Experience Action
How do we do this customer experience thing anyway? Join award-winning customer experience (CX) expert Jeannie Walters as she answers real questions from overwhelmed leaders! Let's turn ideas into ACTION! From company culture to employee experience (EX) to customer service, Jeannie wants to help you demystify the process for enriching the customer experience. With over 20 years investigating the best and worst in CX, this international keynote speaker has heard it all... and now she's here to give you the answers you need! You won't want to miss an episode! Do you have a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail!
Experience Action
Getting Leaders to CARE about CX
Want to turn your organization into a customer experience powerhouse? Join us on Experience Action as we unpack the secrets to making CX a top priority. Jeannie Walters shares her expert strategies, helping CX change agents like Sue to get their leadership teams genuinely invested in delivering exceptional customer experiences. From crafting a compelling CX mission statement to using storytelling to convey customer feedback, get actionable advice that will help transform you into an effective CX change agent.
Discover the transformative power of empowering CX champions and starting small with pilot programs. Jeannie breaks down an inspiring success story from a logistics company's contact center, showing how a dedicated CX mission can elevate both employee interactions and customer satisfaction. With a focus on the importance of data in correlating service performance with customer sentiment, you'll hear about how to tie every effort back to business outcomes. Plus, explore the rich resources available at experienceinvestigators.com to further elevate your CX strategies.
Resources Mentioned:
CX Mission Statement Workbook -- bit.ly/cx-mission-workbook
Experience Investigators Website -- experienceinvestigators.com
Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube -- youtube.com/@jeanniewalters
Want to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/)
Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action. One, two, three four.
Jeannie Walters:It's Experience Action. I'm Jeannie Walters and I'm here to help you deliver great customer experiences. We have a great question from a leader who is possibly grappling with something that you might be as well. Let's listen in.
Listener Question:Hey, this is Sue. Jeannie, I am wondering if you can help me. So I'm on the leadership team of a really great organization, but I'm trying to figure out how to get the rest of the leadership team to really care about delivering great customer experiences. They maybe give it lip service, but when push comes to shove, that's really all it is, and I think we would be much more successful and have more repeat business and referrals if we did a deeper dive. But I don't know where to start and I don't know how to move the need on this. So if you have any insights, I'd be so grateful. Thank you so much for all you do and your podcast. Love Experience Action. You're awesome, thank you, thank you.
Jeannie Walters:Oh, thanks so much for this question, Sue, and I really feel like there are so many people exactly like you in the world. I talk to leaders all the time who come up to me after I speak and say "you know, I love these ideas. I just don't know how to get others to care about it. In our leadership meetings, we don't talk about customer experience. We talk about you know what is the P&L report and how are we doing with, you know, hiring, that next person we need to hire, and all of those things, and we don't connect it to what we can do with customer experience.
Jeannie Walters:And so usually there is an advocate, or what I call a CX change agent, who is out there trying to get others to really recognize that investing in the customer experience means real business results for your organization. So I have a few ideas for you. So the first thing I want you to do is just use your radar. You clearly have an idea of why customer experience is important. You will get repeat business, you will get referrals, you'll have higher retention for both customers and employees. When this is done well, you will see results. So when you are talking about the things that you talk about on the leadership team, when you're discussing your P&L. And when you're discussing, you know, next steps strategically for the organization. Just listen for those moments that you can say, you know, I wonder if it would help if we got more repeat business here. I wonder what would happen if we had fewer returns, if we had fewer complaints. And once you start opening up that discussion, that's when you can start talking about the importance of customer experience. So that's kind of an organic, you know, guerrilla way to do it.
Jeannie Walters:But when we are really focused on making a change, one of the tools in our toolkit which I really believe in is developing the clear North Star of what should our customer experience be. Who are we and what are we promising to our customers? And this is where we have to get out of that vague thinking about well, we're just going to deliver great customer experiences to everyone because that's what we do. That sounds great, but how do you execute on that? And what is the definition of a great customer experience at your organization? So if you don't have that ideal you know vision of where you want to go. The first thing I would do is develop a Customer Experience Mission Statement. Now, this is a tool we use all the time because it helps everybody align around that North Star, that ideal of who are we, no matter what, and what are the trade-offs we have to make.
Jeannie Walters:You can't always be the most global organization at the same time as respecting individuals and regions and cultures. Sometimes you have to make a choice of where are you in your journey, what is most important? So that's where we want to get into what makes us special and really try to elevate your thinking here. Because if you say, well, we're a bank, so we are a secure place to put your money, that is literally the definition of a bank. So what you want to do is figure out what makes your bank special to your customers. It's not about the actual product or service, so you actually want to stay away from language around that. What you want to do instead is actually move forward towards, you know what, what makes us really special is that we help our customers achieve their dreams faster than they could do it on their own. We want to get into that aspiration of what's in it for our customers and who are we to them and what are the choices we're making in the customer's journey to really deliver on that.
Jeannie Walters:Developing a CX Mission Statement is also a powerful way to engage others in these bigger ideas. So if you don't have one, I would start there. We, of course, have tons of resources at Experience Investigators where you can go to our Learning Center and find resources there, and then we also, of course, help our clients do this. But you can do this, I promise. So CX Mission Statement is a great place to start. The other thing you want to do is connect everything around the customer experience back to your bigger organizational goals. So in your leadership team meetings, when you're having these discussions, everybody always talks about more revenue and fewer expenses. You can take any organization in the world and they will be happy if those two things happen.
Jeannie Walters:So if you are having discussions about things not going well, for instance, well, you know we have a sales slump right now and one of the things we heard is that they just don't, you know, trust the process enough. They don't see enough testimonials. They don't understand that we can't just refer them to our clients because maybe our clients aren't as happy as they should be. That is a perfect example of saying you know what this is actually a customer experience issue. Let's dive into this, because if we can get more testimonials, that will lead to more sales faster. So listen and then highlight the financial impact.
Jeannie Walters:The other thing is, if you don't have a customer feedback program, if you don't have a way to consistently monitor how are people feeling about their experience, that's another great place to start. That will give you some data. Some of us have leadership teams who want data-driven decisions. I hear this all the time. This gives you some of that data. So it can be simple. It can be either transactional, so at key points in that customer journey, asking them how that went, was it easy? Do you have suggestions for improvement? You can use things like customer effort score to get that quantitative feedback about the ease of the process. You can use a simple customer satisfaction rate. You can use net promoter score.
Jeannie Walters:There are all sorts of options out there where, if you want to get feedback at a certain point in the journey to reflect, you know what we have to work on this. That is a great thing to do transactionally. If you want to do this in a broader context, you can do what is called relational feedback gathering, and this is where it's really about the entire experience that a customer or client has with your organization. So you might want to see at the end of a project, for instance, or some organizations do this at the same time annually and then they have a once a year report. There are pros and cons to doing that. So you want to make sure that you understand, kind of, what are you really going for.
Jeannie Walters:If you just need some data points to get your leadership team involved, it might be a great time to say, hey, let's just do a survey of all of our customers, past and present, if you can, and let's find out how they feel about us. We can use the Net Promoter system or we could use our own system or specific questions to really get at what you want to get at. Remember to respect the customer here. We don't want to ask a zillion questions. We want to set expectations and we want to be very grateful for the time and the feedback that they give us. Make sure you have a plan to close the loop with customers who give you feedback that either are you know alerts basically this isn't going well or the people who give you glowing responses to you want to make sure you have a plan of action to respond back and close the loop with those folks. But if you can do that, that gives you a data point that then you can track month over month or year over year and get everybody to realize, you know what, when customers are happier, we're getting those financial results that we all care about.
Jeannie Walters:We always have to tie it back to this. This is a business case. This is about making sure that we are applying the right strategy and pulling the right levers at the right moment so that we can really deliver on our successful business outcomes. So you want to make sure all of this is aligned. As you're shifting strategies, as you're talking about different goals, maybe quarter over quarter, you want to really look at your customer experience initiatives and make sure they are aligned with all of those organizational strategic goals. Show how improving customer experience can actually support your key business objectives. And then another thing, if you are part of, maybe a larger organization is, try to find other CX change agents like you.
Jeannie Walters:There are probably people in your organization right now who are thinking the same way, who are saying like, wow, this is really frustrating. I have to field all of these complaints because you know marketing makes too many promises that we can't deliver on further in the journey. Or sales did something where you know they made a promise for a discount and we're getting all these customers who are not our ideal customers and they're disappointed because it's not matching up. So there are so many places to look in your customer journey for where to improve things, but one of the most overlooked areas are our internal champions. Who are the people in these roles? Some of them are team leaders. Some of them are customer facing. They are dealing directly with customers on a more regular basis than others.
Jeannie Walters:Invite them into this process. Say, hey, what are you seeing? What could we do If you had that magic wand? How would you change our customer experience? You will get great information that way and by engaging them, you're opening up the whole discussion about customer experience at your organization. So you want to identify and empower the leaders who are really acting as those change agents and understand the value of CX. So what we want to do is ask them to help us influence how we do things there, influence the thinking and the approach of their team members and throughout. So this is a little bit of CX by osmosis, right, but it can be a place to start.
Jeannie Walters:Sometimes we have organizations who just aren't ready to take a more structured and formal approach to customer experience. They just haven't gotten that mindset yet. So this is a great way to start spreading that vision and that mindset in an informal, organic way. That can be very effective. I would encourage you to think about what are the ways you can invite all those champions together to share best practices, to share what they're hearing, what they're struggling with. This can be incredibly effective with franchise models or those with like regional groups or departments. This can be very effective for that. If you do, let's say, a brown bag lunch where everybody comes and just shares ideas, or maybe once a month you host a webinar and you talk about customer experience and you invite questions and feedback from your champions and then you say to them you know what we would love if you invite others to these things. It's a low cost, sometimes no cost way to really start spreading the word throughout your organization that customer experience is not just something we give lip service to. We are looking at it as that proactive, intentional customer journey to drive business results. It is a strategic approach, not something that just happens magically. So that's another idea for you. If you can't quite get your leadership team to invest or understand that, this is something to really take seriously and as part of that, you know you can always start small and scale.
Jeannie Walters:I have seen organizations who have a team that really starts getting it, and so what they do is they say, okay, this team, we're going to create a CX Mission Statement for us and we're going to then define what are the strategic outcomes that we want to see from the customer experience that we deliver. One of the most effective examples of this that I've ever seen is a contact center that was located in the center of the headquarters of a logistics company, and basically they were the ones who the you know people on the road would call them and say what's happening here? What's my next stop, all of those things. So they were constantly interacting with both the field employees who were delivering, but then they were also hearing that feedback from them about customers and what they were complaining about, what they were happy about all of those things. So they said you know what our job is? Not just to be available to the employees. Our job is actually to make the customer's experience better, to make sure that we're delivering on those expectations, that they feel good about working with us.
Jeannie Walters:So they created a CX Mission Statement for themselves. They put it up all over the contact center. They got people to really adopt it. They talked about how, they used it for coaching so that if somebody had a call that maybe didn't go so well, their manager would go up and say, okay, let's talk about this. Where can we live the mission? How can we really do this better? And so they really took on this idea that they own the customer experience in a very specific way. Again, low cost, no cost. It was very much about them figuring out how can they deliver things better for the employees that they serve so that they could deliver for the customers. Then they used that to provide a two-way communication strategy. They brought what they were hearing up to the leadership team. They had one leadership advocate.
Jeannie Walters:So if that is you, this is where you can really identify. Where are those teams that get this that we could get on board with this. You bring back to the leadership team. Here's what they're hearing, here's what isn't going. Well, you know, we've started tracking when we deliver on time and when we don't. Well, if you correlate that with what customers are saying, that's a bigger deal. Then you're starting to say, okay, it's not just saying we have a 30% on-time delivery rate. What we're saying is 70% of the time we are disappointing customers. So some of this is about storytelling. How are you telling the story of your customers? And when you work with teams like this, who are more likely to interact with the frontline employees and the customers, they will give you some of those stories to tell. So I know I'm covering a lot of ground here and it depends on the size of your organization and the type of your organization.
Jeannie Walters:But the most important thing that anyone can do is number one understand what you're trying to do. So have that mission statement, define your strategy, figure out how will this actually help our organization? That's what your leaders need to hear. And then the second thing is start where you can. If that's having these CX champions and helping to support them throughout your organization, that could be a place to start. If you have one team or area that you know really could help lead this idea with you, that could be a pilot program. That could be a way to start small and then scale.
Jeannie Walters:But as the CX change agent, your job is to show that this is not just something to talk about and this is not something that is magical. Sometimes people think, well, I don't understand why people don't get this. It's common sense. That sounds great, but we have to define what does it look like for us, what are our expectations for our employees and how do we deliver business results? So, always bringing things back to that, then you can start investing in a more robust program around customer experience.
Jeannie Walters:So I wish you so much luck here and don't forget, as you're taking these things on, look for those quick wins. Celebrate those successes, brag about it, talk about how you know what. We made this change in the contact center and we actually were able to improve our delivery rates. We were actually able to see better results on that customer survey that we have. There are all sorts of ways to measure success. Get really clear on what that looks like for you.
Jeannie Walters:Great question, I am so happy that there are so many people like you in the world who are really looking at what can we do for our customers that will improve our business, that will deliver on our results and, frankly, it makes employees happier too. So I say this a lot but customer experience, when it's done well, when you are investing in it as a strategy for your organization, is a win-win-win. It's a win for your customers, it's a win for your employees and it's a win for your overall organization. So if you are just starting out, if you are, if it feels like an uphill battle, we are here to empower and support you as you take this on, because we believe it makes a better world. The more we can treat people with respect, respect their time, their energy, be grateful for them as customers, that makes everything better for everyone. So keep going and let us know if you have more questions in the future.
Jeannie Walters:I encourage you to check out our Learning Center at experienceinvestigators. com. We have tons of resources. We have a lot of different articles and videos and things like that and, of course, keep asking questions on the Experience Action Podcast. So thank you so much for all of you who are out there being that CX Change agent, leading your teams, doing what you can to make this a better world. It really, really does matter. So thanks so much for this question. I can't wait to hear your next one, and I will talk to you in a week. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience. Check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.
