The CX Leader Podcast: "The Self-service Experience": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "The Self-service Experience": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
As we grow into a new era of self-service, customers are demanding better ways to find solutions to their problems without having to contact support.

Gal:
People don't want to talk to anyone, they don't want to talk to anyone as consumers at home when they watch Netflix or buy an Amazon or an Uber. They want a self-serve. They want to do everything themselves and the same thing in the B2B world so that consumerization of the enterprise experience is a very big trend.

Steve:
Looking into the trend of self-service support on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone, I'm Steve Walker hosted at The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. We like to say that it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast helps explore those topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. So here's a scenario: you just purchased a license to some cool new business management software and you've run into a problem setting it up. You don't want to spend the time calling support, so you click on the support link and spend way too much time searching for an answer. In frustration you call support and turns out the solution was easy, but you're thinking, well, that should have been easier to find on their support site. Well, you're not alone, and there's some research to support that today more people are looking for self-service solutions and options to find help with their products and services. And I'm delighted that my guest today is going to spend more time speaking to that trend and even has some new research to back up that assertion. Gal Oron is the CEO of Zoomin, a software company that helps global enterprises turn their documentation into a mission critical asset that supports every part of the customer journey. Gal, thanks for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Gal:
Hey, Steve, great to be here. And I definitely agree that it's a great time to be a CX leader now.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, it's great to get to know you and very interesting background. Just in case you know, just to give a little context before we get into our topic of self service and support and some of those things that I think are very relevant for our listeners, just give us a little bit of your background, how you got into the customer experience base and then maybe also a little background on Zoomin.

Gal:
So, yeah, so I actually grew up in Israel. I'm in, now I live in New York City, but I grew up in Israel. Got into the tech world after an interesting military service in the Israeli Air Force. Actually started my career in core technology, QA, engineering, pre-sales and enterprise software and got into experience mostly from the world of overload of information. I mean, I felt the need that the world is exploding with data, with content, with knowledge, and there is a need to simplify things for everyone. People just cannot absorb the amount of knowledge and data that's in front of them. This resulted in a much better experience and Zoomin and me and my partner, when we started Zoomin, we basically identified an asset that every company has technical manuals, guides, training materials, knowledge articles, community discussions, support tickets, everything that every every company creates around their product information so Steve can know how to use the product to the greatest potential. This is the asset that we're dealing. We realize that there is an it's an asset that is while every company has it and has a lot of it, it's completely overlooked, has a huge strategic impact on on customers, probably the only asset that has an impact on almost on a customer almost every stage of the customer journey, from buying to onboarding to support to everything. And we decided to address this asset by basically taking this asset to every company has, understand who Steve is on on the other side and delivers Steve, stellar and user experience around how you consume and interact with product information.

Steve:
And when did you found the company?

Gal:
We founded in 2016.

Steve:
2016?

Gal:
Yeah.

Steve:
And let's just talk a little bit maybe Big Picture: what are you seeing in terms of the trends towards self-serve support and B2B? And then how did that lead you to create this company?

Gal:
Yeah, it's a very good question. So I see two and a half trends.

Steve:
Two and a half.

Gal:
Yeah. The first thing is the importance of online self-service and customer experience in general. You know, to put it in simple words, people don't want to don't want to talk to anyone. They don't want to talk to anyone as consumers at home when they watch Netflix or buy on Amazon or an Uber. They want a self-serve. They want to do everything themselves and the same thing in the B2B world. People don't want to talk to anyone. So that consumerization of the enterprise experience is a very big trend. I mean, that consumerization, together with along with the with the importance of online self-service, this is the big trend. People want to experience and work have the same experience they have at home as consumers. They don't want to suffer at work. And so that's a very big trend. And the other one is that every company is a tech company today. Whether you're a hardware, software, franchise company, everyone in every company is becoming a tech. And when you're becoming a tech company usually have products, you have content around those product. Digital is becoming very, very important. So the pain of of so many companies has the same pain that that and the need to to provide great digital, just like we're using, we're experiences as consumers and at our home. Almost every company that we know today and B2B, they have the same need. So these are the two trends that we see out there.

Steve:
And what's the half trend?

Gal:
The half trend is that the B2B customer experience, because of the two things that I said, the importance of online self-service, every company is a tech company. B2B customers have high expectations today. They are not willing to suffer anymore. They want to have great experience. So that's the that's the half.

Steve:
I'm really glad that you gave us your two and a half. The first one is one we've talked about on this podcast for a long time. And really, you know, like, I think it was in 2013 when you could start using Uber on your phone. Like if you can see where your ride is on your phone, why can't you see where your delivery is, right?

Gal:
Exactly.

Steve:
And so the B2B space was forced to catch up because of people's consumer experiences and leveraging the same technology. It just it just took a lot longer. I think your other point about everybody's a tech company. That's kind of a really interesting thing. But but you're right, if you weren't digital before COVID, you better be digital now, right?

Gal:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Steve:
You might have been able to survive without it in late 2019 through February of 2020, but now there's no way you'd still be in business without some digital aspect. And and some of these companies are just going totally all in on digital too.

Gal:
Yeah, exactly. And you know, we did. We did. We commissioned the survey, a very interesting survey around the market and about B2B customers.

Steve:
Yep.

Gal:
And they say that more than 80 actually 81 percent of them still prefer to solve old product issues themselves. I mean, and they expect this. They don't want to talk to anyone. And it's a big it's a big statement. I mean, they're sitting at home and they want to resolve their own issues themselves. They don't want to call the call center. I think that the number is around less than three percent of them say that they will call the call center before they try. So ninety seven percent will want would want to resolve thing first of all themselves before they even talk to anyone. It's a very it's a very big trend that we see out there.

Steve:
Yeah. And actually, I was able to get a copy of your… it's "The State of Self-Service Content Experiences" and could our listeners – I think it's a wonderful document, but could our listeners find that on the web somewhere?

Gal:
Yeah, sure. They can find it in our website.

Steve:
Ok.

Gal:
Zoominsoftware.com. They can find a link to this by Forrester to this survey by Forrester.

Steve:
Yeah, actually, I got… I got an advanced copy of this a day or two ago, and I read it the other evening, and it's a very nice piece. And really anybody that is providing services today, there's some, some relevant information for for our listeners. So I'd really encourage my listeners to go to the Zoomin website and download this study because it's it's very relevant for all of us that are, you know, trying to operate in a world that is moving quickly with technology.

Gal:
Yeah, I think I think it's the first comprehensive report about B2B customers as it relates to content experiences and their impact on on on overall experience and on real enterprise KPIs. And so it's a very comprehensive and I strongly recommend. A few very important things from from this report that if you want, I can we can discuss it later on.

Steve:
Well, yeah, let's go ahead and get into the report because we've talked about it. And I think, you know, you mentioned kind of the overarching result is that we've come to the point where now four out of five people, eighty one percent of the respondents in your study said they'd prefer to do it self service.

Gal:
Yeah.

Steve:
And that is a result of how we've trained, you know, how we've been trained over the last decade to to look at things and to figure it out ourselves. So what are a couple of the key findings and what are those implications for CX leaders?

Gal:
So I'll mention a few. First of all, I think an interesting one is that we found that eighty one percent of users preferred to – and when I say users, it's users of B2B or enterprises – prefer to solve all product problems by themselves. Eighty one percent for every five that want to do it. Fifty two percent of users believe that if we actually provide better content experiences, they can actually resolve everything themselves. I mean, so the experience is not there, but if we improve it, if we provide 52 percent of them think they actually can resolve things themselves. However, eighty four percent of them of them in the survey, it was very interesting, say that product frustration is a big reason for them to just switch from one vendor to from one company to the other. And I think we also know it as consumers. And when you're not happy with something, with your cable company, with your phone provider, it's so easy to switch from one company to the other. And we found that the content experience is the big, big factor in this because what's happening in enterprises today, every enterprise has a great product, but around this product, they just create a whole world of information. As I said, for Steve to know how to use the product to the greatest potential. So what's happening is that rather than the product experience being just the product itself, the real experience of the product become the whole thing with all the content of technical content in many ways becomes the face of the product. But it's even more than this it becomes the face of the company. It's a little bit surprising at the beginning, but when you think about it, it's not. Seventy percent of the traffic of almost every company that, you know is their own technical content: manuals, guides, training materials, knowledge articles, 70 percent technical content, which means that the technical content is the de facto face of a lot of companies. So as I said, 84 percent feel like if the content experience are not good, they're just in the product experience is not good, they're just going to switch to another vendor. Another important area is around the will of customers to actually contact support centers. Only three percent said that they're willing to talk to the contact center before trying to resolve everything themselves. Ninety seven percent, first of all, will try to resolve everything by themselves. In a related related thing is that only six percent, which is pretty shocking, find the answer that what they need in the first attempt, meaning 94 percent of the people do not find information to what they need, and the catch about it is that the answers are actually there. I mean, companies are having great product. It's all there. But still only six percent are able to find the information they need and the first attempt. Yeah. So these are some of the interesting figures that we found, and there is a lot more. But these are I thought it would be the highlight of what we saw in this survey.

Steve:
You know, we're always on the lookout for new and exciting ideas, and we'd love to get your thoughts on how we're doing. If you have a minute, go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey. Tell us what content you feel will help in becoming a more effective customer experience leader. Again, that's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Steve:
Gal, if you don't mind, I'd like to break this down a little bit for my listeners because again, some of the things that you're identifying in this study are things that we've talked about on the podcast. But you know, one thing you mentioned is that you really can't separate your brand from the experience that your customers have in B2B. You know, it's not like you can create some image of, you know, like, you know, I'm cool because I use this company if the service doesn't match up to that. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how Zoomin helps companies get that information in a way that their customers can access it better and what you're doing to kind of close that gap.

Gal:
So by the way, the gap exists mostly because while C-level people realize what exactly what you said, that experience has a huge impact on on on the brand of the company. They believe that 90 percent of them think that the experience is actually pretty good. I mean, and there is a big gap between what they see and what the users see. The users think like 60 percent of the users think that the experience is actually good. But 90 percent so that 30 percent is a big gap. Yeah.

Steve:
And and I should have also, I should have reiterated because you made the point is there's big potential to switch here, too. I mean, it's you know, it's not just that the experience is bad, but they have alternatives. And if it gets too painful, they will switch.

Gal:
So the way we help this is in two ways. So we sell to mostly medium sized enterprises McAfee, Imperva, DocuSign companies who have products, usually sometimes more complex products. And we go to a McAfee and with other we we don't care how you create and manage your technical content, manuals, guides, training materials, knowledge articles, whatever we have, we know how to pull it in into our our cloud. We do it off the shelf and in a very smart way. So in a smart way, meaning we need to know how to make a paragraph that was created in Adobe Frame Maker, talk to a Salesforce knowledge article to a Zendesk support ticket, making them all one. So we know how to pull it all in and to ingest all this content. And then on the other side, we know how to deliver that experience to Steve. Wherever you are engaging with the McAfee's product, that can be their website, their support site, their community inside their product, in their call center. And we're doing it by understanding who Steve is, a understanding whether Steve is techie or marketing. He has version three or seven. He's he's a customer or a prospect in order to provide Steve experience, which is completely personalized, just like in Netflix. Steve and Gal are different people,

Steve:
Right.

Gal:
In Zoomin, and we're also different people. So you and I are going to experience completely different content, different experience because we are different people. And that's the secret sauce. I mean, there is a lot of data that we're collecting and on behind the scenes about about experiences and what's leading to what what led led Steve to open a ticket? What led Steve to call the call center? What made Steve buy something? This data that we collect allows us to personalize the experience and to really provide you around technical content and Netflix-like experience. People like Steve found this interesting. Eighty eight percent of the fifty people found this article to be relevant for your specific problem.

Steve:
So, yeah, I can totally relate to that. You know, kind of from the consumer standpoint, sometimes we use the term personas. Do you guys use that for designing this or is it more based on the algorithms and the data? But you do. You just the through the patterns, you find that the way that this person is interacting, then they're going to be most likely to be responsive to these kinds of of information or these kinds of delivery methods.

Gal:
Exactly. And I'll use again the Netflix analogy. I know my kids go into Netflix and they get recommendations for their stuff, and I really like documentaries and sports documentaries. I'm a huge fan of sports documentaries and The Last Dance you, and so that's what I'm going to get. So the other part that we have, which is big, in my opinion, is we have a great insights analytics platform and that provides companies a lot of insights about the product and about the content. Because if you think about it, 70 percent of the traffic is technical content, which means if there is no one really overseeing it, most companies are… they have a blind spot of 70 percent of what's happening with their customers. So we have an insights and analytics platform that provides enterprises insights about product, product features and functionality, about content about where, where their customers get stuck in the journey, whether they spend ten minutes on finding something because they get all kind of insights like this, that the result of those insights are really business, either business or operations, better business efficiency. Or real KPIs, more upsells, more cross cells, less churn, real KPIs that our companies, our customers see from those analytics inside that we're providing them.

Steve:
Yeah, there's got to be huge algorithms in data integrations here. If I'm one of my listeners here and I know we have a call center and a contact center, that's not maybe taken full advantage of this kind of self-service automation, who in the organization typically would be the ones to say, You know, we've got to make progress in this. We've got to make sure that people are getting the answers they can in the self-service channel.

Gal:
So we see one of the few personas, OK, in most cases, in many cases start from C-level people who understand the importance of experience.

Steve:
Yep.

Gal:
But the key organizations that we see out there are the support organizations, the CX organizations, of course. And as as you know from this podcast, more and more companies and enterprises have experienced leadership, customer success, people and product people. These are the main personas that we see out there that they really care about the experience they see. Technical content is a real asset that can help and drive more business, and they're the ones triggering those those initiatives.

Steve:
Gal, we've reached that point in the podcast, where I ask every guest to give us their best tip. We call it take home value. And the idea is for you to give our listeners something that that they can go back to the office today or tomorrow or next Monday and actually put into place and make their organizations better for the future world.

Gal:
So everyone, every enterprise, especially everyone on this podcast, we're all looking for the most innovative initiatives to improve customer experience. But the solution is already there. I mean, you already have it in your company, and that's called technical content. Every company has technical content and technical content when I talk about technical manuals and guides and training materials and knowledge articles, your ability to take an asset that you already have and to turn it into experience is just enormous. You don't need to create anything because the content is already there. You don't need to invent anything because the B2C world already already taught us what we need to do. You just need to implement it. And that ability to deliver great experience from an asset that you already have is immediate. I mean, as I said, no dependency on anything that you don't have. It's already there. And that has huge impacts on KPIs that are very, very important for every experience leader. And I'm talking about NPS customer effort score. I'm talking about a number of support tickets, case deflection, support cost, and I'm talking about real business KPIs, more upsells, more across more cross-sell, more leads, less churn. As I said, from an asset that you already have, it's an asset that, as I said before, surprisingly or not surprisingly, take 70 percent of your traffic, which means that a lot of us, as companies are blind spot for 70 percent of what's happening with our customers. We don't know what's happening there. And today, technology allows us to just clear this blind spot and to get a much better understanding, as I said, from an asset that's already there.

Steve:
That's a great tip. So it's, you know, we already have a lot of expertize because it's our product, right? We know more about it than anybody else. We just got to organize it in a way that's easier for our customers to access it.

Gal:
Exactly.

Steve:
And that's what Zommin does, so. Gal, thanks again for being on the podcast. Really enjoyed having you. If anybody would like to continue the conversation, you want to let us know how they might be able to find you.

Gal:
Yeah, pick it up right up through our website. www.zoominsoftware.com.

Steve:
Zoomin, it's Z.O.O.M.I.N. dot com.

Gal:
So, yeah, exactly. We'll be happy to talk to you.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, again, thanks again. Congratulations on your success and really appreciate you being on the podcast.

Gal:
Great. Great. Happy to be here. Thanks for the interesting conversation, Steve.

Steve:
If you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or other podcasts, or even how Walker could help your business, I hope you will feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show. Find all of our previous episodes, our podcast series. We have our contact information. You can drop us a note. Let us know how we're doing. Suggest an idea for a future podcast, or just peruse all the different podcasts that are out there now. Almost two hundred. Hey, The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their experience management success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader, so keep doing it out there and we will see you again next time.

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