The CX Leader Podcast: "It's a Great Time to be a CX Leader": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "It's a Great Time to be a CX Leader": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
The CX Leader Podcast is four years old, and we've covered a ton of topics in that time.

Sonya:
Picture of a typical client for us four or five years ago was, for the most part, a global Fortune 500 company. Today, nearly every company of any size realizes that they need to have some kind of process or knowing how they're performing in the different ways they interact with their customers.

Steve:
Taking a look at how things have changed since we started this show and what to expect in 2022 on this, the 200th 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. As we like to say each week, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast helps explore the topics and themes so that leaders like you can leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. Can you believe it? We have produced over two hundred episodes of The CX Leader Podcast, and I want to take this opportunity to thank all of our wonderful listeners and guests for helping make that happen. We've covered a ton of topics around here and beyond customer experience with thought leaders from across the globe and with many, many guests. So we thought it would be fun to take a look at how customer experience has evolved since our first episode debuted on January 9th, 2018 and what to expect in 2022. And to do that, I couldn't ask for two better people. I'm delighted to have my friends and colleagues on the show today and neither one of them's a stranger. They've both been on previous episodes of Of The CX Leader Podcast. Sonya McAlister is a principal in the firm and senior vice president, head of sales at Walker. And Sean Clayton is also a senior vice president and he's the head of our advisory and manage services here at Walker. Combined, they have many decades of experience in customer experience. They have consulted literally with hundreds of big name companies over the years, and I just couldn't be more proud to call them my colleagues. And they truly are thought leaders and experts in this, this field that we are all so fortunate to be a part of. So, Sean, Sonya, thanks for all your great work and especially thanks for being my guest on the 200th episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Sonya:
Great to be here. Thanks, Steve.

Sean:
Yeah, thanks for having us both join.

Steve:
Sonya, let's start with you. For those of our listeners who don't know who you are, maybe just a quick overview of your career history. But more specifically, I'd like you to take us back to kind of what you were doing four years ago in January of 2018.

Sonya:
Most of the couple of decades that I've worked at Walker, I worked in a client facing role, typically leading account teams that were working large, ongoing engagements with some of our more strategic customers. But in late 2017, early 2018, we made a very important strategic decision to partner with Qualtrics, and that led us to sort of reconfigure our organization a bit to best provide Qualtrics related professional services. And that's when we formed the sales team that I'm leading now. At the time, I think we were a small team of maybe five people that has grown to a team of twelve here at the end of 2021.

Steve:
Yeah, I can remember those days and I think when we first started the sales team, most of them were still working, had a lot of client responsibility, right?

Sonya:
It was a long transition process. Yes, to get people out of that and freed up, and we were migrating customers from our homegrown systems to Qualtrics. So yeah, there was a lot going on when this podcast process started.

Steve:
And Sean, again, you've been on the podcast before and you have a really great background. So just a quick history of your career. And then maybe you could share with us where you were four years ago in January 2018?

Sean:
Sure. Very, very similar background to Sonya's. So spend most of my career working servicing clients, primarily in the experience management space, folks at Walker and a couple of other places, and currently head up the group of consultants and project managers that works directly with clients and our key accounts. And four years ago, as interesting, so, fourth quarter, we were doing one of one of our clients forums. We were telling our clients and associates about transition to Qualtrics, and I was traveling a lot more four years ago. So I was actually out in Taiwan for a couple of weeks, working with one of our largest accounts in the tech space, traveling both for work and for leisure as well. I distinctly remember four years ago, at some point during the fourth quarter of this quarter, I was on a beach somewhere and then heading into Q1 2018 I think what I remember most was becoming one of the first Qualtrics Partner Network partners, so we were a founding member. I think that was back in Q1 2018 and then going out to the X4 conference and, really becoming part of that, that Qualtrics family.

Steve:
Well, I always give you a lot of credit for first putting the idea in my ear that maybe we should be partnering with these platform companies instead of trying to fight against them. And I'm grateful for that because it really was a big change. And maybe I'll start there with you, Sean. But obviously, the emergence of these platform companies has been a big change in customer experience in the last four years. Maybe if you comment on that and then, you know, other, you know, any other kind of big changes that you've seen over the past four years in the CX space?

Sean:
Yeah, I think definitely the customer experience space, the whole market has obviously expanded a lot over the over the four years, both in terms of the technology players as well as the professional services companies. As it's really as an area, as a domain become something that's almost mainstay now, which several years ago, some of us that have been in the CX profession probably thought it was still a relatively niche occupation relative to some of the other business areas in the world. But you look at it now, and it is it is very, very front and center for so many industries, for so many companies. I think just earlier this week, the announcement by the current president that there would be a new mandate to customer experience standards across various government agencies. I mean, that just shows you how far we've come, even even in just four years. I think there have obviously been some technology enablers over that time frame as well that have really changed just the customer experience that we all kind of see us as consumers day in, day out. So just the advances in mobile technology and big data and analytics. But I think overall, this space is bigger and the players have become more diversified as well. I think if we were looking back four years and earlier, a lot of traditional market research companies were dominant in this area. And you look at it now and it's really much more diversified in terms of the kind of companies that are advising on customer experience.

Steve:
Yes, Sonya, let me go to you. What are some of the big changes you've seen over the last four years?

Sonya:
I think the size of a company that realizes they need to have some kind of process in place to monitor their customer experience has expanded pretty dramatically. The picture of a typical client for us four or five years ago was, for the most part, a global Fortune 500 company that had naturally available budget to to spend on a customer experience initiative. And today, nearly every company of any size realizes that they need to have some kind of process for knowing how they're performing in the different ways they interact with their customers. I think that's really a an indicator of what has become kind of the downside of delivering a bad experience. Obviously we talked a lot over the last four years and longer about continually improving and enhancing the customer experience. But I think the punishment that companies get today for delivering a bad experience is just so much more of an issue, I mean, a true business performance issue for them because it can become so much more quickly, publicly known. By word of mouth traveling through social media, et cetera, that it can really significantly affect a company's ability to continue to do business.

Steve:
Yeah, there's really a convergence there, you know, the speed at which the technology is moving, the number of organizations that are now able to access this kind of insight to create great experiences. It really does put a premium on it, and it makes the kind of the cost of having, you know, bad experiences bigger and better than ever. You know, you get so spoiled to having good experiences that when you don't have one and you can't resolve it in the hassle factor is too much, you know, it's just really, really… and if there is some sort of replacement out there for it, you know, the smart customer is going to go find it. And then kind of relate it back to something Sean said, you know, really the the number of companies that are involved in this, you know, we used to think this was sort of a kind of a slow growth, kind of boring business that is now really become kind of a fast moving dynamic, great space. So again, we say on the show all the time, you know, it's a great time to be a CX leader. So for those of you who are listening to our podcast, you know you pick the right profession. Let me go back to the start of the podcast and and we actually did our first three episodes in January of 2018 on a study that we had actually conducted in 2013 that was looking at the future of customer experience and what we thought it would be like in the year 2020 and we'd actually updated it like in 2016, 2017. So the whole kind of rollout was how are we doing on the road to 2020? But you know, you go back to 2013, the three key findings of that study of customers 2020 that customers wanted the most were personalization, ease, and speed. How do those things resonate now as we enter the year 2022? Sean, maybe I'll start with you. Personalization, ease and speed.

Sean:
Yeah, and I would say overall, it's hard to argue against the need for any experience to be personalized, easy and fast. So I think those are still tenets of great customer experiences in general. But I think to some extent over the last four years and since we first suggested that those were key facets of great customer experiences even earlier than 2020, I think they're becoming somewhat stable state expectations and a lot harder to differentiate on for companies. I think we mentioned the current administration and what they're doing in terms of government agencies. I think more and more companies, small and large business to business as well as business to consumer, have spent significant amount of time taking a hard look at how their delivery experiences. I think they've seen the leaders, they've seen those best practices, and now they're starting to look at the technology that can be deployed to make their experiences more personal, easier and quicker for that for their customers. And so I think the it's taken a while, but I'm not sure that those three things are necessarily differentiators for customer experience leaders, but they're absolutely still requirements, whether we're talking about business to business or business to consumer. I think an area that that might be added to those three for consideration would be empathy. I think the challenge with the double edged sword of big data and AI is that while yes, it can help with making experiences more automated, it can make them faster. It can help even create some sense of personalization. The double edged sword is that it does kind of remove a little bit to human touch and the empathy, and I think that's something that, especially in the current circumstances, we all find ourselves in around the world, and especially after the last 18 months, customers, consumers and employees are looking for empathy when they interact with others, whether it's their employer, the health insurance provider, a local retailer, the utility company or even the public sector.

Steve:
Sonya, I pick it up with you there. Any comments you'd have about Sean's assessment? But then even more particular, how this has been impacted over the last 18, 20 months as we've been dealing with the COVID and the fallout from that. But you know, it seems to me like some of this is just accelerated because of that.

Sonya:
Yeah. So just going back first to the three elements we identified in the Customers 2020 report, from what I've read and observed since 2013, when we rolled that out, it seems that the most progress has been made on the ease and the speed elements. And we've talked about this since 2013 that a lot of that was kind of driven by what we referred to as the Amazon effect. You know, expectations were clearly affected by that and companies had to respond. It still seems, though, today that personalization is an ongoing challenge, and personalization, I think, does help to build the trust and empathy that Sean mentions, whether it's via technology or via humans. You know, it's that personalization process that can create that stronger bond. And companies are still struggling with that today. Now what I want, what all do we think about? What, Sean, do you have a take on what the impact of COVID has been on how companies are managing CX or how they're shifting their focus?

Sean:
Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's I mean, a general level force companies for CX professionals in tech companies that we that we work with day in, day out to be a little bit more agile and flexible about how they manage their programs. I mean, just the fact that most of them were forced to kind of pivot that whole business, which includes the CX strategy and that CX programs from where things were at a meeting its March 2020 to them where things are at now. And I think some had maybe got into a little bit of complacency and a little bit of the trap of focusing on the measurement, focusing on the tracking and less on being able to adapt based on what customers are saying or what they what they're hearing from companies. So I think from a CX professional standpoint, agility or flexibility has been an absolute must have. I think just in terms of more general changes in in customer service and customer models, the pandemic obviously kind of created a need for change. And I think some of the changes were probably happening already, but quite gradually. And then it just acted as an accelerator for some of the things that we're now starting to see is quite commonplace that some of the businesses that have got into restaurant food delivery, for example, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, and they've transformed that whole industry with ghost kitchens and ghost restaurant brands and things like that. Online ordering from grocery stores was really not did not have a lot of uptake until after the pandemic. Even even companies very niche companies that were focused on things like speed and personalization. And he's in an area like buying a car like the Carvana is very, very small players. But now some of the larger OEMs offering to deliver a brand new vehicle to your home. So I think that there have been these larger changes, but from a CX standpoint, more around just flexibility and agility.

Sonya:
Yeah. And I would just add that I think the one outcome of the pandemic is that it created a stronger managerial level interest in truly understanding what customers are dealing with as they're trying to go through transactions and interactions. I mean, it has been a surprising level of demand growth over the course of the past 18 to 20 months.

Steve:
Yeah, I think you guys nailed it. I mean, nothing has probably disrupted how we interact with companies as customers and employees than this pandemic and the ability for people to figure it out. You know, it does. It puts a premium on agility. It puts a premium on flexibility. The whole embrace of digital, whether you were on the road or not. The ability to kind of move between channels to service customers from self-serve to help. And I think that's what you were getting at with the personalization thing. We're still challenged on that a little bit. And then you overlay, you know, some of the, you know, the supply chain issues and inflation for the first time in almost an entire career. So yeah, it's it's definitely been a radical time of change.

Steve:
Hey, my guests on the podcast in this special week are 200th episode are my colleagues and friends Sean Clayton and Sonya McAllister, who were both senior leaders here at Walker and and really respected thought leaders in the CX space for and have been for a long time. We're kind of doing a reflection on what's happened since we started the podcast, which is a lot. Let's go forward now and look at the future. So I know you're both visionary CX leaders, so I need you to go look into your crystal ball here. And what do you think it'll be like? You know, how do you forecast, Sonya, you know, kind of what the state of CX might be four years from today?

Sonya:
Yeah, one of the things that we've. Been recently talking about and and now really anticipating as increased focus on contact centers and how much more of a role they can and likely will play in delivering the best customer experience as possible. And then to the points that Sean was raising earlier, that will require the perfect combination of technology and humans to really be able to provide the right kind of interaction for each customer in the way they want it at that point in time.

Steve:
Sean?

Sean:
Yes, I definitely would agree with that. I think one of the things we've seen in the last 18 months is just kind of by force people that have shifted more towards online channels in dealing with their vendors, whether it's consumer or business. And of course, there are generational preferences that are going to continue to make that the preferred way of engaging. I think the kind of whole idea of engaging with customers omnichannel, another big part of that, is the role of contact center has to play. Also is where you can have this, you have to have this kind of careful blend of automation. It's got to be efficient for the company providing the service and to the consumer receiving the service, obviously leveraging AI and data because you have it right there or digital, but not neglecting that human element, which is where the contact center has a key role to play. And I think an interesting kind of if you do that as a Venn diagram, like what channel seems to be like right at the heart of that at the moment as a really accelerating way that people are interacting with companies in its chat live chat. Not the chat bot, which the chat bot has a place, but it is not likely to replace the live chat anytime soon. It is the the way that younger people are preferring to engage with with businesses and with other companies. And it's the leaders in this space in terms of companies have embraced live chat. I've kind of really figured it out and that feedback is integrated into that whole channel, but it's still quite a few companies that have yet to to really deploy the latest technology to make live chat as seamless as it should be, and probably more so when we're talking about the business to business space. So I think that's an area where companies will be playing catch up, maybe not over the next four years, but definitely over the next one or two years. And that will become table stakes, just like the things we talked about in the Customers 2020 report. I think another thing that will that will continue to evolve is is the personalization area. So when we originally were talking about personalization and when technology platforms were starting to enable personalization, it was still at a reasonably macro level. So, you know, maybe a company was able to detect how you would prefer them to communicate with you and then you would start getting communications primarily through that channel. But there's a big movement now towards something called hyper personalization, and that's taking it to a whole different level and is very much down at the individual customer micro moments in a journey that they have with a with a company, and the technology that enables that is journey orchestration. But what it essentially does is allow companies to have almost like a one on one conversation with the customer across those different channels. So I think that's something that we'll see more and more of over the next couple of years, if not four years.

Steve:
You know, ee just had a really good discussion here about kind of the path we've been on the last four years and then sort of your guys take on where we're going. So this is the point in the podcast is our listeners know that I always ask our guests for their take home value. That's kind of a practical tip or a call to action for the CX pros that listen to this podcast that they can take from this podcast and actually implement in their programs to make them better so. Sonya, what's your take home value based on where CX is headed and and here at the start of 2020 to what is CX leaders want to be doing to make sure that they're prepared for that future?

Sonya:
Yeah, I'm going to come back to the the downside of delivering poor experiences. And just sort of reemphasize that. The reality of being able to know when and how often a poor experience is happening, I don't know, is very available today. And anything that a CX leader can be doing to identify those, or at least the likely conditions for a bad experience and putting in the enablers and processes that could help avoid that, I think will be the biggest contribution that CX leader can make in the next couple of years. It's just to maintain the reputation of a company and the public opinion about the experience that they can deliver.

Steve:
Thanks for that. Sean, bring us home. What's your take home value for the future of CX?

Sean:
I'll go back to the the topic of sea and say, think about ways as a CX professional that you can humanize the CX program. And what I mean by that is trying to actually bring your customers into your CX program and reducing the proximity between your customers and the data that you're reporting on. I think there's a tendency that we all fall into this trap of let's look at data, let's look at charts, let's look at dashboards to understand our customers. And those are certainly important things, but they're not the only ways of understanding and empathizing with customers. So think about balancing your surveys and your listening architecture that you currently use with approaches like one on one in depth, customer interviews, observing customers, setting up customer advisory boards just really ways that you're getting. That proximity is going to be much closer between your CX team and your CX insights and your actual customers.

Steve:
My guests on the podcast this week are my colleagues and friends Sonya McAllister and Sean Clayton. Hey, thanks for being on the podcast and for lending your insight to this special 200th episode. If any of our listeners would like to continue the conversation, could you just quickly tell us how we might get a hold of you, Sonya?

Sonya:
Yes, of course. Easiest first connection is probably via email. So that is smcallister@walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Sean?

Sean:
Yeah. Likewise, very easy email address: sclayton@walkerinfo.com, and you can also find both of us on LinkedIn as well.

Steve:
Thanks again. Always a pleasure to have you guys on. And sure, it won't be the last time. And here's to a great 2022. And if you want to learn anything else about what you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Also, be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show. Find all of our previous episodes, podcast series, our contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing, or suggest 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's a great time to be a CX leader. We'll see you again next time.

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