CX+EX=Profit

Beautiful Huntington Beach, CA was the backdrop for the Frost & Sullivan Events 19th Annual Frost & Sullivan Contact Center West Mind Exchange. The week started off with a bang sharing a beautiful yacht with fellow attendees for a morning sail gawking at the beautiful houses and getting to know who we would be spending the next three and a half days with. It was a great way to kick off a conference and really allowed us all to get comfortable and have a bit of fun!

Monday morning was kicked off by a truly inspirational keynote by David Weisman, PhD, CPXP, FPCC (who I had the pleasure of spending a hour enjoying the sand and surf the day before) highlighting the Five Questions you Need to Ask your Employees. His insights set the tone for the rest of the Mind Exchange about how Employee Experience is the integral factor in elevating Customer Experience. Arretta Stivers (She/Her) followed and echoed David's sentiment saying that 92% of CEO's believe changes in #CX equals more profit and 95% believe that CX+EX=the most impact.

During a Crowdsource session with Nate Brown , Co-Founder of CX Accelerator, I was surprised to hear that a typical enterprise has an average of 464 different tools that an employee has access to and may need to use at one time or another. With agent proficiency being a top priority, that can lead to a very long ramp up time. Another alarming stat I heard was that in general an agent takes between 30 minutes and two hours just looking up information to do their jobs! Both of these factors lead to not only agent attrition, but also customer attrition because you are never truly optimizing the #CX when you are constantly playing catch up. This was validated in Wednesday's Executive Bulletin led by Thomas Rocharz of Cape Air. He highlighted that agent payroll is the top expense and when attrition occurs it accounts for 50-100% of an agents annual salary. So the question becomes: How do I reduce attrition and invest in the right people that will elevate my Customer Experience?

Through Brooks Bell's Insight Driven Organization Framework, we help organizations understand the sweet spot for retention. We surface the behaviors that help predict which agents to invest in and create micro interactions through their employment journey with you so that they are happy and healthy. This can also assist in succession planning and promoting candidates by understanding the behaviors of your best reps and how to identify them as soon as possible. Our governance consulting work distills the data an organization already has available to create hypothesis of what indicators to measure that influence decisions. Another way to look at it is how do you prevent unnecessary attrition? Realistically an organization cannot increase wages past a certain point or they price themselves out of the market. We can pinpoint the baseline for how long an agent needs to stay to become productive and couples that with the inflection point where they may need to move on in some form be it promotion or exiting the business. We help understand why agents may be attriting too early and why and conversely why agents may be staying to long and optimize that process.

During a collaboration zone we discussed Uniting Humans and Generative AI in Contact Centers hosted by Peter Mullen , CMO, Interactions. I was surprised to hear that 58% of organization have adopted AI in some form, but only 14% are delivering value with it. One use case that came up consistently was using AI for the more "mundane" or low effort tasks to off load some costs and level up the agents having them tackle the more demanding and complex tasks. During the first evening network receptions I spoke with a Vice President of Service Operations who was doing just this so they could focus on their top customers to give them the best service. It's a sound strategy. The question I would ask would be: What is your understanding of your top 10% of customers? How are you measuring that? What behaviors are you looking for that make up that customer and how can you predict that for new customers so you put them in your journey immediately versus waiting until you have a year's worth of data on that persona? Also, what journey's do you have in place for your B customers, C, customers and so on to increase their LTV? All of these things Blazer has deep knowledge on and has proven methods to test and validate all of these to allow organizations to optimize their #CX.

While the overall conference was heavily focused on the tools and AI and what it could do, I was comforted in the fact that many presentations and roundtables honed in on the change management needed to see success in implementing any of these new tools and business models. It's what sets an average business apart from agile and successful one. It rang true to a recent post my CEO, Gregory Ng sent me from Zack Hamilton with Frosta. His post highlighted the RFP's he'd seen the last 4 years and how is underscored why CX is considered a nice to have not a must have. He says that experienced leaders wrap the experience strategy around the business strategy allowing tech to enable, not drive the results.

I am energized as a consumer at all the advancements to my customer experiences and also eager to help solve many of the challenges surfaced. If your organization is in need of guidance in either of these areas, please reach out to start a conversation!