Transform Customer Experience: From Fixing to Innovating

Many businesses are pouring time, money, and energy into customer experience but only end up with maintaining the status quo. Here's a secret. If you keep doing what you've always done, well, you know the rest. We talk about the importance of innovation in every aspect of our businesses. So, why aren't we talking about it when it comes to Customer experience. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs develop new skills to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And I am so glad that you are here today. Absolutely thrilled to bits because my guest today is CX Cultivator Katie Stabler. And today, we are going to pull back the curtains on the difference between fixing your customer experience and actually shifting to changing customer experience. So, I have one simple request. If there's somebody in your circle who could benefit from the insights that we're going to be sharing today, Please do them a favor and pass along a link to this episode. And if you haven't done so yet, make sure you yourself have subscribed to this podcast. That way, you get notification when I bring you fresh new content each and every week. You know, when I work with business owners and managers, the number one question I get besides, oh, how much do you charge? Now, the big question I get is, why aren't my customers coming back with any kind of regularity? And when you think based on the research that I did back in 2019 that 94% of the owners I surveyed rated the service that their business provided as great or above average. 74% of their staff agreed. But only 16% of the customers I surveyed came back with that rating, which means we have this challenge that we are hugely delusional about the level of expertise and the level of experience that we provide to our customers. And we have no mechanism to see past these rose-colored glasses that we put on. So, if you've ever wondered why despite all your efforts, customer issues keep popping up, and the improvements that you make seem to make really minor differences, at least until the next crisis, then today's episode is for you. And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, when it comes down to your customer service and customer experience, are you simply just fixing the problems as they arise because you're just trying to get back to what you've always done? Or are you driving real change that moves your businesses forward? I'd love for you to drop thoughts or your questions in the comment box right here. And if you have any, oh my God, this is me moments, I'd love for you to comment on those as well. I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. As I mentioned, joining us today is someone who truly understands the ins and outs of customer experience and has dedicated her career to helping businesses thrive through innovation. Katie Stabler is an internationally recognized CX thought leader ranked number 5 globally in 2024 and is the co-author of the Amazon best-selling Customer Experience Too. With a wealth of experience across industries from financial institutions to not-for-profit, Katie has seen firsthand the challenges businesses face in maintaining customer loyalty and driving real change. She's the founder of Cultivate Customer Experience where she helps organizations shift from fixing problems to creating lasting meaningful improvements. And if you didn't know, she's also a UK MasterChef quarterfinalist, proving that her skills in the kitchen are just as sharp as her expertise in customer experience. Katie, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today.

Thank you for that great intro. And yeah, I love when anybody mentions my MasterChef experience because I will continue to talk about it until the day I can't.

Excellent! And I hope that you're able to leverage that experience and everything else that you do, right? It becomes part of the storytelling that you do.

Absolutely.

Talking about storytelling, I'd love to know who do you serve and how do you serve them?

I serve you and the people you serve basically. When I'm talking to customers, that's exactly my mentality. I work industry agnostically because every company has customers unless you're quite an unusual type of company. So, customer experience is needed everywhere and I go where customer experience is needed. needed. And I really aim to help the organizations that I'm working with, the leadership teams, the frontline, whoever that may be, but also their end customers. They're all my customers.

And so, you mentioned industry agnostic and you mentioned I had a boss once who said, if you're not serving a customer, you damn well better be serving somebody who is. And so, to your point, I think every business is a customer-based business.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when it comes to customer experience, despite the variety of companies that I've worked with over the last decade and some actually now, and despite the individual nuances that each of those customers and companies have when it comes to customer experience, actually, the core challenges, they don't tend to differ too much from industry to industry. So, I think there needs to be more wider outside of your own industry learning because we all face the same challenges when it comes to customer experience, many of which you alluded to in my intro. And we just need to get better at talking about it and learning from each other.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I've met with many business owners and I can't tell you how many times I've heard the line, oh well, our business is different from anything else. You've never experienced what we've experienced. And I think it takes people to— you have to get them out of their bubble in order to see that. And speaking to other industries to realize, oh wait a second, we're dealing with human beings. So, a lot of what we're contending with is human being based, not necessarily industry based. True.

Very, very true. People experience. Total experience.

Yeah. So, we're talking today about customer experience. We're talking about this idea about Not fixing but actually innovating. What are some of the biggest challenges that you see that business owners face today when they're trying to fix their customer experience?

Ultimately, the big one is working reactively rather than proactively. And going back to what we were just saying about industries facing similar challenges, I have seen very few companies who genuinely work proactively because we are all so gosh darn busy. We all have such limited resources. So, we tend to be jumping where we're needed and firefighting. And that kind of reactive approach to work, it doesn't enable us to be innovative. It doesn't enable us to think differently because we just don't have the time, space, or energy to look at insight or to think in a different way. So, I think a standout— there's multiple reasons, But stand out, working reactively as opposed to proactively is a big challenge companies face.

So, for those tuning in, when we talk about this idea of trying to fix customer experience, can you share an example or a couple of examples of what fixing looks like? Yeah.

So, if you get customer feedback, for example, which is you're looking at numbers of feedback coming through and they're telling you that there is a particular problem in your customer journey, then naturally, our customer experience teams, leaders, departments, they go to that problem and they fix it. And that's great, you know, that we should be doing that. But if that's all we're doing, the experience will always just stay the same. It will never change, it will never improve. And you alluded to it again earlier, if we don't change, then we're going to lag and fall behind because our customers change, our competitors change, the industry changes. So, we can't just fix something when it's broken. We have to work above and beyond that.

Yeah, I'm a big proponent that for me, customer service is easy. Where customer experience really shines is when things go horribly, horribly wrong. But to your point, if all we're doing is putting out those fires, there's a big challenge behind that. So, how does this reactive approach then manifest in customer interactions or the feedback that they're getting even though we feel as service providers, we've solved the problem. Yay! Yeah.

Oh, I'm going to say something which is quite contradictory now, but you've lined me up for it and I need to share it. So, you mentioned around the time where you can really shine is when something goes wrong. And for anybody listening, there's something called the customer service recovery paradox. So, it's the one time where actually you can proactively be reactive. Which is why it's paradoxical. But the magic here is that, you know, you can, as a customer, go through an experience with a brand which has no particular peak points, you know, no pain points, no high emotion. It's just very neutral experience.

Right.

And by the end of that experience, you might be pretty meh about the brand. You know, you're not a massive advocate, you're not a detractor. If something goes wrong, of course, not good. But if something goes wrong and the company fixes it, then you actually leave that experience with a much higher sentiment to that brand than you would have if there was a neutral experience.

Right.

Which is why it's paradoxical, because actually it's saying to companies that if something goes wrong, as long as you can fix it and fix it well, actually that customer is going to have more trust in you and is going to appreciate you more as a brand. So you're absolutely right when you say that there's magic in recovering a bad experience. But that is the one time when I'm going to give companies a free pass on just fixing something. At the end of that process, there should still be a lesson learned and a consideration of not just how we can fix it but how we can stop it from happening again or work to improve. Yeah.

It's funny that you mentioned that because I teach and I put it in my book that there are actually 3 reactions that people will have to your service. One is, oh, that's a shame. Or, hey, that was really great. Or nothing. Absolutely forgettable. And so, for us, some people are saying, we have our standards, our definition, and so on. And everybody, we make absolutely sure everybody's treated the same and everybody walks out with the— we're very, very efficient. And so then, my big question is, okay, well, how did you create an experience?

Yeah, yeah. And I work on this framework, which is so simple. But if companies can utilize it, then you're going a long way in creating a good customer experience. And it really is just the 3 S's. So, success, satisfaction, and sentiment. And if any interaction you can engender all 3 of those, you can Success is just achieving your goal as a customer. So whether that's, you know, pay a bill or whatever you're aiming to do. Satisfaction is, you know, having the omnichannels that are available to you, being able to contact them in your own time, it being, you know, a pretty pleasant experience. You know, you can get success without satisfaction. You know, you could pay your bill without having a good experience. But then, to your point, what's memorable about that? If your customers are only ever having transactional interactions, how are you ever going to create a good customer experience? So, if you can get that 3rd S in there, that sentiment, if you can engender some kind of positive emotion, then you've cracked it. That's what you need to do.

I love that because we talk endlessly about how in the sales cycle that the actual purchasing decision is made emotionally. And so, what we're saying is not only are we looking for the sale to connect emotionally. But we're looking for the whole experience to connect emotionally. So, people walk away and go, that was a great— like, I had a great time with that. Or, that was a lot of fun. Or, I went to this coffee shop and I couldn't believe how they treated me.

Yeah, yeah, that just does something.

Yeah, for something. And I do know that there are customer service or customer experience people out there saying that it's unreasonable or unsustainable that you can exceed expectations every single time. Because whenever you do, exceed an expectation. It just sets a brand new bar for what the expectation is. And people will measure you against that. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, yeah. But I don't think it should be a blocker or a reservation to trying. You know, even if you think about it in its most logical term, some of that doesn't entirely resonate. So, the coffee shop example is great. I've got a local coffee shop that I go into. And there's a particular lady named Cheryl. I know her name because I took the time to learn it because Every time I go in, she is just the most lovely person. Like, the way she speaks to you, it's so comforting, and she continues to do that. Now, I'm not looking for more every time I go into that coffee shop. I don't want her to be better. She's just great consistently. So I think consistency is important. And yes, great if you can continue to do things that surprise and delight, why not? But it really isn't about that. It's just about being consistent and deliberate in the experience you deliver.

A lot of times on this show, we've been talking about how really the business community from when I grew up, like I entered the workforce in the late '70s. So, that's just dating myself that I'm the old guy in the room here. But back then, it was all very transactional. I worked for McDonald's and it was all, this is what you had to do, da, da, da, da, da. And there wasn't a lot of opportunity to start thinking and bringing your personality to the forefront. In fact, I found a lot of times we were pushed down from being our personal authentic selves at the counter because you took 30 seconds longer with the customer. We have a big lineup and so on. So, it was very almost industrial-aged.

Yeah.

And so, very transactional. And now, we are in kind of the relational age where relationships seem to be counting more points than any other aspect of interaction that we're having with our customers. Again, is that a fair statement?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, and it's so interesting that you say that because we're talking about being relational in a time where AI is exceeding everybody's like top of the priority list. So, 2 kind of contradictory terms there. But when you look at all of the data, maybe because AI is so prominent and because the conversations around it are so intense and so many companies want to do more with less, fair enough. But maybe that's why that whole relationship piece is coming to the top more, because actually people are starting to appreciate that it might not be there for us, you know, for much longer. I'm not saying that, of course, AI is going to overtake all customer and human-facing interactions, but just the thought of that even being a potential possibility, maybe people are thinking about how important relationships are now.

Yeah, and I think we see it in some of the transactional businesses that we see. I mean, Starbucks for instance makes sure they take your name down, right? It used to be you had to pull a ticket. Okay, you're number 63. And they'd go through and go, number 59. And you're like, oh, I'm number 63. This is taking so long. But now, they're actually, okay, what name can I put there? And they're actually calling you out. It would be nice if they did other interactions rather than say, yeah, I have for Marc. Marc! And here you go. And then, you walk off. It would be nicer to turn that into more of a conversation rather than just a tag you with a dart kind of situation. But it's nice now that we're no longer just feeling like, okay, well, we're just a number.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's the key, right, to personalization. You can go over and above that. But ultimately, it's just making the customer feel like a person and not a number. And I'm working with a telecoms company, actually. And in this age of really prolific AI use or progression towards that digitalization of service, this particular telecoms company in the UK, they are making sure that it's a people-first approach. So, if, as a customer, you want to speak to a human, you don't have to go through cumbersome web chat to get there. You don't have difficulty trying to find a contact number on a website. They make that speaking to an actual real human super, super easy. There's other alternatives if you want self-service. But unlike a lot of companies which are trying to direct people away from humans, this particular telecoms company are saying, no, it's human first. For as long as you want it, that's what we'll do.

I would even challenge them to change the phrase from human first to human always.

Human always.

So, so—

I'll take that back to them.

Yeah, excellent. Don't thank me. It's all a public service. For the leaders tuning in today, what warning signs should they be out looking for to indicate that their organization is merely kind of just teetering on this edge of crisis management and maintaining status quo? What are some of the signs that they're seeing at the front end, through their middle management, through their corporate culture?

Well, I suppose one of the cultural things would be prioritization of customer experience. So, actually, looking at where you're spending your budget, how much of your budget is going towards customer experience, as in how much dedicated resource have you got? Because one of the biggest challenges, and one of the reasons we end up working so reactively, is that actually a very small proportion of the expenditure goes to customer experience. And if you're not willing to put money where your mouth is, then you're only going to get a limited source from that. So, I think budgetary spend is important. I think another thing is to look at your continuous improvement pipeline, and even just really, really simply do an exercise, which is what is working on a fix? What is working on an improvement? And what is working on genuine innovation? And that should give you a really early indicator as to whether you're working reactively, and you are just fixing things when they're broken, or whether or not you're actually forward and future thinking. And a third one, actually, which maybe I think I should have done second, because it's probably more important, is look at your insight use. Because you can't develop customer experience innovatively without utilising your insight. And what I see commonly across organisations is that A lot of companies are good at collecting data, then less good at turning it into insight, less so at taking all of the different insight pockets from across the organisation. So, not just customer feedback, but voice of the employee, voice of the process, user data, complaints, SLAs, KPIs, you know, you name it, all of these different insight points, very few actually bring this together holistically. And so, we end up as companies making somewhat erroneous decisions based on the data that we're just not using effectively. So, I think, yeah, in the middle underneath prioritization is just look actually at what are your data sources? How are you bringing them together? How are you sharing them across the organization? And how, if at all, are departments utilizing it to improve or innovate the customer experience? I'd guess so many would say yes.

I would like to dig in a little bit more into some key strategies to help make that happen because I find what happens a lot of times is business operators, especially when you're looking at grassroots businesses. So, we're talking about maybe their businesses with under 20 employees.

Right.

That the focus is on, oh, we have to give good service. We have to give good service. And when I did my survey back in 2019, when I would talk to the businesses, all the managers are working within the confines of their own ego and their own biases. So, when we come back, I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into how we can shake ourselves out of that. And find the real data that counts. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I am here with CX Cultivator Katie Stabler. Katie, you have a book as well. You were a co-author of a book. You want to tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, Customer Experience 2. It's part of, oh, 5 now. I believe Customer Experience 5 has just come out. It's a really great pick-up-and-put-down read because it's full of short chapters written by authors who are all professionals in the industry, not necessarily dedicated CXers, but in some way have a touchpoint in customer experience. And that means that as you're reading it, you get the breadth and depth of knowledge of so many different professionals, their good practice, their experience. And across every possible area of customer experience that you can think of.

I love that because one of the things that we talked about just before we went live was the need for business operators to get out of their environments. Because as we alluded to before the quick little break was that people are working within their own kind of bubbles. And I like to say that every business has a bubble. And it's not until you look outside of that bubble do you actually see the truth. When I did that survey back in 2019 and having 97% of the leaders say, oh no, we are great to awesome. And when you actually talk to the customers and find out that really their customer experience was about 16%. So, how do we catch the data at a kind of core foundational level? And then, how do we filter through it to actually make it mean something?

Yeah, and it isn't— there isn't an easy answer to that question because, as you said a moment ago, you know, we're talking about so many different kinds of companies here, you know, large companies with lots of different employees and departments, or much smaller companies with people who wear multiple hats and are responsible for different things. So each company is going to have to take its own approach. But I think one of the most important things is when you are looking at your strategy for data collection. So there's probably tip 1, Have a strategy. Don't just throw a net out and see what you catch. Actually think about what do we know, what do we need to know, and where are the insight gaps that we need to plug. And that's often one of the starting points when I work with any organization is to, to get them to answer those questions. What do we know? What do we think we know? And how can we make that think back to what we do know? So having that strategy is first and foremost. Then I think you need to have, as I say, that robust spread of data. So, a lot of companies, when they look at customer experience, they just go straight to voice of the customer, understandably, you know, it's one of the big things we want to know what customers say, think, and feel about us. But what customers say and what customers do don't always align. So, you can't rely just on voice of the customer, which is why user data is really important. You know, how do they interact with your staff? How do they interact with your website, your social, your services, your operations? You know, you need to have all of this information along with what they say they do. Then again, complaints, customer lifetime value, customer wallet share, all of this stuff, you need to be able to bring this together. And normally, different departments own different buckets of that data. So one of the strategies to be able to bring that together is make sure you have our way, whatever it is, a conduit, a catalyst to bring people together in the organization to talk and share. So, a customer experience forum, some kind of group where it's prioritized and people aren't looking at this data individually in silos. You're bringing it together. So, strategy, forum, 2 big ones.

I love that. And Fit from Brit, love listening to Podcast. Marc, you always bring on the best guests. This is one of the best guests. Brittany, thank you so much. Hey, if you have any questions, if you're tuning in live and you have a question for our guest expert today, I'd love to be able to feature your question. So, feel free to type it in. But it's really interesting because being able to— again, I think a lot of people are incidental leaders. A lot of people don't have a lot of training on how to data mine and how to really ask really good questions. And so, they're really doing it from the perspective of Their head is down. Hey, whenever I work, all my customers are happy. And I train my staff. And I know I train my staff. So, this idea of being able to get really good data and then effectively use it is a challenge when we don't have a dedicated customer experience specialist maybe on our team to be able to mine through this. So, for these people who are kind of the solopreneurs or for the entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs with the small teams of people who are obviously resource kind of scarce. How would you recommend? What would be a first step for them to be able to really find out what their reality is?

I'm a massive fan of customer journey mapping. Now, I know that this has got mixed feelings in particularly the customer experience industry. But I believe in so many ways, this is an excellent methodology. And it goes back to the point of what we know and what we don't know. So, when— for anybody who isn't familiar with customer journey mapping, just really quickly, it is essentially putting yourselves in your customer's shoes and walking through your experience as they see and feel it. And why I like it so much and why I think it's great for data collection is because if you do this exercise, either by yourself or as a team, and I'd really advocate for a multidisciplined, cross-functional team, so as many different minds in that room as possible to eliminate some of that bias, bring in different opinions, bring in different challenge, and complete that customer journey map. Try and do it with as much data as possible, but where you don't have data, you know, fill in the gaps from what you, knowing your business, know, and then ask yourself, looking at that map, What of that, again, is reality? What do we absolutely know for certain happens at each and every single one of those touchpoints? And where are we guessing? Where are we making assumptions? And straight away, in a really simple exercise that can just take a few hours, you're identifying what you do know and what you don't know. And there's no fluff around it. You either know it or you don't. And if you don't have data to back up what you've got on that journey map, then that's one of your number one actions is make sure that you're collecting that data. So, the next time you do it, it is data-based and not assumption-based. And I love that.

I love that. And do you have any frameworks or anything that you can offer the audience or anything that you can offer along that route as kind of a starting point?

Yeah, I mean, as in the actual steps that I need to take?

Yeah, to create this first journey map.

Yeah, so I mean, you, you can go on— I mean, you can contact me and I can give you a template for starters, but you can get journey mapping templates anywhere. They're, they're not, um, hard to come by, and there's different variations. So there's ones, you know, which will definitely suit your business. Um, and as I say, you can, you can do it yourself, but you just need to dedicate a few hours to it. If you have the capacity and the resource to bring in a consultant, then you know that it's going to be well facilitated and it's going it's going to be done right. But you can learn this skill and you can do that and you can bring people from your group and your team together to do it. As I say, you need a few hours depending on the complexity of your journey. Ideally, starting, you would go full end to end. And then once you've got the use of it and the practice of it and you can see the benefits of it, you can start to diversify that journey. So not just end to end, but you know, what happens when the customer reaches a pain point and the journey goes south? What happens when they are coming back for a repeat purchase and you continue, you know, loads of different avenues you can go down, but firstly, you do your end-to-end journey. It's typically workshop, so you, as I say, you do it in a room, you'd be— there'd be lots of conversation, lots of Post-it notes, or if you're doing it digitally, there's lots of online tools that you can do this with as well. And the way I like to approach it is to do your actual journey as it is, because that's, as I mentioned, the great opportunity to identify what you do and don't know. But also your desired customer journey, and then overlay the 2. So what's the desired? What do you actually want to happen for your customers? And what do your customers want to happen? And what is actually happening? And by doing the 2, you can see how close or how far apart those 2 journeys are, and you can work to close that gap. And if I was really working with an organisation seriously about customer journey mapping, I would get them to structure a program of work around this. So it's not just a one exercise done and it's chucked in a drawer and you never see it again. It's something that you do if you have the time and space monthly, if not, you know, quarterly, biannually. But it is a process you continuously keep doing to help you stay on top of what's actually happening with the experience.

So for people tuning in, and this is really resonating, how can they get ahold of you? to have you help them with what their angst is?

Oh, you can contact me in loads of different ways. My social media, LinkedIn. I'm very, very active on Instagram if you like to see the background life of the consultant as well. And you can contact me directly by email. So, it's katie@cultivatecustomerexperience.com.

Lovely! And for anybody tuning in as well, if you go to my website at marchaine.com, I do have a Customer Touchpoint Assessment that you can download for free and actually do the walk through your property and through your business from using the eyes of your customers. So, please feel free to download that. What about the use of things like secret shoppers? What are valuable? Not really valuable? What do you think?

Yeah, yeah. I think, but again, a mix. So, it comes back to having that robust view. I think secret shoppers are great. Interestingly, I don't see an awfully big use of secret shoppers these days, and I think it's purely because with the use of technology that maybe it's become a little— well, the traditional secret shopper has become a bit of a methodology of the past. However, I have seen a regeneration of it again with the new technology that's available at our fingertips, a whole different sub-segment of what used to be the old traditional mystery shopper. But I think that's great. I think a big one, a huge one, and if companies aren't using this, I would be shaking them to say, do it, is conversational analytics and, you know, AI-generated sentiment collection. You know, the thing with surveys is that, as we all know, sometimes survey fatigue pops up. We all get asked to complete a lot of surveys. Sometimes there's a bias to surveys where only the people who have got something really that they want to get off their chest do to fill in a survey so you can get a lean towards really negative or really positive. And generally, response rates on surveys can be tricky. People can suffer from low response rates. Whereas conversation analytics, for anybody who isn't familiar with that, you know, it's the technology that attaches itself to phone calls and live chats and emails and social media conversations. And all of this feedback, which isn't explicit, but which your customers are giving you nonetheless, is being captured. And all of that sentiment that your customers again are showing and sharing with you, but has typically been hard to capture, is now really easy to capture. And again, this works for companies at all different levels. There is technology out there which is relatively cheap that you can integrate into your systems and can give you amazing amount of data on Amazing.

And so, how would somebody find something like that? Is it that they need to hire somebody to do it? Is there a specific Google search they might get into in order to find this?

Yeah, I mean, if you were gonna just look for conversational analytics, you'll have no end of tools to come across. It probably would serve you well and it'll probably save you a lot of time to speak to a consultant who works with different companies and give you some recommendations. And because one of the benefits to that also is that there are companies that do more than one thing. And, you know, if you're looking at quality assurance, for example, well, there are a lot of great quality assurance companies which also have conversation analytics and sentiment collection for your customer experience. So rather than going out and buying 2 different services and having all of that technology to deal with, you could potentially get it all from one company. So Having a chat with a consultant like ourselves, Marc, definitely is beneficial. Probably would save you time and maybe some pain down the line.

A lot of what we're talking about is forcing people to start thinking outside of their little bubble of kind of the way they do things. People who have had their businesses for multiple years have been in their positions for multiple years. And it's like, no, this is the way we've done it. We've always done it. And they really kind of It's really hard to shake them out of their kind of complacency of the status quo into a culture of innovation. So, how can leaders start to foster this culture of innovation so that people aren't stuck in this routine of crisis, solve, crisis, solve, crisis, solve, especially when resources are tight or the teams are stretched thin like they typically are?

Yeah. And that's, that is a hard challenge because we do get so ingrained for many, many reasons. You said it right at the beginning, you know, to actually empower your team is one of the best gifts you can give your company. And when I say empower, I just mean making your team members, whoever they are, you know, be them customer-facing or back office, making them know that whatever they have in their mind, whatever problems they are seeing, whatever solutions they are coming up with, whatever it is, that they can with confidence talk about it and bring that to the table. And it might be that, you know, it's not an idea for today, or it might be that absolutely it's something amazing that we can utilize. But having that empowerment, because nobody comes into work and just thinks, oh, I'm just going to do my job today and nothing else. You know, everyone— Really?

When I talk to managers, how come there's a lot of finger How come I have staff who don't want to take any initiative? They're so lazy and they keep calling in sick. But to your point, I truly believe that everybody on our team has a magic superpower that they bring to the forefront. I mean, people hired them, right? You hired them into your business.

Exactly.

But I find it's funny that leaders won't tap into the teams that are actually doing the work. Like I run across a lot of businesses and their owners that define like customer experience as the front lines job. Oh, we have a policy. We have training. It's up to them to do that. So, how important is it to involve the entire organization in this shift rather than just leaving it to, you're the customer experience person. You're the customer service person. You take care of it.

Yeah, do you know I've had the absolute pleasure of 3 standout companies over the last 5 years that I've worked with who genuinely taken without me needing to encourage it. It's been one of the things that they have wanted to do. It's part of their strategy from the beginning, and I've been there to facilitate it, is having everybody at every level engaged. So another telecoms company, for example, I'm working with at the moment, over the last just shy of a year, we have trained the whole organisation with the same customer experience training. The management and leadership teams had slight differences in just a little bit more, but ultimately, they all got the same training. They were all speaking from the same him, she. It was all about their strategy in particular areas of the business that they needed to work on and how we could support that organization to do that. But it was amazing that everybody was getting that training. It doesn't matter what part, what department you're in, everybody had it. I'm also working with another company at the moment, an airport, and every single one of their leadership team has been engaged right from the very beginning in all of the workshops. So, Vision Builder workshops, persona creation, customer journey mapping, insight collection, all the way up to the non-executives as well. So, again, that kind of not just saying it, not just saying that it's important at the top, but demonstrating with action that leadership right down to frontline, everybody needs to be engaged in this. And that is just, it's so important if you're going to make a difference. Again, you said right at the beginning around, oh, my initiative made a little change, it did a little nudge in the right direction. Ultimately, all the efforts are for nothing if the whole organization doesn't take a level of responsibility. They don't have to take ownership, because somebody ultimately has to take ownership, but everybody needs to have a level of responsibility and I love it.

And it's so important. I can't tell you how many times I've been brought into organizations, especially earlier in my career, where I was brought into organizations to say, yeah, my staff need customer service training, or dealing with difficult people, or whatever. And then, I would get into the room and it would be only the staff. And then, the staff is like, oh, I wish Steve was here to hear this because he does blah, blah, blah. Or, my supervisor John, he should be here. And so, it got to the point where I made it a contractual obligation when people brought me in that the leaders and the frontline leaders responsible for the teams I was training had to come into the training as well. And the interesting thing that I found is when you bring people together and have these conversations, it's not only about what you want in the aspirational customer experience. But you start talking about corporate values. And that becomes the seed for how we react to everything. And all of a sudden, your supervisors and your managers are now becoming servant leaders within the culture. And the magical shift just happens.

Yeah, servant leadership. It's just, if you are working with organizations that operate with servant leadership style of leadership, it's just beautiful. And another thing, you were saying to shake people out of the bubble to get people thinking. Actually, this approach of this shared learning and development together, where everyone gets a similar kind of content, that's really helpful. So, again, at the telecoms company I'm working with, part of the leadership training at the end was to play back the thoughts and feelings of the frontline around some of this. So, what was their feedback? And what were some of the key conversation points? And you said it around initiative, you know, oh, my staff just don't have initiative. initiative. Well, one of the questions I asked all of the frontline was, what stops you from taking initiative? It's not a finger-pointing to say you don't. It was just generally, what stops you from taking initiative? And we had this pie chart, you know, with all these different reasons on there, but the top one was culture. They said culture. They said the organization doesn't, for whatever reason, culturally doesn't support us to do that. And when we sat and played that back into the leadership team, well, first of all, it was like, look, they were shocked.

I bet. I knew it.

We have great culture. Don't believe that. But somebody, one of the directors, said, one of our biggest faults is that we get insight, we don't listen to it. And again, they were like, no, no, we do. And he's like, you are getting insight on a plate right here. Our people are telling us that this is a blocker. And you're not listening to it.

And you're shutting it down.

Yeah. But that was one of those moments where I think, you know, post that session, actually, hopefully, the leaders in that team would go away and say, right, actually, something isn't translating from a cultural perspective, because the organisation, actually, I would say, from a maturity perspective, is doing great culturally, like they really are. I mean, even the fact that all of the training is going to all of the people, But there is something that isn't translating. So, they have to go away and that could be the light bulb moment for how they can make improvements.

And that's so good. And this is one of the reasons I went from being a customer service trainer to customer experience trainer to being now a customer and employee experience strategist. Because the two, I believe, are so tied together in so many different facets that if we start making sure that the aspiration of what we want from customer experience, if we aspire to do that, we need to have the reality to be that for our employees.

Yeah.

And I think it translates beautifully.

Absolutely! You can't have one without the other. And I think it's Richard Branson's quote. I'm going to misquote him now. But it's, look after your employees and they look after your business. Something along those lines.

J.W.

Marriott. J.W. Marriott. If we— yeah, to that same thing. I can't remember what the quote is.

Yeah, no, it's true. You don't have a business, do you? Unless you have customers and unless you have employees, you quite simply do not have a business. So, they're both as important as one another.

Yeah. And my first, I mentioned at the beginning of the show, my first experience working in a culture that was really centered on this idea of we are there to be of service was when my boss came to me and says, if you're not serving a customer, you damn well better be serving somebody who is. And for me, that was just a magical awareness, like a mindset shift. Because it's so easy to get bogged down as a department manager or whatever into all the crisis that you have to deal with. But knowing that we are there to serve somebody who's serving our customers was magical.

Yeah, yeah. And I actually love it when you work with an organisation and they get confused with who you mean by customer. So, when you're talking about customer experience, and then they kind of stop you and go, but who do you mean? Who is the customer? Because we've got each other. And then I love that, because I like the way that they're thinking. It's not, to your point, it's not just about the actual end customer, but it's about our internal customers, our stakeholders who are customers, the third parties who might be customers. You know, when we say customer, it's such a broad and varied term depending on the organization you work with. And I love it when that question comes up.

Yeah, and I've also had the arguments with especially baby boomers that my employees are not my customers because they don't pay me anything. It's like, okay, let's talk about contribution at a different level.

Interesting.

Hey, when we come back, I'd like to talk about some cautionaries and pitfalls. As people listening and tuning into this, they know they need to make a change. Let's talk about some pitfalls and we'll get to that right after this.

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We are having a great discussion. I hope you're getting lots from this. As evident from our discussion today, you can tell that Katie and I are deeply dedicated to supporting business and business leaders just like you. So, if you're in the midst of planning a leadership retreat or an industry conference and you are looking for some amazing content, or you're just needing some expert guidance, we're just a message away. Feel free to reach out for a conversation, a clarity call, whatever you need about your unique challenges, or to discuss how we can collaborate to achieve your goals. Our contact information is in the show notes. Don't be shy. So, having said that, what are some common obstacles that you find businesses face when trying to drive innovation within their customer experience?

So, one we've already mentioned. But I feel like I have to bring it up again. It's insight. It is insight, insight, insight. Like just honestly, you cannot be innovative around your customer experience if you don't actually understand understand and know what your customers want, what they are actually experiencing, and what they expect. And it's— this is so prolific right now because, again, with all this use of amazing technology at our fingertips, we often jump into the whole technology is the answer. But wait, what's the question again? So, I think, you know, we— I feel like that little dit Sums it up perfectly. You know, we jump to the great new, sexy, shiny technology. Actually, is it serving our customer experience? If it isn't, it's a waste of money. Why are we investing in it? So, insight is the biggest pitfall. But then, I think, seeing customer experience as that friction finder. And even if, I think, if you ask yourself honestly, Whatever your approach is to customer experience, whether you've got a team, a department, a leader, whether it's just part of everybody's job or someone's side-of-the-desk activity, when I think you look at what customer experience really is, I bet most of you, without putting a name on it, would say it's friction finding. It is finding the problem and fixing it, finding the problem and fixing it. And honestly, if we keep just fixing problems, we are going to be buried beneath fixes because there will be no end of things to fix. And we are then going to miss opportunities to truly innovate. So, I think the second pitfall is just getting yourself out of the mindset that customer experience is there to identify problems and fix them because it is way, way more than that.

Yeah. And it's such a shift I think in mindset because it's again, when things are going well, we stop actually questioning if it could be better. Right? And so, yeah, so that's just magical. Any other pitfalls or cautionaries you should have, people should be aware of as they try to make this transition into understanding how to be more innovative within customer experience?

I think also, and right back to one of the very first points we made is not looking outside of your business and outside of your industry. Even when we do look outside of our business, We tend to look at our competitors, you know, we tend to benchmark against what other people in our industry or sector are doing. And again, that's such a blocker for you because actually there is amazing customer experience happening all over the world in all kinds of different industries that we can learn from. We don't just have to stick within our little ballpark. So, but it comes back to that point of having time and being able to do that because It's not just a, oh, I'll stumble across something exciting and interesting. I'll maybe look into it. You need to actually have the time to look and to learn and develop from that.

But there are so many resources right now to be able to do that. I mean, just attending a Chamber of Commerce meeting where you have people within your community from different businesses sitting around networking. This would be such a great conversation to have at your table during lunch. On customer experience? Or what are some of the hiccups you're seeing in customer experience? And so on, to open up that bubble. Because the challenge I think is that everybody thinks that their business is highly unique to them and nobody else is suffering the same way.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And podcasts like this where you are listening to different experts who can cast a different light onto something in a way that you haven't looked at it before, or raise a topic which you've not thought about in enough depth, but actually really resonates with you. I think these kinds of conversations are fantastic. Or working with somebody who you just haven't worked with before. And this could be someone within your own organisation that you just haven't spent an afternoon or a day with, but actually see how they work, see how they do things differently, see what questions they're trying to answer. You know, they're just exploring past as we've said, your own bubble. It's so advantageous. And especially when we're talking about innovation. Innovation, there's so many ways we can lean into it. But that's the thing. We do have to lean into it.

Yeah, and be mindful and intentional with it as well. Because to your point, there's no shortage of people willing to take your money. So, it needs to first and foremost come down to a solid strategy.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What does your customer want?

Yeah. Katie, this has been such a phenomenal conversation. As we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts about what we're talking about today?

Oh, just advice to everybody that if you are doing anything on your journey towards customer experience, then fantastic. That's great. But the absolute best thing you could do for yourself is to make it intentional and consistent. So, if you can focus time and effort to making sure that it is intentional and consistently part of your agenda, and you can take some of these tips and just progress from that first foundational level of fixing and elevate it to the next stage, then you're doing a lot more than other organizations are. I can say that.

Right. And for all the people who fear, what happens if I make a decision or I go in a direction and it's wrong? You can always pivot. You can take a step and pivot. Take another step and pivot. And you'll figure it out.

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

Katie, could you just remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

Yep, you can email me at katie@cultivatecustomerexperience.com. You can find me Katie Stabler on LinkedIn and Instagram. And you can go direct to my website, which is Katie, thank you so much.

I have thoroughly enjoyed. I knew this was going to be a magical episode with you and I coming together. I really appreciate you sharing your passion, your expertise, and your brilliance with us today. It's been phenomenal.

Thank you for inviting me.

Thanks so much for being here. Why don't you let me know if this was of value to you? As always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is in the show notes. It's the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. It would be my absolute honor to be of service. And while you're at it, why don't you go ahead and leave a comment or review about this episode? I'd love to get your feedback. Was this of value? Did you pick up any tidbits? How did it work for you? And of course, if you haven't done so yet, please make sure that you subscribe to this podcast. That way, you get the notification for the next episodes when I bring phenomenal experts just like Katie to this podcast to help open up your world. And hopefully, maybe you can pick up something that you weren't aware of. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.