Today’s interview is with Fortuné Alexander who is the senior director of product marketing for customer service and sales automation solutions at Pega. Fortuné joins me today to talk about National Customer Service Week, recognising and celebrating excellent customer service, the changing world of work, service with respect, simplifying service, applying technology, where to start, contact center heroes and giving them the recognition they deserve and also leadership.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The only thing that limits you on a no code platform is your imagination – Interview with Pierce Buckley of babelforce — and is number 405 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 babelforce for sponsoring my podcast this month.

babelforce is the #1 most flexible platform for contact center service. Pierce Buckley, CEO and Co-founder of babelforce, and his team of telecoms veterans have created a powerful cloud communications solution focused on No-Code integration and automation. Their goal is to break down every barrier to great customer experiences by putting intuitive tools in the hands of people who live and breathe CX.

Pierce and Jonathan Baer of Vonage are running a webinar on the 28th October at 11:00am CET and they will be discussing exactly how businesses are getting maximum benefit from WhatsApp, one of the fastest-growing channels for customer service. Follow this link to sign up. You don’t want to miss out as you will get to see a demo of the babelforce platform in action!

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Fortuné:

• This week we recognize and celebrate excellent customer service.
• The theme this year in the US according to PACE (Professional Association for Customer Engagement) is celebrate the heart of service, where H stands for helping others, E for exceeding expectations, A for achieving goals, R for responding with care and T for thriving through teamwork.
• Here in the UK, the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) is focusing on different themes each day of this week. They are The Changing World of Work, Service with Respect Day, Skills & Capabilities, Effective Strategy & Focused Leadership and Recognition.
• James Dodkins, who Pega recently hired, is doing a lot of video stuff this week.
• One of the biggest frustrations shared by customers and agents is having to repeat themselves or to ask someone to repeat themselves.
• A lot of contact centers have multiple systems that agents have to deal with and log into just to start their day. Sometimes they have to log into 10 or 15 applications. That’s a lot to deal with and it shouldn’t have to be this way.
• With anything that is repetitive and mundane there’s a massive opportunity to deflect some of that work or to help customers help themselves and solve some of these simple things themselves.
• One insurance client: the top contact reasons in the contact center are to check a claim’s status and to ask how do I file a claim? Those are basic questions. To respond to that they have enabled a smart IVR that recognizes who the customer is and whether they have a claim open. It then asks if they would like to know the status of their claim and provides an update.
• There are so many opportunities in the contact center to apply technology to help make the agents role easier and to allow them to focus on more complex and interesting customer questions.
• We’ve seen different sources report that many service agents are facing rising levels of hostility and abuse and that has been particularly true over the last 18 months or so. That’s not acceptable.
• We have to make sure that our agents are taken care of but also that we’re giving them the tools to do their job.
• We need to give agents better technology to give them context of what’s going on with the customer and insight….. if for example this is a bank and the customer has is in arrears and has financial hardship. Technology can be used to display that to agents so they understand they’re dealing with someone in financial distress and know to take a more empathetic tone and not just process them as a widget if you will.
• Are we seeing the return of the unified desktop?
• There’s this notion that if you want to transform customer service you have to have a 360° view of the customer, you need to rip out your current desktop and replace it with a new desktop and move all your data into that new desktop. That’s a very risky endeavor. That sort of move is a once in a 5-10 year decision.
• A better, less riskier approach that we follow at Pega is to take a process that you’re struggling with, the one that’s driving the most call volume into your contact center and let’s fix that process across all your channels i.e. build a case management architecture and then you can activate it in all your channels. Design for the micro-journey. That way you can embed case management and process automation into your existing desktop.
• I’m a big reader of military strategy and like to think about how you can apply some of that notion of decentralized command in other places, particularly in contact centres.
• Do your people understand what are your strategic objectives? What is the mission? Are we enabling our people with the right tools and processes to understand the customer’s intent and do right by them.
• By connecting real time decisioning with customer service we can make decisions about what is the next best action to take. How we should respond if the customer is at risk of leaving. And, what incentive or offer can we perhaps offer them to keep them and to stay.
• Quote from a Jocko Willink book:
  • “You are the most important member of the platoon. I told the point man, you are the one who leads us on patrol. You know where we are going. You got us through all the hazards and are the eyes and ears of the platoon when it comes to sensing danger like ambush or improvised explosive devices. And it was the truth. We all counted on the point man. I had a similar conversation with the radio man. You are the most important member of the platoon. If we want into a large enemy force and we come under threat of being overrun. The radio on your back and your ability to use it. That is going to save us. Your ability to call for fire to contact aircraft or tanks or other friendly forces to come and save us is what will keep us alive in this desperate situation. It will all depend on you. This was also a true statement, but it was also true for the medic. I told him just that, you know, there’s nothing more important than bringing our guys back alive and if someone gets wounded, it will be you and only you who keeps him alive until we get him to a surgical facility, you are the most important person in the platoon. The list goes on, I told the machine gunners that they were the most important without putting down suppressive fire during a gunfight our platoon would not be able to maneuver and survive. The rear security man was the most important because like the point man, he knew we were going in the direction to take us if we got in a gunfight.And of course the enlisted and officer leadership heard the same thing for me. They were the most important individuals on the team, because leadership is the most importantthing on the battlefield. So, and then I would tell each and every member of the squad or platoon or task unit that they were the most important person in the platoon and I was never lying.”
• That obviously comes from a military point of view but I think it’s super important in the company and I think that our contact centre frontline workers need to hear that message.
• The job they’re doing is the most important job in the company. It will keep the customers, it will retain loyalty, it will reprove satisfaction.
• That’s what I believe leaderships job is to do is to make people understand the importance of their work and to recognize their work.
• Fortuné’s Punk CX word: Good.
• Fortuné’s Punk CX brand: Echelon Front

About Fortuné

Fortuné Alexander is the senior director of product marketing for customer service and sales automation solutions at Pega. He has a deep understanding of the customer experience technology landscape and specializes in go-to-market marketing strategy and execution for enterprise customer engagement solutions.

He’s a global citizen who has lived and worked around the world for Fortune 500 companies including Dell, Sony, and Oracle.

Check out Pegasystems, say Hi to Fortuné and Pega on Twitter @fortune_a and @pega and connect with Fortuné on LinkedIn here.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay