How Empathy Improves CX and Drives Outcome-Based Selling

Learn more about CX at Smart Customer Service 2022.

See more videos from CX Connect 2021 on the CRM YouTube channel.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Andy Bird: There's this whole thing that we go through on a regular basis with our customers. Starting with designing the experience all the way to running the metrics and measuring how we've done. And we're going to get a little bit more into this whole outcomes-based selling, because Will, I know this is something that you're very passionate about, and you do very well with customers. And by the way, I said this the other day in a different presentation with some analysts: outcome-based selling or optimization-based selling only works if you have lots of before and after pictures. And so you want to be able to show before and after. And thankfully we've got some of those before and after pictures. And so we're able to do that, but talk to us about your opinion on from the designing of the experience, all the way to measuring the improvement or the reporting of it, of where you see empathy and optimization intersecting with each one of those points.

Will McCain: Something interesting we get asked is, "Why Concentrix?" or "Why would you partner outside of your organization? Why would you bring in somebody else to help you with this?" There's a lot happening in the industry. I think we're seeing innovation, especially driven by the cloud and the democratization of technology developing into ecosystems that are really melding with each other almost seamlessly. But bringing those things together is a challenge for organizations. And so, of course, you've got things like time to market, but you also have things such as, "Am I getting the most out of these new platforms that I'm deploying and trying to offer to my customers?"

And so when I talk to this slide, I typically think about all the different things that Concentrix thinks about as we engage with our customers through the lifecycle of an engagement, but also the ongoing customer success that we provide.

Sure, omnichannel meant something a couple of years ago and today the preferred channel is vastly changing. You've got changing demographics. You've got en users who are becoming more competent and want to communicate and their own preferred channel. I mean, think about it. A lot of the world has been locked up, working from home, doing what they can virtually, and now everybody's learning and rapidly learning technology. And so the different universes that people want to communicate within is probably first and foremost for organizations. I think of self-service, and in the past, a lot of customers were after it, just purely from a cost-optimization perspective, but now digital self-service is getting so good that we've got organizations who look at it as a differentiator for their own organizations. So we've got a lot of industries that could potentially be viewed as commodity industries and that people aren't necessarily buying products or goods or services that are vastly different, but they want to procure and interact differently.

One of the big examples we've all gone through in our history is Blockbuster versus Netflix. Blockbuster had an opportunity not only to buy Netflix, at some point in time, but they were sure that brick and mortar was the way to go, and that they had the customer experience down, and that they they knew best. But what happened in the industry was, customer preference changed. I don't necessarily think movies have changed, although we've gotten better graphics and things of that nature, but the concept of, "I want to sit down and consume and watch a movie" hasn't. And so I look at listening to your customers, listening to various different organizations in terms of how they would actually prefer to interact with you.

I know we're not traveling right now--although, hopefully, next year, this is in person and we can join the crowd in person and see all of your faces--but think about Uber or Lyft, various different ride-share programs. The concept of going from point A to point B hasn't changed, right? Transportation. But you look at taxi cabs and, and various other different forms of traditional transportation. And now you've got customers who want to self-service from their phones or their applications.Tthey want to interact with organizations differently. Again, the, the end products necessarily haven't changed, but we've seen a lot of disruption in moving share of those various different industries from one organization to another simply by being more forward-thinking and listening to how customers want to interact.

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