The one with the DAF CX – Dr. Liz Okuma E243

When you think “endowment foundation,” customer experience probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Yet Dr. Liz Okuma, Director of Client Experience at the American Endowment Foundation, is reshaping how donor advised funds deliver trust, responsiveness, and ease… even when nearly all interactions happen without ever seeing a client face to face. This conversation reveals how listening, collaboration, and design thinking translate into real business impact.

5 Insights From the Episode
-DAFs are booming… and CX is becoming a differentiator
-Two customer groups, one experience mission
-Internal listening is gold
-Journey mapping unlocked cross-functional momentum
-Culture changes when employees own CX

CHAPTERS
00:00 What is a donor advised fund… and why CX matters
02:50 Serving donors vs. serving financial advisors
05:30 Looking out the window… not the mirror
07:54 Listening to frontline teams
09:33 Making best in class tangible
11:05 Journey mapping and quick wins
13:24 Cutting a process from 3.5 months to six weeks
15:58 Measuring what matters
17:10 First Class Lounge
21:56 Getting non-client-facing teams invested in CX
24:29 The power of stories and internal visibility
26:53 Cross-functional influence in action
29:33 Where to find Liz

Guest Links
AEF Website: https://www.aef.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-okuma/

Mentioned in the Episode
Bose QuietComfort Headphones https://amzn.to/44e3hCT Affiliate Link

Your Next Steps
Listen: https://www.cxpassport.com
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@cxpassport
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I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed are those of the hosts and guests and should not be taken as legal, financial, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified attorney, financial advisor, or other professional regarding your specific situation. The opinions expressed by guests are solely theirs and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of the host(s).

Transcript

Rick Denton (00:20)
Off to Ohio today as we speak with Liz Okuma, Director of Client Experience at the American Endowment Foundation. Now, when you hear Endowment Foundation, your first thought is probably something like, isn't that just for rich universities? What does that have to do with customer experience? But Liz is proving there is a whole world of CX opportunity in places that don't always show up in the usual CX conference circuit.

And what's interesting is she's stepping into this space after decades of CX industry progress, bringing that modern thinking into a place that's ready to level up on how it connects with clients. She's also doing the hard work of defining what good actually looks like building internal buy-in and figuring out how to serve clients. She may never meet in person. Liz, welcome to CX Passport.

Dr. Liz Okuma (01:10)
Thanks, Rick. I'm so excited to be here today. Thanks for the opportunity.

Rick Denton (01:13)
And I'm,

and I'm very excited to have you on the show as well. This is, I love it when it's a category we don't talk about. This is new to us and so new to me, new to the listeners. So let's just start with those basics for those of us unfamiliar, what exactly is a donor advised fund and what makes CX in that space different from more of the traditional industries.

Dr. Liz Okuma (01:17)
Thank

Yeah.

Sure. Yeah, that is a great question. Thanks so much. a donor advice fund or a DAF, as we like to call it in the industry, is the fastest growing charitable strategy that we have for clients. ⁓ Think of it as a account that you can just go in and give and give money and be philanthropic. It's great that donors get to put assets into this account.

Rick Denton (01:55)
Hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (02:02)
and then get an immediate tax deduction on those assets and then decide to give in a year or 10 years or 20 years. At the American Endowment Foundation, we think of ourselves as a triangle. So we've got the donor at the top that we are trying to serve, but on the right side of the triangle, we also have our financial advisors and their offices. So we get and receive our donors through our financial advisors.

and through the firms that we work with. And then we, as the American Endowment Foundation, are the DAF sponsor. So we have the opportunity to serve those financial advisors and those donors on their charitable giving throughout the year. And we sponsor that. What makes it so interesting is this is lots and lots of phone calls and lots and lots of emails back and forth, but it's never across the counter.

Rick Denton (02:58)
Hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (03:01)
We're never talking to that donor or that financial advisor face to face. And I shouldn't say never, you know, we have donors that show up in Hudson, Ohio. I've been here two years and we've had two. We see financial advisors at conferences when we go to their conferences, but for the most part, 90%, 99 % of our work is done via phone, via email and in our process. That's why it's so important that we've got

Rick Denton (03:07)
Mm-hmm. Sure.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (03:30)
clear processes, we've got streamlined communications with our clients because we are building trust in a different space than maybe a target, than maybe some other Starbucks, some other organizations.

Rick Denton (03:44)
Well, and I imagine there's a wide spectrum also of dollars that are passing through. some intensity around is my experience high quality or not? You mentioned two sets of customers there. And forgive me if I'm using the wrong words. Y'all may have different phrasing for it, but you've got the financial advisors who might be advising their customers, their clients, hey, this DAF is the right solution. And then those end clients likely interact with or at least appreciate or expect a certain experience.

Dr. Liz Okuma (03:57)
Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yep.

Rick Denton (04:13)
How do y'all nuance the difference between going to those different roles?

Dr. Liz Okuma (04:17)
Right, right. And I think that it's about listening to what the clients need. So our financial advisors really want us to provide good experience to their donors. We are like a mouthpiece for them. So it's really important that we know how to work with their donors. We know how to work with their back offices and streamline those processes. Our donors on the other hand, want to send checks. They want to send wires. They want to ACH information.

Rick Denton (04:46)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (04:47)
or money to that organization.

And so they have different needs. They're on our platform. They want to be able to do that from their mobile phone and send money when they get asked for money or when they want to make a donation. So it's really understanding what the needs are of the two clients. Financial advisors also want us to be thought leaders. They want us to bring us things that they can bring to their donors and say, hey, have you thought about this? They also want us to provide reports.

and make it easy for them to sit down with a client and say, wow, look at your giving the last six months. Look at what you've done. What other space do you want to be in? So we really have to serve multiple different clients here at AEF.

Rick Denton (05:29)
I, if we have time, I want to come back to that. Cause when you have different clients, there's different listening, there's different execution around that. I want to talk about though internally, cause you had mentioned earlier to me that you had talked about that people felt pretty confident about the client experience, but there really wasn't much of a perspective from outside of the organization. How did you start shifting that focus away from, we think it is this to what it actually is beyond those internal assumptions.

Dr. Liz Okuma (05:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a great question. I arrived two years ago and what I heard from our CEO at that time is we have been looking and he was new to the organization as well. And so this was one of his takeaways. We've been looking in the mirror and we've been saying, wow, look at how good this is. We need to look out the window and we need to hear what's really happening on the outside. And so I have the opportunity and made opportunities for myself.

to really listen to our donors and our advisors and in some cases into the advisor associates that we are working with every day here. And so I took those stories with the data that we had and made them real to the organization. In addition, I listened to our internal team members. They have lots of stories to tell. They have lots of concerns that they wanted to bring up and figure out how to change processes. And so

Rick Denton (06:55)
Uh-huh.

Dr. Liz Okuma (06:55)
It really was a listening tour to be able then to maybe flip the script a little bit of saying, hey, there's a world out there.

Rick Denton (06:58)
Yeah.

100 % you may have even seen and viewers would have seen me start to grin right about the point that you said, talk to our internal associates, team members. shocks me how many companies overlook that, that rich source of customer insight. Is this something that you brought in because of experience from your past? How did you bring that in?

Dr. Liz Okuma (07:35)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rick Denton (07:54)
And how did you make sure that everybody understood, look, there is a rich treasure trove of insights if we just talk to our frontline.

Dr. Liz Okuma (08:01)
Yeah, you know, I think that it's really been a philosophy before I came to AEF. I spent 25 years in higher education and I had the opportunity to work as a vice president for student affairs. And what I really thought about and I did every day on that college campus was I couldn't see students every day, but I knew my staff did. And it was really, really, I felt like I could service my staff and my students better.

Rick Denton (08:09)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (08:30)
if I listened to what they had to tell me and got them answers and made processes smoother. So for me, it's really a philosophy of, really want to have a staff who really wants to be there and is really excited because that translates to our customers. And here's the same way, Rick, like I think it's important. I say to my staff all the time, I work for you every day. And they're like, do you see the org chart? Yeah, I do. But the important part of it is, is that I'm here to make your job easier.

Rick Denton (08:43)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (09:00)
So ultimately it's easier for our clients.

Rick Denton (09:03)
⁓ absolutely. Yeah, we've seen even visual manifestations of that where the org chart gets flipped upside down. the you're supporting, but a chart is really irrelevant as opposed to actual tangible actions. And I think about that when you had mentioned to me that the CEO has asked for in quotes, your best in class client experience. Well, that sounds really ambitious and also a little vague, kind of like me talking about when you put a chart on the wall, how do you define what that actually means in a practical

Dr. Liz Okuma (09:09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

Rick Denton (09:32)
day-to-day way.

Dr. Liz Okuma (09:33)
Yeah, so that is a great question. ⁓ it's not a buzzword here. I can tell you that it is part of our business strategy. So it's best in class client experience is part of it. It's the second part of our strategy. But it we really defined it as what what's our trust? What what how are we building trust with our clients? How are we responsive to them? How are we making it easy for them to do work with us?

And how do we continue that engagement to continue either our current client and making sure that we're retaining them or engaging with new clients. so one of things we did very early on was really talk about how those are actionable and tangible. People can see that. People can see.

Rick Denton (10:05)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (10:26)
wow, look at this engagement I had with this advisor or this donor. People can see when we're responsive. And so really trying to take it out of the clouds and bring it back down into a more actionable and tangible strategy for our ⁓ internal team members.

Rick Denton (10:30)
Mm-hmm.

Can we, can I pull on that a little bit? And that is talk to me about some of the tactical ways that you did that, because that's something forget donor advised funds, endowments, that's true of any company. When you're talking about a vision, it gets into sort of execution and then actually at the frontline, fingers on keyboard, how are you translating that vision into actual actions that folks can take going forward?

Dr. Liz Okuma (11:05)
Yes.

So let's talk about that a little bit. One of the things that I did probably after, after my listening tour was I went and we put together what we called a discovery team was a person from every different department. The great thing about that is that we took a journey map and we mapped from the beginning of the experience to the end of the experience. And at that point in time, you should have seen the light bulbs go off with our team members like

wow, that's a gap. I didn't know you did that. Why are we doing that if you did that? And so we were able to see some of those gaps. And so what we did early on in our process, and we're still early on, I say early on, but we're still new at this, is we took the low hanging fruit. And so one of the things that we were able to do very quickly is we had a 10 page maybe welcome packet that we sent out to advisors and donors like

Rick Denton (11:38)
Hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (12:02)
in a folder who does that anymore. ⁓ And so we had people stuffing it, we had people putting labels on it. And so this team got together with our marketing department and put together a digital marketing hub. What a great thing. We were able to send those out. We were able to show a financial impact on the work that we were doing. We cut down on people having to do that and resources and postage. so

Rick Denton (12:17)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (12:28)
Those types of things, we have another example of a liquidity project that took us about three and a half months to do. And once we got this team together and started to think maybe a little bit more cross collaboration, we started to think about that differently. We were able to move a process from three and a half months to six weeks. Amazing, amazing progress. And so when we talk about responsiveness and we talk about ease,

Rick Denton (12:36)
Mm-hmm.

MWAH!

Dr. Liz Okuma (12:55)
and we're able to take some of these big heavy lifts and show our internal team. See what I mean? Like, look at how responsive we are to this. Look at how easy it is. It's easy for you as our internal teams. Imagine what it's like for our clients right now. Something that took three and a half months takes six weeks. so those are the type of things, Rick, that we did to really start to the tangible things to start to make a difference.

Rick Denton (13:20)
Yeah.

Well, and the victories and sharing those victories, like, and we talk so much in CX about things that aren't necessarily direct business value. That's direct business value and shrinking that down. And that is spectacular. And so let's talk about that because you brought a sense of modernity that we talked about that you've got from the outside that you brought in. There were elements of the usual CX ingredients in place when you got their surveys, scorecards, that sort of thing. But as you've talked to me here and as we talked before,

Dr. Liz Okuma (13:24)
Yes.

Correct.

Yeah.

Rick Denton (13:50)
you're able to kind of leapfrog a lot of that. How have you been able to take those tools and move past the typical CX baggage to create something more meaningful?

Dr. Liz Okuma (13:58)
I think it's really about this change in our, not to be cliche, but really our design thinking and who's at the table and why what I'm doing in my department matters to what the next person is doing in their department. And really starting to open team members eyes a little bit on, wow, what I'm doing does make a difference to ⁓

Rick Denton (14:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (14:28)
to the organization. addition, think, so we did surveys, we had surveys, ⁓ we looked at those, but numbers really ⁓ don't make the impact as stories do. It's understanding the why. Why are we doing it this way and why is this causing issues? And so it was flipping the script a little bit of, yes, we might have scored this and that's great and we should be proud of that.

But really, why did we score that or why didn't we score that with our population? so really using that data to understand it. In addition, the other thing that we have started here is a dashboard. And that can sound pretty intimidating. Like, what do you measure? You have to measure everything in the world. What do you measure? And it's really about taking chunks at a time and saying, these are the most important measurements to us, whether it's reducing call time.

Rick Denton (15:14)
Yeah

Dr. Liz Okuma (15:25)
or whether it's looking at our retention or looking at our additional gifts or looking at our engaged advisors, looking at ⁓ really slices of that and developing not this huge dashboard, but really a dashboard that people can get around. Maybe it's an Excel spreadsheet first. mean, you have to start somewhere, but what I am really trying to instill here is you cannot manage what you can't measure. And so we have to make sure

Rick Denton (15:27)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (15:54)
that we are measuring, even if it's the little things and then reporting back out on that. Look at what we did here. Also look at what we talked about earlier, the business financial impact. Everything we're doing should have some business financial impact ⁓ around that. And so I think it was maybe going back to the basics a little bit, Rick, and not just survey, survey, survey, and ⁓ what's our MPS score and what's our EMP score and all that. It was really about, okay,

Rick Denton (16:05)
Hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (16:24)
understanding some of the why so that we could plan specifically on some of the things that we would change to make a difference in the new year.

Rick Denton (16:41)
Oh, Liz, I can't begin to tell you how much like my cheeks are a little sore from grinning. I'm trying to restrain it because you're hitting it so many of my sweet spots when it comes to tangible business value. You mentioned though, I'm going to take a little break here because you mentioned you get two visitors, you one a year. And so there may be some travel involved for them getting to Ohio. I'm sure that they might've enjoyed stopping off in the first-class lounge. Well, I'm going to invite you to do that now. Stop off here in the first-class lounge with me. We'll move quickly and have a little bit of fun here. What is a dream?

Dr. Liz Okuma (16:45)
you

Rick Denton (17:10)
travel location from your past.

Dr. Liz Okuma (17:12)
⁓ From my past, it's the Disney Cruise. It was absolutely wonderful. My kids were young. Every time we turned the corner, we saw a character. Disney knew what I needed before I even needed it. And ⁓ it's one of those things that I, it was a great vacation and one that I would hope to get back on soon. I'm not promoting them or plugging them. I'm just saying it was a great, it was a great vacation from the past.

Rick Denton (17:17)
Really?

Yeah, I gotta assure you, I do have no affiliate links with Disney. Otherwise, ⁓ we'd be promoting the heck out of those right now. Yeah, I've seen some things, but I'm not a cruise person, but I've seen something about the Disney cruises and how they even handle if you're inside the portholes and the animation and all that. They just do such a great job with experience as I've at least read about in Sun Now. You've got that experience that it's your actual dream trip from the past. That's awesome. How about the other way? What's a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Dr. Liz Okuma (17:42)
Exactly. Exactly.

Yes.

I really want to go down under. I really, really want to get to Australia. ⁓ And a dream ⁓ would be to go on a boat. I'd really love to see it on a boat. know, flying in an airplane from Ohio to Australia doesn't sound very exciting, but traveling the seas to go ⁓ to get there, number one, it would be a vacation of a lifetime. It would take a ton of time to get there, but I'd love to go see down under, see what it's like.

Rick Denton (18:06)
Okay!

No!

Yeah. I don't think

I realized that when you were saying that I thought you meant a boat that would just go around the continent. You mean take a boat from the Western hemisphere to Australia. How about it? Okay. You're to have to look into that one. That sounds interesting. Well, there will be plenty of meals on that. That boat when you're going from the Western hemisphere to down under, what is a favorite thing of yours to eat? Get out.

Dr. Liz Okuma (18:37)
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right. Brussels sprouts. I love

Brussels sprouts. And you know what? When we were, when I was talking about this with my family, they're like, do not say that that sounds terrible. But I have to tell you, this is something I never experienced as a child ever. They just, my parent, my mom did not like them, but I have never met a Brussels sprout that I do not like right now. I think our taste buds change as we get older.

Rick Denton (19:08)
huh.

Dr. Liz Okuma (19:16)
But I just, I love Brussels sprouts. If I have an opportunity, I'm having a Brussels sprout.

Rick Denton (19:19)
And Liz here I thought you and I were gonna be friends and now I'm thinking

about just terminating the episode right now because longtime listeners know that is one of the foods that I consider that Satan himself created. So I've never, and I mean this, never heard somebody declared as their favorite thing to eat. It's actually usually the answer to this next question. So I'll ask you, you're gonna say like ice cream.

Dr. Liz Okuma (19:28)
No,

I know.

Rick Denton (19:45)
or something. What is something you were forced to eat growing up, but you hate it as a kid?

Dr. Liz Okuma (19:50)
Yogurt. Absolutely. It was just like everybody has to have yogurt and I just didn't have that. Didn't have that palette, but we always had it and it was always in my lunch and it was always something that we needed to have. it just, kind of really wanted to like it, but I didn't. And you know, so, um, it was yogurt and you're probably hoping that I say Brussels sprouts again. I didn't have that, but

Rick Denton (19:52)
Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's

Well, I was, yeah, but

I guess not. But at least you haven't totally flipped it and like, you know, well, I really hated ice cream and pizza as a kid or something like that. It just completely blown my brain for the day. Unfortunately, Liz, I love the laughing. I love all the fun here that we're having in the lounge. Sadly, we're going to have to leave though. What is one travel item? Not including your phone, not including your passport that you will not leave home.

Dr. Liz Okuma (20:22)
Candy. I hate candy.

My AirPods. ⁓ my goodness. I love to listen to podcasts. I love to listen to books when I'm traveling. I love to listen to music. And sometimes I don't like to listen to others. And so for me, making sure that I have those, it's really important. Helps me, helps my travel. Keep me sane.

Rick Denton (21:08)
Liz, you snuck in a little phrase in there. Sometimes I just don't want to listen to others. Yes. These headphones that those can see on screen right now are one of the best things I've ever purchased. And it is noise canceling headphones. And maybe I will slip an affiliate link in for these guys because they're awesome. You had said something ⁓ to me earlier and we even talked about it a little bit where a lot of the roles there simply don't ever face a customer. You mentioned the two.

Dr. Liz Okuma (21:19)
There you go.

Rick Denton (21:38)
that have come in face to face. Yet these people's work really impacts the ultimate experience that the customer receives. How do you get those people bought in when CX feels really disconnected from their role? And how do you make sure that they just don't see this as another item for their to-do list?

Dr. Liz Okuma (21:56)
Yeah, it's not a check off the list right now. And it's not also, I've seen some companies that it's about ⁓ getting points or getting rewarded. It's really about ⁓ making the connection clear and visible to the employees, to our team members here. I also think it's about ⁓ those wins and celebrating those wins. so

Rick Denton (22:00)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (22:22)
⁓ outside of my door right now, it's giving season. So you can imagine in the financial world business, we do 65 % of our business now until the end of the year. So we are hopping out there. But one of the things I started last year and was asked to bring it back this year by our employees is a giving season map. It's the journey map. And so we've got red post-its, we've got yellow post-its, we've got green post-its.

Rick Denton (22:34)
I it. Yeah.

Okay.

Dr. Liz Okuma (22:50)
We can celebrate on those yellow post-its. We can say, hey, this isn't working on a red post-it. Let's fix this for next year. The green post-its are, hey, have we ever thought about this? Here's an idea. But it's really important that those yellow post-its are out there and we're celebrating our wins. This is really good. This happened. Thank you so much, so-and-so, for making sure that you could help me support this financial advisor in the best way I could. We have a saying here that says, if you have a deadline on the inside,

Rick Denton (23:15)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (23:20)
Please understand you've made it on the outside for our support teams. And so ⁓ it's really important that we meet our deadlines. So it's not a checklist. It's something that we are trying to instill in our culture. When we talk about trust, when we talk about responsiveness, we talk about ease and engagement, our employees want that as well. They want to come to work every day at a place that they know and they can trust.

Rick Denton (23:27)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Dr. Liz Okuma (23:46)
their job is as easy as possible. You we're all looking for that easy as possible. And so I really do think that that our employees are really living this in a different way. So it's not a checklist. It's not a, I didn't see any clients today. You know, that face to face that you and I were talking about. It's really about I did hear this client on the phone who was struggling. I do hear this financial advisor who's really frustrated. How can I help them?

Rick Denton (23:50)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

But that triggered a little thought there. Those stories that you talked about, hey, I just helped this financial advisor, I just helped this client. And I realize there's a lot of confidentiality, sensitivity, so there may be stories that you can or can't say here or the like. How are those stories shared inside of the organization then? Or is there a story that you could share here of a really significant victory that then is something that has inspired the rest of the company around customer experience?

Dr. Liz Okuma (24:29)
Thank

Yeah, that's a great question, Rick. ⁓ I think that let's talk about the sharing of stories first. One, we have a CX website. We have a web page. have an internal web page that employees can share stories. They can ⁓ make shout outs to their other team members that are helping them. This journey map, I wish I could walk you out there. This journey map has yellow Post-It notes all through the journey map.

⁓ So we are sharing stories and we are sharing wins. ⁓ You know, I think that one of our, can talk about one of our visitors who came to see us a couple of weeks ago. ⁓ He was in Ohio. He was doing business. He had never seen us ⁓ physically. And so he really wanted to come here. He was a little frustrated with maybe some of his fees that he was paying and ⁓ had some questions about his successor plan and.

Rick Denton (25:15)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (25:39)
You know, we welcomed him. He came in. He was surprised to see the organization and what was happening. He'd always been on the phone, but it was almost like a ⁓ book. You you read a book and then you see the characters. You're like, wow. You know, he got a chance to actually see what was happening. You know, before he left, he was able to meet with our CFO. He was able to meet with our CEO and really put faces with names. And that's really what this is like. It's about building that trust from afar.

Rick Denton (25:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Liz Okuma (26:07)
I think one of those donors came and was really re-engaged with, this organization is working for me and I want to make sure I keep my money here.

Rick Denton (26:15)
I

like that. like that. Hey, it sounds like y'all need to start a tour group and invite more folks in. you have shared so much with me, Liz, about all the wisdom that you brought in this and the tactical elements. Like there's some really good elements this well, I can see why you were a finalist for a women in CX collaboration award. That

Dr. Liz Okuma (26:20)
Bring

Rick Denton (26:35)
that came from real change, actual business results, reducing call times, redesigning processes and bringing people together. Everything we have just talked about. How do you pull off that cross-functional work? And then what does it teach you about the influence that is required throughout an organization?

Dr. Liz Okuma (26:53)
Yeah, that's a really great question. know, in talking about the discovery team, I think that that was really the first step to say, hey, come together. Let's talk about what issues you are facing. Let's make sure we educate you on what that person's doing next to you. We talked about that already. That's really important. ⁓ That design thinking and those quick wins are really ⁓ pushing the organization to say, this is our standard. We will always have meetings with cross

Rick Denton (27:00)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (27:23)
across collaboration between departments. I just had ⁓ a meeting yesterday with, we're trying to solve this problem and people said, okay, well, who should be in the meeting? And they're like, well, we need somebody from here. We need somebody from here. We need somebody from here. We can't solve this in a silo. And I was like, ⁓ my goodness, thank you. Like this is really happening and it's not coming from me. It's coming from the team members that see how far we've gone.

Rick Denton (27:44)
Yes! Yeah. Right.

Dr. Liz Okuma (27:51)
We've made real progress here. ⁓ We've looked at the CX maturity matrix. Where are we on that? What improvements have we made? And so it's really about letting our employees also speak for themselves. And I was so excited to hear employees say a couple of weeks ago, we're putting the journey map back up because that really helps us. We get ideas in this busy time.

Rick Denton (28:16)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Liz Okuma (28:18)
Are we gonna invite these people to the meeting? Cause we can't be in a silo. We get more done when we've got the right people in the room. I'm excited to see ⁓ those conversations happening. And I'm excited to see that our employees now have a, they feel empowered and they feel like they can actually make change ⁓ with the experience. And so that has been absolutely wonderful to see. This isn't about Liz Okuma at all.

This is really about all the employees who've come together to make those processes that we just talked about hum. And also when it doesn't work or when we think that process is really good, those owners are saying, we could make it a little bit better. What if we do this next year? And so that's exciting to see in an organization.

Rick Denton (29:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

That now I said I was going to end it on the Brussels sprouts earlier, but this is where we're going to end it because that is the, the, the real impact comes out when it's not you being the, the forced driver of it, but rather the organic culture and the employees themselves take it forward. Liz, absolutely. If folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you get to know a little bit more about donor advised funds or the American endowment foundation, what's the best place for them to find more.

Dr. Liz Okuma (29:33)
⁓ Our website, so I would encourage you to go to AEFonline.org to see what opportunities we have here if you have somebody who needs a DAF or would like to start that philanthropic fund. I'm on LinkedIn, Liz Okuma if you want to connect with me there, I'd love ⁓ to connect and continue the conversation. I have learned a ton and I have so much more to learn.

Being able to connect with others ⁓ is really important to me.

Rick Denton (30:06)
That's fantastic. will get all of that in the show notes. Liz, this has been a eye opening moment for me because I just never thought about a DAF. I never thought about endowments really being focused on customer experience. I just kind of selfishly thought about them as money houses, right? And it's so much more than that. And you've helped walk us through that both just conceptually and then really getting the tactics of it. Those nuts and bolts are going to be helpful, not just to the industry you and I are talking about, but to customer experience industries across

Dr. Liz Okuma (30:22)
defeat.

Rick Denton (30:35)
multiple industries. Liz, it has been an absolute treat having you on the show. Thank you for being on CX Passport.

Dr. Liz Okuma (30:42)
love the opportunity. Thanks, Rick, so much for having me today.