With a Little Help from AI. One Step at a Time, Persistently Forward

“It’s being able to tell the story. It’s using data first of all as the starting point. And being able to use that data to articulate a story in a way that’s easy for stakeholders to understand, if they don’t how contact centres work. And let’s face it, most people don’t how contact centres work. So you’ve gotta cut through all of that.”
Daniele Iezzi

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Being brave to quickly learn and showcase new technologies and AI. Instil confidence!
• Staying close to your data. But don’t just show data, convert to stories and present persuasively with passion.
• Speaking the exec lingo and always looking for ways connect service language to commercial outcomes.
• Planning, experimenting, staying agile, to learn and improve. Never stop to ensure manoeuvrability.
• Seeking allies from unexpected places, build support, face resistance as one!

We hope you enjoy the show!

Key links
21 Jump Street
David Jones 
Country Road
Purple People

About our guest

Daniele Iezzi is a Customer Service Transformation Strategist.

As the former GM Customer Services at David Jones and Country Road Group, and with a retail career spanning over 25 years, Daniele is on a mission to redefine customer service from its traditional operating model to a seamless omnichannel conversational commerce experience, powered by great people and enabled by AI.  Most recently, Daniele established a digital first contact centre for David Jones and CRG.  He’s excited about the opportunity to expand the scope of customer service beyond the contact centre.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching & consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

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Transcript
Chris Hudson: 0:07
All right. It’s been a big day and the kids are in bed and fast asleep, and I’ve just jumped on to record this podcast intro with the new glasses on and the headphones, and now I realise that I look like I’ve just walked out of the set of21Jump Street. So if you’re listening to this, you won’t see it, but feel free to jump onto the YouTube channel where you can see what I’m talking about. Anyway, hello all and welcome to episode three of the Company Road podcast, where we explore what it takes to change a company. In this episode, Daniele Iezzi, a customer service transformation strategist and retail superhero slash veteran shares his journey in transforming customer service through ai. He started out in retail in store25years ago and then quickly moved up the ranks to head office roles. Initially, he worked with basic customer service tools and he realised the potential of AI and automation. When asked to oversee customer service for David Jones and Country Road Group, he faced massive challenges in cultural shifts, cost pressures, and customer and team acceptance of these new AI based virtual assistants. Implementing the technology at lightning fast pace they struggled to deflect calls and had to educate both customers and the team. Despite the difficulties, Daniel’s team adapted and he became fascinated by AI’s role in transforming the customer experience. Through true grit and perseverance, Daniel learned the importance of coaching, communication, and continuous improvement, and eventually saw positive results from his huge string of efforts. This is the tale of real diplomacy, tenacity, and a good dose of showmanship. For anyone who considers themselves a subject matter expert or aspires to be one, you’ll know all about working in a niche. This episode walks through some of the challenges you might face in having your voice heard and the ways to stand tall above the rest. Get comfy and get ready for this insightful chat with Daniele. Daniele, welcome to The Company Road Podcast and thank you so much for coming onto the show. It’s so good to see you and so good to have you here. And yeah, I know you’re gonna have some stories to tell around the experience that you’ve had both in the retail space, the customer service space, and you’ve seen some change in the time that you’ve been working in those areas. And I’d love to hear about your experiences along the way. So moving from, probably what was considered quite a traditional set of channels to something that was more digital first and in hearing about that, but also, yeah, just I’d love to just start with you. Maybe tell us a bit about yourself and maybe start talking to some of the changes that you’ve either seen or you felt you needed to address or fix in some way.

Daniele Iezzi: 2:27
Sure. Thanks very much for having me on your podcast, Chris. I really appreciate it. Just by way I guess of introduction I have a background in retail. So I worked for about25years at David Jones and more recently as well at Country Road Group. And I fell into retail completely by accident as most people who work in retail do. It wasn’t, by design, by any stretch of the imagination. And I had started my career in stores and after managing a few stores decided to move into Head Office roles and over the subsequent15, 20years. It’s a bit of a blur, I worked in a number of roles through projects, strategy, marketing, operations, so it was a really great experience. And every couple of years I had the opportunity to learn something new. In terms of my time in the customer service and customer experience space. Obviously working in stores, you’re the coal face, so to speak. So really living and breathing it on a daily basis. But in head office, I guess the one of the first major roles that I had was as was called then the customer service manager. So we’re talking probably gosh, I think it’s about15years ago, I can’t even remember. It’s a blur. And we just centralised customer service, set up this customer relations function. And I had the opportunity to manage that. And back then customers used to love typing letters and handwriting letters into us. Email was the bright new channel. And it was pretty, pretty basic and we didn’t get terribly very many customers contacting us, which was a good thing unless something terrible went wrong. But we didn’t, at that time, we didn’t even have an online store. So the most of the complaints or feedback we were getting was about the in-store experience or product issues or issues relating to the financial services product that we had. So I did that for a couple of years, then went back into some different roles in corporate partnerships and tourism and all sorts of things which were really interesting. Then about four years ago, I was tapped on the shoulder and asked to look after customer service for both David Jones and Country Road Group. So at the time, the companies were both part or owned by Woolworths Holdings which is a South African company, not affiliated with the supermarkets in Australia. And a lot of the functions had been regionalised under a shared service model and customer service was one of them that had just been brought together. And I said, look, thanks, but not, I’ve been there, done that. I’ve done customer service, don’t need to do it again. And my manager at the time was very persuasive. He said, you’re gonna do it. And I Oh, okay. And so that’s how I came back into it. And safe to say, in the intervening number of years, the world had completely changed. But having said that, we were still operating under pretty basic set of tools, and I guess just to put it into perspective the David Jones team was still using desktop computers that we’d installed like10years earlier when we’d centralised the contact centre in the first place. They were still using Lotus Notes it was a pretty basic proposition. But the volumes that we were dealing with were certainly much more than we had because of the online business built up in the meantime. Country Road group is a little bit more advanced, but marginally but at the time Business was looking at customer service very much through a cost lens and had decided that outsourcing was the way to go. And that kind of posed a really interesting dilemma because I think it was about12months prior, maybe six months, David Jones had replatformed its website and it was very unstable. And it on our peak trading days, there’d often be multiple issues arising on the same day. And it was the contact centre team that actually identified them and was able to resolve them in terms of the impact to the customer without any adverse effect. And we realised then that the IP that the contact centre team had was really valuable. And particularly in terms of maintaining the customer service and that David Jones in particular and country group. David Jones was known for. We worked very quickly to pull together a business case that would enable us to keep customer service in house. And to do that we would use technology. So using virtual assistants at that time predominantly through the telephone channel to automate a lot of the basic inquiries that the team was getting. And that started this journey of me playing with technology and artificial intelligence to transform how customers engaged with us. And that was a very long introduction!

Chris Hudson: 7:14
No, that’s brilliant and really helpful context for the stories that I’m sure will also follow next. And just really good to hear your background. It feels like you, you knew the company as you were going through so many different parts of it before that role presented itself. Tell us a bit about some of the barriers and some of the changes that you needed to make through that journey. Before the contact centre. I’m interested in hearing about your perception of the culture and what you felt you could do to change it in some way.

Daniele Iezzi: 7:42
Sure. It’s a really good question actually. And I’ll talk predominantly about David Jones. Some of it’ll hold true for Country Road Group, but they’re actually two very different companies in terms of their culture. And I’ll probably start on that point. Country Road Group was, is much more entrepreneurial. It’s a smaller company much more nimble and probably willing to experiment a little bit more. David Jones on the other hand is a much more complicated business, much broader product portfolio and sometimes steering, getting change happening in David Jones is like steering the Titanic, it takes a while, you have to do it kind of incrementally and governance really. If you could get a kind of happy medium somewhere between the two, that would probably be the sweet spot. And both those brands, they’re iconic Australian brands, particularly David Jones. It’s a brand that customers, have shopped with their grandparents. They might bring their children into the store and so on. And both the brands have this real I guess heritage of service. So that’s really important. At the end of the day though, retailers, when times get tough, quite often where’s the first thing they’ll look for savings. Unfortunately, it’s customer service, whether that might be looking at the salary hours on the selling floor, sometimes in the contact centre. So there’s this disconnect there. And I think historically probably be a bit controversial, I think sometimes, we relied on the reputation and the heritage that we had but weren’t continuing to invest as much as we should have in maintaining customer service and maintaining the advantage that we had. So I guess the first bit and the fact that the company was thinking to outsource customer service kind of rings an alarm bell. So there’s this cost pressure that really hovers over everything, and particularly David Jones, because David Jones runs on pretty slim lean margins. So that was the ultimate challenge to overcome and where I guess we’re a little bit naive originally thinking that technology would be able to produce this great cost saving from day one. Unfortunately we learned that wasn’t necessarily the case. And then we had a pandemic in the mix as well, which kind of, made everything start again from scratch. But it was really what I had to learn to do very quickly was to build up the knowledge of, in the, within the company, and particularly with the executive committee, about how AI works. And the, I guess the journey that the company needs to go and our maturity in terms of AI was almost non-existent. Including myself, I knew nothing about it. So we’d implemented these great virtual assistants, but we were only deflecting maybe10, 15%of inquiries on the first day. It wasn’t delivering the outcomes that we had put in that business case. And that took a while for us to get there. And a lot of hard work. And I think that was the other bit too, that kind of, to really coach all the stakeholders said this is the effort that we need to put into now to make sure that these virtual assistants will actually deliver the benefits that we want. And it takes time and it takes effort. And then eventually I think that understanding started to permeate its way through stakeholders and through other parts of the business.

Chris Hudson: 11:07
Yeah, it’s so true, isn’t it?When you have an idea or when circumstance dictates that you need to just change direction, adopt a new technology and implement it in presumably what was quite a hurry, that all of these other factors come out of the woodwork and you suddenly need to consider the broader cultural impact that you are gonna be having. And even if you try and ring-fence, that initiative in itself, it’s gonna be connecting to other parts of the organisation in some way. How did you come to realise what some of those connecting parts were and then overcome some of the situations that then arose?

Daniele Iezzi: 11:41
You couldn’t ring fence Customer Services and the contact centre one of their main roles was actually as the switchboard for the business. So as a customer, if you wanted to talk to somebody in the menswear department, in the Bourke Street Mall store, you’d ring the number that would get channeled through to the contact centre. And in the olden days, four or five years ago, the team would say, okay, what store do you need?What department, what brand?And they would type that into a solution that we had that would bring up the extension and then push that call through to the selling floor. So immediately you’ve got probably, about7, 000users. And in terms of employees, frontline employees and people on the shop floor and in other parts of the business who rely on the phone ’cause customers are relying on that channel. So when we launched these, and I think one of the things I’d probably would try and put more due diligence on, ’cause we did do this very hurriedly, was again we found out very quickly we needed to educate customers about how to engage with bots because we and we needed to educate the team on the selling floor who were at the other end of the phone. And I’ll take a step back. What the journey that we had created was that if you, we had one centralised phone number that we’d set up and using natural language processing you would, as a customer when you rang, you would say what you needed. So it might be you needed to talk to this particular department in this particular store, or you might need help with your order. You might wanna make a complaint. You might wanna have a query about your financial services product. From day one, what was really interesting was that customers, they’d be greeted by name, by this virtual assistant as well. ’cause it would do an API call to Salesforce. And would say, welcome Chris. Welcome to David Jones. So first of all, customers were just freaked out by it. And we were, I think, one of the, a bit of an early mover in this space, and so the first of all, the first thing they said was how did they know my name?So we were able to tell customers, oh it uses technology and we already have your record, and so on. But the other challenge that we had was they’d ring up and the virtual assistant would say, welcome to David Jones, Chris, how can I help you?And customers wouldn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say admittedly. So from day one, we weren’t deflecting many calls at all. And then it was the complexity of it. So we had, I think, oh gosh, close to40stores multiple brands, multiple departments. So the number of iterations and permutations that the bot had to work through was something like44, 000, I think was calculated. And those would change as well. So new brands would come in, brands would go, brands would move within the store. So we’d have to change the phone number associated with them, the extension. So again, it had to work through all of that and understand what the customer was saying. And then the other challenge we had was that50%of the time when a call goes through to a store, it doesn’t get answered because the team member in store has to decide between the answering the phone, serving the customer in front of them, keeping an eye on the shoplifter that’s trying to steal something and, and maybe doing some stock work as well. We didn’t really set ourselves up for success from day one. So as a result of all of those combinations, we got a lot of pushback on initially going this is the worst thing that’s ever happened, but we just like the old system better. We just wanna speak to people. We just, we liked it better the old way. So that was a really I guess salutary lesson in change management and engagement. And not only with our teams in stores and again, in the rest of the business, but also with our customers and the user. We didn’t really take into account we assumed that the solution, was gonna be easy to use and natural, but our customers weren’t used to it. They’ve been ringing us for, 150years. And we’re expecting a change overnight. I guess, with customer service, whilst it can be traditionally quite siloed, and when I say customer service in that context, I’m talking about the contact centre. But ultimately it can’t operate purely in a silo, particularly in a retail context. When you have stores, you’ve got customers, you’ve got other parts of the business that all need to be connected together. That’s probably the biggest, learning for me you can’t ring fence it, so then you’ve gotta be as prepared as you can and continue to take customers on the journey and have that governance in place, having people checking that the system’s working and if it’s not being nimble enough to make those changes that you need to make, and then communicate with the rest of the business that you’re making those changes and that, and then when the results start to improve, that you’re communicating those as well.

Chris Hudson: 16:21
Yeah. Wow. I’m surprised you made it through all that. It feels like there was a lot going on. I’m sure you did it very well and you obviously lived to tell the tale, which is brilliant. But I’m just wondering if you were to reflect on that story, from your personal point of view, what was it like for you going through that?

Daniele Iezzi: 16:39
That’s a really good question. On one hand it was really exciting and but also quite daunting as well. And I think from a couple of perspectives it was exciting ’cause it was this great new technology and we were doing something new and investing quite a substantial amount of Capex in this new solution. We had to build a new call centre in Melbourne recruit75people because we were relocating our head office. That was what the catalyst for this whole change implement this new journey and doing this all in a three month period during Christmas, which was our peak trading time. We were nuts. Not ideal timing, but so there was that excitement and I guess, we’re operated on quite a bit of adrenaline. It was also, daunting because from a couple of perspectives. One is again, I had, I’m not a contact centre person by trade, so to speak, if that makes sense. I came into this from a retail background and yes, I’d set up a contact centre years ago, but the world was completely different back then. So I had to get my head around the lingo and the jargon and, how a modern contact centre works. So personally for me, there’s that expression you’ve gotta fake until you make it. And I was faking it left and centre, but trying to get up to speed at the same time. And fortunately, I had some really great partners there with our vendors to help me on that journey. But it’s also daunting because everybody has a customer service experience. I go to barbecue or a dinner party and, and I would say, oh yeah, people would say, where do you work on at David Jones?Let me tell you about the time David Jones did this. Or, I was in your store the other day and this happened. And when you’re dealing with our single biggest channel in terms of customers engaging with the brand. And I think on we’re probably doing about40, 000calls a week at the time, if memory serves me correctly. That the big risk was we’re gonna end up on the front page of the newspaper if we stuff this up. So that was always in the back of my mind. We can’t stuff this up, there’s so much at stake. And that’s probably a bit of a very black and white view of looking at it. But that’s how I was thinking at the time. But then on the other hand, on the plus side had such a great team that I was working with both internally and with our vendors, that it was just, a fantastic journey and it set me onto this new career path we’re now, I’m really fascinated about the role that AI can play in transforming the customer experience, particularly from a contact centre perspective. The role that the transforming, the role that the contact centre can play in an organisation, and we’ve really seen that shift from the contact centre being that, reactive service model where customers just ring up to go, where’s my order or this is the wrong item, to I guess more of a customer engagement centre where the contact centre is playing more of a proactive role in helping customers in their decision making and their purchase process and really driving conversion and revenue online and in store. So to me that’s just been so exciting and I think we’re only now starting to see that continued like more possibilities with that particular thing, with sort of things like generative ai as well. So that, if I look back on the pain that I went through it’s certainly been really worthwhile.

Chris Hudson: 19:54
There’s so much in that. Just to unpick it, I think I’d like to just ask you about the team, if possible, that were working pretty well, a lot of moving parts there. Not only the situation, the technology, you had a vendor group, you had a close team that brought a team, which is, the embodiment of that customer engagement through all of the different stores every single concession, there was something going off, at one time or another at high volume as well. How did that work?Maybe if we start with your immediate team and how you got that working well, and then maybe talk to a bit about the other ones as well, if you can.

Daniele Iezzi: 20:25
Yeah. In terms of the immediate team, so again, a bit of context. David Jones was in the process of relocating the head office from Sydney to Melbourne. And the contact centre was the last team left. And the business had been trying to figure out what to do and consequently we had a very narrow period of time left to actually make a decision and get it in into play. So when we were given the approval to keep customer service in house, we actually had to recruit a new team to be based in Melbourne. Fortunately we still had the team in Sydney and a couple of the leadership team there, the, the contact centre manager and the team leaders and supervisors were really invaluable. In terms of instilling the service ethos how we serve customers. Because what was very fascinating was when we recruited75people we looked people that did have contact centre experience and it was interesting, they were the ones that in terms of fit with the way David Jones and Country Road Group work, that just didn’t stick because they were used to a black and white kind of environment where, you know, if this is the policy and it’s either yes or no. Whereas in David Jones in particular, we’ve taken a more nuanced approach and we’d say, okay, yes, this is the returns policy, but there’s this mitigating factor. Okay, we’ll make an exception. And so people who had worked in retail got that, and particularly if they’d worked, they’d had previous experience working on the selling floor in David Jones. People from a contact centre background, whether it was through banking or travel or whatever really struggled with that. They just wanted certainty and in a retail contact centre, there is no certainty. So we were fortunate to have the expertise from that Sydney team. We fly them down to Melbourne and help with the training. And a really great people team as well that helped us onboard everybody. And then as we started, once we completed the orientation and the training, we started scaling up the Melbourne team and we would just transfer, proportion of the calls over on day one. It might’ve been maybe10or15%. And the Sydney team was the more experienced team was taking the rest of the calls. And then we started building or changing that mix. So that eventually after, I think it was about a three, maybe four week period, the Melbourne team by that stage was taking all the calls and the Sydney team was able to I guess finish up what they were doing. So having that process was really helpful. Country Road Group, we didn’t change the team, but they had to learn all of the new systems as well. It was a very different approach that we had to take there. But yeah, again, using the team leaders really came to the fore there and trained the teams and identified any issues that we were having. So it was a bit of a two-pronged kind of approach there.

Chris Hudson: 23:27
I’m interested in the experience of those team members. As you were going through the transition, what were some of the things that you had to overcome through that process that were coming up as themes, if you can remember and how did you get around some of those things?

Daniele Iezzi: 23:41
Look, it wasn’t easy, we were operating on a very short timeline. The change program or timeline that we had was really condensed, less than ideal. We had these new agents and they had an understanding of the David Jones policies and procedures. It was pretty minimal I guess, or basic. And They didn’t have the, I guess the comfort or the maturity to be able to deal with the more complex questions with confidence. And we didn’t have a knowledge, a decent knowledge management system either. Left to their own devices. So that was a challenge. And also then, we had technology that was new. And so I alluded, or described earlier about the issues that customers were having with it. Particularly in the early days when the virtual assistant weren’t understanding customers properly. They either weren’t understanding the intent for getting that combination of store, department, and brand wrong. And so then the call would come back to the contact centre team and customers would be frustrated. The team members in store would be frustrated because customers would be complaining to them too. So it was it was a challenging Time for the team. But I guess, unfortunately we didn’t really have much of a choice. And then ironically, I think it was about three weeks, two to three weeks after we’d completed the transition, we had our first Covid case. I had to go into work from home mode before the broader community went into lockdown. So that added another layer of complexity to the whole mix. So it, it was a difficult time for them. I was really fortunate in that I had a strong manager and some really strong team leaders and they really rose to the occasion and just supported the team as best they could. And very much yeah, we worked through all of those issues, so it did take us a while. But certainly it was probably not the most ideal introduction to the business.

Chris Hudson: 25:40
Yeah, for sure. And through that time as well, presumably you were needing to report up to the leadership on what was going on. How did that side of things play out for you and what were your, what were some of the skill sets that you were trying to use to, to smooth that over in that sense?This podcast is about intrapreneurs and how to effectively succeed with an entrepreneur mindset within an organisation. If you can talk to anything around your stakeholder management, that’d be interesting.

Daniele Iezzi: 26:04
Sure. It took me a, to be honest, it took me a little while to get that right. And again, I think that’s, if I reflect on my personality. Here we go. Need the, the psychologist, bit of a session here. I wanna please people. That’s a big drive for me and it’s probably a bit of perfectionism in there as well. So when the solution wasn’t working smoothly from day one I, started to internalise a bit of that. So I had to learn to overcome that first. I think the big learnings that I had were, again, it became apparent that, as I mentioned earlier, as a business, we were immature from an AI perspective. We knew about it, but didn’t know the, so one of the really key learnings was for me to be a coach and to explain and use examples. We had a lot of data to start getting real life data and sharing that, whether it was transcripts and conversations or later when we started amplifying live chat and asynchronous messaging, sharing the results there and really just using the data to tell interesting stories that hopefully help them understand that we were on this transformation journey. When the penny dropped for me as well, when I realised once we’d started amplifying live chat, which we did as a response to Covid we’d had live chat for years, we might’ve had one person on it and. If it was busy on the phones, we’d take that person off live chat and put them on the phone. That was how we were operating pre pandemic. And with Covid our contacts went up, I think about700percent overnight. So we looked at live chat initially as a way of helping manage those volumes and then later on introduced automation, live chat so customers could check their order status without having to enter their order number and all that sort of thing. So pretty core functionality. But once we really started playing in that space, we could see that shift from the reactive service model to the proactive service model. So once I started talking about the impact we were having on conversion, on basket sise, on incremental revenue that we were generating, I. You could start sensing this, I was peaking their interest and somebody once said execs, they get remunerated on sales and profit. Very rarely are they measured on customer service. So I was talking a language that was most beneficial to them. Once that started really becoming this self-fulfilling prophecy as we, as the sales were increasing and the conversion rates were increasing, we would look at any other functionality that we had and looked at ways to sweat the assets that we had without having to ask for more CapEx. We’d had this big CapEx in investment when we implemented the whole new tech stack, but then it was like, okay, what can we do?But every time we do these changes, and some of them were minor initiatives in the grand scheme of things. But again, it was something interesting to the business. And again, we’re demonstrating that we’re on this road of continuous improvement of innovation, which was really well received. That was the other thing, making sure that I was telling, broadcasting what we were doing because my, you’ve gotta be a bit of a showman in a way, and I don’t mean that in a boastful way, there, I guess historically I would just do stuff, get it done, not make a big song and dance about it. That’s not gonna get you the investment at the end of the day. So you’ve got to, because you’re competing with all sorts of other people for a finite bucket of money. So being able to have those conversations demonstrate that the benefits that we were introducing to the business and that meant that we were able to go back and say look, actually, if we extend our live chat hours to midnight we anticipate that we’ll be able to speak to this many more customers and based on our performance, we’d be able to generate incremental revenue of this many hundreds and. I’ll need some incremental salaries to do it. And once I was able to articulate it that way, generally I got the, the approval to go ahead. So it was just making that connection between customer service and financial outcomes. ’cause customer service practitioners, I think we don’t, by nature, we don’t like talking finance, it’s like a dirty word. But you’ve gotta do that to be able to really grow and transform how your contact centre works and how you can transform customer service and the customer experience more broadly across the organisation.

Chris Hudson: 30:54
And did you take a set approach to setting up those metrics and was it an approach that almost involved a lot of those stakeholders in setting it up?Were they given to you?Did you come up with’em yourselves and then you knew that they would work?Talk to me about that process a little bit.

Daniele Iezzi: 31:09
Sure I inherited a kind of set of standard call centre metrics, average handling time, average speed of answer, blah, blah, blah. You know, time to reply, that was my least favourite one, I was never very good at getting that one into a good state of affairs It was a challenge because sometimes we would have an incident that might occur. For example I think that one stage there was a train crossing the Nullabor with all these orders and there was a flood and the train was delayed or something like that. So that meant all of these customers, their purchases were delayed and we saw this big spike in calls and then of course we didn’t have any easy answers, we’d get customers contacting us multiple times in multiple channels about the same issue. And so I wasn’t needed to get better at how we responded to those situations and how we actually prevented them happening in the first place. But in those particular instances, I’d get a lot of, a bit of a grilling from Xco, why is it taking so long to reply to these emails?Why is it, why do customers have to wait so long on the phone?I guess to answer your question, these metrics started changing. Slowly and fluidly if that makes sense. So again, as I kept talking about revenue and so on and as live chat became our single biggest channel. By that very nature, I start talking more about live chat and some of the statistics that we were getting out it. And as we introduced extra functionality into live chat, I would talk about that. How well the order status chatbot was working in deflecting calls. We had some functionality where if we did an e dm, so to support the start of a sale, a customer could chat from a link in that eDM. So we would talk about that and how well proactive versus reactive chats were going and so on. So that started changing I guess the conversation. And it started being more about revenue and more about conversion and so on. And then we introduced asynchronous messaging. And so that was another channel that was our fastest growing channel. So that was a whole new set of data points that we could talk about and the changing shift in customer behaviour and so on. And that led to a couple of things meant, started to focus the SLAs on or the KPIs on those two channels and the revenue they were driving and so on. And the concurrency that we were getting. But it also meant that, if I was getting pushback on emails, because at the end of the day, you’ve got a finite pool of resources in terms of the people and your hours. So we made a conscious decision, we’ll invest it in live chat, we’ll invest it in asynchronous messaging, we will not invest as much in email. And the customers were already voting with their feet. It was a dying channel. But we said, all right we’ll have to forego a good SLA on that if we wanna be able to speak to as many customers in live chat, because we know that’s where we’re gonna generate the revenue. And and so then I could say look, it’s a decision. We can either invest we can, I can put more hours into email, but then that means I’ll have to take them away from live chat and there’ll be an automatic knock on effect to revenue. As soon as I explained that, 99%of the time I get a, okay, just keep it in live chat. Or if you need some extra resources, put them on you’ve got the approval to put that onto email. So it really started changing, but then eventually as email kept declining and voice kept declining, we’ve just stopped. One day we just said, my manager and I said, oh, we just won’t put that on the report now. Somebody asks, we can tell them about it. So it was done a little bit I guess below the line, but it was a kind of organic process of getting to that point, if that makes sense.

Chris Hudson: 34:52
Yeah, absolutely. And was it ever set out on a plan that the transformation looked like this and that you were gonna try these things?Or was it all quite ear to the ground and you were trying to figure things out a little bit as you went along?How did you go about almost trying to set up some of those experiments so that you could unlock the future opportunities in the other channels and then reset on the metrics through that process?

Daniele Iezzi: 35:14
Sure. It was when we had made the worked on the original business case to implement at the time as Amazon Connect and so on we really didn’t look beyond that point. It was quite weird. It was just a, let’s get this done. We then had the pandemic come and it was, I think the first sort of six months were just scrambling and running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but then it was, as we were getting used to this new normal at the time, and also as my I guess confidence and competence in understanding of the levers that we could push and pull. Then I, that’s when I started to, I started building this three to four year roadmap, and that roadmap would change. But fundamentally, the, I guess the milestones were pretty much. But it was this move towards more automation that ultimately one day we’d have this really seamless omni-channel conversational commerce experience so that, the vision was if you contacted us through any channel, you would have a bot interacting with you in the first instance that would know, Hey Chris, how was that shirt you bought last week?Did it fit?Yep, great. Okay. By the way, we’ve got an offer on here that’s personalised to you. And so on. And yeah, we started making steps towards that. So it was really yeah, there was a little bit of planning. So particularly in terms of when live chat running across both brands and we had to introduce it into Country Road Group and the next stage has got to be asynchronous messaging. Let’s do that, learn from that. And then it was really just about in the meantime, looking at those smaller opportunities as they arose when we could see how customers were engaging with us or there were opportunities that typically these would come from the team themselves. How, what could we do to sweat the assets that we had and make these little changes that didn’t need a lot of IT effort or anything like that. And we would build those in as well. So it was a little bit of planning, a little bit of more of an agile, let’s just throw this into the mix and see what happens. And and some things stuck. Some things were a complete flop. And other things, I’d say, wouldn’t it be great if we could do X, Y, Z?We can do this as the next logical step. So again, I had somebody reigning me in a pragmatic kind of way which was really useful as well.

Chris Hudson: 37:47
Yeah. I’m just reflecting as you’re talking. I work in the field of design thinking and often we’re talking about failing fast to succeed faster, and ultimately it needs to be okay to fail sometimes so that you can find that clearer path or that new, way of innovation a lot easier. It goes through iteration, test and learn, continuous improvement, all of those things. Did you feel that was very much, okay. Within the context that you’re working in, that you were describing, did you feel like the pressure was just get it done and to make it work straight away?

Daniele Iezzi: 38:22
Initially it was. But then over time it very much became a case of, alright, let’s give it a go and let’s see what happens. And it’s okay if it fails providing, we’ve done with, reasonable job of it. And, really great example of that was actually at Country Road and it was just before Christmas last year. And I was talking about messaging and, the future of customer service and, isn’t this great. And sharing the pathway that we had and what the future of customer service would look like. And the operations team for Country Road said, look, can you help us with the phones?Because we weren’t managing Country Road work differently. They didn’t have. Customers would just ring each individual store and hope for the best. And but again, the same issues there. 50%of the time the calls didn’t get answered by the team ’cause they were just too busy. And they said to me, oh look, is there something we can do before Christmas?Well, maybe we could try messaging in stores because and I think that’s actually how I said it, because the business had started issuing iPhones to the teams in stores. That was in conjunction with an app launch and but had some cool, they could use it to check stock availability and so on. And the messaging platform that we used had an iPhone app that was designed to be used by salespeople on the selling floor. So we said look, we could do something where we could actually unpublish all of the country road store numbers from the website effectively channel customers down an asynchronous messaging route and have those inquiries triaged by the contact centre team. And if a customer did ring, we would have the virtual assistant come in and transcribe that customer’s inquiry into a text message and deflect that to a SMS channel as well. And so we thought let’s give it a go and we trialed it in stores and trialed a couple of iterations of it across a number of different stores. And, not great. We did it around Black Friday, the peak trading time. And was it a complete success?No. But we, when we had the opportunity in January to regroup and look at how it performed and talked to the team in stores and so on there were some highlights, they said yeah, the phone rang a lot less. It was great. We could actually concentrate on the customers that we were serving. That gave them the time to actually, if it was quiet in store, they could just batch those messages. Or if they needed to, they could go out the back, the tea room and batch them out there. And and in some stores it worked really well in the bigger stores. In some of the smaller stores, that have more of a community feel. It was less successful there because the customers know that, the sales assistants by name and they wanted to speak to Sally in the store by name. But I think two interesting things come out of that. When I said to the, when I asked the operations team what do you want us to do?Do you want us to keep persevering with this or, Pull it back, they went no, there’s no going back. This is, yep. It wasn’t perfect, but we should keep going down this road. And likewise the CEO I saw him in January, and I said, oh, wasn’t that interesting?It wasn’t super successful, he said, but you know what?It was, we gave it a go. It was absolutely the right thing to do. There should be no going back. So to have that support from the CEO and also, the stakeholders was just so fantastic. And then it gave us more opportunities to or carte blanche to try more keep experimenting and keep trying new things. And, unfortunately not everyone’s gonna love it, love that experience, but at the end of the day, it’s probably on balance. The benefits outweigh those disadvantages. But it was a bit of a journey there. I know, certainly a few years, four or five years ago my experience at David Jones was, everything had to be perfect before we ever tried to implement it. So I think the businesses have moved on and I think that’s absolutely necessary now because competitors are at pace, the world is so unstable and uncertain and technology is changing. I can’t keep up with chat GT and generative ai and so I don’t think a companies have any choice now, but to keep progressing and failing, in order to move forward.

Chris Hudson: 42:50
Yeah, interesting. There are so many drivers of change that you could pinpoint. And often within an organisation, there are multiple factors that somehow miraculously align and they come together and this change happens. It’s not always deliberate. And then you see that possibility is unfolding right in front of your eyes when you hadn’t planned anything like that. But what are some of factors that, yeah, that’s it. That’s it. What are some of the factors of change, what are the other positive influences of change do you feel elsewhere in the organisation and often beyond your control?

Daniele Iezzi: 43:23
Oh, that’s a good question. I think one of the things is and again, maybe it’s a byproduct of sharing insights and data and successes and what you’re working on is that particularly, the experience that we had where the contact centre was becoming this revenue generating centre, started to make other people from other teams aware of the possibilities there. And I think one of the other things too is that, I talk to a lot of contact people who work in contact centres, heads of customer service and so on. And, typically we can feel very isolated feel like no one understands what we’re doing. Every time we get together, it’s like group therapy. And we’re going, oh, how did you solve this?What were you experiencing this problem?And typically the feelings and the problems are universal. But I guess you, It is also a beholden to us to really drive. We’ve gotta sell customer service to the organisation. And part of that might be here are the benefits that we’re doing, but other things are really going back to that education piece, explaining to exco the customers are changing the way they interact with us, emails aren’t their favoured form of communication anymore. Phones are on the way out too, and using, and actually researching what other companies are doing and what’s happening in this space. And I would remember getting statistics that said something along the lines of75%of Australians if their mobile phone rings, they don’t answer the phone because they don’t want to talk to the person there. They’d rather text them or go on Facebook or WhatsApp for or whatever. So being able to share those insights was really invaluable and it helped drive that appetite for innovation and change. So the just before I finished up at Country Road, one of the things we’d said was we should close the email channel down because fewer and fewer customers are using it. It’s not a great experience when they do use it because the reply times are long and who wants to write an email anyway?Let’s look at how we can amplify asynchronous messaging, live chat to replace email. And we had the, I had the stats to demonstrate the change in customer behaviour and, brand went okay, that kind of makes sense. It’s scary having to think about not being able to close off email, but we can understand it’s the right thing to do and particularly if we want look, have a future focus in customer service. I think, yeah, that’s been one of the most pleasing things and probably just being able to demonstrate that there’s a role that customer service has to play in the success of the organisation rather than just answering complaints.

Chris Hudson: 46:12
Yeah, one thing you were saying there was around the data and the stats, and you were describing the decisioning that then could follow. But I often think there’s a gap between one and the other. And in my world, in CX and where we’re looking at experience design, we’re thinking about how to interpret the data and almost read into it more, to come up with an insight that will then become actionable and that can actually change and positively influence the business. So what’s your process there for converting what you see to something that you can talk about and story tell and then leading to a decision?

Daniele Iezzi: 46:48
You’ve actually answered the question for me, Chris. It’s being able to tell the story. Sometimes it’s using data is first of all the starting point. And being able to use that data to articulate a story in a way that’s easy for stakeholders to understand if they don’t how contact centres work. And let’s face it, most people don’t how contact centres work. So you’ve gotta cut through all of that. And I guess a classic example, again, took me a little while to figure this out, was every year we’d have to do a budget presentation. I’d say, oh look, we’re gonna, I’m anticipating we’ll speak to so many more thousands of customers and I’m gonna need more salaries. And one of the CFOs I’ve worked with would say, but we’ve invested all of this money in virtual assistant s and you’re asking for more salaries. I went yes. And I realised, okay, I haven’t done a very good job here of filling in the blanks. And so I was able to demonstrate the next time that the amount of work that those virtual assistants were doing. It was something along the lines of33full-timers. So I said, if we didn’t have those virtual assistants, I’d actually be coming to ask you for even more. But also those incremental salaries are helping drive these sales. So I was just joining the pieces together. And I think the other thing that was really useful was actually finding those purple people. So I had a finance business partner who was actually really interested in wanting to learn about how the contact centre worked. And I realised if I could explain it to him, he would actually explain it to the CFO and be a bit of an ambassador for the work that we were doing. And that was a really helpful insight and helpful exercise. I took that approach with other parts of the business as well.

Chris Hudson: 48:28
And you often have the data in front of you, in and around, what you’re seeing. You then present it on to other people and then almost their response becomes a data point in itself because you then need to respond to that. So the leadership that the CEO, CFO, CO O, whoever, whoever’s looking at the stats, actually needs to be told it, almost from their point of view. So you are using that empathy in a way to convert what you know, into something that you think they care about. Is that something that resonates?

Daniele Iezzi: 48:57
Yeah, it does. And I think, at the end of the day, you can’t look at customer service purely transactionally. It’s not just numbers. There are people behind them, whether it’s customers. Or whether it’s the agents as well. And to be able to share some of those stories and we had a voice of the customer and, actual verbatims from the customer and how we were able to assist them or how we’re able to make their experience a better one really is a very powerful thing. And it’s easy to forget, because you you have so much data that you go, okay, numbers and numbers, and no one can argue with that. But actually sometimes it’s more compelling to share a customer story or a team member story. Particularly if you’re looking at contact centre teams as well. The turnover is so high, and, engagement’s super important. So to be able to share some of the challenges that they were dealing with as well is, super important.

Chris Hudson: 50:02
That can be very powerful. And I’ve used it myself where there’s a shock tactic and you yeah, you’re presenting the voice of the customer in a way that they’ve never seen or heard before. Have you used things similar to that where you’re trying to prompt a certain action or response because yeah, a group of customers or a customer did this and you’ve just gotta share the story, but it results in the change that you are hoping for.

Daniele Iezzi: 50:24
Yeah I have a couple of times. I think it’s one of those things, you can overuse it. So shock tactics aren’t probably ideal, but sometimes they do have their place and one presentation that we were doing with I think it was store managers and we used, shared some verbatims from customers I think it’s important for them to hear it. And likewise sharing those stats about if I think back to my time at David Jones about how infrequently the stores answered the phone, and it wasn’t to say they’re doing a terrible job. It was actually to demonstrate, you know, what, it’s hard. We’ve never been able to do it. And actually we’ve gotta stop trying to figure out how to fix the phones ’cause the phones aren’t the good channel anymore. Let’s look at messaging. Let’s look at live chat. Let’s look at some other opportunity. Because we don’t give customers any other choice to speak to a store. It’s a terrible process for all parties concerned. Why don’t we start thinking about how we can do this differently?And sometimes you’ve just gotta share those really ugly facts. And it’s not about throwing people under the bus. It’s just, here are the facts but there’s a way that we can possibly do better and do something that’s much more interesting for everyone.

Chris Hudson: 51:32
That’s right. I just wanted to come back to one of the points that you’re making a little bit earlier around it being a lonely place, working in customer service or in the contact centre world. And within any organisation there are gonna be different leadership structures, points of view, agendas and so on. And in that context, have you found that you’ve had to come up against a lot of resistance?Or do you feel like mostly the contact centre and the data that you’re describing can be used as a positive force for good and that you can actually bring together people around that conversation much more easily because you’re that unifying thread, you’re representing the brand. You’re obviously in the coalface, you’re talking to customers all the time, and you’ve got a rich data set. So did you come up against that opposition a lot?And if so, could you just describe that?

Daniele Iezzi: 52:21
Sure. I think, look, we did more so at the start and again, once we went through this journey of showing the value that the contact centre could provide, that really did help change how it was perceived and really quite a bit of the resistance that we did have. But you, I know when we were looking at pulling this business case together to keep customer service in-house I was engaging with various stakeholders to get the data I needed to pull the business case together. And at the time, one of the, I dunno if I should say the function, but anyway, one of the functions I was dealing with just said Why are we doing this?This is a waste of money. We’ve got perfectly good equipment already in Sydney. We don’t need to buy new laptops and why are we spending, money on new systems?Just use the old ones and, I just went actually listen to what you’re saying. And so I was probably like a bit of a bull at a gate at the time, really I can be a bit stubborn myself heads are being knocked together there. But I think, the learning is that not everyone’s gonna agree with the strategy. There’ll always be somebody, and they may question it or interrogate it not to be antagonistic ’cause they’ve actually got some genuine concerns or they need more information to make an informed decision. But yeah, certainly at the start there was a bit of resistance. I was talking to the people team. I said, oh yeah, we’ll have this new solution and we’ll be giving the team laptops so they can work from home. And they said, why would anyone wanna work from home?I went, I don’t know. Plus they broke their leg and they couldn’t catch the bus. Little did I know, right?But again, because this what we were embarking on was so different and revolutionary. And we were going from, the20th century to the21st century in, very short period of time, no investment for10years in customer service to, spending over a million dollars I think it was, to get this new contact centre up and running. Of course you’re gonna get some resistance there. But there will always be some allies there that will see what you’re trying to achieve and that will help you along the way. So I think that’s the one thing to try and remember. Yes, it is very lonely, but there’ll always be somebody there. You just have to find out who they’re and then they’ll help you get onto that journey. It might take longer than you want, but you’ll get there in the end.

Chris Hudson: 54:38
Yeah, that’s a really good point around resilience, because often you, you take that on yourself, you feel like I need to be resilient to this and this environment, everything that’s going on around it. But actually it’s a shared problem usually, and you can usually find somebody that can help you with it to your point around the allies.

Daniele Iezzi: 54:54
Yeah. And it might not be as I was saying, it might not be within your organisation. Speak to, again, if you’re head of customer service or whatever, or head of contact centre, speak to somebody else managing a contact centre in another organisation. They’re probably having the same problem, or they may have figured it out and they’ll be happy to share that insight with you. There’ll always be somebody around there that’s just finding that person.

Chris Hudson: 55:18
And just to finish so just thinking about the people listening to this show, they’re mainly gonna be intrapreneurs. They’ll be trying to move and shake in their own organisations. What’s some advice that you’d want to impart to other people that are going through organisational change or transformation themselves and are trying to fly that flag and do similar things?What would be your advice to them?

Daniele Iezzi: 55:39
I can’t take the credit for this. As I say, when you’re on the plane, put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help others. So you have to make sure that you are looking after yourself, whether that’s physically, spiritually, mentally, particularly if you’re leading big teams as well and you are the face of transformation, you need to be match fit and you can’t do that if you are not looking after yourself first. So it would be the single biggest piece of advice that I would give.

Chris Hudson: 56:11
Brilliant. Thanks so much Daniel and thank you so much for being on the show. Before we finish, I just wanted to give you the opportunity to to allow people to connect with you in some way or another. I’m guessing it’s via a number of channels. You probably want SMS, live chat, web chat, virtual assistant but

Daniele Iezzi: 56:26
Oh God.

Chris Hudson: 56:27
Tell people how they can get in touch with you.

Daniele Iezzi: 56:31
Yeah. Probably the best thing is on LinkedIn. My surname is IEZZI. There aren’t very many Iezzis around. But I also happen to attend quite a few CX or contact centre conferences. And I have the every now and then the pleasure of speaking at some of those. So if uh, anyone sees me there, please come up and say hello.

Chris Hudson: 56:52
Perfect. Thanks again, Daniel. I really appreciate your time and yeah, we’re looking forward to publishing this one thank you.

Daniele Iezzi: 56:58
Thanks, Chris.

Chris Hudson: 57:00
Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the ways to the end, so thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback, so please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference. After all, we’re trying to help you, the intrapreneurs kick more goals within your organisations. If you have any questions about the things we covered in the show, please email me directly at chris@companyroad.co. I answer all messages, so please don’t hesitate to reach out. And to hear about the latest episodes and updates, please head to www. companyroad.co to subscribe. Tune in next Wednesday for another new episode.