Experts of Experience - #27 New Report Reveals Trends and Challenges for the Industry

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

On this episode, Rekha Srivatsan, VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce Service Cloud, discusses the findings of the sixth edition of the Salesforce State of Service report. The report dives into some of the biggest trends in the customer success industry, including the increasing demand for personalized and fast service, challenges of implementing self-service while maintaining customer trust, and the use of AI and data and why it’s crucial in meeting customer expectations and improving customer experience.Tune in to learn:How service organizations are moving from cost centers to revenue generators by meeting the increasing demand for personalized and fast service.Why AI and data play a crucial role in improving customer experience and meeting customer expectations.Why implementing self-service requires a balance between providing convenience to customers and maintaining their trust.How to create a unified view for agents and why the use of technology can enhance customer service and improve productivity. The ways AI should be used to augment, not replace, agents in customer service.Why to consider customer sentiment and the complexity of the issue when determining whether to use AI or human support.How to build trust with customers and why it is crucial for a positive customer experience.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more.--Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at http://www.mission.org.

All it takes is one negative interaction for you to lose a customer. Every touchpoint becomes ultra-critical. Enterprise organizations use about 900 apps across their company. It's just mind-bogglingly crazy. So that one view, the unified view that you can bring and help the agents will go on. 58% of agents at underperforming organizations toggle between multiple screens to find what they need compared to 36% at high performers. These inefficient processes are reducing the ability for our team

to create impact. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Quick PSA before we jump into today's episode. If you enjoy this episode or any others from our show, please hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to your podcasts. Clicking that subscribe button does wonders for helping us to grow our show and continue providing you with great CX knowledge. So without further ado, let's get into today's episode. Today, we are going to be diving into the Salesforce State of Service Report with Rekha Srivatsan, the VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce Service Cloud. This report is packed with tons of insights about how organizations can better connect with their

customers, improve service quality, and drive revenue growth through investments in AI and technology. Rekha is here to help explain all of this and more. So let's dive in. Rekha, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me here. So excited to talk to you about all the goodness from the new state of service report. I've read through it and there's a lot of really juicy insights that I'm really, really excited to get into. And my first question for you is, as you've developed this report with your team, what is the greatest opportunity that you see for businesses when it comes to customer experience? When we first started this report, we had a hypothesis of where we were going to go with

this. And I'm so excited to see the results from this. At the outset, the biggest opportunity I would say is the customers do truly want better, faster service that's just personalized and tailored for them. It's not changing. In fact, it's gone up significantly. The good news is the service organizations do understand that, and they are getting way better at delivering against that demand. In fact, we saw from the report

about 69% of the agents say that balancing the customer service speed and quality, which used to be difficult, has gone down from 76% in 2022, which means the service organizations know how to cope with the demands and the expectations and rising expectations from their customers. The one thing is also continuing to be very clear. The customer continues to be the primary focus for all organizations now. The decision maker's number one priority is improving

that customer experience, and their number one challenge is how they can keep up with it at the pace that it deserves right now. And that's where AI and data are coming in to help. So I'd love to hear, because this is the sixth edition of this report. What have you seen changing, especially last year to this year? Because I think AI has become so top of mind where even one year ago, it didn't have as much attention. Totally fair. And, you know, when we did this report back in 2022, we saw this uptick that we had from service organizations, specifically around measuring their case deflection or signaling that cost cutting efficiency processes increase. But now, two years later, we are finding

that the fastest growing KPIs for customer experience, customer support is actually linked with tangible business outcomes and that renewed focus on growth. So what we are now seeing, for instance, is that the organizations, the service leaders are now responsible for revenue driving at organizations versus just being a firefighting cost center line item in business reports. So that's a huge shift from when we see service organizations actually driving revenue and impacting the bottom line for organizations. So I'm pretty excited to see that shift come through. Oh my gosh, me too. As someone who has been working in CX my entire career and been advocating for the power that the support and service teams are able to provide,

especially when it comes to revenue generation, it's huge and it's really exciting to see that. And I think one stat that I pulled out was 85% of decision makers say service is expected to contribute a larger share of revenue this year, which is really, really great to hear. Yes. What do you think is really driving this shift? I think there are a few things. One, I think the customer is wanting more and more these days,

that personalization that they want, they need everything for them right now, right there. Yeah. And most importantly, the service agents or the field technicians become that first point of contact for most of these customer support organizations, right? Even before a customer interacts with your brand online or digital, they interact with an agent or a technician or on your chatbots, for instance, on the website. What that does is they want to have those answers faster now. And the quicker you're able to solve for their challenges, the longer they're going to spend time with your organization. That gives you an opportunity to do those cross-sell, up-sell

opportunities with the customers because you've now gained their trust and you're able to now deliver the experience that they deserve and they want as quick as possible. So I think that's what's driving that shift. And we're all consumers of companies at this point, right? And how many times it ticks us off when you're having to wait on hold for a long time and you're like, I'm never going to buy from this company again. I'm never going to buy from this brand again. And that's what's driving the shift. And the better experience you have, the better lifetime customer value you have with the customer in your organization. I've experienced this as a customer support leader myself, where we were really working to improve our CSAT and trying all these different things to make sure that our customer satisfaction

was increasing. And the number one thing, like we were hitting our heads against the wall trying to change all these things. And the number one thing that made the most significant impact was speed. If we got back to people sooner, that's what drove the. We want to have immediate responses because we want to go about our daily lives. We don't want to be caught in a service loop. And I think that is what is so exciting about AI is enabling us to provide those faster responses and also tailor it more. And I think the other thing that I would also say is we're also seeing a lot of the shift in subscription-based models right now, right? So many industries, especially the ones in software or technology, are moving to the subscription-based business model. What happens here is the customer success and the retention are now so closely tied to that long-term revenue growth. And because of this, you find your service

organizations focusing on those value-added services that you can provide for the customers and that proactive service to the customers so that you have maximum satisfaction, you reduce churn, and you can drive revenue growth. So I think that trend is also contributing to this significantly, but I would love to ask you too, how many times you would rather pick up a phone to talk to an agent versus finding something that you want online all by yourself and solving it right there. As long as it's easy, I'd rather do it myself. As long as it's something that takes like a couple of clicks and it's like, oh, it's right there.

So the more you can bring services like that to customers, the better it is for the organization too, because you're now focusing your agents to do more high touch activities versus, you know, spending time on solving a simple question that the customer might have. It's a win-win both ways. And truly AI and data can accelerate that for us. Going back to, or just really tapping into this like revenue generation versus cost center. I think this mindset shift is still happening. I think a lot of CFOs or CROs are still thinking about where do we cut costs versus where can we really drive long-term value? And what are some of the KPIs or measures that organizations should really be looking at to prove to themselves the

revenue generating power of the support team? I think the biggest one would be to start doing the customer lifetime value a lot more, because you'll see that that trend, as you see that progress over time, that's your direct answer to knowing that your customer is happy with your company, with your brand, and is investing more on that. Yeah. The other thing at Salesforce we also do is, you know, we look at how many of our customers use more than one of our products.

Are they using two to three more products at Salesforce? Because that's a good indicator that they are truly invested in the brand, in the company, and they are happy with the service and the experience that they get. We usually have your CSAT and your NPS scores. Like all of that is important.

Yeah. But in addition to that, you start tracking the customer lifetime value would be a critical one. Completely. Something else that you had mentioned a little earlier was about the changing expectations of the consumer. It's the number one thing on leaders' minds is how customer mindsets and expectations are changing. How can organizations keep up with this? That's a great question. And I think there are a couple of things, right? Like technology is just changing so rapidly these days. Like we didn't know what chat GPT was two years ago.

Now, if you look at it, it's the fastest growing service and it's crossed 100 million users in under two months and it's growing faster than TikTok, which is supposed to be the biggest channel we have. So what that makes is the technology has become so ubiquitous in the customer's day-to-day lives, and the expectations are rising. What we need to do better is providing those engagements or those touch points with the customers and close the cases faster, which is what's going to help them do that. And the other thing is they also expect customers like you and me, expect everything to happen with a flick of their thumbs. And you want that to be on their favorite channel at the right time, at the right thing. So what we need to do is have service organizations be able to tackle that, keep

pace with what are the different channels that are happening. You don't have to be on everything, but if you have a way to tackle, look at it holistically and see how you can bring that under one console, which will help them do that tremendously. But the reality is we are all learning and evolving at the same time. So you've got to have that strong grasp and pulse on the market, the customer to see where they are at and how you can better serve them. So a lot of customer conversations is what you're going to have to do. Yeah, completely. Always speak to your customer. Number one thing. 100%. Speak to your customers, see what it is they care about. And I also think that

we can really look at who are the major players that your customer is also working with that may even be completely outside of your industry. I mean, you mentioned open AI. This is changing what we expect to be able to do and receive from a business that within a second or less than that, we are able to get a transformational result to a question that we had asked. And that is now what we are expecting more and more. So businesses need to be keeping up with that trend and implementing those, even if they're not a competitor of open AI, everyone should be looking to how consumers are using that product and bring it in because that's what consumers now expect. And truly where the big shift will be for agents is productivity, because you can now bring in this chat GPT or the open AI or the generative AI capabilities

truly in their flow of work. We have within Service Cloud where we have for an agent to be able to respond to a customer, we have our Einstein best actions and reply recommendations right there in that console. So imagine the productivity gain for an agent when they have to think and find an answer and type that up for a customer where you have on your site panel an exact recommendation. All they just need to do is copy paste and see if that's the right way or customize it to their need. But that V1 or the first draft is already there for them in that same view. So think about the productivity gains that we've seen. And we are trying to get more stats around this, but in-house at Salesforce, our customer success group uses Service Cloud, which is a huge deal for us because it's a test

bed for us. We can always test, see what's working, adapt and everything, right? We are now seeing on an average, how many cases we are seeing AI help with the deflection and how many cases or how much hours that gains back for an agent. That's a powerful metric for us to know because that's what other companies should also be thinking about when it comes to how AI can be in their flow of work. So very soon we'll have those stats out there, but we're seeing a lot of excitement around how we can augment agent technician productivity with AI. Something that I hear you saying is actually the parallels between our customer experience and our employee experience.

And when we're driving, for example, as we were just talking about, we should take inspiration from what's out there in the world for our customers. We should do the same thing for our internal teams. If we create ease internally, we can create ease externally. And- Yes, and at scale too, right? Yeah, completely.

And there was a stat in the report that I wanted to highlight as well, that 58% of agents at underperforming organizations toggle between multiple screens to find what they need compared to 36 percent at high performers. And this is such an important stat. And I'm sure that every leader who is listening to this can relate to the fact that these inefficient processes are reducing the ability for a team to create impact. And so what are some of the things that you see are really getting in the way of being able to provide this internal streamlined operation that really then is something that we

can pass along to the consumer? Change management is hard, irrespective of where you do it, right? And the challenge we have with service teams is you don't want to disrupt the business because you do have a job and an accountability to answer your customers. So you've got to think about how you balance that with adapting new technologies and adapting new tools that come your way. So I would say that balance is a little hard and that's a rhythm that every organization kind of has to figure that out. But the second thing I would say is you have so many tools out there now which bring in AI and generative predictive AI capabilities into service. Do you want to try all of them?

Do you want to take your agent out of like 10 different tools to do it? Or do you want to bring it all in one? So that fragmentation of tools and how you need to think about that as a holistic strategy is going to be critical. And the other thing is going back to our revenue point is the cross-sell upsell is always comes into play when you have a strong grasp on that customer across the board. So let's say you have a customer that's engaged with you on a particular case, like they have a problem, they have an issue, they're working with a customer success agent. On the flip side, you also have their account

executor who's reaching out to them to talk about like, hey, I have this new product that's out there that I would love to talk to you about. Think about the customer. You're one thinking, I just need to solve my issue first. Like, I don't want to buy anything more from you. Just solve my problem first. Like, just do that first and then we can talk. So that's where if the agent has that view of the customer on the different touch points that they have with that particular customer from a company perspective, you're able to understand them a little bit better, understand them, solve their cases. And the agent can actually talk to them about the cross-sell upsell in a more natural way versus

like selling to them. So I think the balance of identifying the tools and what you can try, but at the second, keeping your customer at the core of all of it is what's going to help. Yep, completely. I mean, I think there's so many shiny objects right now, like the number of new tools and solutions that are out in the market. It's amazing to see there's so much innovation happening. And at the same time, I really believe that leaders need to prioritize that employee experience. And sometimes just having one tool that does at least most of what you want is actually going to be better than having your team switch between multiple perfect solutions. Couldn't agree more.

And think about the drain in resourcing too. Like it's complete context shift. Each tool is different. They're very intuitive. We did a research last year about this too, where we saw on average organizations, enterprise organizations use about 900 apps across their company. How crazy is that? Like 900 different apps. And for someone to even understand it holistically, they have to go through so many different apps to solve. It's just mind bogglingly crazy. So that one view, the unified view that you can bring and help the agents do that will go a long way. I really appreciate how Salesforce has been approaching this. I really think that just in, I've been a Salesforce customer in the past and seeing how you've really been focused on creating this all-in-one solution has been really inspiring because it's something that has pained me deeply as a CX leader in having, like, why do we have 10 tools to get back to our customer? This is crazy. And so I really appreciate how Salesforce has

been approaching it. Just wanted to let you know. Thank you for being a valuable customer. And you're not the first customer to tell us that. And that's what pushes us to constantly innovate and come back with different ways that we can solve for the customer holistically, versus looking at it from just a customer support problem, just a sales problem. That's not how we are treating it at all. So I appreciate that. Completely. I wanted to talk a little bit about self-service because this is something that a lot of people are thinking about. How can we just reduce the number of tickets overall, let the customer do what you had mentioned earlier, just solve their own problem quickly,

they don't have to wait for us. And one of the stats in the report is 61% of customers would rather use self-service for simple issues. However, there is little room for error. 72% of customers won't use a company's chatbot again after just one negative experience. So the stakes are high. We want to be able to solve our own problem, but we are very quick to lose trust. So how can organizations provide self-service and implement this without risking losing the customer? It's such a tough spot, if I'm being honest with you. Service leaders have such a tough spot in balancing that. The reality is all it takes is one negative interaction for you to lose a customer.

So every touch point becomes ultra critical when you think about the user and how you can do that. There are a couple of different ideas that we've been talking about on our teams. It comes up quite a bit with our customers too. The first one is how closely monitor your bots in terms of like what responses do they talk? What's your tone? We are

now at a point where we are able to have these bots mimic the voice and tone of the company's brand, which is very, very critical. So, you know, there is now, we are at a point where it's going to be hard for you to know if it's a bot or it's actually a human agent, which is the dream for most service organizations because it allows you to scale that way. So watch for that, be close on that. The other thing that we have is one of the features that we have in self-service is called search answers. What search answers does is if you have your agents or customers searching for a question or something on their community, Einstein GPT will bring in a very generated answer that is grounded on the company's knowledge base. It's not a Google search.

It's based on the company's knowledge base when it's directly into that page. So no one has to take them off of that page or go back to something and change and find that. To your earlier point, that ease of use becomes so critical when it is self-service, right? So you need to have your answers right there, but you also need to know the right answers right there. So that becomes a big critical piece. The other thing that we're also trying to figure out is when can we bring in an agent in those bot conversations? And when do we not have the agent bring in the bot conversations? An example is for most part, your simpler case is about resetting your password or, you know, forgetting your username.

Questions like that, you're able to get a bot to answer. When it gets a little bit more complicated on, hey, I want to change the orders that I just did. Typically, that's where you push that funnel to an agent and have them do it. Now, if you train the bot to be able to have the data pulled up, have Einstein or AI to actually tell you, here is the order, here is what the customer did, here is what the changes requested, and we can take care of it, that's a huge win for productivity and case deflection. So think about where Einstein can come play in in your world or AI can play in versus using it as a

blanket for everything. I often see the mistake where customers are just like, okay, I'm just going to use AI for everything. I wouldn't recommend that right now. We are still evolving and we are still learning. Monitor, but do some research on where you can plug in AI and where you can still have your agents help the customer. So that's where I would say that the balance and monitoring is going to be critical. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey.

Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. We cannot go without the human component. We're not at the place, and I don't think we ever will be or should be at a place where there is no real human who is there to step in. There's always going to be nuanced situations. And although AI can be very helpful, we still need to be able to provide that human touch when it is warranted. And so it's a fine balance. Absolutely. It is. And you know, you read all these articles about how 40%, 30% of contact center agents are going to be replaced by AI. It's a pretty crazy stat.

And if the company is actually doing that, they're doing something wrong because you cannot replace agents. The way to think about it is how AI can augment the work of the agent and drive more productivity with it. So it's not about replacing, it's about augmenting. And that nuance is very critical for service leaders, because if someone tells you that you should replace your entire call center agent with AI, that's not the right strategy. Completely not. And just going a

level deeper in this, something I think about is like, how can leaders really decide what is being tackled by AI and where does a human need to step in? Do you have any advice for people on that? We're seeing so many use cases that we are tracking to understand that a little bit better. What I would say is this is where we also need to understand the voice and tone of the customer too. Because if you have an angry customer, which 80% of the time happens to be the case, giving them a bot and asking the bot to ask them three, four questions is not going to be the right experience. So if you realize that the customer is having a negative reaction or a negative response

or is not in the positive frame of mind, positive sentiment, that's when I would say pull the trigger and put an agent there so that way they get that access sorted. That'll be the first step. Like don't go down the path of pushing a bot with more questions when someone's already angry. The second thing that I would say is if you were to do an audit of all the customer cases that come your way in the last month, watch what trends. If your trend is more around like, it's the same question that keeps coming again and again, you don't need an agent. Sure, you can do a knowledge base, you can do a search answers, you can do a bot, like you can figure that out. But if you're getting to a point where you're seeing these questions that come up and the bot is not able to solve in the first five minutes of an interaction, that's your cue to make it

more streamlined with an agent. So watching them in terms of like, how long does it take for a bot to solve a question or how long does it take for them to respond or to solve the case, will also tell you a lot about where the agent can come in versus a bot. So those are the two things that we are seeing now play out with our customers at least,

but it's one to watch. What are some of the things that you see service leaders doing when it comes to AI or implementing when it comes the things that you see service leaders doing when it comes to AI or implementing when it comes to AI that you would disagree with? I don't know if there's anything specific like that, but I can tell you some of the hesitation that we are seeing when it comes to implementing AI and the questions that we get often from the customers, right? It's usually they know they want to use CI, they don't know where to start and they don't know how to go about. So that's usually the fundamental question. So let's say

once you get past that, the next set of questions that we get from customers is usually, can I trust this data? Can I trust the source of this data? Is it securely managed because you're playing with customer's data here? Where is it all managed? And the crucial part is not a lot of companies are spending time on the trust security of the data aspect when they talk about AI. You usually hear the use cases. You usually hear how it's going to dramatically increase your productivity. But all of that foundation is based on trust. And if you don't have that, or if you don't talk about it, then your strategy is a little far. The thing with generative AI is also, it's just so creative and possibilities are endless, but it's still a tool. It will still get things wrong. It will still not be able to

provide the right answers like a human agent would do, which means you've got to worry about the hallucinations and the toxicity, the terms that are now being used in generative AI. So that's a concern. And the last one I would say is, how is this all connected? Like, are you connected to all of my systems? Are you connected? Do you understand my customers well? Like, those questions still exist.

So those are some of the hesitations, at least we are hearing when we try to push AI with our customers. The good news for Salesforce, at least, is a lot of this is built on trust. In fact, trust is our number one value. So we talk about trust. We cannot talk about AI and data without trust. So that's always been our philosophy. And that helps ease the mind of customers when they hear that. But it's one crucial thing that the leaders and service organizations should think about before investing in an AI tool. Like, where is the data coming from? Are you clear about the data? Do they have access? What do they do with that data? Think about that. Yeah. Trust is the most essential

thing. And when you have trust with your customer, it makes everything run smoother. When you have trust with your team, it makes everything run smoother. What are some of the ways that organizations can really improve or increase the trust that their customer has in them? A lot of that comes from resolving their cases faster. And I say that because it matters, right? If you're able to do that faster, you have given me back my time and I trust that you got the right next step. It builds a relationship very quickly. I would say that is a big one. The second one is whenever I interact with a consumer

or a brand for that matter, if they are able to pull up my details without me having to give that, that also increases the trust value because now I know that you know who I am as a person. You have all my details and I don't, I hate when I have to repeat myself on, my name is Rekha Srivatsan, my date of birth is this,

my, you know, verify your questions. Like I hate when you have to do that. That breaks the trust of a consumer or customer pretty quickly. So tackle the case as faster, help them understand that you are on their side, become the trusted advisor. And two, knowing your customer and showing that you know them also brings in the trust

value significantly. There is nothing worse than having to repeat yourself. If you tell one person, I had this experience recently with a very large company that I'm a very loyal customer of. I'm not going to speak about who it is, but it was an airline. And I was speaking to a bot and telling a bot something, but I was also on the phone and I was also waiting in line. And so, I mean, this was a tricky situation, right? I'm hitting them at multiple angles, but I was surprised at how many times I had to tell them

my information, probably like five or six times in this one moment. And my trust diminished in this organization because I had to repeat myself. And I mean, this was an extreme example, but I think in any case, if you have to repeat yourself, if they say, yeah, this is my account number. Okay. We're going to transfer you to someone else or the bot's transferring you to a person now, and you have to repeat yourself. There's really nothing worse. It is, you do not care about my time and I feel disrespected. And now I, I like you less. Essentially what happens. There's nothing that ticks off people

when you have to do that because it's just such a worst feeling. I also usually hate when they put you on hold for 20, 25 minutes and then they come back and say, oh, you're talking to the right, wrong department. Let me transfer you to the right department. It's the worst thing on the planet. So I do this for fun. So I actually call companies to see how they

actually do customer support because that really makes or break a brand these days. And I have two preteen daughters and they are now so wired into doing this too. So we all take turns trying to figure out, oh, how do we get your answer as well quickly? Or if you have to return something, how did you do that faster? And it's quite a fun game that we have going in this household. I do the same thing. And I actually suggest that to any CX leader is to just really think about what are the brands that you like and why? What are the interactions that you have that really leave you feeling impressed or at ease versus frustrated and angry? It's a fun job. And I genuinely do think that you're seeing at least a lot more companies invest in that and, you know, figuring out the right way to go about it. I also really

find it hard when you go to Google search and it takes you some time to find the customer support number for companies because it's all hidden, right? Like why do you make it so difficult to contact someone to change? Like that should be the first thing that you should do, right? When you have a company and you have your customers. So I think there's a lot, there's potential for us to do a lot of things differently, but it's so quick. Customer support is that front and center. Like I said earlier on our call, it's the first interaction that you have with customers. There's an agent or a technician or whoever it is that can truly make or break your brand and define customer loyalty for you. And you actually bring something up I'd love your opinion on. I often hear service leaders or organizations,

CFOs perhaps say, we want to reduce the number of tickets that are coming through. We want to reduce the number of interactions that we have with customers. And I've also heard some leaders say, I don't agree at all. I actually want to have as many touch points with that customer as possible. And I'm curious to know your many touch points with that customer as possible. And I'm curious to know your thoughts on that, because it's a fine balance between your team spending a lot of time interacting with your customer and the pros and cons of that. So, so what do you think? I actually love that question. It also varies a lot by verticals. And I don't know if you're seeing that too, but when I, it, it significantly varies from like a B2B brand versus a B2C brand, for instance, like the amount of customer tickets that you get and the

interactions that you have. It's not a one strategy for all at this point. So you kind of figure out what is that rhythm for each organization. But I will say this though, like if your customer is willing to have those touch points with you, you should be able to give them that. It puts the onus on the customer, but it helps you as a company, as an organization, as a brand to understand your customer better with all of those touch points. So you've got to do that. And reducing the cases, I think that's truly where you can have AI help. Because when you have your self-service community, or when you're able to solve for, the customer can solve for it themselves. It'll reduce the number of cases, but it's not reducing your customer touchpoint. You still have, your customer is still invested, is engaged in your brand and is trying to solve for something on their own.

So I don't think it's one or the other, but I think you can figure out the balance about spending your agent's time on requests with customers. I think that's what we need to do. That balance is what you need to figure out. Yeah. We don't want to completely avoid having those customer interactions by hiding our phone numbers or only allowing them to speak to a chatbot and there being no other option. We want to give them the options, but we also want to give them the solutions as quickly as possible. Sometimes you're multitasking and you just want to go and solve for that yourself. And that's great. And sometimes you're in a time crunch and you just need to talk to someone to get it done. And that's okay too. But oftentimes you find service organizations sometimes make

this mistake of forcing one channel to the customers and that's wrong. You've got to give them options and let them figure it out, but you're there for them wherever they are. So you meet them where they are versus you giving them just one channel and saying all your questions, this is the only way you're going to get in touch with us. That's not going to work. Yeah. I really, really like that you brought that up because everybody's different. Some people want to speak on the phone. Some people want to serve themselves.

Some people have a question that a chatbot can answer and they're multitasking, like you said, and they want to just be able to do that and not be on hold, for example. And giving options is really important. I think the flip side of that is the complexity that that brings for organizations to have agents and teams servicing those. But again, it comes back to the one platform solution. It's one unified platform. Yes. Don't do what we're saying and having multiple different channels a customer can reach out to if you have multiple different tools that your team is using to provide that. It makes things so confusing. So trying to avoid that. If your goal is to alienate your customers from your brand, sure. You have a surefire strategy in doing that, but it's not going to bring them any closer and it's definitely not going to keep

them happy customers for your brand. So yeah, completely. A lot of good learnings. And again, all you have to do is put yourself in the customer's shoes because out of all the functions you have, sales, customer support, marketing, customer support is one that not everyone is a marketer, but you're always a consumer of some brand or some company or something. So you're always a customer. So how do you use that to your advantage to build

the right tools, to build the right experience, to build the right journey for your customers is really critical. So the customer support industry is at such an inflection point right now because it's so easy to be disrupted by AI and the new technology. But at the same time, your goals haven't changed in the last 10 years. You still have to put the customer at the center and you still have to provide the right customer experience. That hasn't changed. But you have now so many new tools and technology to do that better. So you have a job.

You have a responsibility to do it right. There's two things that I want to recommend to anyone listening based on what you just said. One is walking in your customer's shoes, which is easier for some businesses, harder for others, depending on the nature of what it is you're providing. But sitting either as the customer or with your customers as they experience your product is invaluable. You need to have that knowledge of what they are actually experiencing. The other thing that I suggest is customer journey mapping and actually sitting down with

your team and thinking through at every phase of our customer's journey with us, what are they feeling? What are they experiencing? What friction are they experiencing? What opportunities do we have to make this an even better experience? And really thinking through all of that step by step will enable you to see what is going on with your customer and actually empathize with how they are experiencing your product. And it's such a good call out too. And if you do that right, if you nail that, you're going to see revenue opportunities pop up automatically, right? Like it's all timed. And we are at a point where it's table stakes right now to figure out your customer journey is table stakes. You've got to do that. And there have

been times in the past where you could get away with like just giving them a few options or, you know, having one strategy. It's not the case anymore. You've got to figure that out. And doing that will truly help you generate revenue for the company with that trust and the relationship you have with the customer. Could not agree more. We're very much on the same page here. Yes. So a couple last questions for you. Firstly, I'd love to understand what resources, podcasts, books, places do you go to learn more and expand your knowledge of customer experience and product marketing? Oh, I completely geek out in trying customer support numbers and just reaching out

to like online searches for around customer support. That real life experience. Right? Like from your water bottle to the phone that you use and everything. There's a brand that you touch every single day. So what do they do? I'm just naturally curious. And I am one of those people that actually spend time on 1-800 numbers and see what that process looks like. So I do that. The second thing that I would say is I have a few podcasts that I really like. I definitely watch, I read yours and I'm not saying because I'm on the show, but I've been a huge fan of your expertise

and how you bring in new leaders and learning from them. In addition to that, I do like Janine Walters. I think her new podcast that she does, it's actually, it all started with like a very small crux. She asked her viewers to leave a voicemail and she'll resolve that case on the podcast, which is a fun premise. And I got hooked onto it and I've learned so much through that process.

So I would recommend her. The other one is Stacey Sherman, her podcast, where she brings in leaders from different organizations, service leaders that come to talk about, you know, what are they doing? How are they thinking about it? What are the challenges they face? She makes it very personable, which I appreciate. And I would say between those two and doing my own research and talking to my customers, I think you get a lot from that. Amazing. Thank you. Need to check all of these out. Yes. So two last questions for you that we ask every guest. The first is kind of going back to something we spoke about, which is

I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was that experience? This was last week. So I had to get new dinnerware for my family. So I was looking online for about a month. I had to find the right specific one. I finally narrowed it down to something from Crate & Barrel. Crate & Barrel happens to be a brand that we all love and, you know, huge consumer base. And I was not in a position to go to their store. So I decided to order it online. So delivery happened within three, four days, as promised. So I got the delivery. The problem is one of the dinner plates was actually cracked. So I was like, oh God, okay, now I have to take it back to the store. I don't have time to do this. I'm traveling. When am I going to do this? What's the return policy? All of those things.

So I quickly get on Google search to find their customer support number. It was a chat. I reached out to them. They were immediately able to pull up my record and they actually texted me. The text part of it was really cool because now I don't have to be waiting on a Safari or a mobile browser page, waiting to see when the next chat is, but they texted me directly. And immediately they introduced themselves

and they gave me like, oh, are you talking about this order? Are you referencing this particular plate? I'm happy to take it. And everything was done in text and I didn't have to open any other window, nothing. The whole interaction probably took about five minutes total. And the person was immediate to say, okay, I'm going to ship you this and sorry for the inconvenience. I'm also going to throw in a little butter dish to compensate for your inconvenience. I didn't going to throw in a little butter dish to compensate for your inconvenience. I didn't ask for it, but I'll take it. Not a big deal. But all of that within five

minutes and the dinner plate was actually delivered again in two to three days. The problem this time was the butter dish was cracked. So I had to call again. And this time I didn't even go to the 1-800 number and go through the process. I went back to the same text thread I had with this person. I said, hey, you know, I had this problem now. No biggie, but I just want you to know that that happened. Again, very quickly, they were able to pull my record. They apologized and they shipped another one, which reached me in two to three days. What it helped me realize is I didn't pick up the phone.

I didn't have to go to a different browser. I didn't have to go to a different website. All I had to do was chat like I would with a friend and they were able to resolve that so quickly. And I'm a huge Crate & Barrel fan just because of how seamless the process was, but also how fast they were able to do it for me in such a short span of time. So that was a recent experience. And I don't think I've seen other company handle it that fast as they did. And I'm very appreciative. That's great. I'm such a fan of the text messaging. Whenever a brand is, and you can even have that little branded text message thing. It's amazing.

I'm such a fan. Whenever that happens, I'm like, oh, this is going to be so much easier. And I didn't even have to go back the second time. Like I would have expected myself to go back again, start a new text, like nothing. It's just like I picked it up from where I left off. And I'm sure if I need something new, I can still go back to that same text and order that without even going to the website, which is really cool. Yeah. Talk about low effort.

Extremely low effort. Amazing. And then my last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Stop thinking about the customer support teams as a firefighting team and integrate yourself to the business strategy. What I'm learning or where we are now at the point is

customer experience is just a part of what makes a business successful, right? So it's very easy for all these professionals to think that customer experience is the big deal and that can alone drive business success. It's a critical component, like no denial there. But in order for you to truly achieve that, you've got to understand your business goals. You've got to understand everything that you're doing for your customer experience. And you've got to bring them together. The moment you start thinking about both of them and thinking about the business outcomes

that customer experience can drive, it's going to be beneficial for you to know how customer experience or customer support can truly become that revenue generation for the company. And this is something that I learned pretty early in my career. And I think this applies to every leader. And as a leader, you always have to think about yourself on par, but two levels above you. The moment you start doing that, the better it is for you to understand their goals, their outcomes, your exec leadership, and you will start seeing that you're bringing a different expertise and different perspective into that discussion to be able to tackle that.

And that is when you've truly earned a seat at the table and you're able to impact the outcomes for an organization. So the last one is more of a generic leadership comment, but the first one is, you know, you've got to think of customer support more than just resolving the case to actually bringing a customer in for life. Such good advice. I also just want to highlight what you had just said about thinking two levels above you. And it's really highlighting the fact that your internal teams, your colleagues are also your customers to a certain extent. What do the leaders in your company need to understand or see? How can you be thinking for them and delivering something that's low effort for them to understand and act on?

So great advice on all fronts. This has been such a wonderful and insightful conversation for everyone who's listening. Go and check out the Salesforce State of Service Report. It is chock-a-block full of juicy insights that are going to help you improve your customer experience. So Rekha, it has been a wonderful, wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. thriving with Salesforce AI and data. And it is bright.

Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI and data vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services. expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.