Your Employee Experience IS Your Customer Experience

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast. I'm here today with Brad Cleveland, an author, speaker, and consultant who focuses on customer strategy and management. He's also the author of Leading the Customer Experience, how to Chart a Course and Deliver Outstanding Results, as well as contact center Management on Fast Forward, succeeding in the new era of customer experience.

Sean Weisbrot: We talked about customer experience and employee experience and all of the things in between for how to make your organization great. He shared some anecdotes. I shared some anecdotes. It was a brief, but knowledge pact and Experience Pact episode that I know you're going to love. So I'll make this one short today.

Sean Weisbrot: Why are you interested in customer experience?

Brad: I kind of got into it just. By osmosis over the years, I worked in various tech and customer service roles back in the early days of my career, and I went on to become a founding partner in the International Customer Management Institute and served as CEO there for many years.

Brad: And we were primarily focused on customer service. Any customer experience, professional will tell you, customer service is just a part of customer experience, which is everything. Products and processes and promises we make. But customer service really opened the doors for me to work with some incredible organizations over the years, and that inherently morphed into more of customer experience.

Brad: You know, what are we learning that can improve products and services and processes? I love the idea that we can align an entire organization around what we're doing to do a great job for customers, and that is everything. It's been a fun journey. I, I love to serve and, and that's really what's been at the heart of my career, is wanting to, wanting to help.

Brad: And I love it when I see organizations. Do that.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I think customer experience is something really important that sadly a lot of companies do a horrible job at. I'll give you an example. I hate to do this just because I'm a paying customer of this product and I really love the product, but the customer service sucks.

Sean Weisbrot: Is Figma. Which is a design tool. And while Figma, the tool is amazing, when I tried to reach a human about trying to solve a problem I was having, I was directed to email them, but it took like a week to get an email back, and during that time I was directed to their user community where. Hopefully one of the other users was going to tell me how to solve my problem, but to which no one replied.

Sean Weisbrot: And then finally after a week, I got a human. And even now I'm not even sure that they'll be able to help me to solve the problem. I already solved it, although I didn't solve it in the way that I wanted it to be solved. so I was like. Ready to quit on them. But it's such a good product that I like had to stay.

Sean Weisbrot: So maybe they can afford to not care about customer service 'cause they know how good they are. I don't know what their thought process is, but I think humans just need to be more in the loop on customer service.

Brad: That's a great example. Sometimes you can get away with it for a while. What's the chance of you staying around as soon as anything similar or, or.

Brad: Certainly better comes along. That's not what we want. Customer experience really is the long-term game. We've all run into the same sort of stories. Drive you crazy.

Sean Weisbrot: So I was actually introduced to them through an outs, outsource design firm that I hired for the company. And then when I wanted to take ownership of the design and move it into our own company, I had to pay.

Sean Weisbrot: To be an editor on these projects. And so they've earned my loyalty because I'm paying them, but I'm not happy about the customer service. That's it.

Brad: Well, they're missing a huge opportunity. And, and I'll tell you, Sean, over, over time, and I've, I've been bouncing around in this space, I'll, I'll date myself a little bit here for 30 years now, and customers have a long memory, even if it's not their memory, you know, it's, it's easy to hear what others have gone through.

Brad: With the, you know, environment we have today where it's so easy to share information, it's very easy and readily available to find out what kind of experiences others have had over time and, and what the company's values really, really represent. So play the long game. That's, that's always my advice and that will, um, certainly.

Brad: Come back to an organization, it feels like sometimes a leap of faith to do what's right today. for some execs, I wish it weren't the case, but do what's right long term for your customers and you'll, you'll see the results.

Sean Weisbrot: Slack was promoting this like Twitter Wall of praise that they had, but what they didn't promote was that there was a website where there were over 50,000 comments about why people hated Slack.

Brad: I hope every company earnestly tries to do well by their customers. But yeah, and, you know, and some have the right intentions. It just begins to break down at the operational level. I'll tell you a quick story and, and, and there's no bad guy in a lot of these cases, but we have to bring these different functional areas together, and we have to make sure customer experience plays out every day, every decision across the board.

Brad: I worked with a technical support center a while back. You know, they're handling tech support. The kind you tried to get, had to work so hard to figure it out yourself, but they do a great job with it. Their director was a little concerned. She's like, alright, just from an economic standpoint, I've got a lot of my team who have, you know, 10 and 11 and 12 minute.

Brad: Average handling times. That's how much time they're spending with customers. Their customers are happy. We're getting things done. She said, I've got one guy that's got, I think it was 22 minute average handling time, so twice as long. His customers are thrilled. I mean, he had emails from customers, printed out and, and tacked his walls.

Brad: you know, great job. Thanks so much. She's like, what do I do? And she felt like she faced a conundrum and she took a step, I felt was very wise. She had several of her team members, including the person with a long handling time. That's just a, that's just a. Clock. That's not a driver here, it's just an outcome.

Brad: So she had several of her team members in a conference room. She gave them a stack of index cards, very low tech approach, and, and some markers said, write each step in the process of just the basic steps of handling a tech support interaction. You know, some main issue they get frequently and she let them work on that for a couple of hours.

Brad: Came back in and she asked you what, what'd you guys learn? And someone jumped in, someone with a lower handling time, said, yeah, I learned I'm not doing some of the steps. I could, taking some of the steps I could to ensure these aren't repeat contacts and I want to, you know, just talking to my peers here, there's some things I wanna do there.

Brad: Make sure these things really are once and done. The person with a long handling time said, look, I, I admit I'm going above and beyond. I'm telling them about features that come up in our conversation. They love it. Our software is so cool. We've got these great capabilities that a lot of our customers don't know about.

Brad: I, and when they find out about it, they are so loyal. And maybe he was right. Maybe that's what everybody should have been doing now. They were getting somewhere, they were having that discussion about what they're really about. And what they ended up doing is, you know, he was, first to admit, I'm probably getting into kind of one-off person by person training, and that's not probably effective from a tech support operations standpoint.

Brad: The whole team agreed. Well, you're providing information they need to know. Well, they ended up creating some cross-functional projects and initiatives where some of their reps were involved part-time in these, but like he was creating YouTube videos on product features and, and working with. Some of the communication areas on, hey, here are capabilities, here's how to learn more about them.

Brad: He was working with part of the organization that created customer training. Really cool. Went back in months later and you know, you could tell there was a real spark in the place and, and everybody's handling time had migrated back down to just that tech support amount of time required. But they had all these cross-functional initiatives and I talked to him.

Brad: He is like, now we're helping everybody, not just those that. Happened to reach my desk. You know, we're helping everybody. That's an example of an organization that had their intentions, right? It just could have started breaking down at the operational level. They had some wise leadership and didn't let that happen.

Brad: But in a lot of organizations, that guy would've been the villain. You know, like, look, pal, put a lid on it. You're costing us a fortune trying to serve these customers. And he would've felt not great about the company. It just would've been a disconnect. So in many cases, there's no bad guy. There's. An opportunity to, at the operational level, make sure we really are living out our values.

Sean Weisbrot: I love that story and I love how they worked through and tried to learn from the guy who was taking the most amount of time and the idea for making these kinds of. videos to teach people about the product more is also really good. It's something that I started talking about with my marketing director, where I'm going to make a series of videos where, for example, people sign up for our waiting list when they finish, like entering their email and hitting sign me up.

Sean Weisbrot: They're gonna see a thank you page with a video of me thanking them and telling them a little bit about the company and some of the features and what we're building and, and why they're gonna be really excited about it once they get to see it and use it.

Brad: I love that, that and, and my encouragement is to continue to build that out. That's terrific. A lot of CEOs, you know, to that point, they'll say, I'm not great in front of a mic or camera for that sort of thing. I mean, most have had that time just to get to where they are. You're more of a natural and, and you're inviting your customers into your world. There's gonna be a terrific connection there.

Brad: But my encouragement to any CEO is, look, it's not Hollywood. You're, you're trying to make a connection and invite them in and create that rapport and trust. You don't have to be some dynamo on camera, and you don't have to do every video either. You know, just a, a, a welcome and a, Hey, we are here for you.

Brad: It's a privilege to serve you, and here's where the organization's going, and then bring the rest of your team in. Others who enjoy that sort of thing.

Sean Weisbrot: What made you feel like you needed to write a book about customer experience?

Brad: That's a really good question because there are 1,000,001 of them out there already, and it wasn't that I wanted to come in and say, all right, we need something different.

Brad: But here's what I saw happening, Sean. The customer experience has become kind of a victim of its own success. So as it's grown up, it's become professionalized and lots of unique terms and wonky frameworks that are great. I saw the same thing with equality movement as it grew up, but it can get to a point where it repels rather than attracts people.

Brad: And we need our entire organization involved. So I saw disconnects across a lot of organizations. Even as they had customer experience initiatives going, and I wanted this book to be clear and hopefully very structured fresh, though lots of stories and examples, something you can hand to anybody and if they wanna spend a little time going through it, they will understand customer experience, they'll understand the breadth of customer experience, they'll understand their role in it.

Brad: And the opportunity we have, I hope it adds value in that way to a lot of great work that's been done in customer experience. But this is for anybody. This is, you can lead a team, you can lead the company any point in between. My hope is that customer experience becomes more accessible through this work.

Sean Weisbrot: How has the pandemic changed customer experience?

Brad: I was talking with the senior VP of a large insurance company in February of 2020, and he is like, yeah, we're gonna move 30% of our workforce to work from home in the next two years. It's aggressive, but we plan to get there. And I talked to him in April.

Brad: He's like, okay, make that a hundred percent in two weeks. I think that's opened up the ability for us to find the best talent anywhere in the world. I'm seeing right now the seeds of better listening tools for customers, that there's been a ton of innovation and I expect to see good things come from that.

Sean Weisbrot: One of the big problems that companies have is silos between departments. We have tried to build the company from the ground up in which all departments have data pipelines that flow between each other and, and can seamlessly interact. And the people that need to can communicate with each other at the times they need to, about the things they need to in order to make decisions that can then flow down to the rest of the team in each of their departments.

Sean Weisbrot: Oftentimes customer experience gets excluded from that, I think. So if someone's building a company now, how can they make sure that their customer experience can be integrated with, let's say the marketing and sales team or the product team or the development team? How, how can they build this kind of a structure to support this?

Brad: You have to have an owner of customer experience. Everyone's gotta be, feel, ownership and customer experience though. But you've gotta have an owner who can, who can help facilitate these connections across the organization and ensure that those communication channels are not only in place, but they're an inherent part of our culture.

Brad: And I'll tell you a real quick example of how I kind of saw this unfold in one organization, I got called into work with a customer service area and a large consumer products company. They had some severe challenges. I mean, it's a big company. This customer service area was second from the bottom in terms of employee satisfaction.

Brad: So their employees hated working there. You know, they just wanted to get their foot in the door so they move on and get a real job. It was awful. Their director's like, I can do about anything. It's only gonna get better. I had to chuckle. I was like, yeah, it's, it's one very optimistic way to look at this.

Brad: I said, I bet your team has the answer. You know, they've been doing this. I bet, I bet they have some answers on how you can create a better environment. And I remember one of these first meetings that, you know, he's asking, Hey, what, what can we do? What, what would make this more valuable for our customers and, and, and better for you guys?

Brad: And I remember one, one person in the back of the room, he is, got his arms folded and he's like, well, I don't know how we can be more valuable. We're handling gripes all day. That's what we do. And they decided to put that to the test. You know, what, what can we do to be more valuable? They did some analysis on what was driving their work, and they found just for an.

Brad: Example, early on, they found that 11% of the customer contacts they were getting on one of their spray cleaning products was because the cap was hard to remove. So you'd buy it, you'd take it home and try to force the cap off, and all too often it'd sheer off the spray nozzle. So throw it away. Don't use that brand Again, thank goodness for those customers.

Brad: You know, few. Percentage wise, who took the time to, to reach out and contact them. Like, Hey, I just blew five bucks. I can't even use this. So they took that data to their packaging supplier, they redesigned the caps and those contacts went away. They're like, wow, that that was a spark. Like, wow, that's cool.

Brad: What else can we do? Um, they went on to work with communications areas, marketing, how to shape messages that make more accurate promises. They were the inspiration behind a new product line, which is doing really well. They've worked with it on how to improve systems, not for internal use and for customer use.

Brad: The self-service sort of systems they're involved across the organization, but they had to see how they could be valuable across the organization, and they had to have someone who championed those. Interactions. So now it's built into their culture. They have a small customer experience team, and one of their roles is they put this to stay outta the way, facilitate, and then get outta the way, you know, get these cross-functional efforts going.

Brad: Make it very clear we need this communication, we need this collaboration, and then get outta the way, but by all means, be there to facilitate that cross-functional work that has to happen to really be coordinated and focused on customers. So it's fun when you do that, when you, when you get an organization working together, working across silos, and you just pinpointed one of the biggest barriers to customer experience silos.

Brad: When you really get at that, you're making a huge difference and you're, you're creating a culture and a framework, then a foundation that's gonna serve you well into the future.

Sean Weisbrot: That's a really interesting story. It's often that. People don't listen to their employees. They feel like, oh, you're the one I'm paying to do the work. Just do the work. But I have made it a point to give everyone in the company a voice. Now, obviously we're not at the point where we're talking to customers yet beyond me doing, initial. Discovery and all that, but I was the one doing all of the ui, ux and designs and the feature specifications and all that, and then I didn't have anyone to bounce the information off of.

Sean Weisbrot: And now that we've hired a product manager and we've given her a lot of the responsibility from my end, now we're creating processes where I would write down the specs, I would design it, I would put it into the sprint, and the development team would just do it. But now I'm fleshing out an idea, it's now getting sent to her.

Sean Weisbrot: She makes it easier for the development team to use. They talk about it, they come back to me with any problems they might have discovered in the plan. I'll fix them with the inside of the design and then they figure out when to develop it. And so everything is like much smoother now because of these processes where you've got design, talking to products, talking to tech, talking to marketing, because sometimes the feature implementation might require an integration with HubSpot or something so that the marketing team has more information about the user.

Sean Weisbrot: So we're, we're really building out this stuff and doing it in a way that eventually when we have customers, the product manager will be able to go through a product like Canny or something like that to get feedback and we'll have community testers and they'll be able to give feedback back to the product manager.

Sean Weisbrot: And it's really cool to see it's a team doing all of this. I just gave them the freedom to do it. I think it, it really starts from the top and you have to just allow that freedom.

Brad: The quality Guru w Edwards Deming who passed away years ago now, he was one of the real catalyst for quality improvement in the US He worked for in Japan for years.

Brad: I had a chance to meet him very young in my career, and, and he was very late in his career. I had a chance to chat with him, and one of his points is drive out fear. And I always thought that was dramatic. Like, who's afraid? Who's afraid of what? Um, and, but I see that sometimes in organizations like, eh, I don't wanna speak up because I, I've got this great idea, but it might take us off track and other things we're doing and rock the boat a little bit.

Brad: We've never done it that way, and. You know, those are, those are symptoms of, I think what Dr. Deming was talking about in his day, and it's taken me a career to really appreciate that better that we've, and, and that's what you've done with your team is drive out the fear so anyone can speak up on any of these issues and then support it with processes and really create a culture where innovations firing everywhere.

Brad: So I think getting past those initial hurdles and making it safe for anyone to come up with a. Quote unquote crazy idea. And it may be the next big idea, or it might be an idea that, you know, there's a lot of small, great ideas that as you implement, they have this cumulative effect. That's really powerful.

Brad: So create that culture, drive out any inhibition to, for anyone to put their hand up and say, Hey, I, I'm seeing something. I think that would make a difference here.

Sean Weisbrot: I think it's way too common for people to be like, well, I'm the boss. You need to do what I say. But then when you look at the most successful companies, they're like, I don't know what this team is doing.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't know what this department is doing. All I know is this is the vision and they're doing it the way they think is the smartest. So I've gotta trust that that's. The best way to do it. 'cause they're the specialists, not me. I'm just the guy with the idea, the, the top level idea. I don't care how it gets done, I just care that it gets done.

Brad: One of the recommendations in the book that I, and this is an example of why I wanted to get this out there, is you mentioned specialists and we, we have a company in especially large organizations today, we've got all these departments and all these initiatives that. Are staffed by specialists, and they are, they're good.

Brad: We've got the quality team that really knows quality. They're black belts and quality, and know the tools, know processes. We've got all these specialists, but the best ideas can come from someone who doesn't have a lot of technical background in those areas. I've seen this with technology all the time.

Brad: What if, or could it do this? Or what if, what if we did it that way and someone that doesn't even understand technology and suddenly we're like, eh. You, you know, that makes sense. I mean, from a usability issue, from the perspective of ease of use, that would make a lot of sense. So they ask these sort of innocent questions that can really drive progress.

Brad: So have the specialists, but have cross-functional teams where you have those that aren't so versed in those areas, be able to ask the, quote unquote silly questions.

Sean Weisbrot: When I first started the company, I didn't have any formal training in tech. So I would go to my CTO and be like, Hey, like what about this?

Sean Weisbrot: What about this? And I learned through a lot of his, this isn't possible, or this is possible, but you also have to think about this. That really shaped my ability to design and create in a faster way.

Brad: There are some skills across our organization that our employees may not even know they have. I've seen this in customer service areas where someone is brilliant at forecasting, let's say.

Brad: They can forecast the work that's gonna come our way. They've got a real knack for it, but they don't even know they have that knack yet because they haven't been exposed to it. We've got others who are really brilliant at product design. But they're so far removed from where products are being developed and designed.

Brad: So as we give our teams our, our individuals exposure to these processes and opportunities, they may discover things that they really love to do that they've had no background in, but really have a knack for. So taking some of the steps you're taking with your own organization just to get people involved, see what their interests are, um, see where they're contributing there.

Brad: There's a lot of merit to that, and it's really a. Key function of customer experience, employee experience, drives customer experience. We're really talking about what's happening on the inside. Um, and giving those opportunities is such a powerful way to innovate and to ultimately create that kind of product and service and experience for our customers that we're after.

Sean Weisbrot: I could go on and on about internal experience. I think as well, employees are like the most forgotten of all of the groups 'cause everyone's like, oh, the customer is always right. Or the investor is always right, but like nobody puts any attention onto the employee in particular.

Brad: Yeah. The employee experience is the cornerstone of customer experience and, and that should be an inherent part of their journey as an employee.

Brad: As I'm getting these opportunities to grow and to contribute in ways that maybe even I didn't know that I can add value.

Sean Weisbrot: Once they get the exposure, they get excited. It reignites that passion for being in that company because a lot of people feel like they're not capable of adding any value to the company.

Sean Weisbrot: At some point, they're like, oh, well this is all I can do. But when you give them the opportunity and you, you know, you, let's say you put them in a different department or you put them on a different operating system, or you give them some opportunity to manage people, then you start to see them in totally different ways like.

Sean Weisbrot: When I promoted my architect to the CTO, he didn't really have the time to continue also being a lead developer as much. So we, we haven't officially promoted one of the developers, but he's been kind of acting as like a lead and he started doing all sorts of things that I didn't even think you could do, and he's blown me away with how he's performed in this position.

Sean Weisbrot: That's a great case study.

Brad: That customer service area I mentioned that discovered how innovative they could be, you know, they were second from the bottom in employee satisfaction.

Brad: They went from second to the bottom, to second from the top in employee satisfaction, turnover went down to almost nothing.

Brad: They love what they do and it's, it's because they see the impact they're having. They're making an impact, and they see that. They feel a real sense of purpose. They know they're making a difference.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that may be a function of the workforce becoming younger. I've had this conversation with a few previous guests.

Sean Weisbrot: I, I've been talking more about Gen Z and the workforce as customers and things like that, because inevitably they're the ones that are gonna be buying things. If they're not already, and it's important for companies to understand that the employee experience and the customer experience will have to evolve to support the wants and needs and desires of Gen Z.

Sean Weisbrot: If we don't accept them, we're gonna go outta business because they are extremely vocal and they will cancel you very quickly if you, you know, are not living up to your promises or things like that. So, yeah, I, I think Gen Z is forcing customer experience to evolve. Have you witnessed anything related to that specifically yet?

Brad: Any generation can innovate. My, my fellow Gen X or some, some of us didn't get a chance in their careers to, to really be a part of driving progress and innovation. That culture didn't exist in a lot of cases. Younger generations are often put in buckets that aren't very helpful, you know, stereotypes, I don't think that ever works very well, but there's a picture that went viral on the, on the internet recently of.

Brad: Some kids in the Reichs Museum in Amsterdam, you can find this easily through search. It's, it was quite a story.

Brad: They're in the Reichs Museum and they're all, the picture shows them all sitting on this bench with this beautiful Rembrandt behind them. And they're looking at their phones. They're all on their phones.

Brad: And the backlash was like, oh my goodness. You know, young generation can't, they don't have two seconds worth of attention for anything. And, and all this, all this feedback they got, it was totally misconstrued. What the picture didn't say is they were on the museum's app doing some assignments. They were totally engaged.

Brad: It was quite the opposite. So all of that to say, I feel like that we, you, we've got such a rich set of backgrounds and. Most organizations that we can tap into, and I, I feel like any generation can contribute, um, including those who have been around for a while, maybe never got that chance. Certainly those coming in that have a fresh perspective.

Brad: It's just really exciting to me to see all the potential that we have to tap into.

Sean Weisbrot: Have you seen companies changing their customer experience because Gen Z?

Brad: Absolutely. And that can be internal and external drivers. Um, how to. How do our customers who are, you know, coming up, um, through our customer ranks wanting to engage, what, what, what do they wanna see in, in our products and services?

Brad: So, absolutely evolving by the day. And a, and a quick example is just the communication tools we use. How we communicate and dialogue we're having internally, and we're gonna continue to see, I think, a lot of innovation because of that driver. So here's a quick example. You open up a product today, in many cases, there's a one page quote unquote user manual.

Brad: You know, it wasn't too long ago when you'd buy something and there'd be a, you know, a piece of technology or whatever, something for your, for your home and appliance or whatever. There'd be a pretty thick manual. The expectation was you could look up what you need to in the manual. No one reads the manual, you know, we, we wanna pull it outta the box and just get going.

Brad: So there are very short user guides and whether they glance through those is a question or not, but that's a tangible example of, Hey, let's just get them going. Give 'em what they need in the bare minimum of space to get them started, because we know they're not gonna read it anyway. But then have lots of online capabilities and tools so they can get the full user manual online.

Brad: You know, they can tap into. Anything they need at, at a level that is as deep as they need, but think about their, their world and how they're really responding and why we thought, you know, these thick user manuals were a, a good idea for so long as a question to debate.

Sean Weisbrot: All right. Is there anything I haven't asked you so far that you'd like to share?

Brad: These are great questions, Sean and I, I think the overall theme, if, if I could sum it up from just a lot of our discussion, is that customer experience.

Brad: Involves everybody and every aspect of what we're doing. So make it inviting, create a culture where our, our employees are part of innovation. They're, they're helping us, shape products and services that are really right for our customers.

Brad: And by all means, listen to customers, you know, what do they expect in terms of. Products and communication and how they're using what we're providing, how would they change what we're doing? Those are exciting opportunities we have right now for all the challenges the world's been through. It's a really exciting time.