Transforming Customer Experience: Unleashing the Power of Employee Engagement

There is a significant chasm between what an organization's mission and vision statement says up on the wall and how that organization trains and supports their frontline employees. But then, we wonder, why is customer loyalty at an all-time low? Or we even think about, why are my employees more disengaged with their jobs than they've ever been before. So, what can you do about this? Well, that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees I am your host, Service Expert and Master of Experiences Marc Haine. And it is so great to have you here with us today. I hope you get amazing value from what we're going to be talking about today because my guest for this episode is the Experience Handyman, Scott Gilby.

Hi Marc!

We will uncover the challenges faced by businesses such as things like dropping and flatlining customer experience metrics and erratic employee experience metrics, and ongoing employee retention issues. We know that this post-pandemic world, getting and keeping our employees is really, really tough. So, stay tuned because today, we will uncover some incredible insight that has the potential to transform your workforce. If this is your first time with us, I invite you to check out the other videos on the channel. Each one is chock-a-full of information and learnings that you can apply to your business. And I am so blessed to have really great experts like I do today. You know, many businesses are facing the issue of customer experience metrics plateauing or plummeting. Employee experience metrics are inconsistent. And businesses are struggling with retaining their employees. What makes this really scary is according to today's guest, 80% of managers say that the service they provide is absolutely fantastic and only 8% of the customers would agree. So that brings us to our Question of the Day. How do you rank when it comes down to the level of service you provide your customers? And how do you know it's right? Like, what systems are in place to help you measure what your perception is to the customer satisfaction levels and what the customer actually feels? How are you measuring that? I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. Why don't you go ahead and comment on this? Either in the show notes right here, right in the comment box here, or what you could do is you could share a link to this episode on your favorite social media platform, #GetExperienceLeadership, and put your comments down there. I'd love for you to be a part of this. As I mentioned, my guest today is the Frontline Experience Handyman, Scott Gilby. Scott is a seasoned expert in customer experience. and employee engagement. With a wealth of experience and a real passion for transforming organizations, Scott has been a trusted advisor for businesses seeking to bridge the gap between the boardroom and the front line. His innovative insights and practical strategies have helped numerous companies improve their customer experience metrics, enhance employee experiences, and drive sustainable growth. Scott, welcome to the show!

Thank you, Marc. Nice to be here. I appreciate it.

It is so awesome to have you here. Before we get into today's topic, could you maybe dig a little bit deeper and tell us a little bit about how you serve your clients?

Hmm. Well, I serve my clients the same way I think I have been for throughout my career, but with more of a laser focus on some specific things. So, I've always been a process mapper, a journey mapper, looking to see what's happening between the customer and the shop and the plant and the employee and delivering on our promise to customers and finding hiccups along the way that we can fix. So, that's always been in my DNA and my professional background through engineering and sales and marketing, etc. So now, what I like to do is how do I make that current? in the world of customer experience. It's 2023 now. As you said in your introduction, companies continue to struggle with customer experience itself as well as its metric. I hope we get some good answers to that good question. How do you measure that? Same with employee measures and other things. So, I've taken, I think, a unique step to help solve some of those problems or answer those questions. And we'll get to that next, I think. I hope.

Great! So Scott, why do you think this is such an important today kind of in our post-pandemic world? Why is this kind of should be a front and center issue I think for all businesses?

Hmm. I think this gap you introduced and I would say contrary to popular disbelief, the gap still exists. And there are lots in the customer experience community that talk about the same experience gap. We think this, but in fact, customers say that. And I think to my days learning to drive up in Canada. And I know you're from Montreal. I grew up in Ontario. And there's this familiar sound of spinning tires in wet mud. And you rev the engine and the engine sounds good, but nothing happens. And I get the sense that's occurring a lot with a lot of us, myself included. in this whole area of improving customer experience, engaging employees, and using data, and all these things. So, that problem exists. And when I started consulting under my own brand, well, what am I doing differently? I'm saying the same things. I get it. I can understand it. I can talk about strategy and vision and goals and North Star vision, etc., etc., insights, organizational design. All those things are essential. What's missing? What do you do with that gap? And so, what I did, I said, I'm at the top of that gap right now. Instead of trying to observe it, I'm going to dive into it. And I became a frontline employee at a couple of different organizations. Marc, it's eye-popping.

It is. You know how cool that you actually challenged yourself to get into that because you have a lot of people in leadership roles who will talk about customer experience and customer service theoretically with an expectation that other people will do the work. And I was lucky to grow up in an environment. One of my mentors a long time ago was kind of like a heavy-handed kind of dude. But one of the things he told me, he says, if you're not serving a customer, you damn well better be serving somebody who is. Right? And I've always kind of just embraced that. Because I think as leaders, we are there to be of service to the people who we're working with. And it's the weirdest thing because I've talked to some leaders who call themselves the boss. I'm the boss of this, or I lead this, and so on. And yet, no matter what position I've always had, I've always looked at my position as working with people. And one of the things that I came across when you and I touched base, I thought I was the only one on the planet who tied experience, employee experience with customer experience. And I noticed that you also tie employee experience to customer experience. Could you talk a little bit about that and how the two are tied?

Absolutely! I should have written this down. But you said a minute ago, if you're not looking after a customer, you better be looking after somebody who is.

Yes.

That's the gist. And use that. And again, this is again part of the spinning tire in the mud ice syndrome, Marc. Yes. Okay. Employee experience is tied to a customer experience. Now what? Run along and go do your job. And let's zoom forward to right now. Let's just Jump over that time gap. Boom! Here I am. I'm on my 4th frontline gig, immersion gig, and 3 of them with retail, 1 with an airline. And in my travels over the last months and putting together my thinking here, I'm adding a 5th experience profile, which is as a healthcare patient. I had some surgery on my feet a couple of years ago, and then I was a regular patient of the surgical clinic and their physio. And I talked to their employees a lot.

Yeah.

with the same kind of stuff. So, I wasn't an employee there but I got a pretty close plug into what's going on. So, 5 frontline experience immersions.

Yes.

And they hear the boss saying, you're important. You're empowered. You're the most important thing we have. You're this. You're that. And it's great. More than 2 of these 5 organizations have been voted regularly Best Place to Work or amongst the Best Place to Work. It's awesome. And you know what, Marc? They are the best place to work. They are great employees— employers. They are great companies.

Yeah.

Profitable, successful, well-known. The brands are international, most of them. Well, no. So, it's not about finding a faulty company and commenting on it. What I'm doing is I've been into 5 excellent places. Like watching a sports team go to the Super Bowl or The tennis championships or golf or whatever it is. And if you stand there and observe or you actually play the game, you start thinking, holy smokes, you know what? Somebody on every team has their shoelaces undone. Someone, you know, can you imagine the receiver, the first time they catch a ball is during the Super Bowl? And this happens at the front line. The first time as a service desk employee, I had to answer a question, can I get a 2x4? The first time I had to figure that out was at the desk in front of a customer. I said, well, I think so because I think the store sells 2x4s. Where are they? I don't know. Let me ask. Can I order one? Yeah, I don't know how to do that. I didn't know anything. I had had a week of LMS video training but I couldn't do anything. And this has happened 4 times, the exact same thing.

So, a couple of things I wanted to define for the— so, I mean, your point is with the football game at the at the Super Bowl. Obviously, that is not going to be the first time he's ever been on the field. It is not the first time he's ever going to catch a ball. And it's not going to be the first time he's going to be heading to the goalpost. He would have been trained and he would have been honed in order to make that happen. You mentioned LMS. And I think I'd like to define what LMS is for the audience because some people don't understand that there are— it used to be that you would start up in a company and they give you copious policy manuals and stuff to do. And then, If you were lucky, you worked at a progressive business that had a VHS tape of the position that you were working in. And you tried to have— you would have to then interpret what, yeah, welcome to this Friday and try to interpret what they were telling you. But LMS is a different technology now. Can you just explain a little bit what that is?

Sure. LMS is an acronym for Learning Management System. And every company has this. It's essential for sharing large volumes of important information. Basically, an intranet, an internal YouTube channel. You watch all the videos of things you're supposed to know to do your job. Yeah. And hey, don't get me wrong. Some of it is good. But—

Yes.

Maybe 10%. The rest of it is just because we're so used to producing video and so used to telling an employee to watch it. This thing just piles up and piles up and piles up. Yeah. And you have to watch it all.

It is good for kind of the basic, to get a basic idea of what the objectives are and a basic product knowledge. But really, at the end of the day, the LMS should not be replacing hands-on training. We'll get a little bit more into that. You mentioned that— I mentioned your statistic that you gave me about the 80% and the 8% customers wouldn't agree that they were getting— only 8% of people would agree that they would get good service. And what's funny about that when I read it was that mirrors a study I did back late in the '90s where I found that 92% of the business managers thought they created fabulous experiences for their customers. 27% of the frontline staff thought they provided great experiences. But only 7% of the customers agreed with that. But my study was 30 years ago.

Why?

Like, why are managers so disillusioned with their stat? And why hasn't it changed in 30 years?

Oh, that's a good question. Now, the 80 The 80%, 8% experience gap, a lot of customer experience folks use those numbers. I think Bain was the original organization that produced those results or those particular studies. But it's been verified time and time again, time and time again.

Sure.

And in fact, I've been at several corporate events where exactly the same thing happens. We're great, great, great. But hang on a second. Look at our voice of customer. That's not what they're saying. So, it's substantiated. The question is, as you said, okay, why is it? Why doesn't it change? Good questions. Very good questions.

Yeah. And so, why has it? Like, I mean, when we think about our current kind of business, I mean, right now we are more connected than ever before. We're more technically savvy than we were 30 years ago. We're more sensitive. We've even had things out in the forefront. I mean, we've had things like Kitchen Nightmares and Bar Rescue and Undercover CEO, Undercover Boss, right? We've had so much media actually focused on how challenged we are in our own environments. Yet, we still see that these things are still a challenge. So, what do you think needs to happen for us to start evolving past this?

Okay. Now, let's dive right into the heart of the matter here then, Marc. I don't have all the answers because it's made up of a lot of these large topics that I've hinted on. Again, the strategy, vision, organization, insight, design, investment, CEO buy-in, all of these things. I don't even pretend to want to try to do those things, all of those things differently than anybody has already done. I just recognize that we're still stuck in this same situation. So I dove into the frontline. Here's what I've learned, and I've learned a lot of things. They fall into 3 general categories, and I'll just say what those are right now, and then we'll come back and talk about them. The first one is competence. Competence. And by that, I don't mean competence as a human being, as a person. I mean super simple competence, like being able to Guess what? Log in on your first day on the job. Be able to find a pencil to write a note down because the customer is at the desk asking a question. You need to give them a piece of information. You want to write it down. There's no pen. Sounds silly, but that makes me feel incompetent if I don't have a pen, if I can't log in, or if I can't place an order, if I can't do a return without a receipt. Another one is more complex to unwind, is all of these companies have multiple systems. So there's somewhere on the company intranet, there's this big grid of all the systems and you click through and you— I'm at the front line, I've got a line of 10 customers deep, I've got more over here, I've got the phone ringing, and I sometimes have to log into 3 or 4 different systems with different user IDs.

Yeah.

be enabled to be able to answer some of these questions. So, competence. I don't feel competent on my first day on the job. My 6th week on the job, I'm still not competent because I haven't thrown or caught the ball before the game. All I've done is watch the video of someone else playing. I haven't thrown the ball. I haven't caught the ball. I haven't logged in. I haven't answered a customer's question. So, competence. Second topic is supervision. And I want to be careful because I don't mean supervisors. I don't mean the people who are supervisors. I mean the company sets up its supervision in a certain way. And supervision wants to know when you're taking your lunch break, wants to know when you're going pee. It wants to know that you haven't clocked out a minute and a half late and Tick into the overtime list. It wants to know all these things. It wants to know that you've watched your 100 hours of LMS. It will evaluate you. And there it sits as supervision. When I'm feeling incompetent and my supervision has put me behind the desk, I have a question. Guess who I ask, Marc?

Your supervisor.

I do that once or twice, 3 times. Call me a fool 3 times. I won't ask a 4th time because the typical— not a person as a supervisor. The typical company supervision will point its finger at me and say, why don't you know how to do that? I can't believe you can't do that.

Didn't you watch the video?

Yeah. And if I say, how is that done? I sometimes get an answer. Sometimes, I don't. What I have learned to do, Marc, is go to my peers.

Yeah.

I'll say, Marc, hey Bob, hey Tom, can you show me this? How does this work? And so, that's where I'm trying to be competent. I ask my peers. I ask my supervisor or my supervision layer. I ask them for permission. If I need knowledge, I go to my peers. And it's almost all the time. All right, so that's an important learning. That's what I've discovered. And how can that be? How can that be?

It's interesting because I've worked with a lot of different organizations. And these are kind of multiple departmental organizations. And it's funny that you say that because the reality is without having kind of a regular kind of way to be able to recognize and reward behavior so it gets repeated, what happens is like to your point, when somebody doesn't know something, they'll go to somebody else and say, can you help me with this? And they'll teach you what they know, not necessarily the way it's supposed to be done. Especially if it's something that is procedural in any kind of like if it's something that has to do with finance or legal stuff. It's like, oh, don't worry about it. Just do it this way. And then, months down the road, supervisors are pulling out their hair going, I don't know why we lost so much control over this one component. Right? So, I mean, if the supervisor is not there then to help with the knowledge base then, and it only literally becomes a peer-to-peer thing, how do organizations bridge that gap of knowledge?

Well, those that figure that out will take a leapfrog. Their tires will stop spinning in the mud.

Love it.

I promise you. I promise you. I think back years ago. Now, let me preface or let me preface. Let's go zoom back and forth in time. Here I am now making these observations. Okay, who are you? I'm just a frontline guy. I have been a Senior Vice President at a global level. I was the one creating the videos, the training. I actually narrated myself some of the videos. I was the one that helped organize them and decide— we would decide what would be trained and dump it out. I was the culprit. I was the person dumping that stuff out there. And again, you have to have some of it. So, I'm speaking from this fairly unique perspective. I've done those things and now I'm experiencing them. And now, I'm at the front line with these observations. I want to be competent.

Yes.

The supervisory layer is not focused on making me competent.

Right.

All right. So yeah, so the— and I do have some ideas of how we can tackle this. But the companies—

So, you mentioned the 3 things. You mentioned the 3 things. One was the competency. The second one was supervisory or supervision. What is the third?

Data. Data.

Okay.

And everybody talks about data. Of course, data, data, data. And I thought, what better call it something else like information or knowledge? Nah, it's simple data. It's data. I've already mentioned a couple things, um, in, in the, in the preamble here, or the first little bit, and one of them is passwords. Passwords. Okay.

Sounds simple.

Sounds simple, yeah. But where are those passwords? I, I— next time you go into a store, a retail shop, or anywhere near a busy service counter, go around and see if you can peek behind the counter and see what's there. You've got all kinds of sticky notes, Post-it notes, tape with with codes and pass— and I promise you, the key, the main login that everybody uses for the core system is at the bottom of the screen, or it's right there. It's right there. Because it has to be. Because when you're in a bind, you're in a pinch, how do I get in? And there it is. And then you have your own personal password. You have different systems. So those passwords will be written on that screen somewhere, or they ought to be, or they shouldn't be. They shouldn't be. How do I find that 2x4? What codes do I input into the different systems? This is all data.

Yeah.

When can you deliver? I don't know. How do I figure? Where's your bag? You're going on an airline. Where's your luggage? Airlines have a differing competence in data. The one I've worked with and admire greatly is very good at all this data. And they're very good at By the way, there are millions of passengers and tens of millions of bags travel every year and you get some problems now and then. I mean, yeah. So yeah, take a hike.

So when you think about the sheer volume of what's happening when people lose their luggage and they get all upset about, how the heck can you lose my luggage? It's really a small percentage of the total deliverables at the end of the day.

It's a teeny weeny percentage and you get some horror stories and they're terrible horror stories. They shouldn't. It's like getting a flat tire in a high-speed race.

Yeah.

It's bad.

Yeah.

But there are also ways to reduce that even small number. So, when I say data, I mean all of that information. And I don't mean all of the company information because that's just an infinite—

Too much.

Yeah, it's too much. What I'm referring to in this frontline aspect is the data that the frontline employee needs right now to serve the customer that's on the phone, online, staring at them in the face. What do I need right now? I need to log in. I need to find their order. I need to find their bag. I need to— here's— okay, if I need to phone a supervisor, how do I do that? If I need to call an associate in another department that's like a, you know, an Uber ride away at the far end of the store, how do I, how do I call somebody? All these things are so basic, but for me, it's all data.

Yeah, so data tied into the knowledge base of what you need in order to be competent. Again, to what you need to be competent. I'd like to really uncover how companies can start bridging the gap between the people in the boardroom and the people on the front line. And I'd like to get to that right after this.

Thank you, Marc.

Or not. Maybe I won't. Okay, let's try it again.

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Welcome back! I am here with my brother from another mother, Scott Gilby. You know, I love this idea of understanding what customer experience is all about and how it ties to customer service. I also love how we tie employee experience to the overarching deliverable at the end of the runway, which is the customer experience. And it was Marriott who said, if we take care of our employees, they'll take care of our customers. And so, really this whole idea now of customer experience versus employee experience is putting that on steroids. And it's funny to what you were saying before. I wrote in my book Lights! Camera! Action! I wrote a book. The book is all surrounded by my experience as an actor after 30 years of being in management and understanding that what we did in theater, really the catalyst for the book was I had this brainstorm that my goodness, if businesses put that much time, attention, and focus into their business that we did to put on 6 shows, we would have amazing businesses. And in one of the chapters, I talk about this idea of rehearsals, the required rehearsals. And to your point, there are a lot of businesses out there. In fact, I was just at a restaurant the day before yesterday. And I sat down and the server came up and she introduced herself. And I said, oh great! What's the soup of the day? And she just went, I'll have to check. Right? And so, it makes me imagine what it would be like for an actor if they walked in and they said, yeah, you went through the interview process, the audition. And we want to hire you. And so, here's the script. Here's your outfit. We go on in 5. Right? It would never happen because you couldn't put on a show like that. But yet, time and time again, we are doing this to our staff. We're throwing them into the field with the commitment that they're going to watch these videos, that they're going to shadow somebody perhaps. But we're still throwing them into the fire expecting to learn from osmosis. And it just doesn't work. And so, that is an example I used in my book to say, if you wouldn't do it for something like theater, like when people have to play a role, how are you going to do it when your frontline staff have to play the role of the customer service face for your business? So, it's amazing.

Great! Beautiful analogy. I love that one.

Yeah, yeah. So Scott, do you have any— this idea now of this gap between what management perceives, so the boardroom side versus what the frontline staff are experiencing. Do you have any mechanism you can share about how we can kind of close that gap of perception about the level of service that we provide?

Yes. And I mentioned LMS earlier, all this video training for a reason because I think that's part of the problem. It's baked into our our business culture. It's baked into our global culture that you just sit and watch all this stuff. And I actually had lunch with a president of a large organization that I was associated with and made the suggestion. And he said, that's really cool. I wrote it down, went to talk to his team, and it went— even he talked to his team and it went flat because no, we're not doing that. So, that's not over yet. But It's, it's, I just have to do a better job as a, as a business person showing them that there's value. So it's, I don't fault, I don't fault them because we're talking about something that's so ingrained, the spinning wheel. It's up to me to break that barrier to, to have them experiment. But here's, here's one suggestion. And back to your great analogy of being a waiter in a restaurant or something. Hey, Guess who had, you know, who, which of us have not been waiters or something along the way? And, and can you imagine that situation not, uh, not having practiced something beforehand? Or the Super Bowl? And I, and I, it's not just a, it's not just a whim or just a random thought. This actually happens. You get a week or 10 days of video and then out you go, go catch, tell them what the soup is, um, and figure it out. Happens all the time. So I would take a test case for an organization, whatever size. It needs to be big enough so it matters, but it can't be the whole thing. Take a unit or a store or something. Immediately, look at your volume of video training and just throw half of it out right away on a whim because you'll know with the right people in the room. You'll know pretty fast what adds value and what might not. Boom! And then, with the second half remaining, just do some triage on that. And they say, okay, this is core. That's essential. It's brand. It's communication. It's safety. It's all those critical things. Compliance. That's all essential. I'm not referring to that stuff. Anything that is expected to actually teach or have practice with catching the ball, serving the soup, folding the napkins, placing an order, finding a bag, Maybe have a quick introduction on the video. But then, put yourself— put your folks in teams, 2, 3, 4 at the most, just and have them practice. Don't supervise them. Just get 3 or 4 people who do the same task. Find a way to make it fun and just practice. Practice having a customer come in with a broken chainsaw with no receipt. What do you do? Finding a customer coming in to pick up their online order. Their online order is a 500-pound double window. How do you put that on curbside? It's supposed to practice that. Obviously, you can't put a 500-pound double window into the back seat of a car. But people come to pick that up. So, practice what you do. Actually practice these things. That's the first step. Sounds, oh yeah, okay. Yeah, we do that. No, you don't. Or really evaluate that and get some help. to, uh, to do that. Key thing is, is remove something first. Remove hours of non-value-added video watching or something else and replace it with something smaller and better. I'm a big fan of not adding anything additional. Take something away first before you do something different.

And what you're talking about basically is functional training. It's not, again, it's not this idea of sit them in a room watching. Because I mean, we have to understand that adults have different learning styles. And whatever we do, we need to be able to pick into those different learning styles. And if we're not, then you get the situation that we talked about earlier where the supervisor will look at somebody and go, didn't you watch the video? Yeah, I watched the video. But there was so much information. It's just, it's all gone. And so, as human beings, we can't retain everything without it being a functional training outcome.

Yes, yes. This isn't going to solve all the problems in the world. But it will get some traction in that spinning tire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned the very first point that you had earlier about competence being the number one. Obviously, training is the way that we shake that up. Putting in some sort of mechanism to be able to train people to be able to move them forward and move them through this thing. How important is it for employees to feel recognized for their skills?

Holy smokes! It's vital.

Okay. So, let's talk a little bit about that. What does it look like?

What does it look like? I know what it ought to look like. In my frontline role, it's very rare. I get it. Now, I do get a congratulatory pat on the back. A lot of stores have little badges. You get badges. That's all good. It's all good. It's the way organizations know to recognize. Here's a badge. Here's this. I got a badge at my first retailer because I talked to a customer. I saw you talking to a customer here. That's great. And I thought, okay, thank you. I liked my first badge. It's great. And I'm thinking, I was excited as a frontline employee. I got a badge, I got recognized. Then I'm thinking, hang on a second, change hats. I could thank someone for talking to a customer. So you can have some fun with it along the way as well. But yeah, recognizing is vital. Now let me put some meat and potatoes on that bone of recognition. Please, Marc.

Please.

Good job. Tell me how you feel about this. Marc, good job with that video.

Thanks.

Or yeah, good job. Or, hey, keep up the good work.

Okay.

Or, Marc, loved your video. I learned something about employee experience and the link to customer experience. And by the way, your production, the lighting and sound are awesome. So, thank you.

Much better.

Yeah, a little more specific. And I'm not pretending to be an enablement coach. But we all know that good job, Marc is pretty hollow. Something specific is. I don't want to be congratulated for showing up to work. I don't want to be congratulated for talking to a customer. I don't want to be congratulated just for being there when the day before you told me to get the hell out of there because I was a minute on overtime. I, you know, I want to be— I want someone to say, hey, Scott, I just saw you. I just noticed that you handled 3 customers simultaneously, 1 on the phone, 2 in the line. And you did it all at the same time. And none of them felt put out of place that you weren't giving them attention. Right?

Good job.

That would be— That would be— that would be better than a good job. Right? So, there's class. Again, I don't want to pretend to insert any new way of recognizing people. Look at a Marc Haine podcast and learn how to recognize, or go to YouTube and just— there's some good stuff. You know how to recognize. Do that. What I'm suggesting is actually do it. Actually do it. Yes.

And there's so much power behind that as well because I believe that especially if you have behavioral issues within the role, it's so easy to focus on bad behavior. I believe that if we focus on the good behavior, if we can recognize and reward it by saying, very specific recognitions, then that behavior will start becoming the norm, not the bad behavior.

Yeah.

And I think it's probably the easiest way to manage that leaders have in their tool belt if they decide to use it. But they have to be willing to look for the good things. Scott, what we're talking about is like I love this conversation. I'm sure there are people who are tuning in would like to know more about you and how to get in touch with you. How can people reach out to you they need to use your services?

Oh sure. Right now, the easiest way is just go to LinkedIn. I've got a very strong profile there. It's easily found. There are some posts. I've got my own website, growcx.com. There's some information there that might be useful. Or just give me a call. I'm easy to reach on LinkedIn or my website. And I just love rolling up my sleeves in this area. I don't have all the answers. I have an answer is what I'm saying is, yeah, is fantastic. Try some of this.

Okay, I'd like to uncover some cautionaries as people want to make a change. If this is resonating with people and they're thinking, oh, I got to start thinking about doing implementing something like this in my business, I'd like to touch on some cautionaries. And we'll do that right after this.

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As you can tell, Scott and I are really passionate about serving business owners and managers just like you. So, if you're planning a leadership or management training session in the near future, or maybe you're looking at doing something within an association that you want to do some leadership, some customer experience training, or employee experience training at an association conference that could serve, that could be served by maybe today's topic, feel free to reach out to Scott or myself to explore how we can support your leadership growth. Our contact info is in the show notes. So, don't be afraid to reach out. You can, I believe that Scott also is offering 30 minutes of his free time for a discovery call to uncover what you might need. So Scott, let's talk about somebody who's kind of resonating with what we're talking about today. And they're thinking, okay, yeah, I want to implement this. I'm going to get all my supervisors together and we're going to start focusing on bridging this chasm between what we believe as managers and what the frontline staff need to be doing. What are some cautionaries we should be aware of?

Sure. A usual one. Don't do it. To ad hoc, do it fast, do it, have a pilot. But when I say ad hoc, don't just start tomorrow. You got to give it some careful thought, like give it a few days. Don't plan forever and then do it, just get started. But have a good conversation with your leadership team vertically as well. Make sure there's support. And the typical, any large-scale customer experience project or business model change, Needs that, needs that okay and buy-in. Okay, having said that, having said that, go right back down to the front line. And so, the cautionary tales of what not to do. Don't hire someone, myself included, to come in with the 30 PowerPoint slides. Here's how you do it. Clonk.

Eh.

The first thing you need to do is just, yeah, 2 slides. Here's your summary. Here's what we're trying to achieve. Let's talk about it. Do any of these examples resonate? Talk about it and just talk about it. Hash it out. Hash it out. And my bet is this competence thing with the supervision layer and access to data when I need it, I promise you, your, your immediate frontline people, um, will, if it's safe for them in your environment, will, will talk freely about it. And back to the supervision layer, you know what else be eager to do something different, those supervisors, the people who are supervisors, they will want— because they are actually frontline people themselves.

Yes.

And what's interesting, what's interesting is I found that all supervisors I've met are good people. Where I've worked, not one of them, not one of them is a good— I wouldn't swap out any of them for anybody else. They're just good people. Companies have made a good hire. They've got good experience. They have good intentions. They get wrapped up in the world that they're in. And what's interesting, and I've been really carefully observing this thing, and not with any sort of scientific degree of evaluation, just observing, and I find that a person can have a supervisory role in a large retail big box store. Sometimes they're acting as a layer of supervision. Point, point, point, point. Other times they kind of take off their cloak and they blend in and they're one of the front line because they have to do the job and work. And the same person on a given day or over the week can be one of my peers helping. And, and then, and then, and then they come out of a management meeting of their own they've been pointed at, and they come out of there All fired up and that stuff rolls downhill.

Sure.

So, one person can be a supervisor or frontline. And those people are huge assets. So, get those people in that supervisory layer involved in the discussion as well. And ask them, how can we help you be competent as a supervisor?

Yes.

And then, the whole group thought, okay, well, what is the role of supervision? Is it to monitor lunch breaks? Or is it to help make your cashier successful? Ask them those. And then, assuming it's yes, make them successful, what data? They don't need the whole wagon full of hay. They might not even need a bale. They need a couple handfuls. What's the core data that they need? What are the core tasks that you as a supervisor need to do? What are the core tasks of these 3 roles? 5 to 10. What are those things? Okay, let's go. Let's go practice. Just go practice.

Well, and I like your focus. I like your focus that really focus on the competency of the new supervisors. Because unfortunately, we see a lot of people get promoted into the role of supervisors. But then, they're never trained. And they're just doing what they think is right. They're doing how they were led when they were on the front line. And now that they've taken a step up, the only example that they had was what they were given. And unfortunately, like we said with the peer-to-peer training, things can get blurry. And lines can get blurry. And objectives can get blurry. And then, people forget all about it. So, it's really essential when you do promote people, train them. Let them step up.

Yeah.

But then, to your point, give them the resources. You call them data. Give them the resources to be able to do their jobs and things will be great. Scott, this has been such a great topic. Do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

Yes, yes, one thing. Give them time to practice. Train them. Okay, give them time to practice. Give them time to practice the core tasks that they need to face every day to help customers. That doesn't happen.

And then, that is a perfect opportunity to test for competency.

Yeah, thank you for saying that. I think the employees will know whether they're competent. Well, this is, this is part of my, this is part of my observation. If I'm behind the counter and I can't do something, I don't need to be tested.

Yeah.

I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed that I've not been properly allowed to be ready to— so that's, that's the one, that's, that's a really— I'm glad you made that comment because that's something that happens a lot. Different kind of testing on LMS. The employee who is curious and truly wants to serve customers will know if they're in a trusted culture environment. They will know if they can do something or not. They don't need to be tested.

Well, and I'll roll back to my role as an actor. When we have scripts and when we go into rehearsals, the purpose of the rehearsals is to find out where we're falling down. It's to find out and test, are we in the right place doing the right thing at the right moment with the right people? And similarly, in our roles on the front lines, we have those roles. We have to know we're in a situation with a person. We need to understand what our resources are, where we need to be, how we need to be, and so on in order to be able to fill the expectations of our customers over the long run. So, you're right. Like, there's something to be said for knowledge testing. But there's also a way to be able to turn around and say, let's look at competencies and being able to sit down and go from being a supervisor to a coach and sit down with your people and saying, where would you like— where do you want to focus to increase your level of competency?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I love that analogy, the acting analogy. The director is there to coach or guide. Sometimes, you have 3 actors. You don't need a director. Just 3 actors go over there and practice your lines together, right? Or in the restaurant, the soup. Okay, 3 waiters. Just go practice. Pretend you're the customer and practice serving drinks and food. Just practice.

But to that point, if you're out just practicing and practicing and practicing, you have the— you've picked up the knowledge But you don't necessarily until you actually practice the skill. You don't necessarily have the competency.

Exactly.

And so, because to your point, that's exactly what we do when we're in rehearsals. We might break out because we're working on different scenes or we're working on different interactions. And so, we'll break out and work on those and work on those and work on those. But it's not until we stand up on the stage within the confines of the production that we actually have it within context. Does that make sense?

Exactly, 100%.

Okay.

110% agree. That's really because in that, in the acting context, you have the script, you have the stage, you have the audience, you have all these fellow actors. Yes, exactly, exactly. And the key, yes, 100% agree.

Love it. Scott, thank you so much. This has been really a great conversation. As you could tell, we're two peas in a pod, I think. And but it's so great to have you come along for the ride and And test my theories as well. As you're talking about things, it's like, yes, yes, yes. And it actually reinforces a lot of, I hope, and with the audience, hopefully reinforces a lot of what we already know. We just now need to put our competency to practice.

Yes, sir. Absolutely.

Thank you so much. Could you just remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

Yes, I think Scott Gilby is on the screen there. Go to LinkedIn. My profile is easy to find. Happy to DM, direct message with you and hook up, give me a call. And as Marc said, I'm happy to give half an hour of just casual chat or coaching at no charge.

Lovely! Thank you again, Scott, for being my guest today. It's been absolutely fabulous having you.

Thank you, Marc. It's been a great time. I appreciate it.

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 down below. It's the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. It would be my absolute honor to be of service for you. If you enjoyed today's episode, why don't you go ahead and subscribe to this podcast? By doing so, you will be able to get The postings whenever I have a new episode dropped. You can also leave a comment or review about this episode. I love reading the reviews— good, bad, the ugly. I love learning whether or not my content is valuable to you. So, I'd love to get your feedback. And ultimately, the number one question I'd love you to ask is, was this of value to you? It has been so great being here with you. My name is Marc Haine. I hope that you stay safe. I hope that you Stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. Thanks for joining me.