Jeannie Walters: 0:00

Welcome to the Experience Action Podcast where I answer your real world questions and today we have a great one. So let's listen in.

Listener Question: 0:09

Hey Jeannie, this question came to us from Lee-Anne. Love your show all the way here from Melbourne, Australia. I'd love your perspective on effective offboarding feedback approaches. Here's the challenge we're seeing. Immediate feedback often reflects what account managers already know. Waiting a few months before reaching out allows customers to settle with a new provider and offer more balanced comparative insights. From your experience, what works best? You've noticed that much of our feedback points to a lack of process and heavy reliance on individuals who may move on or deliver inconsistent experiences. When we talk about investing in consistent experiences, such as processes and structure, leadership often disengages. Eye glaze moment. With AI, there's a perception that drafting processes is easy, but the real challenge lies in OCM, compliance, monitoring, and management. What have you seen work in terms of timing, framing, and getting leadership buy-in for structured approaches?

Jeannie Walters: 0:58

Oh my goodness, I bet so many of us could relate to this on so many levels. First of all, there is no perfect moment for feedback in general, but offboarding feedback is especially challenging. And Lee-Anne, I love that you mentioned eye glaze moment. Because I think we've all seen that with our leaders too, when they don't really get what we're trying to do, when they think that it's one thing and we're saying it's another. So let's dig into this. When we talk about offboarding, we have to remember our customers, we have to remember that we are kind of intruding in their life after the relationship. So a couple of things that I want to highlight. One is I think there is a difference in what we get based on timing. Now, humans are really funny creatures. We misremember all the time. We get very emotional and we make decisions based on emotions. And we also sometimes don't want to share feedback when we are emotional. And so there is a difference, I believe, in asking immediately and then later on. Now, the trick is, I think that both of those things really apply to valuable customer experience insights. So let's talk about that. If we have a two-phased offboarding feedback approach, that would look like immediate feedback and then delayed feedback. So immediate feedback is where we want to get that operational learning. We want to keep it very short and focused. And we have to acknowledge that sometimes this is emotional. We might get those emotional raw responses, but it might not be giving us insights that we're unaware of. Some of the questions that I think you could ask that might lead to interesting things. What was the breaking point? Why did you leave us? What made staying harder than leaving? That's a great question. What promises did we fail to keep? Now, these are hard questions to ask, and they're even harder to hear the answers to. So as you put those questions out there, I encourage you to remember we show up with humility. We have to be the vessels. We have to open up with our minds and our hearts and really listen to the feedback that we get. Otherwise, what I've seen happen is we ask these great questions, like, what made staying harder than leaving? And they tell us, and then people get very defensive and they say, Oh, they don't understand. We have all this paperwork we have to do. We are, we have to be compliant. They don't understand. And they're not really hearing the feedback, the gift of feedback that they've been given. So I encourage you to both ask right away and be very strategic, short, and concise about what you're asking and make sure you know why you're asking it. And then as you put it out to the world, remind yourself this is not always easy to hear, but that's what we're here for. So make sure that you have that open heart and open mind and listen with compassion and humility when they give you that feedback. Now, this will probably validate a lot of what you already know. This probably highlights some red flags that you already know are red, but that's okay. This is more of signal detection. Sometimes we learn one or two things here that raise that question mark of, ooh, what does that really mean? And we have to investigate further. Look for those things, but also understand that part of this is just checking in immediately, giving those customers a chance to share, and also giving us a way to validate what we believe we know. Then think about following up and getting more feedback, maybe 60 to 120 days, even six months, depending on your industry. You, this is where we get more strategic insight. And what I want you to do with this one is flip the script and think about instead of what was the pain, I want you to find out what's going well now and where are those differences? They are probably working with another provider. They have now comparison, they are in that mode of really being treated as a new customer, which is often a little bit of both a honeymoon and a challenge, depending on the industry. So you can ask them comparison questions, like what's easier now? What surprised you about your new provider? Is there anything you miss or anything you don't miss? So we, this is where you can get into things that really highlight process gaps that you might have, um, inconsistencies, ways that maybe your structural weaknesses were masked by employees, because this happens a lot. We, if we get feedback that's all about employee names, usually what that's telling us is that there are certain employees who are heroes who are saving the day all the time, but they are masking the structural weaknesses of your organization. If your customer experience design is not intentional and proactive, then it's going to be reactive. And these customer heroes are going to respond accordingly and do a great job, but it sets up your customer journey for inconsistencies, not to be as seamless as it could be. Making rework often with different employees or different departments and teams. So make sure that you are really looking for those things when you get that more seasoned, uh, thoughtful feedback when somebody really has a chance to kind of settle in and understand what those comparisons are. Now, I will say these this is harder to get that delayed feedback. So it's important to, if you can, maintain that relationship with the customers who have left you. Make sure that you are still reaching out, seeing how they're doing. Are they all going to respond? No, they won't, but it's worth asking. So with when you put this all together, you will start seeing patterns around reliance on individual employees, and you know that that's going to lead to inconsistency. You're going to see inconsistent execution and maybe that lack of process that you talked about as well. But it's not only a process problem, it's really about a risk problem. And that's the language we need to use with our leaders. So when we're talking about things like, well, we really need to change the process, they're sitting there thinking, why? So we want to make sure that we are really understanding why we are asking to change this process? Well, because if we do it well, it means that we're going to have fewer customers leave us. We're going to have more customers feel comfortable to maybe upsell or cross-sell or stay with us longer, all of those different things. This is where leadership checks out when we don't give them the why. They care about the why, not the how, which is the process. So instead of saying process, start talking about things like consistency, risk reduction, speed to value, resilience, even things like enterprise memory. When we have a really highly skilled employee who serves our customers leave, they leave with all that knowledge, all of that experience. And if they are one of those heroes that has basically created work personal workarounds to get around our processes, that can be very detrimental to that customer relationship. So our customers are leaving because outcomes depend on who they get and not how they operate. That is not a sustainable, consistent way to deliver on the customer experience. So as you're thinking about this, yes, I totally agree that AI can draft a process in minutes, but it cannot make people adopt it. It cannot make people trust it, and it cannot necessarily improve it. We need people for that. That means we really need to understand that experience, the experience that we deliver within our organization, it lives everywhere. It lives with compliance, it lives with monitoring, it lives with coaching, it lives with all of the ways that we interact with our employees and with the tools that they use, like AI. So it's really not about documenting the process, it's about the discipline of making sure everybody's on board with it and then executing on that. So it is not just a flip the light switch, let AI do it. We can never do that with this type of process. We have to make sure that we are getting people on board, that they are understanding the why, because if we don't give them why, they're going to start thinking, why am I doing this? Right? This is silly. So as you get that leadership buy-in, because we don't want you to have those glazed eyes. That's not, nope, no more of that. We're going to link this feedback, whatever we have, and with the insights that we gather, we're going to link that to financial either reward or exposure, meaning talk about customer churn, talk about rework, talk about hiring and how expensive that can be, talk about employee burnout, talk about onboarding costs when key people leave. Show patterns, not anecdotes. So if you can talk about like we heard this from the last 60% of our customers when they were leaving, a pattern is a leadership problem. That's what they're hearing. And then we want to make sure that we are really positioning structure as freedom. Structure doesn't slow great people down, it actually accelerates the work they do. If we can protect customers from inconsistencies and kind of the randomness of it depends on who you get, then we are actually creating an intentional customer experience that we can all understand, that we have defined the mindset to, we have defined the strategy, and now we have the discipline to really execute it. So the most effective offboarding feedback strategies, they don't just ask why customers have left. They don't just kind of beg with desperation, you know, why'd you leave us? We thought we, it's not, it's not you, it's us. We're so sad. Um, what we want to do with offboarding is actually reveal why customers are quietly drifting. What are they tolerating that they're not even commenting on that we could do something about to keep them? And when leadership sees this really clearly, especially through that really comprehensive feedback with uh both immediate and delayed feedback, if you can get it, it becomes much harder to ignore the needs of the structure you have that has to scale along with your customers. So I'm curious what you think about this. So, Lee-Anne, if you're listening to this, please let us know. And for all of you out there, are you conducting offboarding feedback? And if not, why not? Are you scared of it? Do you not know what it says and you're a little nervous, or do you think you know what it all says? So, whatever the answer is, I encourage you to think about what you can do to learn from the customers who leave us? Because this is a gold mine of insights that can really help you prioritize the right improvements for your customers and possibly more importantly, for your organizational results. And that's what this is all about, folks. We have to make sure that we are constantly talking to our leaders about the fact that our work and understanding our customers and delivering for them actually helps deliver on those organizational goals. Thank you so much for this question. Don't forget, you can always ask me a question at askjeannie.vip. You can record me a voicemail, or if you'd rather write it out, you can do that too. And somebody on my team will record it for us just like today. We are going to have so much fun and cover so many more things. So if you haven't already, please subscribe. And also, we love your ratings and reviews. If you haven't already given us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts, we sure do appreciate that because it helps other customer experience leaders just like you discover the Experience Action podcast. Thank you so much, and I will see you next time. Thanks for listening to Experience Action brought to you by Experience Investigators. 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