The CX Leader Podcast: "Designing for Beautiful": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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

Steve:
Like many things in life, it's always a good idea to take a step back, see what changes are needed and just make it happen.

Christine:
A lot of our teams then were wondering, you know, what are customers saying? How are they feeling? Do they feel safe? What are they thinking? Are the changes that we're making impacting them for the better? Are there other pain points that are happening? And that was really why we needed to revitalize it was to bring back the voices of our customers because we wanted to know how they were doing.

Steve:
How a global company revitalized their 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. As we like to say each week, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast explores 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. Every car will need routine maintenance, oil changes, new brakes, tire rotation, even the occasional trip through the car wash. But eventually, with age, your vehicle will need more intense and expensive care. A tune up or even an overhaul. Maybe it's even time to trade it in because it doesn't have the features you need. Customer experience can be very similar. Every once in a while, you need to do some basic maintenance or completely overhaul your program to make sure it's delivering the right results for your company. Well, I'm very excited for our guests this week who can provide some insights into this revitalization of a CX program. Christine Beishline is the director of customer experience insights at Freeman, a global virtual, in-person and hybrid events company on a mission to redefine live for a new era. Christine, thanks for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Christine:
Thank you, Steve. It's great to be here.

Steve:
It's my pleasure to have you. I'm so thankful that you're willing to come on and tell the Freeman story, which I'm somewhat familiar with. But I think just for context, if if you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit of background on Freeman and then if you also wouldn't mind, one of the things we talk about on The CX Leader Podcast is most of us didn't start out to be CX leaders. We sort of got there. And so it's always interesting to kind of hear about your personal journey to kind of your position today.

Christine:
Yeah, that would be great. So Freeman is a global leader and events like you said. We've been at in the business for about a hundred years. We've seen it all. We build it all. We've built a lot of it. We know that every great event is dependent on a solid foundation, a foundation that starts from really powerful ideas paired with the right infrastructure, logistics, operations and experiences. And we're at the forefront with defining what comes next in the events industry. We want to connect businesses, brands with customers and really meaningful ways. And really at the heart of what we do is this customer experience, and it's about making those moments that matter happen for our customers and it's really what keeps us going every day.

Steve:
And so you're actually providing experiences for your clients stakeholders, in a sense.

Christine:
Yeah, that's that's right. That's correct.

Steve:
Yeah, great. And again, your personal journey. How did you become the director of customer experience insights?

Christine:
Yeah. So I actually didn't start in customer experience. I started in strategic planning and market research about 15 or 20 years ago in health care and what I loved about strategic planning, and I'll get to how this ties into customer experience. But what I loved about strategic planning was the idea that you could take people's ideas and visions and align them with data analytics and strategic goals. And some of my favorite projects were getting to work on merger and acquisition plans. So these are really fun. I don't know how many people would think that was fun, but I did. And it was like, you guys, we get to sit down with all of the senior leaders and hear what they were saying and what their ideas were, and then take that and match it with market data and help make those ideas come to life. And I love that and I found passion in it. And oddly a lot of those plans were over a hundred pages, and they were always due on Valentine's Day. I have no idea why, but they were. But I still loved it, and at the time we kind of got through all the mergers and acquisitions and a position opened up in customer experience. And I thought, boy, this would be a really great opportunity for me to be more challenged and to really grow in a way that I hadn't been able to before. And surprisingly, when I got into customer experience, I realized how much I loved it and how much it was the perfect mash up of all the things I had been doing before with strategic planning and data, which I love data and but then listening to people, but helping people and making things actually better. And I absolutely love the application of doing the work that I do with data and everything, but ultimately helping people and improving experiences.

Steve:
Yeah, I would guess you have one of the common stories you came up through the market research side, which I did too. But your connection to the strategic planning and particularly the M&A story should resonate with our listeners because that's the real benefit of customer experience is to tie it back to the business objectives and to prove the impact. And it sounds like you were quick to recognize kind of the the beauty of marrying up the quantitative with the qualitative and being able to tell that story to a senior level group in a way that made an impact on the company. Is that fairly accurate description?

Christine:
Yeah, that's actually very accurate. And and the thing I love about it the most, too, is that your our customers are taking time to share their feedback. So you're it's like you're doing them justice by listening to what they say and then trying to represent them, their voices back to senior leadership. And it's especially great at Freeman because our senior leadership teams and our leadership teams love hearing what our customers say, and it's useful to be able to deliver that back to them.

Steve:
These are great moments for me to reinforce the purpose of this podcast because you've just given our listeners really a couple or three good tips there. You know, one is that's our job is to link our customer experience data back to the business objectives. To do it in a way that speaks to the management team and then also that we have to acknowledge that we are taking information from our customers and we we need to follow through on that and close that loop because that's the virtuous cycle. It sounds like you're blessed at Freeman to have a culture at the senior level, which makes that a heck of a lot easier. So, Freeman, it sounds like your marketplace might have been disrupted a little bit over the last couple of years. Would that be a fair assumption?

Christine:
Yeah, I think that that would be a fair assumption. Not to say we weren't we didn't keep ourselves busy. But yeah, that's really a fair assumption.

Steve:
No, we all had to adapt, right? And, you know, kind of initially it was scary. But then, you know, we had a lot of innovation come out of it. So was that really the impetus for revitalizing your program or was that effort already underway?

Christine:
Well, it wasn't actually. It was an impetus for that. And during the pandemic, there were no surveys because there were really no events happening. We did. We did grow a lot in the virtual space, so we were gathering feedback from the customers who were utilizing our virtual services. But as far as our broad, broader feedback program, there was not there was not a lot happening there. But internally at Freeman, there were some very massive changes happening to our operations and our infrastructure ultimately focused on improving operations and all of the things that we needed to improve to make experiences better for customers when we did return to live. And everyone, everyone talked about that and was very excited for the day when we would get back to live events and we would celebrate once they slowly started to happen again, we'd celebrate every single one of them as a team every week would be like, Yeah, we've got we did a couple events or. And it's been really fun to watch it grow over the past couple of years. And once we did get back to live internally, a lot of our teams then were wondering, what are customers saying? How are they feeling? Do they feel safe? What are they thinking? Are the changes that we're making impacting them for the better? Are there things that other pain points that are happening? And that was really why we needed to revitalize it was to bring back the voices of our customers because we wanted to know how they were doing. And like I had said earlier at Freeman, we know that every event is built on a solid foundation. And for us, one of the main components of that is customer feedback.

Steve:
So how did you set off on this journey? What we're kind of the key things that you emphasized to get this project up and going?

Christine:
Yeah. So I talked about senior leadership support and that that is absolutely true. I've never worked for more genuine leaders than I do at Freeman. I say that truly they are. They were so supportive of investing in our transition to Qualtrics and away from the platform that we've been using. Not that that platform wasn't great and didn't serve a great purpose because it was a really great platform. But we needed a new tool that would help us get to where we wanted to be. So they were supportive of that transition. And then also of a lot of the innovations and ideas that we had and that we had in working with the Walker team that would help us reinvigorate and improve our program. So that was one just senior leadership. And then we also knew our challenges like we we really understood what the challenges were with our with our past program, and we knew we had the opportunity to leverage all the improvements and changes that were being made in our system with our data and our structure. So there was a lot of opportunity for us to rebuild and rebuild bigger and better with the ultimate goal of just capturing the feedback better and being able to bring that back to the organization. And we also had a vision of what we wanted to become. So we knew with the purpose of improving experiences that the vision, at least for insights, we wanted to become a trusted conduit for customer feedback and insights, which we were, but we wanted to become more so across the organization, trusted by both our stakeholders and our customers. And you touched on this earlier, Steve. Like that feedback loop back to the customers. Do they know that we're actually listening to them? Do they know that we're actually reading their comments because there really is a team of a small team of people, but we are reading them and we are paying attention, and we wanted to do something that would help us start building that bridge back to our customers, too.

Steve:
Yeah, the the closed the loop, particularly in B2B, which I assume you're mostly B2B, right?

Christine:
That's correct.

Steve:
You know, it's just amazing to me how many organizations just can't even do the simple process of documenting what happened in the formal relationship survey and setting that forth of some sort of document that you refer back to over the kind of the next couple of cycles of service? And it's just amazing. You know, you hear all the time, well, that person left and I, you know, I don't know anything about the account. I mean, we are way past that today with technology. So what are some of the things you learned along the way, you know, what are things that came at you that you anticipated and what were some of the surprises?

Christine:
Yes, I so I don't. I know that we wanted to keep the podcast to a certain amount of time. There is a lot there's so many and isn't that I think that's the great part of the journey is not being afraid to learn lessons and face challenges. So I'm like amidst all the other, like, very specific challenges. I think though one of them was just being willing to change and being willing to be challenged with the process. And it's hard to change because you get used to what you're doing before. And we had a program that was great. It was very well received. It was well embedded in the organization. So people were very comfortable with it and we could have pretty easily stood that back up. But we just knew that given all of the change in the organization and the evolving needs of our customers, we needed to change to which meant we needed to be ready to do that and work hard to make that happen. And that was lesson one is just being willing to change and being willing to evolve. And honestly, the we've been doing this for 10 years, so it's it's been an evolving process. And I think the second part of that being willing to change is having the right partner and the right tool to do that. And I do, you know, and having worked, I worked with Qualtrics and my first customer experience job. So I knew Qualtrics already. I had implemented Qualtrics in more of a research panel kind of way, but I loved Qualtrics. I was really glad when we could embrace that platform again and start to use that and that that was really helpful.

Christine:
We knew that we needed a platform that could be nimble, that would allow us to pull more data into it and enable us to have more robust reporting and another and also in order to be able to distribute surveys in a more engaging way because everyone gets email surveys for all super used to it. We know that we can talk now, we can text message surveys or have scannable QR codes, which feels super cool because we can design signs that show site with a QR code our customers can scan. And that's just not now, but that's also in in the future. So we learned that having that partner in that tool are really important for us to be able to enable that change. And another piece of the partner is having a partner that will learn your business because it's one thing to have a group that you work with that is helping just advise on surveys or how to implement something or automating it from a technical standpoint. But having the team that we've been able to work with, Walker has been amazing for us because they come to the table almost daily, as much as as much as we can, and we talk and we solve issues. We we strategize, we design things. It doesn't always go perfect, but that's what makes the team important because then we can overcome those challenges that we're facing and work together on that too. So it's been a really good fit for us.

Announcer:
Are you looking for a little recognition for your hard work as a CX leader? Well, here's just the opportunity. Applications are now being accepted for the U.S. Customer Experience Awards. Finalists and winners will be named in 19 different CX categories, and you could submit an entry in multiple categories. This could be the chance for your team to finally get the recognition it deserves. To find out more and submit your entry, go to usacxa.com.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Christine Beishline. She is the director of customer experience insights at Freeman, a company that you ought to check out, and we'll make sure that you know how to do that when we get to the end of the podcast here. She's been really sharing how they revitalized a mature customer experience program. Your comment, Christine, about being willing to change that again is a function that is key for our CX functions. To be successful is you have to be willing to take on the challenge and function of that to be willing to change even if things aren't broken. Like you said, you had a, well, embedded, you know, system that was well regarded, but it wasn't contemporary with where the business is. And so that's that's really key, too. So but you're on a roll, go ahead and give me a couple of more lessons.

Christine:
I appreciate that. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think one of the other areas we focused on was designing with the end in mind, but also designing for beautiful. So it's kind of a two part lesson. So beautiful at Freeman is kind of the ultimate goal. It's it's picture like the most perfect place to you on the planet or whatever you love or something that just makes you really excited and passionate. And that's that's beautiful. It's it's trying to create something in its most perfect state, and we know we can't ever get to perfect. So it's not about setting unrealistic goals, but just setting goals that are high enough that you can stretch towards them. So we were designing this program for beautiful, but then also designing with with ends in mind, like where do we need to get to, you know, as a data person, I of course, have this vision of this dashboard that I've never told anyone about, but now I'm telling lots of people about. But it's just beautiful and the data people will appreciate this, probably. But it's this beautiful dashboard with all this integrated data, and it works perfectly. And whenever anyone goes in, they can see all of the current feedback metrics and like what's top of mind for customers and what's happening.

Christine:
And they can do it really quick and it's just really easy. I don't know if we'll ever get there, but I'm optimistic. Maybe we will someday, and I feel like we have a good tool now and a good partner that can get us to that place. Even if we don't get there, we've made some really great strides, and that's what I mean in terms of designing with an end in mind. You know, we've we've designed in ways where we can get to, where we need to get to and stay focused on that. Because what also happens is when you're writing a survey and you could spend an hour and a half just writing one question, and we're dismissing it and trying to be very particular and get lost in those details unless you can stay focused on where you're trying to go and why are you measuring something and what are you trying to measure? That's what I mean by designing. With that end in mind, it's keeping focused on what you're trying to measure, what you're trying to accomplish and trying not to get lost along the way and get distracted by by other details.

Steve:
I love the concept beautiful. I wrote it down a couple of times here because, you know, setting a goal or something that's aspirational is really helpful to kind of get the mission, the vision right. Then it's so critical not to to measure against perfection, as you said, you know, we'll probably never get there, but that's the kind of the idea is to make sure you keep moving forward. So I love that. Now I know you are a very analytical person and data driven in. In my notes, I have something related to unlocking the black box. And so I'm intrigued by that because I think I know where you're going with this, but I'm going to check my suspicion here. So what about unlocking the black box?

Christine:
Yeah, so that I'm a data driven person in a very hands on person, too. So for me, with our with our prior program, we couldn't touch anything. We couldn't we couldn't watch our numbers of responses. We just we couldn't. We didn't know how the program was working per say, because we would write everything and hand it over. And our our collaborative partner at that time would kind of do all the work for us. They would distribute, they did all the automations. So with this, in this instance, as we revitalize, we also wanted to have more ownership and control over the program. And that's what I mean by unlocking the black box is just being able to watch that. Like watch, it's been so great to put survey responses or calculate margins of error now because we have the data. So we're able to do that and it's been great to be able to watch that and touch it and see how it's working. And it's been empowering for our team as others have learned how to program surveys and deploy them. And you know, you get that rush like when you hit the distribute survey button and it's going out to ten thousand people or whatever. And you're like, you know, you say a little prayer or whatever, like, you just look that work and you kind of watch the numbers. It's just it's really fun. It adds a level of fun to it. So I think in getting in and being able to dig in, we've also uncovered a lot of things that have been really fun for our team and given us some new growth opportunities too.

Steve:
Yeah, so I was incorrect, but I love your discussion about that, because, you know, I think one of the big megatrends in business in general and I think we as customer experience professionals are driving this and I think technology in particular, the cloud based tools are driving it too, and it's transparency. So, yeah, I mean, as a, you know, as a professional, you should have insights into all the workings of your program and there should not be any black box there. What I thought you were going to talk about is sort of how we formulate these complex metrics or measures that, you know, get get to be black box like, you know, nobody exactly knows, you know, how the thing's calculated and stuff like that. So actually, there I learned something well, I always learned something. That's why I enjoyed doing these podcasts. So that's great.

Christine:
Well, I will, you know, just on the subject of measurement strategy two, though, I think the the black box of that too is then not having consistent measurement across all of our surveys. So that's that's something that we've been working to design to is just make it much more transparent, like a hierarchy of why how this measure like net promoter score, for example, or overall satisfaction, how those relate to the other measures and making sure all of that ticks and ties together in our program. So when someone says, Hey, why did the NPS do this, we can say, well, it's because we know these other based on these other data points you're able to analyze. We know and can see kind of what's happening and see their relationship evolve that. So we have rearchitected in a way too and are trying to get to a place for all of that kind of unlocks and works together, though, so we can see what's happening.

Steve:
That's exactly how it ought to work. And you know, when a senior exec asks you why the NPS moved, you'd probably like to have a good story behind that. So if you design it right, that's exactly what you're going to be able to do. It should be both predictive of future activity and behavior, and it should also be diagnostic so that you can prescribe corrective action. So we were talking a little bit about beautiful and the concept of beautiful in the design. Describe what that kind of means, not only to your kind of your customers, but also to your fellow colleagues at Freeman. And and how does it sort of change the playing field?

Christine:
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that when you think about beautiful, you probably don't necessarily think about customer feedback programs, maybe. But I think pulling the two of the ideas together at Freeman, we work with a lot of different customers. So beautiful to every customer means something different. And I think that that's something that is what the is, where the value of the customer feedback program comes from, because we can capture that. So we're not trying to generalize across large segments, but we can do that and we need to do that. But we also need to understand individual and unique needs, whether they're an association or a corporate customer or someone who's coming to exhibit at our at our show. They all have a different idea of what's beautiful for them and maybe for the show manager. Maybe it's putting on the event of their dreams for the exhibitor. Maybe it's making sure that we deliver what they ordered on time, or that they don't even notice that everything is just there and they're able to do what they need to do at the show. And that's what matters most to them. So it's those it's being able to capture and understand those things through the feedback program that really help us better design beautiful and help get that feedback back to the organization so they can digest that, understand that and then make changes to improve those experience and deliver those moments that matter and try to get do what we want to do, which is put on great events and really support our customers and move towards being a more customer centric organization.

Steve:
That's probably going to be the teaser for this podcast is How can you make CX beautiful? But I love it. You know, a couple of reasons. I love it for your business. I mean, when one of your customers customers comes in to see an event that should be one of the emotions they feel when they walk in right for the first time…

Christine:
Right.

Steve:
…and your customers should feel like they are putting on something like that. And then I've always felt like, you know, we should use more emotive words when we describe CX. You know, these are important relationships. We're looking for something deeper and definitely more human than that. So I just love the concept of beautiful. So thank you for sharing that. Well, Christine, we've reached that point of the podcast where I ask every guest to give us their take home value. And this concept is that you give your best tip or your best idea that our listeners would be able to take right back to their operations and improve their programs starting tomorrow or if not later on today. So, Christine, please give us your take home value.

Christine:
Yeah, well, you might be surprised that you actually guessed my take home value earlier. And we talked about so many things like matching customer feedback with strategic plans and designing for beautiful and designing with an end in mind and getting the right tools in the right partners. But at the end of the day is I've thought about this and taking the pandemic away because there's so many other takeaways from that. But really, it comes down to collaboration and I don't think I would be sitting here talking to you. Luckily, like I am, if it hadn't been for the collaborative efforts of not only our team, but our leadership teams, our stakeholders, our customers for continuing to complete surveys and provide feedback to us and then also our partners at both Walker and Qualtrics, who helped make our program successful and our I.T. team who has just been amazing. I mean. So if I had one takeaway, it would be go, go collaborate. If you're already collaborating with a team, try to improve the collaboration, try to talk more, try to share more. If you feel like you should be collaborating more, go go start one just one this week or this month just one new collaboration within your organization where you can help just ultimately do what we're what we do every day, which is just improve customer experiences.

Steve:
Well, Christine Beishline, thank you for being such a great guest on The CX Leader Podcast. I'm kind of biased, but I really do think our clients are are the best guess we can have on there because they just share such meaningful, practical knowledge for our listeners. So thanks, I hope you might come back again some other time.

Christine:
I would love to. I would love to you. This has been great.

Steve:
Thank you. Hey, Christine, Beishline been my guest this week. She's the director of customer experience insights at Freeman. Christine, if anybody would want to continue the dialog or wants to learn a little bit more about Freeman, can you give us just a quick reference like your website or maybe LinkedIn profile or something?

Christine:
Yeah, I'm definitely on LinkedIn. You can look me up with my name, Christine Beishline, and my email is on there, but I do check LinkedIn often.

Steve:
And it's Freeman.com?

Christine:
Freeman.com, that's correct.

Steve:
Great. Hey, and if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, find all of our previous episodes, podcast series, contact information. You can drop me a note. Let us know how we're doing, or suggest an idea for a future podcast. 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 again next time.

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