‘Why CX is failing and what we need to do about it’, with Diane Magers
Episode #702 show notes:
Clare:
We’re back with another episode of the Inspiring Women in CX podcast!
A series usually dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in Customer Experience, this series we’re putting some of our awesome allies in the hot seat too!
No longer rehashing the same old conversations, in series 7, you can expect us to challenge the status quo on CX topics, provocative discourse, and of course, plenty of healthy debate!
I’ll be your host, Clare Muscutt and in today’s episode, I’ll be talking to one of our most audacious community members from the US.
With over 25 years of experience in CX, sales and marketing leadership, she’s the Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Experience Catalysts, a consulting and training firm that helps CX executives develop and grow customer and associate engagement programs.
Passionate about coaching CX leaders on how to design and implement strategies that drive growth and impact financial benefits, she’s worked with organisations across industries to deliver solutions aligned with their employee, customer, and associate needs.
A skilled presenter and trainer, let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest, CX sister, Diane Magers.
Clare:
Hi, Diane.
Diane:
Hello, Clare. How are you?
Clare:
I'm so good. I'm so happy to have you here. Welcome to the Inspiring Women in CX podcast for the second time.
Diane:
It is so great to be here. I am still on such a high from the conference. I've been looking forward to talking to you because I haven't had a chance to really talk with anybody. But I've been talking with a lot of other women that I met at the conference and helping them to kind of process what they learned and things that kind of shifted their direction a little bit just on what they experienced at the conference. So, it's been amazing. I've been busy. It's almost like I need to focus back on work. I'm having a lot of good social time with my peeps, my girlfriends.
Clare:
That's amazing. And I'm sure the listeners will love to hear more about that in our podcast today. But I should also say, welcome to our listeners, wherever you are in the world. It's fabulous to have you with us today, too. So, Diane, why did you join Women in CX, and how's it been going for you?
Diane:
I had joined very early because you inspired me to really think about the strength of what we bring to the table, so to speak, as women, why this profession needs our talents, why the profession needs our boldness and our braveness. Because this is not easy work. And so becoming part of a community of women who understand and are marching forward and are kind of taking the reins was something I wanted to be part of. And so throughout the last few years, I have met and been inspired by many women who are beating their own path and have begun to recognize that women in CX and the types of communities that you've created are a way that they can have support along that path and not feel like they're out cutting down the jungle on their own. As I say, they're cutting their own path, but there's a tribe behind them.
Clare:
And what are some of the highlights for you so far that have come from being a member?
Diane:
I have learned so much. Every time I attend one of the webinars or I attend the conference, any event, I think that are women out there who are continually pushing the edges in many ways. It could be how they tell a business case. It could be about their career and the path they're taking. It could be about one of the competencies that we do, like Voice of Customer. But what they're doing is really shifting and moulding themselves into their future selves. So, it's always great to see, one, to see that and be inspired by it. But two, how you can adopt those things for yourself and become, I think you think about it, it's kind of taking the best of all those worlds and learning from others and bringing that together for yourself.
Diane:
And that's just so unique. I mean, there are lots of webinars and lots of information out there today, but it's the way it's delivered and the way that women talk about themselves and what they're doing, that's what's different. And that's what I love about, oh.
Clare:
That feels good to hear because it's so true. And you've had a bit of international travel from being a member as well, haven't you? The Caribbean and Mexcio?
Diane:
Yes, yes, all over the globe there for a little while. But what I've come to realize is that in the travels, when you're international, there is an additional layer of how you think about and learn in this space, because even the slightest changes in culture and how people think and how they do business, how they treat each other, all of those things are slightly different, but you still have that same core of the human, and that's what I'm seeing even in the countries where they're not quite as mature or they're more mature than we are here in the States anyway, we see a common thread of people are returning to that humanity in business. They're recognizing that brands today have to be so much more than just that balance sheet and just that product or service that they're delivering. And that's coming true. When we hear CEOs, COOs begin to use that language, they begin to hire teams differently. Lots of companies are hiring psychologists and anthropologists and people with emotional intelligence. They're being very specific about how they understand how their brand works in the world and how the humans, both internally and externally, are a key part of that and their success.
Clare:
Yeah. And I think it's been a joy, I suppose, for me as the founder to be getting approached by organizations like [inaudible] in Latin America and saying, we'd love to feature 100% women as our keynotes. And you got to go to Mexico. I got to go to Argentina. Well, I spoke in Chile, but I also went to Argentina. One of our members went to Colombia. It was pretty cool to see the Women in CX Speaker Bureau come to life.
Diane:
Yeah, and to have really the follow-on, too. So, a lot of events like WiCX, like the Caribbean and Mexico, there was such a wave following that, typically, you go to a conference, you come back, you kind of get back into your old habits. But what I'm seeing is, even for the Caribbean, we're going to get together again, and we're going to figure it out, because there were so many things that people wanted. They were so hungry to learn, and they were so hungry to be a part of learning from each other. So, we're scheduling more time to really figure out how that's going to work and what we can do for that group that was there. They just loved it. Same for the Mexico group. We're going to go to Panama.
Diane:
It's just been an amazing follow-up. I would say it's almost like a ripple effect. You know, you get this big tsunami wave of love and joy going to the conference. But I've had so many phone calls, so many follow-ups. I've reached out to people who were there just to keep that fire alive. And there have been some amazing conversations.
Clare:
Nice, nice. And then one of your adventures was to come to London to speak at Women in CX conference. What are your reflections on that experience?
Diane:
I have never been in a room where the energy and the bonding between people at their conference had been so strong. There were so many workshops where people were really digging in with hands-on learning. They were hungry. They were there for each other. There were a ton of connections and introductions being made, which is one of my favourite things about the community and the, I think, inspiration that came out of it. And I don't mean just the cheerleader inspiration. I mean truly life-changing, like thinking about how that conference actually might change the trajectory of my life and the way I do business, the way I work with my clients, that's the impact. So, it was amazing to be a part of that.
Clare:
And you said you'd had lots of follow-up conversations with women. What's been happening since?
Diane:
There's been some let's keep this going kind of conversations. But I think most of the conversations are about that hunger I just talked about where they want to grow their competencies. They want to understand how other people have gone through their careers. They want new skills, and they want to develop themselves. They want to be able to have. Not just about the skills, but it's also about how do I work within the organization. How do I help my company become a community of people who are passionate about this, too? So, it's been interesting, and, of course, there's been some. I'd love to go to X, Y, and Z. Where should I go? Who can you introduce me to?
Diane:
So that's always part of it in your community, Clare, if I don't know everything, Lord knows I don't know much because there's so much out there to learn. But if I don't know, I love to refer people to others and make those connections. That's who we are as professionals. And so I've been doing a lot of that with the folks who are in attendance, getting them connected, those right people and have the right skills.
Clare:
That's what it's all about, isn't it, in community, making those introductions and helping people to grow their networks. I agree. So, we announced that we were becoming Women in CX with the strapline, ‘the movement for human-centred business’. What did you think of that change and our new value of audacity to add to our collection of courageous, authentic, inclusive, and collaborative?
Diane:
Yes. The first part of being human-centred, and those of you, all of you who know me at all, know I started in clinical psychology. And so human behaviour and understanding humans has always been in my blood. But what I think for businesses, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, they have to begin to realize that we're bringing our full selves to the brand, our values, our expectations, our needs, what we define as success, what we define as value. We're bringing that to brands and our expectations have grown from just “Fill my need” to “Help me grow and develop”, “Help make my life easier.” All of those things that brands have been looking toward but haven't been paying attention to, the emotional side.
Diane:
It's often very dysfunctional and physical. The ability for us to really think about the human in their life and what they're trying to accomplish and how we not only help them with why they're visiting us as a brand, but what we can do to help them in other ways. I think is one thing that the organizations are shifting, but it's going to take audacity and tenacity to make that happen. And it's going to be driven by women like the ones who belong in the Women in CX community because we have to help the brands understand what that human element in business means because it's been pretty devoid for quite some time. We've had human-centred design for a long time, but that's only a part of it. How can we really grow that? So that's, I think, where the human-centred approach is really going to have an impact. We can make that happen.
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Clare:
And what do you think of the state of customer experience today or the current state of CX?
Diane:
I think it has evolved. I think we still have a few camps of there's people who are doing a lot of get the surveys, get the data, talk about the scores. I think we're seeing a shift, though, in more people moving toward how do we do design better, how do we really create value for our customers, measurable value for customers and employees. So, I think there's a big shift happening now where the maturity, not necessarily overall, but in certain elements of how we bring the human to business, how we're implementing design in many more ways, how we're thinking about that value creation and building that into what we do every day is a part of the maturity of where we're headed. I also think that we are all cautious right now about AI and machine learning. And some of the new technology and things that I heard at the conference, for example, were we can't lose sight of the human. We don't want to go everything digital. We need to keep them in mind even as we're designing and using AI.
Diane:
How does it feel? What have we done for them? What are they trying to achieve? And is it going to help them or is it going to be a barrier? So, we have to figure out how we're going to leverage that technology and balance those human needs. And I think that's what everybody's struggling with is there's a lot of things we can do, but what are the right things to do?
Clare:
And what's the state of CX like in the USA? So, for example, in the UK, our UK CSI, which is the Institute of Customer Satisfaction, has shown that we've returned to pre-pandemic levels of customer service. The customer opinion on digital has been that digital experiences have been done badly and now they've changed, basically switched off any ability to contact companies other than through digital, but the experiences that they've got to contend with are not fit for purpose. How is that compared to the USA?
Diane:
I think part of that is, well, a couple of things that come to mind when we think about the digital transformation we went through. A lot of people had digital teams, and they'd never had digital teams before. And digital transformation was more about digital for digital sake. And now there are a lot of organizations who are recognizing that they didn't design and think about the experience in that human as they went digital, and they certainly didn't think about other channels and how they integrated and supported. That's. I think that's happening more here in the States, really trying to get these collaborative teams. As a matter of fact, I think one of the newest trends we're seeing is these journey teams where they're kind of a permanent part of how the organization works. I think from the state of the satisfaction scores and some of those pieces, I wonder if it's not, “Hey, we're not doing a great job.”
Diane:
“We're not doing as good a job as we did before”. And more about the expectations have risen. And because people are facing these AIs that don't work, chatbots that are funky, and then you got to try to find another channel, so you waste time there. I think that's what's really creating a lot of the angst. So, it's a combination of that higher expectations and the things that we're trying to do. Not working in digital, because we're not thinking about the human and we're not thinking about what could go wrong. We're designing things for the happy path, as I always say, and not really thinking about, well, what if AI doesn't answer the question for them and they have no way to explain the true problem they're trying to solve? Now they've gotten more frustrated because AI is not able to take them down the path they need to. I think it's back to that whole concept of, we got to step into the human shoes.
Diane:
We're back to the basics, right? We've got to look at it from their point of view and think about what they're trying to accomplish and where they might run into opportunity.
Clare:
I guess the reality is a bit different to that, isn't it? Those that are investing in customer experience are investing in customer experience design and journey management, like actual roles that specify focus on that. But for a lot of organizations, especially ones that have recently made cuts to resources, CX seems to still centre around customer insights and outcomes metric measurements. So, the thing that tends to be preserved is measuring the outcome, and therefore the effort seems to be more focused on how do we change these scores in a lot of cases than it is on how do we understand the problems to solve and how do we work with the business to fix them. So, I know you talked about hybrid cross-functional teams working together through digital transformation. That's the right thing to do, isn't it? And for CX people or human-centred people to be embedded into that. But the reality is most of the resource is actually focusing on reporting back what the problems are and the actions not being taken. And I know that's a frustration for a lot of the members of our community, is that customer experience has become synonymous with a score like NPS.
Diane:
Which is super frustrating to me because I get a lot of people who say they just cut my team or they did whatever and there’s a part of me that says, yes, that happens. That happens in a lot of organizations. Like how many salespeople got let go at the same time you did, right? There are cuts across the board, especially at this time of year, third quarter, fourth quarter, it's very common. But what you said about the, “Hey, we're going to do the market research and insights and have lagging indicators as a way to run our business and try to recoup and be reactive” has never worked. Has never worked. If we don't get human-centred design and do it right the first time and avoid having all the problems that cause those scores to go down if you're going to do that is where we need to focus. It frustrates me when people say they cut my team, and my response always is, well, I'm sure they didn't cut all the sales team because they're creating value and they talk about the value they're creating.
Diane:
Same with operations or marketing. If you're not telling the business case story, yes, you're at risk. What you do, how you do it, how you move the organization forward, how you embed this in what people do every day. And you should be telling that business case story. And I think it's part of, if you can't tell that and they don't see the value, no wonder you're going to be the first one on the docket when it comes to cutting. So, we've got to get out of that score-watching and really start thinking about how we're going to design things right in the first place. I always see that same thing. I had a client call and say, hey, we're going to try to put new technology in our call centre.
Diane:
And all these improvements they were trying to make because they were having a higher volume and so they needed to upgrade their systems. I'm like, well, wait a second, you're getting a higher volume of calls. Why are those calls coming in in the first place? And so we went back to really look at the data, and what it was telling us is that they had a lot of broken experiences along the way, which was driving the calls. They weren't higher value calls, relationship calls, because all the basics had taken care of. There were just a lot more things broken because the teams were working incongruently. They were all making changes, but they weren't telling each other and not working together. And so once we started to really look at how they could proactively not go back and fix the things that are broken, but when you proactively design and you have tested it out and you've prototyped it and run it through, seen the results, you've thought through all the bad rainy day scenarios, that's where you're going to get some value. I think we have to look at our profession differently. There are teams in an organization that are cost centres. We don't have to be one of them.
Clare:
So, I agree with a lot of what you said. I guess my concern though is still around that financial value is being attributed to shifting NPS scores in a lot of cases because the message was sold, a percentage of NPS increase equals cash. And that has been proven not to be true. But the business cases we need to be talking about is about creating value and the impact that that has on the outcomes of financial metrics as well as customer metrics. But we have to be doing the work and taking the action to prove that rather than the thing that frustrates me most is this whole army of professionals who are trying to validate their existence or prove the value of customer experience as a thing in totality. Where I think that's where you end up with this. Net promoter equals cash return or ROI from CX rather than return on investment of being customer-focused in the design, development and delivery of products and services and experiences, which is so much easier to prove. But there's a whole army of people that have been trained, no, we need to sell customer experience to our organizations and try to force fit something as a framework that in a lot of cases these days, because of digital and technology and how differently businesses are organized, whether it's B2B, B2C, whether it's non-profit.
Clare:
But this is why you see it, isn't it? Like hospitals, would you recommend this cardiac ward to your friends or family? Well, of course not. A&E, would you recommend this A&E to your friends or family? No, I really wouldn't want them to be there in the first place, but this is everywhere, and it's become what people focus on. And I think in a lot of organizations you can ask frontline team members, well, what is customer experience? And they'll say it's a mystery shopper, or it's a net promoter score, or it's a customer survey, and that will be their response. And what's your role in customer experience? Oh, it's trying to get the customer to give us a good score or…
Diane:
If you think about that, the things that you're saying when you think giving us a score and wrapping ourselves around that, the true question is what behaviour are we looking for from the customer? It's not to give us a good score. The behaviour we're looking for is that they come back to our website, they browse longer, they refer people, they buy more product, they stay longer. As a customer of ours, those have financial impacts. You can tie financial impacts to those behaviours. Giving a score and saying the reason they gave us the score is X, Y or Z happened is again, reactive. And so if we don't get more proactive and we don't identify the measures, things we can count of what behaviour we're driving differently, that ties to financial outcomes. We aren't going to have jobs. It's really part of how we have to build that acumen because everybody else in the organization who's coming to the CEO asking for money and investments is talking about, if you give me this money, I'm going to do these things and here's the outcome.
Clare:
Yeah, I don't disagree with that at all. I was just thinking that this is the mirror that operational leadership is bonused on metrics and therefore what ends up getting measured gets done by the frontline teams. And that that is part of the problem. Service leadership is no longer there because CX has been metrified to the extent that unless they naturally give great customer service, which a lot of people do do, would struggle to because the boss is saying we need to get good scores or good scorecards and the outcome being the thing that they're trying to drive, rather than focusing on the inputs like just delivering great service and looking for opportunities to improve environment or service or whatever product, their outcomes will take care of themselves. Right. But it's this focus on, no, we can just improve the score. Let's improve the score. I think that's what…
Diane:
And it's hard to move. It's hard to move because you can catch somebody on a bad day and get a bad score and the next day, they'll give you a ten. Right. It's super hard. But I agree with you. We're not building that business case and really thinking about when we work alongside the teams and we're trying to change experiences, we have to be thinking about is it improving employee productivity, is it reducing our tech debt? Right. Are we consolidating systems in the back end to make this experience happen? Are we creating better workflows that are going to reduce the time that we spend on it? Are we presenting information? So people aren't spending on average, get this, 1.3 hours a day just looking for information.
Diane:
So if we're able to serve that up, it gives them that time back, which is also a benefit. So we have to start telling that story. We have to be thinking about the projects that we do and how we help the organization. And all of those financial levers we're pulling. The scores are just an outcome later on that's going to happen. But they take a long time to impact what we're doing and how we're changing that customer behaviour and what it means for the organization from a financial perspective. That's the question I want everybody to ask themselves. If they look at an experience, what's the financial impact of the experience to the organization?
Message from WiCX Founder & CEO, Clare:
Sorry to interrupt your listening, but I just wanted to take a break to tell you a little bit more about WiCX. We’re the world’s first online membership community for women in Customer Experience, our mission is clear, and that’s to unleash the power of women to lead the future of human-centred business.
Working in CX can feel lonely at times. We’re often singlehandedly trying to change the way that organisations think and behave about customers.
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To learn more about membership, see how women are progressing personally and professionally with the support of the #1 community in CX, and apply to join us today, visit www.womenincx.community/membership.
I really hope I get to see you there soon!
Clare:
So, I just wanted to ask you maybe a bit more of an audacious question, which is, if we look at existing CX frameworks or competency frameworks or maturity models, CX design and innovation is a relatively small proportion of all of those. Do you think that that means that with the speed at which technology is driving business change, that actually that makeup of competencies needs to also shift and the focus on what's most important, because I think data metrics and ROI of customer experience, not ROI of design and innovation, is like the biggest proportion at this.
Diane:
Yes, I agree. I agree.
Clare:
The ex-CEO of CXPA, cheeky questions to ask you.
Diane:
Yeah, I think that you're going to see a shift in, like I think about, there's a systems integrator that helps people move to the cloud and they do all that implementation work, and we know a lot of companies like that, but the problem is they come in and they turn on the technology and say, good to go. Right, we just moved you to the cloud. Some organizations, the smart ones, are taking that human-centred approach. They're getting a group of employees together, a group of customers together that are going to run alongside the project, the technology implementation Project, and bring that human element to the project itself. So, what that means is the employees are saying, well, here's what I do today. What's that going to look like when we move to the cloud or we're going to move to teams? Well, I got all my other stuff here. How am I going to migrate all my stuff? And I don't think I'll be able to do that. Or will I? So they become part of co-creating what the experience is going to be like when that shift to technology happens and that input and that ability to really think about the human and what they're doing for this organization has driven better adoption.
Diane:
The employees that are a part of it now are championing the difference and they're getting their other compadres in the organization to come along. So, I think we're seeing benefit in don't just run a long technology and go plug it in. Let's take time to really design the experience we want to have. Design the project, understand all of the arms and legs it has, the tentacles that it has into other things in the organization before we do the shift. I think that's a huge part of AI right now. People are doing AI for AI's sake and it's horrible. If you've had an experience, sometimes it is just horrible. Back to you and tries to answer your question.
Diane:
They ask you the same question three times. It's like, no.
Clare:
I suppose that's one really great example where they're employing CX design and co-creation in the implementation of a product. If they are genuinely actually changing things like knowledge bases and chatbot training, if they're going to be implementing chatbots, and by understanding the problems that customers are trying to get solved. But then there's this kind of poor relative, I think, of that, which is more doing it by business analysis and requirements for customers and employees that get gathered by a business analyst and inputted into a project and checked off, rather than how we do it today. And how do we turn that digital is a massive issue in creating digital experiences that are really bad because just because a process exists, just digitizing that process isn't necessarily going to be the right thing to do when you could just take a step back and go, okay, what are the problems that we're trying to solve for the people outside and inside our organization? How would we do that digitally? I think because the skill sets involved in IT and technology are very traditional and like say business analyst-led, that if we could, I think, fuse a bit of that, like business analysis and customer experience design together as part of these digital initiatives, or even have people who are customer experienced, but they have design skills and understand existing ways that businesses work through IT development, that's where we need to be. Not sitting over here in an ivory tower just pushing out survey feedback reports every month and saying the same problems exist, or things have got worse over here. That's a massive shift in the role and capability, I think, of people who have CX in their job title. You look at job descriptions now, right? It's increasingly product and design that is the requirement because companies are digitized now in the mean and there's this huge gap. So, I'm super excited about… I know we announced this at the conference, but introducing the Women in CX Certified Customer Experience Design course in 2024 to help close that gap based on the reality of businesses today and where it's heading in the future to help to close that gap.
Clare:
But where do you think we're heading in the future? What do you think is going to come for customer experience as an industry or for Women in CX or whatever?
Diane:
I think exactly what we just talked about. When we think about the skill sets that teams have and what they're doing today, you're right. They were so focused on measures and metrics, the ability for us to truly design experiences that are going to provide value, that are going to meet needs, that are going to optimize what the brand wants to do and tell the story around the impact that those have in the business case are two things were people are least competent or confident. We have to do things like design thinking. And remember, we have our webinar coming up where we're going to talk about the ROI and how to approach that in a formula way. So, when you ask the question about what I think is coming, it is that we have all the competencies and for many practitioners, they are focused on getting the basics because I think they feel like I got to get the basics right, but they get stuck people.
Clare:
Oh, sorry, my microphone just switched off for a second. I said focusing on getting the basics, but also, I think for a lot of practitioners, it's focusing on getting certificates, isn't it? For status of being a professional in the industry, rather than, I think, the most successful CXers I know don't have certificates, but they've got this innovative way of approaching problems within organizations and they're actually incredible influencers, as in organizational influence is a key competency which they hold. They're amazing project managers where they're able to engage with the kinds of documentation that help them to prove the results of their activities. They're really great resource coordinators within organizations, so they can reach into finance for help or get really close to understanding what other teams do and how they operate. They're highly credible. A lot of them have operational experience. They've actually worked at the frontline or in management in business. So, they've seen the other end of it.
Diane:
Well, it's kind of what you said is they're working in the business, they're not working on the business. So, I think a lot of CX professionals work on the business and try to give that kind of reactive piece to it versus in the business. And I want to remind, I tell a lot of people that I mentor, I tell them this, this profession gives you a unique perspective and ability to learn. If you think about executives when they get ready to shoot them up the ladder to the higher level, they move them around in the organization, and the reason that they do that is that you have to have an understanding and be able to talk the language and put the pieces together for all the different parts of your organization. Our profession allows us to learn that. And if we don't take advantage of that learning and recognize what it's doing for us as professional women, in getting us to talk about master data management and AI and technology and infrastructure and product, think about that. We're holistic players and that is a skill set and incompetencies that you can't replace.
Diane:
It's hard to replace. Not a lot of professionals in any one of the business units has the capability to think more broadly, understand more broadly, and glue those pieces together. And I think we miss that. But we have to have the business acumen and the respective people using that knowledge to be able to build a different way of working operationally in the organization. We can't be everywhere at once. We can't be a part of every project. We have to help them own it and embed it in just everyday work that they're doing, like product development. That's why so many CX professionals are being called in because the product teams are recognizing they need that design, they need that thinking, the strategy, human thinking.
Clare:
Yeah, I agree. I was just thinking, I remember I did a keynote during the pandemic where we were getting asked about the future of the CX profession and I described it as being either I-shaped or T-shaped as a leader. And I think a lot of us end up very I-shaped. So, with this huge depth of experience and expertise in CX, but CX, and that's it. Whereas the T-shaped leader has that depth, but they also have the breadth and the understanding and the generalist leadership skills. And I think it's skills that would not sit under just CX, right?
Clare:
As we've discussed, commercial acumen and awareness is definitely a big thing, but understanding how products are designed and developed, how commercial systems work, how sales works as a function of an organization, because I think to succeed in today and in the next generation of organizations, that's who you've got to be able to make those recommendations about what the right things to do is. And that's a movement from saying, here's what customer experience should be, now everyone get on board and do it. When you might be one or two people within an organization trying to try and change organizational culture or trying to make businesses customer-centric for anything to work. And it's this five-to-ten-year plan of how things are going to change to be like, how do we create value in the here and now? And a compound effect of change over time that has the biggest material impact on the business outcomes rather than here's a five-year thing and we've got to do all of these things to get to value. And that's a huge mindset shift, isn't it?
Diane:
It is. It has to be in the right now. Right now. You can't wait. And I think people have to be very purposeful about those skills and seeking out individuals in their organization or externally through WiCX, where you can learn and begin to grab a hold of that. To say, if I need to make change today and I want to prove what customer-centred is, I need to do X, Y and Z. Because when I ask people and they tell me I want the organization to be more customer-centric, I'm like, what does that look like to you?
Clare:
What does that even mean?
Diane:
I don't know. What are you asking them to do differently? Because people are saying, yes, I want to be more customer-centric. I think I am, but how will I know what should I be doing differently? Give me a checklist. People want to do that. Nobody's combined saying, I don't care about experiences. There are some people who would do that, but most people are well-intentioned, and they want to do it, but we're not telling them what they need to be doing differently. And so they get frustrated with wanting the organization to be customer-centric. Well, what do you want them to do differently? What behaviours are you looking for? Wanting the product team to put design before they build the product.
Diane:
Then you got to go to them and teach them how to do it. They're hungry for it. We've created all this hunger for experience. Everybody's talking about it, but we're not providing the way to go do it. And we're not doing it from the perspective of what that team or person or role needs in order to move forward.
Clare:
Yeah, it's just become a buzzword. Yeah, no, I agree. I think what needs to change about the way CX practitioners practice is the biggest change that we need to see in the world. How do we, as in anyone who works in customer experience, adapt to the business challenges, that are either or now on the horizon, rather than trying to get the business to adapt to the customer experience that we think we should be offering? And that's like a big shift. But for me, customer-centricity is just a buzzword now. I roll my eyes when people say that. I think it's become problematic.
Clare:
But if you boil it down, what does it mean designing products that answer human problems? To create experiences that are configured so the people on the inside and the outside of the organization have the least possible friction in being able to deliver them. To be truly customer-centric is literally another really great example is processes. How do you make processes more people-oriented for the customer policies, for example, to work better for the humans in the business? They're like more manageable, achievable things. Whereas the true meaning of customer-centric organizations is literally absolutely everything they do is built around the customer. And to take a regular organization, particularly with legacy, and turn it into that is impossible. But you've got a really good chance of making processes and policies more human-centred and impacting product design with design thinking and of course experience design as well. Do you know what? I feel like I've just been on my little high horse for a bit too long here.
Diane:
No, I think this is a great conversation because this is essentially part of our problem as a profession. And you kind of asked the question of why teams get let go. It's because they're riding, skimming the surface and they're not getting into the guts of the organization and making it part of the way the organization works and working alongside to build the approach of being experience-led. So, products that lead with experience, look at Apple, they've done that forever. Every organization you look at is always starting with the experience and then they're building product and then they're building. It's not building the product and then seeing what happens and then going back and fixing things. It's designing it right in the first place and telling the story about the impact that it has.
Clare:
I just keep doing these reality checks, though. Not many organizations are an Amazon or an apple. They didn't have a Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs in the leadership to be able to architect and to be that customer-centric. I just think they're exceedingly rare, aren't they? And that's why they're touted as such amazing examples. But to take an organization that doesn't have the leadership, the budget, the timescales, all of everything involved in trying to make that change happen, the timescales, the leadership, the costs, when the goalposts are probably going to change within that five-year period of trying to transform to be customer-centric because the rate of change with technology is so fast now that I just don't think that approach works or it should be the ambition.
Diane:
It takes too long and you're never going to get everything perfect… Somebody said that to me the other day, it's like, yeah, we have this roadmap of things, but you don't have anything on that roadmap that talks about working with the organization. You're working again on the business, not in the business. You have got to be sitting beside those product teams and helping them understand if you put this product out the door right now, there's going to be all these issues and the cost. Yeah, you're going to get adoption, but it won't be as high as if we design it right in the first place. To get adoption to drive revenue and to reduce the cost of issues that come across because we didn't design it right.
Clare:
Totally agree.
Diane:
“That's what customer experience is?” Yeah, it’s designing for the human. Let's design it right in the first place before we kick it out the door. Once they have that and you can talk in that language with them, they go, oh, yeah, our adoption last time was horrible, and…
Clare:
And it cost us a fortune to try to fix it.
Diane:
The product fails and you've just invested. I go back to this ROI. You invested all this time and effort of the whole product team to put this product out the door. It didn't meet the expectations or needs. We had additional costs because things were broken. And now we've just said we're going to completely abandon the product and move to something else. If we don't do it different this time, you're going to get the same results. So, when we say audacity, this is the type of conversation you need to have.
Diane:
You need to practice this type of conversation and be confident in what you tell people. And I think having a script, having a story, having narrative, you have to have it. You have to have it.
Clare:
Hopefully. Sorry, no, go for it.
Diane:
Having the boldness and audacity to be able to say those things and stand in front of people and say, this is how it needs to get done if we're going to be successful in what we're trying to do.
Clare:
Hopefully this conversation has given them loads of examples and direct practical use cases for how to do CX differently. So, I'm sure all listeners have got a lot out of listening to this episode in this conversation. So, I just looked at the time and realized we're almost out. There's going to be quick-fire answers. So, talked about where we are today, where we want to get to, and what do you think is going to happen in 2024. If you get your crystal ball out and look at your prediction for the next year, what does that look like? I don't know. You actually have a crystal ball.
Diane:
I was laughing. I'll show the audience. Right? I actually have a crystal ball on my desk. It hasn't worked yet…
Clare:
For anyone just listening and not watching, Diane just literally showed her crystal ball from her desk, a paperweight.
Diane:
But for 2024, I believe that it will be a year of reset for us. We have the unique opportunity as AI shifts, as product, as technology gets implemented, all the things we talked about. We have an opportunity to influence organizations differently, but we have to be different. We have to be asking those tough questions like, what's the financial impact of this experience and how can we improve it? We have to be asking, what is the human trying to accomplish? Jobs to be done, emotional, social. We have to start thinking about the work we do differently. We're not working on the business, working in the business. So, all of these T-shirts, so, I always say I have a lot of T-shirt phrases. That's part of what we need, is our mantra for this year.
Diane:
We need to be brave. We need to stand up and say, this is the way it needs to be, and here's why. We have to tell our story and have that narrative super clear, super crisp and ready for any audience that's going to ask us questions or question whether we belong in the organization or not.
Clare:
That’s great advice for our listeners. So, I'd just like to say thank you so much, Diane, for appearing on the Inspiring Women in CX podcast.
Diane:
Thank you. It's always a pleasure to be with you, Clare.
Clare:
I'm just so excited to work with you in 2024 towards creating some in-person events in America.
Diane:
Yes, I am, too. And I think this could be one of those things we talk about, creating a new CX narrative, a new experience narrative.
Clare:
So excited. And thank you to everybody who's listened or watched along at home as well. Stay tuned because we'll be back with more audacious episodes of series seven real soon. Thank you so much, everybody. See you next time. Bye.
Diane:
Thank you. Bye.
Clare:
Thanks for listening to the Inspiring Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt.
If you enjoyed the episode and you don’t already, please, please, please do drop us a like and subscribe to our channel – the bigger the following, the bigger the impact we can create on our mission to amplify the voices of women working in CX and technology!
Well, that’s it for now! Join us again next time when I’ll be talking to a very familiar face, it’s none other than Global CX Specialist Ian Golding, about whether, in 2023, women’s communities are really necessary. See you all soon!
