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Steve:
When a company is entrenched in its ways, it can be difficult to sell the importance of CX, but sometimes it takes just a single customer complaint to make that change happen.

Pamela:
When a customer comes to us and they're like, hey, we want to be able to use this partner integration, can you flip the switch and just activate it so that we can get started with it? That should be a pretty easy ask for a technology company and it was taking us a long time to do it. So what we wanted to understand was why is it taking so long? It's just a simple question, right? Why is it taking so long?

Steve:
Creating customer focused change through cross-functional collaboration 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 The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. On The CX Leader Podcast we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. It's very common for growing companies to develop complicated and disjointed processes. If business is booming, no one seems to have the time to stop and take a holistic look at how things are working, and that can be a detriment to customer experience. So what is it that snaps us out of it and makes us take a look at the processes that create friction in the experience? And how do we sell the importance of CX to a company that is not otherwise been CX enlightened? My guest on this episode is Pamela Herrmann, vice president for customer experience at Mortgage Cadence, a mortgage technology solutions company and also a wholly owned subsidiary of the consulting giant Accenture. And she's going to share with us the importance of cross-functional collaboration and how that can help drive customer-focused change. Pam, thanks for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Pamela:
Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve:
It's my pleasure and really happy to have you on here in, you know, kind of the topic that that you're here to talk about is, you know, just over the course of my career is very near and dear to my heart because, you know, so often people say, well, we don't really have time to focus on the customer experience. But in essence, I mean, that is the reason a business exists, right, to focus on their customers and create the value for their customers.

Pamela:
You know, I always say the purpose of business is pretty simple. It's to get and keep customers. And if you don't have customers, it's just a really cool hobby or maybe it's not even cool. I don't know. I mean, that's that's subjective. But, yeah, its customers drive business and you just have to follow the money and you'll know how well you're performing with your customers. So that's why my focus has always been about customer retention. If we could help businesses understand how do you get them to cross the threshold? And I'm speaking metaphorically to Main Street business, for example, let's get them across the threshold. And from the moment they do that and the little bell rings over the door, the show starts and we have to do everything in our power as employees and as business owners to make sure that it's a flawless experience so that they go out, they come often, they buy more and they tell others. And that's the key to growing organically. So that's really where I focus my attention.

Steve:
Yeah, that's a great background. And just for the context of our listeners, why don't you just tell us a little bit about your journey to being a CX pro and sort of what how your experience got you to this point.

Pamela:
Sure. So my – it all kind of started with a really interesting interaction I had at Petco or one of the big box pet stores, and my son had purchased a lizard. I didn't know what lizards ate. And it turns out they eat live crickets and so everything, and they only live for like seven days. I went to the pet shop and every week I was buying, you know, 25 live crickets. And I'd been doing this for months. And it's always the same girl behind the register. And every time she would ask me or you part of our member or our loyalty program. And it got me to thinking because I was in there every single week and she never really acted like she recognized me. I mean, I was a repeat customer. And even if she didn't remember my name, I thought it was interesting that she never really connected with my face or anything. And it got me to thinking about what is loyalty. So it was really that was a catalyst moment for me as a consumer to say what is loyalty? And I really sought to understand what is consumer loyalty and how does a business earn it. So my journey started with that moment and with a marketing background. And I wanted to explore how do businesses do that? I have a huge heart for Main Street businesses, and that's really where my journey started, was to say, you know, I want to I want to help businesses understand where are consumers looking for their business and how do we intersect with them on the path, particularly in the early days of mobile. So that's where it started. As I started building out this expertize around loyalty, which was getting very wide and deep, I moved into consulting and my customers were not just Main Street businesses at that point, but they scaled all the way up to companies as big as JetBlue and Community College of Denver and working really across all these different industries and different sizes and just looking to see if these very simple concepts could scale up and if they could scale wide. And so I got to prove that out. And then one of my customers was. Mortgage cadence, and they offered me an opportunity to become a full time employee, everything that I had been using from a consulting perspective that I'm sure, Steve, you get this, you have a whole menu of things that you can do to help companies improve their customer experience, but maybe you get hired to do a little thin slice of it. This was an opportunity for me to kind of test my knowledge and my skill across the width of what I knew and the depth and really just personal challenge everything that I thought I knew and see if it could stand up and end. So that's how I wound up here.

Steve:
So how long have you been in at Mortgage Cadence?

Pamela:
It's been almost four years. The first three years of it, I was leading the marketing team and then we were more of a product led organization. Really. They were they were the that was the team that was really dictating our future. And we had a new CEO came in who was customer centric but really was not familiar, neither was any of the executive leadership team around these concepts of CX and the methodologies. They weren't familiar at all with them. So when an opportunity came up, which was a very specific, painful customer complaint, and it was a persistent one that had been going on for a long time, I just raised my hand and I said I'd really like to apply some of the methodologies I know work around this and I'll just take it, take it on as a side project and let's just test it out. And I thought this could be a good opportunity for me to do a land and expand. Let's just demonstrate the value first and foremost. Let's show them some of the tricks and the tools and everything, the toolbox that we use from a CX perspective. Let's present it in a way that's unique to how they've been approaching the business. Let's educate and inform them in the process and just get their heads nodding. Yes, that was my objective.

Steve:
Just to unpack a couple of things you mentioned there. It's it's interesting. Very few people got into the CX business on purpose. You know, most of us kind of gravitated there from a couple of different ways. You're more the kind of the classic marketing side, but you always had a passion for the customer. I actually personally feel that customer experience in today's world is best aligned with marketing because it's got to pervade the organization. Just like marketing is not really a silo. It's got to collaborate with all the other groups. So does customer experience. And then particularly for our young people that listen to the podcasts, I want to just highlight one thing you said is that you volunteered to take this on as an extra effort. And I counsel young people all the time. You know, if you're really ambitious, you know, you don't have to wait for the promotion. You just got to find the opportunity, step up and volunteer. So I thought that was a really cool way that you articulated, you know, how you kind of created this opportunity. And I didn't want the audience to get get lost on that.

Pamela:
So let's see if it's kind of interesting, because I think that shows the scrappiness of entrepreneurship, to be honest with you. And I…

Steve:
Absolutely.

Pamela:
…think I always kind of have this inner debate when I see that universities are trying to teach entrepreneurship because I I'm very torn. I don't know if it's something you're born with or if it's a skill that you can develop, but there's a certain way that you lean into questions, the way you explore answers, the way you become very investigative in the process, how you raise your hand really very much leaning into the problems and into the solution. So so that's what I really credit that wiring in my brain just to say, hey, I've got something that can help me.

Steve:
So in the intro we reference this one customer complaint that led to company wide change. Is that is that ring true for this story? Can you share that?

Pamela:
Yeah, it's a really fun story because it really demonstrated all of the richness of CX, all of the value, everything, every tool that we use. It was all bundled into a six week project and it was probably way more extensive that it needed to be. But I knew going into it, I had to show the full spectrum of how we approach the work in a unique way in order to to go to a series of not just the stakeholders and the people that I were I was working with in the project, but at the executive leadership team who represent the spectrum of the organization. So I had to get a lot of different types of audiences to I had to ring a bell for them in some way, shape or form across it. So I had to have a varied approach to the to the methodologies that I brought forward. So, yeah, it started with a customer complaint that reached the the CEO level. And everybody's just going, how why is this happening? Why does it take so long? So just to kind of set up the framework of the story, we're a technology company. We sell our technology to banks and credit unions. And if you've purchased a home, you've submitted a lot of documents and you've answered a lot of questions. And all of that goes into a tech stack. That's what we provide to banks and credit unions. And so really just. Very compliance driven, right, we have the CFP that tells us how we have to do it in a specific way, and it's a it's a particularly beastly piece of technology. It's it's not easy. Right. And so really what our job is, is just to reduce the effort for banks, because any kind of soft words that we use around CX like create delight or. Wow, or all of these words that really helped us understand the concept of CX in the early days, it doesn't apply to our business. There is no delight or wow in what we do for banks or for borrowers, it's very difficult work. Right. And so I had this concept around effort, like if we can reduce the effort, that's really where we should be measuring our performance is how easy or difficult is it for us to to do the work? So, yes. So this this complaint came forward. One of the to talk specifically as a technology company, we have these partners that we work with and we integrate our technology to theirs. And for those of you who are not familiar with technology, it's really just a bidirectional data exchange. And so when a customer comes to us and they're like, hey, we want to be able to use this this partner integration, can you flip the switch and just activate it so that we can get started with it? That should be a pretty easy ask for a technology company. And it was taking us a long time to do it – months. And so what we wanted to understand was why is it taking so long? It's just a simple question, right? Why is it taking so long? And so when I raised my hand, I said, let's let's pull together all of our internal stakeholders and let's come around. The table will use about 96 hours, total six weeks. And at the end, I'll show you a presentation. We'll show you the findings and we'll make some recommendations. So so it was really kind of interesting, some quick stats. We had 15 teams that were in they had their fingerprints on this process, 15 teams, which is pretty remarkable when you think about. We had 27 documents that we were using in order to create the endstate for our customer. Many of those are shared documents. Right. And so what became very obvious very quickly, like within the first hour or two, this project was that we had we had some fundamental challenges with how we were organizing our documentation and having a central repository where people could just grab and go. We were relying on a lot of tribal knowledge as to where those documents lived, because we use SharePoint and we have our, you know, our own laptops that we've got documents on and we've got different teams that store documents in different places. And so the stuff is just all over the place. The other thing that we realized is that we were relying on our ticketing system behind the scenes to dictate our workflow. Right. So while somebody's fingerprints might have only been on the process for 10 or 15 minutes in order to do some coding, the handoff of the ticket to the next person in the line to do their part, we found that the tickets were getting de-prioritized. And this was in large part what it was, what was creating the delay. Right. So if that got pushed back another week because it was de-prioritized by the next person, we thought, OK, great, now that we can see this, now that we can see what's creating the delay and we map this out, next step is to really my approach was kind of unique. I really wanted them to understand the business value in the business exchange between our business and our customers business. So before we got into solutioning, we went back to the basics. What is the purpose of business to get and keep customers? How do we do that? So I took them through a value exchange exercise. So I'm going to take a breath there. Steve, [laughing]

Steve:
No it's great. I want to go kind of in, you know, how you got the momentum going in terms of fixing it. But one things I've always said is that, you know, a lot of people don't have to have a sophisticated approach to CX, and it typically is an enlightened executive who he or she just realizes that this is the kind of information that you need to have systematically to run your business. You talked early on about Main Street businesses. I think for the small entrepreneur, the self proprietor who knows all the customers, knows all the employees personally, they kind of keep this stuff in their head. Right. But at a certain point, an organization gets gets to the point where it's too complex, and particularly in today's world where, you know, so much of the value is a combination of product service, people, process, product. You have to have some sort of shared understanding about where the customer is so that people can quickly access this. My favorite story on this have of a significant event goes back, I'm sorry to say, like 25 years. But I was in Chicago…

Pamela:
You look a lot younger than that, Steve!

Steve:
I know. Well well, it's not for the roads I've traveled. I can tell you that. We're sitting in a high rise building in Chicago, old line kind of manufacturing company with a group of executives. One of the executives had commissioned, you know, a very detailed study of their customer relationships. And I'm watching and during the kind of discussion and presentation and the ops guy in the room who's old school, you could tell and you could just see his you know, he just getting madder and madder and madder when he's looking at this. And most of the other executives were dialoging about it. And finally, this guy slams table and goes, you know, our customers just don't know how happy they are.

Pamela:
We know that we have that little slice of denial to it's kind of like just tell them to hang on. They'll be happy soon.

Steve:
The perfect thing was it broke and like everybody kind of stopped and then he kind of realized what he'd said and he kind of self corrected. And it just was great. You know, it was kind of this this watershed moment that everybody said, hey, yeah, we run a good business. Yeah, we do a lot of things right. But that doesn't mean we can't be better. And that's I think, you know, that's that's why I think CX is so important today is because, you know, it is so competitive. And if you're not creating a great experience for your customers, you know, pretty good bet somebody else will.

Pamela:
So. Well, it's kind of funny, Steve, because I think it wasn't that long ago, I would say a matter of just a few years, maybe three to five. This was all a gas cloud for a lot of executives. They were not able to tie the quant… the quantitative value to the work. I think there's just been a tremendous amount of effort through research, data analysis, how we know how to use data more intelligently as a profession that has really evolved our work and elevated it to that strategic level, which is what you want to do. You want to take it from the tactical and be able to thread it all the way back up to those top line executives. So they're like, oh, this can help drive revenue, profitability. Oh, that's all I care about. And so now we're able to do that. The conversations are very different today than they were not that long ago.

Steve:
Yeah, that's my other thing to say, is it's a good time to be a CX pro isn't it.

Pamela:
100% – We have all the tools we need.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Pam Herrmann. She is the vice president of Customer Experience at Mortgage Cadence. We're having a fascinating discussion about her journey with her present employer, previous client, about how they undertook a massive customer focused change management effort and really had it turn out successfully. Well, let's go back to your story, because I think it is such a great case study. So now you've got that moment of truth where everybody's got the understanding. You've kind of gone through the infrastructure, sort of you know, you've mapped the the processes map, sort of the ways that you do it. How did you get the ball rolling to get the organization to start changing and rallying around this?

Pamela:
Yeah, well, I, I think one of the most important things that I can do to help this business is to help improve business fluency. Because what I didn't realize when I started with an organization this size is that a lot of people are doing the work and really not connecting to what drives our business at the profit and at the revenue level. And so when I was working on this project, I stopped anything about future state and how we were going to solve for this. And we just paused and said, let's take a look at what are the scale abilities and the profitability of our business, what drives our business. That was one column. Next to that was a column about operational, you know, what drives our operational value. And then I did the same for our customer side. What are what drives our customers business in terms of growth? What's the operational value that connects to that? And then when you think about this as two columns on the left and two columns on the right, there's the center point. And this is our value exchange. And any time that we can identify what is that shared value to both our business and to our customers business, that to me these these become the drill sites through customer experience. So when we paused on that as a group of stakeholders and said everything we need to do has to drive into one of these eight buckets, then that helped get everybody centered. It just felt like buckshot to them. They didn't really know where to start and where to focus their attention. So I said at the end of the day, and this is just going back to start with the end in mind, we have got to land on these things right here and that's what's going to sell it up stream to our executives. And that's what's. To sell it to our customers, so so that was really the next exercise and they really learned more. These are people who are deep in the engine room of our organization. So then the next step was, OK, now let's let's just check our coat at the door. Anything you think you know or believe, I want you to park it right there because we're going to go into a space. And this is where I kind of pulled out some design thinking tools. Let's step into a space. And just like magic wand question, if you could wave a magic wand and money, time, resources, whatever you need were not an issue, what would this process look like? But the only caveat is it's got to be through the lens of the customer. Let's design what this experience looks like for them. And they said, well, if it's taking four or six months for us to do this, I think what they would really love is for us to do it in a very abbreviated amount of time, like they're visualizing flipping a switch, great flip, a switch that takes a nanosecond. How close to that can we get? And what came from this was just the most remarkable thing. It had nothing to do with me other than me facilitating their ideas and helping them to draw them out. But the ideas were within them, which I just fully embraced. And I thought, oh, my gosh, I'm they're like they've they're embracing this process of just creativity and their thinking and and just letting go of all these old processes and thinking about processes in new ways. And so what they landed on was, well, rather than letting our ticketing system dictate our process, why don't we come together as a pod? Let's all get into a phone call with our customer and with our partner, and let's just do it all in real time. So we took what was a process dictated by ticketing, we just reimagine how people come together and they were able to accomplish it in less than an hour, which is pretty remarkable when you think about it and you think about the time I just go back to, OK, what's the hourly rate for all of these people? You add it up, that's your cost. That's your cost to activate. So it's a very simplified way of saying this is our cost to activate. This is how we get to revenue faster. As soon as they're active, we start making money. They can get what they want done faster. It's good for everybody's business. Right. And satisfaction goes way up.

Steve:
It's a tremendous story, Pam. So you said this started 18 months ago, roughly?

Pamela:
Yeah, we yes. It was about 18 months ago that we did this project.

Steve:
And what does it look like today?

Pamela:
Well, it's amazing. We have now taken this whole concept of pods and we've rolled it out into other parts of our cross-functional collaboration. Anything that the customer needs in terms of delivery of our technology. We're now reorganizing with pods and the managers that are running these small groups of people. They tie a straight line back to that activity we did 18 months ago. So it's really I'm a proud, like a proud mother in this whole thing because it really gave birth to a whole new way of thinking. One exercise. It's profound.

Steve:
No, you should be proud. It's a great, great story and one that I'm sure our listeners can really relate to. Now, I suppose there were some bumps along the way, weren't there, Pam? I mean, was did you ever get any pushback on this or was everybody just like Kumbaya from the start?

Pamela:
Steve, have you ever sat on a table with some stakeholders on a project and somebody got their arms, arms and their legs crossed and a little bit of a skeptical look on their face?

Steve:
Yeah, I was being a little sarcastic because we all know how organizations work.

Pamela:
Absolutely. So I feel like they're selling. Like, the better you are at selling, the easier this process is going to be because you will have people who are not completely bought into it or perhaps, you know, they like you and they like your work and they're not opposed to the project. They just don't believe that we're going to be able to affect change because they've been banging the drum for a few years and feel like nobody's listening to them. So. So what I found is that it's as soon as I detect somebody's body language or anything that they're saying, it feels like they're a bit of a wrench in the system. What I want to do is cast a net around those folks and bring them closer to me to understand how I can help. And so one of the objections that was presented very early on, I would say, maybe even in the first hour of our project, was, hey, Pam, believe in you and your capabilities. But we've been yelling about this for years and I just don't see anybody responding to it. So I'm not really sure I'll give you the time. I'm not really sure that the results are going to be the same. And so one of the things that I did to overcome that objection, I said, well, the the challenges that we have so many different teams that are involved in this process. And if you're just expressing to your manager the problem as you see it, the challenge is they don't know what to do with it because it is it's vast, right. It's across so many different teams that they don't know that they're not even sure how to approach the work. The difference this time is that we're coming together collaboratively and we're through were threading the story across. All of the teams were coming together. And we're saying collectively, here's where we've got some gaps and bottlenecks and redundancies and here's collectively how we've solved for it. So that's how we get them to listen in a new way. It's never gotten out of your silo. That's my that's my suspicion. So we're going to bring it out that way. And they were just like, if you can do that, then I'm on board.

Steve:
All right. Pam Herrmann, thanks for being a guest on the podcast. We have reached that point where I ask each of our guests to provide our listeners with take home value. You've got a lot of value here. So I think the trick here will be how you boil this down into what the key point is that you'd like our listeners to take away from today's podcast.

Pamela:
I think it's really important that you simplify this as much as possible. Don't try to bake the whole thing at once. Never did kind of a program approach to this. It's just a problem approach and then use the tools to demonstrate the value. You can grow the program as you go, but think land and expand. So start small, start simple, get heads nodding. Yes, that's the simple objective objective in these exercises as you're growing out your CX program.

Steve:
Pam Herrmann is the vice president for customer experience at Mortgage Cadence, a mortgage technology solutions company, also part of the broader consulting company, Accenture. Pam, thanks again for being a guest on the podcast. Really enjoyed talking to you.

Pamela:
My pleasure, Steve.

Steve:
And if people would want to continue the dialog with you, I know you're on LinkedIn because we're LinkedIn, thanks to you, so they can find you. Pamela Hermmann, it's H.E.R.M.A.N.N. Two "R's", two "N's" and any other you want to give us like a website or anything like that that anybody else might want if they want to?

Pamela:
Reach out to me there. If you need any help at all, want to talk about concepts. I love connecting with people. That's what I do best. So please do reach out to me and LinkedIn and we'll continue the conversation.

Steve:
They're good. I encourage you to do it, people, because a lot of our listeners do like to connect via the via the shows. So I appreciate that. And if you heard anything on this podcast that you'd like to talk to me about, or if you just want to know how Walker might be able to help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at a podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast, series and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing or drop me 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. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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