Scaling the Front Line
By Russell Bourne
What part of your customer journey would you scale if you wanted to make the most of your company’s efficiency, and also deliver a positive customer experience? If you said the front line, you’re not alone. For the purposes of this article, we’ll define the front line as the first point of entry for a customer interaction which the customer initiates. If you’re looking out for front line touchpoints that tend to be high volume and create reactive work, you might zoom in on the classics: inbound emails, tickets, and phone calls to a general company number, or that you would like to route away from manual delivery and toward the general company number.
With that in mind, let’s operate under three given statements:
Your business is interested in scaling certain customer journey touchpoints, or improving on ones you scaled in the past.
You’re curious about where generative AI might fit in.
You agree with the widely-held belief that business to business (b2b) companies are about 10-20 years behind business to consumer (b2c) companies when it comes to scaled touchpoints - with the exception that both types of businesses are getting access to generative AI at the same time.
Let’s start with what we know from scaled b2c front line touchpoints. Specifically, let’s look at these touchpoints from the customer point of view - you.
Lessons from Business-to-Consumer
Typically, b2c companies offer a few routes for front line help for customers.
Web FAQ
If you’re like most modern consumers, when you need answers about a product or service, you start by visiting the company’s website and looking for the FAQ section. Some companies simply list questions in a single column. Others bucket the questions into categorized groups. Others may skip an FAQ section altogether and route you to a Support-driven knowledge base. Fundamentally, your experience here boils down to three things: whether the company addressed your question at all, how easy it was to find, and whether the content allowed you to solve the problem with no further interaction.
Phone
If you’re dealing with anything but a small company, chances are your phone call is answered by an automated phone tree system. Frankly, the majority of these offer a horrible customer experience, starting with breaking your trust with a blatantly untrue statement: “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed”. Assuming we all endeavor to be trusted advisors to our customers, to be clear: don’t break your customers’ trust!
This is also a good place to acknowledge we often resort to calling the phone number when the website didn’t solve the problem. For some of us, this is now our second touchpoint and we’re starting it from a place of frustration.
Diving deeper into the tree, you’re often met with a menu whose choices don’t clearly align with your reason for calling. Further frustrated, you press “0” for a live agent, which defeats the purpose of the phone tree, which is to correctly route your call. Your front line touchpoint - which has now creeped into manual delivery, so it’s no longer scaled - is now requiring you to solve the problem with a second touchpoint or more.
Here’s the kicker: whether the live agent solves your problem or not, you’re often prompted at the end of the call to provide feedback in the form of a 1-5 star rating. The problem is, companies often ask you to rate the agent, but not the product or experience. Most of us recognize an agent isn’t responsible for a poorly-designed experience and wouldn’t want to bury them with bad feedback - so we give a high rating or skip the survey. This is a crucial lost opportunity for the company to hear valuable feedback at volume.
Chat
Many companies offer chat functions on their website. Chats sometimes start with a clickable version of a phone tree allowing the company to either solve your problem FAQ-style or route you to a live agent. As generative AI matures, expect it to replace the tree model, and to solve problems deeper into the interaction and of greater complexity so that fewer and fewer customers are pushed to a live agent. Many of us have used Amazon’s version of chat when faced with issues on delivered products, and would probably agree their process is a seamless, intuitive, and generally good experience.
Making Sense of Customer Behavior Data
Now that we’ve vented on our front line experiences as b2c customers, let’s apply learnings on how we as b2b vendors can do better as we build or update our scaled programs.
Step 1: Know what your frequently asked questions are. If the web FAQ and phone tree options are any indication, companies do a poor job of this. Whether your customers made use of a question you had accounted for, or they had to overflow and ask one that wasn’t, track what the question was. Re-tally the most frequently asked questions quarterly if not monthly. You can compile this data through post-touchpoint surveys, Pendo, or a variety of other options. Most importantly, ask the right questions that lead you to uncover what customers really need.
Step 2: Update the scaled touchpoints with the real FAQs. This is a seemingly simple step that, again, doesn’t seem to happen in many cases. If you have the right data from your regular re-tallies, act on it by changing what you offer your customers in the front line scaled touchpoints. You will provide your customers a faster, easier, better experience, and you will meet your goal of making as many front line inquiries single-touch solves as possible. Efficiency was the point of scaling, after all.
Step 3: Train Generative AI on the real FAQs and their answers. Before diving into AI, let’s acknowledge steps 1 and 2 are completely doable without it. You don’t have to use AI to scale; but if you do, remember you need to retrain your AI according to what the new questions are, and any updates on what the answers are. Answers may change with product updates, new laws or regulations, or even structural changes to your company. If you have a chat interface and you’re introducing bot functionality through a 3rd party vendor, they likely have automation built for this exact thing.
This article was written with simplicity in mind - and with empathy, an acknowledgement that most companies have not gotten one-touch-solve front line touchpoints right. They’re deceptively easy to forget about, even if you’re thinking of ways to scale your journeys! The upside is, if your company gets them right, you’re already ahead.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that focuses on building and developing top performing CS programs. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for more on our offerings.
Russell Bourne - Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter. Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.
