Must Have: Entrepreneurial Lessons for CX Leaders

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 interesting guest and conversation here with Thomas Lehner. Thomas, you are the global director of operations and support for an e-commerce company. You support people throughout the globe.

[00:00:19] Steve MacDonald: You are constantly innovating on your product. You are adding additions to the product daily, which provides some complexities in training and operating the team. I want to get into that a little bit. 

[00:00:31] Steve MacDonald: But you started your career as an entrepreneur in the early stages. You’ve been a consultant. Maybe expand a little bit on your background before we jump into what are the entrepreneurial lessons that CX leaders need to know and understand. 

[00:00:48] Thomas Lehner: Absolutely, Steve. Thank you and also thanks for having me.

[00:00:50] Thomas Lehner: So, I studied entrepreneurship in beautiful Scotland. I started a software development company startup with a friend of mine back in the day to help customers and companies put together websites or e-commerce platforms to run their business. This is something that we did parallel to our studies and also helped us finance our studies a little bit there.

[00:01:14] Thomas Lehner: So, this is my entrepreneurial background. This company that we started back in the day. We dissolved after we finished our studies. It’s not something that we pursued further, but I think it taught me a lot of valuable lessons and I look back to those days very fondly every day, pretty much.

[00:01:30] Steve MacDonald: That’s a great place to start here because it’s the idea of an entrepreneurial mindset that you think every company needs to have and specifically how it impacts CX leaders. So, maybe you could just give us your overview on what is important in terms of an entrepreneurial mindset that we need to have.

[00:01:50] Thomas Lehner: It’s quite interesting and can be very beneficial. There’s a very interesting paper called Intra Corporate Entrepreneurship. I think it’s from Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot. In this paper, they explain a little bit about what kind of benefits they see for people using a more entrepreneurial mindset working in a company that they do not own. So, the intrapreneur, so to speak, and I like to think that this mindset has very beneficial effects on companies if they manage to create the right kind of culture environment for intrapreneurs. 

[00:02:26] Thomas Lehner: If we take a look at what is important in intrapreneurship, I think you will not be able to run a successful company if you do not manage to deliver sustainable, relevant value for your customers. 

[00:02:39] Thomas Lehner: I think this is what it all boils down to. So, your offering needs to be attractive. It needs to satisfy a need and you need to consistently produce relevant value and sustainable value for your customer. I think the sustainable part of that sentence is quite important. And the first thing that is valuable for people to have is working at companies that are not their own.

[00:03:00] Thomas Lehner: I think the sustainable mindset is you work with what you currently have. You do not request a lot of expensive things and start thinking, okay, I need this and I need that and I need that.

[00:03:09] Thomas Lehner: You start thinking, ‘Okay, this is what I have. What can I do with these things that I have now and maximize the output, maximize the value?’ I think what is helpful for entrepreneurs as well as whatever they start doing or whatever they are working on is to once in a while, sit back and say, ‘Okay this activity that I’m currently performing, how is that connected with providing sustainable value for our customers, right?’

[00:03:34] Thomas Lehner: Because if you think about it, if your whole company thinks this way, you run a very centered, a very focused company. 

[00:03:40] Thomas Lehner: I think it’s very valuable for people to reflect on what they’re doing every day in this context because they will also identify a lot of fault lines in your business processes. They will avoid waste naturally because they have a sustainable mindset and think, ‘Okay, how can I do it with the same amount, or how can I do more with less even?’ I think they will always think about the customer this way, and whatever they are doing is targeted towards providing value for that customer. This is the most significant part of being an entrepreneur, to always have this mantra, so to speak.

[00:04:15] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting. I’ve run my own companies for the last 20 years. I know the entrepreneurial mindset very well.

[00:04:22] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that you’re never satisfied with is you’re never satisfied with the value you’re providing. You are always looking to expand the value that you provide. It is a competitive advantage for the business. Whereas an employee mentality is, what’s enough? Because that’s all that I want to do.

[00:04:42] Steve MacDonald: It’s not an “expansion” mentality. It’s “what’s enough to get the job done?” That is not how you run a successful business. When you talk about value, we hear it so much that it’s generic, but it’s not. It’s a never-ending pursuit. That’s what I’m hearing from what you’re saying.

[00:05:03] Thomas Lehner: Absolutely. It can be very damaging if you’re stuck with people who only do what’s enough and don’t look for ways to maximize value for customers. I think it’s poison for a company. To be honest, sometimes the fault lies with the leaders and managers of those people who develop this mindset.

[00:05:23] Thomas Lehner: I believe we often incentivize the wrong things. If you want to motivate people to think about abstract concepts like customer value, for example, in a contact center, it’s long-term. A support engineer might realize that value years later. Yet, many employees fixate on small tasks—closing cases as fast as possible—because that’s what managers emphasize.

[00:06:03] Thomas Lehner: Managers run reports to see how fast teams respond to cases or mitigate issues, then give feedback accordingly. This leads to employees seeking instant gratification and overlooking the deeper goal: providing sustainable, long-term value. Adjusting metrics and reporting could help refocus teams on lasting customer value, such as monitoring reopened cases.

[00:06:19] Thomas Lehner: They forget what they should actually be pursuing—something more profound, maybe a bit abstract, but infinitely more valuable to the customer: providing sustainable value. If you adjust metrics and reporting slightly, look at things like cases being reopened, or examine the types of cases during different customer life cycles, you can track how they develop over time. Reducing the number of issues customers report to us is more aligned with providing sustainable value than incentivizing quick responses or quick fixes.

[00:07:10] Thomas Lehner: It’s the responsibility of team leaders and managers to create the right incentives, motivating people to provide sustainable value.

[00:07:20] Steve MacDonald: The support team is in the best position to provide sustainable value because they communicate with customers every day, and the customer is the highest authority in any business.

[00:07:33] Steve MacDonald: So, if you’re the one with constant communication about products, promises made in a marketing campaign, issues that are coming up, or trends in the industry you’re in, are you adapting? What are you going to do? This is golden information to translate into the rest of the organization, starting with product development. When you talk about sustainable value, it’s about understanding the industry, the customer, and their needs better than anyone else. We should require our agents, and our support teams, to look for ways to augment the value we create—being that megaphone and feedback mechanism, reflecting it into the organization.

[00:08:23] Steve MacDonald: You run a global organization in a very fast-paced product-driven environment. How do you train for that? How do you teach people to do that?

[00:08:33] Thomas Lehner: I think it’s the feedback mechanism and closing feedback loops with the customers and partners. It’s an amazing thing and I think people should spend more time on it and also mapping it out and making sure that this is a conscious process, not something that happens by accident, but the conscious effort to gather this feedback and make sure that it’s processed very well.

[00:08:55] Thomas Lehner: I think support, as you mentioned, is like the eyes and ears of a company pretty much so they are in very close contact with customers and partners to know about issues in a very intimate way. Their job is to inform the product organization, inform managers, also marketing sales, customer success, and so on about any kinds of signals that customers and partners give.

[00:09:18] Thomas Lehner: When we said before that value is an abstract thing, it rightfully is because it is constantly evolving if you’re satisfied one need of a customer, they develop more, right? So, value is constantly evolving. This is why you constantly need to have your eyes and ears open and this feedback is not something that you do once a year. You need to do it consistently, and continuously. Since you asked, how we do it in Spryker and how can it be done optimally, I think support is as many contact centers, customer-facing centers, it’s an interface for customers and partners to provide feedback. Customers and partners provide feedback in many different ways.

[00:09:56] Thomas Lehner: They might create cases and you need them to abstract or interpret the cases and the feedback and move them on to the next owner that might provide them with more direct ways of providing feedback by forms or whatever interviews. 

[00:10:14] Thomas Lehner: I think that whatever you do, the most important thing is that you do it consciously and very prominently. Partners and customers, if you ask them, where can you provide feedback, they immediately can point it out. They shouldn’t say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know who to tell, who to contact.’

[00:10:27] Thomas Lehner: I think the feedback process is a little bit similar to the very classic incident management process in the sense that you have one stage where you gather via the interface that you provide the feedback, then you have a stage where you validate that feedback. Feedback can also be overwhelming for product organizations or management level specifically. I think you need to be careful also not to overwhelm.

[00:10:53] Thomas Lehner: You need to filter things because if we stay with the example of an eye and ears, sensory overload is also not helping the same as sensory deprivation is not helping. You need to provide feedback on the right kind of dose and also the right kind of quality. I think this validation step is very important.

[00:11:10] Thomas Lehner: You check if this feedback is valid. Is it addressing maybe, for example, a bug? Is it addressing a feature that is consistent with our strategic direction? 

[00:11:18] Thomas Lehner: Then, you have a step where you prioritize those things. You look around and see, ‘Okay, what kind of feedback do I get?’ Likely you get a lot of feedback so you need to understand what is more important than the other things. Now you need to triage those things. I think one of the very critical steps is assigning the right owners for that feedback.

[00:11:36] Thomas Lehner: If that feedback is not addressing your support organization directly, you want to hand over that feedback if it is a bug. For example, for a feature request, you might want to hand this over to the engineering or product department. To be able to do this, you need to translate that feedback first into their language.

[00:11:56] Thomas Lehner: Not always the language that a customer or partner will use is the same as your product or engineering organization. Then, it needs to be a translation step to make sure that the message is transmitted optimally in the step as well. I think it’s super important to have formalized service contracts, or internal SLAs that you agree on with those other teams that you regularly hand feedback over to. You explain that this is how we deliver you feedback. This is what we expect in return. So, maybe an estimation on time to resolve or time to implement that feature request or something very simple as just explaining where feedback should be put should be put into confluence. 

[00:12:38] Thomas Lehner: All of those very trivial things. I think what makes this so important to have this kind of service contract is that it makes it very easy for you to onboard new people into that process, which reduces the effect rate of this very important business process.

[00:12:57] Thomas Lehner: It also allows you to track your performance. Are we meeting the SLA service level objectives that we have in those SLAs? Yes or no? How do they develop historically? This is just for due diligence of improving your continuous improvement pretty much.

[00:13:15] Thomas Lehner: I think we need to close the feedback loop at one point. As we have received information on what will happen with the feedback, the bug report, and the feature request, and then we should really honor the time that the customer and partner put into reporting that stuff to us and get back to them, basically explaining to them that this is how we processed your feedback.

[00:13:36] Thomas Lehner: This is what will happen. This is potentially how you can get or how you can stay up to date on what’s happening with your feedback, right? Ultimately, this is our decision. You might tell them that the feature will be implemented or the bug will be resolved. You might even tell them this is not something that we’re currently looking into because of that reason.

[00:13:54] Thomas Lehner: Closing that feedback loop is very important, even if sometimes you cannot relay a happy message to them. I think it’s still honoring and making sure that this exchange is something reliable that people can trust and that you are taking them seriously. 

[00:14:07] Steve MacDonald: How many times, as customers, have we given feedback and never heard anything from it? You feel like just a number; you feel like you weren’t taken seriously. That feedback mechanism is one of the most important parts of a customer experience. They have voiced a concern; they have voiced an opinion. The worst thing we can do is just never get back to them.

[00:14:31] Thomas Lehner: Absolutely. It’s a little bit strange. I think the relationship we have with feedback is quite difficult because you also run into the risk of receiving negative feedback, and some people will not like to hear negative feedback. But on a meager level, you, as an entrepreneur or as someone running a company, have your target group telling you what they need, which makes it a hell of a lot easier for you to provide sustainable value. It’s essential, as you said, and we need to do all we can to make sure those feedback loops and feedback processes are working very well—super essential.

[00:15:09] Steve MacDonald: There’s a direct benefit to the growth of the company, a direct benefit in terms of an experience to the customer, and making them feel heard. We all know just as humans, if we feel heard, we feel better. What is the impact on the agents themselves? If they feel that the feedback they’re receiving and articulating is being heard internally by their superiors and by other departments, and is being used to help mold and grow the company, what does that do to their feeling of importance in this whole system?

[00:15:44] Thomas Lehner: I think it’s one of the most powerful motivators for them because if you are the one responsible for transmitting information that will potentially help hundreds of customers have an easier time with your product and make more money with your product faster, I think that is very meaningful.

[00:16:02] Thomas Lehner:  I think that individuals or people working in support sometimes are living in a very small world that doesn’t expand for more than just processing cases. I think it’s super important also for managers to make sure that those people have visibility on how their actions—processing the feedback, validating it, refining it, handing it over to the right people—have a tangible impact on the success of partners, customers, and ultimately the company they are working for.

[00:16:34] Steve MacDonald: There’s something that has been reported by Gartner and several other studies and surveys, and it talks about, in today’s environment, where most companies have between 20 and 25 different competitors. The competitive landscape is intense. What we did yesterday, and what we do today to compete and have a sustainable competitive advantage over our competition is something we need to think about and not take lightly at all. 

[00:17:03] Steve MacDonald: Companies don’t, but we tend to rely on price. We tend to rely on products, and the sustainable competitive advantage in these studies has concluded that it is CX. It is the experience that we create. As much as we innovate and are constantly rolling out new products, technologies, and benefits, none of them can be sustainable over time because they can be duplicated by our competition. What is your point of view? Because you are a very product-driven organization, right? You are constantly innovating, and you have to have a good product. You have to. But what is your point of view on the long-term sustainable competitive advantage for a company being CX?

[00:17:59] Thomas Lehner: I’m telling you this as a German. There’s a saying that the Germans are very bad at service. Yeah, they don’t care for service and they are very bad at providing service. And I’m saying this to you as a German. I think that CX, the experience that we are providing to our customers and partners, is a big part of it. It can be a very powerful and maybe also a little bit overlooked source for competitive advantage because let’s take a look at what makes a competitive advantage meaningful. It needs to be hard to copy from your competitors, meaningful to your customers, and sustainable in a way that you can keep this up for an extended period. I think these are the aspects of what makes a competitive advantage meaningful.

[00:18:38] Thomas Lehner: If you take a look at the support part of the things we talked about—the mindset of people going the extra mile and reflecting on how they can provide better value every day to their customers—motivating this change in mindset is not something that can be done easily.

[00:19:04] Thomas Lehner: We speak about this in a manner that just do it and people will be fine, but it’s super hard to do. You need the right people to start with, you need to have the right managers, you need to have the right processes in place, and you really need to buy into this idea to get this done because you also need to sacrifice some things for them. I think a company that says that customer experience in my contact centers is something that I’m absolutely serious about, and I take the people working in the contact center seriously, and maybe I change a little bit my attitude towards them and allow them space to grow and take the risk, this can be a very beneficial experiment for companies. I think it’s very hard to replicate it because your competitor also needs to find the right people. They need to have the right leaders. They need to have the right processes in place. I think if you are a company that trusts their leaders and trusts their people, I think this is a competitive advantage that can be built, should be built, and then can be very powerful and a very good differentiator to your competition. Because there are a lot of companies out there that have great products, but they do not manage to make the customer successful with the products because they’re not enabled.

[00:20:16] Thomas Lehner: They are not connecting the value chain, so to speak. They have a great product, but they do not get it out to the customer’s hands because they do not have an intact value pipeline. They do not have the teams that buy into the vision, communicate the vision, go the extra mile, and also think, “What can I do to make the customer journey easier?” Okay, the customer I’m interacting with now is in a particular stage of the life cycle with us. A motivated employee will think about the issues they’re having now.

[00:20:45] Thomas Lehner: Next stage, they will have entirely different sets of issues. What I can do now in rendering my help or consulting them in a certain way is to potentially maneuver them away from those pitfalls, increasing or decreasing the time to value for them. We are making sure they can go live quicker with fewer issues. And so on. So, in my opinion, often overlooked, but potentially a very powerful competitive advantage, if you can create this cultural environment for others.

[00:21:18] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting. We remember things 22 times more if we hear them in a story. I was talking to another gentleman about this, regarding the competitive advantage. He said, “When I buy”—and this was a chief security officer at a company—”the most important thing that I’m looking for is what’s the experience afterward.” Because they all have platforms that say they can do this, they can do X, they can do Y, they can do Z. But if I don’t have the team internally with that new partner or vendor that I brought on, that’s going to help me be successful. It’s the implementation and the constant adherence to how we are successfully innovating in what we’re doing together. That’s the differentiator. He said it was all about the experience. To your point, product is not what it used to be today. There used to be lots of patents and all kinds of different technologies that had very sustainable competitive advantages. That is no longer the case today.

[00:22:19] Thomas Lehner:  Yeah, I think people also get into the habit of prioritizing ticking off boxes. If you look at RFIs, for example, where people are requesting information on your product, they send you a questionnaire: “Can you do this? Can you do that? Can you do this?”

[00:22:33] Thomas Lehner: It was historically important that you could tick off all those boxes.But I think, to the point that you’re making, if that is true, if feature completeness is what makes a product good, then that vendor that has the most boxes ticked will have the most successful customers. But if we look around, it’s often not the case. Those people that maybe have a more reduced scope and say, “I want to do this and that and this very good,” and I make sure that my value pipeline is working and I have the people in the contact center that actually make sure that the customer can use those points that I ticked off, I think they are more successful in the long run.

[00:23:14] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. This all hinges back on what you were talking about earlier: the focus on people. There’s this kind of tug of war going on right now about human versus AI. In our previous conversations, you were very much in favor of, there are a lot of benefits that AI is bringing, but there’s never going to be a replacement for the human interacting with customers in delivering that experience. Now, AI is a part of the experience, right? CX is a very broad swath, but what is your opinion on human versus AI?

[00:23:48] Thomas Lehner:  I think AI is such an interesting topic. It’s an understatement to say it’s an interesting topic. I think it is disrupting so many industries. We do not even understand fully how disruptive it is for us, so we really do not know it yet. I’m very much looking forward to the next innovation cycle where AI matures even more. I think that the discussion is not, it’s not so much about AI versus human.

[00:24:13] Thomas Lehner: It’s more about AI and human, because I think the winning combination right now is humans working with AI. As you mentioned, I do not think that where we are at right now AI can replace humans in most functions that you have in contact centers because I think there are a couple of things that we need to sort out in AI, and some things we might potentially never be able to sort out. At least, what I think about AI, I’m not sure how to properly secure AI from an IT security perspective. I think this is one very big challenge. I do not expose AI directly to customers and partners for that reason.

[00:24:55] Thomas Lehner: Yeah, and also if we look at other early adopters where they went ahead and provided direct access to AI via chatbots on their website, for example, some of them had great success with it and saved a lot of costs. Others, not so much. Others maybe got into trouble for doing that because the AI was a little bit too helpful or too revealing in the information provided or promised stuff that the company then needed to deliver.

[00:25:23] Thomas Lehner: So, I think the guardrails are not yet very well understood, at least from my side. I do not personally understand how to properly provide guardrails for AI and security in an IT security kind of way. What I really think, and I encourage in my team as well, is people should work with AI.

[00:25:42] Thomas Lehner:  I think my team, myself, we work with AI multiple times a day. I think it’s an incredibly powerful tool, even if it’s just something trivial, like finding the right words or correcting your spelling or correcting your grammar, or in a more technical perspective, providing you help with some scripts, error messages, and so on. I think that AI is really good at doing that. But I think that you still need this control, this human eye audit. And apart from those more technical limitations, I think that AI has a problem, and I’m not sure whether this problem can ever be resolved. The problem is that it just doesn’t care about your company’s success or the success of your customer and partner, or the feelings or success of your coworker. It’s basically a very cold system. I’m a firm believer that empathy and feeling for someone that turns to you for help and advice, I think that cannot be replicated by AI anytime soon.

[00:26:47] Thomas Lehner:I would be very surprised if we ever get to this point, at least not in a very convincing way, I think.

[00:26:55] Steve MacDonald: Another way to say that is it’s hard to train AI to have an entrepreneurial perspective, right? Which is what we’re talking about on this podcast. We’ve talked about a lot, but I want to crystallize things. If there was one takeaway that you wanted people to have from this podcast, what would that be?

[00:27:14] Thomas Lehner: We did touch on a lot of very important points. I think, in my opinion, what people should really think more about and take away from this discussion is that thinking in systems and thinking about sustainable value, constantly motivating people to reflect, and even if it’s something as simple as during standups, dailies, lunch breaks, or whatever, to sit back and say, what are the activities that I’m doing each day? And which of those activities do I understand create sustainable value for my customers and which I do not understand? I think that’s very powerful, and people need to make sure that they are constantly reflecting on what they are doing under this context. There really needs to be more focus on teaching everyone in the company what it is really about, and this is providing sustainable value for customers.

[00:28:08] Steve MacDonald: I think we could probably go on for another couple of hours, but what I’d love to do is if people had questions, as a follow-up, would it be appropriate to give a link to your LinkedIn profile so they could get a hold of you?

[00:28:20] Thomas Lehner: Absolutely. Yep. 

[00:28:22] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thomas, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of these insights and changing the way that we think more entrepreneurially about how we provide sustainable value and grow our businesses. I really appreciate all your feedback.

[00:28:36] Thomas Lehner: Thanks for having me, Steve. It was a pleasure. Nice discussion. And as you said, if anyone has any questions or wants to know more, they can contact me on LinkedIn anytime.