Put your CX on the elevator to success.
Maybe you’ve noticed a common thread in every elevator you’ve ridden. They often seem to have a single name branded on the inside: Otis. Now, maybe you weren’t a child fixated on elevators and your caregivers didn’t ask you to stop pointing this out. But on the off chance you were, do we have the episode for you. When Elisha Otis entered the elevator industry in the mid 1800s, they were novel and dangerous. So he invented a way for them to become simple and secure: the elevator brake. From there, the world would be changed forever.
When it comes to simple and secure, no one understands it better than Joe Burton, CEO of TeleSign. Putting in the extra work to make sure his customers are more protected than ever is the perfect recipe for a simple CX. And today, he shares those insights with us. It’s a ride you don’t want to miss.
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“If you go the extra mile, they'll stay at your website the extra minute.” - Joe Burton
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) How the elevator impacts your CX
* (6:36) What is TeleSign
* (8:24) How peace of mind betters CX
* (11:18) Safety and simplicity in the gaming industry
* (16:11) The intersection of technology and humans
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Narrator: On a warm summer night in 1854, a crowd of people stood inside a glass dome in New York City. The room was silent, everyone seemed to be holding their breath. PT Barnum, the legendary circus master, had already hyped up the crowd and introduced Elisha Otis, the star of the show. Otis stood on a wooden platform, suspended above the people. Dust sparkled in the air as it caught the light. He was so high that, if he fell, there’s no way he’d live. But he was about to do something unthinkable: have his son cut the ropes holding him up.
As they snapped and Otis went into free fall, the crowd gasped. But after dropping just a few inches, he quickly came to a stop, still hanging in the air. Still alive. “All safe!” he shouted to the crowd. There was a moment of terrified silence, and then a roar of applause and cheering. The thing that saved him? His own invention.
See, Elisha Otis had always been a tinkerer. He was antsy. He got bored easily. He invented all kinds of machines, and most of those inventions never went anywhere. Otis had many different gigs, and he was also a single dad. He dragged his two sons everywhere, moving from state to state. In his late 30s, Otis moved to Yonkers, New York to take over an abandoned sawmill. The idea was to transform the sawmill into a factory for bed frames.
When Otis and his sons arrived at the mill, they realized it was a total mess. The place was huge. And it was dirty. Slabs of wood were everywhere, and sawdust covered everything. He needed to transform the factory, but where would he put all this wood? Otis and his sons decided they could throw the wood upstairs in the top factory floors, which were empty. But they didn’t really have a good way of getting it up there. They needed an elevator.
The thing is, even in the mid-1800’s, elevators weren’t new. They’d actually been around for centuries, all over the world. But no one in their right mind would use one of those death traps. The ropes that held them up broke all the time. And Otis didn’t want to hoist up a bunch of wood only to watch everything crash back down.
So, without realizing what they were doing, Otis and his sons got their tools together and designed a safety brake to make sure the platform wouldn’t fall. The brake helped them get their trash out of the way, and they didn’t think much of it after that. That is, until the World’s Fair came to New York City. And gave Otis a platform to revolutionize cities everywhere.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about making experiences for your customers safer and easier at the same time. How Elisha Otis’s elevator brake expanded possibilities because it increased security for everyone, and how CX leaders can do the same. On today’s episode you’ll hear from Joe Burton, the CEO of TeleSign. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
Narrator: Elisha Otis performed his stunt above a crowd every day for months. His new and improved elevator didn’t take off immediately though. It wasn’t until three years later that a department store in SoHo installed the first Otis elevator. It was expensive for the store owners, but it paid off. The store became a landmark – everyone wanted to come see the new elevator, to experience the seamless rise up through the building. Even though Otis died a few years later, his sons continued his business. The elevator brake spread throughout the world. The Otis elevator meant high-rise apartments and skyscrapers were built – the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa. It meant that people in wheelchairs had new independence, they weren’t always stuck on the ground floor. It changed everything.
We don’t always think of safety as being fun. Taking the “safe” path implies a lack of adventure. But in this case, making a tool that increased safety was what allowed innovation to thrive. Our guest today is Joe Burton, the CEO of TeleSign, and he’s trying to do just that in today’s digital world.
Joe: At TeleSign our mission is to make the mobile, digital world more safe and engaging for everyone.
Our philosophy is to make it simpler and more secure.
Narrator: Today, many businesses are based totally online. For TeleSign’s clients, they’re building entire digital relationships – think freelance companies like Upwork or entertainment groups like Ticketmaster. People are conducting business without ever meeting face to face. How do they protect their communications? How do they make sure the people they interact with aren’t scammers? That’s where TeleSign comes in.
Joe: And we do this by actually creating a set of web APIs that enterprises can call into, to understand if a phone number or an email address is legitimate. If it's really Ian really on Ian's phone, or if this is a hacker, a bad guy, a SIM swapper, that's gotten a hold of your, of your information. We can make sure that it's really you, so enterprises can interact with you correctly. And then we also provide the communication solutions. So they can message with you over voice, over text messaging, or even over WhatsApp, Viber, Google, or anything else.
Narrator: Sometimes, safety does come at the expense of ease. At the airport, no one likes shoving all their liquids in a little bag and waiting in line for TSA. On the road, being safe is driving the speed limit and strapping a fussy kid into a car seat. But Joe wants to make sure TeleSign customers get both more peace of mind and a more pleasant experience at the same time.
Joe: First of all, there has to be an account onboarding when you sign up, we need to make sure that that sign up process is incredibly simple and incredibly secure.
If you ask the user 50 questions about their dog’s maiden name, then that’s incredibly frustrating, it’s not easy.
That's a really interesting tension ensuring that you don't have to ask questions, but we're really sure the person is who we're supposed to be and their mobile device is really what it's supposed to be. No hackers, no scammers, no bots, et cetera. Number two, we make sure that that account is continuously monitored and protected to make sure that it's never taken over. And it's never someone impersonating when they're doing business.
Narrator: Having that balance of safety and simplicity allows ideas to flourish, and it can also really improve the bottom line.
Joe: When TeleSign has been in use for a while, we actually wind up seeing in many cases, uh, the holy grail of the end customer actually is happier. They're being asked to log on less. They're having less abandoned sessions because they're frustrated with the application or the enterprise. So we can wind up in that rare spot where it is indeed, higher usage because it's easier and safer
If you're in a system that is simple, intuitive, and you're highly confident, it is secure, then you're going to stay longer, you're going to use it more.
If you go the extra mile, they'll stay at your website the extra minute.
Narrator: When Elisha Otis invented the elevator brake, he was preventing something pretty straightforward: a deadly fall. But for Joe Burton and TeleSign, there are infinitely more ways for things to go wrong online. That means infinitely more opportunities to prevent fraud and improve simplicity.
Joe: The internet is a scary place. Unfortunately, online identity theft last year actually cost the economy about $56 billion and cyber crime as a whole was estimated to cost the economy five to $6 trillion annually.
Narrator: Joe saw this play out when one of TeleSign’s clients, a gaming company, released a new game.
Joe: They saw a huge spike in new customers wanting to sign up for this game. And it seemed anomalous to them, it seemed like even more demand than they expected. And they asked if we could actually, um, very rapidly put in one of our account onboarding fraud detection systems and help them make sure that the people signing up for new accounts were really people, not bots, not fake identities. The reason somebody might want to do it in this case was digital good mining. So you create a bunch of fake accounts, you create achievements, you get, you know, whatever the digital sword, the digital gold, and then you actually sell it to a real user for real money. This is a common online hack.
Well, we put our system in, it ran for a couple of days, and, um, I got a call from the, uh, Senior Vice President that's in charge of the website for this game. And he was actually not very happy with us. He was not very happy because our fraud detection system for account onboarding stopped 70% of the account registrations they were getting from this particular region, and he thought we were, perhaps, uh, taking money out of their pocket. Quickly got a couple of data scientists involved and realized that, um, um, we should not have been stopping 70% of the account registrations, we should have been stopping about 94% of the account registrations. In other words, it was almost all bad traffic coming out of two specific data centers that were running these fraudulent, um, uh, bot farms, trying to sign up for the game, trying to steal value and go a different way.
Narrator: Just like a good elevator, when TeleSign’s doing its job, it’s in the background. But when things go wrong. If an elevator stops working, if TeleSign doesn’t catch the fraudulent accounts, the consequences could be huge.
Joe: Every business that is doing online business, that has an application with accounts, that is a website, et cetera. I think all of those businesses, uh, probably know, um, two hard statistics, they might not know one soft statistic. The two hard statistics I'm sure they know is what is their customer acquisition cost, what we always call CAC in the industry, and they probably know the lifetime value of a customer. So they probably know how much does that cost them to get you to sign up?
And then what are you worth over the 3.5 years you stay with this company? So, you know, I think they know what it costs them when somebody has a bad experience because they paid for you to sign up, you have a bad security experience, you leave and never come back. The soft statistic they never, they, they rarely, um, um, take the time to quantify is reputational harm.
If you get hacked on a site and never go back, you probably, at least never go back. you probably tell your friends, you had a bad experience there. And if what got stolen is, um, really important, your credit card number, your personal information et cetera, boy, you went from being a customer to being anti that site.
And how many people do you think your customer is going to go, um, become a negative advocate to, and it comes out to a pretty big number. If it cost a couple of hundred dollars and you are worth three or $4,000 over the life of the relationship, that's already a big number. But if you go scare off 10 other customers, this is an astonishing number and that's what really happens. But no one talks about it.
Narrator: Safety is a funny thing. If you don’t feel safe you will tell other people. Maybe not a random website that is suspicious. But If you get hacked, you definitely will tell other people
Joe: I have always lived at the intersection where very complicated technology meets actual human beings.
My best CX advice is don't think about technology, don't think about cost, and don't think about limitations of the system, at least at first. Truly, truly, truly understand what the customer wants, and how they would like it to happen. In fact, if customers start thinking and talking in terms of, "Here's what I'd like the app to do," or "Here's what I want to have happen when I log on," I actually gently try to tell the users, "Yeah, I don't, I don't want to know about log-on. What do you want to do? What would you like to accomplish?" So, avoid discussions of technology security applications until you truly understand the customer goal, and then construct a system that allows them to do that as simply and securely as humanly possible.
When you really understand the goal, what your customers want to do, then you can start backing into technology limitations, security, what you have to do, but when you come at it, truly human-centered, no technology words, you wind up in a fantastic place. When you start at the limitations of the current technology, you almost always wind up disappointed.
Narrator: Clearly, Elisha Otis lived by that same attitude. First, he identified the end result he wanted, then worked backwards. Not the other way around.
And he put safety as the top priority. Your customers always need to feel safe. As my NCO in the Army always said, Mission first, safety always.
It can mean the difference between them reaching new heights or coming crashing back down..
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, written by Katherine Moncure, and produced and edited by Mackey Wilson, Jon Libbey, and Callen Turnbull. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com.