Unpacking CX Celebrating 5k Streams

In late 2019, KUBRA released its first episode of Experience Better - the CX Podcast. The podcast’s goal was to share success stories, research and interviews with CX leaders with the hope to help organizations deliver better customer experiences. Four years and 36 episodes later, the podcast has hit a new milestone of 5,000 streams! In this time, we’ve had a variety of CX leaders talk on a diverse range of topics - from developing human-centric design through customer empathy to the effect of clean energy transition on CX.

In this episode, we will look back at our most-streamed episodes to uncover important lessons learned on delivering great customer experiences.

This transcript has been generated by AI and may contain minor errors.

Shaun Jackson, SVP of Marketing, KUBRA:

In late 2019, KUBRA dropped its first-ever Experience Better: The CX Podcast episode

Why?

Well, we wanted to spread the good word about all things customer experience.

Sharing success stories, interesting research findings, and chats with CX leaders with the aim of helping organizations give their customers the best experience possible.

Flash forward four awesome years and thirty-six episodes down the road, we are stoked to have hit five thousand streams.

In this time, we've had a mix of CX executives chime in on everything from crafting experiences with customers in mind to how the switch to clean energy is transforming customer experience.

In our latest episode, we're taking a stroll down memory lane, revisiting our most popular episodes to dig up some golden nuggets of wisdom on keeping your customers happy with memorable customer experiences.

Alright. So let's dive straight in.

First on the agenda, the definition of customer experience.

Is it as simple as having a nice, friendly chat with a customer service re,p or does it involve resolving issues using some nifty self-service tools? Well, perhaps it's a bit of both with a bit of this, a bit of that, and a whole bunch else thrown in for good measure.

To answer this, let's go back to our first episode, in which we answered the question, "What is CX, and does it matter?"

Alfred Sawatzky, Head of Product Management, KUBRA:

So you've helped build a five-hundred-employee business on providing customer experience software. So I'm curious, why is customer experience so important?

Rick Watkin, CEO of KUBRA:

Well, I that's a great question. I think if we just, at least provide some context to what, you know, I look at the how I would define customer experience.

I really think the best way to define it is it's really an impression that you leave with your customers and how they think about your brand itself. So think about that. The impression that you leave with your customers and how they think about that brand. I mean,  I can think of a recent report from the Havas Group.

Here's a startling figure: If seventy-seven percent of brands disappeared, nobody would even care about it. Yet that same seventy-six percent of people expect brands to contribute to their quality of life and their overall well-being. I mean, think about that.

What's the overall meaning? I mean, companies that are gonna survive are truly the ones that are making strong connections with their customers. I mean, I look at customer experience and why it matters to KUBRA. It's incredibly, important.

So, I mean, it improves customer retention.

It looks at the overall attraction of new customers as well, improving customer satisfaction.

I think of our top clients that we have across the board and the ones that are really, have this meaning and have this understanding of our brand and why that customer experience is so so important is our ability to cross sell and upsell a lot of our, a lot of opportunities.

We are like a trusted adviser to a lot of our clients because of this customer experience that we're building. And I really think that if customer experience is done well, it can save a company tons of money and increase revenues exponentially. I think a good rule of thumb is that a good rule of thumb is that ten times the amount, of revenue or ten times the amount of cost rather in bringing on new business or bringing on new customers, it costs you that much more money to bring on new customers than it does, when you when you wanna retain the ones that you have. So keep the clients, keep them happy, keep them engaged because it costs you ten times more money, to go out and get new business or get new customers.

And just some other statistics that I think are relatively important if we look at, you know, really, this whole customer experience thread across any industry: Seventy-three percent of buyers point to customer experience as an important factor when they look to purchase something, whether it's a service, a solution, or a widget.

You know, seventy-two percent of buyers really point to that customer experience as an important factor. And out of that, eighty-six percent of the buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

Eighty-six percent of them are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Incredible.

Shaun Jackson:

Looking back at our episodes, I've picked up on quite a few buzzwords used to describe great customer experiences.

Words like data, metrics, and business intelligence. But then there's the softer side too with design thinking, customer centricity, and empathy.

It got me thinking. Is customer experience more of an art or a science?

I turned to KUBRA's internal generative AI tool to shed some light on the difference between art versus science. Here's what it had to say.

Art is generally perceived as a creative process driven by expression, imagination, and subjective interpretation.

Science, on the other hand, is systematized knowledge based on empirical data.

The GenAI tool also threw in this nugget.

While the two might seem different, they often intersect as both require keen observation, a deep understanding of the world around us, and the desire to explore and uncover new layers of understanding.

Circling back to my question, is customer experience an art or a science?

Well, it's both.

There's the science part grounded in methodologies, techniques, and metrics that we can test and optimize, but it's also an art, calling for creativity, intuition, and empathy to meet and exceed customer expectations.

On the episode "How UX impacts CX," we spoke about how great CX includes empathizing with customers through a practice known as design thinking. Let's tune in to learn more.

Jamel Singleton, Head of Product Design, KUBRA:

The thing we really try to focus on is trying to evangelize the idea of design thinking within our organization or within our clients' organization.

So we wanna sit down with them, and we wanna talk to them about the strategy or the research they've done or research they may still need to do about how this thing is gonna work, why they're putting it on the market, what it needs to accomplish. And then once we have that initial research, we start talking to them about the process, about the design, what we think we want to do, and we get their opinions. We want to have them engage. We want them to participate.

It's really important that my team is not the sole arbiter of what or how design is gonna happen in an organization. It really, really is important, and it really helps if we can get everybody on the team involved. If we can get everybody thinking about design or thinking about user empathy, then we can make really, really great products because, you know, we can't catch everything. And most importantly, we can't be everyone. Mhmm. You know? You don't know someone's perspective unless you can talk to them and ask them questions or have them participate in a conversation so that you can understand where they're coming from, and you can apply that to the work that you're doing.

So more important than anything, always design thinking first.

Shaun Jackson:

Now that we've covered CX as an art, let's shift gears and explore the scientific aspect. In the episode "How Business Intelligence Improves CX," we shared insights on the value of data and how that can deliver positive customer experiences.

Anthony Mancini, Director of Client Success, KUBRA:

There are, you know, various definitions out there on what business intelligence is. And the one I like the best that I think articulates it, properly is that business intelligence turns raw data into actionable insights that drive customer interactions and business, decisions.

So let's take a step back there. Right? There's three primary components of business intelligence based on, you know, what I just said. The first is the data.

The second is reporting and analytics on that data, which then lead to visualizations, which are is very important.

And then finally, gathering valuable insights to drive particular action.

So let's look at data.

In today's world, you know, large companies are gathering and receiving mass volumes of data unlike ever before. Right? It's an incredible amount of data that's flowing through systems today based on customer interactions with, you know, your platform or your services that you provide.

Specific to KUBRA, you know, we work in, home services industries. We work with utilities, with government entities, with financial institutions.

We see all these different interactions generating and driving this incredible volume of data and information.

Now let's look at a utility for example. Right? A utility has multiple back end systems that they're using.

For example, we have customer information systems. We have outage management systems, work order management systems, asset data management systems. All of these systems have an incredible function, but produce an enormous amount of data. Now the challenge from a business intelligence perspective is that a lot of these systems, Scott, work in individual silos. Okay? They may or may not be, communicating back and forth. And what happens here is the data that's being gathered, again, exists within these individual, silos and these individual components.

So one of the challenges that business intelligence solves is around the data being captured in these individual silos. Right? So we're looking at what's called data warehousing, where you're able to pool and consolidate the data into, you know, a singular or consolidated, stream so that it's easier to run analytics and reporting on.

The second component, like I said, is reporting and analysis on this information.

So through machine learning, through, artificial intelligence, through complex algorithms, we're able to take raw data, whether it's organized or unorganized, and format format it in a way that allows us to perform this proper analysis.

And then from there, once we have the reporting captured, once we have the analysis, we're able to build, you know, vis visualization against those reports, which again makes it much easier to digest and understand all this, you know, raw data would now have visualization to it. And we'll look at specific examples, of that in just a moment. But before I go on, Scott, let me ask, do you use the tool Microsoft Power BI?

I have used it many times. Yeah.

Excellent. So, you know, here for everyone listening at KUBRA, we we use, Microsoft Power BI, and it's a tool we use because we're measuring our key performance, indicators or KPIs, from all the the, items that we're trying to, to solve if you will and to report on, and we capture this information within a Power BI dashboard. And it's incredibly powerful tool because we're actually able to see, again, in a singular view, how we're doing, how we're certain metrics are measuring up against one another. The example that I love is, you know, think of a pilot flying in, or within their cockpit. They have all of their monitoring instruments and gauges right there in front of them. So in their cockpit, they are able to have a very accurate understanding of how their plane is operating just by reviewing their, their monitoring instruments, and that's what business intelligence allows us to do.

The third component is gathering valuable insights to drive action. Okay? And this is the key. This is the major component of business intelligence. Right? So we start again from just all of this mass amounts of information to the point where we're able to produce reports, provide visualizations, and now we're starting to understand things that we may have not understood before in our businesses through these valuable insights, which then allows us to pick and choose what actions are we going to perform against these insights to help drive our our KPIs or, our our goals.

Shaun Jackson:

Over our thirty-six episodes, we've also uncovered some incredible technologies and tools that help deliver great customer experiences.

From outage maps to digital wallets, we've covered it all.

While it may take a whole episode to showcase all the remarkable tech solutions that we've discussed, I'd like to highlight two such solutions, chatbots as well as billing and payment options.

On our 2019 episode, “Why Chatbots Are the Future of CX”, we spoke about some interesting facts about why chatbots are the future for great customer experiences.

It's fascinating to see how these innovations are continuing to share the landscape of customer interaction.

Colton Marshall, Previous Product Manager, KUBRA:

Yeah. Well, I think chatbots are really interesting technology for a few reasons.

You know, typically, we've relied on websites, graphical interfaces, and call centers, you know, to really make sure that customers are getting what they need out of a utility or service provider.

And what a chatbot opens up is the opportunity for those very, very repetitive tasks that typically require a human, or typically require a very, maybe, esoteric set of things that you need to do on a website in order to accomplish them, we're enabling those repetitive tasks to be accomplished in a more natural way. So rather than going to the website to pay my bill or going to the website to report a power outage, I can just open up my favorite, you know, communication channel, Facebook Messenger or something like that, and say, Hey, my power's up. And we're enabling, essentially, that natural interface, and we're also offloading that volume from customer service reps, and I think that's why they really are important for customer experience, because there are a lot of repetitive tasks that we typically see call center reps dealing with, And every minute that a call center rep spends on a call, you know, performing a sort of basic task that they do twenty times a day, is a minute that they can't use to actually help someone with a task that really requires a human.

So there are a lot of tasks that simply don't require humans anymore, and we're trying to make those as accessible as possible. And I think chatbots are important for doing that.

Shaun Jackson:

Fast forward a year. We explore the value of offering customers multiple billing and payment solutions and how that directly correlates to higher customer satisfaction.

Here's a small snippet from our “Power of Billing and Payment Choices” episode.

Sara Small, Senior Product Marketing Manager, KUBRA:

So we recently researched utility customers about their attitudes and behaviors towards billing and payments, and we began to notice some interesting trends.

These consumers weren't selecting email as their preferred method of receiving bills. They were selecting email and mail and text message. And they weren't selecting just credit card as a preferred payment type. They were selecting credit card and debit card and cash. So it really became clear that the preference here was for more options.

And these preferences were not just specific to the utility customer. We actually captured the same trends in billing and payments for government services as well. And you can actually find all of our research published on our website at KUBRA.com and we have some really interesting insights available.

So Shep Hyken, an expert in customer service and a best-selling author, said it best. He said customers don't worry about anything other than choice and convenience, and you will discover the truth in this when you speak to consumers.

If you ask even a handful of customers, why do you choose to pay the way you do? The word convenience will really pop up quite a few times. So choice and convenience really go hand in hand. When customers have limited options, convenience is replaced with frustration, and frustrated customers is really the opposite of what companies are trying to achieve.

Shaun Jackson:

We've come a long way in understanding what customer experience entails, why it should be a priority for organizations, appreciating it as an art and a science, and some of the technologies available to make it happen. It's been quite a journey of discovery.

So what really goes into creating those outstanding customer experiences?

If I were to pinpoint the qualities or values crucial to delivering great experiences, what would they be? Earlier this year, Reliance Home Comfort, KUBRA’s long-standing client, covered how the organization follows eight tenets to deliver great customer experiences.

Arun Kanagasabapathy, Vice President of Central Services at Reliance Home Comfort:

We're all customers. Right? We've all been in that seat, and we all have a certain expectation. So all we try to do is make sure that we are encapsulating everything we ourselves would want in an experience and or we ourselves, or make sure that this is what our mother or our family member would get every single time. So it starts off with having the best product.

It's number two is showing empathy.

Number three is being friendly.

Number four is providing value.

Number five is never stop improving.

Number six is something that's unique to us. It's called the right call. It's really encapsulates a lot of the other tenants, but it's put into, sort of a formalized mantra that every one of our touch points, with customers, you'd be at a call center agent or be it a tech, or be it, the billing function, they make sure that they adhere to. But, again, it encapsulates all of these other points.

Number seven is leveraging technology, and number eight is, you know, having the right partners like KUBRA.

Shaun Jackson:

Wow. You know, again, thanks for the comment about uniqueness. You obviously come, approach us with a lot of humility, both individually and as an organization.

It does sound like the right call is a bit of a, an interesting and unique approach in and of itself. Now Reliance has been in business for almost sixty years, which is incredibly impressive. And as you know, at Pruber, we're we're setting our sights, for sixty having just achieved, thirty last year. Now have these tenets, do you think, changed over time during the course of those sixty years?

Arun Kanagasabapathy:

So, you know, if you were to look at the top five that I talked about, showing empathy, friendly, providing value, you know, none of those things change. And I think almost every, company, on this planet, tries to adhere to those things. Those are just human values of, us trying to make sure that, we're providing the best experience. So I think those are, almost, foundational.

The, you know, the right call, that's something that is just a formalization of that, as I mentioned. The last two, that's changed. Right? Technology continues to constantly change, And what you wanna do is integrate technology that, allows you to deliver all of those other precepts that we talked about, in the most efficient manner.

And then the right partners, you know, those change, and just because of the changing, you know, the product suite you have, the different technologies you're introducing, and so on. But what you expect from your partners never really change.

Shaun Jackson:

Thank you so much for tuning in on this episode and for your continued support of the podcast throughout the years. We're excited to continue to share fascinating stories on customer experiences and to cover the latest and greatest in CX enabling technologies on our road to ten thousand streams.

Goodbye for now, and see you in the next episode.