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Steve:
Regardless of whether your customer experience program is finely tuned and humming along, or if you're just getting things going, it's important to remember that you might need to pivot in a moment's notice.

Drew:
Really, the premise of experience management as a practice, it's about helping organizations transition from the old world model of make and sell. Modern companies that will succeed and do succeed, they don't make and sell. They sense and respond.

Steve:
Adaptability, 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 welcome to our semi-quincentennial episode. That's right. This is our 250th show and we thank you, our listeners, for allowing us to provide you with customer experience knowledge and advice that will help you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. This is also the seventh episode in our series "CX Now: Eight Essential Themes Driving CX Evolution." We've been taking a close look at current topics and trends that CX pros need to embrace to be better leaders and take their programs to the next level. And if you need to catch up on the previous six episodes, you can find them on Cxleaderpodcast.com. Collaborating with our partners at Qualtrics, we developed this series using feedback from more than 50 CX leaders. Let's talk about adaptability on this episode. The ability to maintain an agile mindset in order to provide the best possible experience for customers. And as we have been doing throughout the series, I'm again going to turn to one of my Walker experts and friend and colleague, Drew Hall, to delve into this topic more completely. Drew is a vice president and team lead in our client services group, and he is no stranger to the podcast who's been a previous guest. And Drew, hey, welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Drew:
Thank you very much for having me, Steve. I'm really glad to be here again.

Steve:
Well, we're proud to have you. And as always, it's always a real treat to have our people on the podcast, particularly for topics that are around thought leadership. But just before we get into our topic for our listeners, just give a little bit of your background and sort of your pedigree and the CX space and what brought you to Walker.

Drew:
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to do that. I've been here with Walker now for about three or so years and have really enjoyed the breadth of challenges we work on with our clients. It is a very different lifestyle than being a practitioner. I was a practitioner before joining Walker and maybe spent about seven years in the high tech space out in the San Jose Valley working for some semiconductor companies and such. And it is amazing how many different flavors experience management can take. And certainly over the last five years, we've seen all different types of teams joining into this practice we've been hard at for, and I know Walker is is in maybe its 90th year. Steve, you could probably educate me on the year. I think we're getting close to 100 and you've probably seen more than any of us some changes that have happened at the industry level and how adaptable we've had to be as an industry to continue to meet the needs of customers. And this is really one of the fundamental pieces of why I'm here in this space and working on this as there's just so much opportunity to to deliver great experiences. And to do that, we have to listen. We have to understand what those changing needs are and then be in a position as practitioners or consultants, ultimately as organizations, to make those changes, to deliver on those changing needs. And so what a fun place to be on a daily basis trying to make the world a better place.

Steve:
Well, it sounds like you're tailor made for this topic of adaptability. So one of the things we've been doing on this series and by the way, you are the seventh in our series of eight, so thank you for taking the time to do this. But I've allowed each one of our experts to sort of define what they mean by the term adaptability as it applies to CX. So what Drew Hall, what is your kind of definition of adaptability and why is that so important for a CX leader?

Drew:
Yeah, I think it's a it's a hard question to simply define, but really what it means is accepting of change, eager for change, wanting to change, to be a better organization for your stakeholders. And whether you're an employee side experience manager, a customer experience manager, a constituent and voter side manager we all need to have in the bedrock of our DNA the desire to try something different and do something new. Creative people should be drawn to this field. If you're not a designer, if you're not creative, it's going to be tough. So the way I define it is an eagerness and openness to change. So that's how I would define that one.

Steve:
I actually love that. You're right. There's a lot of resistance to change built into organizations, but a CX leader can't be one of those, right?

Drew:
I mean, it was it was one of the first lessons I got early in my career is really the premise of experience management as a practice. It's it's about helping organizations transition from the old world model of make and sell. All right. You can have whatever car you want so long as it's black. Yeah, right. That's the old way for a world that we don't live in anymore. Modern companies that will succeed and do succeed, they don't make and sell. They sense and respond. And the ability to build effective feedback loops where you can sense in real time and then respond in real time is what defines and differentiates the competitive companies of the future. And when I was when I was handed that lesson early in my career, it's just been such a clear path to understand what we're doing as CX leaders and how we can help our organizations move into that mindset culturally, but then build the systematic operational frameworks to fill the organization with that listening so they can sense and then respond.

Steve:
I love that. And it kind of goes back, I think, to some of the evolution we've seen in the business. You know, originally we were kind of react and respond, you know, like we have this quality issue. We've got to go fix that. But today we're really talking about being in front of that, anticipating listening to customers and coming up with solutions for the problems that they can't really even define. So we talked in the intro a little bit about the Agile mindset, and Agile is kind of become a buzzword, but talk about that as an input to sort of a CX leader's ability to adapt.

Drew:
Sure. I mean, so the Agile premise is we're constantly improving. We're taking big problems, putting them into bite sized pieces and tracking to the progress towards those goals on a two week sprint cycle, four week sprint cycle. I've seen some some different versions and flavors of Agile, but it's a simple term to define something the organization has to do. So Agile is not something we expect of our customers. It's something we expect of our teams and of our culture. And if we have amazing listening posts out there collecting feedback from stakeholders at any point along their journey, if the organization is isn't ready and isn't in an agile mindset to react to that feedback, it really puts the listening program in jeopardy. I would argue that the Agile mindset is imperative as a pillar of culture to enable successful experienced management programs and without it, your experience, your experience program will not mature to the level it could with that organizational mindset of of agile thinking.

Steve:
Yeah, and what we're really talking about is accumulating customer information, but then making sure that we're using that information to do something that's going to be good for the customer or improve the customer's condition. I think I keep going back to kind of eager for change. I think he even said hungry for change. So what do you need to do to kind of make sure that you're constantly keeping your hand on the pulse of what the customer is thinking?

Drew:
I mean, it's inner loop, outer loop follow up when we collect feedback, whether it's a relationship study, a transactional listening post or post purchase on a digital portal. We have to have processes that review, analyze, interpret and inform the organization based on what's collected, and it's going to be different at different places. And so that's why inner loop, micro micro loop follow up is so important is because you learn more about those momentary experiences. And if there's root causes or root opportunities that can bubble up, then unit leads, team leads, process leads can really hone in their process at those moments of truth and not just break what not just fix what might be broken, but really showcase those breakthrough moments in a customer experience that become the differentiation place. I don't know. When I think about adaptability, there's another lesson I've learned, which is not necessarily a professional lesson, but a personal lesson that I think is really applicable in this. It's the difference between the Golden Rule and the Platinum rule, and we were all raised growing up with the Golden rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated.

Drew:
Do they all know that one? Yeah. We think the Golden Rule has been replaced by the platinum rule, which is treat others the way they want to be treated. Right. It's just a one word change, but it's so meaningful to think about not what we want to make and sell, but what our customer wants us to sense they need and then respond to it. And so as a as a basis for building programs internally, creating the agile mindset to react to what customers are telling us, it's important that we do it both at that one on one level, at the feedback, but also find ways to bubble it up and work at a higher, more strategic level about things customers need. And it might not. It might not always. Be stated. For example, response rates are declining over email. Customers are clear that they don't want to respond to us over email anymore. What are we doing as an industry? What are we doing as an organization? What are we doing as leaders to understand and sense that that's changing? How are we building better programs to meet a changing need?

Steve:
Yeah. No, I think that's a perfect example. I was going to kind of come back to because I you know, sometimes when you say, you know, you you got to be hungry for change. You got to be eager for change. It gets a little overwhelming. And I was thinking, for example, coming back to like the customer's journey, or if you have a journey map, that can be a good guide for for where you want to try to be adaptable, right.

Drew:
100%.

Steve:
Or to kind of kind of guide your focus, if, if you will.

Drew:
Yeah, it's it's all of the practices in our toolkit: Journey Mapping, Persona Development, Survey Design, Dashboard and insights. They all come together in a way that should inform us on where to take our next best step. Right? The mark of good business is the successful allocation of scarce resources. We only have so much time in our day. So how is leaders? Do we help our organizations make those good decisions and know what the right next step is? It has to be through data. It has to be through data driven decisions that start with great listening posts or in-depth interviews. It doesn't again, doesn't have to be a digital digitally delivered survey. We just need feedback from our stakeholders and then putting that through an internal process where the culture, the culture is in place to ask ourselves, Is this something we need to respond to? Are we sensing that this is a change?

Announcer:
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Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is my colleague and friend, Drew Hall. It's the seventh of our eight episodes on "Eight Essential Themes Driving Evolution," and we've been having a discussion around adaptability. And so I want to take it down to a little more practical level now. And you know, I know you have a pretty good background in the call center space, and I think many of our CX pros can relate to that because they somehow interact with some sort of contact or technical support or customer care center or even if they don't, they've probably experienced that from the side of being a customer themselves. So give us an example of kind of how adaptability would play out, say, in a call center use case. And just give us a couple of sort of generic examples.

Drew:
I mean, the contact center is a treasure trove of experience management data. It's unsolicited. It's unsolicited feedback and front line contact center agents are there every day understanding, listening and solving customer challenges. So fundamentally, we, number one, need to look at the contact center as a source of feedback for our programs, period. Right. The second most important thing about contact centers are the agents themselves. These are representatives of the brand. These are probably the most adaptable people in the organization. The empathy, the emotional intelligence of frontline staff is is second to none and needs to be celebrated tremendously. At the same time, there's opportunity for improvement in that staff, and adaptability has such an easy opportunity to play itself out in contact center use cases, because typically we're asking callers about their experience on that call and their experience from a task orientation perspective. Did your problem get solved? But also from a relationship perspective, How was your interaction with your agent? Were they courteous? Were they knowledgeable? Did they fully understand your issue? And coaching is such an important component of effective contact centers that tuning in to that feedback, providing that feedback to contact center managers about the interactions they're having really becomes a, and it can turn a contact center into a place where problems go to sort of just be problems and it can turn them into opportunities. We can actually leverage challenges, focus on relationships through good training and understanding what moves the needle in that interaction experience, and then coaching agents to to modify and not upsell, but just resolve and and retain and regain the trust of that caller who feels lost and feels like the organization isn't there for them. So we could talk about contact centers for multiple episodes. I think this is one of the growth opportunities for experience management leaders, is to think about partnerships with our contact centers and really start to understand it's not just about the customer in that interaction, the employee has a very important role as well.

Steve:
Yeah, and you said something really important right off the start that that goes back to an earlier comment. I just want to kind of comment on this. But, you know, the contact center is not only a place where customers interact, but it's a source of tremendous amounts of data. And back to your earlier comments. If you're having trouble getting your surveys conducted, your transactional surveys, there's now technology that just allows you to download the entire text of each call. And this is very manageable in today's environment. And then there's algorithms and things that can can read into that. So you you really actually when you're talking about the unsolicited data, you have 100% response rates on your contact center. And this is really state of the art. I mean, the percent of companies that are really making use of this is probably in single digits, maybe even a 10th tenths of a single digit. I don't know.

Drew:
Yeah. And I think I think the adoption is low because the promise of machine learning, the promise of AI, is it'll do everything for you.

Steve:
We're not there yet.

Drew:
No, we're not there yet. And I don't know if we ever will be. I think it always will require strong operators that know how to tailor a model on to the things that matter based on other insights we know about the organization itself and the experience. Right. Just getting a temperature right. What we want to build in our programs isn't just a thermometer that tells us what the temperature is. Customers are hot or cold. We need to build thermostats. We need to build things that can change the nature of that experience. So if customers are hot, we'll cool it down. If they're cold, we'll heat it up. Right. And so the contact center is a place where that's happening without having to ask you to solve your response rate question right there. Build better agent contact interactions where we're asking some of the questions and getting solicited feedback in the context of an unsolicited call. This is blue ocean space, I think, for all of us as leaders. And I think if we start to invest a little bit of mindshare into how artificial intelligence, how voice to text, how sentiment analysis can support our programs and build better data models for us to then make decisions on, we're really going to be doing our our customers a service by investing our thinking in that sooner rather than later.

Steve:
Yeah, you bet. And then on the other side, the front line folks, the contact center reps who are interacting with your customers, they've got insights into the customer experience as well. So we talk about VOCE a lot on this podcast, but again, there's another source that you can use. And as you mentioned, this is part about developing our human resources too, and you can continue to train and is go back to your platinum rule, really teach our reps how to serve customers in the way they want to be served.

Drew:
One 100%. I mean, to take adaptability and to talk about our organizations needing to be ready to drive the changes check. Got it. We all we all know that. Inside the contact center, adaptability is now more than ever important because we have hybrid workforces. Folks are working remote. There's not your contact center. Humans need interaction with each other. So as managers, as leaders, that employee experience that's happening, yes, the agents knowledge of the customer is paramount and needs to be valued and needs to be sourced and needs to be a part of the model. But how we how we coach and train and care for and deliver experiences for the agents themselves is another place where organizations need to adapt and we need to be thinking about the future of a hybrid workforce and how that relates to the interface where our customers are contacting agents. It's a really critical nexus of of how experience management can come together on the CX side and the EX side in one very unified way that provides value to both stakeholder groups and can really help build one unified experience management program in an organization.

Steve:
Thanks for that example. And again, I think we'll be talking about call centers and unstructured data a lot more in the future on the podcast, maybe on our 500th episode, we'll have you back, but we'll have you back between now and then. You know, we are moving towards more and more applicability here to the CX Pro, and I've done this on the previous six episodes and now I'm going to do it with you. But let's say I'm a CX leader. Maybe, maybe I'm new in my role, maybe I'm tenured in my role, but I haven't really kind of maybe my organization isn't as adaptable as we would want it to be today. So what is the CX pro do to start their organization down this road of being more adaptable for the future?

Drew:
Yeah, that's a hard question because there's no silver bullets and every organization has potentially different starting points. But I think one technique that's probably easy for everyone to implement as not only communicating the respondents' scores themselves like your your NPS or your CSAT scores, not just focusing on the scores themselves, but what the organization has done in response to that. Right. Making follow up actions, a standing part of a reporting framework or KPI set equal, equal and equivalent to the scores themselves? Right. The ROI isn't just improving from 4.6 to 4.7 or 72% top box to 80. It's about how many individual actions were taken in an organization, how many senior leaders made commitments to driving change in the key priority areas identified in that study. And until CX pros and CX leaders communicate the follow up action equal and equivalent to the sentiment itself, it's never going to have the mindshare and the space to get both the executive buy in and the ground level bottom up, buy in where everyone knows they can do something. Hey, if you can do it, I can do it. Wait. You did something that was cool. I can do something that was cool too. Because we can't centrally manage everything. We have to build a culture that's hungry for this change, that uses the data from our programs to make those decisions in their own unique ways.

Steve:
I love that back in the day, we always used to debate whether you ought to incentivize the scores or incentivize the behavior. And I'm really more of the school of thought that lets incentivize the behaviors, because I think that incentivizing the score leads to some bad behavior and bad activity. But I think you've just given me kind of a new way to think about it is, you know, report the scores out, but really put the emphasis on what we're doing and how that impacts the organization.

Drew:
100%. And I think of it like a bookend to the response rates as KPIs as well. I made the comment that where feedback is coming from is changing and if any of you listening are tracking your response rates, I'm pretty sure they've been going down over the past five years. Right. And Steve, I know Walker is highly adaptable and Walker used to have an entire floor of folks doing phone based surveying before digital and email took off. Right, Right. We see WhatsApp, we see social media integration starting to drive responses. We know that many organizations are on digital transformations and building portals that unify a lot of the processes that clients are. Their customers are going through in a single space. Because we live in the digital world. We know clients are building digital portals for their customers and asking for feedback in those spaces is delivering high response rates. So I bring that up just as a bookend to when we report our programs. To build momentum towards more mature spaces, we have to focus on the scores. We have to focus on the follow up actions. But we should also focus on where our customers are giving us feedback. We need to sense that things are changing and start to invest in the digital. We need to start investing in meeting our customers where they are. The inbox is not where they are anymore. So where are your customers? Let's go find them.

Steve:
Drew We've reached that point in the podcast, all 250 of them where I ask each guest to provide their take home value. That's kind of the one point or the key action item that our CX pros can take from this podcast and go out and make a difference for their organizations. Drew Hall, what's your take home value on adaptability for our CX pros?

Drew:
Steve That's a great question and I'm glad to deliver another piece of take home value for our listeners. I think the idea of adaptability is it's rooted in the DNA of the modern, successful, competitive organization. And I think for us as CX leaders to continue to enable that into our cultures is is the take home value. We have to focus fully on building organizations with adaptability as part of the DNA. And one of the ways we can really do that to start moving that needle is to make sure when we collect feedback and we're listening to our customers, we're sending the right data to the right people at the right time within our organizations so they can start to make those changes. One size does not fit all. The golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated has been replaced by the platinum rule, treat others the way they want to be treated. And how amazing would it be if each of us could deliver that one piece of insight that moves the heart and mind of a business unit lead to them taking an action Improving experience. And delivering a better customer experience. I think that's a challenge that all of us are probably ready to take on, and I'm looking forward to hearing some success stories in the future about how we're driving adaptability in our organizations.

Steve:
Drew Hall is a vice president and team lead in our client services group here at Walker. Drew, thanks for being on the show. And in case anybody would want to continue the conversation, you want to just let them know how they could get ahold of you.

Drew:
Sure. After the podcast, there's usually a discussion on the LinkedIn thread so you can find me on LinkedIn at Drew Ball. You can post Hey, Drew on Walker's LinkedIn. I really do want to hear what each of you are doing in terms of driving adaptability, and I hope some of this discussion was helpful and if anything, just a bit motivating.

Steve:
Thanks a lot. Thanks for being on the show, Drew.

Drew:
My pleasure, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, 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 here at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a review and rating through your podcast service. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all of our 249 previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. Make sure you go out and be adaptable and make your company adaptable and we will see you again here next time.

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