What if your company’s most valuable source of competitive intelligence and brand insight isn’t a market research report, but your contact center?
Agility requires more than just reacting to customer issues; it demands the ability to listen, understand, and act on the collective voice of the customer to proactively shape the business. This means transforming points of friction into opportunities for innovation.
Today, we’re going to talk about transforming the contact center from a reactive, cost-focused operational hub into a proactive, strategic engine for growth. We’ll explore how to unlock the wealth of insights from customer interactions to drive innovation, create more empathetic experiences, and deliver tangible value across the entire enterprise.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Courtney Shealy, SVP, Global Presales at Medallia.
About Courtney Shealy
With 25 years in SaaS and CX, Courtney brings deep expertise in leading global sales engineering and strategy teams. She has a proven track record of connecting customers to innovation that drives measurable business outcomes. For the last 15 years, she’s focused on transforming CX adoption into an engine for revenue growth, efficiency, and stakeholder value. At Medallia, Courtney leads the Center of Excellence that helps customers maximize their CX investments—modernizing programs with AI, breaking free of outdated foundations, and accelerating results.
Courtney Shealy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtney-mcmahan-shealy-9b3251/
Resources
Medallia: https://www.medallia.com
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Transcript
[Greg Kihlström] What if your company’s most valuable source of competitive intelligence and brand insight isn’t a market research report, but your contact center? Agility requires more than just reacting to customer issues. It demands the ability to listen, understand and act on the collective voice of the customer to proactively shape the business. This means transforming points of friction into opportunities for innovation. Today, we’re going to talk about transforming the contact center from a reactive, cost-focused operational hub into a proactive, strategic engine for growth. We’re going to explore how to unlock the wealth of insights from customer interactions to drive innovation, create more empathetic experiences, and deliver tangible value across the entire enterprise.
To help me, discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Courtney Shealy, SVP Global Presales at Medallia. Courtney, welcome to the show.
[Courtney Shealy] Thanks for having me, Greg.
[Greg Kihlström] Looking forward to talking through this with you. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Medallia? Sure.
[Courtney Shealy] So my role at Medallia is to connect not only our platform, but really our value to our end customer. So that means uh leading with agility and flexibility. When I speak to that have how the industry is changing, it’s making sure that my team helps to explain and as well as demonstrate how we’re evolving and how our broader customer base is evolving and working with CX. So it’s an exciting role. I love it because we get to not only play in the platform, but also innovate as we move along.
[Greg Kihlström] So let’s let’s dive in here and want to start with what I touched on in the in the intro, and it’s it’s just this idea that, you know, a lot of organizations really view their contact center through a a cost center or an operational lens focusing on efficiency, cost per call, compliance, all all important things, of course, but you know, from your perspective, what’s the single most compelling argument for a C-suite leader to start viewing their contact center, you know, yes, it it’s operational, but also as a strategic asset for growth and and even for innovation?
[Courtney Shealy] Sure. Well, simply put the calls is the actual voice of the customer. When you say you’re listening and you want to hear from your customers, it’s not about just what they wrote you in response to a survey. This is the actual gold mine of I’ve I’ve taken my time to interact and engage with you and I’m I’m there to have a conversation and the conversation is two-sided. So I want to make sure that the C-suites, not only do they see that, hey, you have the ability to listen to what they’re contacting you about, but you also start to learn self-describing attributes. When I call, I acknowledge oftentimes am I married? Do I have children? Maybe other um sometimes competitors that I have am more familiar with and have expectations building because I do work with that particular organization. So what this allows for you to do is not only service and support, but it also allows you to get a greater understanding of who your buyer, who your member might be.
[Greg Kihlström] And so you recently wrote an article mentioning the the flexibility and adaptability needed to do just that. You know, to embrace contact centers as a strategic asset. Once a leadership buys into this strategic vision. So, you know, they’re they’re they’re sold on it, but, you know, how does it change the way that they approach things like resource allocation, agent empowerment, and and other things to allow for more agile and and empathetic responses instead of just scripted ones?
[Courtney Shealy] So I I think that’s probably your your point there about it being scripted. Like we’re so or we have been conditioned to say, I need to give them the words. I need to make sure they follow the X, Y, Z protocol, which is still true. You still want to make sure people do the right disclaimers, they introduce themselves to create the connection between myself and um and who’s servicing and supporting me. But one of the things that’s changing now that we have all these other human factors that we’re evaluating for, are they frustrated? Are they uh unhappy? Are they excited by something? And that’s why they’re contacting you. Now, I have the ability to give a lens to my agent so they’re that they understand who they’re engaging with almost at the start. So not only am I saying I own this product or here’s how I identify who I am, can I imagine a world where I start to surface up for that agent to say slow down when you speak to this customer or realize that they’ve been extremely frustrated, so I want you to open the door to not just playing the empathy card, but make sure you are very crisp and acknowledge that, you know, here’s what their last several engagements have been with you as an organization. Or if they’re new, making sure, oh, so excited to have you part of the family of working with us. How do I start to get them excited about things that are coming? So when I say you have to be agile and flexible, one of the things is thinking through the different types of agents you have, and ensuring is like, what’s the level of service you want? And is that on brand? I’ve worked with customers where it’s a large retailer, but they their brand isn’t just what they sell. It’s it’s an identity. And so they want their agents to represent that identity. So when you start thinking, how am I gonna better coach? I need to make sure I can give them detail but not overwhelm them. I need to make sure that the system of the product or of the service. When there’s failures there, digitally or whatever, the agent bears the brunt of that. And so how do I acknowledge and I’m watching that to say, hey, let me give an alert. Let me showcase to my agents. We are seeing a problem right now. Just be aware, we’re going to we anticipate an influx of conversations. So it it makes them part of a connected tissue in terms of how you can be flexible and how you coach them, how you say, don’t go too far. I have had a customer say to me once, if they get too involved in connecting with the customer, then all of a sudden the saw the long the call becomes so much longer. So there’s this, there’s a balance, but I think they’re so empowered to just say, if you can give me three sound bites before I start talking, I feel way more comfortable engaging.
[Greg Kihlström] To your point, you know, those those those static scripts, let’s just call it unless you have a near infinite amount of them, they’re they lack the context of, you know, all the things that you mentioned, right? And and of course, though to to get to that um, you know, that ability to, you know, be able to personalize and and give those those um, those important points ahead of time, you know, contact center is is definitely a gold mine of unstructured data, which is a a good thing, but also can can be challenging for, you know, for a lot of businesses. So, you know, all those voice calls, chats, emails, you know, to do this well, what are what are the key people, process, or platform changes that are required to effectively mine all of that? Again, it’s all it’s all gold, but how, you know, how do you effectively mine these interactions and translate this rough customer feedback into actionable intelligence, not only for that that customer, but for other, you know, future customers as well and and for product development as well as marketing.
[Courtney Shealy] Absolutely. So one of the things I want to say to C-suite and CX practitioners is that the CX program lens actually has this broad appeal to the enterprise and impact. And so they should embrace it, push for it, and know that there’s so much power in looking at this data through this lens, number one. The reason being is because when you think about someone in product marketing or product development or even, um, you know, someone that’s in a brick and mortar facility and you want to make sure people show up and and represent well when a customer comes in. We are allowing, is now I can say, all right, let me go make sure I can be curious and ask questions that are pertinent to my purpose, my role in the organization. I’m no longer feeding them information through a dashboard that says, I think it’s this is what everybody needs to see and hear. I actually can and the addition of AI as a lens on top of that is helping with this. But one of the things that we want to promote and push is that you have questions, why don’t let’s self-serve, ask the questions, or let’s make sure that that is uh an outreach to you to say quickly, here is what your program needs. And you yourself now get to be a catalyst for growth, for innovation, or simply saying curiosity, what is what’s the feedback from the customers and how do I better message moving forward? So the traditional goals of the contact center has been all about containment and throughput, and that doesn’t go away. So you can still look to optimize there, but now you have all these other opportunities for deeper engagement and or growth, right? To make sure that you are protecting your customer customer base as well.
[Greg Kihlström] Well, and I I wanna dive into that that growth and the the innovation part of that too. Cuz I mean, definitely, you know, serving the customers and having, you know, customer lifetime value, loyalty, all of that, obviously super important, but I think I at least I’ve talked about this less on this show is just, you know, can you maybe maybe share an example of, you know, how can a company connect insights from the contact center to, you know, some kind of major business decision that can transform something like a, you know, a customer complaint into a competitive advantage or even a a new revenue stream?
[Courtney Shealy] Sure, absolutely. So let’s let’s take an example of um, a company we have Santa Lucia Seguros. I’ll say that correctly. Um, but they you know, imagine their program started like many other CX programs around surveys and asking questions and getting answers. But when they started to include Medallia speech into their program, what they were able to do is not only continue their search for where’s dissatisfaction or what’s their intent or intent to cancel, so protecting from churn, right? But they started to sort of acknowledge some other operational pain points, which then allowed them to say, okay, we’re seeing this in frequency because the majority of your data sits in the contact center. It’s in those calls, right? Um, and so if you start thinking, okay, now if I start to understand who is has intent to cancel, where are they most dissatisfied, what part of the journey did that happen? I can start to create predictive models. Those predictive models of flagging those risks, right? This is what they did. They said, okay, this is how we connect feedback to operational data to make sure we’re doing proper service level agreements, right? We are now linking that to with internal system data so that the information isn’t lost. It doesn’t sit in a dashboard for just the CX team or just maybe um like a a smaller subset of the organization. It actually became, you want to personalize experiences, well, you need to be listening and seeing what everyone’s talking about, and then help me break that up segment to segment so that now those marketing teams are empowered to go design the messaging around a new offering. Right? This is a company that has many different products. So they have insurance products, they have um, you know, from that perspective, they have they want to start connecting and stair-stepping people in between all the different products that they could potentially sell. So what this is allowed them to do is to say, let me break down the silos. Let me start to democratize this feedback and allow each team to ask questions of the data in the way that they need, number one. Number two, then organize that feedback so they can say, all right, these are the workflows we need to create the next best action for my team. And they stopped waiting for someone else to determine, here are the actions we recommend. And then you have to evaluate that and they’re engaged and it’s it’s part of their daily DNA of what to look at. And that’s then allowed them to create the processes that matter team to team, and they weren’t waiting for someone else to create. So that’s increasing service level agreements, outreach when they see a problem faster, and then designing new ways to package things in order to create greater adoption.
[Greg Kihlström] So let’s talk a little bit about how we measure this. And, you know, as uh certainly the I I keep saying this, but, you know, they they don’t take things away. They just keep adding more, right? So, um, you know, to that to that end, it’s like we’re we’re not going to, and we shouldn’t get rid of things like average handle time and and and some of those, they’re very a lot of a lot of traditional metrics can be anything from directional to, you know, just vital to understand, you know, how how pieces of this are working. But to to what you’re saying here as well from a more strategic and and innovation standpoint, you know, are there are there other metrics that we should be more focused on than perhaps in the past when when we start looking at, you know, contact centers contribution to broader business goals?
[Courtney Shealy] Absolutely. The thing I tell my team all the time is the number one. A lot of times people get focused on the tasks and the tactics of and so that’s why it was very easy to attach yourself to average handle time or first call resolution, which sometimes, I I did have a customer say to me, if they’ve call if if you’ve called me, I’ve already failed you, so I will spend whatever time I need to do to make sure that we resolve the issue. So it really ties back to now outcome-based metrics. So think customer effort score or value enhancement score. So did I take the opportunity to evaluate, not only did I support, but did I open the door to creating a deeper connection and about So we can start to look for, not only did I solve a problem, but did I also offer up something and did that convert? So now I start to kind of measure myself on the success of the connection to the enterprise, and sometimes that’s containing, sometimes that’s growing, sometimes that is identifying new opportunities of things to of what to sell because people like to suggest, I wish, I want, I could, these are this this language kind of points us to, let’s go ask a different question of the data now that we’ve solved the support problem. So ultimately, everything needs to go back to a business metric. And that is what I mean by being agile and flexible because those business impact needs change quarter to quarter and they might get set at the beginning of the year, but there might there’s a catalyst of something that could change to say, go capitalize on this. We saw that with COVID. It was a huge shift. All of a sudden, everyone had to start gearing up to say, part of the business is shutting down or this is a new growth opportunity. I need to measure it differently. So the tools of things like in Medallia are designed to say, I need to maintain, but I also need to go take some risk and ask some new questions of the data quickly so I can create new opportunities for myself.
[Greg Kihlström] In addition to this, you know, looking at the the contact center, which I I believe you’ve you’ve referred to this as well as as a complete canvas rather than focusing on individual interactions. You know, how how can technology, particularly AI, help leaders connect the dots between, you know, in in the current state, maybe seemingly isolated support tickets to reveal larger patterns in the customer journey and and their overall experience?
[Courtney Shealy] So so what I like about um kind of what’s evolving and happening and it’s scary to some people, is the overlay of AI, but using AI in a purposeful way. And so today, right, we’re used to text analytics, tagging and measuring and organizing our our data. And the strength of that TA is only then allowing AI to function and work more purposefully for you. So if I think about connecting tickets and calls, it it’s it’s helping to fill in the gaps of that canvas and of that landscape, right? If it if I get too close, I’m too narrow, and I’m not seeing all the other things that start to encroach on that business goal. And so when I think about um, what what our approach in particular to AI is to say, can I be front-line ready? Can I make sure there’s consistency in how we prompt and the questions we ask of the data? And I can ultimately start to surface that those responses, you know, the summaries and or the recommended next best action or simply saying, here is a new group of customers that shared like experiences and feedback. Maybe you speak to them in a different way. As this grows and as we evolve, it’s gonna be not only can I say, hey, I see a linkage in the journey, but I also see a linkage team to team. Which team is performing better or worse? Where should I coach? Where should I double down on engaging with the team in order to make them do better, grow more, or and or they’re struggling, let’s go through that training again with this team because the downstream impacts are cost or churn, etc. So I think um, that complete canvas now is I can connect all these different teams in different ways, and it doesn’t have to be, I spent three quarters or two quarters looking at data and now I’m gonna go tell them, but I’ve already missed the next change and the next wave that’s happening with my customers.
[Greg Kihlström] Well, and and to to that point, um certainly, you know, AI you know, for for those, you know, it’s been around for for decades. It it seems as if it was invented, you know, a couple years ago if, you know, if you weren’t paying attention, but but to your point, you know, predictive analytics, text analytics, you know, these are these are tools that have certainly been um been in use. Generative AI certainly is is kind of the thing that’s that’s been taking up a lot of oxygen now AGI as well. Um, you know, but from a customer experience standpoint, I think, you know, a lot of people are used to the the chatbots and I think we’ve all had varying levels of exp Oh yeah, the chatbot of old, where Right, right. Yeah, it’s um, it’s the it’s the newer equivalent of the the the phone tree doom loop, I I like to call it. Um, in in the worst case scenario. And in best case, sometimes it just helps you quickly on on your way. But thinking forward and and thinking um less reactive, I would say, and more proactive, you know, how do you see Gen AI or or other forms of AI really having a more high impact role that augments the, you know, those those contact center those agents or or others to be more strategic and more proactive?
[Courtney Shealy] What we just released a um a report today that’s expressing that 81%. It’s called state of the customer experience report. And 81% of surveyed practitioners, CX practitioners say that they need clear, measurable goals for AI and customer experience. And why that mandate is coming down, right? Let let’s be honest. It’s can I make my teams more effective and efficient so they can do more. I mean, that’s the end goal at the end of the day. But I think it’s also when you start prioritizing um what the front line needs and it it’s can I equip them with usable tools. And AI is not an easy button, and if you just, we’ve all had this experience of working shopping online and there’s the summarization of all the reviews, there’s just some tags, there’s some green checks, which mean, you know, positive sentiment, some some warnings to say, oh, this gets returned a lot. So we in our everyday lives, we’re engaging with not only machine learning, but also AI. And so there’s this expectation of can I evaluate the tools well? Well, in the same report, you’ll see that there’s for the AI to be wrong, there’s less forgiveness than there is for a human to make a mistake because we still need that human touch and that human moment. We don’t want to just over-rotate to where there’s not that connection, and we assume, right?
We assume we know what the next step is or what we should say next. So there’s going to be a balance and and our approach has been front line ready. Let’s make sure we kind of help to organize how the AI is going to respond and what it’s going to tell so that it’s a value and it creates action. But it also leaves room for when you want to make sure the human connection is there and how quickly the human connection should begin. Some customers, maybe that should be from the moment based on a segment, a class, or the complexity of the ask. In other cases, I want to make sure I reduce effort. We said that effort score earlier really matters. Can I make it easier to where Courtney can self-enable herself and execute on the task because Courtney’s very busy. I don’t want to prohibit that. So I do think that the AI tools that are coming in, we need to find the right moments of efficiency and automation because it’s those low-level tasks. But what we learned from the bot fiascos of the old days, we had to define the path. We had to be step one, step two, step three, step four. And what AI is allowing it it can faster compute the best options and the routes. And so for some of those tasks that really are just execution-based versus complexity of and require engagement, let me go capitalize on those things first. So, um, so I I would say, you know, we want to make sure that I don’t want to get rid of, and I advise all my customers, don’t get rid of the human need because even I don’t want to over-rotate on that. But I think it’s a matter of where can we use AI and to give you quick understanding but also make it defensible. So anything we serve up and we showcase, we need to make sure that I can backtrack and show you how, and that’s one of the other things that even I had frustrated with on my first engagement with a bot was, how did it decide that this was the route it was gonna go because I don’t even understand. So, so these are the things that I think are it’s moving so fast and keeping up with it. That’s where, you know, it’s it’s gonna be an exciting time to be in CX in my opinion.
[Greg Kihlström] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Courtney, thanks so much for joining today. Uh a couple last questions as as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[Courtney Shealy] Oh, it’s it’s funny. I think based on my last point, it’s like where has AI and CX worked well and where has it failed? And the faster you’re willing to um, kind of take the risk, be curious, and say, is it working? Is it not working? But I think it’s truly helping in a lot of ways, but we need to fast fail on the detraction and and course correct on that from that perspective because I do think that that will open the door for more creativity and growth for every organization, whether it’s from FinServe, to healthcare, to retail.
[Courtney Shealy] I mean, every everything needs a little bit of a fact check and, you know, I’m I’m certainly uh excited about, uh, you know, I’m I’m an optimist when it comes to this stuff, but it does it does help to, you know, take a look back and and and and do exactly what you just said. So, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s it’s fun. I I’m month to month we are we are, is that the best way to say that? Do that, work on that. I was like, oh, look at the I the the creativity and curiosity that is coming out of all that with our customers and how we share that across, like that’s where everything is going from zero to 60 versus saying, I’m going to slow and steady win the race of a lot of the CX programs of old. They’re all just very snappy now, which is a lot of fun.
[Greg Kihlström] Yeah, love it. Well, last question for you. Uh, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[Courtney Shealy] So one of the things that I personally have been doing, I can’t be in every customer account. I can’t read every article that’s out there. That is one where one way that AI is helping me to level up where I start to bring in um, people that speak on the subjects, right? Speak on contact center, speak not just myself but others. Yeah um, and I aggregate that information together and then I start asking my own questions based on things I see. So the way I’m leveling up is knowing that I can read 10 X more than I’ve ever read now because I start to kind of bring it all together in one call it notebook and then I can evaluate and engage with that data as if it’s a live um, thesaurus or library of information very quickly. So that’s how I’m kind of trying to keep up the best I can. And I’m not traditionally an early or an early adopter. But this has been, oh, great. Answer my question. This is great.
