Forbes: How Customer Journey Orchestration Changes Your Marketing Approach

 

This article was originally written by Greg Kihlström for Forbes. View the original article here.

Customers increasingly appreciate personalized experiences and are growing to expect them across all of the online and offline channels they engage with brands on. Companies that understand and embrace this are increasingly approaching their marketing and customer experience from a fuller customer journey perspective, as opposed to interacting with their customers using a more traditional marketing campaign approach.

In this article, I’m going to highlight some of the ways that marketing from a journey orchestration approach differs from a more traditional campaign approach and why this can be beneficial to both brands and their customers.

This article was originally written by Greg Kihlström for Forbes. View the original article here.

 

The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation  

Read More 

​ 

MarTech: 4 critical platforms to support customer journey orchestration: Getting started on CJO

 

This post was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Read the original article here.

Aligning your customer data, content management, CJO and analytics and reporting platforms is crucial for CJO implementation success.

This is the third article in a three-part series. In case you missed them, part 1 (People) is here and part 2 (Process) is here.

Customer journey orchestration (CJO) is supported by many platforms in addition to a single CJO application. Orchestration requires that omnichannel content management, customer data, testing and personalization, as well as analytics and reporting platforms are aligned. Therefore, we need to keep all of these in mind as we plan for CJO implementation.

In the last article in this three-part series, we are going to explore this by looking at four critical platforms necessary for your organization’s success with customer journey orchestration.

This post was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Read the original article here.

 

The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation  

Read More 

​ 

CMSWire: Defining Your Marketing Technology Philosophy

One incredibly helpful thing to define before embarking on an effort to define your technology infrastructure is to define what I call a marketing technology philosophy. This will consist of your guiding principles that point you in the right direction as you make fundamental choices about the types of platforms you incorporate or reject as part of your marketing technology stack.

Forbes: Understanding When To Use Automation, Orchestration And Next Best Action

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

The latest article by Greg Kihlström for Forbes Agency Council.

Customers increasingly want personalized content and experiences from the brands they buy from, and the race to deliver the most tailored experience is on among a sea of competitors. The range of methods to provide this personalization spans from more basic event-triggered automation to a more sophisticated “next best action” approach utilizing AI and machine learning, with other methods in between.

What is the best scenario to use, and how should your brand think about utilizing automation, customer journey orchestration and next best action? In this article, I will explore the benefits of each and when to use them.

Read the rest on Forbes.com

  

CMSWire: Agility Is No Longer Optional in Business

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the rest of the article here.

Agility is no longer an option, and agile marketing and CX organizations and businesses are best set up to weather whatever storms may be on the horizon.

Once relegated to software engineering teams, IT departments and other technology-centered practice areas, agile has made inroads to almost every area of business today. Yet many companies, and teams within companies, still are either reluctant to adopt more agile practices, or take steps to formalize the nascent agile practices they have already.

For those that are still on the fence, the gaps in their ability to deliver on transformative change initiatives, as well as the incremental improvements that keep businesses competitive, continue to grow.

In this article, I’m going to discuss why agility is no longer an option, and how agile marketing organizations and businesses are best set up to weather whatever storms may be on the horizon.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Read the rest of the article here.

  

Healthy Organizational Cultures with Gary David, PhD, Bentley University

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

Listen to the Episode

Prefer to listen? Click play on the video below to listen to the episode on YouTube. 

Today we’re going to talk about experience design from a systems perspective and what creates a healthy organizational culture. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Gary David, Professor of Sociology, Information Design, and Corporate Communication at Bentley University.

[Greg Kihlström]  Let’s start by talking about experience and relationship between customer and then employee experience, which we haven’t quite touched on yet. But how would you define this relationship between that customer and the employee experience?

There’s a really nice book, an older book now, that I reference quite a bit, and it’s called “The Customer Comes Second.” And I just did a talk on how to identify employee gifts and capabilities. And I reference this book. And one of the responses and the feedback was from an attendee who was very uncomfortable with this formulation of the customer coming second because we’re always taught the customer comes first. But in reality your employees need to be your first customer. And if your employees aren’t not just happy or engaged but if you’re not designing experiences with your employees in mind, the customer experience is going to suffer, OK?

And so if you focus on the employee experience first, the customer experience can benefit from that focus. And so they’re really closely connected. And this goes back into the systems framework, right, that companies often treat experiences as siloed, user experience as separate from customer experience, as separate from employee experience, from digital, from brand, from et cetera. I focused on what I call integrated experience design, or how to align these experience channels in a strategic way so that they’re not working against each other. And especially around employee and customer, you’ve really got to focus on this employee experience to allow the customer experience to take off, right? But if it doesn’t start with the employees, you’re going to have a harder time moving the customer experience.

Can you have a good customer experience without good employee experience?

I guess it depends on how you define good, right? I mean, is it good enough? Is it good enough to keep them coming back? So there’s a lot of variables involved there. And one of the frustrating things about talking to a sociologist is the number of times we say “It depends.” And I tell my students, you know, “Every time I say ‘It depends,’ drink.” And then by the time you’re either going to be very well hydrated or very intoxicated, depending upon what you’re drinking right? Well, it depends. It depends how much are you paying me right now. No, I’m joking – only a little bit. You know, it really does depend on what’s good enough, and good versus great. And is “good enough” good enough?

I mean, you might be good enough, but is it going to be great? And is it going to be a key differentiator between you and your competitors? And going to the Pine and Gilmore work about competing on the ground of experiences, good enough might not be enough, especially as people up their game. And so it might be good enough for now. But it’s not going to be good enough for tomorrow. And so companies need to be thinking strategically and proactively around what it means to be good enough and how to do better in that space, especially around the employee experience as a starting point.

The tomorrow aspect is a key part to me. I think you can probably get something really good for a very short period of time because everybody’s trained and everybody’s at least somewhat motivated. But it’s sustainability of customer experience that really matters. If you have turnover because employees are disengaged or unmotivated, you’re not going to have a good customer experience. If your processes aren’t good from the start, again, you may have great customer experience one week or one month, but then it all kind of goes to hell after things shake out.

And I’m working on a book right now with the co-host of my podcast “Experience By Design,” and the book is called “Experience By Design.” And we’re writing a chapter on expectations. And I don’t think expectations get enough attention. And so it’s hard to evaluate “good enough” without first considering what the expectations are. And one of the classic examples of this is something like, you know, spirit, right? My expectations might be low, and this is part of the expectation-setting of the organization that they’re like, you know, “Don’t expect too much.” And one of my mottos actually goes back to a song by I think it was the Gin Blossoms, where the lyric goes, “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.” And so there’s a lesson to be learned there, not that we should set a low bar but that we, in terms of looking at perception of interactions, we also have to layer in there expectations, and how do we build expectations into our experience design to let our customers know what they might expect and also understand what our customers expect, and not just expect from ourselves or our competitors but connected spaces.

And so if I’m renewing my driver’s license online or if I’m doing something online, I’m not just expecting what I expect from the government for my driver’s license but I know how good Amazon does it, or I know how good someone else does it on an online space, so my expectations are going to bleed over into this other engagement, into this other interactional experience space and influence what my takeaway is from that. And so it gets into this very complex kind of experience-design environment that companies can often feel overwhelmed by, but I think part of our job as experience designers is to help those companies translate that complexity into action, so that they don’t feel overwhelmed by it but they can actually approach it from a proactive standpoint.

That’s a good segue to my next question. You talk about experience design from a systems perspective. What does that mean to you?

Well, for me as a sociologist, we’re trained to think in systems. And so take for example user experience. And I’ve been teaching our Ux program for a long time now, and we have a really great UX program at Bentley University. And often UX approaches the topic from what’s called an HCI model, or human-computer interaction. It’s often cognitivistic and individualistic. We’re testing how a person interacts with an interface. So the unit of analysis is the individual and their mental approach to it, to the interface, to the design, to the task, right?

There’s another approach. It’s called the computer-supported cooperative work approach. And this came out of Scandinavia in the 1990s. And this looks at the embeddedness of technology in an organization. Anybody who’s used a technology in an organization like an enterprise system knows that it’s not just how you interact with the technology but it’s how you’re interacting with the organization through the technology and how that technology might support or inhibit collaborative work and communication with other people in the organization. And so there’s layers of considerations going on. So that’s just, like, one example of a systems perspective. Another one, I was talking with a person in the patient experience space earlier today, and patient experience really doesn’t capture the complexity of what health care institutions are trying to accomplish because it’s not just patients. There are clinicians of various kinds. There are caregivers. There are insurance agencies. There are employers. There are government, regulatory agencies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of those different players have a vested interest in this healthcare space. 

So really the patient experience is about a much larger healthcare experience. One of the things I get my students to do and, when I consult, I get my clients to think about is elevating experiences. What’s the experience ecosystem that you’re operating in? So it’s not just about the customer as a touchpoint but it’s in a broader environment that this thing is taking place in, and how do we kind of map that out and think about that complexity, think about that system so we understand the forces that are influencing and impacting what we’re trying to achieve. 

Let’s switch gears a little bit here and talk about organizational culture and its evolution over time. So there’s healthy and unhealthy cultures. But in addition, there are also vastly different cultures from organization to organization that aren’t necessarily good or bad, just different, right? How can a leader know the difference between healthy and unhealthy and just different?

It’s a really great question because there’s not a clean answer to it. But I do think this is where, again, something like a sociology approach or an anthropological approach – I just came back from the Society for Applied Anthropology meetings that were in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I know both disciplines, sociology, anthropology. We study culture. This is what we do. We often do it from what would be called an ethnographic perspective, so we’re trying to understand the culture as a lived experience. And so it’s hard to extract the lived experience of culture simply from a quantitative dashboard, not that that can’t be a piece of the puzzle in our understanding, but it doesn’t provide us with all the answers of what that lived experience looks like. And so I think it’s really important for any leader to get out from behind the corner office and to really have trusted basically communication streams into their world. 

You know, just as a segue here, as a different topic, one of the things with Russia in the Ukraine right now is that Vladimir Putin didn’t have good information about the reality of the Ukraine because his advisors would only tell him things he wanted to hear. Well, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble, clearly, if that’s the world in which you live. And so you really need to have those lines of communication that incorporate multiple data streams, qualitative and quantitative, in order to get the more multidimensional understanding of what that culture might look like and also all the different aspects of culture, you know, so whether it is beliefs, whether it is practices, whether it is symbols, whether it is storytelling that’s being done by people in the organization, et cetera, all of those things are part of culture. And a good leader, in their attempts to understand culture, needs to have an understanding of what those things are in the organization.

To make it even more complex, there are shifts over time, too, right? So again, not only is culture not necessarily good or bad but also a company may need a different kind of culture. You know, a startup that’s six months old may need a different culture than a 16-year-old company. So, from your perspective, what are the things that maybe should shift in that older organization or over time, and what are things that may be counted as losses if they disappear?

That’s funny, I wrote a blog at my consulting website, http://ethno-analytics.com, if anybody wants to see it. And it was on basically what I called “reboarding.” And, you know, we talk about onboarding; we talk about offboarding. Well, what about reboarding? What about rekindling the fire that employees and organizations have for each other 10, five, 10, 15 years in? And I actually related it to a marriage. And, you know, when a relationship is brand-new, it’s all exciting and engaging. And you’re infatuated with the whole thing. And then maybe at the very end, you just want it to be over. You know? There’s another line from another song. We’re just going to pull out song lyrics. It’s by Amy Mann, “What started out with such excitement would gladly end in, you know, with relief.” So it’s like, let’s just get it done with. But, you know, before it gets to that point, how do you rekindle the engagement? And I think that, not just for organizations that are 16 years old or older, but if you’ve been with an organization for a certain length of time, how do you reconnect with each other? And I don’t think any attention, or much attention, is given to that. There’s so much attention given to the newness, and there’s more attention being given to the end stage. But that middle part, there’s a lot of opportunity there to re-engage, to not lose that excitement, to repurpose the relationship, to almost renew the organizational vows to each other, so that you can identify what you still like about each other. And if what you liked before is no longer sustaining, right, the newness, the excitement, how do we reinvigorate that? And so almost thinking about organizational relationship counselors and thinking about coming in with that kind of approach, you know, couples therapy between employees and organizations, to try to think about what did we lose? How do we recapture that? And this is part of, when I do this inventory assets, or accepting the gifts that employees bring to the workplace, that’s part of that effort, to really appreciating what each other has to contribute to one another so that you can make that connection work once again.

We’ve talked a bit about how things can shift; there’s a lot of diversity within what works at one org may not work at another. How do you measure healthy culture then? What are the metrics that might go into determining that?

There’s a lot out there. Andi Simon, who is a business anthropologist, wrote this great book, and I’m looking at my bookshelf because the name is escaping me right now, but Andi Simon, A-N-D-I, wrote a great book, and they talk about a survey from the University of Michigan that could be used for measuring organizational culture. There’s a lot out there, right, and that’s fine. I mean, I design surveys. I’ve done surveys. I’m not a big survey person, because I think surveys can be indicators of something, but they can also indicate just how people take surveys, right? So it might just be an indicator of that. 

As I tell my students, crime statistics have nothing to do with how much crime is committed and has everything to do with how police report crime. It’s a very different thing. I developed a class that was called Data, Context, and Information. And the point of it is, to make data into information, you need to add context. And if you’re just relying on a survey or this dashboard, you really have to understand the context in which that data is created, not that it can’t be useful, but, on its own, you should use it at your own peril or at your own risk. This is where developing multi-methodological, or what we would call triangulating, using different data measurement touchpoints to develop a better understanding of what’s going on in an organization. 

For example, I was talking with this organization that was experiencing a lot of change because they were hiring a lot of people. And I asked, “Well, how many remember when stories are being told?” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Well, you know, people who have been here for a while start saying, ‘Hey, remember when, you know, the organization just started and it was like this? Remember when we used to be at that other place?’ Or ‘Remember when it was just, like, the 10 of us?’” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, people talk about that all the time.” And I said, “Are you capturing that? What are those stories about? Are they about, you know, how far we’ve come in a happy way? Are they talking about it in a way that’s like ‘Remember when things were so much better?’ And how can you capture that to basically socialize the new people into the culture that you’re trying to create?” So even something like narrative can be a really important metric, if you know how to analyze it. And part of what I teach, and when I do consulting work I do it on my own, is analyzing the qualitative data you have all around you but you don’t know how to leverage. And that can be really valuable information because people might share it, just unconsciously. It’s just out there in the cultural space, and the organizations don’t know how to capture it, analyze it, and then turn it into actionable information to then build healthier cultures around.

About the Guest

From Gary:

As a certified applied and clinical sociologist, I use a systems approach to generate analytical insights, design solutions, and create client value.

As an instructor, consultant, and facilitator, I have worked with companies across sectors in achieving a contextually-based experience design strategy, developing community-based approaches to achieve distributed work, and identified opportunities for and barriers to organizational cultural change.

Research and instruction specialization in:

Ethnographic and qualitative studies of work,

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Achieving collaboration in distributed teams

Experience design

Forensic linguistics and applied conversation analysis

Organizational cultural inventory and change

Over 20 years of instructional experience across a range of audiences, including: undergraduates, MBAs, master’s program in UX, professional associations, non-profit organizations, and for-profit businesses.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host of The Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations on customer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017.  Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist at GK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board.  Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF. 

  

Creating a Consistently Great Customer Experience, with Wendy Pravda, Medallia

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

Listen to the Episode

Prefer to listen? Click play on the video below to listen to the episode on YouTube. 

Today we’re going to talk about how to ensure your organization takes a structured approach to providing a consistently great customer experience through CX governance. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Wendy Pravda, Principal Customer Experience Advisor at Medallia.

[Greg Kihlström] Let’s start by making sure that everybody knows what we mean by CX governance. So why don’t you start by defining that, and why is CX governance so important?

[Wendy Pravda, Medallia] Governance is the process that guides the company or the organization to identify the accountabilities across specific teams and individuals. And it also enables effective decision-making. It’s a critical component of change management and it ensures that something happens with all of the information you receive from your CX program. There are 3 main models for governance, generally, that we talk about:  centralized, decentralized, and hybrid models. And those are the three that in general companies use when talking about governance.

As timing and sequencing goes, when is the best time to define governance for an organization?

The best time is when you begin your CX program and you’re working on that change management component that I mentioned. It’s best to start thinking about it and defining it up front with your strategy. However, if you didn’t do this up front, it isn’t too late. You can always do it later, if you realize you have gaps and you need to establish governance.

For those organizations that might have some gaps, what are some of the signs that either they need some better governance or they might need some better governance?

If you’re seeing confusion with your team structure, with accountabilities, roles and responsibilities, those are things I hear often; also, if you’re not seeing inner and outer loop closure occurring as you should, we talk about inner and outer loop closure with clients a lot. With proper governance, it’s hard to close the loop effectively on the feedback coming in. If you don’t have that proper governance, you can’t do that well. So you need to ask yourself, “Is everyone clear on what they’re supposed to do? Do we have defined meetings with a purpose and cadence? Are we solving customers’ needs based on the feedback we’re getting?” And if you can’t say yes to all of those, then you need to look into governance. And I can’t stress enough how important governance is.

Can you elaborate a little bit – you mentioned inner/outer loop – for those that might not be as familiar with that?

Yes, so your inner loop is when you are closing the things that happen on a daily basis, let’s say in your field, right? You have things coming in and so you’re closing that loop with the feedback that you’re getting, regularly. The outer loop is going to be the bigger themes or bigger topics that you’re seeing coming in from multiple people, so on an aggregate basis, and those are things that you’ll end up needing executive buy-in on. You’re going to probably need cross-collaboration with teams to determine which of those issues you fix first. But you need to be looking at both of those, right? So there’s the closing of the inner loop and the closing of the outer loop. And that governance is going to help get you both.

You mentioned earlier about there being three different main models of CX governance: decentralized, centralized, and hybrid. Can you talk a little bit about each of those and point out if any of these models generally work better than others?

Yes, so centralized is when you have 1 CX organization with one central leader. So picture one leader at the top, and there’s strong corporate authority there. There’s support from champions and key functions. And I’ve really found that this model works best for smaller organizations. It could work for larger companies. But this is really a model where you have that central leadership. So that means it’s going to be more autocratic in nature. 

Decentralized is different in that model. The CX program owners are in each business unit. So think of multiple executives. So there are independent CX teams and each department has autonomy. So that would work well in an organization that has multiple executive leaders or different sorts of businesses. 

And then, lastly, hybrid – and this is the one, by far, that we recommend the most. It works well for a lot of companies. It’s a blend, really, of the two. So there’s a central advisory and governance with localized accountability. So you have a CX team and councils that meet regularly, so those councils are made up of different people in the organization that meet. But you also have that CX team. So the centralized corporate team focuses on methodology, systems, and best practices, and then the execution is done in the business units. So it’s a little bit of, you know, best of both worlds, and it can work for small or large organizations equally well.

In that hybrid model, then, what are the kinds of roles and maybe departments that are sitting in those groups?

So let me give you an example. In one of my previous companies, how it was set up, it was a hybrid model. We had a global organization, and that global organization looked at things like best practices. They managed the main contract with the vendors. And they looked at it globally, so they had APAC; they had EMEA; they had the U.S.; they had Canada; they had Mexico; they had everything. Then you had the localized people, so CX positions that were in each region. So let’s just say the U.S., for instance, had a CX team of their own, and there were councils that would meet between sales, between customer service, between marketing. So you had multiple teams that impact CX, and those councils would meet together. There were also councils that would meet for all of the regions up into global. So there’s a lot of cross-pollination and cross-learning, but the execution work is being done in those local areas.

That makes a ton of sense because I often say CX is everybody’s job. I completely agree with you that governance is definitely needed, but it allows for all of the different roles: sales, marketing, I.T., all of those different roles that you need.

Exactly, so you want to get those people involved in those council meetings. And hybrid model will help allow for that, not that the other ones don’t, but we just find that that hybrid model really allows for those councils to get together and that cross-collaboration.

So let’s talk a little bit about measurement. I think there’s two ways of looking at measurement. One is the CX metrics, so, you know, are customers satisfied; are they buying more; all of that. But talk a little more, internally, how do you measure that your CX governance is working with more of an internal and an operational measure?

So that is an interesting question. I would say if your governance is working if you have a clear team structure, you know, cadence; you understand the roles and responsibilities and that’s all established and working, and also, like I said before, if your inner and outer loop are being closed successfully. So there isn’t a specific metric just for governance. But you’re going to know if there are gaps, and you can, at least, metrics-wise, look at your loop closure metrics.

That makes sense because it’s also, because it’s hybrid and somewhat decentralized, the reporting structure isn’t centralized, so I would imagine it can become challenging based on some of the normal metrics that, you know, you and your boss have a certain set of metrics that are used to to measure your success. But when you’re working cross-enterprise, it’s a little bit different.

Yeah, and, you know, the thing is that governance means so much, right? It’s all these different practices that come into play. And a lot of it does have to do with the structure, right, making sure that everyone understands their roles, that everything is being accomplished as it should. And thus then your inner and outer loop are going to get closed. So that’s why I say it’s a little hard to find a specific metric for governance, but you will know. You will know if things are going well, and if everyone understands what they’re doing and if things are being closed and done successfully for the customer.

Well, and so one part of it is ensuring that you’re being successful. We’re here on the Agile Brand podcast, so this is a bit of a leading question, but what about the systems of continuous improvement, and are those working groups or that hybrid model responsible for continuous improvement as well, like how would you handle that?

Yes, so if you are looking at what you’re doing well or what you’re not doing well, especially in those council meetings or in your CX function, you know, you should always be looking for that continuous improvement. It’s a loop that you go through even with governance, right? You’re going to continually assess, “How are we doing, and how do we do things better?”

About the Guest

Wendy Pravda is Principal Customer Experience Advisor at Medallia.

From Wendy:

I am a results-oriented marketing professional with over 20 years’ experience in digital strategy, customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX).

I started my journey during the .com boom, where I worked on the agency-side, for clients such as Motorola and Ditch Witch, performing usability tests and guiding UX design for websites. From there, I led an agency team on omni-channel marketing campaigns, managing projects and strategy for website design, SEO, email, videos and PPC for companies such as Dell, HP, AMD and Seagate.

With a strong background in digital marketing and UX, I wanted to continue to gear my focus toward customer-centric marketing around the digital space, using data as a backbone. At this time, I shifted over to the client-side, and worked for companies that needed my expertise to build full marketing programs from the ground up.

I worked at Microsoft, where I managed global digital strategy for several products that had recently been acquired by Microsoft. Next, in my position with Verio, I started an analytics platform and was able to guide decisions based on data, which led to increased Marketing performance. At Rocky Mountain Health Plans, a health insurance company, I ran digital initiatives and customer experience, working on changes and challenges during Obamacare implementation. This was when I started look at CX in a different light and wanted to do even more in this space. I then came to ExxonMobil, where I ran digital marketing and CX training for the corporation, executed omni-channel marketing campaigns and managed overall CX vision and strategy.

Having worked for multiple types of verticals, in both B2B and B2C, I bring a breadth of knowledge into my profession. I have a passion for this field and am so thankful that I fell into this area of work during the .com boom.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host of The Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations on customer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017.  Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist at GK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board.  Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF. 

  

Improving CX with Conversational AI, with Bob Summers, Goodcall

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

Listen to the Episode

Prefer to listen? Click play below to listen to the episode.

Today we’re going to talk about improving the customer experience with conversational AI. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Bob Summers, CEO of Goodcall.

Your company is described as helping businesses grow with accessible AI. I thought that was an interesting description. Can you describe what is your definition of accessible AI, and why is this so important?

There are a couple of components here. But when we talk about accessibility in this regard, it’s that the product is easy to use. So there’s, say, kind of, a wave of technologies now like this “no code” element. Maybe some of your listeners have heard of “no code,” which allows anybody, you know, a salesperson, a marketer, someone who doesn’t have any technical skills, or low technical skills, to be able to build something of value. And so we talk about accessibility, we’re thinking about how can an average person with general tech capability create a conversational AI that can work for them? 

So that’s the first component, which is to make it really easy to use. Take the power of something, so conversational AI, in terms of its deployments, have been in two markets, consumer, as I mentioned, like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, and enterprises, like really big enterprises like Apple – like if you’ve ever had an issue with your Apple phone and you called Apple, you’re going to talk to a conversational AI first. If you’ve talked to Verizon, or like big telecom, or even airlines, your first round is through some kind of conversational AI. But what’s missing, in terms of solutions, is that other market, which is the SMB market. So we want to enable that group to be able to technically implement the product at low cost. And so there’s the second dimension, is that – so first is ease of use, and second is it’s cost-effective. So big enterprises can spend millions and millions of dollars annually to build their conversational AIs. This is obviously way beyond what an SMB can spend. And so we’ve made our product affordable in the sense that you can start using it at no cost per month, and then our premium tier is only $49 per month, per location. So it’s a huge difference in price.

What motivates you about approaching the SMB market? What’s the opportunity and what’s your motivation for seeing that through?

First of all I’ve witnessed firsthand, not only as a consumer, like a caller of these local businesses, but I have many friends that run these businesses, hair salon, barbers, contractors, lawn-mowing. These are people that I know that struggle just to manage opportunity. And so what I mean by that is that the phone channel is the primary channel for this particular group of customers. So if you’re a business that’s getting more calls than you can manage, what happens? The experience is terrible. You’re going to get just a ringing phone line, voicemail, or maybe you’re put on hold for a long time. And that customer experience is just bad for the customer; it’s bad for the business. And if you’re a platform like Google or Yelp that, maybe, made that introduction, it’s bad for them, too.

Our team wakes up every day eager to essentially add value to every single call that comes into a business because, when they don’t answer the call, it’s a lost opportunity to gain a customer or a lost opportunity to retain an existing one. So this is what we’re just really passionate about, and we see that there’s a massive gap in terms of solutions in the marketplace. There’s either consumer or there’s stuff at the enterprise. 

There’s another piece of this, too, which the audience might appreciate, which is that you might be a larger-size enterprise. This caught me by surprise. I was talking to a customer earlier this week, and they said that they were evaluating standing up a contact center. So this is a business with a couple hundred stores, and they were evaluating what it would cost, because, so a couple of things are going on. There’s a labor shortage, so they’re struggling to answer calls. And this is really impacting their business in terms of revenue. And so this enterprise, “OK, what would it cost for us to stand up our own contact center or call center?” And the early costs, it was at least a million a year, to stand up something with decent quality. And so that’s one solution he’s looking at. The next one is, and they’d already tried this, was spending a few thousand dollars per month on an answering service. And the quality was just terrible, right? So these answering services, they’re form-filling, their people don’t really know the business. 

So the area that we’re at is there’s something in the middle, which is essentially an AI, which you can train, and it learns with every call. And that’s what Goodcall is all about; it’s learning about your business and, when calls come in, it can route these calls to self-help online websites that you may have built for appointments or pricing. Any kinds of investments you’ve made digitally, Goodcall is very good at moving people in that direction.

You mentioned this definitely can have an impact on the customer experience because you’re able to get exactly what you need and consistent delivery of information. It sounds like it’s a benefit for the owner. You know, one other potential benefit here I can think of would be, what about the other employees of an organization? They’re picking up the phone, answering what are your hours, and they’re trying to do their day job or whatever it is, restocking shelves, or whatever the rest of their day job may be. Can you talk about that component?

There’s this really interesting tension that occurs in many of these smaller stores, where you have people that are doing a balancing act between what they’re doing in person and also serving someone on the phone. And a product like Goodcall does something really fantastic, which is it triages inbound calls, meaning there can be spam or scam calls that come in; it virtually eliminates those, because you have to be able to talk to the machine in a way that it understands to get through. And, I mean, you can ask the machine, “Hey, I need to talk to somebody,” and it will route that call, but these spam robots can’t do that.

So what this means is, when the phone does ring, because we’re not trying to eliminate calls into the business, definitely not. But there are so many repetitive calls that a machine can do that the solution is really there augmenting that staff that’s on the ground so they can focus on the thing that they’re good at, right? 

So I think, as we’ve seen wages go up in this country, owners and even the individuals want to do things that matter, right? And answering the phone and telling someone they’re open or closed tomorrow, or they need to wear a mask, or some of these other things, like, “Hey, you can order our product from our website,” or “Here’s our pricing schedule,” these are things that are better done with machines. And this is where we think part of the future of work is automation of these mundane tasks. And conversational AI, I can report, is doing quite well at moving these types of tasks and automating them so the people in the store can do their job.

One data point we have is a large customer with hundreds of stores in the home services market, and we’re converting almost 30 percent of their inbound calls to online transactions. And these were missed calls, calls they couldn’t answer at the store, that the machine picked up and converted to paid. And that’s just a dramatic change. And we see that universally, like callers might not be aware, “Oh, there’s an online option,” or, “You know what, I thought I needed to talk to somebody, but I don’t want to wait anymore. Let me just go ahead and use that website and get this thing done.”

What are some of the other measurable KPIs that businesses should consider when adopting a tool like this?

Yeah, so the number one is revenue, right? So if the business has invested in online infrastructure, it’s a digital infrastructure to take orders or whatever the transaction of that business is, the machine is really good at moving them via links to those resources. And those could be tracked, right? So we could actually attribute directly, the machine is generating this much revenue. Fantastic, right? Reduction in spam calls, meaning, so that when the phone does ring, is it valuable to me? The next one would be, is there more traffic to the online systems? And am I seeing efficiency in my staff, like doing things in the store or addressing other tasks? So if they’re measuring efficiency in some manner, they should see an increase there.

Let’s switch gears a little bit and just talk a little more broadly about conversational AI and how it affects customer experience in the enterprise. You have a lot of experience in conversational AI, and not even just at Goodcall, as you’ve worked in this space in a few different ways. Where do you see it going in the near future, in terms of transforming CX for maybe some larger brands?

There’s a lot of interesting activities going on out there. There’s a group of companies. The enterprise call center is not our sweet spot, but I’m very close with many people that are. There’s a lot of augmented capability out there that’s helping humans. There’s a company called Cresta that is helping call center agents with their scripts, like understanding, “Oh, the customer is upset; you should be more empathetic,” or “Make sure you have a strong closing.” Here the agent is kind of helping or coaching the human while it’s going on. So there’s another dimension of when conversational AI is not just this talking thing, but it’s listening and coaching actively.

And that’s really cool because it’s helping those people be more effective in a way that they could not be before. And then, beyond that, the other dimension, more on the side of where Goodcall is, note that our market segment is not call centers; our market segment is fully digital but assisting the SMB market, is that, if I could wave a magic wand, Goodcall knows everything it can about your business and can answer on behalf of you when you are not available. And it’s fully plugged into all of your digital systems. So it’s your voice assistant. It is your business assistant that’s interfacing with your customers every single day, no matter what mode they come to you, whether that be voice, chat, VR in the metaverse. Whatever it is, your business has this voice that understands your business and all of its digital hooks. 

So that’s where I think, if you look in the future, in five years or so, you might not even have a phone number to call. You would just tap the button for your agent, the agent of this business, and transact with it in an efficient way. Because it’s fully scalable, like, it’s never busy. It never forgets. It certainly doesn’t walk out the door the next day and take all its knowledge with it, right? So it’s quite compelling, the advantage of digital. And then there’s also the analytics side, which, because, when I talk with these SMBs, many of them don’t know how many calls they got yesterday.

They’re not measuring these KPIs. So how can they make it better? How can they drive marketing? I mean, the story of Goodcall started with driving phone calls to small businesses and people not answering the phone, I mean, like, this is really frustrating, like I’m driving dozens of calls to small businesses – and when I say me, like Google driving dozens of calls to a small business, and they can’t answer the phone to grow because they don’t have the capacity to answer the phone. So, fundamentally, your hands are tied, if you don’t have a scaled capacity in this channel.

I like that concept of augmentation, and I think that’s maybe even less scary to some that are less familiar with the concept than replacement. You know, that coaching thing is very cool. I’ve got to check that out. But even what you’re talking about with Goodcall and the SMBs is, it is augmenting someone who just simply cannot, for whatever reason, pick up the phone at the moment. And, you know, at the scale and the volume of leads and opportunities at a small or medium business, they can’t afford to miss those. So that’s really interesting.

Yeah, next time you’re sitting in the chair at a barbershop or you’re getting your nails done or you’re at the host stand at a restaurant, open your ears and see how many times you can hear the phone ring, or someone’s going to stop serving you and go answer the phone. And it’s actually bad for everybody. And so we need to help, and machines can help and augment so that those people can do what they’re best at.

About the Guest

Bob Summers is the CEO and Co-Founder of Goodcall, a conversational AI platform. Creative, collaborative and entrepreneurial product leader driven by customer delight and team development. His approach to enhancing our world is building practical applications with cutting edge technologies: making complex tech accessible to everyone. The result is a career of engineering, product and business leadership for consumer and smb applications of computer vision, machine learning, broadband, conversational AI and Internet touching tens of millions of users globally.

Beyond his passion for Internet products, he plays an active role in the entrepreneurial community founding both 460 Angels (now Virginia Tech Investor Network) and TechPad (acquired), a co-working space for software companies which helped 60+ startup companies . Through a crowdfunding campaign, university, government and business collaboration, he improved broadband access in a rural college town (Virginia Tech) by deploying a gigabit fiber network and the world’s first free open access gigabit wifi network: now GoGig Internet.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host of The Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations on customer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017.  Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist at GK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board.  Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF. 

  

Forbes: Getting Ready For Customer Journey Orchestration

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

This article was originally published through Forbes Agency Council. Read the original here.

Customer journey orchestration promises a seamless experience for your customers and greater revenue through timely and relevant offers and actions. These types of experiences create customers who buy, buy more often and bring their friends along as well. Getting to that point, however, takes careful planning, coordination across teams and choosing the right platforms and metrics to tie it all together.

I’ve been fortunate to work with many organizations to help prepare them for this big step and to work to ensure success at and after launch of customer journey orchestration. In this article, I’m going to discuss how to prepare your people, processes and platforms for customer journey orchestration.

This article was originally published through Forbes Agency Council. Read the original here.

  

Automation’s Role in Customer-Centric Retail Operations with Doug LaBahn, Cin7

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

Listen to the Episode

Prefer to listen? Click play below to listen to the episode 

Today we’re going to talk about automation, and how it is helping retailers stay customer-focused amidst a variety of challenges including supply chain disruptions and more.. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Doug LaBahn, CMO at Cin7.

We’re here to talk about a few challenges that retailers are facing today as they struggle to stay customer-focused. So let’s start by talking about some of the supply chain issues that retailers face. Can you describe the current state of things and the strain this is putting on retailers?

Certainly. I think you’re on a key topic here. There’s a lot of stresses in the economy. So there’s inflation, and prices are going up. So we see that our customers, and we have over 8,000 customers, are thinking about their pricing strategy and how to be fair to the customers and create a great experience so the loyal customers continue that loyalty without feeling the pressure of inflation. We also see, at the same time, supply chain challenges. So one of our many retailer clients, a fashion designer, Meghan Fabulous – and you know fashion is very season-oriented, so they’re ordering product but it’s arriving after the peak season for that. So lots of businesses are struggling with the delivery of the product at the right time, when customers want to purchase it. And the third one, which I think we’re all thinking a lot about, is, is there a recession on the horizon? Will consumers close their wallets and stop purchasing, or slowing their purchasing? So those 3 factors are really coming together to create challenges.

So how can increased automation of inventory help retailers alleviate some of the challenges associated with supply chain disruption?

Well, I would start by dividing the world into two types of businesses. You have businesses that are established; they’re successful, but they’re running on desktop and server-based technologies. And we’ve done a study of 4,000 businesses in the U.S. and the U.K., and 86 percent of businesses still have a lot of on-premise, old software. Those businesses are really struggling because they can’t get real-time information about customer purchases, about their inventory and consumer changes.

The second type of businesses have moved to the cloud, and now they’re natively integrated, meaning they have direct connections to their online marketplaces, to their retail stores. They can see their inventory in a physical retail store and online at the same time. This second group of businesses are thriving in large part because the automation reduces a lot of the manual work and a lot of the manual errors.

So platforms like Cin7 can be used by retailers to help with some of this. Can you talk a little bit about how your platform works and maybe how it differs from some other solutions that might be available?

Excellent, I’ll use a couple terms that I think everybody will be familiar with. So a 360-degree view of your business, or a customer 360, being able to see everything about your customer, and those are long-term trends, and people are at various stages of maturity and achieving those. What we provide is a 360-degree view of your inventory. So you can know, at any time, you can open a browser; you can open a mobile device, and know exactly how many you have in stock, in what locations, in what colors and sizes, in your stores, in your 3PL warehouses, or somewhere in your supply chain. So we give that 360-degree visibility in real time to our customers.

So let’s talk about another challenge now, switch gears a little bit. Inflation:  so how has inflation affected these companies, and what are the best methods that retailers can use to maintain profitability despite fluctuations in inflation?

Well, at a starting point, and it’s perhaps the basics, is a retailer can’t be successful if you sell a product for less than you paid for it, so the purchase price. What is hard for many businesses is also to understand all the handling costs and shipping costs that come from the point of location. So maybe you manufacture a product in Vietnam with contract manufacture. It’s shipped through Los Angeles. There are shipping delays in the Los Angeles harbor. And then you’re gonna put it for sale in your online stores, and you’re deciding between your own online store or Amazon, and how to price that. 

First, my sympathy to everybody that struggles with that. That is hard. What can make it a lot easier, though, is understanding your total cost of the product and the total availability of the product. So if you know what’s available, then you can sell it to the most profitable channel. Sometimes Amazon’s gonna be more profitable than your online store and other times you’re gonna want to send it to the physical retailer. When you add inflation to that, you have to anticipate what your cost to replace that inventory is. So your prices today may reflect the inventory that you bought six months ago in a slow supply chain. So you can still, on paper, provide profit if you’re reporting to your investors. However, you can’t replace that inventory at the same price. So you have to anticipate how that cost flows through your supply chain and ultimately to the customer.

So we’ve talked about inflation. We’ve talked about supply chain Issues. You know, what else is there? That’s enough, in and of itself, but what other changes, trends or competitive forces have your customers been experiencing, and how have the most successful ones adapted?

I like both of your questions. The first one is the reality everybody faces is a labor shortage. So not only that, if you’re focused on delivering great customer experiences, you may not be able to hire the people that you want and not be able to staff in the right locations or find the digital marketing skills that you need. So there’s significant challenges. What I can say with excitement and optimism is, in our study of 4,000 businesses, we found about 10 percent of those businesses, they were growing 40 percent faster than the year before. Everybody wants to know what the most successful businesses are doing, so we double-clicked on that, interviewed a number of them, and looked at what were the common traits of those high-performing businesses?

And I would boil it down, the findings, to very simple things. The first one is they’re working with great technology, so they’re using modern in-the-cloud technology so that they can understand where their product is, as we’ve spoken about supply chain. But one of the surprising facts is that it is also a much more enjoyable employee experience to use modern technology. I suppose, pre-pandemic, all of us can remember when you walked into a retail store and you said, “Hey, I want to buy this particular size,” and the retail associate at the desk said, “Well, unfortunately, we’re out of stock; let me call around to other locations and see if I can find that.”

Well, if you have a fully staffed team and you don’t care about costs, you can afford to have a retail associate call all the locations, and think of how long you as a customer are standing there, and how much it was costing the business. With today’s cloud technology, they look at their mobile device; they tap it twice and say, “Would you like it delivered to your home this evening or would you like it tomorrow? There’s a $5 service charge for that, or we can deliver it two days from now at no charge. What would you like, dear customer?” Think of the employee experience there of waiting, making all those calls, getting the customer increasingly anxious about waiting so long, versus tap your device and have the answer. So great customer experiences come from these modern technologies that enable both a beautiful customer experience and an employee experience.

That’s so great, and I think retail is definitely one of those areas where the employee experience can be so closely related to customer experience simply because there’s frontline employees, and that sometimes face-to-face relationship is so important, so that’s great to hear. Let’s now talk a little bit about Cin7’s business as well. So how has the pandemic and all the related challenges affected your outreach and approach to your customers? Did you experience any significant pivots in direction or anything like that?

So that’s a good question, and I think, like many businesses, when the pandemic hit in March 2020, the concern was “What’s going to happen to the economy?” And there was a big push to the online, and our software enables a retailer to be able to quickly turn on an online store and to sell to the customers the way they want to buy. So if the store is closed, they were able to buy online. So that helped our business. And there’s a business called Pepkor Specialty, and they were a traditional retail store with physical locations. And they did not have a single online store. We were able, for that business, and this is a large blue chip business, to open five e-commerce stores in less than four months. So we were able to turn on these stores and create and deliver great experiences in a modern SaaS world for a business that had very old legacy software. So that helped us, kind of, Act One of the pandemic.

Act Two of the pandemic was people returning to store shopping. So now people have been selling online and go, “Wow, my Shopify store, my online store looks beautiful, but when I’m standing behind the desk and looking at my old point of sale system, it’s looking pretty old and tired, and, by the way, it’s not connected to my online store so I can’t tell what stock I have and what the current customer purchased last time if they asked me, like, ‘What size did I buy last time?’” So now we’re seeing, as the retail stores open, people want to modernize their point of sales experiences. And we help with that by bringing that 360-degree view of the inventory.

Now, I think the third act is all the uncertainty about what’s going on in the world; is there going to be a recession? And it raises the question for many people, “Is this the right time to invest in technology?” And we compete in an area which is closely aligned to but different than traditional ERPs. So if you go out and you shop for an ERP and you say, “Hey, I think my business is ready for that,” you’re going to get a price tag of, say, $100,000 a year for the software and, say, $300,000 to implement that. And businesses are wondering, “Is that a good investment? I see the return from that; I know it can create better customer experiences, will be more efficient, but what if the economy slows down, and we’ve just made that $500,000 investment?” That third act actually plays very favorable to us because our software and the implementation is less than $50,000. If the economy gets tight, we’re well positioned because we deliver great value for the dollar.

That’s wonderful, and along those lines, I think you’ve touched on this already, but how do you stay customer-focused, to really understand and anticipate? Some of what you’re talking about is, kind of, paying attention to the trends, whether it’s economic or otherwise. But how do you stay customer-focused so you can better understand other aspects and empathize with what your customers either were experiencing or are experiencing?

Greg, I’m glad you asked that because I skipped the second part of our big study of what distinguished those top 10 percent of performers. And I hope your audience has a lot of consultants in the audience because the second thing that stood out that was very different for the top 10 percent was their use of experts. So if you’re running a business and I’m the chief marketing officer of our business, I actually have five digital marketing coaches or experts that I work with. So I get the brain power of an army of smart people to run our business. And I feel for the person that’s out there, and the CMO, or the customer experience person that doesn’t have their network of experts. And I say this from a point of data where those top 10 percent had on average five different experts consulting for their business. So I think the first mistake you can make in your customer experience is to try to do it on your own or to try to run workshops internally within your business. The benefit of an expert and the speed to answer is so significant, that would be the starting point.

About the Guest

Doug LaBahn is CMO at Cin7. He is a very experienced product and product marketing leader with an outstanding track record of scaling companies by bringing strong value propositions and business models to market to rapidly grow SaaS revenue. I love collaborating in fast-paced, collaborative environments and enjoy leading and building world-class marketing, product, innovation and channel teams.Customer focus, insights, story telling, digital/field marketing and service design all play important contributing roles in scaling product portfolios within small business, consumer and mid-market segments. I’m also appreciative of being part of awesome teams that have led businesses through growth curves from ~$100M to ~$800M ARR several times in my career. World class sustainable growth is a team sport and I am looking forward to doing it again.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host of The Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations on customer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017.  Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist at GK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board.  Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF. 

  

The Agile Brand Guide
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.