Experience Action

CX Pulse Check - September 2024

• Jeannie Walters, CCXP • Episode 86

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This is your September CX Pulse Check. Once a month, we check in with news and current events to find out what's happening in the world of customer experience and discuss ideas and insights that we can learn from as CX leaders.

Ever wondered how a company with a loyal customer base could fumble a major app redesign? Get ready to discover the profound impacts of customer feedback – or the lack thereof – as Jeannie Walters and special co-host Karen Lynch, Head of Content at Greenbook, dissect a recent case that saw Sonos face significant backlash. The episode discusses valuable lessons for businesses on the importance of avoiding organizational silos and integrating customer insights consistently.

Next, we shift our focus to a seemingly mundane but crucial aspect of branding strategy: grammar and consistency. We discuss the need for clear and effective communication strategies, particularly during product rollouts. In a timely twist, we tackle the grammatical intricacies of Kamala Harris's name in the context of the 2024 election, illustrating how these details can impact clarity and user experience.

Lastly, we venture into the evolving world of furniture shopping, where technological advancements like augmented reality tools have disrupted how consumers visualize and purchase furniture.

Join us for a holistic exploration of how listening, communication, and technology are reshaping customer experiences and stay tuned for our next CX Pulse Check episode!

About Karen Lynch, Head Of Content at Greenbook:
Karen grew up in the research industry. Before joining Greenbook (https://www.greenbook.org/), she spent 30 years as a full-time qualitative researcher. All the while she dabbled as a part-time writer, earning bylines in mainstream consumer magazines, online publications, and popular anthologies. She merged her two passions when she took the role of Greenbook's Head of Content. In her role, she manages the content strategy and operations across Greenbook's publishing platforms: the Greenbook Blog, Podcast, Newsletter, and Global Events.

Follow Karen on...
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenmlynch/

Articles Mentioned:
Sonos App Redesign Fail: Customer Outrage and Falling Stock Prices (CMSWire) -- https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/sonos-app-redesign-fail-customer-outrage-and-falling-stock-prices/
Harris’ or Harris’s? Apostrophe row divides grammar nerds (The Guardian) -- https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/14/kamala-harris-or-harriss-apostrophe-row-grammar-nerds
Customer Journey Insights from 2024 Furniture Shopping Trends Study (Home Furnishings Association) -- https://myhfa.org/customer-journey-insights-from-2024-furniture-shopping-trends-study/

Resources Mentioned:
Experience Investigators Website -- experienceinvestigators.com

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/)

Jeannie Walters:

Welcome to the Experience Action Podcast. I'm Jeannie Walters and I'm so excited because this is the CX Pulse Check. Once a month, we check in with the news and current events, what's happening in the world of customer experience, where are the ideas and insights that we can learn from as CX leaders? And I am so excited and you should be too because we have with us today a very special co-host, my friend and the Head of Content at Greenbook, Karen Lynch. Karen, it's so nice to see you. How are you today?

Karen Lynch:

I am well, Jeannie. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to see you too.

Jeannie Walters:

Thank you and you know, I would love to hear you know a little bit more about you. What should our listeners and viewers know about Karen?

Karen Lynch:

Well, you know, I start off telling everybody I had I had an entire career as a qualitative marketing researcher before joining Greenbook just two and a half years ago. So my work was adjacent to CX, right, but in the world of just marketing research, helping customers have their voices heard by people that need to hear them for whatever might be happening and whatever initiatives and business challenges corporations were trying to address. So I did that for quite a long time. The position at Greenbook came up and it was just at a point in my life where I was like you know what, I just need to stop being such a road warrior, because I had qualitative researchers around the road all the time and needed the next creative adventure. So I started this career and now I.. at Greenbook,

Karen Lynch:

if you're not familiar with it, we're a multimedia company that serves the insights and analytics industry. So we have articles, we put on events, the IIX event series I'm curating speakers, I'm contracting with authors, I'm running a podcast, we have a weekly live stream everything to keep the insights and analytics industry kind of informed and ahead of the curve. So that's what I'm doing now. It's been a cool 30 plus years in this working world and I've loved almost every minute.

Jeannie Walters:

Almost every minute. That's fair.

Jeannie Walters:

I think. Well, I thought you would be a great co-host because, you know, when you talk about gathering insights and really listening to customers, it seems like such a no brainer and it seems like we have all these different tools now, right, like the customer experience, industry overall has been kind of consumed by artificial intelligence and natural language processing and all of these things large language models and so when we look at what's happening there, it's so easy to think, oh, we're listening everywhere we should be and getting all the insights we need. But some of the things that we're going to talk about today actually show how important it is to just bring that humanity to it, the nuance, understanding kind of why we're doing these things. So the first thing I would love to talk about here is what's happening with Sonos, which is an audio tool, stereo system, all those things, and so they actually shared this headline.

Jeannie Walters:

This is on CMSWire and it says Sonos app redesign fail, customer outrage and falling stock prices. Now, they are not the only ones who have gone through something like this, but what I found really interesting about this is that they had such loyal customers. They had customers who really sang their praises everywhere they went. They had evangelists and they really missed the mark here, and so, when you dive into this, there are so many reasons why, but what are some of the things that you see that maybe could have gone wrong here?

Karen Lynch:

Well, you know it's interesting because you know I'm sort of what do you call that? You know when you're, you know looking at it with hindsight, you know kind of looking at it from this perspective, because I wasn't tracking this trend and what was going on here. But I did try to reverse engineer what I was seeing and you know what I'm seeing by going on, you know say, I'm on X or Twitter, and I'm seeing the customer complaints, very public complaints about this, and I'm seeing a very quick social media response, but it feels too little, too late. My question is were they asking for all that feedback or being as diligent about responding to everything prior to this launch? Did they know what was coming their way? Because right now they certainly are trying to answer everything that is popping up socially.

Karen Lynch:

I wonder if they hired more social media strategists. Because of this debacle.

Jeannie Walters:

I wondered that too, based on how they're handling it. Yep.

Karen Lynch:

Yeah, they're handling it really well at this point. So that's a big question for me is were they on it before? Did they catch it early? I do know that when there's app updates, I don't pretend for a minute to fully understand all of the technology that gets changed and how you can make one change and other things fall apart, but it would seem to me that for a company that large, they should have had that locked up.

Jeannie Walters:

Yep, Yep, Yep. Well, and I think you you kind of touched on this, but I think one of the things that I really started wondering about is how often in these big organizations do we have these projects that we we get really excited about, right? Like we announced them, we've got teams working on them and we start losing sight of kind of who we're serving, what they're really looking for. Are we checking in enough with them? Are we closing the loop on some of these things?

Jeannie Walters:

So that was one thing, because in a way, this is an example of user experience versus customer experience and how it all fits together. And so maybe they had a app development team or user experience team working on this and they were not even connected to the customer feedback cycles. They weren't even listening because they weren't really asked to do that. So I see this all the time with the organizations we work with, where somebody is working on a project over on one side of the organization and somebody's got another thing. Even in my little team, sometimes I have used the word silo, right, Like I've said, oh my gosh, I think we're siloing. This is like what we tell our clients not to do.

Karen Lynch:

Tell people not to do, right? Are the changes that they made the changes that their customers really wanted, those loyal customers as ambassadors? Did they want those changes? Because if they didn't, then this was just a pain in the neck. So I mean there are times, uh, you know, probably the closest thing I have is just iPhone usage. You know where I'll complain about my something, about my phone, and my husband will say oh, be patient, they patient, they'll fix that.

Karen Lynch:

So, you know he's very generous in that. Right, he knows that customer feedback will result in a change in the Apple organization because they are very responsive to customer feedback, not just UX feedback, right, and certainly there are teams that that go out there and try to tackle what could be done, what is possible, and they they have a lot of innovation that way. But there's a line between you know, going too far with innovation when you've got customer needs that are vocal and clear.

Jeannie Walters:

And I think another great point there is you can be super focused on innovation, but if customers aren't ready for those changes or they aren't really prepared for a change, like humans resist change we really do and so trying to guide somebody through something after they're comfortable and trying to guide them through that change is a is a whole practice unto itself, and so I think we have to really think about this as an example of both internal communication strategy, but also how do we really understand the journey of the rollout for customers so that we can make that as seamless and easy as possible? So okay, so the next thing I have is a little out of scope of customer experience usually, but I thought it was fun. So, as most people know, here we are, and we are in September 2024. And there's this election you may have heard about coming up.

Karen Lynch:

May have heard about. I don't know, I don't know.

Jeannie Walters:

Yes, and for the first time in a long time, because Kamala Harris is running and the Democratic candidate. We have a candidate whose name ends with an S and this has created all sorts of angst and I think it's just as the grammar nerd that I am I get a kick out of it, but also because it's just another example of like things you didn't think you had to think about, Right? Well, unless, unless you had one of those last names like Lynch which has had to think about.

Karen Lynch:

I've had to think about things like possessive and plural for a last name like Lynch, because it has that funny CH at the end, right.

Karen Lynch:

So so as soon as I saw this I thought you know, oh, it's so interesting, to where do we place the apostrophe? In a name like Harris, and then also this article will go on to say, like in a name like Walz, because again I've had the name Lynch. So for instance, you know, we were Lynches L Y N C H E S. You know, and, and at first I really I found that really irritating because I was never that way with my maiden name, like we just threw an S on the end and we were done when we were plural, and then same thing with the possessive, but lynches, if there's we, we. I had to when I took the name Lynch, and now we're going back 25 years, right when I took the name, I had to do the research and say, when I'm raising my children, how will I teach them to do this Right? Right, it's a thought process.

Jeannie Walters:

So anyway. So I saw this and I'm like, oh yes, this is a headline from the Guardian and the headline is Harris, with an apostrophe at the end of the S, or Harris's, which is apostrophe S after the ending S in Harris. See, it's very confusing when you talk about it too. Apostrophe row divides grammar nerds.

Karen Lynch:

And you can see by my excitement. You can see that I am one because, literally, this is something that I would want to dig into and I hadn't really thought about it.

Jeannie Walters:

Yeah, and there are cool things too.

Karen Lynch:

You do have to think about it and what's interesting, what I was about to say before you so mindfully and kindly brought us all together on the same page is that her team should have known about this. They should have been like what's going to be our grammar protocol, and it shouldn't be going back and forth. They should be sending out a style guide to everybody saying here's how we handle it.

Jeannie Walters:

That's exactly right. And I have a similar story where I married into the name Walters and it has an S on the end, and so I literally, with our holiday cards and our return address and things like that, I like to say the Walters family. To avoid the whole subject.

Karen Lynch:

I just avoid the whole damn subject. I totally get that, because for a while there we'd be the Lynch family. I love when things would show up to our house. It was always to the Lynch family because other people don't want to deal with it.

Jeannie Walters:

Yeah, exactly, and I think that you know that solves the problem, maybe temporarily, but you know it works for me. But I thought to your point. I think this is another example of like one of these small things that in the grand scheme of things doesn't really matter? Probably not, but it matters enough to just irritate somebody or to just make somebody think a little extra hard. And when we're trying to really serve a community, when we're trying to provide something for a large group, we have to think about things like this and get ahead of it. And to your point, a style guide would be great for that. Universities are known for this right. Universities and companies that have they put out style guides for their brand, for the, you know how do you say this? Do we capitalize here or not? Do we hyphenate? Do we do all these things? Because otherwise you're basically saying it's the wild west, you can do whatever you want.

Karen Lynch:

And you want to be in charge of the conversation about you. So, again, if I I'm not, they didn't ask ask me if I wanted that role. But if I was in charge of the campaign semantically, you know, from a content standpoint, that would be one of the first things I'd collaborate with the marketing team about. You know, even here at Greenbook, at one point Greenbook had a capital B in book right, it was capital G, r-e-e-n capital B-o-o-k Oh, okay, we changed that within the last year to the lowercase b.

Jeannie Walters:

Oh boy!

Karen Lynch:

And I am telling you we had to work with marketing work, with our graphic team work within our communications to make sure everybody knew we have changed stylistically. It's a big effort, a mindful effort, because the branding matters. So their team needs, in my opinion, needed to be ahead of this and probably could still stand to get ahead of it and stop the nonsense and the bickering back and forth between the grammar nerds.

Jeannie Walters:

Oh, we will never stop bickering, we will never. AP styleguide versus Chicago Manual of Style right, exactly, exactly. Oh my goodness.

Jeannie Walters:

That's so funny, but yeah, well, and another thing that kind of struck me about this that the Guardian article dove into, was there are differences in just regions and dialects and culture and things like that, that sometimes these things are handled differently.

Jeannie Walters:

It doesn't mean that one is wrong. It means that we have to kind of honor what the both intention of the communication is and respect kind of the brand, if you will, of who is actually leading that, and I think that's something that, as we talk about even inclusive customer experiences and making sure that we are careful with our language, that's always something to be aware of too, and we see that a lot in customer experience work, where translations are a great example, where somebody will translate an instruction manual and assume that Spanish is Spanish everywhere, but it can be different. You know, Puerto Rican Spanish is different than Spanish in Spain and all these different nuances, and so I think we have it's another reminder of and you use the word mindful, which I really love like being mindful of these things because even though it seems little and it seems like it doesn't matter, it has an impact.

Karen Lynch:

Well, and if you are a brand right, and if you, if you distill a candidate down to their personal brand right that's that's who is being marketed to the American people you need to own the integrity of the brand or the conversation will be about something like this and that's not really going to be helpful. And again, not not a strategist hashtag, not a strategist, but you a strategist, but the people that are strategists this isn't what they want people talking about. So if they owned this and controlled the semantic narrative, then there wouldn't even be this type of article out there.

Karen Lynch:

It'd just be like oh, we've all learned something. Isn't that interesting? Instead of which is it? Why is it going back and forth? Why are they inconsistent? It opens the door to thoughts that shouldn't be there.

Jeannie Walters:

That's another great point that you know. If people are talking about this, they're not talking about the things that you want them to talk about or focus on. So if you're not thinking about where the apostrophe goes, this is your reminder.

Karen Lynch:

Yes, we hope you're listening. It's part of our customer experience, that's right.

Jeannie Walters:

Love it. Well, this last one I did. Really I do. I'm going to admit a bias here, because I brought this up because I was like well, let's talk about insights and research, shall we? We shall, we shall.

Jeannie Walters:

So this is from, and you never know where I'm going to pull these articles. We pulled from all sorts of places, but this is from the Home Furnishings Association and the headline is Customer Journey Insights from 2024 Furniture Shopping Trends Study. And I found this interesting because when we talk about kind of customer behavior, a lot of times we break that into everyday purchases or these bigger purchases. What does furniture say? Furniture traditionally has been one of those bigger purchases, but people are starting to treat it differently. There are more options. We can order a lamp on Amazon and it shows up the next day, or use the virtual room in, you know, on the Lazyboy app and see if it will fit in. So there are all sorts of different ways. But, the trends here, even though it was about furniture shopping, it felt very universal in many ways around evolving customer behavior and preferences, and really just that whole idea that, I always cringe a little when organizational leaders will say to me well, our digital shoppers do this and our retail shoppers do this, because that's all of us now. We are doing both all the time. So, just curious, what did you think about this research? Anything that you want to highlight?

Karen Lynch:

Well, of course, I dug into the entire thing, downloaded the full report, you know, all the way down into the method. You know, read the methodology, like, of course, this is the one. I was like oh yeah, I'm spending some time here, so thank you, this is fun. Well, here's a couple of things. First of all, I always love to see myself in findings, so that's one of the ways I think I always have kind of have had empathy for respondents in general is if I see myself in them.

Karen Lynch:

So of course, I shop online before I buy and I have been thinking about furniture purchases and of course, I've done it in all the different ways, you know, from ordering, you know, something to my left, right here from Ikea and having it show up and having to build it to. From going to a furniture store with something generally in mind but needing some help from a human being who was going to help me also find the right coffee table to go with the new couch you know. And from ordering, you know, online, a mattress online at Costco for a spare bedroom that I just didn't want to invest that much mental energy. Like. I've done it all, yeah, and what I think what I think is is consistent across the board is with furniture, and I don't know how many categories this is true in, but the shopping for furniture's experience,

Karen Lynch:

it has the person in the mindset of how am I going to experience this piece of furniture in my home? And that's why this was really interesting, because it's not just the shopping experience, it's the living with this purchase experience. What will my experience be at my desk once I buy this piece of furniture, or what will my experience be in my living room? So, from a CX perspective, I thought really cool. This report starts talking about 3D planning and 3D configurations and how consumers want to see what an object is like in their own home. I'm like, of course, that's what it's all about. Anyway, it was a little bit meta for me to go there, but that's where I went.

Jeannie Walters:

I love it. I love it and you know, several years ago, it sounds funny, but we have Pokemon to thank for some of this comfort level because people became really comfortable with augmented reality and, all of a sudden, brands started realizing we could do more with this. Right, you can start showing things in the space. You can actually play around now with AI, with moving things virtually, to really see what it looks like. I have in this office you can probably see it behind me I'm in an alcove, a little bit, and so I always have to be aware of the furniture that we bring in to this space, and I have found that when I'm digitally researching in advance or shopping in advance, that is a big factor for me. If you don't have the right tools, the right information for me, I'm going to move on right. I'm not even going to waste my time because I've been burned in the past, and so I think that's the other thing is like there's a step by step process that people take. Even if it's three steps in 30 seconds, they're still seeking certain information. They're they're looking for a comfort level about their real lives.

Jeannie Walters:

This is what I always talk about in journey mapping. Like we talk about people like they're just going to march through the journey, do, do, do, do, do and really they're just living their lives. They're just trying to get stuff done. So I thought this was just kind of reinforcing some of the trends that we've been seeing, not just with furniture, but throughout. But furniture is such a great example because it is a slightly, it's a more thoughtful process, or purchase I should say yeah, but at the same time, people are still treating it differently than they did 10 years ago. Yeah, it's not that huge investment of the past that a lot of people treated it as, which there are pros and cons to that. We won't get into that today.

Karen Lynch:

We will age ourselves if we start talking about when we first were married and we wanted to buy the Ethan Allen furniture that lasted our lifetimes that was a thing at one point was to buy the most solid couch you could. Instead of now which is like if I was starting it all over the advice is just buy the Ikea couch, because, for heaven's sakes, your children are going to trash it.

Jeannie Walters:

And then you'll get a puppy.

Karen Lynch:

And then you'll get lazy and you'll spill your coffee on it. So what were you thinking getting a white couch?

Jeannie Walters:

And it's not like you have a chamois around. Just flip the cushion, you're fine.

Karen Lynch:

But it's true, right, and I think that you know one of the things that we do, that I did in the qualitative research space I shouldn't speak on behalf of all qualitative researchers is when we were walking through customer journeys with people. I often, you know, would do an exercise with, with with emotions cards, and I'd have people kind of match the card to the stage of their journey. And what are you feeling at this stage? What were you feeling when you did this and so on and so forth?

Karen Lynch:

And you think about the online shopping part of it. Like those are all like, for the most part, pretty positive because you're in control. You're feeling confident. You are making decisions, you're ruling things out, like you are owning that stage of it. You're like being really decisive about price points. You're like, no, I can put this filter in place to make sure I don't see a couch that's more than a thousand dollars or whatever it may be. Like you are really empowered online shopping and I think that that's probably you know, probably you know it's definitely present in furniture and mattress shopping, right. Is is that feeling of I don't want this to get out of control, so I'm owning it before you go out to the store that. You know, maybe it's not as important for other purchases to do so much time online, but yeah no, I think that's a great point.

Jeannie Walters:

And the filters, and I mean now I I've shopped for items where you can say, like these are the colors right, like I need these colors, I need this size, I need it to be delivered by Tuesday, Right, and so you're right. Like we put up blinders that actually make it better. Yeah, and, and you know, my husband and I have a story of like when we were looking for something I can't remember what piece of furniture, but we went into one of those big furniture stores and nobody else was there except for the salespeople, and there was one guy with a clipboard, who, who had his eye on us, who wouldn't let us just browse.

Karen Lynch:

Yeah.

Jeannie Walters:

And, we left the store.

Jeannie Walters:

Yeah, and I'm like he thinks we just didn't find what we needed. But we were actually annoyed because he wasn't giving us the space that we needed. And so you're right about control. Like we all want that control to, with our own environment, our own choices, everything. So it's a it's. Yeah, that's an interesting point, but I think the bottom line is we are all omni-channel shoppers now and I think that's the piece that there are still organizations out there missing that or designing things differently, as if they're different people and they're really, really not. There's so much overlap now. The percentage of people who only shop in store is getting pretty low.

Karen Lynch:

Well, and if you tie it up with a nice bow to kind of what we're talking about with the user experience, the US experience with Sonos at the beginning of this call, I have a wedding to go to Saturday. I didn't love the dress that I had originally intended for this wedding, because it's going to be colder in upstate New York than I might've thought it was when I bought a strapless sleeveless dress. So I went to one of my favorite clothing stores online. There happens to be one in my town, but I figured let me just see what the assortment is online. I found something I'm like oh you know, let me just order it here. I can always pick it up in store if it can't be shipped to me overnight and the charge wouldn't go through and from a US UX standpoint, that's infuriating.

Karen Lynch:

I'm like I sat at my desk. Granted, I only sat at my desk, but I went through this whole process one of my favorite stores. The charge wouldn't go through. So I sure as heck didn't go there because I was so annoyed with one of my favorite stores, where I always can find something, because I'm like no, it's not going to work. If I can't shop online when I might need to shop online and you're losing me as a brick and mortar customer, also because I'm annoyed with you. So CX and UX in that context are completely associated and Sonos should have known better.

Jeannie Walters:

Yeah, and there it is. We've come full circle. Amazing. This is why you're a pro, Karen.

Karen Lynch:

Well, you make it easy. You make it easy, my friend.

Jeannie Walters:

Well, thank you so much for being here and for adding your insights, and I hope everybody goes to check out Greenbook. You all do great, great work and I think that there are just resources for a lot of us, and I know many people like myself are focused on CX and, you know, focused on the strategy of it, insights and research and analytics. All of that is such a huge part of what we do that if you're not well-versed in at least understanding how to read some of the reports, how to understand what's going on, what are the best ways of applying research and insights, that is part of this role. So Greenbook is a great resource for you there too. Thank, you, Thank you.

Karen Lynch:

We're glad to be out there for people. It makes me feel good that I can help people be more successful in their roles, whether they're in insights, in data and analytics, in CX, across the board. It brings me kind of great fulfillment that I can do what I'm doing right now.

Jeannie Walters:

That's awesome. Well, we feel that. So thank you for being here, and thank you for being here at Experience Action Podcast. You make it worth my while too, so we love hearing from you. So keep sending in those questions, and we'll be back next month with another check of the CX Pulse Check episode. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week.

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Jeannie Walters, CCXP

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