Investing in CX Priorities - Frost & Sullivan - Keynote

It's my pleasure to get the morning started by introducing to the stage Jermaine Edwards, Growth Advisor and creator of The Customer Advantage, who will be sharing with you why your role as a customer advocate is not just about— not just to present investment options, but to demonstrate the power of the CX story as an internal and external driver of results. Please welcome Jermaine to the stage. Awesome stuff. A quick caveat here, I have a very strange accent. I'm not from around these parts. I was Jamaican-born, English-raised, spent most of my education in Germany, and I'm actually married to a Southern belle. So I don't know what accent is going to come out today directly. But what I am excited about is really thinking about this area of CX and what it actually means for us today as professionals, as business owners, as people who are really concerned about the customer outcomes. And what I recognized today, customer experience is not necessarily just about a hot topic. What it really demonstrates is something much more profound, much more significant for us. And that is, for us today, if I move to this particular part here, is that we all make decisions on customer experience, on our experiences that we have. And I found this to be more and more true every single country that I visited. In fact, in 2009, 2019, I visited 22 different countries looking at very different growth projects and experience projects that were happening, and I ended my tour in a place called Senegal. Has anyone been to Senegal? Okay, I'm gonna advocate different continent travels for you guys as we look at experience at a broader level. But a place called Senegal, in a beautiful place called Gorée Island, and in Gorée Island I met a guy named Steve, and Steve actually ran a beautiful I guess you can call it sand paint art studio. And while I was with Steve, something clicked in my mind as we were having these conversations, and I was seeing people coming in and out of his store in this hut, literally a hut sitting on the side of a beach, and he had literally tens of people going in and out of that store. Something clicked in me, and I began to see what we're going to actually talk about today, which is there are 3 stories. 3 stories in the minds of our customers that CX has to begin to think about much more pragmatically. We're going to look at those directly. We're going to offer some controversial statements, some things perhaps that we can discuss a bit later on that I think is going to help move the consciousness of customer experience forward. And it's going to be this, that the question is, am I viewing CX in the right way? I want us all to be asking that question as we go through this conversation today. Am I viewing doing this in the right way? Because the reality here is understanding the key essence of CX will fundamentally transform everything that we do. We believe that absolutely. So the more we ground ourselves in different perspectives and ways in which we think about CX, the more enriched it will become in thinking about how we can make the best use of the resources that we have. So I want to offer this. So what is CX? There's a number of definitionists out there, people who have very clear understandings of what their organizations mean by CX, but I want to give us a broad definition that we can really interact with and debate together. So here's what it is. The customer experience refers to how a business engages with its customers at every point of their buying journey, and this is some total interactions a customer has with your brand. In a broad sense, would you agree with that? In a broad sense, right? Clearly there are other nuances to that— emotionally, psychologically— things that we can begin to tailor both digitally online and in person. But I want to just highlight something specific here, which is the interactions a customer has with our brand, the different engagements that's there. Because I have a premise here. I have a premise and it's a bit of a wild premise here. And it's an unconventional saying that I believe personally, customers don't want your experiences, they want outcomes. While en route to the outcome, they don't want it to suck. And that's what it is. CX is really there to help support the outcomes of the customer. And so if you're ever in a place where you're looking to purchase a product, almost always you're not thinking about, you know what, I hope I get a great experience going to this coffee shop. What you're hoping is that en route to getting the thing that you want, it just doesn't suck. And so for us as CX professionals and those thinking about that, we think about how do we make it suck less for our customers in that respect. So see, it's really about the stories in the minds of our customers. What I mean by stories, it means that as we begin to think about our customer journeys, what is happening really, is that there is a story, a narrative playing before they get to your brand. They're thinking, you know what, I want to go get this particular thing. The story's playing, and at the end of this, I'm going to go do this, and I hope it doesn't take me long, or I hope they're really fast, or I hope actually I can go get this thing the way in which I want it. There's a story playing that CX needs to be fundamentally aware of in order for us to be successful. And so I want to give you a story here, Ritz-Carlton, real quickly to illustrate this, and we can begin to kind of dissect some other things. Now, has anybody actually been to the Ritz-Carlton? Yeah? Okay, so we've got some Ritz-Carlton alumni here. I've actually been to the Bali Ritz-Carlton. This is the story I want to kind of share with you here. So Bali's particular story here, and if you've ever read the book Excellence Wins by Horst Schulz, who's the CEO of Ritz-Carlton, it's a really great book. Fundamental principles for ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen is the premise of the Ritz-Carlton. So in this particular story here in Bali, there was a particular prominent family who had a child with severe allergies. They showed up at the Bali Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and unfortunately on their travels, the, the food that they had for their child had gone and literally had spoiled on the way. And so as they arrived, they were literally distraught. They literally— the child could not eat anything but the things that they had brought with them. And so the customer experience, a service desk, They saw this and what happened at that moment was, to some degree, it may seem a little bit extreme to some degree, but they began to search the entire, literally, place of Bali for these different ingredients that this particular family would need to prepare meals for the son. But they couldn't find it. They couldn't find it there. And so they were really kind of rattling their brains and suddenly the head chef at the Bali Ritz-Carlton said, You know what, I actually think I know a shop in Singapore that sells this. And so he called his mother and asked his mother to fly over from Singapore to Bali with the ingredients for this family to be able to prepare food for their child. Now it turns out that as soon as this happened, this particular family, family was actually connected to the Sultan of Brunei. What happened at that point is that that family became not only custodians of that particular Bali location, but they had donated up to $500 million to that hotel on that one experience. Phenomenal return, right? What if we get $500 million for every experience we have with a customer? Woo, we'll be in— pay rises all around. That would be it. But it actually tells a much more fundamental story here. A much, much fundamental story is that within the context of CX here, there are two things that we're really playing on, two things that we need to really be associated with, and that's really understanding the expectations and outcomes of our— and desired of our customers. If we understand what that is, the story that's playing out in the mind of our customers, we will win every single time. And for this family, the story that they had was moving in the particular— into this Bali Ritz-Carlton Hotel. They wanted to have a great experience. They wanted their son to have a great experience. At that time, he was only 7 years old. They wanted him to have a great experience and to receive the food and not be pained by his allergies while they were away. That was the story. They had a particular story playing out in their mind. And Ritz-Carlton recognized that story and began to see the expectations and outcomes that they wanted. And we're willing to go to the length to meet those expectations. Now, this is not necessarily a particular edict for us to go out and fly to Singapore and fly ingredients from different places, but it was really— although we could— but the principle here is how are we meeting the expectations and desires and outcomes of our customers? How well do we really know them to be able to really take action on our CX initiatives? The other part to that is this. Within the story, we need to think about how we creating, supporting, or removing the things that influence the customer story, meaning the things that may detract away from their story or add to their story. How we thinking about those two things together. So how well do we know the expectations and the outcomes of those customers that we own, that we, we cherish, that we really want to take after? And what do we then building directly to help create support or remove those things that influence the customer story. CX sits in the middle to support that. And here's what I want to kind of share with you, because it happens implicitly inside the data that we see and the conversations that we have. I want you to look at this stat here. So 89% of customers get frustrated when they need to repeat their issues to multiple customer service representatives. What is the customer actually saying to you in in that statement, in that data? What are they saying? Wasting their time. What else? I'm sorry? You don't understand? Absolutely. So underneath this here is, 'I expect you to know who I am.' Right now, your customers are always speaking to you, but really, are we listening? Because the data is saying it. In many different aspects. But are we listening and really hearing what our customers are saying? So in this particular example, it could be that I expect you to know who I am. What about this stat? I've just given you the answer already. There we go. But certain customer response to the journey based on the customer feels they've been treated— I expect to be treated fairly. That could be part of that particular idea. But for you, you have your own data and your customers are speaking to you through the surveys and that they fill in through the experience and conversations that they have. The question is, do we really understand implicitly what the expectations underneath those data is really saying to you as an organization? A question here: McDonald's and Ferrari. What is uniquely the same about McDonald's and Ferrari? What do they have in common? Sorry? Loyalty. Yeah, part of that. Sorry, they're recognizable. Absolutely. Anything else? I'll give you a really obvious one. They both have customers. They both have customers. But guess what? The expectations of customers are vastly different. And here's what it is. Oftentimes we will hear case studies from varying different places. The reality here is this: is that the expectations of our customers will be vastly different. For McDonald's customer, they want to be in and out within 15 minutes max. A Ferrari dealership, people want to come in, they want to smell the wheels, they want to hear the engine roar, they want that time to be slow, meticulous. They want you to walk you through experience because the value of that purchase is significantly high. But even if they do They don't buy anything. They just want to know that they've been in the Ferrari. Most people here aren't bragging that they went to McDonald's yesterday, but they would if they went into a Ferrari dealership and sat inside the latest Ferrari. So knowing your customer expectation is super important. So here's the magic question. Here's the magic question for you guys. This is it. Are we building the experiences that we have for a client we don't have or are we building a better experience through a deeper understanding of the clients we do have? Here's what I mean by that. If when we come to places like this and we begin to see the case studies that are out there and we begin to apply practices that other people are doing for their customers, we're actually building something that's actually for a client we don't have. We have to first start at baseline with our own customers and say, how do we build this for them? And then out there, we're not looking at best practices, what we're looking at are best principles. All the principles that we can move into our business that best supports where our customers are moving to. How we best go and solve and support for them directly. And so here's what we're gonna explore together. I wanna give you 3 stories, 3 important stories that we all need to be aware of directly. And we're gonna look at those things, we're gonna break them down. Then we're gonna look at 3 powerful investments that come along with those stories. And at the end, I'm going to give you a single action that you can take, that will be the single most important action you could ever take as a CX professional. So here's story. Story number 1 is the story of your customer's relationship with your product or service. This is story number 1. So greater CX returns, this is my belief here, are directly correlated to its ability to help your customers get more of what they want. If CX isn't doing that, for me, it's not really fulfilling its entire purpose for your business. They're not getting more of what they need and want through that experience. And so here's what it is: 94% of customers who have a low-effort experience have a company— will buy from that company again. What does it mean, kind of low effort? When you hear low effort, what does that mean to you? I'm sorry, they need it easy. What else? It didn't suck on the way. I love that. What else? So here's what it's in principle here when we think about low effort. What is, what is the customer really saying to us here? The customer is saying not necessarily that I want necessarily to be easy for me. I need to apply the exact appropriate level of energy, resource, and effort to the appropriate— and so that's going to be different for your different— for your customers in different areas. For Ferrari dealership, going back to that, the appropriate level of effort is actually staying there about an hour. They recognize that this is a time expense that is tied to that kind of brand experience. Whereas McDonald's is actually really quick, and so it's designed in that way. So you need to figure out what is the appropriate amount of energy, time, resources is needed for that person to get exactly what they want. I'm not sure if you guys have read this book by Richard Brandt named One Click of the Amazon. Has anybody read this book? Yeah? So it's actually a really great kind of biopsy in some sense of the whole Amazon journey. There's a particular phrase in here he kind of— Brandt kind of captures from Jeff Bezos. It's this: the site had to be simple, simple, fast, and intuitive. Now it seems like a really just trite statement. Simple, fast, and intuitive. Of course things need to be simple, fast, and intuitive. But actually this statement alone has made Amazon one of the most successful brands in the world. Simple, fast, and intuitive. Let me offer you this particular story. It's back in 1997, a guy named Perry Hartman, the senior programmer at Amazon, was sitting at lunch with Jeff Bezos and a guy named Sherry Kaplan, who is the software engineer at the time. And Jeff Bezos was looking at Amazon. They were selling books at the time, 1997. They haven't really kind of broadened horizons as much as you see today. But what happened in that particular moment was Jeff said, look, we need to, we need to create this platform. This platform needs to be so easy. It needs that when somebody comes into the platform and just go one click and they're able to to purchase what they want. One click. At that point in time, there was not a single company on the planet that could offer a client that kind of experience on one click to make a purchase. So everything then was engineered by Perry Hartman to move to this place of one-click purchases. Amazon today is still really the only company that can do this in the manner in which he has.. But for me, I look at this story and I say, well, Perry Hartman, it took him 2, 2 and a half years to put that together. The patent's still, still out there, and people can actually— you can actually license the technology from Amazon, if you didn't know, to actually apply that technology to your own business. Most people don't know that. If you wanted to, it's expensive, but you can do it. But at the point in time, Perry recognized something that would define Amazon forever. And in fact, I believe— and I could argue this for many, many people— is the single greatest CX innovation that's happened in the last 20 years. Why? Because of the returns that Apple has— that Apple— Amazon has seen. Amazon has seen returns of hundreds of billions of dollars on a single initiative, a single statement of understanding the story of the client. When they get to this place, here's what they want and here's how we get to that place. It's one click. How clear is it to you in your business? What is the single greatest CX initiative, innovation that you could make where the returns would be phenomenal? It's a question I often challenge my clients with. We have interesting innovation sessions around this. But the question here is, investing in effort is where you should be. Investing effort is where you should be. It's gonna look different for different organizations, but once you begin to think about the premise here of the story of the appropriate level of energy, actions, resources for a client moving to get the outcomes that they want, all of a sudden you begin to unlock something that is brand new because reality here is this, is that if a customer can get more of what they want want, in the expectations of the things that they believe is appropriate for them to go get it, they will come back again. It's irrefutable now. The data has shown it. Amazon showed it in many different regards. But investing in effort is the place where you guys should be. I'm happy to answer questions later on about this. That's the first story, the story of your customers with your products and services. And investing the effort is my recommendation in that area. Story number 2 is the story of your customer's relationship with your company. We might start talking about brand here a little bit, but let me talk about merry-go-rounds for a moment. So I'm a dad of 6 and 1 on the way. We have another beautiful baby girl turning up in August. This is my youngest daughter today. This is Carmen, and she loves merry-go-rounds, but more than anything, when I say the word zoo, she knows that merry-go-rounds show up at that place. So whenever I mention the word zoo or places, the zoo, she goes, "Oh my gosh, I know exactly what's going to happen at that point in time. We're gonna have so much fun because we'll be spinning around in a circle on a large giraffe for a very long time." And that's what she enjoys. So the question here is, when you think about associations, what comes up? What are your customers most excited about when they show up at your company? What are you most excited about when you think about your business? They go, oh my gosh, this company is a company that saved my life. I spoke to somebody who's doing some life-changing work in the diabetics field. What are your customers actually saying about that when they show up to your particular company? Because companies with excellent customer experience outperform their competitors by 80% in terms of revenue growth. This doesn't happen by happenchance. It's an association that's happening with your brand based on the consistency of what you have and what you deliver. So let me give you another story here coming up of Apple here. Now, many of you guys may not have retail stores necessarily, but the principle still remains. The retail store industry is still— largely competitive. People are not necessarily hitting the streets in the same way. But the reality is, is that the store is not necessarily a place that Apple sees people just going to buy product. They actually see it as more like a gallery, more like a museum, a place you go of seeing artifacts and trying things out. But the store is not the point. The soul of Apple is actually the people that people that they meet going into the store. And then you have specialists out there, people you can, you can ask to try out different products and will answer your questions. But it's even more than that. It's even more than that, that in the Apple Store, what you see is a consistent alignment of an understanding of what the company wants to be to their customers. And so I'll ask you this question: What do you think Apple is trying— well, I guess I'll say it in a different way. Apple is a particular brand. What do you think they're trying to be to their customers? It's an odd question. What do you think they're trying to be to their customers when somebody walks into their store? Sorry? Exceptional? Is that what you said? Yeah? Okay, yeah. Experts. Yeah. Anything else? Essential. Yeah, absolutely. Technology made simple. That's quite a phrase. I like that. Are you from Apple? That's quite very specific. So I'd I say this, and having kind of worked with a few executives that come from this particular area, here's what they're trying to be. As somebody comes in through the door, what they're trying to be is a memory. A memory to people. When you come in, they're trying to be a memory. I want you to store Apple as a memory in your mind. And so this comes actually through this principle of the Apple steps of service. Anybody come across the Apple steps of service before? Yeah, absolutely. So here's what it is. Approach customers with a personalized warm welcome. Probe politely to understand customer needs. Present a solution. Listen carefully for issues and concerns. End with a fun farewell and invitation to return. This doesn't sound like much at all. Each of us, I imagine, at some point has spoken with our customer service reps and we've said, look, these are the ways in which we want you to go out and engage customers. But here's the difference between perhaps people like Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Apple and so forth, is that the Apple steps of service isn't necessarily about just following a rote script. It's not about that at all. It's actually about this: the goal is to make the next decision to continue with you easier. The goal is to make it easier for you to make a decision about continuing doing work with us. That's the whole purpose of it. The whole purpose of those steps, the whole purpose of you getting information from your service reps and helping and teaching them to engage, engage with your customers, ensuring that there's consistency across the board, is to make it easier for your customers to make a decision with you every single time. It's to make those memories more consistent. So here's the investment I want you to think about. I want you to invest in alignment. Investing in alignment is probably one of the most challenging things we could do as CX professionals, is is getting people to really understand what it means to get alignment across our organizations. Thinking about that practically, pragmatically, getting our people aligned with our technology. So as much as we talk about this digital explosion and the transformations that we're all going through, our people still matter. Our people still matter to the experience because the reality is at some point your customers are going to touch one of your people. And you want them to be aligned and you want them to know exactly what their role is in that moment. And their role in that moment may look different for that particular customer, but you need to know who you're trying to become to that customer in order to make that happen. Who are you trying to become? Investing in alignment is a, is a significant area here that should be looked at within your organization. All right, that's story number 2, story of your customers with your company. Here's story number 3. So what else is your customer's relationship with your shared values? And this is an interesting one, and I'm gonna kind of break this down a little bit because it's a super important one that perhaps really goes undervalued and not really kind of understood well. But here is what it is. So 73% of customers are more likely to remain loyal to a brand if they have a positive emotional connection. What does that even mean? A positive emotional connection. What does this statement say about your customers? Potentially your customers or any other customers? 73% of customers are more likely to remain loyal to a brand if they have a positive emotional connection. If their feelings are important. If their feelings, absolutely, yeah. Anything else? Relationship. Relationship. Indeed. So what it tells us is that our customers Don't actually just want transactions with us. Sometimes they do, they just want to get things done. But for the most part, they actually want to know something specific, that you care, and that they have the relationship with you to actually want the desire to want to continue to that relationship with you. In fact, Tom Shoes does this very, very well. Is here— somebody shop at Tom Shoes? Yeah, okay. So we have, we have as well. So I want to give you a couple of examples. Because really interesting. So when it comes to shared values, for me shared values is perhaps the most, the most powerful way in which you begin to connect emotionally with your customers. Now for TOMS Shoes, when you purchase a product, you're not just purchasing a pair of shoes, you're actually giving shoes away to a child. When you purchase a pair of glasses, you're actually giving somebody sight. Just imagine that. For every single purchase somebody's making, they're actually changing a life. It changes the psychology of the customer and their view of your company immediately. But it's just— this is more than just the purchase of a customer, or the purchase that a customer makes with you. What TOMS Shoes is not doing is saying, 'Join me.' They're saying, 'Let me join you in being the thing that you already are, which is you're generous.' They've labeled something with their customers, saying generous people are We want to attract generous people to our brand, and people who are generous will do business with us directly. And so for you, are you understanding the values of your customers? What they actually really value— this doesn't mean necessarily completely reinventing your values or thinking about that— it's about asking the question, what do our customers value, and what of our values can we make more prominent that is directly connected to the things that we do? I'll give you another example. I'll give you an example here. There's a particular coffee shop that's back in London I used to go to, a place called Mum's Pop Shop. That was it, Mum's Pop Shop. It was a place in a place called Islington. And in Mum's Pop Shop, what they had were these particular areas in the shop where they had these standing kind of vertical pillars, almost like similar to this. And the vertical pillars, they had these option boxes. The option boxes are, would you like to pay some— pay something forward to somebody else so they could taste the thing that you like most in the store? So you can literally put in like a dollar into this box for somebody else so you can gift it back to somebody who may not have tasted something you really like. And they had these other boxes that were in there, and the whole idea here— they had a big banner on top, on top of that particular box says, we care about about giving back to the people who can't afford what it is that we do. And so what will happen is on a Thursday, they invite people from the street, literally from all across, homeless people and so forth, and they have these particular days where these homeless people would come in and they'd serve them based on what was gifted to them in those boxes. And so they'd pull out the dollars and say, "Hey, this is what Andy said you'd really like. Can Andy—" and he would pay for these donuts and they'd hand out these donuts and so forth. What they're really saying is that we want to be a community-centered organization. And so they're inviting people not necessarily to join them necessarily, but to do the things that you already would do in your organization or for you personally. So being generous or the shared values here is an important distinction here that we have for organizations to think about what are we inviting our customers into, or what could we join our customers in doing that they already value themselves? Investing in connection is the place that you want to be. Investing in connection, making sure that your customers know that you value the same things that they value, and you can make that clear and transparent and able and, and connected with them as they have these conversations and they connect through through that CX journey. So a bit of a recap here before I give you the single most important action here. We ask some questions. So CX is about story. It's about stories in the minds of your customers. It's thinking about the outcomes and the expectations that they have and then aligning them and making sure that we can remove or we can add to or support to the things that are most important to them. The other part of that is investing in effort, alignment, and connection. For me, is single things that you can begin to do that actually drives significant outcomes and lifetime value. Seen this happen over and over again in projects that I've done. But the single most important action— I want to give you this because I think it's important. I mentioned Steve earlier in these three stories, so I wanted to give you exactly what this looks like. So this is, this is a story laid out. Story number one, story of the product and service. I was there with Steve, literally working in the sand with him looking at the pictures. He was asking me questions, and we were working through this particular thing with the product. And as he was asking me questions, he's asking me questions about what things I care about. So I said, family is super important to me, family is super important to me. We had this really great connection talking about family. And then Steve and I, we had this really interesting conversation just talking about what it's like to be somebody whose profession is to sand-dark in the sand art industry and working with tourists and having that connection. I got to understand his mission and what he was up to. But most importantly, I wanted to look at the story in the middle and that picture. This picture here is the most important part. This one right here. Can you see how many figures are in that picture? How many are in that picture? 8. How many people do I have in my family? 8. As Steve was— he was walking through this experience with me, I could have bought something off the shelf from him. But in that moment, story number 1, there was a product. He began to ask me questions up front that defined what he began to build. Then we started having more conversations about his mission, where he was going, and talking about family. But then at the end, we had this product that showed exactly that, that process that we went through, but showed that he cared about the things that I was saying. And he wasn't just painting something arbitrary and non-valuable to me, but he painted something that reflected the very conversation that we were having. And that became a visual representation of our relationship together. Together. At the end of your customer experience journeys with your customers, they're going to see a picture and they're going to ask themselves the question, do I see myself in that? Do I see myself in this picture? Was this really about me, or was this about them? They're asking me questions, yes, but it sounded like I was just helping them do something rather than helping me do something. So the question here is, Do your customers see themselves in the final picture of your CX journey? Here's the single most important action you can make. Make your story seamless. Make it so that the things that you do in the journey of your customers end up showing the picture of them being the center of that story. Not you as the company. Not you as the brand. So we have to be really careful with the questions that we have and the questions that we ask. Because here's the reality here: every experience either enhances or erodes trust in the stories of your customers. This is what it is. It's the challenge that we have as, as organizations. Every experience either enhances or erodes trust in the stories of your customers. So my commendation to you, my challenge to you guys, is to make sure those stories matter.