Introduction
Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. We’re going to be talking about small changes, big impact today. So at a really high level, we’ll be talking about a 120-day plan for digital experience success and what that means when it comes to setting up your digital experience program. I’m joined here today with Jess. I’ll let her introduce herself in just a second. But my name’s Chris Rey. I’m a senior digital experience strategist with Medallia. I’ve been with the company for about five years, working on delivery roles, sales roles, and a few other things, but I’m looking forward to talking with you all today.
Background and Experience
Thanks, Chris. Best part about this webinar is that Chris and I used to work together for almost all of those five years. So we’ve seen the inside look from our customers working with some of the biggest brands in the world. Introducing myself, I’m Jess Gangemi. I’m the head of digital solutions here at Medallia globally, and my team works with thousands of brands around the globe in helping them use our products to improve their digital channels.
Addressing Common Customer Questions
A lot of the questions that we get from customers are something as simple as this: I’ve launched a program, now how do I start seeing wins? A lot of our customers get a little hung up on scores. They start to think about their NPS; they start to think about benchmarking. But what we want to talk about today is how do you transform real insights, verbatim feedback, the signals you’re getting from the behaviors of your customers into actions that add value for your program?
The 120-Day Plan Overview
So let’s look at what a 120-day plan may look like when setting up a program. And again, keep in mind these are guidelines, not hard and fast timelines. If you don’t meet these timelines, you’re not in a better or worse place. But we just want to clarify again that these are just general timelines that we see a lot of clients and recommend clients to shoot for.
First 30 to 60 Days: Aligning on Business Goals and Building Your Program
So at the first 30 to 60 days, you typically want to start off by aligning on your business goals. Now, you’ll have done this with your commercial teams when you’ve started becoming a Medallia client, and we’ll translate that to the professional services situation as well. But aligning on business goals, this means, what do you want to get out of your program? What are the outcomes that you’re looking for? What’s important to the business? The second part of that is building your program. It’s kind of the tactical part of question design. Where are you putting your surveys? Who’s responsible for reading the data and actioning it?
90-Day Mark: Uncovering and Acting on Low-Hanging Fruit
Now, the second step here is at the 90-day mark. Once you’ve got your program set up, you know what you’re marching towards, what your goals are, and you’ve got your surveys designed and launched. What you want to start looking at is uncovering and acting on low-hanging fruit. I think there’s this notion with a lot of these CX programs that there’s going to be this big lightbulb moment, and we’ll find something that is going to save us millions of dollars in the snap of the finger. And that is possible, but it is not the most common way that programs find success.
Understanding Low-Hanging Fruit
When we say low-hanging fruit, it could be as something as simple as updating a button or changing some text, or a page layout that could really help do something like increase conversions or even increase certain metrics and scores, right? So we don’t want you to always think that it has to be these big picture goals that help you achieve your business outcomes. It could be small things that add up over time.
120-Day Mark: Telling Your Story and Showcasing Return on Investment
Now, finally, at the 120-days mark what we’re going to talk about is telling your story across the org and showcasing your return on investment. Now, this part is really, really critical on an ongoing basis, but at 120 days is typically when you have, I would say, enough data to tell your story and really formulate a narrative.
Importance of Storytelling
At a high level, what telling your story means is sharing this data across the organization and with key stakeholders so they understand what your customers are seeing so they can really empathize and potentially act with you as partners in your organization.
Sales Pitch and Demonstrating Value
So let’s talk about the 120-day mark. So this is the point where you really want to put on your sales hat. I hate to say it, but it’s real. You want to pitch your program, you want to sell the value, you want to tell your story across the org to showcase the ROI.
Communicating Thought Process and Achievements
So explain your thought process. You must explain your thought process. Going back to what we talked about, what was the business goal that everyone in the business can align to? How do you rally around that statement? We wanted to increase sales on our website. We designed a program to do this. Here’s the uncovered trends that we found, and here’s the small changes we put in place, and here is the outcome. Doing those over and over again in that cycle when you can explain that thought process and what you were trying to accomplish, maybe the revenue impact, the loyalty impact, the loss of revenue, any type of metrics that you can share, that’s really what’s going to help you prove the value of the CX program.
Understanding Your Audience
Something to think about is who are you telling this story to? You have to think about the stakeholders and how to talk to them and what they really care about.
Head of Contact Center
If you’re going to talk to the head of the contact center, you probably want to identify the reasons for calls that are going to the call center and what you can do from a digital perspective to reduce that cost. And trust me, the contact center will advocate for you. They will be highly supportive because it’s their incentive to reduce those call drivers as well. So you’re helping them look good, and it becomes a partnership. And you can break down those silos in your business by connecting the digital to the operations.
Head of Product
Head of product. If you’re talking to the head of product, what they might care about is digital products. They want them to be easy to use, they want them to be intuitive, they don’t want any issues. They want to drive more adoption. They want to repeat, loyalty members and usage of the product. So when you want to win them over, you may want to share here’s how customers are using our product today. Here’s how customers are being impacted by those pain points, and here’s where our adoption goals as a business are not being met. So then being able to make those customer-driven suggestions to drive into the roadmap is going to speak to them.
Head of Finance
Head of finance, this is a big one. This is the one where they will easily tell you if you’re going to have a CX program or not because they’re the ones that are funding it. So you want to think about them, think about the finance leader who wants to reduce the operational costs. They want to reduce the cost to serve. They want to optimize our resources and optimize our investments. So really getting down to the brass tacks of the revenue is what they’re going to care about. And you want to show how those CX wins, those small wins that Chris talked about, is going to help the business grow in those areas or reduce the cost for our operations. So speak their language and be able to quantify everything.
Building Trust and Breaking Silos
And that is what’s going to allow you to build this cycle of trust across all these stakeholders. And it also will break down silos and get everyone aligned into why this program matters and why there needs to be like a tiger team centered around always thinking about the changes that these programs can make to improve the bottom line overall.
Partnership Approach
These are really great points, Jess. One thing I want to call out that I don’t think I’ve touched on very much is when you’re talking to these partners, I would really, really recommend that you talk to them in a sense of partnership, not talking at them or giving them something to do, right? You want to work in partnership with them to succeed in each of their individual areas, right? ‘Cause that’s the power of these CX tools is that everyone can succeed with them. Everyone’s jobs can be made easier, but you want to partner with them. You want to bring them into the fold. You want to be their best friends.
Importance of Collaboration
And actually, we did a webinar the other week where the contact center person owner said that their best friend was the digital experience owners and they met regularly and shared feedback, they shared metrics, they just had casual conversations because they were partnered together to improve the experience. But good stuff, Jess. This is really, really good information how to talk to stakeholders.
Key Takeaways
All right, so a couple of key takeaways here. My first thing that I want to clarify that we talked about very beginning. 30, 60, 90, 120, just a guideline, but a nice guideline to follow. The second one, metrics are not everything, but they are important to understand how you’re tracking. Your metrics should be applicable to your business goal or your outcome when you’re setting up your program. A third one here is like telling your story, partnering with your stakeholders. Telling your story with data, with feedback that you can get from Medallia, it will be very powerful to the narrative that you’re trying to share with your team. And the last takeaway here again is partner with your stakeholders. Become friends with them. Understand what they’re going through, what’s important to them so that you can talk their language when you need to. This was great. Chris, I’m glad we were able to do this today. And the teams out there running their own CX programs, no matter what level you’re at, if you’re the head of CX, if you’re a digital product owner, if you are a head of call center, think about how you can tell this story and the framework that we’ve given you today; it really can work anywhere. So I really hope that we can change some mindsets here in using this 30, 60, 90-day plan so that at the 120-day mark you really have results to show for your program.
