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Steve:
I'm sure you've seen posters or memes of how a process or perception is like an iceberg. The visible part above the surface is only a small piece of a much larger reality. Well, it's also a great analogy to a well-designed customer experience.

Andy:
When we design The Performance Innovation Lab, we did it with a look at an 80 over 20 approach. What are the things that we can do to really make big change, not strive for perfection.

Steve:
Let's look at how one of the largest banks in the US creates a seamless experience 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. As we like to say on the show, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader and we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. Creating seamless experiences is one of the many goals of CX pros, but what should be perceived by the customer as a smooth experience can sometimes create complicated processes for the company – that hidden part of the iceberg. But if it's done right, it can benefit both the customer and the employees. And we have a guest on our show this week who heads up a unique program on how to make that happen. Andy Netzel is a CCXP and the head of the Performance Innovation Lab at KeyBank. Andy, thanks for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Andy:
Hey, thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, it's my pleasure too, and really appreciate you coming on. One of the things I always like to do on this podcast is just get a quick background on you and how you made it to become a CX pro. I know most of us didn't start out to be that, but just give us a quick rundown on on your journey to your current position and then we'll, we'll get into the topic of the podcast.

Andy:
Yeah, sure thing. So actually started out as a journalist doing both writing and on radio. And as the journalism field started to disappear, I got into marketing but didn't really know what marketing was because, you know, I'd come from a journalism background. So ultimately I just started looking at, Hey, if we're going to sell more stuff, let's create the environment to sell it in an interesting way. So that kind of led to me doing client experience type work as a marketer, and eventually I just gave up on the whole marketing title and aimed for shaping experiences that our clients go through.

Steve:
And how long have you been at Key?

Andy:
Just about five years.

Steve:
Five years? But did you start in marketing and then emerge into the CX space?

Andy:
No, I started off as the the sole, the sole person in this department. And now we got a big one.

Steve:
Cool. Were you doing CX before you got to Key then?

Andy:
Uh, yes. But again, never with a CX title. More with marketing titles.

Steve:
Yeah, well, it's interesting. You know, actually had a guest on the show just a few weeks ago that was a PhD in communications. So that may be just another more maturing of our our industry profession is that, you know, and obviously I've always said that marketing is kind of the closest thing I think to customer experience because it has to be pervasive. It's not, you know, it is it typically is a department, but it's so cross-functional. It's got to be involved in everything and particularly in complex, you know, B2B plus, B2C services like financial services, you know, the experience can't really be separated much from the brand. So I think the tie in to marketing and your background makes a lot of sense. So tell me a little bit about the Performance Innovation Lab and how that came about. How does that fit in to the kind of the overall vision that that Key has for CX?

Andy:
Yeah, well, sometimes the the phrase customer experience, it can sound a little squishy. So we wanted our name to really reflect the culture and it took a few years to come up with something that, that made sense. But we really focus on being practical, being pragmatic and, you know, having a focus on just getting things done. Um, so when we design the Performance Innovation Lab, you know, we did it with a look at an 80 over 20 approach, you know, what are the things that we can do to really make big change, not strive for perfection? We rely a lot on pilots with a thought of failures, okay? We want to be willing to try things, willing to stretch ourselves. And truly, in the end, we focus on trying to look at the holistic experience. So everything from what our clients employees are saying, those transformations that we put out, making sure that change is adopted and accepted and de-risked, and then communicating both to our clients and employees, what's changed and what that looks like.

Steve:
Yeah, it sounds like, you know, back to your opening comment, it sounds very pragmatic and practical, kind of like an Agile type of approach where you're iterating and and one thing you said is, is beautiful. I love this. You know, progress over perfection any day of the week. You know, you you know, as long as you're making progress, you're moving in the right direction. Things are probably doing pretty good. And then I love the concept of the 80 over 20 chart, you know, Pareto chart, actually, historically, I've been in the business a long time, but a lot of this goes back to some of the Six Sigma total quality improvement type initiatives where we were we were kind of looking for the, you know, 20% activities that could generate. 80% of the results. So I really like that approach that you've taken, and it sounds very, very practical.

Andy:
I always joke that we don't move at bank speed in my department. And, you know, I think a big part of that is if you make those big plans and want everything to run exactly perfect, you're just never going to get that stuff off the ground. So, you know, we know we're going to mess up. Let's get it out there. Let's see how it goes and we can iterate.

Steve:
Yeah. And you said that you joined the bank five years ago specifically for this function. How did how did you get this thing started? What was kind of your first step in this process?

Andy:
Yeah, well, so it all starts with collecting that feedback first, right? So we stood up some client feedback points, you know, a relationship study which I always see as kind of the canary in the coal mine. You can start to see the trends, but you don't necessarily know what's causing them. And then we looked at onboarding and servicing as two big moments of truth. And then, you know, beyond the clients then we also started talking to our employees and you know, of course we stood up your traditional online forums and group mailboxes and all of that. But generally, I don't think, you know, a suggestion box isn't going to get you to, hey, here's everything that we need to go fix. So we did a lot of targeted questioning and kind of scrutiny of the business as well. Journey mapping workshops, focus conversations and a big focus on, you know, don't care how the information gets to me. If there's good stuff, it doesn't matter if I'm in a meeting and I hear it there, if I hear it in the hallway, if someone sends an email, I'm going to make sure that all gets into our prioritization funnel.

Steve:
Yeah, I love that approach. You mentioned the journey mapping. Was that something that you undertook pretty early on?

Andy:
Yeah. I, I… Journey mapping was something like two weeks in there. Like, okay, we want to do a massive journey mapping. We're going to invite all of the executives and you know, we want to, we want to look holistically at our entire onboarding process because we know we want to blow that up. So get planning. And, you know, at this point, it was like, wow, I'm still trying to figure out what's going on. But it was such a great introduction to the organization because I got to meet so many different passionate people across the business. And also, if I was going to post the kind of journey map I like to do, I had to figure out everyone who's involved that touches all of this stuff. So I had the right people at the table. So, you know, we ended up… I pulled in several different groups and we spent, I think it was two and a half days going through and building out some of our first journey maps that had ever been done at the bank.

Steve:
And are you across all aspects of the bank, B2C and B2B, or are you more focused on the retail or the commercial side?

Andy:
Yeah, our our focus in the Performance Innovation Lab is on our business clients. So we're really focusing in on just the B2B side of the bank.

Steve:
Okay. So commercial lending, treasury?

Andy:
Really focused on payments and treasury is our, our main area, but nothing stays in a box, right? Like anything you touch, it's going to cross silos. So. So we work with groups all over the bank.

Steve:
Yeah. You know, one of the things we talked about was this iceberg analogy. And you've built this really robust program with both customers and employees, and obviously you got top level buy in and kind of all the things that we would always look for. But let's go back to the iceberg analogy and can you give us a couple of examples of where you were able to kind of make things more seamless to the customer without really exposing all the ways the sausage got made?

Andy:
Yeah, sure. One of our first big projects was really tied around the onboarding experience. And what we realized or recognized pretty early on was we had clients that valued different things. Some folks really wanted to get things up and running quickly, so they valued kind of time or speed to market. Other ones, this was a big change. This was they're changing the way they operate their business and they want to make sure that they feel safe. So they want a very deliberate project plan. They want hand-holding as you work through and they want to leverage you as a true advisor. So one of the early things that we needed to do was a bunch of data analysis to understand what are those different clients look like. So if we're going to create two different experiences and put people through different paths in order to get onboarded. Who values time and who values white glove service. So we kind of dissected the feedback that was coming in, looked at it by client type, looked at it by the different types of products that were being onboarded. And we eventually came up with kind of two paths, an expedited process and a white glove process. And we were able to kind of direct the clients to the right path. But we also made sure that we stayed flexible in a relationship bank. So when whether it's the relationship manager or one of our payments advisors, if they said, Hey, I know my client, this is what they value, we could call an audible and make sure it goes to the other team.

Steve:
I think that's great because, you know, sometimes you do you sometimes, you know, they're following the process that's been designed and you're sort of like, okay, yeah, let's let's get on with this a little bit more. So it sounds like you might have used some persona type work there too, right?

Andy:
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. We we built out personas when we did our journey mapping and we were totally off in terms of really actually break the clients down for our end solution. So how we think about our clients from a, you know, a sales perspective was totally different from how we needed to think about them from an onboarding perspective to get them feeling good about their experience.

Steve:
You know, I have I'm a small business person, so I have had bank relationships for my business. And then I actually about ten years ago got to go on the board of a pretty nice sized regional bank in Indiana. So I am very aware of the regulatory environment and some of the limitations that that places on the customer experience. How do you feed that into your overall process and program? And I'm sure there's a lot of concern that you got to stay right with the regulators, right?

Andy:
Well, of course. So I mean, risk is such an important part of everything that we do. You know, think back to past places where I've worked and we've been a product led company or we've been a marketing led company. At a bank I don't think you can be anything but a risk driven company. So it really goes back to some of our core. At past companies I've worked at, there's always a resistance to change. It was, Oh, we've always done it this way. That's totally not true at Key, but at Key there's the resistance comes from, Have we really thought through this? Are we sure there's no unintended consequences? You know, it's really thinking about what is that ultimate action going to do. And is that action, is there any chance whatsoever that one of our clients is going to be able to make, you know, push through their their payroll for the week? You know, that would be devastating, right? Are they are they not going to be able to pay off their loan balance is something that we're going to do, going to impact that client from their regular business operations? So we do a ton of validation. I take any I think we're on to it, we we figured out the idea, I walk around, I go on a road show to get beat up. I throw out things and say, Hey, what could possibly go wrong with this? What's what's happening here? And then I hand off, I have someone on my team who does change management and she loves to do a pre mortem. So kind of like a post mortem. But you're, you're thinking ahead of time. What's everything that could have gone wrong? And if that did go wrong, if we figured out what we're going to do about it. So really just beating everything up. And then lastly, pilots, right? So anything that we can possibly pilot ahead of time, we want to do that, suss it out, see if anything happens that we weren't expecting or, you know, if we realize any of the problems that that we did expect to happen and and did those mitigations work?

Steve:
I love pre-mortem. I'm going to use that. I'm stealing that one from you. I'll try to give you credit for that, Andy, next time I use it. But you know what you've really figured out part of the secret here is that you need to be kind of paranoid about stuff, right? You got to you can't just, like, want to change. You almost have to be like looking for change to implement it, don't you?

Andy:
So I mentioned my background as a journalist. Um, one of my favorite journalism professors back in college used to say, If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And that is something I repeat a lot here at, you know, take nothing for granted. Question everything. Even the thing that seems like the most basic thing that you can trust, go validate that.

Steve:
Yeah, I bet your mother does love you, though.

Andy:
So she's pretty great. Love you mom.

Steve:
Remember the CX Now series we just wrapped up not too long ago here on The CX Leader Podcast? Well, we just published a new e-book highlighting each of the essential themes driving CX. You can download it at walkerinfo.com/cxnow. And don't forget about our blog. That's right, we have a blog and we update it regularly. Check it out at walkerinfo.com/blog. There's a ton of great experience management content available and the best part, it's free. That's walkerinfo.com/blog.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the program this week is Andy Netzel. He's a CCXP and he's the head of the Performance Innovation Lab at KeyBank, which is a really you know, if you've been listening to this podcast, he's really got kind of a unique approach to how they they focus on CX, and I'm just really intrigued with it. So you mentioned you had one person on your team. I assume you don't have a huge staff, right? You're pretty cross-functional?

Andy:
Yeah. Well, between the between the the different groups, we've got about 16 people.

Steve:
Okay. It is a big size group. But so you've talked a lot about kind of the the impact you're making on on change and processes. How do you get that to go when you go back to the operating areas of the bus or however you define that?

Andy:
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of that goes back to the process. So, you know, my team, the the thing that gets people's hackles up, I think whenever you're making a change is one, everyone looks at it and says, Oh man, they've got their fingers on my pudding, right? Like, this is my process. I own it. Stay away. The second thing is there's fear of trying to come over and take things over. Well, it's great. My agenda, I don't want to own anything long term, right? If it's working, I'm not interested in it. I only want the broken stuff. And, you know, the way that we operate is we're able to say, okay, you know, let's step in, let's partner with who ultimately does or will own this process. And, you know, we want them to own it. We want them to not just be at the table, but helping to drive those guiding principles, helping to design it, helping to take that leadership the whole way. You know, at the end of the day, you know, they're the ones who I want up on the screen at the town hall getting recognition or at an executive briefing. They're the ones who should get the credit. We're just here to help disrupt. We're here to help push it through, to de-risk, to help handle something that's really complicated because there's always some reason a process was bad, right? No one at the bank is trying to make them something cumbersome. Everyone has that same objective. It's just there's some hurdle that was placed in the way that makes it tough. So, you know, my job is is to help other people succeed.

Steve:
Well, congratulations. You seems like you've put together a really robust program to drive all the kinds of things that we we hope. I think when we try to set up these CX programs that we're able to impact, and it sounds like you've got really figured out part of the secret. Now that you've sort of gotten five years under your belt, how do you move this forward? What's kind of what do you see in the future or where are your priorities right now?

Andy:
Well, it's it's funny, you mentioned Agile in the beginning. Probably the biggest thing that we're working on right now is actually moving to a more Agile operating methodology across the bank and especially in my line of business. So the big shift work around right now is, you know, how do we integrate my team into all the different programs and design the business so that client feedback is just so integrated into the way that we operate and is driving all of the different product development life cycle and, you know, everything else that's going on at the bank that we're just tied into every single program as we work across and act kind of as a chapter in this bigger picture. So that's that's what we're doing. We're we're building ourselves into the into the fabric of the bank.

Steve:
Well, I did not know that when I made the comment, but just your description of sort of your approach to your work seemed very consistent with Agile. And I think it's a great model for CX pros. If you're not familiar, you know, you can you can Google this, you can find a lot of good stuff on Agile, but it's really a collaborative, iterative, you know, kind of put stuff out there co-create with the other people, right? Is that is that a fair description?

Andy:
Oh, absolutely. And I think it drives a lot of the behaviors that that we're trying to drive every day.

Steve:
Yeah. And I think, you know, particularly for CX pros, you know, a lot of times we don't get the business owners to seek us out as often as we would like to. But, you know, if we're out there delivering value and and really demonstrating that we understand what the operating manager or the front line people are trying to do, over time, we can demonstrate that. So again, congratulations for a great program you put together.

Andy:
Well, I mean, it's it's certainly not just me, right? I've got an amazing team. And then even the extended team, you know, that don't fit in a hierarchy or a reporting structure. You know, the bank and the leadership is all focused on delivering this exceptional experience for the client. And that's a cultural thing.

Steve:
Yeah. It sounds like you had the top buy in right, right off the bat, which we always talk about on this program. You know, if it's not impossible to to do the change if you don't have it, but it sure is a lot easier if you've got it from the top to start.

Andy:
Yeah, absolutely. I can't take credit for that. I walked into walked into leadership that wanted to invest and believed in this.

Steve:
Yeah. And I think like a lot of initiatives in the organization, if the leaders really are role modeling, not just the values or putting the values out there, but they're actually demonstrating through their actions that they buy into it, it just makes it a heck of a lot easier. So that's always a nice, nice factor to have in your program. Andy, it sounds like you haven't done anything wrong, but I've got to believe in five years you might have at one time found something that tricked you up or someplace where you you learned or you didn't hit it right out of the park right at the start. So any kind of lessons learned there or anything you'd want to share about that?

Andy:
Oh, for sure. Plenty of those. And like I said before, failure is is such a great teacher. And, you know, certainly we've got our share of share of good teachers in our past. Um, so we had this, we had this grand vision or I should say I had this grand vision of creating a all knowing chat bot for our internal teams that I was calling Jarvis and, you know, set the bar really high right off the bat. The, the computer that talks to Tony Stark. Right. That's what we were going to build. Well, the idea was this was going to be a one stop shop. You can ask it any question as an employee and it's going to point you to the right answer. Well, when we started to build this thing, the first thing that we learned quickly was the back end infrastructure. All the all the answers you need for these questions, they're not out there. The information is outdated. It's not easy. The second thing we learned is the questions people can't answer are really complicated. There is no quick reference guide you can build.

Andy:
It's so client specific. It's, you know, it's a very, very tough thing to answer these questions. In fact, people have been here 20, 30 years, it's their brains that you need to tap into to be able to answer these questions. So at the end of the day, my team identified this really early and pushed me and said, this just isn't going to work. We got to take a different approach. But I had I loved this idea. I had a cool code name for it. I knew exactly how to tell this story inside the organization, so I kept pushing. Guys, we can figure this out. Let's not abandon this. Let's let's figure out how we can do this planning session after planning session, idea after idea. Well, eventually my head of innovation pulled me aside and said, Andy, we got to drop it. And so we probably wasted, you know, I probably wasted time over the course of six months that really could have been spent on doing some better things. But I had a dream and we just weren't ready for it yet.

Steve:
Yeah, no, that's a great story. I really appreciate you sharing that. And you know, it's very consistent with the Agile approach is, you know, you do you fail fast and you really try to incorporate those learnings going forward. So again, thanks for sharing that. Andy Netzel It is now time where I ask every guest on The CX Leader Podcast for their best tip. We call it take home Value. But the concept here is that you leave our listener with an idea that they could implement pretty quickly at their own program based on kind of what you've shared today and make a little improvement for their own CX efforts. So Andy Netzel of KeyBank, what's your take home value for this podcast?

Andy:
Sure. Well, I'll focus on the the latter part of the podcast and the leader part versus the front part CX. I like to try and lead with a career focus on my team. So as we start doing goal planning for the year, one thing that I always ask is at the end of this year, what's going to be the resume bullets that we're adding for you? What are those big successes that you're going to be able to boast about at the end of the year? And I think sometimes framing projects in terms of personal success, it's a great way to motivate great results. So taking a step back and saying, okay, so hold on, this is what the resume bullet sounds like that I would want to bulk that up. What's the stat, what's the KPI? How do we make that even more impressive? And then how do we design the project to make sure we land that? The other nice byproduct of that is it makes it really easy for me to argue for a bigger raise or a promotion for my teammates.

Steve:
That's a great tip. Thanks. I might take that one too. So I always learn something on the podcast and today I learned about that and pre-mortems. Hey, my guest on the podcast this week's been Andy Netzel. He's a CCXP and also the head of the Performance Innovation Lab at KeyBank. Andy, thanks for being such a great guest on The CX Leader Podcast. Really appreciate having you on.

Andy:
Hey, it was fun, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, and if anybody wanted to continue the conversation, I think I found you on LinkedIn, right? You're on out on LinkedIn, aren't you?

Andy:
Sure thing.

Steve:
Yeah. Andy Netzel.. N.e.t.z.e.l. And when people are tuned into the podcast, they'll see your name. And yeah, we always like to try to expand the community. So thanks again for being such a great guest on the podcast. Hope you'll come back again sometime.

Andy:
Anytime.

Steve:
Hey, and if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember 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 listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes, podcast series, contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing. 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 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 go out there and keep working on that part of the iceberg that nobody can see and we'll see you again next time.

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