The CX Leader Podcast: "The Year of Agility": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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

Steve:
Here's a quote that should get your attention: "Bad experiences are costing businesses some four point seven trillion dollars in consumer spending every year globally."

Bruce:
There continues to be a demand for consumers to be treated well, or they're going to make decisions about going somewhere else. So we really looked at when people had a really bad experience, how often did they either say that they were going to decrease their spending or they were going to completely stop.

Steve:
Continuing to look at customer experience trends in 2022, 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. We like to say that it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast explores 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. We've always maintained that customer experience is one of the best differentiators you can leverage in driving customer loyalty. And there's yet another piece of research that's proving this assertion correct, with consumers giving companies a clear warning about 2022: "we won't tolerate bad experiences." Well, my guest today is no stranger to our podcast. Bruce Temkin is the head of the Qualtrics XM Institute. He's a very well-known thought leader in customer experience and experience management world. He's also a super nice guy, somebody who I've known for a long time and is a real thought leader in our whole profession, and he's here to talk about some of the results that are coming out of the 2022 Global Consumer Trends Report. Bruce, happy New Year and welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Bruce:
Thanks for being here. It's a crazy year, so it's fun to talk about this year and 2022.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, just in case somebody has no idea who you are, which I can't imagine that anybody in the CX world doesn't know who you are, but just give us a little bit of your background and also just remind us what the XM Institute does.

Bruce:
Sure. So those of you don't know me, I lead the XM Institute, which is a part of Qualtrics that is focused on helping XM Professionals around the world master experience management. Our mission is to empower and inspire XM Professionals around the world to deliver breakthrough experiences. So we do lots of research and publishing, creating online training and a blog posts and research report and tools all focused on helping XM Professionals. Whether you focus on customer experience, employee experience, product experience or brand experience to be able to do your job better and all of this that can be accessed, this is my one pitch, from xminstitute.com. Pretty much everything we do is for free, so go visit us there.

Steve:
Yeah, I mean, you've always been helping to build the category and with your association with Qualtrics, you just probably have a bigger platform to do that. And we we've had you and your colleagues on the podcast before, and I always say it. It's not. It's just fine to pitch because if you're a CX leader and you're not accessing the content at the XM Institute, then you're missing the boat on that. So really grateful for what you do for the whole profession. And sometimes you guys even put some of our stuff up there, too.

Bruce:
Oh, we love it when you publish on our site. Actually, some of the more popular content is when you talk about B2B and we get to publish the report. So keep giving it to us.

Steve:
We will. Well, you've got your new report out your 2022 Global Customer Trends report and man, what a year. Maybe before we get into that, let's just talk about 2021. And you know, we're coming up on year two of the pandemic and been a lot of challenges, a lot of them really mind blowing and significant changes to the way we do business. But in many ways, a lot of opportunities for those of us in the XM profession, right?

Bruce:
Yeah, I I actually think that, you know, this has been a tough year on lots of dimensions, but a particularly important and I think positive year for the profession of the more broadly experienced management. You know, lots of things happen in 2021. One of them is that there was an intense focus on people, right, whether the people happen to be customers or whether the people happen to be employees or whether people happen to be patients or whether people happen to be doctors. Pretty much everything that happened in 2021 was intensely focused on human beings, and what that does is that raises the visibility of the profession of experience management, right? Because we are what what do we do? We help organizations understand and cater to the needs of people. And I think that the whole rest of the world joined us in recognizing how important that is in 2021. So I think it was. I think it will turn out to be a really good year in the evolution of experience management, although not such a great year for many of us in other ways.

Steve:
Yeah, I think that's a really good perspective that you just brought to it is that, you know, when times are tough, we really do we we try to take care of each other. And you know, that's kind of what the XM profession has been about for a long time. So I guess if there is a silver lining, it's it's made us all, you know, just a little more aware that we do need to take care of each other. So I really like that concept of a focus on people. You know, the other thing that I think that this pandemic really brought on was the acceleration of digital. And I know you guys have talked a lot about that, but I don't know if you wanted to comment on on that at all, too.

Bruce:
Yeah, no. It's funny the clearly digital accelerated right. And when I look at consumer practices that stay and those that go, I always start with the the viewpoint that we as human beings are incredible, incredibly resilient and our resilience is good and bad. Right part of the resilience is that we, whenever something comes up that makes us change what we do, we like to go back to our old patterns. So when I bring that to digital, I think it speaks to some points of digital where I think there we're going to lose momentum and we've looked at this right. Like, I think that Peloton, I would not want to be trying to maintain growth at Peloton, for instance, because you know, part of what we've seen is the digital move to online exercising was a new type of behavior that started during the COVID. And new types of behaviors don't generally stay because people like to go back to them. But what we see accelerating are the types of behaviors that were already part and growing with with consumers like online banking, online customer service, right? Even some of the streaming, not to the extent we've seen. So I do think that, you know, while online became a formidable part of our lives even more than we would have expected going into 2020 and 2021, that there's going to be some reverting back to normal behaviors as people decide, you know, I really do want to dine and I don't need to, you know, have my food delivered by Grubhub and UberEats. And I do want to go to the movies because, you know, there's only so many blockbusters I can watch from HBO Max in my home theater. And I do want to go to football games and concerts, and I do want to go to my religious services. So I think digital got some momentum, but I don't think everything we've seen is going to stick going forward.

Steve:
That's really interesting. We could do a whole podcast on that because I actually I just saw something on one of the feeds earlier today about some of these companies that got a big boost out of COVID like Peloton. And they were talking about which ones, you know, it might come back. And it's sort of the same thing, but your perspective on that's really interesting. So that that right, there is kind of a good filter for us to think about. Is this something that you know really is going to endure and will be a forever change? Or are we going to want to go back and I'm with you? You know, I'm I'm kind of I want to go back to live music. I want to go to sporting events. I want to go back to religious services. You know, as we head into 2022 what are some of the things that that you're looking at and what are kind of some of the big things that you think is going to happen as we come out of this second year of the pandemic?

Bruce:
Yeah, I think that we're about to label 2022 the year of agility. That's that's our theme. And that's because I think that encompasses everything that I see going into next year, right? What I see is that anyone who locks into a strategy based on a deep understanding of what's going to be going on with their customers and employees is has a flawed approach, right? Like, it's like the only thing I know for certain is that just about every assumption about what 2022 is going to be like is going to be wrong. And so in that environment, it's really important that organizations build for agility, right? You know, agility with they're going to be a ton of employees who are going to leave your company. And hopefully if you're doing well, they're going to be a ton of employees that are coming. So your organization is going to go through this amazing transformation of skills and capabilities. In some cases, it'll go down your skills and capabilities and others it'll go up, right? We're replacing employees, but you're going to be if you're a growing company, you're going to be short of employees trying to keep up with the pace, right? You know, everyone has a hiring shortage, if you're trying to build because you have to make up for the people, the leaving, so like how much are you going to be all that stuff on the employee side. And then on the customer side, the digital things we just talked about, right, like it's going to be hard to gauge when the digital uptake on some things in the down take on others. And we talked about, you know, and I don't want to pick on Peloton, but we talked about Peloton – does Peloton forecast another surge of COVID, which will create another surge of sales for their, you know, for their hardware products? Or do they expect things go back to normal because of the vaccine, in which case people go back? You know, all of that stuff is unknown. So I think that this is the year where you really focus your experience management efforts on being able to pulse and understand what's going in the market at any point in time and continue to be very fluid in the decisions you make, especially this the strategic commitments you make and try and make strategic commitments as late in the year as you can.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is our longtime friend, Bruce Temkin, and, you know, thought leader and and guru of experienced management throughout many, many years of service to our industry. And we're talking a little bit about the year that has been 2021, but more importantly, what we ought to be doing for 2022. Let's talk a little more specifically about the the consumer study that you're you're you guys are rolling out. And you know, what are some of the big themes? What are customers saying as we head into 2022?

Bruce:
So it's it's interesting. We find and you mentioned the four point seven trillion dollars, which is part of our global study. Right. And I think that that points to there continues to be a demand for consumers to be treated well or they're going to make decisions about going somewhere else. Now, like what we end up finding out is it's not, you know, the idea that every time you have a bad experience, people just walk away is not true. So we really looked at when people had a really bad experience, not just a generically bad experience. How often did they either say that they were going to decrease their spending or they were going to completely stop? So we found about thirty four percent. And this is a global study. The study was of 18 countries, but then we extrapolated that to all of the other countries. But about thirty four percent of consumers globally said that after very poor experience, they would cut back and 19 percent about one out of five said they would completely stop spending from an organization. And so when you put that all together and we looked at the overall consumer spending inside of each country, you end up with about four point seven trillion dollars. So we know that there's a pot of money that is at risk and continues to be risk, which is sort of good for the profession, right? Because we know that what we do matters. That's one thing. What we do really matters. We also found that when we asked consumers about what they thought should be improved – and so we gave them a whole set of choices about different things that they thought should be improved with the experience they wanted pretty much across the board for most industries and most countries customer service came to the top. Right. They wanted, I should say, after, you know, after wanting prices to be lower, they wanted the thing that they felt needed to be improved the most was customer service. So I think what we're seeing a big trend that we're seeing in a big thing that will continue is, I think, the importance of customer service as a function inside of organizations, right? How we treat customers who have a problem, how we treat customers who haven't been able to fully get the value out of whatever it is they purchase from us. That is going to be an even more important function going forward because if you combine that with, you know, organizations are realizing that human beings are really important and the service experience is something that people are really being bothered by and needs improved with means that I think there will be renewed focus and investment on in customer service functions going into next year.

Steve:
Yeah, you know, one of the things that we've keep discovering throughout these interesting times is that there really are unique things you can do with technology to improve the service experience. I'm actually traveling on business tomorrow and I got, you know, my digital key and my room assignment already. And so when I check in at my hotel tomorrow night, I'm just going to walk straight to the room and use it. And you know, we weren't doing that pre-COVID. And it gets gets you to the point where you're spoiled, right? I mean, and we're in the business. So we get we're particularly, I think, a little bit sensitive, but there are so many great experiences out there that when you have a bad one, it's just it really, really stinks now. It's just, you know, it's just so irritating. And I think what your study is highlighting is that, you know, if if there's a replacement or a, you know, if there's an alternative to that really bad experience, people are going to take their money, other places.

Bruce:
I think part of when we talked about the fact that organizations and leaders are recognizing that people are important, I think people are becoming – I don't want to say, selfish in a bad way, but they're being selfish in a good way, right? That people are realizing that their their time is precious, right? And I think that by and large, people are saying that I deserve to be treated better. And we're seeing that in the space, right, as people start thinking about themselves, if we've had to, we've been sheltered in place. We've been, you know, focusing on our needs, right? We become intensely focused on our own needs and how we're being treated. And I think that that, you know, that amplifies the issue you're talking about, right? Like, you know, I don't want to wait in line at a hotel to figure out that I got the wrong room and I go up and it's not the king size bed I wanted, and it's a twin bed or whatever we want, right? In this day and age, we really want our needs to be taken care of.

Steve:
And I think that aspect of service, you know, particularly if we're paying for the service we want, we want it delivered as as well as we can now. When we were prepping for this, you, you introduced me to a new word called "skimpflation." Tell me about "skimpflation" because I'm kind of interested in this.

Bruce:
Yeah. So I can't take credit for that. That word that was not one that I came up with, but it's sort of the notion that, you know, people are cutting back on their service investments. Yeah, right? And so and you know, people are doing it, whether they mean to or not, right. In some organs, you can't hire people, you're losing people, you have turnover, right? And so sometimes companies are purposely underinvesting in the services. Sometimes it just sort of happens. But if you think about this world in which there's more demand for us to be treated better and organizations are underinvesting in that part of their organization and capabilities, you run into this really sort of skimpflation is sort of the the the lack of service relative to expectations based on, you know, investing in this area. So I think that, you know, as organizations think about where they need to do, where they need to invest and the increasing demands of their customers, hopefully this skimpflation will disappear when inflate as inflation also disappears from our midst.

Steve:
Let's talk a little more about some of the positives that are going on and some of the things that you're seeing just from your perspective, your your literally global perspective. You know there are some companies that are obviously leaving money on the table due to poor experiences, but on the other side of the equation, we have just incredible breakthroughs and and really great stories of companies that are innovating around their experiences. Can you just share some of the kind of macro, really positive things that you see are occurring?

Bruce:
So, you know, I think that when I go back to just if I think about the the XM space, right, just there is an enormous investment in employee experience, right? Like that's wonderful, right? Because I think that, you know, employee experience is has been mostly outdated sort of the way customer experience was like 10 years ago. You know, people would do an annual study and, you know, do some PowerPoints and make pretense that it was important. And then, you know, put the PowerPoints back and come back to it a year later. So they're starting to do much more robust, ongoing pulsing of employees really sort of focusing on how they take action based on what employees are thinking and feeling sets. That's that is a great thing I see happening across the board. The I think the whole practice of employee experience has jumped, you know, five years in this one year because of COVID. And and, you know, while we see employees, even the fact that employees are leaving, you know, the great resignation, I talk about the flip side of that, the great onboarding. Right. Because if you're a company, you're you're bringing people in. All of that is forcing organizations to think more about their employee brand and how they treat employees. So I think it's like this is going to be a turn out to be a wonderful time for employees because of the employee experience focus of organizations. I think that's a great thing. I do see, you know, we talked about digital, right? I think that the the residual of this is that many organizations have really stepped up the effectiveness of their digital platforms and made them easy and easier, right? Because if you think about what happened in the last year or so, digital adoption, whether it was people using Netflix or people buying or ordering from UberEats or whatever people are doing digitally, the use of that had been primarily heavy digital users. But over the last year, organizations had to cater to a wider group of people using their platform, many of them who aren't necessarily as digital or digitally oriented as others. So what I've seen is lots of organizations have made their platforms easier to use, right? Because they've been forced because the new wave of users, you know, are grandmothers and aunts and uncles. And, you know, not the they're not just, you know, 20 year olds who will figure out anything that you put in front of them that's either on a phone or on a computer. And so that's been great because I think that whole practice of making things easier will be a discipline that will continue to go on. So that's that's been a great thing. I also think that, you know, and we've probably talked about this for for a decade, Steve, that the organizations in order to effectively use experience management, we used to call it just customer experience. Now we're more broadly experienced management. They have to act on what they learn. They have to act on it. And I'm hopeful that the muscle that organizations have built over the last year to act on because they've been forced to continues on and that we don't just, you know, track information and ask questions of customers and employees and have dashboards that we look at that hopefully this process and organization has been really good over the last year. It's saying, all right, we can't just have quarterly meetings, so we to sometimes get together weekly or monthly and look at what's happening and make decisions about how we're changing our business or how we're treating this segment of customers or that segment of customers. Hopefully, that muscle continues and we continue to see organizations take action based on the insights that they're gathering.

Steve:
So just to bring this thing full circle, you know, we talked earlier about how this after the pandemic, people might want to go back to the way things were. But in terms of taking action on your EX and XM and CX initiatives, we do not want to go back. We want to keep pushing forward. Bruce, we've had a fascinating discussion, far reaching and talking about a lot of the trends that you've been seeing at the XM Institute. But we've reached that point of the program where we asked for advice, and I think you've given us a lot of good advice today. But with all these things considered, what should our XM pros be focused on in 2022 and then what's your specific tip? What's your specific take home value? What should people be working on right now to make sure that 2022 is their best year ever?

Bruce:
So I'm going to break with my normal angle and advice, and here's my advice to accent professionals: grab this moment. I think it's a special time when XM is particularly important and particularly needed and is the should be the focus of most organizations as they go into what we're calling the Year of Agility 2022. So my advice to XM Professionals is don't treat this year like every other year. Don't ask for incremental plans. Don't do incremental types of activity. Step up and make sure that the leaders in your organization understand how XM can be the underlying capabilities for the organization's agility. Rethink how you talk about experience management. Don't talk about it as, you know, net promoter score or employee engagement data. Talk about how XM creates the ability to continuously learn, propagate insights and rapidly adapt the foundations of agility. And I want you to use that language so that you make sure that in this moment when XM should be fundamental to organizations, that it becomes that for you and your work. So grab the moment. That's my advice.

Steve:
That's awesome. Thank you for that. Grab the moment. And it is the year of agility and there's no need to be nibbling around the edges. It's time to be bold. Hey, Bruce Temkin is the head of the XM Institute. Bruce, thanks as always for being a guest on the podcast. We always enjoy it. If anybody would like to continue the conversation, make sure that to let them know how they could get a hold of you and also access the content at the XM Institute.

Bruce:
Absolutely, I would repeat. xminstitute.com as many times as anyone would let me. xminstitute.com. It's a place to get access to all of our content, all of our resources. Join our global community and you can find me there or find me on Twitter at the handle @btemkin.

Steve:
Bruce, thanks again for being a guest on the podcast. Here's to a great 2022, and I'm sure we'll have you back on soon.

Bruce:
Looking forward to it. Cheers.

Steve:
If there's anything you want to talk about that you heard on this podcast or previous podcasts, or about how Walker could help your businesses 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, our podcast series and our contact information. You can drop us 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 you again next time.

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