Customer Experience Maturity Assessments with James Perryman – E11

Episode released on: 27. February 2021

The CX Goalkeeper had a smart discussion with James Perryman

LinkedIn Headline: Working with ambitious individuals and organisations to improve motivation, productivity and customer experience by giving them the self-awareness, confidence and tools to unleash their potential.

Key learnings:

It is all about the “moment” to make the customer fall in love with a company and stay in love with a company
There are 2 ways to understand CX maturity assessments
based on a KPIs selection in the customer journey (e.g., CSAT, NPS)
assessing the maturity internally and externally based on 6 key areas

Vision,
Leadership (Behavior),
Customer (VoC)
Culture
Design methodology
Governance.

How to contact James :

James book suggestion:

Measure what matters by John Doerr

James’ gold nugget:

“Think bigger when are setting goals” @jamesperryman1 on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
Tweet

Thank you James.

Transcription:

Gregorio Uglioni 0:03
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the next session of the CX goalkeeper Podcast. Today. I’m very excited because I have James with me. Hi, James!

James Perryman 0:14
Hey, Gregorio, how are you?

Gregorio Uglioni 0:15
Good, thank you. I am really, really happy to have you here. We discussed in the pre recording, how we met. And I want really to say you helped me quite a lot with the preparation of the accredited customer experience specialist Certification. It was a great support. Thank you very much. And today, I’m really keen and happy to our discussion a smart discussion with you. But let’s start please, explaining who you are what you’re doing, James,

James Perryman 0:44
Of course. So I’m James Perryman. I run agile on two businesses. But I think the important one is my business called momentus, which is where I focus on helping businesses and sometimes kind of leaders within businesses with customer experience. And it’s in the reason why business is called momentous is because it’s all about that moment. And you know, when you think of customer experience, we’ve got to provide great customer experiences all the time it has to be throughout our organization. But you know, what makes us get those top CSAT scores, those top NPS scores, what what makes that 10 out of 10 experience, it’s those moments, it’s those things that customers don’t expect, that wows them and just even when things might be going wrong when we’re in a global pandemic like we are in and times are difficult, and it’s hard for businesses to provide answers to customers and solutions and services to customers. stepping back and thinking about what can I do that just makes my customers stay in love with me fall in love with me. That’s the key. And so we do that through coaching and mentoring through some training and through consultancy, just doing short sharp consultancy projects with businesses.

Gregorio Uglioni 1:59
Thank you, James, for the introduction. And perhaps in this moment, I can really use what I learned in my Latin sessions, carpe diem, this is the momentum, it means now we need to understand and and I think this is really the key to understand how to cope with with the customer and how to create these experiences. And as you said, you are touching quite a lot of different topics. Today, I would like to deep dive with you in the topic, customer experience assessment. And for example, perhaps let’s start really with the easiest one with the basics. What is a customer experience assessment?

James Perryman 2:39
A great question. It’s a I think there’s there’s actually two ways of looking at it, you’ve you’ve got a customer experience assessment, which I’ve alluded to just in in my introduction, so whether that’s CSAT, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, NPS, all those kinds of measurement assessments, which, if you put them in place in the right parts of a customer journey, then you you get that view of the experience at those moments in time. And ultimately, you know, if people are recommending you or not, and if you’re satisfying your customers or dissatisfying them, I think the other side of it then is is actually your is assessing your maturity as a business. Whether you’re a small business Medium, Large doesn’t matter. If you know how mature you are, when it comes to customer experience, internally and externally, then that’s a really valuable form of assessment. And you can use that to complement what you have from a from a CSAT and NPS data perspective as well. It gives you that rich picture of what’s going on inside your organization, with your people, with your leaders with how you get stuff done, how you launch new products and services, how you change things with the end result for customers.

Gregorio Uglioni 3:52
This is really interesting and bring me to the idea or thinking about the six core competencies of the cxpa the customer experience professional associations, where you have different areas where you need to be an expert in order to get the certification. And if I understand what what what you’re saying is you could apply these areas also to a business to understand where you are in your maturity maturity, maturity level, we charted the most important topics that that you touch base while you are performing such a customer experience maturity assessment.

James Perryman 4:30
So I think yeah, and I think there’s I think it must be a thing about models in business, but there are I can see there’s six key areas and and they are a headline level there around the vision. So your customer experience vision around leadership, and that’s about your leaders role modeling the right behaviors and really thinking about customers. You’ve then got the customer themselves. You’ve got a bit around your culture fit around your design methodologies, how you go about designing your experiences and then the governance. So how do you stay on top of them? How do you keep on track with them. So I mean, kind of let me go into a bit more detail with that. So every business should have a strategy have a set of goals of what it wants to achieve, and they’re not always very rarely mentioning customers, they’re often around a revenue, profit EBIT da, they might be about employees around being the best place to work. And looking at kind of almost an E NPS. So it’s kind of how your employees are feeling. But a vision should also include the customer, and you should have certainly within the area of your business that you that owns the customer. So whether that is in marketing with best customer service, whether that’s a customer experience function, kind of at the board level, there should be a vision that talks around kind of what are our objectives for customer experience? How well is that vision understood, at all levels of the business, whether that’s people in head office functions, whether that’s people out in the stores, delivering products or services to your customers, to your people believe in the vision, were they involved and so on, it’s you know, that vision needs to be understood, as is the saying that I’ve seen very recently, with quite big business that I’m working with a CEO, who said, and it was the end date was the CEO who said, If I’m getting bored of repeating the message, then it’s understood. And that’s the point at which I really know. So if you’ve just getting to the point where you’re just, you’ve talked enough about your vision, then people understand it, then it’s there, it’s done. And you know, and they should be embracing it. In order to bring the vision to life, and in order to, I think to give it give it life, then your leaders need to be on board with that the leaders need to engage their people, their teams, but they also need to talk about the customers at their board meetings, at their leadership team meetings, they need to think about the customer when they’re making important decisions, commercial decisions around the business, and then need to spend time with the customers, whether that’s whether that’s bringing customers into the business and having customer forums, whether that’s going out into shops into retail, if that’s possible, and just watching customers interacting with them, going into the customer service areas, call centers, you know, that that can be done remotely, you know, we’re we’ve just tripped into 2021, where the COVID is still around. And you know, certainly in UK, in Germany, I know we’re back into a full lockdown. So whilst that impacts our ability to go out and about and interact with customers, it doesn’t mean we’re it doesn’t stop us doing it remotely, we can, we can very easily do that. And so leaders need to be really thinking about the customer talking about the customer and making sure that, you know, they, they bring it to life very regularly.

I think the bit around the customer is about knowing who they are. And whether you’re a business and you’re a big business that you can segment your customers like some do. And it’s kind of part of I know what we talk around in the AC Access Program. But knowing who they are, knowing who your typical customer is, and making sure they’ve got a voice in your business, you know, a voice of the customer program is, is so rich in order to bring some of that insight in and to bring some of that challenging. And I talked around leaders bring in customers into the organization in you should do that I work with a company who deliver some training to businesses, and they will physically bring in a cardboard cutout of a customer into the meetings so that when you’re having a really difficult discussion, you’ve got a really difficult decision to make, then, yes, you might have a marketing director there, the sales director, the HR director, it and so on, but you’ve got someone who is representing the customer, right then and you can look at them and say, what would they be saying right now, if they had a voice? What would they think to the decision that we’re about to make? What would the pros and cons been and you bring it to life and that also with the customer voice, you can get insight through, through customer forums through NPS surveys, CSAT surveys and so on. So and you keep it alive, he really bring that outside in, in terms of the culture, and obviously by leading from the top by bringing the customer in you, you really have a good customer experience culture. And I think you’ve got to you’ve got to make sure that you’re the people in your organization, know and understand and really recognize that they’ve, they’ve got a voice. So it might be people who are customer facing and they get those insights, they hear them firsthand and they want to share them. It might be people who talk to friends and family about the business or they hear from friends and family about the business and and they want to bring that insight in and they need to know that they can do that they need to know that when they’re coming in and saying, I think there’s something better and different we can do towards our customer experience and to improve it that it will be listened to, it will be reviewed, it will ultimately be acted upon. And to make sure that the people you’re recruiting into your business, think about customers, you can do that through your selection process, through the interviewing, through your job descriptions, through job adverts, there’s so many ways in which you can test that people think customer and bring that in. And then when you’ve got all that, you know, you’ve got to if you’ve got leaders that are leading by example, you’ve got customer insight coming in, you’ve got the customer in your business customer in your room, you’ve got the culture where where your employees really talk about customers and talk about what they learn and what they know, then you’ve got to have that right. Design process in place, when you’re thinking about changing products and services, changing your organization, maybe changing target markets that you go to maybe you want to reach out to a different customer segment, as you go through certainly as a big organization, thinking about what to do what to change what to what to create, then you’ve got to have some maturity in your design process. You’ve got to have checkpoints, as you go through to say, is this still what our customers would want? Are these customers, we’re trying to target still the right ones? What might have changed in the outside world that would change our thinking, what are our competitors done that might change what we’re thinking? What have we done as a business that might impact it? Have we brought the insight in have we brought the customer’s voice in? Have we done everything we can to make sure that this is really driven from a customer perspective than just a revenue point of view? And then, given that alive, really is that governance piece? It’s saying? What are our KPIs that we have around customers? Where do we measure them? How do we track them? How do we talk about them? How do we make sure that we’ve got the right conversation at the right level? So a business board level, we want to be talking about customers and customers KPIs were out in the business? Do we need to have that focus? It’d be great that we have it within kind of design forums and kind of design parts of the organization. But actually, where else do we bring it in? How do we make sure that we make investment decisions with the customer in mind? How do we make sure that when we’re when we’re kind of facing into environmental issues, market issues, things that impact us a business? Where do we bring that? Where do we bring that customer thinking in so that, for me is a very whistle stop tour around those six areas of vision, leadership, customer culture, design and governance? And you can you can easily assess kind of where you’re at. And that model of maturity? I think

Gregorio Uglioni 12:50
it’s I think it’s great. We had in the last five minutes, we had a short customer experience masterclass, he was touched all the relevant topics, that then that needs to be touched. And and I think this is a great explanation, perhaps with your words, or to make that a bit better understandable for, for our, for the people who are following this discussion, why is so important to perform at some point in time, maturity assessment.

James Perryman 13:22
I think it’s important because you’ve certainly if you’re, if you’re looking to grow as a business, you’ve got to have a benchmark, you know, and if you’ve if you if you really believe and you say that you want to, you want to win more customers, you want to retain more customers, you want them to spend more with you, you want them to recommend you more to their friends and family, then you’ve got to have a benchmark, you’ve got to know where you’re at. And so part of that is around those those measures that CSAT, NPS, that kind of thing. But part of it is how you are as an organization, how do you know where you’re at to be able to improve if if you don’t have measures in place KPIs, if you don’t have leaders that bring people in, and then you know, you don’t know where you’re starting from, and you also don’t know where to make improvements. You know, you might say yet, in our board meetings, every week, we review revenue, operating costs, employee numbers and customer satisfaction. That’s great. You review it, and you’re following the trends. And you’ll see that customer satisfaction is going up and down. But if it if it starts going up, do you know why it’s going up? Where where is the governance? Where are the design checks that say, it’s because we made that change? Or if it goes down? Where do you know that is going down, you’ll you’ll be blind effectively. So by understanding immaturity as an organization, you’ve got that starting point and it gives you a lens, very easy lens of where to make improvements. So that you’ve got that framework in place, you’ve got that way of working in place so that you can start fine tuning all those different bits of your customer experience those different bits of your customer journey. Knowing that as an organization, you You’re stable, you’ve got a great position and you can assess it again in six months time, it is time to say, right? Have we become even more mature, and that maturity, how does that match to our business growth, to our, to our revenue to our brand recognition to our market share all that kind of good stuff, you’ve got a really good correlation.

Gregorio Uglioni 15:21
I think this is this is really important. And what you’re saying is where you start at some point, and then you want to get somewhere with these KPIs. And you need to define the path of to achieve that. And with this assessment, you can check where you are in your journey in your growth strategy, not speaking only about revenues, and so on. But for sure, it’s about customer experience, because at the end customer experience, if it’s done in the proper in a proper way, it’s also growth strategy, and therefore you can find a way to, to get there. And you mentioned something, perhaps, to do it now. And then in six months, when do you perform such such such maturity assessment, perhaps also, based on your last experience with your with your customers,

James Perryman 16:06
we almost certainly do it at the beginning, you know, when when customers, when our customers, when our clients engage us to help them address, either, you know, low customer experience scores, or low customer SAT scores, or, you know, it’s their first step into being really customer centric, one of the first things we’ll do is, is take that assessment view straightaway and, and, you know, what we’ll do is we’ll coach them around it, if we’ve got an organization who we think and maybe we recognize from our research might be quite immature, or we’ll do some coaching with them first, before we run that assessment. And before we share the assessment, like you would with any type of survey or type of process or assessment that gives you a score, you’ve got to know they’re ready for it. So if they think they’re okay, and actually, their assessment comes in, and they’re not okay, you know, you’ve got to hold their hand with, we’ve taken them through that, but also highlight where, why those areas are low. And equally, why those areas are higher. So, so we’re doing at the beginning, because then it also helps us demonstrate the difference we’ve made, if we if, because part of what we want to do is show that we’ve helped a business increase its performance in in, in this context as customer experience. So if we can’t show a growth in maturity, and marry that with a growth and an improvement in customer experience scores, then I don’t think we’re demonstrating the difference we make. So I think it’s important to do that. And to do that early on, I think the second point in which we make an assessment really is dependent on the work we’re doing the level of maturity of the organization, and the and the type of organization. And if you’ve got, if you’ve got a startup, and who move quickly, they act quickly, they react quickly, then you might want to do that assessment quite regularly to show the change so that they’ve got that real time view almost. Whereas if you’ve got a big company, you know, which is almost like a bit of a machine, you know, just quite heavy to move, then then, you know, I think at least every six months as a as a minimum is right, because it takes a long time for organizations to go through change, to think about putting new governance in to think about new ways of working. So you know, if you do it any sooner, you might see a small degree of change. But it’s, it won’t be enough to motivate people, you know, they think it’s too soon. And they think, well, we’ve only gone from a six to a seven and our governance score, but I feel like we’ve done a lot more work. That’s not that’s not very motivating. It doesn’t inspire people to carry on. Whereas if you maybe did it a year apart, and you could demonstrate a much bigger degree of change, then, you know, that’s that’s a nicer picture to see for organizations.

Gregorio Uglioni 18:52
Sure, and I think it’s extremely relevant also to understand that self assessment is quite different from a third party assessment performed in our in a professional way. And there are quite quite a lot of numbers, statistics that are saying that most of the time in the self assessment, you’re thinking that you’re better than what you really are. And also compared to the to the competitors. And therefore I think it’s really important. And I would say today, I learned also that we should run more often our maturity assessment because just thinking about an average of six months, and I think quite a lot of company also on my side and thinking about Switzerland, if they are doing that it’s on a yearly basis and perhaps it’s not enough. Thank you. Thank you very much for this information, James. We are progressing and for me it’s also important in this podcast in this smart discussion also to learn a bit more about about you. And therefore my my first questions, James is you mentioned you’re again in a lockdown out Ensure to a satisfactory life work balance. I’m always saying life work balance, because for me, it’s bit more important than the work.

James Perryman 20:10
Yeah, it’s a great question. And, and I think it’s, you know, this is for us in the UK, this is our, I think it’s our third proper lockdown. So I think it depends which era the UK you’re in but but it has been a test. And I think it’s difficult because you’re right, you can’t say you kind of home and work balance because home is work. Now, you know, I’m sitting in my office at home. So there’s a very thin line between where I stepped from my office to the sitting room to watch TV or to go make a cup of coffee. So you know, what I’ve put in place, and I’m someone that’s worked from home, for the best part of about 20 years. On and Off, whether that’s five days a week, one day a week, anywhere in between, for me, you’ve got to have some geographical boundaries within your house, if you can. So even if you don’t have a room that you can convert to an office, at least have a room you can put a bit of a temporary desk in. So that one room is where you work. And that’s separate to when you eat, where you drink, where you relax, you know, where you where you live, when you’re not working. I work with a worked with a couple of businesses over last year, startup businesses who, you know, we’re based in, in London in our capital, and had quite young people working for them who lived in the city, and therefore lived, you know, they didn’t have their own house, they they rented a room in a house. So for them, the one room was their office, it was their living space, it was their kitchen, it was everything you know, where they where they die and where they eat. So that really impacted their mental health that that was hard for them to separate work from home because it just merged into one. And so that’s where, what’s for me, what’s second most important thing is about structuring your time, really carefully structuring your day, and putting in place, the times at which you want to do stuff that isn’t work. So for me, and it might have lapsed a bit over Christmas, New Year, but I’ve got it back back from this week. But for me, I like to do exercise and fitness first thing in the morning and I’m you know, like six in the morning, I will get up. And before lockdown, I’ll go to the gym, or I can go for a run or I can do something at home. And so I’ll do that exercise. And then I can share, I can have some breakfast, get ready. And then I can start my work. And it might be eight o’clock in the morning, it might be half past eight. But I can start my work in a different part of the house. And I can work through until whatever time it’s appropriate for that day, whether it’s five, whether it’s six might be four, I might say I’m not going to do anything this afternoon. But I’ve got that clear boundary. And after that laptop shuts down, I’m out of that room and I’m doing whatever it is I want to do spending time with the family, doing a hobby, going for a walk, whatever it might be. But having those that you know putting in place, the time at which you’re going to work or not work is important. Because otherwise you’re you know, you might just be finishing an email but that you’re dinner’s ready. So you go and have dinner, you take your laptop with you. And so you just put your laptop on your lap after dinner and you’ve got the TV on and you’re with your family but you’re not, you’re not present with your family, your your head is in your laptop, not with them and, and you’ve you’ve just let those lines blur. So it’s it’s important to say, This isn’t my work time now this is my relaxing, you know, relaxing time. This is my personal time. So for me the physical space time. And as with anything even before lockdown is is about goal setting is saying what do what do I want to achieve this week? That, you know, as part of my plan, whether I’m in a business, whether I run a business, you know, what do I want to get achieved this week, and making sure that those goals are realistic, making sure that they they help you develop the help you grow, that you know you can achieve. So that you you still have that sense of accomplishment when you when you finish them and know what you need to do each day. Because if you finish something early on the daily think I’ve done everything I wanted to do today I’ve done it a bit earlier, then great kind of finish earlier laptop down away from the room and go and do something different. But you know, for me that standard practice, I think in business and particularly when you run your own business, to be to be really mindful of what you want to achieve and and getting that sense of enjoyment when you can take it off the list that you’ve done it.

Gregorio Uglioni 24:34
Sure. And I think this is something that everybody should follow to understand that it’s also important to have proper time even if we are we are working from from from home. And this. The next question I would like to ask you is what what’s the last book you read or a book that you would suggest to the audience to read?

James Perryman 24:57
Wow. Topical Actually, from what I was just talking about the the book I’m reading at the moment, is by a gentleman called John Doerr, and it’s called measure what matters, which I think probably a lot of your viewers and listeners might have read. But it’s, it’s interesting because I’m doing a piece of work with a business who are changing how they measure performance. And they don’t have a very mature way of looking at performance at the moment. But they want to adopt a similar approach that companies like Facebook and Google and Netflix have adopted, which is called OKRs, which is different from your standard objectives and KPIs and, and so John Doerr, his book is all around OKRs, and where they came from, from his time at Intel, and how he took them to Google. And, you know, obviously, he’s kind of very successfully implemented them or, or founded companies or being part of companies who have helped other businesses adopt them. So I’m one of the third of the way through reading that book at the moment. And it’s good, because it’s helping me, it’s helping me just get some of that detail around OKRs. And, and helping this business implement them. I think prior to that, it probably would have been another, it would have either been another business book, because I tend to like flicking between books that are around kind of business growth and having the right mental attitude towards business, or it would have been an autobiography. And I can’t remember whose I read last, because it probably was a while ago, probably on holiday, which wasn’t last year, sadly. But I kind of like clothes, I like finding out about people, and what makes them tick, and what makes them who they are. And ideally kind of relating that into business. And when I’m not reading those kind of books, I like a good detective book, something that that has me correct from page two.

Gregorio Uglioni 26:51
That said, that’s, that’s also nice one, back to the to the stories about individuals, perhaps if somebody wants to contact you to get some more some insight on what what we what we were discussing, what’s the best way to contact you.

James Perryman 27:05
So they can find me on LinkedIn, change pyramid and hopefully be able to share some links. If not, there’s a photo that looks very much like this. And yeah, connect with me there. And you can find out obviously a bit more about me and my business and what to do. Or take a look at the website, which is momentus, which is m o m e n t u s . uk . com. And there you’re you’ll see more around what we do in the world of customer experience, but also around team engagement and career and leadership development. And you’ll get my email address and my phone number. So yeah, please, please go via LinkedIn all the website to get in touch. Thank you,

Gregorio Uglioni 27:45
James. And there were the last question. It’s Please, could you share the last golden nugget with the audience? Something that we discussed or something new that you would do you would leave to the audience?

James Perryman 28:03
Oh, what a great question. And I think the I’m going to I’m going to relate it to that book that I’m reading measure what matters by John Doerr. And I, my nugget would be with him with it, it’s for you individually. And it’s a personal goal that you want to accomplish in 2021. Or it’s as a business and it’s about where you want your business to be. Or if you’re within a business, what you want to accomplish within your role. Don’t just settle for having an objective, something that says you know, I will deliver this by the end of December or I will have lost two stone in of weight in 12 months time. Think bigger. Think about something that in the world of OKRs is called big hairy audacious goals or BHAG. And it helps you think much, much bigger. And it might be a great example could be you say, I want to run in a marathon, I’m going to run a marathon. And I’m going to do it in less than however many hours. And then you break that down. Because that’s you might say, well actually, if I’m going to run a marathon, I’m going to have to lose some weight. So that’s that I’ve just already elevated that losing weight objective into a much bigger goal. So I’m going to have to lose some weight. And actually, that means, you know, I’m have to join a running club, and I’m going to have to learn about nutrition and diet. And I’m going to have to think about some of the bits around registering for a marathon. Where do I do it? Do I do it in New York? Do we do it in London? You know, where would it be but have that great big goal that might just feel a little bit a little bit scary, a little bit exciting. But if you aim for it, you know what you might get to in December and you might not have run a marathon, but that could be because you’re going to do it in 2022 and it could be you actually achieved a personal best distance of 20 rather than 26 miles, but you went somewhere towards it, which is way better than just a small objective of losing some weight because it gives it some purpose. It gives it some intention. And it gives it some excitement as well.

Gregorio Uglioni 30:12
As usual, I’m not commenting the golden nuggets, because it’s your golden nuggets for the audience. I want only to say thank you very much, James, for your time.

James Perryman 30:23
There, Gregorio. Thanks for inviting me. Appreciate it.

Gregorio Uglioni 30:26
And also to the audience. Thank you very much for being here for following this smart discussion, With James. I conclude with nine words, please like it, please share it, please follow it. And so we can have other discussion in future about it. Thank you very much.

James Perryman 30:47
Thank you

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