Maximizing ROI with AI in Customer Support Team: A Guide for Heads of Support Previous Next Good morning, Anita! It's a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you, Kagan, for the introduction. Anita brings extensive experience as an executive and independent board member in many technology companies, with a particular knack for maximizing return on investment. It's fantastic to have someone with such a background, having been associated with Vio, Flex, Texas Instruments, and currently serving on the boards of Power Integrations, Exro, and Svako. Her expertise, coupled with a finance major from Waton and a computer science background from Virginia Tech, will undoubtedly enrich our discussion. Anita, I was thinking we could approach today's discussion from the perspective of a head of support evaluating AI tools and working with vendors to identify the best fit for our team. Additionally, we'll delve into how to present these findings to our executive team to secure funding and ensure success. Does that sound good to you? Absolutely, sounds excellent. Anything else you'd like to add before we dive into the slides? No, let's get started. This is a critical coaching moment, and it's crucial for people considering adopting new technology to view it holistically and understand the concerns of all stakeholders. Exactly. Our audience primarily consists of heads of support in medium to large enterprises, so our discussion will cater to their needs. Are the slides being shared now? Perfect, let's proceed. Today, we'll discuss why ROI on AI is crucial, navigating internal dynamics, expectations from vendors, and positioning the AI tool to senior-level executives to garner support for the project. We have a lot to cover, so let's see how far we get. Anita, anything to add? No, this agenda looks good. Let's dive into it. It's essential to address the skepticism surrounding ROI on AI, especially considering past projects' unclear results and use case ambiguity. Absolutely. As a support leader, it's vital to address this skepticism first. Do you have any suggestions on how to begin? Each organization has its risk tolerance and regulatory concerns. Understanding these factors and quantifying potential risks and costs are crucial first steps. So, essentially, I should start by identifying and quantifying risks and costs by consulting various stakeholders, including those knowledgeable about regulatory issues, security risks, and industry-specific challenges. Exactly. Once we've addressed these concerns, we can move on to identifying specific use cases and their potential ROI. Right. And then, I can work with vendors to calculate the ROI for each use case and present this data to our CFO. What should I keep in mind when presenting this to the CFO? Be transparent about costs, risks, and realistic timelines for ROI. Be prepared to answer questions and be open to multiple discussions. That makes sense. Once the project is underway, how do I ensure continued buy-in from stakeholders and the CFO? Transparency is key. Provide regular updates, be honest about progress, and be prepared to address any unexpected challenges constructively. So, maintaining a transparent and constructive relationship with the vendor and stakeholders is crucial for success, even when things don't go according to plan. Absolutely. Building strong relationships and handling challenges effectively will ultimately lead to success for everyone involved. Thank you for your insights, Anita. I believe our listeners will find this discussion valuable, and we look forward to exploring their questions in our next session. I'm happy to help. Thanks for having me, and I look forward to our next discussion.

Using AI to Drive Service Improvements Previous Next Kay - Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to the experience dialogue. In these interactions. We pick a Hot Topic. That doesn't have a straightforward answer. We then bring in speakers who have been there and seen this but approached it in many different ways. This is a space for healthy. Disagreements and discussions. But in a very respectful way, just by the nature of how we have conceived, this, you will see passionate wiser of opinions friends. Having a dialogue and thereby interrupting each other or finishing each. The sentences. Our mission is at the end of the dialogue. We want our audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can try at your workplace and continue the discourse in our social media channels with that. It's my pleasure to introduce the topic of today. Which is AI and how to use AI to drive service improvements. And for this, we have several Eight. She is aum global medical device leader. And then, what interested me about Anne's background, is she has done everything from, our organizational strategy program management sales marketing field operations and she is ranked huge field service operations within Philips and Baxter in many many, many capacities and has grown. The business has considerably And she has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Washington University with that. She focuses on the patient. Experience is fabulous and it fits in this conversation today. We're and will be taking us through a framework of how to introduce data science to improve service operations. Including how to identify a proof-of-concept project. So how do you start with a Concept and how do you determine AI is the right for your organization for this? She will be sharing a practical example of, how she and her team used AI data-driven insights. To drive improvements in service processes at large medical device companies and teams with that welcome and welcome to the discussion. Anne - Thank you. Okay. I'm excited to be here and speak with you and those who are Watching this experience dialogue today. Very excited to discuss this topic. Kay - Yeah, I know this is the first LinkedIn life for you. So it's a good experience and we had a lot of interest from service leaders who are in medical devices and outside of the medical device, backgrounds, who are in the show watching today, which brings me to the first question, what led you to impart down the AI Pack. Anne - Yeah. So you know, in the years that I've been managing service organizations but the one thing that you have a lot of within Services, data tons, and tons and tons of data so much that, you know, it leads you to wonder how best to mine. It how best to make conclusions from it and how do you, you know, improve, you know, over time and so what intrigued me about AI, you know, we had started. Are working with you through the R&D group, you know, looking at some futuristic kind of applications and reviewing log files and things like that, and as you and I were discussing with the team. Well, what can we do today? You know, so certain improvements have to be made over time. You have access to log files and increase the information that's available in them. But is there anything we can do today? That would practically help solve some of these issues. And that's where we started to discuss. Do you know what kind of information is available and then what can we do with it to help Drive improvements within These large organizations? Kay - Yeah, and usually what we have seen companies, look at implementing IoT on edge devices, digital twins data, lakes, and all of that, all of it was important. But I remember the first conversation we were having and you were like, what can we do with the service circuit data? Because we have very, you know, details of and what more value can be reaped from the existing service record data so we can improve service operations. And that's how I believe we started down the service record data path. Anne - Absolutely. Yeah. And I had in parallel but having a discussion within my organization that the Service Experts and the service leaders across the globe around you know some potential you know needs that they had that they saw. Right and so just to give an example in this, this is related to the project that we ended up working on together. Many medical devices require some sort of annual maintenance schedule, right? Whether it's an annual preventive, maintenance work by annual, you know, And this is a huge driver of overall service cost because it's a predictable service event that has to happen at a certain frequency and requires a field service engineer to go out and look at the equipment. Well, most companies are looking at, you know, what is the optimal p.m. schedule for any given piece of equipment? It's not always assessed when the product is originally designed, it is sort of assumed. Well we need to do something annually, right? And so with this, Particular device that we were working with there was a biannual p.m. that was pretty detailed and involved parts replacement and several things that were kind of required to keep the equipment up and running.However, there was also this annual on-the-off years kind of a p.m. light, you know. So it was an electrical safety check and some you know some basic things that India decided years and years and years ago were required to make sure that the equipment Moment was running and functional and so our regional leaders and our Service Experts were sorts of asking the question, what is this p.m. Am I doing? You know, is it reducing the incidence of corrective maintenance later? Excuse me. Sorry. Yeah. And there wasn't a good way for them to prove that so they had gone to R&d. And said can we look at this and Hardy said, well it's always been there.It's going to take a lot of time and money to assess that we're going to have to run devices and do testing. And, you know, let's just leave it for now. We've got other stuff we're working on and so it kept coming up and that's when we started our conversations around. What is it that we could do with the existing data? And we realized we do have these service records, right? We have a history of what has occurred on these devices now Now, the question was, how do you know if you took away a p.m. light, for instance, versus keeping it in? You know, what would happen to the devices? And that's where we had a bit of a fortuitous occurrence that had occurred as well. This is that just like within all large medical device companies, occasionally there are some misinterpretations or inaccurate interpretations of requirements which had You know, within this device in a certain country for many years and that's a compliance risk. But you know we run into it all the time within service that these things happen and you have to look at it and then make a decision. How do you remedy that? But in this case, we had a country that had not been doing the p.m. light events for some time, and then we had the rest of the world where they had. And so basically we had a test Population. And then, you know, the control that we could look at the service records and compare amongst them and say.So in these groups where that wasn't done what happened were there more Service events that were required. The problem was. And so we knew this but the problem is the amount of data, right? I mean, we're talking thousands, thousands of service records, you had to track it over time from one device to the other. There was also manual information entered, right? So sometimes when you do a PSA, You know, they have to replace something that wasn't part of that p.m. schedule and we needed to document all of that. And so that's exactly the kind of thing that AI is designed to help solve, which would require a massive amount of people to do a project like that.And so that's where, you know, your team and our team partnered up and spent probably good two to three months, right? Figuring out how best we Analyze that information. And what are we looking for? And what do we do with the information that comes out of it? So, that's, that's kind of just in a nutshell, the project that we embarked on and we can talk a bit more about, you know, the results if you'd like. Or if there are more details around that, if you think that the audience might like to know, I'd have to be happy to answer questions, too. Kay - Yeah. You know, what intrigued me is the path on which Your team embarked on it, right? So there was a hypothesis. Hey, we needed to evaluate it. And you question some of the assumptions that have been there for a long period. That's the one-second thing you want to make sure that there is data, so substantiate, whatever hypothesis that we come up with, and that has to be cost-effective from a service angle optimized and quality based does. Snot impact patient experience and has to make sense of the data has to make sense, such that going forward. The teams can operate with this new normal and that's a perfect you know, a data-oriented project that you are describing here, you know to be able to do something like that with existing data and two to three months is awesome. And we also mentioned a little bit about humans.Into data and humans enter data. I should say so which means there will be some level of algorithm inconsistencies and any should factor into that level of data cleansing to see which ones to take and which ones to ignore and where to put the emphasis on and all of that. Anne - Yeah. And it really required close collaboration between your team and then our team, right? Because you have to understand the process and the equipment and what's needed to be able to tell, you know, if we're seeing something a year later was that related to the fact that you know, the p.m. wasn't done or was it completely unrelated, right? And so the data can help tease that out but we wanted to look at that in detail together as a group because, you know, your team is the expert in the data. I didn't how to how to, how to develop those models and interpret the information that comes out of them and then you need the company to be the expert on the equipment right? To help point you in the right direction. Kay - Yeah, absolutely. And that also means doing a lot of change management internally across the geographies with the product teams. Getting a lot of product feedback from service data and then driving product Efficiency through service data is not normal in this industry and you have spearheaded some of it. And we see that with a lot of other Med device companies that we are working with, is this a trend that you see continuing? How did you embark on the change? Anne - Service is a huge cost driver for medical device organizations. Ask the globe, right? So it's a requirement, it's absolutely necessary. It provides a lot of value for customers as well. And so there's your huge attention on how to capitalize on that value while also reducing the cost, right? And that's true for the companies themselves, but also customers, right? So there's a lot of customers that do self-service on these, on these pieces of equipment, and they want to be able to manage how to do that themselves. And so the Question is, can they do it at the level that you know, an organization like Baxter Phillips does? You know, has that kind of knowledge and that kind of expertise within their group? Well you know the only way to do that is to provide them with the right data. The right tools. The right information to be able to service that equipment at the right level.And so I see organizations large medical device organizations are very interested in AI-based solutions for service because it is, it is a way to improve efficiency for them, as well as for customers, and to create more value over time as those insights and that information can be fed back to improve devices. Number one and also to help customers understand how to maintain their equipment better. So yeah. Yeah, please continue. Oh no, I was just going to say I mean, I think you know, AI is being used all over and every industry. But in particular in medical device service, Isis is one of those areas that can benefit the most from AI because of the massive amount of data and information that is running through a large organization every single day. Kay - We are so happy to have been popped off that Journey with you and your team. And what benefits do you see from doing this project? Anne - Yeah so I think, you know what What comes to mind first and foremost is always returning on investment, and what is the fine? What is the potential financial benefit? Right? And so, if we look at the example that we talked about with, you know, potentially removing this annual p.m. light, because the data showed that it didn't really, it didn't reduce the number of Service events that were happening with these devices over time. That alone and that example would have saved the organization a million dollars. Just to and that's every year, right? That's an annuity over time. So that's the kind of you know, what are relatively small projects that you can work on that have humongous Roi overtime right now. It's not just about Finance though. Service is all about customer experience and so you have to be able to prove that whatever change you're making first of all it doesn't degrade the customer experience in any way or another quality and compliance. Those are huge. Those are always number one and then beyond that. Is there an improvement? You know, for instance, in this case, if we tell customers will you don't, you don't have to do these p.m. lights either. If you're going to do self-service, right? That saves them time and money. They don't have to pull that equipment out of service for out of use for a day to do this. So that's a huge benefit to them and you can imagine and that's just in this example, but say that you Had access to service record data beyond this, and could look at Trends and patterns and see that certain devices are failing more frequently than others. For some reason, then that becomes a huge indicator of a customer experience issue or you might, we might need to pull the device out and then replace it or, you know, somehow determine which devices are functioning at the right level and not. And you could also avoid field actions, and narrow the scope of a field action if you could figure it out. For instance, it's only devices that were manufactured in 2015, that all of a sudden have these issues, that's the kind of power that I can give it can give that kind of insight. And ultimately, you know, help all of the metrics that a service organization is tracking, as well as, you know, improving the financial side as well. Kay, - You bring up a very good point. Most of the teams are used to looking. In meantime, between failure, and them tbf failure characteristics alone in service what you are bringing up is that alone is not enough, there is a lot more color to it which is when it was installed. What is geography? Who was the supplier?Do you know which teams worked on it? What are the human element and I can keep going? Can you think of some more failures? Chicks that you can add to what we were just talking about. Site of alone, MTBF Anne - Customer use patterns, it could be a chemical thing as well. That the way that they're using the equipment is somehow different in one region or another.It could be that the service process is not ideal in one country or, you know, with one set of tools. I mean there are so many variables and unfortunately, the tools to be able to assess all of that have been Limited. Did you know, for organizations and so they've had to embark on very large projects, to look at that information to try to narrow down the scope of field action, or to figure out the root cause or put together a Kappa, you know?So, these are ways that, I could speed up all of those various categories, Kay - each one is a problem in itself, right? So neat. On that. You're pointing out can drive service improvements significantly on its own.um, So can you expand a little bit on the other things that you mentioned here? You know you said it fast. You can. Please expand on it, Anne - sure.So, you know, if we're looking at some devices that let's say, you know, a piece of equipment was designed for an average use of Three times per day by a customer. But you're not, you're installing devices in a large high volume. A dialysis clinic is an example and they're doing 15 procedures per day. So most of the time, you know, the requirements that a device was built under our, then how it is tested, right? So for a device that's on average used three times a day, there's a certain service interval and frequency, and there's an Acted failure rate of certain Key Parts which are all within the acceptable range of how the product was originally designed for the customer requirements. But when you install those devices then and start using them just like you would a car, you start driving it. A lot more we have to do to get new tires, more frequently of to get the oil changed more frequently, and up until now, most companies haven't had the tools to be able to assess what is it that we need to do to make sure that that equipment. Payment is still delivering at the level that that customer expects. Right? And, do we need to modify the customer's expectations? Yes, we told you. It's only going to need one p.m. a year, but you're using it five times more than we expected. And so we need to do p.m. at least two or three times a year. Those are the kinds of insights that I think AI could help provide because of its real-time use. So it's unrealistic to design a product to Encompass all of the In areas, in which, it might be utilized in the field, they try, but it's very difficult to do, right? And so, the question is, once it's out there and they have real information about what's happening, how do we utilize that to then feed back into our service processes? Our data, our design requirements for the future to improve and I think that's where you know the types of Tools that Ascendo developing and putting together around a, I could benefit organizations in that effort. Kay - Yes, Anne what you did within the, you know, your team is, you're getting information from the product into service, but you close the loop going in from service, back into the product into the design of the next generation of the product, giving them insights. What you see in the field. So, in a way, you have alleviated, not just the service experience for the patients, and our customers, but you elevated the service experience for the R&D teams to absolutely. Anne - And I think it also has, you know, one of the challenges that a med device companies run into is that that feedback loop isn't always there as you just mentioned but even if it is there and it's getting into the next product, you still have 10 or 15 years of use of the existing product that you have to figure out how to optimize and it's unrealistic to read design the products that are out there, right? If there's a very large installed base there there there, and we need to figure out what to do with the ones that are already out there. And again, I think that's where I can help. So that's, that's sustaining engineering piece is huge for a lot of companies. It's a Strain on R&D, resources, and investment, it's necessary. But if there's a way to sort of provide better data around, what are the top opportunities? Because I think it gets hard, there's a laundry list of items that, you know, as a service organization, you want to see improved in the devices that are out there but R&d and sustaining engineering rightfully ask well, which ones are we going to go after? Because I can't work on 50 things. And so that's where having better data. Helps. You build out a case for which ones can require sustaining engineering resources, which ones are a process issue that could be solved within the service itself, or which ones do we just literally need to replace the devices because they're just not functioning at the level that was intended, you know? Kay - Yeah. And that's, you know, the beauty of using something like a simple AI is As you said, we can get that pretty much real-time information back from service as a voice of the customer into the product. And that gives a lot faster feedback back from the field into the product. And like you said, it's for sustaining, how do you manage and continue? The experience of the existing products is as much as the new products, right? So, getting this real-time, Input is hugely beneficial.um, Do you have anything else on the topic? Otherwise, I was going to switch it. Anne - Be only the only thing I think that you're hitting on probably transitioning into our next topic a little bit but that data piece is how you then convince stakeholders right.That this is an important initiative, that requires investment and that will generate the kind of return on investment that every organization is looking for. And so, that's huge. That's a huge piece of the change management part as well. Kay - Yeah. Can you speak about change management before and after AI because even after AI, it still affects the business processes before doing AI? It's a lot of convincing and looking at the data and being able to substantiate it. Yeah. Can you speak a little bit more about it? Anne - Absolutely. Yeah. So I think you know if we look at the example that I gave earlier you know it's It started with a team, you know, the team of experts, whether it's your Regional experts or your service engineering kind of expertise, experts on the hunches that they have, right? So they have these questions. Is this the p.m. cycle that's been redefined? Is it the one that is optimal for the device? Is it doing what's intended? Right? Is it reducing the number of Service events later and I think just starting with that, question knows, And was that had been in place for a long time? Hadn't gotten the right level of attention or investment. Because again R&d didn't have any data to say, why would we believe this? You know, this is what was predefined? Why change, what's working? You know we might introduce more issues, we don't want want to do that and those are all valid concerns, right? And so what is needed then is to get that data, right? And we ended up in a fortuitous situation where we Had a compare group and a control group that we could look at and basically, and I think any company could do that if they could create their own, their compare group, right? If you could take their requirement away in one area and then wait a year and then see what the data showed. We happen to have historical data, which was helpful. And so we were able to pretty quickly in two to three months. Compared those groups and take a look at what is the data show. And with the Data. Then you have evidence to go back to the right, stakeholder groups within R&D and it's going to be leadership, right? Because that's where the investment is required, both in terms of time from their teams and then also the return on investment. And so you want to show compare those two things and say this is, does this make sense to go after most of the time within service it will because even if you don't generate the returns in one year if you look at the lifetime of that equipment, You're going to generate it into, or multiple five years, right? And it will pay off and so. So that's kind of the direction that we looked and luckily in this case it was very clear well if we remove this p.m. light and here's the implication of that I think with some other types of interventions in might be a little more complex to say, well what do we do about this problem? If it's one particular part that seems to be failing more than another does that require Design, or does that require a replacement strategy? I think that could be a little more complex with some of the other problems. But the returns could be even greater right for something like that. And so, that's kind of how we moved that particular project forward. It had a pretty clear outcome, the data was convincing. And so the question just became like when can we do this, right? Not should we be doing this? Kay - Yeah, that's perfect. So essentially what you have given for any leaders, service leaders is a framework to do our think about AI Projects based on our joint experience together. So if I me summarize the kind of steps that you have been guiding us through, you started with a hunch you looked at what is the data that we have to substantiate that. Conch and where are the most efficiencies that can be improved and what information do I need? So it's also coming up with a clear deliverable at the end that needs to be convinced for the change management portion. There was a so that determined a clear outcome for the project and then ongoing, how do you continue that change management and the steps that need to happen? To create, you know, come up with that review and do this periodically. So did I summarize this correctly? Anne - Yes and I think, you know what you would like to do with the proof of concept. Like, this is convincing the right people within your organization of the power of this kind of approach, right? So that then it becomes something that the next time it's more Blessed. Right? There's less convincing that needs to be done around the model and the data and things like that. If you can get some buying early on and show the proof that that project worked, then that creates kind of a framework and a roadmap to continue this type of improvement down the road. Right? And so that was the vision for us let's pick something very tangible that we can use to develop a model. Internally how to use AI insights to improve service the fish. Kay - That's awesome. That's awesome. Thank you so much for your time. I think this is very very helpful from a service standpoint, for leaders to be able to start implementing AI within their teams and create that feedback loop and that voice of the customer to the R&D teams. Thank you for your time and for continuing. The Discussion and look forward to sleeping more benefits. Anne - Thank you for the opportunity.

Deepdive: Voice of the Customer Playbook Previous Next Kay - Welcome to the experience dialogue. This webinar is a place for healthy discussions and disagreements, but in a very respectful way, just by the nature of how we have conceived, this, you will see the passionate voice of opinions, friends. Having a dialogue and thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences at the end of the dialogue. We want to make sure you are the audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can take to your work. continue the discourse on the other social media channels. Today's topic is specific to going into a deep dive in specifically on the voice of the customer Playbook using wise of the customer data to enable us to understand that customer Journeys, which facilitates the ability to keep our customers satisfied and retain our customers to avoid treating our customer's Murmurs, we needed to set up and guarantee the level of support quality, which comes through the voice of the customer Playbook system. There are multiple levels of this Playbook and playbooks generally provide step-by-step guidance that's needed for the standard ways in which an agent, any customer success individual, or anyone who's involved in the customer journey responds in a standardized way. With that I would love to introduce the speaker today, Ashna. Ashna is an emotionally intelligent coach, who came across very well in the first decision that she had. I was also very intrigued with her background coming in from sales and she is a community Builder 4 Cs and as part of Cs Insider and would love to hear from her experience on the voice of the customer Playbook. Welcome, Ashley. Ashna - Thank you so much K. Good to be here. Excited to be here. Thank you. Kay - So we can start T off concerning. How do you see it with a customer Playbook and you know what faces, do you see that the revised estimate program? Ashna - That's a great question. So I think, now, when we talk about what to the customer Playbook, it's really about, I mean, it's kind of, in the name, it's really about that. Capturing those feedback, capturing those moments from the customer set, those expectations with the customer, and then having your processes built around. That so you know as part of your customer Journey which again it was the customer placed throughout your customer journey and as part of your customer Journey, there are many different areas now, we, when, you know, every part of it, there's Playbook But then there's Playbook Within the and these playbooks are processes and the way that voice of the customer plays around is in each of this area of your Customer Journey. How are you capturing information from your customer? And then, you know, making sure that you have Your processor built around it. So to answer your question it means there are different parts but you can start with the onboarding, you know, within the onboarding. There are multiple different playbooks that we can talk about. There's kickoff, there's sales to see as Playbook.And then, you know, as we progress with the onboarding implementation, you know, configuration and pushing the customer to long term success. That's kind of like the ongoing part of the things, then just a high level. There are some other Business Reviews. Play bulk, you know high Outscore lower Health score playbooks.So, really about the health score are asuh of customers journey. And then also, you know, renewal playbook which contains, you know, turn playbooks and even, you know, when there is an expansion and cross those opportunities. So, throughout that Journey, the voice of the customer plays, because you're capturing data from your customers, you have your processes built out so that you can Capture those data, and then you react against it. Kay - When you talk about processes, Schneider you come from a CSS background, you come in from a sales background, are you going to be covering those two specific areas so, when they hear your experience, do we look at it from those two contexts? Ashna - Yes, hundred percent. That's a great question. K. Because I believe that, you know, the success of your customer, really starts at the very beginning and also, you know, We see it starts when your customer, your prospects are knocking the door, but to kind of answer your question is that, you know, the hand of that the structure that you need to have defined a design that goes from cells to see s, it needs to be something that, you know, at that works. And you want to make sure that, you know, everybody, all parties involved, all stakeholders involved are on, you know, they understand that structure. You want to make sure that everybody's kind of on the same page. And so, Likely cells to CS handoff. That's something that even we have, you know, done quite a bit of work to implement and we continuously revise and redefine.You know what, we have just to kind of give you an idea in that specific Arena. What we have done is particularly different for a larger scale of the largest customer so Enterprise Sheedy, customers and then also different for SMB, mid market customers, there's a different type of, you know, the handoff and then the playbooks that we created there are a few changes. A little bit of a difference in those, but the sales to CS is about, you know, who's doing, what during this cycle, you know, Celsius playing some part of it, CSS playing some part of it, and I'll give you my example company, we have everything post cells is the customer. Success is handling so onboarding to up, to Renewal to some part of it. Customer success is handling it.So, the cells to see, we make sure that as soon as a prospect becomes a customer the end, CSM is a sign that to onboard that customer csm and sales members are coming together before connecting with the customer. And having that particular hand-off. Now for the, you know, midmarket and smaller team, we have just that, you know, it could just be book questionnaires that salespeople can answer for the CSM.uh What we recommend with the Strategic Customer because a lot is involved, there's a lot of stakeholders. The customer side but they're also involved. We recommend that you take that 1530 minutes on your calendar and have that proper hand-off between, you know, cells to CS. So it's a knowledge transfer session that happens between the cells and CS. Where cells are saying, you know, here's you know, how the deal went years what they want, this is the expectation, this is what we talked about, and here's the plan, here's the end goal for the customer and then CS is taking that. And then, you know, it's almost kind of like, you know, you're going into a war with all the tools and everything that you can. So see us. So that when they do get on that kickoff call, which is the next Playbook After that, they are prepared, they're confident and they know exactly, you know, how to get to the next stage. Kay - So that's the process that we have so a couple of things that I want to note down, right? So once we look at it as a joint partnership with the customer, it's not going on the water. Every experience we want to make sure our audience hears that the speaker speaks from their background and experience because we had previously, and the handoff, actually, sometimes in some companies, especially to be technically oriented starts much earlier, even at the solutioning, but space. And so the door kind of really, you know, is not a fact. They become a prospect to a customer, but even when they are prospects certain points to that because they are also trying to buy offers and everything. So, when we look at hand-offs, we have to remember the business model. We also have to remember that they support the business model. We also have to remember the product business model. Yeah. Both in mind before the hand of happens, um so in terms of, Setting the right expectations. Is this the fact that you look at it from a value-driven standpoint, are you defining the values here or you're doing it as a next step? Ashna - That's a great question and just to kind of redo what you mentioned. You're right. I think we also have some areas and some customers that we also try to, you know, do that hand off before that? So I think, generally speaking, it depends, you know, business to business, but you're right, you know, handoffs can be happening beforehand, too. And it's all about. Just make sure that you present that plan that you have in place in front of your customer and you're coming together as a team coming together, you know, from the customers and from the from your business, Community standpoint coming together as a team to Andrea, got another question, I mean, great question. I think the value proposition is throughout the journey. I think you're real, you're defining and redefining the value, you're making sure that you know, the end goal of the customers is continuously discussed and, and some help. Protective Services exactly kept kind of in the center of it. But I would say that you know, part of the onboarding Playbook as I mentioned, one of them, the biggest part is the Celsius handle, but also the kick off that you have with your customer. Now business, this could be different from the way that we have it. You know, after our hand we have ourselves reach out to our customer schedule that time. And what we're doing is we're officially handing off the customer on that kickoff call. CSM and in that kickoff, the call is all about. Here's what we know, here's the expectation, where are you in this process? Where do we need to go? Let's Build That Joint plan, as you mentioned together, and let's build out those timelines around it. And you know, you kind of go from you go further. So the main portion of the beginning, you know, at the beginning of the cycle, or when you are setting and realizing and understanding those values of your customers that ends at the kickoff level. But even before that, you know, cells, and see, we have already been talking about because cells know a lot about, you know what the customer's expectations are, what do they need, what the success looks like for them. So that's, that's been part of the conversation. It's coming together. Now, with the customer at this stage at the kickoff and you know making sure that we're all on the same page and we understand what is success for you and what's going to be the plan going forward? Kay - Yeah, I love them and always love the findings. W framework, right? So who what? Why how? And then there is a hitch there, but the interesting part in the entire hand-off is defining who is going to play? What roles are we in this together? What is it that we want to achieve but I do want to know how usually the definition of the customer does this? We do this. All of that gets defined, that's perfect. And when is very important because when are we going to achieve it? That's when the right expectations that you talked about earlier come. Yeah, play, right. So yes. When are we going to achieve something like this? And I know you had aum sample here that you would like to share with the audience, which will be there when we have the fine. um, Things. And you can also reshare it, so we will go from there. Soin then you talked a lot about health scores. So tell me from your experience. What defines the health score here? Ashna - Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, help scores could be different from company to company, business, or business. I think, there are some generic major parts of Health scores or criteria for say, you know what makes a health score, but how you wait for it, you know, how you wait for your, your score per how you know what criteria are included in the health score. It could be different based on, you know, business requirements and based on the type of products you are based on the type of customers. The way that we have it is we have a higher Health score defined and then lower Health score defined and it's just you know, the criteria that we have included in the health score includes all sorts of it, not just about CS it is as We were discussing earlier. It's also about you knowing those support areas to you because the customer is getting, you know, customers getting support from all parts of the business, you know, from the CS a little bit from the sales as well and also from the support. So we want to make sure that we're capturing all of those into the health score as well. So he'll score for us is, you know, usage adoption their main ones and a 1 is also product and marketing, right? Kay - So there is yes, well, yes, so there are experts, for example, security companies. There's usually a security person from, you know, compliance companies and stuff like that. But please continue. Ashna - No, no, that's great Great. great. Correct. Correct. Just wanted to run that. Yes, Lily. uh, That's great. But no, I think it's a lot around usage adoption for us, you know, but we're also kind of doing, you know when was the last time you had an activity with this customer? That's something that we also Target the amount of Engagement that you had with them. You know, Finance is also somewhat involved. Have they paid their views already, you know, then you have support? As I mentioned, what we include from support, is what we call bugs, and other people like we call warranties and warranty. So, you know, how do they have active warranties and effective bugs with us? That's also included and waited somehow if they have cases that many cases open with us or tickets per se and for more than you know, 30 days or whatever, it's for that. That's also defined for us and so that's and also you know main parts surveys. You know we also support doing surveys. We want to make sure that those surveys are also as part of you know what's there whatever. You know The NPS RC sad or satisfaction score sentiments. Do you know what they look like? Then we also include gum. Check, you know sometimes your health score could be high but you know your CSM or your ccsm has a feeling kind of like well I'm not too sure about this customer for this many reasons. There is that then you have you know, if the champion has left that's also involved in the health score, then you have Acquisitions and mergers. If they've gone through that, we want to also, make sure that that's involved. Another major thing that we have is competitors, you know, have they, you know, if we have some insight into competitors that they've been looking at or been working with whatever? That's also something part of them, the health score that we have. So we have waited for this differently based on, you know what we find important. And like I said, it's business. A business could be different, but most of the time, some of these are, you know, really important ones that I have a feeling that you know, a lot of the companies include these types of criteria in their health score two. And then it's just about creating processes and these scenarios and which will be called playbooks. So, what we have is, if the health Or is about the certain line of a certain number. We consider that higher if it's below that then that's lower. And we're continuously tracking those and our CSM's have, you know, Cadence's and playbooks created around those so they can continuously, you know, make that as part of their schedule and going behind them, and then we have built out resources and libraries, you know, accordingly. So that we can pull those resources also and then send it to the customer based on where they are, you know, if they have a for Sample, they have a higher Health score. I mean, that that's an indication that you could be talking about, something more that you can do with the customer. There is some more value that you can provide me. There's an expansion opportunity, maybe there is a cross selling opportunity, you know, in this area or even to help marketing with some, you know, getting some reviews for them or whatnot. And so these are the areas that we have defined, okay? If this is a scenario, this is what you do. This is a scenario, that's what you do. But then again it could change over time. So we're continuously revising and redefining You know, I'd create different processes areas where our csm'scan work. Kay - That's right. That's the client creating that knowledge, not just creating the knowledge, but also making sure understanding, of which knowledge needs to be improved. Then examined, updating that piece of knowledge as required and that goes, comes back into the feedback from them, saying, hey, this helps us didn't help this needs to. Yeah, so yeah, is it in itself a journey. Ashna - Yeah, yeah, exactly. I hundred percent and I think and it's a queen back to the topic of the hour west of the customer. It's particularly in this area. Like just imagine how much feedback you're getting, you know, from the customer with all of these. There are different criteria that define a health score but that's also a way for you to get that feedback from your customer, you know. And then you kind of have your processes built out around it. Kay - So it's I think healthcare is one of the most of the voice of the customer playbooks uhscoring should definitely. It, you know, provides a standardization that nonscoring is not right. So there is a standard way to measure everything. Yes, right? So how is the support experience? How is the customer experience? How is the onboarding experience? was so each one of those, I think scoring definitely helps concerning Sizing and looking at data from multiple angles and also doing analysis on top of it. I loved how, you know, you did touch upon the feedback. So he's right. So there's a lot that can be done by surveys, but now we are also moving towards understanding sentiment in every tourist, and then bubbling up the actual sentiment of that interaction. So, we don't have to necessarily just rely on surveys alone. So 100 on, it's amazing how where the industry is going and there is a lot that we see that's happening on the right path, right? So yeah, that's present, yeah.ThemeForest, just brought out a couple of research and we shared them with our social media, and to State how much customers support customer support experience and customer experience. And Intertwine is at the lowest level in the industry right now. So and how that presents an opportunity to make Leaps and Bounds in that area. So glad we touched upon the Health's scoring part of it in detail. So yeah. So when we talked about onboarding sales to see someone off, we talked about the kickoff process. The five wiseW'sthing.Then we talked about the health scores. Anything else that you would like to see? Have you seen the covered invoice for customer Playbook? playbooks Ashna - Yeah, I mean, I know, I think it's fun because playbooks have playbooks within them. So it's kind of like, there's just so many that could be involved in it, but I think one of the other ones that I would say is the renewal which is also kind of like, coming back to the circle of the customer's life cycle. Renewals are also really important because and you're going to capture a lot of, you know, a lot of information from your customer whether they're renewing, whether they're churning, whether they're reducing, whether they're, you know, Expanding whatever that may be at the time of renewal, there's going to be a lot of data that is going to be captured from your customer. That's going to Define how your relationship with your customer is going to progress going forward, you know. So I think renewal is also a thought important part of it to kind of give you some more into it. I mean the way that we handle Virgo is all two different parts of it. We have Auto Renewals and then we have manual renewals either way. I think it's important that you are putting enough I guess, you know, you have a process defined so that you are capturing, you know, forecasting. First of all four rules are for scat forecasting. For your customers ahead of time, but then you also kind of like, you know, reaching out ahead of time to make sure that you have enough time and customers also have enough time to work with you. But you also have time to understand where they are and where they need to go. And then you have those options to present them. So I feel like when it comes to renewables, That's why I always recommend that those parts are implemented. Well within your, you know, playbook renewals. Kay - Let's go a little deeper into this, right? So at the end of the day, support and success professionals are the ones talking to customers. They are the ones who know the gut of the customer. They are the ones who know we did. We provide them the value that we signed up for and are we continuing to provide the same level of value to the customer? Right. Soso during renewal times that value assessment comes back into play, right? So if you can drill a little bit more into tying the value back into the renewal cycle, it'll be great. Ashna - Yeah. Yeah, 100%. So like I, you know, we talked about throughout the cycle, you know, there's even at the onboarding part of the journey, there's going to be that value assessment. You can be doing that value assessment. Whether it's a, you know, one of them, one of them, one of the practices again. Is also studying whether it's a survey or just like, you know, doing a little bit of a gut check at, you know, how successful this customer is? At the end of that onboarding cycle, when you're moving them into long-term success. So, that's kind of like the value that you've taken from them. If you're going through a business review if you look at Health scores, that the midjourneymade part of the Journey of customers' Journey. When you're looking at a health score, that's also a part of the value, you know, if they're held score is high, but if they have Champion, that's Left. I mean, you know, then that's kind of an area where, you know, I would like to consider that as like, you know, I'm going to put this customer or renewal at risk. Or I'm going to put a little bit more pressure on this, or more attention to this because there might be an area where I might have to resell. We sell it to them, if I don't have the champion that I used to have, things like that, it's important. I think. So all of these areas where you capture this information come back to that rule. And so that what we do is well, we're Advanced and I think a lot of companies are Advanced. You can have triggers and things created. What we have done is based on the health score and based on other criteria that had been talked about. You know, you could have triggers created that indicate that fork at that it's forecasting. Your renewal already. So that, you know, you already have a different set of customers that you can work with. And the way that I it's, you know if the health score is low, I want to Target them at risk, you know, already. And then we're tracking those separately and we're targeting those separately already. So there is a whole different Playbook that we played with that customer ahead of time. One of the things that we also like to do is, you know, sending them out sometimes, you know, for a certain segment of our customers, not all of them, but send six months in advance, whether it's a survey or just a question, like, hey, if you had to renew tomorrow, would you renew with us? And if the answer is, yes, well, then that's your opportunity to do. Castelo Expansions, and other areas that you can work with them. If the answer is no, well, then that's your opportunity and you have six months now to work with them rather than, you know, knocking on their door about renewal 30 days or 60days in advance. So it's kind of like, you know, creating those processes in place, which can kind of help you based on this information that you're capturing based on the value discussions that you've been having, maybe you've had a business review, where you talked about some of the values and you kind of understood that maybe something's happening on the customers business side of the things that might have. Effect in the future, that's your indicator. You know, that's what you want to kind of, you know, take it separately and work towards you knowing that that's almost kind of like marking at risk or maybe, you know, that could be a best case, we're not sure yet. So I think that's a whole another playbook right there for you that you want to, you want to kind of work with them. So that's valuable. The proposition is really important before renewal and also at the time of renewal because even at the time of renewal, you are going to be learning so much from your customer, maybe they will reach out to you six. It's or 90 days in advance that they're like, hey, we're ready to renew but we want to reduce our whatever the contract that we have now, that's a type of whole other discussion that you need to kind of go back and maybe you might have to resell to them on a certain level. So it's continuously looking at the data that you're capturing. And about, you know, what type of process is what are you going to do about them? And that's part of the plate. But that's all about those processes that need to be in place. Guidelines. You know, when I say processes their guidelines because you don't want to be stuck in that kind of like this is it, but their guidelines. So at least you know what the next steps are, and then you can kind of go from there. Kay - Yeah. Hardware upselling Hardware was always with a lot of benchmarks and with a little more value-driven even decades ago, I'm so happy to see that software is also getting More value driven because at the end of the day you know gone are the days where you're just buying it for a workflow like buying a database or something like that. So It's wonderful to see that value-driven aspect in every step of the way in a customer's journey and the customer and the transparency right to be able to do that. So thank you so much for your time Ashna. Really appreciate it. Appreciate the time you took to share. ThePlaybook and specifically drink-driving around the voice of the customer. Thank you for your time. Ashna - Thank you so much for your pleasure.

Using proactive metrics for support operations Previous Next Kay - Welcome to experience dialogue. In these interactions. We pick a Hot Topic. That doesn't really have a straightforward answer. We then bring in speakers who bring their skin, but approach it in very, very different ways. This is a space for healthy, disagreements and discussions, but in a very respectful way, just by the nature of how we have conceived this, you will see very passionate wisest of opinions, friends. Having a dialogue. And thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences at the end of the dialogue. We want our audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can try at your workplace, workplace and continue the discourse in our social media channels. It's a pleasure for me to introduce Charlotte after,u , having had a few discussions with Charlotte, but we were right off and we were picking up exactly where we picked up from. And The discussions I've had with Charlotte really talked about the underlying Foundation of why we did the experience dialogue. So it's a pleasure to welcome Charlotte here to have a discussion with us. Thank you for coming. I Charlotte - Thank you for having me. Kay - Charlotte and I will be working together and we'll be having a discussion about a framework on how to look at support operations, data from the eye of proactive support shall be talking and shall be taking us through which support data matters. Which ones need which metrics need to be retired. And which metrics need to evolve and where we do need to. Look at this. Data will be taking some very practical examples and on how to support operations teams. Be transitioning themselves to proactive metrics with that. Charlotte, I'll hand it over to you. Charlotte - Thanks so much kay. This is me. I am Charlotte wouldead of support a snow plow. That's a behavioral data platform. That allows you to purposefully create behavioral data AI. I have been in support in deeply technical organizations for a lot of years and doing everything in and around support, for a lot of years. I'm sorry to So, say please years, to say both in technicalHP tech companies,I've been 18 years, fully remote leading, technical sport teams.I look after a little website, little corner of the internet called customer support leaders.com, and that is also the home of my podcast, which is customer support leaders.com,and it's all about support and customer experience. Kay - Hey, so many years of experience here too, I'm Bill, teensscale, businesses, add some Adobe, and also have done startups.I was just counting Charlotte, actually, have done more time with startups.Now,and that time has surpassed the corporate experience. And every time, , in the Adobewe took those Adobe Connect to the cloud. And number, one thing that comes up as soon as a product goes to the cloud is doubled because it becomes a very integral part of the organization. AndI still remember, we would rotate our Architects and we would rotate our senior Engineers to take support calls every month and that was something that we would do just to understand the pulse of the customer. And so I'm actually super excited to have this discussion to really talk about, , how can we get the pulse of the customer in many other ways? Thank you so much. So with Ascendo what we want to do if we want to be able to provide meaning to every interaction. So Charlotte and I are having an interaction here. How can we do the same thing as a company? At the end of the day, it has many, many, many interactions with customers and the interactions happen from website, forums, Community,chatbots emails, phones, And slack, teams, many options, that B2B companies are now having interactions with customers. How can we get provide meaning to all of those interactions is really what we are focused on and that's why this topic is very, very close to your heart. Charlotte - Indeed ,I think one of the things that we often do and support is we want our meaningful interactions to mean something to the business as well. Don't we? We, we talked about, we have these big desires, we have big goals. What support leader doesn't want to see at the table and use those meaningful interactions to unlock the key to customer success. And Through that, , we often So we're off to contribute to the business through driving efficiency and contributing to product and contributing to revenue. These are all really big goals.And so how do we get that seat at the table is something that is often asked for support to do that. We often focus on outward metrics that the business understands.So we talk often about customer satisfaction, our average handle time in terms of efficiency, mean time to resolution and how it contributes to customer success and customer satisfaction. But these are all really lagging indicators.These are all metrics that lag behind our ability to provide more meaningful reactions for our customers, I think. Kay - Yeah. Those are the metrics that most support leaders are looking at today, right? Charlotte. Charlotte - Absolutely. They are. They are. Take my van out of your day and think about not reacting to those external metrics. Those external metrics are very important in terms of being able to give a narrative around the health of what we're doing, but actually how we can use turndata internally within our teams within our business trunk functions to be ahead of the game, stop reacting to those lagging indicators,and actually proactively create data internally. That helps us. Those indicators. AndI think it's really important just to take a step back and understand what the difference is between metrics and data because we use them interchangeably quite a lot and metrics is the word that strikes fear into every support person's heart, right? But let's just be really clear. What we mean metrics are the parameters that we might use with quantitative be all measures in and of themselves. So your average handle time is a metric but it's made up of data points. So what data really is, it's actually the underlying numbers in information that we produce and collect and metrics what we produce from that data. So when we think about data, there's a lot out there, we might have time data,we might have, in fact, data from our health centers. We've got product analytics and we'll dive into some of those shortly, I'm sure. ButLet's just think about data that can be created purposefully. And with a structure that we understand, and I would call that data Creation with snowplow, that data creation or as a byproduct of all of our other systems. So This this term that we're beginning to use of data exhaust data, that is a byproduct that just happens to be there because of interacting with systems all the time though. that's our data at the low level numbers. Kay - One of the wonderful things that during that first discussion,Charlotte isometrics, why doesn't it work anymore? The reason it doesn't work anymore is data has become huge, not all the data that challenges talked about, right? The structured data, the byproduct data, exhaust data, the unstructured data, they all have become large and focusing just on metrics means focusing only on customers who have filled in some of those cervix and that me be only a percentage or a sliver of a customer population that's number one. Number two is, we are not getting the level of color that when we don't include all of the interactions, we are only getting a biased view from it. There is squeaky customer or from a high paying customer or something like that. Instead of everybody and getting the feedback or getting the insights, from all of the customers becomes very important, not just for SAAS, but also, Also, for non SAAS for even traditional come. that something? What we have seen. So what this data and whatCharlotte is alluding to, with respect to the difference between the metrics and data is seems to be very or knowing the difference between metrics and data, seems to be the underlying Foundation of always supporting moves from proactive to from reactive to proactive. Charlotte - Absolutely and how understanding the difference and how you react to and operationalize around metrics versus data, allows you to do the things that you very kindly outlined on this slide. And That is like begin to look for patterns, begin tomine, our customer data, make it better, use it to interact with our customers in a more meaningful way. As you said at the touch but also the, , internally again driving Operational excellence. If we concentrate on the operational excellence of our business functions. Then it hasan onward effect in terms of driving value. For our customers in improving the customer experience and therefore, in improving. All of those lagging indicators that we outlined at the start, our customers' satisfaction are handled times and, and everything else. Kay - Yeah. That's it was wonderful to see this report from Gardner on top priorities for customer service and support leaders actually just the 2023 report, and the number you can see that it's mining customer data is important primarily from helping out representatives from providing that intelligence that's needed for taking in that seat that Charlotte was earlier talking about at the table, or the support leaders to be with the rest of the leaders, to be the word true, what the customer, and to get Rest of the organization to be more customer centric.uh So I think it's really important.Therefore we've already defined metrics and data, data can feel like an almost, will it really is an inexhaustible landscape of numbers and information. And it, Charlotte - I think it's quite often difficult to know where to start. Particularly, when we talking about actually driving actions from it.So one thing that I like to do is think about data in three different ways.There's some snow plow. language in here and there's some Meyer language in here, but I Think it's really important to think about The quality and the usefulness of the data that we have, and what we can do for it, and what we can drive from it. So first of all data, that is best for light work, the less reliable or anecdotal, this is actually not that actionable,uh it's valuable. If you are able to take it and appreciate what you can do with it,and I would say the anecdotal data,or data that's on reliable data. That's about feelings and everything else. Is really an inspirational thing. So those the things that might trigger a research project or might drive you to go and collect more accurate data and more structured data and so on the stuff that can really Drive action exhaust, data might actually be accurate, you might have a whole landscape of numbers at your fingertips. But If they are, nearly the byproducts without any thought given to exactly what then the meaning of those numbers, It is of everything you're doing. They can be unfocused and disparate, and really, that's what we need to think, not about research projects but about brain structure andAnalysis. And finally, the most positive end of this is the data Jizz that is really created specifically for a purpose.This is where I love to play around because I love creating data knowing what the question is that I want to answer. South thinking about data is, what the how its structured allows you to create action. If you have the question in mind, what data you need to collect, , how to structure it. And you can use that to answer your questions and therefore driver actions. Kay - That's so beautifully said because one of the things that then these targets and do the reform of we were talking to initially, its customers. The first thing was hey what we have these these questions that we could just ask those questions and we get those answers, right? And provide the patterns for the Soma, it's that questioning that Curiosity, that's coming in,not to just look at the metric but to say okay, what does the data say? How do I need to carve out the story? What, , that Curiosity stemstarts in this entire exploration? So I love how you said it,Charlotte and I think thank you. Charlotte - And I think what's really nice about sending these three layers is that you can approach this from either end, , you can, you can you have a kind of idea, but you have to begin and go and see what you, what date you have. So you might start at the anecdotal and like, this is given Confront him, , I'll go find some things that sort of support it and then I'll dig the Diabolical data we've got and then I need to bring some some structure to really answer the question or you've got a really specific question and you can answer it because you've invested in that structure already, which is great, but you might enrich it with a bit of exhaust age. But very particularly with the anecdotal and get more narrative from the, from the fuzzy are end of the data spectrum of your life. I really like that part. and so, I think in,Helping other leaders out there. Thinking about this is really important to me because it's not clear often I think at the start, when you think about your data Journey,exactly how you approach all of those things. And one thing I've asked other or other leaders from other organizations in the past to do is just take this two step approach literally list everything out that you have Even dated something that you don't think is data, it is Data. So, including all of those, your slack conversations, people's feelings comments that you see in survey responses, this is all data,but list it all out and then just take the take the time to categorize it so that you give it the appropriate way so that, , where you can start to ask questions andwhere you need to bring data on in this, , down the ladder if you like to. To actual action at the bottom. So you might have this anecdotal but we've all got it. We've all got buckets of slack conversations about our opinions and everything else there, but they do Inspire the research, don't they? Kay - Yeah, that's what. Yeah. Gear Generation. Yes. Yeah, one of the customers actually had an outsource there at one Gmail's Royal one team.They still follow theirL1 model 0, of the swarming model. But it's fascinating that they were talking about people. Who has posted notes in their computers and all of that is data, right? So, all of that is knowledge that is sitting in somebody's and unstructured and that needs to be coming in and there's a wealth of information from the front end of people who are talking to customers that can be piped in all the way up to the escalation. Charlotte - Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutelyPostit notes.uh I love a screen surrounded by post loads. It tells me. to pay attention to it, take it to a whole nother level. Then like, we again in help centers, we're producing data all the time, but we don't necessarily pay much attention to most of it but we are generating time stands. We are replying to tickets, we are resolving tickets. Actually, most questions have an answer and that's a fairly good answer. It's not. It's not structured well enough necessarily to mind immediately. Idiots lie, but usually answers are having an attachment to the question, ? So, ticket resolutions are what I sort of consider to be exhaust data as well. What you need to do with exhaust data as I said before is really just spend the time bone to give it further shape to , analyze it and decide. What's useful? What's not what you can, what you need to do is little to as possible to make actionable it and What needs further work and this is where the analysis comes in is on all that. Seoul station. Now, if you're very lucky and you work for a company like smoke now, or we spend some time with me, you'll know how passionate I am about creating data that asks, where the answers questions from the get go. And so, the last one here is where I spent most of my time and that is creating data and pulling data points together to really specifically answer questions and therefore Drive actions. And the structure comes in all sorts of ways. , it's around. It can be around understanding how the different data points that you've got fit together and what, what narratives and actions you can drive from bringing two pieces of data together that never existed together before or it's, or it's also possibly bringing structure to something that didn't have stretch before. And for me I'm deeply passionate about having a pretty straight ticket tagging taxonomy.So that's one that we have a very structured approach to a snowplow as well. So it's very many of these data points, what we can drive actions from Kay - Absolutely. And what you're really talking about is getting the data ready as time series data, right? So then it's time data. What happens when at what given point across the interactions that can be mined for AI, Rich, right. So,I'm just going to tag onto what Charlotte was mentioning and call out the various types of data. So we have the transactional systems that the CRM,the bug, tracking the knowledge pieces and all of that. On top of it, we have everyday interaction that comes in from the various channels. And on top of it we have the data exhaust that comes in also from all the logs and the product usage in all of it. What is interesting? Here is Tithing in those pieces of information, trying to find those patterns to answer those curious questions. So what kind of problems are really happening? If you can,what parts of the product right now? Or a month ago, where is it? Increasing,which part of it is increasing, who isMooney? Who within the team is an expert in these kinds of problems?What? And which of these Solutions are being most effective? Or a customer. And how can we take that piece of knowledge that is in a human's mind and used to resolve or train somebody else who's coming in on board, right? So it's really, if systems would be, it doesn't we call it human,human machine interaction, right? So, essentially what we mimic is how humans solve problems. So it's very exact Charlotte said which is, yes, there is a solution for every kind of problem. And even if there is no solution, how do we humans? Think about it, right? Oh, this is very similar to something. I did three months ago, and of course a little bit of the solution, let me dig a little bit more, right? So, it's that mimicking of the data that it provides to the agents, to be able to solve things faster. Charlotte - Absolutely, absolutely. And that's what we want to do. All three solve things faster,better, more efficiently and with more value to the moment. Yeah. So I thought it would be useful to describe briefly what this looks like in reality. I will say that the charts on the right are anonymized and fictional but there are taste of the kind snowplow. of things that look at And so how we, how we think about this and how we've operationalized around the state today,which is subtitled talk came from,it is really about what we, what data we have, how we structured it, how we bring it together and what we added, actually,to answer the questions, the big part of going through that process of understanding. What data you have is understanding what data is missing. Then you need to answer those questions. Sowhen I joined smoke, now, one of the first things that we did was begin tracking time and support, which I know is controversial. I know it's controversial, but it's important to me and to us because it's a very, very complex ecosystem to support and it's a really, really valuable and insightful data point for a number of reasons. And so, in tracking our time, I was filling one of those missing gaps. It's one of those missing actionable data onesand beginning to drive data. Better created and joined up data. So I love this phrase,which I buried in the text here. But, , you can validate hero hypotheses or calibrate emotional readout which is take take, all those feelings about all of the pain. We're feeling and supporting our pain. Our customers feeling and actually make them validate them .Is this hypothesis that there's this thing? This PostIt note is this bit of feedback valid in the great landscape of things.uh It of course it's valid actually because it's somebody's opinion or feeling. But is it actionable can actually do anything with, , and in and in calibrating and being able to compare one thing against the other, you can drive actions. So that's what gets teams out of the firefighting mode. It really does because it's very empowering actually. You're absolutely right knowing that you have information on how you can draw on any coin and we repeatedly come back to this. And even if we have a question from six months or two years ago,the data stays there, we don't throw away. We can because we're a data company, we love dashboards, everything is live, everything is continually updated. So we can go back and ask the same question and see how the landscape has changed and to You That we have more of a dashboard and this is a little taste of it as a service, all kind of fictional.But it just has things. Very visually, it's important for us to be able to and hotspots spot patterns and allow us to dive in very quickly. So, to that in turn going back to do the process that I mentioned, we create all of our data very intentionally drums sources together, outside of the CRM.So we do have Salesforce then just data, we've got our product and their tits.We've got ourtime tracking Key. And a number of other pieces that we can pull together. Other. So some examples I've given here or, ,how much, how many not just, how many tickets are we getting an objective taxonomy, and what's the Applefrom my team and beginning to resolve, a certain type of problem? And by effort, I mean, ours, I don't mean elapsed hours for a ticket. I don't mean resolution time. I mean actual effort because we all know resolution time is elastic. Weit depends how responsive your customer is, , you might have to go off to another third party. But effort is a really good indicator of the complexity of a problem , I think. And so I could become more and more important as groups of people are working together to fix problems like this warming model.Right. Exactly. Exactly. So we can respond to that. We can respond to ing if this is more complex than we think it is weird. Again, it's calibrating emotional reader, something feels a bit painful but actually is it five seconds out of all day and it's just not worth, like engineering around or We do something different actually quite a lot of the way I approached a chore, it's should we be doing something different? to that end we look at things like which of our customers I dug out some fictional customer names,they're from The Simpsons and everywhere the organization's there. But this perspective of like, again, the effort involved in supporting customers is really insightful. Cuz it tells us if a customer is, it's about being proactive. It's about again, getting him ahead of the game. We can see when customers are starting to need more of Time, need more of our support, we can get ahead of the game by these visual clues. That said, I should probably spend some more time investinglike, more quality interactions with a particular customer. For example, maybe I get on a call with and maybe we just do a few more coaching or Kohl's or something like that. Customer, I get them. And that, and the, the chart underneath the kind hand in hand in that respect because, , a big overhead is tickets wandering around your team, looking for the answer. So I love to drive independent ticket resolutions. So how many of my tickets are sold by one? That's awesome. And can deeper dive and say which of my people on my team are seeking more help, ,which people are providing more help. So it's beginning to identify Stars mentors and people who do need just maybe a little bit more knowledge and support which in the early days we know that it's supertight onboarding is really critical particularly in ain a very technical environment and then of course in terms of operational excellence understanding stretched, my tears or isn't on any month a year. How, how am I matching my resourcing against my incoming load is really important manage, operational excellence. That's a sample of some of what we've actually doing day to day. Kay - I was actually just hearing you did actually help you say as Already better, right? So whether it is the operational aspect of it, whether it is going to an agent and saying here is the reason why, ,I would love you to take this training. It becomes very collaborative with the rest of the organization to March forward on this customer mindset, right? Charlotte - It really is, and more than anything, it helps you tell those stories before. the customer tells you, though, before the customer says to you, I didn't have a great experience. Yeah. And that's already more than getting ahead of the game driving. Those proactive interactions are proactive actions from this data because you can respond to it very quickly, and this misleading information, not lagging emotions. And so I think, those actions, I just wanted to throw out a few ideas and I know you'll have some thoughts on this as well because we taught quite a lot about this slide when I was pulling them for your support driventalk. And after two so I eat. This is awesome. Yeah, please. I went full everything on here but I think what's really interesting is just just how Butuh how how many different parts of your operations,you can touch with this approach and you can improve with this approach,and that you can, , you can modify and positively, and proactively modify opt is where we're getting to ultimately with all of this work. In terms , the technical side reduces humans in the loop. So reducing the tasks that could be Automated away and given the team better quality of their Professional Day,improving internal, tooling, and reducing friction. These are all really positive experiences. You support me organizationally managing your customers better efficiencies creating and getting the right people the right problems. , I think these are all really good ways of really good things to think about in terms of how you interact and contribute to the rest of the compliment or rest of your own organization. And then from the point of your business growth you'll help your customers by reacting. And adjusting the way you solve problems and as you said before, adjusting what knowledge, you use it, that definitely contributes really well and your ability to get bored quickly. Kay - Yeah. I actually would love to shallot. start seeing if I'm a Charlotteto all the support leaders. Start being curious,So it's the questions that you are asking here. That's making you look at the data and coming up with answers. And the interesting part is there is a question that someone has asked saying how much data is actually needed and will start ups, and or companies with new products will they have enough data to do this kind of analysis, and from an AI aspect? Absolutely. Yes. Because until you start thatCuriosity and questioning you don't even know, there are always going tobe. This is a journey, there is always going tobe data gaps, son. You will encounter those data gaps only when you start on the journey. So when you start in the journey is when you would recognize, oh, here are the gaps and I can fill those in. In models are also when it is done, these are proprietary models you have done for support. So they are very good at looking at even smaller pieces of data and coming up with answers for a lot of these questions. So Charlotte, do you have any comment on the amount of data before we go into the slime? Charlotte - I think it's a super, super interesting question and I think there is no single answer to that. I think it's exactly as you said and as was describing before, you just have to get started because until you understand what data you have and how you move it along that chain. So well structured questions, that question answering data,, that drives actions. You just don't know. And I think, , in terms of the number of data points, you don't need much. I think you'll like it, but I think you have to get started and I think the important thing is beginning to data along that move your German. Kay - Yeah. Charlotte you talked about, which is,um here are the types of questions and just extends into the type of questions across the various support teams, what the leaders are looking for, were the agents are Looking for and customers or even the supply chain and the logistics teams are looking for course, hardware, and software companies. So across the board, there are all these curiosity and all of these questions and we had the discussion with and last last time, and she was alluding to an example and she was talking about an example where even with a small amount of data, she was able to get answers for a lot of these questions. It's looking at the similar data from various angles and looking at the patterns across those, to be able to come up with good arguments. That can help say a story, right? So that's all I wanted to cover here. Charlotte - Yeah. It's about looking at small amount of data from different angles is all about structure.It's like what is the thing that I need to extract? And how do I fit this together and you don't need a lot of data, two or three. Disparate points is Entity to give you lots of different pictures. So, , the final thing and I know we both, we probably both want to talk this Like A and B, but but B me be the key takeaway me is the leavers column, ,it's what actions can. Try it. And I talked about some of it. When I looked at my dashboards, we talked a little bit about it on the following two slides where we just drew out. Some of the kinds of things that we'll be looking at. These are really the questions aren't they? How do I, how do I do this thing? How do I improve this thing? How do I? And, ,and I think for me the Believers, the actions that you can prolonged a bigare all in that column and they're allHave to be, they all have to have a pounding and strong data and in a strong approach to data and well structured data because otherwise if you pull a Lie by you without knowing exactly what you're pulling, you're not going to get measurable outcome for it from it and you're not going to see.mean, every one of your impacts on those on the right hand corner as a number by to it. You can't apply a number without founding in data. And for me, that's what I take away from this, that the passengers Civil actions are great, but you need data to be able to measure the album. Kay - Yeah, so there are a lot of questions here. I'm trying to peel some of these questions too. So there is a couple that is appropriate to what you're talking about here. So can you comment on what data may become important, given the projected, , Global recession. That's our way. Charlotte - I mean I think unfortunately we're all having a little bit. Operating more efficiently efficiently and there's big term of operational excellence huge part of that is operating efficiently and therefore to I mean it's the age old story don't think that the while we are in the throes of a recession I don't think this story really has changed a great deal of support ever since I've been doing sport which is how do you more with less and that's that's what every support leader will. It will be dancing but just more so now than ever before. So I think that in terms of Creating Efficiencies In your business function.Unfortunately, sometimes that means people, but, but actually, it doesn't necessarily mean lay-offs. It means how can you provide a good or better service with what you have? How much time do you invest in improving things operationally, , taking team pain away so that they're able to provide a more valuable experience of all of these things. And I think it just comes down to doing more with less, and more. Can mean many things. Kay - It's not just about load exactly. And it's also not just what, , makes existing people work hard, and it's also making them work smart by providing them and empowering them with tools and techniques that makes their job easier so they can do more with less in a smart way, right? So Absolutely absolutely. The other question is,there are so many ways at the end of the day, , even this chart Talks about increasing customer support experience, right? So because they enter your company's marketing towards increasing some customer experience,but if there is one leading indicator in here, that you would like to pick for the support team. I think that's what this question is about. Does it just see it? I need to pick one forward looking indicator. What would that be? Charlotte - I would look at the value that your team can add to every interaction. That's going to vary so much organization to organization. But I think that surfacing Information data,uh actionable data,from across your business, to your support team is really critical in maximizing the bag. You are your customers. Our been for every interaction with that support team.And so I think you have to figure out what value add looks like to your organization.And I'm sorry, this is a little bit of a wooly answer but, but that's just so different, .It can be, , how do, how do we process returns faster? Or how can I help a customer to a next to use case or anything, in between, where I,I think figuring out what your team can do to add value to customers into action. Ins. And what that looks like to your organization. Kay - I would agree with. The reason it's different from what you're saying is because organizations are in different stages in this journey. So that's why it is different, right? So for some, we are starting off with,,bringing inuh collecting pieces of knowledge. For some it is I'm starting to do some service, for some it is I want to empower my agents first. Or something that eats it. So it's different for different companies. So absolutely. Yes. The I know we have a few more slides to go through so we should do that General pet because I didn't get the next question. I guess the next one just asked everybody else out there. 2023. Sofor Or in five of them are looking at customer value and enhancement. And that's the one that Charlotte was talking about: what is the customer value? I can provide support as a teen and how can I tell a story about that to the rest of the organization? And how can I make the rest of the organization March along with me? That's really the Crux of what a support leader should be doing, and with that I think that pretty much speaks to the slide. Charlotte - Absolutely. And I just got one thing to that, which is that, as we said before, understanding what customer value looks like to an organization.how you tell those stories back in the business, relies on you being able to measure what customer value is as well and believe, as we can pull it. So it's super that I learned portables. Kay - What I learn from this conversation, Charlotte, starts with the Curiosity of a question, right? So, and then align the data, and what data can answer those questions then that data in itself will come up with a story on what needs to be done to improve support operations. And then how do you move forward with that story to bring the rest of the Ization and the team on board, right? So that's the path that you clearly laid out in this conversation.Thank you. Thank you very much for providing that insight. And thank you very much for having that framework for all support leaders. Like I said, I would love for everyone to be your shelter. So I'm starting to ask questions. Charlotte - That's great. Thank you so much for having me case and pleasure, and very happy to continue the conversation with you or anyone else who happens to be listening. Kay - Thanks Charlotte.

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Cultural Changes that we see within CX in the African continent Previous Next Kay - Welcome to the experience dialogue. In these interactions. We pick a Hot Topic. That doesn't have a straightforward answer. We bring them. Bring in speakers who have been there, done that, but approached it in different ways. This is a space for very healthy disagreements and discussions. But in a very respectful way, we have been justified by the nature of how. We conceive that we will, you will see the passionate voice of opinions, friends, having a dialogue and thereby interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences. We wanted to make sure at the end of the dialogue, our audience leaves with valuable insight and approaches that you can take. Try and take in your workplace. We have been having deep and long conversations for the first time. We're going to be having a short and sweet discussion. And the topic today is primarily around cultural changes in the African continent. And with that there. Is so much that Covid has brought out in various ways. Except for the globe. There are individual differences that have been there in various continents and we want to focus specifically on the African continent and see how we'll see as different in Africa and then dive into it. And we cannot find any better speaker today than Ifeanyi Welcome. Welcome to the show. Ifeanyi - Thank you, Kay, for that introduction. Kay - The main reason why it was very interesting to have you in the show. If only is, you have to the success just for you, but you're also bringing other people along with you and bringing you into it. So that was excellent for us to be able to Showcase that in.our webinar, sopost quickly, we can start off saying, I would love to be would love to hear what are the actual cultural changes that you see within the African continent that people outside of it need to be mindful of. Ifeanyi - Thank you for that question. So when in terms of cultural change, right? As you love us might be, you know up, you know from my interactions with folks in Europe and Asia, you know, I've had you know interactions around what you know CX means, you know to Advocate General African consumer and you know, a lot of folks believe that when it comes to customer experience people generally here. In Africa, I would expect, you know, Quality Service. They would expect time to their queries. But, you know, a lot has changed in the last 1 - 2 years, especially with the Advent of covid, right? consumer customer expectation, you know, I would like to highlight, say, if you so in terms of, you know, customers Expedition generally, so people here in Africa now don't just rely on reactive service. They expect, you know, brands of businesses to be proactive with the savings. Not necessarily waiting for them, you know, to reach out to the bronzer. Say he looks, we have, I have a problem, they generally expect. You know, Brands to be Innovative and intuitive with the approach to support and, you know, trying to identify areas where they're having challenges and you know, practically resolving those issues and also in terms of, you know, the customer Journey customers expecting sort of like it connected Journey map in terms of you know, how it dissolves ax approach, right, you know, it's no longer or you just use spoken to our sales department. Okay, Our customer success department will return as it is divided, you know. Which to customers, you know, trying to, you know, ensure that businesses can break, you know, that silence in between their process and show that, you know, clients have that seamless experience throughout their journey with the brand. So these are some of the expectations of customers and then when it comes to,you know, that Choice point, you know, customers also expect personalization, right? Is not just one General approach to, you know, reaching out to customers throughout select torture. you know, send a blast email to every customer. Say, look, we have this update, you know, trying to personalize interactions from support to General Communications, making sure that customers feel valued, making sure the fuel value. Because people here in Africa tend to say I want to speak to people from my country. They tend to appreciate, you know, Brands when they recognize their look and Mr. Social, so I am this,so they would appreciate bronze, you know, try to personalize the approach to Interactions. And also one interesting thing. I also found that you know, customers. Also, you know, expect customers are Brands to be Innovative and you know, too fast thinking in terms of their product to services and support. Not just, you know, deployment program Series where we are and will continue to improve and then they are not seeing Improvement. Do we want to reach out to you? To see? Look, I've seen such also in Social business. So in a social environment, why not have this right? Customers now come to you to tell you, Look, we need this. They know what they want and the demand for it. So they expect Brands to be very Innovative across their product offerings. And then one last thing in terms of data protection, right? We've also seen interesting historical data. We are customers, you know, from the force sales Soviet 2020 customers. Now expect, you know, you know, expert Brands to protect their data. So for us lie to us as payment, Payment Integrations. I've seen scenarios from, you know, consultation experience, with startups. I've seen scenarios where customers feel hesitant to, you know, use their card, their cartoon mobile apps, or maybe your web application because they are scared of losing their money. So bronze needs to, you know, sort of enhance their, you know, their approach in terms of, you know, making customers know thatof their, there they are on top of data. Protection policy, ensuring that they are keeping their data safe. And that any information entered in the system. I kept seeing the need that you need to know that, you know, that you need to end that trust. now, we are browsing to antitrust. Some customers and you do what is required at different points in time? A day. I think these are the key five major cultural changes. I've observed during my interactions with Brands and customers and also from, you know, so very portable so saying Kay - yeah, thank you for that. Couple of things that I'm noticing from what you just said, value. Bringing people value.um Bringing customers value seems to be Global. um, The second thing that you mentioned is also, that being proactive is something all customers are expecting right nowbecause part of it is an instantaneous response that they get in everything else in their lives. They wanted to see proactive outcomes within their customer support and customer success team. So, I think that's a global phenomenon where I see that the Africancontinent is evolving from what you just said, it seems to be around data and protection and all of that. So in terms of,if prime, a, CSif I have a serious, Global operation. And if it's any scale, Global serious leader, when they Bri have teams to see what Kind of things that they should look for from an employee experience perspective. Ifeanyi - So when you say, what should they look for you, talking about, know, characteristics of the employee or the skilled trades. So what are you Kay - I am primarily talking about? How, what is the? What are the things that leaders need to do to make sure that their employees are well? Sustained from within the African continent. Is there anything else? That's culturally different, that support leaders need to do Global support. It does need to be done specifically for their African employees. Ifeanyi - So yeah, I would say yes. Why? Because you know, when you say Global sales operations, you talk about, we talk about, let's talk about Africa and India Normandy. So Africa is a regional culture. We have to serve a diverse culture. We have diverse cultures and we have people from different countries, including South Africa, and people from Nigeria. And you know, and we call today Petitions. In terms of interaction with Nadia various companies are also different because what they expect, how they expect to be treated also differ by for instance, in Nigeria out, speak from my own experience working for an international organization. I would expect that, you know, sometimes in terms of update timing by climbing to work, how many hours should I do? I need to work, you know, in other countries like in the example United States people work shift different tasks. Slightly in Africa, different people value their religion, right? People to remember, you might want to deploy to enforce new corporations. And then someone would say, look more on today's Sunday. I have to be in church. I can't afford to, you know, to, you know, to leave my religion and be at work, right? They value religion here, people, take it that seriously. And so if you, even if it's a global sales operation special needs, use to consider, you know, treats that they need to put in place then it will be around, you know, ensuring that. No, the Devalue the loop in between the look, the above the contents process and also look at the current environment, you know, and ensure that the ability to incorporate, you know, what people believe their lives of all these I can for instance and idea we have a lot of worries these you need to be able to appreciate how you know, give run this and make sure, you know you are taking note of that. Kay - let them honor the local cultures and local things while providing Global support, right? So let me also add this recently. Ifeanyi - I was talking to a Founder in Newfound of the West part of Nigeria and was helping to set up the sales operations and then because there are too many holidays in Nigeria. And how can I keep my Customers and say, look, this exists? This is what you should be looking at in Nigeria. And this is what is obtainable you have to key in? Otherwise, you'll be employees. Because people want you to recognize that today's a holiday and you have to grant that, right? And if you need to have someone, you know, it has to be that has to be open. Thinny shouldn'tbe something that you have to foreign Force, right? We should have the choices. It looks, I'm going to walk you're pay me extra for today. And you know, all those things that no matter to ensuring that you're able to keep your employees are motivated and engaged. Kay - Yeah, so there is actually a follow-on question from our previous comment that you made, concerning proactiveness. So, I would love to, you know, like to just bring that question up now rather than later. So in terms of being proactive,what are the things that support leaders need to look for? And you can answer it generically and you can call out something very specific to the continent itself. Ifeanyi - So, in terms of proactive, proactive, Outreach or proactive strategy in terms of the engine supporting your customers, I would give one good example, right? So let's come to less constant support. So you need to do it as a business leader. You need to be able to level data. Because from CRM yours, if you have a walk-in too well, automated you have all the trigger setting the right properties and you all constantly update those properties and ensuring that you're able to make sense of the coming in, right? I'm sure you would get a login. Inside. So you need to pay attention, you know bees are leaders who also need Keen support in looking at what the data is saying on a week-by-week basis. What are the top trends? What are the top issues and challenges? Our customers are facing user experience issues. It could be, it could be poor support, you know, from the dissatisfaction Matrix. It could be, you know, it could be product stability. It could be anything, right? So you need to, constantly, look at your data and see what data it is telling you, and then we'll take it back internally to meet with your engineering and product team and see. Here's something that you can resolve internally and ensure that you know, the custom expenses are smooth. So I'm pretty much sure that data will give little insight into you know. Go ideas of productivity and then the second part would be around the customer success approach. Like when you have died in the service business world, where you have a CSM, managing an account and then, you know, perhaps, they are different users, you know, currently using the particular, you know, a particular software and maybe they are some set certain goals that you have. You put it as a benchmark to see that within this given time. Different users should be able to have achieved ours and accomplish different tags. And then after me, You one week or two weeks that you have said and you go through the profile on the portal those and you're just to have to elect review of what the performance of your customers, and then you realize that your customers are performing today represent below what your, your actual expectation? Then you have to be proactive, you need to, you know, engage, you know, you need to further engage your customers and see new ways to understand why they haven't changed at any challenges that you have been and see how basically help them to achieve, you know, achieve those tax. And that way they will Be able to achieve their objectives. Kay - I love how you tied in the proactiveness to the value. You know, part of being proactive is not just, you know, providing that value. So, you can take anproduct, a little girl to a customer LED growth. So, right down there. um, Do you see any differences between B2B b2c andin this area? Ifeanyi - Sure, because when you talk about B2B and b2c, you know that they are different personalities like business, you know, your approach to supporting consumers, who, because early is different from one when you're supporting business businesses. So I'll also speak from my experience working at this half. Our Solutions are C customer success specialists where you know, I have to interact with decision makers, you know, senior managers and you know, ensuring that we can deploy our solutions to meet their daytoday operations. So the Expeditions are usually different from the way the expertise to support them is quite different. From the way customers expect you to support them. So, in terms of business, businesses are looking, at know, the listicle to their business.And, you know, customers are looking at, you know, what do I get right now? How do I have you? Make this happen? Right? But businesses are looking at, how can you, how can you, how can you drive value Falls in on a long-term basis, making sure that our own business, you know, not just supporting us making sure that we are also achieving their desired outcome of, you know, subscribing to your product, right? Not just some tiny thing. Perspective. But from a broader perspective. So when you are talking about the support approach, it has to be like an animalistic strategy like a bigger broader plan strategy to assure them that, you know, you can effectively engage different channels and ensure that they canmeet up with their own business demand. Then when it comes to customers, you know, the Apple 2 would be different because, you know, when it comes to customers saying no, it depends on your business model, right? So if you are looking at say regular or toxin, We'll talk like a regular customer, you know, it's just like taking a total purchase, engaging and interacting with them. And then, everything you know, in technology to ensure that you can keep the interaction going, but if you are talking about, you know, High net worth individuals, or you know, key accounts or, you know,High Revenue customers, then you upload to be different because you have to come up with an personalized approach, like, you know, having like it CS a is CSM, you know, engaging that that customer to ensure that they can get there. Observed outcome. Kay - How do you know there's a lot of discussions around see us being responsible for Revenue, right? So growth through supporters who are how we call it, right? So, where do you go? You see that phenomenon happening in Africa? Ifeanyi - So, yes, when it comes to revenue rights, the expectation is that customer success owns revenue. And also from my experience. Stations where sales will say they are also part of their revenue generation team and then it becomes like a one-sided thing. Maybe they take a few thousand customers and then CS 50%. But ideally, I would say that customer success operations or team wins Revenue. Why? Because they are the ones, you know, you know, after let me, let me, let me take it back. So when your cells bring in you, do the customer success, I expect to provide ongoing support and also, You know, ensuring that you are able to manage that relationship because and by managing the relationship, they are saying historical Behavior pattern that the CSM understands about the customer. And the third point from the service. Might, you know, maybe the last time, this salesperson reached out because it was the last time they requested for a renewal, or they wanted the invoice, but the CSM was a customer. Success managers keep abreast with customers and understand the customer and there has been no, there's been a relationship, you know, you know, in terms of the Of times, they've been with Equity, understand the customer better. And also, you realize that within that experience, you know, people might have changed how you manage it. You know, when you come to change management, people might have cleaned. And then the person who has the buying decision, the decision-making power might have left and if someone else and maybe the CSMalso developed an approach to managing that place on ensuring that you can retain the person. So I would say that the CS team needs to continue managing the relationship anyway. , When it comes to revenue and ensuring that you are able to renew their contract, then you can leave you at the admin lot in the long run bringing a sales team, you know, when they are, you know challenges with you know, baleen, Etc. Kay - A lot of support leaders underestimate the amount of change management that's required. So, you know, I'm glad that you called it outum the other, you know, if you think about the flywheel, see, as kind of comes in the middle. You are tying into sales. We just talked about it, right? Marketing, product development. And I think you did mention on the product development where you talked about the data where we can, we have to harness the key issues that come out and provide it as feedback back into the product. So we have that continuous innovation Loop coming in from support to product. So we talked about that, it would be wonderful to where you think that flywheel is moving towards the continent. When I'm talking about the flywheel. the flywheel of Cs being in the centerand all the other teamstying in into the CSS teams. And recognizing that support is important for the growth of the company, right? So that's the flywheel I'm talking about. Ifeanyi - So, I'll say that. We see a little bit behind from my experience, especially with you, with your new startup. you know, in Africa. So they still believe that you know, more of that, more of the, you know, that up is no Sport and in an customer retention lies with, you know, products, you know, having a great product, having a great marketing team, having a great still stream, right? So but, you know a lot of love of effort for the with love, being made to ensure that, you know, Brands understand the importance of support and you can see that you know, in terms of what I do personally as customer success and failure is I try to talk about about the importance of customer support and raising their awareness to the startups. Can start leveraging understanding the importance of customer success to business and how, you know, how to ensure that, you know, customers are retained. I often give this as an analogy to starting herbs. I always know when I meet with them, and we have this like argument, there's always fallout. And then I make him understand that you know, I look at the customer phone like a basket. It's just like you have the sales. the marketing team bringing customers into your bust into the basket and you don't have any protection on them. Customer success is that protection that keeps your customers and ensures that the engagement is ongoing. Interaction is smooth there getting the prompt service and, you know, they're getting everything that they need to, you know, too, be do remaining loyal customers and also make them, you know, and advocate of the brand. Kay - So, there are a lot of Youth Watching this because you have beaten their leader, and I'm sure,You know, they want to hear the words from you. um, What advice do I want to rap with this question. What advice do you give to those who are aspiring to get into customer support and customer success? Ifeanyi - Yeah, so from experience, you know, I'll take it back to the business and the industry generally, right, you know, customer experience. Most expectations are constantly changing. What you used to know yesterday, might not be what's obtainable today? So you have to keep updating yourself, you know, keep top of the, you know, current industry strengths. Not just saying. Oh, I just got fired yesterday. And now it's 256 presents tomorrow. What, you know, yesterday might be obsolete today. So you need to constantly, you know, engage with cs folks, you know, out there on LinkedIn and ensure that you know, you join those workshops webinars, you know, try to learn new strategies, new approach to CX and keeping yourself. If up to date as to, you know, what happened in the field of customer experience Kay - be they're being proactive to that's what you're saying. So sure that you get to see us so you can be proactive with your customers. So Ifeanyi, It's a pleasure to have you in and share your here, your background, your experience, and get a glimpse of the African. Tenant, super excited to have you on the show. Thank you for your time. Ifeanyi - Thank you so much for having me today. I really, really appreciate this time. Looking forward to more of these conversations.Absolutely by now. So can we confirm that the light is starting? Yes, it is. Okay. Soif I only thank you so much. I appreciate the time you took.

The Future of Service Support: Unveiling the Power of Knowledge Intelligence Previous Next Hey, Brett, it's a pleasure to have a discussion with you on Knowledge Intelligence. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me. It's exciting with what's going on. We really appreciate the time. Yeah. Brett, just looking at your background and your experience, you've actually been serving for very large companies like HPEDES, Dell, Xerox, and Avaya, and now with Veritas. You've led very large service teams and improved service operations quite a bit. So it's wonderful to hear your insight in this session of the experience dialogue. So thank you. I want to start off with having you know level setting about knowledge, right. So knowledge is an integral piece of any services support organization. But lot of times teams go ahead and have a couple of knowledge management, people building the content and then agents and, and customers and experts and product groups, everybody contribute to it. That's kind of how a lot of companies think of knowledge. How do you think of knowledge and think about knowledge intelligence? A lot of the is is all around it's, it's not only the uniqueness of the knowledge, but it's also how do you, how do you unlock it? How do you reuse it, especially in the services services industry, which is where I spent most of my career now in support. Very, very much you find similarities between supporting a a a product and servicing a a customer. Very, very similar in the approach knowledge unlock who, who has it, who has the answer to a particular challenge that you're working on at a point in time you, you find a unlocking it is, is locating it, where's it at? And as we went through REI proof of concept this past summer and now the, the full implementation of it, what we ended up finding as we inventoried our, our knowledge, intellectual knowledge, we had two 290,000 items of knowledge. And then when we started to unlock the organizational silos in a support organization again, we found more content of which much of it was rich. So we started really focusing on how, how do you collect all of this? How do you make it available instantaneously and helping resolve support issues? And then how do you create live articles from closing out cases? So when you do 180 or 200,000 cases a year throughout the course of time supporting customers, there's the creation of all sorts of knowledge. So how do you unlock that? Make it available because it's relevant at a particular point in time, not only for one customer. We found it being relevant for multiple customers. So how do you create that content? How do you get it through the process of publication and available internal? And then what do you use as a standard to finally decide you're ready to make it externally available for your customers to access? And so you, you find yourself moving from a very slow pace of methodically moving to a really high pace and recognizing that if you can unlock that content at a relevant point in time, its relevancy is across multiple cases. So you get a high reuse factor out of it. Yeah, I, I, you know, we've had very good conversations around it. And I can see the three buckets that you know you and I have discussed on. The first bucket is how do you summarize all of the cases and all of the knowledge so it can be reused by everybody, which is the one that you just talked about. The second case is how do you start creating new pieces of knowledge from everyday interactions, agents with agents, agents with product teams, agents with customers, etcetera. And then the third bucket is how do you make this proactive so you can start looking at the list of customer interactions that are coming in in real time and then creating knowledge to map to the interaction. So completely take it to proactive approach. So those are the three buckets in which you and I had discussed earlier. It would be great to get your opinion about how do you bring in, you know, a level of quality and accuracy, search ability and all of that within these three buckets. Well, I, I think like anyone would get and, and most companies all have it today. They have a, a knowledge management team. They have some sort of hierarchy set up for the purposes of, of creating and reviewing and then publishing. Veritas is no different. We have the same in the support organization. The only difference now what used to be days of creating articles and going through that process, we're doing it now in in the matter of hours. So as cases are closed, it's flushing through AI. It's looking at the relevance of content and relationship to what we already have and deciding, OK, this is a unique article and it's predicated on a standard that we've established. Create the article and publish it for the KM team to review. So we, we can now take the, the timing of the closing of a case from the time it's closed and 40 minutes later we can have a full article published internal for the TSE engineering community to use in servicing customers and, and support requests. And the reviewers are very focused now on the quality aspects of the article. In fact, often times when it's rejected, it's because it didn't meet a, a standard that we have. And you know, it goes through the rejection process is either a full rejection and it's, it's no longer a useful content, or it's a rejection for rework, which then requires the, the manual aspects of, of cleaning up the, the part that needs to be resolved. The beauty behind it though, is that we're, we're maintaining a 60 to 70% content rich creation. So that means we're only working on 20 or 30% of the article for the quality aspects of what we want to refine to meet our standard before we publish it. And then it has to be referenced so many times internally by our TSE community before which time we then publish it externally for our customers to access and our knowledge base. So we, we've established a standard we're working toward that. We, we have always had one, but we had to establish some standards around the AI aspects of it. And you know, so far it's, it's, we have an internal what's called a business value index that we rate the articles and the AI content is, is scoring high in that business value index every day. So we, we know we're, we're creating relevant content. It's timely. It's not 100% creation like it used to be, as 70% of it's created from the closed case. And we're finding high reuse, meaning that we're, we're finding that the content is used in more than a one or two KS. It's because of its relevancy. It's used multiple times throughout the course of the week. Yeah, go ahead, please. No, no, go ahead. It's, it's, you know, so tell us a little bit more about the business value index and how it is calculated. Sure. The business value index is, is predicated on the number of times it's used internally referenced and, or how many times it's referenced externally from, from a customer. It also can be a part of the index. Is is is also based on a rating that the customer or the TSE provides A sentiment rating and it is also calculated based on the number of times that AI uses it to produce an an answer and and Veritas support. We took a slightly different approach in that we created a hybrid approach where we have we used working with Elastic Search as our search engine. If you were looking at your screen on the left hand side, one through 10, most relevant to least relevant, we rate the articles predicated on the prompt question on the left hand side. On the right hand side, we have a bot that actually produces ALLM response from the content Veritas content and everything we've deployed is is predicated on our content. So while we're using a three 3.5 turbo and in the ChatGPT engine, all of the content that we do the search with and the creation of the LLM response is coming from Bertha certified content. So that way we know we've got a high degree of accuracy. We have had some hallucination because of, of AI given us an answer. You ask and it's gonna give you an answer. It's you and you want high degree of accuracy. Obviously because we're working with customer data, we want our product to, we don't wanna delete something. We wanna make sure the integrity of the data is always intact. So the quality of the the content is an important aspect of what of what we do. And the BDI index is just a real time view of how is the the articles performing not only internally but externally. And it's weighted like any index. It's weighted business value index. Yeah, so, and it's interesting, you know, because we were talking about knowledge from the old cases, knowledge from the interactions and then identifying what pieces of knowledge, the three buckets of taking it all to proactiveness, right. But what I'm curious is at what point is it useful for training? And I have a subsequent one for product 2, but let's talk about training a little bit. At what point is that knowledge used to train new support teams or new employees or new products or product changes etcetera? Yeah, what we, we tested that too. And in fact some of the content that we have indexed is in fact our training material. It's also included in the in those documents in which it's, it's searching for answers with we took what we have we we call our our level 1 support the the care team. Level one obviously would be the the entry level of of knowledge of, of the technical knowledge of the product and what we found in using the content and helping educate the the use of a prompt how to problem solve iteratively as you go through your question you asked the very first time is that we've we've we've found double improvement in the throughput in in cases. So you're taking a a loved one support who used to do 20 to 23 cases a day and now they've doubled that. You're doing 5253 cases a day using the the prompt and using the content. And keep in mind that most of that content, or at least not most a portion of that content comes from the training material that we use to train the level 1 support. So what does that mean? That means that the folks that that they're getting on on the on the phone faster from new hire time to starting to engage customers and you spend more time teaching now the prompt and the questions and the iterative process you go through with diagnosing the problem upfront and you can immediately start becoming productive. Now we're working on making sure that, that we've got a, a finite way of identifying the boundaries for we've now kind of crossed into a complicated problem, not one that you could, you know, level 1 support could handle itself. So when you get into file movement, file deletion commands of that sort you, you like to move that to level 2 and Level 3 support just to validate what not only the system is saying, but that to have the expert look at it and validate, OK, if this is the right, this is the right answer. So a lot of training has occurred in and around the the handoff in that in that space. We haven't, although it's being worked on right now, we have not started creating content training content from the live activity that we're performing on a daily basis. We have folks working on it. But the the first phase of what we wanted to get done was in the proof of concept. We wanted to prove, we create content from closed cases and we wanted to prove that we could enhance the, the TSC internal to Veritas its capability using AI by getting quicker answers. So those are the first two things that that we wanted to get accomplished. We went live on the KM portion of it in November. We went live on the AAR portion in February and we're up now fully operational on the, on the, on those two aspects, training being worked on. The next thing we'd like to do then is work with Ascendo and, and you guys and, and really start looking at how we take the, the large amount of data and correlate the patterns that we know we have and start creating content out of, out of those patterns. Because as, as, as we get into the patterns, you obviously get into higher reuse. And as you get into those patterns, you can also give a lot more clarity back to the product team with things that we may need to go and and resolve within our product itself, not just solving problems, but hopefully working toward making an even better product. Yeah, I, you know what? I the synergy I find every time I talk to you is because people look at knowledge and workflow as two separate things. You know, be have you know we look at it together, right? Knowledge creating from all cases, knowledge creating from interactions, knowledge created from what the customer interactions are coming in from and predicting what did that would be and knowledge used by L1 knowledge used as a business value index. So knowledge used for training, knowledge used for self-service. So it's knowledge is the integral part of every workflow within support service operations. And that is to some extent that's the crux of the entire thing that you are talking about. It is and it's, it's pretty powerful when you start to move it fast and even more fascinating to watch the prompt queries that we get to go and review the queries and you can look at the queries at the time we introduced AI and you look at the queries today and just in six weeks, there's such a 7-8 weeks. I guess there's such a huge difference from when we started. And then out of that is the knowledge that that's getting created just from the prompts, because you can, you can now start to see, you can look at, you know, 7 or 800 people, 3 or 400 at one time on the system. You can see the queries coming in. You can see the types of questions that are being asked at the prompt. It gives you some real time feel for what your customer base is calling about related to your product. Now how do you convert that into knowledge that you can actually do something with in that immediacy of time Is the next step that we're we're we're looking at as well? Yeah. And we also talked about, you know, how this can be utilized to facilitate product improvements. Do you want to touch on that a little bit? Yeah, we're, we're, so one of the areas that that we're working on right now is logs are the Veritas product like any software has a lot of logs that has immense information. And so the next step of what we're working on with AI is how we ingest those logs that we get from our customers, ingest it, let AI interpret this large amount of data and then come back with an action plan. And early indications are that we can, you know what, it's going to take us minutes. The process, ingest it, process it and come back with a, a set of answers. And So what we're, we're, as we work through the process, we have air conditions obviously, and we've worked closely with the product team at making sure that we, we have the air conditions also documented and in our indexes related to AI. So what we can do is as, as we have, as we solve cases, you can take the content that's being created by closed cases. And you can look at this and you can tell generally what what types of issues on a particular release that was just put out to to the customer base. And as their adoption allows for upgrading the software. As we're getting in the inbound calls, AI is creating new article content related to a release that we were just that we just published. And so you can start to see as as time progresses, customers adopt, you can see the issues that are coming in, what types of areas in the product and the content creation for that new release is again, it's, it's done in, in minutes, it's not days or weeks. So the ability to get relevant information related to a release and the issues that customers have had published and available then to the support organization happens the through the process that we talked about earlier. And at the same time, we can provide the product team a more in depth understanding of what we're working on in a particular area of a, of a, a new release. And you, you know, all of it, it, it, it's just accelerated what we used to do. It just makes it all faster. And at some point you can start to bring solutions faster in, in the, in the product cycle. So you're finding the support organization playing a, a, a more relevant role in helping with the with product maturity, if you will, as you go through the life cycle. That's very, very, very true. Brett, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about how we are revolutionizing the support content creation process so knowledge can be valuable, actionable and can be aligned with customer needs. And thank you for discussing this in depth. Thank you for your time. Thank you, really appreciate it. Enjoyed working with with you and the team so and thanks again. We appreciate the time.

Customer Playbooks: When is it useful and how to create one that evolves? Previous Next Welcome to the experience dialogue. These interactions. We pick a hard topic. That doesn't have a straightforward answer. We then bring in speakers who have been there? Seen bears and approached them in very different ways. This is a space for healthy disagreements and discussions, but respectfully, just by the nature of how we have conceived this, you will see passionate voices and opinions. Friends. Having a dialogue thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences. At the end of each dialogue, we want you and our audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can try at your workplace and continue the discourse in our slack channels. The topic for today. Customers' success playbooks. When is it useful and how best to create one that is evolving? Customer success. The playbook is a series of actions that are meant to be executed by customer-facing team members to achieve the desired outcome for your customer. If a series of past events can be delegated to a group of users at different measures for the customer journey to help them. Adopt your product successfully when the, but when is customer success, Playbook is useful and how best to create one that is evolving, that's why we're going to talk about. I am. So privileged to be joining our introduction, our speaker Emilia She's a Management Consultant board advisor author, educator, and partnering with companies, to create scalable growth, and metrics, driven, customer programs, from onboarding to adoption, renewals, and advocacy. She's also the founder of a management consulting firm. Her area of expertise is building high-impact and measurable full lifecycle customer programs across the voice of the customer, renewals growth operations, customer education offshore BPO support, team management csat, and NPC initial initiatives. So, you can see it's such a breadth and the depth that she brings to the table. She is part of Gainsight top seven influential women in customer success. And as being awarded the Stevie award for customer service, so much pleasure to welcome you to this speaker event, Emilia. Emilia - Thank you for having me on your show today. Ramki. Ramki - Awesome. So just to get started I've seen your goal of the Playbook from your standpoint. The way I understand this, we need to arm CX teams with tools to manage risk and mitigate them, right? Right. So you had recently written about enabling more channels to use data to answer questions raised in those channels. When would you enable more channels can you comment on them? Emilia - Yeah. Absolutely. I believe you should start raising channels as soon as you possibly can and what does that even mean? It means ensuring that your product team, customer success, and support are aligned. So once you create a Customer Journey that everyone adheres to, and thought that is the customer Journey because remember it's not like this, it's not like this, it goes up and down all the time. So it's really important that you identify the key opportunities to engage with the client throughout that journey and understand what is the best channel to meet that client sometimes it's customer success with the more proactive and sometimes it's customer support and that is often reactive, but But the best way I can describe it is something like for anyone who owns a Tesla there no keys. There's no customer support per se. There is an app on your phone and that is how you engage with the app and the car telling you when you need to proactively engage with their customer service. Now, that is meeting a client at the client's need not when you want to engage with the client. So that's just the best. Well, you need to have channels where the client will engage with you, in a way that works for them and sometimes it's in different ways. Sometimes they want phones, sometimes they want to chat slack. So really understanding the client's journey and their needs is when you should start engaging with the client through various channels. Ramki - That's perfect. So, you kind of covered the channels from bread, and then I hope support or services to look. Proactive, you also talked about data, right? When you save data, what data are you referring to? Emilia - I'm talking about the data that you can pull from your client’s usage of the product and actions, there are so many products out there that you can interact with your product team with Customer support success sales to see, where is the Klein engaging most and where are they dropping off. So, Able to look at data by cohort. And I mean, when I say cohort, I mean by segment or by quarter, when did they sign up, maybe a new product change was implemented that increased churn or mitigated it. So that kind of data will help you better understand how to serve your customers and what are the key moments in that customer Journey that are leading to growth if you those key moments, maybe it's a decision maker, downloading a report, or scheduling a report to come to their inbox or maybe it's getting a decision maker to come to an executive business meeting, those kinds of things that they're proving that you have more adoption and engagement with the client. Then you should be using that data to make decisions for your product moving forward. Ramki - I love the way you're talking with the data, right? You don't typically either talk about all the internal events and we are, we talk about external enmity. When the customers onboard it, it is the first 90-day experience. First, 30 days of experience is kind of a thing, right? I think what you're talking about is this? Yes, you want to look at the customer journey and also see the main events that might be happening. Like product announcement products, upgrade product changes, new modules, you're trying to connect both of them and then, and then see from the customer angle. So, have you seen success or support in making this call and making the decision individually? Jointly? How does this work between success and support or I guess? Emilia - Yeah, I will tell you that in the times when one of the teams has made a decision and not informed the other, there has been a breakdown in the client experience and when I was a vice president of customer success at a previous company that had of making a product change decision failed to tell support and success. And you can imagine what happened the next morning, my WhatsApp, my cell phone, my text email exploding, and that product leader was fired almost immediately afterward because there was a breakdown. And so, what I recommend is making sure product operations, success, and support are continuously aligned with the Customer Journey, especially when you're making any product changes, communicating with the clients, and how you're servicing them. If there are any changes you need to ensure that first, your internal team feels confident to speak to those changes and then notify your customers proactively, especially if it's a massive change, you can't just announce it. You need to announce it leading up to that change, just like for anyone who uses Google. I know they're Some changes to their services. We've been getting emails about it for months so it won't be a big surprise when the change comes. Ramki - That's right. Because yes, it’s not like, depending on the changes I assume, right? Some changes you can make short early. I guess. Big changes where you need some internal time and you're saying think of it from a customer angle and not what you've done a prod complete is not enough, there is a big difference between product complete versus Product consumption. Yes, awesome, awesome. So, you mention getting feedback from all interactions. um When you say all interactions, I would love to understand what you mean by them and how you act on them. What does this mean to you? Emilia - I will give an example to illustrate an answer for you. This past week. I was stuck in my stripe account so growth molecules we have a customer Success Academy. For training, I needed to make a change in my stripe account. And the support experience asked me, would you like to chat with us? Or would you like a callback? And the Callback will be in 3 to 5 minutes. The Callback was in about 10 seconds and not only did the woman help me and stay on the phone until I was successful with my change immediately afterward an email was sent to me explaining exactly what we went through. Should I need to make a change again? And then not long after I received a support survey with a simple question. Well, 1, how was your child's experience, and 2, you did you, did you complete what you intended to complete through this support experience? I was blown away that I was able to do much in just a few minutes and that is an experience of a very proactive successful supposed support experience that you should be measuring and ensuring that the clients are happy because I could have been telling you right now, very different story. So that is one of the best in class. They're not only ensuring that the client is successful with the product. But also afterward, confirming that yes, I agreed with what the support agent had closed the ticket with. Ramki - Yeah, it's complete. Close the loop. I think what you're saying is too few things I can see, right? One, when you had the issue and reached out to them, they kind of expected it. What you were going through. , they unloaded already understood even before coming to you unassuming, right? That's one. So, he understood what the issues were too. I think they were working with you and they kind of set the right expectations and beat the expectations, right? Five minutes versus ten seconds is kind of a thing. So, they are, the first response time or quick response, time was the first thing. A, when you have a problem at least there is somebody that helps you. I think. that second one. The third one is when they were on it, they didn't make you repeat all the problems. Again, they kind of understood. They were well prepared for it and you are really in there to solve the problem at that time and that changed the game, right? And I guess closing the loop did solve the problem? Make sure that you are good and with cap problems, how do you get back? I think that's your problem with that. Fantastic, fantastic. So let's talk about switching the gear right now, Playbook assessment. So, give some examples of how support metrics are tied into this kind of Playbook: what to do, when to do it, and who is the best student? I know it's kind of a broader thing, you can split it into multiple things. So I thought I was just asking a broad question. Emilia - Absolutely. Well, I will start with just breaking it down and singing. Before you build a Playbook, you need to ensure that you understand the company, the company culture, who is serving the client, and then the client's needs. And if you're building a customer success Playbook, without looking at the customer support experiences, well, you're missing out on the key moments in the customer's Journey because a customer's journey is not just adoption and growth Shirley throughout the customer's experience. Even product LED companies that have no support and are helping the clients. Through the product, never talking to a human per se or support ticket, they need to ensure that they're including the support experience and I love examples. I love storytelling. So I'll give you an example: Ticketmaster. I recently had an experience with them. They don't have support. There's no way to get a hold of them. The tickets disappeared from my account after the concert was canceled due to covid. And I was never able to retrieve that money, and I've never been able to get ahold of them. That is the worst customer experience. I've probably ever had, and it's because they built a customer success Playbook without assessing the client's needs first. So, before you build a Playbook, and sure, you understand, how do I enable my team to use the book. What do they need to support our customers? And secondly, what does the customer need to be successful? And if there are challenges in that Journey how can we support them successfully? So they're not on LinkedIn life or Twitter or other social media saying negative things about their experiences with your product. So that's why assessments are so important. When you're Building A playbook, you need to understand the employee experience of the product. Experience and the customer's experience and build a Playbook to enable all three to work together seamlessly. Ramki - I love the way you connect because a lot of times we just think one or the other and how you have to connect them. I mean when you talk about it I was thinking of a recent example, I was in Costa Rica kind of, me and my daughter. We were doing some kind of an event. Of course, the weather didn't cooperate. We had two back-to-back events. First, one got done, some more Wee, Man. Is it true with so much pouring rain? And with a lot of lightning and thunder. So we decided we didn't want to do it and the challenge was for them, The Print office and the back office operations forces, and customer support. We're kind of originally disconnected. They did not know how to handle it. So, they have to make a lot of calls. They understood why they wanted to do the right thing, but they did not have the processes in the Playbook to manage that, while I was talking to them in life and then trying to figure out a solution etcetera. So finally, they came up with a very convoluted way and cut system. But everything got handled the next today that they had no processes to put in, from what you're talking about, I mean the internal person employee they wanted to do the right thing and they were real because it's your cue point. They also did not want to get different, not that I was going to give you any type of. You've got to be very sincere, um they wanted a good review. They wanted to help out the Back office. They also wanted to do the writing but things went all not connected. I can see how you're talking about when you do these things. You have thought about customers and employees in the process of connecting. Connecting them all. Exactly. So, I know you are a fan of the customer journey? I mean I'm just looking at your post and activities. It's fantastic. Tell me. Why does it matter in terms of mapping them, Using a mirror as doing a risk assessment, like CSM checking for a few times? how you do these things. Can you please elaborate? Emilia - Yes. So the way we do customer Journey building for clients is we bring them together so we bring together leaders, maybe up to eight people in a room on mirrors. Zoom if it's remote and then on sticky paper and big whiteboards. And if it's in a room and we're all together and what we do there is we map out the customer's journey and we include the employee. What does it take from a product? Whether it's a technology or a human touch with the client and what we have found over and over again. Are there a lot of crunchy conversations between product sales marketing, customer success, and support before we can build that Journey that everyone will align with so it isn't it is not a one-time Workshop? First, we survey all of the employees that are engaged in touching the customer experience. Then we gather that data and present it to the executives to mentally prepare them for building that customer Journey from there. We host a collaborative Workshop. It can last anywhere from two to four hours depending on the complexity of the product and then from there we go back and we gather all that data and create a beautiful Journey for them with steps for churn opportunity and growth opportunity. And from there we then present it to them. And from once they have the sign-off, then we can go and start building a Playbook on, all right? Well, if these are churn opportunities, how are we going to build battle cards for your employees to be enabled to mitigate Their growth opportunities? What are the questions? Your employees should be asking so that they can expand with upsells and cross-sells renewals with more seats. Etc. So that's the power of a Customer Journey. It's, it's kind of like me, suggesting you go see a heart doctor and I'm not a doctor and I don't know any. No, I have no idea why you're breathing heavily, it could be something related to your lungs for example. So, you want to make sure you understand the opportunities throughout and that the whole company from the top down is aligned on that before you start building and that's why I believe in customers. Journey mapping is so important. Ramki - This is fantastic. I'm also getting some live questions by the way, um this pretty, similar topic. So I'm going to just interject an Oscar that so when we talk about these playbooks at what Point, do you stop to assess how effective the Playbook is? And from there. How do you move ahead? Emilia - Yes. So when I let customer success at my last company and several of them that I've been leading, I've always reflected on the customer journey in the playbooks on a quarterly Cadence. And it's not just me, it's in a group of people where we sit down, and we look at the product map and what's changed? We look at the support tickets where they're the most challenging with the product, where's The NPS csat, wavering, and from there we update the Playbook and we get feedback from the teams as well. Because maybe we've rolled out a new way to do an executive Business review and it's at an earlier point in the customer journey. All right. Well, then we need to change the customer journey to move that Executive review earlier. And then we need to ensure that the Team has enough time to roleplay and access. The new questions were asking them to use or to feel comfortable role-playing with any rub Junctions to the new pricing, for example. So, I highly recommend at least quarterly Cadence is the Playbook the customer Journey, supporting the customer experience and the company's revenue goals. That's my advice for times a year. Isn't a lot to ask for when You think of the impact you can have on the company and the client, you'll always have a regular Cadence help site. Ramki - I mean if you just put it down and then come back to visit after say, one near 67 Monday becomes, you probably will put a lot more effort to start all over again because you don't understand what this Continuum quarterly has. It sounds real, fantastic. When you talk about the Playbook like how does one Define it? The voice of the customer in the Playbook, right? How important is product feedback to support the voice of customers? can you comment on that like the voice of customer Playbook? Emilia - Absolutely. So there's a school of thought that says NPS is irrelevant and I agree and PS was created by a CEO at a car company. And then two professors from Harvard were hired too. To analyze customer experience and create this NPS score. Now, investors, I believe do indeed, put too much focus on it. But what NPS does or customer satisfaction scores, they're different. So, you want to make sure that you're asking csat customer satisfaction after customer support experience and NPS on a more regular Cadence across the specific Target segments. For example, regardless of what the score is, the voice of the customer is important and you need a Playbook or a way to address any challenges that are uncovered. So at one of the companies, we work with and created a voice of customer program, we added all of the opportunities to experience the voice of the customer into a Slack Channel. And then on their Confluence, we created a guide. So if its product a related product has X number Of days or hours to reply. And here are suggested replies. If it's support related, this is how to address it if its customer success Etc. And through that experience, we were able to expose the voice of the customer to the executives and the employees. And suddenly the culture shifted in the organization because the voice of the customer was being heard now and the customers whom I. Because I wanted to make sure I was diagnosing and delivering the correct experience. They were so happy. They thought that one person said to me wow I thought my reply would just go into some black hole and to have a human being called. I genuinely care about my feedback, I'm taken back. So I suggest you don't just put the voice of the customer program together and say you have an NPS or see Don't do something with it. There's technology out there for you to quickly be able to evaluate and then act upon. Ramki - that's such a wonderful thing that we talked about like, for example, within Ascendo what we have done is to your point. Yeah, NPS has been a very long-standing one. Simple number. You can just get it kind, but the interactions are not at that time, right? It is that you don't want the feeling of the moment, you want to collect the feeling of the customer. So, we have Modeled, which detects that type of sentiment continuously and also on an aggregated basis. All these things are automatically done and it's given as an alert so that people can take action. So, you're not listening as I have to do this and I'm going to get and then I come back, this happens as a natural course of your day-to-day execution. Our customers are loving it. And, it's just taking the whole voice of customers to the next level. I have another question for you on this, right? um Some questions, the customer success, our support teams should be asking before they start to create the Playbook, right? One is, do you have a Playbook? Yes, you have to vacate. It's like, if people, there are some customers, early growth customers they may not have a Playbook. Would you just talk From something or do you, how do you what type of question that you may want to ask to start creating their playbook? Emilia - I would start by experiencing the customer experience. So, going in listening to calls with, from an onboarding perspective, looking at the support tickets, how they're being answered, what is the current state of affairs, and then actually interviewing the people on the front line working with customers. Honoré daily Cadence. So, looking at understanding the customer experience, looking at the data and any processes and systems that have been put into place, and building that assessment to understand the customer experience. And where's the company headed? I've seen companies create products that the customers didn't even rate high on customer needs but the CEO insisted that that was the future of the company. And It flopped drastically. So you need to, put your agenda aside and use data and the voice of the customer and your employees, the voice of the employees who are on the front line to make these decisions. So that would be my advice for this question. Ramki - Awesome, awesome. I'm going to switch a little bit. So we talked about the customer Journey. Then we went into how all the different experiences have to tie together. Then we went into the playbook and kept it. Let's talk about change management, , I mean, that's one of your passions in that topic. Talk about change management. How are they connected to measure the value? Emilia - Yeah, I don't have the exact stats but what I can tell you is changes hard and companies waste Millions. If not billions of changes sunsetting systems, implementing systems, only to experience failure. And so, transformational change with products is really hard because we're humans, we like habits, we like safety, and we fear whether it's our jobs that will fail using the new products, it may feel uncomfortable, it may not feel like it's the right decision. So prepare your employees and explain what's in it. For me it is really important and one of our clients recently hired us to do change management. Current workshop and out of that experience, I better understood doing things like breakouts. Letting people talk about the change in their fears, what they understand, the change to be, and then really ensuring that they understand what's in it for me. Because again, as humans we not only fear it but we want to know why are you doing this? Like, well will it reduce the number of employees you're going to have, is it going to have more work to mine? Wait, what are you doing with this change? That will make me more productive. So, if you put change management with that, if you implement it with that perspective and you give people time to practice, to feel confident with the changes, you will be so much more successful. And that's why we offer these workshops and why we build these playbooks to help understand, okay? This is how we used to do it. This is how we're going to do it. And here's why right? So, being able to give people time to absorb the changes is a really important part of transformational change. Ramki - Yeah, I kind of agree with you disagree with, I mean, this is such an important thing. It is not just listening and building the Playbook and keeping it current really? And a course in and to adapt yourself, people want to do this, right? They just don't want to have to do it, you want to create a Men where they want to do this. And when that happens, the magic happens. The customers get better, the experience gets better, support experience, get better. So um I think we are kind of coming to a kind of a toward the end of this, Emilia, anything else that you want to add a comment? So the team. Emilia - Yeah, I would say, don't skip out on bringing your team together for alignment, and don't assume that everyone at your company understands what the other groups are doing. This is one of the reasons we're often brought in teams working in silos. There's a breakdown in communication internally, which means your employees aren't happy, which means your customer experience is poor. So ensuring that your team's not only are in the loop of what's happening but enabling them with playbooks and technology that will help us proactively serve them is important, just giving them more work or announcing that we're adopting new technology or new playbook is Bound for failure. So we want to make sure they're part of the decision. They feel confident with it and they've had time to practice it on a regular Cadence because if you don't practice the skill, you quickly use it, especially if you're just doing quarterly reviews. For example, once in a while, you need to practice the Also give your employees time to absorb and practice. Ramki - Absolutely. I think it's all not just about learning, it's also putting the things into practice, right? And that's exactly what we worked with us in, do we bring such metrics? It makes it easier from a support perspective for customers to see them right on the leaderboard and the execution of the operational theme so they all can make those changes. So, thank you very much, Emily. This is Fantastic. Fantastic discussion, just for the audience. If you have any questions, always visit. You can also see it on Lincoln Life. Please feel free to contact us at www.ascendo.ai . I look forward to having more of such dialogue in the future. Thank you. All. Emilia - Thanks for having me. Bye bye.