#831: CSG's Megan Lukitsch on radical simplicity in CX

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Now let's dive in.

What if the ultimate goal of customer experience isn't to create a memorable moment, but to

deliver an outcome so seamless and intuitive that the customer doesn't remember the experience

at all?

Agility requires brands to pivot from building complex, memorable journeys to engineering

simple, almost invisible pathways to customer outcomes.

Today we're going to talk about a counterintuitive but powerful idea that the future of customer

experience is not about creating more elaborate experiences, but about radically simplifying

them to the point where they become forgettable in a good way.

We're going to explore how focusing on effortless outcomes and leveraging AI to enable simplicity

can become a measurable growth strategy.

Tell me, discuss this topic.

I'd like to welcome Megan Lucic, Vice President of Global Sales, CX at CSG.

Megan, welcome to the show.

Thanks, it's so nice to be here.

Yeah, look at looking forward to this topic here and definitely, definitely an interesting

one.

Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your

role at CSG?

Yeah, absolutely.

As you mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Sales for our customer experience division

and CSG is a global leader in monetization and experience platforms and I've spent about

20 years in this space and worked with leading brands around the world really focused on

turning those moments that matter into momentum and I think of moments that matter as the ones

that make you money, that save you money and build brand equity and seen a lot of technology

trends over my time, but I think the one thing always holds true, which is the brands that

really nail these moments that matter tend to be the leaders in their space.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, let's dive in here and I want to start at the strategic level here and I want

to get back to what I teed up in the intro and it's this, you know, this kind of counter

intuitive idea that an invisible experience can be preferred by customers over even exceptional

ones.

There's so much, there's so much to talk about, you know, the, the wowing and all that

stuff of customers and certainly there's good case studies there, but that invisible experience

over, over the exceptional one is kind of, you know, kind of contrary to CX philosophy,

let's say.

So, you know, for, for leaders out there listening who have invested heavily in, you know, moments

of delight, journey mapping, all of that, you know, what, what's the most compelling strategic

reason to start this, this shift more to that, that invisible experience?

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I think that for a long time, customer, customer delight was the gold standard that

we were striving for and customer experience, but I think today that's a luxury that most

cut consumers really aren't asking for us.

What, what they are seeking today is not exceptional moments, they're seeking immediate

outcome.

You don't really want to marvel at the journey and, you know, be delighted in everyday

interactions, they want to get things done and they want to move on, you know, I can

think about an example in my own life that's, that illustrates this, like my first business

trip of the year was last week and it happened to be scheduled at the same time as winter storm

for, oh, yeah, storm, right, and it was predicted to results in the most flight cancellations

and delays in U.S. air travel.

So, I live in Buffalo, New York, so travel that's impacted by weather is, is not something

that is foreign to me and I, I generally am like suited up to deal with it and the day

of like my flight came and I didn't really know what to anticipate, but I was pretty sure

it was going to result in like frustration and anxiety and, no, the day I get the text

that I was anticipating from the airline and it was pretty simple.

It's that we've rebooked you on a flight due to the storm, your new flight, we saved

your upgrade, here's your new seat, we already checked you in, travel safe and I was shocked

at this because what I was expecting was something telling me my flights been canceled,

my blood pressure to rise and redirecting me to an app or a website to go fix the problem

myself, but instead the airline had done all of that for me and I got four more, more

of those messages, it wasn't the first stuff like that was changed for me and I got to

my destination 28 hours late, but I didn't spend one second fixing the problem myself,

the brand did all of it for me and that's what customers are expecting today.

I know what I'm trying to get done and get me there as fast and as efficiently as possible,

that's the win that consumers are looking for and that's the shift, wasn't exceptional,

but it was frictionless.

Yeah, yeah, and so, you know, for all those, all the complexity and sort of complex thinking

of around personalization engines and complex marketing stacks and all that, certainly

there was a lot of logistics behind that experience that you just mentioned, but on the surface

of like you weren't taken to a page with a million different personalized options and had

to go through a bunch of hoops, right?

So like in a sense, simplicity can outperform sophistication is, you know, how do you,

you know, how should leaders, I guess, how do leaders typically go wrong in kind of thinking

about sophistication as sort of the gold standard versus that simplicity?

Yeah, I think a few things.

I actually think that simplicity is probably the new sophistication, right?

People are really focused on their time, right?

Time is a thief and consumers don't want to give you any more of their time than absolutely

necessary.

And so you've got to create these simple interactions where they can get in, get out, get things

bought, get things resolved and move on.

And the current environment isn't really designed for that.

You've got these very complex, smart tech solutions and very in-depth tech stacks and multiple

teams that are interacting with customers, it's marketing, it's sales, it's support,

it's finance, and they're all doing it kind of their own way.

And the intentions are so good, right?

We want, we've customers want to be, we want to make customers feel like they're seen

and they're valued and they're important.

And so the approach is often, let's just come up as many messages as possible at them

from all of these different sources and get their attention.

And that's the opposite of what customers want.

Like we just published our annual state of CX report and we found that 70% of consumers,

so the majority of consumers are saying they are so overwhelmed that they are just ignoring

messages at this point.

They don't even open on because if it's not top of mind and the thing that they're trying

to solve for right then, they just completely ignore it.

And they think that if the message is important enough, the brand will rescind it.

That's true.

But then that's more messages that are coming on top of the hundreds of messages that

they're already getting every day, right?

The average adult gets between 350 messages a day from emails to voicemails to app notifications

and work stuff and it's just not working.

So I think the opportunity that we have is break it down, send fewer messages.

Make sure that the messages that you send are impactful, that they drive action at their

timely and make it simple, fewer options, right?

Less noise.

And that's what today's consumer is responding to and that's what they're asking for.

And we're seeing that brands that are implementing that, they're starting to really separate from

the pact in terms of delivering that experience that consumers today crave.

Yeah.

So I mean, by that token, then, I mean, you could say there's a handful of brands that come

to mind in my experience that do this is there's somewhere I just, you know, I get 20 messages.

Let's just say, I assume a day a week, I don't even keep track anymore, I'd get too many.

There's others where when I get a message from them, I actually open it because they don't

send me 20 messages a day, right?

So I know, okay, they're sending me a message, they're, you know, and I would say maybe

not 100% of the time it's something I deem valuable, but it's often enough that I open

it versus skip, right?

No, that's exactly right.

I mean, I often say simple as sexy and that's really what people desire, you know, Amazon

Uber.

That experience has set the stage for that just in time messaging, right?

The messaging is relevant.

When I need to do something that they send me a message and to your point, I open those,

I respond to those.

It's the other brand where they send me, you know, hundreds of emails and messages that

are just like, hey, we're here or hey, we're having a sale, but it doesn't drive me to

do anything.

I ignore those.

And those aren't the brands that get the bulk of my time money, money or loyalty.

Yeah.

And so doing this simplicity, so, you know, taking, taking a little more tactical here, you

have mentioned that AI is kind of the equalizer that enables some of this radical simplicity.

So maybe talk us through, you know, beyond some of the, some of the maybe go to use cases,

how can a brand use AI to remove friction and make that, you know, quote unquote, forgettable

and yet positive interaction?

Yeah, absolutely.

I, you know, I guess what I think about AI is equalizer, it's, it's more than just

smarter chat bots or better personalization or faster automation, all of those things

really matter.

But it's using AI in experiences that are today, probably places where you exhibit,

where you have friction.

So if I think about like a customer that is opening a support ticket, that customer

is already coming in hot, right?

They're agitated.

They want to be spending time, opening a ticket to fix their product or get their service

restored.

And, you know, so they're, they're going to enter their information and as soon as they

start interacting with that, that, that ticket reporting process, AI can go to work.

It can be looking at who is this customer, what is the product or service that they have

from us?

How long have they had it?

What have they maybe done already to try to resolve it, where have they been on our

website?

Like what, what's the sentiment that that they have when they interact with us?

How do they like to be communicated?

What channel?

Like, AI is doing all of that in milliseconds, and it's starting to help guide decisions.

It could be something as simple as saying, Hey, here's the answer to your problem and

delivering an app or sending a link where the customer can self serve effects.

Or if a human's necessary, getting that customer directly to a specialized agent who can fix

their problem and delivering all of that information that AI just gathered to that agent.

So customers known at that point, they're not repeating basic information and giving

their address and restating their problem and trying to explain who they are, the agent

already has that.

So now you've got an AI-empowered agent.

You've got a customer that's going to have their problem resolved as fast as possible.

Their customer effort was super low, right?

They had to go through the motion of contacting you and telling you what was going on.

But the resolution was really fast.

So now you've got fast time to resolutions, you're lowering your operational costs, and

you've got that consumer who is just getting what they need to get done, moving right along

with their day.

That's what they're expecting, and that's the experience that they're going to remember.

That's how, you know, their blood pressure went down, problem got fixed, they moved on

without spending a ton of time on it, that's the win in today's environment.

You know that moment when marketing wants a landing page, design mocks it up, and engineering

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And so maybe back to your earlier point, implementing something that feels that simple from

a customer perspective really does involve some sophistication and often some complexity

on the back end of things, tying the right systems together.

And then as I certainly do quite a bit of consulting in large organizations and I see this,

we have this technology to tie these things together.

But there's also the people and there's the processes and there's, you know, with those

come the silos and the politics and all of those other things.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a thing.

How does, you know, from, from that people and process standpoint, you know, what's,

what's it maybe a first, there's lots of steps, of course, but, you know, what's a first

tactical step that a marketing or CX leader could take to, you know, just try to, try

to figure that out, try to untangle some of those things.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I often say you can't fix what, what you can't see.

And so I think, I think there's, there's two engagement points here.

The first is to get everybody that's involved in a customer journey or experience in the

same place.

You know, you need a working session of marketing and CX and support, the finance and

you know, anybody that's involved in the journey that you're, that you're evaluating,

get everybody together, walk out a few hours and map the whole thing out, put it on a

whiteboard, right, draw out all the steps.

And then, you know, engage with, I like to call a friction audit, right?

So take that one interaction and, you know, you usually suggest you start with something

that's like high volume, like what's, what's the, something that's happening a lot with

customers?

Maybe it's a, I'm like a billing question.

And you map that experience out and you look at it from the customer perspective.

Like what are all the steps long way?

What are the decisions that are being made?

What are the handoffs between departments or systems?

And look at every step along the way and ask three questions.

So first is, why does this step even exist?

Who owns it?

What happens if we remove it?

And when you start looking at it, I'm a myopic view like that with everybody sitting

at, I would say at the same table as you start to uncover, like those duplicated steps,

you start finding redundant approvals, you start finding that there's conflicting data

sources, where data sources that are missing altogether might find, I don't know, policies

are outdated or old messaging or incorrect messaging.

And I think one of the biggest aha moments is you tend to discover that your process is

built for your brands and journal convenience and not built to drive customer outcome.

And that's where all that complexity is.

And so when you start like getting rid of those duplicated steps or you start, you know,

building ways to smooth out that journey, that's when you really start to build momentum

speed, right?

You do that once.

Pick one journey, fix it, roll it out into production, find your success points, and then

do it again.

And you know, you're not looking for perfection at this point.

A lot of this is trial and error, right?

We've got to try new things and see what works, what you're looking for here is momentum,

right?

Journey of a thousand.

What is that?

The phrase journey of a thousand miles starts with one step and that's really the case

here.

And then prove that it works.

Let that be the blueprint for future future journey mapping.

And you know, we're seeing that the cut that our customers that are doing this are really

starting to see rapid results from from attacking at one step at a time.

And if we look at it from the customer lens, like, you know, one of one data point they

came out and are surveyed here was that 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer

experience.

So if you spend that time to fix the experience and fix the journeys and, you know, remove

those unnecessary steps and make this an effortless experience, it actually drives revenue

and loyalty.

So it's time lost.

Yeah.

And so let's, let's follow on that as well and talk about the measurement component of

this.

And so certainly again, you know, the high level business KPIs don't change in regards

to, you know, making things simpler.

Are there other measurements or there are different measurements that are used when

we start thinking about again, we're trying to create an experience that is so seamless

that it doesn't feel like an experience.

So again, I'll just put my own that the sending a survey at the end of that seamless experience

is a disruption in my opinion.

So, you know, how do you, how do you measure things that that are meant to be almost invisible?

Yeah, it's a great question.

You know, I think that the traditional CX measurements like NPS and C set still matter

and will continue.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is important that we understand how customers feel about us, right?

Do they like us do that?

Like, because that is very important.

But if we're going to start focusing on those forgettable experiences, the way we measure

that is really around operational KPIs, it's, you know, time to resolution for call resolution,

customer effort score, which has been recently introduced.

And that starts to measure like, is that experience frictionless?

Is it fast?

Is it efficient?

Or are we just like really good at being friendly and being slow, right?

Which is what NPS and CSAT will tell us.

And so when you start marrying those two together, you're looking at dashboards that are showing

NPS and CSAT trends along with those operational KPIs of time to resolution and first contact

resolution, then you're going to start saying, hopefully, you're going to start seeing

both of those go up into the right, right?

So increase NPS, increase CSAT, faster time to resolution, et cetera.

And you'll start to see that result, you'll start to see that reflected in those scores

and in those survey results that you're sending out.

And then you'll also see a higher adherence to surveys or a people don't love filling out

surveys at this point because they feel like it's time that they have to spend that they

don't want to give you when the experience is good.

And maybe when they've been surprised at how experienced the was good, like your line

example, I gave you, right?

And I was genuinely surprised at how effortless that was.

That would have been a great time to ask me as a long time customer, how are we doing?

Because I would have given a much better feedback score than I normally do.

So I think it'll drive customers to give you feedback.

And if you're doing this as part of that kind of effortless experience.

Yeah.

And so how do you certainly, at the stakeholder executive level, there's certainly a lot

of interest in fancy AI implementations and all the bells and whistles and everything

like that?

How do you make the business case for simplicity over something that is maybe a little

flashier and more visible, but potentially less effective than this invisible kind of

journey?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I think your business case here, you start with one of those high-volume, high-cost

customer journeys, like maybe an onboarding journey.

And you look at that as a financial model and not just as a CX project that's got experience

outcomes.

So you're going to start with your baseline economics.

What's your current cost to serve per interaction, like how much does it cost you to onboarding

your customer today, how many touches are involved, how long does it take for the customer

to get to value, that's your baseline.

And then you start applying some of these simplicity concepts, right?

You're moving steps, automating handoffs, using AI, resolving issues faster.

And then you can start looking at two things, you can start looking at cost down and value

up, right?

So in the cost side, you've got less interactions, fewer contact, each and interactions,

shorter handling time, things like that, that's going to drive down your operational costs.

And you look at that compared to the value side, which is all that faster time to value

less friction, higher loyalty.

You're going to have higher retention rates, you're going to have higher lifetime value

of a customer, you're going to have more expansion opportunities.

And so you've got your two financial metrics and then you just, the key then is just telling

the story, right?

You have to say more than just, hey, we made it simpler and the customer is like a scout.

Like that's good.

But you've got all those metrics, we reduced average resolution time by X and not eliminated

Y percent of repeated context and that created D and annualized savings, right?

We got your financial story there and you've got both growth lovers and margin lovers

at the same time that you can, that you can present.

It's now, this isn't just this nice to have theory, it's actually competitive strategy

that has financial impacts.

And you know, we see that across our customers that we've worked with, I mean, we've seen

customers that, you know, I'm sure that they have 32% less agent transfers and interactions

of 14 times faster resolution to things like billing issues.

And this is resulting in them saving millions of dollars operations and probably most importantly

driving hundreds of million dollars in additional revenue.

So the financial argument is absolutely there.

Yeah, yeah.

And so thinking about, you know, looking ahead a bit as, you know, some of the things you

were just mentioning as well as other, other AI related things and just evolving this,

customer journey to be simpler, you know, all of these things kind of happen.

Where is the most valuable part of humans in this, in this mix here?

You know, there's, there's certainly a lot of capabilities that AI can bring to the table

to, to simplify and, and do all those things.

But, you know, where, where are the human-led interactions going to provide the most value?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think, I guess the question I never, but he's mine now, right?

Like he's, say, I really going to replace the need for humans and I, I think it's actually

the opposite.

I think that AI is going to make the role of humans more valuable and not less.

You know, AI is handling that predictable, repeatable fast stuff, the what, the when,

the how fast and humans get involved when it's emotional and strategic.

It's the why, the what if, the what next, the why not?

You know, humans have to get involved when you've got, you know, you've got conflict resolution

when you've got uncertainty when you've got ambiguity when there's emotion that's

involved.

Right?

AI has figured that out yet.

You know, it's when a customer's frustrated or a customer's making like a, you know, a

high impact decision or they're considering like a long-term relationship with your brand.

AI can't handle all that.

AI can resolve some issues, but only a human can really like build a true relationship

and only a human, I think, can help build trust.

And so you can use AI to really superpower that human with, you know, financial

analysis and, you know, intense scoring and historical analysis and you can make that,

you can help that human have all of the information that they need to help guide the customer

to good decisions.

And that human interaction just becomes so incredibly important.

So it's like, AI is creating space for humans to show up even better and at the moments

that really matter, you know, they're the advisors, they're problem solvers and they're

the relationship builders.

They're absolutely AI is not going to be able to replace the human role in any of that.

I don't think anytime soon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, agreed.

And, you know, I would say maybe a follow on to that is just, you might have already

answered this, but, you know, as in thinking of this concept of invisible interactions,

what's the, you know, what's the brand or competitive differentiator there?

Let's say everybody starts adopting these things and everything becomes so seamless.

Like, where, where does a brand really stand out?

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I think, I think when we get to the point where everything is fast and efficient

and frictionless, then, you know, then I think they competitive differentiator really

becomes relevance, right?

If it's, if it's easy to interact with anybody, then it's, how does that brand make a consumer

feel and how well does it understand them?

Yeah.

And, you know, you're starting to move then from transactional to trusted and, you know,

the competitive advantage, then again, becomes will a consumer trust you with their time,

their data, their money, their loyalty, like who do they consider to be the brand that

will consistently show up for them with clarity and understanding them versus just making

it fast and easy.

So I think it's all about that relevance and trust.

Yeah.

Well, Megan, thanks so much for joining today.

Two last questions before we wrap up here.

If we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely

be talking about?

Yeah.

I think a year from today, we're going to be talking about, you know, AI not being a theoretical

feature anymore, but how it is actually has been implemented and is now deeply ingrained

in the operating systems, you know, that managed customer experiences.

Like we're not going to be saying who adopted AI because everyone will have adopted AI

at some level by then.

I think the story really at that point is going to be like who has used it successfully,

who has used it to help scale their human interactions and who's emerging as leaders.

That's where I think we'll be in a year.

Nice.

Well, and last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you

find a way to do it consistently?

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I think for me, it's really kind of staying close to the edge of our business

and not focusing on the center of it.

Like I am adamant about meeting with customers and partners and frontline sellers and support

like our support teams and our marketing teams every single week because that's where

all the actions happening, right?

You know, that's where you're hearing customer feedback.

It's where you're feeling friction if it exists and it's really getting in front of

all that and understanding all of those input points and knowing how to kind of learn

from that.

And learning a loop of listening, taking an information, testing out new things, adjusting

strategy and doing that constantly like that's an every day, every week thing for me because

I think that's how you stay ahead of what's happening in the market and you're, you know,

you're helping create it versus reacting to it.

Yeah, love it.

Well, again, I'd like to thank Megan Lucic vice president of Global Sales CX at CSG for

joining the show.

You can learn more about Megan and CSG by following the links in the show notes.

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