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Steve:
We've discussed several themes in our CX Now series and they have all been leading up to this critical aspect of customer experience.

Sean:
When we talk about speed in the sense of customer experience, it's really around how a customer is expecting an experience to be delivered when it comes to the timeliness, proactiveness and just the sheer speed of that delivery and its how a company is delivering against those expectations.

Steve:
Speed 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. It's a great time to be a CX leader and this podcast discusses topics and themes so leaders like you can deliver amazing experiences for your customers. Number eight. That's right. We finally reached our eighth topic as part of our series "CX Now: Eight Essential Themes Driving CX Evolution." We've developed this series in collaboration with our partners at Qualtrics, using feedback from more than 50 CX leaders. Over the last three months, we've discussed digital interactions, adaptability, data integration, employee enablement, personalization, predictive CX and seamless experiences, all of which could be argued are needed to build the operational efficiency for programs to provide experiences at the pace that customers demand. In case you missed any of these previous episodes, I highly encourage you to listen to them at cxleaderpodcast.com. With me this week to discuss the theme of speed is my friend and colleague Sean Clayton. Sean is a senior vice president and leads our client service team here at Walker. And he's no stranger to the podcast. Sean, welcome back to the podcast.

Sean:
Thank you. Thanks for having me back. Happy to be here.

Steve:
Yeah, well, I was just thinking, you know, last time you were on, we were talking about racing. We did that whole racing analogy. So I think you're you are qualified to talk about speed as it relates to CX, so…

Sean:
This does seem like a relatable topic. Yes. And I do like to try and get things done quickly in my personal and professional life as well. So happy to be talking about this one.

Steve:
Yes. I've worked with you a long time. I always describe you as you have a high motor, you got energy. So just in case some of our folks are not familiar with your background, why don't you give just a brief overview of your CV and and how you came to be a CX leader and expert in in the topic of speed?

Sean:
Sure, sure. Happy to do that. So I've really spent most of my career over the last 30 plus years in traditional market research and more recently, customer experience settings, both for vendors as well as on the client side. So being here at Walker now going on nine years in my current role to head up a group that is responsible for delivering customer experiences to to our clients and if previously played a role more on the advisory side of experience management.

Steve:
Yeah, and speaking of speed, you've ramped up quite a staff of CX pros here over the last couple of years. How many people do you think you've hired into our advisory group over just maybe the last two years?

Sean:
I would say in total, probably 20 to 30 people in the last year or so, about half of which are on our consulting or advisory side and the other half of which manage a lot of our CX programs for clients.

Steve:
Yeah, well, we love to say on the show it's a great time to be a CX leader. And again, that's just another example of what's going on for people in our profession, so. Well, let's get to the topic at hand. As we mentioned, this is the kind of the seminal topic here on our eight emerging trends that are affecting the CX evolution today. Speed goes back to something we talked about almost ten years ago when we put out our one of our best reports we ever did, which was Customers 2020 we put out in 2013 and we were already seeing this as an essential piece of it. And that hasn't changed for sure. In fact, if anything, it's become more important. But one of the things I've been doing on this series is allowing each of our Walker experts to sort of define the term. So. So what do we mean when we talk about speed as it relates to CX?

Sean:
Yeah, it's a good question, a good place to start the conversation. I actually did go back and have a look at those earlier reports that you mentioned, and it's been nearly ten years since we put out Customers 2020 and we did say back then there was three key areas to deliver great experiences and one of those three was, was speed. And I think at that point our lens was more around how is CX professionals really building out their listening programs and other metrics and data kind of focused on things that have happened in the past or things that could be happening in the future. And we found that most of them were very much rearview mirror. So I think speed in that sense almost is the continuum from reactive to proactive. But then when we updated that same report about five years ago and we were really then looking at customer expectations for speed, and what we found talking to CX professionals for that report was that only 8% and the 8% thought that their company was effective at delivering on customer expectations for the speed. So to me, when we talk about speed in the sense of customer experience, not Formula One, it's really around how a customer is expecting an experience to be delivered when it comes to the timeliness, the proactiveness and just the sheer speed of that delivery.

Sean:
And it's how a company is delivering against those expectations. So the one thing to note and I think the other podcast leading up to this, this last one have talked about a lot of other topics or trends in CX that are absolutely necessary in order for fast and effective experiences to be delivered. So I think the reason we put this one last is this is almost in a way an outcome of everything else working as it should. But of course, if you're only focused on speed as the one thing that you're going to differentiate on, then you may be missing a lot of those other areas that were covered in the previous podcast. And I think we probably all as consumers had experiences where, yes, something was delivered fast, but it wasn't delivered correctly. So maybe you received the wrong product even though it was shipped overnight or it was damaged, or you had a tech support call and they gave you bad advice, but they gave it to you very quickly. So it is multi-layered. As a tenant of good CX.

Steve:
You gave, you gave me a lot of things to think about there. But, you know, I'm thinking back to that old adage, you and I may be dating myself here, but they used to say, you know, fast, cheap or good, pick any two. That doesn't really apply anymore. And you're right, you can get it fast, but it better be still be good and it better be at a competitive price. And I think the other thing that you were alluding to is that a lot of our expectations are set by our own experiences as consumers. Again, going back to that 2013 report, that's about the time that Amazon was really becoming mainstream. And the fact that they were delivering stuff that rapidly was just blowing people up. And now it's almost kind of table stakes that when you order something, you expect to be able to get it the next day or certainly within the next couple of days.

Sean:
So absolutely, that "Amazonification" effect for sure has has changed the expectations across a lot of different industries and segments, consumers and business professionals as well. And I think relative to that, as we've seen so much technology evolution over the years, over the decades that the world that we live in now relative to even ten years ago, but especially especially relative to 20 years ago, is just very different. And consumers are always on they want instant gratification. And so a lot of those things in play speed in their experiences. So I think it has heightened speed as a requirement for good CX. So like you said, almost the table stakes now.

Steve:
Yeah, but, you know, actually you just said something there. I think this was maybe it was one of our previous episodes here, but we were talking about speed in terms of expectations or being appropriate. And I can't remember who it was, but somebody was saying, you know, like when you go out for a fine dining experience, you know, you don't necessarily want that super fast. But on the other hand, you know, you don't want to wait 20 minutes between your courses either or, you know, be sitting around trying to get the check from the from the server. And it's taken forever. So, I mean, that speed is sort of something you got to dial in that's appropriate to the experience. Did that trigger any thoughts kind of in your head about this topic?

Sean:
Yes, I think people do tend to assume that faster is always better. And I think a lot of cases it is assuming that again, it's still faster and delivered accurately. But expectations, I think, are situational for speed as for a lot of other dimensions of customer experience. And I would say often relative to the emotional intensity of a customer journey or a customer phase within an overall journey. So yeah, definitely fine dining. Planning a vacation, maybe buying an engagement ring. Those are things where slower is probably better. But I will tell a quick personal story, and I think another high emotional, intense type of journey is anything related to health care as a patient. A few months ago I had a an injury or an injury on my feet and went into the doctors, was not able to get an x-ray out of the doctors. So that right there created an initial delay in the experience, was sent to a hospital the same day I went in, waited a little bit, got the x-ray, and I could see that the x-ray was using a very sophisticated machine that had digitization built in. So I knew it wasn't the case of an x-ray happened to be developed in a lab. That result was there and then available, but I was not able to actually see the report from that x-ray. I was told it would take 2 to 3 days for that to arrive. I don't know why to this day why that would be the case. But again, an example of where in my case I needed that result as soon as possible. And it was days, not minutes or hours. So it really varies on the situation.

Steve:
Yeah, actually that relates to some. I was just with my wife the other day. She had kind of one of her normal checkups and she was awaiting the response, you know, the results of a routine test. And they weren't getting back to her. And it was kind of it was stressful, you know. And I finally said, well, why don't you give them a call? Because they probably just forgot. And of course, it was fine and all that. But again, that's you know, there's another expectation around how long should it take for somebody to get back to you. You were referencing how speed almost becomes the outcome of some of these other things that we're doing. So I'm just going to read through the list again of the other seven components that we've covered, and maybe it'd be like picking your category on a game show. Maybe you can just pick one out and that and how that might relate to speed, and we'll see how that goes. And if it goes good, we might do another one. How about that?

Steve:
Sounds good.

Steve:
All right. So digital, adaptability, data integration, employee enablement, personalization, predictive CX and seamless. Which one you want?

Sean:
I think it relates to all of those. So I could I could just take one any of those if you want. But I think it really there is definitely a connection to all of them from the standpoint of speed.

Steve:
All right. Well, which one you want to try? How about digital?

Sean:
Digital. Yeah. So I think that when we look at industries that have been disrupted by digital, often it's because the disruption has enabled things to be accomplished much faster by customers. So I can just think of so many examples where that's the case. But some of the more obvious ones would be the music industry. So Apple really changing things when they first introduced iTunes. And instead of having to go into a store to buy physical media, you could download it and then Spotify disrupting that with streaming, so you didn't even need to download it. Similar with cable TV still around, but being massively disrupted by the content providers, whether it's Netflix or Amazon Prime or Disney. I think about some of the car dealership models that are trying to change the traditional way that people buy cars, whether it's CarMax or Carvana or it's all around being able to use digital assets to fast and and speed up that experience. So there's many, many examples where I think digital is the enabler. I think also from the standpoint of how people are able to access service and support from companies and no longer needing to start out with making a phone call or a visit to start that support process. But being able to do it online, whether that's email or chat or a bot type of process.

Steve:
You know, you're right, the self service aspect is is a huge part of speed and it also lowers the overall cost to serve as well when you can offload some of that. And actually I think many of us now prefer to see if we can do it ourselves. And we've talked a lot on the show in various episodes about when you can't get it done, self serve, how do you default? But I love your example of music because I'm actually living proof of that. You know, I, I actually threw away a bunch of my vinyl LPs and now I probably if I would have kept them, I could have sold them. And I've gone through the whole series, you know, I used to buy the music on iTunes to the point where my younger friends were saying, What a sucker for buying them. And then I switched to Spotify. And actually now I really like Spotify because I can go back and actually listen to an entire album that I used to listen to like 40 or 50 years ago. And I explain to people, you know, in the old days we'd put that, we'd put the LP on the turntable and you'd listen to that whole side and you turn it over and listen to that whole side, and nobody does that anymore. But anyway, I digress. Hey, we talked a little bit about the episode we did on racing, and if I really had my choice, I'd have a podcast about racing, not about CX. But, you know, I think there's a great analogy here, and I know you're a race fan, particularly an F1 fan, actually, for those of you who don't know, Sean's kind of an F1 fan. I'm more a little more of a North American racing fan. So we have this banter that we go through. But give me that racing analogy because I thought it was so great. I think we ought to just kind of put that into the equation here. I think those those are always helpful for understanding.

Sean:
Yeah, so we did a podcast on this recently, but there's just so many parallels between delivering great customer experiences and the world of racing and speed is just the one that comes to mind, first of all. But with the one element of racing that can really make or break a team in terms of, of crossing the finish line first is the way that the team functions when they have a pit stop. And I think when we look at clients and other companies that we work with, that can be one of the most challenging aspects of delivering experiences and delivering them well in terms of speed as well as the other dimensions in this podcast series is collaboration. It's everybody knowing their roles. It's using data and analytics and technology to make all of that work seamlessly. But the image that we have shown before and worker conferences or the video is of a pit stop at the Indy 500, probably from the early 1950s maybe, and then compare and contrast to a Formula One pit stop where you actually can't see what's happening unless you slow the video down because it is that fast. It's less than 3 seconds.

Steve:
Yeah, they've taken pit stops from a minute literally to a matter of a couple of seconds. And I remember vividly a couple of years ago, our native Hoosier Ed Carpenter would have won the Indy 500 had he not stalled it in the pits. They think he lost about eight or 9 seconds and he actually lost the race that year by like 5 seconds. So one mistake in a 500 mile race that costs you 8 seconds and you finish fourth instead of first. So and that's kind of what we do in the CX world, too. You know, we got to make it all work together because, you know, we can deliver great service all the time. And then, you know, one, one bad process or one person that kind of deviates from a process. And you you can lose a lot of reputation. And, you know, we've seen that in other things.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Sean Clayton. He's a senior leader here at Walker and heads up a big part of our client service operation. And we're wrapping up the series that we've been doing on "CX Now," eight essential themes that are really driving our profession. Sean's here talking about speed, which is the wrap up to the whole series. Let's get a little more practical now and apply it to actually some others. I think you had a kind of a banking example that you wanted to share.

Sean:
Yeah. So I mean, with any kind of service related experience, so whether it's banking or another form of retail, there's there's typically a fair amount of human interaction between the customer and the staff at the company that they're trying to interact with. And really that that's where the friction tends to happen in customer experiences. There's less controllable variables that play more moving parts. And so when we think about some industries that may be still trying to deal with that, banking would be one. But I would broaden it to just general retail really. And then looking at what can we do, what can companies do in those industries to make that process more efficient for the end consumer, for the end customer? Because just like the Amazonification effect applying to stores, that applies to really any interaction that a customer is used to being able to do very seamlessly and quickly online, you know, really with with banking. I mean, one thing is that industry also is being disrupted. You can open up a bank account online now you didn't use to be able to you don't even need to use necessarily a traditional bank account. You can use PayPal or Venmo or Apple Pay. So I think one point is just to be able to compete, you have to be rethinking how you deliver that experience constantly because every industry is ripe for disruption, because of technology, because of data and analytics. But the other is how you can use technology to really improve and optimize the experiences that you're delivering today. We probably all had an example of where you're either on the phone or face to face. Whether it could be, could be with a banker, could be with a support person, and then you have to repeat the same information multiple times or you actually started the process online and then something was broken and you had to go into the branch or you had to call the branch. That tends to be more common today is that a lot of customers are used to trying to self-serve and in some instances would prefer to self-serve. But the journey often ends with a human to human interaction, whether that's phone or video chat, whatever it happens happens to be. So I think there's a massive opportunity for companies to make better use of the technology that's already available today to really help these front staff deliver better experiences, enabling the reps to have those human interactions and less time spent juggling all of the different data and systems that are out there that they would need normally to answer those questions.

Steve:
You know, up to now, Sean, we've been talking mostly about more traditional like process processes that are broken and fixed and kind of really more context of speed is a competitive advantage, but there's ways to kind of leverage speed that while you're already involved in servicing or that might even be able to take a good experience up to being a great experience. So why don't you talk about that a little bit for our CX pros out there?

Sean:
Yes, it's really interesting because we used to think back in the day that when we're talking about customer experience, it happens. And then we ask customers about it and they tell us whether it was good or bad and maybe what needed to be fixed. But with technology now, at the point that it's at, we can actually set up decision support systems that make decisions that intervene during a customer journey, especially a digital customer journey while it's happening, which I think is pretty amazing and I think there's a huge opportunity to become more prescriptive, more proactive, and try to anticipate what customers are going to need before those needs actually occur. And just using all of those tools to get ahead of what you know is going to happen further on down in the journey. So new one for me that I just just popped up on my phone today is related to the travel industry, so I'm heading out on a trip next week and this is the first time I've seen this, but I got a notification from United saying, would you like to choose your in-flight meal for your next trip? Which makes a lot of sense because you probably had that experience when you're sitting maybe in the back of the section of the plane that you're in. And when they come to ask you whether you want chicken, beef or fish, the only option is beef because they've run out of the other two.

Sean:
So a great way to get ahead of that, make sure that people are going to be able to have what their what they would like to have when they're on on that flight. I'm sure it very minimal cost to the airline, all done through the through the app and through that website. So just just one example of that. I think the the other thing is we think about speed in terms of the experience, but when we're thinking about customer listening programs, there's also speed has two components, one at the beginning and one at the end. So at the beginning we want to be as quick as possible to ask for that feedback after the experience has happened. So I've still seen from other companies that I've used for services, I've received an email maybe a week after the interaction and at that point I've completely really forgotten the details of what happened. So speed is around making sure that we minimize that window from an experience finishing to us, asking customers to tell us about that experience. The second the tail end of that is when we have customers that need following up with that, there's a minimal time between them telling us that they had a bad experience and us following up with the customer to acknowledge and hopefully resolve that issue.

Steve:
Yeah. You talked a little bit offline about how speed might impact innovation. And again, that's this is really where we've advanced our our profession. We, you know, we used to just fix the broken stuff, but now we're actually really coming up with innovative ways to deliver value to customers. So talk a little bit about how speed impacts innovation in a company.

Sean:
Sure. Yeah, I think the micro level would be talking about the experiences an individual has or how we build listening around individual needs. But at a macro level, definitely speed of innovation is absolutely important and reacting either to changes in the market or ideally being the company that creates those changes in the market does require having a process for creating new experiences or redesigning existing experiences, not just fixing, but really trying to break through. This is probably the most challenging aspect of a customer experience program we've seen in multiple iterations of different maturity models that this phase tends to be where companies get stuck because it does require a culture of innovation, willingness to invest in innovation and the process for doing that. So the companies that are really leading here have developed and are actively managing almost a portfolio of innovation projects, and they're putting those into production with their customers, usually on a very small scale at first and then scaling when they become successful. And we tend to think of innovation as as something really dramatic. Some of the examples we were talking about early on, but there are small innovations as well that can be very valuable for improving that customer experience and delivering the right kind of business results.

Steve:
Thanks a lot for all the all of your insight. It's really been a pleasure. So one of the ways we've been trying to wrap up this series is with a little addition to our take home value, which we'll get to in a minute. But first of all, I put you sort of in the place of a, you know, a newer CX pro or maybe somebody that's been around for a while, but maybe their organization is lagging on the speed component. What do I do first? How do I start to take some action on making my customer experience a little more responsive and a little more, as you were saying, disruptive rather than reactive?

Sean:
Well, I would always say start by talking to the customers. If you don't have a listening program in place today, then just start by qualitatively talking to a handful of customers, maybe in a key segment or using one of your more strategic products or services and understand from their perspective what that timeline looks like, both from the entire journey and then discrete steps inside of that journey. One of the things we've done in the past is actually run analysis to understand the different thresholds that customers have for speed of a particular aspect of the journey being delivered. So there are things that can be done to help inform what kind of targets or measures you might be setting for speed related criteria, whether it's speed of an issue being resolved or speed of a product being shipped out and delivered. Yeah. So we tend to generally assume that faster is going to be better, but that's obviously not always the case. As we mentioned earlier on, and customers do recognize that the time to receive a particular experience is not going to be uniform across the board. So they would understand that the time to order and receive a car is going to be a lot longer than the time to order and receive a book, for example.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, hey, we've got to that point of the program where I ask every single guest, you've done this before, but we like to send our listeners back to the office with a take home value. That's your best tip or one thing you'd like them to really take away from our time here on the podcast today. So Sean Clayton, what is your take home value today?

Sean:
I would say when we're talking in thinking specifically about speed, it's important to understand that entire breadth of the journey and the time interval is associated with that. And what we think of as fast or slow is not necessarily what our customers think of as fast or slow relative to the relative to the situation. But we have to break it down into each specific phase. So as an example, when we think about a patient experience, even as as simple as going into your local doctor's for a checkup, there's making the appointment, there's having that appointment made in the window that's suitable for you. Do you have to wait a week or two weeks to see your doctor? There's driving to the physician's office. There's waiting in the waiting room after you check in and fill out all of the forms. Then as being escorted by the nurse to the room. And then there's the actual interaction with the doctor and then the process of leaving the clinic after you've had that appointment. And if you think of it just as far as the entire journey and how long that takes, maybe it's a day, maybe it's a week or two. But if you think about the actual time with the doctor, it's a fraction of the overall journey and possibly the most important part. So just thinking about speed in to general of a sense I think can be quite misleading. We have to really think about speed relative to expectations, relative to the journey and relative to the emotional intensity of that particular experience.

Steve:
Very well put. Thank you. Sean Clayton is senior VP here at Walker, a real leading thinker in our whole profession, and I'm grateful that he was willing to come on and he moves fast and he loves racing, so he's intimately qualified to discuss the topic of speed. Sean, thanks for being our guest this week on the podcast.

Sean:
Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, and if anybody would want to continue the conversation, how might they find you?

Sean:
Most easily on LinkedIn.

Steve:
And remember, if you missed any of the previous episodes in this series, go to cxleaderpodcast.com to listen, or you can download them from wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series, contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing. If you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listeners. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that can help your 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 get out there and make your company faster in an appropriate way. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you again soon next time.

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