Breaking the Blueprint

Why Your CX Metrics Might Be Lying To Yo

• Vinay & Iqbal • Season 1 • Episode 5

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What if your customer experience (CX) metrics were telling you the wrong story—and you didn’t even know it? In this episode of Breaking the Blueprint, hosts Vinay Parmar and Iqbal Javaid are joined by James Adamczuk, CX Evangelist for Zoom, to challenge the metrics that dominate boardroom dashboards. From his background in finance and digital transformation to becoming a leading CX strategist, James offers rare insights that connect data, emotion, and real business outcomes.

James shares why many organizations are stuck chasing vanity metrics like NPS and CSAT, while missing the deeper insights hidden in customer conversations. If you're a contact centre leader or CX strategist, this episode will shift your thinking. You'll learn how emotional intelligence in your contact centres can lead to powerful loyalty, how to uncover the truth behind your customer journeys, and how AI is transforming the way we extract meaningful data.

From uncovering the real value of verbatim feedback to using emotional sentiment for brand strategy, this episode goes deep. You’ll also discover how flawed benchmarking can mislead your strategy and why your “satisfied” customers might be anything but. This isn’t just a chat—it’s a call to evolve your CX mindset and get smarter with your data.

CX professionals, C-suite leaders, and anyone invested in driving true customer advocacy—this one’s for you. Join us on this journey into smarter, more human CX. Don't forget to subscribe and stay ahead of the curve:
 https://www.youtube.com/@BreakingtheBlueprint?sub_confirmation=1

Show Links
Vinay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinayparmar/
Iqbal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iqbal-javaid/
James Adamczuk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesadamczuk/
Catch us on your favourite podcast directory: https://www.breakingblueprint.buzzsprout.com/share

[00:00:00] - Gain REAL value from your CX data & metrics
 [00:02:00] - Highlights
 [00:01:13] - Episode Begins
 [00:02:25] - Metrics Gone Wrong
 [00:04:05] - Metrics That Actually Matter
 [00:05:45] - CX Leader Spotlight
 [00:06:49] - From Finance to CX Pioneer
 [00:08:30] - CX Metrics Gone Wrong
 [00:10:09] - Contact Centre Metrics Revolution
 [00:14:40] - NPS That Converts
 [00:15:42] - Benchmark or Blindspot?
 [00:18:15] - Unlock Hidden NPS Value
 [00:20:09] - Data-Driven Innovation Secrets
 [00:22:08] - Data-Driven CX Evolution
 [00:23:02] - Expert CX Consultation
 [00:24:28] - Metrics That Matter
 [00:24:58] - Metrics Mindset Shift
 [00:25:22] - Beyond Vanity Metrics
 [00:28:19] - Unlocking Contact Centre Gold
 [00:29:16] - AI Transforms Customer Intelligence
 [00:31:31] - Emotional Customer Intelligence
 [00:36:06] - Measuring Customer Emotions
 [00:39:00] - Referral ROI Secrets
 [00:40:04] - Mining Customer Gold
 [00:40:56] - Actionable CX Metrics
 [00:41:32] - Closing Remarks

#CXMetrics #CustomerExperience #ContactCentreInsights #CustomerLoyalty #DataDrivenCX


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Vinay:

Brilliant. Iqbal. Welcome to another episode of Breaking the Blueprint with me, Vene Palmer and my host Iqbal Javaid. How are you doing? What's been going on? I.

Iqbal:

Oh, it's been a crazy few weeks. It's I feel like I'm on repeat. I say the same thing every time. It's, it just seems to be getting busier and busier with lots of different things. I think the most, interesting thing since we last met is I managed to go to the cup final. Sorry, James. I know you are a city fan.

James:

I cannot believe you've opened the podcast with that. Literally, I was raging for like a hundred minutes,

Iqbal:

but I'll tell you what, I was sat amongst the Palace fans'cause I, went with a Palace fan. Yeah. And Palace have never won a trophy in their whole, their whole history. to see how they were, felt like the emotion was just like incredible. So I just, yeah, I, might talk a bit more about that a little bit later on, but yeah, that was, a pretty cool experience. I should,

Vinay:

yeah. Don't do too much'cause I'm a, a hard suffering man, United. so am I. So

Iqbal:

we both we're all suffering. this week.

Vinay:

I'll take it. Let's hope come Wednesday.

Iqbal:

Yeah, that will change this. Anyway. Yeah.

Vinay:

back to the podcast. So yeah, welcome to this latest episode, of Breaking the Blueprint. so listen, I, we've done some prep before it, but funny thing, I was watching, an episode of Friends and you might be thinking, where the heck is he going with this in this opening? So this episode of Friends and I, most people have seen friends and are, fans. And it's this weird thing now where my daughter's now rewatching friends. 20 years since I first started watching it. I dunno if anybody else has got kids that now, anyway, this is an episode where, Joey and Chandler, who are two key characters, Joey's given Chandler some money because he's now in a job and he feels like he needs to pay him back. But Chandler doesn't want the money, so he's trying to give it him back. But Joey won't accept this money. So the way that Chandler has his little brainwave, he says, what I'll do, I'm gonna, he makes up a card game. Like on the spot and starts just giving Joey random cards and whatever cards Joey puts down, he's, oh, you've won. And he starts giving him money. So Joey thinks he's on this hot streak'cause he's just making the rules up as he goes along. And the kind of link or the tenuous link to CX is that sometimes I think that's what happens in boardrooms and the leadership teams when we talk about. CX metrics. I'm not saying that people make them up or we make things up, but it feels like sometimes people are playing by different rule books and the rules are different depending on where you're sitting around the table. you've got this obsession over NPS and be careful because the NPS police will jump on this podcast and go out, NPS and CSAT and customer effort score and looking at clicks and conversions and all these metrics that we look at, right? and the thing that happens sometimes is that. People use those metrics to tell the story that they want to tell from their position, where the customers are leaving you or not leaving You people get obsessed with the NPS and go, NPS is great, but meanwhile you've got a leaky bucket and customers are going out, right? And, a friend of mine, Andrew Crozier, shout out to Andrew, who's a great CX leader, doing some amazing stuff. Andrew shared this podcast, this post on LinkedIn, and in there was a line that said it's a compass, not a destination. And I thought that was like, he nailed it with that line. and he used the analogy of sport using the analogy of football that we were talking about. You've got all these metrics that are crept in about chances created, passes, completed forward, passes completed. But the only metric that really matters is have you scored more goals than the opposition?'cause that's how you win. And in business it's simple. It's are you profitable or are you not? Are you making money or are you not? And how does everything you do lead to that? So I'm not saying that these metrics aren't important. But they're a compass, not the destination. They're a guide to getting us to understanding what's going on in our organisation But boards become obsessed with them. KPI perhaps become obsessed with what's the NPS, what's the CA and all that kind of stuff. So really that's what we're gonna debate today. We're gonna talk about c its metrics. we're not here to say what's wrong, what's right. We are here to create some great debate, start some great conversations, and really help leaders to make. Smarter decisions about, CX in their, companies. And before we jump into that, a really quick plug. for, Iqbal iso, I'm Vinay PArmar As I said, I'm the managing director of Customer Whisperers and Iqbal runs a great consultancy called CX Evolve. And we are both in a place where we work with organisations to help them to really understand how to drive loyalty advocacy, and for us to go beyond just looking great on a dashboard to delivering real value in their organisation what you hear in these podcasts is always, is great real life examples from the work that we do. There's no sales pitch. Just great conversations. And with that Iqbal, would you like to introduce our guest for today?

Iqbal:

Yeah. I'm delighted to, have James Adamczuk join me, or join us on this podcast. And, the, I guess the best way to describe your role, obviously you've done a load of stuff, right? You worked with big organisations like HSBC from a CX perspective. and you and I have worked together at Zoom for a number of years, and, I think it's safe to say that, for me you are the CEO of, zoom. And, why, not say, CEO is. It's, really, for me, it's stands for chief Evangelist Officer. We, actually you are leading. You are playing the evangelist role at Zoom, so welcome. Thank you for taking the time out. See us. What,

Vinay:

what a great title. What a great title.

James:

Thank you, gents, this is great and great to have a great conversation to spend some time with you both today.

Vinay:

Yeah, brilliant. Bit, just reminded me, I used to work with a guy, in a previous role and his, in his title was group operations director. So he literally was God. God. Yeah.

Iqbal:

Yeah. I like that. That's, pretty cool.

Vinay:

So anyway, James, welcome to Breaking the Blueprint. Really great to have you with this. Let's start with the intro. Tell us a bit about yourself, what do you do and how did you end up as Chief Evangelist Officer at

James:

okay. Let's start with how did I, end up being Chief Evangelist Officer? my job title is actually CX Evangelist for Europe, which is really cool. And, I've. Always been on the kind of customer side for, from a kind of contact center and digital transformation perspective, which has been really good. So the past 10, 15 years, mostly within financial services, leading kinda large scale digital transformation, like in a, I'd like a new contact center, please. Okay. What does that actually mean, we know what we're talking about here, and one day I was on my way back after a fairly long hard commute, as you do when you work at Canary Wharf on the way back on the train, and I saw this role pop up on LinkedIn and in true James style, it just took my, my interest, right? Because Zoom wanted to, hire somebody to help launch their customer experience suite here in, in, in Europe. And because I've been the guy that's. Being on the other side of the fence, signing the purchase order, running the plan, and the delivery. Why not find out what Zoom are trying to achieve, what the industry is trying to achieve and get a different perspective on it. So that was August, 2022. And it's goodness, me, being a, an absolutely brilliant, interesting rider over those past near three years.

Vinay:

Fantastic. Fantastic. What a great story. keeping on theme, and let's just pick up on that. Having worked on both sides piece, right? obviously you've been inside businesses advising them, sorry, working with that, and now you're advising them. So from your perspective, what do you think is the biggest trap, that organisations fall into when they approach CX metrics?

James:

What a brilliant question. I'm resonating back to the kind of compass and direction of travel here, because like with any. Transformational with any kind of piece of work, there has to be a strategy about what you're actually trying to achieve. So if we look at, for example, what sea level are trying to achieve, there's gonna be some strategy around there. Either it's gonna be an increased sales, it's gonna be some kind of reduction in cost to serve. It might be even being the number one north star within the segment that I work in. Okay. So we start with a strategy, and then clearly there has to be a plan to go and achieve that. So where CX comes in at this juncture is. All the component parts that can help deliver what that strategy is. So again, when we talk about metrics and, again, we can go as old school as you like, average handling time and things like that. And is that really relevant in today's organisation when in fact we're looking at much more of an outcome-based approach, right? So I'm really, big on outcomes and to build on that. Let's think about, the contact center may be a decade ago where we had very stressed out department managers and contact center managers carrying, literally carrying round reams of a four paper stressed to the max. That wasn't insights that was reporting. So I think we got from reporting to insights, but now we need to take that further step forward to really understand how some of these metrics can influence my organisation

Vinay:

Yeah, it's really interesting. I, grew up managing contact centers and I know we are, we're focusing on contact centers as a part of that customer experience. But it is interesting, I've been in contact centers where I've taken a HT out as an immediate measure, like just for planning purposes it's in, or budgeting. So you get a head count. But actually in terms of performance measurement, it's a really archaic measure. And I remember introducing things like first contact resolution, customer effort score, post contact NPS or satisfaction. although I will share one example with you with an organisation I worked with years ago. And, they were talking about, they were talking about, having a hundred percent satisfaction all of their calls. And I was like, that's amazing. How have you, a hundred percent satisfaction in every single call. yeah. That's what we do. Great. So how do you measure it? Oh, at the end of each call we send. The customer survey, we ask them a question, how satisfied are you? Oh. Who decides which customers get the survey. Oh, yeah. But the agent chooses and suddenly, when they, you know when somebody says something out loud.

Iqbal:

Yeah.

Vinay:

And suddenly the penny drops, they're like, oh, two and two together. That's just funny. But yeah, I think that, those kind of, archaic measures. Yeah.

Iqbal:

yeah. what's, I think from a you, you're absolutely right. I think we've got the insights now because the technology's there. And we are seeing now, working closely with. Organisations who are trying to extract all sorts of data and just going back to the outcomes, it's always trying to, let's start from what it is that you're trying to achieve from this data.

Vinay:

Yeah.

Iqbal:

Because then we can come up with a plan of making change. Because right now you, you still are, whilst you're not seeing, Tons of paper paperwork. You still end up with a ton of reports being emailed. Yeah. To supervisors and managers. Okay. So what comes next? What are you doing with this? and I, think you're, you're absolutely right. there, there are so many metrics that have become archaic in the sense that they're just not fit for purpose anymore, but it's just what you do with it. I think some of it could be relevant, like even average handle time. Like I, I get, it's an old one, but actually if you are. Agents are spending far more far, much longer with their customers. You've gotta get to the bottom of what, why that's happening.

Vinay:

Yeah.

Iqbal:

are they not trained properly? Have they not got the knowledge that they need? Maybe we can use a bit of AI to Yeah. To give them some real time support to bring that average handle time down. Ultimately,

Vinay:

yeah. but you break the HE down into talk time and. Yeah. Wrap time, right? Yeah. If somebody's got really long wrap time, that's a different problem. Yeah. And then in the tort time, how many times are they putting customers on hold? That might give you an indication. Yeah. That something's going on with that, that, but even, broader than that, I think you, both touched on it. I think what's been is that we've confused performance indicators with reporting. and, haven't made that real distinction often. and it's funny'cause the example I shared with you in the prep was just on a broader CX note, was I was talking to a guy who was leading CX in a pest control company, and, he was talking about NPS and how they measure it, and he said, it doesn't really work for us. And I said, why do you measure it? Then? He said, everyone tells us we have to measure NPS, so we ask our customers, would you recommend us? But of course, we don't really get a high response rate or customers tend not to. Yeah. And I'm like, why is that? He said, think about it if. We're a pest control company, you don't really wanna recommend to anyone that you've just used, particularly if you're a restaurant owner or a hotel, or any kind of those establishments, right? You don't wanna say, yes, we'll recommend you. So what we got through talking and I said, what? What's the thing that really comes through for when you know you've done a great job? And he said, actually, customers that rave about us talk about us trusting us to do a great job, trusting us to be discreet, trusting us to get in and do the job, and nobody know that we're there. great. why don't you measure that then? Yeah. Why don't you measure how much your customers trust you? So that's more

Iqbal:

like CA isn't it? Yeah, you can, come up with a list of questions that are appropriate to your business that actually gives you the, that's it, the, kind of results that will help you, change the direction of your business if it's necessary. Yeah. so definitely I think csa, that's just one example of that. Yeah. But I think just going back to NPS for a second, because I think, I feel like. That's the one that most organisations really tend to, benchmark themselves against. and, I recently came across an organisation that, were doing that, that were getting mixed results. and one of the things that we realised is they were asking the customers after the first engagement they had with them on, would you recommend us. the customer's not had to, had time to consume the service, to really get to know you as a brand. It, the timing of when you ask these questions, I think is also important, isn't it? From, a timing perspective. See, I

James:

think this is really interesting because if, you think about a customer journey, and we really focus on personalisation for, so ensuring that, I've got the right channel, I've got the right agent, I've got the right look, first contact resolution, if you will. If we make that effort on personalisation why can't we make that effort? When it comes to net promoter score, to your point, so in comes the customer journey net new customer. That shouldn't be some generic NPS question. That's different. Yeah. Whereas, and then there's all these tens of millions of dollars that we're spending on things like customer data platform and, my amazing CRM or whatever customer lifetime value. And I have a different conversation with a customer who's got a different metric there. I think that's quite interesting. Because it's not a genetic to get to a real NPS rather than some, just for the sake of doing it. NPS maybe put a bit of personalisation in there.

Iqbal:

Yeah, That, comes with design though, doesn't it? No, I,

James:

I, I agree. I think we're designing on the fly here, folks. This is great doing a workshop on the

Vinay:

podcast, but I think there's, lots and lots of merit in that. And, but just to go back to your point, I think there is that classically, NPS was supposed to be a brand question, which is, would you recommend us? And it was supposed to be a temperature check. And then you've got confused with relationship NPS versus transactional NPS and NPS, which is after a certain point in the journey. But you've also got companies then saying, we'll ask it after the purchase, get a really high score there. And then they quote that. As their overall NPS. So when you're benchmarking, you're not really comparing apples with apple. So the danger in NPS benchmarking can be like, you gotta be really clear about what you're benchmarking against and how confident are you that the NPS measure that you're benchmarking against is at the same point in the journey, or for the same segment to get a life for and it's, that's, it's tough, isn't it?

Iqbal:

Really hard.'cause the benchmarking that I see is we're comparing against the previous year. that's what tends to happen there. You everybody just wants to see like a, that number's gotta go up year on year. Yeah. and so, what are you bench, at what point are you benchmarking? What types of customers are you benchmarking? Are these like existing customers, new customers? so when you, actually get into the detail of it, that's when you realise you do that. This, it's flawed.

Vinay:

You, you do. And, picking up on James's point, that personalisation piece, because that's the other thing that's frustrating is that. We'd go through all this effort of measuring who our promoters, distractors, and then we'd treat them all the same anyway, like who's really got a program where they take their promoters and treat them any different to anybody else. They might, they might send them an email and say, thank you for completing the survey, but they don't recognise them as, thank you for being an advocate and a fan would really appreciate your feedback. Or, Actually then tapping into that base and using them as people that can be part of their product development suite, for example, Hey, we wanna take you, we want to invite you in to be part of, you're a fan. Come and talk to us about your experience. Help us to, re refine our products or our, our website or our app, or whatever the thing might be, versus what are we doing with detractors. And then within that, the subsections, the new customers versus existing customers, returning customers versus customers that are. A brand new to your brand oversees all of those nuances, bringing those in and being able to extract it. And I think that deeper level of segmenting within those buckets, is missing. I don't often

James:

see that level of deep dive. Yeah. And what's interesting here is that it can all relate to what your strategy is. Back to the point about strategy. So I want to be the best brand, I want, have the most, I don't know, advocates from our brand, or I want to increase sales, or I wanna reduce churn, whatever it looks like. There's an NPS for that, right?

Vinay:

Yeah.

James:

So who are you asking? Why are you asking? Yeah. And is it relevant to your point?

Vinay:

Yeah. Yeah. Because imagine you had a, you were doing that, you had a say you had a returning customer NPS. Yeah. That was really high. Yeah. But you had a new customer, NPS. That was tanking that would tell you part of a story that's going on in your organisation that something's different. Yeah. I don't see that

Iqbal:

though. Do you guys? I haven't come across that often, actually. the way you've positioned it, maybe that's a pretty cool idea. We should, yeah.

Vinay:

and I think that's what board should be doing. I think partly it's reflective of how the board conversation happens.'cause let's face it, a lot of the time. we have these unconscious biases and we have a picture of who our typical customer is. Yeah. So we have an overall score, and even in the language customer experience, it's customers experience. We have subsets of customers, we have different demographics, segmentations, accessibility, different needs, different wants and expectations, and yet that's not reflected.

Iqbal:

Yeah. In the

Vinay:

way we look at it and look, that takes work, that takes investment, but that's where the real value is not in an overall score. That gives you a generic. Here's a general score of NPS. Here's what we think about general customers.'cause you're missing the nuances. And when the opportunity is, and you know it, this is not an example exactly in that state, but I know previously where I've been, where we did transactional nps After people traveled. what we're able to do is break it down by, at which station? At which stop On which service? Yeah. On which day. And that really helped us to dig deep and go, actually, we found it a use case where at one airport there were two terminals and there was a different NPS on each side of the terminals. Yeah. And, but it was the same service going in. It was the same team that were there. And we couldn't figure out why that was. And all it turned out to be was when we did some observation and went down, talked to the frontline staff, talk to managers, stop passengers, and had a conversation. The Rotary of frontline staff was different on that. Terminal than it was on that terminal. And just a small adjustment suddenly shifted the outcome. And the NPS went up on both. And it was more, yeah, it was more equalised Yeah.

Iqbal:

Sometimes difficult to pinpoint, like there's a great example of an electronics brand that Zoom that we, you and I were working on at Zoom, where actually they fed the metrics back into their product engineering regularly and. They genuinely used that data to help improve the product and the services that they offered. But there wasn't a tangible, like it was because of the data that we are now delivering a great service in a product. But obviously it does impact the bottom line. So I think there's tactical things you can do with the data that you can collect and the, with the metrics. But overall, I think it's just figuring out at a high level, what are those real outcomes that we're getting? and actually, rather than the question shouldn't be what's the NPS score, but what's the outcome of this score? what are we getting?

Vinay:

Yeah. I think exactly that it should be informing the quality of questions. Yeah. Of exec, if you've got a CEO sitting there. If they're just accepting that overall NPS, they should be driving their teams to, except, tell me what does that actually mean? Yeah. Let's break down our subset. How does that relate to what our marketing team are doing or operations team doing? how does this inform them and help them or tell the story around it? And I think also it's. and going back to it, this is just a compass. It's not the destination. Yeah. So it's not supposed to be perfect data by which you can suddenly go, we're gonna make a bunch of decisions. It's supposed to be enough data for you to go and ask. More compelling questions of your team. Yeah. To help you to understand what's really going on.

Iqbal:

Yeah. So do you know what really, confuses me, not confusing me, but there's a lot of people have got a lot to say about this and I don't understand why the controversy around those that are so pro, like NPS and so against it, what's the big deal? the, it's what you do with the data at the end of the day. I do wonder why there's so many people that are. So stuck in their ways that they're just not open to th looking at different ways of work.'cause for me, there's no right or wrong answer. Sure. Is there, it's going back to how do you, how do we go and achieve what the business is trying to do.

James:

Yeah. I think that's a really good point. And hearing this conversation and what's top of mind for me here is that our metrics, like NPS something that needs to be. Evolved. I'm taking the name of your firm here. Al, but something that shouldn't just be okay, I've baselined it now and I'm gonna run this static inverted comm moment of truth NPS net metric for two years and leave it. Should we be looking at the compass saying that okay, it's doing Northeast now, when in fact I actually wanted to track it, at June North. So to do this, I need to make these changes. The point you made around the travel firm that you looked at, is it another thing just to take. Metrics like NPS at face value and think it's okay, set and forget. When it actually isn't set and forget, you gotta take that data and get to that next level of analytics.

Iqbal:

Yeah. No, exactly. I'd

James:

love to have a go at that. that's what I miss from the customer side a bit. Yeah.

Iqbal:

Yeah. But it's dedicated effort and time, isn't it? 100 Percent. What do you do you bring an external consultant in to help you do this? Or there companies out there that, that kind of just look after this side of things?

Vinay:

Yeah. And look and. Classically, sometimes you do, classically bring in a, you bring in a consultant who can come in and say things to your board that you can't say. You can't say, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Or to challenge the thinking in a way to position at different thought. That's what you do, isn't it? Pretty much. that's your role. That's what, yeah. so sometimes it's supporting that internal conversation in, in, being serious for a second, so supporting that internal conversation. So yes, you can do that, but I think it's also about CX leaders being brave and challenging that story at that board level. And. Asking those compelling questions and prodding and poking and stop presenting that. This is just a number that we're chasing. It's not going, I'm gonna give you some real interesting data. if you said to the commercial director, we've got some data here that's showing that our recent price change is driving customers away. Yeah. We've got some data here that's showing that we've got high basket abandonment. We've got customers complaining, that they feel like, they're not getting value for money. you present that to a commercial director. There's something gonna be interesting in your conversation versus if you just said, here's the NPS score guys. It's gone up this month. Everyone will clap and high five you, and then you walk out the room. Yeah. And they'll go, they've gone now let's have a big boy conversation. sorry to be generalistic about it, but that's Yeah. After what happens, right? Yeah. So you've got to make the conversation interesting and. And also you've gotta invite people in, see it. Metrics like customer, satisfaction may, maybe NPS more and customer effort. And lawyers, they're relatively new and unknown, Most people are looking at classic measures like sales conversion. they're looking at

Iqbal:

customer lifetime value, customer lifetime, looking at

Vinay:

profitability, looking at more traditional metrics in an organisation operational metrics. So not everybody understands that. So you have to invite people into the conversation to get to understand what is it that you're actually telling them. Yeah. What does this measure actually mean? Yeah. Yeah. And I think going back to your question about why so much controversy, I'm sure there are a billion answers, but I think sometimes it's just human nature. When you've got a measure that works for you and you think that's the way that you should measure something. When you get challenged on that or when somebody's telling you to do it a different way, you Yeah. you put out a bit because you've, that's your crutch. That's the thing that holds up. Yeah. Yeah. Everything you do, right? Yeah. That's true. but NPS, a lot of the time is a vanity metric. It's like judging a business purely on turnover. Yeah. And not looking at profitability. Yeah. It's just that's,

Iqbal:

I, I think that's a good point about the profitability at the end of the day. Why are we doing all of these things? Like the metrics that, how do you tie, I think this is the gold. In all of this is if you can tie a, a set of metrics to actual revenue and profit, I think that's where you're winning, aren't you? Where you, if you're seeing an upward trend, because actually there's a change that you've made and being able to track that, and if you're seeing a decline in revenue a again, does the metric represent There is a fair representation of that?

James:

Yeah. Again, it has to be relevant. Okay. If you're looking at things in a manner of driving more product sales or looking at some specific outcome that you're looking to achieve, you need to make sure your organisation's geared up to actually, first of all, make sure the metric that again, is right, and it's measuring that particular set of data at the right point in time of that customer journey. That's absolutely critical. But then how and when do I need to make changes? How do I need to take that, act, those insights and do something with that data? And it goes back to. How this kind of feeds into, from an industry perspective, how CX is evolving anyway, and the empowerment of being able to, the question I'd be asking at the C level is my empowerment to be able to do something with that data? And that might be a new project, it might be a new sales launch, it might be some feedback to product management. I don't know. Yeah. But that's where the empowerment is not just presenting a vanity metric or a, set of information that might tell you what you do or you don't want to hear. Yeah. It's what do I do with that? That's important. Yeah.

Iqbal:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a, there's always a lot of politics at play as well. When you work, when you get more deeper into a lot of these organisations. everybody's protecting their own job or their own roles and, time. Time,

Vinay:

yeah. Time. Yeah. It is time. Yeah. And that's. A bend back to the, what's the culture in the organisation? What's the strategy? Because yeah, CX is an ecosystem, right? It's not a single point on a journey. It affects everything that we do. So actually it's in everybody's interest to understand what's the contribution around the table that drives this outcome, this, measure, and the data underneath that measure.'cause the most important, I would argue, the most important part of an NPS survey isn't the score, it's the box underneath that says. Tell me why you gave us that score. That's where the gold is. The verbatim for sure. That's the verbatim, that, we're in a world now where technology's allowing us to transcribe calls in real time, pull out real contextualisation Really helping us to understand tonality changes and pick up when customers are getting frustrated and assist agents. that's all come, we've talked about that for a decade. Yeah. but it's, I think the technology now is really making that, yeah. more readily available and making it a reality. So if you've got all of those things going on, what you're also then seeing, going back to contact centers and, without going off topic, we'll come back in a second, but, they're going for, I got into a conversation, a while ago about, this phrase that has been going around a long time for. Contact centers need to become value centers. How do we turn it from being a cost center to a profit center? How do we turn it to a value center? Traditionally, people have gone, oh, that's through upsell, cross sell. you, generate revenue in there. Yeah. But actually is the, change is the changing of the guard now the value is in the insight you can get from the conversations that are being had. Because now you've got the tools to be able to mine deep, pull out that deep ation and sell that valuable insight into the rest of the. organisation to help them to make better decisions around the table. So the value is, in those conversations, up until now, the tech hasn't been that great to be able to, at speed in real time, really unearth some of those gems that are in there.

Iqbal:

Yeah.

Vinay:

So I, I think that's part of it as well. But yeah, NPS it's the verbatim, that's where the magic is. Yeah. That's really where you've gotta,

Iqbal:

yeah. and, I think, obviously James, you've seen this, the. The way that AI in itself has really changed the game. and I think what we're, starting to extract some of this real value that we're getting in real time and actually as insights that people can use to start making some decisions. I think what's interesting for me, it's yes, we can get customers opinion on things, but actually AI is probably a better judge of what's going on across your whole entire, the way you are engaging your customers, not just on, on voice calls, but. Every step of the way. Yeah. In terms of socially and all of those things.

James:

Yeah, I, think it's a massive, un, untapped opportunity and, thinking about metrics like talk, listen ratio and sentiment. I, think we need to really look at those because that's a massive opportunity to, do something with that information and to your point. Conversations that are actually happening regardless of the channel. Convers. That's gold. I love that you said it, you said it was a jewel. It's absolute beyond dual this stuff. Because it's, better than a verbatim because of verbatims probably right at the end of an event or, during, post call and conversation, but this is real insights. Yeah. How did I show up as an agent? How did I deliver my brand? Yeah. and that's, and that brand could be my doctor's surgery. It could be my travel in company. It could be my, financial institution, my regulated business. Yeah. How am I delivering my brand? Yeah. And that's massive because if I'm a CMO or chief marketing Officer, I'm really interested in that stuff. Yeah. now that's something I want to hear about.

Vinay:

Yeah, exactly. You want to know how's this impacting our consideration? How's that impacting our perception of the market? And I think, just as you were talk, just you was talking about those ratio things, there's a couple of things that came up for me. Number one. Is, that's great that we get that insight, but then we've gotta empower those team leaders and leaders in the organisation to, be able to articulate, use that data and turn it into actionable insight. And I think that the other thing is, that if you think about the metrics we're really using, we're, using quite transactional hard metrics about a thing that happens. Yeah. Point in time. Yeah. But, what drives loyalty and beha loyalty is emotion. So where are we measuring emotion? How are we really getting an indicator now, if you think about the written word? Yeah. The way that I write something down, the moment you read it, you are the one who's taking the emotion, not me, because you are reading my words and translating them to go, this is what it means. So that's the limitation of taking a written, piece of text and the human or somebody going, oh, they must have read it that way. Then layer onto that, the complexity of first language, second language, where somebody is what they meant, what they didn't mean, all of that kind of stuff. But if you're listening to a call, you've got the tonality. Yeah. You've got the real what's feeling in there. And then the third part I would say is that the volume of contacts you have into an organisation in the contact center is far greater. Yeah. Than the sample sise you have for an NPS survey. Yeah, So using it alongside. NPSC sat, customer effort score, basket abandonment, the NPS score and how was the sale using it alongside all of those things. Yeah.

Iqbal:

Yeah.

Vinay:

Should help you to triangulate and find those key moments in the journey where you go, we need to drill down deep, deeper here, and here. Yeah. And that should force your organisation to contract. To concentrate, focusing and prioritise those areas.

Iqbal:

Yeah. Instead of just

Vinay:

scattering,

Iqbal:

it's possible now. There's no reason why what you've said there. I think going back to the point around time is a big problem and, I think we've solved for that because you've got AI taken care of a lot of the grunt work to present the kind of data that you need to be able to pinpoint exactly what's going on in it. There was an example recently where, working with a, fashion retailer. And they put their prices up on a particular product and they noticed that their complaints went up and the immediate kind of response, and based on some of the metrics that they were looking at, they, decided that it was initially down to the hiking price. That was the only thing that had changed. But what actually had wasn't the only thing that changed. They, also mi, they moved their contact center to, Eastern European country. It all coincided. And when they actually. Dig into some of what people were saying it was because the people weren't understanding them. Yeah. Like the, when they were calling in, that resulted in, and it wasn't, they were happy to pay, they were getting value from the price increase. They were okay with it. Like the product was still good, but the service they were getting. Getting was, impacted. So it's just you some, that's why you've gotta go into the detail of it. Otherwise you'll end up making the wrong decisions.

James:

Isn't that an amazing opportunity though, to unlock AI in that kind of use case where you can take that unstructured data and just say, how many times were, customers asking the agent to repeat themselves? A nice prompt. Let's train our people, our, organisations, to be able to use this technology and the insights you can get from that's really powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Really powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And isn't that exciting for the industry, right?

Vinay:

it's massively exciting. And I think, CX leaders, contact center leaders on this call should be suddenly thinking, I'm sitting on a pot of gold here. Yeah. How do I extract the value from what we have going on? How do I take the C-suite on the journey? To really go, geez, we didn't know this was going on. Or I've said this to you before. Yeah. when you're sitting at that board level, you're getting a narrative written in a board pack that's telling you the reality. Yeah. Giving you a version of the reality, right? Yeah. And I'm not saying that people do it on purpose, whatever, but human nature is, you're gonna, you're gonna tell a story in the most positive way that you possibly can when you present your list. And when you're at that level, you got so far away from the customers that you are not talking to them daily. You don't have that real time contact. No. So that you have this version that's presented to you on which you're making decisions. Yeah. And deciding investments. So to get closer to the customer, you've got a number of options. You either go and sit in contact centers. This is the course which I would advocate for. Yeah, for sure. You go onto the front line and you speak to customers, and the third thing is you get deeper insight. Yeah. Out of extracting those, what's happening in conversations. I wanna know what's being said about this thing. Tell me what's going on. What nuances are you finding? the marketing director is saying that the last campaign really, went really well. Or the metrics are saying that, but you are telling me that you are getting lots of complaints'cause people can't use the coupon code or the QR code that was with it. Or, people are complaining that they've unable to fulfill, get their order fulfilled. Like you should be able to, not to, stitch people up, but to help. Elevate the conversation. Improve,

Iqbal:

yeah. That's what we're, aiming for, right? CX is all about improvement. we've gotta figure out how we, do that. And, it just, you just, you talk, you mentioned sentiment there. I just got a an example recently, somebody that asked me about, they, they wanna work out what the average sentiment is at the end of every day across the board. So the, there's a sentiment of how calls have ended. Like they want to know when the calls ended, the sentiment positive, negative, or neutral. And they want to, I'm trying to figure out what, are you gonna do with this data? what's that? What does that mean? I, what they were trying to figure out what the trend is because they, want, it correlates with some training that they're doing for their agents to, to drive more empathy in the way that they are approaching their customers. Yeah. So even if the, service that the customer's getting isn't great. They wanna know that the calls ended on a positive. Yeah. Because actually they're teaching their agents to be more empathetic and Yeah. to, show care and all of those, going back to the whole point around emotion. Yeah. Are our customers ending conversations with us on a positive note? Yeah. there, I guess there, there's, some value in that.

Vinay:

of course, because the customer doesn't care what your a HT is, what your wrap time is. Yeah. What your talk time is. They don't care about any of those hard metrics. What they care about is on this call, did I get, did somebody actually care about me enough to help me to solve this problem? Yeah. And have I come off, that call feeling better or worse than when I first got on. Yeah. Because that feeling is going to drive whether I, am likely to do business with you again. Yeah. And how, what conversation I have with my friends and that, but what that company's measuring is interesting as long as they've got a metric upfront that says, what would the sentiment at the start of the call.

Iqbal:

Yeah,

Vinay:

and what was the sentiment at the end of the call? And if they can measure. Some kind of shit. Yeah. Because if they're getting a trend that says, actually we're getting a lot of calls in the beginning that are starting to almost come across as being customers frustrated, angry, whatever. But actually by the end of the call, yeah. We are getting a lot of customers saying, thank you you really helped me. Those are the things that are coming out. Yeah. That's a positive indicator.

Iqbal:

Yeah, it is. Yeah. But also, why are they unhappy to, begin with? So that's probably the right question isn't exactly.

Vinay:

but then you can show that your agents are doing something quite remarkable. Toran, which then back to the CMO. Is a conversation to have. Look, we are, a brand protection. We're part of your branding team. Yeah. Yeah. That's

Iqbal:

a good point. I like that. Brand protection.

Vinay:

Yeah. Yeah. we are here to reinforce who we are, what we stand for. We're letting the customer know that we'll take care of them. Yeah. When they have a problem. Yeah. That, that goes deep. And I think I shared a stack with you that when a customer refers another customer, a customer that's referred into your business on average, spends 25% more on their first order, are three times more likely to recommend you and have twice the lifetime value. Yeah, than as somebody you require direct. Wow. So if you are thinking that this is a soft measure, if you're thinking there aren't any economics behind this, or there's no real money behind this, there is because the more you drive that, that feeling of advocacy from customers and they are the ones recommending Yeah. Yeah. The greater the opportunity of growth, future revenue, lifetime value. All of that really comes into the mix.

Iqbal:

You, you see a lot of brands also use like referral fees to try and encourage those kind of bribing your customer to refer you. does that, work in the same way? Fuck you. just because Revolut are messaging me every day. look.

James:

Yeah. But yeah, but it goes back to deal of the brand, I think. I think for, yeah, getting paid 50 GBP to, to, refer somebody. I'd only do that if I really loved Yeah, me personally. If I really loved what I was getting. It's true.

Iqbal:

But isn't that because like obviously for 50 quid for you may not be a big deal, but actually for my son, I know for a fact he would get all his banks on.

James:

Yeah. Yeah. I, get it. I, completely get it. because it is around a demographic thing for sure. ultimately. WI want good service and, if is a competitive marketplace is financial services, so maybe as, my, like me, like, you, with your family, my 18 year old's probably got a different need to myself, right? Yeah, exactly. and again, it's about trust with that brand as well, and that's really, important. Yeah. Yeah. So I love this conversation because it, just shows how important it is to, get into the detail and not just have a, value. It isn't. It isn't a Boolean. Yes, no, it isn't a range or a percentage. It's reality of what's happening.

Vinay:

Yeah.

James:

Let's have that gold. Let's have that reality. I. And contact center is the place. It is the reality. and I think what we need to do as an industry again, is to really think about what we're sat on here, our people, our data, all those insights. That's massive. And if we can use tools like ai, to your point Al, to unlock that, free up some time, get the chance to be able to dig into this stuff. Yeah. One opportunity to transform cx.

Vinay:

Yeah.

James:

Do you know what I

Vinay:

mean? It'd be hugely, and, contact centers, frontline service, all of those a hundred percent. Okay. Let's, jump to a final question for you, James. so if you could change just one thing of how companies use metrics in CX that would make the biggest shift or the biggest difference, what, would that thing be?

James:

When you present the metrics, what are you actually doing about it or what is the ask? Tell me what you need. If I'm the CIO, tell me what you need and maybe instilling the confidence of the people who are listening to this now, on this podcast, to be able to do that's gonna really help. Help you help us, And help your customers. What's the ask?

Vinay:

Great. thank you for being an awesome guest. Thank you for your contribution. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. I really enjoyed that conversation. James, if people wanna find you, track you down, what's the best way that they can get in touch? Is it LinkedIn? Is it.

James:

Yeah, come and say hi on LinkedIn. I tend to be a very nice person and respond to, emails and stuff because I think we're here for the industry again, and, we've gotta bring people through. We've gotta generate that enthusiasm and confidence that it's a great place to be. So please do reach out.

Iqbal:

Yeah, I appreciate that, James. and I think, for me personally, you are one of the most passionate people that I've come across in this industry. I really appreciate you coming in, giving, us your kind of insight and your thoughts. So yeah, appreciate that.

Vinay:

You're very welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for watching that episode of the Breaking the Blueprint podcast. I hope you really enjoyed the conversation and we had a lot of fun recording it. Now you might be wondering why Vinay is all of a sudden in a different location. Well, um, we had a bit of a tech fault yesterday when we were recording the summary portion of this podcast. One of us who's not in the video today. Forgot to press the record button. So here I am in my home studio just to summarise some quick points for you. So look, I hope you enjoy the conversations. I've said. CX metrics is a really interesting conversation. Always divides opinion. You have staunch supporters in one camp. You can have violent disagreement in another camp. But it always sparks a great debate and conversation, and that's what this podcast is all about. Not being right, not being wrong, but just driving a positive conversation and getting people to really take an interest in the things that drive customer loyalty, advocacy, and trust. So if you're a leader in the C-Suite in your organisation, who's not traditionally in the CX space. I hope what you've heard today has given you some food for thought. I hope it's going to help you to ask more empowering and challenging questions of your team and really kind of dig deeper under the surface to find out what really is driving loyalty. I. In your organisation and if you are somebody who is responsible for driving customer experience improvement, I hope it's helped you with some ideas on how to frame the conversation and tell more powerful stories to get buy-in into your projects and drive the change that you really want in your organisation. The kind of change that will deliver experiences that we all want, the kind that bring customers coming back time and time again. And have them tell all of their friends. Next time on the Breaking the Blueprint podcast, we have a fantastic episode with an expert in the field of membership organisations. That's gonna be a great one. There's some nice, um, conversation and debate that we'll be having in there. So if you like what you've heard today, hit the subscribe button below or wherever it is that you're watching this video. Be sure to follow the Breaking The Blueprint podcast page on LinkedIn and on on other social media channels including Instagram and TikTok. And you can also follow me and Iqbal on LinkedIn, connect with us. We'd love to hear from you. If you have any ideas about topics or conversations you'd like us to have, drop us a message we'd only be too happy to delve into those and until the next time. Keep moving forward and drive that customer loyalty.