The People-First Customer Experience Strategy

Transcript

[00:00:02] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we’ve got a super interesting guest and topic. We have on Selvan, and Selvan, I’m going to allow you to explain a bit more about your background, but we’re going to be talking today about the people-first customer experience strategy and what that means. You know a lot about this—you’re the Head of Customer Success for CX at SAP South-East Asia. What we’re going to talk about is how we apply a people-first strategy to customer experience and customer support—what the difference between those is and how you really think about that and deliver excellence. So, we’ve got a lot to talk about.

[00:00:47] Steve MacDonald: You have a really interesting background. You’ve got an MBA in systems and marketing, but you work a lot with universities. You mentor in universities, you speak in universities. In fact, you talk about reverse mentoring, which I’d love to have you explain just a little bit. Maybe, if you don’t mind, take a moment to expand on your background a little bit, and then we’ll dive right into the subject matter here.

[00:01:12] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Thanks, Steve. First of all, thanks for this opportunity. I’m really glad to be here to share my experience and knowledge around customer success and customer experience. So, I’m Senthamizh Selvan Pandian, and you can call me Selvan—that’s much easier to pronounce for you.

[00:01:26] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: So, like you mentioned, I head the CX Customer Success at SAP, and one of the hobbies or passions I recently picked up in the last couple of years is mentoring students at universities. Also, my son is 16 years old and he’s also getting into university, so that’s something I’ve just started—learning what this new-gen is doing, the way they’re thinking, and all that.

[00:01:50] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: I think it’s also giving me a kind of reverse mentoring—I learn from them as well. I’m really excited to learn from them, and the kind of knowledge and exposure they have is amazing. I think today, when we talk about these different aspects, I will try to touch upon what the new-gen kids are also looking at in customer experience.

[00:02:12] Steve MacDonald: Oh, that’s great. I mean, there’s a lot of different layers to that. Now I understand the reverse mentoring—you’re learning from the students—and what we can learn from our own customers, being students of our customers. That’s a good way to wrap what we’re going to talk about.

[00:02:27] Steve MacDonald: And I’d love to just ask you right off the bat: no matter what, the market is always changing—it’s always complex. Nothing stays the same. Technology is changing, there are trends, there are pandemics. How do we understand customer needs in a rapidly changing marketplace? How do we keep up with that?

[00:02:49] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Yeah, I think the pace of technology and innovation has been much faster than in the past, and that evolves from a lot of different factors in terms of customer needs. The customer needs are also evolving over time, and the priorities of customers are also changing. What this means is that companies have to come up with new business models to meet customer demands.

[00:03:10] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: So, I think from a product perspective, what you need to first accept is that change is required depending on what the customer is looking for. Accepting that change and working towards what is required for a customer is the most important aspect, I would say. The company should prioritize customer needs instead of just assuming what would work. There should be deep research and analysis done, and then you should focus on the customer’s priorities and then on your products.

[00:03:37] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: This is also not just a one-time exercise. Because of the pace, you need to make this a continuous exercise. It’s a continuous evaluation, not just a one-time change. Also, I think no customer is asking you to solve every problem.

[00:03:51] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: When you’re trying to solve a customer problem, try to see in the ecosystem how you can partner and collaborate with others who can support you. Let’s say you’re providing software in the software business—if you’re giving a commerce platform, you try to see how the payment gateway can be integrated. There are different vendors who can provide that. So, partner and collaborate with different vendors and models, and try to solve the customer’s problem end to end rather than solving everything by yourself. Those are the things any company needs to focus on.

[00:04:27] Steve MacDonald: Now I understand it. In our past conversations, you talked about innovating around customer problems, and you started the answer by saying we have to innovate. We tend to think about innovating within our own technology. But when you talk about problems—and we’re never going to have all the solutions—but we want to be that guide, that problem solver for our customers. Thinking beyond our own tech, our partners, and bringing that together in innovating around customer problems, even if we are not equipped to solve every single one of them.

[00:05:09] Steve MacDonald: What does that take in order to do that? That’s training beyond our own technology, finding the right partners, integrating the right partners. In a practical way, how do you get that done? How do you implement something like that?

[00:05:25] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Yeah, I mean, if I get the question, you’re talking more about how you focus on the problem rather than the technology. I think first and foremost, technology is just an enabler, not the driver. Of course, all your innovations are driven by technology, but there are a lot of other factors, like market needs and future trends. Many factors contribute to this change.

[00:05:51] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: And towards that, what we need to understand first is that the “why” part is more important—the problem you’re trying to solve—rather than the “what,” which is the technology. From that aspect, I think the innovation should be around what I call customer-centric innovation rather than product innovation.

[00:06:12] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Customer-centric innovation is the key to a successful model, and that can only happen with a mindset shift—putting your customer first. I think that happens through knowing your customers well, understanding their problems, spending time with them, and those are the things that are important to ensure you understand the customers.

[00:06:35] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Then you focus on developing your product. In simple terms, the focus should be on solving the problem, not just on functions and features from your product perspective.

[00:06:45] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: I just remember, in one of my conversations with a customer during a renewal, the customer jokingly said, “Okay, you guys keep coming with so many features in every release, but I’m not even using them. So why don’t you give me a 10% discount?”

[00:07:00] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: It was a funny conversation, but when you think right here, it’s all the new business models—pay-per-use. I’m not using what you provide, so why can’t I pay for what I’m using? I think that’s where the business model is moving, especially in subscription businesses.

[00:07:15] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Again, I’ll talk about some examples, which probably all of us know. Take Netflix or Amazon or Uber. Technology is one aspect, but the commonality is they try to solve a problem.

[00:07:29] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Netflix solved the problem of accessing media content that wasn’t easily accessible to customers. Similarly, if you look at Amazon, they solved the problem of getting products much easier than before. And Uber solved the problem of inconvenience in booking rides.

[00:07:48] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: So, the commonality here is you’re solving a customer problem, and you do that through technology. I would say focus more on customer problems and pain points, and that will help drive innovation and technology.

[00:08:03] Steve MacDonald: So, there is a hierarchy of customer pain points—there’s more than one. What’s interesting about the stories you told is there was an overriding problem that each of those companies set out to solve.

[00:08:18] Steve MacDonald: When you’re training your agents—the people delivering the customer experience inside your organization—how do you think about training them to solve customer problems? You’ve talked about people being the core in solving these customer-experience challenges, so how do you get your team thinking that way?

[00:08:38] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: I think people are the core—people are fundamental for any business. There’s definitely a lot of questions that come to all of us around AI replacing jobs and all that, but what we need to understand is that AI can take over some of these repetitive tasks, and AI is also going to create a lot of new opportunities.

[00:09:00] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: In this journey of what is being replaced and what opportunities are being created, the people who have the mindset of adapting to change are going to be the winners. Having the right mindset of learning and adapting to new situations is key for any organization—that’s the people perspective. From a company perspective you need to develop a culture of upskilling and provide opportunities for your own employees to upscale to recent technologies and trends.

[00:09:40] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Building that culture over time is important, and once that base is built you start forming a team of individuals who are equipped to provide a good customer experience. It’s all interlinked. People are the core of your business, so focus on their skills; that will help you keep pace with a fast-changing world.

[00:10:05] Steve MacDonald: In our past conversations you talked about continuous upskilling being critical to the effectiveness of the team. The market is constantly changing, problems are changing, and the complexity of the people we serve is changing. When it comes to upskilling, is it something you do continuously, or do you reassess now and then and upskill? How do you think about that?

[00:10:39] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Upskilling is a key part of managing your employees. Employee engagement is vital for your business. If you have engaged employees—individuals motivated to drive the outcomes you’re looking for—then to maintain their productivity and efficiency you must ensure they’re successful, and that can only happen through upskilling. That’s one aspect.

[00:11:07] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: When you focus on employee engagement—actively making sure your employees can come together and solve problems—you develop a team culture. With that culture you have an organization full of individuals who can actually solve problems for you. This enhances the employee experience, which helps you solve customer-experience problems.

[00:11:32] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: These are two different aspects, but they’re definitely interlinked. By focusing on employee experience you drive engagement and upskilling, which boosts team performance and directly—or indirectly—improves customer experience.

[00:11:48] Steve MacDonald: I talked to a gentleman with a PhD who was a Chief People Officer. His thesis empirically connected the dots: better-engaged employees create better engagement with customers, leading to growth for the company.

[00:12:10] Steve MacDonald: We all know that if we focus on our own employees, that has a halo effect on how they interact with customers, resulting in better retention and higher revenues—but he proved it empirically.

[00:12:25] Steve MacDonald: In terms of engagement with our employees, how do you see the link between employee engagement and customer experience? How does that manifest in how you train, engage, empower, and create culture internally?

[00:12:46] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: As I mentioned, people are core to any business, so the focus should always be on employee engagement. When you invest in successful engagement, the individual becomes invested in the company, starts liking what they’re doing, and that fuels team performance. That positive environment lets the team perform well, which in turn enhances customer experience because they’re the ones working for your customers, right?

[00:13:20] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Employee engagement—whether you call it a direct or indirect relationship with customer experience—is part of a virtuous cycle. You focus on engagement, which improves team performance, which improves customer experience. That’s the relationship.

[00:13:36] Steve MacDonald: Yep, one hundred percent. Even within the industry we throw around terms with a lot of overlap—customer success, customer experience, customer support. How do you differentiate between customer experience and customer success in today’s organization?

[00:13:58] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: I get this question often, so I’ll try to keep it simple. Customer experience is the end-to-end journey when you buy a product—the experience you get at every touchpoint: awareness, sales, the purchase itself, and how it’s serviced afterwards. That complete journey defines the product for you.

[00:14:34] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Customer success, on the other hand, is a strategic approach to engaging with customers once the product is sold—post-sales engagement.

[00:14:50] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: After the product is sold there are different touchpoints: onboarding the customer, explaining how the product works, helping with implementation, choosing partners in the software business, and later driving adoption so they can better consume the product and leverage its functionalities. Supporting them with any required services is also part of this entire customer-success journey.

[00:15:25] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: In a subscription business, many think renewal decisions are based on cost, the product itself, or other factors, but studies show two-thirds of customers decide to renew based on the experience they receive during the post-sale phase. It’s crucial to provide that experience and be with them on the journey. Customer success is therefore a very important phase in any business, and many companies are investing heavily in it.

[00:16:10] Steve MacDonald: You know, I read a study that came out about three years ago from Forrester that said in B2B businesses, 72 % of new annual revenue comes from existing customers. So that post-purchase customer-success phase you were talking about is the most important revenue-generating activity the company has.

[00:16:37] Steve MacDonald: It outpaces sales in new-logo development. We spend so much time as organizations going after—conquesting—new business, whereas 72 % of our revenue comes from existing customers. I love that emphasis you have on that; it can’t be underscored enough how important customer success inside these organizations is.

[00:17:01] Steve MacDonald: But lots of times it’s like the baton gets passed: now I’ve got this group that’s answering questions from the customers and keeping them happy, and then—oh, shoot—they’re up for renewal. Well, we’d better go talk to them and see how they’re doing.

[00:17:13] Steve MacDonald: From your point of view, customer success is an ongoing thing. In our past conversations, that emphasis—that focus—has to be very proactive, not reactive at the time of renewal: “Let’s talk to them again and see what’s going on.” How do you think about that and how you’re training?

[00:17:32] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Yeah, I think, like you pointed out, making sure your existing customers are important is very key in today’s business. Like you said, 72 % of the revenue comes from your existing customers, so you’d better focus on them. I think renewal, to me, is just an event or a milestone, but you need to do a lot of other things, like I mentioned before.

[00:17:52] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: For example, once the customer signs up—during onboarding—the first and foremost thing is how you onboard the customers: explaining the products, what products they’re entitled to, what the product can do, and having an open conversation to understand what they’re looking for. Plus, also getting to know if there are any gaps and how you fulfill those gaps.

[00:18:13] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: From starting those conversations and helping the customer through the journey of implementing—say, in a software business—and, let’s say, choosing the right partners, being in the implementation journey, and making sure they successfully go live. Plus, once they’ve gone live, you might have challenges in change management—in business adoption, technology adoption, or solution adoption, et cetera.

[00:18:39] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: So, helping the customers during this journey is also key, and helping them understand how they can consume or use the product in a better way, while providing them more use cases.

[00:18:51] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Once you start doing all this—the different phases I explained, from onboarding to implementation to choosing partners—if you do all these right things, then, to me, renewal is a no-brainer. It is just going to happen as an event or milestone. If you focus on all these other things, it’ll happen automatically.

[00:19:12] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: That’s how the mindset of the customer-success manager should be: focus on all these right things and renewal will happen automatically. As I said in the beginning, two-thirds of the customers will choose you based on the experience they get during customer success. Of course, there are other factors that also play an important role, but focus on these key things and it will happen.

[00:19:37] Steve MacDonald: Everything we’ve talked about here comes back to the title of this episode—building a people-first customer-experience strategy. Regarding the key components of a people-first strategy in building customer success, you’ve talked very eloquently about how the people are so important. If you were to give some advice to those customer support, customer experience, and customer success leaders listening right now on building that people-first customer-experience strategy, what would you tell them?

[00:20:15] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Like I mentioned in one of the previous questions, people support any business, and your success actually depends on how well you understand the customers’ needs and their problems—and you need people to do that. As I said, with so much change happening around, you definitely need to have the right people—people with the right attitude—who can invest in you, and you need to invest in their skills. Those things are interlinked, and that kind of continuous learning will help you attain that.

[00:20:45] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: So, focus on both the customers’ needs and your own employees’ skills development. If you can take care of both together, you will be solving the customers’ problems while keeping people at the core. That becomes your people-first customer-experience strategy. The last thing is that a people-first approach will help you drive business growth with the right workforce, and that will lead to customer satisfaction.

[00:21:11] Steve MacDonald: I love that—getting the right workforce, attracting the right people. It’s not just focusing on how you upskill the people you have; you have to attract the right people into your organization, and you’ve got to be able to keep—retain—those people once they’re inside the organization.

[00:21:28] Steve MacDonald: Is there a team culture or strategy you have for not only engaging but retaining these people? Because you’ve talked a lot about the importance of the people here.

[00:21:41] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: I think retention is very, very important, both in business and also for people. In terms of people, we understand that acquiring early talent and focusing on early talent with new skills is equally important. At the same time, you need to have experienced colleagues—an experienced team—who can help you maintain that mindset and culture over a longer period of time.

[00:22:04] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Retention is not just from your own team’s perspective. Even with your customers—you talked about that 72 % of revenues coming from your existing customers—one study says that acquiring a new customer is almost five times more expensive than managing your existing customers. These days, operating profit and revenue growth are key for any business. So, I think retention, or focusing on your existing customers, is crucial, and at the same time, from a people-strategy point of view, you should strike the right balance between bringing in early talent and retaining your experienced team.

[00:22:40] Steve MacDonald: We’ve covered so much, and our poor human brains can only retain about two or three things. If there were one takeaway that you wanted the audience to remember from this podcast—something they would carry with them—what would that be?

[00:23:02] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Okay, that’s an interesting one. For those listening to this podcast, I’m sure you are serving your customers. You probably have many conversations with them to get to know them better, and sometimes you might wonder why you can’t solve their problem. In most cases, we look from our own perspective: “Oh, the product can do it, right? If ten of my customers are able to use it, why is this customer not able to use it?”

[00:23:31] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: My approach is to have an open conversation with an unhappy customer and try to understand them. Either you convince the customer, or you let yourself be convinced. Explain why the product works for ten other customers in the same industry, or how they are using it more effectively.

[00:23:51] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: If you’re not able to convince them, then try to understand what they need—what is unique to their business. That insight can help you, and you can feed this back to your own product team to make the product better. I would say that is the one key takeaway I’d ask each of you to work on.

[00:24:09] Steve MacDonald: I love it. It gives us so much to think about, and here’s what I know: people are going to have more questions. This is such an incredible conversation. Would it be appropriate for me to share a link to your LinkedIn profile so that, if people have questions, they can reach out to you?

[00:24:22] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Sure, definitely. Please do that.

[00:24:25] Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. The mission of this podcast is to bring customer success and customer experience leaders together from all over the world, across B2B businesses, and share our insights, experiences, and perspectives. If we do that, it’s like a rising tide that lifts all boats, and I think you were an important part of that rising tide today. I just want to say thank you.

[00:24:49] Senthamizh Selvan Pandian: Oh, thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me here. I really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for asking me some easy questions.