Ken Peterson is the President of QuestionPro’s Customer Experience Division and joined me for an enlightening conversation about the intersection of AI and CX. QuestionPro’s Voice of the Customer platform already incorporates AI in its range of products from basic surveys to complex research, customer experience and employee engagement.
GenAI promises to change customer experience but what are the smartest strategies to create a win for the customer, a win for employees, while delivering on business outcomes?
Ken, a self-admitted geek and mathematician, shares his vision for the future and shared insights on practical applications.
In this episode of The Delighted Customers Podcast, Ken answers these questions and much more:
- How can companies be proactive in addressing customer feedback to prevent passive customers from looking for alternatives?
- What are some examples of AI tools, like those used by companies such as Target, that empower employees to assist customers more effectively?
- In what ways can AI contribute to customer retention, share of wallet, and add-on sales, as well as improve employee satisfaction?
- Why is it important for content to be curated and actionable when incorporating AI into customer experience, and how can companies ensure that employees are properly trained to use it?
Tune in to discover how integrating AI thoughtfully can revolutionize your customer service strategies.
Episode Notes:
Meet Ken
Ken Peterson has over two decades of experience in the marketing research, retail, technology, hospitality and transportation industries with a recent focus on Big Data Business Insights, and SaaS deployments. This ties in with his long history of P&L responsibility and detailed understanding of improving business operations. He has had the privilege of helping clients in retail, hospitality, technology, travel, sports and media better understand how to make use of the vast quantities of data that is now available, but often underutilized and misinterpreted. He enjoys delivering relevant insights, fact-based execution and bottom-line results.
LInkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenpeterson/
Website: https://www.questionpro.com/us/
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Mark Slatin:
Well, I am so excited about my guest on today’s Delighted Customers podcast. Ken Peterson has over two decades of experience in marketing research, retail, technology, hospitality, and transportation industries. More recently, he’s been focused on big data business insights and SaaS deployments. And this ties in with his long history of P&L responsibility and detailed understanding of improving business operations. He has had the privilege of helping clients in retail, hospitality, technology, travel, sports, and media better understand how to make use of vast quantities of data that is now available but often underutilized. and misinterpreted. He enjoys delivering relevant insights, fact-based execution, and bottom line results. Ken, welcome to the show.
Ken Peterson: Thank you.
Mark Slatin: Ken, I just shared a bit about what you’ve been up to in a broad sense. Can you bring us up to speed as to what your role is now, what you’re doing, and anything I may have missed?
Ken Peterson: Yeah, now I’m working. I’m the president of the CX division here at QuestionPro. It’s voice of the customer software that we roll out. And what’s been really terrific is over the years I’ve gotten to work with all of them. I won’t name all the names, but All the big players out there, when I was in my prior role at Ipsos, I got to work with them all. I saw what was good, what was bad, and the things that I got, I’ll say jealous of, and I got to bring it all together here at Question Pro and start picking and choosing and making a voice of the customer software setup that just sort of is in my image really of coming out from an operational standpoint, being able to deliver actions from the journeys that we talk about all the time in CX.
Mark Slatin: So are you like a little bit, because I’m more on the people side of this, but are you a little bit more of like a numbers geek, a data geek?
Ken Peterson: I am a little bit more of a data geek. In fact, my role before I accidentally stepped into market research and customer experience. I worked for a retailer and I was doing all the operational analytics behind the scenes. I was the guy that was doing the sales forecast, bringing in all the sales from prior years, trying to predict what the sales would be, and then from those sales, deliver inventory plans, deliver labor plans, labor forecasting, and all those things. So I was the guy behind the scenes. They called me the king of spreadsheets. And I had some, I mean, this is early days and those spreadsheets couldn’t handle much, but I had some killer spreadsheets. And the flip side of that is you never saw the human element of it. It was just all, you know, what are the numbers? If there’s a storm coming, how will that affect us? You know, we have predictions for things like that. And then just spit them out and say, OK, well, here’s the inventory the store gets, here’s the labor the store gets, and you better get these sales or you’re in trouble. Not that they had much say in it, but that was basically my role before. So it was very numbers driven.
Mark Slatin: Interesting. All right. So QuestionPro is a company mentioned like a VOC platform for those people who are a bit less familiar. Give us an idea of what it can do for a company.
Ken Peterson: Well, I mean, if you look at, you know, all the big names out there, when you talk about the voice of the customer software, um, there’s one thing that actually drew me to question pro and it’s the sophisticated survey tool. I mean, it’s amazing. I mean, I worked with them in my prior role and it’s just an amazing survey tool and. It took a lot to talk me out of retiring in my little place in Hawaii, but Viv managed to and it was because I knew the background of the platform because I’d used it before as one of them that, you know, one of the many partners we had when I was with Ipsos. And what’s really different about it now is, you know, I’ve, you know, I’ve mentioned it before, but I say it’s all about, you know, understanding those journeys and taking the actions. We have that full suite. We have customer journey mapping, which then in turn for each touch point, you can measure for that touch point. You don’t have to have You know, some companies like to build this one survey. Oh, you’re talking to a customer, so let’s ask them 50 questions about every aspect of their journey. No, we can make that all about the micro journey. We have one of the most sophisticated closed loop feedback systems out there. I know because I was huge on the closed loop feedback. I mean, that’s part of the operational side, being able to take action and then taking those tactical actions of responding to one customer at a time and then turning them into strategic actions. not just fixing one after another after another. I always talk about my car rental experience where I complained once and I just got a coupon like 10 seconds after I submitted the survey. So I complained every week just to see if they would do anything and I just kept getting these $25 coupons on my next car rental that I couldn’t really even use because you can only use one per and it was like no one was listening. And if they had been listening, they would have been able to fix the systemic problem. So we really like to talk about that outer loop as, you know, that, you know, it’s not just fixing the one offs, it’s bringing the team together and taking actions. And then that feeds right back again into the journey map of we’ve got to change the map, we’ve got to change the flow, we’ve got to change the process for this persona. And it’s a nice cycle. So that’s really what I’m so appreciative about since I’ve come to QuestionPro is being able to build that out sort of in my, I’ll call it my operational image, but still have a little bit of emotion tied in with it because we can fix the problems. We can get back to that one person and say, here’s the solution for you.
Mark Slatin: So I, at Michigan State, I teach a course called Customer Relationship Management, and it’s not a salesforce.com course. It involves, at some point of it, it involves using automation to improve the experience and nurture and develop customer relationships to drive loyalty. But it’s really more holistic about how you build trust, earn loyalty through the process, how to use strategic CRM, and then the whole operational CRM is the part we’re talking about automating. So when you mentioned inner loop and outer loop of the closed feedback loop, some people listening may not completely understand. So would you mind just breaking that down for people?
Ken Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I mean, if you think about an experience that an individual will go through, um, they’ll, they’ll walk in and let’s take something simple. If you go to the grocery store, um, you’re going to pick up five or six items for dinner. You’re going to check out anywhere along there. That experience can break down. It could be a product was out of stock. It could be, um, you went to the produce department and things look like they were falling apart. or you get up to the cashier and the cashier might’ve just been having a bad day and said very flippantly like, oh, you just had to pick my register, didn’t you? And I recognize that as a bad day. I was a cashier at one point. I know how that is. So at any one of those points, you could have that service breakdown and you walk out of there and you have your receipt in hand and it says, how was your visit? And you come back and you say it was terrible because it might be one of those items that sets you off. It might have been all three of those items that set you off. But that closed loop feedback, basically, once you finish that survey, gives that store an opportunity to call you back and say, hey, I want to apologize for what happened. Empathy is a big part of it. Don’t try to cover up a mistake. Don’t say, oh, you misinterpreted what happened. Just apologize and say, if you come back in, call me, Ken, and I will give you $5 off your next purchase. And that’s what we call the inner loop. It’s very tactical. It’s one customer at a time. It’s very much taking in and saying, we messed up with you, we’re going to fix it. And then you can then take that same closed loop ticket and talk to the cashier that mouthed off, talk to the produce department and say, Hey, maybe freshen up the older stuff. Don’t use it. Don’t bury it underneath and put the fresh stuff on top because everyone takes the fresh stuff. And then, you know, all the things, and then make sure you talk to the stocking manager and say, Hey, you know, when we’re out, make sure it’s getting back on the shelf. We had this in the back and a customer missed out. So, It’s very tactical in nature. And, you know, you know, I hesitate to call it one off because there’s a lot of these that happen on an everyday basis. And that’s the reason for what we call the outer loop, which is if it happens over and over again, if we keep going in there and we see, Hey, our produce is getting skewered as this horrible mess. Every time customers are coming in, they’re complaining about it. Well, is that a problem with the distributor we use? Is it a problem with how the store is stocking it? Is it a problem with, hey, maybe the heater’s not working correctly in the store? It could be any one of those things. So that outer loop brings the task force together and says, we’re going to create a plan to fix this, measure it, assess it, and make sure we’re doing better. Because you certainly can’t give $5 off every time someone complains.
Mark Slatin: And in both of those instances, you can potentially save customers from leaving.
Ken Peterson: Yeah. And I’ve often said that, you know, I’m a middle child, so I take it a little personally. You know, you have promoters and detractors. Promoters, you say, oh, give us a good review on Yelp. Detractors, oh, we’re so sorry. Well, let’s fix things for you. Those passives just get ignored like a middle child. And but it’s those passives that if you don’t fix these processes, they start to slowly slide down the scale and they become that churn risk. And that’s, you know, that’s the big thing that people forget when you, when you don’t fix these problems. I mean, the produce is an easy example. They might walk in and say, I’m fine today. I’m fine today. I’m fine today. But fourth, fifth, sixth visit, they start to go. It’s not as good as it used to be. And maybe I’ll go somewhere else.
Mark Slatin: Hmm. So, um, so powerful. Thanks for breaking that down. And, uh, it’s just so critical because if you’re not doing this, um, you’re, you know, I hate to say it, but you’ve got your head in the sand because it’s still, whether you measure it, whether you have a closed feedback and inner loop and outer loop, whether you’re doing it or not, the customers are still having that experience.
Ken Peterson: Exactly.
Mark Slatin: So you just don’t have an opportunity to respond to it if you don’t know about it.
Ken Peterson: Yep.
Mark Slatin: And we could probably spend a lot of time talking about the best way holistically and operationally to manage a program or a system like that. But I want to switch our attention to what’s happening now because you’re a great person to ask. You’re at the forefront of this thing called AI. and in particular, how to operationalize AI to improve the customer experience. So first of all, why is this a big, I’m assuming you’re a proponent of it, why is this a big deal and why should leaders care?
Ken Peterson: Well, I mean, it’s obviously a big deal. With my clients over the years, there’s always this phrase, you can have it faster, better, and cheaper.
Mark Slatin: Right.
Ken Peterson: But you probably have two of those three. Well, AI changes that. You can have three of those three now. You can have it faster, better, and cheaper when you’re using AI. So taking that broadly and then sort of synthesizing it down to customer experience specifically, you can start to see where AI can help us better serve the customers. And it’s so huge. There’s cautions around it, but it’s also like one of these things that you can really, and we talk about it all the time, we don’t follow through with it all the time, but we talk about empowering the frontline. And that is, AI gives us that possibility. Calling into a contact center is one of the most mundane, painful things that one has to do. First of all, if you’re calling someone, something’s probably already went wrong. Your package didn’t show up. You had a bad experience. You couldn’t complete the ticket purchase on the airline’s website. Whatever it is, something’s probably already gone wrong to the extent that you’ve already had to make this call. Then you make them go through this little system that says, oh, well, press 1 if this, press 2, and they go through that phone chain. And then you finally get to a person and anyone that works in contact centers knows that as soon as you get to the person, they ask you, what problem are we dealing with today? And on their screen, there’s like 30 options. And they just pick the number and say, okay, we’re going down this chain today. And there’s a script behind it. And there’s, you know, just this map that says go from point A to point B to point C to point D based on what the customer answers. AI flips that because now you can personalize that response. With AI, I’ve had We have one internally where if someone asks me, are we SAS 16 certified? I can actually type it into our Slack account and say, are we? And it spits out all the certifications we have and says, yes, you are, and things. Now, someone in the contact center now has that ability with the right tools to be able to give that response. And so this is a huge game changer. A lot of people, I remember when it first came out, they said, oh, anyone in service is going to lose their job. Companies are going to use it to save money. They’re going to cut all their support staff. And all you’re going to have is AI automation for everything. And I don’t think we’re ready for that. I mean, there was an Air Canada example last year where they ended up getting sued. I don’t know why they went to a lawsuit for it. But the AI chatbot gave a customer the wrong answer. the refundable, they thought they had a refundable ticket and turns out they didn’t. But so it’s one of those things where maybe it’s, it’s not good as a standalone at this point, but it’s great to help supplement how customer service agents respond to the customer. We’re seeing it more and more. And it’s great in that aspect. Will it save us money long-term? Yes. Every company is going to save money by having this. Are we going to eliminate employees? I hope not. I mean, I hope we enable the employees empower the employees with more tools that they’re disposable to say, hey, I have an answer for you, because I could type it in my machine here. I say AI right now is at this place where if it’s curated before you go to the customer, it’s great. If you’ve ever gone to chat GPT and type something in, and sometimes you get a response and you’re like, I was not expecting that. And I think that part’s wrong there. It’s not perfect at this point, but it will long-term allow us to save money and better serve the customers.
Mark Slatin: And can I just affirm what you just said and just add to it? So you mentioned that person who’s picking up the phone and calling the call center, something went wrong. I heard, yeah, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I can’t wait to call this call center. I heard once that actually a CXPA inside exchange conference back when we used to call it that. It was keynote speaker, and I’m pretty sure he was from Comcast. And he had this quote, which is almost paradoxical that we had someone from Comcast, which is true for all of them. They’re all pretty much in the same general band when it comes to how customers feel about their service. But he said, the customer service happens when the experience is broken. And so you’re calling it and something went wrong to your point. What you’re talking about, the AI solution, helping to provide the agent with more information at their disposal, quicker, way more, you know, more accurate, more comprehensive, more personalized. Not only are you helping improve the customer experience, you’re helping the employee Because again, by the time they’re calling in and the phone tree you just talked about, they’re frustrated. So now, do you want to be the one taking however many 80 frustrated customer calls a day? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a tool where you could give them quick, accurate answers? So it does have, wouldn’t you say, an impact on the employee experience?
Ken Peterson: Oh, yeah. I mean, absolutely. The people, the companies, the brands that are enabling and empowering their employees with it see the difference. I mean, Target is a great example. They’ve already rolled out an app that every one of their employees on the store floor can quickly find out just about any question just by pressing the microphone prompt and saying, hey, do we have product XYZ in stock? And it goes to their database and says, it’s in stock. You can find it in this location. If it’s not there, it’s in Bay 234 in the back room, or it’s not in stock, but you can find it at this store here. And it’s amazing how much that really helps a customer. Can you imagine telling a customer, we don’t have it in stock, but I’m going to make your life better by telling you where it is in stock. I mean, those kinds of things are now, I mean, realistic for when someone’s on the floor. And that kind of empowerment just, I mean, employees love it because now you’re not dealing with a frustrated customer, you’re helping the customer. And I mean, that’s where we should be aiming for. We shouldn’t be aiming for, how can we, you know, get the most out of this customer? It’s, you know, how can we frustrate them the most? So they just buy whatever we want them to buy. It’s how can we enable our frontline employees to help the customer even more? And then even better is, hey, if you’re buying something that requires a battery, the AI can tell the employee, like, hey, make sure you recommend AA batteries because they’re going to need it for that. It doesn’t come with batteries. Make sure you get the power plug for the new phones because most people don’t realize that new phones now don’t come with power plugs.
Mark Slatin: So the terms related to what you’re saying I’ve heard is NBO and NBA. Right. So next, next best offer, which would be the batteries and next best action.
Ken Peterson: Exactly.
Mark Slatin: You know, and so you’re helping what you’re talking about really is customer retention, potentially improvement in share of wallet or add on sales, um, potentially profitability improvement because whatever that other product is more going in the basket and then going back to employee retention and satisfaction.
Ken Peterson: Oh, yeah.
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Ken Peterson: I say, without a doubt, the first thing top of mind is make sure it’s curated. And by that, don’t pull what Air Canada pulled and say, set a chat bot free and say, good luck with that. You know, I actually, you know, it’s strange to say something like, hey, I’d rather have them call a number. But no, if you have a chat bot that’s giving you bad information, you need to reprogram it and say, okay, just tell the person to call customer service and get the right answer, rather than get the customer to a point where they’re that you could ever have happen, not just for that customer, but for the brand in itself. And so curating the content, that target example is a great example, because the employee can look at it, and if it came up with a wrong answer, if it said, hey, you’ll find mobile phones in our freezer section, employee can go, hey, that’s clearly wrong. Now, I hope whatever AI they’re using doesn’t give that as a response, but Let’s be practical. Sometimes it gives you the wrong response. So number one, make sure you’re curating it. Number two, make sure it’s giving and I always use the word actions. don’t let it give back fluff. I mean, you could say to chat GPT, tell me about the cosmos and what they mean to people. And it will give this nice big flowy, you know, probably almost poetic answer. And you’ll be reading it. And it’s like, no, what I’m really trying to say is, How does astrology affect us humans on the planet? And chat GPT just reads it as, oh, you want some sort of philosophical response. So make sure it’s actionable. And then the third part corresponds to those employees. Make sure the employees know how to use it. Make sure that they’re trained to use it. One of those rare things that people tend to forget is make sure the employees understand they’re not being replaced or being supplemented. They’re giving them more tools. So when you train them and show them how it will help them do their jobs, they start to understand that, oh, I’m not going to be replaced by a robot. I think we’ve already seen that failure. They automated a complete, you know, fast food burger stand, and no one used it because there were no employees. No one knew what to do. No one knew to turn on the lights in the morning at 6 a.m. and say, hey, we’re open now. So, you know, just by giving those employees that empowerment and that training on how to use it right, that really will help organizations operationalize it the right way.
Mark Slatin: Well, I love that. Curate it, make sure it’s actionable and train the people who need to be trained on that. Ken, how, if at all, at this point is QuestionPro entering into the AI and incorporating it into your solutions?
Ken Peterson: Oh, well, I mean, we have several ways. Number one, and it’s again, I’ll speak curation. We have this thing called QXBot. It came out like you know, we were already one of the early adopters. Uh, it, uh, chat GPT opened up on what November 30th. And by December 2nd, we had introduced our QX bot, which allows you to just say, Hey, give me 10 questions about this topic. And it scours and it looks at for the smart thing. So if you said, Hey, I want a 10 question survey about a retail store experience, it will spit it out. Now I’ll also say. Once it spits it out, it does give you the opportunity to curate it and say, OK, I like these eight questions. I’ll rewrite these last two and I’ll add one or three tickets because they’ve had six complaints in which you’ve just given them $5 and we know that they’re coming back for the $5. So they will start analyzing this information and saying, we know who you should prioritize, we know where you should take action, and we know which customers are going to be most meaningful for your bottom line. And you can’t expect the store manager to really ever know how to do that on their own. And you can’t hire enough data analysts to get that data there, let alone get it there real time, where they can actually take some action while the customer is in the store, for example.
Mark Slatin: So that’s really, really powerful, Ken. And what I love about what you just said is use the word actionable, which I do hear you use a lot. So whatever we, whatever we develop, they can’t just be insights, right? So I’ve got one more question cause we have to land the plane, but it’s the same question I ask all my guests. And that is what advice would you give to your 20 year old self?
Ken Peterson: Well, I mean, aside from mining Bitcoin and investing in Microsoft, I definitely, one of the things that I really wish I had spent a little more time on is really some of those. I’m a math major and a lot of people don’t know that, but I never took courses in Python or SAS and things like that. And I’m like, boy, I wish I just, you know, a little bit of basics on some of those would have helped me along this entire path. It would have just changed the trajectory. I mean, if you think of a graph, I mean, I certainly did well in this field and in this space, and I knew how to do the analytics. But really, just take the time to learn some of those things that just they’re tools that help you along the way. You know, and in my case, I wish it was like something like Python or SAS. Um, sometimes I tell people, one of the best classes that you can take is like a discrete logic class. It’s one of the most amazing classes that will really tell you how to think about these problems in a, you know, a turn on and turn off perspective. If then statements are king when you talk about programming. Um, so when you start thinking about the question that you’re going to ask the AI tool. And if then statement is a great place to start, but yeah, absolutely. I wish I had spent a little more time learning some of those really advanced statistical packages that, you know, even as a mathematician, you know, Fortran can only take you so far.
