CXChronicles Podcast 170 with Ilenia Vidili, Customer Experience & Success Expert

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #170 we welcomed Ilenia Vidili, Customer Centricity Advisor, Speaker & Author based in Milan, Italy.

Ilenia has over a decade of experience in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies. She works with her clients to close the gap between internal and external stakeholders  to find new opportunities ripe for customer centricity optimization.

Ilenia is currently the founder of The Smarter Crew, a customer-centricity consultancy and training company helping a plethora of businesses in Europe to close those gaps by thinking differently, combating inefficient processes, turning product mentalities into people mentalities, and improving their overall customer focus.

In this episode of CXCP, Ilenia and Adrian chat through how she has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout her career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked across her customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #170 Highlight Reel:**

1.  How digital experience has evolved & shifted over the last 10 years
2.  Why Customer journey mapping & personas should be your jump off point
3.  How do you know if your business has too many SaaS solutions?
4.  Does process fuel your ability to train, support & grow your team?
5.   Contextualizing customer & employee feedback to fuel growth!

Huge thanks to Ilenia for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring her team's work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Ilenia Vidili

Click here to learn more about The Smarter Crew

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future customer focused business leaders to tune into our weekly podcast. 

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel with all of our video episodes & customer focused business leader content!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

#170 -- Illenia Vidilli Customer Centricity Advisor, Speaker & Author

Speaker 1 (00:00:02) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the cxchronicles podcast. I'm your host agent breaches Ana super excited. Today. We have Alania Bewdley joining the show. So Alaina, why don't you say hello to the CX nation? 

Speaker 2 (00:00:15) - Hello. Thank you so much for having me, Adrian, such a pleasure to be here and hello everybody. Whoever is listening is, um, it's amazing to, to be interviewed by you. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:26) - Well, no, I'm excited to have you. And I think obviously it's everybody listening to the show knows we are just constantly on this global search because Elena is joining us from, from Italy today, but we're always trying to just find what other customer focused business leaders across the world are doing, what they're thinking about, where are they investing? How are they, what are some of the connections in the clients and the, and some of the customers that they're working with seeing. So I'm pumped to have you on the show today, and I'm really excited to kind of have you share your story and talk about some of the awesome things that you guys are doing, um, over, over on, on your side of the pond. Um, why don't you start off and just set the stage and then to give us a sensor, how did you get into this whole customer experience, customer success, customer centricity world. How did you get, how did you get into this game? 

Speaker 2 (00:01:09) - Ooh, it's a long story. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:13) - I'm kidding. Well, it's all started after I graduated, I joined NEC corporation, um, in marketing precisely in corporate marketing, but we, we basically, um, I focused on the facial recognition softwares, um, that we used to sell years ago. And, um, basically this, um, it, it was called Neo face is actually still called near face. But, um, but yeah, something that in Europe we don't use anymore because, uh, European union stopped with the facial recognition software's for private reasons. Um, so basically we used to sell this Neo face software and, um, what are used to, do you see, uh, optimize, um, patients, uh, experiences because he used to recognize whoever would enter, um, let's say medical, um, surgery, or, um, a VIP kind of environment or a big media hotel, um, this kind of stuff, or even a retail. So you would find that these, um, software's everywhere basically, even in shopping malls. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:22) - So these softwares would recognize the people, uh, they face your features, their, their age, their demographics, their emotions, and based on that, they would personalize their experience within the environment that they would be on. Um, for example, if they were in a, um, in a shopping mall, their software would recognize the face of the person looking at that at a digital signage and would personalize the advert would personalize the, um, whatever, like any product or any, um, um, how can I say any path or any journey within the mall that they, they would potentially do? So basically the software would optimize the customer experience, patient experience, citizen experience as well. Any experience, um, also would recognize the VIP's is so, um, would would say, for example, the salutation was personalized based on the person entering the, the hotel or a, as I said, a medical surgery or a hospital or anything like that. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:32) - And he was great until obviously the European union stopped, um, allowing these, these software facial recognition softwares to, um, to be used, um, anywhere. Right? So, so basically that's how I, I started in customer experience while understanding customer experience. Although I was working in marketing, then my, um, experiencing corporate marketing carried on for years and up until I realized that corporations and multinationals that have a huge gap between the boardroom, the people like the employees and the customers, there are huge gaps that widens, uh, the, um, the experience like the intangible experience with the employees, but also the external experience with customers. And, um, and obviously like my values to, as a person would clutch a lot with the values of the, of those particular companies. So that's why I decided to quit my job my corporate job years ago. And, uh, and then I decided to start my own, um, my own little consultancy company, um, which is all based about on optimizing the employee experience end the customer experience based on my previous experience. Of course, 

Speaker 1 (00:04:58) - I love that. That's awesome. So, number one, hold on. We've got a, we got a few things to unpack. I think.

Speaker 1 (00:05:02) - Um, that beginning part of your, of your journey here and the facial recognition software, and thinking about like this entire, all these different experience, that's whether it's patient side or retail side, or it's interesting. Cause I do remember when that was really hot topic and there was a lot of, um, there's a lot of really firm opinions, some, some thinking that it was an excellent way of modernizing the future and having a full snapshot of what everybody wants. And then I remember the other folks that were, that it thought it was, uh, almost like an invasion of privacy, if you will, like 

Speaker 1 (00:05:32) - Personalization of brand, like almost as if it was like, um, almost like it was like cheating in the game, if you are cheating in the marketing game. But I think that's a super cool place to start in this spot because you guys must've been thinking about the entire journey piece, but then definitely hadn't been thinking about the technology. Cause I imagine, you know, when you start thinking about malls and, um, uh, hospitals and airports and all these different places where you've got a lot of different faces walking through that technology must have been pretty interesting to just be a part of thinking about how to leverage the technology, how to utilize the technology and how to tie it into the experience. So that's a super cool starting point. And then lastly, so I love, and there's so many awesome guests we have in the show that kind of got to that point where after they saw a lot of the stuff with big businesses or some of the early companies that they were working within their careers, you decided, as you just said to go start your own business and start helping a bunch of companies, uh, with this type of work, what was that? 

Speaker 1 (00:06:23) - What was that initial, uh, that initial scary period like for you, Elena? How was it like those, let's say the first year, getting your business up and running and starting to try to find clients and working with different customers. What was that like? 

Speaker 2 (00:06:35) - Oh, well it was a little bit of a mess, especially because as I would come from corporations, you know, when, when you work in a multinationals, you do your own little bit, right? So you don't know anything about finance, anything about accountancy, um, accountabilities, they can this kind of thing, or even like sales, I didn't know how to sell anything, you know, because I used to work in marketing and customer experience and optimizing the experience of Setons and passengers and, and customers, as I said, so I didn't know anything about all the other things that are part of, um, a company basically. And I had to learn everything from scratch, even doing my own websites because initially of course the budget was very tight. So I started with doing everything on my own, on my, on my own. So I basically self taught myself a lot of things. Yes. So initially was a little bit of a mess because of all of these things, new things that had to learn, you know, and, um, hi to join all the points and all the dots and, uh, yeah, get running. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:49) - It's definitely as any, as any entrepreneur, any founder or any of the startup leaders that are, uh, really kind of founded some of their businesses and their teams that are listening to this, they're all gonna completely, um, completely that in the beginning, man, it is like, it is so difficult. And then it's like, you are, as you just mentioned, you're wearing way more hats than you ever thought, even when you knew going into that, it would be crazy. And then you're at the learning part. I love that you bring this up because for a lot of founders and a lot of, um, you know, builders of tomorrow's companies, you are on a constant learning voyage. It's really crazy. It's like every damn day or every single week, just when you thought you like learned a whole other set of playbooks or a whole other, you know, skew of, of information that you needed to know, you come back to work on Monday, then you realize, oh wait, now I've got to learn this next. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:36) - So, but I'll tell you what it's part of the fun of the journey. And I also think for so many startup founders and business leaders and business executives who are building these companies, that is, I think, where that intimate, um, involvement, awareness, appreciation, and just general understanding of customers. That's what sets them apart. And that's what sets them up to be able to be successful and build these companies into something that, that, that taught me to multiple customers and multiple employees are I get to come around as they build it. So that's awesome. Um, Elena, I'd love to, I'd love to kind of jump into the first CX pillar. Talk about some of the different teams that you get to work with today, or talk about some of the different things that you're learning while working with some of these customers that you have and working with some of these clients that you have when it comes to that first pillar of team. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:23) - Oh, of course. So one of the things that I see a lot, and this is a common pattern that I see in companies, regardless of the size, regardless of the sector, is that Avery apartment and every, um, seniority has their own perspective of things, but nobody has a customer perspective of things. And that is a huge problem for a companies that say that they are customer centric or say that they care about the customer.

Speaker 2 (00:09:59) - But in fact they are disconnected or, um, the apartments are very disconnected, um, between each other. And, and therefore it's very difficult to put the customers at the center. So that's what I see a lot, these dates. And, um, so for example, like the, the ballroom has their own perspective and customer care agents or call center agents. They have their own perspective and they see, um, the world from their perspective. So it's really difficult to, to put the customer at the center, if we all have a different view of the customer or the customer experience. Um, that's what I see. And that's what basically I am, um, in the, my job, ease my job based to optimize this, this view and to put the customer at the center of the organization and try to join everybody, to see this, to see things from the customer perspective in stat. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:55) - I love that. I think, you know, I know, I know I talk about this a lot in the show, but like when certain business leaders or executives sort of roll their eyes at what type of value, um, uh, really excellent customer journey mapping, um, project or initiative, or even better a task force can bring to any company, whether you're a multinational or whether you're a small scrappy startup is exactly what you just said, Delaney. Cause if you think about it, some of the basic principles of most customer journey maps, not only are you identifying which teams are involved with touch points is a customer feeling what are in play, consternation points, what are customer consternation points, and then where are their opportunities to build or where those milestone moments that you can really kind of knock out of the park. Because if you understand that the CX side and you understand the X side, you really is, it's almost like companies need to be thinking about or have somebody, um, that's constantly thinking about the balance of your employees experiences and your customer experiences, because the two do compliment each other. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:55) - And I know, I know that in our world and they, you know, there's more and more and more people that are getting loud and proud about this idea of you got it. The only way of world-class CX is if you have world-class IEX, you have to have people that are completely aligned. They understand why they're there. They understand the role, they know exactly what's expected of them. And the customer is going to feel that type of a, of a team every single day of the week. They're going to feel that they're well-informed, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're motivated, they're involved in it. So it's it's I totally agree. I think that's one of the easiest things that any business leader or executive can really kind of focus on. Um, but before we move forward, I'd love to, has there been any, either team exercises or has there been any team dynamics or just general ways that you've seen some of these teams lead or manage that are really kind of stuck out, stuck out to you over your journeys? There's one or two things that you've kind of seen that could be a really, um, you know, easy way for some of our listeners to kind of take that bit, a bit of knowledge to kind of bring it back into their own business. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:50) - Oh, for me, like the best thing you can do for teens to really understand what customer feel, um, east to actually let them put their selves in the customer shoes is so make them do the exercises, the right exercises to actually see the customer journey and to feel the customer journey. So like, you know, when we talk a lot about empathy, the MC will not be understood enough unless we do, um, no, just the customer journey mapping, but you actually go there and feel what the customer is doing. Um, yeah, exactly. So, um, you go into the retail store, for example, and you walk in that retail store, you talk to the person who's serving the customer and you actually do. And, um, um, try to do exactly what the customer is doing. Exactly. That, that I feel is empathy. You know, that, I think that's basically when, um, employees, but not only employees like the whole organization should be doing this. You know, I also have executives, I talk to executives who believe that they are customer centric and then never talk to our customer. So 

Speaker 1 (00:14:13) - That's what 

Speaker 2 (00:14:13) - I, I know that's what I'm saying. So for example, if right now I'm doing a training for a telecommunication company, which is one of the most difficult sector out there, and I'm training 200 customer care agents. You know, they basically talk to customers every day. They know where the pain points are. They know what the, um, where the problems are. They know their customers. So the people are that tall. They don't really understand unless they pick up the phone and talk to customers. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:46) - And 

Speaker 2 (00:14:46) - That's why I think we all should be, uh, walking in the customer's shoes, but actually talking to customers every day, not just, um, customer care agents, you know what I mean? 

Speaker 1 (00:14:59) - I absolutely do. And I'll tell you, you know, Elena for me in my career, um, and many of the startups that I worked at in New York city, and then with all of the, all of the incredible customers that we're working with today at cxchronicles one of my absolute favorite things has always been customer listening tours. And it's, it's funny because like, it's really interesting to in your first, maybe your first 30 days, you get, you spend a lot of time with the team. And a lot of times the executive team and a lot of time with the product, just learning the internal stuff, and then nothing's better than the next 30 to 60 days. You get to go out and you start talking to customers who are actually using the product, using the service, absolutely leveraging the team to your point, leveraging the customer success or customer care team. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:38) - And it's, it's, it's always incredible to hear the differences, right? You hear like the internal, the internal items that are core focus areas, but then you go talk to customers and hear the external ones. And it's always interesting to kind of see what the differences or where the commonalities are. Cause that's where you can really begin to kind of dig in and, and kind of make sense of you're going to get the most bang for your buck and where you're going to be able to really, um, double down in terms of some of that success. So I love that. Um, and then I'd love to dive into the second CX pillar of tools, spend a couple of minutes talking about how you've kind of think about the way that today's customer experience and customer success leaders really need to kind of think about some of the technology that they bring into their business, bringing to their team, to serve their customers. I'd love to hear some of the things that you've learned, uh, around tools. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:24) - So yes, absolutely. Um, what I often see is that there are loads of nice and bright and shiny tools out there. What I see is that a lot of companies tend to rush around getting the new west, a piece of technology, you know, and placing it in there to optimize, um, whether it's a process, whether it's, uh, uh, optimized, um, a customer journey or a customer experience. I think right now there is a little bit too much automation out there. And a lot of the times, um, some of, some of my clients or, um, employees of companies lament the fact that there are too many softwares 

Speaker 1 (00:17:13) - To 

Speaker 2 (00:17:13) - Utilize. And first of all, that basically it creates too much friction because a lot of soft, some companies have owned the software's that don't really much newest. Uh, software's a new, it's a version of softwares and that creates friction and the friction always fall back into customer experience. Right? So, and also in the employee experience, because if you don't optimize the whole, um, technology stack stuck, then what happens? Your employees will be, um, feeling that, you know, and getting more stressed. A lot of employees say to me, a lot of, um, stakeholders, internal stakeholders say to me, well, we have too many softwares sometimes to help a customer with, um, something we have to open up like six or seven softwares, which is way too much 

Speaker 2 (00:18:07) - It's way too much. So I think we really need to step back a little bit and really think, what do we actually need in terms of technology and tools, because it's easy to get the newest software out there, um, in sorry, in place, but we really need to understand, do we actually meet your software? Is it helping our employees or is it helping our customers or is it making our stakeholders lives more difficult? So that's another thing that I see out there. Um, there is too much tendency to get and to optimize, sorry, not to optimize to yeah. To optimize as well, but to automate things and too much automation is actually decreasing the human touch. That customer is meat today, you know? So I think there should be a balance we need to reach the right balance between technology and the human factor. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:04) - Yeah. I, I absolutely loved that point, um, to, to, to follow up items on a number one. You just, absolutely. Now that we're, especially in the growth focus business sector, millennia, where like companies are you right there attracted to shiny new pieces of software, maybe they think that the differentiator or the competitive advantage is to avoid maybe an older seasoned mature solution. So they'll go get the new bright, shiny one. And then it presents a couple of different problems. Number one, you're absolutely right where so many of these companies, after a year, two years, three years of building and growing, they, they turn around and all of a sudden there's like 27 different tools that people are expected to use. There's a variety of problems with that. Number one is just your general budget, right? You're spending a lot of money that you probably don't need to be spending as a business, but number two, it's that, um, it's that focus? I know I talk about this all the time in the show, but like, boy, if you can have a customer success and a customer experience team, that's got three tools instead of 27 tools.

Speaker 1 (00:20:00) - Absolutely guarantee you they're going to, not only are they going to know exactly how to use those three tools exceptionally well, they're going to utilize them to their full capacity. You're probably gonna have a tremendous amount of excellent data in, or your data governance and structure and hygiene is going to be excellent going in. If you've got good information going in, you've got great information coming out. Um, and then the other thing is this, I love that you call it like customers feel that. And every one of us know, as an example of dealing with a huge cup, big companies are really bad at this dude. You can feel when their internal tools are failing you as a customer, whether it's, they don't see the last four phone calls that you had to call in, or they don't understand that it's like the third time this week that I'm calling about this problem, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:20:38) - And that type of stuff is like a huge opportunity for, for emerging companies. The other thing I loved that you brought up when you're building these things, guys, when you're building these companies and building these businesses and building your team, Elena, just now that if you have an opportunity to get a bunch of awesome humans who understand your product, understand your service, understanding just the general market position, you're going to try to take, if those folks can have phone calls and zoom calls and conversations with other humans that are paying for your products or your service, that's going to be how you figure out how to rinse, wash and repeat way quicker. And then frankly, you're right, that like, there's this race to automate when in reality, when you're growing a business, the reason why most businesses blow up is because early on they're crushing it with the personalization game. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:19) - There's people know exactly how to get through to the company. They there's a human element to it. So I love that you're calling some of the stuff out. And I think part of this is you really do need to there's and then the last part balance you're right, because I get it. Some of the listeners that are building companies, maybe they have massive scale or massive volume, or the only way their businesses is going to work to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or a million accounts or customers that's different than you have to leverage technology. You have to leverage some of those automated features, but find the balance, certainly find the balance. Right? 

Speaker 2 (00:21:46) - Exactly. And I find it like as a customer, sometimes I need to talk to someone, uh, to a real person for, you know, for whatever reason. And it's impossible to find the way to talk to a real person, right? Because there is way too much automation. Um, we need to understand and remember, well, we understand of course, but we need to remember that we are social tribes and we still need to talk to people who are just Roberts. So I think that should be the good balance, you know, between tech and, um, the human factor that we can definitely provide because, um, as a, you know, customer experience and it's, it, it was in customer service is really born from a little shop, basically. That's how you build the customer relationship. You can grow it with tools and that's great. You can grow the business tools and, and just better understand customers with data analytics and the tools and technology help you with that. But will you really need, is building and strengthening customer relationships with your people. That's how you, um, build and strengthen those relationships. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:02) - I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more and they need love to dive into the third six pillar of process. Um, and you, you kind of started to hit on some of this, but like when you were talking about some of the training efforts that your business is doing, and some of the different customers that you're working with, can you spend just a few minutes kind of talking about what are some of the things that worked really well for you when it comes to thinking about, uh, process, um, documentation or standard operating procedures or living playbooks, or how do you help some of these teams, or how do you work with some of the clients that you have to think about how people understand where they can go get the answers or where they can go get the information or how they can actually follow a process to be able to have, you know, a scalable, repeatable type of experience that you're building? 

Speaker 2 (00:23:44) - Oh, we do a lot of training. Um, so for us a training alongside with, uh, workshops and, um, um, mapping journeys, sorry, my cat is, uh, Yes. Um, yes, so it's a lot of training for us and a lot of workshops and, um, I mean, yeah, sorry. No, you're fine. Um, and, um, customer journey mapping. So for example, for this particular client, what I'm doing.

Speaker 2 (00:24:21) - I am. Um, w we, my team and I are doing a lot of customer journey mapping. So we actually test and do auditing on what's going on for the customer and from the customer perspective. And from that, then we present what we felt like as, as a potential customer, as an existing customer, as a, a repeating customer and or as a customer, who's abandoning the service for example. And then we present it to the employees and we find, we try to find, well, we find ways to optimize that experience. So we design, um, uh, future customer experience. So basically we understand the ex the existing, um, customer journey, and we design a future customer, um, journey of, um, how we wanted to be, um, in a better way, like, you know, improving it basically. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:19) - Yep. Do you find, do you find that typically when you kind of embark upon some of these journeys or when you're trying to dig into some of the process elements that are given company are really got a, going to be going to have to focus on to be able to find their success? What level of involvement from employees or from the team, or from the staff, do you find to be like the right amount? Or like what level of involvement do you want the employees completely entangled in the, in, in, in those exercises? Do you need them a little bit of distance? What does that, what have you kind of found from some of your work that's kind of worked the best? 

Speaker 2 (00:25:53) - Right. So for my point of view, I want most of the, it depends on how big is the company, but for example, flu this particular company that I'm working on, I want to talk to you most of the employees, because they have the right answer, especially with the employees that are customer facing employees, they have the, the solutions they 

Speaker 1 (00:26:17) - Have, 

Speaker 2 (00:26:17) - They know exactly what's going on. They know exactly the customers, why things are not working, what are the processes that are not working within the company. So I want to understand from their perspective what's going on and how we can optimize. So they have the answers, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:26:36) - Yep. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:37) - Um, and that's why for my perspective, I want to talk to everybody. I want to talk to you, the processes, people, I want to talk to the customer agents, customer care agents. I want to talk to also the managers, like from their perspective, what's going on, why things are not working from their perspective, because sometimes it's not just in the hands of managers and directors is in the hands-off, um, the bureaucracy that's inside of a company and the culture of a company that it's been like that to for many, many, many years. And, you know, it doesn't change because this is the way we've been doing. And this is the way that we do, but he doesn't mean that is the right way. Okay. So for me, I need to involve everybody. So I do like interviews kind of thing, you know, with, with everyone. And I ask them questions. And then we, um, um, I grew up, I gathered my group of people and the people inside the organization, and then we'll design better, a better way of dealing with customers or internally and externally. So Berlin pre-experience, but a processes, this doesn't work. How can we make it better? And then we, we design, um, but customer journeys and customer experiences. Basically, 

Speaker 1 (00:27:56) - I love that. I think the one thing that for our listeners, you gotta be thinking about is everybody talks about focusing on edX and investing in edX and thinking about employee experiences. And everybody knows about the talent migration that's happening across the planet earth. Right now. There's a lot of very excellent, smart A-plus people that are going and getting phenomenal jobs where they're oftentimes you're walking around across the street to a competitor. There there's a ton of those stories. But one thing that Elena just said that I think is so easy to bring back to your business like dead day. Once you start to include some of that, some of those excellent guys and gals inside of the journey, map exercises inside of the interview exercises inside of the playbook writing, like you start to get some of these managers and these directors who are just salivating to get more, they want to do more than one more responsibility. They want more authority, get them involved in this stuff. It's the easiest way for you to fan the flames of your yaks and to make it really, really.

Speaker 1 (00:28:52) - Talk, but like walk the walk, like you're showing the team members that they are a part of building what's going to become tomorrow's, but that's some of the easiest step you can do guys. So it's really, really important to think about that. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:05) - And employees want to get involved in understanding what are the new strategies that for example, I'm going to take in place, or they want to be involved in making like bets out of processes, like improving the business, you know, they want to get involved in the high level strategies. 

Speaker 1 (00:29:27) - And to your point on the high level versus the mid level, versus the boots on the ground, you're going to get wildly different feedback, right? You're going to the executive, the executive thinks everything's beautiful and glorious and spot on. And then you talk to the incredible lady that has a hundred of those conversations today. And she's like, dude, our product is broken here. Our service elements are broken here. We struggled to deliver here, here. And so like even finding those differences and kind of like getting into the middle of it where you could figure out how to start making some, some progress. That's one of the best parts of some of the stuff that we're talking about right now, 

Speaker 2 (00:29:59) - You know, Adrian, we, we are, um, consultants. Um, we are basically a little bit psychologist in a way because we have to hear a lot of 

Speaker 1 (00:30:09) - Therapists. 

Speaker 2 (00:30:10) - Yes, gosh, we are, we have to hear a lot of, um, um, complaints from the people on the top, the Peter, the people at the middle and the people at the bottom, you know, so it's a lot of like information in your head and you need to, it's, it's, it's like a nod you need to try to, um, make a straight line. Isn't it. Um, another thing that I want to, I want to add here is, um, that we shouldn't forget the most important stakeholder. So involving customers is the best strategy of all right, because they obviously understand the customer experience better because they will connect every day and all the time. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:55) - So 

Speaker 2 (00:30:56) - We need to understand their perspective. And, um, I, I, um, like I eat for my book. I interviewed a company, uh, or utility company that that's this exercise very, very often, they involve in new product creation. They involve customers all the time to co-create a product to create an experience. And that's the best strategy, you know, because you get all the answers because there will tell you where they want 

Speaker 1 (00:31:26) - A hundred percent. Yep. And you're, uh, you're getting those customer blueprints and those customer ID or customer fingerprints all over the early product. You're getting their suggestions, their ideas, what they love, what they don't love, what they'll pay more for, what they'll pay less for huge. Those are all, some of the easiest ways that you can really start cooking with gas. I think I'd love to, I'd love to dive into the fourth and the final six pillar feedback. And we're already starting to hit on some of this. You mentioned some of these employee interviews, and you mentioned some of these customer interviews, but I'd love for you to spend just a few minutes. What are some of the ways that you've kind of, um, not only just like collected feedback, whether it's from customers, whether it's from some of your clients, employees, but what are some of the things that you've kind of learned as you've progressed in your journey for how to act upon that feedback? I'd love for you to spend a few minutes just talking about feedback. 

Speaker 2 (00:32:12) - How do we collect feedback? Do you mean 

Speaker 1 (00:32:14) - Feedback? Yeah. So like essentially let's start with customer feedback. I'd love to just hear some ideas for some of the things that you've seen done exceptionally well for, for gathering and then acting upon customer feedback. And then I'd love for you to share some examples on the employee feedback side as well. 

Speaker 2 (00:32:29) - Yeah. So employee feedback, I told you already, basically we just do interviews and questionnaires and surveys to understand whether they are anonymous surveys or, um, full nanny Sev uh, surveys. That that's fine. That's uh, that's, that's, um, that's what we do. Um, and to, for customer feedback, we either, um, get a number of people to co-create experiences with us. We also have, um, uh, tools that collect customer feedback, collect data, of course, from social media, for example, that, um, do social listening in a way. And, um, and surveys, we did a lot of surveys and, um, questionnaires and things like.

Speaker 2 (00:33:21) - So that's, um, I'm not sure whether I'm answering your question, but that's how we collect feedback from customers and employees. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:29) - Nope, that's awesome. Yep. That's awesome. Awesome, awesome mediums and great ways of acting about it. What are some of the things was, so once you've used some of these mediums to get that feedback in what are the two or three things that you would kind of give to our listeners as, as some advice for how they can act upon the feedback, once they get the surveys back, once they get the questionnaires back, once they've done the interviews, what do you do next? What are like one or two ideas that you, you, you would bestow upon the listeners, 

Speaker 2 (00:33:54) - Oh, analysis, um, analyze everything. And, um, uh, first of all, understand, you need to contextualize a lot, because like, for example, I see a lot of companies using, um, NPS and using other, um, or the measurement, you know, of, uh, uh, majoring customer customer experience, for example, customer satisfaction scores and et cetera. But if you don't contextualize those, um, those measurements, then it's very difficult to understand what's wrong. What's going on? Why the customer gave you, for example, a, a low rate, a lot score, or, um, is not happy with, with the experiences. So we really need to understand and contextualize all those feedback and, uh, and the questionnaires, um, and a lot of clients, a lot of customers don't really, they're not very, um, what's the word, honest, straight on with what's going on. So with why they're not happy, you know, because people, um, they don't really want to share too much, let's say, you know, way. So it gets quite difficult. Um, when getting customer feedback, especially for example, I see a lot of customer, um, sorry, uh, call centers that ask for customer feedback at the end of the call, especially when a customer is, is upset. And, um, at that point, the customer is so angry that even though they, they want to, um, leave a good feedback for one side of, um, one part of the customer experience, they will leave like that, um, negative feedback for everything. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:47) - So 

Speaker 2 (00:35:48) - Exactly. So exactly. And, uh, but we do, we need to contextualize what's going on. And I think a lot of companies, they have issues with that, you know, because they send just automation again, automated, um, customer feedback, um, asking for example, on, uh, on the phone. And, uh, it's really difficult to contextualize that. How would I say yes, I'm not happy, but why you're not happy. Yep. Um, so that's why it's, um, it's a little difficult in a way. 

Speaker 1 (00:36:24) - Yep. There's there, there's a number of different ways you can do, but I love that idea of contextualization, whether it's thinking about if once your company gets really excellent at collecting this feedback, how do you compartmentalize it? How do you in the, in the analization process, how do you compartmentalize it? How can you create tags or specific buckets to really pull out what the different tronches of feedback are telling you? Then there's another, there's a ton of other ways you can cut this stuff. When you're thinking about what types of customer segments are we even looking at are, what are these early customers are these customers that we just signed on in the last site? There's a number of different ways you can carve this up, but I love some of those ideas are they need, this has been an absolute pleasure before we wrap up. I want to make sure where can people, I want you to please let people know about your new book and where people can find out more about your new book. And then where can people find out more about some of the incredible work that you're doing on the customer centricity just said, where can people get in touch with you? 

Speaker 2 (00:37:17) - Oh, absolutely. So my book, journey to centricity is, um, it can be found on Amazon and on all major, um, online retailers and, um, people can find me on my website  ...  dot com and on LinkedIn, I'm quite active on LinkedIn. Actually. I haven't been in the last, in the last few weeks Usually. 

Speaker 1 (00:37:41) - Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (00:37:42) - Exactly. Uh, but usually I'm so LinkedIn and my book is on Amazon as, um, and also on my website, my website in any of delete.com. 

Speaker 1 (00:37:52) - I love it. Well, then it was a pleasure having you on the cxchronicles podcast, we look forward to seeing what you're going to do next. And I absolutely look forward to staying in touch with you moving forward into the future. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:00) - Thank you so much for having me, Adrian. 

Speaker 1 (00:38:02) - Absolutely.