CXChronicles Podcast 187 with Mark Slatin, Founder at EmpoweredCX

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #187  we welcomed Mark Slatin, Founder at EmpoweredCX based in Lewes, Delaware. 

Mark helps his clients by listening to them and really understanding their goals, vision, and challenges.  Whether you are just launching or ready to take the journey to the next level, Mark leverages his "real world" experience that only comes from serving as a CX practitioner across multiple businesses & industries over the years.

His focus for the last decade has been leading an award-winning CX journey from launch to maturity at Sandy Spring Bank . During that time, the Bank received numerous awards including The CX Innovation Award (2X), Great Places to Work, Forbes America's Best Bank, and American Banker Best Bank to Work For, The Washington Post Top Workplace, among others.

Today, Mark spends much of his time working with his clients + hosting The Delighted Customers Podcast (Adrian was able to be a guest on his show recently, chatting about his experiences building CXC). 

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

**Episode #187 Highlight Reel:**

1. How you turn your most loyal customers into your biggest fans & promoters
2. Why investing in employee onboarding is the glue to build world-class CX 
3. Ideas for building & leading your Extended Leadership Team (ELT)
4. Building your VOC task force to govern your customer journey as you scale
5. Leveraging feedback to build new products & revenue streams
 
Huge thanks to Mark for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Mark Slatin

Click here to learn more about EmpoweredCX

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

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

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

Transcript

CXChronicles Podcast #187 with Mark Slatin, Founder @ EmpoweredCX

Adrian (00:00:08) - All right guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited for today's guest guys. Mark Slaton is joining the show, and, um, mark is an awesome customer focused business leader who's had a bunch of different, uh, interesting, um, leadership positions in the customer experience, customer success base, and we're super pumped to have him. So, mark, why don't you, uh, why don't you start off show, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend. 

Mark Slatin (00:00:31) - Hey, CX Nation. Uh, thanks so much, Adrian, for having me on the show. I'm excited 

Adrian (00:00:36) - A hundred percent, man. So guys, uh, mark a couple things to call up before he sets the stage for us. Number one, um, his company Empowered CX, is doing some really, really cool things inside of the customer experience space. And, um, the other big thing, mark, similar to myself, guys, has this awesome podcast, delighted Customers podcast. We actually just had the privilege of, of joining Mark a few days ago on the show, so we're excited for that. But Mark, why don't you start off the episode like we start off all these shows. Um, give the CX Nation a sense for how you got started in your personal customer focused business leader journey. How'd you get into this space? And what were some of the stepping stones that that, that you kind of took early on and as you got later into your career to get into the whole space to bring it where you are today with Empowered cx? 

Mark Slatin (00:01:18) - Yeah, well first, again, thanks so much for having me on the show. Uh, and I would say, uh, it started way back, uh, when I was in college. I went to the University of Maryland and got involved in this summer program from a company based in Nashville called the Southwestern Company and sold book Door to Door all three summers while I was a college. Um, first year was, uh, Amarillo, Texas, which is from a native New Yorker, just culture shock, totally <laugh>, um, and then Phoenix, which was very hot no matter how you slice it, uh, in the summer. And then, uh, Atlanta. So, um, I just went into a career in sales and spent like 23 years for really just two different companies, uh, Boise Cascade and Standard Register, uh, in sales management and leadership. And, um, and then decided, you know, I would love to try to do consulting and help other companies with revenue growth strategies and, you know, corporate strategies that connected to the revenue growth. 

Mark Slatin (00:02:13) - Did that for six years. And at the end of that, um, one of our clients, uh, one of my prospects and one of my clients was a bank. Um, and the CEO of that bank said, uh, you know, thank you for helping us, um, as a consultant, but we'd like to bring an internal resource in to this thing that, um, had just gotten named, called Customer Experience. Um, it, it, um, I know people had floated the name around before that, but, um, the C X P A had just, uh, written its charter in 2011, and this was around 2012. Um, and so I started with, with the bank, uh, Sandy Spring Bank in 2013 and stayed there nine years, and I launched and led their CX work over that, over that period of time. And then just a year ago, not quite a year ago, um, I, uh, my wife and I moved from Maryland to Delaware to the Delaware Shore and started Empowered cx And, and the goal here is to empower. Um, so give you the, the tools, the skills and everything you would need as an organization to turn in different customers into loyal fans. Uh, and, and most of my, my, because I worked in the bank and we had an insurance and wealth and, uh, we were a bank retail and commercial, um, that'll be in financial services, particularly in the mid-market. 

Adrian (00:03:38) - That's awesome, mark. So number one, thank you for sharing that story. I guess where my, where my brain immediately goes is I, I I, I, I love that you started your journey on the sales side because <laugh>, if there's so many awesome CX and CS leaders who did get the privilege of being able to start on the sales side, cause number one, they know how hard it is to create a buck out of thin air, right? Selling. I know a lot of our listeners probably have a lot of different opinions about their friends across the aisle, on the sales side and the revenue side, but yeah, selling is super difficult. It's one of the hardest things that you can do in the world, I think, um, to be able to get an individual to understand what your product or what your service or what you're offering is, and then to get them to be able to sign a contract and then for over a stack of bucks to be able to pay for it. 

Adrian (00:04:21) - It's hard, man, but this, this is the thing I love about CX and CS leaders who were formerly in the south side, man, they understand people, they understand relationships, they understand, um, having to build rapport and having to be able to be typically be extremely good listeners to understand whether or not an individual's qualified or unqualified. And then more importantly, the expectation side, right? Like the best sales people in the world, not only are they great at listening and great adhering, whether or not some of the major qualification items are are in in line, but then they're also an expectation side.

Adrian (00:04:56) - Because the best salespeople in the world say no a ton, right? They literally are getting through a hundred names and a hundred different people, uh, to maybe get the one or the two people that are actually qualified, actually have the expectation alignment and are actually ready to buy in a position. So I love that that's kind of how you started. It must have set you up really nicely. Um, before we move, move forward, I'd love to, so your experience with Sandy Spring break, this is cool, man, because I think number one, you see so many big banks out there always talking about customer experience and talking about their customers. Um, I I I, I, I gotta, I gotta wonder, like in, in all the time that you spent with Sandy Spring, um, was the bulk of your time really kind of spent meeting and talking with customers? Or is it really kind of spent with spending time internally with the employees who are doing the bulk of the customer communications and the customer activities? 

Mark Slatin (00:05:45) - Yeah, so, um, let me, let me come to that question, but I wanna respond to something you said because it kind of left it out as I shared the, the, uh, what I did, but I didn't really show the why, why what I, it relates directly to what you shared, which is about how sales people, number one, agreed 100% how difficult that a job it is. Um, if you don't believe it, try it yourself if you haven't <laugh>. 

Adrian (00:06:07) - It's true, man. It's hard. 

Mark Slatin (00:06:08) - And, and, and number two is what I noticed as, as someone who was responsible for a sales organization in the DC metropolitan area, is that the best sales people that worked, uh, on my team were really good at building relationships. And so much so that they were the people that were invited to their customer's weddings. They, they were named godparents to their customer's children. So the relationships were real. And I noticed that, and that's what kind of led me to say, okay, on the other side of the fence, which is the customer's lens, you know, what could we be doing better to serve the customer? Um, and, and so in some cases you have people like great sales reps who are doing heroics, who are making it happen, and people supporting, directly supporting those salespeople doing hero HEROs. They tend to be like the triage between whatever's going on behind the fence and whatever the customer's seeing. But then how do you, and, and this may be a good segue, answer your question, how do you then turn people from doing heroics into making them heroes by just having a culture where CX is embedded and, and that really is the difference, and there's obviously a lot that goes into that, but, um, the, the, the issue is, you know, how do you build those trusting relationships with customers and begin to design, you know, your strategy is starting with the customer in mind. 

Adrian (00:07:37) - Yep. I think you are spot out, man, which is like, if, if, if some folks are wondering why maybe in their organization or at past organizations that they've been a part of why CX and CS doesn't work or why, uh, it, it's constantly met with roadblocks or it's constantly met with nos, or it's constantly difficult to get the right types of SMS to buy into some of the stuff. You just nailed it, man. This is a top down thing. Uh, if, if you're in a business where your executive leadership team isn't fully bought in and fully supportive of the fact that customer experience, customer success, customer development, constant learning and, and, and pivoting and, and, and really kind of constantly kind of being on the pulse of what your customers are saying, it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard to get things done. It's gonna be hard to get to push projects across the line. 

Adrian (00:08:17) - It's gonna be hard to break silos down and build bridges across different team and departmental, uh, silos. And then the last thing is, I, I, um, it's a, it's a team sport man. I know it's, I know some people might think it's cliche, but like your CX and your CS is only gonna be as good as how an organization can be. Its team around the customer journey around all the decisions and the calls to action that are gonna be required to improve. And, uh, and again, we, there's, there's, it's, it's, this is why it's, it can be such an incredible way to transform your business, but this is also why you see a lot of CX and CS efforts maybe fizzle out. And so, um, I I, I think you're spot on where relationships and then just having that top down approach is really, really imperative to making sure that you're gonna get the biggest bang for your buck on the CX and the CS side. 

Adrian (00:09:01) - Mark, I'd love to dive into the first CX pillar team. Um, I'd love to hear, kind spend a couple minutes talking about, so from all these different places that you've been a part of leading and, and, and, and coaching and pushing the, the future of, of CX forward, I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes talking about team men. What are some of the things that you've kind of picked up along your own journey that have worked really, really well for you? Or maybe what are some of the examples that you've seen within your own teams over the years, or that you're doing now with some of the clients you're working with at Powered cx? Spent a couple minutes talking about team. 

Mark Slatin (00:09:27) - Yeah. So thanks. Um, and yeah, I'm not sure I've actually fully answered your question as where do I spend most of my time? So it was both customers and employees, um, and, and figuring out, you know, what are, what are the things we need to have in place, uh, organization and clearly team was one of them, right? So, um, you know, having executive leadership I is supporting is, is critical. Uh, and what I always say is, you're going to have a ceiling on your CX work.

Mark Slatin (00:09:55) - Unless you have, you know, to the extent that you have leadership support or don't. Right. So one of the first things I did as, as I'm sure other people have done, is done a listening tour around the organization with all the key stakeholders, um, and try and build a team that way as just really trying to understand what each key stakeholders, um, objectives, goals, what mattered most to them. And then, you know, you have to speak their language, language of the C-suite, but also language of other key stakeholders. Cuz even if you have the C-suite on board or mostly on board, well then, then the next level down or the people really are the ones getting things done and potentially putting up roadblocks to getting things done. So I think it's really important, number one, that you listen to what you know, to what it is that's most important to them. 

Mark Slatin (00:10:43) - And, and, you know, whether it's, um, data that comes back or a survey or a listening project that you can do for a key stakeholder, um, it will be based on how well you listened and the fact that you're hitting those buttons that are hot buttons to them. Um, so an an an example, uh, of one team building, I guess you could say, uh, activity was we had a treasury management department, right? And they're, they're the people that really are involved in all the suite of products and services that a business could buy from, from a bank. So ach, wire management, um, you know, electronic banking, positive pay, which is like a, uh, security type, um, fraud prevention for your checking and your operating accounts. So, um, they were concerned about, so as we were not alone, as you go through mergers and acquisitions as banks, which is not an uncommon thing these days, um, when you, when you bring in a new bank, there's two different ways of doing business. 

Mark Slatin (00:11:47) - And so the new bank came in, one of the, one of the two acquisitions we, we had done in a short period of time, and they had a different way of doing things and they had more handholding. And as you scale and grow, um, as a team, your team, uh, can't hold hands as much. You've gotta, you know, you've gotta create, uh, processes and systems that are more efficient. And so the concern was that this new bank was used to that. Now they're gonna be, you know, merging into our kind of way of doing things. Um, how do you, how do you make it a customer-centric acquisition? And one, and this was a particular concern for that stakeholder, um, that I was trying to build a team and work with and, and list the supportive on my team. And he was concerned specifically about the onboarding friction without getting into the details. 

Mark Slatin (00:12:35) - There were some technical things, there were some complicated things. And so we ended up surveying, we did an external survey about trends in the marketplace as it related to that. We did an internal survey of the employees and then we did a survey of the customers and got really pinpointed what part of their, their journey and specifically what the pain was. And they ended up at the outcome of all that was, they ended up, um, carving out a group of people from the contact center that were dedicated just to the onboarding of the contact management, um, as, as people were onboarding. And so they were there to help with that really high friction element. Um, and then we survey, you know, surveyed again and started to see improve results. So, um, I think that's it. I think two things is one, if you listen, you know, then you can, you can check in along the way and, um, and then gain some support by, um, trying to serve based on the specific needs that also are in alignment with the corporate needs, if that makes sense. 

Adrian (00:13:36) - Right. No, it makes a ton of sense. Mark. I absolutely love some of those ideas. There's two big things that you called out that i, I wanna bounce right into. One. One of them is just this notion, you said, um, making sure that essentially the, uh, the executive view or the executive story aligns with, um, and I'm just gonna say for lack of a better term, your extended leadership because you just nailed it, man, there, there's a big difference. And oftentimes there's many gaps with many businesses around the executive leadership team thinking that they've done a brilliant job of telling the story and sending out the marching orders and giving the directional, uh, view for where the company's going. Yep. But you gotta go a layer deeper and, and you gotta go to that extended leadership team. Those are typically your directors, your managers, your senior, these are the guys and gal that are gonna get stuff done. 

Adrian (00:14:23) - They're gonna be the ones that are leading the damn team. They're the people that are talking to customers every single solitary. They're definitely, um, the part of the organization or the part of the team that gets it the best because they, they got both sides that you're starting to hit on for us. They know the customer pulse and then they know the frontline pulse. They know that they, they know exactly what the guys and gals are thinking that are going hand to hand with your customers every single solitary day or your tools and your technologies you started to mention. Um, so that's one, one huge thing that I love that you kind of called out earlier. The other big piece too though, is just this, um, this consternation point, right? Like you mentioned, you give an example of like the technology possibly providing a little bit of stickiness or consternation. 

Adrian (00:15:02) - But like the other thing that I love about that Mark is like getting customer feedback is just part of it, right? Getting customer feedback and then layering on top of an employee feedback. And then almost like looking at the two things aligned together. More often than not, guys, that's gonna show you the the top areas that you've got to prioritize, right? Cause if your customers are saying the exact same thing that your internal employees are saying, you're onto something. If you just figured out a thing that needs to get either flipped to the top of your OKR or your strategic roadmap, or you've figured out the thing that's probably going to yield the highest roi, right? If you're gonna bang out a problem or a consternation point that smooths a bunch of things for your customer side and a bunch of things for your employee side, you've just found a nice little area to kind of stick into for that, for that give course. So I love those ideas. Um, and Adrian, yeah, go ahead 

Mark Slatin (00:15:51) - Adrian. I would just add, just to compliment that thought about the, um, about thinking about, um, the data that you get back from employees and customers. I would add one more element, and that's the operational data. So in, in this case, it would be sort of how long it takes to onboard a client fully, um, and understanding what the KPIs are in that process, and then go back and measure after you've made the improvements. Um, that helps tell the story. And also, um, just to add on to the roi. So what I've, what I've learned kind of the hard, the hard way is that, um, I I, one of the mistakes, you didn't ask about mistakes, but I'm gonna be vulnerable here for a minute. 

Adrian (00:16:34) - Let's talk about mistakes. 

Mark Slatin (00:16:35) - It's, it's really tempting. It's really tempting to go for the Grand Slam as a CX leader. And by the way, our job is very hard. So if, if you're doing that and you're a practitioner right now, God bless you. I have all the respect in the world and admiration for you, it's really, really hard. Um, in some ways it reminds me of selling books door to door, but even harder. <laugh> even harder. 

Adrian (00:16:57) - Understand it's a tough, it's a tough space in any organization. 

Mark Slatin (00:17:00) - It it is so hard. So, um, so yeah, what, what was I just talking about? Um, 

Adrian (00:17:05) - The mistakes. The mistakes that, 

Mark Slatin (00:17:07) - Mistakes, yeah. The goal for grants, the Grand Slam and this, this roi, cuz there are some huge projects that, you know, have the potential for, for an amazing roi. You can't lose sight of the fact, um, that, what I like to try and think of it is, is what's the business value that you're gonna, you're gonna give back to the organization as a result of the efforts going in. So it may not always translate into dollars and cents, but um, but there's a value statement that should come out of any work that you can do that an executive can easily grasp onto. And, and, and what I was gonna say was don't lose sight of the importance of quick wins. Um, I was told that going in, um, I had some really smart Sherpa's helping me and I lost sight of it. And it's like, get the quick win. The story that wasn't a hundred, you know, a hundred, uh, pound lift. It was a thing that really mattered to someone that you could say, this was the before, this is what we changed and this was the after and the outcome was a success, even if it wasn't a million dollar roi. Do, do you know what I'm saying? 

Adrian (00:18:17) - A hundred percent do. And I think that's incredible advice where there's almost sometimes a tendency for customer focused business leaders or the guys and guests that are leading C and Cs to wanna highlight and um, to be able to pull out, to be able to put front and center, all the bad stuff, all the, all the stuff that's broken with your product and all the stuff that is not okay with your team and all the, all the shortcomings, all, all the, all the things that every company the world is, is, is struggling with. And you're right man, focusing on the wins of the week and the wins of the month. And for sure man, like calling out like the positive stuff because frankly like a big word of CX and a big part of CS is like, man, once you know the three or the four or the five or the 20% of things you hear 80% of the time that people love about you, talk about that all the time and think about how you can show new customers how they start to experience those good things. 

Adrian (00:19:05) - And you're right, that's a big part of it. And the last thing is this, and it's like we all spent all of our time at work, man, I know we talk about this all the time, but like, man, constantly drowning yourself in the negative stuff. It's not going to yield the types of, um, action or investment. This is another big piece for our younger CX and CS leaders. You want a real good way of snoozing your executive leadership team right out of the room. Keep bringing the, the negative stuff. Like, come on, work is hard. Growing a business is hard, keeping revenue coming in is hard. Talk about the good stuff. Talk about the things that are going great with the customers. Going great with your CX team. Love that advice. I love that advice. Mark. Mark, let's jump into the second CX pillar of tools. Um, I'd love to kind of hear how you sort of navigated the complexity as a CX leader of thinking about how to manage the tech stack and how to think about what tools were gonna be, um, ideal for not only your team or for the businesses that you were working at at the time, but how have you kind of navigated the, the, the ever evolving world of.

Mark Slatin (00:20:00) - You as it relates to customer experience? Hmm. Well that's, that's a great question and I will tell you, I think, you know, I've heard so much, um, about how it may continue to change in the next five years even more than it changed the last five years or so. Uh, with the whole advent of, uh, robotic processing, learn machine language, um, ai and how accessible it's gonna be. And so those partners, as a midsize or small size organization, you may not have the infrastructure to build out yourself, but your partners will start having that and those will be available. So I think, I think what's important is a couple of things is one, get really clear about what the CX mission is, right? And then what is your plan as a CX leader or someone in the organization who's advocating for the client? If you don't have a full time person, what's the plan? 

Mark Slatin (00:20:51) - What, what do you want to see in terms of the way your customers experience the organization? And then the mistake I think, you know, you a lot of organizations make is they, they have technology in search of a strategy, right? And so you want to have your strategy around what it is. So maybe it's, hey, we're gonna focus on our, I I'm making this up, but we're gonna focus on our highest value client and, and their journey that they go through with us. And to support that we need x in a bank. Maybe it was a loan origination system, maybe it was, um, more applications that connect to our crm, which was happened to be Salesforce, right? That could facilitate, you know, better tracking and better feeding of the sales pipeline so that we equipped our salespeople and frontline people and automated more to make their job easier, to get higher quality leads. 

Mark Slatin (00:21:49) - And, um, and to, to get more intelligence about what, and I'm, I'm making this up again cuz this may not be a priority for you, but really to understand what the highest value slice of our customer bases. Um, and that could be something based on our customer lifetime value, but which percentage of our customers are bringing the most, you know, revenue back to us and what do we need to understand more about them? Because I think some, you mentioned before about focusing on the mistakes and the, and things that aren't going right. And we need to do things like closed feedback loop, talking about technology and the use of it. We need do need to have a, a mechanism in place. Any mature CX program will have a mechanism in place to close feedback when they get feedback from customers, they do something about it and they can do something short term. Um, but also it's important to say strategically, you know, do I understand what these best, this slice of customers that are bringing me the, the top 10% or something that are bringing, bringing us the best value back. What do they want? What are they willing to pay for that we don't currently offer them? Yep. It's the sky box thing. You know, you, you were talking about the bills, the bills a minute ago and that the fact that it's gonna snow like heck in Buffalo and they're gonna have to move the game to Detroit 

Adrian (00:23:06) - <laugh>. We might have three to six feet of snow buffalo this week, guys. And Yep. As Mark said, the bills might be playing in Detroit, uh, Detroit Lion Stadium against the brownies this week. So the Joys is being Western York. Mark <laugh>. 

Mark Slatin (00:23:18) - Yeah. So, so, so people pay for a sky box, uh, at, at the stadium there and uh, you could get a seat, I don't know, $150 for a regular seat, but they're willing to spend 20,000 for a sky box and happy to pay that money. So what is it, you know, are you understanding your customer base and are you building the technology and the tech stack as you said, that supports the strategies to, so you're thinking about it, this is not just because everybody else is buying it and somebody said, we need a better this or a better that. Um, so we can be more efficient. Cuz that's what I call just pedaling faster in the wrong direction. 

Adrian (00:23:56) - I like that man. There's, there's a, there's a bunch of stuff that you just dropped Mark, that I think is so important to, to, to, to circle back on one piece is you just made a comment about so many companies, they want to throw tools at problems, right? And then I get it, we live in this world now where like, everybody's comfortable, most people are comfortable technology. Everybody knows that it's an easy game changer and easy way to optimize any of our human involvement, right? When we're, we've got some technology based support or some software that can kind help ease the flow of the day to day. Totally get it. Um, one, one thing that I think is really interesting is, I mean all these reports suggest the global SaaS market is literally about to just become a behemoth. It already is, right? I think in, in, there's many reports out there that suggests just in 2021 alone, you know, there's anywhere from 140 to 150 billion of global SAS spend annually. This number is about to get even bigger. Mark, I've seen reports that suggest that the global SaaS market is expected to reach over 700 billion by 2028. And it makes sense cuz if you think about it, you look around, especially with the world right now,

Adrian (00:24:57) - Lot of, lot of pessimistic view about the global market, the global economy. Lot of teams are probably gonna slim down a little bit, right? A lot of folks, a lot of folks are gonna be asked to tighten that belt up. How are you gonna be able to get, get by with less people? Technology, right? Everybody's almost trained to think, oh, no worries. We can get rid of 20% of the team and now we've got all this additional budget where we can go invest in some of the technology that'll optimize for the rest of maybe, right? I think like it's really easy to think that technology's gonna solve all your problems, I think in the real world doesn't necessarily always, always flow that way, but I think you're right. Where the second piece is just man, like making sure that there's somebody in the business or there's somebody on the team who's constantly thinking about what your today tech stack can do for you. 

Adrian (00:25:41) - What are the utilization rates within that tech stack? What are the pricing, right? Right. Let's talk brass tax for a second, guys. Part of us, part of our job is the CX and CS leaders making sure that we're running a lean budget that's actually going to be sustainable for the future, right? And, and I think that the last part is this, man, I think that I know with cxc Mark, we've spent a ton of time with our clients doing like our tool stack audits and our tool stack assessments. And a lot of what we're trying to do is help them slim things down. But really more, really more about what you, you made a comment about helping to provide focus, right? Helping to understand, look easy to understand that there's 15 tools that might be able to accomplish everything. Let's pick the three or four that our organization can get around, become masters of understand how to utilize, understand how to leverage. 

Adrian (00:26:22) - And then from the CXCs leadership perspective, typically reporting becomes a bit easier. Your data aggregation becomes a little bit easier. Your ability to build stories with the data that you're seeing becomes a little bit easier. So all, all all really awesome ideas here. And I, I think, frankly, guys, my, my personal thought is I think that the, the second pillar of tools is going to become one of the biggest areas that future CX and CS leaders are really going to be tasked with, um, understanding for their business and being able to report back to their executive leadership team and their technology team what's working and what's not working. And I think that you're seeing some of the best companies in the world, they're already doing that. I think that there's a lot of companies that have to catch up with it. Um, and then alignment with your cx, your Cs and your product, you're gonna see that becoming more and more and more of a norm. 

Adrian (00:27:07) - And, and, and you're gonna see, uh, the companies that accelerate ahead into the future really investing in that. Mark, I, I'd love to, I'd love to jump into this third CX pillar process and we just started to kind of hit on it, but over your journey, ma'am, I'd love to understand some of the things that have worked really well for you with a couple things. Number one, just building playbooks for your team. Thinking about what standard operating procedures need to look like, thinking about how you collect and aggregate FAQ's knowledge base. I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes talking about some of the things you've learned along your journey around how a CX and a CS leader can think about process and process management. 

Mark Slatin (00:27:43) - Yeah, so that's a great question. Um, and I think one of the things that you mentioned earlier, team sport. I hate to, I'm not gonna go backwards, but I'm gonna tie it to this process piece, which is you really do need, um, people you, you really need to do, it needs to be more than the CX department or CX person that is, that is managing a portfolio of projects through the system, right? It it, you need to get together some sort of governance group that is prioritizing the things that get spun up, the things that get spun up out of, um, the data you collect from x data experience, data, data that you collect from operational data, data that comes from financial data, data, um, that you say, okay, or, you know, we need to make a change here, um, in the way that the customers are experiencing us. 

Mark Slatin (00:28:35) - So that needs to be, in my opinion, a group. And we had what we call the customer, we call it the Client Experience Leadership council. And it was a bunch of key stakeholders that were aware of the things that kept coming up based on data, you know, and made data driven decisions, but not in a vacuum. Cuz it doesn't work that way. So it, it, it, you can try, but ultimately you need, you know, you need support, you need employee engagement. So at that top level, I think for, um, we're talking about process now, that's, that's one thing that needs to be in place and in a mature CX program is you've got the governance in place. Um, and then, and then in terms of change, right? So how are you understanding the journeys that your customers are going through? And at any given point, you should really document your top two or three customer journeys, uh, and understand the process that your customers are going through. And a lot of organizations now, I know ours was, was, was, um, getting a formalized business process improvement team together. Well, the process improvement, you know, often works with the pmo, the project management office, the process improvement that happens, um, should be informed by the customer journeys, not the other way around, right? So what are your top journeys? What are the, the problems? Your customers? What are the goals your customers at? What are the needs that they have? And what are we as an organ? It's in alignment with our corporate goals.

Mark Slatin (00:30:02) - That we need to attack first. And that's where the governance team, and then you've got journey maps in place. And then if you're, if you are an organization that's mature, you've got people that can help with experience design to design the new experience and ways that you're, again, gonna then measure and test, you know, and circle that, that feedback and say, Hey, customers, did we do it for you? What else needs to get done? So another thing, you know, you talk about the employee experience. One of the things we, we had hard was employee experience. And, and, and that is what I call turning, turning all the light bulbs on in the organization. They turn on one at a time, but once they're turned on, they don't turn off. So it's hard to turn, sometimes hard to turn on. They really have people kind of believe in, you know, be, maybe they're not evangelizing, but they're believing in what you're doing from a CX standpoint. 

Mark Slatin (00:30:54) - And that involved from the day they got there, orientation had a CX component. And we share with them the process that we went through to make a change in the customer's experience. It included an experience champions program, uh, where people could volunteer, raise their hand and say, I would like to learn more about this. I'm gonna go, you know, get a certificate at the end of eight months or 10 months and you'll teach me the basics. And now we've got people, you know, ready and poised to move up in the organization to maybe be on that governance council. So it's, it's a whole strategy and infrastructure built in, embedded into the culture that takes time. But it's a strategic look at how change gets made. I that, that's my view of it. I don't know what you think. 

Adrian (00:31:38) - No, mark. I think that's awesome, man. I think like this idea of the council, um, I know, I know it's cxc a big part of what, what we're doing is helping clients build essentially voice of customer task force. And it's the same thing that you said as a council, but there's something that I wanna jump on that I love about what, what you're, what you're laying out here for us, which is, and, and you and I chatted about this on, on, on your podcast recently, but guys, this is one of the easiest ways that you can start to take, take, take some of your CX efforts and immediately start to bolster some of your ex efforts, right? Like the minute you start to get, um, smart turned on light bulbs on type of people in your business who care about this stuff, who've got great ideas, plus then you start to do the very, the variation of subject matter expertise. 

Adrian (00:32:22) - You got the marketing person, the salesperson, the operate person, the financial person, the DevOps person working together. Number one, you're making in your team way smarter, way more well-rounded people are learning from each other. You're also, again, when I, I know I say I'm always talking about the bridge building mark, you know the show, but you're building bridges. You're literally laying plumbing, you're laying electrical, you're building bridges, you're giving people an opportunity to expand their tribal knowledge or to share their tribal knowledge. The other thing too is that, I wanna go back to the, so happy you brought up the journey map part. I am a hundred percent with you, man, where like journey maps aren't just these fru colorful things that people want done and they're very, very expensive and they take many months. They, they candy put their blueprints, their blueprints for your business, their blueprints for your team, your tools, your processes, and your feedback. 

Adrian (00:33:10) - So they literally start to lay out all these different opportunities around how to think about your playbooks, how to think about your learning management, how to think about what they've assets, training, coaching, and ongoing support that your employees need to be able to do their jobs exceptionally well. And then the last thing is just what you made me think about, man, is all of that is great and all that's well and good, but companies change every single solitary week, every single day, every single month. So if you're not doing controlling and monitoring and how to borrow from, from our Six Sigma friends, you know, thinking about some of that, you gotta be doing controlling and monitoring. I know, I know that, um, whether it's once a month or once a quarter or someone in the business or someone on your council or your voice of customer task force has got to be sharing the updates, the changes, the decisions that need to be made, made organizationally, right? 

Adrian (00:33:57) - Like, so this is some of the, like the gold that you can be having this counselor or this, this voice customer task force put in front and center on a monthly basis for your entire, not just your leadership team and your extended leadership team, but for your whole business to be thinking about. And I, and I say, I think the last thing I I almost view this like any type of fanship, right? Like people, for people to become fans and for people to be able to buy into this stuff, they gotta know about it. They gotta be aware of it to even start to formulate their own ideas around it. And then there's gotta be some involvement. So I love that you kind of talked about with some of your teams just polling and, and getting feedback and then, uh, uh, democratizing the feedback, showing the results to the groups so that people can kind of say, Hey guys, look on a hundred employees, this is what y'all thought on a hundred customers, this is what they all thought. 

Adrian (00:34:40) - Let's figure out where the, where the meat and the potatoes are and let's start digging into the higher high ROI areas that we can invest in. So I love those ideas. Mark, um, mark, I'd love to jump into the fourth and the final six pillar of feedback. And we, we just kind of started to tee that up perfectly. So good segue, but what are some of the things that, um, you know, you've really been the most blown, blown away by in your own career? Let's break this into two parts. I'd love for you to start with like some of the things that have just been exceptional or really, really eyeopening on the customer feedback side. And then I want you to finish the, the question with talking about the same thing with your teams and the employee feedback side. Spend a few minutes kind of talking about how you thought about feedback and tackle feedback throughout your career. 

Mark Slatin (00:35:18) - Um, yeah, so like, like, um, many other, um, maturing CX organizations, we, we got event voice of the customer platform. Uh, we used one of the, one of the large, uh, you know, VOC companies, I'll just leave the name off cuz we ended up switching at the end to another. And, and essentially, um, they have very similar offerings is is what I found. Uh, and then the service does matter. Um, so we, we set that up in place and that worked pretty well, pretty well for our retail, uh, customers. We had large numbers and um, you know, we, we had a, a better than average response rate and we, we were able to get some, some good feedback, start a close feedback loop loop system where we would respond and distribute to the different, in our cases it was mostly branch branches, it was a bank. 

Mark Slatin (00:36:08) - Um, and, and get some, some immediate response back to our customers. Then, then develop the, the trend reporting. Um, that allowed us to see what was changing over time and what maybe some of our weak spot. And this was some of the data that, that drove our decisions on what we needed to change. And, and then we, and then we got to the point we get agile. So we get a question from a, a stakeholder that said, Hey, I'm about to do, I'm thinking about adding this product line. Can you go look, work with marketing, do some research on our customer base? Let tell me how those, that particular slice of customers feels about their experience with us. What have we heard about in terms of complaints or needs? And then bring all that together, go back to the stakeholder and then introduce a new product line. 

Mark Slatin (00:36:53) - Um, so, so that's one, one way to use feedback. Another way is, um, we were in the middle of digital transformation as, as I'm sure a lot of organizations inside of financial services are outside saying all the things that we've done manually, all the things we've done with Excel spreadsheets in the past, you know, we need to automate those things. We need to have things, um, uh, predictive analytics and things working on our favor. And so, so how do you, how do you then ask the customers what do they care most about? We ended up saying, you know, the surveys aren't gonna work for our business customers. They're, we just don't get enough feedback and we don't know who to ask, right? Within the organization, we, we have a contact but may not be the right contact. So we, we developed three cohorts, um, and this is just an idea, but three cohorts of 12 customers, business clients, um, in each one. 

Mark Slatin (00:37:49) - And met with them virtually once a quarter, asked if they would commit to two years and, and you would be surprised because we're we're asking them to help us shape probably the most important thing. There were other things as well cuz we were still in the middle of the pandemic. We were asking about that. But, um, and, and we're asking about something called P P P, which is the payroll protection program that the government set up for businesses. But the biggest thing was digital transformation. That team that was about to make a whole bunch of changes, not the whole tech stack, not just one, one core switch out, but a bunch of things is what do the customers think about it? And the customers in this case largely said, you know, there are certain basic things you need to do a better job at, but don't take away the people part of it because we would, that's what distinguishes you from other banks like the big banks. 

Mark Slatin (00:38:40) - And we don't have to name names that I can get on the phone and I can, I can call you or I can call even an executive if I want to get an answer about something, you take that away and we'll leave you. And that's me generalizing. But that, that doesn't show up in, in a regular survey. So the, the, whether you can do an idi, which is an in-depth interview or a focus group round table. But if you can put something together that has, you know, sort of a longitudinal thing and really have conversations with, with the right customers, whatever that is for your organization, um, and get, get into their, and not just one, but you know, more than one and so it's not anecdotal, um, some gold in those, those hills there. 

Adrian (00:39:22) - I love that man. I think you're, you, you're spot on. It's, it's just keeping that regular pulse plus, um, you know, customers, the right types to, to your point, the right types of customers and some of the, the customers are gonna be imperative to your, your, your company's future. So many of them are willing to take the time to give you some feedback or to give you some candid ideas or to tell you about the stuff that they think you're doing a brilliant job with. But to also say, Hey man, mark, there's like three things that this competitive bank's doing over here that y'all might wanna take a look at that because that should be on someone's r and d play, right? Or somebody should be thinking about the research and the development that could yield your future offering. So all all fantastic ideas there. 

Adrian (00:39:59) - I i, I love it. Um, mark, before we wrap up today's show, man, I wanna give you the opportunity, um, where could people find out, number one, how to get in touch with you and how to learn more about the things that you guys are doing in a powered cx and then, um, please make sure that you're dropping where people can listen to your show to delight a customer's podcast so that people know where they can find all the awesome content and discussions and dialogue that you're having with, with, with, with your incredible community customer focused business leaders. 

Mark Slatin (00:40:23) - Yeah. So thank thank you so much Adrian. Um, I, you mentioned earlier at the top the Delighted Customers podcast and uh, one of my favorite guests was Adrian. Uh, by the time you hear this, that episode will will be available and like the other episodes are available in all the major distribution, apple, Spotify, et cetera. So that's delighted customers. I am the company's Empowered CX and Empowered CX is the website.com. And also I am gonna be, by the time this airs, I'll have an assess a free assessment for call, an experienced maturity assessment and get a kind of a starting place for where you might, um, line up, uh, as an organization compared to some of the best of the best and what they have in common in terms of maturing their, their search. So, um, so just stay in touch, reach me through any of those two avenues and, uh, love to hear from you. 

Adrian (00:41:18) - Awesome. Well Mark, thank you so much for joining the SEA Podcast. It's been our absolute pleasure having you on the show, sir. 

Mark Slatin (00:41:24) - Thanks Adrian. Awesome to be here.