Today’s interview is with Joyce Kim, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Genesys, a global leader in cloud -based customer experience and contact centre solutions that serves over 11,000 mid-sized and large businesses around the world. Joyce joins me today to talk about what it’s going to take for organizations to deliver a more empathetic experience to their customers, how empathy will move from fuzzy to actionable, how CMOs can take responsibility addressing customer experience woes as well as what lessons service and experience leaders need to be learning.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Journey analytics and orchestration is helping brands stop doing stupid stuff – Interview with Mark Smith of Kitewheel — and is number 380 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.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Joyce:

• Empathy has been really hard to operationalize across organizations.
• Empathy in action: How technology can enable companies to listen, understand and really deliver for that customer as an individual and what they need at that moment.
• This is a key part of moving empathy from fuzzy to action.
• There’s no reason why we can’t leverage technologies like AI and orchestrations to really foster more empathetic experiences. And, seeing contact centres less in terms of efficiency and cost but more as an effective and empathetic place where you build customer loyalty and advocacy. That’s where you can start really delivering on that.
• Empathy in action is how you do that.
• Video as a channel is going to help build that human connection for distinct audiences and situations.
• Ethiopian Airlines is leveraging Genesys’ technology to proactively engage with customers via digital.
  • One use case is where a customer is searching for something on a website and the system surmises what they are doing. After a period of inactivity a chat window will pop up that says something like “Hey, are you looking for booking information?” rather than saying “Can I help you? And, what is your account or loyalty number?”
  • Another great use case for them was when they find that when customers were booking flights and they would stop at this one window where it says input your discount code here. And we guessed that going and searching for a discount code. So, the system now proactively pops up and asks: “Are you looking for this discount code?” which has helped with conversion.
  • That’s a great example of an empathetic experience, because while you’re not being nice to a person you are giving them what they want when they want it and you are doing it proactively without being asked to do it. That puts a smile on the customer’s face.

• There’s a difference between functional ownership and who owns the end to end experience of the customer.
• The CMO today should really drive and own the end to end customer journey, especially where digital touchpoints are concerned.
• CMOs have to work more closely with, foster better relationships with and enable teams that have functional ownership of different parts of the customer’s journey, especially the contact centre.
• This is not about a land grab but is about taking responsibility and saying this is important and that it needs to be seen holistically.
• There’s an amazing amount of data and insights that can be gleaned from customer service and the contact centre. That should be seen much more strategically than it is today.
• The connection with customers today is so important because if anything, the pandemic has shown that, they’re not necessarily loyal to the same brands as they were before.
• People are increasingly not loyal to brands, but they’re loyal to behaviour.
• My advice is always to think about and get an understanding of where you are. Don’t sugarcoat it because you’re just gonna get led astray.
• Joyce’s Punk CX word: Uncomfortable.
• Joyce’s Punk CX brand: Tesla and SouthWest Airlines

About Joyce

Joyce is the chief marketing officer for Genesys. She is responsible for the company’s overall marketing and communications strategy including strengthening its brand, fueling growth as well as go-to-market and demand generation strategies for new products around the world.

Joyce has more than two decades of experience in scaling growth in the technology sector. Her expertise spans all facets of marketing including digital, brand, communications and product marketing for software solutions leveraging cloud, real time communications, AI, IoT and more.

Most recently, she was Chief Marketing and Digital Officer for Arm, where she spearheaded the design and implementation of the marketing tech stack to jumpstart data-driven lead generation and optimize conversion rates. Joyce also successfully launched multiple products in new markets alongside one of the largest partner ecosystems in the world.

Prior to Arm, Joyce led marketing for global brands such as Skype and Skype for Business at Microsoft as well as product communications and partnerships for Chromebooks and Google Hangouts at Google. She has also held multiple marketing and product management leadership positions for several startup and mid-sized companies including Wrike, Symmetricom, and Internap.

Joyce has two Bachelor of Science degrees in Finance and Architecture from the California Polytechnic State University.

Check out Genesys, say Hi to them on Twitter @Genesys and do connect with Joyce on LinkedIn here.

Image by S K from Pixabay