Your First Customer Is Your Colleague

Ben, what's on your mind?

The AX strategy gap is what's on my mind. The gap in between what your leadership team say and what your business delivers to the customer.

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. And if you're a regular of the AX podcast, you'll know that in every episode, I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders and thinkers to help share best practices and tips to help you with your very own B2B Account Experience program. You know, one of the most popular episodes we've done recently was with Ben Phillips, and he spoke about how to deliver on B2B experience, where management is obsessed with everybody else's score. I love this episode. It's one of my favorites to record as well. And I was able to persuade Ben to come back because he's been thinking a little bit more about this area about how to think about internal experience as part of the whole CX program. So we've got Ben back today and just a way to introduce Ben. He's a certified CX professional and he's got about more than 25 years working directly with customer experience. He's been with big organizations that are in IT and financial services. Not only that, he's the author of three books on the subject of cx, including the CX Dictionary. He's ranked as one of the top 20 CX influencers, and he's one of my favorite voices in B2B.CX. Ben, welcome back.

How you doing? Hello. Well, I was thinking then, it's when you and me get together, it's like a couple of old mates getting together, putting the world to rights about cx. So here we are again. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.

Is there a lot to put right? I don't know if it's broken. We should be fixing it, right?

Well, I guess maybe I wouldn't have a job if there wasn't. So, yeah, a few things we got to sort out, I feel.

Hey, well, listen, let's get straight into that because, you know, you've been. One of the things I loved about the previous work that we did was just helping people think about customer experience as a sort of holistic exercise. It's not just about focusing on the end customer, is it? There's more work to be done and I'd really love to unpack that a bit.

Yeah, well, look, I mean, the reason that's a topic for you me to chat about today is because, you know, I've just left the most recent long term assignment that I had, and I mean one thing about doing that is whilst you have a period of concern about where's the next dollar coming from, you can actually just take a little bit of me time and just sort of sit back and go, all right, so these industries that I'm very passionate about that I'm very active in, what's going on, what can I see? What's the big picture? And I think you're right to introduce it that way because what I see is a disconnect between these wonderful and I'm not disparaging any of them, there are some wonderful, excellently put together CX strategies out there. Really, really good one. So my general take on this, there's nothing wrong with CX strategy for the most part. Actually you see them when they play back with companies, that's not the problem. Now the big consulting orbs might come in and say, oh, that is your problem. Because it's their aim to rewrite your strategy for you, right? So by default they assume the strategy is not right in the first place. Actually, I don't think that's where the problem is. I think the problem is internal engagement. So every colleague around you in your company, in your business, how do they and do they even get and buy into that strategy right from day one? And there's a myriad of different reasons why they might not, then there's a whole bunch more even reasons why those things are just not connecting properly. And I think it really starts with communication. You know, I always say the C word's the biggest word in all of this. And we did this last time and you and me guessed what the C word can be short for the obvious one's customer. No, it isn't, is communication. Right, so it's the same thing I said last time, communication is key. If you can communicate the strategy to your, your colleague in a really, really effective way and that has to be adaptable, then you'll achieve more success in terms of delivering on your customer experience strategy. Is that making sense to you so far do you think?

Yeah, let me just see if I can repeat it back for you because again, communications is a two way thing, as my dad always used to tell me. So what you're saying is, is that you need to start with the people closest to you, the colleagues, to explain to them the customer experience strategy and understand what's going on. Did I get that right? And if I can further play this back to you, because I think most people who are parachuted into a CX role, they've grown up through it, have all the right instincts to go. It's got to be about the customer first. We need to fix their issues or their problems. But you're saying, you know, physician, heal thyself, something like that.

So.

Okay, it's not counterintuitive, it makes sense. But why is this not part of a conventional CX program?

All right, well look, we can be as challenging as we like around this, right? Because we reserve the right to do that. Maybe I'll go so far as to say to you that your customer experience job is not necessarily about the customer. Eventually it is. Okay, but hold on a minute before you go cowboy and start going out there straight to customer and listening to what they're doing and getting and triaging their issues and getting their feedback and making commitments and making promises and saying you do with all of that, you then come straight back into your organization, don't you? And ask for favors from your stakeholders, your colleagues. Sitting all of those people to deliver what you just said to the customer, you'll do what a bonkers way round of thinking about the world that is. Why do we not by default, and this is especially true in B2BCX when we're talking about multimillion dollar complex long term multi layered relationships, not just single transactions like we have in B2C. We're dealing with very complex landscapes in B2B. Actually you could spend a long time talking and networking and navigating your colleague network before you ever get to the customer. And in fact would you not be better set up for success had you already won those colleagues over and got them on side? And that's why these high level statements about CX is everyone's job makes no sense until you realize your colleague is your first customer. Yeah, when your colleague is your first customer, that could be sitting right next to you at your hybrid working desk, right? So your hot desk, whatever you come into work that day, you have an initiative, you want to make it land. Who do you turn to first? I don't want to go off and start making promises to the customer because I've got no support for my stakeholders around me deliver on those promises. So I really want to evangelize internally first of all. And I just don't think that's there in the psychology from the Bronx, the acting work in today.

Let's probe a bit deeper if that's okay. Because I think you're really onto something here. If I think usually the key set of stakeholders in any big organization is with the sales and commercial team. Okay. I mean it could be support but you know, the sales team are there because they got to keep customers happy. They because you know, their livelihoods to some extent depends on repeat sales. And often what I hear from people and even in my own experience is that the salespeople are most resistant to this kind of customer experience. The head of the sales team frequently a guy. I don't know why I said that, but actually it's often the case.

Yeah.

Stereotypically says I don't need to know about my customers, I know everything about them. You come across this. It's very resistant to that kind of external thing.

Well, you see in CX stable. So autobiographically thinking back, what did I used to think about CX back then? I wanted to sell the product, right. And driven by the number. So actually you might come up with this nice CXC stuff. But actually what I need to do is to find a way into my customer that ticks their needs, boxes and beats my competitor. And so anything else is just noise. But actually I think, and this is why you see I'm role hunting at the moment, right. So I spend a lot of time and I see a lot of CX roles and they are extremely diluted. Many of them can be 10 jobs in one and they want to pay people, pay people peanuts for it. It's just not right. So actually when you carve out those responsibilities like you've just said a sales or can be really resistant to taking on board some of that key customer centric mindset change stuff. But the light bulbs go off when you demonstrate that that's a growth opportunity. You know, you can show how a real focus on the customers needs around. Customer centricity can be a reason why you would be chosen over your competitor. So this is support intelligence, right. These are ways of being able to penetrate a very convoluted marketplace right now which is full of AI solutions. Yeah, why? So how do you cut around that? Well, you can use that to your advantage.

I totally agree. But again, I'm just playing this out. Speaking from what I see in the market is salespeople often be resistant to that kind of customer feedback. It gets in the way. First was a fear of feedback as well documented. I don't want to know what the customer's saying in case it's bad. I came across one the other day, did a podcast with BlueBay. Really great guy Gerard Hutchins was saying if the sales person who's in the account, the account manager says no Please don't survey my account because stuff is going wrong there. That's the time when you need to go in. That's where they think. So there's this going on. And if I can just extend this a bit further, Ben, is that my traditional approach has been to say, okay, we will prove this. There's an ROI here. If you do this, you will sell more. Well, that works on some people, but I don't think it really cuts through. So I want to come back to your point about this. If you turn them into an internal customer, to me, I'm beginning to see that there could be an alternative strategy there. Can you flesh that out a little bit?

Yeah. I mean, look, how would you. Okay, so a lot of companies, what do they do? They look at something like Net promoter to demonstrate whether they're being more customer centric or not.

Yeah.

I think I've said in a post or an article or something yesterday, actually thinking about it, since there's things like that, they're a great measure if they're handled very well. And you and I are like kind of believers in NPS anyway because of the good that it does. But sometimes when it's mishandled, then it's not. You're not able to use it very well. So what really is your single only true measure of customer centricity? I think it's cultural change internally, and that comes from simply talking to people. How do they perceive the customer? How do they see the customer? Do they believe they serve the customer, even directly or indirectly? And I think your real winning ticket on whether you've achieved that or not is talk to people who aren't customer facing, but actually in back office or support roles.

Yeah.

Ask for then, you know, how does your role contribute to the way that our brand is perceived or the way that the customer sees our product service or, you know, our.com or the thing that you just bought, how do you feel you contribute to that? And if that individual actually has a perspective and a take on it and that makes sense, then I think that's a really good sentiment led measure of just how well your customer centric strategy, vision, thing, the thing that you as CEO stood up on stage at town hall last year at your very expensive kickoff event in Vegas or whatever you did. Right. How does that actually penetrate other than just being a nice set of PowerPoint slides? If everybody has a take on what that means for them, then you're doing well. The challenge is, Adam, they can't figure that out for themselves. Sometimes that's the layer that's missing that need for some expertise that goes in and says, hey, do you know what? I'm going to take your beautiful. There's nothing wrong with your strategy. Strategy. Nothing wrong with it. Not broken. I'm not here wanting to charge you money to go fix this bit and do that. Nothing wrong with it. Your challenge is getting the people in your organization to realize, okay, so now what do I do? I agree, but what do I do? How is it different? For me, that's the missing layer.

I think this is fascinating and I genuinely think this is something that a lot of companies don't realize because they focus on the external customer measurement, which, you know, it's essential. We always, you know, we think this is really important to do this. But what you're saying, the missing piece is if you're not measuring or you're not thinking about the internal change, cultural change, you're missing a trick.

Yeah.

Did I get that right?

Yeah, yeah.

We see pockets in our client base of people that do this sort of internal measurement, but they're not. It's still a new science, I would say.

Yeah. And I think it's probably still. So a lot of what I see, again, you know, this whole thing about me having taken time out to sit back, you know what I think helicopter type view, I still see a lot of ex cx. You know, you get folks that brand themselves as ex specialists and then others as C specialists. And it's kind of like this, two separate disciplines and rightly so described as such. Because there are unique things that you would do with both.

Yeah.

But then they get mashed together and one's presented as empirical proof that the other one's working. Yeah, but I find it hard to figure out the fact that you've got a best friend at work doesn't necessarily mean you're going to give a fantastic customer experience to the next person that calls your contact center. I find that a tenuous link. Yeah. It'd be much more sensible to ask the colleague base, what do you think about the customer experience we're delivering to our customers? Now you get a rating internally on that. Ah, so now you've got a rating internally on customer experience and a rating externally on customers. Yeah, to the customer survey. Right.

And then you can put the two together. I'm guessing.

And now you've got something which is much more closely connected than a tenuous. Hey, isn't it great place to work here? Yeah. Great coffee. They have hybrid working. I'll get loads of time off it that's all lovely, but that's an HR measure. Is my colleague a satisfied colleague? To work here doesn't necessarily mean the next customer that calls in is going to have an amazing experience when they call me. I find that link too tenuous. So you've got to bring these things closer together. You're really serious about changing CX strategy and changing internal culture.

I really love this.

This podcast is sponsored by Customer Good and they're the experienced leader in the CPG market. Let me tell you why. They're contacting more people in the independent trade and modern trade than any other customer experience company out there. And you'll know the brands that they work with. We're talking Coca Cola, AB, InBev, Heineken. Just E takeaway. They're literally pulsing millions of contacts around the world in more than 60 countries, most multiple times a year, delivering those insights to thousands and thousands of frontline employees in those companies. But, you know, it's not just the CPG business Customer Gauge is famous for. They're ranked number one for B2B customer experience by Gartner. However, if you're in the CPG business and you have not contacted Customer Gauge to understand what is going on in your business, you're seriously missing out because we know there are other people out there just doing it once a year. Well, CustomerGage gives you customer insights 52 weeks a year, right to the front line in real time. It's going to absolutely transform your business like nothing else. But don't take our word for it. Listen to the podcast and they'll tell you exactly why.

Can I share a little anecdote from some custom work that we did? We measured Net Promoter outside and then we also asked the colleagues in the company for this organization, if you were a customer, how would you rate our customer experience? So, same scale, same things. And we plotted the two together and there was an interesting. I won't tell you where the differences were, but we found that there were some things that were below the line. So the way the customers rated the company lower than the internal people did, and we recognize that as a kind of internal arrogance. Hey, we got this. Customers didn't think so. So there was a point of, you know, difference there. And the other way was also equally interesting where the company rated themselves more poorly than the customers did.

Okay.

And that was almost like a lack of confidence. And we were able to work with the client in that sense to identify those things to. So, hey, listen, there's a gap here. Comes back to your point about strategy.

Gap gaps gaps is the same gaps in perception, gaps in strategy, gaps in confidence. You just said it.

Yeah. So I think, I think there's really something in this. I think this is so. Hey, I'd love to hear more about this as you do this, but in fact what I'd like to go back to is you've actually got a wealth of work that you've been doing on this over the years and I remember some of the things you've been doing in your most recent assignments where you use video to communicate the message. I'm fascinated with video. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Me too. And not by the way personally, not AI generated video. Because I think that suddenly becomes something very quick that people leap to. God knows why. I mean, just get yourself in front of a camera and talk. Necessitate you to have to generate some, you know, pseudo you to do it.

Right.

So yes, look, how much attention time do people really have? We read reports and stuff all the time on the stats that people are spending on screen time and video and you know, they're just conflicted by multi channel information. So give people what they need to know in high level, consumable bite size chunk format. I did a whole series of bite sized CX videos in my last company. Three seasons, did it like Netflix, right? And into that we plugged a library of topical, relevant, up to the minute, sort of you need to know type stuff. And the law was no video no longer than 10 minutes. You know, some of them stretched to 11 minutes and 10 seconds. And we did some trimmy stuff on it. But the most popular one of all was MPS in 3 minutes, 2 minutes 59 seconds. Me. Few slides, bit of background about Fred and Bane and Rob Markey and the scale and who did it back in the 2000s and where it came from. Couple more slides on, what does it mean? How should it play out for you? Couple more slides on how does anybody use this data and how should you treat it? 2 minutes 59 seconds. I got eyeballs. They count these days, don't they? I've got lots of eyeballs on thousands of repeat views. 4 years old and it's still the most watched internal video at my last company. So what does that tell you? It tells you that people love stuff in three minute format. Is it that meaningful? Well, yeah, it is because you've just done what we were saying earlier. You've taken strategy and made it sort of more realistic. You've spoken, you've communicated it, you've articulated it, you know, you can be nice and chatty and informal and bubbly and energized and lively on a video, you know, that's just as easy to do. You know, sometimes when I'm doing them, I bounce in my chair, you know, like there's lots of look at the camera, you know, all these nice ways of delivering. Very punchy, up to the minute storytelling. And it ain't a set of PowerPoint slides and it bamboozles me. Adam, why I still see companies send 50 slide decks to colleagues and say, yeah, go read that. Yeah. Extrapolate all the insight. Make your business decisions off the back of this 50 slide deck I just sent you. Executives don't have time to do it because they're too busy running the company. Middle management don't have time to do it because they've got hundreds of reports. Frontline don't have time to do it because they're dealing with the customer. None of your back office people care because they've all got other things that they're doing. Of course, it doesn't work to do it that way. So video, visual, verbal, podcasty style, comms, mobile friendly, you know, very up to the minute, watch me in your coffee break type stuff. Personally, I think that's the best way to present anything. And it's resonant. Right. People remember, I think I love this.

I mean, you and I both into music, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Those who are listening to this podcast with Video enable, they can see all the guitars that are behind you. And when you. So when you say 2 minutes 59, I'm immediately thinking of a 7 inch single. I'm thinking of classic Motown, you know, Beatles songs, all of these things that needed to be delivered because the medium of 7 inch single couldn't really handle the bandwidth to do much more. But I think it's really good. And I keep coming back to this. If you can tell a story like a classic pop song.

Yeah.

And you know, what do pop songs have? They've got a great intro, a couple of, you know, choruses, maybe a middle age. This is the sort of thing that you, you know, and I love the idea about doing that. Now we also have this added phenomenon these days with video and you spoke about that TikTok is huge.

Yeah.

And the TikTok, maybe even the attention is a bit shorter than that.

Yeah.

And a great talk with Chris Savage. He's the CEO of Wistia Yesterday video company. He said that the. What's happening in video is people love a short video. If you can tell a story in under 20 seconds. That's great. You can see that the people also love a longer form video, up to 10 minutes. But you've got to sort of signpost that and get people there. You've got to catch their attention maybe on a couple of shorter things and say, hey, let's go deeper on this. So, yeah, there's some good tips, I think, for people to communicate internally.

It's a great comm strategy. Think about how your audience consumes information and how much of it you need to spend time on delivering to them. And you're right, you know, that kind of. That's why there's been a rise in popularity of listening to podcasts while we're doing other things right now. The gym or driving or whatever, you know, audibly audio described books, you know, you can listen to them rather than read them. Then you can multitask. Because we're in a multitask environment and society right now, we need to do different things at the same time, but we can still consume that information in a very digestible way while we're getting on with those other things. So I wholly subscribed to that. And I just think your comm strategy therefore needs to be built on attention grab. You know, get your audience. Yeah, put them in, stack them in. There's been a lot of gimmicky ones doing that. You know, clickbaity titles and things. I'm not suggesting for a minute we do that. But sometimes it can be controversial to raise attention. You know, NPS is whatever is probably the kind of more.

There's a lot of that out there.

Yeah, you might be being done. Yeah, but you click on it, don't you? And you read it. That's the thing. So it's working, you know, it's grabbing your attention.

I think so, yeah. And you might then do the counter argument. You know, it's. You might bring people in. NPS doesn't work if you do not close the link.

Yeah, we did something like that internally. We did. And it worked. 100% worked. This title on our SharePoint site was what's the point of a survey?

Oh, I love that. That's really good.

And then the subtitle was if you don't act on the insights. So the whole point is that you're challenging the norm because everybody surveys, right? It's really important. Got a survey. Got a survey. But actually you say, hold on a minute, why are we getting all of this data if it's just a repeated tick box exercise? And you're sitting on it and not acting on it. Right. So. And we actually got. And this is another way that you can do your comms. I think people will get very bored very quickly if it was just you talking to them all the time. You know, a little while. How come this person thinks they know so much? They don't even work in our company. How would it then get colleagues involved, you know, panels of colleagues that you effectively hoped. Yeah. Interview and talk to and ask you, how do you do it? What for you?

I. Yeah. Again, this is. You were saying about AI and I think AI can obviously help us in many ways, but there's something about the authenticity of humans speaking into it. I also think what's underrated is a vulnerability is people at the head of the company going, hey, we might have gone. We might be screwing up in certain areas. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's so powerful, isn't it?

It's great listening because it's authentic.

Yeah.

And it also shows if you're really genuine and transparent about that and what impact you've seen, you can do two more things with it. You can say, we've heard you, you've told us, we're listening. We think it work. That's the first thing. So open ears. And the second thing is. I hate this word pivot, but I'm going to use it. You're able to then pivot if you can. Right. If you're not such a big. You see these images of speedboats and tankers. If you're not the tanker and you can be a bit more speedboat, then you can change direction. It would be ridiculously stubborn, though, to continue to pursue in the same direction. If you have identified that that ain't the right way to go.

Yeah.

Because ultimately it's going to impact the customer. Right. It's going to be the service, the product, the delivery, whatever. So, yeah, I think that vulnerability, that honesty, that transparency is how you communicate your CX strategy.

I love that. I think that kind of really sits at the heart of any customer experience program. And really what you're saying is that we should be thinking about the internal experience first.

Yeah. Darren could almost corner phrase ix around.

This, couldn't ix internal experience. I think you're onto something there, Ben. So you see, you finish your project at Fujitsu. What sort of things are you working on at the moment? What are some of the projects that you're doing for clients right now?

I'm looking at that. The things that we just talked about really. So how do you bridge that strategy gap from high level statement, company strategy, beautifully designed roadmaps and I even worked in some companies where they call it their big hags, their big hairy.

Big hairy audacious goals.

Right, exactly. Yeah. So what do you do with that bhag? Right. How do you get it to resonate through and cut through to colleagues? So I've been thinking a lot recently about the modeling of that messaging. So an awful lot of how you can communicate what the video engagement format might look like, some of the key messages, where do you start? And whilst there might be some generic plays across lots of businesses, I think that strategy to action piece is unique to every company. So that should be a bespoke way of doing things right. And that can be fine tuned whichever company you're working with according to what they do, how they deliver, what service they provide for their customers. See, I've been spending a lot of time on that reason.

Well, I think you are one of the few people that's out there that can actually do this. It's important to some extent speak truth to power.

Yeah.

And I think you've been doing that your whole career and that says something about how successful you've been and how much I also value you in this marketplace. It's great to have somebody that's really clear about this. So how about we get you back in a few months and we talk about the development about more of this internal experience stuff.

Love to. Yeah, I'll be there. Put me in.

And if people want to get hold of you in the meantime or who follow you, where do they find out more about the Ben Phillips find me on LinkedIn.

Look me up on LinkedIn. You'll know that I occasionally post the odd dry comment and can't help myself. Sometimes I have to think before I hit the submit button. But it's all in good spirits. Right. The whole point is that I think, you know, remember this, it's easy to lose the fun in cx and actually you can have a lot of fun with cx, delivering it internally in organizations, challenging the norms, you know, smashing the myths, disrupting a little bit in a positive way just to get people to think slightly differently about what it is they're actually applying in the work that they're doing. So yeah, come find me on LinkedIn or at the events that I attend. I'm occasionally a panel speaker or a guest.

Yeah, super. I think what you're really referring to, Ben, I always think you bring a lot of heart to it. And with heart. There's authenticity, vulnerability, transparency, and out of that comes trust. Yeah, I really think that in B2B organizations it goes a long way. So yeah, thank you for sharing the great examples today and your thoughts about internal experience, and I really look forward to hearing more about it.

Thanks so much for having me.