CX Champions

This episode features an interview with Alexandra Morehouse. Alex is Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health, a health system with hospitals and facilities in six states. In this episode, Alex talks about addressing data deprecation in the cookie-less future, integrating disparate systems after an acquisition, and the “Know Me” principle.

Quotes

*”Marketing used to be seen as the people who issued the invitation to the party. And now it's come to mean you better have the chips and dip and the drinks ready. Because if you stimulate all this demand, people either show up online, in a call center, or in your retail location. If you don't have this integrated experience, then your brand looks disorganized and of lower value.”

*”Healthcare in particular is under tremendous financial pressure. So digital transformation is simply taking transactions that used to be done with expensive people and moving them to technological self-service. And when you get that self-service in place, the customers are way happier.”

*”Baseline is, know who I am. So if I go into Urgent Care over the weekend because I sprained my ankle, and then they tell me, ‘Hey, you need to go and follow up with your primary care next week,’ when I show up next week, they better know that I was in Urgent Care over the weekend. And I think that's probably more important. That's what builds trust. And it's that continuity that says, all right, no matter where I show up inside your system, you know it's Alex and you're not going to treat me like a stranger. And because the whole industry has grown through acquisition, that is the challenge on the CX side.”

Time Stamps

*[0:13] The Case of Bringing Digital Transformation to a Highly Regulated Industry

*[0:39] Introducing Alexandra Morehouse, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health

*[9:29] Evidence #1: New tech systems from acquisitions don't mesh

*[19:05] Evidence #2: Not prepared for data deprecation in the cookie less future

*[26:04] Evidence #3: Unclear how much information to collect from clients

*[30:36] Evidence #4: Call center is slammed

*[37:51] Debrief

*[38:54] HGS Pub

Bio

Alexandra Morehouse is an experienced board member who brings digital transformation experience and strategic focus to her board assignments. She's worked with companies through M&A, turnarounds and growth efforts.

Alexandra additionally has deep leadership expertise focused on Diversity and Inclusion. She's managed global teams of over 2,000 FTE and P&L’s up to $10B. She has led decentralized global teams at organizations including American Express, Charles Schwab, AAA, Kaiser Permanente and, currently, Banner Health.

Her board committee assignments include compensation, governance and audit. Her background in DEI has been instrumental in pursuing ESG work on her boards.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn

Follow Alex on Twitter

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This is a special episode highlighting key takeaways from past cases. In this episode, host Lyssa Myska Allen discusses tips for the best customer experience, from in-person to virtual, from top industry leaders.

Quotes

*”There's no easier audience to sell to than people who have already bought from you, know that you exist, and like the product. And so if you want to sell more to your existing customer base, you can increase their lifetime value, either through your core offering and doing a subscription service, or you can continue to launch new products that are complementary to whatever you're selling.” - Orchid Bertelsen

*”When you're designing an [educational] experience, you have to get out of the learner's way as much as possible. And anything you do that adds a little bit of cognitive load or unnecessary cognitive load, the learners feel it, and you'll see that in the churn.” - Ori Ratner

*”If you do it really well, you have this nice flow between an intelligent virtual assistant and an agent. If it needs to hand off for context, that's going to make or break an experience.” - Melissa O’Brien

*“The most important thing to me is the symbiotic nature of technology and customer experience. In this day and age, you can't really have one without the other. Or you can, but it just won't be a great experience.” - Boone Putney

*“I think the best thing that has come out of the blended world is really seeing how much we're able to do without having fans actually come to the building, and how much we've been able to engage with the community and help in other ways, besides from the hockey standpoint. We have great ownership that allow us to do that and have given us the ability and the resources to be able to do that. And so it's just a testament to our foundation and our DNA that's within the brand.” - Keren Lynch

*“You need to have focus and say no to 98% of audience expansion tactics. And then you have to have a super clear origin myth that almost acts like a magnet. A brand is not that visual styling you put on at the end. It's your brand voice and your attitude and your very reason for being. It's the mission. And that's what millennials and others will get attracted to. Nobody wants some generic corporate thing. It's very forgettable. So you have to have a narrow focus and a clear appeal to those people based on a deep understanding of their needs and their larger context. You may be just a small, transactional part of their life, but if you want to attract them, you should still resonate for them.” - Tim Ash

*“We really should be the guide along a customer's journey, not the hero of their journey. Like they are the hero, right. We're just here to make their lives better. And so much of it is listening to their pain points, listening to what brings them joy, listening to the words that they say, and then writing them down and then saying them back to them. I mean, that's literally what we do. We do a lot of case studies with our customers and we'll take the exact words that our customers say about why they like Transect, some feature that's helpful for them, and we'll regurgitate it in a marketing campaign because we know that that's what their peers are used to hearing.” - Robin Laine

Time Stamps

The Case of…

*[0:43] Scaling up a DTC Brand with Orchid Bertelsen, COO at Common Thread Collective

*[1:42] The Move to Mobile with Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Quantic School of Business and Technology

*[2:30] Balancing Automation with Human Interaction with Melissa O’Brien

*[3:08] Leveraging Technology to Meet the Needs of End Users with Boone Putney

*[3:58] The Pandemic Pivot with Keren Lynch

*[5:17] Getting Inside Your Customer’s Head with Tim Ash

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This episode features an interview with Orchid Bertelsen. Orchid is the Chief Operating Officer at Common Thread Collective, an eCommerce growth agency. In this episode, Orchid talks about the three ways to grow, developing strategic partners, and how to do it all without losing the soul of your brand.

Quotes

*”There's no easier audience to sell to than people who have already bought from you, know that you exist, and like the product. And so if you want to sell more to your existing customer base, you can increase their lifetime value, either through your core offering and doing a subscription service, or you can continue to launch new products that are complementary to whatever you're selling.” 

*”There are some products that people just want to experience in person. There is a certain way to expand into the brick and mortar experience while still utilizing and connecting the digital experience to it, whether it's something simple, like your transactions in store being tied to your account online, and you get an email receipt. I think that is the challenge, is that retail space is obviously expensive. A lot of flagship stores in major city centers are loss leaders. That retail footprint isn’t actually generating a lot of revenue per square foot, but it’s just another marketing expense, having a physical manifestation of what the brand is beyond the website.” 

*”There was a boom in e-commerce overall during COVID. When you have different partners like Shopify or Sub Stack, you can bring your business idea to life very easily. What happens then is that you have a community that's just really focused on single-channel DTC. And they probably created a solution to solve a personal problem. But at a certain stage of growth, they’re like, ‘Hey, I can no longer sell to people like me with the same exact problem, because I've already reached all of them,’ which is a good problem to have. So over the course of the last two years, you've seen more mature e-commerce businesses try to go omni-channel.”

Time Stamps

*[0:05] The Case of Scaling Up a DTC Brand

*[0:32] Introducing Orchid Bertelsen, COO at Common Thread Collective

*[10:45] Evidence #1: Sales are single-channel

*[17:40] Evidence #2: Hasn’t developed strategic sales partners

*[20:44] Evidence #3: Has already saturated market

*[34:16] Debrief

*[35:28] HGS Pub

Bio

Orchid is the Chief Operating Officer of Common Thread Collective, an agency focused on helping ecommerce brands grow profitably, and entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams.

Prior to joining CTC, Orchid Bertelsen was the Head of Consumer Experience Strategy & Innovation at Nestlé USA, where she evaluates and tests emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, voice assistance, AR/VR. She has a varied portfolio, made up of 40+ brands and includes beloved brands like Coffee-Mate, Toll House and DiGiorno. Nestlé is also a majority stakeholder in Blue Bottle Coffee and owns and operates Starbucks at Home.

She lives in Hayes Valley with her husband and daughter, and loves to travel back to Taiwan, where her family is from.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Orchid on LinkedIn

Follow Orchid on Twitter

Check out Common Thread Collective

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This episode features an interview with Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner. Alexie is the Chief Product Officer and Ori is the Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology. And they are also both Co-Founders. In this episode, Alexie and Ori talk about keys to designing an engaging UX, challenging learners with real-world scenarios, and how to leave students feeling like they’ve made meaningful progress in their studies.

Quotes

*”At the time the buzzword was ‘The Attention Economy.’ When we were identifying what was missing in education, we quickly zeroed in on the fact that motivation is a big part of it. And to solve that motivation problem, you're competing with non-education products. In the early days, when folks would ask us about our competitors, we would joke that Facebook and Twitter were our primary competitors, not the schools. So we just recognized that mobile is where students were living at that point. And so we had to be there, too.” - Ori Ratner

*”When you're designing an [educational] experience, you have to get out of the learner's way as much as possible. And anything you do that adds a little bit of cognitive load or unnecessary cognitive load, the learners feel it, and you'll see that in the churn.” - Ori Ratner

*”We create standard learning lessons that walk the learners through the material. They're very interactive experiences, so every eight seconds, the students should be interacting with the software in some way. And then we quiz them on the material we want them to learn at the end. And the lessons are designed to be story-based, focusing on what does it really look like to be working as a data analyst or someone in finance?” - Alexie Harper

Time Stamps

*[0:08] The Case of the Move to Mobile

*[0:38] Introducing Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology

*[8:53] Evidence #1: Format of material is outdated

*[20:40] Evidence #2: Visual design is clunky and cumbersome

*[27:05] Evidence #3: No incentive to motivate users

*[37:27] Debrief

*[38:30] HGS Pub

Bio

Alexie Harper is the Chief Product Officer and Ori Ratner is the Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology. They are also both Co-Founders. Alexie was previously Director of R&D and a senior researcher at Rosetta Stone, and a travel writer and editor for Let's Go Inc. And Ori was previously a director of software development and the software architect at Rosetta Stone.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Alexie on LinkedIn

Connect with Ori on LinkedIn

Check out the Quantic School of Business and Technology

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This episode features an interview with Melissa O’Brien, Research Leader at HFS Research. Melissa discusses simple ways to apply automation to both the customer and employee side to create an efficient and balanced customer experience.

Quotes

*”​​There's so much data, in particular in the contact center, that just gets overlooked. It's a treasure trove of information.  How can you understand your customer before they call in? Do you have kind of a golden record or repository of this customer's background, their buying habits and what their social media sentiment has been? I think one of the big things that you can use data for is to actually help an agent have context before a customer gets on the phone. And that you can really tackle by having the right kind of omni-channel and the right CRM integrations.”

*”A lot of times, companies have a software license that comes with a chat bot, so they feel compelled to roll it out. And that has resulted in a lot of chat bot fatigue. Because it’s a poorly designed chat bot. They're just put out there with their FAQ's. You could get the same responses just searching the website. It's not just ineffective, it's also a detriment to the brand, because people are then having frustrating experiences on your site.”

*”If you do it really well, you have this nice flow between an intelligent virtual assistant and an agent. If it needs to hand off for context, that's going to make or break an experience.”

Time Stamps

*[0:08] The Case of Balancing Automation with Human Interaction

*[0:44] Introducing Melissa O’Brien, Research Leader at HFS Research

*[4:59] Evidence #1: All processes are manual

*[10:15] Evidence #2: Implementing automation seems too big a task

*[14:09] Evidence #3: No visibility on data to pinpoint what to automate

*[25:50] Debrief

*[26:35] HGS Pub

Bio

Melissa O’Brien is Research Leader at HFS Research. Melissa leads HFS’ research initiatives for CX services including digital marketing and sales, contact center, and digital associates. Melissa brings over 13 years of both hands-on industry and analyst experience to her role at HFS. She previously led IDC’s Worldwide Customer Experience Management Services program, including in-depth analysis of evolving contact center business process delivery and consumer communication trends.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn

Check out HFS Research

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This episode features an interview with Boone Putney, Chief Technology Officer at Fetch Package. Boone talks about bringing excitement and beauty into the customer experience, the importance of all teammates understanding the end user, and how technology and CX go hand in hand.

Quotes

*“I'm definitely passionate about the customer side of things. I think you can have some pretty hollow technology if you're not thinking about the implications of the customer experience. Same thing if you're exclusively thinking about the customer experience and not figuring out ways to leverage technology to deliver that experience.”

*”Our entire team has an understanding of the end user. And our product managers have an end user focus. Their core job is to make sure they're bringing to the table this end customers’ core needs, and they can know that customer better than anybody. And then they can interface with the technology and the engineers to figure out a solution together, and make sure we're building the right solution. User research and user testing is a big piece of that. Having somebody dedicated to knowing that user and being their advocate within the product delivery process is very impactful for us.”

*”I love sales. We wouldn't have any jobs if it weren't for sales. But I think the place I've seen some cultures go wrong is being very sales driven, where you have a customer or a certain set of customers ask for functionality and just smashing it through the product without really understanding how it affects the core offering and the rest of the user base. So we're lucky that we can take a look at that from all angles instead of any individual perspective.”

*”[Customers] want us to take good care of their packages, to alert them when we have a package and make sure we deliver a package when we say we're going to, the way we say we're going to. But beyond that, anything we can do to bring some excitement and beauty into the process is really important for that end user.”

*“The most important thing to me is the symbiotic nature of technology and customer experience. In this day and age, you can't really have one without the other. Or you can, but it just won't be a great experience.”

Time Stamps

*[0:08] The Case of Multiple End Users

*[0:33] Introducing Boone Putney, Chief Technology Officer at Fetch Package

*[8:57] Evidence #1: Using clunky pre-existing tech tools

*[12:37] Evidence #2: Most processes are manual and inefficient

*[22:54] Evidence #3: Gig workers' rely on their parent company's app

*[27:19] Debrief

*[28:11] HGS Pub

Bio

Boone has spent over 25 years writing software from games for the TI-83 calculator to developing solutions for Fortune 500 companies facilitating billions of dollars in annual transactions. Luckily enough, his first introduction to programming was in 2nd grade as part of an advanced curriculum in the Austin area public school system. He soon convinced his parents to purchase the first family computer with a 25MHz processor and 8MB of memory. Boone continued his software engineering education through high school and college where he graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Computer & Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas. After graduation, Boone spent the intervening years developing software and leading teams across large multinational corporations and start-ups alike including UPS, State Farm, Waldo, CardMyYard, and Pizza Hut.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Boone on LinkedIn

Check out Fetch Package

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This episode features an interview with Keren Lynch, Publicist and Manager of Communications for the Anaheim Ducks. Keren talks about the challenges they faced during the pandemic as an in-person events based business. She shares how the Ducks worked to be an asset to their community, and to engage with their fan base in new and unique ways, including socially distanced and virtual events.

Quotes

*“We ran a few food drives during the pandemic just to make sure everybody in our community had the resources during this time. We did a back to school drive where we made sure kids had supplies for school. We also did a number of socially distance events in the parking lot. So we really tried to stay as engaged as we could with our fan base, given the restrictions and keeping everybody safe. But it was a really neat time just because you realized how much of a community asset we were.” 

*“I think the best thing that has come out of the blended world is really seeing how much we're able to do without having fans actually come to the building, and how much we've been able to engage with the community and help in other ways, besides from the hockey standpoint. We have great ownership that allow us to do that and have given us the ability and the resources to be able to do that. And so it's just a testament to our foundation and our DNA that's within the brand. [...] I think that that's something that our ownership, the Samueli's, really try and touch upon and make part of our culture. And obviously we love having people to hockey games and that's always going to be the biggest draw. But I think that our charity component and everything we do off ice has really taken center stage.”

Time Stamps

*[0:08] The Case: The Pandemic Pivot to Virtual Engagement

*[0:36] Introducing Keren Lynch, Publicist and Manager of Communication for the Anaheim Ducks

*[5:40] Evidence #1: Reliance on in-person events revenue

*[16:20] Evidence #2: Struggling to diversify events

*[19:57] Debrief

*[21:08] HGS Pub

Bio

Keren Lynch is the Publicist and Manager of Communications for the Anaheim Ducks professional hockey team based in Anaheim, California. Previously, Keren was a Marketing And Public Relations Consultant at Stanton.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Keren on LinkedIn

Check out the Anaheim Ducks

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This episode features an interview with Tim Ash, Founder of TimAsh.com & PrimalBrain.com. Tim talks about getting inside your customer’s head and creating an intuitive website that feels familiar and drives sales.

Quotes

*“You need to have focus and say no to 98% of audience expansion tactics. And then you have to have a super clear origin myth that almost acts like a magnet. A brand is not that visual styling you put on at the end. It's your brand voice and your attitude and your very reason for being. It's the mission. And that's what millennials and others will get attracted to. Nobody wants some generic corporate thing. It's very forgettable. So you have to have a narrow focus and a clear appeal to those people based on a deep understanding of their needs and their larger context. You may be just a small, transactional part of their life, but if you want to attract them, you should still resonate for them.”

Time Stamps

*[0:07] The Case: The poorly designed landing page

*[0:34] Introducing Tim Ash, Founder of TimAsh.com & PrimalBrain.com

*[5:34] Evidence #1: Low conversion rates

*[11:13] Evidence #2: Site has no clear visual hierarchy

*[25:01] Evidence #3: Landing page uses unfamiliar elements

*[27:23] Debrief

*[28:23] HGS Pub

Bio

Tim Ash is the Founder of TimAsh.com and PrimalBrain.com, and author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education, Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion, and understanding of online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s, he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Tim on LinkedIn

Check out Tim's books

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

This episode features an interview with Robin Laine, CEO and Co-Founder of Transect, a SaaS company providing automated environmental compliance solutions for the built world.  Robin talks about advocating for the customer, making a product 10 X better than the competition, and the life cycle of a startup.

Quotes

*“We really should be the guide along a customer's journey, not the hero of their journey. Like they are the hero, right. We're just here to make their lives better. And so much of it is listening to their pain points, listening to what brings them joy, listening to the words that they say, and then writing them down and then saying them back to them. I mean, that's literally what we do. We do a lot of case studies with our customers and we'll take the exact words that our customers say about why they like Transect, some feature that's helpful for them, and we'll regurgitate it in a marketing campaign because we know that that's what their peers are used to hearing.”

*“We make money to control our destiny as a startup. The more that we can control our revenue, the more we have choice over who our future investors are, among other things. We're making money so that we can all continue to enjoy this really awesome culture that we've built and continue to build what we want to build and do what we want to do on our own timeline.”

Time Stamps

*[0:07] The Case

*[1:20] Introducing Robin Laine, Founder and CEO at Transect

*[5:08] Evidence #1: Mis-identifying the target customer

*[12:27] Evidence #2: Solving for the wrong problem

*[19:12] Evidence #3: Product is too similar to others on the market

*[21:30] Debrief

*[22:30] The HGS Pub

Bio

Robin Laine is the CEO and Co-founder of Transect.com. She has spent over 15 years managing natural resources compliance and permitting projects across the U.S. Along with navigating federal, state, and local permits for her clients, Robin established in-house natural resource compliance processes for oil and gas companies and gave presentations across the U.S. educating various industries on how to best manage federal and state environmental regulations.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Robin on LinkedIn

Follow Robin on Twitter

Check out Transect

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Follow Lyssa on Twitter

Check out HGS

Creating a great customer experience can feel like solving a mystery.  How do you listen to your customers?  What are their pain points? What do you do with the feedback they give you? From analytics to automation, how do you deploy the proper technology to get the right insights?  

Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to CX Detectives.  A podcast dedicated to cracking the case on your toughest CX challenges.  

In each episode, your host Lyssa Myska Allen teams up with a customer experience expert to discuss the most compelling CX challenges and how to solve them. You’ll hear insights from Fortune 500 executives and top CX leaders–the pioneers and visionaries who have reinvented industries and continue to blaze a new path forward. We’ll also explore how to be a more effective CX leader, the future of digitally-led customer experience, and much more.  

This show is for CXOs, CIOs, COOs, and anyone looking to improve the way they serve customers. So hit follow, put your feet up and get ready to help us create the future of modern customer experience.  Welcome to CX Detectives. Presented by HGS Digital.