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
The Human Experience: Elevating Customer Connections
Experience transformation isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a necessity for successful businesses today. Join us as Eric Karofsky, CEO of VectorHX, shares his wealth of knowledge on building impactful customer experiences that drive profitability and satisfaction. We explore the interconnected realms of customer experience, user experience, and employee experience, illustrating their collective influence on customer interactions.
Eric dives deep into his unique approach to enhancing customer engagement through proactive strategies like prototyping, which have successfully helped numerous organizations revamp their customer interfaces. We tackle the often-misunderstood concept of customer experience audits, breaking down how organizations can systematically analyze customer journeys, segment their audiences, and collect valuable feedback to inform better practices.
The conversation also highlights the pitfalls many businesses face when implementing chatbots. Discover how these automated solutions can sometimes add more frustration than effectiveness and learn the importance of achieving the right balance between automation and human interaction.
As customers become more discerning with their expectations, organizations must adapt their measurement strategies accordingly. Explore why traditional metrics like Net Promoter Score can sometimes mislead, and how companies can ensure they're really tapping into customer sentiments.
Dive into this rich discussion that provides invaluable insights for professionals looking to elevate their customer experience strategies. Don’t miss out on the knowledge shared in this episode! We invite you to subscribe, share, and engage with us – your feedback matters!
You need both a top-down and a bottoms-up approach. So from a top-down, helping the C-level organization understand why customer experience is important and understand how do we go ahead and measure it and what are some of those plans, and really driving as much as possible to ROI. And it is not just cost containment and I appreciate what you said beforehand it is not about improving the call center.
Speaker 2:Eric Karofsky is CEO of human experience firm Vector HX. The HX may confound you a little bit, because it's not the kind of suffix you see on a lot of companies or efforts, but trust me, when you hear about what Eric is up to, you'll have a far better understanding of its relevance to the worlds of CX and the broader engagement disciplines that we talk about so much here. But before I go on and on about stuff I really know nothing about, eric, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, mike, pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:So, for context, can you tell us why don't we start with what VectorHX is and does? And then I think it would be great if you could kind of give us a kind of a short or whatever path that took you to get here, because it seems like it was. Well, frankly, there's no direct path to do what you and I do, but how'd you get here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'll go ahead and start with what VectorHX is. So it's Vector Human Experience and the human experience being comprised of customer experience, user experience and employee experience, and they're all intimately related, all supporting better customer interactions, which ultimately drive profit if done correctly. What got me here is for about 20 to 25 years, I've been a consultant at very large consultancies and agencies and my job was to come up with digital initiatives for brands and structure a team to create a prototype of whatever that initiative is that serves some sort of business solution, and if I did my job right, the customer would say, yeah, we want that prototype, and then that would lead to downstream revenue for the consultancy to go ahead and build the technology to support it. So again did that for a while, worked with top tier brands like Michelin, Fidelity, Royal Caribbean and many others, and then I realized I never went client side.
Speaker 1:So I took a job with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and, for those that don't know of it, just an amazing, amazing institution. They focus on genomics, DNA, RNA, proteins basically any cellular structure and trying to understand what causes disease, and I led user experience for them for about five years where we developed different types of analysis applications that computational biologists would use to come up with their insights applications that computational biologists would use to come up with their insights and worked with a range of different organizations everybody from, like Chan Zuckerberg to, obviously, the Broad itself, to the National Institutes of Health and many others and for about two years now I've started VectorHXX and it's been a blast so far. I've been very lucky to have some wonderful clients and having a great time.
Speaker 2:So you've just prompted 400 more questions. So it sounds like you said you were involved in prototyping and if the prototype was successful you know there was, you know they'd order they would. There was downstream success, but you know that's really a broad application of your talents, like prototyping can mean a lot of different ways to get you here. So what are some of the kinds of prototypes that you built out?
Speaker 1:If you can talk about formats or forms and what you're trying to accomplish there, so these are large interactions and just to kind of go way, way back, how my mind works, I was originally a double major between studio art and business, which at the time was pretty bizarre. But now, in this very experience-led world, it has served me well. Experience-led world, you know, has served me well. I have an MBA and I think you know that, combined with a creative background, has led me down that route of, you know, working with these agencies and consultancies to come up with ideas, and these ideas would solve big business problems. So when I say a prototype, that probably is underselling it a little bit. It's more about coming up with some sort of engagement idea, a business plan around it and then the actual interaction. It was done by a prototype. So you know, one specific example, something I did for Royal Caribbean the chief marketing officer put out a bid to a select group of agencies and said we want to do something with the pre-cruise experience. We don't know what, but we know we have a captive audience. And this is several years ago. And so, after doing a bunch of research, I identified a specific segment to the population, doing some qualitative and quantitative analysis and segmenting them in a variety of statistical methods and we found a group that you know.
Speaker 1:It's the typical family of four. They take a big vacation like this once every two years. They go ahead and tell the kids hey, we're going to go on a trip to the Caribbean. Everyone's all excited. Let's say they do this in August for a Christmas vacation. They book the trip and then nothing happens until you get on that ship. And when you get on the ship, for those that have been on a cruise, there are these engineering marvels. All you want to do is explore. It's like las vegas at sea, but what you have to do is wait in lines and wait in lines for specialty dining, for excursions, for spa appointments, things like that.
Speaker 1:So I went to my team and said let's come up with the mantra of start your vacation now, so the second you go ahead and book. You then get a calendar and you get a list of activities and you start dragging and dropping. It increased the customer experience because it was fun to say hey, honey, you want to go for a couple's massage, kids, do you want to go snorkeling on the reef? People get excited, so they get more and more engaged, and it led us to a tremendous amount of information about the passengers that were coming on board.
Speaker 1:So no longer did you need to have, you know, let's say, 20% kosher meals, because for some reason this population it was only 10% kosher. So therefore you could save in costs. And the other thing is it increased revenue, because people got into the habit of customizing their vacations and adding more and more. So, rather than waiting in a line to add something which all you want to do when you wait in a line is get out of that line. This increases the excitement and it led to an increase in revenue.
Speaker 2:One of the interesting things you just brought up is, well, back up a hair. We talk a lot here about customer expectations and what a giant factor that is in customer satisfaction. However, you're going to measure it and, ultimately, the value of those interactions, and by coming up with this pre-purchase engagement mechanism, not only is everything you've said, like you know, a logical outcome, but you've also helped to preset expectations of what's going to happen on that cruise. So you know, ultimately the consumer has been a part of building out their experience, which means that you know their expectations for it are largely set already. They don't have to show up with a giant question mark over their head as to what's going to happen now, which I think is pretty brilliant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and it definitely lent, you know, more excitement to the trip and again that just increased the experience overall, you know, from right as you book to the entire trip you know from right as you book to the entire trip.
Speaker 2:So my job over the next 20 minutes or so that we're going to be talking is to try and contain this conversation to something sensible and not let it spiral into all the directions.
Speaker 2:I think it wants to. But you know, as your definition equals, you know HX equals CX plus EX plus UX. We'll talk about some interesting overlaps there in a minute. We just launched something called the XE Awards, which shares the exact same definition, by the way. So that's something interesting to talk about, part of your work for your clients, and I think it seems like the way you think about these experiences, you start with something you call a CX audit, but looking over your materials, it's something way bigger than that. You know this is not simply, you know, a one facet, one track audit of, say, customer journeying. You're looking at a holistic process that creates an experience, and I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit, because I think that's going to be really instructive for people who are in the traditional CX roles as well as people who operate kind of adjacently to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. You know there's a big disconnect. You know there's some surveys out there. You know that talk about how much more profitable companies are that deliver a good customer experience, right, so there's a big mismatch there and the reason why is because it's really hard to do. And you know, when you think about all the different elements, you know one is customers navigate brands in multiple ways, so it's difficult to optimize the experience. It's difficult to even understand the experience for some of these very large companies, difficult to segment the right customers.
Speaker 1:So one is kind of understanding the customers in their journey. But then when you think about customer experience, multiple departments in an organization all support the customer experience in very different ways. So getting them all to work together is hard because each individual department has their own sets of goals, so it's very hard to focus on one common goal. And then the other kind of leg of the puzzle is the data. The data is spread across multiple systems and multiple vendors and the data doesn't really talk to each other and it's very difficult to get to that. And because companies often grow through acquisition, we just exponentially increased the level of difficulty because there's now even more departments, there's more data, there's more databases that need to integrate, so it becomes really, really difficult to go ahead and organize all of this. So that's one of the reasons why we kind of came up with this customer experience audit and it's a way to just quickly well, it's a way to systematically understand where should you focus first.
Speaker 1:And we touch upon a number of different areas, everything from understanding the customers, doing segmentations, coming up with personas as relevant, understanding their journeys, getting feedback from employees, benchmarking with competitors as relevant, taking a look at the technology and seeing how all of that is playing well together.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, one of the core things is just understanding what does CX governance look like and do they have a governance model? Because when you're thinking about going to what I was saying earlier about the multiple departments, they all need to play together and they need to work on consistent items. So you know, I've developed a bunch of different governance models for organizations, but they all kind of stem from the same thing. And taking that organizational mission, that broad mission for the organization, and then say, all right, what is the customer experience vision behind that? How does customer experience support that mission? And then, from there, what are the key performance indicators that support that vision and then from there, what are the signals and metrics and then action plans that support all of those items. So, without any sort of governance model, it becomes very hard to know how do we all, meaning all of the different departments- work together, right?
Speaker 2:And how do you even define success Exactly? Right? And how do you even define success? Exactly? Because CX the term has largely been co-opted by a lot of customer service operations. Yet the real definition of customer experience is a very, very big undertaking. So much of the work that they are describing has to do with change management and you know, it's one thing to lay out the roadmap, but it's something entirely different to get all of those disparate corporate components kind of singing on the same song sheet. Because and it's funny, I was just having this conversation with somebody yesterday. I think, because and it's funny, I was just having this conversation with somebody yesterday.
Speaker 2:I think, like you know, we all, we work hard in this world, in this space, to break down silos. It's necessary to do that. Yet as humans, I'm convinced we love our silos. It's our comfort place. There are some really strong reasons why silos and the walls between divisions need to come down, at least to a certain extent Good, solid business reasons, but there are a lot of human reasons why they just don't want to. I'm curious because a lot of the work you've described is not just hey, I'm going to come in and work out this project and leave. A lot of these are are much broader in scope. So when you're looking at, uh, a project, an initiative that requires more than just one department's input and execution, how do you? How do you do it? What's? What's the? The Eric Karofsky method of of getting people on the same song sheet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's really really hard. You know people, as you said. You know our processes that we already know and follow our comfort zone. We're measured on those processes, so then to go ahead and change becomes and paid on those processes as well.
Speaker 1:often so then, to go ahead and change becomes, and paid on those processes as well often, Exactly exactly, and it's just change management is hard and that's why you know some of the reasons why you know the largest consultancies of the world the McKinsey's and Bain's BCGs of the world focus on change management because it gives them the opportunity to not only kind of steer the organization but to touch all of the different departments and get their hands in all of the different technologies and really embed themselves. It's, you know, a really lucrative component of their business. But the way that you know I typically address it is you need both a top-down and a bottoms-up approach. So from a top-down, helping the C-level organization understand why customer experience is important and understand how do we go ahead and measure it and what are some of those plans and really driving as much as possible to ROI. And it is not just cost containment and I appreciate what you said beforehand, it is not about improving the call center, although that is a component of it. You know customer experience is much bigger than the contact center. So you know that top-down approach is really getting them to buy into it and hopefully getting them to paint a vision and really getting them to buy in on it. And you know some of the tactical ways that they can do. That is, you know, start the corporate-wide meetings with a customer quote. You know, start the corporate wide meetings with a customer quote. You know, attend, if you are a C-level, attend some of the qualitative interviews to show everybody why it is so important. And obviously, and also, you know, really start driving towards making sure that this can be quantified as much as possible, but from a bottoms up approach is really where the magic happens.
Speaker 1:So you know, what you need to do is grab people from all the different organizations who feel they have a part of customer experience, and inevitably there are people that feel they do. You know, even in the finance group there's somebody that feels like they play a part in customer experience and they do. And it's getting those people together and forming a bit of a task group and saying we're going to be the customer experience grassroots group. I recently did this for a very large government organization that's creating the world's largest biobank. And you know there were, you know, just a tremendously complex organization made up of multiple government organizations, which are always complex, a lot of consultancies, a lot of different vendors, and it was about getting all of the people across, all of those organizations, in one room or one Zoom call and saying let's go ahead and craft out what does this customer experience vision look like?
Speaker 1:And when you get them to do that, you're then starting to get buy-in, certainly from those people, but they can raise it up to their superiors in their departments. So then you start making sure that all the departments are working together and through you know this is not a one and done meeting. This is, you know, a couple times a month for years and maybe never stops. But you know that group then starts coming up with the plans. Naturally, some leaders will end up showing up that have more of a passion and also more support from their leadership, and then they can go ahead and help develop the rest of it and be really become ambassadors for customer experience.
Speaker 2:I would love to have been a fly on the wall for some of those meetings because, having been a part of some of those kinds of meetings myself, the great ones start with a smaller group that tends to grow because of the enthusiasm and scope grows intentionally. But I've also been a part of some of those kinds of meetings where it's a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth and posturing and you know, and protection and, and I think you know again, I would think it would be fascinating just to see what happens in those kinds of, especially in a in a government type setting, because the, the group dynamics, the relational dynamics and the power dynamics are very different in those kinds of places, and just to see how people respond to that kind of thing. So if you can get permission to shoot a little video on your phone next time, I'd love to see it, you know, I'll tell you the um.
Speaker 1:You know, one of the things that's really important in getting their buy-in is well, you know what? Let's edit this part out. I was going to go into a place that wouldn't be kosher to talk about.
Speaker 2:That's okay. Yeah, we'll cut it out. That wouldn't be kosher to talk about. That's okay. Yeah, we'll cut it out. Having said that, though, it would be a great conversation with the record button off. Let's talk a little bit about chatbots and their ubiquity right now growing ubiquity. I know personally a handful of big companies that are investing heavily in chatbots. Yet there are really two sides to that whole idea. On the one hand, they do solve some problems. On the other hand, they tend to create others.
Speaker 1:I'd love to get your thoughts on that. I'm having an internet issue. Hold on one second. You just came in. Let me go ahead and switch to my different.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, mike, mike Barrett. It's okay, mike Barrett, usually this happens to me, so I love that you're apologizing and I'm not.
Speaker 1:All right, there we go. Sorry about that.
Speaker 2:That's okay. Should I start over on that one?
Speaker 1:Yeah, start over my apologies.
Speaker 2:So I'd like to move the conversation over to the topic of chatbots, their ubiquity and what and how companies are using them for. Are using them for? You know, and I know, a lot of companies who are investing heavily in chatbots because they solve some problems. They solve some problems pretty nicely, in fact, but they create others, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's so many and you know, right now my general feel is, you know, most chatbots feel like the automated call centers of the 80s, where you get in these circular loops and it just creates more and more and more frustration until you start typing agent please.
Speaker 1:And you know, the chatbots that are doing that certainly don't have the technology understanding to know that I'm typing in all caps and I'm getting angry. But you know there's like a relay race where AI handles the first leg but it knows exactly when to hand it off. Hand off that baton to a human teammate. So you know, in other words, know the balance between automation versus human interaction. And you know you can do this by designing clear escalation triggers and base those off of customer emotion, understanding of the complexity of the specific task, maybe transaction value, things like that. So you know there are some companies out there that are doing that well Delta, I know in a recent trip. They use chatbots for straightforward booking and it works pretty well. But once they become more complicated there's a handoff to a human agent and understanding that sort of the complexity of the ask becomes really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, having you know how many, how many passengers do they book every single day? You're going to start to discern those patterns. And there are technologies out there now too that are, you know, they can detect tone and sentiment really really well and, you know, kind of deflect those. But I have my own very you know, I get very soapboxy when it comes to chatbots and all that and I think like, look, the technology is out there now to make these things really smart and give a customer a very personal interaction, you know, with a certain amount of understanding and even kind of empathy.
Speaker 2:But that takes a commitment on the part of the host company. You've got to invest in that. It takes that. And I've seen the technology. It's wildly good in so many ways to recognize what I'm thinking, what I'm saying, but also, which is much harder, to discern what I'm feeling and that's. You know, so much of what we end up doing comes from that place. But yeah, so I'll, I'll refrain from getting too soap oxy, but there, except to say that the opportunities are huge if companies decide to invest in them and not just take the easy way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and we're starting to move from teaching customers how to talk to AI to teaching AI how to talk to customers. So it used to be we had to learn speak to an agent or check order number X, and you had to type it exactly like that. And now we're getting to that point of like, hey, I'm frustrated, I ordered a four-person camping tent and was sent a two-person camping tent, and I need it this weekend Instantly. The chatbot should start to be able to recognize that importance and either move it to a different flow or escalate it to a human.
Speaker 2:One of the things that's just a fun thing to kind of toss this hot potato around is, like you know, where in your stack of KPIs does NPS fit in it? And some people are very, very passionate defenders of that metric and method and some people are very passionate opposed to it. I kind of see it both ways.
Speaker 2:I see some utility there, but I see a definite over-reliance on that as a main measure. But you know, you're actually, you're in the trenches, so to speak. You talk to the people who are, you know, the people who have bought in a lot. So so if you're how can I put this so that it's not sounding pejorative? But you know, if you're an operation that has put NPS, as you know, one of your North star metrics, how does Eric Karofsky go in and say, guys, there's a better way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, um, nps, I, I, I also share that. You know love, hate, relationship with it and can see it both ways. And you know I think your companies aren't going to get away from NPS that rely on it. There's a lot of investment there and parity with competitors or understanding you know how you're benchmarking against others, becomes really important at the executive level and it's a nice simple measure. The problem is it's also very simple and therefore means different things, and you know I'm in favor of capturing different types of metrics as well as NPS. So, whether it's CSAT or more specific things like sentiment, you know in that program that I was talking about earlier, the government organization we instituted a trust survey and are trying to move people more and more to trust.
Speaker 1:You know I'll tell you a really interesting anecdote about NPS. That becomes a problem and I see it all of the time. So in a company that I've been working with, they're very numbers-driven, executives, very analytical, come from math backgrounds and the NPS score was pretty good and they were like hey, we don't have a customer problem, we're doing great. You know, we're beating competitors and by all measures it's great. When I started peeling back the onion a little bit and trying to understand it. And the reason why I needed to understand this is because qualitative discussions painted a very different picture, showed that customers were unhappy for a variety of different reasons, so there was this big mismatch. So I went in, tried to understand more about NPS and it turns out that they were asking NPS at the wrong time. They were asking NPS right as the customer signed up, so of course the NPS is going to be good. They just signed up, they just gave you some personal information because they were excited about the prospect.
Speaker 2:It's literally the peak of the sign curve on how well you feel about a purchase.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I see that all the time like as just trying out different applications online right after I register. How likely would you recommend this product to a friend I just registered? First of all, I don't know, but if I'm going to answer it, probably pretty good, probably pretty good, and so there's. There's can be this really big mismatch. So number one is you got to make sure that you're asking NPS in the correct way and in the right context.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the context is everything in those kinds of questions.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:Really interesting, yeah, I think. I mean I would love to get a a panel together of people who are passionate about this in on both sides and and hash it out once and for all, publish the findings and you know, say, look, we've, we've created the definitive uh, reasoning and thought process for how and when and how not to use nps. Here it is.
Speaker 1:Please don't argue about it anymore I don't think that it'll be an interesting conversation. But you know, I always look back and say you know what's the difference between a six or a seven? Because they both mean you know I really don't love it. But one is is bad and one is neutral, Right, Right. So it's a little too fine grained but again, the simplicity makes it easy to understand. And you know companies are, you know their incentives sometimes are aligned with NPS increases.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I've seen I've seen recently, some variations on NPS which I think make a lot of sense. Basically, you're taking NPS but you're adding other dimensions onto it which add context and make it more actionable, which has always been kind of the problem I saw with NPS, which is it's a, it's a score that's only really useful as in relation to itself.
Speaker 2:you know here's how he looked last quarter. You know, here's what we're aiming for next quarter. But you know, does it really give you anything like genuinely prescriptive? Not by itself, it really doesn't. So, anyways, that's another one for the debate, another different soapbox.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I look forward to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could be fun, eric. I feel like there's just so much more to talk about here. This happens a lot when two people whose passions are aligned like this, but I would be kind to your schedule and just say thanks for the time, for the thinking. We will, of course, be paying close attention to what you're doing at VectorHX and look forward to the next couple of times we get to do this.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. It was a pleasure and look forward to more opportunities.
