Customer Contact Week gathers leaders that span the customer journey, from Marketing to Operations to Customer Care. CCW talked with me and two other leaders speaking at CCW NoLa to discuss some of the keys to delivering great customer experience, challenges on the journey, and the personal meaning of world-class service with speed and efficiency.
Download the entire Customer Contact Week Speaker Series Q&A or you can also find it on the Customer Contact Week Digital site.
Here is my interview in its entirety:
Question: Our CCW New Orleans theme this year is focused on delivering world-class service with speed and efficiency. In the context of your work, what does speed and efficiency for the customer mean to you?
Answer: For me, it’s about speed and agility in servicing the customer’s needs. That could come in the form of how quickly we respond to an issue; how efficient we are at solving it at first touch – while remaining consistent with our brand tone, yet still with a personal human touch, independent of channel (stores, online, social, call center, etc); it’s also the speed of shipping out an order as quickly as possible.
On the Digital Marketing side, we like to try new things. We don’t love mass communication (who does?) we like relevant communication. From the digital media we buy, to the preference center we launched (enabling newsletter subscribers to opt down in frequency of email received), we don’t want to inundate our customers with our shopping messages. We’re also trying to be better at communicating non-sale messages, and focusing more on pairing up looks, new site features that make the browsing experience better, or our Click & Collect solutions.
Q: Tell us a little more about your speaking role at CCW New Orleans and how it relates back to your current focus areas. What makes you passionate about this topic?
A: This session might be a bit different, since my title or position is not necessarily Customer Service or Customer Experience. However, leading the Digital Marketing and Ecommerce team for one of the largest apparel retailers in Canada, we obsess about customer needs. So I believe my session will touch not only how to do things for the buying customer, but also your internal team members (think about it, they are your customers as well), not to mention our external vendors or agencies; they are an extension of our team, and so we refer to them as our partners (again, they are customers as well in the broader sense).
Being in the retail industry, I’m passionate about change. I hope I’m one of the leaders working to bring change to older legacy thinking (we’ve always done it this way) and technology by acting fast, thinking faster, and being iterative in our approach (small mistakes will be made, and fixed even faster). Retail leaders of today need to not fear change, but embrace it. And I am passionate about solving retail’s issues, or at least playing a small part to do so. I sit on a few boards and associations – I like to collaborate with like-minded people who share a passion for disrupting and bettering processes and technology to create a more fruitful customer experience.
Q: What CX milestone at your current organization would you say you are most proud of? Why?
A: Implementing Scrum sessions. We started doing this in June 2017. How does this impact our customers? Well, each Scrum session we undertake involves a technology, service, or strategy that improves the user experience for customers, be it live chat, testing chat bots, getting ready for Black Friday, launching a referral marketing program, etc. We needed a better way to launch more customer programs with better agility and efficiency, with way better communication. Scrum has helped us achieve that.
Q: In your view, what is the biggest challenge when it comes to customer contact and customer experience?
A: We all talk about personalization. And we all stress the fact that we need it. But are companies and brands going about it in the right away? Or at all? If you don’t have the right content and the right contact strategy (from content to media to timing to roadmap, etc) and you don’t have the right, agile technology powering your personalization and growing with you, personalization will fail. So the greatest challenge over the next few years is not the need for personalization. It’s getting it right!
Q: There are so many technological advancements spurring transformation in both customer contact and customer experience. Which technology currently excites you the most? Why?
A: For me and my line of work, I think Chatbots, if done well, and Virtual Reality, are the ones that excite me.
VR in particular (which can also stand for Virtual Retailing) can be the next evolution of making online shopping easier and more fun. We lose that sometimes. Online shopping shouldn’t be stressful. The checkout process shouldn’t scare you. And items not fitting properly shouldn’t impede a purchase, especially if you can be up front and state your amazing and easy returns process (you do have a good one, right?)
So imagine if we can work on a solution that allows you to be 99% sure that the clothes you are about to buy will look good on you and fit just right? Now that’s something to be excited about. Coming from someone who loves to shop online, I know any doubt can alter confidence in the purchase decision (i.e. lead to an exit rather than a conversion).
Another thing I see happening as it relates to physical retail stores, is less product in stores, and more unique experiences in them. Brick and Mortar stores will start caring less about sales per sq. feet (a main metric in retail), and start caring more about store experiences. For example: if you sell hiking shoes, imagine being about to test those shoes on different hiking surfaces, maybe even test it out on a climbing wall? Wouldn’t it be cool for the retailers to also provide you maps and paths to wherever you’ll be going on your hike? That’s putting the customer experience first and foremost.
Q: Can you share a fun fact about yourself?
A: Sure. I have represented Team Canada at the World Ball Hockey Championships on 4 occasions, winning gold twice and silver once. People are often surprised that there are organized leagues and events for ball hockey, but there are. And some current and former NHLers have taken part in them as well.
Q: Anything else you’d like to share with our CCW audience?
A: I know I may be coming at this from a Digital Marketing and Ecommerce perspective, but I am pretty certain that my session will have key takeways you can initiate right away to drive change and adoption (and disruption!) in your organizations. Looking forward to meeting you all.
Download the entire Customer Contact Week Speaker Series Q&A or you can also find it on the Customer Contact Week Digital site.
Check out the CCW NoLa Event for more info.
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