This week on Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos, we’re having a fascinating conversation with Luis Angel-Lalanne, Vice President, Customer Voice at American Express. 

Luis has global responsibility for the Voice of Customer program and complaints reporting for the Global Services Group. The Voice of Customer program covers all servicing interactions and is the primary measure of customer experience success for the organization and for individual frontline colleagues. 

Throughout today’s episode, we dive into Luis’s approach to customer listening, the evolution of customer listening, using customer listening to drive change within an organization, and more.

[01:20] Getting to Know Luis – We start the conversation with a brief look at Luis’s career, which he started as an engineer and transitioned into business.

[04:12] Evolution of Customer Listening -  Luis shares his perspective on how the discipline of customer listening has changed over the years and what we can expect in the future.

[07:04] Luis’s Approach to Customer Listening – Luis shares the philosophy and the approach they follow for customer listening at Amex.

[10:11] Reporting vs. Insights – The measures implemented by Luis and his team to move away from traditional reporting and pivot toward deeper and more meaningful insights.

[13:26] Driving Change – Luis shares his perspective on how insightful information gathered via customer listening could be used to drive change within an organization.

[17:00] Journey Analytics – Luis shares his thoughts on how Amex’s approach to journey analytics and orchestration has evolved over the years.

[23:54] Future of Surveys – Luis’s perspective on the place surveys will have in the future of customer listening.

Resources:

Connect with Luis

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/luis-angel-lalanne/

Luis Angel-Lalanne on How Customer Listening is Evolving

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another week of be customer led. I'm your host bill. Staikos another special guest for you all today. Louis angel Alon is vice president for customer voice in the global services group at American express. And this is a really important conversation for us and Louis. Thank you so much for coming on the show, but before we just get to you for.

[00:01:11] Luis Angel-Lalanne: No, thanks very much.

[00:01:19] And you've got a really interesting one because you don't have the traditional background of someone who might be in this space. And I'm curious, just even understand like how. That history, that professional history of yours also kind of impacted your, your success, in the, in this role at American express to, so

[00:01:39] I was a Naval architect, so I was a yacht designer. And I did that for a few years. really liked the engineering. I liked the, the aesthetic part of yacht design. it had to be beautiful at the end of the day, but I realized I wanted to be in an industry that was more dynamic, more competitive.

[00:02:12] So I joined risk management at American express and spent 10 years there in multiple different disciplines for multiple different customer sets. But I knew from literally day one, when I joined Amex, I was always looking or wanting to create kind of a well-rounded general management career for myself.

[00:02:45] And when an opportunity came up to go build and run their compliance monitoring program, I jumped at it and it was surprisingly a good fit coming out of risk management because we were building the program. So they. An analytics background, someone who could help figure out, like, what are we going to measure?

[00:03:17] And I really enjoyed that and I really enjoyed the culture in servicing and that, that culture of needing to solve for the customer immediately. And after building the compliance monitoring program and running that for a couple of years, the opportunity came. To move to this role for customer experience, voice of customer complaint reporting, which felt like a terrific transition of, I get to keep the analytics that I like, and I've enjoyed wanting to get I've enjoyed the customer and wanting to get closer to the customer.

[00:03:47] Bill Staikos: awesome. And I love the risk management background. I was actually having a conversation with someone this morning about how do you get the voice of the customer into the boardroom? And we talked about sort of what are boarder important topics of boards, right?

[00:04:17] whether that's technology, whether that's business focus, whatever that is like. I'm just curious to hear about your perspective because part of this, this conversation is about the evolving nature of customer listening. And I want to talk about the future a little bit about as well, but just let's take a quick look, over the last couple of years and just kind of get your perspective on the change.

[00:04:53] So I moved into a role that was well-established in servicing. So I didn't need to go fight for attention. I didn't need to go prove myself and in the value of what we bring that was wellness. And accepted in R in American express that said the program had been focused on expansion and covering all the different aspects of the servicing experience across 26 markets.

[00:05:33] So as I came in, I learned in talking to different vendor partners who came knocking, I learned about the different capabilities that were out there and we thought, Hey, this is a great chance to. To explore new technologies. And so that kind of kicked off a whole revisiting and transformation of the entire program.

[00:06:06] So we can be, like I said, more dynamic and respond faster. It really moved from a kind of a process, like a very mechanical process about getting it out the door well into a much more dynamic process, really focused on listening carefully and responding to that listening. So it's been an exciting time, I think, to be in customer experience, as you think through the, the move from kind of a fixed rigid survey program to a more dynamic listening program.

[00:06:51] I said, continuing to be on

[00:07:07] Right. And by bringing data by identifying other signals that are out there, you really do get a much more fulsome picture of who your customer is and what they think about your brand and the, and the, and the product and the service that they get every day. What is your general philosophy and approach?

[00:07:29] the fairway continues to be our anchor point, and in terms of what we, what we do with our customer feedback and the importance of that anchor point is that we, that becomes metrics and goals across for our frontline folks all the way up to the top of the servicing organization.

[00:08:04] So it's not, no one's ever going to accuse us of, of it being a flavor of the month, et cetera. The other benefit to all of this is we've got. our colleagues are really experienced in it as well. So they're able to self-service and in use dashboards to really understand what they're doing. We're able to focus on deeper analytics.

[00:08:43] And then my team comes in with a more advanced analytics to really get at root cause driver analysis, things like that to really make sure that we're focused on responding to and changing processes for the customer. And probably the third thing that's been really important to us and kind of our philosophy.

[00:09:22] And then we just morphed that into kind of a random file of customer listening. We'd literally take a file from a day and say, here's. On this day, two days ago, three days ago and send it out to get people focused on listening. And, and how are we responding to customers regardless of scores, regardless of how it impacts our metrics.

[00:09:52] Bill Staikos: score. I love that one to focus on your second point for a second.

[00:10:15] Bill Staikos: How do you find the balance? Like, what do you think is the right balance and what do you have. more importantly, just, what's your advice for listeners who are trying to. Come out of this, I'm pushing out reports and there are still really big organizations that I talk to. They're like, they're still in this mode of, I create the reporting.

[00:10:46] Luis Angel-Lalanne: So this has been a really. Kind of rewarding transition. I've seen in my team since I took, I moved into this role six years ago when I moved into it, we had, we did a lot of reporting and that was a big focus, was getting the monthly reports out, but then moving to a new platform, a modern dynamic real-time platform, we were able to start to slowly shift that focus away from we produce reports.

[00:11:31] And then we went through and we. Put some special focus on training, kind of the analytics folks that support the operations leaders. so an operations leader might have a small analytics team of center head. the woman who runs the center head in Mexico, she'll have an analysts, a few analytics people.

[00:12:01] I mean, we still probably have a handful that we send out, but most of it really is now focused on deeper analytics and insights and things you can't level with that can't answer, I should say with that level one, dashboarding filtering, et cetera. And so I really feel good about that. And it makes also the job more rewarding for my team.

[00:12:26] Bill Staikos: And that must, well, obviously it, or maybe it did. I don't know, but, the skillset of the team must change and evolve as well as part of that. Right.

[00:12:47] Bill Staikos: So kudos to you and the team for having the courage to do that. and the, and the, and the foresight to do that. Cause I think that's largely what a lot of this work is going. one of the, one of the things that. I wanted to talk to you about as well as when you think about that, not just, the stuff that you're pushing out to the business, through these dashboards, but even the work that you're doing as a team, how do you focus on actionability?

[00:13:24] Actionability. and maybe in the analysis that you and the team are doing and delivering back to the business.

[00:13:42] You'll go with an analysis, you'll take it to a partner and say, oh, here's what we found about the part of the business you run. Here's the opportunities here's, what's working with. And everyone will love it. You'll walk out of that meeting and you'll think, wow, we really nailed it. no one gave us remotely bad feedback.

[00:14:08] So we definitely recognize that the gold standard is. A partner, who's going to take your information and go change their business practice because of it. And that's what we're aiming for. So some of the ways we deal with that are the first thing we'll do is we'll partner. Our colleagues, who've demonstrated a willingness and a desire to drive change using our information.

[00:14:47] And so that was. It took us a little while to realize that it's okay to not give everyone the same support because they don't, they don't all need the same thing from us. And so I think it, it fits pretty well for, for the folks who are doing a great job. They just need to understand and tweak on the margins.

[00:15:21] And then the other is a real focus on my team at having that seat at the table, are we pulled in when our business partners have a question, which is, which is nice or do what we do. We always have a seat at the table. So we're actively listening for what are they talking? And we can make connections for them and recommend things.

[00:15:55] so those are a couple of things we do, they're not necessarily easy to do. They're not always consistent, but that's the way we try to think of that. Focus on driving impact and not just, proofing reports that everyone thinks are interesting. And then does nothing

[00:16:11] Never, never an easy time for the. Louis. I want to talk to you about journey analytics and journey orchestration. It's kind of like all the rage these days, and everyone's got, right. It's the silver bullet for CX and et cetera. How are you thinking about the impact of these type of capabilities for American express?

[00:16:35] Luis Angel-Lalanne: so we're, I feel like we're where a lot of companies are in terms of expanding our view of journey. The way I think about it. Our survey historically has been a transactional survey.

[00:17:03] what happened before that interaction? What happened after, and then look at a ring that goes even wider than look at a ring that goes even wider. So. I think we're evolving from transaction out to journey almost, almost like, ring by ring further and further out. And so that's the way we've been thinking about it.

[00:17:34] How do we understand when a customer might be stuck at a certain point of a journey? So I don't know if we've cracked the code on that yet, but I feel good about this, this evolution of that we've been on for a few years of starting with that kernel of the transaction and thinking more and more broadly about the journey as, as time goes on.

[00:18:06] Done on the phone, but it could take weeks of back and forth with merchants and getting more information, and that's a survey that we recently, revised to rep to better capture what happens at the beginning of that experience and at the end. And so that's one that we have put more attention into recently, so we're still evolving.

[00:18:31] Bill Staikos: I love that, you're it. You're taking your time almost, right. At least that's what I'm hearing. So I don't want to put words in your mouth, but, because this, this, I mean, the capability is super powerful, and it can have a profound impact on your customers as well as your business.

[00:19:13] Over the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years. And maybe that's technology, maybe that's different ways of accessing, the customer's voice, accessing different signals. I'm curious just to get your perspective because, and this is where I learned to as a, as a, as a leader in this space, and I love how people are tackling the same problem in different ways.

[00:19:33] Luis Angel-Lalanne: perspective on that. The, what I see for the next few years is a couple, like a combination. Some big steps and then just a lot of continued evolution. one of the big steps we're working on right now at American express is rolling out a modeled customer sentiment, so using the actual customer's voice from the phone call, using the transcript from the words and the tone and metadata, like length of the call, crosstalk, dead airtime, and modeling that against the survey responses.

[00:20:18] And this is obviously a big step for us. We've been, like I said, it's been since 2007 that we've had the. Output in our frontline incentive, and now we want to move to a model score. So we're going to go really fully and carefully, as you would imagine, across thousands of care professionals. But the idea is start to, sensitize them to this model and we've been sharing it and the feedback has been, so I want to say, I keep wanting to say surprisingly positive.

[00:20:57] Cause the survey picks up things that happen outside of the phone call or maybe your perception of the brand, which is valuable to us in process improvement, but maybe not necessarily valuable for holding a frontline person's account accountable. And then. So the reception has been pretty, pretty positive so far from, from our front lines all the way up to leadership in the frontline that this population score is going to be a more effective measure of performance for our frontline.

[00:21:45] So I think what started as a way to get a better frontline metric is going to turn into hopefully. Or a whole structure that allows us to do much more detailed, coaching at scale. So I think that's going to be a big one and I think. Around that as technology gets better, it's going to allow us to get more granular, even with our regular insights, as we start to pull more and more data into our big data environment as omni-channel gets better and better.

[00:22:24] Is going to get better through our own experience and just through the data and technology around us getting better. So I see reliance on it, on the survey, continuing, I don't see it going to zero, but I do see us getting to a point in the future where we're going to be smarter about when do we survey, why do we need to survey?

[00:22:59] Bill Staikos: So there's a lot of just sort of clickbait articles out there, right? Like the, the depth of the survey and the survey is going away and the whole thing I agree. Where do you maybe see, I'm just curious, just to hear your, your thoughts, where do you kind of see it, maybe sticking around or having, having a place in all this?

[00:23:38] I just think with processes, continually evolving products, continually evolving. I think we'll be able to model transactions better than we'll be able to model journeys. So I think journey surveys are going to continue and I still want to find a way to get that customer voice and that feedback, how did this experience land on them and what do they have to tell us?

[00:24:14] Luis Angel-Lalanne: Cause we might be able to model, like I said, the score, but I don't think we're gonna, I think, I think we're pretty far away from me. The feedback that we'll actually get from customers,

[00:24:31] who are the leaders you admire in this space most and why?

[00:24:54] I'd always walk away thinking. I think they learned more than I did, through that. but in the CX space, The community. I love the interactions with peers, with experts, because the nice thing about what we're doing in this space is we're competing on customer experience, but we're not competing on customer experience programs, like, so it, it makes it.

[00:25:32] First principles to really understand what's going on around us. They're giving us tools to help solve our problems. I think of like max Maxie, Schmidt, Subramanian at Forester, she's one of the people, my favorite thing to say about maxi is you walk away from every conversation with her.

[00:26:08] and again, helped me feel. Kind of like fulfilled in this industry that we're in and, they've always been there for me. So I really appreciate that. Like the intelligence with the. the listening and, and like being able to connect things, which, which is just fantastic. so yeah, lots of really good people in this space and it's, it's definitely energizing

[00:26:27] I actually was, was on LinkedIn early this morning with someone actually who's new to this space, with a large pharma company. And, they were like, where do I go for? I'm like, no one is going to turn you down. if you're looking for information. you can literally ping anybody and we'll get on the phone with you.

[00:26:46] Luis Angel-Lalanne: Ah, so I think I'll answer that two ways. One is for CX and this is going to sound generic. just like the experiences around us, I always tell my team like, Like, let's be good consumers of all the surveys you get and all the experiences you get and think critically about them, you know?

[00:27:20] Helps create energy and excitement, for me. And then the other is I'll take a different approach for the second part of the Sanford. That's just kind of music. I love listening to music and one of the positives of having been working from home so long as, I can turn the, turn the music on, turn it on loud, and get my energy depending on the mood I need and what I need to get going.

[00:27:50] Bill Staikos: answer this. I love it. So I, we're, we're probably the same age kind of just looking at you.

[00:28:14] Bill Staikos: So thanks for coming.

[00:28:18] Bill Staikos: Awesome. All right, everybody. Great show this week, we're out. Talk to you sooner for

[00:28:35] Leave us feedback on how we're doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time we're out.