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B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#65: Transforming CX with AI plus People, Processes, and Platforms, with John Durocher, Calix
00:23:03
Are your people, processes, and platforms delivering value or to drive better customer experiences, or are they—and your CX—disconnected and siloed? Agility requires a willingness to adapt and evolve, as well as a deep understanding of how...
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- [00:01]
John Derocher
The Agile brand.
- [00:08]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, bestselling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.
- [00:34]
Are your people, processes and platforms delivering value to drive better customer experiences or are they and your CX disconnected and siloed? Agility requires a willingness to adapt and evolve as well as a deeper understanding of how customer trust is built or broken through simplicity, personalization and empowered employees. Today we're going to talk about how brands can transform their customer experience using AI powered strategies. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome John derocher, Chief Customer Officer at Calix. John, welcome to the show.
- [01:07]
John Derocher
Thanks for having me on.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a timely topic here and looking forward to diving in. But before we do, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Calix?
- [01:19]
John Derocher
Absolutely. So as you heard, I'm the Chief Customer officer at Calix, but how did I get here? In my career, I've kind of rode these big waves of business evolution. So I started at Accenture and worked on globalization and consolidation, outsourcing, non core functions as global delivery models. From there I went to Salesforce and got on the cloud evolution and building a success team kind of wave. And then I've ended up. My final stop here is at Calix. We're really trying to help our customers move from selling a commodity to delivering a differentiated experience, to deliver an experience first kind of solution.
- [02:01]
Greg Kilstrom
Nice, nice, that's great. So yeah, let's dive in here and definitely some great experience that gives some great insights into what we're about to talk about. And first thing I want to touch on is AI's impact on customer experience. Certainly we talk about AI a lot on this show. Everybody's talking about AI a lot, of course. But I'd like to hear from you. How does Calix approach AI as an organization? And you know, what would you say is a guiding principle there?
- [02:31]
John Derocher
Well, there's a couple of different dimensions. First of all, there's the approach of like, how do we adopt it? I'll talk about that first. Right. Which is, you know, really encouraging people to experiment. Think about what are the, what are the business problems that we want to solve? In our company experiment, but we've actually put governance around it because you can experiment, but then if it doesn't get to scale, it's not that useful. So that's been a big part of our focus is identify a problem, test it out and then can this scale to help a department or the entire company. And we put some ground rules around that from a product perspective because we are a product company. Right. We believe that AI has to be fundamental to the solution. It can't be like bolted onto the side. So we were in the midst of replatforming. There was a perfect opportunity to re architect how we were going to approach AI to begin with. And then lastly, as the chief customer officer, I think it's got to be more about making sure that AI enhances the human experience, not diminishes that experience. Right. Because I think as a subscriber or as a customer, you think this going to be better for me or worse for me. And we really want to lean into saying, hey, this should be beneficial both to the employee experience and if that's good, then the, you know, consumer experience could be better as well.
- [03:51]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I know we've seen, I'm sure you've seen as well a lot of product companies, I'd say in some cases slapping AI onto a bullet list of features, in other cases, you know, more meaningfully, you know, adopting it. But you know, you mentioned using AI to enhance the customer experience and that's absolutely. Instead of just again using AI for, for, for something that's not going to create real value. Can you share in an example of, you know, how, how is this being realized? You know, how's it proactively solving problems for your clients and their subscribers?
- [04:29]
John Derocher
Yeah, well, I'll be honest, if it gets released in Q4, so in a few months we're going to be releasing what it's going to do. But on our roadmap and what we're focus these agents that will do network anomaly detection. So you think about, you know, people reacting to or getting a signal or waiting to find a signal. How about if that's all automated so that the network is constantly looking ahead for the anomalies. Again, if you think about that's one, that's a service cloud kind of one where you're saying, hey, we're detecting anomaly and we're getting an engineer to act before a customer even knows it's a problem. Right. So that would be a great customer experience. They wouldn't even know it. Which is really what you want, as a customer, you want to know, not have the problem at all. Right, Right. And that's what we're trying to do is think about what we have. There's a lot of data available, but that data be parsed in a way that can be more useful. Same if you go onto the other side and saying, how do we do hyper personalization for the customer? Like you and I may be somewhat the same and the offer comes in and it, but it's not a hit because it's not personalized to us. It's generalized. But you know, because, you know, our BSPs have lots of data about those consumers. They can, we can really take that data and really tune it. So you're getting, you know, hyper personalized offer in the app or in a channel that's just for you. Right. Meeting, meeting their needs. I mean that's, that's our focus is really trying to do that and then chain these agents together. Because most workforces, you know, a lot of our companies that we're dealing with are small in nature and so they're, they have a capacity problem. So how do we help them put the humans in the chain at the right spot, but automate all around.
- [06:09]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And I, I think, and I know you touched a little bit on this too, this, this idea of empowering employees to deliver exceptional CX and, and just how important that is because again, you can automate things very completely or whatever, but when you take the employee completely out of the equation in the wrong way, the customers are going to feel it or you know, in some cases, customers want the employee in there and stuff. So to empower employees to deliver exceptional cx, you know, what's, what are steps that organizations can take to do this and really help their teams own that customer relationship?
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John Derocher
Well, first of all, make sure they have the same data that the customers have about what's going on. That's not always the case. Right.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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John Derocher
Second is, I think it's around your culture and the processes you put in place. I think it's, you know, everybody has to have policies, but is the policy so restrictive that the customer, the employee can't do the right thing for that customer. And we've seen it right, where the person on the other side of the desk is as embarrassed as you are about what they're having to say. Right. Really empower them. Give them some budget so that they can fix things when they need to be fixed. Because when you have that experience, I was telling somebody about travel experience, I was going out to Iowa to do this bike ride. One of our customer sponsors across Iowa, and my bike, I could see that it was not on the plane, and we were leaving, and the flight attendant saw that, saw that I was concerned, and they said, well, did your bag make it on? I said, it did not. And they immediately, like, usually they would say, well, you know, that's not my job.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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John Derocher
This person went onto a social app that they had in the company in the. In the. In the. And was texting, messaging people, trying to get this bag on the plane. And then the pilot got involved, which I'm like, this is incredible. Now, in the end, the bike didn't make it, but how I felt about that, because they took a vested interest in just trying to help. Right. Versus just saying, hey, that's not my job. That's the ground, you know, baggage handler. So just a little thing like that changed my whole feeling about the bike not making it there.
- [08:24]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. And. And I mean, and in large organizations, I mean, it is so easy to. For there to be unaccountability. Right. You know, because again, I. And I've had good and also terrible experiences in the same way of just like people throwing, shrugging or whatever and saying, how am I pro? And then I've. I've had similar enough experiences where regardless of the outcome, when. When employees are empowered to be able to do and go the extra mile, then quite often that happens. But that stuck with you. You know, even bag didn't even get on the thousand times.
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John Derocher
Right. And it didn't make it like the outcome wasn't what it was, but how they handled it with empathy and a little like it wasn't that hard for them to do what they did. Right. But I felt great about that. I felt like, okay, somebody's trying on my behalf versus just saying, can't be done, because, you know, it can be done. You have the technology. You know, I know where that bag is. You know where the bag is because you told me it's not on the plane. Right. In. In their app. So I think that, you know, like you said, accountability over blindly standing behind a policy is so powerful. Right?
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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John Derocher
And then, you know, rewarding that front line for doing that. I wish, you know, probably if I was a really good customer, I would have got that guy's name and wrote a thank you for trying. Right. And more people who are like you would be just an overall better experience.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, definitely. So how does a company find the right balance between. You know, there's these automated systems that are great because they do a lot of the stuff that employees, you know, AI is better at lots of things than humans. It's also not as good as at many things as humans. How does an organization strike the right balance between, you know, using technology where technology is good, things like AI, and also, you know, maintaining the balance where people can try to do the right thing and, you know, for the, for their customers.
- [10:22]
John Derocher
Yeah. I think this comes back to how do they design the customer experience? Oftentimes it's when you think about the solution that they're a company solving. It's at a functional level and they're like, oh, let me automate this. This would be amazing. Right. It would be such a big cost savings and it would be better. But they don't zoom out to say what happens when that doesn't work. They don't get the answer or they need some kind of. And we've had this, like, when it works, it's amazing. Like companies like Amazon, you order and it all works. If you've ever had a problem with Amazon, don't get me started. Yeah, it's impossible. There's no out button. Right. To get to talk to human beings. So I think you have to intentionally design that there will be problems. There has to be a human that can come in and be part of that process. And even if it's only 10 to 15% of the cases, I think you leave customers thinking it was an amazing experience when it worked and it was an amazing experience when something went wrong.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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John Derocher
And that has to be intentional about how you think about customer experience. Because I think most places, you know, in the big companies I was at, it wasn't designed. First functions have a goal that they're trying to, you know, sales is trying to sell, marketing is trying to market. Right. And you go through each function. Nobody's saying, okay, how does this really. How does the customer experience that? What are the seams? What AI is going to do because of how it works, it is going to expose those seams fast. Right. And if you haven't really thought about that, first of all, you won't get the full value out of AI because the data won't be connected, the experience won't be connected, and you'll be automating things that aren't really good end to end. So I think being intentional about the design of that and what role humans will play. We've been talking a lot about this. The things that we want to automate it is so we can increase human interaction, not decrease, because we know that There are things that we do when we interact with our customers. They get better results and then we get better results. So I think you just. There's a big operational savings that can happen, but it shouldn't be at the cost of your entire experience.
- [12:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, last topic I want to talk about is, you've mentioned before trust and simplicity as cornerstones of great customer experience. And I want to talk about that. You know, there's obviously there, there are examples of things, let's call them minor or relatively minor things that go wrong in, in the, you know, in the customer experience. And then there's data breaches or there's other, you know, major service disruptions. So there's a. There's a wide range of things, and some of these things diminish trust over time. Some of them can have a bigger impact. But how can companies rebuild trust where it's needed or strengthen trust with customers, even in light of some of these things happening?
- [13:23]
John Derocher
I think first of all, it comes down to transparency and be willing to share when you're having a problem. Be proactive about that. I'll tell you the story. When I first got to Calix, our incident process wasn't as world class as I would have liked to have been. So I'm getting calls from the head of sales saying, hey, we have a problem. And I'm like, wait a minute, I don't want you to be telling me that. I want my team to be telling me. And I'm calling you right, and letting all of our customers know that there's a problem. I said, we have a lot of work to do. And first of all, it's like getting the data signals, coming up with the process, standardizing communication. Currently, you got to get everybody. Some people are like, whoa, we don't want to share that. We don't want to share that. And there's going to be some tension of what should be shared, what can't be, especially when you get to the security. That's a whole different level of discussion. But, you know, I'd say incidents, and I'm on the side of erring on the side of transparency and information, telling customers what they know. They will appreciate that. And look, I was in the early days of a cloud computing company. Early, early days, and we felt like we should tell them how we're doing and we should be intentional and we should be sharing because, look, they made a big bet. They trusted us to run their systems, they put their trust in us, so they risking their own career. So I, as The chief customer owe them insight into what's happening. What are we doing about it? What are our swim lanes? Because I can't predict how long it's going to take to fix somebody. You cannot do that. But you can at least tell them, I have a plan, this is what we're doing. So they can at least say, okay, they have a well thought out action plan. This is the swim lanes. Sharing as much about that customers, when you do that, they're way more forgiving. Right. In terms of knowing what's going on, they're not happy. Nobody's happy when you have an incident or an outage of security breach, but being in front of that. And I think there's some great examples. Sonos, when they changed the app. I don't know if you're a Sonos user.
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Greg Kilstrom
I know the story, but yeah, I mean.
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John Derocher
Right. And when they started to really communicate, you felt better about the situation versus what was happening before as a customer. And I think that's an important step.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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John Derocher
And committing to sharing. Like we have a ton of user groups, but the long term improvements. So what do you know? Not just what did you do to solve that, but what are you doing to avoid other problems? Giving people confidence that you're looking at this carefully. And again, I think that's an important part of the step as well. And really building trust and letting people, you know, by the way, if you do it enough, they're like, quit telling me that stuff. I don't care. You haven't had a problem. Right. And that's exactly. I want them to be bored with that conversation when we have it, because I know then we've done a good job of staying in front of it and them trusting and saying, this is not my problem to need to worry about. You guys are. Have it under control.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think that transparency is. And to your point, I think most customers, when they're just communicated with, when they know that someone's actually on the other end of the line or whatever, they're going to be a lot, a lot happier. And. And yet, you know, a lot of organizations have some challenges even with that, be whether it's silos or other things kind of getting in the way of, of not only communication and transparency, but also the journey that the customer goes through as well. You know, I always say like a website or an experience shouldn't be organized like the org chart. Right. It should be around the customer. Right. So what can companies do to simplify that? You know, regardless of the org Chart and the, you know, all the stuff. Because some of that, for better or worse, necessary or at least it's not going to change anytime soon. You know, how can a company simplify the journey just so it's easier for customers to interact with them?
- [17:15]
John Derocher
Yeah. Well, let me tell you what we are doing. I had a guy on my team experimenting with just that. Right. With our customers websites and said, hey, what happens if we created an agent to go out to your website and we prompted it to say, I'm a new customer. Are the offers clear? What are the sticking points? Where do I get hung up? What's the flow? Like, think about like if you can direct AI to do that. Now we have that in our hands, we're in a report and we can say how do we make that better? Right. And that's like, I think that's an important part is looking at those touch points, you know, secret shopping, you know, all those things to really experience it like your customers do and find out. Because I think first of all the most important thing is do you understand what that experience is like?
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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John Derocher
You really understand. I mean, you know, we, I was at a company, our CEO used to go do it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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John Derocher
He would go out to the website, try and buy something and then he'd call the marketing team in and said because, because he would go to our site and then other sites.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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John Derocher
And he said, why is it so much easier over here? Why are we not easier? And so somebody's, you know, filling that role and making sure that the links aren't broken. You know, simple things like that, which is, you know, frustrating to consumers and tedious to go through and do, but important in creating that experience.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I mean I think that's so important that not just like the QA team does stuff like that, but it's, it's like other, I mean I know somebody shared with me the other day like some very high level person at Uber, like product person literally does deliveries and like does Uber rides like at some, I don't know how frequent, but they, they do it and they do it regularly. Yeah.
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John Derocher
They're so important. Yes. One of our customers, CEO went on a ride along and, and he was with a technician and he was there and he, he, he, they were walking around and the CEO picks up the garbage cans because they're out the street.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah.
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John Derocher
The guy said like what are you doing? If I'm a good neighbor or if I'm a good partner, why wouldn't I bring these in for them? Like you Know, just little things just to reinforce the behaviors that you want people to take. You model it, you see it, you can see what's really happening versus what you think is happening. I think, you know, those are really important.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So looking ahead, you know, what are you, you know what, what are some of the most exciting potential applications of AI and CX that you're seeing?
- [19:46]
John Derocher
I think those that I mentioned earlier, the hyper personalized ones, I think that is really exciting to market to me as me, nobody else, just what my combination of activities and products that I own, you know, I think the second one is this predictive service when you're fixing things before they're even broken. I mean that's great, you know, acknowledging and being able to do that on a seasonal basis, looking at the trends in seasonal, but also what's happening in the community and what's happening around that and then you really dial that in. I think those are things that humans could never do without lots of humans looking at lots of dials, which is not scalable. So I think that's the other one. And then I think the last one is more of an employee experience. But think about AI powered coaching and having a coach next to you all the time. First of all, it's not embarrassing because it's AI. It's like having a full time coach that just cares about your success. I think those are the areas that I'm really excited about because it can, you know, up level skills, change the experience, make people more productive, maybe make the job more fulfilling.
- [20:57]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. I mean and it's, it's elevating that employee and instead of replacing them, it's, it's helping them do their job better and grow and learn and yeah, that, that's, that's awesome. Well John, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [21:18]
John Derocher
Yeah, so there's, there's three things that I always do. First of all, I mentioned it. Listen closer to my customers. Never stop listening to customers. Right. The second is looking at the data. What is the data telling me that maybe the customers aren't telling me? And then the third is around that I think what you were really going with, you know, where, what's on the horizon for innovation, what's the emerging technology, the market disruptions, how do you apply, you know, these ideas that are not maybe in your industry to what you're doing and so podcast like yours is a is a great one. You know, articles. I'm I dedicate a portion of my time every day to listen to a podcast and read articles so I stay relevant. Otherwise, I think, you know, the world is changing so quickly, I just get left behind.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yes. Love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank John Derocher, Chief Customer Officer at Calix, for joining the show. You can learn more about John and Calyx by following. You can learn more about John and Calix by following the links in the show notes.
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John Derocher
Greg, thanks so much for having me on as a guest. That was a lot of fun.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it was. Thanks.
- [22:23]
Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.that's b2b agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
- [22:58]
John Derocher
The Agile brand.