Be Customer Led

Is customer experience ALL we ever talk about? In B2C, definitely.

In B2B, strangely enough, it’s not something you hear that often. @Leahanne Hobson, founder and CEO of Alinea Partners, has a rare story on how B2B companies have a great opportunity to improve their processes and how people engage with their prospects.

In short, I am impressed by her and her company’s work; especially her Secret Shopper program, which covers a great deal of this episode, was just fascinating. By going through the client’s buying journey, Leahanne gives a raw and very rich view of the entire sales process.

The Secret Shopper program is a unique service in the B2B world and a very refreshing topic with inspiring insights you will all walk away smarter from. If you’re not already using secret shopper in your B2B business, I recommend you connect with Leahanne.

I think a lot of listeners will get inspired by Leahanne’s personal story as well. Starting her career in the US, she now works in Vienna with some of the biggest global IT organizations. Having lived in Zurich myself for 3 years, our conversation brought up some great European memories.

Get access to this and all other episodes at: https://linktr.ee/becustomerled.

The CX Allstars include Hollis Roberts, Jill Raff, James Dodkins, and Dennis Wakabayashi. They have created a new training platform to help you and your company navigate the EX to CX journey for your organization, getting everyone on the same page. The course helps you open up your aperture and gives you tactics to improve the employee and customer experience, and ensure it's aligned with your brand.

Hollis Roberts focuses on how you can show up every day to understand who you are, the value you can create, and how you contribute to the success of the broader team and company. For new leaders, Hollis shares wisdom on how to take yourself on as your first project vs. a project to fix the customer experience, and define "the experience of you."

If Hollis helps you on "how to lead ourselves," Jill Raff focuses on "how we lead others" and create employee engagement that creates employee lifetime value. From the staffroom to the boardroom, Jill helps gives you the tools to make people feel recognized and heard so they can translate their work into meaningful customer experiences.

James Dodkins portion of the training platform is about showing you the principles and the mindsets that create ideal customer experiences. You don't have to "wow" your customer at each turn, but you do need to deliver a consistently positive experience, and James will help you do that.

Finally, Dennis closes out the show and his focus is on the known and unknown customer, bringing together data and touch points to create customer lifetime value. Dennis shares his expertise on how to think about the recency, frequency and size of the purchase, and how to align EX and CX closer to your brand to create value.

A star-studded show with four leaders in the EX and CX space, bringing together their decades of experience into one platform to help you accelerate your career.

Stay tuned for more details from Hollis, Jill, James and Dennis!

Sandra Thompson is the Co-Founder of RISE Emotional Intelligence (EI) and we had an absolute amazing conversation around EI, Empathy, and specific tactics leaders can take to better engage with people around them. A sample of things we covered include:

Difference in EI and Empathy for frontline vs. back-office employees and giving employees the ability to act on empathy innate in all of us

What leaders can do to connect their team member's role to the experience desired and objectives of the role/company + how this allows your team to see customers at an individual, human level

How the EI space is riddled with jargon, and does the word "emotional" in emotional intelligence connote negative sentiment itself

Advice on how to take the jargon out of EI and embrace it more fully

How to engage one of your team members when you know they're not okay, and what is the boundary you can't cross

Sandra also asks me great questions where I feel like I was on the virtual chez lounge. Such a great conversation, and timely given many are still feeling the impact of 2020.

Check out https://riseinei.com/ (RISE) or find Sandra on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cxeisandra/ (here).

Tabitha Dunn is the Chief Customer Officer at Ericsson, leading Customer Experience and Global Sales Excellence. Tabitha is a leader in the CX space with leadership roles at Philips Medical Systems, Citrix and SAP more recently.

Tabitha gives an expert's view on:

Evolution of CX from her perspective

The CCO role and how she is approaching it and how it might evolve to add more value across the enterprise

The CX tech stack

The importance of change and CX leaders being change leaders

Culture change as it's within her remit at Ericsson

Too many insights to list here, but no doubt an amazing show you will walk away smarter from and ready to tackle some of the challenges you might be facing in your role.

Truly an honor to have someone of Tabitha's caliber on the show!

Did you know that about 60% of podcasters haven't published a show in the last 90 days?

Melanie Colling is a speaker, author and podcast host of https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-business-connections-podcast-with-melanie-colling/id1170118420 (Business Connections). Melanie is also the co-founder of https://expertsonair.fm/ (Experts on Air), helps podcasters build their brand, share and re-purpose their content. Pretty cool company.

Melanie is an expert in collaboration and we spend time talking about how to improve collaboration so that all parties succeed, including the customer, and the importance of it if you're running your own business; don't look at others as competitors, look at them as collaborators!

We also talk about how to ask for help if you're running your own business, and, not surprisingly, it starts with understanding your value first. and knowing what you're looking for.

We wrapped up the conversation talking about podcasting and its importance as a medium to gain insight into different topics, but also to develop your own brand; it's better than blogging or book writing as it's a less crowded space.

[Note: Be Customer Led is not a client of Experts on Air]

What's better than one thought leader on your show? How about having two join you!

Ann Cosfol is the Founder of Design Mind Consulting and Betsy Westhafer is the CEO and Founder of The Congruity Group. They partner to leverage their company's expertise in understanding customer needs more deeply and then defining strategy and design around those needs.

We cover a lot of ground on this show, with a particular emphasis on B2B and the role of customer experience. Specific topics include:

Creating advisory boards with your customers; not just at the executive level, but also at the user level

UX research and design

Changes in the B2B space as it relates to CX and why this will come back to haunt B2B companies

The impact of COVID on the acceleration of digital and how it will create confusion in the customer ecosystem; it might be happening too fast

Why we need an "Experience Officer" so we don't keep drawing a line between employee and customer experience

Normalizing the language of CX to be more business focused and get out of the jargon trap that is hurting our practice

Great show with two industry pros delivering amazing value to the CX community and the companies they work with every day.

Find out more on Ann: acosfol_AT_designmindconsulting_DOT_com, or Design Mind Consulting

Find out more on Betsy: betsy_AT_thecongruitygroup_DOT_com, or The Congruity Group. Betsy also has a podcast called https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/really-know-your-customer/id1515310420 (Really Know Your Customer) with her partner Tony Bodoh, which is great so check it out!

Luke Williams is an award-winning CX practitioner, researcher, speaker, author, and thought leader at Qualtrics. I read Luke's book, The Wallet Allocation Rule about five years ago, and it fundamentally changed the way I thought about Customer Experience.

Luke is not only a deep well of CX insight, but he shares so much on this show. You also get the sense that he's so deep on this subject, he shared a small fraction of his knowledge in the 50+ minutes we talked.

If you are looking to completely re-think your approach to CX, starting new in the game, or wondering where it is headed in the next few years, this show is for you.

Too much to cover in the show notes. Go. And. Listen. Now.

Stephanie is an amazing leader and is not only leading Customer Experience Management at Teleperformance, but also an amazing human being who focuses a lot on supporting women in leadership.

Stephanie and I talk about:

Her journey to becoming a CX leader

The value of conversation and sharing a moment

Listening more to customers during the pandemic, but also ask the right questions

The importance of empathy in your work and humanizing work

Why listening to your employees is key in improving CX

There's a ton more here, including what our respective secret talents are. Had so much fun here, and it was a pleasure having Stephanie on the show.

Mary Poppen, Chief Customer Officer for Glint at LinkedIn talks about how she is bringing together customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) in her role leading everything post-Sales at Glint.

We talk about the value being created by Glint's technology, and the opportunity of bringing together their platform with the power of LinkedIn and ultimately Microsoft who also owns Workplace Analytics.

Mary and I talk through incredibly important topics including employee engagement surveys, what companies are getting right about employee engagement and, perhaps, what they're not doing as well as they could be.

We also discuss who should own EX in the company and her framework for bringing together CX and EX at Glint; it's a super simple model that uses data you likely already track in your organization.

A must listen to episode with a ton of insights that you can start implementing tomorrow!

Mike Soldan is the Chief Experience Officer at Shmoop, leading Engineering, Product and Content; this is a very new and different way to create the CXO platform, and it's a game changer.

Mike and I talk about how he organizes his team to deliver value for customers and employees, and is taking a human-centered-design approach at Schmoop creating quality products for students and schools across the country. We also talk about the connectivity of CX and Agile teams, and the importance of integration.

Shmoop is an EdTech company, so Mike and I also cover how the industry has been impacted due to COVID, and how it is changing the education landscape forever. A lot more in this insight-packed episode that can't be missed. It's one of my favorite shows.

Such an all-star CXO and an amazing conversation that will no doubt leave you with a bunch of take-aways as you think about customer experience and driving change in 2021!