Jay Wolcott of Knowbl On How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More
For me personally, I want to bring people to faith in God. I often see this disconnect in business with a fear of sharing faith with those who might be lost. In every business decision and action, we must think about how our behavior might draw others closer to God.
As part of our series about “How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jay Wolcott.
Jay Wolcott is the CEO and Co-founder of Knowbl. Wolcott is an innovative entrepreneur and global business executive with deep expertise in customer-facing operations and using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital engagement. With a proven track record, he launched Digital Roots in 2009, a SaaS company providing advanced social media engagement and insights. Digital Roots achieved multinational success, recognized by Inc. 5000 and esteemed publications. In 2017, Interactions acquired Digital Roots, where Jay served as Head of Digital, helping build their next-generation platform for omnichannel virtual assistants. Since then, he has supported CX transformations as an Independent Consultant, and his past experiences include General Motors and successful entrepreneurial ventures like Seed Staffing and Verego.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I started my career on the brand side and was tasked with outsourcing and offshoring 7,000 call center jobs to save money. From those early days, that objective didn’t make sense to me. I was always more curious about why customers needed to call us at that volume. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be better if we could avoid them needing to contact us to get things done?”
So the journey started there and has been entirely focused as a serial entrepreneur to accelerate innovation in customer experiences to not only reduce the effort but also create exciting and enjoyable experiences that foster brand loyalty. All of the efforts have harnessed the potential of AI and machine learning to deliver more efficient and effective customer journeys.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My very first investor and business partner was Cliff Moore. He was like the “Godfather” of the Call Center Outsourcing world and encouraged me to become an entrepreneur. Without his encouragement, guidance, and financial support, I would never have been able to achieve the impact we have had over the last 15 years.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
“The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt. It was the first read that helped me think holistically about operations and develop a strong interest in process efficiency. When you are building products, companies, or teams, you need to think about how it will all work together. Otherwise, it can become chaotic and inefficient. This has influenced my work in all areas of customer journey optimization to cross-functional collaboration.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
It’s all about the team! If you can assemble the greatest talent that believes in a common vision, and get them working well together, it can create something incredibly special. Enabling talent with unrestricted potential aligned to values of innovation, speed, and efficiency can allow a small, newer team to outperform bigger, more expensive teams that are lost in bureaucracy and lack of vision.
It creates quiet confidence when you see them outsmarting or being doubted by the perceived experts. In November of 2022, we sat on stage with some innovation we developed well before the market understood it and were ridiculed by people who were constrained by narrow thinking. It felt offensive, yes, but the team remained steadfast. Now, those employees get to laugh about those doubters when they see them professing what they were questioning a year later.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
This industry has been stuck in a flywheel for decades. I imagine most execs aren’t super stoked about radical innovation in a field that largely has customer contacts being considered an expense.
However, we are entering a new dawn of machine intelligence that will provide the greatest innovation for the customer experience we have seen in our careers. When exponential acceleration is on the horizon, question everything, squash small thinking, and be bold. We can leverage our experience to redefine customer engagement if we understand the potential of this innovation. It will be an exciting ride, and even more fun if you are the first to take the leap.
This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business in general and for retail in particular?
The only resource we can’t get back is time. Consumers understand this and will make choices with their other most precious resource — money. Even if you have the best product or service, if dealing with that wastes their time, they will begin to look somewhere else.
Now, customer service amplifies this. Something might not be meeting expectations, so service recovery matters (if you want to keep them as a customer). For example, in retail, if you make it hard to return something the customer spent their money on, that isn’t meeting expectations. You must make it easy to return. It seems like we almost always cast policies for the small minority of folks who might scam the system by penalizing the most loyal.
However, we can’t stop there. Customer experience innovation can also be exceptional for commerce. If I have to spend four minutes and 40 clicks to find what I was looking for to spend my money, it isn’t good enough.
Imagine an online experience that is like the best in-person retail experience. I don’t want to walk up and down dozens of aisles looking for what I need. The best experience is someone walking up to me and saying “How can I help you?” Imagine if our digital front doors could do the same.
All of this enables you to give your customers back their time. Reduce the effort, and they might spend that extra time spending more with you.
We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?
The reality is those moves are happening. Even 20 years ago, retailers that were slow to adopt e-commerce are now gone, and the early adopters are outpacing the laggards. Now, there are a large number of brands that can’t seem to make this “exceptional experience” because of competing priorities. Have you ever seen an online retailer shut their site down to do a full remodel? No one wants to shut off the cash register so they make incremental decisions that lead to mediocrity. So again, we see startups with a fresh slate that are creating the most compelling experiences.
I remember sitting in a client executive meeting with the C-suite and the CEO asked, “Who owns the customer?” They all looked at their shoes. Eventually, the CMO says, “Well, I own acquiring them.” After minutes of realizing how fragmented they were in managing the end-to-end customer journey, he finally created a new position of the Chief Customer Officer. This is happening at scale across a large number of brands, and that leads to disconnected experiences.
Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?
I remember visiting a retailer’s headquarters to demonstrate our tech. After they described their pain point, we asked for an opportunity to show them how that would be resolved with our solution. Five minutes later, after building something from scratch and showing an experience that would blow your mind, the technology leader said, “How did that guy just do that in five minutes when we’ve had two engineering teams work on that for over a year?”
Did that “Wow! Experience” have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?
Fortunately, it has become one of our most exciting accounts. Reflecting on that moment of inspiration has a couple of fun parts. We can spend all day talking about innovation or admiring the potential, but until you just do it so they can experience it, it doesn’t serve the same level of inspiration and conviction to say, “We must do that.”
A fantastic retail experience isn’t just one specific thing. It can be a composite of many different subtle elements fused together. Can you help us break down and identify the different ingredients that come together to create a “fantastic retail experience”?
A fantastic retail experience should be the standard. However, an exceptional experience (or experiences) will create more business value than your best marketing slogan, and those experiences come from innovation and enablement. For online experiences, innovation can give them an experience they have never had. For brick-and-mortar customer service, that could be an employee who feels empowered to do something special. It’s like the classic Zappos examples of employees spending hours on a phone or sending flowers, or Dutch Bros coffee drive-thru employees praying with guests. There is a reason those stories go viral across social media — they are inspiring, but always require an authentic moment of enablement.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.
- Value their time by reducing effort in every step.
- Connect your siloes for a seamless end-to-end journey.
- Anticipate their needs and be proactive.
- Stop constraining innovation to current capabilities.
- Don’t be afraid to shut it off for a fresh redesign, it will likely pay off in the long run.
Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
For me personally, I want to bring people to faith in God. I often see this disconnect in business with a fear of sharing faith with those who might be lost. In every business decision and action, we must think about how our behavior might draw others closer to God.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Recently I started podcasting as a means to share perspectives and knowledge. Personally, I enjoy listening to others and decided between our work and our network of influencers that would be the best medium to inspire others. Look for “The Conversational AI Divide” podcast on all the popular streaming services.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with me on this!
Jay Wolcott of Knowbl On How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.