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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.