Consistently Good, Strategically Amazing

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Steve:
It's amazing how much customer experience has evolved over the last couple of decades and how many companies have adopted a customer centric culture. But what's next in the world of CX?

Megan:
So in the early days it was kind of about be less bad, and then it started to be, okay, we don't want to just be less bad, we want to be uniquely good. We want to deliver a branded experience – you heard a lot of that. Now I'm encouraging and seeing companies to kind of settle for a happy medium. I refer to it as being consistently good and strategically amazing.

Steve:
Let's look at the past, present and future of customer experience on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast. And thank you for listening. It's a great time to be a CX leader and we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. When did customer experience come into existence? Well, if you've listened to this show for a while, you know there was no definitive "Big Bang" event for CX. It evolved from various other disciplines into the practice and, dare I say, ethos of customer centricity that it is today. And there's no stopping it. Customer experience is here to stay and I can't wait to see what's in store for the future. And I'm very excited that our guest this week is an old friend. She's not old, but we've been friends a long time and she just wanted the smartest people in CX that I've ever met. So I'm really excited to welcome back Megan Burns, a world renowned author, keynoter and CX expert. Megan, welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Megan:
Thanks, Steve. It's great to be back. I feel like I'm coming home somewhat.

Steve:
Yeah, we were talking offline. It's, you know, somehow we've let you go like 4 or 5 years without being back on the podcast. You know, I've lived this for a few decades myself, so I'm, I'm really looking forward to this kind of this trip down memory lane. And then even more so picking your brain and where are we headed from here? So just real quick, for those who don't know you, give us a little more on your background and sort of your body of work in the CX field.

Megan:
Sure. So like most people in CX, I've been doing CX since long before anybody called it that. I started my career as a systems engineer. So I was doing user experience. And what does this system have to do for people at AT&T in the very early days when we were first doing ordering and customer service online. In 2006, I had the privilege of joining Forrester's customer experience research team, which I spent a decade on. And while I was there, I started out covering customer experience measurement and analytics. But as companies evolve to start thinking about customer experience as more than just a digital discipline back then, customer experience, when you'd say it, people would say, Oh, customer service, you mean the call center? Or they'd say, Oh, user experience, you mean the website? As companies started to see it more of as more of a holistic business discipline, I started covering it at that level with Bruce Temkin, and so I from there I developed the customer experience maturity model that's in the book "Outside In", because at the time people were like, what does it mean to do CX well? And nobody had an answer. So we were doing research. We said, Let's figure it out. I developed and ran the Customer Experience index with Roxie Strohmenger for five years, did a whole bunch of other stuff executive engagement, all sorts of stuff. And then in 2016 I took a little break and for the last seven years I have been in private practice actually, because what we succeeded in doing in my time at Forrester is getting people to care about customer experience. But then came the hard part, which was doing something about it. And it turned out that's a much harder and more involved process. So I actually work very closely with a small number of clients now really on this, how do we play the ground game and get this stuff done inside a big, complicated organization?

Steve:
Well, that's a fun memory. I met you at Forrester, and Bruce and Roxie have both been on the podcast and continue those relationships and, you know, it really is a long career. So it's it's great to see people who are, you know, good people be successful over a long haul. And congratulations to you on all that success. Well, let's talk about how CX evolved. In your perspective, what were the disciplines that came together to create what is now CX? And and I might have a few thoughts on this as well, so…

Megan:
Oh, I have no doubt you do. And I can answer this question from a couple of different perspectives in terms of where in the early days, who did we see asking questions about or working on CX? It was a lot of market research, the sort of research side of customer experience. There was a lot of web what we would now call digital, but was pretty much just web. Then a lot of folks from marketing, contact center, call center and then depending on the industry operations because a lot of the efficiency, especially in physical businesses, improving the customer experience was parallel with operational efficiency. So we have always had a little bit of everybody pulling in. I mean, we had people on our team at Forrester who had degrees in medieval history, so it's a pretty diverse group, but those were the big ones that started out.

Steve:
Yeah, I think social science for sure and kind of measuring why people behave the way they do. And like you, I mean, we have sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, which is really kind of the study of culture and civilization. So, you know, it really is kind of how the humans have have evolved. A couple other notes. So I always like to say this. J.D. Power, Dave Power did his first surveys on automotive in 1968, and that's not exactly CX I would say it was a little more based on advertising claim. But I think, you know, J.D. Power is certainly one of the brand names that we still think about when we think about customer SAT. And then really at our company, we came from the market research side of it. We were doing a lot of it in regulated utilities where there really wasn't a competitive alternative. And most of these monopolies, they basically use the customer feedback as a way to establish kind of the level of of service they were providing. So and then obviously if things evolved, that that kind of that became applied to, to many other industries. I think a lot of service industries where the the people was a big part of the equation. And then the other thing I would say is that you mentioned like there was the quality movement that total quality management. So Six Sigma and some of those other things, they always had this like you had to have some sort of customer feedback piece of the equation. So I think your depiction, like most of our guests, they either came up through like a call center or through more of the traditional market research field or then I think like I think you're a little more of technology background, but all those things kind of go together to create what we call customer experience today.

Megan:
Yeah, I'm actually a software engineer by training, but I found very quickly that I cared more about the people using the software than I did about building the software. So I jumped over to the light side, so to speak.

Steve:
Yeah, and digital is huge now. I mean, there's really, you know, when I first got in the business, we didn't ask about their digital experience. We… But then suddenly, you know, the websites and their ability to self serve became a big part of their experience. And that's why it's kind of fun. It just keeps evolving. There's only so much you can control. So what in your mind did it really kind of coalesce as a as a discipline? You know, we've kind of now talked about kind of maybe the forefathers or the antecedents of what became CX. But when did you really think and you were a part of that. Obviously, Forrester was one of the real thought leaders in that area. But how did you see it kind of coming of age, I guess?

Megan:
Well, my story starts from that perspective in 2006 when I joined Forrester, because before that I wasn't really thinking beyond my own company. And there were really three things that came together. It was it was kind of funny. When I joined Forrester, there was no iPhone, but social media was the big thing that was scaring the heebie jeebies out of pretty much every company because suddenly one bad experience did not stay one bad experience or go to ten people. It was like, Oh my goodness, you had digital transformation going on at the same time. Again, we didn't call it that, but the Amazon effect, you started moving more business online, more banking, online, more financial services.

Steve:
Yeah, the internet was in full bloom by then.

Megan:
Oh yeah. And that was really when we were moving from sort of brochureware to actually doing things on the internet. So there it wasn't so much a question of a good or a bad experience as it was just different. Like what does it look like to interact there? You know, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, which suddenly brought the term experience into the public vernacular and then the sort of cherry on top of the sundae or the pebble that toppled the hill, depending on how you want to think about it, was the 2008 economic collapse because companies had kind of been dancing around this and going, Yeah, this is important. We should kind of sort of do this. But suddenly the ability to throw money at marketing and acquire customers faster than you were losing them, that option was off the table. So suddenly companies had to scramble to say, Oh, wait, we need to keep our existing customers, which means we need to understand what is driving them away and fix it. And so I call those first couple years leading up to the 2008 recession, I call those the Awakening because people were starting to get a feel for the need for customer experience. And then 2008 to 2012 I call the Scramble because that's when everybody was like, we need a survey, we need a feedback program, we need a this, we need a that. And you were there, too. I was flabbergasted by how many massive global brands had absolutely no visibility into what their customers were experiencing back then. So a lot of people scrambling.

Steve:
Yeah, that's interesting. I had not really thought about it that way, but yeah, you couldn't really afford to churn and burn customers anymore. And it's funny how those big kind of economic events define because I would say COVID had a big effect on CX as a practice too.

Megan:
Yeah, there've been a couple of those cycles. So coming out around 2012 when the economy started to get better, I call that the Inflection Period, 25th… 2012 to 2015 because you had a handful of companies that were like, okay, we have a survey that's good enough. And then other companies that were like, Wow, no, this is, like you said, an ethos, a fundamentally different way of operating. And so companies really diverged in terms of their investments and how much they transform their organizations. From 2016 to 2019, we had what I call The Bandwagon everybody was doing CX, whether it was CX or not, they were calling it that. That's where the marketing budget, everybody was on the bandwagon. And then 2020, with the pandemic, to your point, was really a reckoning. It was like, are you serious about this? Have you really been building experience management capabilities? Have you been giving it lip service? The companies that had really gotten serious in the previous years were the ones that I think were able to pivot most quickly around the pandemic and even more importantly, the one whose emails, the ones whose emails and messages of empathy didn't sound hollow. A lot of people were like, Oh, now suddenly you care about me, but you haven't cared about me until this point. Well, the companies that had shown that they did, they had some goodwill stored up because of that.

Steve:
So give me your ages again. You threw them out there and I wasn't sharp enough to be writing them down, but…

Megan:
So '06 to '07, I call the Awakening. 2008 to 2012 is The Scramble also known as the VOC Era. 2013 to 2015 was this Inflection Point – if you go back in history, a lot of the CX programs you and I know and have worked with for a long time were founded right around that time. Then 2016 to 2019 was The Bandwagon, and then 2020 to 2022 is The Reckoning. And I actually gave this timeline in the keynote that I gave at the CXPA event. And then 2023, I think we're in another one of those inflection moments. But this time I'm calling it The Commitment because it's sort of like, all right, you're either serious about this or you're not. And we've seen a lot of customer experience programs disband recently, and a lot of people were like, oh, you know, does that mean the death of customer experience? No. It means the people that aren't serious and committed are are showing that they're not. But the ones that are man, are they doubling down.

Steve:
Yeah. And I probably don't have to ask you, but who's going to win?

Megan:
Customers ultimately in the end. And employees, frankly. I mean, you and I have both worked in and with big companies and everybody wants to feel good about how the company they work for treats people. And that's a big shift, I think, in the pandemic that that brought. It wasn't just about the employee experience, but it was about the employees sense of being part of something that treats other people well, that kind of magnitude the story around CX in a way that hadn't been there before.

Steve:
Yeah, You talked about the commitment and kind of hollow empathy, and I think marketing is the closest discipline to CX because it has to be pervasive. It can't… It's not siloable. But CX, if, you know, if you've got some slogan that the experience doesn't match, it's actually going to hurt you, not help you. So, you know, particularly in our B2B, B2C, where we're ongoing relationships with our providers, the experience better match the marketing or it's going to actually end up being a penalty, not a not a benefit.

Megan:
Yeah. And I think we're seeing more balance come to that. So in the early days it was kind of about be less bad, right? And then, you know, it started to be, okay, we don't want to just be less bad. We want to be uniquely good. We want to deliver a branded experience. You heard a lot of that. Now I'm encouraging and seeing companies to kind of settle for a happy medium. I refer to it as being consistently good and strategically amazing. So it's really hard to be consistently good in a big B2B organization.

Steve:
Yeah, we see examples of it all the time.

Megan:
Yeah, but people don't necessarily buy from Amazon because Amazon wows them every day. It's like generally, you know, I know my package will get there or, you know, whoever. And then being strategically amazing as saying, how can we yes, we need to deliver wow moments, but we need to deliver them thoughtfully and in the places where they matter and where they create a differentiator. And that's a more sophisticated level of thinking about experience strategy that I think eventually everybody's going to get to. But that's where kind of the folks who are leading, that's the mindset I see now.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is the renowned CX expert, keynoter, author Megan Burns. We've been having a fascinating retrospective on sort of the evolution of CX and what kind of the modern era is today and what it means for CX pros. I want to go back to something you said earlier about some companies are just putting it away and saying we're not going to worry about that. Do they actually gain a position by that? I mean, do they do they get a segment of the market by saying we're not going to try to or do they still get the opportunity to do something consistently good or strategically amazing?

Megan:
Companies that aren't building formal programs very often, they're already pretty good at some basic things. So they sometimes they have the consistently good they they might have strategically amazing, but it's always in panic hero mode. I had early on, I had one chief customer officer come to me and say, you know what? We're really good, but we're really good in spite of ourselves and we need to not make our people be heroes anymore. You know, we need to be systematic at this. So the companies that are shutting down their their programs, I think at a minimum, they risk getting left behind and not noticing or keeping up with customer expectations changing. They're much more susceptible to changes in market dynamics. I mean, we argued endlessly over whether or not streaming services like Hulu should be in the customer experience index because they weren't really a market at the time. But that's changed. But I think they also I'm seeing particularly in B2B now, a lot more of the customers that I talk to saying that this isn't about a vendor relationship, this is about a partnership. The more, especially companies where their operations are really fundamentally entwined with their customers business. Like, look, we live or die by whether or not you're up. We need to know that if and when something happens, you've got our back and we've got yours. And we trust the way you're going to handle it. And that's very hard to do at a large scale if you don't have systems in place to plan for it.

Steve:
Yeah. Again, it's just always fascinating to talk to you and get that perspective. But you're right. I mean, if you're not available when the customer wants you and is expecting you. How could you ever have a great experience? Right?

Megan:
Yeah. One of the payment services went down the other day and we wanted to go get ice cream in our local ice cream shop had to post on Facebook that they could only take cash for the moment because the payment service was… You didn't have that kind of interconnectedness now. But it's like with the platform world, everybody is in everybody else's business, literally.

Steve:
Yeah, it's very intertwined, isn't it? It's codependent. Well, we've done a great job of, and I love your ages there. I've written them down and I'm going to reflect on some of that. But you've talked now that we're in the age of the commitment. So what does that mean for CX pros? What is the CX scene right here during the age of commitment?

Megan:
Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a there's a couple things going on. The biggest one is probably the transition from find and fix mode to prevent and innovate. So there's, you know, the be less bad is sort of find and fix broken things and put governance in place so we don't inadvertently break more things. A lot of companies have that and they have that run in pretty well. So the customer experience leaders are thinking, okay, we know that customer experience is and can be bigger than that. It's a more intentional approach. That's where kind of bleeds into customer centricity. And so they're thinking about how do we lead the rest of the organization in seeing the potential for this as a way of doing business and a way of thinking about the business? And then how do we actually move the mechanics of that? So that's one big transition that is happening right now. I think we're also seeing to what I said earlier, a lot of profitability conversations. There's unfortunately this myth out there that being customer centric and being profitable are mutually exclusive. And it's not, right?

Steve:
It's not.

Megan:
Never has been. But so you're starting to see more companies think about what would have been horrible to say 5 or 6 years ago, which is sometimes good is good enough. You know, what is the point of diminishing return? How do we find a balance of this, you know, tiered experiences so more sophisticated financial modeling, more sophisticated business model planning as this idea of customer experience as both a product and a differentiator really hits its strategic stride.

Steve:
Yeah, I should be able to quote this, but I've seen some other surveys out there about the percent of organizations that differentiate based on experience. And it's it's way over half right now.

Megan:
They think they do. In my experience, half those people aren't even sure what that means. But but no, there are very much, much, much more that are doing that. And not always with white glove service. Sometimes it's by doing less and being streamlined.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, as we move into this next stage, what's going to be kind of critical for CX leaders. How are they going to handle this in the… I mean, I heard we're moving from fixed and find and fixed to listen and innovate and ROI and so forth. But where would you guide your clients these days and our listeners just generally?

Megan:
Yeah, there's three things. And I think folks who are drawn to CX are naturally good at these, but we're really going to have to kind of challenge ourselves to be even better. One is perspective taking, and that's sort of the more intellectual brainiac side of empathy. Empathy is important, but you can't have empathy without being able to see the world through someone else's eyes. And what's interesting now is that I think the more important audience that we have to do that with is our other business partners and our the folks we work with in the organization to bring them along in this. So the ability to agree or disagree, but see the world not only from somebody else's perspective, but from multiple at the same time, that's going to be a really big skill. I wrote a post years ago about why CX leaders should do crossword puzzles, and it's because crossword puzzles force you to think about words in all different contexts, and that's kind of great practice. Another one is systems thinking, right? This holistic. It's not if we fix this or this is the driver of customer experience, it's it's an ecosystem and all of the parts are influencing each other. So the ability to understand and design and manage that and help the organization think that way is a big one. And then the last one is practical wisdom. I don't know if you've seen the book Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharp.

Megan:
Barry Schwartz wrote The Paradox of Choice. But the concept of practical wisdom is that you can't write a rule for complex or new situations. Doctors have to be kind, but they also have to be honest. And you can't give them a rule to tell them where that line is. They have to live through it and experience it and develop the wisdom to, in practical situations, figure out where the balance is between two equally important but inherently competing factors. And a lot of times we just hear people throw out use good judgment. Well, yes, but it's really practical wisdom that they're talking about. The recent announcement from Delta about the changes to the Skyclub and the SkyMiles. I am one of those customers that they are weeding out.

Steve:
Yep.

Megan:
I am going to lose big and as unhappy as I am about that, I also don't accuse Delta of being not customer centric because they had two customer groups whose needs were in direct conflict and at that point it's about picking which problem you want to have as opposed to solving a problem. So I think the ability to cultivate practical wisdom and to get others to cultivate it and recognize it, that it's something you have to build in employees. If I had to get up and stand on a soapbox, that would be the one.

Steve:
Megan We've reached that part of the podcast where I ask every guest for their take home value. This could either be something you've already talked about or reinforcing, and you've given us a lot of good structure and framework and context today. So Megan Burns, what's your take home value for this version of The CX Leader Podcast?

Megan:
My take home value for this version is the idea that scale creates problems empathy can't solve. And a lot of companies, it's not about care more. We used to have the narrative that we have to care more, individuals care, but you've got these complex systems and caring more is not going to do what you need to do to allow you to deliver a good experience. So shifting your mindset a little bit from that. The problem is people to the problem is systems. That would be my piece of wisdom.

Steve:
Well, Megan, thank you for being a great guest. And guess what? You're coming back for part two. So I'm not going to say goodbye to you because I want everybody to tune in and come back and listen to part two of our podcast. But it's always a delight to have you on.

Megan:
Thanks, Steve. My pleasure.

Steve:
Megan Burns is a customer experience expert, keynote speaker and author. Be sure to check out her website, megan-burns.com. If you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your businesses 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 our previous episodes, podcast series, a link to our blog which we update regularly 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. We'll see you next time.

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