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

It's the Experience Action Podcast, and we have another fantastic question from one of you, our listeners.

Listener Question: 0:38

Hey, Jeannie. I've worked at companies that say they're customer-centric, but it doesn't always feel that way behind the scenes. What are some signs that a company is truly living that value versus just talking about it? Thanks so much.

Jeannie Walters: 0:54

Oh, I bet a lot of you can relate to this one. We hear it all the time. We talk to leaders and they tell us we don't really have a customer experience team or leader or process because we are customer centric. Well, saying it is not enough and yet too many organizations really believe it is. We've talked to so many organizations who talk to us about how incredible their people are and how everybody puts the customer first. But if you actually reverse that and talk to customers, they'll often say, yeah, the people are great, but it's very inconsistent.

Jeannie Walters: 1:35

One person calls me back right away, one person I have to track down. Sometimes I get different information based on what department is emailing me. It's hard to find the information I want and they've never really asked me what I want. So it's very easy to become complacent. It's very easy to think that because we care about our customers, because we talk about caring about our customers, that that is enough. But I'm here to tell you it isn't. We have to stop just talking about customer experience. That can't be enough. Now, this has to be both an internal and an external exercise. A truly customer-centric organization actually applies the same values, both within the organization, how we treat one another, how we work cross-functionally, how we show up and make sure we are exceeding expectations within the organization as well as to our customers. Now that can be a little tricky, but essentially, customer impact is built around decision-making. We have to know what decisions are we making that will impact the customer experience. Sometimes that means that what we do inside the organization the customer might never see it it still has an impact on what they experience as a customer. So these are the signs I want you to look for.

Jeannie Walters: 3:02

This was such a great question. What should we look for? So, if you are living in an organization right now, if you are working within an organization that is telling you, oh, we are customer centric, then look for these things. Number one the customer impact is considered as part of that decision-making process. We can't just have a process in a vacuum. We can't silo everything. What we decide about our supply chain management and our HR policies and how we invoice, that has a direct impact on the customer experience, even if it doesn't feel that way. Because if we change our HR policies around time off and we have a bunch of grumpy employees, or maybe the opposite, where we don't have employees when we need them where we need them for the customer. We have to think through how will this impact the customer experience, because otherwise it's very easy to make very well-intentioned decisions that actually don't deliver on the idea of customer centricity.

Jeannie Walters: 4:03

The other thing I want you to look for is customer feedback that actually drives meaningful change. Sometimes we talk to different organizations and the leaders tell us oh, it's great, we're doing all these surveys, we've got our net promoter score, we really have it all figured out. But if we're not using that information almost in real time to make meaningful change for the customers, then we are wasting time and resources and money and everything else. That is the hard truth. There are so many organizations who invest so much in customer feedback. They invest in the software and the surveys. They write these beautiful things, they get them out, they rewrite them, they get out more, but there is no process or even person who is gathering that information and looking for what are the trends, what are our customers trying to tell us, what do they want and can we make that happen? If it is not driving meaningful change, then feedback is not really customer-centric. I know that's hard to hear because many of you are probably doing just that. Where you are investing in those surveys, you are investing in these robust platforms, but if you are not using the insights and information, then that is not an investment, that is just an expense. So customer-centric organizations use feedback on a regular, consistent basis to drive meaningful change on behalf of their customers.

Jeannie Walters: 5:34

The other thing I want you to watch for is employee empowerment. Are employees actually empowered to not only report when things are not going right for the customer, but also to do something about it in the moment? Frontline employees we cannot have them just follow scripts. We cannot have situations where they are not empowered to raise their hand and say I see a better way to do this. If we don't have those things in place and if we don't have that trust with them the training, the empowerment, the mission around what we're doing and we can recognize those who are doing the right things then we are just kind of asking everybody to be a robot. That is not customer-centric. We need to empower people at every level not just frontline at every level to look for better ways to work together, to be more efficient operationally, to serve the customer as well as look at the customer experience and think is there a better way to do this? What can we do and feel empowered to actually do that? And you heard me mention consistency before, because this is such a big part of any winning customer experience.

Jeannie Walters: 6:49

Consistency builds trust. So if we are delivering inconsistent experiences, that is eroding trust with our customers. We want consistency across channels for our customers, across teams, across the way that they receive information. All of that. We cannot leave the experience to be left to chance. This is where proactive, meaningful, intentional design comes in. We need to understand that marketing billing operations support every single group in our organization. They understand the tone that we want to have. They understand how we want to show up for our customers. They need to understand the clarity that we want to bring and all of that is aligned. If you see that sometimes as a customer, you might get a bill, for instance, and it might have codes on it or acronyms and you don't know what those are, and then you get something else and it might have different acronyms on it, because that's from marketing instead of billing. That inconsistency erodes trust with the organization and brand. So make sure that if you are truly being customer-centric, you are breaking down the silos everywhere you can, especially around communication with the customer, but silos everywhere really chip away at a consistent, seamless customer journey.

Jeannie Walters: 8:15

And then we want to make sure that this is not just something we're talking about. This is something that is measured and managed. We could walk around all day for years and never say the words customer experience and guess what? Our customers are still having an experience. We have to stop saying that we're doing customer experience or that this is something that is just happening because we're thinking about it. Your customers have an experience, whether you think about it or not, whether you're intentional or not.

Jeannie Walters: 8:49

The trick is to be intentional, measure what matters, make sure you understand what success looks like so you can measure against it, and then you need to manage that. People need to be held accountable. We have to make sure that we have checks in place to make sure we are actually delivering the experience that we think you know. In the last several months we've been talking a lot about AI and one of the things that I've seen is that people kind of release AI into the customer experience and they hope for the best. We have to make sure that we are constantly checking in with these new ways of working, to make sure we are showing up on behalf of our customers in the right way.

Jeannie Walters: 9:31

And then, of course, we want to look at the right leading and lagging indicators. Things like customer effort score can be really helpful Transactional satisfaction rates, resolution times, customer health scores if you're in customer success, there are all sorts of ways, but you have to make sure you've defined what success looks like so you know what to measure. This is what has led us to develop our CXI Navigator Framework, and all of that is based on this idea that you need the right mindset. So, yes, we need to talk about it, but then you need to apply strategy. You need to have a real plan with real metrics, real measurements, so you know how to adjust, how to course correct and how to get to success. That matters, and in order to deliver on that plan, you need discipline. You need to make sure that everybody understands what role they play and that there are real accountabilities around that role. That's what leads to action, which is why we're in the Experience Action podcast. So think about how can you define that mindset. Within our framework, we talk a lot about a customer experience mission statement that gets everyone aligned.

Jeannie Walters: 10:47

Then you want strategy. We use something called a success strategy blueprint. This is where we really map out what are the top priorities around customer experience. Otherwise, what happens is everything is ad hoc, everything is kind of onesie-twosie and it's not aligned and you miss opportunities for that consistency and then discipline who's doing what when? Most of us don't have full, robust teams only dedicated to customer experience, we rely on our influence to really get things done with other departments. It helps a lot if you have real definitions around what you're asking for and how to get there. And then we want to take action.

Jeannie Walters: 11:30

At Experience Investigators, we like to say we have a bias towards action, meaning stop talking about it and go do. So, if you are in a world where right now you are questioning, am I in a customer-centric organization? I hope these signs will help you see if you really are and, if not, lead the charge. Start asking for that real accountability. Start defining success. Use the tools, because if you can do that, other people will start picking up on your success. A final question for you: If you saw something broken in the customer experience today, would you feel empowered to do something about it? If you answer no, then you have some work to do. If you answered yes, you might be closer to a customer-centric organization than you think. What a fantastic question. I love these questions coming straight from you. The customer experience change agents out in the world making a difference.

Jeannie Walters: 12:28

Our mission at Experience Investigators is to create fewer ruined days for customers, and the way we do that is by empowering leaders like you through programs like this, the podcast we have lots of content with articles, of course, LinkedIn Learning courses. Now we have CXI Membership. We have all those resources to empower people like you. So check it out at experienceinvestigatorscom and don't forget you could hear your question on the next Experience Action Podcast. Go to askjeannievip and I can't wait to hear from you. See you next time. 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.