Insights

Blake Morgan Encourages Companies to DO MORE in #TFUS18 Keynote

Oct 10, 2018

How being more thoughtful, understanding the customer journey and being empathetic can drive customer experience

What do your customers experience when they call into your contact center? Do they end the call frustrated or delighted? Those are questions Customer Experience Futurist and Author Blake Morgan posed during this morning’s keynote speech at the 2018 Toll Free User Summit.

In her keynote presentation, Blake emphasized how the phone call provides an ideal branding and relationship building experience: Customers pick up the phone when something goes wrong, and they need your help. However; sometimes companies make it difficult for customers to “walk through the front door” of your business. Instead, Blake notes that companies should take strides to get ahead of the game and make customer-centricity a key tenant of their business from the very start.

One suggestion Blake has for improving customer experience and being more customer-centric is to find the right balance of human and technology in the contact center—especially as consumer products become increasingly interconnected. In the future, Blake says, help will be embedded in all our products and services. Customers with a smart fridge will be able to call a help agent from the fridge itself. Customer service agents will be able to use virtual reality to see exactly what customers are seeing and troubleshoot the problem. To find this balance, Blake says it’s imperative that companies pay attention to evolving technologies—such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence—and how it might work into how consumers interact with their business.

So, how can companies actually do more for customers? The key, Blake says, is being thoughtful and empathetic when thinking about the customer experience. Blake urges companies to consider her DOMORE framework to build a better customer experience strategy:

• Design something special: Does your company offer a service to customers that makes their lives easier?
• Offers a strong employee experience: Companies must find the perfect balance of company culture, technology, and physical space to create the best customer experience. If you invest in employees, it unlocks discretionary effort.
• Modernizes with technology: Tech is shown to be a huge differentiator for employees and customers.
• Obsesses over customer: All levels of a company should be obsessed with the customer experience. Consider the fact that Jeff Bezos trains in Amazon’s contact center every year for an onthe-ground look at the customer journey.
• Rewards responsibility and accountability: What customer experience metrics are you using? Blake urges companies to reward responsibility and accountability over rigid KPIs.
• Embraces disruption and innovation: Innovation shouldn’t come about by need. Instead, Blake believe companies should be innovating when they’re doing well.

So, where should you go from here? Blake left everyone with these three action items:

1. Work in the contact center
2. Go through the customer journey with your empathy hat on
3. Use DOMORE as a filter when assessing the customer journey

You can learn more about Blake Morgan here.