The Modern Customer Podcast

Imagine having an expert mentor at your fingertips at all times. Someone who could answer questions, provide advice and move you in the right direction. For customer experience representatives at Allstate, that dream is a reality with Amelia, an AI-powered bot trained in the language of insurance. It’s just one way the company is using AI to power customer experience and lead the charge in a changing insurance industry. As customer expectations have changed, Carla Zuniga, senior vice president at Allstate, has worked to modernize how the company interacts with customers. The goal is to make more out of everyday interactions with customers and to move more interactions to automated channels, including chatbots and AI-augmented human roles. One of the major players in the AI game at Allstate is Amelia, a chatbot trained on more than 50 unique insurance topics and regulations across all 50 states. Allstate employees can quickly chat with Amelia to get concise answers about complicated insurance questions from customers. Not only does it allow customers to get the answers they need right away, but it allows employees to be ready to work much sooner by cutting down training time. Instead of having to sort through numerous articles and resources and make customers wait, representatives can now chat with Amelia while the customer is on the phone to get the most accurate information. In an industry where regulations and compliance are incredibly important, Amelia helps make sure every customer’s needs are met and are in compliance. Amelia provides the best of both worlds—the quickness and accuracy of AI mixed with the personal touch of human interaction. Amelia handles more than 250,000 conversations each month and is used by more than 75% of Allstate call center employees. Allstate has plans to increase her workload and expand her scope to eventually interact directly with customers. Paired with other AI programs like automation and big data, Amelia has helped Allstate reduce its talk times and increase its first call resolution rates. Zuniga believes AI will continue to grow and transform over the next five years as the technology becomes more robust. As Amelia and other AI services become more customer-facing, employees will be able to focus more on case management and the human aspects of customer experience. No matter how the technology grows, personalization is still a key element of insurance companies. It can be easy for customers to just feel like a number when they get a new policy, file a claim or contact their insurance agent. To combat that, Allstate relies on data and creates detailed profiles of each customer. By leveraging this information and using AI to highlight trends and the most important data points, the company can help interactions feel more intimate. As the digital transformation continues and AI changes how insurers interact with customers, innovating and staying ahead of the curve is incredibly important. Modern customers want to feel empowered and engaged, and the best insurance companies must innovate in order to stay relevant. A major part of that innovation must be centered around AI, just like what is being done at Allstate.

It used to be that customers went to a restaurant for dinner, enjoyed their meal, and left without a second thought. Now, digital technology is changing how restaurants connect with customers and opening the door for big advances in customer experience. Using digital communications to improve the online and in-restaurant experience gives brands more opportunities to get to know their customers and to provide a more personalized experience. Stephanie Perdue, CMO at TGI Fridays, compares it to fine dining restaurants that know their guests and why they are in the restaurant and then caters to the occasion, whether it’s a birthday dinner with friends or a romantic date. With the wealth of data available to restaurants today, brands can know why customers are dining and what they are looking for in an experience. Innovation is in the DNA at Fridays, and the restaurant is constantly looking for ways to evolve the brand to match customer trends and technology. Much of the digital improvement comes from connecting disparate data points. Fridays has a wealth of data from customers, both online and in-store, but the challenge is connecting the data and providing it to servers to create real-time, tailored experiences. Imagine if the data could show that a certain customer always purchases a certain type of cocktail, was celebrating a friend’s birthday and prefers to be seated in a booth. The server could take the information and deliver an amazing experience to help Fridays stand out from other restaurants. The company is currently testing a variety of technology to turn that dream into a reality. Data also extends to rewards programs. Fridays was a pioneer for restaurant loyalty programs and is constantly evolving its approach to meet customers needs. By using data and digital technology, Fridays is able to connect customer data for its rewards customers to provide personalized offers and recommendations. Instead of the traditional “earn and burn” program, Perdue says the company is looking to use the rewards program to provide more opportunities to engage with customers. Even something as simple as giving a rewards customer offers for items they already buy can be incredibly effective. If a customer always buys appetizers but never dessert, offering a deal on appetizers is much more effective than a once-size-fits-all offer on dessert. A big trend for TGI Fridays has been using digital to grow its to-go and at-home dining options. Data has shown that customers want great food from their favorite restaurants without actually having to go sit and wait in the restaurant. TGI Fridays invested heavily in its delivery and to-go ordering business and doubled it in the last six months. Digital is a communication point that makes traditionally brick-and-mortar restaurants accessible for at-home customers. Expanding the to-go service not only opens the door to a wave of new guests, but it also allows the restaurant to understand the needs of its customers and track their trends and purchases. Perdue says it is important to be where the customers are. Fridays allows customers to place orders via Facebook, GM OnStar or Amazon Alexa, which makes it convenient to order great food from wherever they are. Going forward, the biggest trends in the constantly evolving restaurant industry will be using data to connect the online and in-restaurant experiences and engaging customers after they dine. Taking advantage of digital trends and technology can help restaurants like TGI Fridays stay ahead of the curve.

Business leaders and executives would all agree that today’s customer experience has to be personalized, convenient, fast and right every time. But how many of them actually know what the experience is like for their customers? Are they aware of hold times, connection delays or other issues? Customer experience is one of the defining characteristics of today’s brands. But too many brands measure things reactively instead of taking advantage of technology to proactively understand and address issues. The majority of brands rely on surveys and find out about issues after the fact instead of using technology to prevent issues and catch them before they grow. Alok Kulkarni, CEO of Cyara, a cloud-based solution that looks at customer experience from the outside in, says it is important for executives and CX leaders to put themselves in their customers’ shoes to really understand the experience. If they wouldn’t want to go through something themselves, they shouldn’t make their customers do it. By using an early warning system to find integration breakpoints and system flaws, companies can take a proactive approach to solve problems before the customer experience is impacted. Rather than relying on employee feedback and stories that are hard to substantiate, a digital CX solution allows brands to perform systemic audits to get data about issues and potential pitfalls. Kulkarni shares the example of a large bank that launched a new call recording solution for customers just before the entire team left on Christmas vacation. When the vice president of customer care returned after the holidays, expecting to hear how well the solution was working, he was surprised that more than half of call center agents reported that customers couldn’t hear them on the phone. Customers were frustrated, and the bank’s net promoter score took a nosedive. The entire team had to come back from vacation early to address the issue, which could have easily been prevented with an early detection system that showed the audio wasn’t going through. Instead of having to play catchup and solve the problem later, CX technology could have pointed out the issue before the system went live.  Digital is also a powerful tool in customer experience monitoring. Monitoring from the outside is like a canary in a coal mine compared to finding out what happened after the event when it is too late to solve the problem. NPS and customer satisfaction scores are useful in tracking customer experience, but they don’t tell the whole story and are rear-facing instead of proactively seeking digital feedback in real time. The new metric is operational customer experience, or OCX, which objectively tracks scores for things like call success rates, connection times and hold times.  This is just the beginning—customer experience technology will continue to play a huge role in the future. Kulkarni expects an explosion of AI that will lead to more conversational bots. Customers are expecting more human-like conversations through technology, and a conversational AI boom is right around the corner. A connected digital journey that seamlessly takes customers from an AI bot to an actual human can help provide timely responses. Kulkarni predicts that connected journeys will be a key battleground in the future of customer experience. An omnichannel strategy allows companies to use digital to solve customer problems on their first contact with the organization. As experience becomes more important than product or even price, brands need to make customer experience their top priority. In today’s battleground, brands need to arm themselves with a digital solution that puts customers first. This podcast is sponsored by Cyara. If you would like to sponsor a podcast please contact our team blake@blakemichellemorgan.com.  

When you think of great stories, you probably think of things you connected with emotionally. Sweeping images and great characters and locations instead of rational content and lists of facts. That concept is followed by Tourism Australia, where Chief Marketing Officer Lisa Ronson says companies shouldn’t be overly rational with customers. It’s a common trap for many brands to over-explain things to customers. Consumers are surrounded by so much noise in today’s busy world—the best way to cut through the noise and make an emotional connection is to ignore being rational. Ronson says the best storytelling is grounded in what people know, but then moves forward. People can’t connect emotionally to a list of facts. After all, an emotional connection, not a rational explanation, is what drives us to change our behavior. Tourism Australia followed that idea with its Super Bowl commercial that re-created a fake Crocodile Dundee movie trailer with Chris Hemsworth and Danny McBride. By tapping into a sense of nostalgia and fun, it was able to relate with customers on a different level and build an emotional connection with Australia. Instead of embarking on a massive campaign, Ronson and her team focused on quality over quantity and decided to do fewer things but to make them more compelling and really reach out to customers to create an emotional connection. The main idea was fewer, bigger, better. It’s a stark contrast from many marketing efforts that aim to be louder and flashier than the competition, but it paid off for Tourism Australia and made their commercial the most watched from the Super Bowl. In order to be effective storytellers, Ronson also says that organizations need to look at who they are targeting. The most effective organizations target their audience based on attitudes and behaviors instead of demographics. Attitude is a much better indicator of consumer behavior, which is why Tourism Australia focuses on high-value global travelers instead of one particular demographic. Focusing on attitudes and behaviors helps marketers better understand changing customer trends. Today’s customers want genuine, unique experiences. They want to be able to connect with people around the world, especially as they travel. Part of the reason Ronson believes the Super Bowl commercial was so effective was because it highlighted the down-to-earth and welcoming nature of the Australian people instead of just listing reasons Australia is a good place to visit. No matter the story we tell, Ronson sums it up correctly by saying we’re all human. There is always something that connects us emotionally, and it’s up to marketers and storytellers to find out what that is.

When it comes to understanding customer satisfaction, it’s best to go straight to the source: the customers themselves. Perhaps no one does that better than the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a research groups that looks at more than four dozen industries to find out what customers are buying and how satisfied they are with their experiences. ACSI’s data covers all major consumer industries. With data from the last 20-plus years, the organization can see how trends and technology impact overall customer satisfaction. The biggest trend in retail for 2018 is the continued growth of online retailers and the struggle of traditional big-box retailers, said ACSI Managing Director David VanAmburg. Brick-and-mortar stores have been struggling for quite some time, especially as online stores like Amazon and Walmart continue to grow. However, the struggle has been bigger in the past year compared to the previous three to four years. It’s even harder for specialty mall stores like Gap to find their footing with customers. Customers just aren’t shopping in malls as much anymore, which means many of these stores have had to focus on their online presence. A great example of that is Nordstrom, which is doing better than many other department stores. Nordstrom saw that the industry was changing a few years ago and pivoted to expand its web presence. The idea is to be where the customers are. Nordstrom realized many of its customers prefer shopping online, so it put more effort into its online experience. VanAmburg says one of the keys to a strong web shopping experience is navigation. It should be intuitive for customers to find what they want. There also has to be logistics to match—even a great website doesn’t create satisfied customers if the items or sizes they want aren’t in stock. For modern customers, efficiency and convenience is crucial. That’s one of the reasons that supermarkets and drug stores are doing better than they were a year ago. As Amazon moves into the space with its Whole Foods acquisition, supermarkets have improved their marketing and found ways to offer competitive convenience. Even small changes to the look and flow of the store can improve efficiency and overall customer satisfaction. ACSI’s data has found that efficiency is the most important quality to customers. In a world where Amazon offers two-day shipping and instant in-store checkout, stores have to come up with creative ways to compete. In order to get customer data that is useful, stores must focus on the entire customer experience. ACSI regularly asks customers about all of the elements of the shopping experience, from overall satisfaction to their expectations, prices, store location, employees, and merchandise. Customer satisfaction doesn’t some from one single area, but is the totality of the entire experience. Stores can use the same metrics to track their own internal progress and that of the competition. Today’s world is data-driven, and customer satisfaction is no exception. In order to best serve customers and compete with the retail giants, stores across all industries need to understand customers and what they are looking for. With the help of ACSI and other internal data, retailers can stay ahead of the competition.

It’s a situation many people have found themselves in. As a young professional who was throwing herself into her career, Lori Wright looked around one day and realized the person she had become was not who she really was. She was so focused on building a great career that she neglected every other area of her life, from working through family vacations to not seeing friends or taking care of her personal well-being. In what Wright calls a “catastrophic burnout moment”, she called her boss and quit a job she loved. Wright, now the GM of Microsoft 365, uses that experience to help find balance in her life as a busy mom, executive and community member. One of her biggest life lessons is that working women can’t have it all and must make trade-offs. Women are under a lot of pressure to be perfect in everything they do. Scrolling through Instagram or flipping through a magazine showcases women who seem to do everything perfectly—great careers, clean houses, well-behaved children, a strong marriage, community involvement, fit bodies and much more. But Wright wants women to realize that the idea of being perfect at everything is an illusion. No one is doing everything perfectly every day, and a big part of self care is giving yourself a break and realizing you can’t do it all. The key is finding balance and trading off. Wright recommends laying out all of your responsibilities and then identifying the critical moments in each area. It could be that being at your kids’ soccer games or school pickup is critical for your family responsibilities and being at board meetings or employee trainings is critical for your work responsibilities. Critical moments are different for each person. Be deliberate with your time and make sure that you show up for the important moments. As Wright says, once you leave college, you never get straight A’s in life. Instead, make the moments you need to get an A in for the day a priority. One day you may get an A in work and community involvement and a C in family responsibilities, but it balances out when you get an A in family and a B in work another day. What matters is that you’re there for the important work moments and the important family moments, as well as moments that are important in other areas. Time is finite, and accepting that there are trade-offs can be powerful in your work-life integration and overall success. Wright also says it is important to help others along the way, especially other women. Every woman has a magic wand she can use to help someone and make another woman’s life easier. As we work to be more deliberate with our time, we can be honest and open about what else matters in our lives. Instead of only keeping work things at work and family things at home, we can bridge the gap and create more trusting relationships.   Wright sums it up with her advice to her younger self: enjoy the journey. Even with the trade-offs and challenges, there is joy in every day. Take the pressure off yourself to do everything perfectly and instead look around and enjoy the view.

Business leaders, contact center employees and sales associates interact with customers every day and are faced with requests, questions and a wide variety of complaints and issues. The customer experience largely comes down to how they respond—is it with a rote reply or a personalized reaction? Jeanne Bliss, president of CustomerBliss, bestselling author and a pioneer in the CX field, wants leaders and employees to pause before responding and remember the human side of customer interactions. Her new book asks the question, “Would you do that to your mother?” The idea is simple—we take good care of the people we care about, whether it’s our mother, sibling or a close friend. In many situations, there is a difference in how we treat customers and how we treat our loved ones. But every customer we interact with is someone’s mother, sibling or friend and should be treated with the same humanity and respect. Bliss says the work of customer experience can get unnecessarily complicated. By pausing and evaluating the situation before taking action, practitioners can connect in a more human way instead of being stuck in a sea of processes and regulations. After all, customer experience comes down to connecting with people, not just sticking to a rule book. An example Bliss cites in her book is Vail Resorts, which outlawed phrases like “Our policy is”, “Not my job” and “I don’t know.” The company gave its employees freedom to deliver the experience of a lifetime to its customers and provided the training and trust to go along with it. If your mother called in with a warrantee claim three days after the warrantee expired, you wouldn’t give her a lesson in your company’s warrantee policy—you would simply take the claim and make an exception. The same should be true with other customers. If a long-standing customer calls with a warrantee claim just after the warrantee expires, take care of them like you would your mother. If not, you put that customer relationship at risk and open the door for them to go to a competitor. One of the reasons people often overlook the humanity of customer experience is that there is a lack of trust in many organizations. When leaders don’t trust employees, it leads to a poor experience that drives away employees and customers. We should trust employees and trust customers, just like we trust our mothers and other loved ones. Bliss also shares the example of Cleveland Clinic, which realized more than a decade ago that it just wasn’t pleasing customers. The organization implemented rules that meant that no employee, no matter if they were a doctor or worked in the gift shop, was allowed to pass a customer requesting help. It also made all employees caregivers and gave them training and permission to stop and help every customer and patient they saw. The company got rid of silos for a more holistic approach to customer experience. You wouldn’t leave your mother in the hallway of a hospital, so why would you do that to a customer? Customer experience is all about humanity. More than profits or growth, it really comes down to connecting with customers and meeting their needs. As we build and strengthen relationships, the growth and profits come naturally. As Bliss says, we need to add humanity to customer experience and really ask ourselves, “Would I do that to my mother?”  

The world of small business insurance has always been riddled with hoops to jump through. Instead of spending valuable time growing their businesses, entrepreneurs are forced to waste time on the arduous process of finding insurance. In many cases, these people end up just purchasing a policy to be done instead of being confident that they made the right decision for their business. Next Insurance is on a mission to reinvent insurance for small business, and it centers around updating the customer experience. When Next Insurance entered the market two years ago, it realized that the insurance experience was universally unpleasant across all small business industries. According to COO Sofya Pogreb, there was lots of room for improvement. One of the biggest paint points was simply the amount of time the entire insurance-buying process took. Oftentimes, small business owners only had a few days before they needed to have a policy in place, but it took weeks of dense paperwork to make a purchase. Next Insurance turned that on its head by removing most of the humans from the application process and leveraging AI and machine learning technology. As Pogreb said, the vast majority of customers don’t actually want to talk with a human if they can have a better experience working with a machine. Instead of weeks of paperwork, most Next Insurance customers can buy a policy in 5 to 10 minutes, and 93% of them never talk to a human. The company has agents available for customers who prefer human interaction, but the vast majority of customers simply want speed and accuracy, which is provided with the the help of strong AI algorithms. One of the biggest holdups for traditional insurance companies is the fragmentation of the value chain. The agents interacting with the customers might not understand their small business industry, and the data of what customers want and need isn’t getting to the back end and product development. Without a flow of data, the product and customer experience aren’t optimized to best meet the needs of customers. Insurance essentially comes down to three main decisions: the underwriting decision, or if a company will sell insurance to a customer; the rating decision of how much the policy will cost; and the claims adjudication decision, which decides if the claim is covered and for how much. Traditional insurance companies use humans for each of these decisions, which is often why things take so long, instead of using data to make the process more efficient. Next Insurance enables data to move through entire entire value chain to better understand the customer. Data is updated in real-time so product developers and those focused on customer acquisition can know what is and isn’t working with customers on everything from pricing to coverage. Next Insurance is also leading the charge in how it handles claims, which Pogreb calls the moment of truth in insurance. One of the biggest frustrations for customers filing a claim, only to realize that their policy doesn’t actually cover what they thought it did. Next Insurance focused on transparency with customers so that they know from the beginning what is and isn’t covered. According to Pogreb, there’s a revolution coming to the insurance industry in customer experience and product quality. Next Insurance and a growing wave of insurtech startups are leading the charge, but soon all companies will have to transform their customer experience and product offerings.

Is your company running from the future or preparing for it? Nearly every business leader knows the the future of work and technology will bring huge changes, but very few of them are actually doing anything about it. Companies that invest now to become future ready will be the ones that lead and withstand upcoming changes instead of getting disrupted and being pulled in multiple directions. Wunderman Global CMO Jamie Gutfreund and her team recently undertook a major research project and discovered a large disconnect between companies seeing problems and actually solving them. Most people see change as an obstacle instead of an opportunity. And while Gutfreund agrees that you can’t predict the future, it is definitely possible and wise to prepare for it. One of the main keys to becoming future ready is to be constantly evolving. As technology changes, it opens new doors for how brands connect with customers. Brands that are preparing for the future pay attention to new technology and find new, innovative ways to share their messages and connect with customers. It’s easier said than done, however. The research by Wunderman found that while the majority of brands say they are future focused, 70% of business leaders said they can’t sacrifice short-term gains for long-term goals. The important thing to remember is that digital transformation and new technology isn’t just a trend. It’s a long-term game and a powerful tool for forward-thinking companies to have in their tool belts. Digital transformation isn’t a quick fix but rather something that needs to happen over time. However, digital tools don’t matter if the messaging isn’t there. Gutfreund says that the most successful companies are the ones that have set themselves up to receive feedback from employees, customers, competitors and industry leaders. These companies can hear what is going on and put it into context of what their brand stands for. Companies that are future ready can’t operate in a silo. They have to be exposed to what is going on with their customers and across all industries. Instead of simply competing against other companies in the same industry, technology and customer experience have made it so that all brands are competing against each other. Customers compare every interaction with a brand to their best brand interactions, regardless of if that means a bank or airline is getting compared to Netflix or Amazon. It’s in everyone’s best interest to make listening and customer experience a key focus moving forward. Wunderman’s research also uncovered the idea of wantedness. Today’s customers have all the power. Instead of brands seeking loyal customers, they need to pivot and serve their customers as loyal brands. The vast majority of customers will only consider using brands that show they are interested and care about their customers. Customers want to feel wanted, and it’s up to brands to give them that special treatment. So much of the buzz in the consumer world is around transparency and low levels of trust. Brands that can show they are invested in incorporating feedback and new technology and actually want to serve their customers will not only be ready for the future but will be the ones leading it.

A huge change is coming to Europe, and most businesses aren’t ready. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, goes into effect May 25, and with it comes a power shift that allows customers more access to their personal data than ever before. Customer data has long been thought of as a business asset. However, under GDPR, customers are now taking back ownership of their information and the power that comes with it. They can now choose what information companies have and delete their information from a company’s database for any reason. Companies that don’t comply with the new regulations run the risk of being fined up to millions of dollars. However, the majority of businesses aren’t prepared for the new legislation. According to Jeff Nicholson, VP CRM of Pegasystems, most companies didn’t realize the impact GDPR would have until it was too late. That leaves companies scrambling to come up with a data solution that meets the guidelines of transparency while also preparing for a potential wave of customer data requests. A new survey from Pegasystems found that 82% of EU residents plan to use their new rights to view, limit or erase their personal information that companies have on file. That means that not only will companies have to field the requests and share the information they have on each customer, they will also potentially lose customer data if customers request to erase their data. Companies also should handle the request in a way to adds to their customer experience. Nicholson says it’s more a question of when, not if, the requests will come in. Companies must plan for large numbers of customers asking to see and potentially remove their data. GDPR doesn’t grant exceptions if there are too many requests for a company to handle in time, so all brands must be prepared for large volumes. Nicholson says the best thing companies can do to be GDPR ready is to be proactive. The power and data shift is coming, and companies that ignore it or don’t plan accordingly run the serious risk of being blindsided by data requests and changes. Being transparent and creating reliable processes for customer data allows proactive brands the chance to build relationships with customers and gain a competitive advantage. It all comes down to trust and transparency. Customers want to know they can trust companies to take care of their personal information and not sell it or use it inappropriately. Companies that can demonstrate customer trust will be much more successful than unprepared companies inundated with customer deletion requests. One of the biggest downsides of customers electing to have their data erased is that it can no longer be used for data analytics. Losing data means companies won’t be as connected to customers or have as many insights into their preferences and habits. One of the most vulnerable industries with these changes is retail, which relies heavily on customer data for personalized recommendations and marketing. Companies need to learn to do more with less data to still provide a high-quality, personalized experience. GDPR is a huge shift in the EU, and it has the potential to expand to other parts of the world, including the U.S. According to Nicholson, the implementation day of May 25 isn’t the finish line but rather the starting line to a long road of customer data changes. Companies that are proactive and GDPR ready will set the tone and can weather the shifting consumer landscape.