Episode 191: The Evolution of Customer Experience: Insights from Blake Morgan
I had a fantastic time chatting with Blake Morgan, a renowned customer experience expert and author, about the future of customer-centric strategies and the role of technology in shaping them. Blake brought her wealth of knowledge to our discussion on the Product Thinking podcast, offering an in-depth look at how companies can truly revolutionize their customer experiences.
In our engaging conversation, Blake delved into the success story of T-Mobile’s 'Un-Carrier' strategy and how a commitment to exceptional customer and employee treatment can lead to remarkable business outcomes. She also shared invaluable insights on the transformative impact of AI on customer service, the potential pitfalls of poorly implemented chatbots, and the delicate balance between leveraging technology and maintaining a human touch.
Read on to explore Blake’s vision for a more customer-focused world and discover how you can apply her insights to drive meaningful improvements in your own product strategies.
You’ll hear us talk about:
05:36 - Customer-Focused Leadership Starts with Mindset
Blake starts by delving into the core principles of customer-focused leadership, as outlined in her book, "Eight Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership." She explains that being customer-focused starts with the leader's mindset, and it’s crucial for executives to wake up every day excited to serve both customers and employees. The modern customer-focused leader needs to be deeply involved in the trenches, just like Lindsay Snyder, the President of In-N-Out, who frequently works alongside her team members in the stores. Blake points out that this hands-on leadership approach not only builds a strong connection with employees but also helps leaders stay attuned to the reality of day-to-day operations.
20:37 - Customer-Centric Approach: Learning from T-Mobile
Blake highlights the critical mistake companies make when they prioritize profit over customer care. She points to T-Mobile’s "Un-Carrier" strategy, led by former CEO John Legere, as a model for customer-centric transformation. In 2012, T-Mobile shifted the telecom industry by eliminating hidden fees and complex contracts that frustrated customers. This approach helped them rise from a lesser-known player to a major industry leader. John Legere's leadership style evolved alongside the company’s philosophy—he embraced a more relatable and bold persona, which resonated with both employees and customers. As Blake explains, his consistent focus on creating a customer-friendly brand was instrumental in T-Mobile's growth.
26:55 - Pitfalls of Poor Chatbot Implementation: Air Canada
Blake recounts the case of Air Canada’s chatbot failure as an example of how poor AI implementation can lead to severe customer dissatisfaction. A customer was misinformed by the airline's chatbot about a bereavement reimbursement policy, leading to a legal case when the customer followed incorrect advice and was denied compensation. Air Canada’s failure to take responsibility for the chatbot’s error worsened the situation, resulting in negative PR. Blake criticizes companies that release faulty chatbots without adequate testing or fail to uphold their customer promise when mistakes happen.
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Intro - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Joining us today is Blake Morgan, a customer experience futurist, expert, author, and keynote speaker. Blake's journey in customer experience spans over 15 years of working in senior-level customer service executive roles at Fortune 100 companies. Today, we're gonna dive into what businesses need to know to be truly customer-focused. And I'm really excited about this episode because Blake has a lot of real-life examples to share based on tons of research for her book and also working in these companies and helping her clients. But before we go to talk to Blake, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions, and I answer them every single time. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what you're thinking. Also, if you drop me a voicemail, I answer those faster. Let's see this week's question.
Dear Melissa, I read your book and it was fantastic. Our startup was acquired by a large professional services firm. We are in the build trap. We need to explain to our new leaders what a product manager is, what is the value of working this way, and eventually escape the build trap. But how do we convince them? How can we use a language they understand?
So having done professional services myself, I can tell you what these people are probably thinking. When you sell services, it's very different than selling software because you're usually scoping out a service for each customer and tailoring it to their needs. Sometimes you have productized services. You sell the same service in the same way. Now, you might tailor it a little bit here or there, but again, you're using people to deliver on this, not necessarily software. So you have to pull on that productized piece to kind of relate to them. This will help. The idea behind software products is that you can create repeatable products to sell that you do not have to refine for every customer and that you can also scale without having people labor involved. So let's first start to talk about what is a software product manager. A product manager plays. It plays a huge part in steering our companies towards success by determining the right products to build in the right order. They do this by making sure that we are solving the right problems for our customers in a way that prioritizes success for our business. Now, with software, we're also doing this in repeatable, scalable ways, which is different than services. We want to make sure that we build a solution that meets the needs of many people so we don't have to redo it every single time. This creates a lot of efficiencies. Now, the product managers themselves do not have to come up with all the solutions. They are not magic. Instead, they're in charge of de-risking solutions no matter where they came from. So they do this by doing really good customer research, market research, experimentation, data analysis, all of that work that goes into making sure that this is the right product.
And what that ensures is that we're getting the highest return for the dollars we are investing in software development. This also helps our margins. When we don't do product management well, organizations are usually skipping the derouging staffs instead we've got leadership or sales or other people coming in with ideas and they go straight to development in a professional services firm too. You might have customers saying very specifically what they want. You might be going to build that. When we don't focus on the value of the solutions for both the customers and the business here, and we don't design and prioritize them accordingly, we could not only be wasting money building the wrong thing, but we could be losing an opportunity to get the right thing into market faster. Product managers work across the whole company, ensuring that our products will be successful. And that means understanding sales and working with the sales team so they can actually sell the product, working with the marketing team so that they can market the product, and hearing the feedback from both of those places, working with the tech and design teams to make sure that we're building the product well, and customer support to hear the feedback. So we go and we work across everything to kind of pull it together and make sure that what we're building is the right thing. So that's what you want to explain to your leaders here. Now, in a professional services firm, you are either selling that product directly to customers, in which case you're directly impacting revenue, or you're allowing them to scale more effectively with their people. Delivering the services by providing some kind of software enablement on the back end.
But no matter what, you should understand how your firm uses the software and then communicate the value of product management accordingly. Tell them how it helps with those goals and why the product managers make sure that that product, whether you're selling it directly or indirectly, is effective. Try to relate it back to the value there and what product managers do to make sure you're de-risking the solutions. I hope this helps. And again, if you're listening to this and you have a question for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what it is. Now, let's go talk to Blake. Are you eager to dive into the world of angel investing? I was too, but I wasn't sure how to get started. I knew I could evaluate the early stage companies from a product standpoint, but I didn't know much about the financial side. This is why I joined Hustle Fund's Angel Squad. They don't just bring you opportunities to invest in early stage companies, they provide an entire education on how professional investors think about which companies to fund. Product leaders make fantastic angel investors. And if you're interested in joining me at Angel Squad, you can learn more at hustlefund.vc.mp. Find the link in our show notes. Welcome, Blake. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Blake - 00:06:05: It's so good to be here. Thank you for having me.
Melissa - 00:06:08: So you've had a very impressive career spanning over 15 years working with major companies like Coca-Cola, AT&T, IBM to enhance their customer experience. Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to the field of customer experience?
Blake - 00:06:22: I'm so lucky, Melissa, in that I fell into this like 18 years ago when smartphones were just being released and social media also was slowly, slowly making its way into modern life. So I had a front seat to a few different things. One is CRM, moving from customer relationship management to the concept of customer experience. And then coupled with that, the explosion of customer experience technology. Also, the thought leadership around these topics grew because now we have blogging and podcasting and video. So in those 18 years, I've been studying customer experience. I've done a lot of different things from producing content and thought leadership, but also working at Intel, working at startups. And then for the last 10 years, doing what you mentioned, Melissa. So speaking, writing, podcasting, and really immersing myself into customer experience, contact centers, and helping to really build out the category. Because we're building the plane as we fly it. We're trying to create the language, the concepts. And my role as a storyteller and researcher is to really arm practitioners with tools that I've created myself to help them take my stories, my concepts into their companies and say to their bosses, like, hey, treating customers while making their lives easier and better is really important. Here's a story. Here's an example. So that's basically the summary of my career is just being interested in customer experience, being really curious about it. Being passionate about technology and ultimately being passionate about people and how to make their lives easier and better.
Melissa - 00:08:08: Well, I think a lot of our listeners out there in product management and UX can definitely feel good about that. So customer experience, you did mention a little bit about it being a category. For our listeners, right, we've got product managers, UX designers, a lot of leaders out here. We talk about digital experiences. We talk about user experiences. And people are talking about the customer experience. But I think there's some kind of misconceptions or confusion about what that term means. Can you describe what customer experience is when you talk about it? Is it a role? I've seen chief customer experience officers out there. Or who's in charge of the customer experience?
Blake - 00:08:43: The short answer is it depends. It depends on which company you're talking to. Some CEOs run or drive customer experience. Sometimes companies will hire a chief experience officer. The challenge and the problem is when customer experience is paid lip service by hiring a customer experience officer. And then companies just feel like, okay, we're done. In my research, what I found is that customer experience is not a division. It is not necessarily a discipline. You can't go to school for it. Customer experience is just a decision. It's a decision that employees have to make every single day. Do I make the product-focused decision or do I make the customer-focused decision? And so if customer experience is just a decision that every employee has to make every day, it turns out that companies that lead with customer experience really have that customer-centric culture. That culture where an employee walks by something that's clearly wrong or an imperfection or a problem, and they feel extreme ownership. They go, I got to fix that. I don't want customers seeing that mess. And so it's really a culture that has to be driven by leadership. It's a decision. There's been a lot of noise and information about customer experience. But if it's just a decision, that makes it actually very clear and very simple in theory. But in practice, it's not that easy.
Because, like, I've been in the business for a long time. Like, even when I worked at Intel and I was a customer service executive, if you sat in our meetings, you would have no idea what we were talking about. Because there was so much jargon and many, many years and layers of just legacy. Oh, this is how we've always done things. This is how we do things. Instead of kind of being hungry and aggressive and going, we have got to constantly think about customer insights. Because if the customer can't use the product, then they're not going to be loyal to us. And for your listeners that are i in product marketing and product management, I like the example of Slack. Because what Slack does is they actually sit their engineering right next to customer service and customer insights. So you've got that beautiful feedback loop where customers are feeding the company information and data about how they use the product, what can be better, what's going well. That feedback loop goes right into engineering. I go, okay, we're going to change the way we build based on those data insights.
Melissa - 00:11:05: That's really refreshing to hear about that too, that you've got engineering so close to all those insights. You just wrote a new book too on the eight laws of customer-focused leadership. Can you tell us a little bit about how you become a customer-focused leader and what those Eight Laws are?
Blake - 00:11:22: Well, I have the book right in front of me. And here's the book, Eight Laws. And what makes a customer-focused leader is really the mindset. It starts with the mindset. The book is simple and easy to follow. It follows the acronym, literally CX Leader. The first is customer experience mindset. Do I wake up, jump out of bed in the morning excited to serve employees and customers? And it really starts with the executive, the leader's commitment to curiosity, to, I call it flipping burgers next to employees. Like in the book, I mentioned Lindsay Snyder, the president of and owner of In-N-Out. And here's a president, a CEO essentially is her role, where you can see on her Instagram, she is a leader who's very much in the trenches. She is very connected to what's happening on the ground. She is doing the work out there in the In-N-Out stores, connecting with team members, very involved in leadership development, this is the modern customer-focused leader. So increasingly you're seeing examples of customer-focused companies. They're also employee-focused. They're on the great place to work list. Like Lindsay Snyder, they are highly rated by employees on Glassdoor.
Because it's not an accident, so much of customer experience is stuff the customer never sees. It's actually, how do we run our business? How do we reduce back-end complexity? How do we improve employee engagement? So in all my research, I have distilled this concept of customer-focused leadership down to these eight principles that include things like, how do I focus on short-term profits and long-term profits? Can I hold these two opposing ideas in my mind as a leader at one time? What do I do in the first 90 days of a customer experience role or any role? How do we measure success? Because we know that we'll work toward those success metrics. So customer experience is very broad. I think the challenge is to distill it to something very simple that's easy to implement at any company. That's what the goal, that's the objective of the book.
Melissa - 00:13:30: One thing that you just said that was really interesting to me is about how we measure success. And in product management, there's a lot of asks. I see this especially in large enterprises for the product managers to be able to quantify the return or the ROI on the things they're building. And a lot of it, too, is I actually heard a leader ask the other day, can you tell us exactly how much revenue this part of the product is responsible for? This is a huge enterprise. This is not like a SaaS product where it's like, oh, this feature is what they pay for. So I see a lot of asks for that at the leadership level. But in product management, a lot of the things that we're looking at is like usage or happiness from customers and all that. When you are working with a company that you think is particularly great at customer experience, how are they measuring success? Is it just by the financials? Are they looking at product metrics? What are the differences in those metrics that really matter?
Blake - 00:14:22: For SaaS companies, the advantage they have is they're able to track everything. And so like Fred Reichelt, the creator of Net Promoter Score, recently came out and said, hey, I have a better version of Net Promoter Score. It's called Earned Growth Rate. And I talk about this in the book. Earned Growth Rate is essentially how many new customers are coming in through current or past customers. So how many of your customers are referred? And only membership-based or subscription-based companies are able to do this, to track it. Because it turns out your referred customers are more valuable. They spend more money. They stay longer. They tell their friends. They're just great customers. So I think Earned Growth Rate is a really interesting new customer experience metric to check out. Obviously, most companies are still tracking Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction. They're also looking at all the hardcore contact center metrics like average handle time. We can also look at revenue and how many times customers come back. So I think that you have to look at the metrics that work for what you're individually doing. They say if you treasure it, you'll measure it. What's measured gets improved. But I mean, for everybody listening and watching, like think about your own life. If you want to achieve a goal, you have to make it very simple and break it down every single day. Let's say you want to lose weight. Well, then you've got to look at what you're eating and how much you're exercising, maybe how much you're sleeping, how much rest you're getting. And you have to start measuring it every single day.
But for so long, we've only been measuring the short-term metrics. How much money did we make in the short term? But what I found in the research, we look at Honeywell and David Cody, the former CEO, his turnaround of Honeywell, the B2B multinational conglomerate, where he took a company from a $20 billion market cap in the early 2000s to $120 billion market cap by really just focusing on customer service leadership looking at doing my metric make sense? Am i just being fed nonsense by people just don't want to be bothered? It's actually quite an interesting story about disfunction about a big dysfunctional family. And the bigger the company, the more dysfunction. That's why the metrics, you have to be really careful because a lot of these customer experience metrics like net promoter score, they can be gamed. And they are gamed all the time. And you see it. I mean, agents, car salesmen, they just want the score. They don't care about anything else. You know, like Uber, please give me the five stars. Like they'll literally ask you, like, what's the point?
Melissa - 00:17:01: Yeah. And you're not actually getting a full experience on whether the customers are doing that. My mom works for a very large corporation and it's a physical site where people can come in and they're always asking her to get more Google reviews. If she doesn't get her Google reviews for the end of the month, she gets dinged. So she's constantly like texting us, hey, can your friend give me a Google review? Or can this person give me a Google review? And it's just not an accurate representation of what those things are. So I like that part of not gaming it. What do good leaders do to ensure people are not gaming these two? Like, how do you make sure that you're defining the right metrics? So it's not just, hey, get our NPS up 10 points.
Blake - 00:17:37: Well, I think you have to watch the metric and be careful about it. I had a client, it's a new home construction company, and all the divisions across the US, they're all treated like separate businesses. So they compete with each other. And whoever had the highest net promoter score would get to go to Martha's Vineyard with the CEO. Well, no ding against your mom. Sure, she's a lovely person. But they were gaming the system, not saying she was, but they were actually gaming the net promoter score system. And these presidents would be taking customers out that bought new homes from them for lunch and saying, hey, can you give us the score? It would really help. So they could go to Martha's Vineyard at the end of the year. So I think that knowing that so many metrics are managed and gamed, and if you look like your audience are product managers, software companies, these are companies that can directly just look at the data and see it themselves, and I think when C-level leaders are actually looking at the data, they understand it, the facts, they're interested in the facts, even if it's ugly, they talk to customers because that qualitative data, I think, is so important too. How often do you just talk to customers, call them? This is really, really important, and that's how you're going to avoid that. It's like when you keep stepping on the scale and hoping you're going to see a better number, but you don't make any changes, and you just keep trying to find ways to lower that number without actually working hard. I mean, we have to avoid that in our companies because we're just lying to ourselves, essentially. We don't want to do that.
Melissa - 00:19:08: I've heard from product managers before too, where they knew that the metrics they were measuring were the right things, but when they went to bring them to the leadership, they didn't want to hear it, right? They didn't want to have that open mind. They didn't want to really understand what was driving behind it, right? They were just very focused on the wrong metrics or getting their numbers up, probably because they promised something to a board. If you're not the executive, and you're trying to help urge executives or help leaders understand what the problems are, what do you encourage people to do to speak to them and to help them understand that they're measuring the wrong things?
Blake - 00:19:44: I think if more employees told stories, like here's our customer, Debbie, who lives in Florida, and she experienced this with our product. Here's how it made her life great. Or here's how it really inconvenienced her. And like telling the story to make that visual example for the audience, this is more powerful than a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet. So like Jean Bliss, customer experience author, has a great saying, like get customers off spreadsheets. I think people really appreciate truth tellers. You can always say everything in a nice way. So the curiosity about the truth. I think if executives really care about the company's success, then they'll listen to employees. And there's no arguing with facts. And if employees are interacting with customers and seeing things that are noteworthy, maybe they're red flags, maybe there's opportunities. If you learn to paint the picture and tell the story in a compelling way, then you will be able to make a difference. You will capture your audience, no matter if it's your boss or colleagues. So I think being willing to stick your neck out and go, I'm going to tell the truth. It might not be pretty, but I think it's in our best interest to know what's actually happening. And you don't criticize or offend people. You're going to have a lot of success with this at work. If people don't want to hear the truth, you might find yourself in a company that's not customer-centric, which means they're probably not employee-centric either, which means honestly, I would get out of there.
Melissa - 00:21:10: That's good advice. So you just mentioned to being out there and talking to customers. What are some of the ways that the companies who do this best are getting that customer feedback and going to talk to customers? Do they follow any cadences or practices that have made you go, oh, wow, that's really cool the way they do this?
Blake - 00:21:29: There's a couple examples that I really like. There's a company called ThredUp and the CEO and founder of ThredUp. ThredUp is e-commerce. It's consignment. And what he does is he looks at heat maps of how customers are actually moving through the website. So he's watching them with their cursor moving. And if they have trouble, the CEO is looking at that. And he spends about 10% of his time on customer initiatives. There's other examples like the CEO of Air New Zealand who does kind of an undercover boss thing and he'll actually dress up as a steward and give snacks on flights to customers. So there's so many examples of leaders that are actually willing to do undercover boss, to look at heat maps, to take calls in the contact center. And this I think is so powerful. Or the CEO of Waste Management, the trash company that literally attends 3 a.m. Huddles with the employees that take out the trash because he knows the power of camaraderie. He knows the insights he's going to get directly from employees. Those 3 a.m. Meetings are incredibly powerful and helpful for him to remove roadblocks to make employees' lives better, which impacts their bottom line. And Waste Management is a very successful company because it has this kind of on-the-ground flipping burgers next to employees' leadership. That's committed to qualitative data as well.
Melissa - 00:22:53: What you're describing really feels like leadership coming together around the customer experience and looking at it as a whole. For some of the people listening, they do have that ability as an executive to gather the other executives and do this. Some people are very dedicated to the digital experience, let's say, on a customer journey, but they might not oversee the whole thing. How should organizations set up for success so that they're really looking at that whole customer experience, like that whole journey piece, and not siloing themselves into just the digital experience, not talking to the customer service experience, or have that fragmentation across the board?
Blake - 00:23:30: It's really important to do customer journey mapping. And so then you bring your team together and you collaborate around one seamless, zero-friction view of the customer. And if you're committed to journey mapping, then you're going to break down the walls and the barriers. And you're going to start knocking down those walls to collaborate with colleagues across the business. And that's going to be a really around the customer. I remember working at Intel and customer service, and we would go meet with marketing. And honestly, they weren't that interested at the time. This was quite a while ago. This was like 2013. But they weren't as interested in customer service because I had to explain to them why it's important for us to collaborate around the customer. And so a big piece of advocating for the customer and making that customer experience seamless across the business is the employee's ability to connect and collaborate with different stakeholders across the business to almost be like a politician, you're definitely in change management where you are finding what you have in common with these individuals, understanding what motivates them and how to get them to listen.
Don't focus on the naysayers, the difficult people that don't want these innovative programs. Just try and find advocates and slowly network your way through your own company to build that experience around the customer. But again, it really does take a lot of time. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think leadership and leadership's commitment to breaking down the walls for employees to say, hey, I'm head of sales. We're going to now be collaborating with marketing and customer service and changing the way you measure these employees so they are actually incentivized to work across the business together.
Melissa - 00:25:09: Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take? It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams, and companies to upscale their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product dilemma. Visit productinstitute.com and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code THINKING to save $200 at checkout on our premier course, Product Management Foundations. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see organizations make when it comes to customer experience?
Blake - 00:25:44: The biggest mistake a company can make is when they treat customers badly. When they try and make quick money, they dupe them, they trick them, they put hidden fees and small fine print that make decisions that are not best for the customer. I mean, look at T-Mobile and the success T-Mobile had by in 2012 announcing at CES they were going to be the un-carrier. And they changed the whole industry for all the telecoms, saying these contracts that lock you in, these hidden fees, roaming charges, all these things that were just basic parts of every telecom provider's customer experience. T-Mobile's like, oh, we're going to be the un-carrier. Like, you guys suck. You're all treating customers like garbage. And we're going to be different. And they were at the time like fourth. And they slowly moved their way up. Their stock price ballooned under this new program. And this is why. What's your version of being the un-carrier? John Legere was the CEO, obviously, at that time. What's interesting about John Legere is his whole brand change. Like, if you look at old pictures of John Legere, like, he looks like every other corporate collared shirt, haircut and everything.
He said, hey, we're different. He became different, too. He grew his hair long. He had all pink clothes, this magenta T-Mobile with the leather jackets. And he was always talking crazy, even cursing at times. He would go to the contact centers at T-Mobile and take like a million selfies with all the agents because he wanted employees to know, like, he had camaraderie with them. So it's interesting, too, when you take the opposite approach of what I mentioned, the worst offense you can do and you say, oh, this whole industry is taking advantage of customers. Like, we're not going to do that. Like, we're going to be the un-carrier. And I'm going to be the leader and pioneer this. They're unstoppable in T mobile stock skyrocketed under John Legere. But if you don't believe me, go look at old pictures of him before this transformation and you'll see, oh, my gosh, wow. He just looked like a banker before. Now he looks like a rock star.
Melissa - 00:27:52: So I hear like a lot of willingness to adapt from leadership, though, is necessary to be able to turn this around and recover from bad experience or to make changes like this.
Blake - 00:28:02: If you commit to treating your customers well, to treating them beautifully, then you're going to treat your employees beautifully. You're going to focus on employee experience. You're going to bring them into the fold and say, hey, we're in this transformation together. And this is actually a rock star program. This is cool. Like T-Mobile and John Legere. There's nothing that can stop you from having 100,000 employees that are marching to the same tune, the same beat of the drum. And you have to bring your employees along for the ride. I would say that will make you very successful.
Melissa - 00:28:37: So one of the topics that has been really hot in customer experience lately is how AI is going to change that and what it's going to look like when more and more companies are adopting some kind of AI strategy. What have you been observing in the market for how this is shifting the way that we take care of our customers and the way that customers experience our products?
Blake - 00:28:58: Is set to change customer service in a very incredible way. Contact center agents are now training AI. AI is being brought into the contact center, and we're not necessarily talking about change management, which is a big piece of any technology that's going to change how we work and live. For example, if you bring AI into your contact center, and AI is doing summarizations of calls. In the past, in a contact center, an agent would do a call summarization. So after every call, the agent is doing a short write-up, which takes them supposedly two minutes about what happened in the interaction, any notes about the customer. However, it only would really take them 30 seconds. So they were getting a 90-second break in between all of their calls with customers. So now AI comes in and takes away that fake break. And so the agent says, I don't like this AI. I reject it. I don't want it in my workstation. Are they rejecting the AI, or is the manager not aware that the employee is overworked and not getting enough breaks among all of their interactions in the contact center, interactions can be very negative. And so this is why it is so important that you don't have managers that are not paying attention. But the manager is not just paying attention to the technology brought into the contact center, but also looking at how it's impacting agents.
For example, research shows that when agents are trained with AI, they're working with AI and they're trained on it in small groups with other agents where they talk about it. It's like a support group. The AI implementation goes better rather than just training one individual person on their own. So having support groups for agents. I actually produced a whole course on this for LinkedIn, which will be out in August on AI contact centers and change management. So we can't forget AI is set to change the whole world. It's set to change customer service, taking away a lot of unpleasant aspects for contact center agents, creating efficiencies. But there are many examples of companies doing this poorly and just getting too excited and not thinking through the human aspects of these technologies.
Melissa - 00:31:08: That's really interesting. I have heard a lot of initiatives lately from companies where it's basically just cost reduction strategy when they want to put the AI in. So there's some kind of big goal that's like we're going to reduce X million dollars of cost within this many years. And we're going to do it by using AI for customer service. And I've seen them just kind of default to implementing like a chatbot and not really thinking through that. What kind of strategies have you seen around that, especially with chatbots or anything like that? And where have you seen companies go? What's wrong or that not work out for them?
Blake - 00:31:41: Air Canada is an example where they release this chatbot. A customer wanted to attend a funeral of a loved one, but the ticket in Canada was very expensive. So the customer asked the chatbot, if I fly to this funeral, when I come back, can I be reimbursed with your bereavement policy, which helps customers that are attending a funeral? And the chatbot said yes. So the customer attended the funeral, came back, called the contact center to get reimbursed for the ticket. The contact center agent said, oh, I'm sorry, that's actually not our policy. You needed to have done it before you attended an event or you flew. And the chatbot, it's a third party chatbot. It's not our voice. So I'm sorry, you have to pay the full fee. Well, that customer took Air Canada to court and the court awarded the customer money from Air Canada. Now, Air Canada trying to shirk responsibility and saying, oh, the chatbot hallucinated. It's a third party. It's not actually us. How embarrassing for them. They should have taken accountability and immediately pulled that chatbot to fix it. So here's an example of a company releasing a poorly constructed chatbot, also shirking responsibility and accountability, not a customer focused trait and not doing the right thing for the customer. So we really want to avoid embarrassing PR issues and customer issues by just being thoughtful before we release a chatbot. It should not go up on our website until it's perfect. And if it does mess up, we have to uphold our customer promise and make sure the customer is okay and take care of them and not do what Air Canada did.
Melissa - 00:33:18: It's so funny because they probably would have just saved so much money had they just reimbursed them anyway and said, oh, our fault. Here's your money back.
Blake - 00:33:25: Well, not just the money. I mean, this story was everywhere. Like, forget about the money. It was everywhere.
Melissa - 00:33:31: The PR was not good.
Blake - 00:33:33: PR was horrible. So it's like, these things are just easy. So who are making these decisions? And what kind of silly juice are they drinking in the morning to think this is okay?
Melissa - 00:33:45: For that too, with chatbots, I think everybody is kind of exhausted by them, honestly. Like, sometimes they work and it just does what you want to do. Like, sometimes you have a great experience. Amazon chatbot, right? I've been able to be like, hey, this didn't show up or whatever. And they're like, refunded. No questions, whatever. And then other times you get a chatbot that doesn't help, keeps telling you to go back to the help, never gives you anybody to contact, won't answer your question, makes you dig for everything. And I think people are getting exhausted by companies trying to adopt technology in poor ways at moments of when people need help and then sending them into these loops. When do you use a chatbot or one of these technologies? And when does it help people? Like, how should they think about, like, when to implement these types of solutions versus when do people need to talk to a customer or what are the limits around this technology?
Blake - 00:34:35: The reason we have contact centers is because customer service interactions are often complicated. They can't be solved with just a two-dimensional chatbot. In my experience, chatbots are still very basic, and I only use them for very basic, like, frequently asked questions or to get information that's just very flat. If I have a complicated manner, I want a person on the phone. And that's why I think some industries like finance, taxes, healthcare, things that's complicated and high stakes, a chatbot is never going to replace a person. So I think we have to be careful. In your example, I do the same. Let's say I order food from Whole Foods, which I do quite often through Amazon. And let's say they sold me a fruit that was, this doesn't happen often, but let's say it was kind of rotten or the strawberries had mold on them. They're going to give me my money back, like, right away. How much could this cost them? That insurance, knowing I can easily solve my problem without too much hassle, makes me buy and order groceries and get them delivered often from Whole Foods at least once a week. So I think that we have to be realistic about what these chatbots, what they're capable of. When they don't work, fix it quickly. If we can't be proud of our chatbot, don't put it up on the website. I think all executives should be forced to go through the customer journey themselves all the time to mystery shop their own customer experiences, in particular with potentially messy and high PR stakes like AI chatbots. I mean, you've got to be using your own dog food.
Melissa - 00:36:14: Another thing with chatbots is, especially with our generative AI out there and open AIs, I've heard a lot of people talk about how user interfaces are going to be completely replaced with just text. Just being able to chat to somebody and tell you what I want. Have you seen any trends out there with how interfaces are changing that way or how the experiences of using products or interacting with them have been changing now that there's a way to just text in? Is that good? What have you observed?
Blake - 00:36:40: I would say the best example of this is just still the 11th. Alexa. For me, I have yet to see another company incorporate an AI that can shop for you. Now, even Alexa, I saw an ad where it's like, if you have children at home and let's say there's a fire or an earthquake or something bad happens, you can actually say to Alexa, like a little kid can say, like, Alexa, there's an emergency and they'll send police or firemen. And I think that's interesting because they're actually looking at use cases. Okay, we have this robot in people's homes. How can it add value to the customer in every way? I mean, remember IoT and all the excitement and promise of these refrigerators that were going to talk to us and like refill our fridges or our laundry devices that were supposed to talk to us and do things for us. I mean, I'm looking around my house. There's still not much AI and interaction except for smart lights and things like that. Talking, turn the fan on, turn the fan off. So clearly it takes a really long time for these things to come to market. I was interviewing somebody from a principal at consulting firm profit in San Francisco. I think his name is Ted Moser. And he was saying that that in the future, he felt there would be cameras.
And like robots in people's kitchens to just honestly be part of the family. And I thought to myself, and I said to him, like, I do not want cameras in my kitchen that brands can like see how I'm using their products. And I said, no, like I would never want that. So I think you have to be realistic about how fast we can move with technology, where customers are at. Do they want this in their homes? Is this an invasion of privacy? And kind of slow down. Because I think tech people, they get really excited, but they're kind of some of them are like missing a common sense. Like this is how people actually are. I'll call it an angel on the shoulder. Like, do people really want this? Like actual people, moms with kids at home. And if you're not talking to them and you're building products just based on who you are in San Francisco, like you're going to miss the boat, not to be negative.
Melissa - 00:38:49: No, it's true. I think a lot of people in tech, we're early adopters. We want to try the cool new thing, right? But most people don't. Most people are scared of it. I remember Alexa had that problem too with privacy where people were like, oh, it's just listening to literally everything I say, not even when I say Alexa. What does that mean? Are you recording all of my conversations? And then people got really nervous about that. And I think there's a big privacy concern that people are not thinking about when it comes to how humans want to interact and how they feel safe with devices or with technologies in general.
Blake - 00:39:21: I mean, every other day it's like, oh, AT&T, like two billion people's data was hacked and they have all your texts and all your calls. It's a scary world out there. Like can you be a brand that isn't messy with customer data, that isn't sloppy or forcing them to do things or sign waivers and things that you know they're not reading the fine print and you know it's dangerous for them? So is this an experience you could offer your grandma, your mom? And really being careful.
Melissa - 00:39:51: When you look at trends and the future of customer experience and how we treat our customers, what does get you excited? What are you seeing that people are doing well and what are they leveraging to make customer experiences better?
Blake - 00:40:04: One example, I was in Austin last year and I was at a store called Reformation. And when you go in, it's kind of like an art gallery for clothes. You walk in, you say, oh, there's like one dress. Oh, I love that dress. And you have an iPad. So you like put that dress in your dressing room. Let's say you go to the dressing room, it turns out to be the wrong size. You fill that information in on the iPad or on the computer. Someone brings you the right size. It's interesting for me to look at these companies that are building digital experiences in physical places. So if we know these malls, it's an interesting time because we still have shopping malls. We know no one's really shopping there. Some people are, but not as many. And we have the technology to build these incredibly rich digital experiences. What are the ways we can marry the physical and the digital to make these digital experiences in unique and creative ways that actually consider how people want to buy from us? And I think that's really interesting. And it's still very nascent, in my opinion. There's still a lot of problems, even with e-commerce and digital shopping, that I think in the future, it's just going to get so much more seamless, personal. Meeting the customer where they want to be.
Melissa - 00:41:20: So if you're a product manager out there listening to this and you said, say, I want to rethink how we do our products or how I think about my products and the customer experience, what's your advice for them to get started with that, to really make sure that they are being customer-centric and what kind of process should they follow?
Blake - 00:41:37: I think every employee should have to talk to customers, should actually have to watch how customers use the product. And if you start putting every employee in the shoes of the customer and you reward them for being customer-centric over being product-centric, then you'll stop shipping software updates and iterations that aren't relevant to the customer, that they don't even like. And I think it requires people to slow down, which isn't a bad thing, especially in software and in tech. Slow down and make sure every employee really understands how what they're building impacts an actual person and that commitment to reality, to that feedback loop from everybody, not just the people that connect with customers that are in customer success. Like everyone is in customer success at your company. This is really key.
Melissa - 00:42:22: Well, thank you so much, Blake, for being on the podcast. If people want to read more about your books and about you, where can they go?
Blake - 00:42:28: Head over to BlakeMichelleMorgan.com to make it easy. If you want to buy my book, head over to 8cxlaws.com, or you can pick up a copy on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.
Melissa - 00:42:42: Thanks for joining us. And we will definitely put all of those links to Blake's books and where you can follow her as well on our blog at productthinkingpodcast.com. So go to theproductthinkingpodcast.com and check out Blake's episode to get all of those. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, if you have any product management questions, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.