I’m really happy to be featured as CX Accelerator‘s Community Member Spotlight for November!
Click here to go through to the Community Spotlight page or just read my interview below 😊
Greetings Kaye! Tell us where you are in your CX career right now?
I started off, like many of us do, in my teens on the phones myself. The contact center I started out in wasn’t the best, had zero knowledge resources and no training program, and nobody really had a clue what we were meant to be telling customers. Needless to say we weren’t providing good service at all.
So I coded a basic knowledge hub for the team with the HTML I’d learned from designing terrible teenage Geocities websites. I took on training duties, coaching and mentoring other staff, and doing quality assurance. And I kicked off programs to measure and improve KPIs, built out a VoC program, and implemented continuous improvement processes, using those to feed back into training and development plans for staff so we were measurably improving.
Since then I’ve worked in a variety of different organisations in the private and public sector, designing and delivering customer-centric learning programs for staff of all kinds, although my heart definitely lies in the contact center. I now manage Learning & Development for Comm100, a customer engagement software company. I work with our contact center clients to get their staff beautifully trained on our software and handling customer queries with ease.
Are you a CX practitioner or an ally?
In my work with Comm100, I primarily design learning solutions for the agents, managers, system admins and project managers who are all learning to work with our software. Those solutions could be training courses, videos, reference guides and more. I never interact with the customers that our clients serve, but I definitely consider the experience of those customers in everything that I do!
When designing I have a few aims in mind. First, how take what I know about contact center work and learning to make it as easy as possible for staff to use our software? Then, what extra hints and tips can I give from my experience as an agent and in CX that I know will result in really outstanding customer outcomes?
It takes a bit of thinking outside the box to not just talk about features of our software on a surface level, but to demonstrate how they can be exploited to maximum advantage, making things easier for agents and allowing them to give their very best to customers.
What have been some CX highlights for you so far?
I’m a big proponent of social learning at work. When we look at how learning occurs throughout history, often we see social learning at play, with apprentices and craftspeople, for example, showing how skills can be passed down and kept alive through generations of people learning together. So in our workplaces I’m very concerned with creating the tools, processes and communication flows to allow people to do the same.
I consider CX Accelerator to be like a modern, online version of that, on a community scale and allowing even geographically disparate people to learn from each other. So it’s been amazing for me to be a part of the CX Accelerator community facilitator team and see social learning in action, helping community members build relationships, pick up skills and grow bonds that I know will serve them throughout their careers.
What’s next for you?
I’m hoping to take what I’ve learned from the CX Accelerator community and apply it to creating our very own customer learning community!
How are you doing CX even if your job title doesn’t say it?
CX and Learning & Development (L&D) are both undergoing parallel shifts in understanding, and I’m sitting at the intersection of these changes.
We’re realising that EX is at the root of CX. That of course our employees won’t be serving customers at their best if they’re given poor tools, if they have to follow broken processes, if they’re deep in silos or if they’re not rewarded or developed enough.
At the same time, L&D has changed. Once, training courses were viewed as the answer to most performance issues at work. Now, we’re realising that often that’s a sticky-plaster approach as often people aren’t enabled to learn, grow and do their best work in the first place. So the focus for L&D pros has shifted and we’re increasingly working to provide the tools, systems and communication flows for people to improve their working processes, learn from each other and get the feedback they need to grow.
In my world on the vendor side, we can’t control a lot of the experience our client’s employees have in their workplaces and how those experiences impact on customers. But what we can do is implement technology, give best practices and help clients build effective implementations that take the strain off a whole host of other workplace problems, and we’re primarily seeing those benefits achieved through customer- and agent-side automation right now.
Finally – imagine you have your own late night talk show. Who would you invite as your first guest?
Ever since I was a kid I’ve thought that the late great Robin Williams is probably one of the funniest people who has ever existed. Now, I’ve started doing a little stand-up comedy and I’ve grown to appreciate what a gifted comedian he was. So I would definitely choose him (and if I could book Jim Carrey too I’d be delighted!)
Originally published on CX Accelerator.
