Culture Is Not Fluff: Annette Franz on Employee Experience & Customer Success

The fastest way to see the future of your customer experience is to look in the mirror of your culture. Because every frustration your employee feels eventually shows up in the lives of your customers. Welcome back to Chats with Jason. I'm your host, Jason Espracho. And today we're joined by someone who who has built her career helping leaders fix culture so their people thrive and their customers win. Annette Franz is the founder and CEO of CX Journey, Inc. A globally recognized thought leader and the author of three game changing books on customer and employee experience. Her newest release, Employee Understanding, introduces a three pillar framework, Culture, insight and empathy, that shows leaders how to design great employee experiences and drive real business success. Annette, it's such a privilege to have you here today.

Thank you so much for having me. I am so looking forward to our conversation. Yay.

You've been shaping conversations around customer and employee experience for decades, and your work has influenced for a long time. Sounds better than decades. And your work has helped leaders all around the world. So let's dive in to some questions.

All right, let's do it.

So you've been in CX Sense before. It had that name just like me. We've seen the practice of customer experience and the profession of it evolve over time. But looking back, what first sparked your passion for this work and how did it evolve into a focus on culture and employee experience?

Fair question. And you know what? I can tell everybody who asked me this question. I have no sexy introduction to this world. There are people who will tell you stories about breaking things or bad experience or this or that. And I'm like, I grew up on a farm. I wanted to be a vet. That didn't happen for a variety of reasons. I moved on and studied business management and started my career at J.D. power Associates. And that was pretty much my entree into this world. And honestly, for me, it was a lot of fun. @ JD Power Associates. I came into this market research role and I loved reading, I loved math. And very quickly I was like, wow. And I wasn't on the syndicated research side. I was on the customer research side. And then very quickly I was like, wow, this is pretty awesome. You know, at the time, it was listening to customers and doing this research and really understanding what drives satisfaction and loyalty. And that's at the time, like you said, wasn't customer experience wasn't even a term back then. But those, that's what we focused on. And it was very enlightening. And I would talk about the role at the company for myself as somebody who was Working with businesses to help them improve what they were doing, how they were interacting with customers. So that would ultimately not only improve that, but improve the business and the business wins kind of thing. And to answer your question about culture and employee experience, it. It just, it all evolved as I moved on from J.D. power Associates and went over to the client side and worked at Mattel for a little while, and then came back to the vendor side and was in some consulting leadership roles. It became very apparent to me very quickly that if we don't have a leadership on board and be the right environment to do the work that needs to be done and for people to understand what that work is and what it means and why we're doing it and how to do it, and all of that, things are going to slow down really quickly. And we talked about leadership, commitment, and buy in very early on. We talked less about culture, but I knew that there had to be this environment that really was conducive to listening. And that's a big piece of it. People ask me, often ask me, how come you're so focused on employee experience and culture Now? Back in the day when I was at J.D. power and Associates, I'd go out to clients and I'd say, hey, why don't we also survey employees and get feedback from them? And they would at that point say, hey, we're just gonna listen to customers now. We'll, we'll listen to employees later. And I always say, here we are, it's later, and they're still not really.

Listening. I think without naming names, we're probably find later. Still hasn't arrived for some of.

Those. For a lot of them, yes. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So you often say that fix the culture, fix the.

Outcome.

Yes. And you've touched a little bit on why culture is the foundation of delivering great customer experiences. But for a leader who senses that their culture is broken, what's the very first step they should take to start turning things.

Around? I think the first thing is to take a look inward and take a look at why or what is happening. What is, what does broken mean? And when I first start working with clients, I interview the entire leadership team. I interview a sampling of employees and a sampling of customers, and I ask three questions. And I think you don't necessarily have to have a consultant to ask these questions, but I think you'll probably get much more direct and real answers if you do. If you have somebody outside a third party asking these questions, the first question is, how would you define your culture? Like just keywords I don't need paragraphs. I don't need big stories. I just want words. What are the keywords that would describe your culture? And then the next thing I ask is, what's the glue that holds the business together? What's the glue that holds your company together? And then everybody, as soon as I ask that, everybody goes, oh, that's a great question. But then I ask, what's the unglue? What breaks the company apart? And just those three questions alone, and especially the last two, are huge pieces of information that really open the doors to, oh, my goodness, we didn't even know this was happening, or, oh, wow, we didn't realize we had this many employees who feel this way about the culture. So I think the first part of it is to do that type of an assessment. And everybody's got their own set of questions to ask, but those just happen to be the three questions that I ask. And they usually get the conversation started pretty.

Immediately. Yeah, yeah, I. I love the question around about the glue and really how people would respond to that. I'm thinking that the answers would be from A to Z. And that really would give you that insight.

Quickly. Absolutely. A lot of times it's. It's the people, it's the teamwork, it's the collaboration, it's those kinds of things. But then when you go and you ask the unglue, you find that, yeah, people, collaboration, teamwork, that's all well and good, but the unglue, there are definitely some undercurrents there that are totally go counter to teamwork and collaboration. And those are the kinds of things that you need to dig deeper into and really understand what's happening.

There. Yeah, it makes sense. Hey, I can remember about 20 years ago, I'm trying not to date.

Myself. I think I talked about my decades. So we're.

Good. So it's only fair. It's only fair. So, yeah, a couple of decades ago, I was sitting at an audience as a team member of a company, and they were. They had gone through, I think, the third acquisition in as many years or third takeover. And so a new, fresh leadership group had come in, and they were telling us about how they had just been on this amazing executive retreat and that we've got five new company values. And the first one was customer experience, and second one was employee engagement. And I have no idea what the other three were, but I remember to this day when it got to Q and A, someone stood up in the audience and said, why are employees number two on the list? And I Don't necessarily think that particular organization was out of step with. Even today, a lot of companies say customer first, but you argue putting employees more first. Why do so many leaders get it wrong? And what does it look like to truly put employees first in.

Practice? Yeah, and I wish I get to take credit for that term, but Hal Rosenbluth of Rosenbluth International, the travel agency many years ago, and there's a book too, it's called Customers Come Second. And in that book he talks about if we want to put customers first, we need to put employees more first. And basically what we need leaders to understand or recognize is that the importance of the employees. Right. The employee experience is really a strategic imperative and not just a nice to have. Right. What we need them to understand is that without employees, we have no one who's going to design, build, sell, implement, deliver, install, service, all these things for your product and deliver that customer experience. So this is why it's so important that we say employees more first. Yeah, you can put customers first, but then you've got to put employees more first because you have to have that realization that the employees are the heart of the business and they are the reason that you have something to deliver to your customers and are able to deliver an experience to your customers. And so I think there's a real big disconnect. First of all, there's a lot of disconnects there. Right. Because I think a lot of leaders don't even appreciate the fact that the customers and are the reason that we're in business.

Right.

It's. It goes back to that old mantra, stakeholder value or whatever they have in their heads that why we're in business. And I think it's so important that they recognize that we need to take care of our people first. And people is both employees and customers. And if we can make that connection and we can take a look at employee experience and customer experience and how they go hand in hand, everybody's going to win, but the business will definitely. And if I go back and I talk a little bit about culture and culture as the foundation, I call it a precursor to the employee experience. Right. So culture is core values plus behaviors. Culture is often defined as the. The things that we do when nobody's looking. Right. But that's where those core values and behaviors come in. And it's interesting that you said that their core values were employee experience and customer experience and employee engagement or whatever they're. Because those aren't really values. Those are, you know, values are we put our customers first or I, my health is first or whatever. A lot of people like to do integrity and safety and whatever, but customer trust, those kinds of things are values. I don't know that the experiences shouldn't necessarily be a value. But anyway, so we look at them when we say core values plus behaviors, that's what culture is. And we have to define the behaviors that go with each of the values. We have to socialize them, we have to operationalize them. We have to do everything that we do through the lens of those core values. Hire, fire, promote performance reviews, develop policies and procedures, make decisions. All of those kinds of things are done through the lens of the core values. And when we do that, and we create that foundation, and we create, especially in this case as we're talking about it, a people centric or a people first type of a foundation, then we're setting up our employees to have a great experience, right? So I say the culture is that precursor for a great employee experience. Healthy culture. Healthy and great employee experience. And then employees benefit. They have great outcomes. That means that customers are also going to reap the benefits from that. And in the end, the business will have some great outcomes as well. So culture really is a foundation for all of that. And it just, there's this really nice, neat linkage. And it's just such an important thing that for executives to see and to realize. And as a matter of fact, I'm working on an article today about. Because what I hear a lot is that we have competing priorities, right? And I've heard it over the years. I've written about it just in paragraphs or whatever here and there over the years and included it in one of my books. And. But I'm taking a little bit of a deeper look at that and saying, why do leaders say that we have competing priorities? What is it that competes with the people? What is it that competes with the people who build the products that the customer ends up buying or services? So there's a real disconnect there. And how do we bring that together and make sure that they're not competing priorities, that they're online priorities, and that we're working together for a common goal and all of that. So it'll be interesting to see how that ultimately turns out. But it's an important thing that executives need to.

Understand. Yeah, absolutely. So in your new book, you lay out the three pillars, culture, insight, and empathy. Can you unpack what just one of those pillars for us today and give us a practical way a leader could bring it to life for Their.

Teams. Yeah, yeah, I'll talk about. Because I just talked a lot about cultures. That is the first pillar. I'll talk about the second one, which is insight. And that is really about two key things. It's about listening to your employees wherever you want to listen to them. And however, it's not just about surveys. There are so many different ways that we can listen to employees and really understand who they are, what their needs are, the pain points, problems they're trying to solve, what they're ultimately wanting to get out of being an employee of my company. In the book, I look at building out this feedback culture, and not only a feedback culture, but a listening culture. And again, like I said, listening anywhere. I advocate for when I'm working with my clients to do employee roundtables or executive tours where they go from location to location and they swap going out and listening to employees and taking the time to share information, but also making sure that probably about 80% of the time is you sit there and listen. You listen to what employees are saying. And it's not just about you giving them information that they can get off of the intranet or next week's email kind of thing. An employee advisory board where we really give them a voice in the culture we create, the workplace we create, the tools that we use and the technology and how we shape the business going forward board. Those are different kinds of things. And we have tons of data in our HR systems too, where we can use the tools for people, analytics tools to get at that. Married with the survey data, married with the other things that we hear from employees. I have plenty of examples of companies where they would do quarterly engagement surveys. And my favorite story to share is a hornet whose employees would just copy and paste their comments, copy and paste their comments into a text, a notepad or whatever. And then every quarter the survey came out, they would just copy and paste from previous quarter into this quarter's survey. And that happens a lot. And so I really, if you're going to do surveys, do them in a cadence that allows you to analyze it, figure out what you're going to do, do it and close the loop with your employees, that kind of thing. And I like to ask at the end of those kinds of surveys, do you believe that your leaders will do something constructive with this feedback? And then usually it's now, I really don't. We really don't think anything's going to happen with this kind of thing. So that's one piece of the insight pillar. The other side of it is to develop Personas. And there's both employee Personas and internal customer Personas. So employee Personas is who are the people that work for this company and their experience versus the internal customer Personas, where it's who. Who are the different types of internal customers that different employees deal with, and how do we design the experience internally so that if I'm a marketing person or whoever I am, and I need to reach out to the help desk, what are my needs, how should that experience be designed for me versus somebody who's in engineering? There's a whole section or several chapters on the importance of Personas as well, and how it's really important to talk to employees. Just like when we build customer first, I would just talk to employees, understand who they are, their needs, their pain points, the problems they're trying to solve so that we can design specifically for them. So I think that's a really important part of that whole insight.

Pillar. I wasn't going to go down this path, but I've been in organizations or worked with organizations, as I'm sure you have, where leaders openly say to their teams, this is the score we have to achieve in our employee survey, because if we don't, our bonuses are on the line or this is going to happen. It's not going to be good for me, it's not going to be good for you. So just put what they want to.

Hear.

Yeah. To start with, I think that says a lot about the culture, but how do we break that.

Cycle? Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's a great point. And it happens both with customers and with employees. We chase the score, and we need to have the conversation. There's gotta be this mindset shift. And to your point, it is the culture. And that's where we need to shift the culture. To be one of listening, to be one of feedback, to be one of action, and to be one of we're not chasing the score. So there's a lot that goes along with that. And I think one of the key things is that we focus on behaviors rather than scores. Right. That we focus on the core values and the behaviors that we've outlined for those core values. And take a look at those in terms of our performance reviews and the things that we chase versus the numbers. Right. And I think there's a real need for an education around the things that we do. I don't always explain that the things that we do to move the needle, to focus on just moving the needle are different that we do to improve the experience to move the needle. Right. They're two very different approaches. On the customer experience side, we've had it here. Where in the US My very first experience with it was when I worked at Jane Powder Suits, and then I bought a car, and it was like, hey, you're going to get a survey. Right? And here's a free oil change. Here's a candy bar. Here's my firstborn. You know, it's crazy like that, right? Where we'll walk into a drugstore and they'll hand us the receipt with the QR code or the URL on the end of the receipt, slide a candy bar underneath the receipt, and say, hey, you got to give me all tens. And that's when you know that the business is not focused on the people. The business is not focused on employees or customer experience. They're focused on metrics, and they're just focused on the numbers, and they don't care what it takes. We just want the number to move. Like I said, very different behavior when you're doing that versus when you're really taking the time to listen and improve based on what you hear. And it really does have to tie back to your core values, your behaviors, the culture that you've.

Designed. Yeah. We could probably both could tell a few stories about how people have tried to game the system. I'm really.

Resisting, but we'll keep that separate.

Episode. So journey maps are one of your many specialities, but you've said far too many organizations to stop at creating the pretty picture. How do leaders move from mapping the experience to actually driving measurable change when it comes to customer or employee experience? Because there should be a map for.

Both. Yeah. There's two things that you have to do. First of all, I'll just say this. Anytime that I have gotten executives in a journey mapping workshop where we've got customers, or a mapping workshop where we've got employees, and we're doing their journeys and we bring executives in for them to hear the customers talk or for them to hear the employees talk and go, oh, my gosh, I never realized we made them do that or we put them through that process or we put them through that pain or that many steps or whatever. Anytime I've done that, it's been just such an eye opener that I've gotten executive commitment for CMOs and CCOs to move forward on whatever they need. That's what it is. And it's usually what we say is we need to appeal to the left and the right side of the brain. And we got that number signed. We got to make sure they have that connection to business outcomes and everything. And they understand that we're doing this. And the work that we're hearing from our customers today, this is the outcome. And it's bad for this particular customer, it's bad for other customers. Then there's a storytelling side and the creative side where we need to let them hear the customer and hear the voice and hear the pain and hear the frustration. And that's when I've always seen the executive jump in and say, let's do this. I can't bear that. I can't believe that's the legacy I'm going to leave. Is that made so much pain for our customers or for employees? We need to fix this. And that's, to me, has been what's taken us from mapping to action is really letting the executives see what's what.

Yeah. Yeah. It makes so much sense. I was just thinking about making the executives do their own expense claims versus having their assistants do.

It. Exactly. Notice that.

Too. And as soon as I started to think it, I was like, my former executive assistants would be throwing daggers at me now. You hated it. That's why we did it. Here's a bit of a curveball for you. If you had to explain the difference between employee experience, customer experience, to a 10 year old only using what's in their lunchbox, how would you do.

It? Can it be anything in the.

Lunchbox? Yeah, I didn't say what's in the.

Lunchbox. Okay, all right, so here's how I explain it. Okay? You see the things in the lunchbox? You're the employee. You made those things. Did you have everything you needed? Did your mom buy all the things that you needed to make that peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Or did you end up just with the peanut butter sandwich today because she didn't have the jelly and the dishes weren't clean, so you didn't have a good knife to really butter it up. And so it's got jagged edges and yeah, it wasn't the greatest. That's the employee experience. Right? You have to have all the tools, everything you need to do your job well. And your job was to make that sandwich. Over on the other side, is your friend sitting across from the tables. Or it could be you, but I'm going to say it's your friend. And they want to, but they look at your lunchbox and they go, what the heck? I'm not giving you my sunrise sandwich from Subway for that jagged piece. Whatever you've got in your lunchbox. The value exchange is just not there. I'm not getting what I'm paying for and you're giving me something that doesn't make me happy. I'm gonna go next door to my other friend and I'm gonna get it from them because hers looks much better. I don't know, that's how I could describe.

It. I love though, how you tied in that employees need to be given the right tools to do their job. And how often is it that we expect our employees to deliver an amazing experience? Not once, not twice, but consistently. But yet when they say to us, my computer reboots five times a day or there's 35 steps that just take too long to get the outcome that we fail to listen. You've talked about culture, you've talked about listening to employees. I'm wondering, how do we as frontline leaders. So I'm thinking about the team leader, the immediate supervisor. How can we encourage them to remove some of that friction that exists in the world of the.

Employees? Yeah, that's a great question. Everybody needs to advocate up, right? First thing they need to do is they need to listen. They need to listen, observe, take notes, gather all the information they have. And then they need to get advocate up, right? They need to take the data that they have and take it up to their superiors and say, listen, this is what's happening and that data is going to include. This is what my employees have and don't have. And this is the outcome for the customer as a result of the 13 screens or the 5 minute hold as we change screens and all those different kinds of things. So I think that's an important part of it. It's information gathering, it's data gathering. It's making sure that we make that connection between the employee and the customer. And then we go and we advocate for that, say, listen, this isn't working. And as a result, this is how many customers hung up or this is how many customers didn't buy or whatever. So we need to always link it back to outcomes for the employee, for the customer and for the business. But then go and advocate, sell it. We need to all do it. And there's this consistency that really, I think works in our favor. If we all work together and advocate that. And there's power in numbers, I.

Guess. Yeah, yeah, I love that advocacy space. As leaders, there is no excuse for not advocating for what is right. You don't need another tool, you don't need. You don't need anything other than your voice. And we as leaders should absolutely have that. One of the other things you've written about that I really love is this notion of designing experiences for memory, not just moments. Why are memories more powerful than moments? And how can leaders intentionally create.

Them? Yeah, that's a great, that's a great question and great point. It's emotion. And we've talked about this for forever, the importance of emotion. And if we look at the definition of employee experience, and we look at the definition of customer experience, some of the interactions that we have with the brand, more importantly, the feelings, emotions, and perceptions elicited by those interactions. And that applies for both employees and customers. Some nuances in there, definitions, but for the most part, that's it. So emotions have always been a huge part of what the experience really is. And so if we design for moments, in my mind, that's very transactional. Right? It's buy my cookies and see you later versus creating this whole memory. And one of the things that, and I know I just made a circular definition there, but one of the things that I had written about a long time ago was something around nostalgia. And it was around the ice cream trucks and the good time ice cream and, and some of the memories that the ice cream truck bell elicits in our brains and the emotional connection to, oh, when I was a kid, dad took me there, those kinds of things. And so I think those drive you back to a brand more than that sort of transactional, here, buy my cookies kind of thing. I guess that's in a very simplistic, A simplistic way of saying it. Experiences are emotional. That's at the heart of what a customer experiences. And when we talk about employee experience and customer experience, a lot of times what we're talking about is the designing of those interactions. We're not talking about the emotions and the feelings that customers are having about those interactions. Right. So you really have to look at both sides of.

That. Yeah, yeah, absolutely agree. And it's. As we come to wrap up the show today, if you could stand in front of every CEO and deliver one sentence on why culture and employee experience matter, what would that sentence.

Be? Culture is not fluff. It is your operating system and it is really the precursor. I know that's a long winded sentence, but it is really the precursor for the employee.

Experience. I love that. Culture is not fluff. It's your operating system. Annette, thank you so much for joining us.

Today. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Great.

Conversation. You've reminded us that culture isn't just a backdrop. It's the stage, the script and the cast that make everything else possible. When we understand our employees, when we design our experiences with culture, insight and empathy, we're not just creating happier teams. We're unlocking the key to lasting customer loyalty and business success. And to everyone listening today, take this as your call to action. Look in the mirror of your culture, because when you transform the experience, you transform your business. Thanks for listening to chats with.