Give Them That “A-ha!” Moment

Release Date: October 10, 2023 • Episode #288

Here’s a situation you might have heard about, or even experienced: you’re ready to get going on this CX “thing” – you’re going to revolutionize your company. But you don’t quite have executive buy-in, or you’ve got the buy-in but you just can’t get people to do what needs to be done. It’s a common problem with companies new to customer experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes back Megan Burns, CX pioneer, keynoter, and advisor, for a discussion on how to active customer experience in your organization.

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Learn more about Megan at https://megan-burns.com/

Megan Burns
Experience Enterprises
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Highlights

Remove Ambiguity

“I think the biggest red flag that I see and look for, I don’t have to look very hard is ambiguity. Ambiguity kills action and we don’t realize how ambiguous we are. We want to improve the customer experience. Great. Which experience? Better how? For who and why?”

The “A-ha” Moment

“Humans have this innate ability to want to be in control of our own stuff. So if we think something is our idea, we’re more likely to do it. So we don’t tell people what customers are saying, were thinking. We engineer the opportunity for them to have their own epiphany. Customer listening sessions, customer feedback, hearing things from other people. Right? When I give keynotes, my goal is that everybody in the room has at least one aha moment because that aha moment is going to get them to do things differently more than me giving them a list.”

Transcript

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Steve:
You know, having a ton of customer experience knowledge is great, but what good is a fancy tool if you don't pick it up and use it?

Megan:
So when we look at, okay, well, what keeps people, especially people outside the CX team from actively participating, one is awareness. They don't know what they don't know. But sometimes it's also an awareness of what they personally can do.

Steve:
Let's look at how CX pros can activate CX within their organization 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 we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. Here's a situation you might have heard about or even experienced: you're ready to get going on this CX thing and you're going to revolutionize your company, but you don't quite have executive buy in or you've got the buy in, but you just can't get the people to do what needs to be done. It's a common problem with companies new to customer experience. But my guest has some insights on how you can overcome those hurdles. Megan Burns is a pioneer in the CX world, keynoter and CX advisor. In our last episode, we discussed the past, present and future of CX, but today she's going to give us some advice on activating CX within your organization. Megan, welcome back for part two of our excellent podcast with Megan Burns. Thanks for being able to come back.

Megan:
Oh, thanks, Steve. My pleasure. I got time to make up for.

Steve:
Yeah, yeah, we've we've allowed you five years off on the podcast, so it's not going to be five years before you come back, I'm quite sure. You talked in part one… we had a great discussion about sort of the evolution and why it's important, and you gave some great kind of thinking about how the whole discipline and has evolved. But you said a couple of times referring to your own interests and kind of what is so important is it's not so much measuring it as it is taking action and making something good happen. So I'm just going to start with that. And as CX leaders, you know, we've measured it, we've discussed it, we've gone out and talked about it. But what is that hurdle? Why can't people take action? What is it that holds us back there?

Megan:
Well, I'll give you a kind of a 50,000 foot answer and then I'll get into a little bit more specifics. At the 50,000 foot level, it's basically that customer experience is the eat healthy and exercise of the business world. I've said this for years, going.

Steve:
To start on. I'm going to start Monday.

Megan:
Yep, I'm going to start Monday. Everybody knows it's important. I mean, I have a fitness watch and how many days have I looked at that and gone, Oh, I've only taken 2000 steps. That's not good. And done nothing about it. Right. Knowing and doing are two very different things, even when we want to do. So when we look at, okay, well, what keeps people, especially people outside the CX team from actively participating? One is awareness. They don't know what they don't know sometimes about the experience, right? We've seen journey mapping workshops where people's eyes get bigger and bigger going, Oh my God, that's what's happening? But sometimes it's also an awareness of what they personally can do, right? I have a lot of conversations about, okay, I'm in H.R., what can I do to influence the customer experience? How does it come through to that? So we have to help people sort of see how that translates into an action personally. And sometimes it's nothing more than be a good colleague so that your colleagues who do talk to customers aren't annoyed from dealing with you. There's a problem of alternatives, right? People know that what they're doing isn't the right thing, but they don't know what else to do.

Steve:
Right.

Megan:
You know, what does this look like? So very often we'll talk about I did an exercise where we mapped out the project, the portfolio planning process for a company and said, okay, if we were going to take customer insights and inject them into this process, what would that look like and where? And they had just never really gotten down to that level of detail to think about, okay, well, what would that look like? And then I also think that one of the issues is energy, right? People are tired.

Megan:
There's a lot going on. It's hard to do something new. And so we have to help them take baby steps, right? Just like in the fitness and health industry, we can't just jump in and say we're going to have a transformation rate. We have to help people make these changes gradually, because even if they mean well and they want to start out with a great process, you know, first crisis and it's all going to go out the window. So there are a lot of complex reasons, but none of them are usually that people hate customers.

Steve:
Yeah, no, I think that the majority like I mean, hi, 90% of people out there want to do, you know, good work for their company and for their clients and their customers. But like you say, it's not always, you know, I guess, innate or natural. And then we put a lot of barriers around that too, with process and regulations and resource constraints. But, you know, it's funny, like we were talking in the last podcast, you know, I've been around a while. You've been around a while, but you know, this, you know, we used to call it taking action and now we're talking about activating. But I love the analogy of the kind of the personal health. We're really kind of like personal trainers, aren't we?

Megan:
That's actually when people ask me what I do or how I work with clients. That's actually what I say a lot of times. I'm like a personal trainer for CX: I can't do it for you, but I can help you sort through all the noise and figure out what the right sustainable program is for you. So yes, absolutely.

Steve:
Teach them better habits and give them moral support and reinforce it and maybe be a little bit of a guilt trip if they're not doing it, but…

Megan:
Happy to. I pay people to do that for me. We we're human. We need it.

Steve:
No, it's perfect analogy because we all know what to do, right? To be healthier. But that doesn't mean we we do it. And and, you know, all the research is that if you write them down and you measure it and you hold yourself accountable or you do it with a friend or you know, you're actually paying somebody to hold you accountable, then it's probably going to work better. And and we do have to try to change our businesses for the good of the customer and for the success of our business businesses as well. Because if we don't change and we don't provide that, there will be a void in the marketplace that somebody else will fill. Correct?

Megan:
Yes.

Steve:
So what are some I mean, I threw some things out. When do you see these things stall out? Usually? What are kind of the key symptoms or sort of some of the things that you see commonly will derail this program or at least slow it down?

Megan:
Yeah, I think the biggest red flag that I see and look for, I don't have to look very hard is ambiguity. Ambiguity kills action and we don't realize how ambiguous we are. We want to improve the customer experience. Great. Which experience? Better how? For who and why? I have a little framework I use called the the CX Project Pyramid and it's like just getting people – they know this, but they've never articulated it this specifically. We want to change – and I use the word change intentionally because it's neutral – the onboarding experience so that it is less boring and more engaging for new customers so that they will be more likely to renew. You know, there is that hypothesis, that specificity living in people's brains, but they don't articulate it. And if you go to someone in the organization and say, Hey, you know, we want to make the onboarding experience less boring and more engaging to do this that is granular enough that can people can be like, okay, I get that. I understand how we might do that. If you come to them and say, we want to improve the customer experience or even just we want to improve the onboarding experience, it's too nebulous. People can't. There's actually research that shows that people are more likely to follow through on requests that are specific than requests that are generic. It's fascinating research, but it's basically even if you're not the kind of person who is normally inclined to do something, if somebody makes a specific request of you, you're more likely to do it.

Steve:
I love that. You know, again, you just make it a little more clear and your little framework there of who why exactly what. That's that's good stuff.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast is again, Megan Burns, keynoter, author, CX renowned expert. And we're talking in part two here about how do you activate in this kind of this new phase that we're going through? What are the other factors that kind of need to be considered when planning how to activate think?

Megan:
One of the big ones is the the sort of sociology social influences aspect to it. And you know this and I think you're in this camp with me, right? We both love behavioral science and human science. We talk about needing to make things easy for people to do, and we tend to talk about tools and things like that. There's functional ease and then there's psychological ease, and psychological ease is much harder to get, right? So how do I make it psychologically safe for someone who absolutely wants to change the way that they prioritize the product portfolio because they know it could be better? But how is that going to be received? Are they going to get in trouble for doing that or their boss is going to support it? You know, there's this whole cascade. And so how do we whether we provide examples, people call me and say, hey, what are the best companies doing? They want to know that because they want to give their employees some sort of social proof that A, other people are doing it and B, it's working. So thinking about how either by leveraging people who are really well respected, getting them to try things first, or if they do things, getting them to be more visible about it. A lot of executives will do customer centric things and don't realize that nobody else in the organization sees it because they spend all their time with their first and second level reports and employees are like, I had no idea that you did that. So they think they're living the values of customer centricity, but they don't realize that employees aren't actually seeing it. So thinking about how do we create those moments of of safety for people? That's another big one.

Steve:
I love that. And I could go back to the physical health analogy, but in the interest of time, I won't. So you've talked about be specific, not ambiguous, talked about psychological support, not just, you know, kind of technical support, anything else, any other factors you want to highlight or?

Megan:
So when I talk to people about strategies for for activation, I've covered two of the three. I usually talk about engineering epiphanies. Um, providing social proof and facilitating first steps and engineering epiphanies is probably my favorite one. I have not, nor will I ever go into a company and say, You don't know your customers. That's the fastest way to get kicked out.

Steve:
Yeah.

Megan:
Even if I think it's true, right? So people it's funny. Humans have this innate ability to want to be in control of our own stuff. So if we think something is our idea, we're more likely to do it. So we don't tell people what customers are saying, were thinking. We engineer the opportunity for them to have their own epiphany. Customer listening sessions, customer feedback, hearing things from other people. Right? When I give keynotes, my goal is that everybody in the room has at least one aha moment because that aha moment is going to get them to do things differently more than me giving them a list. So thinking about how do I maybe saying the same thing, but you're saying in a way saying it in a little bit different, more approachable way that makes people go, Oh, I never thought about it that way before. I'll give you an example. I was working with a tech company and they are obsessed with analytics and monitoring their technical network and all of this. And I said, Would you ever run the network without monitoring, run it blind? And they literally laughed at me. Who would run a network blind? And I said, Well, that's what you're doing with your customer network. You're running your customer network blind. And silence. They never thought about it that way before. But that metaphor was so impactful that suddenly they were like, Oh yeah, maybe we do need to do more of this now. It's usually not one big aha like that, but that's that's a really powerful way to kind of watch people come along without any cajoling from you.

Steve:
Yeah. You said a couple of things that are so intriguing to me and I think it's your engineering mind, but engineering epiphanies is a great one. You always have good names for stuff too, and you know, you have a good way of framing things. But you know, there is a benefit to getting people to go through the process rather than just telling them, you know? And I've seen that that's classic change management theory is like you kind of create an environment where they can go through and have the same experience that you've had. So you've given us some really great ideas here, Megan. What are some of the frameworks or methods to sort of spur the action of customer focused activities in the organization? Just give us a couple of your tips there.

Megan:
My number one tip is to ask the question, what do you mean by that? And it sounds silly, but I have an entire workshop I do around who owns the customer experience and who should own the customer experience. That literally starts from what does it mean to own something? And that's different in every organization. I'm a huge word nerd, so I tend to use definitions and things like that. So asking people to be more specific, what do you mean by that? Can you give me an example that forces people to take these kind of pie in the sky concepts into a more tangible way? And it's it's not threatening if you do it the right way. But again, it engineers some of those epiphanies. And sometimes the epiphany is that they don't know. They haven't thought through it in that much detail. But that's step one. That's probably the biggest one. I mentioned the customer experience Project Pyramid earlier, where we talk about rather than say we want to improve the experience, which experience better? How for who and why? I actually have a little downloadable that if you want to link to it for listeners to download, I'm happy to. That's a that's turned out to be a really powerful one. Those are probably the two big ones that jump to mind. My brain thinks and frameworks, so I have a zillion of them, but those are the two that are that I use most often.

Steve:
Yeah, no, it's it's always fun to talk to you. I always get good insights and your, your ability to break down complex things into ways that we can kind of digest them a little better is kind of one of your superpowers. So you did this last week, but we always ask for take home value and you've given us a lot already. So I'm anxious to hear kind of what you're you're going to instruct our listeners to what they could do to immediately be better at activating CX in their organizations. So Megan Burns, take home value for this week.

Megan:
Take home value is assume positive intent. Everybody is trying to do the right thing.

Steve:
Love it.

Megan:
Their definition and their understanding of the right thing is based on a particular worldview. And so coming in and saying, what's the good thing they're trying to do and how is that a "yes, and" with customer experience. It helps make people less defensive and it acknowledges the fact that, you know, security and costs and legal those are all valid concerns we have CX is a "yes and" field. We got to embrace that.

Steve:
Megan Burns is a customer experience expert, keynote speaker and author. Be sure to check out her website megan-burns.com and we can link to your little framework for how you can be more specific. Megan thanks again for not only doing one CX Leader Podcast but doing a two parter and really always fun to connect with you. So thanks for being a great guest.

Megan:
You're welcome. It was great to be here.

Steve:
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 us 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 listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes, podcast series, a link to our blog which we update regularly and our contact information. You can drop us a line, let us know how we're doing or suggest something 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. Thanks for listening and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. So go out there and action your CX. And we will see you again next time.