A career dedicated to customer experience – Interview with Rebecca Burns

For 15 years, Rebecca Burns, General Manager, Support at MYOB, has demonstrated her passion for customer experience (CX) and success. Throughout her career in customer success and project management, she has focused on strategising and implementing solutions to make customer interactions exceptional. Mark Atterby from CXFocus talks to Rebecca about her role at MYOB and what customer success looks like for her in 2024.

Mark Atterby (MA): Can you please provide a background to your career and an explanation of your role at MYOB?

Rebecca Burns (RB): With 15 years dedicated to customer experience (CX), I’m fortunate to have held specific CX roles throughout my career. This experience, combined with expertise in customer success and project management, has allowed me to develop and implement solutions that optimise customer journeys.

Currently, I lead a passionate and high-performing team at MYOB as the General Manager of Support. Our mission is to deliver exceptional product help and customer service to small and medium-sized businesses across Australia and New Zealand. In this role, I not only oversee the future strategy for our support experiences, but also influence product prioritisation decisions to enhance usability and feature adoption.

(MA): Over your career, what has been the most important lesson you have learned about customer experience? 

(RB): The ideal customer experience anticipates and eliminates the need for contact altogether. While exceptional digital resources, AI-powered chatbots, and optimised support channels are important, true delight comes from addressing the root cause of customer issues. This could be a clunky product workflow, an unintuitive self-service portal, or an off-target consulting service.

By proactively identifying and fixing these underlying problems, you can create a frictionless and frustration-free customer journey.

(MA): How do you apply that to your current role?

(RB): At MYOB, we foster an environment where our support team thrives. They are the closest to customer concerns, acting as the frontline listeners who understand customer issues, frustrations, and pain points better than anyone. My role is to empower them by actively listening to their feedback and amplifying their voices throughout the organization. This ensures their valuable insights directly shape our customer experience strategy.

(MA): What does CX success look like for MYOB in 2024?

(RB): MYOB’s top CX priorities for 2024 are threefold:

1. Enhanced Product Usability: This is measured with UMUX (Usability Metric for User Experience).
2. Reduced Contact Volume: This is tracked by the Contact Rate, which reflects the percentage of active subscribers contacting support.
3. Improved Contact Center Quality: This is monitored through First Contact Resolution (FCR), ensuring issues are resolved promptly during the initial interaction.

(MA): What are your biggest challenges and opportunities, and how do you plan to address them?

(RB): Our biggest focus is on improving First Contact Resolution and Speed to Resolution for intricate technical issues. These inquiries often involve collaboration from multiple teams and specialists. To address this, we’re implementing a two-pronged approach. Firstly, we’re optimising our case management process to streamline the flow of information. Secondly, we’re upskilling our support team by revamping internal knowledge resources and capability matrices. This will empower them to handle complex issues independently, minimising back-and-forth communication with customers.

(MA): What advice do you offer organisations to get their strategy right?

(RB): The cornerstone of a successful customer experience (CX) strategy is alignment across the entire organisation. This means establishing clear, measurable goals at all levels, from leadership (top-down) to frontline teams (bottom-up). These goals should be specific, outlining exactly what you want to achieve and by when.

To develop a truly impactful strategy, it’s crucial to incorporate a variety of feedback sources. Actively listen to both customer and employee voices. Customer feedback can be gathered through surveys, support interactions, and social media sentiment analysis. Employee feedback can be obtained through surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one discussions.

Before diving into implementation, take a critical look at your organization’s resources. Does your team have the necessary skills and experience to execute the strategy effectively? If there are gaps, consider partnering with external experts who can provide specialised knowledge and support.

A solid implementation plan is vital. This plan should identify the essential elements needed from a process, content, and data perspective. Prioritise the must-haves, the minimum requirements to get started. Avoid getting bogged down in the pursuit of perfection; focus on getting a functional strategy in place quickly.

Rebecca will be a panellist on an upcoming webinar (Thursday, July 24), sharing her experiences and expertise on how to deliver seamless and connected customer experiences across various touchpoints.