← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#831: CSG's Megan Lukitsch on radical simplicity in CX
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in. What if the ultimate goal of customer experience isn't to create a memorable moment, but to deliver an outcome so seamless and intuitive that the customer doesn't remember the experience at all? All agility requires brands to pivot from building complex, memorable journeys to engineering simple, almost invisible pathways to customer outcomes. Today we're going to talk about a counterintuitive but powerful idea that the future of customer experience is not about creating more elaborate experiences, but about radically simplifying them to the point where they become forgettable in a good way. We're going to explore how focusing on effortless outcomes and leveraging AI to enable simplicity and can become a measurable growth strategy. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Megan Lukic, Vice President of Global Sales CX at csg. Megan, welcome to the show.
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Thanks. It's so nice to be here.
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B
Yeah, looking forward to this topic here and definitely, definitely an interesting one. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at csg?
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Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Sales for our Customer Experience division and CSG is a global leader in monetization and experience platforms. And I've spent about 20 years in this space and worked with leading brands around the world. Really focused on turning those moments that matter into momentum. And I think of moments that matter as the ones that make you money, that save you money and build brand equity and seen a lot of technology trends over my time. But I think the one thing always holds true, which is the brands that really nail these moments that matter tend to be the leaders in their space. Yeah.
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Yeah. So yeah, let's dive in here and I want to start at the strategic level here and I want to get back to what I what I teed up in the intro and it's this, you know, this kind of counter intuitive idea that an invisible experience can be preferred by customers over even exceptional ones. You know, I think there's so much, there's so much talk about, you know, the, the wowing and, and all that stuff of customers and certainly there's good case studies there. But that invisible experience over, over the exceptional one is kind of, you know, kind of contrary to CX philosophy, let's say. So you know, for, for leaders out there listening who have invested heavily in, you know, moments of delight, journey mapping, all of that, you know, what, what's the most compelling strategic reason to start this, this shift more to that, that invisible experience experience?
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Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that for a long time customer, customer delight was the gold standard that we were striving for in customer experience. But I think today that's a luxury that most consumers really aren't asking for is what, what they are seeking today is not exceptional moments. They're seeking immediate outcome. They don't really want to marvel at the journey and you know, be delighted in everyday interactions. They want to get things done and they want to move on. You know, I can think about an example in my own life that's, that illustrates this. Like my first business trip of the year was last week and it happened to be scheduled at the same time as winter storm firm.
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Oh yeah, huge storm.
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Right. And it was predicted to result in the most flight cancellations and delays in US air travel. So I live in Buffalo, New York, so travel that's impacted by weather is, is not something that is foreign to me and I, I generally am like suited up to deal with it. And the day of like my flight came and I didn't really know what to anticipate but I was pretty sure it was going to result in like frustration and anxiety. And middle of the day I get the text that I was anticipating from the airline and it was pretty simple. It said we rebooked you on a flight due to the storm. Here's your new flight, we saved your upgrade, here's your new seat, we already checked you in. Travel safe. And I was shocked at this because what I was expecting was something telling me my flight's been canceled, my blood pressure to rise, and redirecting me to an app or a website to go fix the problem myself. But instead the airline had done all of that for me. And I got four more more of those messages. It wasn't the first flight that was changed for me and I got to my destination 28 hours late, but I didn't spend one second fixing the problem myself, the brand did all of it for me and that's what customers are expecting today. Know who I am, know what I'm trying to get done and get me, get me there as fast and efficiently as possible. That's the win that consumers are looking for. And that's the shift wasn't exceptional, but it was frictionless.
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Yeah, yeah. And so you know, for all those, all the complexity and sort of complex thinking around personalization engines and complex marketing stacks and all that, certainly there, there was a lot of logistics behind that, that experience that you just, that you just mentioned. But on the surface of like you weren't taken to a page with a million different personalized options and, and had to go through a bunch of hoops. Right. So like in a sense, right, Simplicity can out perform. Sophistication is, you know how, how do you, you know how, how should leaders, I guess how do leaders typically go wrong in, in kind of thinking about sophistication as sort of the gold standard versus that, that simplicity?
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Yeah, I think a few things, I actually think that simplicity is probably the new sophistication. Right. People are really focused on their time. Right. Time is a thief and consumers don't want to give you any more of their time than absolutely necessary. And so you've got to create these simple interactions where they can get in, get out, get things bought, get things resolved and move on. And the current environment isn't really designed for that. You've got these very complex martch solutions and very in depth tech stacks and multiple teams that are interacting with customers. It's marketing, it's sales, it's support, it's finance and they're all doing it kind of their own way. And the intentions are so good. Right. We want, we've customers want to be, we want to make customers feel like they're seen and they're valued and they're important. And so the approach is often let's just pump as many messages as possible at them from all of these different sources and get their attention. That's the opposite of what customers want. Like we just published our annual state of CX report and we found that 70% of consumers, so the majority of consumers are saying they are so overwhelmed that they are just ignoring messages at this point. They don't even open them because if it's not top of mind and the thing that they're trying to solve for right Then they just completely ignore it and they think that if the message is important enough the brand will resend it and that's True. But then that's more messages that are coming on top of the hundreds of messages that they're already getting every day. Right. Average adult gets between 350 messages a day, from emails to voicemails to app notifications and work stuff. And. And it's just not working. So I think the opportunity that we have is, you know, break it down, send fewer messages. Make sure that the messages that you send are impactful, that they drive action, that they're tin. And make it simple. Fewer options. Right. Less noise. And that's what today's consumer is responding to, and that's what they're asking for. You know, and we're seeing that brands that are implementing that, they're starting to really separate from the pact in terms of delivering that experience that consumers today crave.
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Yeah. So I mean, by that token, then, I mean, you could say, and I. There's. There's a handful of brands that come to mind in my experience that do this is. There's some where I just, you know, I get 20 messages. Let's just say I assume a day, a week. I don't even keep track anymore. I'd get too many. There's others where when I get a message from them, I actually open it because they don't send me 20 messages a day. Right. So I know, okay, they're sending me a message. They're, you know, and I would say maybe not 100% of the time it's something I deem valuable, but it's often enough that I, I open it versus skip. Right.
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No, that. That's exactly right. I mean, you'll. I often say simple is sexy, and that's really what people desire. You know, Amazon, Uber, that experience has set the stage for that just in time. Messaging. Right. The messaging is relevant when I need to do something that they send me a message. And to your point, I open those, I respond to those. It's the other brands where they send me, you know, hundreds of emails and messages that are just like, hey, we're here, or hey, we're having a sale. But it doesn't drive me to do anything. I ignore those. And those aren't the brands that get the bulk of my time. Money. Money or loyalty.
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Yeah. And so doing this simplicity. So, you know, taking. Taking it a little more tactical here. You know, you've mentioned that AI is kind of the. The equalizer that enables some of this. This radical simplicity. So maybe talk us through, you know, beyond some of the. Some of the. Maybe go to use cases. How can a Brand use AI to remove friction and make that, you know, quote unquote forgettable and yet positive interaction.
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Yeah, absolutely. You know, I guess when I think about AI as the equalizer, it's more than just smarter chat bots or better personalization or faster automation. All of those things really matter. But it's using AI in experiences that are today probably places where you exhibit, where you have friction. So if I think about like a customer that is opening a support ticket, that customer is already coming in hot, right? They're agitated. They don't want to be spending time opening a ticket to fix their product or get their service restored. And you know, so they're going to enter their information and as soon as they start interacting with that, that, that ticket reporting process, I can go to work. It can be looking at who is this customer, what is the product or service that they have from us, how long have they had it, what have they maybe done already to try to resolve it? Where have they been on our website? Like what, what's the sentiment that, that they have when they interact with us? How do they like to be communicated? What channel like AI is doing all of that in milliseconds and it's starting to help guide decisions. It could be something as simple as saying hey, here's the answer to your problem and delivering an app or sending a link where the customer can self serve a fix or if a human's necessary, getting that customer directly to a specialized agent who can fix their problem and delivering all of that information that AI just gathered to that agent. So customer's known at that point, they're not repeating basic information and giving their address and restating their problem and trying to, you know, explain who they are. The agent already has that. So now you've got an AI empowered agents. You've got a customer that's going to have their problem resolved as fast as possible. Their customer effort was super low, right? They had to go through the motion of contacting you and telling you what was going on and but the resolution was really fast. And so now you've got fast time to resolution so you're lowering your operational costs and you've got that consumer who is just getting what they need to get done, moving right along with their day. That's what they're expecting and that's the experience that they're going to remember. That's how you know, their blood pressure went down, problem got fixed, they moved on without spending a ton of time on it. That's the win in today's environment.
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Yeah, absolutely. You know, I often say you can't fix what, what, what you can't see. And so I think, I think there's, there's two engagement points here. The first is to get everybody that's involved in a customer journey or experience in the same place. You know, you need a working session of marketing and CX and support and finance. You know, anybody that's involved in the journey that you're. That you're evaluating. Get everybody together, walk out a few hours and map the whole thing out. Put it on a whiteboard, right? Draw out all the steps and then, you know, engage what I like to call a friction audit, right? So take that one interaction. And, you know, you usually suggest you start with something that's like, high volume, like, what's. What's the something that's happening a lot with customers? Maybe it's a. Like a billing question. And you map that experience out and you look at it from the customer perspective, like, what are all the steps like along the way? What are the decisions that are being made? What are the handoffs between departments or systems? And look at every step along the way and ask three questions. The first is, why does this step even exist? Who owns it? What happens if we remove it? And when you start looking at it on a myopic view like that, with everybody sitting, you know, at the same table, as you start to uncover, like, those duplicated steps, you start finding redundant approvals, you start finding that there's conflicting data sources or data sources that are missing altogether. Together, you might find, I don't know, policies are outdated or old messaging or incorrect messaging. And I think one of the biggest aha moments is you tend to discover that your process is built for your brand's internal convenience and not built to drive customer outcome. And that's where all that complexity lives. And so when you start, like, getting rid of those duplicative steps or you start, you know, finding ways to smooth out that journey, that's when you really start to build momentum and speed, right? You do that once, pick one journey, fix it, roll it out into production, find your success points, and then do it again. And, you know, you're not looking for perfection at this point. A lot of this is trial and error, right? We gotta try new things and see what works. What you're looking for here is momentum, right? Journey of a thousand. What is that? The phrase journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, and that's really the case here. Simplify one, prove that it works. Let that be the blueprint for future, future journey mapping. And, you know, we're seeing that our customers that are doing this are really starting to see rapid results from attacking it one step at a time. And if we look at it from the customer lens, like, you know, one of one data point that came out in our survey, that here was that 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. So if you spend that time to fix the experience and fix the journeys and you know, remove those unnecessary steps and make this an effortless experience that actually drives revenue and loyalty. So it's time well spent.
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Yeah. And, and so let's, let's follow on that as well and, and talk about the, the measurement component of this. And so certainly again, you know, the, the high level business KPIs don't change in, in regards to, you know, making things simpler. But are there other measurements, are there different measurements that are used when we start thinking about, again, we're trying to create an experience that is so seamless that it doesn't feel like an experience. So again, I'll just put my own thing. Sending a survey at the end of that seamless experience is a disruption in my opinion. So, you know, how do you, how do you measure things that, that are meant to be almost invisible?
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Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think that the traditional CX measurements like NPS and CSAT still matter and will continue.
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Yeah.
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It is important that we understand how customers feel about us. Right. Do they like us? Do they don't like. Because that, that is very important. But if we're going to start focusing on those forgettable experiences, the way we measure that is really around operational KPIs. It's you know, time to resolution, first call Resolution Customer Effort Score, which has been recently introduced and that starts to measure like is that experience frictionless? Is it fast, is it efficient? Or are we just like really good at being friendly, at being slow? Right. Which is what MPS and CSAT will tell us. And so when you start marrying those two together, you're looking at dashboards that are showing NPS and CSAT trends along with those operational KPIs of time to resolution and first contact resolution. Then you're going to start seeing, hopefully you're going to start seeing both of those go up into the right. Right. So increased nps, increased desat, faster time to resolution, et cetera and you'll start to see that result. You'll start to see that reflected in those scores and in those survey results that you're sending out. I think you'll also see a higher adherence to surveys. Right. People don't love filling out surveys at this point because they feel like it's time that they have to spend that they don't want to give you when the experience is good and maybe when they've been surprised, surprised at how experienced it was. Good. Like the airline example I gave you. Right. I was genuinely Surprised at how effortless that was. That would have been a great time to ask me as a longtime customer, how are we doing? Because I would have given a much better feedback score than I normally do. So I think it'll drive customers to give you feedback, you know, if, if you're doing this as part of that kind of effortless experience.
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Yeah. And so how do you. Certainly at the stakeholder executive level, there's certainly a lot of interest in fancy AI implementations and all the bells and whistles and everything like that. How do you make the business case for simplicity over something that is maybe a little flashier and more visible, but potentially less effective than this invisible kind of journey?
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Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think you, I think your business case here, you know, you start with one of those high volume, high cost customer journeys, like maybe an onboarding journey. And you look at that as a financial model and not just, you know, as a CX project that's, that's got, you know, experience outcomes. So you're gonna start with your baseline economics. What's your current cost to serve per interaction? Like how much does it cost you to onboard a new customer today? How many touches are involved, how long does it take for the customer to get, get to value? That's your baseline. And then you start applying some of these simplicity concepts, right? You're moving steps, automating handoffs, using AI, resolving issues faster. And then you can start looking at two things. You can start looking at cost down and value up, right? So on the cost side, you've got less interactions, fewer contact agent interactions, shorter handling time, things like that, that's going to drive down your operational costs. And you look at that compared to the value side, which is all that faster time to value, less friction, higher loyalty, you're going to have higher retention rates, you're going to have higher lifetime value of a customer, you're going to have more expansion opportunities. And so you've got your two financial metrics and then you just. The key then is just telling the story, right? You know, you have to say more than just hey, we made it simpler and our customers really like us now, like that's good, but you've got all those metrics. We reduced average resolution time by X and not eliminated y percent of repeated context and that created the annualized savings, right? You, you've got your financial story there and you've got both growth levers and margin levers at the same time that you can, that you can present. It's now this isn't just this nice to have theory. It's actually a competitive strategy that has financial impacts. And you know, we see that across our customers that we've worked with. I mean, we've seen customers that, you know, I'm sure that they have 32% less agent transfers and interactions and 14 times faster resolution to things like billing issues. And this is resulting in them saving millions of dollars in operations and probably most importantly, driving hundreds of million dollars in additional revenue. So the financial argument is absolutely there.
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Yeah, yeah. And so thinking about, you know, looking ahead a bit as, you know, some of the things you were just mentioning, as well as other other AI related things and just evolving this customer journey to be simpler, all these things kind of happen. Where is the most valuable part of humans in this mix here? There's certainly a lot of capabilities that AI can bring to the table to simplify and do all those things. But where are the human led interactions going to provide the most value?
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Yeah, absolutely. I guess the question on everybody's mind now, is AI really going to replace the, the need for humans? And I think it's actually the opposite. I think that AI is going to make the role of humans more valuable and not less. AI is handling that predictable, repeatable, fast stuff. The what, the when, the how fast and humans get involved when it's emotional and strategic, it's the why, the what if, the what next, the why not. You know, humans have to get involved when you've got, you know, you've got conflict resolution, when you've got uncertainty, when you've got ambiguity, when there's emotion that's involved. Right. AI hasn't figured that out yet. You know, it's when a customer's frustrated or a customer's making like a, you know, a high impact decision, or they're considering like a long term relationship with your brand. AI can't handle all that. AI can resolve some issues, but only a human can really like build a true relationship. And only a human, I think can help build trust. And so you can use AI to really superpower that human with, you know, financial analysis and, you know, intense scoring and historical analysis. And you can make that, you can help that human have all of the information that they need to help guide the customer to good decisions. And that human interaction just becomes so incredibly important. So like AI is creating space for humans to show up even better. And at the moments that really matter, you know, they're the advisors, the problem solvers and they're the relationship builders. They're absolutely. AI is not going to be able to Replace the human role in any of that, I don't think anytime soon.
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Yeah, yeah, no, agreed. And you know, I would say maybe a follow on to that is just. You might have already answered this, but, you know, as in thinking of this, this concept of, of invisible interactions with what's the, you know, what's the brand or competitive differentiator there. If, let's say everybody starts adopting these things and everything becomes so seamless, like where, where does a brand really stand out?
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Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, I think when we get to the point where everything is fast and efficient and frictionless, then, you know, then I think the competitive differentiator really becomes relevance. Right. If it's, if it's easy to interact with anybody, then it's how does that brand make a consumer feel and how well does it understand them?
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Yeah.
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And, you know, you're starting to move then from transactional to trusted. And, you know, the competitive advantage then again becomes will a consumer trust you with their time, their data, their money, their loyalty? Like, who do they consider to be the brand that will consistently show up for them with clarity and understanding them versus just making it fast and easy? So I think it's all about that relevance and trust.
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B
Yeah. Well, Megan, thanks so much for joining today. Two last questions before we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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Yeah, I think a year from today we're going to be talking about, you know, AI not being a theoretical feature anymore, but how it is actually has been implemented and is now deeply ingrained in the operating systems, you know, that manage customer experiences. Like, we're not going to be saying who adopted AI, because everyone will have adopted AI at some, at some level by then. I think the story really at that point is going to be like, who has used it successfully, who has used it to help scale their human interactions and who's emerging as leaders is where I. Where I think we'll be in a year.
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Nice, nice. Well, and last question for you. 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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Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I think for me it's, it's really kind of staying close to the edge of our business and not focusing on the center of it. Like, I am adamant about meeting with customers and partners and frontline sellers and support, like our support teams and our marketing teams every single week, because that's where all the action's happening. Right. You know, it's where you're hearing customer feedback. It's where you're feeling friction if exists. And it's really getting in front of all that and understanding all of those input points and knowing how to kind of learn from that. Like this call extent learning, loop of listening, taking in information, testing out new things, adjusting strategy and doing that constantly. Like that's an everyday, every week thing for me. Because I think that's how you stay ahead of what's happening in the market and you're, you know, you're helping create it versus reacting to it.
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B
Yeah. Love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Megan Lukic, Vice President of Global Sales CX at CSG for joining the show. You can learn more about Megan and CSG by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode hit, subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in continuing consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.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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The Agile Brand.