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 & Television Association, and a proud alumnus of Continental Cablevision, MediaOne, and AT&T Broadband. Today, we’re going to continue to examine the historic trajectory of the cable customer experience or CX. We’re doing so through the lens of an earnest and hardworking group of CX and operations executives that has worked for nearly two decades so far under the leadership of The Cable Center and the Syndeo Institute. Today, that group is known as the Syndeo CX Collaborative or CXC, and its predecessor was The Cable Center Customer Care Committee or C5.
The immensely collaborative efforts of C5 and CXC have laid the groundwork for a sea change in cable CX, in which our industry has gone from a onetime laughingstock in customer care to a position of global leadership in CX. Our mission, in these conversations and as part of the Syndeo Institute’s CX Archives project, is to try to understand why and how that progress has been made. And we’ll do so today through the eyes of some of the executives who have collaborated, innovated, and executed the efforts that are turning cable CX around.
For today’s conversation, we have a wonderful panel of domestic and global industry leaders on CX. Kimberly Gibson has been a leader at Cable One for more than 20 years. For the past decade, she has served as senior director of customer operations for the company, which today does business as Sparklight. Kim is a longtime member of the Syndeo CX Collaborative and its predecessor, the Cable Center Customer Care Committee. Currently, she serves as an executive chair of the group.
Brooke Pruter is also a renowned industry leader in CX. For more than 20 years, she has worked at Comcast. She currently works as senior vice president for customer experience, having previously been vice president for national customer operations. Brooke is new to the world of CXC and C5, but certainly not to the struggle for excellence in cable CX. And we’re pleased to have her today for her bird’s-eye perspective on industry progress in this area.
Tina Rodriguez is an executive with Liberty Global having spent the past year leading CX for the company. Her objective is to drive CX optimization across the company’s TV and connectivity platforms on all of its operating companies, which include Virgin Media O2, Virgin Media Ireland, VodafoneZiggo, Telenet, and Sunrise. Before that, she ran the entertainment business for Sunrise in Switzerland, and she launched entertainment services across all Liberty global markets. At the time of this recording, Tina is a relatively new member of CXC.
We are so fortunate to have this diverse and global group for our discussion, so let’s get started. And, Kim, I’d like to start with you since you’re, to some extent, the veteran CXC member of this group. What would you say is the significance of CX in the cable and broadband business and for your company specifically?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: At this point, CX is the differentiator between our new competitors in our markets and in our space. Really standing out to the customer and what they need and what they expect, and to meet them where they expect to be met, those are some of the things that really stand out to me that make a difference in what your company or organization is offering. Our competitors are offering similar packaging, speeds, pricing, channel lineups, things of that nature, and CX is really where you can make a difference and expand on customers’ loyalty.
ROB STODDARD: Is that a relatively recent phenomenon that CX has become such a differentiator, or has it been out there for quite some time now?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I think we have a history that doesn’t lend to that. We were in markets where maybe we didn’t have a lot of competition and didn’t put a lot of emphasis on the customer’s experience or service, so we’re trying to overcome that history. Do I think it’s new? No, but I think we’re putting more emphasis on it. We have ways to measure it. We have tools that help guide associates to provide a better experience. We’re doing more to provide feedback to associates about how they could have improved the customer’s experience and that interaction and engagement. So I think it’s just for my company, and sometimes when we talk about it in the CX space, that it’s something we’re putting some more emphasis on.
ROB STODDARD: We’re going to spend some of today talking about the history of CX and how we’ve gotten to where we are. But based on your preamble, how would you say your company is performing in the area of CX? And you probably have metrics, you’re welcome to talk about that.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yeah, yeah, we do. We look at CSAT [customer satisfaction scores], we look at MPS [maximum potential score to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction] and some of those other things, and those are relatively new numbers for us to be managing and looking at, but I think we’re making headway with some of them. Trying to understand better, what is it the customer wants as an experience and not making an assumption about what it is that they’re looking for, and then making things easier for customers to do business with us. So I think those are some of the things.
ROB STODDARD: So you mentioned something that keyed another question in my mind. You talked about the fact that, for many years, we in the cable industry, even though we said we had competition from broadcast television, we really had no other multichannel video competitors in the marketplace. To me, that harkens back to some of the issues in the 1970s and ’80s and ’90s that created such a bad rap for cable in the customer experience space. I wanted to ask each of you why you think cable has this reputation of not performing well in CX? And, Brooke, I’m going to put you on the spot since at this point in time in 2024, you work for and represent the largest cable and telecommunications company certainly in the US. But what do you and your colleagues see as the origin problem here?
BROOKE PRUTER: I think it’s, you can’t think about cable in isolation, right, because that’s not how customers behave. They’re shopping for the best experience across any brand, so we talk a lot about the best-loved brands, whether it’s Costco, Chewy, those are some of our favorites — I don’t know if I’m supposed to mention them here — but they are. They’re the ones that we look to and know that their customers are incredibly loyal. And a lot of that is because they grew up, I think, maybe more entrepreneurial than the cable companies who tended to be purchasing, acquiring, merging.
We were just talking a little bit about taking over different territories, and as you do that, all of the policies and the processes and the tools that you have are disparate. And so it makes it incredibly complicated for people to serve the customer in the way that we want to. So I think there’s some, I would call it, legacy bad feeling about the cable industry from that standpoint. But if you look at where we are today, we are in an incredibly different place, and I think we are looked at as on equal footing, if not better than some industries, largely due to the fact that we’re not looking at each other or ourselves just in isolation. We’ve got to think about Netflix, you’ve got to think about other broadband carriers, Google Fiber is the one that we talked about this morning. So there’s tons of competition out there that makes you think differently about the way that you want to serve customers, and I think that’s the shift in mentality.
And the other thing I would say, as you were talking about the evolution of the customer care focus here to the CX focus, that’s what we saw in our world. If you look 20 years ago, customer service and the customer experience was largely laid on the shoulders of our frontline teammates. So whether it was an agent in the call center or a retail store or a technician in the home, everyone thought that was what customer experience was. And now, I think we’re super proud of the fact that it’s not that way anymore. Our entire company is invested in NPS practices and thinking about how do we serve the customer and how do we understand the customer. If you’re in HR or finance, there’s still a requirement to understand what that experience is like and how far do you move it back upstream so the customer doesn’t notice an issue. It’s a long-winded way of getting to, I really think we’ve come a long way. I think we’re, hopefully, mostly over that hurdle of the legacy impression.
ROB STODDARD: So you mentioned other trendsetters in the space that Comcast looks at, if not follows, I wanted to draw you out a little bit on that. What other industries do you think are doing well in this area? What other lessons have you learned from other enterprises?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, there are actually several. You look at all the best-loved brands, right, and they can be across any industry, but USAA is one that we look to, Delta Air Lines is another one that we look to. So whether it is that they’ve managed to move folks into an app that’s incredibly friendly and easy to interact with, we know customer effort is one thing that we talk about a lot as one of the friction points, right, from a CX lens. The more friction you put into an experience, the less likely a customer is to love you. And those folks that have done well in being proactive and communicating a message to you via the app or a push notification or SMS, they’ve done incredibly well in that space. So depending on the interaction, we’ll look to different industries to tell us what works.
The Chewy example is always one of our favorites. We have a program called Xfinity Love that if we get a compliment from a customer or we hear a moment from a customer where they may be struggling, we’ll actually send them… One example is champagne glasses for a wedding, or sending remotes to a baby for their first birthday, things like that that make you human to the customer. We look to Chewy for things like that to tell us —
ROB STODDARD: I don’t remember getting the champagne glasses —
BROOKE PRUTER: I know, sorry, next time, we’ll get them to you.
ROB STODDARD: Right. (laughter) That’s really great. This may be an unfair question, but sitting here today in November 2024, how would you rank Comcast versus some of those other global leaders? Do you think you’re in the top tier, or do you have a ways to go?
BROOKE PRUTER: We still have a ways to go if I’m being really honest. I think we are excelling in certain spaces. I would say we look at three really key areas in terms of customer experience. One is reliability, and we’re incredibly strong there, we have 99.9 percent uptime of our network, we’ve made huge investments in the network and the platforms that we leverage. Price and value, I’ll get to in a minute, and then customer effort. And so customer effort, largely a focus of ideally customers not having a problem in the first place; when they do, having an easy resolution path. And then price value is one where I think the industry, as a whole, struggles. Really just again, you’re up against a Netflix or somebody like that that has a cheaper price point. However, it’s our job to sell the value of what you’re buying, and I think we’re doing a better job of that. I think we still have a little ways to go.
ROB STODDARD: I will just tell you as a Comcast customer in several different places around the US, the improvement in CX has been overwhelming and dramatic over the course of the past decade. I’d love to come back later in the conversation and talk a little bit about what forces have shaped that.
BROOKE PRUTER: Oh, absolutely.
ROB STODDARD: But first, I’d like to ask Tina a question. Tina, I don’t mean to make this a US-centric conversation because that’s not the idea, and I’ve asserted that we have a bad rap on CX here in the US. As you operate in other countries around the world, does our industry have a bad rap, or are you, in some ways, better off than we are here in the United States? What’s your sense of that?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: I think the history is not too dissimilar, quite frankly. I think in Europe, it depends on how far you want to go back, right, but in the early days, it was very much an acquisition business and a growth business. So the focus of the full organization was on sales and not so much on the aftercare. And the growth of customers, obviously, also means it’s hard to adjust the whole business further, more and more and more customers to care for. So I think that perspective change from sales to taking care of the customer base, reducing their effort, and making sure they have a reliable service, and everything you just said, that’s happened over the past years. Starting with, this is the department, it does these things, and maybe looks into NPS [net promoter score to measure how highly customers think of you]. In good times, we’ll listen to them; if push comes to shove, let’s go sell some more and make sure that we hit the numbers. But in recent years, it really elaborated more and became really a part of the brand strategy, and that’s where I think it belongs. Because it is a differentiator to your point, but it’s also very important for the financial resource of the company, quite frankly.
Because we’re in saturated markets, we can’t really very well monetize further speed increases. Speed itself as USP [unique selling proposition] is gone, as you said, so we need to make sure that with the price wars happening, we keep the base stable and loyal and trusting and happy. That’s really fundamental to be successful in the business.
ROB STODDARD: Absolutely, I’m so glad you mentioned that because I do see, from what you’ve just explained, immense parallels. Our industry here in the US — and I hope Kimberly would bear me out on this as well — got into a fair amount of trouble in the 1980s, even earlier than that, 1970s into the ’90s. Because during that era, generally speaking, if you spoke with senior-level executives of large, multiple-system operators, it was all about the acquisition, all about the rollout, all about building the numbers. And there was a perception that customer experience, or as we used to call it, customer service, had no impact on shareholder value, right? That it was more important to get customers before you worried about making them happy. And I’m so happy to hear you use the same tone because, clearly, that’s what bedeviled our industry for a while before things began to turn around, so very interesting.
Kim, I’ll come back to you because you are a veteran with Sparklight and Cable One, and you’ve had a couple of decades under your belt now. How would you say the company’s attitude towards CX has evolved over that period of time or has it?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: It has, I can remember 2010, 2009, somewhere in that time frame, we were doing the best service is no service, trying to mitigate interactions, right? And doing things to prevent customers to come in the office to make payments and things of that nature. And when you look at that now, we’re doing something very different. We want customers to come into our space, utilize our products, and purchase, or be supported in this space, which is very different. We went from having offices open part of the day or closing at lunch that we now recognize customers want to come in throughout the day, so we don’t do those things. Definitely very, very different, we’re actually looking at how we can bring them back, whether that’s either making payments or whatever they may be looking to do. But we definitely have made some strides from going to be operationally efficient to looking at the customer’s experience and their engagement with us and our company.
ROB STODDARD: Interesting. So during a fair portion of that time, you’ve been involved in the principal topic today, what we used to call C5, The Cable Center Customer Care Committee, and then CXC. Can you tell us a little bit about your relationship with CXC, how you got involved, and what the important or critical elements were to you in terms of your engagement? And then finally, where I’m really going with this, is do you feel as though your work with this particular group has paid any dividends to you on a company-wide basis?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yes, so from the onset of getting this particular role in Cable One, I joined the C5 as it was then. And it was just a great opportunity to talk through issues and challenges because you weren’t unique in that space. MSOs come in a variety of sizes, and sometimes, the bigger folks have tried things that maybe we haven’t in our smaller space, and you avoid a lot of trial and error. And so I think that was very, very helpful to me. It’s helped me also broaden my own personal network from a career perspective, and idea generation and innovation, there’s a lot of that. We looked at a lot of KPIs [key performance indicators] and metrics before, geared around the call center, and I can see over time that we shifted and looked more about the experience and how we were engaging with customers and multichannel and what we were doing there. I give it to the Comcasts and the other MSOs doing a lot of different things in the AI space, and I enjoy that because we aren’t quite as involved in that. And it’s a nice thing just to be able to see what things are working or not working for them and things that might work better for us that, like I said, we don’t have to do as much trial and error.
ROB STODDARD: Sure, sure, and we’ll come back and talk more about AI as we talk about the future of CXC as well. But you — you’d stepped on something that was really important from my perspective in terms of the history of this particular group, C5 and CXC. When I became involved in it really at the outset at about 2005, 2006, for a period of 5 maybe 10 years, virtually every discussion was about the call center. It was about call center metrics, it was about call center management, it was about recruiting and hiring and everything under the sun, 100 percent call center all the time. I wanted to ask you and your colleagues here to what extent — now in 2024, to what extent does — do contact centers play a role in CX? And what relationship do they have now with other disciplines that factor in?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I think they still play a good role in — overall. When we have an outage, that’s where folks are calling or coming into the office, and so those sometimes are the only interactions with our company, and those are the ones that build loyalty and things of that nature. I think they still are just very important from that perspective. Some customers may not ever have a problem, and hopefully, those are the ones that we don’t hear from. But I mean, the call center still plays a role overall.
ROB STODDARD: Are you happy with the progress of your call centers over the years? How much change has there been in recent years.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: There’s been a lot of change. COVID made us really pivot to something very, very different. We were all in-office, we shifted to work from home, and then post COVID, we have a hybrid model as well. Some associates still work remotely — not in market, some are in market — and others are a hybrid where they spend some time in the office and maybe a week at the front counter, and then the other three weeks they’re on the phone or chat supporting customers. So we really diversified and leveraged for resources. We don’t have as many as we used to from that perspective between that and the leveraging technology to our advantage, but, yeah, it’s very different.
ROB STODDARD: I’d love to talk about other channels beyond call centers that have risen to the fore in recent years. But, Brooke, as such a large provider, I suspect contact centers are still critical to your strategy as well?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, they’re a significant portion of the strategy. I think the way we talk about it is customer service is what happens when the customer experience failed. So if everything else upstream went wrong, now you’re in a contact center, and they’re your last resort, right? You expect them to be able to solve every problem you have as a customer when you call in. And historically, that’s been challenging, I think, given some of the platforms and the tools that we had 20 years ago that may not have performed as — we’ll talk about AI later — but as intelligently as they do today. And so a lot of that, the work in our space has been helping provide better policies, process, tools, support for those frontline teammates so that they do have an easier time answering customer questions. I think it’s interesting during COVID when our call center agents went home they actually were able to have more human conversations with customers. They’d hear dogs in the background or kids or whatever, and I think everyone felt a little bit more connected in odd ways, and we’ve tried to preserve that as we’ve kept going. Our teammates are still working from home, 100 percent of our US-based agents, and it’s even that much more important then to figure out ways to keep them connected, to make sure that the tools do work and support them in the right way. Fundamentally, when it comes down to it, it’s critically important for somebody to get to a human being to have their issue solved in the most empathetic way that we can possibly support.
ROB STODDARD: Tina, enlighten us, if you would, about the contact center environment globally. Talk a little bit about the role that it plays for your company and what kinds of challenges you’re facing in that area?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Of course. So obviously, our operating companies, you named them, are in different countries in Europe, and people speak different languages. The scale per market is smaller from the population perspective and from our customer base perspective. I think challenges are financial quite frankly, right? Because it’s a high salary market, so it’s nearshoring or offshoring, but then making sure that the agents are able to understand the customer, not only from a language perspective, but also from a product problem perspective. Can they really see what’s happening in the customer’s home? And another one is — I just listened to what you said — in some of our markets, we have, not the majority of customers, but a significant base calling not necessarily because something went wrong. For example, I just recently learned, in Ireland, people like to call to pay their bill. That was, for reasons, encouraged a while ago, I guess in order to have a good contact, then to cross-sell or upsell. And nowadays, it’s a bit of a situation because everybody calls to pay their bill, which creates high volume. And remember, it’s more anecdotally, in Switzerland, there were customers that were just calling to have a chat really, to have someone to talk to or… And the biggest competitor we had actually put calling in as a premium service or incentivizing to not call but use your online, self-care opportunities by giving you a rebate if you didn’t call in that month.
ROB STODDARD: So I’m curious, Tina, we talked just very briefly about your background in the business. And you come to CX from other disciplines throughout the business, very focused to some extent on content, to some extent on operations. How has your experience in other parts of the telecom business informed how you look at CX?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: That’s a good question actually. It’s better to look at it now in hindsight, right? What did I miss all these years? Which was really the customer perspective in a way, of course. So I was for long years responsible for product management, product development, value proposition, and I thought I understand the customer needs, and I’m going to sell the right services and the right features and the right functionalities that meet their needs at the right price that is still doable. And everybody does in these disciplines, and to a certain extent, that’s probably also true. But if you really look into the customer experience discipline and the methodologies, it puts your thinking a bit upside down or from inside out to outside in. And understanding the customer needs from a commercial perspective is a different perspective than from a caring perspective, really wanting to understand what is the life situation that the customer has and what are the driving needs from that situation, how can we really serve the customer? It’s a different perspective.
ROB STODDARD: So what have you learned from that? Does it make sense to bring in people from other parts of the business to be more engaged in direct contact with customers?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: That’s definitely something that I’m also trying to encourage more in my current role and a benefit. Everyone should be able to be visiting call centers, go on truck rolls, et cetera. I mean, it’s not new, but it’s still not permeated through the whole business, right? Especially the central functions where I’m a part of. But also to never make assumptions really, to stay curious, and really try to put yourself into the shoes of the customer.
ROB STODDARD: Brooke and Kim, how do your companies approach this question of engaging senior-level executives, people from outside of the care organization in CX? Is there any protocol that you use to make that happen?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yeah, actually, we implemented something, probably four to six months, that I actually score QA calls. And there’s four that I get a month, two in care, two in technical support. And it’s an interesting perspective. Because I’m not as close to the work, I understand the rubric and what I would want to hear, and I don’t know that necessarily the rubric is driving that behavior. But the overall gets scored with my supervisors, managers, directors, and others, and it’s presented to our executive team. So they understand what I thought of the call, what the folks who know the details thought of the call, and then they listen to the call as an executive team to understand what that looks like and the customer’s overall experience. And it’s funny because sometimes, I’m really hard on the call, and the executives thought it was great, but — I might have some more insights that you didn’t tell them about pre-call. So that is immediately you want to be in another phone call because you didn’t tell the customer, we — you need to answer this phone call in order to have the service technician come.
But I mean it’s an engagement. I think it also gives them insight of what we expect from our associates and the tools that they do or do not have in order to be successful to do that. So it definitely has brought some awareness, so I feel like when I ask for tools or technology, I have a different ear, and they understand a little more of what it looks like to be an associate in the space where we’re at now, and to offer this experience that we all would like them to offer.
ROB STODDARD: That’s terrific, and, Brooke, I’d like you to address that. But I want to tell you, in talking with other executives, particularly other colleagues of ours that have involved — been involved in C5 and CXC over the years, we were flashing back to roughly about 10 years ago when Comcast launched a substantial CX initiative. And part of it involved taking senior-level executives, right? And getting them to directly engage with the care organization and to talk directly to customers, particularly through social media, through blogs, through chat. And, at that moment in time, it blew people away because you had people in the C-suite who were assuming the role of dealing directly with customers. So that was 10 years ago, to what extent has any of that outcome carried over to the way you guys look at the business today?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, I would say it’s even stronger today than it was when it started. So I’d piggyback a little bit, Kim, on what you said earlier about — we talk about you can’t have a great customer experience if you don’t have a great teammate experience. So you have to have people that understand, to your point, what the calls are like. What are we handling when a customer comes in who is irate or has an issue, and do the agents actually have enough support to address those calls? So I love that that’s where we all are focused.
I think the extrapolation that we were talking about before is our NPS work practices, We’re all grounded in NPS work practices. And it is a requirement that you make customer callbacks at a certain level, and you talk to customers live, you talk to people who love us and people who hate us, and you learn why. And we have — my team actually will go do — with specific executive teams, we’ll go sit in the room with them, because we have operational expertise, and help them through the call if they need help with answering the customer’s specific question, but most of it is just presenting it as we’re not here necessarily to solve your problem on this call, we’ll find somebody if we can’t solve it for you. What we want to do is understand what you thought about the experience, what you felt about it, why didn’t you like it, what was — what could we have done differently or better? And it’s so great, I will say one of our most senior executives, he does it every month, and he’s wonderful. He loves talking to the customer, I think it’s his favorite part of the month now, where he — it’s not his function, but he will sit down and just get so enthusiastic. And he’s like, “Oh, I’m going to go talk to, you know, my neighbor, I learned something new, I’m going to go talk to them about what I just figured out about our services.” So it’s a way to get people excited, engaged, understanding.
You talked about the product experience, so all of our senior product officers go through those same callback experiences, and we find it funny. They think it is super easy to navigate whatever the new platform or technology is that we’ve got out there, and then they’ll talk to a senior citizen who’s like, “I — yeah, I thought the remote was going to be great for me,” and “Have you tried the new, big-button remote, like have you tried this one?” and the answer might be yes or no. But it gives them the good, the bad, and the ugly of what customers really think about us. And it’s probably one my favorite things that we do because I think it just gets everyone engaged at the right level.
ROB STODDARD: Sure, Brooke, so if you don’t mind staying on the hot seat for a minute or two longer? This might be a good time for a little bit of a deep dive. Because my own recollection of the evolution of cable CX over the last 20 or 30 years, in that period of time, to me, one of the greatest milestones happened in about 2015 when at a national cable show, your then CEO, Brian Roberts, announced really a massive commitment to customer care, including that initiative that we’ve already discussed, the engagement of senior-level executives. The bottom line was that the company was announcing it was investing about three hundred million dollars, which turned everybody’s head because that’s — as we used to say, that’s serious money. And a wide variety of other sub-initiatives to reinforce the importance of CX and demonstrate the company’s commitment to it. And I was struck, at the time, that Brian was talking as much to shareholders as he was to consumers and certainly to his own industry. Now, here we are in 2024 recording this today, it’s been almost 10 years since that announcement, can you talk a little bit about how you’ve managed collectively to turn the ship around over the last 10 years? What do you see as the major inflection points that have helped Comcast improve so dramatically in this space?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, I think it’s so interesting, we were chatting about this beforehand with some of my peers and thinking, yeah, what did really change? And it wasn’t that we didn’t care about customers, we always cared, and, obviously, our intentions were always, we thought, right. I think what changed was the shift from thinking about customer experience as being that frontline, customer-care experience to really being the whole company, and everyone is involved in this. It’s everyone’s job to think about the customer and to understand what they want. So, if you think about the big things that we did all the way from the network investments that we made to make sure that we did have reliable service, we still stuck with those same kind of tenets, right? Reliable service is foundational. You can’t have a great experience if it’s always in and out, doesn’t happen. Then you think about customer effort, we had a lot of policies and processes and things, tools that really weren’t as sophisticated as they needed to be. We shifted our billing platform so that it was — conversational is not really the right word, but gave us the ability to put a lot more on a piece of paper that we delivered to every customer every month that they could understand in a very different way than they had before. So all those things that caused friction and pain upstream from the frontline teammates were much bigger areas of focus than customer care. Not to say that we didn’t focus on customer care, but it was one element instead of the only element. And I think we talk about we have customer journeys, all customer centric, thinking about what is their experience at this moment in time and how do we think about it differently? What’s our North Star, end state of what we want that to feel like in five years? So that needle moves every year, which is very disheartening some days.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: We never get there.
BROOKE PRUTER: We just check the box, and we’re never going to get there, but the North Star should move, right? If you’re thinking about what customers expect, it’s different today than it was 10 years ago.
ROB STODDARD: Sure.
BROOKE PRUTER: It’s going to be different two years from now than it is today. And we’ve got to keep up with what other companies are thinking and doing, what you expect when you shop for your clothes, you shop for your insurance, you shop for your services. That’s what we’re being compared to, and it’s — that bar is not going to keep — not going to stop moving.
ROB STODDARD: Kim, a lot of the things we’re talking about today have been massive topics of conversation for the old C5, for CXC. You’ve been, as I mentioned, engaged with the group for quite some time. Could you share with us a little bit about what some of the learnings you’ve taken away over the years, and particularly what you’ve been able to take back to your company and apply, right? Because that’s always — for all of these industry-wide groups, that’s always the bottom line. It’s not just that we want to come and sit in a meeting, even if it’s building relationships and friendships, but what have you garnered from that, that you’ve actually been able to implement within the organization?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I think one of the learnings as we trial and error things and we, as a group, become very innovative with solutions is to fail fast. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t pan out, pivot and shift quickly. I think that’s one of the things. Because sometimes I think I’m looking for a certain measure or outcome or something to that perspective when you can recognize early on that there might — it might not go the way that you expected it. And just to get out of that sooner than later and then continue to go down that — the rabbit hole. I think, too, just the ability to collaborate, reach out to others about my ideas. Maybe there’s something we haven’t tried or talked about at a CX activity that I can reach out and interact with folks about that, kind of a brainstorming or a second opinion.
ROB STODDARD: Sure, sure, I think The Cable Center has been very deliberate over the years in creating that environment for collaboration. Particularly through decisions that were made a long time ago, almost 20 years ago, to working with a group like C5 or CXC, keeping it small, right? CXC is not a large organization; at best we have 25 or 30 people around the table. You could make the opposite argument, which is, well, this is a big problem, we need hundreds of people in the room to make it all happen. But my recollection is what they decided and found in ’05 and ’06 particularly were that people were much more willing to be collaborative if it was a small group and if they were able to build relationships that were sustained long term in the room. Do you find that that has been a big factor in how the collaboration has evolved?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yeah, I definitely think that, that’s a big factor. That and the NDA [non-disclosure agreement] we all sign has helped us all because I feel comfortable with sharing data. There are times — as we’ve expanded, there is a competitor in the room, but even then, I still feel comfortable in discussing certain topics and things or initiatives that we’re doing or KPIs. I still feel comfortable in that space because of this long-term relationship that we’ve built. Even new folks were building on that, and I just feel that there’s a certain amount of openness and trust in the space, so yeah.
ROB STODDARD: Another big factor that’s helped spur a lot of collaboration has been the involvement of vendors in CXC and C5 over the years. To what extent have you found those engagements useful? Do you take lessons away from the opportunity to directly interact with vendors as well?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I definitely do. I think, at one point, it was more of a sales kind of thing, and now, it’s a partnership. And I think that pivot has helped a great deal to talk about how their product will work for us, what we can be doing better. And some of us have the product, and they’re talking with us about how we can improve on it, so it doesn’t feel like you’re selling us something again. CSG came not that long ago and talked about the Bill Explainer. And I had had the product before, and I don’t know if it wasn’t the product or how we were using it in defining success that was the issue, but I reengaged with them and we actually have an agreement —
ROB STODDARD: For viewers who may not be aware, can you talk a little bit about the Bill Explainer?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: So the Bill Explainer is a tool that takes the customer through their bill and tells them what’s different in comparison to the prior month’s bill. So if we did a rate increase, it would call out that rate increase and explain to the customer what was different with that amount versus the prior amount the month before. So it really is a self-service type of tool that helps a customer understand the bill because I think, of any of our challenges, that’s the biggest one. So if they still have questions, they can call us, but this is a first stop. And so we went back, and they changed the tool, significantly improved it, and so we are implementing that at the beginning of 2025, but there again was an opportunity. I didn’t feel like it was a sales pitch. It was educational, informative, and them telling us how it was different and what others in the room are experiencing who are using the product as well.
ROB STODDARD: That’s great. I want to stick with this for a minute or two longer because I’m also thinking about, over the years, the segment that, for several years anyway, at CXC was called the egg-timer session, right?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yes.
ROB STODDARD: Tina may know this, Brooke may not have encountered it, but this was an opportunity for people to come in to essentially share their problems, challenges, and/or learnings with the group, and to use an egg timer to limit the length of the conversation. Because what we found over the years was we’d end up running down rabbit holes all the time because you’d talk about billing conversion or something, and all of a sudden, you’d be off on a 90-minute conversation. So the egg timer was implemented to keep the conversation relatively short. Can you — I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but can you recall some topics or some ideas that came up and surfaced during those sessions that you found useful over time?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I think when we were talking about multichannel and how people were navigating multichannel and defining success there, I think that egg timers were great for things like that. Because even though you may not have solved, which it wasn’t intended to solve, it was intended to have some dialogue. And to me, it meant connecting with someone else who said, “Hey, I’ve done that, we’ve experienced this or that,” and we connect after. So I think that helped to build the relationship within the group as well. Because, again, you weren’t solving with your egg timer, you were presenting a problem, and usually there was a show of hands or discussion of who had either experienced it and overcome or, hey, here’s my fast fails on those and why. And so I think it was a great opportunity to connect.
ROB STODDARD: Do you recall what you might have contributed over the years?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I’ve contributed lots of things. I think one time we talked about handle times, the scripting or not scripting of agents and was that effective in guiding conversations with customers or not. Staffing for sure was a popular one during COVID because we were all struggling with getting resources. We were not used to competing with McDonald’s and other fast-food chains. So, yeah, I always had something to discuss.
ROB STODDARD: Yeah, that’s great. As an eye witness, I would say that it’s always been very useful, absolutely. Kim talked about staffing, and, Tina, you very interestingly mentioned an issue around compensation for staffers. Recruiting and hiring has always been a very big item of discussion among this Cable Center group. To what extent is staffing an issue in global markets, and how hard it is to get good people to staff your operations?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, so I guess with COVID, it became harder. And I — maybe a general remark because I’m more in the — not in the operating company, but in the central technology division, and we are focusing on building the services and the platforms upstream so that downstream, there’s not so many issues and call reasons.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Right, thank you.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Maybe I could elaborate on that a bit later.
ROB STODDARD: Please.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: So I think since COVID, yeah, it’s become harder. Also, there’s been more — from what I heard from the colleagues in the operating markets, there’s been more fluctuation so that training becomes a challenge because — you know? So, you invest in the staff, and then you have a new staff all over again, and they leave and go to another call center. So, yeah, it’s an issue in Europe as well.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I think it’s different — it’s a different associate too, right? It’s very hard to hire in the office now —
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Yes.
BROOKE PRUTER: That’s true.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: — because there’s now an expectation of working remotely. Engaging, you mentioned that before, we do associate satisfaction surveys, and we are struggling with having them connect together, having new hires connect to our culture. It’s hard to transition that through remoteness; they’re not even in our local markets in some cases. So I think it is, the pay, and there are several other attributes that impact our staffing today. It’s a very different associate. I feel like we are leveraging technology better, so I can look for somebody who is more focused on offering a better customer experience and not so technical. I can let the tool do the technical piece; I would like you to engage and connect with the customer.
ROB STODDARD: You’re probably hiring a fair number of digital natives these days as well, I assume, and I’m wondering if — I think of children and grandchildren that have grown up using Apple products, for instance. And I’m wondering if that experience makes them any more sensitive to CX-related issues? Because so much of new technology has been designed with user interface in mind and making people comfortable with the product?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yeah, I think so. A lot of our technical care support folks, they are very technical folks outside of work and engage in a lot of technology. It’s just hard to keep up the training to allow them to support customers the way we would want to support them. New products come out, the iPhone 16 and other things come out, and now, we’re trying to help a customer download our mobile app, things of that nature. And just trying to keep up from a training perspective sometimes is challenging as well.
ROB STODDARD: And, Brooke, what does the staffing environment look like for Comcast?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, I was going to actually just, I mean, maybe first piggyback on what you just said about — I think the expectations for teammates are higher too, right? They’re using their Apple phones, they’re using widgets that work really well, they expect our app to work really well, they expect their tools to be very simple and easy. And so, again, a lot of our focus has been on those tools and making sure that any data that we have is surfaced in a really simple and easy, clean way. So they can have a better conversation with the customer, not spend time hunting through five different tools trying to figure out what the answer is.
And I think we struggle with the same things, right? We have lower turnover than we’ve had in the past, I think partly because we have a virtual environment, and the folks that we have hired into that virtual environment, there’s a reason why they chose this job, and they want to stay in that job, but it’s always a challenge. You’re always going to have, in any kind of call center work, a higher turnover and training needs. And so some of it is becoming really smart and giving them a career progression within the call center and saying, “Look, you can start as a tier-one repair agent, and that’s really following just a very simple flow of questions. Then you’re going to progress into maybe a tier-two technical agent or a billing agent or retention and have a much deeper conversation with a customer.” And so there is a way to move up the ladder and feel like there’s a career if that’s where they want to stay. So I think we’ve been really successful in that space, but always a challenge to bring in the right people, the new people at the right time on different trainings.
ROB STODDARD: I know that training has been such a big issue for our industry over the years. In your 25 years at Comcast, how has it changed over time?
BROOKE PRUTER: It’s changed dramatically. So when I first started, I actually started with AT&T local services, which ended up becoming part of Comcast, but when I started, I was a training manager. And we — I vividly remember having a young woman come to me and say, “I just had this idea. We have all these worksheets and manuals, and can we just put them in one big spiral-bound notebook kind of thing?” And we did, and I think from that, of flipping through literally hundreds of pages of documents to now everything is online, and it’s quick and simple bites, and you can go back in and find. I don’t really understand this product or I don’t understand that system, and you can find a five-minute nugget to help you get up to speed. It’s just light-years of difference between where we were and where we are now. But I will never forget the massive amounts of paper that we printed for them.
ROB STODDARD: Right, yeah — and, Kim, I imagine you had that experience as well?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yeah, yeah, and I — definitely for sure, we got out of the paper too because then you can’t keep the paper current.
BROOKE PRUTER: No, you can’t keep it updated.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Right. But I think that the other challenge that I see with training is training teaches you the tools and maybe the rubric of what you should do, but it never throws in a customer interaction. And so I think sometimes it can be overwhelming to a new agent in our industry because you have the technology tools, the bill, the billing system, and other applications that they’re navigating. And then we throw in a customer who’s not always happy and wanting something resolved quickly or what have you, I think that’s a challenge that we have.
And I know there are some technology tools out there that do simulation, and then those are some things that we have just started to look at, but I think that’s another challenge. And then just keep them engaged. Training’s remote, we don’t have in-office training, and I know some folks do have people come in and then send them back home.
ROB STODDARD: It’s not always been that way, I assume? When did that start to change?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: We did have in-office when they actually worked in the office but when we went home [during Covid], we went home and training is virtual too. And just keeping an associate engaged is a challenge.
ROB STODDARD: Interesting.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yeah, it is, it is very interesting. But, yeah, it does present that challenge, to engage an associate to interact during training, constantly navigating to ensure that they are understanding or acknowledging. You have checkpoints throughout, but again, that experience doesn’t have a customer. We also really looked at how much we were training in the technical space. We navigated just residential and then put them on the phone for residential and then we put them back in for business training, and maybe there’s other tiers. But we were, at one point, training it all, and it was too much, it was too much. We were seeing some fallout. We were seeing some not good customer experience, and so we really stepped back and reevaluated that and piecemealed it. Our organization, I have great retention, I probably have less churn than most folks in the room. My midrange of associates out of my 560 is probably 8 to 10 years of tenure.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Oh that’s good.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: And if I do have churn, it usually is internal, they’ve gone to another department through a promotion. We are the farm team of Cable One, there’s a big chart outside of our elevator, and my name is on it. I’m proud of the fact that we are able to retain our associates and give them opportunities. That’s why they stay.
ROB STODDARD: Sure, and Brooke talked a little about this a few minutes ago. The kinds of people that you’re recruiting today, particularly younger generations, how are they different from previous generations and what impact does that have on your CX?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: They’re different. We look at students going to school for technical things. Like I said, we don’t necessarily look for the technical pieces, but I think the student mentality works for us in that they are flexible. They’re willing to pick up additional hours as our queues demand those things, and they’re in a learning phase, so I think that has been good for us. One year, we did teachers, we went after teachers for the summer because that’s kind of their peak.
ROB STODDARD: Wow, how interesting.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: And teachers don’t work in the summer, and they have great customer service skills and handling conflict and unhappy customers because sometimes when you have elementary students. They navigated that very well, and it served us well in that space. But it’s just about, I guess, being reflective of what did or didn’t work and being agile and making the adjustments.
ROB STODDARD: So a couple of you have mentioned nonresidential services, to some extent business services. And I learned something interesting while I was researching the history of C5 and thinking about the history of CX in general.
I was talking with people at our national marketing society, CTAM, and I knew that they had a fairly serious commitment to customer care in the 1990s into the early 2000s. And in a lot of ways, the work that they did became a precursor because literally, they handed off industrywide CX to The Cable Center in 2006, which gave way to the creation of C5. But one of the things that I hadn’t contemplated before, I talked to one of their former executives who said, “You know, we had a real issue in the 1990s and in the early 2000s when our multiple system operators were beginning to expand their business services offerings.” The problem was that the cable customer experience for residential was so bad that it was hurting our progression in the business services space, right? Because people who run businesses are customers at home, and it was going to take a lot to overcome the CX issues in residential just to begin to build success on the business side, which for me, raises the question. We’ve talked mostly I think about residential service in our conversation so far today. Can you share with us how your companies look at CX in the business services environment? How does it differ or is — and is there more in common, or is it really different from residential services? Brooke, maybe we’ll let you take a crack at this.
BROOKE PRUTER: And for us, it’s the same.
ROB STODDARD: Really?
BROOKE PRUTER: So we have the same structure, same dialogue. We have actually a peer of mine who leads the CX space and in business services, and we are connected at the hip. We use the same tools, same work practices, same everything. I think it’s interesting, sometimes you do hear a customer who’s a residential and a commercial customer, and they’ll mix and match what the issues were, so we’ll share those back and forth as well. I do think it matters that we are connected, and it matters that we understand and can see that a residential customer who’s calling us has also got a business and vice versa because they’re not looking at us as two separate companies, right? They’re looking at us as one company.
It’s the same thing if you think about customers who — we have a group that manages property managers for multi-unit dwellings, and so it can be a school, university, a hospital, whatever the case may be, but those people have different needs too. And, again, they’re going to be thinking about us for their home needs and their business needs, and so I think that connection of always listening, using the work practices, the huddles, we call it. We — I didn’t get into it much, but we — once you do a callback to a customer, the expectation is you take those learnings, and you can create an elevation, which is a new idea for how we could do things differently and better. And that goes up the chain through the company to get people to work on it. And then you have huddles that talk about what you learned, all of you, on your various callbacks. And so we do some of those with our business services partners just so we can hear what are you learning that we may not be seeing in our space because we’re heads down on our residential customers. But we have an overlap with those property managers, MDU [multiple dwelling units] customers that really — it’s a big part of the marketplace, and we can’t ignore that they may have slightly different needs that crossover maybe more into business than into residential.
ROB STODDARD: Tina, what would the European perspective on that be? And forgive me, I don’t know to the extent that your companies are engaged in commercial services.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Our companies also have B2B branches. As a matter of fact, the B2B part is an important growth driver for our business in Europe. It depends, obviously, on the segment, right? If you look at the SoHo [small offices or home offices] segment, yes, that’s very much the same experience and also management of the experience and also care and other elements of interactions as with the residential customers. If you look at corporate customers, there’s different needs and different — and also different services that we offer in the different markets, right? So it could be a stadium where we provide connectivity. That is a different need than an end customer, and that has different demands, different also prerequisites to engage with us, certain certifications, environmental sustainability, things like that, but also from a care perspective, that’s dedicated teams then.
ROB STODDARD: So that’s a different shade of customer experience than it is for residential customers, is it not?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: It’s very B2B [business to business]. So we have B2B, and we also — it’s a phrase coined, B2B2C [business to business to consumers. I think that’s very close to the residential business, but B2B in corporate domain is separate.
ROB STODDARD: I appreciate that. Well, let’s go for the trifecta, Kimberly, how does your company deal with CX in the commercial services space?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: So I support business on my side of the house, but sales and everything else is under business services —
ROB STODDARD: Okay, fair enough.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: — under a different leadership, but from the technical support space, it’s very much the same. They have the same kind of evaluations, KPIs, and other things of that nature. But on that other side, I don’t have ownership of that, yes.
ROB STODDARD: Sure, fair enough.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: But it’s a great idea. I liked what you said, and it had my mind wandering around.
ROB STODDARD: It is a great idea, isn’t it?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yes.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: It is.
ROB STODDARD: Yeah, for that cross-pollination.
BROOKE PRUTER: The operations can be separate, but unified to a certain extent with the same kind of guiding principles and tool sets.
ROB STODDARD: I’d like to pivot to some forward-looking stuff and particularly get your perspectives on the impact of artificial intelligence on your businesses. But I’d like to do one more thing in the C5 and the CXC space. Over the course of the past decade at a number of C5 meetings, we’ve had a fair amount of discussion about the role of emotion in the customer experience. Not just value. I think for a long time, customer value was the principal factor driving CX and, of course, loyalty became a factor because you didn’t want to lose customers or have to run around and sign them up again. But this idea that the customer forms an emotional bond with the provider is something that’s relatively new in this space. How do you all think about that? How does it impact your customer care operation? Brooke, we’ll start with you.
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, the thing that comes to mind the most easily is — we laugh about this, this is 15 years ago — you could register a complaint about Comcast or an agent or a technician anywhere, it was easy to do. What you couldn’t do was give a compliment to us, and so there was nowhere. So now, we have a group that literally funnels compliments from customers to our teammates.
ROB STODDARD: I think I’d like to work for that team.
BROOKE PRUTER: It’s amazing. You would love the woman that runs it, she’s fabulous, and it’s our Xfinity Love team. And I start with that because I think it is such a different model. I think, again, back to the, we were used to getting yelled at, we were used to getting complaints all the time, we weren’t used to getting compliments. And when you start acknowledging that you might be worth a compliment, you start building that relationship back with a customer. And so I remember back when we — when CX was a new organization, Charlie Herrin was running it at the time, and said, “Well, why can’t we just send flowers, when we hear somebody’s birthday or we hear something went wrong,” and we just weren’t organizationally structured to do that. Now we are, so we do things like that; there are those surprise-and-delight moments. And when you get the card back from the customer saying, “I had no idea, you listened, you heard me say that, you took the time.”
We do Military Appreciation Month. This month, we send handwritten notes to our vets who are customers who self-identify, and so those moments matter because, again, customers have so many choices. So if they feel that we care about them, as a customer and a human, not just for the money, we care that they had a rough day, and what mattered to them was being able to turn on their TV and have it work. I mean, those simple things really do matter, and getting our teammates to understand that it is an emotional connection, and fostering that with customers has really, I think, changed the whole dynamic of how we interact with customers.
ROB STODDARD: Sure. Tina, do you find that emotion plays a big role with your customers as well?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Oh, yes, I think if you talk about customer experience and how you — how we all also express a successful customer experience implementation. We talk about satisfaction, we talk about engagement, we talk about loyalty, we talk about trust, advocacy, all of these are emotionally driven sentiments, and you do not invoke them with a good price point, you invoke them with being human and creating a relationship. Otherwise, it’s, I think, just pretending, right? So really caring and understanding the intent, the need, taking the effort from the customer was something you said earlier. And making sure that their day works smoothly when they turn on the TV, when they have a video conference at home while working from home, whatever it is, or if they have a problem when they call. It’s all about emotions, and that creates value ultimately, but without that, you don’t get good customer experience outcome.
ROB STODDARD: Yeah, and the same thing in your space, Kim?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Yeah, I believe so, I —
ROB STODDARD: You seem a little skeptical about it —
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Well, no, —
ROB STODDARD: — that’s why I’m asking.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: — I’m just trying to think that one through a little. Because some of the things that they’ve talked about resonated with me. Part of our quality assurance is that you don’t gloss over when customers are giving you these nuggets of information. I remember a call with a lady who was very concerned about her internet being down because it was tied to her husband’s medical stuff that was at the home and that he was very ill. And if I recall, the appointment window was far out, and you could tell this woman was terrified that something was going to happen to her husband, and they weren’t going to be able to get help or do what they needed to do. And the associate didn’t handle it in the best way, right, kind of glossed that over and gave her the talking points, if you will. And so that was a big learning opportunity for me on what autonomy we need to be able to give our agents to help solve that. I mean, the panic in her voice, I ended up calling that customer back and apologizing to her for the experience, and then escalating her ticket to get some resolution for her. But definitely, I think there are some opportunities in that space and building a connection with the customer. When they say, “I’ve just become a grandparent” or something like that, acknowledging that, doing something with those pieces of information that they’re willing to share with you. I feel like they’re trying to make that connection, and we need to receive it.
ROB STODDARD: That’s really wonderful, those are great stories. Tina, you’ve recently joined CXC, you get to look at it with fresh eyes. This is a group that was built almost 20 years ago. And now you’re walking into a phase here in 2024 where it feels like the group has matured to some extent. It is looking at a wide variety of issues that they might not even have thought about 15 or 20 years ago. Tell us a little bit about what benefit you hope to get from the group and what you expect to bring to it?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Sure, so, first time I joined was actually this year in the spring conference and that —
ROB STODDARD: This is spring of 2024?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Twenty-twenty-four indeed. I didn’t really know what to expect, right? And I really have to say I was so overwhelmed afterwards by this group of people. It’s like the collaborative, it’s true, it’s a good word, but it’s really, really true to everything you said earlier, and how you described the past many, many years, I saw that immediately. For me also coming from Europe, the competition point is not so relevant because — except for Sky maybe —
KIMBERLY GIBSON: We thought that too. (laughter)
TINA RODRIGUEZ: — so it is — yeah, it was — it’s a highlight, and I wish in Europe, we could establish a similar group actually. Besides the network, of course, I also found, oh, that’s interesting, actually, the challenges aren’t so different. While the customer’s life circumstances might be a bit different, but the challenges from our companies, from our legacy, they are very, very similar. So I actually can learn a lot as well here like everyone else. And we even had follow-ups one-on-one with some colleagues from South America —
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Nice.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: — on a specific question that I had and that they had, and that was nice. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to being part of this group for hopefully a long time.
ROB STODDARD: For many years, I hope —
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Yes.
ROB STODDARD: — absolutely. Well, you also walked in at a time when the group has really tried to wrap its arms around artificial intelligence and the impact of AI on CX and, say, the impact of AI on CX and essentially the improvements or enhancements that AI can bring to the customer experience. Brooke, I’m going to guess, working for the leading broadband provider, well, one of the leading in the world and here in the US — that you guys are all over this?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah.
ROB STODDARD: What’s Comcast’s perspective on AI, particularly as it applies to CX, and how is it changing your job at all?
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, it’s interesting. We have been using AI for years in our frontline tools, so it’s not new-new, but the evolution —
ROB STODDARD: We didn’t even call it AI for a while, right?
BROOKE PRUTER: Right, right, but it’s like everything else, it’s accelerating. So as we learn more and we’re moving faster, we think truly the benefit is what we keep talking about with our frontline teammate tools. So how do you just surface everything that they need to know in such a simple way? I mean, it’s like Google Search when that was a new thing, and you were like, my gosh, I can find things, but you still have to scroll through forty documents or links to find what you’re looking for as opposed to having something surfaced like ChatGPT does now with a very concise answer that’s, at least, a starting point that you can start to dig into a little bit more. And I think the power of having — we have so much data in our environment, so we have network data, we have customer data. All of that information is critical when a teammate’s picking up the phone and saying, “Well, I already know a lot of what you’re struggling with, I know you called last month, I know you’ve had a truck roll, I know this, I know that, I know how to help you.” And instilling that confidence, and again, it becomes that emotional conversation, you know me, you know what I’m struggling with, this is great. And then I think the second piece of that is building it into our network. So people far smarter than I am are doing that today and have been doing that.
ROB STODDARD: I can’t believe there are people far smarter —
BROOKE PRUTER: Yeah, lots, (laughter) so much smarter. You don’t want me touching the network. But they’ve been building it in too, so we can see what’s broken. So if you think about years ago, you had to send a tech out to figure out where the fiber was maybe broken or what had happened. Right now, we can see within two minutes where the break is, what’s going on, get somebody out there, and have it fixed, and also be communicating to a customer proactively at the same time, “Hey, we know you’re out, we’re working on it, here’s what we think will be done. Here’s a text, do you want one when we’re finished? Yep, great, done.” That kind of experience is something that AI powers that we haven’t — we’ve just started to scratch the surface, I think, and we’re going to be so much farther ahead in even the next 12 months, I think, than where we are now. It’s exciting.
ROB STODDARD: Is it safe to say that AI has made CX easier than it was before?
BROOKE PRUTER: I think 100 percent easier. Again, just the level of information and understanding that we have makes a customer feel known and understood and valued in that sense. Look, I see you’ve been a customer with us for however long, and that pops up. I see you had a truck roll last month, how — is everything going okay with that? That kind of connection instead of having somebody have to hunt and peck for it, just having the information surfaced, I think, is amazing.
From a CX lens, one of the things we learned, we work a lot with J.D. Power, and one of the things they told us was outages, obviously, are one of the most painful experiences customers in our industry can have. And so understanding the minute they happen, communicating the minute they happen, being able to set the expectation for, look, we know it was a fire here, it was a fiber cut there, this is how long we think it’s going to take. All of that is powered by all of that intelligence, and putting it together in minutes instead of in hours is just an amazing, I think, move forward that customers really appreciate and now expect, quite frankly.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Maybe I can build on that? Because we’re also running a broad program on AI, in network, in care, and home, and employee, and so on, and so forth. So in care, for example, to your point, right, to make sure that the agent gets the best assistance to have a high-quality conversation. One capability that we’re rolling out is, for example, the call summary, automated call summary, right, that takes away a burden from the agent in terms of time. He just needs to look it over at the end and say, “Yeah, that’s correct” or edit it if he wants to. It gives him more time to have a better call and to attend to the customer in more detail, you know.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Kind of like a copilot or something.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, and — but also, more in my, let’s say, core domain, which is providing the platforms and the services to our customers, there’s a lot of applications that take the burden from the customer or the effort. Because with large language models, you can always better understand the customer intent in every touchpoint, whether he’s switching on his TV and wants to find something to watch or whether it’s he goes online or to the app of one of our operating companies and is searching for his — I don’t know, his how do I create a guest Wi-Fi or how do I manage my connected devices? All of this today requires a certain effort of the customer, more and more so because navigation becomes more complex because of the feature overload and everything. And AI has the opportunity to take that away by basically saying, “What do you want? I can give it to you.” One step away from the future that we already have, but it was buried somewhere in the navigation, and customers don’t know how to find it. So taking away the effort and really making it intuitively usable and giving you the solution as the customer in one step, that’s going to be revolutionary. I really believe we will laugh in five years about how we did things today.
ROB STODDARD: Yeah, just a wonderfully succinct statement of how AI is going to help the CX business. Tina, thank you. Kim, I want to come back to you because I heard your disclaimer a few minutes ago that, “Oh well, we may not be as involved in AI as these other guys.” The CXC group really believes this is a major issue to be tackled. Are you finding that that kind of industry collaboration is helpful to you? And does it make sense that we stay on that topic over the next few years?
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Absolutely, I think it’s everywhere, right, you just can’t avoid it. And in our space, it has so many benefits, kind of what they’ve talked about, about summarizing notes and helping the agent engage better with the customer at the onset, but it also, there are some question marks. One of the things that we were looking at is AI call routing, how calls should be routed based on sentiment. So the agent has a sentiment score and over time, a customer one, and you align the two. I still question that. Do I want to do that, should we do that, and is that a good thing? How do I explain to an agent, “You get more calls than she does because your sentiment score is different?” And how do I engage her to improve the sentiment score? Because you don’t get the secret sauce necessarily from the vendor about how that works. So there are things to me that are very clear, yes, let’s go down that AI path. And there are other things that I’m a little slower down the path. I need to know more, understand more, understand the potential impacts and unintended consequences.
TINA RODRIGUEZ: That’s definitely a very valid point where you also need to look into regulation and privacy and compliance and all of these things. The sentiment analysis on either side, customer as well as agent, also, I think you need to be careful on —
BROOKE PRUTER: And I think so much of it goes to the human in the room, right?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Yeah.
BROOKE PRUTER: Like you’re never — you should never be in a spot where AI is driving everything and there’s no human thought or intervention, I don’t think, and so it is going to be a balance. I think you’re exactly right, some things you’ll test and lean into quickly and some things we’ll all sit back and go, “Is that the right thing to do for the industry, for the company, or not?”
ROB STODDARD: Sure, sure.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: And that’s the benefit of the group. There are others further along in the game, and I’m learning as you evolve and roll things out and what’s working, what’s not working. And then I’m more comfortable in trying them in my space, and that is one of the bigger benefits. So, yeah, definitely AI is on our radar in some more of the basic — basics. I haven’t gone advanced AI yet.
ROB STODDARD: Hmm, fair enough. Well, the beauty of this conversation is this is classified as an oral history, so people will be watching us in 5 years, in 10 years. They’ll be able to look back and say, “Oh, those guys were right on,” or not —
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Or not, exactly.
ROB STODDARD: — as the case maybe. That’s right.
Just one more forward-looking question before we wrap up today, and what a great conversation so far. Now, this is unfair because I didn’t tell you I was going to ask this, but as we talked about it, I’m curious. In addition to AI, what do you or your companies think are going to be future challenges for CX? Have you gamed that out? Obviously, you’re trying to build staffs that are capable of dealing with all contingencies, but aside from implementing and insinuating AI in everything that we’re doing, what other challenges come to mind? Does anybody have an idea off the top of their head?
BROOKE PRUTER: I don’t have a technical answer. More of an emotional answer, I think, if the bar is going to keep getting higher. So some company, some small company, some entrepreneur is going to be the next Uber or the next whoever and think of something we haven’t thought of. And so whoever that is, I think the challenge for us is to react quickly, think creatively, mirror the best of the best, and hopefully, we’re the ones that are coming up with the next great idea, but if we’re not, then we’re at least aware that there are those people in the CX space that are doing that. And so some of it is having these conversations collectively and talking to peers outside of our own industry too and thinking about what is going to be the next big thing that customers expect, is it going to be –? I mean, go back to COVID a little bit, — everything at your doorstep, who thought that that would have accelerated so quickly? And yet, now you expect, I can not only get food at my doorstep, I can get — well, I can get groceries, I can get devices, I can get cameras.
ROB STODDARD: And you all had to turn that around in about two to three weeks.
BROOKE PRUTER: We did.
ROB STODDARD: It was miraculous.
BROOKE PRUTER: We did, and we would not have done that I firmly believe without COVID.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: Oh, absolutely.
BROOKE PRUTER: And so things like that, I hope there’s not a trigger like that that is the cause of it, but things like that where it really challenges you to think about how do we just do what we do differently and better and faster and more conveniently? And there’s always going to be somebody thinking about that.
ROB STODDARD: Right, so as in the category of we don’t know what we don’t know yet.
KIMBERLY GIBSON: I think the same thing, and then what does a customer expect as we evolve and things evolve? I think that’s a piece of it. I feel like we always assume what the customer wants without confirmation. And I think it will be important to engage with customers on a regular cadence about what is it they’re expecting from us so that we can meet that need. When whatever pops up, we’re somewhat in a better space than guessing.
ROB STODDARD: Sure, that’s great. Tina, any thoughts?
TINA RODRIGUEZ: Nothing revolutionary. (laughter) I think the challenges we have today will, in parts, also be the challenges of tomorrow. They will not vanish, and that’s — a lot of it has to do with the legacy. It’s very — it’s comparably easy to build a great customer experience if you found a start-up and build all your IT landscape, build all this, the OSS [operations support systems] and BSS [business support systems] stuff, from scratch today. And we struggle, obviously, then to compete with top-notch customer experience on that — in that kind of greenfield implementation. And that will not go away quickly.
ROB STODDARD: Well, that’s a wonderful last word for us, thank you so much. I’d like to thank Kimberly, Brooke, and Tina for a wonderful and enlightening conversation today. I also want to thank my good friend Brian Kenny and the team here at The Cable Center for producing these segments for us and doing a great job. Now, I also want to point out, this conversation is part of the Syndeo Institute’s CX Archive Project of the Barco Library. There are other conversations in the series, so please be sure to check those out as well. On behalf of the Syndeo Institute at The Cable Center and all of us here on the panel, thank you for joining us, and have a great day.
