New Podcast: Welcome to the CXM Experience

Customer experience is the new brand, and in a world where everything is moving online, customer experience has become strategically critical for all organizations, large and small. Welcome to the CXM Experience, a new podcast series where I’ll be featuring tips, insights, and strategies to help you delight your customers and prospects. It’s a Customer Experience… experience.

You can find the podcast in your favorite directory, or on Apple Podcasts. Or, listen right here on the Sprinklr blog.

In the past 10 months, Internet usage has increased 70%. We’re on our devices almost all the time. That makes the customer experience even more important than ever. The questions every business leader should ask are: How do I make someone want to be a customer, and how do I make them want to stay a customer? This podcast series is all about answering those questions.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Hello, everybody, this is the CXM experience. I’m Grad Conn, CXO, chief experience officer at Sprinklr. And today we’re going to talk about what is the CXM experience, and what are we going to be doing on this show. Mostly we’re going to be talking about CXM — or customer experience management—something that Sprinklr’s fantastic at, and we’ll be featuring stories from different customers, and actually customers and prospects who are interested in the CXM, plus a few leaders in the field who are going to share some of their experiences… with experience.

So, let me talk about a few of the principles of what’s going on today. It’s pretty amazing how life has changed over the course of 2020. This year, internet usage has increased 70%—seven, zero percent. People are deeply expanding their use of digital to do everything from shopping, to booking appointments, to connecting with others to working. And we’re all on our computers, almost 24-7. What this has done is it’s driven a massive shift in digital transformation.

Now, digital transformation is a word that’s been around a while. I’d say maybe ten years ago, digital transformation stood for: let’s get all of our paper stuff turned into PDFs, or let’s get all of our reports done in dashboards, etc.

But today, digital transformation means something quite different. Because today, it’s really customer-first. It’s customer led… it’s about the customer experience. Because customers are interacting with companies in a digital context, the digital experience that company lands has to be amazing. Satya Nadella at Microsoft has famously said that in the first two months of the COVID emergency, Microsoft saw two years of progress in digital transformation. And I think that that’s kind of what we’re seeing the same thing at Sprinklr, and the same thing we’re hearing across the board. In many different businesses today, that this sudden move to digital is become an imperative.

It’s become core to what causes the company to survive. It’s become an experience… about experience… to make sure that companies survive this experience (maybe I used “experience” too much, we’ll see).

Alright, so let me talk about care, though. One thing that’s puzzling to me is that customer care has been treated differently from marketing. There’s always been a customer care organization… separate. Reports up to a different C-level executive. And then there’s been a marketing organization… reports to a different C level executive. And that’s seemed really odd to me, because it’s the same customer that’s calling in to care. In fact, it’s your very, very best customers who are calling into care, because they’re the ones that are using the product. And so they’re having problems and issues. And they’re most likely to buy your product again.

Ford’s got a famous statistic, which is that 50% of all Ford buyers are already Ford owners, right? So obviously, taking really good care of your current customer is really important. But you know, it’s so separated from marketing. And so what happens is, you’ll have a customer experience that goes somewhere along the lines of: I have a problem, I go to the website, I get cookied, when I hit the website. In the process of getting cookied, I start getting ads for the product that I’m about to complain about or about to open a ticket on. As I’m opening the ticket and dealing with the customer service person, ads started appearing in my various feeds and starts hitting me across the internet. And so now I’m getting served all these ads for something that I’m literally complaining about this very minute. It’s quite irritating to the customer and a massive waste of money for the company, because I’m obviously not buying it.

And so how do you get an integrated view? For me, I think this is lack of an integrated view of the customer. And it causes a huge waste of money and time. And so for our standpoint at Sprinklr, what you need is a CXM database, customer experience management database. What that does is it allows you to have a single view of the customer that allows you to be able to clearly understand everything that they’re doing with the brand across different social platforms, across different different access points: like chat, or email or SMS. And across different types of functions like: I’ve got a care issue, or I’m being advertised to, or I’m engaging with the brand in some way, in a chat based way.

So this this kind of constant need to understand the customer from a full standpoint — a 360 degree view — is something that most companies don’t have. And it causes huge problems. And we all feel that, you know, as customers. You always know when a company doesn’t know you. And it can be quite irritating. There are many situations where you’ve spent thousands or maybe even 10s of thousands of dollars with the company, and they act like you’re a stranger. It’s extremely irritating. Like, how come I’m loving you, and you’re not loving me.

And I think a lot of the things that are also happening in care are a bit dated. Care has traditionally been delivered by voice, with large groups of people around an onsite PBX, in a large room. A lot of this has gone away, obviously, the large rooms of people… not sort of super cool in a COVID environment.

For the first time, these care teams are now distributed. VOIP is now a legitimate option, which is really tough in a single room because it’s hard to get the pipe big enough. But VOIP will work in a single customer working from home context.

But what we’re really finding is that customers prefer to interact on the channels of the choice, what we call modern channels. The modern channels are the channels that have been invented in the 21st century, things like social platforms, messaging services, forums, blogs, review sites.

People want to have you talk to them in the place that they want to talk to you. They don’t want to have to find a new place to talk to you. It’d almost be like if I were to call you on the phone, and you say, “hey, Grad, thanks for calling me. It’s great. I love to talk to you today, I’m going to send you a fax. Why don’t we just do this by fax?”

I mean, I’d be like “what are you doing man, I just called you to talk to you.” That’s a little bit what we do in companies. And people will reach out to us on a modern channel, and then we switch them to something that’s more traditional. It doesn’t make any sense.

So so you know, as we kind of go through this journey together on the CXM Experience, we’re gonna talk a little bit about what are best in class examples of customer care, how do we do a better job of that, what are the ways that experience can be landed.

I’ll usually share some good and bad experiences, you know, I’ll usually hide the names to protect the innocent… I had a brutal experience this weekend, which I’ll share sometime later this week. And we’ll talk a little bit about how we land better experiences. Because the challenge is that, in most companies, a single customer experience typically crosses multiple silos, or multiple organizations. It is that cross link between the different organizations where the breakage tends to occur, and the customer feels that, but the organization rarely notices it, because no one is examining those linkage points.

And so it’s this silo collaboration that needs to get solved in companies. And part of the way to do that, not the only way but part of the way to do that, is to have at least a single profile of a customer. So you can understand who you’re talking to, no matter what group in the company you are, as opposed to having multiple individual customer databases, some that are based on selling to the person, some of their based on caring for the person, some that are based on servicing the person. You have those integrated, so you have a full picture of the person, everything they purchased, and then be able to have a cohesive conversation.

So that’s going to be the CXM Experience, and I’m looking forward to talking with you each and every day as we go through this journey together. I’m Grad Conn, and I’ll talk to you soon.