Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
The Guts of Great Customer Experiences
What happens when the shiny exterior of customer experience meets the messy reality of operational execution? In this eye-opening conversation, we speak with FD Giambattista, a veteran CX operations expert who has spent 25 years implementing customer service solutions for major corporations.
FD takes us behind the curtain to reveal what actually makes customer experience work—or fail. While technology providers focus on capabilities and features, FD deals with the operational realities: systems held together with "bailing wire and duct tape," agents navigating through 14 different applications to handle a single interaction, and the delicate balance between cost, quality, and speed.
The most surprising revelation? Despite all our focus on technology, the most common breakdowns occur in people and processes. FD shares his practical approach to uncovering these issues, starting with candid conversations with frontline employees: "You get them in a room without any of their management and just say 'tell me.' Once one person talks, everybody else chimes in."
We explore the "cost-quality-speed paradox"—the uncomfortable truth that organizations can only optimize for two of these three factors. This framework helps set executive expectations from the outset and forces critical prioritization discussions that many organizations avoid.
FD also emphasizes the direct connection between employee retention and customer experience quality. Companies with lower turnover deliver better experiences because their employees thoroughly understand the products and services they support.
Whether you're leading CX transformations or implementing customer-focused technology, this conversation offers invaluable perspective on what it takes to create truly seamless experiences. Join us for this honest look at the operational side of customer experience—where simplicity should reign but complexity often dominates.
You get them in a room and I've done this so many times, I've lost count. But you get a number of these folks in a room without any of their management and just say tell me, and once one person talks, everybody else chimes in and you find out pretty quickly again what's working, what's not working. And that's great for insights, but then it's what do you do with that? What do you do with that information?
Speaker 2:Today on Customer Land, we're getting a peek behind the curtain of CX with someone who I'm calling, even though he wouldn't agree with this, a CX ops expert, somebody who has been putting CX projects together successfully for decades for some very large companies, and I feel fortunate to have him on the podcast today. So if you would welcome FD John Batista to the pod and if you recognize a similarity in last name, there's a reason for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And then you mentioned decades of experience. That feels old. So, yes, I, mike and I are related. He is my brother, I won't say how much older but essentially, but not that much. No, not that much, but essentially. But not that much. No, not that much. So yeah, I have been in the upside of the customer experience for the better part of 25 years now.
Speaker 2:He was 14, which accounts for his age right now.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you for that. Yeah, initially I got involved in it probably more by default than by design, but after a couple of years into it I realized there's a lot to be done here. It's a fun space to be in and have purpose to stay in it ever since, and it's been particularly on the contact center side of things and in the back office and specifically in leveraging outsourcing to make the customer experience happen, be it with contact center, be it back office, be it business process outsourcing any one of those and so it's for me it's been a fun experience to use those tools, those solutions, and use them in a way that perhaps the company that I was working for at the time wouldn't have been able to do on their own, either from a scale standpoint or a quality standpoint or any number of standpoints.
Speaker 2:So on this podcast we talk to a lot of technology providers. In fact, I would say that we're kind of technology-centric here, maybe by default. I happen to find that stuff really, really, really interesting and, fortunately for me, so do our listeners but we rarely talk about operationalizing it. We're talking about the capabilities of what the technology can do, but operationalizing those kinds of things, especially at scale, is a complex having heard you discuss it arduous often process of moving some chess pieces around the corporate board that oftentimes don't really want to get moved. So I just think there's an awful lot to talk about here. If we can start off as kind of a jumping off point from look, technology enables all kinds of things and the acceleration is happening faster than I think anybody really understands with the advent of AI and what we can now do with that. But that still leaves these giant operational gaps that still need to be overcome.
Speaker 2:No matter how amazing your tech is, there's still silos. There's still silos. There's still, you know, incentives for the people who are running those silos. Um, there are cultures, there are massive numbers of people in seats that have to be dealt with and all that. So, um, with that as kind of like okay, we're just, we're just peeling, peeking behind the curtain right now to to what I would just like, in all deference to you and your colleagues, I think it's the ugly stuff. I think what I get to deal with is the pretty stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got to thinking about that, and it's you deal with the pretty stuff on the outside, I get to deal with the guts you do.
Speaker 2:You do. Hats off to you for doing it.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and I've admittedly I kind of geek out on that, on the on the guts of these things, and as you and I were talking about getting ready for this conversation, a lot of it comes to the way I summarize it all is it's my job to make sure that the ecosystem works right, the delivery ecosystem for the product or the service or whatever it is that's being being out there.
Speaker 1:And it's all great if you've got the latest in technology and systems and everything else. It's all great until it's not and stuff breaks. And what do you do in those moments? And I think for a lot of companies, they build these great systems and these great processes and organizations, but you never realize how many of these key, critical processes are held together with bailing wire and duct tape until you decide to move them to another company who's going to help you out with delivery? And then you find out very quickly oh, my systems are not as robust or as nimble as I wanted them to be, or my process, or my learning, or I've got people who've been doing this for 15 years and I've got so much institutional knowledge that I haven't captured anywhere else.
Speaker 2:And now I'm up a creek. I mean there's, there's, um, um. You know the secret, the secret that that nobody on the front side of CX talks about really. But if you really want to know how good a technology is, or if you really want to know how well systems are put together, go talk to your system integrators, who have to deal with that stuff all day long and they can see the duct tape and the bailing wire.
Speaker 1:I absolutely agree with that.
Speaker 2:And you know, unfortunately, I have spoken with a handful of those people but unfortunately they don't want to name names. I can't understand why and you know, unless you get them off off off the record, you really don't hear that stuff. But they know it and so I feel like this is one of those opportunities where you deal with the system integrators. You've you've seen their work, you've had the the candid discussions with them on what works and what doesn't. So, um, I kind of view this as like, okay, look, this is a little a legit view underneath the hood. Here is some of the things that that that could happen have. You said that you know you're presented let's just kind of make up a hypothetical situation, which actually isn't very hypothetical because you've done this before but you know you're presented with with a new customer service situation. You've been brought in by some large company in your case, often financial services to optimize their systems.
Speaker 2:What kinds of things are you looking for at the outset? Are you saying, okay, here's the normal places where you know you find the dust bunnies that need to be cleared out, or where things are duct taped?
Speaker 1:Yeah, much like what you talked about with the system integrators. One of the first places I go is talking to the folks who are actually doing the work, the frontline people, and it's like tell me what's working, what's not working, what do you like, what don't you like, because they're the ones tasked with either they're on the phones or sitting behind a keyboard answering chats or emails or whatever else, or they're working the processes that are meant to feed everything else. I'm like all right, tell me what's working, what's not working. You get them in a room and I've done this so many times, I've lost count but you get a number of these folks in a room without any of their management, and just say tell me. And once one person talks, everybody else chimes in and you find out pretty quickly again what's working, what's not working, and that's great for insights. But, dennis, what do you do with that? What do you do with that information?
Speaker 2:Well, before we get to that which I think is going to be really important, when you've done this in the past, having done it quite a few times, are there any kind of commonalities that show up? Anything that you know? Oh yeah, I've seen this before. This is case a two. And then you know, which repeats itself every so often, or is it? You know? Every situation has got its own unique wrinkles and nuances.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there tend to be some commonalities. From a tech standpoint, it comes down to reliability of the systems and the applications or the programs that you're using. Um and uh, believe it or not, there's still some very major companies out there who are using AS four hundreds and some very old technology to hold together some of their very key processes. Um, and some of them are even batch driven, where they have to be offline for significant periods of time to be able to process the information instead of being able to process real time. Um, those are things that need to be taken into account and I think a lot of folks, when they get into it, don't realize oh yeah, we've got this great customer experience in mind and here's what we're going to do with it, and we've got 24 seven follow the sun. Oh, we can't deliver on that because our systems are pretty well jacked up Right, working off of four and a half inch floppies pretty well jacked up Right, working off of four and a half inch floppies, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:And from a service delivery standpoint, it's how well do all of our systems work together to be able to present the information?
Speaker 1:If anybody has ever been inside a contact center, most oftentimes you'll find agents sitting behind two screens.
Speaker 1:And if they aren't, find agents sitting behind two screens, and if they aren't, then they probably should be. The reason for that is that there are oftentimes so many different applications that they will need to interface with in order to handle one interaction. One company I worked for had no fewer than 14 that an agent had to be able to navigate pretty seamlessly to deliver on whatever conversation they happen to be in with the customer. And that's a lot of interaction to take place. And if you think about it just from a sheer number standpoint, being able to do that seamlessly in a conversation and near real time with the client or the customer, it's going to take some time, versus a more simple user interface that brings all of that information together, presents it in a way that the agent can get to without having to maximize, minimize and toggle screens and all the rest of it. But that's an aspect of it that I think needs to be looked into when you start looking at how do we support the kind of customer experience we want to have.
Speaker 2:When you open up one of these new projects, do you often find that the sponsoring company, the people who are hiring you, are aware of the problems, the kinds of problems or the reasons for their problems? Or is it kind of just like we need to optimize? Let's get Mr John Batista in here and he'll do that, you know? In other words, will they understand what's involved in the fixes?
Speaker 1:In some cases, yes, but I would say in a lot of cases the full extent of what needs to happen isn't really known, until you get in there and you start poking on some of these key processes and it's like, okay, well, I've got a batch driven system. I'm offline between 2 am and 6 am. Okay Well, does any customer experience need to happen during that time? If not, okay well, that's a fairly simple thing to address. If so, then what do you do with that? But it also comes down to an appetite for how willing leadership executive leadership in particular are to be able to fix some of those problems. Are they mission critical or are they annoyance?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Is it just like okay, we can figure out a workaround and it's okay. It's not the smoothest or the nicest of ways to get around it, but we can do that in the meantime. But it comes down to an appetite for how far they're willing of. Them are probably aware of the issues that they have. But again, until you try and package up some of those processes and some of those systems and move them outside of the walls of the organization, you never really realize the full extent of how many things are happening. Tape together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you know. The other thing is, you know there's, there's a okay, maybe we can deal with the, the B class solution. But a lot of times too and I'm sure I imagine you've seen this as well, but I know it happens in other technology integrations is like there's just this willingness, like almost a knee jerk, to like kick the can, like I'm not going to spend the money on my watch. You know I'll wait until the next quarter is here, when my bonus is isn't quite so near and you know achievable, and uh, or it's the next guy's problem because we're having a reorg and you know I can, I can dodge this bullet if I, if I just wait another four months or something yeah so yeah, and that's when you have to get into defining what's the problem.
Speaker 1:Statement like what's what's the actual pain point here and at what point are are folks willing to say you know what this is. If I don't fix it now, it's going to be critically broken and that's not going to be good for anybody. But I think it. In coming into these situations, one of the first places I go is what's the outcome you're after? Start with the end in mind, right, like what is it you want to have happen here? Is it just about moving to work because you're looking for savings or you're looking for scalability? What is it you're looking for? Are you looking for scalability? What is it you're looking for? But even beyond that is what is this product or service that we're supporting and what do you want that experience to be? All right.
Speaker 2:Now show me all the systems and processes that are supporting that come from C-level execs, or does it tend to come more from the people who are, you know, kind of more operational within the CX, like divisions you know? Do those, do those kinds of suggestions roll up so that the C-suite can make a decision, or how do those kinds of goals kind of emerge and get you know solidified?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, the nuts and bolts is going to come from your, your operational folks and getting an understanding of what. What's actually in place, how it works together, why it's there, um, and what's being done to either simplify the process or tie them together so that they work more seamlessly, and so on. The C-level conversations are more about okay, what's the overall delivery on this? What's it going to do for me? Right, what are the end results? Is this going to drive the customer experience so that we have gain in market share or that we're getting net promoter scores that are in line with what our goals are? That kind of thing. They're not as interested in the nuts and bolts unless something is critically broken or needs to be fixed, and there's now some significant dollars that need to be put towards fixing that. And then there's the inevitable timeline of how soon can we get it fixed or get this solution in place?
Speaker 2:So somehow, somewhere it always boils down to where is or what is the ROI on this thing? Absolutely, I've spoken with enough CX professionals to know that it's an absolutely universal problem and I'm surprised at how many people who are day in, day out in that space kind of miss that honestly. I mean, these are really smart people. They've got their heads down doing their jobs in smart ways. But at the end of the day, your executives just want to know how that's bottom lining for the company and, um, you know, having those conversations can be really eyeopening because, you know, I think everybody who's who works in CX and is passionate on some level and that's a lot of people um, know they're doing the right thing by the customer and know they're doing the right thing by the company, by doing the right thing for the customer.
Speaker 2:But I'm surprised at how many of them really have a feel for the bottom line effects of what they do. And I'm sure you've seen it too CX programs start off with a bang and they're looking for ROI at some point. But if it's not really well-defined in terms of milestones and hard goals, I'm surprised how often those things you know you're going to miss it If you're not tracking towards you know a defined goal. You're going to miss it, and that goes without saying. So I'm sure you've seen the same thing.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think a lot of it comes down to expectations as well and level setting expectations up front of how quickly we intend to see ROI and what are the factors behind that. One of the one of the exercises I like to take especially executive leadership through when we're looking at a new program or they're looking at outsourcing for the very first time or expanding whatever they may have outsourced, is the cost-quality-speed paradox, as I call it. So think of a three-circle Venn diagram cost, quality and speed and they all overlap in their various ways, but in the middle there's where all three of them overlap. Can you get cost, speed and quality all in equal measure? No, you're going to have to go with two of them, and this has proven itself out multiple times in my experience.
Speaker 1:I'd be curious as to what other people's experiences in this realm. The reason I bring it up is it quickly identifies what leadership expectations are. It's like well, I want it fast, I want it really good and I want it cheap. Okay, well, one of those things is going to have to give in order to get the other two. You can't have them all in equal measure. I've never seen.
Speaker 2:Where do you find the give typically?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, if you go with cheap, then you either sacrifice on speed or quality, like I want it fast, but I want it good, like well, then you got to pay for that. If I'm willing to give on speed and develop something of quality and maintain my budget line items, then I'm going to have to go a little slower to build this the way it needs to happen. Now, if I've got gobs of money that I can throw at this, well, I can give you speed and quality.
Speaker 2:Which nobody would ever say, actually not out loud in front.
Speaker 1:Well, no, not loud out in front. I have been part of an organization where that was the things like throw whatever you need to at it. It's like, okay, we're talking seven figures here. Uh-huh, go Right. Oh, all right.
Speaker 2:Well, party on Garth, I'll call you from the beach here.
Speaker 1:Well, not quite that but yeah, still, and it's that is not the case. That is definitely an outlier where companies are like, well, how, how can you do this and maintain budget? Okay, well, if we're after quality, then we're going to have to take our time to get there. I was part of another company where they weren't about quality and they weren't about budget.
Speaker 1:Even before I joined, I asked how they were paying their call center providers and those companies that were answering calls for them and helping answer some of those calls. They were so far into the bone in paying them that there was nowhere to go, and the customer experience absolutely showed it. The handle times were horrific. Service levels were in the tank because they were getting exactly what they paid for Right, and it's not about paying them gobs of money so that you know, have this amazing experience. There's a balance there, for sure. But that was an extreme case in my experience where the company was so unwilling to reasonably compensate their contact center partner in order to get the service levels that they were after, the customer experience that they were after. But they were constantly saying, well, what can we do to get service levels up? We have to be able to compensate a little more. It has a downstream effect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, sure, we have to be able to compensate a little more. It has a downstream effect. Yeah, sure, sure, you know this all kind of wraps together. But to jump back a step or two in our conversation, you know where is the ROI on this and what are you going to turn the CS operation from a cost center into a profit center? And that goes beyond just kind of the perception of it. I mean, how can you take these expenses and directly attribute them to a bottom line benefit in dollars and cents?
Speaker 2:And it's been really really interesting process in some of these conversations because you know, look, if you look at a typical call center CX operation, you're spending money to retain customers.
Speaker 2:Retaining customers is actually hard to define an ROI on that a lot of times.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's just a lot of factors that you really are hard to tie together.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, one of the more interesting conversations I had with one of these guys was that they figured out or are figuring out how to take the data from all of these interactions, which is massive amounts of data, the customer data, sentiment interaction, you know, even purchase value and repeat purchase and all that, and they've been able to kind of turn that data into a valuable dollar, accessible value to the company, saying, look, you know, yeah, not only we, we improving the customer experience and we can show you, through a couple of different links in this chain, how we're improving customer retention and sentiment, but look, the value of this data that we can now feed back into the company and the different aspects of this company now has an ROI that you can attribute very directly in all these other ways.
Speaker 2:And that was kind of like it happened through this just kind of organic discussion of I wonder ifs and you know you get to see a light bulb go off, they're going wait a second. Maybe this division has a chance at surviving, if I can just work the math.
Speaker 1:I think there's a really tight correlation. In fact, I'd love to see what the data would prove out on it, but my experience there's a tight correlation between when you're talking about customer acquisition, customer retention and the same thing on the employee side. Sure, employee acquisition, employee retention If your turnover is low on the employee side or lower, and you've got people who are sticking with it and are in there, know the product, know the service, know the kind of personality of the product and service that they're supporting and so on, it's so much more of a better experience. Whereas if you've got extremely high turnover, you're constantly behind a learning curve, you're never able to get in front of it. That has a direct impact on your customer experience and your retention there and all the money and the effort that's spent on acquiring these customers.
Speaker 1:It's less expensive Everybody we know this. It's less expensive to retain them than to go out and find one. Everybody we know this. It's less expensive to retain them than to go out and find one. It's the same thing on the employee side. So if you can find that balance of balance reducing my employee turnover either internally or externally to the point where it creates that balance, where I can begin to deliver on that and my overall costs now come down, where I can actually create a profit center out of this because of that.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking of some of the conversations with some of the technology providers over the past, say six months or a year, where they've developed AI-based systems that can deliver insights and actually kind of agentic AI before it was called that um on such a scale that the, the efficiencies and I've heard some of these stats, I just don't recall off the top of my head the efficiencies that were gained by the, the host companies, were, were giant. You know the dollar figures I remember. I don't remember, I remember closely what the number was and when the guys were telling me I was a start, like you know, yeah, yeah, we just saved this company over the last quarter, like you know, $13 million in in hard costs. Well, that becomes really interesting to to a CFO. You know, I think you can get a CFO's attention really easily with those kinds of numbers and and I think that facilitates the sale.
Speaker 2:You know, if you're selling these things, hey, look what we did for other company B over here and what we could do for you. So I'd like to change the direction here a little bit. I want to throw out a completely hypothetical to you and and uh, you know, just to be fair to listeners, we did talk about this a All right details and complications. What's the first thing you do? What's?
Speaker 2:the first thing you look for.
Speaker 1:In a word, simplicity, and I've thought a lot about that. What's the first thing I do? What's the outcome? Again, coming back to the outcome, start with the end in mind. What is it we want the experience to be, and why? The why is a big piece of it, because those who are responsible for delivering on that experience, the more they're connected to the why, the more they're going to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:If it's purely transactional and all they're doing is just cranking widget after widget, okay, that's not so much, and in some cases the why doesn't matter, but in a lot of cases it does, particularly if they're customer facing, the why doesn't matter, but in a lot of cases it does, particularly if they're customer facing, the why really matters. But coming back to the simplicity theme, I would want to design something that is as seamless as possible to interact with. Make it as easy as possible to get the information I need or the product or service that I'm after, and when stuff breaks or I have a question, make it easy to get my answer. I think we've all had any number of experiences over the years of I just want an answer, and now we can go to the web and Google search or whatever search, anything we're looking for, looking for. But even then sometimes it's like, okay, this, the answer I'm looking for, is so far down in the feed of my search results that I it's taking me a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Right, it's useless.
Speaker 1:Right. So make it easy. Make it easy to get the information that folks are after, make it easy for them to get the questions that they're they're looking for. Um, to use the the industry aphorism, you want to eliminate, then automate and then see what you can do with the rest, to do it in a way that meets the customer experience, but in a way that is more cost-effective to the organization. And all of that, for me, falls under the heading of keep it simple. Complex systems and solutions and delivery mechanisms get the more they're prone to breaking, the more they're prone to friction, and it just gets bumpy.
Speaker 2:So I break this down for me anyway into three kind of operational categories there's people, there's processes and there's technology. So those are fairly traditional ways of looking at these kinds of things. When you're looking at a customer service operation of those three categories, where are the typical breakdowns that are kind of first identifiable? Is it the people side, is it the process side, or is the technology side? I know the technology providers would love to hear that it's always the third and they've got a fix for that.
Speaker 2:Oh sure, but, um, but that's. I know of a one a friend of mine is CEO of another company who swears that it is 95 to 6% always process.
Speaker 1:but I'd love to hear your take on it to 6%, always process, but I'd love to hear your take on it. Yeah, that's when I dig into the data, and what especially? Performance data. It's like, all right, if we're looking at customer satisfaction scores or net promoter scores, what's that information telling me? And then you take that and you start to peel it apart. Is it a people process? Is it a people issue or a process issue or a tech issue? Is there one that's more prominent than the other? More prevalent process wise? Yes, because you figure a lot of processes have been cobbled together over the years.
Speaker 1:You very rarely get a greenfield opportunity to come in and say, okay, we're going to design this thing from scratch, and you know, put it in a testing environment, work out all the bugs and then put it in motion. And now we've got this fantastic thing that works from day one. Nice in concept, not so much in reality, right, um, but the the people factor is really where I actually find a lot of it tends to focus, because we're human None of us are perfect. I'm surprised, but that comes out in a lot of different ways. It comes out in how the processes are designed. It comes out in expectations of what this thing is supposed to do.
Speaker 1:It comes out in management expectations of this is what we need our people to do or how we're managing them, and so you poke at it from a lot of different angles, but it's still the people aspect of things and what we talked about earlier with do I have 14 different applications that I need to access, or do I have a management team that is so focused on performance that they're not able to pull back and see where friction points are being created because of whatever management approach they might have? The technology piece yeah, I know most tech folks are loathe to admit that there might actually be a tech issue. It does happen, right? That's why product support, tech support, exists because stuff happens, but I think a lot of it does come down to your people and your process first, and then the underlying technology that supports all of that, and how is that working together?
Speaker 2:There you go. You've heard it from an expert, an actual expert here. I'm not saying that with any sarcasm. Well, I can be sarcastic and make fun of you in other ways, but this is not one you've got. So I do it's my role, it's my my lot to bear. Having said all that, thank you for this. I think it's insightful, it's needed. I appreciate your perspective. I think the people listen to this will as well, and I think we should keep doing it.
Speaker 1:This has been great and talking with you about work that we're doing from. You know, it's funny because over the years, yeah, we're kind of on two different sides of the same coin and uh, you're on the pretty side, I'm on the gut side and uh, and that's okay, I'm good with that, um, but it's been a fun. This has been a fun conversation and talking about this from from each of our perspectives and kind of working it through and realizing that, yeah, there are a lot of connecting points between these two different sides of the coin to ultimately deliver on what we're looking for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, super interesting, like there's a, there's a full circle, kind of a circle of life thing happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, don't start singing Lion King.
Speaker 2:Anyway, thank you. Thanks, Mike.
