MC: 0:00

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.

Jeannie Walters: 0:34

It's Experience Action. I'm Jeannie Walters and I'm here to answer your questions about customer experience or employee experience or whatever else you have to throw at me. So let's go ahead and listen into our question this week.

Listener Question: 0:46

Hey, Jeannie, it's Cara Silletto from Magnet Culture. I'd love to know how to get my leaders to understand that customer experience is not the same thing as customer service. Can you help me out?

Jeannie Walters: 0:59

Thanks, Cara, it's good to hear your voice and for those of you who don't know Cara Silletto, I encourage you to check out Magnet Culture. That is, her organization focused on employee retention strategies. So check that out.

Jeannie Walters: 1:15

Now, this is a great question, because a lot of times when I introduce myself or when I am speaking somewhere, I talk about customer experience, I use the phrase customer experience, and still people walk up to me and they say I'm so glad you're talking about customer service. And so we've been kind of trained to think about these as interchangeable ideas, and what I want to share today is really why it's so important to have both represented in your organizations in powerful ways, and why every single business leader should absolutely care about customer service, but also they should care about customer experience as well. And so, as we are exploring this idea, I encourage you to think about you know where are the places in your organization where this might apply and who are the leaders that you can really reach out to in your organization to bridge the gap, to create that cross-functional leadership that we need in order to deliver on a positive customer experience. So let's back up a little bit. When we talk about customer service versus customer experience, what are we talking about? Well, here's the way I think about it.

Jeannie Walters: 2:32

Customer service is reactive by nature. Customer service is what happens when people need us. When the customer, maybe, is wandering around in a store and they can't find something, they need to go find somebody to help them find that. Or maybe they use their app to way find in a store. That is them seeking information, seeking help. This also shows up in contact centers. You know, if we have an issue, we have to call and figure out what's going on. That's up to us as customers. We have to reach out and figure out how do we solve this problem. Maybe we didn't get the right order, or maybe the bill is incorrect, or maybe we're just missing a piece of information that we need. There are people, and now we have apps and AI and all these other tools that are there to respond to those inquiries, to respond to those needs. So when things go not quite right or when the customer is missing either information or a product or service, customer service is there to help. It's an important and critical role in your organization. Now, customer experience is really a proactive and intentional idea.

Jeannie Walters: 3:53

Now, one thing I like to say is don't forget you don't have to talk about customer experience. Your customers are still having an experience. Customer experience, by definition, is the experience that your customers have. This is true from when they first interact with your brand, all the way through every touchpoint, every interaction, to when they actually either leave you or become a lifelong customer and advocate for your brand. That's a long journey. That's something that we have to really think about. If we don't think about that journey, what happens is the customer is still having an experience, but they are not moving through the journey in the most optimized way, in the way that makes them feel the best about your brand. They might have to, you know, figure things out to get to the next step. They might not feel reassured and confident when they make a purchase because they're not getting that reassurance. Because if we're not looking at things from the customer's perspective, we are missing an opportunity to develop a proactive and intentional customer experience.

Jeannie Walters: 5:05

This is where it comes into the idea of when we add all those interactions up, when we are looking at the end-to-end journey. However the customer feels about that, their perception is really what makes the experience for them. So, yes, they might make a purchase, but they might walk out and think I'm never going back to that store. I couldn't find anything, it was a mess, things were dusty. When I actually went up there, I didn't feel good about giving my credit card, whatever it is. We have to look at those interaction points as the customer and think about how can we make it as effortless as possible, how can we make it as delightful as possible, how can we help the customer take the next step that they want to take? And so if we're proactive and intentional about our customer experience, that means a few things happen.

Jeannie Walters: 6:01

Well, you may have heard about customer service being kind of the cost of doing business. Sometimes in large organizations we literally refer to it as a cost center, meaning that we're investing there even though there's not a direct line to return on that investment. However, if we can be proactive and intentional about our customer experience, that does a few things for our bottom line. Number one: it actually reduces service cost. If we don't create problems to begin with, we don't have the service issues at the end.

Jeannie Walters: 6:38

Now, the other thing that happens is if we are working together hand in hand with the idea of customer service and customer experience, we're going to listen to what customers are saying, we're going to ask them about their opinions, their feedback, and once we gather that we can again go back and be intentional about the experience, we can start predicting what they need so that they don't have an issue to react to, they don't have a need to call in, they don't have to search around and find things, because we've thought about that for them as part of our customer experience efforts inside the organization. So inside the organization, what we're really doing is customer experience management or customer experience leadership. This is where we are putting in the right efforts around the customer experience to get the results that we and our customers want. So that is really the difference between the ideas of customer service and customer experience.

Jeannie Walters: 7:42

Now the question is about how do we get our leaders all to care about this. You know, I have heard customer experience described in so many ways that sometimes I have to just stop somebody because I hear it described as fluffy or soft skills or a cost center or all of these different things. And if you are listening to this podcast for more than the first time, if you followed me on LinkedIn, if you have paid attention to the articles and different things that we have out there, you know how I feel about this. I really believe that customer experience drives business value. It is a winning business strategy, but we have to treat it strategically just like any other part of business. Can you imagine talking about sales as if it's just going to happen? Right, we say, wow, it's really weird. We are just waiting here for sales to happen.

Jeannie Walters: 8:42

We've told everybody on our organization that sales is important. We have said that. We put up a poster and it said sales, they are important, our number one priority. But if we don't actually give people the communication, the tools, the processes, the technology to get things done around sales, then it is magical thinking. And yet we do that with customer experience all the time.

Jeannie Walters: 9:09

So what I would do if I were a leader trying to get others to really understand why this is important is I would start by defining the business impact. I would literally sit down and figure out what is the strategic advantage if we can drive a better customer experience. Now Cara asked this question and she added that, yes, this is part of it. We can get higher retention, we can get higher referrals. All of that is really important. What I want you to do is make a strong business case for that. Figure out what would a few more referrals look like for your bottom line. What would a higher customer lifetime value mean? What would it mean if we could extend the relationship with a customer so that they actually made more purchases with us? Or flip that and think about the service issues that you actually have today. What if you could prevent those things? What if you had fewer people making returns on your products or trying to get refunds or retribution because things went wrong? There are so many great case studies out there, but really, when you look at the cost savings, the savings of expenses there, that's going to make your chief financial officer happy If you are looking at ways to increase revenue in this tight market we have right now. Look for ways to really optimize the customer relationships you already have, but make your case.

Jeannie Walters: 10:45

The other thing that you could look at is how to innovate around your customer experience. If you look at many of the disruptions that have happened in the last decade plus they have all been experience-based. When we talk about the Amazons and the Ubers and the Carvanas of the world, we are talking about disruption through experience. The products they sell are the same as others and have been for a long time. What they did was they disrupted industries by focusing on how can we make the experience more effortless, more convenient, more delightful for our customers. So if you are not focused on customer experience, this is a great message for those leaders you want to convince.

Jeannie Walters: 11:36

If you are not focused on customer experience, somebody else in your industry is, and right now, today, they are working on ways to disrupt your industry. So do not be left behind on this. Focus on how you can be proactive and intentional and look at all of those interactions and touch points in your customer's journey so that you can innovate and stay ahead. This can be really something that develops a tremendous lot of value for your organization. So you want to take this holistic approach and that means we have to get cross-functional leadership involved. And that means that, as you make your business case, as you say to your fellow leaders, we need to care about this, because we need to make a case in a couple of different ways. We need to think about who those leaders are and what do they care about.

Jeannie Walters: 12:31

Now, if your CEO is all about growth, you want to talk about the growth potential of working on customer experience. That's where you get into the referrals, the higher customer lifetime value, more market share, more share of wallet, all of those things. Now your CFO is going to be looking for higher revenues and lower expenses. In fact, if you need a winning formula, this is the winning formula. Look for ways that you can increase revenue and decrease expenses. One of the ways you can do that is by preventing service issues. So if you have a lot of people going out to, for instance, repair your products, well, that's a customer experience issue. You might want to look at that and say, okay, what could we do to prevent those repairs and that expense for our organization. Use that as part of your case as well. And then, of course, we want to include customers in this.

Jeannie Walters: 13:30

Sometimes and I've seen this again and again and again we think leaders want spreadsheets. We think leaders want to know exactly logical steps for everything. Now that is important, but they also need story. They need to understand what is this doing for the human behind the number on that spreadsheet. This is where bringing in real quotes from your customers. This is where recordings from your call center can be so powerful, or videos that customers record and share for you. This can happen on social media. This can be maybe testimonials, things like that. You want to bring that into your leadership. Because I have seen very hardened business professionals who seem to only want to look at, you know, spreadsheets and graphs and charts. And then you play one of those recordings where a customer is emotional and they start hearing the impact that your organization has on individual people and suddenly that becomes the priority. So use emotion to tell your customer's story. That can move mountains with leaders, but you have to do this within the context of the broader business case.

Jeannie Walters: 14:53

So if you haven't already, I would encourage you to check out our Customer Experience Strategy Success Statement tools on our site. It's in the Learning Center at experienceinvestigatorscom. That process can really help you think through what is the definition of success here and why should we care about this as business leaders? If we're only talking about customer feedback, our leaders are not going to pay attention. We need to translate that into what does that actually mean for our organization. So there's a place for customer service. There's a place for customer experience. But all of it fits into this broader idea of what does success look like for our customers, our employees and our organization? And it's up to us to really define that for our fellow leaders.

Jeannie Walters: 15:43

So if you want a few easy calls to action here for your fellow leaders, one is let's make sure we are training and educating and developing our employees to think about customer experience in this way. Not just the customer facing staff, not just the customer service folks, but everyone throughout the organization. That's a great way to get some cross-functional engagement. And then, if you don't already have a cross-functional CX team who is really leading the charge around this, that is another great place to start. Sometimes these start very organically, but I would encourage you to think about developing a charter, making sure you have regular check-ins, making sure you have ways to close the loop with customers who give you that feedback, as well as with leaders who have requests or ideas or things like that. So make sure you have some sort of cross-functionality across your leadership team when it comes to customer experience. And then customer journey mapping is another great tool that can really help leaders understand what this really is and how you can move forward with it. So if you haven't done that recently, it's a great way to get engagement with that leadership team as well.

Jeannie Walters: 16:58

I hope this helps. I love this question because really we have been trained in so many different ways as business leaders, as entrepreneurs, as people who are focused on different aspects of our organization and often we just haven't really been taught this stuff. So there is no shame in the fact that your other leaders might not know exactly what this is, but the fact that you want to advocate for it is a great step in the right direction. So you will see the rewards of this. Think strategically, develop that definition of success and engage cross-functionally with your leaders across the organization so that you can really see the return on the investment around proactive, intentional customer experiences.

Jeannie Walters: 17:45

Thank you so much for this question and, as always, I am here for you. So if you are listening to this, thinking, well, I have a follow-up question or I have another question? Hey, that's why we're here. So go ahead and check out askjeannievip. That's where you can leave me a recording, anonymously or with your name, and I'll give you a shout out. And we're here to solve experience problems and to make sure that we are taking action around experience. So I will talk to you again next week. Thank you for all you do and can't wait to hear your next question. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.