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Robert Zirk: On Questions for now, we ask big thinkers today's big questions. Questions that matter to CX leaders.

So far, many of these questions have been about the big picture. They've been questions for brands.

But this episode is for you, the CX leader, as an individual, and it starts with a couple of questions I'd like you to think about:

Would you describe yourself as "customer-obsessed"? And how successful are you in rallying others around the wants and needs of your customers?

Many CX leaders face an uphill battle trying to get their wider organization to adopt the same mindset.

A Forrester study revealed that just 8% of organizations would be considered "customer-obsessed," which they define as "putting the customer at the center of your leadership, strategy and operations."

Execs who mirror the priorities of their customers position themselves and the brands they represent to attract new customers and keep their current ones happy, with a number of studies showing that when leaders can demonstrate the link between customer satisfaction and their organization's financial metrics, they're more likely to achieve customer experience success.

So today on Questions for now, we'll ask: How can you act as a customer experience change agent in your organization?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS International where we ask today’s big questions in digital customer experience. I’m Robert Zirk.

To be customer-centric, you have to focus on meeting the needs of your customers. Truly exceptional companies understand that to a point of being customer-obsessed, continually raising the bar for what customers have come to expect: an experience that's fast and tailored to their preferences.

Robert Zirk: Blake Morgan is a keynote speaker, three-time author and customer experience futurist. She's a frequent contributor to Forbes, has been dubbed "the queen of CX" by Meta, and she speaks to CX leaders routinely, including as host of The Modern Customer Podcast. I asked Blake about her thoughts on the state of customer experience today.

Blake Morgan: Customer experience isn't what it used to be, for better or worse. The positive is the technology innovation, the awareness of customer experience as a serious business discipline. On the flip side, there was an article that came out in the Wall Street Journal interviewing Forrester — Pete Jacques, the analyst — saying customer experience today in the summer of 2024 is just way down, that many brands, they're tired of spending. With inflation and all the economic stress and uncertainty, companies have not done a great job of investing in customer experience and many brands have just frozen investments.

Robert Zirk: But while these spending cuts may help alleviate budgetary concerns in the short term, they can undermine growth and customer retention in the long term. And it's here where Blake sees opportunity for the next company that wants to join the 8% that are customer-obsessed.

Blake Morgan: This is an opportunity for companies that get it, that want to double down, invest, take the risk, because when every brand is going left, your opportunity is to go right, to say, " Oh, if we make customers' lives easier and better, if we create back end operational efficiencies to make things smoother for both employees and customers, we'll win more business." It's just common sense.

There was a stat that I was sharing a lot in my speeches a few years ago from Forrester that most customer programs are going to be cut, but one in five will be stronger than ever. So for the companies that double down at a time when everyone else is making cuts, those investments are going to pay off and you're going to come out ahead of the competition.

Robert Zirk: To provide a framework for leaders who are looking to capitalize on a customer-obsessed business strategy, Blake wrote her latest book, The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: New Rules for Building a Business Around Today's Customer.

Blake Morgan: In all of my research, and I've been doing this almost 20 years now, it's just become very clear that customer experience has to be a leadership conversation. And so, that has big implications for leaders everywhere.

Robert Zirk: The eight laws follow the acronym, CX LEADER. Let's run through each letter quickly to start, and then we'll take a closer look at some of the key ideas.

First, the letter C represents a customer experience mindset.

Blake Morgan: X is about exceeding long term profit expectations, but focusing both on the short term and the long term.

Robert Zirk: L involves laying out a customer experience strategy.

Blake Morgan: What does that look like and how do you stick to it?

Robert Zirk: E is for embarking on a 90-day get started plan.

Blake Morgan: Because a lot of people that will pick up a book like the one I wrote are new in a customer experience role. They don't know where to start.

Robert Zirk: A is for anticipating the future.

Blake Morgan: We look at how everyone watching and listening to this podcast can themselves be a customer experience futurist.

Robert Zirk: D reminds leaders: don't forget that employees are customers too, while E covers evaluation.

Blake Morgan: We talk about measurement because you can't talk about customer experience without thinking about how are we measuring if we're successful.

Blake Morgan: ...Retention. How do we keep customer experience front and center? Because it's easy to get the momentum and everyone gets excited about customer experience and then it falls by the wayside over time.

Robert Zirk: To recap, Blake's first law of customer-focused leadership is create a customer experience mindset. That begins with an understanding that customer experience is a team sport.

Lori Branton is global vice president of client success at TELUS International. Her team supports leaders across a variety of industries in the design, build and delivery of next-gen digital solutions to enhance the customer experience. Lori shared how customer centricity needs to be a key component of an organization's business model.

Lori Branton: Customer experience is inherently cross-functional and top-down, but it really requires an operating model that helps define the roles and responsibilities from the frontline team member all the way up to the executive level.

Successful models include a plan that's really establishing clear principles that are translating into your blueprint for your customer culture. They can also help in setting clear goals and metrics that are focused on customer-centric outcomes.

Robert Zirk: Lori emphasized that leaders who embrace CX as a team sport equip frontline team members for success.

Lori Branton: Another key component is helping to empower and prepare the frontline teams with the appropriate tools and authority to be able to resolve issues quickly and effectively for customers.

Robert Zirk: While a customer experience leader and their team can set some of the groundwork, CX is cross-functional and needs to extend beyond a designated CX team across every area of the organization. CX leaders must break down silos so that every leader, even those in traditionally non-customer facing departments like finance or IT, understands the relationship between customer and business outcomes and is accountable to that relationship. For example, if agents are struggling to use the tech setup that the IT team puts in place, they'll also struggle to deliver the best support possible. But that happens, customers aren't thinking...

Disgruntled customer: Wow, their IT department really ought to fix the technology their agents are using.

Robert Zirk: Instead, they walk away thinking your brand's customer experience is subpar. Lori notes that despite the net benefits of fostering customer centricity, it isn't simple to pull off.

Lori Branton: It does require a lot of time and energy to ensure teams are aligned. They're continuing to keep the customer experience front and center. And as we talk, customer expectations are changing. So this is a continuous process.

And I think companies often stumble when they cannot unify under a common set of objectives or measures that really transcend their individual or department goals. So the key is really around how we're compromising, collaborating and recognizing that this is really a shared mission to move beyond any siloed objectives to a more collaborative customer-centric approach.

Robert Zirk: Blake stresses that leaders throughout organizations need to reframe the way they think about customer experience.

Blake Morgan: Customer experience is very simple. And I think that, over the years, I've just noticed how complicated everyone makes it. And I've realized that what it takes to be customer-centric, it really is your people. It is each individual working at your company every day, jumping up out of bed, excited for their work, having purpose in their work, feeling engaged and connected to the work, understanding the importance of them showing up and bringing their full selves to work.

So customer experience is just a decision, but to create a culture where every employee is making that decision every day across the company in every meeting, it's really hard to do. And so most companies fail at it.

If you're a leader and you want your employees to make customer experience a decision every day, well, guess what? You, the leader, have to make the decision first!

You have got to exude that energy for influencing change. You have got to be a leader where, when you speak, you can change the molecules in the room because you care. You care deeply so your employees will care, because that energy cascades down and creates that customer-centric culture.

Robert Zirk: For CX leaders, Blake notes that it can be as simple as starting with a smile when talking about customers or talking to your team members.

Blake Morgan: How many people watching and listening to this podcast before they start the day at work, they just even talk to their employees, like, "Hey, how was your weekend? How are your kids? Are you planning a vacation this year?" Small talk, like, talk about the weather, talk about what their favorite foods are, favorite music.

We're full people with colorful lives. And I think that it's important as managers to create that culture of caring where I care about you as a person, not just as a producer working here. I care about your life. And then you'll get to see that trust build when you form relationships with your teams.

Robert Zirk: In The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership, Blake highlights the importance of a 90 day get started plan, a key component of which is to keep the lines of communication open at every level of the organization so that you can formulate an honest assessment of the employee experience as well as qualitative customer feedback.

Blake Morgan: I advise everyone to, first, no matter your level at your company, listen. It's very obvious, but go on a listening tour. Definitely listen more than you speak. Once you understand the gaps in the business, you can start to figure out who you need to have on your side to get things done, what tools, where are the gaps, where are the opportunities.

I've found that these are some of the more effective strategies from executives like Ali Bouhouch, the former chief technology officer for makeup brand Sephora, he was in charge of a lot of the digital transformation that they had that was really successful. And he did such a great job to also take ideas from employees and really create some of the first digital products of their kind. It's called Visual Artist, where customers can use augmented reality to try makeup on. Sephora was one of the first to do that.

He found that idea by just listening to employees on his listening tour. So I think that part of being a customer experience change agent is understanding how to win friends and influence people. You will need partners and advocates and that means that when you go in, don't start day one with an agenda, start with listening and understanding.

Robert Zirk: And as leaders foster customer-centric thinking among their teams, employees will take greater pride in their work.

Blake Morgan: It's that accountability factor, like, we all want employees that take ownership, that are accountable, that feel like they almost own the business. And if we could all have employees that had that level of ownership, that block and tackle for each customer, I mean, that would be the dream.

Robert Zirk: Blake pointed to Jocko Willink's book, Extreme Ownership, and its core concepts of leadership and accountability.

Blake Morgan: That's the best brand you can build is when employees have extreme ownership over their work, care deeply, take it seriously, and aren't afraid to stick their neck out and say, "Oh, hey, I think this thing that came in through the contact center could be a potential red flag. We should probably look at this before it balloons into something bigger." These are the employees that you want.

Robert Zirk: Lori highlighted that more CX leaders today are aware of the direct connection between the employee experience and the customer experience.

Lori Branton: I think we all understand that engaged team members ultimately are delivering stronger performance, they achieve higher customer satisfaction and they can better innovate because they're able to tailor their recommendations and what success looks like directly to the customer-focused outcomes.

Intuitively, companies understand the linkage and there's been multiple studies and examples that show there's a strong correlation in having a customer-centric culture and things like higher revenue, increasing profitability, revenue retention and brand loyalty.

Robert Zirk: For example, Forrester research shows that customer-obsessed companies generate two and a half times more revenue than companies that aren't customer obsessed.

Lori Branton: But there is a discrepancy between the belief in customer centricity and its practical application. And there's many reasons for that.

Robert Zirk: Lori cited funding, conflicting scorecard priorities and limitations on the customer data you're collecting through your contact center and across your business that impede you from gathering the insights you need to better serve your customers.

One place where leaders can start identifying pain points is the operational environment, examining how employee-facing technology is helping or hindering your frontline team members' ability to deliver a great customer experience.

Lori Branton: Having an employee who is looking to resolve a customer concern in real time, having them able to look up information, triage and resolve a challenge in real time is directly influenced by the tools and systems they have at their disposal. If they have multiple frontline systems they need to log into in order to find information, if they're searching for an answer that is in PDFs and they have a customer waiting, it's a huge impact to the end customer experience.

Robert Zirk: In Time to Win: The Consumer Patience Study, conducted by CX expert and past Questions for now guest Jay Baer, in cooperation with StatSocial, 85% of customers highlighted speed and responsiveness as an important factor of whether or not they're loyal to a brand. And, in a Forrester report, two-thirds of consumers identified a company's respect for their time as the most valuable component of an online customer experience.

Lori Branton: Many leaders are looking at how they can best empower the next generation customer experience agent. There's a lot of use cases in place, things like how we can better improve the tools for frontline team members and provide data that's helping them make the right decisions.

Robert Zirk: Increasingly, leaders are turning to generative AI to support their agents in delivering a more responsive and efficient customer service.

Lori Branton: What leaders are thinking of is how are we advancing some existing cases while also cautiously balancing things like data privacy and other concerns that, entering full into generative AI, may create some hesitancy in testing things out live in front of customers.

Robert Zirk: And Blake reminds leaders to apply new technologies like generative AI with customer centricity in mind, focusing on how these new efficiencies can be leveraged to create better experiences.

Blake Morgan: I think it's a big opportunity if you're going to save money with some of these frequently asked questions, how can you add value to customers lives? If experience is the only thing that differentiates your product or service, you better have an experience. What is that experience? And generally the best experiences are driven by amazing people that make your customers feel good.

Robert Zirk: With the rapid pace of technological advancement, leaders need to carefully balance short and long term priorities. This ties into another of Blake's eight CX laws, where she advocates for leaders to become customer experience futurists.

Blake Morgan: One of the biggest hindering blocks to customer experience that I've seen is this. Most executives struggle to hold two opposing ideas in their mind at one time. So how can we take care of the business needs today while also planning for the future?

We all have to take care of today's agenda, but what about growth and innovation in our own lives? Maybe our dreams are to take our kids on vacation or get in shape or learn a new language. You know, you have to come up with some kind of plan for yourself to see that future vision of yourself, but you can't throw out all the responsibilities for today.

So again, being a futurist, especially from a customer experience perspective, it's understanding the importance of taking care of your customers today and all those fires we put out in customer service, but it's also understanding the opportunity to create a growth plan, a higher vision for our programs of where we want to be, whether that's through technology or hiring better, great people, retaining our employees.

Robert Zirk: Blake referenced a quote by Forrester: "Customer experience is a game of inches rather than yards." This quote is an adaptation of a phrase that's associated with American football, and popularized by a speech delivered by Al Pacino in the film Any Given Sunday.

The idea is that small details, marginal gains, and incremental progress all add up, and can make the difference between winning and losing, or success and failure.

Blake Morgan: So even just a few tiny inches of progress can be a huge growth strategy and help us win. We can just make a few small improvements and through that, we're going to end up winning more market share. In the book, I have some more hardcore futurist tools like horizon planning, scenario planning, thinking about what could happen, but I also talk more just about growth, change and innovation.

I actually, in that section, talk about David Geffen. You would think, what does a record company innovator, what does that have to do with customer experience and customer service? But I think that's the fun of the book is I take examples from the real world of innovators, people that are pushing the bounds, and I bring it back to the contact center and the customer service and say, "Hey, we can all be more and do more and achieve success if we think a little differently."

Robert Zirk: Another customer experience futurist Blake mentions in The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership is David Cote, author of the book Winning Now, Winning Later, and the former CEO of Honeywell.

Blake Morgan: He inherited the company in the early 2000s. No one thought he would succeed. He came from GE and he knew that in order to prove Wall Street and all the naysayers wrong, he was going to have to figure out how to turn this multinational conglomerate to win now and also win later.

And he did that. He did that by personally, even though he's CEO of this billion dollar company, he decided to start calling customers directly because he found that his teams were lying to him about the health of the company. Plant managers at this company, if they didn't feel a flaw in the customer experience was their fault, they wouldn't include it in reports.

So he was getting reports when he started that everything was great, but upon meeting customers, they were saying things to him like, "It's so nice to meet you. We're about to sue Honeywell because you haven't done your share of what you promised to do for us."

And so David Cote is the example of a leader who really has the customer experience mindset, who in his many years at Honeywell, dove in, really understood where the gaps were. He wasn't above what I call flipping burgers next to customers or employees to understand the needs of the business. And so his book, Winning Now, Winning Later, is an amazing book for anybody who is at the leadership level that wants to understand "What does it look like to have a CEO that really embraces customer-focused leadership?"

He turned his company from a 20 billion market cap to 120 billion market cap when he left. So I have a lot of examples in the book, but I would say Honeywell is a really interesting turnaround. It's a really complicated, large company with many divisions and products, but it just goes to show that all it really takes is one leader that decides to advocate for customer experience and the whole company can turn around.

Robert Zirk: The idea of customer experience futurism brings us back to creating cross-functional opportunities for collaboration.

Examples Lori suggested include innovation days, which are days set aside for stakeholders, across departments, to take a step back and discuss challenges and opportunities to drive better outcomes.

Lori Branton: We want to be thinking about how are we empowering the frontline team member to make those decisions.

It could be enhancing the frontline tools and an emulator so that they can live and breathe the in-app experience along with your customers. It could be a frontline team member wearing a virtual headset and going through things live. So I think re-imagining and looking at innovation. Nobody has a crystal ball, but there's that cross section of where are you today and where do you want to go?

Robert Zirk: Lori shared a great example from a recent innovation day TELUS International facilitated with a client that leveraged customer and employee insights to identify quick wins and empower the organization to deliver a better customer experience.

It brought together teams that wouldn't conventionally be thought of as directly customer facing, like marketing and IT. But each team's insights, when challenged to approach their roles from a customer-focused lens, proved to be valuable in holistically transforming the organization.

Lori Branton: We have the IT stakeholders at the plate listening to the transformative power by making decisions around how we're routing calls, how we're enabling things like digital concierge or enabling pop ups that show the next best action, for example, taking not only the IT mindset on what will be required in order to have that pop up appear, but what it actually means to the customer experience for the frontline team member who is trying to triage information in real time and recommend to the customer the next step.

So that included reimagining an agent of the future. That included trying to look at ways in which similar clients are trying to resolve challenges and how they're approaching it.

So looking at it that way, narrowing it down, having a broader set of stakeholders focus on the problem, we've been able to shortlist a couple of ideas to bring forward in solution, in addition to looking at a larger redesign on the customer experience that includes everything from in-app all the way to the face-to-face interactions within a store.

Robert Zirk: Wins like these can be very encouraging, and can help to demonstrate the return on investment for CX to senior leadership. But customer centricity isn't something you leave on autopilot. Blake reiterated the point that customer-focused leadership is not a short term initiative. It requires constant upkeep.

Blake Morgan: Kind of reminds me of New Year's resolutions. You know, we all start January 1 with big ideas of what we're going to commit to that year. And by February or March, it's like gym memberships. They often fall to the wayside and people cancel them after a few months. So how do you keep these customer principles as part of your daily practice?

Customer experience is a wash, rinse, repeat effort. It never stops. You have to do it all the time. It has to just be part of the way you do business, because if you don't build it into your culture and your operations, it will fall by the wayside. And if you want to win and compete on experience, it can't be an afterthought. It has to be a core part of what you do every day.

Robert Zirk: One way to keep customer centricity connected to business outcomes is to ensure constant monitoring, measurement, analysis, and a feedback loop to improve service delivery. Lori suggests leaders focus on real time and voice of the customer related metrics, which can include NPS, CSAT or customer effort.

Lori Branton: Those are what we're typically looking to connect back to our customer on what that means from how they operate their business and real operational savings or growth and loyalty-based metrics.

Robert Zirk: Gallup workplace research indicates that a 25% growth in customer loyalty is associated with companies who emphasize customer centricity.

On this episode, we explore customer-focused leadership — and the steps CX leaders can take to cultivate and champion a customer-centric culture in their organizations.

Episode cover image for Questions for now, a TELUS Digital podcast, featuring an illustrated character looking through a telescope while holding a tablet showing a graph with an arrow trending upward.

How can you act as a customer experience change agent in your organization?

Since publishing this episode, we've rebranded to TELUS Digital.

Customer centricity goes beyond providing good customer service, relying on company leadership to consider every decision, action and strategy from the perspective of the customer. Leaders who foster a customer-centered mindset best position their organizations to attract and retain customers, with a number of studies validating the correlation between customer-focused leadership and CX success.

Listen for the actionable insights of Blake Morgan, customer experience futurist, keynote speaker and author of The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership, and Lori Branton, global vice president of client success at TELUS Digital.

Blake's new book, The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership, is available for purchase on Amazon or at 8CXLaws.com.

How can you act as a customer experience change agent in your organization?

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