Over the past several weeks I’ve been speaking with other presenters who’ll be joining me at the Smart Customer Service conference in Washington D.C. starting on April 29^th. Well, today I have a very special treat for you because I was fortunate enough to speak with the leader of the conference, Bob Fernekees. Bob is also the Publisher of CRM Magazine. In this episode, Bob discusses what led him to the customer service industry and why it means so much to him, the work he does at CRM Magazine, how the Smart Customer Service brand came to be, the changes and trends he’s noticing in the customer service field, his thoughts on A.I. and how it will impact the landscape of customer service and brand management, the details of his upcoming Smart Customer Service conference, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

• CRM Magazine
• Smart Customer Service Conference

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Alright folks, so you know that the last couple of months we have been focusing in on customer service, in particular, in leading up to the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29th through May 1^st.  And today I have with me Bob Fernekees who is the publisher of CRM Magazine and is in charge of this conference.

 

Andrea:  So Bob, we’re honored to have you with us today.

Bob Fernekees:  Great!  I’d love being here, Andrea.  I love it!

Andrea:  Alright, so Bob, can you tell us, first of all, tell us a little bit about CRM Magazine and what you do there?

Bob Fernekees:  OK.  Well, I’m the publisher of the magazine and I understand that a lot of people may not know where the magazine is these days.  But it was the chief form of communication, especially in B2B 20 years ago.  We launched the magazine in 1998 actually as sales and field force automation.  Around 2000, we saw that things were changing and we changed the name of the magazine to CRM Magazine.

Sales and field force automation is still a thing, believe me, but CRM has grown well beyond the scope of just sales and marketing customer service.  But I’d say in the last 20 years, the big change has been that the customer service piece has really become huge.  And that’s reflected in the pages of the magazine or website Destination CRM.

And we actually started a second website, Smart Customer Service to support not only the conference, but really to give customer service people a dedicated place where they could get information.  Not much marketing automation or sales type of information, it’s 100 percent customer service focused.  So, we’re still going strong 21 years later, so it’s been an exciting ride and things have changed so much but I’m sure you know that as well, Andrea.  Things have changed, you know, unbelievably in the last 20 years in technology.

Andrea:  Oh, certainly.  So what are some of the biggest changes that you’re seeing now?  

Bob Fernekees:  Well, you know, it’s funny because every single year, there’s almost a theme of new technologies that are sort of bursting on the scene and really become just all over the place in terms of media coverage and messaging from vendors and things that people are concerned about.  This year, definitely I would have to say artificial intelligence and machine learning is sort of the big buzz.

As with most technologies that especially really large, you know, large life-changing technologies, it will take many years for these technologies sort of work themselves through the system.  And probably in 20 years from now, they’ll kind of dropout of sight almost like when, the turn of the 2000’s cloud computing was a huge change in technology.

It couldn’t even be thought of before that because, you know, in the 1990s, late 1990s, most people were still using dial up.  You just didn’t have the bandwidth or the infrastructure to support real cloud computing.  But now it would be really odd if you heard, end users or vendors touting their ability to kept cloud computing.  It just becomes everywhere and that’s probably what’s going to happen to a large degree with the artificial intelligence and machine learning, you know, in a decade or two. 

Andrea:  So it’ll be so normal that we won’t even talk about it anymore.

Bob Fernekees:  Absolutely.  I guarantee that that will happen.

Andrea:  Sure.

Bob Fernekees:  And there are many, many different cases of that, but you know, just think cell phones, just think anything. And yeah that’s the way it’ll go but it’ll take a while.  

Andrea:  So do you think that AI will replace customer service to a certain degree or completely?  Or do you think that there’s always going to be a role for human to human connection in customer service?

Bob Fernekees:  Well that’s a really good question and we’ve done lots of webcasts and lots of content around this.  And I could tell you for the foreseeable future, AI, machine learning, you know, all the technology portions of it will do pretty much more of the same which is what the technology does great.  It takes low value interactions and automates them.  So that nobody really wants to talk to a human being, especially if they want to do something that’s fairly simple.

And that will just become, you know, web self-service on steroids where the AI or the machine learning portion of it will just make that so much easier, so much faster, so much more efficient voice, which was a big thing 20 years ago is coming back around with all the conversational technologies and natural language, you know, conversion.  So that people will be interacting instead of using a keyboard, especially since everybody is on their cell phones right now, a voice will become huge.

And so all of that self-service that can be conducted through AI or machine learning will be done, but there will always be humans on the other side, especially for high value or really complex or just the out-of-the-ordinary types of questions and issues.  Now, from what I understand is that, that will really make the life of your typical contact center agent a lot more interesting just because they won’t constantly be asking, “How do I reset my password?”  “How do I do this?”  “How do I do that?”  They’ll just be dealing more or less on more interesting, less repetitive types of service issues.

Andrea:   High value, as you said.  Interesting.  I just had a question in my mind, just a second.  So how do you see AI helping being almost like a brand asset more than even just as a quick answer to solve a problem?  Is there a way the AI is or can be even encouraging the brand connection with the customer or is it mostly going to be just “This is the way we do it.  We get it done fast and that’s what we’re offering you here in this moment.”  Is there any kind of way to connect with the brand anymore with AI?

Bob Fernekees:  You know what, I think that really forward-looking business leaders right now are looking at that piece of it, AI and brand, really hard because you know as the old song goes, it’s really, you know, a lot more…well, put it this way, selling on price the old way doesn’t really create value for a brand because everybody can sell at a lower rate up to a given point.

Andrea:  Uh-hmm.

Bob Fernekees  But when you’re using AI, and that’s the other great thing about the industry and the technology piece that we’re in right now, Andrea, is that it’s not customer service and marketing have blended together, customer service and sales have blended together.  So in many ways, there won’t really be those kinds of delineations.  Yeah, there’ll be outreach demand generation and those types of things but building a brand that will be done through sort of a mixing or melding of all three.  So when you’ve got AI into the mix and, you know, machine learning, you’ll really have brand managers trying to capture the essence of what their brand is to a prospect or a customer.

Now, it’s really hard to see when we’re talking about consumer product goods.  I don’t know enough about consumer product goods, I’ll say it right now, but to build a brand around, you know let’s say laundry detergent is really hard for me personally to conceptualize.  To build a brand around mountain climbing equipment, that seems a lot easier because, you know, immediately you can say that, you know, “Hey, delivering high quality content, or somebody climbing El Capitan is something that could really enhance your brand.”  I’m sure you can do that on a laundry detergent side too, but it’s just a lot easier when you think of a brand that’s much more extreme.

So yeah, I think, you know, AI will definitely allow all those things and it’ll be able to do trillions of computations to say that Andrea Wenburg would really enjoy receiving this communication from us and here’s what we think will be her next action and, you know, all those things that you can’t really do right now.  And it’s probably very hard for a lot of people to conceptualize these things right now just because no one else has.  But we’re headed into that territory where there will be lots and lots of clever users that no one has thought of before.  I mean, just think of Facebook.

Andrea:  Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

Bob Fernekees:  I mean, you know, everybody knew it’s a great idea just because there was social media before that, but to this extent, probably not literally changing democracy.

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  Well, and I was even thinking about Facebook algorithms and how the other day I purchased a Growth Mindset workbook for my kids, OK.  And then the next day on both Instagram and Facebook, I’m seeing ads about another workbook by that same company that’s on resilience now.

Bob Fernekees: Right.

Andrea:  It’s a lot like what you’re talking about in terms of being able to predict what the next step would be for the customer.

Bob Fernekees:  Absolutely, absolutely. Now, I think the way that most companies, and believe me it’s getting way, way, way more complex, especially up to maybe two years ago, I think most companies did that type of ad serving, you know, in a very heavy-handed flatfooted type of way.  So that if you bought a Ford car and signed the deal last month for the next six months, you’d be seeing ads for Ford cars and it’s like “Ohh, I already bought one and I don’t know why I kept seeing this now.”

Now, you know, that’s just a technology in its infancy.  But, you know, now whether or not they predicted the needs of your children to get these workbooks, probably not, but they definitely predicted your likelihood of buying another workbook on a similar but different topic in serving you that ad.  And that’ll just get way more, way more creepy.

Andrea:  You know that’s an interesting way to put it, because I do think that people feel a little like creeped out by things like that.

Bob Fernekees:  Sure.

Andrea:  Yeah, they probably should.  But at the same time, it sounds like we’re going to be not creeped out by that in 20 years is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees:  Well, yeah.  Like I said, I mean, you know, there’s an episode of The Office where Dwight is trying to sell his car to Andy and he keeps saying, “Buy this car, buy this car, buy this car.”  And that’s kind of what we’re getting right now in terms of the immaturity of technology right now.  So, yes, it does sound, you know, it is heavy-handed and not real subtle.  But, you know, possibly in the future there will be targeted offers for things that you really need, didn’t know about but could really use that ad value to your life other than just buying the exact same workbook with a slightly different content.

Andrea:  Sure.

Bob Fernekees:  And, you know, in all the ramifications like how I could figure out how old these kids are and what they’re doing, you know, going along through every grade that they go into from now until they get out of school.

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah, that’s interesting.  I’m trying to think of what the subtle way of doing that would be, but it would be something less obvious is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees:  Something less obvious but also could be completely, you know, obvious or it could be something like “Hey, you know, you bought a car and that one component of it, you know, that 100900 was bad and it could fail.” Well, you know, that’s just a recall issue but you kind of get what I’m trying to say that there could be some things that are like a lot more helpful to you and of value to you.

Andrea:  You were talking about forward-thinking companies and it sounds like they really do have to be forward thinking.  They really do have to be able to map out the customer experience and journey and what could possibly happen and all those sorts of things, so lots of innovation and forward thinking, like you’re talking about.

Bob Fernekees:  Yeah, absolutely.  I mean, I think one of the things that probably astounds people that aren’t, you know, sort of sitting in our seats where we get to see lots of different vendors and lots of different applications and end users.  So you’ve got a really broad view of things.  That’s an inch deep, but you do have a broad view of the customer service market.

And one of the things that really surprises me all the time is how much real thought, real effort, and real research goes into customer journey mapping and all of the different sort of strategic people process type, definitely the technology too.  But, you know, just sort of encapsulating the whole thing, obviously, you can’t just plunk technology and you really need a strong idea of how you want your customer to progress and all of those other things that go along with great technology, but it’s amazing to me.  And I’ve met such intelligent people that have really devoted a lot of serious research and I’m sure you have as well. That’s the part that is really encouraging to me.

And the other thing, having done this for quite a while and just seeing things progress, is how far people’s expectations have come.  I mean, it’s hard to believe that we used to do things the way we used to do.  It was the best you could do at the time.  But I think 10 years from now, we’ll be looking back on 2019 as a stone age, as how did we ever deal with having to dial a phone or, you know, just the simple things.  So it’s really encouraging and there are a lot of really smart people that have put a lot of time and effort into figuring that out.

Andrea:  So Bob, what drives you in this industry?  Like why did you get involved in the first place and what kind of, I don’t know kind of excites you about it or feels like it’s a purposeful for you?

Bob Fernekees:  Well, OK that’s a fair question.  Basically, I was involved in the professional broadcast video film industry on the publishing side.  I worked for CBS, but I also worked for magazines, you know, magazines that dealt with professional B2B broadcast video and film production.  So, you know, I kind of did that.  Me and another salesman actually split the cost of some sales force automation software.  I got really interested in at that point.

And around 1998, I guess it was, I heard of a magazine that was starting up.  I really liked the idea of it because that just, for whatever reason that’s what I did.  I felt like it was going to be a really interesting area to go into.  Like I said, the sales automation part of it really was eclipsed very quickly by much larger customer service aspects.

Marketing automation, people don’t really probably remember this, but really marketing automation, didn’t really start to take off until after 2010 in my opinion or maybe even a little bit earlier than that.  But you know, it’s relatively new, which is a really exciting piece of it as well but, it’s relatively new.  But that’s kind of how I got interested in CRM.  It was through Sales Force Automation which was the first iteration.

And when we launched the magazine, it did extremely well.  We changed the magazine to a name CRM Magazine.  At that point in time, I think there was only one analyst that was using “customer relationship management” as an acronym, so we kind of see where things are going. And for the last 20 years or so, it’s just been really exciting because there’s different  that kind of die out and the river changes course, and it’s just really an interesting way to just watch for patterns and see what’s coming up.

You know, we’ve jumped into technologies or different facets which haven’t exactly panned out.  Mostly things don’t pan out and then they come back in five years or so when there were more possible to do.  Like I said, when I started off cloud computing, I mean, there were people trying to do cloud computing in the late ‘90s and it was virtually impossible because they still tried it.  People still bought solutions, but trying to do cloud computing on dial up connections was, you know, hard.

Andrea:  Yes.  I’ve heard that sometimes it’s better to be the second one on the scene after the first person is kind of, yeah, yeah.  OK, so let’s talk a little bit more about the conference.  So what are the different aspects of the conference or the tracks and tell us a little bit more about it.

Bob Fernekees: Sure.  OK, so first of all, we’ve got the conference coming up April 28th through May 1^st, Washington, DC.  It’s actually work distinct conferences co-located together.  So it’s a total of about eight tracks.  Now, you know, if you had a Venn diagram sort of the piece in the middle would be customer experience.  We’ve got speech tech.  Speech technologies are used in all sorts of things, conversational interfaces for one. We’ve got some great keynote speakers, which we’ll talk more about that.

But speech tech, huge with contact center, huge in many other different ways.  We’ve got CRM Evolution.  Brent Leary is the chair.  That’s three tracks.  We’ll be covering the breadth of CRM technologies and people and processes as well.  Geoff Ables is doing smart customer service.  Actually, it’s the first year that Brent is doing CRM alone, and Geoff will be doing smart customer service.  That looks like it’s going to be really exciting, super successful, and it’s a great place if you want to come and meet people.

As I was mentioning to you before, we’ve also got a digital experience as well, which is a newcomer.  That’s the fourth conference as well.  But just, you know, to stick with the customer service portion of it, the thing that we’ve done differently with, especially CRM Evolution Smart Customer Service, is that although we have speakers that are aspirational CMO’s of very large companies. We also got people that you actually read on our websites and in our magazine.

So lots of analysts, lots of well-known authors, industry gurus, thought leaders, and you know, you can put a name to the face.  It’s a conference where it’s very easy to talk to these people.  It’s not a large conference where, you know, the session ends and you can’t get near the speaker.  So if it’s a really good place to get out, meet people, and especially meet some of your peers and do some networking on the peer side as well.

Andrea:  Great!  OK, so who would you say it’s for just any company that’s dealing with these particular issues, or is there any more of specificity to the target audience?

Bob Fernekees:  Well, you know, that’s a great question.  We do everything in a broad way.  So we’re like horizontal.  It doesn’t really matter to us if somebody is in financial services versus government applications.  For us, especially for Smart Customer Service, 90 percent of the people that go to the conference are involved in customer service probably at the manager or the director level, really depends on the size of the company.  If we had a VP from Zappos, they’d probably be speaking not in the audience but there could be a VP from a smaller company and that’s kind of how those things go.

But, you know, it’s great for all sorts of call center or customer service or people that are dealing with customer experience.  And like I said, there’s so much research and information out there to go to the conference and to be able to ask the speaker, “Hey, you know, I’m seeing some conflicting information,” or “Here’s my company, here’s our situation.”  And to get some positive feedback with an expert because a lot of the speakers are consultants, analysts, people that seen a wide variety of different types of end users and also have an in depth knowledge of a wide variety of industry solutions and technologies.

So, it’s a great place to come and ask those types of questions.  In today’s day and age, you know, a lot of people don’t like to pick up the phone.  But I still think that, you know, getting face to face and making connections with people is just a great way to go beyond, you know, remove the digital wall and make a human connection and there’s so many different ways things can go from there.

Andrea:  I can definitely attest to the personability or the way that the speakers are ready to connect and help out.  Because having interviewed more than a handful of them, I know that they all really care and they’re sincere and they are smart.  And I just really enjoyed connecting with them personally and so I know that your attendees are going to really appreciate being able to connect with the speakers as well.

Bob Fernekees:  Yeah.  You know, as we were talking before, you know, one of the things that I really liked about this industry is the type of people and professionals that, you know, have made this career.  I definitely like working with people like this and just having them enhanced my life and definitely enhanced my professional life as well.

Andrea:  OK, Bob, so anybody that’s listening, if you’re on the fence, it’s time to sign up because it’s right around the corner here now.  And, Bob, if they can’t make it or even if they do make it, what kind of offerings does CRM have?  Do you have a magazine?  Tell us a little bit more about how they can connect with CRM Magazine and your other offerings.

Bob Fernekees:  OK, so, just right off the bat because I may not have mentioned this is that if you googled CRM magazine, you’d find our site.  Our site is actually called destinationCRM.  So you can go there, you can sign up for the magazine.  It’s free to anybody that’s qualified.  If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m sure you must be qualified unless you have a strange taste in podcast.  So just go there, sign up for the magazine, either site destinationCRM or smartcustomerservice.

You can sign up for any of our newsletters, any of our webcast.  By the way, we do webcasts once a week on different topics.  You’ll be notified if you sign up for one of our newsletters or promotions of what we’ve got coming up.  People really love those. We’ve been doing them for 20 years back in 1998 when there was no broadband and we were trying to do them live from a TV station through camera shoot when there was no broadband.  So that was an interesting thing.

So yeah, we’ve had some troubles with getting a little bit ahead of the technology.  But, you know, we’ve got that.  We got tons of white papers and we will have a bunch of the content on video that you can watch after the conference is over.  Most of it will be edited down.  So you’re getting more of a flavor or maybe some of the major bullet points, but I think we will have some long format video as well.  So there’ll be those opportunities, but there’s nothing like sitting in the audience of, you know, I’m thoroughly convinced.

Andrea:  Yes, I agree.  And you know what, if you happen to be there on April 30th, I’ll be speaking at 1:45 about transforming your call center from a customer service model into a customer’s ascension model for profit and purpose.  So I would love to see you there too.

So, Bob, thank you so much for being here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast and for providing this fantastic conference and connecting people to all these really important solutions around customer relationship management.  And we’ll be sure to link everything that you talked about in the show notes on our website.

Bob Fernekees:  Great!  Thanks so much, Andrea.  It was fun being here and I just think you’re doing a great job.  It’s pleasure meeting you.  I can’t wait to meet you at the conference in person.

Andrea:  Great! See you then.