Today’s podcast is with Edwin Margulies, Chief Evangelist at Nextiva, a provider of a unified customer experience management platform. Edwin joins me today to talk about his new book, Mastering the Customer Experience, why it was over twenty-five years in the making, the eight-step discovery model at its heart and how it can help companies execute and deliver better experience outcomes.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Pandemic maths and measuring all of marketing – Interview with Gregory Kennedy of Alembic Technologies – and is number 525 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 chats with Edwin:

• The book is intended to be a guide for those who have this unwavering dedication to understanding customers better and who want to do something about it.
• The discovery methodology contained within the book has been developed, refined and tweaked over the last 25 years with clients all over the world.
• The book is centred on an Eight-Step Discovery Process. The steps are as follows:
  1. Teaming And Goal Setting
  2. Transaction Taxonomy
  3. Customer Maturity Model
  4. Mapping Volume And Complexity
  5. Essential Use Cases And Automation/Workflow Candidates
  6. Rationalize Business Rules And Policies
  7. High-Level Workflow Worksheets
  8. CX Engagement Best Practices Template

• The first step is a big and important one for one really big reason: there is often contention between the practitioner in a business unit versus the corporate directives. And, these need to be ironed out via a discussion with all stakeholders right up front.
• This first step forces transparency and collaboration. And anyone who really doesn’t want to cooperate, their intention is made known very quickly.
• The transaction taxonomy establishes the landscape that you’re dealing with.
• The first three steps really get you to a point where we understand what we want do, we understand where we want to be in terms of maturity, and we’ve characterized the kind of transactions and modalities and complexity that we’re already dealing with.
• If you have a really happy agent who you’ve given proper tooling to, the experience that the customer has with that agent is going to be superior.
• Rationalizing the business rules and policies around a targeted automation project is very important because you’ve heard the adage, garbage in, garbage out. In other words, here’s the warning. If you attempt to automate a process that is ill-defined and doesn’t have articulated rules, you’re gonna get garbage.
• If you’re a practitioner in this space, you’ve got to manage people, you’ve got to understand process, you’ve got to understand incentives and the alignment between teams as well as a little bit of technology and all these different things in order to get this right.
• If you don’t take the time to build an ROI calculation, then your project may not be looked upon with favour by the people that hold the purse strings and who would actually be paying for the work to get it done.
• Edwin’s best advice: If you want to improve your customer or employee experience, you need to tune into what they hate and what they love, and then do something about it. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be in a much better position to offer them a sublime experience. So it’s about listening, observing, understanding. It’s about developing an appetite for understanding.
• Edwin’s Punk CX brand: Costco and Amazon.

About Edwin

Edwin Margulies is the Chief Evangelist at Nextiva. He co-founded Thrio and played a crucial role in creating modern omnichannel and AI-based CX solutions deployed worldwide. Edwin is a pioneer in the adoption of conversational commerce, process automation, and virtual contact centers. He has an impressive track record of driving growth and creating value, leading to successful acquisitions by major global companies like Oracle, Five9, and Nextiva. Edwin has been a thought leader for more than four decades and has authored 18 published books and 11 patents, including “Social Engagement for Customer Care” and “Understanding the Voice Enabled Internet.” Apart from his professional achievements, Edwin and his wife also run a non-profit animal sanctuary on their ranch in Central Texas.

Find out more about Nextiva here, say Hi to them and Edward on X (Twitter) @Nextiva and @EdwinMargulies, respectively and connect with/follow Edwin on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Photo by Joshua Olsen on Unsplash