INTERVIEW
Four Metaphorical Rocks Affecting Customer Flow
With Sean Albertson – Creator, CX4ROCKS, LLC.
Sedimentary, Metamorphic, Igneous, and Meteoric—symbolize layers of complexity, organizational changes, unexpected events, and external factors affecting customer struggles.
Sean Albertson is an original CX thinker whose recent and award -winning book, CX4Rocks, is making a valuable contribution, in my opinion, to the customer experience thought leadership field. Sean has, prior to writing, a long and successful career at the sharp end of customer experience analytics, having worked most recently for Schwab as the head of client experience measurement and analytics.
Well, that’s pretty high in my esteem given Schwab’s leadership in customer experience. And Sean brings that and other program leadership experiences into his work today. During our conversation, Sean explains the thinking behind his Four Rocks metaphor and how he brings it to bear on the practical aspects of building programs. And he focuses also on how practitioners can use that framework to understand better the challenges and solutions around creating change in organizations, especially around contact center environments.
Richard Owen
I want to start by, of course, congratulating you on publishing the book that I think is out in the market now a few months. Maurice has written far more books than I ever have, mercifully. I surrendered after one. I think, how many did you do, Maurice? What was it?
Maurice FitzGerald
I’ve done four in all, if you count the cartoon book with my notes in it that my brother did as well. Yep, and they mysteriously keep selling for now six years.
Richard Owen
Okay, so.
That’s, yes, I mean, just how many more copies can your wife buy? I mean, there’s a limit, right? So, Sean, the old gag was the only type of writing that pays well is ransom notes. But we really respect the fact that you published a book. We know how much effort it takes. And you sort of positioned it, and correct me if I’m wrong, as something of a sort of sequel to The Effortless Experience. Is that the right way to think about it?
Maurice FitzGerald
You’ve spotted the trick!
Sean Albertson
Yes.
A little bit, yes. I mean, you know, The Effortless Experience, the studies that CEB did, Matt Dixon, Rick DeLisi, I’ve met and know those guys pretty well and have talked to them a lot in this transition. But it really spoke to me. But not only that, there was so much truth to what they showed. And so, I very early in my career or, you know, middle part of my career kind of embraced the Customer Effort Score and that whole strategy and I’ve really built on it. And you know, talk to, you know, more about how to implement than here’s what the research shows. And that’s really what the book was. It’s kind of a guide to, hey, if you think about this, you know, here’s what you can do with it. Cause you know, definitely, execution is the key.
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Richard Owen
So, given that, what would you tell the audience in terms of the big takeaway in terms of execution?
Sean Albertson
Well, one is you’ve got to do something, right? You know, too often when, yeah, exactly. You can’t, you know, you’ve got to be able to think about saying, you know, when we measure in customer experience and user experience and brand and any of the Xs, you know, in fact, I hate putting a letter in front of experience. I’d rather we just talk about the experience because it’s all, you know, combined.
Richard Owen
Execution requires execution. Is that?
Sean Albertson
But it’s just making sure that you’re understanding that you’re not just measuring to have a metric and see how it goes. You’re measuring for purpose. Otherwise, you are just literally measuring for measurement’s sake. And the whole point of customer experience or any of the experiences is do something with what you learn and then improve upon your business model. And that’s the key. And so, it does take collaboration because at the end of the day for most businesses, everybody across the business influences the experience in some way. And so, you’ve got to get teams aligned and people aligned, and departments aligned to really focus on the experience and do it together. You can’t just do it in silos.
Richard Owen
When The Effortless Experience came out, one of the things that I thought was most useful as a contribution was this focus on a certain type of experience, which at the end of the day wasn’t really about creating moments of wow or whatever you want to call it but was really about trying to do fairly hygienic things, friction-oriented tasks, and just do them well and sort of go home happy.
Sean Albertson
Yeah.
Richard Owen
Is there a risk that in doing this and in taking this to its full extent, we’ve become somewhat myopically focused on this idea of the customer experience equals customer service? Because you talk about the need to get lots of people involved, but the contact center in particular tends to get very narrowly focused.
Sean Albertson
Oh, absolutely. And I think one of the drawbacks when we put the letter in front of X is we start to put those silos on ourselves or those blinders on to what we’re focused on. And the other thing that’s changed since, you know, 2013 when the book was published in the years prior when the research was done is the channels that we interact with customers have multiplied greatly.
And now instead of the traditional phone, well, in the old days, mail, literal physical mail and phone systems and maybe websites, and then now it’s apps and then social media and any number, chat bots and all of this new technology that increases the way to communicate with the customer. Here’s the problem. The experience is the connection or potentially disconnection between all those channels.
Customer service is only one piece of the overall picture. And so, thinking about experience and the journey of a customer, this is really where the whole idea of my book came from. It’s like, it’s like a river. The customer journey is like a river. We like to think it’s nice and straight and smooth. And maybe they’re on an inner tube with a cold one. Our customers are happy and it’s great. But the reality is they’re bouncing off the rocks.
Richard Owen
Yeah.
Sean Albertson
The river is winding back and forth because they’re trying different channels and then they’re running into rapids and things like that. And so really that idea that it’s more often now the challenge is the connective tissue or lack thereof between the channels than it is the channels themselves. We had gotten pretty good at channeling task. I call, I get an issue resolved. Great, it was easy. I was online, I got the issue. Great, it was easy. I tried four different channels to get my issue resolved and it’s still not resolved.
That’s the journey that most companies are struggling with today because it takes everyone across the organization to be able to pitch in on that one because we’re all responsible.
Richard Owen
And so, it’s been a longstanding lament, I think, in the whole CX industry that there’s been too much, too much segmentation, if you like, too narrow a focus on different elements of experience. But I would argue that’s only increased in the last couple of years. In fact, I think COVID drove a lot of people to say, well, we need to make investments in the contact center because all of a sudden, you know, that’s where the action is.
Sean Albertson
Oh yeah. Mm-hmm.
Richard Owen
And contact center teams became increasingly focused on how do we just optimize this narrow set of experience and in somewhat more insular. And so, are you making an argument that they need to break out of that? Or are you accepting that as a reality?
Sean Albertson
I think we’re not gonna change how businesses are designed. Channels have leaders, leaders have agendas. That’s not really gonna change. I mean, really good organizations are doing things differently in that space. They’re creating cross-functional teams focused on individual collaborative journeys. But fundamentally, your channel’s always gonna have a leader. The key is understanding and realizing that you’re on the bank of that river, your customers flowing down, you got to look upstream and downstream, and you’ve got to think about how do you come together and create the handoff. And that’s where a lot of the new technology, you know, whether it’s, you know, generative AI or anything else is really going to help us create more connection between that, you know, those different channels so that, you know, if I, as a consumer, I’m online, trying to find something and then I hit click to call.
And I’m now talking to an agent that agent should see a summary, not here’s all my web logs, but like in summary, here’s what they were trying to do. So that they’re already a step ahead in that, you know, understanding that experience.
Richard Owen
So, I do want to dig into this idea of how you think technology is going to solve this problem. I think you can make a counter case that technology has actually entrenched this problem. But I’m really interested in that. But before we do that, I think it’s worth explaining about the rocks. So, for anyone who hasn’t read the book yet, why don’t you give us the headlines?
Sean Albertson
Absolutely. Well, as I started to really look at it, and again, all of my work is based on making things easier, you know, because, you know, it’s the fault of this, this little thing in our hands all the time. You know, it’s got to be easy, or our customers leave. And that’s only getting worse because the younger generations, I mean, my son, he’s a freshman in college. He basically tried to do his entire application for college on his phone and wondered why it wasn’t working. And literally made the statement when it wasn’t working, said, well, maybe I shouldn’t go to a school that can’t do it on the phone, right? You know, it’s like, what? Yeah. But it’s so it’s all really about making it easy. And so, if you if you want to make things easy, the challenge for most organizations isn’t that they don’t know they’ve got problems. Usually, it’s they’ve got too many problems to figure out.
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Richard Owen
Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough.
Sean Albertson
Finding the rocks, understanding the rocks, analyzing them, and then doing something different. So, in the research, when I really boil down all the different challenges that companies have, it really kind of comes into four areas. That’s why it’s four rocks. And the first one is, if you translate that to real life geology, sedimentary, layers, layers of complexity, silos, anything that creates separation in your organization creates rocks.
You know, lack of communication, you know, any of that. And there’s plenty of examples of that, of course, as businesses grow, one of the worst rocks out there is having to be bounced around and transferred between departments just because of the layers of complexity. That, you know, metamorphic rocks, you know, on earth come from change, you know, that, you know, coal to diamonds. But and any change that we do as a business creates rocks for our customers. You change your brand, you change your product, you change your service, mergers, and acquisition.
Any change can really create a great amount of pain and challenges and rocks for your customers. Igneous, fire, lava, right? I spent 15 years in telco, an outage, major landslide of rocks on our customers, any sort of outage you have or financial situations and fires that you just have to put out, obviously those are rocks. And those are the three kinds of rocks on earth. And then there are external factors as well. So, you know, meteorites, meteors, you know, coming from space. And so now those rocks really are from very external factors. The biggest meteoric rock that unfortunately was an extinction level event for a lot of companies was COVID. And that just, nobody expected it. It came from the outside and that was something that really impacted, you know, the businesses. So that’s really where the four rocks come from. And the idea being if you understand their source, change, silos, et cetera, now you can do things proactive to get in front of them. They’ll slip through, but you can do something, yeah.
Richard Owen
It’s very clever. I love it. I feel like I’m getting a geology lesson. I really wish I’d paid more attention to any of this when I was at school. But no, it’s a clever metaphor. So well done for thinking that way, especially the meteoric one, because obviously COVID springs to mind. It’s kind of synonymous with black swan events, right? Unanticipatable things we assume to have zero probability, but actually just have low probability.
Sean Albertson
Yeah. Exactly.
Richard Owen
And you could argue that any business today is at risk of its own personal meteoric rock because of potentially new competitors emerging that simply weren’t anticipated or couldn’t be anticipated. And so, it’s not a society-wide event. It’s just somebody pops up and all of a sudden, they’re your competition.
Sean Albertson
Yeah, oh absolutely.
Richard Owen
Competition for Google. Obviously, they’re piling into it themselves, but search is extremely vulnerable. Probably the biggest risk to search we’ve seen in the last 20 years. But picking up on this topic of technology and how it can solve the problem versus entrench the problem, do you see companies understanding how technology can actually solve this. And I’m thinking of the investment companies trying to make in some simple ideas like CDP. Well, CDP is not necessarily that simple, but even the idea that you can have joined up data on customers seems to be a challenge.
Sean Albertson
Yeah. Well, and there’s, there’s really two challenges the, with that. There’s the legacy of the business that is further entrenching when new technology is placed on that legacy, further entrenching that, that siloed behavior. Um, the reality in my mind, and this is a lot of what I speak about with companies or, you know, keynotes.
It is the important, I know OCX absolutely is focused on it, bringing that data together, because that’s really where the story is across all that data. But a lot of companies are still stuck in their data silos, you know, big focus on moving to the cloud or, you know, creating big data environments to do the kind of analytics and research on. But when the data separate, if you put technology on it, you’re just putting technology on, you know, separated data. That being said.
Most companies also are too myopic in their view of what technology can do. They’re thinking about it, you know, and I’ve talked to plenty of call center managers. I want to use technology to, you know, to stop calls from coming in. That is all they are talking about. Well, what about creating a better experience? No, no, let’s just stop calls coming in because that’ll be a better, that’ll be a better, exactly. Exactly. And…
Richard Owen
Just call avoidance. Because the economics of call avoidance are really well understood.
Sean Albertson
In the reality, so people, technology only does what people tell us to do. So, the issue isn’t the technology, it’s what people think about when they use the technology. So, my message is take a step back, take this opportunity in time, which greater than any other opportunity in the past, honestly, is saying, how does technology bring us together versus separate us versus separate our business versus create additional silos? Because, you know,
Again, if our focus is on that river, that entire journey, that seamless journey from channel to channel, from people to technology and back, you have a different view. Now you can start to look at that emerging technology for what it can be, not what it is. The other issue I see often is vendors who deploy technology, they have to come up with their market, their product, what does it do?
How is it different from everybody else? So now what you end up is you’ve got vendors that are building technology that only do one function. And so, when I talk, a lot of vendors wanna talk to me and I talk to a lot of vendors about things like that. The reality is, if their focus is too narrow, I don’t really wanna talk to them too much because that’s a limitation in their own strategy. As we move forward, this technology will enable us to come together.
So, I’ll use an example, and this is a real example that you might think it’s ahead of its time, but really there’s a lot of companies that are doing this. But I call in, I know something’s gonna happen on my account and I call in, well, the IVR, the phone tree recognizes what’s gonna happen and says, hey, is this why you’re calling? Why yes.
You know, all right, let me get you to that department. No pounding on buttons or yelling representative to try to get through and then routes you to the agent. But not only that, they’ve popped to that agent. Here’s this customer, here’s their information. Here’s what they’re calling about, you know, and it’s the right group. And so, you know, simplifying that. And then it’s just making sure the pieces of your customer experience puzzle are connected.
And that is the fundamental challenge, but it’s also the opportunity some of this technology can really do because the generative part of the new AI, the ability to look at all this data, but summarize it is incredible because agents have been looking up past notes, you know, the last time you called for years. But the problem is they’re trying to read through a lot of different data. Generative AI can look at summaries. Here’s the last, you know, the key topics from the last five calls that might be why they’re calling today. Let me, you know, let me move you ahead in that context.
Richard Owen
I mean, I think that’s a really exciting idea, right? And it falls into the broad category of prediction. If we can predict behavior of customers, if we can predict why customers are calling in, right? I mean, in manufacturing circles, the obvious focus has been on, let’s get data from the actual product, let’s get IOT data, and let’s use that to predict issues. So, we can even be proactive. We can reach out to customers and say, you know, we see you have a problem. And you talk about telecommunications and networks going down, right? Everything’s probabilistic in that space, is what’s the likelihood that something’s gonna go down? Can you jump in front of it? So, in that way, we are, we’re solving a problem of trying to give better service by having to relieve customers of the burden of trying to explain the problem by making it more efficient to get them to a resolution. But I’m still intrigued. I mean, I think…
Sean Albertson
Mm-hmm.
Richard Owen
I think that the contact center, and I don’t know whether you agree with this, I mean, one of the big takeaways in The Effortless Experience in some ways was that at the end of the day, the best we can accomplish in these kinds of service interactions is not screw up. And I’m paraphrasing, obviously, right? But at the end of the day, the goal is to do a good enough job, get through this, try, and serve customers the way they want to be served, and get out at the lowest cost.
And that does sort of drive people towards this idea of this is all just a cost minimization exercise. When you’re talking about getting broader viewpoints here, do you think the biggest obstacle is going to be technology or is it going to just be organization? At the end of the day, the problem is that we’re a long way away from creating effective organizations that know how to solve problems across organizational boundaries.
The reality is, if their focus is too narrow, I don’t really wanna talk to them too much because that’s a limitation in their own strategy. As we move forward, this technology will enable us to come together.
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Sean Albertson
I do think it’s more of a people issue than it is technology. I think, again, technology will do what we need it to do and what we ask it to do. People, by default, we have to narrow scope to survive. We as people just can’t handle trying to do everything, the whole epitome of boiling the ocean. So, when you put a group of people together that are part of a business, it gets even more challenging in that context because they’re like, I can only do what I can do, so I’m gonna focus here. The unfortunate reality too is it means that we have to reach out and communicate more. And we all know that kind of activity is actually getting less, especially as the employees are getting younger and younger, this idea of just having a lot of communication, especially in conversation, is actually getting a little bit more interesting because of, again, cell phone and technology and things like that. But the opportunity, I believe, is use the technology to bridge the gap because if in contact centers, to your point, that cost reduction and that the focus and Effortless experience was very narrowed to let’s stop screwing things up. But the odds of having the opportunity to the light.
Because you can’t delight everybody every time. You would spend way too much money to try to delight everybody every time. The opportunity to delight is low. The likelihood of screwing something up is very, very high. And so, there is that focus of that leaky bucket. You pour them in the top. If you got the leaky bucket, they’re going out the back. Yeah, absolutely. But once you use technology and capability and all that understanding
Richard Owen
Safety, safety first. Risk, risk aversion.
Sean Albertson
Do it right to create ease, now you can flip the script, especially within Contact Center. It was actually two summers ago, I was asked prior to ChatGPT coming out, I was asked what’s the Contact Center gonna look like in five years? And I honestly still believe this. I don’t think it’s five years anymore because once ChatGPT came out, I’m like, all right, we’re already almost there. I think the reality is the more technology we throw at consumers, the more they’re gonna wanna talk to somebody.
Richard Owen
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad you said that. I was kind of waiting for that punchline because there’s a running joke that, this is the kind of thing that AI people seem to joke about is that every presentation today on chat GPT comes down to just a better chat bot, right? So, there’s always gonna be a big story about how it’s gonna transform the enterprise. And when you get down to it, it’s like a slightly better chat bot. And…
Sean Albertson
Yeah.
Richard Owen
It’s not obvious that any of this technology we’ve deployed in terms of chat bots has materially changed customers’ perspective of the problem they’re solving or making any better. So, we seem to be focused on sort of sub-optimizing or optimizing this very narrow element of things. And I do think in some ways it is changing…
Sean Albertson
Nah.
Richard Owen
customers perspective to say I place high value on a human interaction now because so many companies are making it actually hard for me to interact with a human
Sean Albertson
Yeah, oh, absolutely. The worst experience is when they hide the phone number, and you can’t find it, or they just don’t have a call center. When you’re dealing with an issue, I…
Richard Owen
Or they basically put you in this infinite loop of which you can’t escape from because you’re failing to comply. So, does human experience start to become a premium now and you actually tout it, we have real people and that’s a win, right?
Sean Albertson
Yeah.
Absolutely. I think that’s the future. I think businesses that use this, again, for that narrow focus of call avoidance will end up with backlash from their own customers. And those that embrace it to say, we’re going to provide you options to do things if you want to, but we’re also going to make it even easier for you to contact the agent. Because if you think about it, again, going back to this future,
I’m having a conversation with you, Richard Owen, and I am a person that loves to have conversations. I’m very empathetic. That is who I am as a person. Sometimes they were the best but the worst call center agents because they were great talking, but the multitasking and trying to do everything they had to do is very difficult. Well, we’re at an age now where not too distant future AI is going to be listening to the conversation in real time.
I want to sell 10,000 shares of Amazon. It’s going to be plugging into the system on my screen as an agent, 10,000 shares of Amazon. I’m there to make sure it’s the right information, but the articles are coming up, the generative AI is giving me summaries of what I need to say and think about, but my focus is on you. And it’s now being able to be a value center because part of that now is added products. Things we’ve been talking about in the contact center for decades. Becomes so much easier because the tasks are getting easier that you would otherwise have to do.
Richard Owen
So put another way, we solve the cost problem by just making people more efficient. We make people more efficient and effective by giving them tools and data that supercharge them. So, it’s about creating individual productivity for the individual. And I don’t dispute, by the way, that certain types of tasks that people want to undertake, friction-oriented tasks, aren’t well suited to human contact. They should be solvable.
Simple, you know, the old adage in software engineering was always simple things, simple, complex things, doable. I think that’s true in terms of interactions with customers. Simple things should be extremely simple. And simple today means you go to the website, you log in, it takes you two seconds, you get the whole thing done. I mean, how frustrating if you can’t change your address online, right? A mailing address. I mean, it’s just, it’s absolutely crazy now. You come from the financial services industry, and you know.
Sean Albertson
Mm-hmm.
Richard Owen
Sometimes that’s a more complicated problem. But for a lot of industries, it’s inexcusable that people can’t do basic operational elements online. But then complex things require nuance and human interaction. And that’s where we want to create a lot of productivity. So sooner or later, are we going to start to make this distinction clear? There are tasks that people want to accomplish. There are solutions for it. And to your point, the solution for complex or ambiguous tasks is gonna create opportunities if we can create sort of supercharged humans with the benefit of technology to support.
Sean Albertson
Yeah, well, and that, you know, think about the, when I first started in the contact centers back in the, you know, mid-nineties on the phones, you know, there was all this debate about super-agent versus, you know, siloed agent and, and so forth. And the, again, sedimentary rocks get created because, you know, a brain can only handle so much education about a certain line of business for, you know, your tech support and your billing support because near the two shall meet between those two folks, so they can’t handle being both. The tools could enable that truly that super-agent, that ability to say one agent, no transfers, et cetera. And I think if you look then at the opportunity within the chat or the chat bots, if you will, to almost jump at the opportunity of routing you to an agent when it’s likely you may need it anyway.
I mean, thinking about it that way, if I’m chatting, sure, if it’s something basic and easy, take care of it, move on, great. But the second, because using past data, and I know you guys know this better than most at OCX, using past data and the real data, journey data and or transactional data, you can, again, predict and even then, identify what’s potentially gonna be the problem. We’ll use that then and say, this customer is starting a path. That is likely gonna create a really horrible journey, let’s interrupt it very quickly and say, you know what, rather than trying to do this over, let me not just tell you to call, but let me route you. Click here, let me route you to the right group with the right education or whatever, and then move faster. Yeah.
Richard Owen
Yeah.
No, I think that’s a great vision, Sean, and certainly beats the whole, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that, could you repeat it or type it differently? So no, I think that’s a terrific vision. I want to wrap up by a question back about the four rocks here. So, when you think about the ones that, you know, you’ve seen companies overcome these barriers and have the biggest impact. Is there one that…
Sean Albertson
Right?
Richard Owen
Typically, is where the success lies. You know, they’ve zeroed in on one of these and you’ve seen great results. Or is it taken on all four?
Sean Albertson
So ultimately for organizations, they’re going to have to tackle each of the different rocks in different ways because they’ll have their own, you know, are they natively just more siloed than most others. The biggest thing is to plan and practice, to understand where your biggest challenges are by doing that kind of research and then practice what you’re going to do to both avoid it, but then also what you’re going to do when you find the rock because they’ll get through.
The companies that I have had the most success with working with and in this program are ones that have embraced the use of data at scale. They’re bringing their contact center data together with their transactional data, with their operational metrics, with their survey data, and they’re using the power. Again, we’ve been using AI, and I know you guys have much longer than ChatGPT’s GPGs around. I mean, that’s the big AI topic now, but we’ve been using AI for power, for knowledge for a very long time. And so, you know, it’s not really chasing this generative for the purpose of a chatbot. It’s looking at the evolution of the AI that we’ve always been doing and using the capability to not just leverage it to look back and study, but now use it to predict and interrupt when we see that opportunity happening. But businesses are going to be challenged to say, what is it in our business that is most likely to be? And I went to work with a company that went through seven mergers and acquisition over five years. And talk about change. I mean, they had an avalanche of change rocks, metamorphic rocks, and siloed rocks and sedimentary, because it was just so much happening at once. And it took a very long time to break that all down.
Richard Owen
I don’t know, M&A is easy, isn’t it? M&A’s got to be easy because people just do it all the time. So, I mean, how hard can it possibly be? What a great strategy and, you know, it’s unfailing, isn’t it? I mean, people just keep, let’s add, let’s bolt a few more companies on what could possibly go wrong.
Sean Albertson
Yeah, right?
Exactly.
It’s just magic. Yeah, absolutely.
Richard Owen
Well, Sean, thank you very much for joining us today and congratulations on the book. We’ll be providing all the details of the book in both the podcast notes and also the introduction for those of you who are interested in follow-up. And I suggest certainly if you’ve got an interest in this space that you obtain a copy and share your thoughts. But Sean, we really appreciate you joining us today and look forward to hearing more about the reception for the book and what you see coming out in the market.
Sean Albertson
Absolutely. Well, Richard Owen, thank you so much and I appreciate spending time with you as well.
So ultimately for organizations, they’re going to have to tackle each of the different rocks in different ways because they’ll have their own, you know, are they natively just more siloed than most others.
ABOUT THE CX ICONOCLASTS
Richard Owen is celebrated as a leading figure in the Customer Experience industry, primarily known for his contribution as CEO at Satmetrix, where he and his team, along with Fred Reichheld, developed the Net Promoter Score methodology, now the globally dominant approach to customer experience measurement. His efforts further extended to co-authoring “Answering the ultimate question” with Dr. Laura Brooks, establishing netpromoter.com, and initiating both the NPS Certification program and a successful conference series. Owen’s diverse 30-year career has seen him drive technology-led business transformations at Dell, lead software companies like AvantGo to a Nasdaq listing, and Satmetrix to acquisition by NICE Systems, while also engaging in venture investment and board roles. Today, he spearheads OCX Cognition, leveraging machine learning for real-time NPS and customer health analytics.
Questions?
success@ocxcognition.com
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