 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale just off the runway here at Moffitt Field, really interesting place. A lot of cool toys downstairs. But we had a conversation today about customer experience and kind of next gen customer experience and how to drive a better customer experience so that you have a better customer relationship. And we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Christy Schaffler, the Director of Customer Experience for Comcast's California Regions. Christy, great to see you. Thank you. Thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. Absolutely. So it's funny, we had this great little panel discussion talking about customer experience, but you kept coming back to employees and really leading with employees before you worry about what's going on with the customer. Kind of where's that kind of mindset come from and how should people be prioritizing employees for the benefit of customers? Yeah, so honestly it all comes back to Comcast itself. It is a very strong employee culture. And so the company began as a small company, family owned, and I think that's what's permeated throughout the company as a whole. So when we started to introduce the best practices for Net Promoter System overall, it was an easy grasp I think for employees to start looking at like how is it that I'm going to be able to help overall? Because I think they're all out there trying to help each other. Right, right. Well it's funny, right? Because there's kind of two dynamics. There's a great dynamic of helping a teammate, right? And this goes back to military rule and you fight for the person that you're with, not necessarily some great cause or old white guys that are back thousands of miles away. But it's different in terms of getting bad news up to the boss. That's a really hard problem and nobody wants to tell the boss bad news. And in fact a lot of times the bad news doesn't get up. So how do you enable people to actually share the real bad news that they might be uncomfortable or not necessarily it's even addressable? Yeah, so what we did was we introduced our employees to the concept of elevations. And so what they do is they input an issue where they are struggling with helping out the customer. There's a barrier to them to be able to deliver the service that we're expecting. And what happens is once that gets input then that actually goes up into the region. We take a look at it and say we can't really do anything with it here but we can bump it up to the next level. That eventually gets to a point especially in the case of employee tools for example where it has to go all the way up to the headquarters and there's a team that's ready and waiting for that to happen. So when you tell them hey there's something broken here they have to come back and respond within two weeks they have to be able to get back with that employee to say here is what we're gonna do about that or it may be put on a map to say that we're gonna eventually fix that. That communication goes directly back to the person who actually input it. So it's a direct direct communication between the employee who's having the issue and the software developer who may actually own that tool. So it goes directly, is it a special type of ticket if you will? That I wanna post knowing that this is, I've decided it's a high enough priority that I'm gonna take the risk and take the personal risk, the professional risk to go ahead and escalate that up the chain of command. Right, so what I'm so proud about is we've gone back to the team and said give me your number one barrier that's holding you back so they work it out amongst their peers about what they think should be the top issue then they get everybody else to watch that issue. Once you get a number of watchers on it it becomes elevated into the company where it becomes a big issue. It's like, hey, there's a lot of people that look at this issue and want it resolved. And so as soon as they put that in they assign it to the area that's responsible and that is it's a direct communication because as soon as they comment anybody who's watching that elevation gets an email in their inbox with the actual comment from the person who owns it. So it's a nice targeted communication for issues that they're having. So is there any fanfare when there's some big one that gets voted by the broader group that oh my gosh this was a really big deal? So recently we had something that came up with our Xfinity home and so as you probably know we have the ability to have security where you can actually look at your cameras on your mobile app and one of our technicians said hey guys I'm hearing this from the customer so what they do is they come back in and they have a huddle with their team and have the discussion and then that manager takes that and puts it into the system. What happened was it went straight back up to the person they actually did a software update on it and then our senior vice president of customer experience out of our corporate headquarters said hey guys congratulations that's fantastic this got fixed and that communication went directly back to the person who input it. So it's just it's a celebratory moment when you can be able to get that direct feedback from the customer it comes up through the employee the employee's owning it as an issue that they can't solve personally but they know to get it to the right people. Right so you talked a lot earlier today about employee tools and so you know as you clearly something you think is a great investment how should people think about investment in employee tools actually manifesting itself in better customer experience with the company? Exactly we actually had an elevation that was associated with that where the employee was using a tool in the home and when he was trying to check the health of the system they found that there was a piece of the tool that was breaking off and so again they took it back to the owner of that tool and then they worked with the manufacturer to go back and redesign that tool so that meant that the customer was able to get better service because if their tools aren't working that's what they depend on to be able to serve our customers and so it's key that we take care of them. So just curious to kind of wrap it up what has the focus on the NPS both the score as well as the process kind of what's happened from that not only the direct result in terms of changing the score and execution details but more kind of the second order and unintended consequences of that focus. Yeah so we've definitely seen our net promoter score increase year over year so that's very exciting and we're celebrating that and we're not there yet so we still have a ways to go but the other thing that we're seeing is that the employees are feeling empowered they're feeling like that they can bring back issues and if it's something that they share with everybody they feel like that they have a sense of I can help direct where we need to focus our time and make sure that those issues are being addressed. So we have an employee survey it's actually called the ENPS so it actually we send that out every other month and ask our employees how do you feel about the workplace? Are you motivated? We have some of the highest scores of any company of employees that are motivated because we have set up this system to basically come back and say let us know where you need help and we're coming back in and helping so I'm excited about it. Great all right we need to have another follow up conversation about NPS at another time I need to get educated but thanks for spending a few minutes and inviting us to attend today's event. Thank you so much I appreciate it. All right she's Christy I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE we're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center thanks for watching we'll see you next time.