The CX Puzzle: Solving One Piece at a Time

As a metric, call volume is an awesome one. I mean, literally, the higher your call volume, the lower your customer experience. I challenge anyone to find a situation where you're getting tremendous high call volumes in a call center and your customers are happy.

I couldn't agree more. Yeah.

Literally, every single call is a failure of CX somewhere.

Welcome to Simply CX, where we bring you customer voices and expert insights. I'm Nicole McKinley, leader of Global Customer Experience at Microsoft. What if I told you there's a global technology giant that's quietly transforming the lives of 198 million people every single day by putting real customer experiences at the center of everything? I'm talking about e&. Today, I'm joined by Chris Lipman, the award-winning Chief Customer Experience Officer at e&. Chris is a puzzler and someone who's truly obsessed with redefining what it means to serve people in the digital age.

With a footprint in 38 countries, he and his team have made it their mission to become the most trusted brand in the region by moving away from just tech-centric solutions and focusing on empathy, data, and innovation. Always keeping the actual human in mind.

It's good to connect with a fellow CX nerd.

Love it. Well, that's what this is all about. And let me congratulate you on your accolades. e& won Forrester's Customer Obsessed Enterprise Award, which is huge.

Very, very pleased to be winning that one. That was a great win.

Yeah. Significant. I'd love to start by just learning a bit about why customer experience is so important to you.

There's probably two pieces that blended very nicely and really got me hooked on customer experience. I had owned my own business previously, and I'd sold it. And I wanted to move into the world of corporate. And at the time, the entry-level was call centers. I wasn't terribly good at that. I like to say because I have too much integrity. And then I moved into a customer service role, and this was clearly my niche, right? I'm a pleaser by nature, and so that contributes in resolving customers' issues. And there were things that I could see at the most junior entry level of the organization, like, "Why are you doing that? That just doesn't make any sense." And you'd ask the question and not get a proper answer, and things would just continue on the way they were. And if anything, that lit a fire within me because that coupled with the personality trait that I have, which is I'm a puzzle guy and I've definitely got OCD, and so I don't like to leave things unresolved.

It's those traits coupled with that experience and the satisfaction that I personally get from fixing things and seeing things that are not right being put right is really what drove me into this world, and gave me plenty to feed from because CX is not an exact science and, of course, very difficult to impossible to satisfy everybody. And so I think that's what drove me, and that's what keeps driving me.

So you mentioned you're a puzzle guy. What type of puzzles are you into?

Sudoku in particular. It appeals to my logical side and also my inability to let go until I've solved a puzzle. I was on a flight, and I was doing the extremely hard Sudoku, and it consumed three to four hours, which made the flight go fast, to be honest. So it was pretty good. But by the end of that three or four hours, I was just exhausted from doing the mental gymnastics that Sudoku makes you do, but I did solve it. And so--

Impressive.

Yeah. I was very happy to do that. So yeah, that's me. Personal and professional, I definitely love a puzzle.

And for sure, CX is definitely a puzzle. What is the puzzle that you're seeking to solve as the Chief Customer Experience Officer?

There's multiple answers to that question. I think the daily puzzle is finding out the real reason for customer angst and detractors and negativity that customers express because customers don't give you the answer. They just tell you their experience. And just telling you their experience, that's not nearly enough information to actually work out what's going wrong. So the customer may give you a negative NPS score and say, "Your bill's too high." But that's not enough, right? Did they buy the wrong plan? Is the bill wrong? Did they inadvertently sign up for a service that they're unaware of? Are they doing things out of bundle? Are they breaching the allowance that they've purchased? There's so many things that it could possibly be. And 80% of the puzzle is working out exactly the specific issue that these cohorts of customers are actually really not happy about.

The other 20%, the fixing, is normally obvious. As soon as you work out the actual problem, the solution, typically, pretty obvious. Sometimes the obvious is not obvious, I guess. But we have mechanisms in place to make sure the fixes that we put in place actually did resolve the problem, and we hit the mark.

Can you talk a bit more about what NPS is and how you and [inaudible] are digging into really understanding that next level of depth behind what a customer may initially say is the problem or that they're unhappy about?

They're very different, right? So NPS, Net Promoter Score, was a financial customer metric created by a gentleman called Fred Reicheld, who was a Bain consultant. Being a consultant and a management consultant, he understood very clearly that everyone feels good about delivering good customer experience, and it feels like it's the right thing to do. But when you're sitting in front of the CFO and you're talking about customer experience, typically he glazes over. There's not much interest there. What's it got to do with the CFO? And he's interested in the numbers. And so he realized that the only way through that is to convert customer experience into something that is financial. And that's what NPS or Net Promoter Score brings to the table, and it's not an exact science. Some people don't like it and all the rest of it. But NPS, it's the only genuinely global benchmarkable score because everybody measures it the same way, and everybody asks the same questions. So you can compare yourself intra and inter-industry using this. But it's also the only one which genuinely links to financial value.

Right.

It's an 11-point scale, and the detractor is a 0 to 6, and a promoter is a 9 to 10, and ambivalent people who don't care either way are 7s and 8s. And you derive the score by taking the promoters and subtracting the detractors. And so you could be anywhere from minus 100 to 100, so 200-- to 200-point range. But yeah, the ability to link that to commercial value is where the rubber really starts to hit the road with CFOs and the ability to build business cases around it because you can actually show that if customers move from not happy to happy, they actually spend more money with you, and they stay your customer longer.

Right, right.

This is critical in corporate world where everything revolves around return on investment. And likewise, if a customer goes from happy to not happy, they spend less and they tend to leave more. And so the establishment of that financial link is critical because in every role I've been in at a senior level, the feel-good, warm and fluffy part of the CX about-- which is doing it because it's the right thing to do for customers wears off after about two years. And people start to go, "Well, why are we spending so much money on CX?"

Yeah.

This is typical in most organizations. And to be honest, it's not unfair either. I mean, we're running a business, and the CEO needs to understand. The CFO need to understand, "Well, if I give a dollar to sales, I can get $5 back. If I give a dollar to CX, what am I getting back? This allows the ability to cut through.

There are countless metrics available, but the real question is how to measure the impact of CX investment on business outcomes. I'm interested in how you use these metrics like NPS and which ones actually influence decisions or drive further investment in CX.

Let me give a bit of background. When I arrived here, and it's not atypical, it's quite common, there was probably four or five different ways of measuring customer experience and service. There was CSAT, there was customer effort score, there were versions of NPS that were being collected, but those versions had human hands in the way, which means possibly unreliable. There was a range of these metrics. And so not only is that very confusing from an organizational point of view, because which one is right, but they're all showing that we were doing amazing things. And the trouble with all those other metrics, which is why I tend to sideline them, is everyone runs them differently, right? So if you're running CSAT, some people do a five-point scale, some people do a seven-point scale. So first of all, it's a bit meaningless because what does it mean? Secondly, because there is no benchmark, because they're all different, is a 4.2 out of 5, is that good? Is it bad? Who knows? I don't know. Is it worth spending money for me to move that 4.2 to a 4.4? I don't know. Maybe 4.2 is the best you're ever going to get. Maybe it's the worst score on the planet. I don't know. You just don't know. And so those become a bit useless, and they become a bit moot. And of course, it's impossible to justify improving them because there is no benchmark to say whether you're already doing well or doing poorly around things which you have created yourself internally to measure the customer experience. Same goes for customer effort score, which I know is another popular one. And maybe it's okay in very nascent stages of if you're quite immature from a CX point of view. But once again, it comes down to the same thing. If you're generating a 3.8 customer effort score, is that a good score? I don't know. And it varies between industry. And so it's very difficult. And so if I move that from 3.8 to a 4, does the business get something out of that? Is there an improvement in revenue? Is there a reduction in churn? All of these are very difficult to link. MPS is really the one which brings all of these things together. You can tell I'm a pretty strong advocate. So how we use this score, it's basically now at every single customer touchpoint where there is a human-to-human touchpoint, and in some cases, non-human to human touchpoint, we use NPS. So we do transactional surveys. Straight after every transaction, you will receive a survey. We get a very good response rate from our customers. We also do relational surveys. So per product, we do random across the product using the MPS methodology, and we also get a good response rate. And we get a very, very large sample, which makes it much easier because it becomes very believable and your trend lines are relatively stable. They're not all over the place. And we also do episodeal. So we look at episodes that are important to customers, and we look at each step of those episodes and the various different channels and ways the customer can actually do each one of those steps or segments within the episode. And we do MPS scores throughout all of those. And then we look at the overall score for the episode, but then we also look at each individual component of the episode. And you may find that the majority of customers are using a component of-- they're paying via a certain channel, which is not the highest NPS. And so the challenge is to either improve that or encourage customers to use the one which actually they're going to find much better. And that richness of information gives you that. That's at a practical level. At a corporate and at a cultural level, we also use this. So everybody in this organisation carries an MPS target from GCO to CEO and down. All the agents in the call center carry individual MPS scores. And we have a platform which gives the customer comment and the score directly back to the agent in the call center. And sometimes it's not very nice.

So almost real-time feedback?

It is. It's real time feedback.

Very cool.

And it's very important because of the whole individual nature of CX. You may think you've done an awesome job, and the customer thinks you stink, and that's the way it is. At the end of the day, you stink because that's the customer's point of view. They're the arbiter of the truth, not anybody else. And so this is very motivational. I mean, sometimes it can demotivate because you think you did a great job. But when you're introspective about it, and you start thinking about, "Well, what could I have done better?" this is where the real value lies and the challenge around it. And it's an unarguable point of view because this is the customer's point of view.

Excellent.

So this is, in a nutshell, how we use this. And of course, we link it to customer lifecycle value as well. And so the ability to do business cases, the ability to demonstrate the return on investment that is being made in customer experience. Those things are invaluable. These are mandatory things. If the CX program in any kind of corporation is going to be sustainable, these things must happen.

So essentially, you have MPS as a consistent metric across transactional, relational, episodeal. And is episodal equivalent to key moments that matter for the customer? Or how do you determine what is episodal and what episodes or scenarios to really target getting customer feedback on?

You can usually sit around a table and determine what are the most important episodes in a customer's journey with us. So for example, it may be an initial purchase or onboarding. So if you think about a customer's onboarding in their first 60 days with the organisation, that's potentially an episode. How do they find out about the product? How do they then buy the product? How do they then use the product once they've done it? How do they then pay? Was their first bill correct? Their call after the first bill, were they happy? Were they not happy?

And we do surveys at all of these points. So we survey customer after their first bill. And we survey just general billing. But first bill, most important, because this is their first payment interaction with you. Is that what they were expecting? If it's not, and when we first started doing it, it certainly wasn't, right, then of course they're grossly unhappy because most humans would think, "Ah, the salesman lied to me, and I didn't buy this. And what is this? I didn't sign up for this kind of stuff." And you get a thorough understanding. And it leads to so much change within the organisation beyond the Department of CX.

In that particular instance, we got sales to start including things that they would tell the customer and an attempted explanation of what pro rata means and what their bill would look like, and certain inclusions that we would make sure sales now tell the customer because we could see from customers calling in month zero or even month one. We could see what was lacking in the selling that the customer shouldn't have to call to ask this. This should be included upfront and with the sale. And we could see what the top five or top 10 pain points were. And we started including that when we were selling to the customer, including these things there.

And then we measured the success of that by saying, "Did we get less call volume on this topic?" And I guess that's a whole other topic is the value of the call center. A lot of companies don't realize the value of insights and the ability to gauge whether you're doing a good job or not. As a metric, call volume is an awesome one. And it's beyond the cost of a contact center. I mean, literally, the higher your core volume, the lower your customer experience. I challenge anyone to find a situation where you're getting tremendous high call volumes in a call center and your customers are happy.

I couldn't agree more. Yeah.

Yeah. And I actually said this at the Forrester of Ed, I'll say, "Hands up anyone in the room who calls a call center for fun. [laughter] Hands up anyone in the room who calls a call center to just tell the company, 'You're doing a great job. Thank you so much.'" But never, never. Literally, every single call is a failure of CX somewhere.

Absolutely.

And, look, this is one of the paths we've taken. If you find the root causes of those calls and you eliminate the reason for the customer calling you, you automatically push up CX it's just a no-brainer.

Couldn't agree more. Thinking about call volume as the equivalent of a defect. It's a defect in something, right? It's a defect in the product. It's a defect in the experience. And every one of those defects is a ripe opportunity to fix and eliminate.

Remove the reason for the call.

For sure. One metric I didn't hear you explicitly call out is around competitive satisfaction. And we're in this world of commoditization and the technology and the products and the services across almost every industry, right, are becoming more and more commoditized, more and more similar. And there's a lot of discussion around how to differentiate. Is there a metric? Are you using MPS in this way, or is there a different metric, or are you thinking about a new metric that can give you deeper insight into not just customer's perception of the [inaudible] experience, but insight of the relative perception of that experience to other competitors in your industry?

We do external MPS studies with customers. Here, it's done via face-to-face interview, which is, they basically go to shopping malls and sit people down and go through a survey. People are willing to do it. It's probably an imperfect way of doing it. The sample sizes are acceptable, but small, but it's difficult to get to the root cause, and it's also very slow. Because of the sample size, typically, you do a rolling three months of the score, and so it's quite an imperfect way of doing it. There's restrictions in this market in terms of being able to text message your competitors, customers, surveys, and this kind of thing. But that's a more ideal way of doing it, right? Because you get the volume and you get genuine reasons behind a customer thinking the way they do. But we track our MPS at a market level, and we track our competitors' MPS as well on a monthly basis. So this is how we do it here.

All right. Yeah. So you use it. And I'm a fan of quantitative and qualitative feedback. It all matters, and it gives you just additional perspectives. So I know [inaudible] really prides itself on this transformative shift of moving from being tech-centric to customer-focused. Why is it so important for the company, not just you personally as the leader of CX, but for the company to be customer-focused?

The realization, which is why we shifted some years back from purely being a telco play to being a techco, I think we probably have to delve a little into that context first. So as telco becomes homogenized and productized and becomes commoditized, your only differentiator is really going to be CX. Everybody has, over time, similar network coverage. Everybody will have similar plans. Everyone sells the same handsets. So how do you differentiate yourself in that market? So this was one of the key drivers. And I think moving into techco, which as telco revenues-- I mean, we're doing quite well, but typically telco revenues wane. How else can we use our core asset that we have, which is the network, to add value from a tech point of view? And so it's been quite public that we've done quite a lot of M&A and moving vertically and horizontally in this space to become a techco at a gathering pace. In the world of tech, CX is paramount.

Apple's entire business is based on its CX and the usability of its products, and the fact that their products just work. But Steve Jobs was a CX fanatic. He's the reason why Apple Mouse-- I don't think anymore, but the original Apple Mouse only has one button because it's just easy, because that way the customers will get it and it's a great CX. For example, personal intervention. Only wanted one, can't screw it up. And it's why the iPhone is so popular, right? The advent of CX in that world, it has to be done right. And to be able to do that and give a brand offering and a brand promise around customer experience is something that we're striving towards and crucial for our sustainability and success moving forward.

No, I love that. And if I were to join e& tomorrow, how would I know the customer centricity is core to the company?

A couple of really obvious ways is it's one of our company values, and we only have three. So it's one-third of our values. And this is reflected also in everybody's KPIs, right? So the addition of NPS, which is, of course, a customer experience metric in literally everybody's KPIs, you should be left in no doubt. And it's also weighted to the same degree, for our business teams, it's weighted to the same degree as their revenue targets.

Ah, that's key. That's huge.

It's absolutely huge because if you just give it a 1% or 2% rating, you know what? A rating, nobody really cares. It's difficult to get that care factor because they know if they miss it and they nail their revenue target, it doesn't really make much difference. This way, it really does. And so this is the company's way of sending a message loud and clear. No, it's just as important to do it the right way and to ensure that we have good customer experience, just as important as bringing the money through the door. And it's that that is key. And that as a new employee, you will feel it right away.

And as the CX division, we vet the processes for all new products and everything. We are involved as a gate to vet what goes out the door before it goes out the door. And so without that alignment between us and product, for example, things just get stalled, and it becomes slower to get to market. And so the alignment between us and product and marketing is critical. But what it also means is they're on the same page as you when it comes to CX, and that's the critical bit.

And so until you have that alignment, it means that the CX is constantly acting as a police force, which is never very pleasant, and you don't really want to be that. Initially, it probably has to start that way. But as you develop that alignment, then it becomes less and less about that and more about everybody singing from the same hymn sheet.

For sure. And so what I'm hearing you say also is just that the executive sponsorship and kind of the ethos of e& is centered around valuing the customer, valuing feedback from the customer, and ensuring that everybody, no matter what your role is, feels accountable for customer experience. And that shows up in your KPIs. It also shows up, as you said, in your values, but also in how people are paid, which I think makes a huge difference. I think that's probably one of the biggest levers that any company can establish.

That's exactly right. And it makes up a key component of the CEO's own scorecard, right? And so if there's a problem with it, of course, he's interested to know what it is. And so it drives that personal accountability. And look, it was challenging to get some of what you would traditionally call the support groups, like legal or finance, because their argument is, well, we don't really influence the customer experience. Why should we have this KPI? And the answer is, well, you do, in fact, influence the customer experience. You do a lot. So finance, they vet every business case, and they're aware of everything that goes out the door.

If you see something which is not customer experience-friendly, then you should call it out. And you should become the practitioner. And this is, I guess, a gauge of how I determine whether I'm doing my job well or not. If there is a CX problem and everyone in the room turns to me, I'm not doing my job very well. So everyone should turn to whoever is accountable for the CX, right? So why didn't you pick this up? And why didn't you do that? It's not about blame. It's about ensuring that we're all in the same boat when it comes to this. We're all pulling on the oars to get into the same direction, guided by our strategy and our principles that CX determines.

I think that's really important because I think there's this misnomer across industries that if you, as a company, have a Chief Customer Experience Officer, they are uniquely or solely accountable for CX. And what you're saying is that e& every individual, every department has a CX accountability. It's not just about you or your team.

Correct.

And you guys make that real and just how you operate day in and day out, which I think is super powerful.

It really is. And to be honest, you can't really do it effectively any other way. I would need a team of 5,000 people if we had to be in every meeting, in every part of this organisation, cracking the whip and ensuring that, "Oh, you've got to think about the customer." The job becomes impossible. But also it's really a truly ineffective way of doing it. And it shows up when you do CX maturity exercises. It shows up glaringly that you're an immature organisation. If you try to simply be-- like this one guy's accountable for CX and that's it. Everyone looked to him, and he's going to fix it all. It just simply doesn't work.

Yeah, I've seen that for sure as well in my experience.

Me too. [laughter]

Yeah. Many, many times.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

You talked about some of the challenges, though, right, in making this shift. And you talked about it wasn't always easy. And there were some parts of the organization that maybe were resisting, feeling that accountability or having a metric around CX. How did you overcome that? The how behind overcoming the resistors, the naysayers, is so critical, and what a lot of companies struggle with. In my own experience, even it's easy to feel that that resistance is so strong that there's no way to overcome it. But clearly, you did, and you have successfully.

Yeah. Yes.

What was your secret sauce?

It's a journey. It's an ongoing, never-ending journey. First of all, it's understanding the phases that people need to go through. And this is my own personal take on it. It's identical to the stages of grief. First one is denial, right? So we started producing NPS scores. Everybody just starts attacking the score. "This is not reflective, but we're doing all these things. This can't possibly be right," straight up denial. Then you move to anger, right?

Yep.

And it really is genuine anger, right? So out and out trying to absolutely stop all the activity that CX is trying to do and trying to implement. And from an anger point of view, because they were doing quite well previously, and now here's somebody who's come in and produced these results and showing, "Actually, we're not doing very well at all." And so you definitely have that anger. Then you move to negotiation. Once you get to the negotiation part, you know you need a bit where you need to be where they're accepting the score.

And to be honest, it comes down to all the reporting and analytics you have to do to show that the score is actually moving in line with demonstrable reasons. So if your app crashes and then your product score dies the next month, that's probably the reason. And you can tie this together using NPS and, of course, critically, the customer commentary, and then you get to acceptance. And we're definitely at this stage now where the NPS score is not in question in any way, shape, or form because we've demonstrated over the last three years that the ups and the downs are specifically correlated to events and things that we're doing to customers.

And so you can see it very, very clearly. And you can see it coming out in specific things, or things that went wrong, or things that fell over, or things that we did. You can see this very clearly. The ups are as significant as the downs, right? So what made it go up? Because if it's just random, it's going to go down again. What things did we do to move the needle? And we have very specific programs. And we know specifically how much-- I mean, within the margin of error, of course, we know specifically how much it's going to move the needle in NPS because we know all these X% of customers are detracting for this specific reason.

And so if we fix that reason, these detractors should go away. Now, it's not an exact science because maybe the customer starts detracting about something else. Sure. But you get into the vicinity, and so you can explain this. Look, it's been a very hard push. And so my advice is you just need to keep going. But you are very open to the negativity because because of the slow nature of the fixes that have to happen and the plodding nature of it and the fact that it is all very small grains of sand that add up to a beach at the end of the day. Probably for the first 12 months, you don't see much in the way of improvement. You may get lucky with a few things, but really, as it starts to snowball and then you start to get momentum, in the last two or three years, you get a lot when you look back. I mean, we've increased our corporate MPS score by probably 70% to 80%. In the first year here, we moved it by 20%. That's not usually how it happens. That's a really big achievement. But we've consistently just kept moving it to the point where it's touching very reasonable levels. Still have challenges within some products. But it's a question of keep going and understand that the practice of CX is slow and plodding, but the results will come if you keep following the methodology that you need to in order to make the customer's experience better. It has to follow that if you're removing the reasons for customers being detractors, that they will therefore be happier. This is just logic, right? It has to be. And so if you keep removing them, at some point, your customer will express that they're happier.

Great advice. Beyond resilience or tenacity, clearly you're using data and you're able to actually action on the data.

Absolutely.

So it's not people just sitting around talking about, "What does the data tell us?" But it's--

No.

--acting on that and ensuring impact as a result.

It's a really good point, Nicole, because you have to think a lot of people look at MPS and they go, "Yeah, but MPS just gives you a score. It doesn't tell you what to do to fix it. It just tells you whether you're good or bad." Well, technically, that's correct. But when you're doing the NPS surveys, you also give the customer free form ability to tell you why they gave you the score they gave you. It becomes challenging from a categorization point of view, although with AI, it's become much easier to say. We typically, at a relational level, we get about 20,000 surveys a month responded to us, and about 30% to 40% have a comment attached. And some of the comments are just generic like, "You suck," things like that. But others are very specific. Some of them are full-blown essays. And they're great because they tell you in micro detail what that customer experienced. But the categorization of those customer verbatims and the association to the amount of detraction and angst that it's causing customer is critical. And it opens the doors for where you need to drill, and under what rocks you need to look. It points you in the direction of where you need to go in order to fix the things that you need to fix. And without that, you're simply shooting in the dark. If you don't get that customer verbatim and you've just got an MPS score, quite correct. It doesn't tell you what you need to do, which is why a lot of people go into CSAT and things like that. But if you're actually doing the survey correctly and asking the customer for why you gave me the score that you gave, it actually is giving you all the answers. It requires a lot of interpretation, but it is giving you the answers.

That's fantastic. And really, it's about actionable insights and then actually driving the follow-through to address those issues that are surfacing to the top.

Exactly. And I think just to close out your question, you're like, "So what did we do?" One of the difficulties was getting people to empathize with the customer because as you get more senior, you really become more detached from the front end and you become detached from the customer beyond the spreadsheets and the PowerPoint presentations. You don't actually get to talk to customers and you don't get to hear their feelings. And so a very successful program we've launched here. It's a retake on a McDonald's program, which they have, which I know everybody in the McDonald's organization needs to go serve in a restaurant once every 6 months or every 12 months. And they need to do it all. They need to serve the customers. They need to flip the burgers. They need to clean the toilets. They need to do every bit in a restaurant. And the reason they do that is so you don't become detached from your customer. And so we launched a program called Beyond the Desk, and we started with the C-suites, but we will roll this down to everybody, at least VP level and up, where they spend a day in the call center. And it's not sitting there listening to somebody doing the job. You are the one who's talking to the customer. And I think a lot of organizations do it the other way where you just go, "Oh, just go listen to the customers." If you've ever seen that exercise happening, look around. 90% of the execs are doing emails on their phone. They're playing with their phone. They're not paying any attention at all. If you're talking to the customer, you're trapped. You need to focus on what the customer is saying because the customer doesn't know who you are and doesn't know that they should treat you with a certain amount of respect. They will just let fly if you're giving them nonsense answers. So we take them to the call center. We give them a crash course in how to greet the customer. Obviously, privacy regulations, etc. And then we sit there next to an agent who actually works the systems for them because that's just too hard.

Makes sense.

So the agent next to them is instructed to, "If they're really crashing and burning, you can step in. Otherwise, don't. Don't. They need to work it out." And so yeah, it's really good. And the agent will bring up-- I mean, they will bring up product information for you, but it's up to you to speak to the customer, and you have to listen to their complaints, and you have to listen to their questions. It was a fantastic exercise, and our CEO loved it. And so what came out of that was each one of the C levels took away one to two individual items from the actual calls that they took, where they commit to they will resolve this all the way down so that this never happens again. And we don't even know how many customers it impacts. It's not really the point. The point is we wanted them to hear it directly from customers, but also wanted them to experience the kind of difficulties of making the changes that we need to make on a daily basis here in CX, actually having to go through that pain of doing that. And it leads to process change, it leads to systems change. And of course, there's a lot of nerves, but you have to push through that. And I think it's very good for them to feel that level of-- sometimes you get angry customers, and sometimes they're just irregular, but I think it's an excellent experience to go through, and it really molds you.

Yeah, that's so powerful. Hearing how execs are stepping into the call center and walking in the customer's shoes, literally, is such a game changer. In part two, we'll pick up right there. Chris shares what it was like to take customer calls himself, what surprised him most, and how that experience led to real product and process changes. Plus, we'll dive into the role of AI in CX, what's working, what's not, and what keeps him up at night. You won't want to miss it. Thank you for listening to SimplyCX. I'm Nicole McKinley. Our show is produced by Larj Media. That's L-A-R-J Media. Special thanks to Luya Polka and Elizabeth Machado. To find out more about today's guest, check out the links in the show notes. If you have your own challenges or questions about CX, email us at SimplyCX@microsoft.com. And please share today's episode with someone you think could learn from it and follow me on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going