Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience. I'm your host, Jordan Hooker, and I'm excited to introduce you to today's guest, Matt Baron. With over 20 years working in IT and customer experience, Matt brings a deep well of knowledge here for our conversation today.
Matt, welcome to the table.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Thanks for inviting me to the table, Jordan.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: So glad to have you here. For our viewers who may not be familiar with you, would love if you could take a moment and just share a little bit about your background and experience.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Yes. Excellent.
I went to college for computer science, failed calculus, and then immediately went to work in the IT department because I knew that's what I wanted to do was work in computers. And so I got an English degree, which I am not teaching English, quickly got into customer service right out of college, started doing customer service and then moved into enterprise support, so supporting IT operations within companies and quickly found that there was a lot of work to be done. And so I spent about 10 to 12 years consulting in the IT service space, the IT service management space, and also consulted in the experience management space at that same time and kind of have been podcasting and just living in this support and service industry for about 20 years now and loving every minute of it.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Awesome. Awesome. I too am not really using my music history degree, so I understand the challenges there. One day I'll find a customer who likes Gregorian chant. It will happen.
Well, let's hop in. I'd love to start just with a conversation around experience management and human centered design. Can you talk a little bit about these topics and why companies should focus their efforts there?
[00:02:04] Speaker B: This is a passionate, passionate topic of mine and I was talking to someone yesterday about this specifically. They were building a voice of the customer program and what her challenge was, moving beyond surveys to understand people, which is a very, very common sticking point for organizations. They get to a point where people aren't giving them what they need to be successful. The feedback that they need either isn't clear, isn't direct, they're not doing analysis correctly. And I think where experience management and experience design really lives is within organizations trying to sell and build and deliver services and products. And it's sort of, I'll call it table stakes because I feel like that's where we're headed. But it's the human centered design concept is really meant to drive the customer, the people using the products and services further upstream towards, towards testing those services, towards prototyping those services and products towards the actual design and implementation of those services and products.
And the. I think that this is really where a major differentiator lives in just about every industry.
The panacea of experience management is having your customers on your agile teams. If you're able to bring customers onto your product teams and onto your service design teams, your customers are going to love what you put out because they built it, you know, so for so long. And this is, this is way worse in within internal IT departments. This is way worse than business to customer in internal IT departments. What will happen is people will build a system and they'll build an experience and then they will cram it down people's throats. They even have this concept called organizational change management, which is meant to convince the employees to use these things. And although that still has a place in every modern organization, organizational change management is legit.
Experience management is the right way to avoid needing organizational change management. If you can implement this in your organizations, people will hear the research, they'll all hear what the customer wants. And, and you won't have to convince people on your teams to do the right things because the customers are sitting right next to them telling them what the right things are. Does that make sense?
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Absolutely does. You touched on an interesting topic there around surveys and I think you've got a pretty strong opinion on this topic. Would love to hear a little bit about how you reached that place and what you think companies should be focusing on.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Yes, surveys are selfish.
They are totally selfish. And the phrase that was really popular last year was survey fatigue. I think that even made its way into this year, into 2024. When I have a relationship problem with my spouse. We've been married for 18 years. If I'm having a relationship problem because every relationship has good points and bad points, I would never text my wife a question or an emotional response or anything really, because it comes off as tone deaf.
I'm going to fail. That's really why I'm not going to do it. I'm going to screw up that text message and it's going to push her away further or it's not going to repair anything. And I think the same can be said for surveys.
If you have a great relationship with your customers already, surveys are good. They're like a pressure valve. Like, okay, they're sending me another survey, I'm giving them another 10, they're sending me another survey, I'm ignoring it. And just continue doing that over and over. Suddenly the customer's upset, okay, I'm gonna fill out this survey at a seven and then a six and then a two. And it's great to be a pressure relief valve for those happy customers. But for the rest of your customers, and certainly if you haven't been having a conversation already, you need to have a conversation with your customers. And I think the other thing that really bothers me about surveys is that you can send a survey and get five years worth of work back from that survey.
At least if you're getting responses and the survey is written well, should get a ton of work back from, from your customers, your, your stakeholders, they're all going to tell you things that you need to fix. And oftentimes we continue to just send that survey without doing that five years of work that we just got, which again, more tone deafness. So that's really like that. That's really why I hate surveys the most.
But a great survey can be delivered and still get that NPS score because I know there are bonuses based off of NPS scores.
The best way to deliver a survey and to give people a voice is to not only capture that NPS but also be able to have a conversation. Whether it's a call to action, to talk to someone or your product team wants, maybe they've got an email box where people are putting their stuff, or even just a plain text box so people can complain and then throw all that text against an LLM to figure out what you need to work on. So surveys, they do have a place, but usually I encourage people to use them as the last possible thing they can use.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: Sure, yeah, absolutely. Let's say a company has been doing surveys for years in this way and then decides, you know what, we're not getting what we need from this. We're not engaging with our customers. What do you think that initial conversation that you mentioned would look like in terms of changing the direction that a company focuses in this area?
[00:08:42] Speaker B: I love this question because you're right. If we're going to take away surveys, what are we going to put in its place?
And so what I recommend to organizations is of course, baby steps, because it's a mindset shift to move towards having customers on your Agile team. What you can do though, is you can meet your customers where they are. I was talking recently to someone who runs an E commerce platform in Korea and they were, they were trying to get closer to their customers. And so I told them, go to the E commerce conferences in that country and you will see, you'll, you'll see all of your customers There and bring developers bring, developers bring, marketing people bring, executives bring, product executives bring. Because those people, then they will learn so much from these customers. At least you should try to create the environment for you to learn so much from your customers and then they will see the value in listening to the customers and then try to bring that to other people. And so surveys are great.
Developing a voice of the customer program, great.
And eventually your voice of the customer program needs to move beyond ones and zeros and move into conversations with the customers. So that can be meeting them at their events, starting up a customer advisory board, giving them a voice, building a community site, finding them on Reddit. There's probably already a community site if you're a popular product. So there are so many steps that you can take that, that, that replace the survey and get you closer to your customer and closer to understanding your customer.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So thinking about a shift to a few other topics, the concept of value stream mapping. Would love to dig into this with you a little bit.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Well, it's trendy right now. I work in the internal IT space very often. That's, that's the industry that I play the most in. It's very niche. There's less like when you think about call centers or customer service, there's a lot of people in that industry. But internal IT is fairly small. And internal IT is also very complex because we don't have, we don't have the luxury of being able to throw things out.
We don't often have the luxury of determining what technology we're going to use because we depend on our companies to determine that a lot of times or we trust them to the best. IT departments are really close to their business and they've got a great relationship. And some of those IT departments and businesses, they shed old technology just as fast as they pick up new technology. And that's great.
But the reason that value stream mapping is so popular in that industry right now is because of the complexity of what, what IT does, what technology does.
And this can be applied a lot of different ways. It can be applied in experiences, something like onboarding.
Seeing that visually and understanding our capacity for hiring. If we know that we can only hire one person per week successfully, we know we're not going to grow more than 52 people a year.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:19] Speaker B: And so, and so that, that capacity, that demand management aspect of, of technology and of service management really depends on understanding your sources, your supply chain. Where are you getting technology from? Are you able to get more of that technology?
Are you able to get IT from one vendor or four vendors? Okay, which of those vendors is best?
Can you use one vendor and then a backup vendor? And I really feel like understanding throughput helps teams understand better when a company is trying to scale. And I think, like, from my perspective anyway, everyone's trying to grow, and if you're not growing, you're dying. So value stream mapping sometimes helps with that.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Thinking in terms of potential outgrowth of that and companies picking up a lot of products, a lot of solutions, trying to develop a strong IT department, whether internal or not. We kind of leaned into this conversation about sustainability, which is a hot topic in IT and, and in multiple industries and for good reason. So we'd love to hear a little bit about your thoughts about the way that IT can put sustainability into practice.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Yes. I'm really hoping that there becomes a standard for this. And speaking of standards, I should have mentioned for value stream mapping, I should have mentioned that NIST too is a great cybersecurity framework that's come out in the EU and they focus on that supply chain. Because even if you as a utility company can't be hacked, can one of your vendors be hacked? And what does that risk look like?
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: And I think the same thing when we talk about sustainability.
I really wish that it was risk required or mandated, but we're not at that point yet. When I think about sustainability, I think of it like this. Now, I y just yesterday was buying a new fidget spinner. I can't believe that I'm admitting this on a podcast, but here I am.
I need fidgets to pay attention sometimes.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: And mine's right here.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
Excellent. I'm safe here. This is a safe place.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: And this is a use case specifically from Amazon, but I had an option of two companies, same price, same spinner, but one of them features at the top that they plant a tree for every single spinner that is sold. And the other one didn't promise anything like that. And that differentiator made me choose the sustainable option. And I think the same is going to continue to happen. And you already kind of see it happening with AI because the cost of running a model and querying a model can be quite high.
And people are starting to realize it. They're starting to realize that maybe there are better ways to answer the question than to spin up a server, have it read all of the Internet, and then spit a response back. So I think that's, that's kind of like the beginning of consumers starting to pick it up. But when I think about organizations, it's really about the social and environmental and governing aspects of sustainability, for sure. So for instance, a company needs to buy a thousand laptops that can have a huge impact on the earth. Depending on which laptop they choose, they might be contributing 20 tons of carbon dioxide or they might be contributing only 10 tons of carbon dioxide. And I think, like, as companies begin to measure that and start to tie those into those assets and those systems and those services and those products, and they start to understand, okay, if we, if we're picking Lenovo, this is how we look to our customers, this is how our sustainability impact looks like. And if we pick Dell, it looks a little different. And here's why. And just knowing that, I think is, I think that's the beginning of where organizations need to be measure first so that you can understand and then eventually you could take action on it if you need to.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Sure. Let's say you had a company that came to you and was like, matt, we know this is important, but we feel like if we invest time in this, it's going to slow us down and our competitors are going to speed right past us. What would your response be to them?
[00:17:18] Speaker B: I'm sorry.
No, really though, that is a tough one. And I think I love a morality question on a podcast. I love a morality question about groups of people and companies because so often we remove ourselves from the actions of our organizations. We think, oh, the organization is doing that. I'm not doing that. But later, how is the guilt gonna feel? Does it feel like you did it? Does it feel like the organization did it? And to me, I think that if I can't, if I can't start, run and succeed as a business and do it in a way that I feel comfortable, honest, authentic and trustworthy, then it shouldn't be done.
You know, if it, if it does become so competitive that you have to do things the wrong way to get an advantage to beat the competitors, you know, you either got to find another niche, you have to find another go to market strategy, or you got to shut your doors. And that's totally fine. It's totally okay to close your doors.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Sure, absolutely.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: And I think that's a really valuable thing. Cause I think you're right. I think it's often we just distance ourselves from the long term impact of the organization we're working for. When in reality, organizations are made up of people. People are actually the ones making the impact. So I'm very, very much aligned with you there.
Let's shift to the last topic. Let's talk about artificial intelligence and customer experience. Would love to hear a little bit about your thoughts on what is currently the the hot topic. I got to tell you, as a support leader, I probably hear from five or six companies every week that promise me they've got the AI solution that's going to solve all my problems. So I'd love to hear your thoughts here. So maybe we can start to weed through what's, what's real, what's not.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: I love this. This is actually a good transition from the morality question to this question. And I didn't even think about it when we were talking about the questions, but that really is what's causing so much consternation in the customer experience space. In the customer service space, all of the service spaces, there is so much fear, uncertainty and doubt that people feel anxious and paralyzed and quite honestly exhausted like listening and thinking about AI all the time. And I think part of it comes down to companies over promising and under delivering. I don't know about you, but I look at a lot of these companies and I go to their website and I look and I see the same five features.
We make responses better. The chatbot sounds more natural. We'll draft your knowledge base articles for you and we're going to find stuff that you're not paying attention to.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Great.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Those are great use cases and they're table stakes right now. That is not innovative, but people are selling it like it is innovative. And that, that bait and switch is something that it hurts us, it hurts the brand, it hurts the entire ecosystem in our industry.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: And I think part of this is born out of the startup mentality. Right. We need to get money, so we have to be impressive.
I think part of it is born out of publicly traded companies. They have to have the headlines or their shareholders are going to suffer. Sure. And so for me, what I'm doing is I'm really listening to the people that are willing to do the work, read the books, take the classes and build new things and experiment because the companies, again, you cannot trust what they're saying because it's a company saying it. If an individual is saying it, then it's got some meat to it. It's got some.
It's an entree, it's not a snack, it's a meal.
And so that's kind of where my thoughts are. I have yet to see something really fascinating and I love this. On Support Driven the other day someone asked, has anyone found an AI technology that will write and publish knowledge articles without a human being involved at all.
And no one could find anything but the conversations that, that stem from that are super useful. So I think like if you're in customer experience and you're in customer service and support, yes, do talk about stuff because we have to, we have. It's how we're going to stay relevant. It's how we're going to continue to be relevant in our industries.
But take it with a grain of salt and know, know when to be appropriately anxious because if no one's threatening you right now, don't worry about it. It's going to take a long time for these models to catch up. The whole agentic AIs, AIs with agency to do what we do as customer service professionals. It's not here yet. It's not even close yet. And I think we all know that the question, like once it's here though, then it's time to learn, you know, learn about this stuff. Because no AI can be left to its own devices. They all have to be checked for quality. They all have to be checked for accuracy. So your job may change, but just know that if you're adaptable and flexible, there's nothing to fear.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Well, hey, thanks for walking us through all these thoughts. Would love to take a moment for any closing thoughts you may have just about the industry or other thoughts that you'd love our listeners to hear.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yes, I think the big thing that's on my mind recently is because of AI and it really is that our technology is becoming more complex. It's becoming more intricate and as it becomes more complex and intricate, the duty and role of caring deeply about it, caring deeply about the quality of it, and caring deeply about the customers of those technologies, that really is where humans will continue to play role. So as long as you care, if you feel like you are the kind of person who's a caretaker and is ready to help people, you've got a long career ahead of you.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say so. I find that the folks that are most successful and have had the longest staying power in this industry, you always find that quality and characteristic in them.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Truth.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: If somebody wanted to get in touch with you to hear more about your work or more thoughts from you on these topics, how would they best reach out to you?
[00:24:20] Speaker B: You can Find me on LinkedIn. Matt Baron, B E R A N or you can email me directly. Matt.b e r a nvigate.com that's I N V G A.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks Matt. We'll make sure to include those down in the show notes as well for Easy Access. Well, thanks again for joining us today. Really appreciate having you here at the table.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Thank you, Jordan. Thanks for having me.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Absolutely. Have a good one.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: You, too.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: You've been listening to the Table Service podcast. You can find out more about today's guest in the show notes below. The Table Service podcast is presented by Tavolo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
