Episode released on: 13. March 2023
Seeking The Frictionless Organization with Bill Price and David Jaffe – Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper
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The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Bill Price and David Jaffe
Bill’s LinkedIn Headline: President, Driva Solutions; Co-Founder, LimeBridge; Chair, Global Operations Council; Advisor, CustomerThink.
David’s LinkedIn Headline: Consulting Director and Partner in Limebridge Australia Co-author of The Best Service Is No Service
Highlights:
- 00:00 Game Start
- 00:25 Introductions
- 02:34 Bill’s and David’s values
- 07:00 Friction
- 09:04 No Service The Best Service
- 11:51 Interactions
- 15:06 The Value Irritant Matrix
- 20:01 Customer ecstasy
- 23:30 Measurements
- 28:11 Personalization
- 31:22 Cultural Aspects
- 35:31 The Future of CX
- 38:35 Books’ suggestion
- 40:21 Contact Details
- 41:06 Golden Nuggets
and much more
Guests’ Contact Details:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-jaffe-3857b21/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-price-drivasolutions/
Book suggestion:
- Managing At the Speed of Change by Daryl Conner
- Exit voice and loyalty by O. Hirschman
Golden Nuggets:
- Ask yourself what should we do with the customers that never contact us for help. That ratio will vary based on your organization and the maturity of your customers and the company. But we’ll say that it could be more than 50% of your customers never bothered to contact you at all for support or with questions. Some companies say well, those must be happy customers, they don’t need to contact us. But we would suggest that maybe they are not happy that they are what we might call in the book, silent sufferers who could be beginning to leave your business. They just don’t bother to contact you anymore. Maybe they never even bothered at all. So figure out how to reach out to those customers who never contact you maybe even literally reach out to them and call them up and say, Hey, you haven’t heard from me for a while, Greg, how you doing? And Greg might be really shocked. Because he might say, well, actually, everything’s fine. Or he might say, you know, something, let me tell you, I got these five problems. And maybe you can fix it. And maybe you can keep me around.
- Industries become obsessed with asking how do we go. But I feel like we need to step back from that before we fully have the right to ask that question. We need to ask why did they have to? And so that’s my golden nugget is to be thinking much more about Why did this have to occur… not asking necessarily the customer! Because again, that’s putting them to more work. But asking ourselves why was it necessary? And should we even be asking customers how did we go? Because there’s a more fundamental question about why do we have to.
The Frictionless Organization – Bill Price and David Jaffe on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
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What did we discuss?
Gregorio Uglioni
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast your host, Greg will have smart discussions with friends, experts and thought leaders on customer experience transformation, and leadership. Please follow this podcast on your preferred platform. I am sure you will enjoy the next episode with the guest I selected for you.
Ladies and gentlemen, tonight really big, big pleasure because I have Bill Price, and David Jaffe, all together with me on the CX goalkeeper podcast, they wrote outstanding books. And today we are here to discuss about their latest book, The frictionless organization. I read the book, and it’s really outstanding. And it’s a big, big pleasure now to have you both on the stage. Thank you, Bill. And thank you, David, for being here. I would like to start the discussion as usual in the center in the same way, I would quickly ask you to introduce yourself and therefore perhaps, Bill, could you please introduce yourself?
Bill Price
Sure. Thank you, Greg. And thanks for the opportunity to meet with you today and to share what we’ve learned over the years about frictionless organizations. I’m Bill Price I live outside of Seattle, Washington on the West Coast of the United States, been here for a number of years, moved up here in the 1990s and eventually found my way@amazon.com serving as the first worldwide VP of Customer Service, have remained here since then run a consulting firm called driba solutions, which is part of a nine country alliance with David and others. We call ourselves Lionbridge. As as a consortium.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Bill. And David, please. Also your for introduction.
David Jaffe
Thank you. I’m David Jaffe. I’m based in Melbourne, Australia. But originally British studied at Oxford. And then I spent all my career as a consultant, which is almost shameful. But I started with Accenture, and then moved to other strategy firms, and about 20 years ago realized that I wanted to dedicate my career to working on customer problems, and improving the customer experience and hence set up line with Australia. And I also run something down here called the Chief Customer Officer forum where we bring executives together to talk about customer problems several times a year. So and Bill and I have had the great pleasure of working together now for nearly 20 years. So we’ve we’ve shared a lot of fun and written three books together.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, David. And I can remember quite well that one of the core values of Accenture is best people. And there are others because I was also one, former Accenture. But now I would like to learn a bit more about you, David, which values drive you in life.
David Jaffe
I like making a difference and helping people. And I think that’s when I’m happiest getting up in the morning to do consulting works, because I think I’m gonna make a difference. And I think I’m gonna make the company better and their experiences for their customers better. So that’s what really drives me, Bill. So I throw to you.
Bill Price
Yeah, I think my personal values have to do with maybe two or three things, Greg, one is is honesty, to be honest, on your own, but also honest about the path that you take. The second one is to challenge yourself and to challenge everyone around you. Making sure that you make mistakes along the way that’s good, and then learn from those mistakes. But the second one, therefore would be sorted to challenge into perhaps get outside of your comfort zone along the way. The third one has to be fun. Dave and I have had a great deal of fun together, we’ve shared that personal value intertwined over the years with our with our families as well. So I think fun is maybe a third one that I would go for.
Gregorio Uglioni
Oh, thank you very much. I think these are great, great values that this C CX community is also sharing. But one question that I would like to ask is one based in Australia, the other based in the USA, how can you collaborate?
Bill Price
David, why don’t you start with that one?
David Jaffe
Yeah, it’s been fascinating. For our first book, we did actually get together physically, several times for sort of like, you know, writing workshops and stuff. But I think, you know, I guess we were ahead of the curve, you know, what COVID induced in people and now being able to work virtually do zooms. We’ve been doing that stuff for, you know, 15 years plus, with all the available mechanisms. And after a while, we found we were just so used to it, and we’re so used to being a virtual network anyway, that it really hasn’t made much difference to us. So, you know, there’s so many mechanisms that we can use in terms of sharing documents, dropboxes, SharePoint, all those all those things we can use to share things and collaborate. And I think what works well about having two of us working on on a book and why we stuck with each other to do three is that you sort of as Bill was saying, You challenge each other and you go hang on, I promised I’m going to commit to getting this idea thought through and then I’m handing it over. And I think we well as a tag thing, because we inspire each other and bounce off each other’s ideas. Bill over to you.
Bill Price
Yeah, I just Just very briefly on the mechanics, after we outlined the book got approval from our publisher, we decided to write one chapter at a time. And we would meet at, for instance, on Zoom and figure out what the outline for that chapter was. But we knew what we wanted to learn about it some more, then we go away, David would write one chapter, I’d write another chapter, we would then swap the editing back and forth. So that the end you really couldn’t tell who’s who was the original author, because became quite, quite joint and common. And then we went through all of that as a team meeting every week. So we had zoom calls every week, sometimes. Late Night, for me and early for David, sometimes all the way around, it worked out quite well.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s really interesting. I think the joke you already heard several times, I need also to say that, do you still have or did you add some friction in your relationship?
Bill Price
You know, I think I think very little, which is interesting. i It’s funny, you should ask that funny and fun. You should ask that. Now, I think because David and I have been working on these themes and helping clients and, and interviewing some great companies for so many years about this. I think there’s been there’s been very, very little would you say, David?
David Jaffe
Well, that’s typical American imperialism right there. You know, he just he doesn’t notice when when he has frustrated me, but now it’s seriously it’s, it tends to be more about it’s anything, it’s about little bits of language, that are different in in maybe, you know, European English to American English, and some terms that just seem as sort of graded on me that I said, as an art. So I would just carefully deleted and put something in that I found, etc. And sometimes they come back, this word would reappear, because it’s really important to Bill. Yeah, there’s been, there’s been some funny ones over the years, we should have written them down.
Gregorio Uglioni
Yeah, thank you very much, I think we can really kick off the discussion and start the game. Speaking about the frictionless organization, I am a big, big fan of the value, irritating matrix. I had also the pleasure to use it in the in at my former employer to really understand what to do with different processes. And we had a lot of discussion. And now it’s super interesting, because the question that we asked ourselves now are answered in the latest latest version, in your book, the friction as organization, it’s an outstanding book, I really enjoy it. And I recommend everybody listening to this podcast to pause this podcast quickly go to Amazon, buy this book, because it’s, it’s really a lot of interesting thing. But now we would also help the audience understand a bit better about this topic. And therefore perhaps starting with the first question, David, what’s your definition of friction?
David Jaffe
Yes, it’s easy. So our definition of friction is any interaction, a customer has to have with a an organization that they didn’t want to or need to have. So we’re not we’re not counting as a friction, someone logging on to a web app to get their bank balance. That’s something they want to need to do. But we are counting something where they say, where is my why haven’t you? Or how does this work? All those things? Bill, did you want to add to that?
Bill Price
Yeah, I would frame it this way. It’s how we we attempted to put it in place at Amazon many years ago, when I was when I was there. As I mentioned earlier, it’s usually the source of confusion and mistakes. So when you when you sum up friction, it really is where the customer is confused, or mistakes were made, that maybe sometimes the organization the company didn’t even know about, but the customer knows it, they realize it and they come across with with questions like why isn’t this working? Why is this broken? Again, I can’t understand this came late. It didn’t come on time. So these are, again, combinations of of frustration, that relate to mistakes and confusion.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you. I think you mentioned several times that you worked also at Amazon, and you wrote an order great book, the best services is no service. And my question to you Bill is, is really the best service no service and why I’m asking this question. And I think you answered that several times is sometimes it’s the last opportunity that companies have to have a direct interaction with with the customer. And if there is no service, there is no interaction. What’s your view on that?
Bill Price
It becomes what we might call a slippery slope. And because if done well, a service interaction can resolve the issue. The customer can be very happy and they can say good things about you to other companies or to their friends. But if it doesn’t go well, it drops off very, very fast. It’s like it like a deep drop off at the ocean. And so there is a theory called service recovery that says wow, if we do a good job fixing the customers probably Blum then the customer is more loyal. But what David and I have discovered and what the companies we interviewed have confirmed is that it’s best to make sure things work so well and so smoothly, they don’t need to contact you at all. So sure, when there is a problem, have a well trained, motivated, empathetic team to help you clearly do that. Most companies only stop there. Because what we want to say is go beyond that and find out why that happened. Why did that happen in the first place? And how can we remove the need for that, for that type of interaction?
David Jaffe
Can I pick up from bill that I had an interesting case study about this with a an Australian business and at a conference, someone challenged me once and said, You’re wrong, David, you know, the best service isn’t no service because we get our highest, I think it was NPS. They were measuring scores on customers where we’ve, they’ve had a problem, we fixed it really, really well. And I was a little bit concerned, though, because obviously, you know, there’s a logical argument that comes from that, as Bill was saying, well make more problems and make your customers happier. I mean, that sounds illogical. But funnily enough, a few months later, I got to meet with one of the data analysts at that company, I said, that was really interesting, you know, the fact that you get better satisfaction and net promoter scores from from problems you fix. I said, What about sort of customer loyalty? And she said, No, no, no, our most loyal customers are ones that have never had to ring us at all. And so you know, the executives challenged me on this, I wasn’t willing to reveal that statistic. So I was very reassured by the fact that, you know, the most important thing of all, was, you know, there were these customers who never had a call, and yes, funnily enough, they did, that they’re measured, net promoter score was lower. But in terms of customer value, and all those things, they were the ones that delivered.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think it’s really interesting. And Bill mentioned, also about contacting a company, and a lot of companies are speaking, discussing, and I say, dreaming about having a clear overview, why the customer are contacting a company, to the to the app through the phone, through all other channels, like chat, and so on. But few companies are really able to track them. David, what’s your view on that? Because I think everything what you are defining starts off from understanding why are these or this interaction? Yeah,
David Jaffe
you’re right, it’s always been a difficult problem. So historically, we know that the companies have generally had their staff tag or code codify the the contact and say it was one of these often using drop down lists. And I think our record is in the 1000s of you know, how many different things you had to pick from and of course, they never did, and no one trusted it. But the world has moved on. And I think now the the available tools to help you do that are very sophisticated through all kinds of analytics. And not only can they can they get pretty good at that, and therefore take away the effort of frontline staff having to sort of help diagnose, and document. But they can also bring a whole variety of channels together for the first time. So now we can if we can analyze calls, and we can do it in the same way. So we can do chats, and the same way we can do messages and emails, suddenly, we can bring a whole bunch of data together that used to be very discrete and separate. So the tool sets have made it easier. And you know, as we know, those technologies are getting more and more sophisticated. And so I think there’s really no excuse for not understanding anymore. And worse, the thing we always found fascinating is either even if we’re going to do it manually, organizations have, have had other mechanisms available to them. Like maybe they’re maybe they’re assessing context for some kind of quality scoring or things like that. But they never even take the data out of that, which they could trust as a really good sample every month of you know why people make contact. So there’s always been other mechanisms anyway, people just generally haven’t explored. But and I don’t know if you want to add to that.
Bill Price
No, I think that covers really well, like companies just either have too few reasons that they collect, like, billing issues, and you’d have no idea what billing issues really means or what to do about it. Or as David said, so many different options drop downs within dropdowns, where the vast majority are never used, and the accuracy is quite low. So we boil it down to what did the customer say in the first 30 seconds of the phone call? What did he or she put into their subject line or into the beginning of a of an email or opening up of a chat where it says how can I help you? And generally, that’s what we call the reason it’s the reason or the intent for them to have made the contact. They they could say they could have five other issues that they talked about during the rest of the conversation, but the first one, the one that really prompted them to call in or contact the company that we want to capture and that’s why analytics are so powerful, because you can listen to the first 30 seconds of a phone call. I’m pretty much understand why they contacted you. For this purpose, you at least know where to start the analysis.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you’re saying it’s really what we are facing, I was working in a contact center. And we spent hours discussing about the granularity of this contract reasons. And more what the topic that you mentioned, if a customer has several reasons how to track them, and how to work on that. And as, as you’re saying, it’s important, it starts with tracking in a way that it’s understandable. And I think when you have these contact reasons, then, and you’re showing us a really interesting framework in your books, not only the last one, but also the first one, it’s about some context can be irritating for the company or for for the customer, or can generate value. Can you please explain that. And I know with if it would have diagram, it would be much more easier to explain that. But I think it’s really a super simple concept. But it’s, it’s can really create the right discussion in the companies, when we are discussing about digitalization, and where to find the efficiency or where to create value. And therefore, I stopped because you are the expert. Sorry, I get so excited. Not only you about this topic perfectly, do you want to start about that?
Bill Price
But David, David, why don’t you start on? I’m gonna give a couple of examples after you after you kick it off here.
David Jaffe
Sure. So the framework, Greg, you’re talking about we call the value irritant framework where we, we think about from the customer’s perspective, was the content valuable or irritating? And from the company or organization’s perspective, was it valuable or irritating. And when you put those those two dimensions together, you end up mostly with four boxes. So were irritating to both the company and the customer. We call that the eliminate quadrant, because neither neither wanted this to happen. So those are obviously sources of great opportunity. Where it’s valuable to the customer, but entertainments company, typically those are transactional things that lend themselves well to digital solutions, or some form of self service. When it’s valuable to the customer that irritates irritating to the customer, but valuable to the company, things that they just need customers to do, then we want to make those as simple as possible. So we call that typically simplify or streamline. And then the one area we’re left with, it’s valuable to both. Typically, those are the things we want to leverage. Those are often sales opportunities, or retention opportunities, or opportunities that were that where the company really thinks they can add value for the customer. So there were there’s this, there’s the stuff we want to leave behind, and we want to invest in. And that doesn’t mean they can’t be digital as well, because maybe maybe that’s for some customers. That’s that’s the way they’d rather do it. They’d rather buy online these days, or they’d rather they’d rather provide information some other way. So it does it doesn’t exclude digital from any of those. But it tends to lead to different conversations about what are our priorities? So Bill sounds like you want us to talk through some examples.
Bill Price
Yeah, just just gave you just a few examples. So the audience understands where we’re coming from, and maybe they can read, they can find out that they’ve they’ve asked these questions themselves. A good example of the irritating customer irritating the company are would be examples like, why is my bill so high? Or why did my internet service drop again? Or, where’s my stuff, I waited for this product to arrive, you told me was going to arrive today and hasn’t arrived, that deadline has come and gone. And so quite a few of the irritating irritating combinations, the one that we want to be eliminated and company should eliminate have contractions. It’s like why not? Why didn’t this work? Why can’t you do this? The ones that are in the positive or valuable for the customer, but irritating for the company. That’s where they really, customers really would prefer a self service solution or something in the digital world. And those David mentioned earlier, I’ll just repeat it for might be like how can I do this? How do I do this? Where’s your closest depot to where I’m where I’m living right now? Did you receive my my my latest payment? How can I change my password? How can I change my credit card? And so those are the vast majority of all the contacts and the costs associated with the contacts are ones that are in that lower left meaning if you have the picture in front of you, the ones that are irritating to both parties, or in the lower right, which is valuable for the customer but irritating to the company. And digital solutions can go anywhere. But in terms of taking the action to digitize we show as ones that are valuable for the customer they need the answer they want the answer but they’d rather they’re they’re fine with with a well functioning self service tool.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. It’s really interesting and design. Great example. One, one thing that it’s I think it’s extremely relevant. It’s also you explained pretty well, that are different types of interactions. And therefore perhaps they should also measure it in a different way. And before we deep dive into measurement, I listened to several podcasts with several presentation that you did Bill, and you spoke about customer ecstasy. Could you please elaborate a bit on this on this concept?
Bill Price
Well, it’s a funny expression to maybe some of the audience out there. But when I was at Amazon, that that was that was the existing expression at the time, Amazon wanted to create and sustain customer ecstasy, meaning of such a high level of loyalty that goes beyond just basic satisfaction. And we would go out of our way to fix a problem and to deal with the customer when they had the problem. But then we would back up and say, Well, gee, there shouldn’t have been that call, we should not have had that customer contact about a promotion, about a late delivery, about a problem on the website. Everything should should have worked smoothly, again, no confusion and no mistakes. And so ecstasy just meant to have something that is almost off the chart. Hi, it was similar to Jeff Bezos, his overall philosophy that he wanted Amazon to be Earth’s most customer centric company. I mean, he, I don’t know how he came up with that idea. I love that expression. But he used it all the time. And it’s one of those almost unattainable goals that got all of us to stretch, an end to push harder. So that I think that’s probably the concept of customer ecstasy. And ironically, in the day, we actually abbreviate it as CX. Now CX means customer experience. But at ICC x, it harkens back to the Amazon term, which was customer X to see anyway, it’s it’s just a term, every company has something like it. That’s just one that that I’m quite familiar with, from working there.
David Jaffe
Interestingly, Greg, we had an Amazon, recent Amazon executive talk at a meeting we run down here. And he said that that customer focus still prefer Sorry
I lost my mind, I lost my microphone, that customer focus still is there today. And they think about they talked about customer before they talk about shareholder all the time, if they even talk about shareholders, so it seems to me that that still remains thorough that I had to duck off screen.
Bill Price
No, no, no, no, no, that it, it’s, I still have a lot of good friends up here in Seattle who work at Amazon, or maybe I’ve recently left, and it’s still such a strong part of the culture, and the reinforcement. And, and, and it goes beyond, again, just collecting data or collecting survey information, it just it just permeates everything, the way the company does things.
Gregorio Uglioni
It’s extremely interesting. And this measurement also helped company to improve themselves, because if you measure it, you can improve that. And also in your book, in your book, you are explaining that you should measure in different ways in these four different quadrants. Because if you create value for the company, and you create value for the customer, perhaps how long it takes to have a call, it’s not so relevant, because if you generate value, then you should measure something different. Bill, do we want to start? And then we the end over to David?
Bill Price
Yeah, I mean, one of the challenges that we always see, one of the problems we already see is that there are too many speed metrics, too many pace and speed metrics in the contact center in the support industry. We have average handle time we have speed of answer, we got all these things that we can capture and report so quickly. And so easily. But but they really are a problem when you have a frustrated customer, or you have a great opportunity. So in in most cases, we say just do away with any any time limits on those conversations, especially if it’s a frustrated situation, an irate customer, or if it is a case where the customer wants to buy something more from you, or they are really intrigued with a new offer. So you have that conversation. We call that the leverage action. And so there are other metrics we’ll get to David may pick up the ball on this one or pass the ball to him on that one. But the idea is move away from the speed metrics. And think about them not as averages but as as the entire spectrum. Because sometimes you can talk you can spend too much time on a conversation or too little time, but make sure you spend the appropriate time and not some sort of artificial limit.
David Jaffe
So I’ll pick up on the spill. We started just with with a metric we were surprised more organizations don’t use and we’d love to see it in every annual report of every company. And that’s something we call cp x with As the volume of contacts, divided by some key measure of the growth or amount of business going on, so that could be contacts per flight for an airline. Right? So if you’re doing more flights, you might expect to have more contacts proportionately more, there’s more chance of things going wrong with things. So that would be an interesting one. Because if you just measure pure volume of contacts, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s like, well, we grew 20% last year. So did our contacts grow 20%? Is that the right outcome or not? So it’s a very simplified metric to say, are we getting easier to deal with or not, but you also have to decide what to include in the in the content world. So it’s like, we don’t want to measure how often I choose to check my balance, or my app. Right? We may, we may say, let’s take that out. Because that’s, that’s not necessarily showing problems in any way, shape, or form. So it might be about the min contact, the number of times I have to talk to somebody or get an email back or, or message or chat or all those things. Whereas if the Self Service is working, well, we may exclude that from the from the measurement. But we need different measures for the self service, like did people manage to get what they want done, done in the cellphone. So again, it spins off different opportunities.
Bill Price
Let me let me just tag on that just briefly, Greg, if I can, which is the cp x is a really powerful metric. And we’ll probably talk about later in this discussion with you. But to give you a good example, we were working some years ago, maybe eight years ago with a broadband provider, and they were providing TV services, intranet to homes and offices. And at the time, they were using about eight or 10 Different set top boxes, that would deliver the final signal to the to the screen. And that was very typical back then. So when we work with them, we had them do a contacts per device, what was the contact rate per device across these 10 or 12, different set top boxes, and the results were dramatic, some of the boxes were very low rates of contact, some were very, very high and increasing. And so they realized that they had too much inventory they had, they had too many different devices. So they wound up removing almost all of their devices, they reduced it to to a customer base that they that they really liked, and then one from a well branded well known company. So they reduced it from 12 device down to two, which helped a lot on supply chain and support. But they also did, they made that decision by by lopping off by removing the ones that had a very high context per device, which I hadn’t really seen before. So breaking down those totals, in those totals and averages into individual, in this case, devices can be very powerful. And as David said, you can look at Context per order context per flight context for customer, but that CPS starts to normalize all of it, especially if you’re growing fast over time. If company is going fast, it starts to show whether you really got a healthy direction. So you want CPMs to go down in general, and you want it to stay down as as the company continues to grow.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think that that’s totally makes sense. And it helps also to steer them development also of products to ensure the quality of these products, not adding service service issues. And I think this is also something important that I would like to discuss with you, customer are expecting always personalized service. How do you integrate this requirement from the customer that it’s now really easier? And everybody expect? I’m an individual I wants to be? I wanted to have a personal service in your value returned framework. Perhaps David, do we want to start?
David Jaffe
Yeah, I think the first thing we find a lot of organizations are not doing is allowing the customer just to tailor the way they want to interact. So very, very few organizations we work with in Australia Anyway give you the choice about when you do get a message about this or an update about that, how would you like to receive it? And so that’s a form of personalization. That’s pretty basic. But we find many organizations don’t even enable that. So we’d kind of start there. So there’s terms of saying, particularly as we’re now we’ll talk later about, we’re now we’re now reaching out and being proactive, more often out to the customer, but it tends to be about well, we’ll tell you the way we the organization want to tell you, right, rather than trying to find out from the from a personalized perspective, what how do I want to see this information or even what do I want to see? So you know, giving customers a palette of Do you want to be notified about this? How often when, through what mechanism? That’s a great form of personalization as a start, build, you want to go next?
Bill Price
Yeah, I’ll flip it around from from the outbound as you mentioned, to the inbound, if, if a customer has a very high A value to the organization, then that should be recognized in some form or another, perhaps they can bypass certain steps, they may be serviced by a more senior customer service representative, they may be offered something a little differently than than another, then that’s called the average customer. On the other hand, if a customer has very frequently contacted the company have really high contact history, it might represent a special opportunity to hold on to them, because maybe that’s the beginning of them leaving the organization leaving the company canceling contracts and accounts. And so if you look at contact frequency and history that can also set up a different type of personalization, or at least recognition that there may be some problems in the past. And then if you have a brand new customer who’s never contacted you before, maybe they just signed a deal, they signed a contract, they just they just landed, they bought a new, new piece of software from you, and they’re calling you up for the first time or contacting for the first time, what we found is that those customers need to be handled very delicately with additional information and support, or else they’re going to wind up having to contact you multiple times, and probably create a lot of friction and frustration. So there are lots of ways to do that on the inbound side to recognize Customer Value, Customer frequency, and so forth, and then be able to handle them in different ways.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, Bill. It’s extremely interesting. And you’re already suggesting or preparing also for the next question, because you mentioned also at the beginning, there are different contact reasons it can be 10 100 or 1000 Contact reasons, often there are linked to processes. And if you reach the book, then you start Okay, I want to do that I want to implement that. And then you start classifying all these processes and say this should be simplified, this should be eliminated and so on. But then in reality to implement that, it takes quite a lot of time. And therefore my question, or do you have also some suggestion from the cultural aspect from the cultural point of view? what can companies do to, to and stick to this framework in order really to achieve effortless SRE frictionless experiences? David, do you want to start?
David Jaffe
Thank you. We do think that this way of thinking can contribute to building a culture that focuses on the customer. Because fundamentally, it’s a whole of business problem. And historically, many organizations have have said to the Head of Customer Contact, or customer care, why aren’t you picking up the phone faster? Why your calls taking too long? Or why have you got more emails or all those things. And it’s not their fault. Because generally those, as we’ve talked about, the interactions are coming from other problems. It’s like, it’s the guys distributing the product, or the guys manufacturing the product, or even the guys designing the product that are causing a lot of these issues. So what we think this is a great opportunity to do is once we understand it is everybody has to be around the table talking about and owning these problems. And so can bring the whole of an organization together on culture on customer issues, and create that sort of customer culture. we’ve hinted that in a couple of businesses. And we do interestingly, in the book, we talk about what we think is interesting. We talk about innovators, or younger, newer businesses, versus renovators come, organizations who’ve been around for a long time. And obviously, they have more legacy in terms of the way they work, the complexity of systems and products for the innovators often think like this. And so you’ll find in the book that a lot of the examples we talked about are companies like Uber, who’s always tried to be a completely digital business, and therefore anything any time interaction pops up, that isn’t what they’re expecting and wanting. They’re all over it, they want. They want to find out what can we do to get rid of that? And they realize that isn’t, yeah, they realize that’s a shared problem that everybody in the company has to come together to work on. Build your your product to go from there.
Bill Price
Yeah, and I think I think culture is is at the core of so many things about strategy and making strategy work and make business work. It almost shouldn’t be said, but it needs to be said that CEO and other exco SLT senior leadership team needs to be much more involved in what these customer issues are listening to calls, getting into what the customer frustrations really are looking at results from, from the metrics that we’ve been talking about so far, looking at cp x rather than just looking at volumes. And when that happens, when when that’s happened. It’s like lights go on. The senior executives go women now are we really causing those problems? I can’t believe that customers aren’t counting that and we’re lucky that they’re contacting us, you know, and let’s talk about how we can fix that. When when we encourage executives to listen to calls, let’s say over or two hour period, they come away with about 20 things that they can fix. Because from their level, they know how products or services are designed or how they the pricing plans have been put together or what the billing system looks like. And so the culture of starting from the top and getting them to reinforce it will make it so much easier for the organization to sort through all the priorities and implementation does take time. So it’s got to be done one step at a time. Look at some success, celebrate that success and see the improvements over time.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, Bill. And it was really a great discussion. I still have one question, perhaps not related to the book. But I would really like to learn from you. Because if I remember, well, you wrote the best service is no service more than 10 years ago, in 2008. It’s roughly 20 years ago. And my question is, in 10 years from now, we are on the CX goalkeeper podcast, you are always welcome if he wants to join again. And we are discussing about customer experience, what we are discussing about Bill Do you want to start
Bill Price
I think we’ll be discussing about the the failures and the successes of AI, and how AI has enabled some improvements. But it’s also frustrated and created friction for a lot of customers, because it hasn’t been trained or tuned up adequately enough to to help customers. So AI and machine learning are very, very hot, the topic will continue to get very hot companies will flock to it and say, oh, let’s just use AI. Let’s just digitize everything. So I think in 10 years time, we might be unraveling some of that, we might be saying maybe we should not be using as much of that new technology, technology that is now 10 years old when we talk about AI, but rather get back to the personal touch where that’s appropriate. Thank you, David
Gregorio Uglioni
and, David, what’s your view and use?
David Jaffe
Yeah, I hope, I hope we’ll be talking about what do we do next? Right, that we’ve got our contact rates down so low, and it’s all working so well. You know, where are next opportunities and in some ways, I’d expect them to be getting harder, right that we’ve done the easy stuff. And products now arrive on time because the drone delivers it so quickly. And it’s all automated. And that all works. But now, I don’t expect that we’ve we’ve found some new problems. But for start, we may find some customers left behind. Because we’re not all adopting technology at the same rate. So in terms of that personalization, I’d expect that we’d be discussing tough issues like what do we do for those those customers, the ones who aren’t prepared to work this way? And that or do we want them as customers even so there’s going to be some tough questions that are different to those we we we work on today. But I hope we really have moved on and we are making it better because one of the dangers bill talks about AI, you know, even with some of the robotics and chatbots. And things we have today is sometimes companies are willing to take the what I call the easy road and say oh well that automates 20% of the interaction. So that’s great. The business cases are overwhelming. It’s fantastic. And they’re ignoring the 80% who it fails for. So that’s what we’re gonna have to have some tough discussions where they said, Okay, is it okay, now? Maybe we get to 50 5050. It was 50%. But it failed. 50%? Are we happy to fail 50% of the time? And how can we make that? If we are? How can we make that as painless as possible? Right, because you know, failing is it’s only going to frustrate 50% of people put them to the experience largely doesn’t work. Yes, interesting equation. So I think we’re going to have some be having some some tough discussions at times.
Gregorio Uglioni
Yes, and I will be delighted because there will be a new version or the next book of Bill Price and David Jaffe, that I will read. But now we are coming to the end of this game. And in the extra time in the last three to five minutes. I have some I still have some question for you. Perhaps starting with you, David, is there a book one book that you say it stand out? Tell me during my career or during my personal life that you would like to suggest to the audience?
David Jaffe
Yeah. One book I’ve never forgotten is a book but by a guy called Daryl Conner about, I think sort of managing the speed of change. And he talked about different models of change, and how they affect people. And the negative change. I think people all understand well, there’s been more research on how you react to that. But he also talked about positive change and things that can happen with that. And I’ve never forgotten that model. And so I’d always if people don’t know that some of those frameworks and that model I’ve always recommended
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And Bill what your suggestion?
Bill Price
sticks with me the book that sticks with me gums called way way back as well and it’s called Exit voice and loyalty. That the author’s last name is Hirshman. Very thin book, very easy book, it talks about public policy and a number of different things not necessarily corporate, corporate business. But we think about those three different words. Customers can believe they can exit, they can express their voice, they can express their frustration to the voice or they can remain loyal, or become loyal. So I use that book quite often it’s dog eared behind me in my bookcase. And it’s one that I that I refer to quite often and recommend, even though it’s been around for probably 40 years or something 30 or 40 years.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And perhaps, I think from this discussion, some people will have will have some question for you, Bill, what’s the best way to contact you?
Bill Price
I think the best way, my way, I’m actually getting my website back up and running in about a month. So until that comes up, my email address bill at drivasolutions.com would be the best way. And then David and I have written have produced a, a website for the book called frictionlessorg.com. So that’s another place to be able to reach out to us to
Gregorio Uglioni
thank you. And David, what’s the best way to contact you?
David Jaffe
My email address is David underscore Jaffe at Lionbridge, LIMEBRIGDE .com .au . Today, you so more than happy to receive people’s emails and talk to them from there.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And you will find also all this information in the contact notes of this episode. But please take a moment to have a look at the two books. At least you add that if the frictionless organization the best service is no service, you can buy them in Amazon, I think both are worth it, to read and to reread and to reuse the array are always with me. And if I need to check something, I can check that. Now we are coming too late to the very last question of this discussion. It’s let’s start with Bill, it’s Bill’s golden nugget, it’s something with that we discussed or something new that you would leave to the audience?
Bill Price
Well, we’ve discussed some of the things that I thought about in answer to this question before, but I’m gonna bring up a new one, it’s in the book, but it’s a new one for this discussion, which is ask yourself, What should we do with the customers that never contact us for help. And those that ratio will vary based on your organization and the maturity of your customers and the company. But we’ll say that it could be more than 50% of your customers never bothered to contact you at all for support or with questions. Some companies say well, those must be happy customers, they don’t need to contact us. But we would suggest that maybe they are not happy that they are what we might call in the book, silent sufferers who could be beginning to leave your business. They just don’t bother to contact you anymore. Maybe they never even bothered at all. So figure out how to reach out to those customers who never contact you maybe even literally reach out to them and call them up and say, Hey, you haven’t heard from me for a while, Greg, how you doing? And Greg might be really shocked. Because he might say, well, actually, everything’s fine. Or he might say, you know, something, let me tell you, I got these five problems. And maybe you can fix it. And maybe you can keep me around. So that’s what I would suggest.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Bill. And what is David’s golden nugget.
David Jaffe
I think the customer experience industries become obsessed with asking how do we go. But I feel like we need to step back from that before we fully have the right to ask that question. We need to ask why did they have to? And so that’s my golden nugget is to be thinking much more about Why did this have to occur not asking necessarily the customer? Because again, that’s putting them to more work. But asking ourselves why was it necessary? And do we have should we even be asking customers how did we go? Because there’s a more fundamental question about why do we have to
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, David, I think the audience really feels that you are a great team. You are were passing the ball in a perfect way. I would say friction less. And therefore the only thing that I can say is Bill, thank you very much for your time. And David, thank you very much for your time.
Bill Price
Pleasure. Our pleasure, Greg and continue Good luck with CX Goalkeeper.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And also to the audience. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. It was really enlightening. It was great for me after reading the book several years ago now having the opportunity to speak with two experts, the guys that wrote this book that I really enjoyed and we discussed a lot also during business hours. Thank you very much. Let us know your feedback, contact bill, David or myself. Happy to share all the information that I have on the value irritant framework. Thank you very much. Have a nice evening.
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