Episode released on: 10. April 2023
Unlocking the Return On Investment of Customer Experience: Making the Business Case with Jessica Noble (mini-series 3/3) – Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper
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The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Jessica Noble
LinkedIn Headline: Transformation Strategy & Execution | Organizational Change & Org Design | Customer & Employee Experience | C-level Advisor | Author | Speaker | MBA, CCXP, PMP, MCP |
Highlights:
00:00 Game Start
01:06 Jessica’s Introduction
02:57 Jessica’s Values
03:56 Profit Margins
05:39 Return On Investment ROI
06:46 How to quantify it
9:36 Heroes vs. It depends
11:25 Too many options
15:24 A good example
16:52 It’s not possible to measure everything
21:45 Communication
26:13 Future
29:02 Book Suggestion
31:19 Jessica’s Golden Nugget
and much more
Jessica’s Contact Details:
Her book suggestion:
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Jessica’s Golden Nuggets:
- Find people who are passionate about operational excellence in your organization. And if they drop words like Lean or Six Sigma build alliances with them. Because we forget that Lean and Six Sigma were built on starting with what customers value. So they get it and that whole thinking outside-in and inside-out. They focus on outcomes, maybe on operational excellence. But they’re following a very similar approach instinctually, if not, intentionally, so find those folks, because that’s a great way to build momentum alliances and measurable ways to improve customer experience.
Find people who are passionate about operational excellence in organizations. If they drop words like Lean or Six Sigma build alliances with them. They’re following a similar approach instinctually, if not, intentionally. A great way to build q measurable ways to improve CX. Jessica Noble on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
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What did we discuss?
Gregorio Uglioni
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast your host, Greg will have smart discussions with friends, experts and thought leaders on customer experience transformation and leadership. Please follow this podcast on your preferred platform. I am sure you will enjoy the next episode with the guest I selected for you.
Ladies and gentleman tonight. It’s really a big, big pleasure because I’ve Jessica Noble together with me. Hi Jessica, how are you?
Jessica Noble
I am wonderful and very happy to be here. It’s been a while since we chatted before.
Gregorio Uglioni
Yes, thank you very much. And for the people watching to this video and not listening to the podcast, we see a nice background that you have you have two nice books behind you. Could you please share with us which books are.
Jessica Noble
So one of them is customer experience 3, which is actually when we had a chance to collaborate. And the other one is the 5 customer experience mistakes that are causing profit erosion.
Gregorio Uglioni
It’s really interesting. And I think this will be also the topic that we are going to discuss today. It’s about return on investment, speaking about customer experience, not the fluffy things that everybody’s thinking about. But it’s really creating return for companies. We will deep dive in this topic in few minutes. But before that, we would like to learn a bit more about you, Jessica, could you please introduce yourself and highlight your career steps that really bring you to this to this role that you have now?
Jessica Noble
Yeah, Jessica Noble, I live in the States in Southern California. So if anybody knows where Orange County is much further south than that, right near the border to Mexico, I have been in working in customer experience for a long time. And I actually started in it before I knew that customer experience was a career or a discipline and probably about 20 something years ago, when I worked for Nationwide Insurance. And it was probably about seven years maybe after that, that I’ve realized what customer experience was. And I dug into it and realized I had been doing some of the things that practitioners of customer experience focus on, but really started to understand all of the things that customer experienced practitioners do, and leading practices. And I’ve been doing that ever since. And now our organization, we work with clients to achieve strong and sustainable profits, profit margins, by one plugging money link leaks. So operational excellence, and then by elevating experiences, both for customers and for employees or team members.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Jessica, you are already start touching the relevant topics. You are too quick because there are still one question I would like to ask but I really liked that you are straight to the point and also reading your books. It’s it’s quite clear, and we feel and understand that. But before that before that which values drive you live.
Jessica Noble
Oh my life. So I would say there’s really one big very significant one that anybody who works with me probably knows and or will recognize and that is that I believe in treating people with respect and kindness. And by kindness, I don’t mean niceness. I mean radical candor. So I’m very direct and to the point person, if there’s an issue, let’s tackle it. Let’s dive in. So it’s being respectful, but then also being candid.
Gregorio Uglioni
And that’s really interesting. And it’s something that also Gary Vaynerchuk is sharing with you or you are sharing with him radical candor. It’s in his latest book 12 and a half. The half is really candor. And I think this is really an interesting thing, something to understand. And if it’s possible to apply even better, because I think it’s it’s key in business and also in in life. Jessica, I am really happy that we can start discussing about linking customer experience with business results. And as you already mentioned, one words that we need to deep dive in profit margins, a lot of people are speaking all about profit, and he will start really pointing on the right topic. Could you please elaborate a bit on what you are meaning meaning with profit margins?
Jessica Noble
Yes. So profit became really popular with companies like Uber and trying to think of other ways grants were really they’re subsidized by their private equity or their venture capital firms. And profit margin is really at the end of the day, how much money do we get to take home that hasn’t been spent trying to get us where we are. And that’s what you need to be sustainable, you can only live in the red upside down for so long. Now, given the you know, the last handful of years, some massive companies, we work, like I mentioned, Uber, some of those lived in that space a lot longer than we would typically see. But that era, I believe it’s over.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you’re saying it totally makes sense. Because at the end, it’s what it’s counted what you you bring home, what you have in your bank, and what what it’s the result of what you’re doing. And you explained that profit margins, because let’s start making one step back, perhaps why is return on investment, so important when we are speaking about customer experience.
Jessica Noble
So return on investment is an important way to decide how we’re going to invest our limited resources. So time, money, focus and attention. And I like to call out cognitive resources, we have a very limited amount. So we have to determine what’s the best place to apply those resources to get a return, whether that return is short term or long term. And that is why ROI is such a powerful tool to determine that and that continue to stay in sync with rich return on investment because it does change over time as factors change.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think this is something important. And perhaps, how do you quantify the CX improvement? Because a lot of people are saying, yes, it’s about the long term, you mentioned that it’s sustainable growth and sustainable profit for for the future. But how do you quantify the improvement improvement in CX?
Jessica Noble
Yeah, so I will admit, there are some areas that are softer, and it can be more difficult. So our ROI is not the fix that answer for everything. But the way that you calculate it is really look at what is important to your company, what are your values and goals? What’s important to your client? And what are you trying to improve? So let’s say that we are an earlier stage company and our focus is on we need to get customers. So we need to acquire customers, that is going to be one of the important measures, for your business case for your ROI. If you are a little bit further in your growth process, it may be about retaining customers. So again, that is a measure. And those are very, very quantifiable. We know hopefully, what the value of a customer is the value of keeping them what it costs to get a customer. But the other side of the equation is around that operational excellence, the processes the efficiencies, how well do we do what we do? And are we productive? So it’s, I talk a lot about the cost of over relying on hero employees, which heroes are great. But if you have an organization that is relying on them too much, when it’s terribly expensive. It’s very risky. And it’s ultimately it’s gonna affect your customer experience in so many ways. It’s just it’s not scalable. And so looking at both how can we improve the top line? And how can we improve or reduce the bottom line is really the simple way to look at ROI, understanding two things. Not everything is super easy to quantify. And to kind of prove out the thinking you may have hypotheses, we think if we do this, it’s going to do this. So that’s a given. And then the time horizon, which you mentioned, if it’s going to be a more of a long term return, or short term and calling those out. And if you can incorporate references to where we’ve seen that before. Benchmarks research, that’s great. Sometimes it is just something that people in business now that if we invest in a that it is going to be a longer time horizon.
Gregorio Uglioni
You are mentioning several interesting thing. I think, one it’s also what you’re sharing in customer experience 3, it’s these heroes or these “it depends days” that it’s important to have a consistent service. Could you please elaborate a bit on that?
Jessica Noble
Yeah, one of my favorite topics that you mentioned is the chapter in the book and it’s called the it depends turn app. And that is, if my experience with your business is, you know, working with you or working with that brand. Is that good? Well, it depends. If I call on Sunday, or if I go to the website on Tuesday, or if I’d have a return, and the answer to all those, well, it depends whether my experience is good. And as you said, it’s that consistency piece. If when I go to a restaurant, sometimes it’s excellent, the food is great, it’s clean, the service is wonderful. What other times it’s horrible. I can’t trust that experience. And so for me to want to invest my money in that experience, that’s probably not where I want to go unless I’m a gambler. And, and I don’t mind surprises. And so companies that can provide that same level, that same quality of experience. And one key is for a similar level of effort on my part as the customer. That is key. So I may get the same outcome. But if it requires a lot more work for me this week than it did a week ago, a month ago, which that’s a lot of times one of the key is that customer effort. If that varies wildly, then I get into that my experience will it depends on the channel that I engaged with, et cetera.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s, that’s a great, great example. And the other thing that we were also discussing in the pre recording is I started working in in hospital roughly one and a half years ago. And we wanted to start the customer experience or patient, patient experience transformation. It’s everything about making the life of our employees and our patient easier. And basically, when I started, companies started contacting me. And do you want a customer experience platform? Do you want a voice of the customer tool, and by the way, you need to put everything on cloud and so on. And for me, and I would like you to explain that, it’s extremely difficult, because I can start making investments, spending a lot of money on technological solution, but I don’t know if I need them because it was at the beginning. And I think a lot of companies invest a lot of money on ending to under different channels, and on the best in class Voice of the Customer platform. And they’re not leveraging that and everything needs and must be on cloud from day one, and so on. I think there are clear advantages of using cloud. But at the end, as you’re saying, it’s, it depends on how you’re progressing. What’s your, what’s your view on that?
Jessica Noble
Yes, so I’m really simple person in terms of when you get started. And that is using a two by two matrix where you are taking all of the problems and solutions and plot them based on the level of impact you think address it’s gonna have, and the amount of effort and it’s order magnitude is it going to be a massive effort to fix it and a massive impact. If so that’s probably going to be a priority, but it’s going to be a longer term one, then we get into the things that are relatively lower effort and high impact of low hanging fruit or quick wins, get started on them, now, stop talking about it and do it. And that’s where you get into providing value early and often. And taking those smaller, quick wins or whatnot, and demonstrating that you get things done. That’s how you build up a lot of that credibility, for CX and for yourself as a professional by delivering on those little things that oftentimes, they’ve been just driving people crazy. But why they haven’t moved forward, I will say most often what I see is because it’s cross functional, it may not be complicated. But it requires the coordination and the understanding of a few different areas. And so nobody says I own that I will drive getting it fixed. And so I would say that is the number one place that I start, where I tell people not to start, and I may get in a little bit of trouble with people is the last thing that you want to do is go by a big tool to get voice of the customer, or to start talking to the customer bias surveys. minute one. And the reason I say this, don’t ask customers what you should already know the answer to because somebody’s already asked the question and you’ve done nothing with the information. And don’t ask a question if you’re not willing to do anything about it. I have left more brands, I actually left a very big logo last year, because I kept getting a survey request and they’re gonna you know, pay you $25 or something to complete it. I already did that last year and the year before and It’s the same things that they nothing’s improving. And so while a lot of people are like, oh, I need to go hear from the customer. That is not the first step you need to know, what information do we already have? What feedback do we already have? So that I’m not making things worse by asking them a question that they’ve already communicated.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you’re saying it totally makes sense. And I remember to meet to an experience that I had last week. And I contacted the bank because they had a money transfer issue. And they explained me pretty well, and in a clear way that they were not guilty for this mistake, but the other bank did the mistake. And then they said, Okay, now we’re going to close the chat, and then it pop up an automatic survey. Are you satisfied with this with the service? And I answered, No, I have not satisfied. And then the guy came back and said, Yes, but we explained to you the issue. And I said, Yes, but you asked me if I’m satisfied. I’m not satisfied, because with this transfer, I lost money. And this, this is not your fault. But it’s I’m I lost money. And the guy said, yes, your true. That’s that’s perhaps not the best question that we could ask. And I think this this, this is really disruption because I understood the explanation. I accepted the explanation. But don’t ask me if I’m happy with that. Because I’m not that I lost money if they weren’t guilty.
Jessica Noble
That’s Oh, I’ve been in that spot. And yeah, those things, they drive me crazy when they end the call and say, you know, it was wonderful to serve you today. And all their answers were no, no, no, we can’t. And no. It was wonderful to serve me. It didn’t serve me anything other than know.
Gregorio Uglioni
Exactly. Perhaps one question. And you are also often involved in this discussion about the return the profit and so on. But there are also additional things that can quantify how much are good this transformation are, but are more fluffy, like brand awareness and all this stuff that you cannot quantify numbers? What’s your view on this topic?
Jessica Noble
Yeah, so I would say two things. One, there is no single way to measure everything. So you can’t quantify everything with a hard number. That said, you have people who quote, try and quantify everything, but they have horrible assumptions behind it. And then you have some people who think everything is too hard to even try and quantify. And so you have to come to the middle. And one of the things I would say is, let’s say you’re really struggling, and you can’t quantify, is there a way to test out your hypothesis that says, I think if we do this, this is the benefit we’ll get. So let’s make a really narrow investment. And let’s test our hypothesis. That is one way to do it. The other for things like brand awareness. And there’s a lot we could talk about that all day. But as I would ask the question, what happens if we don’t do anything and people aren’t aware of our brand? What is the cost of not doing anything? And then people start to think, Oh, well, we get a lot of our leads, based on natural search results, or referrals, because people already know our brands are not referrals, but because of name recognition, because they’ve already seen it. And so they’re aware of our brand when they go at any point in their life looking for something. And so that’s another way to frame it. And that usually shows us just how much of that is quantifiable, whether it is in reducing the cost of acquiring customers, or, you know, kind of the other key elements.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you. Perhaps one question, and I think that’s something that it’s the reason from my point of view, no answer, but you can give guidance to to the audience, this customer experience transformation, it’s a program, it’s a lot of different initiatives and projects. But this is one or several projects that are going and they’re progressing, but the company is doing a lot of different things. They are changing products, they are doing this and that. And therefore it’s often difficult really, to link back after six months after one year. What was the cause? Or the effect of something? What’s your view on this topic?
Jessica Noble
Yeah, so I think one we have to look at how we should be measuring what we’re doing. And part of that is define those with the end in mind, what are we going to be able to reasonably measure? So if you’re a smaller, less mature business around data, don’t base your case around things that it’s going to be so expensive to measure that you lose your ROI. And so I think that is one of the biggest pieces. And the other is, I love to go into an organization, when you understand the company’s goals, what are they trying to accomplish, but then forever an area of the business? What are they trying to do, and then match up your customer experience transformation strategy, with what they’re trying to do. A lot of it being operational, not all of it. In a lot of times, we’ll see that they are two sides of the same coin, if we invest money, in this customer experience improvement, or this operational improvement, we’re solving the same problem. And so let’s what are they measuring, because if we can help another area of the organization hit their goal. Oh, now we’re getting momentum. And if we can do that with a few areas and tie in what they’re trying to do to our big picture vision, that’s how you create that sustainable vision that has momentum across the organization. Rather than designing a customer experience transformation, kind of in this little silo that is totally disjointed. From what the rest of the organization is trying to accomplish, we can actually be that framework where we’re plugging in this is how it fits together. And this is how what they’re doing gets us to where we need to be with customer experience, this is how they’re doing. And then invariably will identify some gaps or overlaps will overlap. So that’s a great thing to raise, because probably means we’re spending twice as much to do something or the gaps, and we say, You know what, we’ll take initiative to help figure out how we close that gap.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s, that’s, that’s really interesting, you start collaborating with the with the other departments. And this is, for sure, one important thing, that we helped them achieve their targets. But how we can explain to other departments the importance of customer experience, for example, also the finance team?
Jessica Noble
Yes. So CFOs and finance teams are actually they’re my favorite to work with. And I’ll just give a kind of a quick little, I don’t know, quite quite a story. But I was on a panel a couple of years ago for a CFO professional association. So all the CFOs in the southeast of the United States, it’s been a panel of us, and I was brought in to represent customer experience. And then there was a couple of different CFOs on the panel. Well, they probably realized they didn’t need me there at all, because one of the CFOs, she was, I would call me more of a modern CFO, every answer she gave is what I would have said, she really understood the levers of their business. So the way I break it down in this is perhaps a little bit Elementary, but CFOs, their job is to care about risks, and to manage risk, which is really the potential loss of something of value, or the potential gain of something of value. And so your job is to reduce the risk of losing it, and to reduce the risk of gaining it and or the cost of gaining it. And so when we think about what is the business value, most customers sales, potentially a few other things like safety. So what are the risks that we encounter related to customers, acquiring them and retaining them, and the risks related to sales, the duration of a sales cycle, the cost of sales cycle, those types of things, and CFOs care about effectively managing the risk. And in order to effectively manage risk, they need to be informed with meaningful and timely information. And then they, you know, want visibility into other things like customer profitability, service consistency, and those types of things. Again, these are modern CFOs that really understand what is impacting the risk that they’re looking at. So when you have one who understands that they speak our language almost faster than we do, and when they don’t, that’s when we can kind of bring them back to the basics that will make sense to them. And I’ll give an example if that’s okay. When we think about having a bad experience, and we can kind of personalize it when we’re talking to someone, every other key metric and a business is going to show it kind of that the trending is going to be impacted. Now you may not be able to see it in the volume of transactions or experiences but when people have bad experiences, well, the cost of sales goes up. And sometimes that’s because we can’t get references in a more of a b2b situation because people are having bad experiences so we can’t find any references. Cycle Time that goes up. Maybe it’s because they need more convincing because they’ve heard on Word on the street is there’s bad experiences? Well, when the cost of a sale, sale goes up our margins that’s automatically eating into our margins. It’s similar when we look at bad experiences, now customer complaints are going up. Dealing with those complaints, requires operational time. And so the cost to serve goes up. And both of those now are eating into margin from the other end from the bottom side. And then ultimately, if you have these bad experiences, enough, it wears on employees, it is incredibly exhausting, and painful and demoralizing to work for a company that’s doing a horrible job all of the time, even if you had phenomenal employees. But if you have broken broken systems and processes and bad data, there’s only so much that team members can do. And it’s demoralizing. And then you get into that cycle boat talking through that with CFOs. They get that logic, it makes sense.
Gregorio Uglioni
It totally makes sense. Yes. Because you make that understandable for them, and you speak their language so that they understand and they can achieve their goals. And as we know, CFOs are the guys and ladies looking at figures and therefore they want to see figures. And therefore it’s totally understandable. We are coming to the end of this game. But I still have one question. It’s not related to return on investment to to profit and loss and profit margins what we learned today, it’s in 10 years from now we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast, Jessica is together with me, what we are discussing about,
Jessica Noble
oh, um, there’s gonna be a lot of things. But I would say, I’ll pick two. One of them, which is super timely, I would say is around technology, like chat GPT. And really artificial intelligence in general, I think we will still be talking about how to bias proof it. And we’ll still be in the fight of what is appropriate to regulate, and what is not. So I think those will be still two of the big topics, even in 10 years. The other one that I think is I’ll pick an example, sentiment analysis. So this is just an example, I think we’re going to be getting into more and more nuance of what that means and what we can do with it. And then potentially are probably likely, there will be a way to take that intelligence, and automate the next action. So if you have intelligent process improvement, it diagnosis a problem and it’s self fixes. Same for customer journey. It, you know, understands the customer, and then it decides the next action. And we see little glimmers of this here and there. But most of it is based on just pure artificial intelligence as opposed to machine learning models and the capabilities that chat GP chat GPT has given us a glimpse into. And so I would say those are probably the two big ones. I will put the conversation on our calendar for 10 years from today.
Gregorio Uglioni
You are more than welcome. And I think then you can again, explain how to get the approval from the CFO to invest in such tools, because I think this will be a big investment.
Jessica Noble
I think I think so yeah.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Jessica, we are coming to the end of this game. But we still have three minutes in the extra time. And I still have three questions for you. The first one is, is there a book that helped during your career or, or during your life that you would like to share with the audience?
Jessica Noble
I have been I’ve read so many incredible books. So rather than telling you the most impactful I’ll pick one of the more recent ones that I’ve read, that was very different than other books I’ve read in it’s called Thinking in bets. How to make smarter decisions when you don’t have all the facts, which I think ties into what we’ve been talking about. And it’s actually written by a professional poker player. And yeah, it was interesting, someone recommended it to me, and it’s not a book I would have picked up otherwise. But one of the key things she talks about is you can’t gauge the quality of a decision by the quality of the outcome. Tom. So if I if in poker, you know, 99% of the time this move is your best bet? Well, 1% of the time, it’s not. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. Just because you got a bad outcome that 1% of the time. So I highly recommend that book, I think it’s a really good way to remind ourselves, how to make good decisions, and then how to evaluate them after the fact.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s totally makes sense. Thank you. Thank you for the suggestion. And then find sure that people will have some questions, some to ask you, what’s the best way to contact you?
Jessica Noble
Yes. So I am on LinkedIn, Jessica Noble. And actually, when you go to the LinkedIn URL, I got the backslash Jessica Noble, so I’m pretty easy to find. I would say that’s the biggest one or have on there. There’s my email or phone number. I’m also on WhatsApp, which is also an easy way to connect.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. The question that I still have is where we can find your books.
Jessica Noble
they’re on Amazon, you can get either hard copies anywhere in the US just go on Amazon. And they’re also digital. So both the one we co collaborated on and the other. They’re both on Amazon.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. We are coming to the last question. It’s Jessica’s golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new that he would like to leave to the audience.
Jessica Noble
I think mine is find the people who are passionate about operational excellence in your organization. And if they drop words like lean, or Six Sigma, build alliances with them. Because we, I think we forget that Lean and Six Sigma were built on starting with what customers value. So they get it and that whole thinking outside in and thinking inside out. If they’re lean, or Six Sigma, or that’s their background, they’re already thinking outside in. So their focus on outcomes, maybe on operational excellence. But they’re following a very similar approach instinctually, if not, intentionally, so find those folks, because that’s a great way to build momentum alliances and measurable, measurable ways to improve customer experience.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Jessica. The last thing that I wanted to say thank you very much for your time, and being on the CX goalkeeper podcast.
Jessica Noble
Thanks for having me. This was so fun. I was so glad we got a chance to catch up.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, please, Jessica. Stay with me to the audience. It was a great pleasure. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. You know, feedback is a gift. Please come and contact me or contact Jessica, happy to start a discussion with you share what we think about customer experience, and more. Thank you very much. And when I see many bye bye.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share the word of mouth. Subscribe it, share it until the next episode. Please don’t forget, we are not in a b2b or b2c business. You’re in a human to human environment. Thank you
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