AiThority Interview with Ryan Lester, Senior Director of Customer Engagement Technologies at LogMeIn

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at LogMeIn.

I am the Senior Director of Customer Engagement Technologies at LogMeIn. This role gives me the opportunity to work on both our Bold360 Product strategy and roadmap while improving the experiences we deliver to our current, and potential future, customers each day. I have the unique advantage of working every day on delivering a better CX while also working closely with our product team to build solutions that help our customers create a differentiated customer experience.

How have definitions for Customer Experience evolved in the last 12-18 months?

The way that companies are thinking about customer experiences is expanding and shifting, with new opportunities opening up to create more one-to-one interactions while also creating a more scalable and consistent experience. Much of this change has been driven by new technologies like AI and CX-focused solutions. Companies are still using tools like journey mapping and traditional survey tools to better understand their customer’s preferences and needs.

However, building on those existing CX tools, companies are now starting to discuss how AI can bring more consistent and immediate touchpoints to their customers and also to their employees. The exciting shift in the conversation is that companies are now talking about employee enablement and empowerment with the same excitement as they have in the past around topics like UX or mobile.

The CX conversation is becoming more inclusive to other parts of the organization and they all have the opportunity to see value from new technologies like AI.

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What are your CX standards at LogMeIn?

We think about CX across three different aspects. The first is in high-level traditional metrics of NPS, customer effort scores and intent mapping, which help us to identify what problems are coming up most often. These help us to better understand the current state of our CX and where to focus our efforts next. The second growing area of focus for us is around customer segmentation and mapping their specific needs. We are moving away from a world where we look at every user, or customer, through the same lens or journey.

We are starting to think about different customer types, across verticals and use-cases, and how we create a customized experience for them – at scale while still being personalized. This is across content, channels, programs and in the way they interact with our Bold360 solution during the work they do each day. The third and final area is around continuing to better instrument our business and solutions.

As a company that develops software and interactive experiences like Chatbots, we want to continuously look for ways to better understand where our customers need assistance and then react in real-time. This is where the industry is going.

How do CX standards help achieve higher and sustained customer engagement? Any example you would like to quote from your experience with brands/case study at LogMeIn?

We are seeing really good early results out of our new focus on customer segmentation and better instrumentation. It is giving our entire organization, from Product to Marketing to Sales, a much more informed view into how and where key target customers are engaging with us and it is helping us to better identify where we should shift our time and resources. From this effort we are seeing improved impressions, engagement, account penetration, increased sales and it is helping to more quickly identify leading indicators on where to focus.

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Which tools and technologies do you leverage to deliver CX to your customers?

Our list of technologies has expanded but through a coordinated effort across our teams aligned to our overall goals. A big aspect of our overall strategy is our own Bold360 digital engagement solution. It powers the bot on all of our LogMeIn websites, from GoToMeeting to LastPass. It creates a personalized and scalable experience to assist our customers in finding the best product for their needs.

We are also using it for customer service use cases as well, like self-service support. In addition to our own technology, we are investing in best in class Marketing Automation tools, in-product engagement solutions, interesting new interactive content tools, and better back-end analytics platforms. Our team is working hard to get a global view of our customers while also improving touchpoints along the journey.

Tell us about the similarities and differences between Employee Experience and Customer Experience. How are these unified at an organizational level at LogMeIn?

The great news is that companies are truly beginning to see the value of investing in the employee experience, which in turn can dramatically improve the customer experience. When employees feel empowered and engaged, they are much more likely to deliver a better customer experience.

We have done some really interesting work with our Bold360 product to create better employee experiences, across HR open enrollment, sales assistant bots, and improving how we support IT service desk tickets. All of these efforts have improved our eNPS scores while also freeing our employees to spend more time on important activities like engaging with our customers.

What is your prediction on the disruptive application of AI for Mobile-centric businesses when it comes to delivering CX?

The biggest disruption happening with AI for mobile-centric businesses is how it will bring the personalized, high-touch, in-store experience to mobile devices. Too often, today’s mobile experiences are impersonal and require the end-user to do much of the work.

A technology like AI can help to make finding information in an app or completing a task much less difficult. This can be done through technologies like NLP and more conversationally focused interactions. The customer can be guided, in a personalized way, to the best outcome. We are seeing early signs of this in the financial services space with banking apps, but this will become more mainstream over time with all mobile-centric businesses.