ROB STODDARD: Hello and welcome to the John Malone Theater at the Cable Center here in Denver, Colorado. This is Wednesday, the 13th of November, 2024. I’m Rob Stoddard, formerly senior vice president at NCTA, the internet and television association, and a proud alumnus of Continental Cablevision, MediaOne, and AT&T Broadband. Today we’re going to examine the historic trajectory of the cable customer experience or CX. We’re going to do so through the lens of an earnest and hardworking group of CX and operations executives. This group has worked for nearly two decades so far under the leadership of the Cable Center and the Syndeo Institute. Today the group is known as the Syndeo CX Collaborative or CXC and its predecessor was the Cable Center Customer Care Committee, also known as C5.
Why is this topic important? Because at a time here in the 2020s when the market for connectivity and multichannel video services has become extremely competitive and as those services themselves have become somewhat commodified most business observes believe that the customer experience, CX, is the true differentiator in the marketplace, that customers will choose their providers based on how companies treat them as well as the quality of the services those companies provide. The Cable Center has been deeply committed to CX as an area of excellence since it worked with the University of Denver in 2005 to establish the Cox Chair in Customer Experience Management. And starting in 2007 the Cable Center, now known of course through its brand name, the Syndeo Institute, began convening periodic and regular meetings of senior executives from cable operating companies with the express goal of collaborating to improve the cable customer experience.
The collaborative has been an historic leader these past two decades in helping the cable telecommunications industry turn the corner from being a punchline in customer service to becoming a global leader in CX. The story of cable CX is a long and winding road. To relive some of that journey I’m so fortunate today to be joined by several pioneers in cable CX.
Gibbs Jones served as the longtime senior vice president for customer experience for Suddenlink Communications which was acquired by Altice USA in 2015. At the time of this recording Gibbs is a consultant. He also has served as executive chair for C5 and is an emeritus of the Syndeo CX Collaborative.
Maureen McCabe Moore is senior vice president and chief customer experience officer for GCI Communications Corporation, the leading provider of cable, broadband, and wireless services in Alaska. Maureen has worked for GCI for more than 27 years and at the time of this recording she is an executive chair of CXC.
Graham Tutton is founder and lead advisor of GTT and Associates LLC, an executive advisory group focused on driving retention, growth, and operational excellence. Earlier in his career Graham worked for a decade at Comcast leading units focused on net promoter score and customer insights. Graham also has served as executive chair of C5 and he too is an emeritus member of CXC.
And we’re immensely fortunate to have joining us in this conversation Diane Christman, the president and CEO of the Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center. Diane is a 20-year veteran of the Cable Center serving previously as its chief programs officer and senior vice president for programs and development. Importantly for this conversation, Diane for many years also served as a key Cable Center staffer supporting the work of C5, the Cable Center Customer Care Committee.
Welcome all and let’s get started. Diane, I’d like to start with you today. Why is CX a priority for the Syndeo Institute and how do CX and CXC fit with the overall strategic objectives of the Cable Center?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Great question, Rob, but first let me just say thank you to the panel and thank you to you. You’ve been the driving force behind this. We’re delighted to be creating and adding a CX collection into the Barco Library so thank you.
The Cable Center first got the customer care group in about 2007 and my predecessor Jana Henthorn is very passionate about customer care and was really happy to receive the group. And you all were a part of the early days so you’ll know this, but there was so much dedication and enthusiasm and passion around the work that we were doing at the time and you know, at the Cable Center we never felt that our mission was to solve any customer care challenges, but to provide tools for everybody’s tool belts, bring people together, and establish kind of a think tank which we did really, really well and kudos to you all.
What we’re trying to do with Syndeo Institute, our mission has shifted just a little bit and we’re really looking at how we can prepare future industry leaders. And so when I think about the importance and the weight of the work that we all do in this area I think that the Syndeo Institute is very well situated to continue this work. We’ve just done a big reset of how we focus on things. We’re kind of known as the agnostic Switzerland of all the associations and the nonprofits. We’re also known as the connector, the industry connector, so it just makes sense, I believe, that CXC lives here with Syndeo Institute and the Cable Center.
ROB STODDARD: And Diane, you know I can’t help but think about the Syndeo Institute’s emphasis of the last few years prior to this recording on intrapreneurship. How do you think about the intersection of intrapreneurship with customer experience? How does — does one feed the other? To what extent do they have an impact on the other?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Absolutely. And you said earlier in your intro that customer experience is the differentiator and I would add so is intrapreneurship. And I think that intrapreneurship means that you’re simply acting as an entrepreneur within the workplace. It means you have the skills and the understanding to do what’s best for the organization and in addition to that you have the support to make change, find answers, move things forward, and return to the bottom line, I think. And so I see a very strong intersection between intrapreneurship and CX.
ROB STODDARD: You know, among your three fellow panelists here today I think we probably have somewhere in the range of 75 to 80 years of cable industry experience so I wanted to offer you all this question as well. What’s the significance of CX in the cable and broadband business? As you think about all of the operating issues that you’ve dealt with over the years kind of where does CX land and how does it inform other issues? Graham, you can take that first if you like.
GRAHAM TUTTON: Thank you, Rob. I think CX has absolutely affected not only the brand of cable and cable companies, but internally in how they operate. And it is a lens that I think organizations have become more and more accustomed to. How do we do this? And it’s well beyond measuring customer satisfaction. It’s well beyond surveys and the like. It’s more of how do we operate with a customer as the end destination and how do we finesse or optimize our product, our services, our technologies to make sure that the experience is at the front — forefront? And yes, the cable industry has been a punching bag, so to speak, for poor customer service. I’d say over the last 10, 15 years that has absolutely changed. Still work to be done and always will be, but I think it’s redefined the brand of customer service as well as cable across the board.
ROB STODDARD: Have you guys had to, within your years working for companies within the industry, did you find that you had to work as an advocate for CX? Were there doubters among the other executives at your company? Did you have to fight for dollars? Did you have to fight for prominence? Gibbs, what was your experience during the Suddenlink years?
GIBBS JONES: Actually, I worked for the large MSOs in the ’90s. I’ll just sort of compare and contrast. In the ’90s I would say we probably have created a well-deserved reputation of not providing good service because it just, it wasn’t a focus, right? It wasn’t that people didn’t care. It just wasn’t something that we focused on. And then as the world changed and things got more competitive, people recognized — and also, we got a lot of feedback from FCC and a lot — like you’ve got to do better, right? So it became much more of a focus and when I was at Suddenlink it was a major focus from the moment I started. I was in charge of the customer experience, but there was always — there was a lot of emphasis on making sure that we did it right, we served our customers properly, that we just treated people as we would like to be treated as customers.
ROB STODDARD: It’s interesting that in the research that I’ve done over the last couple of years trying to kind chart the course of all of this going back to the 1980s I talked to people who reminisced that particularly in the ’80s and ’90s that customer care, customer service, was really secondary. That the companies, some of the companies, some of the leading companies then, did not believe that customer experience improved shareholder value or improved the value of their company. Did you see some transition during those years that you’re talking about from the ’90s into the 20 teens, for instance?
GIBBS JONES: Oh, big — yes, yes. I mean we — it became something we talked about, right? Whereas before it really wasn’t anything we talked about much. And when it came to trying to fight for dollars for additional resources in the ’90s it was tough, right? There were other places that people wanted to spend money.
ROB STODDARD: Well, it was still a rollout period. You had to invest a lot in plant and rebuild and all of that.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, that’s right, but you know, I think in the 2000s particularly people realized that it was important and that we had made some mistakes and it was time to fix those mistakes. And a funny story, when you talk about kind of what’s the value of all this, we measure lots of different things. Shortly after I left Suddenlink I was in a Costco and DIRECTV was there and I walked by and I was wearing a Suddenlink shirt or hat or something and the guy said, “Hey, you work for Suddenlink” and I said yeah and he’s like, “I used to be over in Greenville, North Carolina doing this. You know, trying to get people to sign up for a dish.” He’s like, “You guys made it so tough for us because your service was so good nobody wanted to switch,” right? So I remember that because that’s one of those things like you’ll never be able to capture kind of the value of that, but it was really, really valuable for the guy trying to sell DIRECTV to say, “We had a hard time selling against you because people liked your service.”
ROB STODDARD: Sure. That is a dramatic turnaround. You know, in the 1990s I was fortunate to participate an industrywide training program for cable executives. It was essentially a public relations training program, but the big issue was around the fact that in that era that people were afraid to go out in their shirts that had the names of their companies on them. They were afraid to wear them to cocktail parties, to cookouts and barbecues because they were afraid they were going to get hammered by their friends and neighbors based on the customer experience that most consumers were feeling at that time.
GIBBS JONES: Oh, yeah, in the ’90s we would print up things for employees and we printed up a sun shade for your car and nobody wanted to put it up because they were afraid someone would break their windshield, frankly.
ROB STODDARD: Right, so your story is a testament to the great turnaround during the last — those next couple of decades.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, and people, I think, when you dig a hole, it takes a while to dig yourself out, but it feels like we’re doing that and that people are recognizing that we’re making good progress and investing and doing the right things.
ROB STODDARD: We’re going to come back to that, particularly because I’d like to look at the role of this group, CXC, for having accomplished some of those changes, but while we’re still talking about kind of this generic transition of the last few decades, Maureen, I wanted to turn to you. You’re a little bit rare among all of us. You’ve had 27 years at the same company. As you told us before we started, you began your career at age five undoubtedly, but how has CX and the perception of CX at GCI evolved over that period of time?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: I would say probably most notable in the way that we think about it is even the words that we use. So we referred — we used to refer to agents, representatives, customer service, and then we morphed it into customer care, but it was really focused on just the front-line interaction with customers. And I think now as we’ve evolved into customer experience, we truly are looking at the end-to-end experience. It isn’t just the interaction that somebody has with us on the phone or in their home or in a store. It really is every part of it whether it’s billing or any other aspect of the way that we offer services to customers. And I think it’s — I mean it’s been a fantastic evolution and going back to part of your earlier question in terms of when we rolled it out into the company, I would say that people — there was an educational timeframe that had to occur because people didn’t really understand what customer experience was.
I was promoted into this role in 2015 with no department. I was creating it and there were a lot of people that were like, what is this exactly? It took a long time to educate people and there was some fighting for dollars and now we’re in a place where it is actually part of our corporate goal. Everybody is focused on it and I think it’s been great.
ROB STODDARD: Can I ask you to get a little granular for a minute? Your title is chief customer experience officer. That’s pretty powerful stuff. On a daily basis what does a chief customer experience officer do? And to use the inverse of that question, what keeps you up at night these days?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Oh, gosh. Well, so I wouldn’t say that I necessarily have a traditional chief customer experience role. Obviously, voice of the customer is a big part of what I do, but I always characterize it this way. Me and my actually very small department — we are small but mighty — we work across the company and focus on all the different ways that we interact with customers and try to make it better. And as you mentioned earlier, there is still lots of opportunity so we — it is a constant evolution. And then in addition to that I have some other responsibilities that fall out of what you would call traditional customer experience, but I think on the whole my department is known as Switzerland. We are known as the facilitators of collaboration. So we bring people to the table to try to solve problems.
ROB STODDARD: That’s really a terrific, terrific answer. So let’s talk a little bit about — and the real purpose, of course, of this discussion is to talk about the role of CXC and the role of its predecessor group, C5, over the years.
Diane, coming back to something you said earlier, you guys at the Cable Center embraced this group in 2006, 2007 at a time frankly when NCTA, the association I worked for, had taken a look for a while about becoming engaged in customer service. CTAM, the marketing association, had a 20 or 25 year run dealing with customer experience and its impact on marketing, but ultimately decided in 2006 that there were other more pressing priorities for cable marketers. So it was a little bit of an orphan at the time that you all embraced it and yet over the ensuing period, it would be 18 years now until the time of this discussion today, we have seen a dramatic turnaround in cable customer experience. How as the administrator of this group did you guys navigate that? And what I’m asking specifically is we’re going to talk a little bit about the various topics and issues that arose over the course of the years, but it was really left to the Cable Center as the administrator of the group to decide what was important at what point in time. Tell us about the interaction with the committee and the committee’s leadership that made this kind of turnaround possible.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Sure, but I like how you used the term orphan. I was thinking like a hot potato, right? Because really nobody — I don’t think anybody — not enough people saw the value of the group and what we were doing. And I can even recall some board members questioning why we had made the move to —
ROB STODDARD: Cable Center board members specifically?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Right. Lots of discussion around that. The other thing is I’m so glad the way you asked the question earlier about investors and everybody recognizing the importance because to me that’s a great evolution. That is a great example of the work that this group has done. And I was just thinking back to some of the earlier meetings and even how the discussion was framed and the topics that we discussed, those have all evolved as well. And you know, it’s about darn time, right? And then thinking, to Maureen’s comments about customer care, service, and now experience, I really have to talk about Dr. Chuck Patti, Dr. Ron Rizzuto, and Dr. Maria van Dessel. And I think Chuck, with the help of Maria and Ron, really helped the industry understand the idea and concept of customer experience.
ROB STODDARD: So, sorry to interrupt, but just for our viewers, so Chuck, formerly the Cox Chair at Denver University, Ron Rizzuto, longtime business professor at DU as well, and Maria van Dessel who happens to be Chuck Patti’s spouse, but also has worked at Denver University and has done some great research in CX over the years as well.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Absolutely. I mean —
ROB STODDARD: And they served as Cable Center Fellows, correct? Senior Fellows?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: They did. Senior Fellows and of course Chuck was the Cox Chair for many, many years, but truly instrumental in helping everybody understand and define the difference between customer experience and customer care and customer service. And really, you know, I think kind of paved the way. And I recall some of your efforts as well when you were at NCTA helping everybody understand and grasp the idea of customer experience and what that means. And, as Maureen said, it’s far more than just whoever’s answering the phone. It’s organizationally deep.
ROB STODDARD: But it — what strikes me, and I want to stick with this for just a minute longer, I was always impressed with the engagement of the Cable Center — this was not a project where the Cable Center said, “Yeah, just come out twice and year and we’ll have meetings here,” right? For a long period of time, you were administering monthly conference calls, telephone audio conference calls, running two — twice a year two extremely good and well-disciplined meetings and really staying engaged, by my perception, and have on a day-to-day basis with this particular group. What did it take to do that and what is it about this entity, Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center, that creates such a nurturing environment for a group of executives who have had to fight their way out of a paper bag on a lot of these CX issues?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: I think a lot of the credit goes to Jana Henthorn. And you know, Jana had a history within the industry before she joined the Cable Center. She had a great understanding of the difference —
ROB STODDARD: She worked for many years at Jones Intercable.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: She did, yes.
ROB STODDARD: And worked in the customer service space there.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: She did. So she really understood the importance of what we were doing and what the group could do. And there were some tough years, I have to say that, where people really did question the work that we were doing and why we were doing it. But she really did have a keen understanding about this as a differentiator, right? And that — and we were ahead of the curve. All of us were. early adapters, right? But part of what we do, part of what our mission at the Cable Center is, is yes, we have the legacy piece, we tell the story, but we always look to how we can contribute and be a part of the conversation for the future. And you know, looking back on it now as a part of this panel, gosh, I’m so glad that Jana had the passion that she did and that we fought the way that we did just to keep the program together and to make sure that we had the right kind of investment that we needed. And again, could not have done it without the great group of people that we had and the great committee members.
ROB STODDARD: So let me jump in I’ll to try to remind us what we know about the history of this particular group. We know that dating back to the 1990s the marketers through CTAM ran a variety of customer experience initiatives. During that era, it was seen as a major impediment to growth in the cable business because customer service was not viewed very well by American consumers. And I think the marketers were trying to figure out frankly how to overcome that in order to sell more product. Of course, we hit the mid ’90s when we kind of flashed to the triple play, started selling broadband service, voice over IP, video services went wild with high def and a huge variety of additional programming services. So the marketers held that very close to their heart for a long time. NCTA came along in this in the early 2000s because, as frequently happens in the regulatory world, customer service was creating impediments to the industry’s public policy agenda and NCTA was beginning to hear from members of Congress how upset their own constituents were with CX. And it had penetrated down to the local level so that a group called NATOA, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, in about 2002 began to threaten that it was going to begin some initiative to more heavily regulate cable franchisees to get them to do a better job in customer service and customer care.
For a while the NCTA staff presented to the NCTA board of directors the idea that NCTA should essentially create a full-fledged customer service committee and create an initiative focused on customer care and customer experience, but at about that same time in the early 2000s the leaders of Cox Communications decided to endow the chair at Denver University which would focus on customer experience management and that’s when the NCTA board pivoted and said well, if one of our own, if one of our companies, is designating a substantial amount of money to take a close look at this academically and in a disciplinary space we think that’s sufficient for now. We as the industry’s public policy trade association don’t need to become involved in customer service.
So that takes us to about 2005, 2006 when there was consolidation going on among industry societies and trade associations and that’s when Char Beales came to Jana — Char Beales, the former CEO of CTAM, who also had served or was serving on the Cable Center board of directors and who was concerned about customer experience, but was realizing through consolidation she was going to have to offload it as an imperative for CTAM. And happened to have the good fortune of talking to a prominent Cable Center staffer, Jana Henthorn, whose previous career had been in customer care.
So it kind of clicked at that point. In 2005, 2006. Char came to Jana and said, “What would you guys think about taking this on?” And of course, based on her own experience, Jana said, “Yeah, why not? How can we make it happen?” Now, there was a problem initially because there was no money to run the operation. Eventually CTAM kicked in a little bit of seed money to get it going, but I guess with this rambling dissertation what I’m trying to get here to, Diane, is at that moment in time in ’06 what did it take for the Cable Center to be convinced that this was an appropriate path for you to follow?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: It took the support of Cox and they made a very generous gift. And I love this story because the gift was centered around customer care, customer service, and Jana, what she did, she worked with Dr. Patti and Dr. Rizzuto and they created the first ever concentration in customer experience as part an MBA program. And —
ROB STODDARD: Chuck Patti has told me, in fact, it was the only program of its kind in the world at that moment in time.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: In the world, right? And I think also too the investment from Cox, what I loved about what they did is they said, “We want to make this investment in customer care and customer service for everybody, not just the cable industry.” That’s why we were able to make the concentration happen within the Daniels School of Business and be a part of the MBA program and that was a pretty big deal and it was the only one in the country and I think that that was a great launch and jump start and then it made sense for us to bring the group together.
I mean I recall the early days of what was then C5, I think we did do two meetings a year. We weren’t as sophisticated, I would say, in our facilitation in management and then it just made sense to extend what we did with Chuck and the Daniels School of Business and bringing in Chuck and Maria. Well, Chuck and Ron first and then later Maria on board to help facilitate it.
ROB STODDARD: They did apply some real discipline to the idea.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: They did.
ROB STODDARD: My own memories of some of those early meetings were — and probably even predating the other practitioners with us on the panel today — half a day spent literally going around the table and saying to each person, “What’s gotten under your skin? What’s bothering you, what are you dealing with right now?” And it kind of laid the foundation for the kind of collaboration that C5 began.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: And you know, the other piece of this too, and I think that Chuck and Ron were really instrumental in this, is bringing in — introducing the idea of emotion into the discussion, right? And —
ROB STODDARD: Sorry, that’s emotion with an E?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Emotion with an E, yes. And I can remember, you know, how do people feel, how do your customers feel and talking about how we’re going to build a case so that people can have more investment in their companies to spend in customer care and customer service. And I remember somebody in the group saying, “You know, I took it to the bean counter in my organization and he said “I don’t care about this touchy-feely crap,” and that was many years ago and that has changed, that’s evolved. And the touchy-feely stuff is dramatically important and —
ROB STODDARD: It happens to be our bread and butter right now.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: That’s right. And it is the differentiator. It is what is — what’s going to make a difference and carry us through in the next three to five years, right? And I think about all the — and when Chuck came to — when Chuck started as the Cox Chair, he had a very impressive background in marketing and design thinking and all the touchy-feely emotion piece of this so he was really just the perfect person in partnership with Ron, who had a more financial focus and could make the financial piece soft and understandable. So it was really a great combination and I think that spurred a lot of the early conversation and some of the evolution.
ROB STODDARD: Dr. Charles Patti, who we finally — fondly call Chuck, also created for this group a kind of a disciplinary hierarchy to help people understand where their company rested on the scale of customer care, customer service. Gibbs, do you remember that and did you participate in it and answer the question, try to figure out where you guys came out? And this was a scale not comparing cable industry companies with each other, but trying to figure out where you fit on the curve compared to global companies.
GIBBS JONES: Right, yes, we did. It was an interesting exercise. And comparing yourself to cable companies is not necessarily the way to improve things, right? You compare yourself to others and that was helpful and painful and, but it made a big difference, yeah.
ROB STODDARD: Absolutely. And Graham, I turn to you as well having worked at what is at this moment in time the industry’s largest company, Comcast. I would guess that Comcast would have been keenly interested in that kind of comparative analysis.
GRAHAM TUTTON: Well, absolutely. The comparison, and I think what we’ve said here already is comparing ourselves to each other was helpful, but it was more of where are we on the maturity? Where are we on the maturity of proving that this has a return on investment? And I think what we’ve said along the way here, and Chuck and Ron and Maria and others helped out, you think about it from the early 2000s to today, the journey that we’ve been on is understanding the emotional piece of it, but fighting the headwind of that’s great, but does that make me money? And/or does that make us profitable or more efficient? And the short answer is yes, but it took time and it took insight —
ROB STODDARD: Because you had to demonstrate, you had to use hard numbers and that was the hard part, right?
GRAHAM TUTTON: Exactly. You think by definition we are cable operators. Operators tend to be what is the operation, the number, very lineal. Not an indictment, but that’s kind of the mindset. How do you bring in this emotion and prove it financially, operationally through numbers? And not only to show it, but prove the so what of caring. And I think the work that the Cable Center and CXC has done over the years has, in its Swiss mentality, has really enabled that conversation. And I think whether it’s Comcast or whether it’s any of the others of being able to make it their own and how do we operationalize understanding customer, employee, and product and the emotions surrounding that? And what we’ve found based on a lot of research done here at the CXC and Syndeo, but also in our own organizations is a lot of what we’re dealing with the experience is affected upstream by the tech, by the network, by the programming, engineering, and the finance. And over this two-decade journey we’ve been able to very detail oriented connect the dots and say how does an engineer affect customer care and then how do we monitor that and address it along the way.
ROB STODDARD: Maureen, you’re also — you continue to be in a unique position on this panel as well and I think in terms of working in the great state of Alaska. GCI in Alaska, and we’ve had the pleasure of visiting with you in Anchorage and seeing the operation, GCI in Alaska is considered something of a behemoth in the state, in a positive sense, not in a negative sense, yet within our cable and telecommunications industry it’s considered to be perhaps at best a midsize company because of number of subscribers. That probably creates a really unique environment in which you work. What’s the role of emotion among your customers and your consumers and how does that affect their competitive choices? Is what you’re hearing here today ringing true for you?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Well, 100%. And actually, I’d like to take a step back on how we even joined what was then C5. Bridget Baker was a board member of the Cable Center and also a board member at GCI and when this CX was created at our company she immediately, like within a month, said, “You need to be part of this organization.” And luckily at that point I don’t think there were any mid or even small providers in the organization and so GCI, thanks probably to her advocating for us, we were able to join. And I can tell you immediately — I think I attended my first meeting in probably April or the spring of 2015 and I was blown away by the work that had already been done. So what you described, I got to be on the end of it all. It had all been created. So it was really fascinating and awesome to see the way our larger peers were approaching this, to your point both from an operational and an emotional standpoint, and to this day it has been incredibly helpful. Our membership has — our membership in the organization has been helpful because we do lag behind a little bit. We’re in — Alaska is remote, we’re kind of up there by ourselves —
ROB STODDARD: I might disagree with you. I don’t see GCI lagging in terms of what you’ve done, in terms of broadband connectivity in Alaska, it leads the nation.
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: That’s true. No, that is true. From the network and service standpoint we actually are leading the nation both in we have two and a half gig in more than 80% of the state and we were the first 5G network on the wireless side in Alaska. And so from that standpoint we are leaders, we’re technology leaders. Where we have lagged behind our peers is in the development of customer experience. We just took a little longer to get there, but we’ve had the benefit of riding the coattails, again, of the others that have gone before us. So that’s been super helpful.
ROB STODDARD: Sure. And to your point, you’re bringing to mind a great study that then C5 conducted over a period of six years from 2011 to 2018 which I view as a longitudinal study. I’m not sure that the group thought of it that way, but what I recall is the hardest part of it, going back to 2010 and 2011, was developing a common scorecard because each of the companies had radically different language, they were applying to all of the metrics that kind of undergird customer experience, right? Did you — and now, having said that, also talking to Ron Rizzuto, I think the Senior Fellows at the end of the day felt a little frustrated because the data was collected, but then it was a little bit hard to know what to do with it and there was a lot of second guessing by your companies as well in terms of is this definition correct and are my numbers at Comcast, you know, do they jibe with what’s going on at Suddenlink or with GCI? It took a lot to plow through that and to make it happen, but it was an early sign of the level of collaboration, to your point Maureen, that existed among all of these companies.
GIBBS JONES: And I would say one of the neat things about this group is there are not many groups like that. Maybe there’s not another group like it. Because we’re in an industry where you can share and I don’t know for sure, but I bet you Capital One and Citibank don’t get together twice a year to talk about customer service strategy. They’re just in a, you know, they compete differently. So it’s nice to — that lots of people sort of recognize that, embrace that opportunity, and are invested in it because flying a bunch of people across the country for a two-day meeting, time out of the office, it’s a big commitment and our meetings are always full. So people are — you can tell how committed the cable companies are based on how many seats are full in the conference room and they’re almost always full.
ROB STODDARD: Gibbs, I agree with you. I’m not a student of business, global business, but what little contact I’ve had with companies outside of the cable industry, I agree with you. I cannot name or identify any other industry that has the same level of collaboration in this space which I think — and now you and Graham have had the opportunity in recent years to work outside of the business. Would you verify that for us? Do you think this is unique in the annals of American business?
GIBBS JONES: I’ve never heard — I mean outside of the C5 or the CXC I’ve never seen a group, a cross-collaborative kind of group, in an industry.
GRAHAM TUTTON: Agreed. That the level of conversation that takes place in this group, the CXC, is unlike anything I’ve seen. And while there are industry groups that get together that talk at a 100,000-foot level, so to speak. Being able to say, “How did you do that? With whom did you do that and why?” That’s unique here.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, and sharing net promoter scores, I mean things that are pretty sensitive —
GRAHAM TUTTON: Sharing data.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, and someone’s at the top and someone’s at the bottom and, you know, but that’s important, right? I mean because then you can start to make change and improvements.
GRAHAM TUTTON: I think that collaboration and I think the conversations, as friendly as well as sometimes cranky as they got, was part of the evolution and by definition it was evolving the cable industry and the operators and what we presented to customers. Turn, exist, you know, perspective. And even lost customers. And to my earlier point of how this journey has evolved, where does customer experience, even though it may be getting a little bit diluted these days, how do we think about customer experience, finance, marketing, technology, all in the same vein? And it’s not an oh, by the way; it’s a driving force. And those conversations of how do you perform, how do you measure, and oh, by the way, what do you do with it, that is the evolution and customers are feeling it.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, and I think it’s important — so our meetings aren’t, as you said, always touchy feely, but often the conversations are around someone coming to the table and going, “We just tried this and it was a total disaster, let me first off share what happened and also get your feedback on maybe how I could do it better.” Right?
ROB STODDARD: Sure. I’m thinking of some of Maureen’s stories of billing conversions over the years and the types of things you had to deal with there.
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Yes, I cannot overstate the value that we have gotten out of the organization for that exact reason. Sometimes it’s positioning a situation or a problem or a challenge or something we tried that didn’t work and the feedback from the group and the ideas that come as a result of that are priceless frankly.
ROB STODDARD: I think it’s always struck me that one of the keys to the success of C5 or CXC is based on the decision made by Jana and Diane in the mid-2000s to keep the group small, right? Graham, you mentioned there are other groups that consult at the 100,000-foot level. CTAM, the marketing group, would be a great example of that. SCTE, the engineering group, which has thousands, if not tens of thousands of members, addresses telecom and engineering issues, but these are — and of course NCTA which comprises most of the big MSOs and cable programmer companies. So in all of those organizations you’re talking about groups of hundreds or thousands of people that are collaborating. Here at best with CXC — we’re taping this — we’re recording this show on the verge of an upcoming semiannual conference and even just counting the heads in the room we’re up to about 40 participating individuals all in, right? So this is not a large group of people. And, Diane, Jana told me the decision was made early on to keep the group small because collaboration would be made easier that way.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Absolutely. We just did a — we did kind of a reset of how we wanted to conduct business with C5 and one of the things that all the members told us, keep it small. Keep it intimate, we value that.
ROB STODDARD: But the question that I always had, which maybe skews a little bit to the critical side, is okay, so we’ve got a group of 25 of us sitting around a conference table, to what extent are you able to take that back or were you able to take that back to your companies and kind of drive progress based on what you learned here?
GRAHAM TUTTON: I did — so I’ll speak from my experience at Comcast. It was the ability to have experienced leaders that typically were director or VP level and above that had not only accountability for P&L but cross functional influence and members like a Tom Karinshak who was my boss for years, being able to bring that back and break some paradigms of why we’re doing things. And the relationships that exist within CXC as well as outside of it, when they talked and the value and the intimacy and the detailed conversations, critical or supportive, and how that got back to the organization, that was very unique. And I think the small number of members facilitated that.
ROB STODDARD: So I’d love to drop back to the early years of C5 because I was always fascinated witnessing these conversations and I’ve heard the same from Chuck Patti and Ron Rizzuto. In the early years it was all about call centers. It was call center, call center, call center. Bringing us flashing forward to 2024, still a little bit about that, but not so much anymore. It’s a much more global perspective on it. But my question for each of you is to what extent did call centers during that era play a critical role in CX and why was the group so focused on call center metrics? Why was it important? Maureen, will you take a crack at that?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Sure, and actually you’re jogging my memory of my early — my very early days in the group and the focus was call handle time, call answer time, like those were the stats that we all knew. They were reported in that way which is, obviously that’s super important to the way that you’re serving a customer, but if you think about it, it is such a small part of the whole picture. And thinking — I mean we’ve just evolved so much past that, but that certainly was where we started.
GRAHAM TUTTON: I was going to build on that. The metrics and not a faulting statement, but the metrics of contact center or call center leaders that were part of the original group, that was their job. Optimize the operation and fine tune. Handle time, abandon rate, first contact resolution, etc., etc. But as the conversations evolved it was each of these things were influenced by the volume of calls, what was triggering the volume, proactive or reactive, and how do you minimize the volume so you didn’t have to worry about racing through a call in your handle time. And I remember there was an inflection point in my career. It was hey, I would rather take one long call than two smaller calls or shorter calls because of the cost to the organization, to the irritant to the customer, and the consistency. And that —
ROB STODDARD: But that’s not always the way companies looked at it, right?
GRAHAM TUTTON: Exactly and it was get them on and off because I can tell you to the second how much that call is costing us versus as a customer who has to call and go through the quintessential stereotypical IVR, etc., etc. And that was the evolution that I think we’ve been talking about here versus metrics, which are important obviously, but what are the effects or what are affecting those metrics that we can influence upstream? Product, marketing, sales, etc.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, I would say in our meetings initially, as these guys have said, it was very focused on kind of the hard numbers, but if you look at the evolution, we had marketing folks that would come and join. It started to expand out. Our speakers generally weren’t talking about call centers. They were talking about the bigger picture, right? Like customer experience and we had some well, well known speakers that have come in to talk to us and really begin to — that began to shift the focus from what your average handle time is to how happy are your customers.
ROB STODDARD: Sure. I’m flashing back, Gibbs, to your point. Over the years we’ve had a handful of CEOs, industry CEOs, doing fireside chats, but just as critically, and this I felt was another innovation kind of introduced by Patti and Rizzuto and Van Dessel, which was to bring people from outside, way outside the industry– from the airline industry, from the banking industry, from the financial services industry, to share with us what their experiences were in CX. As practitioners was valuable that to you? Graham?
GRAHAM TUTTON: It was incredibly powerful and I remember a conversation here that we had and I apologize, I forget who the speaker was, but it —
ROB STODDARD: Here being Denver at the Cable Center?
GRAHAM TUTTON: Yes. And it was, here’s a day in the life of a family and then of a business customer and looked at all the various touch points and the brands that were associated with it. Everything from waking up in the morning with your Apple iPhone going off to going to Starbucks to getting into your BMW, whatever. And how they focused on looking cross-industry and not looking to the competitor in industry. And again, it completely changed the dialogue about how we live and breathe cable operations and customer experience in the industry, but our customers don’t. Our customers hit that ideally maybe once a year, but reality is once a month with a bill. And how do we situate that and present it that it is low friction, low effort, high value in entertainment, and if something happens to go wrong it’s easy to resolve and comparing ourselves to, whether it’s airlines or retail environments or others that have been known. I think Nordstrom comes to mind, American Express comes to mind.
ROB STODDARD: Right. Gibbs, what was your take? Was that kind of guidance helpful during your time with CXC?
GIBBS JONES: Oh, yeah, super helpful. Because, as Graham said, you know your world, right? It’s great to be able to have someone come in and talk about maybe not just their world in another industry, but someone like a Bill Price who would come in and would talk globally about all the industries that he’s worked in and what he’s seen and how you reduce customer effort, how do you improve. How do you improve your operations in a way where customers don’t feel like they need service because you’ve already anticipated kind of what their need might be?
ROB STODDARD: And Maureen, I’m also flashing back to the meeting in Anchorage which I believe was in 2019 and if memory serves you brought in an executive with Alaska Airlines to talk.
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Marilyn Romano.
GIBBS JONES: She was great.
ROB STODDARD: Is the customer experience a common issue for industries outside of cable, do you think? Or how do we — to the extent that we differ in cable and telecommunications from other industries, is there a difference or is it really more of the same?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: I guess what immediately comes to mind is certainly there are other industries that are similar in some ways, maybe on the negative side. Like what comes to mind immediately was medical billing which is the only other bill I think that people can’t understand.
ROB STODDARD: My chest gets tight thinking about that. (laughter)
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Right, I mean the medical bill is harder to read than a telecom bill which that’s saying something. And then you think obviously there are a lot of very positive other places. And the point of what we’ve been talking about here today is that we’ve come a long way and there are still others out there that do things maybe better or differently than we do and we should be looking to them because, I agree, there is always something to learn from somebody else whether they’re in your industry or something totally different. We can take some of those learnings back and apply them to what we’re doing to make our experience better.
GRAHAM TUTTON: I would build on that as well. I look across industry and think of let’s start with ourselves in telco, in cable. It is multiple products, multiple touch points, millions of customers. And typically, in a matrixed organization that is disparate across geography. In short, complex. I go to financial services. A whole host of products, a whole host of customers across geographies, matrix. Utilities, and the list goes on. There are some that are closer that we can learn from their mistakes in learnings along the way, but as we start graduating and become more comfortable with what experience means to the organization, then we can go to some of the organizations, be it airlines or be it retail or whomever, that are a little further ahead because of simpler product offerings and interactions. And I think that, based on my experience, the industries I just mentioned, telco, financial services, and utilities, they have very common things. Contact center, web presence, field operations, and really want to simplify the complexity behind the curtain.
ROB STODDARD: Chuck Patti used to like to emphasize that we are, and even to this day still, a subscription-based business and therefore have a lot in common with some of those other businesses that you mentioned, and that in fact the subscription-based model is increasing instead of decreasing over time. Do you find that there’s truth in that analogy?
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, I think so. I think that, one, I think companies, you know, everybody would love to be a subscription business, right? Because it’s, you know–
ROB STODDARD: Because it’s steady income.
GIBBS JONES: It’s steady income, right? So that’s certainly a benefit of our offerings. I would say — I was just reflecting on our conversations around the folks that — I’m going to transition here a second. I think one of the things that’s been a problem, ironically a problem for the cable industry, at least from a service perspective, is initially there was very little competition, now there’s quite a bit more, but — And so we didn’t learn what we didn’t learn because we didn’t have to compete early on, whereas a lot, most companies do, right? So they had a much sharper view of, and frankly more urgency around like fixing things, right? So this group has, as we’ve brought in speakers and other companies, I think one of the things that struck me was wow, they’re like so much further ahead because they have to be and we have to be too because, one, it’s the right thing to do, but times are changing, right? I mean if you look at 15 years ago you’ve got your internet from your cable company and now you can get it from multiple companies, you can get it from fixed wireless, you can on and on and on. So I think the work that we’ve done has — it’s a good thing this group was in place because if it was not in place and we were starting now with all this with all the other competition it would have been a totally different game, both from a service perspective and financially frankly.
GRAHAM TUTTON: And frankly I would stipulate even in a perspective of collaboration because during that period of time, the last 20 years up until today, 2024, a number of the big companies within our industry have gotten larger. They’ve well established their own brands. To some extent it may be kind of a level of professional arrogance which is I’m a big global company now, I don’t know that I need to collaborate with other companies in my space because I’ve got the people, I’ve the intellect, I’ve got the experience now, and I can go out and chart my own course without having to compare notes. So I actually agree with you that it’s — we’re blessed that this germ of an idea came to fruition 20 years ago.
ROB STODDARD: Right. It also takes me back to — we were talking about call centers a little while ago and I just have to relate to you a short anecdote in talking to Chuck Patti. He told me the story of how Diane when our group started holding meetings here at the Cable Center, that Jana or you would give Chuck a call and say, “You know, C5 is meeting over here tomorrow. Why don’t you and Ron come on over and sit in?” And he said, “Ron and I would come over and we’d kind of sit in the back corner of the conference room and we’d monitor very carefully everything that was said and then we’d walk out of that meeting and I would turn to Ron and I would say, ‘I have no idea what the hell those guys were talking about.’” (laughter) Because it was so exclusively focused on call center metrics and some of the things that Graham was outlining for us. What strikes me is of course during the evolution of C5 there was an evolution in clearly in customer care and customer experience as well with the addition of so many more channels through which our customers could begin to talk with us. Initially it was just websites and then apps and then chatbots and a variety of digital technology. I guess my question is, and Maureen, I’ll go to you for this, has that made customer experience easier or more complex, the fact that you’re now talking to customers through so many different channels?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: I think it’s absolutely made it better and easier for customers and clearly, we want to be where customers want to be. We want to be where they want to contact us. I definitely think it’s made it more complex on the back end, on our side, keeping track and managing all of the different channels in which people communicate with you, but it’s absolutely positive for customers.
ROB STODDARD: But in terms — so talk a little bit more about having to manage that. Although I say that with the knowledge that you introduced these channels to your own customers, right? By and large.
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Right, that’s true, but you do it out of necessity because you want to meet people where they are. I am not the best one to answer that question because we’re the least sophisticated in terms of the way that we manage it and so I mean I don’t want to say, yeah, we’re managing it manually. (laughter) Ask one of these guys. They’ll have a way better answer. (laughter)
ROB STODDARD: I want to ask Graham about this. I found in researching the history of C5, and I’d forgotten about this, but there was a period of time in about 2014, 2015 when Comcast created a bold new initiative in which its seniormost executives began online chatting with customers. Many of them created blogs, many of them started talking to customers directly on Twitter. What are your memories of that? And tell us at the end of the day was it successful, did it make much of a difference?
GRAHAM TUTTON: So my memories of that was it was a radical disruption to the organization. Who’s going to be talking to who and why? And once we got over the fear factor of it all and what the impetus or the reason behind it, it was a classic massive skip level of senior executives cross functionally from finance to HR to operations in understanding what was in the truest sense of the word the voice of the customer, good, bad, and ugly. And what it did, it first created mass chaos simply for the fact it was lots of information and how do you govern that? And we got really good at being able to organize the conversations, not script them and not dictate what type of calls or what type of customers they called, but how do we take the information and position — perhaps the wrong word — how executives showed up. And not to get defensive, not to justify or just throw money at a problem, whatever the solve was, and how did it bake into our ecosystem of understanding employee, customer, and product experiences.
ROB STODDARD: Did your senior executives willingly volunteer for this or did they have to be dragged into it? Do you recall how that worked?
GRAHAM TUTTON: The minority were willing and dare I say it with air quotes, I will be your guinea pig, so to speak. But once they saw and heard the impact it had first and foremost on customers, but equally if not more important, the employees, the men and women on the front lines. Contact center, field operations, retail center, chat agents, not in just the US but around the world. That was where the blogs continued. And I speak of myself, to this day I stay in loose contact with several contact — former contact center agents, just seeing how their careers have evolved. What it also did is helped us align and validate priorities that analytics brought to life and whether it was pricing or billing or product functionality, reliability, and humanized it. And it was also part of the evolution of I get the information, but what do I do with it? And I’ve become a little bit notorious for saying, so what? I have all this information, I have petabytes of data, but what am I doing with it in creating the structure? And whether it was chatting with them, phone calls, ride-alongs, in many areas of the business it became part of the performance goals in that you were in a truck or you were on a phone call or in a retail center at least once a quarter. And it, again, humanized and changed the culture of being customer centric and it was — people then saw it working and then it spread like wildfire.
ROB STODDARD: So it kind of sent a shock through the system, I suppose?
GRAHAM TUTTON: It did. And again, Comcast is, and was, large and there was well over 100,000 employees and millions of customers and to do that at scale was daunting, but we started and we fell down a couple of times doing it, but once you were able to do that scale and communicate back to customers, we’ve heard you, this is what we’re doing, and back to employees, we’ve heard you and — that was probably one of the more prouder moments of the CX organization at Comcast.
ROB STODDARD: And I think it’s well worth mentioning that, and I think I’m correct in asserting this, that that was part of a broader initiative announced at about the same time that had a wide variety of initiatives wrapped into it to improve CX, but to me the most important thing was when your then CEO, Brian Roberts, announced the commitment to CX at a national cable show it was estimated that your company, your then-company Comcast, was investing $300 million in CX which at the time felt like a tidal wave in terms of investment. To Diane’s earlier point, people began to think oh, there must be some impact here because investors and share owners wouldn’t want to turn you guys loose to do this unless there were some financial return.
GRAHAM TUTTON: Yes.
ROB STODDARD: So immense leadership and my own simplified thinking is, and even in the context of CX, that really began to turn the proverbial ocean liner that we’re all talking about. May I ask your industry colleagues, Maureen and Gibbs, to what extent does that kind of leadership or did that kind of leadership have on the way your companies operated? And is this a bad assumption or a good assumption that having a company jump out front and do that —
GIBBS JONES: No, a good assumption. I know — I mean, perfect example, Tom Karinshak and I worked on a number of things together where we were basically, for lack of a better term, kind of ripping off what Comcast was doing because they had the resources, right? But they were always — I remember I was — I think it was a cable show and I called Tom a couple weeks into looking for a vendor to do something and I was at a cable show and he was like, “Gibbs, Gibbs,” he’s running, he’s like, “I found another vendor for you.” It’s that kind of — so not only is it important to look at the Comcasts of the world because they’re going to be out front, they’ve got the money to spend, but it’s also this group has allowed you to have that kind of relationship where someone will chase you down and try to help you out.
ROB STODDARD: That’s great. Maureen, how do you look at it?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Same. Same experience. As I’ve said a couple of times here today, the benefit that we get is I’ll say riding the coattails and that does two things. One, it allows us — it gives us new ideas that we might not have thought about, but secondly it actually helps validate and it is helpful. C5 or now CXC is highly regarded even by my boss, our president and COO, and he frequently will say things to me like, “What are the C5ers doing? What are you hearing?” And it’s a fantastic resource for, again, validating sometimes. Sometimes you’re getting good ideas and sometimes you’re validating something that you assume that your peers, larger peers, have already done a lot of work towards it and can be super helpful in getting that information within my own company.
ROB STODDARD: Tremendous. I want to pivot in a moment in the time we have left to the future, such as it is at this snapshot, this moment in time in 2024. But before that I also wanted to comment, dovetailing, Maureen, off of your point, and to Diane, early on the Cable Center made a critical decision to include other associations and professional societies in the work of C5. And so I was privileged to represent NCTA for many years. CTAM has had a representative in the group for many years. I see at our upcoming meeting after this recording that SCTE, the engineers, will be more deeply involved. CableLabs in recent years has been a great partner and participant in this group. And you know, the importance of that decision, which now dates back to 2006, 2007, is that we all go back to our associations within our other disciplines within the cable industry and report back on what this group is doing. To Maureen’s point, there was always an interest at NCTA among senior leadership, what is C5 involved in, what are they doing that are either going to improve my public policy perspective or perhaps damage my public policy perspective based on the performance, the actual performance, of the business. So Diane, I would say that was a hugely valuable decision made back in the day.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Thank you. I totally agree. I think that they are such great contributors and when we talked about our reset and did — talked with all the members of C5 a couple of years ago one of the things that emerged from that is a desire for the group to connect the dots. And having association memberships I think is a large part of the dot connecting.
ROB STODDARD: Diane, you probably don’t get nearly as much credit as you deserve in the history of C5 and in our group because part of your job at the Cable Center over the years was to make sure that this group was sustainable financially and I know you made some critical decisions early on to create sponsorships and other partnerships with vendors and manufacturers to not only improve the sustainability of the group through their money, but through their collaboration. Can you talk a little bit about that, the vendor piece and how that fits into what C5 and CXC have done?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Sure. So when CTAM gifted us the group there were — there were no funds that came along with the gift. (laughter) And so that was a challenge for us and Lela Cocoros, who I know you know. She and I put together the first kind of membership sponsorship piece of that and we had some success, but as we did the work and the analysis a couple of years ago for the reset, and the feedback that we got from the members is that there is probably a stronger way for the vendors to participate. Often they would come to a meeting and they might do a 30 minute commercial or 45 minute commercial and then kind of meet with people and network at the lunch and the dinner. And so what we were thinking about is something that the vendors would be kind of a working partner with the group. And they would, rather than send their sales people, send your people who are doing the work and doing the research and bring us the data and the thought leadership and let’s sit down at the table together to solve problems. And so we’re about a year into that new model and I’m feeling pretty confident that it’s working having the vendors be a part of the discussions versus an observer.
There’s still some work that needs to be done, but they — they’re doing a lot of the research and the analysis and they have the data and so it just made sense to bring them more fully into the group. And of course, there’s always a fine line because we want to make sure that it’s not an eight-hour commercial every day and that they really are partners and that it’s not an effort to — for sales or anything like that. And I think we’re off to a good start. There are still some things that we need to figure out and work out, but we’re well on our way there. And from a funding perspective the vendors are paying to be there too and we do charge a very modest membership fee for all of our members. Not quite so modest for the vendor partners. You know, it’s an investment for them, but I think there’s a lot to be gained from their perspective when you’re talking to the people who are doing the work.
ROB STODDARD: I agree. I mean my personal observation from over the years is that some of the more stimulating discussions at C5 and CXC meetings has been during vendor presentations when people, particularly companies that may not be customers or clients of the presenting vendor, have had the opportunity to really bear down on the points that they’re making and what kind of progress they can bring along.
DIANE CHRISTMAN: And I’m glad that you mentioned that because Lisa Modisette was one of the people that we kind of modeled this new reset under because she was always a very engaged sponsor and would bring the data and it wasn’t a sales pitch. It was, “I’m here to help you and whatever analysis or data or research we have that I can bring that’s going to help, I’ll do that.” And that was what we were thinking about when we looked at the restructure of the vendor partners.
ROB STODDARD: We have just a few minutes left so we should, again bearing in mind that our viewers will see as just a snapshot in time, people watching will see this as in the past, but let’s talk about at this moment what we think the future of CXC might be. Diane, I’d like to come back to you for a moment longer. You’ve referenced several times the reset that’s been involved in how this organization is led. Can you talk a little bit more about what the Syndeo Institute’s vision is for the future of CXC and what contribution and sponsorship that the Cable Center can continue to provide in the years ahead?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: Sure. Back when we first started this and up until a few years ago the Cable Center, Syndeo Institute, we really didn’t talk about C5. It wasn’t something that we shared with or reported on to any huge extent and in talking with the members, you know, that’s part of — that’s one of the areas that we’re going to change. And I think it all boils down to the desire of the CX group to connect with the engineers, the marketing, the bean counters. It’s a necessity, it has to happen. And that’s something that the members said you can help us do this. So you’re going to hear more about CXC. We’re going to be at some of the shows. We had our first CXC panel at the 2024 Expo of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers. About three years ago Syndeo Institute published an Intrapreneur and Innovation Report. This last edition in 2024 featured a whole empowering the experience part. It was all embedded with CX and what we’ve been chartered to do is help all those dots, help everybody make the connections up, down, everywhere and bring those communities together. I think it really ties into what I was saying earlier about the associations and their participation.
ROB STODDARD: That’s great. Well, to our experts and practitioners on the panel my sense is that one of the most exciting topics to arise during the history of CXC has occurred just in the couple of years prior to this conversation and that’s the rise of artificial intelligence and AI and the role that it now plays in CX and will play in the future. And, Diane, I know that CXC has made this and will make this a priority in the time ahead, but I wondered if each of you could speak to the issue of AI. Explain for our viewers what role AI plays in CX and how it’s going to improve and enhance what we do in future years. Go ahead, Gibbs.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, huge potential. I’m a consultant now and I’m working with a couple of clients that are installing AI and it takes a lot of the systems that we’ve had before and it pulls them all together and really tells the story. And in many ways will really improve the customer experience because you can — out of a million calls you can find that one call that didn’t go well really quickly and not only find it, but it will tell you what didn’t go well and why it didn’t go well. It’ll be interesting to see as these tools become more and more — and they’ve come a long way just in the last couple of years, but a year or so from now they’ll be even that much better and I can see a world where you can — it used to be monitor 10 calls and try to come up with some score for an agent on how they did. Now with AI you can monitor 100%, right? Totally automated. Very high levels of accuracy. So it’s going to be a lot easier to make sure that if folks need help, that they get that help quickly and if folks are doing well, they get rewarded for doing well and these systems will listen for customers, you know, the things they say and even how they say them and will create alerts saying, “This is a problem, you need to look at it.” It’s just, you know, it used to be a needle in a haystack and now all of a sudden, it’s become very, very easy to find those things that are going well and those things that aren’t going well as it pertains to the customer experience.
ROB STODDARD: Interesting. Maureen, as a chief CX officer, to what extent is this on your radar?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Well, highly on our radar and actually to add, I’m excited about the opportunity that AI is going to offer us in terms of the way we manage networks. We are going to have much better understanding of the experience, proactively be able to identify where there might be future failures so that you can prevent it from happening in the first place. So in addition to the customer facing opportunities there’s immense opportunity on the back end to overall provide excellent service. So that’s something I’m super excited about, and I’m also chuckling to myself at some years from now someone’s watching this and they’re thinking oh, you guys were so cute.
ROB STODDARD: Isn’t that quaint, right? (laughter)
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Look how cute they were talking about AI then in 2024.
ROB STODDARD: Graham, you’re embroiled in AI up to your elbows as well, right?
GRAHAM TUTTON: Steeped in it and I — yes to all the comments thus far. I look at AI like the internet or like the evolution of technologies along the way. From a business leadership and strategy perspective there’s a lens to look through as well as from a consumer and AI is relatively fresh, it’s exciting, it’s sexy, but it’s not fully understood. And so there is excitement, but there’s caution. And from a business perspective what’s the risk, what’s the impact, what’s the outcome, etc.? From a consumer perspective it is how can you make my life easier, how can I leverage this? And I’ve been pretty vocal about this. Love the technology, keep going, pedal to the metal, but let’s not forget the human aspect of it, that the whole robots and Siris and people like that of the world, there has to be a human element and how do we finesse it? AI is an absolute efficiency game changer, but how do we keep the hearts and minds and the emotions of our consumers regardless of demographic, regardless of industry, how does it fit in? AI will absolutely help us, get us there quicker, in theory more efficiently and more accurately, but what do we do with it and how do we keep that human dynamic? Because we are human.
GIBBS JONES: Yeah, and I would say, like with any big technology change, there’s always a risk, and frankly there’s always the real potential that people just focus on that and they don’t focus on the blocking and tackling and making sure that people are being nice to customers. You know? I mean they just like — AI doesn’t do it all. AI is a great tool, but it’s still important to hire the right people, to train them properly, to have the right system. I mean all that other stuff still counts like it did before, but often — and I would count myself as someone who’s done this as a mistake in their career, this big new shiny object will come out and you’ll put too much focus on that and then the other stuff, which is just as important, doesn’t necessarily get the attention.
ROB STODDARD: So the basics still make a big difference?
GIBBS JONES: Absolutely, yeah.
ROB STODDARD: Diane, I’ve been impressed over the years with the fact that CXC and C5 went global some time ago, that there are companies represented in within these ranks from other parts of the world, from Argentina, from Brazil, some Chinese companies were involved for a while. Liberty Global of course which has contact points throughout the globe. To what extent will that global influence play a role in CXC’s future do you think?
DIANE CHRISTMAN: I hope it’s always a part of CXC. And again, keeping in mind that we want to — we don’t want to have a membership of 100 people, right? And so when we look for partners internationally, we’re looking for people who want to be engaged and want to contribute, contribute their own experiences and thought leadership. I think — I’ve enjoyed it and I think it’s been beneficial to all of the members, you know? We’ve just been really fortunate. We’ve had some just — it’s such a great group, it really is, and everybody’s passionate, everybody contributes. I hope it will stay that way.
ROB STODDARD: Absolutely. So here’s my closing question for all of you. We have spent 20 years or so as of this moment in time learning from each other and learning a lot from companies outside of our industry and within other industries. Are we at enough of an inflection point in cable CX to be able to take lessons that we’ve learned and to share that with other industries and other companies around the globe? In other words, my personal point of view is that we are, but you’ve been the practitioners, you’ve taken the lumps over the years. Do you think we’re there yet or do we have a ways to go?
GIBBS JONES: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean I think there are lots of — I mean I’ve worked in lots of different industries. They’re all very similar — I mean they may be very different as far as the product they’re selling, but operationally they’re all very similar and I think on a couple of fronts. One, we’ve made a lot of improvements so I think we have a story to tell now. Two, I think people recognize that and they’ll listen to the story whereas 15 years ago if you’re like, “Hey, I’m here from your cable company, I’m going to tell you how to do customer service” you’re not going to get a big audience, right? But I think that’s changing and I think people recognize it and that we’ve done good work.
ROB STODDARD: Maureen, do other industries ever come to you and ask you for learnings?
MAUREEN McCABE MOORE: Sure, and I echo I think we have come a long way and that people are interested in hearing more about what we’ve done. And frankly acknowledging that we started in a place that wasn’t necessarily great and there’s lessons learned there so it isn’t always just about we’re doing great now, but what did we learn, how did we get there, and what can others take from that and apply as well?
ROB STODDARD: Graham, you’re having opportunity to work with other businesses, other industries. Are you taking the cable knowledge and sharing that with the rest of the world now?
GRAHAM TUTTON: I am. And I think the underpinning is evolution and you mentioned it in your question. Cable was not a bastion of customer experience 20 years ago and, again, we will continue to have work done, but the strides and the impacts we’ve made to customers, employees, and operations is remarkable if you think of the scale. And whether you look at health care or financial services or fill in the blank of industry, they’re all looking to evolve in some form or fashion. The strategy, the governance, and the tactics to get it done, I would say because of our scale, our being the industry’s scale and complexity, people look to that. And while it’s not a one-to-one match the approach and the thought process and the milestones that you celebrate, yeah, definitely received well by multiple organizations.
ROB STODDARD: Graham, on that very optimistic note we’re going to give you the last word. Diane, Graham, Maureen, Gibbs, wow, what a powerhouse conversation. Thank you for this. I do want to note for our viewers that this is part of, as Diane mentioned, part of a CX archives project that the Syndeo Institute has begun to formulate and within that project there will be other similar oral histories and conversations underway so I would invite you to tune in to those conversations as they’re made available by the Syndeo Institute as well. Thank you so much for joining us and have a great rest of the day.
