Discussing the Past, Present, & Future of Customer Experience with Jonathan Shroyer

I think what’s interesting is the advent of the Internet and the mobile device; those are actually the two things that changed customer experience more than anyone working in the field, because they moved the consumer’s perception to be front and center and made them believe they deserved more than what they were getting from the call center in the 90s, where you had to dial on the phone and, 30 minutes later, get an answer and just deal with it, because that’s how everyone did it back then.

You armed these consumers with the power to provide feedback about brands online and engaged them, then gave them a device that offered instantaneous gratification with apps. When you put those two together, you had to change how you treated consumers. I think that was one or two things that really changed over the last 20 years.

I also think COVID, although outside CX, pushed the CX envelope further because it forced brick-and-mortar businesses—businesses that had been operating the same way for 20 years, with everyone coming into the office and putting on headphones—to rethink and reimagine how to staff, resource, and generate revenue in the services area, and to create new revenue work streams.

The third interesting factor is the natural improvement in technology and analytics. Consider how analytics in the 90s compares to today, with the amount of data available and what big data can do. Think about technology, whether it’s bots, the self-service nature, or the technology of the product itself allowing users to do things on their own without contacting service.

These three areas have really pushed forward CX, and it has less to do with CX itself than with supporting products as they have evolved. This is why we created a fish game: because we didn’t really think that CX was maturing and being disruptive enough, and we saw an opportunity. I think there are other companies out there. My co-founders and I believe there’s probably five Einsteins in the world today—we just don’t know about any of them. Similarly, there are probably four other companies just like us out there, thinking and dreaming about the same things. If they have success, they either grow through an IPO or get bought by a bigger company, because there’s a great idea and they want it, blah, blah, blah.

I think the few that I’ve mentioned—actually, the way some sub-technology areas have been visualized—helps enormously to understand who your customers are and how you’re treating them. For example, you look at the tableaus, the lookers, and other tools that make data visualization and data application easier for a common person inside a corporation to use and leverage. I think that’s a component.

I think when you look at these different mechanisms with big data, being able to not only have these rating systems online but also integrate with them to respond to negative ratings is important. Yelp obviously lets you do that, so then they’ll go back and change their rating based on how you treated them. In the early 90s or late 90s and early 2000s, you would just give feedback without a mechanism, but now you have mobile systems where you can instantaneously respond.

I think social proof isn’t a technology, but the technologies that built the social media area allow you to create social proof and social perception. As you consider the future of services, imagine creators and influencers. It won’t be too far in the future before someone says, “Hey, I’m a services influencer. You tell me your problem, and I’m going to help you solve it,” and then do it live on air—you’re talking to me, I’m talking, I’m supporting, and I’m getting coins from Twitch because I’m streaming. That could be an interesting application in the future, using modern ways of engaging and gamifying the world.

On the service side, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes. A ton of bot activity, including RPA and other bot processes, is happening that companies will continue to use without publicizing, decreasing both their back-end and front-end costs. There’s a lot of that happening that consumers don’t think about.

In addition, there’s a lot of technology around marketing. For example, my wife and I might be talking about something randomly, and 10 minutes later it shows up in the feed of my favorite social media as an ad for what we were discussing. The listening systems and the data, and how they present that data to you because they believe that’s what you want, are all happening on the services side—often called soft services. I’ve listed a bunch of different things, but you can see many of them starting to naturally integrate into the future service stacks, marketing stacks, and tech stacks that companies have.

Sometimes they know me better, and I know myself. I don’t know. I think if you invite devices into your house, you should have the expectation that they’re going to try to deliver content to you that they think will be valuable.

That’s not gonna make you any money, though, but I understand.

Good question. Somebody asked me five years ago what I predicted for 2050, and I said, “Customer service on the moon.” But we’ll see how that goes. It might be a high-cost labor market, so it might not work out essentially.

I think generally what you’re going to see is more companies investing in analytics and data, and then using that information to drive marketing and stickiness through services. More companies are going to invest in technology, and they’re going to use that to decrease effort. They might try to commoditize service, which would be poor to do. On the back end, more companies are going to invest in tech to automate the website itself so that the contacts never have to come in. I think that’s going to happen.

In addition, you’ll probably see a lot more focus on where and how people work in the services area over the next three or four years. I think you’re going to see a lot of fun stories, blogs, and companies coming out of what I call the future of work. And if you want a bonus item, the future of payments—there are going to be more companies that accept crypto on the product side, so you can expect that on the services side, more companies will pay in crypto.

I think it’s interesting. Companies that really invest in a great experience are few and far between. There’s just not enough of them. What I can say is, I feel really comfortable with my experiences at Amazon. Amazon, I think, had a mission early on to be the world’s most customer-centric company, or something like that. I always have good experiences with Amazon. In general, customer experience-wise, I have a buddy who heads up Amazon customer service, and he does a great job—shout out to him. But I like Amazon a lot; they do a good job.

There are some gaming companies that have really demonstrated great customer service, at least in my view. Kabam is a great gaming company, as is Playdemic and EA. Those are companies I’ve had good experiences with. On the services side, I think when you look at the medical side, there’s a company in California called One Medical. It’s a private health network, and they do a really wonderful job with customer service. In fact, I think they have an amazing model that, if we had more time, could be a good 20 or 30-minute conversation about how they built a 24/7 cost-effective model to deliver a best-in-class experience without their patients even realizing it. Their patients just come to expect it. In fact, before everyone else went virtual, they were virtual three years before.

So, One Medical does a really good job. There are probably a few others out there. I tend to be mostly dissatisfied with my customer experiences, especially with big companies. In the early days of Uber, I thought Uber had some good customer experience. I haven’t really used Uber in two years, so I don’t want to give an opinion on that now, but in the early days, I thought they had a good one. The same with Postmates. I was a VP at Postmates, so I’m biased, but I thought we did a really good job there.

There’s a startup grocery company called Farmstead that has good customer service. I think there are a lot of interesting companies out there. Dr. Squatch is another soap company. They’re not a client of ours, but I know their customer service director, and they do a good job.

I think what you’re starting to see is more and more of these companies, usually small to medium-sized startups, because it’s easier to transform in those environments than in bigger companies. But if the customer experience leader has a seat at the product table, you’re going to see a great customer experience. If they don’t, then you’ll see a commoditized customer experience. It doesn’t matter the talent or the company; that’s just what will eventually happen.

I did a funny one a long time ago. When I started as VP of Postmates, I actually answered the phones a lot. One day, I noticed one of my employees was visibly emotionally distraught, dealing with a really difficult customer. So I picked up the phone and chatted with her. Let’s just call her Jane for now.

Jane was immediately frustrated with me. What happens in delivery logistics, especially with food, is that when you say there’s an hour delivery window, customers get hungry at the hour mark, get hangry at an hour and 10 minutes, and then at an hour and 15 minutes, they get what I like to call emotionally hijacked. I can understand it, but they get really upset. So it had been an hour and a half, and when Jane finally received her bagel order, it was wrong. She was really frustrated because it was her specific order, and she wanted it just right.

She berated me for the first five or 10 minutes, telling me how terrible my company was, how awful my people were—just all these things. I apologized, acknowledged that her order was wrong, and said I’d like to make it right. I did all the right things, but then she stopped me and asked, “Are you 25?” I told her, “I’m not going to answer that question, ma’am, it’s a PII issue. I can’t tell you my age.” She insisted, “You’re 25 years old. You’re just at a broken startup, and you’re 25 years old.”

I replied, “Well, I’m not 25, but if we could help you, I’d be happy to get you the right bagel and refund you.” We handled it and everything, but it was one of those surreal experiences. It made me realize that people who work on the front lines every day don’t get enough credit for the challenging customers they deal with. In my opinion, getting emotionally hijacked over a bagel that was late or wrong isn’t enough to make the person on the other end cry. And the bagel is definitely not worth that.

So, I just give so much credit to those people working on the front lines and handling those experiences. They aren’t easy. That was a funny, yet unfortunate, experience.

I think it’s funny in the sense that people would do that to another person—it doesn’t make sense to me. But it’s also interesting in terms of what these frontline workers go through. On the flip side, I had an interesting experience with a big hardware store, and we’ll leave it at that, where they scratched my kitchen wood floor that I had just redone when they brought in the refrigerator. I called and talked to four or five of their service center people, but they couldn’t figure it out. Nobody would refund us or give us anything.

Eventually, I had to do what I call the LinkedIn move. I reached out to their VP of Customer Service. At that time, I was a VP myself, and I said, “Hey, I don’t think you know what’s happening.” I told him, “I don’t think you’d want this experience if you just got your $10,000 floor scratched and no one was willing to do anything about it.” Of course, he made it right. But again, that’s a disconnect, like you mentioned earlier—sometimes executives need to understand what’s happening day to day to see what processes or policies are actually preventing them from being sticky.

I haven’t shopped there since, and that was seven years ago. I’m glad he mostly made it right, but he should have done it from the start. It’s those types of experiences that really need to be focused on.

What I heard is that I just got a new investor, so what I would be doing is looking into Serbia, Brazil, or potentially a country in South America or Africa. I’d use that seed money to incubate one of our first labs in another country. That’s what I would do.

Life is all about having purpose.

My superpower? I think it would be empathy. I know that may seem counterintuitive. I’m not the most sympathetic person—I’m not intentionally a jerk or anything—but there are people, like my co-founder Scott McKay, who just naturally knows what people are thinking and feeling. I’m not bad at it, but I’m not great at it. If I could just walk into a room and gauge how people are thinking and feeling, and then know how I can help them, I would love that superpower. I feel like I have a lot of other great skill sets and experiences, but even though I tutored for five years under some amazing leaders, I’m still not there yet. I still have lots of work to do.

I mean, we’re gonna have virtual 4d interview.

You can reach out to me at jshroyer@officiumlabs.io or jonathan@officiumlabs.io—both go to the same place. Our website is officiumlabs.io, and we also have a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. I recently received Entrepreneur of the Year from the Global Choice Awards for customer service. You can visit their website to watch a video about that. It’s been a good year, but those are the places to connect with us, or you can reach me directly on LinkedIn as well.