Infuse Agility Into Customer Experience

The Gist

• Emotion tracking. AI sentiment analysis boosts CX efforts.
• Agile approach. Fast adaptation leads to product success.
• Customer focus. Preserving familiar experiences matters.
• Quick response. Rapid feedback action boosts retention.
• Pain identification. Observing customer struggles aids innovation.
• Valued features. Customers' demands can overturn company decisions.

Editor's note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Dom Nicastro: Hello again, everyone and welcome to another edition of CX Decoded by CMSWire. I'm Dom Nicastro, managing editor for CMSWire.com. And we are joined today by my new friend who I actually met in person. It's a new world, and I get to see these human faces in person again, and it was awesome. We met a couple of weeks ago at the time of this recording in May, at the CMSWire Connect conference in Austin, Texas. And my friend is Marietta Silva Allison, principal CX leader at TurboTax. Marietta, what's going on?

Marietta Silva Allison: Hey, Dom, it's pretty decent weather here in Austin today is what's going on. I actually live in Austin. So it was a very quick commute for me to get to your conference.

Dom: Yeah. Let's see. So you said it's a good day. Does that mean the bats are alive and well and flying under that — what is it the Congress Street Bridge or something?

Marietta: It’s Congress Street Bridge. Probably the bats are alive and well. When there are lots of mosquitoes though sometimes I don't want them to be so alive and well. I mean, like great, just not by me, please. 

Dom: Yeah, I was shocked. I was shocked at the passion that the residents and natives that I met in Austin, Texas, had for these bats. This is the new Silicon Valley we're talking about. Right? Austin, Texas. This is the place where they have some of the best food in the world. We're so close to Mexico, we have all this history and culture. Yeah. But did you see our bats?

Marietta: We're a little batty for bats. It's true.

Dom: Man, well, let's get batty for CX, shall we? Yeah. So let's start here, though, you know, I know about you, because I met you a couple of weeks ago. But I would love our audience to get a little insight on the career for you and your trajectory and how you kind of ended up in this CX leadership role at TurboTax.

Marietta: I've been in CX in some way, shape or form my whole life. I kind of laugh because my first job out of college, my title was letter writer. And I responded to customer letters for the president and CEO of this bank. And this was like way back in the day when you could still smoke in the office and all that stuff, like totally Mad Men. And so it just kind of went from there.

I did a stint at what is now CoreLogic, wound up being a marketing director for them for a while, had kids, ran my own consulting business doing CX types of things for different companies, and then got back into the work world full time, like full bore in the startup space. 

And that was a whole new world for me, moving that fast. And that's really where I cut my teeth on this concept of agile CX was in that and worked for, you know, different customer success and CX roles and then got recruited by Intuit, and it popped up on my LinkedIn profile, you know, the little message pops up. And I'm like, ah, the recruiter, you know, that got this message from this recruiter out of the blue. And so I read the job description. And I'm — I replied so fast that the recruiter, are you sure did you like actually read it? I'm like, oh, yeah. Everything in here is like my dream job. You know, sign me up now, man. And so that's how it happened. 

It was the world's fastest interview process. I was actually talking to another large, really well-known company. And they were just so slow on the uptake that Intuit just beat them all hollow, rapid interview with my now boss sitting in an airport giving me the final interview. They made the offer the next day, and I have been a happy clam ever since.

Dom: Nice. Every tax year. You've been a happy clam. That's great. And how many years now? How many tax years has it been? We were speaking tax terms? OK.

Marietta: Only two tax seasons. And yes, everything is actually measured in my life, not just by the tax season, but as we call them peaks, is it first peak is it second peak? And then third peak in October when everybody finishes their extension? So are we you know, I get all my early testing done in that time period.

Agile CX: Transforming Customer Experience With Data-Based Pivots

Dom: Yeah, you talked in Austin at CMSWire Connect about that very topic, agile CX, I think that's a good place to start, you know, how would you define agile CX I'm sure people in the business world obviously know the term “agile” but when you apply to CX, what are you talking about there?

Marietta: it actually applies very closely adhering to the principles that the original dudes who came up with the Agile Manifesto for software development, it really applies to that. So it used to be, you'd have your big marketing plan, and you would execute on it to heaven and earth to be able to move things quickly. 

In contrast, in agile, I'm going to really found on what my customers problem is, but I'm going to operate really, really quickly. So just like in software development, where they tend to operate now, you know, if you're an agile organization, it's the same thing and CX, so I can have a plan, right, but I'm going to break it up into bite-sized chunks. 

And if I'm going along, and the data comes back differently, or, you know, something indicates that I need to take a different direction. I can pivot extremely rapidly, like sometimes daily, I can pivot which way I'm going. So we had a recent campaign that is related to one of our additional products. And we met every single day, we met with our partners who were running the experts, most of our product experts are not employees, but they're seasonal employees. 

And so we have some partners that we've worked with for many, many years and understand our needs. And we have repeat people come back season after season after season. So we met with them. I'm meeting with learning and development, we're interviewing the experts, we’re listening in on customer phone calls, we're tweaking training as we go, I actually came up with some TikToks, some roleplay. To address different needs, there's really it's a super fast, really quick process, where you're checking the data, every single day, here's where we think we want, you know, we're aiming at landing, here's where we actually are landing, is it better or worse baseline? What changes do we need to make? 

And so in a matter of four weeks, we ran through a complete experiment process. And actually, I'm working with the design team to implement some tooling inside our CRM, because we're going to roll this to baseline across our organization come October. So that's super fast, not how it used to be.

Related Article: Agility Is No Longer Optional in Business

Turning Giant Corporations Agile: It Starts with People and Speed

Dom: Yeah, four weeks is like four seconds in the business world, like you're trying to get people convinced on something that the data is telling you about your customers. And that takes four months sometimes. Right? I mean, I'm sure you've been at businesses before this, where you're like, oh, this would have taken me a half a year.

Marietta: Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. And that really is a change in perspective. And that if you're going to do agile, you're not going to have it all nailed down, like 70% certainty. Woohoo, let's move. And that was a real shift for me. Moving from more of a standard corporate mindset, I was in banking forever. OK, you know, so it was like, everything was so tightly controlled. There’s a lot of nos. It's very much command and control structure. Super customer oriented, very command and control. 

So I go from that into startup world, run this series of very agile companies. And then I think, Oh, well, it's probably going to slow down when I go down to it. Whoa, this is the fastest, biggest 40-year old startup I’ve ever been in. There is no waiting around, which both makes it really fun and can be a challenge if it's not a type of working style that you're used to. 

And even though I was used to moving fast, this was still even faster, right? One-hundred days in the tax season. I have a very limited time to get a lot of goodness in. And so even for myself, I had to go oh, I can't wait till next week. I have to do this today before I can leave my desk, I have to get this done, I have to get this data, I have to get analyze it, I have to decision, I have to get my stakeholders on board. Whereas before I could be like, I got a couple of weeks to do that.

Dom: So getting to the point where you can make at this big corporation, this big startup, if you will, you can make decisions that are impactful, but also take only about a month to do maybe even less, two weeks, let's say, how do we get to that point, because people in the crowd at CMSWire Connect when you were giving this talk, I'm sure they're like, hey, we want to be agile, too. But we have all these blockers and this, there's always excuses of not to start. So my question to you is you've done it successfully with your teams. Where do you start? Like, where's the first place? Is it the people? Is it the hiring? Is it the tools to infuse this agility into your organization.

Marietta: So if you have the ability, if you're situated in your organization, where you can drive agility from the top down, there's one set of answers. And if you are in a place where you're going to have to drive agility from the bottom up, so to speak, there's another set of answers, but they both truly start in the same place. And that's with people. If you have people who are going to be resistant to moving fast, you can't train that out of them. 

And I had long conversations with one of my CEOs who had worked in different large insurance companies that run operations for USAA. And it was such a, I would still I would walk on broken glass for this guy, Steve, I love you. He’s so awesome. Love you, Steve. We talked about this a lot because he had an experience where they tried to change the culture of an organization to be agile, and it went so far as to create almost a mirror organization. And the original Goliath eventually ate the small David. So he was really depressed about that, how can I ever change culture, if it's created in that way, I can't push it forward. And so if you find if you're a leader, and you're in an organization, where you're trying to, to turn the ship of state, there will be people who are ready, and they are ready to go with you. And then there will be other people that you'll need to put in places where they're going to be happy. And limited. Or, you know, maybe I hate to say it, but maybe it's not a fit for them in the long term. And that really is a case by case basis for each individual company. 

If you're going to get your hiring profile right, you want people who are going to be really empathetic and customer oriented and have extreme ownership. Because with agile, everything that you do isn’t going to come down from above. I think about it, we talked about the neural networks in AI and how you have this self organizing almost group of nodes, right. And that's what agile is, in a company that does it well. 

So it means as a leader, I can't control everything. I'm going to make my North Star, very clear. I'm going to make sure I have the right people. And maybe I need to do a personality test. I think it was Office Depot. But iI could be wrong, who was trying to change some culture. had everybody in the company do a Myers Briggs, and found that most people were saying, you know, answering the question like no, I don't want to work with customers, who are their frontline people. That's all I got.

Related Article: Failing at Agile? You're Doing It Wrong

Agile Failures and Successes: Key Metrics for Fast-Paced CX Strategies

Dom: That's what we look for in a in a in a job interview. And the guy says, Hey, you owe this whole customer thing. I'm not going to quite do that part of the job, but I'll do anything else.

Marietta: Yeah, I'll do it. Right, right. So it's like no, like, of course, you don't necessarily want your engineers customer facing, but you want them to be able to understand the customer pain or problems or whatever that drives it. So if you've got you know, your North Star, you've looked at your people. And then you have to make it safe to experiment and to learn and that means to fail.

Dom: Yeah. And so, you know, we're talking about agile being great and good all the time. However, do you have any examples of like, moving too fast? Maybe like, right, like, yeah, you know, like, hey, it's great that we rolled this TikTok campaign out in 24 hours. But how did it do? Right? If you can think of any examples like that, that'd be great. Because there’s cautions here, this cautionary tales, I'm sure.

Marietta: Yeah, we were anxious to move a proactive experience where we were offering help to customers that at times, we thought they needed it. And it made sense, you know, the face of it, of course, but we moved quick, I'm gonna guess we didn't do the in depth, follow me homes and customer research, we were super, super fast. And when we got to the end of it, we put a lot of resources, we staffed it, specially. I had special cues and specially trained experts and changed our learning and development programs, and how we handled next best action guidance. And we got to the end of the season. And when all that was a bust. Like, like that didn't do anything. And so in the retro it's why, why did that not do anything? And what were the surprise was is it was a bust? But it's not a bust, and that we got some really good learnings out of it. Don't do that things that way.

Dom: Yeah, you have the model of failure. And because you were able to use Sprint's use agile so fast that you rolled it out and said, All right, well, it didn't work. Next time, we're going to maybe change it up a little bit. So yeah, so you have that data now?

Marietta: Yeah. Why don't we actually did change it up during the season? Well, let's tweak this thing. And see, no. We're humans are funny creatures. Sometimes we get it wrong.

Dom: Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes the data just gives you the answer. Right? So those metrics, like what are the primary metrics you're staring at, you know, each day to help infuse and empower your agile methodologies? What are you looking at mostly? What type of tool are you using to get all this great data from all these consumers using TurboTax. And the other properties?

Marietta: Well, my favorite most used metric, I should say, is NPS. And that is both on a transactional level, as well as when you finish using the product. We also collect some sentiment data in the middle of the experience that we've leveraged very effectively, and there's even more goodness to get in there. And we're, I'm, you know, looking at expanding that we use it some is to expand more into the customer effort score, and then partner that with emotional AI, to really give what I think will be a tight retention indicator that I can get in front of, you know, taxes are emotional. I know we like to think it's just number and sense, but they're really emotional, and some very deep and negative emotions can come up.

Related Article: 20 Customer Experience Metrics Critical for Your Business

Emotional AI in Practice: Harnessing Facial Mapping & Voice Analysis

Dom: That number that the top left of the TurboTax screen is scary. Okay. Sometimes it makes you happy. Sometimes it makes you nervous. I mean, you're right. It's that emotional connection to that number. And as you're going along what it's doing and the ups and downs, right? I've been using TurboTax for almost 10 years now. And you know that you probably checked it before you got on the podcast.

Marietta: No, no, that’s private, Dom.

Dom: That's right. I'm just a number. My social, by the way, is .... So tell me, tell me, but it's like, you're right. And something you said I wanted to jump in because you said emotional AI. So I want to know what that looks like in practice, because it's all the buzz obviously. So when you are leveraging emotionally I what does that look like? What does that mean?

Marietta: So still in the process of it. So I don't have a lot of data. This is my passion project right now, way, way back. I looked into this, like in 2015. When these models were just getting off the ground, but what it looks like and there are several companies who excel at this and they all have a little different spin on it. So they can use facial mapping. They can use voice analysis that focuses on tone and resonance and literally what vibration are you at? There are ones that you can really get into If you're gonna do this, like in an experimental level where you can hook people up to things that measure the moisture in their skin and their heart rate, all of that stuff that really invasive level of emotional monitoring has been around for some time. But it's only been used in panels or specific cases where somebody has said, yes, yes, you can do this to me, right. 

But at scale, what it can look like is, I'm going to listen to what you're saying and how you're saying it, if you dial in, I'm going to analyze what you select, we actually ask people in that product, how you feeling? And then we give them the opportunity to tell us, right, and it's the smiley frowny face kind of thing. And then if they want to give us more information, there's little pills that they can click on as to why or they can leave us verbatim. And then we actually call those people back. Not all of them, not all of them, that would be a lot. We do have different standards as to what is actionable and what is not actionable. We actually call them back to say, Hey, we got your survey, that you're not feeling so great about your taxes, can I support you in any way? And people are like, what you're kidding me? Wow.

Dom: You should partner up with Johns Hopkins or something, you know, you gotta have some therapeutic services from the best of the business. After you do taxes, everyone needs a little therapy. Instead, you have your wonderful contact center, people calling, which is they do a great job, too. I would imagine,

Marietta: You know, I because of my job and probably for you to most people in this CX space, though we love, love, love all the kudos. It's where we have our failures that are opportunities to make that difference. So I dig into that, but our experts, when we actually have a connection with a customer, because clearly we don't talk to everybody, not everybody calls us I mean, goodness, I was a TurboTax customer for something like 20 years before I called in, I just didn't need to call. It was pretty easy. Which is the ideal, right?

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Proactive CX Approach Can Boost Retention

Dom: Yeah. That’s pretty proactive CX, that's pretty powerful. You don't hear that a lot where, hey, we get some sentiment analysis, and we follow up with actual phone calls to these human beings. That's a pretty powerful initiative to do that. What have been the returns on that one? I mean, do you get a lot of feedback on the phone calls? Like, now you're like feedback upon the feedback kind of thing?

Marietta: Oh, yes. Not only do we analyze the recordings, right, because every phone call is monitored and recorded. Unless the customer says don't, of course, caveat. So we can analyze that we get NPS scores for the interaction with the expert after that. And we leverage all that to say, Hey, are we on target? Are we not? So we had a goal before this project was launched, which we exceeded. So it had about a 5% increase in retention for those who were included in it. Right. So obviously, we’ve expanded and it’s still going on.

Dom: Cool. So what's the moment of relief for you guys? You get the extension season?

Marietta: Oh, man. That's a good question. I had thought of my first season, right? It's like, Rudy, you said, All Marietta, you know, we all get to relax a little bit. You take a breath after season. And it ends, you know, the April filing deadline comes and goes, Man, it hasn't slowed down yet, Rudy. It's like the false peak when you're a runner and you think you hit the top? No, no, this is not the top yet because as soon as season ends, then everyone dives in to indices and learnings. 

What did we learn? What surprised us? What questions did we think we're going to get answered but didnt? But those are actually my two favorite things from retros. And then maybe, you know, maybe a little bit in June and July, people take vacation. The crazy thing, though, is that for as fast as you work, it's fun. Because you see, this is the beauty of agile you see very quickly the impact that you had as a one human that you have on how people all got their job done of taxes, right? So you literally made a difference in a very tangible way to people's lives. That feels great because that's what gets me up in the morning. And then you also see how it benefited the company overall. So it's a win-win, there's something fun about getting scrappy.

Related Article: Is Your Organization’s Digital Customer Experience Proactive or Reactive?

Agile CX Approach Launches New TurboTax Feature in Two Weeks

Dom: I would say so yeah. If you could think of the ultimate example of where agile kicked in for you guys. And you know, whether it was a few years ago this year, where something told you that you needed to adapt pretty fast. And I know you told us a little bit earlier, some stories, some anecdotes, but is there that one that stands out for you? And if so, if there's that one shining moment, where it kind of all came together? And how did you get to that point? Is there a moment like that for you in your CX team?

Marietta: For me, personally, it really was doing, launching that mid-product survey experience. First, I thought, Oh, I had a couple of months to do it. I was brand spanking new, I got a couple of months. And then I looked on a spreadsheet, my name showed up. And I realized, oh, I don't have a couple of months, I have four, I have four weeks, OK? And then I readjusted my perspective, and I thought, well, I bet I can beat that. So I launched it in two weeks, I got off the ground and VP. And I do remember the moment where it flipped inside me. And I was like, I don't care whose job it is, I'm gonna fill the gap. I'm going to ping the project manager, I'm going to talk to the partner, I'm going to make it happen, I'm going to own this thing. 

And I do remember pulling my boss and my director, and Monday morning when I realized like, oh, we have a little bit of time. I just looked at him. And I said, I'm committed to beating this deadline. So let's get aligned and make it happen. And it was a blast. But agile into it. Oh my goodness, that that goes back, honestly, to the very beginning with Scott Cook, they've really always worked that way before agile was the thing they worked that way, if you look and Scott Cook's original business plan, he's like measuring the data. Here's, here's what we're aiming for, for timesavers because Quicken was the original product, here's where we're going. 

And then they worked and worked and worked, they solve the big hairy problem, got the MVP out there. And it was incredibly fast that they became the market leader. And how what had happened was they had a home product that they were asking people, how are you utilizing this product at that, you know, like Where where are you utilizing it. And people kept saying they were using it at work. And they thought, well, they must be doing their personal finances in the office or something, have a home office, and found out that that wasn't the case. It was a bunch of regular people, small business owners who didn't understand debit and credit accounting. So they used, you know, the Intuit product. And out of the curiosity of why are people saying that the expansion, all the various products that Intuit has created and built over the years really came from those principles that Scott Cook laid out, probably when I was a child.

Balancing Agile Innovation with Consistency in Customer Experience

Dom: Right? I think this kind of brings everything together this question, you know, because there's always the balancing act of the desire to roll things out fast and be quick and be ahead of competitors, with the urge to stay with the tried and true that your data tells you works every year. So I guess to kind of bring it all home, how do you go about balancing that need for agility, and experimentation with maintaining all that consistency and continuity in the customer experience that your consumers and prospects have come to expect?

Marietta: Yeah, when you read a newspaper, you can read any newspaper across the US. And they're all going to have the same basic serif font with a large cap that tells you this is the beginning of the paragraph. And they're all going to have the same basic typesetting and you probably don't notice it, or you probably do, Dom, but most people don't notice it. 

It's almost invisible. But it's very purposeful. And it has trained us. It's like the grammar, or the etiquette of how newspapers work, and Apple did the same kind of thing, they came up with this etiquette, well, Intuit has this internal product etiquette that everything has to adhere to. So we keep it in that space for customers. 

So when you come in, you don't go, oh, my you totally redone everything, I can't find the button anymore. Right? So that's very intentional, and the customer focus that is embedded at every level, like, you can hardly have a business meeting without saying, what's the customer problem we're solving, let's get crisp on that. What is the thing and it's truly incorporated in everything. So in that process, where you're prototyping with customers, you're observing them, you're keeping yourself out of the process, you're really truly observing how they get the job done of doing taxes, you see, if they compensate for something, that to them, that seems really natural and logical, you know, how they're doing it. 

And you know, it's like five steps that they don't need to do. So we get in front of that stuff that pain. And we do, ask ourselves, what will the impact be on the customer? Will they have to do anything different? Are they gaining? Are they going to in any way lose any functionality or capability, or anything that they're used to having? So there was a product that people use to track their donations and different things like that expenses, and it's a little freebie, and we were gonna sunset it. We didn't think it drove that much value. Boy, we heard back.

Dom: That's the best customer experience test right there. Take something away, and really see what your feedback you get you. Sometimes you solicit feedback, right? You email them, you call them, you make them do a survey. Well, hey, let's just good old fashioned, rip it apart, and then see what happens. 

Marietta: Well, we just said, Hey, we're gonna take it away.

Dom: Oh, OK. You want?

Marietta: Yeah, yeah, that that ended very quickly. And it's still there to this day operating away. Happily. 

Developing Successful CX Strategies

Dom: Yeah. And that's probably an example of, like you said earlier, we didn't take ourselves out of it. We saw something that we think needed to go away because it wasn't provided. I'm sure the analytics were there. Right, the ROI wasn't there. You know, that kind of thing. But you had that customer demand, nope, nope, nope? No, keep it and you're like, okay,

Marietta: OK. Yes, ma'am. 

Dom: Got it. 

Marietta: Exactly.

Dom: I love it. Well, I am so appreciative of not just this podcast, but being with us at CMSWire Connect in Austin. That was a lot of fun. Meeting you was awesome. You were very interactive in the sessions I saw you attend. 

So we just can't thank you enough for letting us opening the doors to your CX world. And into it and sharing all these practical real-life examples that I know, fellow CX leaders are going to get a lot out of. So, Marietta, great job, and thanks so much. 

Marietta: You're welcome. My pleasure, Dom.

Dom: I do want to give you one more opportunity to just share a little bit about you know, any thought leadership you're doing where people can follow you. Are you going to be speaking in any more conferences? Heck, even if it's a competitor? Go ahead. Say it? I don’t care.

Marietta: I don't have any more speaking engagements planned. Yeah. So you can follow me on LinkedIn. I hope you put my link on this podcast somewhere. And yeah, I love to connect to other thought leaders in the CX space. You never know what you learn.

Dom: Absolutely. Well, thanks for sharing your learnings with our audience at CX Decoded on CMSWire. And thanks, everybody, for listening. Have a great one, everybody, we'll see you on the next episode.

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