Today’s interview is with Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk. Adrian joins me today to talk about the new Zendesk CX Accelerator report, the main trends and headlines coming out of the report, what we can learn from them and what sort of things CX leaders need to be thinking about doing in order to deliver that stand out experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Time, customer experience and driving retention and growth – Interview with Katie Christian of Calendly – and is number 449 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Calendly for sponsoring my podcast this month.

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Here’s the highlights of my chat with Adrian:

• The Zendesk CX Accelerator report sorts businesses into four different categories: The starters, the emergers, the risers and the champions and assesses the behaviours of these businesses.
• The biggest thing we are hearing this year is that even the CX champions are struggling to keep up with rising customer expectations.
• Unresolved queries are up 157% year over year.
• It’s just not enough for companies to close tickets quickly.
• Those that are winning are investing in a balance of human and automated strategy.
• 75% of US CX champions have some kind of bot to human hand-off strategy in place, where there is some triage that’s automated and then it moves forward. We saw an increase in that sort of behaviour from 52% to 64% of respondents.
• We see people integrating key data from critical apps.
• It’s not about all the data. It’s right data, right time to inform the CX conversation.
• In a previous podcast from back in 2017, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, former CMO of Mozilla talked about the idea of lean data i.e. only use the data that you need.
• GDPR and the right to be forgotten is becoming significant and important.
• And, where Europe goes the US follows now on privacy. Not rapidly, but it definitely does.
• This idea of personal data ephemerality will destroy, to a certain extent, the traditional notions of a system of record in CX and people are going to have to think differently about how do I have the data in the moment or at this time to run this inquiry.
• Eventually users will be permissioning us to see their shipping address or to understand things about them in the same way that crypto wallets basically give you temporary and private access.
• We need to understand what trust means for you and how we can earn your trust and keep earning your trust.
• You will allow us to be a custodian of your data on terms that you dictate.
• 66% of respondents to the survey claim that customers are now less patient in their interactions with service teams. And, companies are 18% more likely to report that customer satisfaction is below expectations.
• The mental model of what to expect as an outcome is changing for people and its being set by the great experiences they are having, particularly with things like some of the more mature food delivery apps.
• Champions in our survey are 2.5 times more likely to respond to feedback.
• Example: Lush. Every time a customer praises a member of staff and a store, that experience is captured and can be forwarded (in this case through Zendesk. Their top score is almost 92%, which is well above the average 70 to 75% reported by retailers.
• You can’t often drive the CX car looking in the rear view mirror. It’s a little bit difficult. You need to respond faster than that.
• Customer satisfaction over the last year as a global index has dropped.
• The job of customer service is to establish, identity, understand sentiment and language to get to the point of understanding intent and then to propose an action. So, its all about intent to action.
• Every customer service or experience implementation now should be judged on the mental model of intent to action.
• Zendesk’s client YourParkingSpace has a one touch resolution rate of 85%.
• Adrian’s favourite CX champion clients expect their CX managers to adopt product manager like thinking.
• Adrian’s Punk XL brand: Instacart

About Adrian

Since 2010, Adrian has led Zendesk’s product management and engineering teams, constantly creating new paths for product innovation and development. As the company’s chief technology officer, he is currently responsible for defining its long-term strategic product direction that will shape the future of customer service. He also helps guide the company’s global customers on how to enhance their customer experience to create better relationships. Previously, Adrian served as chief technical officer at Attributor, where he managed web-crawling and content-identification systems for text, video, and images. He was the first engineer hired by Plumtree Software and remained with the company through its IPO and subsequent acquisition by BEA. Adrian is a Yorkshireman living in San Francisco.

Check out the report: CX Accelerator report, say Hi to Adrian and Zendesk on Twitter @amcdermo and @zendesk and feel free to connect with Adrian on LinkedIn here.

Photo by Huckster on Unsplash