Putting Customer Insights in the Hands of Operations Transcript

Bruce: Welcome to another episode of Customer Experience Superheroes. My name is Bruce, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode.

Each episode is packed full of ideas, inspiration, and insights from the great and the good across the world of customer experience. We look to find guests on this podcast who will challenge assumptions, make us think differently, and give views and opinions that allow us to rethink how we’re approaching customer experience.

Sometimes it’s strategists, sometimes it’s solution providers, but always, they’re superheroes. And today’s guest is no exception.

I’m delighted to have Adam Alfia with us today. Now, Adam Alfia is a name you may not be familiar with, but you certainly will be familiar with the work that he does. Real Time Feedback is a form of insight collection that we’re all very familiar with, and Adam will come on to explain the value of it. But it’s really important to understand its purpose, which is very operational.

Quite often with customer feedback, we find ourselves in the vacuum of collecting insights for the purpose of presenting performance and progress at boardroom level. But really, is that valuable? Or is it more valuable to be able to put the insights into the hands of those in the operational functions who can administer change and improvements, even in real time, on behalf of the customers?

Let’s hear more then from the conversation I had with Adam when we caught up recently.

Adam, welcome to the CX Superheroes podcast.

Adam Alfia: Nice to meet you.

Bruce: Yeah, good to have you here. Now, as I say, in fairness, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, what you do is probably a lot more famous than you. And perhaps that’s how it should be. Countless organizations make real improvements to their customer experience, and it’s all because of what you do.

But before we get on to talking about Real Time Feedback, just give us a little bit of a history lesson here. Where did you start, and how did you end up with Real Time Feedback?

Adam Alfia: It’s a funny story. I started out when I was in college. I started an auto repair shop, which grew to several locations here in the Texas region. I sold those back in 2005 and then started a concierge company, primarily servicing auto manufacturers.

Like OnStar does for GM, we have a handful of brands that we support. And our entire philosophy was, how do we get a customer, when they get off the call with 1 of our agents, to say, “Wow, that was really a great phone call”?

We’re still doing that 17 years later, supporting automotive manufacturers, and I’ve learned a lot about the power of words, and that a customer can hear you smile over the phone, and that a customer can tell when you really like your job and what you’re doing.

I got into the hospitality space about 10 or 11 years ago. So having not only the concierge experience of how to make customers happy, but now translating that into a face-to-face environment, how do you make customers happy and continue to come back to your restaurants or bars?

I really saw a drop-off about 5 or 6 years ago where customers were less and less inclined to tell you when they had an issue in person. Even when a manager would walk by a table and say, “Hey, I’m the manager here. How’s everything?” traditionally, if there was an issue, they would still say, “Fine.”

But then when we looked at the online reviews that the same customer might have left, even though we’d talked to them and asked if everything was okay, they would still go online and leave a not-so-positive review. And you’re scratching your head saying, why didn’t they just tell me when the manager walked up?

It turns out that as the younger generation, the 1 that spends a lot of the money, grew up behind cell phones and keyboards, that face-to-face personal interaction is not 1 of their top talents. They’re used to giving people digital information, but not so much face to face.

So we set out, using our team of developers, to build a real-time communication platform where customers who had an issue, or even wanted to give accolades, could do so digitally in a manner they were used to. And we found that we had a lot more engagement when it was digital versus in person. That’s really how Real Time Feedback was born. We built the platform for our own use, and then took it out to market.

Bruce: And when you say where you are now, give us an appreciation of geographies you’re supporting, the industries you’re supporting, and the organizations you’re supporting.

Adam Alfia: Right now, our biggest footprint is in the arena space, arenas, venues, and similar environments where professional teams play and where there are large gatherings of people at one time. That’s been key to our growth because they are recognizable names and venues, and that has opened a lot of doors for us.

We started and cut our teeth in large space venues, and now we have a lot of retail organizations and restaurant chains that use our platform to fix things operationally in real time.

Automotive has also been a great industry for us, because it is such a review-sensitive environment. When you think about industries where people complain a lot, or where trust is a huge issue, automotive is right up there. And because a vehicle is the 2nd largest purchase most people make, having a stellar customer experience and strong customer reviews online is critical.

So by fixing things when a customer gets their car serviced at a dealership, whether there was poor communication with the service advisor, a dirty car returned, or something else, it’s very important to capture that customer’s real experience in real time and try to fix it before they leave and tell friends or family or go online and blast the dealership.

Retail, automotive, and arenas have been huge for us right now, with expansion into many other industries that don’t always realize they have a customer service opportunity. One of the industries that is growing for us right now is parks and recreation.

Because they often have fewer people to manage their facilities, our platform is being used by several large cities. We’re about to launch with Dallas and all of their parks and recreation locations. If you have kids, I’m sure you’ve been to a park where you see broken swings, sprinkler heads shooting water in the air for hours, and other things that aren’t maintained well. Most people don’t know how to relay this information to the people who can fix it.

By using a platform like Feedback, you can have real-time 2-way conversations very easily with whoever is in charge of maintaining those facilities.

Bruce: It is very interesting to me, because you’ve got these different sectors you’re working with and they’ve got different motivations. If you take automotive, to your point, they have JD Power surveys from the manufacturers and dealerships, and they’re heavily incentivized to deliver a great experience for customers. But if that survey goes out before they’ve had the chance to resolve any issues, it can be damaging.

Even if that’s not a really good reflection of what’s going on in the dealership, the fact that they didn’t get it right the first time, but they are very responsive, is a massive asset. But if you don’t have the ability to find that out until the survey comes in afterwards, then you get a poor reflection. It’s not really a true reflection.

So in that respect, you’re helping them actually be the business they’re trying to be.

Coming onto parks and recreation, it appears to me that this is more about having a limited amount of resource and a very large estate. How can we possibly be everywhere all the time, or certainly at the places we need to be, without increasing headcount?

And then arenas, they have a short window to resolve things. You can’t say, “Let’s have a meeting next week and figure out how to deal with that issue in the toilet tomorrow.” It needs sorting today.

So very different motivations. Have you found that you need to adapt what you do to suit those different environments, or is it actually a fairly generic application that works well across all of them?

Adam Alfia: Getting the right data to the right people has always been a challenge in any solution. What we found is that it depends on the organization, but our platform, and the technology we developed and patented, is location based and smart.

So when you scan a QR code, it knows exactly where it was scanned and relays that. But you can also program it so that particular sets of QR codes go to a particular department. So now, instead of giving everybody all the data to sift through, it actually delivers that exact piece of information to the people who can do something about it and fix it.

Originally, when we started, 1 QR code went to everybody. Then we moved to smart QR codes that knew where they were but still went to everybody. And now we can make a particular QR code go to a particular person, even within certain hours. During these hours it goes to this person, during other hours it goes to somebody else. So we can slice and dice it any way the organization wants to consume that information.

Bruce: So you can support my job as an operator. Just-in-time management becomes a reality. I can make sure that the most urgent of the requirements get dealt with first.

This is 1 of those areas where we’ve really struggled with customer feedback, this democratization of data, getting it to the right people at the right time to make decisions. And I think I largely hear that it tends to be about getting it to the right senior leaders to make a critical decision. But what you’re talking about here is in-the-moment feedback, where you’ve got a very short window to actually resolve something, and you’re putting it into the hands of the individual who’s empowered to make that change so they can act quickly.

How important is it for you to have the confidence that organizations will not only take that information, but act upon it?

Adam Alfia: We’ve built several functionalities into our software that not only deliver that information, but also measure how fast you’re responding to the customer, how fast you’re closing out the ticket, and what notes you’re putting inside.

It actually gives you warnings. When you close something out, it may say, “We see that you’re closing out this feedback, but you never responded to the customer.”

The customer in our platform has the option of either being anonymous, or not anonymous, and then asking you for a response. If that customer is asking for a response, it could just be, “Got it, thank you very much, we’re on it.” Then the customer feels they contributed to improving the experience at the venue they like to go to.

Customers want that 2-way engagement. We want not only for them to give us that data, but we want the organization to respond and let them know they received it and are doing something about it.

Because customers don’t want to feel like they’re just giving you information that goes by the wayside and doesn’t contribute to improving their experience.

Bruce: That’s just so reassuring to hear. We’ve seen with organizations that when they have the ability to listen and act, and go back and recognize the customer with feedback, to say, “Thank you, we’re on it,” or, “Thank you, it’s resolved,” it increases trust. It makes them feel like they’re being listened to.

And guess what, the next time they run 1 of those relationship surveys, they’ll fill it out, because they know this is an organization that actually acts on feedback.

It also helps us because, if you’re getting back to me straight away on something like, “I’ve just noticed the tap is running in the men’s loo and it needs sorting out,” it gives me confidence that when I’m booking tickets, you’re going to get back to me quickly. When a new offer comes up, you’re going to get back to me quickly. I just get the sense that you’re an organization that responds quickly to me.

I’m interested to know, I’m a season ticket holder for a football club here in England, and there are lots of things that go on. What’s the biggest issue that comes up at stadiums?

Adam Alfia: Either broken chairs, chairs that are malfunctioning in some capacity, and then drunk spectators.

Bruce: Is there a correlation between the two?

Adam Alfia: There could very well be.

But think about it. Right now, if you’re sitting in your seat, maybe with your kids, and there’s somebody behind you yelling, throwing stuff, or cursing, for me to relay that information currently to somebody that can do something about it is very unnerving. You have to get up, walk around, find security, point the person out, and then come back to your chair. They saw you leave, and now security comes over 5 minutes later. It’s obvious it was you.

Most people say, “You know what, I’m not going to say anything because I don’t want anybody to know.”

With our platform, venues flash a QR code on the Jumbotron, or announce it throughout the event. If there’s any issue whatsoever, please go to TellAAC.com, or scan the code on the screen. Now I have a direct line of communication to central command very easily.

I can say, “There’s a drunk guy sitting behind me.” They respond because it’s all text or WhatsApp back and forth. Then 3 minutes later, security comes up and tells the person, “Hey, we’ve had complaints about the way you’re acting. Pipe it down,” or whatever is appropriate. Nobody knows it was me, and I was able to resolve my situation very easily.

Bruce: Which is wonderful. And we talk about tech for good, going beyond business and trying to improve society with better experiences. That’s a case in point. Because if I’m there with my family, I don’t want to ruin this moment for myself. I don’t want to put myself in a vulnerable position.

And to your point, I don’t want to be the person everyone says, “Sit down, he’s only had a drink, leave it alone.” But I’m uncomfortable. This is not going as I wanted it to. And I need a way of getting this resolved.

What you’re providing is that lifeline for people to discreetly call out and say, “Hey, this isn’t as it should be.” You must find that extremely rewarding, because you’re not only helping organizations improve their efficiency, you’re actually helping in a social way too. You’re increasing enjoyment and entertainment for people.

I come away from that event thinking, “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it because there was that drunk guy there. But it was dealt with brilliantly by my club.” That changes the experience completely.

Adam Alfia: Very rewarding. The first time we launched at a venue back in 2019, a family had come with their daughter to the Jonas Brothers concert. They had purchased tickets through StubHub, and when they bought them, they thought they were buying stage-side seats.

They got there 2 hours before the event, got settled into their seats, and realized they were actually behind the stage. Their daughter had Down syndrome, and it was her 16th birthday. She loved the Jonas Brothers.

They took the opportunity when the QR code was up on the Jumbotron, scanned it, and started by saying, “Not complaining, but we bought these seats thinking they were stage-side seats. You guys should let StubHub know that’s not how they were represented. We’re here with our daughter for her birthday.”

Within minutes, the team at American Airlines Center sent a VIP team. They responded to the family, asked where they were sitting and how many people were in the group, and asked if they’d like to be moved. They brought a VIP team, took pictures with the little girl in front of the Jonas Brothers poster, sent them to the family, and moved them into a VIP area, completely transforming their experience.

You can see the back and forth between the family and the venue. Then the family went on and made a Facebook post about how great their experience was. They said the girl hadn’t stopped talking about it and how wonderful it was.

But without that information, the venue would never have known there was an issue at all. That family would have sat there, after driving 3 hours to come to the concert, and it would have been a bad experience. Using a platform like ours gave the venue an opportunity to fix it and, to your point, turn a bad experience into a great one.

Bruce: Wow, that’s a lovely experience. And that’s the same as the dealership we were talking about earlier. The organizations you work with are smart. They’re good. They have their customers’ best intentions at heart. However, they’ve not had the data to be able to act upon it.

In a parallel world, there’s a VIP team sitting there saying, “I wonder if we could help anyone out,” but they’ve just not got the data to know how to pinpoint and solve that. The dealership may be a great dealership and just have a few problems, but they resolve them really well. But without the data, they end up getting a bad reputation that they don’t deserve.

That could have ended up being a Twitter story, and instead it became, “This was my view, and then they made it right.” That’s fabulous. It’s great to hear.

This is great, this in-the-moment type responsiveness that we all expect organizations to be able to do, but perhaps haven’t appreciated that they want to deliver it too, they just haven’t had the data or the technology to achieve it.

There’s obviously a lot of room for greater development of solutions for the sectors you’ve spoken about. There are many more stadiums out there as well. What about other sectors, Adam? Other sectors out there that aren’t connected in this space yet, but really should be?

Adam Alfia: Retail environments, especially now with online shopping being so popular and growing, are a huge opportunity.

It’s only going to grow, especially with virtual reality making online shopping feel even more immersive. So businesses that are heavily leveraged in brick-and-mortar real estate and still want customers to leave the house, get in the car, and drive to a retail location, only to be met with a bad experience from an employee that doesn’t want to be there, that’s where this really matters.

I was at a Bed Bath & Beyond, and the cashier was actually on Instagram while checking me out. Their phone was in 1 hand and the scanner in the other. I said, “Can you please get on your social media after you check me out?” They said, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t even realize.”

But then as soon as they scanned my last item, they went right back to their phone. Once I paid, I left and watched the employee spend another 45 seconds on the phone before calling the next customer. You multiply that over the course of the day, and you’ve got 2 or 3 hours of wasted productivity because this person wants to be on Instagram.

I actually found the manager and said, “Just so you know, this person is on their phone constantly. I don’t think that’s good customer service.” She shook her head and said, “Man, we’ve told them several times about this.”

That’s why we tell retail organizations, put a QR code right at the cashier that says something like, “Let our manager know if our cashier was friendly.” We even encourage them to run contests. Whichever cashier gets the most positive feedback gets something, maybe a day off or a gift.

Let the cashier tell customers, “Hey, can you scan that QR code and let my boss know how I’m doing today?” It’s been fundamental, because employees today know that most customers won’t say anything, so they can get away with bad behavior. But if I put something right in front of you that gives you a direct line to my manager, I’m not going to behave that way because I know a customer could immediately tell on me.

Bruce: It really does help empower those people on the floor to provide a better experience. And as you say, when online retail is eating your lunch, you need to figure out how to improve the experience. That’s 1 thing you’ve got a game changer on. Online can’t do that. You can enhance the experience by dealing with things that don’t work well in the moment.

In the past, we were very reactive with this sort of stuff. You mentioned relationship surveys, and some organizations do scrape those and see what they can improve. Others sadly just look at the scores.

We come into your world, and it’s actually moved from reactive to active resolution. I guess the next step is pre-emptive or proactive. How do you see what you’re doing evolving to somehow resolve things before the issue occurs? Where do you go next?

Adam Alfia: Our technology currently puts together reports that show trends and identify key issues in a store or location. Keep in mind that our platform is organizationally based to help not only the organization as a whole, but really that particular store and its employees.

If I’m the manager of a specific store or rooftop, I care about the whole organization doing well, but I really care about my own ecosystem. Our platform helps identify key issues in your store and gives recommendations on how to fix them.

We also have client success managers that review the data once a month and have calls with managers to say, “Here are some of the things we recommend.”

Not only that, but we have the ability to create pre-canned responses, because not everybody knows how to respond to customers properly. For example, for a restroom issue, you can type in a corporate-approved response such as, “Thank you for letting us know. Maintenance is on the way.” Then managers can just click on that pre-canned response and send it.

So by loading the lips, so to speak, of the people responding to customers, and making sure responses are corporate-approved and consistent, that goes a long way in making sure everybody gets a response and customers know the organization cares.

It’s been very eye-opening to see how many managers tell us there are things in the surveys they get back from corporate that never even touched on some of the things customers care about. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a survey that says, “How clean are our restrooms?”

Restrooms are a big 1 for me. In the restaurant space especially, whenever I walk into any business and look at the restroom and how it’s kept, it tells me a lot about how that organization or store manager cares about everything else. Because if this is how they’re keeping something they know I’m going to see, what’s happening in the areas I don’t see?

In the restaurant business, they say you probably wouldn’t eat at 90% of restaurants if you walked into their kitchen. So keeping the places customers see clean is incredibly important.

Bruce: I remember being in a dealership once and they had the CRM rack or tech stack door wide open, cables hanging out, clearly in full view. These were tens of thousands of pounds worth of automobiles, all gleaming and shiny, and my focus was on, what’s going to happen with my data? Because that’s what that said to me.

I do understand your point about restrooms. And I remember hearing that with airports, if the lavatory is clean, it increases my confidence in the security and the standards of that airport. If it’s messy, how do I trust you’re really on it?

Do you find you are working more and more in conjunction with other parts of the tech stack in CX? Or because of the way you’re working, I don’t even need to tell you who I am, really. I don’t need to tell you I’m at seat C24 if I’ve just come from loo block A. You only need to know that loo block A is dirty. Can you sort it out? But are you finding your data is getting integrated with the rest of the organization’s data?

Adam Alfia: Yes. We built APIs to go into Salesforce and even Medallia. The problem is that we try to stay away from being just more data for the organization.

Yes, we will give you all the data you want, and we’ll integrate it so you can drop it into any CRM you want. But the focus really is on operational repairs and issues, rather than just being another data point on a report shown once a quarter or once a month.

1 of the things I’ve learned is that some organizations do not share customer data with the stores the data is actually about. In dealerships, for example, there’s 1 OEM, and I won’t mention the name, but when we talked about their survey process, I asked them about the information that comes back from J.D. Power. They told me they don’t share that information with the dealership.

I said, “What’s the point of getting that data for the organization if the dealership doesn’t know where they need to fix things?” Even though it’s hindsight and the customer is already gone, why wouldn’t you share that data with the dealerships? That was mind-boggling to me.

Bruce: I really don’t understand that.

When we get to a point where you’ve got the ability to resolve issues for organizations in the moment, do we as consumers start to deselect organizations that don’t have this capability? Do you feel that we’re at a point where this is part of the reason I choose 1 place over another, because I know if something goes wrong, they’re on it?

They don’t know it’s Real Time Feedback, all they know is the organization is really responsive. So if I walk into this shopping mall and see a spillage, then I can contact them and in 30 seconds or 2 minutes there’ll be someone there with a bucket, whereas at the other shopping mall I walk in and walk out and it’s still there. So I’m going to go to that shopping mall.

Do you think as consumers we’re at that point where we differentiate by how well organizations respond?

Adam Alfia: Yes, obviously. I’m sure you’re familiar with CES, customer effort score. How hard does that organization make it for me to connect with them and let them know about things? That absolutely plays into it.

When you see an organization that wants that feedback in real time, and not only gets that feedback but acts on it, it does influence where I’m going to go next time because I know they’re responsive and they take care of my issues.

We’ve even built functionality recently that allows a manager to record a video when responding to a customer. We did surveys with customers who had used our platform and asked whether they would prefer a text response, or a video from a manager saying, “Hey Christopher, this is the manager of XYZ. Thanks for letting us know. We really appreciate it.”

Managers can take 10 seconds to record that and send it to the customer. Especially now that we’re all on Zoom and similar platforms, people are much more comfortable with recording themselves.

We found that organizations that did that, that recorded the video rather than just responding through text, really get an uplift in customer engagement because the customer says, “Wow, that person took the time to record a video and send it back to me.” That goes a long way.

Bruce: I’m so glad you say that, Adam, because humanizing the digital experience, I’m sure that’s a phrase you’ve heard, and taking the moment to record a video, which doesn’t take much longer than typing out the answer, just reminds the customer there are real people behind this acting in service of you.

So thanks so much for sharing a good appreciation of where Real Time Feedback has come from, what it’s up to now, and where it’s going. I think we can rest assured with quality applications like this out there that real-time experiences will improve.

Organizations have the right intentions. They want to make a difference. They want to help. But perhaps the capability hasn’t been there, and you’re bringing this to them. So thank you for that, and thank you so much for coming on the CX Superheroes podcast. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Adam Alfia: Thank you. The best way, just go to RealTimeFeedback.com and hit us up through the contact submission form, and we’ll be more than happy to chat with you and see how we can make your organization go from good to great.

Bruce: Wonderful. Thank you, Adam. Take care.

Adam Alfia: All right. Thank you.