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Steve:
We all have bad days, but it's pretty much a given that a lousy experience with a company should not be the cause of it.

Jeannie:
We've all had those days where you have to wait on hold and it ruins your day and then you go get a cup of coffee and the barista has a bad attitude. And so then you bring that attitude back to your family, right? You bring that out into the world. And I started thinking about that, thinking, you know, if we can not ruin somebody's day, then that means that they're going to bring more positivity out to the world.

Steve:
How to avoid ruining your customer's day 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 XM 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 and happy CX day to all of those CX pros out there. You know, we have a saying on The CX Leader Podcast that it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and that's especially true on CX Day. This podcast highlights and explores the topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. "Do not ruin your customer's day" sounds like something that belongs at the top of a list of rules for any CX Pro, but we've all had those moments where employee with a bad attitude ruined your mood or you're left waiting on hold for over an hour and steamed about the experience for the rest of the day. By the way, you can always reference our CX Horror Stories for some good examples, but there are ways where you can prevent fewer ruined days for your customers. And in fact, my guest this week just happens to be on a mission for this episode. Jeannie Walters is a CX consultant, speaker, fellow podcaster and CEO and chief customer experience investigator for Experienced Investigators. Jeannie, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Jeannie:
Thank you so much, Steve. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

Steve:
Well, it's our pleasure, and I can't imagine that it's taken me this long to get you on our podcast. So thank you finally for coming on and being a guest.

Jeannie:
I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Steve:
Well, just in case somebody is not familiar with your background, they should be just for the benefit of maybe some of our listeners. Can you just give us a little background on your own journey and kind of where it took you to to your role in this great profession of ours?

Jeannie:
Sure. Yeah, very few of us. You might be the exception here. Very few of us looked around in in preschool or kindergarten and thought, I'm going to be a customer experience leader, right? Like, that's that's not usually the journey and mine was was not that way, either. I started off in more of a traditional marketing communications firm, and it was kind of the dawn of what I call the big internet when large organizations started realizing that the web could do so much more than just show their brochure. And that broke down a lot of barriers between customers and brands, and we were sitting in a room and listening to legal and marketing and all the folks talk about the operations and the process, and I thought, nobody's here for the customer. And so at the time, I was partners with my brother. We had a traditional marketing firm and we decided then to switch gears and focus on customer experience and advocate for customers as what we were doing. And after that, I started this business in 2009 and really have been focused on connecting the emotional experience with the actual organizational goals that we all have to. Because customer experience can't be something we just talk about. It has to be something that delivers. And so I've been working with organizations all over the world for the last, what is that 13 years at this business and 20 plus years otherwise?

Steve:
I always love to hear people's stories of how they got into it, and I really didn't. I kind of got into it by accident, too. I was really more a traditional market research pro. But, you know, early on we were doing these customer satisfaction measurements. And, you know, I was actually just kind of reflecting on this, the sort of the confluence of events and and opportunities that came along. And lo and behold, now we've got kind of our own, you know, unique profession and practice. And well, you know, I love this concept of don't ruin your customers day. It's sort of, you know, it's it's sort of like, "duh," yeah, I mean, obviously. But but yet, you know, there's a lot of things that go on that doesn't make it easy sometimes for people that are trying to serve customers. So, you know, your mission is to create fewer ruined days for customers kind of what led you to that?

Jeannie:
Yeah, I get asked about this a lot and it's something I'm super passionate about because I think when I was asked about starting this business in 2009, somebody said to me and a friend, you know, but she said, what? Why do you care so much about this? And it was kind of a challenge. It was like, what of all the things in the world? Why do you care so much about this? And I thought about it and I realized that, you know, what we do is trying to create better moments for people. And you can call them customers, but we're all people here, and even in B2B, we're still dealing with people, right? And so when I started thinking about that, I was like, You know, we've all had those days where we have to exactly what you were talking about in the intro, where you have to wait on hold and it ruins your day and then you go get a cup of coffee and the barista has a bad attitude. And so then you bring that attitude back to your family, right? You bring that out into the world. And I started thinking about that thinking, you know, if we can create better moments, if we can not ruin somebody's day, then that means that they're going to bring more positivity out to the world. They're going to be more positive in their interactions with other people in service. They're going to bring that back to their family. They're going to just be a positive influence in the world. And so it sounds a little lofty, but I really believe if we do this well, we create a better world for everybody. And that's what really gets me excited and that's why I'm so passionate about it.

Steve:
No, actually, I like it. I mean, it's it's very simple and it's it's kind of universal, I guess, in its acceptance. And you know, one of the things I've always said about being in this business is it makes you pretty judgmental about your customer experiences. You know, you're your radar is up pretty high and you know, you just see so much. And I think some of it is, you know, maybe that person's having a bad day or particularly in large organizations, some of it's brought about by policy and procedures and lack of authority or autonomy to make a decision at the point of kind of the point where the customer is experiencing that. So anyway, I actually I really love the simplicity of it, and I think it's just an easy thing for people to communicate. So how do you play that out sort of in your practice and work with your clients on that?

Jeannie:
Well, I think a lot of what happens in customer experience is that people get very excited about the idea of it. They get very excited about certain tactics, right? They say, Oh, I know we'll we'll just start tracking customer satisfaction and then we'll be doing CX, right? And it's like, what I look at is, first of all, you have to get the foundations right and the foundational pieces that I really believe in. One is not just having a corporate mission statement, but having a customer experience mission statement, and that's how you can show up for customers, no matter what throughout the journey, no matter, it's not connected to your products and services, it's connected to. Who are you? What are the promises that you've made and how can you make sure everybody's on the same page for that? And then the other part of that is really defining success both for your customers and for your organization. And I, you know, I talk a lot about how we have to be intentional to create proactive, positive customer experiences because a lot of what happens right now is leaders get charged with customer experience with very little else. They're not given resources or tools or even really a charter of what that means. They're just told, Hey, guess what, marketing person? You're in charge of customer experience now. And if you don't take the time to define what success looks like, it's really easy for people to say, Well, I think we were nicer to customers, and I think we've been tracking these numbers for a year and nothing's happening because it's not intentional design of the customer experience, and it's not intentionally really defining what success looks like. So we know how to measure progress, so we know how to make those adjustments as we go. So when we talk to leaders, that's a lot of what we're trying to do is let's narrow our focus a little bit into what is absolutely fundamental here so that in a year, in three years, in five years, we can really look back and say, OK, here's where we're making progress. Here's where we need some work. Here's how we can get customers more involved. Here is the feedback we're we're getting and what we're evaluating and how we're acting on it. So it's all of those different pieces, but I think that all comes back to being intentional and proactive about creating that positive customer experience. And that's the step, ironically, that a lot of organizations get.

Steve:
Yeah, let me unpack that a little bit. I think there's a few really important nuggets in there. You know, when we're in the customer experience business, they're sort of this implication that we're being of service to others. And so, you know, you can't really look at it from your perspective. You have to force yourself to look at it from the customer's perspective. You know, you mentioned like the people measure, measure, measure, but they don't do anything and then they're surprised when nothing changes. Yeah, my old joke about that is like, you know, I get on the scales every morning and I don't change what I exercise or what I eat, and I'm surprised that I don't lose any weight, right? It's it's the same thing. And really, I think we came coming at it from the research side like I did, we had to figure out how to action the results. And so I think that's a really important thing. And then just. You break it all down into pieces where people can see the progress and, you know, you can have lofty goals like I'm going to do this, but you really got to break it down into things that you can actually get done. You know, in a short period of time. So coming back to sort of how companies would be intentional and proactive about that, could you just give me an example of how a company might go about not ruining their customers days in a… I don't want to get you into any client confidentiality, but maybe just kind of some generic type of ideas.

Jeannie:
Well, I think you brought up a great point that sometimes employees are trying their very best, but they don't have the right tools, they don't have the right procedures, they don't have the right empowerment in order to really deliver for that customer in front of them. And so one of the things that you know, I think is super important is when you're looking at once, you develop that customer experience mission, that's something that you you socialize throughout the organization and then you start looking for, where are we not living up to this? And sometimes if you invite employees into that discussion, you will hear things that are so easy to address. But if nobody's paying attention to it in that way that it's really easy to overlook, it's really easy to think, well, that's just the way it's done or the one I hear a lot lately is, well, everybody in my industry does it that way. And to that, I say not the disruptors who are right around the corner. Right? We all have a disruptor right around the corner right now. So be your own disruptor. And if you are not living up to that mission, then then you are basically leaving that for the competition. So doing things like walking through the journey with your employees and saying, How can how can we empower you here? We know this, this part of the journey is an issue. How can we empower you better? What tools do you need? How can we improve? I mean, I always bring up like the some the hotel chains which are huge, right? They're huge companies. Up until about maybe a year ago, some of them still, you look at the monitor that they're using and it's like a green screen from like 1984. And they have to type in all this stuff and you're like, What is happening? And just things like that where you're like, Why is this so difficult? I'm just trying to, you know, check into my room. So when you look at things like that that are so obvious to the customer and you're not spending the time really thinking, how is this preventing us from delivering on that customer experience mission, then it's really easy to just overlook that stuff and think that's just the way it is. And once you have this lens, it's like everything opens up and you can start seeing ways to really improve the journey in both small and, you know, long term ways as well.

Steve:
You know, we're always on the lookout for new and exciting ideas, and we'd love to get your thoughts on how we're doing. If you have a minute, go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey. Tell us what content you feel will help in becoming a more effective customer experience leader. Again, that's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Steve:
Well, hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Jeannie Walters. She's the CEO and chief customer experience investigator for experienced investigators. She actually co-hosts her own podcast, Crack the Customer Code, and she's an author, keynoter and consultant and a delightful guest on the podcast. Jeannie, what are some of the kind of the common touch points or areas? I think we can probably think about them here, but just again, to kind of get our listeners thinking, where do you kind of see these places where it rubs you the wrong way?

Jeannie:
I think there are a lot of overlooked moments on the journey, and one of them, ironically, is like the minute somebody becomes a customer. We a lot of times this happens in B2B, a lot where we woo them, right? Like we spend all this time and then they become a customer. And the first thing we do is tell them all the horrible things that will happen if they don't pay their bill on time. Like, we've built this beautiful relationship and then the first thing we do is kind of punitive. So that's one where I don't think we spend a lot of time thinking about the emotional resonance of really being welcomed as a customer and what that can mean. So that's one area. The other is when you understand your customers journey, and I like to talk about journey mapping as a verb, not a noun, because it's a process that you should continually be looking at. And if your journey mapping and you start realizing, you know what? We have so many people who call customer service because they have a question here in the journey, then you can start proactively designing to avoid that service moment and to give them information that they want. And customers are telling us they want more self-service. They want more ways to access knowledge and information. So, you know, looking for those moments can prevent that service moment altogether. And that's not a wow moment, right? Like if somebody finds the information they're seeking, they're not going to be like, Wow, this is amazing. It's it's avoiding something that could ruin their day. And so that's another kind of reframing that sometimes helps because sometimes I think we hear a lot about we've got to overdeliver all the time and you talk to business leaders and they're like, Hey, I can't do that, right? Like, we've just got to get through the day. And so if you look for areas where you say, OK, how can we prevent those service moments that can go a long way to to just preventing those ruined days? And then I I mean, in some cases, the only consistent communication we have with customers is invoicing, and we do not take advantage of that as a moment of gratitude and a moment of connection. And just taking a little more time thinking about how are we presenting that? How are we interacting? How are we making that process easy and effortless? That can go a long way to so those three moments in any journey, I would say if you focus in, you can start finding ways to prevent ruining your customers day.

Steve:
That's really, really good. Just again, it's the invoicing part of it and kind of turning that from a punitive into a gratitude type of moment, utilizing some of the feedback as a way to go back and and prevent errors and processes. And then I'm sorry, the third one was?

Jeannie:
The welcome.

Steve:
The welcome, yeah.

Jeannie:
When we really welcome them as a customer and we celebrate that with them. And one of my favorite examples of this was I was working with a construction company and they build like schools and hospitals and big things. And those those sales processes take months, sometimes years, right? Because they've got to get everything figured out. And the client would call and be all excited because they would say, Guess what? We picked you. We're so excited after this huge competition and they would go right into business mode, right? They would say, OK, here's what we need to do. We've got to set up our project management, blah blah blah. And you could almost hear the person go, Oh, OK, like, we thought this was a big deal for both of us, but OK. And so all we did was ask the foreman, essentially who were getting these calls, celebrate with them for a minute. Just say, Wow, we're so pleased. We're so happy that we're on this journey together. And you know, they they had very good metrics. They track things. Their feedback metrics went up in the first part of their journey simply because it was acknowledging where the customer was emotionally with that. And so it doesn't have to be like a big deal. It doesn't have to be something you heavily invest in. It's about really looking at these moments and thinking, how can we kind of turn up the volume a little bit and connect with the customer more? Because that's what this is all about. That's what all of us are trying to achieve is that emotional connection between our brands and the customer, and that's just one way to do it.

Steve:
One of my observations over my career is most companies are more interested in chasing new business than they are in really reinforcing their existing business. Yeah, and they tend to over allocate into the chase and not properly allocate into the onboarding, retention and so forth. So…

Jeannie:
Well, I like the way you said that too, because one of the things that occurred to me a couple of years ago was if you look at traditional business plans and business education, it's all about acquisition. It's all about customer acquisition and then even a traditional business plan, you get the sale and then it goes straight into operations and the internal functions of the organization. It does not talk about customers, it does not talk about customer experience at all. And so people have this kind of warped view of what it means to be a successful business, and they think it's all acquisition. And of course, we know like, you're missing this huge part. Yeah, right. Like if you retain people and if you improve customer lifetime value, everything else gets easier, including acquisition. So it's, I think, on its way up like people are starting to get this concept, but it's taken a long time.

Steve:
Hey, I noticed a couple of times in the conversation. I'm sure it goes back to your roots in in marketing communication, but you keep bringing the brand back to this. So what are the implications for the overall brand of the organization of, you know, obviously again, not ruining their customers day, but just being more more intentional and more proactive about putting these kind of things into practice?

Jeannie:
Sure. Well, I think there's been a tradition of of treating the brand like it's the logo and it's kind of the vibe and it's this all like sexy marketing piece. But really, it's the promise, right? It's what we're saying to customers. Here's here's who we are, and here's what you can expect. And when you know that as a brand, you can live up to it so much better throughout the entire customer journey. If we treat brand as if it's just the branding, then we're missing an opportunity to really pull that brand promise throughout the entire customer journey and deliver on it every step of the way. And that's why in any organization like CX is a team sport, right? We're here, we are in CX Day. That's the theme this year, I think, and it's really about working cross-functionally so that when your marketing folks are putting out information and wooing people with these promises that your customer experience people, your operations, people, everybody can actually deliver on that because they understand that's that's part of who you are. That's that's really what the brand is. It's really the kind of the soul of the organization. And so we need to make sure that we show up with that consistently throughout the customer experience.

Steve:
Yeah. One of the things I've said, I think this is, you know, it's especially true in B2B, but you know, back to kind of the old days of of image marketing where you could differentiate a product based on some sort of, you know, image thing, you know? And you know, like, you know, the classic ones were beers and cars and, you know, things like that. But you know in B2B you can't really separate the brand from the experience. In fact, I would. I'd argue that if you had some slick advertising campaign that oversold the experience, it probably ends up being a detriment. Jeannie, we've reached that point in our podcast, where I ask all of our guests to give their take home value. This is your best tip or idea that our listeners might be able to take back to the office still today or next Monday or sometime in the next couple of weeks where they could implement and actually improve what they're doing today. So. Jeannie Walters, what is your take home value for The CX Leader Podcast?

Jeannie:
I would say if you don't already have a customer experience mission statement, start there and look at your corporate mission statement because I bet it doesn't mention customers. And so that's where having a CX mission statement can really help you get everyone on the same page and it becomes your North Star for your customer experience.

Steve:
I love that. That is again, you, you are. So some of my guests will go on and on and on on the tip of the day, and you were so succinct and so actionable. That's what I like about you. I bet you you might have some tools and resources that folks could access too, and I want to give you a chance to make sure that if anybody wants to continue the conversation, they know how to get a hold of you. So how do I get a hold of Jeannie Walters?

Jeannie:
Yeah. Well, you can find me pretty much anywhere but experienceinvestigators.com is a good place to start. We also are wrapping up our year of CX, which you can find at yearofcx.com. We have all sorts of tools, including a workbook for designing your own customer experience mission statement that you can download there. And then I'm also really active on LinkedIn and Twitter. Linkedin I've got a couple of LinkedIn Learning courses. You can also check out too, but I love hearing from you, so let me know.

Steve:
Great. Well, again, thank you for being a guest on the podcast. It really was a ball to have you on the podcast, and I hope we can do it again sometime.

Jeannie:
That would be wonderful. Thanks so much, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, it was my pleasure. Thank you, Jeannie. And again, I would encourage all my listeners to check out her website. She really does have quite a presence out there and lots of good, useful tools as you, if you just listen to this podcast, you can tell she knows how to get things done. And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, Cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes. We organize them by series and topic and we have our contact information. There's even a spot where you can drop us a note, tell us how we're doing or give us an idea for a future podcast. 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 is a great time to be a CX leader and happy CX day and we will see you again next time.

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