The Role of VoC at Amdocs

Foreign.

Hello. Welcome to another edition of the Account Experience Podcast. I'm here with Dave Barber, who's joining me in Amsterdam today. How you doing, Dave?

Good afternoon, Adam. Not doing too badly, thank you. How are you?

Oh, great. Sort of. Holidays are sort of over a bit, so I'm really pleased to be back in the city I love, and also really delighted today. We got a guest who's dialing from Israel today. It's Shaki Ben Sasson. He's basically an organizational psychologist. I'm really curious to find out what that is, Shaki. So, but you've been in customer experience for a long time, and you're with amdocs, which is a company that delivers services for communications and media, and it's a pretty big company. I mean, it's in the billions of revenue listed on nasdaq, so really want to hear about how you've been running the program. So welcome to Account Experience Podcast. Shaky. How are you doing?

Thank you. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Dave, for having me. Delighted to be here.

Welcome.

Hey, so first of all, what's an organizational psychologist doing in customer experience? What is an organizational psychologist?

Yeah, that's. That's one of the questions that, you know, I always get. So wait a second, you're a psychologist. So, I mean, do you, like, have, I don't know, employees talking to you about problems? No, absolutely not. I do, but, you know, just like. Just like each and every one of you. Right. So do I have customers talking about their mommy daddy issues? No, absolutely not. Sometimes they do, but that's not what this is all about, by the way.

That's not how I expected this day to go, getting customers to talk about daddy issues. But I really like the direction that we're going. So tell me more about that, as.

Much as you can handle.

Take a step back, first of all, introduce the company amdocs, and tell us about that. And let's drill a bit more further into your role in there.

So amdocs has a fascinating story, a fascinating history, and I think even a more fascinating future, really. What Amdocs started out a bit over 30 years ago is from the Yellow Pages industry. Do you remember the days that we used to.

It's what people used to get a couple inches taller.

Right.

Exactly.

That millennials won't get this, but they used to say, let your fingers do the walking. Remember?

Exactly.

I beg to differ there, Adam. I know what I remember that you're.

On with the boomers now, Dave.

All right.

Sorry, Jackie.

So, yeah, I'm having a blast so really what this or what amdocs started out is, hey, we have this great software and think COBOL, the early 80s.

Oh yeah, software.

That software world, not this era of cloud and DevOps and whatnot we're talking about. Here's are software that can actually optimize your yellow or white pages in a way that could bring you a lot of profit, which was patented and everything. And that's how it started. But unlike many companies that have, they lay a golden egg and then, okay, what now?

Right?

What are we going to do? Amnox managed to lay, you know, even bigger egg when it got into billing and add that to the invention of mobile and further on, you know, mobile, Internet, 3G, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not where we are today. But that what, you know, really made it explode.

Right.

So kind of the combination of that. So what we do today is really sell software and services to communications, media, financial. And what we really do is basically.

Enable them to service their customers.

I mean, that's a very definition of big B2B, right? It's exactly right for the Account experience podcast here. So can you quantify your customers? I think I'm guessing that you've got some very large customers and some very small. Can you give us some background on that?

Absolutely.

So large and small is always in the eye of the beholder, right? I mean, so for us, any, you know, any one of our smaller accounts would be probably a huge account for, you know, any other company because basically when we look at our largest customers, the largest accounts are basically the communication companies, the biggest ones in the world. So we have customers in 85 countries. And as you would imagine, anywhere you are on earth, really, excluding Antarctica maybe, you would probably be experiencing either a.

Bill or customer engagement or network that is powered by ambox.

You're not necessarily always aware because just.

Like you said, Adam, this really a pure B2B.

But we help our AT&TS and T.

Mobiles and Vodafones, all of those are.

Obviously our huge customers, impact billions, literally billions of people every day, enabling them.

To have an optimized customer experience.

That's really, you know, in a nutshell, fantastic.

Well, I want to get into some of the, how you treat the large customers in a moment, but I want to drag you back to your background. So how did Jackie get into this? I mean, you know, again, the psychology, what was your route into managing customer experience in the business?

So I think that, you know, ever since I started, you know, in university studying psychology, I was really drawn to. So how does that actually work in real life. Right. And by real life, I don't mean, you know, digging into the roots of psychodynamics and Freud, but really more group psychology. And I think the best. I mean, think of how much time we spend. And I'm not even talking about the pandemic, which is a whole, you know, we need a different podcast just on that.

Right.

But how much time do we all spend not just in the office, but working and we work with, know, vis.

A vis other people.

And what does that mean for us as people? And how does that influence, you know, the experience?

The experience we get, the experience we give.

Because obviously, you know, it flows both ways.

Right.

So that's why I was, you know, pretty early on drawn to customer experience, customer service and everything related to that. And at the time before I joined andocs, I was working for Deloitte, small company, you may have heard of them. And at Deloitte, I was working with some of the more international companies that have presence in Israel and in other places, obviously. So intel, tiva, some of the banks, Israeli aviation industry and so on. One of the things that, you know, it's sort of how life leads you, leads you in certain places. I don't, you know, at least I'm assuming I don't sound Israeli, right, With my accent. And the reason is I grew up in the States, so most people, you know, if you don't see my name, which is very Israeli, think, okay, this guy's American. So I did grow up there. And, and what that gave me as an advantage is actually to be able to be bilingual. And for that matter, if you're looking for someone with background in language, in high tech and in psychology, I actually got an offer to come here to amdocs and start this new interesting pilot that they were thinking of. And the whole idea, or how does that connect to the amdocs background is up till the millennium, amdocs was really a market dominator. I mean, it did not have as much competition. There was hardly any a sales department or any sales force.

As hard as it sounds, how could.

A company this big, or even as big as it was, not have any sales or marketing because it was really kind of selling itself. And then when the boom of the millennium turned comes competition and then, okay, maybe we should actually think about customer experience. Let's see, let's check the.

Let's test the waters.

And that's how it started, really started, you know, at the beginning. More of a grassroots movement than something top down. By the book, and, you know, all that jazz.

So how. How did you start off with it all coming. Coming in, completely fresh, coming from. And we see it sometimes in our experience with a monopoly business, if you like, where with not much beforehand. What is your beginning point there? Is it. Is it going out and just researching first, or are you really just capitalizing on what internally is working?

Well, yeah, in the beginning, it was really, okay, why don't we try and sell this idea to account managers? And some of them really embraced the.

Ones that were more mature, said, you.

Know what, this could be really interesting. Let's actually hear what our customers are telling us. And others were saying, yeah, you know, this sounds to me a bit like.

I don't know, internal affairs at the.

Police, you know, we're not sure if we really want to, you know, pull the carpet and see what's under there.

Right.

So.

And once it started gaining momentum and people actually saw, really, wow, that's what they think about us, really. You know, it's, you know, it's kind of like each and every one of us holding a mirror. I'm holding a mirror, and it's like, really, I don't have any hair left. That can't be true.

You talk about psychology, that fear of feedback is so real. I think all of us around, you know, on the podcast, we really feel that. Dave, we get that also with people, our whole time, customers. And so how did you get over that? Shaky. How did you, you know, I think the magic. What was. What did you put in place to make. To make people get over that?

I think the magic in any. And this really goes back to psychology, like the silver bullet is the, you know, what you call in textbooks the wifm.

Right.

The what's in it for me? And it's different from, you know, any point of view. It's different. So if you're, you know, a customer, the only reason why customers will actually do your surveys, give you time to feedback is if they feel they're getting anything out of it.

Otherwise, they're not going to waste their time.

Especially in, you know, thinking B2B more than B2C, you're actually target targeting chief executives. You're competing with, you know, hundreds of other people that want 30 minutes or an hour of their time, and they're not going to give you that time unless two things. One, you really have strong engagement. And the second is obviously, yeah, you.

Know, we're going to actually get something out of it.

The wifm, for if you're thinking the CEO, and it should really be the CEO of your company is talk the money language that, that really speaks much more than words or psychology or any type of metrics that we think are great. But if you're at the C Suite, you're thinking, okay, can you actually tell me what that means for my revenue.

Or for my margins?

And two, how do you actually tie customer feedback?

How do you use customer feedback to shape behavior? Otherwise, why do this at all, right?

If you cannot say, look, I got feedback, and using that feedback, I can.

Actually drive the top and bottom line. I can actually influence behavior.

And it's more of a hobby than a mission, right?

Yeah, sure.

This episode of the Account Experience podcast is sponsored by CustomerGauge, the leading B2B account experience software that ties revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric decisions that drive revenue growth. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail? Believe it or not, it's lack of C suite buy. In CustomerGage's research with MIT, they've found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C suite is to actually align with what they care about most, which is revenue. That's why CustomerGage is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue coming contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken. Yeah, we get a good amount of FreeBear1 login, Iron Mountain, HR Block, SuperOffice, and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue actively being managed in Customer Gauge. Yeah, that's billion with a B. They're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on feedback quickly across multiple departments, divisions, or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well with account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback for multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with the churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department Regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. Customer Gauge's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing. If you want to see Customer Gauge in action, go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. You won't regret it.

The way that you're tying revenue to, to the customer experience outcomes puts you in the most mature segment of what I think of companies out there doing that. We've done recent surveys about this to do that. So congratulations. First of all, that's a really awesome place to be. So what are some of the real results that you've had out of this? How are you able to keep driving this with them? Which I love, by the way, you know, by. To the companies what to the company, what are the stories that you tell people?

So I think it's really, you know, especially the day and age we live in. It's sort of, you know, you wake up in the morning and you know, it's always morning somewhere. If you're working internationally and you need to retell and resell the story, you.

Can'T just rest on your lawyers and.

Say, hey, I have this graph from a year ago that shows how nicely our metrics can predict future revenue. People will say, so what? Okay, that's very nice. You need to show, okay, you know what, here's an account that got feedback on the product, the project, the individuals, and here's what they did. And it actually helped them identify business opportunities. If you know, it's not something that happens every day, right. It's not every day, you know, you stumble upon. Here's a beautiful opportunity.

Right.

But you know that once in.

Is.

What makes people, you know, the aha moment.

Right.

And then I'm assuming that then drives people to want to get more of these responses and more of these feedbacks from their customers and things like that. And is that just on the top ones of your accounts and are you sharing that? If I'm a key account manager for three accounts, are all of my results and feedbacks shared constantly with other key account managers so that everyone can learn?

Absolutely.

We tried to, you know, because in many ways we're so disparate in the sense of, you know, unlike. There are a lot of, you know, real excellent, top ranked companies that have, I don't know, 2, 3, 100, okay, products and, or services and they can.

Say, yeah, we have this product at.

You know, 100 accounts, we have those services at 500. We're not like that because it's such.

A complex business, for good and for bad.

Each and every customer, in a way, is. Has a unique experience.

Right.

So, and obviously add to that the different geographies, the different contracts, the different histories and whatnot. And then in a way, we try to connect the dots and we try to come to management and tell them.

Look, here's the story, here's what you know, here's the picture.

Not just from a revenue perspective. Okay.

Which is important.

But think of what you know, your.

Long term, if you're holding a periscope.

Or you know, to use customer gauges.

You want to have a customer gauge for everything.

You want to have, you know, finance.

Right.

You want to have hr.

And you should have something in the.

Long term, not just for the next quarter.

Right.

Every public company, which of course we.

Are, lives from quarter to quarter. That's how it works.

But how do you actually see a.

Year, two years, five years ahead? Can you actually see that's where customer experience comes in?

Great answer. One of the things that our listeners often tell us about, they really want to hear the mechanics of the program.

Sure.

Let's nerd out for a minute and maybe you can dive in and tell us a little bit about how you are gathering your customer experience, how you're bringing it back into the organization.

Sure.

So it's in a way different pre Covid and post Covid.

Just like a lot of things.

So it's different and similar in weight. The most important thing, and this is, I know, a challenge for us and.

For others is scoping out who is the customer. As dumb as it sounds, of course, the customer is, you know, AT&T or the customer is Vodafone.

Yeah, it is. But how do you actually manage to.

Listen to everyone you need to.

The fact that you deal with one or two or 50 people does not mean that there's not 500 additional people that have a lot of stake in what you do. How do you actually reach out to them? So it's really, what it means is that we go through a heck of a lot preparation to really go on LinkedIn and get org charts and whatnot to make sure we understand who's who in the zoo we try to listen to. Of course, in our industry, the usual suspect would be the IT tower, the cio, the cto. But procurement, marketing, digital, and it's always an evolving world.

They matter Just as much so we.

Definitely try to have a good feel of. Here are the people that we want.

To get feedback from.

And then the next step is like.

We just spoke about.

That is the wifm.

How do we actually get on their calendars?

How do we actually tell them, look.

Guys.

You should give us an hour.

Of your precious time to do this because here's what you get out of it. And what you get out of it is clear and simple.

One, there is an obligation for each.

And one of the amdocs cbe. CBE stands for Customer Business Executive, or in other words, an account manager. Their goal sheet is tied to customer feedback, a component of it. They're not just compensate on sales or ebit, so there's a component.

Second, they have an hourglass that flips after getting the feedback. And they need to get back to.

The customer and work with the customer on forming together an improvement plan that itself is engagement. And that's walking the talk. It's not just, okay, yeah, you gave.

Us feedback and we're going to put in Excel in the PowerPoint and it goes into the wazoo and then, you.

Know, who knows what happened, right?

And a lot of companies that I've, you know, done this before in the.

Past, that's, that's one of the challenges, right? How do you close the loop? So it's not just the generic, yeah.

We listen to you and, you know, we may have done things and stuff. It has to be concrete, it has.

To be signed off by the customer.

And even if, you know, it's not, it's never an idea world. It's never, you know, okay, we're gonna sprinkle some magic powder and you're gonna be happy, you're gonna be loyal, you're.

Gonna grow your business. It's never like that, right? But it's always, how do you find.

The differences between like, we tend to call it closing either the smaller loop, which I think is kind of what you're talking about there. And you know, we get the feedback from the customer, we say what we're going to do about it. It might be more tactical, if you like, with also making sure that you're or strategic loop of saying, right. Six of our top customers have asked us something that will fundamentally change the way we do our business. Is it all valid? How do we get it going? What's our kind of prioritization for it? Or do we stick to our guns? How do you guys kind of process that internally?

Dave, you asked the million dollar question. That's really that's where, you know, we.

And I'm sure it's not just us.

That's where, you know, we have a long way to go.

Right.

If I could say, you know what.

We heard this from our customers and.

We came up with a new groundbreaking.

Service or product that R and D.

Took and then turned it into this and that we fundamentally changed the way we do this process entirely. You know, then, you know, that would be a big attaboy that currently we're not there.

That's where, you know, the program needs.

To definitely, you know, grow.

That's.

That's the biggest challenge.

And like you said, I think a.

Lot of people, you know, and us included, we can show a lot of successes at the account level, even at the company level, but nothing that, you.

Know, is, hey, we learned not just.

On this opportunity here.

So that's where it's at.

Okay, I've got a few nuts and bolts things. So are you treating larger clients same way as smaller clients? How do you distinguish that?

We basically take and scope out.

Okay, here are the large strategic customers we have. And for those large and strategic customers.

We would map, like I told you.

A few minutes ago, we would map out all the stakeholders and make sure.

That we get on their calendars, listen.

To feedback from each and every one of them and obviously supplement it with.

Web surveys that, you know, support all these languages.

Obviously, you know, we have to support that too.

And with that, we make sure that there is a dedicated process that should take us a month end to end to get all the feedback and try.

Also to make sense of it.

Right.

The fact that a lot of this is the classic a lot of customers.

Yeah, you know what, you're too expensive. Okay. You don't need a survey for that.

Right.

No need voice the customer for anything. Say, you know what? Yeah, that's too expensive.

If that's what, you know, if that's the feedback we'll come back with, then.

You know, why are we doing this at all? It's a waste of time, money, right?

So you need to also make sense.

Of it all and understand, you know, just like in any SWOT analysis, this stuff is strategic. Here is, you know, what they're telling us about competition. Here's, you know, the opportunities, here's some threats, here's, you know, the positives, the negatives and whatnot.

And then, okay, so for the large.

Customers, we will go through all that.

Just because obviously, just like any B2B, not all customers are equally, you know, treated.

Right?

And it's. It's much more than that.

It's not just, okay, how much is this customer reeling in annually?

It's obviously the potential. And in that I don't think we.

Differ from anyone else.

If it's, you know, well, we have this small project, but potentially wouldn't it be great to reel this, you know.

Whale in and do so much more than we do? Obviously we would treat it that way.

And for smaller customers, it really is, you know, about. Okay, what type of feedback are we looking for? Are we just looking. Cause if, you know, it's just about the look and feel of them product or the account management, you don't need to use your, you know, heavy guns.

Excuse the metaphor to just, you know, kill an ant.

Okay.

It's just not, you know, cost effective.

Right?

The way it's true, it's appropriate.

It's about appropriate action, right? You know, making sure that you've got the right resources on it. So I'm going to keep going down to the details because I'm a real nerd about this. So how many are you doing it once a year, twice a year, four times a year? What's the sort of cadence that you've got going on with your clients?

So it's a mix. What that means is that in each and every moment in time and unfortunately in Covid, it's really, you know, 3, 65, 24, 7. Because, you know, it's, it's sort of the opposite. It's always five o' clock somewhere, right? It's way past five o' clock here.

And you know, look where I am.

So, yeah, and that's, you know, when you think of it, what that means.

Is that we have customers giving us feedback each and every day of the year.

We have actions being taken on customer.

Feedback each and every day of the year.

So for each account of these accounts, we will survey them, you know, once a year. And by survey I mean the whole nine yards. I mean basically we will go through.

That interview of 45 minutes or more and understand and get to the bottom of everything.

Then six months after, they would just get a survey. One question that asks, which is really.

More of a pulse survey, to what extent that they feel that their feedback was acted upon.

We have that check, but obviously it's not. We try to limit the amount of.

Over surveying, which is, you know, always, always a challenge.

And we try not to just make it a survey.

Right.

I mean the, the best compliment that, you know, we can get.

And we do get that and I.

Have it on record, even Is, you know what? We typically don't take surveys, we typically.

Don'T do interviews, but we actually do.

It with you because we know, you.

Know, it means something and that type of stuff.

It's really cool.

That's the money quote right there. Shaki, you love to hear that.

So, yeah, I mean, one thing you touched upon as well as, you know, trying to close that, you know, improve the way you like, close that strategic loop and things like that, what is next for the next one year, two years of the program, you know, obviously hitting quarter, quarter, quarter, but that long term vision, what, what do you have for the program going forward?

One of the things that, and I'd love to hear your, your take on it too, Dave and Adam is how do we actually use voice of the customer? Not just for revenue, which we're doing.

For years and having all types of.

But how do we actually use big data? How do we take voice of the customer and marry it with any of.

The operational data that we have in disparate systems?

Because we're not even at a maturity level. And obviously, just like other big companies, we made and will be making a lot of acquisitions.

Right.

So what that means is that, okay.

We bought this company, some companies were.

Pretty big, let's take a pretty big acquisition.

We had, we bought Converse, used to be a competitor, open it, used to be a competitor. And Those are just two out of more than 10.

How do we integrate everything?

How do we get the operational data, whether it's the tickets, whether it's jira.

Whether it's anything we've got, and then.

Say, you know what, here's something we can sense.

Right.

In terms of.

I think that's often the silver bullet that we hear people looking for a lot at the moment.

Right.

And I think that's, that's the direction we're going in terms of saying, right. What is the health of this account at any given point in time and is that an accurate indicator? I think that's always the thing that we're always striving towards. Adam. I know we've spoken about it a lot in the past as well.

Yeah, this is my helping horse, actually, because of course things like NPS and other stats are really important, but I think engagement is more important than anything. And you really touched upon the shaky earlier on. It's about having that sort of constant dialogue with your key accounts. You've got to keep that up. When you don't get that, you have these periods of radio silence or, you know, white space or dark matter. Call it what you will, those are the things you've got to watch out for. And actually most software tools are not very good at highlighting those. Even as humans, we're not very good at spotting absence of signal. So that's one of the things that we're most concerned about, about making sure that you get all these, you know, all these information streams. But when things go quiet, that's when you need to be alerted and you need to be brought into the packet. I think surveys are going to be around for a while. They're very high bandwidth way of calibrating the rest of the data set. And you sound like you've got a fantastic program there, shaky to do that. So I just can only see that that will be the expansion for you guys. But that's great to hear that you're thinking about that. Great story you've told us about this. I really love some of the things that you spoke about, like wifm, that's a word I've learned today. I love that. What's in it for me? And the way that you're tying things back to feedback, you know, the bonus. That's fantastic. Shaki, how can people reach you if they want to ask you more about this?

Well, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. You could definitely find me. There's, I think only one person that I know on LinkedIn with my exact name. So I'm the one that looks like.

This and works for ambox.

That's the easy way to tell. And yeah, I'd love for anyone to reach out if there's any questions, comments, ideas, anything.

What a wonderful way to end that. I really get something in it for me today. Saki, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for joining Can Experience podcast. Take care and talk to you soon.

Thank you very much.

Thanks guys.

Bye bye.

Hey Dave, it was great to speak to Jackie, wasn't it?

Well, that was absolutely fascinating.

I really like to. So the thing, I wrote down loads of notes during that, this thing about the wifim, what's in it for me and the way he was talking about how that works inside his company, that's how he motivated people to do it, but also how it works for the customers as well.

Yeah, 100%. Also who's who in the Zoo was.

Another one of my favorite ones. I really.

That goes to really show a good point about. It's not just about blasting surveys out or just hoping for responses. You need to know who you're getting feedback from and then what to do with it from there. And I think the way that they do that, that's a real credit to them. So I think, you know, doing, doing it right if you're one of their customers and that they're really putting the effort into finding out who you are and then then following up and completing.

The loop as well.

Yeah, I think it's rare that companies have such a mature CX program. So I think it was a really, really good learnings that we got from check it. And also I think amdocs customers must be pretty lucky as well. And I like the thing he said also about, you know, they survey people after the closed loop to say to what extent was the feedback enacted. I love that more companies should do that. And you know, we don't normally do this, but we fill in your survey. So I thought that was really nice.

Yeah.

Cool. Okay. Another great Can Experience podcast. Hey listen, looking forward to our next one. You know, we've got coming up next. Yeah, I've secured Maurice Fitzgerald.

Fantastic.

So we are looking forward to talking to him about the future of customer experience and probably getting into a tussle about Net Promoter, yes or no, things like that. That should be quite good.

So stick around.

By the way, if you are enjoying the content from the Account Experience podcast, please do not hesitate to subscribe and also rate us. We'd like that. That helps us spread the word and recommend us to your friends. Till the next time. Catch up with you soon.

Cheers now.

Bye.