Once Upon a Time…

Release Date: August 24, 2021 • Episode #180

When we talk about “experiences” it’s often from a holistic point of view – through the lens of “experience management”, or “XM.” But how do you connect the customer with the employees, or the employees with the brand? One way is through the use of storytelling, which can be particularly effective in building empathy and understanding. Host Steve Walker welcomes Bruce Temkin, head of the Qualtrics XM Institute, for a discussion on how storytelling can build customer empathy and lead to better customer experience.

Bruce Temkin
XM Institute
Connect with Bruce

Highlights

It IS just in your head…

Great scientist, guy by the name of Paul Zak, who’s a leading neuroscience researcher in storytelling, along with other sort of academics, have found that stories actually create physical and neurological change in people. A good story actually produces dopamine and oxytocin, dopamine increases attention, and it increases not only someone’s willingness to listen and willingness to engage with content, but it actually stimulates their memory so they remember it more. And oxytocin increases the likelihood that someone will actually change their behavior based on what they’ve just heard. So stories are not just about this sort of nice thing to do. It actually stimulates human beings to actually change based on what you’re telling them.

We have to drive change

We’re all change agents right? At the end of the day if we’re not change agents, then we’re not delivering value to our organization. I always say, like if if we as CX professionals or XM professionals more broadly are doing our jobs, then people in our organizations are going to be doing something differently in the future than they’re doing today. Right? If they’re not, then we’re not creating any value. We’re just reporting we’re just bringing up data. Then we are not going to be successful. But we have to drive change.

Transcript

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Steve:
It's an art form that predates writing itself, and yet it can be a powerful tool for CX pros.

Bruce:
At the end of the day, you want to have an impact in what you do, and data and analysis is valuable, but they don't have the bang and the punch that a good story has.

Steve:
Communicating experiences through storytelling 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. One of my new statements about this show is it is a great time to be a CX leader. Never in history has CX been so important for our businesses. And so thank you for joining me on this podcast. 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. When we talk about experiences, it's often from a holistic point of view through the lens of experience management or XM a term you've heard often on this show. But how do you connect the customer with the employees or the employees with the brand? One way is through the use of storytelling, which can be particularly effective in building empathy and understanding. Well, today's guest is an expert on storytelling in the context of experience management, and he's also no stranger to our podcast. Bruce Temkin is the head of the Qualtrics XM Institute and a co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. Shorthand, we say CXPA. Bruce is a good friend. I've known him a long time. And so please welcome Bruce back to The CX Leader Podcast. Bruce, thanks for being on the show today.

Bruce:
Steve, thanks for having me. And I love that statement. Now is the best time ever to be a CX leader. So it's awesome. Thanks for having me.

Steve:
Well, I would bet that most of our listeners know a lot about you, but we do pick up new listeners all the time. And just so many people are new to the space. But just for the benefit of context and for our audience, just tell them a little bit more about Bruce Temkin, your career and and what has led you to such a lofty position in our profession.

Bruce:
Oh, well, thanks for that intro. I don't know how to actually describe myself to live up to that, but I'm currently I lead the XM Institute in Qualtrics so we do a lot of thought leadership, training. And that's really been my my focus for the last two decades. I don't want to tell you how long, Steve, because I don't want to share sort of how old I am or get any idea of it. But for a while, I've been focused on helping large organizations transform what they do to better serve their customers. I did that for over a decade at Forrester. Then I had my own company, Temkin Group, where we helped large organizations transform around customer experience. And during that time, I co-founded the CXPA, and then we were acquired by Qualtrics to create the XM Institute. So that's sort of what I've been up to for the last several years around the CX world.

Steve:
Yeah. And you really came at it as a research analyst at Forrester. That's really where you first discovered CX. Correct?

Bruce:
So it's it's interesting. It depends on how far you go back on the story. I actually think that my focus on CX started after I graduated. I got my MBA and worked for General Electric, and I was an internal consultant and actually led some of the first Six Sigma projects at G.E. And the projects I were leading were around the customer facing processes for their for their power generation business. That was one of the first things I did as an internal consultant there. And really that was a lot of what CX is today. Obviously, it's evolved and matured and a lot more things, but a lot of my learning and focus on customer came from those days when I was, you know, involved deeply in what turned out to be the quality of movement and Six Sigma. And so then, yeah, then at Forrester, I got more formalized around CX and really ended up building my expertize and creating, I think, a lot of what the practices around CX at Forrester way back when.

Steve:
Yeah, actually, I don't think we've ever had this conversation but G.E. Was one of our marquee clients early on, and I think it was all driven by the Six Sigma total quality management, which if you look at those techniques, all of them require some sort of customer input into the design of the processes. And so this that was you know, I come at it more from the traditional market research side, but that was a kind of a macro management theory that drove the demand for what we did.

Bruce:
Cool. And I would say it's interesting you said like I would challenge one thing you said. You were you were right, but not quite right, which is that those Six Sigma require good customer input. That's only if you do them correctly. Yeah, right. Like there's a bunch of Six Sigma projects. And that's one of the things early on when I talk about like CX versus process improvement. Right. That lots of people do process improvement, but not many of them do it with the correct amount of customer input to drive them. And I think that's actually one of the the drawbacks of the traditional Six Sigma and process improvement projects of the past, which is I don't think they had enough customer input.

Steve:
Yeah, I actually I think you're absolutely right. But I think if you go to the textbook for Six Sigma, there is sort of a you got to collect some what is it valid customer feedback or something? Valid requirements. Yeah, well, we date ourselves, too. That's enough down memory road. But I guess where I was going for today's topic is, you know, I've I've always been a little more on the quantitative side, and that's kind of my comfort zone. But something that you have talked about almost since the day I met you is to tell the stories, to make it live and to make it real. And we talk about this a lot on the podcast is don't get bogged down in your data, but but really make, you know, make this stuff come to life for the people that need to act on it. So just kind of give me an overview on how you think storytelling has affected your career and really come to some of your basic philosophies on how you approach your profession and in how the whole profession has evolved, for that matter.

Bruce:
Yeah, Steve, to be honest with you, without storytelling, I wouldn't be on this podcast. I doubt too many people in the world would care about what I had to say. I started my career designing submarine missile systems, and I'm now advising leaders in organizations around the world about their most critical strategies. And one of the most important, if not the most important skill that's helped my evolution has been tapping into the power of storytelling, because otherwise I would be showing up here sharing details of an analysis that I've done. And I bore the heck out of everyone in your audience. And they'd be going, who was that clown who Steve had on his podcast who just bored us? And so I really think about, you know, we talked about G.E., I got trained on presentation skills at Forrester. I honed into like what I think are pretty strong presentation and storytelling skills. And throughout that time, I realized that a good story is more powerful than a good fact. As a matter of fact, I love this quote from Philip Pullman who said, "thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but once upon a time, last forever." And I think that's what I've learned over the years, which is that at the end of the day, you want to have an impact in what you do. And data and analysis is valuable, but they don't have the bang and the punch that a good story has. And I think all of us, all of us, you know, who care about customer experience, who care about experience management, we want to drive change. And there's almost nothing more powerful to drive change than storytelling.

Steve:
Well, you just led into my next question, but, you know, why is it that an experience management professional has to perfect their ability to storytell? You just sort of led with that but let's unpack that even a little more.

Bruce:
Sure. We're all change agents right? At the end of the day if we're not change agents, then we're not delivering value to our organization. I always say, like if if we as CX professionals or XM professionals more broadly are doing our jobs, then people in our organizations are going to be doing something differently in the future than they're doing today. Right? If they're not, then we're not creating any value. We're just reporting we're just bringing up data. Then we are not going to be successful. But we have to drive change. And one of the best tools for driving change, like I mentioned, is storytelling. Let me explain why. And let me get a little bit geeky on this for a second. Right? Because storytelling is not just a soft topic. People think, oh, that's storytelling. I do analysis. Right? I do predictive analytics. Right? I do conjoined analysis. That's storytelling is for fluffy people. Well, storytelling isn't just a soft topic. Great scientist guy by the name of Paul Zak, who's a leading neuroscience researcher in storytelling, along with other sort of academics, have found that stories actually create physical and neurological change in people. A good story actually produces dopamine and oxytocin, dopamine increases attention, and it increases not only someone's willingness to listen and willingness to engage with content, but it actually stimulates their memory so they remember it more. And oxytocin increases the likelihood that someone will actually change their behavior based on what they've just heard. So stories are not just about this sort of nice thing to do. It actually stimulates human beings to actually change based on what you're telling them. So to me, we need to have XM professionals need to think less about sharing data and more about motivating people to change. And with that mindset, you'll see that you really want to have that dopamine and oxytocin working in the people that you're actually trying to change.

Steve:
So I get it. Give me a kind of a for instance, if you could. So let's say I am a little more analytical. I'm a little more into my not that I'm talking about myself here, Bruce, or anything, but, you know, and I want to get the point across that we need to change something in the business. Let's say it's in the customer service call center, contact center area. And I've got clear data to prove that if we could move the needle on a certain touch point, that it would have a positive impact on our customer relationships and ultimately our business outcomes. So how would I present that data and then roll that into, say, a story?

Bruce:
Sure. So I think that, you know, one of the things that is interesting to look at is how other successful change agents and leaders operate. And I'll come back to the the contact center story. But I think it's worth looking at sort of the if you look at the State of the Union, like when the president sits in front of the country and, you know, tens of millions of people are watching and the president wants the country to make a move and make a change. What is it? Well, let's say let's say he wants to have us invest more in our infrastructure. Well, he'll make a case, 22 percent of bridges, 42 percent of roads. But then in order to make you really want it, he'll talk about one bridge in Indiana that is so bad that a mother can't get across there and actually get her job done. So she's stuck at home and she can't have a job. And that's leading to her unemployment, which which actually led to her having to be evicted from her house. And, oh, by the way, she's here in the audience. Go look at her. Right? You know what is that's about taking us the data and making it come to life through the eyes of an individual. I go back to the contact center. If you want to make the case about investment. Talk about a single journey that someone's going through that is so bad that people can see what it is and sense what it is. And let me show you something. This is something that that I've done for presentations to make storytelling come to life. And I tend to do it with like a PowerPoint slides, but let me do it but just sort of with my voice. And I'm going to share with you a couple of different stories or a couple of different ways to present data. Now, my share, two of them, OK. And I want everyone in the audience to think about how you're responding to each one. All right, well, we'll go away from CX for a while. All right. His first way, I'm going to say: did you know that each year one million children die of hunger around the world, which means that malnutrition causes 15 percent of all child deaths? OK, presented a data. However you feel, you feel, I'm sure no one's feeling good about that, but people going, oh, yeah, that's pretty bad. Well, let me try a different approach. I recently interviewed a mother in a very poor town in Mogadishu who lost her six month old daughter, Nzinga, because she couldn't provide this beautiful baby with the equivalent of two pieces of bread per week. For the price of two venti lattes at Starbucks, Zynga could have lived for another year. How do you feel about the data now?

Steve:
No, it's very powerful.

Bruce:
Which one of those would drive you to do something different tomorrow?

Steve:
Yeah.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is the one and only Bruce Temkin. He's the head of the Qualtrics XM Institute and also the co-founder of the CXPA. He's had a long and great career, and probably our profession wouldn't be where it is today without him. So I'm grateful that he's come back on as a guest. But kind of in the organizational context, not just to drive change, but just in terms of the employee experience, I think there's a role for storytelling to play that that the XM professionals can fulfill. What's kind of the impact on the employees of a company when when organizations get good at telling stories?

Bruce:
So I think that, you know, employees don't actually generally tend to process data even as much as executives do. Right. So executives are used to having 22 percent of this. We want 40 percent growth. They live in a boring world. Right. Charts and figures and all of that. But employees are if you think about like what you really need change, you need to have in any large company, a vast number of employees decide that they want to do something differently. And and you can tell them to do something differently, but that doesn't stick. So using stories about what their future life will be like, working in a different way, telling stories about the impact that it'll have on customers as part of a rollout of the new approach of a new process, you're going to implement of a new set of rules, you're going to do of a new script that you're going to have in the context. And let's say we're going to roll it. Let's stick with the contact center. Right. We're going to roll out a new approach to with new scripts for how we're dealing with some customers in the contact center. We can just do it, we can just roll out script and say this is going to be a bunch of new scripts and read them as is, or we could say that we did research with our customers, and here's the feedback that some of them talked about in terms of how they felt about how we were talking to them in the past. And then we did this research where we created these new scripts. And I'm going to share with you feedback from two of our customers and how they felt after hearing these new scripts. And then I could tell the story of how they felt. Which one of those approaches do you think is going to be a driver for better change in the contact center? One. In one way, you might get compliance, but compliance will like fall over time because people aren't bought in. And the other, they go, oh, I get it, I want to be the person has that impact on the other person on the other end of the phone. And so I'll go along. So stories are really powerful in terms of driving widespread – not just adoption, but widespread buy-in to some of the changes you want to make across an organization.

Steve:
Let's take it to the… back to the CX pro here for a minute. And let's again assume that maybe this isn't part of their toolkit today. What advice would you give them? Like, how could they start to start to transition to using storytelling more? Where do they go look for some some of these stories or or what types of things might give them the biggest impact or the quick wins?

Bruce:
Yeah, no. And I think it's interesting, as you earlier mentioned, like films, you talk about films, right. Document films like I think just if you want to be a good storyteller, go to the movies. But don't just go to the movies to watch the movies, go to the movies and look at how the story is being told, because stories actually have a repeatable pattern. This is the thing that the analytical XAM professionals will love, right? That's that stories actually follow a pattern. There is a a finite number of… I don't know, there's probably an infinite number of story like what we call storyline arcs, the flow of the story. But there's a finite number of them that are used over and over and over again. So here's why I say think of a James Bond movie. Go to a James Bond movie. Right. The storyline arc is exactly the same as it turns out. Those arcs are the arc that I use in almost all of my writing. So now you'll like you'll look at the stuff that I write. My presentation of Bruce is boring because he's just using a single storyline arc. But the arc really follows a very predictable range. And if you can think about arcs and think about stories and the arc goes like this, you start with an introduction that has context and that establishes and draws people into the story. Right. You're standing up trying. Then you have to introduce the important thing called conflict or tension. Right. Someone isn't working well or someone's in danger or some problem exists. And then you actually, depending on how you want to have the story, how long you want to have the story go, you draw out that tension. Right. That tension continues. You build on that tension. But that's all that's happening. And then you resolve the tension. Right. You resolve the tension. Either James Bond wins and beats or you say here's how you can actually fix the problem that you've introduced. And that's most of it. And then you can add a prestige. A prestige is an element that happens at the end that people aren't expecting. In the James Bond movie, it's sort of like, you know, the James Bond has solved the problem. World peace has occurred. Everyone, all the bad guys are either dead or in jail. And that's where you think it's about to end. The prestige is, oh, my God, they introduce that guy who you thought had died actually didn't. That bad guy is coming back to get him. And then James Bond actually solves the problem by by, you know, arresting that guy or putting him down in the end. And you weren't expecting that some prestige at the end. But pretty much if you go to movies and start looking at how they're presenting their storylines, I think that'll help you think about how you start telling a story around the data in the insights that you have.

Steve:
That's awesome. I want to go [singing…]

Bruce:
[laughing]

Steve:
Actually go any minute? You can watch James Bond on cable about any night of the week, I think, if you're flipping channels like I do.

Bruce:
Oh, absolutely.

Steve:
Just based on your great history of doing this for a long time, are there kind of any anecdotes or any stories where you really felt like you could you really made a difference or where you really had a story that just really clicked and achieve the outcome that you were looking for?

Bruce:
Yes. I would say the oftentimes I'll do that… that that story about the mother in Mogadishu. And by the way, I should tell your audience I made that story up. Don't stop feeling bad for her. She's completely made up. I, I generally you have I tell that story I remember to let people off the hook and not feel as bad. I made that up. Don't worry about her. It's your latte's have nothing to do with her. So for me, I always think so. Here's the the story that comes to my mind about storytelling is really when when I was at at Forrester and I remember the moment when I like really learned how to present stories, was a time when a vendor – and it could have been Walker. It wasn't Walker at the time. A vendor hired me to do like a series of speeches across different cities. Right. And I knew the content I was going to present. It was like, you know, going back then, it was probably some boring charts about this topic or that topic. I don't even remember what the topic was. Right. But because I was doing it in different cities, I could play around with how I presented myself around that content. Right. The content stayed the boring pieces in the middle, but I played around with telling stories, the front and how I pulled it all together. And I got in… I remember getting increasingly bolder city by city as I mastered the stuff in the middle. And that for me became really clear that from the storytelling that I do. Right. And it's not true for all of our audience. Right. This may not be true. But for what I do, sometimes I have to be an entertainer as much as I have to be an informer. And many cases I've learned that I need to entertain more than I need to inform. Right. Like, you know, you've got like a twenty to twenty five minute podcast, right. If writing captures someone's attention in the first four or five minutes, I'll bet you they don't listen past seven. Right. So if I want you to hear about storytelling, right. I need to make sure that I open it up in a way that you go, OK, this guy's at least worth listening to because, you know, they know Steve's going to be worth listening to. But there's this like other person on here and is it worth my time? But I learned that in the presentation mode, because what I ended up doing is because I repeated I was able to look at the audience and do my own little lab research on on what things seem to keep people people's attention on what I was saying. And I could tell that when I opened up with a more dramatic story. Right, that that opening and brought them in, they stayed attentive longer. And when I played on that story throughout my presentation, they would reengage in higher level. So if I did an opening story about, you know, maybe I did, I've done opening stories about shows like James Bond or like Cinderella. And then if I come back to that story and refresh their mind, then they they I didn't know at the time, but I was inducing dopamine and oxytocin. I didn't know those terms back then, but that was what was happening. And then so for me, that became clear that I need to get better at this craft, maybe even more so than the analytical craft that I had mastered or I tried to master for years.

Steve:
You know, it just reminds me of an old saying that I don't I can't attribute you're so good, you can attribute some of this research to the people that created it, but somebody once told me that all business is show business.

Bruce:
I love that. And it is except for, you know, when you're in a company, an operating company, 99 percent of it has to be not show business. Right. But the things that people remember, the things that drive change is all about show business.

Steve:
That's right. Well, Bruce, we've reached that point of the podcast where I put all of our guests on the spot and we call it take home value. It's kind of the concept as if one of our CX pros has been listening to this podcast as they commute or work out and they're getting ready to go to work. What is Bruce Temkin's take home value from this podcast? What can I do as a CX pro to improve my storytelling today or tomorrow or next Monday?

Bruce:
All right. Here's my takeaway: add a story to every key point you want to make with your data. So I know you're doing presentations out there and you're doing data to figure out what are the two, three, one, two, three key points you want to make. And tell a story associated with them. That'll mean, yes, you will have to spend less time in whatever meeting you are, whatever forum talking about the data. But that is a worthwhile investment to be a change agent, because that story will have more impact than the time you going to take to tell to talk about more data.

Steve:
Great take home value. Thanks again, Bruce, for being a guest on the podcast. We often refer to it, but just in case anybody wouldn't want to continue the conversation, or more importantly, maybe just go see the resources that are out there to the XM Institute. Could you just let us know where we can find that and all your good content?

Bruce:
Absolutely. So you're going to turn me into saying, well, I'm happy to say XMInstitute.com. Come visit us. We have research, we have training, we have tools. And it's almost all. I think it's pretty much all at this point free. That's right. XMInstitute.com. You can see everything, research, everything. We publish videos, whatever, whatever you want about XM. We probably have relevant content

Steve:
And probably could leave a message for you there, too, right?

Bruce:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week has been Bruce Temkin. He's the head of the Qualtrics XM Institute. Bruce, thanks again for being a guest on the podcast. Always a pleasure to have you on.

Bruce:
Thanks, Steve. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Steve:
If you want to talk about anything you heard in this podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast at Walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series, contact information. You can let us know how we're doing or give us an idea for a future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker, we're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. We'll see you again next time. And remember, it is a great time to be a CX leader.