The CX Leader Podcast: "Close That Loop!": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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

Pat:
One key practice in providing a great customer experience is following up on customer feedback. But if your response is not done well, you could be doing more harm than good.

Greg:
It's an acknowledgment from the brand that you have heard and received customers feedback. I always used to like to say, if you're going to ask a question, you have to be willing to do something with it and be acknowledged that you heard it and you want to do something about it.

Pat:
Making certain your front line is engaged in closing the loop with customers 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.

Pat:
Hello, everyone. I'm Pat Gibbons. I'm filling in for Steve Walker today as guest host of The CX Leader Podcast. And thank you for listening. As we like to say around here, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader and this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you develop all the right skills to deliver amazing experiences for your customers. You know, it's a common practice in customer experience and a vital close loop responds to customer feedback. Simply put, you need to make sure you respond to customers in a timely and appropriate way. But like all things in life, it's not that simple, and if not done well, it can actually create poor experiences for your customers. This is why it's critical to get frontline employees engaged in CX and understand the processes set in place that provide the best possible experiences for customers. Well, and today's guest has quite a bit of experience in closed loop follow up. Greg Chase is an XM catalyst with the Qualtrics XM Institute, and he's going to help us avoid common mistakes in closed loop feedback processes. Greg, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Greg:
Thanks, Pat. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Pat:
Yeah, well, you know, I think it's great to have you on board. You've got a great bit of experience, particularly in the hospitality industry. And you know, I'll mention I'll kind of do a little setting of the scene here. You know, a lot of people have heard of closed loop follow up. They probably have different impressions or different perspectives of it. In the B2B market it's a lot about account management and industries like hospitality, like your industry. It's a lot about individual feedback, you know, to any sort of customer and a B2C environment. So we'll we'll touch on all of that. But to give us some context, tell us a little bit about your impressive background.

Greg:
You bet. So I started my CX journey, as you stated in hospitality, working for Disney in Orlando. Spent several years there and transitioned out to Las Vegas in the hospitality sector resorts and casinos with MGM Resorts International, where I was the corporate vice president of all customer experience, strategy, market research and insights. Was there for a while, then went on to start my own consulting practice in customer experience, employee experience, service strategies, etc. for large gaming, hospitality, CPG insurance, senior living. Really got to take some of those lessons and learnings from hospitality, which when you think about it, is a very people centric industry. So tying in to emotions of of the customer is really important in a very humanistic industry and a lot of other industries have really benchmarked hospitality along their journey. So being able to apply that while consulting to other industries only helped me understand that, you know, the CX principles and foundations that we we sit and preach really apply to everybody. And now I sit at Qualtrics and the XM Institute really excited to help bring those insights and learnings as a, as a former practitioner to the forefront and provide more tools to to really build the profession.

Pat:
Yeah. Wow. I mean, given experience at Disney and some of the, you know, hospitality industry in Las Vegas, you have likely seen it all.

Greg:
So I have plenty of stories to go around. Absolutely. That's a whole nother podcast part.

Pat:
Well, we're going to see if we can weave a few stories into this one. How's that so…

Greg:
Perfect!

Pat:
Well, I think one of the keys to this is in any of this, a lot of it is about frontline employees. And as CX professionals, it's it's not a given that you can get frontline employees engaged. Where do you start with that?

Greg:
You know, I I've been a huge proponent of getting in touch with the front lines since, you know, since I started, I think as I grew through my my career getting into corporate, you see folks who who lose sight of, you know, the folks who are actually there making these experience, these these moments, these journeys happen every single day. So, you know, I think the first thing to think about is really being thoughtful about setting aside time to get yourself in the shoes of your front line. And one of the ways I used to do that is as a CX leader in the corporate office of a of an organization of 90,000 employees, as I would I would go into uniform and go clean hotel rooms with housekeepers. Why? Because it really level sets your you know, as your building strategy, you're building processes. It really reminds you, oh, my gosh, a the amount of passion that the frontline teams have around the work that they do and then be the the process that you've been cooking up in a boardroom with a bunch of other executives, you don't quite remember how that's going to impact the front line unless you go put yourself in the shoes. So I think that's first and foremost is there's so much to understand from their perspective in not only designing, but empathizing and understanding what's going on in the organization.

Pat:
Yeah, I think your your point about just trying to devise it in a boardroom is such a good one because I think it's, you know, let's face it, it's kind of an easy trap for a CX professional to fall into is making assumptions and trying to develop strategies. And granted, we all have a lot to do and so it's hard to really have the discipline to take the time and put yourself in the shoes of those that you're really trying to work with. So that's excellent advice for any of our listeners.

Greg:
I'll give you a quick example of this, too. You know, especially now, I think as we see what's going on in the economy and around the world, you know, experience management is is even more critical now than it ever has been to stay competitive and to listen to the customer. You know, we are having an issue. I won't name the organization, but there is a large hospitality organization that was having an issue with room cleanliness perception from the customers. And we saw a dip in room satisfaction. And it's funny, the the gut reaction was from the senior leadership, let's get a bunch of executives in the boardroom, sit around a table and we're not going to leave until we problem solve this issue. And, you know, it wasn't until I think I stood up and I said, we've got to find a different way, because this is this is Einstein's theory of insanity. We're going to keep sitting here trying to problem solve. We're going to get the same result again like we always have. And it wasn't until we said, you know what, we're going to fill this room of housekeepers and and our engineers and the properties instead. And we're going to leave the room and we're going to give them the challenge. Or here's what's wrong. And I will tell you what it was quicker, faster. The solutions they came up with were practical, I'll tell you. And just allowing them to be a part of the the solution. Right. And that that process, they had the answers. And, you know, not only do we flip the satisfaction on the guest room, but it's sustained, which absolutely shows they felt really confident in their ability to help surface, that they're passionate about the experience they create. And their peers were more willing to buy in to what was changing because it came from their their peer group.

Pat:
Absolutely.

Greg:
They were part of the magic and changing that thinking.

Pat:
Yeah, yeah. That's a great example. So let's get into what we talked about at the top of the show and that was closed loop follow up. I think most people either intuitively just because of the words, know what that is, but in CX terms, maybe you can describe it and tell us a little bit about how it works from your perspective.

Greg:
You know, when I think about closing the loop with with customers, I think of three things that really come to mind. First, you know, it's an acknowledgment from the brand that you have heard and received customers feedback. I always used to like to say, if you're going to send a survey and solicit, especially with unstructured data comment boxes, if you're going to ask a question, you have to be willing to A., do something with it and, B., acknowledge that you heard it and you want to do something about it. So acknowledging the feedback is first and foremost. Second, really recovering and providing some sort of solution resolution helping problem solve an issue that may have popped up in their experience or needs a little bit more care and attention. So having that opportunity to not just let someone leave and rate you poorly, but but also, hey, we want to fix this for you because we care about you and your loyalty to our brand. But I think third is the most important aspect of it is you can garner all the insights and scores and data points that you want, but this is closing the loop and hearing from the customer's point of view. Specifically, what went wrong and how that happened gives you a treasure trove of deeper, richer understanding and insights as you go to improve processes, make the business better, and improve experiences from a context of how the customer saw it, not through how we're reading it through a dashboard on a computer screen, which gives you even more insight into to what to do next and how to fix that.

Pat:
Yeah. So it's really about circling back, making sure that you followed up on the issue, let people know. And you know, sometimes that's as simple as acknowledging they've given you feedback. Other times it's as complex as a big problem or an issue that has to be solved. And, you know, making sure that that it is solved, because I think too often sometimes the loop isn't closed, but the people on the on the company side just think, well, I responded so I think we took care of it. Right. Do you ever find those where it's not quite closed all the way?

Greg:
And customers expect this? I mean, you know, you've got to think consumers are out there making trade offs and how they're spending their money. They're making very deliberate choices of where they're going and why. And this is yet another opportunity for us. You know, when you get to circle back and talk to that customer again to really understand what matters most to them and what's essential in keeping them loyal to to the brand, it's just a great way to engage and continue to learn and understand.

Pat:
Right. So, you know, we mentioned kind of in the intro that, you know, you can implement a closed loop process, but there's probably some right ways and wrong ways to do that. And I've got the benefit of having read what I'm going to call a very passionate article from you that talked about the top mistakes that are made. And let's face it, we can learn a lot from our mistakes, so I'd love to dig into that a little bit. What do you see is some of the top mistakes? Let's let's start into that. And I'm going to ask you to weave in a few of those stories.

Greg:
Yeah, I think, you know, I'll start with the one that I think is the largest. It's as organizations grow, they get larger. I think they look to find efficiency and streamline and make things easy. And one of the ways that I've seen this done is adopting a centralized closed loop response strategy. So that could be a centralized guest services team, contact center, whatnot, that's focused on ingesting all of this closed loop feedback, getting the alerts or the triggers that we need to follow up with whoever the guest is or the customer is, and then either providing an automated, slightly automated or very templated response from a from a corporate center that A doesn't know the ins and outs of the very business or interactions that the customer was engaged in may not quite understand how all the processes and aspects of the business work. So the risk is you you risk the empathy or the being able to relate to the customer at that level because you may not truly understand how that works in the business and understand why they might be so frustrated or, you know, upset that something went a certain way. So I always like to say moving away from a centralized focus to to actually moving that closed loop process back into the business, I don't think there's anything more powerful than you stay at a hotel. You had a poor experience with the room and now the head of housekeeping is the one responding to your feedback about your hotel stay, which says a couple of things as a customer. A we heard you, but B, it's not just going into a blank inbox. We have now sent this out to the very people who can do something about it. So the perception of that coming back from the business leaders continues to show to the customer you're listening and you are doing something about it at the end of the day.

Pat:
Right. So certainly and obviously you've you've worked with a number of organizations. Certainly you've had people respond to that advice by saying, well, I don't know how we can we can do that. It just be too hard. We have to operationalize it. What do you tell them?

Greg:
I've seen it happen. I've seen it done at large volumes as scale. And it may seem scary, but at the end of the day, you know, there's a lot of downtime in everyone's day. There is certainly opportunity. And when you can spread that out among a group of responsible parties for a business division, it lightens the intimidation of the volume. So I certainly understand, trust me, coming from resorts, that one resort had 4000 hotel rooms, plus more food and beverage offerings in a small city block. I get it. But at the end of the day, you know, we can make excuses for everything. We can make excuses as to why not do this or why we shouldn't do that. But at the end of the day, when you can just own it and see it, you know, the other benefit was that that very quickly came to light. So you may have that initial push back on throwing this back into the business and adding on to people's plates the second that that housekeeping director or leader had to continue to keep responding to the same issues over and over again, really helped them prioritize that. That was something that they wanted to stop wasting their time on and start fixing the issues so they didn't have to keep doing that. So it also builds in what I would like to call this subconscious motivational tool to help the business leaders. We talked about unlocking additional context. Well, now it's also motivating them to fix whatever that may be. That's recurring and trending because guess what? It's less work off your plate if we can fix those those big issues.

Pat:
Right. Because because really, you know, in close the loop processes, you know, there tends to be some will call it inner loop, outer loop or micro and macro where, you know, in the case of micro macro, micro is responding to that person showing empathy, you know, getting back to them. But the macro is what you're describing of recognizing that a process needs to change. Right. So do you see it at those two levels? Frequently?

Greg:
I do. And, you know, they intersect quite a bit. So when you start getting a customer that's feeling better about the interaction, you're providing the empathy which now allows them to feel more comfortable to unlock even more of the insight into how you can fix something. I would say if you do want if you do the one well, you get even more opportunity to help fix the the more macro view as well. So I would say they're very, very well aligned and absolutely support each other in success.

Pat:
Right.

Pat:
Here's a timely question. Do you happen to be at the Forrester CX North America conference right now? Well, if you are. Be sure to stop by Walker's exhibit. I'll probably be there and would love to meet you. And I'm always interested in talking to listeners of The CX Leader Podcast. And you know what? I'll even give you a free gift. So stop by and mention you're a listener for The CX Leader Podcast. That's the Forrester CX North American Conference is from June 7th through 9th. Right at the time that this is playing, it's in Nashville. I hope you can stop by.

Pat:
Today. I'm talking with Greg Chase. He's an XM catalyst for the Qualtrics XM Institute. And we're learning a lot about Close the loop feedback strategies. Now, I know another issue that you focused on was just some clarity about who's responsible. Tell us tell us more about that.

Greg:
Well, you know, it's funny. There are. You know, a lot of centralized teams. There's a lot of, again, these guest services teams, there are many leaders within the division. It's funny. So the first time I decentralized a closed loop process with a large organization, you know, they wanted all of their their managers to have access to this and to be able to do it. And I mean, there's probably 50 managers in this division. It caused a little bit of chaos in regards to not having a process or a plan. So so being very intentional about, you know, if you're going to decentralize this back end of the business, you need this set of managers who, you know are going to be more well versed, have the right tools and resources in order to do something with that customer while they have them on the phone, not just put them on hold or tell them you're going to call them back yet again. Because I'll tell you, there's one thing customers hate and that is being bounced around or having to continue a discussion outside of this call that they were hoping was going to be resolved in that moment. So I would say being very intentional about, hey, here's who we've got going to do this, make sure they've got the right tools and resources to be able to provide service recovery in the moment, you know, not have a script that they're reading from, but feel confident in going into a difficult conversation because sometimes closed loop feedback is passionate and being able to acknowledge and have the tools to talk through that and not take it personally is important. So again, being very intentional about who's going to own that and making sure they're held accountable to actually doing it and doing it well is important, right?

Pat:
In working with companies that are in the organizations you were at, did it matter which you know, which customers were most important? I know you make a comment about cherry picking customers. Tell us more about how you manage that type of thing at such a scale.

Greg:
You know, setting setting a strategy around, closing the loop, I think is important. I see organizations say we're going to close the loop with every single customer that sends feedback in. And that's that's awesome. You know, I think that's an aspiration. And again, back to efficiency and time and the amount of volume you may be getting, that may be a bit unrealistic. So then starting to understand, I've seen companies just answer the good stuff or respond to the good stuff because it's easier, right? And you don't have to have conflict. But those are the companies that are also missing the boat on how to make the business better. Right. I think that, you know, that's one of the magic things of Qualtrics is we want to help companies uncover their unmet needs and build the experiences and services that customers want. But if you're just going to sit there and listen to the good stuff, you're not going to going to do that. So I've seen organizations shifting towards certainly tackling those those customers that reported they had some sort of a challenge. Right. So a we know we can get some really good, meaningful context as to how that happened or why that happened or what happened before it that may have triggered that. Again, you can't get that in just answering good feedback or assuming, you know, I've also seen brands take a loyalty approach to setting time expectations on closing the loop. So depending on the loyalty tier structures that they may have within their organization, you know, their highest value customers would probably get a more immediate type of response when receiving that feedback. And then you set different 72 hours, 48 hours depending on the customer's tier level, and use a bit of that as a prioritization matrix to help kind of ease through this. So I would say there's many ways of looking at it. You just can't cherry pick the good, though, and leave the bad, you know, sitting in the pool. You've got to have a very balanced viewpoint across the organization to get the really meaningful insight.

Pat:
Yeah, that makes sense. So another mistake that you mentioned in your article that I'm interested in hearing more about is limiting team members ability to fix problems. So obviously some people feel like their hands are tied or they say, I've got to ask my manager or whatever. Tell us tell us more of your experience in that area.

Greg:
I was hoping you were going to pick that mistake. You know, it was interesting. In a couple organizations I've worked with, when you start looking at big drivers of satisfaction, you start to see that if they encountered a problem, typically you start to see lower NPS scores, lower CSAT scores across the board. And then if you dig in a little deeper and realize that they had a problem and they left the property, the building, the retail store, whatever it is, the grocery store, and we didn't resolve it while they were there. But I told you about it. You can say goodbye to any sort of positive CX metric at the end of the day. So learning that insight, you know, I set up some focus groups with frontline employees across a couple of these companies that I've worked with. And it's fascinating when you get the frontline into a room and just ask questions and you're not a representative of the company and you are just this is all confidential, open, you know, just tell me what's what's. When you have a customer who's coming up to you with a challenge, what what tools do you have to work through that? And, you know, at one organization, every policy that was written about service recovery was written in a way that made sure you knew that if you did X, Y or Z, you would be punished up to and leading to in termination.

Greg:
So everything was written in a very fearful, I can't do that. I don't want to risk doing that, put them on the defense versus really enabling them to to do what it takes. I think Disney is a great example of this. You think about Disney training. You know, a child drops their ice cream bar, go get them a new one. You know, you're not you're not teaching the negative aspects of that. But I think that's where some brands have lost sight of we're writing policy and processes for probably the 1% of employees who might make a bad decision at some point in time. But we're we're punishing the 99% of the team members who actually want to do the right thing and come to work trying to make a difference for a customer. So ensuring that the tools you have aren't providing an opposite effect at the end of the day is important.

Pat:
Yeah. So you've probably seen a lot of organizations that are too restrictive. How do they make that transformation to kind of relaxing their rules and trying to, you know, empower their front line employees to make decisions on their own?

Greg:
Yeah. You know, in one example, we knew that problems were one of the biggest drivers of CX for this organization. And we went into the CEO CFO's office with that data and said, listen, here is your biggest driver to your your NPS score, your CSAT score, you're driving, you're wanting to drive positive change and growing these numbers. But at the end of the day, if we can't make a a movement on these problems and how we're resolving issues, we're never going to see any type of positive trajectory. So, of course, it's what are you proposing? I said, you know, we want to give every employee in the organization the opportunity to provide service recovery, to do something, whether it's a free drink, whether it's a free buffet, whether it's something of value that typically we can get at cost. So you're thinking we're not giving away the farm here. But I'll tell you that that one conversation would I expect it to be very controversial, actually was an immediate approval to move forward with rolling out a service recovery program that touched 90,000 employees and gave every employee the ability to issue compensation with a no questions asked policy tied to it.

Greg:
So your manager wasn't allowed to go and say, Well, why did you do that? I would have given them this instead of that. Managers were also trained to not be able to have that discussion. You know, there was a group that was looking into misuse and whatever, but again, that's the 1% we wanted to really build the power of the behaviors and the skill sets more so than the number. The number one department of issuing these recovery certificates was housekeeping, which blew my mind because I thought it would be been front desk in a hotel. It would have been folks on the floor. It was housekeeping because they take so much passion into cleaning a room. And when something's wrong, they were the biggest issuers of these these certificates. And that's a department you probably wouldn't have thought, you know, in doing service recovery training, because usually they go complain somewhere else. But here we now had housekeepers seeking out customers in the hallway asking how their room is and if they can do anything to make it better. So it completely transformed even the personal interactions with our team members and customers, which was amazing.

Pat:
That's a great example. And you know, this topic is just such a good one for CX professionals because so, you know, it seems like one of the biggest challenges is action. And that's what close loop is all about, is just taking action on customer feedback. So really good stuff.

Greg:
And do it early, right? Small wins really build up to a much bigger success at the end of the day. So take any sort of action and move forward with it.

Pat:
Excellent. Well, we've reached that point in the show. It's kind of the hallmark of The CX Leader Podcast is we ask you for your take home value and that is the one tip or trick or piece of advice that people can try to put, put to use right away. So Greg Chase, what is your take home value for CX leaders?

Greg:
My tip and take home value would be find some sort of time in the next week, two weeks, lose the suit, go put on a uniform and go get into the trenches with the frontline. And again, A, listen. But, B, take the time to just experience what they experience around these very journeys and moments that we curate from a very strategic level. Just go get yourself immersed in the front line, especially now as things are changing in the economies. You know, there's a lot of uncertainty out there. Go and understand what it's like because it will give you a whole new perspective and really reinvigorate your passion around what we're doing and why.

Pat:
I can't think of anything more practical or more immediate that someone can do. That's great advice. Thank you, Greg. Greg Chase is an XM catalyst for the Qualtrics XM Institute. Greg, thanks for being on the The CX Leader Podcast and for sharing all your wisdom.

Greg:
Thanks for having me. It was great.

Pat:
And if people want to stay in touch with you, can they find you on LinkedIn? Is that a good way to get a hold of you?

Greg:
I'm on LinkedIn. And also check out our XM Institute website where we have a lot of our this type of content that we curate every week.

Pat:
Absolutely. It is an incredible resource at the XM Institute. xminstitute.com. And we'll make sure that Greg's article on The Seven Mistakes to Avoid when Closing the Loop with Customers, we'll make sure that that's on the website that where this podcast is featured. So if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or how Walker can help with your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information and you can let us know how we're doing as well. 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. We'll see you next time.

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