Sumit Saxena:
Hello, and welcome to the CX Files, where we talk to the top experts from the field of CX about their experiences, about good practices, and their tips for us in the field related to CX. We have recently done a lot of podcasts about certain aspects of CX. We’ve spoken about getting data from the customer. We’ve spoken about customer success, escalations. One of the feedbacks that I’ve been getting is, all this is great, but how do I get started? How do I go and set up a program on CX? And I thought that was fair. So let’s talk about that. So to talk to us about that, I have with us today Shanta Kumaran Anantalingam, who I’m going to call Shanta only because I have only 30 minutes today, with his permission, of course. But just to do a quick introduction, Shanta is an award-winning CX specialist and he’s a founder of CX Expert Asia. And he’s had the opportunity to actually set up CX programs ground up for mid-sized and large-sized organizations. So welcome, Santa.

Santhakumaran:
Thank you Sumit.

Sumit Saxena:
So why don’t we start with your introduction? Can you just give us like a couple of minutes to introduce who you are, what you do, what’s your experience been like with CX?

Santhakumaran:
So my name is Santhakumaran. I’m from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I’m the founder of CX Expert Asia. Been in the industry for more than two decades. My actual industrial experience about 25 years after my graduation. I’ve been doing a lot of, my background is marketing, sales, customer service, operation, process improvement, technology, interface and so on. So all these domains helped me to become a competent CX consultant and recognized globally. And CX, if somebody asks me what’s your blood group, I will tell CX.

Sumit Saxena:
So there’s a good one.

So, Santha, what I intend to do today is to talk to you about certain things about how do you get started with CX. Okay, so we’ll start talking about, do we need a CX program? If you are a mid-sized or a large-sized company, do you really need a CX program? If you do, how do we get started about it? Who are the stakeholders that one needs to involve? What are the tools and technologies that one might use? What are some of the challenges that one might run into? And then importantly, once you’ve set up this program, how do you keep it running? So a lot to cover, half an hour, so we’ll go as fast as we can, but we’ll basically do a good job of each one of them. So let’s get diving. Imagine a scenario. I’m a mid-sized company. I’m doing fairly well, profitable, customers love me or at least that’s what I think. Why do I need a CX program now and where to start?

Santhakumaran:
It’s a challenging question because customer experience covers the entire organization. So you ask me, it starts from top down. So somehow from my experience with my clients, they will set up a department, customer experience department, they’ll pull resources from customer service or I’ve even seen from people from finance heading the CX department, there’s nothing wrong. But ideally CX should come from the marketing department. Because only customer experience should start from that marketing 101, marketing plan, product development and then towards customer experience. So ideally if these guys take up the job, setting up the customer experience, they will know the end to end spectrum journey of the customers. They can design it straight. So ideally what we do…

Sumit Saxena:
Alright, let me rephrase the question here. So, at what point in your experience do companies start to feel that I need to have a standardized program to measure customer experience?

Santhakumaran:
Yes, normally the CEO would have attended some conference then come across this term customer experience, that’s the intake, that’s the future and call somebody, some management team in the office and shall we do customer experience, go and find out what is it all about. So they will call me, Mr. Santa, what is customer experience all about? So I will need like 30 slides to explain what customer experience is all about. So I started to create the vendors, the mindset that it is a change management program because currently before embarking on the customer experience journey, any company will be very process and compliance centric. We work at bare minimum to meet compliance so we don’t get any penalty, ISO, audit, everything is okay, okay, let’s do business. And it’s very profit driven. So in customer experience, we have to change that mindset to customer centricity, where you put your customer in the center of the design and work backwards toward your processes system and everything. So that’s the starting point. Awareness is the starting point.

Sumit Saxena:
And where does it start? So you said mostly it’s CEOs who’ve gone to a conference or spoken to somebody and this is the future. So it’s us up there. Who is the person who calls you? Is it the CEO who calls you or is it the CEO who speaks to a CMO and then CMO calls you?

Santhakumaran:
Something like that. Either the CMO or sometimes the customer service aid. Can we know more about what is customer experience so I will tell bring your entire management team for the one hour talk I will throw it for free so the whole organization about 20-30 managers will come then that is where I get the buy in and also explain to them that this is a collective effort for the entire company it’s not somebody’s responsibility one department with 3-4 people cannot drive customer experience absolutely.

Sumit Saxena:
absolutely, it’s a culture, it’s not a program to begin with. But tell me what’s the bare minimum? Who needs to be there in that first meeting to discuss this? What’s the bare minimum that you ask for?

Santhakumaran:
Bare minimum give me the person who’s taking the responsibility. Yeah. Let me drive this through, I want to see that person. And I want to make sure that he or she has enough energy to drive this through because sometimes can be very tiring. Right. Very tiring. So the next step, the next step, I will demand to meet the CEO, arrange one hour presentation to the CEO because the top level buy-in is so important for customer experience transformation. At a point we will need some capital injection, change the system and also we need to break the inter-department silo where only the CEO can oversee the entire operation so we need his otherwise Otherwise, I will tell them upfront if you can’t even get one hour presentation for me from your CEO This thing’s not going to work. Let’s have coffee and nice to meet you. 

Sumit Saxena:
No, I think that’s a great filter. So I what I hear you saying is that you need the top level Involvement. Absolutely. You need somebody to come and hand hold this. It cannot be an orphan. There is somebody who’s driving it internally So these are the two bare minimum set of people that you need for that first meeting but as you said this is meeting that officer who’s driving customer experience.

Santhakumaran:
Second meeting, I want to meet the CEO first. So because, I will ask these few questions from the CEO to the CEO. Question number one, are you prepared to move, switch from process-orientated organization, profit-orientated organization, to a customer-centric organization? It’s change management. So we’re going to change a lot of things in your organization, number one. Number two, we can’t expect a group of unhappy employees to create a great experience for your customers. Are you prepared to listen to your employees? That is the question number two. If he’s prepared, let’s continue. Otherwise, nice meeting you as well.

Sumit Saxena:
So we have the basic stakeholders in place. There are a couple of things that you touched upon. One, you said the data currently exists, but it exists in silos because departments are not talking to each other. And two, you spoke about how CX is a culture. And I think both of them are essentially saying the same thing. It’s an organizational driven change. You’ve got two people on your side now. How do you take this and make this an organizational thought process?

Santhakumaran:
So the next what we do, I will push for a three days workshop, a Venice workshop to create the Venice. Bring all your middle management, head of departments, team leads, about 20-25 people for the workshop. We want to line everybody behind now and break the silo, inter-department silo because now how people will work is any company, the head of the department, do you have, are you all staffed?

They’ll tell “no, I’m short of staffed.”

So they have enough time to walk into the office every day, clear the daily tasks, do some firefighting, damage control, and work for 10 hours and go back. There’s nothing else they can do. So you have to take them out of the office, go to some hotel, clear their mind, clear their mindset. Now, we are one team, and that’s our customer. How are we going to future proof our business, so we are ready to welcome our customers in the future, number one. Number two, how to become future ready, and how to stay relevant in the future. You cannot do the business the same way you’ve been doing the last ten years, for the next five years everything changed tremendously. So that will be like a wake up call. So we always focus on solving yesterday’s problem. Today what we’re going to do is, yes, we’re going to find ways to solve yesterday’s problem, and we’re going to design the future journey for your customers. Are you interested? Everybody will be like, OK, let’s do this. I’ll get the buy-in for everyone.

Sumit Saxena:
So we have now buy-in from the right stakeholders. What next? So how do you go about building that basic foundational blocks for a good CX program? What would those blocks look like?

Santhakumaran:
Okay, so the biggest challenge for any organization is from my experience, my consulting experience the last 25 years, they won’t know where are their underlying issues. So I will use this analogy, you cannot see your own children being naughty, but somebody else’s kids you can see like, wow, that’s like a monkey, you know. So we cannot see our own problem because we are so immune, we are part of the problem. So we ask them, give them a piece of paper, write down all the problems you have in your company. They write anything and everything except their name. I will tell them, why your name is not here? You are part of the company, you are the problem in your company. Put your name in. Now, we are the problem and you need someone like me from outside to come and tell you where are the underlying issues. So we do a deep dive, so we start with customer research, journey map, interviewing the customers. So I’ll train them in the methodology for the first three days.

That’s basic.

Sumit Saxena:
Right, so you basically go in and you help them do customer research, figure out what the ideal journey map is, and I’m assuming at some point you are figuring out what are each of the touch points, what are the problems that customers are complaining about at each of these touch points. So once you have that in place, what do you do? Do you then go identifying SOPs for each of them using some tools? What’s the next step from there?

Santhakumaran:
We use design thinking model where first empathize with the customers. At this stage, the empathy stage, what we’ll do, we’ll establish a voice of customer, voice of employees and also voice of management. We want to understand the problem from 360 degrees, everybody’s perspective. And then we go into a deep dive into the root cause analysis, why this is happening. We want to dig out what’s causing this pain for our customer. And normally you can see the correlation between the customer’s pain point in the customer journey and internal issues from the voice of employees will have a direct correlation wherever you have internal problem will reflect as a pain point in the customer’s journey map. So then they’ll be like okay now what’s next so I would make it very clear look we are not here to find whose fault. It can be my department or your department but we are together in this and together we’re going to look for the solution so don’t worry about whose fault or whose department and all that. So let’s work together. So that will give them the room for a breather and feels okay. Let’s work together on this. We need some help.