CX Conversations

Today, we talk with Sergio Frias, the president and CEO of The Federation of Canadian-Brazilian Businesses and Chief Customer Experience Officer at The Chartered Institute of Marketing Management of Ontario. We begin our conversation with Sergio sharing his career path, he highlights how he developed his passion for customer experience, no matter where he worked. He shares how he developed a unique customer experience program, NICE (Nurturing Insights about Customers Expectations), and we talk about it more in depth. We break down the 8 components of NICE: Context, Benchmarking, CX Mapping, the Essence of NICE, the Dream of the Customer, Triple Organization, Knowledge Sharing, The Right People at the Right Place, and The True Meaning of Service. Listen to the full podcast episode to understand what are the key underlying principles to improving your customer service and why customer service should be the focus for companies as they recover from the COVID-19 crisis.
Sergio’s Background 0:58
The “Why” and “How” of Sergio’s CX Program 4:50
The 8 Components of NICE 9:20
Implementing NICE 18:34
“ If you want, the job is yours -- you’re going to be the owner of this business. So you buy, you sell, you do everything. All the logistics, distribution, everything. That was a great opportunity for my career. I was not really thinking about CX, but the more I got into that, I realized that I know how to do it, because of the many years working with customers and always being concerned about how to get the customers what they needed, I realized that that was an amazing thing.” 2:41
Reach out to Sergio: [email protected]

Today we talk to Mike Miller, the Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Convey, and Vikas Bhambri, the SVP of Sales and CX at Kustomer. We discuss issues and trends we are seeing in the customer service business, such as a spike in e-commerce and an increase in customer inquiries. Other things like an increase in online orders has put a strain on deliveries and being able to get deliveries out on time. Don’t assume that you’re over-communicating with the customer, but instead always be proactive in communicating with them and wait for them to let you know you’re reaching out too much. We talk a little bit about AI and the effects it’s having on customer service, and then we need to be thinking about how we can be strategic in these times and take advantage of the shift in the market.
Trends and challenges customer services organizations are facing 1:46
What companies are doing well to combat this 7:40
An example of the problem we face now 12:00
Artificial intelligence 14:51
“We hear pretty consistently that customers at least are looking for 3 things, and the first is setting an expectation around when something that is going to arrive. That is harder to do today than it has been historically, but that is absolutely the expectation. They want frequent updates as early as possible as to when that’s going to change, if it is going to change. And then lastly they’re looking for flexibility about delivery options.” 7:48

In this episode we talk with the User Experience Architect at Pitney Bowes, Nitya Pannala. We discuss this idea of design thinking, which is a mindset, or ideology of approaching every problem in a human centered way. Nitya gives 3 easy rules to put design thinking into practice. Number 1 is empathize and put yourself in your end user’s shoes. Number 2 is go broad before you go deep by considering multiple options before narrowing down. Number 3 is to experiment as much as possible by testing many different ideas so you can nail it before you scale it.
What Nitya does at Pitney Bowes 1:07
Why it’s important to talk about design thinking 3:50
What is design thinking? 4:51
Putting this into practice/3 easy rules 10:34
How people should get started 20:35
“Contrary to popular belief, this mindset isn’t really about design. It’s about helping companies and individuals think differently about strategic options and system impact. It is most powerful when you combine it with strategic context and that’s where design meets business and the most impact happens.” 6:25
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitya-pannala/

Today we’re gonna be talking about operations and how that really plays into the role of helping you transform your customer experience, and with us we brought on the Vice President at Mercy Hospital, John Timmerman. The best thing to do is find out who is performing the best and study their behavior, and don’t study the behavior of the average employee, or you’ll get average results. It’s easy to take your company values and just put them on the wall, but often that doesn’t affect a lot of the people working in the department. John tells us how to deal with the employees that aren’t adapting or don’t want to change with the company.
John’s background 0:52
How to coach organizations to shift from subjective to objective 2:33
What it comes down to 8:16
How to deal with people who won’t adapt 10:54
Stay away from this 24:02
“I’d talk about our values and say, ‘If there’s anything here that you feel uncomfortable with, please we’re gonna take a break and do not come back because this is not the right organization for you. There’s an organization out there for you, we’re just not the one, and that’s OK. We want you to come to that self discovery now.’” 11:50