CX change management in action: CX Mini Masterclass – E48

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back.

This episode is part of my CX mini masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts, and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity.

Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

If you’re keen to do some more intensive online training in the field of customer experience, stay tuned at the end of this episode for an exclusive listener discount code from our show sponsor, CX University. This is episode 48, and I’m kicking off this month’s CX Mini Masterclasses with another guest expert. This time, Nate Brown from CX Accelerator is joining us on the program.

Building on what we heard from Diane Magers in episode 44, Nate makes the case for why customer experience professionals must become proficient in change management methodologies. He then takes us through one of the most popular change management models, John Kotter’s eight-step approach, outlining practical ideas and recommendations for CX professionals at each step of the way. I can’t think of a better guide for this immersive tour of change management.

Nate is the co-founder of CX Accelerator, a virtual community for customer experience professionals. While customer service is his primary expertise, Nate is able to leverage experience in professional services, marketing, and sales to connect the dots and solve big problems. From authoring and leading a customer experience program, to journey mapping, to building and managing a complex contact center, Nate is always learning new things and sharing with the community.

Beyond Nate’s expertise bringing together the CX community, he’s also an in-house CX practitioner himself. On the front lines of driving change, so he’s here to bring a great balance of theory and practice. If you’ve been wondering how to bring change management theory off the textbook page and into real action in the workplace, then this episode is for you.

And as always, if you happen to be out for a walk or cooking dinner, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I’ll also include links to find out more about CX Accelerator and how you can get in touch with Nate. So with that, I’ll let him take it away.

Greetings, everybody. Nate Brown here, signing in from Nashville, Tennessee. Very excited to be on the podcast today. I first met Julia on CXChat about a year ago and was immediately drawn to her energy and enthusiasm and wisdom. Love the show, love the episodes that I’ve seen and thrilled to be on one myself.

I feel like CX work is just the best work in the world. I mean, we’re getting to make people’s lives better and easier. There’s so few things that are that intrinsic and that wonderful and that powerful, but that are just so clearly also the right thing to do for the business in terms of impacting the bottom line and being that competitive differentiator.

Customer experience is some of the best work in the world, but it’s absolutely some of the hardest. Just the criticality around us being intentional with change management, change methodologies, and being aware of those, and the CX professional becoming more and more of a change manager, which I just think is so good and wonderful and important.

So, I’m going to continue on that topic today and just talk about some of my personal experience in this area, and then also from some of the insights collected via CX Accelerator and the many wonderful folks in there.

We have these sobering statistics that are out there, and I’m sure you’ve seen them from Bob Thompson, from Forrester, from Gartner, from others, that are being very realistic in terms of the fact that many customer experience initiatives are failing, failing to show real results and meaningful returns to the business.

I don’t think we need to be embarrassed of that, but I think it should motivate us to want to do more and to be even smarter in our approach to change the playbook up a little bit perhaps to ensure that that statistic is not the same in a couple of years.

But if we look at things like digital transformation and the recent article that came out on Harvard Business Review, very similar statistics — 80% of those digital transformation initiatives are failing to generate the results as expected. So I think the bottom line there is that change is hard, especially in these large enterprise organizations, really in any organization.

I mean, we’re changing the thoughts and behaviors of human beings, which crosses the employee experience over into that customer experience, and it’s difficult and it takes time. But there are models and there are things that we can do to enhance and increase our opportunities for success.

So I’m going to talk about my approach, the way I like to think about customer experience transformation in these four pillars of leadership and strategy, voice of customer, experience engineering, and employee experience. Taking that holistic approach, but then also wrapping that around in the John Kotter model.

You might remember from many years ago, the leading change methodology from John Kotter, the eight-stage model, which is still so good and so true, and has been so heavily validated over these years. I think his model is about as old as NPS. I think both of them have the ability at this point to have a driver’s license. But that doesn’t make them any less valuable. It just means they’re that much more validated, I guess.

That first area of leadership and strategy. The very first John Kotter principle is to establish a sense of urgency. I think that’s so critical as we approach this movement of customer experience inside of the organization.

It’s really easy to just try and plug ahead forward before we’ve really earned the right to do the work and the sense of getting others to care and making them want it, making them want to do customer experience and them naturally being the executives and those that are going to be investing in the program.

But even beyond that, just the sense of urgency inside of the organization — we need to focus on this and customer experience is not just something that we give lip service to, it’s something we need to do and do very well. So there’s many ways to establish that sense of urgency.

It could be around your competition and the fact that those that are excelling in customer experience are gobbling up the market. The Forrester Index makes that very clear. Other ROI statistics out there show that CX laggards are losing, whereas those that are focusing on customer experience and doing well are winning and the return is there.

So that is certainly a way to motivate and to collect that sense of urgency, or it could be a little bit more localized. Just having true insight into your customers and who it is that you are serving and how you can serve them even better. And that can absolutely be used to create a sense of urgency.

So then springboarding off of that, once people have an appetite for the work, the next step in that Kotter model, which I believe is just so powerful, is setting up a change coalition. And having a true CX change coalition that represents the different functions inside of the organization is essential. I really don’t think this work can be done if you take the customer experience function and put it over here peripherally to the core of the organization.

How are those individuals, how is that function, that team, if it doesn’t exist in the very core, if it’s not infiltrating and embedding itself in everything, how are they going to influence change? And that CX change coalition is your ability to do that and to influence change in every area.

And I love how Jeanne Bliss talks about the power core and identifying where in the organization change is coming from today. Who holds the purse in terms of the money? Who are the decision makers inside of the organization that have that strategic backing? In many cases, especially recently, it’s IT — information technology — because they’ve got the digital transformation projects.

So therefore they’ve got the money, they’ve got the strategic backing, and now they become this driver inside of the organization. Instead of trying to come in as a customer experience team or function or person, and just drop the customer right in the middle of the organization, which is just not really realistic, the idea of taking the power core and turning them into an ally and making them a central part of the CX change coalition is better, it’s more reasonable, and the changes last when you can get others to buy into those changes in a meaningful way and to help you to drive them.

Instead of you trying to point fingers at everybody and get them to do things, they are taking the strategy, they are taking the importance of customer experience and being an evangelist for that inside of their team and beyond. So think about that power core and think about your CX change coalition inside of that leadership and strategy.

So then thinking about voice of customer. Historically, CX professionals — at least from what I can kind of see and tell — there’s almost like this false finish line at this voice of customer concept, where what CX was is we would generate the insights around voice of customer. We would understand what’s going on with the customers via a survey program, or hopefully even a little more than just a survey program, and then have a report that was generated.

But that’s almost like a false finish line — as long as we established that NPS score and generated a report of, well, here’s what we could and should do to make our customers happier, the customer experience work was over. That certainly is not the case anymore.

Organizations expect us to not only be able to identify those changes and those priorities, but to make them, and to lead the charge and lead the strategy around making them. So it requires a highly skilled group of individuals to make this effort happen. We’ve got that analytical piece, but then also this motivating, this strategic element of taking those changes and making them happen inside of the organization.

So the next area of the Kotter model is removing the barriers, which if you read into that, it’s really about effort reduction and taking those things that are going to eliminate energy from your program and removing them, making them into an ally, or displacing them, or reducing their impact.

And I really think that we should be focusing more and more on effort reduction — not just for our customers, but also for our internal employees. I think it’s so valuable and powerful to be measuring effort inside of the organization. How easy is it for you to facilitate a quick and easy resolution for your customers? What a powerful question to be asking. And the insights that come out of that will allow us to identify what are those barriers to the customer experience and to actively work to remove those.

And I love Annette Franz on this topic and many others. It’s kind of funny how the phrase “CX program” has become kind of a bad word. And I think it’s actually a good thing that it is. I was actually teaching a class recently and I started having to put a dollar in a jar every time I called it a CX program, because it’s really so much more than a program. And if we try to make it a project or a program, it’s not going to have the long-term impact that we need to be able to have to drive real lasting results.

And customer experience, it’s the type of thing that requires a very long-term view. It’s absolutely a marathon, not a sprint. So the more that we look at it as a movement, the better off we will be. I just think that’s critical.

And the part in the John Kotter model that’s next is to enlist a volunteer army. And a volunteer army is not going to enlist in a project. But when you start to talk about the movement and the power around making people’s lives better and easier and injecting life into the business through doing the right thing for your customers, that is something that people can intrinsically get behind. And you can enlist your army of volunteers to take these voice of customer insights and generate real change, which leads us into this experience engineering category.

So next in the John Kotter model is generate short-term wins. So when we can take voice of customer insights and have people and resources that can actually make us successful in taking those insights and generating real change, we can knock some stuff out. We can show real value. And when we’re smart about the way we do that and identify where are some areas that we can collect some real momentum, we can have some quick wins and we can demonstrate to people the value of customer experience and our ability to be successful in it.

I think a lot of movements around customer experience fail because we don’t identify the ability for us to collect momentum in the short-term, in the beginning of the program. We think about that two to three year strategy, which is so essential. But in order for people to continue the appetite to get there, we have to have milestones that lead us through to that stage of success.

And then the next in the Kotter model is sustain acceleration. It’s exactly that. It’s how can you put the milestones out there to get people excited and keep them excited about the work. And I think it’s so funny and so brilliant how John Kotter talks about not celebrating victory too early.

I feel like so many change initiatives fail because we celebrate them in such a way that it takes all the energy and all the momentum out of the program. I could think back to so many times where I’ve seen this happen inside of organizations and I didn’t know what it was. It seemed good at the time. It seemed like the right thing — even the natural thing to do when something good would happen — that you would celebrate that thing.

But if you’re not careful in the way that that’s celebrated, instead of saying, look at this milestone that we’ve achieved, here’s the next thing we get to do together, and here’s what that’s going to culminate into and keeping people into that program and the energy up — if you put a bow on it, then where’s the opportunity to contribute? Where’s the glory in that to continue that effort moving forward? And people will absolutely start to tap out because they’ll feel like, well, we can check that box and move on with something else.

And then, of course, last but not least, this all has to be embedded in the employee experience. And I love seeing job titles now that represent a true scope, not only into customer experience, but also into employee experience, with people realizing that it is impossible to try and create a customer experience and focus on the customer when we are not super intentional about building a real experience, an authentic experience on the employee side that can then be mirrored to the customers.

So the next John Kotter step is institute real change. And it’s this idea of embedding these ideas, these principles into the organization in a strong enough, in a palpable enough way to overcome old habits. And I think we could all agree, having had to work through many things on our own in our own lives, it’s hard to change our thoughts and behaviors. We’re stuck in a pattern.

And inertia — if you look at Primed to Perform, which is just the best employee experience resource that I’ve read in a long time — they make it very clear and compelling that inertia is the most damaging thing inside of the organization. We’re gonna keep doing things because that’s the way that we do them. And that’s the rut that we’re in. We have to be able to break out of that. We have to overcome that.

And in order to do it, it takes a significant amount of intentionality in this long-term view and building up this model and working through these stages of customer experience and these stages that John Kotter talks about.

So use that as an encouragement that, if we take the good, patient approach to embed these changes and focus on our people first, earn the right with them, show them the value of it, have them slowly begin to change their thoughts and behaviors, that’s how we create a true, authentic customer experience that will last.

It can be done, and once it is done, it is not something that can be replicated quickly by your competition or anyone else, because it’s difficult, and most people give up somewhere along the way. Those organizations that can follow these stages and take that marathon view and embed the changes inside of their employees, not only are they just a better place to work and are attracting the top talent, but they’re gobbling up the market share. Those are the organizations that are excelling, and those are the ones that are winning.

Think about those stages — leadership and strategy, voice of customer, experience engineering, employee experience — and then think about how those can be followed using the John Kotter model, or one of the models that Diane had talked about. However you approach the change, just know that it’s going to take time, but it is absolutely possible, and it’s the greatest thing that you could do for your organization and for your employees. So thank you for listening today, and everybody have a wonderful rest of your week.

Well, podcast listeners, there you have it. Special guest Nate Brown sharing insights on how to realize customer-centric transformation. A summary of Nate’s insights from this episode are available in the show notes, along with links to Nate’s CX Accelerator, which is a fantastic online community for CX professionals around the world. It’s a great place to learn, find encouragement, and connect with others who share the common bond of creating exceptional experiences.

I’ll also include links to Nate’s CX Primer, which is essentially a customer experience wiki with all kinds of great information about customer experience topics. And if you’re on Twitter, you can follow Nate. His handle is @CustomerIsFirst.

As mentioned at the top of the show, I have a special promotion for those interested in pursuing intensive online training in the field of customer experience. CX University offers a broad array of e-learning options that you can access anywhere and anytime. Their offering includes practice tests for the CCXP exam, and their courses are an accredited resource from the Customer Experience Professionals Association, meaning that their materials have been reviewed and vetted by the Association for alignment to the six core competencies that are in the exam.

And what’s better is that all this is available on a flexible monthly subscription plan, meaning that you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars to get started. As of the time of publishing this episode, plans including CX courses and practice exam questions start at just per month. And listeners of this podcast can use the discount code Podcast10 to get 10% off the first month’s subscription and help support the show.

I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX mini masterclass. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is @JuliaAhlfeldt and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.