Has “Experience” Become a Four-Letter Word?

Chris Rockwell sits down with Donald Chesnut to discuss how Customer Experience has become a great idea with the wrong execution.

Transcript

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Welcome back, everyone, to Seriously Curious, a podcast about all things business strategy and design. My name is Chris Rockwell. I'm president and founder of Lextant, where we unlock business value through customer centricity. I'm super excited today to have CX leader and author Donald Chestnut with us. He's founder of Digitally Human and most recently chief experience officer for General Motors, Mastercard and Sapient. Donald is also co-author of the book UX for Dummies. So you've seen that on the shelves, and I'm sure there are copies in your organization. He's helping fortune 500 companies increase profit and market share through impactful customer strategies. And today, we're going to be talking about building a truly customer centric organization. And how our focus on customer experience might be getting in the way. So Donald, welcome super glad to have you here. Thank you Chris, I am delighted to be here. It's great catching up with you. Yeah. So Donald, if you can maybe give our audience a little bit of a background of, how you arrived here, you know, tell us about your journey in and customer experience and how you've landed here from sort of AOL to to AI. So I have been around technology. I don't even want to put the number of years around it, maybe 25, 30 years. Chris, I think I was telling you recently in one of my first jobs in interactive, back in the day, I was working at American Express on a product called express that over AOL. So it was the only area you could do transactional function accounts with customers through AOL, because the internet wasn't yet secure enough for that kind of data. So 25 years I started in interactive products, although I don't think we really called them products back then. But we did talk about experience, brand experience. And over the years I went from brand experience to user experience. So I worked 21 years at Sapient, working with designers and technologists, designing, I'd like to say, some of the internet's most used and most successful products Wall Street Journal, Disneyland, Disney Parks and Resorts, target, United Airlines, all award winning and kind of game changing at the time went from web to web and mobile to web, mobile and sometimes in venue stores and banks. And then the conversation moved from brand experience to user experience to the customer experience, looking at the full journey and really helping brands, as you said in the intro, become customer centric. So what do they need to do to change how they're working? Really to maximize the experience for the customer, but as well as for the business? And then the last year, some time at Mastercard, which was brilliant, looking at payments, Mastercard is a very interesting business direct relationship with consumers, but a deeper relationship with banks and merchants. And it tends to be a B to B to C, and then time at GM looking across the four brands, mobile apps, some in-vehicle websites and contact center, and really helping GM and their brands be more about customer focused and making it easier from shopping, onboarding to service. So and now I'm advising clients of all different types small cap, medium, large cap, really with a focus on how to generate real results from being customer centric. And I have some points of view around how customer experience has evolved over the last 20 years and how it's not evolved and what needs to change in the next few but exciting times. Technology Continues to change, offers new services to consumers. You all know that at Lextant doing some brilliant design work and taking the complex and making it really both usable and engaging. But there's new products and services, and there's continually new expectations from the people that use them. So that's kind of the sweet spot that I fit in. Yeah, you know, it's amazing. I, you and I started our career, I think in a similar time when this, we had moved sort of from a technology centric approach to services and, experience was becoming a thing. And we were doing a lot of evangelizing. Right. Hey, this experience matters and you can actually design for it. It's funny, people used to ask me, they're like, they pay you to do that. I was like, no. Yeah, they actually, but but you know, that idea of experience now, everybody has it. Everybody realizes it's important, but it seems to be maybe working against us a little bit. So you mentioned this idea of, I saw in something you wrote recently, customer experiences distracting companies from true customer centricity or or, asking the question is all our focus on is it really moving the needle? And if it's not, then we're going to have some sideways looks from the C-suite. Right? So tell me about, you know, this idea of, is it working for us or against us at this point. Such a good big, rich topic. So I feel a little blasphemic? If that's a word, a little bit of blasphemy to have spent 25 years in the world of experience. You know, one of my earliest mentors was my first boss in the design world, Clement Mock Studio Archetype and Clement Mock Studios. He oftentimes is associated with this expression, and I don't know if he actually said it first, but the experience is the brand, and I do believe it was technology in that era of 90s and microcomputers and then internet, that got us to think about the experience. We talked about brand in a different way because it became experiential, not just marketing and logo. So I had believed that deeply still do for 25 plus years. I do think it is problematic today. I don't know, in my years of consulting and working on working within brands, I don't know of any company that doesn't have customer or the customer experience specifically in mission or purpose or core values. Absolutely critical. It's always at the center of every illustration of strategy, in the middle of a whiteboard or a slide. The customer experience and business leaders talk about it. But I've come to believe the operationalization of experience based thinking is incredibly difficult. And we might be more successful. And I imagine the folks listening to this conversation, I imagine there's a real affinity for how do we create great product experiences. And you do that through design, you do that through other components. But that word, this notion experience, whether it's user or customer, it is so problematic it creates swirl. It is not often understood. Many stakeholders have a different interpretation of what the experience is and what it means. The responsibilities for delivering great experiences are so widespread across the company. I mean, from technology and what is it doing and the latency to legal to are the policies correct and friction. And whether it be privacy or just a policy around the product to design? Certainly all of the aspects of great design determine whether it's a good experience to the pricing to I could go on. I feel like there's almost every function across a company is responsible for delivering a great experience, but to focus on it, to have teams to have strategies. It becomes really hard to rally all of those things. I think there are better ways and we can unpack them over the next over this course of this conversation, but I actually think the experience word creates swirl, creates lack of clarity, creates a bigness around what we're trying to do in business that actually might be, contradictory to the outcomes we are trying to deliver. And we'll talk a little bit more around that. But I have come round, I was joking with someone else saying that I almost have developed an allergy to the word experience. And that is if you look at my LinkedIn and my resume, I have championed experience based thinking for 25 years and in all of its different forms. Doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means maybe I'm slow to the uptake on what needs to change. But we'll talk a little bit more about, you know. As you said, nobody can say that experience is a bad thing and nobody comes to work saying, hey, I can't wait to create an experience that customers hate and nobody wants to buy. Like nobody has those goals. So but I feel the same way as you. It's like I've been a champion of customer experience. I've built this business around it. And but now it's gotten it. Maybe it's backfiring a little bit because maybe it is difficult to define. You know, design is pretty clear when you say that marketing seems pretty clear to people, although, you know, that can get fuzzy too insight is a player, you know. So, nobody would say that experience is a bad thing, but it is difficult to sort of uniquely own within an organization. I mean, you've had the title chief experience officer and and led and championed experience at the highest levels of the organization. What's it like to try to do that? And you mentioned it creates swirl. I mean, what does that look like? When it comes to actually achieving the goals around experience, let's set aside maybe who does it, you know. Exactly. But like if you want to champion that at the highest level, what are the things that are getting in the way and maybe how do we rethink that a little bit, how we're, you know, positioning this idea because it's not a bad idea. It's a matter of how we execute it. Right? Absolutely not a bad idea. It's still valid. So I'll be very transparent. So I have that title, as you said, chief experience officer, which I love. I rallied around, as I said, I pursued experience based thinking. We can talk about the elements of that, but both at Mastercard and at General Motors, both when I arrived at those companies was heavy excitement around the experience, because everybody knows the experience matters. There's not a business person. I think that would at least outwardly, admit that the experience isn't critically important. We've all had bad experiences, you know, as consumers, I heard I hear the stories all the time in my role and working with other stakeholders, people bring their favorite brand or their least favorite brand. And we'll talk about Sonos else, the experience, or a Whole Foods or a Zappos or whatever it might be, or Chewy all different brands that are delivering at all different levels of experience. But, when I left, each of those companies left Mastercard because I was asked to come to GM. GM kind of I went through a whole bunch of change and kind of moved on, and when I left both places, they didn't replace the role, and I, you know, I can look at myself and say, what, what do I what are my responsibilities in there? But I can look at also the challenges, of the excitement around, we need to move forward on the experience. And at the same time, it is such a big thing. And the, requirements of aligning the entire organization with the outcomes, if they're not clearly defined. Measuring experience I use quotes, but the actual measuring is very sticky. Not usability, not usefulness, and not customer satisfaction or even NPS, but breaking down what makes for a good experience and prioritizing the journey, depending on the complexity of the journey, can also be like how you're. And I'll also say making change sometimes takes time. Some of the biggest problems in the experience in a customer's journey to experience problems are not easy ones to fix, so some of them take time, some of them we can make more progress more quickly, etc.. So, the fact that they didn't replace the role in some form, I think it says everything around kind of there are components to the experience that I think you can make greater progress and there are outcomes of the experience. You can make greater progress, and that might be better ways. And I'll tee up, I'll just take a take a breath, but I'll tee up one change that I've seen in the last year that I think is really important, and that is what I call the productization of everything. Everything in today's business is considered a product. So we have the real products. We have channels that have become products, mobile website, customer contact center. We have features within those channels. Certain features like a customer account. It's a product experience based thinking, understanding who your customer is, great design, etc. it's up to those product leadership. I think in the next generation of business. But if you look across, I think many businesses, the world of products has emerged like never before. And I think experience based, customer centric thinking, great design needs to be integrated in the product world. But I'd be curious, Chris, are you seeing that in the work that you're doing with [Lextant] So many things? You know, the first thing is, you know, with our product thinking, you know, we don't want to think about the thing. We want to talk about the experience around the thing. Right? Because if we can deliver that, we can deliver value to customers and value to the business. So one of the ways that we're positioning this idea of experience is really to talk more about value. Where is the value, what is the what are the field and the goalposts look like so that we can deliver value at every moment of truth in the experience, because customers are experiencing these brand touchpoints, at various levels. You mentioned product service, brand, you name it, they're having an experience, right? Like it or not, on purpose or by accident. And so we have to be intentional about the ways we deliver this and not there isn't one person at the top that owns those touchpoints. You're right. So so we think about it as how do we develop the principles and the processes so that we can equip in an organization to deliver, great experiences, because we know that will deliver to the bottom line. And measurement is a key part of that. And so we've been doing a lot of work and the book that we published recently is a lot around desirability. Like. Yeah. So I'm talking about sort of current experience and let's get to more how we really understand what people desire and how to deliver it. Well, you can develop experience metrics that are, diagnostic that will tell you where in the experience you need to to, you know, change, thats proactive and predictive. It'll tell you what the market will say about the kind of things that you're you're doing. And it's such an important aspect of this, that old adage adage in business that, you know, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, manage it is kind of, you know, comes to mind here, but I think so. I think a shift to value centricity, I think developing the principles and processes to align an organization, are particularly important too, you know, when I started Lextant, I thought I was in the experience business, but the more in it I think I'm in the alignment business, you know, how do I get an organization to understand what problem we're solving or what opportunity is in the market for the customer and for the business, so that then we can activate all functions of the business to, to get there. So but yeah, so I think everything that you're saying resonates with what we see, with all the clients and you and I, share some of those, you know, clients experiences with big businesses. It we're seeing the same kinds of things that if you get if you get precious sometimes I think practitioners get a little precious about experience or we own the experience and, you know, it is like man, We have been democratizing this idea for so long, nobody owns it anymore. You know, we we have facilitators. We have to be aligners. We have to be leaders. And those are the opportunities. I think, when it comes to how we're going to make these ideas, continue to make them centric to the organization. So, you know, one of the things that strikes me about our conversation is this idea of, people who are in this experience, you know, in the business of delivering experiences, need to become business sensitive. This is a gap that I think I see, across almost every client that we work with, all of our client partners. I'm a human factors engineer by training. I'm a systems engineer. And so when I came into market, I started, Lextant, the one thing I realized is I needed it to become more design sensitive. I needed to understand how what I was doing was going to be actionable by design teams. And then and then, you know, I realized, well, no, we need to become more business sensitive. You know, we need to understand all the functions of the business. So to talk a little bit about that, where you see, some of these ideas about experience, everybody nods their head, but then it kind of falls apart. Like how do we connect this to the business outcomes and business results in ways that, business leadership will advocate and be a proponent for it. I, great topic. I there's one thing I want to pick up on that you just said around, kind of you feel like you're in the alignment business, being in the alignment business around an area that is fundamentally talked about easily around the experience, but so misunderstood and without the right metrics, etc.. That's that's the challenge of being an experience person, in a in a company with complex products, because you have I think you inherently have that lack of alignment. the business value of what we do. So important. And I feel like for me as, just a professional last five, six years have led me to, newfound understanding of how critical it is to relate everything. And I'll say we do. And we probably your listeners hear around great design, human factors, the value of design, designing a product and platform, etc. what is the real value of the work we're doing to the bottom line? One of the things that I did in my recent past that I feel like is an opportunity moving forward, is take a lot of the metrics that we had and begin to relate them directly to business value, if not dollars. How do you take a feature and talk about how many calls will that remove to the contact center? If we can automate this and let's put a price tag on those calls. So that's kind of obvious. That's maybe not rocket science in some form or another, but suddenly you have real value and you have the ability to talk about, well, the simple things. We're looking to automate simple problems and take out cost and allow the actual people to do the complex things. Kind of. It was a strategy that we call, you know, digitally human. You make your products more like a human and deliberately human and leave the people wherever they are in the journey from sales to support, to like, you know, to be useful for deliberate things that are more complex, that are building your product, life cycle and brand in all different ways on a grander level. The work that I was doing with teams in the last few years around what I call voice of the customer, I think it's kind of sometimes an area of a business that doesn't sound very exciting. It just feels like the analytics. But it's, if you're customer centric. It is the feedback that you're getting. And the data is gold because it's Jeff Bezos that has that quote from, I think it's 2016 letter to shareholders that customers are always wonderfully dissatisfied. And he uses the wonderfully like if you constantly focus on that, you can find out where you should be going next. I heard a CMO mentioned last week saying that if your customer focus, you're in the demand side of business, and don't we all want to be in the demand side versus focusing on just what you have is the supply side. But so relating what you're doing to demand side to dollars. So we recently looked at NPS, which is oftentimes held up as a great metric, oftentimes maligned because it only tells you so much. It's an outcome of an experience, doesn't measure the experience itself, but it's really useful. It tells you based on that interaction, the holistic action of a holistic interaction. How likely are you to bring in your friends and family and it's a score, and you can look at the score. But you know, what I've done with recent teams is let's do a business case and figure out how many points is NPS worth in profit. And if you can reverse engineer or even back of envelope, or they get a little more specific and describe how you achieve that, suddenly you're talking about the value of an interaction, a product, etc. it's usually an area of a product that relates right to business dollars that opens up conversations in new and different ways, like I've never seen before. So I think having our design teams get closer to that is exactly where you're going, Chris. Yeah, sorry Donald I love the simplicity of Net Promoter Score. It's just a simple concept. And as you were talking, it made me think that sometimes we overcomplicate this idea of experience, too. And you mentioned, for example, voice of the customer, which is another kind of maligned idea, I think, in workstations, but just the idea of bringing stories of the customer experience or quotes and making those visible and accessible, is really empowering to the organization. It doesn't mean you want to act on every data point of one, you know? I mean, we need to make sure that we understand where the serious systemic things are that we need to activate in this area. But but those are simple ideas. Tell stories of customer experience, experience today and experiences people want to have. And that gets people A.) excited and clear. We talk about clarity, alignment and action. Anything that we make as an organization, whether it be a product process, service, experience, whatever it is, you have to know what problem you're solving, right? You have to know what the opportunity is and that you need to align the organization around that. And then you need to activate it so people can actually do stuff about it. Yeah. So sometimes I think we kind of overcomplicate. I love Net Promoter Score in its simplicity. The challenge I have sometimes with it is like if an organization is a 40 in Net Promoter score and they want to be a 70, it doesn't tell them sort of what to go do. So I think that's where, you know, professionals can come in and say, okay, well, here's here are the metrics, here are the things we know that customer will move the needle for customers. But I love your idea of connecting that to business profitability. Yeah, right. Do we know what return on investment is. Do we talk about that? Well, I think one of the things we've been working on at Lexant is what I call experience value management. That is that you need to understand where to invest in the experience. Where's the business value of that investment and how are you going to show it. Because not every experience problem is equally important. And I think that's a mistake think that a lot of experience people make, they they sort of die on every hill they can find. And sometimes you're like, okay, we can make this product cheaper and still have a great experience. Here's the place you should invest and helping organizations understand that, brings a high, higher return on investment, on experience, sort of focused initiatives and it demonstrates that the folks who are responsible for these kinds of things are sensitive to what the business needs are. And that's where I really think we get high return on all of these activities. And we get a seat at the table, you know. Love it. You mentioned, you know, it's been exciting to see the emergence of the CXO role, and it's discouraging a little bit to see. And you're not alone. I mean, almost every organization you can point to that or that role doesn't exist anymore. And I think partly it's because we haven't activated the work we were doing against business results in a concrete enough way. And, and we need to get a seat at the table and lead. And I think that the folks who are creative and who have the science behind this stuff are uniquely capable to do that if we take the advantage to do it. But you can't get insular about it. And you can't expect that the organization will activate or do everything that you want them to do. When I was learning, I had a Hewlett Packard. When I first started, I was the the fresh green experience guy at Hewlett Packard, you know, and I would come in to the R&D aisle, you know, with 100 things that were wrong that we had to fix. And every time I walked in the aisle, you could hear the groan from the team, from the development team. Right. Because they're like, here he comes. He's going to tell us everything's wrong again. And I had to learn quickly that I can't be the bad news. I have to be. I have to be the solution, not the problem. And so I think that's some of what's happened here too, is, you know, we spend a lot of time, you know, beating our chests about experience and how important it is. But then we don't give teams the tools to really solve. And so, yeah, I don't know. There's I love where you're going with this because I think it also points to the cultural change that needs to happen within the experience field. I include design there include the analytics, etc.. And I your example of, you know, I'm sure did wonders for your ego, but walking into the the technology team and hearing and feeling that they're groaning is exactly what still happens. I do think as experience practitioners, I want to generalize, but we don't do ourselves a favor by being close enough to the metrics, by talking to the metrics. So the value that you're bringing in, you know, human factors and understanding what is working and what could be fixed for a better value is not criticism, it's just a value conversation. But we're probably, I think, at fault for that. Your point that you made not well, I'll make not all customers were so within design and CXO customer focus. Not all customers are equal. So you know, I say that kind of bluntly, but you know, we're there to make it work for them. But understanding some are more profitable than others. That's okay. You want to encourage the more profitable and stronger and you know, and and work on how do you make the other customers grow, you know, into that not all experiences are equal, which gets to the softness and understanding design changes. And what works in digital is very different in other forms. And then to the same culture and words that we talked about need to change. And then lastly, I think the expression customer and even product experience tends to be thought of as existing customers. So you have teams within companies that are there as a champion for existing customers, while other groups like marketing become the sales and acquisition. And both of those things are wrong. So marketing is close to the customer has an opportunity just for growth, being customer growth. oriented to I think marketing needs a rebrand and our customer experience team. Sometimes they sit within digital can't just be looking at making existing customers happy. They need to be again closer to the what are the results we're trying. Let's not be entirely precious around it. Let's the more business focus we can be in stripping out some of those other things. And you know, I love all of the tools and culture of empathy design think[ing], but I think sometimes it also creates a swirl if there's the lack of the real results focus. And I feel like as I'm saying these words, it's probably gonna hurt some of my friends, colleagues, etc. because it sounds so, just really singularly focused on generating. But that's what we're there to do. I firmly believe you can help a customer get more from a product service moment, a journey. You're doing them a benefit, and you're doing the business. And that's the business we're in. Which is why I feel like, you know, the the focus on great experiences across a business shouldn't change. It's just how do we achieve it? Move the, you know, move the swirl aside and get to some of the real values and change some other cultures. But yeah, I, I love your I mean this is really about effectiveness, right. And nobody none of us in this area, in this industry want to be less effective. So I think this conversation does help us understand when we talk about it, how we activate these ideas. I think you mentioned swirl and the folks who follow the podcast know I talk a lot about ambiguity and unpredictability as being enemies of experience. Right? If I don't understand how to interact with it, or it seems random and unpredictable, people don't want those experiences. So. But but that's true also with our interactions in companies, you know, if people if we don't create clarity, then how can we expect people to want to work with us towards the things that are on their MBOs, you know, the things that they're accountable for. So you know, there's a lot of what I call slippery words in organizations, things like marketing or from the experience domain like, well, we're going to make it simple or, you know, people will trust it or whatever. It's like, well, we we have the tools to make those really concrete to activate them in the experience, to measure them, to see how they impact business results. So we have all the tools. I just think it's a matter of, changing the conversation a little bit. And if avoiding this word experience helps. Okay. Let's use a different word you know or but but more important than that let's let's lead and let's connect what we're doing to business results. Because that ultimately is going to give us the kind of effectiveness that we're all looking to, you know, looking for. Absolutely. So I think there's another element, you know, I listen to kind of your, your perspective in the design work that I've seen your teams do. So brilliant. And taking complex and making it that bloated word, but simple but just comprehensible is really brilliant. The what I have seen also, just in the last few years, particularly since Covid, the route on going down is the ability to test and learn to AB. Sometimes I you know, I throw out these these words, but I've seen a step change in our ability to get real data really quickly for that helps to take choices that are oftentimes subjective and give us real proof around is this better? And is this doing what we achieve? And I so I tend to be very excited about what I've seen. And I say particularly since Covid, because I've seen a lot of, research tools deal with more quantitative data or sometimes online research testing that has democratized it, simplified it, that I didn't see to the degree to which before, it just made us do a lot of online, etc.. So I've seen the ability in a Mastercard in General Motors. We both had two larger initiatives that aim to bring customers, real customers of our product directly to a product leader in very simple ways. So online research programs that could look at product features and design changes and explore that, and I, I think that is also as we talk about getting closer to the business results, but also making sure that the rest of the stakeholders are staying very connected to the customers and our design choices that we can, as we have different ideas. Test explorer that you can do that before you can do that. AB testing, great tools to do that in production that just give it insights in a level of speed and a level of, maybe, expense, lower expense and lower level of effort that they could be operationalized, I think is seriously, really exciting. So I don't know if that's stuff that you have seen, but that level of test, learn, explore, optimize. Yes. Could be tactical downstream. It also could be up front concept of thing. So out of curiosity, what you know. Absolutely. I mean data is more available than it ever has been. And I think the idea of failing fast is good. You know, that what we tell startups is fail fast, right? Well, as organizations, if we have ideas that aren't going to work or experiences that aren't going to work, then we got to know sooner rather than later. Okay. So I love to test and learn concepts. The one thing that I push, our teams to look at is always make sure you understand the why behind it. So, you know, for example, if you're doing a B testing and let's say A1 and B didn't do as well, if you want to do that twice, you need to know why. Why did a when why was it you know, what is it about what just happened that made that particular solution more effective. So I think getting to the why is super important, You know, so, so critical. Yeah. So we talked about I just I want to pause on that because I think it's come up a couple times in our chat, the root cause and the why, even what we're talking about a little while ago around NPS, it's just a number. I think the culture of organizations is to focus on a number. Where are they? What is it? Good NPS? I got asked that question so many times. Same thing with design feedback. What's working? What is which is the leader without root cause, without the why? Useless. And I think that's why. Again, we're not going to get back to NPS. But I think that's oftentimes while it's maligned, and I think the creators of NPS always understood you need additional data to tell you the why. Otherwise you're just flying blind. But in research insight and that level of what is working and why so important, so and it becomes I think you use the word a little while ago, Chris stories, the stories on why, if you want to design a business, design a product from the outside in, that's what we're talking about. You need to have a why. You need to, you know, be close to your customers, have them brought like the faces, the stories. But the examples and understanding of why because again, otherwise it's just data. It's not really insight. And it's probably loaded with a whole ton of assumptions. So yeah, I think it's spot on. You know, we've said forever you can't design anything without the why, you know. Yeah. And there was a lot you know, a lot of marketing has been done in the past, like top to box, you know, how do we get preference, you know, become first and second choice or are we ahead of the leaders or behind the leaders? And that's all useful information. But if you don't understand what's underlying, you know, that that, result, then you're never going to be able to change that result or you'll be guessing. I mean, guessing is bad for business. I think that's a universal, message. You know, the business people is like, look, guessing is bad for business, so don't guess. You don't need to, you know, you don't need to guess. And it's expensive and it takes way longer. You know, if you're guessing that if you just got some actionable data to propel your business, you know, so true. And we talked about design. I mean, talk about big D design. I know you believe that, too. It's like every tech, every everything from you know, we mentioned the service experience, the buying experience, the usage disposal, those are all, designed kind of, as I said before, you know, before on purpose or by accident. So we need what is happening at each moment of truth. What are the key moments of truth so that we, you know, deliver on this idea of better experiences for customers and then the kind of business results we need? I do think it's interesting, you know, you were you were talking about gaining, in a way, gaining more intimacy with customer as organizations get larger. It's kind of ironic that they lose intimacy with customers. You know, when you're a small startup, you know exactly what your value proposition is and why you're solving that particular problem. And, you might not have the resources to bring solutions to market fast enough, but, you know, you have that level of intimacy. And I think as organizations get larger, they somehow get disconnected from customer to the idea of bringing more immersion so that everybody understands, hey, you know, this is who your customer is, this who they are, this is, you know, or not just your customer, any stakeholder that you're working, you know, I mean, the folks that have to service the product, the folks that are, you know, maintaining or manufacturing the product. I mean, we have all different kinds of stakeholders that we need to really understand, in order to deliver better results because it, you know, it really does take an entire organization to deliver great experiences. It's not going to be can't be done by one person at the top or some team and product or design, you know. Yeah. It is. It's a challenge. I will also say the larger a company gets and the more complex a company is. What I have seen is the leaders, the folks within it get their focus on the work they're doing to develop a business, financial services, automotive, even retail. The issue is you're not your customer. So and it's easy for us to sit here and say that. But you might be a user and might drive the vehicle, you might use that product, financial product, etc. but being aware of that, how an actual customer and knowing who you target and they might be from a very different demographic or a very different region, etc.. they have a very different perspective on what's important in the product, etc. so that level and it goes back to the stories we tell and making sure you're close to who you're who you're supporting and you know, just because I can go to a target or a Walmart doesn't mean I'm necessarily the most profitable type of customer that goes there. And in their target customer, I just might be someone, so, you know, but I could work at either of those places and be filled with ideas for what needs to change. So yeah, easy thing to say, but it's really, as companies move from what is startup to something far bigger, to just keep in mind the closer you get product aficionados that and particularly Now that everything's a product, you get people that are, you know, totally focused on a financial service, payment product or a vehicle, etc. but they're not the people typically trying to support and find the answers to the problem. You know, I see this sometimes in the automotive industry where they want to test products with their own associates, and it's like, you guys know way more about this product than any of your customers. So don't do this, you know? Yeah, I think I do think though, as folks who are involved in the delivery of product and services and customer experiences, it can't be our opinion versus their opinion. You know, we have to equip ourselves with the objective information to support our decision making, to support why this is better for the business and better for customers. Because I've seen that mistake too, which is team will work on on some sort of solution set of experience delivery things, and then it'll be overturned by an executive who just has a different opinion and but the team isn't advocating for the customer. They're advocating for a design outcome or something like that. And it's like, okay, we need to advocate for both. We need advocate for the customer, advocate for the business and why this is the right approach. Because, you know, business leaders will respond to that. You know, they they know they want to surround themselves with smart people who can make help them make good decisions for the company. So. Absolutely, there's many other drivers, I'll call out. There is the love of a product that comes from stakeholders. There's the focus on competition. Well, our biggest competitor just launched a feature. We need to do this too. It's real, so let's accept it. There is differentiation doesn't mean we should go ahead and release the feature. Or maybe it needs it means we should. But again, as design and experience people closer to the business we can be, and then and the more we can work with our product leadership to get them to really be laser customer focused. It's not about the products, they're making it. It's about the customers that are getting the service from the product. That's that's one of the biggest areas for change. I think continued is making sure product leadership today are customer leaders in addition to everything they do in the product world. And if they're equipped by us, they will be right. I mean, what they don't want to be less sensitive to customers, right? They want to be more sensitive. So we we can help them improve their decision making. So that's the single biggest thing. I think sometimes that should be taught to business leaders is the jobs to be done. Yeah. Something you understand I'm sure. And all your teams at Lextant understand. But what is the job to that framework of understanding? So if I am in retail and working on one part of an e-commerce player and really understand, at the end of the day, I have a customer and this feature or this whole overall service is is solving a job to be done. Don't you know, I imagine many of our listeners today understand what that is. But I don't think product leaders, I don't think, you know, broadly it just making sure that they get that because that unpacks a huge opportunity for innovation and defending choices and things. It's a simple concept, too. You know, the idea of if you were going to write an ad in the paper, what would the ad say that the customer would choose you, right? I mean what job is this product or service doing? How do people want to feel about it? So what are the emotional and functional benefits and how do you connect that to features and the things that does? Yeah. Again, I think the more that we can map that or organizations, we get both success on the experience side and success on the business side. Brilliant. So so, you know, we've talked a little bit about becoming more business sensitive, increasing our, view of stakeholders like who were designing for, understanding and, and applying the practice to all the moments of truth, not just the specific one that I'm working on. What are the ways that, being value focused, like, kind of this sort of, getting precious about the experience and thinking about more value for the customer and value for the business? These all seem to be a positive next steps or ways that we can, improve this idea, execution of this customer centric idea, anything you can think of. So there's one. One that's coming to mind, kept coming to mind as you and I were talking. And that is in designing a product or service and thinking about that constant customer centricity. I have a point developed over the last few years is particularly for new products and services. We focus a lot on the happy path. So that is how we get to which baseline design. And I think much earlier when I think about how do you generate much earlier in the process and how you generate customer loyalty, it is in in managing experiences and products and services over the last maybe 7 or 8 years, come to believe that how you resolve a problem is sometimes far more valuable in the long run. So it is. I'll use the easy words managing the unhappy path. But I have, and these are. I believe how you manage the unhappy path is always done. Afterwards you get the happy path. You get the baseline product. You feel like you continue to build it, build the build it, and then at some point you have teams that are sometimes are not even fully thinking through what are going to be the problems until the product has gone live, and then you're catching the problems. But I do think if we challenge ourselves today, our listeners, and to think about those brands that resolve problems and the problems I think tend to be very front of mind. On whether or not you're going to be loyal to that brand and that product moving forward. So thinking about how easy and what are the most important problems? I think you and I were talking years ago sometimes, sometimes around things that are as low level or tactical as error messaging, but along and experience along with product. I don't use the word experience, you know, is the error message telling you what's wrong? How is it telling, what's the tone of voice, is it in brand, etc.? Does it feel those things? That's a very, lower level example, but they make or break, how a person feels about a particularly if something's really going wrong and like something like onboarding higher level when, when something fails, there's been a service failure in a product, or I'll give examples, you'd get something delivered from an e-commerce player. How easy is it to return what you know that helps you decide whether or not you know what, whatever your NPS is, but your whether or not you're going to want to buy something. Again, it didn't work for whatever reason. If you check into a hotel and something's wrong with your room, how easily oh wow. It's kind of we all have those stories, right? All of us sit in workshops and things can talk about how well a partner brand, retail or whatever resolves things and sometimes how much more loyal you can be as a customer. So there's a big one's. Something really went wrong. There are the small ones from steps along the way that don't work, error messaging and a lot in between. But I do think as designers of experiences, product services, taking in at product launch, that feature launch, and over the longer term, figuring out how do you make right? I think there's magic there. And it's, just for my experience, it's about one out of ten times that something doesn't work. If you can fix it and fix it. Well, on each of those, from tactical to major, you've built a loyalty that I wish I had data to prove, but it's incredibly valuable. I'd be curious to see what you. What you think. Maybe we should build that case study. You know, I think about, you know, for as long as I've been doing this service has always been this, like, unrealized opportunity. And I wonder why businesses don't invest in it. For me, it's really simple. When you sell a customer a product or service, it's the promise made. Yeah. And when it goes wrong and things need they need help. It's the promise kept. It's easy as that, you know, when things don't go well, customers don't expect you to be perfect. They just. Exactly! want you to try. They expect you to try to help them with their problem. And I think when I see, you know, traditional customer experience groups handle, you know, the tier one, two, three call center. So when I see how UN empowered those folks are and I'm like, man, what golden opportunities we miss, give people the ability to say yes and your customers. You will keep a customer forever. You know, just customer like empower your call center folks. It's it's you know, when you think about like, the, L'ermitage or the Beverly Hills Hotel, like, the word oh is not in their vocabulary. I stayed at one of these hotels early in my career. I was like this young kid, and the client was staying in this nice hotel, and I and I, I called down and I said, hey, I need some cameras for this research thing that I'm doing. And I'm like, you don't have anything like that down there, do you? And they said, oh yeah, absolutely. And next thing I know, a limo is pulling out of the 7-Eleven buying disposable cameras and bring it back to the hotel for me. You know what I mean? They just, you know, no is not in their vocabulary. And I think it was such a powerful, idea. And so I really believe, you know, servicing is one of those critical moments of truth that if we deliver well on you will build customer loyalty for life. And then you watch your net promoter scores go through the roof, you know. Absolutely, absolutely. You said one thing that customers don't expect things to work all the time. I firmly believe that. Again, maybe one of our listeners can point us to some research that proves, again, customers don't expect everything to always work. And two, when you resolve a problem, the quality of the resolution is worth, I think, far more than ten good experiences that you just didn't notice and weren't expecting. So again, I'm looking for my quantitative research to help prove that, but I think that's a guidance for us all that you know, if you're trying to create stronger relationships, a bigger share of wallet, that's where it leads and kind of longer and greater promoters, the resolution of problems is often ignored. It's done after a product launches, it's honed, it's improved. It's not done when the product is getting to live, when you should be looking at what can go wrong. How can we resolve it? What can go wrong? What can go wrong? And then when you're actually managing customer relationships and that operational nature, there's ways to do that. That turned your Four Seasons experience. I'm sure you only stay at the Four Seasons now that they actually did that. Kind of joking. I, I, yeah, you're a loyal customer in waiting back, but like that. But nonetheless, that's how you build a brand. That is so, admired, I guess, you know, really admired. Iconic in a lot of ways. Yeah. No, I agree, I think that this, this idea of, understanding all the moments of truth and the experience and how you can begin to deliver on that, and you get, like you mentioned, share of wallet. Is that something that design teams understand? Do they understand what servicing needs to look like? Do they understand what maintainability looks like? We've seen some of the work we've seen, has resulted in this is a strange statistic, but a return not defective, decrease from like, 80% to 20%. So this was for a thermostat that you put on the programable thermostat for your house. 80% of those bought at Home Depot were coming back as returned, but not defective. In other words, they were difficult to install and use that people just brought them back in just by some simple focus on improving the experience. The installation experience, we put a little level on the thermostat so you could hang it right and square and things like that, just little stuff. But, we see this huge decrease in return. Not defective, which was a huge cost, problem for the business. Right. So again, it's like when you can connect this kind of work to the business outcomes, you get just such a lift. Now, at the same time, the opposite of a problem isn't always the best thing to go make. I think we need to understand desired experiences and where other opportunities are to add value, but it's really a combination of everything looking at current experiences, what's working, what's not working, and then really engaging and giving people tools to help us understand what would be better solutions in the future. Because I think that's really where business transformation, you can leapfrog competition, then. Absolutely everything we're talking about as we're in the business of customer, what we do is design a process, a product, I guess an experience trying to not use that thinking about the journey, think about what are those unmet needs and kind of how do we innovate on their behalf. But it's the business of customer and that it's phenomenally exciting. But making sure we're successful takes a constant calibration of everything we're doing the value of design, the value of the product, the understanding. How do you, you know, make sure a product is not returned and thinking differently around share of wallet, etc.. Some of those some of those lenses, I think are a little foreign to some of the teams that we are working with. But great areas for us to continue to get better at what we do and for business. We lead with this idea. And again, you know, you and I both built our careers around this idea. You call it whatever you want, but if we can deliver better for the customer, they will win. Businesses will win. There's no doubt that, this is the right thing to be doing. I can't imagine a future where experience, call it whatever you want is going to be less important, right? It's absolutely going to be more and more important. And so maybe, you know, changing how we think and talk about it, but more importantly, how we enable organizations to do it. And we've talked about several of those ways today. I really like this idea how we talk about value and don't talk about experience any more just talk about value. Absolutely. Use that word in customer value and business value and share wallet and all of those things. Right. I'll put out maybe your next podcast topic should be I look at kind of some of the AI solutions that are going out to market. How do you make sure that they are branded? So just technology or is it really an extension of well, just like we would design a service and really thinking through, does this fit with the product, the brand, etc.? But we're in a whole new realm of technology that is generated by data and powered by technology. And how do you make sure that that feels like something? And that's a super sticky, but it's a very exciting thing. And continuing to pull back or continuing to focus on what we talked about today, the real value it's delivery So important. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. We do have an upcoming podcast on AI and the future of it. And, and you and I even talked about this the other day. It's the ironic in some ways, but the key to AI is humans, right? That the human in the loop. Is it, delivering on authentic experience, you know, can people build trust and relationships with technology? Some of the work we're doing would suggest that people will quickly ascribe human attributes to technology, and they'll get sad when those technologies go away and things like that. So there's there's a lot to, the delivery of AI powered solutions. But we want we need to think about the characteristics or the attributes of what these things can do and how they add value. And then we can, deliver solutions that will really work in the industry. It's a it's funny, you know, I'm hearing a lot in industry saying, well, we're going to do AI. It's like, would like, what does that mean? Let's, let's have a real conversation about exactly, you know, what are the experiences that people seek. Where's the value proposition and then use that. But but I think, there's a lot of fear around AI too. But when you think about human in the loop, the fact that it's an accelerant for, for customer value, it's an accelerant for our productivity as, you know, as business people. And there's a lot of good that can come with it. So true. the key is the human, you know. And so true. Donald, this has been amazing. I mean, really good it. Talk for another, hour on these things. And I think we've, we've covered, some of the ground that we wanted to. I don't think we left too much on the table here, but will you come back again sometime and talk? Absolutely. It's always good catching up with you and people that are listening, but I love the work that you and the Lextant team are doing. It's really exciting. Thanks, man. I appreciate that and I'm excited about your new venture. And, just to see the impact you're going to continue to have on organizations, look forward to the opportunity for us to work together. Me too. Sure. Any closing thoughts? Where can, Where are you going to be next? Where can people get a hold of you? So I, I'd say LinkedIn is the best place people can get a hold of me. I'd love if people that hear this and agree or disagree. Reach out. Posted some comments I'm sure Chris, you're interested in them as well. But I, I'm interested in continuing to look at how, you know, I'm fascinated by being in the business of customer. I'm fascinated by how that generates value. I do think we're at a tipping point, so I'm loving having some time to think and help businesses really generate more value from experience related efforts. But maybe it is by not really focusing directly on the experiences, all the things that are under that. So it's exciting time that we're living in. Customers always change. It really is, you know. And what do they say that first? You know, the first way to solve it is to identify that you have a problem. Right? And I think that, we are identifying that this experience word is problematic and a little ambiguous and it's frustrating for some people. And so let's now that we know that let's take this capability that we've built to deliver great experiences and figure out how to do that for our business partners as well as our customers. Absolutely. I think we'll succeed. So, Donald, again, thank you so much for being here. I know. My pleasure. Incredibly busy, and I really appreciate the time. And I know our audience does as well. So and thank you all again for joining us today for Seriously Curious Podcast for all things business strategy and design. Find us on all the streaming platforms. So please go out there and make sure you like, comment and subscribe to get notified of our upcoming episodes. Keep your eyes and ears out for Donald, who's going to be speaking at conferences. He's got some great content coming out on LinkedIn, so definitely make sure you reach out and, get engaged with all of Donald's content. And in the future, soon you're going to be seeing episodes on AI and health care, the future of smart cities, humans, and advancing automation with some of the best leaders, in the industry. So stay tuned for future episodes. For more on this podcast Seriously Curious, or to learn more about how you can build customer centric, business organizations, visit us at Lextant.com. Visit Donald, on LinkedIn. I'm Chris Rockwell, and I look forward to seeing you again next time on Seriously Curious.