← Insights Unlocked
Insights Unlocked
Why trust drives great customer experience with Mark Slatin
00:26:21
Discover why trust is the foundation of great customer experience, with expert insights from Mark Slatin on building loyalty, empathy, and CX leadership.
Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:02]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we're joined by customer experience expert Mark Slayton, host of the Delighted Customer Podcast and creator of the Trusted Guide Framework. Mark shares why trust is at the heart of every great customer experience, how to get executive buy in on your CX program, and why empathy, not just data, closes the experience gap. Enjoy the show.
- [00:28]
Bobby Meixner
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concepts to execution.
- [00:47]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal Content Marketing Manager at User Testing, and joining us today as host is UserTesting's Bobby Meixner, Vice President of Solution Marketing. Welcome, Bobby.
- [01:01]
Mark Slayton
Hello, everyone.
- [01:04]
Nathan Isaacs
And our guest today is Mark Slayton. Mark is a nationally recognized customer experience leader, educator, and host of the Delighted Customers podcast. He's the creator of the Trusted Guide Framework and a professor of practice at Michigan State University, where he helps the next generation of CX leaders excel. Welcome to the show, Mark.
- [01:25]
Mark Slayton
Hey, thanks so much, both of you for having me on the show. It is truly an honor to be here.
- [01:30]
Mark, you've worked with CX leaders across industries to help them transform how they approach their customer experience. Tell us a little bit about what sparked your passion for cx and why do you think it's such a powerful lever for business transformation?
- [01:48]
Well, thanks. Thanks, Bobby. I think I started my career in sales and sales management and spent probably the better part of three decades on the other side of the desk trying to do my best to make a living as a salesperson. And I recognize certain patterns of the successful salespeople and the successful businesses that I work for and competed against. And one of those things, or the biggest thing in the center of that was trust. They were highly trusted by their customers and the brands were highly trusted as well. And so I think to me, that led me toward joining the Trusted Advisor Associates and got certified as one of the people working on their team to deliver their training. And then I got connected with Charlie Green, who wrote the book called the Trusted Advisor or co authored it. And so that influenced my career going forward. I ended up working for a bank in the Mid Atlantic for about a decade and launched and led their CX program. So that's a little bit about my background. I think it's a powerful lever to answer your second question, because I think most organizations definitely care about loyalty, loyalty of their customers, but many of them don't really have a systematic way to operationalize cx, the customer experience. And I do believe trust is at the center of it all. But you do need to think about, okay, how does this happen? Who is the one person in your organization who would be an advocate for the customer if you don't have a CX leader? And so I think the reason it's powerful is because if you do this well, and the best companies in the world do this well, they have a systematic way to operationalize it. They, they build it, they embed it into the culture, the, the way the business operates on a day to day basis.
- [03:55]
So companies may have a choice as to whether or not they have a systematic way to operationalize this. They have that choice. But you've said that every customer has an experience whether they actually design for it or not. Why do you think so many organizations still fail to actually intentionally design those experiences? And what's at stake if they don't?
- [04:21]
Right. I think to, to give credit where credit's due. Lou Corbone who wrote Clued in, included that, that comment or that quote in, in his book, which is your customers are going to have an experience. It's a question of how well, how well it's managed. And so if you don't, then they're going to have randomly good experiences or even great experiences. But that difference between consistently great experiences, especially amongst your best customers, your most valued customers, can make all the difference in the world. So like question you might want to ask is for every 1% improvement in pick the CX metric, what would that mean to customer loyalty and in turn to your bottom line?
- [05:04]
I was actually just at Commerce next and the one of the quotes that one of the keynote speakers said is every customer's best customer experience is the new minimum. Right. So that, that's really what folks expect on an ongoing basis. Mark, in your trusted guide framework you emphasize trust as foundational to see leadership. What role does actually listening to customers versus assuming what they want play in building trust?
- [05:42]
Yeah, so I think, I think listening is key and I think that most companies think they're doing a good job of it, but they're really not. And listening should be a strategy. It should be a way part of that framework that we were talking about. I design and build two courses now. One and both of them are centered around this very topic which is how do you build trust within your organization as a CX leader? One is becoming a trusted guide and that's on demand and the other one's a trusted guide roadmap. Which both have trust frameworks in them. And what I learned is that we often as CX leaders fall into what I call the hero's trap. And the hero's trap is for a variety of reasons, we can talk another whole podcast on why, but we fall into this trap and we what it does, what it means essentially is that you're taking charge, you're pushing through your agenda and you're doing it oftentimes on your own instead of inviting people in and taking a collaborative approach, understanding, like strategically, who are my key stakeholders and what can I do to deeply understand their needs to make an impact and have them form sort of a guiding coalition to get my work done. So I think, I think in order to design those experiences, you need to have people on your team. And that means building trust. That means listening deeply to them. And the same is true for customers. It's part of this framework is essentially any good customer experience strategy involves, you know, designing the product, listening, maybe even listening before you design the product and designing it, and listening deeply to customers. Not only about not just getting NPS data or customer satisfaction data, but to understand first, what do you hope your customers will feel, think, say and do regarding the experience they have with your brand? Answer those questions, then make any design changes you need to do, remeasure, measure again and figure out what needs to be tweaked and listen again. And so it's just a cycle that should happen strategically making sure you understand the deepest needs. And what keeps those customers mentioned the word loyalty earlier. What keeps them coming back and telling their friends about it? And if you don't really listen deeply, you can't really, you're just guessing at what that information is.
- [08:28]
So you mentioned the importance of having people on your team. Obviously folks are working with a number of key stakeholders. When you coach CX leaders, what do you say to somebody who's actually struggling to get executive buy in for those types of customer interactions or conversations?
- [08:47]
So that's a great question, I think, and that is why I designed the training programs, is because it is a common challenge that CX leaders have is trying to get executive buy in. And I think the easy answer, and one that you see on social media all the time is just prove the ROI of cx. Just prove the roi. And I think people mean, I'm not sure what they mean, but I think they mean the financial analysis that says if you do this, you get that in return. I think it's really important to have some, as a leader, have some of those Arrows in your quiver to understand things like customer lifetime value or share of wallet metrics or even you can use NPS as a way to, you know, percentage of improvement in nps, an impact on the dollars that, that a company may get, either in revenue or income, however you want to measure it. But I think ultimately people are people and the C suite, believe it or not, are people. And each one has a different set of things that motivate them. It's part of what we build into the course is how do you understand the external, internal and philosophical needs of each of your stakeholders once you've mapped out the landscape of who those people are and what drives them, what role they have, what influence they have in the decision making process. So when I say external, I mean what do they say overtly is their goals? What are they trying to accomplish? Your COO might say we want to have the smoothest operation amongst all of our peer group and operate efficiently. And the folks in finance might say we want to get the most return or bang for our buck and make sure our financials look good, et cetera. So you go down the list, but then there's the, that's what they say externally. But then internally is like what is it that may be keeping them up at night? What is it, what is it that they, they feel like is underneath the surface that they really want to get accomplished that they're not? And it could have something to do with internal politics, it could have something to do with I need more budget. It could have something, it could have a whole bunch of things. But what internally are they not expressing that you have to build trust with in order to get those answers? Typically, I mean often, maybe there's some people willing to share that right away, but typically it takes a little while to get to know the people so they'll share that. And then lastly to go one level deeper is what is the philosophical needs of that person? And that's saying how do they feel the world ought to exist or what should or should not be the case? For example, I worked at a bank, so we should have a more up to date operating system could hear that, probably even including the COO who I work directly for. But we don't because of this, this and this. We should have a better way for our contact center to respond quicker to customers. We should have more budget dollars for marketing our bank. So there's all sorts of things. Each one is an individual and understanding each one and viewing that as that's my goal is my goal is to really Understand each one of the people who I consider key stakeholders, what are their external, internal and philosophical needs.
- [12:10]
So understanding those key stakeholders, obviously different metrics matter. One of the biggest hurdles can be showing ROI on research and testing. How do you recommend CX leaders frame the value of talking to customers and in the terms that some of these executives actually care about?
- [12:30]
Yeah. So first of all, I'm a big fan of what you guys do. And I've had a chance to be involved in using user testing. And I think that it's just so critical to have a deeper understanding of what the customers especially I say your best customers, your most valued customers. You have to start there. You have to understand, you know, It's a. Peter, Dr. Peter Fader from Wharton, was a guest on my show, talked about the 8020 rule. And that's generally true that it's different for each organization, but that means basically 20% of your income, however you measure income, is coming from the top 20% of your customers. So it starts there. And once you understand that, to get a deeper understanding and not guessing, many, many of your listeners would have heard of the experience gap, which, you know, Bain had, had done a study a while back and they said essentially that the difference between what executives felt was 80% of them felt like we were superior to our competition. But actually their customers, only 8% of them felt that that was accurate. Whatever the number is, it's a huge gap, right. Whatever you believe it is today, because that was done a while ago, still a huge gap in between. So you'd be guessing at your customers, as I said earlier, not just what they're. They're doing, because it's important to watch what they're doing with their feet, no doubt, and what their activity is with your organization, those leading indicators. But nothing compares with hearing from them directly and getting their feedback on how they feel about their experience with your brand. You can try and pick it up through signals and data and, and we're getting better and better through AI and other tools to be able to connect dots of different activities. So they're clicking over here, they're clicking a number of times, then they're shifting channels, are calling in. There's some data that you can pick up, but nothing quite matches that. And so if you said 20, if my, my 80% of my profits were coming from my top 20% of my customers, wouldn't you want to know what it is that's motivating them not just to buy and repeat purchase, but what gets them to say, this is my Brand. I'm an advocate for this brand. I would recommend this brand and will recommend this brand to friends, colleagues and neighbors. So for me, it's. It's understanding that it's really not negotiating. And going back to what you and I talked about earlier, Bobby, is, you know, Lou said if you don't really, you're going to. They're going to have an experience with you. It's a question of how random it is or how well managed it is. And part of the management of it is getting a deep understanding of what it is from your customers. And you can't do that without really hearing from them directly.
- [15:27]
Yeah, they're going to have that experience. And let's hope there's not a big experience gap. Right. The one you mentioned is, was quite significant. So closing the experience gap then, between what companies think they're delivering and what customers actually experience, that can be obviously a real business differentiator. What makes the light bulb go off? What helps executives finally get it?
- [15:53]
You know, there could be a number of factors involved in what gets the executive team to get it. What you don't want it to be is a burning fire, which we've seen. I've seen organizations hire a head of CX to respond to some horrible information they got from their customer base. That's really. That's a reactive way to do it. In one word, to me, the way they get it is empathy. At the bank that I work for in the Mid Atlantic, we work with our learning and professional development team to create a year of empathy, a series of events that involves everybody in the organization. And one particular set of events that we did was with the executives, and we called it executive listening. And that was an example of executives rotating through the call center, literally putting on the headset, sitting next to a call center representative and watching them interact. And it was painful. It was painful for many of them to see that they had to go into seven different systems to get an answer for a customer. And in one particular case, it was if they asked a certain kind of question, it was guaranteed they couldn't answer it on the call. They'd have to call them, wait and get a call back. Same was true for the branches. They went to go visit on the platform and spend time in the branches and see firsthand what it was like. So not just from the customers and the pain, the friction the customers felt, but also the people serving them. And so that particular event, we had a proposal in the works to upgrade. Everybody knew that the operating system, that the core operating System in particular that involved the call center, involved the sales team, whether that be frontline people in the branch or relationship managers calling on commercial business people. It was clunky, it was old, and it was painful for customers. But more importantly, the frontline people wanted to service and please the customers they were handcuffed by going through the year of empathy, in particular executive listening, a $3 million upgrade in software essentially took literally a month to do, which it had been in the burner for three years. But they just didn't. They saw data, they saw information that wasn't enough. So for me, it was walking in their shoes, which really made the difference.
- [18:21]
You're saying get feedback from your customers, but also the people that talk to them. Walk, Walk in their shoes. On your podcast, the Delighted Customer, you featured CX leaders who turned simple customer feedback into pretty breakthrough moments. What's one example that really stuck out with you when listening to customers actually led to some unexpected innovation or perhaps a course correction?
- [18:50]
So I will say that I've learned so much from all the podcast episodes that I've done, including Baran or Kel, from your organization, which will be coming out shortly. I learned so much from them, so much collective wisdom, so many years. One that stands out, and it's hard to choose was Horst Schultze, who was the co founder of Ritz Carlton and president of Ritz Ritz Carlton. And he developed a set of principles for them called the 20 Basics, which was based on the golden rule. And it was really a blueprint for how to treat customers for Ritz Carlton employees. And those 20 things were ways in which the organization, whether you're frontline or not frontline, should be treating customers. And it was clear. It was clear. Brene Brown says clear is kind. This is clear. And so more importantly, when you think about change management and what makes change, one of the key factors in change management, if you develop a set of principles or a methodology that reinforces the behaviors that you would like from your employees. The reinforcement piece was done at Ritz by having a daily standup. And each day every Ritz Carlton around the globe would take the same principle and discuss it amongst the group. How did you live out this principle today? How did you. How will you live it out? What opportunities do you see tomorrow for living this out? Can you share some examples? And they celebrated those examples. So, you know, including Horst himself would go to locations and sit in on this daily huddle. What better way to really hear from the frontline staff and celebrate and honor those kind of behaviors that you'd like to see. And also I would add this isn't a one way street here. So it's you could get feedback going back up the channel saying this is friction as the examples I shared for just a moment ago for our bank, getting that $3 million software package approved for an upgrade, getting things done that need to get prioritized through leadership by hearing feedback on these daily, these daily huddles. So I think that one kind of stuck with me now.
- [21:13]
Mark, we rarely let anybody get out of this podcast without talking about AI. From your vantage point, what's the most exciting or maybe the most misunderstood thing about how AI is, is influencing customer experience today?
- [21:29]
Yeah, I'm with you Bobby. I hear AI questions asked all the time and rightly so. It's a new frontier for us. It's a lot of unknowns and I am probably the least smart guest you had on AI. So start with qualifying. Put a disclaimer on myself and my own knowledge. I've had a lot of people on my show who are way smarter than me in general, but specific to AI. And I think leaders in general are still trying to figure this one out. I had an executive from Salesforce, Phil Nanis, who is the executive vice president of customer success for them, and that's a good example because salesforce.com is focusing on trust first. And I think that means integrity of the data and how you use AI in the application. Make sure that there aren't unforeseen risks that you're putting in that could mess things up for customers and employees alike. So I think that's really smart. I think going back to our earlier conversation is when you think about a CX framework and strategy and the goal to improve the experience, especially for your best customers, deeply understanding how you can listen better to your customers, what they want, if it can help you design or deliver that experience in a more effective way. By using AI to get metrics and measurements that we couldn't have access before, either because it was too difficult or it was too costly to get. How can you listen better, how can you then measure better and then how can you make adjustments better? I think one of the, I guess, dangers I would point out is if you're just looking for a cost play, there's nothing wrong with trying to reduce cost to improve the bottom line. But be careful that you're not diminishing the customer experience in some way when you're just reducing costs. So ultimately you do want to free up resources to design, deliver and measure and you want to listen better to customers and improve the way that you can embed this into the way you do business every day.
- [23:35]
If you look ahead, what skills and mindsets do you think will be most critical for the next generation of professionals?
- [23:43]
I think one of the low hanging fruits there is to change your mindset. Speaking of mindsets from nps, Voice of the Customer Manager from Journey Mapping Expert from all the things that we do, the activities we do to think about yourself as a change leader, right? That is a big part of what you need to do and that means understanding what change management is, understanding what it means to lead change, understanding what it means for yourself as how trustworthy you are. And that means understanding the factors of trust. It we talked earlier about being a hero versus a guide. I think that's going to be critical is building this guiding coalition by understanding who your key stakeholders are and developing those relationships to not just do it alone, but do it in a collaborative way.
- [24:43]
Mark, thank you so much for being on the show. Really enjoyed our conversation. How does somebody learn more about you? Your consulting and thought leadership or the Delighted Customer Podcast?
- [24:56]
Thanks so much. I think yeah, one is to listen to the podcast. We just passed a million downloads of the show after about three years of doing this and we're recognized by Forbes as a top 10 business trending. So if you're interested in anything to do with delighting your customers and we've had great guests as I mentioned before, even people from user testing on the show. So so grateful to to visit. We're on all the major platforms. Delighted customers I mentioned. There are two training programs. One is available through the CXPA site and I'll give you a link so you can put it in the show Notes. The website is empoweredcx.com and lastly is the Trusted Guide Roadmap Masterclass which is 5 weeks. You can find all that information on the website.
- [25:46]
Awesome. Thank you Mark.
- [25:49]
Bobby Meixner
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already. Don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.