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Steve:
You've worked hard to build a brand that informs the world on what to expect from your company. So who's responsible for making certain the customer's experience meets that expectation?

Chris:
I used to think that customer experience was underneath the tent of brand, and I feel like it's almost inverting to the point where Brand is going to start fitting underneath and superceding customer experience. They're just becoming so interchangeable and so intertwined,

Steve:
Ensuring the front line employees deliver the experience promised by your brand 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. 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. Think back to a time when you had a great customer experience. What's the first thing you remember? The company's name? An image of their logo in your mind? Or was it the representative's name that went above and beyond to help you? It's important for those leading a company's CX effort to make certain the customer experience delivered by your front line employees matches the customer's expectations. And that means your employees need to understand your brand and the expectations it promises. Chris Wallace is the founder and president of the InnerView Group, a marketing consulting firm helping companies reach and influence the people and partners that represent their brand. And he's going to give us some advice on how to ensure frontline employees deliver the experience promised by your brand. Chris, thanks for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Chris:
Steve, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Steve:
No, I'm really delighted to have you and really looking forward to this conversation. You know, before we get into the meat of the topic, I always like to ask our guests to just give our listeners a little bit of the background and how you made it into this world of customer experience.

Chris:
Yeah, well, so I've spent most of my career, or at least the early part of my career working with larger consumer brands. I spent time with the PGA Tour, Comcast and some of their entertainment properties, a variety of other brands, and always in this kind of in the sales side of things. So always carrying a bag and out there representing the brands. And I think I've got to learn the perspective of being the person who has to be out there delivering the message every single day. And so it gives me a unique perspective in my entire team who have also been in sales unique perspective and how to connect that brand story with those those moments like those single moments, those individual conversations where that brand message is either either delivered or not delivered. I've lived it and I'm really honored to have the opportunity to help brands kind of reimagine the way they connect their story to the front lines.

Steve:
So tell us a little bit about how you founded the InnerView Group and what was the thing that got you started with your own company?

Chris:
Yes. So I actually just I just celebrated 10 years, 10 years as an entrepreneur last week. And so InnerView is not the first company that I founded. I had the opportunity to start an organization 10 years ago. We merged that business. And after a couple of years of being part of the merged organization, my business partner and I, Diana Finley decided that was just time for a change. It was time to take stock and we had a chance that we had really done it. InnerView is really our third our third opportunity to to grow a business together. And we had a chance to really start over and really say, what do we want to do? Where have we had success in the past? And we really looked back on the two previous organizations that were really focused on sales effectiveness. OK, kind of 21st century sales support, sales training, sales enablement. And what what we really got sober about was this idea that marketers needed the help. It was marketers who were really struggling. They were building the brand story and they were spending all the money on advertising. But the disconnect really was between the marketing, the sales side of the house, and we focused mainly on consumer brands. And especially in consumer brands that disconnect between marketing and the sales and service team is pretty stark. So when we start an InnerView, we really started with this premise of marketers are the ones who are feeling this pain, right? The marketers are the one telling the story and they need to drive that consistency. But they needed the tools, the tactics, the approach to be able to connect to their own internal team.

Steve:
So you focus on consumer brands, but I assume that's not as much the fast moving consumer goods or is it primarily fast moving consumer goods? Because…

Chris:
No, It's typically high consideration purchases that that's mostly

Steve:
Where there's not just sort of a transaction, but some sort of ongoing relationship or maybe a service element to it, if…

Chris:
That's exactly right. Typically, when a human's involved, when we work a lot in the cable and telecom space, we work a lot in the financial services space. Right. So can you open a checking account transactionally? Sure. But that's not exactly the type of relationship that people think of transactionally. And we know from working in that space that banking customers really are always looking for that that relationship with the bank to take that relationship and extend out and give them greater levels of advice and things like that. It's really how do you make sure your your your story kind of comes to life when you have customers who kind of want that help and want that support.

Steve:
Yeah, I'm glad you clarify that, because that's kind of the track I was on here is, you know, you can sort of create a brand image for a product that is quickly consumed. You know, it may or may not match, but a lot of it's the perception that the consumer has. But when you're consuming a service over some period of time, you can't really create an image or an expectation if the service doesn't, in fact, support that, correct?

Chris:
It's absolutely true. One litmus test that I use is I look at a brand's tagline, right. And if I'm talking to somebody from that organization, I'll ask them, what is your tagline? Either do your people know what it means? And so many so many of them are so generic and an agency made a lot of money to come up with that tagline. But does it really stand for something? Your people know how to behave in a way that's consistent with what that tagline promises? I used that. The tagline is an interesting way to kind of get a glimpse into how serious a brand is about backing up their their brand with a great customer experience, a consistent customer experience.

Steve:
So just in your philosophy, how do you tie the brand to the customer experience? What's the philosophy you start with or framework, if you will?

Chris:
So I'm going to tell you, I honestly think that the answer is different today than it may have been three and a half years ago when we started InnerView Group. I think that and I think that the pandemic has obviously had an impact on that. But I really do think that the phrase brand and customer experience, I used to think that the customer experience was underneath the tent of brand. And I feel like it's almost inverting to the point where brand is going to start fitting underneath and superceding customer experience. They're just becoming so interchangeable and so intertwined. But when I when I think about the the the connection between the two, we always ask marketers, how confident are you that the people who represent your brand are your are telling your story confidently, consistently. That is our that is our core question. And the responses we get are typically pretty comical. Right. The the lack of alignment or the acknowledgment that there's a lack of alignment is pretty high. Right. People are aware of that. But we really look at it as the connection truly is. The external piece of your brand is the communications that you are driving out to the marketplace that is trying to to draw people in. Right. To to magnetize your brand and to draw people in. The customer experience in our mind is, have you aligned the behaviors right? Have you taken the words and translated those into behaviors that are going to get delivered consistently? So your brand is so your brand can win? For lack of a better phrase. The marketers have decided the platform on which you want to compete and win in the marketplace. How your position if your people don't behave in a way that is consistent with that, you win less because you're not differentiated. Your customer doesn't know how to choose you from another provider or another product. And we truly believe that the connection is the external brand is the words and the customer experience is the actions that align to that.

Steve:
Yeah, and some of these companies that you're talking about, they use a lot of front line personnel because they have, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers. Right. So how do you get that at scale for a lot of front line employees to to sort of be aligned with what that brand promise as it relates to the customer experience has been said?

Chris:
Yeah, you've got. So the way you cascade this down through an organization, it really depends on each company and really what what tools and capabilities that they have. But there's a couple of tried and true methods that we use. We have launched them or when we started InnerView Group, we started with an on the back of a tool called the Brand Transfer Score. We built it from scratch. We started InnerView with it. We decided we were not going to start this organization unless we had a scalable, to use your word and viable tool to really help us understand what the misalignment is from the corporate team down to the front lines. So we measure it. And I know this will be near and dear to your heart at Walker, but we measure what the alignment is from from the front line down to the exit in the corporate team, down to the front line. We essentially take a market research process and we've sort of optimized it for the internal conversation. And just as a brand would go out and get the voice of the customer data, we're taking the same evaluation you would do externally with customers on your brand and we're doing that type of evaluation internally. So we always say you spend so much money to influence the customer, but you might want to spend a little bit of time and invest to make sure that you're influencing the person talking to the customer. So kind of moving that focus one step up. So the brand transfer score is a way for us to measure and kind of pinpoint how much people talk about the game of telephone. Right. How much of the message is getting lost between point "A" and point "J" in the process is a long chain in these companies and then a lot of ways in terms of how you get it to cascade down. We're huge believers in sort of the peer to peer and horizontal leadership model, whereby we are we are building mechanisms whereby peers are engaging each other around what's working in the customer experience. Where are they finding good reactions from the customers? Where do they have confidence spreading those ideas to each other and really kind of building the brand organically, kind of from the inside out?

Steve:
I want to take a break here and tell you about Walker's newest report, "Deliver More Value with X- and O-Data," which provides a practical framework for integrating experience data and operational data to drive better decisions. You can download the report for free at cxleaderpodcast.com\xoreport.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Chris Wallace. He's the co-founder and president of InnerView Group, a marketing consulting firm that helps companies reach and influence the people and partners that represent their brand. We've had a fascinating conversation that CX pros should definitely take heed of here, particularly if you have a service or a product which is consumed sort of in a relationship level over time and through people that are part of the value prop that you offer. I'm fascinated with this brand transfer score. Generally, do you find higher brand transfer scores higher in the organization than you do lower in the organization, or is that not necessarily the case?

Chris:
You just so you just ask the probably the most interesting question. OK, so we just I just ran an analysis on that. When we started this, when we built the brand transfer score process, we assumed it was going to be a linear drop off. It would be corporate team has a certain opinion and understanding of the brand and a vision of the brand. And then as you got further layers down through the organization, down toward the front line teams, that you would see a stepwise drop off. Right. That's actually not the case. Fifty six percent of the brand transfer studies that we have done, it's been inverted. The corporate teams are rating their brand like their performance of their brand and key attributes of their brand. They are rating lower on aggregate than the front line teams. So when we talk a lot about belief, confidence and pride, we believe that we can measure through this process believe, confidence and pride in your brand. Where do you have it? Where do you lack it? Where do you need to amplify those types of things? Where is the line or misaligned? And it's very interesting for us that when we do the performance ratings around the brand, that when companies wonder why there's a lack of confidence at the front line or they're not getting that. We talk about momentum all the time. We're a momentum company. Why are we not getting momentum around this this new product? Why are we not getting momentum around our new experience? Well, we look at it and we find that the corporate team is rating things lower than the field teams. You're seeing that the lack of confidence in many cases is starting at the top.

Steve:
Yeah, you know, maybe it's because the front line folks are so close to the customers and they they see the value that they're delivering for customers. And then they're also kind of the ones that are making it work if there is a kink in the operation. But do you have any more hypothesis on that?

Chris:
I think there's a bit of a positivity bias, to be completely honest. I think that the front line teams have a bit of a positivity bias in terms of they feel like if their organization is asking the great thing about the brand transfer study process is it's not gameable, so it's not a survey per say. It's a very structured approach whereby the insights we deliver to our clients are derived from an analysis of the answers. It's not just what. Here's what they said. Right. So we're kind of getting underneath the data. So it's not really gameable, but you still run into situations where it just depends on the organization. To be completely honest, there are some organizations where there's clearly not a bias toward the positive. Right. People are people are giving very unvarnished look at what they think, how they think their brand is competing in the marketplace. But so I think that that that could be one aspect of it. I also do think that a lot of the programs that we work with are on the newer side. They're new. So I think what ends up happening is organizations are rolling things out and the corporate teams being honest and saying this is not fully baked. Right. This is not where it needs to be in the long run. And they're critical of themselves in the offering that they're putting out there, whether it's whether it's right or wrong. Right. We're not really measuring right or wrong, we're measuring perception. But we're consistently seeing that the corporate perspective on their brand performance in the marketplace is lower.

Steve:
And what about longitudinally? Can you improve this brand transfer score? Can you improve it over time with the right kinds of actions?

Chris:
Yeah, absolutely. And that's that's the way the support and the the work that we do with our clients really is designed to to improve the alignment. Now, the score itself is a measure of alignment. We do a statistical comparison of the way the corporate teams who have architected the message and architected the story and built it, how they evaluate it compared to the people in the field. And we do a statistical comparison of those. And we're work. We're getting close to eight thousand front line people that have taken… We actually launched our biggest one today, in fact, with several thousand, several thousand front line employees with one organization. And the great thing about that is if we get that metric back and we find that there is misalignment, it's not just misalignment in the aggregate, the overall score is an aggregate score, but we can look at the individual elements that are driving the misalignment. We can say your people do not think that your warranty competes in the marketplace. They think that you're advertising the warranty, but they don't have confidence in the warranty. Something's got to give. Either you need to change your advertising or they need to change the way they talk about it so we can pick out the individual, the pieces that they want to improve. We can target those with the right messaging internally by team. Right. Some teams might not talk about that piece. We focus on the type of conversation the front line teams are having and we tailor the message to them. We can come back and measure whether or not they have improved their belief, confidence and pride around the specific elements.

Steve:
So how would you just can you give us an example of how you might take a scenario and actually help the frontline employees improve their belief, confidence and pride.

Chris:
In terms of the tactics that we run and just what that intervention looks like?

Steve:
Yeah.

Chris:
We do work in the manufacturing space. So so consumer brands, but manufactured goods to go to market through distribution and retailers and dealers and things like that. And they have a lot of these organizations have outside sales reps and will run a brand transfer study and we'll get information back. One thing we always ask is, to increase your confidence in this offering, what are the tools and materials that would make would increase your ability to have a confident conversation? So we're asking what their preferences are, what are their what are their media preferences? How do they want to consume information? And we heard from one client of ours that the front line team, so the sales teams kept saying, no webinars, please, no webinars. We're sales reps. We're supposed to be about seeing people. This is pre-COVID, obviously, but we're supposed to be out seeing our customers. Please give us something new, like give us something fresh here. So we created a podcast series with their leadership team. So we took feedback from the from the sales reps. What do you want to hear about? What are the messages you're just you're uncertain of? And we hosted a fun podcast series internally. There were like 17 or 18 minute episodes, wasn't anything too heavy. But now when they're driving from appointment to appointment, they're going in to have an important conversation about this new program with one of their retailers. They can listen and kind of freshen up their their approach before they go in. So that's one example. We've done graphic novel series for for another manufacturing client. They're relaunching a brand. And they wanted to tell kind of this comeback hero story with with this brand. So we took people in their production facility, took head shots of them and created superhero characters around them. And we're releasing a series of issues out to their sales team whereby the content that they're getting looks more like the stuff that they'd like to consume in their spare time as opposed to their work done. We treat them like consumers. We want them to have fun with it. We want them to be engaged with it. We want them to have an experience with the story, not just tell them the story, but help immerse them in the story. So we continue to push boundaries with those are just a couple of examples.

Steve:
So you're really changing the customer's perception of the value through internal marketing to the people that actually deliver the value to the customer.

Chris:
That's very well said.

Steve:
Yeah, it's brilliant. And particularly for those of us that are really focused in the space where, you know, you can't just throw out a marketing image. The experience has to match what the company's values and what their value proposition is. Can you give us kind of an example of how this looks when it's when it's done very well?

Chris:
So there's a couple of folks that that we've worked with. We worked with a jewelry brand called Blue Nile. I don't know if you've ever heard of Blue Nile, but they're they're a pretty large online jewelry retailer. I'm sure you've seen banner ads, but they we did some work with them a couple of years ago and really came in and did a brand alignment engagement with them. It truly was about how can we take the message that we deliver around our expertize and our longevity in the industry and in our customer first focus and really make sure that they're that their interactions with the customers were lined up to that. They've done an incredibly good job of that. They've done an excellent job of aligning that and know what they deliver to their customers now is really what it comes down to is a lot of times front line teams simply don't know, could not rattle off an action, come up with an action that they believe is consistent with their brand. They don't know their brand. They don't they don't understand truly what it stands for. Right. And that's why we believe in the process. You just said we're just marketing it to them. But Blue Nile really bought into this. Their diamond jewelry consultants really bought in. And for lack of a better phrase, we're selling it back to them. Right. Use this phrase marketing. We will sometimes say when we're selling them on the idea of the brand, we're treating them like they have a choice, whether or not to opt into this. Another brand that we see doing this quite well, not currently a client of ours, but I would call sort of a partner and a collaborator. We've written some things together and things like that. But Rogers Cable up in Canada, Rogers Communications Up in Canada, has a team called Voice of the Front Lines and voice to the front lines went from an idea to a full on department and really a way of life and a cultural element up at Rogers, which is essentially any time something's getting pushed out to their front line teams, they have a process through which the front line teams review the content, review the materials vetted, and they they stamp it with front line approved. And when you talk about building belief, confidence and pride, if you answer phones or man or retail retail kiosk for Rogers and you get this material and you see that your peers have vetted it, that drives your confidence that somebody has really given consideration to what the customer experience is and what needs to be delivered. So it's credible content. The interesting thing is when that program started, it sort of sat in like a communications type function. I believe that's what originally started and now it's part of their customer experience organization. So it has morphed over and it's completely aligned with what they're doing from a customer experience standpoint. So, Rogers, as always, we always hold them up as a great example of these are people who are progressive and trying to do it the right way.

Steve:
That is a great example. Chris, we've reached that part of the podcast where I always ask our guests for their take home value. This is your best tip or what you'd really want our listeners to take from today's podcast, something that they can take back and apply to their own CX program and make it better right away. So, Chris Wallace, what is your take home value today?

Chris:
So my take home value, it's going to tie in with the conversation we had about the brand transfer score, but I would challenge anybody listening to look at their own organization. You know, look at your front line employees. We believe they're the gateway to your customer. Right. They can choose whether your customer experience is is successful. They can choose whether or not they sell your brand or they sell your products to services. We see that choice happening every single day. My hot tip is truly looking at them as a consumer of your message, not a somebody to be forced into compliance. Ask them what they think. Do it in a structured regular way. Right. And if it's just a Survey Monkey that goes out and you gather some feedback, fine. I mean, it's better than doing nothing but having it be structured and ongoing and consistent and gathering that feedback and being able to look at it and really evaluate what their perceptions are, not knowledge. We don't believe in checking people's knowledge because they can know something and not choose to behave in a certain way. So we go straight for their perceptions. So that the hot tip is really looking at those front line teams as an audience to be won over and asking their opinion in an ongoing structured fashion.

Steve:
Very good tip. Thank you, Chris Wallace, for that. And also thank you for being a guest on our podcast this week. Really enjoyed having you. Chris, if people want to continue the conversation, you want to give them website or email or LinkedIn profile, something that people might want to be able to reach out to you.

Chris:
Absolutely. So the website is innerviewgroup.com. It's I N N E R, View group .com, as in brands taking an inner view of their of their message and their customer experience. In terms of LinkedIn. Active on LinkedIn, happy to connect with folks. Now, I'm not the easiest person to find on LinkedIn because I have a very common name. So Steve Walker and Chris Wallace, those are those are needles in a haystack on LinkedIn. OK, so Chris Wallace in Philadelphia. You'll see the InnerView Group mark next to my name. But Philadelphia is where you can find me, and I'm happy to engage on that platform.

Steve:
Yeah, there's a bunch of us in the phone book, aren't there? Chris Wallace is the co-founder and president of InnerView. That's I N N E R view, like taking an inner view of your own products and services and customer's experience and really enjoyed having Chris on the podcast. I do encourage all of the listeners to check out their websites and connect with Chris. And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on the podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes. We organize them by series and we can you can cross-reference find the topics that you're interested in. We also have our contact information on there. And you can drop us a note, see how we're doing or suggest a topic for a 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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