Sharing Feedback with Everyone

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready, set, action. One, two, three, four.

We're back with another episode of Experience Action where I answer your questions, all about customer experience, employee experience and experience strategy in general. Now, before we jump into this week's fantastic question, I want to remind you that if you like this podcast, if you appreciate what we share here, we would love for you to share that with your network. And go ahead and check out ratings and reviews. We love hearing from you and that helps others discover our show. Thank you so much. Now let's go ahead and listen in to this question. Thank you so much.

Hi, Jeannie, this is Jillian from the XI team. We recently had this question come up in a webinar from a participant and I wanted to ask it here. So when you receive negative feedback from customers and try to share it internally, how do you handle the internal resistance to that?

You know, I will tell you, the work of a customer experience professional is really multifaceted and a lot of times we are relegated to the role of the bad news messenger. It's our job to go up to different teams and say here's what we're hearing from customers and this isn't working, or we need you to help improve this, or gosh, we know that you just worked on that process for the last two years, but our customers don't like it. That's not fun to hear and that's not fun to share. I sometimes say that the role of customer experience leadership includes sharing the hard truths. Now, that is just part of our world, but we have to be careful. If we want to build coalitions, if we want to make sure that we have cross-functional support, if we want to get the resources and investments we need from our leaders, then we can't have people running down the hallway the other way because they're afraid of what we're going to say. So, as you present feedback, which is a critical part of what we do, we want to listen to customers, we want to look for the insights we can act on, and then we want to act on those, and oftentimes that means getting other teams, other leaders, involved. We have to share the feedback, even when it's hard. But I want to give you some ideas on how you can think about how to communicate that on an ongoing basis so that, instead of just hearing from us when we have that hard feedback to share, we have leadership, support and cross-functional coalitions because they know that we're also going to share the good stuff with them. We're going to recognize and reward those teams and people who deliver for customers. We're going to look for feedback that brings up everybody in the employee world instead of just looking for things to highlight that aren't going so great. So think about whatever you present as a way to communicate in an ongoing way about customer experience. We need engagement throughout our organization. So if they're only hearing from us when customers are complaining, of course they're not going to think it's worth it.

So I have a handful of ideas for all of you out there who are struggling with how to present this feedback to different teams in your organization and really, what is the right approach in an ongoing way. And the first thing probably doesn't surprise you, but I want you to start with positivity. Look for those positive things that you're hearing in feedback. Look for any of the metrics or key performance indicators that you're watching that are going up and you want to share that good news. Look for things that really highlight that people are working hard, they are delivering. We want to start there and sometimes we want to end there. It's enough to share positive feedback. It's enough to get that engagement. So if you see an opportunity to start building a coalition with a team or leader who maybe is cynical about the customer experience efforts or has been burned in the past by just hearing about the complaints, it's okay to just share the positive. Sometimes I think we get hung up on the fact that we have to share things that need improvement or attention, the issues, if you will, but really it's okay to share the positive and help people feel good about their role in the customer journey. It helps build that positive tone and it helps encourage trust, frankly. And you know, research out there from Gallup and others have shown us that employees who receive positive feedback are more engaged and productive, and that's what we need. We need engaged, productive employees to deliver on the customer experience. So we can help facilitate that simply by being positive. Make sure you are looking for ways to share the good. Now, part of this, too, that we have to remember is that we need to be specific and actionable.

I was coaching an executive and one of the things that I started noticing was she would come to our meetings after what we had prepared for as a positive, constructive conversation, and she would come back and say I don't know. They just don't know what to do. They keep telling me that I'm not giving them the right information. So I said Well, how are you sharing this feedback? And she would say things like well, customers say that they're frustrated with this, and I would say well, what instruction or advice or insights did you provide around that so that the team could make those adjustments? And she hadn't quite gotten there. She thought her role was to share general feedback, and the person in product or digital or these different teams that we work with, was just supposed to figure it out. We have to help with that figuring out. So we have to be specific and actionable about either specific examples that help tell the story that we're trying to tell or actionable insights, things like we don't want to say customers are unhappy and just leave it at that. Instead, we want to get specific about what we're seeing. 20% of customers mentioned that our checkout process is really confusing. So I was thinking maybe we could have a customer journey mapping session or we could do some user testing on a pilot to see if improvements make sense.

We want to get specific so they understand how important this is and what the priority is, as well as what the outcome should be. We want to increase this number. We want to make sure that more than 90% of our customers feel like the checkout process is easy and straightforward. Can you help us with that lift? We also want to involve the team. Whenever we're talking to a leader or a person on a team, if they feel like they're on an island, that's going to be a hard battle because we want to have support. We need this.

CX is a team sport, so let's engage the team in finding solutions. A lot of data out there says that when employees are involved in defining the problem and finding the solution, they are more engaged in actually delivering on it. They feel like they are more involved in the strategic approach instead of just being told what to do and not understanding how that ties to outcomes. So we want to really engage the team, to feel involved in the process. A great tool for this is service blueprinting. Let's say we are looking at the checkout process. We've identified that customer feedback is telling us that something's not working there. We engage the team. We say, okay, let's figure out what it should look like. Now let's figure out what does that mean for our people, processes, technology and tools. Once we dig into that, we are involving all the people who are actually delivering on that experience. Now, one of the great things about doing something like a service blueprinting workshop with that team is that first of all, you're bringing that expertise, or sometimes this is what clients call us for. We come in and support our clients in this, but you're bringing in that expertise and then you're also involving the team so that you can really make sure that they are aware and understanding from the very beginning of making these big changes. They are understanding that, even if they're in the technology department and they never talk to a customer, they are delivering the customer experience. This helps with that engagement, helps with people understanding that every single person has a role in delivering on the customer experience.

The other thing we want to do is show the impact. We want to show the impact of the customer feedback that we're receiving, and then we want to predict and forecast. What will the impact be if we listen to this feedback and act on it? If we determine that there are some insights here that we can act on, what will that mean for the organization overall? This is where we can talk about things like hey, if we help with checkout, we're going to get more sales, we're going to have higher revenue. That's something everybody wants. You can even tie it back to the bigger aspirational ideas of we said, or our CEO has said recently, that they want to be the most responsive organization in our industry. Well, if we can improve this customer service issue, then we will be able to increase our responsiveness and make sure that we're delivering for the customer.

Everything has to come back to the impact on the customer and your organizational goals. Once you start talking like that, then you're on the same team. You're not coming to them saying, hey, you know this CX thing that you might not know a lot about and you're not judged on. Well, I'm going to give you a bunch of stuff for your to-do list and it's going to feel like it's extra. That's the opposite of what we want. We wanna say to them hey, we all want these organizational outcomes. We all want to do better as a business and provide better experiences for our customers. We see a pathway to do that. We wanna work together to make sure that we're listening to this feedback and responding and showing the impact of that along the way.

We also want to communicate regularly. This is what I mean when I say we shouldn't just be communicating when there are issues or complaints. We want everybody in the organization to understand that customer experience is not a program, it's not a project, it's not a flavor of the month. This is something that is who we are and how we do business. That means that if I'm in sales, I still want to hear what's happening with customer experience with our customer success team. I still want to know what's happening with the delivery group. So make sure that we're communicating far and wide and on a regular basis. That's how people know to trust that this is who we are and what we do, and not something that is a fly-by-night idea that we don't really have to care about. So communicate regularly in general and then also communicate regularly to those teams. If you haven't shared positive feedback for a while, look for ways to share positive feedback. If you feel like there are teams that have been cynical for a long time, look for recognizing the improvements, the changes, the investments they've made to improve the customer experience and share that far and wide.

Communication is absolutely a tool in our toolkit as customer experience leaders. We need to leverage it, we need to optimize it and we need to use it to build trust throughout our organization. Part of this that goes hand in hand here is that we want to both celebrate the successes and make sure that we are celebrating that with the teams that we work with, as well as across the organization, and we also want to empathize and have compassion and support when things aren't going well or when we can't really make those adjustments, or when we try something and it doesn't work. We can't just go back to these teams with feedback as a blunt object and say the customers still hate it, you have to fix it. We have to go back and say, hey, we've noticed that this thing that we all thought would work isn't working. So what if we try this? What if we do A-B testing? What if we try a pilot. What if we invite customers in to do a co-creation session? I can help facilitate that, and you offer what you can.

So, whatever you're doing when it comes to sharing feedback with different teams and leaders, it's all about engagement, it's all about inviting them into the process and it's all about making sure that they know that we're not just singling them out for those times when things go wrong. We want to celebrate when things go right and we want to recognize that every single leader, every single team, is delivering on the customer experience. That's pretty powerful when you think about it and when you position it the right way. So don't be afraid to share feedback. Be empowered to share feedback with others in your organization. Show them the impact of what it means. Help them understand how important it is, not just for customers and not just for the customer experience team, but for your organization overall. And then make sure we're supporting those groups. Make sure we're communicating regularly. Make sure we are showing them the feedback and outcomes that come from the work that they do. It's an ongoing practice, and we call it a practice because it's something we have to keep working on.

So I hope this is helpful. I wish you a lot of luck as you communicate about customer experience in your organization. And don't forget we have lots of resources for you at experienceinvestigators. com, including free guidebooks, free workbooks, plenty of videos and articles and all sorts of resources, so I encourage you to check that out. In the meantime, we love hearing from you. Please leave me a question at askjeannie. vip and I will answer your question on this very podcast, Experience Action. Until next time, keep up the great work. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience. Check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.