Jeannie Walters: 0:00

Hi everyone, it's Jeannie Walters with Experienced Investigators. I want to invite you to a very special webinar that we are hosting for your fourth quarter. This will be on November 4th, and it's called From Assessment to Action. This is about building your customer experience roadmap. Join us at the link on your screen, which is bit.ly/CXAction. See you there. Sometimes we have to follow policies that might not be the best for the customer. That's what we're tackling here on the Experience Action Podcast.

Listener Question: 0:38

This is Shawn in operations here at Experience Investigators. I received this question via email and thought it'd be good for the podcast. What's the secret to balancing company policies with the flexibility required for exceptional customer experience?

Jeannie Walters: 0:52

Fabulous question. And this is a good reminder that if you have questions for me and you don't really want to leave a voicemail, maybe you're a little shy, go ahead and email us at Experience Investigators, or just go to askjeannie.vip and there's an option there where you can type in your question as well. We love hearing from you. This is such a great question because all of us are in this world and in this job where sometimes we have to follow the rules, right? We don't necessarily write the policies, we don't necessarily understand even where they came from. So sometimes we have to make decisions that don't feel quite right for the customer, even though we're technically quote unquote following a policy. So let's think about this a little differently. You've heard me talk about the importance of a customer experience mission statement. And the reason is because if we don't have that agreement of this is who we are in principle, this is who we are for our values, then we're making every single person in the organization really make judgment calls. An individual judgment is based on our life experience, our history, our values, our assumptions about people. So if we don't have alignment around that, this is where it can get very, very tricky. I like to think about policies as kind of principles more than policies. We want a little flexibility if we can get there. We there isn't really a secret between choosing policies or flexibility. Instead, we want to design policies that empower employees. We want employees to make the quote unquote right decisions with some guardrails. Because if we don't have those guardrails, there are chances that, you know, customers do sometimes exploit the system, right? They sometimes try to take things a little too far. We want to make sure we have proper policies in place so that we can be prepared for those things. But at the same time, we want to have the flexibility and empowerment for our people to make different decisions sometimes based on the situation, based on the relationship, all sorts of things. So before we get too far into it, I want you to think about yourself as both the customer and as the person who is acting on that policy. Because when you can see both sides of this equation, sometimes that leads to different outcomes. So for example, we might have at a retailer a policy that says 30 days only for refunds or returns. But a loyal customer shows up and says, hey, the reason I'm here is because I got this package late. So while the purchase happened 35 days ago, I only got this package a few days ago. If we have a long history with that customer, if they have shown themselves to be a loyal customer, why would we jeopardize that relationship for a few days? These are the types of questions we have to train our frontline on so that they can be empowered to make the right choice for the right moment for the right customer in the right situation. So a couple ways to balance this. First of all, clarify intent behind the policy. If a policy doesn't make sense, we need to raise the alarm on that. We need to ask that question. Because sometimes the intent is based on one thing that went wrong 10 years ago with one customer. So now we're punishing all other customers with a policy that no longer makes sense. Feel free to use your radar when you are thinking about your customers and their experience. Look around for policies that do not make sense for them. And if it's something that you know was based on one time or one customer, start asking about changing that policy. Look for ways that you can give people leeway around that policy. We want to make sure that we're not doing something because one time something didn't go our way. We want to look at the majority of the experiences that our customers have and making them effortless and seamless and delightful. And so we can't do that if we have a bunch of policies that basically are based on what if something goes wrong this one time? It's really about intent. So ask yourself, what is this policy protecting or promoting? If it's protecting financial risk, that's a reality. We have to be prepared to think that way. But let's make sure there's still room here for human judgment. Let's make sure we can still align ourselves with that customer experience mission and ask people to really understand the situation. There are times, especially in regulated industries, where you cannot mess around with those policies. So if that is the truth of the situation, make sure everybody understands that too and why. Because the why is also something we can share with customers. If they are facing a policy that isn't going to be good for them, we want to make sure they understand, we understand this might be frustrating for you, but we are doing this because of XYZ. Now, if the XYZ is always simply because that's what we're told to do, that's not a very good reason. That's why part of this is about the culture. When we say empowerment, we want to empower people with the knowledge and wisdom and understanding so that they can back up these policies if they need to. We also want to equip our teams with not only the, you know, checklist about policies, but really a framework about this. Why are we making certain decisions? When are you empowered to make certain decisions? You can even use things like decision trees to help employees understand when do we need to stick to this policy no matter what? And when could we have a little leeway based on the loyalty that we've seen from the customer, based on the situation or the circumstance, or simply based on the fact that we're looking at a customer who we really believe needs us to make a few adjustments so that they feel like they were treated fairly. Now, can we do that all the time? No. But there are certain circumstances when we can. We also want to start collecting data on exceptions. If you have one of these policies that a lot of people complain about that you don't feel good about, start looking around for when are the times when we would have made an exception but we couldn't, or when are the times when we have made an exception because we had that leeway. If you find that there are more exceptions than following the rule, that is giving you data to go back and look at this policy, these processes, and see if you can make them more proactive, more effortless, and just more feasible for you and the customer. And then, of course, when employees make these decisions, when they are in that situation where they give a little leeway on a policy, or they feel empowered to really do something a little outside of those guardrails, we want to make sure we're looking at all of those examples. And sometimes we want to highlight that was a great thing to do. You made the right choice here. Or it could be a coaching moment where you say, I understand why you wanted to give some leeway on this policy. Let's go over why that probably wasn't the best option in this specific circumstance. Now, policies are there for a reason. We want to protect our organization. We want to make sure we're giving people who work those front lines the ability to really do what they need to do within the structure of our organization, and we want to be fair to customers. So we can't give one customer a whole bunch of options that another customer hasn't. So we have all of these things in place for a reason, but there are individual policies that probably were put in for the wrong reasons. So I do encourage you to question the policies that you have. Are they always needed? Are they always necessary? A great example of this is the culture shift that has happened among public libraries in the United States. Most of us have borrowed a book from the library. When we've done this in the past, there used to be a fee if you did not deliver back that book by the due date. Now there's a lot more flexibility. There usually aren't fines and fees, and libraries are really embracing the role of being a public good, of helping people really connect with books and information and all the great things that our libraries give us. The shift in that has actually provided a lot of opportunities for them to build better relationships with the communities that they serve. So that was a big shift because that was we're talking decades, maybe even a century or more, of if you did not return the book, that was on you as a customer and you had to pay fines for it. They would come after you for that. So now there's an understanding that maybe that policy didn't serve the people we were serving and our organizational mission. So once they started connecting those things together, they changed the entire culture of those policies. That's the type of thing to look for. Ask why. Why do we have these policies? Is that a good enough reason for today's experience? And then deliver the experience that you want and that your customers want within those appropriate guardrails of appropriate policies. So I wish you a lot of luck with this idea of flexibility and this idea of really principled intent. We want to make sure that we are providing the right intentions when we set up policies, journeys, and everything else for the people that we serve. Bottom line is policies should be guardrails, not roadblocks. So I encourage you, look around today, see if there are policies that maybe you can adjust or even get rid of, and then ask yourself: what are the things we can do to empower our people to live within those policies and still deliver what they need to to our customers? This is another great question. So thank you so much to all of the CX leaders out there who are listening, who are watching this. And don't forget, you can always ask at askjeannie.vip. See you next time. 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.