68 — Seamless Experiences, Lasting Impressions: Dish Network's CX Approach with Dave Duganne

Lenny: 00:00:10

Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the GreenBook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to spend it with myself and my honored guest of the day, Dave Duganne. He is the Senior Manager of Consumer Insights at Dish Network. Dave, welcome.

Dave: 00:00:30

Thanks for having me, Lenny.

Lenny: 00:00:32

It’s great to have you. So, appreciate you taking time out of your day as well. Now, for those who don’t know you, why don’t you just tell the audience a little bit about your background, and then we’ll dive into the conversation of the day?

Dave: 00:00:44

Yeah, sure. As you mentioned, I’m the Senior Manager of Consumer Insights at Dish Network. Currently, I have responsibility for overseeing all of the research that we do on the television side of the business. We have a team that also conducts the research on the wireless side of the business, but I’m handling the TV these days. I’ve been at Dish for five years, currently based in Denver. And before coming to Dish, I spent a couple of decades on the supplier side of research.

Lenny: 00:01:15

And from looking, you were at Harris and GfK, so great places to learn the supplier side of the business.

Dave: 00:01:24

Yeah, yeah. I actually started off in a call center. My first job at Harris was a company called GSBC Ohio, it was when it was Gordon S. Black Corporation. And I spent three months on the phones doing B2B CSAT studies.

Lenny: 00:03:11

That’s very cool. I was grinning because I got my start in the industry running a call center, doing healthcare satisfaction research. So, it dated both of us, right? So [laugh].

Dave: 00:03:26

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s wild because I probably—I mean, I’ve learned a ton of my career, but that call center foundation, I don’t think I valued it at the time as much as I do now, but gosh, that’s a really good place to cut your teeth in our industry. Well, at least it was in the ’90s, right [laugh]?

Lenny: 00:03:43

Yeah, well, agreed. Actually, that’s an interesting point. I had never thought of it until as you said that. I mean, obviously, you know, the basics of sampling, and you know, but particularly in something that—a topic I think that we don’t get into nearly enough in our industry is engagement. There’s been a lost art of that when everything is online, and I think to our detriment.

Dave: 00:04:47

Yeah, yeah. So, our team, the consumer insights team was actually moved to the customer experience team last fall. Prior to that, we sat in the marketing organization as a center of excellence. So essentially, the teams that are running the daily transactional customer experience studies, like your NPS, like your studies that follow up with CSAT after an experience with an agent or with something related to customer service, they’ve always been in a CX organization. And one of the reasons that the organization moved us to that team was to be closer to the work that each other is doing.

Lenny: 00:06:26

I love that. It’s a topic of the day. I was actually, right before our recording [laugh], preparing for a webinar on this very topic of the reorganization, not necessarily from kind of a corporate structure standpoint, but to enable synthesis of what have been kind of siloed components all, kind of, insights, but CX, UX, business intelligence, competitive intelligence, marketing [laugh] analytics, traditional market research. And we’re seeing this shift happen, which I think we’ve talked about for years as an industry of, you know, let’s get this holistic view of our customers and our prospects are targets. And that’s been just challenging, right? They’ve just sat in those silos. So, that’s really cool that Dish is making that change. How’s that gone? You said, it’s been really surprising. Have there been challenges in making that connective tissue between the two different groups?

Dave: 00:07:27

Yeah. I mean, it’s still early in the evolution of bringing the teams together. Fortunately at Dish, across the organization, we are relatively strong at talking to the other and knowing other teams that have datasets that are doing different types of study. So, we came into CX, knowing our colleagues and really working together on some projects. But now as one team, we have the opportunity to get more, I’d say more along the analytical lines, Lenny, where we’re looking at certain trends and taking data to, like I said earlier, really stitch stories together, analytically, in some ways, doing, like, statistical analysis between datasets, but also analytically and looking at patterns and what we’re seeing in one survey is in within another survey.

Lenny: 00:09:33

It’s exciting to hear a company that is further along that journey. We’re hearing a lot from folks that are beginning that process, and you know, you’re actually activating that. So, what about UX? Where does UX fit into that mix as well?

Dave: 00:09:50

Yeah, so within our organization UX sits within the product research teams. They are always in, you know, talk to customers, talk to consumers, test, reiterate mode, so they are in a separate organization. But as I mentioned earlier, just by the nature of our organization, we do know the teams that are doing UI, UX, we share insights with them, they share insights with us, we’re on group chats together. So, we’re always talking to them to find out and to learn what each other are doing, I’d say. And when they have a need for, let’s say, a quantitative study where we’re going to add a pretty significant feature to Sling TV, for example, they’ll reach out to us and we’ll work together to run the quantitative research with the UX researchers as well as the product team. So, we know each other well, we’re very connected and try to keep each other informed of what we’re doing, you know, to the best of our abilities.

Lenny: 00:10:54

Now, I have a hypothesis that one of the things accelerating this model that you are demonstrating, first began with kind of knowledge management systems, you know, integrating the information in one central location, but more than just being a storage place, actually being [unintelligible 00:11:11] platforms like Market Logic, or Lucy or et cetera, et cetera, right, those companies, they’ll allow you to extract information across the library, the corpus of data, was one piece. And it’s accelerating now because of the possibilities around generative AI to really take that to the next level, to interrogate information wherever it lies within the enterprise and pull that out really [laugh] easily. Like, scary easy.

Dave: 00:11:53

Yeah. Yeah, I could talk a bit about knowledge management because that’s an area where we’re also expanding. So, we’ve been using a knowledge management platform for a couple of years. And with the move to the CX organization, we’ve recently had the opportunity to make that an enterprise-wide solution. So, I believe we’re probably at a 50-seat subscription right now, but we’re contracted and moving that to—like I said—an enterprise-wide solution.

Lenny: 00:14:13

I think we’re quickly recognizing, as we do with most tools, you know, it’s a how—

Dave: 00:15:20

Yeah. Yeah, definitely, I’d be there’s always a continued focus on customer experience and delivering—like I said, delivering that positive experience across all touchpoints. And one thing that our team—as well some other teams—are working on is to have the organization really think broadly about customer experience. So, you know, oftentimes, when you hear the word customer, you think of a customer service. And that’s, of course, is a very important touch point.

Lenny: 00:18:22

Yeah. Well, I mean, it matters to every brand in the world. You’re in a very competitive category—

Dave: 00:18:58

Yeah, yeah. There has to be another reason though, why you selected Dish. Not just [crosstalk 00:19:00].

Lenny: 00:19:04

Yes. And it was. There were other options that were not nearly as attractive. Anyway. So, from an enterprise value creation standpoint, that philosophy of look, we need to understand, you know, everybody who touches the brand needs to be aligned, we need to think through this because the more we ser—focus on those things, the more it creates more value for the organization. Are you seeing that ROI? Do you track it? Do you track return on research investment and things like that so that you can show, look, this really is making a difference organizationally?

Dave: 00:19:38

Yeah, we do track ROI through our brand health tracker. I can say it’s a little bit more related to investments in our marketing. As you can imagine, it is very hard to understand, you know, how changes with another other parts of the lifecycle are impacting ROI, brand health, and linking that together. That being said, it’s something we’re certainly thinking about how we can measure that. And if we go back to—I mentioned we have colleagues that are working on the transactional day-to-day customer experience research—the cues that come up for different changes across the different customer touchpoints will usually surface themselves in unstructured data through, you know, open-ended comments within that body of research. So, we do see how changes show up from our customers there and, you know, it gives us the ability to then strategize about what we can do to address that feedback. But yeah, the ROI piece is really hard.

Lenny: 00:20:56

Yeah. I don’t know about who’s cracked that code. But it’s good to hear that, at least you’re trying to priority because there’s some brands that aren’t even particularly trying. The is research is something that we have to do, but they’re not tying it to that business value. So, it’s really great to hear you guys are doing that.

Dave: 00:21:35

Yeah, yeah. So, I’d say several things. One is our team is actually growing. We’re in the process of doing a lot of hiring right now, especially to build up our [bench strength 00:21:46] on the wireless side of the business. From an organization, we are standing up the—I mean, it’s live, right, but we’re also standing up a 5g network across the country, so it’s live across many parts of the country, and we have a postpaid brand to compete with the big carriers in the space, so that is really exciting to be in an organization that is just investing in the future of wireless technology.j, and so there’s a lot of great stuff there.

Lenny: 00:23:45

That’s really cool. Now, all right, so I have to ask a question that you might not be able to answer.

Dave: 00:24:34

So, it’s definitely something we need to be paying attention to from a long-term strategic perspective. Exactly what is happening with that? I would imagine that our teams that are working on, like, long-term engineering development are taking a look at that technology. It certainly hasn’t come around and hit the insights team yet. But just generally speaking, Lenny, take the TV industry and how consumers are watching what they watch, they’re leading the way, right?

Lenny: 00:25:37

Okay.

Dave: 00:26:03

I don’t think there was anything that we didn’t cover. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast. I’m honored. I was honored to speak at IIEX, and honored to be here with you today.

Lenny: 00:26:17

Well, we were honored to have you both at IIEX and on the podcast and hopefully we will do this again.

Dave: 00:26:52

Yeah, so the best way to contact me is on I’d say on LinkedIn. You can look me up on social media, but it’s all, you know, dog pictures and sports and concerts and such. But I’d say for business purposes, LinkedIn is the best.