5 Takeaways from Comcast CX Technology Day

In today's episode, uh, I had the opportunity to attend Comcast's uh CX Technology Day at the invitation of Jay Bear and the team at uh Convince and Convert. Uh CX State is Comcast's sort of uh event highlighting what they're working on and some of the challenges that they're working to overcome to improve their overall customer experience, which, as you know, from two seconds of Googling is not great. And there were five key takeaways I thought were interesting from the day that are more broadly applicable to uh everyone in in all of our businesses. Number one, uh in their digital transformation and trying to adapt to where customers are and where customers want to communicate with them, uh the digital transformation uh has been mostly uh focused on uh process. So there's three parts to digital transformation people, process, technology, right?

HJ Lovitt's 1964 framework, which we've been uh listening to consultants talk about for six decades. And for Comcast in particular, the biggest gap has been on the process side. Uh a company put together by more than 30 acquisitions and things has enormous challenges making process standardized. Uh technology has not been the issue. Getting 60,000 people to follow the same playbook, significantly uh tougher challenge.

So I thought that was interesting in our own work in digital transformation, in your work at your company, uh, recognizing that process is probably the thing that will be uh most difficult for a an otherwise uh good company, right? For a company that's not filled with malevolent actors um or completely broken technology, process is the toughest part. Uh the chief customer experience officer Charlie Heron had an interesting insight on chatbots, sort of number two. He said that chatbots are a bridge technology between old-fashioned call centers and what will eventually be uh fully automated, at least first level of support for customers using using voice, but driven by AI. And I thought it was a really useful insight because a lot of folks are sort of putting a a big stake in the ground on chatbots and how they're the next thing.

But yet when you look around at at our all of our lovely, you know, smart assistants and things that that are on our desks, in our kitchens, uh on our phones and mobile devices, and you look at where Google's going with things like BERT and its natural language queries, it really are focused on voice and voice interfaces, even to things that have screens. And so Charlie's point that chatbots are a bridge technology, the sort of a stopgap measure. I thought was useful, uh a useful insight to say, like, yeah, don't invest in them, get good at them, use them to train your team on better natural language processing, but don't bet the farm on them because in the next couple of years they will evolve, especially as we get more and more and better and better natural language processing technology. Number three, uh Lisa Blackshire, who is the SVP of comms and digital media, said that social media for them has really become an early warning system, uh, letting them know of issues before they hit the call center and and first tier support. And that uh obviously because of that, social media scales much better than phones.

Comcast has something like 50 million customers, and the social media uh support team is only about four hundred people. That's a lot of people to manage. Certainly it's more than the thirteen they had a few years ago. But it when you consider just how well that system scales. Again, for your own company, there are plenty of tools that can help you listen and scale and deliver better service through where customers are.

And if you can build those early warning systems, you can potentially head off much larger issues. Uh speaking of phones, the uh EVP of customer service, Tom Karinschak, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, uh, said that in measuring customer satisfaction, they they measure on uh NPS scores. The biggest increase uh that they saw double digit increases was offering customers a choice other than calling support. Uh it turns out that not as many people want to talk to uh phone support, uh especially if they're gonna be on hold for a while. Uh are their options do work better.

So when we think about our own companies and how do we take those uh all these technologies, chatbots, SMS, uh, Facebook Messenger, whatever the the tool is, Slack, is that where our customers want to be? And are we prepared to meet them there? It's a tough question. And five, uh the most interesting session of the day I thought was on uh callbacks. So one of the things that they do that's mandatory for all employees, uh top to bottom is uh they require them to call back customers.

Uh even folks who are not in a any kind of customer service roles, uh developers and project managers. And what was interesting about that was that they do that to see to show employees how their work is being received by the marketplace. If you're a developer and you're working on uh the X1 interface and you're making change to the U changes to the UI, it's not a bad thing for that person to see, oh, this is what people actually think of the thing and getting that feedback directly from the customer. That is something that way too many companies do not do in any capacity. Uh and it would behoove companies, particularly a product-based company, to have your product developers, your project product and project managers, uh, the people who make the thing, but don't necessarily have to support the thing to be in that role in that customer service role and in that having a conversation with the customer about how the product is working for them, because you get the unvarnished feedback from the customer saying, Yeah, I hate this thing, this thing doesn't do this, doesn't do this, and when you have the ability to have 60,000 people reach out and say, hey, how's it working?

How's it going, you're gonna get a lot of useful data. Now, the one thing I thought was interesting was that uh the company doesn't use like 90% of its data above and beyond diagnostics to know something's wrong, but there are tremendous opportunities for a company like that and your company too, to use even relatively mundane data for things like machine learning and uh and predictive analytics. Real simple example from from the day, we're talking about uh the use of their systems in hotel rooms. If you had a building with 500 of these set-top boxes and and these these fancy remotes, uh, you can tell usage levels within that building. If you can tell usage levels, then you can predict future usage levels, which means that for someone who operated a hotel, for example, they could actually use that data to forecast uh the likelihood of of guests.

Combine that with things like electricity usage, plumbing usage, etc. And you could build very sophisticated models that could probably uh reasonably accurately forecast when your volume uh is going to change. And that would change your staffing, change your marketing, change your uh budgets. And so I think there's a tremendous opportunity for any company that has operational data to turn that data into something uh more useful than just diagnostics. Now Comcast itself has got a long way to go.

One of the interesting things that uh Jay had to say um at the start of one of the panels is that brand reputation is a decade-long cycle, meaning it takes a full decade of mostly positive experiences to teach a new generation of customers that the way things were at that company, the company's past reputation is not the present. And you know, 20 seconds in Facebook search or Google search or Twitter search will reveal that there's still a long way to go for uh for the team of Comcast. But from what we saw, they're making the improvements that they need to and putting the infrastructure in place to meet customers where they are. So the reason to be optimistic there. Uh, my thanks to uh Jay and the team at uh uh Convince and Convert for inviting me to participate and uh look forward to uh uh other interesting insights into and companies, particularly very large ones, and how they operate when they have many, many, many people and many different types of stakeholders to keep happy.

As always, leave your questions in the questions uh the comments box below. Please don't ask any questions about Comcast support. I can't help you. Um and uh if you have a chance, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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