Can we fix Customer Experience? W/Michelle Martinez

Amas Talks Podcast

​​Amas

So, Michelle, we both work in the same area around keeping customers happy. And I was reading an article that talked about the ACSI rating, the American Customer Satisfaction index rating, and something happened. From 2006 on, we were on a steady rise. And in 2018, it starts to plummet. And I don't think anyone needs data to tell them that customer experience is getting worse. I, for one, when I buy something, somebody lies to me and tells me they need my email address so that they can send me a receipt. And then next thing you know, I'm getting emails that I didn't ask for. And then when something breaks, God forbid, I call the 1800 number, and it tells me my call is very important to me and somebody will be with me shortly. That's another lie. And then I get to the human.

Michelle

Wait, alas, just to be clear, that's a difference of definition, right? Shortly, in your mind? In my mind, maybe like one to two minutes, but in their spectrum of like ten years, an hour, maybe it's.

Amas

Our definition of time. And then I get a human, Michelle, and something happens, and they promise me a callback that also happens to be a lie. And then at the end of all of this, I get a survey that says my feedback is very valuable. And again, that, too is a lie. And I could go on. While that is going on, every single company on earth has the word customer experience somewhere on their website or on something, right? It's like, oh, my gosh. And then we have apologies to my colleagues. So many customer experience gurus on LinkedIn writing thought pieces about customer centricity, and yet I can't get checkout lanes everywhere I go. And let me now get back to the data. Remember those ACSI ratings I said was going up until 2018? We have erased all of the gains. We are now lower than where we were in 2006. And so, you know me, I am a little bit dramatic. I am ready to declare the whole customer experience practice a failure. Let's pack our bags and go home. What says you?

Michelle

At least you didn't call it a sham, right? That could be the other way to go. So, look, I think, and I'm always the, like, let me find the gray in between. So I'm going to go with the yes and no. So I think there are elements of it that have been successful in that. Yeah, companies are talking about customer experience, and there is, overall, a greater recognition of the fact that customer experience and well designed customer experiences can actually enhance your bottom line and can be ultimately revenue drivers. They can be that organic growth engine of your organization. So I think there have been some wins in that way and kind of a little bit of some of that quantification of the value where I think CX has fallen down and then I'll get into what I think has maybe happened over the last couple of years. But where CX has fallen down, I think is some of the practitioners, and again, not against any of those that are out there and people that I know, but I think we got a little too enamored with the idea of great customer experiences and we didn't really hone in on what is the practical business value of enhancing the customer experience. And how can I actually translate that back into business terms. So yes, it's the right thing to do and that's a good story to tell, but if you don't come back with the financial value of that right thing to do, you're not going to get buy in in the long term for continuing to be able to do that. So I think where the practice has failed is pulling in that financial kind of not just justification but value addition that has come from CX. So that's where I think there's been kind of failure from the practitioner side of the house. Now what I think has happened kind of more largely is you've definitely got a concentration of businesses and you see that across the board, right? Who's in the top ten of the businesses, their size of market share. So therefore, since there is less competition in the marketplace, you don't actually have to differentiate yourself with better customer experience, you can kind of screw customers over and. Sorry, where are they going to go? Choice. Right? Where are you going to go? And there have been some changes, right? Like the ability to port your cell phone number from one provider to another has certainly made movement of cell phone providers a little bit easier. But in aggregate they still put a lot of challenge in that process so that it's not really easy. And so that's why I think you've seen that type of a dramatic drop from 2006 to where we are today is that concentration of business.

Amas

I want to go back to that point you made about value, Michelle, before there was customer experience, and I would love to hear how you got into this then. I was a service guy and there was no department I had envy of more than. Remember I had a vp counterpart over marketing. And we would be in these meetings and they would say things like, you know, half of the money we spend on marketing is wasted, but we can't tell you which half. And everyone would laugh and the CFO would write another check. And when I compare that to me, a service guy and to some extent a customer experience deal, even before that was a thing, I had to justify every penny. And I think I hadn't connected it till just now because a lot of cxos are cmos that I wonder if it's that laziness from marketing. Apologies to our marketing brethren of kind of like, what else are you going to do? You're going to write me a check to do marketing regardless of the value? Maybe we took on some of that and gotten into this more ethereal. It's good for the customer, it's good for the world, versus really trying to make a discipline out of it.

Michelle

Yeah, that might be a component of it. I would also say, certainly from my personal experience, I felt like there was almost a backlash. And I know myself and others have reacted to that backlash, which is customer service sitting within operations and customer service being a component of customer experience. Right. I do not want to confound those two terms. I'm really passionate about the fact that customer experience is overarching. Customer service is a component of it. But when you had customer service pulled out and it existed within operations, it was very much viewed as a cost to the organization. And how could you essentially optimize that cost and how could you minimize the amount of that cost? And when you have that lens on it and you constantly get the push of shorter average handle time, like lower resolution cost, whatever it may be, not necessarily to the benefit of the customer, but exclusively for the benefit of the business, I think then you get some backlash that says, look, we got to move away from that model. We have to go back to this kind of more marketing type of model where we're thinking about kind of the brand promise and what are we delivering to our customers and that value. So I do think there's some of that that's been at play. And I've certainly seen, like I said, I've lived living in that coo world and having been pushed on that operations side of the house in terms of why people might lean more towards the throw money at. We'll see what sticks and what doesn't stick.

Amas

Yeah, I want to be balanced here and acknowledge one thing you said, which is the progress we've gotten from focusing on CX. Perhaps you can tell I don't remember CX roles when I started. Right. And I haven't sat in that chair. I've spent most of my career in decidedly service, supply chain, those kinds of talk a little bit about the journey. I'm quick to throw the baby with the bathwater, but we have come a long way. Talk about from your experience, how did we even get to the point where CX is this ubiquitous thing everyone talks about?

Michelle

Yeah. So I don't know that I know exactly how I got there. I can certainly tell you. Similar to you, I grew up in marketing. A little bit of business development, a little bit of sales, but mostly marketing. And to me, what became so apparent was if you sold the living daylights out of a product, right. But then you couldn't deliver on what you were selling. That lack of kind of communication continuity was the downfall of a company, right. You can't oversell and then under deliver. It just won't work. So you have to have the pre and the post sale talking to one another. After I operated in marketing for a while, I was a general manager of a business unit, and there I owned the customer, the entire lifecycle of the customer. And that's the first time that I really came to realize the value of really understanding that entire customer lifecycle and how important that retention component was. Customer lifetime value. How do you calculate that? How do you bring that? Now, it was a subscription based model, so it was significantly easier than, as an example, Wayfair, where I worked, where it's not a subscription based model, it's much harder to figure that out, but able to do that. And so I don't know exactly the moment in time where customer experience became like the thing in an organization. I would also say, I still feel like today people are struggling with what that actually means. I think in a lot of organizations, they say customer experience, but what they really mean is customer service. And they're just giving it a new nomenclature, right. Very similar to how I see people. Yeah, go ahead.

Amas

No, you're right. That's part of the confusion in the marketplace, right. Is that I think lots of service individuals, myself included, started to think, well, the CX thing, right, it's this broad, thin. Maybe we'll now get funding, maybe we'll not be thought about as a cost center anymore. But you're right, the discipline around CX is different. And there's service elements in the customer experience for sure, but it certainly is different. If you're just joining, I have got my good friend Michelle on. We are talking about customer experience and a bunch of other topics. You'll get to know her. We'll put her LinkedIn information in the show notes. Let's get to know you a little bit. I ask my guests these questions and the one I'm going to ask you is tell me about a purchase under $50 that changed your life. I'm a dramatic person. For the better, for the worse. What is yours?

Michelle

So I'm guessing most people give you the for the better, and I'm going to give you the for the worse. But it dramatically changed my life. We've talked about this, so I have it here, at least the component elements of it, which is this used to be a dog leash. And my daughter was taking my dog out for a walk and he was on our property. Another dog, our neighborhood dog, was on the road, started barking at our dog. She held onto the leash, no problem. And all of a sudden, the leash broke. The nylon of the leash broke. My dog felt loose. He had been agitated because he was antagonized and he did some damage to the other dog. He bit the other dog and ripped open kind of his front paw to the tune of about $2,000 in a vet bill, which, of course, I was obligated to pay for because it was my dog that did the damage. And so that's life changing. What was on top of that life changing was the absolutely abysmal customer service that I got. I went back to the manufacturer and I contacted them and I said, hey, look, this is what happened. I'm not a litigious person. I'm just hoping that you can kind of compensate me for the vet bill that I pay.

Amas

Vet Bill? Yeah.

Michelle

And the response back that I got from the company was, I'm so sorry, we can't pay for the vet bill, but we'll give you a $15 refund on the leash. And here's a 10% off coupon for future purchases.

Amas

Come get some more.

Michelle

Go get some more of the thing that broke where your trust is fundamentally gone. Right. The core function of the thing that I bought was not delivered upon in any way, shape or form. Go buy more. And I responded back, rather, I think, nicely, and said, look, I work in customer experience, and let me just tell you, this is not the way to go down the road, because you just pissed me off even more by the buy. And now I'm going to go otherwise. And now I'm going to write a really crappy review on Amazon for your product. And now I'm going to also inform Amazon of the fact that your product broke and they shouldn't be selling it because, oh, that's a liability. And so they stuck to their guns. And I even kind of pointed out to them that, look, the value of you, having spent $2,000 on fixing this for me, would have been tremendous. I would have been more than happy to then go on the website and say, hey, look, this happened. But the company was really gracious about it, and that could have gone a really long way for other customers, too, and for that company, but they chose not to. And so now it's going to cost them a heck of a lot more, a lot more time in order to deal with the situation. So that was my under $50 life changing purchase.

Amas

There is so much there. And I want to respond with, you have one job, if it's a leash. And by the way, until you told me the story, it has never occurred to me that this could be a thing. Right. And back to what we're talking about, about the entire experience is, I think this is why, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it right in.

Michelle

That.

Amas

It touches everything.

Michelle

Right.

Amas

You had a purchase experience. Service is what tends to expose your experience. Like, the service is kind of what calls your attention to it. But for that to have been a positive response, we've got to go back to operations, manufacturing, give them that feedback, because it's not just about making you this one customer, even just throwing money at it and making you whole. It's about then, right. Let's make sure this thing doesn't happen again. Because if you go on and even give them a good review, that, hey, they made it right, and they did the right thing. If it happens again and again, your one review is not even your one positive review. Had they done that, would not have helped them. And I think it's so symptomatic about how there's service experience, which would have been, oh, we apologize. But if you're thinking about the whole thing, it gets a whole lot more complicated.

Michelle

And that organizations really aren't organizationally structured in order to enable all of that kind of connective tissue to exist, right? Because it should be this kind of service feedback goes back to the product team, like you said, goes back to the supply, goes back to the manufacturing piece. So they have that feedback and they can now make changes. But it sits, and I think very often, and I know we're focusing a lot on service, but I think very often service sits isolated from the rest of the organization. And as an afterthought, it's like, oh, we should probably have a customer service department versus thinking about, how am I going to really intentionally design my experience and then use service as a core and fundamental element of the delivery of that experience as well as a core and important element of my feedback loop. Yeah.

Amas

And speaking of feedback, I want to focus on that for a second because most of the barometer of how good CX is going, for better or for worse, tends to be around this feedback thing. And by and large it is some variation of survey through some channel and customers say some stuff and then it gets quantified and next thing you know, voila, we are great. Because NPS, whatever thing you're using, say you are good. What I did not share with you earlier is those scores are going okay.

Michelle

Yeah.

Amas

Listen, I don't like to tell people I am in this business because they start telling me are you responsible for this? Right. So what gives? What is going on with surveys and it kind of lying to us what's happening there?

Michelle

Okay. I have so many thoughts you're going to have to shut me up because I get really excited about this topic, as weird as that sounds. So I absolutely think the problem is we're measuring the wrong stuff. So if you think about CX again kind of more holistically from a business perspective, whether or not a customer is satisfied, neither here nor there. Worthix did actually a really great presentation on this and they showed how, I think it was BlackBerry, how BlackBerry had phenomenal csatin ratings. They went out of business and they collapsed and it was still their customers that they had that were giving them five star and ten point ratings. So it's not a valuable tool in order to assess whether or not your business is successful, which is ultimately the purpose of customer experience is to really drive and deliver on the business. So you're not measuring the right thing. So that's one I think the second is I get again, really passionate about this NPS thing. So NPS is really a relationship management. Calling it a metric, I think is something that is too far away from me, but tool, I guess. And I don't think it works particularly well because most people abuse how they leverage nps. They're trying to understand whether or not a customer is going to purchase a product again. Right. So they're using that as their way to be able to predict if they're going to purchase a product again. We have data now and we have mechanisms to be able to understand if people are actually going back and purchasing product and telling their friends about it. So use your operational data, don't ask the question. Because, and this is my feeling about surveying in general, I think kind of the solicited structured feedback like that is not particularly valuable. It's like me walking into a party. And I ask all the people in the party, what do you think of my outfit? Who's going to tell me, Michelle, that thing looks hideous on you, right? Not a soul. I walk out of the room, they're all going to be, oh, my God. Did you see oh, my God way too? No, that's the unsolicited feedback when I walk out of the room, the solicited feedback is what I get when I'm in the room. And so when we ask these survey questions, we're getting those responses. It's not the truth. To get to the truth, you have to listen to things like what's happening in social media, what's actually happening in my phone conversations, what's happening in my chat experience, right. Customers are telling you there, if they're pissed and what they're pissed about, you have to be able to extract that. And that's the true information that you need, not just for customer experience, but for business in general. Right. That's going to help you understand, am I actually delivering what my company needs for growth? Because I've got this type of input now from these unsolicited, unstructured sources of data.

Amas

That is so on the money. And I think it occurs to me, and I've heard you say this on multiple occasions, but I think it'll be good for you to articulate. I think this term customer experience has gotten so ubiquitous, and it's been slapped on so many things, if you think about it as a discipline, right? Someone's just listening and just sort of going like, what is this thing as a discipline? How do you explain that to organizations or people who are still just trying to wrap their arms around it and want to do it, right?

Michelle

Yeah. So to me, the true essence of it is how do you want your customers to feel in every interaction with you? So what do you want them to have that emotional takeaway be in every interaction with you? And that's whether it's chat, whether it's sales, whether it's marketing acquisition, whether it's service delivery, all of those touch points. And there are so many layers of the things that impact that emotional response that you have, whether it's pricing, whether it's language, whether it's creative, whether it's the actual mechanism of delivery. Those are all components of what create that customer experience. So I view customer experience, ownership as being the ownership of that emotive response and all of those touch points. And so it is beginning to end, and it's every single touch point now. It's really hard for someone who works in customer experience to own every single touch point. And that's not what I'm talking about. It's a very collaborative position within an organization, and collaborative because this piece of the organization should be a centralized hub of getting elements and feedback. Right. This unsolicited feedback and bringing it to the rest of the organization and sharing with them. Hey, you know what? Pricing department, finance. We're getting a lot of complaints from these customers around the change in pricing year over year, and that 20% increase, we're starting to see a drop in retention from those customers that have had a 20% increase in their pricing. And here's the data to support that. Can we work together on what might be a different pricing structure in order to keep these customers over time? Because it may be that just a little bit more investment here can enable us to retain these customers. Those are the types of interactions that the CX team should be having, and it's a highly interactive, cross functional type of role to bring that in. And I'll just add to it, which is, I very rarely have come across an organization that has a really good understanding of what is it that they want their customer to feel. And so the core thing. I'm sorry, go.

Amas

No, go ahead.

Michelle

The core thing that I think organizations need to do and CX leaders need to do is get people in a room and make a decision around what you want that to be. Do you want your customer to feel confident? Do you want your customer to feel at ease? What is it that emotional key you want them to have? Because here's the truth. You as a CX leader cannot be in every single meeting helping everybody make a decision. You are but one or a team of whatever your team size is. When finance decides to make a decision about whatever, some price increase, unless they've got this guidance of this is how I want my customers to feel in every interaction. They're going to do what's right from their books perspective, from their narrow lane. But once you give them kind of that, think of it as like a constitution. Once you give them that constitution of this is how you want your customers to feel. Now they can ping that idea up against that kind of constitution and say, does it fulfill that? Does it beliey it? If it does, how do I adjust it so that it's right? And that is how you make great customer experiences scalable. Otherwise, if you don't have that decision around, what is the emotion I want my customers to feel? You cannot scale customer experience. Great customer experience.

Amas

Wow. I think you just gave voice to some of the things I used to struggle with, which is that just working on the inside of a company, the way the finance department looks at the world and the marketing department, you might as well be working in a completely different friggin company, right? And as a customer, it is very obvious. So I'm in the middle of like an insurance claim, right? And when I was doing the intake with kind of their general customer service, my gosh, it was pleasant, always good. But the moment they moved me into the claims department, it was like a whole different company has shown up. A company that will never speak to you, communicates with you with faxes and fucking snail mail. Right. For that company to start to say anything about the word customer experience, I don't know what the experience part of that word actually means because it's so different. And what you said just makes so much sense in that you need this kind of baseline. I love the term constitution. I'll kind of steal that, right. That says every state in our union can be a little bit different. But these are the things, right? We have a first amendment. Like, these are the things you want customers to feel regardless of what that is. And I think that may be why, maybe one of the reasons why so many organizations just struggle with this thing, because they're optimized for the opposite, for doggy dog. Different mandates, conflicting things, and it makes it tough.

Michelle

Speaking of, wait, sorry, can I just jump in there too? Because there's just one piece too that I think is part of the reason why this doesn't get more traction in organizations. And that is because you talk about emotions, and I don't know about you, but anytime you say the word emotions in a C suite room, everyone's like, squishy feely. We don't do emotions. We do hard facts and numbers and data, which, by the way, is so not true because the numbers out there are like, 80% of all decision making is based on emotion. It's not based on hard data. As much as people would like to be spocked, they are the furthest thing from it. And so that's part of the reason why I think organizations struggle on getting traction with this idea. But once you get people to understand that decision making is really emotive to begin with, then you can start having the, okay, what do we want that emotion to actually be to help foster that great customer experience?

Amas

No, great point. I just have one more place I wanted to go, and then I want folks to get to know you a little bit. What happened recently? So I started this conversation with you saying that we were on this upward trajectory. There's not one universal measure, but in general, things were kind of improving, and not in a straight line, but helping. And then something has happened recently, and, oh, my gosh, we have erased all the gains we had. We're back to 2005. What do you think recently is that we're now going in the wrong direction?

Michelle

Yeah, look, I think it's a financial pressure for sure. I think the uncertainty in the economy has driven businesses to make decisions that are exclusively short term, financially based. And so I think most of your larger drivers of those types of experiences, let's say you mostly interact with public companies. They've got a lot of pressure on them right now to deliver on numbers. In this climate of uncertainty. Now, I think maybe some of that might be getting clearer. I'm starting to see a little more optimism. The economy seems to be moving in a little bit more of a positive way forward. But for sure, for the last six months, people had no idea where things were going. And I did see a lot of businesses making decisions, whether it was they were, as we saw, firing of a lot of teams, or whether or not it was making cost cutting decisions in order to make the bottom line look better so that they could kind of weather the uncertainty of the future to come. So that's what I think was driving a lot of it.

Amas

Yeah, that makes sense. So another question I would ask you, I like to ask people is, what is a scam that you just recently discovered? I think the world is full of things that we accept that can be kind of scammy. What new one have you found?

Michelle

It's funny, you sent me this question, and I actually don't have an answer for you. I couldn't think of a scam that I've come across. I'm sure there are a multitude of them. Look, I think social media is a scam, like the stuff that they farm out to our kids and the things that I watch them engage with. And it's like, oh, let me get you this far, and then you're going to have to pay for it, and, oh, tell everybody about it. And that, to me, is like the biggest scam on the planet earth. But aside from that, I didn't have a good example.

Amas

So, sorry, mine, it's not recent, but I got engaged in a project that brought it even more to life. Bottled water. I don't go down that rabbit hole because, as it turns out, the bottled water we paid for the water is like free. Like in this example, a for profit company is allowed to just.

Michelle

Put it.

Amas

In a bottle and say, that would be $2. And I missed the memo when that became an acceptable thing. And yeah, bottled water, although I still partake in it, but it's a scam.

Michelle

So actually that makes me think of. Now, I appreciate that. That brought me to what actually I think is a scam. So I've been listening a lot to. I listened to a bunch of different podcasts, and there was one podcast that was talking about Nevada's core problem of water, and that there are actually builders that will get approval to build in locations where there simply is no water available. Like, there's none. So you will have a home, and it's a beautiful home, and it looks amazing. And you do not have access to water. No matter how deep you dwell. You drill that well, you're not getting it, and the builder isn't responsible for that. Isn't that fascinating? That's a total scam to me.

Amas

You will have a house, you will not have water, and you would like it. That is terrifying. Before I let you go, what do you think is next? Make predictions that I will hold you accountable to. What is the next kind of maturity for this? Let's give. I didn't show a lot of grace to this industry, but it's relatively new, comparatively to sales and marketing. And that. What do you think is the next leg of maturity we would see, especially in the climate of. I'm seeing a lot of companies give up. At least that's what it looks like. Like they're dismantling CX teams, not reforming. So what do you think, as best as you can predict comes next in the maturity of this whole industry?

Michelle

There's what I think and then there's what I hope, and I'm going to give you what I hope, which is, I hope that with the development of analytical AI and kind of the capability to really cull down lots and lots of data to meaningful and succinct outputs, that people are able to build voice of customer programs much more easily and at scale for a business so that you can now get to insights that took you. Gosh, I remember some of the work I did at Homeserve, like, would take you months in order to pull just a small sample of phone calls, and you can now do in a matter of hours because of the power of AI. So my hope is that that becomes something that is more pervasive in organizations, and they're smart to leverage that. And incorporate it into their operational data to improve their processes.

Amas

Well, that is a good place to leave it. Michelle, I have been dying to have this conversation recorded. We've had plenty of this. Thank you so much for coming to the show, and we hope you come back. You've been listening to an AmAs talks production.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemartinez12/