CX Leader Podcast: "The Laws of Experience Management": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Download the “CX Leader Podcast: "The Laws of Experience Management" audio file directly.

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

Steve:
We all have rules or guidelines to follow throughout life, but when you call something a law, it typically means something more fundamental.

Isabelle:
In the same way that the laws of physics are the set of fundamental principles that govern how natural forces and elements behave, XM laws of experience management are set of fundamental principles that govern how people and how organizations behave.

Steve:
The laws of experience management 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 joining us again this week. On The CX Leader Podcast, we like to explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. We all have rules that we must live by, whether they're for the betterment of society or simply a way to make our own lives a little less chaotic. Customer experience is no exception. There are certain truths in our practice that we as CX pros have to observe. But when something becomes a law, like the laws of nature, that has a much more fundamental connotation. Back in August, the Qualtrics XM Institute published the Six Laws of Experience Management, which help companies understand the realities of human behavior within the context of XM. My guest on the episode this week is no stranger to our show. Isabelle Zdatny is an XM catalyst and a certified customer experience professional at the Qualtrics XM Institute, and she's going to talk about these laws with us today. Isabelle, welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Isabelle:
Thanks so much for having me, Steve.

Steve:
Well, it's a pleasure. Actually, I was out the last time you were a guest on the program, so I didn't get the honor of interviewing you. So I'm really looking forward to this. But obviously, I know a lot about the XM Institute at Qualtrics. But just for those folks who might not be aware of it and if you're not aware of it, you should be aware of it, just give us a little bit of the background on the XM Institute and then also a little more of your professional background.

Isabelle:
Yeah, no problem. So the XM Institute, as part of Qualtrics and we were acquired in 2018. The foundation of the XM Institute used to be called Temkin Group. For those of you who are familiar with Bruce Temkin, he's one of the and he's called a visionary and the CX field. And so we were acquired by Qualtrics in 2018 to start, it's almost like this little think tank inside the company where we really think about what do organizations need to do to operationalize not only customer experience but employee experience and product experience and brand experience across the organization. So we do research with organizations. We conduct some benchmark's across industries. We used to back before COVID have workshops and training and we are just entirely focused on helping organizations build their CX their experience management capabilities. And so I joined Temkin Group way back in 2013. I am an XM catalyst with the company, so I also do research, speaking, advising, training. My particular area of interest is around experience design. I love anything with behavioral economics or consumer psychology or emotions are really what got me most excited. But like most of us inside the XM Institute, a little bit of a jack of all trades have to work on lots of different stuff.

Steve:
But your real passion is the sort of the human behavior, sort of the from the social science side.

Isabelle:
Yes, it absolutely is. I think it's a very interesting opportunity to take all of these, you know, academic studies and learnings from the field and then actually apply them inside organizations to improve people's experiences. I think there's such an interesting opportunity available to us there.

Steve:
Yeah, throughout my career, I've seen so many people who were drawn to this industry because they truly were interested in the social sciences and maybe didn't know exactly how to make a career out of that. And that's it's kind of fun to to see that. So because up until recently and until there were things like the CXPA and XM Institute, you know, there really wasn't a professional development for XM pros.

Isabelle:
Yeah. So, yeah, my background is in biology and…

Steve:
Science.

Isabelle:
…yup, and religion. I wrote a thesis on the evolution of human morality. So I'm just very interested in why people behave the way they do, why they make the decisions that they do. And I don't think organizations think about that enough, but they're starting to.

Steve:
Well, let's talk about your new report, "The Six Laws of Experience Management." And I know we're going to link it on the on the website so that people can who are listening to podcasts can find this easily. But, you know, as as we said in the intro, you know, when you call something a law, that's pretty bold statement. So tell us a little bit about how you came up with these fundamental truths of XM. And and then we'll talk about how you guys are backing that up.

Isabelle:
Yeah, yeah, you're right. It is actually pretty bold. We like to joke that while Isaac Newton was quarantining from the plague in the 1600's, he defined the law of universal gravitation, and while we were quarantining from a plague in 2020, we define the six laws of experience management, which we fully expect to basically at the same level of import and significant on society.

Steve:
Well, I won't have to be around to figure that out. So I think that's great. That's a great analogy.

Isabelle:
Yeah. I mean, in all seriousness, though, the comparison between the laws of physics and the six laws of experience management is actually a pretty good one in our eyes, in the same way that the laws of physics are the set of fundamental principles that govern how natural forces and elements behave. The six laws of experience management are a set of fundamental principles that govern how people and how organizations behave. So just like if you're building a bridge, you need to understand and account for the laws of physics. If you're building a customer experience management program, you need to understand and account for the laws of XM. You need to recognize these underlying realities that are shaping experiences that people have with your organization. And to answer your question of why we selected these six laws in particular, we chose them because they're both foundational to the discipline of experience management right there to help people and how organizations behave. And they tend to be overlooked by a lot of companies on an individual level, I think pretty much everyone would agree that these laws are undeniably true, that people are emotional or commitment is essential to culture change. But somehow this knowledge tends to get lost when it's scaled up from the personal level to an organizational level. And so our hope is that by defining these laws, we can start to bridge that gap and help organizations make smarter decisions about what they do to design and improve people's experiences and then how exactly they go about doing that. We actually have one of our favorite quotes here at the institute is from Jack Welsh, who is the famous CEO from General Electric who said, "deal with the world as it is, not how you would like it to be." And we really just see these laws as describing how the world is. And so the sooner organizations start recognizing and complying with these underlying realities, the sooner we believe they will achieve experience management success.

Steve:
I love that quote. And that's a that's a good mantra, I think, for XM pros is to deal with the world as it is. Well, let's get into it. So the first law, law #1: people are emotional, not rational. Give us a little more insight into that one.

Isabelle:
I love this law. I'm sure there's like some unwritten rule somewhere that XM professionals aren't allowed to have favorite XM laws. It's probably like having their children or something. But if we're being totally honest, this is my favorite law, as we already discussed. I love how it speaks to some fundamental truth about how human beings are hard wired. And so what this law essentially means is that if you want to design experiences that address people's true wants and needs, you need to speak to how human beings actually make decisions and process their experiences. And unfortunately, it's not logic or reason that we're using to do this. It's usually our emotions. But this is actually a pretty big problem for organizations. There's a quote that often gets attributed to Peter Drucker that goes, What gets measured, gets managed. And I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. But it's it's often enough inside companies. So emotions which by their very nature are intangible and subjective, are inherently pretty difficult to measure. And that means that organizations often don't really try to manage them. Instead They tend to dismiss them as too fluffy and ephemeral to take seriously. But that is exactly the wrong way to think about emotions in the world of experience management. Because emotions are fundamental to human behavior and human decision making, they're an essential component of all great experiences. They're an essential component of brand loyalty, which makes them far from being fluffy. They're actually extremely vital to organizations long term business success. So this is a law that companies really need to understand and comply with.

Steve:
Can you just give us a couple of examples or anecdotes just to kind of demonstrate where the emotional piece overrides the rational?

Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe it would be good to give you some examples of how to put this in action that will really draw out how this relates to experience management. And the first strategy that we like to advise companies to follow is to not try to please everyone. Another one of our mantras at XM Institute is that experiences that are designed for everyone are going to satisfy no one because the emotions that people feel in response to an experience. Right. What's going to make them happy or what's going to frustrate them or what's going to reassure them is going to be different for different people. Right. What what makes me happy on the website is probably going to frustrate my grandma, so rather than trying to create experiences that appeal to everybody, you should really start with a clear description of who your target audience is so that you can understand what will emotionally resonate with that important group. And I will put in a quick pitch here for persona's. I think they're really valuable tool for creating these type of experiences that are tailored to the needs and the emotions of specific segments. So that's one thing to think about with customer emotions is that they're going to be different for different people and you need to plan accordingly. Another fundamental truth about people's emotions is that people have evolved different modes of decision making. Right. If anyone is familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman, system one, system two thinking we have this intuitive mode of thinking, which is fast, it's automatic, it's based on emotion. It relies on cognitive biases and heuristics to reach conclusions. And then on the other hand, we have this rational mode of thinking, which is also called system two thinking. And that's the thinking. That's slow and it's effortful and it's logical and it uses reason and rationality to reach conclusions. And basically throughout human history, we've convince ourselves that we operate most of the time using rational thinking, right reason as what separates us from the animal. It turns out that is not really true. We make almost all of our decisions using intuitive thinking, which definitely has its downsides, which probably don't have time to get into here. It can talk about this for hours, but overall, using intuitive thinking helps us make faster and more efficient decisions. The problem that this causes for experience management, customer experience management efforts, however, is that organizations are still stuck in this past mode of thinking about how human beings make decisions right. They tend to act like everyone who interacts with them are making these totally objective, reasonable decisions. They're forming perceptions in this very objective way and that is just absolutely not true. And so organizations CX programs should not assume that the people engaging with them are behaving rationally. Instead, to comply with this law, you should really cater to how people are actually making decisions by tapping into the cognitive biases and heuristics that rule our system one thinking, and our emotions are absolutely fundamental to those cognitive biases and heuristics. If you like a quick example of how you could do this inside a company, there's this cognitive bias known as framing effects, where basically people's preferences for different options can change depending on whether you highlight the positive or the negative aspects of that decision. So, for example, patients are more likely to agree to surgery if it's framed as having a 90 percent chance of success rather than having a 10 percent chance of failure. And so when you're communicating bad news to customers, which is a pretty emotional time and unfortunately it's inevitable for all organizations, there's just going to be sometimes we can't do something, have to deliver bad news. You can account for this bias by framing things in a positive light. So instead of saying something like that product is out of stock, you could instead say we'll have that product available for you in two weeks. So there's lots of cool ways to apply this strategy by nudging people's behaviors and perceptions. And then the last one that I'll give you here is because organizations are so bad at talking about emotions and designing for emotions, CX leaders can start building emotional fluency across your organization to start complying with this law. Essentially try to start making it normal to talk about customer emotions internally. One way we've seen companies do this is to introduce some common language around emotions. At the XM institute we have this rating scale of the five A's, which goes from angry to agitated, ambivalent to appreciative to adoring. And then once you have a common vocabulary like this in place, you can then begin to integrate it into your other CX activities, things like journey mapping or survey design. There's some work to be done of just kind of normalizing emotions inside the company.

Steve:
Well, you're throwing out a lot of great frameworks and tools, which I think that, again, why if people are just learning about the XM Institute, they should go on and check out this report.

Steve:
I want to take a break here and tell you about Walker's newest report, "Deliver More Value with X- and O-Data," which provides a practical framework for integrating experience data and operational data to drive better decisions. You can download the report for free at cxleaderpodcast.com/XMReport.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Isabelle Zdatny, she's an XM catalyst and CCXP with the Qualtrics XM Institute. The folks at the XM Institute have just released a great report called "The Six Laws of Experience Management," and Isabelle has been giving us a fascinating discussion of the topic. Let's move on to law number three. We don't have time to go through all six today, so we're going to kind of do a little tease for the report. But law number three is actions transform insights into value. What should that mean to the XM pro?

Isabelle:
Yeah, so collecting and analyzing insights and data is fine, right? It is a core activity for any CX program worth its salt. But that information that you're capturing is ultimately completely useless unless you're taking meaningful action based on those insights. There's another great quote from Booker T. Washington that we include in the report that says "The world cares very little about what you or I know, but it cares a great deal about what you or I do." And the same idea applies to customer experience management. Right. It doesn't matter to customers that, you know, that 76 percent of them find your website difficult to navigate or that your contacts and our agents have low ratings for helpfulness. What they care about, what is ultimately going to make them more loyal to your company, which will in turn help grow your bottom line, is whether you are taking the feedback and information that you're collecting from them and then using those insights to make meaningful improvements to their experiences. And to be totally honest with you, this is a rule that we tend to see a lot of the less mature CX programs struggle with. Often organizations who are in the earliest stages of maturity are hyper focused on serving customers and collecting metrics and building dashboards. And they tend to forget that as the saying goes, you don't fatten a pig just by weighing it. If you want to improve people's experiences, you have to actually do something with those insights that you're collecting and distributing. Otherwise, all the work you're doing on the front end to get those is just going to waste. Then we get to the million dollar question, right, of how exactly can companies stop violating this law and start complying with the underlying truth that actions transform insights into value. And so we also have three strategies that we suggest here. First one, improve your decisions, improve people's decisions, role of role. Different people across the organization are going to need a different set of insights in order to meaningfully act on them. Right. If you're a product manager trying to select what features to include in the next product release, if you're a customer service supervisor who trying to figure out how to better coach your team, you're going to need a completely different set of insights to do your job well. And so to follow this rule, think about the people who are using your insights that you're collecting and generating, kind of like your customers, in a way, take those same CX principles that you would use to design and improve the experiences of your regular customers and use them to tailor things like the timing, the format, the type of insights that you're sharing out to those internal stakeholders so that you're making it as easy as possible for them to incorporate and apply the insights in the course of their everyday role. Second strategy that we would suggest under this law is to adjust listening to fuel acting. So once you know what insights these users need in their everyday roles, you should then be using that knowledge to adjust what data you're collecting from your customers. Right. So they shouldn't just be like this one way street of you pushing insights out to the people using them. You should also be soliciting information back from the insights users to understand what data they need to better do their jobs and then adjusting your listening post and your data collection accordingly. And then the third strategy, this one might be a little controversial. This one is accelerate your response to smaller signals. Often we see researchers really focused on looking for significance in the data they're collecting, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can inhibit this ongoing rhythm of capturing and understanding and responding to customer employee insights, which is really the cornerstone of any successful CX program. So we suggest that rather than always thinking that you need to collect these huge data sets to ensure that you're getting a representative sample, which again, sometimes is totally unnecessary, but you can often move much faster by looking for some leading indicators in smaller bits of information sometimes. Just a single piece of negative feedback from one customer can be profound and worth taking action on and ultimately lead to meaningful change.

Steve:
You know, that's such a good breakdown and that's why this report is going to be so great for our listeners to check out. But I just think back to my career and, you know, how long we've been trying to get people to take action on the data and, but I really in the last decade, I've seen us make progress. And I'm sure a lot of that is because we've you know, we've taken some of the effort out with tools like Qualtrics and things like that, that now the humans really can work on the action. All right. Let's go on to law number six. XM is a habit, not an act. This might be my favorite.

Isabelle:
Oh, we should all we need to, like, pull the listeners after to see what everyone's favorite was. So Aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. So, as you said, this is perhaps the most foundational law of all six of them. Even if you do the other five laws, if you do them in this haphazard or inconsistent way, you're still not going to have a CX program that's successful over the long term. And a lot of times we see XM CX efforts fail because organizations are playing this kind of like whack a mole game with bad experiences right there. They're so focused on trying to treat the symptoms of bad experiences and trying to fix the isolated individual pain points as they're popping up, that they don't really focus on tackling the fundamental or systemic problems that are the root causes of those bad experiences. And in fairness, you can definitely make some progress doing this, especially if you're early on in your CX journey. But at the end of the day, the experience as an organization delivers are a reflection of its culture and its operating processes. So if you are going to achieve long term experience management success, rather than focusing on these isolated independent issues like fixing a survey over here and mapping and experience over there, or setting up a closed loop system in that department, you really need to focus on embedding customer centricity into the very operating fabric of your organization. You need to make CX management a system wide habit rather than an isolated set of actions.

Steve:
Well, can you maybe give us a couple of exercises or ideas about how you can start to make it a habit?

Isabelle:
I certainly can. My first suggestion here is to plan for a multi-year transformation. To weave customer centricity throughout your entire operating fabric, it's going to take some time. Right. And so to help you maintain this systematic focus on growing your CX capabilities over multiple years of building this organizational habit, you really need to articulate a clear customer experience strategy and then coordinate the execution of that strategy across multiple people, across multiple projects over multiple years, which involves things like articulating a comprehensive program roadmap or setting up cross-functional governance structures. We also suggest that you focus on creating repeatability rather than heroes. So I know those stories of heroic employees going above and beyond for customers are really inspirational. They go viral on social media. But at the end of the day, those types of behaviors just aren't scalable. Right? So instead of focusing on creating these magnificent outliers, we instead suggest concentrating on building an organizational culture, an environment that naturally incentivizes great experiences within the course of your normal business operations. Third strategy is it's a really easy one, no big deal, and that is to build an enduring discipline experience management, which encompasses customer experience, employee experience, brand experience, product experience. This is a discipline. It is not about making one single good isolated decision. It is not just a technology or a random array of stuff an organization might do. It's a discipline. It is a persistent set of capabilities that are embedded into how an organization does business. The way that you are going to turn into an organizational habit is to ingrain them across your culture and your operating processes.

Steve:
Isabelle, you've given us tons of things to think about today, but part of the deal with the The CX Leader Podcast is we we always have our guests give their one take home value, their best tip that our pros can right away go back and put into practice and help their organizations move up in the maturity model. So Isabelle Zdatney, what is your take home value on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Isabelle:
I'm not going to lie. This is a hard one for me because six laws cover so much ground. There are so many different places I could go with this. I think I've already given you like nine different strategies. I'll try to keep this one simple and say that my one tip for turning customer experience into an organizational discipline, no matter where you are in your journey, is to do a maturity assessment either by yourself or probably more valuably with your CX team. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for us as CX professionals, as that keeps us in a job, customer experience transformation takes a really long time, as we just talked about. So having a good maturity model that helps you track and measure your progress along this journey, one that lays out a clear roadmap for how you can go about building and expanding your CX capabilities. I just think is unbelievably valuable. It's like having your own Google Maps, right? It's going to help orient and guide you through unfamiliar territory and will help you recognize where your efforts currently stand and help you map out all the improvements and changes you need to make to get where you ultimately want to go. That would be my tip.

Steve:
Isabelle, thanks again for coming on the podcast. Again, you're a delightful guest. And I hope we'll get you on again sometime.

Isabelle:
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast.

Steve:
Isabelle Zdatny is an XM Catalyst and a CCXP with the Qualtrics XM Institute. Izabelle, if anybody'd like to continue the dialog. Can you just quickly tell them where they can find you, LinkedIn or the website or whatever you want to do there.

Isabelle:
Yup, you can find me on LinkedIn luckly with a last name like mine there's like 20 of us in the entire world. It's so easy to find.

Steve:
And then if they go to the XM Institute website, they can probably work their way to you there too?

Isabelle:
Highly, highly suggest going to XM Institute website. We're posting new resource and content multiple times a week that are aimed at helping you improve XM programs.

Steve:
If you want to talk about anything you heard in this podcast or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at a podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show. Find all of our previous episodes. We organize them by series and we have our contact information. You can drop us a note, give us an idea for a future podcast or just 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. Thanks again for listening and 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, automated transcription, automated subtitles, powerful integrations and APIs, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.