In this next post in our Customer Experience Conversations
series, we sat down with
Total Customer
Experience Leaders Summit’s speaker Nestor Portillo, Director, Social
Communities and Customer Experience at Microsoft who shared his best
customer experience, the importance of empathy, and how social media has
affected customer experience today.
In April, TCEL will explore these topics and the all of the new
realities of building brands and relationships in today’s socially driven and
data abundant world. The event will shine an important lens on the power of
insights and the critical need for marketers to focus on factoring emotion into
the bigger equation to get a return on customer relationships. Your experience at TCEL will include three full days of
high-level visionary keynote presentations and in-depth case studies
illustrating linking insights & data, data measuring & mapping, design
thinking, synthesize intelligence from B2B and B2C companies across verticals,
disciplines and cultures to march forward with a sound total customer
experience plan.
Here is what Portillo had to say:
IIR: Describe
your best customer experience.
Portillo: My best
customer experience was with Wells Fargo few months ago. I’m not sure if this
is a common practice everywhere or not (if don’t it should), but my experience
with them when deactivating my debit card (lost it) and getting a replacement
was awesome.
First I will say, it was flawlessly and fast which is
something that I was expecting however what really surprise me was that the
whole interaction was extremely effortless on my side and once the case (card
replacement) was completed, I got a print out with the name of the agent who
managed my case, his manager name, their contact information, a summary of the
transaction, a summary of what to expect next including timing and also a
promise to follow up with me a week after which took place as promised.
What made it a different experience was the low level of
effort required from my end and the high level of accountability demonstrated
with the print out. You don’t always you proactively get a written commitment
about what to expect and on top of that the names/phone and emails of the
people accountable for make it happen.
IIR: How is
empathetic leadership changing leadership in customer experience today?
Portillo: I would
say it is becoming more important than ever. Companies are pushed to deliver on
revenue expectations while reducing costs; this makes customer experience a key
piece in the operational model to achieve these 2 goals (revenue and
operational efficiency).
IIR: Why are
empathy and emotion so important in when it comes to customer experience?
Portillo: In my
opinion, customer experience is a combination of emotions, memories,
expectations, needs fulfillment, timing and effort. All of these are important
add-ons to your product or service. So, in order to deliver a great customer
experience, it needs to have a high degree of empathy and emotion because the
interaction goes beyond product functionality or a feature explanation. You need
to engage with empathy because for customers it is no longer a transaction it
is about them and their feelings that you care.
If you operate in a business that has low switching costs,
then customer experience is your key differentiator or competitive advantage to
drive loyalty and keep your market share. Think about cable or cellular
services. They all have low switching costs, which means that the
real differentiator is the customer experience.
IIR: What are the
key traits of a great customer experience leader?
Portillo: I think
a great customer experience leader is a person that embrace responsible
innovation because customer preferences are evolving as fast as the technology
evolves; is a change agent because you need the whole organization onboard and
is a customer centric person because customer needs to be at the center of what
processes, technology, procedures are trying to address or serve.
IIR: If your
customers have a bad customer experience, how do you reconnect with them moving
forward?
Portillo: It is
very well known that takes years to build trust and seconds to destroy it. Keeping
that in mind if your customer had an unpleasant customer experience you are now
back to square one and need to rebuild trust. You can reconnect with them by
acknowledging what was wrong and telling them what you are planning to do
differently from now on. While this may sound easy, this requires high level of
transparency and empowerment to truly change things or do things differently!
IIR: How has the
digital revolution changed the overall customer experience?
Portillo: I
wouldn’t say changed, I will say changing because the digital revolution is
pushing companies to embrace the concept of “Omni-channel” as more and more
customers want you to engage with them where they are, when they want and how
they want.
Traditional inbound channels are rapidly getting replaced by
mobile, social networks and lately with wearable’s devices. With the new
“Internet of things” where now you have a variety of devices that customer are
using to connect with your company, this demands a consistent customer
experience regardless the entry point and this is where the Omni-channel
concept becomes more and more important.
IIR: How do you
utilize Big Data to gain the fullest possible understanding of your customers?
Portillo: Big Data
is definitely a differentiator, while it is getting better defined as we speak,
it is in its early stages and companies needs assess how big data may help
however companies have to embrace it and get ready ASAP. It needs to become a
formal business practice because it can tell you a lot about customer
preferences and behaviors so you can better design the customer experience.
Because of Big Data’s complexity, it requires specialized resources due to
current tools are great aggregating data, trending it but you need analysts
behind understanding what that trends means and how it aligns and impact your
business strategy or your product.
IIR: Employee
recognition can positively influence employee behaviors and cultivate a
customer-centric culture. How do you recognize and motivate your employees?
Portillo: Customer
satisfaction and loyalty needs to be part of the individual goals and a key
component of their performance assessment. You need to tie compensation,
bonuses and rewards with satisfaction and experience to achieve great customer
experience.
IIR: How has
social media affected customer experience?
Portillo: Social
media is a megaphone for good or bad customer experiences. In fact, many
customers are using social media to put pressure to the companies when their
customer experience is poor or to simply “shame the company into a response.”
Today customers know that companies are monitoring social channels so they
are using these channels to capture their attention when the customer
experience is broken or to expedite a response.
But, not everything is about bad experience, there are
several cases where customers use social media to praise companies for their
customer experience but let’s say that this is less frequent.
IIR: How do you
make the connections between experience, brand and loyalty, which together
create customer expectations?
Portillo: In my
opinion, brand is a promise, experience is your way to demonstrate commitment
on delivering on that promise and loyalty is the customer assessment of how
successful you are. I don’t think you can create customer expectations, you can
identify and meet customer expectations and you need to align those three to
meet or exceed their expectations
Overall, the customer experience leader needs to make sure
customer experience is part of the operational agenda and not only part of the
PR agenda. If you ask companies how important customer experience is for their business
strategy you will get “top priority” as an answer. But, if you dig a little bit
and see how many resources are allocated to ensure a quality of customer
experience you may get surprised.
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