Category: Podcasts

Building a Transformative Culture of Caring Leadership and Active Listening Inspires Employees and Elevates CX

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Heather R Younger, founder and CEO of Employee Fanatix, a leading employee engagement, leadership development, and DEI consulting firm. Heather is on a mission to help leaders understand the power they possess to ensure employees feel valued at work. Heather has built a reputation as a champion for positive change in workplaces, communities, and the world at large by delivering clear and purposeful strategies that drive real business results—such as increased employee engagement, loyalty, collaboration, and connectivity. On this episode, we discuss three key principles from her book, “The Art of Caring Leadership.”

The Impact of Caring

Heather experienced the importance of caring from a young age. Born into a mixed-race family, she and her dad were viewed as outcasts by many in her mom’s family. But one aunt on her mom’s side always made her feel included and worthy of her care and attention.

When Heather was nine, her family moved from Ohio to Las Vegas. She remembers her aunt sending her a large box of eight individually wrapped gifts for every day of Hannukah. To Heather, the box represented the connection between her and the other half of her family that didn’t really make her feel included or cared for, but her aunt did.

Her aunt demonstrated that she was a leader with heart. That has stuck with Heather and helped build the foundation for what she does around the world to guide others towards caring leadership.

Three Key Principles of Caring Leadership

In her book, “The Art of Caring Leadership,” Heather writes about how to build greater trust and engagement in the workplace through caring leadership that promotes inclusive cultures, improves morale, and builds resiliency. On this episode, she shares three key principles of leadership that inspire loyalty and improve retention and performance—translating to better employee and customer experiences.

1. Cultivating Self-Leadership

Often when we think of leadership, we think of leading others. We think we need to do something for someone else first. But Heather says it’s important to make sure leaders care for themselves first, before caring for others. She says each day should begin with a focus on self-leadership. This includes making sure your words and actions align with the things you say you value, being authentically yourself, exercising good self-care, and building a strong supportive network.

Heather emphasizes that cultivating self-leadership first, helps us give from the positive sides of ourselves, not the empty parts that we then rely on others to fill. She explains this with a metaphor someone shared with her about a coffee cup and a saucer. If you pour into the coffee cup and it overflows onto the saucer, caring leaders should give from the overflow. If you don’t, then you’re drinking from the coffee cup and giving from the coffee cup and it will eventually run dry. You’ll have nothing left to give.

2. Making People Feel Important

Heather says there’s nothing better we can do for a person than making them feel important. It’s critically important that managers recognize and show appreciation for people at work in specific ways so they feel appreciated and recognized.

According to Gallup research, only one in three workers in the U.S. and Germany strongly agree that they received recognition in the past seven days for doing good work. If they haven’t received praise, they don’t feel appreciated and are twice as likely to say they’ll quit in the next year.

To address this, Heather says workplaces must be filled with appreciation and gratitude. They also need to foster strong human connections with leaders, the organization’s brand, customers, and coworkers. She recognizes the importance of looking at touchpoints throughout the employee journey and ensure they feel connected. Once employees feel disconnected, they care less about the organization’s mission, less about the tasks and processes to be completed, and they want to do less, they start to check out, and then they leave.

Heather senses that organizational leaders know the importance of appreciating employees, but the number of leaders that practice it on a regular basis is likely much lower. To help incorporate employee recognition into organizational cultures, Heather works with executive members and team members within organizations to build employee engagement and DEI practices with accountability. She ensures thoughts and actions align to produce results that employees and customers actually need.

3. A Culture of Listening

To demonstrate the importance of listening, Heather talks about when each of her four children were babies. They’d make cooing sounds in their cribs and were so happy when their voices produced the results they needed—mommy or daddy arrived at their side. Then there were times when they made noises and she wouldn’t go to their crib and they’d start throwing or knocking things. Our voices are innate and they make us us. At work it’s no different, she says. If we use our voices and no one responds, or cares, or listens, then we feel inconsequential; we feel like cogs in a wheel spinning to achieve an end goal that doesn’t align with our own goals.

Listening is critical. Heather has a five-step process for listening and an upcoming book on the art of active listening to ensure people at work feel heard, valued, and understood.

Of all the things organizations want at work—employee engagement, customer satisfaction, customer retention, higher revenues—we’ll never reach those goals if we can’t listen to stakeholders to give them what they need. Listening helps people feel important and know you care. Then they want to engage with you.

This aligns with who we are at iQor and our strong customer service culture. We prioritize helping customer service agents, supervisors, and all other employees understand how important they are to us as people, not just from a business perspective.

Reflect on Your Leadership Goals

To sum up her approach to caring leadership and put it in perspective for all leaders, Heather recommends identifying a person you’ve worked with, a manager or not, who made you feel like you could do anything. Someone who appreciated you and recognized the work you did every day. Then think about someone who made you feel small and inconsequential at work—like you were just there to get a job done. Which person do you want to be? You’ll be remembered either way, but as which type of leader? This is a choice leaders make every day.

What Heather Does for Fun

Heather loves spending time with her crew of teenagers—her four children. They all love hanging out together, going on long walks, going to the movies, even watching double-header back-to-back movies at the theater. It doesn’t matter what they do, Heather values the time they spend together—it fills her coffee cup!

To learn more about Heather and her caring approach to leadership, check out her Leadership With Heart podcast, visit employeefanatix.com, heatheryounger.com, follow her on Twitter, and connect with her on LinkedIn.

Data-Driven AI Performance Enablement Software as a Service Improves Metrics and Delivers Better Employee and Customer Experiences

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Sean Minter, founder and CEO of AmplifAI. At AmplifAI, Sean and his team apply science to make teams better, leveraging AI-powered data to create a personalized environment that enables every frontline employee to succeed. As more companies explore the new generation of hybrid work, innovative leaders and organizations are relying on AmplifAI’s SaaS solution to enable performance, improve people, and make work more fun—wherever work is happening.

The BPO industry is no exception. Focused on delivering great customer experiences for some of the world’s top brands, every day thousands of iQor customer care agents respond to questions pertaining to our client’s products or services. Frontline supervisors are in a constant mode of coaching agents to empower them to consistently create smiles for our clients’ end customers.

Leveraging advanced digital technologies to facilitate the coaching of frontline employees, iQor recently announced our selection of AmplifAI as one of our digital CX initiatives to support excellent employee and customer experiences.

On this episode, we learn how AmplifAI’s artificial intelligence-driven software as a service (SaaS) performance-enablement technology platform helps iQor improve key metrics on a client program and deliver smiles through coaching and analytics.

Solving Problems Through Innovation

Sean entered the technology startup space years ago, starting three other companies before AmplifAI. He also worked at a private equity firm in between his startups and bought a BPO—PRC out of South Florida—about 12 years ago.

Bringing a perspective from outside the BPO industry, Sean looked for opportunities to do things differently when he began running PRC, drawing on his process-oriented background in tech.

He was determined to gain insight into why some customer care sites and some teams performed better than others. Indeed, his greatest challenge was figuring out how to replicate the highest performing frontline associates and frontline leaders to scale performance ability and drive consistent outcomes for clients.

He ultimately sold PRC to a larger BPO and he turned his attention to solving this problem. He knew that this challenge was not unique to PRC. He realized that other BPOs as well as brands with internal customer support call centers faced the same challenge. Harnessing his expertise in tech startups, Sean founded AmplifAI to drive more consistent customer care performance outcomes.

5 Things BPOs Need to Do to Be Successful on Any Client Program

Through his work to replicate high-performing frontline associates at scale and develop an AI-driven platform to enable consistent outcomes in customer service, Sean identified five things BPOs need to do in order to produce excellent consistent outcomes for clients.

1. Deliver on a Client’s KPIs

Whether first call resolution, average handle time, or Net Promoter Score (NPS), BPOs need to deliver on client KPIs with efficiency. Sean finds that the key to improving these metrics is improving the people driving the metrics. For this to happen, frontline leaders need the right tools to engage their team, understand the data and metrics around performance, and coach their frontline associates with the right information at the right time to improve a specific outcome.

AmplifAI empowers frontline leaders to do this more efficiently. It takes away the need for frontline leaders to spend time manually analyzing data from multiple systems and reports. AmplifAI handles data analytics and recommendations so supervisors can focus on engaging and developing their teams.

With AmplifAI’s performance enablement platform, BPOs develop higher-performing and more engaged frontline associates and leaders.

AmplifAI saves 30% of a frontline supervisor’s day by identifying actions they need to take to support their team, whether it’s enabling better performance, following up after a coaching session, recognizing agents, understanding what to coach, or driving the coach-the-coach process.

This allows BPOs to deliver more efficiently on a client’s KPIs, which ultimately increases productivity, and creates more smiles with our client’s end customers.

2. Instill Confidence That Agents Will Create a Great Customer Experience

Clients put their most important asset—their customers—in the hands of a trusted BPO partner like iQor to take care of them. In order for them to make this decision, they need to have confidence that the BPO will perform.

Because consistently providing good CX to a client at scale is very important, AmplifAI helps drive organizational processes by collecting data from the client, identifying what a high performer is, and creating a persona for that high performer so the BPO can leverage it to drive actions that will result in good CX at scale.

This applies to all sorts of contact center agent personas, from empowering new hires to helping good agents become great agents. By providing access to streamlined data, AmplifAI helps frontline leaders deliver timely, personalized, and efficient employee development and engagement across their teams so everyone can deliver a great customer experience across all sites consistently. Built-in accountability ensures agents and supervisors receive the support they need to thrive.

Sean knows firsthand from his time in the BPO industry that when a frontline employee has a great experience, they’re inspired to deliver an excellent experience for the customer.

3. Manage Agent Performance at Scale

The need to manage agents’ performance at scale, for both work-in-office and work-at-home employees, is essential. Indeed, as mentioned previously the goal of engaging, coaching, developing, and recognizing frontline associates is important for scaling activity. When frontline leaders need to study reports to discover insights they can use to coach their agents, it can inhibit their effectiveness, hinder their ability to remember who should be recognized, and make it difficult to prioritize their time especially when frontline employees aren’t always in the office with them.

AmplifAI addresses this challenge in several ways. It gives frontline leaders access to performance data and AI-driven recommendations through a single, unified system that prioritizes actions, key behaviors, and performance indicators so they can spend more time coaching and building connections.

Through integrations with remote work tools, it can also push information out to platforms employees are already logged into to drive more interaction within the work environment.

And, its proprietary Coaching Effectiveness Index maximizes a supervisor’s ability to coach their agent’s performance while driving team engagement and cohesiveness. The Coaching Effectiveness Index identifies coaches’ strengths and areas for improvement so managers can help coaches become better team leaders.

4. Maintain Compliance With Client Standards

Meeting client standards is the minimum threshold, with the goal being to exceed these standards. This means staying on top of operations in real-time. To do this, Sean says BPOs should look at data to create balance scorecards on the agent and company levels that will illuminate a bell curve of people—from high performers to low performers.

To this end, AmplifAI builds personas over different time frames to account for changing impacts (such as seasonality, new product offerings, and a new prioritization of certain metrics). This drives coaching, recognition, and activity in a systematic way across all sites at scale to help adapt to changes and identify where you are at risk of non-compliance with client standards while also recommending next actions for better customer support.

5. Balance Quick Onboarding and Training With Retention

AmplifAI gathers data throughout the employee lifecycle, which AI validates before loading it into the database. This acts like an AI assistant at the agent and frontline leader level to help identify whom to coach, what to coach them on, whom to recognize, what behaviors need improvement, and more. The AI assistant gives relevant recommendations enabling the leader to focus on creating human-to-human interactions.

Sean says that as we think about the future of the contact center, it’s helpful to think of how a customer service agent can have an AI assistant to connect them to content so they are empowered to improve themselves on easy things and human-to-human coaching can focus on more complex needs.

Understanding where frontline employees face challenges when they reach production can inform training, nesting, and onboarding so future employees are better prepared before production. AI helps recognize the data to make this possible at scale.

When BPO supervisors are empowered to help frontline employees strengthen specific skills in less time, it supports quick onboarding, training, and retention.

Human Interactions Remain at the Center of Great CX

AmplifAI helps BPOs like iQor deliver the right employee experiences to their most valuable asset, their agents. It supports better leadership that ultimately improves frontline employee performance and engagement to create customer experiences that make people smile.

What Sean Does for Fun

With a 10-year-old and a three-year-old, Sean and his family focus their free time on fun home activities in the Dallas, Texas area. Barbeque is their go-to tasty activity when it’s not 105 degrees outside!

To learn more about Sean and how he and his team power AI-enhanced people enablement, visit www.amplifai.com and connect with him on LinkedIn.

How Quality Management and Service Excellence Are Essential for a Great Customer Experience

This week, we welcome Alec Dalton to the Digitally Irresistible podcast. Alec is co-founder and managing partner of the Hospitality Leadership Academy, a firm offering professional development programs and management consulting focused on service excellence.

Alec has operated five luxury properties and has held various corporate positions with hospitality industry pioneers like Marriott International, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, and Walt Disney Parks & Resorts. He is a renowned keynote speaker on customer experience and quality strategy and a contributor to several internationally best-selling books on the topic. He also operates a consultancy that helps businesses—brand names and boutiques alike—design and deliver five-star services.

On this episode, Alec discusses the role of quality management in your customer experience strategy and how essential it is for achieving high levels of customer satisfaction.

A Career Journey That Began Where Dreams Come True

Alec’s career dreams date back to when he was eight years old on a family vacation at Disney World. While he and his family were at lunch talking about the special experiences they had that morning at the Magic Kingdom and sharing excitement about the upcoming fireworks that night, Alec noticed a custodial cast member (aka Disney employee) cleaning a nearby table. Seeing quality management in action, he realized that the magical experiences he and his family enjoyed were only possible because of people like the custodial cast member and all the other employees in various functions across the resort.

As he grew older, Alec was captivated by Disney’s focus on quality and he learned that other organizations did the same thing. He studied hospitality at Boston University, worked in a variety of hotels and resorts, and spent time in the quality management function in different corporate offices. Today he enjoys helping a variety of large and small organizations develop their own five-star services by training their teams, refining their executive and leadership development programs, and shaping custom frontline training programs. He provides this management consultancy focused on quality management, HR, and customer service both through his firm, the Hospitality Leadership Academy, as well as Accelerate Learning Systems, a partner company.

The 3 Components of Quality Management in CX

Alec believes that every organization should have a philosophy around quality. Quality, he says, centers on the interplay between customer experience, customer success, and customer service. He defines three primary components of quality management.

1. Conformance to Company Standards

One way to assess quality is based on conformance to the expectations a company has for the way work gets done and how outputs are produced. There should be consistency in your company’s quality standards.

2. Competitive Quality

Another way to assess quality is in the context of industry norms and the experiences customers have with your competitors. Consider what competitors are doing to meet customers’ needs, where they are failing, and what expectations customers have of your brand based on their experiences with analogous businesses.

For example, in the hotel business, it’s common to check in with an employee at the reception desk for a few minutes before going up to your room. But in the airline industry, it’s possible to check in online or check in at a kiosk in the airport. Also, in most cases, it’s possible to select your seat on an airplane. Why can’t the hotel business take advantage of the same self-service mobile technology innovations to enable mobile check-ins and room selection in advance? The analogous expectations customers have of your industry compared to other industries influence their perception of competitive quality.

3. Customer Satisfaction

Finally, in Alec’s experience, customer satisfaction is the most important definition of quality. Customers bring their own unique wants, needs, and expectations. It’s your job to deliver the products and services that satisfy those needs or help them find a way to get there if you can’t.

How to Use Quality Management to Improve CX Design

Despite how essential quality management is in good CX, it is often overlooked. Yet there are ready-made frameworks CX professionals can use to design and improve experiences.

One of Alec’s favorites is the Six Sigma quality framework that guides CX professionals to reduce inconsistency and improve efficiency. The DMAIC process (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) outlines this strategy, which Alec writes about in “Customer Experience.”

Define

First, customer experience professionals must define the experience they want to deliver. This includes both the actual experience and the outcomes—the memories or products you want the customer to leave with. Alec says it’s important to measure the key touchpoints along the customer journey that are important for driving customer satisfaction.

Measure

Second, measure the business operating metrics so that you can address compliance quality and competitive quality throughout the customer journey.

Analyze

Third, track the key metrics over time to reduce risk and make sure you’re actually satisfying your customers. Ensure your standards meet the needs of your customers and are at least equal to your competitors’ standards.

Improve

Next, look for opportunities where you can take things to the next level and improve on your current experience.

Control

Finally, develop a quality control plan so you can sustain a new level of quality or improve it and delight your customers even more in the long term.

Perceived Challenges of These Frameworks

Originally developed in the manufacturing world with clear metrics for consistency, the data-intensive focus of the Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing philosophies can lead some brands to hesitate with them, especially for those in industries that rely on measuring customer or employee emotion.

The DMAIC process, however, is fairly common for brands in the hotel, hospitality, and entertainment industries. Using voice of the customer channels like surveys and social media feedback, hospitality, and B2C companies can mine those sources for data. And there’s increasing potential for more data in the future as video recognition and artificial intelligence technologies continue to advance.

The Cost of Poor Quality Management

In “Customer Experience 2,” the second customer experience book Alec coauthored, he writes about the cost of quality in the customer experience. He explains how there is a cost to deliver quality, but the cost of poor quality is even greater.

The cost of poor quality can include negative word-of-mouth, opportunity costs, loyalty loss, negative sentiment, waste, and the cost of reworking processes to eliminate quality concerns. It’s important for brands to consider what happens when things go wrong and how you can prevent it from happening in the first place.

For example, say you check into a hotel and the front desk provides friendly service and your guest room is lovely. But after you go to sleep, another guest suddenly walks in and you realize you were both checked into the same room. Oops!

In this scenario, two customers are understandably upset about the experience, which may result in negative word-of-mouth, rebates, refunds, or other accommodations to ensure customer satisfaction. Poor quality by design—the breakdown in process that caused this problem—resulted in all of these costs.

The cost of quality management can be categorized into two groups: conformance and non-conformance.

1. Conformance

Conformance is the cost of designing and implementing effective quality management. There are two types of conformance costs: appraisal costs and prevention costs.

Appraisal costs include things like inspecting parts or supplies before production begins or before a service is provided. Implementing quality assurance programs, performing inspections and the like are all part of the appraisal costs. This costs money, time, and effort, but it can prevent faulty parts or experiences from advancing through your supply chain and production process.

Prevention costs are similar but from an in-built design standpoint. Prevention costs often go by the Japanese term poka-yoke which means foolproofing. These are the measures you put in place to prevent accidents from happening. In a digital world, they might include preventing an employee or customer from skipping a step in a transactional process through a pop-up message. There are costs associated with designing, building, and implementing these, but these costs are often much lower than the costs of non-conformance.

2. Non-Conformance

Companies incur non-conformance costs when things go wrong, often due to poor quality or ineffective quality management. These include external opportunity costs—the cost of an upset customer, angry guest, or negative word of mouth. But they also include internal costs when things go wrong and you need to rework processes, reduce waste, or address low employee morale.

Balancing Quality and Cost

To reach a healthy balance between quality with cost, it’s important to remember that the ideal level of quality, at least from a financial standpoint, isn’t perfect quality. Perfection is astronomically expensive and often unattainable, especially in services businesses because we’re all human and accidents happen. In contrast, the goal is to balance the cost of preventing and assuring quality to help reduce the cost of any potential failures and ensure a great customer experience with high levels of customer satisfaction.

What Alec Does for Fun

Being in the hospitality business, Alec loves to travel. Last year he visited all 50 states in the USA! He’s still deciding on this year’s adventure, but he has his eyes set abroad.

To learn more about Alec and his insights into quality management, visit his website at www.alecdalton.com and connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

How Strategic Email Marketing Can Create Great Customer Experiences and Improve Your Bottom Line

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Emily McGuire, a self-proclaimed email marketing nerd! As the customer evangelist at AWeber, Emily applies her email marketing expertise to create a great customer experience through email at every step of the customer journey. On this episode, Emily explains three key elements to creating an exceptional customer experience using email.

Delving Into Data-Rich Email Strategy

Emily’s foray into email marketing began about eight years ago while working as a digital marketing generalist. Although she initially focused on social media marketing, she soon discovered her love for email marketing. She was drawn to email marketing by its ability to engage with people in order to gain insight into where customers are in their relationship with a brand.

She worked on email marketing for a large e-commerce brand and then began her own consulting business to help a range of companies with their marketing efforts. Today she’s the customer evangelist for AWeber, an email service provider that delivers email marketing software to help small businesses and entrepreneurs harness the power of email to create deeper relationships with their audiences while growing their businesses.

Emily notes the value email marketing adds not only in the context of marketing campaigns but also to help brands grow and scale their business by creating a great customer experience.

3 Elements for Creating Exceptional CX through Email

Throughout her years of work in email marketing, Emily has identified three primary elements for creating exceptional CX through email.

These three stages of the customer journey with email are:

1. Onboarding

For Emily, it all begins with customer onboarding. Although this phase looks different for different types of businesses, it always encompasses beginning the customer relationship on the right foot—anticipating the customers’ needs and providing the information they need to be successful with your brand.

This step is focused on educating and nurturing new customers to set the stage for their relationship with your brand. Email onboarding campaigns keep the customer experience at the forefront to build customer trust, whether it’s navigating a new platform they signed up for, anticipating the next steps in a professional services relationship, or learning when to expect a product they ordered and how to use it effectively.

This involves predicting what the customer needs for a personalized experience every step of the way. One example of a successful e-commerce email onboarding campaign Emily shares is from a company that sells washable rugs. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Emily purchased a rug with a removable top that can be cleaned in the washing machine. She began to take note of the company’s engaging post-purchase email series before her order even shipped. After placing her order, she received a series of onboarding emails beyond simply an order confirmation.

This included helpful emails telling her, as a new customer, how to prepare for her new rug and how to care for it. She also received an email addressing shipping delays due to the pandemic and supply chain issues. Soon thereafter she received a shipping confirmation email, an email confirming her rug was delivered, and a reminder email about how to care for her new rug along with potential problems that may arise and how to contact customer support in the event of an issue.

Throughout the new customer onboarding process, the brand proactively anticipated the questions their customer support team was likely to receive and answered them up-front instead of waiting for new customers to reach out to customer service, probably reducing some of the volume of inbound customer service calls for this brand. They shared useful information at each step of the customer journey, and built a strong relationship with Emily, as a new customer, to foster brand loyalty from the get-go.

This step looks very similar in the software as a service (SaaS), B2B, tech, and professional services worlds—anticipating questions, offering new customers a tour of the product upfront, and providing a brief introduction to the most common features people use first with their new product or service so they aren’t left to guess or reach out to customer service in frustration. A happy customer is more likely to be a loyal customer.

2. Retention

The next step in Emily’s map of the customer journey is customer retention, to nurture your brand’s relationship with customers and make sure you strive to gain their loyalty. As the great management thought leader Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.”

To foster loyalty, Emily says it’s important to ensure customers get what they need from you. This includes making certain you provide information in your emails to customers on how to get support if they need it so they don’t need to search for it on your website.

It’s also important, especially in the e-commerce world, to thank people for being a customer and for being a part of your brand community, incentivizing them to order again. In the SaaS and B2B world, this involves looking at critical touchpoints for customers and the types of services or future adoptions they are likely to take and nurturing them to take those.

Ultimately, it’s not just about retention, it’s also about adoption and usage so you bond customers to your product or service with a long-term view of their lifetime value. This means anticipating the information they need and reinforcing it with the value that it provides. The deeper their connection, the more value they’ll see and the longer they’ll stick around. By guiding customers through each stage of your service or product and helping them make the most impact with those features or services, you can capitalize on their customer engagement and garner better, more cost-effective results than trying to win them back after they ghost you.

For example, Emily recently signed up for a SaaS product and, during the sign-up process, indicated that she works with a team. The first onboarding emails she received provided a standard overview of the platform and the value it provides. Then she began receiving emails about collaboration and the advantages of adding team members to her account. The SaaS provider capitalized on the information they gathered from Emily to target their email campaign to her anticipated needs. They knew that if she adds collaborators she becomes “sticky” — a strong signal that she’ll become a loyal advocate for the product.

3. Reactivation

The third and final step of the email customer journey is reactivation. Emily explains that there are two types of reactivations:

1. Reengage. The first type of reactivation is with customers who display a loss of interest in your product and are at risk of abandoning your brand. These are customers who are cooling off, starting to ghost you, starting to put distance between themselves and your brand, and are using your product less frequently and contacting you less often. You can gather data by looking at how many times customers are logging into their accounts to use your product if you’re a SaaS business. Similarly, B2C brands can determine if it has been a while since they were in contact with their account representative or ordered your product. Looking at these signals and developing campaigns to remind customers of the value you provide and sharing information on how they can get that value or giving them a discount code for additional products or services can help reengage their interest and improve customer satisfaction.
2. Win Back. The other type of reactivation is focused on bringing back customers who have abandoned your product altogether or canceled their account or service with you. Sending them a series of follow-up emails addressing why they left, offering them incentives, and having a representative talk to them about what you can do to win back their business can give insight into how you can improve their experience with your brand and win them back.

Although reactivation offers a significant ROI because there are lower costs associated with gaining business from an existing customer than winning a new customer, Emily finds that reactivation strategies are fairly uncommon. Brands often don’t think about customers that disappear because their data simply goes away. It takes actively seeking them out and understanding the needs of your customer in order to win them back.

Marketing in the Customer Journey

Emily concludes that these three themes are really about anticipating what customers are about to do and nurturing your relationship so they can be as successful as possible with your product or service.

Marketing is often focused on lead generation and conversions, but retaining existing customers is much more profitable. These three elements can guide brands to cultivate great CX through email marketing campaigns as part of a unified customer experience strategy. Remarketing to customers over and over again in these ways deepens their relationship with your brand and optimizes their customer journey.

What Emily Does for Fun

Emily loves playing with her child in addition to exploring old hobbies that went on hiatus during the pandemic. Rediscovering the joys of disc golf is at the top of her list right now. To learn more about the email expertise AWeber offers, visit www.aweber.com. To connect with Emily and follow her email marketing tips, visit her page on LinkedIn.

How Active Learning Improves Employee Engagement, Training, and Retention for Better CX

This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is John Kruper, senior vice president of global learning and development at iQor. John leads an award-winning team of trainers and coaches around the world who skillfully train iQor agents and supervisors to rapidly enable them to provide service and support for the customer care programs entrusted to us by some of the world’s biggest brands.

John specializes in designing effective employee training and development models that contribute to great CX and high employee retention levels. He designs active learning strategies that produce better-trained agents with higher performance outcomes, whether it’s upselling, reducing average handle times (AHT), or driving better customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). This method of learner-centered training empowers employees to learn by doing through collaborative experiences that enhance their skills and deepen their relationship with the company.

On this episode, we explore the current and future states of global learning and development and look at research-backed innovations that enable rapid training and high levels of employee retention at scale. The contrast between current and future states of learning applies to many businesses, including enterprises training internal frontline employees as well as business process outsourcing (BPO) companies training frontline customer service agents. As research-based evidence of effective adult learning evolves, so does the need to adjust training methodologies to ensure frontline employees get the opportunity to be onboarded successfully by trainers who use practices that result in better performance outcomes.

Lifelong Learning and Training

John has a longstanding commitment to cultivating excellent educational experiences. His career journey began with a doctorate in science education. He spent the first 20 years of his career developing an expertise in digital education and virtual learning while working in higher education and academia with professors and academic programs to bring their programs online.

Then, about 15 years ago, John transitioned from academia to the BPO industry to bring valuable digital learning and career development experiences to frontline customer service employees. He joined iQor in 2022 as senior vice president of global learning and development where he works with an award-winning training team to enhance innovations and active learning methodologies in our physical and virtual learning spaces.

Training for Frontline Employees

With hourly workers representing 80% of the global workforce spanning all industries and companies, John says it’s critically important to pay attention to the training experience for these workers. Training enables greater success for hourly employees that typically begin with a baseline set of skills for which they were hired but must learn additional skills and responsibilities in order to perform their new job function.

A bad training program puts the employee behind the curve so they are perpetually trying to play catch-up learning their job responsibilities. This deficiency in skills makes it difficult for them to excel in their job, disconnects them from the company, and often results in their decision to leave.

Indeed, John points out that the training experience is critical to an employee’s success not only in their job but also in their career because these jobs are often pathways to their ultimate career development.

Current State of Training: Passive Learning

Frontline workforce training has commonalities at enterprises and throughout the BPO industry due to the need for employees to master numerous policies, processes, services, and software systems in order to do their job. As a result, new hire employee training is often packed with dense information delivered in a short timeframe by trainers who know the content well but may not necessarily know the most effective strategies for delivering the information.

This typically results in passive learning experiences whereby employees are expected to absorb massive amounts of information through a trainer-focused lecture-based training format. Desks are set up in rows with a lectern and a projector at the front of the room and all eyes are on the trainer who delivers lengthy content in a show-and-tell style. But research shows that showing and telling doesn’t work.

People learn best by doing. As a result, information-rich training needs to change so that new-hire employees can collaborate with other new hires to practice and problem solve with the information they’re learning while being coached by a facilitator who knows the ins and outs of the content.

Future State of Training: Active Learning

The future state of training for frontline employees is active learning. John notes that training classrooms need to support how adults learn best: active, problem-based learning in a collaborative, social environment. This simple yet radical approach transforms information-based learning so employees are empowered to discuss, share, and collaborate with peers. This approach increases knowledge retention, higher-order thinking, participation, engagement, and ultimately contributes to employee retention.

In this training environment, there’s no front of the room. Employees work with colleagues in small groups while the facilitator circulates throughout the learning studio—mentoring, coaching, and asking questions providing an enriching learning experience.

Active learning is organized around the learner with a set of problems and goals that the learner practices solving in a safe environment where they can grow and hone their skills.

How iQor Is Deploying the Future State of Learning and Development

iQor is taking a three-pronged approach to transform its entire learning organization into an active learning one in which high-quality effective learning and employee development is delivered rapidly and at scale to frontline employees.

The three elements of this transformation to active learning include the following:

1. Design Physical and Virtual Learning Studios

Physical and virtual training classrooms are transformed into collaborative active learning studios that promote interactions between the facilitator and groups of learners.

2. Establish a Change Management Approach

Implement change management to upskill trainers to support their shift from lecturer to facilitator so their methodologies align with the new pedagogical approach.

3. Harness Technology

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and other software technology systems offer new tools that enable and empower the active learning environment. John explains that now we can have learning systems that monitor what each individual is learning and how they’re performing and adapt the material accordingly. This makes it possible for everyone to have an individualized learning and development plan instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum.

With the combination of these three elements, John notes how iQor is transforming our training into an active learning approach, enterprise-wide across all geographies and verticals to support how adults learn best.

Through active learning, frontline workers and training facilitators enjoy a more collaborative and appealing environment, where employees have the opportunity to learn more, retain more, and engage more with the curriculum, one another, and the company. This enhances the employee experience, reduces employee turnover, and builds empathy in the customer experience they provide.

John emphasizes the continued importance of partnering with clients throughout the training process. Transitioning to active learning methodologies is accomplished through an ongoing collaboration with clients to draw on their content expertise and integrate it into an instructional design that supports active learning experiences.

What John Does for Fun

John goes the distance in all that he does. For fun, he loves running every day. Every year for the past 15 years he has run the Chicago Marathon! When he’s not racking up miles on foot, he enjoys road trips with his wife. Over the past two years they have clocked more than 25,000 miles on their camper van, exploring national parks and other areas of the country.

To connect with John, visit his page on LinkedIn.

How a Customer-Centric Culture Improves the Employee Experience and Elevates CX

This week’s guest is Annette Franz, founder and CEO of CX Journey. She has 30 years of experience—on both the client and vendor sides—helping companies understand their employees and customers to drive retention, satisfaction, engagement, and the overall customer experience. She is a credentialed CCXP who has authored two books on CX as well as numerous articles in industry publications and she is regularly invited to speak at conferences and private events.

On this episode, we delve into Annette’s four key steps to improve the customer experience from the inside-out, looking at the interplay between culture, leadership, employees, and customers.

Customer Experience Strategy From the Start

Growing up on a farm in Ohio, Annette always dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. While the science of chemistry rerouted her from that endeavor, she did find a lot of chemistry in creating great customer and employee experiences. She left Ohio for sunny southern California and found a job doing market research at J.D. Power putting her math and writing skills to good use.

Since that time, she has been focused on customer experience strategy work on both the corporate brand side and the private agency side. Her work has ranged from customer understanding to culture and employee experience. As a certified customer experience professional (CCXP), she has seen the CX profession evolve over the past three decades and has gained deep insights on how to improve the customer experience.

The 4 Steps to Improve CX From the Inside-Out

Drawing on her years of strategic experience in the industry, Annette has identified four key pillars to improve CX from the inside-out. She takes an in-depth look at these and other strategies in her two books, “Built to Win” and “Customer Understanding,” and shares them with us here.

1. Culture

Annette’s four-step strategy begins with the heart of the organization: the culture. She finds that by looking at what’s happening on the inside with employees (while taking into account the voice of the customer), an organization can fix what’s happening on the outside with customers.

Prioritizing culture means prioritizing how you do things. Annette says culture equals core values plus behaviors. This means defining, socializing, and operationalizing core values (including customer-driven ones). In labeling the values and defining appropriate behaviors associated with each one, a customer-centric culture will flow through the DNA of the organization and yield profound improvements and a great customer experience.

2. Leadership Commitment and Alignment

This customer-centric culture hinges on your organizational leadership’s commitment to design and deliberately cultivate the culture. This commitment must extend beyond the CEO and a few leaders in various departments. It has to involve the entire leadership team. All leaders across departments must be aligned on what it means to be customer-centric and how the organization is going to deliver on that in order to ensure a unified customer-centric transformation.

This commitment must be evident in measurable ways. Leaders need to provide the resources needed (time, financial, capital, and human) to do the work that’s needed to create and maintain a customer-centric culture.

Indeed, a customer-centric culture is a collaborative one in which everyone is working together towards the common goal of creating a great experience for customers.

3. Employee Experience

For all of this to happen, employees must come first. Without employees to design, build, sell, service, and deliver the products, an organization has nothing. The employee experience drives the customer experience.

Knowing this, it’s important to define what the employee experience should be. This includes soft characteristics like building employee relationships through a leadership team that cares about the people, open and transparent communication, career planning, and knowledge that their work impacts the business and the customers. It also involves hard characteristics like the tools, processes, policies, workspace, workplace, and everything else that is needed to service the customers in the ways in which they deserve to be served.

4. Customer Understanding

The final step of Annette’s strategy focuses on the voice of the customer. A customer-centric culture must include the voice of the customer, but how do you use that voice internally to drive employee and customer success?

Annette says this means looking at customer feedback, data, and personas internally to ensure employees are informed and educated about who the customer is and the experiences they desire. Using customer journey mapping, service blueprinting, and other initiatives to guide the values of the customer-centric culture and inform employee coaching can drive higher levels of engagement and help brands ultimately deliver a great customer experience.

The 10 Foundational Principles of a Customer-Centric Organization

In her book “Built to Win,” Annette discusses the 10 foundational principles of a customer-centric organization. The first three she shared here comprise the first three in her book: culture, leadership commitment and alignment, and employee experience.

The other foundational principles include additional ways to inspire people to think about what a customer-centric organization really looks like and entails. This means truly being people first; putting people before product, people before profits, and people before metrics.

In contrast to the inside-out approach of her four-step process to improve CX, her foundational principles incorporate outside-in thinking and doing—always including the customer perspective, knowing who they are and what their expectations are. This perspective can boost customer satisfaction and, subsequently, customer retention levels.

She also looks at governance—the structure, committees, and governing model. This foundational principle of a customer-centric organization guides how to break down silos to create cross-functional teams working towards the common goal of improving the customer experience.

Her culminating principle is the platinum rule: treating others the way they want to be treated. She said this approach sums up what outside-in thinking and doing is all about in a customer-centric organization and builds customer loyalty.

Customer Experience Strategy Today

Looking at customer experience strategy today in the context of its evolution over the past 30 years, Annette notes that it’s more challenging today than ever before. Before the pandemic, many organizations were repurposing CX staff. Once the pandemic began, however, they shifted to work towards understanding the customer and their motivations. This evolved into a focus on the employee and the employee experience.

Today, Annette hears more and more stories about bad employee experiences, but companies that prioritized a customer-centric culture aren’t facing that challenge. In contrast, their customer-centric outlook and empathy have guided them through hard times.

What Annette Does for Fun

Annette loves being outdoors and working out, whether on the water or in the woods. She enjoys paddle boarding, biking, mountain biking, and many of the other outdoor experiences that southern California has to offer.

To connect with Annette and learn more, visit annettefranz.com, cx-journey.com, and LinkedIn.

Streamlining Contract Management Workflows Through Digital Transformation to Improve Ease, Efficiency, and Cost

This week’s guest is Jerry Levine, general counsel and chief evangelist at ContractPodAi. He both uses and celebrates the ContractPodAi technology platform that offers inside legal teams the ability to get more work done with less friction while contributing to a great customer experience.

On this episode, we hear how the ContractPodAi cloud enables the digital transformation of the in-house legal field through contract lifecycle management that utilizes intuitive artificial intelligence (or augmented intelligence, as Jerry says) to increase legal agility, improve workflows, and save money.

From Client to General Counsel and Chief Evangelist

When Jerry joined ContractPodAi as their general counsel and chief evangelist he brought with him an extensive legal background as well as experience implementing and using ContractPodAi as a customer himself. At his previous in-house legal department for a tech company, he first tried implementing another contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, but with many features only available as add-ons, he sought a better solution. He turned to ContractPodAi which offered integrations with other systems and extensive automation to improve workflows along with excellent customer support to learn the ins and outs of the platform.

Almost immediately, ContractPodAi identified lost revenue on previous contracts and saved the company $500,000 while also significantly lowering the turnaround time on contracts.

With such positive experiences using the platform, he truly believed in the product as a user, so much so that he joined ContractPodAi. Jerry is still a loyal customer and helps guide ContractPodAi’s digital vision and enhancements while adding value for inside legal teams and clients.

The Digital Transformation of CLM

Built by attorneys, ContractPodAi guides the digital transformation of contract lifecycle management and provides insights and efficiency into the process in addition to offering other capabilities through its extensive legal platform. It uses an intuitive artificial intelligence (AI) engine to help legal teams be ready for anything.

Because legal teams manage numerous contracts and relationships concurrently, managing them efficiently can often present challenges with large amounts of unstructured data that isn’t easily organized in a database without assistance from natural language processing, machine learning, or other AI technologies. The digital transformation of CLM offers structure to the process that saves time and money and improves accuracy as well as speed of contract closings.

ContractPodAi distinguishes itself in this transformation by providing end-to-end contract lifecycle management. This enables in-house legal teams to quickly and easily create, complete, search, and manage contracts of any type while advanced AI automatically detects and extracts obligations and offers recommendations to help make decisions.

It is configured to each customer’s unique systems and requirements offering a single repository for every contract with powerful tools that grow and scale through an easy user experience that improves speed and efficiency.

Moreover, the excellent customer support that Jerry experienced firsthand makes the integration simple and stress-free so legal leaders “look like heroes” as Jerry says. 

Empowering In-House Legal Teams With AI

Contracts are the lifeblood of business and CLM can benefit legal teams across industries, from banking and finance to customer care, software vendors, and manufacturers. ContractPodAi makes all aspects of the contract process better, faster, and easier through digitization and automation.

Jerry sees this as especially helpful in the legal profession which hasn’t seen significant changes in the nature of their work since the time of Abraham Lincoln. Legal work still involves a lot of research and writing, but in the fast-paced digital world of today’s businesses there are opportunities to streamline it with digital technology. Many legal professionals rely on older technology like email and Excel and sometimes resist digital innovation within the legal department. But with contracts impacting many aspects of the business, utilizing AI to improve workflows offers tremendous benefits throughout the contract lifecycle.

With so much information contained in contracts, extracting it, organizing it, and accessing it with ease presents opportunities to leverage the power of digitization. Early contract management platforms focused on storing and organizing the information according to customer and/or project. 

Modern CLM technologies like ContractPodAi offer similar features, but also address the entire contract lifecycle. This innovation is a significant change from electronic storage and shared drives or syncing programs. ContractPodAi’s technology enables it to extract and interpret data better than people can, providing insights that may otherwise be missed.

Two Examples of How CLM Helps Your Entire Business

Jerry describes ContractPodAi as “augmented intelligence” that makes it possible for the humans using it to do more. It takes things that are tedious and cumbersome and uses automation to make unstructured and hidden data accessible and manageable to improve business processes and outcomes.

An effective CLM platform empowers legal teams to act more strategically to make good decisions with efficiency and deliver a great customer experience to the organization.

He offers two examples of these benefits.

1. CLM Adds Value

The entire team at ContractPodAi is committed to creating an excellent customer experience within their digital transformation. As general counsel and chief evangelist, Jerry wants customers to enjoy the success he has experienced with the platform since switching to it several years ago on his previous legal team.

He had a dedicated 24/7 support representative at ContractPodAi that gave him his WhatsApp and phone number and made it clear that Jerry could contact him whenever he had questions. Having this customer service resource with one-on-one support made Jerry very comfortable with the platform. The resulting insights ultimately led to tremendous savings for his firm which was able to spend less on outside counsel. 

In fact, within three weeks of using ContractPodAi at his former tech company, Jerry’s legal team identified two outstanding contracts that finance had stopped billing but support teams were still servicing due to gaps in communication. Remedying this situation saved his company $500,000 a year!

2. CLM Improves Workflows Across Departments

ContractPodAi integrates with Salesforce, Workday, and numerous other platforms and services to facilitate workflows across business functions. This enables in-house legal departments to effectively manage risk while also delivering solutions that are connected throughout the organization and equip sales with the resources they need to sell with confidence.

This type of digital transformation enables legal professionals to move faster, access the information they need, and collaborate seamlessly across the business.

For example, when Jerry originally began using ContractPodAi in his previous job, his team closed a contract in 24 hours which the sales team thought would take two weeks! The improved workflows enabled by the CLM made it possible for the legal team to move faster with efficiency and accuracy in ways that benefited the entire organization.

What Jerry Does for Fun

Fun for Jerry is all about family. He relishes the time he spends playing video games with his son and exploring new destinations with his family. In addition to that, he and his family are foodies who love exploring restaurants and tasty dishes. With encouragement from his wife and their commitment to a healthy lifestyle, Jerry went vegan a few years ago and enjoys all kinds of vegan delights.

Jerry Levine welcomes connecting on LinkedIn to explore topics such as the future of law.

How CX and Experience Marketing Create New Opportunities to Energize Brands and Delight Customers

This week’s guest is Kevin Tydlaska-Dziedzic, founder and CEO of BKN Creative. As a practitioner of experience marketing who works in sync with customer experience throughout the customer life cycle, Kevin leads customer experience initiatives across the entire business. And he’s not alone. According to the 7th State of Marketing Report from Salesforce, 80% of marketers maintain responsibility for customer experience.

Through branding, photography, web design, copywriting, marketing, and social media marketing, Kevin’s agency helps clients develop better relationships with their customers before, during, and after the sale.

In this episode, we discuss how experience marketing has evolved to become an essential part of the overall customer experience, and how the ‘why’ of a company’s brand is essential to creating that experience. Plus, Kevin shares three examples that show how his approach to experience marketing builds on growth opportunities to enhance the customer experience through marketing efforts.

Finding His ‘Why’ and Helping Clients Make the Most of Theirs

Kevin grew up in Colorado where he always gravitated towards creative outlets. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in photography and began working in the marketing industry when he moved to New York City and joined the marketing team at Whole Foods Market. Kevin and his husband eventually moved to Tampa where they worked at several marketing agencies that were full of creatives, strategies, and fantastic clients.

Although the marketing world fascinated and inspired him, he wanted to do more. He sought a culture that was inclusive, fun, and motivated by his ‘why’ to focus on clients’ passions and why they do what they do.

So, in 2018 Kevin founded BKN Creative. His mission was to grow the agency by helping clients find their ‘why’ and to deliver on those findings. He also knew that he had to grow the agency in a way that reflected his passions.

A minority-owned business, BKN Creative is certified LGBTBE® by the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC). Agency headquarters is in Tampa, but they also collaborate with clients in Colorado, New York, and New Mexico. Kevin and his team of 11 help companies leverage their ‘why.’ They also show them where they have opportunities to improve their relationships with customers and build brand loyalty through experience marketing.

What is Experience Marketing?

The original concept and practice of experience marketing was to create specific in-person marketing events where customers interacted with a brand’s products or services. It was a separate department from customer experience. Each had its own budget and managers.

Over time, companies recognized that customer experience was the most important way to differentiate their brand. Since talented experience marketing professionals were already well versed at creating great experiences for customers, bringing them in to improve CX at all customer touchpoints made a lot of sense.

And that’s what Kevin and his team at BKN Creative do—experience marketing at every touchpoint to build brand loyalty throughout the customer journey.

He approaches his brand of experience marketing in three phases.

1. Understand the ‘Why’ Behind the Brand

The brand needs to reflect what’s important to the business. Why was the business started? What motivates you? What are your passions? How do customers find you?

Answers to these (and other) questions are key to every visual design element. That includes color palette, typography, imagery, layout, and more. And from these elements a logo emerges that captures the spirit of the brand and sets it apart so it appeals to its customers. But that’s just the beginning.

2. Delight Customers at Every Stage of Their Journey

Phase 2 is where customers meet products and services, one-on-one, throughout the customer journey. Those encounters can happen at retail (brick and mortar or online), at events, on the client’s website, on social media, on search engines, and even on review websites or even how the company books appointments.

Any time people experience a company’s brand—even if it’s before they realize that their customer journey is about to begin—is an opportunity to create a great experience for them. And that needs to reflect who the company is, what they stand for, and why the customer should want to do business with them.

3. Extend the Experience Beyond the Sale

As Kevin points out, the experience doesn’t stop at the sale. Instead, it’s necessary to extend the elite experience the customer enjoys on their journey beyond the sale. Why? To encourage the customer to deepen their relationship with the company, to buy again, and to be an advocate for the brand.

3 Examples of Experience Marketing

Kevin says even companies that do a great job with most of their experience marketing efforts can still have gaps that leave them susceptible to customer complacency or customer churn. He explains that those gaps are not negatives, they are growth opportunities to improve the customer experience strategy and boost customer engagement. That always-positive perspective plays out in these examples.

Example 1: Changing Customer Perceptions on Social Media

A respected financial institution approached BKN Creative with a very specific need. For the most part, their marketing efforts were rocking. But customer feedback showed there was a gap in their social media activity.

That’s a heavy lift for two reasons:

1. People are more uninhibited when commenting on social media as opposed to face-to-face or voice interactions.
2. Money is important to all of us, and people can get emotional about their money on social.

After analyzing touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey, Kevin and his team identified opportunities for the financial institution to grow the speed at which they harnessed social media to answer questions, route calls, route messages, and handle issues raised by customers.

Kevin’s team put together a customer experience strategy that leveraged every social media platform they were on, as well as their review platforms. The goal was to further improve the positive perception of their customer service by being as helpful and responsive to customer needs as possible.

The strategy embodied the mindset that there are no stupid questions. There is no experience we can’t solve, or help, or make delightful. Now, from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., all customer complaints and concerns expressed on social media are addressed.

Planning for effective social media monitoring support, training agents, and identifying and responding to trends yields significant positive impacts on the customer experience. As an example, iQor collaborates with a prepaid wireless service provider to deliver social media customer support, reducing response time on social media from 1 hour-plus to under 6 minutes.

BKN’s client also expressed a desire for its customers to make better use of its mobile app. Kevin’s team created an educational campaign using video to make learning the intricacies of the app easier.

These two experience marketing engagements seized opportunities to fill in the gaps and expand on the company’s positive customer experience efforts to increase customer satisfaction.

Example 2: Extending Success and Opportunity for a Consulting Dynamo

When LaKendria Robinson approached BKN Creative with her idea for a new company, she was already a recognized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) powerhouse in Tampa Bay. Running the NFL’s Business Connect program for Super Bowl LV helped earn her that status.

BKN Creative collaborated with LaKendria to bring her vision of a DE&I consultancy to fruition. Their effort was top-to-bottom and end-to-end, including:

• Name ideation
• Branding
• Color story
• Typography
• Mission statement
• Website
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Potential client booking process
• Growth opportunities

From their collaboration (and LaKendria’s unstoppable commitment) The Orenda Collective was born to “. . . challenge organizations and individuals to view their community through a diverse, equitable and inclusive lens and deliver innovation solutions that live on in perpetuity.”

Once The Orenda Collective was on its feet, BKN Creative presented LaKendria with a growth opportunity—to start a nonprofit that provides microgrants to minorities so they can create their own small business. LaKendria embraced the opportunity, and BKN Creative provided the creative direction.

Example 3: Smile at iQor

iQor is excited to collaborate with Kevin and BKN Creative. As it did with the financial institution discussed in Example 1, Kevin’s team analyzed iQor’s experience marketing strategy and zeroed in on social media as a chance for growth opportunities.

But unlike the financial institution, iQor has two social media audiences:

1. iQor’s current and future clients.
2. iQor’s large and extraordinary audience of team members and future team members.

As Kevin noted, iQor has a robust culture that deserves celebrating. Now, not only do future team members learn about our culture, they also hear about it from current team members who celebrate it on social media.

By filling in the gaps, Kevin and his team have strengthened iQor’s robust experience marketing efforts.

What Kevin Does for Fun

When he’s not running a busy agency, Kevin loves to act in plays, films, and television. And while he can’t mountain bike in Florida as he did in Colorado, he enjoys biking the many trails he’s found in Florida with his husband and business partner, Brandon.

How Design Thinking and Direct Observation of the Customer Experience Guides Companies to Better Meet Customer Needs

This week’s guest is Karen Hold, founder and CEO of Experience Labs. Karen is an expert practitioner and consultant in the field of design thinking. With her team at Experience Labs, Karen helps clients innovate and adapt to change in industries ranging from education, professional services, government, healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, entertainment, and the arts.

She is also co-author of “Experiencing Design: The Innovator’s Journey,” which serves as a guide for innovators to achieve transformational change through design by shifting their mindset and skillset.

In this episode, we discuss the principles of this book in the context of how to optimize the customer experience throughout the customer journey. Not only does Karen explain what design thinking is and why it’s valuable to CX, but she also shares examples of design thinking in action. These examples illustrate how observing customer experiences helps companies create experiences that delight customers and increase sales.

A Career Path Is Not Always a Straight Line

A native of Washington, DC, Karen started her career in politics. After reading Tom Peters’ “In Search of Excellence,” she decided to change directions and go into business. She built a foundation in business strategy and brand management at a major consumer packaged goods company.

With a strong foundation in place, Karen and her husband started a business of their own in the telecommunications sector. And when the dot-com bubble burst 13 years later, she embraced the opportunity to shift directions again.

Drawing on her years of experience, Karen founded Experience Labs 12 years ago to help companies transform their solution-development mindsets and behaviors, putting design thinking at the heart of their efforts. Today, individuals and teams—with design thinking experience ranging from newbies to experts—hire Experience Labs to facilitate designs and develop training programs, crash courses, and design competitions.

Why Should Solution Providers Use Design Thinking?

Companies use journey maps, focus groups, and other business intelligence tools to gain an understanding of their customers. But limiting customer research to those tools often leaves big questions, including:

• Does the solution solve a significant problem for the customer?
• How will the customer react to the solution?
• Will the customer want to use the solution more than once?

Those unanswered questions leave companies with substantial risk. In a worst-case scenario, what seems like a great idea today could be at risk of failure tomorrow. Design thinking limits that risk and increases the likelihood of a positive customer experience.

What is Design Thinking?

The best way to understand design thinking is to explore the three elements of its framework:

1. Customer Obsession

Design thinking practitioners must be obsessed with the customer. To generate better solutions, they need to have an absolute grounding in the user experience, their problems, and their needs. That’s why direct observation of customers trying to solve their own problems is key to design thinking. From a customer perspective, design thinking is what makes products or services easier, more intuitive, and more enjoyable to use. It boosts customer satisfaction and customer retention.

2. Experimentation

Practitioners experiment with solutions not only to delight customers but also to lower their company’s risks and costs. Sometimes those experiments produce not-so-obvious results that change how companies design and/or market their solution. From a business perspective, design thinking is a risk management strategy that uses experimentation to help practitioners make smarter, more informed decisions and reduce risk.

3. Diversity of Input

The best solutions come to light when there is diverse input. But companies don’t always know how to work across differences within their organization. This is especially true in large organizations where the differences in how everyone works are more pronounced. Design thinking provides the social technology to create solutions together and work across differences within organizations. From a practitioner’s perspective, design thinking is a way to solve problems creatively with people who think and work differently.

How these elements work together becomes clearer when we look at them in practice.

Three Examples of Design Thinking

Karen has seen design thinking at work since her early days with a major consumer goods company. The three examples she shared with us present three companies, three customer problems, and three completely different solutions—all resolved with design thinking.

1. Finding the Right Job for the Perfect Scent

A company spent close to a billion dollars on what is, essentially, a room deodorizer. But when they tried to sell it, nobody wanted to buy it. The people who had smelly rooms didn’t notice the odor or care about neutralizing the odor. (Think of homes you’ve walked into with pet odor or tobacco smell.) The company discovered that people who live in those homes never notice that smell.

The company learned through observational research—going into homes and following consumers—that people with odorless homes would value the product as a room perfume. These insights identified a new target customer and transformed their product development.

With that knowledge, the company completely changed the product, including the marketing. It went from zero to a billion dollars in revenue and became a brand leader in its category with high levels of customer loyalty.

2. Taking the Scary Out of a Big Scary Machine

An industrial designer wanted to create a piece of hospital equipment that would be top-of-the-line and state-of-the-art, and he did. The hospital equipment he designed won a lot of design awards for the technology used to create it.

When he went to a hospital to see it in use, however, he saw a six-year-old girl standing frozen at the door. She could see this piece of equipment, the one to be used for her test, and she was in tears. She was too scared to enter the room. And the worst was yet to come. The test required sedation for most children because the equipment was noisy and produced low-quality imagery if the patient moved.

The industrial designer resolved to turn this scary situation into a friendly experience for this six-year-old girl, and for all children, so they would be able to take the test without fear.

After consulting with early educators, children’s museum directors, preschool teachers, and children themselves to develop potential solutions, the designer and his team created a kit that included:

• Stickers that kids enjoyed putting on the equipment.
• Scripts for the administering techs to use with the kids.
• Playlists for music to play during the test.

The total cost of the kit was $50,000, a fraction of the cost of the equipment.

The design thinking team turned a negative experience into one that children enjoyed. Some asked if they could come back the next week. And because children enjoyed the experience and were able to stay still, sedation rates went down. That meant anesthesiologists could work on more pressing cases.

The wins for the hospital, the wins for patients, and the wins for families were significant. All were accomplished through the use of this $50,000 sticker kit that resulted from the design thinking process.

3. Making Floor Cleaning Less of a Mess

A consumer packaged goods company wanted to make it easier for consumers to clean their homes. They spent time in peoples’ homes to solicit true customer feedback and to better understand how they cleaned their homes.

They discovered that people were spending as much time cleaning their mops as they were on their floors. As Karen put it, “If you were a Martian,” and you landed here in the United States, and you watched what people did when they cleaned their floors, you might think they were cleaning their mops rather than their floors. The whole process was messy, so much so that people were putting on their “dirty clothes” to do the job.

With the customer insights gained by going into homes, watching how people cleaned their floors, and applying the design thinking process, the company was able to create a product that was much simpler to clean the floor with, didn’t cause as much mess, and didn’t require as much time or effort to clean the mop itself.

Origins of Design Thinking: Transforming Mindsets and Behaviors

While many people have never heard of design thinking, the concept originated more than 50 years ago with psychological studies on creativity.

Academics coined the term when studying two kinds of leaders:

1. Those who were able to make substantial gains within their companies.

2. Those who could not make those gains, even though they had the same contacts, same industry, and same size organization.

They found that some leaders were growth leaders focused on innovation and other leaders maintained or worked at the status quo.

They then identified the mindsets and behaviors that growth leaders used to achieve success and codified them for the rest of us into a framework that became known as design thinking. Now, design thinking practitioners learn from those mindsets and behaviors and adopt them into their own practices to develop innovative solutions and achieve profound results.

What Karen Does for Fun

Karen is a skier and hiker who likes to spend her time in what she calls her “happy place,” the Sawtooth Mountains of South-Central Idaho.

How These Three Pillars of CX Drive Profits When Leadership Is Proactive About Customer Experience

This week’s guest is Jeannie Walters, CEO and founder of Experience Investigators, a global customer experience consulting firm that helps companies improve loyalty and retention, employee engagement, and overall customer experience. For more than 20 years Jeannie has dedicated her work to creating meaningful moments and real results with one mission: “To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers^TM.” As the Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Experience Investigators, Jeannie has helped organizations—from small businesses to Fortune 500s—to do just that. In this episode, Jeannie explains the three pillars of good CX to create positive experiences for customers and employees alike. She details how this is possible when customer experience management is proactive instead of reactive.

Jeannie’s Journey in CX

Jeannie began her career in fundraising consulting and marketing. While working in marketing, she found that many organizations thought about legal, product development, marketing, and sales but no one was truly advocating for the customer. So about 20 years ago, she and her brother decided to focus on customer experience. They successfully ran a CX firm together until 2009 when Jeannie started Experience Investigators.

She has helped hundreds of companies of all sizes and across three continents strengthen their CX strategy. In addition to being a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), Jeannie is a TEDx speaker, a founding member of CXPA, co-host of the top-rated Crack the Customer Code podcast, and a four-time LinkedIn Learning instructor whose courses have been watched by more than 200,000 online learners.

An active writer, Jeannie’s work has been featured in “Forbes,” “CustomerThink,” “The Future of Customer Engagement and Commerce,” and “My Customer,” as well as in university-level textbooks. She has received numerous recognitions for her work in CX.

The Three Pillars of Good CX

Jeannie has found that leaders often view customer experience as something that’s nice, purely common sense, or solely focused on measuring feedback. But customer experience that’s focused only on tracking customer satisfaction through surveys doesn’t actually have an impact on the customer experience itself. This way of thinking about customer experience is an afterthought when what is really needed is forethought and planning to optimize the customer experience.

All organizations have customer experiences, whether intentionally designed or not. Jeannie’s three pillars provide leadership a roadmap to be proactive, not reactive about the customer experience including how the entire organization should align to execute a successful CX plan.

1. Mindset

The first pillar lays the foundation for a CX strategy. The organization’s mindset determines how to cultivate a customer service culture and ensures everyone in the organization is focused on it as something that is central to their business, not something extra or limited to certain departments.

Jeannie recommends writing a customer experience mission statement that helps everyone align where they’re going so they can show up for customers no matter what. The mission statement documents who you are as a brand, including what you stand for. As an example, are you “the fastest” or “the most economical”? She points out the importance of gaining internal agreement on the brand promise in the customer experience mission statement as the north star that everyone in the organization gets behind.

2. Strategy

Next, this mindset needs to be translated into an effective business strategy to ensure customer experience is done right. The strategy must define what success looks like for your customer and for your organization. This becomes the success statement for the organization, what the business leaders care about, how CX can support those goals, and how to measure that success.

Watching CSAT go up and down only helps your bottom line if you connect it to the bottom line. A business strategy builds these connections by, for example, discovering that a higher CSAT results in more satisfied and happier customers that share their remarkable experiences, spend more with your brand, and refer other customers. This connected strategy can support the revenue goals of your organization through increased customer loyalty and retention.

Throughout this process, it’s important to be proactive about delivering intentional, positive customer experiences that connect to the central mindset and culture. We can apply best practices such as customer journey mapping, service blueprinting, and other tools. But because we ultimately experience things from our own perspective, we must be intentional in how we develop strategies that draw on the customer service culture to deliver excellent customer support.

3. Discipline

The third and final pillar is focused on crafting the discipline to deliver on the business strategy. This can’t be accomplished effectively in silos, so it is essential to build collaborative cross-functional leadership teams that understand their role in creating the customer experience.

Everyone in your organization has a role in the customer experience. Your mindset and culture lay the foundation for guiding the discipline to deliver on your business strategies. Whether collaborating internally with colleagues, working with vendors, or communicating directly with customers from the contact center, everyone in your organization has a contribution to make and their daily efforts have a direct impact on the customer experience.

The Three Pillars in Action

Removing barriers to good customer service creates a chain reaction of positivity and empowers business leaders “To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers^TM.” When organizations embrace these three pillars and implement a focused business strategy for customer experience, they will see measurable results.

By starting with the documented mission statement, you define how you will show up for customers no matter what. Sometimes there are tradeoffs because you can’t always be the fastest and most accurate, for example. That understanding needs to be reflected in your company culture and mindset.

Then craft an execution strategy based on your organizational goals so you can measure the ROI you want to achieve. Include in your strategy details such as how each department plays a role in customer experience, how you will build your customer experience team, and how you will measure effectiveness and customer success.

Finally, turn your strategy into the discipline to work with other leaders within your organization. The coalitions you build will make powerful impacts, ranging from how you post jobs and how you hire and onboard employees, to how you deliver your products and how you collect payment.

In sum, by proactively identifying the business goals of your customer experience strategy, deciding on the execution steps necessary to achieve them, and determining how to measure your success, you can transform the customer experience into a strategic asset. By looking at a combination of experiential data (customer feedback) and operational data (customer behaviors) you can gain insights into your customer experience and modify your goals as you go, while remaining grounded in your mission for excellent CX.

Learn More About Jeannie

To learn more about Jeannie and her strategy for good CX, visit ExperienceInvestigators.com where you can also find Year of CX customer experience resources and workbooks. Visit CrackTheCustomerCode.com to learn more about the podcast she cohosts with Adam Toporek featuring insights and innovations from business leaders.

What Jeannie Does for Fun

Jeannie enjoys spending her free time with her two teenage sons. She loves watching them do what they love, from choir concerts to soccer games. Her oldest son is heading to college in the fall and she’s grateful for the time they have together.