Jeannie Walters: 0:10

It's the Experience Action Podcast and it's your favorite episode of the month our CX Pulse Check, where I discuss timely customer experience episodes in the news so that you can learn what customers are expecting. I'm thrilled to have a special co-host with us, as always, and that is Camille Kremer, who is from Holiday Inn Club Vacation, the director of CX. Senior Director of CX. So, Camille, I would love for you to introduce yourself to our listeners and our viewers.

Camille Kremer: 0:42

Well, hi, Jeannie, thank you so much for having me. I'm absolutely delighted to be here and hello anyone who's watching. As you said, I'm the Senior Director of Customer Experience at Holiday Inn Club Vacations. It is a mouthful. So if I say H-I-C-V going forward, just know that that's what it means.

Camille Kremer: 0:58

As far as what our company is, we're like a Goldilocks-sized company. We're not too small, we're not too big. We've got 30 resorts domestically and a few over in Mexico. We're a timeshare company. We also like to call that vacation ownership, because people have feelings about timeshare. We are trying to change those feelings. We've got about 7,000 employees and about 365,000 customers.

Camille Kremer: 1:29

As a company, we're customer obsessed, like not just as a tagline, but it's literally our number one goal in our strategic long-term plan. It's also our number one metric and everybody has to aim for it. And I just want to kind of share this because I did say we're in timeshare. It's a really interesting industry and the reason that we're customer obsessed makes a lot of sense when you think about it. When you purchase with us, it's into perpetuity, right. So we don't have transactions. We've got relationships that last a lifetime. So we have to be obsessed with you and making sure that you are happy now, 10 years from now, 40 years from now.

Camille Kremer: 2:04

And then the second piece is and then I'll stop waxing poetic about the company is we're kind of like the Green Bay Packers. Do you know how they're like? Owned by the fans.

Jeannie Walters: 2:13

Yep, yep.

Camille Kremer: 2:14

So our owners literally own our units and own time at our properties. So they kind of own the company, kind of. My CEO would kill me for saying that. But we do philosophically think of them as like well, they're the owners, they're the boss and we're just working for them. So when I say we're customer obsessed, it's built into the model that is our company, it's built into our philosophy, it's built into our strategy. So I am stoked to be here and talking about it with you.

Jeannie Walters: 2:40

That's so great. Well we are thrilled that you're here with us and I think that one of the reasons that we wanted to have this conversation with you is because you have really be part of leading that journey of what does it take to get a customer experience program that is focused on customers and business results off the ground and maturing. It's a long-haul process and so we're gonna weave that in to a couple of the discussions that we're going to have today, because I just think your story has a lot of learnings for everybody out there, and I talk to leaders every day who are struggling, who are trying to figure out okay, how do I do this with a small team, how do I do this when we are being tasked with impossible KPIs? Right, and I love that your program really does focus on this is the number one metric and this is what it means, and I know you've had a lot to do with that. So how about we jump in? You know it's a good thing there's never news. It's a good thing that you know nothing ever happens. We can talk about the same old, same old.

Jeannie Walters: 3:44

Ironically, though, some of the conversations that we have are kind of the same ones we've been having for a while, even though the data shifts a little bit, and this is, I think, an example of that, and for those of you listening, this is from Vision by Protivity, and the headline is Global Execs Say CX Is Crucial To Success, But Most Still Struggle To Optimize Its Performance, and this is really an executive summary of an executive survey that they did, and the things that really stood out to me about this were that there's still this huge gap between executives who say, yes, this is so important, and then, when they were asked about, you know, are you good at operationalizing it, essentially. They're like, well, maybe not. So I'm curious on your take on this and I'm also curious did you see any reflection of your journey in this?

Camille Kremer: 4:41

Actually, okay, let's just give some kudos first to executives, having like the reflection moment and saying this is important and we're not delivering on it.

Camille Kremer: 4:52

So I just like kudos and like, oh, that's really humility to be able to acknowledge both of those things and that's juxtaposed right, like it's very important and we're not nailing it.

Jeannie Walters: 5:02

And I think that's a really good point, because one of the things that we talk about a lot when we work with our leaders in all the industries is this work takes a tremendous amount of humility, and I think sometimes people don't realize that until they're in it. And we have to make it a safe place so that when people say like, wow, I'm realizing this isn't working, they're not punished for that. So I love that you use the word humility, because that's one that we lean into as well, so sorry carry on.

Camille Kremer: 5:32

No, no, I'm now we're going off track here. But you said safe and I had a whole conversation yesterday with a couple of CX colleagues about. There's a huge piece of CX that has to be built on creating psychological safety.

Jeannie Walters: 5:44

Yes

Camille Kremer: 5:46

It's got to be okay to be curious. It's got to be okay to try things. It's also got to be okay to fail at things, as long as you fail forward fast and learn from it. The only way to innovate is to try, and if you're not creating a space where it's okay to point out that something's wrong, it's okay to try something, it's okay to keep trying. You won't make any progress and so beyond anything else I say what makes it work: I think having the people in place and a culture within your company that can support that. That's the fertile soil. More than anything else is creating that environment.

Jeannie Walters: 6:25

I totally agree with you, and if you look at the stats from this survey, the actual gap was 47% of execs say CX is critical. So that's not even half. Let's be honest about that too. But at least some of them it's close to half are saying, yes, this is critical. We understand it. But when they were asked if they thought they were doing it well, only 17% said they were. And this is the gap we see over and over right. There are these big ideas about customer experience and this big longing to do it well, but a lot of organizations just aren't putting the tools in place, aren't putting even the goals or the words in place to get things done. So I love that we just talked about humility and safety. What are some of the other things that you think could help bridge this gap?

Camille Kremer: 7:19

I think you asked early, early, like what is it? What does it take? You know what has it taken for you to do this? Like a lot of coffee.

Jeannie Walters: 7:29

We can all relate to that one.

Camille Kremer: 7:32

But CX isn't a silver bullet, it's a commitment, right, and so you can. You can say the words, but if you're not going to make the commitment and put the resources and the time and the effort and the belief behind it, then again you're not going to get anywhere, right? So there needs to be kind of a persistence and a faith that it could happen, and that needs to come from the leader level that we've got the, gratefully, our CEO is bought all the way in, and so when he started our department five years ago when I started as well, we knew this was going to be a slog.

Camille Kremer: 8:07

And the five year journey I think I told you the story of bamboo. I'll share it if you'd like me to. Yeah, five years is how long it took us, and I would bet that's around a fair time frame for a lot of companies to start to see things. So the analogy that we talked about last time we spoke was I think it's an analogy, still haven't cleared that up. I might be using the wrong word. Sorry about that, but let's just go with it. So, analogy, the analogy of bamboo is you can water bamboo. You can plant bamboo and water it for five years and really not see anything of it, and then in the fifth year, within a couple of weeks, it'll shoot 80 or 90 feet high. And so that analogy just speaks to again the persistence, the commitment, the knowing that you're feeding the soil the right things, and what you can't see is that there's all the infrastructure that's actually kind of happening underneath. The root system is there, it's becoming fortified so that it can take off on that kind of hockey stick trajectory. And that's exactly what happened for us.

Camille Kremer: 9:10

The first year was building infrastructure and identifying key points. What are the key points in our customer journey? We found let's call it six big ones. Then we found the stakeholders for those. We found out what are their pain points, what do they think matters? We went out and talked to industry experts and said what questions would we ask on a survey? And then we built and deployed. This is a little ambitious. I wouldn't actually say that anybody should do this, but we deployed eight programmatic surveys in the year, three separate call centers, each with like 30 questions each. Our post stay when you check out from a resort is like 150 questions long. We still have a 34% response rate. It's incredible. After our sales experience. And then three separate digital properties. So that first year was just like build, build it and they will come.

Jeannie Walters: 10:09

Wow.

Camille Kremer: 10:09

So you get past year one. There's not a whole lot to show for it, except that now we've got a lot of VoC. There's a lot of noise, kind of out in the world.

Camille Kremer: 10:14

So what do you do with it? So the second year is getting into the relationship building. So now you've got those stakeholders who identified in year one building the relationships. Nobody really likes when you come into their space and say you're doing it wrong.

Camille Kremer: 10:28

So you need to build that relationship so that the communication isn't seen as an attack, it's seen as collaboration. Right, so do that and then leverage the data to start getting to your insights. Get something. Get something meaningful that people can see. Again, not a place where you're seeing a lot of growth. You're just, you know, kind of doing the background stuff. Year three is where we started to get into accountability, where the executives that we were, those major stakeholders we were working with, we would meet with them or we do. This is all stuff you have to keep doing. What you did in year one, you got to do in year two. What you do in year two, you have to do in year three. Year four, you're doing what you did all those other years.

Camille Kremer: 11:10

So by that time we decided okay, now there needs to be accountability. So the executives from the various functions we meet with them monthly, we say how they're performing, they say what they've done, and then following week all of those executives have to go and sit in front of the CEO and he says what have you done for CX lately?

Jeannie Walters: 11:31

And this is why executive buy-in is so important and critical and why it's often the piece that's missing for the successful CX programs, cause we can't just talk to each other.

Camille Kremer: 11:45

I think there's a, there's probably some white paper somewhere that says that you can do a groundswell up. But it is tremendously easier if you can bring it. If the executives understand the right thing, the numbers will follow. Like, even if I can't prove the financial linkage today, I'll be able to at some point, like, have the faith in the spreadsheets, have the faith in the graphs. It will all come together.

Jeannie Walters: 12:26

Yeah, for sure and I think one of the things that we see over and over again is that sometimes we start with that process mindset where we start with well like if we just send that surveys out everything going to be okay. And really we need to connect that to what are the goals that we're trying to achieve? What is best for the customer? What do we have the bandwidth for? Because if we're making a bunch of promises and surveys by asking, would you want a waterfall in your room, you know like, and we know that that's never going to happen, then that's wasting everybody's time. So I think you describing that journey in that way is really helpful to realize. This is not like there, there is no one step. There's not even a one, two, three step.

Jeannie Walters: 12:55

It's like you have to keep figuring it out as you go, and that's why I really believe CX leaders the ones who do this well, we have to be so strategic and often the role is not seen as strategic, it's seen as tactical, and I think we, as the royal we of all of us customer experience change agents everywhere we need to start showing up a little differently and talking in this very strategic way and helping our leaders connect those dots. And one of the things that came up in this survey that we just talked about was leaders see AI as a solution, but it's the data integration that's the blocker, and that's another thing we see everywhere. So it's like sometimes we get out above our skis because we think that you know if we just do this, if we just add AI or if we just send that survey, but we have to think in this holistic, integrated way. So there's a lot to unpack with this. I would encourage everybody to check out the survey. And the next thing I have here it's kind of a similar theme. I hate to say this, but we are talking about CMSWire. Let me bring that up here. Our friends at CMSWire and our good friend Dom Nicastro is the author of this. Shout out to Dom. He always does great work.

Jeannie Walters: 14:21

Marketing Promised. CX Didn't Deliver. Here's The Cost. It's quite a headline. And really this is about the announcement from Forrester about their total experience score and how they're looking at things like branding and what is the experience like for prospects versus customers and how do we strike that right balance?

Jeannie Walters: 14:44

Honestly, there is a little controversy already about this and people are already kind of throwing stones saying I don't know if this is what we should use or not. I think that's true for anything that you try to measure like this, but one of the things that I took away from this and one of Dom's kind of highlights here was that retention still beats acquisition, meaning we have to keep focusing. Right. Do you hear the angels singing? We have to keep focusing on customer retention, even though so much of business is built around acquisition, so much of business is focused on sales focused on new. If we spent more time on really taking care of our customers and retaining them, all these good things would happen, and the total experience score kind of addresses that in the way that it's using these measurements. So so your thoughts on this, what do you think?

Camille Kremer: 15:40

So for one, expectation setting is my favorite CX topic. Oh my gosh Like it is.

Jeannie Walters: 15:47

We are just. We are just geeking out on all the cool stuff right now.

Camille Kremer: 15:52

100% It's why I do this. Come on, I love my job. So there is no like secret sauce or magic spell to get CX right, but there is definitely like a rotten tomato you could put in the soup to make it go bad, and that is mismatching expectations and for me, I think about it as kind of like a quick equation. So we said we were going to give you a thing. You this is actually the most important part of this whole equation is you, as the customer did something to invest in that, like you booked at our restaurant, you booked your flight, you came to our store, you bought our product, you decided to come on vacation with us. The customer's invested. Then we do or don't deliver. Let's say we don't deliver.

Camille Kremer: 16:44

So now they have this expectation that they were personally invested. We've under-delivered. They've now got this like cognitive dissonance right. They're holding two different thoughts simultaneously. They had their expectation wasn't met. People hate dissonance. It's upsetting. It's upsetting it. It's frustrating. Basically in the long run of it it breaks trust. That's what it equals. So on the equals side of that plus those three things equals you've not only dissatisfied someone they're not going to be loyal to you. They don't trust you. Right, you've broken trust, and not only have you broken trust, but you made them think they make bad decisions. So likely.

Jeannie Walters: 17:29

Oh, I love that. Wait, say that again. So you've made them think that they've made a bad decision.

Camille Kremer: 17:35

That's why I said that second one is so important, because they did something to invest in the expectation you set.

Jeannie Walters: 17:40

That's right.

Camille Kremer: 17:41

Right. So now that's part of that dissonance piece. They're like but wait a minute, now can I trust myself in my decisions. You made me make a bad decision. Nobody likes to feel like that. So you've broken the trust. You don't have loyalty. You probably lost the most customer and you've probably earned yourself a detractor. To be honest. They're probably telling people about not doing business with you.

Jeannie Walters: 18:01

Absolutely.

Camille Kremer: 18:01

So mismanaged expectations. A hundred percent to me, like I said, that's the secret sauce of getting it wrong.

Camille Kremer: 18:09

You can get it right, though, and this is where I like the experience score in the Forrester article, and when we chatted previously, I told you I'm a Lean Six Sigma black belt, and that's part of what we do is we do CX and we also do continuous improvement, so a huge piece that we push in our company is system thinking, and experience anywhere, anywhere in the journey, will set expectations everywhere.

Jeannie Walters: 18:34

That's right.

Camille Kremer: 18:35

Upper funnel. I tell you you're getting a yacht and and then I deliver the product and it's a canoe.

Jeannie Walters: 18:45

Or the Fyre Festival. Remember that.

Camille Kremer: 18:47

Oh my goodness, gracious $5,000 to be in like a wet tent eating a sandwich,

Jeannie Walters: 18:53

A cheese sandwich yeah,

Camille Kremer: 18:56

Probably without mayonnaise or condiments, like, come on, they paid so much money.

Camille Kremer: 19:01

But so I mean, I really do think that you have to take the whole system into. It's like for us, uh, like, that's just a kind of cheeky, funny example but most of our resorts uh, let's say domestically and in Mexico, most of our resorts have golf courses. So a lot of our owners anticipate that if they go to a different resort there'll be a golf course. Well, some of our resorts are urban. We've got New York and New Orleans, some of them are at the beach, some of them are mid country and we got another one out in Las Vegas. So actually, some of them have golf courses and some of them don't.

Camille Kremer: 19:40

We when opening, the collective royal we used earlier, when we opened the New Orleans resort, which is two blocks off of the French Quarter, we just kind of assumed our customers would understand that there was no sprawling golf course in the middle of the city of New Orleans that our resort was situated on. We were wrong. People absolutely thought there was going to be a golf course, and so to fix it, we were like, oh, tiger team, this, and that's what we do. We'll pull a task force, we'll pull a tiger team and we're like, okay, we have to get people from the call center who are selling the packages.

Camille Kremer: 20:18

What are your scripts? Well, the agents who are actually doing the talking. Who writes the scripts? Who puts the content on the website internal, external website? Who needs to update the technology for that? Who is sending up the pre-arrival emails? Obviously, the GM from the resort needs to be involved for the actual messaging. Any pre-arrival phone call. That needs to happen. All of that now needs to be perfectly aligned to set those expectations, to let people know you won't have a golf course, but you do have the French Quarter.

Jeannie Walters: 20:47

That's right

Camille Kremer: 20:47

You know, you keep repeating that message because the message is a great one. It's not that it's going to be a detractor. It's just different from what you would have expected if we didn't tell you.

Jeannie Walters: 20:57

And if you want to take a golf vacation, you probably don't want to go to the French Quarter, so you would make it, you would self-select as a customer then, and that's that's what's also so important about expectations. And I think that when we we do a lot of journey mapping with our clients, and one of the things that comes up in every single workshop I've ever done for the last 20 years is about proactive communication versus waiting for the customer to tell you. And once you identify it, just like you are talking about. Sometimes we identify it in a reaction because we didn't know or we made an assumption. But once you identify that, we need to have a process in place to actually create that proactive communication to customers so that we share the right expectations and information. And it's just, it's something that's going to happen, and so we need to have those processes aligned, which is why I also love service blueprinting, because you look down to people, process, technology, tools, how do we deliver, and once we put all that together, that's when you really get the traction on this as both serving customers and delivering for our organizations, which is what it's all about, am I right?

Camille Kremer: 22:13

They play the light bill literally we don't have a company if we don't have customers.

Jeannie Walters: 22:18

That is absolutely right, and I don't know why we need so many reminders, but we do. But the this last headline here? It's from Newsweek and the headline is Verizon Announcing AI Powered Customer Experience Transformation. And I will be honest, when I read this headline I did a little eye roll, because we've heard this before, right, and we've heard these big declarations before.

Jeannie Walters: 22:44

But when I started reading the article, a few things stood out to me that maybe this is bigger than I was giving it credit for. And a couple things stood out to me. One is yes, they're leaning into AI, they're partnered with Google, but one of the things that they're doing is, instead of just saying, look at all the stuff we're doing at scale or look at the chatbots, they're also investing in more in-person support. They're investing in things like speed to knowledge. So the AI will take in all the transcripts from all the calls that they had in a day and by 11 am the next day, it's the summaries, the themes. What they're hearing is in front of the executives.

Jeannie Walters: 23:25

This is what I think might be the future of where we're going, and I think that this what I liked about this, too, is that it was a little grounded, not in these big, generic, large language models, but they talked about small language models, which we heard a lot about when I was out at the Salesforce conference last whenever that was September, I think and I think that this is what we need to start thinking of is not just these generic ways to use AI, not just big you know announcements about AI, but what will it mean to our customers and how can we tell them that? So I actually saw this, as you know, refreshing in a way, because the headline I've seen before. Frankly, like replace Verizon with somebody else, and we've seen that headline before. And then you read the article and it's like we got a bot. We are so progressive and this one I felt like there are a lot of cool things.

Jeannie Walters: 24:24

I think this might be where we're going with the AI, so we don't have to go in depth with this one. But I'm just curious what you saw, especially from the seat you're sitting at a more mid-sized company. What do you think?

Camille Kremer: 24:35

So I took a lot of the same things away from the article. Like I love to see that we're going to leverage AI where it makes sense.

Jeannie Walters: 24:42

Yeah.

Camille Kremer: 24:42

But we're not losing the human component. They're building more local stores because they recognize that that's a major part of their business. Yeah, actually, expanding the service hours they're offering, right. So let the AI take the you know the rope, easy stuff that we don't need a human to answer the phone for, but that allows us to actually let people, real people answer the phone for these different shifts. That could be, you know, more acceptable to our customers. I thought that was just a beautiful like hybrid blend that it's not to your point, but we typically hear we hear like yeah, it's here and it's going to save the day and everybody's going to lose their job and it's like yeah

Camille Kremer: 25:16

not like a couple of things there. I think AI is a lot like data. It's the rhyme of the ancient mariner like water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Right, I think it's a great. I think it's a great resource, but until you desalinize the water, you can't use it. Until we figure out how to effectively use the data that you brought up earlier, or how do we effectively use the AI, we're just kind of drowning in this epic resource. Yeah, that, not necessarily leveraging it the way that it's nourishing and feeding to us. And I think if companies approach it like the way Verizon sounds like they are where it's not We're rolling this out to decommission humans. They're rolling it out, yes, as I said, as a hybrid, as a partner. Yeah, right, we still need the humans, even to train the AI. It's a very, very informed five-year-old. It is not. It doesn't have empathy, it doesn't have compassion, it doesn't have judgment. It's never lived a day in its life, you know. So, when it deals with people, there will still need to be a person who's training it. I think the big thing is, as we roll AI out, is one demystifying, be like everybody's going to lose their job over it and instead teach people how to work with it as a new colleague, but also recognize if you don't know how to work with it, you will put yourself at a professional disadvantage. So there is an advantage to learning about how to work with this new colleague, but it's not the doomsday or naysayer thing, I think it's really something that it's leveraged correctly, sorry.

Camille Kremer: 26:49

we're last thing. Yeah, I know we're short on time, probably. I also think when we're saying AI now everybody's talking generative AI, Chatgpt, all of those. We've been partnering with AI in most of our tools for a decade or plus, right? So like we use personally, we use Medallia. It reads I mean, we get 275,000 surveys a year. There's only three of us in the department. We can't read them all.

Camille Kremer: 27:17

No I'm not that fast. I also have, like the day job I have to do besides just reading the surveys. I have to drive the insights and do the customer the continuous improvement. So it's reading the comments, it's creating the themes, it's you, it's pointing out the sentiment or quantifying the sentiment and then letting us know how do we, with a scalpel instead of a chainsaw, go in and really refine the customer experience? And nobody was afraid of that. So those types of tools I think are going to expand and make our lives so much easier. Writing summaries great. Nobody likes doing an executive summary. Let it do that. And then free people to be able to do the work that only people can do. So I'm not afraid of it, I love it.

Jeannie Walters: 28:06

I also think that you know you mentioned that Verizon is building new stores and they're kind of they mentioned how they want to be part of the community. That's a very big part of what they're doing. And you think about the people in the stores, the people answering the phones? They need information so fast and in context, and that's another area where AI could really support that so the humans themselves are going to be supported in ways that right now they're held accountable for things that sometimes are impossible because they don't have all the information. And so the fact that now we can use AI in these different ways, I do think it's going to provide a more robust customer experience.

Jeannie Walters: 28:47

But we are at the start of the journey here. We still have a long way to go, and that's what I think is so fascinating. We're all in this together. We're all kind of looking around, going, okay, what's going to happen next and how can we stay ahead of it and how can we make sure? I just had a whole conversation with my 18 year old about that movie 2001 with about HAL the computer, because I was like, literally, this is what people are scared of, Like people are scared of HAL, and we had a whole conversation about it, and so I think that there's going to be just so much evolution in the next couple of months and years and we're all I try to take the approach that we're lucky to be a part of it, right, like we are lucky to be witnessing.

Camille Kremer: 29:30

On the ground floor. Like this is transformative, right.

Camille Kremer: 29:33

I think it's an AI revolution, I think it's a human transformation,

Jeannie Walters: 29:37

yes,

Camille Kremer: 29:38

and I think being at the onset of it is a really cool moment in history where, you know, as long as we're willing to do our homework and you know I like doing homework if we're willing to do our homework, then we can be part of this and kind of ride that wave.

Jeannie Walters: 29:55

And kudos to Verizon and others like it who are really embracing it and starting with their goals and then using AI to support that. So well done, all right, this was so much fun, I knew it would be.

Camille Kremer: 30:05

Thank you, this was wonderful. Thanks for having me.

Jeannie Walters: 30:08

Absolutely Thank you for being here, and if people want to learn more about you or reach out, what's the best way for them to do that?

Camille Kremer: 30:16

For right now, that'd probably be through my LinkedIn, which I will be updating.

Jeannie Walters: 30:23

And we'll make sure that's in the show notes as well. But thank you so much for being here, Camille, and thank you everybody here who has been a part of this program who has sent in those questions at AskJeannie VIP, and just keep those coming. I love answering your questions and hearing from you about the challenges that you're facing as one of those amazing customer experience change agents that we talked about. My thanks to Camille for being here, my thanks to you, and I cannot wait to see you next time on Experience Action Podcast. Take care.