Why Contact Centers are Still Fundamentally Flawed in 2024

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a very special guest on. We’ve got Neil Dlin. Now, Neil, you’re not only the founder and president of a consulting firm, Chorus Tree, but you’re also currently active VP at Aviso on customer service experience.

[00:00:21] Steve MacDonald: But that’s just scratching the surface of who you are. You’ve been in this business for 30 years. You actually have played every role that there is to play inside of a contact center, which gives you a very unique point of view. What I’d love to do is not only know that you’ve consulted with companies like J. D. Power and you were looking at as a thought leader.

[00:00:41] Steve MacDonald: Maybe you could expand on that. I’d like to have you expand on that short bullet list of background points before we launch into the topic today, which is why contact centers are still fundamentally flawed in 2024. 

[00:00:58] Neal Dlin: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to talk about this stuff. I’m a nerd for this stuff. I think our community is so full of great people and information I like to share. I want to learn from other people, and if anybody gets anything out of this, I really hope they do. I’ve had an illustrious career in contact centers for 30 years.

[00:01:18] Neal Dlin:  I’ve had every role, as you mentioned, I started on the phones. I was very lucky to work in all these different disciplines and contact centers. If you’re just working one, if you’re like just a workhorse manager, for example, you have a very big focus on those KPIs and those processes. 

[00:01:35] Neal Dlin: You might want to reduce adherence without considering how that affects employee engagement, coaching, or training. Similarly, you may want to extend the training period if you’re a trainer. That might be a really great idea, but then how does that impact service levels and so on? So, just having worked in all disciplines across the service center has always been something that I’ve been able to lean on, and in terms of thought leadership, I always find that one interesting; I do think I am.

[00:02:00] Neal Dlin: I’m a bit of a status quo challenger. I think things in the contact center and many best practices don’t deliver what we want them to, and I think I’m noisy about that, which gets me considered. I keep getting labeled a thought leader, and I’ll take it if it opens up the conversation and allows us to think about these things and challenges thing. Great. I’ll take that title too. 

[00:02:23] Steve MacDonald: I will have you start right there, and it may be critiqued as best practices and industry standards. When you say there are many fundamentally flawed in context today, we’re all ears. What was yours? 

[00:02:38] Neal Dlin: Yeah, it’s funny. I certainly remember what it was like when I started in the contact center on the phones.

[00:02:44] Neal Dlin: I remember I had a single monitor. One system, maybe I have to access another system here and there. I was trained on precisely what I was going to get. I had a binder before me, and I would go to someone who asked a question. I could go to that tab and answer. Life was fairly simple. 

[00:03:03] Neal Dlin: Back in those days, the mentality was often that you could hire anybody, and to some degree, there was truth to that because there was a clear understanding of what you were going to get, what we needed to train, how to navigate the systems, that’s how it was. Everyone knows this, but contract centers are primarily based on manufacturing principles.

[00:03:22] Neal Dlin: The idea of an assembly line, a planner, but your job is to pull the thing down, create the mold, and move it on. Quality comes in and checks for defects. Anybody can do this job, and many of the basic principles of contact centers and many of the best practices that still remain today and have survived all these years are still rooted in that idea.

[00:03:45] Neal Dlin: But that’s not what contact centers are anymore. My world, when I was on the phone, was nonexistent. All the stuff that I dealt with is automated and mitigated. What happens now is contracts that are agents are dealing with the unhappy path. They’re dealing with something that didn’t go right.

[00:04:04] Neal Dlin: We had a knowledge base for that. Didn’t answer it. We had a chatbot set up, but it didn’t work. We have a way to do that online on our website. I’m getting a lot of errors, not working, and I can’t log in. We have a two-factor authentication, but we still can’t log in. When people call in now, they’ve likely exhausted other avenues.

[00:04:24] Neal Dlin: So, their frustration level is higher. No one wants to call in. When they call in, they likely say it’s more urgent. So, they have a higher emotional component relative to that interaction, and likely, this isn’t the call you get every single day because these are the variances. These are the things that you didn’t expect.

[00:04:41] Neal Dlin: So, an agent today isn’t the agent that I was; an agent today has to navigate an organization, have ambiguity tolerance, be better at making decisions because there’s no tab on the binder, deal with people coming in hot. People would ask me, “What are your hours of operation?” It’s a fairly benign question.

[00:05:02] Neal Dlin: But now it’s, “Hey, why hasn’t the money transferred? I have to pay the bill for my daughter’s wedding.” It’s a very different scenario, with a different person coming in with a different energy and urgency. The problem is that we have made many technological advancements in contact centers. But I would say we have very few processes and people changes in contact centers.

[00:05:24] Neal Dlin: So, the things we measure that we deem necessary, how we measure our agents, how we measure the center as a whole, who we hire, what we focus on in trading, all of these things are lost in best practices. I shouldn’t say that they’re in a state of transition. So, I’m not the first nor the last person to challenge them, and they are starting to change, but largely, they’re still lost in that other era.

[00:05:45] Neal Dlin: So, it’s a very broken experience for agents. It’s a very broken experience for customers. Even if you can check and say, “I’m doing all the best practices.” That’s the conversation I like to stir up and have with folks. 

[00:05:57] Steve MacDonald: Give us an example where maybe most contact centers have this as a best practice, but it’s working against them, or there’s something that’s broken that shouldn’t be happening.

[00:06:07] Steve MacDonald: Is there an example you can think of that would accentuate the point? 

[00:06:11] Neal Dlin: There are so many examples. Quality assurance is always an area that I’m very passionate about, and it’s been going through a lot of change. It’s also been going through a lot of change driven by technology, but what is the fundamental point of this function?

[00:06:28] Neal Dlin: We don’t often take that moment to step back and ask that question. So, the whole point of quality is a few different points originally. Again, as I mentioned, manufacturing defects. It is a defect in the beginning, but most leaders of today would say, no, quality is meant to ensure that we’re providing a great experience, but then when you break it down into the practices that happen and the kinds of things in scorecards must say the customer’s name three times or two times must use an empathy statement.

[00:06:57] Neal Dlin: What is an empathy statement? Here are three examples. I’m so sorry that happened to you. Let me look into that for you. I’ll take care of this for you. That’s terrible. That’s not a bad thing to say, perhaps. But as an employee, if I can’t assess the person I’m talking to, some people hate it when you say, I’m sorry; as an example, some people need you to say, I’m sorry.

[00:07:19] Neal Dlin: Some people hate when you use their name; you sound like a car salesman, and other people, it makes them feel really special. So, hiring great EQ agents, which is changing the script, means we can train anybody to do this because we can’t hire great EQ agents. Focusing on the clear objective of having excellent outcomes and great customer experience outcomes, how you do that has some variability and some decision making. This quality program focuses on outcomes versus the steps you took.

[00:07:50] Neal Dlin: Yes, if the outcome was poor, we can talk about, “Hey, I think you could have used their name a few more times,” but if that’s the criteria, then what happened, and it is in the majority of contact centers today. What happens is the aid can talk to the forum and not to the customer. We all experienced that all of us do.

[00:08:10] Neal Dlin: We call a call center, and I’ll give you an example. I call a call center. They say, “Hey, thanks for calling such and such bank. How can I make your day better?” I’m like, well, that’s lovely. I called up three more times. Thanks for calling such a bank. How can I make your day better? It becomes a little bit insincere at that point in authenticity.

[00:08:25] Neal Dlin: Then I say, “Listen, the website is always slightly out of sync. I know. I just wanted to find out what the balance was.” Then they’ll say, “Oh, I’m so terribly sorry about that.” Okay. I’m not sorry about that. I’m not really upset or stressed or nervous about it. I’m just checking in on something. 

[00:08:43] Neal Dlin: “Oh, don’t worry, sir. We’ll take care of this for you right away. I could imagine how frustrating that would be.” I’m like, “I’m not frustrated. I’m just checking my balance. If you could give me my balances.” But I know what they’re doing and they’re reading to the form, and they’re reading to the form because that form will have a heavily weighted impact on their scorecard.

[00:08:59] Neal Dlin: That form may have, on the plus side, a trip to Mexico for the top person in the year on the downside. If you don’t make a certain score two or three times, you don’t have a job anymore. Either way, the agent’s focus is the form and not the customer, and that best practice and those criteria take our agents out of the mindset of the person they’re talking to this other human on the other end of the line.

[00:09:22] Neal Dlin: Instead, how do I hit this criteria to get my scorecard to get my bonus and not get barred? So, that’s just one example, but there are so many. That’s the thing about how context centers have been run. People will say, “No, but I have a quality scorecard. Yeah, no, I’m checking for empathy statements. I’m doing every best practice.”

[00:09:40] Neal Dlin: Great. But if you stop thinking about what the point is, and a challenge that I maybe try to reimagine in a different way, in a way that no one’s doing potentially, because no one has all the answers. A lot of these practices are broken out. People need to experiment, try things out more, and stay laser-focused on great customer experience, human being, great employee experience, human being. All the rest is just information, not goals. That’s where the problems start to happen. 

[00:10:14] Steve MacDonald: Does that compare to when you said best practices are rooted in good manufacturing processes? Anybody can be there, but we will be all right if quality control is the step along the way.

[00:10:27] Steve MacDonald: What that means is, and there’s been a lot written up on this, is the lack of trust. It’s the lack of trust in contact center leadership and their agents that we can’t rely on them if we don’t control everything. 

[00:10:40] Neal Dlin: Yeah. 

[00:10:41] Steve MacDonald: You combine that with AI taking all the easy stuff, and now the harder stuff’s going to the agent. Are we in a day and age where we’re being forced to hire higher-quality agents and train them to think independently? Just a trend that we’re on that the industry needs to get on faster. 

[00:11:03] Neal Dlin: Absolutely, and that’s not easy. People already struggle to hire people into contact centers, and it is already a talent challenge for people to bring people in and out.

[00:11:16] Neal Dlin: The reality is you need to bring in a higher caliber of individual, definitely somebody with higher EQ, training them and giving them and positioning them to make judgment calls and to have more flexibility in how they do their jobs. But the reality is that the great, beautiful catch to that is if you actually brought in high EQ, smart people, paid them well, focused on these clear outcomes, and gave them more room to navigate to get there.

[00:11:45] Neal Dlin: Guess what happens? Attrition goes down. So, you’re paying them more, but you’re spending way less on hiring. Hiring is expensive. Just the hiring process is expensive. The training process is expensive. How about the error rates from someone who’s not fully proficient yet? That’s expensive.

[00:12:04] Neal Dlin: So yes, you pay them more, and you focus on great talent, but you lower attrition, lower error rates, and it becomes easier to find good people because you become a beacon really in the industry, a great place for people to be able to work in field ratification network, people refer other people to the job, and then, on the other side, beautifully, your customers are having a better experience.

[00:12:27] Neal Dlin: I promise you those handle times come down when you have someone good at working with somebody. It’s funny that a lot of handle time issues that I see have handle time targets, and all it does is put more strain and sometimes cause higher handle time because you’re stressed, you’re not equipped, and you don’t have decision-making capability. It creates holes early in calls that agents can’t get out of.

[00:12:55] Neal Dlin: It gets the customer more and more frustrated. Now, you have to de-escalate. It takes longer and longer, so your handling times come down. Your customer experience is substantially better. Your first contact resolution is so much higher. You need to hire a different agent today.

[00:13:12] Neal Dlin: Pay them well. Train them on different things. Parameters that are wider and not so prescriptive. You said something else that I love, which is trust. Contact centers, which, by nature, are a mistrusting environment. At least they have been historical if I’m measuring you on 37 metrics, micromanaging you, and then performance managing you on them regardless of circumstance, and that happens.

[00:13:39] Neal Dlin: You’ve got a big contact center. You’ve got a bunch of team leaders. Maybe you haven’t properly trained them, given them the tools, and empowered them. So, they defer to, “Hey, this happens. You got a written warning.” There’s no humanity and nothing circumstancial about that.

[00:13:57] Neal Dlin: But you see, it could be late, for example, 17 times a year because you’ve got some serious childcare issues at home that maybe I can work with you on your schedule for, whereas I’m late only 15 times a year, but it’s always an hour, and it’s every Monday morning because I’m just not being responsible and taking it seriously.

[00:14:19] Neal Dlin: So, I’m a bigger culprit than you are, but you might have been further along on a performance management plan than I am. This is how the mistrust manifests. So, all of these micro measures, all of these rigid performance management processes scream, I’m giving you something so important, which is the customer experience, but I don’t trust you have any decision-making ability, any competency to do that for me.

[00:14:44] Neal Dlin: So, I’m going to micromanage you against these strong metrics that not only do they communicate mistrust, but they hurt the customer experience, and the worst byproduct of all is you start to breed untrustworthy people because if you’re not trusted, you don’t behave in a way that’s trusting. On the flip side, if you trust somebody out of the gate, if you hire really well, which is another thing I can get into, most people don’t spend enough time and they’re hiring.

[00:15:10] Neal Dlin: If you hire well, trust somebody and let them know, “Hey, I’m trusting you. I know you were measured on AHT and the other center. I’m not measuring you on AHT. I’m measuring you on a great experience. I’d like you to be responsible about how you use your time, and I trust that you can do that. I won’t come talk to you every three days about your AHT.”

[00:15:26] Neal Dlin: In center after center to go that route, AHT comes down because people take that trust very seriously when they’re trusted. But when they’re not trusted, they’re looking for the loophole; they’re looking for the reprieve; they’re looking for that chance to fill in a break because you didn’t give them one, you haven’t coached them in three months because it keeps getting canceled because of SLA or because they get off a call five minutes early, they don’t want to be out of adherence on their break, or you don’t trust them to decide between maybe being a little late on break because they stayed on the phone with the customer. So yeah, I know I’m just rambling off way past your question, but it all connects.

[00:16:09] Steve MacDonald: It actually connects also to what I think you have as a solution because you have a methodology that you call the FEALs. In that methodology and training, you’re training the agents to understand cues they can act on. If you train in that way, then what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to entrust more latitude to the agent in what they’re doing. So, explain a little bit what the FEALs framework is. 

[00:16:40] Neal Dlin: Yeah, I will. Just before that, I will say that it can’t be something that you insert in a spot in the employee journey. It has to be something that lives throughout. So, first, you’re hiring people with a propensity for what I will talk about, and then you train and focus on it.

[00:16:57] Neal Dlin: But then you adjust your goals to look for it and measure that versus what we’re used to measuring. Then, you use that for recognition programs and as prerequisites for promotion. So, it has to live across the whole journey. The FEALs are just one aspect of it, but it’s a big one, which is this idea that every interaction we have, just like us today, a coaching session with an employee, a conversation with a customer, with our boss, whatever the case may be.

[00:17:26] Neal Dlin: Both parties are coming in with a set of FEALs. It’s F.E.A.Ls and stands for feelings, expectations, attitudes, and limitations. If you think about every attraction in this context, someone is coming in; I know where I want them to be.

[00:17:46] Neal Dlin: I have a destination feel. I want them to feel a certain way. I want to adjust their expectations for this. I’d love to have them have this attitude, and if they had certain limitations, I’d like to elevate that and get them to a different place by the end. So, we have a fairly standard destination over a longer cycle with an employee. You might gradually work on that, but customer interaction is more of a one-time situation. The trick is to help people understand how to identify where someone’s coming from, and sometimes, it isn’t even a trick to identify. It’s just to think about it.

[00:18:20] Neal Dlin: I gave that example of someone calling in because the money wasn’t transferred for their daughter’s wedding. It’s very different from someone asking about a money transfer that they’re just curious about because they didn’t see it. No bills are riding on it. There’s no spam they have to do. They just noticed that it’s taking longer than usual.

[00:18:36] Neal Dlin: They were concerned that maybe it didn’t go through, but they have no investment. In the timing, but just so much as a curiosity, that’s a very different set of FEALs. That same person may be great at navigating your website, and the other person may not be; that’s a different set of limitations.

[00:18:53] Neal Dlin: This other person may have called five times and had terrible experiences. This first person may have called and had a great experience. It is a different set of expectations and attitudes, and so on. The trick is identifying that in every interaction; how do you try to assess that? Because the goal of every interaction isn’t supposed to solve the problem or be accurate.

[00:19:15] Neal Dlin: That’s table stakes, foundation. However, the ultimate goal of creating great experiences is to know where they are in the FEALs and where we need to get them in the FEALs. As an employee, you should have some ability and autonomy to make choices. That’s where that quality form comes into play because if it’s not built for that, it will hamper it.

[00:19:38] Neal Dlin: It will stop you from getting them from this FEALs to that FEALs. That methodology is one that I’ve worked with a lot of clients in training, coaching interactions, and customer interactions. It works in life. It works with friends. It works with family. It’s a good thing to be focused on.

[00:19:57] Neal Dlin: Hey, I see you. You’re a human. You’re not a robot. You’re not a number. You’re not the same as the last person I talked to. I want to get you to the same place, but I must do that differently. On the previous call, I could do it in five minutes. This call is going to take 25 minutes. On the last call, I had to be apologetic. This call, I have to be social. You know what I mean? It’s an adjustment based on that individual. 

[00:20:18] Steve MacDonald: I understand why you call yourself a chief human officer. Now, it’s understanding these people as people. You also said that it has to be applied across the board to the end, where you’re measuring different things. There are different KPIs. Can you give us an example? You talked about average handle times before as a traditional KPI. What are the conventional KPIs you’re not as worried about and the new ones you want to focus on?

[00:20:48] Neal Dlin: Yeah. Handle time is one that I’m excited to see more and more centers drop off with agents’ scorecards. It’s not that I don’t believe that we don’t have to measure those things; by the way, to clarify it, the question becomes who’s accountability is, who’s focused on it, and how much focus they should have on it. One of the ways I would like to start with mapping out an employee is to start with who you are.

[00:21:12] Neal Dlin: Like, who’s your company? What’s your purpose? Do you even have a purpose? Most companies don’t have an aspirational purpose or vision. We want to have this much EBITDA and be the top restaurant in this industry. I’m going to butcher this, but Dove has something about making people feel comfortable in their skin, which is so different that I want to flog.

[00:21:35] Neal Dlin: So, if that’s the purpose, if that’s the vision, how do you translate that into the service center? I’m a big fan of creating service center purposes that support the organizational purpose. I’ll give you an actual example of when I was at Sonnet. So, I helped launch Sonnet Insurance in Canada, and we wanted to change how Canadians felt about insurance.

[00:21:57] Neal Dlin: I can’t remember what we landed on the final, but was that, are we caring enough to change everything? But the point was that we were very aware that people don’t trust their insurance companies. They don’t know what coverage they have. They don’t know if they will get claim covered, and so on. We want to change that.

[00:22:12] Neal Dlin: We want to change people’s thoughts about contact centers. We want to change your experience with us in this interaction, and so that changed; we didn’t hire insurance people. The organization worked on changing our policies’ language to layman’s terms, simple terms that anybody could understand.

[00:22:32] Neal Dlin: We didn’t focus on those traditional metrics. We didn’t focus on training. We didn’t focus on a knowledge dump and an assistance dump. We focused on the kinds of calls we’re going to get. Here’s the experience we’d like them to have. Here’s the product information you’ll have to access. Here’s the system information you’ll have to use to do that.

[00:22:51] Neal Dlin: The focus isn’t on learning or memorizing the product and the system. Those are the enablers of the overall thing. But the focus is here’s what they’re calling it about, and here’s how the experience we want to create. So, it was more of a scenario-based focus. Then, when they got out onto the floor, we had an outcome-focused quality program.

[00:23:10] Neal Dlin: It was more about defining what we want the customer to feel. So, in this case, we wanted them to feel valued, heard, and cared for, which is pretty standard. A little bit different there was we wanted them to feel a little surprised, and that was part of our purpose. I work with a high-end winemaker who owns estates in Niagara, and they chose pampered

[00:23:27] Neal Dlin: The brand starts to infiltrate into, cause they have beautiful estates where you come and you can stay at their hotels and do wine tastings and tours, higher end white club. So, that infiltrates into the quality program and focuses on that. 

[00:23:45] Neal Dlin: The question is, do we think we did that and why? What were the cues we heard? What did we not hear? By the way, it is hard to run a quality program like that. There’s a reason why we shy away from it. Because it’s so much easier when we have binary questions. Did you do this? Yes. You didn’t do it. No. Makes for an easy conversation. You can’t dispute it.

[00:24:02] Neal Dlin: We’re not going to have a; no, this is, you did it, or you didn’t. The problem with that is you’re crushing the best down to mediocrity. So, I want them to focus on how I want the customer to feel and what cues we received to determine if we achieved that. If we didn’t reach that goal, it’s important to analyze why. For example, it might involve something as simple as using the customer’s name or not. 

[00:24:19] Neal Dlin: That has to support it. You have to drop handle time and adherence because I know that was your question. I still never really answered it. Handle time, adherence, and even absenteeism; these things are important, but they move to outlier management. So, Steve, I trust you; I need you to be responsible and not take forever, wrap up, and start playing Sudoku and not wrapping up your call.

[00:24:47] Neal Dlin: I trust you to make great decisions with the customer. I trust you to be here every day. I’m going to focus on how great an experience you can create. I will measure that maybe through the survey, sentiment analysis, quality, and all of the above, and the only time I’m going to talk to you is when you’ve broken the trust, or if something is happening, that is out of character.

[00:25:10] Neal Dlin: So, that’s the outlier management. So, why did you have a 10-minute handle time, and now your wrap-up has exploded? Why is that? Even managing those metrics as outlier metrics versus goals, I encourage leaders to look at them with curiosity, not suspicion and judgment. Why is that? Did we launch a change, and you missed the training and didn’t realize you could get there with three faster steps?

[00:25:35] Neal Dlin: The assumption should be that you’re not doing anything wrong. Then, it inevitably will come out if you are, if you are being malicious, if you are taking advantage, that becomes very clear in that process. You do not have to tell all agents that I don’t trust you to hit handle time.

[00:25:53] Neal Dlin: A few agents may legitimately abuse it. You will manage that in outlier management. So, it’s changing those things over and being laser-focused. We’re not trying to hit an adherence, occupancy, or handle time. Those things impact the experience, but the experience is what we’re trying to create.

[00:26:13] Neal Dlin: Incidentally, things like handling time usually are more influenced by systems, IT, processes, operational decisions, and missing knowledge-based articles or lack of training. Those typically are way more influential than a handle time than an agent taking an extra 10, 20, 30 seconds, or maybe even an extra 10 minutes because this customer needed that kind of support.

[00:26:38] Neal Dlin: And the last thing you want is your agent thinking about talking to this customer and taking any mind share away to a clock that should never be in their mind. You want to bring everything from who you are and who you train to what you train and measure, not the traditional metrics, more the outcomes, to what you coach and support, to what you build into your recognition programs.

[00:26:56] Neal Dlin: If you promote somebody and recognize somebody, this happens in every environment, not just contact centers. It’s so critical that you focus on the people that everybody knows are great, which again, the metrics if they’re a conflict with that, which they often are the person who’s the best with customers and a lot of contact centers doesn’t do so well on quality or handles time. They continuously don’t get recognized, or they do.

[00:27:28] Neal Dlin: But so does this person, who has great handle time and quality but a horrible customer experience. You’re sending this mixed message and signal that continuity of what you expect has to be lived and breathed throughout the whole life cycle. 

[00:27:42] Steve MacDonald: When I’m taking away from this, the focus is training them to handle the customer the way that they think is appropriate to handle them and not be burdened, have the freedom to do that. Because there are so many of them, they’re like, you’re dinged if you move off the script and your average handle time is going up. I think there’s also a manufacturing perspective that.

[00:28:07] Steve MacDonald: Also, because there are employees there, employees cost money, and contact centers are one of the largest overhead costs in a company. So, you are a cost center to be maintained, contained, and shrink. That mentality is very different than our goal; our outcome is an experience because the wrong experience will result in losing people.

[00:28:35] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. We will impact the business in a very negative way. But on the other side, if we can create a positive experience, word of mouth from that, the ability to cross-sell upsell, Oh, have agents that can cross-sell upsell. So, much good comes out of that, but these old KPIs are burdened by being a cost center or perceived as a cost center.

[00:29:02] Neal Dlin: Absolutely. Leaders are under immense pressure to shrink and to save costs. The irony is these things aren’t even usually exclusive. If you do invest, and I’ve done these numbers on dozens of contact centers, where if you invest in some proactive things, higher salary, more coaching, higher shrinkage, because you have more time for development and things like which, and it has an immediate shock on the numbers.

[00:29:23] Neal Dlin: Oh, that will cost us more, but I run the numbers over a year. When you do the transformation, the costs do come down. They come down for all the reasons I said at the top: lower attrition, higher FCR, lower error rates, let alone, as you were talking about customer satisfaction, so you’ll have a better net promoter score, and you’ll have more growths in the business.

[00:29:42] Neal Dlin: You can increase wallet share through upsell cross-sell. By the way, people don’t even connect these budgets. But what a massive financial impact a great customer experience makes on the top line. You’re just focused on the cost, and it’s hard to connect.

[00:29:59] Neal Dlin: sometimes there are soft benefits, but if you can build that into your analytics and we’re at a place to the technology, you can connect those dots. You can see the influences of good experiences on advocacy and wallet size. To me, it’s self-defeating both on cost and revenue to focus on those traditional KPIs and look at it as a concept.

[00:30:20] Steve MacDonald: Out of everything we’ve discussed here, is there one thing you wanted your peer community watching this to take away? One main thought: what would that be? 

[00:30:32] Neal Dlin: Just maybe it’s a couple, but firstly, human, everybody’s a human being. We don’t realize how often we work that out of the equation and how we treat our employees and customers.

[00:30:44] Neal Dlin: If you can keep that in mind. I use lens statements, a set of statements that have to remain true no matter what we do about how that customer or employee feels. Those are lens statements. If you keep that top of mind and let that guide your decisions, you will find incredible results.

[00:31:02] Neal Dlin: The second thing is don’t just think of best practice, or everyone else is doing it, or even that you’re the top of your industry is a place to plateau because things change like that. Industries are disrupted when new players deliver an experience because legacy systems do not burden them.

[00:31:19] Neal Dlin: They have a headstart because they’re building it from scratch, in a way. So, be proactive when thinking about how to be the best because your today’s best is tomorrow’s worst every time. 

[00:31:30] Steve MacDonald: This is tomorrow’s worst. I love that. I love that thinking that’s a change management. I always have to be thinking. I always have to evolve and want my employees and agents to feel that way, too. I Love it. There’s going to be questions. I know people will have questions after this, and would it be appropriate if we could perhaps give you a LinkedIn profile so people could get ahold of you? 

[00:31:54] Neal Dlin: Yeah, I’m a nerd. You can tell because I had verbal diarrhea for most of this conversation. I love talking about it, and I give freely. I’m happy to share. I’m also happy to learn. If people have tried new things and they find success, I’m so excited to learn and geek out on that. So yeah, not just questions, but discussion in general; please hit me on LinkedIn, and I’m happy to talk to anybody about this.

[00:32:18] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Again, Thank you for coming in, sharing these insights, and helping us think differently. I think that change that you were talking about at the end is we have to constantly evolve by thinking and thinking differently and your shared perspectives have helped us do that today. I appreciate it.

[00:32:33] Neal Dlin: Thanks for having me, Steve. I enjoyed it so much!