Digitally Irresistible

Equip Frontline Employees With Everything They Need to Provide an Excellent Customer Experience

On this week’s episode of the Digitally Irresistible Podcast, we welcome Lori Brown. Lori is a seasoned customer experience executive with more than 25 years of experience in the BPO industry. She is a respected thought leader, CX consultant, and keynote speaker.

Lori helps brands develop and evolve their CX strategy, enabling them to meet the rapidly changing demands of their customers. She embraces innovative technology that enables CX leaders to develop frontline employees into effective representatives of a brand, creating smiles for the customers they serve.

On this episode, we discuss what it takes to equip frontline employees to succeed in delivering a great customer experience.

Frontline Employees Are the Lifeblood of CX

Good customer service has been a passion for Lori since her early days working in retail—selling wool coats in Florida. She worked her way through college managing a retail store. One night at 9pm as she was closing up, a customer crawled under the security gate and said she really needed to buy something for an important meeting the next day. Lori explained that the store was closed and she turned the customer away.

The next day, when she got to work there was a stern voice message for her from the regional manager. He explained that Lori needed to immediately apologize to the customer she turned away, send her a dozen roses, and let her know that she’s welcome in the store any time. Lori learned that without customers, the store is simply an empty box. To this day, Lori embraces the lesson that customers are always Number One. Frontline employees have a duty to make them feel welcome each time they interact with the brand.

Lori’s experience in retail ultimately led her to the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry where she was able to leverage her background in retail customer service. More than 20 years later, Lori still has a strong passion for the industry, customer service, and the frontline employees that make an excellent customer experience possible.

5 Key Elements Frontline Employees Need to Deliver a Great Customer Experience

By listening and creating an environment that empowers frontline employees, CX leaders can address the changing demands of customers and keep frontline employees motivated to deliver great CX. Frontline employees know what customers want and technology can provide real-time insight into what they’re hearing to help them deliver the best customer experience possible.

Lori has identified five interconnected elements to help create an employee experience that results in excellent outcomes for the customer.

1. Data

Data has played an important part in Lori’s BPO experience over the past 20+ years, and for the last 12 she’s noticed a greater focus on speech analytics and interaction analytics that provide insights to better understand customer behavior as well as how frontline employees support them.

This goes beyond surveying customers and simply capturing data. Data-driven decisions include capturing, understanding, and then acting upon and continually measuring data. Data empowers educated decisions because you can't run a business on assumptions.

2. Environment

The start of COVID necessitated that BPOs quickly and securely transition from work-in-office to work-at-home environments in order to maintain seamless customer service. Within days, BPOs addressed opportunities to provide reliable work-at-home environments and now, several years later, companies need to think about the hybrid contact center environment that exists today and how they can optimize it for their frontline employees.

BPOs need to ensure they have consistently high levels of employee engagement for agents working at home, as they would in the office. They need to creatively implement ways to provide a supportive environment and a customer service culture with flexible work environments. It is essential to cultivate an environment where employees can freely share ideas and engage in peer discussions to emulate best practices of the work-in-office environment. 

Happy employees with high levels of employee satisfaction provide great customer service. Frontline employees should feel valued and cared for in any work environment. 

3. Technology

Investing in technology to enable a collaborative environment as discussed above is one way to help employees feel valued. Another way to harness technology is through coaching tools that share best practices with agents, tells them how many times they’ve used a best practice, and how many more they need to use in order to meet their metrics.

Technology such as this helps frontline employees feel valued when they know the company is committed to their growth and success. Coaching tools, data analytics, and other technologies equip agents to better serve customers with more complex issues which sets them up for success. Such tools can also enable supervisors and leadership to provide more effective coaching and feedback to frontline employees, resulting in happier employees and happier customers.

4. Policies

Policies set direction for a business. If the goal is to be a customer centric organization, the policies and procedures should drive customer centricity. It’s important to consider the full downstream effect when creating policies to make sure they align with the original intent along every step of the customer journey to provide the best customer experience possible.

Lori shares a personal example of this from a recent trip to bring home a new puppy during the busy holiday travel season a week before Christmas. She tried to check in for her flight from home in Ft. Lauderdale and couldn’t. She called the customer service line and the agent stated that the airline’s pet policy required customers to check in at the airport when they have a pet ticket. Lori explained that she would only have the pet with her on the return flight home and she didn’t want to get to the airport three hours early at Christmas time just to tell them she didn’t have the pet with her on the outbound flight. But the agent made it clear that the policy stood and there was nothing the agent could do to change it for her. This is an example of an unanticipated scenario where a policy didn’t serve the customer well. 

5. Empowerment

In this example, the frontline agent Lori was speaking with could have been empowered to provide a great customer experience by enabling Lori to check in recognizing that she didn’t have the puppy yet. But instead, the agent was required to uphold the policy. Although the airline had invested in hiring the right people, training them, and providing technology to provide a great customer experience, the agent was not empowered to bypass the policy, resulting in a frustrating experience for the customer.

There are times when it’s necessary to uphold policies due to regulatory and compliance mandates, even when it impacts the customer experience. In some other instances the frontline agent could be empowered to improve the customer experience in the moment. 

Lori points out that policies should maintain a focus on customer centricity and agents should be empowered to intervene on the customer’s behalf, with proper guidelines, to ensure a great customer experience.

Integrating the 5 Key Elements Throughout the Employee Experience

Data from interaction analytics can empower employees by providing tools to understand customer interaction and to support the employee experience. This fosters trust and feedback from frontline employees, making it possible for them to create an excellent customer experience. By acting on data, creating an environment and culture conducive to great customer service, utilizing technology, assessing the impact of policies throughout the customer journey, and empowering employees to deliver rewarding customer experiences, brands can ensure employees feel valued and customers keep coming back.

What Lori Does for Fun

Living on Ft. Lauderdale beach, fun is always just footsteps away for Lori. When she’s not at the beach, she’s still enjoying the fresh air and sunshine practicing her newly discovered golf skills on the course and at the driving range. 

To learn more about Lori, visit her on LinkedIn and her website at lbrowncxconsulting.com.

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here.

 Make Customers Swoon and Create Zealous Advocates for Your Brand

This week, we welcome Dr. Chip Bell to the Digitally Irresistible Podcast. Chip is a world-renowned authority on customer loyalty and service innovation, ranked by Global Gurus for the past eight years as one of the top 10 keynote speakers on customer experience. 

Chip is a decorated U.S. Army veteran and has written more than 700 columns for business journals, magazines, and top blogs. He has appeared on CNN, CNBC, CBS, Fox Business, and ABC among others. His work has been featured in “Fortune,” “Businessweek,” “Forbes,” “The Wall Street Journal,” and the list goes on.

He has authored 24 books on customer loyalty and service, many of which are award-winning bestsellers. 

On this episode, we discuss nine principles to improve customer loyalty through service innovation that Chip explains in his 23^rd book, “Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles.” 

A Passion for Writing and Service

Chip’s interest in writing began in the 11^th grade when we earned an A on a creative essay he wrote about a coat hanger. This unlocked the door to creativity for Chip and later gave a voice to his passion for excellent customer service.

Since starting his company in 1980, he has had a blast making a positive difference in the lives of others and helping companies develop customer-centric strategies.

9 Steps to Improve Customer Loyalty Through Service Innovation

In his book, “Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles,” Chip differentiates between good customer service that leaves customers satisfied and innovative service that makes customers swoon and become zealous advocates for a company.

For Chip, a kaleidoscope is a metaphor for the key principles that remain constant when creating profoundly remarkable customer experiences that are unique to each organization.

To create the types of compelling experiences that keep customers coming back, Chip says businesses must go beyond value added and develop value unique—innovative ways to create experiences customers can't wait to tell others about.

1. Enchantment: Create Magical Experiences That Customers Talk About

Enchantment is an unexpected and unique aspect of the experience beyond what the customer can imagine. 

Chip’s wife experienced enchantment after trading in her old car for a new one. When she turned on the radio for the first time, she discovered the service tech had programmed the radio stations from her old car. Now, more than the car, she talks about the radio—the enchanting experience that went beyond her expectations.

2. Mercy: Treat Customers With Respect and Assume Innocence

Mercy is how we treat customers when things go wrong, when they're upset, and when they're angry.

Chip experienced mercy when he was driving down a rural road one Sunday morning. He was the only car on the road and didn’t notice when the speed limit changed from 65 mph to 45 mph because the road conditions hadn’t changed. A highway patrol officer stopped Chip, and the first thing he asked was if there was an emergency. The officer assumed innocence and showed mercy. Chip got a ticket, but what stood out to him was how incredible the experience was. So much so that he wrote a letter of commendation to the highway patrol unit because of the way the officer handled the situation with mercy.

3. Grace: Show Unconditional Acceptance and Care

Grace is all about unconditional acceptance, assuming the best in others. Grace is also about dramatic listening to build connections—interacting with customers in ways that demonstrate they are important and valued.

Chip notes an example he saw in an upscale retail store. A few teenagers walked in with ear pods and baggy pants and the clerk welcomed the teenagers and thanked them for coming in—treating all customers equally with grace. The kids were taken aback, and one said they had to buy something. That grace and unconditional acceptance created a positive encounter because of how the customers were treated. 

4. Trust: Demonstrate Trust in Customers and Empower Employees to Make Smart Decisions

Trust is an essential part of how we treat customers and how we empower frontline employees. When leaders trust employees to make smart decisions on behalf of their organization, it creates better employee and customer experiences.

An example of trust—from the employee and customer perspectives—was when Chip’s wife stopped by the local grocery store during a jog. She picked up a few items and when she arrived at the check-out, she realized she had forgotten her credit card (she usually carried it and her driver’s license when she went running). Instead of turning her away, the cashier told her not to worry about it. She knew Chip's wife as a regular customer and simply wrote down the amount owed, put it in the drawer, and told her she could pay the bill the next time she came in.

5. Generosity: Give Something Extra to Demonstrate a Gifting Attitude

Generosity is the giving of something extra. It’s the baker’s dozen spirit of abundance integrated throughout the customer journey. 

One example Chip shares is of a heating, air conditioning, and plumbing company that looks for ways to bring something extra when they make a house call. They may bring a balloon, greeting card, flower, or another small unique token that shows they care.

6. Ease: Take the Effort Out of the Customer Experience

Ease is how we remove emotional effort from the customer experience.

Harvard Business School marketing professor Ted Levitt used to talk about how people buy a quarter-inch drill bit, not because they want the drill bit itself, but because they want a quarter-inch hole. They’d probably like to snap their fingers and have the hole, but instead, they must go to the hardware store, find the drill bit, pay the clerk, go home, attach the drill bit to the drill, and finally make the hole. Customers would love to skip this entire process, so we need to make it as comfortable as we can for them.

Chip says this applies to all processes, from filling out forms to waiting on hold for an agent, our goal should be to create an experience that the customer finds emotionally effortless—remove anxiety, worry, and angst from their experience. 

7. Truth: Be Completely Honest and Open With Customers

Great relationships are founded in absolute trust, so we must trust and be completely open and transparent with our customers.

When people take the stand in court, they promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The statement is broken into three parts to emphasize the importance of telling the entire truth, without omitting details or including white lies.

Chip shares an example of when he was on a flight and the pilot announced they landed on time. Chip looked at his watch and the flight was 14 minutes later than planned. The pilot viewed this as an on-time arrival because the FAA permits a 15-minute window for flights to be considered on time. Truth is being completely open and honest with customers.

8. Alliance: Create a Partnership With Customers and Seek Their Help and Feedback

Alliance is about a partnership. It’s about co-creating an experience with a customer that they feel a part of. This can include inviting them to provide feedback or any other action that helps customers feel like they are co-owners of the experience.

By creating experiences with customers that make them feel like trusted partners, we should also treat frontline associates the same. Creating a culture of respect, alliance, and partnership produces more rewarding employee and customer experiences.

9. Passion: Exude Passion in All Interactions With Customers

Passion in a customer relationship means every moment will be the best it can be.

During keynotes, Marketing Hall of Famer Seth Godin sometimes asks the audience to hold up their hands as high as they can. He then asks them to hold their hands a little higher. Invariably, people can always go a little higher, so Seth asks why hold back?

Sometimes we’re too reserved to do our very best the first time around. With profoundly remarkable and innovative customer relationships we must deliver excitement and positive energy. When we have passion, our customers know we’re doing the best we can to serve them.

CX Leadership That Prompts Innovation

CX leaders can inspire innovative services by treating employees like valued customers their bottom line depends on. It’s essential to trust employees and empower them with training, support, and all the tools they need to make smart decisions on behalf of the organization to best serve customers. 

The Ritz-Carlton famously empowers employees with the authority to spend up to $2,000 to satisfy a guest’s need before bringing it to management’s attention. That authority is grounded in trust that serves employees and customers well. 

What Chip Does for Fun

Chip travels for work and for fun. He and his wife love visiting museums in any city they visit. Next on the list is the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. He’s on the board of the Georgia Writers Museum and is also an avid fly fisher. Always learning, Chip is taking up Tenkara, the Japanese method of fly fishing.

To learn more about Chip, find him on LinkedIn and his website at www.chipbell.com.

Watch the video here. 

Read the blog post here.

Customer Experience in a Deregulated Electricity Market

This week we welcome Katherine Wright to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Katherine is co-founder and senior vice president of customer experience at Energy Texas, a retail electricity provider in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) market. Electricity has been deregulated in the ERCOT market, where the consumer chooses their electricity provider. 

The ERCOT market includes about 85% of Texas, including the cities of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and much of West Texas. Utilities that were in place when deregulation went into effect, about 20 years ago, manage the infrastructure, poles, and wires. They also read the meters. Independent retail electricity providers (REPs) like Energy Texas manage customer relationships. 

When a customer opens, revises, or closes their electricity account, they do it with their REP. When they experience an outage, they contact the utility.

On this episode, we explore how Energy Texas differentiates their brand through innovative products and programs, competitive pricing, and excellent customer service.

Giving Retail Electricity Customers Texas-sized Options to Choose From

Katherine describes herself as a serial entrepreneur. In addition to Energy Texas, she co-founded Bounce Energy in 2004, which a large competitor bought in 2013. 

Katherine and her co-founders formed Energy Texas in May of 2020. Nine months later, Winter Storm Uri caused blackouts throughout Texas. Uri’s impact forced some REPs to leave the retail electric business. 

In the aftermath of Uri, Katherine and her co-founders recognized an opportunity to enter the market and provide innovative, creative products to their customers. Giving their customers choices differentiates Energy Texas from most of its competition.

Katherine wears multiple hats in her operational role. Her favorite is creating meaningful relationships with customers by doing things differently than traditional utilities and the bigger REPS. Energy Texas does that by offering flexible pricing plans, ensuring that the reality of every plan is as good as advertised and making every customer experience as easy as possible.

These four programs demonstrate how Katherine takes the company’s ideals and customer experience strategy and turns them into Texas-sized options for their customers.

Peak Perks Program

Energy Texas launched the Peak Perks Program with fresh memories of Winter Storm Uri that stretched the Texas electric grid beyond capacity. This program gives customers an opportunity to help prevent a similar crisis from happening and save money at the same time.

Customers who sign up for Peak Perks volunteer to reduce their electrical consumption during peak load events. If they’re able to reduce their consumption during the event by at least 10% (based on their usage in a similar time period), they receive a 10% discount on their bill.

To make the customer experience as easy as possible, Energy Texas alerts them in their online My Account that the company has called a peak load event. The alert includes tips and helpful insights covering appropriate ways to reduce consumption during the peak event.

Everybody wins. The customer can get a discount for using less energy, Energy Texas keeps them satisfied by telling them how to use less energy, and the grid is under less strain. 

Giddy Up Guarantee

At energytexas.com you’ll see rates based on average or greater electrical consumption. Energy Texas tracks their competitors’ rates and offers their rates at a discount. The Giddy Up Guarantee program enables Energy Texas to offer an additional discount to new, energy-efficient customers.

Energy Texas knows how much electricity a new customer is likely to consume by reviewing their history.

Most electrical meters in Texas are smart meters that send meter readings to the utility digitally. No one is needed to go out to the resident’s home to read the meter. Since the utility that handles metering is different from the REP that sells the electricity, Energy Texas has access to consumers’ meter readings history. 

When a new energy-efficient consumer signs up with Energy Texas, they send the customer an email inviting them to take advantage of an additional discount.  

An additional discount like that is sure to put a little giddy up in their customer onboarding. 

Freedom Flex

Freedom Flex is for customers who want the flexibility to cancel their energy service if it doesn’t offer the lowest market rates. With Freedom Flex, customers pay a nominal monthly fee. They have the freedom to cancel their contract and sign a new one as frequently as every 30 days. 

So, if a Freedom Flex customer signed a contract for a rate that was low, and now contract rates have gone even lower, they have the freedom to cancel their current contract and sign a new contract at the lower rate.

Another customer might have a few months left on their low-rate contract when they see in their My Account that rates have been trending up for the last three months. They might want to cancel their contract now and sign a new contract for a somewhat higher rate to avoid paying an even higher rate after their contract expires. 

Freedom Flex doesn’t guarantee customers they’re always getting the lowest rate, but it does give them the freedom to choose.

Sun Jacinto Solar Buyback Program

The State of Texas doesn't have rules governing if or how utilities and REPs compensate solar panel owners for the extra power they generate and then feed to the grid.  

Most REPs that offer a solar buyback program compensate their customers for electricity they feed to the grid at a lower rate than the REP charges them for the electricity they use. 

The Sun Jacinto Solar Buyback Program stands out because it compensates customers at the identical rate that they pay the REP. For example, if a customer puts a thousand excess kilowatt-hours back on the grid and has an energy rate of five cents per kilowatt-hour, they'll get a $50 bill credit. 

The credit comes right off the month’s bill, and in any month where the customer’s bill is less than the credits they’ve earned, the credits carry over until they’re used up. 

Tex-cellent, Easy-to-Use Customer Experiences 

Another one of Katherine’s most important and rewarding tasks has been to lead the technical effort to include the website and self-service options for their customers. These are all accessible in the customer portal, easy to use, and save customers from having to wait on hold, speak with an agent, or write emails.  

The customer-centric nature of everything she’s accomplished at Energy Texas makes it easy to realize why the founders’ mantra is to treat customers as they would like to be treated. They call it Tex-cellent customer service.

What Katherine Does for Fun

Katherine has three primary outlets for fun. For her family, travel is the thing. They went to England and Scotland for Christmas in 2022, and are planning to fly to Boston and do a New England road trip in the summer of 2023. For herself, Katherine is a big foodie and, as she describes herself, “a Pilates machine.”  

To learn more about Katherine and Energy Texas, you’ll find her on LinkedIn, and Energy Texas on their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Watch the video here. 

Read the blog post here.

 Teaching Brands to Master “How to Wow” in Customer Experience  

This week, we welcome Adrian Swinscoe to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Adrian is a prolific writer, blogger, podcaster, and the author of four books about customer experience. 

Adrian works with companies looking for cost-effective ways to improve business and team performance, find new customers, and keep their existing ones. He and his associates focus on helping clients improve their customer service, customer experience, client experience, and business.

His work results in increased profits in sales, higher productivity, increased word of mouth, improved service, and an overall increase in the customer and employee experience. 

On this episode, we discuss the eight sections of his first book, “How to Wow, 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing.” 

A Guide to Help People Chart Their Brand’s Own Path to Greatness 

Fifteen years ago, Adrian recognized an abundance of opportunities to improve customer service, including staying out of the way of employees who do their best to treat customers well.

He started writing and writing, and writing (and podcasting) about it: articles, blog posts, a column for Forbes, and four books. Companies seek his help in building amazing customer and employee experiences.  

Adrian describes himself as “an advisor, speaker, and bestselling author on customer service, experience, and engagement.” He helps brands “craft their own level of greatness and deliver their own level of greatness and engagement to their customers.”

Unpacking “How to Wow”

In “How to Wow,” originally published in 2008, Adrian organized 68 effortless ways to wow into eight sections.

The first five sections—Attract, Engage, Serve, Keep, and Refer—are all external, customer-facing actions brands can take. The second three sections—Communicate, Motivate, and Lead—are internal employee-facing actions.

On this episode, we discuss these eight sections. As you’ll discover, each section leads right into the next. 

Attract

Adrian’s experiences as a consumer, researcher and analyst taught him that people don’t like to be “sold to”. He was convinced that there must be better ways to attract people than overt selling. He sought more empathetic and sustainable methods to attract people. Ways that are more appealing to the people you’re trying to attract so that they’re more receptive to your message.

And once you’ve attracted people, then you can…

Engage

To engage people in a sustainable way, you have to step back and take a look at your relationships. In each case, ask where is this relationship now and where is it going?

Understanding your relationships is the first step to knowing what interests the people you attract. Knowing what interests them enables you to treat them with respect and empathy, and to balance two very different dynamics: making yourself interesting and proving you're interested in them. 

Knowing what interests them allows you to…

Serve

Service goes beyond customer service. It's about being proactive in service to people across the business.  

How do I serve you? How do I serve you as a marketer? How do I serve you as a salesperson? How do I serve you as a support rep? 

Think about different ways to help the customer achieve their goals. When serving people is part of the foundation of who you are, you can build relationships that mean more than sending them a thank-you gift after they’ve bought something from you. 

Strong relationships are relationships you can… 

Keep

Adrian doesn’t use the word loyalty because he thinks loyalty is a product of what you do. 

Loyalty programs, rewards, and special discounts can help, but keeping customers is about the fundamentals of what we do.  

Keeping is about how you value the relationship. Can you give people access to different things? Can you make them successful? Can you make them feel like they belong?  

When both sides value a relationship, it’s only natural to ask your customer to…

Refer

If you’ve gone through the earlier steps, have built strong foundations for your relationships, and continually build on those relationships, then people may be ready to become an advocate for you. 

The key is advocacy doesn't happen by accident. Sometimes you have to help people be an advocate. Sometimes you have to do something as simple as just asking them. And too many companies don't ask for a referral.  

Also, bear in mind that sometimes they don't know how to refer. So, think about their situation and make it easy for them. That can be a powerful way to start driving a stream of referrals back into your business and building your community of relationships. 

Now, let’s move from the external ways to the internal… 

Communicate

This section is about how we communicate with our customers, how we take what they tell us— particularly around surveys and feedback and customer voice—and how we take it into our business. How do we act on it? How do we then communicate back to customers and tell them, “this is what we're doing”? 

Again, this is all in service of building relationships, showing people, “We value what you say. We are listening to what you say. We are thinking about what you say,” and “We are acting on what you say.” 

Still, customer survey fatigue is a real thing, and we have to understand that somebody giving us feedback is a gift. We have to make sure we respect their time and make taking a survey easy for them. Make sure they understand that if they give us this feedback, we'll value it and act on it.

For many companies, the question is how. How do we connect with our customers? How do we listen to them? How do we act on what they tell us? 

They’ve learned that it takes engaged employees to deliver exceptional service, so we…

Motivate

Motivate and Lead are two sides of the same coin: how do we build a culture of highly engaged employees who truly value customer relationships? This culture empowers people, supports people, and enables people to be the best versions of themselves in service of the greater mission to serve their customers. 

Why the same coin? Because how effectively we motivate employees is influenced by how well we…

Lead

Sometimes leaders within companies need to do things differently in order to enable, support, motivate, and inspire their employees to do a great job and go that extra mile in service of their customers. That may require them to change their thinking, to do things differently, to lead by example. 

Adrian loves the idea that comes from the old Toyota management system, where managers and leaders would do Gemba walks (Japanese for “actual place” walks). They'd walk the factory floor to understand the work, see processes in action, ask questions, and learn how things were being done.

He also says you can learn a lot about a company by their Terms and Conditions page on their website. Many are written so only a lawyer can understand them. Some companies have rewritten them in plain language so all their customers can understand. 

Make Improvements Incrementally

Trying to improve all aspects of customer and employee experience at once can be a great challenge. Adrian cites a concept known as the aggregation of marginal gains, which was popularized by Dave Brailsford, who became performance director for British Cycling in 2003. The idea is that if you execute a series of marginal gains of only 1%, the aggregate of those small gains over time will equal a major gain. 

What Adrian Does for Fun

If you agree with me that Adrian is a rock star, you may be right. In his spare time, Adrian likes to go rock or boulder climbing—indoors or outdoors, depending on the weather. In fact, after recording this podcast with me, Adrian headed to a nearby boulder gym. Rock on, Adrian.

To learn more about Adrian and his work, you’ll find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and his website, www.adrianswinscoe.com. Adrian also recommends looking him up on your favorite search engine, as there aren’t many people named Adrian Swinscoe.

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

6 Behaviors to Develop Loyal Customers and Employees Through SIMPLE Customer Experiences 

This week, we welcome Matt Lyles to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Matt is a keynote speaker, customer experience consultant, and host of the SIMPLE brand podcast. He’s also writing a book by the same name: “SIMPLE brand.”

Matt enjoyed a long career with FedEx leading their brand strategy and guiding the effort to redefine their customer experience. Today, he helps companies deliver experiences that create loyal customers and loyal employees—all through the power of simplicity.

On this episode, we discuss the six behaviors any brand can use to create SIMPLE customer experiences.

A Passion for Simplicity

For many years, Matt Lyles handled marketing and branding for FedEx. He led FedEx brand strategy, guiding their effort to redefine the overall FedEx customer experience and teach it to 500,000 people across the globe.

Matt and his team grounded the FedEx brand experience in simple customer experiences. Their strategy was so effective that organizations reached out to Matt’s team to present about the FedEx brand at conferences. No one on the team felt especially comfortable presenting, but Matt knew it was an opportunity to grow his career by speaking in front of crowds. And the more he did it, the more he loved it.

Matt enjoyed all of his experiences at FedEx, but as his passion for simplicity and public speaking grew, he decided to share the benefits of simple brand experiences with businesses across the globe. 

Simplicity in CX Delivery

Matt explains how today’s world is evolving at a rapid pace and customer expectations have never been higher.

At the same time, he says customer loyalty is at an all-time low with consumers being bombarded by different experiences, many of which are complicated. As previous Digitally Irresistible podcast guest and CX thought leader and author Stan Phelps said, it's important to differentiate based on experience.

Thinking about the different things consumers are bombarded with every day and the complexity of our lives, Matt knows firsthand that the best way for brands to differentiate is through their customer’s experience. Customers say the best experience is a simple experience.

6 Behaviors of SIMPLE Brand Experiences

Keeping things simple, isn’t as simple as just that. It takes thought and planning. 

Matt has turned SIMPLE into an acronym that outlines six key behaviors his research has shown the world’s simplest brands implement to create the simplest experiences for their customers. Matt has created a SIMPLE Playbook comprised of these six behaviors that any brand and its employees can integrate into their approach to deliver a simple customer experience. This will help earn more loyal customers and employees to maximize long-term customer lifetime value. 

These six behaviors are:

1.   Simple Never Stops

Matt says things will always need to be simplified so we should continually assess what we can do to make things simpler and simpler. As the world continues to evolve, things will inherently get more complex. When you reach a point where you think your experience is simple, it may not still be simple enough a year or two later.

2.   Innovate to Stay Ahead

It’s important to look ahead, innovate, and consider ways to continually simplify for the future. What will impact customers and what proactive measures can you take to offer experiences that meet those challenges at touchpoints throughout the customer experience?

3.   Minimize Barriers

Think about what you can do to minimize barriers that prevent customers from enjoying the full experience you deliver. Some companies, for instance, allow their frontline support staff to offer customers only the minimum level of support needed to solve their problem. Some brands, however, empower their employees to provide first-call resolution and solve the customer’s problem without the need to refer them to someone else. This boosts customer satisfaction and differentiates them from competitors.

4.   Prune It Back

Just as expert gardeners know, if you want to promote plant growth, you have to prune. In customer experience, for example, this means pruning back a complicated 12-step process to six simple steps, or maybe even three. It could mean if you offer a variety of products and services that give your customers decision fatigue, prune back your offerings to help simplify what customers must decide between.

Changes to the grocery shopping experience during the early days of the pandemic are an example of this. Instead of making customers shop the traditional way by driving, parking, walking around the store, standing in line, and checking out, a number of grocery retailers pruned back the process and enabled customers to order their groceries online, drive up to a designated spot at their local store, and have their groceries brought directly to their car.

Some grocery store chains then further pruned back when third parties began delivering groceries to customers’ homes. In 2023, some retailers are actually bringing groceries inside the customer’s house and storing them in the customer’s refrigerator and pantry.

Matt says maybe the next iteration will involve the retailer sitting at the table and making your kids eat their vegetables!

5.   Lose the Jargon

Speak simply. Clear and concise communication makes it easy and quick for customers to understand.

In their book, “Made to Stick,” Chip and Dan Heath talk about how we’re all cursed with the knowledge that we use to communicate about our company and our industry. But this turns the average customer off because they don’t understand it. With all the complexity in our lives, customers don’t have time to figure out what a company is saying. We need to make it easier for them by using clear, concise, simple language. Even if you think your industry necessitates jargon, know that there will be disruptors in your industry who embrace simple experiences and simple language. 

Once such industry is insurance. Many insurance carriers use similar language about protecting against damage to your home or safeguarding your assets, and consumers may find this communication hard to understand. 

But some insurance companies are simplifying how they talk to customers. They’re gaining customers quickly through simple language like, if your home is damaged, we will cover the repair cost. This makes it easy for the customer to understand and it appeals to the consumer’s emotions—they're covered in times of loss and hardship.

6.   Empathize With the Customer

Understand your customer and what they go through on a day-to-day basis. What are their external goals, their external challenges, and what are their internal struggles? Think about how you can solve or minimize those through your offerings. This includes thinking about the words you use to help the customer feel comfortable.

Another way to empathize with your customers is to talk to them, listen to them, and observe them. When you observe your customers—especially when they're using your product or service—you can understand what they're going through and identify struggles that inform how you can further simplify their experience.

Keeping It SIMPLE for All Employees 

Matt reminds us that customer experiences are designed and delivered by people. His six SIMPLE behaviors are developed to be easy to instill in every employee regardless of their role, whether they’re a C-suite executive or a frontline customer service agent. These behaviors have been embraced at all levels and promote employee engagement.

What Matt Does for Fun

Matt spends his free time with his wife and two young sons. They enjoy checking out different events, going out to eat, and having movie nights together. Living in Nashville, they also enjoy the excellent live music scene, which is made even better when Matt brings one of his sons to a concert.

To learn more about Matt and his SIMPLE methodology, connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and his website www.mattlyles.com. You can also visit www.mattlyles.com/iqor to access his SIMPLE Playbook which reviews the six behaviors discussed on this episode along with exercises and questions to help instill them.

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

Supporting the BPO Industry and Driving the Digital Transformation of Businesses in the Philippines

This week, we welcome Jack Madrid to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Jack is president and CEO of the IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP). He oversees day-to-day operations for the primary trade body and advocacy group for the IT and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) sector in the Philippines.

With almost 400 member organizations, including iQor, and six partner associations, IBPAP plays a pivotal role in sustaining the growth of the IT-BPM industry by working with stakeholders in the government and academia.

On this episode, we discuss the role of IBPAP and how the organization supports the BPO industry and drives digital transformation among businesses in the Philippines. 

A Transformative Journey to the BPO Industry

After graduating from university, Jack began his career as a banker in both the Philippines and Hong Kong. That led him to a role overseeing strategic planning and business development for a Philippines-based conglomerate.

His career then took an interesting turn when Jack became managing director for MTV Philippines, empowering him to reinvent himself professionally and personally. From there, he was introduced to the BPO industry in the Philippines where he recognized the future of the country and vibrant opportunities for job creation. This prompted his digital journey[BB1]  in marketing, setting up operations for Yahoo Philippines. After a few years there, he set out to establish the first e-commerce marketplace in the Philippines. Several years after that, he moved to Vancouver, Canada to be with family and six years later he returned to the Philippines to lead IBPAP—15 years after his introduction to the BPO industry.

How IBPAP Supports the BPO Industry in the Philippines

IBPAP is the flagship association for the IT-BPM industry in the Philippines, primarily representing the industry, its members, its employers, investors who have offshored their operations in the country, and—most importantly—BPO employees. IBPAP has grown to represent 1.56 million Filipino employees in the country since the beginning of the BPO industry in the Philippines several decades ago.

In fact, IBPAP represents the largest industry in the Philippines in terms of jobs and revenue, contributing nearly 8% of the country's GDP. The work and mission of IBPAP is essential for advancing continued opportunities to create jobs throughout the country.

Because the Philippines is an archipelago, jobs extend beyond metro Manila and Cebu to 25 cities throughout the countryside that have their own unique characteristics and talent pools with good universities to educate future talent and further expand the BPO industry in the Philippines.

The Present State of the BPO Industry in the Philippines

Jack notes that the BPO industry in the Philippines is entering an exciting new chapter given the COVID-driven migration of 1+ million employees to work-at-home (WAH) and hybrid environments. When onsite operations quickly moved to work-at-home and hybrid environments while maintaining security, productivity, and customer satisfaction, the BPO industry proved it could deliver outsourced customer service success independent of location and environment for global customers spanning different time zones across verticals and industries.

Jack believes the future is bright as the BPO industry in the Philippines develops more value-added services for brands across the globe.

Core Strengths and Advantages of the Philippines as an IT-BPM Investment Destination

Jack says the primary strength of the Philippines as an IT-BPM investment destination lies in Filipino talent. With a population of 110 million, the Philippines has the demographics and the scale to grow the IT-BPM industry even more. The Filipino workforce is world renowned for excellent communication skills, English fluency, patience, empathy, and the ability to adapt and learn new skills to resolve customer issues across different industry verticals. 

Talent supply will always be an advantage, but Jack recognizes the need to continue to build on that strength given the continued demand for offshoring to the Philippines. On top of that, he says the Philippines has done a great job building up the digital infrastructure and internet connectivity throughout the archipelago outside of metro Manila and Cebu.

As a nation comprised of thousands of islands, each with its own unique population and talent pool, internet connectivity has improved over the years and will continue to improve in the years ahead as IBPAP works with telecom partners. 

Future Opportunities for the BPO Industry in the Philippines

IBPAP recently launched its IT-BPM Roadmap 2028. They publish a new roadmap every six years to outline specific recommendations on how to grow the industry. 

The most significant part of their Roadmap 2028 is the goal to deliver an additional 1.1 million new jobs for Filipinos by the end of 2028. IBPAP will work with industry stakeholders, government partners, and the private sector to realize this vision over the next six years.

The roadmap outlines the following four pillars to grow the IT-BPM industry in the Philippines.

1.    Attract and retain investors by reinforcing the ease of doing business in the Philippines.

2.    Cultivate an extensive and qualified talent pool. Work with the Department of Education and other partners in government to strengthen university and high school curricula and collaborate with the private sector to ensure the continued availability and employability of talent for the years ahead. Jack emphasizes that this is likely the most critical pillar.

3.    Improve and strengthen digital infrastructure in the Philippines to ensure strong connectivity in in-office, at-home, and hybrid work environments throughout the archipelago.

4.    Continue to strengthen the Philippines’ industry positioning to meet the challenge of adding more than 1 million new jobs in six years, a goal that took over two decades to achieve in the early years of the BPO industry in the Philippines.

By focusing on these four pillars, tapping into new talent pools, and continuing to strengthen the Filipinos’ acceptance of the BPO industry as a long-term career path, Jack and his colleagues at IBPAP will continue to support the growth of the BPO industry and drive digital transformation among businesses in the Philippines.

What Jack Does for Fun

For fun, Jack’s passion is studying wine. He began his studies a few years ago and now teaches others as an informal wine coach. He enjoys sharing his knowledge about the wine regions as well as the different grapes and varieties of wine. He also spends a fair amount of time analyzing wines through blind tastings. When he’s not honing his wine skills, Jack enjoys playing golf and improving his short game.

To learn more about Jack and IBPAP, connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and the IBPAP website at www.ibpap.org.

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

Connect With Employees Through Rewarding Experiences That Elevate Their Engagement 

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Jaymee Marquez. Jaymee is a director of operations at iQor Iloilo in the Philippines. She has extensive experience delivering and overseeing customer care delivery in the BPO industry. In her current role, Jaymee oversees a team of three operations managers with dozens of agents on their teams. She understands the importance of engaging iQor’s frontline employees through fun and rewarding activities that inspire them to Be More with iQor and to create smiles for the customers with whom they interact.  

On this episode, we discuss her creative approach when developing employee engagement activities with the teams she oversees and the positive impact these activities have on the CX programs they support. 

Leading Is All About the People 

 After studying electronics and communications engineering in undergrad, Jaymee began her BPO career as a technical support agent. She was soon promoted to team lead where she discovered her passion to lead. Progressing through several leadership positions, Jaymee knew that building connections with people was essential to her role.   

She joined iQor as an operations manager in 2017 and was most recently promoted to director of operations for a telco client. Throughout her years in the BPO industry, Jaymee has enjoyed investing in and engaging employees to promote higher levels of workplace satisfaction, whether through fun events, meaningful coaching, or an open-door policy whereby all employees are welcome to discuss concerns. She has found that higher levels of employee satisfaction result in higher levels of productivity. 

The Importance of Employee Engagement 

Developing high levels of employee engagement helps people feel more connected to their team, their company culture, and their customers. This improves motivation and leads employees to be more passionate about their work, translating to a more positive customer experience.   

In customer service, we say that we go the extra mile to make customers happy—at iQor we provide the extra smile. To create excellent experiences, Jaymee regularly develops employee engagement programs and activities to connect with her team. She shares a few of them with us. 

Customer Service Week Activities 

In October 2022, Jaymee celebrated Customer Service Week with different daily activities. For the Monday kickoff, all directors of operations wore aprons and went to the production floor to serve donuts to employees. It was fun and rewarding for Jaymee to serve her team which does so much to support customers every day.  

Even though it’s as simple as donuts, directors serving their employees is powerful, meaningful, and makes for many smiles. The week’s activities continued each day: Tuesday was pajama day, on Wednesday team leads dressed up as wizards, on Thursday they dressed up as K-pop stars, and the festivities kept going. 

Monthly Massages 

Before the pandemic, Jaymee and her team hired massage therapists to treat employees to five-minute massages of their choice (back, head, or hands/arms). A nice massage at work was a great treat for everyone to add some Zen to their day. 

Charity Events 

Jaymee also hosts charity events with employees to help give back to their local community. Jaymee especially enjoys celebrating her birthday and the holiday season by helping her community. 

One year on her birthday, Jaymee and her team of employee volunteers visited an orphanage for girls and brought food, played games, and gave out gift bags with dolls and candy. She also got to share her birthday cake with two little girls celebrating their birthdays that month. 

For the winter holidays each year, Jaymee and her team invite local children (ages three to 10) to a special holiday party with games.  

She and her team also host a food program. They invest their own time and money to support members of the local community facing food insecurity. At one of the events, an employee dressed as Spiderman and brought smiles to the children. Jaymee emphasizes the joy she and her employees feel from seeing the children smile. 

Online Contests 

When the beginning of the pandemic restricted in-person events, Jaymee was determined to keep up the high levels of employee engagement and camaraderie through fun online events. With such tremendous success, online events are still a hit today. 

She set up a Facebook page to host online activities and events that would have previously been in person. One of the contests was a competition for the best work-at-home workspaces. Entries with the most “heart” reactions won. Jaymee herself was one of the winners, possibly because of her comfortable gaming chair at the center of her setup! Winners received a gift certificate. 

In another friendly competition, Jaymee led the charge for directors to compete for the best TikTok dance video called Cheers and Yells. Directors danced individually without knowing the song and Jaymee edited them together. The video played on TV screens throughout the contact center and the directors became instant workplace celebrities. They won the competition! 

For Mother’s Day, Jaymee gives out flowers and invites employees to post photos with their moms. Those with the most “heart” votes receive a gift certificate for a date with their mom that includes a special meal. This honors not only employees who are mothers but also all employees’ moms. 

Holiday Celebrations 

On birthdays, every month Jaymee and her team pick a date to celebrate employees with a birthday that month. They enjoy cake and balloons! 

For the most recent Halloween celebration, she invited employees to bring their children for a special trick-or-treat party. The children got to walk the contact center production floor and receive candy. Jaymee also brought in clowns and magicians for a magic show. 

A Fun Work Environment Boosts Performance 

Jaymee has found that fun and engaging activities increase employee happiness levels at work and make it a place they want to return to every day. When they love their job and their colleagues, they have a better overall experience which translates to better performance and a more positive experience for the customer. When frontline employees are happy, customers are happy and that makes for more smiles. 

What Jaymee Does for Fun 

When she’s not working, Jaymee loves to travel, both domestically in the Philippines and to other countries in Asia. She has visited 46 out of 81 must-see cities in the Philippines and she tracks her visits on an online map of the Philippines to be able to look back on where she’s been. 

She’s visited nine countries in Asia, with Taiwan, Thailand, and Cambodia topping her list of favorites. Her travels have inspired her to create digital content celebrating her explorations, Michael King, and restaurants that would delight any foodie. 

Watch the video.

Read the blog post. 

Three Principles That Elevate the Customer Experience and Enhance Customer Lifetime Value

This week, we welcome Dennis Wakabayashi to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Known as the global voice of CX, Dennis is a renowned thought leader on the topic of customer experience. He teaches digital marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is also a distinguished speaker at the University of Oklahoma. 

In 2021, Dennis was a keynote speaker at the World Marketing Summit in Turkey, the West African CX summit, and the LATAM CX conference; a workshop leader at Customer Contact week in the U.S.; and the host and MC of CXS Canada’s largest annual Customer Experience event. In 2022, he was named CX influencer for Expo 2020 Dubai.

On this episode, we tap into Dennis’ expertise and discuss how to create a profitable customer experience based on the insights he shares in his book, “Laying Golden Eggs: How to Create Profitable Customer Experiences.” 

The Writing Was on the Wall for a Creative Career

Growing up in the inner city, street art provided an outlet for Dennis to express his creativity and transform his neighborhood streets into vibrant sources of inspiration. One day he completed a mural that read, “greatness can start from anywhere.” This garnered national recognition and features on news programs that caught the eye of the CEO of a prominent advertising agency. The CEO appreciated Dennis’ talent and hired him as a production artist. Over the years, Dennis worked his way up to art director, strategist, creative director, and ultimately senior vice president of strategy for a national ad agency. 

Through it all, Dennis maintained his curiosity to investigate what makes advertising and marketing effective and profitable. Today, as an instructor, speaker, and author he shares his thoughts and techniques so others can do the same.

Getting Omnichannel CX Right

The modern omnichannel customer service environment adds complexity and opportunity to the customer journey that didn’t exist in years past. It can be a lot for brands to manage omnichannel CX in ways that align with their corporate culture and growth model while limiting costs and maximizing returns.

This can lead to inconsistencies throughout the customer journey across different lines of business or even from one customer to the next. When organizations create a unified customer experience based on values that matter to them, they can better meet customer expectations and drive consistent revenue. 

3 Components of a Profitable Customer Experience

In his book, “Laying Golden Eggs: How to Create Profitable Customer Experiences,” Dennis separates the customer experience into three primary components: reputation, reach, and relationship. He finds that prioritizing these three elements throughout the customer journey provides opportunities to increase customer lifetime value, boost loyalty, and support long-term revenue gains.

These three components unify the important touchpoints that connect a brand to a customer. In the modern digital world, social media and algorithms play a significant role in each of these three elements of the customer experience.

1. Reputation

While working for a national burger chain, Dennis stood across the street from one of the restaurants and typed “burgers near me” into his phone. The search results didn’t show the restaurant he worked for, even though he stood only a few feet away. 

Reputation is everything to a brand and its visibility to customers. Google wants to show you the good burgers near you, not just any burger.

When Dennis later started executing for that brand, he used social media to share great things about the burger chain and build its reputation. Then he introduced product promotions. This strategy yielded more profitable results than simply posting ads. 

Reputation plays a powerful role in today’s customer experience even though it's not as tangible to measure as other aspects of the customer experience. 

Customers are willing to go out of their way to buy from brands with great reputations, even if their pricing is a little higher than their competition. This creates profitable customer experiences. Conversely, brands that lack a good reputation are hard for customers to find, especially when Google doesn’t recommend them in search results. 

This leads to the second part of the experience. 

2. Reach

In the burger situation, Dennis found that the promotions they offered through social media (such as a dollar off) would generate a huge backlash of criticisms of the restaurant or the burgers. 

Although this is to be expected to a certain degree due to the nature of expression on social media, Dennis recognized the importance of building a strong reputation before focusing on the brand’s reach through ads or promotions.

The combination of a good reputation and broad reach reduced customer care costs and increased sales for the burger chain through social media monitoring and responding promptly to negative comments on the internet. 

Dennis finds there is a strong correlation between the strength of a brand’s reputation and the degree to which they can reach customers.

Because this form of scaled communication relies on algorithms to connect with people online, a good reputation is essential in order to reach customers authentically. This builds a long-term customer relationship that supports greater customer lifetime value and revenue.  

In addition to reaching a wide audience, reach also encompasses omnichannel customer experiences that offer myriad opportunities for brands to connect with customers through various channels.  

By building a strong reputation, reaching customers across a vast number of channels, and developing a relationship with them through the use of technology, brands essentially adopt a business model that more closely resembles a subscription model than retail. 

In this process, loyalty forms a key attribute of the relationship or the experiences that brands have with customers at scale. 

This leads to the third and final pillar, relationship. 

3. Relationship 

With so much content across all these digital channels, brands must think about how to develop and sustain relationships with customers.

When a brand wants to drive incremental revenue year over year, building long-term customer relationships is one of the best CX strategies they can deploy. These relationships are cultivated well through email and loyalty programs, but many brands have also been able to use social media to convert connections to e-commerce opportunities.

Digital channels form the main element of most customer experience strategies that drive consistent revenue at scale through a strong customer relationship across industries. 

The bigger the brand, the more customers they have, the more integrated their customers are into their technology, and the more difficult it is to advance the additional technological opportunities that are available to them.

Newer companies and startups, on the other hand, tend to have an advantage in building relationships through digital channels because they're not built on legacy technology systems. Instead, they start with a new technology base to acquire customers, build relationships, develop a social presence, and build their reputation.

Dennis finds that business to business brands tend to move a little faster in developing their customer experience because they're typically inbound marketing organizations, while business to consumer brands enjoy greater opportunities for profitability although they implement CX a little slower. 

The Role of the Customer Journey

The customer journey should connect the reputation, reach, and relationship between a customer and a brand. These three principles are connected by transparent, actionable data to create profitable customer experiences at scale for any organization, large or small. 

What Dennis Does for Fun

Dennis’ family and coworkers would say work is where Dennis finds his fun, because he's always working. 

But that all changed when Dennis received a virtual reality (VR) headset from his family for his birthday. Now, his favorite pastime is playing Beat Saber—a rhythm and music VR game set in a futuristic world. 

To learn more about Dennis and how to create profitable customer experiences, connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and his website www.denniswakabayashi.com.

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

A Digital Transformation Approach to Enhance CX Cloud Security Within an Expanding Cloud Footprint  

This week on the Digitally Irresistible podcast, we welcome a trio of CX cloud security experts: Chris Fago and Kyle Pierrehumbert from Palo Alto Networks and John O’Malley from iQor.  

We’ve come together to discuss the benefits of a scalable solution that helps provide real-time visibility and full stack protection for all applications that iQor deploys in our cloud-first digital transformation strategy. iQor recently announced our selection of Palo Alto Networks Prisma® Cloud Native Application Protection Platform for integration into our digital ecosystem to further enhance cloud security. This integration supports iQor’s digital transformation initiative to increase our footprint in the cloud while keeping security as a top priority and ensuring end-to-end visibility across all cloud platforms. 

On this episode, we unpack what this integration means for our clients and how it enhances the customer experience that we create for their end customers.   

Career Journeys to the Cloud  

Though his high school peers voted him most likely to host his own talk show, Chris’ career path led him to software sales. He joined a cloud security startup company that Palo Alto Networks acquired in 2018. Today, he's a technical sales manager on the Prisma® Cloud team helping large enterprise organizations secure their applications from code to cloud. 

Kyle’s social nature combined with his longstanding interest in technology also led him to software sales. After working at several large cybersecurity companies, he now works as a cloud security solutions architect at Palo Alto Networks.  

John shares a longstanding interest in computers and technology. He studied mechanical engineering in college but realized his true passion was for computers and IT. He worked for a consulting organization for 14 years, an HR software as a service (SaaS) company for three years, and has led the infrastructure team at iQor for the past seven years. Today, John is the chief information security officer at iQor. 

The Business Benefits of a Secure CX Cloud  

Maintaining a secure environment is the top priority for iQor's digital transformation initiative to transition its entire tech stack to the CX cloud —from applications and services to the tool sets we use to support our BPO clients.  

iQor sought a product set to aid in securing our cloud environment. iQor's existing partnership with Palo Alto Networks to help secure the perimeter of our firewall and enhance data security within the networks made Palo Alto Networks Prisma® Cloud a strong contender. 

Since selecting Prisma® Cloud through a comprehensive evaluation process, John says iQor’s CX cloud security journey with them has continued to enhance our posture in all areas, including network and storage objects, services, servers, and the code we put into our repositories.  

How Prisma® Cloud Supports iQor’s Digital Transformation Initiatives 

Prisma® Cloud is a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP)—a term coined by Gartner. Chris explains that this is a set of security and compliance capabilities designed to secure and protect cloud native applications from development to production.  

Prisma® Cloud helps support iQor's digital transformation initiatives by increasing our footprint in the cloud while ensuring security and end-to-end visibility across all cloud platforms.  

A Cloud-First Development Strategy to Improve Customer Outcomes  

Because firewalls can’t solve everything, Kyle points out that every phase of the cloud native application lifecycle presents new opportunities for iQor to further enhance security and deliver better customer outcomes to clients.  

Prisma® Cloud’s scalable solution helps provide real-time visibility and full stack protection across public clouds to detect and prevent vulnerabilities and secure running applications. It alerts iQor teams immediately of any potential risks so they have the opportunity to address them quickly. This includes performing code checks that may require reconfiguration to enhance security before going into production as well as detecting any active threats in the public cloud environment.  

Simplifying Processes and Improving Efficiency Through Cloud Security  

John notes that Prisma® Cloud also improves efficiency with audits and compliance certifications. It enables his team to continually monitor the cloud infrastructure to ensure adherence to all controls that have been put in place by enabling them to set up alerts so they can promptly address any issues. This simplifies the audit and certifications process, enabling John's team to spend more time developing and deploying code.  

Securing Work-at-Home Environments  

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted organizations to expand their cloud workload deployments at a rapid pace. Chris explains that this presented more cloud security incidents because cloud security investments lagged behind.  

When government orders shut down work-in-office environments in the early days of the pandemic, iQor needed to quickly create secure work-at-home environments for thousands of employees across multiple locations worldwide. This was essential in order to continue to provide excellent customer experiences for our clients’ end customers.  

By adding a layer of security to assist with multi-cloud protection deployment while providing real-time insights into potential vulnerabilities, Palo Alto Networks and Prisma® Cloud have helped us deliver secure work-at-home environments and have enhanced our cloud security.  

Helping the Infrastructure Team Develop Code Securely  

Kyle emphasizes how Prisma® Cloud helps iQor by taking the guesswork out of cloud security. Security is no longer relegated to the security team, it's a full business effort.   

John adds that Prisma® Cloud helps developers create code securely, without having to be an expert in everything. His teams can focus on developing good, efficient code while enjoying the peace of mind that it’s secure when we deploy it to the CX cloud. With Prisma® Cloud, iQor's development teams create secure environments without having to be security experts and infrastructure experts. 

What the Trio Does for Fun   

John enjoys spending time with his wife, kids, and dog. He used to spend much of his free time coaching his son's soccer team, but now that his son is in high school he cheers him on from the sidelines. 

Chris loves baseball and enjoys going to games with his wife and family.  

Kyle keeps it simple. Whenever he's not at the keyboard, he's lifting weights, watching or playing hockey, or enjoying time outside with his friends, girlfriend, or dog.  

To learn more about this week’s guests, connect with Chris, Kyle, and John on LinkedIn. Additional details about Palo Alto Networks Prisma® Cloud are available on their website at www.paloaltonetworks.com/prisma/cloud. 

Watch the video here.

Reach the blog post here. 

How Integrating Health and Well-Being Into an Organizational Culture Promotes Sustainable Employee Wellness  

On this week’s episode of the Digitally Irresistible podcast, we welcome Laura Putnam, founder and CEO of Motion Infusion, a San Francisco-based company focused on transforming organizations to inspire better health and well-being. Her company merges evidence-based methodologies on wellness with best practices in learning and development to deliver creative solutions that address employee engagement, behavior change, and human performance to build healthier, happier, more innovative and resilient organizations.  
 
Laura's bestselling book, "Workplace Wellness That Works," has been featured by MSNBC, Forbes, The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and NPR among others. She’s a frequent keynote speaker and has worked with a range of organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, academic institutes, and nonprofits to be a catalyst for change.  

On this episode, we discuss the tremendous impact an organizational culture can have on employees when it prioritizes health, well-being, and the benefits of staying “in motion.”  

Laura’s Career Path to Create a Movement  

As a former competitive gymnast, professional dancer, public policy staffer, international community organizer, and public-school teacher, Laura’s career journey and personal experiences led her to the important role of movement builder in the world of health and well-being. 

As a thought leader on health and wellness and CEO of Motion Infusion, Laura is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant who helps organizations recognize and address the critical need for more movement and wellness in our lives. Her revolutionary work has centered on leveraging every workplace to promote better health and well-being for our nation and our world. 

An Organization “In Motion” 

Laura's mission is to energize individuals, teams, and organizations to, both literally and figuratively, get in motion and make a positive change towards wellness. Her mission centers on closing the knowing and doing gap in health and well-being. 

Although we know we can improve our health and well-being simply by being active, eating healthily, not smoking, and maintaining the recommended body fat percentage, less than 3% of Americans actually exhibit these basic healthy lifestyle characteristics.  

This is the knowing and doing gap that Laura is on a mission to close by empowering every workplace to promote better health and well-being. She finds that the problem, unlike in “The Field of Dreams,” is that if you build it (e.g., a workplace wellness program) they (e.g., employees) will not necessarily come. 

Although workplace wellness programs are created with the best of intentions, they often don’t generate significant employee participation, and the employees that do participate don’t necessarily become healthier.  

Getting organizations in motion to close the knowing and doing gap leverages the workplace to promote better health and well-being by inspiring employees to become healthier and a little closer to their best selves.  

3 Stages of Workplace Wellness 

In Laura’s book, “Workplace Wellness that Works: 10 Steps to Infuse Well-Being and Vitality into Any Organization,” she breaks down wellness into 10 steps that any organization can implement. Today she highlights the three overarching stages of this framework. 

1. Start It: Workplace Wellness That Excites 

Laura says workplace wellness that inspires change begins with shifting our mindset from being an expert to being an agent for change. People don't get excited about yet another program or company initiative, but they do get excited about feeling like they're part of something bigger—part of a movement.  

This involves tapping into what matters most to people: envisioning what their best self looks like and moving closer to that goal. Rather than scaring people into making a change by measuring what's wrong with them and expecting them to get excited about it, we need to help people start with what's right and take steps to get even stronger.  

In Laura’s experience, the most important part of this initial stage is to look honestly at the organization’s culture and see if it enables people to become their best selves simply by the way business gets done. 

2. Build It: Workplace Wellness That Grows  

The second phase builds on the why. This is where you develop strategies to engage everyone in the organization in the movement. Although it's important to connect this to the emotional and physical well-being of employees, Laura recommends calling it anything but wellness so employees are more likely to get involved.  

To do this, look for opportunities to integrate it into other initiatives such as leadership development, safety, and onboarding. This can include appealing to leaders with subtle references to wellness such as sharing practices to help them maintain the energy to be an effective leader and develop a high-performing team. You can also appeal to their desire to develop sustainable engagement and build winning teams. This ingrains wellness in the company culture and integrates into daily job functions. 

At iQor, we live by our employee motto to Be More with iQor. This belief that we can all be our best selves permeates our organizational culture so we are empowered and supported to reach our goals. This leads to amazing employee experiences and a better customer experience from the inside out. 

3. Make it Last: Workplace Wellness That Works  

This final stage is about optimizing the organizational culture and environment to create a new norm so people are naturally healthier simply by being in the organizational environment.  

This stage focuses on creating a sustainable movement that becomes the organization’s way of doing business going forward. On a simple human level, the sustainability of wellness initiatives often presents challenges even though we want to prioritize our personal health. For example, New Year’s resolutions often involve healthy practices that start off strong and dwindle by March.  

To avoid this fate within an organization, Laura says it’s important to tap into our deepest human psychological needs. Avoid using extrinsic incentives, and instead appeal to the need to master skills, feel more connected, or fulfill a purpose. 

Wellness for New Hires  

When health and well-being permeate an organizational culture, new hires know things are good from the start, even if they can’t pinpoint the cause.  

Laura illustrates this idea with a story about two young fish who swam by an older fish that asked them how the water was. As the younger fish kept swimming, one asked the other “what is water? was.   

This is how we can describe culture and environment: it's the water we swim in. Like the two young fish in the story, we may not see it but it impacts our behaviors.   

Though we think of ourselves as creatures of habit—especially in the realm of wellness—Laura argues that we're more creatures of culture and environment. New hires can feel that the water is different and they swim in it naturally without necessarily defining what's different. 

Implementing a Framework for Wellness  

Laura notes how we’re all born to move, but are told to sit from an early age. Her framework guides organizations to create a culture that changes that. People know how to be healthy, but often struggle to sustain a healthy lifestyle, despite the abundance of guidance on how to do so.  

By appealing to other workplace motivations, organizations can promote wellness in ways that actually work for employees. And by leveraging the workplace to promote better well-being, we can close the gap between knowing and doing and create a more sustainable commitment to healthier lifestyles. 

What Laura Does for Fun  

For fun, Laura moves as much as she can with others! She brings out her inner gymnast whenever possible, whether in yoga class, on the ski slopes, or hiking in nature. 

To learn more about Laura and workplace wellness, connect with her on LinkedIn, Twitter, and her websites www.lauraputnam.com and www.motioninfusion.com. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here.  

Exceeding Customer Expectations Through a Differentiated Experience Drives Loyalty and Sales 

This week, we welcome Stan Phelps to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. As a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator for numerous brands, Stan delivers the message that a purposeful differentiated experience (DX) wins the hearts of employees and customers. Stan shows how differentiation ultimately boosts loyalty, retention, referrals, and bottom-line results. He also says that differentiation isn’t just about what you say, it’s about what you do and, more importantly, how you do it and why you do it. Stan leverages his collection of more than 5,000 case studies to engage his audiences with practical ideas that inspire action. 

On this episode, Stan shares the I.D.E.A. framework—his step-by-step method to communicate how to adopt and implement a differentiated experience.  

A Quest to Exceed Customer Expectations 

Stan worked in marketing for two decades, beginning on the agency side at IMG before working for several large brands (Addidas, the New York Yankees, and PGA of America). He later returned to the agency side to do experience marketing at Synergy. While there, he created larger-than-life experiences during the advent of social media and saw first-hand how quickly marketing was evolving. 

In 2009, he had a moment of truth about the seemingly elusive goal of meeting customer expectations. This led him to collect and analyze more than 1,001 examples of companies that purposely go above and beyond to exceed customer expectations. 

That journey led to his first book, "Purple Goldfish," which is now one of more than a dozen books in a series he has written about creating a differentiated experience.  

The I.D.E.A. Framework  

Stan's I.D.E.A. framework is an acronym that outlines how brands can create a differentiated experience to exceed customer expectations. Each phase of the framework involves a straightforward three-step process. 

Inquire 

In the I.D.E.A. framework, an improved customer experience begins with the inquire phase. This phase helps you build personas of the customers you serve in three simple steps. 

1. Gather insights to best understand the customers you serve. 
2. Look at things from your customers’ perspective. Think about all the experiences along their customer journey and consider how they relate to you as a brand. 
3. Use the information you gain to uncover gaps and opportunities throughout the customer experience. A gap is a friction point where you can improve a specific part of the customer experience to better meet customer expectations. Opportunities are key moments within the customer experience that you can elevate to create a truly amazing experience.  

Stan sums up this phase with a quote from the late Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, who said, "There are only two sources of competitive advantage: the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition and the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition." 

Design 

The design phase provides an outline for identifying the parts of the customer journey you want to address and how you plan to improve them. 

1. First, set your focus on what you plan to address. Identify the most critical gaps you want to fix as well as the most promising opportunities to elevate the customer experience. 
2. Once you've set your focus, begin asking big questions to explore different ways you could address the gaps and opportunities. What would you do if you had a year to make the improvements? What if you had a million dollars? What if you had 10 minutes and $10, how would you implement your changes? 
3. Then brainstorm and design ideas that address your gaps and opportunities. Think big while also grounding your ideas in reality. Consider how other industries have solved similar issues. 

Evaluate 

Once you have developed some ideas, evaluate the best ones on your list.   

1. The evaluate phase begins internally to ensure you have the capability to deliver on the idea. Look within the organization to answer questions such as the resources it would take to implement the idea, whether you have the organizational bandwidth to deliver on the idea, and if the benefits outweigh the costs associated with the idea. 
2. Once you’ve assessed internal capabilities, begin the external validation process. Test your ideas in a focus group, do surveys, or run them by a customer advisory board to validate that your opinions about the ideas align with what the customer thinks of them. There's often a disconnect between what we think and what customers actually feel; external validation strengthens your plan before you allot resources to the next step. 
3. The third and final step is the pilot phase. Test your solution in a specific market or in a limited fashion to validate its effectiveness. If the pilot is successful then you're ready for the last stage. 

Advance 

Advance is where the rubber hits the road—where you begin large-scale rollout of the plan. 

1. Incorporate the feedback you learned from the pilot and achieve buy-in. Secure the budget and resources you need to effectively implement the idea. 
2. Plan the rollout by training your team and creating the processes and procedures to carry out the idea. 
3. Determine how you're going to measure improvement to the experience on an ongoing basis. This critical step takes you back to the inquire phase to ensure you continue to achieve what you set out to do. 

Taking a Holiday With a Differentiated Experience 

One example of the I.D.E.A. framework in action comes from the hospitality industry. An all-inclusive vacation group that offered week-long vacation packages for guests wanted to identify the gaps and opportunities in their customer experience to make it the best it could be.   

Utilizing the I.D.E.A. framework, they stepped into the customers’ shoes and went on a holiday. They found that guests loved the week-long experience, but the final day of the vacation presented opportunities for improvement. Guests would check out of the hotel with time to spare before they departed the resort. During this waiting period, they felt forgotten and ignored—they no longer had full access to the facilities and the staff had moved on to a new group of guests.  

Based on that insight, the group set out to design a better experience for these departing guests. They knew the last day of the trip left a lasting impression and they needed to make it the best it could be. After brainstorming and assessing ideas, they implemented one called "Departure Beach." This was a lounge they created within the resort where departing guests could enjoy a designated experience just for them on their last day of vacation. This capped a fantastic week-long experience and left them with a positive impression that was worth repeating. 

A Differentiated Experience That Drives Loyalty 

By methodically implementing an organized approach to elevating the customer experience, brands can gain insight into the customer journey and identify ways in which they can exceed customer expectations. By inquiring to know more about your customers and their experience and designing, evaluating, and advancing ideas to make those experiences the best they can be, brands can create remarkable experiences that customers want to share. 

What Stan Does for Fun  

For Stan, golf has been the silver lining of the pandemic. After giving up the game for several years, Stan reignited his interest in golf with his two teenage boys over the past few years and they enjoy spending time together. Being outside, exercising, and immersing themselves in nature adds to its appeal. 

To learn more about Stan and the I.D.E.A. framework, connect with him on LinkedIn (#the1299), Twitter, and on his website at https://stanphelps.com. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here.  

How a Digital Transformation Strategy Improves CX, Boosts Revenue, and Reduces Cost to Serve in Health Care 

This week, we welcome Brian Wagner to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Brian has over 20 years of global operating and consulting experience at organizations ranging from start-ups and private equity to Fortune 500 companies in various high-tech industries, including SaaS, MedTech, medical devices, diagnostics, and life sciences tools. As founder and CEO of Health Insights Consulting Group, he helps small companies grow to become big by transforming organizations to meet unmet customer needs. 

In addition to previously holding Fortune 500 chief digital marketing and operations officer roles, Brian has expertise in digital marketing, product development, commercial operations, and M&A. He has led both growth and cost-reduction operational improvement efforts across industries as well as global marketing organizations, overseeing product and go-to-market strategies.    

On this episode, we tap into Brian’s expertise to discuss what it takes to create a digital marketing ecosystem in health care to improve the customer experience while boosting revenue and reducing the cost to serve.

A Quest to Improve Lives 

After college, Brian sought a job in sales and marketing and landed one at a consumer packaged goods company. He worked there for five years, gaining all the insights he could, before being recruited by a small entrepreneurial company in health care. There, he solidified his passion for improving and saving lives, calling on interventional radiologists, interventional cardiologists, and vascular surgeons to learn the business from the ground up. 

From there his career continued to progress, earning roles in digital marketing leadership and general management, approaching each one with a customer-centric perspective. He took time to understand the customer experience—customer challenges and unmet customer needs—so he could focus on improving patient care and the customer experience while reducing the cost to serve. He assessed how they went to market, established end-to-end marketing tech stacks, and went from push to pull marketing to boost customer engagement and enhance the customer journey. 

In all of his experience, Brian has remained true to his commitment to saving and improving lives while establishing operational efficiencies and reducing costs. He’s developed some best practices along the way.

3 Business Functions to Digitize for Improved CX and Operational Efficiency in Health Care  

Brian has identified three business functions that, when digitized, improve CX and operational efficiency, resulting in incremental revenue and cost reductions, specifically in health care. By simplifying processes and access to information, customers across the health care continuum—including acute care facilities, surgery centers, and outpatient providers—enjoy a better overall experience along each step of their journey while vendors can reduce their cost-to-serve.  

1. My Team – Who is the Customer’s Team?  

The first opportunity Brian identifies is to improve operational efficiency through a customer relationship management (CRM) system that enables customers to easily find and contact the right person on their vendor’s team to answer their specific question. He points out that with multiple health care solutions and products sold by one vendor to a hospital, a customer could have as many as 10 people assigned to support them. In the absence of an accessible digital CRM solution, it is cumbersome to find the right person to answer a simple question or schedule a service request. 

With the goal of addressing these unmet customer needs to improve the customer experience for health care organizations, Brian led a team that revamped an outdated system and established an end-to-end digital ecosystem platform that enables customers to sign into a secure online portal to view their personalized team. 

In the My Team component of this digital ecosystem, customers can view their orders, obtain contact information for their support representatives, and complete product training. Enabling customers to securely access the information they need online on their own schedule improves efficiency, increases satisfaction and customer loyalty, and reduces the cost to serve by redirecting staff to other areas that more directly benefit the customer.  

2. My Orders – How Does the Customer Order? 

The second opportunity to improve operational efficiency involves optimizing the order placement process. Through a digital ordering experience, customers can conduct initial pre-purchase research, identify what they need without necessarily involving a sales representative, and ultimately place their order online according to their own schedule—which in many cases occurs outside of conventional business hours. 

When customers enter the post-purchase experience, they can track their order online (delivery, construction, installation) and set up and complete training sessions to maximize their product onboarding speed and utilization with patients. Having online access to the information they need vastly improves the customer experience for MedTech customers in acute care centers and hospitals which make capital equipment purchases that often require arrangements for construction within the hospital and training on how to use the new product or service. Brian says that customers have embraced My Orders to such an extent that many of them purchase hundreds of thousands worth of capital equipment through the system.   

But change can be hard, especially in the beginning before customers understand the benefits it offers for efficiency. The improvements Brian and his team made to enhance the digital customer experience required a lot of marketing and customer support to help customers learn the new processes and enjoy increased productivity so they could focus more on patient care rather than administrative tasks. 

These improvements served as a differentiator in the marketplace and incentivized customers to do business with them because of the convenience and efficiency factors. The ease of doing business gave them an edge even when competitors offered viable alternative products as well. Their customers valued the improved process as well as a better customer experience, enabling them to devote more time to patient care. 

3. My Training – How Does the Customer Receive Training? 

The third opportunity for operational improvements is to revamp how customers arrange to get trained on their new product or service. In the analog world, customers would call their specialist to schedule in-person training. This generally required a lot of back-and-forth coordination and a high cost to serve because the training was delivered in person, which also involved travel, hotels, meals, and a lot of time.  

In the digital world, however, the customer onboarding process is much simpler and results in good digital CX. Customers can conveniently schedule on-demand or live training through their secure online My Training portal whenever and wherever they need them. 

Digital Transformation Improves CX in Health Care 

By studying the customer journey and identifying areas for improvement, organizations can implement digital transformation strategies to solve pain points in the customer journey and delight the customer from pre-purchase to post-purchase, while also boosting revenue and reducing the cost to serve the customer. 

The modern era of pull marketing strategies vs. dated push-marketing methods meets health care customers where they are. It empowers them to efficiently transact and arrange training and support in ways that are similar to the convenient and user-friendly experiences consumers enjoy with online merchants such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart. This digital health care ecosystem offers acute care centers and hospitals improved efficiencies that allow them to focus on the things that matter most—patient care and improved outcomes. 

What Brian Does for Fun  

Brian, his wife, and their two young daughters love to travel. They enjoy experiencing different cultures and foods, making human connections, and building a global perspective. Before COVID, they loved going on adventures, but when COVID hit, they hunkered down and found new opportunities for fun. 

This year, their travels picked back up and for spring break they went to Hawaii to visit Pearl Harbor in Oahu and the Road to Hana in Maui. They did SNUBA where the oxygen tanks float on the water so they could swim down 30 feet for an up-close experience with the marine life and sea turtles.  

This summer they traveled to the former Yugoslavia (where Brian’s wife is from) where they spent time with family and friends and visited Montenegro and Herceg Novi on the Adriatic Coast. 

To learn more about Brian, connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

Building a Transformative Culture of Caring Leadership and Active Listening Inspires Employees and Elevates CX 

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Heather R Younger, founder and CEO of Employee Fanatix, a leading employee engagement, leadership development, and DEI consulting firm. Heather is on a mission to help leaders understand the power they possess to ensure employees feel valued at work. Heather has built a reputation as a champion for positive change in workplaces, communities, and the world at large by delivering clear and purposeful strategies that drive real business results—such as increased employee engagement, loyalty, collaboration, and connectivity. On this episode, we discuss three key principles from her book, "The Art of Caring Leadership."  

The Impact of Caring 

Heather experienced the importance of caring from a young age. Born into a mixed-race family, she and her dad were viewed as outcasts by many in her mom's family. But one aunt on her mom’s side always made her feel included and worthy of her care and attention. 

When Heather was nine, her family moved from Ohio to Las Vegas. She remembers her aunt sending her a large box of eight individually wrapped gifts for every day of Hannukah. To Heather, the box represented the connection between her and the other half of her family that didn't really make her feel included or cared for, but her aunt did.  

Her aunt demonstrated that she was a leader with heart. That has stuck with Heather and helped build the foundation for what she does around the world to guide others towards caring leadership. 

Three Key Principles of Caring Leadership  

In her book, “The Art of Caring Leadership,” Heather writes about how to build greater trust and engagement in the workplace through caring leadership that promotes inclusive cultures, improves morale, and builds resiliency. On this episode, she shares three key principles of leadership that inspire loyalty and improve retention and performance—translating to better employee and customer experiences. 

1. Cultivating Self-Leadership 

Often when we think of leadership, we think of leading others. We think we need to do something for someone else first. But Heather says it's important to make sure leaders care for themselves first, before caring for others. She says each day should begin with a focus on self-leadership. This includes making sure your words and actions align with the things you say you value, being authentically yourself, exercising good self-care, and building a strong supportive network.  

Heather emphasizes that cultivating self-leadership first, helps us give from the positive sides of ourselves, not the empty parts that we then rely on others to fill. She explains this with a metaphor someone shared with her about a coffee cup and a saucer. If you pour into the coffee cup and it overflows onto the saucer, caring leaders should give from the overflow on the saucer. If you don't, then you’re drinking from the coffee cup and giving from the coffee cup and it will eventually run dry. You'll have nothing left to give. 

2. Making People Feel Important  

Heather says there's nothing better we can do for a person than making them feel important. It’s critically important that managers recognize and show appreciation for people at work in specific ways so they feel appreciated and recognized.  

According to Gallup research, only one in three workers in the U.S. and Germany strongly agree that they received recognition in the past seven days for doing good work. If they haven't received praise, they don't feel appreciated and are twice as likely to say they'll quit in the next year.   

To address this, Heather says workplaces must be filled with appreciation and gratitude. They also need to foster strong human connections with leaders, the organization’s brand, customers, and coworkers. She recognizes the importance of looking at touchpoints throughout the employee journey and ensure they feel connected. Once employees feel disconnected, they care less about the organization's mission, less about the tasks and processes to be completed, and they want to do less, they start to check out, and then they leave.  

Heather senses that organizational leaders know the importance of appreciating employees, but the number of leaders that practice it on a regular basis is likely much lower. To help incorporate employee recognition into organizational cultures, Heather works with executive members and team members within organizations to build employee engagement and DEI practices with accountability. She ensures thoughts and actions align to produce results that employees and customers actually need.  

3. A Culture of Listening 

To demonstrate the importance of listening, Heather talks about when each of her four children were babies. They’d make cooing sounds in their cribs and were so happy when their voices produced the results they needed—mommy or daddy arrived at their side. Then there were times when they made noises and she wouldn't go to their crib and they'd start throwing or knocking things. Our voices are innate and they make us us. At work it's no different, she says. If we use our voices and no one responds, or cares, or listens, then we feel inconsequential; we feel like cogs in a wheel spinning to achieve an end goal that doesn't align with our own goals.  

Listening is critical. Heather has a five-step process for listening and an upcoming book on the art of active listening to ensure people at work feel heard, valued, and understood. 

Of all the things organizations want at work—employee engagement, customer satisfaction, customer retention, higher revenues—we'll never reach those goals if we can't listen to stakeholders to give them what they need. Listening helps people feel important and know you care. Then they want to engage with you. 

This aligns with who we are at iQor and our strong customer service culture. We prioritize helping customer service agents, supervisors, and all other employees understand how important they are to us as people, not just from a business perspective. 

Reflect on Your Leadership Goals  

To sum up her approach to caring leadership and put it in perspective for all leaders, Heather recommends identifying a person you’ve worked with, a manager or not, who made you feel like you could do anything. Someone who appreciated you and recognized the work you did every day. Then think about someone who made you feel small and inconsequential at work—like you were just there to get a job done. Which person do you want to be? You'll be remembered either way, but as which type of leader? This is a choice leaders make every day. 

What Heather Does for Fun 

Heather loves spending time with her crew of teenagers—her four children. They all love hanging out together, going on long walks, going to the movies, even watching double-header back-to-back movies at the theater. It doesn’t matter what they do, Heather values the time they spend together—it fills her coffee cup! 

To learn more about Heather and her caring approach to leadership, check out her Leadership With Heart podcast, visit employeefanatix.com, heatheryounger.com, follow her on Twitter, and connect with her on LinkedIn. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

Data-Driven AI Performance Enablement Software as a Service Improves Metrics and Delivers Better Employee and Customer Experiences  

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Sean Minter, founder and CEO of AmplifAI. At AmplifAI, Sean and his team apply science to make teams better, leveraging AI-powered data to create a personalized environment that enables every frontline employee to succeed. As more companies explore the new generation of hybrid work, innovative leaders and organizations are relying on AmplifAI’s SaaS solution to enable performance, improve people, and make work more fun—wherever work is happening.  

The BPO industry is no exception. Focused on delivering great customer experiences for some of the world’s top brands, every day thousands of iQor customer care agents respond to questions pertaining to our client’s products or services. Frontline supervisors are in a constant mode of coaching agents to empower them to consistently create smiles for our clients’ end customers.  

Leveraging advanced digital technologies to facilitate the coaching of frontline employees, iQor recently announced our selection of AmplifAI as one of our digital CX initiatives to support excellent employee and customer experiences.  

On this episode, we learn how AmplifAI’s artificial intelligence-driven software as a service (SaaS) performance-enablement technology platform helps iQor improve key metrics on a client program and deliver smiles through coaching and analytics. 

Solving Problems Through Innovation  

Sean entered the technology startup space years ago, starting three other companies before AmplifAI. He also worked at a private equity firm in between his startups and bought a BPO—PRC out of South Florida—about 12 years ago.  

Bringing a perspective from outside the BPO industry, Sean looked for opportunities to do things differently when he began running PRC, drawing on his process-oriented background in tech.  

He was determined to gain insight into why some customer care sites and some teams performed better than others. Indeed, his greatest challenge was figuring out how to replicate the highest performing frontline associates and frontline leaders to scale performance ability and drive consistent outcomes for clients.  

He ultimately sold PRC to a larger BPO and he turned his attention to solving this problem. He knew that this challenge was not unique to PRC. He realized that other BPOs as well as brands with internal customer support call centers faced the same challenge. Harnessing his expertise in tech startups, Sean founded AmplifAI to drive more consistent customer care performance outcomes.

5 Things BPOs Need to Do to Be Successful on Any Client Program 

Through his work to replicate high-performing frontline associates at scale and develop an AI-driven platform to enable consistent outcomes in customer service, Sean identified five things BPOs need to do in order to produce excellent consistent outcomes for clients. 

1. Deliver on a Client's KPIs 

Whether first call resolution, average handle time, or Net Promoter Score (NPS), BPOs need to deliver on client KPIs with efficiency. Sean finds that the key to improving these metrics is improving the people driving the metrics. For this to happen, frontline leaders need the right tools to engage their team, understand the data and metrics around performance, and coach their frontline associates with the right information at the right time to improve a specific outcome. 

AmplifAI empowers frontline leaders to do this more efficiently. It takes away the need for frontline leaders to spend time manually analyzing data from multiple systems and reports. AmplifAI handles data analytics and recommendations so supervisors can focus on engaging and developing their teams. 

With AmplifAI’s performance enablement platform, BPOs develop higher-performing and more engaged frontline associates and leaders.  

AmplifAI saves 30% of a frontline supervisor's day by identifying actions they need to take to support their team, whether it’s enabling better performance, following up after a coaching session, recognizing agents, understanding what to coach, or driving the coach-the-coach process. 

This allows BPOs to deliver more efficiently on a client’s KPIs, which ultimately increases productivity and creates more smiles with our client’s end customers.  

2. Instill Confidence That Agents Will Create a Great Customer Experience 

 
Clients put their most important asset—their customers—in the hands of a trusted BPO partner like iQor to take care of them. In order for them to make this decision, they need to have confidence that the BPO will perform.  

Because consistently providing good CX to a client at scale is very important, AmplifAI helps drive organizational processes by collecting data from the client, identifying what a high performer is, and creating a persona for that high performer so the BPO can leverage it to drive actions that will result in good CX at scale.  

This applies to all sorts of contact center agent personas, from empowering new hires to helping good agents become great agents. By providing access to streamlined data, AmplifAI helps frontline leaders deliver timely, personalized, and efficient employee development and engagement across their teams so everyone can deliver a great customer experience across all sites consistently. Built-in accountability ensures agents and supervisors receive the support they need to thrive.

Sean knows firsthand from his time in the BPO industry that when a frontline employee has a great experience, they're inspired to deliver an excellent experience for the customer.  

3. Manage Agent Performance at Scale  

The need to manage agents' performance at scale, for both work-in-office and work-at-home employees, is essential. Indeed, as mentioned previously the goal of engaging, coaching, developing, and recognizing frontline associates is important for scaling activity. When frontline leaders need to study reports to discover insights they can use to coach their agents, it can inhibit their effectiveness, hinder their ability to remember who should be recognized, and make it difficult to prioritize their time especially when frontline employees aren't always in the office with them.

AmplifAI addresses this challenge in several ways. It gives frontline leaders access to performance data and AI-driven recommendations through a single, unified system that prioritizes actions, key behaviors, and performance indicators so they can spend more time coaching and building connections.

Through integrations with remote work tools, it can also push information out to platforms employees are already logged into to drive more interaction within the work environment.  

And, its proprietary Coaching Effectiveness Index maximizes a supervisor’s ability to coach their agent's performance while driving team engagement and cohesiveness. The Coaching Effectiveness Index identifies coaches’ strengths and areas for improvement so managers can help coaches become better team leaders. 

4. Maintain Compliance With Client Standards 

Meeting client standards is the minimum threshold, with the goal being to exceed these standards. This means staying on top of operations in real time. To do this, Sean says BPOs should look at data to create balance scorecards on the agent and company levels that will illuminate a bell curve of people—from high performers to low performers. 

To this end, AmplifAI builds personas over different time frames to account for changing impacts (such as seasonality, new product offerings, and a new prioritization of certain metrics). This drives coaching, recognition, and activity in a systematic way across all sites at scale to help adapt to changes and identify where you are at risk of non-compliance with client standards while also recommending next actions for better customer support. 

5. Balance Quick Onboarding and Training With Retention  

AmplifAI gathers data throughout the employee lifecycle, which AI validates before loading it into the database. This acts like an AI assistant at the agent and frontline leader level to help identify whom to coach, what to coach them on, whom to recognize, what behaviors need improvement, and more. The AI assistant gives relevant recommendations enabling the leader to focus on creating human-to-human interactions.

Sean says that as we think about the future of the contact center, it's helpful to think of how a customer service agent can have an AI assistant to connect them to content so they are empowered to improve themselves on easy things and human-to-human coaching can focus on more complex needs.  

Understanding where frontline employees face challenges when they reach production can inform training, nesting, and onboarding so future employees are better prepared before production. AI helps recognize the data to make this possible at scale.  

When BPO supervisors are empowered to help frontline employees strengthen specific skills in less time, it supports quick onboarding, training, and retention.  

Human Interactions Remain at the Center of Great CX  
AmplifAI helps BPOs like iQor deliver the right employee experiences to their most valuable asset, their agents. It supports better leadership that ultimately improves frontline employee performance and engagement to create customer experiences that make people smile. 

What Sean Does for Fun 

With a 10-year-old and a three-year-old, Sean and his family focus their free time on fun home activities in the Dallas, Texas area. Barbeque is their go-to tasty activity when it's not 105 degrees outside! 

To learn more about Sean and how he and his team power AI-enhanced people enablement, visit www.amplifai.com and connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here.  

How Quality Management and Service Excellence Are Essential for a Great Customer Experience  

This week, we welcome Alec Dalton to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Alec is co-founder and managing partner of the Hospitality Leadership Academy, a firm offering professional development programs and management consulting focused on service excellence.  

Alec has operated five luxury properties and has held various corporate positions with hospitality industry pioneers like Marriott International, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, and Walt Disney Parks & Resorts. He is a renowned keynote speaker on customer experience and quality strategy and a contributor to several internationally best-selling books on the topic. He also operates a consultancy that helps businesses—brand names and boutiques alike—design and deliver five-star services. 

On this episode, Alec discusses the role of quality management in your customer experience strategy and how essential it is for achieving high levels of customer satisfaction.  

A Career Journey That Began Where Dreams Come True 

Alec’s career dreams date back to when he was eight years old on a family vacation at Disney World. While he and his family were at lunch talking about the special experiences they had that morning at the Magic Kingdom and sharing excitement about the upcoming fireworks that night, Alec noticed a custodial cast member (aka Disney employee) cleaning a nearby table. Seeing quality management in action, he realized that the magical experiences he and his family enjoyed were only possible because of people like the custodial cast member and all the other employees in various functions across the resort.  

As he grew older, Alec was captivated by Disney’s focus on quality and he learned that other organizations did the same thing. He studied hospitality at Boston University, worked in a variety of hotels and resorts, and spent time in the quality management function in different corporate offices. Today he enjoys helping a variety of large and small organizations develop their own five-star services by training their teams, refining their executive and leadership development programs, and shaping custom frontline training programs. He provides this management consultancy focused on quality management, HR, and customer service both through his firm, the Hospitality Leadership Academy, as well as Accelerate Learning Systems, a partner company.  

The 3 Components of Quality Management in CX 

Alec believes that every organization should have a philosophy around quality. Quality, he says, centers on the interplay between customer experience, customer success, and customer service. He defines three primary components of quality management. 

1. Conformance to Company Standards  

One way to assess quality is based on conformance to the expectations a company has for the way work gets done and how outputs are produced. There should be consistency in your company’s quality standards. 

2. Competitive Quality 

Another way to assess quality is in the context of industry norms and the experiences customers have with your competitors. Consider what competitors are doing to meet customers' needs, where they are failing, and what expectations customers have of your brand based on their experiences with analogous businesses.  

For example, in the hotel business, it’s common to check in with an employee at the reception desk for a few minutes before going up to your room. But in the airline industry, it’s possible to check in online or check in at a kiosk in the airport. Also, in most cases, it’s possible to select your seat on an airplane. Why can’t the hotel business take advantage of the same self-service mobile technology innovations to enable mobile check-ins and room selection in advance? The analogous expectations customers have of your industry compared to other industries influence their perception of competitive quality. 

3. Customer Satisfaction  

Finally, in Alec’s experience, customer satisfaction is the most important definition of quality. Customers bring their own unique wants, needs, and expectations. It’s your job to deliver the products and services that satisfy those needs or help them find a way to get there if you can’t. 

How to Use Quality Management to Improve CX Design 

Despite how essential quality management is in good CX, it is often overlooked. Yet there are ready-made frameworks CX professionals can use to design and improve experiences. 

One of Alec’s favorites is the Six Sigma quality framework that guides CX professionals to reduce inconsistency and improve efficiency. The DMAIC process (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) outlines this strategy, which Alec writes about in “Customer Experience.”  

Define  

First, customer experience professionals must define the experience they want to deliver. This includes both the actual experience and the outcomes—the memories or products you want the customer to leave with. Alec says it’s important to measure the key touchpoints along the customer journey that are important for driving customer satisfaction.   

Measure  

Second, measure the business operating metrics so that you can address compliance quality and competitive quality throughout the customer journey.  

Analyze 

Third, track the key metrics over time to reduce risk and make sure you’re actually satisfying your customers. Ensure your standards meet the needs of your customers and are at least equal to your competitors’ standards.  

Improve 

Next, look for opportunities where you can take things to the next level and improve on your current experience.  

Control 

Finally, develop a quality control plan so you can sustain a new level of quality or improve it and delight your customers even more in the long term.  

Perceived Challenges of These Frameworks 

Originally developed in the manufacturing world with clear metrics for consistency, the data-intensive focus of the Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing philosophies can lead some brands to hesitate with them, especially for those in industries that rely on measuring customer or employee emotion.  

The DMAIC process, however, is fairly common for brands in the hotel, hospitality, and entertainment industries. Using voice of the customer channels like surveys and social media feedback, hospitality, and B2C companies can mine those sources for data. And there’s increasing potential for more data in the future as video recognition and artificial intelligence technologies continue to advance. 

The Cost of Poor Quality Management 

In “Customer Experience 2,” the second customer experience book Alec coauthored, he writes about the cost of quality in the customer experience. He explains how there is a cost to deliver quality, but the cost of poor quality is even greater. 

The cost of poor quality can include negative word-of-mouth, opportunity costs, loyalty loss, negative sentiment, waste, and the cost of reworking processes to eliminate quality concerns. It’s important for brands to consider what happens when things go wrong and how you can prevent it from happening in the first place.  

For example, say you check into a hotel and the front desk provides friendly service and your guest room is lovely. But after you go to sleep, another guest suddenly walks in and you realize you were both checked into the same room. Oops!  

In this scenario, two customers are understandably upset about the experience, which may result in negative word-of-mouth, rebates, refunds, or other accommodations to ensure customer satisfaction. Poor quality by design—the breakdown in process that caused this problem—resulted in all of these costs.  

The cost of quality management can be categorized into two groups: conformance and non-conformance. 

1. Conformance 

Conformance is the cost of designing and implementing effective quality management. There are two types of conformance costs: appraisal costs and prevention costs. 

Appraisal costs include things like inspecting parts or supplies before production begins or before a service is provided. Implementing quality assurance programs, performing inspections and the like are all part of the appraisal costs. This costs money, time, and effort, but it can prevent faulty parts or experiences from advancing through your supply chain and production process.  

Prevention costs are similar but from an in-built design standpoint. Prevention costs often go by the Japanese term poka-yoke which means foolproofing. These are the measures you put in place to prevent accidents from happening. In a digital world, they might include preventing an employee or customer from skipping a step in a transactional process through a pop-up message. There are costs associated with designing, building, and implementing these, but these costs are often much lower than the costs of non-conformance. 

2. Non-Conformance 

Companies incur non-conformance costs when things go wrong, often due to poor quality or ineffective quality management. These include external opportunity costs—the cost of an upset customer, angry guest, or negative word of mouth. But they also include internal costs when things go wrong and you need to rework processes, reduce waste, or address low employee morale.  

Balancing Quality and Cost  

To reach a healthy balance between quality with cost, it’s important to remember that the ideal level of quality, at least from a financial standpoint, isn’t perfect quality. Perfection is astronomically expensive and often unattainable, especially in services businesses because we’re all human and accidents happen. In contrast, the goal is to balance the cost of preventing and assuring quality to help reduce the cost of any potential failures and ensure a great customer experience with high levels of customer satisfaction.  

What Alec Does for Fun 

Being in the hospitality business, Alec loves to travel. Last year he visited all 50 states in the USA! He’s still deciding on this year’s adventure, but he has his eyes set abroad.  

To learn more about Alec and his insights into quality management, visit his website at www.alecdalton.com and connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Watch the video.

Read the blog post. 

How Strategic Email Marketing Can Create Great Customer Experiences and Improve Your Bottom Line 

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Emily McGuire, a self-proclaimed email marketing nerd! As the customer evangelist at AWeber, Emily applies her email marketing expertise to create a great customer experience through email at every step of the customer journey. On this episode, Emily explains three key elements to creating an exceptional customer experience using email. 

3 Elements for Creating Exceptional CX through Email 

Throughout her years of work in email marketing, Emily has identified three primary elements for creating exceptional CX through email. 

These three stages of the customer journey with email are: 

1. Onboarding 

For Emily, it all begins with customer onboarding. Although this phase looks different for different types of businesses, it always encompasses beginning the customer relationship on the right foot—anticipating the customers' needs and providing the information they need to be successful with your brand. 

This step is focused on educating and nurturing new customers to set the stage for their relationship with your brand. Email onboarding campaigns keep the customer experience at the forefront to build customer trust, whether it’s navigating a new platform they signed up for, anticipating the next steps in a professional services relationship, or learning when to expect a product they ordered and how to use it effectively.  

This involves predicting what the customer needs for a personalized experience every step of the way. One example of a successful e-commerce email onboarding campaign Emily shares is from a company that sells washable rugs. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Emily purchased a rug with a removable top that can be cleaned in the washing machine. She began to take note of the company’s engaging post-purchase email series before her order even shipped. After placing her order, she received a series of onboarding emails beyond simply an order confirmation.   

This included helpful emails telling her, as a new customer, how to prepare for her new rug and how to care for it. She also received an email addressing shipping delays due to the pandemic and supply chain issues. Soon thereafter she received a shipping confirmation email, an email confirming her rug was delivered, and a reminder email about how to care for her new rug along with potential problems that may arise and how to contact customer support in the event of an issue.  

Throughout the new customer onboarding process, the brand proactively anticipated the questions their customer support team was likely to receive and answered them up-front instead of waiting for new customers to reach out to customer service, probably reducing some of the volume of inbound customer service calls for this brand. They shared useful information at each step of the customer journey, and built a strong relationship with Emily, as a new customer, to foster brand loyalty from the get-go.  

This step looks very similar in the software as a service (SaaS), B2B, tech, and professional services worlds—anticipating questions, offering new customers a tour of the product upfront, and providing a brief introduction to the most common features people use first with their new product or service so they aren’t left to guess or reach out to customer service in frustration. A happy customer is more likely to be a loyal customer. 

2. Retention  

The next step in Emily’s map of the customer journey is customer retention, to nurture your brand’s relationship with customers and make sure you strive to gain their loyalty. As the great management thought leader Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.”  

To foster loyalty, Emily says it's important to ensure customers get what they need from you. This includes making certain you provide information in your emails to customers on how to get support if they need it so they don’t need to search for it on your website. 

It’s also important, especially in the e-commerce world, to thank people for being a customer and for being a part of your brand community, incentivizing them to order again. In the SaaS and B2B world, this involves looking at critical touchpoints for customers and the types of services or future adoptions they are likely to take and nurturing them to take those.  

Ultimately, it’s not just about retention, it’s also about adoption and usage so you bond customers to your product or service with a long-term view of their lifetime value. This means anticipating the information they need and reinforcing it with the value that it provides. The deeper their connection, the more value they’ll see and the longer they’ll stick around. By guiding customers through each stage of your service or product and helping them make the most impact with those features or services, you can capitalize on their customer engagement and garner better, more cost-effective results than trying to win them back after they ghost you.  

For example, Emily recently signed up for a SaaS product and, during the sign-up process, indicated that she works with a team. The first onboarding emails she received provided a standard overview of the platform and the value it provides. Then she began receiving emails about collaboration and the advantages of adding team members to her account. The SaaS provider capitalized on the information they gathered from Emily to target their email campaign to her anticipated needs. They knew that if she adds collaborators she becomes “sticky” — a strong signal that she’ll become a loyal advocate for the product. 

3. Reactivation 

The third and final step of the email customer journey is reactivation. Emily explains that there are two types of reactivations.  

1. Reengage. The first type of reactivation is with customers who display a loss of interest in your product and are at risk of abandoning your brand. These are customers who are cooling off, starting to ghost you, starting to put distance between themselves and your brand, and are using your product less frequently and contacting you less often. 

You can gather data by looking at how many times customers are logging into their accounts to use your product if you’re a SaaS business. Similarly, B2C brands can determine if it has been a while since they were in contact with their account representative or ordered your product. Looking at these signals and developing campaigns to remind customers of the value you provide and sharing information on how they can get that value or giving them a discount code for additional products or services can help reengage their interest and improve customer satisfaction. 

2. Win Back. The other type of reactivation is focused on bringing back customers who have abandoned your product altogether or canceled their account or service with you. 

Sending them a series of follow-up emails addressing why they left, offering them incentives, and having a representative talk to them about what you can do to win back their business can give insight into how you can improve their experience with your brand and win them back.  

Although reactivation offers a significant ROI because there are lower costs associated with gaining business from an existing customer than winning a new customer, Emily finds that reactivation strategies are fairly uncommon. Brands often don’t think about customers that disappear because their data simply goes away. It takes actively seeking them out and understanding the needs of your customer in order to win them back.  

Marketing in the Customer Journey 

Emily concludes that these three themes are really about anticipating what customers are about to do and nurturing your relationship so they can be as successful as possible with your product or service.  

Marketing is often focused on lead generation and conversions, but retaining existing customers is much more profitable. These three elements can guide brands to cultivate great CX through email marketing campaigns as part of a unified customer experience strategy. Remarketing to customers over and over again in these ways deepens their relationship with your brand and optimizes their customer journey.  

What Emily Does for Fun 

Emily loves playing with her child in addition to exploring old hobbies that went on hiatus during the pandemic. Rediscovering the joys of disc golf is at the top of her list right now. 

To learn more about the email expertise AWeber offers, visit www.aweber.com. To connect with Emily and follow her email marketing tips, visit her page on LinkedIn. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here.  

How Active Learning Improves Employee Engagement, Training, and Retention for Better CX  

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is John Kruper, senior vice president of global learning and development at iQor. John leads an award-winning team of trainers and coaches around the world who skillfully train iQor agents and supervisors to rapidly enable them to provide service and support for the customer care programs entrusted to us by some of the world’s biggest brands.  

John specializes in designing effective employee training and development models that contribute to great CX and high employee retention levels. He designs active learning strategies that produce better-trained agents with higher performance outcomes, whether it’s upselling, reducing average handle times (AHT), or driving better customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). This method of learner-centered training empowers employees to learn by doing through collaborative experiences that enhance their skills and deepen their relationship with the company.  

On this episode, we explore the current and future states of global learning and development and look at research-backed innovations that enable rapid training and high levels of employee retention at scale. The contrast between current and future states of learning applies to many businesses, including enterprises training internal frontline employees as well as business process outsourcing (BPO) companies training frontline customer service agents. As research-based evidence of effective adult learning evolves, so does the need to adjust training methodologies to ensure frontline employees get the opportunity to be onboarded successfully by trainers who use practices that result in better performance outcomes. 

Lifelong Learning and Training  

John has a longstanding commitment to cultivating excellent educational experiences. His career journey began with a doctorate in science education. He spent the first 20 years of his career developing an expertise in digital education and virtual learning while working in higher education and academia with professors and academic programs to bring their programs online.  

Then, about 15 years ago, John transitioned from academia to the BPO industry to bring valuable digital learning and career development experiences to frontline customer service employees. He joined iQor in 2022 as senior vice president of global learning and development where he works with an award-winning training team to enhance innovations and active learning methodologies in our physical and virtual learning spaces. 

Training for Frontline Employees 

With hourly workers representing 80% of the global workforce spanning all industries and companies, John says it’s critically important to pay attention to the training experience for these workers. Training enables greater success for hourly employees that typically begin with a baseline set of skills for which they were hired but must learn additional skills and responsibilities in order to perform their new job function.  

A bad training program puts the employee behind the curve so they are perpetually trying to play catch-up learning their job responsibilities. This deficiency in skills makes it difficult for them to excel in their job, disconnects them from the company, and often results in their decision to leave.  

Indeed, John points out that the training experience is critical to an employee’s success not only in their job but also in their career because these jobs are often pathways to their ultimate career development.  

Current State of Training: Passive Learning  

Frontline workforce training has commonalities at enterprises and throughout the BPO industry due to the need for employees to master numerous policies, processes, services, and software systems in order to do their job. As a result, new hire employee training is often packed with dense information delivered in a short timeframe by trainers who know the content well but may not necessarily know the most effective strategies for delivering the information.  

This typically results in passive learning experiences whereby employees are expected to absorb massive amounts of information through a trainer-focused lecture-based training format. Desks are set up in rows with a lectern and a projector at the front of the room and all eyes are on the trainer who delivers lengthy content in a show-and-tell style. But research shows that showing and telling doesn’t work.  

People learn best by doing. As a result, information-rich training needs to change so that new-hire employees can collaborate with other new hires to practice and problem solve with the information they’re learning while being coached by a facilitator who knows the ins and outs of the content.  

Future State of Training: Active Learning  

The future state of training for frontline employees is active learning. John notes that training classrooms need to support how adults learn best: active, problem-based learning in a collaborative, social environment. This simple yet radical approach transforms information-based learning so employees are empowered to discuss, share, and collaborate with peers. This approach increases knowledge retention, higher-order thinking, participation, engagement, and ultimately contributes to employee retention.  

In this training environment, there’s no front of the room. Employees work with colleagues in small groups while the facilitator circulates throughout the learning studio—mentoring, coaching, and asking questions providing an enriching learning experience.  

Active learning is organized around the learner with a set of problems and goals that the learner practices solving in a safe environment where they can grow and hone their skills. 

How iQor Is Deploying the Future State of Learning and Development  

iQor is taking a three-pronged approach to transform its entire learning organization into an active learning one in which high-quality effective learning and employee development is delivered rapidly and at scale to frontline employees.  

The three elements of this transformation to active learning include the following: 

1. Design Physical and Virtual Learning Studios  

Physical and virtual training classrooms are transformed into collaborative active learning studios that promote interactions between the facilitator and groups of learners. 

2. Establish a Change Management Approach  

Implement change management to upskill trainers to support their shift from lecturer to facilitator so their methodologies align with the new pedagogical approach. 

3. Harness Technology  

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and other software technology systems offer new tools that enable and empower the active learning environment. John explains that now we can have learning systems that monitor what each individual is learning and how they’re performing and adapt the material accordingly. This makes it possible for everyone to have an individualized learning and development plan instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum.  

With the combination of these three elements, John notes how iQor is transforming our training into an active learning approach, enterprise-wide across all geographies and verticals to support how adults learn best.  

Through active learning, frontline workers and training facilitators enjoy a more collaborative and appealing environment, where employees have the opportunity to learn more, retain more, and engage more with the curriculum, one another, and the company. This enhances the employee experience, reduces employee turnover, and builds empathy in the customer experience they provide.  

John emphasizes the continued importance of partnering with clients throughout the training process. Transitioning to active learning methodologies is accomplished through an ongoing collaboration with clients to draw on their content expertise and integrate it into an instructional design that supports active learning experiences. 

What John Does for Fun  

John goes the distance in all that he does. For fun, he loves running every day. Every year for the past 15 years he has run the Chicago Marathon! When he’s not racking up miles on foot, he enjoys road trips with his wife. Over the past two years they have clocked more than 25,000 miles on their camper van, exploring national parks and other areas of the country.  

To connect with John, visit his page on LinkedIn. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

How a Customer-Centric Culture Improves the Employee Experience and Elevates CX 

This week’s guest is Annette Franz, founder and CEO of CX Journey. She has 30 years of experience—on both the client and vendor sides—helping companies understand their employees and customers to drive retention, satisfaction, engagement, and the overall customer experience. She is a credentialed CCXP who has authored two books on CX as well as numerous articles in industry publications and she is regularly invited to speak at conferences and private events.  

On this episode, we delve into Annette’s four key steps to improve the customer experience from the inside-out, looking at the interplay between culture, leadership, employees, and customers.  

Customer Experience Strategy From the Start  

Growing up on a farm in Ohio, Annette always dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. While the science of chemistry rerouted her from that endeavor, she did find a lot of chemistry in creating great customer and employee experiences. She left Ohio for sunny southern California and found a job doing market research at J.D. Power putting her math and writing skills to good use.  

Since that time, she has been focused on customer experience strategy work on both the corporate brand side and the private agency side. Her work has ranged from customer understanding to culture and employee experience. As a certified customer experience professional (CCXP), she has seen the CX profession evolve over the past three decades and has gained deep insights on how to improve the customer experience. 

The 4 Steps to Improve CX From the Inside-Out 

Drawing on her years of strategic experience in the industry, Annette has identified four key pillars to improve CX from the inside-out. She takes an in-depth look at these and other strategies in her two books, “Built to Win” and “Customer Understanding,” and shares them with us here.  

1. Culture   

Annette’s four-step strategy begins with the heart of the organization: the culture. She finds that by looking at what’s happening on the inside with employees (while taking into account the voice of the customer), an organization can fix what’s happening on the outside with customers.  

Prioritizing culture means prioritizing how you do things. Annette says culture equals core values plus behaviors. This means defining, socializing, and operationalizing core values (including customer-driven ones). In labeling the values and defining appropriate behaviors associated with each one, a customer-centric culture will flow through the DNA of the organization and yield profound improvements and a great customer experience.  

2. Leadership Commitment and Alignment  

This customer-centric culture hinges on your organizational leadership’s commitment to design and deliberately cultivate the culture. This commitment must extend beyond the CEO and a few leaders in various departments. It has to involve the entire leadership team. All leaders across departments must be aligned on what it means to be customer-centric and how the organization is going to deliver on that in order to ensure a unified customer-centric transformation. 

This commitment must be evident in measurable ways. Leaders need to provide the resources needed (time, financial, capital, and human) to do the work that’s needed to create and maintain a customer-centric culture.  

Indeed, a customer-centric culture is a collaborative one in which everyone is working together towards the common goal of creating a great experience for customers. 

3. Employee Experience 

For all of this to happen, employees must come first. Without employees to design, build, sell, service, and deliver the products, an organization has nothing. The employee experience drives the customer experience. 

Knowing this, it’s important to define what the employee experience should be. This includes soft characteristics like building employee relationships through a leadership team that cares about the people, open and transparent communication, career planning, and knowledge that their work impacts the business and the customers. It also involves hard characteristics like the tools, processes, policies, workspace, workplace, and everything else that is needed to service the customers in the ways in which they deserve to be served. 

4. Customer Understanding 

The final step of Annette’s strategy focuses on the voice of the customer. A customer-centric culture must include the voice of the customer, but how do you use that voice internally to drive employee and customer success?  

Annette says this means looking at customer feedback, data, and personas internally to ensure employees are informed and educated about who the customer is and the experiences they desire. Using customer journey mapping, service blueprinting, and other initiatives to guide the values of the customer-centric culture and inform employee coaching can drive higher levels of engagement and help brands ultimately deliver a great customer experience. 

The 10 Foundational Principles of a Customer-Centric Organization 

In her book “Built to Win,” Annette discusses the 10 foundational principles of a customer-centric organization. The first three she shared here comprise the first three in her book: culture, leadership commitment and alignment, and employee experience.  

The other foundational principles include additional ways to inspire people to think about what a customer-centric organization really looks like and entails. This means truly being people first; putting people before product, people before profits, and people before metrics.  

In contrast to the inside-out approach of her four-step process to improve CX, her foundational principles incorporate outside-in thinking and doing—always including the customer perspective, knowing who they are and what their expectations are. This perspective can boost customer satisfaction and, subsequently, customer retention levels.  

She also looks at governance—the structure, committees, and governing model. This foundational principle of a customer-centric organization guides how to break down silos to create cross-functional teams working towards the common goal of improving the customer experience.  

Her culminating principle is the platinum rule: treating others the way they want to be treated. She said this approach sums up what outside-in thinking and doing is all about in a customer-centric organization and builds customer loyalty.  

Customer Experience Strategy Today  

Looking at customer experience strategy today in the context of its evolution over the past 30 years, Annette notes that it’s more challenging today than ever before. Before the pandemic, many organizations were repurposing CX staff. Once the pandemic began, however, they shifted to work towards understanding the customer and their motivations. This evolved into a focus on the employee and the employee experience. 

Today, Annette hears more and more stories about bad employee experiences, but companies that prioritized a customer-centric culture aren’t facing that challenge. In contrast, their customer-centric outlook and empathy have guided them through hard times. 

What Annette Does for Fun  

Annette loves being outdoors and working out, whether on the water or in the woods. She enjoys paddle boarding, biking, mountain biking, and many of the other outdoor experiences that southern California has to offer. 

To connect with Annette and learn more, visit annettefranz.com, cx-journey.com, and LinkedIn. 

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here. 

Streamlining Contract Management Workflows Through Digital Transformation to Improve Ease, Efficiency, and Cost 

This week’s guest is Jerry Levine, general counsel and chief evangelist at ContractPodAi. He both uses and celebrates the ContractPodAi technology platform that offers inside legal teams the ability to get more work done with less friction while contributing to a great customer experience.  

On this episode, we hear how the ContractPodAi cloud enables the digital transformation of the in-house legal field through contract lifecycle management that utilizes intuitive artificial intelligence (or augmented intelligence, as Jerry says) to increase legal agility, improve workflows, and save money. 

From Client to General Counsel and Chief Evangelist  

When Jerry joined ContractPodAi as their general counsel and chief evangelist he brought with him an extensive legal background as well as experience implementing and using ContractPodAi as a customer himself. At his previous in-house legal department for a tech company, he first tried implementing another contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, but with many features only available as add-ons, he sought a better solution. He turned to ContractPodAi which offered integrations with other systems and extensive automation to improve workflows along with excellent customer support to learn the ins and outs of the platform.  

Almost immediately, ContractPodAi identified lost revenue on previous contracts and saved the company $500,000 while also significantly lowering the turnaround time on contracts.  

With such positive experiences using the platform, he truly believed in the product as a user, so much so that he joined ContractPodAi. Jerry is still a loyal customer and helps guide ContractPodAi’s digital vision and enhancements while adding value for inside legal teams and clients.  

The Digital Transformation of CLM 

Built by attorneys, ContractPodAi guides the digital transformation of contract lifecycle management and provides insights and efficiency into the process in addition to offering other capabilities through its extensive legal platform. It uses an intuitive artificial intelligence (AI) engine to help legal teams be ready for anything.  

Because legal teams manage numerous contracts and relationships concurrently, managing them efficiently can often present challenges with large amounts of unstructured data that isn’t easily organized in a database without assistance from natural language processing, machine learning, or other AI technologies. The digital transformation of CLM offers structure to the process that saves time and money and improves accuracy as well as speed of contract closings.  

ContractPodAi distinguishes itself in this transformation by providing end-to-end contract lifecycle management. This enables in-house legal teams to quickly and easily create, complete, search, and manage contracts of any type while advanced AI automatically detects and extracts obligations and offers recommendations to help make decisions. 

It is configured to each customer's unique systems and requirements offering a single repository for every contract with powerful tools that grow and scale through an easy user experience that improves speed and efficiency. 

Moreover, the excellent customer support that Jerry experienced firsthand makes the integration simple and stress-free so legal leaders “look like heroes” as Jerry says. 

Empowering In-House Legal Teams With AI 

Contracts are the lifeblood of business and CLM can benefit legal teams across industries, from banking and finance to customer care, software vendors, and manufacturers. ContractPodAi makes all aspects of the contract process better, faster, and easier through digitization and automation. 

Jerry sees this as especially helpful in the legal profession which hasn’t seen significant changes in the nature of their work since the time of Abraham Lincoln. Legal work still involves a lot of research and writing, but in the fast-paced digital world of today’s businesses there are opportunities to streamline it with digital technology. Many legal professionals rely on older technology like email and Excel and sometimes resist digital innovation within the legal department. But with contracts impacting many aspects of the business, utilizing AI to improve workflows offers tremendous benefits throughout the contract lifecycle.  

With so much information contained in contracts, extracting it, organizing it, and accessing it with ease presents opportunities to leverage the power of digitization. Early contract management platforms focused on storing and organizing the information according to customer and/or project.   

Modern CLM technologies like ContractPodAi offer similar features, but also address the entire contract lifecycle. This innovation is a significant change from electronic storage and shared drives or syncing programs. ContractPodAi’s technology enables it to extract and interpret data better than people can, providing insights that may otherwise be missed.  

Two Examples of How CLM Adds Value 

Jerry describes ContractPodAi as “augmented intelligence” that makes it possible for the humans using it to do more. It takes things that are tedious and cumbersome and uses automation to make unstructured and hidden data accessible and manageable to improve business processes and outcomes. 

An effective CLM platform empowers legal teams to act more strategically to make good decisions with efficiency and deliver a great customer experience to the organization. 

He offers two examples of these benefits.  

1. CLM Adds Value 

The entire team at ContractPodAi is committed to creating an excellent customer experience within their digital transformation. As general counsel and chief evangelist, Jerry wants customers to enjoy the success he has experienced with the platform since switching to it several years ago on his previous legal team. 

He had a dedicated 24/7 support representative at ContractPodAi that gave him his WhatsApp and phone number and made it clear that Jerry could contact him whenever he had questions. Having this customer service resource with one-on-one support made Jerry very comfortable with the platform. The resulting insights ultimately led to tremendous savings for his firm which was able to spend less on outside counsel.   

In fact, within three weeks of using ContractPodAi at his former tech company, Jerry’s legal team identified two outstanding contracts that finance had stopped billing but support teams were still servicing due to gaps in communication. Remedying this situation saved his company $500,000 a year! 

2. CLM Improves Workflows Across Departments 

ContractPodAi integrates with Salesforce, Workday, and numerous other platforms and services to facilitate workflows across business functions. This enables in-house legal departments to effectively manage risk while also delivering solutions that are connected throughout the organization and equip sales with the resources they need to sell with confidence.  

This type of digital transformation enables legal professionals to move faster, access the information they need, and collaborate seamlessly across the business.  

For example, when Jerry originally began using ContractPodAi in his previous job, his team closed a contract in 24 hours which the sales team thought would take two weeks! The improved workflows enabled by the CLM made it possible for the legal team to move faster with efficiency and accuracy in ways that benefited the entire organization. 

What Jerry Does for Fun  

Fun for Jerry is all about family. He relishes the time he spends playing video games with his son and exploring new destinations with his family. In addition to that, he and his family are foodies who love exploring restaurants and tasty dishes. With encouragement from his wife and their commitment to a healthy lifestyle, Jerry went vegan a few years ago and enjoys all kinds of vegan delights.  

Jerry Levine welcomes connecting on LinkedIn to explore topics such as the future of law.  

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here.

How CX and Experience Marketing Create New Opportunities to Energize Brands and Delight Customers 

This week’s guest is Kevin Tydlaska-Dziedzic, founder and CEO of BKN Creative. As a practitioner of experience marketing who works in sync with customer experience throughout the customer life cycle, Kevin leads customer experience initiatives across the entire business. And he’s not alone. According to the 7th State of Marketing Report from Salesforce, 80% of marketers maintain responsibility for customer experience. 

Through branding, photography, web design, copywriting, marketing, and social media marketing, Kevin’s agency helps clients develop better relationships with their customers before, during, and after the sale.  

In this episode, we discuss how experience marketing has evolved to become an essential part of the overall customer experience, and how the ‘why’ of a company’s brand is essential to creating that experience. Plus, Kevin shares three examples that show how his approach to experience marketing builds on growth opportunities to enhance the customer experience through marketing efforts. 

Finding His ‘Why’ and Helping Clients Make the Most of Theirs 

Kevin grew up in Colorado where he always gravitated towards creative outlets. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in photography and began working in the marketing industry when he moved to New York City and joined the marketing team at Whole Foods Market. Kevin and his husband eventually moved to Tampa where they worked at several marketing agencies that were full of creatives, strategies, and fantastic clients.  

Although the marketing world fascinated and inspired him, he wanted to do more. He sought a culture that was inclusive, fun, and motivated by his ‘why’ to focus on clients’ passions and why they do what they do.  

So, in 2018 Kevin founded BKN Creative. His mission was to grow the agency by helping clients find their ‘why’ and to deliver on those findings. He also knew that he had to grow the agency in a way that reflected his passions.   

A minority-owned business, BKN Creative is certified LGBTBE® by the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC). Agency headquarters is in Tampa, but they also collaborate with clients in Colorado, New York, and New Mexico. Kevin and his team of 11 help companies leverage their ‘why.’ They also show them where they have opportunities to improve their relationships with customers and build brand loyalty through experience marketing.  

What is Experience Marketing? 

The original concept and practice of experience marketing was to create specific in-person marketing events where customers interacted with a brand’s products or services. It was a separate department from customer experience. Each had its own budget and managers.  

Over time, companies recognized that customer experience was the most important way to differentiate their brand. Since talented experience marketing professionals were already well versed at creating great experiences for customers, bringing them in to improve CX at all customer touchpoints made a lot of sense.  

And that’s what Kevin and his team at BKN Creative do—experience marketing at every touchpoint to build brand loyalty throughout the customer journey.  

He approaches his brand of experience marketing in three phases.  

1. Understand the ‘Why’ Behind the Brand 

The brand needs to reflect what’s important to the business. Why was the business started? What motivates you? What are your passions? How do customers find you? 

Answers to these (and other) questions are key to every visual design element. That includes color palette, typography, imagery, layout, and more. And from these elements a logo emerges that captures the spirit of the brand and sets it apart so it appeals to its customers. But that’s just the beginning. 

2. Delight Customers at Every Stage of Their Journey 

Phase 2 is where customers meet products and services, one-on-one, throughout the customer journey. Those encounters can happen at retail (brick and mortar or online), at events, on the client’s website, on social media, on search engines, and even on review websites or even how the company books appointments. 

Any time people experience a company’s brand—even if it’s before they realize that their customer journey is about to begin—is an opportunity to create a great experience for them. And that needs to reflect who the company is, what they stand for, and why the customer should want to do business with them. 

3. Extend the Experience Beyond the Sale 

As Kevin points out, the experience doesn’t stop at the sale. Instead, it’s necessary to extend the elite experience the customer enjoys on their journey beyond the sale. Why? To encourage the customer to deepen their relationship with the company, to buy again, and to be an advocate for the brand. 

3 Examples of Experience Marketing  

Kevin says even companies that do a great job with most of their experience marketing efforts can still have gaps that leave them susceptible to customer complacency or customer churn. He explains that those gaps are not negatives, they are growth opportunities to improve the customer experience strategy and boost customer engagement. That always-positive perspective plays out in these examples. 

Example 1: Changing Customer Perceptions on Social Media 

A respected financial institution approached BKN Creative with a very specific need. For the most part, their marketing efforts were rocking. But customer feedback showed there was a gap in their social media activity. 

That’s a heavy lift for two reasons: 

1. People are more uninhibited when commenting on social media as opposed to face-to-face or voice interactions. 

2. Money is important to all of us, and people can get emotional about their money on social. 

After analyzing touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey, Kevin and his team identified opportunities for the financial institution to grow the speed at which they harnessed social media to answer questions, route calls, route messages, and handle issues raised by customers. 

Kevin’s team put together a customer experience strategy that leveraged every social media platform they were on, as well as their review platforms. The goal was to further improve the positive perception of their customer service by being as helpful and responsive to customer needs as possible.  

The strategy embodied the mindset that there are no stupid questions. There is no experience we can’t solve, or help, or make delightful. Now, from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., all customer complaints and concerns expressed on social media are addressed. 

Planning for effective social media monitoring support, training agents, and identifying and responding to trends yields significant positive impacts on the customer experience. As an example, iQor collaborates with a prepaid wireless service provider to deliver social media customer support, reducing response time on social media from 1 hour-plus to under 6 minutes. 

BKN’s client also expressed a desire for its customers to make better use of its mobile app. Kevin’s team created an educational campaign using video to make learning the intricacies of the app easier. 

These two experience marketing engagements seized opportunities to fill in the gaps and expand on the company’s positive customer experience efforts to increase customer satisfaction.   

Example 2: Extending Success and Opportunity for a Consulting Dynamo 

When LaKendria Robinson approached BKN Creative with her idea for a new company, she was already a recognized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) powerhouse in Tampa Bay. Running the NFL’s Business Connect program for Super Bowl LV helped earn her that status.  

BKN Creative collaborated with LaKendria to bring her vision of a DE&I consultancy to fruition. Their effort was top-to-bottom and end-to-end, including: 

• Name ideation 
  
• Branding 
  
• Color story 
  
• Typography 
  
• Mission statement
• Website
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Potential client booking process
• Growth opportunities 

From their collaboration (and LaKendria’s unstoppable commitment) The Orenda Collective was born to “. . . challenge organizations and individuals to view their community through a diverse, equitable and inclusive lens and deliver innovation solutions that live on in perpetuity.”  

Once The Orenda Collective was on its feet, BKN Creative presented LaKendria with a growth opportunity—to start a nonprofit that provides microgrants to minorities so they can create their own small business. LaKendria embraced the opportunity, and BKN Creative provided the creative direction.  

Example 3: Smile at iQor 

iQor is excited to collaborate with Kevin and BKN Creative. As it did with the financial institution discussed in Example 1, Kevin’s team analyzed iQor’s experience marketing strategy and zeroed in on social media as a chance for growth opportunities. 

But unlike the financial institution, iQor has two social media audiences: 

1. iQor’s current and future clients. 

2. iQor’s large and extraordinary audience of team members and future team members.  

As Kevin noted, iQor has a robust culture that deserves celebrating. Now, not only do future team members learn about our culture, they also hear about it from current team members who celebrate it on social media. 

By filling in the gaps, Kevin and his team have strengthened iQor’s robust experience marketing efforts.  

What Kevin Does for Fun 

When he’s not running a busy agency, Kevin loves to act in plays, films, and television. And while he can’t mountain bike in Florida as he did in Colorado, he enjoys biking the many trails he’s found in Florida with his husband and business partner, Brandon.

Watch the video here.

Read the blog post here.