Today’s interview is with Sam Wilson, the CEO of 8×8, a provider of a unified cloud platform for contact center, business phone, video, chat, and APIs that helps companies of any size deliver differentiated customer experiences. I’ve spoken to Sam a couple of times, and every time, we have great conversations where we rummage around some of the big issues that organizations are facing when it comes to delivering against customer expectations. This one is no different and touches on everything from why brands are not keeping up with customers’ expectations to what they should be doing to build loyalty and create lifetime customers. It was great fun so definitely check it out.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Building customer loyalty and a human connection in an increasingly competitive landscape – Interview with Conny Kalcher of Zurich Insurance – and is number 517 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Sam:

• This is a moment for innovation spending and innovation and development and the creation of new technologies and new capabilities that can radically change how we engage with our customers.
• Customer expectations are running ahead of the technology deployment and capabilities of the companies. And so the perceived notion is that customer engagement or customer support is worse than it’s been in the past. But the reality is on an absolute basis, it’s better.
• The labor market for contact centers is about 240 billion dollars a year based on McKinsey’s research.
• That number has been squeezed for 20 straight years and only now is it starting to increase again.
• PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2018/19 found that one in three will leave a brand they love.
• The corporate world has been trying to convert their business model into subscriptions, thinking that will cause customers to become more retained, and it’s actually not.
• Tony Hsieh at Zappos was one of the first people to realize that if you treat the customer fantastically, they will amplify that message.
• I think in the B2B world, the thing they’re missing is that they are not diferentiating themselves based on their service offering.
• Professor John Seddon, who’s a systems thinker, said to me once on this podcast, “Organizations tend to take a customer typology of demand and then try and fit it into the way that they want to do business.”
• When I became CEO, one of the first meetings I had was with my chief customer officer and I said to him,

“You are not a cost center. You are not a post-sale cost center. You are part of revenue. You are part of or you are just as important as the VP of sales to me. If I have unhappy customers telling everyone else how unhappy they are, My business is screwed. I could spend an infinite amount of money on marketing and fail.”

• One of our primary things is we don’t call anything to with customer support, customer support. It’s customer success.
• 8×8 is adopting this philosophy and it’s taken us two years but our retention rate is materially higher than it was two and a half years ago. Our renewal rates are higher. Also, our ability to cross sell additional products is significantly higher.
• This is how we’re transforming the company. It’s going to take us another two years to complete that transformation.
• I think consumer companies for decades have competed on service, but business companies haven’t competed on service.
• I was talking to a customer and he said something that absolutely moved my cheese. He said to me, “Sam, your moment of maximum happiness is my moment of maximum anxiety.”
• If you can step into that, that is the moment you can create a loyal company or a loyal customer for decades.
• If every listener walks away today and thinks about how am I gonna focus on the jobs that need to be done of my customers, their life will change and their business and professional life will change.
• If you have no bad customer support experiences, then you’re going to be so far ahead.
• I have tremendous respect for every contact center leader in the world. You are in a zero defect business. You can have zero mistakes, and yet your boss is chinting you on costs and dollars and all those kinds of things.
• Three things organizations should do: Meet the customer where they want to be met. Be proactive. And number three, enable self -service.
• I am still amazed that something like two-thirds of all contact centers are voice only. Getting to omnichannel is still a stretch.
• We’re going to need to stop treating our contact center people as agents to be cheapened down.
• The average contact center work in the United States makes $18.31 an hour (Bureau of Labor and Statistics data). The average hourly employee in the United States makes $33 an hour.
• My dream, and I’ve said this publicly two dozen times, is that within five years, contact center agents become contact center specialists.
• We need to prepare and say, we are gonna turn our contact center agents into specialists. We’re gonna pay them real wages. We’re gonna treat them as real employees, not disposable cogs in the wheel, because they’re actually gonna tackle the hard things.
• Recent Gartner research finds that about 73 % of customers want to use self-service tools. But, the same piece of research found that only about 14 % of all those customers were able to be resolve their problem. For super simple stuff, the number went up to about 30%.
• Sam’s best advice: When it comes to customer service, consider it a source of revenue.
• Sam’s Punk XL brand: Costco. Costco pays its employees substantially above market wages, sees substantially less attrition in its service employees, and that has materially improved the performance of into the company.

About Sam

Samuel (Sam) Wilson serves as Chief Executive Officer of 8×8 and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors.

Sam brings more than 25 years of experience in financial analysis, investment management and sales to drive 8×8’s business forward. Having held multiple leadership positions with the company, Sam possesses in-depth knowledge of the growth and expense drivers of the business.

Most recently, Sam served as 8×8’s Interim Chief Executive Officer. Prior to that, he served as Chief Financial Officer, responsible for leading the company’s financial strategy and overseeing the Company’s accounting and financial reporting, planning, tax and treasury functions, as well as investments in 8×8’s SaaS platform and future growth.

Prior to his role as CFO, Sam served as 8×8’s Chief Customer Officer, where he managed the complete customer lifecycle globally, including professional services, implementation, customer support and the enablement teams. He previously managed 8×8’s strategic business initiatives and expansion into the UK and Europe, in addition to his role as 8×8’s SVP for the global small business, eCommerce and US mid-market sales.

Sam joined 8×8 in 2017 from MobileIron where he was instrumental in taking the company public and part of the team that grew annual billings from $26 million to $200 million, including building and leading their eCommerce business. Prior to MobileIron, he spent 14 years in technology banking, both as an analyst covering communications and as an institutional investor. He is an internationally recognized financial expert, Chartered Financial Analyst and former top-rated Wall Street analyst.

Sam is also a veteran, having served in the US Army. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Seattle University and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Find out more about 8×8 here, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @8×8 and feel free to connect with Sam on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay