The One Where She Works Past the Metrics – Frances Chapireau E249

Metrics are useful. Until they become the destination instead of the signal.

In this episode, Frances Chapireau joins CX Passport to talk about what happens after measurement. The conversation focuses on turning market research into insight and insight into decisions that actually influence the business.

This is a practical discussion about dashboards, interpretation, and the discipline required to move beyond reporting. It is about understanding customers well enough to act, not just measure.

Key Insights

• Metrics describe outcomes, not underlying need
• Market research only matters if it informs decisions
• Dashboards can distance teams from customer reality
• Insight comes from synthesis, not volume
• CX maturity shows up in how organizations act on what they learn

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome and episode framing
02:34 Frances’ background and path into CX
06:12 Market research versus performance metrics
11:05 Where dashboards help and where they fall short
17:48 Turning data into usable insight
19:33 First Class Lounge
24:30 What organizations miss when they chase numbers
31:10 Making insight relevant to decision makers
38:22 Practical advice for CX teams trying to go deeper
43:55 Closing thoughts

Guest Links

Frances Chapireau on LinkedIn  https://www.linkedin.com/in/frances-chapireau-62644b38/

Listen: https://www.cxpassport.com
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@cxpassport
Newsletter: https://cxpassport.kit.com/signup

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 (00:21)
Welcome back, CX Passport listeners. Today we head

to Germany to talk with Frances Shapiro. Frances has been working in customer experience for about 15 years now, but she didn't start there. She came from a market research background. Back when being close to customers wasn't debated, it just was expected. Over the last few years, she spent a lot of time helping organizations make better use of voice of the customer and just as importantly, well, actually doing something with the insight they collect.

She's also trained in Lego series play, shows up in how she thinks about teamwork, collaboration, and why closing the loop in companies is often harder than listening in the first place.

She brings a very practical, grounded point of view to a space that often swings between hype and hand-wringing. And she's not afraid to challenge some comfortable assumptions along the way. Francis, welcome to CX Passport.

Frances (01:15)
I thank you for having me.

Rick Denton (01:17)
Francis, I know you came from that customer experience market research background. When you look at how companies are listening to customers today, what feels like real progress? And what feels, well, like we just somehow made it harder than it used to be.

Frances (01:34)
Yeah, so this is a really good question. And I think the one thing that jumps like, or springs straight to mind is the fact that we're able to listen to customers kind of in an ongoing way, ⁓ much more sort of quickly, but I think back to ⁓

of customer satisfaction tracking. that's where I started and that the turnaround times are quite long, right? You would, you would do your sampling and then you'd go into field and you've got a whole lot of work to do on the back of it. with the data tables and then manually putting that into PowerPoint presentations. And so just like the speed of what we can do now, right? terms of near to like real time listening.

Rick Denton (01:59)
Mm-hmm.

Ha ha.

Frances (02:21)
And getting that all done is sort of automated, pushed into dashboards. I mean, we've been doing that for probably the last 10 years or so more already now, but like just that leap, you know, from traditional market research to customer experience management platforms that just automated all of that. I think that's been, that's just been huge in terms of the speed of the turnaround. The fact that we are able to respond then to customers much more quickly, like, I mean,

Rick Denton (02:29)
Mm.

Yeah.

Frances (02:48)
Maybe come talk more about Closed The Loop later, but just the ability, know, if you've had a transaction, you put down the phone, you get that survey shortly afterwards, you maybe leave a not very good score or comment, you might then get a call back within a really short frame, like time frame, and that didn't used to be possible. It just wasn't like, you know, when I sort of started my career, that wasn't how we were managing things. So I think that's been amazing.

Rick Denton (03:03)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Frances (03:17)
And then on the dashboard side, yeah, and I a lot of people sort of hate dashboards. So there's too many them and they're not helping, but at least you're getting that, you know, it's all held in one platform normally, or that platform's pulling in the data, automating all that. So there is less human error, there's less manual work. And again, it helps us democratize the data.

Rick Denton (03:23)
You

Frances (03:42)
Um, you can push that out to different departments. can easily apply filter. So you're much more able to quickly respond to questions, but you know what customer is saying about this? Oh, let's let me go in and check. You know, it's not a request put in and we've to go and do formal analysis. So I think all of that has been really positive development. And in recent years, you've also had this, this push towards multi-source. So not just survey, but you know, let's put in.

Rick Denton (04:03)
Right.

Frances (04:11)
reviews, social media stuff and particularly over last five to seven years maybe also that going into the contact centre, getting the data from there and yeah, there's so much.

Rick Denton (04:11)
Right.

Thank goodness. We used to blow

that off and now we're like, wait, there's a lot of stuff going on here. Yeah.

Frances (04:26)
Yeah, right. There's

so much going on there. Now with like text analytics has come, you know, it's come so much further and there's a lot more accessible than it ever was. So I think all of that is really good. but

Rick Denton (04:43)
I feel

like there's a but coming here. ⁓ that's really good. But.

Frances (04:46)
Yeah,

there is a but and I think that is that because it's moved, you know, out of the market research space or a lot of the time into these sort of platforms, so its own space, customer experience management, these often itself so platforms, I think in a way we've lost a bit that instinct to go and deep dive where we see the data is not giving us all the answers, which of course it doesn't.

Rick Denton (05:02)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (05:16)
But where previously you might have had a research team sitting on that with you and saying, if you're just going to do some interviews, let's just follow up on that. Let's just go and dig into that a bit more. Why don't we recontact some of the customers that left us comments about that? There was a way of quite quickly doing that if the customer wanted to. And I think you've always had that whole market research toolkit at your disposal.

But now like not all of the platforms kind of really offer that or, that's not their main thing. And certainly when we're talking about maybe, you know, going out and talking to customers live or doing like going and observing them doing a sort of more ethnographic approach, like they didn't offer that. Right. So, and then, and so I think we've got kind of, we've got pulled in this direction of want data predominantly.

Rick Denton (06:03)
⁓ huh.

Frances (06:05)
And even where we're dealing with more qualitative sources, like ⁓ the contact center, right? That's all text, that's all voice. But these platforms are so designed to kind of quantify that and show it to you as a graph or whatever. It's not going out and doing that deep, having those deep conversations with customers and digging into the, the why and stuff. So I think that's the but I think is that we've gone, we've gone too far, maybe in one direction.

Rick Denton (06:19)
Yeah.

Yeah.

You saw me, you probably even heard me go, huh, when you were saying that, because I would think that with all the tools and all the capability that we have now, that we would actually find research to be easier. And then you mentioned, but we've lost that instinct to go deeper. Why do you think that is? If we've got all of this rich information that's available, why aren't we going out and talking to customers? Why aren't we digging deeper? How did we end up here?

Frances (07:04)
Yes, it's a good question. think, think in part it's because like we made doing things like online service, like really cheap and really easy and really fast.

You know, a lot of CX teams, a lot of voice, the customer teams are quite small and they're trying to manage these big survey programs. And you think about the whole sort of range of what people are trying to do. And then it feels like another thing that could be quite time consuming,

I think, you know, maybe increasingly we're going to find we have got the tools to help us do that at scale.

and certainly in terms of, you know, analyzing interview transcripts that's all we're to get again, cheaper and easier. hopefully, hopefully we're going to move back in that direction. But I just think there's been this period. Maybe 10 years or so where, you know, the, customer experience management approach kind of got established. And then we moved into this era of kind of voice of the customer, these large scale

Rick Denton (07:41)
Yeah.

Frances (08:00)
real time, like high volume surveys. And I just think we got so occupied with those. you've often got sort of CX and UX and market research all sitting in different places actually in the organization.

Rick Denton (08:01)
Mm-hmm.

huh.

Frances (08:16)
and not really working together that much. so sometimes some of those things would be seen as that's a market research activity, not a CX activity. I think bringing all that together is important. I mean, it's interesting when you talk to UX teams, like product teams, and you talk to them by voice of the customer. For them, it absolutely is that user research. is interviews, it's user testing. But the CX space, it feels a bit crazy to talk about those separate

Rick Denton (08:35)
Yeah.

yeah, like voice of the customer in general, right? That's a, that is a, I'm going to just use this maybe, maybe I'm channeling a little bit of marketing here, but that is a brand that has been somewhat tarnished because it got associated with surveys. You even talked about, look, the voice of the customer, big survey programs, and you mentioned how, hey, that, that's a lot of work that's consuming time. Maybe the actual value wasn't there and possibly the perception.

of value wasn't there. How can companies get back to real value around voice the customer? And how can the perception of that value be improved?

Frances (09:48)
Okay.

one topic that is really big right now, has been discussed a lot right now is this sort of this obsession with metrics and measurement as the sort of focus of these programs rather than learning and doing something actually with it. And I think so that's one thing I think we can definitely do is try and shift that focus. You the measurement is still there, that's not going to go away. And there's a demand for that.

Rick Denton (10:11)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (10:27)
but maybe we don't make it so central and focus so much on the score and instead try and push the conversation onto you know what have we learned you know what we learned from from the feedback this month and really looking at kind of the score as a conversation starter is that okay that's nice but what does that score actually mean what we've been doing

Rick Denton (10:31)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Frances (10:52)
in the business to have changed that and is that showing up in any of the comments, for example, or, you know, we fix that thing. So comments about that should have gone away entirely, have they? You know, and just really sort of focus more on like, what are we learning from the feedback rather than like, have we moved that number? And I think that way, you know, that's one way at least that you start to sort of, you shift the conversation, you reframe it as something else.

Rick Denton (11:12)
Yeah.

Frances (11:22)
Another thing I think is that we need to just get a bit more creative in sort of breaking out of that survey box, finding other sort of ways to bring the customer to life and sort of show that yeah, voice of customer isn't just this one thing. You know, it's actually all these other things we can have sort of communities, we can have live customer events. We can, you know, actually go, you know, if you've got a business with sort of physical locations, know, shops, whatever it is, go there.

Rick Denton (11:36)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (11:52)
watch what customers are doing, talk to them.

Rick Denton (11:54)
Yeah,

actually, what examples do you have of that? Because I imagine from your market research background and then also working with clients today, where have you seen some of that turnaround where, hey, you know, actually, we're going to go have a little chat here and see the impact around that little chat.

Frances (12:09)
Yeah, well, you know what, I had a really interesting conversation last week with a woman called Claire Bristow, And she runs the Connecting with Customers program at AGON, which is like an insurance and pensions provider in the UK. And, you know, they very much, I think,

have a sort of nice model program in terms of, you know, how do you go beyond the survey? then her part of the team, they really focus on these live panels and making sure that they organize things like live call listening. And like not as a one-off, like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to do, but they offer it sort of every week you can sign up.

Rick Denton (12:47)
Ha

Frances (12:49)
Um, and they just run a whole host of events where they bring customers in and people, you know, can ask them questions. Um, they make sort of video things that sort of do podcasts, but they're doing a whole range of activity. Um, and I just think it's such a nice example because, you know, it's not that they ditch the survey part, but it's, it's all part of a much bigger picture and you've got sort of measurements there, but.

Rick Denton (13:04)
Yeah.

Frances (13:18)
that focus on, you know, other parts of voice of customer that also helps really drive the culture. That's more.

Rick Denton (13:26)
And point,

yeah. And points out that voice of the customer or survey does not equal voice of the customer. It's just one piece of it. And as we continue to grow and find ways to listen to the customer outside of the survey, all the better, but we're going to, we're going to bring all that in together and not, I like what you said. They're not as sort of this just one off, but rather part of the ongoing rhythm. Yeah. That reminds me of your background and team performance. I know you mentioned doing a lot of that kind of work, Lego serious play, closing the loop.

Frances (13:37)
Mm. What?

Yeah.

Rick Denton (13:56)
All of those things sort of weave together. Heck, even when we were talking about you've got UX teams and marketing teams and CX teams, all of that is in that realm of team performance and closing loop and all working together. Why is it so hard for companies to move from insight to action? What do you see right now getting in the way of teams actually doing something with what they know? We talked about all this, a great input, but it doesn't matter if they don't actually do something with it. What's standing in the way of that?

Frances (14:23)
There are a lot of reasons, know, and I think we just forget how hard it can be, like the reality of bringing people together from different teams, like first of all, getting the right people in the room who are in a position to make that change and then getting them to work together. A lot of programs that I've come across don't really have

Rick Denton (14:39)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Frances (14:53)
sort of the governance structure in place that makes it clear, you know, who can take action or who should be doing it, how, know, who's accountable, where's the budget coming from, how do we measure if this is a success or how do we prioritize, you know, we've actually got this, this range of things we could be doing and then people often get stuck in that place of saying, well, well, which should we do first and, you know, what's the return on that, you know, that you've got to have a way of prioritizing.

Rick Denton (15:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm, yeah.

Frances (15:23)
you whatever you base that on, you know, the number of customers that would affect the value of those customers, but you have to have some of the systems and processes in place to allow people to take action. And then where it requires this kind of cross-functional collaboration, I think we need to focus on that a lot more deliberately in sort of how we shape it, because I think silos is a huge problem. It's a topic that comes up all the time.

Rick Denton (15:32)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (15:48)
SIDOs are kind of natural in business. You know, we organize ourselves into groups of people with expertise to tackle specific problems. But when we do have something where we need to bring people in, you know, from marketing and IT and product and I don't know what, that's where we can run into difficulties because they've got their own work going on and they've got their own priorities. And there's probably some politics in there somewhere.

Rick Denton (16:02)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (16:14)
people have different ways of working and they have different languages, jargon within their own sort of, sort of speciality, their way of talking about things instead of just expectations about how things would be done. And so I think if you throw a bunch of people into it and say, hey, we need to solve this problem, it's not just gonna happen. Collaboration is hard, even within a team that you've maybe been consciously trying to build.

Rick Denton (16:19)
Right.

Frances (16:42)
So let alone a team that, you know, sort of thrown together into a working group and they're trying to squeeze it in between other bits of their job. So I think, you know, where we put a lot of effort into building our sort of regular static teams, I think we need to put similar effort if we form a working group or some sort of steering committee or some sort of little squad to go and fix something. But we also just put a bit more effort into shaping that team and making sure the alignment's there.

Rick Denton (17:05)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (17:11)
building a shared language for talking about the problem and making sure that everyone's actually understood the same problem. I mean, on a sort of high level as an example, you can even take that concept of what it means to be customer centric or customer first. So if you go out and ask different people in different departments, what does that mean? What does that look like in our business? You'll get quite different answers. you have to.

Rick Denton (17:35)
Yeah, you will.

Frances (17:39)
invest that time, I think, at the beginning. ⁓ I think that's really, really, like, that's really important. I think another thing that sort of feeds into it, going back to the insight side and, you know, insights to action. I think we've often on the insight side tried to come with kind of ready package kind of perfect insights. You know, that was always even, you know, back when I started market research.

That was the expectation. You come with your recommendations. here's all the analysis and here's the results and here are the three things you should do. And I think I like to challenge that a bit. I mean, I'm not saying we shouldn't try and do that, but again, I see that as that should be the start of a conversation with the stakeholders who actually have the power to go and do the thing because they just, have so much more context. the CX team or insights team, are never going to know.

Rick Denton (18:08)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Frances (18:34)
all the ins and outs of everything that's going on in every department and what could be causing this and what might be blocker to that. So I think you have to, I mean, by all means, try and come with an opinion because that's important too. But as a starting to point to, you maybe you start your workshop around it maybe and so say, what are we missing?

get that context and get the stakeholders themselves to try and shape what they think the way forward is. You so you present them like the what and the so what. And then when it comes to like the now what, it's like, we want to hear from you too. when people are involved in coming up with the solution themselves and contributing their ideas, they're more invested in

then seeing that through and getting that implemented.

Rick Denton (19:33)
Francis, I love that idea of, get folks involved. If I'm just an audience member, it's a lot different than when I'm actually in there participating, 100 % agree. Now, folks may have heard me say at the beginning of this introduction that we're talking to you in Germany. I think folks can also discern that that accent may not be a typical German accent. So travel is something that you definitely do and have done.

And it can be nice to take a little break when there's travel in the First Class Lounge when it is available. And it is available now for us. So I wanna invite you here into the First Class Lounge. We'll move quickly and have a little bit of fun here. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Frances (20:11)
So that would have to be Cambodia, where I went. Well, more than 10 years ago now. ⁓ But it's a beautiful country, interesting. ⁓ Yeah, when you did the typical things, you do the temples and it was just like nowhere else I'd ever been. So yeah, definitely Cambodia.

Rick Denton (20:31)
Mm-hmm.

What

a great place. I've spent, I think, 36 hours there. was on a business trip. And so I would love to spend more time having not done any of the tourist things. Although that is where, huh, I don't necessarily want to sneak ahead to some of our food section, but that's the place that I had my fried tarantula was there in Cambodia. So we'll talk about food. We'll talk about food a little bit later. What is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Frances (20:52)
No. ⁓

Yeah.

not been to. This is hard to pin down and actually the list of places we'd like to go as a family I think it's getting longer and longer. But I think Japan I think has always made me curious like and ⁓

which might be odd for like listeners in North America, but Canada. I've never actually been to Canada and it looks beautiful and there's, I've always been kind of, that's been on my list for a long time as well. So yeah, when you live in Europe, it's exotic.

Rick Denton (21:31)
⁓ I love that.

I think it's so important for those like all of us when we live somewhere, it becomes kind of normalized. And while I've not been to Canada, but a couple of times, it's still you're right. I'm like, it's in the backyard. It's it's it's something close. It's not exotic. It's not a bucket list trip. And yet for someone with a different global perspective has a different perspective on that. There are places probably that you live, heck, maybe where you are right now that is somebody's bucket trip. You're like, yeah, that's just where I get my groceries. So it is I love that global perspective and how we

we view things through different lenses. Francis, I mentioned food earlier. Let's talk about that a little bit. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Frances (22:10)
Right. Well, this I struggle with because I like, I am a bit of a foodie, I like lots of things. I asked my son this morning, he said, what do I like to eat? I thought I couldn't, and he said lasagna. It's my home, my own homemade lasagna. It's weird because it's true, I love it, but I hate eating lasagna in a restaurant. It's always disappointing, but the one I make at home, I quite like.

Rick Denton (22:27)
Yes.

Me too. Yeah. Yeah. That's

so funny. Like you and I are very, ⁓ you and I are very similar in that regard in that our homemade recipe, I love, I hate restaurant lasagna. It all comes down to whether it's cottage cheese or ricotta cheese for me. And so that's one of the big differences for mine. Well, it sounds like the home stuff is something that you really liked there. What about while you were growing up? What was something you were forced to eat, but you hated as a kid?

Frances (22:53)
.

Well, like many people, think, Brussels sprouts. Although I have to say, I never got all credit to my parents, they never forced me to eat them. Very rarely, normally at Christmas, they would appear on the table and I never liked them and every so often I'd be encouraged to try one and they remained disgusting. I don't, I really don't like sprouts.

Rick Denton (23:08)
All right.

Good, okay.

⁓ Well,

you and I are very, very similar. We love lasagna and we hate Brussels sprouts. All right. I look forward to when we can meet each other in person and share a meal together because I know we will like the same things. Sadly, it is time for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item not including your phone and not including your passport that you will not leave home?

Frances (23:37)
Mm-hmm.

Again, tricky. I would say there's two things I actually always take. One thing I always take, so it should be that really, is painkillers. Because there's nothing worse when you are traveling and you're on a long flight or whatever and you're feeling groggy, or even a short flight, you start feeling groggy and you've not got anything with you and the first thing you have to do is find a pharmacy.

Rick Denton (23:58)
Okay.

Frances (24:11)
that just on a pragmatic level. On an emotional level I often take a few British like English breakfast tea bags with me places because that's just a thing from home and even living here in Germany we drink like breakfast tea and yeah so if I'm going somewhere I think they might not have tea I take it with me.

Rick Denton (24:43)
Oh my gosh, I love that. I love the fact that it's something, well, I love the fact that you can bring a little dash of home in something so compact and so easily travelable. I don't think that I could bring my barbecue or my Tex-Mex or my queso quite as easily as a bag of English tea. I love that. I love that one item. That's a lot of fun. Francis, getting back into the world of customer experience, but really in a more broader sense.

Frances (24:56)
That's the vaccine.

Rick Denton (25:10)
When clients are coming to you today, where are you seeing their real need? Not just customer experience, but in that broader business context.

Frances (25:17)
Hmm. So this is, yeah, again, it's a good question, isn't it? It's hard. I honestly find it hard to separate business from customer experience because I just think it's so, it's not that separate add on, is it? Like if you're doing it well, wouldn't be. So, I mean, I am seeing that need to reconnect with the customer, that need to understand them. So even though, you know, if you're running a big program, all the ones we're talking about earlier, that kind of understanding of, but like,

Rick Denton (25:28)
It shouldn't be. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Frances (25:46)
But who are our customers? Like, can I picture someone, you know, can I actually picture them before me? Do I really understand if they're going to like this decision or not that we're making? So I think that sort of deeper connection I think is there. I think, again, that topic of silos and that sort of work in the business that's not joined up, I'm seeing that causing a lot of frustration and friction. And I think people are aware of it. I think people are very aware of it. But

It's like, how do we go about changing it, especially if I'm in large organization and I'm however many levels down from the sort of the executive team, you know, how, how do I, you know, go about sort of navigating that? I think that's a big challenge. And I think, well, there's a few things I think need to simplify that's linked to that, isn't it? Of course, they've got all this different work going on in different departments. And I think.

Rick Denton (26:32)
Right.

Right.

Frances (26:45)
people are sort battling with complexity, I think. And there's that really nice example, it was an experiment someone ran and they give people like a, I think it's like a bridge or something made out of Lego and it's not stable. And they ask people, fix this bridge. And people almost intuitively add a brick underneath so it's stable. But an absolutely valid solution would also be to take a brick away from the other side and it also be stable.

Rick Denton (27:02)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (27:14)
but people was natural. Yeah, it's a cool experiment. can't remember who did it. And it just illustrates our human instinct, I suppose, to add things. Like when we find a problem, we add something to fix it. But actually, then you get to the situation where you've got really sort of complex processes and extra steps added into things instead of thinking, well, what can we

can we take away? How can we simplify this? How can we subtract? ⁓

Rick Denton (27:46)
Wow. You just broke my brain. sitting here.

You just completely broke my brain. I was like, Oh, that's brilliant. Cause I see it. There's the bridge. I'm absolutely putting, in fact, I'm putting a lot of bricks under that bridge. I'm adding, adding, adding. And that idea of moving to simplicity, really being a, and I think about it in our own lives. Heck, happens. A lot of folks in January, they're like, how, what can I strip out? Right? As we look to new paths and new things forward. Oh gosh, that really,

Frances (27:53)
you

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rick Denton (28:16)
That gave me a lot of optimism and a lot of energy there. And I think that's something that is kind of missing in the customer experience world, right? Especially over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of doom and gloom about the state of customer experience, especially inside that LinkedIn CX bubble. When you get out of that, like you are working with real teams, real companies, does the picture look different? What do you think about LinkedIn amplifies

Frances (28:32)
Yes.

Mm.

Rick Denton (28:45)
that people should, well, take with a little bit of grain of salt.

Frances (28:49)
Yeah, so LinkedIn is a love and hate relationship with LinkedIn. I mean, what we read there, like everything, a lot of things are very over exaggerated, right? And there was this, I don't know, this trend or I don't know, it was like a disease that spreading, was this desire to declare things had died.

Rick Denton (29:02)
Hmm.

Frances (29:15)
NPS has died, surveys have died, CX has, you know, journey mapping dashboards. And it's just, it's ridiculous. And I know it's just meant to encourage conversation and debate. And it's supposed to be a bit controversial to poke people's buttons so that they, ⁓ so that they comment and respond and get into the debate. And that's all good. But I think it started to annoy people, I think, because it was just happening all the time.

Rick Denton (29:16)
Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Frances (29:44)
And then you go and you sort of, it does get you thinking, Are we barking at the wrong tree? Are there things that we really should stop doing entirely? You you start asking yourself this question and then you go out and you go to conferences and you see practitioners like people, know, CX managers presenting their programs. You talk to people and, and you see that, no, there is actually, I mean, of course there are businesses where it's not working and they're dissatisfied and they want to do more, but

Rick Denton (30:04)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (30:14)
You also meet a lot of people who are like, yeah, we're really happy with what we've just launched and it's working and we've got engagement. And, you know, lot of sort of programs that sort of people say, you this approach belongs in history books. And you see people saying, well, actually, no, for us, we've made it work. And so I think it's, it's on us to, to look at those examples and say, okay, well, what are they doing differently? You know, if you take, take over to that agon example I gave, it's like, okay, what

Rick Denton (30:30)
Mm-hmm.

Frances (30:43)
what's made that program engaging, what's made that into something that is driving culture and you know then they're like they're happy with what they're doing it's got like buying you know from the senior management team like the executive team and you do you see these you know you see these examples of programs where you know the CEO is on board you know so it's not it's not not working you know so I think it's just

Rick Denton (30:48)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Frances (31:15)
You have to just take it unlinked in with a pinch of salt, I think. ⁓ It's important we have debate among ourselves and push the kind of, you know, push the thinking forward and let go of things that maybe aren't serving us so well. But I think it's just that the level to which we, you know, should completely abandon things versus tweak and move forward. And yeah.

Rick Denton (31:18)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Well, and Francis, I think I want to end there because I think that's what the customer experience world and really the business world in general needs to hear is there may be some things to tweak. There may be some things to leave behind, but customer experience still matters. It's not all doom and gloom. Maybe it has different labels, maybe it has different tools, maybe different techniques, but it's not.

that we've just abandoned the customer and we don't care about them anymore. And businesses have proven in the real world, like you're saying, that there will be success if we continue to focus on that area in the right way, working on business value. Francis, I've learned a lot today. You saw the epiphany light go off on the top of my head. If folks wanted to have their own epiphany light by learning from you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Frances (32:31)
probably LinkedIn. ⁓ But I am on there a lot. yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, send me message. Yeah, very happy to chat about some of this further with anyone who wants to.

Rick Denton (32:33)
Ironic, right?

I will get that in the show notes. Click there and you can have that conversation with Francis. Get that started. Francis, it was a delight today. Thank you for being on CX Passport.

Frances (32:57)
Well thank you very much for having me, it's been lots of fun.