Unleashing Creativity and Innovation: Exploring the Power of Lego Serious Play with Sirte Pihlaja – E128

Episode released on: 29. May 2023

Unleashing Creativity and Innovation: Exploring the Power of Lego Serious Play with Sirte Pihlaja Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Sirte Pihlaja

LinkedIn Headline: CEO I CCXP I Trained LEGO® Serious Play® Facilitator I Global #1 BestSelling Author I Global Top 150 CX Expert I International Keynote I Board Member I CXPA Finland Lead I Championing CX in Caribbean, Europe & SE Asia

Highlights:

00:00 Game Start
00:38 Sirte’s Introduction
05:02 Sirte’s Values
09:19 Lego Serious Play LSP
14:42 Flow
16:00 The power of playing in Business
18:11 Where to use it
21:34 Experiencing Lego Serious Play LSP
23:53 The Role of Happiness
26:18 Customer Experience Management benchmark
29:04 The Future of CX
31:57 Book Suggestion
32:17 Books’ Suggestion
34:03 Contact Details
35:02 Golden Nugget

and much more

Sirte’s Contact Details:

Her book suggestion:

  • Customer Experience 2 by Writing Matters
  • Customer Experience 3 by Writing Matters
  • Customer What? by Ian Golding

Sirte’s Golden Nuggets:

  • I believe that creativity is inherent to each individual from birth. Thus, it is merely a matter of us tapping into our inner five-year-old selves to discover and unleash the creativity that resides within all of us.

Creativity is inherent to each individual from birth. Thus, it is merely a matter of us tapping into our inner five-year-old selves to discover and unleash the creativity that resides within all of us. @sirteace on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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 have Sirte together with me. Hi Sirte, how are you?

Sirte Pihlaja
Hi, Gregorio. I’m fine. Thank you for for inviting me for this podcast.

Gregorio Uglioni
Finally, you are joining the podcast after we collaborate also for customer experience 3 together for the book, I know that you wrote also customer experience too. And now finally, we find time together to discuss about that super interesting topic. Let’s start the game. Let’s start the play. Let’s start playing and speaking about LEGO serious play. But before we deep dive in this topic, we would learn a bit more about you and therefore see if they could you please quickly introduce yourself?

Sirte Pihlaja
Sure. So my name is Sirte Pihlaja. For those who want to know how to pronounce it. I have to say CEO and founder of Shirute. That that is the first customer experience agency in Finland. And I’ve been my background is actually in journalism, whether you’re working for the Finnish broadcasting company for the BBC for Radio France International. So I have a very long background, doing things for for different kinds of audiences. And over 25 years now, I’ve been advising international companies and organizations into creating, you know, better customer experiences for them in quite a wide range of industries. And what I do is basically anything and everything between CX related strategy work and design, the X design, e x design, Voice of Customer programs, customer performance, customer dialogue, related projects, and we also do customer intelligence, so big data and, and nowadays more, we’re hopefully doing more and more of these machine customer AI related stuff as well. And not certainly also the employee experience, because we see that as a very important part of the whole people experiences. thing. Other than that, I’m a global CX ambassador, like you said, we have been writing books together two of the books that I’ve written our global best bestseller, CX two and CX three. And I’ve also written a third book in Finnish, about customer experiences. And I’m a keynote speaker in various international CX awards, ceremonies, I’ve been judged on the panel panel or the judge, panel leader, and also very keen proponent on the cxpa of the global cxpa. So I was one of the founding members of the association. And I’d be helping out as a as the one of the International Advisory Board members, when that was still existing. And I’ve been running the CSP in Finland, a local network since 2013. So for for 10 years already, right now. And also, within the CSP, I have been helping out other parts of the world. So cxpa in Asia, when they were starting some of the local networks I was trying to support them. And now here that, that I live here now in Barbados, I’m helping out to to fund the cxpa in the Caribbean.

Gregorio Uglioni
Oh, that’s super interesting. And I think what you’re saying it’s extremely interesting, because that’s also my feeling everywhere, there is something international related to CX going on, you are in the background and things support and connecting people. And therefore I know that, and we know, and we really appreciate what

Sirte Pihlaja
Thank you, thank you. It’s a big passion for me. And when I see that, again, here, here in the Caribbean, the situation is pretty much the same as it was back in the day in Finland when they were when we were just starting the activities there. It was first to introduce really cx to everybody in anybody in the region, and then starting to create these events and webinars and and all of that. We did actually do two global CX days, back in 2020. And find the one that was great fun, we got all the biggest CX stars to join us as speakers and we had people coming from all over from from Latin America to to the Asia and the Nordics all the way to South Africa. So I love bringing people together and especially when it’s all about CX and which is my great passion?

Gregorio Uglioni
And you’re already sharing the answer to the next question, but I will formulate it anyhow. Because that’s something that I think we preach always about values and the importance of the purpose. And you are already sharing that. But I asked, the question is which values drives you in life?

Sirte Pihlaja
Well, I would say, for on the personal side of my life, it’s really friends and family. I think that all all my passion for CX starts there, I’ve always wanted to, you know, make things better for everybody that I know. So it’s been a long time, a long time endeavor. And I think that ultimately, all we do is really something that we do to create a better future for our children. So trying to then do that in my professional life. And on that side, I would say that, well, you probably heard me say several times already how Finland has been selected as the happiest country on Earth. And now it’s the sixth consecutive year that that has happened on the United Nations World Happiness Index. So we are of course, very proud proud about that, and happy about that. But really, happiness is something that I do consider a very important value, as I want to make people happy. That’s, that’s my whole purpose in life. And so that’s also there for the purpose of shoedazzle as a company. And I’ve tried to do that through CX better CX and UX. And because I really think that if you are happy, you are much more likely to have the time to look around yourself, and you know, reach out to other people, and help them to become happy and prosperous, and all of that. So I consider that very important. Another thing, Finn’s, I think famous for being quite reliable and trustworthy people. So I do think also that, well, you don’t hear in Finland, people don’t leave your you don’t leave your friends behind, you know, and you they will always be famous will always have your back, whatever the situation is. So that is trust is really another thing that is important to me. And of course, being being the expert side of things, I don’t want to call myself a consultant, because it has certain connotations that I don’t like so much, I much rather be a personal, personal trainer kind of expert on the like your goalkeeper podcast is a really fun place to say that, but I really think that trust is something that you have to gain. And that is something that you one needs to have on the client side as well, because I couldn’t be working with, you know, some of our clients that have hundreds and millions of customers on on their company companies. So so if I didn’t do that, but also I think that extends to the partner, partner level in the sense that I do trust all of my and I would never select the partner that I didn’t trust 100% So that is very thing, I think that I’m very committed to and then maybe thirdly, three C’s. So curiosity, creativity and courage. There’s I think that Well, I, my my, my whole thing is about training about it’s about talking to leadership teams to make them understand that they have to be more more courageous and more creative that in their work so that they wouldn’t be able to be changed, make changes transformations and, and behave differently themselves. Because it all starts from the top. If people see you know, on the grassroots level that hey, they are talking about CX and E X and how important this is, but nothing really shows then they are not taking the bold step to change things for real. And I think you need to be also courageous to be creative, which I’m so sure we’ll be talking talking a little bit later. But in CX and in business life in general, I think that you need to think differently than others to really differentiate yourself. So you have to think a little bit out of the box as well.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much and I think now the team is complete we have the trainer and the goalkeeper and then we can we can we can start the game. And we can start speaking about LEGO serious play. I have also a small child is six years old, a really like and enjoying playing that but not it’s not what we are going to discuss today we are going about adults playing with Legos and creating things that means also something and I would like to really to understand this process. I know a lot of companies are already using it. But some companies don’t know it, don’t use it. And therefore it’s I think really interesting to deep dive in this in these methods. Could you please share what is Lego serious play?

Sirte Pihlaja
Yes, of course, Lego Serious Play is a creative methodology that Lego created themselves for themselves in the mid 1990s or so. So they invited two university professors, Mr. Johan Rose and Mr. Bart Victor’s to create it. So it’s based on sound academic theories. I think there’s 20-30 Different kinds of theories about behind it. But the most important of them is flow. Because you kind of have to get into that state of flow to be able to be more creative. And when you do you really launch yourself into it. Totally. The reason why they needed this methodology was that they were on the brink of bankruptcy almost. And they needed to make big changes in their organization. And they needed to make them fast. And I’m not saying that it was the only thing that turned the company around. But it was 111 great tool in making those changes happen. And we all know how Lego is doing nowadays. So. So I guess there has been some some useful use of it. For them. Lego serious play, to really quickly explain it is about creating, you’re utilizing less specialized Lego bricks, different kinds of models that are your answers to the challenges that the facilitator puts forth for you. And I always start my workshop saying that I’m going to be teaching you a new, totally new language today. Because that is, in fact, what it’s all about, because you’re talking through your hands. And like, it’s a totally different way of expressing yourself. And also it is a way of making things become concrete, your thoughts become concrete in a very, very, very concrete fashion. The way Lego serious play workshop advanced is that you start always with the skills building set as part because if you don’t have scales building, it’s not like a serious play for real. So you have to understand what what is like construction, constructivism on metaphors, what is storytelling, and all of that, once people are done, done these like short exercises to understand all of the plate that is in play with we put the challenges in front of them, and they start building their answers to them. And the idea is that everybody wants their they have built their models, they explain them to everybody else around the table. And then everybody else needs to listen very carefully and not, you know, they can ask questions about the models, but they are not to make any judgmental comments or anything like that. That’s one of the main key principles of Lego series play that we are trying to create this safe environment for everybody to express themselves on their opinions. So it is one of the main key things really in Lego serious play, then, when everybody has explained, the next round is most often about creating a shared model where everybody is points of view are put into this bigger model together based on those smaller models. And then yet another round would be to create agents around those that model that what are the different things that and I’m really focusing on my, the word agent doesn’t mean here, a person, it might be a law, it could could be a cultural thing. It could be resources, budgeting, you know, all of these things. So agents that affects the whole model. And then we do connections between the different parts of the Lego shared, shared model. And then the idea is that there’s a lot of reflection going on, although the whole the whole time. So we try to then create this last table guiding principles based on that. And that basically, is what what is the one of the key deliverables in Lego serious play workshops, we could be also doing some scenarios around the model. So playing different kinds of things that might happen to that specific model in real life. Or then things that are totally out there in you know, moonshots and things like that. But then, the idea being that we are really trying to play the different futures together out so that they wouldn’t happen in the or if they do happen in the real life, then you would be prepared for that already.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you. I think we are feeling the passion, you are spreading patient and let us please make one or two step backs because you explained the methodology, how it’s working. You mentioned something at the beginning or two topics that I would quickly, deep dive together with you really quick but to make the time understandable also for for the audience. You mentioned flow, perhaps could you please explain quickly explain what do you understand with the word flow?

Sirte Pihlaja
I think most of your listeners probably know what it is no even better than me that what it’s all about. But it’s this theory created by Mikael Mikulov scheme and I won’t try to pronounce the name is way too difficult, you can Google that up. But he, he’s the kind of founding father for it. And basically, what he’s saying is that, when you do things, you, if you’re too skilled for what you do, and you’re not kind of putting all of yourself into it, then you become easily very bored. But but if you’re all the time trying to do things at the level where your skills are, or even going a little bit further than that, then that helps you become more energized than putting all of your kind of effort into it. So that you will be more likely to produce better results is well basically, the idea there,

Gregorio Uglioni
that’s better because we are in the flow. And we can explain why, what, what flow is. And the second thing, and I know that it’s also perhaps already at the beginning, you mentioned that, but at the end, what you are doing is you are bringing play into business, moving, unlocking creativity, giving the opportunity to participants also to learn quicker, learning a new language. And indeed, I know that it’s not team building, it’s really about creating results. But could you quickly, please elaborate also on why it’s important to bring this way of playing into business?

Sirte Pihlaja
I think that we don’t have enough creativity in business life. So that’s, that’s the number one problem that this is bound to kind of solve for companies that we had we it could be any I mean, basically, it could be any creative methodology. But I just happen to know Lego serious play the best. And come to think of it actually the creators of Lego serious play or LSP. For short, they said that you could actually use any kind of material for Lego serious play that, you know, it could be parts like cotton, or it could be I don’t know, paper clips, I know that during the COVID times, people were doing online LSP. And sometimes the packages of Legos could not not get delivered in time, or they wouldn’t for some other reason have the Lego Lego bricks on their hands while participating. So people were using books, and you know, all of that whatever you have at hand you can use for playing, because it is all about metaphor. So I could say to you that okay, I don’t know if you see this, but like, like this airport box that I have here that this is actually a polar bear. You know, because I’m saying it is. So from from now on, when I’m giving you this story, it’s going to be about this polar bear that is doing something. Okay, that’s not exactly a, you know, business kind of example, but just something that makes you understand that it could be anything really,

Gregorio Uglioni
no, I think that’s thank you for this explanation. And perhaps also to make that understandable for for students. Which challenges can you solve with Lego, Lego serious play.

Sirte Pihlaja
I would like love to say anything and everything. But I’m not one of those people who say you know that you need this hammer for for for those nails. But I have not yet come to, to meet anything, like a business challenge that couldn’t be solved using Lego serious play. I think it’s more of a question of the company culture, that in some companies or organizations, they are more likely to kind of embrace new methodologies, being more open to being like, trying to be creative, and all of that. But I have had banks as customers. So you wouldn’t think that that’s the, you know, the nest of creativity, but those people have loved those Lego serious pay workshops. So I think that it’s if you take like, like the methodology as itself, it started from from being used for strategy work, firstly, and that’s where its foundations are. But then very, very quickly, Lego realized that actually, you can’t have strategy without changing transforming the culture as well. So very fast. It was also there were applications created, that can be used for team development and for individual individual development. And then also, another thing that they realized was that there are these big changes that are going on mergers, acquisitions, for fusion of organizations, other reasons why, you know, there are big changes and maybe controversial changes happening in take the pandemic in organizations. So therefore, they created a another application called the beast, it has a funny name, but basically, that is what it’s meaning that we are going to now take this piece and get, you know, solve this problem together. So, so those are like the generic ones, there’s a lot of HR related things that can be done with it, really driving transformational changes is what is best suited for. And what we do in with our clients is basically, those undertones but then we have created our own application called the CX play, which is then addressing all the customer experience and employee experience related needs. So it could be, you know, Persona creation, it could be customer journey mapping or management. It could be CX strategy, work CX design, we have been doing prototyping with some some companies, it’s a very good tool for prototyping as you can imagine. Using those creations also, I know that it is really helpful for for Scenario work. So that is something that I would consider or recommend doing doing with, because it’s one of the foundations where the Lego series plays this scenario, work

Gregorio Uglioni
experience with with with Lego Lego serious play, what was your best experience with Lego series play?

Sirte Pihlaja
My best one, you know, some of the some of the when you when you’re sitting as a as a participant, because I regularly take these advanced training modules where I’m actually a participant myself, so we get to, to experience our sales, what the what the newest applications are. So the best things that we have been doing there, I can’t remember anything like single things. But the feeling that you get when you’re being putting being put forward with a with a challenge. And then you have absolutely no idea what to respond. And the one of the, maybe the second rule of Lego serious play is Don’t think just build. So you just get yourself a bunch of Lego bricks, and you start fiddling with your fingers. And then you realize that this is actually talking through your hands. Because when you look at look down on the table, you realize that, hey, there’s a model, I don’t know where it came from. But this is like, this is my response to this thing. And, and I know what I’m talking about, and this is exactly what my response is for this challenge. When you get that it’s maybe a question of flow coming back to that, that thing, because when you see people that they’re running around getting more breaks, and you’re like, Oh my God, I don’t know what to respond, then you just, you know, launch yourself into it, and you come up with a response, even not knowing yourself what you have been doing. So on the participant side, I would say that it’s kind of that would be my best answer. As a facilitator, I love when I see the fun that people are having and how engaged they become, you know, they get all over all over the place with with their joy and, and get these ideas. And it’s not one, like one time only, it’s been several times that I’ve been getting people after the workshop telling me that they’ve never given so much out of them. And they really got into that state of flow. So that is really what was happening there. So yeah,

Gregorio Uglioni
it’s so nice, because while you’re speaking, I can see you the podcast colleagues or the the audience listening to the podcast they cannot cannot see that. But you are laughing, you are really laughing while you are explaining that. And they and it’s really great. And what to continue on this on this flow on this discussion. You mentioned that that’s also really important for your company, the role of happiness, and that you want to drive that for people around you. What’s the role of happiness in businesses?

Sirte Pihlaja
Well, first of all, I think on the employee side, it’s so important that people are happy, like I said earlier on that they are much more willing to think about their customers than if they don’t have a grudge against their boss or somebody that is their colleague, it really helps teams perform better because they open up new avenues of communication. And it can help people to talk about things that maybe would be more difficult to talk about, you know, if you didn’t have the LEGO model in front of you. You know weights a catalyst for change that that helps this driving these discussions, I would say, people get, you know, less stressed, stressed out, when they can really express themselves, they get to launch into this creative, you know, sessions, that they they, it’s a different way of working, I would say. Of course, then then the, it will, like I said, it’s not a team building exercise, but it is pound bound to make your communication better and your collaboration better. So in a way it is doing that the same thing as team building, like, like traditional team building exercises will do. That I think is very important. And that will then you know, in a long, longer, long run, then of course drive also the growth of the companies because people are willing to put much more of them. And then you get new ideas when you have new perspectives to things. And you get told those more maybe introverted people join you as well when they know that or they have that same feeling of safety. And they don’t you know Kindred, hid themselves from from joining the crowd and telling their opinions.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, I would have 200,000 additional question. I still have some for you. But we are running out of time. The first question looking in the future short term, I know that you are going to launch maturity model, benchmarking Customer Experience Management shortly. As a matter of fact that you are on this podcast, I need to add to this question, can you highlight what’s what’s your purpose what you’re going to do?

Sirte Pihlaja
Sure, of course, so the same benchmark Customer Experience Management benchmark is something that we have been doing since the beginning of cxpa. The launch of CSP in Finland, so 2013, this being the 10th year, we were running it, we did it, firstly, in Finland to understand what the state of customer experience was in Finland. And it really works as a tool for people who take it like from organizations who take it every year, they say that it’s a checklist for them that okay, have we been doing better in this part and this area, and they sort of use it as their own tool to reflect on what they have been doing during the year. So it works as a development tool for those who take it as well. And at the same time, we can benchmark now different even continents or countries between each other because we are now it has been in international one for now. And the idea there is that when a couple of years ago, I started to get these questions from from the Finnish organizations that hey, we would love to be able to also benchmark ourselves against the, you know, the bigger world out there. So, so we decided to take it global. And that was why we are now running it internationally all over the world. And of course, it will in some areas, like we’re also going to launch it now in the Caribbean, so that they will be now getting the first steps and seeing that, okay, this is where we are now. And maybe in five years time, they will see that what what kind of improvements they have been able to do in between. So basically, it’s a it’s a benchmark on five different competencies of customer experience management, and you get a shoe the same index, which is telling you from zero to 100%. But how good are you doing? And and there’s four different levels of going to the visionary part of like, you know, exec an executive once and people do say, say that they keep taking it because they are really they really benefit from it. So I guess that’s, that’s the main reason why we keep doing it. And improving it

Gregorio Uglioni
looking forward to share that also to my audience, if you could share that, super happy to share that. And now we looked in the short term, let’s look in the long term. In 10 years from now we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast and we are discussing about what

Sirte Pihlaja
well probably we are still going to be talking about creativity. I think that’s not going to go anywhere from this world. And I think that I’m actually at the moment I’m torn between these two worlds because I’m so into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and machine customers. You know that I’m following that day in day out and I’ve created my own Python programs for it and learn the language programming and all of that just to be able to do AI stuff. And I don’t know, the customer experience professionals have been entirely understood how big a change this is going to be for us. Because there’s not just chat GPT or open ai ai the API for the for the law of large language model. That’s one thing, then we had the plugins come on top of chat GPT, which gives companies the possibility to offer these services a little bit better than you know, your old chatbots. But what the change that has been happening, like, very, very close now is auto GPT, and baby AGI. And these are the new tools that are 10 times 100x, on what chapter up, they can provide because they are actually launching several autonomous agents that are able to then talk to each other. And, you know, go go do your search online for me when I want to go to, to us and get me the best tickets or best airlines, and then decide for myself, what I would like based on the criteria that I give them, like the goals that I give them, and then just buy the tickets for me without me ever needing to do anything other than lift my finger, you know. And now, it’s still in a phase where you need to have some programming skills to be able to create these autonomous agents. But we are like one step from having plugins on top of auto JpT. And that will certainly changed the themes, because then people will be able to create for each other, all these different kinds of autonomous agents. And that’s when we have the machine customers come into the picture for real, and that is going to change. So totally the customer experiences. And I hope, I certainly hope that customer experience professionals or practitioners are now looking into these things.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you what you’re saying is extremely important. And yes, we need to take care also about about this topic. We are coming to an end of this game, but I still have three questions in the extra time short question with short answers. Is there a book that you would like to suggest to the audience that you during your career or during your life?

Sirte Pihlaja
Well, of course, I would have to plug a plug in here, the CX two and CX three books I, but not because of my own chapters. But but because of all the knowledge that has been shared by the 20Plus, other authors of those books, I think that they are really gold mines. As such, and the chapters are so easy to read that I definitely recommend those other than that probably be mentioned several times. But Ian Golden’s customer, what is one of my favorite books, and I also love everything, and everything that shows to me it has a creative because he’s really the, you know, we wouldn’t have customer experience management without him so

Gregorio Uglioni
clear. But now that you’re mentioning him, I need to ask this question because I was also to Ian’s attending his master class. And it’s really clear which colors of each post-it we are allowed to use while we are doing journey mapping. And therefore the question that I have to you is you are also so picky when, with the colors of the bricks that people are allowed to use during the serious play. It’s the same.

Sirte Pihlaja
Yeah, that’s actually the short answer is no, but the thing is that people they take whatever breaks they’re using. And then one of the main, like, most important questions to ask your colleagues from their models is why did you use that color? Does it have some significance? You know, because they might have forgotten to tell something that okay, I use pink here because that dadada and yeah, so there is but then other than that, it might be just the aesthetics that people are using but no, there is no no rules about that because that’s totally up to what you can what you want to do with the table fix.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you. I am quite sure that people would like to deep dive also in this topic what’s the best way to contact you

Sirte Pihlaja
I’m very easily you can very easily find me on LinkedIn I’m the only set up there in town or globally it looks like it if you’re writing you will find me also you can go on our webs website on Shirute dot FI slash en if you want to understand anything. Cx play dot FYI is an English speaking site for anything and everything on LEGO serious play. And if you’re interested in joining the same benchmark, the easiest address to go to is Shirute dot FI slash C E M, which then has more like links towards the actual survey

Gregorio Uglioni
and the audience will find all the links also in the show notes. Now we are coming to the last question is a Sirte’s golden nuggets. It’s something that we discussed or something new that you would leave to the audience.

Sirte Pihlaja
Sure. I’m going to tell you a story to back my, my golden nugget, George land was was an researcher in 1965, who created this test for the NASA back in the day. And he’s his idea was to create a test that would distinguish between the people who applied for NASA to be become their engineers and personnel to find everybody who was on a creative genius level, because they needed to really find the cream of the crop. And he created this test. And he actually took 1600 children aged four to five years old to take the test before, you know, to make it a really scientifically proven that what his findings had been from that. And he realized that when they were only five years old, those people, those little kids 98%, out of the them were on the creative genius level. Then he took the same children when they were 10 years old. And they were there were only 30%, who made this level. And guess what happened five years later, there were only 12% of them who managed to be creative on this one day scale. And I think that that’s what he is he and his George Landan and his colleagues that then what they came up with was that we are really drained from our creativity when we grow up from being children to adults, so that there’s something terribly wrong with our school system, that everybody loses their creativity, creativity when they come to the business world when they would really need it. And he has actually taken this test to over 1 million adults after that. And regularly he gets only 2% of adults who get on this creative genius level. So that tells you a little bit that there might be something like a small bit of truth in this. And my golden nugget based on this story is really that I don’t think that we are you know, people are creative, or they’re not creative, that that it’s something that you’re born with. I do think that it is something you’re born with, but everybody is. So it’s just a question of us. Finding that five year old within us to understand an unlock the creativity that we all have inside of ourselves.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you Sirte. This was an outstanding conclusion of the podcast. Please stay with me to the audience. It’s everything. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. We discussed about Lego series play. I think it was super interesting. And contact me contact Sirte. If you have any questions happy to direct you to Sirte in order to kick off the discussion. Thank you very much. And bye bye.

Sirte Pihlaja
Thank you, Greg. Thank you for inviting me and hope to hear from everybody soon.

Gregorio Uglioni
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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Driving Business Success – The importance of Employee Experience with Neha Dutta – E127

Episode released on: 22. May 2023

Unleashing Creativity and Innovation: Exploring the Power of Lego Serious Play with Sirte Pihlaja Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Neha Dutta

LinkedIn Headline: Award Winning Transformation Executive I Digital Client Success I Customer Experience I CHIEF Member

Highlights:
00:00 Game Start
00:35 Neha’s Introduction
02:09 Neha’s Values
04:19 Employee Experience
05:49 Key Components
09:18 Employee enablement
11:47 Keeping employees engaged
15:40 Best Practices
18:20 Generations Integration
20:52 Artificial Intelligence for employees
24:42 The Future
26.05 Book Suggestion
28:01 Contact Details
28:33 Neha’s Golden Nugget
and much more

Neha’s Contact Details:

Her book suggestion:

  • The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Neha’s Golden Nuggets:

  • Stay ahead of the game. Always know what is happening right now. But keep your eyes on what’s about to follow. It will help you embrace change, it will help you upskill (…) if you’re ahead of the game, it will compel you to try new things and it will compel you to change yourself.

“Stay ahead of the game. Always know what is happening right now. But keep your eyes on what’s about to follow. It will help you embrace change, it will help you upskill” Neha Dutta on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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 gentlement. Tonight, it’s really a big pleasure because I have Neha Dutta together with me. Hi Neha, how are you?

Neha Dutta
I’m good, Greg, how are you?

Gregorio Uglioni
very Well, I am really thrilled to start the discussion to kick off the discussion because I know that you are high energy and you have a lot of information to share with us today. And we are going to discuss about employee experience. But before we start discussing and deep diving this important topic, we would like to learn a bit more about you. And therefore you are today’s top player. And we would like to learn more about you. Could you please introduce yourself?

Neha Dutta
Sure. Thank you, Greg, thank you for having me on the CX goalkeeper. I’m very excited to be on this a little bit about myself. I’ve been in the industry for more than two decades. Now, I would like to consider myself as a customer value champion, I think that will be my elevator pitch. Because I’ve been at various stages front end back end. And I’ve always believed in driving value to the customers through whatever roles I’ve done through innovation in technology. And I currently work with Excel. And I’m doing the role of a digital sales engineering, what it means is I take everything that Excel has to offer in our digital offering and take it to our clients and solve their problems and help them in their transformation roadmap. Mother have a 10 year old, and I just heard something on LinkedIn, which I just resonated is that nobody taught us a lot of things we learn in our in our roles, but nobody taught us how you know, as mothers, we go from mommy to mama to Brah, right. So I think I’m in that stage when my daughter refers to me as Dre, and you don’t, that’s where I am.

Gregorio Uglioni
That’s, that’s, that’s great. And I think these these are also why we are we are working, that’s for our families to create something with our families, and the best experiences that we can have, or at least for me, with my family, and therefore super happy that that you share that. And I when when you started speaking about your daughter, you started smiling. It’s quite easy to ask them the next question, the next question and expecting the answer. And perhaps which values drive you in life?

Neha Dutta
So that’s an interesting one. And honestly, they’ve not changed much over the last, you know, decade or so. But some of the values which have, I think, rather amplified with me are, you know, other values of collaboration. So I completely believe in working with others, I think in the power of team, right, because everybody brings something additional, something unique and something valuable. And I think we just need to nurture that we need to nourish that and work as a team and shine as a team. I think that collaboration is one of the bay key values that I believe in. And second is, you know how to embrace change. I think we are in this time and age where before we can think about it the way we are consuming knowledge, the way we are doing our you know, day to day things, everything is changing around us. And everything is changing in the work environment as well. I think how well can you embrace change and become a change agent and Evangelist, I think it’s really going to take you to places. And the third value which is very, very, you know, personal to me is passion. I believe in driving passion. And I believe in whatever that I am get to, you know, I am entrusted to do to give you a small story on that I was once asked to build a team from scratch, which was completely 100% technical. And you know, I’m I consider myself a pseudo technical person. But I believed in it and I put my heart and soul into it passionately and I was able to, you know, do a decent job at it. So passion, collaboration and embracing change are three values that come to my mind.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And I think these are also very important in the in the employee experience. And now let’s really start the game after we know a bit more about you. We were discussing about the importance of employee experience in customer experience, or let’s say also in businesses and all there is always this discussion employees customer or shareholders who is forced. Let’s start from there where we should focus first.

Neha Dutta
I would say there’s no you know, there’s no right or no or wrong answer to it. Right. I think it’s an analogy and it’s about the the the pace or the condition of the organization. This Up to that you are in the industry that you are in, and the value that you want to bring in, in my opinion, today, day and age, a customer is an is very, very enlightened, he’s full of choices, right. And everything that we do today is driven by what they need. So I will put the customer in the first category, I will put employees in the second category, because unhappy employee can deliver to a happy customer. And I will put in my shareholder into the last category, not in terms of priority, but if I put my first and second, if they are doing what they are supposed to do 100%, I don’t think I need to worry about my shareholder, happy employee will lead to a happy customer and will lead to happy EPS, and my shareholder will be very happy. So that’s how I will take it.

Gregorio Uglioni
And this was a really smart question, because you skipped them avoided saying the priorities, priority customer employees and shareholders. But what you’re saying it’s exactly what what makes sense, because you need to have happy employees or engaged employees to create epic customer. And if the customer is happy, coming back or buying more, they’re referring and therefore then you have also epi shareholders. And therefore it totally makes sense today focusing on on the employees, from your point of view from your experience. And you shared already that you created those a team from scratch, what are the key components of employee experience?

Speaker 2
So I would say that, you know, from my vast experience in employee experience, and I’ve also handled for a brief stint of time, talent as well, when I was hiring people as well, I would think that I would say maybe we used it once is that, you know, they are the three E’s of employee experience, right? How can we empower them. And we can empower them through a variety of things, right, we can empower them with tools, AIDS processes, but largely technology, right? We believe technology is only to empower customers, right? But that’s not really the case. First, first, the technology has to empower your employees, he needs to feel the ease to be able to manage all the work that he’s doing right. And then he will be able to transfer the same ease to the customers. So they need to fail. So I think in CX when we work with clients, we really put a lot of importance of how are your employees adopting to this technology more than your customers? So I would say empower them through technology. Second, I will say is how are you engaging them, the second E, adding, it’s a very important nugget. And there are various ways in which you can look at it right, you can look at engagement, or in the first six months, because it will be very different for employees between six months to two years, because they are like almost settled and they are on their you know, stream and then completely tenured employees more than three years. Right. So an engaged employee, I think, is a walking marketing material. Right? If you have an engaged employee, you cannot imagine how much you can talk good about you in terms of like you said referrals. So you don’t need to really spend on marketing if you have an engaged employee, right? I think, looking at a study that I read, before, you know, an employee decides to try it and leave the company, I think spotty five days before that he begins to disengage. So I think they give clear signals. And this can help us in a lot of way, even if you want to move towards EX, or we want to, you know, really spend time on attrition on both ends, I think employee engagement is very important. Third is how are we enabling them? Have we given them an environment in which they can nourish in which they can be transparent about how they feel in which they can talk about in which they know that? How’s my company doing? Do I know the stocks? Do I know the where’s my company, you know, going in AI? Where’s my company investing. So I think they need to be enabled there to be engaged and they need to be empowered. And I think if you do all of these three, even if 50% I think you will be in a Gold Trust with most of your employees.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I would say an employee for life, even if there is a lot of change what what what you are saying Are they are really important key components. And you said empowering, engaging, and enabling employees. Let’s start and double click on the first one, empowering and you shared this example of technology. And I think it’s something that also we discussed in earlier episodes. Sometimes you offer to the customer, the best possible interface, one app with all the interfaces, and then you think about your contact center agents that they have seven different systems that they need to run through them and try to find out the solution and I think are what I would like to learn from you is sometimes perhaps we could test some technology also first with employees, and then going out to the customer, what what’s your view on that?

Neha Dutta
So I think that’s terrific. And that’s a very important part of change management. So we are seeing when we are employing, or when, you know, when we are deploying technology to a lot of our clients. And typically also we see that change management is very, very important, you need to first A simplify the life or the ease of your employees. Right? You have to keep that as a, you know, as a very important metric, right? Not only able to think that, okay, my, my customer should be able to, you know, reach, you know us in seven different channels right through the app and everything, you can absolutely give them an omni channel experience. But what about the calls, which hit the agent, like you said, if they have to navigate through seven screens, right? The quality is telling him, the quality department is telling him think about the script, the churn department is telling him, absolutely make sure that you know, the customers don’t leave us right. So I think we have to, we have to think internally, like I said, we like I said, customer, employees and stakeholders. So you have to first think about how is this ecosystem going to be? And I think we should definitely take this time to simplify the user experience from the lens of an employee, I think the voice of the customer, if we take from an employee, I think they’ll be able to give us valuable information of what do the customers want? Why do they struggle? Why don’t they have the means to give them the right information? And I think we should definitely look at this, even if we are deploying some technology for the customer, we should understand from the employee that does he have the ease to adapt it? Does he have the buy in to use it or not?

Gregorio Uglioni
Yes, I think that’s that’s extremely important. And also covering the second point that you shared about engagement you spoke about in the first six months, and after three years, a lot of experts are doing also example with honeymoon, can we do it the employees in the first six months everything is going well. But afterwards, it comes some difficulties and so on, perhaps do you have some examples, some best practices that you that you are faring or as a leader that you are leveraging, in order to keep to keep the customer and power engaged during these, these these timeframes.

Neha Dutta
So I would say for the sake of simplicity, we can divide it, you know, the honeymooners, or the early birds can be you know, less than six months, I think in less than six months, it’s very, very important to maintain a bond of trust, right, with the direct line of people that they work with, right, and especially right now it is become important because we are in a remote scenario, right? Maybe the person is sitting in Czechoslovakia working for somebody in Germany, right, he would not even go to office and meet his peers, I think it’s very important that we use technology. And we develop a bond of trust, we develop some kind of synergy where employees feel that you know, they have an avenue to talk to people. Right? I think it’s very important. I think second, the clarity of role is very important. Because again, we are in a remote working scenario, we expect that people are available, and they can do an A and they can do a B and they can do a C as well, depending on their bandwidth. So I think clarity of role is very, very important. Third, I think that as a team, whoever is in a team scenario, or meeting up as a team, even virtually right, I have heard of many things, many best practices, virtual volumes, and you know, what’s cool pizza days, and, you know, trivia days, and all of that I think people have, you know, really, really explored innovation. And, you know, I don’t think we need to meet up as a team, you need to, you know, really be in person, I think there are a lot of things that you can do remotely, right. So I think we need to develop that bond of trust and that transparency in the first six months so that the person starts to feel a part of that ecosystem. After the six months to two years. I think they are very, very, in this market. I think they are very, very interested to know what will happen to them. Right? How does that how does the roadmap look like? So I think we need to transcend the relationship between the direct line of supervisor and the employees to how does this role shape for them right on their performance? And on their roadmap as well? I think that’s really, really important. And I think more than two years of employees were absolutely to note, we’ve seen when we are deploying technology that they become sometimes the hardest to adopt technology, right? Because they are already set in their ways, right? They know I do this, even if it will take them five minutes, they will be absolutely comfortable with it. And if you tell them that this can really reduce your time to two minutes, they will figure it out 100 ways not adopted, because they are setting their terms. I would say that we should make them champions and we should make them red hats and we should make them the pioneers of change. Right, and say that, you know, you guys have this knowledge and domain and SME, and give them that elevated experience role that they should be doing. Right. And again, the roadmap with a little bit of, you know, added responsibility, and we will change depending on how they have done. So I think you need to engage them. And I don’t think having entertainment is the only way that you can engage them, I need to, I think they all need to feel a part of that organization, they all need to feel like a little stakeholder, or, you know, or a stockholder, and they need to feel that I, I exactly, you know, contribute to the success of my organization, I think that’s how they need to feel.

Gregorio Uglioni
And what you’re saying it totally makes sense, because there are a lot of studies showing that the tenure of employees, how long they stay with the company is directly impacting also the quality of the services that are that are providing the impact directly impacting NPS and therefore acquisition retention, and, and share share of wallet, therefore, it’s, I think it’s key. And the last thing that you shared, it’s enablement, enabling employees do you have also share some best practices that you would like to share?

Neha Dutta
So I think we can enable them through technology like we spoke about, we can enable them through the right kind of culture, I think it’s a very, very loosely used term. So I will not bring it to that. But what I would like to say is, I think they need to be enabled, that you know, depending on what loyalty they have, with the organization, six months, two years, or whatever, right, they need to be enable that, you know, you are qualified to become a mentor. Now, you’re right, you have the right kind of skills and everything, I think they need to be enabled to get upskill, right, which is very, very important in this time and age, right, so that people don’t become so that tomorrow, your role does not get done by a bot, and you don’t know what to do, and you don’t start hating the bot because it’s it’s killing your job and you don’t adopt it at all. So I think upskilling is very important, they need to be you know, they need to be enabled by that. And they need to be enabled by the right kind of culture that we grow around them, of transparency, ringing up your voice, and then additional responsibilities or value adds that they can get to a system, a lot of places. And a quick idea to that is a lot of ideation helps in all of these. So I think all the organizations, even at startup, or enterprises have an ideation engine, right, where new ideas can keep stepping up and everything, I think, enablement will also mean that, you know, you give them this kind of hope that you know, whatever you are, you know, even if you are in that ideation scheme, if you come up with something, it will definitely, you know, have an impact. So this, they just need to feel valued, I think, and that’s how enable they need to be, if I know that my organization has a, you know, three day work policy three day coming to office, and I feel that something around it, there should be avenues and forums where people can actually voice their concerns, and you know, work around it, and not make every process as an exception. But they need to feel enable that I can do it, not get bothered by it and start looking for the next role, which allows only two day work policy.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you’re seeing is, it’s extremely interesting, because what a lot of people are facing and we are always reading about it’s also this new generation and I’m not speaking about the to the 10 years old as your daughter, but as I speak also about new generation working in the working environment, and they have different needs. And I think you’ve touched one extremely important topic in the employee experience. It’s also about culture, and perhaps what’s your view our How can we integrate all these different generation in one culture in the company?

Neha Dutta
I don’t think we can. But and I don’t think we need to, what we need to do is every organization has some values, right? That they go by, and they are you know, they are they come from the top, I think we just need to have enough respect for those values, but give people flexibility, and give people you know, agility in terms of you know, if you want anything else or if you’re looking for anything else, or if you believe in doing something in a different way. We are open to hear it. Right. So we work in a you know, I can talk for myself, we work in a totally diverse environment and with people across the globe with people across the age, right. I think as long as we believe in the value of respect. We end you know, respecting people’s opinions, cultures and celebrating each other’s festivals. As much as we celebrate Eid, we celebrate Hanukkah. I think if we do that, then people get the idea that you know, I have done this in a different place and it works. Can we try it or not? Right? I think it is seen this work brilliantly with, you know, people who are, you know, millennials and Gen Z’s and people who have been working for more than 20 years. One comes with experience and one comes with a lot of thought process, right? One is tried and tested. And one is, I’m just trying to try, right. So I think you need to find the right balance, but give both of them an equal voice so that, you know, you don’t shut one down, and you don’t give the newer employees an idea that, you know, we only want to go with something that’s already worked and tested. Right. And see, this is what we’re trying to do for our clients and for our businesses as well, right, we are wanting to do newer things with them. So I think we need to be open about it, anything, if we respect anything, leave the ideation, you know, bulb on, I think we should be good, we don’t need to color them. Same with the same culture, flavor,

Gregorio Uglioni
I think what what you’re saying it’s can can can be also related to customer experience and employee experience. Absolutely. And every customer is different. They want to be treated as human beings. And it’s the same for employees. There are some rules, some boundaries, but everybody’s different is acting differently. And also myself, or I think, also you in the different phases of life, I have different needs, I have for me something different important, but I still live my value. And that’s what you share those at the beginning. Throughout your career, your value state is the same, perhaps change a bit, but they were the same. And therefore it it totally makes sense. Let’s go back to the topic tech technology, because uh, you know, I really, you really liked that. And also following you on LinkedIn, seeing your post about artificial intelligence and technology. And you already shared a lot of insights about the importance of technology in the employee experience. But really, let’s speak about artificial intelligence, what can how can be used to empower, engage and support employees?

Neha Dutta
I think there are a lot of ways in which we can do that in terms of you know, how we hire employees, right? How we train employees, right? I think gamification is a it’s a terrific example. There are tons of paperwork in terms of trainings, which people have to do when they you know, become a part of an organization. And I think when the customer like, and now we are touching the point that, you know, what are some of the key milestones when the employee is only six months old, right, in which he is like, check, check, check on an organization that, oh, I’ve made the right call, I think we need to make, you know, every employees experience, very, very unique, and you know, like a unicorn experience, right? So there is Ai plus what you can do from a human touch is well, right? How do we make it special and all of that, but I think in terms of AI, we can use hyper personalization to know a little bit about the employee, right, and then, you know, to some things on his first day, we can ensure there is enough gamification on his during his onboarding or his training, that you know, those somewhat boring or mundane tasks do not, you know, are not so much on his head. Second, I think, because efficiency is very, very important in these days, right. And the amount of time we take to write from the time the person gets elected, to the time the person comes to could be enough gap in that, I think to in terms of efficiency, we can help we can help you, we can take the help of technology and AI and ensure that you know, right alerts are going to the employee, he knows exactly what he needs to do. He knows what who’s his mentor, or there are enough chat bots, even if we don’t have enough HR people to ensure that, you know, there is somebody who will be able to, you know, look at all your needs and everything on your day, one day two queries and all of that, I think AI can do a lot of stuff. And AI does a lot of stuff in that. And I think this is by these by these occurrences, you can make the you can make the employee also enough adaptable, that when he goes to the seat in a contact center and takes the headset and starts taking a call, he wishes to give the customer the same kind of experience that he’s had. Right? If he’s absolutely averse to technology, he will only understand that a customer feels the need to call any calls a call center right he will not understand that a conversational IVR can also deflect calls, he will not understand that we should try that, you know, this call should not come over, we should be able to get enough give enough proactive outreach to the customers that you know their queries answered. Right. So I think if we give them enough ease, they will start thinking like that, and they will also keep the user at the center.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. I think that’s totally makes sense. And now that we discussed about technology and artificial intelligence, let’s think in the future in 10 years from now, we are back you are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast, perhaps in virtual reality or something Now, we are discussing about customer experience or employee experience, what are we discussing about?

Neha Dutta
I think we will be discussing that, you know, how does, how does the hybrid of, of the tech and the human look like? Right? I think by the time they will be there, they will be yours when tech will overshadow, they will be yours when people will talk about the human quotient, right. I think we will still be in that debate. But we would have had far more use cases where we know how does Metaverse work? How does Changi PT work? Right? But there are there are things that you know, a customer will still want to feel, you know, what, you know, actually talking to a person. So I think we will be talking on how technology has, you know, really taken care of the non value ads, but how can we, how can we make our you know, our agent, or our people read interactions, very, very unique. I think we will be talking about that, because the scales would have completely changed.

Gregorio Uglioni
I am looking forward to the discussion with you in 10 years, and I’m looking forward to leverage this technology to make every task that is not value added for me so that I free, I can free up my time. Because if you’re speaking about experiences, it’s also about time and how much time we have or we still have for for something. I’m sorry, we are coming to the end of this game. But in the extra time, I still have three questions for you. The first one is, is there a book that you would like to suggest to the audience that helped you during your career or during your personal life,

Neha Dutta
I would say a book that has really helped me shape both my personal and professional life will be the power of now. It’s by it’s by, you know, a very spiritual leader called Eckhart Tolle. It’s the power of now, if it makes you believe in the present in the present moment, right. And whatever you are doing, and whatever is happening to you, you can take a lot of connotations out of it. I will give maybe two that had struck to me in the personal sense, I think we need to value the present, not think about past regrets, not think about the future so much. But think about what does this moment hold for us. And, second, I think, professionally, we all believe that, you know, multitasking helps us and everything. But I think there are various theories, you know, tags to it, that if you I feel it if you give your energy. And if you give all your passion to that one thing that you’re doing, I think you will do a great job at it. And you know, the power of now believes you makes you believe in the in what you’re doing right now, right there. And it’s very, very simple. You just need to see and feel what’s happening with you right now. And believe and be in the moment. And I think you’ll read great results. So that’s my book, suggestion.

Gregorio Uglioni
Perfect. Thank you very much. And what’s the best way to contact you.

Neha Dutta
So I can be contacted through LinkedIn, and through Twitter, I believe my handles on this and we can DM I am forever in search of our mentor or a mentee. So if I can be of any help to people. I’m a big believer of women in technology, women and CX. So anybody who wants to, you know, get in touch and talk about anything. I’m more than happy to

Gregorio Uglioni
thank you very much. And as you share the Power of Now, therefore, please, dear audience now follow me Nia, and get in touch with her because it totally makes sense. You see her you feel and see the passion that she’s spreading and all the knowledge that that she has. But before we leave, and we conclude this game, I still have one question is near as Golden Nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new, that you would leave to the audience.

Neha Dutta
I would say that, stay ahead of the game. Right. Always know what is happening right now. But keep your eyes on what’s about to follow. I think it will help you embrace change, it will help you upskill it will. I know I said Believe in now. But I think that’s really in the moment. But I think we need to always keep your eyes on what’s there to follow. So I think if you’re ahead of the game, it’ll it’ll compel you to try new things. And it will compel you to change yourself. And I think that’s really important. And I think that’s what I would leave

Gregorio Uglioni
Neha. Thank you very much for your time. Please stay with me and to the audience. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. If you have any question, feel free to contact me or to contact me. It was a great, great pleasure. Thank you very much. Bye bye.

Neha Dutta
Thank you. Bye.

Gregorio Uglioni
If you enjoyed this episode, please share the word of mouth. Subscribe it, share it. Until then 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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Cracking the Code to B2B Customer Experience with Shaun McAndrew – E126

Episode released on: 15. May 2023

Cracking the Code to B2B Customer Experience with Shaun McAndrew Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Shaun McAndrew

LinkedIn Headline: Vice President | Helping P&L owners create complete offers and harden services │ Keynote Speaker │ Coach

Highlights:
00:00 Game Start
00:34 Shaun’s Introduction
02:50 Shaun’s Value
03:51 B2B satisfaction shocking satisfaction scores
06:49 Customer Centricity in B2B
09:04 Service Design
12:44 Customer Needs
16:11 Streamlining Processes
20:05 Enhancing Service Quality
22:38 Creating an offering journey
24:46 Best Practices
26:43 Breaking Silos
29:45 Learnings
31:36 The Future
32:49 Book Suggestion
33:57 Contact Details
34:15 Golden Nugget
and much more

Shaun’s Contact Details:

Her book suggestion:

  • Digital Hesitation by J.B. Wood and Thomas Lah

Shaun’s Golden Nuggets:

  • My personal philosophy is: Think Forward, Choose Excellence. Be able to think forward, think through the options, think through what are the consequences of all those options, and then choose, actively choose what is the best one for everyone.

Think Forward, Choose Excellence – Shaun McAndrew on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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 pleasure because I’ve Shaun McAndrew together with me, I Shawn, how are you?

Shaun McAndrew
Hi, Greg, great to be with you today.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much for taking time from your busy calendar. And coming to my show to discuss about b2b in customer experience. I think it’s a really important topic that it’s not so much discussed from from people in the different communities, and therefore I really appreciate you taking the time. But as usual, also for the audience. They know that before we deep dive in this topic, we would learn about something something about you. And therefore Shaun, could you please introduce yourself?

Shaun McAndrew
Thank you so much, Greg. My name is Shaun McAndrew, I am the Vice President of Business Development for the service design group. So I talk all things service design and service design approach. I got into this I’m actually a Navy veteran, I had a career in the Navy first was a helicopter pilot. And then when I left the Navy in 2020, I took some time, we moved from Idaho to North Carolina, here in the United States, I wanted warmth, that was number one option. And then I took some downtime, and I’ll say fell into learning about this company and started working with them. And I’ll say, fate be safe be what it is. That was over two years ago. And I have absolutely fallen in love with I’ll say the service design approach, as well as a service dominant mindset. And I really do think it is the way of the future. What I love about the company, is we’re always looking for a win win win. And that ends up falling in line with my personal values and my purpose. Why? Because I’d like to leave the world a little better than when I found it. And we’re looking to make sure as a company, how technology integrates and creates customer outcomes that are very viable for the customer, to create better business, great, generate better revenues. And so you end up with a win win win, and doing integrity and bringing all of that together in a positive way. So those are I’ll say, That’s a quick introduction on me, to let people know, at least where my starting point is.

Gregorio Uglioni
And you prepare to very well, because you already answered my second question about the your, your personal values, but I think it flew it flew very well. And therefore, if you want to add something about your personal value that you have, then please please feel free to do that now.

Shaun McAndrew
Yeah, well, Greg, thanks for that kind compliment. I really do appreciate it. One of the things I’ll say that I take away from the Navy is the value of integrity. And I’ll say helping people. And that is truly where I enjoy what we do, because it really is about helping people. And not just Yes, we all do want to make money, there is the value for that, I get that. But actually in the end, it’s really about helping people helping businesses thrive. And that’s what I truly enjoy, about the company, about the business and who I get to meet and talk with.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I would say let’s give me this opportunity to say thank you for all the services that you provide your provided in your past career. Thank you very much. I think it’s not so easy. But you I’m sure you did a great job. But now let’s really deep dive in understanding better customer experience in the b2b world. This is the topic we would like to discuss and I saw one of your posts in LinkedIn, please do your audience. Follow Shawn because she’s sharing really great, great insights. And on one of that, and I’m reading that you stated only 22% of the b2b buyers are very satisfied with their current service provider. And 65% of the b2b buyers are open to switch service providers. What does it mean?

Shaun McAndrew
Now I love this and I loved finding this statistic. It was from HubSpot, where they surveyed 1000 b2b buyers, about their suppliers, and I was really shocked at the statistics. For me, the biggest thing it says is there’s a huge opportunity For b2b suppliers, that if they can do the value proposition, which includes the customer experience as part of the offer, they can outrun their competition very easily. And so I see this as a huge opportunity. And I’ll say, this is where I look at CX CX is not just a business function. Yes, it is a business function like marketing, like sales. But it actually it’s also a mindset. And it is a mindset in the the customer outcomes, not the customer, it’s him or herself, because it’s b2b. So it’s a business, but the customer outcomes, what your customers business needs to do to do better, you do better than they do.

Gregorio Uglioni
It’s your are stating already a lot of great pills inside. Let’s go step, step, step by step. It’s only a podcast, not a masterclass.

Shaun McAndrew
Well, here’s the thing is, when you can tell I, I really enjoy this I am passionate about I know you are passionate about it, you look at how long you have been doing this, and I love how much you give your audience, you know, and be able to make them and participate with you in this experience. That’s why I’ve enjoyed these past two years they’ve flown by. Because, again, I see this win win win, I see where companies could do better. And, but there are obstacles you’re right. Because if there weren’t obstacles, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Gregorio Uglioni
That’s true. And unpacking the first thing that he that you shared, we are in the b2b world, in the b2c world, we are often speaking about customer lifetime value. And this is something relevant also in the b2b world. And if it comes to my mind is thinking about how much value is is a customer in the b2c world, compared to a b2b world. This, this is a big, big amount of money that could be together with a customer taking this decision after a contract renewal two years, three years, five years to renew the contract, it can be good to have a massive impact on the complete business, and how are you working with your customer in relation to this important topic?

Shaun McAndrew
One of the things I’ll say is that the concept of customer centricity and customer outcomes is part and parcel to this service design approach that we’re talking about. And I will say the customer experience, the mindset as well as the requirements are built into this approach. So in a b2b world, what we start to focus on is, what are the jobs to be done, that you as the provider, do better than they do? And then how do you put I’ll say, a complete offer together. So whatever combination of product service, hardware software, IoT, AI, machine learning, data science all together, so that the offer itself creates a business outcome for your target client, for your target customer, that actually improves their business. And you must prove it. So this is where the data science the digitalization must go hand in hand, and are normally part of this kind of complete offer, as well as part of the customer experience. Because if you can prove to your customers that you’re improving their results, you almost guarantee they have a good customer experience.

Gregorio Uglioni
Yes, I think that’s that’s extremely, extremely important. And we see also beyond you and nice information, service design, and let’s talk about service design. From from your point of view, could you please share the framework around the service design that you are offering to your customers?

Shaun McAndrew
Oh, okay. The framework of service design, I’ll say, we have framework and we have tools. All right, but it I’ll say it starts with our mindset. And what we believe is businesses need to create these complete offers, and or harden their services at in order to create customer outcomes. So that are viable. So all of our tools, which will start from why it is important for, I’ll say, the leadership team, or even just the team creating these offers to understand why they’re going in this direction. Too often, and I’ll start with this framework, people have a product first mindset. So I call it product dominant mindset. Which means all the services follow. After the product, the features, everything is done. For us, they actually have to go hand in hand. And that is actually what ends up creating the full customer experience because everything was done together. In one, I don’t want to say one step, but in one process, so that the offer is cohesive? Well, the starting point is, is getting everybody on board to believe that. So we actually have a workshop that we take people through, and they individually figure out through our workshop, why going towards a more service dominant mindset, makes sense for them kind of personally, as a consumer, but also for their business, as a b2b. So it takes them through an evolution where they discovered themselves and I think it’s a very fascinating, simple workshop, we do it in two to four hours. It can be virtual, we do it live. But that’s the starting point. Because if you don’t have the decision makers and the resources and the support to do this, it becomes very, very hard to actually implement. And I think that’s where a lot of b2b CX organizations find their frustration. There isn’t the mindset across the entire company, that everybody is part of the offer, therefore, part of the customer experience. And without that, every CX department will struggle until there’s that larger mindset and the support from on high and other teams. And that’s why we created the workshop, because I honestly believe that is the first step is recognizing why do you even want to go down this path. So I’ll say that’s that’s the start. That’s that’s the start of the service design approach and, and framework.

Gregorio Uglioni
And they totally make make sense, because at the end, we are in business, and we need to understand that businesses can select US can pick our products, our services, but they want what they want at the end is working products, working services, and everything around that. And therefore it’s important to build to build the relationship with with these with these customers. Absolutely true. And and based on that, I know that you are also sharing several points, and sorry for jumping from one topic to the other. But let’s pick some some interesting stuff, we now understand why. And one one topic that you are often sharing in service design is understanding customer needs. Could you please elaborate a bit on that?

Shaun McAndrew
Now that is wonderful. customer needs, and I will say the customer jobs to be done. I want to put out what exactly we think of as a service as a definition because that will help explain why we’re putting it out there and and its importance. So our definition of a service is an in market offering, that affirm performs a jobs to be done or a specific outcome on behalf of the customer at a level of value or efficiency or expertise that the customer cannot attain on their own. So unpacking that a little more is if you do not know the jobs to be done, or the business outcomes that you do better than your customer. You cannot offer them something of high value. That is the challenge with one of our clients that we did, they were it was a biotech company that one of their ingredients was essential to biofuels to make the biofuel and they sold it by the kilogram. So it was very much a commodity. They wanted to do something with data science. They brought us in and over time what We help them create was the outcome of maximum yield for per biomass, and the data science, the measurement, the instrumentation, the process engineering, the data engineering that is needed. So they’re no longer selling, you know, something by the kilogram, they are now actually selling a specific yield, maximum yield. So they know the quality of the biomass coming in, they have the proper dosing, so it’s not too much, not too little. And then they prove they’ve maximized the yield. That’s an example of how you, and the whole thing with the experience is, now instead of the relationship being a price based relationship, it’s no, how do we make this better for each other? And how do we prove it, so you have a better customer experience, because everything was about the customer outcome, and getting the right business result. So you’ve taken all of those things into account upfront.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s, that’s incredible, because you are failing out to create or maximize the value that is creating throughout the relationship. And basically, this is the starting point of every business connection, to maximize the value and you share that several times. You need to do that in better than others. Because if you’re not doing that better than you can be exchanged, or the company can can do it by themselves. I think what you’re reiterating, and I would like to double click on is streamline processes beyond beyond service, you are always saying it’s not only about the thing, the product and so on, but it’s much more, could you please elaborate on that?

Shaun McAndrew
Alright, so I keep saying a complete offer. You know, and that is something that I’ll say, especially as we get more and more complex offerings, so the products themselves are more complex. And it gets harder and harder for a company to use or that that b2b customer use, there’s onboarding, there’s training, there’s all these other things that are required to get the maximum use out of whatever was developed. So companies built, they’ll create the product, and all the fit all the features all the widgets, and they’ll sell it. And then the customers are like, cool, how do we use it, and then they’re like, and then there’s this six month delay of additional services that have to come in. Some of those, again, are rushed, are added on are individualized. And we have this ad hoc kind of feeling to everything. And then everything has been expanded. And nobody can take track or knows exactly what the real offer is. So there’s this, this frustration of how do I manage all of this, especially for service managers, or services managers, they’re doing this. So a complete offer, you start with the product and the service team together, and everybody else who has a voice of the customer. So your marketing side, your sales side, your tech support, customer support, they get a seat at the table. Now you don’t you have representation, you don’t bring everybody in the room, you’ll never get anything done. But the focus is to integrate the combination of product hardware, software, tech, AI, machine learning, IoT, data analytics, and services needed to align to the customer outcomes, those business outcomes that you improve that you deliver at a level of expertise higher, it is a single value proposition in one offer. That is what companies need to come together and bring all those wishes to the customer in the one section, so that those jobs to be done are really understood. Because there’s not when you’re selling b2b, there’s not a single target persona. You’re selling to a business, which is a group of people. So you have to focus on the jobs to be done not on single personas. And I’ll say that’s something that is a little bit nuanced. Between b2c versus b2b CX is the focus on the customer outcomes and the jobs to be done. Are the personas that need to be addressed.

Gregorio Uglioni
At the end, as you’re saying, on the other side, you have several stakeholders that you need to manage you need to discuss, I was working with a company, and the marketing team already sold in a b2b, worth a product. And they came back to the IT department and they asked for this product and the IT department told them, yes, we need two years to build it. And they said, Oh, the product need to be there in six months. And then it starts exactly what you’re saying that they are not not aligned. And it’s not it’s not working properly. And I think this is and also extremely important, speaking about quality, and I know that you are often speaking about enhancing service quality, could you please share your thoughts on this topic?

Shaun McAndrew
With the service quality, I’ll say everybody wants to develop to develop good quality, you know, and deliver good quality. To me, it’s about knowing what you are going to deliver what you have to deliver, and therefore build, specifically what you should be delivering, which then ensures the quality that you need. I love your example, because we’ve heard that either marketing or sales, sell something and then everybody else is left to do it, which is why they need to be part of this team. Because they need to understand the offer as much as the product team, because they need to know what they’re selling. And vice versa. So you can deliver the quality. And that’s why designing it ahead of time. And not just going to, you know, whatever the customer needs, and being able to say no, this is what you know, based on what you have said and what the outcomes you want. This is what we can deliver, that ends up ensuring a much higher quality. And you don’t have those gaps that you talk about, well, we need, you know, we need two to three timeout times the amount of time to deliver what you said you could and then everybody ends up upset. So, again, some forethought ends up getting a lot higher quality. And that’s what I would say is a you know why I think what services they ended up getting last minute, therefore the services don’t feel as good as they should be.

Gregorio Uglioni
No clear. I think that’s extremely important. Because you mentioned earlier, it’s the product or service must be better than others. And therefore you need you need to work on that and and invest time on that. And I think in the b2b world, it’s also important to invest time creating an offer journey, I think that’s the word that you use in in your videos. I think this is something really interesting. Could you please also share your your your ideas on that.

Shaun McAndrew
The idea that of the offer journey, I will say there’s there’s the the customer experience, the customer journey, but then there’s the business function and the business journey. And they have to be one, they have to be on a single document single sheet, being able to see who supports what, at what time. And so it really is about business model design, and you’re designing the experience for both the business and the customer at the same time. Therefore, they are mutually supportive. And you end up with again, a cohesive offer, that everyone in the business understands they understand the role of what they are delivering. Therefore, with that understanding the customer feels supported, because everything is already understood. Next steps, they’re already known. So the handoffs and those gaps that we have I have seen when we’ve when we’ve talked with other companies, where things fall through the cracks, the cracks have already been identified in bridges made ahead of time. So that’s, I would say where the offer map is different than a journey map, because it’s two sided. And I just see that, that’s the that’s the requirement is is you don’t need just the customer side. You also need the business side, and they have to be mutually supportive.

Gregorio Uglioni
Yes, because he needs to build up it’s B to B to C or to somewhere else and therefore you need to create all this, this flow that that it’s working properly and smoothly to create value and At the end of the of the of the complete chain, what we know and what we see. And what we’re feeling is you’re passionate about this topic and your experience about this topic. And I’m sure that your this add some best practices that that you could share, but perhaps also some mistakes that you did in the past. Let’s start with with best practices. Could you share from your point of view, what are the best practices that you often use, or you see, this is something really important in customer experience in the b2b world,

Shaun McAndrew
the biggest thing is that cross functional team, I have mentioned it before. But breaking down the silos is also an essential secret sauce that we have, and requiring there to be a p&l owner to take the lead. So those two elements together, are really essential. And we require that when we work with people that we simply say, these are the requirements, and they do follow along. But if a company were to do it on their own, they really need that p&l owner to bring a cross functional team together, to become advocates to really do the ideation to talk through the process of what is going to be offered, what are all the different jobs to be done. Because if they don’t, something’s going to be a gap. And that’s why with CX, even with the best of intentions, somebody always knows something else. That’s not getting put on the table, if you don’t have those other job functions, you know, together with you.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I think what you’re saying it’s really interesting, it’s putting all the relevant people together, you share those throughout the discussion, one thing is getting older, and people are at one table, the first thing that you mentioned that I think is key is to explain why we are doing that. And why is so important. Perhaps, do you have also other learnings from finding ways to break these silos and bring people together?

Shaun McAndrew
You know, you need an advocate, somebody needs to be an advocate, and has to be willing to also do all the branches. Or someone has to be frustrated enough to say, Okay, we have cool innovation, and we’re tired of Acts, being commoditized not seeing the value, giving our services away for free, you know, something like that, or there’s way too many services, we have to reduce the portfolio, there has to be something that is a frustration that is driving that is recognized in somebody has to to be want to step up and take action. I’ll say one of the biggest obstacles is the fact that everybody gets comfortable in their job, and everybody’s job is full. So to do this work, you’re actually asking people to take time out of their normal busy day, and do something different. That’s actually not necessarily easy, not necessarily intuitive, and work together in ways that they’re, they’re not used to. That’s change. Nobody really likes change, you know, so this is one of the reasons why we end up getting brought in, is because we can galvanize change, you know, and make it so that there’s less prep, you know, at least starting to work with us. And it makes it easier for a company to at least get started. Because they don’t have. The other thing we realize with it is they, you can’t stop doing what you’re doing. Now. Take the time it needs to create a new offer, because then you won’t be in business because you won’t have been sold anything. So it has to be a gradual process. And it can’t be something that you just drop on a company and actually expect it to take over. It has to evolve. And people will probably, you know, the objections are, well, they don’t want to work with outside sources. They’ll say they don’t have the money. I look at it this way in my own budget. If there’s something that I really really want, I will find the money. I think businesses do the same. So if it’s not enough of a pain point to not find the money you know, that’s that’s a business decision itself too.

Gregorio Uglioni
But then you can say let’s meet let’s meet in six months again, when it’s the platform is really burning. And exactly that’s the important thing what you are saying experts like you also give the feelings And the security to the teams to these people that you can guide them through this change, because change is difficult. And the business is perhaps focused on their daily activities and not on changing everything. And therefore, it totally makes sense. Perhaps moving to one of the last question that I would like to ask you, mistakes are opportunities to learn and to grow. And perhaps throughout the journeys with your customers, and what you lead with with your customer. You said the next time I would to this or that in a different way, would you please share some one of the latest learning that you gained,

Shaun McAndrew
I’ll say our biggest learning is is making sure you keep the executive team informed of the progress and that they continue to see the value of the work, the work to create complete offers and extremely good customer experience. Without that, that leadership buy in and making sure they understand the value that is being brought with the change, the change will the chain, the positive change will stop, you know, because they will not allocate the resources that are needed to actually do it, they won’t make the decisions to make to actually enact the changes that are real realistically possible. So making sure that you that, you know, the senior leadership, you know, not just as briefed, but actually continues to buy in on the process is essential.

Gregorio Uglioni
And this is hard work. It’s hard work. Yes. Jumping from from your learnings from the past into the future, it’s now it’s in 10 years time from now we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast, and we are discussing about customer experience. What’s the topic?

Shaun McAndrew
I would say that the topic is is Look how far we’ve come in with a service dominant mindset. Those that were early to adopt, look at how much they have been thriving. Look how much better our economy is, because we’re coming from more a place of abundance, and not necessarily scarcity, because that’s what this mindset actually requires is the idea of abundance, that there’s enough for everyone that there’s higher value in working together than not. And so that will be the improvement of look how quickly the the end, we were on the leading edge of this change. And we are enjoying sharing conversations and sharing stories about all of the different changes in positive impact that this has made.

Gregorio Uglioni
Oh, thank you very much. Basically, we are coming to the end of this game in the last three minutes. I still have three question for you. The first one, is there a book that help you during your career or personal life that you would like to share with the audience?

Speaker 2
You know, one that is has been very good right now is digital hesitation published by J.B. Wood and Thomas Lah from technology and services, Industries Association TSAA. It really outlines I’ll say, this challenge and the hesitation to this change that that we’re talking about with customer experience with service and with service offers. And I found it really informative to to understand I’ll say the hesitation the fear about making it. And so if companies really want to see and understand what that looks like, being able to get a copy of that would be fantastic. And again, really, really beneficial.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you and what’s the best way to reach you?

Speaker 2
Sure, I can be reached at Shaun at the Service Design Group. Sean is spelled s h a u n Yes, there are multiple ways of spelling it. But the service design group.com That service design group is all squashed together.

Gregorio Uglioni
And there is only one there is only one. Thank you very much you will find out so all the contact details in the show notes. And now we are coming to the last question is Shawn’s golden nugget. It’s something that was discussed or something new that they would like to live to the audience. And I think this is a difficult question because you shared so many golden nuggets throughout this discussion. But I’m pleased to listen to to the to the conclusion.

Shaun McAndrew
My last golden nugget in kind of blows in with with everything we’ve talked about as well as my personal values. My personal philosophy is Think Forward, choose excellence. Be able to think forward think through the options. Think through, you know, what are the consequences of all of those options, and then choose, actively choose what is the best one for everyone. And so the golden nugget is simply and how I want to live my life is Think Forward, choose excellence.

Gregorio Uglioni
It’s great. Thank you very much, Shaun for your time. It was really a great pleasure to have you on on the CX goalkeeper podcast. Thank you very much for your time.

Speaker 2
Greg, thank you as well and I hope you have a lovely evening. Thank you all for your time tonight.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. Shaun, please stay with me to the audience. It’s everything. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion. feedback is a gift please contact me contact shown if you have any question. We would love to hear from you. Thank you very much. And 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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Discussing Empathy in Action with Dr. Natalie Petouhoff – E125

Episode released on: 08. May 2023

Discussing Empathy in Action with Dr. Natalie Petouhoff Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

LinkedIn Headline: WSJ Best Selling Author, Speaker, Board Member, Expert In Residence, Strategist in AI, CX and EX

Highlights:
00:00 Game Start
00:58 Natalie’s introduction and values
04:17 Definition of Empathy
08:28 Empathy in Action equation
14:07 5th Industrial Revolution
18:26 Customers and Employees are not on the balance sheet
21:27 Applying Empathy In Action
23:52 Getting a Common Understanding
29:08 Where to start
31:20 Measuring progress
34:42 The Future Question
36:51 Contact Details
37:59 Natalie’s Golden Nugget
and much more

Natalie’s book – Empathy In Action – is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1646870433/

Natalie’s Contact Details:

Natalie’s Golden Nuggets:

  • Becoming an empathy practitioner can truly change your life. Whether you apply empathy in your interactions with family members, romantic partners, or colleagues at work, this skill of genuinely listening to others can have a profound impact. I’ve experienced personal transformations myself, and even after writing a book on the subject, I continue to learn and grow every single day. I wholeheartedly encourage you to embrace empathy and become an empathy practitioner. It’s a journey that will enrich your life in countless ways.

Becoming an empathy practitioner can truly change your life. Whether you apply empathy in your interactions with family members or colleagues at work, this skill of genuinely listening to others can have a profound impact. Natalie Petouhoff on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

picture from https://www.drnatalienews.com/blog/10-awards-for-empathy-in-action

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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 gentlemen, welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast tonight I’m really super thrilled because I’ve one of the authors of empathy in action. Hi Natalie, how are you?

Natalie Petouhoff
I’m great. Thank you, Greg,

Gregorio Uglioni
thank you very much for joining my podcast and to our audience. Now, you know, Natalie, Petouhoff is together with me. And it’s really, I am saying thank you very much for your time. It’s really great to have you on my podcast.

Natalie Petouhoff
Thank you, I’m thrilled to be here.

Gregorio Uglioni
Perfect. Before we start deep diving in your book, and for the people watching this video, you see the nice cover in the in the background of Natalie. We would like to learn more about you. And therefore not only could you please shortly introduce yourself.

Natalie Petouhoff
Sure, I’m someone who’s very passionate about thinking about other people’s feelings and needs. And I think that’s really the origination of the book and the topic. One of the values that really drives me in life is authentic, genuine communication. And I think what I really learned as I was writing this book is the value of empathy. So you start out with a topic, you think you really know it. And it’s not until you actually get into it, and you start to digest it, and then you practice it, you know, becoming an empathy practitioner is very different than writing applied theory. And so I’ll tell you a short story. So I had a friend who had gone to a concert got pushed down, his face got cracked open, and it was like 230 in the morning, and he called me and he said, Do you have any superglue? I said, stop calling me for superglue. And he showed he did FaceTime. He showed me the space and I said, Okay, I really think you need liquid bandage. And it goes no, no, no, I want I want super glue. So I’d rummage through my drawers, I can’t find it. I go to the grocery, I’d go to the drugstore. And I’m standing there with a tube of superglue and a tube of liquid bandage in my hand. And I and my gut is saying buy what he asked for. But my brain the part that thinks I’m right, is thinking by limpid bandage. So I compromised. And I bought both, so I delivered them. And a couple days later, he knocks on my door. And then he had had to shave off his eyebrow because he had put the superglue on and it wasn’t a good choice. And he said, Now I want to thank you for your generosity. And but mostly because you didn’t do what you thought was right. You actually heard me I felt acknowledged and seen. And even though you were right. Superglue was not the right answer. He said, You sat in my shoes, you heard me and you delivered what I asked for. And so that’s, you know, one of the many, many stories that when you actually start to practice empathy, and you sit in the other person’s shoes, and you understand what they want and need and then deliver it even though you’re you know, logic brain is saying, I know the answer. It, it has a profound effect on the friendship and the relationship. And so what I learned through that experience was how many times as leaders and managers do we do what we think is right from our point of view, versus the customer, or the employee. And it’s almost 100% Because we think we know. So empathy is one of my my big values.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you for for this great story. And now we understand better why you’ve wrote such a book, empathy in action. And please dear audience Take the time to buy this book and to read this book because it’s really full of insight. And now we are going to unpack them together with Natalie. Let’s, let’s start you, you’re saying you’re using the word empathy, perhaps to really kick off the discussion, what’s your definition and also in particular in the customer experience customer service field.

Natalie Petouhoff
So it’s interesting because a lot of people will pick up the book. One, they think they’re already doing it. I can tell you, you It 99% of people are not right. And you look at the number of layoffs, you look at the the how many companies are not meeting their revenue goals. It’s because they’re not employing this new business model, empathy as a business concept. So people think it’s sympathy, right? And they think I’m building a kumbaya factory. And sympathy is really hearing what someone says and saying, I’m so sorry, that happened. Right? And then it’s usually from our own perspective, it’s a feeling of compassion, or maybe pity. And empathy is the practice of sitting in the seat of someone else, seeing their point of view and then acting in a new way, right? And what I find is almost sometimes you are being empathetic, but oftentimes, especially in business, we’re acting from where we think is right. And so in terms of customer employee experience, think about it. So for instance, when a customer interacts with an SMS bot, right, for chatbot, do they want the interaction to be long? Do they want to have to repeat themselves? Now? If it gets transferred to an agent, does the agent want to have to listen to the long story? No, but the way that we’ve set up customer and employee experience, that’s exactly what happens. And so what’s fascinating is, when you look at the experience from the employee and the customer’s point of view, they want it short, they want it easy, they want to get it done, they want to move on. So they want, like when you look at average handle time, or first contact resolution, that’s what the employee and the customer want. But it’s also what the company wants. And later on, we’ll talk a little bit about what we’re doing at DoorDash. But basically, we’ve taken our chat sessions from 10, to 15 minutes to five. Because we’re employing empathy, we’re actually sitting in the seat of the customer, and the employee, and we’re reconfiguring how we deliver those experience, some of its technology, some of its process, some of its just looking at it from a different point of view. So for me, the definition of empathy is really looking at those experiences, from the customer’s point of view. And when you do that, you also meet the business goals, and you actually reduce your, your, your costs, and you increase your revenue. It’s not, it’s one of those things, and you probably get it, but it’s not one of those things. It’s very obvious to many people. Because people think all you want me to spend more money, I’m like, No, I want you to spend less money. I want I want you not to spend any money on our tuition. For agents, I want you to get your customers in and out very quickly. I want your customers to be so happy with the experience that they return. And they tell others right in the way that we’re doing experiences now, where self service ends up in a dead end. And agent interactions are very long and take a lot of questions and it’s fine. It’s not a satisfying experience for me back and across the company.

Gregorio Uglioni
Exactly. I think that’s one one big example you are using now and the example from the USA, but they are facing this similar experience in Europe, we are always speaking about being customer centric, focusing on the customer focusing on the employees preaching about that. But then when discussed with customer centers, they’re always measuring or only our speed of answer our handling time. And they are not really focusing on the real transformation that now technology can do. It’s simplifying processes, improving processes, and then going to automation so that you have less time for discussion. And the remaining time that you gain, you can reinvest to create value for the customer and being empathetic with with teams based on that you shared and it’s really super interesting because I’m not often I see in customer experience book or employee experience related books, also some mathematics equation and you have a nice equation is the empathy in action equation. Could you please share a bit about that?

Natalie Petouhoff
Social sell the business centric equation is business centric efficiency, business centric effectiveness, and that gives you a certain value. Right. And so that’s when, you know, I used to be a Forrester analyst. So the things that we talked about were, you know, reducing average speed of answer or reducing average call time iron ore, increasing first contact resolution, but we were doing it by employing business centric logic, what’s best for the business. And oftentimes, especially up until now, where we are in this new industrial revolution with technology, oftentimes, that thinking and the technology and the way it got deployed, would decrease the average, you know, the increase the efficiency and effectiveness, but it would do so at the end, it would compromise the experience. So the empathy equation is really about looking at efficiency, and effectiveness from a customer’s point of view. And when you do that, you also gain the value to the business, but you gain additional value. So the efficiency would be did I get my question answered quickly? Right? So if you if you have a dumb bot, that asks, Who are you? Where have you been? What do you need, and then it gives you a bunch of canned answers, or even some AI answers, but they never quite hit what you want, then that’s not a very efficient process. And then the person figures out, okay, I’m just gonna get transferred to an agent. So now you paid for self service technology that ended up in a dead end, it gets transferred to the agent, now the agent that they don’t have customer journey analytics, right, and they have no knowledge of where the customer has been or what they’ve been doing. And that doesn’t get transferred to the agent desktop, then what happens is the customer service agent has to say, maybe they know who you are, right? Because maybe the Annie identified that. But what have you been doing? How can I help you, and then the customer has to go into this long story, right. And that’s the way that the technology has been set up, up until now. And so that’s why average handle time is high. That’s why agent stress is so high, because they have to ask the same frequent questions over and over. And I like I don’t, I don’t know how they do their job. I give them so much credit, because I couldn’t do that job. So what if he you transferred all that information about the customers interaction? Maybe they were on a website, they were looking at paint, they have something on their shopping cart, you see them migrate over to the FAQs? And then they want to chat, right? That chat bot should be able to answer the question. Or if they need more help, or it needs to be transferred to an agent, that agent agent should have all that information pop to the desktop. And they should say, Hi net, I see you’re looking at paint, you have this in your shopping cart? Is this what you have a question about? Right? Get to the answer. And so when you do that, now you’re getting the customer where they need right away, right, and maybe you can upsell or cross sell them, because you know something about them. And you can add value. And it’s not just a generic blue light, special, like everybody gets the same upsell, right, but you’re actually understanding that person, and what they need and what they want. And then the agent isn’t so tired, they’re not hating their job. Right. So now you have a happy customer who got what they needed, who’s going to buy more who’s going to tell all their friends, there’s customer lifetime value, there’s your loyalty, there’s your trust, there’s your revenue. And then for the for the agent, they’re not bored with their job, they feel satisfied, they feel that they’ve given somebody help, because that’s what they’re there to do. That is their job. And they’re not frustrated by it. So now we’re lowering your attrition. So the equation really represents the old way about thinking about business from a business centric point of view, versus the customer and the employee centric point of view. And when you do that, then that’s when you’re going to get the exponential value out of your technology and your people

Gregorio Uglioni
related to empathy. And I think that’s, that’s really super interesting, because you’re sharing, you’re sharing a lot of nuggets. And one thing that you mentioned is technology until now, and I know that in the book, you are fearing the fifth Industrial Revolution. Could you please elaborate a bit on that?

Natalie Petouhoff
So what I did, I like history. And I’d like to go back and look at where we’ve been. And if there’s a couple of charts in the book, and one is it is that it shows the productivity and the capabilities of technology going up exponentially, right. And so when you look all the way back from the beginning when our first tools were like fire and stone and wheels like basics, right to where we are today with semiconductors and computers, and now AI, right? All the different technologies, you see an exponential change in the capabilities. And so the link really is, when you look back at the first industrial revolution, you see very, very basic tools, right? That allowed us to make steel and buildings and glass and build skyscrapers. And so, cars, Boeing, Ford, all those inventors who did really amazing things. Now you look at where we are today. For the first time in history, we now have technology that can be focused on human need, and to be focused on providing what people need, what is the customer need, what is the employee need. And so the now what can happen is, is back in the early 1800s, or earlier in Europe, when you look at the first industrial revolution, everything was focused on business centric efficiency, right, reducing costs, increasing productivity, and a lot of wealth for those particular business owners, today, we can start to think about not only providing great products, but also great services, great experiences, right? And so when you look at the evolution of human beings and what they want, and they need, right, needs were different back then they’re they’re very mean, customers make decisions about buying from a company based on one experience. So if we are now whether you are selling pencils, or cars, or cell phones, you are in the experience business. And so whatever that experience is, not only with the product itself, right, someone buys it, they use it, say it’s a pencil and you go to erase an eraser after you race a little bit, it falls off, and then the lead doesn’t stay sharp. Are you ever gonna buy that pencil? Again? No, you’re gonna buy somebody else’s pencil, right? And then when you try to ask a question, get service, do a return. If that’s a horrible experience. Are you going to go back there again? No. So we, I think that that’s one of the enrollment, your questions was What is experienced as a service? Right? We are in an experience economy. And then I also have Joe pines book up here, because he’s really, I would say, the the godfather of the experience economy. And companies really need to think about that. And now we have, technology has different capabilities. And we need to apply that with a new mindset. Because if we take the old mindset, and we take the new technologies and apply it in the same way, we’re probably not going to get that exponential return. But if we actually change our mindset and go, Okay, when I design my technology, right, all the vendors who are designing technology, or as a business, when I implement the technology, now I’m going to change my mindset. And the mindset is, how can I make this wildly successful, and a great experience for my customers, and for my employees, and when you do that, what you’re gonna find is, that’s where you’re gonna get your business results. And that’s why everybody’s stuck right now.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you’re saying is, it’s extremely interesting. And you’re saying to transform and going to this transformation. I know from older keynotes that you were giving another podcast where you are discussing on, you shall know something extremely interesting that in reality, customers and employees are not on the balance sheet, but without customer and without employees. There is no value to be written into, into the balance sheet of, of companies. Could you please elaborate a bit on that?

Natalie Petouhoff
Why that fascinating, because when we started down this path, I had to ask myself, how come customer experience and employee experience is still a topic that most of us who are in this field, are constantly trying to pitch up to the CXO? Office? Right? Why is it so hard for people to actually understand the value? So I isolated those the employees and customers and I said, are they on the balance sheet? It doesn’t. So when you think about assets and accompany you have buildings, you have software, you have technology, you have all these things, and they’re accounted for on the balance sheet. But the two critical components in a business are customers and employees because without employees, there’s no one to create products and services. And without customers. There’s no one to buy them. And so essentially without these two assets You do not have a business. And yet, we don’t make them a priority. And so part of the soapbox, in my mind is to try and say, Look, this is old thinking, we really have to think about them. You can’t think, Oh, well, you know, there used to be the saying about, well, if you don’t want your job, then there’s 100 People lined up outside the door, that will take it, or we could just get more customers. Right, and we’re reaching a point in time, where that those old sayings and those old thought patterns are no longer true. Because customers have choices with the advent of the internet, the advent of online shopping with the advent of online reviews, if you’re not a good actor, right, you’re not doing good business. Everybody knows, and everybody tells everybody else. And at some point, it’s going to catch up with you. So why not start now? I mean, and that’s what I’m so excited about DoorDash. And my other customers, is they and not everybody, like there’s it’s kind of like Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption curve, it’s the empathy adoption curve. There are some companies that read this, and get it and like, now come and help us like, we want to do this right away, and others are like, Oh, we’re doing it, and others are like, Nah, still doesn’t matter. So it’s, it’s fascinating being an observer of all of this.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you’re saying it’s really interesting. And you’re sharing also that the first customer already trying to implement it, what what it’s, what’s the experience with them? What what are their question to start and kickoff?

Natalie Petouhoff
So what’s interesting is David, and I did not know each other. He bought the book a year ago, when it first came out, he read it. And he was like, Oh, my gosh, this is it. Like for any CX person. This is everything that I’ve been thinking about, compiled in one book. And I was like, that’s very proud. But that’s, I wanted it to be a one stop shop. Right? I wanted it to be the why. And the what now I’m working on Book Two, which is the how, right. And so part of what I’m doing with with DoorDash. So David, read the book started to think about it. And he’s, he’s already been working on implementing this for about eight months. And they have great results, but they feel like they’ve done as much as they can. And when I started to go through, and I said, okay, and I actually went down to South San Salvador to one of his contact centers, I said, they but what we want to do is we want to look at the framework. So the framework for implementing empathy is to look at culture, to look at leadership, to look at metrics, and your financial business model, and the technology. And he’s like, wow, we only did a little bit. And some of them we didn’t touch at all, because we didn’t know what we didn’t know what we didn’t have the skills, right. So now what I’m putting together for brands is kind of a framework to really go deeper than what the book currently does. And to help them understand how do you do this. So it’s a little bit of assessing where you are currently, and understanding and those four categories that have like a whole bunch of dropdowns underneath each one, and then understanding where you are today, what’s possible, and we don’t even know what’s going to be possible in the future, right? So those are going to be our stretch goals. And as I help companies implement this, what I’m learning, okay, this is, this is what they read, this is what they understood, this is where they’re at. And now here’s how I can help them go to the next level, and really realize these savings and increase in revenue.

Gregorio Uglioni
It’s super interesting. And I know I’m going off script, but sometimes good contact center agents are going off script. And you mentioned something that I think it’s really interesting. Everybody reads your book from the beginning to the end, because it’s really super interesting. And then everybody has a bit a different understanding or wants to set some point you’re on and that how can you ensure that you and your customer, you have the same understanding of empathy In action?

Natalie Petouhoff
So part of what we’ve been doing is actually reading the book together. So the team will read a chapter. And then we’ll have discussion groups. And when people actually verbalize their thoughts, then it’s not like anybody’s wrong. There’s no wrong here, right. But it’s interesting because when you think about it writes a book about empathy. When you think about it, each person is putting themselves and I as an author, I have to put myself in their shoes. Listen to what they’re saying, because they’re reading it and interpreting it from their point of view. Right, and sometimes they come up The stuff I didn’t think about, right? And that’s, that’s the value of teams and diversity, right? Is that and including other people in this process, because they come up with things. I’m like, wow, that’s really good. Let’s do that. Right. So it’s really fun for me, because I’m learning with them. I also think that part of it, it is doing the assessment. So saying, and the assessment that I have built, will change over time. Because as I learn more, and how people are actually trying to implement this in a corporate environment, and assessing, you know, in detail all those things, you see how they interpret it, and you also see where they’re at. Right? I mean, one of the things everybody pretty much misses is organizational change. Right. And so there’s kickback, and I don’t know, why are we doing this? And, you know, oh, initiative de jour, right? And so I learned a long time ago, when I was a management consultant, that you have to do some org change, otherwise, you get a lot of resistance. And the resistance is what what increases the time to go. Right. So why would why would you leave that out. But a lot of people don’t have that background. They don’t know how to assess where the attitudes and mindsets are. And then how do you move people on some of its training, really just getting getting the definition of empathy versus sympathy? Having people really understand, because they think it’s an HR book. Right? So they think it’s about just the people part. And so getting them to understand that a lot of what we want to do can be done with technology at scale. So really having people understand, yes, culture is really important. Hiring, onboarding, training, rewarding incentives, really important leadership, having leaders be able to speak about this having them having a talk track that they believe in, right, that they can say with conviction. And it’s not just something that they’re saying, really looking at that financial business metrics, what are we measuring in a contact center? And why it doesn’t make sense? And from whose perspective, and then technology, right, so technology is a really big part of this, whether it’s, you know, using assessments to be able to hire people, or, you know, the different pieces of HR, right, but there’s a much bigger component in the actual customer and employee experience. So looking at all the C cast vendors, looking at all the experience vendors looking at all the CRM vendors. So part of it is assessing technology, and determining does that technology really help the customer and the employee get what they need, in the moment real time? Or is it somehow hindering that and I think that you can only see that in comparison. And in retrospect, because up until now, whatever we had was the best that we could do. But now when you compare it to what could be happening? Now you go, Oh, I see there’s the gap. And so now I’m working with vendors who are really transforming their products, right. So part of this is a partnership, part of this is the business and the business organization. Part of it is to really scale this and to take it to the future, you know, 100 years or 200 years, or hopefully, this never stops. Because empathy is just make sense. Helping vendors really understand how their product itself is hindering a great experience. And most of them don’t think that they are, right. And it’s only when I say, Well, does this happen? Does this happen? You are a customer when you experience this? How does that make you feel? Oh, it’s horrible. Okay, so your product does that, though. So how can we help you get your product not to do that?

Gregorio Uglioni
It’s extremely interesting. And there are a lot of topics that that you’re touching, if I understand well, and please correct me, if companies want to implement empathy in action, it used to just to start with an assessment. And basically, after the assessment with all the different dropdowns, you have an outcome, the question that I would have, your suggestion is to start where the biggest, biggest pain points are, or to double down on the strengths that they already have to differentiate in the market. What’s your view and what are you suggesting to your customers?

Natalie Petouhoff
It kind of depends on what their goals are. Right? And it also depends on their appetite. So as a consultant, you always want to start with the customers. Employee empathy, right? So where are they most excited? Where can they see the value? Right? So I might Uh, you know, I would, in a perfect world, I want them to attack everything. Well, having been in corporate America for a very long time, an organization can only digest so much. So, you know, there’s someone who’s really passionate about culture are really passionate about getting their leaders trained. I mean, they often asked me, Where do we start? Right? And so it kind of depends, did you try it? Have you started this on your own? And where are you in that process? And then where do you see the low hanging opportunities, right? What’s going to be easiest for your organization to adopt? And then let’s start there and have some successes. So how I’ve had success before, is picking places where people are excited, it’s possible to have success, so that you can build on that success. And the people go, Hey, what are they doing over there? That looks really interesting. I want to do that too. Right? And then you build on that and you build the excitement and people. People are, you know, that they feel their own excitement. At that point. It’s not just me kind of pushing new ideas and saying, it’s more of a poll. It’s like, well, now what can we do here? What can we do here? And what about this, and I want you to talk to these people over here. And so you want to create a pull versus push?

Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s always extremely important in organizational change management, to pull and not to push. And I think why companies are then progressing implementing this empathy in action? How can you measure the progress? And to add and complete the question, how can you measure empathy?

Natalie Petouhoff
So the measurement of empathy is the degree to which you’re doing things that get the customer what they need, so we’ll just focus on the customer for a second. So when when I’m working with DoorDash, one of the things was what David termed flower early flower lay language. So when someone calls and says, Hey, you forgot my eggs, the typical response from the agent would be, oh, bow, we forgot your eggs, we’re so sorry. Breakfast is a very important part of our meal. You know, that that must be really frustrating and going on and on. So what we discovered was that when a customer says something, like you forgot my eggs, or I didn’t get my drink, or or my stuff is cold, or whatever it is, right. And, and it doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t just apply to DoorDash, it deploys to any company because a customer calls and says, I need help. I have a question. This didn’t work out, right? So instead of, let’s say, a customer calls, and to them in that moment, they’re saying the house is on fire. So would you say, Oh, I’m so sorry that your house is on fire, that must be really frustrating. Having a house that’s on fire is really important to your lifestyle. Like, the customer would want to strangle you right to the phone or to the computer. So when a customer says the house is on fire, showing empathy and measuring, whether you’re delivering empathy is the way that you respond. And the way that you would respond is I’ll get the hose. So in part of measuring that is looking at the length of the chat, or the call. Because when you go through all that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it makes the interaction longer, makes the customer frustrated, they don’t leave a good recommendation. Right. But if you give the customer what they need, you’re reducing that chat time, you’re reducing the frustration, and you’re getting the person what they need. So part of what David and team have done is to look at their interactions and create a matrix to be able to evaluate in the interaction, are we delivering empathy, right, and they have their own particular formulation of how they evaluate those interactions. And then, based on that, so they work with the agents, and they help the agent understand, here’s what empathy does not look like. And here’s what empathy looks like. And so, one, you can start to look at the number of interactions that show empathy and don’t based on the set of criteria, and then what you see when you deploy empathy is the average handle time and first contact resolution goes up.

Gregorio Uglioni
And this is something that all the companies are looking for, because this drive also efficiency. And the big question, does companies want to invest the time for creating value or keep only the cost reduction with the decrease of everything what what you share or earlier, taking care also of the time and we and ensuring that we keep the discussion, I still have one question. And it’s about the future, let’s say in 10 years from now we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast, I hope that you will be back earlier. But in these cases in 10 years from now, what we are discussing about

Natalie Petouhoff
I think we’ll be discussing about how we’re applying the latest technology. So right now, it’s chat. GBT, right, and AI. And that’s like the whole conversation. I think that technology is going to continue to expand, it’s going to continue to change. And what I’m hoping the goal of this book was to not separate technology from business, but to actually bring it in the business together. And so my goal is that every company gets excited about empathy, because it’s the right thing to do by their customers and employees. Maybe we won’t have another great resignation, or a quiet quit, right? Like all these divisive things that employees are doing, because their experience at work is not good, right? And then the response of companies is to lay everybody off. Right? And so I’m hoping that leadership becomes skilled in the science of empathy, and the implementation as a new business concept. And that it won’t be me trying to convince people, but rather a poll where people are like, Oh, my God, I want to learn about this. And like, they just naturally are implementing this. So right now, there’s a handful of companies that are I’m talking to and, and helping but I hope that that extends to every single company on the planet.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I suggest to a lot of companies to be enough smart to approach you now that you have time to explain that because later, it could be a bit difficult, because that’s the way to go. It’s we are in a human business. And empathy is one of the most important values that we have. And we care about because we need to care about people. We are coming to an end of this game of this discussion in the extra time, I still have two questions for you. What’s the best way to find you?

Natalie Petouhoff
You can find me on LinkedIn Dr. Natalie Petouhoff. Or my website, Dr. Natalie news. And yeah, just by me, if you want more information, or information on how to get the book, the book is on Amazon. The audio book is coming out soon. It’s been all recorded, I actually recorded my own intro. So that was very fun. And yeah, the audio book, it’s up to Amazon when they put it up so that you can find it in any any bookstore.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And dear audience, you will find also the information in the show notes with including all the links to find this outstanding book that I really suggest empathy inaction, it’s an outstanding work. Thank you very much, Natalie, for your time. Before we conclude, one last question is Natalie’s golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new, that you would leave to the audience.

Natalie Petouhoff
Become an empathy practitioner, it will change your life, whether you use empathy, that skill of really listening to the other person, whether it’s a family member, boyfriend, a girlfriend, someone you’re in a relationship with at work, it will literally transform your life. I’ve had personal transformations. And like, you write the book, so you think you know, and every single day I see something and learn something new. So I encourage you to become an empathy practitioner.

Gregorio Uglioni
That’s something that I love because we are not learning about business, but we are learning also something for our personal life. This is the conclusion of the podcast. Natalie, please state stay with me, dear audience. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. If you didn’t do it during the podcast, please now go to Amazon, buy the book. It’s really worth it. And take the time to read it, understand it and contact Natalie for any question. Thank you very much and have a nice evening. 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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

The Rise Of The Frontline Worker with Cristian Grossmann – CEO Beekeeper – E124

Episode released on: 01. May 2023

The Rise Of The Frontline Worker with Cristian Grossmann – CEO Beekeeper Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Cristian Grossmann

LinkedIn Headline: CEO at Beekeeper || 👷🏽‍♂️The Frontline Success System👷🏻‍♀️

Highlights:

00:00 Game Start
00:57 Cris Grossmann’s introduction
01:23 Cris Grossmann’s values
02:21 Beekeeper
03:45 The Frontline workers
05:37 Their role in society
06:43 The needs of Frontline workers
08:46 The hotel story
12:44 Digitalization and Frontline workers
14:46 An engagement tool
16:58 The frontline experience
20:38 The Future
21:50 Book Suggestion
22:47 Contact details
and much more

Cristian’s Contact Details:

His book suggestion:

  • The Rise of the Frontline Worker by Dr. Cristian Grossmann
    Unleash the Power Within by Tony Robbins

Cristian’s Golden Nuggets:

  • “The fascination with the frontline and an invitation to take a closer look at your day-to-day life, because frontline workers are everywhere, and their work is so essential and amazing that observing it more closely and sometimes asking them, ‘Hey, how do you do the job that tends to be so different from others’ work?’ is fascinating.”

“The fascination with the frontline and an invitation to take a closer look at your day-to-day life, because frontline workers are everywhere, and their work is so essential (…)” Cris Grossmann on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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 today. It’s really a big pleasure because I have Christian Grossman together with me, Hi Christian, how are you?

Cristian Grossmann
Good, are you Greg, nice to meet you. And thanks for having me here.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. I’m very, very happy and very thrilled that you accepted my invitation to share your story what beekeeper is doing, I know that you are very, very busy. And you will find time also to share your story with with others. And therefore Thank you very much for your time. I’m really pleased that you are you.

Cristian Grossmann
Thank you, Greg

Gregorio Uglioni
Cris, perhaps some people don’t yet know what beekeeper is. But before we start introducing beekeeper, we would like to know something about you. And therefore Cris, could you please introduce yourself?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, for sure. My name is Cris Crossman, I’m the CEO and co founder of beekeeper. I’m originally from Mexico. I lived there the first 20 years of my life, and I’ve been living the next 20 years in Switzerland.

Gregorio Uglioni
Great, thank you very much, Cris. And we would like also to learn a bit more about you. For example, you are a father of great child, and which which will just drive your life.

Cristian Grossmann
Thank you so much. Great, great question. So yes, I’m a happy new father, three months old, of my little daughter. And what kind of values drive me in life, I think for me when when important one has always been working hard. Like that’s how I learned from my grandfather’s from my father. And the working heart is definitely one of the values that I that I follow in. For me also the topic of not only working hard, but also doing something good is really important. That’s a little bit what a story of beekeeper entails, which is really helping all of those frontline workers that are out there that would leave have been forgotten and disregarded for a very, very long time. And it’s time to fix that.

Gregorio Uglioni
That’s That’s a great story and a great introduction for the topics we would like to discuss today. Today we are speaking about empowering the frontline workers. And I think we have different understanding about who are the frontliners. But before we deep dive in this topic, perhaps could you please quickly share what beekeeper is doing?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, for sure. So at beekeeper we have a big mission, which is connecting frontline teams and we’ll talk about what frontline teams are. But connecting frontline teams with everything they need to do a great job. We’ve learned over these last 10 years of building the company that frontline workers enjoy and love doing a great job. And we believe when we do empower them with technology, a two great things happen. One is frontline workers live better lives, they enjoy more of their work, they stay more loyal to their companies, and the businesses they work for also thrive. So that’s I would say our big mission, what beekeeper does, is to provide what we call a frontline Success System, which is an application that the frontline worker will download onto their phone. And in there, they will find everything they need in order to be productive, engaged and informed at work. So we cover really everything they need. We have studied a lot, what they need, what are the needs of a frontline worker, and we’ve distilled it in a very simple way and a very a frontline specific way for them to be more or

Gregorio Uglioni
what a mission. It’s incredible. I think you are already doing a great job. And I am looking forward to see the growth path of beekeeper. And perhaps now read to make that understandable. If we speak in our industry about frontline, we always think about contact center agents and perhaps also a bit about hospitality. But you have a bit a different view on that. And I think it’s really interesting. Who are the frontline workers from your point of view?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes. So frontline workers is I would say the umbrella term we use for everybody who’s typically not sitting in front of a desktop like probably you and me. And many of the people hearing this podcast, we spend our time behind the laptop, we have all of these browsers and tools open. That’s the way we work with Zoom. We use Microsoft Teams for video calls and so on. And it happens to be that people that work like that is only about 20 to 25% of the global workforce. So there’s a vast majority 70 80% of the global workforce who are longtime workers, they have to stand on their feet. They have to do physical jobs, and it’s everything from people working in a hotel. The staff in a hotel housekeepers, food and beverage in the kitchen. It goes on to retail people in the shops, filling up the shelves, working in logistics, and travel less well, manufacturing people in the factories in construction. It’s a really big class of workers. Some of them are oftentimes called blue collar workers, deskless workers. So there are many names. The one we liked the most and find it describes also the fact that they’re also on the front of the business is the word frontline. So those are the frontline workers, a for us, and as we understand in the most generic possible way.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I think what you’re saying, Bring me to think about that. There are a lot of people that have such roles. And if they’re up in their life, they have a big, big impact on our society. Because for us, it’s normal to go and buy something, but it’s something should be there in the store at the right time at the right place. And this This is their role. It’s a big, big role in the society, correct?

Cristian Grossmann
Totally, totally. I mean, we went through it in the pandemic a couple of years ago, I think it became very evident and very clear how essential they are. They were also called during that time essential workers, right. I think they they kept our world running while everything else stopped. And there were lock downs, the ones that had to keep on working were frontline workers and be essential workers, right. So as you say, they are the fundament and the basis of a lot of what our businesses do our economies and the society at large.

Gregorio Uglioni
It’s extremely interesting. And you said you are working on this topic since roughly 10 years. What are the needs of these frontline workers?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, so we spent a lot of time studying and understanding what drives a frontline worker, what do they need in order to be successful at work? And there are a number of insights there. So we’ve identified for example, in terms of needs to your questions, what do they need? A we’ve asked many of our customers from the US from Asia, from Europe, what do you need in order to be successful? And what you will always hear are things like, I want to know when I have to work, like, what’s my schedule? With whom do I have to work? What’s my team, they tend to be very loyal and very close to their immediate teams, maybe not so much to the company, but to their immediate teams? How much do I earn. So the topic of payment is a really important one that you typically live almost from paycheck to paycheck, they sometimes have to juggle one, two or three jobs. So the topic of payments and making money is an important one, right? And of course, what’s the bigger picture of what I’m doing. So if you compound all of these a questions that they have in their head, you will quickly find out that it’s really hard for them to get that information in a very simple manner. There’s sometimes that type of information tends to reside in systems that are spread all across the company, too many of them they don’t even have access, they have to ask their manager. So there are a lot of hurdles for them to actually get to the information that makes them be focused and at peace of mind, and that they can serve better the customers and do their job. So the needs are very, very particular are very different from the type of needs that an office worker would have. And that’s why we believe building software and the name and technology for the frontline is like a completely different ballgame than building software for Office. Workers we see it as one is like playing tennis and the other one is playing baseball, both of them do have something you need to hit the ball with. But it’s not quite the same. The rules are different, the players are different. And the way of winning, and making them successful is very different.

Gregorio Uglioni
What you’re saying it sounds really extremely clear, and we see the big need of finding solution for them. But I think when you started it was not so clear. And perhaps where does this idea to create this this app, the solution from front frontlines worker from you shared with me in a private discussion and the hotel story, I hope that you can share that also today and keen to listen, how did you create this this great product?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, for sure. And so the story goes as follows. So that are two parts. One is more of a bit of a background story. A personally, both of my grandparents were frontline workers, they worked in a factory. So I spent countless summers and afternoons with them. And I would say I was sensible life with how the whole world worked, at least in the 80s. But bad news is it hasn’t changed that much. It’s still a lot of paperwork, bulletin boards written and notes and so on. So it’s very old fashioned a steel nowadays, and we save with all our customers. How did we get started so we initially have a another idea it was a student community that we were trying to build up a in Zurich, turned out to be a great place for students to get to exchange, it was some something like an anonymous Twitter, we got quite some some nice traction in the end through that we started putting some advertisement on the platform to make some money. And through that, a we got in contact with different HR departments. And some of them told us, hey, the platform looks really good. It’s a it’s a great tool, would it be possible to also use it internally for us? And initially, we said, No, we want to focus doing only what we want to be doing. But at some point, we said, You know what, it’s not such a bad idea. Why don’t we give them the technology that we’ve built, and the skills that we’ve built to bring people together. And we offer that as a service for companies. And that’s how it started. And one of our very first customers where I would say we had our whole day come moment was with Swissotel, the brand that A was acquired by Fairmont. And then of course, the hacker group. But a they were basically going through a transformation after being acquired PMI project, where they needed basically to rebrand everything internally towards their own employees in terms of what’s the new strategy, what are the new values, what are the new processes, and so on. And they were struggling to get to all of their frontline workers they had at that time, around 50,000 People in 120 hotels, and none of them had an email address, it was really hard to reach them. And the typical methods of cascading information were too slow to intransparent. And really hard to know if they weren’t having the impact that they wanted to have. And that’s where we started with a small pilot in a couple of properties in Switzerland, we deployed our platform to bring people together together with the idea that you need to help them and bring them onto the platform. So we drove from hotel to hotel, helping each and every single one of the employees to get a board. And by the end of the day, when we got back to the VP of HR and the CEO and said, You know what, you can write a message on your phone. And everybody will read it right now that were completely mind blowing, because that’s something that in the hospitality industry had never happened before. And it wasn’t the right moment for them, but also for us, because we were thinking, well, we’re just helping them to bring people together. It turns out, we solved a much more fundamental problem, which is how do they reach, interact and enable all of their frontline workers? Right? So that was, I would say, the turning point where we said, wow, we’re on to something bigger here. It seems to be a really big problem. We took a bit of a step back and said, Well, is it only a hospitality issue, or something that in manufacturing, retail logistics, all that happens, and we were mind blown by by the scale of this opportunity?

Gregorio Uglioni
It’s really a great story and the tools again, that it starts small. And if it’s the right idea, and it solves a problem that companies have, then it can it can really scale up. But basically the question that I would have now it’s you shared example on the hotels, now perhaps speaking about manufacturing, and so on, how can you bring this digitalization to the front line? What are the reasons? Yes.

Cristian Grossmann
So I would say that the reasons vary from company to company nowadays, the reason is quite clear, in an economic environment where there’s pressure around costs, increasing from labor, from energy, and so on, all the companies are looking for ways to become more efficient. We’ve heard also about the chronic, a labor shortage that there is, so imagine us a company, you’re seeing more and more demand, your cost basis is increasing, you don’t have enough people to cope with that. And one of the few ways of dealing with it is well, you make the people that you have been more effective and more productive, and you give them better tools to be more efficient. So that’s certainly one of the triggers that brings companies to do this. A couple of years back, it was more even the pandemic, when they realized, well, how do we steer a whole team with 1000s or 10s of 1000s of people, if we can not even send the messages or let them know where we’re going as a company? Right. But I think in general, those would be certainly a some of the main reasons why they why they start engaging with us. There are others more on the personnel side, in the sense that companies want to become a better employer and it’s also this war for talent in the frontline. It’s equally true as for the office, and being a modern employer offering the right tools more flexibility to your frontline is certainly something that allows them and helps them to cope with this war for talent on the frontline.

Gregorio Uglioni
And now let’s go on the other side. You describe the advantages for for a company but for a front frontline worker and we discuss also that already once it’s perhaps you’re outside on the road Working on the road or doing something and then you need to take out your smartphone and check stuff and so on. Out there frontline workers workers reacting on this tool?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, yes. So it is super interesting a aspect because typically companies like when we talk to management, they’re like, oh my god, we’re afraid of releasing this type of technology. It’s typically the first time that they do it. Because so far it has been literally pen and paper and bulletin boards, the way they work with a frontline. So they’re kind of nervous and afraid of this change that comes and ask themselves questions like, Well, are they going to use an app? Are they going to be open for this? A will they want to install it on their frontline or on their phone, and the philosophy we take and what we’ve learned, it’s really the magic key to all of this is turning everything around and asking yourself, what’s really important for the frontline worker in order to be truly successful and add a lot of value for the frontline worker. So we take this perspective of what is it that a frontline worker needs, and the amount of value that we have been able to put in the app for them over these years, is immense. So we get really good feedback from the frontline workers. It’s a feelings of appreciation, what come back, it’s feelings of wow, we’re being heard, we have a voice, we have a modern workplace where we can actually get the information that we need. It’s flexibility for them to for example, swap shapes, or in or a or trade the shift with our colleagues. So all of those things are advantages and values for the frontline worker that make their life easier. And a allows them to be more engaged with the organization. So that’s certainly I would say, besides the big benefits from the company side, we always try to balance it with equally big benefits for the frontline. And I think that’s the the recipe for for the success that we’ve seen with our customers. Yeah.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, Cris, what you’re seeing in our customer experience language is really the frontline experience, changing that improving that making, making it easy, comfortable, that you can use use that and work on that. And perhaps also to understand that how are you coping with this frontline experience? Also in future? Do you have also partner groups feedback groups that provide your feedback? Or how it’s working?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, yes. As you say, the frontline experience is something really unique, as I was mentioning before, supposed to the office space, right? For office workers, you can have horrible interfaces, like the ones we know from old ERPs. And people just have to use it and they will use them and they will hate them, but they will use them right. In the frontline. The life is different. Frontline work by nature is hard. You might have some protective equipment glows, it’s noisy, maybe there was a lot of more of you call it like there are things that don’t allow you to see really well, if so, you have to make sure that everything that they touch and that they do, it’s super simple and quick and easy for them, right. As opposed to the office workers like we tend to work, for example, on a presentation on an Excel file. So we are working with the systems to produce the output. In the frontline. It’s different because the system is more of a guidance of a coach to let them know what they need to be doing. But they do it in the real world, right? So they need to put things on a shelf, they need to clean up a room, they need to produce something physically. So it’s a bit of a different direction and a different philosophy. And that’s why the frontline experience is so important. I think there’s one rule that we’ve learned over these years, it’s our golden rule, which is that complexity is an absolute killer of adoption and of usage. The counterpart is also true, which is simplicity is king in the frontline experience. So what we see a lot is companies trying to take office tools, rewrap them or something and just provide it one to one to the frontline workforce. And that tends to be not the best way to approach this because a exactly this complexity is something that hinders usage hinders the adoption and ultimately also the business impact and the business value that you want to have. So the frontline experience, I would say it’s one of the key things to get all of these mixed right in and it’s something that we we spend a lot of time from different areas we have user researchers that actually spend time with our users understanding this type of thing. We have a lot of feedback from our customers directly on how they use beekeeper what type of improvements that need. We thrive a lot of our roadmap based on that. And we also have, for example, a customer advisory panel or customers a more at sea level to understand more of the strategic direction that are customers need to be supported with. And that helps us also trickle down that into the whole process. So I would say it’s a very multi dimensional way of trying to understand and trying to be as close as possible to our customers. Why? Because there’s also a big disconnect and a big barrier, we ourselves, we are not spending our time like a frontline worker. So we need to invest extra effort and extra time to understand it and to know exactly what is it that

Gregorio Uglioni
I would say in our language walk into frontline shoes?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, yes. Very true. That’s exactly the way to describe.

Gregorio Uglioni
I am very aware of timing, we are coming to the end of the regular time of the self this game, I still have one question in the regular time. In 10 years from now we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast and what we are discussing about

Cristian Grossmann
I think, in 10 years, I would like to discuss how the frontline and the perception of the frontline has changed. And the bowl, it is something that is out. That’s the frontline to wow, it’s something exciting, it’s something respected, and it’s something that is equally empowered as the office worker. So that’s certainly one thing I would love to be discussing. The other one that maybe 10 years is already passed or happen. But I think data is also a really strong topic for the frontline. We’re talking here about even introducing basic systems to them. We’re already thinking one to three steps ahead, which is by digitalizing. So many paper processes, you suddenly have data and insights that you didn’t have before about frontline engagement, how your organization works, where are the bottlenecks, how can you become more efficient. And I think that’s the topic that in the next decade, for sure will gain a lot more attention.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I’m very looking forward to discuss this topic together with you also in future on the CX goalkeeper podcast. They now the extra time the last three minutes of this podcast are starting three questions for you. The first one, is there a book that you would like to suggest to the audience that helped during your career or during your personal life?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, well, I mean, a, if they’re interested about the frontline, I wrote a book about the rise of the frontline worker. There you go. Thanks so much, Greg. It’s certainly one that I would recommend to read. And it captures some of the insights and learnings we’ve had over the last 10 years of building beekeeper and serving the frontline that are others that I have been super helpful. One is certainly the one by Tony Robbins called the Unleash the Power Within I think it was I read a couple of years ago, more from the personal side. It was certainly a very good read, and they changed a lot for me.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. The second last question. It’s about your contact details people would like to reach reach what’s the best way?

Cristian Grossmann
Yes, so the best way is a either to write me directly on LinkedIn, I’d be more than happy to connect with you follow our handle of beekeeper on LinkedIn as well. We’re always publishing the latest research and content around the frontline. Right now we have, for example, the frontline trends, and our insights from a frontline survey that we’ve done recently. So if you want to learn more about that, that’s certainly one way to stay connected or directly go to our website, you can check out our product directly there with our free trial. It’s beekeeper.io. So

Gregorio Uglioni
thank you very much. You will find all this information also in the show notes. The last question is Cristian’s golden nugget, it’s something that was discussed or something new that you would leave to the audience.

Cristian Grossmann
I think the fascination for the frontline and an invitation to look closer in your day to day life because frontline workers are everywhere. And their work is so essential and so amazing that it’s fascinating just to observe a little bit closer and sometimes just ask them, Hey, how is it doing the job that you do that tends to be so different from the others work?

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Cris. It was really a great pleasure to have you on the CX goalkeeper podcast. Please stay with me to the audience. It was a great pleasure to have Cristian Grossman, the CEO and founder of beekeeper on the CX goalkeeper podcast. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. As you know feedback is a gift please contact me contact beekeeper they have a great product product for your frontliners and if you want please leave a short review on Apple podcasts. Thank you very much. Bye bye.

Cristian Grossmann
Thank you so much Greg. Thanks everyone.

Gregorio Uglioni
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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Mastering the Art of Customer Experience: Insights from the CEO of the CX Professional Association with Greg Melia – E123

Episode released on: 24. April 2023

Mastering the Art of Customer Experience: Insights from the CEO of the CX Professional Association with Greg Melia Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Greg Melia

LinkedIn Headline: CEO at Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)

Highlights:

00:00 Game Start
00:38 Greg Melia’s Introduction
02:58 Greg Melia’s Value
04:18 The roots of the CXPA
07:43 Focusing on the Customer and not on definitions
11.02 Connecting with the outside world
16:09 Purpose led companies
18:26 Culture
20:40 CX Day
24:23 The Future of CX
27:36 Contact Details
29:28 Greg’s Golden Nugget

and much more

Greg‘s Contact Details:

Greg‘s Golden Nuggets:

  • Take control of your career. Make today the day that you think about what you want to achieve, and what you want to give back to the world and what you want to do with those working hours, (…) and be prepared, because the next impact opportunity for you is right around the corner.

“Take control of your career. Make today the day that you think about what you want to achieve, and what you want to give back to the world (…) and be prepared, because the next impact-opportunity for you is right around the corner.” Greg Melia on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

What did we discuss?

Gregorio Uglioni 0:00
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 gentlemen, welcome to the CX goalkeeper Podcast. I’m super thrilled today because Greg Melia is together with me. Hi, Greg, how are you?

Greg Melia 0:34
Hi, Greg, cross the ocean glad to be with you

Gregorio Uglioni 0:38
The same name. But far away. We have the next episode of this podcast. Thank you very much for accepting my invitation. I’m thrilled that we are going to discuss about the customer experience professional associations. There are a lot of people already there. But we still have potential to grow. And with this podcast, I would like to share a bit more about the CXPA. Before we start discussing about the CXPA, I always ask my guests to introduce themselves so that you can share your career highlights and make understandable for the for the audience what you’re doing. Greg, please welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast. Could you please introduce yourself?

Greg Melia 1:22
Thank you, Greg, it’s great to be invited on to the pitch. And to have this conversation with you. Today, I’m going to try to work in as many of the European soccer terms that I can think of along the way. But for those who don’t know me, my name is Greg Milia. Cae, which is certified Association Executive. And I have the honor to serve as the CEO of the customer experience Professionals Association, which means that I get to work with CX professionals from across the globe, to help define and raise standards for the customer experience profession, bring people together to accomplish things that they can’t easily do on their own. And to help make sure that we’re raising awareness and respect and celebrating great customer experience that’s happening throughout the world.

Gregorio Uglioni 2:16
Thank you

Greg Melia 2:19
I was gonna say now, you know, a lot of people wonder along the way, you know, what is your career path and wherever you come from, and you can see the books behind me that’s, that’s actually my bookshelf. And most of those books are anthropology and systems theory and some CX thrown in for good measure, trained a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics. And my background really has been in hospitality and working with government consulting. And then in association management, including, you know, the last several years at cxpa.

Gregorio Uglioni 2:58
Thank you very much. I wanted to only to state that we are honored that you are our CEO, I am also a proud member of the cxpa mscc expe customer experience, professional. And thank you very much really for the great job that you did in the in the last few years. And I always ask this question, and I’m really looking forward to listen to your answer, which values drive your life?

Greg Melia 3:29
That’s a great question in our you know, there are a lot of things that come to mind a, you know, giving back intellectual curiosity, and really trying to leave the world in a better place that I’ve been, but I’ll share a little story and you know, I have I have a book, one of the books from the shelf moves the first Sharif and misery for Sharif was a social psychologist who introduced a term called super ordinate goal. And what that means is trying to bit bring people together for a higher purpose. You know, a longer story, which I’ll which I’ll skip for the moment. But that’s what I’m always trying to do. How can we listen to different perspectives, find the common ground and create something that unites us to all work further and farther together.

Gregorio Uglioni 4:18
I think like a soccer team, or in Europe or football team, working together through same target or same goal winning the game. And for sure, we can define what winning the game means. But I think at the end, it’s really a great similarity. Thank you for your introduction. Going to the main topic, the cxpa. Perhaps it’s all about customer experience. Where does customer experience come from? Because the CXPA is here since I think 12 years…

Greg Melia 4:53
Yeah, you know, if we trace the roots of customer experience, I think the first time that the term was used was a article that Luke Carbone contributed to in a marketing magazine in the mid 90s. You know, it traces its roots to the quality management, movie movement, and to really looking at the development of customer relationship management. I think that the foundation and founding of cxpa in 2011 marked a really important time. Because prior to the founding, there were very few companies that had departments or positions that were specifically dedicated to customer experience. Many of them were in consumer management, or in complaint resolution. And what it marked was a shift in mindset, that we should think holistically about the perceptions that customers have across time. And in its early days, cxpa was a community that allowed people to exchange ideas. And it says, we’re talking about the soccer field, I’ll actually use a analogy that the great grandfather of customer experience, Bruce Temkin shared with cxpa at insight exchange a few years ago in New Orleans. And what Bruce shared was that, in the early days of cxpa, customer experience was a little bit like your kids on a soccer pitch. Everyone is out there, we’re all happy because we’re playing the ball. And we’re playing around, but no one’s really headed in the right the same direction. It’s just everybody’s doing their own thing. And when somebody does something cool, somebody else tries to copy it. You know, and Bruce went on to share, and this is the progression that we’ve seen is this, that, then you start developing strategies and techniques. You know, I love Italian soccer, when I watch Italian soccer, and you see these long passes across the field, and these well designed set plays very different than the sort of bully ish American soccer that I grew up with. You know, and so to think about, well, what are the techniques? What are what are the strategies? Nowadays, I think Bruce ended his analogy, by pointing out that customer experience has become much more like an orchestra, where you have a conductor and the CX leader is the conductor, that’s bringing out the strengths and the elements of the different parts and different parts of the orchestra or parts of the organization to create something beautiful to create a symphony that is creating that customer experience. Now,

Gregorio Uglioni 7:43
I think what you’re saying, it’s really interesting. And at the end, we are playing on this field. And I would like to understand for you, how did customer experience change throughout the years because, for example, one biggest learning that I hear this, I used it, they were six now there are five pillars from from the six pillars. And I tried to explain to our board, in my back my former employer, what was customer experience, and with these pillars, I was able to explain to them that it’s not only about creating one journey, or doing this or doing that or doing as you said, complaint management. But it’s a bit broader. It’s about a bit re thinking about the customer from the beginning to the end. What’s your view on it?

Greg Melia 8:32
Yeah, you know, I couldn’t agree more, Greg, the importance of what cxpa in the cxpa community has done to help raise awareness that we shouldn’t be arguing over the definition of what we mean, we shouldn’t be trying to change from cx to a different set of letters. What we should be doing is, is agreeing on the topic that we’re discussing, so that we can then begin to advance the conversation. So I was really, really pleased that cxpa came together and developed what is cx.com and a common definition for customer experience and customer experience professional so that we can advance the conversation. So that was I think we did that about three years ago. And then where does that lead to you coming up with you know, one sentence that says customer experience is the perception that customer has of an organization across all touchpoints technology and time, you know, that results in the perception that the customer has of that organization. Agreeing on that and agreeing that customer experience professional is a catalyst that works across the organization to drive those results allowed us to take that space and create the CX book of knowledge 320 Two pages of textbook material that talks about the fundamental techniques, the fundamental theories, the fundamental steps and definitions that are used. And so that’s sort of where we are, you know, there’s a lot of work to be done, because right now, we’ve identified over 120 universities that are teaching customer experience courses. And that’s great. But the next question is, are they teaching the same techniques and information that employers care about? And so that’s why CCXP and the book of knowledge are all based on research of actual CX professionals around the world to say, what do you do on a daily basis? How important is it to your success? And we update that every five years, which is why we went from six, you know, to five, it’s not just a one consulting companies perspective, it is the sense of the community.

Gregorio Uglioni 11:02
What you’re saying, it’s really interesting. And it brings me on to the next question, because I see in LinkedIn, in all these platforms, a lot of discussion, our six pillars, our five pillars, it should be four, I have three that are better than the one of the cxpa, I create my view on that. But at the end, we’re always speaking about the same, putting it in from a bit different point of view. And in our CX community, it was a little little buzzword, everybody’s speaking about customer experience, I can find maintenance on articles about for example, customer journey management. If I go to a CFO, and I speak about customer journey management, the first thing that is telling me and I tried that, because I wanted to tell us that he said, I couldn’t care less about customer journey management, what does it bring to the business? What does it bring to us? That’s the question that he asked. The you are the manager, the senior manager in charge, if you want to use customer journey management, or something different apps to you, I trust you do that, but stop speaking about strange words and focus on what we and what we really need? And based on that, my question is, we are a bit in, in our community, we are always speaking about the same topics, how can we get a better connection to outside of this community?

Greg Melia 12:28
Yeah, you know, so, you know, the first thing is that I take away from, from your experience there. And what you shared is, is that you’re talking with a CFO. And it’s interesting, because all of us have to eventually talk to our finance advisors. And we’ve gotten to a point where everyone knows what the term profit means. Everyone knows what revenue expenses made, no one asks the CFO, I don’t care what method you’re using, because there are accepted standards, you know, so the first thing that I think we need to remember as a community, is when you invent a different model, when you use a different term, when you try to go and do something that is a I think you use, you know, strange terms are in these other terms, you are creating and seeding confusion. You know, if you can go back and you can say, this is the definition from the global society, it is helpful to just move forward on to the next question. And that next question, I totally agree is a huge one for us. How do we make sure that we stay focused on business results and business results are happier customers, happier employees, and a better bottom line? You know, and so, that is something we as customer experience, people have to keep in mind. The goal is never, never to have a higher NPS score or to have a better CSAT. The goal is always to have happier customers, happier employers, employees and happier, you know, bottom is this bottom lines. We might measure that with a piece, but we really have to think what’s what’s the outcome that we’re looking to drive. So how do we make sure that we bring that forward to others? Very important question very dear to cxpa. In addition to the book of knowledge, we published eight monographs back on CX day. And those monographs are all designed to help a CX professional talk with their counterparts throughout the organization, whether it is building more effective collaboration with the C suite, or with the finance department or with marketing. Each monograph helps you as a CX leader, better understand what’s important to that department, what their terms and their measures are, and ways that you can work with them. So a great way to build success on one side is to to build it from within the organization. The second way is to make sure that when we have an opportunity, we are pointing the general public back to the broad definition of CX, rather than the occasional misuses, you know, so I know how frustrating it is when you have a bad customer service exchange. But don’t post that on LinkedIn and say, This is an example of bad customer experience. It best say this is a byproduct of a customer experience product design that isn’t working correctly. But when you use the term customer experience interchangeably, with a magical marketing moment, or with a customer service breakdown, you are failing to focus on the fact that customer experience is a business management discipline that’s designed to create consistent results over time. It is not one interchange, it is the perception that is formed across all of those interchanges.

Gregorio Uglioni 16:09
And I think what what you’re saying brings me also, to think about that, please allow me to say that we as customer experience professional, we need also to align what we are doing with the purpose of the company with the vision of the company. And perhaps could you share also your view about this purpose led companies.

Greg Melia 16:29
I love that, and I want 100% of great, you know, there’s a lot of conversation at the moment, about customer experience, experience, employee experience, brand experience, connecting to purpose. And, you know, as I said earlier, we have to keep in mind that the outcome we’re looking for are happy customers, happy employees, and better business results. And that comes through a number of different features and a number of different spaces. But let me give you a practical example. Yesterday, Roxy Stroh Menger, at UK GE, posted to the UK GE blog, talking about the importance of empathy across the organization, not just to employees, but also to the values that the company has. And that’s what we can bring as customer experience professionals to take the world we live in to the next level, is to make better outcomes for all customers, you know, for all potential customers and customers thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion, you know, there as well. Thinking about the way that we make sure that the commitment to customers is known and supported in the C suite. And think about how we create better employee experiences. Well, you know, and one piece of advice for anyone who’s listening in at the moment, if you find that your commitment to customers is not in line with your organization’s brand commitment to customers, you probably need to start looking for your next job. You know, it’s not going to be sustainable for you on your mental health. And it’s probably not going to be supported. Your CX initiatives are probably not going to be supported. If your brand doesn’t have the same values that you do.

Gregorio Uglioni 18:26
Yeah, and based on if you’re speaking about values, top management support, and then brand purpose, then I need to ask this question, what was the role of the culture in a company? Oh, yeah.

Greg Melia 18:40
The, I think that this is actually it may be the space I should have answered. When you asked earlier about what’s changed with with customer experience. You know, if you if you rolled the clock back, probably even just five years. The big buzzword at that time was customer centricity. You know, and there was the thought that if you just focus everything on the customer, that everything will be solved. And it’s important. customer centricity is very important. But it’s not enough if you don’t bring forward the culture as well. How do we balance the way that we treat our employees, the way that we develop our employees, the way that we empower and share information with our employees to allow them to deliver the great customer experience? How do we hold our brand values in terms of what is fair, what is right, what is equitable? what is just and that is, you know, both across our customer levels, and our place and being in the community, and so, the culture is one of those core pillars, you know, and, you know, I’d have to say that what’s interesting about the culture pillar is that it is the one that requires the most advanced form of leadership change management leadership, and that it requires the greatest amount of collaboration, you know, to the C suite and, and to others, and it’s why CX professionals shouldn’t view themselves as superheroes that wear a cape and swoop in to break fix a problem. You know, they should instead view themselves as strong, empathetic humans that work alongside other great teammates throughout the organization. And we should be looking to, of course, always hold up the customer, but always hold up our teammates and talk about how they’re helping to create the success along the way.

Gregorio Uglioni 20:40
I think you are perfectly describing also the role of a C CX professional, because we cannot solve everything, we cannot continue only trying to push water Hubble’s trying to explain to everybody, we have also this this education role. And this is something that what the cxpa is really supporting us with the with the great community with the books that you shared, and you and you mentioned, and one important thing is also sharing experiences, and I’m thinking about the CX day now it’s we are having that since several years, if I remember, well, and please, if I see something wrong, please correct me 2021 The motto was CX is a team sport. Last year is Cx drive success. And and could you please elaborate about about the CX day and how the CXPA created this? This this idea?

Greg Melia 21:35
Yeah. So CX day, first Tuesday in October, you know, tremendous vision, you know, by the cxpa board, and early leaders to say we should have a day where we not only recognize the CX leaders that are driving success, but we also celebrate the customers, and we celebrate the teammates, who are helping to create a better world. And so it is another space to engage and inspire, I think are the terms that I would use your entire organization, in thinking about the difference that customer experience has made for your organization, and to also encourage CX professionals to do more. And to be more successful, you know, along the way, by highlighting the great work, you know, that has been done cxpa on on CX day. cxpa always develops that theme. You know, I will not announced the theme for 2023. Today, but I will invite you know the viewers to drop me an email at Greg at cxpa global.org. If you have a interest in getting involved in the planning, Percy extec. With that theme, what we look to do is we look to give companies an organizing framework cxpa networks an organizing framework, and to create some communication strategies to the general public. During the course of CX day, many companies will host internal appreciations. Sometimes the CEO will record a message about the importance, sometimes they’ll bring together frontline staff and executive staff. Sometimes they’ll do thank you initiatives for key customers. But cxpa itself, it always loves that day, because we also announced our impact award winners and our Emerging Leaders class on CX day as well. So this year, we’ll be introducing the new award. And the award will be based on collaboration. And so we will be looking to put a spotlight on particularly effective collaborations between the CX team and either another department within their organization, with a customer or with a supporting organization outside that has allowed the organization to better serve its customers by working together with others.

Gregorio Uglioni 24:23
Oh, that’s that’s really interesting. Thank you for sharing that on on this podcast. We are very much looking for what what will will what will happen at the CX day and what the theme will be and not looking only in in October this year, but looking in the future. In 10 years from now we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast and we are discussing about customer experience, perhaps you have a bit of a different role, but what we are going to discuss about

Greg Melia 24:51
Yeah, you know, so a couple things that that I would be be hopeful for in 10 years. First and foremost is a renewed commitment of the board of directors, which is that in 10 years, that CX will be a known, established and respected career path, so that doing people when we’re talking to our next generation, you know, our kids, our friends, kids and things that people are thinking, I want to grow up and be a CX professional. That’s the space that I want to be. So that’s one half. The second half is, is that we want to ensure that customer experience is known as a preferred business strategy. So in addition to thinking about, you know, being a environmentally friendly organization, or being one that has great public trust, we want people to think that organizations that have a strong customer experience program or commitment are preferred organizations to work with, and that by committing to customer experience, and doing customer experience, well, those organizations are seeing better results. So that’s one overarching goal. How will we see that manifest? You know, I think that the growth of the CCXP program has been fantastic. But I think we need to accelerate and have many more CCXPs, and to have many more organizations that are trusting the leadership of their CX programs to CCXPs, so that they get those results that we just talked about, I think that we will see you like that one. I think that we’ll see colleges and universities structuring content programs and aligning them with the cxpa CX framework, I think that we will see a variety of education available through cxpa in different languages, and giving both global content with a localized flavor, so that people can find in advance, you know, their career. And then I think that we will see that we’ve hit those ideas of credibility, we’ve hit those ideas of certification and education and making business impact. But at the core of it, we’ve kept the feeling of a community that supports one another, and welcomes everyone to bring their gifts to the community and contribute, and also learn and benefit from their involvement.

Gregorio Uglioni 27:36
I am looking forward for the future that you are describing really looking very much for it. I want to say thank you very much, Greg, we are coming to the end of this game. But in the last three minutes of the extra time, I still have two questions for you. You already shared your email address. But if people would like to contact you, what’s the best way?

Greg Melia 27:58
Yeah, probably the two best ones, you know, emailed and I have to admit, I get a lot of emails, Greg AT cxpaglobal.org So I apologize in advance for any delay in responding, feel free to send them again, if I haven’t answered. The second is the CX community is very active on LinkedIn. And I encourage you to connect with me. And you’ll always know that it’s me, because you will not find my profile without my CA connected with it. So there are a few other Greg Melia in the world. I am not a mixed martial arts fighter. And I am not qualified to give you financial investment advice. But I’m not a bike rider in the in, in the UK. But you can find me on LinkedIn and connect there as well.

Gregorio Uglioni 28:48
Thank you very much. And for the people that were not aware of the cxpa. Before that, where they can find the cxpa

Greg Melia 28:54
Yeah, come visit us at cxpa.org or cxpa global.org. You know, we will be proud to have you connect, we have ways for you to be involved at all sorts of different levels. But let me suggest you know, if you’re watching this, this podcast, one thing that I’d love for you to have as a takeaway is visit what is cx.com and share that on with somebody else today. So that we can help spread the common understanding of customer experience and advance the work that we’re doing together.

Gregorio Uglioni 29:28
Thank you very much. And the very last question is Greg’s golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new that he would like to give to the audience.

Greg Melia 29:36
Yeah, you know, what I love about this podcast is is that you are inspiring a lot of people who are interested in CX, some of them are currently in a CX role. Some of them would like to be in a CX role in the future. You know, my advice to each of you is to take control of your career. make today the day that you think about what you want to achieve, and what you want to give back to the world and what you want to do with those working hours, and take a look at CX job board.com You know, for opportunities, you know, and explore the opportunities to be a CX professional, and be prepared, because the next impact opportunity for you is right around the corner.

Gregorio Uglioni 30:26
I can only say thank you very much, Greg. It was a great pleasure. Please stay with me. To the audience. I think it’s time to reflect about what Greg told us all the insight that he shared with us and the golden nugget that he shared with us. feedback is a gift. Please let me know. Let Greg know about your thoughts, your question. We are here to answer the questions. Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure. Bye bye.

Greg Melia 30:51
Thank you, Greg.

Gregorio Uglioni 30:53
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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Are You Listening To The Whole Picture? with Nick Lygo-Baker – E122

Episode released on: 17. April 2023

Are You Listening To The Whole Picture? with Nick Lygo-Baker Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Nick Lygo-Baker

LinkedIn Headline: CX Strategy and Transformation – Chief Customer Experience Officer. Fine Tuning Customer and Employee Experience to Drive Business Performance Improvement. #CXMechanic

Highlights:

00:00 Game Start
00:40 Nick’s introduction
01:43 Nick’s values
02:34 Listening to customers
05:31 Every customer is different
07:32 Five voices
12:52 Voice of the Market
14:52 Voice of The Customers – Best practices
17:50 Voice of The Employees – Best practices
24:34 Bringing all the pieces together
28:40 The Future
33:28 Book Suggestion
34:50 Golden Nugget

and much more

Nick’s Contact Details:

His book suggestion:

  • Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Nick’s Golden Nuggets:

  • Insight without data is just opinion. So be wary of making decisions on insight that is just driven by one or two comments. data has to be there to, to underpin it and support it.

Insight without data is just opinion. So be wary of making decisions on insight that is just driven by one or two comments. data has to be there to, to underpin it and support it Nick Lygo-Baker on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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. Welcome back to the CX goalkeeper Podcast. Today I’m really, really thrilled because I’ve Nick Ligo-Baker, the CX mechanic together with me. Hi Nick, how are you?

Nick Lygo-Baker
thanks, Gregorio, lovely to be here.

Gregorio Uglioni
It’s a great pleasure, thank you very much for your time and for stopping by from the your, with your car into my pitch. And, and we started discussing about listening to the whole picture. But before we deep dive in this great topic, that also you wrote a chapter in customer experience three, the book that we wrote together with other 28, International CX professionals, we would like to learn more about you. And therefore, Nick, could you please introduce yourself? Yes, yep. So

Nick Lygo-Baker
I suppose I’ve spent about 17 years in in customer experience, predominantly agency side, looking at market research, customer research and tracking behavior. But more recently, I’ve spent time with a client side with organizations to help build their customer experience strategy, and then to implement change. And that trains transformation through whether it’s physical or digital, to enhance their customer experience for their customers and their employees in many ways.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, I think this is the passion right? That we are faring in in common, that’s its customer experience. But also to understand better where you’re coming from? Could you please share your values that drive you in life?

Nick Lygo-Baker
Yeah, I mean, I think I have quite a few shared values with with, with a lot of my compatriots and CX. But I think one that stands out for me is the I’m a member of Rotary International, and their motto is service above self. And that, for me is always a kind of a mantra when thinking about customer experiences, how do we enrich? How do we bring a better experience to our customers in order to build a relationship with them. And that is a kind of a blueprint for thinking about how CX comes together has been one of my core drivers.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s great. And I think everybody working in CX on the CX professional, are sharing the same validate that you share together with us. But now let’s really deep dive in listening to the old picture. I think that’s really, really interesting, what you are sharing in your chapter of the book customer experience 3, and let’s start unpacking all these different types of listening to the customer. But I know it’s perhaps a stupid question, let’s let’s start from the basic, why is there a need to listen to the customers.

Nick Lygo-Baker
And I think there’s a, there’s a, it’s very easy for organizations to think they know what to do that it’s best for their customers. In some cases, they do get feedback, they get told they get anecdotal information. But more often than not, it’s on a very small scale. And it’s very easy to react to those pieces of information, because they might feel like they’re really important. But if you don’t understand it in context, then you can make wrong decisions. And some of those decisions can be very costly, because they can alienate larger groups of customers, they could cost you a lot of money, and ultimately not deliver any value to either yourself as an organization or to your customers, in general. So, for me, I mean, as I say, having having been in customer market research for the best part 17 years, it’s, it’s kind of drilled into me that we need to understand what the needs of our customers are, in order to then build around that in order to then deliver that service. And a lot of small businesses start with a single person who can directly talk to their customers and engage. But as those organizations succeed, and they grow and they expand, the more distant the relationship is between the CEO who started the business and that customer. And in between that you end up with a huge disconnect between what those customers need and what the CEO thinks they need. And therefore, as time progresses, that disconnect can often mean that the organization starts to lose relevance, because they’re just not able to get that understanding because they’re just too far apart. So the purpose of voice of customer and in sort of the case of my chapter in the book is more holistic listening posts is to get a very rounded view of exact See what the customer is thinking, but also how they’re behaving, because people will tell you some things, and then deliver a different behavior. Because a lot of people just want to be nice, yeah, they want to give you positive feedback. Or if it’s customer service, they might be trying to resolve a problem and give you some negative feedback. But at the same time, those are two polar opposites. And it doesn’t necessarily represent the whole of your customer base. So for me, it’s really important to get that rounded view that informs your insights, which then support your decision making.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, Nick, for for this great introduction, and thinking about what you’re saying listening to the customer understanding their needs, but at the end, being the devil’s advocate, every customer experience and event in a different way, based on their emotional status based on their knowhow based on their their former experiences, and therefore, how can companies cope with this with this fact that everybody’s different?

Nick Lygo-Baker
Well, I think that’s, that’s part of the the challenge that organizations face. And if they were to listen to a very small group, they might get an indication of feeling. But that group is going to be based on a very few and their opinion. And that opinion, again, will be influenced by the way they see it. And that’s absolutely fine. Because we are now in a world of everyone having a mobile phone, they’re more informed, they have the opportunity to create their own view their own customer lens on you as an organization. But that perception is is effectively how they view your brand. They however you position your brand promise they will receive and interpret that in their own way. So in order to then collect information back to say, Okay, well, if we make a change, what impacts that are going to have? Or are we delivering consistently, that there needs to be volume. So when it when it comes to researching and talking to customers? Yes, there are ways and means of delivering indicative research through focus groups and small groups, which help you guide the current hot topics. But to really understand the significance of them, you need some quantitative data and some volume that helps you prioritize, because you can then understand, okay, is this a really serious issue, is it to something it’s a nice to have, isn’t an absolute need. And therefore you can prioritize where you spend and how you spend your investment when you’re developing the organization.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, Nick. And this is something that we discussed also, some episodes ago, together with Sergio Rossini, and he shared exactly the same view that you are sharing, if you are focusing only on the customer that provide you feedback, and the company gets, let’s say, roughly 5% response rate, then you’re really focusing only on a niche of customer. And often they are really, the detractors and the promoters because they want to say, Oh, thank you very much, you did something great, or this experience, the experience was really bad. And therefore I want to complain, and you are missing the complete holistic picture, as you said, and I think it is something really, really important for for the audience, to understand and to always keep keep in mind, and therefore you are sharing several sources to get feedback. And you are sharing five voices. Could you please elaborate on them a bit to quickly explain these five voices?

Nick Lygo-Baker
Yeah, I think we’re, as I was considering the types of information that you need to make better decisions. The first there’s always going to be voice of the customer, because that’s top of mind. And there are multiple ways of collecting that whether it’s satisfaction surveys, whether it’s actually political journey mapping, you know, looking at where people go in, if it’s a retail store, for example, some behavioral you information that you can click through various different ways. So that creates your, your voice of your customer effectively. But equally we have the anecdotal feedback that we can collect from our employees, those who are interacting with our customers directly, who are managing challenges who are able to help and provide really important feedback is this. It’s all very well making promises to customers if we don’t enable our employees to be able to deliver those. So we need to understand are we making it easy for our customers, but are we also making it easy for our employees to then deliver that. So that was another component that was really important in starting to get a holistic view. Next I’ve called Voice of service and this is effectively looking at how well is the training we’re giving our employees being delivered and manifesting itself on the shop floor. Now we can measure that through mystery shopping and other sort of audit type experiences where there’s consistency in the measurement rather than the freefall that you get in voc. But the key there is to understand okay, are we training the right things to deliver the brand promise that we’re making to our customers. So those three are the, I suppose the key people elements, which, which creates the majority of what we would probably discuss as customer experience. But there’s then a more of a macro understanding as to what might be happening. So voice or process is the fourth. And that is about what are we doing to create the right things in our organization to then deliver to our customer outcomes. And that could be anything from making sure we have products on shelves, it could be our communication, it could be our promotional marketing, what which are the touch points that really matter to customers? are we managing in order to make sure our processes are both efficient, because we don’t want to spend money in places that don’t add value. But equally to make sure that when we’re spending that money, it is directly, something that’s relevant to our customer base that we’re trying to target. And that’s, that’s a really key piece, because particularly, at the moment, I don’t know, certainly in the UK, at the moment, we’re seeing a shortage of certain products. So we have salad, for example, you can only buy in many stores, three items of salad. So you can have a cucumber or pepper and some tomatoes, bacon, I have one of each, because there’s a there’s a shortage of supply coming through to the, to the country. So that is a process that’s affecting my experience as a as a consumer, because I can’t buy as much of the products I would normally buy because of the restrictions that are in place. So to me that voice a process is about being then able to manage the communication to customers to say, and sometimes it’s beyond the control of the organization, we understand that. But it’s about then managing expectation. So what promise Are you making? And are you able to live up to that. And in this case, yeah, we were fully experiencing some in real terms, it might only feel like salad. But suddenly, when it’s taken away, it’s suddenly a big issue and everyone wants to buy it. So yeah, that creates that little bit of frustration, I guess, within the customer base, so that communication and management of expectations is really important. And you can to a degree, you can start to be more proactive with how you engage with customers by looking at your process. And you will know that okay, if you’re you’re suffering from a stock availability, or you have a production issue, that there’s going to be a knock on effects after a period of time. And that window is really important, because that’s the window of opportunity to communicate. And more often than not, the business isn’t as aware as it could be. And that can mean in terms of what’s going on from a customer communication perspective. You might know internally what’s going on. And most organizations are probably working really hard to fix those challenges. But they sit on it, they don’t go out and proactively communicate. And that is one of the opportunities for me that CX is bringing to the fore where that communication is about managing that expectation.

Gregorio Uglioni
And perhaps, short highlight on the voice of the market.

Nick Lygo-Baker
Yeah, I mean, how relevant is your product? Eventually. So often people manage their market share, they want to know what the where they sit in the organizational hierarchy in the market hierarchy. are they wanting to be number one in terms of scale, size, profitability, what have you, all of those things are important to understand, okay, where are we heading and what’s our future goal. But equally, the key for that market is to understand what what threats and competition could be coming in. And always go back to the sort of cameras as a as a component. So you now have probably as good if not better cameras than we would have done 10 years ago on a mobile phone. Now, if camera producers were not aware that mobile phones are going to come along, their market is almost turned inside out, they’ve now gone to two. So you either produce a camera, which fits into a mobile phone in order to produce a product, or you’ve become really specialist and nice producing really high end cameras, which phones can’t deliver. And again, that reduces your customer base, because you’re now talking to professionals rather than just amateurs potentially. And you’re also talking about a much higher value product. So your market has shifted. And we’ve seen the same in I guess, music consumption, we’ve moved from DVDs CDs into digital streaming. So the way in which people are consuming those products has shifted. And if your market and your organization is built around delivering the previous channel for about products, a lot of a sudden that disappears. If you’re not aware that that’s evolving or changing or you’re not pioneering and leading that, then there’s a real danger that you’re going to be left behind. And we’ve seen quite a few retail casualties over the years where their market has disappeared in a very rapid space of time. And it’s been very difficult for them to pivot and augment into the new ways of delivering their services.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much for this introduction about these five voices And let’s double click on two or three of them based on how much time we have. And I think one, one really important piece is the voice of the customer. And perhaps, on the voice of the customer side, which are the best practices that you are leveraging that you are really using. Everyday when you are involved in topics around voice of the customer.

Nick Lygo-Baker
I think the key is to understand what you want to get back from your voice or customer program. Are you in a complete space where you really don’t understand much about your customer? Or do you know enough to then be become a little bit more targeted about what you want to ask as a question. And the science around building questions is has been evolving quite rapidly over the last sort of certainly three or four years. And that’s really critical, because quite often you’d see questions which feel less relevant to your journey, because the organization hasn’t understood the journey that you’ve gone through. So the question might feel a little bit irrelevant. And secondly, you quite often get questions that by their nature, they must be asking two things. So based on this, how about that? And it’s well, you know, which one do you want to know about? Because actually, for me, the two things are separate, maybe. So it’s about reducing the ambiguity of the question, in order to make sure the response you get, can be really easily understood, because if it can’t be, or it’s difficult to interpret, then he is much harder to link that response to an action. And at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is understand where we’ve got a gap, and what we can do to fill that gap to meet that customer need. So that that is an evolution is quite paramount. And I think the software that is now developing to do that level of analysis is far more powerful. So we’re able to dig deeper into the sentiment behind the responses that we get, and the facts to a degree, the questions with a yes or no answer are becoming far less relevant. Because we can’t know the answers. What we want to know is this is more of the dig deeper into the verbatim. What’s driving the answer? Is it something we know about? Is it something we can control? And is it something that we we need to be mindful of for the next decision that we make as an organization. And that’s, that’s quite difficult to to get to. But the services that are now being provided by some of the tech companies that provide voice or customer service, software, are getting to a stage where that level of interpretation is building. And the use of AI to effectively group and categorize types of response to be able to add validity to those responses is becoming really powerful. So that’s that’s probably the biggest thing for me when it comes to those exports of customer

Gregorio Uglioni
product. Thank you very much. And I think what what you’re saying, is it also possible to leverage in the voice of the employees, but perhaps also there, you have a longer longer experience in customer experience. How were you able to leverage the voice of the of the employees, what were also their your the best practices, practices that you used?

Nick Lygo-Baker
I think for me, the key was when we first started looking at bringing the two together was was that they were asking different things. The voice of employee, certainly 10 years ago, he was saying, Well, you know, do you like the company you work for? Are you paid enough to get enough holiday? Do you get on with the boss? So, you know, to practical questions and some political questions which we know the answers to, everyone wants more holiday and to get paid more. And no one’s gonna say they don’t like the boss. Yeah. So it just to ask that once or twice a year, it just seemed that it wasn’t really getting the flavor of what was happening. It always happened at a certain point where it probably led into performance reviews and bonus time. And it just the reason for doing it was sound, but the way it was delivered just didn’t really get to I think what most organizations wanted to understand. So for me, the the, the clear and first port of call was to align the customer journey with the employee journey. So almost asked the employee about their view of the customer journey as it was happening. And that made a huge difference to the ability to understand well, okay, we see that there’s some pinch points with the customers, then all of a sudden, we can discover that there are reasons that our employees can’t deliver the things that are affecting our customer experience. So all of a sudden, you’ve got this really intertwined relationship between process, our ability to enable our employees and the outcome for a customer. And that was a turning point in terms of getting a voice of an employee program, moving to the benefit of the overall CX side of research. That’s not to take away from the fact that Yes, we need to understand how that individual feels about their role, their job and performance. But you can subtly drop those things in on a more regular basis. So that you can start to see whether things move up or down or whether they’re generally consistent. But at the same time, by following the journey of the customer in the eyes of the employee, you get a very different lens on the way in which your organization is geared up to deliver to a customer outcome.

Gregorio Uglioni
I will say that, I think it’s extremely interesting what what you are saying, because at the end employees are the ones that are developing products, they’re doing the marketing campaigns, they are creating the journeys, they are responding to the phone, writing, chat, and so on. And therefore, it’s extremely important to keep them in the loop there, they have a really an extremely important role on this topic.

Nick Lygo-Baker
Well, this is it, I think, when we talk about that alignment, it very clearly focuses on those employees who are customer facing. And very quickly, you start to realize that actually everybody in the organization, their role is to support somebody to support another process that eventually has an impact on the frontline customer. So turning that back round, and recognizing that everybody has a role to play, is not only does it add a degree of purpose to that individual’s role, so it doesn’t matter how Junior they are in the organization, they are contributing. But it also starts to generate a, an understanding of whether those processes should be improved could be improved, or what have you. So I have an example I worked for an organization that was delivering food. And when a customer was ordering, you know, the payment process was slick, the online ordering process was great. The delivery, the product was fantastic. If there was a an issue, and a complaint, and we we know what percentage of people come through to call centers, I call that the iceberg of discontent, it’s just just your top 4% that are going to proactively get in touch with you. Of those who did, the amount of time it was taking to deliver a refund. And to make a decision on that response was quite quite long, there was some rules in place, which meant certain people couldn’t had to make a decision, sometimes in terms of providing a refund. So again, agents weren’t enabled. And when a refund was approved, it was sent through in an Excel sheet to effectively a finance clerk. And they would receive a file once or twice a week, they would process those and if it got to five o’clock in the evening, they’d go okay, my days done and off, they drop, then a handful of people would sit there and then and two days later, and the next form came through, they’d oh, I need to. So they pick that up. So there’s a handful of customers, we’re not necessarily getting the service that the organization had put in place as a process. But if you then think about, okay, how does a return on etailer handle that it’s almost instantaneous. So that creates a paradox and then expectation, where people think they’re going to get a refund almost instantly. And in this case, it was taking up to six or seven days just to get to the point of processing it. And then you were falling foul of the banking system where yes, the refund has been pushed through. But the bank could take up to 16 days to then show that in your balance. Because again, it’s just systems clogging up going slowly. So obviously, the project I worked on was to resolve that and to and to enable the agent to make that decision and process it incidentally, we we changed the banking process and the provider, which meant we could instantaneously push things through and then it reduced to between three and five days for that banking process to update. But then it was just the fact that that process existed in the first place because it it had started probably 15 years ago as a process. And it seemed to work. So they didn’t seem any pressure to fix something that wasn’t broken. But the reality is it was just not relevant anymore because the world had moved on. People expected their refunds to be delivered very quickly, because everyone else can so there was this seems to be a well, why can’t new approach to that? And yeah, for me, it was it was really understanding what the customer need was. And then looking at, okay, how do we improve what we’re doing internally to deliver a solution that would enable us to be portly in the same ballpark as an Amazon over tesco.com for example.

Gregorio Uglioni
I thank you, Nick, I think this is a great example that it’s showing also the complexity throughout the internal processes to get to get the refund. And at the end what you said everybody’s working for the customer or to the accountant not doing or doing the refund. You are sharing a lot of ideas and these five voices customer employees, services process and market At the realities, companies are already overwhelmed with the voice of the customer to get this right and to agree, what are their priorities and so on. And therefore, we all understand that it’s important to to get all this view this holistic view on customer needs. But where can companies start to get all this this stuff together?

Nick Lygo-Baker
Many companies have spent more time focusing on collecting data than actually interpreting it and understanding what to do with it. And again, that’s where the more up to date software in terms of collecting the information in first place is really helpful. Because it buys you the time to then spend thinking about well, what does this mean? So what and how do we then interpret that so going back to that example I was talking about, it effectively meant creating a steering group with stakeholders from every department, and building those customer journeys as they were not as we wanted them to be, because it’s very easy to go into solution mode. And just watching the light bulbs come on around the room where people knew what their role was, and their their section and how that worked. They had no idea what impact their role had on the next person’s process. So by just joining those dots, we all of a sudden, the business became much more aware of what they were doing, what their contribution was, and and potentially, what was required to fix some of the elements that we were discovering as being challenges. So that that was the start point. So it was journey mapping to an extent. But it was journey mapping to the existing processes, and understanding what that what impact that had from a customer level, we could then use the voice of customer to overlay that and say, okay, where we think there’s a pinch point, what type Yeah, how important is it? Is it a bit of a frustration? Or is it something that fundamentally we have to fix now, because if we don’t, we’re gonna lose or keep hemorrhaging customers. So that was the starting point and the catalyst, and then it became okay, we understand what our problems are now, what do we want our customer strategy to be? And there wasn’t a customer strategy, there was a business strategy, there was an operational strategy, it was a marketing plan, there was a very detailed social media plan, because that was where sales were shifting towards, I think about 80% of, of sales are starting to become digital. So it was about then teasing out which of all of these plans and objectives and strategies do we have, that have a customer element in it, and some of them did, but it wasn’t really called out, it wasn’t identified as a customer element. It was just we knew that the outcome would be broadly speaking, but relevant to our customers. So that then would be done was another sort of educational process to say, Okay, let’s pull all of those elements out and create a customer strategy. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, it’s creating that Northstar, that goal that we must all aim for, and then sharing that across all of the different business leaders to start to get everybody focusing on that end game. And by doing that, we started to create that prioritization list of what needed to be done, we could evaluate if new technology needed to come in. Is that a quick job? Is it a long process? Is it a full integration piece? And how old and quite rightly, how are we going to use that information to then drive action and improve the organization’s ability to deliver to our customer outcomes?

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Nick, I would have to under traditional questions, but the second half of this game is coming to an end. And therefore I still have one question in a regular time. In 10 years from now, we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast and what we’re discussing about

Nick Lygo-Baker
as a great question, I think it’s going to be the level of interaction that we starting, that we’re starting to have with with AI. I think we’re just at the beginning. We’ve started with bots in customer service and as a means of kind of triaging customers as they come through that frequently asked questions, please self serve, because we don’t want to spend much money dealing with simple things like what time do you open and you know, Can I can I bring my pet into store those types of things? The reality is, I think the way in which the technology is going to evolve is that the conversation will go two ways it will be either driven by smart tech, so you’ll be adding things to a shopping list and that and automatically process in which case the the human to human side is irrelevant is a transaction which we can just see happen and manifest itself through through process. But what that will do is is also mean that when we do have customers in crisis, and we need a human to human contact, that there’ll be much more value placed on that level of interaction between humans than they perhaps is now, because all of a sudden, we’ve stripped out the mundane, boring, easy to easy to solve problems, which we can automate. And the things that are much more important are going to have to be dealt with by a person, and they’re going to have to be much more skills, they will need to be more educated. And they’ll have to be able to help customers in a way now, which is quite difficult, because you have specialists in different things, we’re going to have to start seeing people who are skilled across the board. So a contact center agent for me is going to become a more highly skilled job. And that I would expect to be manifesting itself in a, perhaps a more highly prized role, because I think people see that the churn and the attrition of contact center staff has a problem. Because the environment is not not great. You’re you’re dealing with complaints. So I think that will be a big change, I think the contact center role will become more important. And the way I described it, in the example of the food delivery business I was talking about is you trust a store manager with a million panel business to make decisions, and you pay them the same as a contact center agent, and you don’t trust them to make the same decisions. Why not. And just as capable, let’s make sure that we hire the right people into the contact center to make those decisions. Because ultimately, a customer sees he was one brand, they don’t see you as multiple different departments and different companies, which that’s not how it’s, it’s projected. So that one brand view has to be met with one brand standard. And that has to be consistent for people to know that you’re delivering on their brand promise.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. I think on this side, what you’re saying is the human to human contact will be more and more important and also difficult. But it will be also interesting to see when to machine, the one from the from the company and our AI will interact together. And our will our than AI provide feedback voice of the customer to the other machine. Joke aside?

Nick Lygo-Baker
Well, I think it’s a reality, I think we’re starting to see it and the frustration that people have had with, with customer service bots, is disappearing, because the bots and the technology getting better it’s learning and ultimately, it’s what it’s designed to do. So there will always be that gap. Because effectively at the moment, we’re still telling him telling a machine what to expect. And sometimes what comes through isn’t exactly isn’t hasn’t been programmed, so it falls between the cracks. And then we need to recover that through the human. But the better it gets, the more likely we are to have, again, we’ve seen with smart tech and smart speakers, the tech side will start to pick up the delivery of the requests, not just the human into a machine. And machine to machine is very transactional, very easy to deliver. And on the flip side, the human human side is going to be as you say, much more important, but there will be investment required in both. The technology has to be there to support both of those channels, and the ability for agents to be able to have that autonomy is going to be critical for them to be able to deliver so it keeps coming back to how do we enable our employees to deliver on our brand promise to our customers and meet that outcome.

Gregorio Uglioni
The only thing that I can say is thank you very much for your time, Nick, we are coming to the end, we are in the extra time. We still have three minutes. And I have three questions for you. Is there a book that you would like to suggest to the audience because it helps you during your career or during your private life?

Nick Lygo-Baker
Yeah, I think one of the books that took me a while to get into was was Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s but once you start to go through it, and you start to look at people’s intuitive response versus considered response, it starts to help digest situations. And for me personally, I do on the back of that I always take a moment and pause before I then think because I just want to make sure that my initial gut feel is actually the the response I want to give. And that helps when it comes to managing conflicts. Because sometimes your initial reaction can always be wrong, because you might have misheard something I understood it. So it just gives me time to pause, reflect and ask a question before giving a tree response.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And if people would like to contact you what’s the best way?

Nick Lygo-Baker
Best way is through LinkedIn! I am the only like, open there Nick Lygo-Baker on there as far as I know. So. But yes, yeah, that’s the quickest and easiest way to get ahold of me.

Gregorio Uglioni
And you will find the contact details in the show notes. And the last question is Nick’s golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new that you would leave The audience.

Nick Lygo-Baker
Yeah, I suppose after years of customer market research, the the key for me is insight without data is just opinion. So be wary of making decisions on insight that is just driven by one or two comments. data has to be there to, to underpin it and support it.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much, Nick. It was really a great pleasure to have you on the CX goalkeeper podcast, please stay with me and to the audience. I hope that it was that you enjoyed this discussion. It was for me really interesting to get some insight of this on these five voices. We discussed about listening to the whole picture. And if you have any feedback, please feel free to contact nick or to contact myself. And if you have time, please stop by on Apple podcast and write a short review. It tells me and it helps us to continue this podcast. Thank you very much. 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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Unlocking the ROI of CX: Making its Business Case with Jessica Noble – E121 (mini-series 3/3)

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

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

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Unlocking the ROI of CX: Making its Business Case with Faran Niaz – E120 (mini-series 2/3)

Episode released on: 03. April 2023

Unlocking the Return On Investment of Customer Experience: Making the Business Case with Faran Niaz ((mini-series 2/3) Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Faran Niaz

LinkedIn Headline: Customer Experience Practitioner & Consultant | Top 100 Global CX Thought Leader | Helping Companies Enhance CX to Maximize ROI & 7 STAR Ratings | CEO & Founder-CX FUTURE | Awards JUDGE | Motivation & KEYNOTE Speaker

Highlights:

00:00 Game Start
01:12 Faran’s introduction
02:15 Faran’s values
04:12 Return On Investment
08:04 Return On Experiences
09:59 Leadership Experience
17:45 Measuring it
25:52 Communicating within the company
32:39 The Future
35:57 Book Suggestion
37:11 Contact Details
37:52 Faran’s Golden Nugget

and much more

Faran’s Contact Details:

His book suggestion:

  • Name

Faran’s Golden Nuggets:

“customer experience is about promises made and promises delivered, experiences become exceptional, but promises are consistently delivered above expectations”

“Customer experience is about promises made and promises delivered, experiences become exceptional, when promises are consistently delivered above expectations” @NiazFaran on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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’m sure you will enjoy the next episode with the guest I selected for you.

Ladies and gentleman today, it’s really a big, big pleasure because one of the greatest friends of the CX goalkeeper is back Faran Niaz, for the third time! Hi Faran, how are you?

Faran Niaz
Hi, Greg. Oh, very happy, always pleasure to see you. Very happy to be back.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much for your time and always taking time for me and for the audience sharing your knowledge, your stories, I am really thrilled to start a discussion about you because today we are going to discuss to discuss about return on investment, or as you are sharing in your presentations around the globe on return on experiences. But as usual, before we kick off, let’s spend two three seconds on who you are and which are your values. Let’s start with… Faran Could you please introduce yourself? very short, quickly!

Faran Niaz
Yeah, so I’m very privileged that I’ve been connected with the customer experience world for almost 25 years, I started my career with Citibank, I was 11 years with Citibank, multiple parts of the world. And then I got head hunted to the beautiful land of Dubai, the sunshine. And since then, I’ve been here for almost 20 years, working for two of the largest banks here. I’m also privileged, and you know, a pinnacle of my my career is taking one of the banks from 2012 to number one bank in customer experience. And that is such some amazing stories. I think a lot of people have heard about that. Now. I started my own consultancy, I go to organizations, helping them improve the customer experience is called CX future. And I’m very excited because now I help organizations make happy customers. So that’s why I’m an On a personal note. I’m also an award winning photographer. I want a few words in photography, my work has been exhibited in Italy, Thailand, Pakistan, Dubai, impacts on this conference.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I can confirm that because they are often sharing great pictures. But now let’s let’s really focus on what you said. You said you brought one bank from low levels to number one, that’s something that you also share in the book customer experience 4, it’s a great story. And I think beyond that one of the key success factor from my point of view, the values, your values that are driving you throughout your life, and then help you also in this big project, and it is a big achievement. Could you please share them with us?

Faran Niaz
I think it’s a very good, good, good question. It’s an important one because maybe a lot of people don’t put too much emphasis. They have values, but it’s good to sometimes identify them, I put a put a point to them. I would if I look at it, I would probably divide them into two pieces. One is my personal life. And then there’s a professional one. So I’ll start with my personal one. For me. Honesty and integrity is very important. That’s that’s the core of my personality. Because everything that you do, you need to enter into it with honesty, and integrity. I like to be humble, I like to be outworked. That’s the kind of people I surround with no wonder you’re my best friend. I also try not to judge people. And that’s also very important because people are very quick judging others these days. And like everybody else, I have a family person as well love giving and sharing. And on the professional side, simple basic traits. People who Dobby are very passionate. So for me passion in whatever you do, with full under percent heart is very, very important. I love creativity, probably my photography, you know, crops into into this part as well. And also at the same time, I’m very curious to do new things. I like to learn new things every time I watch your podcast with somebody else, I always learn something new. So thank you for that.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much fine, that’s that’s great. I really think that we share a lot of values and therefore are keen to to kick off the discussion with you. Roi, ROI return on investment, or you say return on experiences. And what why is return on investment so important in customer experience world.

Faran Niaz
It’s such an interesting question. And by the way, ever since I think evolution of customer experience and time people have been discussing this question. There’s no specific or definitive answer, but the importance of it is very, very, you know, it’s quite there. I would tell if I if I would like to just define it. I would just say your alternative investment is it’s a very important financial matrix, because it helps provide you a measure of profitability at Chelsea, if you’re in effectiveness of an investment, so whenever you invest into something you want to know, the cost relation, what you get return out of it. Let me also I think I wouldn’t be wrong. If I related to personal lives as well. I think whatever we do, we try to get some return out of it. If I go to the gym, I pay money to the gym, people, I want what in the end are looking for health out of it, I think my parents invested money in me by education, the ultimate return they were looking for was that I get good education. Great, great, and ultimately a good thing. That’s how we ended up sticking around. So why should organizations be any different? They need to have some kind of, you know, return that they’re they’re looking for. It’s not easy to quantify, you know, that’s a different story. However, very interesting. You know, can I show you a very interesting fact with you, you know, that 60% that this is a very latest study, 60% of the organizations do not measure ROI. They don’t measure it. Only 14% of the organizations are measuring ROI. This shows that how difficult it is, it’s not an easy thing, and how little importance organizations give give to it, they like to get into the project, they like to get into the point without thinking what the outcome or the result that they’re looking for. However, the importance there, but at the same time, there are some few important metrics, where I would look at it, the importance of it, why is more important than just financial as a financial metrics. First of all, the ROI gives you the opportunity to evaluate opportunities for the further investment. If you want to make new investment, if you have a very good idea where to allocate your resources and your capital. Also, it helps assess your performance. So whether the investment has been profitable, not profitable, it has met your expectations or not, the ROI gives you an opportunity to assess that, then organizations want to allocate the resources. So there’s multiple places where I have a limited resource at hand budget limited resources, when should I prioritize my money, where should the buddy go. And if ROI return investment is used properly, as a tool, it helps you, uh, you know, to focus on those areas where the investment needs to go. And then last of all, if I may, one more point, if I may add the accountability. It holds people, businesses responsible for the decisions that they make. It’s a very important point. Because when you give responsibility to somebody, with every responsibility, it comes out of center, somebody needs to hold you responsible. And ROI is a tool that tells you how responsible you’ve been in your budgets.

Gregorio Uglioni
were interesting view on on ROI, I think that’s what you’re seeing it, it makes sense, it totally makes sense. And it helps us to understand how important it is not only in customer experience, but in business and also in private life. I know. And you presented that already several times you started linking ROI with experiences and you created or you shared these return on experiences. Could you please define for the audience? What is the return on experiences?

Faran Niaz
Yes, I think when we talk about ROI, people are thinking about hardcore investment, but they don’t concentrate on customer experience. So since we are the customer experience people, you need to look at the return in terms of customer experience. That’s why it’s important to look at by the way, this is not a replacement of ROI. This is a complementary matrix. It’s another again, it’s another financial metric. But very important that when we talk about return of experience, we’re looking at three multiple factors that are connected with data. So in this performance matrix, we are connecting customer experience to employee experience. So it’s a holistic approach of understanding and increasing the value of investment across customer experience through employee experience, and also leadership experience. So for the first time when I started studying about this, I came across this term Enix leadership experience. So it’s similar to ROI, but it focuses on experience aspects, organizations activities, rather than purely the financial measures. If the question comes to your mind, what is leadership experience?

Gregorio Uglioni
That’s a good question.

Faran Niaz
you you actually understand UX we’re this time next. So there is an experience over leadership how effective a leader are you in creating a basic employees. The effectiveness of a leader that influences the employee experience, tend to work on my career. And I’m sure you’re curious, you’ve come across a basic bosses, I’m sure you’re a boss as well, and people how people perceive you as a leader. You know, when you look back today, and you say how important the leadership was in how you achieved your customer experience, or any other other goals, I’m very, you know, authentically I can say this customer experience cannot prevail in an organization, if it is not trickled down from the top to bottom, the passion or the bottom trickles to the, to the bottom. So leadership experiences is part of it. This particular measure is helping organizations to understand whether or not the experience they’re creating are leading to the results that they’re looking for. So whatever results you’re looking for, it helps you understand that, how did customers perceive and interact with a brand, that’s what it’s it’s helping them and what steps they need to take to build more meaningful relationship with the target audience. So look, what we’re talking about, we’re talking about relationships. And because of this ROI, X leaders can very clearly see the connection between customer and the employee experience. Now, you said that I’ve been talking about it, but I would give the credit where credit is due this, I started looking at it. And this is a study which was done by PwC. It a global consumer insights survey that they published way back in 2019, but very few people give attention to this. But this is a study which was done. And the basic idea is that happy customers and happy employees deliver a very pleasurable return. That’s a very simple formula, we all know about it. How is it different from ROI, it has five basic components. And that’s what we need to look at. If somebody’s interested, how UX is defined, or how e x is looked at, there are components that we need to talk about. One is the pride. The first one is the pride, the emotional commitment of the employees to the brand. So here employee, you’re not looking at the employee expense only, but you’re looking at the employee’s connection to the organization. Then, second one second pillar of RX is influencers. Now, internally and externally, you need to create a bestsellers, people who are emotionally that energy is connected to the organization. And not only they provide great service, but they become your ambassadors. So look at the level of involvement of the employees that you’re looking here that not only that you want them to serve well, but you want them to pick up your ambassadors. And as the pillar is behaviors, so what you do is you identify multiple positive behaviors, habits, actions, that define the culture within the organization. So as an organization, you need to define those behaviors, you need to identify what makes like my organization, click what makes my employees excited about delivering excellence experience. So those behaviors identified and those are highlighted and organizations use that. Then the fourth pillar is the value drivers, there are habits there are behaviors, and there are values. So you need to identify key values that in the eyes of the customer now, that’s for the eyes of the customer, the the values that the customers are expecting out of the organization. The last one is obviously the financial return and outcome of this. Now, let me let me try to give a little bit more sense to this with a very simple example, to understand the organization steady, you know, when they go to the customer, the customers do them for the value that they’re bringing to the table as the product not as a so every organization good organization around the world has a tagline like for example, let’s let’s pick up Volvo so Volvo is not selling cars, we all know Volvo sells safety. So whenever you talk about this, this is a value. What is the return customer expecting out of this brand? Safety, not financial, not anything, and that’s what the organization is boosting, boosting as well. I can take multiple, multiple other examples. For example, let’s say Ikea. Ikea is not selling a portable furniture, but a better everyday life. For many people. That’s the tagline. That’s what they what they do. So good organizations have started coming up with those values, those drivers, where the customer starts getting connected to the to the product, and service. I don’t know if we have the time, or maybe it’s it’s another debate, but there is a formula for heroics, which still being explored. But a simple formula for return of experience is that that the value of the benefits, percentage of the cost of investment, whatever benefit you get out of different activities that you do, to employee experience to CX leadership experience, those benefit and the investment that goes into you take the percentage of that. And interestingly, they’ve created some benchmarks as well, like, you know, NPs as a benchmark and good organizations, different levels. CSAT similarly, always has a benchmark as well, like, for example, if your NPS is less than or o x is less than point 2%, you consider that your experience isn’t generating the value. So we are relating the result to the value. If you’re less than 100%, you’re not generating the value. If your ROI x is between two, let’s say, at your starting to see returns, but your experience is still a de performing your experience is still under performing 250 to 500%, your experience is generating average value and contributing to company revenue. Now, look how this thing is going to 250 to 500%. But the when the result comes in, now, it has started adding to the revenue at anything about 500%. The formula by the way, goes this way, I did a small calculation. And I was surprised that I got a percentage of 450%, I can take you to this formula. Later on. At So anything above 500%, your experience exemplifies best practice for generating returns. So that’s the way it is it’s works with complicated. Organizations are now thinking about it, there’s good detailed work is being done on it. But I feel when I talk to different organizations, they’re a little reluctant, because they still need to sell it to the stakeholders. Customer Experience, people are on board for sure. I think leadership experience. So leaders are a little reluctant about the value to the experience.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think what you’re saying is extremely interesting, because you shared what the return on experiences is and how its creator, how it’s created with these five pillars, how it can be measured, and also how you can check compare with older companies, what you’re doing at which level you are. And I think this this really helped. It’s a measurement that really is focused on experiences. And as opposed to comparing with others. And therefore I think it’s can it can have a really an interesting future. Because then you can you can see, and you can prove the value of experiences and not always only have small pieces out of it.

Faran Niaz
I think the bottom line is that without looking at return early in terms of financials, start looking financials plus experience returns as well.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think that’s that’s totally makes sense. You mentioned something that it’s interesting. And perhaps also to make it a bit more tangible. Customer experience professionals like we are are trying to improve things are implementing you new things. And perhaps do you have an idea or how do you calculate the or do you quantify the improvement in customer experience itself?

Faran Niaz
Yeah, I think it’s a really good question. And I think it’s a million dollar question because a lot of people are trying to, first of all, it’s not that easy. Quantifying customer experience, improvements, results outcomes. It’s quite a challenging, challenging task. And that’s why when I shared the number that only 60% of the organizations are doing it. There’s the reason however, if you look closely into it, it’s not very difficult. Let me also say that customer experience success, what is customer experience success, the customer experience Success to me is what customers feel about your experience and in return what they do to your business because of that experience, isn’t it like you know, what I feel as a customer and what I feel resonates into what I get back my return. If I have a good experience, I will give you a good return. If my bad experiences. I’ll probably leave you you lose by business indeed. It impacts you financially. Now, to make it more simpler, I would say that there is a core relationship between customer experience, there are some that measures customer experience measures and the business values. Now, in order to know the success, obviously we have the customers being specialists, you know, we know that PS, we calculate customer satisfaction scores, overall high satisfaction, corporate customer effort score. So that’s where your satisfaction at the end, what customer is feeling is coming from. So that feeling is then related into the business layers? And how is that happening? So let’s look at some of the key business measures, which victims of ROI organizations should be looking at. So first of all, you’re looking at the lifetime value. So how long is the customer staying with you how the t value that the customer is getting from the day, they’re coming to you till the time this, that they stay with you? Isn’t this the return to the business that they do with you. Similarly, it’s very important to know your ROI, you know, your detection rate, or the customer staying with you or not, if the retention or attrition rate is too high, you have a serious problem with your with your ROI, because that has a direct impact on your revenue, then the churn rate a lot of customers still stay with you. But they stop. They don’t renew. I mean, I, I’ve been to some social networks where they keep sending me when he will send I decided, I don’t get enough benefit out of it. And I do renew it, but I’m still on the books. But you need to know what kind of retention or churn rate you have, then you need to look at the repeat purchase rate, not just the customer, your customer needs to repeatedly purchase from you. That’s where the business is generated. That’s where the revenue is coming from. Order frequency, how frequently do you order the cross celebrate how many times how many other products that are buying from you. So these are the elements, when you look at these measures to realize that you are you’re where your revenue is going. It codifies number of customers upgrading, you need to know how many customers upgrade, if I’m very happy with you. Today, if I’m a if I’m a prime customer, tomorrow, I can pick up become a VIP VIP customer, which means that are bringing more value into your organization. You also need to probably calculate how many of your customers are willing to refer your your products to towards us because that’s where the revenue is generated as well. A Creek also, if I look at the NPS, because NPS is one aspect that we’re looking at. And there is a formula, which is probably all people who are related to customer experience, they already know that one point increase in NPS is resulting into around two to almost $2 billion of revenue increase per year. Because how is NPS increasing? If you look at your detractors, and if you just improve, let’s say, three 3.5 2.75% of your detractors and convert them into promoters. You you’re increasing your NPS by 1%, one scale, and then your your revenue dramatically increases. So those are calculation, I’ll give you my personal example just caught I know, Bishop might be short of time, but I picked up some very simple things. For example, I was running a call center. So I will go to the finance department. And I would say if I deduce a certain percentage of calls, it will result into per se. And it’s very simple, because I know how much each of my call per minute or per second costs. Every organization knows. So you are how do you reduce costs. It’s not like you stop picking up calls. You reduce costs by improving processes. That’s customer experience. So you invest and say give me money, I will improve the processes. In return, I’ve been reduced the calls so customer either I will move them to to digital paper alternative, or maybe they’re calling me for something that I can, you know, handle it some other way. So I did that, you know, you press to five or 10% of your calls reduce humongous amount of money that you’re saving. Similarly. I remember when I went there, I was looking at eServices that we’re going to customers, and I realized I don’t know if you’re part of the world or not, that is the SMS text is too long. goes as to SMS is not as what So customer receives as one as service, but the organization is charged by the company has fewer services. So I reviewed all the scripts and I converted them into the specific number of characters As an organization for short, that much money we received, and this is what customer explained as you look at the process, and then you should have small saves that you can prove it adds to your return.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think these are great example. And in particular, the last one with the SMS, because it’s not something that it was so expensive to do. But somebody looked at the details. And I think, if you want to improve customer experience, then you need to…

Faran Niaz
to reduce the number of companies, it has such a precedence because your people are working on it, you save paper, you save time you save customer, repeat, I used to look at the repeat companies and say why if you have a certain customer who’s calling for the same thing more than three times you have a serious problem with the process, you will reduce that and you reduce.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think it totally makes sense. You are a great storyteller. And you have always great stories. And therefore I think one question is still important to to ask, how do you communicate all this improvement all these changes, for example, to the finance team or to other teams within the company, because again, at the end, it’s about to sell the story.

Faran Niaz
On a lighter note, you cannot tell a story to finance people. Their money and stories got their work with them. But that’s on the lighter side. But obviously, when you present to them in a manner that they make sense it now a first question before you when I asked this answer this to you the question that comes to my mind, like why it is this there is a it’s trust on the pilot side with the with the with the people, and why this whole debate. And I always use what very important statement I say, customer experience produces blue dollars. And finance people love skinny dollars. Sales is giving you good dollars, because you go you get a customer, it gives you the money, you can count, somebody can sit down and count the dollars, marketing, you know the number of referrals ripples kind of convert into into sales, you have the money, a customer experience is not like that. I’m going to the finance people and say, Oh, give me the money, I will improve your NPS after three months. They will be an improvement. It is a gradual process. It’s an ongoing process. But they do see something which is after six months, they want to see something which is so that’s the debate where this whole thing starts. Also another very strange question that comes to by by this, why do I have to prove this every other every unit proves it. You think that organizations go to HR finance departments say, Please prove your return on investment on HR, otherwise, I would want to invest in HR, that doesn’t happen. So we’re always the targeted attack. That’s why job of a leader of a customer experience is far more difficult than the others because they have to go in every time proof prove it. Now the trick is how to do it very important. I think first of all, most importantly, as I understand finance people, I’ve had a share of my finance people, lovely people, but they’re very focused, you will need to speak their language. If they like numbers, you speak numbers. If they like, you know, additional information, you provide additional permission. And you can only speak their language like audio, if you understand the person. So if I don’t understand Craig, as CFO is, I would not be able to communicate because he would want a different pitch. And I will be honest. So wherever I worked, I created a relationship, it doesn’t mean that I’m playing golf. But it needs that I am always in connection with whatever I do, I make sure that they’re part of part of everything. Similarly, you need to lead your conversation with the financial benefits to the company. So overall, so yes, give me this, what overall the benefit that it’ll give to the company, to all the stakeholders in which every part of the organization, so the finance people understand that it’s not a benefit that are going to give to a certain group of people, they understand that they value it more because you say the overall the company is going to benefit out of this. So that’s very important. It needs to be put be a very important one is to show the benefit over a time period. That’s what I was talking about, about the green and the blue dollar is that if you show them today invest after three months, this is going to be the impact after six months, this is what’s going to happen. So at the story comes in, give them the full picture and don’t say oh it was today after six months or do this though. Take them to stay by day. That gradually is The value that I will show that’s the language, they understand it very well, because you explained very well, you need to clearly define your metrics and goals, per se, give me the body, here, I need to invest. And here are the indicators, I will improve this by this percentage. So you are making actually a commitment of the results, they need to see the commitment beforehand, so that they want to vote, they can hold you responsible. Similarly, you need to provide the evidence of the impact. For example, whenever I used to do something, I’ve invested in something, and let’s say a customer comes back and writes you a very good testimonial, and says, Oh, I really like this initiative. I certainly am surprised something basic has happened, your service has improved. This bill needs to go to the CFO. We’d don’t do this. We publish it internal, but we don’t give it to the people who want to see the Ignite. So make sure that all your achievements, all the good stories, all the testimonials, they could reach back to the people who are who are investing into other things I can I can talk about as well. You can address their potential concerns, once again, before you go to them be very open. But it at this point we don’t do. It needs to be a two way communication. Here’s what I want. Here’s what I can do. Is there any concern? Please tell me what you want come back. You I’m sure you don’t have all the answers on the spot. Take all the concerns. Here. We’ll go back through all the questions. So once all the questions have been answered, I don’t think so there’s going to be a conflict again, and last of all, I can talk about a lot of other things. But last of all you do to collaborate at every step. I used to run the service quality council I used to chair a, it used to be have all the group heads, country heads, department heads, CEO to the financial hit. So big should be my first thing first 10 minutes is to brief them what has happened in the last last month. So they knew exactly what was going on. Every time I would baby rather, let’s say a brother, God BAP exercise, I’ll invite a member of the financial team to sit in the the exercise as well. So they felt part of the whole all these are small steps that you can do. It has worked. So hopefully it should, it should work for others too.

Gregorio Uglioni
These are great suggestion. Thank you very much fine, I think everybody can take notes and really, really learn a lot of what you said, we are coming at the end of this game, but I still have some questions for you. And worry briefly. It’s 10 years time from now in 10 years time from now we are back on the CX goalkeeper podcast, I think it’s not the landing the next time because you will be often here. But in 10 years time, what we are going to discuss about, oh,

Faran Niaz
this is beautiful. Are you I think about it I think I can’t predict about tomorrow, the way things are things are happening. But first let me let me put my fears, fears into it. What I fear of people, not what I’m expecting, but what I’m fearful. And this is very important because there are some things that I like today that I want to see tomorrow. First of all, I want to so I hope that the value of the humans customer experience stays the top priority. Even after 10 years, the value of empathy and personal relationships is not going to change. And very important that the smile is not gonna be replaced by important replacing a human being. I love a human smile when somebody welcomes me when I go to Starbucks or somebody hey, welcome sir. You know what’s your day with two steaks, the basic things need to stay there now what’s going to change? I can’t predict but look what has happened in the last just a month or so chatGPT it has launched nice the world in such a short period of time the popularity that ChatGPT has gained there are so many debates that are going on that it’s going to impact the CX and people are still debating how it’s going to impact customer experience. So also I think better worse is going to be the word of the better worse. After 10 years I think you and I will be hugging each other virtually. I will stand up and I will hug you because we will have our beautiful avatars so right now I can’t hug you I can’t shake hands with you. I gotta shake hands for you for sure. And I’ve got to give you a big hug which I always wanted to I’m going to meet you for sure one day Inshallah, in person so then is definitely going to happen, there’s going to be a virtual world that we are going to be part of. And most importantly, I think organizations must understand that you will have to take years, that experience has to be defined by the customer. Not what today, and this is what happens today with many organizations, they caught on to the bag, that bag of transformation very quickly, without really understanding customers not ready for it. Look at the generation, then look at what the customers are desired and what they want. And then provide something according to that. So this, I don’t think even of 10 years, organizations like Zappos or Disney or Amazon are gonna change the way they do it. The digital is gonna stay good digital, and a good physical, you know, collection. I just hope it’s gonna stay. So yeah,

Gregorio Uglioni
thank you very much Faran. A great view on the future. And now we still have two, three minutes, three minutes to conclude. Three questions. Real quick question, please, quick answer. And is there a book that you would like to suggest to the audience because it helped you during your career or during your life?

Faran Niaz
Not in my career in my life, but it has been a great part of my personal achievement. Also, I’m not saying it because I am part of it, and you’re part of it. But I think CX 1, 2, 3 and 4. Everybody should read this, because it is a mix of 18 to 20 to 20, different top customer experience professionals globally, where will you find lots of so many, you know, professionals, and people who have added value to yes, you can pick up a book from one particular person read it, but to be when I hear the thoughts I’ve read the thoughts of multiple people. For me that’s so CX, what to say Export customer experience for our Barbie. Also, if you want to add one to this spread righteous do book because he’s talking about a ps3. So medical purposes is the worst problem people should pick up.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And you were also one of these thought leader writing customer experience poor and I think people want to connect with you. What’s the best way to reach you?

Faran Niaz
I think LinkedIn is for us, all of us. So my handle on LinkedIn is FARANN (double N). On that LinkedIn are all my connects, then like mobile, I love connecting to people through my whatsapp. So please feel free by mobile number is there, just send me a message. And I’d love to connect. I also have a website for my CX future so CX dash future.com. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram as well.

Gregorio Uglioni
And now we are concluding this game with Faran’s golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new that you would live to the audience.

Faran Niaz
I remember last time I gave you a nugget. This time, I’m going to do a slightly different in fact, I have created a quote. I always wanted to be on that horizon. And in fact, somebody asked me, What’s your quote. And it has recently been published by if I if I’m not wrong by Phoenix on LinkedIn, these are the people who do the CX transformation summits globally. So I had this is my my quote. So I say: customer experience is about promises made and promises delivered, experiences become exceptional, but promises are consistently delivered above expectations.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I can conclude saying thank you very much fun for your time being a recurring guest. I think the audience understand why you are a recurring guest. Thank you very much. Always love. Thank you so much. My pleasure. And to the audience for today. It’s everything. I hope that you enjoyed the discussion as much as I did. feedback is a gift. Please contact Faran, please contact me. Let us know what you think. Let’s start the discussion. We have a lot to thank you very much. 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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!

Unlocking the ROI of CX: Making its Business Case with Hrushi Kulkarni – E119 (mini-series 1/3)

Episode released on: 27. March 2023

Unlocking the Return On Investment of Customer Experience: Making the Business Case with Hrushi Kulkarni (mini-series 1/3) Customer Experience Goals with the CX Goalkeeper

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Hrushi Kulkarni

LinkedIn Headline: XM Scientist | ex-CXPA Regional Council Member | CXAD (Dip) | Certified CX Practitioner | Storyteller | Speaker | Trainer | MBA

Highlights:

  • 00:00 Game Start
  • 00:35 Hrushi’s introduction
  • 02:23 Hrushi’s values
  • 03:12 Why is ROI important?
  • 05:09 How to quantify ROI?
  • 09:30 It’s not always about money
  • 12:21 Proving the importance of CX
  • 13:16 Communicating the value
  • 16:04 Collaboration
  • 19:28 How to get the “GO”
  • 24:14 The future
  • 26:11 Book Suggestion
  • 27:21 Contact Details
  • 27:57 Hrushi’s Golden Nugget

and much more

Hrushi’s Contact Details:

His book suggestion:

  • Chief Customer Experience 2.0 by Jeanne Bliss

Hrushi’s Golden Nuggets:

“Deliver on your brand promise to win the trust of your customers” Hrushi Kulkarni on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

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’s really a big, big pleasure because I have Hrushi Kulkarni together with me. Hi Hrushi, how are you?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Hello all Well, yeah. How about you, Greg?

Gregorio Uglioni
Well, I am thrilled to start there. To start a discussion with you. We are going to discuss about an important topic, ROI in customer experience. I think this is a big, big topic. And this is the first episode of a mini series that I’m going to do on this topic, we will have three episodes on this topic. And I think it’s extremely important nowadays with all what everything is happening in the world. All these changes, business changes, inflation, and so on, that we can really prove the quality but also the return on the investment that of what we are doing. However, before we deep dive in this topic, we would like to learn a bit more about you. And therefore my top player today is Hrushi. And I would like to learn a bit more about you. Could you please introduce yourself?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Absolutely. But I must mention that this is a great topic you have picked up I’m so excited to talk to you. And yes, we will talk at that length. But to introduce me quickly, I come with almost two decades of experience. Maybe I would split my journey as the first 810 years focused on consumer insights. So I was a part of market research, where we will look at everything right from our brand tracking, advertisement, product testing, and a small bit of CX I would say in those years. But post 2010 My focus has more been on the last decade, enhancing customer centricity. So that’s where I am and been working in the markets of India, Singapore and Malaysia. More focused on BFSI a bit of I would say ecommerce and a lot of automobile companies. So just just introducing myself quickly, and I’m great to be on your show.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. Right? Perhaps to learn a bit more about you, which values drive your life?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Well, while us I think the best value that I was exposed to in one of the MNC organization based out of France was integrity, you know, the way I understand this, it’s all about what are you doing either the right way or when nobody is watching you. So I think that’s the value that’s driven me saying that there are no shortcuts, I need to, you know, kind of deliver on what we are working on as I mean, it’s it’s your perspective, right? It’s not about who’s watching you who’s not. So I think integrity is something I’ve benefited in my career for sure.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you. I think this is really, really important. And we are sex professional. It’s also extremely important. But now let’s let’s start talking about return on investment ROI. In customer experience. Why is ROI so important from your point of view?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Well, that’s a very important question. In fact, I will spend two minutes on everybody knows what is ROI, but it’s all about the way I look at it is what is the benefit you get for the investment that you do, right. So the investment could be in terms of dollar euro amount, it could be in terms of effort that you put the time cost, it could be even commuting from point A to point B just to deliver what you had planned. So that’s the investment that you’re looking at now, in terms of return, that’s the benefit that the customer gets, you know, saying that as a customer facing person, I did 123 Did the customer really see value in it? And what was the benefit? So putting it all together, I would say the sewer in CX the ROI is very important, because it’s one going to tell me that the water I’m doing is right to being appreciated by the customer. And secondly, there is more important going to be a kind of tool or metric, which is going to tell me how far away am I from the goal? If there is no such metric or no such mechanism to measure the benefit that the customer gets? I think we are going to be haywire. Yep. So you need to have that in your mind saying all my activities is fine, but how does my customer more possibilities. So I think you made a very important opening question otherwise, very important to drive customer experience.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, I think what you’re saying it’s totally sense. And perhaps to understand it a bit better, because you started really explaining, well, what is ROI? How can we quantify the ROI? Or how can we quantify the CX improvements that we are doing?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Absolutely, I think unless you don’t measure something, you can’t action on it. And hence, the measure part is very important. I would look at it in terms of two ways. You know, one is, if I were to measure the ROI, one is how much money am I making for my company? So that could be additional revenue? And the other bit is, in terms of let’s see, how much money am I saving? Yeah, so I look at a two separate concept that we take the first one, making money is all about getting new revenue from a new customer, or cross selling upselling to my existing customer base, so that that’s adding additional revenue. So those are the aspects that are taking an example, let’s say I have a 10 million customer base, let’s say I’m into retail, and I’m talking about very b2c example. And I just want to ensure that each customer’s spending $100, I want to look at, let’s say, 70%, retention rates out of those 10 million customers, every year, I have repeat 7 million. Now if I take up a task, saying that I need an additional 2%. So instead of 70, I want a 72% retention rate, I get the 2% increment on that $100 That every customer is spending, so you multiply by number of years, they would be with you. And that’s a big amount. But having said that, this looks great on a whiteboard, or a PowerPoint presentation. But to do this, that’s the benefit to my company, I need to invest. So there is a cost, right? So there is a cost in terms of let’s say, training my front office staff, because they have to move now retention from 70 to 72%. In my example, I need to invest in technology, people processes, I normally look at those three pillars, it is only then that the benefits will start looking at so. So when we are discussing about you know, how do you measure, the first aspect is that I’m making money for my company, I need to jot down all this down. What is it that I’m getting as a benefit back from the customer for which I make some investment upfront? Let me take a different example. Let’s say saving money. Yeah, that’s another thing. I don’t want a leaking bucket in my business. So I want to save some money. What could I do, I could save money by arresting churn, which is ensuring that your customers don’t leave you and go to competition. The other is you could reduce your acquisition cost. Or the third way I look at it as you could reduce your operational or your business costs. So if if I were to again, take one example from this, let’s say to reduce cost, it could be that, let’s say we have a contact center. And yes, Contact Center is in some countries and regions, one of the prime touch point for customers to go back with the query request or a complaint. So if I have a particular staff strength, how can I maybe shift them from a contact center to do it yourself FAQs or a chatbot. Now again, that’s the savings that I would do in terms of the manpower or waiting time involved on the call, which is also emotional, not only always in money, but for that, again, I need to have FAQs in place, I will need to do research to understand what the Chatbot should do. All these are again, investments upfront. So the way I would look at ROI in terms of saving money is again, the benefit that the organization plus customer gets, in terms of the investment that I made. So So to sum up, maybe I took a little time to explain. But if you can make money for your company, or and save money for your company, I think that’s the best metric to look at ROI, in my opinion.

Gregorio Uglioni
And I think what you’re saying is it makes sense because a lot of companies are focusing only on acquisition, but they don’t try to take out cost and I think nowadays it’s also important to understand that exactly what you think there are opportunities also to take out cost from your business using leveraging customer experience discipline, and achieving then then your targets because if you have less cost then you can offer additional profit. Absolutely. I really think det financials are important, as you said, additional revenues by acquisition or retention or reducing costs, but customer experience bring also older values that are a bit more fluffy. If I can say, quality, it’s brand awareness. How can you integrate all these additional benefits into this airway calculation? Oh, well, that’s

Hrushi Kulkarni
a great point. In fact, it’s not only about money, always, I feel, for example, you made a great point in terms of awareness. So if there is a brand, and the customer see that they’re always looking at driving CX keeping ROI in mind, what ultimately happens as a trickle down effect is that there is a good I would say image of the company in the market. And as a result of which, if you were to look at again, going back to a little bit of brand tracking or a brand equity kind of example, your your images better in the market, and hence the when you look at the fundamentals of power of a brand in the minds of the consumer, they have a very positive image, they they are positively disposed towards you. So next time they want to purchase a product, they will think of your brand first. So yes, this is nowhere in the calculation of ROI. But more of, as you rightly said, the fluffy stuff to do with awareness, then there’s a positive awareness that’s built around the rebrand. It could be also that social media is great. In even a developing country, like India, we see that the rate of internet per kind of day being spent is minimal. In the world, we have smartphone good penetration. So what happens is that everybody is connected to internet with a smartphone. And hence you are on social media, you go ahead you talk positive or negative about a brand, there is a general feeling of whether the brand is really doing great. What is the sentiment there? What are the sentiment score in terms of net net positive or minus negative comments. So I think in addition to ROI, awareness, or social media, word of mouth, these become very critical to sustain the value that you’re giving to the customer back,

Gregorio Uglioni
I think we’re, you’re sharing in an important point, because these are direct impact. And I’m not direct impact and what you are seeing it the example of social media, if some customer is really happy about a service or a product and sharing that on social media, and then additional customer are coming to this brand or buying from this brand new to this post. It’s difficult to measure, but it’s something that you can add in your customer experience transformation as additional proof of what of the power of customer experience.

Hrushi Kulkarni
Absolutely. I mean, instead of spending dollars on digital marketing and TV commercials, these customers, as you rightly said, become the brand advocates. And I am going to replace a lot of marketing budget by actually focus on delivering a better CX transformation, I would say. So yep, you made a great point there.

Gregorio Uglioni
And there are companies that are not investing money in marketing, because they have customer, let’s say like fans also speaking about my background, as football or soccer fans, or all the sports fan that are showing the positive word of mouth, and then you don’t need to spend money on marketing because your customer and your employees are doing that are doing that for you. Right. Perhaps from your point of view, and from your long experience, which are the most important KPIs that you can use to communicate with other departments they impact of customer experience?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Well, that’s an amazing question. I think, from my experience, we do look at I mean, the common metrics could be in terms of loyalty. And when when I when I understand loyalty, it could be something like net promoter score or satisfaction. When I talk to departments internally, I have in fact, enhance the scope. And I also look at something more, I think relevant for some touchpoints, which is the customer effort score. So the idea is to understand that how easy or difficult was it to let’s say, make a bill payment with your company? There are some reasons wherein you need the receipt for sure once you make a payment. Was it easy? If not, how much of effort did it take to connect with either a digital channel which is again from where you can download a PDF or you spoke to someone, the entire process is all dependent on I feel the channel. So for a particular channel? It might be that The loyalty aspect is very important. Whereas for other channel, it might be that the effort of involvement from the customer side, the minimal effort, and let’s say a quicker tat, is something that they appreciate. So while you say that, what are the different metrics that we look at, I think customers want something not quicker, but in a promise that so if the TAT is promised us 24 hours, and I get it in 24 hours, great, I’m not even saying that deliver me something in three for us, that’s okay. But but the idea is that depending on whatever we are looking at, whether it is effort, or whether it is time or its loyalty, we cannot have one metric for all, we will need to have a mix and match depending on one, I would say the objective, second is the persona of your customer. And then we are looking at what is the goal that we are trying to achieve there. So I think basis that we can plan, which particular metric would suit where that’s that’s what I strongly feel.

Gregorio Uglioni
I think it’s extremely interesting, because what you’re sharing are different KPIs that you can measure, measure and understand better what is happening outside of the company with with the customer, and then bring it back to, to them to the to the departments to the company, and perhaps also, on this way. How do you think that it’s the best way to communicate, for example, with the finance team, but also with the with the other teams, its marketing? And and then because they often have their targets that they want to achieve? And we as customer experience, professional are trying to pushing water up the hill throughout the complete the complete company, helping every department much they have different setups? What’s your view on that?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Well, I think if you have to push the water up the hill, rather than one individual collaborative effort works. And when I say collaboration, you took a few names about the marketing team or the CRM or finance, I think the best is to link the business are operational data along with the customers experiential data. So if I were to I mean, I quickly spoke on a distinction. So if I were to look at, let’s say, the same thing to communicate internally, let me take an example of churn prediction, you know, so I need to understand from a contact center, let’s say Greg wasn’t happy with the broadband services that he subscribed to, how many times did he call up the call center to complain? That could be one scenario, how the other is that he is? Okay. He is a fence sitter, not that dissatisfied, he did call the contact center, but he did it only once in a year. And that was only because he had a request or a query, not a complaint. Now, these are two different personas so so what I would do is I would take such different, I would say fields, saying number of times you called up a contact center to complain, or you delayed on your bill payment, or you just made it on the last day. Or it could be that have you just subscribed to one product, or you have a bundle of products from the company. That gives me a very good pen and portrait from the business data. Now this data is what marketing has CRM has what they don’t have an what a CX person would have some somebody like you and me would be the customers sentiments coming from a listening post or a feedback mechanism, saying these are their ratings, the reasons why they’re saying that we typically look at LBNL to drivers, what more can we do. So I would take all that data and along with the business data that I explained, and I can tell with great confidence in case someone is giving you a negative rating in the feedback mechanism, this is the reason and look at the number of times they have delayed their payment, or they have called up the contact center to complain. So I’m sure this lady or gentleman is going to, uh, try it in the next three months, we need to go back to some service redressal resolve whatever their issues are, are they going to try it in another three, four months? If we communicate in that language, I think everybody understands what is the task for them, and that the customer is a priority for that particular department. It’s not the Greg’s or Hrushi’s job as a CX person. So I think you need to talk that storytelling language and that does wonder

Gregorio Uglioni
I think you’re touching a queue extremely important topics. One is storytelling, and the other it’s also speaking the language of the other departments, not our customer experience language, because we love to speak about journey management and all the stuff but perhaps all the departments are not fans of customer experience, they wanted to see other results they want to achieve for the results. And therefore it it totally makes sense to sort of discuss and to speak their language and as you said, with with with your example It depends from HDB I mean, what are their goals, you need to understand them. And then and then try to collaborate. But at the end, we have, we see a lot of improvements on the journeys, we have a lot of ideas on the CX transformation, what we should do, we could do and so on, at some point in time you use it or you stay in front of board. And they need to decide, yes, we go with this customer centric transformation or not, perhaps some insights, some best practices on how to get this go, yes, let’s start doing that it’s for a project or for a bigger transformation.

Hrushi Kulkarni
Well, I think in terms of best practices, I would I would look at, you know, one is what is the objective that I have and always looked at in times of DCX transformations, everything cannot be done in one go. So I need to have a phase wise approach. So we are in Jan right now. So I would say, what is it that I need to accomplish an h1 of 23, h2 and maybe spillover to h1? 24. So I normally make my blueprint in those areas saying that what is it that I need to first tackle? It could be that channels which are heavy on transaction, you have lot of customers there? Isn’t that what I need to first look at and understand from again, feedback mechanisms or even analyzing already available social media? What are the issues there? Or is it that I know that there are a lot of complaints coming up on Team number 123, I need to start this. So what I normally do is that, and it’s a continuous process to be very honest, I’m not going to stop after h2 24. It has to go on. Because you need to measure, you need to monitor you need to improve, manage, and again, measure. That’s how I feel one needs to look at it. So in terms of best practices, I would say, fix on your goal. And then kind of empower people because if you don’t empower people, I mean, small example, you calling up a contact center saying I was I was charged by mistake for my credit card. late payment. I didn’t do it late, I did it right on time. There is a call center a who’s not maybe having the kind of empowerment, you get a standard reply, I’ll check this we’ll come back to in 24 hours all my senior will call you. But a contact center be who has the entire CRM one customer view there on the screen, they can see Oh, yes, this customer is right. They haven’t defaulted ever, it was last that last time they paid on the day of payment, but they were well in time, we need to reverse it. And then while the call is happening, they do it they get automated SMS, first time resolution, customer happy, no need of follow up. So I think in terms of as you say, I would look at what are those issues? And how do I cater to it? Case by case. So that’s what best practices I would share.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. I think you’re really splitting in a clear way. Also customer experience strategy, because you know where you are, where he wants to go. And there is a roadmap and you need to take one step after the other and and what you’re saying also going through small initiative to also show and prove that what what what needs to be achieved make what sense. And then you can go to through this journey with the different speeds depending of how many resources are many are big the budget is. And therefore I think you are really useful, really great best practices.

Hrushi Kulkarni
And also to add on just to add on, once you do a faced manner, I mean the topic that we are discussing on the ROI, it gets easy, because you get an early buying of the other departments including your CFO, so if I don’t do something phase manner, that again, gentleman or lady will have to wait for two years till I prove back saying hey, the ROI is actually there. But every six months, you win over your internal stakeholders by showing them in a phased manner. I did this in h1 and h2 and look, I can see the benefit. So sticking to your topic of how ROI is so important and CX I think that also helps, you know, drive the point.

Gregorio Uglioni
It totally makes sense because at the end, can boards want to see short term results, not only long term results? Absolutely. And we know that customer experience is more for for the long term. But I think what you’re sharing out also to get short term results. Perhaps we spoke about how to transform. And now I have one question for you. In we are on the CX goalkeeper podcast in 10 years from now, and we are discussing about customer experience. What’s the topic?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Interesting. I don’t see that coming 10 years from long. First I’ll be happy to reconnect with you on this podcast and I’m sure our listeners will be even more happy to listen to you again. But I think the topic would be that, how do you look at you know, getting a company to the next level of maturity? I think that’s what is going to be. I mean, we are talking right now about listening post about driving a customer centric culture or even I would, I would say you’re not looking at a strategy. I think these are going to be little outdated, we will be actually moving to the next level, saying that, how can we actually anticipate in advance the customer’s needs and expectations and maybe not always cause a customer delight? Because you and me know it’s going to be not financially viable, but at least to an extent that we know we keep them as motivated customers in our system and knows that hostages? I think those are the discussions that would happen. If we were to reconnect after 10 years, saying that, how is it possible that we could use all the data available? Get it into the way I look at it as information, knowledge, and then action labels? So that we anticipate what is it that our customers want in advance? I think, I mean, time will tell when we reconnect, but those are the themes that I foresee.

Gregorio Uglioni
I hope that we reconnect earlier. But yes, I think we can discuss that. This game is coming to an end, this was the first match on ROI customer experience. However, in the extra time, I still have to 2-3 questions for you, in the end. And is there perhaps a book that helped during your career or during your life that you want to suggest to the audience?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Oh, wow. Okay. To share with you, I do read two books every month one fiction, so that I read something other than CX and one for sure a business book are on the book on CX. I think I’ve read a couple of books. But one particular book that I really liked was by Jeanne Bliss , which is on terms of the chief customer, officer 2.0. So she explains very well, some of the strategies, the fi point framework of how you can actually look at building that kind of customer driven revenue growth, you know, so I think that book, that kind of helped me a lot. There are a few, but in the interest of time, I’m just taking one for now.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, and Roshi. I’m quite sure that people wants to connect with you after this discussion. What’s the best way?

Hrushi Kulkarni
Well, I think I’m connected on LinkedIn. If LinkedIn is some thing that they would be comfortable, then you could just Google for me on us in the search bar, just have Hrushi Kulkarni and that would be the great way I’m quite responsive on LinkedIn. I keep writing some articles or posting something from from I would say thought leaders like you and giving them the due credit. So yep, it’s all there on on my wall.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And I really suggest to the audience to follow Hrushi, because it’s really sharing a lot of golden nuggets, not the only one, the one that he will share in the next few minutes. But I think it totally makes sense. Please follow Hrushi. And we are coming to the golden nugget, it’s Hrushi’s golden nugget, it’s something that we discussed are something new that you would like to live to do on it.

Hrushi Kulkarni
Well, I would say some some golden nuggets from my side is that I mean, when you look at CX and I think it kind of correlates very closely with trust. And trust is very important. In fact, some of the research that we have done shows trust like 60% and all other attributes put together is like 18-20 attributes also put together makes it 40% so so building trust with your customers is very important. And it cannot be just by hopping the fact that trust me, but if you are worried to deliver on the brand promise you make every time each time you go back to the customer, or keep them at least in the loop that hey, I promised you something we cannot deliver give us an extra time or some extra leeway. And then we are we are having a workaround some transparency there. So I think my golden nugget is gonna be that to win trust of your customers deliver on your brand promise. That’s how I would put it.

Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much for this last piece of wisdom. I’m not allowing myself to commend it because it was Hrushi ‘s golden nugget. The only thing that I want to say is thank you very much for yourtime.

My pleasure, my pleasure.

Hrushi, please stay with me, to the audience we know feedback is a gift. And therefore please share feedback with Hrushi or with me a bit to get your feedback. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. Bye bye.

Hrushi Kulkarni
Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Greg.

Gregorio Uglioni
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

 ⚽️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The CX Goalkeeper Podcast ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚽️ 

👍 Do you like it?

Please tell 3 friends, colleagues or family members about the CX Goalkeeper Podcast. Only with your support I can continue share amazing discussions! 

PLEASE 🙏 don’t forget to ✅ follow my podcast

  • Please rate it (Spotify) & review it (Apple Podcast)

THANK YOU – Your feedback is always welcome, please DM me!

Create amazing audios and videos with Headliner, please use this referral link

Need help taking notes and transcribing audio? Get Otter with 1-month FREE Pro Lite by signing up here. Please use my referral link:

How to create a new webpage? it’s super easy with WordPress! Please use my referral link:

Leverage the power of StreamYard – to stream you discussion on all social media including LinkedIn

THANK YOU SO MUCH! STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!