In this episode of The Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity, Justin Schmidt is joined by Rick DeLisi, Author and Lead Research Analyst at Glia. They discuss the benefits of digital transformation in customer service and how businesses can offer effective digital solutions.
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Justin: Welcome to the Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity. Join us for conversations with leaders and customer or employee support who are using technology to answer questions, automate processes, and build innovative solutions to any business challenge. I’m your host, Justin Schmidt. Good afternoon, Rick DeLisi, welcome to the Support Automation Show. Where’s this podcast find you?
Rick: I’m at my home right now. My home office, my work from the home location which is Ashburn, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC.
Justin: Love it. Shout out to all of our East Coast listeners. Rick joins us, you are an author. You’re also a lead research analyst at Glia. Why don’t you give us a little bit of your background, how you got to be an author and the lead research analyst at Glia, and what Glia does. I think that’d be a great jumping-off point for the rest of our conversation.
Rick: I’ve been studying the world of customer service and customer experience for the better part of the last two decades and specifically the psychology of service interactions. What goes on inside a person’s mind when they’re in the middle of trying to contact some company for a service issue, how do those dynamics play out? What can we learn about how people are acting and reacting and what are the changes in behavior that we’ve seen even over just the last couple of years? Some number of years ago, I wrote a book or I was part of a team that wrote a book called The Effortless Experience, which caught a lot of traction in the customer service area, specifically noting the connection between customer effort and long-term customer loyalty. Lots of lessons learned there. Many of which formed the foundation of Glia which is the leading provider of digital customer service solutions primarily for financial institutions.
Justin: Love it. I think you’re particularly suited to answer this question and I’m very, very interested for what you’re about to say. I start every interview with this question, and this is where we’ll start with you. That is when you hear the phrase support automation, what does that mean to you?
Rick: Well, obviously it could be interpreted in a number of ways, but it does seem as if, as the world becomes more digital and as automation becomes a bigger part of our everyday lives. It’s about creating opportunities for people to get the support they need without going through the laborious process of having to speak to multiple people or being handed off from one person to another to get what they need. It feels in today’s world, like the vast majority of us are very comfortable with using automated solutions if it’s the fastest, easiest way to get what we need or the help we require.
Justin: Right. Let’s pull on that thread a little bit because I think when you talked about your work with the effortless experience, you had mentioned the relationship between customer effort and customer satisfaction. In my head immediately I thought, oh, those are probably strongly inversely correlated but then I started thinking about in a marriage or in an interpersonal relationship that’s not necessarily the case.
Effort needs to be made to get the– I’m curious if you can maybe speak to a little about that relationship and then also how the digitization of customer experience and some of the automation, things that you alluded to, like how that has come into, maybe changed that a little bit. I would love to hear your perspective on both what that relationship is and then how it’s evolved as technology has made its way into that relationship.
Rick: The whole idea of customer effort and using customer effort as a metric, the customer effort score, which was first revealed in our book, sounds like, and to us at first, we thought it was mostly about making things easier for people. What customers have to do, and so customer effort, when it comes to the do side of effort would be what customers have to do to get their issues resolved.
How hard it is to do those things, how many things they have to do, how long it takes to do those things. That’s what effort sounds like and that’s what we thought at first, but as we began to explore customer effort more deeply, what we discovered is what customers have to do only forms about one-third of their impression of the effort that was required to resolve an issue. The other two-thirds, probably not a huge surprise is how did that whole experience feel?
Did it feel like the company was making it easier for me? Did it feel like the company was on my side? Did it feel like they were advocating for me? Did it feel as if they were doing what they could to get me to the other side of the issue I have in the fastest, easiest possible way? The feel side of effort turns out to be far more important even than the do side. That certainly plays out in today’s digital world. The vast majority of us, anytime we have any issue requiring support or customer service go first and foremost to a website or app, our data shows about 84% of customers go first to a digital property. Then the question becomes, are they going to be able to resolve their issue fully in the digital channel that they first chose? In some cases, the answer is yes.
When that happens, when a customer presented with a self-service or self-support solution that’s right there on their screen and easy to access, that’s a beautiful, low effort, high loyalty experience. We both know that especially when it comes to service, there’s a lot of issues that can’t be fully resolved in digital. What happens then, and we all know what happens then, you as a customer have to stop everything you were doing and start all over again by finding, and then dialing a phone number and going through the whole IVR process and the whole authentication process all over again for a second time leading inevitably to a high effort experience.
Justin: Yes. The classic speaks to an agent.
Rick: Yes. Speak to a representative. We’ve all zero. No one’s ever said that word with a smile on their face.
Justin: No, that’s exactly right. It sets up this unfair asymmetric interaction with the agent on the other side because that person picking up the phone like they haven’t just had some shitty experience where they didn’t get what they want resolved. They’re just doing their job. There’s an immediate defensiveness or immediate, whatever it is that goes into the conversation with the wrong energy.
It’s interesting when you say like the two-thirds of that effort are the feel and I think that feel, and that emotional connection that companies make with their customers is something where that’s best managed across the buyer journey and across the touchpoints that we have with organizations. It’s not just that interaction with the agent, for whatever reason, you have to gracefully hand off to a human. It’s in the brand experience up to that point.
One thing that I think is interesting about what Glia does and we do a lot of similar work here. I think we’re both qualified to speak on this topic, is the interactions beyond simply the chat or the phone call. I know co-browsing is a big part of the Glia platform. How do you view the intersection of these different types of support and customer experience technologies? It’s not just the IVR and the agent call routing and all that stuff. The CRM, the order history, co-browsing or session replay data, or AI versus a chat, all the different stuff that we have available. How can leaders manage all those different pieces of technology and the intersection of them, and still provide the room for that emotional connection that makes up two-thirds of the effort that you mentioned?
Rick: In my experience of working with hundreds of service and support leaders, and by no means am I blaming anyone for this but the deeper you get into that profession. The harder and harder it is to truly be customer-centric. Every company in the world says we’re completely dedicated to our customers. We’re obsessed with our customers. We’re all about our customers and in reality, the vast majority of work being done by service and support leaders is internal systems, technology, people issues, budgeting concerns.
It becomes harder and harder to do the most important thing when it comes to being customer-centric and that is to think like your customers. If you spend a lot of time thinking about your customers, you’re really not being customer-centric, but if you start to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, remember in the vast majority of situations, the customer doesn’t want to have the issue that they’re having.
It’s an interruption to their lives. Their number one goal is just to get back to where they were before the issue came up in the first place. Thinking about channels or even thinking about technology, that’s not what the customer’s doing. The customer just wants their problem to be over with as fast and as easily as possible. One big difference between marketing and service and support is that in the world of marketing, part of your job is to increase mindshare. Try to create the opportunity for your customers and prospects to be thinking about you more often.
In service and support, isn’t the goal really to create the opportunity for the customer to stop thinking about you? The minute your problem is over, it’s been fully resolved and now you’re back to normal, it’s almost as if the best outcome would be you don’t think about the problem ever again, as if it never happened in the first place. The higher the degree of effort required for the customer to get their issue resolved, the more they are thinking about not just your company, but the problem. The key then becomes, what can companies do to create the type of experience for each individual customer that has them back up on their feet, back to the rest of their lives, and create the minimal impression.
Justin: Is that minimal impression that frictionless experiences? It’s interesting when you say that the first thing that pops into my head is the famous adage and optimization that Google famously, they’ve changed a little bit as the librarian has become more of the book. Google’s successful when you spend the least amount of time on google.com as possible, right? You type whatever it is you’re looking for, you click on whatever it is that answered you, got what you’re looking for and you don’t go back to Google until you need something else.
Things have changed as they started having their own travel listings and shopping listings and now they want you to spend more time on the domain, but I think the initial impetus is similar to what you’re saying in that, the best customer support and customer service journeys are the ones that either A, don’t have to have at all, or B if they do or over before you even realized what happened.
Pivoting to the title of the book, Behind You And Your Zoom Background There, digital customer service, is that speed to satisfaction part of what makes true digital customer service, or am I seeing this slightly differently? I’d love to unpack digital customer service and what that is truly.
Rick: The term speed or speed to resolution is used frequently by those of us who are on the professional side. One of the things I’ve learned is that speed as measured by a stopwatch or a clock is greatly overrated. If a company was to measure the difference between a four-minute interaction and an eight-minute interaction, that’s a two X difference. The vast majority of customers couldn’t tell you the difference between four minutes and eight minutes. What they could tell you is, “Did I have to repeat myself? Did I have to take multiple steps just to get what I needed? Did I have to start all over again? Did somebody ask me a bunch of questions that I’d already answered previously on the website as if I’d never been there before? The number of minutes is way less important than the degree to which the interaction begins and ends with forward motion and in context.
Justin: Interesting. Interesting. In digital customer service, what is different about being successful in digital customer service versus being successful in customer service 20 years ago?
Rick: Well, again, the vast majority of people who have a problem go first to a website or app. That’s the biggest difference. That’s been increasing over the years, and certainly, that spike has gone upward ever since the beginning of the pandemic. We’ve all experienced that. We all now live on our screens all day, every day. The question becomes, can a customer completely resolve their issue on their own screen?
Now, here’s the thing, self-service has moved forward in leaps and bounds. There’s so many more things that we can do with all the companies that we do business with in self-service and in an automated way. You and I both know, there’s always going to be some issues that require some degree of live intervention. In our book, we described the DCS model, which Glia is a creator of, which always starts on a customer screen, whether it’s a laptop, a tablet, or a cell phone, a smartphone.
If a customer can completely resolve their issue in self-service, that’s a great and perfect experience. If live help is needed, it doesn’t have to occur through a separate phone call. That live interaction occurs right on the customer screen where that customer started their whole journey. Again, imagine you get somewhere down the road of trying to resolve your issue or getting the information you need.
Now you realize I’m going to need to speak to somebody, but what if the somebody popped up right on your screen and the somebody already knew who you were, because you’ve already been authenticated in the system, and already had a strong idea of what your issue is based on your browsing history or your digital body language, and was actively working to resolve your issue before the agent or representative even says hello.
That’s the big difference, and that’s what it takes to create a five-star effortless experience in today’s digital fast world.
Justin: I’m going to work in a weird topical analogy here. We had pretty much, I don’t know if you’re a fan of the game, but pretty much the best weekend of NFL football ever.
Rick: Watched every minute of it.
Justin: It’s the same here. Best four games of football ever. The perfect pass is always the one that leads the receiver and lands, hits them right in the numbers. That is what some of this digitization, digital transformation CX has done, is enable the agents to perfectly receive the handoff to your point where you’re not starting over just because you said to switch channels or the automation failed. You used a really interesting term. It was digital body language onscreen, body language. That was great stuff. Double-click on that for me.
Rick: Sure. Digital body language is simply understanding what has this person been doing during the session? Where have they been on your site? Have they started to engage in any processes or filling out any forms or clicking any selections? What does it look like they’re trying to accomplish? One of the graphics that we use at Glia is that red circle with a slash through it, the universal no symbol.
In the middle of the circle are the words, how may I help you. Because in the DCS model, the agent never has to ask, who are you and how may I help you because they already know both of those things. When a customer is greeted by a person on their own screen, who already knows who they are and has a strong idea of what they need, it changes everything about the way the whole interaction feels.
Justin: It makes a ton of sense. It reminds me of a famous Googleism, and that is the concept of Pogo sticking, where if you search for something and you click a link and you hit back, by browser’s back button and click on a different link, your pogo’s taken back to the results and it’s a signal to Google that the results that they have shown are not necessarily what that user wanted for that particular query.
There’s an artifact of the digital journey that they incorporate. You’re exactly right in a modern, web-first world, especially if your product lives on your website, and this is key. You can see all the artifacts of what they’re doing. You know they logged in, you know they check their order history, you know they looked at the returns in whatever policy. You know they’ve looked at another size of the same thing that was in that order.
Chances are when they hit talk to us, they’re going to want to exchange that for a different size. If you have access to that data, there’s no reason not to bundle that up and put that together for the agent when that does happen. One thing that also really interests me about some of the stuff that you’ve done in your work in the digital transformation inside of CX that I was really curious to ask you about was, do you see any particular segments of the market that have done a particularly good job of managing that digital transformation versus those that have not, whether that’s by industry, by businesses, B2B versus B2C?
If we’re sitting in the marketplace as support leaders, what’s a category that gets this really right in general that we can model some of our business after?
Rick: This is unfair and we write about it in our book, but in many cases, it just comes down to the age of the company. Any company that is less than 14 years old, and I mention that specifically because that’s how long smartphones have been around. Any company that’s less than 14 years ago old is probably much more likely to get digital transformation right, because for many of those companies, it isn’t even a transformation at all.
If you invented a company right now today, of course, your entire digital platform would be the basis of your entire interface. You probably wouldn’t even have a call center, why would you? If you could, you’d resolve everything through a digital channel. The vast majority of companies that are older than 14 years old, began their life as a service or support organization with a telephony-based model, and now through trying to modernize or trying to digitize have ended up somewhere in the middle of some hybrid model.
We call it the bolt-on model, starting with a telephony-based call center service operation, or support operation, and then adding digital features and functionality on top of that. By the way, that’s better than not adding digital features, but in no way does that replicate the digitally native companies that invented themselves with today’s customers and customer behavior in mind.
Justin: Yes. It’s one thing for Casper Mattresses to undergo operation to embrace digital customer service. It’s an entirely different thing for the Bank of England or the Bank of Scotland or something that’s been around for 400 years to unravel all that and move into a digital world. One of the things that comes up from time to time on this show and we haven’t completely gracefully made our way here, so I’m going to jump-cut a little bit.
I’m the host I get to do that, [chuckles] and that is, automation and digital tooling inside of organizations like you’re right. As a consumer, you could argue and I think we could take either side of the argument that as a consumer, you don’t necessarily care if you’re talking to a chatbot or a person, you don’t care if you’re– You just want your order resolved. You want your issue resolved.
You want to be moving on to the next thing, but whether or not that’s true. One thing that’s definitely true is that the people that work in the customer success service and experience roles, digitization, and AI, especially can be seen as a threat to what they’re doing. Obviously, robots inside of factories and assembly lines displaces work and has been for a while, and the knowledge work using scare quotes here, white-collar environment of a lot of this stuff. We haven’t necessarily seen a complete automation completely displacing people yet, but it’s easy to get there.
My question to you is how can leaders manage some of that? Manage the fear, maybe manage some of the trepidation, get buy-in from their team when they’re bringing in some of these digital customer service and automation practices?
Rick: One of the things that we write about in the book is that while it seems to make logical sense to be fearful of automation or to feel like the robots are taking over our jobs, that’s a common sentiment. We just don’t believe it’s true, and here’s why. What automation should be used for in-service and support is to take care of easy, simple, informational requests.
When that’s the case that relieves the human beings of having to answer the same repetitive questions over and over and over again. There’s no satisfaction in that. That’s not fun. If you work for a bank, answering 400 calls a day and 300 of them are, “What’s your routing number?” There’s no joy to be gained out of a simple informational exchange. That’s what bots are great at. Bots and AI are perfect at answering questions to which the response is the simple conveyance of information.
“When is my package shipping? When is my delivery day? How can I get new checks sent to me?” Simple things that can be automated relieve the human beings of having to do those same repetitive tasks over and over again. What that frees people up to do is to do what people do best, and that is, have a human connection with another person. In the DCS model, agents are relieved of the burden of having to do authentication and initial issue diagnosis and filling out of forms, and calling up the customer’s information.
All those things are done automatically, which puts the agent then in a position of being much more like an advocate or even a teacher of customers. I, as the agent, I’m not here to serve you, I am here to help you become more digitally independent, to in the case of co-browsing, show you how you can resolve some issues on your own. When an agent and a customer involved are engaged in a co-browsing session, so both the agent and the customer are looking at the customer screen, and again, the screen meaning just that company’s digital properties, not their whole browser history, but just what they’re doing on your site or on your app.
Instead of doing something for the customer, the game then becomes, let me show you how you can do this. When that happens, it’s not only a way better experience for the agent because it’s more fun, it’s more fulfilling, it’s more human, but it also gives both the agent and the customer this feeling of satisfaction like, “We really accomplished something today.” Not just to solve your immediate issue, but to help you feel better and smarter about yourself. That’s a great feeling. People who get into service primarily do so because they like helping people, they get satisfaction out of helping others, but when you can help a person become smarter about themselves, you’ve really done something.
Justin: Yes. I like that. When you make a person feel smarter about themselves, you’ve really done something. That’s a part of change management. We get into business school terms that like a lot of people, I don’t think spend quite an– There’s two things that people don’t spend enough time on in my opinion, when it comes to implementing technology, inside of an organization.
One is really thinking through the change management, even if it’s at a small company and you’re going to like, “Okay, we’re going to get this payroll tool,” whatever. Well now you’ve got to train everyone how to log into it. The place to visit to see the stub is going to be different than the last application you had. You got to deal with the brick mortar, all that.
The other thing is that sometimes the desire to bring in technology to fix a problem overrides the common sense of like, Hey, let’s map out the process. Let’s work backwards, start with why, to quote Simon Sinek. What are we trying to accomplish here? Let’s lay out the actual workflow that we’re looking to transform and bring technology in somewhere. You might find that you have a good old-fashioned process design problem more than you have a technological gap somewhere.
You’re right, part of the journey to bringing technology into a support organization and getting that well adopted is to show and make clear that this is going to make you better at what you do. If it’s not going to make your agents and your staff better at what they’re doing, then you’re probably looking at the wrong tool in the first place, because if they’re successful, the customer is successful, and that’s ultimately what matters here.
This has been a wonderful conversation, Rick, and I can hear and listen to you wax philosophical about digital customer service forever, but thinking about the future, and I know you guys just finished this book, so your brain’s probably just chock-full of where things are headed. Based on 20 years ago, when you got into this business, and I know you spent time at one of the big analyst firms and you’ve also been an author for a long time, so you’ve been thinking about this for a long time.
What excites you the most about the future of support automation digital customer service, and where we’re heading?
Rick: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we humans use the telephone, and more importantly, how we don’t use the telephone. Think about this for just a second. I don’t want to try to guess your age, but you’re probably old enough to remember movie phone. Remember movie phone?
Justin: Oh yes.
Rick: Calling a phone number to find out what time various motion pictures are playing at your local theater. If you describe that to an 18-year-old kid, they’d look at you like you had lobsters coming out of your ears. That just seems absurd. I’m old enough to remember when we used the telephone for timing and temperature. Can you imagine calling a phone number today to find the time and the weather forecast? We used to use the phone for sports scores. Remember sports phone? For stock quotes. I went out with a girl once who used the telephone to find out her horoscope, which didn’t always work out that well for me, just saying, but the way we use the telephone is so drastically different.
We don’t use the telephone anymore for information or for service. When’s the last time you called an airline to make a reservation or called the hotel to make a reservation? We just don’t use the phone in that way anymore, and yet still to this day, every year, US companies alone receive over a billion customer service phone calls, so what’s the future of service and support? It’s a future that doesn’t involve the telephone at all.
Justin: I love it. That’s the stake in the ground thought leadership that we come to this podcast for, Rick, so in a world where there is no telephone. Now, I want to be very clear. You don’t mean an absence of voice communication. You mean,
Rick: That’s the biggest myth. That is the number one myth of digital customer service is that it means eliminating human voice-to-voice contact forevermore. Now, the reality is many issues don’t require any live contact, and again-
Justin: Correct.
Rick: -a self-service interaction that completely resolves my issue in the fastest and easiest way. That’s an effortless experience, but in a situation where it makes sense to talk to a person either because I’m not entirely sure what I want or how to describe it, or some degree of diagnosis or iterations required. I’m not aware of all my options or even more importantly. I’m not confident that I’ve done everything exactly the way I was supposed to, and that I get to get exactly what I want when the need arises for human contact. If it happens in the context of the interaction that I was already having on my own screen, and I can have a human to human conversation without having a stop what I was doing and start all over for again on the telephone, that’s a low effort digital experience, and that’s what our book’s all about.
Justin: Love it. I do remember movie phone. I turn 41-year in about a month, and it’s funny as you’re saying that I specifically remember this really interesting thing about this. I remember calling Columbia house because I had an issue. I got my 10 CDs for a dollar or whatever and there was something wrong with it. I remember calling Columbia house and this was in 1990, whatever, but 1994, 1993, 1995 somewhere around there and going through this whole thing then you wait two weeks or whatever then the right CD gets sent to you.
Then not too long ago, like last week, two weeks ago maybe, I forgot to cancel a Spotify trial. I’m an Apple music guy, not a Spotify guy, but I took three months of free Spotify. I was like, Oh, to see if it’s worth switching and I forgot to cancel a thing. In five taps in my phone, I resolved my issue with the Spotify subscription and it might have been 15 or 20 seconds of my day, and it was done and contrast that with 25 years, 27 years prior getting on the horn with Columbia house and speaking to someone on the phone and writing shit down and doing all this stuff that we just don’t do anymore.
I like that the phone is going to go the way of the Dodo with customer support and the true digital customer service ecosystem. Your channel switching and medium switching, but you’re remaining on the same single screen. I love it. That’s great stuff. This has been a hell of a conversation, Rick. I really appreciate your time. Let’s end with my quick-fire round that I end every interview with.
I still haven’t come up with a catchy name for this, but as long-time listeners to this, it’s ridiculous. As people who listen to show realize part of the brand of the quickfire around is me talking about how it doesn’t have a brand yet [chuckles] but– I’m going to give you a layup here, actually. No, I’m going to challenge you on this. The question is usually what book do you most often recommend to people? You don’t get to choose one of your own though. What’s a book that you often recommend to people in this space>
Rick: It’s Fred Reichheld’s The Ultimate Question. For anybody who’s been around NPS, if you haven’t read that book, you probably don’t understand NPS nearly as well as you think you do. So many companies use NPS and they use it incorrectly, according to Reichheld himself. Net promoter score isn’t really about recommendation or advocacy, even though the question is how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
NPS is really about your own personal loyalty to that company, so what Reichheld learned is that if we just ask you, “Hey, how likely are you to remain loyal to our company?” Your answer to that question isn’t very well correlated with your future loyalty behaviors, but if we put you in the mindset of thinking about how your actions and opinions influence other people, you are more likely to be more transparent about your own loyalty, so NPS is very much just about that person and how likely they are to continue wanting to do business with your company, and more importantly, it was never meant as a dashboard number.
Justin: Yes.
Rick: How many companies are so prideful? Our NPS went up from a +15 to a +25. First of all, if you understand the math of the system from -100 to +100, a 10 point jump could be accomplished in a thousand different ways, so the number itself isn’t meaningful, but the point of asking the question, how likely are you to recommend us, gives you clues as a company as to who you ought to be doubling back with to learn more about what happened during their experience that made it memorable, positive or negative.
NPS much like the customer effort score is designed more as a detector of potential future disloyalty rather than as a single metric or some scoreboard system to tell you how well you are doing
Justin: Love it. I will give the answer that if I want to let you promote your own books. Another book that we recommend here is Digital Customer Service as well as the effortless experience. You’ve been around as your time as an analyst and time as an author, you’ve talked to a lot of leaders and a lot of impressive people and a lot of high-up individuals. One of the things we do here Capacity that in fact, I’m going to be doing it in a couple–
By the time this episode airs it already, I’d already done it, but I do an annual productivity tips webinar rundown. I think it’s going to be 40 something this year. I’m going to have my work cut out for me, but I’ll just drink a lot of coffee. I’ll get through it, but of all the different productivity tips and hacks and best practices and stuff you’ve collected over the years. What’s one that has really stuck with you that you’d recommend people try to adopt?
Rick: As long as companies are going to continue to operate a phone-based system, think about where your phone number is for customers to be able to call wherever that is on your website, and by the way, that’s a whole debate. Should your phone number be right there on the home page? Should it be one click deep? Should you try to hide your phone number?
That’s a whole interesting discussion, but no matter where your phone number is on your website or app, shouldn’t right next to your phone number, shouldn’t there be a little box with let’s say three buttons, and the box says, Hey, you’re certainly free to call us, but if you’re about to call us for any of these three things, click here and we’ll resolve it for you right now without having to make that phone call.
One of the rules of customer service, and tell me if this is true in your world as well, we call it the 80-20 rule. 80% of your incoming volume is typically taken up by the top 20 issues, so shouldn’t the easiest things that a customer could resolve entirely on their own while they’re on the website be right there next to the phone number?
Justin: That’s a great thought. I might even just do that as just in my own calendar and time management. [laugh] If anyone ever emails me a question I’m going to auto-respond with, is this have to do with like–
[chuckles]
Rick: Right. It’s the ultimate out-of-office message.
Justin: That exactly.
Rick: But be aware of that now you become replaceable.
Justin: I always tell everyone who works for me. If you can optimize yourself out of a job, then you’re going to get promoted, but [laughs] if you could recommend any community LinkedIn group, any place for people in the CX world to gather and share knowledge, what’s a good one?
Rick: We were mentioning before because you live in St. Louis, the work of Shep Hyken and Shep is the most prolific author and customer servicing customer experience, jump aboard his train. He’s been thinking about the psychology of customer interactions his whole lifetime. and nobody is better at humanizing this profession and at helping each of us understand the psychology of everyday people better than him. Jump aboard the ship, hike, and train sometime and you will come away feeling like you understand people better than you ever have before.
Justin: Yes, I’m going to have to track him down on a Cardinals game or something and– Love it. Rick, this has been a hell of a conversation. I can’t thank you enough for your time. On our way out, if people want to know more about you, some of your books, or Glia, where should they go to find out that information?
Rick: The Glia website is full of information and videos and case studies and white papers and so full of interesting stuff for anybody who’s in this space. It’s Just Glia, G-L-I-A.com. Our book is Digital Customer Service and the book webpage is digitalcustomerservicebook.com.
Justine: Rick DeLisi, thank you so much for your time and coming on the Support Automation Show. I hope you have a wonderful day.
Rick: Thanks. It was truly an effortless experience.
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