Session Information:

Journey to Superior Customer Experience

The Journey to a Superior Customer Experience in the IT Support Services space within the Digital Workplace can be a daunting challenge. 

We'll walk through a path of innovation plays and best practices to journey toward peak CX performance.

Key Takeaways:

• There are many, many paths toward top CX, yet most include some key best practices.
• The Right-to-Left (or Shift-Left) strategy still has merit in the CX journey.
• Leveraging & Mastering omnichannel means of engagement are key enablers.
• The journey to superior CX is ongoing with continuous improvement and new innovation on the horizon.

Session Transcript:

He's coming directly from Briscoe, Texas, I'm here in San Antonio, Texas. He is not too far from where I'm at.

And then let me tell you a little bit about about James. He is an accomplished digital workplace leader with 30 years in the industry and a proven track record for providing quality and cost effective IT services. He's spent 20 years at IBM in their Digital Workplace Outsourcing Services Unit and currently oversees digital workplace services at Campbell's Soup James. It's a real pleasure to have you with us sharing your wisdom and your expertise. We all very much look forward to your presentation.

Thank you, Joseph. I'm very honored to be here. So thanks for having me.

OK, so I'm going to take you through a journey to superior customer experience.

Now, as you can imagine, this is a daunting challenge. I'm going to be talking to you about digital workplace, IT support services. in particular, arguably, more talking really about the UX or user experience because it's internal customers versus consumers that buy your product, which is traditionally CX, but for simplicity's sake.

For this presentation, I'm going to use the, the vernacular of, of CX and customer experience.

Every company can define what, what they believe is's peak, or superior customer experience, it's going to vary from company to company and getting to that peak can can be one of many different journeys.

So, I'm going to describe to you one particular company's journey to what they've defined as peak customer experience, touching upon two specific areas: one, We're going to talk about the right to left strategy, which actually has been around for a long time, but still has merit.

And so we're going to see how that has some impact into the customer experience. As well as we're going to talk through different channels of engagement, how how you interact with your customers, and how that can be a feeder, and big impactor into customer experience.

All right, so right to left, I can imagine some of my IBM peers from, from back in the day. Or perhaps even rolling their eyes saying you're still, you're still seeing the mantra of right to left. Yeah. So top right, you know, Josie mentioned that I spent a long time, 20 years at IBM, probably over a decade ago, some peers of mine and myself put together a white paper that detail this concept of right to left. In fact, we shared it at our Magic Quadrant session with with Gartner. And then Gardiner turned around and called it Shift Left and I'm promoted at highly. And it's really taken on in the industry.

The model is pretty simple. So I'll go through this, this construct you see here on the screen.

Basically, it's a proven service model that aims to shift work from higher cost, means like level two, level three resolver groups, from the right.

Over to the left, toward more lower cost efficient. means, such as level one you know, calling the Service Desk, or even an automation self help resolution.

Each time you move across that spectrum of right to left, you're moving the customer resolution closer to the source.

You're improving MTT are empty TR is a very common industry metric, mean time to resolution. Just think of that as a stop clock going off on the ticket opens. To when the ticket closes, and it doesn't, doesn't factor in, holds its, that's open to close.

So, you want to, you want to minimize that as much as possible. You want to get your people's issues solved as quickly as possible and get them more productive.

So basically focusing on that manner and over time that can drive way to the left to what you see is problem avoidance.

And by avoiding the problem, you're actually over time lessening the ticket volumes, right? So you can see those traditional state in the optimized state going from a higher to a lower so that in simple terms, that's the, the right to left strategy.

So, you know, what have we done at our particular company in this regard?

Focusing on the the actual shift right from that level two to level one, level 0, 1 of the one of the foundational linchpins of any of that right to left movement And my firm belief is having a robust knowledge base and and solid cabbie governance around that.

So, so, upon coming into campbells, well, one of the things we dug in on was what is the knowledge base look like?

If you think of a service desk agent, it's definitely an entry level job. It's, it's not often that that, you know, you'll ask your kid, hey, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be service desk age, It's, it's an entry level job, it's usually a steppingstone to other career opportunities, so, why do I share that?

You're going to have high attrition.

You can raise salaries, which, which you really don't want to do, or do all the incentives in the world, but you're always going to have high turnover service desks, I've seen anywhere from, from 10% to, I've seen in India 25% attrition rates.

So, to get around that, you want to have a nimble enterprise where you can get a new agent up to speed quickly. And you want your agents to not rely on their, their skills and expertise. Because a lot of them don't have years and years of experience. So you need that robust knowledge base pay up behind it.

So we, we went through the existing knowledge base. There were thousands upon thousands of articles.

some haven't been touched or looked at in over a decade. So we we did. We ended up kind of scrapping that and worked with our level 2, 3 SMI resolver groups.

Looking at the most tickets that they have more common, and having them document how they resolve their their issues incidents. And then putting those into knowledge articles, educating the agents, and trying to do and conduct that, the transformation of right to left, right. So, we do have a very solid KB governance.

Every month, every every article has an expiration date, so every month we're reviewing, we either retire, or update, renew, articles create new as innovation changes or technology changes. So, you can just see this as an example of the activity we see around our knowledge articles.

The other best practice that we've implemented is tagging knowledge articles upon resolution of a ticket.

So, are agents, basically, upon closure of that ticket, they will tag the article they used to resolve that ticket.

You're never going to get hit hit 100% because there's always those one-off ticket's technology changes. These are opportunities for perhaps new articles.

I would say around 80% plus is hitting Nirvana, and you can see in that data that over time, we've improved and we've we've hit that clip level of 80% in recent months.

So what does that look like in terms of what does that do to your, your enterprise? So again, this is, this is real data.

Early on, our desk is what I would call a pass through desk.

They resolved less than half of what came in to the desk and ended up forwarding that ticket to a level two, level three resolver, as we matured as we got, you know, better knowledge articles as the desk got better at resolving issues. You can see that, that improvement over time, and then the last several months hit that stride. I would even consider that, you know, very solid industry numbers of, you're talking 60 to 70 plus percent resolution at the desk. So this isn't F CR, which which excludes tickets.

This is everything that comes into our desk, and whether it's resolved at the desk or forwarded on. So you can see, I could've painted a better picture of, of this, this improvement over time.

If you take that and map it out against this right, to left strategy and kind of work these, these metrics, and that white paper I mentioned, we had a metrics methodology where you could measure where the resolution happens.

You can see if I take those three periods that, that kind of reddish yellow and green, The transformation where level two went down over those periods of time and went up in level one. We did make strides in level zero.

I just haven't mine that data yet, so, don't think we're not doing anything. There We are.

But you can see through the date of the transformation that's happening in the environment, The other piece of right to left is that reduction of, of incidents over time, right? So, so, how did that work in our environment?

We definitely saw a decrease over time, a pretty significant decrease over time of, of it is incident volume going down.

So, again, you can see how that strategy, at its heart, is helping to improve the environment, and, in turn, improving that customer experience, they, they feel the value that they're getting from the support organization.

So, next, I'm going to talk about forms of engagement.

If you think of today's workforce, we have anywhere from Baby Boomers and Gen X to Millennials and Gen Z, And all of these different age groups have varying habits and preferences of how they'd like to do things, including customer engagement, right? So, some factions prefer that traditional engagement picking up the phone or drop an e-mail. While others, more the newer generations prefer more modern means, like chat or text, or social media, or walking into an Apple Store and walking up to the Genius Bar and getting instant gratification right there in the moment.

So in, in today's world of customer experience and getting that superior customer experience, and the fact that you're different user groups prefer different channels of engagement, it behooves a digital workplace leader to offer an array of different forms of engagement. And then optimizing though.

So, the ones I'm going to take you through here are the ones we happen to use at our company and have proven to be of value some better than others. And so, I'll walk through each one and share that with you.

So, let's talk with the most obvious one phone, right? This is the most traditional, most common forms of getting IT support, right column that Helpdesk are calling. The Service Desk, very highly popular means.

And, frankly, there's been a lot of improvements over the years in terms of call center infrastructure, tools have been dramatically improved, where agents can be virtually pooled from all over the world. They can cater to different price points, different time zones, different language requirements, and different call features.

Our outsourced provider, Service Desk service to our company recently moved their call infrastructure to the cloud, to Amazon Connect.

And with that came some, some added features, one of which was that callback feature that you see in the consumer world, where you call up and you're put on hold, and you get the option of, you won't lose your place in line. Just leave your phone number, and the system will automatically call you back. So we've implemented that.

That is a huge people like that, right. As good customer.

Satisfy her as well that helps attack abandonment, if you're familiar with abandonment and how that impacts service desk performance and metrics. So that, that kind of call feature.

The other thing about phone is going back to the concept of MTT, our mean time to resolution of, very, very key. if you run an IT support organization, very key metric that you need to have at your disposal. So looking at, at least for the channels in our particular company, phone is exponentially faster than some of the other channels.

And the other thing, you can see year to year, that that M TTR is getting shorter and shorter, which is, which is great.

Right? So this is definitely still a very viable, especially with coven, and remote and people not being in the office. They they need to call anyway.

Reach out in some capacity. So phone is still very, very valid, and a good customer satisfied.

In stark, contrast to that e-mail, and my attention, is among the lower ends of a customer satisfy her, and why is that right. So I'll go back to that metric I had before, looking at e-mail, as an empty TR, compared to better channels of a phone and chat.

And it's getting worse, year to year, arguably, as well. So, why? Why is that? Well, think of, think of e-mail and how it works, right? E-mail is linear.

I send a note to, to an e-mail to somebody, to send our inbox until they read it, even if you have SLAs around it.

But it's, it's a linear kind of one-way conversation.

It's not, in the moment, like phone, you're interacting two voices talking to each other. Chat to Voices, talking to each other.

Even an in person visit is, is a live conversation, right? So, e-mails linear. An e-mail is also free form, Right? So, I get an e-mail that says, Hey, I'm having some problems with OneDrive.

What's an agent gonna do with it?

But not much, they're gonna have to call you back, and you just along elongating, STTR, which at the end of the day, is not getting the customer's issues resolved in a timely manner. So this tends to actually foster a poor customer experience. Some digital workplace leaders eliminate e-mail altogether as as a form of engagement to to engage for IT support. I've done it myself, that some companies, at our current company, we were not there yet.

So you can see here on this graphic, it's number two, that's half of the main channels that people love. The the good news is it's going down over time from the mid 30% to the mid 20%.

And we have some some aces up. Our sleeve that we're going to implement and make further inroads in this space, but again, not the tops in terms of customer experience.

So moving to chat text, right? So you may have seen that last graphic where chat was, was barely a blip of use in there. But we've made some inroads here at Campbell's. So year to year, we've doubled from 40% to 8%.

Going back to the empty TR metric, chat is way faster than e-mail on the portal.

A little slower than Than phone, but still good improvement year over year.

Again, we have some aces up our sleeve.

We're a Microsoft shop, so we use Microsoft Teams.

Very soon, we're going to implement on that left menu of Teams.

We're going to put A contact or chat, the Service Desk button, so it's right there, front and center in the application that people use day in and day out all the time and help with those numbers. Does a thing you can do in a chat space.

As you can integrate chat bots, you can even do some VI type of stuff for automation, Less cost, and if it's done right, you can also, again, enhance a very positive user experience.

All right, In person. So this is an interesting one, right? So think of, think of the evolution of the PC, right? And in the old days, we called on-site support, we call the desktop Support, right?

So why did we call it that because people had big desktop units that they They basically the only way to help them out was to go to their desk, right?

And so in today's day and age, going to a desk is like invading somebody space and later related to their half the time. So flipping the model to a more commercial model, right?

Replicating that consumer model of the Apple store and walking up to the Genius Bar at your convenience and leisure and getting that instant support. So at Campbell's we've we've opened up we call them a tech lounge. So this is, mean, look at that. That's gorgeous. That's a retail store, right there.

I can't take credit for for designing or building the services here when I got to Campbell's. But it's beautiful, it's inviting people love coming to the Tech Lounge. It's in a high traffic area.

We give away swag. We have are agents, or our texts are all uniformed. Kind of like the Geek Squad at Best Buy.

People loved coming by and they love to how quick and easy it is, right?

And then what happened when, when covert came and nobody's in the office to go to the Tech Bar while we committed virtual, right?

So, we, we ended up setting up a scheduling, an appointment app, where people could schedule half-hour increments with a tech expert in uniform and they'll share their team's background virtually to show the Tech lounge to make it seem like you're You're there at the Tech Lounge. So very, very high scores. I'll share, some data later but very. Very.

high among the highest of, of CX experience in this. The support model.

OK, the portal, right. So the portal is, I find a very makes sense type of, form of engagement, right. Every every company is going to have a ticketing tool to track your tickets.

So it's commonly used.

But if you really designed it well and put in some robust search, tools, FAQs, even self help tools, right?

That, that knowledge base that I was kinda pontificating about before and making some of those articles customer facing where some of your, your newer generations like to to fix their own stuff instead of waiting on you, if you will.

So we definitely, my boss did a great initiative of, we had multiple ticketing tools or ServiceNow Instances within Campbell's HR had their own instance facilities, had their own instance, IT had their own instance. We pull those together in recent months, we, we really keyed up the search engines so that you could get meaningful results if you search for something.

And we did make that knowledge base, a large portion of it, customer facing, where people could look up in an FAQ or even a knowledge article fashion, how to resolve their own issues.

I often think of of IT support as retail. You can tell I use analogies like crazy.

So, thinking of IT support as retail and the ITIL model of incidents and requests, no incident is something broken. It's something not working and it needs to be fixed, right? So, it's not great when I have people walking into my store and hey, this product and gave me, not work. Need to fix, right? You want. You want less and less of those over time, like like we said, with the right. The realist strategy want the volumes to go down for incidents.

But in contrast to that for requests, requests are net new things that people don't have right now, repeat customers. Hey, I need something new.

I need no to buy more stuff, if you will.

So in my view, service requests going up is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means you're giving more value back to your user base and your customers. So we've seen I showed you that trend of incidents going down.

Our request times, going up, people keep coming back for more stuff that they need. Because technology's changing, we're offering more stuff, and they're coming in, and in a matter and consuming it.

Training, training is interesting, Some, some people may say, That's really not an engagement form for IT support, per se.

But, I will tell you proactively training your folks, making them more astute at how things work, abates the need for IT support on the backend, if you think about it.

Right, so we definitely have a lot of companies have your traditional Instructure lead training, whether it's in person, virtual, or a hybrid of both that that certainly still has a lot of merit.

What we've done is we've supplemented that with with an outside service partner that basically has a treasure trove library of how to videos kind of like a YouTube that's tailored for your environment of these one minute, two minute snippet videos of, you know, how how to use Teams.

How to use Outlook, OneDrive, intermediate.

Beginner, Intermediate, advanced, if you will. We can supplement that library with our own videos. So we create a lot of in-house videos for certain things, so you can see that one, I just popped up. The tech tours is a new employee gets assigned the skill path which is a series of videos that you can self paced them through. And they learn How the Environment works at Campbell's different applications, how to engage the, the support center and things like that. So we've embraced that. We've really, really had stellar results.

So size company wise are about 10000 people across our full enterprise. We average per month more than one view Asset View per person, per month in our enterprise. one month I think when the when the pandemic started, we had 20,000 asset views in just one month alone.

We have a lot of repeat users, right? So that 81% total user return rate.

Here's another good number. So, people just don't come see one, that's it for that month.

They'll come back and see more of the service provider we work with.

They are global, they have thousands of customers.

We're in their top 1% of asset views, and we're also in the top five of their client base of event attendance for their live webinars. So, again, this is another medium where we've really embraced it, promoted it, and have gotten some really great results.

And this also has contributed to that concept of lessening of, of incident volumes, social media. So, this, this is an emerging, or has emerged right over the last decade or so. Right, so, a lot of companies have an internal social media platform via Microsoft Yammer.

Campbells, we have Workplace by Facebook. It's grown in popularity.

So definitely having a social media presence here can be a great avenue for people to learn more about IT, what you have. What's going on. Right, so we have definitely embraced this, We have this channel that we call what the tech kinda pun on words there and every week where we're, you know, pop and something in there, that's IT related, right? So, we have the standard, I'll call them columns, think twice a month, we'll, we'll do tech tips that usually point to one of those videos I mentioned with the asset views, right? So, at all. It all ties together.

Um, so, tech tips, right? You know, very short video, hey, how do you do this in OneDrive, how to do this, in Excel, what have you? We do mobile app of the month, where we string together a couple videos of, of certain applications in our environment. And how do they work, how does it work on your mobile versus on the desktop, if there's any difference there.

Then my boss, Christie Latchford. We kind of created this monthly column like a dear Abby column, if you will, where Christie is, is sharing, what's the latest in. Technology should do some interviews with some of our IT leaders. She'll do videos that, are, she's got a great sense of humor. We do a lot of parities that that talk about IT and technology. We did the do's and don'ts of what not to do in a hybrid conference Meeting that was very popular.

And and she's even become kind of this mini celebrity walking around our headquarters People will say Hey, that's Christie from Christie's Corner. So, it's almost like you're creating a brand, right? Where we're definitely going back to that retail analogy. We're definitely trying to sell.

Great services to our, to our end user base, and getting that superior user experience.

Alright, so, as I indicated earlier, right, every company has its own definition of what they would call a superior customer experience. Right. And so, this is just one. When journey here, one path that our particular company has taken.

I do want to give a quick shout out to Western modern Western Morris, who was one of our presenters yesterday, who, I thought, did a great, great presentation on SLAs, experience, level agreements, SLAs, but Excel A's. And he talked about x.l.a.

two O, and the secret of great employee experience, And really was that forward looking of where this space is, starting to move forward, and how can digital workplace leaders measure and drive that forward even further. So, if you didn't catch it yesterday, definitely try and catch the replay. Our company. I'm going to share you some stats, right. Now, we're definitely maturing and evolving in this space, but we have more to go, but it's it's ever continuing improvement, Right?

So here are some, some of the traditional right customer survey feedback that you get, right, so top right, is, is that traditional.

You reach out for IT support.

Somebody be an agent level one or an expert level 2 or 3, resolves your, your incident, your problem and you get an e-mail saying, hey, your tickets now closed, you know, do you mind filling out this optional survey?

Their return rate industry standard wise is around six to 7% where we are in that area, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. So we're happy with our return rate there. You can see over time our numbers are improving.

I would tell you prior to what you see on the chart, pre February of last year, we were mainly in the 80 percentile, mid, mid 80% and now we're consistently in the nineties. We even hit an all-time high of 96 I think there in January. So so great numbers right?

We've started to and this is where I'll harken back to Westons. He talked about an x.l.a. two O, looking at personas and measuring certain survey or feedback from your customers within personas like sales versus Manufacturing versus this other group, right, We've actually started to do this a little bit, not necessarily by those types of personas, but by engagement channel.

So I talked about our tech lounges and our virtual tech lounges. So, what we do there is: if you walk into a tech lounge, one of the the, the benefits of walking into a tech lounge is you don't have to open a ticket.

We will do that for you. That's a benefit of walking in, walking out. We wanted it to be that retail experience. When you walk into the Apple store, do they say, you know, here fill out this ticket, thick tone, right? We wanted that same experience by design.

Before they leave, we very politely, say, hey, if you don't mind, we have a tablet over here, would you fill out that one question, customer survey.

So, we do it in the moment, by design, and you can see, not just because we do the survey differently, Um, but again, that medium, that customer experience of walking into a store. Look at the results compared to the other, look at the return rates. Virtual tech lounge similar but different.

Right, so it's this Teams virtual call, right, before we end the call, we, we say very politely, hey, I'm gonna put a link to the survey in the chat, if you have some time, please, fill it out, it's in the moment, it's not this two days later, e-mail of, hey, two days ago, yeah, you gotta get a ticket. You know, do you remember what it was, and do you want to know?

comment or or rate us on a survey?

So, different approaches, but, but, method to the madness, if you will. And then top right AV events, right, AV has really become very important in the post covert world, because your, your meetings are very hybrid.

Some people are in the office, some are not. So we do host AV events, teams lives, larger events. And so, we asked people to respond to surveys based on how those events go. And you can see the scores there. They've just been tremendous.

So, starting to keep that broad survey in mind, but then doing kind of targets underneath the hood, if you will, and you can see, we've gotten some great results, and we're going to keep going.

All right, so coming full circle.

Returning to this analogy of a journey.

And getting to that peak superior customer experience, right?

Once you reach the peak, are you done? No, you're not.

right.

Technology changes, user requirements change, there's always going to be another peak, another set of requirements, more to do on the horizon.

That's one of the reasons why I love being an IT. It's ever changing. It's not boring. It doesn't stagnated. It changes constantly.

So what do we Campbell's have have on our our horizon for at least near term, I'll share a couple of items with you?

So we're on the cusp of deploying these cool look, and, you know, company branded IT vending machines and lockers. The vending machines, maybe you've seen in airports, right? Best Buy has somewhere. You can just walk up and in our company it's a badge swiped where you can dispense keyboard a mouse headset.

Very conveniently securely, great tracking and then the locker concept of of getting a PC loaner or returning equipment that's broken, or leaving the company, and having a place to return that in a secure fashion. So we're looking to deploy these. These also are 7 by 24, so you think about, right where Campbell Soup, we have manufacturing of beverages and snacks, and we have all these different divisions making all these great, different products.

And we have three shifts work in 7 by 24, but we don't have on-site support, 7 by 24.

So, being able to get this stuff in this fashion with the batch wipe is available 7 by 24, so again, it has its benefits, as well, And this is one that Western mentioned yesterday in his presentation, this concept of a digital experience monitoring platform.

Next thing, if you've heard of that, ... by one E, L T or X has a platform, a lot of different ones. In fact, there's a Magic quadrant out on it, as well. But what do these do, these will kind of like endpoint management on steroids, if you will.

Self healing is introduced, proactive remediation. Weston mentioned, it'll give you a PC happiness score, right?

You as an end user can now push a button and it'll tell you how it's doing across different veins of performance for your PC. So this is one we have a lot of, we believe that's a big game changer that we're moving towards, So, these are some near term items on the horizon for us, but we, we will, you know, again, technology continues to change and evolve, and we will continue to meet our customer demands and drive toward that superior customer experience.

So, thank you. And now we're going to move on to some Q and A.

Fantastic, James, What? I want a great presentation. And the overview. And reveal of this customer experience journey. They are a Campbell Soup and throughout your career as well. one of the themes that emerged during your presentation has to do if the shift that you that you talked about. And then, someone asked if I am.

If I'm starting on this, on this journey, where I really haven't thought through very much in a very disciplined approach for my customer experience and journey, um, do the question is the why is there a linear kind of like path that you take on their shift? That you kind of build capabilities over time? Or there's some steps that you suggest that people just kind of skip over and go straight to this mode. So, in summary, if you're starting fresh of our customer experience system for their, for your organization, what will be kind of the advice that you provide to those who are embarking on the on the on that journey.

Sure. No excellent question, but one that's difficult, right? I'm sure if he has five people, you get five different answers in that. In my particular opinion.

Data and metrics are tantamount, Right? Especially in the IT support space so, everybody's using a ticketing tool these days so you can mine the data. And you can see where your Points of Revolution resolution going back to that right to left is most of your resolution happening at that higher level at what is your MTT our numbers look like aging tickets. I didn't talk at all about aging tickets but that translates into MTT All right so.

Last two companies I worked at.

First thing we did was walk in and say, what's the oldest ticket in, in the system that's open?

And sometimes you've seen tickets open for two years and a cycle. This is not good etiquette of ticket performance. The customer really knows that they have this ticket open for two years. That's terrible customer service.

So looking at aging tickets, we would have over 30 days We, we work with all the alvarez. Go through queues together with all those down, until people started, really, pay attention to their accused in their tickets, and those being worked.

Doing So You'll see MTT are improve over time. And then, and then some of the stuff I did talk about here, getting that robust, knowledge base. It doesn't happen overnight.

It's a journey that takes awhile, It took us a good year to get really solid articles from all the teams and getting those numbers of improvement that you saw, but I would say those are some of the really key, foundational building blocks to get started.

In terms of deployment of technology for your customer experience, if you can talk a little bit about the the use or not of Bots for, for that customer experience and what is what is your perspective on automated Bots and and you know and the not only kind of the the basic ones Maybe just mark bots that are being rolled out nowadays.

Do they play a role, pros and cons? from practice perspective, how do you feel about that?

Yeah, good question. There are pros and cons to bots.

The cons, are you lose that human element.

I find that bots are effective, if they're done well.

If the user knows they're talking to a bot or, you know, interacting without a real person, they frown upon that experience.

Especially if it's not helping them.

Having a bot open up the chat window and asking the very, you know, usually the initial exchange, they'll ask certain questions, you know, Are you working from home today? What side of you working from? What is your contact callback number?

They'll ask some series of basic questions before they get into the root cause analysis.

Having those upfront questions done by a bot, there's no harm there, if anything, that's automated that speeds that phone call conversation.

So, having some some light by technology, I think it is, there's nothing wrong with that at all, As you mature, right. Some of those scripts and resolutions can be translated into bots and you troubleshoot them.

So, we did a campbells, we took the top 10, uh, problem issues that people call in, you know, consistently month over month. And we looked at the resolution notes in the KB.

And we did some automation, where our remote takeover tool, once we identified the issue of what they were calling in for, we were able to get it, where a button was. Was pushed or automatically executed. And the bot ran and quickly, you know, took care of the person's problem, and there was very little human interaction And it was a positive experience for the end user. So, again, pros and cons, have done. well, great user experience, helps the company faster. But if not done well, ends up getting a poor user experience.

Another, another theme that has emerged, James, has to do with governance. Some commentary about, you know, you have the proliferation of a lot of tools and applications, and different types of technologies and organizations. And then the, the, the, the customer experience and the yellow, and the management of all that is became become unwieldy. So, from a governance perspective, what do you see either a Campbell or other places that's being done well to, to manage that.

Because there's this friction about, you know, you want to have users make decisions on what are the best tools and maybe apps that they can use for, for the business. But at the same time, you hit, you need a level of control over it, and, and, and so that you can manage and support those applications effectively. I don't know if there's a balance to be achieved there.

But how, how is gavron set up in a way that could help with that, know, another excellent question Right, and so you, the keyword, you mentioned, there's balance, right? So there's that balance between having too many chiefs That at that expression too many chiefs are too many cooks in the kitchen versus zero ownership, right? To me. Governance ties back to ownership.

If you don't have a name and a box every every ticket has to have an owner, Every Q has to have an owner, every policy has to have an owner, there, needs to be expiration dates against your ....

Every KPA has an owner, and then that overarching governance needs to be simple, right.

But not overkill, where there's, there's no too many gates to get through to get the approval. So, it needs to have that balance of Nimble nests as I don't know if that's a word.

But, there's a happy medium there of balance between having that ownership and that oversight governance, basically.

And, to go a little bit deeper on that, what they may look like, are you talking about, like, let's say, let's talk about a case where I want to have a new technology or new maybe application that's useful for my business? In that governance, as to how does that approval go through, I mean, what type of things you're looking for to approve when you acknowledge a new tool in the business that you're going to support later on.

Yeah, Good. Good. Another solid question, kind of follow up the last one. We do it in our ticketing tool, right? So, the beauty of ticketing tool we use Service now, which is pretty much the dominant player in that market, ServiceNow will allow you to put explorations and time-stamps on on virtually anything you have in there.

It has automation to kick off Ravi use.

We can, so, I don't have a going back to ownership and I say keep it simple. Our governance over our knowledge bases is not necessarily one person, right? Because what if that person is out sick or something like that, Right? So, we do have kind of a board governance and that model is facilitated within our ticketing tool, so it's a matter of creating that.

And another thing I like about ServiceNow is it does have a lot of out of the box features. And so, some of the out of box features within ServiceNow do include some of those kind of best industry practices, if you will. So, striking that balance, but, again, you know, I'm not trying to avoid the question, but the balance will be different.

You know, Campbells is, is a food producing company IT is important, but I don't have an army of IT staff on my team, like I did on my last company, so what can I afford.

But also gets the job done. So, there's that happy medium, but leveraging a tool to help automate that governance is very key.

And then, the one last item, because it seems that this is a very important, perspective, for many of the participants, is that, how do you establish ownership?

Do Stablish ownership at the process level, the established ownership, and the tool level data. Ownership as, well, talk. A little bit about ownership, because that's usually a missing link in a lot of organizations, because of, you know, mobility in the organization. And processes that get redesigning re-invented, sometimes.

It's tricky to establish process data, even toole ownership, how do you approach that?

Yeah.

That can be a very murky water to navigate certainly ties back to IT leadership, the structure of your IT organization and very well clear defined roles and responsibilities tied to those roles. If there's a gray area where two people or two groups oversee something that you don't have that clarity, that's where you get into trouble.

one of the things cambell does well is is we don't use racy.

We use something called deyo, which is Akin to racy but it basically allows you to on any topic, be it a process, a tool. Who's responsible, Who's a contributor, who's a consultant into that.

So, they, they de Mayo stands for campbells.

Folks are probably kill me for not remembering the exact acronym and what the models are, but using that as tantamount, right?

I have been in companies and past customer environments where the role in the leadership of who owns something was not clear.

And basically, that that area was not well governed and spun out of control.

So, not being afraid to speak up to your manager, but, but that's where the leadership, your CIO, and the IT LT, that, that next layer of leadership really needs to defined. Right?

We, we have driven service definitions within our company, across the different domains, so that we've clearly say, This work is done by this group, and then in that group are these people, and those people are doing this work, and then translating that into, right?

So, we definitely have enterprise architecture, you know.

Some of stuff that, that my previous speaker was talking about, Lee, Having that infrastructure.

That definitely has the architecture laid out, who owns what, who's responsible for what, and it all starts at the top with the leadership.

Oh, very well, James, just to wrap up, because we're running against time here. But, I want to ask this. And I want to thank you all again for sharing this with us. Although, you have mentioned the the right to left strategy has been around for some time now.

I think, for a lot of folks in our audience was the first time that they had seen and they thought then, there's, there is a, there is a simplicity and there is an effective its effectiveness and communication about that, that model, that, that is very attractive. So, thank you for sharing that and reinforcing that with us.

And the follow up question is that, now that, know, for those who have worked with that model and kind of follow that, is there an evolution that you have seen now that you have been working on this for many years? Using that view, Have new perspective emerge, or is there, is there a next step for that model?

Or it's still, as, as it was a decade ago, and still today, the same model applies?

Yeah, no, excellent question.

I would contend that the model still applies as is, I'm still applying it as I, as I've gone through different companies after I left IBM, I use it as the foundation of driving that improvement.

And it's, it still has merit. It still has place, as it is. Certainly, the technology changes.

Some of the ways we resolve but the whole concept of moving from that elongated, right, longer, higher cost resolver to the more of that automation self help and driving that problem resolution, still resonates and ties in a decade plus later, from when it was created to drive and have impact in today's day and age of customer experience. So it's still in its roots, which is why I showed it in its its form, originally from, well, over a decade ago, still has strong merit as is. It's still a great proven model.

What, our pleasure to have you sharing your wisdom and your expertise with all of us today. On behalf of our global audience. Want to thank you for your time. Great material, Great perspectives, the model. And the whole journey and experience that you The tale to All of Us is very valuable from a practical standpoint. And we appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was James Craig who is director of Digital Workplace Services at Campbell's describing their journey of digital transformation with the perspectives of the customer experience journey. Very, very useful insights. We are going to be taking a break. Now. If you have additional questions by the way, for James, for Lead Bargainer, for Rudy, you can go to the LinkedIn posts under my name on and in this conference title, as well. And you'll see, I have a post in there and you can comment asked questions, thank the speakers, and interact with them that way. You can also have that link. I direct a direct connection request to the speakers, because they're all listed at the bottom of the conference post. So check it out on LinkedIn, on, the remaining, and you'll see it. We're going to be taking a break now, when we come back.

We're going to get a tremendous perspective in the matter of fact, in the global manufacturing segment and this is gonna come from the global leader for Johnson and Johnson is based in Switzerland. And Marcus ...

is going to be with us at the top of the hour to talk about the smart factory strategy and implementation at Johnson and Johnson. Some leading edge technologies and approaches, combinations of lean principles and six Sigma, and that ... and X exponential technologies applied to one of the great, enduring organizations of our time, and certainly a global manufacturing leader. So, we'll, we'll be back with marcos at the top of the hour.