The human edge in B2B customer experience - Interview with Anna Falcon of MCA Connect

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today I have Anna Falcon, who is the VP of CX Transformation at MCA Connect, which is a Grant Thornton company, apparently. Anyway, Anna, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Thanks, Adrian. I'm doing very well. Very excited to be here, finally. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Now, for the benefit of our people that are tuning in and listening to this episode or people that may be reading the highlights, can you give me a bit of a thumbnail sketch on you and the work that you do? Yeah, would love to. So I'm an industrial and systems engineer by trade and training.

0:36So hyper focused, very interested in, you know, designing and optimizing systems and the flow of work. I started my career in manufacturing on the shop floor doing operational excellence, commercial excellence, continuous improvement. But I've spent the better part of the past two decades in management consulting and technology consulting, specifically in the front office and customer space. So advising enterprise organizations on their customer strategy and how to deliver transformation with respect to their front office customer sales service, etc. So now I'm the VP, as you said, VP of MCA, Customer Experience Transformation at MCA Connect, which is now a Grant Thornton company.

1:24Grant Thornton being one of the largest advisory firms in the world. But at MCA Connect, we deliver ERP, CRM, data, and AI solutions on the Microsoft platform. My team, the customer experience team, again, focuses on customer engagement, CRM, sales, service, marketing on the Power Platform. So we deliver customer advisory services, just customer strategy and tech strategy, and then deliver Microsoft solutions. Perfect. It's a very exciting time in the space. It's changing every day, it seems. And sometimes it's hard to keep up. But we were talking in the run-up to the podcast, and as this happens many times, people say different things to me, and I go, oh, that's interesting.

2:12Maybe we should explore that. And so there was a few things. I made some notes when we spoke, and I wanted to explore some of the things that you said. And one of the things you said where I wanted to start with was that you said that B2B firms must deliver B2C level experiences or lose relevance. And so I wanted to ask you to unpack that a little bit for me because oftentimes the conversation in the experience space is dominated by consumer experiences. But you're talking about B2B experiences. And I want to just understand what do you mean by this? They must deliver this C-level experiences, B2B firms that is, or lose relevance.

2:57Can you help me understand what you mean by that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I've been working primarily with B2B organizations and MCA Connect especially. We're focused on industrial manufacturing distribution. And that being said, what we are seeing, what we've seen for many years now, really, as technology just keeps on evolving and advancing exponentially more rapidly, is that there is no such thing as kind of B2B customers versus B2C customers anymore. Right. Because B2B customers are also just humans right at work. Sure. So they are not benchmarking your B2B organization against your B2B competitor.

3:47They're benchmarking their experience with your company against the best experiences that they're having with any companies in, you know, both at work and at home. Right. So I see that with my clients all of the time, you know, from heavy equipment manufacturers to, you know, even explosive manufacturers, right? And they talk about the technology and the applications that they want for their customers to interact with their business. And they, they reference, you know, the Starbucks app or the Delta app, you know, completely different industry. So expectations are just, I think, breaking down industry barriers, breaking across industry barriers.

4:26And you can't expect your B2B customer to be able to manage personal procurement and finances and tracking and transportation all seamlessly through an app, but then come to work and then deal with your organization through disconnected portals and offline tools. Or software that looks like Lotus Notes or something. Exactly. No shade on Lotus Notes back in the day. Oh, gosh. Yeah. It's a very exciting time that we don't see as much of that. So that is why I think companies now are having to differentiate on the experience and not just the product, whatever that product is, whether it's a B2B product or industrial product, it's all about the experience that they're providing.

5:15Okay. and now with ai kind of in the you know in this ai era that's that's i think accelerating that pressure and kind of making that pressure more eminent i mean there you mentioned ai and i wanted i wondered how long it would go until we kind of mentioned kind of like ai and the um it's i didn't get too far yeah it feels like right now like the discussion is most is surrounds almost like, oh, we just add AI and everything's going to be better. But that's not strictly true, right? Right. I think that's the biggest misconception that to me and my line of work just makes it very challenging for organizations is to have that kind of belief and that pressure that you can just add AI.

6:03I think, like I was just saying, I think AI is an amplifier of the experience that you are currently, you know, set up to deliver or delivering. For organizations that do have, you know, a customer experience that's supported by a business that's connected, that's customer centered, and that their employees are adopting and really delivering on, then that, you know, that's a solid foundation to kind of layer AI and amplify that experience and that system that's working. If you don't have that, if you have fragmented systems, lots of functional silos, then I think trying to layer AI within or on top of each of those just exacerbates the silos.

6:50We also see lots of reports. Obviously, the potential and the technology is quite mind-blowing in places and exciting as well in many regards. But we also see lots of news of people getting it wrong and spending lots of money and spending lots of time and effort, but they fail to deliver value. I mean, there's lots of research out there that says this. I mean, why do you think that so many of these AI initiatives are failing to deliver value? Yeah, I think, you know, as I just mentioned, if you've got, if you don't have that foundation of kind of connectivity amongst your functions and your systems already, and you try to layer AI on top of that.

7:39I mean, I think that you, again, see AI kind of fail your organization at the enterprise level, right? So if you, you know, if sales has one version of your customer, and then, you know, order management and operations fulfillment, they have different data on that customer, you know, transportation, completely disconnected, inventory, you know, disconnected only through ERP, and then you just try to implement AI within customer service and give your service rep AI, then that is still not reconciling all of the fragmentation across the enterprise, right? So I think that when organizations try to try to drive AI initiatives just within kind of a department or a function or on top of just one system, then they fail to realize the value from that.

8:31Do you think it's also maybe that there's a human element to this as well? The cultural and organizational kind of like structure element to this. I mean, cause you mentioned right at the, at the top of our conversation, you mentioned something around sort of front office and how the front office used to be almost like a split that you got sales, you got marketing, you got service, but actually people talk about the unification of the front office, but then oftentimes they're focused just on systems, right? And sort of data and things, but actually that's getting those systems and that data sort of integrated.

9:08That's only part of the puzzle, right? There's a cultural dimension to this as well, isn't there? Yeah, absolutely. And I do think organizations still, they underestimate the human component, as you mentioned. And that's why one thing about not just AI transformation, but just technology transformation and enablement in general, is when you are starting to take a look at how to transform and evolve your technology and your business, you have to start with the end to end customer lifecycle and customer value chain. So from initial engagement with a prospective customer and the experience that you're delivering in the market all the way through attaining a customer and then delivering to them and then servicing, etc.

9:59That needs to be the lens to which for what, again, all enterprise technology enablement needs to be looked at through. And then certainly layering AI on top of that, you need to start with the end-to-end kind of customer value chain and end-to-end customer transformation. And can I just dig into that a little bit? Because you're starting with the customer, but that's starting with the customer and having everybody involved in that sort of discussion, because that's where you get the alignment, right? Because you can't just say, it's done by somebody and they're looking across the piece, but then, I don't know, service goes off and does something else and sales goes off and does something else.

10:42You almost have to have everybody aligned around that sort of vision and that journey and what you need to do at different points. And then think about the kind of the tools and technology you need to almost to deliver, I feel like, that vision. Yeah, honestly, that is transformation step number one, I would say, when we think about how to approach transformation, whether it be, whether you're looking at it as a CRM transformation or AI, but CX, right? CX transformation. Step one is to be business-led and value-driven. And that's not just one department of the business, but enterprise level, who needs to be involved, identifying the right business stakeholders, you know, to then come together and optimize around the customer and not design and optimize just for their department.

11:41And of course, it's, you know, easier said than done, not saying that you need representation from every single, you know, core business unit or business function. But when we work with clients on CX and we have initial meetings with just IT or just service or sales enablement, we flag almost immediately, right, that you've got upstream internal customers and also upstream functions and dependencies and downstream as well. And they're all working with the same customer and therefore need kind of that same customer 360 view, the same connected data platform. And you want to have as many of those relevant stakeholders, representation of those functions, be active stakeholders and sponsors in your transformation.

12:39and is that what you mean when you say to be successful that you need to put and or keep humans at the center of the uh of transformation you have to start with the customer but you also have to get all the internal customers or stakeholders involved and then they have to be because only when you have an agreed vision and agreed way of working and the agreed set of practices of how we're going to work together that's that that's the thing that you have to get right in order to be successful or to build that foundation for success. That's exactly right. Yeah. When I say, again, feel very passionately about keeping, even when you're talking technology in the current technology obsessed world, you got to have humans at the center of that.

13:24And there's two sides of that. There is the customer that's ultimately who you're looking to deliver for, but then it's the humans delivering to them And focusing on what it is these humans are trying to accomplish, both the customer and your employees. And it's such an easy pitfall. I work even with some of my own teams sometimes. I see teams rushing to start mapping out the process and start with a customer case. How do we open a case? And what's all of the data we need to capture? And then how does it need to flow versus who's the customer? What's happening? Well, a customer is, you know, their production line is stopped.

14:13Right. So if that's the case, what are all of the things that we would need to know immediately? How could we identify this proactively? What's the information, all of the relevant information that we would want surfaced to us and that we could proactively communicate? It drives different ideas. It drives the transformation and innovation and, again, ultimately delivers a much better customer experience than thinking just about optimizing cases and orders and opportunity flows. It feels like the people default to doing the easy work, which almost is the technical work rather than doing the human work, which can require discussion and time and commitment and sometimes a little bit of friction in order for us to get that alignment, if you like.

15:09Right. But it seems like you almost need to spend time understanding the problem before you try and fix it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, and I think it's kind of aligned to, you know, to punk CX that especially with manufacturers and industrial organizations that have very, very complex inner workings, you know, then they approach CX from the lens of all of this complexity. But at the end of the day, just starting with the customer and trying to hide the complexity from them and think, instead of what can I introduce or automate to make things work, what can I just remove altogether? Because at the end of the day, how do we just get the right intelligence, the right information to the customer or to us that delivers a much more seamless experience?

15:58And so do you have a couple of examples, firms that you've maybe worked with that you can tell us about, obviously, that you think have approached things in the right way? that they're transforming their experience they deliver to their customers, they're up-leveling their experience to this more of a B2C sort of grade of performance and some of the challenges that they've faced and what they've done to overcome and to bring some of this human-led approach to life. Yeah, yeah. I can think of a couple really strong examples. One, just that I think that they really did something unique from the human-centered standpoint that we were talking about.

16:46And this was a few years ago. And, of course, technology has evolved so much since then. But they were evolving, transforming their contact center services company that grew extremely rapidly through acquisition over a very short period of time. And they essentially underwent a customer service technology transformation very effectively because they did some of the things that we described. It was business-led. There was a kind of multifaceted transformation office that really kind of ran the transformation based on value drivers and not on features and functions of technology, but really the experience for their service reps.

17:31In parallel, though, what was really great to work on, because it was just as big a work stream or a project, I would say, as the technology implementation, was the change management and the human culture. the culture. They called it our contact center of the future culture transformation, where there were initiatives driven at every single one of their sites that were not anything to do with training. Not, you know, looking at their metrics and scorecards and things, they looked to streamline them, make them, you know, two to three metrics at that. And to really just understand what are our service reps friction points every single day, whether they're technology related or whether it's facilities and coffee related, right?

18:24So it was really just placing again, the human at the center of that project in parallel to trying to take advantage of the latest and greatest contact center systems and technologies. So again, multifaceted, You've got to put humans at the center and think of all of the dimensions of what you're trying to enable and deliver. Do you have some insight into the performance uplift that they got from that program? Yeah. So really, in terms of growth, I mean, they continue to grow so rapidly, again, both organically and by acquisition. But what was a really telling, I think, CX metric, I mean, their CSAT did improve, you know, by many points.

19:11But one of the most, the key metric that I take away from that transformation is their attrition of their service reps went from 200 % to less than 60, which in that business is, well, for one, just that improvement, that level of improvement within a year is just unbelievable. unbelievable. But then in that space too, I think that that's very telling of how obviously the culture, but how the technology clearly enabled the reps, right? To do their jobs better and to deliver better. And so now I know that they are now introducing a lot more AI and a lot more, you know, service rep assistance and intelligence and automation.

19:55And they've got that foundation to do that, right? So if they had been themselves from six years ago, there is no way they could layer AI on top of what they had, right? Sure. And do you have another example? Another example is, well, more kind of macro level, what we're seeing that's great about what organizations are going through. And it is both, it's great also kind of rooted in unfortunate learnings from the past, right? Is that we've seen that as AI has come on the scene, multiple organizations have tried it and tried it and failed and rebooted and failed. And so now we are seeing more thoughtful approaches.

20:39We're seeing them ask the same questions that you are about what is the foundation that you have to have? Why are organizations failing? And what do we have to learn from not just our industry, but across, you know, across industries, across enterprises? What do we have to learn about how to transform from a CX and technology perspective? And when you say kind of a more thoughtful approach, does that mean that they are learning lessons, but what are they fundamentally doing differently? Are they starting with the customer working backwards rather than just implementing the technology and then turning the handle and seeing what happens.

21:17They are open to that. So we come and bring that customer lens, right? Because it's difficult within an organization. Who is the leader? What is the function that really does the customer journey mapping and experience design, right? It's hard to find, But that is what they're looking for. And when I say more thoughtful, too, it's not just looking at, again, cost and metrics within their function. It is what is our enterprise AI strategy or enterprise data strategy? And, you know, what is what we're doing all aligned to that overarching strategy? So being more thoughtful around that alignment and what success looks like at the enterprise level.

22:11Okay, perfect. I mean, it sounds like there's hope, as it were, if people take a bit more of a thoughtful approach and put people at the center of it that are both customers and employees because those are the two things that need to kind of mesh together to produce the outcomes. I think that every business wants to, kind of wants to drive. Yeah. But I think, so that's kind of, that's where, I mean, that's where, well, that's come to the end of, you know, my main questions. But I wanted to ask, is there anything else that you'd like to highlight or add that we've missed out before we ask you some quick fire questions to finish up?

22:52Yeah. I think, again, just really exciting times. what I hope that has come out from this conversation or what I hope that more listeners and more organizations start to see is that customer technology and CRM, those are evolving from, they're not just systems and systems of record and things that you're just introducing into your business because all businesses have them. They are, they're enablers to intelligence their systems of intelligence they should tell you what's happening in your business and and what to do next and if that's the lens that you apply i think that to your cx transformation i think that saves you know a lot of just kind of frivolous like looking at features and functionality and um you know a lot of costly assessment and analysis and it helps organizations to to just lay the foundation, lay the data foundation that they need.

23:53Perfect. So quick fire questions now. So I always kind of ask people, because we talk about different sort of things, I always ask people to boil things down so they give me their best advice. And the way I've been doing that of late is to ask them to complete this sentence. And the sentence is this, if you want to improve your customer or employee experience, Anna says, do this. Complete that sentence, Anna. Start with the human, sit with the human, right? Sit with, you know, if we're talking about customers, sit with customers, do ride-alongs, you know, do your mystery shopper due diligence and start with what's the customer trying to achieve.

24:36Or sit with your employee. You know, you're an IT leader, if you're a CTO, sit with a sales rep, you know, and experience what they're experiencing day to day. Perfect. I love that because it sort of speaks to the thing that I talk about. I talk about these, there's almost like this piece of approaches to leadership, right? And it's like, there's, I describe things as having three levels. And I said, I say that level one sort of is where we use data to inform us and then level two is that we is where we use on top of that we use stories to move us because it adds color and context to things yeah but the third level is where i describe it as being experience compels us because when you sit with something or you see something or you can see somebody struggling with something you can't can't unsee it or unexperience it.

25:30And actually it compels you to one oftentimes see things differently, but it also compels you to do things differently as well. Yeah. We sometimes do the start with the inverse, right? But we build those exact same layers. We and we say, sit, sit with the human, map out the experience. Then, you know, what are the, what are all of the processes and the specific activities and the things that you do in order to deliver or shape that and then what's the data and the technology underpinning it absolutely nice so second quick fire question is is a punk related one obviously um and so here goes what company or brand do you think takes a more punk approach to customer experience and why I immediately think of a company that is not a client, although I would love for them to be.

26:26But it's Chewy, the pet food and pet medicine. Okay. So they have taken just an extremely human-centered approach to customer service. Very punk, I would say. They do some of what I described that our contact center client did around. they hire people to be customer service reps without any training they hire they say they hire happy pet loving people right and then they empower those people to do whatever they need to do obviously within reason to deliver a wow experience to their customers and so i've you know starting a couple of years ago you would see just trending everyone's social media and also the Wall Street Journal, right, of how Chewy will, you know, they'll recognize or they'll speak to a customer who has stopped their pet food description because their pet has passed.

27:18And then they will, you know, make donations of pet food and their pet's name. And then they'll deliver flowers and a card and things of that nature to their customers. Very, I mean, not technologically, you know, savvy or automated or digitally enabled at all, right? It's very human. I think it's a lesson to be learned for sure around what you say around punk CX is as companies and our world gets more technologically savvy, I think it's the human, the more genuine, just basic, genuine human interactions are going to really become differentiating. I mean I love that it's more of a case of that you're hiring people because they are one aligned with your brand and passionate about the um the if you like the constituency that you're trying to serve you know pet owners and maybe they probably are pet owners themselves right with with the belief that that'll carry over if you equip them with the skills to serve other people that are of a you know similar passions as it were exactly perfect um and so my final question before we wrap up, tell me a good news story.

28:32Tell me something that's, you know, let's stop and we end on a human note, let's say. Tell me one of the most interesting or positive or exciting things that you've seen in the last week. Yeah, I think personally and, you know, in my line of work, you know, our company, MCA, has been acquired by Grant Borton. That started in July and what I've, or closed in July. And what I've seen is immediate, you know, partnership and collaboration and how we're talking about customer to clients. Because again, I come from, this is a MCA is we have deep, deep technology and solution expertise. And then also, you know, the customer advisory around how to leverage our solutions.

29:15Grant Thornton comes with, you know, much more upstream kind of access and agendas to what's really keeping, you know, business leaders up at night. And so to what we were talking about, about meeting all of the right stakeholders in the room to collaborate on tech strategy, we're able to just have those bigger, better conversations around organizational strategy and then the technology enablement of that. It's really exciting to see. It's really motivating for my people, like for my team, you know, where it feels like we're doing big, meaningful things. And so that brings it back to the human as well, right?

30:02As there's a lot more kind of collaboration, innovation and meaningful work being done, you know, we're able to deliver a lot more value and outcomes for our clients. which is great. Perfect. Thank you so much. I mean, so I know that's all I have for today. And I just want to say thank you for, well, congratulations on the work that you do and, you know, transforming a whole bunch of the B2B sort of space because let's face it, many of them need it. And yeah. And thank you for sharing your time, your expertise and your insight with me today. That's been great. Same to you, Adrienne. Thanks. That's been a pleasure.

30:50Wow, what a great interview. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I did. Find out more about me and the work that I do at adrienswinsko.com. Do leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you have any comments, feedback or questions about the podcast, then feel free to send me a message to podcast at adrienswinsko.com. And do tune in again. Thanks very much.

31:15You