How Do We Keep Up with Ever-Scaling Expectations?

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Prospectus podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a very special guest on, Amber Scott. Now Amber, you are the VP of Customer Experience at Serta Simmons Bedding, which we all know the brands, right? You also, though, you’ve been in CX for over 10 years.

[00:00:18] Steve MacDonald: You’ve made transitions from smaller companies to big large companies. You’ve done turnarounds, and on a personal note, you are a, what we say, a reality TV junkie.

[00:00:31] Amber Scott: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. No, thank you so much for that. So I did start with Tuft & Needle, which was a pretty small company. I was employee 72 or 73 there.

[00:00:41] Amber Scott: And you know, several years ago, Serta Simmons Bedding acquired Tuft & Needle as a brand. And so I’ve gotten to be part of bringing that D2C digital presence into Serta Simmons Bedding and then also learning a lot about traditional bedding in that process.

[00:00:55] Steve MacDonald: Well, what I’d love to do is kind of take your background and I know that you’re also partners with Amazon and they’re one of the biggest CX companies in the world, probably the most customer-obsessed, I would say, company in the world, and we wanna talk about that a lot today.

[00:01:13] Steve MacDonald: In fact, you know, our title here is How Do We Keep Up with the Ever-Scaling Expectations because, God love them, Amazon keeps raising the bar, right?

[00:01:24] Amber Scott: Yes. Yes, they do.

[00:01:26] Steve MacDonald: And at the same time, I think it was McKinsey that came out and they had a study that they had looked at over 400 highly profitable B2C and B2B companies, and CX was the number one differentiator in the market.

[00:01:38] Steve MacDonald: So CX isn’t just a, oh, we have to have happy customers. It’s a competitive advantage for us. And I know you’re gonna talk a lot about that today, but if you could maybe start out with, it was interesting, our last conversation. You said, you know, customer experience in keeping customers happy is kind of table stakes today. And tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that.

[00:02:03] Amber Scott: Yeah, so I’ve been with the company about 10 years, starting with Tuft & Needle. And I can remember when I first heard about Tuft & Needle, I was working in restaurants, and one of the things I loved about restaurants was the priority on customer service, right?

[00:02:16] Amber Scott: Restaurants, very slim margins. They definitely need you to come back again. So that customer-is-king mentality really, in my opinion, exists in the best restaurants. But personally, I hadn’t seen that in a lot of other businesses, right? Like I really didn’t ever have that same guest experience when I would go into a store, when I would call an online business.

[00:02:37] Amber Scott: And so one of the things that Tuft & Needle was doing that I think was very unique at the time was the customer was everything, right? And so when you called into Tuft & Needle, you were gonna get someone that was super happy to talk to you, really showed a lot of empathy, a lot of care, a lot of problem-solving abilities because everything was about the customer and making the customer happy.

[00:02:57] Amber Scott: And again, I think that was pretty unique 10 years ago. So people would be bowled away like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m talking to someone that cares about my problem, that can actually solve my problem, that is treating me like a human being. Cut to now. I think customers expect that, and they should, right?

[00:03:13] Amber Scott: I think it is a good evolving expectation, but really when you think about the rising customer expectations, you’re not unique if you’re treating them like a person and truly want to solve their problem. That is the expectation. And so now, now what, right? Now, what do you do to really differentiate yourself in the marketplace? Because the expectation is you’ll treat them kindly and solve their problem.

[00:03:35] Steve MacDonald: So, you know, we brought up and we talked about Amazon and your partners with Amazon and that they’re masters at this. What have you learned from working with Amazon or just, you know, experiencing the customer service at Amazon and now what you’re doing in your current position that we could learn from?

[00:03:54] Amber Scott: The thing we all love about Amazon, right, is they are fast and they do exactly what they say they’re going to do, right? When you go onto your Amazon app and you order whatever it is, ’cause you can also order everything from Amazon, and they say it’s gonna be there by two o’clock tomorrow.

[00:04:09] Amber Scott: It is there by two o’clock tomorrow. So in one way, Amazon has really shown consumers what’s possible, right? Like they really are the gold standard because this is what’s possible in the world. And so I think for the rest of us that can’t quite always meet the level of service that Amazon can provide, what we can do is ensure that our expectations are clear and that we meet them, right?

[00:04:30] Amber Scott: So in our case, if we say, hey, we’re gonna get you a mattress in seven to 10 business days, we better get you a mattress in seven to 10 business days. If we say we’re gonna answer your call within 30 seconds, we better pick up that call within 30 seconds. And so while we can’t always meet that bar of Amazon that we’re striving to, we can be really sure that we do what we say we’re gonna do.

[00:04:52] Amber Scott: And then a little bit of that, not too far under-promise, but that if we’re, a trade-off, we’re under-promising, over-delivering as opposed to over-promising and under-delivering.

[00:05:02] Steve MacDonald: And so there’s lots of expectations, right? And I love that you used the word hospitality ’cause we’re not all in the hospitality industry, but tell me what that means when you say hospitality in your current role and what you’re doing. Like what does that mean to you?

[00:05:21] Amber Scott: Yeah, so again, my background, I spent a lot of time in restaurants, and hospitality really is one of my truest loves. But when I think about how we can bring that into customer service, it is that empathetic, compassionate service, right? When you call in. I think in our last conversation, we talked about this, nobody wants to call into a business, right?

[00:05:41] Amber Scott: Like if I’m on the phone, I’d like to call my mom, my husband, my friend. I do not wanna call Serta Simmons Bedding. So if I am calling in, I have a problem, but I wanna be treated like I matter, right? So I think that’s where hospitality can come into customer service, is that sort of be my guest attitude.

[00:05:58] Amber Scott: You’re calling in. It is my pleasure to help you. It is not a burden. It is not an annoyance. It is absolutely my pleasure. And I think if we can make people feel that way, even if they call in with a problem, they’re leaving feeling seen, heard, and that whatever’s going on is going to be taken care of.

[00:06:17] Amber Scott: And just like a weight has been lifted off of them. So a little bit of that, leave them better than you found them mentality. 

[00:06:24] Steve MacDonald: So let me ask if this is a part of it. ‘Cause when I think of hospitality, I think of like a hotel, and I think there’s a concierge and that concierge is gonna be there to help me with everything and anything, right, within reason.

[00:06:36] Steve MacDonald: But it doesn’t all have to be hospitality around my room or the room service or pricing, you know. But if I say, hey, I’m trying to get tickets to the game tonight, or I need a recommendation on a good restaurant, they’re there on kind of an expanded level to help me. How does the expanded level make it into your business, and how do you think about that?

[00:07:00] Amber Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think some of that is just the human-to-human connection, right? So typically if you’re calling a mattress business, you’re not looking for game tickets, even though that would be kind of fun, like how do we add that in. You’re kind of very specific. You either need some support with a purchasing decision or you need some support with the purchase you’ve already made.

[00:07:22] Amber Scott: But I think where we can kind of expand into that hospitality level is truly just people calling people, right? Like sometimes agents, I think, are a little afraid to just be themselves on a call, and so then it’s very stiff, right? Like I call the mattress company, I can answer your mattress questions, but I’ve honestly, when I’ve been on the phones for our company, I’ve sort of gone into tangents with people about parenthood, or as you mentioned at the top of the call, somehow all roads lead to reality TV with me.

[00:07:52] Amber Scott: So all of a sudden we’re talking about Bravocon. So, you know, kind of going off maybe a little bit off is like that empowering your agents to bring their whole human self to that call, because I think that’s more authentic. And that’s really where you can kind of level up the hospitality of it all, is just two people having a conversation.

[00:08:11] Amber Scott: One maybe having a problem, one having the expertise to solve that problem. But at the end of the day, maybe you’re both moms, or maybe you’re both reality TV junkies, or maybe you’re both baseball fans. So I think that’s where the hospitality can come in.

[00:08:23] Steve MacDonald: You know, I talked to a gentleman that was in Portugal, and my family, he’s gonna be on a podcast, and my family’s going to Portugal right after Christmas, and all of a sudden he and I connected over Portugal and he’s making recommendations on, you know, oh, you can drive from Lisbon, you can drive here or there. So I love this. I love that you won’t get out with AI, right?

[00:08:45] Amber Scott: Not yet.

[00:08:47] Steve MacDonald: Not, not yet. Not yet. Maybe sometime AI will talk to me about Bravocon or Lisbon or something like that, right? But I think you make a really good point, that even AI, human-in-the-loop, right, is so, so important. And what we can do right now as humans is we can make a connection in any way. That’s what I’m taking away is,

[00:09:09] Steve MacDonald: your goal is to make a connection, show that empathy, but make them feel like, hey, I’m really talking to a real person that understands me. But that connection, even you and I talked before we started the podcast here about, I thought, what was something interesting? And you say, well, I’m a reality TV junkie because it helps create a connection right to you a little bit more that we know. So I love that. I love kind of expanding how we think about training our agents in addressing the customers. Huge.

[00:09:43] Amber Scott: No, I love that. It’s funny, it makes me think that we have a leader on our team now, but he started as an agent, and his goal on every call used to be to get at least a chuckle out of the consumer, right?

[00:09:55] Amber Scott: Like if you’ve met him, wonderful person, but not slapstick funny, right? Like not going to be a stand-up comedian, that’s not really his vibe. But he’s kind of a quietly, sort of humorous person. And he was like, if I can make them chuckle, I know we’ve made a good connection. I know I’ve done something positive for that person, at the very least.

[00:10:12] Amber Scott: And so I do love how you say that. It is about making connections. Again, I’m an AI enthusiast, right? I use it a lot in my work, I encourage my leaders to use it, we’re using it more and more for our service, but as of now, as we sit, there are things that AI cannot provide. And that human connection, I see you, I feel you, I’m laughing with you, not yet how I’ve seen AI.

[00:10:36] Steve MacDonald: You know, I could even see that ’cause AI can take a look at the transcripts. The call and sentiment analysis is a big part of what AI can do, but like, I don’t know if it’s the chuckle KPI, but you know, but we gotta think about this because,

[00:10:50] Steve MacDonald: if they leave with feeling connected to the agent, that’s gonna only impact our CSAT, our NPS scores. And there are all kinds of studies that say even small increases in these measures have big impact on revenue. And that’s where I want to go next, this whole impact on revenue, because we have our external customers, but we have our internal customers called the C-Suite.

[00:11:16] Steve MacDonald: It’s called every other department, right? And so we have to think about them as well. And I love this idea of hospitality and how do we direct that internally, right? Because one of the biggest things that we know is that we’re not always looked upon as more than just kind of a support department.

[00:11:34] Steve MacDonald: Right, but we know we are. We know how we impact customers, we know how we retain customers, which has a huge impact on the bottom line. There are so many different ways that we don’t necessarily get credit for, so this is where our internal communications really comes in. So I’d love to just, I said a whole bunch of stuff, I don’t know what the question is there, but if you answer that, that would be great.

[00:12:02] Amber Scott: Yeah, no, so one of the things, you know, as CXRs, right? Like if you’re a data-driven CXR, which I love—the art and science of CX—so I love that. You know, the compassion, connection, like to me, that’s the art. And then the science is the data, right? There’s so much data in CX, so I totally love, you know.

[00:12:19] Amber Scott: CSAT, service levels, average speed of answer, average hold times—all of that. Like, I am so in the details of those metrics, and they mean so much to me, right? When I look at those metrics, they tell a story. They tell me how the business is doing. When I’m talking to my C-Suite leaders and I’m like, “Hey, let me tell you about our ASA, and let me tell you about our CSAT and NPS and all of these different metrics.”

[00:12:42] Amber Scott: They know what they are, to be very clear. They’re not like, “I’ve never heard of those things.” But that’s not the language they’re speaking, right? That doesn’t tell as much of a story to them. So my job—and I really talk about this with the leaders on our team—is it’s our job to help connect our CS metrics, our CX objectives, our business objectives to the grander business objectives.

[00:13:03] Amber Scott: Right? So how does CSAT tie in to generating revenue? How does average handle time tie in to cost savings, right? And whatever—every business has some different major objectives—but like, know what they are and talk that language when you’re talking to your leaders. Like an example is our B2B team. They literally play a hand in every single order that goes through our business.

[00:13:31] Amber Scott: So every order that comes through SSB, our B2B customer service team touches it in one way, shape, or form. And so we could talk about that as contacts, right? Like, “Oh, we got contacts over here, we got contacts over here.” Or we could talk about that as order support—managing the orders, the X amount of orders that flow through SSB.

[00:13:53] Amber Scott: We are ensuring they move from here to here to… Because the C-Suite definitely cares about that. Like, make sure when you’re talking about CX that you’re speaking the language of the business and not just over-assuming that everybody understands the impact of your metrics in the way that you do.

[00:14:09] Amber Scott: Again, like when I’m talking to my team, we nerd out, right? We’re like, “Oh, okay, let’s do this if we do this.” But the other piece when we think about internal customers is it’s that same connection, support, and care, right? So if business partners come to us and they’re like, “Hey, we need to do, we need to launch this initiative, we need to do this thing.”

[00:14:30] Amber Scott: We always come from a place of like, that person is trying to do whatever they can to move their business objectives along, right? Like, so they’re trying to do the right things for the business. Sometimes we’re like, “Ooh, okay, we can sort of see some downstream effects that maybe give us a little bit of pause,” but we do not lead with, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you doing that’s gonna cause this, that’s gonna cause this.”

[00:14:47] Amber Scott: We very much lead with, “Yes, and tell me more,” right? Like sometimes it is like, “What’s the objective? What are you trying to solve for?” Because then sometimes we can help solution. And then sometimes it’s just understanding enough about the objective to be like, “Okay, hey, here’s some risks we see, but we understand what you’re trying to do, so how do we help you get there?”

[00:15:12] Amber Scott: So for us, it’s our internal business partners—we see them as customers. We are absolutely trying to give them the same compassion and quick service that we do our external customers.

[00:15:24] Steve MacDonald: So I’m gonna say a takeaway that I just got from what you said there, right? So obviously we have to—you know, it’s like when we’re talking to one of our kids versus our spouse, we say things, we couch things differently, right? Like with the C-Suite: put the revenue lens on everything, right?

[00:15:35] Steve MacDonald: I mean, bottom line is they’re looking to growth. They’re going to the board meetings and nobody’s saying, “Hey, can we get that quarter percent increase in NPS? Like, what’s going on with that?” Right. You know, so if you put it through that lens, then all of a sudden all your communication comes that way.

[00:16:00] Steve MacDonald: And I’ve had other guests that come on and say, there is a world of help and support. So go to a ChatGPT, right? Go online and say, “Okay, these are the things that we focus on in terms of a customer support organization. How do I translate these into revenue growth for the company?”

[00:16:19] Amber Scott: Yeah.

[00:16:20] Steve MacDonald: And it will help you, right? Because here’s the thing: we never came into this business thinking we have to be salespeople for what we’re doing—but we do internally, right?

[00:16:31] Amber Scott: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I know, like especially I think a lot of customer service people, we are like, “Oh, we’re not salespeople, right? We didn’t get into this for sales.” But I think no matter what you do, you are always doing a little bit of selling. It’s funny—even you mentioned your children—like I think about when I’m telling them things and I’m wanting them to do something and feel it positively as opposed to, “Do this.” You’re selling to them.

[00:16:52] Amber Scott: And I love how you talk about, like, throw it into ChatGPT. I literally—we use Copilot—but there’s a business leader that I work with and we speak very different languages, right? I mean, I don’t know how further apart we could be. So I will regularly go into Copilot and be like, “Hey, I’m meeting with so-and-so. This is kind of their persona, this is how they like to receive information, here’s the message I need to deliver. What are some suggestions of how I deliver in a way that feels very palatable and consumable to this person?”

[00:17:29] Amber Scott: And it has been night and day, where before I kind of would be like, “Oh, we’re talking different languages, I don’t know how to translate my vibe and the way I wanna communicate to the way they wanna hear it.” But Copilot has made that seamless, and it is insane how much it’s helped our communication.

[00:17:41] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. So I think that right there is the most important, right? Because ultimately, if we are gonna do a better job for the customer—thus a better job for the company—we have to advocate for our teams, our budgets, right? There’s so much we could do. I’m sure you have a list this long of, “If I got more resources, here’s what I would do with it,” right?

[00:18:00] Steve MacDonald: But as long as you’re looked upon as a cost center, the emphasis is, “How do we contract without losing too much service quality?” That’s the mentality versus, “How do I pour more resources in because I can see a greater return?” Right? That’s the advocacy that we have to be on. And so I love it. I love the Copilot strategy, right? It’s amazing.

[00:18:13] Steve MacDonald: I did that—I wrote a message to a friend of mine that has pretty severe ADHD, and I asked, “Can you translate this?” Because you didn’t want it to be offensive to them, you didn’t want them to feel like they had done something wrong. And all of a sudden it was like, “Oh, that’s beautiful. I wouldn’t have thought of that.” Right.

[00:18:49] Amber Scott: It’s funny, I love that—I have a friend whose husband also has some ADHD going on and he only wants the headlines, right?

[00:18:59] Amber Scott: And then he’ll ask questions, but if you give him too many details, you lose him. And so, while I certainly would never diagnose anyone at my own company, you have people that you know maybe glaze over, right? You wanna tell them this whole story, but they don’t need that whole story.

[00:19:14] Amber Scott: And so I’ve even tried it a couple of times with that, of like, “Here’s the story I wanna tell. What are the headlines and how do I say, ‘Hey, here’s the three things that are going on. What do you wanna know more about?’” Because sometimes, again, that’s that audience, right? Like, we tend to love context, love details—tell me more. The more you tell me, the more I understand and I’m invested. That’s not how everyone’s brains work.

[00:19:30] Amber Scott: And so that’s definitely been also a really helpful tool with AI—really just how to have different conversations.

[00:19:42] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. You know, if you really put in, “I am meeting with a C-Suite executive with ADHD with a driver personality, and I’m only gonna have 10 minutes…”

[00:19:51] Steve MacDonald: Yep. Right? Yep. That’s the way you’ve gotta think. I love this. Yeah. This is—you know, we have to think about how we are successful at every level, right? Whether it’s making somebody chuckle (I love that, right?) or it’s how we’re dealing internally.

[00:20:00] Steve MacDonald: So here’s another thing. You have the—you call it—the never say no philosophy that builds strategic influence. So we’re talking again about internal communications here. Tell us the extension, I love where we’re going here, but like we’re talking about how do we make more powerful internal communications to create more success overall?

[00:20:29] Amber Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So one other thing that’s so important for customer experience, customer service, is we need to have a seat at the table.

[00:20:36] Amber Scott: Sometimes we can be forgotten, right? ‘Cause we’re often the—almost like the post-implementation. It’s like we sort of get the—I don’t wanna call it fallout—but whatever the reaction to or whatever the result usually flows through customer service one way, shape, or form. But we’re not always necessarily needed on the build stage.

[00:20:57] Amber Scott: But if we’re not included, things will get missed. And then when we get to the result or the reaction stage, all of a sudden we’re like, “Whoa, we didn’t know this would happen. We didn’t know this would happen.”

[00:21:15] Amber Scott: And so, to be invited to the party, you can’t be the person that’s always saying, “No, no, no,” or, “I don’t like that,” or, “That’s not gonna work.” Right. You have to be the person that’s saying, “Yes,” and—kind of how I said a little bit before—“And tell me more. Did you think about this? What is the objective?”

[00:21:34] Amber Scott: So for my team and myself, we show up strategizing our way to yes—figuring out the process to yes. But again, we do really try to ask those, “What’s the objective?” right? Because we know the objective will be good and true. Sometimes the process is one where we can have a little bit of wiggle.

[00:21:51] Amber Scott: But if we stay in the—like, if someone’s like, “Hey, we wanna come in, we wanna change the process and we wanna do 1, 2, 3”—well, if we know that’s not gonna work, we can’t just say, “No, that process won’t work.” We have to say, “Okay, what are we trying to do here? What’s the objective?”

[00:22:00] Amber Scott: And then, there’s much more well-received for like, “Okay, if that’s the objective, what do you think about this process? Because here’s our concerns with this one.”

[00:22:06] Amber Scott: So I think we wanna stay invited. We’re very lucky at Simmons Bedding—we are invited, we are involved early and often—but I do think a lot of that is attributed to how the team shows up, right?

[00:22:26] Amber Scott: We show up as business partners that only wanna help, that only wanna help achieve your objective, but we are also going to be strategic with you. We’re going to call out the risks, we’re going to ask questions. And so that’s worked really well for us—we just don’t ever show up looking to say no. We always show up looking to say yes, but we are gonna ask a lot of questions on the way there.

[00:22:39] Steve MacDonald: And you know, you come in with a secret weapon, right? Because you come in having more conversations with customers than anyone else in the room, right?

[00:23:00] Steve MacDonald: So you don’t necessarily play that as a trump card, right? But you say, “Yes, but let me help make that better.” Or, “Yes, but let me reframe that a little bit.” And if you come from the lens of what the customer wants, nobody’s gonna say, “Well, that’s just Amber’s opinion.”

[00:23:04] Steve MacDonald: Right. You know, it’s like, “And I got my opinion too.” That’s how internal alignment goes into chaos. But the one thing that aligns everyone is the voice of the customer, right? So that’s what I was thinking about as you were talking—is you hold a seat at the table because you hold the voice of the customer.

[00:23:22] Steve MacDonald: So it’s amazing. I wanted to go back to Amazon for a minute. Because they had—and I was able on this podcast to interview—a CX executive at Amazon, and I asked them about the empty chair policy, which was to represent the customer.

[00:23:40] Steve MacDonald: So it used to be the physical chair of the room. Right now, it could be the physical or the virtual chair, but it’s there to basically say, “If the customer were sitting with us today, how would that affect the decisions that we’re making?”

[00:23:58] Steve MacDonald: And so this kind of customer-centric decision making—we talked about it, you know, like the secret weapon, the superpower. How have you felt that that’s worked when you have brought in and represented the customer? Right? Is it the kind of thing that really levels the playing field, you know, opens up receptivity? Like, just—have you experienced that? 

[00:24:12] Amber Scott: Yeah, no, I think that I love the like, empty chair or just the idea of if the customer is in the room, how would we talk about these same things?

[00:24:21] Amber Scott: Because ultimately, most decisions we make, especially if they impact the customer, we’re gonna have to explain them in one way, shape, or form, right? And so what’s that going to look like? And also sometimes helping business partners that maybe aren’t as close to the customer, understand that those questions are going to get asked.

[00:24:38] Amber Scott: Because sometimes I think you can sort of assume you get to make a decision over here, no one’s gonna ask, so we’re not gonna have to explain it. So it’s like, no, no, no. Someone is going to ask, we are gonna have to explain it. So what’s that going to look like? But really for me, it kind of comes down to two SBs, like two spaces — like our data, right?

[00:24:54] Amber Scott: So every interaction that comes in, we categorize, right? Like, why did this person reach out and what was the impact? And so that’s our manual process through our agents. But then we also have some AI technology that’s reading intents, reading sentiment, mood analysis. So we try to pair it in two ways. One, the data, right?

[00:25:13] Amber Scott: Hey, the data will tell you that customers are asking about this, that they ask about this or that they like this or that this is happening. But then also my experience and my intuition, right? So I have now talked to 10 years’ worth of customers about this, and so here’s the data, but also, let me tell you.

[00:25:32] Amber Scott: From this perspective of what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard. And so I think it’s important as a CX leader to do both, right? Like you have your data that shows up, that is facts, but also you’re a leader in your company because of your experience and your insight, which leads to your intuition, right?

[00:25:50] Amber Scott: So I also feel pretty comfortable when something’s kind of going on. I’ll be like, okay, hey, yes, here’s the data. This is what this says, but then let’s gut-check this, right? Like, talking to customers or sometimes it’s the, if your grandmother was experiencing this, how would you feel? So sometimes I’ve had to put it in those ways.

[00:26:09] Amber Scott: Like, okay, if this was happening to your grandma, do we feel good about that? And we’re very lucky at Simmons Bedding — everyone is so customer-centric. But sometimes, again, people are making decisions for so many different reasons. Our job as customer experience is to show up and just keep us grounded in that customer. But to me, yeah, it’s data and intuition.

[00:26:29] Steve MacDonald: I love that. You know, we remember things 22 times better — this was a Harvard Business Review quote — 22 times better when it’s told to us in the form of a story, right? So telling the story of, like, how would you feel if this was happening?

[00:26:43] Steve MacDonald: Or we have a lot of elderly people that are calling in, right? And now all of a sudden you’re painting a picture. Love that. You talked about how you can never feel like you truly understand the customer, right? That there’s a continuous cycle of customer learning, which leads to a competitive advantage for the experiences you can create for them. Tell me a little bit more about that, if you could.

[00:27:09] Amber Scott: Yeah, I think as customer service leaders or customer experience leaders, we do know the customer. Most of us have spent many, many years in that realm learning. And so you can kind of start to assume like, oh, I know, right? I know the customer landscape.

[00:27:23] Amber Scott: I know what they want. Like, it’s funny, one of the things I hear often now is, well, they’re always gonna wanna talk to somebody or AI is not gonna be able to satisfy that. And that’s why I’m always like, now. Let’s say now, because customers do things so differently today than they did 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, right?

[00:27:42] Amber Scott: Customer expectations and customer behavior continue to evolve. Like, I mean, 11–12 years ago, not too many customers were buying a mattress online. Right now, loads still love to purchase from a retailer — that is always a great way too. But we do have quite a few customers that feel comfortable purchasing online.

[00:28:02] Amber Scott: If you’d asked a lot of people 12 years ago, would customers do that? They would’ve told you no, like, no way, that’s never going to happen. So it’s really about staying— you know, there’s Forrester and Gartner and Furniture Today in my world. So I would encourage leaders or anybody really to read, stay up, pay attention, listen to things.

[00:28:24] Amber Scott: Because sometimes our preferences, we over-leverage, right? Like again, I’m an AI enthusiast, so I’m like, I’ll talk to AI all day. Like, if AI can tell me jokes, I’ll laugh at those jokes, I’ll feel connected to AI, right? I am two feet in — let’s go. But that’s not everybody, right? So if for my business I was like, listen, we don’t need people, we can only use AI because I’ll talk to AI all day — that’d be probably a pretty significant mistake at this point because that’s not really where the customer is.

[00:29:00] Amber Scott: And so I think while we should trust our intuition and the data that we have, it’s also not over-leveraging our intuition or what’s today with what could be tomorrow, because it does change fast at different times.

[00:29:05] Steve MacDonald: You know, here’s the one thing: we’ve talked about a lot and our poor human brains can only take in and retain two or three things at a time. So what I’d love to do is ask you, from everything that we’ve talked about today, what’s the single most important takeaway that you want other CX executives that are watching this to take away from our conversation?

[00:29:29] Amber Scott: Yeah, I would say the biggest thing that I think is important to take away from this conversation — hopefully people are already doing it, so it’s more of an affirmation — is staying connected to the business objective. So what is your business trying to do? What do they see as the key differentiator?

[00:29:45] Amber Scott: Where is the direction they’re heading? And then figure out how CX supports that. I think you said it somewhere in this conversation. We don’t want CX to be this additive thing, right? We want CX to be something that’s immersed across the business and seen as a support function across the business for all of the endeavors.

[00:30:03] Amber Scott: So while you know your CX objectives — again, I have CX objectives, we have mission, vision, and values, have all of that — but we stay really close as leaders to what the business objectives are. I think that’s the most crucial point for a successful CX program: really aligning yourself with the bigger business objectives.

[00:30:22] Steve MacDonald: I think there are CEOs and board members everywhere going, yes, business objectives. Right? In the end, we are a for-profit business, right? So we have to — and as soon as we lose sight of that, we lose sight of, and we’re looked upon as just a cost center. And so, you know, there’s a spiral there, and that perspective is how we advocate and how we get more resources and do more good.

[00:30:47] Steve MacDonald: Right. So I love that. What a perfect takeaway. I also wanted to say that the mission of this podcast is to just bring in different perspectives and insights so we can all learn. And if we do that, it’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats. And I think you were an amazing tide rising boats today. But I do know this: people are gonna have questions.

[00:31:09] Steve MacDonald: Is it okay if we maybe give out a link to your LinkedIn profile so people could find the right Amber Scott and ask questions?

[00:31:16] Amber Scott: Yes, please do.

[00:31:17] Steve MacDonald: Okay. Well, Amber, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us today. I really, really appreciate it.

[00:31:24] Amber Scott: My pleasure.