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Steve:
Good marketing sense says that everything an organization does should be on brand. Customer experience is no different, so maybe there should be a centralized group to help oversee your CX efforts.

Greg:
CX can be a very isolated team, sometimes buried within multiple business units in a very dynamic business. This is really elevating the team to a point that they have much more overview, oversight and the ability to really help move strategy forward across the entire organization.

Steve:
We're talking about a CX center of excellence on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast. And thank you for listening. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader and on this podcast we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. As our profession continues to mature and more organizations adopt customer centric cultures, CX pros often need a way to maintain alignment between their customer experience programs and the other company functions. A hub, if you will, of CX expertise that the entire company can look to for advice and ideas. So your customer experience efforts align with the company's mission and vision. A CX Center of Excellence. Well, I'm excited that I have my guest today who is no stranger to the show. Greg Chase is an XM catalyst with the Qualtrics XM Institute, an organization that should be familiar to all of our listeners by now. It's a great resource. If you've never checked out the XM Institute, you got to do that and we'll talk about more how to do that on the show. But I'm really happy that Greg's been willing. He's a previous guest on the show and so glad that you've come back to join us again. So Greg, welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Greg:
Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Steve:
Well, great. And I love this topic because we like to say how great a time it is to be a CX leader. And I think the way that you promote it and the way that you govern it and the way that you organize it can just enhance the effectiveness of what we know is already a great way to run your business. But just to make sure everybody's got the context, just give us a quick background on you personally, your career, how you got to the XMI and and then we'll get into the topic of the day.

Greg:
Yeah, absolutely. So actually started my career in the hospitality and travel gaming space. So started started in operations at Disney World in Orlando, Florida many moons ago, which provided me the opportunity to come out to Vegas, where I'm based currently. Uh, went to work for MGM Resorts International in Las Vegas, where I spent time as the corporate vice president of overall guest experience strategy, market research and insights for MGM Resorts globally. At the time, we had 90,000 employees across the globe with 30 plus global brands and properties all over the world. So there it's really where I led, you know, the center of excellence of all customer experience efforts for for that corporation and learned a lot of these practices firsthand, often by trial and error. Uh, after I left MGM, I spent about three years consulting on my own in various industries such as health care, hospitality, CPG, insurance, you name it. And then fortunately had the opportunity to join the Qualtrics XM Institute with Bruce Temkin and team back in towards the end of 2021. So it's been a little over, I'd say almost a year and a half now. I've been with the the Institute and really excited to bring a lot of the learnings as a former practitioner to the forefront in helping others navigate some of the challenges I know that practitioners face in a day to day basis.

Steve:
Yeah, I always… hospitality is one of my favorite kind of benchmarks because when people are spending their entertainment dollars, they can be a little particular about their experience, can't they?

Greg:
Yes, they can. And you know, the hospitality business, I like to tell people it's a very dynamic business. Like you just think about hotels, you know, and restaurants. But, you know, you think about some of the integrated resorts that I've had the opportunity to work in. I mean, you've got complete lines of business and entertainment, food and beverage, casino. I mean, there's just there's conventions and meetings. I mean, there's a lot of moving pieces to this business that I don't think a lot of people just take a step back and realize how dynamic it really, really is.

Steve:
No, I love that line of thinking. You know, that when people take vacations, they save their money to go do that, you know, I mean, and they are not going to tolerate like a less than a great experience. And so it's a great benchmark for those some of us that work in not quite as particular of an industry when we kind of start moaning and groaning about, you know, the demands of the customer, I think that the hospitality or anything that people really are really particular about, like, you know, their their home, their health care, you know, those things are really good, good places to benchmark. So we want everybody to be excellent at CX. So let's talk about that. What do we mean when we kind of talk about a CX center of excellence?

Greg:
Yeah, You know, when we think about a CX center of excellence, this is really thinking about creating a strategic hub or, you know, group that ultimately leads the efforts of all your customer experience strategies across the organization. I've seen so many times across, you know, various businesses and organizations that, you know, CX can be a very isolated team, sometimes buried within multiple business units in a very dynamic business like we have just talked about. So this is this is really elevating the CX team to a point that they have much more overview, oversight and the ability to really help move strategy forward across the entire organization. So really defining that central, again, team hub that, you know, has the ability to really drive influence in moving CX efforts across the organization holistically. That's what this ultimately becomes about and making it much easier for the organization to adopt and start living out these these strategies and plans. Much easier.

Steve:
Yeah, that's a great concept because a CX team that's isolated into a silo is not going to be effective because CX really is something that has to be pervasive throughout the organization. I love the comment about the brand because, you know, again, in today's experience, economy, you know, the traditional brand, we create some image around a, you know, a brand of car or a, you know, a beer or whatever you were thinking about. And that was kind of what created the experience was just the image. But in today's business world, the the actual experience has to match that brand. So, you know, you've got to just for organizational, you've got to have a department or something. So how can an organization put together a CX center of excellence?

Greg:
You know, often I like to think a lot of organizations currently may have what I'll call someone who's acting as a wolf, a lone wolf leader, you know, trying to spearhead this against somewhere in the organization. I think, you know, the first thing an organization needs to think about is this whoever may be leading these more tactical customer experience efforts on a on a day to day basis, making sure they're aligned to a senior executive senior leader in the organization that really is going to help be that champion, especially in the C-suite. Right? To help, you know, knock down some of the barriers that may exist, may help elevate the discussion to the right folks and make sure the right individuals and stakeholders are in the room. So I think first and foremost, making sure that whoever's leading those efforts is aligned and I believe ultimately reporting to whoever's going to be that champion in the C-suite, whether that's a chief customer officer, whether that's a chief marketing chief experience officer. Heck, I've even seen very successful CX COEs report under, you know, a chief operating officer or even an operational role. So I don't want to get into this is where it has to fall organizationally, because I think that really depends on the dynamics of the organization and how the organization set up for success. But I think, you know, the first thing to think about is we've got to get the team aligned to the right kind of organizational hierarchy for, you know, ultimate support. And once once we've at least done that, then we can start having further discussions around what other tools, resources, members of this team, what does this team structure look like in order to be successful? But the most important piece is making sure it's under the right supporter in, you know, who has influence within the senior levels of the organization.

Steve:
Great. So that's the first one. I think you said you kind of have three core functions of that. Is that was that the first of the three core?

Greg:
I would say that's the foundation before we get into the three elements of the core. So that's that's the one thing that has to stay constant, right, is unless you've got that in place, we can't do these other things.

Steve:
Yeah. I was just going to say thanks for clarifying that, but I couldn't agree with you more and we didn't really script this. But you know, obviously you've set these up at at big organizations and I've been blessed to be able to look at some great companies. And you are absolutely right. I always kind of used to joke around like, Yeah, you can do it without senior leadership, but it's going to take a lot longer.

Greg:
You're going to double the amount of time it's going to take to try to get any kind of progress. I've seen that play out and I've been in that seat before. So anyone who's currently in that that seat, we hear you. You're… You're heard.

Steve:
Yeah. Now, you also like the way you kind of say, you know, champion it, remove barriers when this person speaks, they pretty much realize that they're speaking for this senior exec. So and then I love your agnostic approach to where it goes. I too have seen it successful. I think it depends somewhat on the company. You know, I think kind of on an operations, you know, like a heavy technical manufacturing company, it might make more sense in a in operating area, but I think it's the most the closest cousin to customer experience, I think is marketing. So I, I love to see it aligned with the marketing function too. But like you say, it really doesn't matter as long as you, you know, you've got a seat at the table. So. Well, let's go ahead and get into your three core functions of a center of excellence, if if that's okay.

Greg:
Yeah. So, you know, the three functions that I see organizations that are, you know, really advanced and maturing their their activities and this have have set up really, again, these three core areas of focus and the first one being analytics and insights. Right? And when you think about. Insights. This is a team that's solely focused on the data that we're bringing in, how we're visualizing that data, how we're reporting that data out to the right people. You know, nothing more important, in my opinion, than making sure that we're not just feeding the same numbers to every single individual in the organization, that we're taking a much more tailored, strategic, customized approach to feeding the right data to the right people so they can take the right action in order to drive change and improvement. You know, having a focused team around analytics and insights also really makes sure that you've got a consistent viewpoint and approach to how we're designing surveys, survey methodology and ultimately aligning all your metrics across the organization. So a lot of benefits there. The second piece being a team that's focused around experience design, and I think this is a little bit more of a forward thinking type of of approach. So analytics and insights, we have to have a good core strategy.

Greg:
You know, movement process in place there before we can start looking forward. So once we've done that, this experience design team is really kind of championing all the discussions that may be happening around the organization of journey mapping, um, you know, more of that holistic view and looking at where there's opportunities to plug in additional listening posts, you know, action, additional listening posts. Um, you know, going back to journey mapping, one of the things that often happen in organizations is you get someone leading a discussion around journey mapping, but you may not realize that there's a lot of other elements of the organization or business units that may be doing similar activities that are called something different. So think about IT, that does a lot of service mapping or process mapping. You know, operations does a lot of service mapping, you know, and looking at workflows. And a lot of these things can be brought together into a much more strategic viewpoint. So imagine bringing in some of the IT components and marrying that on top of a journey map to understand where there may be technical gaps or challenges that are being contributing to challenges that we're seeing in a journey map or some of the customer feedback we're getting back.

Greg:
So again, this team really spearheading that more strategic view of touchpoints journeys, really bringing in, you know, human centered design principles into that and understanding, you know, our customers a human at the at the very center of what we're doing and why we're doing it. And the third being change management. And you know, to your point earlier, I truly believe CX this isn't shouldn't be a process. This shouldn't be something we check off the box. This is something that gets embedded into the culture of the organization that ultimately, when the leaders aren't there working, you know, 8 to 5, whatever's happening behind the scenes still happens with the same level of intensity and care and passion around the experience, you know, for the customers and the employees at the end of the day. So change management really, you know, this is a team that's focused on driving all communication across the organization, really helping, you know, manage stakeholder relationships, getting into the business and understanding what's happening on the front lines to help enable more, you know, role based tools, resources in order to to make it easier and make life easier for for those that are implementing this, you know, day to day in the business.

Steve:
Remember the CX Now series we just wrapped up not too long ago here on The CX Leader Podcast? Well, we just published a new e-book highlighting each of the essential themes driving CX. You can download it at walkerinfo.com/cxnow. And don't forget about our blog. That's right. We have a blog and we update it regularly. Check it out at walkerinfo.com/blog. There's a ton of great experience management content available and the best part, it's free. That's Walkerinfo.com/blog.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is return visitor to The CX Leader Podcast. I'm really happy to have Greg Chase here on the podcast today, and Greg's an XM Catalyst at the XM Institute. We'll talk a little bit about that on the way out here. But, you know, I love your kind of your three legged stool here, and it's a great way to think about it. Would you see a company actually organize the function that way? Would you would the kind of the CX lead, would they maybe have a person or a manager in charge of each one of those?

Greg:
Yeah, Ultimately, I mean, I think the way that this works best is you have a strategic leader over customer experience who's helping orchestrate. I see these as individual teams under that that CX leader.

Steve:
Right.

Greg:
When you're able to dedicate the resource to be able to do that, it frees up a lot of opportunity and creates a lot of opportunity as well.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, let's, let's maybe break each one of those down a little further and go a little deeper. Now it sounds like a lot of your background was more on the analytics and insight. Is that fair to say?

Greg:
Uh, had a had a lot of operational tie in with that as well. So I would say it was a happy balance of actually I would say all three of these…

Steve:
Yeah. Well obviously!

Greg:
…without the stool to support it.

Steve:
Well yeah. I mean and you said you called that foundational. You got to get that right. And I loved your right data. The right people take the right action and not just spitting out a huge deck once a month and expecting people to extract the insights. But talk a little more about how a how a team might share this information in the organization to make sure it's set up for success in the other two core elements.

Greg:
Yeah. You know, especially when we think about the analytics and insights, there's there's a lot of data that sits in an organization that we may not know exists, right? Not every organization has an enterprise analytics team that owns every piece of information coming in and coming out. So, you know, one of the benefits of having a dedicated analytics team is this is a team that can go start a bit of a treasure hunt across the organization and understand what other operational data points that may be sitting in various business units that we can start pulling into a more strategic picture with our experience data and really tying those together to create even more actionable insight. I think that is one thing that you know of great value that unless you can dedicate a resource that's probably not happening today and we're not looking at a lot of that forward looking potential. You know, the piece around change management, that becomes really when you can start building strategic relationships with human resources, some of these other, you know, strategic leaders in the organization and show how you can be a partner. I think that's one of the things that the more that a CX team and a center of excellence can start introducing themselves and aligning themselves as a partner in the business to these various stakeholders, it becomes even more powerful. So you think about change management efforts. I don't know any team that would say no to extra help and support and helping design service training, you know, experience training, help tie some of that into existing training that's happening today. These are the ways that we start really growing this. And a lot of it's just grassroots relationship types of conversations that grow into a lot more strategic opportunity.

Steve:
Yeah, I love, you know, the sort of the I use the term single source of truth, but I think that's what we're talking about when we have an analytics team. And I think it also can make your your survey process that much more effective because sometimes, you know, if it's the wild, wild West, you over survey the design's not good and you're you're burdening your customers too because oftentimes the maybe maybe some pretty usable data already exists. So I love that concept of kind of a treasure hunt and a… You know, I know it's frustrating and it's not easy to execute, but the the effort is certainly noble and worthwhile. So I want to switch over to the experience design part because I'm fascinated with your depiction there. And and, you know, that's more of the forward looking. I one of my business axioms is, you know, you dream forward and you review your progress backwards. So perfection is not something that you'll ever achieve, but it is kind of a you know, it's a it's a good way to to structure your direction. So talk just a little more about how you play in that experience design field.

Greg:
Yeah. And you know, I guess I'll describe this bigger picture kind of tying back to something you had mentioned earlier around, you know, brand and understanding the brand. You know, when you think about experience, ultimately an organization goes out to the public with a brand message, Here's who we are and what you should expect when you come and do business with us, right? Or come visit us, whatever that may be. Um, ultimately, I see this experience design team as the evaluators, protectors of that brand. Ultimately, what this team is doing is ensuring that all those touch points in which a customer is going to be interacting with us are living up to this expectation that we have promised ultimately at the end of the day to to the customer. So, you know, when I mentioned journey mapping earlier, that's again a great way to make sure and really strategically evaluate all those areas that we are interacting and start, you know, potentially tying in some analytics and insights around making sure we've got, you know, here's what good looks like, here's what great looks like and here's where we've missed the opportunity and we've built some frameworks around that. You know, this is also how do we start improving processes based on the data that we're getting. So our analytics teams surfacing insights. I see this experience design team is now taking a lot of those insights and really helping partner with the business to action, the change and the improvement. So really driving a lot of that process improvement to make sure we're meeting those brand standards and expectations. And this team is also going to be, you know, really helping design the closed loop process and understanding who should be connecting with customers. When we do miss the mark and when there's opportunity to circle back and additionally gather more of those insights as well, to be able to pull those together to make greater improvements. So this team is really, again, I think, protecting the brand, protecting the perception of the brand and ensuring that we're delivering on the promise that we have made to our customers across the board.

Steve:
Yeah, I love the way you frame that, because a lot of what you're saying makes so much sense and it's such a kind of an elegant framework to follow from a lot of the successful companies I've seen at this. But you're one element there of this. This is the group that could potentially find the new new places to gain insights and get that back to the analytics group. Right? Like we need more data on this part of it because we're missing something here. So I really like that as a part of that function and how they can work together. Let's switch over to the change management because you really did you hit a spot with me here that and I'm going to tell you, kind of an old war story here, but get your reaction to it. But I remember, you know, back in the day one time, we were reporting out some results to a client. And I saw this one exec just, you know, his face just kept getting redder and redder. And, you know, he slammed his hand down on the table and said, you know, these results are he goes, our clients just don't know how happy they are. And it was actually pretty poignant because he kind of caught himself and he realized that he kind of, you know, but it is this concept of like and I think we're past this thanks to people like Qualtrics and the XM Institute and all the other ways that our profession has evolved and matured. But this is not something extra to do, right? Creating great customer experiences is is kind of central to a successful business strategy.

Greg:
Yeah. And I'll tell you, I think similar to your example, one of the things that human beings typically do is gravitate towards the status quo, right? We we get comfortable and we just, you know, rinse and repeat because it's easy to do and we fall into a rut. It's very hard to try to get out of that rut once we fallen into it for a period of time. And that's where I see, you know, a team that can lead a change management thought process around the organization becomes our our lifeboat to get out of that that that muddy water. Right? Similar to your example. I can't tell you how many times I've walked into C-suite executives offices and, you know, simply ask the question. Let me see how you're looking at data today. And, you know, it's a it's a the same Excel spreadsheet that they've been using for 30 years that literally someone just updates, you know, types in new values in a in a cell. And ultimately it never answers the question why. And that's, you know, and they get very protective when you want to take their spreadsheet away. But this is the team that can get in and really start having more strategic conversations. And I like to say, help show the light and the possibility. But but spend the time to deeply understand where the concerns are from stakeholders, what the business challenges are, making sure that, you know, the teams that are out in the front line are getting understanding what metrics they're looking at today, what they're doing with it, and helping them maybe see a new pathway of even greater opportunity. So I see this team as deeply, deeply embedded into the business, into the day to day rhythms of the organization with an effort to help be the let me show you what else may exist to help make your life easier point of view.

Steve:
No, you're right. And the pace of change today in business, you know, it's human nature to sort of resist change. But for the good of our profession, we have to embrace change. And yeah, we just can't become complacent. That's like the worst thing a CX pro can do. And it's a real disservice to the organization if the function becomes complacent. So. Greg, We have reached that point of the podcast where I ask every guest to give us their take home value. This could be a topic or a point that you've already made, but the kind of the concept here is to just give our listeners some really direct feedback of something that they could take back immediately and have a positive impact on their program tomorrow or Monday or a week from Monday. So, Greg Chase, what's your take home value for this podcast?

Greg:
You know, I think it's easily said, as simple as this. Take the time to strategically think about how these various actions and efforts can help move your organization, what you're trying to do forward. I think we get very tied up. You know, we start reading things like this, we start hearing things like this, we get motivated, but then we kind of get negative in our mind thinking, Oh, there's no way we're ever going to be able to achieve that. But if you can dedicate the time to just pause, think through the benefits of being able to accomplish and, you know, implement these types of focuses or this type of a team and what it could mean to your organization, start looking at the opportunity because that's going to really provide you the pathway to start having discussions to set something like this up in your organization.

Steve:
Awesome. Thank you. Hey, Greg, thanks for being a great guest and coming on the program again.

Greg:
Thanks, Steve. Appreciate you having me. Enjoy the conversation as always.

Steve:
Hey, if anybody would want to continue the conversation, I know you're on LinkedIn, right?

Greg:
I am.

Steve:
And it's Greg Chase just like it sounds. And we'll put that on the on the podcast itself. We always do that. But also folks could find you at the XM Institute, correct?

Greg:
Absolutely. xminstitute.com. You can find, again, more information about us all the various tools resources, our blog focusing on this topic and much, much more.

Steve:
Yeah I again, I reinforce this all the time. We just had Cecelia, your colleague on. Over the years we've had almost all the catalysts on at one point or another, but XMI is just a super resource for a pro. And if if you're not taking advantage of that yet, put that as your other take home value or other piece of homework this week. So if you want to talk about anything else you heard on the podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service or give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, find all of our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing or suggest an idea for a future show. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader So take a step back. Look at the big picture. Think of what you might be able to accomplish with your program and we will see you again next week.

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