Be Customer Led

Gil Cohen is the founder of Employee Experience Design, a company dedicated to helping businesses evolve their people practices to improve both human and organizational outcomes.

Gil and I talk about his journey to starting his own company, the impact of COVID on how companies are now re-thinking their people strategy, and how to nurture corporate culture through a remote work setting.

We also get into employee engagement, how you should think about measuring it, and how employee experience impacts the customer experience.

Gil is one of the few leaders dedicated to Employee Experience, and it's an amazing show with ideas you can start putting into practice today!

Check out Gil's company at employeeexperience.ca

Ryanne Laredo is the Chief Customer Officer at Amobee and is a force to be reckoned with. Few leaders get it right like Ryanne.

This is one of those episodes you tune into and can actually feel yourself growing professionally while listening!

Ryanne and I talk about her journey, how she's bringing together customer experience and employee experience, the importance of listening, OKRs, and how to start - the work is hard, but starting is easy.

Ryanne also talks about her experience as a founding member of Chief, advice for other female leaders out there, and advice for allies investing in female leadership.

I was blown away by our conversation and Ryanne - she. is. fire.

Julie Roehm led Marketing / Marketing Comms at amazingly large brands including Ford, Chrysler (yes, she helped bring the HEMI to market), Walmart, was the Chief Story Teller at SAP (that's a pretty cool title!), and is a contributor to Fox Business Network

Julie is now the Chief Marketing and Experience Officer at Party City, a publicly traded company with hundreds of retail locations across the United States and Canada where you can find the perfect costume, party theme, or inspiration for your next party. If you live in the U.S. and have had an adult or kids party, there's a good chance you've been to Party City or ordered from them online.

Julie and I have a great conversation around Marketing, Customer Experience, and B2B vs. B2C. Julie also shares her amazing journey across multiple industries, including starting her own podcast the The Conversational (https://tinyurl.com/y4p3d38g) where she started #hoshimo talking to industry leaders who had their Holy Sh!$ Moment experience that got them to push ahead personally and/or professionally. This is def a podcast to subscribe to.

Mike Kuenne is the Chief Customer Experience Officer (CXO) for Extended Stay America, a leader in the hospitality space. Mike is not only bringing together Customer Experience and Employee Experience at Extended Stay, and that permeates our conversation, but we also talk about relevant topics, including:

How the pandemic is changing the way he and his team think about the customer and their employee experience

How they're approaching culture change at Extended Stay

As a CXO, how Mike is uniting the C-Suite toward achieving their customer goals

Technology his team is using to support their efforts

How Mike sees the discipline evolving

It's a great conversation full of actionable insight. Mike's Operations and Technology background, including across industry, is helping him and his team create meaningful change for their customers and guests.

Alex Allwood is the Director, Customer Strategy and Experience at https://allworktogether.com.au/ (All Work Together), a business consultancy specializing in customer experience (CX) research, strategy and design; their mission is empowering leaders to make their customers’ lives better. Alex is also the author of https://www.amazon.com/Customer-Empathy-intervention-experience-management-ebook/dp/B0814YH6MB/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1andkeywords=customer+empathy+alex+allwoodandqid=1603117159ands=booksandsr=1-1 (Customer Empathy) and https://www.amazon.com/Customer-Experience-Brand-Alex-Allwood/dp/0994343388 (Customer Experience is the Brand).

Alex and I talk about CX Strategy, Governance, and the importance of elevating CX to the executive leadership team. We also discussed why CX leaders and practitioners need empathy training, how to train for empathy at scale, and the https://alexallwood.com.au/scorecard/ (empathy scorecard), which is free!

Finally, Alex and I talk about the importance of journeys, embedding emotion in them for optimal impact, and where some of the journey analytics platforms out there are missing it.

It's a packed show full of Alex's insights end-to-end!

Jessica Noble started Magnetic Experiences over three years ago to help small and mid-sized businesses improve operationally and deliver best-in-class customer experiences. Jessica and I talk about:

1:48 Her journey to where she is today leading her own small business

6:50 Why she started Magnetic Experiences

9:58 Her definition of Customer Experience in practice; Jessica also throws the question back at me!

13:13 Why we need to get rid of all the CX jargon and what we need to use instead

19:18 The importance of governance in a CX practice to support the work

21:33 Why CX is plateauing or failing in some pockets; I provide my own view here too

24:17 Jessica's approach to working with clients and why building confidence with wins is so important

25:39 We talk about her book The Five Customer Experience Mistakes (You Don't Know You're Making) That Are Causing Profit Erosion and why she decided to write

27:45 We discuss my personal favorite mistake from the book: Relying On Heroes to Deliver Great Experiences

37:05 Where and why CX teams and businesses are struggling in solutioning and how to fix that

44:12 What's next for Jessica Noble; she is working on a new approach that guarantees 10X results (what?!!?) and a new Business Case/ROI model

49:16 We close out with where Jessica gets her insipiration from

An amazing conversation with Duena Blomstrom who is an "Agile Anthropologist" and a unique thought leader - a class on her own really - in the Agile and Psychological Safety space. Duena and I cover a lot of topics, and this is the first where I am including time stamps in the show notes. See below for more:

02:30 - Duena outlines her journey, including writing her book and starting her own business

08:43 - Developing culture and if employee and customer experience shoud be a discipline vs. a leadership topic

11:55 - Why the speed of Agile makes it difficult to include CX, and why you need to make the space for EX and CX

16:55 - How Agile leaders are creating the space for EX and CX and are focusing on psychological safety with intent and building this into the Agile process

19:25 - Duena outlines the building blocks of psychological safety

26:20 - Duena and I talk about the genesis for getting her on the show, and her perspective on why CX and Agile are the same discipline

31:25 - Why bringing Agile, CX and EX together isn't easy and the reason we have so much "Human Debt"

33:40 - Why some Agile teams don't have OKRs, or ones that are meaningful, leading to failure

38:15 - Hear about where Duena gets her inspiration from

39:53 - If you want to find out more about Duena and her company, skip to this part of the show!

In this episode of Be Customer Led, we interviewed Ben Eubanks who is one of the most interesting people I've ever met.

Ben has focused his career on thought leadership around human capital management and helping companies and vendors with strategy, content, and more.

Ben and I talk about some very important topics all companies are facing right now, including: the importance of communication points in nurturing culture, how to maintain and develop a corporate culture in a remote or hybrid work environment, the importance of psychological safety and cognitive friction, the HR tech stack and cutting-edge tech available now that will blow your mind, using analytics to improve the employee experience, and how to change culture.

This is such an important conversation given the systemic change COVID is having on every company, and how so many are thinking about a productive and positive path back to a post-COVID workplace.

You can find Ben and the content he publishes in a number of areas, and I suggest you hit him up on LinkedIn too:

www.lhra.io

www.lhra.io/podcast

http://upstarthr.com (http://upstarthr.com)

Ben's Book AI for HR - https://tinyurl.com/y5rr8g9c (https://tinyurl.com/y5rr8g9c)

Chris Collins is the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) for Ellucian, a company that develops solutions that power the essential work of colleges and universities. The CCO role is different relative to many others out there, as Chris owns all of Delivery, so everything post sales; the model is fascinating and could be the blueprint for other companies looking to create a similar role.

Chris has significant background in technology, operations, services and all from a customer lens; so you will hear him talk about the evolution of customer experience (CX) and its impact on a business, core competencies needed to deliver against a customer agenda, the impact COVID has had on industry, and more specifics around his role and how that is different relative to other CCOs out there.

We also talk culture change from the customer perspective and how CCOs can influence the transformation.

Chris shares so much practical, real-world experience. He is an amazing leader and role model we can all learn from.

Aarthi is a long-time friend and we had an amazing conversation - she is such a breath of fresh air in the customer experience (CX) space; she is practical, strategic, and knows how to connect CX to business results. This is a monster of a show and we cover a ton of topics. It's a longer one than usual, but you're going to learn from Aarthi throughout the entire conversation.

Aarthi and I talk about her journey to being a CX leader, from her youth being curious about people and their backgrounds, to becoming a Chief Customer Experience Officer (CXO); her view on how CXOs can bring an organization together toward a common purpose; the core tenets of CX; the evolution of CX and the impact COVID has had on her team at MandT Bank; her job as a CXO and what it takes to excel in the role; and the role technology plays in CX.

Aarthi and I also talk about the connection of CX with Employee Experience, and she provides thoughtful, amazing advice for other female professionals, including other women of color, and how that translates into the CX context.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I have. I was so impressed that I opened an account with MandT Bank!