Expert Tips for Hiring the Best CX Consulting Firm

Prepare your Company CX → https://activateCX.arroyo360.com/Acti...

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Do you want to hire the best CX consulting firm for your business? Working to pare down the right choice for CX Platforms & Cloud Contact Center incorporating Self Service, AI, etc. Look no further! In this video, Basile Senesi (CRO At @ArcTechnologies , prev at @Fundboxcom ) share expert tips for finding the perfect CX firm for your specific needs.

At Arroyo360, we understand the importance of choosing the right consulting partner to solve your CX problems and drive success. Our framework-driven approach sets us apart from other firms and ensures results for our clients. Watch this video to learn more about how we can help your business excel in CX and Contact Center!

Chapters

• 0:09 Knowing you are in the right place
• 1:51 The Free Exchange of Ideas
• 4:30 How Frameworks Accelerate Change
• 7:06 Building Trust with Fiduciary Responsibility
• 9:46 Readying the Organization for Change
• 12:26 Recommending Arroyo360
• 13:24 Bonus Story: Fired before we got hired

Transcript

0:00

Basile, I just want to thank you today for, for coming in here and sharing your thoughts and your, your experiences of working with both myself and Arroyo360. What was that aha moment for you when you believe that perhaps, you were talking to the right CX consultancy firm? It's a, the word that comes to mind. Which is ironic is Frankenstein, because that's the best way to describe what the tooling and infrastructure that supported our end customer looks like. At the time we started chatting, Frank we had a lot of duct tape and bubble gum kind of keeping the wheels on and what we were doing worked and I think we were coming at it from a place of, it's not broken. It's just not optimal. What was eyeopening for me is a lot of the you know, experts we talked to externally that were. purporting to help us with this kind of stuff. We're coming at it from the lens of patting us on the back and telling us we've done a great job and like tweaking and optimizing around the margin. And I think you had the willingness to kind of hold up a mirror in a way that most of these other guys hadn't been able to do and tell us that we were wrong and tell us that, you know we, while we should be very proud of what we'd built, et cetera. That we should probably rip a bunch of it out and rebuild it much better because in the long run, it would actually save us a ton of time and frankly, headache, and I think you were equally selective of picking us as a client, as we were the other way around, because you wanted our commitment that we would do the hard work. To make this work. Otherwise it wasn't going to be interesting to you to take on a client just to make them feel like they paid for a line item that checks the box. Right. You really wanted us to take the advice seriously and apply it. And I think that gave me a lot of confidence that you would kind of have our best interest. You came to the table with a vision. It was very specific and you had a lot of documentation around it. For all intents and purposes, this was a very deep and personal project for you because it was about refactoring, reformation, positioning the organization for growth. We came in and we did provide alternative viewpoints, how was that for you? What was that experience like in terms of how we positioned that and how that helped you to define an alternative path or maybe a path that was enriched. It's funny because I think even as I say, we wanted somebody to challenge us. The reality is there was a lot of pride in what we built too. You know, I was personally, the reason I felt so personally invested in this project in the first place was because I had put a lot of, you know, my time and my thinking into making the infrastructure that we had work to that point. That meant that, you know, having somebody come in and add value required recognizing that personal investment and that, that emotional attachment to why we had done the things We had done in the way we had done them. I think my general take on working with, you know external experts, call them consultants for lack of a better term, is that you often pay people a lot of money to explain something you already know and get advice that is. Generally pretty vanilla. And I think the reality is what I got from you quickly, was mastery of the problem but at a pretty granular and deep level. We didn't have to debate, you know just the, the kind of like 30, 000 foot view, which of course you were very helpful in helping us set. I got confidence quickly that you understood kind of how the Legos fit together and how we had built this thing quickly because you were asking all the right questions that pointed to the fact that you had, you know, not only done your homework, but like you just kind of live and breathe this space and understood. The nomenclature and the problems and the tooling and the way that those tools were connected with one another. I, I think because you didn't get bogged down, because those details didn't get lost on you, the ultimate advice you were able to provide, the strategic view you were able to provide was grounded in that reality pretty well. And it didn't land on me as something that was just like, Okay, great. In theory, but how do we actually implement this now? You showed us kind of the, you know, how to connect the dots, if you will. McKinsey doesn't do that. The average external consultant doesn't do that. They give you the 30, 000 foot view and leave you to figure out how to implement it only to realize that there's a lot of daylight between that recommendation and the kind of current cards you're dealing with. And you can tell infrastructure wise or otherwise. What I enjoyed working with you and your team is that we really got into the challenge points quickly because there was this vision you had laid out and gave us an opportunity to speak to it. Then it became clear that we had a shared understanding and now it was really, how do we set a plan that we can execute? You're now moving down a path, and that path has to be something that has a certain degree of resolution that is clear from the very beginning with the full understanding that there's going to be iterations. When you started working with our team and we were all working together what was your sense of that synergy and that clarity around working towards a common point? You guys were very involved and you had a method to the madness. We had a lot of ideas. We were brimming with ideas, arguably, and, you know you guys helped provide structure and framing to how to think about coming up with the solution. So if I remember correctly, you're the one who suggested you know, the kind of order of events pretty clearly who we should bring to the table in what order with who else in the room when and I wasn't actually really indexing heavily on that at the beginning, but I think what I realized through that process. Was that having the conversations happen in the right order, both gave everybody the feeling that was involved, that their point of view was being considered and that you know, they had input, but it also gave everybody context that like they didn't have before starting the process. I think that the biggest thing I realized through your method was that you guys helped a team. I thought saw eye to eye on a lot of things, highlighted the fact that there was real gaps in what they even knew about the problem. They were pretty. Myopic in their focus on their specific set of issues. And we didn't really see the whole picture. You guys helped us kind of get everybody to that view much more effectively than I think we would have on our own. That was the biggest standout for me. And look, I think you guys were in the trenches with us. You guys spent countless hours in conference rooms with us, having those debates and those discussions. And I think the biggest thing that you told me at the time, which, you know, stuck with me since. You didn't want to move until we had consensus, at least from the right group of people. And so a lot about the, you know, first couple of weeks was building consensus towards the right end state debating the things that people didn't agree on. Ultimately, there was a lot of ideas on what it should look like that didn't always fit with what was possible. And I think you helped everybody kind of put out the, what the good looked like, and then understand the resource constraints and other constraints we had so that the final design. Made sense for everybody involved. There were these inter relationships between the process that we were going to have to change the technologies that were part of that componentary wise. In the technology side we were also very involved with how you were contracting. You gave us a lead role in determining, the productization requirement what particular term and what the costing was going to be, and building all that into the plan as well. What gave you confidence that we could handle that with your letter of agency you provided? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I got a feeling, and this is, it's odd for me to say this, but I got a gut feeling pretty quickly that you weren't going to retrain us. And I've been retraded before by a lot of external partners who hear one number and view that as the starting point rather than the end all be all. And you are always really thoughtful and thorough in trying to. Meet our ask. I think if I'm being more blunt about it, I've had a lot of consultants come up with estimates that dwarf the original kind of budget that we, we quote, and that was never really your MO. Now you did give us options that I remember sitting down with you and kind of looking at option A through Z of what good could look like with costing associated with each. But you didn't push me towards something that we wouldn't get budget for that would have kind of, you know, made us uncomfortable. You, you solved to the budget we have. So I think that that was very important. I think number two, you didn't do it by. Kind of having a one size fits all approach. You tried to maximize how much we got for that budget. And it was really clear, even as we got into like the right solution with the resources we would pick and how we would divide the work between the arc or the fun box team between the, you know external consultants that we were bringing on, on the Salesforce side. And then ultimately your team as well. We, we thought about that division of labor in a way that gave us just a lot of like price control, frankly and made doing more possible, even within a given budget. So you weren't just a helpful player in like designing it. You also kind of figured out how to project manage it within budget pretty well without limiting, you know, kind of the, the vision that, that we had for, for what this should be. That was awesome because, you know, I think I'd kind of approached it at the beginning from, look, we want, we want every letter of the alphabet to kind of be involved in this thing by the end of it, but we're not going to be able to afford all of that. So let's settle on a handful of points. You said, no, I think we can do more. Here's how we do it. And that was, you know, that was really thoughtful. If you were to recommend our organization, To another company what would be the advice you would give them that would provide a better experience and a better outcome For having a cx consultancy and platform provider come in. Yeah every business is so different, but I think there's probably some commonalities, right? First off know, who the right internal players are like, you can't help with that necessarily. You don't know the organization. The organization is more than the org structure, you know, on an org chart. It's, the tribal knowledge accumulated across every pocket of the business and who needs to provide that knowledge at what point in the journey. And so I think for, for us, one thing we did have is a pretty good view. Of who would be important to the discussion and ultimately the execution of whatever kind of solution we designed that range from engineers to data scientists, a whole bunch of people who, if you just looked at a list of names and titles, might not have thought were relevant. So I would say that's probably the first thing know who your team should be. I think number two know what you're looking for, right? Like, I think just define what success looks like. Not necessarily like the deliverables level, but what thing you're trying to change. Is it cost? Is it speed? Is it efficiency? Is it level of effort required to maintain? Maybe it's a metric, maybe it's a feeling, but ultimately you need to know what, your, I think if you don't have that, it's very easy to feel disappointed when costs start to hit because you don't have kind of a North star in mind. We knew very clearly what it was. It was uptime and reliability. Our system was breaking and it couldn't keep breaking because every single one of those failures had massive consequences on our customers. And ultimately on our cost to service those customers and the amount of time that went into all that. Not having things break was the North star for us. And you, in many ways helped kind of build infrastructure that would do that. But the other thing that we wanted is to create flexibility within our infrastructure to accommodate for the future, a future we didn't know about, or didn't have line of sight into, but knew would come. And you know, part of what had made things break was we didn't future proof how we built things. We've built things for the here and now. And as we added on, things didn't play nice. I think. You helped us, by the way, like articulate those things, but we always knew inherently what we wanted out of this, and I think that would be something else I would recommend. Okay, that's great. How would you go about recommending our firm? The. Parallel I would make to describe what you guys are. You're, you're the general contractor. You're not the tile guy. You're not the drywall guy. You're not the carpenter. You could probably do that. And you guys are all generally trained like that, but you know, the best drywall guy, you know, every tile guy. And you're the one point person that a company works with to rebuild what they need to rebuild, to re engineer, re architect whatever core part. They're non core products. We, they're, like supporting cast of infrastructure. They need to work on, you guys are both the project planners, but also the Wranglers in chief of the myriad of artisans that are going to get involved along the way and making it possible. And, you know, by the way, we had some of our own tile guys and you guys brought some of your carpenters and you're the orchestrator that's able to kind of make all those parts work harmoniously together. I asked you about your aha moment. I'll tell you my aha moment. In the very early stages, you were referred over to us and, and you were talking to several people for this engagement, which ended up covering a lot of things, right? It covered not only the CRM, but we ended up covering marketing. We ended up covering multi touch attribution but ultimately in the initial scope, which was around the refactoring of CRM, you actually gave me a call and I was driving at the moment. I picked up the call and your call was to let me know that we didn't make the short list. And and so I listened through and asked some questions and you were kind enough to, clarify it, and you named three or four points that gave me the opportunity to actually provide some counter views and to address those maybe where they hadn't been addressed before. At the end of the conversation you said, well, okay, I've changed my mind. You're back in and we'll have a conversation maybe next week. And it really spoke to me, in a very powerful way. Like this human being is. Very smart, listens actively asks all the right questions. And I thought to myself, I really want to work with this person. So I'm really happy that , that came about. I appreciate that. And I, I remember that call distinctly. And I remember not being excited to make the call cause I hate saying no. But, I also remember you kind of showing the same thing in return, which was like, look. If all these points were true, you'd be right not to move forward. Let me clarify kind of your, your thinking on this stuff. And you were a thought worker. And I think that showed both there, but also throughout the whole engagement, right? Like you were, you were a partner. You weren't would you like fries and a Coke with that kind of guy? And, that's, what I wanted in in someone that we brought along with us for, the ride on what would be ultimately multi quarter long journey of rebuilding.