Today’s interview is with Samantha (Sam) Richardson, a principal visioneering consultant for Twilio Foundry. Sam joins me today to talk about why many people don’t think very much about customer engagement, how many brands don’t take an inclusive approach to customer engagement, why you shouldn’t always build for the the ‘happy path’, what we can learn from not-for-profit organisations about understanding customers and delivering services as well as some great examples of Twilio clients that she is working with and the sort of results that they are delivering.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – To be good at customer experience has to begin with an experiential triage – Interview with Nick Webb – and is number 427 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

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Here’s the highlights of my chat with Sam:

• Many people don’t think very much about customer engagement until they are struggling to access a service.
• It’s just the same as our everyday conversations. We don’t think too much about all the chats and conversations that we have until we can’t reach somebody or until we need to communicate something urgently or until something’s gone wrong and we desperately need to talk to somebody about it.
• And then all of a sudden that conversation becomes really important. And I think it’s the same with the conversations that we have with brands. Many brands don’t seem to have the same reciprocal respect for that relationship and the urgency.
• We’re kind of obsessed with the word digital and the financial benefits that we think it’s going to bring us by pushing everything digital.
• There’s probably not enough diversity in people that are designing services and experiences.
• There is a real lack of inclusivity and diversity in the way that we actually think about the design of services.
• Drive for efficiency is code for being slightly lazy.
• We ran an IVR Innovation Day the other week. We got a group of customers together and just let them go wild with their imagination and, considering a particular customer scenario, asked them to build a great IVR experience. Given that freedom, giving them permission to be creative, they came up with wonderful very caring solutions for customers.
• I think that there’s a lack of leadership giving people permission to be more inclusive with the design.
• There’s not enough emphasis on research because data and research are not the same thing.
• Understanding how somebody lives every single day and being with a variety of different users of your services is a very different thing to just looking at the data set of people that are already using your service.
• I have worked with all sorts of different companies and the one thing that they all do is really focus on what the happy path would be and map a customer journey to the happy path. But, then they don’t unpick that and say what could go wrong here. I like to run workshops focused on what’s going to go wrong i.e. what are all the things that could go horribly wrong here that we need to think about and design for. That’s almost like a shock to people.
• Instead of call listening to critique agents on what they should or shouldn’t have done, one high street bank conducts collective call listening to monitor the whole customer journey. This helps them find out the bits of the customer journey that could be improved and what can be done to make the call better or even remove the need for the call in the first place.
• Everybody thinks that innovation and creativity are these huge exotic things, but they’re not.
• There’s a lot we can learn from not for profits. They take a very user centred approach because they have to.
• I did some work with one of the financial regulators who were looking at a pretty hefty investment in a new platform. After we did a lot of research, we found out that the key to transformation was actually changing their content and and what and how they were sharing some very difficult legal information. But, by changing their content, that was transformative and their customer experience massively improved. That was a fraction of the cost of a new digital platform. However, that only came about from doing the research and understanding what really mattered to their users and what the pain points were.
• The digital acquisition cost of customers has risen by about 50% in the last year and is going to get more and more expensive, so retaining customers is very important. It always has been.
• It’s never been easier to pay attention.
• Don’t ever assume that just because somebody is a digital native company that they’re going to be more innovative because it’s not true.
• People just have to think about the problem a little bit differently. Two of the most interesting organisations that we work with are both in the financial services sector and are both really established. They’ve torn up the rule book completely as to how they think about customer service and how they think about their organisational structure. They have torn down all the boundaries for the contact centre. They have put teams together so they can operate more like an agile team.
• I get very ‘growly’ at the amount of times I hear companies say that they are customer centric and they put customers at the heart of everything they do when they absolutely do not let employees do what they think is right for their customer.
• Sam’s best advice on where to start: Research. Really get to know your customers because they will have changed. The past two years will have changed people and their needs. And I think companies have to reconnect to what their customers really want from them, what they really need, because it won’t be as complicated or as fanciful as they think it will be. It will be more straightforward, but you won’t know until you ask them.
• Sam’s Punk CX word: Imaginative
• Sam’s Punk XL brand: NatWest

About Sam

Samantha (Sam) Richardson is a principal visioneering consultant for Twilio Foundry and has spent more than 20 years working with the world’s most recognizable brands to elevate their customer experience strategy. She is a lifelong advocate for customer-centric thinking, is a service and experience designer, and is passionate about putting human connection at the heart of all brand communication.

You can find out more about Twilio here, do say Hi to them on Twitter @twilio and feel free to connect with Sam on LinkedIn here.

Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay