Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] 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. Table Service is presented by Tableau Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Andrew Carruthers is a customer experience executive known for developing innovative CX strategies that grow revenue, increase renewal rates and expedite customer adoption. A founding member of Cisco System CX Function, he helped build the organization with a focus on digital experience and partners. He's a 12 time international customer Experience Award winner, frequently writes and speaks on CX topics, and co authored the Publicity Handbook, a Fortune Book Club selection. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Advisors for the University of San Francisco School of Management Strategic Artificial Intelligence Program and as a judge for both the US and the International CX Award competitions. Andrew, welcome to the table.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Jordan. I am so happy to be here.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: So for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, we'd love if you could tell us just a little bit more about yourself. Let's hear the story.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think my origin story is like a lot of folks in CX who've been in CX for a while and I've been in CX for 15, 16 years now, which sort of is the beginnings of the official discipline. I think the CX Professional association is roughly 15, 16, 17 years old, something around there. So like a lot of folks, I came to CX from marketing. CX is the love child of, of marketing and customer support for the, for the most part, right. There are people coming from operations, et cetera, but seems like those were two sort of feeders coming in and it makes sense. So I came in for marketing and I wrote the Publicity handbook when I was a marketer going back years ago and got into Cisco working in marketing. And then at the time Cisco didn't even have a customer experience function. We sold hardware and we sold services attached to that hardware. And honestly it was incumbent on the customer to get value out of their purchase from us. They paid us up front. They were locked in not only because of the costs associated with that upfront payment, but also their whole IT organization was trained on Cisco gear. So they were a Cisco shop. They weren't going anywhere. So whether they use what they bought from us or not, whether they found value from it, whether they found it frustrating to work with us or a joy to work with us, the focus on customer experience was non existent at Cisco because there was no business reason for it to exist. But while I was There we started to shift into focusing more on recurring revenue services and then adding software. And Cisco's always been a serial acquirer of companies. So acquiring a lot of software companies, WebEx was a big one years ago. Our most recent one is splunk about four or five months ago. Huge almost $30 billion acquisition and a lot of small ones in between and collaboration and security and some other areas as well. So now we need, as a software vendor we needed to have a customer experience function because now the burden to leave for a customer to exit and go to a competitor was much smaller. Right. They're not Cisco specific shops. Those contracts may be a year in length, maybe a month in length. So now the responsibility is on the company to ensure that customers are getting value, otherwise they'll go somewhere else. And you lose the opportunity for renewal revenue, you lose the opportunity for upsell, a cross sell growth opportunity and increase wallet share. And you don't do anything to avoid or reduce costs by allowing customers to essentially self serve and through their own means. So now we needed to create a function. So this is again going back about 16 years ago. There were 50 of us out of a company that at the time had probably 60,000 employees who created the function. There were another 50 who were renewals sales specialist who joined the CX organization on Monday doing what they'd been doing the previous Friday in the sales organization. But there were really just 50 of us who were tasked with building out a new function. So that was my introduction to CX and sort of thrown right into the fire with a small cadre and that was a global team of 50 people. We had to learn everything from scratch. We had to go into a crash course of sort of self education. And then we also reached out to experts in the field, whether that be industry analysts or folks at more experienced SaaS, companies with more experienced CX functions in place.
We, we got a lot of consulting from the woman who built Apple's CX function, for example. So folks have been doing it for a while and cut their teeth on it so we can learn from them and from their mistakes as well as from their successes, along with the more academic type of approaches and the more industry analysts reports, et cetera, as we built out a new function. And then I think as hard as it was at the time, one of the benefits of that approach was that we were forced being so small. I mean, I'm not even sure you could say Cisco was dipping its toe in the water with 50 employees out of 60,000. Right. So I think that because we were so small we had to work cross functionally. We had to focus as much on collaboration as on building a function, which means we had to make sure that what we were focused in on in terms of the value that we were going to be able to provide the company was focused in on the value for each of our stakeholders, for the head of sales globally and in each of the geographic regions, for the head of renewals, for the head of marketing, et cetera, because they wouldn't. We were trying to do something different. So in the end I think that served us really well because we built a. It took us time, but we built a coalition of the willing as well as some really strong champions as we were able to show the work that we were doing and how it directly benefited renewal rates or the partner organization. So when we went to the leaders of the partner organization, the Cisco partner organization, working with partners or whomever it might be. So rather than focusing in on CX specific sort of internally focused metrics like CSAT or mps, which I think are valuable from the standpoint of looking internally for operational improvement and measuring that, but I think that we were forced to put ourselves in a position where we were focusing on Cisco's business results rather than CX results. And I mentioned that because I think the industry and the discipline finds itself today realizing that it needs to focus on those types of business results in order to not get the function cut and or secure additional investment for the function, whether that be headcount or IT investment or whatever it might be. Anyway, that's my background and how I came into CX and a little bit about what we focused in on. And then another thing that I'll mention, because I think it's very pertinent to today's CX discipline is we were always focused in on my team as part of the broader, you know, 50 organization within not, not all 50 of those people were on my team. So we had folks building up the CSM function and tying things together. But my team was always focused in on the digital element. Now originally we viewed digital as twofold, one as a way to try to tie together different systems and pull data together. I think for the first couple of years, for the first three or four years within Cisco, we really focused on two things. One was evangelizing the discipline of cx, telling the story of what is cx, what does it mean, what's good cx, right. You know, when you see it. So give field examples of that. How can it apply? Why our customers are demanding that we deliver them a positive customer experience. Why? Or they'll go somewhere else. And the second half of what we did was almost act exclusively as an IT shop. We were working with IT and we were working with other teams to get access to all the customer data within Cisco. That took years to find it, to convince people to give us access to it.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: To build the tech stack to be able to pull that together. So those two areas were an initial focus and then we were looking at digital in terms of output as a segment. Right. Digital as a way to scale to the long tail business that we weren't covering with humans with csm.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Right, sure.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: So from day one, digital has been intertwined as part of the fabric of customer experience at Cisco. And I think that that served us well because we're now in 2025. I think the world is a point where every customer, not just at Cisco, but at every company, whether it's B2B or B2C, wants a digital first experience.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Not necessarily digital only, but digital first. Let me go solve what I'm looking to do. I want to buy an airplane ticket, I want to troubleshoot something I've got. I want to talk to my peers in the customer community. Whatever. I want to find information. Let me just go do that on my own and contact you if I'm having trouble. So make it easy for me to contact you, whether that be contacting a bot, contacting a human, or whatever it is. Like, don't hide the phone number.
So I think that we ended up just by dint of where we were within Cisco when we started the function and what we were required to do to operate and to build and to grow. We now ended up ahead of the game again, as much by chance as by strategic foresight. But we ended up ahead of the game in terms of building out a digital first connected, personalized, intelligent, meaning we know who the customers are, we know who the data is because we've pulled all that together across your customer experience. So that's where I am. That's how I got to where I am today.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: I love that for a good segue into just thinking about now, living in 2025 in a truly digital first world. How do we keep the human touch as part of that? I know we can certainly spend some time talking about AI, which is of course the major conversation everywhere, which now we're also having the conversation of how do we ensure that that that human touch stays in when we're using AI. What are your thoughts on in a digital first World. Keeping the human touch as a part of the experience.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question, Jordan, and I think it's, it's one that a lot of people are a little, are concerned about. I am not in the concerned camp because I think, I think the human touch comes in, will continue to come in in multiple ways from the beginning of the process all the way through. So it's humans who determine where and when to leverage AI. So it's still going to be humans who are building out journey maps, who are working with customers, who are talking directly with customers. Now we'll use data science and AI more broadly to allow us the opportunity to access and analyze much more data than we can with humans alone and to be able to generate some insights from that data sort of writ large so that we can then have conversations with customers and with prospects and we can still get surveys from them and we can do focus groups and we can do one on one conversations. And we should continue to do all of that human connection so that we really understand their process, their adoption process and the journey that they're on. We understand the moments that matter that drive either a positive or a negative emotional response that's gonna come from continuing the conversations with customers, just like we've been doing for years. We'll be able to now cross reference that with scads of data that we've now able to analyze, you know, in large amounts to understand is what they're telling us directly. How does that jive with what they're saying online, what they're saying on social media platforms, what they're saying on peer communities? And sometimes what we know, what we know that sometimes it aligns, other times it doesn't. And then how does that also align with their behavior, with their purchasing behavior, their renewal behavior, their adoption behavior, and tracking their adoption process. So I think it allows us to have a much greater opportunity to understand our customers because we can augment the direct human connection now and then by better understanding our customers, we can better personalize the experience that we deliver. So I think it's an even better human touch because it's augmented by it. Now, some people undoubtedly are rush, you know, sort of skipping over the human part, right, and rushing straight to, to automation and AI implementation.
So I think that's a problem, right? I think, I think like any new technology, if you don't use it accurately, you know, problems crop up.
The customer experience is if we think about, if we move away from sort of the operational and the execution elements and we think about what makes a customer experience positive or negative, we start talking about things like trust or positive emotions, empathy, things like that. And that's all part of it. Right. Understanding the customer journey and the moments that matter lead to increased trust. So one way of looking at cx, I think is the flip side of the coin of brand. Right. So brand is the promise of what a company is going to provide or what, whether that be a service or an emotion, whatever it might be, customer experience is the delivery of that brand promise. And when there's a brand promise and there's delivery of that promise, trust results. I trust that this company is going to be able to make me feel this way or deliver this service or deliver my pizza within 30 minutes, whatever it might be.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: So I think the human element is going. There's the opportunity to actually improve trust, empathy and understand our customers better and increase the personalization by using AI. If we don't flip the switch and go to it 100% of the way, I think that we could also use AI to increase personalization through things like increasing the use of AI for translations. So I'll give a quick example.
It's too expensive to manually translate material into 50 languages. So at Cisco for years, we traditionally would translate. Most materials were created in corporate, so that's in the U.S. so it's in English. And then three months later, we would roll out various language versions of it. You know, sort of three to six months later.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: So two things that downside of that, one is we'd roll out a new product, we'd roll out a new journey for adoption, and it would be in English only for the first three to six months. So folks who didn't speak English, they had to wait. Right. So that's a problem. Additionally, we capped our translations at 16 languages. So that covered a lot of our customer base. But it notably cut out a chunk of our customer base that we identified. Looking at data equated to over a million dollars of annual renewal rate. And we had a business rule in place that said we would not communicate with customers. We would not proactively notify customers about whether it be adoption or renewal. If we didn't, if we could not do so in their language, we had a million dollars of annual recurring revenue that we were not notifying customers about. And we know, and we've known for years because our data has shown us that the number one reason why customers don't rene contract is they didn't know they had a contract to renew. Right?
[00:16:20] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: So we were essentially writing off A million dollars a year. But it was too expensive to go through the process of translation using AI. We are now for a fraction of the cost of what we used to spend on translations. We're translating to 50 to 60 languages and we're doing it within two or three days or a week at most of the initial English version being finalized. So real business results being derived from that. But even more so, what a better way to personalize the experience and improve the human touch than by communicating with somebody in their native language rather than requiring them to engage with us in the language of our choice.
So I think AI can help with personalization with the human touch.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And I think that's a great example in terms of language. I mean, obviously we're in an age now where anybody with a smartphone can carry on a bit of a conversation with most anybody through a translation on their phone. So why not put that into these contexts where we communicate in that way?
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Jordan, let me give you one more example that's language related, but that in a different application. So we have our second. Our most used digital property, like many companies, is our website, Cisco.com our second most used digital property is our customer community. Cisco community. So 20 million members and in the neighborhood of something like 10,000 queries coming in a week from customers posting that a few years ago, we decided to move from an English only community, which we'd had for, I think at that time, over 20 years, to building out a few language specific communities. So we did Portuguese, we did Spanish, we did German, Japanese. So three or four of these additional to test them out. The problem with the community though is that it's only as good as the robustness of the community. So as robust and thriving and active as the English language community is, because it's been around for 25 years now, it's so many members. If you then slice off the German language or the Japanese language speakers, not only do you have to do work to make sure that they understand, hey, there's a language community for you Japanese speakers, right? Do the marketing to bring them there. But additionally, because there's so fewer participants in that community, then questions would be posted and might go unanswered for days.
And that's a bad experience for a customer. Nobody wants to post a question when they're trying to solve something today, and three or four days later there's no answer. But there are only so many people in the community to answer that question, right, who speak the language, who might have the technical expertise. So what we started to do is use AI to leverage the English language community. So use AI to a identify questions in. I'll just keep using the Japanese language community as an example. But we do this for all the language communities to identify questions that have been unanswered for a day, then automatically go and check the English language community to see if that question has already been answered. If so, grab that English language answer, translate it to Japanese and drop it in to the Japanese community as a reply to the specific post. So if there's a post in the Japanese community that's older than a day, within an hour, it's been answered and without human intervention in a way that we couldn't because we don't have enough people to answer those questions in that specific language.
And if the question has not been answered previously in the English language community, then take that question, translate it from the original Japanese into English, post it into the much bigger English language community where it's likely to get answered quickly, monitor, grab the answer when it is provided, translate it to Japanese and drop it back in. So we're able to leverage the power of the full community in a way that's tailored to the language speakers of these individual communities. So really important difference for building the human element and the trust that comes from that.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: So that, that's one way that we're, that we're using AI. That I think again is another example of improving the human element.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's a critical element there and that's such a great use of technology and the AI technology while still delivering a really incredible human experience. For that, I think I'd love to hear a little bit from you just in terms of, you know, as we were thinking about this period of time of building out these experiences, thinking about how to lead and motivate teams that are working in this space. I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can do that.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I think it's, I think it's always important. I think it's particularly important in the moment that the CX discipline and industry finds itself in where over the last year or so there have been a lot of cuts, there's been a lot of de investment or at least a lack of additional investment. So it's been, I think for a lot of people in companies inside Cisco as well as a number of other companies, I think it's been a little harder to motivate teams.
So I think it's more important than ever. I think the way to motivate teams is to be able to show them and really make them feel and understand the purpose. Right. So here's what we're trying to do. So be very clear. Leaders need to be very clear about what our team inside this company or this organization within this company, what we are trying to do and why, and the value that that brings to the company and how, how we therefore interact with other parts of the company or other parts of the organization in order to deliver that so that everybody on the team understands clearly. I get what we're trying to do. I read. I'm not just wondering. And that sounds, that, I mean, that sounds obvious, but in my experience that's not the norm. To be able to commute, to be able to communicate a very clear understanding and to do this consistently because you have to communicate everything more than once. And it can't just come from the leader, it needs to come from the whole leadership team and every level down to be aligned with the message of this is what our team is about and what we're working on. So the sub teams understand the part that they play in the broader team and the part that that broader team plays in the company overall. So I think that clarity of purpose and value being delivered from that purpose is important. I think a second thing that is important is having a belief that every member of the team adds value and that the more that they are allowed to be creative, to be innovative, doesn't mean that every idea gets accepted. But building a culture of let a thousand flowers bloom and encourage people to figure out better ways to do their job, whether that be in general or whether that be for them.
The bottom line is, are we getting the work out of that person done sort of very operationally? Are the tasks that are required to be done getting done in a timely manner? Are we getting more than that? Right, because that's baseline.
But to motivate people, you want them to be inspired to deliver more than that. So giving them the opportunity, the freedom to be innovative again doesn't mean every idea gets accepted or gets funded or whatever. It might be, sure. But if an idea doesn't get accepted, not just shutting it down, but explaining why not, hey, great idea. Not really aligned to the vision that, that we've already talked about. Great idea. I'm going to try to get funding for it. I don't have funding for it now, so we're going to have to put that on hold. Right, Whatever, whatever the explanation, so that people feel like the fact that they are coming up with ideas is encouraged and valued.
I think a third element Here also is, I'll put it in the inspirational bucket. We've got to fill not only our inspiration buckets, but our employees inspiration buckets.
Part of that comes from them having an understanding of the purpose and the value that's being derived. As we've talked about. Part of that comes from I value you and I value your brain. So I want you to be innovative. And part of it comes from storytelling being able to explain here. I want our organization to be X where X is an inspirational vision for the team. Whether this is a team of three people, 300, whatever it might be, and then being able to demonstrate, and this is a key point of the storytelling, to be able to visually demonstrate what that will look like. So for example, creating a mock up when you know, presenting to the team, creating a mock up of a Harvard Business Review article on Cisco's digital customer experience team, whatever it might be, right? So fill in your organization or what you're working on and creating a visual. Now are we actually going to necessarily try to get an HBR case study? Not necessarily, but to visualize and say I want in five to 10 years, whatever it might be, right, in three to five years, I want case studies written about us. I want us winning awards. I want you can have an example of the company name winning an award. You can visualize so that now people understand not only with understanding the words you're saying, but visually being able to see what success looks like not just for anybody, but for them, for the team and they understand their role in the team. Now you've got a powerful motivating factor of like, yes, I want to do that. Right, let's storm the castle together. I'm energized and you're going to let me figure out ways or suggest ways to get us there beyond just doing my day to day tasks like yes, now people are motivated, they're energized, they, they feel seen and they feel valued. So I think those three components are foundational to driving employee motivation which then leads to increased engagement.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, yeah, I think that, that, that thinking is so critical of that vision casting for teams. I think we, we often in the day to day operational needs do job of that. So I appreciate the insight there in that piece. So as we kind of near the end of this conversation, I'd love to take a few minutes for any, any closing thoughts you may have that you'd like to share with our listeners.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Well, one is, boy, I feel like we could talk for hours here. So there's so much to talk about.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: So thank you so much for the opportunity. I think a couple of things I want to leave the listeners with. I think we're in a wonderful time for the customer experience profession. And while, as I said, the last couple of years have been been seeing a lot of contraction. So it may seem counterintu to say I think we're in a wonderful time, but hear me out for a second. I think that the discipline of CX is in its teenage years. I think we moved to the late teenage years. So we were created and we got to a point where people understood that there was a there there. Then we kind of hit the teenage years where there was a lot of confusion within the profession and within executive ranks of who are you? Like, I know, I know real. I know I need you.
Right? So that's, that's the childhood years, right? Okay, you're real now. You walk, you talk. Okay, but who are you and the profession itself saying, who am I? What do I call? Am I customer experience, customer success? I don't even know what to like. There's not even consensus on what we should call the discipline. I vote for customer experience. By the way, where am I in the world? So if you think about in the business sense, I've seen CX an org chart all over the place. Engineering, marketing, sales, its own function, reporting to the CEO. CEO. So where am I and what do I call myself and what value do I bring? I think that we're now in a phase of the maturity of the discipline where we're kind of like we're off to college now or university for the international listeners. Right. We're starting to focus more as a discipline, more consistently on the business results that we drive. We're starting to focus in on operational excellence. There's a new set of standards that have been developed by Bain and Qualtrics and Kantor in conjunction with the CX Professional Association.
Having standards for an industry is part of the maturity of that industry for sure. So I feel like we're at a point where in the next three years, right, we're shaping the next two to three years. And in two to three years, what I see happening is a much better understanding of the discipline by practitioners as well as by stakeholders within companies that will lead to increased investment. Because a CFO or CEO or a head of sales can say, I know what a salesperson does. I know what a sales ops person does. I know if I invest in this salesperson, how much return on that investment I'm going to get in six months and 12 months, et cetera, we're going to be able to start telling that type of story in the next two to three years. So being able to more consistently speak the language of the executives and showing them the value that we bring to them and building stakeholders and champions internally, that I think now is a great time to be building out what the future is going to look like. And the future is only two to three years away.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Add in the opportunity to leverage AI. We're still in the early days of AI. There's still plenty of companies that are not leveraging AI. For all the companies we hear about that are doing all sorts of great things, I would say the bulk of corporate America is not actively leveraging AI. Nobody's left behind so far. Right. You're not, you know, if anybody's listening and is wondering, you're not left behind. The first wave of AI is really automation focused and as opposed to changing processes, it's more automating process. So the language translation example I gave, that's really automating a process.
And so there's the opportunity, there's still the opportunity to get on the ground floor and figure out how to use AI to optimize your function.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: We're still in an era where AI is not going to take people's jobs. People who know how to use AI will take people's jobs who don't know how to use AI. Absolutely great time to be leveraging AI to improve the output again. I think it's a wonderful time to be in the customer experience discipline because of that element as well.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: I think this is a really fabulous time for CX of all varieties and all flavors of what we do. We are in a really exciting time for our function.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: And Jordan, the other thing that I would add is we're also at a time when there are so many opportunities for people to learn about CX strategy, CX tactics, execution, operations, all the different elements of it through your podcast, through books, there's a wealth of information that is available to folks to learn from. So kudos to you for being able to, to put together your podcast and share all this information with people. I think it's a great service.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Yeah, well, thanks. I appreciate that. That's the main thing that I'm hoping to do is just continue to expand the understanding of what practitioners are doing day in and day out for the benefit of our companies, of our customers and in the missions that we're all on. Well, if folks wanted to get in touch with you, Andrew, how would be the best way for them to do that.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: The best way is LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me, you know, directly, follow me, whatever it might be. I love it when people reach out and connect with me. So please use that as an avenue to reach out.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Sure. And we'll, we'll make sure to include a link to your LinkedIn in the show Notes so folks can get to you very easily. Well, hey, thanks for taking the time today, sharing your knowledge.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Thank you, Jordan. I so appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate it.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us here at the Table. Andrew, thanks for listening to the Table Service podcast. You can learn more about today's guest in the Show Notes. Table Service is presented by Tavalo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
