Can we fix Customer Experience? W/Michelle Martinez

Amas Talks Podcast

​​Amas

So, Michelle, we both work in the same area around keeping customers happy. And I was reading an article that talked about the ACSI rating, the American Customer Satisfaction index rating, and something happened. From 2006 on, we were on a steady rise. And in 2018, it starts to plummet. And I don't think anyone needs data to tell them that customer experience is getting worse. I, for one, when I buy something, somebody lies to me and tells me they need my email address so that they can send me a receipt. And then next thing you know, I'm getting emails that I didn't ask for. And then when something breaks, God forbid, I call the 1800 number, and it tells me my call is very important to me and somebody will be with me shortly. That's another lie. And then I get to the human.

Michelle

Wait, alas, just to be clear, that's a difference of definition, right? Shortly, in your mind? In my mind, maybe like one to two minutes, but in their spectrum of like ten years, an hour, maybe it's.

Amas

Our definition of time. And then I get a human, Michelle, and something happens, and they promise me a callback that also happens to be a lie. And then at the end of all of this, I get a survey that says my feedback is very valuable. And again, that, too is a lie. And I could go on. While that is going on, every single company on earth has the word customer experience somewhere on their website or on something, right? It's like, oh, my gosh. And then we have apologies to my colleagues. So many customer experience gurus on LinkedIn writing thought pieces about customer centricity, and yet I can't get checkout lanes everywhere I go. And let me now get back to the data. Remember those ACSI ratings I said was going up until 2018? We have erased all of the gains. We are now lower than where we were in 2006. And so, you know me, I am a little bit dramatic. I am ready to declare the whole customer experience practice a failure. Let's pack our bags and go home. What says you?

Michelle

At least you didn't call it a sham, right? That could be the other way to go. So, look, I think, and I'm always the, like, let me find the gray in between. So I'm going to go with the yes and no. So I think there are elements of it that have been successful in that. Yeah, companies are talking about customer experience, and there is, overall, a greater recognition of the fact that customer experience and well designed customer experiences can actually enhance your bottom line and can be ultimately revenue drivers. They can be that organic growth engine of your organization. So I think there have been some wins in that way and kind of a little bit of some of that quantification of the value where I think CX has fallen down and then I'll get into what I think has maybe happened over the last couple of years. But where CX has fallen down, I think is some of the practitioners, and again, not against any of those that are out there and people that I know, but I think we got a little too enamored with the idea of great customer experiences and we didn't really hone in on what is the practical business value of enhancing the customer experience. And how can I actually translate that back into business terms. So yes, it's the right thing to do and that's a good story to tell, but if you don't come back with the financial value of that right thing to do, you're not going to get buy in in the long term for continuing to be able to do that. So I think where the practice has failed is pulling in that financial kind of not just justification but value addition that has come from CX. So that's where I think there's been kind of failure from the practitioner side of the house. Now what I think has happened kind of more largely is you've definitely got a concentration of businesses and you see that across the board, right? Who's in the top ten of the businesses, their size of market share. So therefore, since there is less competition in the marketplace, you don't actually have to differentiate yourself with better customer experience, you can kind of screw customers over and. Sorry, where are they going to go? Choice. Right? Where are you going to go? And there have been some changes, right? Like the ability to port your cell phone number from one provider to another has certainly made movement of cell phone providers a little bit easier. But in aggregate they still put a lot of challenge in that process so that it's not really easy. And so that's why I think you've seen that type of a dramatic drop from 2006 to where we are today is that concentration of business.

Amas

I want to go back to that point you made about value, Michelle, before there was customer experience, and I would love to hear how you got into this then. I was a service guy and there was no department I had envy of more than. Remember I had a vp counterpart over marketing. And we would be in these meetings and they would say things like, you know, half of the money we spend on marketing is wasted, but we can't tell you which half. And everyone would laugh and the CFO would write another check. And when I compare that to me, a service guy and to some extent a customer experience deal, even before that was a thing, I had to justify every penny. And I think I hadn't connected it till just now because a lot of cxos are cmos that I wonder if it's that laziness from marketing. Apologies to our marketing brethren of kind of like, what else are you going to do? You're going to write me a check to do marketing regardless of the value? Maybe we took on some of that and gotten into this more ethereal. It's good for the customer, it's good for the world, versus really trying to make a discipline out of it.

Michelle

Yeah, that might be a component of it. I would also say, certainly from my personal experience, I felt like there was almost a backlash. And I know myself and others have reacted to that backlash, which is customer service sitting within operations and customer service being a component of customer experience. Right. I do not want to confound those two terms. I'm really passionate about the fact that customer experience is overarching. Customer service is a component of it. But when you had customer service pulled out and it existed within operations, it was very much viewed as a cost to the organization. And how could you essentially optimize that cost and how could you minimize the amount of that cost? And when you have that lens on it and you constantly get the push of shorter average handle time, like lower resolution cost, whatever it may be, not necessarily to the benefit of the customer, but exclusively for the benefit of the business, I think then you get some backlash that says, look, we got to move away from that model. We have to go back to this kind of more marketing type of model where we're thinking about kind of the brand promise and what are we delivering to our customers and that value. So I do think there's some of that that's been at play. And I've certainly seen, like I said, I've lived living in that coo world and having been pushed on that operations side of the house in terms of why people might lean more towards the throw money at. We'll see what sticks and what doesn't stick.

Amas

Yeah, I want to be balanced here and acknowledge one thing you said, which is the progress we've gotten from focusing on CX. Perhaps you can tell I don't remember CX roles when I started. Right. And I haven't sat in that chair. I've spent most of my career in decidedly service, supply chain, those kinds of talk a little bit about the journey. I'm quick to throw the baby with the bathwater, but we have come a long way. Talk about from your experience, how did we even get to the point where CX is this ubiquitous thing everyone talks about?

Michelle

Yeah. So I don't know that I know exactly how I got there. I can certainly tell you. Similar to you, I grew up in marketing. A little bit of business development, a little bit of sales, but mostly marketing. And to me, what became so apparent was if you sold the living daylights out of a product, right. But then you couldn't deliver on what you were selling. That lack of kind of communication continuity was the downfall of a company, right. You can't oversell and then under deliver. It just won't work. So you have to have the pre and the post sale talking to one another. After I operated in marketing for a while, I was a general manager of a business unit, and there I owned the customer, the entire lifecycle of the customer. And that's the first time that I really came to realize the value of really understanding that entire customer lifecycle and how important that retention component was. Customer lifetime value. How do you calculate that? How do you bring that? Now, it was a subscription based model, so it was significantly easier than, as an example, Wayfair, where I worked, where it's not a subscription based model, it's much harder to figure that out, but able to do that. And so I don't know exactly the moment in time where customer experience became like the thing in an organization. I would also say, I still feel like today people are struggling with what that actually means. I think in a lot of organizations, they say customer experience, but what they really mean is customer service. And they're just giving it a new nomenclature, right. Very similar to how I see people. Yeah, go ahead.

Amas

No, you're right. That's part of the confusion in the marketplace, right. Is that I think lots of service individuals, myself included, started to think, well, the CX thing, right, it's this broad, thin. Maybe we'll now get funding, maybe we'll not be thought about as a cost center anymore. But you're right, the discipline around CX is different. And there's service elements in the customer experience for sure, but it certainly is different. If you're just joining, I have got my good friend Michelle on. We are talking about customer experience and a bunch of other topics. You'll get to know her. We'll put her LinkedIn information in the show notes. Let's get to know you a little bit. I ask my guests these questions and the one I'm going to ask you is tell me about a purchase under $50 that changed your life. I'm a dramatic person. For the better, for the worse. What is yours?

Michelle

So I'm guessing most people give you the for the better, and I'm going to give you the for the worse. But it dramatically changed my life. We've talked about this, so I have it here, at least the component elements of it, which is this used to be a dog leash. And my daughter was taking my dog out for a walk and he was on our property. Another dog, our neighborhood dog, was on the road, started barking at our dog. She held onto the leash, no problem. And all of a sudden, the leash broke. The nylon of the leash broke. My dog felt loose. He had been agitated because he was antagonized and he did some damage to the other dog. He bit the other dog and ripped open kind of his front paw to the tune of about $2,000 in a vet bill, which, of course, I was obligated to pay for because it was my dog that did the damage. And so that's life changing. What was on top of that life changing was the absolutely abysmal customer service that I got. I went back to the manufacturer and I contacted them and I said, hey, look, this is what happened. I'm not a litigious person. I'm just hoping that you can kind of compensate me for the vet bill that I pay.

Amas

Vet Bill? Yeah.

Michelle

And the response back that I got from the company was, I'm so sorry, we can't pay for the vet bill, but we'll give you a $15 refund on the leash. And here's a 10% off coupon for future purchases.

Amas

Come get some more.

Michelle

Go get some more of the thing that broke where your trust is fundamentally gone. Right. The core function of the thing that I bought was not delivered upon in any way, shape or form. Go buy more. And I responded back, rather, I think, nicely, and said, look, I work in customer experience, and let me just tell you, this is not the way to go down the road, because you just pissed me off even more by the buy. And now I'm going to go otherwise. And now I'm going to write a really crappy review on Amazon for your product. And now I'm going to also inform Amazon of the fact that your product broke and they shouldn't be selling it because, oh, that's a liability. And so they stuck to their guns. And I even kind of pointed out to them that, look, the value of you, having spent $2,000 on fixing this for me, would have been tremendous. I would have been more than happy to then go on the website and say, hey, look, this happened. But the company was really gracious about it, and that could have gone a really long way for other customers, too, and for that company, but they chose not to. And so now it's going to cost them a heck of a lot more, a lot more time in order to deal with the situation. So that was my under $50 life changing purchase.

Amas

There is so much there. And I want to respond with, you have one job, if it's a leash. And by the way, until you told me the story, it has never occurred to me that this could be a thing. Right. And back to what we're talking about, about the entire experience is, I think this is why, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it right in.

Michelle

That.

Amas

It touches everything.

Michelle

Right.

Amas

You had a purchase experience. Service is what tends to expose your experience. Like, the service is kind of what calls your attention to it. But for that to have been a positive response, we've got to go back to operations, manufacturing, give them that feedback, because it's not just about making you this one customer, even just throwing money at it and making you whole. It's about then, right. Let's make sure this thing doesn't happen again. Because if you go on and even give them a good review, that, hey, they made it right, and they did the right thing. If it happens again and again, your one review is not even your one positive review. Had they done that, would not have helped them. And I think it's so symptomatic about how there's service experience, which would have been, oh, we apologize. But if you're thinking about the whole thing, it gets a whole lot more complicated.

Michelle

And that organizati