The Art Of Listening & Learning From Your Customers & Employees To Drive Growth & Innovation | Shantel Love

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #228 we  welcomed Shantel Love, Global VP of Customer Success Clinical & School Assessment based in Henderson, NV. Shantel is also a keynote speaker, author, LinkedIn Top Personal Branding Voice & work place futurist.  

Shantel is on a mission to help diverse professionals use their voices on LinkedIn to build powerful and profitable personal brands without being tied their phones, without posting every day, without the gimmicks. 

Corporate Executive by day and Business and Personal Branding Mentor by night with a passion for seeing diverse professionals win (especially those who are the first, few, and only).

In this episode, Shantel 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 #228 Highlight Reel:**

1. Identifying problems, curating solutions, & hiring A-players to execute CTAs 
2. Why so many CX executives thrive & embrace the "customer chaos" at scale
3. Aggregating and normalizing your customer data to create actionable tasks
4. Celebrating your Voice of Champions -- your best & brightest employees
5. Putting yourself in your customer/employee's shoes to understand the journey
 
Huge thanks to Shantel 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 Shantel Love

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Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #228 with Shantel Love.mp4

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady-Cesana. Super excited for today's show, guys. We have an awesome guest joining us, Shantel Love. Say hello to the CX Nation. 

Shantel  (00:00:18) - Hey, hey, everyone. 

Shantel  (00:00:19) - Good to be here. 

Adrian (00:00:20) - So guys, I'm pumped. Shantel has an incredible customer-focused business leader journey that she's going to share with us today. She wears many, many hats at an incredible company, Pearson, and I'm pumped to dive into it. Shantel, why don't you start off today's show? Let me start off all these episodes. Two things. Number one, I want to hear about you. I want to hear about Shantel's journey and some of the stepping stones that got you into the role that you're in today as the global VP of customer success, clinical, and school assessment at Pearson. 

Adrian (00:00:49) - But I really want to hear some of the stepping stones, some of the early things that kind of got you just hooked on the customer side of the business world, and then definitely want you to share some of the awesome things that you and your team are doing at Pearson. 

Shantel  (00:01:03) - Oh, Adrian, that's a really good question, and I appreciate you taking me on a journey down memory lane. When I think about my journey to customer success and customer experience, it was actually an accident. I came out of college as an accountant, and if anyone has ever met me, I do not have the personality of an accountant at all. I was following my mom's dreams, and I started as an accountant at Oracle in Redwood City, California. While it was beautiful, I'm a Midwest girl, and I am not attracted to earthquakes, so that only lasted about six months. 

Adrian (00:01:41) - Wait, Shantel, we're in the Midwest. Where's your hometown? 

Shantel  (00:01:43) - Detroit. I'm from Detroit, Michigan. 

Shantel  (00:01:45) - Awesome. 

Adrian (00:01:46) - A fellow Great Laker. 

Shantel  (00:01:47) - Yes. Absolutely, absolutely. 

Shantel  (00:01:52) - I'll be traveling home soon as well. 

Shantel  (00:01:56) - But yeah, as I think about it, I absolutely enjoy the lessons that I learned as an accountant, but I will admit that one of the things that got me into customer success and customer experience was jealousy. I was looking out my window one day, and this guy had this red Ferrari, and I asked someone, I'm like, where's this guy going? 

Shantel  (00:02:18) - Where does he work? 

Shantel  (00:02:19) - And they said, he works in customer success. I didn't even know about customer success or anything, and I hunted this guy down, found out who he was, and learned about his journey. I went to contact centers after this, and I started at a contact center, Comcast, and we built a contact center from the ground up. It became our loyalty center, so we had to hire well over 500 agents for this contact center. 

Shantel  (00:02:44) - It was about 20 supervisors that we had. 

Shantel  (00:02:48) - I think we had about 10 or 15 managers, I mean, starting everything from scratch. And the beauty of it was that it was a customer service and inside sales. So I was able to get exposed to both at that time. And my experiences that I gained from that, I was able to take all of those experiences and I brought them to Pearson. And when I came to Pearson, I had a non-traditional pathway. So mind you, I was a leader of a contact center. When I came to Pearson, I actually restarted my career there. I started from the bottom. 

Shantel  (00:03:21) - And when I say the bottom, I took an entry-level inside sales role at Pearson. And I let the interviewer know that I am taking this role because one, I was relocating from the Midwest to San Antonio at the time, but I wanted to learn the organization and I wanted to get back into leadership. So I viewed that as an opportunity to create this, if you will, a rotational program. 

Shantel  (00:03:46) - So in that seat, I was able to, one, understand the intricacies of our customers, their pain points, where our systems were broken so that I can identify if there was any expertise that I had so that I can fix the problems. I'm a fixer. And that journey took me from that entry-level sales role 10 years ago to an executive role here where I now lead a global customer success team. We support the end-to-end process. 

Shantel  (00:04:18) - So from discovery, when a customer is curious about our products, to the sales process and the credit and collections process within our organization. And I do that globally for clinical assessments and school assessments. And it's a beautiful journey because I thought I was going to be in sales for my entire career, but when this opportunity presented itself, I found myself raising my hand because I was so frustrated by the gaps that we had. And I was talking a lot of trash to my leadership team. 

Shantel  (00:04:51) - And they were like, well, if you think that you can fix it, go ahead and apply. 

Adrian (00:04:55) - That's what us CX leaders do, Shantel. We talk a lot of trash, but it's because we see all this stuff. We see the gaps. We see the misses. We hear what the customers are saying. We hear what the employees are saying. That's why we do it.

Shantel  (00:05:06) - Yes, right, right. And we're problem solvers and I seized that opportunity to put my name in a hat and now the rest is history. And I lead a very amazing team that's really focused on our entire customer experience. And me as a leader, I'm very vested in employee experience because those two things have to go hand in hand in order to get the success that we have. 

Adrian (00:05:30) - Yep, 100%. So a couple of things. Number one, that is all awesome. One of the first things that I want to follow up on. So you mentioned early in the career, having this ability of seeing not just contact center support, but inside sales. I think that that is huge. I've had a similar opportunity in my early part of my career when I used to think I was an operator. Now, and over time Shantel, what I realized was, you know, when it's done well, customer experience, customer success, it is modern selling, right? 

Adrian (00:06:00) - You have every touch point with the customer, creates an opportunity to number one, retain them. Number two, create satisfaction. Number three, if you have the right types of people on the other side of the phone or the screen, listening for upsell, frost sell, listening for if there's indications of potential consternation, maybe it's a churn risk, maybe it's something that isn't going really well. So, and if you're in a contact center and an inside sales floor, you hear all of it. You see all of it. You feel all of it. 

Adrian (00:06:28) - And then you actually, because of proximity, it's probably a bit easier to see and to snip out some of the gaps. And then that's the stuff that can't for us CX leaders. Like that's what we tee up in the form of the proposed CTAs that we have for leadership, or this is how we know what type of teams we need to build or what type of people we need on the teams. And then lastly, this is how we know what type of technology we need to be able to do all this stuff really, really well. That's awesome. Wait, second thing, the Ferrari. 

Adrian (00:06:54) - I'm not letting you go without thinking up on that. Number one, did you ever figure out who this person was? 

Shantel  (00:07:00) - I didn't. I was trying to find out who the person was. I had a name, but I could not find this person. 

Shantel  (00:07:06) - And I don't know if you know anything about Oracle or in Redwood City. Our campus is huge. So I did not find them, but whoever you are out there, you are my inspiration. 

Adrian (00:07:17) - I was going to say, it must've been one of Larry's early people that made a ton of money building that company, but that's awesome. And by the way, for our listeners, that is proof that you can work in CX and CS and still get a Ferrari. That's proof right there. So I love you sharing that. Shantel, let's dive into the first pillar team. I want to hear about your team. You gave us the high level and the overview, but you have a very different situation at Pearson than many of the rest of us. 

Adrian (00:07:45) - I'd love to kind of understand some of the different roles and then you mentioned them in terms of some of the different focus areas, but spend a few minutes talking about your team and spend a few minutes talking about how you kind of went about building the team, scaling the team and how you kind of figured out what type of people you had to bring in to be able to get things done every single day. 

Shantel  (00:08:04) - Yes, that's a great, great question. So before I get into that, I just want to make the listeners aware of size and scale of my team. And then I'll go into my thought process and methodology on building the team. So I lead a global team with individuals in my team located on just about every continent, with the exception of Antarctica. 

Shantel  (00:08:32) - Yes. 

Shantel  (00:08:32) - Yes. 

Shantel  (00:08:32) - And in-house, I have a team of about 150. And with my BPO, I have about 150. So my team is about 300, roughly, size of the team globally supporting our organization. And our organization brings in about $250 million in revenue for the business unit that I'm responsible for. 

Adrian (00:08:54) - That's awesome. 

Shantel  (00:08:55) - Thank you. Thank you. So I wanted to cement the scale. So I will say that my approach was probably very non-traditional when I built my team. I'm actually a former recruiter and I use a great deal of my expertise in recruiting. And I use LinkedIn and my connections to build my team as I've done in the past. 

Shantel  (00:09:20) - But one of the things I wanted to make sure was before I even allowed one champion, and we refer to our agents as champions, before we hired or allowed one champion in our organization, I needed to make sure that my leadership team was sound at the core. And my leadership team consists of my directors, my managers, my training and implementation leadership, my workforce leadership, my data analytics, and my quality leadership. 

Shantel  (00:09:50) - I wanted to make sure that at the core, they understood what we were looking to accomplish, and I needed to make sure that they were on par, psychologically and physically, and were prepared to take on what we were called to do. I say this, go ahead. 

Adrian (00:10:07) - So quick question, did they actually, when you built the team, were they doing some of the things that they would eventually have to hire future champions to be able to do? Did they get a feel and like a taste and a sound for what was gonna come so that they had a better idea how you're gonna build the team and how you're gonna grow the team and what are the people you needed on it? 

Shantel  (00:10:27) - Yes, so yes and no. So I will say that, for example, my workforce leader never had workforce experience. However, he had data analytics and customer success experience. 

Adrian (00:10:40) - Awesome, yep, yep, right. 

Shantel  (00:10:43) - So I looked for skills versus looking for a title or expertise or experience. So I did look for those individuals who had cross-functional experience, those individuals who had worked in call centers or worked in fundraising. I had looked for those specific skills that we needed, people who were familiar with rejection, people who had project management experience. So I was looking for certain skills. So once we got our leadership team at the core together, the interview process was probably a bit unorthodox. 

Shantel  (00:11:24) - And I say this because I needed to make sure that any person who was interested in joining my organization saw all of our dirty laundry. We were at a point where our customers were grossly dissatisfied with our customer experience. Our D-sets were, we had more D-sets than C-sets, I will say that. And our MPS score was unfavorable at the moment. We were at a 24 point MPS when I took over the organization and re-imagined what customer experience looked like. So I needed to be honest with each person that came into our organization. 

Shantel  (00:12:05) - In the interview, I let them know our customers are pissed at us. They're not happy with the experience. Our customers are looking to go to the competition. We get more angry customers than happy customers. Our organization is big and it's profitable. However, it comes as a function of a lot of mergers and acquisitions. So our systems don't necessarily talk to each other. I laid it all out and I asked them, why do you want to be a part of this chaos? 

Adrian (00:12:39) - Right. I love that. 

Shantel  (00:12:41) - So I needed to make sure that they understood before I gave them the engagement ring. I want kids, I want a big house. This is what I want on day one. 

Adrian (00:12:51) - See, but Shantel, even that logic, that is incredibly smart for so many reasons. Number one, you're being candid from day one, right? You're being upfront, honest. You're building trust from day one. Number two, you're showing people what type of show it is, right? You're not going to a PG film. This is going to be a lot of crazy things going on. 

Adrian (00:13:14) - But the other thing too, is like, I imagine that some of the people that you've brought on and some of your best, some of your A players, people that have been with you for years, they probably were excited about that. They probably viewed it as an opportunity. They probably viewed it as, talk about building your own personal playbook or expanding your own personal playbook. Things that are hard oftentimes make us better. Whether it's sports, whether it's business, whether it's marriage, life, whatever the hell. And it takes work, right? 

Adrian (00:13:41) - And it takes people that are open and willing to dive into that to make incredible, great things happen, right? 

Shantel  (00:13:48) - Yes, yes. No, spot on, spot on. And it was important to me to be transparent. I've been, and I'm sure many of your listeners, or maybe even you, you took a job and you thought you knew what it was and you got in. You're like, hold on, wait a minute. We didn't discuss this in the interview. I wanted to be transparent. And I also wanted to make them aware that this was a problem that I didn't expect for a person to solve. Like this is a problem that I need help from everyone. 

Shantel  (00:14:16) - And invited all of them, the people who were hired and joined us, to have a seat at the table to dissect it all.

Shantel  (00:14:24) - So with that and how we took that approach, I was in most of the interviews with the team that we built and my team is amazing. We have problem solvers. What's important to me is that we give credit to those individuals who bring the solutions to the table and I take credit for them as my own. A lot of the success that we had is a function of a lot of the great ideas of the people who are actually on the phone, in the systems, problem solving, working directly with our customers and that itself also shows up in our attrition. 

Shantel  (00:15:04) - We've had some really great positive attrition where members of our organization or the bigger organization have come to my team to promote the people in our organization and to consultant roles, sales roles, project management roles as a function of the core competencies and skills that they bring to the table. And then also we have grossly below market retention rates of our organization. So we are able to retain and this organization has been in establishment for about four years. We've retained about 95% of all the employees in our organization. 

Adrian (00:15:47) - That's super, super high, Shantel, super, super high. I know every business, every industry is different, every contact center has slightly different nuances but that's super duper high. But you know what, guys, when I met Shantel for the first time, I knew I loved her right away because, and she already said this, you cannot build incredible CX without incredible EX. It's all about the people that are gonna be dealing with your customers. 

Adrian (00:16:11) - And then your other comment about taking some of the experiences that your frontline staff has, they're not always about the CEO, not always about the CRO, not always about the CMO, take your frontline people's ideas, experiences and proposed solutions and work that into your goals, work it into your OKRs, work it into some of the things that you're measuring and managing because oftentimes they're right. 

Adrian (00:16:37) - They're doing things so many different times or they're hearing things before it even shows up on a fancy dashboard or before an analyst can pull it out. 

Adrian (00:16:46) - And then the last thing is just like, your comment about how many people went to different roles in the Pearson organization from your team, that you should, I'm sure you are, but you should be super proud of that because I know in my own career, when you touch CXCS support and you get that experience, whether it's good or bad, especially if you're at a company where shit's hitting the fan every single day, right? And FPS is low and churn is high, that is hard. That is so hard to show up every damn day and do that. 

Adrian (00:17:12) - But you become a really, really, really, you're a different type of business leader. You feel things and you create different areas of empathy that some of our friends in other areas, sales and product might not have to really experience, right? Because you're not always dealing with some of the rigmarole that comes with it, but that's awesome. One last question on the team part, I know I want to jump into tools, but of the 300 person team we have, at what level did you remove yourself from some of the hiring meetings? 

Adrian (00:17:40) - Or did you literally sit in all of them? 

Shantel  (00:17:44) - I sat in about 80% of all of the meetings. 

Adrian (00:17:48) - Wow. 

Shantel  (00:17:49) - Because it was important for them to know who I was, but I've met every single person in my organization beyond their employee ID number. I know their dog's names, their fish names, their hobbies, who they are as a core person, because they had to get to know me during the pandemic. That's when we grew. I had a two-year-old son and he was in every single meeting that we had. 

Adrian (00:18:16) - I'm a member of the team, right? Right, right. Oh, that's awesome. That's amazing. So one last thought. First of all, I think that's incredible because we work with businesses at CXC, Chantal, that directors or VPs of success, contact, support, whatever, they don't get to that level and they don't have the size team that you have, meaning they might do a really excellent job at hiring the extended leadership, so the senior managers or some of the management, and then they kind of trail off. And I've always thought that that is wild for two reasons. 

Adrian (00:18:50) - Number one, those are valuable bets for the company, meaning you're investing, right? You're investing in that seat. You're investing in that person. It's a part of your budget. It's a part of your return and your own personal performance. But number two, what you just said, if you can, guys.

Adrian (00:19:07) - every potential hire, even if it's lightweight, even if it's stepping in and doing the intro, because it allows you to set expectations, but it also, for some of us senior folks that have been doing this for a long time, you can sniff things out that maybe other people can't, or you can detect culture areas where maybe they're not gonna fit the culture, they're not gonna jive with like some of the things that the team's doing, and the faster you can figure that stuff out, the healthier you keep your team, right? 

Shantel  (00:19:33) - Exactly. 

Adrian (00:19:33) - So that's awesome. So Shantel, I wanna dive into tools. Can you spend a few minutes talking about some of the tools that you and your team use, and whatever you're able to share, but I'd love to understand sort of some of the primary pieces of your tech stack that you and your team are using on a daily basis. 

Shantel  (00:19:52) - Yeah, so our tech stack is crazy. I say it's crazy because my division, we support well over 800 products. And as I mentioned before, many of our products came from us by way of mergers and acquisitions. So the tech to tech doesn't necessarily fit everywhere. And I use this analogy often is that we have certain products that are like an Atari, because they've been around for so long, and we have some tech stacks that are newer that are like the small Nintendo Switch game, and it doesn't necessarily fit into the Atari. 

Shantel  (00:20:36) - So we have to figure out certain technologies or supplemental resources that help to fill those gaps. But when I look at our tech stack, we have our one CRM tech stack, so Salesforce, we have Oracle as well for invoicing and customer management tools. In our day-to-day systems and tools that we use to maintain efficiencies, we use workforce management tools like Teleopti, and we also use quality tools like Observe AI, which is a really phenomenal tool that allows us to listen all the time and listen everywhere and do a lot more with less resources. 

Shantel  (00:21:24) - Other tools that we use are like our LMS or training tools that make sure that we have ongoing training, high quality training for our team, depending on where they are in their tenure. And then we have sales support tools that we use to help our team to identify selling opportunities and evaluate their pipeline and white space analysis. And we have credit and collections tools that we use as well to support those processes when customers are invoiced or they need to do reconciliation or they need to do audits for their organization. 

Shantel  (00:22:01) - So our tech stack is a function of the business units that we support and the pieces of the business that we support as well. I'm sure I've forgotten something in there because we have a lot. 

Adrian (00:22:14) - Well, so a couple of things. Number one, your comment about just dealing with all these different mergers acquisitions over the years, number one, that's gotta be extremely painful. Just understanding how hard it is to manage a clean tech stack, frankly. So when you start blending all these things, that's really hard. Number two, the CX nerd in me, you can do data aggregation, doesn't always mean it's clean, easy or understandable. So then you still need someone on staff that can normalize it or compute it or almost decipher it. 

Adrian (00:22:45) - And then the last part, you mentioned 800 products. Guys, think about that for a second. If you're struggling with your one product, your one service, your one primary customer persona that you're selling to, imagine dealing with 800 different things across probably an equally high number of different types of customer segments. That's super duper hard, right? 

Shantel  (00:23:09) - Yeah. 

Adrian (00:23:12) - Question should tell around utilization. So you mentioned the LMS piece and I didn't wanna interrupt, but how do you and your team at Pearson, how do you guys like, how do you keep pulse or keep track of the utilization of all the tools that you mentioned to make sure that number one, you're getting the value out of them, right? Because that's got, every one of us knows that's a very, very expensive investment anytime you buy one of these tools, especially some of the names that you mentioned, right? Best in class, world leading solutions. 

Adrian (00:23:38) - Well, how do you guys kind of think about utilization? And I'm thinking about the LMS comment because I'm not trying to tee you up, but like I'm wondering how do you guys manage utilization.

Adrian (00:23:50) - the hard part of coaching and bringing people up to speed when there are big changes, or when there's flags that go up around utilization. Maybe Salesforce isn't getting used the way that it was intended. Maybe people need to be doing a different job with some of the customer activities that they're taking. But like, how do you think about that utilization piece, especially with a 300 person team? 

Shantel  (00:24:12) - Yeah, I think about it in two ways. Honestly, one is admittedly is PTSD. And I know I'm using that term the wrong way, but- No, that's the honest answer right there. 

Adrian (00:24:23) - That's the honest answer. Yeah, for sure. 

Shantel  (00:24:25) - Yes, yes. 

Shantel  (00:24:26) - I was a part of an audit a few years ago with like the big accounting firms, and they went through our business with a fine tooth comb and the way that I left that audit, it had me a bit honestly frazzled and frustrated at some of the questions that they were asking, but they were asking those questions to protect our business, to protect our assets, to ensure that we were utilized and compliant, I should say that. It wasn't necessarily applied to usage or utilization of our products, but I apply that theory and that methodology to our business. 

Shantel  (00:25:06) - And what we do as the leadership team, I'm so fortunate that I have really strong data, leadership and data analysts on my team. So they do run audits, we do run weekly audits of report utilization, especially like in a Salesforce because our supervisors, managers and leaders have access to tools that they should be using actually on a daily basis to monitor our business. And then we also have a Salesforce team that monitors our Salesforce utilization and our Tableau dashboard utilization. 

Shantel  (00:25:43) - We also have the benefit of just working for a big organization that has compliance strategies and policies in place where they're checking certain things on a monthly and quarterly basis. So I have the support of that as well, but it's a part of our ongoing routine to ensure that we're compliant there. But yeah, admittedly, after I went through that audit, it was, I didn't want to experience that and I didn't want anyone else to experience that again. 

Adrian (00:26:13) - Well, but it sounds like number one, it was a learning lesson. And then number two, I think that, and I was telling you this the other day when we were talking, but like the world just keeps building more software. That's great. I love that too. Everyone loves that. Except for when the utility is not thoughtful or number two, onboarding, familiarization and adoption. If it ain't done well, especially in a big organization, why'd you just buy a hundred seats or why'd you just buy, or even the opportunity costs, right? Like think about it. 

Adrian (00:26:45) - Thinking like with your Chateau, you gotta be mindful of almost everything you message out to 300 people, cause you're also like, it's the same way of like managing the news, right? Like you gotta be thoughtful around what makes the local, what makes the national, what makes the weather, what makes the sports. Gotta be thoughtful about those different segments cause things can be confusing. And then lastly, as things get bigger, it's just your comment about like, just being very thoughtful of it after that experience you had. 

Adrian (00:27:12) - We work with so many smaller companies, not even remotely at Pearson's level, that already have 25, 50 pieces of SaaS. And then when we do our audits, a couple of things, number one, and it's always Pareto, it's always Pareto. There's only 20% of the tools that anybody really gives a shit about or cares about, or there's value being taken from it. And then number two, people come and people go. So we work with a bunch of companies where maybe some VP thought that XYZ marketing tool was mandatory and then they leave a year later. 

Adrian (00:27:42) - And then we come in and we're like, wait, this is $800 a month and you've got 10 seats. What's this about? And then they're talking about like budget issues or constraints around not being able to go do more optimization or hiring or whatever. So like, to me, it's just, it's this topic that I've been fascinated by. And then you're at a huge company where like tech stack utilization, tech stack audits and assessments, guys, start it now. 

Adrian (00:28:08) - You don't have to get to the size of Pearson and you don't need to have some of the teammates that Chantal just shared with us. Like, just take a look every 90 days and make sure that there's actual utility and engagement with the tech stack that you've built and invested in.

Shantel  (00:28:22) - Yeah, I think one of the things too, and sorry, I'm still on this, but two things really quick. When you work in a contact center, you typically operate as a cost center. So you know that they're always, not there, most companies are looking to you to control costs or reduce costs, so you have to be mindful about the spin. I know for me, it was important to transform my organization into a profit center. So we're not just sucking all the money out, we're bringing money, yes, into the organization. So that was key for me. 

Shantel  (00:28:58) - And then the other thing in regards to audit, when you are not really in the trenches of things and I have a lot of things that keep me busy, you can make assumptions on how things are utilized and how things are going well, because you're from the outside looking in. 

Shantel  (00:29:15) - And one of the benefits that I will say of leveraging your champions, we have a program called Voice of the Champion, and it's led by a champion in our organization, but they get FaceTime with me and we create these safe spaces where they tell us what's working, what's not working, what we need to start, stop and continue without a punitive consequence. And there have been some investments that I was considering making when we were doing a pilot and on the paper, it looked like everything was going great. 

Shantel  (00:29:44) - But when I got with the champions, they're like, this is clunky, I have to take several different clicks, it's not productive. And I'm like, if I would have just went with what was on face value and not got into the trenches with the team, that would have been a misstep in an investment that we made. But I will say that listening everywhere and pulling in those that's closest to it also helps with auditing. 

Adrian (00:30:09) - So okay, Shantel, you just dropped a bomb on us. I talk about Voice of Customer or VOC Task Force, all the VOC reporting. You just said Voice of Champion or for our listeners, Voice of Employee. Come on, that's easy, right? That's like, sorry, it's not easy, but I'm saying that's one of those things that so many companies don't even think about that. They don't even think about leveraging the people that are literally going to be able to tell you whether or not it's going to work well, it's going to be rolled out well, it's going to be scalable. 

Adrian (00:30:39) - I mean, to sum it up, like it's a thing that many people can do really well. So that's awesome that you did that. The other thing too is just like, even across my career, one of the first places I start with some of the customers we work with, it's frontline. It's not always executive. Obviously, we start with the executive side because we have to know goals, we have to know where people are going, we have to know what the problems are that we already understand we have to start to solve for. 

Adrian (00:31:03) - But we start on the frontline because you start to see very, very quickly. Number one, you learn just how the actual technology flows to the business. Number two, you start to see visibility set. I'll give you an example. You'll sit with a champion, I'm going to use your term, you sit with a champion, they're on the phone with a customer, they're talking about an order, and then you're sitting there with our experience and our visibility, and they don't have things that for us, we might be racking up in the brain. 

Adrian (00:31:31) - Where's the LTV? How long have they been a customer? What type of segment is it? Are they already using X of the Y products or services we sell? Has there been a ticket in the last 30 days? What's the activity level? You're thinking about this stuff, and you're looking at your poor champion, and they got the name, the number, a few of the things, and it's like, you wonder why your support or your success isn't able to generate revenue and to create money. You got to surface that visibility, and then there's also education. 

Adrian (00:32:01) - I'd be interested in your view, but for me, I'd save all the awesome customer frontline professionals I've worked with, probably only about 10, maybe 20% of them over time as they accrue more experience, realize, whoa, I can sell. I'm not just only a problem solver or an operative person. The people that get really comfortable with the customer interactions, many of you get good at solving problems for customers. That's part of selling, right? Part of selling is literally being able to provide solutions. That's awesome. I think that's super cool. 

Adrian (00:32:36) - One last question for you is, in terms of the VOC, your VOC, voice of champion, you do it monthly? Do you do it weekly? Does the executive leadership team get exposure to what y'all are seeing? 

Shantel  (00:32:52) - Yes. We do it monthly, but the immediate ... They meet with me and our executive leadership team on a monthly basis, so I'll put it there, but they have the opportunity to meet with their peers twice a month. They do small groups, get the feedback, get the consensus, take it back. The reason why I like to do that is because some champions aren't comfortable talking in front of someone who has a title, regardless of how down to earth I am, the title scares the heck out of some people. 

Adrian (00:33:23) - Sometimes... people on the team too, by the way. 

Shantel  (00:33:27) - I know. I know. I'm just like, give me the information. They meet twice a month, sorry, and then they meet with executive leadership once a month. We also give them space in our town hall meetings, 

Shantel  (00:33:43) - where we call our meetings the loop, keeping everyone in the loop, but some companies call them town hall, but we give them space to report back to the larger organization, what they're seeing, what they're hearing, what we're working on, what's next, what projects they're involved in. 

Adrian (00:33:56) - I love that. Chantal, I wanna dive into process. We'll spend a couple of minutes on this, but I'd love to just kind of hear the way that you've kind of thought about playbooks, SOPs, some of the stuff that nobody really cares about in the beginning, but once you have 300 people, process is a big damn deal. It glues everything together, it gives people direction, it sets expectation, it provides answers. I'd love to hear how you kind of built the playbook for your team over all these years. 

Adrian (00:34:29) - What are some of the things that you did to be able to kind of capture the milestone moments and bake that into your playbook or your SOPs or the guides that your employees are able to follow to be able to serve the customers at Pearson? 

Shantel  (00:34:42) - Yeah, that's a really good question. I'm trying to figure out how to nail it down to a nutshell. I will say, I would just go through the process of how I started to think about our playbooks. The first thing that I did when I came into our organization to reimagine it before hiring anyone, I spent a lot of time talking to the customer and mirroring the customer. 

Shantel  (00:35:07) - And what I mean by that, I wanted to have an understanding of what the customer journey was, and then also map that to what I envisioned the customer journey needed to be as a result of the customer feedback. So that was one part. I also acted as a customer. So I scoped our competition, so called in to hear what the competition was doing. And I also called into our contact center so that I can feel what that experience was. 

Adrian (00:35:34) - Little ghost listening right there, little sneaking around. 

Shantel  (00:35:39) - Ghost listening, tried to use my husband's family Guyanese accent and everything when I was trying to call in so no one knew it was me. So yeah, so I scoped the competition. And then what I did was I re-imagined what that experience needed to look like, took a look at all of the KBs that we had and were they easy for me to follow? I even utilized some external folks. So I said, okay, if you were to read this, what's your interpretation of it? Because being a part of a large organization, we often get, this is how it's always been. 

Adrian (00:36:18) - Yeah, for sure. 

Shantel  (00:36:18) - Versus taking into consideration, if someone is coming outside of our organization with no industry knowledge or experience, what would they need to be successful? And is this it? 

Adrian (00:36:29) - And if it's not it- It's like a form of user testing that you're doing. 

Shantel  (00:36:32) - Yes. 

Adrian (00:36:32) - You're user testing the content to copy and the KB information, that's brilliant. 

Shantel  (00:36:37) - Yeah, yeah. So thank you for that. I just like the, I'm a millennial, I like the easy button. So I was just trying to figure out how to make it easy for our employees to service our customers. And I think that was one of the key points. And then on that to that comment, we wanted to make it easy for our customers to do business with us. 

Adrian (00:37:00) - Love it. 

Shantel  (00:37:00) - And we didn't know what ease meant to our customers. We assume what ease was, we created, we said, this is what our customers would want. And then we had the question that, is this really what our customers want? What is easy to them? So we started to look at those things. How do we make it easy for our customers to do business with us and map out processes around that? Now, I will say we have a lot of processes. 

Shantel  (00:37:26) - There's a lot of intricacies in certain processes that we have that required us to partner with customers, with our clients, with our authors, with some of the creators of our assessments, some of our vendors to map all of that together. And then sales, I mean, playbooks look different from responsibilities. So when you think about a playbook, the playbook that you create for someone on the phone versus someone in the back office looks different. A playbook for someone in inside sales looks different for someone who's in renewals. 

Shantel  (00:38:03) - A playbook for someone doing credit and collections work looks vastly different than someone that's not. 

Shantel  (00:38:10) - So really thinking about the pieces of your business and the roles in your business and what that outcome or expected or intended outcome looks like for that customer experience. So that's how we thought through building out playbooks for our organization and have to refine them, audit them. 

Shantel  (00:38:30) - Right. 

Shantel  (00:38:30) - Again, going back to that audit term, auditing if it still makes sense, because the world of customer experience is changing so quickly that we have to make sure that we're keeping pace to the expectations of our customers, not the expectations that we have. 

Adrian (00:38:46) - I love it. And you're right. If you're a technology company, your stuff is changing every week, every month. Like you have to minimally be doing audits on a monthly basis just to refine it and keep up. Most probably don't do that. 

Shantel  (00:38:59) - Right. 

Adrian (00:38:59) - Most people can't really get to it, but it is imperative. And it's also the type of thing where what one thought with you guys, with all the M&As, how do you how do you pull all that stuff together on the knowledge base? And the ethic you said, do you use existing or do you do do you actually still have to go through the the review, the audit, the assessment and then update before it goes on? I'm interested in that part of curiosity. 

Shantel  (00:39:24) - Yeah, that's a good question. I know for me and my division, I'm fortunate that we haven't had any recent M&As during my time here. So we are fortunate to have legacy. We have a lot of legacy KBs and I have legacy tenure as well that supported me where we've been able to break down some of the silos where there was a lot of knowledge here. But nothing was documented. 

Adrian (00:39:52) - That's a lot of companies, maybe not to Pearson's level, but there's a lot of companies doing tens of millions per year that have that. It's all up here. It's in one person's head or a few people's head. All right, Shantel, that's awesome feedback. I want to and we'll get to the final pillar here, but feedback. I'd love to kind of have you spend a minute or two talking about one or two ways that you're always thinking about your customer feedback. 

Adrian (00:40:17) - And then one or two ways that you're always thinking about your champion feedback or your employee feedback. 

Shantel  (00:40:22) - Oh, I love this question. I love this question so much because to me, feedback, regardless of it's good, bad or ugly, it's a blessing. Because there is so much that customers, employees and people won't tell you. So when they do take the time to share it with us in our organization, I view it as a gift. So from the employee, I mean, I'm sorry, from the customer perspective, how I view feedback, the space that we work in, that I work in is near and dear to me. 

Shantel  (00:41:00) - You know, education is very important, but me working in the space of clinical assessments, we're dealing with people's lives. And I'm just going to put it that way. We're dealing with people's lives. Sometimes the situations that we deal with are life and death. Some of the situations that we deal with decide whether a student graduates from high school or not. This is this is important to me. So the way that I view the feedback, I am a customer in the industry that I work in. 

Shantel  (00:41:36) - And I always think of what's important to me as a mom, what's important to me as an educator or being educated. What values do I expect to experience in my personal life and my personal situation? And then once I remove myself, I'm able to see that value and what's important to the person on the other side of the phone or the person on the other side of that case. 

Shantel  (00:42:04) - The person who's managing a classroom and trying to administer an assessment or the person who's running a private practice that needs to administer assessment or a tool or an offer that we have to their patient or their client. So I view all feedback as important in the work that I do. I do personalize it because I do understand the impact that we have. It's completely different than me selling cable when I work in telecommunications. This is this is mission critical for me. So that that's important for me. 

Shantel  (00:42:38) - And when I look at the employee experience, I know for me, I really lead with a humanized approach to leadership. And it came out more, especially leading through a pandemic.

Shantel  (00:42:54) - they may show you on the outside that they're great, but they're dealing with life. We're all humans. You know, I'm thinking about, you know, my son's graduation in a couple of days. And I'm also thinking about the time where I needed to leave work early because my son was sick and having to come back to work and ignore what's going on in your life. It's just not really possible. 

Shantel  (00:43:18) - A lot of us try to navigate that space, but I don't want my employees to have to, if you will, code switch or navigate a space having to conform to traditional professional norms. So I engage with my employees like a human. They know my family. They know I admit when I make a mistake and I explain to them how it happens and how I deal with it. I've talked to my leadership team about moments where I've been given more than I can bear and how I communicate to my leader to let them know, hey, you've given me all of this, help me reprioritize. 

Shantel  (00:43:56) - And I become in so many ways an open book to my organization. And I believe that that helps to build trust. So employee engagement, it goes beyond just knowing my team by their employee ID number. It's valuing their opinion, respecting their skills and their expertise, giving them a seat at the table and really leaning into the things that are important to them because they're also a part of this organization because they care about our customers. They also have a family or some responsibility that relies on their paycheck. 

Shantel  (00:44:38) - And those things are just as important to me as well. So all of their feedback, all of the data, we take it seriously. We've adopted what we call it a messy strategy because we know it can get messy sometime going through all of that data, but we wouldn't have the success that we have now if we didn't take the employee experience and the customer experience that seriously. 

Adrian (00:45:01) - I love it. Chantal, number one, that's like, it really is why I knew from the minute that we met that you understand what really goes into being a customer-focused business leader. And even though I use that term all the time in the show, it's employees. It's the guys and gals that are going to take care of those customers. It is, you wanna talk metaphorically, it's the best sports teams in the world have so much preparation, investment, support, education, ongoing training, et cetera. That's why they win championships. 

Adrian (00:45:34) - Some of the, it's just, it's so critical to focus on your people. The other thing too, I just heard you say is the candor. I've always tried to be as candid as possible about myself throughout my entire career, whether people liked it or didn't like it, because at least you know who I am. And then at least you know that when I do ask about your kid or I ask about your husband or ask about your dog or whatever, because remember, we spend more time with our coworkers than our people, right? So that stuff matters. 

Adrian (00:46:02) - And what I've learned, and part of your attrition number at the beginning of the episode, you guys are killing it with your attrition, right? People, oftentimes, they don't necessarily work for the business. They work for the leader that they're most directly tied to. 

Adrian (00:46:16) - And if they have some of that stuff going on, those people are going to want to run into battle and they're going to want to keep working and they're going to want to keep just doing everything they can to pull their weight along and to remain like a big part of building that type of a customer experience. So I love that. I think that's all awesome. Chantal, this has been fantastic. Before I let you go, a couple of things. We're going to be hanging in Las Vegas in only a few weeks from now. 

Adrian (00:46:40) - So June 3rd through 6th, customer contact week, but before I let you go, anything you want to shout out to the CX Nation upcoming events or things that you're doing with Pearson, anything that, and then where people can find you. 

Shantel  (00:46:51) - Yes, yes. So I too am looking forward to CCW. I was sharing with Adrian that I just found out that we were nominated contact center of the year and I was nominated contact leader of the year. That is awesome, Chantal. And this is just a testament of my amazing team. 

Adrian (00:47:08) - That is awesome. 

Shantel  (00:47:09) - I wouldn't be here without them. Thank you. Thank you. 

Adrian (00:47:12) - That's a big deal. 

Shantel  (00:47:13) - Thank you. I appreciate that. I really do. I really do. And if you want to stay connected with me, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Chantal Love on LinkedIn. So I look forward to engaging and connecting with you all. 

Adrian (00:47:30) - All right. Well, Chantal, it's been a pleasure having you. I will see you in a few weeks and we look forward to keeping in touch with you in the future. 

Shantel  (00:47:36) - Yes, definitely. Thank you.