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.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

Let's face it, interviewing for a job, finding out about the culture, that can be challenging in any industry. But if you're a customer experience professional, if you are looking to make that change, we have some great ideas for you based on this question. Let's go ahead and listen in.

Listener Question: 0:53

Hi Jeannie, I'm Alex. Today, my question is the following: how do you think what questions should a CX leader applying for an executive position ask at an interview in executive, with the CEO or founder, to get a clear sense of how the organization values its customers and prioritize customer experience?

Jeannie Walters: 1:13

Such a good question and one that's close to my heart, because I think anytime we are exploring, really joining a new organization or accepting a new role or working for a new leader, we really have to understand what is the culture here? How will we fit in? Do they really take customer experience seriously and give it the attention it deserves? So I love that you are asking these questions.

Jeannie Walters: 1:42

Now, when we talk about customer experience, let's remember that that can be defined very differently from one organization to the next. So before you accept a role, before you step into that, make sure you understand how they define it at their organization. I would be super curious about where does this fit in for the C-suite and the overall organizational goals? That's where I would want to focus first. So let's talk about five questions you can walk in and ask about to show both your knowledge of customer experience, strategy and leadership, and also to make sure that you can understand is this a fit, is this a place that will give you the resources, the investment, the support that you need so that you can really help them turn customer experience into a strategic business driver for their organization. Let's start with the strategic vision. What is the overall strategy here? What are we trying to do as an organization and how does customer experience fit into that overall business strategy? How do we see it really fueling growth or brand differentiation? Let's start there and ask them to really tell us where does this fit? And the answer might be that's what we want to figure out. And if that is the answer, then that tells you you will have a lot of responsibility over defining the strategy. So make sure you ask those follow-up questions. What does that look like? What does the team look like? What kind of support would I get? Those are really important. But make sure that customer experience is really woven into the overall long-term goals and ambitions of the company that you're talking to.

Jeannie Walters: 3:38

The next thing I want you to talk about are success metrics. How will we know that we've achieved success? What are we measuring to get there? Now, if you hear things like well, we've been tracking net promoter score for a zillion years and we will continue to do that, you can say great, that's one metric, that's customer feedback. But what else can we look at? How will we know we're successful? Get into what are the operational metrics that you may want to explore. What are some of those behavioral analytics that you want to make sure you have access to? How will you define success and what will you use to measure it? If they are leaning completely on this idea of customer feedback metrics, that could be a little bit of a red flag because that shows you that they might hold you responsible for those metrics, even though you aren't accountable for the changes that need to be made in order to improve those.

Jeannie Walters: 4:40

Have honest conversations here. If you join a company or an organization that really isn't approaching this the right way, you might not be setting yourself up for success. So, be brave, ask these big questions about what are we really talking about when we say a successful customer experience effort? How will I know that I'm successful in my role? And then, of course, you want to look at how are we doing here as a culture? What do our leaders care about? How does this organization today cultivate a customer-centric culture? That's a great question to ask. And if they say, well, we talk about it and we're doing this and we're collecting feedback, great.

Jeannie Walters: 5:27

Can you give me an example of times when you've turned insights into action? What did that look like? Who was involved? Is it cross-functional? Because you and I both know that customer experience is a team sport. It's something we all have to work on together. And yet, at the same time, if we just use platitudes like, well, cx is everybody's job, then that doesn't really work either. We have to treat this like a serious part of the business. So that is one of the attitudes that you can bring.

Jeannie Walters: 5:59

You can say you know, I really believe customer experience is a business driver. It's a way to achieve growth. It's a way to achieve sustainable customer lifetime values. It's a way to get more renewals and retention and all the things that come with those. So once you state that, don't be afraid to ask questions about how much support do leaders give these efforts? What if we need more data? What if we need more insights? What if we need to cross collaborate with different leaders? Help me understand what that would look like and how we could do that in a way that is fitting into the culture of today.

Jeannie Walters: 6:40

So ask about where they are today as a culture and where you want to bring them. And then, of course, we can't do any of this without a budget. We can't do any of this without a team. We can't do any of this without certain things like technology and tools. So ask those questions about resource allocation and autonomy. How will I be able to lead here? Who do I need to get approval from? How many people will be able to provide insights and action for this program? How can we make sure that customer experience is seen as a strategic asset? So when resources, budget and authority come up, ask about how will that be allocated in the customer experience function and how do you envision collaboration with the rest of the leadership team. Go ahead and ask those questions, because that can give you insight as well into what sort of culture am I walking into. That can be absolutely critical to success at your next role.

Jeannie Walters: 7:51

If customer experience is prioritized, the organization will invest in the right tools, the right headcount, cross-functional support, all of those things. Now we live in a world where some budgets are shrinking, so let's be realistic about that. Maybe they're going to tell you, you know what, we aren't willing or able to invest right now in a huge team of people. What we want to do is start where we are and we want you to lead that. That's a great place to be, as long as everybody understands what the limits are and what you might be asking for in the future. As far as allocation. Now, as long as you can make your business case that this is a strategy that will help everybody win, customers, employees and the overall organization, then they're going to be more likely to trust you once you ask for that allocation in the future. Keep making the business case as you ask these questions. These aren't just fluffy questions. Customer experience is not just about soft skills. It's not a nice to have. It is something that will drive the business forward, and here's how and here's how I can help. That's what leaders want to hear.

Jeannie Walters: 9:06

And then finally ask about how are you listening to customers today? What does the feedback loop look like? How do you apply that to continuous improvement of the customer journey? How do you get people to hear and see the feedback that they need to know about their products, their services, their departments. How do we incorporate different ways to collect voice of the customer, like checking in with our frontline employees? How do we make sure that we are getting the right information?

Jeannie Walters: 9:38

Explore the feedback mechanisms that are available. Explore how they're attached to actions and explore that, you know, if you have that robust feedback loop, maybe that's a part of the business they've done really well. We've seen that a lot where they get the feedback kind of figured out that loop but they don't ever take it to that next level. You want to be the one who says this is great, feedback is important. I can't wait to turn this into more actions to drive the business forward.

Jeannie Walters: 10:10

So if they don't have any sort of feedback, that's a great place for you to say well, I would love to start understanding customers more. I would love to tap into not only what they tell us, but also how are they behaving? What do their actions tell us? How can we track the right operational metrics so that we get the full picture of what customers really want and need for the future? If you go in there and ask these questions and explore these topics, this will give you an idea of how to be the right leader for their organization. It also gives you the feedback so that you can decide hey, this isn't the right place.

Jeannie Walters: 10:52

They're talking about customer experience, but that's it. Set yourself up for success from the beginning. Define what customer experience is, explore how it fits into the culture, poke around and ask about resource allocation and leadership buy-in before you even walk in the door. That way you will look prepared and efficient and like the leader you are. So I wish you great luck as you start looking and exploring at leadership roles and understanding how you can make the most out of not just this role, but really the role of customer experience at the organization. That's an exciting place to be, and we need to embrace the challenges, understand the limitations and really get excited about the vision. Bring that kind of energy to these discussions that you're having and I cannot wait to see you lead.

Jeannie Walters: 11:51

Now, for those of you who are curious about how you're doing with customer experience, I recommend you check out our CXI Compass tool. This is a free tool available to you. It takes about three minutes and you essentially answer a few questions and we let you know. Where do you want to invest more? Where would it make sense for you to put in the effort to get the biggest impact from your customer experience program? This is based on our CXI navigational framework, which has four sections: intentional success, customer collaboration, cultural commitment and experiential innovation. It's all about continuous improvement so that we're not only meeting our customer needs, but we are looking to the future and making sure that we are staying ahead of what they'll need tomorrow.

Jeannie Walters: 12:42

Thank you so much for joining me on the Experience Action Podcast. Thank you for all the great questions. Don't forget you can leave me a voicemail at askjeannievip and ask a question of your own. So keep doing the hard work of customer experience that leads to the business results we know it can achieve. Keep leading out there and keep fighting the good fight on behalf of your customers. Thank you so much for being here and I'll see you next week. 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.