Removing The Rocks From Any Customer Journey | Sean Albertson

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #244 we welcomed Sean Albertson, Founder & CEO of CX4ROCKS based in Castle Rock, CO. 

Sean Albertson is a keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, coach and consultant on transforming your customer journey to reduce effort and drive greater customer loyalty. 

Sean has developed the ROCKS Strategy that leverages survey programs, operational metrics, text and journey analytics, connected with artificial experience to identify the most actionable insights for your organization. Is it Sean at www.CX4ROCKS.com

In this episode, Sean and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that he thinks through on a daily basis to build world class customer & marketing focused experiences.

**Episode #244 Highlight Reel:**

1. What the CX & contact center space looked like in the 1990's. 
2. Working on CX & customer support at T-Mobile, Visat, & Charles Schwab
3. Why Customer journeys are similar to river rafting experiences
4. How technology is changing the game rapidly in every business
5. Why customer listening & customer conversations remain paramount

Click here to learn more about Sean Albertson

Huge thanks to Sean for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the marketing, customer experience & customer success space into the future.

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused business content. 

Transcript

CXCP #244 Sean Albertson

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady-Cesana. Guys, we have a super cool guest today. Sean Albertson is gonna be joining us. Sean is a fellow CXer and an individual who's got an awesome background, awesome sense of experiences, and just like every single one of us, guys, he's thinking about customer experiences, employee experiences, and thinking about how to build incredible customer journeys every single solitary day. 

Adrian (00:00:31) - So, Sean, why don't you say hello to the CX Nation, my friend? 

Sean (00:00:34) - Hey, so happy to be here with you, Adrian. I think this is great. I've listened to a lot of the episodes and love the podcast, so happy to join you. 

Adrian (00:00:43) - 100% pumped. And by the way, I know you'll call this out at the end, but I'm pumped, too, for Austin, brother. Question Pro, you're gonna be speaking at Question Pro X Day in Austin, Texas in a few weeks with you, my friend. So you and I are gonna have some fun and hopefully drink some bourbon while we're in Texas. 

Sean (00:00:57) - Sounds great, absolutely. 

Adrian (00:01:00) - So, Sean, how'd you get into this space, man? Start off every one of these episodes. Just spend a couple minutes kind of like, what was your draw? What was your draw to wanting to work in customer experience? What was your draw to wanting to work with customers or work with customer-facing teams? How'd you get into this whole world? 

Sean (00:01:13) - Yeah, so, I mean, it started for me in the 90s. And I am, before it was called CX, I was in customer service, right? I started on the phones and moved through management of a contact center or a call center back then for financial services and really touched about every part of the experience I could because I was in operations, but I also did training. I did quality. I even ran some kind of tech and knowledge-based solutions early in the days before they were common. So everything in my career was really pointed at this view of the customer. 

Sean (00:01:50) - And then as the industry was really forming into surveys and research and data, I followed suit and became a more traditional CX-er. But through my 25 plus years, I've done customer experience from about everywhere in the organization. So obviously starting out in my heart, being in the contact center directly with the customer, but into marketing. I spent time in marketing, product and pricing. I spent time on digital teams and IT teams, doing customer experience, all of the above. And then even in deep data and analytics teams as well more recently. 

Sean (00:02:26) - And it's just really this, my career evolved as CX evolved ultimately, but it's just, it is so important because one, I'm a customer. And being a customer sucks today. You know, and if I can help anybody improve that, you know, I'm gonna do my best to be able to do that because I want it selfishly to my experiences to get a lot better. 

Adrian (00:02:52) - I love that. You're right, man. It's like every single solitary one of us could probably think of an experience literally in the last week as a customer, where like, you're just like, what the hell was that about? Whether it's dealing with the cable company, dealing with the phone company. I know, I don't know about you Sean, but I am like, my wife always gets mad at me. Like, it's like, I'll be in a retail store and I'm like, why did they set it up like this? And it was just set up like that. Everybody having a better. 

Adrian (00:03:18) - So like every one of us has one of those experiences where like, you just know something's off and you know something's wrong, but I love it, man. What were some of the companies early on in your career, man? Just out of curiosity that kind of got you started or if you're able to share, like what were some, what types of companies or what types of industries were you really kind of digging into and spending some of that early, you know, boots on the ground, hand-to-hand combat with customer type of work? 

Adrian (00:03:38) - What type of industries or what types of companies were you actually working at? 

Sean (00:03:41) - Yeah, so my career has been split across pretty much financial services and telco. So I spent time at the, you know, my first real business that I worked with is a mutual fund company that got absorbed by Bank of America. They don't even exist anymore. But I spent time at T-Mobile, at Wild Blue and Viasat, which is satellite internet, at Wow Internet Cable and Phone, and then Charles Schwab. So I've kind of done, you know, half time in financial and half time in telco. 

Sean (00:04:11) - And honestly, you know, there couldn't be two more different sides, you know, to the experience coin, if you will, from that perspective. But it's really helped me then get into, you know, where I work today, which is consulting with companies in any industry, really, because the fundamentals, one, the fundamentals have shifted, but the fundamentals are still the same for most organizations, regardless of product or service they provide. 

Adrian (00:04:34) - You know, Sean, I love you. I love you calling that out because this is the thing I absolutely just love, and I have such a great, great fortune to do the show with, is like, you nailed it, brother. It doesn't matter what industry, what background, where you came from, what's your, like most CXers end up finding out at a certain point in their career, wait a minute.

Adrian (00:04:53) - there's like some milestone moments in every customer journey, or there's like some core focus areas that regardless of what the business, what the product, what the services, what the customer facing team looks like, what the tools that that customer fit, that is repeatable and it's rinse, wash, repeat. There's certain things that if you really kind of can focus on a couple of core items, you're gonna be able to make minimally an impact, a positive impact, in terms of improving the customer experience. 

Adrian (00:05:19) - And then oftentimes you're gonna find the things that most customers in those businesses actually care about the most. And if you can focus on those things, more often than not, you're gonna be in pretty good position to keep people happy and to continue to find new opportunities to grow the business and to grow the customer base. 

Speaker 3 (00:05:34) - Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, I do a lot of, I even talk to healthcare companies about the patient experience, about the doctor experience for the, you know, it's again, the fundamentals. One, the good news is a lot of these other peripheral industries that haven't really adopted in the past are realizing, hey, we're now behind on it and we need to catch up like healthcare and a few others. But it's definitely, companies today cannot ignore the experience, just hands down. 

Speaker 3 (00:06:03) - I think the statistic is, you know, 88% now, it used to be 80% of customers say the experience they have with an organization is as important or more important even than the products or services sold because it is about the experience economy as has been coined. 

Adrian (00:06:19) - Yeah, 100% agree with that. And people care about where they're spending their dollar. Yeah, people care about pricing typically more than anything else, but if pricing is close, modern customers want to spend their dollars with businesses that care about them, care about their employees, care about the world, care about like all of these things in the, you know, in our day-to-day lives that actually do matter and that for so long, companies and customers didn't worry about these things. 

Adrian (00:06:44) - And now we're in a different, we're in a different place in a different space and time where people actually do care about that. So I love it. Sean, I'd love for you to kind of jump into the first pillar of team, man. You've worked at all these awesome businesses. Now you're working and consulting and coaching a bunch of really, really cool companies. 

Adrian (00:06:59) - Spend a couple of minutes just kind of talking about, I guess, number one, like, what are some of the main things that you really kind of think about when it comes to team building, team management, team leadership, that first pillar of team. I'd love to just have it kind of here. 

Adrian (00:07:12) - Think about team and spend a couple of minutes kind of talking about either some of the things that you've always focused on in your career or some of the things that you're starting to realize, man, wait, look, these are some of the common challenges or obstacles or blockers that if you don't remove them or try to figure out how to get around them, you're going to have issues with the team. Spend a couple of minutes kind of talking about that first pillar of team, Sean. 

Speaker 3 (00:07:31) - Yeah, absolutely. Well, and first of all, I love that it's your first pillar or the first pillar that we're talking about because too often team gets pushed back on the list. Many times, you know, tech, people talk more about tech than they do about team, but the reality is team is where you got to start. So in my keynotes and my breakouts that I do at events and corporate, you know, workshops, et cetera, I start with people, right? 

Speaker 3 (00:07:56) - I use the term people process platform from that perspective, but it's all about the team first because the reality is no matter what you try to do, if you don't get your people aligned first, if you don't align your people, your teams, you're going to struggle or even fail. It doesn't matter. And now team doesn't just mean the people doing the work. The team means the collective organizational team from CEO or C-level sponsor and champion executive down to the people doing the work and throughout. It also means it's not siloed teams. 

Speaker 3 (00:08:27) - You know, you've got to bring cross-functional teams to bear and most organizations, you know, struggle with that. And that's why they end up failing. I mean, silos in businesses are so entrenched and have been forever and probably will be forever, not because anybody's trying to, you know, sabotage their peers, but just because it's hard. And I've got my boss who's telling me to do my stuff. 

Speaker 3 (00:08:53) - I don't have time to look up and look across the aisle at other groups and figure out, well, what are they doing that I could help with and what can they help me with? So it's about building cross-functional. It's about building alignment. And the key to all of that is more than I think anything else is you got to have some good stories. You got to have something that touches hearts and minds. I think the statistic, MIT did a study. It was like only 28% of managers could name three of their company's strategic priorities. 

Adrian (00:09:24) - Wow. 

Speaker 3 (00:09:24) - People don't remember bullets. They don't remember statistics. They don't, well, they might remember some statistics, but they don't remember like strategies and things like that. 

Adrian (00:09:34) - They remember stories. 

Speaker 4 (00:09:36) - Yeah. 

Speaker 3 (00:09:36) - And so translating to bring the hearts and minds involved, translating those, you know, those employees to understanding the story behind it.

Speaker 3 (00:09:47) - using the story as purpose-built, those are the keys to really align the teams. 

Adrian (00:09:53) - So number one, I love all of that. I think it's funny. I used to explain to me when I first started even saying that I worked in customer experience. Cause like, like similar to many, many folks that are on the show, like I, when I started off early in my career, I was, I worked in inside sales. 

Adrian (00:10:07) - I worked in inside ops where basically I was like back in, and I was doing like that customer support, but fixing things that customer support, but then go talk to a customer about account management, like some of these traditional types of all customer related, but like not never called it CX. Right. 

Adrian (00:10:22) - It took, it took many, many years to call it CX. But one of the things that you just said that made it immediately made me think about is when I did start saying that I was working in CX or that I was aspiring towards working as a CX professional, it's cause I started to realize that I was getting good at, you mentioned silos. You mentioned, and this is spot on Sean, cause we both know this. It doesn't matter if you're a small little SMB with 10 people or you're a global entity with, you know, a hundred thousand people working at it. 

Adrian (00:10:50) - Silos happens in small little painting companies, all the way up to the Googles of the world. It just happens. This is weird universal thing that humans get together in an organization. They start building their silos. Well, when I started to, but, but your comment, what it made me think about was what I started to realize when I started to actually call myself a CX, or it's cause I started getting good at two things. 

Adrian (00:11:08) - Number one, realizing, shit, if I could build some plumbing and some electrical, or if I could start connecting silos, at least, at least plugging them together some way so that there's a connection. Okay. That's a win. That's, that's better. But the second part is like, how the hell would you do that? It was storytelling. 

Adrian (00:11:23) - It was, I started to realize that I was getting good at maybe sitting with the sales team and saying, guys, you got to understand from an operative perspective, if you look at X and Y and Z, and you keep trying to sell it this way, we will never be able to deliver the X, Y, and Z, the way that you're telling the customer. Then you wonder why customers hate us. And you wonder why churn is a problem. And you wonder why renewals don't happen. So that's one example. 

Adrian (00:11:42) - So like trying to tell stories across sales and marketing, I'd say the last 10 years of my career has all been about getting sales and customer success to talk. And then most importantly, sales, marketing, customer success and product to get on the same fricking page and tell the same stories because the same thing, there's natural silos that are created. There's natural goals and focus areas that those different subject matter experts have. Sales people want to go hunt, right? 

Adrian (00:12:06) - They want to get the next logo, get the next dollar in the bank, get the next, fine. The world runs on sales people. 

Speaker 3 (00:12:12) - We need sales. 

Adrian (00:12:13) - Marketing is all about awareness and consideration, right? Everything that they think about is curating the next potential piece of demand for sales to be able to convert. Success, it's all about retention, protection, loyalty, like keeping things in the hopper. Product is a funny one because products, sometimes I wonder about them because they kind of, no, I'm kidding. 

Speaker 4 (00:12:30) - I'm kidding. 

Speaker 3 (00:12:30) - Well, there's- Well, it depends if they're major, yeah, if they're major engineers, you have to worry about, because they have this way of thinking that's very different. 

Adrian (00:12:40) - 100%, and I would say, I love all my product friends. Some of my best friends in the world are product people, but you're right, it's storytelling, man. It's being able to take the good, the bad, the ugly, make sure that there's some type of understanding around those things, and then making sure that people understand the why across different silos, or why different silos have different tendencies or different things. So I love that, Sean. That's awesome. 

Adrian (00:13:01) - One example, if you had one example, or one little short story to share, what was, throughout your career, or with all the companies that you've been able to work with, has there been one tactic or one activity that you've done that you'd want to share with our listeners to get them to think about that they could bring back to their company around how to get better at storytelling, or how to get better at bridging silos, if you will? 

Speaker 3 (00:13:23) - Yeah, absolutely, and I mean, actually, I built my business around what I would say is my primary story, because people see this, and they say, it was CX for rocks, what is this rocks thing, and so forth. But ultimately, when you look at the customer journey, which is really what everybody is now measured against, my entire journey, not my call, not my web experience, it's my entire journey, where the reality is, in business, we like to think we're designing very straight, easy journeys. 

Speaker 3 (00:13:57) - Think of them as a lazy river that the customer is on an inner tube with a cold one enjoying the sun, right? That's what we think we're building. No, the customers are facing winding rivers with whitewater rapids, waterfalls, and all of these obstacles, because their experience is full of rocks. Their journey is full of rocks, and those rocks, you really translate to broken processes, poorly trained agents, technology that doesn't work right. 

Speaker 3 (00:14:27) - So as companies, our objective, we want to create these great seamless experiences, but our objective is to find and remove the rocks that are causing the most trouble for the customers. But it's not just going out and saying, all right, randomly, reactively, I'm gonna, like many companies do, I'm gonna pick, I'm just gonna grab rocks and start throwing them out of the river. Well, you actually have to do the research to understand at what part of the journey are the rocks the most dangerous? 

Speaker 3 (00:14:53) - That's why they have classifications, class one, two, three, four, five, six, and rapid. So the reality is, it's doing the research and understanding. So I've used that story with companies to talk about and get them to think more about customer experience holistically at a higher level, and more emotionally about, yeah, I, as a customer, I don't want a rocky, you know, journey and experience with a company. I want it to be nice, and I want that cold one in the warm day. That starts to help people talk about it. 

Speaker 3 (00:15:25) - And then you talk about, well, customers are passing by your part of the river in the contact center, your part of the river in the digital team, in the website. You've got to make sure you're looking up and downstream.

Sean (00:15:36) - to make sure you're getting a solid handoff of that customer journey. Because otherwise you're creating challenges between from the digital site and to the mobile app, to the chat bot or the chat, and then to the agent. It's that continuity that's the most important. 

Adrian (00:15:52) - So you've got to understand you're part of the river, but you've got to also understand the entire river, the entire journey of the customer. 

Sean (00:15:57) - So I use that to really translate. And I have a lot of people that love it and they're like, oh, I'm going to take this back to my company. And I've had a few people say that's hokey. But the reality is it doesn't matter if it's hokey, if you remember it. And if you think about it, if it taps into something. So yeah, absolutely. 

Adrian (00:16:13) - Dude, a hundred percent, number one, it does not matter. Number one, people are going to hate one way or the other. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want to do in your one life that you got. Number two, most people that hate aren't trying to go out and trying to build their own views of the world or views of the space or views of how you can, you know, master something that you're passionate about. So that's number one. So for all the listeners, you know, it's never forget that part. 

Adrian (00:16:37) - But number two, man, I love the, I love the river raft type of analogy because you're right. You literally, first of all, there's literally different stages or places where things are smooth and where things are shitty and hard in every business, every industry. Number two, thing I really love about what you just said, you know, it's funny. 

Adrian (00:16:59) - As you were talking, I was thinking about some of the customer journey mapping facilitation that we do at CXC and like, you know, Sean, I've had so many executives roll their eyes when some executive sponsor brings CXC in to map certain parts of a business or to map the entire journey or to do a remap of something that, oh, we did this four years ago. 

Sean (00:17:18) - Oh yeah, you did it four years ago? 

Adrian (00:17:20) - Weird, because COVID happened in the last four years. So you haven't mapped what your business looks like from pre-COVID. So like, and I've had all these executives that will roll their eyes and like, geez, here comes another CX consultant with their sticker. But what I love about your analogy right there is you just fricking nailed it. And I'm going to borrow this, which is like a lot of people in companies don't even realize which parts of the river they own for their organization. 

Adrian (00:17:45) - Meaning they think sales and customer success and customer support are the only people that have to give a shit about customers. You're the ones that talk to them. You're the ones that email with them. You're the ones that are going to do all the mess. But it's like, wait a minute, finance guy. Wait a minute, ops guy. Wait a minute, product guy. Well, no, this is like a team sport. I say it all the time in the show and some people might think it's okay as well, but like CX is a team sport. 

Adrian (00:18:09) - It's literally one of the biggest gains to a company investing in customer experience or making sure that they have the right team of people that are being tasked with managing the customer experience. It's making sure people know what the hell their roles are on the pitch. 

Adrian (00:18:22) - I'm a soccer fan, Sean, so I always use these soccer examples but like, if you don't know who's on offense, who's on midfield, who's on defense, or if you don't know which parts of the river ride you're on, it's automatically a little bit harder to own those certain tranches of what you're supposed to be doing on the day-to-day. It's also a really good reminder around letting non-customer facing roles realize, hey man, you do have skin in the cave here. Like your finance and invoices get screwed up. That's a negative customer experience reflection. 

Adrian (00:18:51) - Some of your backend operative things don't work properly. That's another negative customer experience that somebody feels. And then the last part is just this, man. It's like, because I know you and I have talked about this before, but like great customer experience is really difficult to curate without incredible employee experience. 

Adrian (00:19:07) - So another part of some of this stuff that we're talking about right now with understanding the river ride altogether, understanding the different posts along the river ride, it's also about making sure that the team is aligned and the team understands what's expected of them along the way. And typically informed, educated, you know, collaborative teams usually like showing up to their jobs each day. Usually, not always, I don't know, not always, but, and so I love some of those ideas, Sean. I think that those are really, really excellent. 

Adrian (00:19:35) - Sean, let's jump into tools. You were talking about some ideas about this earlier, but it's almost like one of the biggest things that.

Sean (00:19:43) - customer experience execs are thinking about nowadays too is, obviously it's technology, it's data, it's customer feedback, it's employee feedback, it's all these product feedback. 

Sean (00:19:53) - I'd love to have you spend a couple of minutes kind of talking about tools, maybe throughout your career, some of the tools that you've either leveraged or some of the tools that you've seen companies use, or even just kind of talk through some of the things that you know at this point in your journey, companies have to be thinking about and have to be investing in on a technology side to really kind of knock it out of the park for the customer experiences. Yeah, absolutely. Well, here's what I'll say. 

Sean (00:20:17) - This tools category, I use the term in my keynotes platform instead of tools because the way I wanna talk about it is, or even technology, is that the tools, just like the people have to work seamlessly together. So thinking it more about your ecosystem as a platform, meaning all the different technologies are working together or the different tools are working together for that purpose of experience. Because otherwise you have just as many tech silos as you do people silos. And in fact, sometimes can have more tech silos. 

Sean (00:20:54) - And if you look at the recent history, especially the explosion of new technology has made the experience, supposedly was supposed to make the experience easier. No, it's actually made it harder from that perspective. So the tools, but this is where customer experience is at the biggest pivot point or transformation it's seen ever, honestly, at scale. 

Sean (00:21:21) - And the reason is this explosion of technology, AI is part of it, but it's also this evolution of, for the last 20 years, we've been working to get the data in the cloud and getting data integrated together. We've done more digital transformations to bring in other tools and things of that nature. And so we're at the point now where to do experience, you have to be an expert in the tools, meaning the data tools and the experience tools, the actual execution tools as a CX-er. And it's one of the things I'm talking about a lot to folks. 

Sean (00:22:00) - I mean, I call it CX on the rocks, not going back to the other rocks, but if you think about it, CX, the people are on the rocks because people are getting laid off in the tens of thousands, CX-ers. You're absolutely right. Across the US, but also at the same time, the experiences are tanking. I mean, all of the most recent results of experience metrics that look industry-wide or more globally show us at one of the biggest declines in the last year. Well, one, those two things are probably related. You get rid of your CX people, you're gonna suffer. 

Sean (00:22:34) - But we're at this transition point because a lot of these companies are taking CX responsibilities and giving them to IT because, hey, it's about data, data science, deep data analytics, and it's about the technology that we're gonna use to create the experiences like generative AI and chatbots and things like that. So we're just gonna give it to tech. 

Sean (00:22:57) - The CX-ers, especially those traditionalists that are really focused, and I know we're gonna get to kind of process and feedback, but a lot of the processes and feedback processes associated with CX historically aren't going to be the same anymore. Survey fatigue is real. People don't wanna take surveys. It's just, it's not there. But the technology is there. You don't have to take as many surveys. 

Sean (00:23:19) - You can use it just as a validation of your expectations by, as we talked earlier, AI studying the calls either in real time or after the fact to understand sentiment, to estimate effort, to predictively estimate the outcomes, and then use that within the tools to change the outcome. So it's all becoming this technology. And so this challenge in the industry and in the space is that this pendulum is swinging towards IT being the solutioners. But I think everybody knows IT is great at tech, great at data. 

Sean (00:23:56) - They don't really understand the human side of your business. So if you leave, if they're left to that work, they're gonna, yeah, they may do some cool, flashy tech stuff, but it won't really be tied to the experience. But the CXers have to, you know, have to help those IT teams come, you know, come more towards the humanistic side. And the CXers though need IT to help them become more experts in data and analytics and deeper work than they've a lot of times had to do. 

Sean (00:24:26) - Cause you know, teams are not, cannot get away with just being the survey team anymore. You have to be deep analytics. Now the good news is those tools that we're talking about can help you there as well. You know, they can up-level and up-shift. And I do a lot of consulting with companies on how to do that, is how do you get your CX people that know the customer, they know the experiences, they know what needs to happen. How do you up-level their capability at a deeper level? 

Sean (00:24:53) - How do you turn them into data scientists without sending them back to school, you know, for four years? And there are tools now that can help with that, but it really takes this strategic understanding of this shift in the industry and where it's going. And that's one of the biggest challenges I think a lot of companies have right now is still living in the past and not really understanding or thinking about where this industry and where this work is taking all of us.

Adrian (00:25:19) - I love that, Sean. I think you're spot on. A couple things to unpack. Number one, yeah, companies are, intro, no offense to our IT friends. I've got many, many, many friends that are incredibly smart, brilliant, fucking awesome people that run IT company, or IT teams, you know, across the country. But companies and industries are in trouble if we start punting off CX to IT because of everything that you just said. 

Adrian (00:25:43) - And then on top of it, there's still this, one of the things that I think many CXers, or many people that don't understand CX intimately miss about our space is we're almost translation, we're almost like translation experts in a business. We're almost like these guides who can like, these like nomadic individuals that go from sales, to ops, to marketing, up to C-level, down to extended leadership, over to team, to a team and even desk leadership and management. And we translate things. 

Adrian (00:26:17) - We understand what different thoughts, goals, ideas, core focus areas are. We bring them to other places. We talk about them back to your point about storytelling. I've literally always said one of the, if you wanna be an awesome CX, you get ready to tell a good damn story. You gotta be able to tell a story. If you can't tell a story, and if you can't keep somebody's attention for more than a couple minutes, maybe there's other things out there that you wanna do. But like, it's that translation, it's that storytelling. 

Adrian (00:26:43) - And then I would argue it's doing the full loop around, right after you've made your rounds, you do it again with all of the new information, all of the updated stories, all of the things that you've learned about the different lands that you went to explore inside of your own fricking company. And the reality is that it doesn't matter what your seniority level is. 

Adrian (00:27:00) - It doesn't matter whether you're the CEO, whether you're a director, whether you're a manager, whether you are a brand spanking new customer support agent sitting on the front lines, banging out a hundred calls a day. We've all got different points of view. We've all got different points of reference. And then we all, and this is why CX and EX guys better be married, man. It better be really, really close together. There's things that across those different levels of sophistication, subject matter expertise, people don't realize, they don't know. 

Adrian (00:27:26) - A CEO's job is wildly different than the person that's sitting on the bench every day doing a hundred phone calls. Thing is, is that the CEO can get quick and dirty feedbacks or quick and dirty snapshots. I was with like, with some of our customers, Sean, we'll talk about it. We'll break it down almost like the news. You've got your international section, you've got your national news, you've got your local news, then you've got your sports and your weather. 

Adrian (00:27:47) - And so like, if you could kind of figure out your company's version of those cuts, and then you get, become an expert at mastering how you translate, normalize, and socialize. Socialize is a word that people laugh at me all the time, Sean, I use socialize, the word socialize in every freaking meeting of every freaking day, because another big part of being customer experience, executive and leader, it's helping to socialize things that people across different tranches of the business are actually expecting. So I love that, man. I think it's awesome. 

Adrian (00:28:15) - I think last part that I want to hit on impact is the data. Look, technology has gotten so incredibly nasty awesome. You can do anything you want with some of the technology that most people have at their fingertips. AI has completely changed the game in terms of letting dummies like me be able to whip up these beautiful, incredible, gorgeous looking reports that somebody thinks that I actually spent all the time to build. I'm just kidding, sometimes I did. 

Adrian (00:28:37) - But there's so many things that we can leverage now to make different cuts of data, different cuts of customer information, different cuts of transactional information, clean, simple, easy, and visually easy to understand for people. And I think that this is going to be a big part where some of our folks that are still kind of scared about AI are still on the fence around like, what is AI is going to do to jobs and what it's going to do to them. 

Adrian (00:29:00) - Look, the faster you embrace it, the faster you learn how to use some of the basic tools that are sitting right in front of all of us right this second. Number one, the faster you're probably going to propel in your own career, because frankly, you're going to get a little bit ahead of the folks that aren't doing it. And then number two, you're going to find out like, wait a minute, this AI stuff everyone keeps talking about. 

Adrian (00:29:16) - Sean, I remember 10 years ago, like some of my jobs, I would literally sit on feedback, survey feedback spreadsheets, literally manually tagging. Like, think about that. And frankly, even at that stage of your career, making pretty good money to literally sit on a spreadsheet and put buckets into, this is a product feedback, sales feedback, support feedback, ops feedback, product. 

Adrian (00:29:36) - And now, so like with AI, now we've got the ability and we've got the capability of letting some of these tools do some of that stuff for us so that we can literally spend all of our time thinking about how are we going to message back to the customer? How are we going to message back to our leadership? How are we going to socialize this stuff internally? So, all awesome ideas there, Sean. Sean, I'd love to you bounce into process. 

Adrian (00:29:53) - I know some of these things are connected, but like spend a minute or two kind of talking about how process plays into this, like throughout your career, ways that you've kind of built your own playbook or ways that you've kind of captured tribal knowledge or captured knowledge bases in a business and kind of leveraged that. I'd love for you to kind of just kind of talk a little bit about how you sort of wrangle process throughout your career. Yeah, absolutely. And again, this is where process to me is, my second of three pillars. 

Adrian (00:30:22) - I know it's your third or four, but process is key because that's the only way you get repeatable results.

Sean (00:30:29) - you cannot wing it. Customer experience is not a, you mentioned it earlier, it's not a one-time journey map exercise. Okay, great. Because things are changing constantly, every day. I mean, think about it, going back to the river analogy, a landslide changes the flow of the river, a flood changes the flow of the river, all sorts of things can happen that can cause challenges. 

Sean (00:30:57) - And it's the thing that causes most CX teams and ultimately even companies to be too reactionary because it's the worst game of whack-a-mole you could ever play, because one, you're not getting points every time you whack a mole, and it never ends. I mean, you get tired of just this reactive. And ultimately, your focus should be building processes that take what you know and turn it into what you need. 

Sean (00:31:32) - So looking at it and thinking, it's all about understanding the past to change the future, up to and including, and this is where you can't, even going back to the tools or the technology of the platforms, your processes will determine how do you use those. So how do things flow or come together? How do you close the loop from a circle perspective on whether it is feedback or it's just experience? 

Sean (00:31:58) - If you know customers out there have just gone through this horrible experience, but you ignore this, close the loop, turn back around with them, either through a message or something, it goes back to that inner circle, outer circle that we all have learned in CX for years. And still, the reality is companies don't close the loop. They don't circle back around and work with their customers. That's a process. And it's partly because they haven't prioritized that process to be part of it. But the process itself is how everything comes together. 

Sean (00:32:28) - Your people and your technology, your tools, they're joined through process. So you can get the hearts and minds on board, but if you don't change the processes to facilitate that mental shift, that culture shift, it'll be dead within weeks. They're like, cause they'll say, oh, you got us all rah-rah about doing the things differently for our customers, but you didn't change anything. You didn't use tools or process or anything else to actually change. 

Sean (00:32:59) - It's like, it's just lip service, which we all have seen both as companies, potentially that we worked for, and definitely some that as clients of, or customers of, you know, it's like, they probably hear this every day and they just decided not to do anything about it. Totally agree, that's a good point. But I think this is though, and I think this process, and it kind of goes into feedback, because I think feedback is becoming part of the process, you know, within that, and, you know, it is to understand and still listen. 

Sean (00:33:32) - But, you know, let me, is another part of how I use the analogy. Great CX people, you talked about it earlier, they're connectors, they're storytellers. You even use the word guide, right? And business guides. Well, as a true, you know, I live here in Colorado. I've been on several whitewater rafting trips. I'm not going without a guide. So the couple of things about that guide, they are in the boat with you, experiencing it with you, but they're figuring out and helping guide where things are potentially risky or challenging. 

Sean (00:34:09) - The CX team is not at the end of the river when everybody gets out of the boat. And from that perspective, they're saying, well, how was the journey? Where was it rough? Where was it easy? You know, that's what traditional CX kind of puts us at the end of the journey, at the end of the river, saying, all right, how was it, right? Surveys, et cetera, et cetera. They got to get in the boat. True CX leaders of the future have to be in the boat using the technology to understand what's happening at that moment. Because here's the reality. 

Sean (00:34:42) - The future is changing the river flow, changing where the customer is going in the boat in real time as it's happening, like a true whitewater rafter guide is. Using tools and technology to do that. I'll use an example of that.

Sean (00:35:01) - I had an issue with a company and I didn't know about it, but proactively they reached out to me and said, hey, you got this coming on in about a month, you may want to take care of it. 

Speaker 3 (00:35:09) - Oh, great. 

Sean (00:35:10) - Proactive. You know, awesome. 

Speaker 3 (00:35:12) - I read the email and said, if you have questions, click here for more information. Clicked went right to the website. Perfect spot for the FAQs. Great. Ah, well, I still had some questions, you know, it seemed through my reading that I was going to have to, uh, you know, I was gonna have to go in, in person. 

Sean (00:35:29) - I didn't want to do that if I had, if I could avoid it. So I picked up the phone, I, you know, I'm over 50. So I, my first step is not chatting or anything. 

Speaker 3 (00:35:37) - It's I picked up the phone, I dialed it and it still works perfectly fine. 

Sean (00:35:41) - Yeah, exactly. Well, maybe. Yeah. 52% of our, uh, recent folks we recently, you know, studied and surveyed still say phone is their first choice. 

Adrian (00:35:51) - Me too. Me too. 

Sean (00:35:52) - So I picked up the phone and the IVR that, you know, press one, press two. It immediately said, hello, Mr. Albertson. I see this is going on on your account. 

Speaker 3 (00:36:01) - Is this what, why you're calling? 

Sean (00:36:03) - They knew that that, that was a risk point and they, they intercepted it instead of letting me choose numbers. And they said, and I said, well, yes, it is. So they routed me directly to the group. 

Speaker 3 (00:36:13) - So great, you know, experience in the IVR. Someone answered the phone. Hello, Mr. Albertson. I see this is why you're calling, you know, what can I answer for you? I asked my question. 

Sean (00:36:23) - They gave me that. Yep. 

Speaker 3 (00:36:23) - You, unfortunately, based on what you just described, you are going to need to come in in person, but I tell you what, here's, here's a link. 

Sean (00:36:29) - I just sent it to you via text and email. Click on it, schedule your appointment. 

Speaker 3 (00:36:33) - All right. I picked a time that worked for me. 

Sean (00:36:36) - I got reminders a week out, three days out, you know, that, Hey, this is, you know, this appointment all with options to schedule a reschedule or cancel, right? All the things we normally see. But again, they, they're putting that into my journey. They're, they're orchestrating my journey. The night before my appointment, I get a different message. It says, Hey, when you get to the location tomorrow to the offices, click this link here again, texting or email. I got both. 

Speaker 3 (00:37:01) - So I walk across the door. 

Sean (00:37:03) - I click the button and all of a sudden it says you're 608 and I'm like, we're on 604. 

Speaker 4 (00:37:11) - Wow. 

Adrian (00:37:11) - That's awesome. 

Sean (00:37:13) - I literally barely sat down. I was like, go to desk six. I go to desk six, the person there. 

Speaker 3 (00:37:17) - Hello, Mr. Albertson. I got this pulled up. I'm going to get this knocked out for you so you can get on with day seamless, but not just seamless, seamless across people and technology and people and technology throughout that journey. 

Sean (00:37:29) - They had, they had gone through the journey. 

Speaker 3 (00:37:32) - They had removed the rocks. They had orchestrated it in that context to understand it. Some of the best experience or worst experiences I've had, some of the worst customer service experience I've had, have been with companies that win awards for great customer service, a great customer. 

Sean (00:37:48) - He recognizes them or something for that. But I've had some of the horrible experiences. 

Speaker 3 (00:37:53) - That last experience, that seamless experience, that experience that had been orchestrated in real time and change to facilitate my better experience. 

Sean (00:38:04) - My local DMV. Wow. 

Speaker 4 (00:38:06) - What? Wow. 

Sean (00:38:08) - Yeah, I tell that and people are like, no, that can't happen. 

Speaker 4 (00:38:10) - No. 

Speaker 3 (00:38:10) - Yes. 

Adrian (00:38:11) - DMV notorious for pack a lunch, man. 

Speaker 4 (00:38:16) - Absolutely. 

Speaker 3 (00:38:16) - Notorious. It's like, it's like they make jokes in movies about that, but here they have, they've, they've figured it out. 

Adrian (00:38:22) - Take a day off work, man. 

Speaker 4 (00:38:25) - Yeah. 

Sean (00:38:25) - At least, at least in my county. Now I know not everybody, you know, listeners are going to say that's not my DMV. It's like, it's county level, but they had, they had been seamless and here's the reality. If the DMV can do it. 

Adrian (00:38:36) - Yeah. 

Sean (00:38:37) - Everybody else out there listening can do it. Yep. 

Speaker 4 (00:38:39) - Yep. 

Adrian (00:38:40) - Sean, I love that. 

Sean (00:38:41) - I love that story. 

Adrian (00:38:42) - I love that example, man. Before we wrap up, I want to pick your brain on, you've already given some awesome ideas around feedback. You've given some awesome ideas around how our listeners, people that are, are, are, are building, running, managing, leading their, their customer experience, customer success, customer support efforts in their businesses. Like if there was two things, keep it simple, but we'll boil feedback down real simple. 

Adrian (00:39:04) - If there's like two big things that you think using that, and that story is a perfect jump off for this, but like two things that people should be thinking about with feedback this day and age, given with all of the modern customer experiences and customer service expectations and all that, what would be like the one or two things that you would tell our listeners to kind of think about or focus on when it comes to collecting the managing that to run their feedback? 

Speaker 3 (00:39:29) - So I I'll again, love your choice of word, feedback versus survey. 

Sean (00:39:34) - Let's just say that because in this new age where AI can summarize the experience, they can do predictive analytics on what the sentiment or the effort might've been. They can, they can, you know, do analytics and, and predict loyalty. 

Speaker 3 (00:39:53) - I mean, a lot of companies these days are using predictive NPS, they're using predictive customer effort score. 

Sean (00:39:57) - They're using, you know, so the reality is all this technology can do that and it can actually change and so forth. 

Speaker 3 (00:40:03) - But we can't lose.

Sean (00:40:07) - still coming back to some level of feedback. Here's the good news. What was always argued as well, I don't believe this NPS score here, I don't believe that score there. 

Sean (00:40:18) - Now that we're, if we're able to truly focus on feedback and not using it as a metric to tell us whether or not we're successful, if the data and the analysis is telling us if we're successful, feedback now can go even further back to the human level, back to the days of conversations, of interviews, of dialogue with customers to fill in the gaps that the data still will show, to continue to educate your predictive models, etc., but reinforce the human approach. 

Sean (00:40:55) - Because one of our challenges we have to be careful of in this transition to data and tech and all of that is losing the human side. And so in my mind, to fix that, to address that, is to help CXers get, while we're helping them get more technology and technologically savvy and data savvy, is to also get them even further back to their roots of talking to people. The deepest relationship studies through that process can be identified from the data and then interviewed and reinforced. 

Sean (00:41:29) - And the kinds of things that you'll find that, you know, the things below the surface, if you will, that are causing bigger challenges that might be missed elsewhere come out of that. And so in this weird way, in this weird way of transition, we have this opportunity to take all of that transition to tech, all of that push to tech and data and formality. 

Sean (00:41:53) - But as CXers, keep a hand back in those, even those more earlier days of, let's just talk to customers, forums, focus groups, you know, conversations, interviews, because that you can use at a qualitative level. And guess what? You can get some of your best stories going back to the storytelling from those conversations, good, bad, or ugly. So the reality is really having that opportunity, because then that interview that you just had can be summarized via AI, studied with 50 other interviews. 

Sean (00:42:25) - And now you've got trends, you've got themes, you've got all of that, that you've not been able to do before. And I actually work with a company that actually has developed a AI chat bot for customer interviews that, you know, as well. So I mean, again, that you can even do some of that at scale, but I don't want to lose sight of talk to customers. CXers hide too often behind surveys and things like that. 

Sean (00:42:48) - This gives us a chance through the efficiencies and scale of tech and data and the prediction and the ability to use it for power, it actually gives us a chance to get back more to talk to customers. Really understand, peel the onion back even further. Don't let your company's shift to tech move everything that way. Almost use it as a pivot point to say, we're going to do all this tech, but then we're going to start doing stuff we haven't done in decades. 

Adrian (00:43:14) - We're going to start talking to our customers. 

Sean (00:43:16) - And that opportunity is huge because this pendulum will swing. It's going to go too far on the tech side. And, you know, the reality is we want it to come back. We got to bring it back to the middle, but you got to be doing some things to bring it back to humanizing the experience. Because again, you know, the more tech we throw at customers, like chatbots and things that get in their way of talking to somebody, the more they're going to demand a human experience and a human conversation and a relationship. 

Speaker 4 (00:43:45) - Yep. 

Sean (00:43:45) - I love it, man. 

Adrian (00:43:46) - Such excellent advice for our listeners. Hit pause, rewind and go back in again. And this is a simple one, but take time to talk to your customers. It's so freaking simple, but it's so freaking good. And Sean, this is why I say it all the time on the show, man, but you know, CX is modern selling. 

Adrian (00:44:02) - If you are talking to customers, you're listening, you're learning, you're absorbing, you're taking some of those gains and you're bringing it back into how you do your change management, your socialization across the organization, positive things will come about from it. So Sean, obviously this has been an absolute pleasure, man. Before I let you go, where can people find out more about you, sir? Or where can people get in touch with you if they'd like to keep this conversation going offline? 

Sean (00:44:26) - Yeah, absolutely. So if you can't tell, I am a professional speaker. I speak at conferences, I do workshops, but my website, CX, the number four rocks.com is where you can find all sorts of information about me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to have a conversation with really anybody, but again, this is a passion point, obviously, as you and I have both grown up in this and our customers deserve better. But it takes a new way of thinking to get to that point of creating the better experiences. And so let me know if I can help you. 

Adrian (00:45:01) - I love it, Sean. And I'm pumped to hang out with you in a couple of weeks in Austin, brother. So looking forward to seeing you in person. We'll have a ton of fun. I'm pumped to see your presentation. CX Chronicles podcast will be there as well. So we've got some cool stuff that we're doing there too. So I'm pumped to get some hang time in Austin, man. 

Sean (00:45:13) - All right. Sounds great. 

Adrian (00:45:14) - All right, Sean, thanks so much for joining the CX Chronicles podcast, my friend. 

Sean (00:45:17) - All right. Thanks. 

Speaker 4 (00:45:18) - Thanks, Andrew. 

Sean (00:45:18) - I appreciate it.