Digital Transformation Strategy for Customer Experience that Drives Revenue Growth

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Speaker B: You've joined the Digital Transformation Success Podcast. I'm your host Priscilla McKinney. I consult with leaders around the globe and bring their teams through a digital transformation journey. Realizing digital transformation across an entire organization is key to business success. While the phrase digital transformation is often used, it's not always understood. So we start each episode with my brief working definition. Digital transformation refers to the purposeful integration of digital technology into all areas of a business. It goes beyond technological innovations in that it requires a fundamental mindset shift of how to operate internally and deliver maximum value to customers at scale. When done well, it results in a culture change to an environment where opportunities for digital technology are are not missed, but are thoughtfully used to change established practices and processes for greater efficiency, flexibility and profitability. You'll hear from consultants, trainers, executives, innovators and thought leaders. We will avoid buzzwords, jargon and leave behind our egos to help you take that next step toward digital transformation success. Let's dive in.

Speaker C: As always on this podcast, I find some of the best people out there doing the work. You're going to love my guest today, Ty Given. She's the founder of CX Collective and she is a trusted partner to brands that want their customer experience to be that competitive advantage. Right. And she is really known for turning messy operations into scalable human centered programs that actually drive these little things that we are all after, which is loyalty and and growth. So Ty, welcome to the show.

Speaker D: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to be here.

Speaker C: Love it. We're going to dive into your expertise. Everybody is being asked to what is going on with our customers? What are they feeling? Where are our bottlenecks? Where could we improve? Nobody walks into a meeting anymore without stakeholders asking these things. But tell me what the current state of leadership is right now. Are they feeling good? Are they feeling pressed? Are they? What's going on?

Speaker D: So I've been in this space for the last 25 plus years. I literally started 18 years old in support. Back then, leadership was really about the people first. So it was about Being available to guide and help and mentor people. Midway through, it shifted when we kind of had that cult Silicon beach here in la where it was a boom about these startups that were like really doing well. And the leadership for support needed to shift from being so focused on people to being more focused on technology and operations. And now we're in a world where even that skill set is mostly outdated because now support leaders are expected to know how to leverage, implement, maintain AI tools. And AI sounds for most people who don't know anything about it, really easy to use. But when you start to use it, you realize like, yes, it makes me much more efficient, but darn, I really got to know what I'm talking about because otherwise, who knows what will come out of this.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's like so ubiquitous anymore, but it's kind of thrown at everybody. Like, use AI to figure it out. Well, okay, how.

Speaker D: And then how do you know if what AI is giving you is right along? So that's one of the other things that I see a lot of is, I mean, for me, I'm. One of my opportunities is, um, not a great marketer, I'm not a great salesperson and I admit that all day long. So I will use AI to help me with those things. And then if I'm following it to the T, I'm like, why isn't it working? And it's because there's no expert there to say, yeah, that's a good idea, but this might be a little different for your business. I don't have that nuance. And so I think that yes, it is useful, it's helpful and it gets me thinking about things in a different way. But I don't think it fully beats out experience.

Speaker C: Right, right. I love that. Okay, so let's talk about your real world. When people come to you, I imagine they're in some kind of a customer experience problem. So how do you get them to move from that kind of firefighting mentality into some strategic leadership? What does that look like?

Speaker D: You have to talk money. Honestly, you have to talk money because at the end of the day, if I tell a leader, let me set you up on a system or set of tools that will automate responses for you, will answer the low hanging fruit questions, and will only filter through the things that a human really needs to handle. What they'll probably say is, that sounds good, but I don't necessarily need to spend the money on doing something like that because my niece is my admin and she's. I'm only Paying her X dollars an hour, and she's handling things pretty quickly. But if I were to reframe that and say you have an opportunity of, let's say you're missing 50 contacts per month, which doesn't sound like a ton, depending on the size of the business. But of those 50, if those are leads valued at $100, that's money on the table that we're literally walking away from, that could be handled by someone who can do it. So that your niece, who's actually building repetitive questions, could be focusing on things that would bring you revenue. Is it worth it for you? That 5k, is that worth it? And the reality is that in that case they're like, oh, yes, I get that. So in order to remove them from thinking about being very tactical, I have to kind of shift them into, uh, thinking about how it's going to impact the bottom line. And then that's what strategic thinking comes in. That's when they want to prevent the fire. Otherwise they'll go right through it.

Speaker C: Right, right. So tell me the truth about when you talk with people. Are they already struggling? Are they inheriting messy systems? Do they have limited resources? Like, what's the reality when you're starting to have this consumer and customer experience conversation?

Speaker D: All three. So we work with startups. With startups, typically they're trying to. They're funded most of the time, so they're trying to start out so that they can scale the processes. Typically, like, if you don't think about this strategically, the processes will break down. Even if you add a second person, if you add four more people, nine more people, you go from a team of one to 10. The way that you're working as one is totally different than the way you work as 10. So for them, they come in because they want a foundation that is scalable. And you have companies that have been around for a long time and they are hearing about all of the new technology. Well, I used to work inside of companies too. And so when I did, I was an expert on those tools and those processes, but I wasn't as aware of what was going on in the world around me. And so those companies will tend to come to us because they're like, we need to modernize. We're hearing all this buzz about AI. What does that mean? What should we be doing to take advantage of that? And so we'll find that our clients, they run the gamut. The ones that stick with us the longest are the ones who've been around for a longer amount of Time. They need less time from us during the engagement, but they need more time for us over extended periods of time because their change is like turning a cruise ship, not a speedboat. So startup is like a speedboat. You can just get it going. They're going to be good, but a larger business is going to take a while.

Speaker C: Yeah. So what are the common customer experience problems people are having? What are they talking about?

Speaker D: Missed opportunities. So I can't keep up with the volume of requests that I'm receiving. I'm getting a bunch of requests and they're pretty much all around the same thing. I've launched AI, but it's giving, it's hallucinating, it's giving false information or bad answers. I just added someone to staff and now it feels like we're two different companies because the team members don't speak to each other the same way. It could be we've launched a, uh, help desk like a Zendesk or Gorgeous or Intercom, and it's running but we're not seeing any efficiency from it and we don't know why. So we have different opportunities within our, uh, client base depending on where they are. Because a lot of times when you buy like a new tool, the tool is marketed to you as like a quick win roi. Set it up, you're good to go. But the reality is that the tool has to be maintained. It has to be monitored. It has to be, you know, your processes have to be clean before it goes in there. If you're trying to launch AI, you got to have really clean, solid processes. So there's all these things that you have to have before you do the next thing. And people don't even know about that.

Speaker A: Let's take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Hi, Priscilla McKinney here, Mama Bird and CEO at Little Bird Marketing. Ever wonder why some teams create extraordinary breakthroughs while others get left behind? Why some collaborative efforts create big wins while others fall flat? I think I have some important insight in my book Collaboration Is the New Competition. Why the Future of Work Rewards A Cross Pollinating Hive Mind is a great read to help you break free from outdated linear thinking. In bite sized timed chapters designed for busy professionals like you, you'll discover the fundamentals of strategic collaboration, plus seven practical anchors to help you implement what you learn. This isn't just theory. It's a practical roadmap that moves beyond traditional competition to harness the power of collective wisdom and effort. You'll learn how to build powerful networks, leverage digital transformation and create Breakthrough moments that only emerge when diverse minds work together intentionally. Find the book on Amazon or just follow the link in the show notes. It's available in paperback, Kindle and even Audible, where I read it myself. If you've already read it, I'd love an Amazon review. And that's a good reminder that if you like what you're hearing on this podcast, we'd say, certainly love a, uh, five star review wherever you listen.

Speaker C: So there's some reliance on the tool, thinking the tool's going to solve it. But the reality is it's a human problem to begin with. And so then you still need the

Speaker D: humans to still need the human. Because if you don't know, like I've seen people come to us and say, hey, we launched AI and it's not working. And then I'm like, oh, let me see your knowledge base. And they're like, we didn't set one up. Well, it has to be the source of truth. You'd be surprised. But it's when you think about it like, because you probably live in the world where you are seeing these tools be introduced, you have a different understanding. Imagine someone who's just being told that AI is the way of the future and is going to just change everything for them. They fully believe that and they think it's just a flip of a switch and it's like, nope, you got to maintain.

Speaker C: So, okay, so let's put that person, they're at a company, they're being asked to improve the customer experience and they feel like they're drowning in support tickets and complaints, probably not peddling a lot in Google, strong reviews, five star reviews or anything like that. They're probably dealing with all the problems and to them it feels like chaos. So where do you start with them to help them get out of that chaos and start building a real system that can use the digital tools to transform their work.

Speaker D: First thing I want to know is I, uh, start with the top five contact drivers. Now not everyone is tracking those. So if they are not tracking them, then we'd have to help them do that. But if they are tracking them and they just don't know what to do, it's like, what are the top five reasons that people are contacting you? The next thing we want to do is determine if those contact reasons are things that we can have set up for self serve or if it has to be agent assisted. Agent assistant means like no matter what, it has to go to a person and then the next thing, if it's self serve, we want to build the infrastructure around being able to help people help themselves. And it doesn't mean that you don't want them. Some people are just like, I want to talk to a person, that's fine. But the idea is that for the people who don't really want to talk to a person, who just want to get their answers done, let them go that route. And then we start with those top five, we look for the easiest low hanging fruit and then we build from there. Another common mistake that people make when they roll out AI is that they try to boil the ocean and like automate really big workflows. But the reality is the best way to do it is to start with your smallest ones, get the benefit of that and then incrementally add on to that over time and eventually what could happen is you can shift a lot of your contacts. So like for one of our clients, they're running at about 26% of their contacts right now are being automated. And this is a client whose customer base does not love anything related to automation or bot. They hate it. But 26% are being handled through automation. And then their CSAT has actually grown two points since we launched. So the customers are happier overall because they can get things done faster. And then the ones who want to talk to someone, they can get to someone as well during business hours. So we try to leave outs and openings for everybody to get what they need.

Speaker C: Well, tell me a little bit about that csat. So really where does this figure into the conversation? And also for we really try and leave behind jargon. So in this show, just if you don't know what that is, it's customer satisfaction. It's a kind of a standard that companies use across the board to gather to measure how customers are feeling about them. But what's the kind of conversation you have with teams about that number?

Speaker D: So the idea is that obviously you want it to be as high as possible, but the reality is that CSAT customer satisfaction, to be very clear, measures the experience that the customer has with the person, because it depends on what you call your team members, but the person in your company at that moment. And there's a separate metric called Net Promoter Score, NPS that measures the overall experience. And then there's customer Effort score or CES that talks about how easy was it for you to do this thing or whatever that is. Right. So you have these three metrics. CES or Customer Effort Score ties more closely to AI. CSAT ties more closely to agent engagement. NPS ties more closely to the overall experience. So as we're working through what those metrics mean, one of the challenges that we find a lot with CSAT or customer satisfaction is that the customer is not dissatisfied with the agent. The customer is dissatisfied with the outcome. And the outcome is probably in line with your policy. So I wanted a refund. They didn't give me a refund. But Ty was really nice. I liked talking to her, but she said no. So I'm dissatisfied.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Let's take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor.

Speaker B: I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Mama Bird

Speaker A: here at Little Bird Marketing.

Speaker B: And in case you didn't know, I'm also a LinkedIn influencer. I also have a passion for teaching other B2B professionals how to be completely influential on LinkedIn. The reality is that very few people are using LinkedIn efficiently or effectively. Efficiency is important because ain't nobody got time for that. And if you're not careful, social media can be a black hole. When you emerge, you find you wound up in a place you never intended to go and you're wondering where all the time went. Being effective is important because the moment you try to be everything to everybody, you begin the journey of being nothing to nobody. Instead, I teach a m mindset shift and the skills to get clarity about what you need to accomplish on LinkedIn and how to build a strategic network and stellar content that resonates with the audience and gets heard above the noise. Tips and tricks are a dime a dozen out there. Getting it done right requires an investment. There's time and money. I teach a course over 12 weeks. You can still get your job done just fine, but over that time you change behaviors and that's key. The money is 3,000 per student. If you're wondering whether it's worth it or not, you should read a few of my recommendations on my LinkedIn profile. Their words, not mine. As the Flashdance title song goes, let's take your passion and make it happen.

Speaker A: Who's with me?

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Speaker C: and I always, you know, just as a human, as a consumer, I hate that you have a wonderful person who helps you on the line. But the company is the thing that is in certain cases, being the big jerk. And you hate. Like whenever I get those surveys and then after I'm like, yeah, they're great, they're. But there are a few companies that don't let you distinguish between the satisfaction you got from the help from the actual issue and that kind of dumb surveying really drives me crazy. I hate that. I hate that.

Speaker D: Yeah, I'm just. Now we're getting ready to start partnering with a company that is really focused on being able to differentiate the ways in which scores are captured so that a business can actually get down to the root cause and tie it back to revenue. Because at the end of the day, no business is around for no reason. We're always here to, like, earn the money. And yes, this experience matters a lot. The higher up you get in these different companies, it really comes down to what is the impact to revenue or retention when we do these things. And so you need to have that story ready. And CSAT helps you with that.

Speaker C: I love that. I love that. Well, Ty, just as a thank you for being on our show and helping people figure out what they do next, please give me one last thought. Like, if someone is sitting there, they're being tasked with this. Where's their first go to? Obviously, I'd love for them to connect with you. It's Ty Givens and it's T Y G I V E N S. Very easy to find her. Obviously, she's very approachable. But what is the first question they should be asking themselves so that they're ready to talk with an expert like you?

Speaker D: What do my customers expect of me? That's the first question. I think that what we find a lot is that we have these ideas in our mind of, uh, what the customer expects, and we start operating based on what we think they expect instead of figuring out what it is that, uh, they really do expect. And if you start from that, because I have a green belt of Six Sigma did this a few years ago. And the Six Sigma is all about obviously centering your business and your work around the customer experience. So if you're doing any work that your customer doesn't expect you to do, it's wasted time. It's wasted resources. So the first question is, what does my customer expect of me? The next question you're going to ask yourself is, what am I doing today? In support of that, the next question is, what should I be doing? And sometimes that what should I be doing? You may be limited because you don't know what's available out there for you to do that. And that's when you talk to somebody who does know.

Speaker C: I love it. I love it. I thank you so much for your time. I hope people do reach out to you. But as always, we're looking for giving just a tip and a clue about what is your next step so you can have some digital transformation success. Thanks so much.

Speaker D: Um, thank you for having me.

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