The Trusted Guide Podcast with Mark Slatin

In many ways, the Customer Experience leader has the most difficult job in the organization. Typically serving with a thin staff, a constrained budget, and limited positional authority, they need to get things done through influencing others. But how? Numbers along aren't enough. There's one powerful tool that CX leaders can and should become masters in, that's storytelling. On this episode of the Delighted Customers Podcast, Dennis Geelen, author of The Zero In Formula and The Accidental Solopreneur, joins me to talk about why storytelling wins over stakeholders and he shares a framework on how to tell stories that inspire change. In this episode: - The unique challenges faced by CX leaders in gaining approval and support - How stories can help convey the urgency and consequences of neglecting customer experience - Using powerful illustrations such as "The Kodak Story" to make the business case for change -Avoid the mistake of assuming that data alone will be enough to make an impact on senior leaders Special Note: This episode sets the stage for the next episode which features a filmmaker who breaks down how he crafted his story, currently a Top 10 Amazon Prime documentary. Spoiler - yours truly is in the film sharing a secret of his own : ) Meet Dennis Dennis Geelen, is the Founder and Chief Difference Maker at his solo consulting company, Zero In, that he founded in 2018. Through Zero In, Dennis helps companies 'solve indifference' by implementing strategies to build a brand customers love and culture where people are passionate to work. Author of the best-selling book 'The Zero In Formula', Geelen has worked with companies in several industries, spoken at countless events, conferences, workshops, webinars, with dozens of guest appearances on international podcasts. And now? Dennis also helps other solopreneurs get started. With his latest book, 'The Accidental Solopreneur', providing a playbook for success and told through a riveting and relatable parable that is getting rave reviews from entrepreneurs around the globe. Catch is weekly newsletter, Happy Accidents, for a new story each week about some of the most famous people, products, or companies who found success through serendipity. Timeline Overview: [00:02:52] Solo consultant turned author and coach for solopreneurs.

[00:05:09] Fascinating background; inspired to write differently.

[00:10:25] Key elements of great stories: relatable characters, clear theme, humor, emotional connection, life lessons, conflict.

[00:12:35] Editor assists writer in crafting effective story.

[00:15:14] Show, don't tell: Use stories to engage.

[00:21:12] Analytical person likes numbers, struggles with storytelling.

[00:23:58] Use stories to relate and inspire action.

[00:26:11] Balancing CX and security to retain customers.

[00:30:58] Start team meetings with customer stories, positive and negative.

[00:33:58] Self-publishing saves money and boosts credibility.

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How do companies like Ritz-Carlton, Apple, and Starbucks earn the trust of their customers? Building upon the trust equation introduced in the Trusted Advisor book, we explore the four variables that contribute to trustworthiness: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation. Through real-life examples, such as a heartwarming story about a lost stuffed animal at the Ritz Carlton Resort, we uncover the power of trust in creating loyal customers. In this episode:

• Credibility: Showcasing professionalism, expertise, and trustworthiness through branding, communication, and online presence can instill confidence in your customers
• Reliability: Consistency is key. Consistently delivering on promises and providing a valuable, predictable experience builds trust with customers. 
• Intimacy: Establishing psychological safety, discretion, and a personal connection with customers can be challenging on an organizational level, but it's not impossible
• Self Orientation: Are you more focused on the sale than the relationship? Asking that question through the customer's lens could help identify areas to become more trustworthy

Don't miss out on these valuable insights. Tune in to the Delighted Customers Podcast episode on "The Secret to Building Trust with Customers" and start creating amazing customer experiences that lead to loyalty and advocacy. Timestamped Overview [00:01:44] Elmo stays at fancy hotel, sends book.

[00:06:25] Workers must pass rigorous training, be screened. Trust through credibility; website appearance, navigation, testimonials, certifications matter. Online presence instills buyer confidence. IRS experience eroded trust, opposite of Terminex example.

[00:09:23] Hotel creates special book for lost Elmo. In the hospitality industry, personal connections matter. A hotel went above and beyond when they understood a guest's attachment to a lost stuffed animal. Instead of just returning it, they involved the entire staff in creating a picture book to assure the guest that Elmo was safe and cared for. This kind of personal touch can make a big impact, whether it's in business meetings or online interactions. Tesla even automates settings for different drivers, and Starbucks' mobile app saves your orders to Siri. It's all about making things personal.

[00:12:16] Embedding trust in your organization is key.

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Trust is the currency of leadership.

The most effective leaders don't power their way through initiatives. They are masters at building trust as a way of influencing.

Businesses that cultivate trust with their customers and employees outperform their competitors.

We explore the Trust Equation, which originally appeared in The Trusted Advisor (now in it's 20th Anniversary Print Edition). 

We're going to explore the four variables of trustworthiness:

• Credibility
• Reliability
• Intimacy
• Self Orientation

...and provide some practical tips on how you can become more trustworthy.

Join me for part 2 of a 3 part series called "Trust and Loyalty Depend on CX" on this episode of the Delighted Customers Podcast.

To Register for the 4 Keys to Leading Change as a CX Pro: https://www.empoweredcx.com/4keys Seats are limited so sign up today!

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Imagine lining up everything just right to land the best fishes only to discover, you lose your entire harvest because of a simple miss.

The fisherman's dilemma applies to the customer experience.

See if you can relate.

Amazon has been on my wish list for podcast guests. 

Dr. Francis did not disappoint in a powerful and thoughtful insider perspective of what makes Amazon a consistent CX leader.

We will dive deep into the world of generative AI and its potential impact on customer interactions, as well as how Amazon harnesses this technology to stay ahead of the game. 

Dr. Goh sheds light on the unique culture and principles that have made Amazon a global leader in innovation. As we explore the fascinating intersection of technology, customer obsession, and the ever-evolving business landscape, get ready to be inspired and discover new possibilities.

In this episode:

- Amazon's journey from a bookshop to a tech giant

- At least half of Amazon's leadership principles focus on innovation

- Generative AI in customer experience and contact centers

- Caution against technology-driven strategies

- Amazon's efforts to help customers use generative AI

Meet Dr. Francis

Francis Goh is the Digital Innovation Leader, for Amazon, leading

innovation engagements with key clients of Amazon in the region. In

2016, he founded Hehsed Consulting, which specializes in Corporate

strategy, innovation, CX, Agile and leadership strategies. He was also a

mentor at NTU Nanyang (MBA) Business School. Prior to this he was the

CEO at the global HR consulting firm, Mercer and President CEO at

Fujitsu Singapore.

Francis has 28 years of international experience in the technology and

energy industries, having had numerous P&L and high impact

leadership roles with global leaders such as Accenture, SAP, HP,

Microsoft and ExxonMobil. During this time, Francis has lived and

worked across Asia, Europe and the United States.

Francis specializes in the areas of emerging solutions, breakthrough

business models and innovation. He has a proven track record in

building #high-performance teams and overachieving both revenue

and profit targets consistently. He has a strong reputation for

developing and deploying new business go-to-market strategies across

sales, operations and resource management. He establishes core

innovative business models which further enhanced brand positioning

and grew both topline and profits as a result. Francis is a hands-on

leader with deep solution and value-selling expertise across a broad

spectrum of clients in the Asia Pacific region across industries such as

Oil &Gas, FSI, telco, manufacturing and the government sectors.

Time Stamped Overview

[00:02:56] Passionate innovator shares Amazon's story and techniques.

[00:08:24] Excited to have Amazon on our podcast.

[00:11:09] Amazon's culture is centered around innovation. Innovation is crucial for organizations to avoid stagnation and competition. Amazon started as a bookshop and evolved into a successful ecommerce platform. Customer obsession is a core value and drives their innovation process. Starting with understanding customer needs before considering technology solutions is important.

[00:16:04] Start with customer and reverse engineer: avoiding technology-driven strategy trap. Customer obsession key in all aspects. Understand customer journey and priorities. Amazon's success: started as digital bookstore, applied principles to expand into diverse businesses like AWS.

[00:21:40] AI, specifically generative AI, is gaining popularity. It can generate new content and have various application

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Change management is a critical profession that focuses on the human side of change, utilizing various sciences and art to support successful projects and initiatives. Working alongside project management, change management ensures that individuals are prepared and equipped for transitions, driving long-term success. Doug Flory serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Change Management Professional and describes himself as a Changeologist. In this episode of The Delighted Customers Podcast, we discuss:

• Implementation of five levers for effective change management
• the different levels of change management maturity and the role of trust in effective change implementation
• he highlights popular methodologies, such as Prosci, ADKAR, Kotter's Eight Steps, and Lewin's Stages
• the intersection of change managment and customer experience

Meet Doug

• We first met at the ACMP Summit in Charlotte and the topic was the Intersection of Customer Experience and Change Management
• 20 years of experience leading the way change works in Change Management & Transformation, Corporate Culture, and Ways of Working
• Background includes a multi-disciplinary approach towards a people-centered solution
• Currently, Doug serves on the Board of Directors @ ACMP and is an Executive Consultant
• His office colleague is a Yorkshire Terrier who is still how to trying to make copies

Timestamped overview

[00:01:01] Podcast host empowers leaders to delight customers.

[00:05:01] Change management: a profession focusing on people.

[00:10:05] "Steps to implement change in organizations"

[00:13:13] Understanding and applying different methodologies is crucial. Popular examples include pro size, ad, car, and model. They are taught in classes, followed by exams and certificates.

[00:16:30] Professional credentials like CCMP and CCXP.

[00:21:37] A global electric utility company faces challenges with change management. A consultant failed to handle the transition well, causing issues with HRIS system and employee trust. A new change management expert was brought in to rebuild trust and communication. The expert emphasizes the importance of identifying stakeholders, understanding change impacts, effective communication, training, and long-term sustainment. These levers are key to successful change management.

[00:31:41] Trust is core to many challenges faced.

[00:37:18] Impact of employee satisfaction on customer experience

[00:42:06] Customer and employee voices drive engagement, trust.

[00:43:53] Online retailer's bot miscommunication resolved by human.

[00:47:25] Hard question, unexpected path, successful career.

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Joe Wheeler, international bestselling author, technology innovator, consultant, and speaker. Joe has recently written a groundbreaking book called "Digital First Customer Experience: Seven Design Strategies From the World's Leading Brands." Throughout this episode, Joe shares valuable insights and practical tips on how companies can leverage digital strategies to create highly scalable and repeatable experiences for their customers. Joe also highlights some remarkable success stories from companies like Lemonade, Amazon, Starbucks and Nike, demonstrating how they have revolutionized customer experiences through digital design strategies. We delve into the importance of personalization, with Spotify serving as a standout example in the field. But it's not just about technology and digital solutions. We explore:

• the importance of understanding customer loyalty drivers 
• the significance of addressing customer problems
• the potential pitfalls of falling in love with the product instead of focusing on customer needs
• The future of technology, including the imminent arrival of 6G and the convergence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and edge-based computing

Join us as we dive deep into the world of digital first customer experiences, uncovering the secrets to delighting customers and turning them into loyal fans. Get ready for a thought-provoking and informative conversation with Joe Wheeler on this episode of the Delighted Customers Podcast! Meet Joe Joe Wheeler is an internationally recognized best-selling author, speaker, and consultant. He is the CEO of CX/Digital a subsidiary of The Service Profit Chain Institute (SPCI), a Boston-based consulting firm he co-founded with Professors Len Schlesinger, James Heskett and W. Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School. In 2002, he and Shaun Smith co-authored the best-seller: Managing the Customer Experience. He followed it up in 2008 with The Ownership Quotient, co-authored with James Hesket and Earl Sasser, Jr. His latest book, The Digital-First Customer Experience will be released in July of 2023, and describes the design strategies of leading brands including Nike, Amazon, CEMEX, Starbucks and others. Mr. Wheeler has delivered keynotes to clients and at conferences around the world on topics including, customer experience, digital leadership and corporate culture. Joe has worked with AT&T, Bank of America, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Digital Realty, Equinix, GoDaddy, Humana, Irving Oil, Maersk. NetOne, Panera Bread, World Fuel Ser- vices and many more. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Bluemvmt, a company with a mission to protect, restore and harness ocean resources for both commercial and conservation outcomes. Prior to co-founding The Service Profit Chain Institute, he held executive roles at Bank of America, The Forum Corporation and earned an MBA from Edinburgh Business School. He lives in both Massachusetts and Nova Scotia when he is not on his way to or from a client event. Time Stamps [00:03:11] Grew up in family business, wrote books. [00:07:21] Controversy around technology replacing frontline staff. [00:12:51] Digital-first challenges for legacy companies summarized. [00:15:20] Key loyalty drivers revealed through research. Be wary of misinterpreting customer feedback. [00:20:58] Culture, climate change, technology, and 6G speed. [00:22:58] Six G will be 30 times faster. Competition and digital asset linkage are key. [00

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"Why Reinvent the Wheel?" That popular expression was taken seriously when the founder of woom was about to buy their child their first bike and realized something was wrong. So the idea to consider the experience from a kids perspective and design a bicycle that wasn't just a smaller version of an adult bike was born. Headquartered in Vienna, Austria, and Austin, Texas, woom has expanded globally and now has over 240 employees and has sold over 1,000,000 bicycles all over the world. On this episode I talk to April Obersteller who leads their employee and customer experience efforts. Hear a fascinating story of the problem they were trying to solve and why they view their role as something much bigger than bicycles. In this episode: - Founding story of two brothers and a best friend creating a high-quality children's bike - The connection between customer experience, design, and employee experience - Importance of quick reactions and direct customer feedback - Commitment to putting employees at the center of retention and engagement strategies - Creating "magic moments" and valuing practicality based on customer feedback - Innovation as a core value and dedicated future-focused team Meet April April Obersteller's 15-year career in the service industry has been rooted within purpose driven companies that are in the fast and courageous stage of start-up to scale-up. Her passion for the human experience is combined with her appreciation for how data and technology can be powerful in identifying how-to make the most meaningful human impact. At woom, she is the Vice President of Global Experience, in which she leads a global team that supports both the Customer Experience and the Employee Experience with a focus on the full internal and external customer journey. Company Overview: woom is a globally-acclaimed kids' bicycle company, originally founded in Austria in 2013, and expanded to the United States one year later. woom has disrupted the kids' bike category across Europe and North America, as the largest and fastest-growing direct-to-consumer brand in the space. Its award-winning bikes include options that are 40% lighter than conventional kids' bikes, making woom bikes the lightest series-production kids' bikes in the world.

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Joe Pine is on my Mount Rushmore of Customer Experience. He shares the exact moment, quite by accident, that the concept of "experience" as the next economy after the service economy was hatched. In 2020 Mr. Pine and his partner James H. Gilmore re-released in hardcover The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money featuring an all-new Preview to their best-selling 1999 book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Joe believes that goods and services are no longer enough; what customers want are experiences—memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way. Join me on The Delighted Customers Podcast as Joe shares a vision for business—a world focused on human flourishing, where individuals become better people and achieve their goals. Discover how understanding your customers' wants, needs, and desires can help you create greater value and make a positive impact. Joe shares practical insights and real world stories of how you can drive business outcomes. Here are some highlights:

• The concepts of mass customization and the experience economy
• Creating robust, cohesive, personal, dramatic, and transformative experiences
• Comparing work to theater and the importance of intentional and engaging experiences
• Changing the world of business to focus on human flourishing
• The importance of not wasting customers' time and aligning value with what customers value
• The concept of "customering" and the individualization megatrend

Meet Joe B. JOSEPH PINE II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. He is cofounder of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. In December 2019 Mr. Pine and his partner James H. Gilmore re-released in hardcover The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money featuring an all-new Preview to their best-selling 1999 book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. The book demonstrates how goods and services are no longer enough; what companies must offer today are experiences – memorable events that engage each customer in an inherently personal way. It further shows that in today's Experience Economy companies now compete against the world for the time, attention, and money of individual customers. The Experience Economy has been published in fifteen languages and was named one of the 100 best business books of all time. Mr. Pine also co-wrote Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier with Mr. Kim C. Korn, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want with Mr. Gilmore, and in 1993 published his first book, the award-winning Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. His latest article in the Harvard Business Review is "The 'New You' Business" (January-February 2022), coauthored with Lance Bettencourt, Jim Gilmore, and Dave Norton. In his speaking and teaching activities, Mr. Pine has addressed the World Economic Forum, the original TED conference, and the Consumer Electronics Show. Today he is a Lecturer in Columbia University's Master's Program in Technology Management in the School of Professional Studies. Sign up for the newsletter https://strategichorizons.com/contact/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepine/

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"Scale creates problems that empathy alone can't solve"

Megan Burns unlocks the key to how leaders can differentiate their brands based on the experiences they deliver to customers on this episode of The Delighted Customers Podcast. She ought to know...she spent more than 10 years as vice president principal analyst at Forrester Research where she developed ground-breaking research on how brands like Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, and Salesforce deliver great customer experiences at scale in the face of constant social and technological never-ending disruption. In this episode we discuss the underlying problems leaders need to solve and why so many companies miss the target, plus:

• What's the biggest challenge delivering an outstanding experience today?
• Why leaders should think about themselves as being in the experience delivery business 
• Understanding the shift from "Pay Attention" to "Believe" to "Care"
• Why getting key stakeholders to care isn't enough
• The Activation Challenge: Why is it critical to customer loyalty
• Why making the business case is not the entire solution

Meet Megan

Megan Burns is a customer experience strategist, author, and keynote speaker who helps companies build world-class customer experience programs that accelerate growth and drive strategic advantage. A former Vice President at Forrester Research, Megan has advised hundreds of corporations over her 20+ year career, including Microsoft, Workday, Akamai, FedEx, Verizon, and AT&T. As the architect of two of the industry's most well-known frameworks - the Customer Experience Index and the Outside In Maturity Model - Megan is considered one of the world's foremost experts on leading experience transformation at scale. Her insights have been featured in dozens of publications like the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, AdAge, and CNBC, and Megan is a popular speaker at events like the Wall Street Journal's Experience Management Forum, CXPA Leaders Advance, the Chief Experience Officer Summit, and the Qualtrics X4 Summit. As a CX pioneer, Megan is regularly invited to judge industry awards like the CXPA Innovation Awards and World Customer Centricity Awards and to appear on popular podcasts like Voices of CX and CX Luminaries. After interviewing Megan, one host said: "I've never seen anyone with customer experience so deeply in their blood."

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