 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston Area Studio. Gonna be having a different conversation today. We often talk about cloud and data and all the various technologies, and we're going to talk about a different application of them in the customer experience space. And to help me to do that, Thoughtler in the space, Steve Pappas, who's the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Pan Viva. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, this is great. It's, I go back in my roots and my first job out of school, the company I started with, puts everybody into customer support. There's no better way to kind of understand how something works and how people interact with technology as well as the product, than taking those phone calls when something goes wrong in customer support. So I have a little bit of experience in the CX space, as I believe you call it these days, watch from the technology space, the call centers and all those kind, but maybe start us out when you say CX, you're in 2019, what's the scope? What are we talking about that? And we'll go from there. That's a great place to start, Stu, because really when we're talking about customer experience or CX as being known, we're really talking about what is the customer's experience when they're interacting with our organization or they're even transacting with our organization. So if you think about it, there's probably the three things that they could do with a company. They can either interact with them and get some information. Maybe they're checking on a rate for a mortgage or looking for a car loan or getting a claim information from their health insurer or they're transacting, they're buying something, they're conveying some kind of a transaction together or there may be more of a back office approach to it so that someone's operating on behalf of the customer. So when we think about all of those three dimensions, it's really about was it frictionless? Was it easy to do? Did they get to the point where they felt delighted and they're willing to provide a reference or a testimonial because they're gushing because the experience was so good. They got what they needed and they're willing to tell people about it. Yeah, that's great. It reminds me, you see frictionless, it reminds me of what we've talked for years about with cloud computing. You talk about bringing joy and having authentic conversations, what we've been talking about for years about how social media and engagement should be. I have to think that the kind of balanced interaction between people and machines and technology have to be a hot button topic there. One of my favorite events that we did a few years ago was with the MIT talking about automation. Are the robots going to take over everything? And what we know what tends to work best is that there needs to be a balance of the robots, chatbots, whatever they are and people. It can't be all of one or even all of the other because it either gets too costly or the experience might not be optimal. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think all of those different things have their place and if you think about it, it's kind of like the pie. You're adding pieces to the pie. So you're adding the chatbot as another method or another medium that someone can interact with the organization, but it's not the be all and end all. There has to be a level of human aspect to a lot of things. I'll give you an example. You're not going to call your hospital when you're feeling some chest pains and want the chatbot to be on the other end. So there has to be, we have to temper what types of technology we use with what areas and we have to be thinking about the customer. I always advocate that you always think about the customer at the center of the universe and make sure the customer has a seat at every decision table. So when we're thinking about bringing technology into organizations, we have to think about, well, how does this make the customer's experience better? Does it help them? Does it make their interaction with us better? And overall, does that technology make the types of customers and lifetime value increase for us as organizations? Yeah, you hear a lot of organizations, they're customer focused, you go read Jeff Bezos talks about, I need to be paranoid about my customer. I need to think about everything they're doing because if they change and they leave us, what are we left with? Bring us into customer experience. What does that matter? How do we get beyond lip service of talking, yeah, it's great to listen to the customers but I got to worry about my bottom line and my employees and my stockholders and things like that. Sure, well, today, if you think about customer service, good customer service, every company in the world is talking about it, right? That's the baseline now, right? That is where we begin and we're moving up from there to a level of customer service. So if we're thinking about customer service as it has to be good, but how do you get from that good to great scenario? It's, well, how do we train our people? How do we make sure that they're empowered to provide the customer with all they need and give them a little bit of decision making power when it makes the difference of keeping that customer for life and maybe their children and their friends and relatives or potentially losing them at that single interaction. So when we're thinking about the bottom line, we always have to think that every interaction could be the last interaction but also every interaction's an opportunity to make that relationship better. So we have to think about that in terms of how we do things as well as what technology surrounds that and obviously the negative side of customer experience is if we do it wrong, we're certainly losing but if we do it right, it's exponentially better. Yeah, I'm curious, Steve, what your thoughts are, how do I measure that? The B2B world, we talked about the Net Promoter Score, NPS and some people, we love it and it's great when you see a high Net Promoter Score but when you understand the details and what goes under it, that's only part of the picture and boy, do I agree with you about, if you have that opportunity to talk to a customer and turn around, if you spend any time in the space, I know it's great when somebody comes back and has something good to say but if somebody comes and says something bad, it's usually only the tip of the iceberg, there's other people that can have it and you have to take that opportunity to turn it into something good. So metrics and how do we measure whether we're doing good or bad in the space? Absolutely, well, the contact center itself is metriced to the nth degree anyway, right? Net Promoter Score is one dimension of how we have to look at things. I'll tell you a story that I recommend to every C-suite person that I interact with and I'm a member of a lot of associations that the best thing that they can do is spend time in the contact center. Double-check into those calls, not only is it the best focus group you can ever pay for that you already have but also it allows for a C-suite, whether it's the CEO or the Chief Operating Officer or CFO, it allows them to understand really how the interactions are happening between the customer as well as the organization but it goes a step further. Not only do you measure the customer satisfaction levels but you also need to measure your employee satisfaction levels that way too because having employees that have the tools necessary to provide the best service possible as well as make sure that they have the training, they have the empowerment to do it. Once you have those things in place, I always say that the CEO and others in the C-suite should be listening to those calls to understand does the employee have all the right tools to make that customer interaction better and to extend that customer lifetime value or not and that's one way which is much more of a qualitative versus the metrics but it's one that's missed all the time and I have CEOs tell me time and time again after they've done it, it was absolutely enlightening for them to say I never saw that part of the business from that vantage point. Yeah Steve, bring us inside those call centers a little bit, I've got a little bit of background but it was often overworked, underappreciated, very much metrics, there's the big thing on the wall saying how long the average call's been waiting, have you hit the number that you've needed to do? Has it gotten better, what's it like in these environments today, how is the outsourcing was a big push for a number of years, what's it like in those calls? So outsourcing is still a big thing, a lot of companies, a lot of US companies have started bringing some of the things back in house too when they found that the metrics might not have been there, but they're also holding their outsources to a higher standard now, right? So they're providing not only the training but what I'm seeing as far as trends is they're providing the how-to much better. They're realizing that having a single source of truth that your employees are using, your customers can access via self-service as well as the outsourcer is really the key to making all of this work so that you have the portability of process much better. Now the call centers are there, I'll tell you, they're getting much better because they're starting to move more onto the knowledge side as well as the process side. They're looking internal. It's not good enough for them to say, well, it's been working fine, right? It's now to the point with how much better can we get it to work, right? How do we get the last mile? How do we get to the point where these customers are willing and called back to say, hey, I had a great experience? So we're finding that one of the keys was making sure that the employees, the people on the front lines, have what they need the second that they need it, right? Not to pop their head over the cube, not to escalate to a help desk, right? Because that just increases the overall cost of a contact center, not to be shuffling through papers or flipping the pages of a binder every few minutes, but giving them the tools that they need so that A, they know exactly what the process is. They can remain compliant with the process. They can navigate the myriad of applications that are open on the desktop, as well as know how to make sure that they say the right things. They avoid saying the wrong things and they don't come across as robotic. And that's one of the keys that is happening now. And we see that trend happening more and more in contact centers. And I probably walk in and out of about 150 of them a year and see them from the inside. You know, the one thing that I always look around in a contact center is if there's lots of sticky notes around the monitors, if there's lots of binders on the desk and papers up on the cubes, there are process problems. There are opportunities to make that organization run a lot smoother on behalf of the customer. All right, Steve, related to CX, one of the topics you've written about is Omni-Channel. Maybe you can explain what that is and what you're finding. Sure, so Omni-Channel really is geared around how do we communicate with our customers, our partners, our dealers, our distributors, et cetera. So how do we communicate properly on any channel necessary that the customer wants? We always say that it used to be multi-channel, right? We would have the telephone, we would have maybe the IVR is giving them directions and allowing them some information when they call in. But now customers want to be communicated with on Skype or Slack or Facebook Messenger or Twitter or Instagram or various other methods that are accessible to the consumer. The consumer has a lot of information as well as a lot of power at their fingertips now that they probably didn't have 10, 15 years ago. Now the Omni-Channel is really geared around creating a universal way of communicating with the customer where they want to be communicated with. And we say that that's probably the best channel is what does the customer want, right? Where are they? So how do we get to them where they are? And to make that work, there's technology involved. And also if we want to say, well, how do we take care of our customers at two o'clock in the morning, maybe with a chatbot so that they can get some of the information that they need when they need it. It's all about time, right? The thing that we're trying to solve now is the problem of time. How do we make sure that we get the information into the hands of the person that needs it? Whether it's our employee or it's our customer or maybe our third party dealer, distributors, et cetera. How do we get that information in a timely manner so that they can do something of action of value, right? And that's really the key. So Omni-Channel really is gearing around how do we maintain all of those? But some of the keys to it, and I'll want to put those out there, is we have to curate content better, right? We have to look at the fact that you don't write a procedure for the employee to speak over the phone the same way you're gonna write for Alexa as a virtual assistant to be speaking out into the air, right? So we have to think about content curation as what are the multiple versions of the same thing that need to be housed in one place and then how do we orchestrate them at the moment of need when Alexa does call in and says, I need information about your hours. That information and the version of that content has to be pushed in a sub-second method to go to the right channel at the right time in the right format. Yeah, that machine-to-machine discussion is added a whole new dimension for a lot of companies to try to solve that. Yeah. Great, give us, here towards the beginning of the year, we're still at 2019, give us a little bit, look forward. What are some of the big challenges? What are the things that are exciting you as we look throughout this year? Sure, so I think we're really looking forward to more companies understanding the customer, right? And by that, I don't mean that they have to go through an entire customer journey mapping but that is a good place to start. But at the end of the day, you have to make sure that the operator number 24 in Omaha, Nebraska knows the result of all that journey mapping. So there has to be a third dimension, if you will, after you've done your analysis and your mapping is how do they execute on all of the stuff that we found in the customer journey mapping? How do they execute at that point, that whole face of business happening for the benefit of the customer as well as for the employee satisfaction? So we're seeing that customer-centric conversations are increasing. Now by that, I mean that companies are looking for what are all of the methods, all the simple methods that we can incorporate today, which doesn't necessarily mean bringing in all kinds of technology, what are the methods that we can start bringing in to make our employees feel empowered around the whole customer experience paradigm? So that I'm seeing is happening. The other one is, as you refer to Jeff Bezos, is whenever you have a decision happening in your company and you've got the conference room table, put one chair over there and just put the name customer on the chair and allow the customer to have a decision. Allow the customer to have a seat at the decision table. And by that, I mean that always think as you're making your moves within 2019 and 2020 and beyond is what does it mean to the customer? How does that going to affect the customer? And will it be positive for their experience? Those are the types of things that are getting real exciting that companies are finally starting to look at those and they're not saying good enough is good enough anymore and they're not looking at, well it's, the whole operation is factored into the cost of doing business. They're all starting to say, how can we do better? And mostly the thing that's driving that is that they have to get better at customer experience because if you think about it, price, everybody knows the price now. They can search for everything that they're shopping for and they know who's got the same price and pretty much there's an equilibrium on that. So if price is one thing and size and color and all of those things are similar and all of the components of that are similar across the board, what are companies starting to compete on? Companies in 2019 and 2020 are gonna start competing on the experience. So if you think about one of the best competitive advantages now moving forward is what's the experience that we give over and above our competition? And that is so important, we're seeing the trends moving to that and honestly that's what really starts to excite me as companies are moving down this path. Great, and Steve, one of the things I know is that you've written a number of things on this topic. If people wanna learn more about CX, what are some resources that they can go to which I understand not trying to pitch resources, to pitch product from Pan Viva, but really thought leadership in a different place. We also work with a lot of thought leaders and we only approach it from an educational perspective. Matter of fact, we just published a new e-book on customer experience. All the tips from 10 industry leaders in customer experience and that's available on our website at panviva.com. They can connect with me at Twitter, SXP01 or by email at espapusatpanviva.com and I'm happy to point them in the direction of any of these resources that fundamentally will help them start a workshop inside and start the thought process of how can we get better on behalf of the customer. All right, well, Steve, really appreciate you helping to educate our community a little bit more about the CX space and definitely do check out, either reach out to Steve directly or check out the panviva.com website to learn more and be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the upcoming shows as well as the archive of everything we have. If you go into the search box, you can search on topic, company or person. We've got the database of thousands of interviews that we've done in the past. So, once again, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCube.