Stephanie Kent, Customer Services Director at Spotler: “Listen to the customer, understand their objectives and deliver the right solution to meet their needs”

Remember when tag clouds were the next big thing? When you couldn’t read a LinkedIn post without a graphic at the top dominated by one word writ large? Well, if there was a tag cloud for our interview with Stephanie Kent, Customer Services Director at Spotler, it would have one word at its centre: Customer.

For have no doubt, Stephanie places customers right at the heart of all her decisions.

“My message to my team is to always take ownership of problems, to listen to the customer, understand their objectives and challenges and to deliver the right solution to meet their needs,” Stephanie explains in our interview below. And that means embracing technology, whether it’s WhatsApp or rolling out chatbots enabled with the latest AI.

The end result of this should be obvious: improved retention rates, happier customers, greater profits for the business. If those three things sound good, read on for Stephanie’s advice on how to achieve them.

Related reading: Omotenashi in digital customer engagement: openness and sincerity through first-party data

Could you please introduce yourself to our audience? What motivated you to pursue a career in customer experience, and how did you embark on your journey in this field?

I started my career with more of a sales focus in recruitment and then within global account management at Vodafone for 13 years. My passion was for customers and delivering solutions to solve problems and delight customers, which steered me away from a commercial position and more toward leading Customer Success teams focused on Service & Delivery.

For the last six years, I have been at SpotlerGroup, a Marketing Automation and Customer Experience Software group of companies – as the Customer Service Director, running teams, managing projects and implementing new methodologies and processes to reduce churn and improve our relationships and tenure with our customer contracts.

What are your thoughts on the escalating integration of AI in customer experience and its potential influence on the future of customer service at large?

For us right now we are researching the effectiveness of AI in two key ways. Implementing an AI chatbot within Customer Support to speed up the process of delivering the right information to our customers and reduce the need for human intervention, and secondly to predict a customer’s email sending and web behaviour so we can help them improve their ROI.

How do you ready yourself for an AI-driven landscape as a customer experience leader? What new skills do you need?

Our new SpotlerGroup acquisition of CrossEngage drives us closer to being at the forefront of delivering AI-driven technology to our customers, but in a meaningful way that will increase their ROI and deliver true value to the customer

What core values have played a pivotal role in shaping your approach to customer experience?

Being customer-obsessed and data-driven means we strive toward gaining actionable insights to improve our processes and our retention of customers. Our focus is very much on reporting on CSAT, NPS, retention and revenue, and continuously improving the methodologies and our approach toward customers at all times.

What major hurdles have you encountered as a customer experience leader, and how did you surmount them?

The SpotlerGroup has now acquired over 15 different organisations within the Digital Marketing and Customer Experience industry, and as such the challenges come to migrate mass volumes of customers to our premium technology. This alone presents its challenges with different features and customer contracts, but our focus has always been on communicating clearly, making the path for the customer seamless and personal and delivering them success along the way.

What piece of advice would you offer to fellow customer experience professionals that has been particularly beneficial to you personally?

My message to my team is to always take ownership of problems, to listen to the customer, understand their objectives and challenges and to deliver the right solution to meet their needs. In addition and in accordance with our company values it is imperative to work together as a team and to share insight along the way for others to learn and gain insight.

What customer experience technology has your company recently embraced and what difference has it made to your business?

We’re implementing WhatsApp for Business as a new communication channel with our customers across support, which is part of our own SpotlerGroup software Obi4Wan, as well as a chatbot to improve the response time and reduce the need for human intervention.