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Steve:
Here's a CX pro's dream: customer experience has become so prevalent in your organization that every department wants someone from CX in the room.

Amanda:
We had some really great projects as well that we were able to sponsor and co-lead, and once we were able to show the ROI and the significance of what that can do for the company and the customer, it was kind of off to the races at that point. It became, what do you need now to do more of that?

Steve:
Making the case for an actual CX function in your company. 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. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader. And on this program, we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. There are so many times on this show that our guests have described their customer experience efforts as living within their marketing department, and we've pointed out many times there are good reasons for that. But what if we made the case that CX should exist on its own? An independent CX practice capable of working with all aspects of the organization, thus improving the customer experience for all levels. Well, my guest has had success in doing that in her company, and I'm delighted that she's agreed to come on and show and tell us all about it. Amanda Flashner is the chief experience officer at LendingPoint, a financial technology platform. Amanda, thank you so much for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Amanda:
Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you so much, Steve. Appreciate it.

Steve:
Well, I'm really looking forward to this. And this is a topic that is important to our listeners and also an area of keen interest to me. And I always like to kind of get the people's background on how they got to be a CX leader because it appears to me that most people don't set out to do this. But Amanda, just for context, could you just give us a little bit of your career background and how you ended up being the chief experience officer at LendingPoint?

Amanda:
Absolutely. I am probably exhibit number 3000 on how it is not a linear path to CX. So I actually my studies are are actually in psychology and forensic science. So just like any good daughter, I had originally thought that I would be going into law and working at my mom's law firm one day. We'd be working side by side and quickly realized that that was not something that filled up my cup. So decided to change my studies and just by accident, took a behavioral science class in psychology and kind of fell in love with learning why people do what they do, what drives behavior, what drives experiences and expectations in the science and math behind all of that, and how to pattern all of that out in the real world. And so I actually got my studies and finalized school and my focus in forensic science and psychology, which is very bizarre. And then I just had these really great doors open to learn and to utilize that behavioral science in my life and had a lot of different doors open for me. And just I think like a lot of CX professionals, we started somehow in marketing utilizing that behavioral science and how to learn what customers need and how they want to get those needs met. And then I had the opportunity to join a founding agency in Atlanta that was one of the first CX practices, and agencies in Atlanta had the opportunity to join and also had a fabulous leader who allowed me to learn on the spot and ask questions and get involved and kind of learned on the job. And that's how we ended up here.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, tell us a little more about LendingPoint. I know it's not a household name, but I've enjoyed getting to learn a little bit more about it. But just as before we get into our conversation here, tell us a little more about your organization.

Amanda:
Yeah, so we are a private fintech platform, and a fintech platform is kind of a very broad base at this point in time. But the best way to say it is that we're really focusing on providing financial freedom to all of our customers. And we have a very complex and diverse line of business and complex ecosystem because we have three lines of business. One is B2C, B2B2C, and then not to make anything more complicated, we also added B2B in the middle of COVID, and that is who we are. We provide access to credit and financial opportunities as well as financial education to a wide variety of consumers and merchants and small businesses.

Steve:
So how many customers in total across all three lines of business?

Amanda:
So currently we're at about 420,000 customers, current active customers. But we have I'm really proud to say this, this is a really lovely moment. We have reached the $8.5 billion access to credit mark and that is in about eight years.

Steve:
Yeah. So you you grew up in marketing and then at some point branched out into CX. And you know, on this show we talk a lot about how, you know, both marketing and CX really can't be successful in a silo. They have to be kind of embraced and pervasive throughout the entire organization to be successful. So how did you convince your organization to to make CX an independent function?

Amanda:
I can be very convincing just by constantly asking, which is pretty much what I did. What we what I noticed is that while we were what I would consider mentally customer centric, operationally, we were not yet focused on customer experience. And I really felt that the division of the two groups was going to be where we would really have a practice and go from customer centricity to customer obsession. And I really wanted us to get to that next phase. And luckily I had a CEO and I have a CEO, Tom Burnside, who every day we talk about customers, what are we doing for customers and what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong and what could we be doing better? And he his mentality was always customer centric. But what we realized was that without an actual group, that was always advocating, always solving for and always creating for our customers, we were missing a really big key piece to what it could be and what we could be in our customers lives. And what I just kind of convinced him like, Let's try this, let's try a small department, let's try to put some practice into our products, into what we're building and creating for our customers. And if it doesn't work, that's okay. But let's prove out that it can and then we can we can come back in about a year. A year later, my team doubled in size. It's tripled in size. And now I actually have a much larger team and I actually have other departments now reporting into into the customer experience department. So it's very exciting. I think it's just a really amazing time for LendingPoint and specifically for LendingPoint's customers and merchants and small businesses.

Steve:
We talked about how many customers and how many how much access to credit you offer, but how many employees is the firm now?

Amanda:
So at the end of the year, we were at about 500.

Steve:
500, Yeah, it's a big company now and I think that your comment about you were customer focused but not customer obsessed and that the customer orientation existed sort of in the culture, but not yet in the operations. Could you talk a little more to that and kind of what that evolution looked like?

Amanda:
Yeah, absolutely. I think what we were able to do was really when we brought in the customer experience practice, it was also the customer experience ethos of how do you do right? It's not just what are we doing, it's not the why are we doing it, but then how do we implement that into our, like I said, our very complex ecosystem. We are a multi product company. 40% of our customers are repeat customers. They do have more than one product with us, which means that we also have overlapping from one business unit to the next. And what we what we really needed to do was show that you have to have a instead of a product vertical and kind of mono product view, you really have to have an ecosystem view. And in order to do that, we really had to have customer experience professionals working within those lines of business. But then also coming up top and saying, now how does this work when you're a product customer and how does this work when you're this type of customer versus that type of customer, how does it work on our digital experiences versus our call center experiences and really being able to put the how together and then have a we mean, we had some really great projects as well that we were able to sponsor and co-lead. And once we were able to show the ROI and the significance of what that can do for the company and the customer, it was kind of off to the races at that point. It became, what do you need now to do more of that instead of the, you know, the typical struggles with the CX profession is in practice is what is your ROI and where are you in the budget and are you a cost center or are you an ROI driver?

Steve:
Yeah, and I would assume that because you're a technology company, it's a pretty engineering based. A lot of it is, you know, sort of naturally more back to the product, the functionality.

Amanda:
Yes, absolutely. You nailed it.

Steve:
So yeah, I mean, this is kind of a common theme that we see with technology companies. But how were you able to translate that, particularly for the more engineering minded in the organization and have that come out with process and and outcomes that were more customer focused, more customer driven, customer friendly, I guess?

Amanda:
Yeah. Well, I think really it's just some of the principles that we just made sure were always there. And it's the, it's the need states, it's the matrixes, it's the understanding. It's a lot of education too, of what is it that we're trying to design for, not how is it, you know, what are all the pieces and the technology that is to support it. But it's really how does this come alive to the consumer? So what we we started doing was actually before we would even go into an engineering conversation is we would design high level prototype. This is what the experience is. These are all the scenarios that we need to consider. Here's all the need states that we're building for. And then they had an actual understanding and view. And yes, they're very engineers and we know that our engineers think very differently than CX professionals, but we're also very visual. We're all very visual beings. And so once they actually got to see what we were trying to create, understand the strategy, understand the business reason, understand the consumer reason, it really changed and opened up those conversations. And we are the CX team is really in a lot of them are technologists so they have this really great technology background.

Amanda:
They just happen to think like CX people. So they're able to have these important conversations with our engineers, sometimes be able to translate it in a way that they understand, and that's a specialty in and of its own, is a real CX technologist is a specialty in and of its own, and kudos to them for being able to do it. But we're in a lot of those conversations. We're an Agile shop, so we're in scrum conversations and we're daily ones if needed, and we're on weekly calls with engineers and they know that they have direct access to us if they have questions as they're building. And one of the things that we always tell them is let us make those business and consumer decisions, you know, you and then you just come up with what it needs to be. So if you have a conversation or you have a question within your engineering work that you know is going to impact the customer, just come back to us immediately and we'll help you answer that and we'll get it. We'll get it through so it doesn't impact the experience that we're trying to create.

Steve:
So you are a relatively young company, eight and a half years old, but fast growing. It sounded like from your last description, you've kind of gotten out ahead of this where you're actually designing from the start an experience. But I'm guessing it wasn't always that way when you first got involved, right?

Amanda:
Absolutely not. No. Cx at one point in time was the the last stakeholder, not the first.

Steve:
Yeah. So you were fixing a lot of broken stuff?

Amanda:
Yes, we were what I would call remediation experts, which is not a place that is very good for CX to be in because we're clearly more valuable in other aspects of the company, including strategic and prioritizations of the company for the consumer. But yes, I. Yes, that's exactly where we were for a very long time.

Steve:
Well, yeah, and I think this is such a neat story because having been in the business a long time, I think that's been historically kind of where we came from. It was break fix. You know, we were fixing the broken stuff, but the as the profession has matured and we've gotten better now. Now we're kind of out on the leading edge. I was wondering if you could give us an example without getting into any trade secrets or anything, but just sort of juxtapose, you know, in maybe a simple version or simple example how you went from sort of this break fix to then being out, out front of the process.

Amanda:
Yeah. I think a great example was one of our more innovative. It's a, it's a bit of a process, it's a policy and it's an experience for the consumer, which is a really interesting one. There was a decision that was made a couple of years ago that it was better to remove the ability and I know this is very detailed, but it's an interesting one, remove the ability for the consumer to select their first payment date and when their payment dates were going to fall. Right. And in the financial world, yes, we're a fintech, but ultimately we have an entire portfolio to manage and ensuring that a consumer has access to having an account that's set up in a way that they're successful and is obviously a very important part, but also ensuring that they're getting what they need by getting whatever funding that they need quickly. It was also a key differentiator for us. So the decision was made to remove that because it was slowing down the funding process. So okay, we were fixing one customer experience, we were giving them everything that they needed faster. But then we also have a potentially 4 to 6 year relationship with them and they weren't set up for success.

Amanda:
So that decision was made. There was quite a few other, I would say, outcomes to that. And what we saw was we took a couple of months and we said, okay, we're starting to put some pieces together where things just aren't working for customers. And we're seeing in our portfolio, we're seeing it in our scores, we're seeing it in just general satisfaction of customers and how they're managing their account. We were able to pin back, pinpoint that back to that decision. And so what we said was we got this, though. We're going to fix this because we're going to do something so different that other financial companies don't do. And once you become a customer, you can pick your date, whatever date works for you, not whatever, but within reason. You can't go 90 days out, but within reason. Let's get you a date during the month that works for you. And it sounds very easy. It was a very complicated process, just due to the nature of finance and how you set up customer accounts. But what we found was that those customers that either confirmed it worked for them or changed the date outperformed those that didn't by 30%. As it was one of our first really big wins.

Amanda:
We took it on. We saw a problem through the company. We saw a problem that we could solve for with customer experience, and we nailed it. We were expecting some good results, but we pretty much nailed this one. And and that really led to, okay, what what else can you do? What other problems are you seeing within the company that you believe that we can fix with CX? And it's just been a cascading impact from there. So it's great because we are still fixing things, but we're fixing them right and from the beginning. But now we're also creating new experiences and we're solving really complex problems that the entire industry has that we're actually able to solve for our customers. So it's really it's been a lot of fun. You know, I can probably ask you, Steve, you know, when you got your mortgage or you got your credit cards, are you able to pick your your date of the month?

Steve:
No, no.

Amanda:
No. Exactly. So that's a differentiator. We solved a problem for the company. We solved a problem for our customer, and we ended up having a brand differentiator all at the same time.

Steve:
Yeah. And I want to make sure we get this reinforced here. So you said that they were 30% more likely to be successful if they got to pick their date?

Amanda:
Yep.

Steve:
And can you just expand on that a little bit? Like how are they more successful or what?

Amanda:
Well, they make them on time, right? They don't go past due. They're more likely just to stay on track because they said this date is perfect for me and they really appreciate it, too. So what we learned in finance and what we have been learning in our industry more and more is it's always been really rigid with how customers manage their accounts. But what we have found is that when customers have a little bit of a power to manage their account, they're more actively engaged in it, they're more active. Download your mobile app and to consistently interact with your brand. And that was one of the that was one of the hooks to even download the mobile app was, hey, download the mobile app and pick your date, right? So they give the gets. And so we were able to increase even the mobile app downloads, which is of course a huge KPI for the, for the team and a metric for the company. But, but also we were able to do this and give this to them as well and they've outperformed in our portfolio.

Steve:
Wow, what a great ROI story for, for CX. That's that's awesome.

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:
My guest on this week's podcast is Amanda Flashner. She's the chief experience officer at LendingPoint and she's built a tremendous program that is really out on the cutting edge of, you know, leading the organization's CX. Amanda, I have something in my notes here about move from the Whats to the Hows?

Amanda:
Yes. And I think that just goes back to in a company and especially in a company that's always fast growing. And there's a lot of really smart people here at LendingPoint. They always have these great ideas and it's always about, you know, what they need to get out of their jobs and what they need to do for their KPIs. And here's a new idea, and they're all interesting. Some are fabulous, but then it's also how do you how do you move into that "How" for them? And so a lot of what we've done in the CX department and how we've been able to become more strategic partners for the organization, get up front and not be firefighters was figure out what everybody's "what" was so we can help them with their how and if CX can help with their "how" and can really go across the aisle and say, hey, I know this is your KPI, my KPIs, and please stop messing it up. How can we support you and give you a product or a process that exceeds your expectations, works for the customer, works for the company and you're hitting your KPIs. So we really moved into this "how" moment as well with a lot of our key stakeholders and financial industry and our company specifically, one of our key stakeholders is our risk department.

Amanda:
You know, risk and CX you're like, Wow, you guys are friends? Yeah, we're really good friends, actually. You know, they their job is to sometimes say no. And we would like to be the Oprah effect. Everybody gets a car, everybody gets money. We can't do that. And we understand that. But what we wanted to do is say, okay, you have some really important you know, you're important in our company risk you have and you also have a lot of influence over the customer experience by different processes and different decisions you have to make. But how can we help you do it in a way that gets you the benefit that you need and also preserves and potentially even accelerate the customer experience? And that was a huge change for us in the organization and for the customer experience. And, you know, now now we have our risk team coming in with just different ideas they want to talk about. We've been thinking about this and what do you think about this? And sometimes we're even able to talk to them about the "what" before we even get into the "how" now.

Steve:
Yeah, it sounds like it's a really again, it comes back to this philosophy of staying ahead of it. Right. And trying to anticipate the problems before they become problems or even really design the ideal experience before you build it.

Amanda:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think. Go ahead.

Steve:
No, I was just going to say, how do you keep that going? It's obvious that you have made that shift from sort of break fix into to leading the process. But how do you make sure that that continues? I guess I think one thing you said is reaching out across the aisle, which is a constant theme we talk about. You know, don't just show up with your survey data, but go in and talk to them about and understand how they think about the the business and what they're trying to solve for.

Amanda:
I think I think the next big shift and it happened really with not only having the own department, but now actually having as this role as chief experience officer, I really have an incredible responsibility and absolute privilege to advocate for our customers at at the executive committee level. So now it now it also changes to prioritizations for the company and prioritizations for the consumers. And I think that's where when you bring the value across the aisle and you make these these allies, these friends, your your own internal fan club of CX. Right. It is. It's a funny story like risk and CX. Usually you're not buddy buddy. But we are I am I am deeply invested in their success, just like they're deeply invested in mine and what our KPIs are together. And and that shows because when you have those allies and you and you have your own internal fan club as a practice, they help elevate your own internal KPIs, your own internal deliverables and your influence within the organization. And so now the influence went from being able to strategically talk about the how and how it works within our ecosystem for our customers to even a higher level of what do we work on for the next 1 to 5 years? What are the prioritizations for the company? And that's a really exciting place to be right now for CX and to see this live within a financial institution, specifically having a CX leader at within the executive committee and being able to advocate and have those types of conversations is amazing.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, what a tremendous story. Amanda. One thing we haven't talked about is, you know, you have almost 500 employees. How does the employee engagement part work as part of this process, or how is that important to to the success you're having?

Amanda:
Oh to… to me, it's a it's essential to our success and to our customers success as well. And we've been we've really created this movement of getting our employees involved in creation of what we're doing. Ultimately, they're the ones that are part of the delivery of an experience, whether it be good or bad, or they may even be helping remediate if it's a bad experience. So getting them involved is absolutely essential. And what we've done, we have a mobile app team that's actually created something even called a bug bash. So we have a really big product or our new process, new feature coming out and we do a bug bash where we invite frontline employees to. We've already interviewed them. We already have all their information, their feedback, their insights, the things that they're hearing from consumers on the front line, but we also get them involved in the final product. It's not just an employee experience, but it's valuing who they are, what they're what they have to say, the things that they're hearing from our customers for what we do and how we utilize it in our practice. It's it's been it's been an absolute essential part of our success. And I know a lot of times we talk about employee and experience as an employee experience. Is it culture, Is it, you know, taco Tuesdays, is it this, that or the other thing? I think those are all really great pieces to it.

Amanda:
There's always the fun little moments. But truly valuing your employees is getting them part of your your growth and part of your creating and part of your advocating and part of your solving. And they the feedback we get from them is they really love it. We have people that are always raising their hands for the bug bashes. They just love the process. We have people that are still a little scared to get involved with them because they don't feel like they're digital savvy enough. And we actually prefer you not to be digital savvy. We prefer you to come in and tell us, okay, I don't know what's going on and that way that we can do it better. And then if they find bugs and they find new feature sets, we follow back up with them. We let them know that they found a great bug and we thank them. And sometimes we reward them. If it's a new feature set that they came up with, we get them involved. So it's not just an experience, but it's also a growth opportunity for them. They get to see another side of the business. They may get to hear more strategically what the business is doing and why more than they ever have.

Steve:
Yeah, I think that's a great point. Is there is a method to that madness of engaging employees in the mission and what you're trying to accomplish and and what the benefits of that are for the organization. Hey, Amanda, we've reached that point of The CX Leader Podcast where I ask every guest to give us their take home value. It's kind of our hook for the show, but we try to leave our listeners with something that is very practical and something that they could implement with their organization that they have learned from from your podcast. So Amanda Fleshner, what is your take home value for this episode of The CX Leader?

Amanda:
Oh, well, I love the first I love the word value and it's something we talk a lot about within our team. And so as our team grew and then we also combined teams, we created a team value and principle document. And I think that really drives who we are every single day. It's just five really simple, key points. We've all agreed that this is who we're going to be. They may change next year and during our onsite when we get together and say, How have we been doing? And I think that's a big part of creating and ensuring that your own CX team, whether you be in the same office or you're scattered throughout the your organizations and all over the world and all over the country, having those values that you are all rallying around internally as your own department, I think is is highly valuable.

Steve:
Amanda Flaschner is the chief experience officer at LendingPoint. She's been a delightful guest. And Amanda, thank you so much for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Amanda:
Thank you so much. This was so much fun.

Steve:
If anybody would want to continue the conversation, I know I found you on LinkedIn, so you're out there on LinkedIn, but any other contact information or is that probably the best place to find you?

Amanda:
That's definitely the best place to find me.

Steve:
Okay, great. Again, congratulations on such a tremendous program that you've built, and I do hope you'll come back on as a guest in the future.

Amanda:
Thank you so much for having me.

Steve:
Hey, 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. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listeners. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com To subscribe to the show, find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their 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 go out there and make sure you're being proactive, work across the aisle and help others in the organization design in their ideal experiences for their customers. We'll see you again next time.

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