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Steve:
Websites, apps, chat support, bots: there's no denying there's demand from customers for new ways to connect with companies and to better manage the human digital balance.

Elliott:
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see or understand that the pandemic really kind of changed the world. Some studies that the XM Institute has recently put out actually indicate that people do not expect to do any less of what they're doing online. They actually expect in the future to be doing even more online.

Steve:
The digital experience is 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 I'm glad you're listening. As we like to say on this podcast, 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. Today, we're launching something new. Over the next few months, we're going to feature a series we're titling "CX Now: Eight Essential Themes Driving CX Evolution." Our goal with this series is to take a close look at today's current topics and trends that CX professionals really need to embrace to be better leaders and take their programs up to the next level. This series has been developed in collaboration with our partners at Qualtrics and includes feedback from more than 50 CX leaders. We'll sprinkle these episodes in every few weeks with our regular programing as I interview experts at Walker on topics which focus on personalization, predictive CX, seamless experiences, digital interactions, data integration, employee enablement, adaptability and speed. So I can't think of a better one to kick things off here than my colleague and friend Elliott Moran. He's an associate vice president here at Walker and our Advisory and Managed Services group at Walker, and he is the leader of our digital practice or co-leader of our digital practice. But he's really a thought leader in this area, and I can't think of a better person to to kick off this series with. So. Elliott, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Elliott:
Hey, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. This is fantastic.

Steve:
Now, how have you gone this long without being on The CX Leader Podcast yet? I want to know that.

Elliott:
Good question. I don't know if I've got a great answer. You know, I think we were just coming up with the right topic and the right time to get engaged. So, you know, I've been doing a lot of work on this one and I'm glad to be here today. Yeah, this is great.

Steve:
Well, hey, just before we get into our content and it is a treat for me to be able to interview our people, our experts on the podcast. I think there's some of the best episodes we do. We, we try not to sort of be too self serving, but, you know, we've got a lot of expertise. We work with a lot of great companies, we've got a lot of great people. But maybe just for a little context, just tell them about your journey in the CX world and then how you got to Walker and and then kind of how your interest in digital CX came up before we get into the kind of the whole topic here.

Elliott:
Yeah, thanks a lot. So, you know, I cut my teeth in the financial services industry, started in production roles just selling money and spent several years doing all kinds of different things with with a small, not for profit financial cooperative out in Broomfield, Colorado. And yeah, I worked my way up in the organization, worked through some business development and marketing roles. And then as we grew, I found myself in the customer experience function, designing and helping to plan some of our customer experience efforts. From there, I moved to another company in Broomfield, Colorado, a big, big ski company. They've got some of the marquee resorts in the world, and I worked with the with the Guest Experience program there, had a great time, met some great, great people. I did a little skiing, believe it or not, and I worked directly with their CX team, their GX team, as we called it, in producing the data and working through customer experience insights generation. So that kind of led me to Walker as as I as I grew and developed deeper interest in actually helping other companies leverage some of these tools and techniques.

Steve:
So you've been at Walker now a little over a year, is that right?

Elliott:
Correct. Yeah, just over a year. Three days ago was my one year anniversary. So there…

Steve:
Congrats.

Elliott:
You got it. Yeah.

Steve:
Time flies when you're having fun.

Elliott:
I'm telling you, it did. Yeah.

Steve:
But, yeah, you've got some great experience on the consumer side. You know, financial services obviously is a, you know, a key relationship for any household. And, you know, nobody's you know, there aren't too many experiences we're more particular about than our money. And then, you know, in the kind of the hospitality business, when people are spending their money to go on vacation, they're pretty particular about what kind of experience they're having. So we're really glad you brought your talents to Walker. And also, I think there's tremendous implications here for the digital. So just to get into our topic, you know, let's just kind of start by what's Elliott's definition of what we mean when we talk about the digital experience.

Elliott:
Yeah, good question. It's pretty straightforward. Kind of means what it says. You know, we're, we're listening to the act of the individual customer going through a digital experience, how they interact with digital properties, websites, mobile optimized websites, mobile applications, things like that. Right? All of the different processes and journeys that we do in those digital channels, You know, that's kind of where we focus, but it's not just listening in order to improve the way those channels function, but actually we can leverage digital intercepts and this digital customer experience model to serve personalized content that actually achieves business outcomes at a very high level. Literally serving content when someone's stuck or having a challenging experience that gets them to the right place to achieve the services, to get the products that they need and want to move them further down those conversion funnels.

Steve:
That's really cool. I hadn't even thought about that. But you know, not only can we measure the process, but we can actually do some corrective action or take some some action right in the middle of it, which you really I'm not sure you can do that if you're not digital, right?

Elliott:
No, it's an amazing… It's the greatest benefit and challenge of the digital space. Right. We're engaging with the individual in real time, right? We're engaging with the user while they're performing the actions that they came to get done. And so we've got to be very careful in kind of balancing our interest to generate insights with the the user experience that that individual came to get done, right? So yeah, so it's a nuanced world.

Steve:
All right. So why should a CX pro care about this? Why why should a CX pro care about the digital experience?

Elliott:
Great question. Well, it's everywhere. I mean, it's everywhere. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see or understand that the pandemic really kind of changed the world and really accelerated the shift to digital delivery. Right. Overnight, we learned how to work remotely through digital channels. We learned how to buy our groceries online. We learned how to do yoga courses online. Right. All of the things that we were doing in person before the pandemic now had a digital and digital spin to it. And so it's something that is here and it's not going away. And some studies that the XM Institute has recently put out actually indicate that people do not expect to do any less of what they're doing online than they are today. They actually expect in future to be doing even more online. We call this digital momentum, and it ultimately is the idea that not only are we going to be doing stuff online, but we're going to be doing more stuff online in future, right.

Steve:
Now, I got in my notes here, zero party data.

Elliott:
Mm hmm.

Steve:
And I am dumbfounded because I think I've been around for a while, but I have no idea what that means. So what's zero party data?

Elliott:
Yeah, good question. So zero party data is the dotted line to exactly what I was talking about a few minutes ago when I mentioned something about serving content that moves people down a conversion funnel or gets them to what they need to do more effectively, right? It's user supplied data. It's basically a request that the individual is making. It's the data associated with that individual that they are freely offering to the business because they're searching for a resolution or an outcome that that that they came to get done.

Steve:
So we can do that. Actually, like we did a podcast a few months ago, I never forget this guy. He really cut to the essence of what CX is, is I'm a customer, I have a question, I want an answer or I'm having a problem. I want a solution. That's kind of the essence of it. But here what you're talking about here is we can actually marry those things up in real time on the digital platform.

Elliott:
Yeah, that's accurate. I mean, we can look at dwell time on an FAQ and we can trigger an intercept after someone's kind of been looking at how to go about solving their issue. And we can serve a piece of content that says, Do you need more help? Right? We're taking an inferred signal to basically help support that experience in real time. That can be done in any number of different ways, right? Product, product delivery, things like that, service and support delivery, you name it. I mean, it's really kind of an interesting concept.

Steve:
And you mentioned the pandemic, and I was going to go there because that made everybody go digital. But you know, as consumers, whether it's for our household or a business or anything, we expect some digital level of support today. I mean, it's like, you know, we're 24-7. You know, we want to be able to log on at Google or or some browser in the middle of the night to study up on something and you know, it better be available, right?

Elliott:
Yeah, Yeah. The channel does not. It doesn't go to sleep, right? It's. It's something that's available in real time at all times. And, you know, that was definitely pushed forward by the pandemic. People really had to go to these channels to deposit the check that they would normally go to the bank for or, you know, to to to do that yoga class or to get those groceries ordered. I mean, we do really just have to shift in that direction. And it's not going away. Right. This this XM study, this digital momentum study indicates, again, that it's actually becoming more prevalent and more profound as time goes on as we move away from the pandemic.

Steve:
You like free stuff? Well, me too. I like it, too. Well, if you want a chance to get your hands on some cxleaderpodcast.com swag, go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey on how you think we're doing. We're always looking for ways to improve, and your input will help us do just that. Again, that's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback for some CX Leader Podcast swag.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Elliott Moran. He's a associate vice president here in our advisory group and a real expert on digital customer experience. And we're having a fascinating dialog about the way digital is really changed the role of the CX leader. And I hope you all are learning as much as I am from Elliott. But let's assume now that our audience believes that this is actually happening, and I think it would be hard to argue that it's not. So as CX pros and kind of coming back to how do we interpret this for our business, our senior managers and our our operating managers, our business unit leaders? What do we kind of put back in to ensure that that we're doing this in a way that builds the case for the business?

Elliott:
Yeah, I think that's a good question. You know, you got to start with an objective in mind, right? What are we seeking to solve for? Right. And that answer is going to be different depending on who you speak to within the organization. Right? You might talk to an IT director that just wants to understand how quickly the pages are loading so that they can get more budget for service space. Right. We might talk to a marketer who says, you know, I need to understand what buttons are actually creating enhanced call to action, right? And so working with a number of stakeholders at the organization is going to help you get a clear understanding of what are all of the things that we could learn through this and then what's the path to actually go about and make that happen. Typically, we look at something, it's a three phased approach, right? We typically start with a track and diagnose no space where we stand up some intercepts on your website and we try to understand what are the most common or problematic journeys that we see and we essentially identify what we need to fix within this digital property, right? Then we pivot it to something called a journey, a journey based deep dive right where we look at, okay, now that we understand these are the common and problematic journeys, how do we fix them? So we'll stand up very targeted, quick hit surveys with maybe two, maybe three, maybe five questions max to identify what the action steps are and how we actually go about fixing a certain digital journey. So then we typically move into what we call the activate and transform phase, where this is a this is an organization that's already settling off some of the feedback that they've gotten to improve the experience. They're already shuttling this off to your dev teams, but this is where we actually start thinking about, okay, how can we personalize this experience and serve content that gets them to a service channel or support channel, a different kind of product recommender, something like that? It really is. It really is. The next step in the final evolution of the digital customer experience journey, right as we reach full maturity there.

Steve:
Elliott You gave us a bunch of good stuff in there that I just want to unpack for a minute. First of all, you talked about beginning with the end in mind, which you go back to your key users, listen to them, think about how they understand the business, you know, talk to them in their language. Then you've got a nice framework with your three step process. So then let's let's take that now another step further, just more practical and kind of based on on your background, let's let's just go to like straight online commerce. Give me an example of like when you're shopping online and dropping things in the cart and checking out and getting your shipping address and all that. What are some of the common things that you see there that where you can inform the journey to make it better?

Elliott:
Yeah, that's a great question. One of the first things that we look to are digital digital metrics, right? Digital benchmark metrics, success, effort and emotion. Right. Were you able to get what you came to do done? Simple success. Could you get it done? Effort. How easy or difficult was that? Right. We want to optimize to make that experience easier if we can. And then emotion. How did it make you feel? And that is the tough nut to crack, right? Oftentimes it's going to be associated with a CSAT score or some kind of loyalty indicator that shows how the emotion may may rest as you come through that experience. But those are going to be the three major buckets that we look at first and foremost. Then there's all the different kinds of journeys that that we would ask very specific and targeted questions on. Right. Why did you abandon your cart? Right. What was most difficult about signing up for our newsletter? Right. Like there are these questions that we ask as well to get very specific. The journey based stuff, but we typically start with success, effort and emotion as as our three primary KPIs. As we stand up these surveys.

Steve:
You know, another thing I just thinking through this process and a real business objective would be and again, I love your framework, success, effort, emotion, those are good things that our listeners ought to be writing down and thinking about how it applies to their company. We'll come back to that at Take Home value, perhaps. But, you know, one of the other big business objectives, in addition to the fact that that customers and consumers now want the digital option, there's there's real cost savings here, isn't there?

Elliott:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a self-service is is key to that cost reduction. And digital channels are oftentimes highly optimized for that self service. So we can leverage listening posts to understand what people want to self serves and build experiences and journeys to match that. So, you know, you can also defray calls that go out to your contact center and a major reduction in cost, comparing one channel to the other. So optimizing those types of journeys, the support experience journey, optimizing and finding ways of increasing self-service, that's going to be a great way to reduce cost with the other benefit to digital experience listening and and some of that zero party concept is helping people move further down the conversion funnel to purchase your products and or just to collect the data that you need to produce those conversions in in future.

Steve:
Well, let's start to talk now in terms of what our what our audience, what our CX pros ought to take from all this great content you've given. Let's just say that I'm a relatively new CX leader and, you know, my company's maybe not at the highest maturity level digitally, but we've got some digital stuff going on. What are some things I ought to do to get started, just from your perspective?

Elliott:
That's a good question. You know, there are definitely a number of different things that you can do to get started. You know, start by studying up on digital customer experience, listening right? Start by speaking internally about some of the ways that you could leverage these channels more effectively, right? By increasing sales, by reducing costs, by learning more about our customers to achieve either one or both of those objectives. Right. To produce those more highly emotive experiences. You know, talk to your executive teams, find out which one of those nuggets resonates and then build your business case in full. Make the pitch and give us a call. We're glad to help you stand these things up.

Steve:
I want to go back to one of your frameworks. You're great with the frameworks. I love it. No wonder you're such a good consultant. But you said success, you know. Did I get it done? Effort? Was it easy or difficult? Emotion. How did it make me feel as part of that process? Talk to me a little more about why we want to do that and what we can do with the data there to sort of enhance that whole framework that you've laid out.

Elliott:
Emotionally is these are the keys to the kingdom, right? You know, success and effort, table stakes pretty obvious. Pretty, pretty, pretty common things that we would want to optimize for. But emotions a little bit tougher nut to crack. The value of digital customer experience listening is that it allows us to capture massive sums of data while the interaction is happening. Right? That's the three primary purposes of a website, right? To showcase a brand, sell some products to collect information, to sell some more products. Right. And so if we have this opportunity in front of us to collect all of this, this data, this data is ultimately what we can leverage to enable greater personalization that enables better and more positive and more emotive experiences, which produces loyalty, which produces repeat purchase, etc.. So, you know, it's a really interesting space to play in because you're not just asking about experiential questions, you're not just asking how did it go? You also have all of the connected information, the operational data that's occurring in real time, right? So this really allows us to connect this information across the enterprise and create those positive and these emotive experiences that produce loyalty outcomes and ultimately drive revenue and business and business objectives as well, so…

Steve:
Yeah, it's powerful. You know, it's while you're conducting commerce in and driving business results, you can also be enriching your kind of your competitive information advantage. A real kind of simple version of that is like a restaurant loyalty cards where, you know, you're willing to give them a little information because they're going to give you some points or some some dollars to come back and use them. And, you know, somebody along the way figured out that it was worth giving you back 100 bucks after you spent 1000 to get that info, right?

Elliott:
Right. Yeah, exactly. And so the tradeoff here is you give us the information, we give you a better experience, right? I mean, that's that's the end of the day.

Steve:
And that's how we build the business cases. See CX pros for why we invest in this experience. And it really is a virtuous cycle. You know, we you know, we're winning because we're delivering outstanding value and we're making people I was actually just thinking of experience I had yesterday. It wasn't wasn't a it wasn't digital, but same deal. It was a fun deal. We bought, we spent and..

Elliott:
Yeah.

Steve:
…and we went away feeling great about it because, you know…

Elliott:
And you want to go back, you know, I can't wait to see you go. Yeah.

Steve:
All right. Elliott, We have reached that point of our podcast where I ask every guest now more than 200 episodes for their take home value. And and this is going to be a fun one because we have a really specific topic. But, you know, I ask you to give your best tip or best idea from this podcast, and it should be something that our CX pros can take back and apply immediately to what they're doing to enhance the value that they're bringing to their organization. So. Elliott, what's your take home value on digital experience?

Elliott:
You've got it, yeah. So at the end of the day, you know, the time is now. Digital experience optimization has to start happening now. And if not, if this is the takeaway, this is how you can sell the case internally, right? The pandemic created a massive shift towards this digital space. It goes without saying we know that this happened. Three years on, people are not only expecting of digital opportunities, they're expecting of good digital opportunities. Right. And so combine this with increased digital momentum, people expecting to do more online. It really does between these three things and the opportunity to create additional data that enriches our customer profiles and personalization that that's the take home, right? The reason that we want to do this and the fact that we should do this now. And so if that helps with your executive conversations and with with getting your project off the ground, then then that then that's a good thing and that's a great place to land.

Steve:
Awesome. Elliott, thanks for being a great guest on The CX Leader Podcast. And if anybody would want to continue the dialog with you, could you just give us your Walker email or your LinkedIn profile or how they might be able to get in touch with you?

Elliott:
You've got it. Yeah. So Walker email emoran@walkerinfo.com and you can find me on LinkedIn at Elliott Moran that's elliottmorancx at LinkedIn.com.

Steve:
Hey man, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for bringing your talents to our podcast and hopefully you'll it won't be another year before we'll have you back.

Elliott:
You got it. Steve. I hope to see you again soon.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week has been Elliott Moran. He's an associate vice president here at Walker and one of our thought leaders on digital experience. Hey, and if you want to learn anything else about this podcast or about how Walker might be able to help your businesses 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 listeners. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes podcast series, contact information. You can even drop us a note in there, tell us how we're doing, or suggest an idea for a future episode. 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 never been a better time to be a CX leader. So keep doing what you're doing and especially do it on your digital experience. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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