There’s a Story in Your Voice featuring Mike Kendall

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:01.442)
That's right. I am back with another episode of Next In Queue today. I am joined by Mike Kendall. Mike, how are you?

Mike Kendall (00:09.53)
I am spiffy on the way towards sparkling.

Rob Dwyer (00:14.12)
Ooh, I am excited to see what Sparkling looks like. I know what Spiffy looks like on you because you and I have talked before. Before we dive into it, I should just mention that you're the founder of The Customer Lab. You are a principal of an organization called Move the Needle and you have worked in Voice of the Customer for some of the biggest brands that people will

Mike Kendall (00:18.122)
Me too.

Rob Dwyer (00:42.856)
immediately recognize, brands like Target, Intuit, P &G, Humana, CapOne, like all the things. so I'm excited for us to dig into kind of the evolution of VOC. For those of you who are like Rob, not another acronym, don't worry, we'll get there. But first, Mike, I have a question for you.

Mike Kendall (01:07.169)
Absolutely.

Rob Dwyer (01:08.564)
I want you to tell us how CX is like drumming.

Mike Kendall (01:15.435)
How is CX, customer experience, like drumming? Well, sometimes drumming can be a bit wheels off. You might look over to your right and see a bass player that's going in a direction you weren't anticipating or look over to your left and there's a guitar player that's either in the wrong key or maybe taking a solo when he or she shouldn't be.

Sometimes you're listening in your ears and you hear some vocals that wish you kind of could put your fingers on a chalkboard and CX can be like that, right? I think of all the days and years and months of my CX career that I say, hey, we're clicking, we're the Oscar Peterson jazz trio that just nailed some sort of ad lib, bebop, something or other.

Those happen, right? You get the mountain tops and you're glad for it, but it's mostly sausage making, right? And you have to have this ability to persist and hit the brick wall and run around it a few times. And sometimes that's the emotional flutter you feel when you're drumming because you're on stage, right? Everybody's watching you. And when things go sideways, there's nowhere to hide.

Rob Dwyer (02:38.062)
Yeah, it also strikes me and maybe you feel differently, but I feel like the customer experience people are often kind of in the background and that's where drummers tend to live as well in the background. They're not at the front of the stage, they're just back there trying to keep everything on track, moving at a steady pace and...

Mike Kendall (02:52.063)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (03:03.68)
It's all these other departments that get these wild ideas. Like no, no, let's bring it back guys. Let's bring it back.

Mike Kendall (03:09.821)
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes if you notice the drummer, something's probably gone wrong. You know, want to just have it be smooth and feel good. And same thing with CX. Sometimes you don't expect to. I remember I was on a flight coming back from, I think, California and made the mistake of telling my seatmate where I worked and...

kind of like two hours of complaining about things I had no idea about. But soon as I got back, I'm like, I got to get this thing fixed because she is really upset. But sometimes we're not necessarily on the front line able to fix it all. But yet, and I think I've heard people call the drummer sometimes the quarterback or the air traffic controller or the architect, you have to, or the symphony conductor, how do you...

get all these pieces and parts together that you don't control and try to make them work together in harmony.

Rob Dwyer (04:09.74)
I love this story about being on an airplane and literally getting voice of the customer feedback. I'm sure it was miserable, right? But I love hearing that because there are so many different listening posts. But I want to start where when were you first introduced to this concept voice of customer? And let's just start there.

Mike Kendall (04:15.795)
Yeah, and nowhere to hide, right? Yeah.

Mike Kendall (04:38.037)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I had to rewind my brain a little bit thinking about this, but you know, my career, kind of got, started off in human resources of all things. And that led me into Lean Six Sigma and was one of the early black belts for a large bank. And that led me into kind of process improvements and looking at the organization horizontally and trying to figure out how do we deliver great processes efficiently.

And the more I got into that, the more I thought, you know, we're trying to reduce costs and improve cycle times and efficiencies, but we're doing it from the inside out. We weren't talking to people on the outside, our customers, and it just started frustrating me. thought, you know, we're sub-optimizing things. We're maybe solve something in the short term, but it causes problems in the long term with customer loyalty or acquisition.

So it bothered me so much. I got some budget and hired a company to come in and do really our first big VOC survey. And this was before Net Promoter, which will date me a bit. kind of in the early days, you weren't getting a survey every five minutes in your inbox. But I just felt compelled that we had to know sort of how we were doing on the outside to prioritize this work we were doing on the inside.

And so I brought this company in that had been working years in this field kind of under the radar. And they said, well, if you hire us, we're not doing a satisfaction survey. We're doing a dissatisfaction survey. I'm like, okay, tell me more. And it was literally hundreds of questions. thought, because back in, we didn't have as much survey fatigue back then, but literally we'd send this out to our customers and they would go through and say, have you ever had a problem? Yes.

And then there'd be all these other questions and tell us about how that got resolved or didn't get resolved or what about this and this? And so we got all this feedback. And as you can imagine, if you don't, been doing this much, it wasn't very good. It was really pretty bad. And they had benchmarked us against some of their other clients to show that we were near the bottom of everything. And unfortunately for me, I had to be the one to present the data to the C-suite and.

Mike Kendall (06:57.705)
You could have heard a pin drop boy after my presentation and all eyes were on the vice chairman who kind of crossed his arms and sat back in his chair and silence. And then he finally said, well, at least we now know what we need to do. And I thought, yes, it could have gone the other way real easily. And I would have been on the street looking for a job, but

Rob Dwyer (07:15.458)
Hahaha!

I imagine you are worried about whether or not you're gonna have a job that afternoon or...

Mike Kendall (07:23.861)
Exactly. Exactly. And it became kind of a milestone moment, I think for us, because it helped us figure out where to go put our eggs and what baskets, how do we prioritize the efforts that we were making already on efficiencies and so forth. And we started, this was commercial finance, so we had a lot of large regional offices and we put in an ongoing tracking survey after that.

by branch and by region and they were so competitive. They all wanted to be the best. So that drove a lot of activity as well.

Rob Dwyer (08:04.142)
So, ballpark, what year are we talking about?

Mike Kendall (08:08.384)
Oh my, this was like early 2000s guess.

Rob Dwyer (08:11.534)
Okay, so by then, were you delivering this via the internet? Was this sent out via email? Were you mailing that out? What did that look

Mike Kendall (08:22.279)
Yeah, the first wave, the dissatisfaction survey was a paper mail out. mean, it was kind of like a book, you you got and filled it out. The tracking then we went online with it, obviously. But yeah, it was kind of a mixed media back then.

Rob Dwyer (08:30.734)
You

Rob Dwyer (08:41.55)
So you mentioned net promoter score. Is that where we should go next? Is that the next logical step, or was there something in between?

Mike Kendall (08:49.994)
why not?

Uh, yeah, I guess, um, in between. So I went after working at this place for quite a while, I jumped out of the big corporate race and went to a startup and we were in the telematics business, which, uh, if you've not, not familiar, that is a real word and it's an industry, uh, kind of before Google uh, Maps and all that, you actually high end cars at the time had the ability to, uh, you know, you could

push a button and they would know where you were. some, got, actually funny story. had a lady in a Mercedes that had locked her prized dog into the car in a parking garage and couldn't get it out. And she, she called us frantic and we didn't have the ability to unlock her car remotely because she's in a parking garage. So that was just kind of one of the minor things you get, but we did get a lot of like emergency calls. And I think you can still do that in most cars now.

But it was a 24 seven call center in Europe and in the U S and really high levels of services. You can imagine we were doing Rolls Royce and Mercedes and BMW and some other brands. And there we put in a tracking study, a real time kind of call center, VOC studies. And the thing for me there, I think that was unique is we were, the processes were pretty good, but it was more of a human factor of

What are these agents able to do in that moment of need? My little boy's in the back seat with an asthma attack and I need help getting to a hospital right away. And how do you hire the right people, select the right people for that kind of pressure cooker? And then how do you monitor and measure them? And you can't just use typical QA metrics of, you got to get off the call in three minutes. Well, the whole city's on fire. have the Oakland fires were going on then.

Mike Kendall (10:48.575)
I remember listening to calls of people frantically trying to get out of their neighborhoods and we're like helping trying to navigate them out. So, VOC in that context was very helpful in coaching those agents to how do they get things done efficiently and at the same time do it in a compassionate way. And then how do we select the right agents? What are the right DNA for that? And you could get that feedback early on in the selection process we actually put in.

a lot of testing and different ways based on the feedback we would get from customers on what created a loyal customer, because we were a subscription service. So you were hoping that they would continue to renew with you.

Rob Dwyer (11:33.514)
It seems to me that there's probably some differences too in that commercial banking, which is a B2B relationship versus this very unique B2C relationship that also has a very discreet experience window. That Telematics product, I probably don't think anything about.

Mike Kendall (11:44.149)
Right.

Mike Kendall (11:54.08)
Hmm.

Rob Dwyer (12:01.984)
until the moment that I need it, which is very different than other products and services that I might have. But I might go three years owning my car and never press that button. But then when I do press it, I am going to have very specific reaction to that that may trigger a decision one way or another. What did you learn that was unique from what you had seen in a more B2B relationship?

Mike Kendall (12:03.169)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (12:08.385)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (12:20.331)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (12:31.928)
versus this more direct to consumer relationship.

Mike Kendall (12:36.139)
Yeah, there was definitely more of a human factor, I think, because there was nothing, you couldn't really escalate to a supervisor in the moment of need. had to, that frontline rep had to be ready at any time to help out with a variety of issues. And so there was a lot of challenges there, I think of practicing almost like a...

Rob Dwyer (12:47.118)
Hmm.

Mike Kendall (13:01.683)
a pilot, you know, if you're a pilot, you have to go in and do your time in the simulator and, and practice for all these events that hopefully never happened. But if they do, you want to be calm and you want to be efficient and, and, and caring at that moment. And so I think for us, that was a big challenge compared to banking where it was a relationship business, but you may have multiple decision makers, influencers, and each one of them had a unique set of needs.

that you had to kind of architect your experiences for. And so when we're trying to do feedback in that situation, it's less transactional in a way, and more longitudinal, if that makes sense, of trying to think about all of those touch points in the end-to-end journey, as opposed to, we have one specific touch point here that we have to nail in the moment.

Rob Dwyer (13:46.114)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (13:56.876)
Yeah, it reminds me, you know, I recently had Casey Denby on the show and we were talking about the fact that, and this happens, right? In contact centers with new people, often there's a period of time where that new agent is still learning, they're still practicing a little bit.

Mike Kendall (14:20.266)
Mm, yeah.

Rob Dwyer (14:22.2)
but there are absolutely certain types of interactions where you just can't afford that. You can't still be practicing.

Mike Kendall (14:27.617)
Mm-hmm. You could lose an account and we're being a startup. Excuse me. We had Mercedes and BMW in the US and you lose one of those. That's 50 % of your revenue. there were some calls where you might have, and I won't mention, maybe I could, probably won't, but some famous basketball stars or pop singers or heads of state, you name it.

And those, those could be, you know, a decision-making point for that client. so yeah, that, that ability to deliver consistently through human beings is the real challenge.

Rob Dwyer (15:07.874)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. OK, so now let's transition to net promoter score, NPS. So when did you learn about NPS and what was your first experience with that particular metric?

Mike Kendall (15:26.065)
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting story there. And it's funny because I've lived through a number of call 'em management fads, if you will, from cool quality circles and total quality management to re-engineering, if anybody remembers those days, to, I guess, Six Sigma and then customer experience. And I think at the moment, everybody jumps on the bandwagon.

and says, this will be the shining star for our company's success. And then the next book comes out, or the next guru comes along, and everybody moves over there. My perspective is a little bit more agnostic, I guess, of how do you take the best of each of those things and incorporate them into an ongoing operating mechanism, if you will, to run your business well. And not to say, well, Net Promoter is good or bad or...

you know, it's what you do with it. And I think we learned early on, we were actually, was at Intuit and leading customer experience for one of our business units. And the company was adopting net promoter pretty early on. know it was before Fred Reicheld's book had come out. We had actually hired him as a consultant and he was helping us kind of figure this thing out in our world. And my business was for

enterprise software for CPAs. And so our customers were CPA offices, basically. So it's B2B software. And we had already kind of established we're using the zero to 10 scale and dividing up promoters and passives and detractors and thinking of it more systemically, I think, than some people I run into do. It's not, I've heard a guy say, don't kiss the trophy. You know, it's not about the score. It's about

what you learn from it and what you do with it. And so that was very much our mindset is we wanted to delight customers. That was kind of our North star. And how do we do that? Well, we need to know what their unmet needs are. We need to know what drives loyalty and we have to find a way to measure it and deliver it consistently. And Net Promoter was one of those tools in the toolkit, if you will. But it was a part of a bigger system.

Mike Kendall (17:48.447)
where we actually did the economics work and said, what's one point of NPS worth from a bottom line perspective? And what do we do with passives and detractors? And how do we get back to these promoters and thank them? how do we empower them to share the good news about us? So there was a lot behind that other than just, we send out a survey and try to get the numbers to be better. Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (18:16.098)
We got a number. Yeah. Yeah. There's absolutely something that I think some companies miss when it comes to any survey that they're using to get customer feedback. And that is what do I do with it? And how do I then close the loop on that to make changes based off of that feedback? What are we doing with?

Mike Kendall (18:40.907)
Right.

Rob Dwyer (18:45.314)
The number, I don't want to say the number is meaningless, but that shouldn't be the goal. The goal should be how do we improve from here? And the number just helps us identify the people that are experiencing your product or your services in ways that is less than desirable potentially. And hopefully they're telling you why.

Mike Kendall (18:57.461)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (19:10.805)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (19:13.89)
and what you can do about it. And then it's up to you to decide, am I going to do something about this or not?

Mike Kendall (19:20.673)
Yeah. And I think the thing that gets lost sometimes in VOC programs is that it's all about the survey. And maybe if you take the next step, it's all about the data you can glean from your product. If you're a software product, you should be able to instrument that thing and figure out when people are on the happy path or the sad path. But I think that the qualitative insights are

equally as important and sometimes more powerful than the quantitative and finding a way to integrate both of those to create insights is super important. And that was something that we did really well at Intuit. We had this DNA from our founder coming out of Procter & Gamble called "Follow Me Home"s, where we'd literally go to people's houses or their businesses and watch them use our product and talk to them and get...

to the level of empathy or emotion behind it. And I remember one of the tools we used was a sort of a photo journal, if you will, survey. We would send out a questionnaire and say, don't answer it with words or numbers, just upload a picture to answer it. And then we would go talk to the customer afterwards. And I remember one of the situations where we had a CPA and the question was, what does our software mean to your business?

And the picture he uploaded was in his living room. And it was a little pop-up tent with his two cute little daughters and wife in sleeping bags in there. And so we're sitting there in a room with the product managers and the engineers, and we're all scratching our head like, what does that have to do with our software? And so we get the guy on the phone and we talked to him and said, tell us about this photo. What does this mean? And he said, well, your software is critical for my business success. If it

has a glitch if the calculations are wrong, you know, it's too takes too long. My business could fail and my business supports my family and my family is the most important thing in my life. And, that's why I, your software is critical to me having a happy life. And, you know, we're trying to brush tears away and to just getting inside the head of a customer where if we just sent a survey, we would have never got that. And so if I can.

Rob Dwyer (21:37.55)
Hmm.

Mike Kendall (21:38.251)
take that emotional connection to the customer and understanding of their needs, marry it up with the data that I'm getting from my analytics, and then put those two together and have a strategy about how I'm going to deliver for those customers. That's way more impactful than just sort of hashing through my data and making sort of educated guesses or maybe AI guesses about what the best thing to do next is.

Rob Dwyer (22:06.254)
I love that story and I think it's a great reminder for all of us that whatever product or service that we provide or our company provides, that ultimately it's helping someone do something, achieve a particular goal. That goal could be, I get to spend more time with my kids in the living room. It could be that I get to

Mike Kendall (22:27.617)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (22:31.797)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (22:34.902)
take a vacation, it could be that I get to buy them the basketball shoes that they really want that their favorite player is wearing and whatever the case may be, that often slips past us because we're thinking about the very, let me use this word again, the discrete job that we fulfill, but that leads to potentially a much larger and more fulfilling

Mike Kendall (22:40.619)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (23:04.6)
goal that we're helping people to achieve. And it could be something as awesome as that.

So I love that you were kind of incubating in PS, if you will. What other VOC initiatives or tools have you used that you have found useful?

Mike Kendall (23:30.847)
Yeah. You know, I think that the challenge becomes, especially for CX practitioners, you don't want to turn into the survey department, right? Or the VOC department. You should have a more strategic role and vision for the company and for yourself. And it's easy to get bogged down into the minutia of promoter alerts.

optimization and text analytics and all of that. But at the same time, how do you have a seat at the table? And I think one of the ways that you can really operationalize that VOC is through what I would call operating mechanisms, things that it's a structure or a scaffold around that voice of the customer. And that could include things like creating small end-to-end teams, cross-functional teams that maybe you appoint.

Who's the end-to-end experience owner for this product or for the service and who are the key leaders around that? And together you guys work on what metrics do we need? When do we need them? How do we need them? What are we going to do with them? And you have some of these reviews built in and then you're together going to the C-suite with here's the budget we need to do X, Y, Z. And we all agree as opposed to some of the traditional silo fighting of

You know, Hey, I'm supposed to grow the portfolio by this and I want this money and all the silos are fighting. If you can get to that model where you're thinking cross-functionally about how that feedback impacts the business, that's a big win, I think.

Rob Dwyer (25:10.734)
Yeah, for sure. Can you talk about it? You mentioned right? You don't want to become the survey department. I think all too often we think of surveys as the. Sometimes only certainly primary listening post. We already talked about a couple of really interesting different listening posts, including an airline seat, but I'm wondering if you can talk through like some of the maybe ways that you can get.

Mike Kendall (25:33.577)
Hahaha

Rob Dwyer (25:40.322)
feedback outside of a survey that maybe you've forgotten about or you've ignored that exists and all you need to do is just take control.

Mike Kendall (25:47.253)
Hmm. Yeah.

Mike Kendall (25:52.255)
Yeah. You know, something early on in my career, when I was working on VOC that somebody said, and I remembered it and it stuck with me is you should never ask a customer something you should already know. And so many times you get these surveys or even now with like chatbots that are asking you things, or I had one, I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago and giving an example from my internet provider where I was having

trouble with their chat bot, you know, and, it tried to sell me a DSL speed package. I'm like, who has DSL now? Don't you know what I already have? I'm on your fiber service and, it's slow. I want it faster and I want help troubleshooting. It's not at the level you promised. And here you're trying to sell me something. it just is way off. Right. So think about that. And, I have a, an assessment model. There's like eight components of it.

Rob Dwyer (26:29.166)
you

Mike Kendall (26:51.379)
of what a healthy VOC system looks like. And one of those is basically easy or maybe not even known simplicity for collecting the feedback. So if I've got to go through a lot of hoops to tell you what you're doing well or not doing well, that's probably not a good VOC system. And so the first step usually should be around how do I automate this stuff? And if it's a software product or it's

somewhat automated. You should know how many times somebody tried to log in and couldn't get into your system. You should know what they're doing in your system and why they're there. You should be able to aggregate those into cohorts and start to identify patterns. We had a thing at Intuit that sat on the desktop of the agents where if they started just getting phone calls in the moment about something that they didn't think was right, they would type it in and it would go to a department that's like,

jumping on it right away to say, something's emerging in this one County in Minnesota and we're not sure why. And, you know, we wouldn't probably not find out till the end of the day, maybe, or even the next day before, you know, the call stats came out. So what are all those ways you can instrument the product to give you, help you think about that end-to-end experience? it can be overwhelming. And I think if you can get it down to less than 10.

key drivers of customer loyalty. takes a lot of work to get there, but then you can really zoom in on those 10 moments of truth and say, hey, we know for sure that we're a six out of a 10 on how do we onboard a new customer. And we also know that our nearest competitor is a 10 out of a 10. We've got a gap we need to close there. So there's that strategic view. And then there's the in the moment view of we've got a problem today or to write this moment we need to take care of. So.

Rob Dwyer (28:38.946)
Hmm.

Mike Kendall (28:43.785)
I think that's step one is get it as automated as you can, make it visible, the terminology around saturate the culture with the voice of the customer. So how are you telling every one of your employees what's really going on in the mindset of customers through storytelling, through other ways? And just like I mentioned, taking some people out to somebody's house to watch them use your product or live their life.

they won't forget those experiences. They're going to forget your fancy dashboards and your charts and graphs and your PowerPoints. But those stories, especially if they're firsthand, where they're in face to face or on video call with a customer. And I run into so many of our clients that are saying, well, let's go out and talk to customers. And they glaze over and they're like, well, we don't do that. We need to get permission. And the compliance board doesn't meet until another month. And just that

Rob Dwyer (29:18.862)
.

Mike Kendall (29:42.271)
detachment from the real customer is, is a big liability, especially for big companies. so finding a way to make that bridge between the data and the emotion and making it as automated as possible or as routine as possible.

Rob Dwyer (29:58.402)
Yeah, I love that. by the way, would love to interest you in two red solo cups and a string that I have that could solve your fiber challenges. We have a new subscription plan for that. It's only $19.99 a month in addition to your fiber service. So I'm happy to set that up for you today if you'd like.

Mike Kendall (30:22.389)
Hahaha.

Rob Dwyer (30:26.894)
I really want to ask you about a failure.

Mike Kendall (30:33.249)
Hmm.

Rob Dwyer (30:34.766)
Can you walk me through a situation where you maybe, right? This was a, I had this great idea or your organization had this great idea and tried to implement something. It did not go as planned. and what did you learn from that? That kind of changed course going forward.

Mike Kendall (30:52.587)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I can give you two actually, and there's probably many, more, but the first one that comes to mind is around incentives with regard to voice of the customer. And it's always a hot topic, but we had, you know, obviously you want to get better. And that's why I say don't kiss the trophy. It's not all about the number, but over time you say, well, if we're flatlining or going down, what's wrong here?

Rob Dwyer (31:06.126)
Mmm.

Mike Kendall (31:24.007)
And so we had a group that decided they were going to offer bonus payments every month to reps in the call center, who achieve certain scores on their, their surveys. And as you can imagine, you will get what you pay for. And so, we found out, and I won't name the company that we were working with, but, we had a data analytics team and they were trying to monitor, you know, reliability of our metrics.

And they said, you know, it's interesting. There's a couple of reps that their numbers look really good right now. And they didn't used to look really good. So they dug in a little deeper and what they were doing basically after every bad call was deleting the email address from the CRM. So the survey couldn't go out. Then a day or two later, they'd pop the email address back in and those people got fired. Fortunately for the company and unfortunately for them, but

So, I mean, clearly you need good data, but you also need to think about what you're incenting and why. And the pivot from that, the learning was don't incent the individual and set the team or the end-to-end product group or whatever it may be. And then give those team members way to work together so that they can together improve everything. And it's not about, you still coach your individual reps and you should have good leadership practices around that. But.

the way you incent should be very thoughtful. And one of the biggest things I saw kind of on the backend of that was just creating, everybody's got detractor alerts or most people do where you get the email and says, somebody gave you a three on a 10, 11 scale. We've got to call that person or figure it out. We flipped it around and said, well, what if they gave you a nine or a 10, we're going to send an email to that individual and to the whole team. And they actually, I think they'll add cowbells and they.

would stand up and ring the cowbell whenever there was a nine or a 10, very Pavlovian, but it worked, right? Everybody within a few weeks of turning those things on was starting to get together after the shift and say, what did you do? How did you do that? And starting to learn from each other. So I think there's definitely some positive reinforcement mechanisms you can put in place without saying it's all about money and I've got to get this certain score.

Rob Dwyer (33:26.24)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (33:46.702)
Yeah. That story brings up memories of other stories. I was actually training at a contact center when they introduced NPS, right, at the agent level. And that was, again, part of their scorecard. It was an incentive. And it really changed, not always in a good way.

Mike Kendall (34:02.337)
Hmm.

Rob Dwyer (34:16.59)
how agents behave when they're interacting with customers. And then you see instances like sales agents in the stores, in the brick and mortar stores. Again, this is in the cell phone industry that will literally, if you need something very specific so that they can avoid getting the survey, just have you call customer service right there from the

Mike Kendall (34:16.597)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Kendall (34:32.118)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (34:44.428)
right there from the store because they know your issue is likely to result in a bad survey. I don't want that survey because it's tied to my score. So I'm just going to have you call customer service and you can dump that on them. Those incentives create a worse experience, not a better experience. And I think any of us who have ever been to a car dealership in the last five years can tell you exactly

Mike Kendall (34:52.788)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (35:00.129)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Kendall (35:07.552)
Yep.

Rob Dwyer (35:14.53)
what that experience is like from a survey perspective. it's, it's really frustrating instead of an exercise that says, help us get better. What can we do to improve your experience? It feels like instead I'm just feeling pressured to not do something that might cause you to lose a paycheck or lose your job or whatever. that's

Mike Kendall (35:16.107)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (35:41.984)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (35:44.174)
That's not what we want as customers.

Mike Kendall (35:45.535)
Yeah, we used to share examples of gaming amongst our team to make sure we weren't getting too close to that. And I remember I was in a hotel checking in and get in the elevator and there's a poster had to been six feet tall by four feet wide with a picture of the survey on it and circling the top box scores. And if you can't give us this call the manager's number now. I'm like, okay, so your priority is the survey, not the experience.

And so then you see some other call centers where it's not quite that obvious, but at the end of the call, you know, and you might be on for five, 10 minutes, like, man, that was the best rep, the best service. And they said, oh, by the way, you're going to get a survey. And would you be sure to give me the best score on that? And blah, blah. like, oh, you just ruined it. You know, I had such high affinity for what you did and for how you represented your company. And now I know it was all for not because all you wanted was a survey score.

Rob Dwyer (36:33.368)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (36:42.513)
And I've had so many arguments with call center leaders about this. I'm like, it's not the rep's job to get you to fill out a survey. It's your system and you want a neutral bias. You don't want any kind of bias. And so I'm willing to die on that Hill. I just had so many arguments about that. And that just speaks to a bad measurement system or bad intent. You know, begin with the end in mind is the end to delight the customer.

Rob Dwyer (36:42.659)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (37:10.355)
and create loyalty and grow the company? Or is the intent to make myself look good or my team and get the score and get the trophy or whatever the reward might be.

Rob Dwyer (37:19.224)
Right.

Rob Dwyer (37:22.84)
So I'd like to get your opinion on maybe what the future holds. We've had for a long time a set of predictive analytics that can analyze customer behaviors, how often they interact with us as a company that will tell us with some pretty good accuracy how

Mike Kendall (37:38.442)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (37:47.746)
they might behave, whether that's canceling a service or returning an order or those kinds of things. Certainly we're able to analyze phone calls and chats and emails with customers doing things like sentiment analysis. there's so much more out there today than when you got started as far as analytics on these things that don't involve

Mike Kendall (37:51.2)
Yeah.

Mike Kendall (38:11.008)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (38:16.242)
sending a survey. Are surveys going to start to take a back seat for companies? Are they going away? Are we still going to get surveyed everywhere we go all the time? What do you see happening over the next five years as it relates to surveys in particular based off of all the AI that's out

Mike Kendall (38:42.539)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, to the extent that AI can help us identify sentiment and emotion and do it in a human way in the sense that we can help customers feel more humanly connected to our businesses. you start to think about the list of companies you go back to because the way they made you feel, not so much the emotional side of it versus the functional.

You know, it's, it's, that's going to be the winning trick for any of these technologies, I think. And so can we, I was thinking about a time at a mall, one time at an Apple store and I left and I got the survey like that and filled it out on the mobile phone. And then instantly got a phone call from the manager of the store and said, are you still in the mall? Can you come back? We'll make this right. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool. But what if.

Rob Dwyer (39:34.648)
Wow.

Mike Kendall (39:41.333)
I didn't even need the survey, right? What if they had cameras in the store and it was able to tell by my body language or my facial expressions and maybe they caught me at that moment, you know? And it just, and then I could aggregate that data and start to say, hey, this store's got less emotional connection than others. And so I don't know that we'll get there. Maybe we will. And who knows with privacy, if we'll be allowed to do some of these things, but I think we can't lose that human connection.

Rob Dwyer (39:43.214)
Hmm.

Rob Dwyer (39:51.842)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Kendall (40:09.465)
And there's still not going to be a replacement. You could say, yeah, well, we'll mass share videos of customer empathy interviews, but I've shared this story before about a company I was working with and they were trying to sell more farm insurance to farmers and they kept hitting a brick wall. Their agents weren't farmers. didn't know what farmers were like. They didn't resonate with them. no matter how many spiffs they gave these agents.

They just weren't selling more farm insurance. we kind of came in and said, well, let's take a different approach. Let's put together a small little team and we're going to go out to farms and knock on doors and get our shoes dirty and talk to real farmers and see what's going on in their world. And what they came away with was that these farmers didn't really trust big insurance companies. And so the teams said, well, who do you trust then? And they said, well, I trust my banker.

My CPA, the feed salespeople or, you know, whoever brings me a seed or feed for my farm. And then the team had this idea of like, well, maybe we should be trying to sell through those channels and not through our own because they understand the customer's needs better. And so they ran up, some prototypes, created some experiments and then pretty quickly saw, wow, that's really working. We should go that direction. I don't know how you get there with surveys or with

data analytics in that situation. Maybe we can in the future, but I still think there's that face-to-face talk to customers, go live their life, understand the deep emotional level until you can't sleep at night and you've got to solve that problem. That's a different thing than, we brought XYZ consultancy in and they did a six month study for $800,000 and told us we should go do this. And, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe they're not, but

Have you validated that in the real world with real customers and with behavioral experiments?

Rob Dwyer (42:10.934)
Yeah, I hope that companies will continue to go back and actually interact with their customers, with real people. There are certainly, I think, technologies that can assist, that can fill some gaps. But I absolutely agree that we can't just rely on

the AIs of the world to do all of this for us because no matter what replication comes out of an AI voice, let's say, it doesn't truly understand, is not ever going to actually empathize with you because it doesn't have human experiences. And only we can do that with each other. And I think that's important to remember that

Mike Kendall (42:39.713)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (43:06.958)
we can understand people in a way that a computer just isn't going to be able to do ever.

Mike Kendall (43:17.717)
Yeah. And I think the other element too, and this is another example that I use quite a bit as, working at a large insurance company, they, they were trying to, get a better sense of what the reps were going through. And we suggested, why don't you go sit with the rep for a couple hours and see what that's like? They had never done that before. And I know, I mean, I've worked for companies where that's normal and you see that all the time, but not everywhere.

Rob Dwyer (43:36.834)
Ha ha ha!

Mike Kendall (43:45.011)
And so I remember, I think we had 18 C-suite leaders that went out and spent a couple hours. We had like rep shepherds that would take them and get them plugged in and double-jacked and all that. And they all came back and we had sort of a therapy session because there were like some tears and emotions. And remember one woman calling in and saying, Hey, I've been diagnosed with cancer and I need to know if my insurance is going to cover this or not. And the rep is sweating it out, trying to figure out whether or not.

their specific software can get her mute to whatever. She went through like 15 screens to, and still never got a conclusive answer. And she's sitting with the CTO of the company and he's freaking out and can't believe that he's put all these barriers unknowingly in the way of a rep who really comes to work and wants to help people, but is kind of hamstrung by technology. so those engagements, you know, even though it's not

customer, it's next to customer, which is the rep. And you're hearing both sides of it are super impactful and help make the funding available to get things done. so to me, all of it's in service to doing the right thing for the customer and for the company and for the employees. And how do you get there? And the most elaborate AI and CSAT scores and all that are great, but if it doesn't

drive action, what's the point? And so that's one of those eight kind of maturity model assessments of a great VOC system is, it actionable? Is it really driving, driving outcomes?

Rob Dwyer (45:21.044)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's awesome stuff. I'm gonna just preview for those of you who are still listening, upcoming episodes on exactly what Mike is talking about. So stay tuned for that because we're gonna explore those. No, I.

Mike Kendall (45:38.121)
I thought we were going to have a drum solo.

Rob Dwyer (45:44.45)
Mike, I gotta tell you, and I'm gonna throw this out there to everyone at this moment. My best friends, when I was in middle school and high school, one's a guitar player, one's bass player. I was the singer in the band for all of one gig. We did one gig at the local armory. We opened for a polka band because it was Oktoberfest. We did some glam rock, some hairband music.

Mike Kendall (45:58.151)
Rob Dwyer (46:13.492)
And I was summarily dismissed from my position in that band because as it turns out, I'm tone deaf and I can't carry a tune. So that was the end of my music career. I have a lot of respect. No, it was bad.

Mike Kendall (46:28.713)
You couldn't even open for a polka band. my gosh, the humiliation. I had a similar experience. It was rehearsal thankfully, but they were insistent that I harmonize. And my wife was there, she's my roadie, right? And she's like, don't give him a microphone. She's heard me try to sing. They did give me a microphone and I think it was one song and they're like, you really can't sing. Get that microphone out of his face.

Rob Dwyer (46:53.086)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's I have a lot of respect for people that can sing that can play instruments that can do all the things I I Just I'm an appreciator of good music. I leave the creation to other people

Mike Kendall (47:10.082)
There's an audience for everybody. There's a number of people in history that I would say can't sing that became megastars. So don't give up on your dream.

Rob Dwyer (47:21.838)
Now I gotta ask who's at the top of that list?

Mike Kendall (47:27.454)
Singing or drumming?

Rob Dwyer (47:28.91)
Let's do both. Why not?

Mike Kendall (47:32.097)
singing. Gosh. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that Adele's ever auto tuned, so I'd put her up there. She's pretty good.

Rob Dwyer (47:34.67)
Pre auto tune you can't we.

Rob Dwyer (47:41.038)
Okay. Wow. I met people who couldn't sing that got famous.

Mike Kendall (47:49.773)
yeah, I'm not going there. I will definitely alienate, know, as a musician, you scratch your head with some of these stars and you're just like, okay, it's not about talent. It's about meeting the need of your audience. And sometimes they're not concerned about talents.

Rob Dwyer (47:53.71)
Okay.

Rob Dwyer (48:07.086)
Mm.

Sometimes you gotta listen to the voice of your customer, right? Mike, thank you so much for joining me on Next. Thank you. If you want to connect with Mike, please do go to the show notes, find his LinkedIn, say that I sent you, tell him exactly what you learned from this episode. And thank you for tuning in. I appreciate all of you.

Mike Kendall (48:12.103)
Yes, yes.

Mike Kendall (48:17.952)
My pleasure.