Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Harmonizing Business Goals with Customer Experience Strategies
In this episode, we sit down with Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and COO at Webex Customer Experience, to explore his journey from the merchant Navy to co-founding Cloud Cherry, a company focused on improving customer experiences. Vinod shares how he made customer needs a priority, even when technology posed challenges, which eventually led to Cloud Cherry's acquisition by Cisco.
We dive into how AI is reshaping customer experience, including innovations like auto CSAT that predict customer satisfaction without traditional surveys. Vinod explains how building customizable, client-specific solutions without the need for extensive coding is changing the way businesses approach CX.
The conversation also addresses the balance between improving customer satisfaction and meeting business goals. Vinod offers practical insights on using AI, automation, and analytics to close the gap between efficiency metrics and customer satisfaction, including understanding how executive compensation and NPS are connected. Finally, we discuss the cultural barriers that can slow progress and how aligning business objectives with customer-centric strategies can lead to meaningful improvements.
how is this experiential improvement likely to help you achieve your business goals? That is what we tried to solve. We knew it was hard, but the one thing we had in our favor was we didn't work bottom up, which is let's start with feedback or customer action and work towards outcome. We said let's quantify the outcome, what's important for?
Mike Giambattista:you Is it.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:NPS? Is it retention? Is it repeat repurchase rate? Is it share a wallet? Let's talk in your language. Let me break it down with how better experience at tiny touch points can yield that outcome. When you sum it up, that was the philosophy. So technology kind of became the enabler. But the start point was not the technological constraints at all, it was the customer experience constraints.
Mike Giambattista:Vinod Muthukrishnan is VP and Chief Operating Officer at WebEx Customer Experience. One of the things that I'm looking forward to about this conversation most is hearing about your let's just call it circuitous route to this position, because it kind of started here in the first place. But I'll let you elaborate on that. Mostly, just thank you for joining me, because we've been trying to put this together for some time. Matching schedules finally did it, so thanks.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Mike, thanks for having me. My journey actually started when I was 18 in the merchant Navy, and when you spend two, three months at sea, whichever boat you land in, any experience is a great customer experience. Obviously, my expectations from life greatly got enhanced as I spent more time on land and that led me to essentially start a customer experience management company. And that led me to essentially start a customer experience management company, because my fundamental premise in 2013, unfortunately still holds through now is brands actually don't have customer loyalty, and we can all remember the solitary one, two, three great customer experiences we've had which have also translated in us saying I'm always going to go back to this brand. Right, and that was a problem I set out to solve with Cloud Cherry.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:And the very interesting part was that, around the time, cisco, which obviously was and is a leader in the global contact center market, looked at the crystal ball and said we're not in the contact center business, we're actually in the customer experience business, and the place in the customer experience journey where the customer is probably most dissatisfied is when they choose to call the contact center. Sure, and my belief always is the best call center experience you ever had is the one you never had, which is you didn't need to call. Right, right, you didn't need to call.
Mike Giambattista:Right right.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:And my acquisition Clutchery's acquisition by Cisco, represented that sort of overton window shift which was we are in the age of customer experience.
Mike Giambattista:Can you talk a little bit about what that looked like back in 2013? Because the world has changed. The world has changed radically since 2013. But even back then, establishing a customer experience management company was something that not a lot of people were doing frankly, Maybe you could describe what CloudShare did and how it worked at that point.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Absolutely. First of all, all great ventures started with great naivete, so we obviously thought we could solve this problem. We thought nobody else was trying to solve it. But essentially I remember our first investor pitch deck. It said this leadership team has 200 years of collective experience as customers. And we said you need to create a software company which doesn't just sort of as a marketing slogan says creative for customers. Except one person in my founding team, nobody else came from the world of customer experience and I thought that was incredibly important because we were unencumbered by legacy. What we were encumbered by is I'm a customer, I shop online, I go to stores, I call uh contact centers and I'm so far away from the experience I desire that if I choose not to do something about it, I'm part of the problem.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:So, essentially three pillars. The simple pillar was customers. Don't you know, in marketing you have a marketing journey. They do a journey. Map sales as a sales journey, support as a support journey. The customer doesn't wake up in the morning and say I'm going to embark on a sales journey today or a marketing journey. Customer goes on with their lives right and, depending on what happens in the brand interaction, it becomes a sales journey or a marketing journey, or a customer experience journey or a support journey. So the first fundamental pillar was let's understand customers' journeys, let's understand all the interactions they have, all the inputs they have, and let's predictively try to ascertain how experiential interactions have a predictive impact on the customer's propensity to either buy more, come back again or do all the things that businesses value from a commercial perspective.
Mike Giambattista:And that was the, and this was back in 2013. The state of technology was quite a bit different. If you're talking about predictive analytics back then, it required rooms full of analysts trying to work that out. It's much different now today, but that was a pretty ambitious undertaking back then.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:It was because one part is the utopian goal of making the world a more delightful place to live. We use the word customer delight very effusively. We believe not in customer satisfaction because it seems like a bit of a compromise. Right? Customer satisfied you didn't go anywhere to get satisfied, you went for delightful, mind-blowing experiences. So delight was the word we went for, not satisfaction. And you said that utopian goal has to be matched with business reality, that everything is expensive. Right, I can walk into a store and tell you hey, it would have been so much nicer if the checkout process was faster. You, on the other hand, have 2,000 stores and to add more checkout counters you're talking about two counters into 4,000 stores, 8,000 checkout counters. I'm asking you to spend $50 million. I'm just making the number up, of course.
Mike Giambattista:A big chunk.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Some degree of predictable tangibility around. How is this experiential improvement likely to help you achieve your business goals? That is what we tried to solve. We knew it was hard, but the one thing we had in our favor was we didn't work bottom up, which is let's start with feedback or customer action and work towards outcome. We said let's quantify the outcome. What's important for you? Is it NPS, is it retention? Is it repeat repurchase rate? Is it share a wallet? Let's talk in your language. Let me break it down with how better experience at tiny touch points can yield that outcome. When you sum it up, tiny touch points can yield that outcome. When you sum it up, that was the philosophy. So technology kind of became the enabler, but the start point was not the technological constraints at all, it was the customer experience constraints.
Mike Giambattista:Very interesting. So pillar number one understanding bring insights from the customer journey, having established it and then pillars two and three, because I just wanted to be clear on this, if you could elaborate on those as well.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Fantastic, so one understand the journey.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Next, capture every single input along the customer journey. Now it could be your clickstream data, obviously with consent and full disclosure. It could be a feedback, it could be the reviews you gave in third-party sites. It could be a transactional cut. So the marriage of what we call experiential data and operational data essentially yields the ability to draw out the future, which is, how do experience and actions interplay with each other? And if you know that, you can one do a retrospective, which is regular analytics. Next is at that point in time we did path analysis, multivariate regression, to say what are the L2 drivers of customer experience? And if you knew the L2 drivers, which is? I'll give you a small example you went to a restaurant. The most proximate cause is often misunderstood there's already usually an, an l2 driver, which is more important. If I asked you directly, even you might not know but if you knew the l2 drivers of what really drove customer experience.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:If you could then build predictive models which essentially told us that if you worked on that little hidden driver, we actually had a little visualizer that if there are 10 things you could change around customer experience and each of them had a cost implication, if you moved each, what is the likely impact on the end goal, which was whatever. So it was the journey, it was all the attributes, all the experiential inputs along it, and the third pillar was the model which allowed you to correlate the two and look at the causal relationship between experience and transaction.
Mike Giambattista:So I think what I find interesting just at this, without really having any understanding of the platform other than what you've described, is that it wasn't a platform play so much as it was a solution play. It sounds like you were building data sets and then technology packages, if you will, to get to certain client desired outcomes, rather than saying, listen, our platform can do X, y, z.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:You know what the interesting marriage was. The product was and is built so easy to use that you can put a solutioning hat on with a product purist sort of DNA. What I mean is you can come in and say, let me talk about your business, your context, your data, your integrations, your customer journey, and yet have to do. Everything in the product happened in configuration and not in code, which means you don't have to code in new things, you don't have to do services work. The configurability of the product allowed you to live solution with the customer, which I thought was a very interesting marriage.
Mike Giambattista:Very, very interesting. So just to get back on your own personal journey so you started there as co-founders, I understand it, and CEO of Cloud Cherry. At some point in the process you were acquired, I guess, started working with Cisco WebEx and there was that integration. Tell us about that interim phase and then how you ended up essentially right back where you started with some changes.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Absolutely so. I always felt that as a founder, first of all you need to look at the business as having its own life, and prioritizing the future of the business over your own personal goals is incredibly important. And we'd worked with Cisco a long time. Cisco was an investor in the company. So from a technology perspective, culture perspective, I generally felt when the time came that this was a great home for the team, and the fact that I'm back here a second time kind of validates that hypothesis the fact that all my teams who stayed back are still here. So if you put the two together culture, career, technology it's kind of worked out. But just to talk to you through the journey, the first aim was to bring experience management to the customer experience world, which was the context in a world um. But I'm very happy to report I obviously went out for two and a half years um because I wanted to learn enterprise ai as a practitioner. So I spent the last two and a half years in an incredible startup called Unifor learning the foundations of enterprise AI as a practitioner and I felt it was very important for my own knowledge and evolution.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:I came back here because, if you look at the convergence of customer experience and AI.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:There are very few entities that are better positioned to essentially own the new AI-powered customer experience age. And that really essentially what brought me back to Cisco apart from, obviously, the incredible people and where my past journey meets my present is, if you look at the foundation of what we've built and we'll talk about it in a bit the foundation of that has been the customer journey. That is a central part of the Cisco WebEx contacts in a stack. The customer journey data service, the CSAT and all of that have actually moved to an AI modeled what we call auto CSAT, which is the customer actually doesn't need to give feedback. You know customer feedback rates are what 2%, 3% if you're lucky. Auto CSAT actually has an algorithm which predicts what would the customer have given a CSAT for this interaction if they actually gave a survey. We've added AI to retrospective analytics. We've taken the journey data service and made it ubiquitous within the enterprise. Beautiful convergence of what I always wanted to build and the company where I wanted to build it at.
Mike Giambattista:Um. So on the the growing list of questions for a subsequent conversation um, the auto CSAT function that you built, um algorithm and AI driven Um, I'm just wondering. And not that we even really have to go down this path, but that probably has utility well beyond your technologies. I can think of essentially not every, but many of the other CX platforms that I deal with, the CX groups that are trying to manage this stuff, and to have a trustworthy algorithm-based CSAT model where you don't have to survey, you don't have to back into questions and hope for the right answers, would be a pretty remarkable thing. So I don't know if that's on your roadmap to put this out as its own module, but that's a pretty neat thing.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Well, if it wasn't, you've seeded the idea. Okay, all right, good, just to take a little segue, and I think it's not even a segue. The way at WebEx Customer Experience we look at AI is you know, the days of walled gardens are over and everything you build around AI autonomous agents needs to be freestanding, which means, you know, often large companies make the mistake of saying no, no, you know, often large companies make the mistake of saying no, no, you've got to buy everything from me, whereas AI is its own decision. Contacts and has its own decision. Proactive messaging, outbound communication, is its own decision.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:We feel that a platform like ours, which has UCaaS, cpaas, ccaas together, right Meshed, is the ideal platform. And if I were to, if you were to ask me, hand to heart, what's your suggestion, I'll say take everything from us, but you have to be cognizant of where the customer is in their own journey, right, what technology is embedded. So everything we're doing with AI we're trying to create it with the lens of it should be capable of operating on its own without being tethered to or encumbered by the rest of our technology. But, of course, if you work it with us, it works best.
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Mike Giambattista:Okay, so now you're back at Cisco WebEx. You are in a leadership role there, based on your learnings from, I think you said, at Unifor. What does it look like from here? You've got a short-term roadmap for the things you're trying to accomplish. You away the secret sauce. Tell us what you're working on and what the near-term future looks like for Cisco WebEx.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Absolutely. First, a slight bit of marketing. I would love for everyone to tune into or attend WebEx One because I think in October later half of October, we have a very, very exciting set of announcements coming up at WebEx One. So, without giving away the secret sauce or the really big announcements there, let me tell you directionally where we're headed and I think we're pretty transparent about that. First is the absolute acute awareness of the fact that we're in a customer experience business which, again, is very loosely used. Everyone says we're in the customer experience business, but I think where that comes to bear is you need to have a vision and a strategy, you need to have the product and technology investments in that direction and you need to have a product roadmap which takes you towards that not-stop. So in our world, any engagement with the customer, be it inbound, be it outbound, on any channel of choice of the customer it could be SMS, it could be WhatsApp, it could be Apple the customer it could be sms, it would be whatsapp, it could be apple messaging, it could be voice all of those customer chooses the channel, we don't choose the channel. You know the good old days where you call, you go to the website, contact us. You know, 9 am to 5 pm pacific. Call me on this number, that's it okay.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:I once had a bank transaction declined. That message came to me at midnight. I'm like this is a time sensitive transaction. So came to me at midnight. I'm like this is a time-sensitive transaction. So I called them at midnight and they say no, no, the fraud sale is only open at 8am. I'm like why'd you block my transaction at midnight if you weren't available to talk to me for eight more hours? And this is the disconnected customer experience, right? So I think channel is not our choice, it's the customer's choice. Our job is to be present, inbound and outbound, at a channel of choice of the customer.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:The next, obviously, is when a customer chooses to have an interaction. We honestly feel that the purpose of AI is to make customer experience more human, and more human does not mean more humans. What it means is the AI experience is indistinguishable from human, what I call the near human experience. Right, you don't want AI to pretend it's human. It needs to be near human, right. And when that context gets transferred and it comes to an agent, to a customer service expert, ai allows you to do what humans do best.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:I believe humans have three superpowers that no technology can replicate. Human beings can pay attention, right, you know when you're being listened to, when you're being heard, and it makes you feel better about the interaction human beings have. Empathy, right, it's not just a word saying oh I'm so sorry for you, as opposed to you knowing that I'm empathizing with you. And the third thing humans have is cognition, which is we're able to take a variety of of context, thread it together and tell you what you need.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:In order for an agent to be able to do that for you, the agent needs to be turbocharged with AI, which is the agent is not looking left, not looking right, not looking at data. Their answers are being pushed in front of them, suggested responses are being pushed to them, customer context is being pushed to them, everything is in front of them and they're able to do what humans do best. So the AI is making even the human experience more delightfully human. And when the conversation gets over is when the cost element of a customer service interaction comes in. After call work, summarization, agent training. If you apply AI and automation to all of that and you trigger what AI does, all the work you have to do and automation triggers all the workforce that makes things fast. Now you're talking about a turbocharged, ai-powered customer experience, and that is the North Star experience that we're going after.
Mike Giambattista:Yeah, that's ambitious. I've spoken to some of your competitive colleagues who frame it. I just think it's interesting. They frame up their, their kind of master plan differently. I'm thinking specifically of of one group that is very, very intent on automating empathy, because I think, as as you've said, wildly difficult, because empathy is hard to fake. You can, I think you can, approach it, but I mean, how do you achieve it? I don't know if you can. So, all that to say, I think the way you frame this up is really interesting. I'd like to talk a little bit about, if you can, about this idea that came across from your team of the CX gap. There are lots of them, there are lots of them, there are lots of them, and I think anybody who's been in the space for any period of time can say, okay, look, we can talk about a gap between customer expectations and brands' abilities to meet them or to focus on and invest in CX, versus what they actually end up doing. So, from the Cisco standpoint, what does that gap mean? What does that gap mean?
Vinod Muthukrishnan:You know, the reason my coming back to Cisco is a very personal decision is because I'm at work doing the things I deeply personally believe in around customer experience. So that's a good marriage, right. So I don't have to pretend at work I actually do what I truly enjoy. And the reason I'm saying that is barring maybe the odd brand no brand wakes up in the morning and says, hey, my mission is to give terrible customer experiences. I think it was Charlie Mungo who said he says show me the incentive and I will show you the motivation or action or whatever, I forget what the exact one is. The point is incentives drive actions, and call centers are incentivized by hey, low handling time, time right, get off the phone fast, don't stay on the phone for too long. Fcr also is, even though we say it in different ways, call centers might be incentivized by saying fcr is because so if you call five times, it's five ahds right, and obviously everyone wants high c-set.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:Often these goals are incongruent with each other. This is the call center word, right, the contact, the contact center world. If you look at it from a customer experience perspective, obviously brands want delightful experiences, but there is a financial imperative that envelops the desire to offer superlative experience that comes in the way of you doing it right. So how do you marry the two worlds? And I honestly always feel when you look at AI, automation, customer experience, analytics, all of that suite, our job is to help, as I said, bring the utopian goal of brands to deliver great experiences and show these are the tangible benefits. You need to talk the two together, right? So the first thing really for us in that is, please, let's all articulation of product, all articulation of vision from our perspective is in the customer journey context, which is let's talk in customer in first person, because the entire gap is about wanting to do something and yet your cost structures or your business structures, team structures, don't allow you to do it.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:It manifests itself in all the data around what do customers experience and what do brands think they are offering as experience? Right, it shows up in hold times, in call centers. It shows up in personalization I always joke about and it's a joke, so take it for what it is which is we always said we wanted N equal to one personalization and all we did around that was mail merge, you know. So Mike doesn't see it's a BCC mail. It's Mike, hey Mike, hey Caroline, hey, no, no, I mean, that's not personalization, right? Personalization is your channel, your time, your choice, your context, something that's relevant to you.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:And we have an entire WebEx Connect portfolio which does predictive, highly tailored, highly time and context sensitive, outbound to you, which means you know that you are being spoken to, as opposed to being the 6,335,000 sort of recipient of that text, which is possible Statistically that may be true, but contextually that should not be true. So those are the two worlds we're trying to merge. That is the gap we're trying to fix, because if you solve one problem in isolation, like average handling time, for example, then you say, oh, get off the phone fast, that's not necessarily what I want when I'm calling you right. So if you take the metrics that matter, you define the North Star Customer Experience goal that you want to go after, and then you say here are the tools and technologies that will help you realize that goal while preserving margin, helping achieve the business metrics that matter, now you have a killer count and that really is what we're going after to bridge that gap.
Mike Giambattista:It's interesting. You kind of answered my question before I asked it, but you know, in all of this some of the biggest hurdles are not technological ones. They are often cultural in nature. They're, you know, they're silos and, as you said a moment ago, what gets incentivized gets gets achieved, and sometimes those incentive structures are just they're, they're directly counteracting, kind of, the overall goals of of, uh, customer engagement and, you know, growing that, uh, that those relationships. So, even though you did address it, I think what would be really interesting for listeners is to hear how you go about talking to your client companies about the changes, sometimes large scale ones, that they're probably going to need to consider in order to move that needle.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:So again, full disclosure that I've been back what? Three weeks. So this is present, continuous, so I'm not speaking to a. So in the early conversations I've had with customers and partners, our approach has been very simple and it's not something I'm doing net new, but definitely it has been.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:My approach is if you walk into a customer and say, look, I'm going to help you reinvent your customer experience and you've not done your homework on customer context, then you're completely in the wrong room or you essentially come to sell product and you're camouflaging. What do you mean by customer context? If I, if you're a public company, if I don't know your earnings report, if I don't know what your stock is valued for and by if I don't know what your CEO is valued for and by if I don't know what your ceo has stated to the board and to shareholders as being the strategic goals of the company, if I don't know what exec comp is driven by? You know there are companies which have 20, 30 percent of the exec variable on nps right, which means the nps program is like very, very important for you. So you can either go after it and say, let me help you improve your NPS or let me actually help you improve your NPS and actually the reason that will happen is because of this massive shift in customer experience, which will also yield ARPO repeat repurchase.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:What have you anyway coming back? So, first is, I believe we need to be that prepared going into the customer conversation in terms of research. Second is a lot of the brands this is the beauty of being in customer experience, 90% of the customers I go and end up talking to, I'm a customer of theirs in some way or the other right, and for me it is a very personal enunciation of what I think the customer experience should be, and everyone in the room almost always resonates with saying, yes, this is the experience that we want to provide our customers, but constraint, constraint, constraint.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:If you all agree on business imperatives and the not-struck customer experience. Now we're all on the same page. I'm not on the other side of the table trying to sell you something. We align on what this is. Hence, as I said, I'm saying this word for the third time. I'm not sending you off to a utopian goal. I'm rooting that in the reality of your business imperatives right Now. If you're all on the same page, can I talk to you about what I could do around helping you solve for that problem? You don't even come to product or technology or any of that before that.
Vinod Muthukrishnan:One last thing I will add is never before has security, privacy, been more important than in the age of generative AI and just knowing that we have a very strong POV and boots on the ground, so to speak, on ethical AI, on data security. I always say this like security is not a bolt-on feature. We might take a little longer to develop a product or a module, because security is sort of in the concrete mix as you build something and I think it's worth taking a little more time on because you're not bolting that on. So, security, privacy, ethical AI I feel really good about it because then we can tell our partners trust us. Take this AI automation customer experience journey with us and you'll never have to question these, what we call table stakes, and I think that's a very, very good pitch to make. I feel very good making it.
Mike Giambattista:Well, I would feel good too, I think you know, were this a multi-series podcast. I think we would create one episode just based on your answer to that question, because your approach to, to you know some of these seismic changes you're advising. I think there's a lot of wisdom there and I think a lot of people who are struggling with their own you know, cx transformations could gain something from your perspective there with that, and let me just say there's so much more we could talk about here, but I'm not sure we're going to pack it all into this conversation. But Vinod Muthukrishnan I just want to reiterate, is VP and Chief Operating Officer of WebEx Customer Experience, a man of a lot of knowledge, because he's put a lot of miles on the ground in the CX world and I'm very grateful to have spent this time with you. Thanks so much.
