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Steve:
CX professionals were just starting to get a handle on the expansion of customer experience, then COVID hit and changed everything, but not necessarily for the worst.

Jeanne:
For the first time, we saw the corporate veneer kind of cracked open, right. We saw people and I think we started to build businesses that were more human. We saw more caring about our employees

Steve:
Trends in CX as we start to emerge from the pandemic 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 The CX Leader Podcast. Thank you for listening. On The CX Leader Podcast, we explore 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. I'm sure there are many of you who are exhausted over the pandemic and discussing how it, quote unquote, changed everything. But it would be a disservice to not recognize its effects on our profession. And as other guests have mentioned on this very podcast, some of what we've learned from the pandemic was valuable to the overall experience management world. Well, I'm delighted to have on this podcast this week Jeanne Bliss, who's no stranger to The CX Leader Podcast, having been a guest way back in early 2019. Jeanne's a C-suite coach and a global thought leader for CX, the founder and CEO of Customer Bliss, a co-founder of the CXPA and host of the podcast The Human Duct Tape Show. Jeanne, welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Jeanne:
Hey, thanks, Steve. How are you doing?

Steve:
I'm doing good. How are you doing?

Jeanne:
Yeah, good. You know, we're finding our way out of that dark bag of COVID, but we're good. We're going over here, Seattle. We're looking for some sun lately, but I don't know. It's OK.

Steve:
Well, here in Indiana, we have sun and we have muggy, humid. But it is July, you know, mid-July. So we would not expect much less here in the Midwest.

Jeanne:
And remember the Midwest. Well, we were super hot and then now we're cooler. But it's interesting. Anyways, I'm good. So I.

Steve:
I see you're a Cubs fan.

Jeanne:
I am. I grew up in Chicago and we we we grew up all seven kids of us going to the Cubs with my dad and mom on Sundays. In fact, he would make a quick stop in front of the church so we could get our communion and tell the priest we had gone to church and then had head over to Wrigley Field. So, yeah, it's in my bones.

Steve:
Yeah. So you've probably been in Wrigley during July, too, so.

Jeanne:
Oh yeah. Well, yeah, totally. It's hot. But but still you sit in those bleachers and throw water all over yourself and it's it's all good.

Steve:
Yeah it is good. Hey you were on the show back in January of 2019. It was episode 52 of The CX Leader Podcast and unfortunately I didn't get to talk to you that day. My, my friend and colleague Pat Gibbons hosted the show that day. I just actually went and listened to the old episode just prepping for today and it was a hoot so

Jeanne:
Let's do it again.

Steve:
We kind of talked about the theme of trends and CX trends. And obviously you're a you're a well connected person and kind of right on top of of everything that's going on. But so what are kind of the key trends that you're looking at these days and what kind is on your radar screen here?

Jeanne:
Well, you know, I mean, the big thing coming out of CVOID was humanity. It's the drama I've been beating for many, many, many years. But what we're realizing is that, you know, you've got to separate the mechanics from the meaning of the work. We've gotten wrapped around the axle, around journey mapping survey work, VOC. But at the end of the day, CX or whatever you do inside of your organization, for me, Steve, is about taking admirable acts in how you lead your company and earned the right to growth. And so what we're seeing more and more is that we've got to connect what we do to how we do it, to how we achieve results that are higher than others so that the growth is sustainable. So that's one big thing. I think that it's moving past the mechanics to making this work be embedded into the business of the work. We've seen way too many companies who say they're doing CX or whatever it is. And when the person leading it or rooting for it leaves the building, so does the work. And and that means it's not real. It's it's not real. It's not embedded. It's not sustainable. And I think that when when all you're doing is programs or chasing scores, it is it is not a sustainable thing. It's not how you do the work, your business. So that's the biggest drumbeating these days.

Steve:
Yeah, right. I guess from my perspective, we've made some progress on that front, particularly, I'd say over the last ten years and maybe even more so in the last couple of years. But we're not we're not there yet, are we?

Jeanne:
Well, you know, again, it's become a big, big thing CX. And what happens when something becomes that big is that it's everything and nothing, right? I mean, it it and people are monetizing it. My clients are getting so many pitches from so many vendors saying that they're the solution when at the end of the day, you may have a lot of solutions, but it's it's what it's about, Steve, it's about the underbelly. It's about how people get along. It's about how you unite. It's about having a common purpose. And then it's about operationalizing your work to really improve customers and employees lives. And we lose sight of that where we're actually inadvertently fractional fracturing the word versus uniting it, because there are so many people with their own agenda of what this work is right now.

Steve:
Oh, yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I think it's in some ways, it's kind of typical of the times we live in today. And it takes leadership. It takes people who can who can get people to find common ground and to work together to know a more noble purpose. Kind of in your travels and stuff, just give me some examples of some of the things that that you've seen go on, particularly here during COVID. You're.

Jeanne:
Well, what I loved about COVID was, you know, seeing leaders in their sweaters or gym clothes or whatever, sitting on couches with dogs, running, buying kids and all the other stuff. And for the first time, we saw the corporate veneer kind of cracked open. Right. We stop people and I think we started to build businesses that were more human. We saw more caring about our employees. But my biggest fear is that we're going to go back to, quote, normal, and lose that behavior, that approach to the work. But the other thing that we're doing a lot of is was prompted by that, which is instead of building, for example, what you want to get from customers, which even Steve, I asked people what their journey map is. They they show me their sales pipeline. It's convert, sell, cross-sell, up sell. That is not really… Again, we've spent a lot of money and intention on building a journey map and a journey map is what you want to get from your customers. And so what we're doing is starting with customers' goals. It goes all the way back to that really pure, fearless listening as a result of your interacting with me. What what do you want to say? What do you want to have accomplished? And so goals become the glue and goals become really the Vulcan mind meld, which switches the point of view of the organization from if we help customers achieve their goals, then we will achieve ours. But that's a hard flip. That's a hard walk in my mind meld. But and it's also a lot of hard work because you've got to then change the operational KPIs of the business to measure what the customer cares about and that that takes more steps.

Steve:
Yeah, you know, I'm a big fan of goals. I always have been. And I think it's you know, those are things that I think you can get people if you do the process right, you can get people to agree that the what what is really important. But it also sometimes takes a little longer, doesn't it, than just sort of a top down, like here's where we're going.

Jeanne:
It not only takes longer and that's why it gets abandoned. You know, I mean, one of the things that we we do is I call it starting with one version of the truth, which is do we even agree what customers goals are? One client I have for right… for example, they're fighting over which journey map to use. And again, we can't set aside our priorities for coming together for one version of the truth or even one version of a goal map to serve our customers. And without that, the shenanigans proliferate and our ability to get anything done just stalls in its tracks. And then you've got to get to tactics like let's bring the C-suite together so that they can agree. And then if they can agree, then everybody else can agree. And it's just it's exhausting. And that's why this stuff gets that's why people do the, quote, easy stuff. Let's do a survey. Let's do a program. Because if you're doing these things, you're doing them independently. You can get a green dot and you can show action. But the problem, Steve, is that we're equating action with outcomes customers see and feel and the two don't connect necessarily. We're exhausting. I think that we've got me saying it one to two years of CEOs giving people enough tether on actions before they say nothing's changing. And a lot of the reason why nothing's changing is because we're not… the starting point is inaccurate. The starting point is still us versus customers customers goals.

Steve:
Yeah. Tell me a little more about break that down a little more. Give me a couple of examples of sort of how that how that breaks down.

Jeanne:
So we were doing work is my one of my easiest ones to tell and favorite one. And I can tell you some other ones. We were doing work many moons ago with Bombardier Aerospace, the part of the company that sold private planes to high wealth individuals. So at the beginning of building the journey or the experience, one of the things that often happens is the silos all want to build their version of the stage of the journey. So if you're an insurance, they they want to build the claimed experience or the agent experience or whatever. But in fact, that's not that's about you. That's about your silo. So the really good at Bombardier the really good sales and service people said, why don't we need to talk about the parts and service experience? And I kind of get a little grin. And I said to them, do you think these people who just bought private planes really want to have a parts and service experience? And then we brought customers in and we asked them what they needed. Again, goals, what we're trying to accomplish, what they want. They want to keep me flying experience. The new flying experience glues multiple silos together. It means we have to have the right pilots. We have to have planes that are cleaned on time. We have to have yes parts and service, but the parts and service in the right place along with the technicians. And guess what the first metric is how many parts and service we sold. The first metric is how many days are people in the air? How many days are they on the ground when they don't want to be? And how fast do we get them back up in the air? If you deliver on the customer goals and the customer KPIs, you will earn what you want, but we'll start with what we want. So we build the parts and service experience, which is about pitching an up sell and putting packages together parts or service, when in fact deliver what the customer needs and it will come. That's it.

Steve:
No, we actually just talking earlier today about kind of the link between our customer experience activities and what what the business wants, the ROI, and kind of got into a debate about capitalism and shareholders and stakeholders and all that. But I think I've seen enough proof that if you do the things right, the the financial outcomes will come. But it isn't easy in a complex organization. So actually, I think one tip I would take from your comments is you got to start your journey mapping your experience, design process with with the customer's perspective. And many people don't. Right?

Jeanne:
And, yeah, we get we have great Post-it notes and the whole thing, and we're just talking to ourselves. So, you know, you can build a map inside the organization, but then you've got to take it to customers and with Teams and Zoom and everything else out there, you can do this virtually now. In fact, we've run many, many two to two and a half hour sessions with customers. So you can do 10 to 15 customers and then you roll three to four execs in for the Vulcan mind meld and you go goal by goal. Is this your goal? What's important to you? What do you want to accomplish? What are we doing right? Who's doing it well? And then we actually, you know, again, using these tools, you can pull at the end and say, how reliable are we today? And then at the end of the entire conversation, you can say you kind of take a lot of furious notes. You can pull them at the end and say of these 10 things you said were important about this goal, what are your top three? So now what you're getting is your customer designing because the problem with asking the customer, how well did we do with your responding to your request for whatever is again, that's about us. When you talk about goals, you learn about things you would have never known you need to build, because what goal conversations drive is innovation. But again, this gets back to fear, worry, concern. I don't own it anymore. How am I going to get a green dot? I mean, it's ridiculous, but our lives are ruled by the red, yellow, green dots on these dashboards and it's harder to get a green dot if you have to earn that green dot with multiple parts of the organization.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is the fabulous Jeanne Bliss, who is a great guest and has been on the podcast before. I'm so grateful that she chose to come on again for those of you who don't know where you should. She is a C-Suite coach and a global thought leader in CX and really one of the really good people in our profession, in our business. Hey, I want to go back to something you said early on that I jotted down because it kind of caught my fancy. But this this whole aspect of through COVID, we saw more humanity. And, you know, I can't remember exactly the context of the conversation, but it was somebody and maybe it was a podcast guest, but they basically were making the case that that through these through this Zoom world, we've actually become more intimate in our business relationships because, you know, we've seen people in their home environment, we've met their kids, we've seen their pets, we've heard their dogs bark. And the UPS man show up during the meeting. And and I think that's that's really kind of an interesting insight. This is going to change change things forever, isn't it?

Jeanne:
I totally agree. Know I mean, well, before COVID, I was rebuilding my website and I, I, I spent a lot of time thinking about, for example, how I wanted to show up. And it was less about showing up as a person or whatever and more about telling you who I am as a person and why have a point of view. And so when you go on my website is a story about my dad and his Lester Brown shoe store and how that taught me about humanity and business. And what's weirdly cool is that's what's what what is becoming more and more important. And yeah, I mean, we love the ones of the kids, the girls tidy whitey boyfriend running across the screen. But just like I said earlier, we've seen people sitting on their couches, seeing their homes. We're we're we're not nameless, faceless corporate beings anymore. It's Joe has three kids and Mary who has this. And we've we've gone through the ups and downs of people when their family members have been sick or whatever. And I think it's taken it's it's taken the edge off. It hasn't taken the requirement to achieve away, but it's, I think, taken the ability of us to think that we're separate beings in the world. And I agree with whoever said that. I totally agree with it. What my theory is, is that we'll forget about that moment and we'll go back to the corporateness. So I really hope that we don't lose that.

Steve:
I got a follow up question on that. But this is reminding me of an anecdote from my past that I just, you know, and I come at it pretty much from the research side, guilty. But, you know, when we first start talking about these concepts of satisfaction and loyalty and commitment, you know, we related those to to, I would say much more than just customer or employee relationships. But we talked about loved ones, you know, but would like would you really like you know, would you recommend your spouse or which or how how satisfied are you with your kids?

Jeanne:
Well, yeah. I mean, I wrote a book called Would You Do That to Your Mother? So, yeah, I'm totally we need to insert our personalness, but we need we need to make it personal.

Steve:
Well, yeah. And that's what I picked up on. The humanistic aspect to this is I think we are really talking about these relationships at a deeper level than perhaps we've been comfortable with talking about in kind of the the business

Jeanne:
Where we are and we're all charged up. But the work is still as hard as it always was.

Steve:
Yeah. So, anyway, thanks for indulging my tangent. Now, I'm going to come back. A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation with somebody and they talked about their employees having burnout because of COVID and how do we keep them motivated in know to keep focused on what we're trying to do even when they're just they're worn out or they're burnt out there? You know? So I guess if you had any kind of tips along this line of being human, humanistic as leaders in your organization, of how do you keep that momentum going, even even in the face of adversity and challenges?

Jeanne:
Well, you know, the biggest thing that we have found helps is trust. You figure out how long your day is, you figure out when you are going to take a break, if you need to take a break in the middle of the day and work in the afternoon or the evening, do it. What we found was that companies that are willing to not adhere to these strict schedules and trust that their people are good people and are going to get the job done, that relieves a lot of the pressure. It also says to them, look, if you need to go take a walk or whatever, that's fine. I mean, there were also even a plethora of many things walk around Zoom after hours. But how many times can you sit in a room with a drink in your hand? I mean, after a little while, that even starts to feel like a chore, right? So I think that I think trust as a way to relieve people of fear and pain and pressure is probably the biggest thing that you could do

Steve:
In kind of a tangent to that or an adjacency to that is how do you kind of in your professional experience, make sure that we're getting the non customer facing employees integrated into the into the customer experience?

Jeanne:
Well, when when we do the goal work, we bring everybody in. When we were doing when we were doing work with an apartment building, for example, company HUGE, we brought in the janitors, we brought in office people. We brought in every part of the organization, because if you're in legal, you're affecting the experience because all that fine print that's in the resident contract, you had your finger on that stuff. And we were able to connect the dots when customers talked to their not knowing if they could even put a picture on their wall. And so they lived for a two year, two year residency with white walls because there was so much scary fine print about putting a nail in the wall that they moved out. So when customers talk, you're able to and again, it's not do you want a wall? Do you want to nail or do you want to think it's what's important to you? How do you how do you make an apartment, your home and you hear all the stuff that gets into fine print, the policies for picking up gifts, the process for throwing away your garbage, the lack of respect, you know, all of these things that have a lot of things to do with Steve, not just the front line, but all the other people that are making the machine happen and either building a respect delivery machine or a frustration machine.

Steve:
You know, I just again, thinking as I listen to your talk, you know, one of the outcomes of COVID has been a rush to digital. And so many organizations had to adapt their business model so quickly. What's the trend there that you see or what has sparked your interest in from that standpoint?

Jeanne:
Well, you know, the thing about digital is interesting, because for me, digital is one part of let me do it my way. And it's been an important part of COVID. But the other thing that's important is that people want self-service until they don't.

Steve:
Yep.

Jeanne:
So going to digital doesn't mean that you abandon all the people on your other human channels. Going digital also means that your chat bot should have a personality, right? I mean, so I think that the people we're seeing that are doing it well are connecting, saying here's who, here's how we want to show up as people. And we're even when we're on chat, we should represent people with a certain personality. But then the other thing that's important, Steve, is when people do want personal help, that now has caused the requirement to elevate the people answering the phone. Because if you've done everything you can on your own and now you get a human, you do not want to be bounced around from one human to another. You want to be taken care of immediately by a good person who listens to you and understands you and empathizes with you and gets the job done.

Steve:
Yeah. And again, I think for those organizations that had to jump the digital fast, they probably struggled with some of that seamlessness, unlike the more mature organizations that already had those kind of multi-modal approaches in place.

Jeanne:
But but I have to say bravo to people for rallying. I mean I mean, we've seen huge banks turn to digital, huge retailers do. And you've heard the stories over and over again. They did it in six weeks. What would normally take them three and a half years of churning through butter. And that's the thing that I think is the lesson is in that moment when we had to work together, we found a way to work together. So hold on to that, let's put on a show member, you know, I'm so old now, but let's put on a show, OK, here's everybody come together. No infighting on none of this. It's not really fighting. It's just agendas. We put aside the separate agendas and we got it done.

Steve:
What's more human than kind of rallying and overcoming a little bit of adversity, figuring it out and the show must go on.

Jeanne:
Yeah, and I think that that's that's probably another big thing is find a simple rally points that put people in a position of being a part of something bigger than themselves. I think part of what happens to employees is they get bucketed into little boxes and they just do the same thing every day. I mean, what we found was the greatest solution building was when we took people off the phones, we pulled people from the warehouses. We we got truck drivers and people delivering along the supply chain, for example, you know, everybody and their brother wanted to buy little desks or new couches or whatever. Well, guess who knew more than anybody else. The delivery guys. So they have been part of building the solution because they get the brunt of they're like the dog, right? They get the brunt of what happens when you deliver them two weeks late. So there you have to get a lot of people involved in rethinking what the solution is, not just people in need of shared service, traditional areas of marketing, operations, sales, get get everybody involved and then it becomes a moment. Then it becomes more about, you know, let's get this one thing done and don't pick too many of these one things. If you pick a simple big one thing that everybody can rally around now, you don't have that fractured list of one hundred projects, but you've got three big things we need to accomplish. I think we've overcomplicated it. Yep.

Steve:
Jean, we have reached that point of the show. We're I all of our guests for their take home value. Your best tip for CX Pro, who's listening, and then it's going to go back to the office later today or tomorrow or Monday. And what should they be doing in their program right now to make it better?

Jeanne:
Well, I would say two things. Go back to why, you know, what in your life motivated you to do this work in the first place? Why why does this work make you happy? For me, it goes all the way back to growing up, watching my dad and his Buster Brown shoe store and wanting to be a part of creating memories. But the other thing is, if if that is your role, then get out of your box and talk to customers, get have an honest, open, fearless conversations that start with what's important to you and what do you want to accomplish.

Steve:
Thank you, Jeanne Bliss, for being on the podcast and as always, for your wisdom and your tips. If people want to try to continue the conversation with you, let them know how they can get a hold of you and your website and your podcast and so forth.

Jeanne:
You are super easy: customerbliss.com, @jeannebliss on Twitter, and I'm on LinkedIn. You can just type in Jeanne Bliss if you want to see on the live podcast, just type in @jeannebliss on LinkedIn and you can see all the live podcasts in a feed as well.

Steve:
Yeah. And for all my listeners, if you are not tuning into Jeanne's podcast, you definitely want to do it. She does a fantastic job. And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast 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. You can sort by series and theme and speaker and guests and all those things. You can also drop us a note, let us know how we're doing or suggest a topic or guest for a future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker, where an experienced management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can learn more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thanks for tuning in for this episode of The CX Leader Podcast. And we'll see you again next.

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