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Steve:
I'm sure many of us have experienced the handoff. That phenomena where you call support to get help and are transferred so many times you just hang up out of frustration.

Diane:
So when we think about seamless and these transitions and having the right functional departments play together to deliver on a good experience across the journey, everybody has to understand and work together in order to meet the customer's needs.

Steve:
A seamless experience as one of the eight essential themes driving CX evolution 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. As we like to say on this show, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader and we explore the topics and themes that help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. I can't believe we've already had four episodes of our series "CX Now: Eight Essential Themes Driving CX Evolution" and this will be the fifth. In this series we take a close look at today's current topics and trends that CX Pros need to embrace to be better leaders and take their programs to the next level. Collaborating with our partners at Qualtrics, we developed this series using feedback from more than 50 CX leaders. The digital interactive experience, personalization, predictive analysis, and employee engagement are all topics we've covered so far in our CX Now series. And of course, you can listen to those episodes on our website, cxleaderpodcast.com. Today we're talking about the seamless experience: minimizing handoffs to provide an ideal unified experience for customers. And I can't think of a better resource to talk about this than my friend and colleague Diane Skirvin. Diane's a vice president and leads one of our market teams here at Walker in the Advisory and Managed Services Group. Diane, thank you for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Diane:
Thanks for having me, Steve. Happy to be here.

Steve:
Well, Diane, despite the fact that we've never had you on the program, I know you're going to be a great guest. But just for a little bit of background, why don't you share with our listeners just your own personal career growth and how you've grown to be a CX leader?

Diane:
Yeah, so I have been with Walker for about 18 years now. Essentially grew up here learning CX from the from the ground up. I started as a project manager helping clients execute their programs from start to finish, and I grew in love with the topics and the challenges that clients were having and shifted into more of a consulting advisory role. Did that for several years and have now, over the last year and a half to two years, shifted into a team lead role, helping consultants and project managers deliver for their clients and stand up and advise on CX programs and beyond CX.

Steve:
Yeah, well, it's been a real pleasure to be your colleague for 18 years. It's hard to believe and feel lucky to have you and that you brought your talents to Walker. I know this seamless experience is something that you're very passionate about. The way we've been teeing up this whole series is you get to define what we mean by a seamless experience. So according to Diane Skirvin, what is the definition of a seamless experience as it relates to the CX world?

Diane:
Yeah, So I'll start with a little bit more of a basic definition, and then we'll go from there because I think there's a lot of complex components that make up seamless and we'll get into that. So the first piece, we just think about speed. How quickly are we able to help customers do what they want to do? Are we clear with what they're supposed to do? Do we have the right systems to support those elements? So those are things that all make up this ease as well as the people that are supporting them. So the more complex parts beyond just speed and clearly communicating with customers is how to think about what a seamless handoff or transition is for a customer, whether it be if they're working in different touchpoints, if they're working across different journeys from using something to support, how personalized are we making it? Are they interacting with digital tools versus people tools, and how connected are we making those experiences? That's important. So those are some of the bigger pieces and a lot of areas where organizations really start to struggle when it comes to delivering on what a seamless experience looks like.

Steve:
Yeah, and you know, there are real valid business reasons why you have to do handoffs. You know, sometimes you need subject matter expertise or there's just you know, there's different capabilities or competencies that that you can't have reside in one system or one person. But I kind of like the way you, you reference the customer journey. You know, let's talk a little bit more about how the customer journey impacts those sorts of handoffs and whether you can make them seamless or not.

Diane:
Yeah, So to me, the most important thing about the customer journey is how they interact with you and the steps that they go through across the journey is not defined by how you are structured internally and the functional groups that own certain parts of that experience. So when we think about seamless and these transitions and having the right functional departments play together to deliver on a good experience across the journey, everybody has to to understand and work together in order to meet the customer's needs. So I would say the true definition of seamless and a good experience across the customer journey actually needs to be defined by your customers from the outside in rather than internally with your functional departments. How do we make it easy for the customer? It should not be that way. It would be first using the journey, the expectations that the customers have and how they want to work with you. What parts need to be easy regardless of when it happens, that that should be the foundation for how you decide what Seamless looks like?

Steve:
Yeah. So the Journey map, we've had discussion on the podcast for years about the value of journey mapping and you know, there's different school of thoughts, but just right there you build a really strong case. And it reminds me of one time we talked to somebody that was doing a journey mapping, but they, they had not involved any customers in that. So you've thrown down the gantlet there. You've got to have that outside in perspective. If you're really going to have a seamless experience, you've got to take in the, you know, the feedback and the the way it actually plays out for the actual customer. So if we can get everybody to agree on that, then how do the internal teams come back in and how do we align those to to start working through some of those kinks and make sure that the handoffs are as seamless as possible?

Diane:
So the journey mapping brings together those cross functional groups and it really just level sets on what those definitions are for, what the customers need, what they expect. It can identify things that need to be fixed right now and ideas that need to be completely redesigned or reimagined in the future. The next thing that we see, and that I've seen more recently, is activating what you learn from the journey maps internally in the organization, and that's through a process that we call service blue printing, which is where you take those outside needs and then you say, okay, how will we make this work? How will we set this up in an organization so we have the right people involved, the right systems, the right technology, the right policies, the right training, the right, you know, all of those things set up, orchestrated in a way that they work well together across that journey and follow the customer through through the end to end cycle. So the service blue printing is something where you really get into the nuts and bolts build of an ideal service delivery and take into account all those different things and map them together.

Steve:
So the service blueprint, just to make sure I have this right, is the way you get those internal processes and people and systems aligned in a way that would create a seamless experience from the perspective of the customer.

Diane:
That's exactly right. Yeah. They basically the journey map tells you what needs to happen. The service blueprint tells you how it needs to happen.

Steve:
Yeah. And then are there any nuances beyond that? Like, you know, are there customer segmentation issues or maybe products or service offerings they use?

Diane:
Yeah. So with any customer journey, we don't do a one size fits all. There are different personas, there are different purchase models, go to market models. And so we need to be cognizant about the customer segments that you have and the personas and think about what easy or seamless means to them and what services we should build tailored to their needs and preferences. And that can't be a one size fits all. Now, that doesn't mean that there can't be some elements that are consistent and leveraged across all of them. But one key point about being seamless is meeting the customer with where they are and their preferences and needs. And that has to take into account that that understanding of their background and goals and interests and products and all that good stuff.

Steve:
Yeah, I know you've, again this is where your passion lies and you've really been kind of a pioneer in this service blue printing concept, which I think is great the way you frame that. Here's why we need to do it now. How do we go about doing it? I bet you got some horror stories from from some of that where some of the internal process people push back and say, can't do it, can't be done.

Diane:
Yes. Oh, yeah. We we actually had a rule or we have a rule going into these discussions. And I show a suitcase with a big red X-mark around the suitcase and I tell them leave the baggage behind.

Steve:
Yeah.

Diane:
We're not worried about what's happening today, what's happened in the past, what constraints you have on right now. We're painting a beautiful future state picture. And later on, we'll figure out what's feasible, what's doable. But let's think big picture, fun, exciting, different, so that we then can create that ideal experience and vet from there.

Steve:
Yeah. And I want to just reinforce this for my listeners, because I think this is just a really a key point for sort of our mindset as CX prose. We need to dream about ideal customer experiences. It doesn't mean we'll ever get there, but it needs to be aspirational. So we dream forward and we measure our progress backwards. And really what it's about is, you know, 90 days from now, could we fundamentally change this process to make it more seamless for the customer? And if so, then we're going to be moving in the right direction and we're probably going to be beating the competition, too, because so many companies just can't do that. OK, we heard a little horror story, but let's talk about the positives and where you've actually seen some some real examples of where companies have have taken this concept of use their journey map and then done the service blueprinting to actually implement customer driven change that has a positive impact on the experience and I would assume also the business results as well.

Diane:
Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I see this in a couple of different ways. I think one is companies are starting to recognize that a frictionless experience is critical. It's almost table stakes at this point. I think what's differentiating or unique about it is how a company decides to deliver on that. I think that's where additional value can be brought on from the journey mapping engagements. What we'll see a lot are development of these service principles, these ideal behaviors or service tenets of how a company wants to act in front of those customers. Every single interaction, every single part of their journey from all of their individuals. Those service principles become essentially a North Star vision for how that company should act. So that's one piece that we see a lot of companies actually do is adopt easy or seamless as a service principle and then take that and translate it down to each specific journey. How can we make this journey easier? How can we make this touchpoint easier? So they ask themselves that, and then it can also be translated down to every individual employee or front line associate that's working with the customer. How can they individually contribute to an easier experience for their stakeholders? So it's it's multilayered. It's a question and a principle that that every function department employee needs to adopt when they're working.

Steve:
Yeah, and I think this is classic change management. You know, you sort of set out what the ideal state is. Leaders need to role model it and back it up and then ultimately you get it all the way down to sort of the, you know, the culture. Because at the end of the day, if the process isn't right or the, you know, the handoff didn't work right, then somebody's got to go ahead and fight through it to take care of the customer and make sure that that happens. And it is a journey.

Announcer:
Are you looking for a little recognition for your hard work? Well, here's just the opportunity. Applications are now being accepted for the US Customer Experience Awards. Finalists and winners will be named in 18 different CX categories, and you could submit an entry in multiple categories. This could be the chance for your team to finally get the recognition it deserves. To find out more and submit your entry, go to usacxa.com.

Steve:
So, Diane, can you give me a kind of an example of of where seamless really kind of came through? Maybe a very simple version, but something that you could just share with us?

Diane:
Yeah, I think one good example and I think a lot of folks can resonate with it, is this challenge of support. If a customer has an issue, they either have a question or they need an answer, they need a problem fixed. One of the key things that we learned is we need to meet them or offer different options for them to engage in a way that they want. So this new support experience has to be omnichannel. It can't just be a one size fits all you call in and you're stuck on a waiting line. So there has to be digital options and a variety of different ones. It has to be self-serve. So lots of different options for them to go down, regardless of which path they go to or if they bounce between options. You have to be able to track them and understand where they've been, what they've done, where they've been successful, where they haven't been successful, what they're trying to do so that each interaction builds upon that prior experience. So this is that beautiful future state vision. Now how that gets rolled out is a is it a concern for later? But for right now, we've defined that that is a critical piece to creating that seamless experience for the customer. It also has to be personalized. So it has to be tied to we know you have this particular setting or where you know, you have this in your system right now. We know you have X many users. So it's all tied back to me personally where I've been. My challenge is so that then the support experience is tailored more to me.

Steve:
Beautiful description of that. But, you know, I was just thinking I called in some call center. I recently and I entered my phone number and they said, Oh yeah, we found your record. All the digital person, the digital agent. And then I got to a point where I had to go out to try to find somebody live. And guess what they made me do right away? Give them my phone number. And, you know, I said, Well, I already put it in the automated system. Well, that's not seamless, right?

Diane:
No, no, it's painful. It's just a frustration. It's not a moment of truth necessarily, but it is a it's a pain point. It's like, why can't you have those things connected?

Steve:
Yeah, because some of them do now.

Diane:
Yes. Yeah.

Steve:
I yeah, I mean, I can think of one place where I call and it's seamless. Like it's actually when they, they come on the live agent might go, Hey, Mr. Walker, I have your records right here in front of me. Thank you for being a customer since blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Diane:
I think that's one of the bigger challenges, is that our every day interactions, they're sort of upping the ante on how important and how slick it can be that if you're not constantly evolving this definition of seamless and the delivery, then you're falling behind because I'm getting some other amazing experience tomorrow or that I'm comparing you against regardless if it's the same industry or not.

Steve:
Yeah, you're right. And that's why it's so good to be a CX pro right now. Is that the you know, the ante is getting upped almost every day and that means we have to stay sharp. Can't be complacent. So, yeah, you keep talking about this being an omni channel environment where everything has to talk to each other. And I just gave the silly example of just, you know, having to reenter my contact information after I already put it in. Are there tools and techniques out there that allow this, that facilitate that kind of omnichannel and, you know, capturing all that data, like from what they're clicking on the website versus what they're talking to the call center or the chat bot with? Is there some of that emerging now?

Diane:
Yeah. The good news is for all of us that there is we call it Journey orchestration, and we've seen that with our Qualtrics partner with XiD, but essentially it's just a behind the scenes internal system that tracks what everyone is doing across their entire journey, their behaviors, their profile information, as well as their experience data, how what they're thinking, what they're feeling along the way keeps it all together in a system and is smarter about offering more prescriptive alerts on what should be done next. So it's always building on on the prior past engagement and making it a seamless, better experience moving forward with what the customer is going to do.

Steve:
Diane, this has been fascinating and, you know, it just sort of occurred to me that, you know, we've been using a lot of consumer more B2C examples, which actually, you know, as we've talked about on this podcast forever, you know, the the B2C experience does tend to drive and lead the B2B, But I was just thinking, you know, so many of the clients that we work with are B2B, and I know a lot of our listeners are B2B, but there you get into even more complex handoffs, right where, you know, like a technology company might need to rely on other third party service providers or vendors to actually make the solution work. What kind of advice do you have for for those complex types of situations?

Diane:
Yeah, it's it's definitely adds a layer of complexity because now you've got an extra organization to add into the mix. And essentially the answer is still that there's a need to build an easy experience and the customer does not care if it's working with two parties or three parties. They still have that need for it to be easy and connected. So that's something to anchor around. I think another piece of it too, is just the combination of digital interactions to high touch or people interactions. And then when you add in a partner or otherwise, there's just so many different groups that you can engage with that it can be confusing on where to go to, how to go to the advice that you're getting from each of those or the solutions. So all of that needs to be understood in that journey mapping engagement. If they are going to work with a third party, what does that look like? What is the journey? How do we make it consistent? How do we make those handoffs ideal along the way just to make sure that it's not… that it's intentional? That's the important part about the design and the delivery of the experiences, that it's intentionally connected and seamless.

Steve:
Yeah, I think it's the same concept. It's just going to be a little more complex and, you know, obviously another cook in the kitchen as they like to say, Hey, you've given us a great overview of this topic of seamless and sort of put it in a framework I think that most of us can relate to and understand, given us some good examples and and even maybe a little bit of what not to do. But one of the ways we've been sort of handling this series is I kind of put it back to you, okay, I'm a CX leader. I know that our program could have a better seamless you know, I know there's some gaps out there in the way that our customers are experiencing our value. Given that, what would kind of be the first steps that you would recommend or, you know, how how do I get started down this journey to actually get some improvement that's going to be noticed by my customers?

Diane:
Yeah. So the first thing I would recommend is you have to define what seamless means to your customers. So start from the outside in, understand what it means to them, what that looks like across their journey, so that you have a definition for what you need to do. You also need to measure it, right? So every single listening post that you have out there should have some type of component measuring the ease factor. It's a critical component in any CX program. It's a key pillar in an effective customer experience. And so that that would be one one piece to add. The other piece to plan on is is that cultural change and taking the insights from the journey, mapping those key principles that I talked about earlier, and how do you activate those in the organization? How do you get folks to understand what being easy means? What does that mean to their functional department, to their employees? How can they do that? What training do they need in order to deliver an easier experience for them? So there's that softer element as well. And then from all of the inputs that you get from the journey mapping, from your ongoing measurement, then you can start to identify improvement initiatives. What are the things that we can do now, some quick wins to make the process easier? And what are some longer term initiatives that we need to roll out. New services, new technology like the journey orchestration tools that I mentioned, maybe something like that is needed to make a more connected experience along the way.

Steve:
Very good. Thank you. So prescriptive that, you know, whatever you have, if you don't have a journey map, you need to have one and then some sort of customer input on where the pain points are and then pick one that you think you can impact. Obviously, if you've got key driver analysis, that ought to be the one that has the most potential to have a positive impact. Put in a transaction survey and start getting a tracking and a baseline and, you know, put your technology and your process improvements in there and you should see rising scores on that transaction. And then six months down the road, you should see that impact on the overall experience. So thank you, Diane. Thanks for sharing your expertise on seamless. We've reached that point of the podcast where I always ask our guests for their take home value. That would be your best tip or maybe the most meaningful thought that you want to make sure that our listeners get out of this podcast. And even better, if it's something they can take right back and put into practice, you know, still later today or tomorrow or whenever they're listening to this podcast.

Diane:
I could go a lot of different directions, but I'll give one that they literally could initiate tomorrow. Go back and look at your listening post right now and see if you have a measure on ease. If you don't add it. Start to understand, do customers think it's easy to work with you right now or not? Overall for the relationship, for transactional studies, for journey studies, if they're on the website, was it easy? And that'll give you a read for their perception. And then from there you can go figure out what to do about it.

Steve:
That's awesome. What a great take home value. We should have had you on before episode 247, Diane. Hey, Diane Skirvin is a vice president and leads one of our teams here at Walker in our Advisory Managed Services group. Diane, If anybody would like to continue the dialog, why don't you give them your Walker email and I think you're on LinkedIn as well.

Diane:
Yeah, they can definitely find me on LinkedIn and my Walker email is dskirvin and that's spelled s k i r v i n at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Yeah, and I really encourage you if you're interested in this topic, you couldn't talk to a better person. Diane, Thanks for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast. It was delightful to have you on.

Diane:
Had a lot of fun. Thanks, Steve.

Steve:
Well, it won't be 247 more episodes before we have you back, I can assure you. Hey, and if you want to talk about anything 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 listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com To subscribe to the show, find all of our previous episodes. They're sorted by topic, so we have amazing content on this database of all these podcasts. We also got contact information. You can drop us a note, suggest a future podcast, or just 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 XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader, so go out and make your customer experience more seamless and we will see you back here again next time.

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