The CX Leader Podcast: "Setting Employees Up For Success": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Download the “The CX Leader Podcast: "Setting Employees Up For Success" audio file directly.

The CX Leader Podcast: "Setting Employees Up For Success": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
You know, as CX pros, we sometimes get buried in the data. So how do we keep making sure it all gets put to good use?

Jill:
We really try to empower our internal teams to get the feedback that they need to make decisions based on data. Right? And we try to help them through that process. So we offer a service and really support folks through all phases of the survey process.

Steve:
Setting up employees to deliver the best possible experiences, 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 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 never been a better time to be a CX leader, and we try to explore the topics and themes that can help you deliver more amazing experiences for your customers. Customer experience is a wonderful blend of listening and understanding our customers while creating the right actions to deliver amazing experiences. But putting all those pieces together is a tall task. How do we set up the right processes to ensure the right information is delivered to the right employees, resulting in great experiences for our customers? Well, I'm really excited about our episode today, and I can't think of a better guest to discuss this topic with us from an outstanding company that runs a fantastic XM program and we're only going to be able to scratch the surface. Jill Helmle is the senior manager for Customer Experience at ServiceNow, a software platform company specializing in digital workflows for enterprise operations. Jill, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Jill:
Thank you so much for having me, Steve.

Steve:
No, it's my pleasure. And we're talking how much I admire your company and all the great things that you're doing. You really are part of this whole experience management revolution. You're kind of a critical part of that whole piece. So I'm I'm really grateful that you're willing to come on the program and share a little bit about your story. Maybe just for context, and I did a little bit of research, you have a really interesting background, and I always find it interesting to have our guests discuss their own sort of journey to becoming a CX pro. So if you wouldn't mind, just give us a brief history of your career and how you find yourself to be in this critical position today.

Jill:
Sure. Well, I will do my best to keep it brief because it is kind of an interesting path. So I was… I received my PhD at UCSB, so University of California at Santa Barbara, and my focus was organizational communication and interpersonal communication. And what I studied there was work life balance, flexible workplaces, all the sort of good stuff that a researcher would have a field day since COVID happened, right? We're all working at home and it's just a researcher's dream right now. But that's what I was focused on. And this was back kind of 2008, 2009 time frame, and I was getting ready to graduate and get out into the workforce. And I knew that that academia wasn't really the route I wanted to go, and I wanted to kind of have a practical application of what I had learned. And so I found Citrix at the time it was Citrix online, and they were actually located just around the corner from me. I used to pass their offices when I was would take my my oldest son to kindergarten every day. And so I learned about Citrix, talk to several folks who worked there and eventually was offered a job as a customer research analyst, which was fantastic. I was super interested in Citrix because they they created technology that enabled people to work from anywhere. So they were encouraging these this flexible workplace space, work life balance, all that good stuff. So I took the job as a customer research analyst, working on a customer insights team headed by Tabitha Dunn. It was also part of a larger customer experience team at Citrix Systems. And so with Tabitha, that's really where I had my initiation into customer experience. That was my first experience in terms of really learning about CX as a discipline, what it can do for business and what it can do for customers. So that's where I kind of got my start and then have just kind of kept moving through the CX space as my career has continued.

Steve:
Just a small world category. Tabitha has been on the program.

Jill:
Yes, I have heard that. And what, what a great person to to learn from as well. So it was a great introduction to CX.

Steve:
Yeah, and I got to know her when she was at SAP. And so it is kind of a small world. But what I found interesting about your background is you really kind of come at it more from the communications side where most of us, you know, almost none of us like started out to become a CX bro. A lot of us, like me, came out of more of the straight market research profession. A lot of the people have been like in contact centers or customer service or tech support. But I just think your background is interesting. And then and you actually were in academia for a while, your professor and taught and…

Jill:
Yes, I taught several different communication courses. What I did love from my program was research as well. So not only the communication element but the research element. And that's really how I got to be in the field that I am in. When it came to CX, I just really loved it and a big piece of why I loved it was the people element, the human element of it. I really like the idea of working for a company focused on customer experience because I felt when you do it right and you really focus on the customer, that you can really make people's life better or easier, even if it's just in a little bit in a in a small way. And so that was what really kind of drew me to that work.

Steve:
Yeah, it really is a practical application of what your academic interest was, and so congratulations for finding it and the profession's better for having you in it. You know, I know a lot about ServiceNow, but not as much as you do. But I you know, I'm a big fan of the company and I just I see how critical the work that you guys do there at ServiceNow is to this whole movement of experience management. But maybe for our listeners, just give us a quick overview on ServiceNow because we are going to talk more specifically about your program and how closely linked it is and how really good you are at experience management there internally, but also how important it is for what ServiceNow is trying to do for their customers.

Jill:
ServiceNow is a great company to work for. I really love it. You know, they they talk about kind of being on this rocket ship at ServiceNow, but it's really a fantastic place to be and really the core of the work that we do and the software that we provide are really about automating workflows and making work work better for everyone, make work easier when you when you can automate those workflows. So that's kind of the the high level. But what we really strive to do and we hear this, we have a fantastic CEO and Bill McDermott, but really our North Star is about the ambition to become the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century, and that's really the North Star and doing that through customer experience as a differentiator. And so that's really where we're striving to be. Where still trying to to disseminate kind of that idea and the culture throughout the organization. I think that customer centricity is really in our DNA at ServiceNow. Our team, our CX team has really tried to operationalize that across the business. I've been at a lot of organizations and I can truly say that we have buy in from the executive team in terms of how important customer experience really is, which is amazing. So it's not just talk. And I really say, you know, our executives, they really walk the walk when it comes to their investment and customer experience. You know, we talk about NPS and our earnings calls, we talk about NPS at our all hands. Our team has really worked hard to kind of elevate those insights across the organization so that we can kind of democratize those insights so that all of our teams know their role in the customer experience and what they can do to make it even better. And so that's something that we've really been working towards. So really just coming together, trying to align the company and working towards that North Star of CX.

Steve:
Yeah, walking the walk is a great one. To oversimplify, your software helps companies with the processes so that their employees can deliver great experiences for their customers. And so in that respect, you guys are very much involved in this whole movement and the fact that you practice what you preach internally is not lost on those of us who are fans of this profession and fans of the business. I really encourage my listeners, if you're not familiar with ServiceNow and you're in the CX or EX business, you should be. So they're a publicly traded company. You can do lots of research at their website. But let's talk a little more about your program, and you call it the Survey Center of Excellence, correct?

Jill:
Yes. Survey…

Steve:
What was…

Jill:
…Center of excellence. Yeah.

Steve:
Yeah. I always like it when the program or the initiative is branded. So how did you get to that and sort of what's the overriding objective of the center?

Jill:
You know, we have a great leader on our team, Matt Lombardi, who was putting together our customer experience strategy team just about three years ago at ServiceNow. And the Survey Center of Excellence was really part of his vision for our team. And so that's kind of what it was called from the beginning. I actually had managed a similar Survey Center of Excellence at Citrix many years before. Very different… similar but different kind of based on program maturity and that sort of thing. And so I had experience in doing so. But when Matt was putting together the team, that was a role that he was hiring for, first off. And so I was hired to create the Survey Center of Excellence, which I can tell you a little bit about what that is. It's a lot. It's a mouthful. So we call it SCOE. S.E.O.E. a lot of times. I think we came in and we were implementing Qualtrics as our experience management platform. There had also been other tools and platforms that were being used, and so the survey experience was a little bit disjointed. Different teams were using different tools, sometimes not branded properly. Variations in brand. The data was siloed in these very different tools.

Jill:
And so part of our goal was to bring all of the teams across the organization onto one experience management platform, and that was going to be Qualtrics. And so part of part of that initiative was this Survey Center of Excellence, which is created to really to be able to provide governance around the survey process and around the use of Qualtrics as well. So I tell folks, you know, basically what it is, is the central hub for all things survey at ServiceNow. And so we ask folks of teams, internal teams at ServiceNow, if you're going to send a survey, please work with the Survey Center of Excellence. So anyone sending an internal survey to our employees or external surveys to our customers and partners, so we ask them to work with us. And what we do is we provide best practice guidance on survey design, on all phases of the survey process to just design, to distribution, to reporting. We want to ensure that every question is actionable so that they can get the insights they need to really to drive improvements across the organization. And so we're there to provide a quality check and really as a service to the organization.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Jill Helmle. She's a senior manager for customer experience strategy at ServiceNow and really talking, having a fantastic dialog about how they take their Survey Center of Excellence and ServiceNow and really empower their folks to have world class, close the loop and just deliver tremendous experiences. So just general don't want to be inside trade secrets or anything, but just the scope and scale of this operation, just how many surveys or how many data points or however you might be comfortable in talking about it.

Jill:
Right? Right. For sure. So we have a request process that we ask folks to kind of complete. A it's actually a Qualtrics survey that asks about their survey objectives and things, their target audience, and we track those. And so we also track the teams that we work with. And we actually we work across all business units at ServiceNow. Last year we worked with over 80 teams internally in our organization. And the this is an estimate, but I believe we we sent about 600 to 800 surveys. Most of those are internal across the organization because we really we also exist when we think about our customers to protect their experience and to minimize their survey burden. So oftentimes we will advise, we'll talk through a project with someone. We want to find out the types of feedback and data they're looking for. We determine, does that data already exist? You know, is it already in this organization that we can tap into? Right. Is a survey the right method? Maybe we just need to talk to a handful of people and do some qualitative research and an interview, and then we really just help talk them through so that we make sure that if we are going to survey that there really is a good business purpose behind it, and that when we do ask those questions, that those questions have been designed with best practices in mind so that it's actionable, so that any feedback we get from either our employees or our customers, that that feedback is actionable to us as a business so that we can actually act on it.

Steve:
That's tremendous. You know, you said a couple of things in there I just want to reinforce for our listeners here, but the governance model that you have and being able to put it all into a single repository so that if you don't need to go get new information, the information already exists. Not only is that saving the organization money, but it's also wear and tear on the the customers. And the other thing you said, which is related is we want to make sure that if our customers spend time and give us information that we actually take it in and make something positive happen for them. So I think that's really how you guys have developed a, you know, a best practice in terms of governance. And then I know one of your really claims to fame is your close the loop follow up. So how does the center ensure that these 80 business units and six or 800 different surveys really are getting you the return on investment and people are taking action on it?

Jill:
That's a good question. So, you know, some of the surveys that we work with, the majority of what we do get at the Center of Excellence are internal. So they could be small team surveys, they could be larger organization wide surveys focused on various initiatives. They're internal, they're quick data points. So not all surveys need that outreach in terms of closing the loop. Oftentimes we do that with sharing the insights we found, right? So if we're internally, we're going to share those insights and also talk about what we're going to do based on those insights, what actions we're going to take. Externally, you know, we have at ServiceNow over 15 ongoing customer listening programs that all have a very robust action workflow and closed loop system. So even our digital programs, so even the digital survey programs that we have have closed loop built in. And we found that we know that when we do follow up on feedback that we have higher NPS year over year. So we really know that that is is important. It's very important, of course, for our customer relationship to know that they've been heard and if they have an issue that someone's going to follow up with them and try to make things better. And so just kind of in terms of members, you know, at ServiceNow, in terms of this enablement, we have 2000 owners across the business who are closing the loop every day. We also focus on the macro feedback that we get and we use that macro feedback to drive large initiatives across the company that will improve the customer experience. And so what we've seen is kind of with the macro and the micro together is really where the magic is.

Steve:
Yeah. How do you work with the various operational areas? Do you guys actually have people in there that are following up on this?

Jill:
For those large programs that are ongoing, those customer survey programs, we have a program owner and so we have a program owner that does the the analysis and the distribution of those insights and shares those with the appropriate teams. Right. The teams that those insights and feedback is in relation to. And so in addition to leadership, so they also share those insights with leadership. But they have those relationships and those connections across the business that they're always in touch with. And we also have goals in terms of closed loop rate, right? And so and the leadership in our company, they they hold the teams accountable for reaching those goals. It's really important to follow up on that feedback. And that ServiceNow, it's so exciting for us and that we've reached a 90% completion rate when it comes to closing the loop and 90% based on our experience, our team's experience across various companies is really seems to be world class. And so we're really proud of that. We're always trying to get better, you know, always striving to to close the loop 100%. And we're getting there. And and I think that really just shows how much customer centricity is is at the focus of our business.

Steve:
Talk a little bit more now about how you at the Center of Excellence keep encouraging this to keep improving so that people are even more and more aware and delivering these outstanding experiences for your customers.

Jill:
So what's really fantastic at the Survey Center of Excellence with the organization, we really try to empower our internal teams to get the feedback that they need to make decisions based on data, right? And we try to help them through that process. So we offer a service and really support folks through all phases of the survey process. Part of that is we help them with dashboarding, getting those right insights and analytics so that they can make the most well informed decisions based on that data. We also help our organization with kind of high impact surveys and survey programs that help enable our leadership to make really critical decisions around employee experience at ServiceNow. So it's it's been a really great program, really. I feel like the success is in the relationships that we have built across the organization. That's really kind of where the success has come from. It's been a little bit of a grassroots effort, but folks are keep coming to us. We have new users almost every day, at least every week, and it's been a really great experience.

Steve:
Thank you for sharing the story. And now we've reached the point where I ask every podcast guest to give us their take home value. This is the one tip or one idea that our listeners could actually take back and in a relatively short time period, implement it to make their programs better. So, Dr. Jill Helmle, what is your take home value for this podcast today?

Jill:
It may sound a little biased, but my take home value is, if at all possible, to invest in a survey center of excellence at your organization. It's not always the first thing that you think about. If you're building a new program or you're building a CX team. But it's very, very important to kind of have that governance and to have a CX focused mindset as you're thinking about crafting your listening programs. So I was hired at the beginning, at the start of a program at ServiceNow, and it was that vision that's allowed us to thrive and grow with ServiceNow. And there is definitely a direct tie with survey operations as your program matures. So it's something that's that's really important as you build your CX program.

Steve:
Jill Helmle is the senior manager for customer experience strategy at ServiceNow. Jill, thank you so much for being a great guest here on The CX Leader Podcast. I appreciate it.

Jill:
Thank you so much, Steve.

Steve:
And if anybody would like to continue the conversation with you, I know you're out on LinkedIn any other way that can they find you that ServiceNow on the website or…

Jill:
I don't think I'm on the website, but LinkedIn is a great, great way to go. I'd be happy to talk with other folks who have a love and passion for CX.

Steve:
Great. Well, again, thanks for being on the show and hopefully we'll get you back in for another one someday. Appreciate it. And 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 me here 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, find all of our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. It's an incredible resource for CX Pros – over 250 episodes now. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experienced management firm that helps companies accelerate their XCM 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. So go out there and keep working hard because our organizations are dependent on us. Thanks, and we'll see you again next time.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your wav files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including enterprise-grade admin tools, advanced search, automated translation, secure transcription and file storage, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.