meet our 2014 customer champions!

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Delivering Bottom-Line Impact

Fostering Employee Engagement

Elevating The Customer Experience

Meet Our 2014 Customer Champions1to1 Media

CELEBRATING 10 YE ARS 2004-2014

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1to1 Media Customer Champion: DefinedBehind every successful enterprisewide customer strategy is an individual who tirelessly

evangelizes the customer cause, who reminds employees that customers are the business,

who understands how to transform loyalty into profit, and whose efforts both command

attention and garner real results.

I am a Customer Champion.

1to1 Media



Since its inception in 2004, the 1to1 Media Customer Champions has grown into a one-of-a-kind awards program that honors and spotlights the individuals responsible for game-changing customer-focused strategies— a truly unique event that honors the leaders who create innovative change in their organizations.

The awards program now includes a group of more than 130 distinguished leaders representing household name brands. From sweeping voice-of-the-customer initiatives and data analysis strategies to employee engagement and omnichannel initiatives, this year’s 12 winners are the creative disruptors in their organizations who play a critical role in advancing their organizations’ customer strategies.

Take Mike Lester, president of The Melting Pot. He established the ‘Perfect Night Out’ standard of service, which aims to create a flawless guest experience for all patrons of the restaurant chain. Lester encourages all employees to adjust their service to accommodate customers’ desired level of experience.

Communication and feedback is also important to Kyle Groff, manager of customer insights, at JetBlue. He and his team implemented a system that gathers feedback from travelers via social media, email, and surveys and tracks Net Promoter Score (NPS) trends for each airport JetBlue services. The team determined the experiences to measure across the check-in, security, and boarding processes and they now track experience trends at each airport and identify issues and share the feedback with appropriate employees from the CEO to gate agents.

And John Wompey, vice president of operations at Foot Locker, who along with his team, implemented the Customer First initiative, which resides at the heart of Foot Locker’s customer-centric culture. The program focuses on customer journey mapping in an effort to help the company understand how customers experience the brand and how to design interactions around each point that cultivates closer customer relationships.

These three Customer Champions, along with the nine other winners, demonstrate that communication is leadership and leadership is influence. According to the late Pete Drucker, “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

The 1to1 Media 2014 Customer Champions have successfully lifted the vision of their employees, the standards of their cultures, and the perception of their customers.

Congratulations to the 2014 class!

Lifting Sights, Visions, and Standards

Mila D’AntonioEditor-in-Chief, 1to1 Media

@MilaDantonio

http://www.1to1media.com/view.aspx?DocID=28269

©2014 1to1 Media. All rights protected and reserved. 1to1 Media is a division of Peppers & Rogers Group.

Though not all brands can engage with consumers at the point of purchase, digital tools now allow many companies to intro-duce an added layer of personalization once absent from the average retail experience. Annamarie Bermundo, assistant vice president of CRM and digital platform development at L’Oreal Paris USA, works tirelessly to carry out this very vision, deliv-ering unprecedented personalization and relevancy to boost engagement no matter where the customer may be.

Because retail stores lack the beauty advisors of department store brands, Bermundo sought to move the company away from mass brand advertising and develop its customer-centric marketing across email, mobile, social, and online display ad-vertising. Now, L’Oreal customers can interact with the brand online and via mobile devices to find and test products at home or in-store. Bermundo and her team recognized that consumers typically conduct research before completing their purchases. Thus, by creating ac cessible, responsive programs and per-sonalization tools, customers can carry their very own beauty advisor in their pocket wherever they go.

On average, most women have unused beauty products ly-ing about because they fail to realize the given item isn’t appro-priate until after they’ve completed their purchase. Bermundo, however, found a way to leverage digital technology, enabling the brand to guide, educate, and inspire customers before, during, and after their in-store experience. Customers can con-sult L’Oreal’s website or myriad mobile applications to learn about products, read tutorials, and use virtual reality to test hair and makeup colors.

“When we built all of our tools, such as our consultation tool, and laid out all our content and advice, we consulted a lot of our experts to make sure that, even if consumers didn’t have a beauty advisor in front of them, they were getting information that was professional and expert recommended,” Bermundo highlights. “For instance, we recently launched our Makeup Genius app, which allows consumers to try on cosmetics virtu-

ally. This is really helpful because in-store we often don’t have testers, so consumers can easily scan the product and try it on themselves. In addition, we offer real-time personalization, so as you interact on the site—as we learn more about you—the program adapts on the fly.”

While the Makeup Genius serves as a sort of virtual mirror, allowing customers to see how various shades of lipstick, eye-shadow, and foundation, the Color and Hair Genius apps of-fer similar services, as customers can use their mobile devices to find colors to match their clothes, their next hair color, or makeup products to achieve certain looks. L’Oreal’s website also provides customers with fresh ways to interact with prod-ucts and consume beauty and skincare tips. Users need only register on-site to turn this online destination into a dynamic service that adapts and evolves based upon preferences and prior searches. Recommendations and content are tailored to deliver personalization in real time, as every aspect of the expe-rience was designed to shift alongside the individual’s current interests. Thus, customers receive the most relevant content and advice for them, thereby building customer confidence and boosting brand engagement and loyalty to cultivate trust.

Bermundo’s efforts have seen significant results, as site vis-its have increased 81 percent and satisfaction has grown by 22 percent. Seventy-six percent more visitors have also used and completed consultations, leading said individuals to add 170 percent more products to their carts.

Under Bermundo’s direction, L’Oreal also launched its ‘Women of Worth’ initiative. This awards program recognizes 10 women each year for their extraordinary efforts within their communities. The program ties back to the brand’s slogan—be-cause you’re worth it—as it highlights inner beauty and allows these women to share their strength and expertise. ‘Women of Worth’ moves beyond the product, yet speaks to the compa-ny’s core values, empowering women to look and feel their best so they may carry their confidence proudly.

Delivering Unprecedented Personalized Customer Experiences2014 Customer Champion Annamarie Bermundo, AVP, CRM and digital platform development at L’Oreal Paris USA, offers customers digital, interactive platforms that enable each individual to experience the brand before completing the sale, improving both loyalty and trust. —By Anna Papachristos

Annamarie Bermundo, L’Oreal Paris USA

What’s the most important to you: mission, core values, or vision? Why?

“All three. It’s really hard to look at everything in isolation because you can have a vision, but if it doesn’t tie back to your mission or core values, then you’re not staying true to the brand. From our perspective, and everything that we do, everything has to tie back to our core values and our mission. Our mission—making everyone look and feel their most beautiful—truly comes through in everything that we do, so it’s important to have the tools to carry out that sort of personalization, which is precisely what we’ve done.”

THE DIGITAL DARLING

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Delivering excellent customer service across multiple channels is a key component of a company’s success. For Google,

a company with millions of customers across the globe, meeting customer demands includes numerous linguistic and

logistical challenges. Deepak Khandelwal, vice president of global customer experience, plays a key role in helping Google

serve its customers at any time through a multitude of channels and languages.

“Providing a differentiated, positive customer experience is critical,” Khandelwal says. “Especially in the technology field

where there are always newer and better products that are coming out, I firmly believe that it is one of the key success

factors for companies to stay successful for long periods of time.”

One of Khandelwal’s initiatives focused on expanding Google’s customer service beyond an online self-help channel

to live phone support nearly four years ago. Google now offers live phone support in more than 40 languages. And in

response to demands from advertisers and other customers for more help, Khandelwal spearheaded the launch of phone

support in English that is available 24 hours, 7 days per week, as well as live help via video chat.

These initiatives would not be possible without the support of senior executives and frontline agents. The key to getting

people to adhere to your objectives and vision, Khandelwal notes, is to impart a “cross-functional ownership” of the proj-

ects. “In Google’s lingo, that means getting people onboard across products, marketing, finance, and sales and then tying

that into senior level objectives,” he says. “You need people to understand that this is an important goal.”

Google also offers recognition programs for employees who provide a great customer experience. Khandelwal’s team

celebrates excellent customer interactions by pinning notes, photos, and testimonials from satisfied customers on “Cus-

tomer Happiness Walls” in 12 offices around the world, and via an internal website with customer quotes and stories.

Khandelwal also introduced monthly customer satisfaction (CSAT) awards, including an award for online specialists

who achieve 100 percent satisfaction for an entire month, as well as special recognition for those who receive this award

multiple times. And whenever he visits an office, Khandelwal personally presents the awards to employees.

In addition, Khandelwal’s management team conducts monthly employee surveys, in-person town halls, and online

discussion forums to solicit team feedback. The management team is also experimenting with programs to improve team

members’ abilities to focus on the customer, such as a meditation program and more flexible shifts.

All of these programs and processes, Khandelwal notes, are designed to enable employees to provide a seamless

customer experience. “They [the customers] shouldn’t have to know what’s behind the scenes,” he says. “Customers

should just know that they’re interacting with somebody at Google and that person will take care of them, and even though

there’re millions of people who might be contacting us in one way or another, that person is the most important.”

Serving the Multichannel Customer 2014 Customer Champion Google’s Deepak Khandelwal, vice president of global customer experience, champions convenience and positive experiences for a global customer base. —By Judith Aquino

Deepak Khandelwal, Google

THE GREAT CONNECTORHow do you encourage others to adhere to your customer experience objectives?

“The key to getting people to adhere to your objectives and vision, is to impart a ‘cross-functional ownership’ of the projects. In Google’s lingo, that means getting people onboard across products, marketing, finance, and sales and then tying that into senior level objectives. You need people to understand that this is an important goal.”



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Deepak Khandelwal, Google

Providing consistency and excellence in customer service often starts with the individ-ual. As Marketing Director at Marketplace Philadelphia Management (MPM) at Phila-delphia International Airport (PHL), Anna DiGregorio works with approximately 43,000 associates at more than 170 retailers and restaurants to ensure travelers have an opti-mal customer experience as they pass through the busy airport.

Several years ago, DiGregorio introduced a common service model—Cutting EDGE (Excellence Drives Great Experiences)—to help associates provide a consistent cus-tomer experience. The model includes reminders to greet customers, make eye con-tact, smile, and be attentive to customer requests.

DiGregorio also works with partners like customer experience measurements pro-vider LRA Worldwide to create leadership seminars, frontline training programs, and in-the-operation coaching sessions to further enforce high standards among managers and frontline associates.

Training programs and coaching sessions are essential, DiGregorio notes, for helping associates provide excellent service, even though some people may resist the programs. Many associates assume “that I can’t teach them anything they don’t already know,” she says. “The most common misconception that people who have worked in the retail sector have is that they won’t benefit from our training sessions or learn something new.”

DiGregorio says she and her colleagues slowly changed associates’ minds by en-

listing the help of managers to get employees to attend the training sessions, providing relevant content, such as discussions about the impact of social media and other rel-evant trends in customer service, and rewarding employees for excellent service with gift cards from the secret shopper program.

DiGregorio also introduced a gamification feature in which merchants earn points for participating in the marketing and training programs in exchange for quarterly and annual prizes. The program culminates in an annual gala event in which the top per-formers are recognized in an awards ceremony modeled after the Academy Awards. DiGregorio is also known for interacting directly with vendors and covers the 183,000 square feet of retail, dining, and service offerings multiple times each day.

DiGregorio and her team’s efforts quickly garnered industry recognition. The con-cessions program Cutting EDGE has been recognized by Airports Council Internation-al—North America for several years running, and over the course of Anna’s more than eight-year tenure has been honored by JD Power’s highest in overall passenger satis-faction, amenities/food and shops, large airport division, Airport Revenue News, and the City of Philadelphia.

The key, DigGregorio says, is consistently helping employees maintain high cus-tomer service standards. “We work very hard to make sure that what we’re discuss-ing in our training is top of mind, and that people are walking away with something interesting and useful.”

Setting Employees Up for Success2014 Customer Champion Anna DiGregorio, Marketing Director at Marketplace Philadelphia Management, implemented training programs and gamification features to streamline services at Philadelphia International Airport. —By Judith Aquino

Anna DiGregorio, Marketplace Philadelphia Management

THE PROBLEM SOLVERWhat’s the biggest misconception about your role and your responsibilities in how it pertains to advancing the customer experience?

“The most common misconception that people who have worked in the retail sector have is that they won’t benefit from our training sessions or learn something new.”

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Customer service professionals often take on the role of detectives when investigating customer complaints to resolve an issue. Kyle Groff, manager of customer insights at JetBlue, uses data analytics and other tools to uncover insights in the vast amounts of customer feedback data that the airline collects.

Groff joined JetBlue approximately two years ago and one of his first moves was launching a companywide voice of the customer initiative. His goal? To take the customer feedback data JetBlue receives and use it to help frontline employees better serve travelers.

Groff and his team implemented a system that gathers feedback from travelers via social media, email, and surveys and tracks Net Promoter Score (NPS) trends for each airport JetBlue services. The team mapped out the customer journey and determined the experiences to measure across the check-in, security, and boarding processes. Using NPS as a guide, Kyle’s team started tracking

experience trends at each airport. If a score began to dip, the team used survey data to identify issues and share the feedback with appropriate employees from the CEO to gate agents.

This led to better visibility into how customers felt about traveling with JetBlue and allowed the airline to address issues more efficiently. Several months ago, for example, Groff’s team noticed a low NPS trend at an airport and recent customer surveys revealed morning travelers were consistently providing lower ratings at that airport.

After examining specific survey responses targeting these travelers, and digging deeper into open-text feedback, the problem appeared to be that airport amenities were not located close to where these early flights departed and it was having a negative impact on travelers’ overall experiences.

Groff’s team communicated this insight to the frontline employees and the airport managers and developed a solution. Gate agents began passing out

coffee and orange juice while travelers waited for their flights and NPS scores shot up quickly.

Groff attributes his success in helping JetBlue maintain its reputation for customer centricity to his colleagues and frontline agents. “Being the manager I oftentimes have to be the face of the voice of the customer,” he says. “It’s great to be nominated and to win awards like this…but our customer support would be nowhere without the team that stands behind me.”

In terms of challenges, quantifying the value of a customer experience initiative for corporate leaders who are looking for profits can be difficult, Groff notes. “It’s such a challenge when you look at something like the customer experience and try to quantify the kind of financial impact that it has,” he says. “I think intuitively most people would admit that a happy customer likely leads to more profit. But saying, ‘this is why we need to focus on the customer because it’s worth this amount of money,’ is hard to do.”

THE GREAT LISTENERWhat’s the biggest customer experience challenge leaders face today?

“It’s such a challenge when you look at something like the customer experience and try to quantify the kind of financial impact that it has. I think intuitively most people would admit that a happy customer likely leads to more profit. But saying, ‘this is why we need to focus on the customer because it’s worth this amount of money,’ is hard to do.”

Kyle Groff, JetBlue

Flying High with Data Insights2014 Customer Champion JetBlue’s Kyle Groff, manager of customer insights, harnesses customer insights to improve travelers’ experiences. —By Judith Aquino



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Kyle Groff, JetBlue

Before any organization can truly develop its customer-centric core, leaders must understand that no two customer experiences are alike. Mike Lester, president of The Melting Pot, recognizes that perfection remains subjective and that success means read-ing each individual guest’s behavioral cues to provide an experi-ence that’s tailored to their preferences.

Lester’s first initiative was to establish the ‘Perfect Night Out’ standard of service, which aims to create a flawless guest ex-perience for all patrons of the restaurant chain. Lester under-stands that, while some guests may prefer to enjoy their meals at leisure, others want to eat without an excessive wait. Thus, with the ‘Perfect Night Out’ standard in mind, Lester encourag-es all employees to detect such signs and adjust their service to accommodate the desired experience. Lester hopes to break free from The Melting Pot’s stereotype as an elegant, “special occasions only” restaurant by creating these varied experiences to encourage retention, return, and referral.

‘Perfect Night Out’ isn’t just about providing delicious food and an appropriate atmosphere, however. The initiative also em-powers employees to go above and beyond expectations by put-ting guests’ best interests first and delivering service in any way necessary. For example, one cold winter night, a couple left the restaurant only to find their car battery had died, so they went back inside to use the phone and call AAA. Instead of allowing the guests to call AAA, team members took matters into their own hands, pulled out some jumper cables, and started the car themselves.

Lester and his team even created an awards program to recognize teams from franchise locations that deliver phenom-enal service and exceed guest expectations. Known as Pot on Wheels, the awards program was inspired by one occasion when team members brought the fondue experience to the guest’s hospital room for her and her family to enjoy after she’d gone into labor during her dessert. These employees live Lester’s phi-

losophy, bringing his vision to light by focusing solely on guest satisfaction.

“Our employees have the hospitality gene—they care deeply about others,” Lester highlights. “All we have to do is get out of their way. For example, there was one family that, though they weren’t from this one specific area, had vacationed there for years. [The Melting Pot in that town] was their daughter’s favorite restau-rant but, unfortunately, she passed away three weeks prior to the vacation in a tragic car accident. The family decided to make the annual trip anyway even though they were in mourning. They came into the restaurant and one of the team members recognized them from previous years, at which point the family informed them of their loss. To lift their spirits, the team took care of their entire meal. They didn’t need to ask permission. They just did it, and that’s what ‘Perfect Night Out’ is all about.”

Under Lester’s guidance, The Melting Pot also introduced new menus based on guest feedback. While the menu was originally developed to reflect team members’ preferences, Lester and his team discovered that these choices didn’t always resonate with guests. As a result, the restaurant has been able to add and re-move items, improve existing dishes, and adjust how items are grouped within the dining experience. Each individual restaurant also has the opportunity to offer localized menus, which reflect the various tastes and preferences of guests in their given area.

Lester also encourages employees to look beyond mone-tary metrics, such as average spend per guest, for this focus detracts from their ability to deliver the ‘Perfect Night Out’ as promised. For Lester and all employees of The Melting Pot, customer centricity means providing service that reaches be-yond revenue to develop consistent, positive brand experienc-es. The company measures success qualitatively, not quanti-tatively, emphasizing the importance of guest perception and overall happiness, for those who are pleased are more likely to return and recommend, thereby benefiting all those involved.

THE COLLABORATIVE CHAMELEONWhere do great ideas come from in your organization?

“Everywhere. While traveling around to our various restaurants, I speak with hundreds of team members. I have a notebook filled with great ideas that came from our team members in every position within the restaurant. We are already working on many of them to get them implemented—things as simple as how our uniforms feel to team members. The key to environment and culture as an organization is that we all listen to everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you have a great idea, you’re going to be heard, and it will be thoughtfully considered, with many of them implemented.”

Empowering Employees to Go Beyond Customer Expectations2014 Customer Champion Mike Lester, president of The Melting Pot, inspires employees to pursue the ‘Perfect Night Out’ standard by serving customers on an individualized level in any capacity possible.—By Anna Papachristos

Mike Lester, The Melting Pot


http://www.meltingpot.com/



A pioneer of Internet and telephone-based retailing, 1-800-Flowers.com founder and CEO Jim McCann transformed his flower shop into an international enterprise with more than 35 million customers and inspired other business owners to follow his example. McCann’s ability to find new ways to improve the customer experience —he was one of the first retailers to offer an online ordering service and have a digital presence—helped 1-800-Flowers.com gain attention in a crowded industry. And the company continues to look for ways to improve its services.

McCann says the company recently launched an internal blog for employees to submit ideas and feedback on how to improve the company’s offerings or processes. McCann declined to elaborate on which ideas the company has act-ed on, but noted that 1-800-Flowers.com already responds to customer input on arrangement ideas and collections.

For example, 1-800-Flowers.com’s Happy Hour collection, which offers arrangements in oversized martini- and margarita-shaped vases, were customer inspired and is one of the best-selling product lines in the company’s floral category. The company also responds to customer complaints through the contact center, email, and social media.

Keeping up with customer interactions on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites has been challenging, especially when people lob criticisms and other negative messages at the company on these public platforms, McCann notes.

“When you get into a customer service environment where, basically people who are annoyed or who have an agenda…can eviscerate you in social media, some uninformed people might look at that and say, ‘Oh, they have a terrible problem,’ McCann says. “The big challenge for us is to have the strength of our convictions to say, ‘We made a decision to be transparent even though we’re getting clipped, and our competitors are not, because they are playing by a different set of rules.”

When asked which customer-centric business leader inspires him, McCann chose Steve Squeri, group president of global corporate services at American Express. McCann says he admires Squeri for his “almost maniacal focus on improving the quality of service through technology and having the right set of metrics to know you are successful on your journey.”

McCann said he was also struck by a former American Express employee who told him that Squeri wants employees to think of American Express as their best work experience. “That doesn’t mean that it will be your highest achieve-ment…but even if you go on to work at five or six other companies after that, Squeri tries to make sure employees reflect back on American Express as the best place they worked,” McCann says. “My brother and I chatted a lot about that, here in our own shop, to make sure that we are approaching things in the same way.”

McCann says customers and employees urged McCann to be transparent in its interactions with customers because it demonstrates authenticity and will ultimately benefit the brand. Doing so, “takes some courage and I’m telling you, I did waver,” McCann says. “But I followed their advice, and we’ve stayed the course to a commitment of transparency. But it’s challenging.”

Delivering Transparent Customer Service2014 Customer Champion 1-800-Flowers.com’s Jim McCann commits to conversations with satisfied and dissatisfied customers. —By Judith Aquino

Jim McCann, 1-800-Flowers.com

THE TRAILBLAZERWhat customer-centric business leader do you admire and why?

“Steve Squeri, group president of global corporate services at American Express. He wants employees to think of American Express as their best work experience. That doesn’t mean that it will be your highest achievement…but even if you go on to work at five or six other companies after that, Squeri tries to make sure employees reflect back on American Express as the best place they worked. My brother and I chatted a lot about that, here in our own shop, to make sure that we are approaching things in the same way.”



CONGRATULATIONS to Jim McCann of 1-800-Flowers.com

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When Eric McKirdy was recruited by Ask.com in 2010 to overhaul the company’s customer service strategy, leaders for the popu-lar Q&A web search engine sought someone who could manage the organization’s customer service portfolio and lead the charge behind delivering an enhanced experience for the company’s one-hundred million monthly users. Since joining Ask.com in late 2010, McKirdy has done that and more.

After evaluating and auditing the company’s existing customer service processes and support systems, McKirdy was able to quickly identify immediate improvements Ask.com could make.

“Two major things stuck out in my mind,” says McKirdy, who previously handled communications for a performing arts organiza-tion. “Ask.com is one of the leading destinations for Q&A, but from a customer service standpoint, we weren’t mirroring that experi-ence and providing great answers about Ask.com. We needed to model that customer experience to allow people to get the answers they were looking for.”

McKirdy discovered that too many basic customer requests (e.g. how to change a user name) were resulting in Tier 1 support tick-ets for information that was available through the company’s web search engine. McKirdy recognized an opportunity to implement a self-service system that customers could use to find answers to many questions on the spot while reducing the number of Tier 1 tickets being generated.

Before the self-service capabilities were implemented, McKirdy took meaningful steps to help make Ask.com’s culture more cus-tomer-focused. He banned the use of the word “tickets” in the organization and other impersonal terminology used in customer support interactions. “When I visit a company’s website and I’m informed that a ticket has been issued when I request help, I feel like I’ve become part of the system,” says McKirdy. “We wanted to change the tone and the quality of the engagement by person-alizing the experience and referring to people by their first names.”

Starting with a “blank canvas”McKirdy and his team sought intuitive support technologies to

help its customers find the answers they were seeking. A pre-vious CRM system used by Ask.com didn’t offer search-ability of knowledge-based articles. Also, the responses it generated to Ask.com users contained a lot of boilerplate and were difficult to decipher, McKirdy adds.

When McKirdy and his team began examining CRM systems that offered strong self-service support, one of the companies, Parature, offered McKirdy and his team a “blank canvas” to craft the types of experiences Ask.com wanted for its customers. “That was huge,” says McKirdy. Plus, the vendor offered solid self-ser-vice capabilities via keyword searches right out of the box which fit well for Ask.com’s customer base, McKirdy adds.

McKirdy’s vision for providing Ask.com’s customers with easy-to-use self-service capabilities has been realized. After Ask.com deployed the CRM system in late 2012, customer sup-port ticket volume dropped 64 percent in the first two weeks thanks to the self-service capabilities. Meanwhile, customers’ use of the self-service options has lowered call volumes by 86 percent.

“I thought something was wrong,” says McKirdy. “Crickets were chirping. I thought I might have re-engineered myself out of a job.”

McKirdy not only manages the company’s 13-person customer service team, he’s on the front lines himself, interacting with cus-tomers by phone, email, chat, and social media to offer support. He also looks for team members who can relate to the customer journey and can provide compassionate support.

“I never hire anyone who says they have lots of contact center experience. That’s not what I’m looking for,” says McKirdy. I’m looking for employees who understand customers’ behavior and what they’re looking for.”

Meanwhile, the technological changes McKirdy and his team have put in place have led to more meaningful communications with Ask.com’s customers.

Says McKirdy, “The quality of the interactions we have now is so much higher.”

THE ENABLERWhat’s one characteristic you believe every leader should possess?

It’s hard to narrow it down to just one. But I’d say the most important attribute is to be very flexible and nimble and not be stuck on the way things have always been done. Technology is changing so much and changing the way that customer service is being done and influenced so much by Gen Y.

Eric McKirdy, Ask.com

Simplifying SearchEric McKirdy, manager, global customer care and the face of Ask.com’s customer service team, is leading the company’s efforts to rebuild its customer service strategy —By Tom Hoffman



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THE STORYTELLERWhat’s the biggest misconception about your role and your responsibilities in how it pertains to advancing the customer experience? “There is a common misconception that the team’s main role is to ‘crunch data.’ Some people assume that we’re just data collectors and that we slice and dice the data and then move on. We had to get away from simply presenting numbers and stats and do more storytelling.”

Collecting and analyzing your customers’ feedback is crucial for delivering an excellent customer experience. But it is also easy to get lost in the data, making it difficult to identify insights and act on them. As the vice president of client expe-rience at ADP, Tom Mueller has spearheaded processes to help executives and other senior leaders better understand their clients’ needs and include customer feedback in company decisions.

Mueller works with clients in ADP’s small business market. His team listens to recorded service calls, reads client comments, analyzes CRM cases, and leverages text analytics to identify specific areas that are important to clients.

Under Mueller’s direction, ADP has implemented processes and technology to integrate and pull key learnings from CRM data, call center notes, survey responses, and social media. Armed with this information, ADP employees can close the loop with unhappy customers, identify problems, and make recommendations on prod-ucts and communications by analyzing aggregated data.

There is a common misconception, however, that the team’s main role is to “crunch data,” Mueller notes. “Some people assume that we’re just data collectors and we slice and dice the data and then move on,” he says. “We had to get away from simply presenting numbers and stats and do more storytelling.”

Over the past year, Mueller and his team focused on conveying customer insights through “a journey mapping experience.” To help their colleagues better understand their clients’ needs, Mueller and his team presented information about

the challenges small business owners face by sharing stories interspersed with data points, client interviews, and recorded calls.

Supporting the data analyses with interviews and customers’ comments helped illustrate the insights Mueller and his team were trying to convey. “We’ll present the data and say, ‘this is what our customers are saying, and now I want you to hear what it sounds like,’” Mueller explains. “We’ll play multiple calls so that the data becomes real to them.”

In addition, Mueller led efforts to help employees who don’t directly interact with the company’s clients feel more engaged with them. One of Mueller’s initiatives was to have ADP executives including general managers, the company’s president, and members of the senior leadership team call clients twice every year to gather feedback ADP has also begun inviting clients to participate in company meetings, such as brain-storming sessions.

As a result, ADP has begun to incorporate customer feedback into more of its decisions and communications with customers. For example, during a forced migration to a new platform, ADP minimized customer churn and received a neutral decrease in satisfaction (as opposed to outrage) from customers by responding to their concerns in communications about the change.

“Storytelling is critical,” Mueller notes. “While the data and the insights we’re providing are important, we also have to come up with an effective way of convey-ing that data in a way that reflects the customer experience and leads to actions.”

Conveying the Customer Experience through Storytelling 2014 Customer Champion Tom Mueller, ADP’s vice president of client experience, makes data meaningful by mapping the customer’s journey. —By Judith Aquino

Tom Mueller, ADP




When Glenn Schleicher joined Cisco in 2010 as director of the Cisco Smart Web Technology Group, his mission was to elevate Cisco’s customer self-support capabilities. Although Cisco had self-service technologies in place including websites customers could visit to find information, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the technology giant to keep the systems fresh with content as it acquired other companies.

To address these challenges, Schleicher placed Cisco’s customers at the center of these efforts.

“When I first came into the role, there were a lot of peo-ple collecting lots of metrics around productivity,” Schleicher says. He decided instead to focus on metrics that are import-ant to the customer experience.

“I put metrics in place that measure time to completion and customer success. Can they complete a task in five min-utes or less? If they couldn’t, we failed. I was new to the organization, so every customer complaint hit a raw nerve.”

As a Cisco Support Engineer who has spent parts of his 20-plus year career at Cisco in both engineering and cus-tomer support roles, Schleicher knows how stressful it can be for customers to find the product information they’re seeking. “Even before I joined the company (in 1993), I was a customer calling Cisco and I understood that perspective very well,” says Schleicher.

Since joining the company, Schleicher has personally han-dled hundreds of customer support cases and he’s learned a lot about troubleshooting approaches for Cisco’s self-serve mobile apps and websites that work and don’t work. He’s also drawn on his experiences as a consumer to blend in best practices he’s picked up from other companies that deliver exceptional customer support, such as Amazon.com.

“Customers remain our true judges”Even as Cisco’s self-service capabilities have won awards,

including a 2013 Gartner/1to1 Media CRM Excellence Award

for customer service optimization, Schleicher has maintained his mantra that “customers remain our true judges.”

To help ensure that Cisco is providing its customers with the type of mobile and web self-service support experiences they’re expecting, Schleicher and his team analyze 300 global customer survey responses each month along with behavioral information on the company’s website to evaluate their journeys and experiences. If it takes customers lon-ger than expected to complete a task, Schleicher and his 264-person team take a deep dive to determine whether any process or system changes need to be made.

“It’s very eye opening to see a customer go down a path you don’t expect,” Schleicher says. “You might expect them to click on a link but instead they go down a rat hole. These insights have been very impactful,” he adds.

Schleicher also spearheaded the creation of a customer and partner advisory board to turn customer input into change requirements. “Part of it is recognizing that most of the people who use our website are below management grade, so the skill sets we look for on the board are people on the IT archi-tecture side or other direct users,” says Schleicher. “They’ve given us some brutal but really good feedback.”

For instance, search capabilities for the self-service web-site have been an issue for customers as Cisco’s content continues to expand. “People complain about the amount of time it takes them to find the right content,” Schleicher says, noting that the company is using these insights to take steps to make improvements. “Listening without follow-up is almost worse than not listening,” he says.

The customer-centric approach taken by Schleicher and his team is paying dividends for Cisco and its customers. The deflection rate for the self-service website has risen from 76.2 percent in 2010 to 83 percent in 2014. Meanwhile, cus-tomer satisfaction ratings are at an all-time high and mobile app downloads have risen 89 percent annually.

Making Self-Service Self-EvidentCisco’s Glenn Schleicher, director of the Smart Web Technology Group, makes sure the company’s self-service technologies are designed to meet customers’ needs and expectations —By Tom Hoffman

Glenn Schleicher, Cisco

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ENGINEERWhat steps are you taking to ensure that you’re continuing to grow as a leader?

“I think it’s continuing to nurture a strong sense of self awareness about your own strengths and weaknesses and you learn that your approach to the world is very personalized. The more that you can leverage diverse perspectives, the more you can draw on complementary strengths to improve the approach to problem-solving.”



15


Gregg Tilston, Flight Centre Travel Group

THE SOCIAL SUPERSTARWhat customer-centric company do you admire and why?

“Social media shouldn’t be delivering customer service. Customer service should be leveraging social media like they leverage phone and email. With that said, when I look at some of the airlines, such as United Airlines and Delta, and the massive amounts of mentions and their speedy response times, I really look up to those companies and how they’re dealing with customers in a very timely, relevant manner. We’re talking within minutes, considering they have hundreds of thousands of mentions. And while they may not be able to infuse each response with quick wit, they deliver a service that builds customer relationships.”

For many companies, social media remains mysterious, as marketers and service professionals work to develop their brand’s online strat-egy. But, for Gregg Tilston, global social media leader at Flight Centre Travel Group, this avenue offers team members the opportunity to expand upon the customer experience and build brand advocacy.

Tilston leads his 14-person social team by empowering each mem-ber to engage with every single brand mention across Facebook and Twitter in an on-brand, prompt fashion. Previously, customers who tweeted @Flight_Centre would receive an auto-reply that asked them to email customer service, at which point they would then receive another automated message claiming their request would be addressed within three days to a week. But, as social media becomes increasingly enveloped in its own immediacy, such methods could no longer satisfy consumer demand. Thus, Tilston introduced responsive customer service, thereby enabling his team to move beyond simple engagement tactics and deliver faster turnarounds and resolutions for all customer concerns and issues.

Under Tilston’s guidance, Flight Centre’s global team also received social media training, including tens of thousands of employees at local travel agency storefronts, to become social ambassadors. Said programs teach staff to be more thoughtful and strategic when it comes to delivering an effective, positive in-store customer experience. “When a customer leaves one of our shops, often they will go out and tweet, update, or post something about that experience,” Tilston says. “So it’s all about instilling the mindset that, the better experience you provide your customers, the more likely they’ll say positive things about you. Thus, they become your champion on social.”

Emphasizing the importance of two-way conversations also drives Tilston’s goal to interact with every social brand mention and cultivate advocacy. Such behaviors boost satisfaction, ultimately leading to revenue gains. Consumers who received assistance and engagement on social media, for instance, were nearly three times more likely to convert, with these same individuals bringing in 10 times more revenue.

Through its partnership with HootSuite, Flight Centre team mem-bers can easily access dashboards that display all brand mentions for the quickest response possible. In one such case, the consumer believed the speedy reply came from an automated bot. Empowered by Tilston’s best practices, the employee infused his response with quick wit by taking a photograph of himself alongside the consumer’s tweet. This engaging reply brought an element of fun to an interac-tion that, if unattended, could’ve harmed brand reputation, as the employee reassuringly extended his helping hand to this potential pessimist.

One Australian blogger also threatened Flight Centre’s reputation when she began critiquing the company’s Twitter avatar. The blogger claimed the pilot in the image looked drunk because his hat was tilted, causing her to question Flight Centre’s reputability. Rather than ignore her insult, someone on Tilston’s team took this opportunity to engage in friendly banter and jokingly Photoshop the hat in question onto the blogger’s own Twitter avatar. The next day, Flight Centre discovered the blogger had written a positive post filled with nothing but praise for how the team handled the interaction, ultimately converting this potential detractor into an enthusiastic advocate.

Moving beyond these one-off social queries and comments, Tilston and his team also created real-time information hubs on the Flight Centre blog dedicated to issues that impact customers and threaten to disrupt their travels. Through the power of social sharing, these hubs link to fresh information, answers, and social resources so peo-ple may better navigate during times of natural disaster, as was the case with the Icelandic volcano and Brisbane floods, for instance. By collecting and disseminating information from partners, government authorities, and social media, Flight Centre’s blog transformed into the destination for both travelers and the general public to interact with one another and crowdsource help and goodwill.

Through crisis management, in times of both social and natural disaster, Tilston has effectively equipped his team with the tools and knowledge necessary to assist customers with authority and confi-dence during times of confusion or need.

Delivering Social Service to Build Brand Advocacy2014 Customer Champion Gregg Tilston, global social media leader at Flight Centre Travel Group, empowers employees with the social playbook and creative freedom necessary to exceed consumer expectations and cultivate true fans. —By Anna Papachristos


http://www.flightcentrelimited.com/

http://www.flightcentrelimited.com/

https://twitter.com/flight_centre

https://hootsuite.com/



To deliver quality customer care, companies must think like their client base. For Gavin Woody, vice president, operations at A Place for Mom, successful service means blending thoughtfulness and authority to ensure minimal stress and maximum satisfaction.

Each day, Woody leads the company’s 200-person customer qualification contact center team, which provides free nationwide assistance to families looking for senior housing and elderly care. These agents determine the caller’s interest and desired location so they may connect the family with one of A Place for Mom’s 300 senior living advisors, who will then refer suitable senior communities based upon client preferences and requirements. Overall, Woody’s team serves two customers: families and advisors. Thus, Woody constantly urges himself and his staff to ask themselves how they’d want to be treated if looking for care for their own aging relatives.

In his effort to always do what’s right for the customer, Woody observes numerous data points, such as NPS and customer sat-isfaction, to develop his understanding of how the customer feels. Woody actively listens to recorded calls, as well, so he may com-prehend the customer situation and how his staff handles various types of inquiries. At the center of Woody’s customer strategy lies his enhanced quality assurance program, which takes the compa-ny’s old, business-centric approach to task, adding an equal focus on the customer experience. Woody established what “good calls” should sound like, creating the standard by which to measure all such interactions and building the trust and rapport necessary to sustain customer engagement. Since implementing this program, the percentage of families connected directly to an advisor has climbed from 88 percent to 93 percent, boosting employee confi-dence in their ability to assist.

When measuring employee engagement, Woody assesses senti-ment both quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, the team’s call center employee retention rate has drastically improved since integrating this added emphasis on the customer experience, drop-ping from more than 7 percent to less than 4 percent. Employee

roundtables and feedback systems, on the other hand, provide granular insight into how employees perceive the customer expe-rience, as Woody places great value on the ideas that come from staff members who work the frontlines each day.

From this data, Woody and his team have discovered great suc-cess and opportunity for change. In the last year, move-ins—the number of families helped—grew 30 percent, while revenue jumped 40 percent and NPS increased by 11 percent. These numbers indicate that this renewed focus on customer centricity and expe-rience resonates with the company’s client base. A Place for Mom hopes to perpetuate this momentum even further by redesigning its approach to IVR.

“We plan to test not having an IVR message at all within the next few months by connecting callers with human beings right from the start,” Woody notes. “We want to be thoughtful about our mar-ket and, often times, those calling us about senior care for their 90-year-old dad or mom are usually between 60 and 65 years old themselves. With the older generation, people don’t really like auto-mated recordings. We think that putting humans on the line builds trust right out of the gate because, in today’s world, the face of many companies ends up being automated recordings with com-plex routing systems. Therefore, what you gain in efficiency, you lose in satisfaction.”

Unfortunately, however, staff members outside the contact cen-ter run the risk of becoming desensitized, as many will never work directly with a family to find the best senior care options for their loved ones. Thus, to uphold engagement and ensure all employ-ees are functioning at peak levels, Woody instituted a voice of the customer program that requires every staff member (director-level and above) to spend at least one hour per month working side-by-side with an agent as they help families start the process of finding senior care. Such strategies remind leaders who they’re helping, thereby creating a companywide focus on those callers seeking assistance in their time of need.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Employee Engagement2014 Customer Champion Gavin Woody, vice president, operations at A Place for Mom, quantifies the customer experience by providing agents with the tools and knowledge required for quality customer service. —By Anna Papachristos

Gavin Woody, A Place for Mom

THE NUMBERS GURUWhat’s the one piece of advice you’d give to someone regarding how to elevate their customer experience?

“Really listen to the customer! Get in the weeds and actually listen to a lot of calls and, if possible, watch the interactions that are happening. It’s easy for people to become distant from what customers are actually doing, so we rely on statistics and dashboards to try and tell us what’s actually happening with our customers. But the best way to do that is to go talk to customers. Sometimes, at the executive level, even when you’re talking to customers, you still miss the granularity—what the end user is experiencing—so you must also listen to random calls and ask yourself how the customer actually felt to drive decisions around making a better customer experience.”


http://www.aplaceformom.com/

http://www.aplaceformom.com/



Like the human body, careers that are in motion tend to stay in motion. For John Wompey, vice president of operations at Foot Locker, life in retail has been one continuous climb, as he started his journey at the part-time stockperson level and rose through the ranks, learning from customers along the way.

Throughout his career, Wompey has always sought to estab-lish truth in order to drive understanding and empathy between customers and employees. “Being able to work in every position along the way in retail, you have the opportunity to be on the frontline of the truth,” Wompey emphasizes. “The truth is where the experience meets the customer. I constantly have to remind myself to dial back to what matters most, the customer, and not only remember the experience I had, but to go directly to employ-ees in those positions—to respect each position—and get their input because those on the frontlines are focused entirely on cus-tomer experience as it stands today.”

Wompey spends most of his time working directly with associ-ates at Foot Locker locations across the country, helping associates with everything from staffing and store layout, to employee train-ing and product merchandising. Wompey specifically taps into the brand’s comprehensive feedback program to establish what con-sumers seek at each point along the customer journey, thereby using this insight to guide decisions and training techniques.

Because his overarching strategy aims to make all customers feel valued, Wompey focuses his efforts upon listening to their comments directly and educating employees on how to do the same. By teaching associates how to decipher the underlying sentiment for each question or concern, Wompey empowers all Foot Locker employees to understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind great customer experience. In one instance, when coaching a 23-year-old associate obsessed with basketball, Wompey asked the young man, “What if LeBron James came in here? How would you treat him?” With one simple question, Wompey managed to convey the precise level of attention and care he wanted from all associates, as these everyday interactions—these moments in

time—generate sales today to create loyalty tomorrow.To carry out such goals, Wompey’s team implemented the

Customer First initiative, which resides at the heart of Foot Locker’s customer-centric culture. The program focuses upon customer journey mapping in an effort to help the company understand how customers experience the brand and how to design interactions around each point that cultivates closer customer relationships. This roadmap highlights touchpoints throughout the customer life-cycle that are critical to both relationship-building and sales. By using customer feedback to identify associate behaviors that could improve experience, Wompey and his team were then able to cre-ate coaching programs that educate employees about what’s truly most important to the customer. Wompey notes that young asso-ciates respond well to quick bites or bursts with regard to training. Thus, these coaching exercises remain frequent and relevant, for this style allows learning to evolve alongside customer behavior and company understanding.

Often times, when conducting a training session, Wompey will respond to customer inquiries personally to teach employ-ees how to handle such interactions and to ensure the voice of the customer remains prominent across the entire organization. Wompey will call the customer back, tell them he’s training his managers, and ask if they’re comfortable on speaker. In most cases, customers are surprised to hear from him directly and take advantage of the opportunity to help employees understand their questions and concerns. Wompey’s willingness to “walk the walk” also offers associates firsthand understanding of how to put said principles into action.

Wompey truly demonstrates his passion for service by actively working to build customer loyalty, educate associates, and cre-ate an internal culture that empowers employees to become “customer champions” themselves. This dedication impacts employees personally and professionally, while also enabling an effective customer experience strategy that improves sales and satisfaction.

Embracing Customer Feedback to Enhance Employee Engagement 2014 Customer Champion John Wompey, vice president of operations at Foot Locker, uses voice of the customer data to uncover truths that drive companywide innovation and employee success.—By Anna Papachristos

John Wompey, Foot Locker

THE TRUTH SEEKERHow have you evolved your leadership style in the past year?

“Trying to find the truth! I’m determined to find out what’s really going on out there. My leadership style has really leaned on asking questions that are stimulating and get people to think. Not only think for themselves and change themselves, but also find out what’s really going on. I always say if you ask a professional question, you’ll get a professional answer, but if you ask behavior-based questions, you get the truth. That stimulation to get people to think is crucial for us to be able to grow future leaders. Every associate has the potential to be a great leader—a customer champion—we just have to help them with the ability to do that.”


http://www.footlocker.com/

http://www.footlocker.com/


You make superior customer experience look easy, and TeleTech knows the significance of that achievement. Leaders like you use a holistic and creative approach to establish a vision, enable continuous improvements across the enterprise, and put your employees on the path to customer centricity.

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