The Customer Experience Show

This episode features an interview with Paul Papas, Global Managing Partner of IBM’s Business Transformation Services.  He has led the launch of IBM’s design and CX division called IBM iX as well as their Enterprise Strategy Consulting services.  Paul has been named one of the world’s “Top 25 Consultants” by Consulting Magazine, among the world’s top 5 CRM influential leaders, and the “King of Commerce” by CRM Magazine.  Before IBM, he was a Partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.  In this episode, Paul discusses providing value to customers first and foremost, incorporating agile and design thinking into CX, and getting clients hooked on the customer journey.

Quotes

“We're in the services business, myself and my team.  We got into service to be of service to our clients.  When our clients are doing any CX initiative, it's for them to be of better service to their customers.  And when they live up to that ambition, and that calling, that's where you see great things happen.”

Time Stamps

*[0:15] Intro

*[1:15] Taking ownership of your CX

*[2:03] Interview begins

*[5:25] CX transformation initiatives

*[7:06] Helping big companies solve CX problems

*[8:21] Set your customer as your North Star

*[10:13] Keys to a successful CX transformation

*[18:31] How CX has evolved

*[29:01] Getting buy-in from the C-suite

*[34:12] Rebuilding trust when things go wrong

*[44:37] Quick questions

Bio

Paul Papas is the Global Managing Partner of IBM’s Business Transformation Services responsible for IBM’s Consulting, Design & Experience, Technology & Analytics, and Business Process Outsourcing services. He leads a 50,000 person global team that helps Fortune 1000 CEOs and other C-suite executives reinvent their businesses by leveraging the latest technology innovations.

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here

Links:

Find Paul on LinkedIn

Connect with Paul on Twitter

Find Phil on LinkedIn

Connect with Phil on Twitter

This episode features an interview with Jennifer Lang, VP of Customer Experience, Innovation and Insights at TD Bank.  Over her six years at TD Bank, Jennifer has focused on understanding the TD customer experience and how to improve it.  In this episode, Jennifer shares the importance of having different perspectives at the table, applying universal design to CX and setting a long-term CX strategy during a period of great change.

Quotes:

“Our work is multidisciplinary.  And to be able to excel, we need different perspectives.  We are deliberate in making sure we not only have a diversity of cultures, but a diversity of thought and experiences.  Then you have to actively ask for different perspectives in your meetings and be okay when people don’t agree with you because it will help you get to a better outcome.”

Time Stamps:

[1:20] Intro

[2:08] Interview begins

[2:57] Background on CX at TD Bank

[8:31] Building a diverse team

[16:20] Accessibility as part of CX 

[25:43] Getting company buy-in on investing in CX

[29:13] The secret sauce of great CX

[32:06] The future of CX at TD

[35:40] Recovering from a mistake

[38:52] How COVID has affected consumer behavior...for the better

[44:54] How to expand your brand through proactive outreach

[47:39] Lightning round of questions

Bio: 

Jennifer Lang began her career working on the research-supply side at Compass Research and Ipsos. She then switched over to the client side, working on CBC's research team for 10+ years, where she ultimately became Chief of Staff for the Office of the Executive Vice President. Jenn is currently Vice President at TD Bank and oversees the Customer Insights and Experience department, Customer Journeys, and Diversity.

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here

Links:

Find Jennifer on LinkedIn

This episode features an interview with Jennifer Zamora, Senior Director of Global Customer Experience and Commercial Excellence at Dow.  Jennifer has spent more than 20 years at Dow, serving in everything from pricing and sales to her current role in customer experience.  We talk with Jennifer about getting senior executives on board with customer experience initiatives, improving the company’s response to complaints, and why the role of CX is here to stay.

3 Takeaways:

*Creating change within a company cannot be done by one person.  It requires a network of relationships that will help with that transformation.

*Sometimes all it takes to start the process of moving up is curiosity and the courage to volunteer yourself.

*Changes take time and discipline to come to fruition.

Key Quotes:

*“By improving in specific pain point areas where customers have told us, ‘We're frustrated,’ we could see significant improvements in CXI. By staying the course and improving in those specific areas, we were finally able to show the correlation between CX, revenue, and our variable standard margin.”

*“I moved up pretty quickly in my career at Dow.  And while I felt good being recognized for my work, I realized that I never had the chance to fully deliver something.  So there is balance to moving up while also delivering within that role and making an impact.”

*“We are highly matrixed so there are lots of silos of different people focused on different priorities and scorecards. I would say that CX has really helped bring a visual to why a single scorecard or an aligned scorecard is so critical for us for the future.”

Bio: 

Jennifer Zamora’s 20-year career with Dow includes a variety of customer service, financial, and marketing management roles, including assignments in Michigan and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. In her current role, Jennifer is accountable for establishing and deploying the long-term CX strategy and disciplines, which includes implementing the customer listening process, institutionalizing a Customer-Centric culture across Dow, and defining and implementing Dow’s transformative customer distinction model and journey-mapping practices. She also ensures alignment and collaboration between the EX and CX practices inside Dow.

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here

Links:

Find Jennifer on LinkedIn

This episode features an interview with Holly O’Neill, Chief Client Care Executive and Head of Consumer Client Services at Bank of America.  Holly has spent her entire career of more than 25 years serving Bank of America customers, from wealth management to sales.  She talks with us about capitalizing on client feedback, increasing communication during periods of change, and how to personalize the customer experience at scale.

3 Takeaways:

• Personalization at scale can be done by providing options for how customers interact with your business.
• Anticipate times of change or stress by communicating more frequently with customers.
• Everyone in the company, from CEO to ground level, should be listening to the client to understand their priorities and goals.

Key Quotes:

• “We felt that that culture of listening to the client not only had to be at the leadership level, but it had to be at the ground level of the organization so that the people who are interacting with clients every day were also receiving the feedback on their interactions.”
• “On feedback, you want to be prepared to listen to the good, and really be prepared as a leadership team to listen to the not so good. Break down where something goes wrong, and figure out why it went wrong. Be really honest with it. Be comfortable as a team debating it at the table and calling a spade a spade. Be prepared to take the opportunities where you see them and commit to improving.”
• “Customer experience means first and foremost we’re making sure that no matter what the customer wants, we're delivering it. It's making sure we're making it as easy for them as possible. So delivering an exceptional experience, really being there for them around delivering for their priorities. What's their agenda? What are their life priorities? And how do we enable them to meet and exceed their goals?”

Bio: 

Holly O’Neill is the Chief Client Care Executive and leads Consumer, Small Business & Wealth Management Client Care at Bank of America. Her team provides financial solutions to more than 66 million clients each year, with a focus on delivering exceptional and distinctive client care with each interaction. She previously served as Chief Operating Officer for U.S. Trust®, Bank of America Private Wealth Management, overseeing strategic initiatives, business management, risk infrastructure and control, enterprise partnerships, and sales and service effectiveness.

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here

Links:

Find Holly on LinkedIn

This episode features an interview with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting.  Janelle is a CX leader and strategist who has authored white papers and articles and spoken at industry conferences like Turing Fest.  Before UserTesting, she worked for UX pioneers the Nielsen Norman Group.

3 Takeaways:

• It’s not safe to just assume what customers want.
• It’s not just about tracking NPS or looking at data and dashboards, but spending time with customers.
• Cultivating a better CX takes experimentation, but you already have some knowledge about what works and what doesn’t from personal experience.

Key Quotes:

• “One of the most important learnings that I've seen in our own customer base and that I've learned personally in different roles is that whatever you do, tie it to customer experience. Whatever change you're trying to drive or initiative you're trying to get buy-in on, you have to relate it to something that the business cares about.”
• “The people that I think of as visionary are anticipating needs and solving problems before customers even know their problems. Those are the people that are understanding their customers as human beings, because you need to be able to relate to your customers on a deep enough level to build empathy for them. So you can create the experiences that they need and desire.”
• “Get inside the customer’s mind. Understand what they care about. What are the words that they use? What's the language that they’re using? Figure out how you show up there to provide value to them that way. It’s taken years of experience to figure that out.”

Bio: 

Janelle is UserTesting's Chief Insights Officer and an expert research practitioner fascinated by human behavior and intrigued by data insight. She brings over 15 years of experience conducting large-scale customer research initiatives with both B2C and B2B companies across a variety of industries to help them transform their customer, user, and brand experiences.

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here

Links:

Janelle Estes' Linkedin

UserTesting Website

This episode features an interview with Mark Hall, a business leader at Google. He manages partnerships with startups and venture capital firms.  Mark is also a contributor to Forbes on the topics of tech, leadership, and venture capital. We talk with Mark about cultivating effective partnerships, shepherding new businesses into being, and leveraging Google’s resources to ensure their success.

3 Takeaways:

• Building partnerships means investing more time in relationships and working in a less transactional way.
• Providing a great customer experience can sometimes be as simple as  putting in the effort to engage with the customer.
• In a partnership, mirroring your partner’s  successful work style drives productivity and progress.

Key Quotes:

• “Every organization, regardless of whether you're in the venture space, whether you're a B2B or consumer company, you have to prioritize customer experience because it becomes the lifeblood of your success.”
• “In the partnership space, they take a long-term view–that time horizon in terms of how you look at the value of that relationship. I think that's the biggest delineation between a successful partnership versus unsuccessful.”
• “Prioritize relationships. Periods of give and take on both sides is a natural order of that process and embracing that is key. If you have a dynamic relationship, it allows you to ensure that there's that back and forth and continued building and strengthening.”

Bio: 

Mark leads Google's west coast partnerships with startups and venture capital firms. He's been at the company for over 8 years and spent a large portion of his tenure in the company's cloud division. Mark is also a contributor to Forbes, writing on the topics of technology, business and culture, and has been featured in Business Insider and Huffington Post.

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here.

This episode features an interview with Dr. Rachelle Ornan, Director of Cabin Research and Passenger Experience and Associate Technical Fellow for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, specializing in the experience and design of commercial aircraft interiors.  Before planes, she worked on spacecraft as a Human Factors Engineer and Industrial Designer for NASA.  We talk with Rachelle about idealized design, balancing art and science, and what it takes to create a peaceful space to house the stress of travel.

3 Takeaways:

• Customer experience includes elements that reach the end-user  on a subconscious or emotional level.
• Consider all potential users when designing a customer experience.
• Customers may have generational differences in what they expect from the experience.  Up-and-coming generations are often looking to be treated to an aspirational experience they don’t get anywhere else.

Key Quotes:

• “There is a transformation that happens when people feel part of something – when they actually feel moved by the experience. That's the kind of research that we invest in and those are the kinds of insights and design nuggets that come from a really deep-seated place, an emotional place, a human place. When we translate that into the built environment, you've got a lot of people nodding their heads and getting on board.”
• “I think that's kind of aspirational – to get treated experientially...being treated to a beautiful interior that’s nice, clean, bright, well lit and people are smiling and happy to be going somewhere. I think that makes everybody feel good.”
• “I really believe that travel helps economies. It connects us to each other. It pulls people out of poverty...This is the big stuff that I think Boeing connects the world to.”

Bio:

Dr. Rachelle N. Ornan, is an Associate Technical Fellow for Boeing Commercial Airplanes specializing in the experience and design of commercial aircraft interiors. Her background includes lighting and concept interior development for the CST-100 Starliner capsule, visual perception research, space hotel concepts for NASA, feature willingness-to-pay, and a comprehensive ethnographic study of interiors. Currently, she directs passenger experience research and bridges communication between sales and marketing, engineering and airlines to ensure a commercially viable, preferred product which maximizes revenue. Rachelle holds a PhD in experimental psychology, and a master’s in Industrial Design from North Carolina State University. She is a dog-mom, an avid skier, backpacker, competitive synchronized swimmer and currently pursuing her boat captain’s license.

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they’ve created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here.

Sharon Mandell, Senior Vice President and CIO of Juniper Networks, joins Phil to discuss why every employee who touches the product impacts the customer experience, the benefits of being a customer of your own company, and how AI can free up employees to offer better customer care.

3 Takeaways:

• Elevate each team member to do their best work, because they all influence the product and therefore the customer experience.
• Take care of the company’s basic needs so you can focus more time on customer needs.
• Stay connected to every level of employees to understand how each one is adding to the success of the whole.

Key Quotes:

• “I think if you're a great CIO, you work your way out of a job in many ways, because you get your team to the level where they're really doing all the work.”
• “Often you'll come into an organization and you'll hear tussles over who owns the system. We don't, no department owns anything. And if somebody new comes in here tomorrow, they might decide that system's not valuable and want to put in a different one. So if your self-worth comes from the tool itself or the particular deployment, or exactly how something gets done, you're probably focused on the wrong area.”
• "No matter what label they put on you, as you climb up the ladder and you get a C in front of your name, you maintain your humility. Be willing to get down in the weeds with anybody, because the minute you lose your connection to where the real work is getting done, I think you lose your people."

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here.

Bio: 

Sharon Mandell is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer leading Juniper’s global information technology team. In this role, she leads the ongoing enhancement of the company’s IT infrastructure and applications architectures to support the growth objectives of the company. She and her team are also responsible for showcasing Juniper’s use of its technologies to the world.

Episode Notes:

City National Bank Executive VP and Chief Marketing Officer Linda Duncombe joins The Customer Experience Show to discuss how City National Bank is a little different than the other big name banks, how she deals with difficult situations involving her customers, and how the recent pandemic has affected CNB.

3 Takeaways:

• Great CX leaders need to be willing to break bad news to their customers. Doing this in the proper way requires bravery and a gentle touch.
• Honesty in marketing needs to be more than a buzzword. A commitment to be honest and transparent is a key first step in creating a great customer experience.
• Creating a great experience for your customers requires thinking through needs from their perspective. CX managers need to be willing to put themselves in their customers’ shoes.

Key Quotes:

• “The importance of digital to the relationship with our clients has grown and grown and grown over the last 12 months, and we have been very innovative in that way. That we serve our clients. We basically sent home 80% of our workforce within a few days of when it got really serious with COVID last March and we've worked tirelessly to make sure our clients feel that we're still there for them 24 seven.”
• “We put together a workforce that was more than just the relationship and we had people from operations, from product strategy, from HR, from legal processing loans. So we could get these [PPP Loans] through, so our clients could get the money that they needed to help their businesses. And it was something that everybody from the CEO, Dan got involved in something that we feel incredibly proud about, and we're doing it again with phase two of the PPP program. And it's just what we do, people. Don't question it.”
• “When Frank Sinatra's child was kidnapped, we were one of his banks and he came to our CEO at the time and said, I need a bank that can open their safe on a weekend. I'm being told that that can't be done. And he'd been told no by another bank. And our CEO at the time said, yes, I can open the safe.”

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here.

Bio: 

Linda Duncombe is executive vice president and chief marketing, product and digital officer of City National Bank. Ms. Duncombe leads a team that is responsible for advancing the company’s brand and digital strategy, articulating its value proposition, and supporting business development. 

Ms. Duncombe oversees marketing, client experience, advertising, and communications as well as digital channels, product development, credit cards, and multicultural outreach. She is also responsible for the bank’s technology innovation team, which identifies and deploys fintech solutions for City National and its clients.

Episode Notes:

Avaya SVP and CMO Simon Harrison joins The Customer Experience Show to discuss how being a product manager has helped him become a successful customer experience leader, what the future of CX looks like as the world transitions into an experience economy, and much more.

3 Takeaways:

• Before they can improve the CX experience, CX leaders need to make sure they understand every detail of the customer journey.
• One key to creating a great customer experience is listening to customers and learning from what they are saying and what they want and need.
• Trust is an important part of building a great CX. Leaders need to train their employees how to create a great experience, and then empower and trust them to do the right thing.

Key Quotes:

• “We have a relentless focus. Effectively, if you have engaged and empowered staff, they enjoy great experiences and that directly translates to our customers having great experiences.”
• “It's whether you decide the ambition to change things is significant enough for you to push on into a role where, it may be out of your comfort zone, but you could make a difference. I took the leap and worked hard to become perhaps somewhat of a success as a product manager.”
• “As a CXO or someone that's passionate about customer experiences and in a leadership role in a company, I'm really keen to talk about the customer journey and understand more about how to make people feel better. It’s about memorable experiences rather than trying to sell them something.”

Thank you to our friends

This episode is brought to you by IBM. If you are responsible for Customer Experience, they've created a White Paper just for you. In the CX North Star Report, you can learn more about how to activate your CX vision. Download it here.

Bio: 

Simon Harrison is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, leading the global marketing function to engage new and existing customers and partners, drive adoption of the company’s software solutions and support Avaya as the leading player in a dynamic digital communications market.

Simon joined Avaya in 2020 from leading research and advisory firm, Gartner, where he was research director and lead analyst for the Unified Communications and Contact Center market. In a career spanning over 25 years, he has been a thought leader, product strategist, marketer and consultant in the communications solutions industry. Prior to Gartner, he held leadership roles in Marketing, Sales, Product Marketing, and Product Management for companies like Cirrus, Vocalcom, Siebel Systems, and others.