Hi Arttur, tell us about yourself and your background.
Hello, I’m a Brazilian guy who first graduated in tourism (what most brings experiences than trips, isn’t it?). Later, I started to study system development (specifically Java), but I hated programming. Today, I have a degree in Production Engineering, as well as an MBA in Business Process Management with a specialization in Lean Six Sigma. Currently, my focus is on the field of Digital Products — metrics and experiences to customers in a digital world.
How did you start working in the customer experience space?
I started my career as a trainee at an IT consulting company in 2014. Since then, I’ve been working in customer experience. At the beginning, I focused in the insurance area, and later in other fields like e-commerce, consumer goods, and healthcare.
What do you think the top priority should be for a company that wants to improve its customer experience?
Listen to what the customers want to say. A lot of companies invest so much money in analytics or in advertising, and do not listen what their customers are saying. Improving an environment of chats and insights with your customers really open a lot of opportunities to your product. This is the best benchmarking that all the companies can have. And later, of course, filter what best fits to your company and the roadmap that you planned. So, open communities for your customers have interactions about a topic and incentive the talk.
How can companies better listen to and understand their customer base?
Listen directly to the customers. Create an environment in which your customers talk directly with you and other clients. It brings a lot of great ideas. My other piece of advice is to use the analytics tools that exist. All customers have a standard behavior, identify it to better offer your product and improve the experience is essential. Nowadays have a lot of free tools that helps the companies to map the customer journey and capture his interaction with your product and a behavior in it. This data can really bring the idea of new features and how your clients are behaving in your product to improve the experience or just improve the process to let it simpler.
Many companies are currently undergoing digital transformation processes – what are your tips on a successful digital transformation?
I think it should have 3 main action plans:
First, create an agile culture. Learn fast and understand that the mistakes are part of the learning process. The biggest problem for companies is the culture and the boycott of employees in relation to new processes. Starting with an agile culture, training, and encouraging your employees (who are your first customers) is essential.
Secondly, start by doing. Start it small, in an area that do not brings any value to you client and digitalize it. The first step of the digital transformation. After your collaborators see that it works and brought value and efficiency, start in other part. For example, Amazon has a successful strategy encouraging the innovation in the day by day. All the employees can bring ideas, and they start developing then. If do not bring any value later, the initiative is dead, but they learned something from it. In a moment the collaborator will realize the benefits, they won’t go back to what it was.
Thirdly, have a repository of lessons learning. It’s never good make a mistake more than once just because you want or because you didn’t planned well.
What are some CX companies/solutions you’re keeping your eyes on right now?
Nubank, Mercado Livre, and Magazine Luiza are companies that are undergoing a highly accelerated growth process based on good customer experience.
All of these companies are well positioned and set to improve the customer experiences. For Nubank, for example, I have received 3 or 4 forms about their products, and I’m just a regular customer. The A/B test is also a great tool that they uses to grow and measure their product.
What are some of your tips for people who want to work in the CX sphere?
Be curious, do not give up because your idea wasn’t well understood. Pivot it. And always remember, you are not your customer. Listen a lot to everybody, your customers first, but remember that you have your clients, your stakeholders, your suppliers, your dev team. Always listen what they have to say and put it in a scale to prioritize the road map. With hard skills is always good to understand about process, why one thing is necessary or why it is been asked. Metrics is not an obligation but is something that is good to know.
So many things changed in 2020. While some things are going to return to “normal,” what are new trends and habits you think will stay with us in the long term?
I think, here in Brazil specially, working from home will be something that will stay for a lon time. It’s going to be hard to maintain the company culture, but it’s bringing a lot of other benefits. Also the concern about health will be something that will keep for long. Apps for telemedicine, training, nutrition, and metrics like blood pressure or BMI will come to our day by day and will be necessary to our health insurance. Using masks, for example, will become something normal in our lives. Nobody wants to make their friend sick. Home deliveries will be more present in our life.
Overall, the customer’s job to be done will be well studied. The solutions that brings this to a specific market niche, will be successfully. So, understand about this “tool” will be great
eCommerce boomed in 2020, and consumers started leaving more product reviews online. How can we make the most out of this momentum?
It’s the idea of listening what they want to say. If they are leaving a review, it is because they care. They care either to help someone, or about the brand or the product. They can care because they hate you, and if it happens, they will scream loud and sometimes on more than one platform. See what they are saying, cluster it and transform it in features. This feature is attacking what job to be done? Is it appropriate? If so, put it in you roadmap and show that you care about they say.
Incentive this reviews in your site, or social media. In the community that you are the host of. This data is so valuable for you let in the other platforms.
What is your favorite CX metric? Why?
Just one? NPS (net promoter score). You listen direct from your customers and to is the most accurate to make a benchmarking with your competitors. Churn is also good. I like so much to use this combined with drop section.
