CX Metrics That Matter to Me
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The Gist
- Churn focus. Prioritize reducing churn by focusing on customer needs to improve overall happiness and retention.
- Growth goal. Aim for an NRR over 100% to demonstrate successful customer base expansion and sustained growth.
- Metrics mix. Balance multiple metrics, like NRR and GRR, to ensure an accurate and comprehensive view of customer success.
- Data storytelling. CX leaders should focus on telling a story with their data, using metrics like NPS and CSAT, to gain valuable insights and feedback from customers.
- Customer engagement. Personal outreach to customers, whether they are promoters or detractors, helps build relationships, encourages feedback and demonstrates the company’s commitment to customer satisfaction.
- Segment prioritization. Not all customers are the same, so CX leaders must recognize and prioritize the needs of their most valuable customer segments in order to provide tailored support and drive success.
The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes famously tackled a pressing problem for his king: determining the purity of a crown. In a moment of inspiration while bathing, he applied the concept of measuring volume to assess the crown’s composition. Elated, he leapt from the tub, exclaiming “Eureka!” (I have found it!).
As with Archimedes’ insightful “Eureka!” moment, today’s customer experience (CX) leaders must carefully monitor key performance metrics to uncover valuable insights about their customers.
Melissa Henley, an experienced CX leader at Luxion, the company behind KeyShot 3D software, explores the vital aspects of both customer and employee experiences. In this latest podcast with CMSWire’s CX Decoded, Melissa, a CMSWire Contributor, identifies two core metrics that CX leaders should prioritize: churn and net revenue retention (NRR). Melissa elaborates on the significance of these metrics in evaluating customer satisfaction and cultivating a loyal customer base, emphasizing the importance of a keen focus on these numbers for a company’s success.
Additionally, Melissa addresses the crucial role of data in CX leadership. She asserts that proficiency in working with data is essential for success in the CX field. And just as Archimedes needed to perfect his measurement techniques to resolve the king’s quandary, in the world of customer experience, mastery of the right metrics can lead to those elusive, yet sought-after “Eureka!” moments.
You can read Melissa’s CMSWire columns here.
We caught up with her on the topic of metrics and more recently.
Editors note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Dom Nicastro: Hello, everybody and welcome to CX Decoded podcast. I am Dom Nicastro here with our latest guest, and I do these ones solo because these are the cool kids I call them they are the CMSWire contributors from the contributing community who write articles for us from the trenches, where they’re doing their jobs, learning the lessons, doing it, the work of CX. I love it. In this one is going to be Melissa Henley, vice president of customer experience at Luxion what’s going on, Melissa?
Melissa Henley: Hey, Dom, how you doing?
Dom: Oh so good to have you. I’m so glad when I can just boot my team off these calls and just do these one-on-ones with contributors. It’s like this is my world, all I think about all day, the contributors making them happy and delivering great content, and you are one of the best.
Melissa: Well, thank you. You could say that again.
Unraveling the Link Between Happy Employees and Satisfied Customers
Dom: So of course our listeners can follow you and CMSWire. Of course you are regularly writing content for us in the world of customer experience. And what I love about you, Melissa, is you actually cross over that path to employee experience a lot, too. I love that you’re talking about both EX and CX because how can you not?
Melissa: How can you have happy customers if you don’t have happy employees? The two are really tied together.
Dom: Right? So much so and how long has it been now since you’ve been writing for us in the contributor CMSWire world?
Melissa: Now probably I want to say like four or five years. It’s been a while.
Dom: That’s so good. Taking the time from the trenches right for us. We love it. The topic du jour today is going to be what KPIs you are following, the top metrics that you care about, the things you’re thinking of, the challenges around those, the successes, and also a little bit of we can open this up to some generative AI conversation, too — how can we not?
Melissa: How can you not truly?
Dom: But yeah, let’s get some knowing Melissa action going on here. So tell us about your role and kind of your path to get there where you are now.
Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. It was funny. When you were talking about metrics. I always say if I had known I would have spent so much time in Excel working with data, I would have majored in something besides women’s studies. So I actually came to software, sort of a really roundabout way. I was previously working in finance, had taken some time off, came back to work. And I was looking for a job at my previous company, their job description said, “we’re looking for a writer and we serve free lunch.” And I was like, well, I can write and I sure do like lunch. So that’s actually how I got into software.
Dom: Wow.
Melissa: Yep. And I ran marketing for a really long time. And then my previous company, they were looking to build out their customer success and customer experience practice. And so because I worked so closely with our customers, they had asked me to kind of step up and lead that. And so that’s how I ended up in the exciting world of customer experience.
Dom: Isn’t that crazy of customer experience professionals, the path is just not straight. It’s not clear. It’s like, where did you start, but you just wonder. And we had time Tom DeWitt on a podcast recently on CX Decoded, talking about his Michigan State University master’s in CX programs. So you actually are starting to see education meeting CX, right, which is so cool. When you’re hiring, in your experience, where are these young CX folks starting? Are they taking courses that relate to CX in any way or?
Melissa: It’s interesting, I see a lot of not just with myself see a lot of overlap between sales, marketing support, and those people tend to go into customer success and customer experience just because of the background is not as important as really being motivated by doing the best thing you can for customers. And I’ve had a tendency to sort of find those people throughout the organization and bring them over. But I definitely see as we’re hiring now, there’s definitely a deeper bench of CX professionals than there were when I started. And it’s exciting to see all the new programs, training and customer experience. I went through one myself a couple of years ago. It’s definitely changing.
Related Article: 20 Customer Experience Metrics Critical for Your Business
The Impact of Churn on Customer Experience and Strategies for Improvement
Dom: So I want to start the conversation by talking about the fun world of metrics.
Melissa: You must have just been at my desk when I was building a deck with all the metrics.
Dom: I like to call metrics, the “yeah, but … “ right there. Yeah…but it’s like, hey, our customers are happy. “Yeah, but what does it really say?: Everyone gets you on something. And in the journalism world, we’re always measured, you know, I mean, I think I shared something that was really exciting about a tweet or something I put out and it was getting a lot of love. And someone in the company said “yeah, but is it getting engagement on the website?” Don’t be a buzzkill. Come on, come enjoy this to vanity tweet, you know.
Melissa: You can’t enjoy it. You gotta look at the bigger picture with metrics, unfortunately,
Dom: I know and you being a leader in your organization and CX you are constantly being measured and asked by, you know, folks that care about the bottom line. So let’s get into three metrics, three high level metrics that you care a lot about. Let’s start with churn. OK, because how important is that one?
Melissa: Obviously, you mean the number that gives me nightmares? Yes, absolutely churn. So here at Luxion, our product KeyShot is 3D visualization software. And so it is really one of those products that a lot of our customers will — they’ll learn it as a student when they’re in school for industrial design, and then become really faithful to it. And so we’ve been in the middle of transitioning from perpetual to subscription. So really, churn is sort of that number that I wouldn’t say it’s the one metric to rule at all for me, but it is one of the metrics that rule it all for me. And with churn in particular, it’s where you really see those hard truths about your customer happiness, because you can hide it all you want behind NPS scores, because that’s just a subset. But churn is really where the rubber meets the road.
Dom: In your past experiences, organizations, is churn like it’s just automatic. Does every CX leader have to be closely watched and churn? And if not, is there a good compelling reason that that’s not top of mind for them?
Melissa: You know, it’s interesting with churn, I think you can look at it a couple of different ways. Maybe you’re looking at your net revenue retention, you’re looking at your gross revenue retention. But in the end, I mean, you always sort of expect there’s going to be some level of churn. And I think as customer experience leaders, we’re always sort of striving towards that zero churn. But in reality, you’re never really going to hit zero, right? Because you’re always going to have companies that might be going out of business priorities change, so you’re never going to hit that 100% retention, although I think we all sort of always strive for that. But it really does keep the focus on the customer. I really think that’s why churn is one of those metrics that we watched so closely.
Dom: And obviously, this comes down to good tools, right? So you need to have that base — that foundation. So what are some of the platforms like those foundational have to have, if this system blew up, in my day, I will lose my mind kind of thing. Something that you’re just firing up every workday, and it’s telling you churn and sort of how does that process work?
Melissa: So for me, we really rely heavily on Salesforce. We’re in the middle of transitioning to a new payment platform. So we’re building our numbers together from a bunch of different locations right now. But for me, it’s really — we live and die in Salesforce, I have a pretty new customer success team. So we’re at the point now where we’re trying to decide if we need to invest in a customer success platform or continue to use our CRM. But for me, it’s our CRM, it’s our payments, its NPS, our customer, community, those are the things that I’m always sort of refreshing throughout the day.
Dom: Are the vendors lately doing a good job with letting Melissa Henley tell them her story, going into these demos, these selection processes, these bake-offs, as they call them, and they do a good job of letting you upfront — telling you your needs and kind of taking it from there.
Melissa: Some I wish they would do a better job of you know, I don’t necessarily want to become an expert on every single software platform in the world. And so when you find a vendor that really understands your needs, and tells you what you don’t know that you need, those are the ones that I really come back to over and over again, our customer advocacy platform. Influitive is one of those, I feel like they’re really on the cutting edge of customer advocacy and providing features I didn’t even know I needed before I asked for them.
But on the flip side, they’re also really good about listening to feedback. So we are really heavy users of the discussions feature. And so when we have feedback based on what we’re hearing from customers, what we’re noticing, it’s they’re always really available to have someone from product management hop on the call set up calls with anyone in the organization. So I think especially those of us that work in customer experience, like we really notice when there’s a good customer experience. And on the flip side, we really notice when the customer experience is suboptimal.
Dom: Yeah, right. All right, so let’s give the one big takeaway for churn. If I were a customer experience leader, and I was tasked with improving that — it’s just been a bad quarter — things are not going well. Like where do I start trying to flip the script on a bad churn number.
Melissa: I’ll give a piece of advice, and I’ve written about this in my columns more than once over the years. It’s a piece of advice from the founder of the previous company I worked at — and she would always say focus on the customer, and the money will follow that if you’re making decisions based on money, customers can sense that and will like sort of recoil from it. But if you’re making decisions with your customer in mind that you’re really keeping their needs front and center, the money will naturally flow from that. So I would say if you’re really having issues with churn, take a step back and think about the customer — really think about — what are they facing? And what changes have you made? Are they addressing sort of driving revenue? Or are they addressing solving for the customers needs, and that should put you on a pretty good path forward.
Related Article: Top Customer Experience Metrics That Impact Internal Operations
Understanding and Leveraging Net Revenue Retention for Customer Success
Dom: Awesome. All right, and this next one, we’re going to talk about metric two of three that you’re super laser-focused on. And I’m going to take a deep breath on this, Melissa, because I’m from Boston. And when I say this acronym people probably won’t understand. So I’ll say it how I say it first. And then we’ll say it like how the rest of the world says it. So it’s NRR. That’s how I that’s how I say it. In the real world. It’s called N ar, ar, I had to take a deep breath to pronounce my R there. Can you define that? Tell us what it stands for, kind of give us the big picture of what it is. For those who might even be experiencing this for the first time. Possibly, you never know who’s listening in the podcast world, and then just lay the foundation of how you approach it.
Melissa: Sure, absolutely. So NRR, which always makes me feel like a pirate, when I say like NRR, to me, it’s really the one metric to rule it all. When you’re working with subscription customers, because it encompasses churn, you basically take your revenue, and then you subtract your downgrades your cancellations, and then divide it by your revenue, and then you get a percentage. And with net revenue retention, you really want to aim for over 100%, because that shows you’re expanding your existing customer base.
Now, one thing with NRR, there’s also on the flip side, there’s gross revenue retention, which takes the expansion revenue out. And so you can have to look at both of them, you can’t just only focus on NRR, because you can sort of game the system, you can hide some of that churn behind expansion. So say you have 10% of your customers’ churn, but you expand one of your largest accounts, then it’s going to look like your NRR is great, when in reality, we have an issue going on.
And so that’s why you can’t look at really one metric in isolation. That’s why probably today we’re talking about three metrics instead of just one. But with NRR, that’s really the thing you really want to be focused on is not just what are you selling, but what accounts are you upgrading and expanding? Obviously key for customer success?
Dom: Yeah, and in the nightmare department how close is NRR for you to churn? Is it giving you as many nightmares are not as much half as much?
Melissa: You know, yes and no, I think with NRR, it’s one that I really drive home with the customer success managers because it shows the other dimension of how well you’re doing your job, like churn shows how well you’re keeping customers, but are you keeping them by throwing crazy discounts their way?
So NRR kind of shows that, and it also shows how well you’re getting to know your customers, how well you’re focused on the customers in terms of recommending features and products that would meet their needs. And, in particular, you know, having that data around adoption, and product usage is really one of those ways that you can push your NRR because you’ll basically know what you can recommend in a timely manner to your customers.
Mastering Data Skills and Understanding the Role of NPS and CSAT
Dom: As you’re talking, I’m thinking, do CX leaders need to be basically data scientists? What’s that balance? Because, man, you know, things that make customers happy. But at the same time, you have to be able to use a tool that can extract these insights, you have to do it well. Are you like the owner of these tools basically, in your organization?
Melissa: Well, we have a business analyst I work with maybe 75% of my reporting needs I can handle on my own, which if you had told me that even 10 years ago, I’d been like, What are you even talking about? I don’t know how to run a pivot table. But then I work with him on sort of the 25% that’s a little more complex, where I need to tie multiple data sources together, where I’m trying to say like, well, if this then that, and so it’s helpful. Do you have to be a data scientist? No, but do you have to be comfortable with data? Yes.
Dom: Yeah, I’m actually typing away to ChatGPT right now to see what it thinks of NRR.
Melissa: Oh, that’s good. You can have ChatGPT tell me if I’m wrong.
Dom: Exactly. Actually, I just put NRR in there and in ChatGPT says, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Melissa: Oh, so score one for the humans. That’s right.
Dom: You don’t know CX metric Nananananana. So all right, NRR obviously important to you. So give me that one big takeaway on this one the needs to be improved. I’m not quite sure that I’m getting it, I need to show my board something better with this, where do I start?
Melissa: I’d say develop cohorts based on value. And so we can’t treat all customers the same. Depending on your product type, you probably have a lot of really small customers, that sort of more quantity. And then it’s like the 80/20 rule, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. And so then you want to make sure you’re not treating everyone the same. And that you’re really focusing on the needs the you know, your smaller customers, they may be your advocates, your fanatics that are out there spreading the word about your product, where you really want to focus on your larger customers and making sure that new customers and new departments are adopting your product. So that would be kind of my one big takeaway is you can’t treat every customer the same. And you really have to know which customer segments are most valuable.
Related Article: Voice of the Customer (VoC): Much More Than a Satisfied Customer
Debating NPS and CSAT: The Power of Storytelling with Data
Dom: All right, cool. Done. Two metrics done out of three. And I know you clearly have more than three metrics in your world. But these are the ones that are top of mind at the moment. And the last one, and I feel like these terms, you can just plug into LinkedIn next to like a CCXP person. And you would get 50,000 results within the last month because everyone debates CX leaders love to debate this. And it’s the Net Promoter Score and the customer satisfaction score, NPS and CSAT.
Melissa: Yes, NPS and CSAT. Well, you know, I was thinking about this when you were asking if you need to be a data scientist to be in CX. And I don’t know that you need to be a data scientist, but you need to be able to tell a story with your data.
And I think that’s where CSAT and NPS really come into play. Understanding not just who your promoters are, but what are the things that come up over and over and over again, it’s easy to maybe tell not the most true story with NPS because it is a percentage of your user base. But if you see the same things coming up over and over, like customers are saying, like, hey, we hate the experience and the product, or we really love this new pricing structure you’ve come up with. Customers will tell you. It’s just a matter of if you’re listening.
Dom: I just wrote in my chat with our producer team, mark what she just said for an audiogram. Because when you said need to tell a story with your data, it just resonated with me so much. Being an editor and managing editor of CMSWire and I can show you the numbers, I can show you our monthly numbers, I can show you the metadata where the content is coming from who’s looking at it when. But I can’t tell you a story if I just show you the numbers, right. And if I can get some stories out of that data, that’s gold for me, that’s absolute gold. So with the NPS and CSAT. The debates I was mentioning earlier was well, yeah, it’s good. If it’s good, that’s great. But I don’t know it doesn’t really give you a full sense of what’s going on. So what do you say to that camp? Who says don’t use that as your goldstar metric? No, no, no, no, you can’t do NPS?
Melissa: Well, I think there’s a reason we’re talking about three metrics today instead of one because they all have their place. And I am actually a big fan of NPS. When used properly, you can just plop your score up on the screen and be like we have an NPS of 60. Great job, let’s all go home.
But what I’ve been doing recently is every customer that leaves a comment on their NPS survey, whether it’s positive or negative, I reach out to them and ask them hey, thanks for being a customer. I’d love to know what you’d do to improve the product or what’s your favorite thing about it with our detractors, fortunately, a much smaller group than our promoters. Thank you for your feedback, I want you to know we’re taking it seriously. Can you go into more detail about why you point it, you know, because there’s things that come up over and over. And granted, I can’t be like, OK, 10 people have said this, obviously, it’s a trend. But we can use it as an opportunity to really be empathetic with customers and try and understand where they’re coming from.
I don’t know, if you’ve read the new book that Fred Reichheld wrote “Winning on Purpose.” He’s the guy who created NPS, but it’s all about customer love, which is something I’m really passionate about is showing customers that we value them, we care for them that we love them and want to do the best thing for them. So I think that’s where NPS really shines is a way to find those people. Because if someone’s willing to spend the time to leave you a comment, they either really love you or really don’t. And either way, as a CX leader, you should be reaching out and finding out why they feel the way they do.
Engaging with Customers on a Personal Level
Dom: That’s another great audiogram right there. Because you hear that all the time in these podcasts, and CX Decoded on CMSWire.com. CX leaders, consultants, they all say talk to your customers more. So I would love for you, Melissa to visualize that for me and put it into action. Like how do you do that? Say, where are you looking at those NPS comments and how do you actually reach out to them? Is that like a personal email that you send.
Melissa: Yeah.
Dom: Wow. I love it.
Melissa: It is customer’s personal email I said, and you’d be surprised how many people respond to it. Wow, someone’s actually, you know, because I mean, as a CX leader, I will respond to every customer experience survey I get, because I’m like, somewhere on the other end, there’s someone on their CX team is like, Thank God, someone filled this out. But I have time blocked out on my calendar on Fridays, usually, which are my slower days, and I spend about an hour just sending emails and you know, hey, I just want to introduce myself wanted to thank you for taking the time to give us your comments, basically addressing their concerns, inviting them to feel free to reach out to me if I can help with anything. And in general, at that point, I’ll pass them off to their customer success manager. But to me, I think it makes a difference showing that from the highest levels of our company, we care about our customers, we care about what they’re saying, we care about their feedback, we care about addressing their concerns, even if it’s not positive. It’s easy to respond to people who love you like who doesn’t like that. But it’s actually listening to people that have feedback that maybe you don’t want to hear, that ends up being really beneficial for the entire organization.
Dom: I’ll tell you right now, that data that you get from those anecdotes, and those email conversations, I’m telling you, I think that’s better than any CX tool out there, to show what the customers are directly saying to you. In a conversation like that. That’s amazing. I think if I’m a board of director, I would love to see something like that what the customers are actually saying, versus just another fancy chart.
Melissa: Well it ties right into everything we’re doing with our customer advocacy program. So we launched a new customer community about six months ago. And our goal was we wanted to get more actionable feedback from customers really give them an opportunity to influence our decisions, give us feedback on what they love in the product, what they would improve, because the people who are going to be the best at telling you how you can improve are the people who are in your product every single day. And we have been blown away by the engagement with our new forums, we went from about 1% of users being engaged to over 40% of our users being actively engaged and just to be able to stand in front of the board or even my boss and say, Look, these are comments people are giving us they’re saying that they want to improve the feature. And this is all such valuable feedback. And it’s really rewarding. I’ve always felt as someone in customer experience, the thing I should be spending the most time doing outside of managing my team is interacting with customers.
The Power of NPS and CSAT: Embracing Customer Feedback
Dom: And it’s amazing, because, you know, I think it’s so hard to wrangle people and convince them to give you money, right to begin with. But it’s twice as hard to give you their time. And I feel that right. I feel that because matter of fact, with folks like you, Melissa, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the contributors of CMSWire because they are literally giving me the gift of their time. I know how hard it is to get in front of a computer, not distracted and write something, That is so hard. So convincing customers to do that after they made a purchase. Like you said earlier, when they’re doing that they deserve a major kudos no matter if it’s negative, or positive or neutral. Is this customer happy or sad? I can’t tell. So that’s why you email them, right?
Melissa: It’s true. And it goes back to something one of my mentors used to say to me, which was the greatest gift you can get is a customer complaining. And at that time in my career is like what are you talking about? Like, no, we don’t want any complaints. You know, if someone’s complaining, or even if someone’s taking the time to provide positive feedback is when you stop getting that, that’s when you should be concerned. Because if someone’s complaining, they still care. And the opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love is basically apathy. And so when customers stop talking to you, that’s when you need to be concerned. And so my hope is that by really reaching out, you know, I do the same thing with customers who churn I reach out to them and ask them about their experience, ask them how we can improve. And with customers that renew, I can’t obviously do every one, but I pick a couple and then just reach out to them to hear. What are we doing well, where could we improve? How can we keep delivering a better experience to our customers? I mean, because really in the end, that’s what my job is?
Generative AI and the Continued Importance of Human Involvement in CX and Marketing
Dom: Yeah. Alright, let’s put the final stamp on this metric that you care about greatly. NPS CSAT. Talk to me if I’m a detractor of it. And I’m not convinced to buy into it quite yet. What do you say to me?
Melissa: I’d say I find people who think that often are using that as their only metric. And if you look at NPS as sort of one piece of your customer health puzzle, it has a place and if you’re really focused on love and customers loving you, you loving your customers, you can really track your trends over time. The other thing I’d say is that just understand that it isn’t the whole little picture, but it should be part of your picture.
Dom: All right metrics aside, thank you for that. Melissa, I want to finish up with again, we cannot let you off the hook without a generative AI ChatGPT conversation.
Melissa: Oh, I have a funny story about this. So I was thinking about, you know, generative AI. And I said, you know, I’m gonna ask ChatGPT what it thinks the benefits of generative AI are for customer success. And I would like to report it was almost 100% the same, which I don’t know if that’s good for me or good for the AI but either way.
Dom: Yeah, exactly. No, I asked the same question. I think I said, what customer experience outcomes can generative AI create? And I put the same question in from marketing to and I think ChatGPT gets lazy. Sometimes I think It cheats. It’s like, I’m going to do the same takeaways, but I’m going to put in marketing where I put in customer experience, you know, it does that. So it’s like, yeah, you’re copying humans a little bit there with the laziness factor. I like it, though.
Melissa: Well, it’s interesting. I was thinking about like, what would my one takeaway about generative AI be? And it’s kind of that we still need humans. And it may get you like, 80% of the way there, but you still need a human to read it and make sure is it striking the right tone? Is it pulling the right information out? Is it being lazy? So there’s still a place where you can I think it can help you get rid of some of the tedious work, and that volume work, but you still need humans at the end of it?
Related Article: ChatGPT Is All the Rage but Don’t Stop Learning Just Yet
The Value (and Challenges) of Training and Vetting AI Systems for Customer Experience
Dom: Oh, you really do. I mean, I just yesterday, I put in a comprehensive report with a lot of data in there was a PDF, but it was online, so it can look at it. And you need to check because it made up some stats that weren’t there. Like I think its algorithms that got thrown off where it analyzed the doc, but then it grabbed some stuff that already knew and kind of combined those a little bit, I think, because it wasn’t in there. I looked at the takeaways at 82% of xxx, and I did Ctrl F 82. Not in the report, that percentage literally wasn’t in the report, and it said it was. So you are spot on, it needs the human touch, no question about it. Now, let’s ask you this. You’ve told me in the past that you actually are finding some successes with ChatGPT. In your customer experience outcomes. What’s the tangible outcome so far?
Melissa: We’re still sort of in our infancy of using ChatGPT. But I think where it’s been really helpful is in sort of, where we have a large number of things we have to do we have a lot of emails we have to write, we have a lot of call scripts we need to create, and it can kind of take away some of how much time would it take for you to research everything. And I know because I just rewrote all our customer templates. And that takes time. And so with the generative AI, it can kind of take a little bit of that time away. The other place I’m really excited about it is with self service bots. So I oversee our support team. And so there’s a lot of possibilities there. We’re just starting to explore with giving customers faster service, using all the data we already have at our fingertips.
Dom: Yeah, and implementing these tools comes with a lot of concerns. And like you said, ethical issues and stuff like that, if you were to hire a human being that worked for you, 24/7 and answered questions to everyone ever, all the time, you would vet that employee prospective employee for six months, but you wouldn’t let them in the door until you knew everything about them. Same thing has to happen, that vetting really needs to happen with these AI systems, no matter how cool and fast they are.
Melissa: It’s interesting, we’ve been working on a bot for our Support Platform, and I sort of had this idea, it would just be like plug and play, but you really have to train it. And it takes a lot of effort to point it to the right information, train it on the right information, get it to respond in the right tone. So at a certain point is like is this ever going to be worth it, but it can be it just, I certainly did not expect the training part of the AI to be so involved. And I think that’s where it’s interesting that a lot of companies like Salesforce, ChurnZero, others are adding AI into their product, where they’ve kind of done the training for you. And so I’m interested to see where that’s gonna go.
Dom: This has been amazing. We get the metrics downpat, we get your thoughts on generative AI. Let’s just finish with one quick takeaway. Maybe not a takeaway, but a vision for this time next year. What’s one thing you would love to have accomplished? If we’re having the same conversation next year at this time?
Melissa: I don’t know how long do you have because I could just reiterate my presentation to the board. One of the reasons I joined Luxion is because everyone here is just obsessed with customers. And as someone in customer experience, that’s what you want. You don’t have to sort of transform the organization to reorient around the customer. And that’s exciting for me. I mean, My past company was like that as well, very customer focused. And so I think if I were here next year, the one thing I would have wanted to accomplish is really start reflecting some of our customer obsession and customer love in a lot of the experiences our customers have with us whether it’s purchasing or renewal, or logging into the product for the first time, and we’re getting there. And there’s a lot of exciting things we’re working on. So that would be what I would say.
Dom: Okay, great. Well, let’s give our audience just the where to follow Melissa, I know probably LinkedIn is a good place, we’ll post a link to your LinkedIn profile. And of course, hey, CMSWire.com. Absolutely the best place to follow Melissa Henley, anything else that he blogs or any thought leadership that you’re doing outside of that?
Melissa: I have a Twitter account that I mostly just use to share my CMSWire articles. You know, I spend more time reading Twitter than I do actually tweeting on Twitter. So LinkedIn is probably the best place you know, I’m out and around. I speak at conferences, write for other publications. But of course, CMSWire is the best. And all that I share on my LinkedIn. So that’s probably the best way to find me.
Dom: Awesome. I can’t thank you enough for yet another use of your time, this time on CX Decoded podcast, in addition to your well lovely, consistent, amazing CMSWire.com articles. Elissa Henley, VP of customer experience at Luxion. We can’t thank you enough for joining us today.
Melissa: Thanks for having me.
Dom: All right, have a good one.
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