Learning to Fly featuring Jeff Sheehan

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:04.234)
Jeff Sheehan, you are Next in Queue. Thanks for joining me. How are

Jeff Sheehan (00:08.528)
I'm great, Rob. Thanks so much for inviting me. Happy to be here. we had a bit of a chat before this chat. so we're all warmed up. But it's great to meet you. And thank you so much for inviting me to your

Rob Dwyer (00:22.302)
Yeah, absolutely. Everyone got to miss the first half of this show and that's okay because we

Rob Dwyer (00:32.736)
For those who don't know, let's start. You're the managing director of CX at JS Consulting. But let's talk just a little bit about you and your history. Give people kind of the Cliffs notes of who you are what you

Jeff Sheehan (00:52.124)
me and my history. Well, like I'm Methuselah, you know, back in the 18s. Oh, thank you. As you might have noticed behind me, know, when I graduated university, I went into the military for a 10 -year stint and enjoyed that. got to be an Army aviator, flew some helicopters and traveled quite a bit. And what, what,

Rob Dwyer (00:59.57)
Yeah, you are.

Jeff Sheehan (01:20.494)
In hindsight, it out to be it was a great sort of preparatory experience for customer experience. Because after I left the military, I transitioned to the commercial world into customer service roles. It so happened that I was interviewing with AT&T, which had acquired a company as its sort of computer business. they had a retired army officer who was responsible for recruiting junior military officers.

to sort of create a new aspect in the culture of the customer service organization, which was pretty large. It was about a $3 billion service organization, and it was the most profitable service business unit in, I think, six business units company. Anyway, so that's how I got my job and my start in customer service. And

just carried on. I did a couple of years of field service management that exposed me to contact centers, field engineer dispatch, all the metrics and the measurements. used an enterprise data warehouse to look at first contact resolution, the use of spare parts and the aligning of trained people and their parts usage and their first contact resolution. All this different metrics and their relationships between them.

And this idea of ROI and efficiency was steeped in that for a few years. I went into service sales as sort of consultative. What was interesting was we took the excess bandwidth, the excess capacity of our worldwide customer services organization and brought it out to other equipment manufacturers, of which there are many, because this goes back to your point a long time ago.

you know, standards were emerging around client server computing and, and, there were how many, how many versions of Unix were out there. Networking was coming up with his own standards. You know, there was remember Novell networking. Most people may, may, maybe don't, but there was a lot of stuff going on in the technology industry, a lot of new stuff around storage and computing and networking. And then of course the internet came into its sort of commercial

Jeff Sheehan (03:46.588)
use era, the dot com era. And I worked in a managed web hosting organization at the time. And we were helping software companies make the pivot from disks on servers in your business to becoming a software as a service and using what wasn't called the cloud quite then, but essentially function the same way. having, and this was when Salesforce, for example, was

probably the most successful software as a service company at the time. And so it gets to be part of that. And then I shifted away from being in a customer service role to hardware, where in those kinds of companies, hardware is king. The sale is hardware. The support tends to be lesser valued, even though it generally generates way more profit than the hardware.

I got into consulting and advisory consulting strategy and assessments and things like that. And learned a whole lot about, because I worked with a lot of CFOs. And when you work, because I was selling to the middle market, generally privately held or family owned kinds of companies, and the CFO was generally responsible for the IT. so, you know, things like transformation and digital transformation and

Let's see, we did a lot of assessments or application assessments where we would inventory a whole enterprise of software tools that were in use by virtue of their licensing and find ways to get an ROI and maximize the value. Those applications were giving the enterprise and oftentimes they were spending way more money than they needed to. They had duplicate licensing, they

one user for an enterprise license and all these different things that just sort of got out of control and we would help rationalize that. So my point is to say, I'll spare you rest of my resume, here we are. About five, six years ago, I got into my own solo consulting CX realm because quite frankly, I wanted to and it was a great opportunity for me to do that. It's something I really see myself doing. But

Jeff Sheehan (06:12.636)
Today experience draws on all that past work that is very, very relevant today. They're not old chestnuts of wisdom per se, but they're business principles that are just as effective today as they were 30 years ago. And what I find is there's a whole new cohort of leaders in CX roles and customer service

that may not have been through the same background that I've been through. so bringing that to the contemporary environment of folks that are leaders in contact centers and customer experience management and so forth is a pretty exciting proposition. It's one of those things where you don't know how valuable what you know is until you have conversations like these and you realize, wow, I know stuff and experience with things that is not universal. There are people

who could benefit and want a partner to learn and apply these things to their business. What I enjoyed mostly about my career is it was varied, it was opportunistic. In other words, there were some things that popped up that I didn't have like a career roadmap. And if I did, I was way off road from that roadmap, I'm sure. But I love coming

Rob Dwyer (07:37.788)
Thank

Jeff Sheehan (07:40.794)
I think there's a Steve Jobs quote that like, things that make most sense when you look back after a period of time, you can connect the dots. And when I do that for my own work, the dots connect very nicely to right now with customer experience management consulting. So long answer, but sort of a nice sort of background, general background for what we're going to talk about next.

Rob Dwyer (08:09.256)
Yeah, absolutely. I do want to ask something. As you were transitioning out of the military and into really the contact center world, what kind of similarities do you see between those? I've got some in my head, but I'm curious from your perspective, what kind of similarities that you experience between those two very different types of organizations?

Jeff Sheehan (08:35.382)
Yeah, so there's a lot of surface level stuff that, particularly for people who may not have been in the military, that doesn't make sense. It's not immediately obvious that they connect. the first thing is they're very dynamic environments. The military is a very dynamic environment. You do not control all the circumstances that you work in, right? There are other world events, for example, that trigger the application of military forces.

And we see that every day in the news. You know, I don't need to elaborate on that. The same is true in the contact center environment where the customer dictates the application of resources, right? And the contact volumes, the ways, the channels they use to contact you, how they feel about the experience when they contacted you and the resolution you provided. But there is this sort

out of your control, got to prepare for all these different scenarios. And of course, you know, just a recent history with COVID taught a lot of businesses to be agile in a way that they had maybe never planned on being, which is very much aligned with a military type experience. So there is that sort of dynamic environment. It's never the same for very long. shift, technology shift, businesses shift, customers shift.

All kinds of forces are acting on the business to make next year a little different or a lot different than this year. Technology also is a big factor in any enterprise, whether it's a military or a commercial enterprise. You don't have to watch too many war movies to see the differences around technologies and stuff. And of course, anyone's been in business for two years.

in a business environment for just a couple of years, know that AI is now this gigantic buzzword that's, you know, people are, it's like the solution that everyone's trying to figure out, where does it apply? But it's a big deal that it wasn't, you know, just a handful of years ago, you know, you don't have to go too far back before it was something else that was a buzzword. And I would say the other thing is the sense of mission.

Jeff Sheehan (10:59.91)
You know, that you really have to be tuned into your purpose. Why are you wearing a uniform? Why did you volunteer? What are you doing here? What are you going to do if, you know, if you're, if you're employed or deployed for that, for the purpose that, that the organization, your organization exists. And I think that's also true. That's also true in business, particularly around customer experience management, where if you're not clear about what your mission

who you are, who you serve, how you support the larger enterprise. Things don't work so well. If every individual soldier just did what they thought was the right thing to do, you wouldn't have one unit, you would have lots of individuals doing things that may not generate an outcome that's desirable. The same is true for business. oftentimes with business, it's a lot harder to do.

And it's one of the things I talk about in my work is like, what's the purpose of your CX program? Have you figured it out? And for some, it's just, hey, we just want to have an NPS score that puts us in an industry, know, percentile. Like, okay, well, that's not what I would advocate, but they're clear about what they're doing. And for others, it's very customer focused and they want to be the brand that is top of mind for customers. And, you know, there's a more of a broader strategic aspect to customer experience.

So those would be like the three big sort of corollaries, I think, between the two worlds.

Rob Dwyer (12:34.568)
Yeah, yeah, very fascinating. Well, since you touched on it. You mentioned NPS and I understand that you don't think that surveys are a very good way to develop your CX initiatives and get some ROI from that. So let's let's talk about that a little bit. Why are surveys not a great starting

Jeff Sheehan (13:03.708)
Well, I want to say two things to that. First, I think surveys are still relevant and important. However, to use surveys as a driver to figure out what to do, what CX projects, what discrete improvements you can make with your business. don't think surveys are going to help you that much. And the reason is, generally speaking, I'm going to say some numbers here that are, you know, disputable for sure, but generally speaking, two out of 10 surveys get a response.

That's 20 out of 100, right? That's 200 out of a thousand. And generally speaking, right? And also generally speaking, those responses are gonna tend to be negative. They're gonna skew to the negative from people who were motivated by a bad experience and they're gonna let you know about it. They're gonna be detractors, generally speaking. And of course, I'm not speaking in absolutes, so please don't correct me with, it's not always, I know it's not always, but.

Don't speak in that kind of certainty. So you can send out thousands and thousands of surveys through all the channels that you communicate to customers. SMS text, email, at the IVR, if you want to do a survey after the call, push this button. Even paper surveys, if you've ever dealt with an American car dealership, shortly after you buy a vehicle, you'll get this hefty envelope with a survey in it.

Bill in, right? And so we know all that. Those can all go out. But what is not great about surveys is not much comes back. So if you're building, if you're trying to build your CX project portfolio solely from, or if your voice of the customer program is dependent upon survey responses, you're not getting much bang for the buck.

You know, so there's that. And what I advocate instead is using the contact center inbound customer contact as the basis for figuring out what portfolio of CX projects should look like, because it's a hundred percent customer feedback, right? It's a hundred percent captured in your technologies and systems. It's a hundred percent affecting your contact center agents.

Jeff Sheehan (15:31.392)
And in specific ways too, like the complaints department will tell you, here's the top three, boom, boom, boom, complaints that our customers have. know. Escalations, emotional content is captured. All these different really, really useful operational details. You get into a whole regime of metrics around hold times, handling times, first contact resolution.

and all these other operational metrics that can be combined with the experiential metrics, transactional, NPS, by channel, by issue, by product. I you can do all these wonderful things and it's not easy to do, but it's easier to do today than it's ever been before. The tools are there, the vendors are there.

the consultants who can help you stitch these things together are there. And that's why I think, you know, a focus on a CX customer experience management program that's still shipping out thousands of surveys and trying to figure out what to do and how to prioritize what to do with some amount of clarity and confidence. And this is where ROI comes in handy. If you have to look for an ROI, and by ROI I

Is it worth the disruption to the organization? Is the effort and the disruption worth for this project? It may not generate more profit. It may not generate more revenue. It may not touch a typical ROI metric. Generally, it does, but incidentally, if you fix the customer experience,

these other factors, these other things will get sorted out as well. But my point is the Contact Center environment provides a lot more data that's a lot more reliable and a lot more useful. And it so happens that the tools in the Contact Center oftentimes can be used in it or not repurposed, but the full capacity of those tools can be used to help you figure out what customers value, what irritates customers, and also

Jeff Sheehan (17:52.604)
company values. There are certain calls that a company loves to get and there certain calls that companies hate to get. I remember when you used to have to call to reset a password. You remember that. You don't have do that anymore. Those are irritating calls to customers like me. Take 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes out of my life to get a password. And there are companies that have whole contact centers, generally offshore, but whole contact centers just for password resets. And now that you can do it yourself,

Rob Dwyer (18:03.978)
Yeah.

Jeff Sheehan (18:22.598)
with a digital self -service tool that's the standard now. And all that cost, all that expense is done, but also all that irritation. I'm happier that I can do it myself and the companies are happier that they don't have to set aside a lot of resources to do it for you. So there's those kinds of opportunities using context -centered data that benefits both the customer and the business that I'm excited about helping companies sort of see

and figure out how to do that and also see the benefits. But back to surveys real quick, just want to say surveys are great as an element of understanding brand, understanding, hey, we made some changes, how are they being received? There's the verbatims and things like that. So I'm not saying it's all or nothing, one way or the other, you got to this and you got to not that. It's not like that at all. But there's a better way, I think,

find the portfolio or create the portfolio of CX projects that really do have a meaningful and measurable

Rob Dwyer (19:30.002)
Yeah, well, think listeners this show. Will absolutely agree with you because they probably heard me say the same thing about a million times and they're probably sick of it, but. What they're not going to be sick of is talking about a specific methodology and approach. If if you're helping one of one of your customers, how do you go about approaching?

what you want to do to deliver that value. it really is about

Jeff Sheehan (20:04.656)
Yeah, absolutely. So the approach we use, I use in my work, is based on work that a gentleman named Bill Price has developed. And it works incredibly well. It's proven. It's called the value -irritated methodology. what basically it's a three phases, nine steps methodology. And it's designed to, I call it teach to fish.

It's not designed to create a dependency on a consultant. It's not designed to create a dependency on a new technology product. I come from the pillars of purpose, people, process, technology in that order. so this methodology is great because it's focused totally on the contact center. And you go from the first thing you do is you sort of quantify.

you know, the customer contact. And one of the things we do that's a little unique is we don't use reason codes. We use customer intents. The reasons why customers are contacting you. The thinking is if everything in your company worked perfectly, the products work perfectly, the delivery worked perfectly, the instructions were crystal clear, all the pieces were in the box, and the online processes worked just great.

Whether it's to purchase something or refund something or check the status, right? You wouldn't get any phone calls. Theoretically, in a perfect world, But we get lots and lots of contacts, more than phone calls, but roughly 60 % of the contacts come in the form of phone calls. People are not gonna not pick up the phone, you know, particularly for sensitive things like, you know, somebody died and you want to sort out their banking.

That's a conversation. That's not a mobile app thing that you're to do. So what we do is we take a volume of call transcripts, or we'll take calls, recordings, and make them transcripts, strip out all the PII, and convert that into a list of intents. And the intents are reasons why customers contact you in the language of the customer that they use. So it's not a reason code from your system.

Jeff Sheehan (22:31.036)
which is generally not helpful about the general and the other categories, just not useful. So we get enough volume, and I mean like 30 ,000, 20 ,000, I like a substantial volume, and we can build a reliable list of intents of maybe 50 or 60 intents. So these are the actual reasons customers are contacting you. And then we build out in that first phase a whole table of volume,

by intent, cost, contact handling cost by intent, downstream costs by intent, and so forth. And then we go into the second phase, which is a strategic action phase. We use the value irritants quadrants to figure out which intents can be eliminated, which can be digitized and automated, which can be simplified and which can be leveraged. And just a note on each, the eliminated ones, it goes back to that like password reset

It's irritating to me as a customer. It's irritating to you as a business. Let's get rid of it. Nobody likes it. It doesn't do anything. No value. God. You'd be amazed at how many legacy decisions, maybe you wouldn't be amazed. Maybe you know firsthand how many decisions that made sense once upon a time, but haven't, they don't make sense today. And they force organizations to do things to their customers that like neither the business nor the customer wants to do.

but it's a policy that hasn't been re -examined and removed or updated. It's a process in a tool that hasn't been updated or fixed. So this is eliminate stuff. And then the digitize and automate, that's where you want to find those parts of your business that customers value the self -service. And you're not doing it to them, you're doing it for

And what's important is a lot of times we see today that the sales guys of these technologies are doing an amazing job and they're selling the magic beans of buy my tool and you can digitize this and automate that and deflect this and contain that. And in many cases, customers reject that and they call and they call after spending their time and being told you can do this on the mobile and you can do this on the web. Did you know? like,

Jeff Sheehan (24:58.278)
I just want to talk to somebody. So I've seen cases where customers just, my clients, implemented a technology to contain customer calls and it backfired and they got more calls. Not only that, but the sentiment for those calls wasn't great. So this methodology will help you find the intents that should be digitized and automated because customers value it, right? They'll actually adopt it and use it and be happy about

And there's a lot of those things, not just password resets. Like I want to, I want to add someone to my account. I want to change my address. I want to add another line to my service or another device to my internet service, all kinds of use cases. The simplify is it is a rather simple idea, but it's like everything else, easier said than done. This way you can look at the processes that are important to the company, but are less important to the customer.

So how do you take the friction out of those things? Because you've got to find the friction first. And looking at those contacts by intent will reveal that to you. And things like application processes are really useful places to examine. I'm a bank. I have a mortgage process. in the States, you've to get your pre -qualification paper that lets you go to an estate agent to say, look, I talked to my bank. I have this piece of paper that says, I can go

not a mortgage, but it's the start of a process. And so a lot of that can be done online. But, you know, are you asking 14 questions? And if you are, let's examine each of those 14 questions and see, I have to know that? And what I'm always amazed by is some of those questions are just legacies from, well, the marketing folks want to collect that. What do they do with it? When you dig deep, what do they do? They don't do anything. It just sits in

Rob Dwyer (26:29.816)
OK. That's permission. I've got permission to go shopping.

Jeff Sheehan (26:55.3)
over here in the marketing automation tool. Okay, so let's take that out. Okay. And then there's the, well, compliance says we have to. Well, let's talk to compliance. Do we have to? Well, no, we don't have to. We used to, but now we don't. You know, those kinds of things. And you can reduce and simplify those processes that can wildly impact your conversions from abandonment of a high percentage to completion of a high percentage. And if you're a bank,

with credit card application processes or mortgage application processes. Those are very profitable products that you can take the advantage of the digitization and the removal of friction for the customer. And then there's the leverage quadrant, is conversations you want to have with your customer, right? The insurance company that you're calling to add a child writer for your new child, for your baby. And that goes into CRM and you know that child is going

Maybe you want to save for college and I have a financial product for that. Maybe you want, your child learns to drive and we want to talk about car insurance or I know at USAA here in San Antonio, there's a little contract you can do, mom and dad can do with the driver that if you give it back to USAA, will discount driver insurance. So there's things like that you can do from a marketing and personalization perspective. And that's really where personalization.

is rooted in that leverage quadrant. And so just by using the intents, we can suss out the different, what intents belong where. And then in that last phase, we take just a couple of intents, not the hardest ones, maybe the easiest ones, because we want to show how to do the process and how to sort of build this new muscle into your organization and create a new business as usual.

And we'll do, that's when you go into the root cause analysis of what is the root cause of this particular intent. Why are we getting this content volume and this cost and so forth? And, you know, like for example, in a telco, there might be, customer doesn't think their internet is working really well and they want a technician to come over because they're not able to, or willing to mess around with the on -premise equipment in their home.

Jeff Sheehan (29:15.788)
technician rolls out and he has to look like he's doing something. So he'll swap out the router, right? The router's fine, but he's got to look like he did something. All right. So what does it cost to roll that truck? What does it cost to swap out that device and take the defective device and process it through the warranty process, you know, and all the rest of it. many of these companies have multiple devices. So if you start changing

I had this device and now they replaced it with something new. And so now I trust my service even less. So am I going to get a call back? Cause I don't, there was a blue light on this one and now this one's got a green light. Like, why is it different? I don't know what it means. People, you know, kind of react to that. so the root cause analysis is a very simple process of, but it was so very cross -functional. You might get your billing department, your legal department, your compliance department, your product management group, your marketing team.

involved. It's very cross -functional understand. For example, I did a project recently where there was promotion expiration intense. People were calling because they saw the price go up on their service on their bill. so we were dealing with root causes of promotion expiry related contacts. And so we had billing folks in to understand, how do we work? How do

How do we present what they purchased and when that expired? It's more promotion standpoint. Marketing, how do we reduce the number of promotions that we have so it isn't so confusing for the context and agents? So there's a lot of interconnection at the root cause analysis that's oftentimes I've seen it where we're introducing as an outside consultant, we're introducing people within the same company to each other who not work together. So it's that kind of like new.

cross -functional collaboration. And then once you have a root cause, you found it, then there's the action to attack it and get rid of that, fix it, so that you can then go on and monitor and measure that intent for volume and the other metrics that are associated with that intent. it's like everything else, easier said than done. But it is a process of really creating a new purpose for that data.

Jeff Sheehan (31:42.684)
Having a new way to organize the data, having a new sort of process to continually do that, because you're going to have a list of 50 or 60 intents. We're going to work with two, maybe another two after the first two. And then hopefully the customer adopts it as their new business as usual, you know, sort of thing. But what it will definitely give you in all that work is a list of DX projects you could do. You can then prioritize

based on any of the criteria that you weight. It could be cost savings, could be volume, it could be whatever. And when you do those projects, you're going to be able to measure the impact of the business and the customer, which I think is ideal, right? That sort of mutual aligned, if we fix this for the customer by taking three questions out of an application that improves the business units application and credit card issuing, that's pretty amazing.

maybe an oversimplified example, but that's the kind of work that we focus on is that customer experience focus also focus on the business and they're not mutually exclusive

Rob Dwyer (32:57.568)
There's a couple things I want to fly back around to. Catch that. Let's hover over them, actually.

Jeff Sheehan (33:07.228)
okay. I get the pun.

Rob Dwyer (33:11.476)
So you talked about Intents. And aside from being a great commercial for Happitu, understanding customer Intents is something that I think businesses have been trying to do for a long time. And they've been doing with dispositions, right? To your point, the reason code and being able to really understand what Intents are is a great use case

people talk about all these different things that we could use AI for and then they fall flat on their faces. But really there are good use cases for Gen AI for instance, and this is one of them. But I love that you talked about when we talk about like digital transformation.

Jeff Sheehan (33:54.78)
Absolutely.

Rob Dwyer (34:04.264)
A lot of companies think about digital transformation in how do I save money? How do I deflect? How do I keep people from calling me? And that's not the strategy that you need to pursue. Your point was find the things that people actually want to do themselves and make those self -service because there are a lot of things that customers would actually prefer. I don't want to call. Let me do

myself. But then you also touched on there are instances where I want to have a conversation. So I just saw recently a great article that said, you know, voice is not dead. And it's true. It's not. But not only is it not dead as a company, you don't want it to be dead. There are absolutely times when you want to be able to have

dialogue with a customer and not push them into self -service because there are opportunities for us to number one, develop a stronger relationship with this customer. Number two, provide them with options, products, services that they didn't even know that we offered and generate revenue and lifetime value for that. And I think we often miss

those opportunities when companies are focusing solely on how do I reduce costs, right? I don't want people calling. I want everything to be self

Jeff Sheehan (35:37.882)
Yeah. And so just three things I want to say there, Rob. Well, four things. First is the intense, the way we approach intense is it's what the customer says explicitly about their reason for interrupting their day. Like I don't get paid to pick up the phone and talk to somebody who gets paid to answer the phone. And I, I'm, I'm, you maybe a grouchy old guy. don't know, but, I don't like, you know, calling the bank. had to call my telco for my internet provider the other

And I was literally bracing myself for the conversation because it's not easy to get through, It's just, it's really not. But if you understand the intent from the customer's own words and the way we do that is we, as I mentioned, we collect lots of transcripts or we can convert recording conversations to transcripts and strip out the PII and all that. But then we feed it into an AI tool, the automatic.

the automated intent generator that takes all that volume and generates a list of intents. And then, of course, we work with the client to come up with the volumes and all rest of it and map what they have to these intents and build out a very comprehensive table of intents, volumes, costs, and other metrics, operational and experiential metrics. And it's never reason goes.

And we know this recent codes, there needs to be a discipline and a taxonomy and a discipline to using. agents, to be fair, don't know or they use the reason, the last thing we talked about to close it with that reason. I called to do X, that's my intent, but we ended up doing something

else as well. And so using AI, one of the great use cases is to generate intents. And that's one of the big value adds that we bring is intents. Don't just make it simpler than 300 reason codes. Now you've got 50 intents. But now you have a taxonomy. You understand the customer. You're talking about the contact center from a reasons why customers contact you perspective, right? Not just volumes and metrics, but really

Jeff Sheehan (38:06.118)
Customers are calling us because of our marketing campaign around this product, in this geography, because we're, you know, we're, we span the country and that is useful. You can bring marketing, you can bring, you know, sales and all the rest of it. So that's huge. And then you have to understand that the customer themselves. So I worked with a client who's a software as a service customer that had business clients and the business customers were sophisticated. The folks that were contacting them on the phone.

didn't want to be on the phone because they're IT department guys. They want self -service. They want to figure it out on their own. And so this company, the provider, the software company, they learned that they were over -investing in the phone with a customer base that doesn't want to pick up the phone. And so they re -engineered their knowledge management. They re -engineered their self -service and gave the customer what they valued.

the self -service, they completely transformed the way they manage knowledge, right? And the articles and the dynamics and they used AI in a big way for that. And customers are really happy. The business is super happy because that was a huge, you know, cost shift, right? And they were a tech company anyway. So using AI and all this kind of stuff was, you know, what they should do. I've worked at tech companies where I couldn't believe the clunky technology

they're using while we were selling the latest greatest to our customers. But and then there there was there was also growth. I worked in Ireland as we talked about. And in Ireland, there was a company called Revolut. Revolut was a fintech out of the UK. And they made their way to Ireland. I was working at a bank at the time and at the bank, which was a conventional retail bank, right? We branches and stuff.

We had, think, I think the number was 75 ,000 customers, but we'd been a bank in Ireland for 30 years at the time, think, give or take. Revolut came to Ireland and in two years, they had 2 million customers, right? There's only 5 million people on the island and they had 2 million customers in two years. But Revolut at the time, they did very simple stuff. They call it current accounts. You could deposit your paycheck in

Jeff Sheehan (40:31.446)
app, was all on a mobile app, they did have a website, they had no phone number whatsoever. If you needed to contact Call Revolut at that time, you could not. But you really didn't need to because everything you wanted to do could be done on the mobile app or their website. It was mostly a mobile app platform. And so people were going out to dinner and splitting the bill or they were using the one touch, sort of near contact.

payment, which is very popular in Europe, much more so than the States, as you know. So was wildly successful and every bank wanted to have what they were doing. And they were worried about it. Two million customers in two years, as opposed to the bank I was at that had 75 ,000 customers in 30 years. But as Revolut grew and added more products to their mix, they had to go to the central bank of Ireland and get approval

to add like loans, personal loans and business loans and mortgages and stuff. As the product set got more complicated, customers wanted to pick up the phone. And that was something that Revolut had to learn to adapt to is that, now they need the contact center. Everything can't just be digital and easy. Mortgages are a complicated product for a complicated transaction or a complicated event in people's lives.

Rob Dwyer (41:59.378)
Yeah.

Jeff Sheehan (41:59.536)
buying a property is not as easy as buying a hot dog, right? So they had to learn to adapt to the reality of picking up the phone, right? So their software as a service company had to learn to adapt to their customer need, what the customers value. And other businesses like the Telco internet service company, very complicated set of products, they have to sort of do both, but they have to figure out where to place their digital bets.

So they're not pissing off customers and making more calls that are unhappy, but they're also monitoring where they can leverage technologies more. So I've seen all three of those types of environments play out with the AI, the use of AI tools, but really the purpose, people, process, then technology was really the right way to sort of assess the situation and sort of roadmap how to address it.

Rob Dwyer (42:57.67)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jeff, if someone wants to come take a dip in the pool in your backyard or just talk to you about customer experience or contact centers or contact center optimization, is LinkedIn the best place to get in touch with you or is there someplace better than

Jeff Sheehan (43:16.124)
Absolutely. LinkedIn is the best. I've been on LinkedIn, think since 2005, something like that. What's that? But LinkedIn is a great way to reach me. I've got a company page, CXJS Consulting. You can find my personal page, Jeff Sheehan. And I have a website as well. can access that through my LinkedIn profile.

Rob Dwyer (43:22.844)
Methuselah again. Methuselah again.

Jeff Sheehan (43:44.988)
And I would love if anyone's got questions or anyone wants to, you know, we want to elaborate, have more conversation about a particular topic. Happy to do that. Please just contact me on LinkedIn.

Rob Dwyer (43:56.724)
Well, everybody, you know the drill. Head down to the show notes. You can find those links. Jeff and I are going to fly out of here. Jeff, thanks for joining the show. I hope everybody enjoyed spending some time getting to know you and learning from

Jeff Sheehan (44:16.518)
Well, thanks so much for having me. It's a real treat to meet you. We've had a few conversations now that have been fun. And I really do appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience and be an episode on your show, sort of a legacy there. I love

Rob Dwyer (44:34.592)
Well, thank you, Jeff and hey buddy, we'll see you again next week