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6-steps-for-Conversational-Bot-success-A-primer 

Make the most of your conversational bot investment with our easy-to-follow guide featuring best practices that can be applied to your digital transformation journey.

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(Featured) 6-steps-for-Conversational-Bot-success-A-primer

Six steps for conversational bot success: A helpful primer for chatbot implementation

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Driving efficiency with digital automation for a financial services brand

Discover how TELUS International implemented a comprehensive intelligent automation
solution for a financial services client that enabled operational efficiency, a
reduction in employee effort and an overall increase in customer satisfaction.

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Artificial intelligence is set to define the future of banking. Learn about how banks are using machine learning, RPA and other AI-powered tech.

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Six AI technologies set to define the future of banking

Protecting your company's reputation in an evolving digital world isn't always easy. Between cyberattacks, phishing, fraud and other harmful behaviors, companies have a lot of ground to cover when it comes to preserving their brand.

These concerns are often compounded when working with a customer experience (CX) provider. Not only do you need to ensure that your brand promise is met in an outsourced environment, but also that your customer and company data is protected.

When selecting a customer experience provider, risk mitigation should be a top consideration. The right partner will make sure you're covering every angle to care for the security of both your brand and your customers — at every touchpoint.

What should you look for in an outsourcing provider?

When it comes to customer experience outsourcing, brands typically have two primary concerns: preserving customer data, and keeping all systems that might compromise operations tight as a drum, says Steve Jablonski, vice-president of information security at TELUS International. These concerns are often driven by an idea that outsourcing some aspects of your business means giving up control — but that's not the case when the right checks and balances are in place.

Companies and their outsourcing partners need to set clear parameters about how to proactively prevent harm, and how to respond if it ever occurs. Setting a strong communication foundation in your outsourcing relationship enables your brand to work in concert with your partner to avoid and mitigate risk. With that at the core, here are three additional factors to consider when assessing an outsourcing partner.

Training: Team members are the first line of defense

With both online reputation management and protecting customer data, organizations frequently wonder where to begin. The answer is: start with employees. Team members are often the first line of defense against security breaches and ever-present bad actors. "Think of your CX team as a human firewall," says Jablonski. "You have to prepare your customer care representatives for battle by providing them with comprehensive training."

Rather than taking a one-and-done approach to customer service training, partners should treat it as an ongoing process, every part of which can strengthen and enhance the customer care team. As threats become more sophisticated and ill-intentioned parties find new ways to infiltrate your defenses, it's important that your team's knowledge base has comparably advanced documentation.

That said, it isn't just outsiders that are cause for concern. When assessing a CX outsourcing partner, businesses often want to know what's being done to mitigate insider risk and to keep employees from jeopardizing the system. While it's smart to ask questions related to brand loyalty and engagement, you should also consider whether teams are being sufficiently trained to prevent all manner of attacks and breaches, adds Jablonski.

Outsourcing partners must have processes in place to mitigate risk from internal and external individuals intent on committing a crime and innocent insiders who fall victim to phishing links. Phishing simulations and security awareness training are useful protocols in a world where threats are subtle and ever-changing. Team members should also know what to do if they suspect a colleague is acting nefariously. Training employees to recognize patterns is crucial, Jablonski says, "because you can't always get ahead of the threat."

Technology: Taking advantage of economies of scale

According to recent research conducted by TELUS International and Statista, leaders named data security and compliance as the number one challenge impeding their digital customer experience goals in 2023. The same research found that transparency and data security were considered the most important qualities for an outsourcing provider.

Collaborating with the right digital CX partner can provide brands with access to best-in-class software with the proper security checks. "There needs to be solid due diligence when buying secure software," Jablonski says of outsourcing partners. "Robust patching, internal scans and penetration testing should occur on a regular basis." A good outsourcing partner not only does everything in its power to safeguard your company; it also takes the pressure off brands to identify and invest in the new technologies needed to deliver a secure and scalable CX.

Put security management processes under the microscope

Outsourcing providers should be investing in market intelligence to stay on top of potential threats. Jablonski suggests that the right partner will "leverage paid and public intelligence to stay current. Your provider should always be collecting information and taking action." They should also have a strong network in place for sharing brand and industry information, he adds.

Look for a partner that prioritizes security at all levels and makes a point of obtaining their third-party certifications demonstrating their commitment to protecting brands like yours. Regulatory compliance and certifications like ISO27001 offer a solid foundation for cybersecurity. NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the U.S. Department of Commerce, is a good resource for publications, reports and other information about the standardization process, while the NIST 800-53 framework serves as a comprehensive guide to strategies, systems and controls that businesses should employ based on risk, cost and an organization's capabilities. Other options include industry-specific certifications, like HITRUST in the healthcare space.

Regardless of the approach your outsourcing partner opts to take, key controls like multi-factor authentication and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) should be standard. Consider your potential partner's stance on working from home and bring your own device (BYOD) management, too. From data leakage to loss and infection, related policies should be treated with the utmost caution and care.

Above all else, when selecting an outsourcing partner you should aim to find a company that values your brand and customers as much as you do. "Your customers are our customers," says Jablonski of TELUS International's mindset. A quality outsourcing partner should share your commitment to defending against threats, while also working to improve your customer experience.

Risk mitigation should be a top consideration when selecting an outsourcing partner. Learn what to look for to ensure your brand is protected.

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protecting brand

Protecting your customers and brand in an outsourced environment

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TELUS International, in partnership with Statista, surveyed 250 enterprise leaders to explore where they plan to invest in digital customer experience (CX) technology in 2023. Uncover the results.

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Survey results: Digital customer experience priorities for leaders in 2023

The digital world continues to shift rapidly. Discover what's next for content moderation to help you navigate the changes in this evolving industry.

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What's next for content moderation in 2023 and beyond?

On this episode of TELUS International Studios, we’re joined by Ante Spittler, co-founder and CEO of Moss. The company offers an all-in-one solution for intelligent spend management, with the aim to be the leading financial management platform for businesses across Europe.

Tune in to hear the origin story of Moss and how it was born from a passion to resolve common painpoints in the customer experience. Ante also shares insight in how fintech is evolving, key driving factors and the impact of regulations on the industry. Go on, give it a listen!

To learn more about TELUS International and our digital CX solutions, contact us today.

Intro: TELUS International Studios where customer experience meets digital transformation.

Patrick Haughey (PH): Welcome to TELUS International Studios. I’m your host Patrick Haughey. And on today’s episode we’re talking fintech. Specifically, the recent changes and challenges that modern fintechs are bringing to traditional banking. As the needs and expectations of consumers and businesses continue to change and evolve. Our guest is Ante Spittler, co-founder and CEO of Moss. Moss is a digital spend managemet platform for businesses of varying sizes, and they’re exploding across Europe with very impressive growth. Ante starts off the conversation telling us a little bit about Moss and their own customer experience approach. Let’s have a listen:

One of the big things we talk about on TELUS International Studios is the world of customer experience and how you interact with your partners, your clients, how you win business and how you help them succeed in partnership with you. So does that form a big part of what you do and your strategy?

Ante Spittler (AS): 100%. Like absolutely. And you can break it down, as you said, in different elements, right? It’s almost like how you look at the lifecycle of a customer. But it’s also how you look at the lifecycle of your employees starting from before they like, engage with us, up until the point when they maybe even leave us and trying to, of course, like shape this journey. So it’s definitely like probably one of the most important instruments and points of view, because otherwise you always end up in this very silo focus. And with this, there will be wrong decisions, that’s for sure.

PH: Well, what has your experience been? Have you just for anyone listening? Are there some key watch outs in the sort of journey you’ve had? Is there a mistake you’ve made that where you to do it again, you would do it differently?

AS: Yeah. Like, we have done hundreds mistakes, but one that we cured, for example, in this, with this company versus probably the last company put a very strong focus on the people’s side and especially the initial team that’s joining us like from the very first days. We focused on bringing in experienced people with a fairly high level of like professional education, but also like very high level of like understanding the problem in depth, almost like sector experts. And with this, we just ended up having a very strong SWAT team. They could do both — manage and build at the same time. And that, of course, also attracted the right people in the next wave, right? Because ultimately, your hiring becomes decentralised is not only one person, it hires it like a number of people, the people they know who are strong from their own network, just fuel referral based hires. So it’s almost like it starts from the beginning, but eventually it has a huge spill over into the whole organisation.

PH: Well, as you move from that start-up phase into a more up phase and scale-up mindset, has your approach to customer experience adapted and evolved?

AS: So it like there is always this discussion around when does marketing hand over to sales? When does sales handover to operations? Is it with application or sign up? Is it before or later? And we had to figure it out. It was a process and we changed it. So, for example, the first phase of customer onboarding was pulled out of the sales organization and is now a customer success organisation that’s quite separate and it has a couple of other KRs on top. At the same time, we’ll probably also be experiencing if part of this journey, maybe even go back to sales, the commercial development. And it’s a never ending process. So quite clear that this is something that needs to be managed really well because it will spill over into NPS, into retention, into engagement like all these elements of our product.

PH: And have you brought in any types of technology or certain programs to assist you and to enhance your customer experience operations?

AS: Yeah. So generally speaking, all processes are tool enabled. We have so many tools. It’s crazy. Like I’m pretty sure that every company or tech company or less tech company with more than a hundred employees, will have 50 plus subscriptions for tech tools. And what we decided on is a plug in like basic customer relationship management tools as a baseline. And we decided to use Salesforce on that side. There is other options which probably also make sense in other cases. And then on top of that, we have extended basically the offering by other tools or have bought tools on top that connect. And that’s how our entire customer journey is managed, including the commercial process, but then also the operations piece that comes later. I would be lying if I would know all of these tools, it’s just not my daily bread and butter.

PH: Yeah, well, you can only do so much. And you mentioned sort of the fact that there’s now many different departments and people and what — you’re trying — to have to try and avoid silos and kind of keep a consistency of communications across the company. And how do you also like you mentioned all the software tools and the various pieces of technology you have? Is that also a challenge is to try and keep them somehow connected and have a broadly working in tandem with each other?

AS: Yeah, I think it’s a huge challenge in how I can advertise Moss a little bit on one element. And then we’re going to answer the other side. So it almost starts like with being able to monitor these subscriptions and also not lose control over how much it’s getting spent. So for our platform, for example, has a subscription feature where there is one virtual card there is to attach to each subscription. So your Salesforce subscription would have one, your Calendly, your Zoom, whatsoever. And you can basically automate the entire process from what gets billed, how the receipt is attached, how to spend is categorised and can track the spend development over time. And that’s probably one of the most used features for finance teams in terms of managing subscriptions. But then, of course, there is also this technical product and almost user perspective, which is the other side of the table. We need to make sure that these tools are either connected or synchronised in any way, because otherwise you end up managing three or four silo tools that don’t interact. And I think that’s a huge challenge. Partially, it’s a — partially it’s a structural challenge because these tech tools are sometimes like scale-ups themselves. They’re just growing and building their product on the goal. And they might be a closed ecosystem initially and only become like an open ecosystem later with open APIs to connect, etc. So it’s almost like restricted by the tools that you use. Yeah, how much you can connect them. And the other one is, of course, being able to, like, process it from an organizational perspective. Yeah, I have the right people understand and can connect. I think more — there is probably more that can be connected versus what is connected just because there is a knowledge gap on the team.

PH: Yes. Yeah. And you know, and each of those roles requires a person or a team of people. And I guess that’s probably part of the reason that you have gone from, you know, your founding team up to over 170 employees in two years. That’s a really rapid scaling, I guess you could call it, and speaks to the initial success of Moss, I would imagine. Have things gone well as you would have hoped in the last couple of years?

AS: Like overall, 100% super happy. Looking in details big variation when we saw. One thing is for certain, we brutally underestimated the complexity when we started. And I think it’s good because if we understood it, we wouldn’t have done it.

AS: So it was almost like a self-protection mechanism to not over-engineer, but just decide to do it at a certain point of time, like we have a pre-assessment phase. But then you just go ahead, quit your job, raise funds, hired a team and just try it out. It’s better than just doing the research for months and years. And then on this journey, things played out really well. So we have been quite lucky with a couple of elements. I think the biggest and most successful element was really around hiring this first team. We get it together as an extended co-founding team with equity incentives. And we made sure that everyone has a certain edge. It can be a cultural edge. It can be a way of working edge or a knowledge edge. And all of those contributed to just being very punchy and fast. We could just turn around things in days and weeks versus like months for in other organizations. And this also brought us to where we are. So right now we have we have hundreds of SMBs on our platform. We grow almost 100% quarter over quarter. We are running more than 100 million in total process volume right now. So it’s really gaining traction. It’s heavily used by our customers and that’s what’s giving us like the early indicators that the company makes sense and that the choices we took were the right ones.

PH: Well, congratulations. And based on all that, I would like to, we’ve got some questions that came in from the TELUS International team. A lot of questions for you. I have to say it’s a very — such an interesting space and such an interesting company from many perspectives. So there was plenty questions here. I’ll just give you a handful and you might answer the ones you can. So here’s one. How did the need for SMBs access to finance change over time and during the pandemic? And was this a major catalyst for change?

AS: It was probably one of the biggest catalysts for change. And even though it’s awful, what happens, I was hit myself with the infection. Nevertheless, we as a business, it helped us. It helped us massively because in essence, what happened is companies from one day to the other move from being together in the office to being at home. And suddenly business processes had to survive the switch from being jointly in this office to being disconnected and distributed. And with our platform where you can basically issue cards to any employees and a super flexible way, this just helped companies continue running their business in an efficient way because you couldn’t hand around the credit card anymore and you couldn’t just walk into the finance department or get something from them, right? You needed technical tools that can support this in a digital way. So for us, it was a massive uplift and not only in terms of like business performance, but also in terms of market education. I think that’s where the question is almost hitting too, like the market understood that something needs to change to work effectively in the future. I think it was, it learned this lessons also on being able to jump on a video conference call like we’re doing right now, right? Not having to take planes all the time. But then, of course, also in terms of how to manage your payments and how to manage your finance processes.

PH: Ok, very good. So another one, how will the SMB lending slash credit card space change the corporate world in the next five years?

AS: And, yeah, also here, I have a strong belief, naturally, I have to be the evangelist. But it’s also honestly my 100% sincere opinion. Finance teams will not run their organisation in the same way they did the last couple of years in five years’ time. And the same also for other functions. It’s like it needs to — We have to move away from any manual workflows, non-digital processes. It just doesn’t make sense. Yeah. We just like people are inefficient and they’re spending time on topics that are not exciting. It’s not engaging brains, it’s engaging hands and other things. And that’s why I think there would be a huge shift. We see the shift happening right now. So I mean, we are now acquiring early adopters, but this backlog of early adopters is growing and growing massively. And I think one of the critical elements that needs to happen to make this work is market education. So people understanding there is another way of doing. Understanding that I don’t have to send an email to ask for an approval to buy something. It’s very inefficient. It can be a Slack integrated request that also pops on a mobile phone if someone is traveling. That’s one green that tracks all these approvals where you cannot get lost later and streamlines the process. And that’s basically what will happen from my point of view.

PH: So you’re saying it’s the end of the petty cash box for companies?

AS: 100%. There will be — so there — like it will exist for quite some time and maybe it’s even good, but the share that runs through it will become so much smaller.

PH: Yes. Yes. Ok. And a couple more quick questions. The role of regulation. How is the role of regulation influencing new fintech’s launching?

AS: Yeah, I mean, regulators have this massive effect. Yeah. And it’s sometimes very hard to predict the recent trends with PSD2, open banking and the whole regulation on that side actually show positive signs. And it’s the whole the opening of the markets, the streamlining of how regulation is done across markets like the U.K. versus the German versus the French versus Malta. It’s just getting harmonised with the European Central Bank initiatives, and this is helping. Nevertheless, like whenever there is a change, it shuts down doors and opens up others right? So it’s going to kill businesses and it’s going to open up new businesses and yeah, important to stay ahead of the curve.

PH: Well, and how do you — do you have any tips in terms of how to stay ahead of the curve?

AS: Just stay close to the business critical elements in terms of what’s getting announced. So for us, for example, now in the card space, there was a decision to regulate consumer card interchange. It’s the main revenue stream that Mastercard and the scheme is paying out to card issuers. And this one has been reduced from more than 100 pips to 20/30 pips, so it killed business models. The commercial one is not regulated. There is good signs why it also will not be in the near future, but it’s something to monitor because the business model changed dramatically if this happens. Same around open banking. People couldn’t access bank account data unless it was shared through scraping or to sharing excel sheets or something similar or something very inconvenient and insecure to a certain extent. Now, with PSD2 and open banking APIs, you basically can tap with a pretty quick process into like 90 days history and can keep the connection and run your processes on this as long as the customer consents, of course, the idea needs to be a reason to do so. But that’s a that’s a huge lift. It just opens up a more modern way to run a business versus how it has been done by the banks before.

PH: Yeah. And that brings me to my final question from the TELUS International Team. How are modern fintech’s changing the traditional banking and financial services sectors for business?

AS: So it’s a very complex question, I’m going to try to answer it very, very easily to not get lost with my own answer. So I think it’s two elements that probably stand out the most and the one is the this aggregation of financial products and financial software. In essence, it’s basically offering a neo bank account or a next generation credit card as a payment instrument is a totally different activity. Versus building tools as a software stack that aim to further enhance those financial products. Integrate them, attach certain products to it, workflows, whatsoever. And I think where banks focused on and what SMBs used to consume was financial products with almost zero software. Just look at business bank accounts — like the online login was the biggest invention that they had. Yeah, like, it’s doesn’t synchronise and link with anything. And I think this this aggregation of the two, and then allowing people to tap into each of those and build products on top, sometimes into both. So we’re doing both, for example. Just opens up a totally new opportunity base and will therefore also change how SMBs work and interact in the future.

PH: You did a very good job and it concisely answering a very complex question, so thank you for that. Ok, look, my final question then. We spoke earlier, you came from the very the comfortable corporate world, safe job and took the decision to leave on this roller coaster, start-up and scale-up journey. Is there anything you miss about the old world? Are you fully bought into the craziness of your current life?

AS: I’ll be lying if I didn’t have moments where I cried for safety and structure, that’s 100% certain. At the same time, I think once you catch the entrepreneurial fever, there is no way to go back like there is — I would not be successful. Like I would probably get like grey skin, be depressed and would not source my energy and my potential. And it’s not — and that’s just because there are other things that attract me more. And so the answer is lots of pain, but also lots of gain.

PH: Great. Ante Spittler thank you so much for sharing your story with us and your views on a very, very interesting industry today on TELUS International Studios.

AS: Thanks. Thanks for having me. Very much appreciate it.

On this episode, we’re joined by Ante Spittler, co-founder and CEO of Moss. Tune in to hear the origin story of Moss and how it was born from a passion to resolve common pain points in the customer experience.

How a modern fintech is transforming traditional business banking, with an illustration of guest Ante Spittler, co-founder and CEO of Moss

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How a modern fintech is transforming traditional business banking featuring Ante Spittler, Co-Founder and CEO of Moss (illustration of the guest's profile beside the title)

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How a modern fintech is transforming traditional business banking

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Outsourcing Locations E-book Feature

Discover some of the top outsourcing destinations for consideration and the factors to keep in mind as you make your decision.

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Selecting the best outsourcing destination for your business

Keep up with the latest in digital customer experience in 2023. Check out this list of important stats to kick-start your CX planning for the year ahead.

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23 digital customer experience stats to know for 2023

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Uncover how TELUS International’s business process consultants helped a leading financial services brand optimize its operations, enhance its customer experience (CX) and begin its digital transformation journey.

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Streamlining operations and kickstarting the digital transformation journey of a leading financial services brand

Customer experience analyst and best-selling author, Matt Dixon, sits down with TELUS International Studios to share insights from his new book, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. Dixon takes us through the bane of every salesperson’s existence: a long customer courtship that ends with an “I’ll think about it.”

Leveraging a first-of-its-kind study that analyzed 2.5 million documented sales conversations through machine learning, Dixon reveals that 56% of sales loss is actually caused by customer indecisiveness. Listen to the episode to gain more sales growth best practices to overcome indecision.

The JOLT Effect: How high performers overcome customer indecision is available for pre-order now.

Intro: TELUS International Studios, where customer experience meets digital transformation.

Patrick Haughey (PH): And you are very welcome back to TELUS international studios. I’m your host Patrick Haughey, and on this episode I am delighted to be joined by someone who I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with at a few TELUS International events over the last couple of years. Matt Dixon is a CX and sales expert, he has written many best-selling books — one of the best known is The Effortless Experience, but he’s joining us on this episode to talk about his newest book, currently available for pre-order. It’s called The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. To prepare for this book, 2.5 million documented sales conversations were studied using machine learning. So get ready to hear some very interesting insights from this first of its kind study. So I thought an interesting jumping off point with Matt might be a line that jumped out at me from the book’s description when I was reading it. And that line reads: “In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t ‘No,’  it is ‘I need to think about it.’ And I started by asking Matt why this is.

Matt Dixon (MD): Yeah, it’s a great question. That’s the beginning of the whole tale. And I love that line, too. Well, I don’t love it: I hate it — it’s terrible, it’s really bad news actually, for sales people. But it speaks to what the whole story is about. You know, I think if I’ve been out there engaged with sales people, I know, obviously, Patrick, you and I have spent a lot of time talking about customer experience, customer service, the effortless experience, etc. The other hat I’ve worn as a researcher is really focused on business to business sales and commercial effectiveness, and how is buying behavior evolving and so on and so forth. And one of the things I’ve been struck by over the years is that when you ask a roomful of salespeople to think about the deals they’ve lost over the past quarter or the past year perhaps, and you ask them to categorize that into two different buckets. On the one hand, deals you lost to a named competitor. So the customer ends up buying but they didn’t buy from you, they bought from somebody else. Versus customers where you lost, but you didn’t lose to a competitor, you lost to no decision — you lost to the customer doing nothing. What you find is, in organization after organization, by far more hands go up around the latter, that salespeople feel like they’re much more likely to lose to the customer doing nothing than buying from a competitor or, as you said, even just saying no.

MD: In fact, I think sometimes in sales we can feel like our sales people are heavily influenced by the last sales call they had, you know the product is too expensive, this competitor is eating our lunch, whatever it is. But in this case, our salespeople are actually onto something. We studied this with data and we’ll talk more about the research that went into the book, but I’ll pull forward one finding, which is that anywhere between 40 and 60% of all deals are actually lost to no decision, to the customer doing nothing. And we studied this across 2.5 million sales conversations. We used machine learning to study it. And what we found is exactly what you said. If you look at all of the I would say hundreds of thousands of things that are said in sales conversations, both on the salesperson side and the customer side, by far in our analysis, the worst thing that can be uttered by the customer is I need to think about it. And the reason it’s so bad is that, you know, the old adage in sales has long been that as a salesperson, you don’t want to you don’t want to chase garbage trucks, right? You don’t want to pursue opportunities that have no chance of closing. So in many respects, for a salesperson, it’s far preferable — it may be painful — but far preferable to be told no. The worst outcome is where you go through the entire sales process with the customer. For many companies that can be months or even years, and think about all the resources, the time investment from the salesperson side, the resources from their organization, not to mention all the resources from the customer side. These are customers who go through the demo, they go through multiple iterations of the proposal, they talk to your reference clients, they talk to your subject matter experts, you talk to all of the sales prevention departments inside the customer organization like legal, finance, procurement, etc., only for the customer to get cold feet late in the game and end up doing nothing. And so that is such a deadweight loss for the average salesperson, for sales managers and teams and for entire sales organizations. We do think that how to overcome that ‘no decision’ phenomenon, how to break through and pull more deals across the finish line is the thing that separates great sales organizations and great salespeople from the rest.

PH: We’re going to come to those traits of a great salesperson who can manage to overcome the hurdle in a few minutes’ time, because it’s a fascinating area. We’re looking at something very psychological here called omission bias. Is that right? Which you cover a little bit in the book. Just briefly explain what omission bias is and what kind of mistakes customers are looking to avoid.

MD: Yeah, perfect. So I think the conventional wisdom in sales has always been that if the salesperson starts to get cold feet, if they start to backpedal, wring their hands a bit, waver, waffle, straddle the fence, whatever term you want to use, that it must be that we’ve not we haven’t put to rest the status quo, because we all know, even as human beings, we are predisposed to stay the course. We’ll pass up on better options just for no other reason than we’re lazy and we don’t like to change. And for salespeople, that’s a really powerful obstacle. But I think salespeople have always been taught that that is your only enemy in sales. And what we found was that in our analysis of 2.5 million sales conversations, when this customer starts to show signs of hesitancy, when they start to show those signs of cold feet, by far, three-quarters of salespeople we found go back and they kind of hammer the status quo. They either try to re-convince the customer that ‘you must not really understand the value that our solution is going to deliver.’ ‘You must not really understand how wonderful it is, the ROI projections and how amazing things are going to be on the other side.’ Or, when the customer doesn’t respond to that, what do we do? We put away the carrot and we break out the stick. And what we try to do is show the customer the cost of inaction. And we do that by dialing up what’s called FUD in sales: fear, uncertainty and doubt.

And what we’re really trying to do is make the customer squirm a bit, make them feel the pain of what they’re going to miss out on if they don’t if they don’t buy the solution. We actually found in the analysis, surprisingly, is that that approach, while it’s commonly practiced, actually makes it 84% less likely you’re going to get the customer out of no decision. So you actually increase the odds of the customer doing nothing by using some of those tactics designed to beat the status quo. And to your question, what we actually found, we realized that we wrestled with this quite a bit because it’s been the conventional wisdom in sales for a very long time. In fact, we wrote about this in the Challenger Sale that the best salespeople are gifted at showing the customer that the “pain of same,” the pain of the status quo is actually worse than the pain of change. And that is one of the things they do really well. And so it came as a big surprise to us that that strategy, that approach backfires so often. And so we took a step back and what we realized was we were asking the wrong question. The question that we were asking was, what’s the best way to beat the status quo? Maybe it’s just not being done well. Maybe high performers have figured out a different technique that’s really effective today. But the question we should have been asking is a bit different, which is not how do we beat the status quo, but rather why do customers make no decision? And it turns out the reason they make no decision is exactly what you talked about, Patrick, actually if you look at the psychology research and this is actually backed up in our own analysis, that there are really two reasons the customer will choose to do nothing. The first reason is that they’re committed to their status quo, they just prefer the status quo. It could be that they don’t believe your solution is superior to what they do today or they may just believe it’s superior, but they believe their current approach is good enough. Right? ‘It’s just not worth it for us to change.’ But there’s a second reason that the customer will choose to do nothing. It’s not commitment to the status quo, it’s indecisiveness about changing the status quo. And I think when people hear that, what they immediately ask is, how are those two things different? You’re telling me that customers choose to do nothing either because they prefer what they do today or because they don’t want to change what they do today. And what we explain in the research is that those two things are massively different. And it’s something that high performers get an average performance don’t.

MD: So if we go to the psychology research, what we find is that there are really two types of loss that people in our customers are worried about. On the one hand, there are what are called errors of omission, which are mistakes and losses that we incur because we choose to do nothing. One of the old stories to illustrate is you’re in a tennis tournament and your competitor has a peanut allergy and you sit down to enjoy a lunch before your match and you know there’s something on the menu that has peanuts in it. The omission bias is when your competitor orders the dish that has peanuts in it and you don’t say anything about it. And so they get sick and they have to drop out and you win. The opposite is an error of commission. Now, an order of commission is when you incur a loss because of something you did, not because you failed to do something right, but because you actually did something wrong. So the same metaphor uses you’re sitting across the table from your tennis competitor and you proactively suggest they order the thing that has peanuts in it because you want them to get sick. Now, with those two scenarios, the outcome is exactly the same, your competitor has gotten sick and had to be rushed to hospital, etc. But by and large, everyone was more comfortable with the first one because I didn’t have anything to do with it. The second one is ‘a thing I did.’ ‘I did something wrong.’ And what we find with customers is that when they’re facing two different options, whenever something could go wrong by me not choosing to buy your solution, we could not capitalize on an opportunity, or I could buy your solution, and then something bad could happen as a result, they will choose to do nothing far more often than they’ll choose to do something and run the risk of getting something wrong. Now, the three types of things they’re worried about getting wrong are:

MD: One, I picked the wrong option. We think about all the options we put in front of our customers. So often they start to wring their hands about, ‘I’m not sure if I’m picking the right contract length’ or the right scope of the agreement or ‘I’m buying the premium version — should I really just buy the basic version?’

MD: The second thing is they start to worry that they haven’t done enough research and think about all the content out there about every vertical, every technology out there. And they start to fret over the fact that it’s the next white paper that they would consume that will have all the answers that they need to be a smart consumer.

MD: The third source of indecision is what we call outcome uncertainty. This is where the customer, before they sign on the dotted line, starts to worry that they don’t have any assurance that they’re going to get the benefits they’re paying for. And despite your rosy ROI projections, despite the great demos and proof of concept trials you did, despite the wonderful reference calls and the great analyst reports they read about your company, the customer is worried that they might be the one company for whom this whole thing goes sideways and if that happens, somebody’s head is going to roll. And the person who is going to roll first is the person whose name is on the contract.

MD: So those three things: I’m picking the wrong option, I didn’t do enough homework, or I’m going to be left holding the bag (if you will) and not getting what I’m paying for, are the sources of indecision, which interestingly have nothing to do with the customer’s preference for the status quo. And so it helps explain why we see this phenomenon that salespeople who are taught that every indecisive customer, every waffling and wavering customer with cold feet, must be struggling with a preference for the status quo. So you go back and, you know, your ‘beat the status quo playbook’ is like a hammer, every indecisive customer looks like a nail. But in fact, if they’re worried about something else, then going back and trying to convince them of the loss that might result from inaction only gives them more to be worried about when they’re actually worried about something quite different. So we found in the research that high performers have figured out a different playbook, a companion playbook not just for beating the status quo, but for laying to rest or overcoming these sources of customer indecision.

PH: And does this take us to the JOLT effect?

MD: Absolutely, yeah. So what we found is, there’s again, there’s two playbooks. We’ve all got ‘the beat the status quo’ playbook. We wrote a book about challenger selling; we happen to think being a challenger is one of the best ways to beat the status quo. But as I said before, it’s only part of the story. If beating the status quo is all about showing the customer the cost of inaction, overcoming indecision is getting them more comfortable with the action you’re asking them to take, making them feel like you’re making a good choice, don’t worry about the other options, you’re picking the right thing. You’ve done enough research, you’re in good hands. I’m your subject matter expert, your trusted advisor, and don’t worry, you’re not jumping out of a plane without a parachute. There are some assurances we can give you that this is going to actually work out well for your organization, etc. So if the beat the status quo playbook is about dialing up the fear of not purchasing with the customer, then the playbook for overcoming indecision is about dialing down the fear of purchasing, right? It’s making the customer more confident and comfortable in the decision you’re asking them to make, which they are quite anxious about, right. I didn’t do enough homework. I’m picking the wrong thing. I don’t have any assurance this is going to work out for me. And so JOLT is a set of four behaviors, and I’ll just explain what they are really quickly, that together form this playbook for overcoming indecision:

MD: The J is judging the level of indecision. And what we found is that high performers are quite good not just at assessing opportunities and customers on their ability to buy their solution, but also on their ability to make a decision. So not just the ability to buy, but the ability to decide. And they do that through active listening, probing questions, and powerful requests they make that elicit responses from the customer that tell them, ‘Is this person somebody who can actually make a decision and do so in a reasonable amount of time?’

MD: The O: offer your recommendation. So salespeople have been taught for a very, very long time that it’s all about diagnosing the customer’s needs, understanding what they want. And the hope is that by asking good questions, the customer will figure out on their own what they really want or what they need. But what high performers know is there’s a time for asking and letting 1000 flowers bloom, and then there’s a time for telling and making a recommendation, because with too many options on the table, the customer again will get wrapped around the axle about what they should choose and they’ll fear I’m going to choose the wrong thing, and that will become an irreversible decision.

MD: The L is limiting the exploration. So in a world where customers want to continue to consume content, they always feel like they’re not enough of an expert on the technology or on the platform or on the competitive landscape or on the decision they’re being asked to make. They will consume information endlessly, and there’s no way that they could possibly develop the level of expertise that we as salespeople have. And so we’ve got to put a limit to their exploration, and the way we do that is we’ve got to earn the trust, the trust and credibility, if you will, the customers trust, and we’ve got to establish our credibility as trusted subject matter experts who have the customer’s best interests in mind, and that we can guide them through this learning journey and that they don’t need to consume all the content because we’ve already done that. And we are their trusted advisor.

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