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00:00 How can brands balance customer expectations with cost pressures?

00:53 What does it mean to take a punk approach to customer experience?

02:17 How can you position customer experience as a revenue generator?

03:18 Why is gaining senior leadership buy-in a common challenge?

04:31 What are the current trends in CX efficiency? 

05:06 How can every interaction become a revenue opportunity? 

07:08 What's the right way to approach technology implementation? 

10:11 How does the business chassis framework drive ROI? 

11:53 What role do external partners play in CX delivery? 

14:08 Which metrics matter most for measuring CX success? 

20:19 How did a financial services brand demonstrate CX revenue impact? 

26:25 What does the future of digital customer experience look like? 

29:36 Why is testing and learning crucial for CX transformation?

[00:00:00] Robert Zirk: CX leaders have their hands full in the current service environment.

[00:00:04] On one hand, they face customer expectations for seamless, personalized experiences. On the other, they face pressures to demonstrate ROI and reduce costs.

[00:00:15] How can brands balance these seemingly conflicting demands?

[00:00:22] Brands that reframe the way they think about customer experience, from a cost center to a revenue enabler, are set to outperform their competitors.

[00:00:31] Research from Zippia shows that companies who prioritize customer experience see an 80% increase in revenue.

[00:00:39] So today on Questions for now, we ask: How can you alleviate cost pressures in customer experience?

[00:00:53] Robert Zirk: Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

[00:01:07] Robert Zirk: The traditional view of customer experience is that it's a necessary cost, but to effectively take on cost pressures while maintaining your current customer experience, or even bringing it to a new level, you might wanna start by shifting your attitude to something a bit more... punk.

[00:01:26] Adrian Swinscoe: Punk emerged out of the back of effectively progressive rock, which was quite popular, but it was also accused of being more obsessed with itself than it was with its fans.

[00:01:35] Robert Zirk: That's Adrian Swinscoe. He's a bestselling author of books like Punk CX and his latest, Punk XL, a Forbes contributor, CX advisor and host of the Punk CX podcast.

[00:01:47] Adrian Swinscoe: And punk went: "Meh. You don't need a PhD in music to do something that has an impact. You can just start a band, learn a guitar, pick up some drumsticks and have a go."

[00:01:56] If customer experience is like progressive rock, then what would a punk version look like?

[00:02:01] And I think that's what I'm trying to encourage people is to look at things and just go "Can we do something different? We can learn from other people's experience, but what can we do that's different, that makes us stand out and makes us noticeable and makes us potentially more engaging and more effective to our customers?"

[00:02:17] Robert Zirk: This change in attitude is the first step to positioning CX as a revenue generator.

[00:02:22] Adrian Swinscoe: You have to start thinking differently about it. Rather than just being, "Oh, it's dominated by headcount and, therefore, it is a large kind of overhead," you have to start thinking "What can I gain from this? What is the opportunity here?"

[00:02:36] The contact center is this gold mine of real time data, which many brands are not really leveraging to its full extent. If you want to know everything that's going on with your business, right here, right now, then the contact center's gonna be able to tell you.

[00:02:51] Robert Zirk: Adrian encourages brands to leverage that data by applying it in other parts of your business.

[00:02:57] Adrian Swinscoe: So you can then start solving problems and creating better experiences and creating more connected experiences that will then drive these kind of greater outcomes and more revenue.

[00:03:06] Robert Zirk: Changing your attitude is an important first step. However, the next challenge is often gaining buy-in from senior leadership. Adrian explained why this is a common hurdle for CX leaders.

[00:03:18] Adrian Swinscoe: They don't talk the CEO and the CFO's language, so they'll go, "Oh, if you do this, it'll improve CSAT," or "Do this. It'll improve NPS," and people are going, "Well, okay. Nice." But it doesn't hit at the right sort of level for the CEOs and CFOs and I think leaders in this space have to get better at being able to illustrate demonstrable ROI that comes from their initiatives.

[00:03:41] And that means they have to get better at tying what they want to do back to business levers that are gonna drive extra demand or greater revenue or greater profitability, all those different sort of things. And if your initiatives can't do that, then you need to go look for some initiatives that do, because you need to build trust and credibility within the organization.

[00:04:00] Robert Zirk: And the pressures CX leaders face aren't going away.

[00:04:04] Adrian Swinscoe: The ROI problem is becoming a perennial one now. As time rolls on, people are just expected to do more with less, to continue to innovate, to continue to look for improvements, to continue to do these sort of things.

[00:04:18] Robert Zirk: Jelena Bajic is global vice president of customer experience operations and transformation at TELUS Digital. She highlighted a number of CX trends in the industry driven by the need to achieve greater efficiencies.

[00:04:31] Jelena Bajic: Organizations are looking at digital customer experiences that can drive increased self-serve adoption for customers and reduce costs. And when we're looking at human customer experience and the need to have an agent assist a customer, we're seeing that there is more and more opportunity to look at a global workforce that will also then create some cost efficiency for organizations.

[00:04:54] Robert Zirk: As brands respond to the challenges presented by rising costs, Jelena highlighted that they're also thinking about the potential for CX programs to drive revenue through cross-sell and upsell activities.

[00:05:06] Jelena Bajic: First off, there is a revenue opportunity with every interaction. If you think about digital advertising and as organizations look at various merchandising and marketing to be able to attract customers, you're often paying for the eyeball visits, right? Whether it's digital, whether you're on the road and seeing a billboard, that is an interaction that organizations value and pay for in terms of advertising and promotion.

[00:05:33] And so if you think about your contact center, you are interacting with customers every single day. And that is an opportunity to not just help the customer with what they are looking for and what they've contacted you for today, but it's also then an opportunity to take that interaction, that very precious interaction where you have their attention, and actually turn it into a revenue-driving opportunity.

[00:06:00] And the same thing would happen when we look at digital advertising with email and one-to-one campaigns. When you think about how many communications we get as consumers and how often we engage with them, when you have that moment where that customer calls you from engaging in that campaign, it is a really valuable asset and you want to be able to ensure that your agents have what they need to maximize that interaction.

[00:06:26] Robert Zirk: To put this approach into practice, Jelena suggests thinking beyond the boundaries of traditional customer support and adopting a business ownership mindset and mentality.

[00:06:36] Jelena Bajic: Once you've owned the call, resolved it, you've built a relationship and credibility with the customer that you've actually earned the right to sell to them and offer them a solution. And now, once you've built that relationship, you're even more equipped to offer a solution because you know a lot more about that customer from the interaction than you did before you answered the phone.

[00:06:57] Robert Zirk: To drive revenue-focused outcomes, Adrian recommended CX leaders start by answering a fundamental question: what's the ideal experience you want to create for your customers?

[00:07:08] Adrian Swinscoe: Too often people fall into the trap of buying technology and thinking about what they can deliver with it rather than actually thinking about what it is they wanna deliver, then working backwards from that. You ask people, "What's your experience vision?" And they give you this, "Oh, we want this AI-powered, seamless, friction-free, blah, blah, blah, mobile first, et cetera, et cetera." And it's an assemblage of a bunch of different kind of buzzwords.

[00:07:31] Robert Zirk: Simply purchasing and deploying technology isn't enough to solve today's business challenges, particularly now that so many tools leverage AI, which requires training with company-specific data and human oversight to refine its performance.

[00:07:46] As a result, organizations must factor in the shared responsibility they hold with their vendors for ongoing maintenance and development.

[00:07:54] Adrian Swinscoe: Sometimes you can't do a lot of these sort of things unless you're willing to invest more in it to be able to reap the potential. Is there pressure to experiment more with the technology to become more operationally efficient? A hundred percent. But is it cognizant of all the complications that go with that? Often, not very much.

[00:08:12] Robert Zirk: So instead of leading with technology to drive revenue, Adrian advises leaders to start with their intended experience first, then work backwards.

[00:08:21] Adrian Swinscoe: I would challenge them to go further and really articulate what it is that you want to create and then how you want to do it. And once you've done that, then ask yourself, how does that tie itself back to your corporate and business objectives? Because when you do that, then you start to connect yourself and make yourself more relevant to the enterprise, both from a brand perspective, but also from a commercial perspective.

[00:08:43] Too often, I see people that, it feels like they're forever playing catch up rather than taking a moment to stop and think, "Okay, what is it we want to do and how do we want to do it? But also, at the same time, I would say the future of customer experience is always built in the present. And what I mean by that is people that follow are always thinking about what's next and disruptions and planning for the future and all these different sort of things, but yet they forget to attend to the problems that are happening for customers today.

[00:09:12] And if you don't attend to those problems today, then you potentially forfeit your right and your opportunity to build and nurture those relationships in the future. And so what leaders in their fields tend to do very well is that they're always planning for the future and experimenting and developing new capabilities and things, but they're also working really hard to serve the customers in the here and now. And those are difficult things to marry up. That's the job of being a leader in the space is being future ready, but also very present.

[00:09:42] Robert Zirk: The 2024 Gartner Customer Experience Survey reveals that 92% of organizations with strong CX performance reported increased revenue, while only half of those with underperforming CX programs saw similar gains.

[00:09:57] According to Adrian, after linking your intended customer experience to business objectives, the next step is to think about how your delivery method can demonstrably enhance ROI over the programs you currently have in place.

[00:10:11] Adrian Swinscoe: I have a simple way of thinking about this called a business chassis, and it's a very simplified way of talking about how a business runs, and it's generally applicable to most types of businesses in broad strokes. And what it says is that businesses have an ability to generate demand, then an ability to convert that demand, and that drives the number of customers they have in a given period.

[00:10:33] Then you have the whole buying experience for those customers, and then how many times they buy from you in a given period, and that will drive your revenue over a given period. And then you've got your cost of operations or your cost to serve, and that drives your profitability.

[00:10:47] Now, that's all very simple. The problem is that most people think about "How do we get more customers? How do I drive more revenue? How do I drive more profitability?" And the problem is that most of those things are outcomes driven by other levers, and so what I would suggest is that when you're thinking about a new initiative that's trying to improve efficiency or improve service or improve experience, rather than thinking about more customers, more revenue, more profitability, you have to target one or more of those levers.

[00:11:15] Your ability to generate demand, your ability to convert it, can you improve the buying experience? Can you improve repeat purchase or loyalty? Or can you reduce or improve your cost to serve? And if you do one or more of those things, then you've got a clear line to being able to prove ROI on the projects that you're proposing.

[00:11:33] Robert Zirk: Adrian sees a larger role for partners and BPO service providers to play in helping brands deliver more efficient customer experiences. As brands focus on their core competencies, external partners like TELUS Digital can offer scale and specialized expertise that brands might struggle to develop internally.

[00:11:53] Adrian Swinscoe: I think that plays well into this new technology space, because having a brand develop all the skills that they need in order to serve their customers, it has economies of scale if you've got a really large customer base. But if you're a partner that is learning from serving multiple brands, there's much greater economies of scale in that, and I think that puts partners like outsourcers in a really good position if they're willing to develop that sort of capability where they can become almost like a technology center of excellence that they can provide to brands and then get them from a fast start to value much, much quicker than if they were gonna do it on their own.

[00:12:34] And actually, I've seen signs of brands outsourcing more and more of some of their back office and service-related work to partners and moving away from being a service provider to actually being a true partnership where they work in conjunction about "How do we both achieve our long-term aims?"

[00:12:50] Robert Zirk: Jelena described how TELUS Digital enables brands to scale their customer experience initiatives, drawing on expertise refined across multiple industries.

[00:13:00] Jelena Bajic: While I'm also supporting a traditional customer experience operation, we're doing a lot of digital transformation. And I think that in itself is unique in what TELUS Digital is able to bring to the table because you have your operations sitting side-by-side with your digital solutions, and you're able to accelerate development, really get practical in the things that are preventing your operations from being successful from a customer experience perspective and accelerate the outcome and improvement with digital solutions.

[00:13:31] And so when you really think about ways that we can partner: we have ability to not just provide agent support, but we have global agent support and we're really leveraging this.

[00:13:43] Robert Zirk: When it comes to measuring success for CX initiatives, Jelena finds that many organizations overwhelm agents and leaders with too many metrics to keep track of. Instead, she recommends a streamlined approach focused on key indicators that directly link CX initiatives to their impact on revenue. For her team, the first and most important of these is first contact resolution.

[00:14:08] Jelena Bajic: We know when customers contact us, everyone wants it resolved the first time. And that's it, right? That is the customer expectation. We don't want a customer to have to keep contacting us. And so first contact resolution is really the primary and the most important metric for us when it comes to customer experience effectiveness.

[00:14:29] Robert Zirk: First contact resolution also drives the next most important metric: customer retention.

[00:14:35] Jelena Bajic: We know that when you have a good customer experience, that is driving loyalty into your customer base, and that's going to help retain those customers as well.

[00:14:44] Robert Zirk: Following first contact resolution and customer retention, Jelena focuses on revenue generated directly through CX channels.

[00:14:53] Jelena Bajic: So the ability to sell products and services to our customers that they maybe didn't know about or they were considering and needed to talk through that with someone.

[00:15:03] Robert Zirk: And finally, Jelena connects these three metrics to the valuable time associated with each customer interaction.

[00:15:10] Jelena Bajic: I know often we talk about average handle time and what is the right amount of time to spend with a customer. The way that we look at this is there is value added time in that transaction or that interaction. And the value added time is the time spent understanding a customer's needs, solutioning that for the customer and then bridging to those sales conversations that are driven from a solutions mindset.

[00:15:37] The non-value added time that agents spend helping customers, that's where we're really looking at how do we leverage AI and technology to drive more efficiency. How do we take away 30 seconds to a minute that an agent spends having to summarize notes at the end of a transaction? That really adds up. How do we leverage that same technology to recommend actions for that agent, whether it is service actions to help support and resolve the support needs that the customer has or even personalized recommendations based off of what we know about that customer and the interaction that can actually bridge to a sale and drive incremental revenue as well.

[00:16:22] Robert Zirk: Jelena emphasizes that focusing on value added time is differentiated from a cost center mindset where efficiency for the sake of efficiency might hinder success more than it helps.

[00:16:35] Jelena Bajic: If you traditionally think about your contact center as a cost center, of course you're gonna look at it in a way where the easiest way or the fastest way to reduce cost is by shrinking the amount of time that you're spending on every single connection with a customer.

[00:16:50] But if you think about "Maybe there's a bit of a floor in terms of how far I can go without risking that loyalty and retention mindset." These days, it's very unique to have a value proposition that no one else in the market has. Products come and go and so what really changes a customer's affinity to a brand and a product is their experience and part of that is the support experience and the interactions that they have with agents and how we can actually build those connections to drive that revenue, I think, is a missing piece in some places and something that I look at more and more every day.

[00:17:30] And I'm really proud of how far our team has come in terms of driving that retention outcome and solutions outcome across all of our sites. And of course we're always testing and learning on how we can do this even better. But it's a really exciting space and way to engage our teams.

[00:17:48] Robert Zirk: Through fostering a business ownership and mindset culture, Jelena has witnessed firsthand how her team feels more empowered to drive solutions, leverage technology and improve processes.

[00:18:01] Jelena Bajic: It becomes really liberating for a team as well when they feel like they have revenue to drive in a way and it's not just about the cost of something. Everyone has a little bit of a marketer in them and it's interesting to see that come to life and it's even more exciting when you see how the operation is bringing it to life, leveraging AI and copilots.

[00:18:22] I'm always amazed when I'm walking or when I'm in a site and I have the privilege of doing some side-by-sides with agents and I see the copilots that they've developed that are helping them ask better questions, probe more, offer solutions and drive the outcome.

[00:18:38] Robert Zirk: For Adrian, when it comes to measuring success, he advises leaders to revisit their organizational framework and hone in on the levers that drive revenue.

[00:18:48] Adrian Swinscoe: If I think about the metrics that are normally used, there are things like your NPS and your CSAT. They only correlate with some of those levers. They're not causative, they don't necessarily have an impact on them.

[00:19:01] Whereas things like your average handle time, your first call resolution, those sort of things are efficiency metrics and you can tie those directly to your cost to serve, your operating costs.

[00:19:11] But if you wanna tie them to revenue, then you have to go back to that chassis and think, "Does my initiative tie to one or more of these levers? And if so, can I then track what its measurable impact could be on revenue?"

[00:19:24] Robert Zirk: Adrian notes that qualitative metrics can be used as indicators to complement quantitative metrics.

[00:19:30] Adrian Swinscoe: We say that we can create customer experiences, but we can't. We can only create the conditions for which a customer has an experience. It's up to us to make sure that we create the conditions hopefully that facilitate them having a good and a positive and a quick and effective and an easy experience.

[00:19:48] The qualitative insights are great clues to helping you understand, "Was this effective? Was it easy? Was it efficient? Was it pleasant? Did it feel personalized? Was it all these different things?" To give you an insight into what makes people feel that way, which is very different to tying it to commercial objectives.

[00:20:08] The CX industry is often more concerned with how people feel about certain things and not about "Is it commercially relevant?" We need to get better at doing both things simultaneously.

[00:20:19] Robert Zirk: According to McKinsey & Company, top performing growth companies attribute 80% of their value creation to core business activities, largely by maximizing revenue from their existing customer base.

[00:20:32] Adrian shared an example of a life insurance company he had advised.

[00:20:36] Adrian Swinscoe: They said, "We've done this digital thing, we've done this agile thing, we've done this customer journey mapping thing, we've done all these different sort of things and we've created all these new products."

[00:20:43] Robert Zirk: But none of those initiatives were getting results. So Adrian asked them to identify some of the biggest pain points in their core business: life insurance.

[00:20:52] Adrian Swinscoe: And they were like, "When somebody passes away and then somebody makes a claim. The problem with the claim is that it requires people to have set up power of attorney in the life insurance because if you don't, then you have to go through all of these prove your identity-type of checks to stop fraud.

[00:21:08] Now, whilst most people say, "Oh yeah, I've got power of attorney in place," many of them don't. In fact, most people don't. And it causes such grief for both the family members that are making the claim, but it also is really stressful on the employees that are having to be tactful, but gently forceful to the family members that are trying to make that kind of claim.

[00:21:31] They're trying to help them, but they have to follow the rule. And I said to them, "That's not great for customers and it's not great for employees either. That's probably gonna cause stress and anxiety and possibly have some impact on turnover and all sorts of different sort of things. It's also gonna lengthen the whole claims process."

[00:21:44] I said, "Do you think all of the skills and the capabilities that you've done there, you could take those and you could apply those skills to that process to make that experience better for all parties?"

[00:21:56] Robert Zirk: So they focused entirely on that pain point by using messaging and encouraging their customers to fill out the power of attorney information earlier in the process.

On this episode, we explore how to alleviate cost pressures in customer experience — and unlock the potential for CX to drive business growth.

Episode cover image for Questions for now, a TELUS Digital podcast, featuring an illustrated character holding a pen and a tablet, standing in front of charts.

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CX leaders face several competing pressures: budget constraints, the need to demonstrate ROI and rising customer expectations. Our expert guests provide practical, actionable insights on creating value-driven customer experiences that reduce costs, improve service quality and connect to measurable business outcomes.

Listen for the compelling perspectives of Adrian Swinscoe, author of Punk CX and Punk XL, customer experience advisor and workshop facilitator, and Jelena Bajic, global vice president, customer experience operations and transformation at TELUS Digital.

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