The 6 Domains of Customer Experience You’re Not Paying Attention To
With Daniel Ord, founder and director of OmniTouch International
Show Notes
Daniel Ord is the founder and director of OmniTouch International. He’s spent the last 20 years helping and inspiring people to deliver great customer experience, employee experience and contact centre performance.
As one of only 15 recognized training providers in the world for CXPA (the Customer Experience Professionals Association), he has deep insight into how to create world-class customer experience in your contact centres.
There are 6 domains of Customer Experience, which you’re probably not paying attention to. Daniel shares what they are.
Dan’s Top 3 Tips For Lifting CX:
Ask yourself whether the metrics you have in place to measure productivity are aligned with achieving your CX ambitions. You won’t achieve your ambitions by focusing on ones like number of calls handled and average handling time (23:15).
Develop a ‘service delivery vision’ - a one or two sentence statement that says what kind of service your contact centre delivers (23:49).
The whole organisation is responsible for delivering on CX. Not just the contact centres. Build relationships with other department heads, so you can work together to fix customer issues holding back CX (25:09).
You'll Learn:
Dan’s ‘circus tent’ metaphor for CX, and why it’s vital to understand it to lift CX in your organisation (04:50).
The 6 core competencies of CX, and how you contact centre can contribute to them (06:11).
The problem caused by asking an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey at the end of calls (10:36).
The ‘spaghetti diagram’ and how it can help you lift CX (11:26).
The one question Dan asks to get a sense of how well a contact centre is operating (16:54).
Dan’s PQ and A model which highlights the metrics to focus on to lift CX. This will also help you recruit the right people (18:17).
Connect with Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniellawrenceord/
If you want to steal some ideas on how to lift operational efficiency while reducing unplanned leave, send me an email (at blairs@bravatrak.com) and we can organise a 15-minute call over Zoom or Teams.
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 - the Future of Contact Centre Coaching. BravaTrak helps contact centres lift operational efficiency, while reducing unplanned leave. Our science-based coaching system achieves these outcomes by measuring and improving coaching effectiveness.
Today I'm fortunate enough to be joined by Daniel Ord, who's the founder and director OmniTouch International. Daniel now lives in a small town outside of Frankfurt in Germany. And he's one of only 15 recognized training providers - in the world - for CXPA, which is the Customer Experience Professionals Association.
Daniel has spent the last 20 years helping and inspiring people to deliver great customer experience, employee experience and contact centre performance.
So Dan, welcome along. Great to have you here.
Daniel Ord (01:04)
Yeah, it's nice to be here at Blair. I'm glad we could catch up.
Blair Stevenson (01:08)
Awesome. Now there will be very few people who don't know who you are, but just in case someone is watching and they don't know who you are, tell us a bit about your background and your expertise.
Daniel Ord (01:19)
Sure. No problem, Blair. And of course, like most people, I refer everyone to LinkedIn, but basically I started my career in finance, which I think is unusual for a lot of people. And then by accident, I ended up running large centres in the US. This is back in the 90s. So what I often say is most of us get into this industry by accident. It was such a brilliant experience. I loved it.
And then in 1998, I ended up moving to Singapore. In Singapore, I worked for a consulting firm where I was flown around, and basically helped companies set up their first contact centre. So that was a great experience. Philippines, India, China, Singapore obviously, Malaysia. And after 2, 3 years of doing that, and constantly being on a plane and working with clients, I honestly said, "I should be doing this for myself".
So in 2001, I opened my own company. Obviously I'm proud of that, because this year we're 20 years' old. Basically we do two things. We have a suite of workshop and certification programs, crossing CX, contact centres and employee experience. And we also have a research group that does a lot of mystery shopper and qualitative research - especially for contact centres and digital channels these days. So it's been a fabulous 20 year ride, I have to say.
Blair Stevenson (02:34)
Very cool. Thank you for sharing your background. I know one of the things you're passionate about is teaching, and particularly teaching customer experience. So just tell us a bit about the breadth of work you've been doing in that space.
Daniel Ord (02:49)
Thank you for asking. When people ask me what I do, I usually just say 'a teacher' because I think that's the core DNA of what I do. It's just that the area of focus for me is anything related to the customer. So as we said earlier, contact centres and CX and EX.
When it comes to customer experience, I think we started teaching it around 2007. Prior to 2007, we were teaching CRM. CRM was the big concept, and I noticed it morphing over time. So at some point, some years ago, I heard of the CXPA and I decided, "I'm curious about this CCXP certification".
I went through the journey myself. I loved it. I have to say, I really benefited. I studied, I took the exam, I passed the exam. And I said - because I'm in this particular business of teaching people - I said, "I want to make this certification available to other people through our workshop programs".
Daniel Ord (03:43)
So then I spent about 2 years, 2 solid years, writing our CX workshop, because the CXPA is very particular about the workshop and does it map to their competencies. And I'm happy to say that that the work was approved. And since that time, we've been delivering this particular workshop all over the world.
Some people go for the certification, some people don't, but in closing for this thought, probably one of the biggest comments I get from people that take the workshop is "Wow. I had no idea of the breadth of the topic. I wasn't aware of the breadth itself.”
Blair Stevenson (04:18)
I'd like to pick up on that last point. I've come to realise - it's taken me awhile - that CX is really a collection of disciplines.
I heard you on a podcast with Justin Tippett. You used a really useful metaphor on CX. Can you just talk us through that metaphor, and the different specialties which fall under the CX umbrella?
Daniel Ord (04:50)
Absolutely. Thanks for asking that, because when I describe CX - as you mentioned - I like to use a circus tent metaphor. So I'll say when you go to the circus - or at least in the old days - and you go into the tent, over here on the right, you'll see the animal trainers and maybe the lions running around. And over here on a different direction, you're going to see the jugglers. And over there, you're going to see the fortune teller.
Now, what I like to say is that CX is similar, because under that tent, you have a variety of different disciplines. Now they're all working together, or are connected in some way, to improve the customer's overall experience, but they require a depth of know how in and of themselves.
What happens in the contact centre, Blair, in the industry, is you'll hear a lot of contact centre people use the term CX. CX this, CX that, we're CX. Blah, blah, blah, blah. But what they're really talking about is customer service. And customer service is simply one element of CX. It's not the same thing.
And I think sometimes as an industry, we do ourselves a disservice in the contact centre by calling everything CX, when we're really talking about customer service. And not these disciplines under the big top that we're referring to here.
Blair Stevenson (06:01)
Yeah. That makes sense. And we'll talk about it a bit later, but I have experienced a lot of confusion amongst contact centre managers around CX.
Daniel Ord (06:11)
It's common. One thing I realised I didn't do, just very quickly, if you follow the CXPA protocol - which I think is a brilliant protocol, I find it very useful - your 6 disciplines are;
Culture
Metrics, measurements, and ROI
Governance
Experience design
Voice of customer, which alone is a massive competency, everything to do with VOC
CX strategy and how a CX strategy supports your organisational strategy.
So all of these are different domains that tend to fall outside of the contact centre area. Now we may have some participation in some of them, and I think we have a lot of lessons to teach CX people about things we've learned in the contact centre. I'm very proud of my contact centre DNA. But they are in fact different.
When I walk into a big top for a contact centre, what do I see under the tent? QA (Quality Assurance), workforce management, IT, HR. So it's got its own big top. "We have our own big top. Why do we want their big top too?", I guess is maybe a new way I can think about it.
Blair Stevenson (07:16)
Nice. I like it. Let's start with three of those domains. Because otherwise we'll be here for hours.
I'm thinking about organisational adoption. And what I'm aware of is that building a customer-centric culture takes time. And so I'm thinking that CX tends to be a bit of a longer play than, say for example, improving sales. What are your tips for Contact Centre Leaders for getting traction around CX within their organisation?
Daniel Ord (08:00)
I think I'm going to go back to the answer I just gave to the earlier question, which is, I think the first thing a Contact Centre Leader needs to do is make sure they know what CX really is. Not what they think CX is. Not what they believe CX is.
Am I promoting a training program? No. You don't have to take a training program. But I think you owe it to yourself to get out there and say, "What are the 6 competencies?"
Once you understand those competencies, then you ask yourself, "In what way can I participate in my organisation's VOC strategy? My organisation's culture strategy?" And notice I keep using the word 'organisation' because the playing fields are different.
Contact centres are responsible for dealing with customers. We put resources in place to deal with customers in real time, but that's just one department within the company. The moment you're talking about CX, you're talking about organisational strategy, organisational VOC, organisational experience design. So the playing fields are different.
(08:59)
I think we have some further discussion in this time together, Blair, where maybe we can drill down into some things contact centre people can do. But my answer for you here is first off, get yourself equipped. Be willing to look in a mirror, which is not easy to do and say, "I don't want to be an amateur in CX. I really want to know what CX is and then go and fill those gaps."
Believe me, once you fill those gaps, the solutions begin to present themselves. And honestly, that's when you begin to say, "Oh, when I do this weird NPS transaction survey in the contact centre, actually that's not recommended.”
For example, when you go through CX or you go through NPS, you learn that's not a smart thing to do. And yet you'll still visit contact centres, and they're like, "Yes. At the end of every call we ask, 'how likely would the customer be to rate based on this call?'"
Well, even the NPS people say that's not a great thing. That's called transactional NPS. It shouldn't be used. There are other metrics that are more appropriate. So I don't know if I really answered that question Blair. I danced around it.
Blair Stevenson (10:06)
That's all right. Because what you're saying really rings bells for me, because almost every Contact Centre Leader I've spoken to about CX, actually almost exclusively what they're talking about is their NPS score. Very narrow focus on one thing. Really coming to terms with what is CX really, is a smart move.
Daniel Ord (10:36)
And NPS is a subset of VOC. NPS is just one possible metric that some companies can use. So you need a strong understanding of VOC, and then you need a strong understanding of NPS.
And NPS is what's called a 'relationship metric', which means it measures the customer perception over time. So maybe after 6 months you'll get a survey from me that says, "Blair, over time, over the last six months, I have a few questions to ask you about your experience with us".
Because I'm getting a sense of time passing, but asking you an NPS question after a call, you can see how problematic that is. I recently made one of the most popular posts I've made on LinkedIn in the past few years. Maybe it fits here. I'll just share it verbally.
(11:26)
I have a good friend who is also the Head of CX for the biggest bank in the country he works in. No need to point out who this is. And he came up through the contact centre like you and I did. So he said, "Look, when I was in the contact centre and I joined, the bosses said this; 'you guys have the lowest NPS in the contact centre of any department in the company. So we're bringing you in, we're giving you a high salary and your job is to fix it.'"
Now, this is a very smart guy. What he did is he studied all the answers customers gave. Maybe it was a low NPS score. He went into what's called the qualitative data. Why did they give the low score? What was it they were actually asking about? Now this took some time, but I'll jump to the chase, after 6 months or a year when they finished the entire study, what they found is 70% of the low NPS scores were based on performance in other departments.
(12:19)
In other words, the customers were unhappy about the way credit card declines were handled. They were unhappy with the branches. So he made this really interesting diagram. He calls the 'spaghetti diagram', which linked the complaint in the contact centre to which department. And he actually visually diagrammed it out.
He is now the Head of CX, has been their Head of CX for the last 5 years. And he's still using the spaghetti diagram. Because his point is - and I completely support it and agree, but I'm going to give him the credit - his point is when you ask a customer this question, they can't divorce their feelings about another department when they answer that.
I've heard marketing people say, "Oh, how can we force the customer to only give us that?" You can't, that's not how people work. That's not how they think.
Blair Stevenson (13:04)
No, it's their perception of the organisation, as you rightly say, formed over a period of time.
Daniel Ord (13:11)
Yeah. And you know what the answer was that made the NPS scores go up when he created that spaghetti diagram? And he went to, let's say, function A and said, "We need you guys to do this". And then function A did that, guess what happened to contact centre NPS scores? They went up. Because the ultimate problems were fixed.
So this sense of looking at a leader board or numbers board and saying, "My NPS score is this, oh my gosh", that must be a terrible spot to be in versus this gentleman who's approach I just described.
Blair Stevenson (13:41)
Yeah, exactly. You mentioned voice of customer earlier. I pricked my ears up because it's probably the most well-known and used approach to improving customer experience. Just briefly, what are the benefits of implementing voice of customer?
Daniel Ord (13:58)
I think the good news here is your audience will resonate with this. If we don't listen to our customers and take into account the things that are important to them, then what's the point of CX? Don't even waste your time. There's just no time.
If we don't set up listening posts, I love that term, where we pick up what customers are thinking or feeling or wanting - even their unknown wants - for example, then how on earth are we going to be able to tailor the things we offer, the way we offer them to people?
Many people would say it's the touchstone. It's not enough on its own to achieve your CX ambitions. But many people would say it's the cornerstone of your CX ambitions, listening to people and getting their responses.
And, Blair, on contact centres - let's just let's shift to there - obviously your contact centres are a remarkable place to pick up VOC. I think that's one of the gifts of a contact centre, is listening to calls, and assessing unstructured data, and looking what customers are complaining about, or not complaining about. That kind of thing.
Blair Stevenson (15:04)
Yeah, totally agreed. Just reflecting on some of your comments earlier, and I had an experience at the Auscontact Association conference in late 2019, just pre-COVID. I vividly remember, in fact I can visualize the scene right now, talking with a relatively small group of contact centre managers who commented to me that CX is so big, they've got no idea how to improve it.
Which really goes to your point about actually, people don't really understand the totality of CX to start with. But that got me thinking about metrics and measurements. What's your advice to a Contact Centre Manager as to the metrics over which they have control, which they should measure and track to help them improve customer experience?
Daniel Ord (16:05)
Cool. No problem. It's one of my favorite topics.
So the contact centre is a touchpoint within the organisation and some customers are going to obviously experience that touchpoint as they go through their journeys. Another term you hear a lot in customer experience. So it's important that we, as a touchpoint, handle our touchpoint well. That's clear. All touchpoints have a role to play in the customer experience.
When it comes to contact centres in particular, here's a couple of things I find. The first is get your KPIs right. For heaven sakes. I mean, it's 2021. I'm still amazed at how many centres out there are targeting or looking at the wrong things. Number of calls handled, average handling time is massively important. The industry has known these haven't been healthy or right for a long, long time.
So I think the first thing you have to do, if you want to run a contact centre touchpoint well, is get your KPIs right. Typically I will say, or I will write, or I will post, "If I could only ask a contact centre one question to get a sense of how well they're operating, without even visiting them or looking at them, I would ask them, 'what are the KPIs you use to measure agents?'"
(17:16)
Now typically, there's a basket of KPIs. I call it a basket. And in the basket, you may have 3 things, 5 things, whatever that is. And each of those will have a certain weightage. Because again, that's a very common approach. I will ask, "What's your basket of KPIs?"
I can tell straight away from that basket of KPIs whether that contact centre is ready to be part of their company's CX ambitions, or not. It's that simple. Because if you can't run your touchpoint properly, you're going to have very little to add to the overall CX ambitions of your company.
And I feel for contact people, because I know - including for myself - none of us went to school for this. We didn't go to school for this. We're an industry full of amateurs. That's what I always say. It shocks people, but that's what we are.
So you have to go and close these gaps. And I admit that it was after I left the industry and I went and closed my own gaps, when I opened my own company, I realized that in running contact centres, I probably knew less than 2 or 3% of what I teach now.
(18:17)
So I think the first thing you have to do is get your KPIs right. If it helps, with agents, there is a model I sometimes use, I call it PQ and A. What do I measure for productivity? What do I measure for Q is for quality? And A is for attitudes. Because I'm a big believer in employee experience and engagement.
So I literally ask contact centre people to work through the P. "Here's my productivity, I worked on my Q. Here's my quality". And A is the attitudes that we need to succeed in the job.
And here's the test for you. I'm not going to go through all the metrics. We don't have time, and that's not our purpose today. But whatever you set for P for productivity, and whatever you set for Q should not fight each other. The moment they fight each other, you've set incorrect metrics. They should actually support each other.
So again, I think the first thing I'd say to any contact centre that wants to support their company's CX ambitions is "Run your touchpoint properly. And first off, get the metrics right." And so much of that revolves around productivity and quality.
Blair Stevenson (19:19)
In what way would you measure attitude?
Daniel Ord (19:30)
It's a fair point. Typically, every job requires what I call a set of attitudes. I never like when I hear someone say, "He has an attitude problem." Because I would say, "Which attitude is it. If you can't tell me, I kick you out, you go find out."
When you're creating a job description - and there's a lot of literature out there on this, you don't have to make this up from scratch. You literally say, "What are the 5 or 6 attitudes a person needs to succeed in this job?" And you actually build interview questions around it. And that's where you do this whole behavioral thing. "Can you tell me a time when you needed to take ownership of a situation and what did you do?"
And the other thing is, I find in contact centres I talk a lot about P every day. Productivity, productivity, slam, slam, slam. Q somewhat less. I think that's your experience too, because that's where coaching comes in. And A never. It's so funny. Attitude never comes up.
(20:25)
So I'm like, "If you don't talk about it, you can't expect that garden to grow". So you have to be able to say, as you bring people in, "These are the 5 attitudes. I am going to help equip you with those attitudes". Now I have met some contact centre people that say, "You know, Dan, when some people join the centre, they don't even know what ownership is. They don't know what taking accountability is."
So in a way, one of the biggest gifts I give to people is to develop them. But I'm not developing them according to my own personal standard. Because if I do that, my standard may conflict with my neighbour's standard, or that manager's standard over there.
I do it according to the company standard. "We decided these are the 5 attitudes to succeed." And we describe what it looks like. And when I see my staff doing that, I'll say, "Congratulations. I want to give you some praise here. I really liked the way you took ownership in that situation."
So I think we forget sometimes in contact centres that if we don't talk about it, then it doesn't get much traction or much resonance. So P all the time, Q somewhat less. A, funny enough, almost never. But still, you need to talk about all three.
Blair Stevenson (21:32)
You really speak to me because from a coaching perspective, what I'm focusing on is what are the behaviors that you need your people to exhibit?
And so if you think about productivity, if you take a productivity metric like first call resolution, what are the behaviors you need someone to exhibit, which is going to maximize their performance in that. Same with quality. But very rarely do I see - if at all - contact centres going, "Well, attitudinally, what do we want? And how is that reflected in specific behaviors? How will I know someone's taking ownership?"
Daniel Ord (22:12)
If you don't know, then how can you help them grow? I know you know that point. We're talking rhetorically here, and you see all the time these quotes pop up on feeds. "Richard Branson says, or whoever, 'hire for attitude, train for skills'", and it gets 10,000 likes.
But then when you ask, "Okay, cool. You believe in it, which attitudes do you hire for?" "Oh, I'm not really sure." "Well, okay. I'm glad you liked Richard Branson's quote, but he had a point to it." You've got to bring these concepts to the ground a little bit.
Blair Stevenson (22:43)
Totally. Dan, you've given us some really good stuff. Just perhaps to wrap up, what would be your top 3 tips for Contact Centre Leaders who are under pressure to lift performance in customer experience? Maybe a metric they've got is Net Promoter Score, or maybe it's something else, but top three tips.
Daniel Ord (23:15)
Tip #1
I tend to look at it this way. We have to eliminate the negative before we can go to the positive. So depending on who you are, the first thing I would do is look at the metrics I currently have in place for productivity and ask if they're holding me back. So I think that's the first thing you got to look at.
And you have to be really, really, really clear. "These are the metrics we have for productivity. How do those link to our customer experience ambitions?" If you tell me it's number of calls handled, then it's game over. Let's not even carry on any further. Because not only is that numerically wrong, that's never going to bring you to your ambition.
Tip #2 (23:49)
The second thing is to look at your quality process. I think people misinterpret it. When you hear quality in a contact centre, what you think of most is someone listening to a conversation and then ticking boxes about how that conversation went.
But when it comes to quality, that process begins a lot earlier. And here's how it links to CX. There's something called a ‘service delivery vision’ or a ‘CX vision’. Some people call it a ‘customer service vision’. That's a one or two sentence statement that says, "What kind of service do we deliver around here?"
If you go to an ice cream shop, they have 99 flavours of ice cream. But if you go into a contact centre and say, "What kind of service do you deliver around here?" "Huh? What are you talking about? We say the customer's name three times, don't we?"
(24:31)
No, no. The very best companies have come up with a flavour of service. And often they're accompanied by principles. So for example, 1, 2 or 3, 4 principles that link to that. And they actually use that as the foundation of building their quality program.
So that would be my second tip. Do you have a service delivery vision or customer service vision? If you have a CX department, then your CX department will come up with what's called a CX vision. It's one of the requirements. If you don't have that, it's going to be really hard to bring quality to life. That would probably be my second tip.
Tip #3 (25:09)
The third tip is just a general tip from having run big contact centres for many years, and now seeing clients who run them. When you're higher up in the centre, you need to quit looking down and in. You need to get up out of your chair and go work what I call 'up and out'. Your job should be to go and talk to this department head. "How can the contact centre help you?" Because part of CX is building cross-functional relationships so that we're all singing the same song.
And I think what happens sometimes in contact centres is we get so focused on down and in, "What is our this, what is our that?" I'll close this thought by saying this. I think I was really successful in my contact centre career, not knowing as much as I needed to know, to be honest, because I had a very strong middle management team.
(25:57)
Here's what they used to say to me, my deputy head or whatever he was called, he would say, "Dan, please go away. We don't need you here. You know what you're really good at Dan? You're really good at the politics. You're really good at explaining things. You're good at getting us budget. Go get us budget. Go get us this. Go remind them to fix that. That's what you're good at. We don't even want to see you around here."
And that’s always struck me, because of the power of my middle management team and their strength and what they did, I was able to work up and out. And if you truly have strong ambitions, you have to do that. You have to do that. You can't fix customer issues, if you don't have relationships with other departments.
Blair Stevenson (26:38)
Brilliant. Great tips Dan, really appreciate it. Thank you so for your time today.
Daniel Ord (26:44)
Oh, it's been brilliant. I'm looking forward to round seven. Just kidding.
Blair Stevenson (26:51)
Well, that's it from us today. For listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Dan on LinkedIn, you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in that description too (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniellawrenceord/).
Now, if you want to steal some ideas on how to lift operational efficiency while reducing unplanned leave, send me an email (at blairs@bravatrak.com) and we can organise a 15-minute call over Zoom or Teams.
Well, that's it from us today. Have a productive week.