Brian Kale, Director of Customer Success at Bank NOVO, a Brooklyn-based millennial by heart and soul and a huge advocate of self-service, provided CX Insider with his insights on the future of banking services.
Episode 46
Episode Summary
What is the difference between customer success and customer support?
Customer support is a highly transactional, methodical interaction where a customer asks for a service, and an employee performs the task. Customer success, on the other hand, is trying to erase the transactional element and create rather value-driven, empowering conversations. It could be said customer success has evolved as an upgrade of the former. This concept most likely originated from B2B sales management, where a highly personalised experience has always been a key to success, and later adapted to a B2C environment.
The future is automation
Moving from transactional interactions to meaningful conversations, Brian firmly believes the future leads to seamless automation. The reason for this is that the costs of human labour are increasing all around the world. As an example, he used companies which offshore customer service in the 90s and 2000s overseas and are now finding this strategy too expensive. If Brian is right, the next question you should ask yourself is, how do you convince older generations, who were raised on phone calls, to stop calling you and fix their problems themselves? The answer is a hybrid model with a frictionless customer journey that intuitively guides the customer to reach their desired goal. The truth is, although the future is heading towards automation, customers still need real humans. For example, video chats hold a huge potential in situations in which this tool can help create meaningful conversations, such as healthcare, counselling, personal shopping, etc.
I think the future is automation. No phone calls and value-driven conversations. Companies need to move away from phones as soon as possible.
Consumers need to start protecting themselves
The banking industry is always at risk of fraud. In today’s world, people are being born with digital identities, sometimes even before they are born. According to Brian, banking institutions have been protecting their clients for hundreds of years but sadly their practices are outdated. Customers need to start adopting two-factor authentication and SMS verification. People can copy your voice, face, passwords and use them to create digital personas.
This article summarises podcast episode 46 ” Stop Asking Your Customers to Call You” recorded by CX Insider. For more information, listen to the episode or contact Brian on his LinkedIn profile.
Written by Valentina Svobodova
Full episode transcript
Brian: I had to interact with my bank, Wells Fargo, a couple of weeks ago, and the only way to do so, I had to call and I was so pissed and I either sat on hold for an hour and a half or got a callback and the callback was four hours later. And of course, I missed it. So I had to do the whole process over again. And then at the end of the day, when I took the call, it was like this 30 second thought, you know, like little conversation that was like a blip. Why couldn't I have a live chat or a button in my app to just do what I needed? I needed to cancel a quick transaction. It's super easy. So companies need to move away from phones as soon as possible. And when you start talking to consumers and training them on how to be empowered and how to use digital tools.
Valentina: In today's episode, Adam and I are talking to Brian Kale, Director of Customer Success at Bank NOVO. In this part, I usually mention about two or three main topics we covered, but in this episode, we talked about so many things that you just need to listen to it all. But in general, we pretty much covered the past, present and future of customer success in the banking industry. So enjoy the episode and don't forget to let us know on social media. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another CX insider podcast episode today, Adam and I are talking to Brian Kale, Director of Customer Success at a startup called Bank NOVO. Hello, Brian. Thank you for coming.
Brian: Hello. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here and looking forward to joining our call chat in our ongoing chat here as well. I love the ally we have going for it.
Valentina: Thanks. How's Miami, by the way?
Brian: It is great here temporarily, of course, just for the month. But, you know, it's great getting out of the city, New York, of course. And, you know, being in person with the rest of my team and seeing people that I haven't seen in a year. It's surprisingly emotional, obviously, during COVID and everything. So it's kind of I'm really excited to be getting back to normal. And, you know, outside of the humidity and the heat, Miami is a great town. I hope it's not underwater in five years. But for now, I'm going to enjoy it as much as possible. I just gotta to sneak all that in there.
Adam: Yeah.
Valentina: Yeah, cool. So, Brian, at the beginning, I would like to ask you, could you maybe explain to the audience a bit what would you do at Bank NOVO and what Bank NOVOdoes in general?
Brian: Yeah, I mean, what don't I do? When, you know, when you work at a startup, you do almost anything that you need to do, especially when you're one of the early employees. So I am obviously the director of customer service. NOVO I joined it early 2019 to come into the company precede we only had seven or eight employees and a couple hundred customers and I was tasked with building out our CX/CS department. And over the last year and a half I have scaled us, you know, from hundreds of hundreds of customers, no employees in the CS to twenty and you know, multiple tens of thousands. And so when you work at a startup, it's. Especially this early, you do whatever you need to do, because if you don't show up for work or if you don't do something, no one one's going to step in. So I oversee the entire customer journey and experience, and my team interfaces with our customers day to day through our support systems, through all of our channels, emails. We do outbound and receive inbound. And we're here to help small businesses in America. And so NOVO just speak to that is a small business debit and checking account for companies here in the United States. We work primarily with very, very small businesses, you know, some five employees, usually the founder and someone else for the last.
Brian: And these are companies forged out of the recession using the Internet of Things to turn their hobbies into businesses when many of these talented people were laid off or and didn't return to the workforce. A lot of our founders are over 40 as well, and there's a lot of other factors. We have a good, healthy mix of generational minds who have come together to start businesses. But at the same time, these are also DoorDashers and Uber drivers who are businesses. And I know that that's a big topic right now - are the employees with businesses within the United States still businesses? And when they bank with traditional banks, you know, through their personal account, like you all do as well, you have a very different experience with what businesses do, because businesses are dealing with antiquated systems, the federal government and the banks still treat large companies, still think small businesses are multiple millions of dollars, tens, 20s, 30s, 40s employees. And the reality is small businesses are a couple of people now with a laptop. And we want to build the bank for them and give them the consumer experience that they deserve. So that was a little bit of a lot, but not that was good. That's what we're doing here.
Adam: That's perfect. Also, I've just learned of DoorDashes. Never even heard of that before. What's that like another U.S. version of Uber?
Brian: Yeah, so it is. Yeah, they are the last mile. Not really the last mile. You order stuff from grocery stores, from target convenience stores, and they go there and they dash door to door. Amazing. I don't know if they're over there yet. Interesting.
Adam: I didn't know of that stuff. We have services like JustEat and Deliveroo which generally do fast food and they now also offer groceries and things as well. But I bet that business like that was probably taken off during COVID.
Brian: All of them exploded right
Adam: Yeah, absolutely.
Valentina: So I would like to know here in the UK, I don't come across the term customer success that often. And when I do, I mostly actually see that in startups. And I wanted to ask you, because to me, I've never actually looked for the proper definition of what customer success is, but I assume that it does sounds to me like a different word for customer support, which I might be wrong, but I wanted to ask you. So how do you actually define it? How is it different from customer service or support?
Brian: This is a very good question. You've already heard me use customer experience to customer success almost interchangeably as well just now. So I'm a big believer in words, have power, titles have powers. When you give something a title, it has meaning and power. So when you call something or someone or an interaction, customer service, a service is like a transactional and methodical interaction where the customer is having a service performed on them and the employee is doing a task. And both sides mentally will create this this unintentional conversation about what's going on. So rebranding as customer success, leveling up your employees to be more than just a transactional helper, to be a conversationalist, to have value-driven conversation, positive and motivated, not not here to just solve a problem here to answer questions and empower customers to then the next time they might not need to contact you. They they they also develop better human connections with you because it's not just transactional one on one thing. And so what you're seeing in the industry and it's been going on for a while, but it's really picking up steam is customer service still exists, especially in traditional companies. But it's like evolving into the support success model where it's we're here to really elevate your experience. And that is overall holistically the customer experience. What's interesting is like the sales at Enterprise has co-opted or even probably developed the term customer success. So you often see customer success applied to enterprise-grade sales or their account managers. They're these hands-on like love people. So effectively, what B2C companies are doing is taking that mindset and terminology and bringing it down to the consumer level and giving one on one individual consumers. That same white-glove experience and white-glove experience is a very nebulous term now. So I know traditionally means one on one having contact with all the bells and whistles. But now it's. You know, fully customized digital experiences, automation, how do you flesh out everything and again, it's all about empowering customers to take advantage of the tools in their accounts and everything without having to contact you. And that's a whole topic in itself.
Valentina: Yeah, it's cool. You touched on customer experience a bit. A couple of weeks ago. I did an online course on customer experience consultancy, I could say, and they were saying that basically every company, if it's possible, should have a dedicated team customer experience team, which should report directly to the CEO. So I wanted to and I can see that mainly in startups, for example,Huel, the brand which provides or which sells meal replacements, it's a startup and they've got their own dedicated CX department, CX department. What do you think about this? Do you think that it's it's necessary?
Brian: Yeah, one hundred percent, so. Usually you start with the support/success side and you build into experience, especially at early stage startups, but every company needs to have customer experience or a customer ownership. At the C-level or reporting directly to the c-level with no barriers in between, it shouldn't be a function of marketing or sales. If anything, those are the functions of CX. That's not obviously to overinflate my my industry. But customers contact your company every day either through support tickets or through interacting with your product. They tell you things all the time. There are billions of dollars of market research on the table. And if you're not collecting and you're not paying attention to it and you're not conveying those stories and messages to the CEOs, to the C-levels, to the investors, what are you doing? You're wasting money. And then you get companies who were developing products that are could be completely misaligned with what the customers actually want. You could be thinking you're solving one problem and your customers actually think you're solving a different problem. And I do think that this is for the benefit as branding is everything. And I know branding is holistically marketing. It's it's design. It's everything. And and no better place is that, you know, brand live than directly with the customer experience because they interact with you and your brand. And as we're moving into an era where, you know, decisions or purchasing decisions are made on brand alone, you really need to dedicate to that and understand who your customers are and why they want to even interact. So, yes.
Adam: Perfect. I said I was going to ask the question first, so I brought a bit of a kind of the broad question this is posed. This will be very hard to answer. Quickly, what do you what do you think is the future of customer service? You know, what you really think is the future of it?
Brian: I can answer that. That's not that hard. I think the future is automation. No phone calls and value driven conversations. So globally, salaries are increasing significantly everywhere. And companies who offshore customer service in the nineties and two thousands overseas are now seeing those overseas operations becoming more and more expensive, specifically around phone calls. I don't know about the UK, but the United States entire generations were raised on phone calls. Yeah, so that's very expensive. An agent can only take a handful of phone calls an hour where they could take, you know, 40 live chats an hour. That's a little high. But they could take you know, they can answer two or three live chats in five minutes where they could take one phone call in five minutes. Could is a little physical cap on the amount of phone calls an agent can handle. And those costs are ultimately pushed on to the consumer. But no one tells you that as a consumer, you're not told that part of the reason Amex charge you four hundred dollars a year is to pay for the customer service costs as well, and as the salaries for customer support and service agents. You keep going up, companies are either going to start charging you directly for white-glove service or they're going to start doubling or tripling down on automation.
Brian: And we're in a weird time where a lot of companies are doing a very bad job at automation. And and, you know, that's sort of like streamline customer service. So you have companies that have these terrible IVRs. They still make you call and then you have to go through this crazy, long, boring. You aren't your boss type thing. The phone companies need to move away from phones as soon as possible. And when you start talking to consumers and training them on how to be empowered and how to use digital tools like I had to interact with my bank, Wells Fargo, a couple of weeks ago, only to do so, I had to call and I was so pissed and I either sat on hold for an hour and a half or got a callback and the callback was four hours later. And of course, I missed it. So I had to do the whole process over again. And then at the end of the day, when I took the call, it was like this 30 second thought, you know, like little conversation that was like a blip. Why couldn't I have a live chat or a button in my app to just do what I needed? I needed to cancel a quick transaction. It's super easy.
Adam: So like Amazon within banking.
Brian: Yeah. So ironically, Amazon's on the cutting edge of this. They invest tons of money in it. Go, go, go buy an Amazon thing, have it delivered and go to your support tab and interactive that you have to go through this whole flow. It's it's it's easy and hard to talk to a customer, to a customer support person and Amazon, but they also give you all the tools they do. Yeah.
Adam: If you're so right, because if it's done poorly, because that story you just said about your back, I can think of two that come to mind for me that I've done very recently because I've just moved. One of them was a credit card all done via the app. They've actually turned off their web support. And I have to do by the app, needed to speak to the live chat. But it isn't a real person. It's automated. But then because I've already to do refers me to call them you then call them and you get an automated voicemail that says everything can be done by the app and it hangs up on you.
Brian: Yeah. And, you know, it's you know, what's crazy is they knew one hundred percent who you were. Yeah. When you and but then they're still going to ask you to tell you all the stuff I know. Like companies are lazy. They take they look at customer service as a cost centre. When it drives revenue, it drives retention. So if you invest in it, you're going to be at the forefront over the next 10 years because you're either going to start charging your your your customers for that phone support that you so lazily invest in, or you're going to have to force them into a bad experience that you just might buy them.
Adam: Because people like you popping up,
Brian: I mean, it's ironically still a battle to talk to bigger companies. And, you know, they were talking about what if we add Zoom to the customer support experience? And it was like, wow, now that's helpful. No, that's terrible.
Adam: I'm going to ask you about video, actually, because you talk about automation. You talk about channels the live chat. What's your opinion on kind of video within a customer experience?
Brian: Yes. Yes. It really depends on what the product and services to like. There are these tele doctors that everyone's popular with, you know, call it like get a virtual counsellor. Yeah, that's video. That is a good customer, by the way. That's customer success. That is a good customer success with the use of Zoom. If you're a mass-market consumer, great product that has a monthly subscription. Now, that is like if you're using Netflix now, why would you use Zoom? That's crazy. Also, you expose your your employees to such risk. The only time Zoome really kind of makes sense is on a very professional setting with companies. But, you know, as I alluded to at the top of the hour, companies are getting smaller and smaller and acting like consumers anyways. So I think it behooves many companies to start rapidly onboarding consumer-grade experiences, specifically from the SAAS space around customer service and support. Like have you fleshed out your ethics? Have you built proper automation? Have you literally just built account management tools for your customers to manage their own accounts? Like some companies you have to call them to change your email. It's like, what is this?
Adam: Yeah, that's kind of like with some banks, what do you change your address with them and then they they then send a letter confirming you change address to your old address. What a waste of money and time.
Brian: Yes, but there's also an there's a lot of reasons for that, that there is a compliance and security element to that. But I would say that that is not as secure or compliant as I think the banking industry is always at risk of fraud or in defending their customers. So they do a lot of antiquated, outdated things that they think are in service of fraud management and mitigation. But they they are outdated and don't really work anymore. The reality is, is, you know, 30 percent of all the people on social media don't exist. All of our information is online right now for three dollars. I don't know what you all have in England, but Social Security number in the United States. I basically every single dollar the United States, your information is online. So consumers need to start protecting themselves evermore and companies do, too. But banking banks have been doing this for hundreds of years and they still do the stuff they did seventy five years ago and. They need to innovate more and not always doing a lot of digital solutions to fraud mitigation for our customers and ourselves. You know, we force you know, you just mentioned a company that forced you to go to the app, which is smart. You never want to email your. I would never want to email anyone anymore because email is such a channel for phishing. And yeah, I like companies that still send emails about your account are putting their customers at risk and... You know, everyone needs to start adopting two-factor authentication, SMS verification, and coming up with multiple layers of fraud mitigation because already. We can we I mean, your voice, your face and all of your passwords can be copied or already copied and people can impersonate you very easily, or they could take that information and create digital personas of new people and open tons of bank accounts. And, you know, it's I didn't know any of this stuff until three years ago. And the amount of terrifying things that are possible are mind-boggling and we're only scratching the surface and I know this is really off.
Adam: No, no, no. This is this is really interesting, though, because I had a Google password hack myself and I could see it happening. And the moment it happened, it was actually by some Russian bot, without a doubt, because by Google language got changed to Russian. Instantly all my accounts start with the password to changing in as quick as I could change it. They change you back. And that was actually because stupid me, I didn't have to stage verification turned up on my Google Chrome. And where do you save your password? Google Chrome. I know I have now about Securus I could get, but yet it was awful, it was
Valentina: Basically your whole identity could be stolen.
Adam: It was my credit card. Everything everything was just gone.
Brian: So just just to speak to that, I would say you should one hundred percent, you obviously have two-factor verification turned on. You should use a third party app. There's a password pass. There's tons of them. Do not save anything in your Google Chrome because you just said if Google Chrome is hacked, you lose everything. But if you have multiple layers of security, so you still use Google Chrome, obviously still sort of Two-Factor, use your email to all that stuff, but you should migrate your password and credit card information to a third party service that you pay for and you should one hundred percent pay for the service. Yeah, don't do VPN, those are those are not what you think they are. Those actually make you more of a target and a threat. They don't want to tell you that, but it does because it makes you more unique online, like. Part of part of you as a consumer, you're lost in the crowd, but the second you have a VPN, everyone knows you have a VPN, so then they might target you even more, which is the dirty secret is everyone knows when you're using a VPN, it's blatantly obvious.
Brian: It's so to tie this back to CX, companies and consumers and this is kind of I'm going to try to do over the next 10 years to try to track consumers. But companies and consumers need to both learn and educate each other on the next 10 years because it's inevitable and it's already happening. And the longer you take to to give it the program, the more at risk or the worse experience you're going to have in companies will turn customers, customers will lose money. And it's just the cycle of never ending. And then you'll see, you know. So someone will come in and usurp you really quickly, every enterprise, great product is at risk for disruption right now. Know, if you're if you have huge annual contracts with ludicrous cost, there's going to be a there's a startup right now who's working on a monthly version that's 50 dollars. So everyone needs to get on board with this or you're just going to get left out like Salesforce bots lack for a reason. Right. They know.
Valentina: That's brilliant. Brian, thanks. I actually want to I want to go back a bit to where you were talking about automation and self-service. Of course. I know. I know you're a huge advocate of self-service. I am myself as well. I think our generation in general, I'm actually dealing with this issue actually regarding my bank account, because I am a customer of Barclays. And Barclays has this app called Pingit. At least I think that's how
Adam: It is Pingit. Yep.
Valentina: So so it's an app that allows you to transfer your money using your telephone number. But the biggest benefit of it all I myself perceive is that I can create like these little jars to save my money or piggy banks. But anyway, they are closing this app and I think what am I going to do with my piggy banks? I need to I probably need to open another bank account somewhere else. And the number one thing that I am thinking about is I just don't want to talk to anyone. Please don't make me call anyone else and an email to anyone or use any life automated. I automated chatbots, please. No, I just want to do everything by myself. A couple of clicks and then done. But that being said, then there's also my dad, right. The older generation who says why? Why you just you just grab your phone and call somebody and they will deal with it for you. Do you think that there is this generational clash that younger people prefer a self-service, but the older generation, they don't do things themselves. They want to they want other people to do it for them.
Brian: Yeah. So I think the only reason it's a generational clash is because when your dad was growing up, he had to call to do anything. There was no website to go to and he either went to the store or the branch and did in person or he called corporate. And so he's been raised his whole life to do that. He's been raised his whole life that I just go into a bank branch, talk to the bank person, and they do this for me. We're our generation's starting very early in the two thousands. The most innovative companies built these tools right away. So what you're seeing is, is a lot of companies in the balance. How do you appease a generation? And I definitely think it's an age. It's just more about the context was the rage. I don't want to I want to make it seem like as you get older, you want that it's about how you were raised. And so you companies need to develop the hybrid model of how do you create an experience that is so intuitive and easy that it appeases. Younger people who want the fastest solution and answer as possible and the older people who just want to talk to someone who just wants them to do it, and there's something definitely admirable about that. But remember when I talked about the differences in customer service and success, older generations want a service performed for them. Right. And they don't want to be charged for it. But the reality is they are being charged for in some way. And so eventually they're going to have to pay for it more than they already are or companies are going to have to come up with innovative solutions. And everyone remembers the Google Voice demo from two years ago.
Brian: That is one hundred percent being developed for customer service. You're looking at some of the biggest outsourcing shops in the world who are on the cutting edge of voice automation and IVRs, because they know as well that as headcounts, as individual employees become expensive, there will still be a need for humans. Right? There will always be a need for humans. Ten percent of your tickets goed to human and 90 percent go to goes to the automation and automation isn't always a bot. It is. It is. As you said, it is tools. It is a button. It is all of the stuff. That's all automation is the umbrella. Part of it is a chatbot. But that that really you want to have. Even you only want like 15, 20 percent going to chatbots, 80 percent going to, you know, 60 percent going to your automated empowerment tools and you want the remaining 20 or whatever, you know, I lost count of the math going to humans. And so you're going to see in five years. Robots that sound just like humans and could probably have more advanced conversations than now, five could be very bullish, but I would say 10 years at the max and I are used to work in AI company. And, you know, five years ago, it was nowhere near ready, but it's been five years and then it's going to be another five years. And these tools are only rapidly advancing and you're going to be able to call them. And you won't even know the EU is already proposing legislation that we have to announce when these are bots like you had to tell the customer,
Valentina: The EU has everything under the radar.
Brian: I mean they do, like I keep bringing it up because I think it's something that is probably a good thing. And like, you know, not no,
Valentina: You're right, because I was just thinking about if I call the customer service an and it's answered by a robot and I can't even recognize that it's a robot, that's that's a bit creepy.
Brian: Exactly. But it's also to protect you, because when you talk to a company, the company should tell you you're talking to a robot because, you know, it also is going to have to. Do you guys get spam calls?
Adam: Yep.
Brian: All the time? OK, those robots are going to become if they're going to sound just like humans. And so you want a company to tell you when you're talking to the robot because that will help separate them from the fraudsters who are spam. Calling you every day in those fraudsters are going to have the same tools that the companies do and they're going to like. Not to bring it back to this thing like things are about to get really weird for everyone, and you're already seeing it with social media and fake media, like, you know, you can mimic and fake anything now and they're going to call your voice. It's going to sound like whoever you want it to be, Boris Johnson is going to call you one day like it's like. And I don't think consumers understand that I mean, I think on some level they know, but like there's a difference between knowing what's going on and happening and actually understanding the ramifications of that. And companies, it's it's in everyone's best interest to pay attention to things. And companies should rapidly adopt this technology to bring it back to CX. And so what's going to happen in the future is for your dad. He'll either be forced to just use live chat, which, by the way, a lot of older populations do enjoy live chat because the second they use it, they get a 30 second response time. They instantly go, oh, this is fast and it's over when you get on the phone. Most companies I don't know, the last time I called someone and didn't have to wait 45 minutes to an hour, ask your dad how much I agree and you can calculate how much money you're losing.
Adam: I've noticed as well on that the many UK organizations, when you go to the customer services, they kind of give you two options and they highlight very clearly they actually put out the word quick or fastest response, live chat and actually call it the really steering people towards that.
Brian: Oh, yeah. And pretty soon they're going to just not even tell you about phones. The phone will be so buried that you'll never find it. No, they have it.
Valentina: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But but that being said, I do think there might be some kind of behavioral shift during the pandemic because people were so isolated and they might want to talk to somebody.
Brian: I know that that's a big hot topic. I think that, yes, maybe in the beginning, but the reality is a lot. No one wants to talk to a company or your bank like that. They might stay on the phone calls longer, but I don't think it cause people to want to talk. I think what actually happened was everyone was home and instead of being busy with work, they had time on their hands. So they were taking care of things that they'd be putting off, you know, thinking. But normally it's like, oh, I have to call my bank to do this thing. I'll put it off. I'll put it off. I'll put it off. Now, it's like I could do right now. I'm sitting at home. I got nothing else going on. And so I think that's really what happened because. While, yes, they wanted to reaction that they were probably calling their family and friends now, again, I do think that they were staying that phone calls longer. But I think the big the big reason why there was an increase in an imbalance for most companies last year was people were home. And rather than putting off calling the company, they just did it right away. That's what I think happened. And there's a sense of panic. Everyone was freaking out, so that created a sense of urgency, rightfully so, by the way, that, you know, I don't want to downplay. I was working on here,
Adam: But we were absolutely I was going to ask a question, Brian, that she's a bit off topic. But from your from the conversation today and look at your LinkedIn profile, you've worked in different industries. You mentioned on a little project before. You kind of worked to the computer game industry. You've worked for an eye company. And the stuff we spoke about so far today, would you say that the banking industry is probably one of the industries that is going through the biggest change? Because said certainly sounds like a.
Brian: Yeah, one hundred percent, there is a big article this week, I think, in Forbes about banks should hire less bankers and more tech people. They should still hire bankers. I'm not downplaying that. One hundred percent. You're seeing nonbanking people migrate to FinTech because we're bringing, you know, our experience from consumer grade SACE enterprise products to banking. Banking is an industry where a duopoly, even though there used to be more banks, but effectively a duopoly in the United States means that they don't have to care. They don't and they really don't. Unless you're like making them millions of dollars, they're going to push you into whatever service they want because you have no choice, no insurance from a bank. Why? Because it's such a pain in the ass. Oh, I'm switching from Wells Fargo to Chase now. I have to give my new credit card number and set up all of my new accounts. And it's like a multi month process. So banks are inherently sticky because of friction and that has caused them to just not care about the customer experience. But customers are more empowered than ever, and they're more willing to make change now than ever because they have more information. And you're seeing that with banking. And, you know, I think that Robin Hood over the last quarter has been a very good case study and customer experience. Ironically, I think they're making the wrong decision. They're onboarding three call centers to support phones because Robin Hood famously did not support phone calls, but they are now because of the GameStop fiasco. But I think that that's counterintuitive. Now, let's let's point out, though, the Robin Hood makes billions of dollars a year so they're able to afford it. But most companies, a lot of banks. They don't make that much money off, they make a lot like a ton of money up, nothing up but off of a checking and debit account, they don't you know, it's not cost effective. So that's why Robin Hood could support funds.
Valentina: So before we finish, I wanted to ask you one last question. Of course. What advice would you give to future leaders,
Brian: To future CX leaders? I mean, to anyone in the reality is no one knows. No one knows they're going to be in CX until they wake up one day. And they've been in the industry for five years. I would say be flexible and be prepared to learn 60 percent of any new thing, because you're going to have to learn new things every six months. And then how can you innovate the customer experience without injecting more people into the process? You're obviously always going to have to hire customer support representatives, but how do you make it so customers don't feel compelled to call you? Because at the end of the day, no one wakes up and says they want to call their bank. They get pissed and say they want to call their bank. So why are they pissed? What what was the root cause? Why? And keep asking why. Dig deeper. Every problem has multiple layers and solving the lower layers will save you money in the long run. Might cost you more money now to fix. But companies keep kicking the can down the road and that is felt by consumers. And so if you're a young speculator or even a veteran speculator, how how do you find a way to have a best in class experience that's not phones? Because phones are not a best in class experience. No one really likes a phone call. So, yeah, just thinking about the digital trends that are happening, the push to self-service empowerment and what are you doing to be prepared for that?
Valentina: Thank you, Brian. I hope you like this episode. And if you did, please don't forget to like share comment or subscribe to the podcast on your favourite channel. And I will see you next week.
