Hi Heverton, tell us about yourself and how you got to the CX Space?
I am known in Brazil as the CRM Guy because I have been working in this area since 1999. I always acted as a technology professional, but I had to open my mind, boundaries and processes to, together with other areas and professionals, envision offering an exceptional customer experience. I had to lose the 4-wall locked side of IT. And after so much time doing this, the journey has been wonderful and rewarding. Most of the projects I have worked on since 1999 in CX and CRM have made me a bridge builder rather than a wall builder between people, technology, process, and business. After all, the customer expects unique experiences with the least effort.
In Brazil, the CRM, Customer Success CX, and Customer services industries have not yet come together completely. Facing this reality, I have been professionalizing myself and, above all, sharing my knowledge from classes, training, consultancies, and my books to unite the communities of professionals. Here are some examples of books that I have released in Brazil and abroad so that we see the client as something organic and not as a database record:
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- 30 Advice from 30 Greatest Professionals in CRM and Customer Service in the world, foreword by Don Peppers.
- The Book of all 20 Methodologies to improve and profit from Customer Experience and Service – Why, when, and how to use each one
- Data Science and Business Intelligence: Advice from important Data Scientists around the World
- The Official Dictionary for Internet, Computer, ERP, CRM, UX, Analytics, Big Data, Customer Experience, Call Center, Digital Marketing and Telecommunication: The Vocabulary of One New Digital World
- 41 pieces of Advice from 41 Greatest Professionals in CRM and Customer Service in Brazil
Online commerce was booming in 2020; how did it affect brands’ CX strategy? – What should be the main focus for brands this year?
E-commerce also saw exponential growth in Brazil during 2020. However, as I always say: badly solved past problems always come back.
And this happened in Brazil as well. In 2020 the number of complaints about companies in e-commerce almost doubled and reached a total of 180,000 dissatisfied customers who went to the regulatory agencies to seek their rights. Many companies talked beautifully about digital transformation but had no scenario. However, with COVID, within days many companies had to digitize their channels, train employees to work from their homes, etc… etc… they just forgot to tell this to their processes that remained analog. So that was our challenge in helping companies: throw out old processes and rebuild them digitally. In 1980 the ISO standards focused on meeting the products, now, in 2020, I call it reengineering 2.0, where we rebuild the processes focused on meeting customer satisfaction. And this focus should perpetuate throughout 2021 and 2022.
Heverton’s checklist for CX strategy
In your POV – What is the ultimate checklist for a good digital CX Strategy?
In my humble opinion and thinking about the concept I created of Reengineering 2.0 focused on the customer, I would remove the exclusive use of customer data by the marketing area, but create an open company to get better insights. And for that, you have to follow and create:
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- The company should have a committee with a bi-monthly meeting with a professional (rotating and never fixed from the same people) from the following areas of the company to evaluate the successes and learning curves: Technology; Customer Service; Logistics; Marketing; Sales; CRM; Customer Success; Ombudsman; CEO; Physical Store; E-Commerce; and invite a customer (to bring suggestions and/or criticism). In this meeting, you can talk about everything without getting upset.
- Customer Effort Level: Identify the SLA (service level) of the processes that receive the most complaints from customers;
- benchmarking: monitor on social networks the clients’ comments about the best and worst channels and competitors’ experiences, to improve and not let it happen in the company. And, with that, run a campaign to bring customers from the competition.
- Level of Employee Satisfaction: constantly monitor the satisfaction, compensation, and quality of the environment of the employees who work in the customer service channels. Satisfied employees become brand ambassadors and can save or damage the customer experience.
How much has Customer Experience changed in the social distancing era – what role digital transformation has in this crisis?
We all know that there are customers who like technology, while others do not like it so much. Self-service technologies whether in physical or virtual channels must always understand and monitor the level of friction of these customer profiles in their channels.
The big problem is that COVID made companies touch their main pains: customer data was not integrated or synchronized, as well as applications did not talk to each other, generating a tremendous effort for employees and customers to interact with the brand. So in reality, it will take most companies large or small until the year 2022 to do their homework on customer experience integration. And one path of no return is the migration to cloud operation of their solutions.
What was the biggest lesson you learned in 2020?
In my latest book The Book of all 20 Methodologies to improve and profit from Customer Experience and Service – Why, when, and how to use each one, I surveyed the world over the 30 most famous important methodologies. But this brings a problem for professionals and companies: who do I want to be? a Disney? a Zappos? an Amazon? what processes or methodologies do these companies use. With this book I could prove that the community should move in the long run towards standardization, the problem is that this should also reach schools and colleges. We have to stop training professionals who are only hunters but also train farmers (who take care of) the customers.
2020 was the year of webinars and online events, what was your favorite one?
CRM Playaz created by gurus of CRM, Paul Greenberg, and Brent Leary
It looks like working from home is going to stay with us for the foreseeable future, how should Executives gear up to the changing times?
I have seen bosses who have resigned from their companies because they did not know how to manage professionals at a distance.
This happens, I think because most bosses still insist on following the person of the professional, and not the task delegated to a particular professional. This is a change of culture and mental model.
I recommend that companies and their managers should be more fluid. Focusing on what really matters and eliminating all kinds of corporate fat. It is a time of diet: only lean bosses and lean companies will survive.
In the case of customer experience, the big challenge is for the manager of a current company to be inspired by companies like Zappos or Amazon to give autonomy to employees who are in the contact channel, whether they have low or high pay.
Last but not least, what is your favorite CX metric?
PCCC =I created this metric to engage the CEO to understand the pains of employees and/or customers in interacting with their brand and company. This PCCC metric of mine is the number of times per month the company has placed its CEO on company contact channels. This is (PCCC = Put CEO at seat of Contact Channel)
