Executive Interview with LogMeIn’s Ryan Lester

We have all used your products for many years. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down and discuss the organization behind these solutions. You have enabled our abilities to work remotely and securely. (I even shredded my cheatsheet of passwords for your product! And, that is saying a lot!)

My conversation with Ryan Lester at LogMeIn gives us an inside view of their organization and what they do. Ryan is the Senior Director of Customer Engagement Technologies.

What makes LogMeIn unique in the industry?

I think the best way to discuss our uniqueness is to look at the foundation of our organization. Our sole purpose is to remove friction. We want to make it easier to connect, whether within our communities or across the globe. We want to simplify how people interact with each other to drive meaningful insight and better outcomes. We want to make it easier to connect with our customers in a frictionless way.

What is your leadership’s top priority?

Our big push is to redefine engagement, especially where it is relevant to our customers and employees. While it’s certainly important to focus on the big, monumental moments, we also try to focus on the little things and moments that can help to redefine an overall experience. We’re constantly looking at how to redefine the way companies engage with their customers and employees to deliver a better and more consistent experience. There are so many opportunities in these little moments that customers have when they’re calling into a contact center or engaging with a frontline employee to make things better—and that’s what excites us.

What is the most important thing you’ve learned from your customers?

The biggest thing we have learned is that contact center and customer experience is a journey. There is always an opportunity to improve, but you need to be specific about the problem that you are trying to solve now. Our customers who focus on identifying the problem they want to solve, what they are going to do about it and how they are going to measure it tend to achieve the best outcomes. Be­cause the con­tact center is ever-evolving, being very specific about the problem statement and the metrics you’re going to use to identify whether that problem has gotten better or worse is super critical before you go about any transformation project.

What is the top pain point that your product fixes for your customers?

There are two things we feel strongly about. The first, which is often under-emphasized, is the importance of empowering employees to create a better customer experience by giving them the latest, greatest tools to help them do their jobs better. Many contact centers today have outdated infrastructures and software; they don’t have technology like AI helping their employees to be more efficient and effective.

The second is aligning internal company efforts to solve the right problems. Too often, businesses don’t properly align the value to the customer to the value of time that is spent around resources for employees. Contact center agents get thrown very repetitive, low-value problems rather than using technology like self-service or AI to solve those inquiries. Instead, let a customer find the answer on the website and free up your agents to spend time on a more consultative sale or more complex problem.

The last point I would like to make is that you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to deliver great customer experiences. No matter your contact center or team size, there are technologies and resources out there to help. Contact centers don’t need to sit and wait for change. Start with identifying the problem they want to work on and seek out the resources. Many of today’s technologies fit well within smaller contact centers, and even if you start small, you can still achieve outstanding results early on.

Ryan Lester, Senior Director of Customer Experience Technologies at LogMeIn, and his team own the strategic development and implementation for the go-to-market plan for AI, chatbot and virtual assistant products at LogMeIn. He is passionate about making new technology easy and helping any size company unlock the potential of AI and bots. Prior to his role at LogMeIn, Ryan held various sales, marketing and product positions at Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems and Eaton Corporation.