Transforming Contact Centers with a Servant Challenger Mentality

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we had a really interesting conversation with Nate Brown. Now, Nate Brown is not only like all of us, a student of the CX. How has the evolution happened in the CX industry, the advent of technology, and how can we enable it?

[00:00:21] Steve: Our agents and customer service representatives can do so much more. But then, as leaders, how can we recognize that and the power and impact that can have on the overall organization? We are not cost centers. We are value centers. Nate’s interesting take is that we will discuss the servant-challenger mentality and what that means.

[00:00:47] Steve: Nate, you’ve been around the industry long. You’re currently running contact centers in the music industry, some of the biggest names. Maybe tell us more about yourself and this servant-challenger mentality to get started. 

[00:01:02] Nate Brown: Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Steve. It’s a huge pleasure to be here; a huge fan of the show. Thank you, Lauen Volpe, for the referral. I’m thrilled to be on. My name is Nate, coming at you live from Nashville, Tennessee, the music city. 

[00:01:20] Nate Brown: I’m a mandolin player, dad of two amazing daughters, got a super cool wife, pickleballer, disc golfer. I  love experience design. I love helping businesses take the meaningful purpose they started for and make it come to life, make it real, and deliver it better more often through great experience design. So, that is the work that I do, and I am so privileged to do it for a major PRO organization and also through CX Accelerator, a nonprofit community I run. Every day is a new adventure, and I absolutely love this work, Steve.

[00:01:46] Steve: Great. Let’s kick us off. The experienced designer’s servant-challenger mentality is right at the heart of that; give us the servant-challenger mentality one-on-one before we start getting in and breaking it out into pieces.

[00:01:58] Nate Brown: Yeah. Justin Robbins and I have been talking to all kinds of different CX and contact center leaders, and we just find that we have this wonderful buzz, this excitement that’s out there about how much the space is changing and how many organizations are viewing CX, contact centers, and customer service in this new strategic light. But then, immediately, we pivot into this technology conversation, which is absolutely part of it. 

[00:02:24] Nate Brown: It’s amazing what some of this stuff can do now around generative AI and what the implications are on the voice of the customer. Some of those areas and our ability to do proactive support and get really intimate from a data perspective with our customers are also amazing. But there’s so much more to the puzzle here, Steve, regarding modernizing a customer service center, and it starts with this.

[00:02:45] Nate Brown: It starts with the psychology of this work. If we look at what CX is, it’s people’s thoughts and perceptions towards a brand. So, let’s start with where the thoughts and perceptions come from that meet right in between our ears. Let’s get on a psychological level here.

[00:03:01] Nate Brown: Let’s think about how we, as customer service leaders, can help the people doing this work. Those wonderful agents and customer service representatives get beyond a ticket-taker mentality. That’s so last generation. We’re in this new, wonderful era where we get to do some really creative and wonderful service, but we have to adapt mentally.

[00:03:22] Steve: Absolutely. So, take us through the definition. The Definition of a servant-challenger and adopting that mentality. 

[00:03:29] Nate Brown: So, the mentality that I’ve been using most often, and with the greatest success in terms of making that leap into this modern era, is that of a servant-challenger. So, the word challenger just kept coming up for me, Steve.

[00:03:41] Nate Brown: I don’t know if you notice that theme too, but I’m looking at the challenger sale by Matt Dixon and the challenger customer and that ability to guide them to use that story brand language. We’re challenging our customers to navigate the path even better, but it requires us to jump alongside them and push them in really good, healthy ways.

[00:04:01] Nate Brown: Internally, we have radical candor care personally so we can challenge directly. We’ve got the amazing four levels of psychological safety by Timothy R. Clark. The circle of psychological safety there. Level four is that of a challenger. So, this just kept coming up again and again for me, Steve. There’s something here, with this repetition theme and what it looks like for us to break the status quo, which we looked at pride in performing as the most deadly thing inside of an organization.

[00:04:30] Nate Brown: In terms of our inability to make that leap and to innovate into this great era of customer experience that we’re in, that’s what holds us back is that state of inertia and status quo. So, to break that, we’ve got to challenge it, but we’ve got to give people essentially permission. We’ve got to give people an example of what that challenger really looks like. But then we layer on some more things. I think we’re going to get to that, Steve, but it’s not enough just to challenge and punch up; we’re gonna break glass, and we want to ultimately serve something bigger than ourselves in pursuing that.

[00:05:03] Nate Brown: That’s where we see the idea of collective genius really take shape and start to help an organization innovate from a customer experience design perspective. 

[00:05:13] Steve: So I’m dying to ask you one particular question here because one thing to talk about is innovation, challenge, design, and new technologies. The relationship between the company and its customers is at the core of all of this, and the agent is right in that center.

[00:05:30] Steve: So, I’m going to ask a question just to begin with here. What is your point of view on the importance of the agent, especially in this new technology? Like you said, generative AI, AI world, where, on the one hand, you could say, wow, that’s gonna do away with agents. Is that a mentality that you share? Why? Why not? But also, to take on everything you’ve discussed in re-engineering the customer experience, you must talk about a higher-quality agent, and a higher-quality training goes into that to understand, adopt, and actually deliver on what you’re talking about here. I would just love to hear your thoughts on all that. 

[00:06:11] Nate Brown: I love thinking about the classic wisdom from the effortless experience when guiding customers to the best resolution path. There are so many resolution paths that are possible, especially right now with what we have available from a technology standpoint, but not all paths lead there.

[00:06:28] Nate Brown: Not all paths will lead to these elevated self-service capabilities. Many of them will and should, but is that the best resolution? The one that’s going to offer the best experience? For so many of these paths, Steve, we’re going to find that people want to get a sense of identity from the brand.

[00:06:47] Nate Brown: They want to experience community with the brand. They want to have a creative, interesting conversation with somebody. Maybe they’re a little lonely, maybe they’re a little lost, maybe they don’t know the questions to ask. When you’ve got somebody on the line who represents that brand, defends the promise of that brand, and can give you that confidence and spark in terms of, ‘Wow, what a cool thing. What a cool thing it is that I get to be in a relationship with this brand.’ That’s what an amazing customer service worker does. 

[00:07:16] Steve: I can imagine, too. That’s what they all want to do. They don’t want to be held to a three-minute max call time. They don’t want to be held to these constraints, and here’s the script and everything.

[00:07:29] Steve: They want to help, and they want to feel that they’re helping not only that relationship here but also conveying the opportunity, what they’re hearing, and what change happens from it. That elevates because we’ve got a major problem in the industry with agent turnover, and part of it is just feeling like you’re a cog, replaceable, entry-level. Everything you’ve been saying so far is in the exact opposite direction in terms of their importance, their role, and their impact on the business. You feel like you had that kind of importance inside an organization as an agent that opens up much more opportunity, growth, career projection, and job satisfaction; it helps change this whole dynamic. 

[00:08:15] Nate Brown: That’s so true, Steve. I love the way that you say it. Let’s automate well, leverage technology well in the areas that we can, and then do an amazing job where we get to cultivate community. I think more and more, as we look at what CX is and what it does, we’re earning loyalty through that idea of identity and community. 

[00:08:31] Nate Brown: We’re in an epidemic of loneliness right now, according to our U.S. Surgeon General. Right in that report, one of the main resolutions of the U.S. surgeon general is cultivating meaningful communities.

[00:08:48] Nate Brown: But what better place to do that than in a relationship with these brands that we would care so much about? If they allowed us to have a community with that brand, we could get a sense of identity from that in a more elevated way. But then we’re put into these little boxes, both as a customer in terms of the way we get to relate and as an agent, as a customer service worker, we’re put in the ticket-taker box, and as you said, that cog, do this thing, say it right, get it perfect, go to the next call, I want to make sure you’ve got 60 of those a day. I don’t really care about the nature of the interaction. All I want to make sure is that these metrics are hit. C-Sats high enough. That’s fine.

[00:09:28] Nate Brown: Let’s make this an efficiency shop. Well, let’s focus on efficiency over here where that belongs and do an amazing job with the self-service capabilities. But in the areas where we cultivate community, let’s let people be people and make them even better at doing that. We’re not doing that enough, Steve. 

[00:09:45] Steve: It’s so funny because everybody talks about how we are a people business, yet we’re boxing our people into areas where they can’t relate or are driven by numbers and time. So, their goal is to resolve this as quickly as possible, not build community, build relationships, or build the loyalty and connection you’re talking about.

[00:10:09] Steve: So, how do we get started? What do we need to do? I’m a CX leader. I’m on the podcast now. Where do I start? What do I do? 

[00:10:18] Nate Brown: As a CX leader, you get to be an evangelist for the brand promise in the organization. This means focusing on why the business was started in the first place.

[00:10:27] Nate Brown: I love that HBR company identity matrix, which guides an organization through those thinking steps and locks you into what sums up what we will stand for. We’re going to put a line in the sand right here. This is who we are. This is our brand personality. This is how we express it.

[00:10:43] Nate Brown: This is who we bring in; this is our character. Here are our competencies. We’re better at this than anybody else, and here’s the experience we’re creating. We’re going to defend that together and create some pride around it. Otherwise, why would the customer service center be more than a cost center?

[00:11:02] Nate Brown: If people aren’t convicted and excited about the concept of defending the brand promise, then the math is there in terms of when you do a great job with the customers you have, that’s how you earn new ones. Look at the rise of customer success. The idea of maximizing customer value, sales, and marketing traditionally is being replaced in many industries by the concept of customer success.

[00:11:26] Nate Brown: Let’s knock it out of the park regarding customer engagement because that feels the acquisition engine more and better than anything else. It’s helping the organization to embrace that larger CX mentality, then bringing it back into the contact center, back into customer service, and free people up to go beyond that idea of average handle time and that over-focus on efficiency metrics to where you get to put that in the right place. 

[00:11:47] Nate Brown: The customer service conversation has a place for that. Let’s save money. Let’s save time in the right areas. But then we get to go deep and foster the right skills with these incredibly talented people.

[00:12:03] Nate Brown: We get to let them be the voice of the customer. We get to let them be proactive in making that metaphor of being a great guide come to life for the customer. All these wonderful things that a customer service representative can do. If only we make the time and foster the skill.

[00:12:21] Steve: So, here’s what I’m taking away from what you’re just saying: you must be a change agent within your company because what you’re describing is not the state of business in CX today. The first thing that you would have to do is change your internal mentality and how you look at the contact center and its value.

[00:12:44] Steve: What the contact center can actually do? Everything from marketing to sales to product development to customer success, and is that a starting point it establishes? Here’s what we can do for you. How do we get started? What’s the important first step in changing that internal mentality?

[00:13:02] Nate Brown: My favorite change management methodology is the classic John Kotter’s Leading Change. If you look at the first three stages of that, number one is to establish a sense of urgency. You have to light a fire, or nobody will change anything like our brains are superwired with these giant highways of neurons.

[00:13:20] Nate Brown: If you want to break that pattern, inertia is so deadly that we’re wired for it to fall into that rut, into a comfortable place. We got to break some pavement here, folks. So if you want change to stick, if you want change to happen, it starts with lighting a match, getting that sense of urgency going; we can’t keep operating this way.

[00:13:39] Nate Brown: The more intrinsic conversation is that we’re not meeting our brand promise, not standing up for the things that we should stand up for, and not doing what we said we would do when we started this organization. Then, on the other side of it, others are, and we’re losing our market share because these competitors are making the customer experience conversation real.

[00:13:58] Nate Brown: They’re getting the customer experience right. It’s hard to do, but that’s where the acquisition engine comes from. That’s how you gain market shares, do a great job with your existing customers, and earn new ones through that clarity of focus that you get when you have that brand promise crystallized.

[00:14:13] Nate Brown: So, there’s a lot that has to be done in that stage of creating a sense of urgency, but then the next stage, number two in that model, is to do a change coalition. You’re bringing people together. So, that way, it’s not you, as a CX leader or customer service leader, cracking a whip. That’s not the way to challenge. That’s not how we will gain influence here. 

[00:14:30] Nate Brown: You’ve got to invite people into the work. They have to want it for themselves. You have to light a match inside of them, the type of match that they want to light for somebody else. Otherwise, it’s not going to take root. You’re not going to gain the plant that has fruit.

[00:14:46] Nate Brown: On this CX vine here, unless you have that CX change coalition established with good functional leaders that represent that overall customer journey, that customer life cycle. Then, number three is to remove barriers. That’s where we start sucking the friction out, Steve, and allowing people and the tools and the technology to do what it can do and free things up to be amazing. 

[00:15:11] Steve: So here’s a story I think is relevant. Everything you just talked about there, CX, if you want to create urgency literally. In most markets and industries, competitive advantage is very hard to come by. You can’t do it with product technology and think you’re going to take any kind of lead that you might have had, a product feature or something, and that’s going to be our competitive advantage that’s here to stay.

[00:15:38] Steve: So, more and more, the competitive advantage is the service that you expect and get from a company. I recently changed where I get my domains and hosting and stuff like that. I was like, I’m only going to go with a price-competitive company, but I can actually call and talk to a live person.

[00:15:59] Steve: I can get live help. I’m not a techie. If I have something wrong, I need to take care of it, and somebody who is actually going to help me do the work and walk me through the process just to get to where I need to go. That became my competitive advantage in a hosting company. So, when talking about that, what’s the first step in creating that sense of urgency?

[00:16:22] Steve: It should be in creating one of the largest competitive advantages this company can have in delivering on those brand promises and the things you were discussing up front and serving our community, serving our customer base. I love everything you’re talking about here.

[00:16:39] Nate Brown: I’ve got a quick little narrative for you, Steve. It’s the idea of that CX change coalition. It’s so critical if you’re going to really get something going here in terms of some CX momentum and start to awaken this larger CX mentality across the organization.

[00:16:53] Nate Brown: You just gotta do it. Jeanne Bliss has this wonderful section in Chief Customer Officer 2.0 about identifying the power core. Every organization has some kind of power core. I remember reading that and thinking about who the power core was in my organization.

[00:17:09] Nate Brown: Sure enough, it was I.T., which I think these days is even more the case because they control the data. They’ve got the budget, they’ve got the strategic initiatives in their department of I.T., and so often, they’re the power core. They’re often the ones most mystified by this customer experience stuff.

[00:17:27] Nate Brown: It’s most important for us to evangelize, educate, be kind, and invite them into the work. I remember doing that inside the organization I was serving in, and I remember that the I.T. leader came alive. I was just so hungry for it. We put most I.T. people in a box like they just don’t get it, and they’re the main barrier we will have.

[00:17:51] Nate Brown: We’re never going to have them be a catalyst for change with us. Don’t allow that because that’s just going to be such a barrier for you; find a way to make the CX opportunity stand out for them as the way to solve their challenges because, at the end of the day, it will be. 

[00:18:08] Steve: I love where you’re going here, and I want to make sure that we get some core of your recommendations. You actually talk about this challenger mentality. You talk about it from the perspective of a confident challenger. You talk about the perspective of a caring challenger and then a servant challenger. Take us into your thinking about the differences and how they apply. 

[00:18:35] Nate Brown: So, at least to me, it started with the challenger sale, which in some ways is like somebody who’s capable of going against the grain, pushing upstream, just making things happen, and breaking inertia.

[00:18:51] Nate Brown: Radical candor really convicted me around now, but it’s more than just that. We also care about the people around us so that we earn the right to challenge. Instead of just pushing everybody, we have to earn the right to do that first, and there are things we need to do. 

[00:19:07] Nate Brown: There are ways to be a caring and relevant challenger. But then, as I look at the principles of servant leadership, that’s the culminating factor for me, especially as we apply this to the customer service realm. It’s that idea of just helping to elevate the voices of others, choosing ethics before profits, finding the truth even when it’s hard, going deep when it’s inconvenient, seeking that out, and making sure that the truth is found in these situations and that we’re not, perpetuating bias or lazy, inconvenience on behalf of me as a leader.

[00:19:41] Nate Brown: We’re gonna elevate those who are doing the best things and that have earned it and are living out the principles of the brand and living out those core values and the mission of the brand and really elevating those individuals. You’re serving the brand promise by making it real; you’re serving each other, and think about how much more important that becomes than just the idea of challenging for me.

[00:20:07] Nate Brown: To hit a sales target or to get to the next step in my career. If you’ve got an organization full of selfish challenges, you’re not going anywhere together; you’re just not going anywhere. I love the work, and forgive me, I forgot the authors’ names, but I’ve just been so enamored with the idea of Collective Genius, an incredible resource out there. I think collective genius comes into play when we awaken that servant-challenger mentality. That’s where you have an organization that is so mature that when a new idea comes up, it’s not gonna be a perfect idea like one person submitting one idea will be the entire solution.

[00:20:48] Nate Brown: That’s not how things work in complicated organizations. It’s gonna be the piece of the puzzle. But then you have to have people willing to bring their pieces of the puzzle together and actually work together to find the larger solution, make the brand promise come to life, and serve customers better. But getting people out of their own zone is so hard to do. You must have that psychological safety circle locked in and in place. You’ve got to have challengers you’ve identified willing to push against the grain in good, healthy, positive ways. When we bring that idea of being a challenger together with the idea of being a servant leader, the sky is the limit, Steve. 

[00:21:31] Steve: Do you have a story about how you’ve implemented this, how it impacted you, and how you bring this tremendous amount of insight to work? Because you’re involved day to day, you’re running contact centers. Give us a story that we can think through in terms of how it plays out. 

[00:21:49] Nate Brown: This is my story. This is my testimony, Steve. As a leader, these are the things that have stuck, that have worked, and that have helped me cultivate good, high-performing teams. So, it starts with me living these things out. I’ve just been watching leaders through my entire career, Steve.

[00:22:06] Nate Brown: I’ll give you this example: the first ten seconds of the day say so much about a leader’s mentality and how they’re going to be able to accomplish anything on behalf of their team. I think about the first ten seconds of the day when you come into the office, and you either metaphorically shut the door and go straight into your own world, or you’re there and immediately like, ‘Hey, how’s it going today? How can I help you? How can I help you to get going? Is there anything that’s in your way right now? How can I remove a barrier for you?’

[00:22:31] Nate Brown: I would see those leaders who are just excited to come in and just serotonin coming out of them, that community chemical of serotonin and just creating that goodwill that would spill over into these customer service workers or any type of worker. Give them the fountain water, which they spill over and serve one another well, and serve the customer well, versus the cortisol of the leader that shuts the door.

[00:23:05] Nate Brown: I’ve just seen so many different leaders who have done one or the other, and it’s amazing, looking at the track record in the results of those teams. I feel like I could predict a team’s success based on how the leader walks into the office and spends the first ten seconds of their day with some degree of accuracy there.

[00:23:24] Nate Brown: But one more small story there, Steve. This applies very much, not just on the leadership level but on the agent level. I remember getting to work as a consultant for a great retailer in the Midwest selling PE equipment. 

[00:23:39] Nate Brown: There’s this one uniquely talented young woman who was just knocking her job out of the park as a customer service worker. I’m looking for the attributes here. What’s going on? I remember asking this person, ‘How are you doing this? What makes you tick?’ She was like, ‘Well, when I was looking for a job at X time, it was during COVID. I couldn’t get into the medical field, and there are reasons for that. I really wanted to find a way to serve children, and I found this amazing job where I got to help these PE teachers knock their PE classes out of the park and have healthier, happier kids. I really came to life in this job.’

[00:24:15] Nate Brown: That’s the intrinsic motivator. It allows you to be the servant challenger you are. It starts with that intrinsic motivation rooted in the actual functional brand promise of the organization you’re serving inside of. It’s pretty exciting when we find those people who are just doing it for the right reasons.

[00:24:35] Steve: Absolutely. We need more of those people. We’ve talked about this a lot. If there was one takeaway that you wanted people to have from this podcast, what would that be? 

[00:24:49] Nate Brown: Establish curiosity. Curiosity is one of our most underutilized superpowers as CX leaders. Make people think about how to do something different and better for our customers. Why does that matter so much? Give that gift of curiosity. If customer experience works, isn’t it making you excited at the possibility that something’s wrong there? 

[00:25:16] Nate Brown: We should be giving that gift of serotonin every day as a customer service leader because we are on the front lines of defending the brand promise in a way nobody else gets to do. So it’s a gift to us. It’s a gift to the organization. Let’s not fall into those victim patterns and fall into a little box that we so often do cause inertia is a knock-in, status quo is a knock-in, we got to be pavement breakers, and we have to keep giving that gift of serotonin outward to awaken the curiosity in the organization about what it could look like if we did an even better job for our customers. So, take that with you today. 

[00:25:49] Steve: Okay, I love it. If folks had other questions that they wanted to ask you, would it be appropriate to give out a link to your profile on LinkedIn? 

[00:25:58] Nate Brown: Love that. Hop on over to cxaccelerator.com. All those roads will lead to our wonderful community there with a bunch of supportive CX professionals that are doing the same thing. 

[00:26:09] Nate Brown: we are just trying to figure this out together and I’m right in there waiting for you. I would love to be your resource, so let’s connect there and certainly on LinkedIn and X. 

[00:26:16] Steve: All right. Nate, thank you so much for coming and sharing your enthusiasm. It’s going to get us off the inertia box. Thank you very much for coming on to the podcast.

[00:26:26] Nate Brown: Thank you, Steve. Thank you everybody.