Inside the CX Toolbox

The Gist

• CX attributes. Key skills for success include curiosity and persistence.
• VoC importance. VoC is critical for process improvement and CX initiatives.
• Problem-solving approach. Ongoing process improvement and root cause analysis are essential in CX.
• Employee empowerment. Empowering frontline staff can expedite problem-solving and improve customer experience.
• Data utilization. Use customer data to identify and eliminate root causes of bad experiences, saving resources and improving satisfaction.
• Feedback importance. Expand closed loop feedback processes to identify patterns and address root causes proactively.

Dom Nicastro: Hello, everyone, Dom Nicastro, managing editor CMSWire here and welcome to this edition of CX Decoded, and I'm happy to say I am joined today by a colleague doing her very first podcast with us, and it's my pal at CMSWire. Editorial producer, Sarah Butkovic. What's going on Sarah B?

Sarah Butkovic: Nothing much. I'm happy to be here.

Dom: You sound great, so you’re happy to be here. You're not nervous. Maybe not anymore.

Sarah: Not anymore. I had the jitters right before we started, but I think it's finally starting to go away.

Exploring the Key Attributes of a Successful Customer Experience Professional

Dom: Not a lot anymore, a minute in. That's pretty impressive. Okay, good. Well, the good news is we got very affable guests here with us to put us all at ease and talk about high level customer experience stuff because this guy has the background for it. He's been there done that. Today, we are going to be joined by Cary Cusumano, former customer experience design consultant at Verizon, spending good chunk of his time now, as a CMSWire contributor. Cary, welcome. 

Cary Cusumano: Hey, Dom, it's always nice to be with you guys.

Sarah: Cary, I'm happy because you're one of the contributors that I found. So it's great to have you. Yes, yes. And I hear you're going to be talking about what's in your CX toolbox. And before we get into the world of CX, we do want to know more about you. So what are you focusing on right now in CX? And what are your past roles that led you to where you are today.

Cary: My hope here from this podcast is that a couple of takeaways will be just key attributes that a CX professional will want to have in their toolbox. Not necessarily the the actual tools themselves, but the capabilities or the skills that they want to take away with themselves. So hopefully, I'll leave a little bit of that for your audience. 

And people will be interested in finding out more to answer your second question. Basically, I started out in the United States Navy was my first quote unquote real job, where I qualified in submarines and ultimately became a chief engineer in the nuclear power plant. So it felt to me like my first move into the civilian world was a natural, windowed stay in engineering and operations. And that's kind of what I did. I worked at a company that's no longer in existence called MCI, telecom company. But the key there was these were roles that were, again, engineering, network design, network implementation, video conferencing, things like that. But you know what the other thing that I found here, Sarah, was where I learned the most about the business was in some chief of staff roles, where now you're seeing everything across marketing and finance, and HR, et cetera. 

And in those roles, one thing that started to come to the fore, in my mind was seeing the same types of issues arise over and over and I developed a curiosity to kind of say, Why did these same things keep happening, whether that was in finance, or whether it was in a technical area, problem solving, Eric troubleshooting for the customers, there just seem to be the same types of issues that were process related. And so one of the things that I that I actually have, that personally, I like, is the investigative aspect of problem solving. So it's this notion of trying to dig under why things happen. And I guess when you combine these elements here, it really became a foundational core of what I think is a key attribute for CX professionals that haven't that's just a general curiosity about why and then that persistence in the investigation of why processes go sideways.

Dom: And once again, we have a CX leader, who took such a traditional route to the CX path, the Navy, right? Isn't that, it's fascinating to me, we've had architects, we've had engineers, math whiz, and all of a sudden, they end up as CX leaders like I find this so fascinating, by the way, thank you for your service, number one. And number two, how does that path emerge, It's nuts?

Cary: It's funny that you probably hear me chuckle because I remember one comment from one of my commanding officers at one point, he said, originality is neither required nor desired. And I was a little bit of resistant to that notion, but I guess when you're operating a nuclear power plant, you want to stick to the rules that would be fundamental.

Dom: You would think so. Cool. Yeah. Always be in monitor there for sure. All right. So let's get into the talk. So you know, talking about the CX toolbox for practical measurable outcomes, the key attributes of CX professional needs for success. So question number one, you began your career with several operations engineering, even chief of staff of roles, again, getting into this whole evolution into CX, what was the true spark that led you to CX management?

Cary: Like I said, in those particular roles, what I found was a recurrence of the same types of problems that got me looking at this notion of continuous process management, particularly in the field that I studied was in Lean Six Sigma, you could be in TQM, total quality management, could be Lean Six Sigma, it doesn't matter, the method, as long as you have some type of focus on continuous process improvement. And so I basically went and became a certified Lean Six Sigma, but though, using those skills to try and get underneath why things were happening, and actually solve problems once you understand the root causes.

Related Article: Align Your Voice of the Customer Initiative With Your Customers

Decoding the Value of 'Voice of the Customer' in Business Success

Sarah: Yeah, and I definitely agree, there's certainly, you know, enormous value to businesses that practice these sorts of process improvements. But that doesn't sound like it's exactly CX. So could you connect the dots a little bit more for us,

Dom: Sara, with the hard hitting questions, usually, yeah, but is it CX related, dude, I love it.

Cary: Yeah, it's a good question. It's a fair question, Sarah. And the reality is that there's essentially in a Lean Six Sigma project, you have five phases. And the first of those phases is called the Define Phase, which is really about justifying why you're going to enter into a project in the first place. 

One of the things I learned from one of my trainers was the question of the Define Phase is what is important. And so obviously, there is a financial element to entering any type of particular process improvement project, whether that's a cost savings, focus, whether it's a revenue, uplift focus. But one of the other elements that had to be done was this notion, again, at the time, I was learning this notion of what is voice the customer, and voice the customer to us at the time really amounted to some survey scores, we were getting Net Promoter scores for various elements or aspects of the service that we were delivering. Occasionally, you would get a verbatim response that helped you get a little bit underneath it. But to us, that's what voice of the customer was. 

But it was essential as a part of justifying why he's particularly did a project. And the problem that I noticed, again, after having done several projects was at the end of a project. We were always asked, How much money did you save or how much revenue? But we were never asked, How did this improve the customer experience. And of course, there was a small team of us, I would say, maybe three of us at most, who walked away with the same thought that this notion of voice the customer, we believe in it. 

But it seems like it was a slide on your define meeting that got promptly shoved in a drawer and forgotten about. And so the three of us essentially made it our mission to raise awareness for this notion of voice of the customer and make ourselves experts in analyzing it, I guess then that might actually include a second attribute, which would be, let's start with voice of the customer as the centerpiece of anything we're doing that affects the customer experience.

Dom: So with those folks, you know, in the past, who were talking about the financial aspect, and oh, what was the financial outcome of this? How much did we make? How much do we save? Were you able to convince those folks eventually, about the customer experience, impact and get them to be sort of believers in that and not hitting in the drawer, as you said, and how so if you were able to convince them to buy in there? 

Cary: You know, Dom, I think that we eventually did, but it wasn't like an overnight thing. It was something that took us a little bit of time. And it really, I think grew out of this small cadre of folks who again, we made it our mission, to bring this notion of voice of the customer to the fore. One of my colleagues, for example, he decided to make himself an expert on survey design, because, as you guys know, this particular audience, that you have your time as well knows that, oftentimes, that's how you ask the question on a survey that's important. 

He went off to Medallia as a consultant there and became an expert on survey design, and sharing his knowledge with clients of his own. A second colleague in this small group of ours, she went on to Verizon, executive response team, and basically you and I know that when I send a complaint letter to the CEO of, let's say, Navy Federal Credit Union, for example, which I did at one point, they never see that. It really goes to a small team. 

And this is what my colleague was doing was receiving and reading customer complaint letters, and she got to a point where the volume was so high, she needed to give herself a tool to sift through that data at a little higher volume. So she began to make herself an expert in text more Particularly with Clarabridge, some of your audience may be familiar with that tool doesn't matter again, what the tool was. This is what she used to become an expert in text analytics and start to find patterns. 

Now, for myself, I went to a conference where I saw a gentleman from General Motors speak named David Mingle. And this became, I think, a turning point in where I wanted to make myself an expert. He talked about how Mary Barra, their CEO would spend about an hour each week, listening to customer calls and their call center, listen them directly. 

And that way, she got to hear firsthand, the voice of the customer, literally the voice that customer not only reading it on paper, this prompted me to say, Listen, you know, we record every one of our calls in our service centers. But our executive management team was not co-located with a call center, there was no way to get them into there. So I thought, maybe I can bring it to them. So I made myself an expert on the voice analytics, and I was using Verint. Again, there's a number of tools out there, but again, using the analytical capability of this voice software, to dig deeper into why customers were calling in the first place.

Sarah: So as someone who's not a sales professional, I'm always on the opposite side of customer business interactions, like I am always the customer, I'm never the provider. And sometimes it feels like these businesses can forget that they're also customers. So do you think today's practitioners still have to make a case for voice of the customer? Or do you think times have changed in most corporate environments?

Cary: You know, Sarah, I think it's even more important now. I don't know what to attribute it to, I don't know whether the COVID pandemic has become an easy scapegoat for a lot of issues. But I am finding, and I don't know if you are as well, that customer service, and customer experience in general has declined over the last few years. I feel like brands are much more married to the process than they are to the customer themselves. 

And so you'll find this, again, I mentioned having to write to the CEO of Navy Federal Credit Union because I had an important check held up, which I needed to close on a house purchase, and it was going to cause me to be delayed, when I called into the service center, it really reduced to sorry, nothing we can do. That's the process, you're just gonna have to wait it out. And at the end of the day, what ended up happening was, sure enough, I got a call from somebody in their executor response team says, I've already got your problem solved. 

Well, if you think about it, Sarah, anybody could have solved that problem. If those frontline service people were empowered to solve it. This is where again, I think, Sarah, that this notion of process, or customers has taken hold, had these people been empowered to solve the problem in the first place. They knew what exactly needed to be done. They just weren't empowered as the frontline service people to do that. 

So I sympathize with you, I've experienced it myself, you bring to mind something that a colleague of mine says, says Cary why do people behave differently in the office than they do at home? And what he means is exactly what you just said, Sarah, is when we're the recipient of the experience, we recognize a bad one immediately. But when we're on the business side delivering it, we kind of get a little bit of a cognitive dissonance about that.

Related Article: 10 Voice of the Customer Tools to Maximize Customer Experience

Unraveling Customer Journey: Root Cause Analysis Drives CX and Saves Money

Sarah: Right? No, I completely agree. And it seems like as well, the voice of the customer is a big undertaking, because I recently wrote an article for CMSWire, about customer metrics. And it seems like there's so many volumes of data that can just be overwhelming. And you might not know where to begin when you have to start addressing customer needs. So I was wondering, how do you solve that problem? Can you solve that problem? 

Cary: Well,Sarah, it's a legitimate question, because it's one thing to be, you know, reviewing survey responses. And you know, one of the reasons that this small team of us moved beyond just surveys was listen, what do you do with an eight? What do you do with a six? What do you do with a four? The number itself doesn't help you understand what is underneath this? And this is why, you know, again, the three of us gravitated toward things that I will call this unstructured, and particularly unsolicited voice of the customer, this notion that customers when they're answering the survey that you've sent them, they're really just responding to something that you think is important, but when they're calling and when their email or know when they're chatting online. That's what's on their mind. 

And it gets to the core of the question that you're asking here is, boy, now you're dealing with large volumes, because at best, you should be delighted if you get a 5% response rate on customer surveys. Many people just you know, give them wave of the hand and pass them off. But of course, if you're recording all your calls, if you're keeping a log of all your chat transcripts, you have 100% of that data and is a very powerful source of data from which you can find those root causes we talked about earlier. 

By the way, now, this reminds me this, this becomes probably another attribute that I would say a CX professional has to have met is go beyond just the traditional methods of looking at surveys, or maybe even reading some verbatim comments on those surveys, go out and find the unstructured the unsolicited sources that will give you a large volume and very meaningful data to work from. Now, going deeper into your question. What had happened was, and this goes back Dom to a question you asked earlier, how did you get the executives on board, what I was doing with this information was, I learned quickly that you don't have to bother with a five minute call, that's probably a password reset, you're not bothered with a 10 minute call, that's an address change or something like that. 

You had to suffer through the 45 minute call or the hour and 15 minute long call, to really understand why the customer was experiencing pain, that's where the pain really was, was in these long ones, where it became a dialogue back and forth. You know, and recognizing that you're trying to get this in front of an executive, you're not going to share an hour and 15 minutes with the call up. 

But I was condensing them, clipping them down to about two or three minute segments, sharing them with executives, and the rest of my colleagues within the team. And then one day, one of those particular calls I shared, my friend who had gone over the to the executive response team, she called me up and she said, Cary, this is crazy. Because remember, you know, we had tens of thousands of business customers in Verizon, she said, Cary, I have an email from this exact same customer that you just sent the cal on. And we just said, you know, that's kind of funny. Wouldn't it be neat if we could sort of reconstruct their journey from other sources of voice of the customer. 

And sure enough, we found out, by the way, that the call that I found was not the first call that that customer made they actually called another center, we found a few points of data within our operating support systems and were able to kind of reconstruct that customer's actual journey, not typical journey map, which again, it's very important and needed in business. But this was the actual journey that this particular customer experienced. It was something that, again, this notion of having a persistence in investigation led me to say, you know, what are the places can we look at, we can look at social media, we can look at Better Business Bureau reports, we can look at chat transcripts, we can look at emails, we can also go look in our own CRMs. And we can look in our trouble management systems, our billing system to find out the elements that even when the customer didn't know it, were affecting their journey. 

So I think what this enabled us to do was isolate root causes through the reconstruction of these actual journeys. And I'll give you an example how that happened. Many of the calls that I heard, had a common theme, and that was I've got a bill that I don't recognize. And a lot of businesses might say, Okay, let's start a project, we have the root cause here billing clarity and billing accuracy. But by reconstructing the actual journey, yet till you got to a root cause it had nothing to do with billing. 

In fact, one of the cases was, we had a third party vendor operating on our behalf. That was selling services to customers that weren't compatible with their equipment. And again, it was just a simple mistake, they didn't know. But we changed the process for that vendor. And guess what just happened there, Dom and Sarah, you took the root cause away? And how many calls did we get after that? Zero, multiply that again by another four vendors that we found that were doing the same thing with just a simple mistake. And now you can see the power and the scalability of using voice the customer data to isolate and eliminate root causes that are causing bad experiences. Oh, and by the way, it also saves you money, because now you're not fielding those phone calls. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it?

Dom: There you go. Now you're speaking the executives’ language. Right?

Cary: Exactly. And that's one thing, Dom, that really catches their attention, you know, the same executive on an another root cause from a billing problem, he realized that one particular configuration of the product we were selling was broken. And he had the courage to say stop selling that product, you're damaging the brand. It took about a month, you know, we fixed the root causes underneath that, and then we're able to sell that particular configuration again. But I would submit to you, Dom and Sarah, that thinkers, like that particular executive are rare because it's a courageous thing to say, I'm going to close off a portion of my revenue stream temporarily so that I get it right on behalf of my customers.

Related Article: Voice of the Customer (VoC): Much More Than a Satisfied Customer

Expand Closed-Loop Feedback to Enhance CX Strategy

Sarah: Yeah, and also I mean, not to mention the other executive you mentioned too, that was listening to the call center calls that's above and beyond, right for an executive that's like a VP of CX or chief customer officers. Dream boss. no? 

Cary: Exactly. And I would tell you, from the lessons that we learned, again, hearing about that GM executive, and seeing the results from my own, one of the things I would recommend to CX practitioners, it's a kind of an uphill battle. But if they could get their executive teams, not just the C-level, folks, but just like you said, VPs, and senior directors, to make it a point doesn't have to actually be listening to phone calls, it can be reading chat transcripts, or reading emails that are coming here in customers pain in their own words, and again, not responding simply to a survey, where they're answering something that we think is important, listen to what these customers are saying in their own words about the pain they're experiencing. 

Dom: Exactly. So if you could kind of like bring it home, like if we were to encapsulate your experience with CX organizations being the CX leadership role, designing their own strategy, what would be your advice for designing their own strategy when it comes to all this?

Cary: Well, one of the first things I think that makes a customer experience program complete is this notion of closed loop feedback, many of your audience probably is very well familiar with this, and those that are doing it, they're probably very adept at the idea of a customer called in or wrote in with a complaint, we opened a ticket, we found out what caused that problem, we resolved the problem, maybe even did a brief project to find a root cause behind it. And then we close the loop by getting back to the customer expressing, hey, listen, our bad here, we're sorry, that your experience with our product with our service, whatever it might be, we're sorry that that was a bad one, we've resolved the problem, we want to make sure that we close that loop with you. 

Brands that are doing closed loop are generally doing that part, some of them better than others. But the one element of closed loop that I find a lot of brands are missing is this whole notion that I just talked through. And that's the how do I take the volumes of complaint data or volumes of questions that come in? They can just be informational questions. And I'm saying Listen, why am I taking such a high volume of them? Maybe I can offer my customers a way to find this information out in an easier way? How do they take these large volumes of data and say, what is the root cause underneath this? How do I find a way maybe to do a project to take that root cause out so that the customers never experienced it in the first place? So I guess, you know, if there was one key attribute that I would take from that notion, not even just for individuals, but for CX teams, is to expand your closed loop feedback processes, to include this element of re-using and re-looking at the larger volume of complaints over time to say, You know what, we've got a pattern here. Let's dig underneath that and find out how we can remove the root cause.

Sarah: And since we're at the end of the discussion, I wanted to ask you if you had any singular takeaway that you'd like to offer for CX leaders that are diving into the voice of the customer, or just anything in the CX space that you want to share with the audience.

Dom: Cary, how about the job of Sarah Butkovic on her debut?

Cary: Sara is asking the right questions. And she's asking the challenging questions.

Dom: Yeah. And she's making calls on like, when the show is going to answer like, All right, we've come to the end of the discussion. We've gotten enough out of this guy, this guy has given us so many good tips. Let's end it while he's hot.

Cary: Exactly. And I think to answer the question for you, Sarah, is this notion of doing in fact, if you look at my LinkedIn profile, you see a lot of folks who are thought leaders, but I actually my profiles is CX doing leader. And that's really what I think I would leave them with Sarah is OK. A lot of folks are collecting voice of the customer data. They're publishing Net Promoter Score for their executives. Oftentimes, they're hoping that NPS changes just because they're measuring it. And to directly answer your question, take that information and do something with it. Use the information that you're collecting the voice of the customer program, as a component of your overall CX program, to say, how do I solve problems, make the root causes go away, so the customer has never experienced them in the first place?

Dom: Well said, way to end it, Sarah, thank you.

Sarah: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Dom: Cary Cusumano CMSWire contributor, thank you very much. And I wanted to give you one opportunity to share with folks you know where they can follow your thought leadership commentary. Sorry and anything, anything you want to share with our audience.

Cary: You know, I just mentioned my LinkedIn profile Carrie Cusumano. It's the CX Doer. But you can also reach me my direct email address. It's [email protected] happy to share ideas. Like I said, the role that I just came from was a CX design consultant. So happy to consult with folks.

Dom: Perfect, sweet. Cary Cusumano CMSWire, contributor, CX thought leader. Thank you for joining us on this edition of CX Decoded.

Cary: Thank you guys.

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