And we’ve tried lots of things. Honestly, the worst thing you can measure and track agents on is average handling time.

[00:22:36] Christian Hornebrant: Because what you’re getting then is a person trying to finish the conversation as quickly as possible and moving on to the next one. So, the most underwhelming and underperforming era of the customer service that we had was when we were tracking average handling time because no agent wanted to take the time to answer anything.

[00:22:55] Christian Hornebrant: They just wanted to move on. So, it’s much, much better to track the resolution rate and the return callers. And it’s also really good to route conversations back to the original agent.

[00:23:09] Christian Hornebrant: If you couldn’t solve it in the first go, for whatever reason, you’re going to get it back. So, take your time, help the customer make whatever they need to get done and solve it. And if you can’t solve it, then it’s not the customer’s problem to own it. Then you, as the contact center organization, would own the issue.

[00:23:35] Christian Hornebrant: Then you can escalate it 55 times internally in your own organization if you would like to. But the contact center organization then owns the issue and owns the task of getting back to the customer. And that takes time, but it’s time that is well invested. We’ve done all the metrics you can think about this. If you’re talking about lifetime value for a customer, if you’re talking about quarterly profits as a public listed stock company—maybe not, but if you’re talking about lifetime value that you should be focusing on, then it’s worth every second of it.

[00:24:11] Steve MacDonald: Well said, well said. That was almost like a trick question.

[00:24:15] Steve MacDonald: Like the average handle times and things like that. But there’s really, in today’s modern era of how we’re looking at this, if we believe at all that we’re not a cost center, we’re a value center, then we can’t track things like that and put that up as the most important metric.

[00:24:29] Christian Hornebrant: With that said, it’s also about if you’re having 2,000 agents and 2,000,000 contacts a year, two more seconds per contact, it costs money.

[00:24:39] Christian Hornebrant: So, that’s why you always—as you were into the value side of it—what you’re getting here that you should never forget. And this is probably something that we didn’t cover that I forgot that we should cover. That’s because it’s important. If you’re having 2 million conversations, it’s an enormous amount of insights that you can get from this.

[00:25:00] Christian Hornebrant: So, every interaction has a value regardless of the outcome, because you’ve learned something. The question is, how can you transfer that knowledge from 2,000 contact center agents into the organization?

[00:25:13] Steve MacDonald: It’s a good thing. We needed it. Glad you brought it up because it’s really super important—because contact centers aren’t cost centers, they’re value centers, and there’s value for every single department inside of the company. So I’m really glad you brought that up.

[00:25:24] Steve MacDonald: What I want to do is give an opportunity because I know people are going to have questions. So, would it be appropriate for us to give a link to your profile on LinkedIn if people have questions for you?

[00:25:35] Steve MacDonald: Yes. Christian, thank you so much for coming on and helping us break down.

[00:25:41] Steve MacDonald: We’ve talked to so many executives in the CX space and the contact center space, and nobody has ever really talked about how we take those baby steps, and how we think through them and train our agents to be able to identify them and listen for them and use that as a part of the strategy to resolve their problems.

[00:26:03] Steve MacDonald: So we’ll cross-sell and upsell. So thank you for expanding our minds on that. We don’t want to talk about the ones, the stupid ideas, but that was a good one. I appreciate it.

[00:26:12] Christian Hornebrant: Thank you, Steve. It was a great honor to be here and have a great time with you.

[00:26:17] Christian Hornebrant: It’s been fun. Usually, when you have fun, good things happen.

[00:26:20] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic.