Author: Lexi Emmons

Human-Centric Service: Only Connect

On By Lexi EmmonsIn Customer ExperienceLeave a comment

Human-Centric Service: Only Connect

Dreamforce 2019 Reflections

Dreamforce 2019 is wrapping up and I’m in a coffee shop taking a moment to collect my breathe, thoughts, and feelz. It’s been an awesome week of challenging ideas and inspirational vision. These are the things I’ll be keeping close to heart as I finish out the year and look toward 2020.

Voice is the New Must Have

“It’s time to do more with voice,” Is the rallying cry of this idea. It’s convenient to think that customers exclusively want to communicate with us through our lowest cost channels. In reality, our customers want to connect with us all the time, across multiple channels. Email, Chat, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… and yes, they would like to pick up the phone and talk us.

Is it surprising? When you asks someone what they love about a conference, how often do they share how much they love being able to talk to people. Our customers want to talk to us. It’s time we stop deflecting them and engage. Do more with voice.

Augmented Intelligence will Beat AI

That said, no one wants to talk about resetting a password. If your voice channels only activates when something has gone wrong and you need to mitigate an issue, you miss the value add of human connection. While AI is getting better all the time, AI has inherent weaknesses that are showing. Better than either AI or personnel solving a problem alone is the two working together. Using Cloud Telephony, real-time transcription, and Einstein, Salesforce demonstrated the power of AI / Phone Consultant collaboration. Einstein listens and serves up the relevant information based on the context of the conversation, leaving consultants free to listen, empathize, and connect with customers. The approach lets computers do what computers do well, and people do what people do well.

Invest in Developing your People

This elevates our Consultants roles and value in our organization. We don’t need to staff bays of people to translate human speech to text and conduct searches. Tech got there. Now, our Consultants can focus on the more rewarding and value add work of connecting with customers. But the agent that you recruited, trained, and rewarded for being fast at translating voice to text isn’t skilled for their new world. The need the training in emotional intelligence. They need support in trusting AI to do its job without feeling threatened. They need recognized for connecting with customers. If we don’t guide this transformation, we will drag them kicking and screaming to the hurt of everyone. Their new role: “Only Connect”.

All this falls under the umbrella of Human-Centric service. It gets to ideas I’ve not been able to encapsulate in a single term before. As a customer, I’m not an account number, and I’m not a persona. I am an individual at a unique time and place. The customer who calls you will never call you again. The next time you talk with them they’ll be a different version of themselves with a different context. Whomever they are when they reach out to you and whatever their context, they need to be at the center of their conversation with you. They need you to connect.

Human-Centric Service: Only Connect.

Getting Ahead: I Volunteer

On By Lexi EmmonsIn Getting Ahead, LeadershipLeave a comment

My grandfather was a Seabee in the Korean War. When I was eleven, we were on a long car trip together wandering dirt roads in farmland Oklahoma. He told me the one rule and phrase that got him where he wanted was, “I Volunteer”.

“Didn’t you get a lot of assignments you didn’t want though?” I asked. He smiled. “Yes, at first. I cleaned a few latrines. But I worked hard and did it well. When my commanding officers saw that I would volunteer and do the work, they started making sure I was in the path of more desirable work. I learned new things, and they paid attention to my interest.”

It seemed like an unreasonable idea to me. My curiosity got the better of me though, so I tried.

“We need someone to work the closing shift.”

I volunteer.

“We need someone to be on the escalation line.”

I volunteer.

“We need someone to take on this messy and difficult project.”

I volunteer.

The opportunities grew my experience quickly. I got to interact with decision makers and players I would have otherwise never met. I made friends, some of them lifelong. I found people who would champion me. “I volunteer” led to my first major promotion.

I cleaned my share of latrines along the way. I got taken advantage of. Other people took credit for my hard work. But on balance, “I volunteer” has paid out. It’s a bet I’ll still take today.

“We have a project that…”

I don’t need to hear the rest.

I volunteer.

How We Tell the Story

On By Lexi EmmonsIn LeadershipLeave a comment

I sat beside my six year old son in his hospital bed. It was 2 am. He was wide awake. From his perspective, the day had been a long nap followed by the euphoria of pain medication. He was hungry. Twenty-Four hours since he had anything substantial. But with digestion still on hold from the anesthesia, he was only allowed Sprite. 

My son has never been one for moderation when sugar is involved. He kept slamming back the Sprite as fast as he could get the nurses to bring it. His third glass in, the nurse slowed him down. I knew something wasn’t right. His little belly was distended. Giving him fluid had not started his system processing again as hoped. I held his hand as he went from giddy to woozy. 

And then, he erupted. I’ll spare you the worst of the details. Let’s just say I had no idea how much would fit in a six year old’s stomach. I grabbed the nearby trash can to try to hold back my little Mt. Vesuvius. It did little good. His bed, his gown, his mom… we were all victims of  pyroclastic Sprite spewing from his belly.. 

And now, finished with the event, he looked up at me. It was the briefest of moments in which the volume of questions on his face matched the volume of destruction in the room.

“Am I in trouble?”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Are you mad?”

“Am I alright?”

All translating to the one question his six year old self needed help with.

“Mom, what story do I tell about what just happened.” 

I smiled. “Wow, you just made a Sprite Volcano!” He laughed. I laughed with him as I began cleaning him up. He mimed the performance again for the nurse who came to help. Over the next three days it was the story he recounted for everyone who visited him. Not a story of pain, or of fear, but one of Sprite everywhere.

"How we tell the story matters" Kintsugi

Things happen in life. But we don’t live in discreet objective facts. We live in the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Stories help us make the meaning. Stories help us remember what we shouldn’t forget. How we tell the story matters.

 For the challenges happening in your life right now, tell the story to yourself again. Only this time, you’re the hero. You’re the one on the journey. You’re the chosen one. You won’t believe it at first. You’ll slip back into “yeah buts” and negative self talk. That’s okay. It’s part of the story. The part where the hero loses hope. 

But now, you get that second wind. You find the deeper truth inside you. You turn the tide. This is your story. You get to tell it. The facts are the facts. But the story is everything else. 

How you tell the story matters. My son is 14 now. He works to become an adult, and to write his own stories. But still, I can smile at him and say “Sprite Volcano” and we laugh at the story again.

Success:Fail

On By Lexi EmmonsIn LeadershipLeave a comment

I’m on my longboard and for the first time, I can slow my pace by cutting hard back and forth. The graceful symbols I draw as I coast down the hill are the very essence of flow. I feel powerful. I look beautiful. I’m a 40+ year old woman. I’m not “supposed” to be able to do this.  People see what I do and ask in disbelief, “How do you do that?” 

“How” is simple. I fell down. 

You didn’t see the time I was cruising on my board, and saw the pothole. An error in my path finding, I couldn’t avoid it. It was going to stop my board. A heartbeat set aside for the recitation I learned from my falls in Roller Derby, and my long ago study of Judo. “Pads down first, let them take the blow. Tuck your head. Roll.” Now it’s time. Just like the plan, the pads take the brunt of it. The asphalt takes is cut, a little from my elbow, and a bruise to remember this moment by on my hip. I got back up.

In the pursuit of the hustle, people say you’re only as good as your last success. 
But that’s not right. Successes are great experiences. But failures are our educators. 
You are only as good as the last time you failed. 

The last time you failed a test, didn’t get backing for a project, got shut down in a meeting, bombed a presentation… these are all parts of the success you will inevitably achieve. Just as long as you keep getting back up.

It’s easy to see the success of others, even your own success as that spotlight moment. But that’s the refrain of the song, pleasant, but meaningless on its own. 

The failure isn’t when you weren’t successful. The failure is when you built the success.

What was the last thing you failed at? What was it in pursuit of? Right now it may hurt. You learned. 

Now, we have work to do. Get up. 

Discipline Won’t Take you That Far

On By Lexi EmmonsIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

It’s a new year. With that comes resolutions and new intentions. And with that comes the tendency to think of ourselves as fundamentally different than we are and to over-leverage the idea of discipline to get us to where we need to go.

Look, you are a disciplined person. You’re reading a blog on leadership when you could be looking at kitten videos. (Don’t do it, stay here a moment longer. The kitten videos will be there when you get done.)

The thing is, discipline is in extremely limited supply for all of us. There is a lot of cognitive psychology and neurobiology behind this, and it’s an interesting study. But the short version is every decision you make and every time you stay an impulse of yours, it taxes you. You are depleting a limited reserve of decision-making ability. It will be a little harder to make that next decision well. It will be a little harder to resist that next impulse. And that stacks up through the day with only food and sleep recharging your capacity.

If on December 10th, you had the capacity to make 100 quality decisions per day, then on January 1 you don’t have the capacity to double that. Much less the 10x required to meet the list of things you set up for yourself for the perfect year.

Rely on discipline and you ensure your failure, building a habit of failure around your intentions.
So what do you do? You know you want to make improvements in your life, but discipline won’t get you there. There are alternatives.

Passion – People do all sorts of hard things because they are passionate about them. Most of us know someone who is a long distance runner. We think of them as really disciplined people. But if you are really close to them, you know it’s not just that. They are addicts. They’ll run when it’s cold and when they are hurt, facing additional injury. Discipline doesn’t get you there. Passion does. Finding your passions is one of the hardest and most vulnerable pursuits you can undertake, but the rewards are unparalleled.

Habit – Do you remember your drive into work today? The way you put on your makeup? How you made the coffee? All these items don’t typically require you to use your decision-making ability because they fall below the cognitive threshold. You just do them. New habits are hard to form, and the difficulty is compounded when trying to learn many new habits at once. But the good news is we’ve got this one down to a science, more or less. A good place to start is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Use a little discipline to turn something into a habit and you can keep it up without all the downsides.

Design – Do you keep your phone on your nightstand beside your bed? Is it one of the first things you look at in the morning? There isn’t a right or wrong answer to that question in my opinion, but the two go together. If your phone is close to you when you wake up, you’re going to take a look at it, and that’s how your day starts. How would your life change if you put your phone in your top dresser drawer or left it in the kitchen when you went to bed?

People – When you are trying to change your behaviors, other people are dangerous and unpredictable influences, but they can be very effective allies. If you are a part of that “book” club that mainly drinks wine and no one reads the book, that’s fine. But be prepared to have a glass of wine…or four. Sign up for a volleyball team and now you’ve got 5 other people who are going to be upset with you if you bail and make them forfeit. The people you surround yourself with have a significant impact on your accomplishments. Choose who you spend time with.

These are four ideas to get you started. If you try all four, you’ll fail. Choose one. Start there. Set yourself a reminder to come back to this article in 90 days. Review how things worked for you, and pick another.

I’d wish you good luck with your 2019 goals, but you don’t need it. You need good design, good habits, people that help you improve, and passion.