Alex Turkovic: 0:03

Hey, it's Alex, I'm back. Let's talk about digital CX, shall we Once again welcome to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me, alex Turkovich, so glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. So hey, and welcome back to the Digital CX podcast, the show where we talk about all things digital in CX. And boy, it's been a while since I have said those words out loud.

Alex Turkovic: 0:53

I've been on a bit of a hiatus for the past few months for various reasons which I guess we'll get into briefly here, but I'm so happy to be back and talking about cool stuff on this show, which was hopping along steadily, week by week, for better part of two years. Um, then I got a new gig. Then life got a little crazy. A bunch of stuff happened and I was like you know what let's and, to be frank with you, I was getting a little burned out on the weekly posting schedule as well. You know, I think we all owe it to ourselves to be transparent with things and realistic about what we can and can't handle, and so I went on a bit of a hiatus, right, and I went hard. I mean, I didn't post on LinkedIn, I wasn't in any communities, so to those of you who sent me messages during that time and I wasn't responsive, I'm sorry. I just I had to like hardcore disconnect and focus on my new gig and just get into a rhythm there. But it's time. It's time for me to come back on the show because I love doing it. I love chatting with you all in this virtual space that we've created together, and I love sharing my ideas. I like giving other people a platform from which they can share their ideas as well, and so it is time to produce some new episodes.

Alex Turkovic: 2:32

It's going to be a little bit different than it was before. Before, if you remember, I was producing basically a solo episode every fifth episode and doing a lot of interviews, which was awesome Met a lot of great people. And that's not to say that interviews are ceasing. We'll continue to do some interviews. I'm just going to do a lot more solo episodes as well, just because I have a lot more stuff to share that I wasn't really able to fully before, and yeah. So we're going to structure the show a little bit differently. We're also going to do, you know, somewhat tighter episodes. If you remember, I used to do anywhere from half hour to an hour long shows here and there. We're going to try to keep it a little bit tighter, make it a little bit shorter, a little more digestible.

Alex Turkovic: 3:23

But ultimately, I want to bring to the table a lot of the stuff that I've been working on, a lot of the things that I've been chatting with other people about what they've been doing, continue talking about some of those best practices that exist out there in digital CX and, of course, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence. In fact, we're going to talk about it a lot, because one of the things I've been doing in my time away is just playing with AI pretty hardcore, a glorified Google, but using it in agent mode especially has been pretty awesome. You know building custom GPTs, you know building team members as GPTs, which is such a cool concept, and whatnot. So I'm super excited to share a lot of that information. Excited to share a lot of that information and on top of that, I am also working on some pretty cool projects that I will pull you into over the coming weeks. Let you know what's going on there. There's some education related things, there's some partnership things coming up that I am insanely excited about and really I'm trying my best to take on projects that serve the greater good of the community, specifically the CS community, the CX community and the digital community especially. So stay tuned for that. Probably next week I'll reveal one of the projects that I'm working on, but look, in this first show back.

Alex Turkovic: 5:12

One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately is this notion of creating memorable moments for customers in a digital program, which is, um, kind of hard to do. So one of the things I did over this break is I read a book by Will Gadara, formerly of Eleven Madison Park, the famed restaurant in New York City called Unreasonable Hospitality. I know from conversations a lot of you have read that book as well, but if you haven't read that book Unreasonable Hospitality it is a fantastic glimpse into the restaurant and hospitality world, but it is also a very wonderful view into the creativity that can exist in this space of creating amazing customer experiences. And so, if you're not familiar with it, the Cliff Notes version is that Eleven Madison Park became the world's best restaurant because they looked for every opportunity they could to create insane moments and memorable moments for their customers. You know, and there's a lot of examples that they give in the book about you know how they would do kind of these. You know outlandish kind of things, like a group was visiting out of town and Eleven Madison Park was like their last kind of New York experience that they were going to have before leaving, because they wanted fine dining, blah, blah, blah. But they said the one thing that they hadn't really had was a New York City hot dog yet and so somebody went out and, you know, bought a hot dog and served it to them in a fancy, fine dining kind of way. But you know, it's like those little gestures that show that you really care about your customers. That kind of stuff really, really resonated with me and those are things that I have been encouraging my team to really embody as much as possible. I mean, sometimes it's really hard to do, especially if you're in the thick of it, just moving from thing to thing, trying to survive, all that kind of stuff. But if there are moments that present themselves where you can create an exceptional customer experience, those are moments that you really have to listen to and those are moments that you can train your team to listen to. And those are moments that you know you can train your team to listen to and to act upon and to give them the free reign to do it without having to ask for, you know, permission. So a couple of examples is I mean, you know some easy examples is if we hear one of our customers is having a baby or something like that, we'll send flowers or a one branded onesie or something like that. Right, I think a lot of businesses kind of do that.

Alex Turkovic: 8:22

I was on a customer call not long ago where the customer was complaining or it was kind of a running joke that the customer had a mouse like a computer mouse not a real mouse, computer mouse that wasn't really functioning correctly and it was super annoying, but he was kind of too lazy or too busy to do anything about it. And so you know, you hop on Amazon, you know the customer's address, so you ship them. You know $30, $40. Logitech mouse or something like that showed up next day and you know those moments of. You know we didn't need to do that. There was no expectation that we would do that, we didn't really announce that we would do that, but it just showed up isn't really serving the purpose of. You know the customer's experience strictly with your software or your solution or your services or whatever you're providing to your customer. And yeah, it's just true, it doesn't at all.

Alex Turkovic: 9:28

But it goes back to that relationship building, that rapport building and that showing the customer that you really, really, really care. Sometimes those things go a really long way. I said really a lot just now, but sometimes those things go a long way to building that relationship with a customer. So the question naturally becomes how do you create those kinds of experiences at scale? And, truth be told, it's hard to do, but with the tooling that we have available to us these days, it's not so far-fetched that you can have your systems listen for these kinds of opportunities. Now I realize that a lot of you live in corporate environments that are very restrictive in terms of data integration and sharing data between systems and things like that. So I totally get it, and those of you who do live in a somewhat restricted environment that way might roll your eyes at some of the things that I'm about to say.

Alex Turkovic: 10:40

But bear with me for a second, because I do think that where there's a will there's a way. Let's say, for example's sake, we're Gong users, we use Gong, we record practically every single phone call that is made into and out of our organization, and Gong has some insanely great automation tools combined with its AI listening capabilities. And so with Gong automations or with something like Zapier or Makecom, it becomes entirely feasible for you to train a bot to listen to transcripts quote unquote listen to transcripts for those kinds of moments, for those kinds of pain points that a customer has that isn't necessarily related to the software. You can also train it to listen for personal details. So the customers sometimes you know they'll share small talk with you or pleasantries with you about what their team is doing or what family thing is happening. Also, sometimes they share some of the tragedies in their life, like a death in the family or something like that. And those are all opportunities that you can, with the tooling that we have today in various formats, listen for and act upon.

Alex Turkovic: 12:09

Now I'm not saying you should go build a whole system that automatically recognizes what a customer is experiencing and automatically takes action on that. I suppose you could probably do something like that with automation, but that then, I think, becomes a little too impersonal. What I'm saying is it's entirely feasible for you to set aside a few hundred bucks in your budget every month to act upon those moments when they come up to send some flowers, to send a little gift, to send some swag, to send a handwritten note, for instance. It goes a long way If you're a longtime listener of the show, you know that a few months ago goes a long way. Um, if, if you're a long time listener of the show, you know that a few months ago, uh, we did an interview um with David wax of of um handwritten, which is a company that does automated handwritten notes. Um, we're a customer of theirs and we have it integrated into our um CSP and so if one of our CSMs or one of our implementation managers wants to, they can quickly type up a note and the integration will fire it off and send out a handwritten note to the customer with this, you know, on a design card for us and all that kind of stuff.

Alex Turkovic: 13:48

What I'm saying is it's less about the tactical of what you do. It's more about presenting the trigger and presenting the event that has happened so that your team can then act upon that. I just live for moments like that and those kinds of things have me super excited and so naturally, being kind of digitally minded, I'm actively looking for ways to scale those kinds of things and I would love to hear from you if you have done similar things, if you have trained a bot to listen to your call transcripts for those kinds of moments, and, if you have, I would love for you to let me know and I'd love to have a conversation with you about it, because I think these are the kinds of use cases that are kind of the nonstandard use cases that really make artificial intelligence exciting for me, because they augment the human experience. I'm all for situations where artificial intelligence augments the human experience and makes the human experience of being in a vendor-customer relationship much better than it is today. So thanks for listening to me ramble about that for a little bit.

Alex Turkovic: 15:09

I'm so happy to be back. I don't know what my publishing schedule is going to be relatively regular, because I'm going to try to pre-record a bunch of stuff. I have some exciting partnerships coming up as well that's going to be great and again launching a couple of programs in the coming weeks that I will share with you as well. But for now, thank you for everybody who checked on me while I was seemingly MIA, and I appreciate you spending the last 15 or so minutes with me chatting about digital, chatting about AI, chatting about unreasonable hospitality. Go read that book if you haven't already, because it's really great. But until next time, hope you have an awesome week ahead and we'll talk soon.

Alex Turkovic: 15:53

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. I'm Alex Tergovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.