Episode #30: Deliver Amazing Customer Experiences With a Unified Front Office

95% of consumers will tell someone else about a bad customer experience. That’s why delivering great customer experiences has become paramount. In this special CXM Experience episode I share my DMEXCO (The Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference) presentation that includes a look at how to truly delight your customers.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Today is a special day. This is another special edition. This special edition is my interview at DMEXCO, which is a fantastic marketing conference that’s held in Cologne Germany every year. Now typically it’s in person. I’ve been to Cologne many times, or Köln, if you’re speaking from a German standpoint… many times. Beautiful city, I think maybe one of my favorite European cities. But of course this year, we couldn’t do it in person. So they did it virtually. And they did an excellent job. They created virtual booths. They ran it over a couple of days. They had a couple speakers from Sprinklr, actually three people, our CEO, Ragy Thomas, Paul Herman, who leads our product marketing department, he did an amazing interview with Siemens, talking about what they’re doing with our content marketing platform, if you get a chance to check that one out. It’s fantastic. What Siemens has done to save money using Sprinklr. And then with me, and I talked about listen, learn and love. So if you’ve heard my listen, learn love speeches on this podcast, this will sound familiar. But there’s always a little tweak and a little twist every time I do it. So enjoy. And I am going to let this run. So today for the CXM Experience. It is a replay of DMEXCO, and I’m Grad Conn, CXO with Sprinklr.

Hello DMEXCO. My name is Grad Conn, I’m the chief experience officer at Sprinklr. I’ve actually been to DMEXCO a few times already. Love Cologne. It’s one of my favorite cities in the whole world. And I’ve gone around almost everywhere. I can’t wait to come back. But this year, we’re doing it virtually. So we’re going to do the best we can on the virtual front. And I’m going to go through a presentation around how to really become customer centric.

You know, the last few months have been instructive for most companies. And I would say that digital transformation and focusing on delivering great customer experiences have become paramount. As the chief experience officer for Sprinklr, what I do is I actually help drive the experience inside Sprinklr for our customers. And I spend a fair amount of time talking about other companies who want to do digital transformation in a customer centric context. In this video, we’re going to talk about that because a lot of people will say, hey, I want to become customer centric. I want to transform. But what does that really mean? What do I need to do to do that And we’re going to walk you through a process called listen, learn and love, which I think is the way to make that happen.

Sprinklr is a system of listening, learning and loving. So it’s essentially, the way that we deliver great customer experiences is through hearing what customers are saying, getting understanding of what that really means. And then being able to actually act on it. And it’s the acting on what you hear, that’s super critical to make all this work. There are listening systems out there. But they just end up being like research, what you really need is something that allows you to hear what someone’s thinking, be able to understand the context of it, and be able to get back to them right away. So I’m going to walk through that now step by step.

So let me talk about listen. So the core fact of our lives is that we are all connected on this planet. In fact, half of the planet is connected on the internet, and almost 3.8 billion people are online now. And that number is growing rapidly all the time. And most of those people are on a social platform of some kind. And what’s different about the world that we live in today versus the broadcast world of the 20th century, is that the 21st century is a world where people’s interests and their identities are available online. And they’ve posted those things willingly. So I can learn a lot about somebody that I didn’t know before, because they’ve told me. Now, part of the transaction that’s going on, is that I’m giving you information about me. And I expect you to treat me in a different way. As a customer, I expect you to know who I am, I expect you to be quick, I expect you to be responsive, I expect you to be personalized, I expect you to not show me things I don’t want to see. Don’t waste my time. And I expect you to deliver great experiences that I want to talk to others about.

The interesting fact, and one thing that I always tell people, is that don’t forget that people share bad experiences very broadly. In fact, 95% of consumers — 95% — will tell someone else about a bad experience. They’re doing it online, they’re doing it in a way that’s both permanent and extends itself very dramatically. And so there’s a lot of data out there around how important all of these platforms and all of the conversations that are out there are. You’ve got to make sure that you stay on top of those.

And one of the things that I like to talk about is this Mary Meeker chart. Mary Meeker Internet Trends report has been going for 25 plus years now. And she’s always tracking changes in behaviors and attitudes. And this one in particular she shows that the preferred business contact channel — so this is how consumers want to talk to a business — has changed. It’s gone from voice where people who are in their 60s and 70s love talking on the phone in a synchronous connection. And if you look at the younger people, which is generation Y and Z or even Generation X to a certain extent, there’s been a massive shift to the modern channels. Massive shift to SMS, to texting, to web chat, to social media. And so companies today can no longer rely on voice based customer call centers, or even email based. They’ve got to make sure they’re leveraging platforms like Insta, Facebook and X, formerly Twitter and Apple business chat and all the other things that are going on out there. So you need some way of comprehensively being able to manage across all those platforms.

So listening is really all about being where your customers are, to a certain extent, fishing where the fish are. And one thing I like to say is that when you think about listening, you can’t just think about it from a social platform standpoint. There are 24 social platforms, and Sprinklr sits across all of those. But there are also millions, if not hundreds of millions of web sources. There are forums, which are critical. It’s amazing what we’re seeing in forums today from some of our customers. You’ve got app platforms, many people have apps that they’re bringing in. There are messaging platforms, that’s become really important. There are blogs, millions of blogs out there, and there are review sites. All that information has to be pulled in, because people are talking about you, and your brand, in all those different places.

Now, the challenge is all this data is unstructured. So it’s coming in as unstructured, unsolicited information. So what Sprinklr has spent a lot of time on over the years is creating a strong AI based way, using seven different layers of AI processing, to really understand what people are saying. From a sentiment standpoint, from a brand standpoint, from a location standpoint, or product standpoint, and be able to make some sense out of it. Because you’re literally pulling in billions of conversations. And when we do that, we can actually convert these unstructured feedback into structured data.

So typically, in any social post, or any messaging post, people will have multiple brands and multiple sentiments. You know… I was kind of sad when I woke up this morning. But my brand made me happier when it delivered a certain value for me. They were sad and they were happy, the brand is mentioned. All that has to be distilled. And once that’s distilled, that is now structured data that can be combined with the existing structured data in CRM systems in the company, and things that you get from surveys and calls and other more structured materials. And that allows you to have a 360 degree view of your customer, also done in a completely ODI compliant way. So it’ll work with any marketing automation system out there. And this is where I think the real magic of Sprinklr occurs is that once you’ve got that 360 degree view of the customer, all sorts of different groups inside the company can start to collaborate around that customer.

Because you’ve got that single customer ID, different departments, marketing, advertising, research, care, social media team, they’re all working on a single profile. And they all see what each other has done. So if I’m talking to someone, I can talk to them with the knowledge of what other people have done. Or for example, if there’s a care issue open, and I’m on the advertising team, my ads can automatically be turned off for people who’ve opened care episodes. Makes a ton of sense, right. And so being able to coordinate and create a great focused customer experience is what customers come back and talk about. They knew me, they understood me, they knew what I had said before, it makes a very compelling story. And so Sprinklr is structured to have a product against each one of those departments. And all those products are on a single platform to allow for a lot of collaboration between departments and coordination within the products themselves. We call this the unified front office. And the unified front office… think of it as: we’ve done a lot of work unifying the back office over the last 30 years. Now we need to unify the front office, which is the customer facing part of our organizations.

And this last chart here, which I think is interesting, is a study from Harvard Business Review. Basically, the question was, does it make a difference to getting back to people on modern channels matter? Do they care? Will they be willing to pay more? So they took a look at the airline industry, which is extremely price sensitive, and essentially looked at whether people would pay more for a plane ticket if they got responded to more rapidly on social media. And they looked at a bunch of different response times. And airlines that respond within five minutes, five minutes, think about whether you’re doing that right now, we’re actually able to command a significant premium on the next ticket: $20. Airlines that responded within 20 minutes, were able to get $10. Still not bad. It declined rapidly as it went to an hour. And then after an hour, no one was willing to pay a premium. So rapid response on these modern channels makes a difference from a business standpoint. People will value your brand more, because people are willing to pay more for great experiences.

And that to me is the key to all of this. So visit our brand room. We’re like I said, been involved in DMXCO for a while. We’ll be there when we’re back live. And we’ll certainly be wonderful to have an in virtual interaction with you now. I’d encourage you to book a virtual meeting, I think it’s a great way to get to know us, we can talk more about what you’re trying to do from a digital transformation standpoint, how we can help and how we can help you create great customer experiences. So you’re able to charge more, be more productive, and have a more successful company. Have a great conference, and I’ll see you soon.

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed doing it. DMEXCO is one of the world’s premier marketing conferences. If you haven’t been, you should check it out. I had a great time. And I really appreciate the organizers letting me speak and letting Sprinklr have such a huge presence at DMEXCO this year. It was a great conference for us. So thanks for listening. For the CXM Experience, I’m Grad Conn and I’ll see you next time.