CX Goalkeeper & the ECXO with Tue Sottrup: Product Led Customer Success – THE CX GOALKEEPER – Transformation, Customer Experience, and Leadership Goals
The CX Goalkeeper had a smart discussion with Tue Sottrup
LinkedIn Headline: VP CX Excellence at Dixa
Chief CX Evangelist at Dixa & an Ambassador of the ECXO. Tue is passionate about customer service and engagement, and he truly believes that software can empower customers and businesses to build stronger bonds, be more efficient and increase productivity to unprecedented levels.
You will learn:
- Some highlights on the ECXO
- How DIXA makes the conversation between companies and customers EASIER
- How agents can focus on the customers and not on the systems they are using
- How to create happy agents and engage them in the improvements process
- How to get the buy-in from the organization to act on customers’ / agents’ feedback
… and much more
His book suggestion:
- The Effortless Experience – Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DeLisi
- Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days – Joey Coleman
Tue’s golden nuggets:
I think when it comes to creating customer experiences, one of them is the customer’s always right to be understood. That’s a mental law that I have had, that has resonated a lot with me. They’re not always right in what they want but they’re always right in being understood. You might not agree but understand where they’re coming from and what it is that they need.
And then the other thing, I can recommend is always be able to change because we live in a world where you can see everything that has gone on with COVID, a lot of things have changed in a very short while and you need to be able to pivot, you need to be able to adapt to changes around you. That can be that you need to work from home it can be that you need to focus on another channel because that is where your customers are. So be quick at adapting to changing situations in your environment, and continue to be where your customers are…
“Customers are always right to be understood. They are not always right in what they want but in being understood.” @tuesottrup on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
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So be quick at adapting to changing situations in your environment, and continue to be where your customers are @tuesottrup on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
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How to contact Tue:
Subscribe to the EXCO:
Thank you, Tue!
#exco #cxgoalkeeper #customerexperience #leadership #cxtransformation #employeeexperience #CXO #CX #experiencedesign
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Transcription:
Gregorio Uglioni 0:05
Ladies and gentlemen, a great pleasure to be again here as CX Goalkeeper. In a bit different setup. I am doing a series together with the European customer experience organization. And I’m really thrilled to have Tue with me to start this interview sessions. Hi Tue, how are you.
Tue Sottrup 0:25
very good, very good to me too happy to be here today.
Gregorio Uglioni 0:29
Thank you very much. I think I will keep the same format as usual. And therefore my first question would be, could you please introduce yourself Tue
Tue Sottrup 0:38
us, my name is Tue. I work as chief CX evangelist at Dixa. Dixa is customer engagement platforms, affording phone chat, social media, and email, been working with DIXA for about five years, and have been both responsible for product for customer success, customer experience and onboarding and is now more industry teaching role at the company.
Thank you very much for your introduction. And you have a super cool name of your job description. CX evangelist, what is doing a CX evangelist during the day?
Very good question. It’s a lot listening to customers. It’s looking at where we need to go with our product in a strategic view, looking at different partners, integrations, go to market strategy, development, so touches a lot of the product in different directions.
Gregorio Uglioni 1:37
Thank you very much. And I need to also say congratulation, because you raised our record breaking $105 million in Series C funding. Congratulation, how was it possible?
Tue Sottrup 1:50
Thank you, thank you. We’re very happy. And it’s really fantastic for us to see that the market believes in this concept of customer friendships that we are advocating, we believe that happy agents create happy customers and build better loyalty between customers and brands. And it seems that the market believes in that as well. And that’s why we are very fortunate to have general Atlantic to this huge investment and exam that allows us to grow and spread the good friendship.
Gregorio Uglioni 2:21
I think this is really great news. customer centricity is something that we really need. And also it’s what is the European customer experience organization is doing? Could you please quickly explain what is your role in the European customer experience organization, how everything started.
Tue Sottrup 2:42
The goal with the European customer experience organization is to build a community of peers within the CX industry, I’m passenger and founding member, and that entails delivering some content participating in event and also talking about what is the value that the ECA so actually brings. And it is a community where you can get a lot of insights into what works best practices within the CX industry, you can network with peers, within this industry as well. And you can also be challenged and learn new ways of working. So I highly recommend anybody out there that is interested in customer success or customer experience, go to the ECXO website and sign up as a member.
Gregorio Uglioni 3:28
I think it really makes sense. And fully disclosure, I am also a member, and lets you can see what I have I can do I can interview you, thanks to the European customer experience, organization, and perhaps one additional questions, which are the specific characteristics that you live more from the European customer experience, organization.
Tue Sottrup 3:51
Diversity, it is bringing everybody into the discussion regardless of backgrounds and views. Very, very open dialogue, and everybody is welcome. And we do a lot of knowledge sharing and mentoring and exchanging ideas.
Gregorio Uglioni 4:09
Thank you. And now let’s go back to DIXA because you started saying something that I think it’s really interesting and can be interesting also for for the audience of this podcast, you were speaking about at the agents create app the customer before we did dive in this topic, what is really DICA doing
Unknown Speaker 4:33
DIXA is making it easier for agents to be happy and to do that. It is about ensuring that the right conversation goes to the right agent in the right order. And when the agent has the conversation, then to make them happy. We need to remove friction and create an easy accessible workflow. One thing we do is give an overview of our conversation from this particular Customer across all the different channels. So very easy to see who they speak to before on what channel? And what about, then we are pulling in information from the customers back end system. So they also know who the customer is, what was the last order? How much all happened? How much money have they spent? What segment are they in, and you can use that to provide a more efficient and more personalized experience. And lastly, we’re also providing support articles. So they know who the customer is, they know what they contacted them about before. And they also know how to solve the customers issue. And we can see when those three pillars are in place, then the agent can actually focus on delivering a really good experience and not spend time looking in other systems about all the information or trying to find answers to questions in the multitude of systems.
Gregorio Uglioni 5:53
Thank you very much reading through what what you’re doing, if I understand well, you define that as product lead Customer Success. Is a framework behind that, that you can share.
Tue Sottrup 6:06
Yes, it is very much using the product to make the customer successful. What we see in this industry, if you have a contact center, very often you are kind of alone on an island, you inherited some systems that you took them over and you’re doing things as you’ve always done them. When we engage with a prospect, then we very much look at what they’re doing today. And we try to force them to forget about that. And instead think about what they want to do tomorrow. And then we show them the different building blocks that they can use to create better experience for their customers. And we draw on our best practices from other customers and help them to create better experiences. And in that sense, we use the product to make them successful.
Gregorio Uglioni 6:56
And how can you understand how your user your agents feel about his using your products or services?
Unknown Speaker 7:04
We do that in a number of ways. One of them is through what we call agent enablement sessions, where we will observe the agents working within the platform. And we spend one or two hours remotely looking at how they work conversations coming in. How do they handle them? How do they train from? Where do they go to find the information about our orders Knowledgebase. And are there any things that we can recommend when it comes to integrations when it comes to change to workflows to routing. And this actually allows us to see not only what is going on within our product, but also how our product interacts with the other systems. And based on that we can create a report that we can present back to the customer to the executive, the buyer and tell them this is the value that you’re getting. These are the recommended actions that can make it more easy for the agents to help customers and helps create a better experience.
Gregorio Uglioni 8:03
Are you measuring these, let’s say agent satisfaction in a qualitative way or in a quantitative way or a bit of both of both
Tue Sottrup 8:11
a bit of both. We also have an in app survey, where we are asking all of our users product makes it easy for me to help customers to what extent do you agree with the above statement? And then they can read from strongly agree to strongly disagree? And then we of course look at what are the triggers for agents that disagree with it being easy? And what are the triggers for agents that find it really easy to use the tool. And then we can use that feedback to improve both the sales process, the onboarding process, the account, setup, the training the product in itself, and also look at how we can either expand or prevent churn within the product.
Gregorio Uglioni 8:59
If I understand well, you are defining the customer effort score, but for your customer, and in this case, your customer, our agent or user, and you are also applying that in the right way, not only asking but then taking action on what’s on what the agent and the users are saying, are doing that only once? Or can you do? Are you doing that recurringly
Tue Sottrup 9:25
we are doing it recurrently. And we see it as really important because what I think you have a tendency to forget is that some of these agents actually spending eight hours a day within the tool. And if there’s something that is creating a lot of friction, it of course creates frustration with the agents and it’s really difficult that that doesn’t spill over into the experience that customers have. So we want to identify what that friction is. We want to remove it so the agent can just focus on providing a good experience
Gregorio Uglioni 9:58
and it makes sense because also the experiences of the agents and of the users are changing over time because the companies are changing. And basically, I think I want really to come back that what to what you said at the beginning. And this is for me one of the key topics, let’s spend some minutes on that. Epi agents, great epic customer, I always getting reading about it. I’m always listening, listening, and everybody’s saying this is extremely important. What makes an agent happy?
Tue Sottrup 10:31
There are several factors and what makes each attack they one of them is the external factors, like where are they? Are they in a stress free environment? Do they have the right hardware? Like? Do they have a big enough screen to see what is going on? Do they have a proper headset so they can give the customer the highest customer can hear them? Well, and noise is included in the conversation? Do they have a proper internet connection so they can deliver the right level of service? Since COVID, we have of course seen a lot of agents that have had to work from home, and ensuring that they have the right environment and the right hardware to perform that job. That’s the external factors, then there are within the tool, it needs to be easy, responsive, easy to find the information about the customer how to solve the customer’s issues. So they can focus on delivering the good experience. So they’re both the things that that you need to put in place as a company and the things that need to be in place in the product that they use it.
Gregorio Uglioni 11:38
Thank you actually, it makes completely sense. And perhaps to adding that or to elaborating a bit on that. On one side, you say epi agents, I think what you are saying it epi but also additionally, that they are really engaged. Is there some way to engage the employees in this creation of customer experience for the final customers? are attacking, tackling this this topic?
Tue Sottrup 12:05
Yes, it’s a really good question that in a very important topic, I think one way that you can get agents more engaged, is to make them see how they contribute to the overall goals of the company. And an easy way to do it is that if you aggregate data from multiple systems, so let’s say you look at your customer lifetime value from your automatic system, and then you look at CSAT from your customer support platform. If you look at those two together, you can actually currently, what a good CSAT or an improvement CSAT means to the customer lifetime value. And if you move the needle 0.2 points, and then you can turn that into a monetary value. And if you are very good at exploiting that for agents, then they actually feel that what they are doing is benefiting the overall goals of the company of the organization. And that’s something that I have seen personally can be difficult to do. And if agents don’t feel that they are contributing to the goals of the organization, then they are not as motivated.
Gregorio Uglioni 13:13
Exactly. And the last question will be agents need to feel and understand that they are contributing to the targets of the company. And on the other sides. The rest of the organization needs to understand what these agents these users are really doing. And do you have some in some practical ideas? How to get the buy in from the rest of the organization to act on the feedback of the users of these agents?
Tue Sottrup 13:44
Yeah, I think a lot of it is in general to listen to frontline agents, what are they hearing from customers? How can we feed that information to the proper departments, that can be done by tagging the conversations that can be done by external tools that are using AI and machine learning to categorize the conversation looking at sentiment, and then using that to come up with recommendations actions, and there you need the buy in for the rest of the rest of the organization. So, if Customer Success identifies a certain pattern, then they need to have the buy in from product and engineering. So they can make improvement based on that. If they detect something that is coming from the sales process. There is some discrepancy between what is being sold and what is being experienced, then they need to be able to pass that on to the sales part of the organization so they can actually make changes to the way they sell the product so they can create a better experience in the long run.
Gregorio Uglioni 14:43
Thank you very much. It’s really an outstanding discussion. And I would like but also to understand a bit more about about you and what drives you drives you in life. And therefore my first question would be, do you have a book or recommendation that you would like I have to share to the audience and saying this is something that really helped me to grow.
Tue Sottrup 15:05
Yes. One of the core books within this field is Matthew Dixon’s the effortless experience, very good at identifying what are the things that are driving disloyalty, what, what is creating friction within the interaction between a customer and a brand, there’s a lot of learnings from that book that is relevant to this day. And we can also see that after COVID-19, it’s much easier for customers to change their vendor, they can just move from brand to brand. And they do that because they are shopping online. And if they have a bad experience, they’re just going to move to somebody else. And that has put more pressure on brands to deliver a consistently good service across all the different channels. Another book recommendation is join colons, and never lose a customer again, what you need to do within the first 100 days to retain customers, there is a lot of actionable advice on each step of the journey that a customer has when they engage with the brand. So I highly recommend those two books.
Gregorio Uglioni 16:14
Thank you very much. And if somebody would like to contact Tue, what’s the best way?
Tue Sottrup 16:22
either through LinkedIn or on Twitter? Definitely the best places to find me.
Gregorio Uglioni 16:28
Thank you. And I will share the contact details on the on the podcast notes for sure. So that if somebody’s question can can connect you also to the ECXO platform, European customer experience, organization platform, you are there you are active, and then everybody can connect with you. And now we are coming to my last question. This is the question I always ask, what is two, golden nugget, it’s something that we discussed or something new that you would leave to the audience.
Tue Sottrup 16:58
I think when it comes to creating customer experiences, one of them is the customer’s always right to be understood. That’s a low mentor that I have had, that has resonated a lot with me, they’re not always writing what they want. But they’re always right. In being understood, you might not agree but understand where they’re coming from and what it is that they need. And then the other thing I can recommend is always be able to change because we live in a world where you can see everything that has gone on with COVID a lot of things has changed in a very short while and you need to be able to pivot you need to be able to adapt to changes around you that can be that you need to work from home it can be that you need to focus on another channel because that is where your customers are. So be quick at adapting to changing situations in your environment, and continue to be where your customers are.
Gregorio Uglioni 17:59
Thank you very much too. I am not commented your two golden nuggets because these are your two golden nuggets. And I say only thank you to you. Thank you very much for your time. And also thank you to the European customer experience organization for this outstanding collaboration that we will have in the next few months. And I conclude saying thank you very much to audience, thank you for listening to listening to this to this episode.
Thank you very much, grazie mille, arrivederci.
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THE CX GOALKEEPER 