How to Create a Proactive Customer Experience with Jeannie Walters
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"So customer experience strategy is literally marrying what are what is the promise that we made to our customers, how can we always live up to that, and what are we actually doing about it? What is the plan? How do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we measure success?"
— Jeannie Walters
Customer Service VS. Customer Experience Strategy
While customer service deals with addressing issues and problems when they arise, customer experience encompasses the entire journey and interaction a customer has with a business.
Responsibility should be distributed across various roles within an organization, with clear accountability for the overall customer experience.
Every team member should work together to create a consistent and outstanding experience for the customers. This approach ensures that customer experience is treated as a company-wide endeavor rather than an isolated task.
Sales VS. Operations
Alignment between sales and operations is important to prevent customer disappointment. Sales teams often focus on making sales without considering the overall customer journey. Bridging this gap and improving communication can prevent misunderstandings and unmet customer expectations.
Customer journey mapping is looking at the customer's experience through their perspective, it’s a powerful tool to enhance the customer experience. By identifying emotions, high and low points, and specific touchpoints, businesses can address issues proactively and make customers feel valued, confident, and reassured. Small adjustments in these moments can lead to a competitive edge.
Driving Business Improvement: The Need for Change
A focus on improving the customer experience simplifies various aspects of business operations, including sales, marketing, and customer service, leading to greater efficiency.
Exceptional customer experience serves as a competitive advantage, fostering word-of-mouth referrals, customer retention, increased customer lifetime value, and overall business growth, especially during economic challenges.
Understanding Your Audience: Creating Customer Personas
Define customers as individuals rather than broad demographics to tailor the customer experience more effectively.
Focus on psychographics over demographics when building personas, considering the values, motivations, and behaviors of customers.
Observe and analyze the commonalities among your existing customer base to better understand their concerns, goals, and needs within their daily lives.
The Gameplan To Reorganize Your Organization
Conduct a customer journey mapping workshop to identify gaps and gain a better understanding of your customer's perspective, helping prioritize areas for improvement.
Create a customer experience mission statement to align your organization's goals and values around delivering a great customer experience.
Recognize that customer experience is not a one-time project but an ongoing commitment that requires prioritization and alignment throughout the organization.
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Mike Goldman: Jeannie Walters, CCXP is an award winning customer service expert, international keynote speaker, and founder of Experience Investigators, a firm helping companies increase sales and customer attention through elevated customer experiences. She's a sought after business coach and more than 500,000 people have learned from her courses on LinkedIn learning.
Her insights have been featured in Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, the wall street journal, and NPR trailblazing the movement from reactive customer service to proactive customer experience. Jeannie wants business leaders to see customer experience as a winning mindset, strategy, and discipline for all organizations.
Jeannie, welcome to the show.
Jeannie Walters: Thank you so much, I'm so happy to be here with you Mike.
Mike Goldman: Same here. Really happy to have you. And the first question I always ask, yeah always like the last four episodes, this has become a thing. But, I think
If people continue to give good answers, so no pressure on you Jeannie, this will continue to be a thing. But what do you believe is the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team?
Jeannie Walters: I think it's alignment. I think you have to have alignment around what you're all doing and what you're really aiming for. And if you don't have that, it makes everything harder.
Mike Goldman: Interesting. That's a new answer. So that's great. And I'm sure that will come up as we're talking about customer experience. So we'll go back to that theme. And then the other question I have to ask you is in your bio, it says you're a CCXP and I probably ought to know what that means and the audience probably ought to know what that means. So what is a CCXP and how do I get one?
Sure, it's a Certified Customer Experience Professional. And it's a credential that is given through the CXPA, which is the Customer Experience Professionals Association. And it's a real credential. You have to test on five different areas of customer experience. It's a proctored exam. There are prep courses on it, the whole thing. So I'm proud that I've been a CCXP since the first year they started offering it.
Mike Goldman: And is that something normally kind of consultants, coaches, trainers that get that? Or are there folks on a leadership team in an organization that may get that CCXP.
Jeannie Walters: Absolutely. There are chief customer officers, chief experience officers, VPs of customer experience or insights, folks like that, who are, you know, working within the structure of an organization. They are definitely getting the CCXP as well.
Mike Goldman: Beautiful, so I'll start with the most basic of questions. How do you define customer experience, right? Because a lot folks I deal with, well, they have well, I'm a VP of customer service, is that what that means? So, how do you define customer experience and why do most companies get it wrong?
Jeannie Walters: Yeah, well, there are kind of two sides to customer experience when we're talking, especially to leaders and business people. One is, you know, you don't even have to utter the word customer or experience and your customers are still having a customer experience. So that's something to remember.
Because sometimes we treat it like it's this thing that we totally control. We don't, it happens with or without us. And the idea of that is that your customers go through a journey with your organization from before they become even aware of you and your brand and a need that they might have all the way through to when they leave you or when they stay with you forever, that's the better option there.
But every single interaction, every single point of communication, every single time that they try to make a purchase. Every single piece of the journey impacts how they feel about your brand, and that's what, you know, we call customer experience is that perception of why do people buy from one organization over another, even if they have similar products?
Well, a lot of that is customer experience driven, so that's what customer experience is. What we talk about with organizations is really customer experience strategy and customer experience management, because if we don't get proactive within our organizations, then we're just letting things happen. And we're basically, I call it customer journey by org chart.
We're literally saying to people, well, oh, great. We made the sale. Awesome. You're going to go over to account management now. You're going to go over here. Oh, you've got a return. You've got to go to our returns desk, right? Like, so all of these different points that are based on our processes aren't necessarily serving the customer in the best way.
And that means that they're more likely to leave. They're less likely to purchase more, all of those things.
Mike Goldman: And I've seen that to be so true, especially in those mid market clients that I work with and those are a lot of our listeners is, you know, it's marketing does their thing and then sales does their thing and then operations takes over and maybe customer service gets involved and then it's our accounts receivable and then we're kind of done and it's so siloed.
As you said, there is an experience, but who owns it? I want to get to the definition of customer experience strategy, customer experience management, what those two things are. But the biggest question I have is who owns that customer experience? How do you get away from those silos?
Jeannie Walters: Well, let me back up to one thing you just said there, because I think when we talk about really making sure that we are understanding the difference between customer service and customer experience, part of that is how we were all taught as business people to think about building a business. If you look at a traditional business plan, there's a lot of emphasis
on customer acquisition, right? It's like, here's how you market. Here's how you sell. Great. You get somebody, they purchase, you turn the page, it becomes all internally focused. It becomes about process and systems. And then there's this little piece about customer service. And the idea of customer service is that that's kind of, we need that because that's part of the customer experience.
That's where when things don't go right. That's when customers need help. That's when all these different things happen. We need people who are there and processes there to support customers in that moment. But that is a piece of the puzzle. And so when we're talking about kind of the end to end journey, we have to make that distinction because otherwise what happens is exactly what we're talking about.
We think, well, that's customer service, right? Like, oh, there's a problem. Customer service will handle that. And we get very excited about certain metrics like, hey, did you notice that we're getting a lot faster in solving customer problems? But we don't ask the question, how can we prevent that problem from happening?
So that bigger question of who owns the customer experience? This is a tricky one because what you'll hear a lot of people say is everyone owns the customer experience, which is absolutely true in some ways, but it's like what they teach us in giving CPR. If you're giving CPR to somebody and you say to a crowd, somebody call 911.
Nobody calls 911, right? You're supposed to say, hey, you in the gray t shirt. You need to call 911 because then somebody has accountability over it. We need to do a similar thing in customer experience management. We need somebody, preferably the CEO, but sometimes there's a chief customer officer.
Sometimes it lands with chief marketing officers, because they have a close relationship with the customer. Sometimes it starts in digital and technology, it starts in all these different places. But we need to constantly build coalitions and cross functional strategy based on the actual experience that the customer has.
And so somebody needs to own the accountability over that, but nobody has the full responsibility of the customer journey. We have to all work together on that.
Mike Goldman: And that's a great distinction of the way I define responsibility and accountability and it sounds like you define it in a similar way is it's perfectly okay for me to say we are all responsible for giving our clients wow levels of service. That's valid, but it's not valid to say we're all accountable if everybody's accountable, nobody's accountable. So I want to be clear on what I think I hear you saying is.
Jeannie Walters: That's right.
Mike Goldman: If we've got kind of the typical leadership team of the, you know, you've got the CEO and the COO and the CFO and maybe a VP of sales and maybe there's a head of customer service and you know, blah, blah, blah. You've got that typical team, head of marketing. You're not necessarily saying, hey, you're missing a role.
You need a chief customer experience officer. Maybe you do, as you said earlier, some companies have that, but it might just be no of all those roles. Everybody's responsible for a piece, butlet's assign one person. And it might be the marketing person. It might be the service person. It may be the ops person, sales, but let's take one person and say, you are the one we are holding accountable for making sure we've got the right end to end experience.
Jeannie Walters: Yeah. I think it's more about you're responsible for building this cross functional team that also has those responsibilities. Right. So because if one of the things I see again and again is we got really excited a couple of years ago, decade plus now about, oh my gosh, we can measure loyalty.
Right. We can say to our customers, would you refer us? Yes or no. The classic net promoter score Fred Reichheld and companies got so excited about this and then people started applying it, but they didn't have a plan of what to do with that information. So they would collect it. They would report out these numbers.
And when they didn't change, people killed the messenger. They said, hey, you, you're doing all these, aren't you responsible for the customer experience, then you should be changing these numbers, these numbers should be changing. But that person isn't necessarily the one who's going to fix the problem on your mobile app.
They're not the one who's going to fix how you hire people, right? So part of what we talk about in customer experience is it's a team sport. We need other people to do this well. And part of that is why I call it a mindset strategy discipline, because the mindset is what kind of unlocks the silos. If we all get on the same page about how are we aligned and what are we delivering for our customers, then that makes everybody kind of see through a different lens and work together on these very specific goals and outcomes around customer experience.
But I think we've done a little bit of a disservice in this space because we act like it's kind of magical thinking. We talk about how it's common sense. Oh my gosh, I don't get why people don't get this. It's common sense to treat customers well, I hear that all the time, or we put up a big banner and we say, well, customers are first, or we put a chair at the end of the conference table and say, don't forget the customer.
But none of that is actually like focused on how business people do their jobs. And so part of this is figuring out how do we make sure we're all aligned around what we want to do. And then how does every kind of team and leader in the organization have at least a piece of that that they feel very accountable and responsible for.
Mike Goldman: So let's dig into that and my sense is digging into that is going to require we dig into, you said before there's customer experience strategy and customer experience management. So tell me more about customer experience strategy.
Jeannie Walters: so this is when we really treat it like it's how we do business. It's part of how what we do as an organization. And the example I always give is, you know, if we have a sales team and after a quarter, we go, oh, well, those weren't the results we wanted, we would never look around and go, okay, I guess we're firing the sales team and sales doesn't work, right?
But that happens to customer experience, because we treat it like it's an extra part. And it really is in an ideal world. And in all of the big disruptions of the last decade plus they've all been experience driven because they grew up this way. They decided from the beginning, we're going to run this organization focused on what customers want, and we're going to do it in a way that's disciplined around the business.
So customer experience strategy is literally marrying what is the promise that we made to our customers? How can we always live up to that? And what are we actually doing about it? What is the plan? How do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we measure success, which usually we don't get to with customer experience.
We just talk about it. This becomes real when it's a strategy. And then the management is really the business discipline that goes around that because
What tends to happen is if we don't have a centralized way to really make decisions around priorities in the customer experience, if we don't understand the journey enough, then you know what, marketing might go, oh, I really want to know.
I'm going to send out a survey to our customers. Somebody else is going to say, oh, you know, we do NPS once a year in account management, and somebody else is doing something else. And so, we don't coordinate the actual journey with the customer. So the discipline of like centralized governance is really important to do this well.
And that's how the best players do it.
Mike Goldman: So what would be an example, make the strategy piece real for us and what's an example of a strategy and how deep does strategy go into, you know, flowing out a process, give a sense of what that looks like.
Jeannie Walters: Sure, so we use something that we call a customer experience success statement to kind of guide the strategy. And what we do is we start with organizational goals. We say, what are we trying to do? Like, do we have a year goal? Do we have a three year goal? Whatever it is. And are those real? Like, are we trying to increase into the market a different way?
Are we trying to increase renewals, maybe, or different things like that? So you start there. You also look at leadership goals. What are all of our leaders held accountable for? Because our chief financial officer is not going to care if we get great feedback and that doesn't translate to more revenue, right?
So we want to make sure we're connecting those dots and then we want to think about what efforts do we put in that we would expect to have the right outcomes. So what are the levers we can pull? For example, if you're in a software as a service, for instance, and you want renewals to go up, well, what you want to do is understand the customer journey before that moment and be proactive about designing things so that it's a better experience so they will renew.
So you say, okay, we have a project where we're going to add some communication or we're going to maybe we need more account managers or customer success managers. Whatever that investment is, you want to make a plan for that and then say, okay, we want to look at both the feedback we get before the change and after, see how customers actually are feeling, and then look at those operational metrics.
Are they actually renewing more? And if they're renewing more, then that's a win. And that's something we can look at and say, okay, that was a good thing to prioritize, right? But if we're never thinking this way, it's all about customer acquisition, and we ignore the people who are just walking out the door.
And that's what this really is about, is looking at it as a business strategy. Including customers in that process, so sometimes having a customer advisory board, for example, is an act of engagement that we learn from and that actually creates loyalty on its own. So it's taking advantage of all these tools in our toolkit, customer journey mapping, service blueprinting, all these things that if we don't get proactive about it, we're just reacting to problems and we're trying to plug the hole in the boat instead of actually having a better boat.
Mike Goldman: So it sounds like and stop me if I've got the logic wrong here, but it sounds like as opposed to saying, hey, to do this, we've got to have a goal. Our goal is to, you know, create a wow level of customer. You know, we need to create the best customer experience. Let's figure out how to do it.
That's the way to think about it is all right. What what are our goals? What are our financial goals? What are our expansion goals? What are our new product goals? What are our customer retention goals? Look at the goals and say, okay, instead of like, if we're talking about renewals to use your example, instead of just saying, all right, you sales guys have to make sure, but before the end of the quarter, go out and get all your renewals.
It's saying, okay, how do we cut an end to end customer experience that would result in their success and therefore the renewal.
Jeannie Walters: Yes. And I will say that there's always two sides to this coin. There's always about what is it that we're trying to do for customers? When you say let's create a wow experience, what does that mean? Let's define that because otherwise what happens is we're asking every single individual in our organization to make a judgment call.
And, you know, every single customer journey mapping workshop I've ever done always has an element where we go, wow, we're talking about these things the wrong way. Like we aren't aligned on what we're doing. And that creates confusion for the customer. Or that creates the wrong results for the customer.
So you know, if we are not defining what does it actually mean, and that's where we have something called the customer experience mission statement. And that's about what is the promise? How do you show up no matter what? It's not about your products or services. It's about who you are to the customer, and then what are they doing because of what you sell them.
So if, you know, nobody goes to a bank because it's a secure place to hold your money, Because that's exactly the definition of any bank. So you have to figure out why would they go to your bank? What are you, what's special about you? And what is the promise you're making? Because we can't be all things to all people.
And so we have to be really clear about who we are to our customers. And so we have a customer experience mission statement. We have the success statement. And those two tools can really work together to help you prioritize. Because otherwise, it becomes just a series of tactics. A lot of action. Somebody reads a book.
I've seen this so many times, Mike, somebody reads a book and they go in and they say, oh my gosh, you know what we need? We need a journey map. We need a customer journey map. And whenever they call us, my first question is why? And you can hear crickets almost every time because they haven't quite figured that out, but they know they need that.
I've seen plenty of journey maps that live on walls that people walk by that don't do any good. I've seen plenty of surveys that go out. And they collect the same information for months, years sometimes, and they don't have a plan of action for what to do with that feedback that they have. That is the magical thinking I'm talking about that I see in a lot of organizations.
Mike Goldman: So net promoter score, I mean, that's the easy one. That's even for somebody like me, who's not an expert in what you do, but I'm working with clients, you know, is net promoter score. Is that a good idea to do? You just have to know how you're using it. Or is that like hey, net promoter score sounds great, but it doesn't work. And here's why.
Jeannie Walters: Well, I think the question is too broad because it does depend on a lot of different factors like industry, like some industries it works better than others, the size of your organization, how you're asking the question. So there are all sorts of things around that, but I personally don't believe there's one magic metric.
People are really complex. We say one thing and we behave differently all the time. And so we have to look at a whole bunch of factors, like what are the quantitative ways that we can measure loyalty and measure feedback? What's the best way to use it? And what else do we need to look at? And so we need to make sure we're not just focusing on just feedback because customers won't tell us the truth and not because they don't want to just because that's our nature.
Like that's why everybody has, you know, a very full gym in January and then it's not so full in February and because we have very good intentions and we think certain things. And I think the the thing that I really love is when we have a way to tell the customer story in a way that people can internalize it. Because that will help people make better decisions in your organization. So I like a scorecard that it might... NPS is a perfectly good metric if you're using it the right way. It's a relational metric, which means it's long term. We don't want our account managers calling the people they already have relationships with and saying, hey, would you recommend us?
Because they're going to go, yeah, sure, I golf with you. I'm not going to tell you I'm shopping around right now, right? So we have to be careful about how we do it. And then we have to know, like, why are we doing it? if we're just doing it to pat ourselves on the back, or if we're just doing it because we think that's the right thing to do, then we're wasting a lot of time and effort and energy.
So know kind of what your metrics are. There are other great metrics out there, like customer effort score, like customer satisfaction rate can be a really good metric in certain industries. And at certain points of the journey, it can be a really good transactional metric. There are all sorts of different things, but then you want to marry that with your operational viewpoint as well. Are people renewing more? Are they complaining
Mike Goldman: Them?
Cause people vote with their wallets, right?
Jeannie Walters: Exactly. And I think if you're getting a lot of service calls and you pat yourself on the back because you actually are solving those faster, you need to back up in the journey and say, what's causing these service calls? How can we stop that?
Because that is then saving expenses and cost. So that's good for your bottom line too. So you have to really look at all these different pieces. And I think that's why I get a little like flustered about this because I think it's so much more robust than people realize, but part of that is because when you do it well, everybody wins.
Your customers win, you win as an organization, and your employees actually like their jobs more. So your job gets easier if you do this well, but we need to put real business acumen and strategy to it. And I think that's the piece that is missing in so many organizations. And part of that is because we believe that if we just tell people, create great customer experiences, that's gonna do it. And we have to do better, in my opinion.
Mike Goldman: How do you deal with, we talked about silos a little bit earlier, but the big one, and I just went through this with a client last week in a planning session, but sales and operations where you know, why does sales is making promises we can't keep or sales is selling things that we can't do and then sales is pissed off that operations is not, you know treating the customer, the way they should be treated or the product was late or the service was late. is there a secret there? Is there a trick there for that sales versus operations silo?
Jeannie Walters: Honestly, this is where I come back to alignment, right? We need to make sure we understand because a lot of times the reason that's happening is because sales is actually told sell as much as you can. That's how you're going to earn your paycheck, your commission, your bonus, all of that. Sell as much as you can.
They are basically trained not to worry about the rest of the journey, not their problem. If we don't connect those dots, then what happens is they go, Oh yeah, oh, that update, that's going to be out by next week. Yeah, will that mean you sign, right? And then they talk to operations and operations says, no, no, that update isn't coming out until next year.
So the customer gets into the journey and then is basically disappointed later because sales and operations were not connecting. A great tool for this. Now I talked about customer journey maps. I like to say customer journey mapping is a verb, not a noun. Because the act of getting the different teams together and doing a customer journey mapping workshop can be incredibly powerful.
Because what you do is you flip the script. You look at the lens through the customer's viewpoint. So instead of thinking about marketing, you think about what is the customer actually experiencing. And you, like, I do it where we write I statements from the customer. What are they thinking, feeling, doing?
What are the high points and the low points? What are the actual emotions they're feeling? So instead of just saying, oh yeah, they're satisfied, nobody has ever said that. Nobody has ever said, you know, how's that new relationship going? Nobody said, well, I'm satisfied, right? Like that is not a real emotion.
So we get into what are they feeling? Are they feeling anxious? Are they feeling neglected? Are they feeling frustrated? Because then what you can do... is think, what do we want them to feel? Well, we want them to feel reassured. We want them to feel confident in taking the next step on the journey with us.
We want them to feel like they're valued. So what can you do in those moments? Well, you could proactively tell them something, instead of making them wait for their delivery date. You could, if they're all calling in about something, what can you do about it? Right? So there are all these touch points that are not that complex to change.
But we just don't take the time to really look at things from that customer's perspective. And if we tweak it just a little, if we go one to ten percent, and instead of overlooking these moments, we do something about it that's positive, we are beating the competition.
Mike Goldman: Love it. Love it. No. And as you were talking, small distinction, but when we talk about customer journey mapping, it's almost like in my mind, if I think of it as a customer experience map, it forces me to think
more. what is
the customer experiencing through all this? Like you said, through their eyes vs. our eyes.
Jeannie Walters: That's right. And there are all sorts of different ways, like you can do an empathy map, you can do a service blueprint, which is where you figure out if we want to deliver this kind of service, what are the processes, systems and people on our side that we need to do to build it to get it right?
Because otherwise, we're saying things like, hey, IT , you need to do the back end of this, right? And oh, marketing, you've got to do the front end. And we hope ugh that it works and we forgot to mention that to finance. We forgot to even tell them that the invoicing is going to be different. And so the customer then is the one who has to call in, who's totally confused, who gets the runaround, who feels like, wow, this company doesn't know what they're doing.
Because I'm getting five different answers and that's all because we're taught to process map. We're taught to think about these departments as an org chart, as like very separate and distinct. The customer sees your brand as your brand, and we have to own that.
Mike Goldman: What's the business case for this, right? Cause I'm, I'm hearing people in my head, you know, imagining people in my head saying, this all sounds great. We're already crazy busy. Maybe next year we'll look at it, but we know what we're doing. We, you know, we make a product. We market it. We sell it. We sell, we're fine. Our retention's pretty good. Like what's the business case for saying, no, we've really got to think about this differently.
Jeannie Walters: Mhm I mean, there are a lot of different ways to connect this to your organizational goals, but I always like to say it really does make everything easier, including sales, including marketing, including customer service, all of those things. And it's really a great way to look for operational efficiencies as well.
Because if you are really understanding your customer journey, if you're really trying to respond to them, what happens is you start seeing places. Where, you know what, you're doing things three different ways in your operations that you could actually. You know, make so much smoother for the customer if you invest a little bit of time understanding kind of that root cause of why is this happening.
The other thing that happens is if you do this well, experience is the competitive advantage in the world today. It just is. When we look at every recession, every kind of dip in the economy, the organizations that come out ahead are the ones who have a great customer experience according to their customers.
And I say that because sometimes people say, well, what about, you know these, I wouldn't like that as a customer when they see some other customer journey. Well, that's not for you then. Like we have to know who we are and who our customers are and just make sure we really are connecting to them because that will be a winning business strategy.
You get more word of mouth referrals. You get more test, and in B2B, more testimonials and client references. Your customer lifetime value goes up, meaning you don't have to fill the bucket as much, because you're not losing the customers that you have. They are more likely to spend more with you, purchase more, hire you again, all of those things, if they're happy with the customer experience.
Mike Goldman: I want to go loop all the way back to probably one of the first steps that we didn't cover and maybe this is something you do or maybe there's something that typically happens before you and your team get involved, but we haven't talked about defining who your customer is. Customer avatar or persona or whatever phrase you want to use. Help us a little bit with that. What should companies be thinking about, you know, that say, well, you know, my customer is families in the Northeast United, you know, it's very generic. How should we be thinking about defining who our customer is? How detailed should we get?
Jeannie Walters: I love this question. Yeah, there are two things I watch out for when we're building personas. Whenever we start a customer journey mapping project, for example, we always need a persona. You need to know who are you mapping for. So it is really important. In B2B and in a lot of organizations, we have layers of customers.
We have buyers, in some cases, who are not the end users. We have you know, just different industries we might be serving, all of those things. I really like to think about a customer as an individual. And so in B2B, one of the things that happens is we say things like, well, our customer is a, you know, fortune 500 financial services, blah, blah, blah.
I want to think about if we're really zeroing in on the customer experience, we want to look at, okay, let's talk about the buyers. What are we doing to make that journey as seamless and effortless and delightful as it can be. Let's think about that one person and get real about that. And so we build personas based on kind of more psychographics rather than demographics because the other thing that I've been really kind of trying to move my industry towards is we make some assumptions.
When we say things like, well, you know, I, I worked with an engineering firm and they said well, one of the things that we know is that, you know, typical engineer, like white guy who's in his fifties, whatever. And I was looking at the data about education and I was like, that's not who's coming out of engineering school anymore.
This is not your buyer anymore. We have to get real about that and we have to stop making those assumptions because those assumptions actually put us into a place of comfort where we're like, oh, I'm just like them. I know exactly what my customer thinks. I know exactly what my customer will do. And so one of the things that I'm doing with personas is actually making it less about kind of a picture of a person and a name and an age.
And I use initials because that also gets out of gender thinking. And I use kind of a shadow just to person that pretty androgynous and other things, because we have to shake that off. If we're talking about diversifying who we serve and being providing more inclusive customer experiences, that's a huge part of it.
But I think getting back to kind of how we define it, the best way to do that is to really look at who are your customers today. And what are their commonalities and talk to them about what their worries are. What do they actually think about when they, and the other thing that sometimes can happen is that we act like our customers are thinking about our products and services all the time.
Right? And we say, well, they've got this need and then they do this and then they do this. Nope, they're just trying to live their lives. They're just trying to achieve a goal. They're trying to feel a certain way. They're trying to get home because they've got, you know, a kid to pick up from school.
Whatever. But we have to think about our customer journeys as fitting into somebody's life. And get real about that too, because I see a lot of, especially like forgive me, but especially marketing journeys, a lot of those are like, and then they're just going to read all this stuff and they're going to be so impressed by our products.
And then they're going to call our salesperson. And that's good. And it's like, no, none of that is going to happen. They're going to look at the headlines. They're going to move on with their day. So what can we do to be proactive about making sure we're providing value along the way? And that's what we really look for is how do we move them through the journey on their terms? And to do that, we have to know who we're talking about.
Mike Goldman: What's the first step someone should take if they're hearing this and saying, yeah, you know what? She's right, and we haven't focused on this where we've got these silos. We're not thinking about it from the customer point of view. We got to get moving on this, but it could all seem very overwhelming, right? Cause man, we have to change the way we're doing business. We may have to reorganize. What's the very first thing someone ought to go and do to kind of get this rolling.
Jeannie Walters: There are two things I always recommend. One is if you want to really get that group together just to start thinking this way, a customer journey mapping workshop is a really effective way to do that. And it's a really good first step because it helps people realize what you don't know and where the gaps are.
And that will help bubble up some of those priorities around what do we need to do first. So that's always good. The other thing is getting real alignment around, okay, what does a great customer experience mean here in our organization? And that's where we always start with a customer experience mission statement, because the act of aligning that and getting into kind of the thinking around that helps everybody realize that this isn't something that will be
a project. This isn't something that's just like, oh, let's check the box. We mentioned customers today. This is about really understanding what does that mean? Like when we make decisions as business people, it's always about priorities. It has to be. And it can feel like everything in customer experience is a priority.
And so the best way to get that alignment is to really understand who are you to your customers and what is the promise that they understand that you've made.
Mike Goldman: Going back to the customer journey mapping workshop. What's the hot, like, okay, got to go do that. What does that look like? Is that literally thinking through here's the customer? What's every step in the process? What do we do? Give us a sense of what that mapping workshop looks like.
Jeannie Walters: So when we're customer journey mapping, we are solely focused on their journey. So we're not worried about our processes at that moment. So what we always recommend is starting with their kind of typical stages to a customer journey. You might have different ones, but you want to get out of the org chart thinking.
So it's not about like marketing or sales. It's about awareness, consideration, selection, sales, if you have an onboarding, you know, process, that type of thing, all the way through to either, yes, they're satisfied, meaning you're doing the exact bare minimum of what they expect, to loyalty, to advocacy, which is what we really want.
We really want people to be so passionate about it that they advocate for us. So, you know, we do that we literally think about what is every step in the process. So sometimes I do a workshop where I, you know, to warm up, I have a scenario where I say, Okay, you are a mom of twins, you are at home, you took the day off from work, because you're getting a new dishwasher, tell me about that process, and map it out from
that person's point of view and what we realize is people forget. Oh, what are we going to do with the old dishwasher that's still in the kitchen. Oh, the kids are running around. He's leaving a mess. Well, you know, whatever so we really want to get into like the minutiae of what does that really mean?
Like when we say send a contract, right? What does that look like to the customer after we have wooed them after we have told them they're so great one of the first things we do right when they say yes, I'm ready is send them this document that tells them all the horrible things we're going to do if they don't pay their invoice on time, right?
Now some of that we have to do but how can we warm that up? How can we make that more human? How can we make sure that that is still living up to the promise that we made to deliver a great customer experience. So there are like different pieces to the puzzle. We use a framework of four areas.
One is intentional success. That's where we start. Because if we don't define what success looks like, then it's all over the place. Then we go into cultural commitment. What are we doing inside our organization to really make sure this is real and that it's a discipline that we'll keep doing. Customer collaboration.
How are we hearing from them? How are we working with them? How are we making sure they are part of this? And then finally, my favorite one is experiential innovation. What are we doing about this to innovate around our experience to stay ahead of the competition to make sure that we're getting the business results we want from doing all this work.
So I just think it's like untapped potential in so many organizations because we just have not been taught to think this way.
Mike Goldman: And not only is it untapped potential, but what is more important, who is more important than your customer and the fact that their experience is an afterthought in most organizations does kind of boggle your mind. So I'm very glad there's people out there like you that smack us, smack us in the head and go, snap out of it. What are you doing? So.
Jeannie Walters: Yeah, they're your only asset if you really get down to it.
Mike Goldman: You know, if you lose them, you don't have much. And, what's the word I'm looking for? Our expectations around service over the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years, and maybe it was before then. I'm only 30 years old, so I don't remember much before then.
Jeannie Walters: I know I can't remember either.
Mike Goldman: But our service expectations, you know, driven by Amazon and our expectations have just gone sky, you know, we want something and we want it a minute after we order it. And we want it really easy to return. And so, we've got to grow along with that.
Jeannie Walters: And I think part of what you are pointing out is that that's not just in B2C, that's not just for the people who, I've heard so many B2B organizations who, or non profit or educational or healthcare, you name it, and they all say well we're not Amazon, but your customers expect you to be, even if you're not in the industry.
And you know, I worked with a medical transportation organization, and one of the things that they said their customers were asking for was seeing the van on their phone, right? Because they were used to seeing, oh, well, when Uber picks me up, I see the car or when the, you know, now we're getting updates from Amazon and others about delivery time and stuff.
So it wasn't good enough to say our delivery driver will be there on Thursday. They wanted to know where is that van so I can track it. Now, they didn't expect that two years ago, but they are absolutely expecting it now. And we have to keep up with that. And so by not keeping up with that, we are leaving the door open for those disruptors.
Because right now today, I like to say there are two people with a laptop who are trying to disrupt your industry right now. that's how it starts, with experience. So if you're not disrupting your own industry, somebody else is trying to right now.
Mike Goldman: Tell us more about your company experience investigators give us the scope of what you do to help with all this and the types of organizations you tend to work with.
Jeannie Walters: Sure. Yeah, we have kind of two sides of the business. One is what we call advisory and consulting and that's really all these workshops we do with organizations around journey mapping around mission statements around success statements. We work with clients sometimes for months or years where it's more of a coaching of the executives, a lot of times I come in and do executive briefings and things like that.
So we have a team over there. That's really great. And we love our clients over there. We work with everybody from, I would say, midsize through fortune 500 based on the organization. And then, every industry you can imagine, I drive my marketing people crazy. Cause they're always like, you know, what industry?
And I'm like, I don't, you tell me, cause we're all over. But the other side is really we do a lot around education and empowerment, so I do a lot of keynote speaking. I do a lot of like customer events where we you know, work with customers on co creation and things like that, as well as webinars and writing and all that good stuff. And I have a podcast too so there you go.
Mike Goldman: So what's the name of the podcast?
Jeannie Walters: Yes, the podcast is Experience Action, and it's kind of like an old time call in radio show. So people can leave me voicemails on any question about customer experience, and I answer one question in an episode, and it's a ton of fun. And then once a month, we do something called CX Pulse Check as an episode, and that's where I talk about all the great things happening in customer experience.
Mike Goldman: Love (it) and I actually went and looked earlier and I found it and I listened to one and they're good because it's a question and they're fairly short. It doesn't take a lot of time. So it's great.
Jeannie Walters: And you can leave me a question. So feel free to do that too.
Mike Goldman: Love it. This will be in the show notes, but where should people go if they want to find out more about you and your speaking and the company and all the great things you're doing?
Jeannie Walters: Yes. Thank you, Mike. So experienceinvestigators.com is the site where you can find all that. And then if you want to connect on LinkedIn, I'm also a LinkedIn Learning Instructor. There are several different courses out there. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.
Mike Goldman: Well, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. Jeannie, thanks for helping us get there today. Really appreciate you coming on the show.
Jeannie Walters: Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.