← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#702: What it takes to keep customers loyal with Anna Convery, Verint
00:27:22
Does your brand deliver answers faster than your customer can send a text message?
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together, we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. To make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. This episode is brought to you by Varant, a leader in customer experience automation. The world's most iconic brands, including more than 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, rely on Varant open platform and AI powered CX automation to drive stronger, faster business outcomes and significant value. Learn more@varant.com does your brand deliver answers at the speed your customers expect? Agility in CX is about answering customers with accuracy and agility, sometimes even before they finish the thought. If you can't evolve at the pace your customers expect, you're already behind. Today we're going to talk about what Varant's recently published 2025 State of Customer Experience Report tells us about loyalty, automation and the thin line between keeping and losing a customer. To explore this topic, I'd like to welcome Ana Convery, Chief Marketing Officer at Varant. Ana, welcome to the show. Greg.
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A
Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.
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Yeah, looking forward to talking about all this with you. Definitely a lot of great stuff in the report. We'll get to some of it, not all of it, but definitely recommend people read more through the links in the show notes. But before we dive in, why don't we start with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at Variant and for those less familiar with Varant, a little bit about what Variant does as well.
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Absolutely. So Greg, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Varant. In fact, I'm very new to the role. I'm just here about four months now.
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B
Oh wow.
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Congrats and thank you so much. But I've known Varant for an awful long time because I've been in the customer experience market and Varant has always been a company that I have competed against, collaborated with, et cetera. So you know Varant is an organization, a company that has a. As you mentioned A who's who of customers around the world. And Variant has been in the business of customer experience for a long time. So that we have to our advantage, we've had great experience, great exposure working with customers around the world to improve their customer experience, their customer experience, automation and also to leverage new technology like AI to better that and to become very competitive in the marketplace when they deliver the best and world class customer experience to their customers. So, so that's the world of Varant and I'm here as the global CMO and quite frankly loving it so far.
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That's great. That's great. Well, yeah, let's dive in. And so we are going to talk about a few things from the 2025 State of Customer Experience report. First thing I want to talk about is the expectation gap. And so the report shows that nearly half of U.S. consumers, about 46% say that brands fail to meet their service expectations. So from your perspective, what are the most common blind spots that keep, you know, customer experience is talked about a lot and it's certainly something that again, lots of people are seem to be focused on. But you know, what are some of the most common blind spots that keep companies on the wrong side of that 50, 50 split?
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Yeah, it's actually a very interesting comment or point to start out with because I've been in the customer experience world for a long time, perhaps longer than I want to admit. But you know, the customer today is very well educated. They are very experienced in what it is they want to do, what results they want to achieve. And they are, they are comparing each company's experience or each company's journey with another company. It used to be, you know, perhaps maybe 10, 15 years ago, you would always think about your experience being with your bank being what it's like with other banks, or your experience with your healthcare provider being what it's like with other healthcare providers. That's not the case anymore. We actually now compare all sorts of interactions with each other and we want to have whatever we want to do, we want to do it very quickly. We want to get it one and done. We want you to know who we are, we want you to remember who we are when we come back and what we've done. And we want to be treated as an individual, not a series of individual transactions. And so that educated customer is looking for that type of experience. And as organizations we have the challenge of balancing a superb customer experience with balancing our engaged workforce and trained workforce and also the cost of doing business so that we can run a profitable organization. And so you've got all these various competing challenges. And at the center of it is this customer who wants to be able to connect with you however they want to connect with you and have the same experience however they've connected with you and to resolve or to complete their transaction. And today's customer is educated in all those things. And when it doesn't happen, they get fed up and they are very quickly going to make a change if they feel that that's the way to go. Loyalty has definitely dropped quite significantly as well as, you know, in parallel to that education. So that's what's happening today.
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Yeah, yeah. And I want to talk about that loyalty component too, because, you know, to your point, the survey revealed that 78% of customers will switch to a competitor after a single terrible experience. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of thought of like, oh, okay, well, you know, in the long play, the long game or whatever, and it all evens out. But this is after a single terrible experience. So, you know, how should marketing and CX leaders translate that, you know, pretty stark number into, you know, how do they budget for this, how do they prioritize this and how do they make decisions around it?
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Well, you said something in the intro to this area of the study that is very important, and that is today we have a higher propensity for our customers to churn after one poor interaction. Now, many years ago, we would say, okay, it's a blip, we'll give it another chance. Now our tolerance level has dropped quite significantly. And part of that is because it's easier to change as well. We've, as marketing experts, as businesses, we've actually also competitively made it easy for a customer to leave our competitor and come to us. So first and foremost, it's easy to do so. Secondly, we go back to the educated customer or consumer who knows what to expect and has those expectations. And the third part of it is also technology has allowed a lot of this transferability, either of our accounts or data off our actions, et cetera, which also, again, makes it easy for us as marketers and us as customer experience experts. We have got to think about customer experience every day. How can we improve those interactions, how can we deliver what is expected, how can we use technology to really optimize the experience and to better it? And then how can we remediate very, very quickly, not after the interaction, in the interaction to stop that customer leaving? So time becomes super important. And honestly, technology is the answer to help us do A lot of those things.
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Yeah, definitely. And that, you know, that, that speed component, you know, again, going back to the report, you know, speed beats empathy, which, you know, we, we need that too, of course, but it beats empathy by a 4 to 1 margin with, you know, 56% of the respondents ranking. Getting information quickly is the most critical aspect of good customer experience. How do brands satisfy that need for, for the speed and efficiency without turning agents or others into, you know, essentially script reading robots?
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Well, so actually bots might in fact be part of the answer. Not, not script reading, but bots. So think about you and me now today, right? If, if I go to do something with my bank transfer funds, et cetera, I want it done and I want it done accurately and I want to have traceability so that I know it's, it's correct and I can reference that that interaction in this situation. Technology actually does deliver the speed, the accuracy and the ability to do that very, very quickly because you allow the technology to capture the person and authenticate them so that we know that they are the person, they can do this transaction. We also allow the technology to automate it online, whatever channel we want to do, and we have access to the data within that account and we have access to the account is getting transferred to. So here technology can actually, without a human being ever coming into that interaction, can do that perhaps. It's certainly faster, more accurately, and have a traceability factor or be able to remember that transaction. Now, if we have a agent or a person in that as well, the technology can come in to speed up the transaction again, because it can come in to persist the data that is needed and to confirm the transaction being completed while online, to record that transaction, to make sure that data is then appended to my account and, or to my records. And so speed is important because we, Greg and Anna, we have become super intolerant of wasting time. We've become super intolerant of having to have multiple transactions to complete one thing. We now expect it to get done quickly. And the technology and the AI that we're all using right now and really showing great promise. The AI, the bots, the data persistence, the ability to record and transcribe, and accurately calls, the ability to ensure the right data is there. That is what is allowing us to have quick, accurate transactions that hit a very high mark in customer experience.
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You brought up another point a little bit ago, which is it's not enough to just be able to record the information and respond in two or three days and make it good or Whatever you need to be able to respond in real time. Right. So it's speed is not even just speed to, you know, end a normal transaction or something. It's to be able to react and pivot in, in real time or near real time. Right?
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That's right. That's right. You know, perhaps maybe a transaction is, is worth an agent and you need to escalate to a senior person. You need the data to persist because you certainly don't want that customer who's not irritated to have to go repeat everything again. Right. You know how frustrating.
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I've been there.
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Yeah, you've been there. We've all been. Also, if you're using automated or you're using technology and it's not working and that customer wants to get to an agent again, you want to be able to persist the transaction. You want to understand what's going on. You want to be able to give them coaching notes in flight in that interaction so that they can better the outcome. So it's all of these things that we can leverage and are leveraging today to improve the customer experience at the speed of the customer's desire to get it done.
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Yeah, yeah. And of course, you know, that flexibility also includes, you know, customers that responded to the survey also indicated that they do want the ability to talk to a human when they need it. You know, that doesn't mean they can't get it done more quickly with an automated way and that, you know, a lot of the times that's, that's the best course of action. But absolutely, when they want it, they want it. Right. So it's, you know, nearly half indicated that they still at least wanted the option. So, you know what, you know, how do you design something? You know, what design principles help you orchestrate kind of a friction free handoff from a bot to a human at that critical moment.
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Right. And so I'd, even before I'd even talk about the friction free handoff, I'd also talk about what you just said. You know, we have all of these articles out there about are we going to get to a situation where everything will be automated? And it depends on the transaction and the interaction that we're having. There are some things where people do feel much, much more comfortable, especially when it breaks to go to a human being or it could be even it's the nature of that transaction, the nature of the demographic of the person or any of those things. I have an accent, an Irish accent. Sometimes, you know, it actually is better for me to zero out and go to Somebody because perhaps the prompt's not picking up my accent or I've talked too quickly. So you always want to have that option. But to your point, whenever the technology is handing over to the human being, this is where data persistence is important. This is where capturing the activity in flight and being able to capture it from the various different sources, what are they trying to do? What did they key in to say that they were going to do? What did they try to do so far? Who is this person? What is their account with us? Sending that over to the agent means when I come to you as an agent, you know who I am and what I'm trying to do. Immediately I put myself on a good foot. Also immediately I put myself into a position whereby I can now very quickly interact with you in what you're trying to do and bring that quality to it. And then I have the ability to leverage all the fantastic assets of you and I as human beings, which is the empathy where we need to have it, to be able to listen to somebody, to perhaps, maybe take a little more time and explain what's going on to someone, or perhaps to also warrant that maybe something is not working. There is an exception here and it needs to go back. So all of these things come into play and it's having the technology correctly balanced to the right interactions and the people correctly aligned to where they bring very high value impact. And also, quite honestly, from an employee perspective, for agents, they don't want to do mundane, repetitive tasks. They know, quite honestly, technology is better than that, than them. So you want engaged employees and how do we get engaged employees? They know their purpose, they have jobs, they enjoy, they feel connected to the work. And when they're allowed to handle customer inquiries, customer service inquiries, customer experience, where they shine, they become more engaged. And that's a massive reflection on the brand of that company and the customer experience that company embodies.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, that. So that to go, to go to the customer angle again, it's, you know, customers do want speed. They want companies that are able to scale, to meet their, you know, the segment of one kind of approach of really understanding that customer. And yet, you know, according to the research, there is still some skepticism about AI, you know, in particular, and its ability to address things and automation. So, you know, 86% of consumers understand that AI can improve their service experience, yet only 44% prefer automation out of the gate. You know, do you think some of that is based on some, you know, and let's face it, we've all just like the phone tree, you know, doom loop or whatever that you get sometimes when you, when you dial in. We've been on those, I would say less than smart chatbot kind of things that kind of do the same thing in the chat world, but that's not what we're talking about here. But does that kind of carry over in some consumer's mind, do you think?
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I do, absolutely. I think skepticism is a healthy thing as well because we want to make sure we're using the right technology at the right time, et cetera. AI is fascinating. I actually am really, really fascinated by the evolution of AI. I would say even 18 months ago, Greg, there was a lot more skepticism than today. And really AI adoption is accelerating. But here's what's super important. There are a lot of AI tools out there. Just building bots, for example, if you don't know the business or the customer experience world or the data, what you'll do is you build technology in isolation to actually delivering what you needed to do the workflow. So that's why, for example, at Varant we are very, very proud of what we've done in AI because we're, we understand customer experience, we understand automation of customer experience, we understand the digital first world, we understand all of the whole platform it takes to deliver world class experience. And so when we build bots, they're built to deliver the workflows and the impact that they need. Now the other thing I will tell you as well, and you can see this from the survey and you can see this from some of the materials on Varant, is today we are looking for results. It's not good enough just to have cool technology. It has to be technology that works. We need to have automation, we need to have bots that are delivering results. And by the way, those who can deliver results are delivering it. We see this with our customers where they're coming back and showing that they have more efficient interactions, that they have better quality interactions. We're seeing reductions in time, so their operating costs are going down, but, but at the same time their net promoter scores are going up. That's a wonderful balance because that is AI correctly applied and delivering impact. And so AI today is very promising. I would ser I honestly in talking to many of our customers, most of them are saying that they are absolutely using AI, but today they're looking at using AI to deliver results and then building on that to scale out more and more. So it's a very controlled way to do that so that we don't Have. What you and I have experienced is this horrific interaction with technology that is infuriating, frustrating and gets you nowhere. So it's AI applied knowledgeably to the workflows to deliver the results and to deliver measurable impact, to deliver outcomes. That's where we are today.
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Yeah, yeah. Because I mean, the lesser alternative is, I mean, it's like having an employee that doesn't know anything about the company but is charged with trying to serve a customer. It's, you know, they're exactly. They may mean well and as much as AI can mean well as well, but they just don't have access to the right things and they are connected in the right ways. And yet, you know, as, as we move forward, you know, digital and that the ability to connect those, those digital platforms in particular is becoming more and more important. You know, the survey says, you know, 73% of consumers are preferring digital channels to phone. I guess I would count myself one of that 73% as well. I'll do almost anything not to, not to call customer support or things like that. But you know, given that there's a lot of organizations that are, you know, they've traditionally had large, you know, phone support operations and things, what operational changes are often required behind the scenes to deliver consistent experiences across. You know, it's not just like phone or web, it's chat, messaging, social, all of those things. Like, how do you, how do you do that? Well, operationally, yeah.
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And one of the things that often happens with us in the technology world is we look at the channel, we look at the activity and we deal with it. What we have to do is step outside of the technology and look at ourselves as our customers look at us. Because when I'm interacting with you on chat, I expect that experience and that company that I see in chat to be the same company, I see online to be the same company that I would speak to with an agent, a live agent. So operationally, one of the things we have to do is to be very sure of having a persistent brand experience, a persistent and a very integrated customer experience across all of those channels. So that I feel like I'm dealing with the same organization. The other thing, we've touched on this a couple of times here today, is the ability for us to use technology to integrate the data on the back end so that we can actually persist the data of the person and their interaction across these different channels if we do indeed have a multi channel experience going on. And then I think the other thing that we need to do, and here's where technology shines is capture what we're doing so that we can learn from it, so that we can, you know, see what that interaction was, what the outcome was. Where are we excelling, where are we not, how do we change it and then scale it? Because technology allows us to capture the data, interpret the data and then to take the good and replicate it and scale it and take the bad and fix it very, very quickly. And so that's a lot of what we can do there. But it's so important that we remember not to get caught up in a slight siloed approach to customer experience, but to get caught, to really look at it as a holistic approach that has a end to end platform approach that is orchestrated across all of these experiences so that we deliver as best an experience as possible. Otherwise we have those customers who will churn.
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Right, right, right. Yeah. And so, you know, we've talked about several of the challenges. I want to kind of end here on a high note, on a good note, here in a positive way. One, the good news is, you know, the, the winners in cx, they, they aren't just liked by their customers, but they're also profitable. Right. So 80, 86% of delighted customers will purchase again and 81% will recommend the brand. So you know, given this, you know, sure, there's, there's certainly an opportunity for them to leave if they're unhappy or whatever. But like these are some great numbers here, right? Opportunities for brands. What metrics, you know, do you, should you monitor to ensure that loyalty, the, you know, that loyalty dividend actually shows up.
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Yeah, there's a lot to unpack in that one. It has been true, by the way, for many years that the companies that deliver excellent world class customer experience are the ones who show they attract customers, they retain customers, they grow customers. These, this is simple business in the sense that we, you know, you and I both know that's what we want to do. Right. But the other things we want to look at is the cost to serve that customer. So we do have to drive operational efficiencies and that's how we help deliver to the bottom line, the top line. We're going to acquire more of those customers. We want them to deal with us more. We're going to bring better products and better services to them and we'll grow their portfolio with us. That's the other part of this. But then of course, you layer in the customer experience metrics, right? Your net promoter scores, your delight scores, and a lot of the organizations we work with monetize those, they know every point change is connected, very clearly connected to their profitability. And so they watch that and they pay very close attention to it. I would say one of the things that is the ongoing challenge for today's customer experience organizations and that profitability is to not sit still and to look at what's going on in the world of customer experience. We talked a lot about using technology to automate, to use bots, to really have this consistent omnichannel presence, et cetera. That is what's going to continue to help us leverage a strong position and maintain profitability and move forward. And so that I think is it's quite clear that good customer experience delivers more customers and more value to the customers. It's also quite clear that you just can't sit still. You gotta keep moving, you gotta keep working on what you do to keep yourself ahead of the game and keep yourself at pace of what the customer wants.
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Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, Ana, thanks so much for joining today and for your ideas and insights. One last question for you before we wrap up. 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?
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I am a reader, Greg, and both online and in the hard copy. So I actually every morning I read for 20 minutes and it could be something to do with bots, it could be, it could be something, nothing to do with that at all. It could be gardening or whatever. I just feel that if you constantly feed information to yourself that that will help you keep ahead. The other thing and I, this is the part that I love, especially with my role, is when you get access to many people in your own team who have lots of different experiences and knowledge and you take time to listen as opposed to constantly run. You learn more and you see what's going on. You take time to experiment, you do some A B testing, you learn more. And then I think the other thing as well is the benefit of a marketer and somebody in customer experience is we've also got access to our own customers and what they do. And from that you learn so much as well. So, you know, for me, agile is really being open and learning every single day, whether it's through reading, whether it's through talking, whether it's through experimenting and being very, very open minded to listening to new ideas. Sometimes we get used to just saying I'll do it because that's how I've always done it. And that's not good. You gotta stay you know, really, you gotta stay Adjan.
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You've gotta go. Yeah, I love it. Well again, I'd like to thank Anna Convery, Chief Marketing Officer at Varant, for joining the show. You can learn more about Ana and Varant by following the links in the show. Notes this episode is brought to you by Varant, a leader in customer experience automation. The world's most iconic brands, including more than 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, rely on variant open platform and AI powered CX automation to drive stronger, faster business outcomes and significant value. Learn more@varant.com thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkillstrom.com that's G R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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