The Frictionless Customer Experience

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everybody to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We have a very special guest here today. We have Patrick Martin from Coveo, and Patrick, you’re the EVP of customer experience. The buck stops with you on the experience created for this company. We’re going to talk about creating a frictionless customer experience today, but we’ll start by talking about why we want to focus on one experience. No matter where customers interact with us, they get a consistent experience from our brands. Why is that important? Why should that be something we should consider and prioritize as one of the biggest priorities in the company? It impacts the bottom line.

But could you start by explaining more about your background and what you’re doing at Coveo? 

[00:00:48] Patrick Martin: I’m passionate about this topic, which is probably why I’ve spent the last 25 years in services, mostly in support, and that’s pretty much what got me at Coveo. 

My role at Coveo as the global customer experience EVP is first responsible for all post-sales motions: customer success, professional services, and tech support. We also have a customer experience team that owns our own customer experience around digital engagements and access kind of the customer experience police within the company to make sure that everybody thinks about the customer experience, whatever we do.

 That was my role before doing that at Coveo; I led the support organization, where I spent most of my time in support.

[00:01:31] Patrick Martin: I started in 1999 in a small company because I was the only person speaking English to do support while the only support person was on vacation.

I went there for three weeks, and I never left. I built a career doing support in different company sizes and different industries, and it’s been a fun ride so far. I discovered this passion for the customer experience, which probably kept me here for so long.

[00:02:00] Steve MacDonald: I could tell your passion here from prior conversations. Tell us why this is an important subject. This has a far-reaching impact on the performance of the company overall, and ultimately, we’re in business to make money, but we’re in business to help.

We’re talking about the customer experience; why is it so important and directly tied to the company’s overall performance?

[00:02:24] Patrick Martin: That’s a good question. There are starting to be many more data points that we can rely on to prove why we need to focus on this. I’ll quote a study from PWC that dates from maybe two years ago around the customer experience, which is their future of the customer experience report. They mentioned that 32% of customers will leave a brand after one bad experience, and even if they love the brand, 59% will completely abandon it after two bad experiences. Now, it’s not for us, companies, or suppliers to define what a good experience is and what a bad experience is. It’s for our customers to define that. 

If we look at how customer expectations have evolved in the last few years, what we see has shifted. We can thank Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Wayfair, and all these other leaders in that space because they’ve programmed us in a way that we now expect easy, frictionless experiences. We expect companies to know us as consumers. When was the last time you searched on Netflix? How easy is it for you to return something on Amazon? It might be a little too easy. You don’t have to speak to anybody. It’s just really automated.

You get all these recommendations, and you feel they are personalized. We’ve seen that shift from what consumers expect to carry over to the B2B world. If you’re not doing that, you will struggle because when we think about what truly differentiates a company from another from its competitors, it is going to be that experience. You can have services or feature functionalities if you’re in tech or products that will differentiate you once you go to market because you will be first to market with that, or your competitors will catch up within 6, 12, or 18 months.

They’ll offer the same thing that you do. So, how do you continue differentiating if you want that differentiated factor? It will all be about the experience, and there is a cost to not delivering the experiences that customers expect today.

I’ll take a little study, but it’s not directly tied to the customer experience; it’s about the candidate experience. Virgin Mobile did a study around the impact of a negative candidate experience because the candidates they were hired to work for their company could be customers, and their friends and family could be customers. They would not feel great about the brand if they didn’t have a great experience, even if they were not hired. They would not want to be customers and wouldn’t want their friends and families to be customers because they weren’t treated correctly.

Their study showed a negative candidate experience would cost them 1.4 billion dollars annually. If you translate that over to customer experience and its importance for your company, there’s a cost to not having the fantastic customer experience they expect today.

[00:05:28] Steve MacDonald: The impact of this PWC study and that story blows your way. Could you tell us what your definition of a frictionless customer experience is as we start, then get in touch about how we create that in our companies? What would your definition of that be?

[00:05:45] Patrick Martin: I think it would be an experience that, regardless of where I am in my journey or my maturity with your company, should be intuitive enough. I shouldn’t waste a lot of time trying to find what I need. As a company, if you know that the best channel for me to resolve my question or issue is to go the assistant route, that would be great.

Don’t have me jump through self-service hoops; route me to the right person to resolve my problem as quickly as possible. If it is self-service, what information do I need to resolve this quickly? In today’s world, with all the technology out there, we have enough data points to do that and guide the customer through that resolution journey.

[00:06:30] Steve MacDonald: If we’re listening, hearing, and saying, ‘Shoot, I’m not there. I’m not overseeing frictionless customer experience in my organization.’ How do you start? This can seem a very daunting task. Suppose there are different departments and owners of different aspects of the customer experience, different training methodologies, different tones of voice, and so on. How do we think about starting something like this?

[00:06:56] Patrick Martin: That’s another very good question. We have to take a few steps back to answer it, to understand how we got to where we are today. I’ve been in this domain long enough that when I started doing support, it was pretty easy in terms of experience.

You had one channel, and it was the phone. If you needed help, you called the company you needed help from, and it was pretty easy. You’d answer the phone, but with the Internet and email, we started to move this experience and leverage the digital aspect of things.

We said, ‘Okay, we have our online help site, or we have that within our app or product. We have our product documentation site, which is managed by our product team or our documentation team. Now, support portals have come up with knowledge-based software, and we have a support portal.’

Chatbots came to the world, and now we have a chatbot. As you mentioned, the diversity of self-service channels or digital properties we use today is impressive. Many of them are owned by different departments and use different content sources. 

For example, my online help will use a certain aspect. My support portal only has knowledge articles on product documentation. If I were going through this experience, I would start with the online help and then go to the product documentation site. Finally, I would not find what I needed. I might try the chatbot, or I might go to the support site, look at the knowledge articles, and finally talk to an agent, send an email, or submit a case and have the agent ask me questions that I’ll have to repeat my entire story all over again because they have no insight into what I’ve done earlier in the journey. All that to say, where do I start? You have to identify who owns each of these different repositories or every single piece of that journey and say, ‘Okay, how do we get everybody in a room and start talking about removing the friction?’

This is a very siloed, disjointed customer experience. If we want to have this connected, unified experience, how do we go about it? Do we have someone like a chief customer officer at a company who could be that executive sponsor and be the owner of that overall experience so that we don’t continue to have these subtle journeys? With the coming of generative AI out there, some companies that we work with have the reflex of saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be a new channel that is going to work the same way as all the other channels’ instead of thinking that this is an excellent opportunity for us to bring all this together and have one experience that’s going to be fueled by Gen AI. There’s a great opportunity right now with the technology, but you have to start by bringing everybody in the same room.

This is not one department that will solve it all because it’s all owned by different people. 

[00:09:39] Steve MacDonald: AI is the talk of the town and the customer experience. What will be done for self-service, and how can that improve the customer experience? What is your opinion on AI versus live agents in the role? Is AI going to, at some point, do away with live agents? Will live agents have a role and are here to stay? How is that dynamic changing? 

[00:10:01] Patrick Martin: That’s interesting because I think you have people who sit on both sides of the spectrum. We’ve read many articles, especially early last year, about this time of year, which said that ChatGPT was the end of live agents and would be able to handle everything.

We’re a year into this journey now, and a lot of what we’re seeing is that ChatGPT is not going to solve the world’s problems in terms of self-service. You have to think it through much more, but there will be this support evolution. In the tech world, many support organizations use a tiered model.

You go through level one, which, in theory, is there to handle all the easily known issues or repetitive things. Then, if they can’t resolve it, they escalate to tier two, and now you start talking to more technical folks. If they can’t resolve it, they will go to tier three, which will sometimes be a sustaining engineering group and things like that.

Issues will move from one tier to another. You have single-tier support, where there’s just one tier, but they work collaboratively through intelligence formation, whereas the financial world is mostly departmental. We all know that when we call our financial institutions, we hit a department, and finally, they transfer us to another department.

You might get someone who can help. It’s a great opportunity for us to bring all this together, which I talked about all our different repositories. If you have the right technology to identify where the answers reside and where the information is, regardless, you might have a bit of product documentation and a bit of a knowledge article relevant to this person’s problem.

You even have a blog post that might help. Then, you generate one answer with that, and you can make it conversational. That will take care of all the easy, repetitive stuff documented, which means the impact on level one through time. If you’re in a tiered model, the impact will probably be significant because what you should see coming into your call center or support organization will be more unknown.

Your new versus known ratio is probably going to flip. It will be interesting to see how that works, but agents are here to stay because there will always be bugs, and there will always be situations in which you’ll want to talk to someone, like if I just saw that my credit card was stolen.

I don’t want to self-serve on that. Yes, I can block it on my app, but I probably want to see if there were fraudulent transactions and talk to someone to make sure that they will be deleted from my account. There are some things that you might not necessarily want to self-serve on. The agents will stay, but their role will evolve because AI is only as good as the information you feed. 

We’ve been talking about garbage and garbage out for years in terms of data and business intelligence and all of that. When we think about generative AI, the trash and garbage out statement take all its meaning because if I don’t have the right documentation if it’s not factual, if it’s not up to date if I can’t use the most relevant information, for that user and personalize the information.

I’m just going to generate incorrect information, which will not help the customer experience at all. I think the agents will transfer more into knowledge workers, take the things coming in, identify the gaps, and say, ‘Oh, we weren’t able to answer this question, but we know the answer.’

Why is that? Where should the answer reside in terms of documentation so that we can add it so that the next time a customer asks the question, the information will be there, and we’ll be able to self-serve if the person wants to be self-served? I think our business models are operation models, and the agents’ work will transform in the next few years because of AI, but I don’t think it will go away.

[00:13:46] Steve MacDonald: The agents need to be able to handle those tougher questions. 

[00:13:50] Patrick Martin: We’ll return to this frictionless customer experience. Let’s take something. Let’s say I’m using a SaaS application, I’m in my product, and I’m doing XYZ.

I’m trying to create a report here, and I get an error. I could click on the help button within the product and get a conversational experience, not a chatbot, but a conversational experience. That will help me say, ‘Oh, you are in this part of the application. I already know what you’re doing. I already know you need help or got a 403 error. I can already give you some information on that. I see you’ve gotten this.’ Make it conversational through generative experience; if you can’t resolve it right away, you can transfer it to a live chat agent. Now, the agent would receive the transcript of what you’ve done with the gen A.I. 

I made sure all of you received what you clicked in the application so they could pick up the conversation where it left off from your self-service experience. Okay, I see what you did from a self-service standpoint. I can pick it up from there and troubleshoot. I know what you’ve done in a SaaS application because we track everything that happens.

From a customer experience perspective, I didn’t have to call or do anything. I was transferred to a live agent who could control my screen and guide me through it, and everything has been transparent.

I did not even have to leave my SaaS application. I didn’t have to go to Google. I didn’t have to go to a self-service site. I didn’t have to submit a case. It’s just like all this is done in the background. It is easy. It’s frictionless. I’m projecting myself in time, but if you think about it, what should we think about when we think about the customer experience? It is how we can do that in our mobile apps, web apps, and SaaS applications and how we capture all this and make it prescriptive, make it transparent, and automate the process because Gen AI is going to allow you to do all of that if you do it right.

[00:15:38] Steve MacDonald: You mentioned earlier that the customer defines the experience, but the company has to deliver the experience, and if it is one experience, there will still be different departments involved. How do you get people involved in understanding the customer experience when they may only have a departmental view of the overall customer experience or are not the user? How do you get an experience that matches what the customers want across departments, frictionless? How do you start to even think about that?

[00:16:13] Patrick Martin: That’s always a good challenge because you have to show them what’s in it for them.

You have to convince the leaders of what’s in it so they can jump on this customer experience bandwagon. There are different ways to do it, but the best way is to be data-driven. I’ll take an example here at Coveo. When I joined the support organization five and a half years ago, the support organization didn’t really have a good working relationship with R&D.

Yes, we transferred things when there were bugs and such. It was a bit rocky, and support said they’re not fixing anything that will reduce our case numbers, and they don’t understand the customer side of things. 

I said, ‘Okay, you know what? We’re going to take a data-driven approach.’ We’re going to build these indexes. They will help us understand the friction points where the customers are struggling. Then, we’re going to put money, we’re going to put a dollar amount on it, and when it costs the company and R&D to fix these, we’re going to go to R&D with recommendations on saying, ‘Hey, if we make this part of the product more intuitive, if we make this part of the product more robust, you won’t have to deal with these things anymore, which means you’re going to be saving X amount of dollars, which means instead of doing maintenance and bug fixes, you’ll be able to take those resources and drive innovation.’

 It’s switching it and saying, ‘What’s in it for you?’ It’s the same thing when we think about it from a customer experience standpoint.

If you own part of the digital engagement program and have to do a lot of maintenance—this and that—what if we took that digital property away from you? Where you don’t have to manage the UI, you don’t have to manage anything, and you don’t have to worry about that.

We will bring all of this into our support portal or a community. You have to focus on the content because it doesn’t matter where it lives. We will bring this into a unified index; the customer can search for it in that central repository.

All you need to focus on is the quality of your documentation. You don’t have to worry about the UI or the experience anymore. Take that off your shoulders. We’ll own it. It’s thinking about it innovatively and saying, ‘Hey, what’s in it for you?’

[00:18:12] Steve MacDonald: I think it was our previous conversation. You said one of the big things about a customer experience is that they don’t want to waste their time. What you just described there is the other departments, what’s their experience. How do you create an experience where they’re not wasting time?

They get to do the things that they want to do, such as proactive work. Nobody wants to be doing bug fixes all the time. You’re applying customer experience, knowledge, and wisdom to the internal departments. That’s what I took away from that. 

You talked before about an efficient channel guidance experience, like the future of efficient channel guidance. What did you mean by that, and why should we talk about it?

[00:18:52] Patrick Martin: I don’t think we’re there yet, but I believe if we have to paint the destination, from my perspective, this is what we should be thinking about. What I mean by that is if a customer comes to a digital property that you have with a certain intent. They start to navigate your content or engage with your content in a way that you can quickly understand the purpose and what they have; you should know through your resolution data, your behavioral data, how people engage with your content when they go to assist or when they not, which channel they use, you should be able to leverage all this information.

You should guide the customer to the most efficient channel to resolve their issue. Let’s say you’re a hardware company, and someone comes to your site and says, I’ll take an example. You build mice, and someone comes to your site and says my mouse is broken. You don’t have a digital workflow to manage RMAs and other similar issues because you want to ask questions.

It would be best if you didn’t even have them go through self-service. It would be best to say, ‘Hey, click this button, and we’ll get an agent to help you immediately.’ We know that the most efficient way to get this done is through the assistant channel, but if the question is, ‘I don’t have power on my mouse anymore,’ chances are batteries are dead, or you didn’t charge it.

If it’s an internal battery or something like that, you might want to bring them through that self-service channel by guiding them through the right steps. It might be with a generative answer with pictures. It might be a very easy example, but when we talk about guided resolution, it’s leveraging your data and saying what the most efficient channel is, regardless of whether it’s self-service or assisted. 

How can I swiftly guide my customers to that point, enabling us to resolve their issues as quickly as they expect, given that you have or will have access to that data? I talked a bit about the history of how we built these self-service experiences versus assisted, and I think it comes from our on-prem legacy, where we were on-premise, especially in the tech space. We didn’t own the asset. It was easier to say, ‘You know what? You bought the laptop. It’s your problem. We can help you with these online resources but don’t want to talk to you. Go and see your reseller.’ People say they never have access to the companies when they buy an Apple or a Dell product. 

I have a MacBook Pro. I have to go to the Apple store to the genius bar. If I have a problem, I can’t call Apple, Dell, or Microsoft directly. If it’s a Windows problem, I have to self-serve.

Now, in the SaaS world, we own the assets as companies or technology suppliers. The customer doesn’t. It’s the same as buying versus renting a car.

You know that if you rent a car and don’t have good service after your lease, bring the car back here, your keys, and I’m going to the other dealership. I’m going to do the same thing over there because I don’t want to be left with this asset.

It’s the same thing. You have to change how you think about service, which is that we own the asset. We want you to renew and grow your business with us. We need to take care of you, and we need to do so in the best way possible. I think the guided resolution should be our destination.

It should be like, ‘Okay, our customer has this problem. We know that live chat is the best way to resolve it. Let’s guide them to a live chat.’

[00:22:16] Steve MacDonald: In this guided experience in the SAAS world, we also know that if we fix something for an issue that’s coming in, that’s going to fix it for a hundred or a thousand people down the line who aren’t going to have that experience.

I wanted to ask you a bit about the world of customer experience; I think over 70% of outsourcing companies, the customer experience isn’t always self-contained within the organization itself and employed agents and things like that.

How do you think about a seamless, frictionless customer experience when so many companies outsource for all the right reasons? How do you maintain that frictionless customer experience in that kind of environment?

[00:23:06] Patrick Martin: That’s definitely a challenge, and if you’re going to outsource, you want first to have a very robust onboarding program for the resources you are outsourcing because they’re an extension of your brand. You want them to be representative of your brand; you want them to share their values, and you want them to have the same beliefs so that when they’re talking to customers, the customers have a feeling that they’re talking to your company or that they’re interacting with your company. I think that’s the first thing. 

The other aspect is system integration. If the outsourcer or outsourcing company is not using the same systems as you are, you need to have a very tight integration point with them. I’ll go back to connecting the self-service journey to the assistant journey. 

Suppose you capture all this information in your system, whether for self-service, insight engine, CRM, or CDB. If that information doesn’t carry over to your outsourcer, how can they pick up the conversation where they left off? It will continue to be a disjointed journey.

It would be best if you thought about all of that. In an ideal world, they would be using the exact same systems as your in-house folks. A lot of people are going to outsource to tier one, and they’re going to keep tier two and tier three in-house. If you’re not using the same ticketing system or live chat systems, it just adds a lot of complexity.

That’s where customers might feel that they’re talking to two different companies. You don’t want to have to figure out a way to make it work through system integrations, training, onboarding, and even shadowing sometimes. You might wish these outsourced resources to sit in one of your offices because they will interact with R&D.

They’re going to interact with customer success. They will interact with other people who are not outsourced and are part of your company. There are different ways of thinking about it, such as making sure or at least putting all the chances on your side that customers are not going to feel that they’re talking to different companies.

[00:25:09] Steve MacDonald: That’s a good way to think about it is from the customer’s perspective; they should never know. 

[00:25:14] Patrick Martin: They should feel like the exact same experience.

It needs to be transparent. You know what? If you are outsourcing to these low-cost locations. It might sound weird that I say that, but I don’t have them call themselves John and Sophie; I just let them be themselves because customers can see through it.

[00:25:32] Steve MacDonald: This conversation is about creating a frictionless customer experience. Is there anything we’ve left on the table that we haven’t discussed that’s important? 

[00:25:40] Patrick Martin: Not really. I think we talked about a lot of concepts and a lot of important things.

But I think what I’ll probably share is a recommendation: don’t try to boil the ocean when you’re going through this digital transformation for your customer experience. Start small, maybe with one business unit.

Work with a subgroup of your customers and say, ‘Hey, you know what? We’re changing this. We want you to be a part of it. We want you to give feedback. We want you to help us build this.’ As you’re going down that path and getting feedback, you feel more comfortable about where you are. You extend it, and you do another round of feedback with customers until you get to a point where you feel very confident that you can roll this out to all your business units. All your customers can experience that and keep your customers engaged, get feedback, and find a way to get them to tell you how they feel about the experience, what they’d like to see, and what they think is missing.

If you have user groups or customer conferences or whatnot, dedicate some time to your customer experience and involve your customers. We want to hear from you. How easy is it for you to do business with us? What are the pain points? What frustrates you about our experience? Keep your customers engaged and make them part of the conversation because we can imagine the best customer experience. We’re going to try to fix business problems. We will say, ‘Oh, we have this problem internally. We will fix it that way.’ However, you might not be fixing a customer problem. 

You want to try to attack both fronts, but if you’re not engaging your customers in the discussion. It will continue to be a business decision and how it benefits us first; instead of benefiting the customer first, put the customer first, make them part of the discussion, try to solve that customer problem first, and see how it benefits the business afterward. 

[00:27:24] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I loved your recommendation about taking on one department at a time. I can imagine that if you do a good job with one department’s experience in coming together and creating this frictionless customer experience, it will be meaningful for the next department. You’re going to go to the next department.

You’re heading in the right direction. It’s crucial to emphasize the importance of that process and ensure it’s easy and frictionless to work together. After all, you’re constantly selling internally—selling the program and what you’re trying to achieve. 

[00:27:52] Patrick Martin: If you achieve it, your customers will stick with you because that will be your key differentiator. It’s your experience and the people who interact with your customers.

[00:28:01] Steve MacDonald: Patrick, thank you so much for coming on today. If people had follow-up questions, would it be appropriate to give a link to your LinkedIn profile so they could reach out to you? 

[00:28:11] Patrick Martin: Sure, definitely. I am always happy to talk to people who are as passionate about the customer experience as I am.

[00:28:16] Steve MacDonald: Thank you for coming on and sharing. We really appreciate it. 

[00:28:20] Patrick Martin: Oh, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me!