Finding the value of X in CX |Nate Brown |Engati Engage

Nate Brown, the co-founder of CX Accelerator, had a conversation with Engati on Finding the value of X in CX.

Nate is the CEO of Officium Labs and Co-founder of CX Accelerator and loves all things customer.

His sweet spot is helping employees to understand the customer journey and how they play in role in improving it.

Nate is well versed in a variety of CX disciplines, including journey mapping, survey process and analysis, the voice of the customer programs and employee engagement.

Video Interview- Nate Brown on Finding the Value of X in CX

Finding the value of X in CX- Nate Brown on Engati Engage

I’ll be summarizing our interview with Nate Brown in this section, but if you’d prefer to hear him yourself, we have our Spotify podcast embedded below.

What are the key tenets you focus on for designing and advising on Customer experience?

CX is essentially an end to end management of the customer’s holistic journey.

But there are 4 tenets that need to be focused on.

The first is Strategy and Leadership.

We need to have intentional ownership around that CX function.

Then you get around to the Voice of Customer engine.

It’s about building out the insights that will make you more intelligent as you drive that CX strategy. It helps you understand the thoughts and perceptions that your customers currently have and then isolating those big returns on investments that will make your customers’ lives better.

Then you get into the Experience Engineering tenet. This is about improving the experience through Change Management and Intelligent Project Management . It also revolves around mobilizing the organization towards a common goal of the customers’ live better

The fourth tenet is to anchor all of this in the Employee Experience.

You can’t create amazing experiences for your customers without first designing something great for your employees.

What are the key technologies you see on the horizon for customer experience management?

Nate has been amazed by the Voice of Customer systems. They now allow us to do things like automated customer sentiment.

AI is bringing that to us. It lets us do the voice analytics that helps with sentiment analysis. This is really changing the game.

How can the incorporation of automation and conversational intelligence helping with customer engagement?

Customers want interactions to take place in real time. And real time interactions cannot take place at scale with a human agent.

And to make sure that customers are supported in real time, companies are going to need to opt for Conversational AI.

The earlier generations of bots may have been a bit frustrating, but with the focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Conversational AI, there are improvements that leave customers more willing to interact with a bot.

How ready for a change do you think the customer service industry is and what role do you think AI plays in bringing about that change?

AI has a huge role to play.

The customer service and customer experience base is transforming at the speed of light. The transactional volume and immediate need volume is going to be handled by AI.

Brands are going to have to decide what kind of interactions they want to have with customers.

Do they want to just have simple, transactional interactions where users are looking for simple answers that could fit into a knowledge base (and could be ) or do they want to have conversations about more complex topics (that would require a human )?

Most businesses need to have a healthy combination of these options. We need to guide them to the best resolution path without forcing them to jump through hoops.

If they’ve got basic queries, let a bot handle it. If their doubts are of a more complicated nature, let them talk to a human agent.

Do you think technology can be an agent’s best friend rather than their worst enemy? What do you think about technology helping agents perform better rather than stealing their jobs?

Agents get really frustrated about not having the technology they need to answer the customer’s queries and solve their doubts as fast as possible.

Agents want to help the customers. They want to solve their doubts faster, but the technology they have has not been effective enough for the to do that.

Inefficient technology can even cause burnout among agents.

A collaboration between humans and tech could pan out by building systems that have the information that the agents will need, curated in an easily accessible manner. AI can come into play here.

How have people’s expectations changed through the years? How do companies keep up with that change?

You’ve got to pick your battles. You’ve got to pick a place where you can excel.

You do not have to roll out the red carpet at all places and at all times.

Customers want a good, consistent experience.

You can’t be a jack of all trades. One of Nate’s mentors had said,

‘You need to have the laser focus of an Olympic athlete’

Pick the area where you want to excel and be the Amazon of that channel.

You’ve mentioned on your website, CX Accelerator, that Customer Experience work is all about perceptions. What steps are companies taking to create positive impressions?

Historically, organizations have been saying, “Here’s what we make, come and get it if you want it”.

Now you have to figure out what customers actually want.

Earlier, companies used to put up a brand promise on their website. Here’s what we are and here’s what we do.

Now, people don’t believe that.

Now, your brand promise is what one customer says to the other.

Your brand promise is the actual customer experience

We don’t the power to define ourselves anymore. That power has shifted to our customers. Their perception is pretty much our reality. Tweet THIS!

This requires us to understand our customers better than before and to manage those expectations better than ever before.

The brands that are excelling are the brands that we can trust. The ones that are really credible.

Do you have any other thoughts that you’d like to share with us?

With the new tools that we have, we can tap into a new wave of CX professionals all over the world. That’s the beauty of the gig economy.

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Finding the value of X in CX- Nate Brown on Spotify

Engati Engage

We hope you learned the value of customer experiences in this interview with Nate Brown. Engati Engage will be back with a new expert in a new episode soon. Stay tuned.

Find Nate Brown

Nate Brown clearly has some interesting insights when it comes to customer experience and customer service. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

You could also check out his websites, CX Accelerator and Officium Labs.

More from Engati Engage

Now that you’ve learned about finding the value of X in CX in our interview with Nate Brown, it’s time to learn how to Craft Seamless Customer Journeys. Check out our interview with CX genius Dan Gingiss on Customer Journeys.