A Smarter Way to Improve Your Organisation’s Customer Service and Experience
With Alex Mead, Chief Customer Service Experience Director at a start-up digital bank in Bahrain
Show Notes
Alex Mead is the Chief Customer Service Experience Director at a start-up digital bank in Bahrain.
With 20 years experience in this role at organisations across multiple industries, Alex has discovered many organisations have critical parts missing from their customer experience equation, leading to poor outcomes for customers.
He’s developed a framework in response, which when implemented, is the secret to customer service success.
Today, he shares what it is.
You'll Learn:
The industry change that happened more than a decade ago which has compromised customer service experience ever since (01:29).
The 2 very separate parts of customer experience which have been forgotten (02:40).
The outdated view that many leaders have of customer service (04:22).
What Alex’s ‘EPIC’ framework stands for, which includes what organisations should always provide to customers in their service experience, but is commonly missing (05:24).
What your agents require to deliver on the needs of customers, which is summarised by Alex’s ‘TIME’ framework (07:58).
Why customer effort is king when it comes to world-class customer service (09:47).
What Alex is putting in place in his current role, to ensure it’s seamless for customers to move from self-service to talking with an agent (11:31).
Why most chat bots aren’t providing the level of customer service they could, and what to do about it (12:45).
The one (controversial) thing Alex recommends organisations do to improve the customer service experience they provide (13:20).
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership System enables contact centres to increase revenue and achieve their sales growth targets.
Today I'm fortunate enough to be joined by Alex Mead. Who's the Chief Customer Service Experience Director for a startup digital challenger bank based in Bahrain.
Alex Mead (00:28)
Hey, Blair.
Blair Stevenson (00:29)
So Alex. Welcome along. Great to have you.
Alex Mead (00:32)
It's great to be here. Always exciting to talk about contact centres, customer service, customer experience, customer success. Wait, I'm confused.
Blair Stevenson (00:40)
Yes. So for our listeners, just as a bit of background, tell us a bit about yourself.
Alex Mead (00:46)
Yeah, so I studied computer systems and information engineering. Realised I didn't want to work in tech. So my first job was as a customer service agent many years ago before the internet.
And I've now worked my way up to be someone who, in theory, makes sure customer service agents get the environment, the tools, the culture, everything they need to give great customer service experience. So that's not changed.
But yeah, I often fail because a lot of people don't get that, but I keep banging the same drum over and over what I think needs to be done.
Blair Stevenson (01:18)
Awesome. Now I know from your experience that you've come to question the value of the entire customer experience movement. I'm just curious about why that is.
Alex Mead (01:29)
Yeah, so it used to be very clear and simple, maybe 15, even 20 years ago now, there was in a company, there'd be a customer service director, a sales director, marketing director, operations, et cetera, directors.
So the customer service director - my role - would typically be responsible for every interaction we have with a customer. So that's, "I want to buy something. I've ordered something, when's it coming? I want to return it. I don't know how it works." And typically, that would be through the contact centre channels or even the face-to-face channels.
And then digital came along, and the buzzwords 'omni-channel', et cetera, came in. And clearly we wanted to put CRM platforms in to make sure we managed all those interactions well, but then along came this buzzword 'customer experience' and it has just confused ... it's ruined it in my opinion, because the worst part of my customer experience is now my customer service experience, by a country mile.
I don't care if I've got the most amazing personalised brand marketing offers. If I have to sit in a call centre queue for 35 minutes, I can't send a message. And I don't know if my order's coming today, tomorrow or next week.
So I think, customer experience is a buzz phrase that's literally thrown out willy-nilly and people have taken their eye off the ball of, "Okay, what is customer experience made up of?" And it's customer service experience and brand and marketing experience. Those are two very different things.
And the last thing, my view is the majority of customer experience thought leaders, practitioners, call them what you want. They are very much focused on voice of the customer, analytics, journey mapping. They don't even think about the customer contact and customer service expenses, which are the biggest issue at the moment.
So I would love to say, let's stop using this phrase 'customer experience'. It's like, "What do you do?", "I do business." Be more specific. So "customer experience, what do you do?", "I look after all the customer interactions across digital, social, contact centres, face-to-face. Any channel, any reason, self-service or agent." Okay, that's clear. "What do you do?" And the others will say, "Yeah, I do journey mapping." For what purpose?
So that's why I think customer experience is just the biggest buzzword we see now. I'm sure there'll be others coming, but it's not delivering in any shape or form I'm seeing.
Blair Stevenson (03:52)
So it's kind of like an umbrella term, which covers so much. And I get what you're saying because talking to contact centre leaders, there's a high level of confusion about what do they do to shift the needle on customer experience.
So what you're saying is that really there are two issues. One is brand marketing, and the other is customer service experience.
Alex Mead (04:22)
And actually just on that, the other thing that really frustrates me when people say "customer service, that's the recovery team, isn't it? That's the people who deal when things have gone wrong." That's all such old school thinking. No. To me, customer service experience is proactive, and you could even call it customer interaction and customer service experience.
And there are still so many broken journeys. "Hey, I'm interested in that mobile phone. Um, does it fit this case?" You can't get the answer to that. "Okay, I've ordered it. You haven't yet sent it. I want to change the delivery address." That's all customer service experience, so that's before things have gone wrong.
And too many people think, "Hey, stop going on about customer service, Alex, that's the complaints team, isn't it?" It's just I'm talking a completely different language to those guys. No, it's everything to do with a customer's service experience. And their service experience is from pre-sales to sales, to post-sales.
So I think a lot of people are still stuck in this legacy mindset too.
Blair Stevenson (05:17)
Yeah. What do you think is the secret to customer service success?
Alex Mead (05:24)
I came up with a framework 10, 15 years ago now, which I've never written a book about. So maybe that's why I'm failing to be in the top 50 CX whatevers they are.
But I said customers should always have four things in their service experience. They need to be Easy, Personalised, Intuitive, and Contextual. EPIC. Stands for EPIC. And I didn't reverse engineer it's coincidence.
Easy, there's so few companies that deliver easy for customers. Because easy means, "Let me choose the channel I want. Let me decide if I want to help myself or not. And let me decide if I want to wait or talk to you later and you deal with it."
And to that specifically, easy means, okay, I've gone to your app or your website, or even walked into a store. And my first thing is, okay, I now have a question. I now have a need. So how easy is it for me to ask my question? And it rarely is easy.
But then personalised is, okay, it should never be asked. "What's your order number?", or "what did you order?" You should know, because you're the company, I'm asking you a question and you were delivering something to me due tomorrow. And it doesn't look as though it's going to make it. So you have to personalise it.
And you should never ask the customer, "Which products are you interested in?" if you already know that because you marketed it to them.
And then intuitive is, okay, that customer is now starting to ask questions of us or contact us. Don't give them a generic chat bot that forces them down certain routes. Intuitive basically means, okay, Alex is trying to contact us now. Ah, we can see he's due to take off on a flight in three hours. And actually we can see already that flight has been delayed by eight hours. That's pretty much why he's going to be contacting us. So let's be intuitive.
But better if that flight is due in one hour, 10 minutes, and you can see Alex is not at the airport yet, he's going to be contacting us about something which leads onto the contextual, which is okay, don't just deal with things longest in the queue first.
If I have an issue that is vitally important to me now, it's different to someone who wants to change the annual billing date for a statement, you know.
So Easy, Personalised, Intuitive, and Contextual. And that's the framework I put in every way. It's not an off the shelf framework. I talk about the principles, then break it down to what it means to every single company. And when we create this framework, we measure against it. And we say, "Do you know what? We're so not easy. We're so unpersonalised, we're so not intuitive. And we don't even think about the context."
And the other part to it I then say is, "Okay, that's what customers need. So to deliver that, what do customer service, customer facing employees need?" They need time, time to focus on the customer they're talking to or interacting with. If there's 50 calls in the queue, it's not that agent's fault. They need information.
And honestly, the planet's most customer centric company, according to them is Amazon, they would tell me, "I don't know where your parcel is either mate, you'll have to phone UPS." But I didn't order from UPS.
So somehow in the perfect world, how can we get that customer service agent information, that the customer doesn't have at their fingertips.
And they need empowerment. "Okay, yeah Blair, I can see that we failed." Pff, sorry. That's not good enough empowerment. "But what I'm going to do is X, Y or Z, I'm going to upgrade this or I'm going to give you that instead."
And the last thing they need is motivation. So why the hell should I go, "Hello, how can I help you?" Why should I be engaged? So that's actually T I E M, but we call it TIME. So it's another sexy word.
So EPIC and TIME are my principles. And, honestly, when I explain them and then apply them, there are gaps everywhere. So the challenge is then, how do we close those gaps? That's the model I try to use. I fail a lot. A lot of people just say, "Ah, it's not important to us." But I will keep banging that drum till I die.
Blair Stevenson (09:23)
I'm curious about a couple of things. I was talking to someone recently about this concept of customer effort. And one of the things that you talked about was easy, intuitive, and contextual, which seems to me to have some interaction with either increasing customer effort or decreasing it. Would that be fair?
Alex Mead (09:47)
Absolutely. Yeah. Those three are all around customer effort, and even personalising it is customer effort. Because if you're asking me for an order number, you should know, "Here's Alex, here's our orders. Is it this?"
And there's been so many reports. To me, customer effort is the biggest thing. So if someone's engaging, "Hey, how can I help you, sir?" That's not as important to me as it being really easy for me. And the simple reality is, most customers want to be able to help themselves.
And, too many companies, I nearly wrote an article about this. Because I had phoned 4 call centres and I was in queues. Airlines, banks, utilities, for over 30 minutes for each. And the message was, "Have you tried a helpful support articles?" Of course I bloody well have. Every customer has already tried to help themselves. Don't refer me to your lame websites.
So it is all about the effort. And the other thing I'd like companies to think about is what we're doing now is really about just catching up. But the younger generations, and even now, I just want to send a company a message. "Hey, that order you've sent to me, it looks at us late. Can you let me know where it is?" Put the phone down. I'm not in a queue. That's low effort.
And, do they know who I am? They should know everything about me. And we have to put security in place, but that's what we should be looking at. So effort is king. Absolutely.
Blair Stevenson (11:06)
And I guess the other side of the coin, so that's about the customer. The other side of the coin is you talked really about that employee experience, under the TIME banner. From your perspective, how important is the entire employee experience in terms of them being able to deliver the right experience for customers?
Alex Mead (11:31)
There's two aspects to it. First of all, I'm even grappling with it in my last couple of roles, you can't have the contact centre, the people who talk to customers, in one team, the people that deal with the self-service solutions in another team.
Customers will often talk to an AI engine or chat bot, or even just well-designed self service. And it doesn't help them. They'll then go on to talk to an agent. That needs to be so seamless. And what I'm building in my current role is every customer can go to our app and they can very simply type in a keyword. How can we help you or click on an icon, and we'll present them with an answer.
And those answers are coming from agents saying, "These are why customers contact us." And if the customer reads the answer and says, well, even if they don't read it, "Okay, doesn't help me." They can then just press a button that says, 'I now need to talk to an agent' or human being, and we let them choose their channel.
Do you want to call us? Do you want to request a callback? Do you want to live chat? Or do you want to message us? Whichever one of those. Whichever one arrives on the agent desktop straight away is, okay. Here's Blair, he's just looked at this knowledge article about how he sends a payment overseas. So that's why he's contacting you. And don't repeat what the knowledge article said.
So you have to have the closed loop between what the agents do with customers and what the self-service and the AI machines and chat bots offer. And too often, the chat bots are so bad because they're not joined up to what customer service agents know in their head they should be saying. To me, you've got to join the two together.
Blair Stevenson (13:01)
Yup. That makes perfect sense. So, unfortunately, I know this is not as simplistic as this, but if you were to pull out a magic wand and wave it, what's the one thing you'd change in organisations to improve the customer service experience they provide?
Alex Mead (13:20)
I've been very, very clear on this for many years. So there's been a huge growth for this role, Chief Customer Officer. And you look at the profiles of 90 to 95% plus, they have marketing backgrounds. So I think you should have a Chief Customer Service Experience Officer and a Chief Brand and Marketing Officer. They need to be separate, honesty.
And to be fair, even if you're an expert in what I do, customer service experience, you're not going to know about above the line, below the line brand marketing. So don't merge the two.
But too often they think, "Okay, we'll create this Chief Customer Service or Chief Customer Officer or Chief Customer Experience Officer”, but then they won't empower the people who really are the people that have been running the contact centres, the digital.
So you create these two roles and you basically say, "Right, everything that is to do with chat bots, AI, customer interaction management, social interaction, is led by this Chief Customer Service Experience Officer. Everything to do with sales and marketing journeys, brand activation retention, lifetime customer value, is led by this Chief Customer Brand and Marketing Officer.” The two of them.
For me, you need two of them, because they're the yin and yang to each other. One pushes and pulls the other. This whole model of, "Hey, we're going to now really put customers at the heart of everything." We hear that so often. "We've now got a great Chief Customer Officer." All those companies, I'm still in the queue going, "Oh my God, this customer service experience is torturous."
So that's what I would change. Stop trying to merge it into this big bucket.
Blair Stevenson (14:49)
That makes perfect sense. Brilliant, Alex. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
Alex Mead (14:55)
You're welcome. It was good fun. Thank you.
Blair Stevenson (14:56)
For listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Alex on LinkedIn you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in that description too.
And lastly, if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn, you'll find a link to my profile there as well. Well, that's it from us today. Have a productive week.