Transforming Customer Experience: The Intwinely Approach

Today's episode, I am joined with Amy Ryttel from Intwinely.com, and she looks at how customer experience intertwines with business operations. You know, we spoke a lot in the past episodes about customer experience and, and how that is important, but Amy's approach to this makes a lot of sense. And when you listen to this episode, I want to put this out there, that if you're thinking, hey, this is a lot to take on, her tip that we spoke about after the recording was you can actually just take on a little bit at a time. You don't have to take the whole thing on. And by improving every single micro step of the customer experience can have a positive impact on your return on investment and your bottom line. So, let's hop right in and let's talk with Amy.

Amy, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about customer experience and how important that is for businesses.

Thank you so much for having me, Shaun.

I know we talked a lot, or I've talked a lot in other episodes about customer experience, the journey and everything goes. But what you do with your clients is you talk to the clients, find out their experience, and then you help the business actually, I guess, model or, or change their operations to leverage that. Is that correct?

Absolutely. There's a lot of different things that go into customer experience, right? We know it's a buzz term. We know that there are job postings all over the place. We see it in articles, we see it on LinkedIn. But what really drives me about customer experience and why I do what I do is that customer experience is really every single touchpoint that a customer comes in contact with. With a brand or a service, right? But what often gets left on the side or is left to a different department to really kind of take a look at as well, and the two are not intertwined, hence my company name, is the aspect of how operations and employee engagement really come to play. So let me give you an example. You have a team who is responsible for bringing various products or services to market. However, if multiple teams within your organization are siloed or the engagement is down or people are missing their deadlines, they're missing their KPIs. All of those warning signs ultimately mean that there's other systemic issues that are going on inside. That could be that the teams are not set up correctly. They don't have the right tools in place. They don't have the right operations in place. And all of these things ultimately are impacting your end customer. But because your employees are really the heartbeat of what brings products and services to your customers, If we don't figure out what's impacting our employees and the processes and tools that they need, it's going to be a lot harder to bring the best customer experience to life.

That makes sense. How, how would a company go about even identifying that there is a, probably a disconnect or a problem there?

Sure. There's generally some warning signs or key terms or words that I'm listening for from a client. Their ROI on marketing has not been as strong as it used to be. So you're getting in your customers at the top of the funnel, but they're not making their way through, or they're disengaging with you halfway through that, that marketing funnel, right? There could be situations internally where employee retention all of a sudden starts to become a problem. You start to have bad word of mouth referrals, both from your employees as well as your customers, whether that's on social media or platforms like Nextdoor. But all of these things, you start to have to listen to the way that in which people are talking and what they're talking about, because they're generally saying it from an emotional state or a state in which they're not happy. But my goal is to help companies to start to get proactive about this and monitor all of these pieces of feedback early on and often so that you're not having to clean up those fires later on.

Now, you mentioned about like disengaged employees, right? So internal issues. Now, I'm sure most businesses will look at their customers and they do, you know, reviews and customer surveys. How do you go about finding out if you're, you're actually employees are disengaged and how that's impacting?, you know, with customer experience?

Absolutely. One of the best ways that I've been able to sort of grow this side of my business is to really actually be a strategic partner with HR leads, but not only HR leads, HR consultants, business coaches, those that have access to or relationships with a management team or a strategic alliance team within an organization, because at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you have an ear to the ground to your employees. And oftentimes HR or certain departments are focusing on the benefits and making sure that, you know, you're answering the time off policies or dealing with other potential more serious challenges within an organization as it relates to their employees. But again, there's tools, there's mechanisms that organizations are able to pull insights from their employees. That might be from their 360 reviews. That might be through engagement platforms that are sent out. I know personally, I have friends and colleagues who actually participate in these within their company. In some cases, they're sent out monthly. In some cases, they're even sent out weekly. So I think it depends upon what the natural state culture is of that organization to figure out the best way and the frequency in which to talk to their employees.

Mm-hmm. Now, the fact that you've intertwined this, and that's the helping with the name of the business. Like what, what made you get involved in, in this area of customer experience?

Yeah, this is, this has definitely been a journey. So I would say, you know, looking back over the past 20 plus years of my career, I've always been in roles that, that want to help or that have been in service of others. So I started out in events. I went to account management. I went to brand management. I eventually went into product management and in between there, I kind of started to dabble to go out on my own. And what I kept on finding is that I wanted to continuously find the next avenue to best round out my experience. And about 10 years ago is really where my personal light bulb went on, where I found that passion for customer experience or CX. And I was like, this is what I've been building towards. I didn't know what term I wanted to put on it. I knew I'd heard it, but it didn't, it didn't hit me. And it wasn't until I had been out on my own working with a couple different clients previously. I'm like, this is ultimately what I want to do. I love being able to find out why customers are happy, why they're not happy, how to have insights into what they want and what they don't want. And then ultimately helping those companies develop services, products, and processes to be able to actually bring those to market. But again, making sure that those internal teams are empowered to actually create those programs, right? We never. We never want to be in a situation where in an organization, all of the projects or all of the, the initiatives are being sent from the top down, right? Because then you just have a team of doers. But instead, in order to actually improve the retention within an organization, to empower those employees, if you give those employees challenges or problems that they need to solve for, or allow them to talk to their customers or sales and have those open dialogues, Allow them to do their research, allow them to come up with the solutions, give them the goals, but allow your employees to actually solve for the customer problem. This makes them feel empowered to do what they, they, they want to do and they love to do, but it also helps with the problem solving skills amongst team members and helps prevent silos.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would think in an organization that, that doesn't have that, the employees are feeling something like, like, why would I bother? Nobody's gonna listen., you know, up the chain, that type of stuff. So it's a two-way communication. Now, are there any trends that are currently happening that you're observing, you know, in this customer experience sector that, that business should be aware of?

I think two things, and I touched upon one earlier, which is the element of hiring for CX. So CX through the years has kind of gone, you know, in its ups and downs. And the main cause of that is companies know that they have to instate a customer experience program, or they have to have some mentality around customer experience. But they don't really know how to implement that within their organization. There's challenges or disagreements around where does CX live in the organization? Is it its own department? Is every department responsible for it? And there's lots of sort of differences of opinion of, of what that case is. And so I think aside from companies hiring for these roles, figuring out where it best fits within the organization so that it can be most effective as possible. And the second thing is, as you can imagine, technology is continuously proving us, you know, to be the better parts of ourselves, how to bring ourselves to the next level, right? Technology like AI or SaaS platforms that are ultimately here to make our lives easier, they also come with challenges. AI, for example, not a perfect science. We should not be taking it at, as it's written for us, right? We should be taking those insights, understanding them, distilling them down, and really relating that back to what our customers are actually saying to us, right? Does, does what AI is telling us and the trends and insights that it's pulling from either data sources or, or reports, is that truly what our customers are saying? Or you have SaaS platforms, SaaS platforms, many are out there that will enable companies to be able to monitor customer experience, the customer journey. To identify pain points for those customers, right? And to provide analytics around where you have conversions and drop-offs and so forth. The challenges is, the challenges are, I should say, that these platforms are instated, but they are not effectively managed within the organization. You have someone who has the bright idea to say, we need a SaaS platform to manage the customer journey. And that is. Coming from whatever part of the organization. And at the end of the day, procurement says, or someone in finance says, great, we're going to sign off on this. The platform comes into house, then there's no owner of that platform. That platform then comes in house and it was like, okay, product team, or hello, marketing team, or hello, sales team, or hello, operations team. Here's your platform that you wanted. And all of a sudden it was like, who owns this? Who's going to be the subject matter expert on this platform? Who is going to be the relationship manager with that SaaS platform's client side, right? How do you report problems or, or issues or requirements or, or roadmap items back to that SaaS platform? And so a lot of times, even the technologies that are brought into organizations to help manage CX are not effectively managed because you don't have an owner. And then all of a sudden it's not used. And unfortunately, this is where CX can get a bad name because it's not showing value to the organization.

And I like that you mentioned AI. There's a lot of talk of that. A lot of our guests are kind of in that space. And, you know, some software that I've seen out there, you know, especially from the customer service side or the sales side, AI does a great job or a better job at analyzing data points than it necessarily does currently with creating content. And so I've seen different ones where, you know, you can analyze the sales calls or the customer service calls for the sentiment of the caller, like the frustration is those type of things that that customer service rep or sales rep isn't trained in, right? So I think putting technology in place to analyze those different inputs would be key. And I'm interested in hearing more about how you at Intuinely work with a client to actually gain insight into these customers. And what's that, that process look like? Sure.

So the first step of working with any client is a discovery session, right? I just need to be able to connect with the client, talk to them, and it's not just one client. The conversation may start out with the head of HR. It might start with the CEO or the COO. It might start with the head of marketing. It's starting with someone because someone has identified that there is a problem internally. Once that kind of starts to make its way up the chain within the organization, the opportunity then is to actually sit down and have a discovery session with key leaders of that company. And when I say leaders, we're not talking necessarily the entire management layer, right? Because the management layer is disconnected from a lot of the frontline challenges that customers or employees might be facing. And so when you do a discovery session, it's important to identify what the end goal is or what they're hoping to achieve out of it. First, identify what your end goal is to then identify who are the players that should be in the room. So for example, I recently had a discovery session with a client and it was for a nonprofit and it consisted of the development team, but that's only one department of the entire nonprofit because we were trying to identify opportunities within the development team. For improvement. And so my process ultimately starts with the discovery process, but then it goes into other programs that I then like to talk to clients about. And those can involve anything from qualitative and quantitative research. It could be an assessment of their marketing or services. It could be looking at their processes and how I could potentially improve their processes or develop processes for them. It is looking at their reporting and their analytics. And like I started this conversation with as well is the employee engagement. How are the employees engaged in the processes and the day-to-day activities of the organization? Usually this discovery session is so enlightening that it really starts to bring up all the things in the organization that people have like talked about at, you know, in the kitchen or over Zoom on private or whatnot that people now feel comfortable in saying out loud. And all the conversations I have, and during this discovery conversation, that's the overall conversation. What I then do to dive deeper, I allow individuals to set up one-on-ones with me. So those individuals that were part of the discovery session, having a one-on-one so we can dive deeper into their experiences and what they ultimately are experiencing personally, as well as identify certain things that they may not have wanted to say in a larger group setting. And then I take all of this information from the discovery session, I distill that down. And provide a report of recommendations for ultimately the, the client or the leader that has brought me in. And then from there, we determine what else makes sense for their organization or company.

Very interesting.

Very thorough. I'm a process person.

Are there, are there any success stories that you'd like to share that, that, that demonstrates implementing the work that you've done with a client and how that actually has increased their, their ROI and, and their bottom line?

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say there was a, a project that I worked on part-time for about 9 months, and then this was for a services company. So a services company that is B2B. And when I first started working with them, I just found that things were a little bit like all over the place. There was a lack of consistency, there was a lack of process, and when I started to dive deeper, I was finding that. Estimates were, were not as consistent as where they could have been, right? Or the estimate to the final invoice or the estimate to the final hours accrued were not active. And so when I started to dive into, you know, estimates and project requirements and, and how the engagement was ultimately managed from start to finish, I found opportunities to help improve this services company. And so what I started to do is we, I looked with this individual at their entire customer journey. From the point of purchase to the final delivery. We then created a service blueprint so that I can start to show them where there are points of success and where there are points of failure in that service delivery. Over the course of the 9 months, we developed how to have timely communication with the clients that they were having, how to deliver those services on time, how to have more effective estimates, how to monitor your costs more effectively, how to create best practices for client engagement. And the goal of this was how to have a consistent experience for your clients that makes them come back to you time and time again, because why? You manage their expectations and you exceeded what their needs were.

For sure. And, you know, I think any of those service-based businesses could improve from, from any process, right? That's in there. I know I've worked with a couple that you wonder really how they're, how they're going to get to where they want to go.

Uh, when you look at that, think, oh, and think about, you know, when any service business, whether you're a restaurant or you're a hotel or you're a gym or you're any service, dry cleaners, you're any service-based business. The goal of what consumers want is they want a consistently good experience or an experience that meets their expectations. But if you're not able to deliver that experience consistently each time, they're not going to come back to you. They're going to go on to the next dry cleaner or they're going to go down to the other restaurant or they're going to go to the other hotel. So the idea of having that consistent experience is so important.

I've had a client that's in the HVAC business and they wanted, you know, wanted more, you know, requests for quotes and heat pumps and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, we implemented, you know, they weren't filling out the quote request form. So we implemented a little chat bubble on the website that people would start to ask questions and they were coming in from Google and they're coming from Facebook. And then I would forward them over to the client and then they wouldn't get responded to. And so I had to keep following up and the clients were getting upset. And when I reached out to the company, I was told that their, their team didn't have the time to check another inbox to reply back to them. Right? So it's like what your goals are and what you're actually showing that you're willing to do is not connected. That's in there. So. It's frustrating sometimes.

And what that also says is that back to the feedback loop, right? If we're not consistently talking to our, when I say customers, your customers are also your employees, right? An employer customer is really an employee as well because the employee and the employer are choosing to have you at their company. But by collecting feedback from your employees of like what's working, what's not working, that pain point of having to check another email box. Mm-hmm. Ah, you have a pain point because it's adding an extra step for you to have to go into multiple mailboxes and check for, for responses back. Mm-hmm. Time to solve that process issue.

Yeah, absolutely. So where do you see the, the future of customer experience heading in probably in the next 5 years?

So, you know, when I think back to, you know, the different roles that I've taken throughout my career, again, account management, brand management, product management. You know, and even now I, I keep an eye on all the different types of CX roles that are posted and it's like you can, you can feel the energy of CX in, in the job ecosystem. And when you look at some of the kind of postings, there's hundreds and thousands of applicants. You're like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? Like, can I really get past this? Right? And my goal there is, or my recommendation there is to develop those relationships with the companies that you want to. Go to and actually work for, for this discipline. And I love seeing those type of roles out there. But what this does do is that this creates, again, the environment of what is CX? Why is it important to our organization? How can we show upper management that this is worthwhile and that this is an investment for the long term? Coming from environments in which companies are looking at today's dollar and not tomorrow's value, or the way I like to put it, or focus on, I like to focus in on the the lifetime value of the customer. I'm not here just to convert a single customer to utilize my service today. I want that customer coming back to me time and time and time again. I want them to come to me as a trusted advisor to help them. And so when I look at customer experience, I really would love to see companies start to shift their mindset around how they're measuring the value of their customers. Of course, we can sell widgets, right?, but in order to not spend millions of dollars on unneeded marketing dollars, or to have unnecessary cycles of teams doing their sprints in the product space, or the marketing teams having to develop new strategies, or research teams having to develop, you know, methodologies to ensure that the program that's going to be launched is accurate. Let's focus in on how to improve the value of the customers that we have. And continuously collect that feedback and respond in real time. Because if you collect your feedback now and then you don't do anything with that for another 3 years, well, you've sort of lost the point. And then the other thing that I would say is just making sure that organizations— this kind of goes back to the LTV, the lifetime value component— and making sure that companies truly have clean data. This is not just for CX. This is for every department of the organization. Have clean data. Have a clean way of understanding what each of the metrics means. What are all the inputs of those metrics? Understand what all the outputs are of those metrics. And by being able to connect the dots between that, companies will finally be able to see how their customer experience programs are truly coming to life and the impact that they're making. Mm-hmm.

I mean, it sounds like CX is a major thing that every business needs to really focus on. And it would make sense that you would carve out, if you don't have additional funds for this, to carve out some of your marketing dollars for this because you're otherwise, sounds like you're just amplifying a bad experience that's there. So how can people work with you? And you mentioned that discovery call. Where do they find out more information?

Sure. They can come to my website. I'd love for you guys to check me out. You can schedule a call with me. Like I said, my first step is really just to do a discovery call with you. My company, as you heard earlier, is entwine.ly. You can also find me on LinkedIn and yeah, Shaun can connect us as if need be as well.

Excellent. This has been a great discussion. I'm pretty sure anyone listening is thinking now about their customer experience because I think we can always improve. I know I can, and I think everybody can improve. So thank you so much.

Of course. First, thank you so much for having me, Shaun. I really enjoyed our conversation.