The CX Leader Podcast: "The CX Plus EX Recipe": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Download the “The CX Leader Podcast: "The CX Plus EX Recipe" audio file directly.

The CX Leader Podcast: "The CX Plus EX Recipe": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
We already know that having a strong EX program connected with your CX efforts has the potential to improve customer experience. But what does that look like?

Tanner:
By unifying these into more of that overall experience management story, the whole company and leadership can start to see that that more holistic picture of what's going on and this can help leadership make decisions all with the same goal of trying to improve the customer experience. It's just such a great way to unify the organization.

Steve:
Linking EX with CX from a data perspective 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. You know, 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. We've talked about this before on the show, combining your customer and employee experience to help improve both. And if you missed that episode, you can find it at cxleaderpodcast.com. But what does that look like from a data perspective? How do they link and why would it be advantageous? Well, to help us understand this better, I'm once again delighted to have one of my own Walker colleagues on the program. Tanner Smith is a senior analyst and it's his first time appearing on the show. Tanner, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Tanner:
Hey, Steve, Thanks for having me. Really glad to be here.

Steve:
How in the heck have we not had you on The CX Leader Podcast before now?

Tanner:
I have no idea. I will say Troy, my my team lead who I work with day to day, he definitely shares a lot of these opinions and, and takes care of that for me.

Steve:
Well yeah I think he's my he's he's Buddy Hackett. You won't even know who Buddy Hackett is. But he was like the guest that appeared the most times on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show, which we kind of role model here on The CX Leader Podcast for for those listeners that are so interested. All right. I digress, as I tend to do. But Tanner, you know, I've known you for several years now, but maybe our guests would benefit from just a little bit of of your background and, and that'll kind of set the tone for what we're going to talk about today.

Tanner:
Absolutely. So like you mentioned, I'm a senior analyst here at Walker. My background comes from psychology and consumer behavior. So that's what I got my degrees in. And I'd say more specifically, though, I come from the cognitive psychology and decision making research domains, and that's where most of my analysis, training and experience comes from. And it's given me a pretty decent perspective on how to approach data analysis in business while knowing the ins and outs of a lot of these advanced analytic methodologies is important. I think it's just as important, if not more important, to understand exactly the context and how our data that we're working with, how that's created. So the measurement style, the systems in place, who are asking where, when, all of that is just as important to the insights we're hoping to get out of data as the specific analysis we choose to use on that data.

Steve:
So how long have you been at Walker now? Three years.

Tanner:
Two and a half years. So this is my third. Yeah.

Steve:
Okay. You know, suffice it to say that you've had a broad exposure to lots of different industries, lots of different business models, lots of different structures of how value gets created for customers and the data behind that. So.

Tanner:
Exactly. And if there's one kind of general thought that I carry from project to project, it's coming from the psychology world in analysis, you quickly realize just how complex any single data point can be.

Steve:
Yeah.

Tanner:
And when it comes to explaining or predicting that with other types of data, you come to learn that every observation is caused not just by a single factor in our world, but a multitude of factors and even the interactions of those multiple factors on each other. And so just trying to make sense of our infinitely multivariate world is to make decisions is a challenge that I thoroughly enjoy pursuing. And one of my passions that I that I bring to work here.

Steve:
Yeah, I love the the human health analogy for what we do for our clients. You know, each individual is a unique person. We all have unique DNA and it's extremely complex. But from a health perspective, there are frameworks and models and generally accepted principles around how you would describe and how you would prescribe and how you would predict kind of someone individual health based on what they do. But then there's always outliers, there's always unique situations and the way that all those variables play together. Otherwise, how could you explain that Keith Richards is still alive? So.

Tanner:
Exactly.

Steve:
You know, but no, and we all know people that, you know, who lived long, who didn't, you know, do the right things. And then we also know people who were extremely healthy that just had bad luck. So it's sort of the same way when we look at a business and their customer relationships and how that works, you know, each business is unique, but there are patterns in their frameworks. And that's really the the discipline that we bring to the to the model.

Tanner:
So exactly. And I think just taking that a little further. I think that's kind of the importance of going through these exercises here is while we do rely on theory and science to provide those frameworks for us, there's just so much variation within the different business models and business contexts that exist in the world. It's just super important to understand what is it that's unique about our business as it relates to these frameworks. So yeah, it's just it's, I think it's crucial.

Steve:
Yeah. Well let's get into the topic at hand here. And that's really when it comes to sort of a joint EX/CX initiative, what are we trying to accomplish there?

Tanner:
Of course. Well, I think there's a couple things. So at a really high level, the organizational level, one of the things that we can accomplish is perhaps breaking down the first silos within the organization. We start building new roadways between maybe the HR department and the marketing department, where the EX and CX programs will live. And by unifying these into more of that overall experience management story that that holistic health story, the whole company in leadership can start to see that that more holistic picture of what's going on. And this can help leadership make decisions about, you know, budget allocation to reduce any redundant or even contradictory efforts that might exist across these different departments, all with the same goal of trying to improve the customer experience. It's just such a great way to unify the organization and coordinate more effective, harmonious activities.

Steve:
You know, particularly for businesses where there is a people aspect to the way the value is created. And I would argue that except for like fast moving consumer goods, you know, almost all businesses today are a combination of some sort of product and service. So it's it's pretty difficult to get at the customer experience without at least understanding part of the employee experience, correct?

Tanner:
Exactly. Yes. Because how they think and feel influences the services that they're delivering to the customers.

Steve:
Yeah. I mean, again, going back to the health analogy, you know, it's almost impossible to separate like a patient experience in a clinical setting from the people that are providing the care. And it's not just the doctors, it's the nurses, the orderlies, the food, the, you know, parking attendants. It is it's very much a people intensive experience for the patient or the customer. And I think you can relate that to almost any industry. So I keep going to the health industry, but maybe you could give us maybe a little different example.

Tanner:
Of course. Yes. So being a data person, I am drawn to business contexts that are just rich, fertile ground for data. And one of my go to places for those is the call center: customer support there. Let's say a customer calls in to support and a survey is triggered after that call has ended. We might be interested in seeing how our support reps' attitudes and behaviors affect the customer attitudes. So from our EX program we have the data from the support reps on what those thoughts and feelings are that they hold on, let's say a few measures like tools and resources to do their job effectively, support from their managers and the effectiveness of their training. And from the CX side on that post call survey, we get measures from the customer like how knowledgeable the support rep seemed, How quickly did it seem like their issue was resolved and how confident the support rep sounded on the phone. And what we can do with a linkage project here. Assuming we have the support rep name in both of these programs, we can roll up the customer data to each support rep. And now we have this new data set that sets a precedent going into analysis for us of given a support rep set of attitudes, here are the average scores that the customer provided for that support rep.

Tanner:
And after we go through this, the analysis, doing the correlations and regressions, we might get a few nuggets of information that give us really specific directions to look. And those might look something like this: so reps that felt like they were more supported by their managers appeared to be more confident to customers on average. Now that gives us a direction to go in and dive into. Well, do all managers have similar scores for how supported their team members feel by them? Or is there some variation? Are there some managers here who are doing better than others? And what can we do about it to make sure that that variation is reduced so we can have everyone experiencing the same amount of support? Another finding we might find on average, customers rated their support rep as more knowledgeable when their reps felt like their training was more effective. Once again, is there something that we're doing that's causing this, or is it just does it just so happen that some customer support reps get certain types of calls more often and those types of calls and requests are more robustly covered in the training and those other people who are getting the trickier, more specialized questions, those aren't covered as much. So it just gives us a good direction to go in.

Steve:
That's a great example and that makes perfect sense. I think one of the things that you're identifying a perfect use case is where you have a unique customer that could be attached to a unique employee. Or I think like, for example, in the what I call a distributed business model, think about fast food restaurants where you would have, you know, individual customers who are interacting with one store. And so you could have like a customer metric for the store and an employee metric for the store. And then you could overlay the O-data, you know, the operating data. Now you really got a powerful model, right?

Tanner:
Absolutely.

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:
My guest on the podcast this week is my friend and colleague, Tanner Smith. He's a senior analyst here at Walker and he's one of our brainiacs and he's given us a really good idea of the power that exists between your EX and CX data. And he's also given us some practical tips of how you can go ahead and make that happen for your organization, your customers experience. Any misconceptions about CX/EX that you run across from time to time or…

Tanner:
Yeah, that's a great question and this one can be a little tricky. One of the things that comes to mind is I wouldn't call it a misconception, but it's a prerequisite step towards doing a linkage. And actually in our EX+CX Walker White Paper, this is the first step that we recommend companies do in unifying EX and CX, and that step is just start presenting the EX and CX results together in the same report. When when people start seeing scores side by side on a slide or in a table, it gets them all on the same page thinking about how they might be connected, pondering what the relationship is between them. However, what we can't do, which what which what we would do with the next few steps, we can't make claims about the relationship like we've determined that how employees feel about their access to continual learning is the biggest driver of customer satisfaction for these support calls. We didn't look at the relationship of as one score goes up, does the other, we just looked at two aggregate scores side by side. So while it is a great first step, that's not the end of the road. And there's more that can be done to get what I call an actual linkage.

Steve:
Well, I think you started to go down here and actually you mentioned the white paper, which we probably should promote heavily on this podcast to to make sure people know it's out there. We'll try to make sure that happens on the on the website. But you're a numbers guy and you sort of said, you know, the first place to start is just put them together. But then what would be the next steps after that? I mean, if you could just, first of all, get them there and get the dialog going about, hey, we got this EX data and we got the CX data. Now take us through the steps that you might go through to actually go beyond that.

Tanner:
Absolutely. So when a project starts or a request comes in, it's usually at the point of, Hey, we've got this EX program going, we've got this CX program going. Can't we just, you know, put them together? And sometimes that's the case. So let me let me give you a quick analogy here, Steve. Let's say your best friend is having a dinner party and they need you to make a pie. Now it's really urgent. The dinner party is tomorrow. You don't have time to go to the store. They hand you two bags of groceries with the ingredients that they had bought to make a fruit salad and chocolate chip cookies. And they say, Hey, can you can you make that pie out of what I have in these bags?

Steve:
Sounds like a Food Network game show.

Tanner:
Exactly. It very well could be, food and music are my go to for analogies.

Steve:
So I love those shows like Chopped and things like that. It's a lot of fun.

Tanner:
So yeah, Steve, you take those bags, you look at them and you tell them, well, maybe I don't… I don't know. We have to check out the ingredients to see if we're able to make that pie. And that's exactly what happens in a lot of these linkage projects. There are a few things that we need to check off first, as if we had planned to make that pie before we even went to the store in the first place. I'd say this could be one of the bigger gotcha moments. If you're really interested in a linkage project or leaning heavily on it for some insights for leadership, sometimes you get those different bags of ingredients and what you're asking for is is just not possible. But if it is possible, there are lots of really great tools out there and we use Qualtrics new CrossXM that make it easier than ever to do actual linkages for us. Assist us with the analysis and help visualize and share the data.

Steve:
I'm glad you mentioned CrossXM because this is something we've been doing anecdotally and episodically at Walker for 25 years, but now we actually have the tools to make it scalable and easy, and I was actually going to go there so that the timing of this is is somewhat critical. I mean, you can put them together and say we got both of these data sets, but how does timing get into if you really want to try to build a, you know, a CrossXM or a truly integrated EX/CX approach?

Tanner:
Of course. So when it comes to timing, I would put this under one of the criteria or the ingredients we need to check off with between our programs. And before I dive into the criteria, I do want to highlight a really important distinction here, and I just can't emphasize this enough between the planning period for a linkage and the actual execution of the data, linkage and analysis. So for the planning side of it, this is what takes most of the time brainpower and coordination between stakeholders. Whereas the execution of the linkage and analysis is pretty straightforward and can be done by a couple of people. So in this planning period, a few of the criteria that we need to check off to make sure that we can make that pie right. First, do we have a common data type and level, what I call the unit of analysis, that we can link our EX/CX data together. So this might be a location, customer service rep, account ID and so on. Second, do we have enough of those units to be able to run some some simple statistical analysis? So we recommend having at least 25 to 30 of those units, 25 to 30 locations, customer reps, account IDs, because this gets at that idea of statistical power and base size. If we have too few, we run the risk of, you know, not finding something that could be there or finding something that's not actually there. Um, another another criteria here. Do we have that temporal ordering of our data that allows us to interpret causality? So. I do want to spend a bit of time on this idea of causality, if you don't mind, Steve.

Steve:
I'd love to spend some time on causality.

Tanner:
Oh, yeah?

Steve:
Yeah. No, actually I'm kind of being flip, which I can do, but I think, you know, there's correlation and there's causality, and that's a really important distinction for CX pros to make sure they know the difference. So…

Tanner:
Yeah, for sure. So before diving into a project like this, one thing that helps us make sure we're thinking about things in terms of a better form of causality is just a framework that lays out the linkages conceptually. And so this also not only helps us inform how we go about the linkage, but also the analyzes we use and the insights we can get and helps us turn those insights into action. Now. Now that phrase of to take action implies that as an organization here, we're stepping into a causal agent role where we expect that our decisions and actions are going to have some desirable effect downstream. So taking this idea of a stream, right, the stream of cause and effect. We can place all of our players in this stream where the water is only flowing one way. Just to be a bit simplistic here, it's not a perfect model. No model is perfect, but it just helps us get things lined up. So looking at this stream of causality, we can think about the organization as coming first. They make decisions about policies, culture management styles, training and development. And all of these serve as the backbone of experiences that employees have. And those experiences go on to form the attitudes that they hold towards the company. And then those attitudes influence directly how that employee behaves, including how they behave in front of customers. And so this is the moment that we're trying to capture in our linkage project here. And those behaviors are then perceived by the customers and they form attitudes about the employee and the organization. And then those go on to inform how they behave in the future with the organization.

Steve:
You know, really very understandable concepts that are complicated, but you really break them down. And I'm just going to reinforce here for our listeners just to make sure that I understand. But and I'll go backwards. You know, both employees and customers have experiences with your organization. That informs their attitudes. Their attitudes drive their behavior, correct?

Tanner:
Yes. Yes. So if you're talking about them in parallel. But when we want to talk about a linkage and the levers that we can pull, going back to this timing aspect, let's let's assume we want to make decisions about how we support our employees. And those are going to be the causal mechanism for the customer perceptions and attitudes.

Steve:
Right. And then the way we action it is, you got to make sure you got right your units of analysis. So we talked about call centers. We talked about locations like in a fast food chain, and then you brought up like an account ID that would be more of a B2B type of situation or, you know, where you have a set of people that are working on on an account over a period of time. But all those are sort of good units of analysis, correct?

Tanner:
Exactly. And just to finish off that last criteria of timing here, Steve, one nuance that I didn't quite get to is when we looking back at our stream that we have our stream of causality, we place the employee attitudes and behaviors before the customer's attitudes and behaviors. So when it comes to our data collection, that's what we also recommend is that our employee data is collected first.

Steve:
First.

Tanner:
And then immediately thereafter that's when we get our customer data collected.

Steve:
Right.

Tanner:
So now we have just a natural flow of given an employees set of attitudes at a certain time. Here are the customer attitudes and perceptions after that. And I will say the last kind of like umbrella check for all of these criteria of ingredients is the actual data that we're using to link our EX and CX data is that representative of where the employees and the customers are interacting.

Steve:
Give me a for instance there on that one.

Tanner:
Right. So going back to that call center, that example here, we have the customer support rep name in both of those data sets. Well, that represents the time and place where the customer was interacting with the employee. It does take some thinking about what's that face to face interaction. What does that look like? And can we start generating these hypotheses about how the employee is thinking and feeling and its relationship with the customer's thoughts and feelings?

Steve:
You know, we've talked a lot about the different kind of business models and applications that you even need to know about how to do this. And then you've given us a good framework for for how you might go about doing it or at least getting the process started. But now let's talk on kind of the action side. What are some things that you've seen in your practice that you can have a positive impact on customers and employees even if you don't go all the way? A little common sense here. What things have you seen that organizations could do to impact both positively?

Tanner:
Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the a couple of the things that I, I see as most impactful going back to this idea of breaking down silos and creating these roadways between department leaders, just getting them, getting leaders from those departments all in the same room, whether it's through some sort of customer and employee journey map workshops or service design workshops, just to get everybody thinking about the interrelationships of what their activities are on the other departments. So I'd say that's probably the main one to get the ball rolling towards some, you know, a more sophisticated linkage activity that we're talking about here.

Steve:
Good. All right. Tanner, well, we've reached that part of the show, The CX Leader Podcast. We always end with take home value. That's your best tip. It can be something you already talked about or something fresh and new. But the idea here is to give them something simple that they can take back tomorrow or Monday or whenever they're kind of ready to go and and start to make their EX and CX stuff work together.

Tanner:
Well, I'd have to say to just start thinking about how you could quantify the interconnectedness of your business operations with the customer experience, trying to keep that customer at the center. That doesn't mean we omit the the employee experience. It's all part of the same puzzle that we're trying to put together here and also invest in and cultivate talent that can help visualize and execute that.

Steve:
Awesome. Thank you, Tanner. Thanks for being such a great guest on The CX Leader Podcast. I hope it won't be too long before we have you back.

Tanner:
Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, and if anybody wants to try to continue the conversation with you, how can they find you? I probably tsmith@walkerinfo.com. Right?

Tanner:
Yes, that is one way. Or you can find me on LinkedIn as well.

Steve:
Great. Hey, Tanner Smith is a senior analyst here at Walker. He's done a great job for our clients with his unique skill set in data analytics and is very passionate about this CX and EX combo. Thanks again, Tanner, for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Tanner:
Thank you, Steve.

Steve:
Hey, and if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email us 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 and contact information so you can 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, so make sure that you're thinking about including your EX with your CX data. We'll see you again next time.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your wav files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including world-class support, automatic transcription software, automated subtitles, enterprise-grade admin tools, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.