Having Conversations with People and Leveraging Customer Data for Improved CX

Sumit Saxena
So, hello and welcome to the next episode of the CX Files. Today I have with me Michelle Martinez, who’s held very senior level roles at companies like HomeServe USA, Doma and Wayfair in CX. She’s a CX Thought Leader and a speaker. And she’s going to talk to us about something that we normally don’t talk about on this podcast. We normally talk about how you should collect customer feedback. Michelle is going to talk about today’s data that companies organically collect from their customers, but do very little about. It’s a fascinating subject and with that I’d like to welcome Michelle. And Michelle, please do a better job of an introduction for yourself.

Michelle Martinez
Well, thanks so much for having me. I have to say, I’m really excited about this conversation because you’re asking some questions that I think are gonna be really interesting to a lot of people. So I’m really excited to delve into the topics. And in terms of my background, I think you pretty much covered it. Yeah, I’ve been around the block for a while. I’ve had over 25 years of working experience in a variety of different kind of roles that are all within the forum of CX, starting within marketing and PR, customer success, client success, everywhere through to operations, types of roles within contact centers, and then ultimately, most recently, within strategies specifically around CX. So that path has been really helpful, though, because I’m not kind of, I’ll call it like a philosophical ivory tower CX strategist. I’m someone who’s actually been in the trenches and has experienced many of these elements firsthand. So I think that brings a certain level of insight into some of these conversations.

Sumit Saxena
What you’re talking about is that you have also been a tennis coach and you’ve worked with USDA as well. And I think that’s fascinating.

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, so way back in the day, I was very super passionate about tennis. When I had my oldest daughter, I took very much a pause just because time is limited. And I decided to spend time more with the kids than playing tennis, but it’s been a lifelong passion of mine for sure.

Sumit Saxena
Fix my serve at some point. I’m not gonna fix my life. All right, let’s dive in. So the topic for today is unsolicited data sources. So Michelle, what are unsolicited data sources? Yeah, sure.

Michelle Martinez
So I think it’s probably good to set up the two sources of data so you can juxtapose them. So solicited data is typically your survey data. So this is information that you’ve actually gone out to customers and you saw it and you’ve gotten their feedback. Unsolicited data is all of that information around interactions that you have where you haven’t specifically asked the customer for an interaction. So a great example would be all of your phone conversations that you have. That’s all unsolicited data and information around the customer experience. Chat content as well. Reviews, to a certain extent, right, depending upon how you capture your reviews, reviews can be unsolicited data as well. Anything you find in social media, that’s all unsolicited data. So that’s the distinction between those two sources of information around your customer experience.

Sumit Saxena
All right.
And so this is data that everybody collects, right? We call center data reviews. Why do you think it’s not as widely used by companies to action as solicited data is

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, it’s unwieldy, right? It can be incredibly large. So if you think about all of your contact center interactions, depending upon the volume of call volume that you have, if you’re talking about over a million interactions in a year, that’s a lot of information to sift through. And the tools that have been historically available to do so have been somewhat limited in that they’ve been not contextual and they’ve been very specific to utilization of words. And there’s now this opportunity with much more robust tooling to be able to go significantly beyond that and start looking at contextual types of analysis. And I also think, you know, with tooling around social media as well, that hasn’t been as good historically either. And I think that’s a wealth of information to me. I think of it as customer experience and what customers think about you is really what they say when you’re not in the room, right? And it’s just like a brand. It’s the same type of thing. So what are customers saying to you when you’re not in the room, when you’re not surveying them? Because I think that that information, and it’s not even I think, we’ve seen that that information is actually really different between what you capture and solicited data versus what people tell you, kind of the unvarnished version that is out in the wild. And so, again, going back to kind of the challenges, I think it’s really been around the tooling and just the vast volume behind it. And I also just think as a CX practice, we haven’t really thought about that as being sources of data. We’ve really focused so much on this more structured environment. This data is all unstructured. That takes a lot more work to parse through to really get an understanding of what is that information that you have.

Sumit Saxena
Right.

And the part of the problem with the unstructured data is that sometimes it’s hard to comprehend because it’s talking about things that we’ve never traditionally gone out and asked. And we have not asked this because we didn’t know that this kind of a problem existed, this kind of a perspective existed. So a lot of times this data is flowing back to us and we don’t realize that there is information contained in this data. We think it’s noise, but it’s actually data flowing back. I think it’s a powerful way of actually collecting data. Michelle, can you give a real life example of how you’ve used unsolicited data in your career? 

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I think that’s such a valid point, right? We ask survey questions thinking we’ve got a very clear idea of here’s what the challenge is and this is when I should ask my question and this is what the question should be. And you’re totally right. You know, the unsolicited data, one of the benefits is that they’re telling you information that you’re not even asking and how do you structure that as well. But going back to your question, I think a really great real life scenario was one that we did with Wayfair. So Wayfair had made a change from a policy perspective around its return policy. And basically for anything that wasn’t damaged, they were now going to increase the return shipping fees. And this had a financial value to the organization as I’m sure you can imagine. And I was really concerned about what might happen though from a customer experience perspective and that the long-term value for the organization would actually be negative, not positive, because you’d be impacting the reputation of the organization. You’d now have to spend much more dollars from a marketing perspective in order to reacquire customers. They would stop shopping with you, et cetera. And so the best way that I could go about demonstrating that this could be a problem, because if you think about it, that timeline in order to actually get the data, but you’ve already done the damage, right? That’ll take you probably a year, particularly in the furniture space where you only purchase something two and a half times a year. So the best way I could go about it was I went into social media. And what I did is I put a kind of a benchmark in place. I put a baseline in place and I said, prior to the event of us changing our return policy, what was the negative commentary that we had around returns associated with Wayfair. And then what we did is post that change, we looked at what was the percentage of negative commentary associated with returns from Wayfair. And you saw very quickly within a two week time period, a significant uptick in the number and the amount of negative sentiment around Wayfair’s return policy. And it just continued to go up as we were looking at those numbers. So that enabled us to go back to the organization and say, hey, this might be policy you’d want to rethink. And here are some ways you could go about doing that. And we spent some time thinking about it from a data perspective. Are there very specific segmented groups where maybe it does make more sense for them to pay more for that return policy, but maybe there are others that we want to kind of, I’ll call it shelter from that return policy, maybe first time buyers, et cetera. And it enables you to then come up with several hypotheses around what are possible workarounds so that you’re still working with the business to help them achieve their financial value while at the same time making sure that you’re not impacting your long-term lifetime value of your customer significantly.

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, I think it’s a great example. And I’ll tell you why. I was wondering how you would solicit a feedback for that if you had a survey and you asked a question how much did you like the fees being increased on you guess what the answer would be didn’t like it at all right and you take that answer to your organization and they’ll say of course they didn’t like it right so I think the only way to do this is through the organic unsolicited data like you spoke about and I think that’s that’s powerful because otherwise how do you sell the idea of customer lifetime value and how these kind of actions can affect your long-term economic perspective rather than making short-term business, quarterly business goals that we are all looking at. So that’s great, Michelle. So can you talk us through some of the tools and techniques that you’ve used to gather this data and then to maybe take it from being a data point or a hypothesis to actual action that you can take.
This is that.

Sumit Saxena
Yeah, absolutely. So one of my favorite tools, I’ve been using them a couple of times now, comes from an organization named Spiral. And Spiral really does some of that work that I was talking about before. They’ve migrated from that non-contextual analysis. So as an example, when some other tools did sentiment analysis, they would look for negative words and they would count the number of times a negative word comes up in whatever transcript you’re looking at. But the problem with that is that sometimes you can have negative words come up, but it’s actually overall a positive sentiment around that experience or around that piece of feedback. So what the new tools, sorry. or vice versa.

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, exactly. Or vice versa, you could have positive words and it’d actually be negative sentiment totally. And so with these applications of AI now, you’ve got this amazing capability to start looking at the contextual environment so that now you can understand, although there are negative words in here, overall, this is actually a positive comment. And then what you can do is you can start applying that information to whatever root cause is associated with that. So if somebody should call in and say, you know, I tried really hard to use your website, I couldn’t use your website to resolve this issue, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Well now you have an understanding if with these tools of, oh there was a website issue, here’s the information that they were looking for, how often does this and the frequency with which this happens. You apply a severity by doing the sentiment analysis piece on top of it. And now you’ve got a really structured way to be able to prioritize what actions you need to take within the organization because it’s by volume, it’s by severity, and you can now go back and say, hey, look, we’re getting a lot of feedback that on this page on the website, people are looking for X, Y, and Z, and they’re just not finding it and they’re picking up the phone. And the great benefit to an organization is you can now say, hey, if we can deflect these phone calls by resolving the root cause issue of fixing whatever they’re looking for on that website, well, now I’ve saved the organization a whole bunch of money. And oh, by the way, I’ve also improved the customer experience at the same time, which is kind of the magical panacea that we all want to be in in CX, which is we want to deliver cost savings and ROI while at the same time improving customer experience. So that’s really kind of the mechanism that you go through and those are some of the tools that I’ve liked. And so one of the things that you can do and I think we touched upon this in our previous conversation was how do you link the experience across channels, right? So you spoke about people calling you because they were looking for some information and you could see some rage clicks on a particular website at a particular place. And that’s where you figure out, okay, this guy was trying to find some information on this page and he’s calling now. So that becomes a powerful way of actually using that data to take action.

Sumit Saxena
Yeah.

Michelle Martinez
And it’s such a great point. There are a variety of different ways that you can get to that. One is you can have teams in-house that have an understanding of, I’ve got this data source, so let’s say it’s maybe your product team that’s responsible for your website data, and then you’ve got your service team that’s responsible for your contact center data. It’s really important for those two teams to collaborate and share that information to be able to get insight. Some of the more advanced organizations are those that have an opportunity to really invest in technology. There are several omni-channel solution providers that are doing a much better job of being able to tack and tie all of these elements together. Intercom is one of the ones that I know of that’s able to pull together, hey, I see that this person went to the website. This is the page that they were last on. This is the moment that they decided to call you in the contact center. And so you can tack and tie that data together on the back end to be able to really understand that root cause.

Sumit Saxena
Fantastic. So you’ve come to a place where you have data, right? So you’ve collected data. You have to now take this data and turn it into information. Take us through that process. How does that happen?

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, so I’ll tell you, a kind of cheat. So Spiral as a tool does that for you, essentially, right? They’re tooling when they’re taking in some of the contact center volume, chat volume, review volume, I don’t think that they’re quite robust yet on the social media side. I’ve used tools like Sprinkler in the past in order to be able to do that. But when you aggregate that information, that already comes essentially prioritized. Sorry, aggregate that data. It comes prioritized to provide you with the information that you need to know. And it also is pretty clear about this is the root cause that you need to address. So that comes as an output. And so that’s why I call it a little bit of a cheat in terms of how you go about it, because now you’ve got really tangible insight to be able to go to the rest of the organization and say, hey, again, these are my five top root causes for contact center drivers. I’m bringing that to the organization. These are the things that you might wanna fix. Maybe we can work collaboratively on how to be able to do that, right? Otherwise, if you don’t have tools in place to be able to do that, it becomes pretty challenging, quite honestly. And the best way I would recommend going about it is really to look at where, if you can find data on your most upset customers. So as an example, we did this when I was at HomeServe, and we looked at what are the characteristics of our most upset customers. What we found is that it was customers that had contacted us more than, it was somewhere around three to four times called us, more than three or four times. Those were the customers that got escalated pretty quickly and the severity of their complaint became very intense. We took a look at that data and so we sequestered all of our conversations of customers that had had four or more contacts with us. And we actually really focused on a narrow band of customers that had 10 to 13, which was tragic, right? Unfortunately, HomeServe had a bit of a problem, which was when customers fell off the happy path, I’ll call it, they didn’t just like stumble off the happy path, they like fell down the entire flight of stairs bumping along the way. And so we said, let’s figure out what’s going wrong with these really bad experiences where they’re contacting us 10 to 13 times. And we did, it was manual, right? Listen to a bunch of phone calls and we wrote down what did we find to be the drivers. We would do all of the hard work in terms of identifying what that root cause was. And then we came back to the organization and we said, okay, in this narrow sliver of where it’s really, really bad, here’s why it’s really, really bad. And we mapped that against, you know, kind of the classic, map it against the customer journey and be able to pinpoint here are the two or three spots where you’ve got the most challenge from a customer experience. Let’s work together on being able to resolve that. 

Sumit Saxena
Fantastic. Now comes the hard part, right? So you’ve got the data, you’ve got an insight, you’ve now got to go to a team that needs to address it, right? As CX professionals, we can only pass on this information, right? How do you go and sell this data to internal teams? And now I’m talking about both upsell, because you have to A, sell the idea to your own bosses, maybe their team leaders, and also laterally to the team to take action basis to this data.

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, so great question. And it’s so important because I think a lot of times we stop at the, okay, well, I’ve got the data and insights and now I can, it’ll be great. But no, you actually have to do that additional  legwork.
So, um, I think there’s one core component that’s foundational that has to happen before you get the data. And that is you have to have already built relationships within the organization. So one of the core things CX practitioners need to do is really. I’ll call it reach across the aisle, but it’s just touch base with all of those parts of the organization that are maybe upstream of where you are or in some part of that customer experience pathway and have conversations with those people to understand what are their goals, what’s driving them, what are their KPIs that they have in place. Once you understand their perspective as a leader, now you can start to think about, all right, how do I shape that data that I have into a meaningful story that really covers the what’s in it for you when I’m having the conversation with someone. And it’s interesting, because when you have these conversations, particularly the larger, the more matrix, the more siloed an organization, what you actually find is that you sometimes have competing goals. And that’s actually something that’s really worthwhile because very few people within the organization will have the perspective to be able to see that, hey, the sales team over there has an objective and a KPI that is directly in opposition with what the marketing team is trying to achieve. They can’t both be successful. And you can actually escalate and elevate those conversations to others within the organization and let them know, might be worthwhile for us to kind of realign and make sure that we’re all kind of marching to the same beat and the same drum. So that foundational work needs to be in place and building those relationships is really important. And I’m a huge advocate of not just business relationships. I’m a huge advocate of bringing in the personal into those conversations. Ask about family, ask about pets, get to those emotional drivers and connectors with other people so that you can then really come in with some of that tougher conversation and you’ve got that emotional basis behind you. So those would be the two foundational pieces. I think secondarily, once you get to the storytelling, and I think you call it correctly, storytelling, around the data that you’ve captured, you really have to think about what are the emotional drivers that I can leverage in order to get people to buy in? Because the reality of it being, as much as we want to be data-driven, and as much as we want to think that we are super rational human beings, we’re not. Our decision-making, I can’t remember who it was, whether it was Gallup or somebody else, has identified that 80 to 90% of decision-making is based on emotion. And then we apply data to that emotion. So you start with emotion. With that being the case, as a CX practitioner, and also knowing that that’s how your customers typically also respond, is emotion first and then kind of data. That’s the same approach that you need to take internally, whether it’s up or cross-functionally. So it’s important to think about how can I present this in such a way that I drive an emotional response. 

So at HomeServe, another great example, we used to take a phone call that we had from a really bad customer experience, and not because the agent wasn’t being amazing, it was all of the other elements that had kind of come together or not come together in certain cases. And we would listen to those phone calls with our senior management team. And everybody would kind of cower, right? And they would think of, oh my gosh, almost embarrassed about that experience. And the moment you do that, everything that comes after that emotional engagement then gets listened to. And everybody’s on board with you to say, all right, how do we solve this problem, Michelle? What are we going to do about it? And you can now give very tangible information around, okay, this is how often this happens. And you can have a meaningful dialogue because everybody’s bought in that this is important. Now it’s a conversation around, how do you do it, the timeline associated with it, and the resources that you can leverage in order to get it done.

Sumit Saxena
So this is fantastic. So, Michelle, I’m a founder who speaks a lot to CX professionals, right? And I can’t tell you the number of times people have told me that I’m great at CX, but I can’t sell. But essentially what you’ve told me right now is selling 101. How do you sell what you found to internal teams so that they buy it? Right? So it’s almost like you’re not selling, you’re telling, it’s a story that is unveiling on them and I think it’s a fantastic way of actually delivering value to the organization. And I think too many times, CX has been too siloed, right? This is our job, our KPIs, we’ll send out reports and that’s the end of our job. But it’s not, right? End of the day, we have to deliver on what we found. And I think it’s great that what you’re talking about is how CX professionals can actually go across the aisle and start forming those relationships so that there’s action. And also because you’ve been front and center of that data, sometimes it’s so powerful to actually be embedded in that action, that the value that the teams can derive out of it is tremendous. I think that’s a great point you make. So, give me like an example of what you’ve done and you’ve been really proud of in terms of capturing, and I know you’ve touched upon a part of it earlier also, but if I was to ask you like one stellar success story of using unsolicited data and applying it to a company, what comes to mind? 

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, I do think that Wayfair example that I gave before was pretty powerful. We’ve done it in the past at Wayfair, sorry, at HomeServe as well, going back to looking at those phone calls from those customers that were between, you know, 10 and 13 phone calls and going through that analysis and identifying where the source of pain really was. I think those are probably the two best examples that I have. And there was one thing that I just want to say, make sure that everybody’s super clear on, which is I’ve learned so much more from my failures than I have from my successes. And as much as this sounds like, Michelle’s done all this great work, like a lot of it has been because I didn’t do the good work or the outcome wasn’t what I anticipated it to be and having learned from that experience as well. So I just want to put that out there that as much as it sounds like it’s all great and it’s all perfect, there’s a lot more falling down than I think we very often share with one another and I want to share that I’ve done my fair share of falling down. 

Sumit Saxena
No, no, fail more is a mantra, right? You fail more means you’re trying more, you’re going out of your comfort zone. So I think it’s great. So if I was to summarize this, you’re saying unsolicited information is powerful because now we have information which has come directly from the customer when you were not around. So they’re telling you about things that you didn’t even know existed or perspectives or motivations that otherwise we would not have asked for. You can take this data, make this into some kind of a hypothesis and we talked about tools like Spiral which would help you do that. Take this data and most importantly, how do you take this data and actually start to make an impact by forming those relationships with the team, selling the idea of corrective actions to the team. And therefore, I think that’s a great way of doing it. And on our podcast, we talk a lot more about soliciting data, how do you get data, how do you get more data, but I think this is extremely powerful. So thank you, Michelle. So this was the hard part of the conversation. Now we’ll go to the really hard part of the conversation, which is the rapid fire question. 

So I’m gonna ask you a few rapid fire questions. So in the spirit of rapid fire, try and answer it as quickly as possible. I leave it one word, but I know what happens. So if you need to talk more, I’m not gonna stop you. I’m gonna just nag you a little later, but let’s start.

Okay, so what’s one word or one phrase that describes CX perfectly?

Michelle Martinez
Emotion.

Sumit Saxena
Okay, what’s the most important CX metric for you?

Michelle Martinez
Apex score, and I can talk more about that.
It’s actually a new score. I’m really high on these guys. They’ve kind of unlocked the, how do you get to the emotional drivers of your customer experience? So NPS is very much about, would you recommend our product to somebody else or your experience or whatever it may be to somebody else. Apex actually asks questions around the key emotional drivers. And it’s really figured out a way to be able to quantify what I’m going to call the squishiness of feeling. So I’m super high on them. 

Sumit Saxena
Okay, so we have our next topic of our podcast now. Apex score, Michelle, we need to do this at some point. The brand that you admire most for its CX?

Michelle Martinez
Lemonade.

Sumit Saxena
Oh, really? Okay.
I thought it would say Mayfair. I think Mayfair is great as well. What’s the biggest myth about customer experience?

Michelle Martinez
That it’s all data driven and that it doesn’t include emotion. 

Sumit Saxena
Okay.
Future of CX in one word?

Michelle Martinez
Predictive.

Sumit Saxena
Oh, nice. Okay.
One tool or technology you think is going to change CX?

Michelle Martinez
That’s going to change CX. I mean, AI. Like, I hate to say it. I know everybody will, but…

Sumit Saxena
No, but I think it’s going to fundamentally change the way CX is done. So I completely am with you on that. What’s the most challenging aspect of delivering a great CX?

Michelle Martinez
Understanding those emotional drivers.

Sumit Saxena
Yeah, linked it very well to the first question. Nice, doing well.
OK, one book or a resource that you would recommend on CX. 

Michelle Martinez
My favorite book is The Power of Moments, written by Dan and Chip Heath.
It’s absolutely phenomenal. I don’t think a lot of CX practitioners think of reading it. I think it’s a lot more kind of leadership, but anything by Chip and Dan Heath is so applicable to CX.

Can’t recommend it more. Okay, one piece of CX advice, the best piece of CX advice I’ve ever received.

Michelle Martinez
You can’t fatten a pig by measuring it.

Sumit Saxena
Then now you know you.
I almost feel offended because that’s my core job.
I measure the CX so thank you for that. I feel the pain but yeah it is one thing you could change about the CX industry. What would that be? 

Michelle Martinez
Give CX a P&L. 

Sumit Saxena
How do you do that? Another topic for discussion? How do you do it now?

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, well, if you’re expected to deliver ROI, you should have a full P&L and own it.

Sumit Saxena
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s wonderful. I think that’s gonna be a game changer, right?

Michelle Martinez
Yeah, it would be.

Sumit Saxena
Fantastic, Michelle, that was great. I think great conversation, great rapid fire. Thank you very much for being here. And I think we have identified a couple of more topics of discussion. So at some point we should have you back.

Michelle Martinez
Sounds great, I’d love to come back. These are great questions for sure, really exciting.