CXChronicles Podcast 222 with Sandra Thompson, Founder of Ei Evolution & TEDx Speaker

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #222 we  welcomed Sandra Thompson, Founder Director of The Ei Evolution based in London, England. 

The Ei Evolution intends to achieve three things by 2030: 

1) Employees experience more joy in their work as colleagues are more thoughtful and bosses are more compassionate. 

2) People have longer-lasting positive memories of their experiences as customers when businesses use neuroscience, psychology and behavioural science to create stronger emotional connections. 

3) Teachers and their pupils thrive as they develop the skill of emotional intelligence

In this episode, Sandra and Adrian chat through how she has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback and shares tips & best practices that have worked across her own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #222 Highlight Reel:**

1. Why building world class CX is like building a puzzle, piece by piece
2. Building your "Spider-Senses" as you evolve into a customer focused business leader
3. Creating clarity around accountability, responsibility, authority with your team
4. Listen to front line employees to understand the primary customer friction points 
5. Understanding the situation, behaviors and impact that your business has on its users
 
Huge thanks to Sandra for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring her work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Sandra Thompson

Click here to checkout Ei Evolution

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Go tell one of your friends or teammates about CXC's content,  our strategic partners (Hubspot, Intercom, Zendesk, Forethought AI, Freshworks & Ascendr) + they can learn more about our CX/CS/RevOps services & please invite them to join the CX Nation!

Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused video content & short-reel CTAs to improve your CX/CS/RevOps performance today (politely go smash that subscribe button).

Contact us anytime to learn more about CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com and ask us about how we can help your business & team make customer happiness a habit now!

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #222 with Sandra Thompson.mp4

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CXChronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady-Cesana. Today, guys, we have an awesome guest. Sandra Thompson is joining us. Sandra, say hello to the CX Nation. 

Sandra (00:00:17) - Hey, CX Nation. How are you? 

Adrian (00:00:21) - Sandra, first of all, why don't you let everybody know where you are working out of today? 

Sandra (00:00:26) - So today I am in a place called Caversham, which is about 25 minutes west of London. 

Adrian (00:00:34) - Fantastic. So, guys, one of my favorite parts about just the last several years of building CXC and doing the podcast is having friends like Sandra that are all over the world. This is why I'm always saying customer-focused business leaders from across the world. Guys, Sandra has some incredible experience. She has spoke all over the world. She has taught all sorts of different groups across the world. She's done some amazing content. And she's someone that I'm super-duper pumped to have on the show and share her story. 

Adrian (00:01:04) - So, Sandra, why don't you take over the mic? Start off today's show like we start off all of our episodes. Take a couple minutes just to kind of give us your background. Give us kind of some of the stepping stones. How did you get into this type of space? And what were some of the things that you were doing earlier in your career that made you realize you wanted to think about CX and employee experience and empathy at work and all these awesome things that you're always talking about? 

Sandra (00:01:29) - Crikey, have we got long enough? 

Sandra (00:01:30) - I'm pretty old, you know. 

Sandra (00:01:32) - Okay, so let's start then with the explanation. I did a degree. The degree had a year within it where I had a placement. So I did a bit of accounting and I did a bit of finance and a bit of HR. And then I did marketing. Marketing. Now I'm liking this. So I decided then when I graduated that I would try to get marketing roles, which I did for about 18 years. I worked for a number of charities and commercial organizations. 

Sandra (00:02:00) - And the heart of it was, not surprisingly, how to influence customers, how to get brilliant propositions, fantastic communication to customers. But you know what's coming next? Did the brand promise actually deliver on the ground? Not always, which caused me massive frustration. So I had this opportunity to go over to New York. Can you believe it? In the UK we weren't doing this. We were doing customer service. We weren't doing customer experience at that point. Came over to New York, whole week, customer experience. 

Sandra (00:02:33) - I now have the badge. 

Sandra (00:02:35) - So when I had a head of a marketing role in a quite big charity in England and I was invited to influence a customer relationship management, so a data project, I said, I'll do it, but under the condition that we create a patient experience program. 

Sandra (00:02:55) - Ta-da! 

Adrian (00:02:56) - Love it, love it. 

Sandra (00:02:56) - And they bought it. 

Adrian (00:03:00) - Wait, I have a question for you. Were there issues, constraints, blockers, or problems that made them buy that and made them want you to go ahead and push forward with that? 

Sandra (00:03:10) - They recognized that the patient wasn't the only audience and they didn't know how to knit all of these different stakeholder groups together. They knew from a very logical, very put them into a box perspective where they needed to go, but they didn't know what to do with all of those connections. And they knew, as everyone does in a common sense perspective, the sum is much greater than the individual units. 

Sandra (00:03:40) - And when I played to them how through a patient experience program we could get better results by looking at those interdependencies, that's what they bought. So they were nervous about it because this patient experience, like customer experience, wasn't a thing. But they were also, luckily for me, quite innovative and a little bit risk-taking. So I basically took advantage of that. 

Adrian (00:04:07) - That's fantastic. Do you mind me asking? How popular or how many people were thinking about the notion of customer journeys or patient journeys or employee journeys at this stage in your career out of curiosity? Was this already still a big thing? Were we calling it something different? Was it absolutely the norm? Because what I just heard you say is you're literally putting all those puzzle pieces together. 

Adrian (00:04:33) - You're getting the right SMEs to figure out how the hell to put it together and that's where you start to see some gains and that's where you start to see some opportunities. But what did it look like at that point in your career?

Sandra (00:04:43) - It's a great question, because I was avidly reading materials from beyond philosophy so people like Colin Shaw, who really are, you know, they're the pioneers in this space. I was reading all of that material and so I knew that this was going on. But as far as patient experience is concerned, I'm going to be bold and say, I hadn't ever seen it in the patient experience before. And there is one thing that is categorically clear. 

Sandra (00:05:12) - At that point, wasn't seeing it in employee, it was still the normal HR boxes and processes of you do these things in this particular order. So there were, it was happening. Definitely customer experience was happening, but it was embryonic. It wasn't established. It wasn't part of common parlance. It wasn't, it was very much about how to manage data and CRM. That's really the main conversation in town. And we know, don't we, that very often CRM projects failed because while they harvested all the data and cleaned it all up and that was all lovely. 

Sandra (00:05:50) - What then were they doing with it? 

Adrian (00:05:51) - Yeah, right. Right. A hundred percent. Yep. Yep. 

Sandra (00:05:55) - And the scary thing is, Adrian, that still goes on in some places. 

Adrian (00:05:59) - I was literally just going to say, you and I both know this still happens and it still happens at companies that are technically financially killing it, right? They could be doing tens of millions of dollars a year. They could have a hundred, 200, 500 people, and it's still happening to this day. And you still have, and then it's funny because in the age of AI and data, data, data, data, data, data, like we still have these silos. We still have these disconnects. 

Adrian (00:06:24) - People still struggle to be able to aggregate or stitch things together to see a singular report. And then I'd say most companies, even great companies struggle with really kind of breaking down some of the numbers and some of the metrics and some of the data into what's leading indicators, what's lagging indicators. How do these metrics tie to financial success? It's crazy. We're still seeing it in 2024. 

Sandra (00:06:48) - It's absolutely true. So let me come back to that because that's quite, that's an interesting point I'd like to highlight later in my journey. So, so I then decided when there was a reorganization at this organization that I would leave and become a consultant because I decided at that point, I'd listened to a lot of consultants. They had repeated what I'd said. The organization had listened to that person and not me. Now it's time for me to be one of those people. So, so I set up, I set up my consultancy and I was doing customer experience. 

Sandra (00:07:27) - I was also doing sorry, I beg your pardon, student experience, which was another big coup. So I worked for the Open University, which is a global organization. I worked in the UK helping them organize themselves in a way. And the story unfolds that I then a few years later start to teach. I go into a college in central London and I say, I've done this student experience stuff. I really, really like what you stand for. Can I help you? Let's do some journeys. Let's do some insight. And they said, no, I don't think so. 

Adrian (00:08:01) - But could you teach this? I was like, are you joking? 

Sandra (00:08:04) - And I just, and honestly, I don't even remember this, but I said, yes. And then they said, great. Can you kind of get all the stuff together? I said, well, you haven't got this material. They know you can write it. You write and teach it. So I left there. 

Adrian (00:08:21) - Did you ever done that before? Did you ever design? 

Sandra (00:08:23) - No, never. 

Adrian (00:08:25) - Because this is hilarious. Even if you're an expert at something, even if you know a ton about something, the whole world of just designing curriculum, designing training, that's hard. 

Sandra (00:08:35) - I've done training, I've done training, but I hadn't done academic teaching. That's the difference. And so while I had done a master's and I thought that was great, I'd never taught 18, 19 and 20 year olds before. But you know, when you get faced with a question and you answer it and you feel every fiber of 

Sandra (00:08:53) - And it's so exciting. 

Adrian (00:08:55) - So that was me. 

Sandra (00:08:59) - And I walked out of there thinking, I don't know what I've just done, but I think it's going to be great. And so I taught for five years as well as doing consultancy work. And that was the brilliant thing about this particular college is that they had practitioners who taught. And I was very, very fortunate because at that time, because I taught in a particular way, they said, right, great that you're teaching that, can you now also teach people management and leadership? We have got some stuff there. And so I started teaching that. 

Sandra (00:09:28) - And that's really where the whole employee experience light bulb went off for me. So here I am as a consultant, I'm now teaching and then I do my TEDx. I bet you wish you'd asked about this question, isn't it? Really? There's a long story, long short of it. I do my TEDx. I talk about emotional intelligence. And then I think to myself academically, I know what this is, but actually I need to become more emotionally intelligent. So I apply to Daniel Goldman and his team and I say, can I become a coach, please? That would be great. I send it off. 

Sandra (00:10:06) - It takes me ages to fill it in and they accept me.

Sandra (00:10:11) - So I go off to Vienna. I learn how to be an emotional intelligence coach. I learn how to be more emotionally intelligent and that's really where we are now. So I do consulting in customer experience and employee experience, but using the science that I've learned that's associated with emotional intelligence. 

Sandra (00:10:31) - So neuroscience, psychology, to try and help people see it's not just about process and rational thinking, because our beautiful brains are messy, confused and a right old mess, but we have to deal with that and that's when we get much better outcomes, when we recognize that brains aren't straightforward. 

Adrian (00:10:56) - Yep, sandra, first of all, I absolutely love that and I love your background. I love your story. Before I let you get off this, though, can you go deeper on that emotional intelligence piece? Because I think when I think about my career and you think about some of the people that you worked with that were extremely high IQ, so maybe math and being pragmatic and being very logically thoughtful, that's one thing right and we need those people. 

Adrian (00:11:23) - But as I got deeper into my career, I think what I started to realize about the best leaders- EQ, I mean, yes, they had. Obviously you have to have IQ, but EQ- their ability- I started to use the word spidey sense on a regular basis, being able to feel your team, being able to feel your customer, being able to hear one thing, but you know it means another thing. Or being able to almost pull something out that somebody doesn't want to share, but the friction you're feeling, or the rub that you're feeling, it's because they don't want to. 

Adrian (00:11:59) - Maybe they don't know how to say the thing, so can you just I want to hear a little bit more about sort of like what you learned, or even if there's like one or two thoughts for our listeners to think about when it comes to like the emotional intelligence side or ways of thinking about how it can help your business. I'd just love to hear some ideas on that. 

Sandra (00:12:21) - It's exciting and it made me get some goosebumps when you were talking just then about some of the aspects of emotional intelligence, because it is everything you've just said plus some. The definition that I use is Daniel Goleman's, not surprisingly, and it's all about knowing yourself, knowing, recognising, understanding the emotions that you feel in order to be present and to help to understand the emotions of others, with the result being better relationships and also a better sense of well-being for yourself. 

Sandra (00:13:05) - So when we look at some of the models out there, the academic models. We've got these 12 competencies. The headlines are emotional self-awareness, we've got management of self, social intelligence and relationship management, and I highlight those very slowly because lots of people get confused between empathy and emotional intelligence. They are not the same thing. Let me tell you that, for now, most often in our society we think that empathy is standing in someone's shoes. 

Sandra (00:13:46) - I'm here to tell you that you cannot do that, because I have not lived your life. I do not know what your values, what your beliefs are. I don't know how you experience experience. I don't know what has triggers for you, what brings you joy, and I don't know the context of the moment. So I really encourage everyone who works in customer experience: stop talking about getting in someone's shoes, because it just doesn't work. The beautiful thing about emotional intelligence is when you recognise your own emotion. 

Sandra (00:14:20) - Then you are better equipped to empathise, because you are present for the other person to tell you whatever they want to tell you, and that's not up for you to interpret and say: oh yeah, I know my friends had that, or yeah, I've been in exactly the same situation, because their experience, their emotions, are their own. When you hold the space and you are curious and you are gentle and you are encouraging. You will build rapport, you will build trust and people will feel significant as a consequence of your intervention. That is the game changer. 

Adrian (00:15:01) - I love that. That's so well said. What you just made me think about is- and I did not know this at the time, but, like early in my career, I think- 

Adrian (00:15:09) - And I promise you, I'm not a great listener outside of work. But what I started to kind of realize at some of the companies I was at in New York City was if I just remained quiet and calm and I listened to what the customer had to say, whether it was an escalation, and then, Sandra, just like you, I'm your boy on this front, always listening to the employees because the employees that you cannot have world-class CX without incredible EX. It's your people that are going to deliver everything. Me and you are in the exact same band there. 

Adrian (00:15:41) - But what I started to realize was if I could remain quiet, calm, almost soothing, like what I mentioned about continuing and trying to pull out more, tell me more about this. And then also kind of dropping the company logo. Like you have to almost put the company logo down for a minute, but you're absolutely right. Number one, you would just have a better conversation. Number two, you could take somebody that was up here at an 11 and kind of start to pull them back down to a better place. 

Adrian (00:16:10) - The other thing too that I always, as I got deeper into the career, you would kind of listen to the customer side of things. You would listen to the employee side of things. And almost every single time, the resolution or the right answer or the right way of remediating whatever that issue was, was right there. And I love what you're saying about just some of the different stages of this because you're right. Empathy is one thing. Emotional intelligence is another thing. 

Adrian (00:16:36) - But nothing is more frustrating than when you tell somebody something and they go, oh, you know what? This happened to me once. It's like, wait, did you even, did you hear what I just said? Did you hear what I just said? So I love it. That's why, and by the way, for our listeners, this is something to crack into. I like just even thinking about a reading more about high level on this. This is like something that could really change the way that you actually interact with your customers and interact with your team on a daily basis. 

Sandra (00:17:02) - It's a really great point. So those of you who like a good book and a gripping read, I'd like to recommend to you Lisa Feldman Barrett, who talks about how emotions are made. And she also wrote something called Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain. There's another one that's come out, but I can't remember the title of it. But I think if we think about the language we use very often, I felt something like that. Someone I know went through something like that, where you can automatically see the flags of this isn't about you, this is about me. 

Sandra (00:17:40) - Do you know what I mean? So when we then say, when you then say, oh, I can't imagine how you might feel about that, or I can't think of examples now, but if you even think about empathy, if you imagine you've got a projector on your head, so, you know, you go to the cinema and it's projecting onto the screen. 

Sandra (00:17:59) - Yeah. 

Sandra (00:18:00) - Imagine you as the projectionist, and the person that you're trying to empathise with is standing where the screen is. When you just use empathy without emotional intelligence, all you're doing is projecting all of the stuff that you're feeling onto them. So not only is it not good, it's actually doing more damage because they're thinking, exactly as you just said, you're not paying any attention, and this is all about you. So do you know what? I'm not talking to you anymore, because you're not paying attention, and it's really annoying. 

Adrian (00:18:30) - And that's when people shut down and they start to look for another path or another door or another person to talk to. 

Sandra (00:18:36) - Or they get more angry, let's face it. I've been listening into calls before now where it's incendiary for that customer. It's actually better, as you just described, to make some non-verbal, you know, some sounds to let them know you're listening, but just shut up for a minute. 

Adrian (00:18:55) - Yep, there was the saying I always love to share with people is you cannot learn anything when you're talking, right? You can only learn things when you're listening to people, whether it's work, whether it's your family, whether it's your friends, it doesn't matter. Sandra, I'd love to kind of hear you talk about the first pillar, team, for a couple of minutes. 

Adrian (00:19:16) - Over your career and over all the different companies that you've worked with and all the different teams that you've had the privilege of working with and alongside, spend a couple minutes talking about some of the lessons that you've kind of learned about what makes a great team dynamic, number one, and then number two, just what are some tips or some ideas for our listeners who are building their teams, scaling their teams, getting ready to, you know, rocket ship up into the future, and they know that their team's about to really get big. 

Adrian (00:19:43) - Spend a few minutes just kind of talking about some of the things that you've learned along your own journey around teams. 

Sandra (00:19:48) - Thank you. This is quite an exciting invitation because I'm going to answer it in a number of different ways, if that's all right. So I'm going to talk about myself and a team who I nurtured, and then I'm going to talk to you about a client I had, and I'm also going to back it up with some academic study. I wasn't expecting to do that, so that's really good. 

Adrian (00:20:13) - That sounds perfect. 

Sandra (00:20:16) - So I worked for a charity quite early on in my career. I was a manager of seven people, and they had been managed very differently to how I managed. They were previously managed in quite a controlling way. Here's what you do. Don't take another step. A lot of micromanagement. When I inherited the team, I said, do you know, this is the outcome that I'm trying to get to.

Sandra (00:20:43) - this is the budget, this is when I need it done. Off you go. And they froze because they weren't used to it because they didn't feel safe, because they didn't know me. And so I was having one-to-ones with them, hey, getting on, oh, lots of reasons why no progress had been made. And I had to gain their trust. They had to feel assured that if they made, in adverted commas, a mistake, they weren't going to be reprimanded because they had previously been reprimanded when they had made a mistake. 

Sandra (00:21:19) - And so what that meant is, over a short amount of time, I did what I said I was going to do. I listened exceptionally carefully. I delivered on the things they needed or I preempted I thought they might need. And over time, they built the trust in me. And do you know what? With that autonomy, they smashed it out of the park. 

Adrian (00:21:46) - Wow. 

Sandra (00:21:47) - Here's the example now of the client. 

Adrian (00:21:49) - So- Sandra, one second, really quick. I just want to add one thing to what you just said. I fricking love what you just said. We have clients at CXC that look at me like I am an alien. When I start to use the three words, I say, okay, we need to think about who's accountable, who's responsible, and who has the authority to get shit done. And when I say that, they look at me like, they're paying me all this money for that type of talk. 

Adrian (00:22:15) - And I say, look, and I know that you've seen this in your career, even big companies, when you look at all the CTAs, all the different project items, all the different lines that they need to think about pushing across the line, so many companies miss the accountability, responsibility, authority piece. You can't gain trust, credibility, respect without giving people those three items, right? Because that's clarity. 

Adrian (00:22:39) - And then it's also like, we both do this for some of the best people that we've ever worked with, or some of our favorite past teammates, or the people that we still love and maybe we don't even work with them. It's because once they're given that type of a track, man, A players are going to fricking run. They're going to run, run, run, and they're going to get stuff done. And then those are the guys and gals that keep getting more and more and more stuff under their belts in their career. So sorry, go to your client example. 

Sandra (00:23:03) - But I just want to build on something you just said, because I think there's one thing to, and I learned this quite early in my career, there's one thing to have a conversation about the accountability, the authority, et cetera. But it's absolutely a dialogue where the individual accepts that and has the opportunity to challenge, to fight back, to query, to reject those things. Because unless you have that psychological contract, it's going to unravel. So I think that I'm in agreement with what you're saying. 

Sandra (00:23:40) - I think I'm adding something which is saying, in an organization, you've got to seek the permission for it. You can't give it out and expect people to want it. 

Adrian (00:23:50) - Great point, great point, 100%. Some people are literally built ready or just silly enough to say yes and to raise their hand and to take things on. And then you're right, some people like following orders and they like following, give me the list, I'll come back when it's done, give me the next. You're absolutely right, it's leveraging the different types of people in your organization and on your team. You're absolutely right, you have to be mindful of that. 

Sandra (00:24:18) - And only bring it up because I've seen it. I've seen that whole, well, I gave it to you, or I didn't really want it. And anyway, so back on then to the example of the client. Worked for a bank, it was quite a disruptor bank actually, not high street in England. And the way that this group of people spoke to one another, the way that they had utter respect for one another and how each of them was cognizant of each individual's preferences, how they like to get work done, how you got the best work out of them was quite incredible. 

Sandra (00:25:00) - So we were doing a customer experience transformation program with them. They were having brand changes, all sorts of stuff, but the conversations were so healthy because they had the confidence to challenge. They had the confidence and some amazing ideas. You wouldn't actually be able to see from behavior who was in charge because it was so healthy as a group of people. And the underpinning of all of this is psychological safety.

Sandra (00:25:31) - This is the whole thing around what is it that I need to feel safe and there are some amazing models out there, there's some really great tests you can take that ask you a whole bunch of questions and out pop your top domain, the thing that is, if something happens in this space, that's it, it's game over. And for me, and when I took this test, it was fairness, if you're not fair, or you're not treating people fairly, game over, and it's other things for other people. 

Sandra (00:26:04) - And what we know from the work of Amy Edmondson, fearless organisation, she's done a TEDx, she's worked incredibly hard in this space, she talks about this and also Google found in their project Aristotle between 2012 to 2015, again, psychological safety is the secret source of teams and progress and performance and productivity. 

Adrian (00:26:34) - So it's funny, because I think, number one, it makes so much sense. I feel like there are so many companies across the world that do not have that. I mean, you hear it from, I mean, you can hear it in sales calls, before you ever start working with the client, you can hear disagreement, you can hear, you can see certain people that are big contributors being very quiet, you can see disagreements. You see it all the time, right? 

Adrian (00:27:02) - One other example, too, that I think the entire world just watched is as much as I dislike the Kansas City Chiefs, Sandra, because I am a Buffalo Bills fan, Travis Kelsey came right up to the coach and yelled at him right before the end of the game. They won the Super Bowl five minutes later, and then they were hugging. And I know that that might have been breaking chain of command or whatever the hell you want to call it. 

Adrian (00:27:24) - But when I hear you say psychological safety, clearly there was some type of relationship, trust, respect, and safety, where that, and I get it, passions fly in sports and football and soccer, I get it. But there's safety there for that to have even happened, and then to be hugging five minutes later after they win the damn thing, kind of interesting. 

sandra (00:27:45) - I believe that's true. 

Sandra (00:27:46) - And if you get a chance to see Amy Ebbinson's TEDx, you'll see how far this goes. Those people who are able to do their best work and do their best work for customers and do their best work for one another and for themselves are, of course, those that thrive, those that are frightened of speaking up for fear of reprimand or embarrassment or shame, shame being one of the most horrific emotions to feel, it's indelible. You know, you really got to wake up to that stuff. 

Sandra (00:28:24) - And I just would encourage people, if they can, to take a look at, it's come out of my head for a minute, it's a, perhaps I can send it to you as a link for people to have a look at. But there's a particular book, which is all about brain science, and it gives you a connection into a little test. And even if you did that, everyone talked about their results. It's a step forward. 

Adrian (00:28:50) - Yep. 

Sandra (00:28:50) - Yep. 

Adrian (00:28:51) - That makes a ton of sense. Sandra, I'd love to pick your brain on tools and process. All these different companies spend a tremendous amount of money on their SaaS or on their software or on their tools. Many companies really, they don't invest as much as they probably should on the process piece, which is, for me, by the way, it's funny. 

Adrian (00:29:13) - When you were talking about team and EX, process for me, I think what so many companies get wrong, that's a part of the investment for EX, meaning taking time to actually build incredible playbooks, taking time to, people like us that are making content, think about which mediums or which different channels your employees want to learn. Maybe they don't want to read. I don't read. Like, I've written a book and I don't read. 

Sandra (00:29:35) - I listen. I listen to podcasts. 

Adrian (00:29:36) - I listen to video, audio, imagery. People learn in different ways. What's funny is we keep spending more and more money on tools and technology. 

Adrian (00:29:50) - I would just love to hear you chat about what you've seen different companies or different clients do with the way that they're leveraging their tech stack, but also because of how much time you're thinking about the employee experience, what are some awesome things that you've seen some businesses do on the process side to really make sure the tool utilization and just general day-by-day-by-day comprehension of sort of expectations and the roles and responsibility. I'd love to kind of hear you kind of talk about those two areas. 

Sandra (00:30:17) - So that's a very big subject, and I'm going to pick out a few things that will answer a minuscule amount, but it will at least speak to your question. So there's a whole raft of different ways to design your processes. There's the legacy. We've always done it that way. And then there's the patch-up, which is we've kind of tried to accommodate some stuff. 

Sandra (00:30:43) - And then there's the agile of, we're always on, there's loads of others as well, but we're always on the move because we're always trying to respond to the changing needs of our customers, respond to the fact that our employees want to work differently, responding to the fact that there are new tech, there are new channels of communication that people are using. In Saudi, well, I was in Saudi last month, everything is on WhatsApp. Documents are sent to me. Sign this, do this, message it, like voice message, text messages, documents. 

Sandra (00:31:15) - It's all going on in that channel. I was like, whoa, this is amazing. 

Adrian (00:31:20) - That's kind of nice, though. That's easy. It's all right here. It's easy to use. 

Sandra (00:31:24) - I know. 

sandra (00:31:24) - But there's me saying, could you email that, please? 

Sandra (00:31:28) - Because, you know, like a right old ladder. 

Adrian (00:31:29) - Because of the way you catalog it and the way that you kind of have built your process. 

Sandra (00:31:35) - So isn't that interesting from a cultural perspective? So.

Sandra (00:31:39) - One thing I know- I'm gonna make a few points here: when you listen to the employees interpretation of the customer journey, you will know who, whether your processes are right or not. And this is the frontline employee. Because time and again- and I know everyone listening will know this- we design process for the silos within our organization, for the risk adverse nature of the business that we run. So we'll ask people to sign something in triplet, triplicate, because we want to make sure the financial director is happy, that there's no risk, etc. 

Sandra (00:32:24) - Etc. 

Sandra (00:32:25) - Etc. 

Sandra (00:32:27) - Because of the speed of technology, you can actually probably strip out two-thirds of your processes because you can get data from somewhere else rather than applying for a mortgage and it taking two hours. We're going to plug into a whole bunch of other data so that this process doesn't take 15 minutes. It takes a nanosecond because it's pre populated from somewhere else. So I think I might be on a bit of a ramble now. 

Sandra (00:32:55) - The fact here is, when you interview your employees- they do frontline employees- they will tell you what is a pain in the neck for them, causes more time and wasted efforts- and they'll tell you, if you don't already have the data, what is a pain in the neck for their customers. 

Adrian (00:33:13) - Absolutely. 

Sandra (00:33:14) - How else could we do that? By basically giving customers what sits in their normal world, and that's why I'm giving you the example of whatsapp. Ultimately, everything was done and dusted in 10 minutes in my visa application because they took a bunch of data from somewhere else. I got a what's that? Message to confirm: do this, do that done? Yep, because they know that whatsapp is used more often. They know that they don't need XYZ and blah, blah, blah really, because they can get that from somewhere else. 

Sandra (00:33:48) - So why aren't we in our processes thinking intelligently about the whole life of the customer and where they're at and what channels they use and when they're likely to be transacting with me? You know, the majority of things I do- and I'm sure you're the same- is on my phone. It's in the little moments of time in between all the meetings I've got. So it's got to be faster. I've got to be able to pick it up again. 

Sandra (00:34:14) - Yeah, so we should be reviewing process again from the messy brains that we have thinking about the whole person, not about the organization. 

Adrian (00:34:27) - Yeah, I love that center. Um, one thing that you immediately just made me think about: when we do our journey mapping with our clients at CXC. We basically there's two different areas that, as we're going across the journey, that we put right on top of each other. So we will start with the customer friction or consternation points and then, by the way, I love that you called out frontline staff. I don't even do journey maps if I don't have guys or gals that are talking to customers every damn day. I love the executives. We need the executives. 

Adrian (00:34:58) - They run the company. I get it there, that, I get it. I, I get it. But you- it's great and I know you know this- it is wild. The visibility and the knowledge of a frontline worker to an executive executives are literally flying well over 10,000 feet above. Then it's incredible guys and gals that are taught doing a hundred calls a day, doing a hundred emails a day. They're looking at a hundred tickets as an example. 

Adrian (00:35:23) - But basically so we'll do customer consternation points with those employees that know that better than anyone because they're dealing with it every damn day. And then, right below it, we do employee friction or employee consternation, and I'm more- almost not- at nine times out of ten hundred. What you see is like you find your major CTAs right there because as you're going through the journey map. 

Adrian (00:35:45) - As you get all the way through it, there's two or three things in both camps that maybe they were said differently, or maybe their catalog differently, or the words are even a little bit different. But when you start to break things down to their simplest sense, it's the same damn thing. And then what's funny is- and then getting back to the tools of the process part. So often it might be so on the employee friction side it might be. Why do we have nine tools? I wish I could just use the one that I pretty sure I could do my whole damn job in. 

Adrian (00:36:11) - And then consultants like Alexandra and Adrian are saying: yeah, you can also save a million bucks a year customer by just getting rid of. 

Sandra (00:36:18) - Yeah. 

Adrian (00:36:18) - But then the other part too is just like. 

Adrian (00:36:21) - The, the messy brain. I love that you keep saying this because you got me thinking about all this stuff. A messy brain, another way thinking about, like what I keep kind of rattling around in my, my head is like when I think about messy brain and I think about touch points across a journey, humans are all different. All of us have different preferences for which touch points we want to use, which touch points we love, which touch points we hate. Some are so old-school we want to smile and dial. Some of us are, you know, afraid to talk to people. 

Adrian (00:36:48) - We just want to chat or we want to talk to a bot. That's right, but like, I guess like messy brain for our listeners. Right now, this is interesting. Think about just some of the different things that your customer has going on in their messy brains. Here's the other thing: if you got a hundred customers, if you got a thousand customers, if you get ten thousand customers, probably pretty easy to start parsing out top five, top ten buckets of messy brain items. And then you start to compartmentalize things. 

Adrian (00:37:13) - And then, once you can start to compartmentalize things, just like a puzzle man, you're starting to put the shapes and the colors and the sizes at least in piles, and now you're getting a little bit closer to thinking about how you're gonna be perfect. And, by the way, one thing I want to call out, because I know that you, you're thinking about this constantly. That is why EX and CX go hand in hand. That is why they're literally critical to one another and you can't, you cannot, have fun without the other. 

Sandra (00:37:37) - So I, I love it, and I think that's the really beautiful thing about the human connection, because you might have, you might be having a chat with me, you might be having a conversation, or you might be conversing with me by email or by chat or through what's up or whatever it is, and because I've got this sophisticated, messy brain, I'm gonna be picking up when we talked about this earlier. 

Sandra (00:38:03) - I'm gonna be picking up on things that you've said or you haven't said, or the things that you have stressed upon, and I'm gonna be able to make recommendations for you that are for you, so I can look at the whole plethora of things this organization does or the channels it offers and everything else, because I know my organization and I could be saying to you: do you know what going forward, let's do it this way, or I've got this tool that can actually save you 15 minutes. 

Sandra (00:38:34) - Let's do that because I've I've heard far more than the words you've given me and the tone of your voice, and so that's why we have got to blend human with tech, because the sophistication of the way that we communicate- we miss out on that if we don't give a human the opportunity to add some value, because that's what we do now. I know that sentiment mining, and I know that there's a whole bunch of new technology out there which is supposedly adding more empathy to the agent. I'm still watching that. 

Adrian (00:39:15) - We'll see. We'll see how this goes. 

Sandra (00:39:16) - Yeah, that's right, but I just think the customer only knows so much. You have a responsibility to give it, the customer, the best thing it can for its circumstances. And the reason why I emphasize that is because I've been in a situation where I am a customer and another human has said: oh god, you haven't got time for any of that, have you? Let's do it this way and tell you what. Instead of doing that, just give me this done. Totally, I will never go to another brand exactly. Does that for me, because they have my back. 

Adrian (00:39:51) - Yeah, yeah, yeah, hundred percent. And human connection: there's a human feel right there like, oh, you can just help, sandra, just heavily, go ahead, sorry. 

Sandra (00:40:02) - So just to say, on the point of tools, and we've got this whole thing, haven't we? The paradox of choice. So we give everyone all this choice of all these things that they could do, but it's overwhelming. We don't know what to do with all of it, and so I do think that we as an organization should work much harder to narrow the choices right down so they are relevant to the persona, attitude, values and behaviors of our customer groups, so that they get the best they can and the best results, because we know how it will work for them. 

Sandra (00:40:38) - So it isn't so broad. So I just wanted to. I just wanted to make that point about tools. They can be overwhelming. Many of them are irrelevant. The more we can do to hone that selection down, people again will think you've really thought about me. 

Adrian (00:40:55) - Yep, yep, I could not agree more, sandra. Let's jump into the fourth and final pillar of feedback. I'd love for you to- I'm gonna ask this question different than usual, I, and not to put you on the spot, but I'd love for you to just think of one story with either a client or A business that you were a part of leading, where you did something that was unique for feedback. So, outside of surveys and MPS and some of the normal stuff that we're all doing, what would be like what was like one of the most interesting things that you've seen a business do? 

Adrian (00:41:30) - That's unique, that's different, like something that's maybe our listeners have not thought about or things that or maybe it was something that you just we don't talk about it, we don't see other CX or CS leaders doing. Just I'd love to kind of hear sort of something that you've done, it's just seen, that's unique on the feedback side. 

Sandra (00:41:46) - Unique on the feedback side. 

Sandra (00:41:47) - So, I don't know if this is unique, but it was definitely a very different experience for me. So, I worked for Avios, and my boss's boss said, I'd like to have a session with you where we can explore how we can work really well together. Now, that was important because she didn't say, I want to give you some feedback. Because when you say to someone, I want to give you some feedback, what does our brain go into? It goes into panic, overdrive. It does all of those things. It's like, oh, my God, it's going to be terrible, she's going to sack me. 

Sandra (00:42:32) - It's just overdrive of imagination. So, I had a meeting with her, and she said, this conversation is about my perception of – very smart, because ultimately, it's her perception of what's going on – this is my perception of what I've observed, and I really want to hear back from you on what you think. And then she used this thing, which I teach, actually, it's called SBI, situation. 

Sandra (00:43:01) - In the meeting earlier this morning, I noticed that you weren't that confident on this particular thing, which meant that your audience felt a little bit nervous about the integrity or the validity of the numbers. The impact, it meant that they were still hanging on to that bit of the presentation and they couldn't go any further. Impact. Basically, so SBI, impact, it meant that you didn't get the response you wanted from those people. 

Sandra (00:43:31) - So, I want to know how I can help you be more confident in these numbers going forward, so that we can smash it together. 

Adrian (00:43:39) - That's awesome. 

Sandra (00:43:39) - Situation, behavior, and impact. And the thing that she did, which we don't do, I don't think, very often. I don't think this is unique, but it's very rare. She asked me to respond to that. Did I have the awareness that that had gone on? And I was quite self-aware even back then. And I said, yeah, I felt like the room had dropped, it was a disaster. I'm pleased that you brought it up, because I was going to bring it up with you, And then we shared the responsibility. It wasn't a, you didn't do this very well, you better do it right. 

Sandra (00:44:10) - It was, this is my observation, what do you think? Great, we're owning it. It's her perception, it might not be true. Yes, I knew about it. What were we going to do together? And then we came up with a plan of how I would definitely get on top of those things. And I felt great. 

Adrian (00:44:26) - Yep. That's amazing. 

Sandra (00:44:27) - And you know what? 

Sandra (00:44:29) - I learned it, and then I smashed it. 

Adrian (00:44:32) - Hey guys, for our listeners right now, well, I'll put that in the show notes for sure, but like that is an easy thing to start doing with your team tomorrow. That's an easy thing to start doing with your customers. You can get creative with how you phrase it, how you frame it. I love that. That's incredible. It reminds me of like one of the first times I ever got, this is early in my career, but one of the first times I ever got a 360 feedback report. And exactly, yeah, I had the same reaction. 

Adrian (00:44:57) - I was like, oh shit, this is, and I was leading the team and I had this, and it was good, but it wasn't clean like that. It was more 360s are kind of, you know, the States would call them kind of shit sandwiches where it's like, you get some good stuff, then you get some bad stuff, then you get some more good stuff. And it's kind of like, wait, so did I do good or did, do you guys like it? So anyway, Senator, this has been absolutely fantastic. Before I let you go, anything that you'd like to call out to our listeners or shout out to our listeners? 

Adrian (00:45:28) - And then most importantly, where can people reach out and get in touch with you if they want to learn more about some of your incredible work or if they want to get in touch with you offline and chat about some of the work that you're doing? 

Sandra (00:45:37) - So I'm excited this year because I'm investing time in more resources to help people learn. And I'm writing a book, but I'm going to leave it at that because if I tell you more about it, I'm going to have to tell you everything and then it won't be a surprise. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, they can most certainly reach me through my website, www.EIEvolution.com, but mostly I'm hanging out on LinkedIn. So you'll find me, Sandra Thompson with an H and a P, titled as an Empathy Expert. 

Sandra (00:46:11) - If you find me on LinkedIn, reach out, say hi, let me follow you, let me learn from you too. This isn't just about me. I'm so fascinated by the wealth and beauty of curiosity. So yeah, get me on LinkedIn, get my website. And thank you so much for having me. 

Adrian (00:46:32) - Sandra, it was our absolute pleasure. And I am super pumped to keep this conversation going in the future. And I'm even more excited for when that book comes out. So we're going to be working together soon. 

Sandra (00:46:42) - Thank you so much. 

Adrian (00:46:43) - Thank you. 

Sandra (00:46:43) - Good day.