The Urgency of the Customer Journey

Transcript

DAVID CARTY: Horse riding can be a relaxing experience, or a thrilling one or, come to think of it, a harrowing one. No matter whether you’re an experienced rider or a newcomer, Todd Unger has been in the saddle for all of those experiences. Giddy up!

TODD UNGER: I started taking lessons. And although it’s only once a week, it’s something that, just like anything, like golf or whatever, you start to learn. What’s different from golf is, you’re on an animal. And there are things that are unpredictable. And it can be very scary. And conquering the fear of riding and trying new things, like jumping, which is something that I do, has been good for me from a courage standpoint and has really changed my life. And I did go to Ireland with my wife and my younger daughter, on a horseback riding vacation. And they didn’t really explain to me what it was going to be. And so we all got on our horses. And we went out to this particular part of the grounds. And there were nine logs lined up in a course, that were as high as I’ve ever jumped. And they’re like, OK, go. And I looked at my wife. I’m like, I’m not prepared for this. So try and talk about overcoming your fear. It was kind of like playing golf, but with horse jumping. So they took you out to a whole bunch of different spots. And that’s the core. Each one is its own course. Talk about overcoming your fear and just trusting that the horse knows what it’s doing and sometimes hanging on for dear life, basically, but really fun and very exhilarating. 

CARTY: Todd’s horse riding experience has informed his professional career to a degree, including yielding one of his most significant leadership discoveries. 

UNGER: It’s much more about getting that sync mentally, with a horse. And again, they’re emotional creatures too. They can tell when you’re scared or you’re nervous or not comfortable. And that makes them nervous. But there are all sorts of physical cues that you could give a horse. But in general, they’re very sensitive creatures. And they just need to know where you want to go. So I always think about that in terms of leadership. It’s having that– looking ahead and just pointing that direction. And people go.

CARTY: The activity has also been profound on a personal level. And it’s one he shares with his family today. 

UNGER: I was the last person in my family to pick up horseback riding. My wife was a rider in her youth, and then picked it back up when my children got older. And then they both rode. And it became very lonely on the weekend for me, waiting for them either to come home. And it’s not a fun thing to watch. So eventually, I took the bait and started riding with them. So I think I might have had my peak horseback riding experience. My days might be behind me. But now we’re more– we did buy a horse. And so my wife spends a lot of time riding. And I accompany her on trail rides and things like that. 

CARTY: This is the Ready, Test, Go. podcast, brought to you by Applause. I’m David Carty. Today’s guest is equine enthusiast and customer experience expert Todd Unger. He is the Chief Experience Officer and SVP Marketing and Member Experience at the American Medical Association. His book, The 10-second Customer Journey, the CXO’s Playbook for Growing and Retaining Customers in a Digital World, came out earlier this year. Wait. 10 seconds? How much can that really change? Well, in a digital context, it can make or break your customers’ experience with your brand. And for that reason, many organizations are placing extra investment on their CX operations as a way to achieve growth. As  Todd writes in his book, for organizations to succeed, they need a data-driven approach and an emphasis on experimentation. But don’t take my word for it. Take Todd’s.

Let’s start with the obvious question. Why 10 seconds? I can’t decide if 10 seconds seems like a long amount of time or a short amount of time. I guess in a digital sense, it does feel like a long amount of time. But can you explain how 10 seconds can make or break your customer journey? 

UNGER: I will tell you just right off the bat, it’s supposed to be a short amount of time. And so when you think about the whole process of what I call the digital customer journey, think about it. It starts with you, whether or not you may be– or not aware of even a product or a brand’s existence. And then to have it in your shopping cart, hit Go, and you’ve paid with Apple Pay. Everything’s really smooth. And you’re done in 10 seconds. That’s a very, very short amount of time. And a little bit of the inspiration for the book was thinking about the old ways. Think about how slow the process was, even the traditional definitions of the marketing funnel, that were very sequential, very slow, very expensive to move people down that funnel. And now, you open up your social feed and you go from not being aware of something to having it in your cart and buying it in 10 seconds. I call that the tornado funnel. That’s what I mean by that, because everything is whipped together, as opposed to being sequential and slow. 

CARTY: You write that the book is about eliminating friction. And for those who don’t know, can you explain what friction is, as well as how it manifests and inhibits growth in customer journeys? 

UNGER: Yeah, one of the things I like to talk about is, I think there’s a theme song for customer experience. And you didn’t know it. But it’s from Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.” I see it. I like it. I want it. I got it. Those are really the steps in the digital customer journey. And friction is what lives all the way through that process. And a big part of the problems with marketing these days is, people think about getting to “I see it.” And they think about making something attractive. But they don’t get to “I got it” because a lot of those in-between steps are run by different parts of your organization. So really, the responsibility is to get it in people’s hands. And so it does take the orchestration of all of the steps that sit in between. And that’s why I say it’s marketing, product, commerce and service, because that friction starts at the beginning. Whether you’re talking to the right people, you’re talking to them in the right way, you’re reaching them through the right media, a lot of that is before the clock even starts. Then there are mechanical sources of friction which are, I landed on a page and you didn’t show me what I thought you were, your payment system didn’t work, I can’t log in, all of these kinds of things. That’s before you even get the product, to have an experience with it and decide whether you want to use it again. So those pieces of friction really are broader than people think of the mechanical parts. They’re mental, as well. 

CARTY: And to get into an example, you write in the book about, at the AMA, there was a login problem that was causing a disproportionate number of calls coming into the call center, right? And while they were very good at remediating this issue with the physicians and the medical students that were reaching the call center, it was a huge inhibitor to growth. And despite it being a known issue, nobody owned the problem. So it was going unfixed. I’m sure our listeners and our audience are well familiar with the concept of technical debt and bug backlogs. But what’s your perspective on how to remediate known causes of friction like this, where there’s not a groundswell or a champion pushing for that change? 

UNGER: Yeah, this kind of experience with what we’ll call a break-fix model, that gets handled in your customer service group, was the inspiration for the formation of customer experience at the American Medical Association. This is the first time I’ve ever run a customer service operation. And we have a fantastic group, a service center that serves all of the AMA. They’re very good at remediating the problem. So if somebody calls in, saying, I can’t log in, they’re going to walk you through all of the steps involved with that sometimes. And it does involve words “clear your cache” and all these things that people just can’t– they don’t like to do. But they were good at fixing this. But I looked at it. I think it’s probably a quarter to 30% of our contact volume is coming through something like “inability to log in.” Now, so many things depend on people signing in. It’s a number-one way of identifying people so that you can give them personalized marketing and customer experiences, is to be able to know that they’re a doctor or they’re a medical student, plus them being able to enjoy their benefits and all these other things. So I looked at my head of the customer service center. And I said, we’ve got to change this situation because we need to fix the problem, as opposed to fixing the customer’s problem on the spot. And that really was what started the repositioning of her as a customer experience director. And we literally went back to school on building a customer experience strategy and team from the ground up. Now, since that time, we’ve seen dramatic reductions in things like the ability to log in. We just had a major release last week about password recovery. It’s basically, every time we find these problems that are getting in the way of our members enjoying their experience, the job’s to fix the problem. Now again, nobody owned that problem. And that is the central part, I think, that Bruce Temkin, back at Forrester is identifying. A lot of these what I call in-between problems. They fall in between different groups. So if you don’t have some group to just take ownership of that and bring all the pieces together, it becomes very difficult to solve a problem like that. So now I call my CX team. And I know that they’re going to handle that. 

CARTY: It’s funny, you mentioned clearing the cache. I remember reading in the book that if you want to see steam come out of your ears, ask you to clean your cache. And I totally relate to that. And it’s just a line from the book that stands out to me.

But you explain, in today’s digital marketplace, how it upends a lot of the traditional marketing discipline because of this sense of competition and urgency. You mentioned the tornado funnel earlier. One of those areas is in persona targeting, where you argue that brands really need to be purposeful in data collection and management. With data regulations and tools evolving rapidly, how can brands best collect all of that customer data and implement it effectively in their digital products? 

UNGER: Yeah you hit on one of my pet-peeve terms in marketing, which is “personas.” And I know that people use them in a lot of different ways. And what I talk about in the book is, the number-one quality of a great customer segmentation is that it’s data driven. A lot of people talk about personas. They’re imaginary. And they’re kind of made up as self-fulfilling target commitments. And I just heard an example the other day. It’s like, well, this kind of person does this thing and they have a lot of this. And I’m like, it’s not based on anything. And so for step number one– and I’ve seen it time and time again in my career, even before the advent of digital data– is the way to get to that, number one, is to collect data on folks. And it can be around the product usage, content. That’s at the fore, I always think, is that first element. And then there are behavioral and attitudinal characteristics that separate people. And that can come through research, primarily. I call this the 4D view, which is having that kind of data on product usage. You’ve got behavioral data. And then I’d like to collect stuff unrelated to the product, that is just beliefs. It could be political. It could be other things, how they feel about risk, things like that. That’s been an important part of another thing. And then I love to introduce product concepts into the mix, which get a sense of which people are going to respond to new ideas that you have. And then fourth and final– and I mean final– is the demographic part. And again, that’s another mistake people make, is concentrating on the demos. And then they come up with, oh, this is for women 25 to 54. That was an old advertising category. But you can have so much more in common with somebody who does the same thing and is interested and has the same worldview as you. They could be 40 years different in terms of age, and you’re still going to have more in common with them, related to the product category that we’re talking, than someone who’s exactly your age or gender, or you name it. 

CARTY: And I would imagine, the more that you can put data points to how you’re measuring your customers’ sentiment or their behavior, the more it can adapt over time, as well, because when you think about how much the world has changed in the last year, the last 5 years, the last 10 years, you need to be able to be adaptive with that, right? 

UNGER: Absolutely. And I think that in general, if you’ve got a great brand positioning and you’ve got a solid understanding of your target audiences, most of those things are going to be– it’s more adaptive than it’s going to be a total change. And I use an example in the book of talking about our strategy, which grew out of an understanding of our target audience. But what happens when COVID enters the picture? How do you adapt for that moment in time? Your brand promise, your target audience, stays the same. But the way in which you support that is what’s going to have to be modified under those circumstances. So I think if you’re constantly changing target audience descriptions and strategy, then you don’t have a very good one. It should be flexible enough to accommodate different kind of changes in the environment. 

CARTY: Now, when it comes to measuring the customer experience, you bring up a few metrics that can be helpful, including net promoter score, customer effort, score, and customer friction index. How can brands do a better job of being foot forward in collecting these data points and implementing them into design and engineering plans? 

UNGER: Yeah, I think the best data is the one that you act on and that leads to changes for the better, for your customer. And so there’s not a heritage of net promoter score at the AMA. A lot of organizations have been working with us for decades. And so that makes sense to continue to track that. But if there’s a disconnect between what happens in the net promoter score and what’s happening at the ground level, in terms of the changes that are being driven by that, it’s not very useful. So I look to some of these other things. Our friction indices, I think, have had the most impact on us. And we’re basically like, the numerator, just basically number of problems that are people are having over total sessions. And that’s not just in aggregate. But that’s with each individual product. And if you’re tracking that carefully, you can pretty much see, are people able to do what they want to do, what they’re trying to do? And A, how are you collecting that data? And what are you doing with it? How fast are you moving to fix the problems once they’re identified? Do you have that at a system level, to do that? So I think, again, back to some of those scores, our indices are a derived thing. I highly recommend it. And I think there are new technologies that help you get to that numerator in ways that are not just people picking up the phone and calling you and saying, I got a problem. 

CARTY: Now, you are a big proponent of A/B testing as a way to gauge the customer experience. And you describe a few ways where it even seeped into your personal life, such as, which subway seat is better? I don’t know if that’s hyperbolic or not. But it was still really– it got that point home. But from a digital delivery standpoint, what’s the right level of experimentation when it comes to the customer experience? Is there a point of diminishing returns or even brand damage if you experiment too much? 

UNGER: I haven’t found that limit yet. And again, we’re talking about, smaller things in the background that somebody’s probably not necessarily going to notice. There are so many things to test that literally, the supply of things to try to understand is unlimited. We’ve been at this, at the AMA, for seven years. And last week, a person who runs all of our digital publishing writes me and says, hey, we moved this item from this part of our navigation over here, and it resulted in a 40% increase in conversion. And I know. I’m like, oh, my gosh, who knew there’s this nugget just hiding underneath these things. And one of the things I’ve learned over the course of time is, you’re always like, how did you not know that before? Why didn’t we test that? And the answer is, because there are so many things to test. How would you possibly know that? Or it just wasn’t the right moment in time. All of these little changes, they accumulate like compound interest. So it may not be a silver bullet from this little thing. But half a point here and a point there, a quarter point there, by the end of the year, you’re making a difference through all these kind of testing. And so that, to me is– it’s important to have a culture that is just systematically building and test. Every time you send out an email, you test the headline or some part of this. And people need to know how to do this, and set up these tests properly. Everything you do is an opportunity to test something and learn. And that, to me, is like, it’s test and learn. And then put something into motion, based on that. So the other thing I talk about in the book too is, sometimes tests– one component may yield a positive thing. But in the end, for whatever reason, down the chain, it doesn’t make a difference. So you have to not get so enamored of these individual wins, that you don’t really keep your eye on the ball, which is ultimately about conversion. 

CARTY: You just mentioned a test-and-learn culture, which you advocate for. “Test,” in this instance, refers to experimentation as opposed to software testing. But whether we’re talking about this in a marketing context or even more broadly, across the business in QA, engineering, or other departments, elsewhere, how important is it to have some form of a test-and-learn culture? And how does it ultimately benefit that customer journey? 

UNGER: Again, back to– just my personal philosophy is, if you’re not testing, you’re not really setting yourself on a path to growth. And I think experimentation and testing is very motivating. And it is very much about constant learning and research on a daily basis, based on data and what people actually do as opposed to what they say they do. And so I think anybody that’s in digital media or digital commerce, it’s part of their DNA to be the type of person that’s going to look at a dashboard and hit Reload to see how what they did is affecting it. They’re just motivated by seeing growth and the numbers go up. And so you have to instill and build that into your team because it’s part technology and part culture and part systems and operational habits to get into. And then somebody leaves the team and you lose that skill. A year later, you’re like, what happened to our testing? You have to constantly be on that. And a big part of that is celebrating the learning. So on a quarterly basis, we get together and we just share. Here are all the wins that came from analytics. Here’s what we learned. Here’s what won. This didn’t work. Great. Move on. So that’s just part of building the DNA of your organization. 

CARTY: And to further get into that organizational strategy, you ultimately settled on the CX operation being the best fit as a center of excellence to improve teamwork and collaboration across the business. And there are other ways to structure the CX operation within a business. But what benefits does a CEO provide in this context? 

UNGER: Well, I think just to go back a little bit to the start. One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is where I think CX should live. And I personally find it to be highly– to work as an integration point with marketing. And so we happen to– I’ll call it “own”– kind of an end-to-end customer experience part, at least related to membership generation, everything from the digital publishing platform all the way through customer service. And so that’s where we started. And there are a lot of issues to address in terms of customer experience all along the way in terms of that kind of marketing product, commerce service continuum. But once we got that operation up and running and could show the kind of results that we wanted within our own team, we did begin to position the CX team as a center of excellence, to be loaned out to the rest of the organization. And “loan” is even a bad word because I would say we’re proactive in doing it, is looking for partners across the organization who have a growth or a friction issue, and to give them an additional injection of people and technology and resources to be able to systematically identify those sources of friction and then put a process in place to actually fix them. So for us, what it really did was allow us to scale the operation because now we have hundreds of people across our organization working on their own CX problems. And they’re getting upskilled to a certain extent and how that is approached. And I look at it as an improvement sometimes, in marketing because that’s essentially what it is, is unlocking growth by using this new set of folks and new set of expertise. The other thing about center of excellence, and at least the way that we run it, is it directly links CX, which is a term most people don’t understand, to growth. And so if I can come to you and say, I’m going to help you grow, who turns down that proposition? As opposed to a separate group that’s more staffed, that doesn’t have any oversight, that’s not operational in nature, that’s maybe working on net promoter score or whatever, and sits outside your group. And so their initiatives may or may not be aligned with what you think is most important or the priorities. That’s where I see these separate CX teams having a harder time getting traction in organizations than the ones that are built to assist. 

CARTY: Right. A COE starts with good branding and then follows through with some execution to ultimately help achieve that growth. Right?

Now, one of the later chapters in the book is called, The Friction-Free Future, which is a Utopian sort of concept for marketing or go-to-market teams. You settle on five A’s for a friction-free future, which are Automate, Augment, Analyze, Act and Align. Can you explain how those ideas come together to ultimately improve the digital experience and lead us toward this friction-free future? 

UNGER: Absolutely. I think one of the key things that you have to accept is, the pace of technology is just going to continue to move extremely fast. And there’s just no way that you, personally, can be an expert in all of these things. And so that chapter and those five A’s are really about well, what’s a leader to do in that situation? And so it’s to concentrate on the big ideas of improving customer experience. And so that when you think about augment and automate– and that really does refer to I think, where we’re going with AI– you’re not going to have to do all these things yourself. The job, it’s just like web publishing was 15 years ago. It’s a lot easier now. So because the tools and the framework and the systems are all in place and you’ve got a lot to choose from, it can be made very easy. Right now, we’re in a situation where a lot of the data streams that constitute customer experience sit in separate silos. And there’s a lot of manual analysis. And then that analysis has to be translated into action. And so there are these handoffs that sit between even those five A’s, that people have to do. Well, in the future– we work with, for instance, on the automation side, a new system essentially, that is automating the collection of friction points. So it’s called Quantum Metric. And basically, it’s looking for places on the site where somebody’s trying to do something and it isn’t working. So all of a sudden, we don’t have to wait for somebody from customer service to call in and say, when I hit that Go button or whatever it is, it doesn’t load the page. So we collect all of that data. And that allows then, somebody to go in and look and try to figure out, what is going on there? And it even helps you do that. Separately, we’ve got Salesforce Marketing Cloud working in the background. And then we have our data science team using other ways of looking at stuff. Eventually, those systems are all going to come together. And I think if you’re a leader in a group right now, is to figure out how to knit all of those things together so that process of automation and augmentation of your team’s capabilities, through machine learning, through AI, is going to just provide you with just this powerful boost to get more done, things that you might not otherwise even have been aware of. 

CARTY: All right, Todd, lightning-round questions for you here. First, what is your definition of digital quality? 

UNGER: Things work even when you’re not watching. 

CARTY: Ooh, I like it, so taking the person out of it. Is it working properly or isn’t it? It’s like if the tree falls in the forest or whatever that metaphor is, right? 

UNGER: You know that thing about integrity, which is, you do the right thing even when somebody’s not watching? I think of digital quality as being about things working even when you’re not watching. 

CARTY: Yeah. Makes perfect sense. What is one digital quality trend that you find promising? 

UNGER: I think automation of friction collection. 

CARTY: What’s your favorite app to use in your downtime? 

UNGER: I’m a heavy user of Spotify. I guess I’m not unique in that. But I love music. And I love the new AI DJ. I know I’m a weirdo on that. But I’m into music discovery, and it does what it’s supposed to do. 

CARTY: It works for you then. It’s offering good recommendations, huh? 

UNGER: I think you have to just– there’s a lot more assist that may be. But the sign, to me, that it’s working is, if I’m adding music to my favorites based on what I hear from the DJ, then it’s doing its job. 

CARTY: And what is something that you are hopeful for? 

UNGER: The end of AI hysteria. 

CARTY: Ooh, tell me more about that. That’s a good one. 

UNGER: Listen, I don’t mean to underappreciate what the future of AI can and is going to do based on what we’re already seeing, the significant impact. But it’s like, if you’ve been through enough cycles of digital advancement in your lifetime, there’s always this period of peak fear and I don’t know what I’m going to do and everybody’s going to get fired and all this kind of stuff. And so you’re in the hype and the hysteria. But then comes the part where people begin to harness the power of doing it, and they adapt. And that can be a painful period, but can also be sometimes, the most exciting period of all.