Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 13 Episode 1 - CX Management Training - Michael Brandt

In this episode of Lexden's CX Superheroes, we catch up with Michael Brandt, a leading CX professional in Europe. In conversation with host Christopher Brooks, Michael shares his experience on what's important when it comes to training colleagues in customer experience. 

With over 30 years experience working for global companies delivering CX training, as well as many years working with companies across the globe as a consultant and CX trainer, Michael is perfectly placed to share with us tips, techniques and the pit falls to avoid. 

Michael also discusses the upcoming Lexden CXManagement Training programme which he both curates content for, but will also take responsibility for delivering in some regions. Hear why Michael agreed to come on board for this project, and learn from his wealth of experience on what you need to do to make CX training a success if you are considering to launch a programme within your company or as a CX consultant/ training business.   

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to the Customer Experience Superheroes podcast. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm your guide throughout this series. This is a series in which we catch up with industry storewalts and innovators and those who are breaking the mold, covering a whole range of customer experience related topics. In today's episode, we speak to someone who has been working in the field of customer experience, both as a practitioner and also has led a global CX transformation program, and that is Michael Brent. We hope you enjoy the content we're going to talk to Michael about, which is related to customer experience training. And training, like many other topics in CX, is one that needs careful consideration, real capability and skills in order to engage the audience. We called up with Michael to hear about his views on what you need to do to deliver excellent customer experience training. And also we discuss the upcoming Lexton Customer Experience Training Program. So it is with great delight that I welcome a CX legend and I'd like to say a happy hammer and I'd like to say a friend as well to the Customer Experience Superheroes podcast. Welcome, Michael.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Hello, Christopher. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Oh, I'm looking forward to this one because obviously we work together, but we've spent time helping organizations develop customer experience transformations. But you know, we're going to talk specifically about training, which I know is something that you've got of a very long history in delivering, but also quite appreciative of the challenges of delivering it. So that's going to be our focus for today is how you land customer experience training. But before we get onto that, many will know you, especially around Europe, for your very vocal and have great insight when it comes to customer experience on LinkedIn and other webinars and things you've appeared on. But for those who perhaps don't know your journey of how you got here, which adds kind of that credibility when you do speak, could you give them an appreciation of uh your your kind of illustrious journey in the world of customer experience?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Sure, happy to. So I worked for ABB, which is a global engineering organization for 25 years. And I started off in something that wasn't at all customer related. It was technology transfer, so licensing. But as a result of that, I uh ended up taking on the position as uh president of a joint venture company in Japan. And that really got me into customer experience, looking at how the Japanese companies handle customers uh both from a B2B perspective and a B2C perspective. That really gave me insights into how excellent customer experience can look like. I was visiting customers, and of course, I was expected to perform and be very customer friendly. So it was really a learning experience. And I went back to head office and I was looking after quality management as the interface between the customer and our factory. And here again, it was a lot of customer contact and trying to make customers uh feel happy. And then I was called to uh group headquarters as head of the Voice of Customer program, customer experience program, complaint management. And as part of that, my role was to train the organization in what customer experience meant. And so I had uh seven years of doing that uh on a global scale and thoroughly enjoyed it. Uh and since then, uh I left ABB in 2020. And since then, I've been doing training on my own account of various organizations um focusing on all aspects of uh customer experience.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Excellent. Thank you, Michael. So there you go. There's the credentials as to why you're a worthy contender to hold this conversation. So we've seen over the years, and as I say, I don't think this is exclusive to customer experience, but learning and development has become an industry in its own right. And training and skills onboarding, capability development, it is it is part of the employee experience. So it's a great way to retain staff, and of course, you increase their productivity, their motivation, their innovation. But what we hear very often when we talk to learning and development managers about introducing customer experience or customer centricity training is we're we're full. It's a very busy agenda we've got already. Now, there are many different ways in which you can approach this, but I mean you must have been in that situation yourself when you are trying to push programs forward. What's the type of conversation you need to have with the learning and development director to help them understand the importance of putting customer-centric training on the agenda?

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Yes, obviously, one of the things which is really important is to have the backing of the of your C-suite, of the senior management. I think that's really key. And if you manage to get customer experience or such customer KPIs as part of the company scorecard, then obviously people become interested because it affects their bottom line. So that is one way of trying to achieve it. Get it on the scorecard. The other way is to discuss with the various different stakeholders how it can benefit them. So if you're talking to managers, department managers, and they say, well, why should we be doing this? And you can explain to them how improved customer centricity and improved customer experience is going to help them, then of course, then you get people who to buy in a lot more easily.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

And with that, I get that kind of buy-in. But let's say you've got the buy-in and the recognition it needs to be done. Is it a sort of one and done? You just organise a mass training program, bam, now everyone is customer-centric, or do you have to look across the employee lifecycle and find different opportunities and different ways to bring it in? I'm not saying either is right or wrong, but in your experience, what's the most effective?

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Absolutely. I I think if you're looking at trying to affect a culture change, and and at ABBU, to a certain extent, that's what we were trying to do. So you you really need a bit of a blanket approach to try and get people, if you like, to kickstart it. But then you need regular programs to keep it top of mind because in in corporate environments, there are so many different day-to-day pressures that it's easy to forget it. You've got uh managers saying, well, sell and collect. And if you've got time after that, then fine. But the important thing is sell and collect, right? Because that's not what they're measured on very often, and that's where the pressure is. So I think it's important to try and and keep a recurrent program going to keep it top of mind, keep it in people's uh on people's agendas.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

And I think that's always the case, isn't it? You you you worry that is it the the ultimate is to get to a point where you're not worried about doing training is going to be at the detriment of delivering a cell. But if your KPI is sales and it's not training, then obviously that's always gonna be what drives the prioritization. Exactly. And and when it comes, I mean when we look now in in 2024 and we've had the the COVID years where I guess well, classroom training just couldn't happen. So therefore there seemed to be a an uprising of alternative formats. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned you're you do independent training, uh, you're based in Switzerland. I guess these aren't all in Switzerland, you're you're doing these around the world. So so how do you transfer the kind of classroom experience to a virtual environment?

SPEAKER_00 8:08

It's it's very challenging. And I and I think I have a when I'm doing training, I have a camera-on policy. I want to see that people are engaged. And the and this was really very difficult at the beginning of the COVID time when you were doing training and people had their screens off, and you might be doing one, two hours training, and the first you actually heard some participants when they were saying goodbye. You wonder how involved were they, how engaged were they? And it's very easy. The temptations are very big when you're on a call or doing a training session, if you haven't got your screen on, to be distracted by other things, and that is a challenge anyway. In some of the training classes, you have somebody saying, I've got to drop out for an hour because my manager wants to see me. And so this is a challenge, and it's made possible by virtue of the fact that person is sitting in their office, yeah, and and so and so they're faced with these challenges and these distractions. So it's really important to try and keep people engaged. Uh, and and I like to pepper my training courses with interactive exercises. So so people have to be involved, they have to get involved. Sitting back and just consuming is not an option. And I think that's really important to keep people interested and involved and active.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

So I guess I mean what the sector we're in, we're trying to create better outcomes. So whilst there's a serious kind of endeavor, how you get there can be fun and engaging, and you want people to engage in it, can't you? You talk about interactive activities, and we've explored, and you've been a part of this, immersive activities as well. I think the need to create kind of deep, deep memories in what you're doing. And if you can remember what you did, and then you're more like how you did it, you're more likely to recall what you actually did. How important is it to have these interactive activities? I mean, are they directly related to the topics you've just done, or are they just a a break from the the conventional learning?

SPEAKER_00 10:07

No, I try to make them relevant, right, to what we're looking at. So exercises that people can also use when they leave the training session. Yeah. Right. So I think that that has to be the takeaway. People need to leave the training course with something tangible in hand that they can use. So my exercises tend to focus on the issue at hand, what we're talking about, but things that people can then take away and use, let's say, do with colleagues to achieve the same goals.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

We've we've I mean you've participated in the customer experience world games, and we've seen firsthand, so just for those of you who you don't know, this is a voluntary movement that we we set up during COVID times, where we brought together CX practitioners from around the world to just positively compete and try to solve experience challenges for charities, be they kind of for their beneficiaries, their donors, um, or or their kind of volunteers helping them. And then the way it works is we have a challenge, and then a group of people who are randomly pulled together from different parts of CX and different parts of the geography, then solve that challenge. And I'm thinking when you talk about activities about this as a comparison, because what we find people play back to us, the uh Gregory uh Gregorio Uglioni, who's the kind of CX goalkeeper, said he felt it's the best training program in the world because you're really rolling your sleeves up and you're having to find the answer by engaging with people who understand the topic. So no text, nothing else, just really working it through. And I'm it was never designed for that sort of purpose, but you can see what he's saying there in terms of that level of engagement activity that you're talking about really does create kind of a deep memory.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Sure. Absolutely. And and I would say that um the most successful training program uh that we did at ABB was actually it was a workbook that so people came in, they were divided into groups of five and six, and they had to work their way through this workbook with exercises and challenges. And they all required everybody's participation. And these groups that were cross-functional, so different people from different departments who had different knowledge, different skill sets. So they had to work together. And the idea was to get them to see through carrying out these exercises how they could affect the way that they did their job in a more customer-friendly and a customer-centric way. And we we got a really good feedback. I mean, people were coming to the uh various country leads and saying, I've heard from my friend that was on this training how good it was. What when am I on the list? When am I going to get to do it? And this is really important. People were saying, are we expected to come in and be bombarded with PowerPoint slides? But actually, we didn't see a PowerPoint slide all day.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

And so this is really important to keep people involved. And the other thing that I think is important naturally, you you want your students or your participants to be fully focused. But I'll make a slight exception if while people are listening, they're also trying to think, right, okay, that's a great idea. How can I how can I use that on a day-to-day basis? So I think if if you're if you're talking about something, if you're teaching something, and people are already starting to think about how they can apply that on a daily basis, then I think you're winning the battle.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

You and I had an experience, didn't we, last year, where we had a client in Greece who wanted to take the principles of customer experience, the principles and take it deep into the organization to the back office. And the scorecard we got back, which was wonderful, just consistent with the work we do in that space, demonstrated that because it was actually getting people to take the principles and apply it to their ways of working and how's it helping, how's it hindering? So, I mean, that that sounds the same from ABB, where you're actually really able to rationalize and understand the impact of the training to you rather than it just being a theoretical exercise, which which quite often I've certainly attended uh training sessions by six professionals who have given me kind of that helicopter view or a very theoretical view. I'm left there thinking, even I'm struggling to understand how to take back that and apply it. I was new to this sector, how how do I do that? Is that one of the biggest challenges you think of training is not being not seeing the relevance of how it can be applied to what you do?

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Absolutely. And I and I think that's a little bit the difference between training courses that are practice-oriented and those that are set up just to work towards preparation for a certification.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Yeah, or a qualified exactly.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

If you're doing that, then you have a you've got a a syllabus that you've got a complete knowledge that you but not necessarily look at how that can be applied on a day-to-day basis, right? If you're doing a practice-oriented training session, uh for instance, like journey mapping, you want people to understand how they can apply that in their work, in their job, right? I mean, that's if people don't know that when they leave the session, then I think you failed.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yeah. I I think you're right. I think that's the only test of the validity of the training, is its practical application. If you come away, and as you say, you can fill out a scorecard or you can fill out an exam paper and you get a qualification. Great. So what in terms of the practical application of that to demonstrate that not only did I get the learning, but I took the principles to down to practice. It's a shame it's kind of not mandated, it's kind of what you do. I remember working with Professor Phil Klaus, and he runs something called the Phil Klaus Institute. And in there at the highest level, the the training requires the board to actually commit to effect change based on their learning and knowledge. And it's when he sees the change delivered, do they get the accreditation? Sure. They can play it back to him, they understand it, but it's only when they believe in it because they apply it, was his thinking, that you actually uh are worthy of a kind of accreditation for it. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Well, it's the same with Six Sigma. I mean, if the more advanced qualifications uh for Six Sigma, so I think a green belt or a black belt, you need to have done a project in order to get the certification. So to demonstrate that you know how to apply the theory.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

And I know that we've used in our working before kind of I think it's I think it's the NHS model, and if it isn't, then I I apologize. But it's this three-level of no-do teach. But the fact that if you can teach someone else to do the thing that you've learned, then that's the a really good way of for you to rationalize, hang on, I don't understand this topic because you've got the responsibility of sharing it with some someone else. Previously referred to as train the trainer, but it is a three-step project you have to go through. So, okay, let's bring up to speed then. So at the moment, you have been developing and delivering training programs for other others. Alexa, we've been involved almost always with our customer-centric transformations with organizations. Invariably, what comes out through that is please could you provide on-the-spot training or or a legacy training program for others to kind of pick up on. And we got you involved to help us with that. And it kind of then sparked a further conversation from others, which is why don't you provide this proven model and methodology as a standalone piece, which we've always resisted doing. We've been going for 17 years and we've resisted doing it. But you know, the conversations you and I had and a couple of others said, well, well, why not? I think this actually could be quite a useful program and it fits all the criteria that you and I were talking about there in terms of the application, the technique, everything else. So we're going to be launching the customer experience management training. It will have an official SNASI title, but that's principally what it is. And so we're absolutely delighted, Michael, that as a kind of a recognized world-leading expert in customer experience training, that you've agreed to come on board and be curator and also to help deliver the program. So what m what helped you decide that you were wanted to be a part of this?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Well, first of all, I'm delighted to be a part of it. I'm really excited about it. I think the really the decisive thing for me is that it's aligned with my values, which are of the practical approach and also how to get people involved and also a certain amount of flexibility in the way that one works. CX is you can't go at it with a cookie-cutter approach because it it doesn't one way doesn't work for all companies, right? So I think what we're trying to convey, the message we're trying to convey, is that you take, you have a certain amount of knowledge and you apply it in a way that suits your organization and the maturity of your organization, right? There's no real wrong and right. It's a question of, or too little or too much. It's a question of adapting what you do to the size and the maturity and the complexity of your organization. And I think those are the kind of skills that we're trying to convey, how to do that, how to carry out that evaluation. And I'm really excited about it. I think that this is something that people will appreciate because of the way that it can be applied.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

And I'm I'm glad you say you you landed on those topics because obviously, with your experience of taking, you know, as you described it with ABB, it wasn't even a concept for it. It was just hang on a second, this is something that's happening in Japan. I wonder if we can build something around it. So making it kind of one of the reasons people choose ABB, that first part, so we're breaking it into three parts, and the first part is around the motivation for customer centricity. Why do it? And I think that's exactly what you're saying there, the importance of really understanding what are you gonna do, where's it think about it in the context of this sector. So that's the first part, and then you also referred to it earlier in terms of when you head up the voice of the customer. You need you quickly get to, don't you? Well, even if you don't want to focus on it yourself, others will ask, how are we gonna measure the success? So that's the structure. Do you want to just talk a little bit more about that? Your structure of the piece you're looking after, isn't it? The motivation.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

I mean, in any organization, when you're doing training or you want to set up a new initiative, uh, somebody's always gonna ask you, what's the payback? Right? Why are we doing that? What's the benefit going to be? And so it's important to be able to answer that question. Why are we doing it? What is the benefit for the organization? What's the benefit for our customers? And so I think it it's really the foundation, right? Why are we doing it? What's the benefit? What's our motivation for starting on this journey? And then, as you said, measuring, that's really important to you because people want to see results. And we're not talking, we're talking about senior managers. They've got a program going, they they want to be able to justify what they're doing. It's one of the today's business imperatives, right? There's you have to justify what you're doing. And so it's really important that people be in a position to do that and to get their stakeholders on board so that they also become fans and sort. Supporters of the program that makes for a strong culture.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Absolutely excellent. And I think with your experience in this space, there's not going to be a question asked that you don't have first hand experience of actually working through rather than just flicking through a textbook. So we're delighted you can kind of host that. Now, we we mentioned earlier about the application of it. So one of the things that we're quite excited about putting through this is that the participants are going to get a real life business case at the start that they'll get us pre-work to understand the organization that they're going to be looking after. Throughout the course of the three days, they will then be looking to take the learning and apply it to the organization to get to the best outcome. I know you were involved in that discussion and the idea of putting that as part of it. What was the rationale behind it?

SPEAKER_00 22:55

Once again, we come back to the ability to apply things on a day-to-day basis. I think it's learning by doing. If you have an exercise, a fictitious company that you have to work through, then you see how you would apply it in a concrete example. I think that's important. And of course, obviously, if you're doing a training session for a specific company, so something that's in-house, then you tailor that example to the company that you're doing it for. So it can be either generic or uh something which is very specific to a particular industry or organization. But the important thing is again giving the people the skills to apply what they learn on a day-to-day basis.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's what I'm most excited about is to see the kind of the penny drop into taking these things forward. And I think as well, I mean, we're talking about doing measurement here. I mean, you said yourself there exactly the point. The senior leaders have a business strategy, they have a go-to-market, you've got to align to that. So we're going to get deeper than the conventional sentiment metrics that we see here. I know you're going to get into really helping people understand, demonstrate contribution and meaningful uh value. I guess you've probably been in the seat before where you've put up kind of measures and people have knocked them down. So there's a lot of your learning, your own experience, I guess you'll bring into this day.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Yes, absolutely. I'm I'm I'm looking forward to that, drawing on my experience and maybe answering difficult questions in in this respect. I think the most important thing when you're measuring something is whatever you measure has to be relevant. And I think that's always a difficulty. And we see that day to day, organizations measuring things which aren't necessarily relevant, but they do it because it's the done thing. So we really need to try and get people to understand the importance of relevance in what they measure. Relevance for the customer, but also, of course, relevance for the organization itself.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Yeah. You can't understate that word relevance because you can make anything look great, but if it's not actually aligned with the business strategy where we want to go, then you've got to question, or someone will question at some point. And you do hear people saying, Oh, the customer experience program failed, and you think I could probably pinpoint down to that one point of relevance where that was, where that was. Excellent. So that's day one, and then there's kind of a handover. Day two, I'm looking forward to curating day two, which is about the methodology, and that's taken Lexton 17 years of learning. The approach we've used now in over 20 organization, uh, sorry, over 20 countries to organizations, billion-dollar organizations who have seen the value of a formalized approach to customer experience management. So that's going to be good fun. And then our uh another colleague who runs the Lexon Lab, Eileen Machado, she's responsible for curating day three, which is about the mindset. Because as we know, you can have a great kind of motivation and intent to do it. You can build a wonderful methodology, but unless you believe in it, unless you think differently, you're going to come back to the set the same old answer. So working as the three of us across this. Now, the intention is um we're going to land in London. It's our our first time. So we're going to go live with this. I think I've certainly been more used to recently doing things virtually. So it'll be great to be in person again and land this. But we will be providing virtual ones because obviously we won't get to every geography. But with the important thing to say is I guess as you and I are create curators, it doesn't mean we're necessarily be presenting. So it gives opportunity for our other colleagues in places like the Gulf, in North America, South America, in parts of APAC. So we'll be able to take the program to other parts. And I think the thing here is which I'm most excited about, we've seen it land in those countries. We've seen it land in the APAC countries, we've seen it land in Argentina and Guatemala and other markets. So we go with confidence taking it to these different places.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

My global experience also, we're also aware of the cultural diversity. Which I think is particularly important when you're talking about customer experience. And I think that's something that we have a good handle on too. So we're not just European-based, but we we can go well beyond that.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Yeah, and I think you're right, it's probably in two levels, isn't it, Mark? I mean, um it's not just the content, but it's in terms of the L and D delivery as well. You need to be aware of the cultural differences in terms of delivering it. So with people in those different areas and us working in those different areas, that's absolutely fine. Uh if you were if you know just give us an insight like from your perspective here, if you were thinking about attending this, what would you want to say would be the output that you would get by attending the uh customer experience management program?

SPEAKER_00 27:52

I would like to say that the participants, when they come out of the training session, they would be in a position to go back and describe to their management what they should be doing, what the benefits would be, and how to start on the customer experience and the customer-centric journey so that they can kick start something and and they themselves in time will learn from their experiences. Yeah. I mean, it I mean, I don't think you you don't come into a course, I'm still learning, you're still learning where you are, right? You've got to keep up to date. So we're not saying that anybody who comes out of that course is going to be the finished product.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

But they're going to be in a good position to start the journey and to get going.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

And and one thing we're going to introduce in the early stages is offer people the opportunity to join our own learning and development cohort. So we it's something we apply to everything we do, regardless of how many times we've done it. We always seek feedback to see if it can be improved further. And the the more we do it, then arguably the less it gets changed. But actually, always you should apply that. I think if you don't apply that discipline to be open to improvement or even criticism, then you really shouldn't be in the game of customer experience.

SPEAKER_00 29:09

I I've got to say that was certainly one of the reasons why I really enjoyed doing on-site training when I was at ABB, because getting out into the organization far away from head office, it was very often by the water cooler or during the coffee breaks that you found out what was really going on in the organization, how things were being applied, why what you were trying to tell them might not work locally. And these are all things that you gathered up and had in your toolkit and went away with and said, well, maybe there's another solution for that. Or so so, yeah, so it's we can all learn and and we should do. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Well, that's what we're hoping. We're hoping that the years, I mean, I totted it up the other day between us. We've got over a hundred years, which is slightly worrying of customer experience management. So we'll bring that through, and I think we're bringing it through hopefully in a very transparent way. We we're sharing it because it works, but we know that you always need to adapt these things. So I'm looking forward to seeing the different sectors how they sort of interpret it and approach it. And they are frameworks and models that we're happy for people to take back and apply. And for us, it's the greatest kind of compliment that happens because when you get training that's applied, that's again the validity of it. It actually works rather than it sits as a poster up on the wall or as a certificate, but you're actually able to use it in anger. Well, uh, maybe we'll get together in a few months and have another one of these with a couple of the other trainers just to, or even participants, see how they they found it. But in the meantime, Michael, thanks you ever so much. Not just for coming onto the podcast, but for putting sending a yes into when we asked you to be a curator, because obviously we looked for the best. And it was really important that if we've bringing people out of their office for three days to sit and learn, that actually we had people in front of them who there couldn't be anyone better to do it. So we're we're so delighted you're a part of this and look forward to working with you on it.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Thank you very much, Christopher. I look forward to it. I'm really excited about this.

SPEAKER_01 31:09

Excellent. Okay. Take care, Michael. Speak to you soon.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Thank you. Cheers.