Watch Jeanne Bliss’s Webinar: Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine

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Customer experience expert Jeanne Bliss joined us for a webinar where she took an in-depth look at one of her key customer leadership competencies: alignment around experience. You can watch it now or read the full transcript below.

Build Your Customer-driven Growth Engine With Jeanne Bliss

In this webinar, Jeanne takes an in-depth look at one of her key customer leadership competencies: alignment around experience.

Jeanne shows you how to:

  • Give leaders a framework for guiding the work of the organization
  • Unite accountability as customers experience you
  • Break down silos when it comes to customer service
  • Align operations around customer experience delivery and innovation

Jeanne’s book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0

In Jeanne’s new book, “Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine,” she provides a roadmap to achieve success with the CCO core competencies, and how to drive transformational customer experience change across the business, breaking down silos.

We love this book so much that we ran a competition to give away 50 copies. We had so many entries (way more than we had books to give!) so Jeanne kindly offered to talk about some of her ideas from the book in a webinar that everyone could attend.

About Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne Bliss is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association. She is the author of the groundbreaking books, “Chief Customer Officer”, “I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad”, and her latest book, “Chief Customer Officer 2.0”, published in June 2015.


Webinar transcript:

Sarah Chambers – All right guys, let’s get started.  This webinar is, ‘Build your customer-driven growth engine’ with Jeanne Bliss, and I’m really excited to have her with us today because she’s been an inspiration to me as well.  Her first ‘Chief Customer Officer’ book inspired me personally in my career goals, so it is quite an honour to have her here.  My name is Sarah Chambers and I’m head of support here at Kayako.  Just a little bit more about Kayako, we help businesses get better at customer service.  We’re used by 35,000 organizations to deliver great support to millions of customers.  You can sign up for your free trial at www.kayako.com.  And that’s all we’re going to talk about Kayako today, so let’s get into the good stuff.

 

A little bit more about Jeanne Bliss, she is the founder and president of Customer Bliss and the co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association.  She is one of the foremost experts in customer centric leadership and the role of the chief customer officer.  She works as a consultant and thought leader, she’s written many great books that you should definitely read, the first one called, ‘Chief Customer Officer’ and it was the first of its kind to address the role of customer leadership in the executive suite.  Her second book, ‘I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad’, was also a best-seller.  And finally, her latest book, ‘Chief Customer Officer 2.0’ was published in June 2015.  Also, we are giving away at least one copy and if your questions are really good we might give away two for anyone who has any questions.  So you can either tweet using #CCO20, or you can put them in the side panel of your GoToWebinar control panel and we’ll make sure that we answer them at the end.  If we don’t have time for all of them, we’ll make sure you get an answer regardless so please do throw those in there.  With that I’m going to throw the control over to Jeanne and we’ll get started.

 

J – I’m happy to spend a little bit of time with everybody.  As we just mentioned, I did have a book that just came out in June 2015, and this book is my love letter to all of the brave customer crusaders around the world working with their c-suite and across the organization to build their customer driven growth engine.  It includes five competencies, but the point of our work is really to help our organizations to earn the right to growth, and that’s important.  I’m going to be a broken record about those three words ‘earn the right’.  Don’t go get loyalty, don’t want loyalty, don’t grab loyalty, it’s about earning its customers’ advocacy and their love by building an experience that improves their lives and by orienting the company to improve customers’ lives and to care about customers lives and take customers and their lives off the spreadsheet.  But this is our current life, this is what we usually experience, this is a product development company.  These probably may not be your silos but you could certainly relate.  What we have inside of our organizations is everybody working very hard but working hard separately, and in the working hard separately, we deliver an experience to customers that isn’t necessarily orchestrated, starting with the customer’s life, starting with customers emotions, starting with what they’re trying to accomplish and inadvertently here’s what we’re delivering to customers.  We deliver a random experience which is the outcome of everybody doing their own thing; working hard but working hard separately.

 

Who’s ever called an airline more than once for the same purpose?  This is a perfect example, as I call this service roulette: you called the airline and you get a wonderful person on the phone but they were a policy cop, they’re there to tell you what you can and cannot do, what you did wrong or didn’t do wrong and they’re going to help you as long as it’s within the control of what they have sitting in front of them.  So I’m very polite, I say ‘thank you very much’ and then I try again, and the next time I may get somebody who’s been there a while longer or is just more savvy on the ways of the world, they know how to navigate you through the clunky roles, they take more time to really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and you hang up the phone and you feel better.  You may have even gotten your experience solved.  When we talk to organizations and leaders, people will say ‘that’s great service’.  That’s still random experience because the answer to ‘did we deliver an experience’ is, ‘it depends’.  It depends on the person you called.  It depends on the time of the day, it depends on the channel and that ‘it depends experience’ is what we’re delivering to customers. That’s our brand, our brand is dissected because of the way we’re doing business and so the work for customer experience, the work for these competencies, the work as the chief customer officer or the customer leader, short-handed to just say the human duct tape of the organization is to unite the operating areas; the leaders and the silos to deliver reliability.

 

In a world of social media, this is the most important thing first, which is to deliver what you say you’re going to do and deliver it consistently. This isn’t about boiling the ocean and mapping every touchpoint, it’s about knowing the things that are most important to customers and consistently deliver a one company experience.  As you do this, what’s ironic is this reliability will set you apart because the ‘it depends experience’ thinks about, for example, think about your own life, going to the bank, going into retail, healthcare certainly, almost all of our experiences are back to the ‘random’ or the ‘it depends’ experience.  So if you deliver peace of mind and reliability, you’re going to earn the right to customer story.  You’re going to earn the right to their growth.

 

I have liked, and I am on a crusade to change people from using the word ‘loyalty’ and to think about instead, an emotionally driven word that drives behaviour, and that is ‘desire’.  If you deliver an experience that customers desire, they’re going to want to have it again, they’re going to want more from you and they’re going to tell other people.  So I call ‘desire’ the ‘cha-ching’ emotion.  If you deliver this memory, and this is our work, memory creation is the currency of our brand.  That’s really what these five competencies in this book really help to drive, and I’m going to walk you through them briefly but then we’re going to focus today on number two.  I’ll walk you through that, which is building your customer path, aligning your company around the customer journey.  Speaking of that peace of mind, think about Amazon.  They are, if nothing, a reliability engine.  Amazon sold their first book in 1995.  If they hadn’t done books right, they wouldn’t have earned the right to adding all of these categories and, well many beyond Zappos in 2009, they wouldn’t have earned the right to growth in all of these categories.

 

Putting a fine point on this from a social media standpoint, what we know when customers go out on the internet and talk in social media is that they speak about three things; is the experience consistent and reliable, because you hear you hear a lot about when it wasn’t.  Did they improve my life?  If you did something to make them have a better day, to improve what they needed to do, and how did I feel at the end of it?  This is so important: 92% of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising and included in this is social media and word-of-mouth.  This is up 74 % from 2007, and so the importance of delivering an experience that earns the right to this kind of verbal advocacy is crucial to the strength of our business.

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One more thing I want to just make sure everybody really understands because as leaders in this work, we need ammo to connect the dots between this work and it being a growth strategy.  This is not ‘kumbaya’, ‘we are the world’, ‘let’s go hug a customer’, this is a growth strategy and there is a 300% revenue gain to be achieved by reducing that negative word-of-mouth by driving reliability versus chasing the buzz.  After you’ve got your house in order and everything is running perfectly, or mostly perfectly most of the time, then you can start layering on great things.  As I mentioned earlier just reliability is going to differentiate.  I’m going to give you a brief overview of the content of this new book Chief Customer Officer 2.0, which is really a transformational roadmap for how to build a repeatable cycle in your business, starting with your leaders, uniting your c-suite and uniting the organization to build a recurring engine for growth.  It’s also about first managing and honouring your customers as assets.  I’m going to talk a little bit more about this because it really is the groundwork, and if we don’t talk about that competency 2, won’t necessarily have a lot of connection.  Competency 2 work, as we’re going to spend our most of our time on today, is aligning around experience, giving leaders in the organization a framework to build the blueprint for how you will and will not grow your business.  Building a listening path which organizes multiple sources of listening so that you tell the story of customers lives that, you don’t start with survey scores or survey metrics but rather the nuggets of information inside those that you use multiple sources of information and that you organize it by the stages of the experience.

 

Proactively knowing and understanding before customers tell you where you’re driving reliability and then finally, leadership accountability and culture, meaning are you enabling your employees to deliver value.  Are you driving regular accountability for improving customers’ lives? In the book there is a chapter in depth for each of these action labs and case studies called, ‘My rock, my story’, which are leaders around the world talking about how they’re embedding these.  So, I hope that you’ll pick up a copy because it really does give you a framework, a realistic operationally driven framework, to drive customer driven growth.

 

As I mentioned, I wanted to briefly touch on competency one first to lay the groundwork for why we’re doing this work.  In competency one, really what we find is starting here turns this work into a return on investment, and this means starting with what customers actually did versus what they say they’re going to do.  How many new customers did you bring in this quarter monthly or before annual planning?  Volume and value, and I encourage you to use the whole number; ‘we brought in 20 000 new customers’, well how many did you lose in this quarter, or month or year?  ‘We lost 15 000 customers’, because you see, until you do the math, what you’re fixating on is your sales, the power of your acquisition engine.  But you’re not doing the math and saying, ‘but as a result of our experience, here’s how many we really kept and grew’, and that is the power.  We need to get leaders to care about human lives coming in and out of our business.  One of the ways mentioned in the new book to get leaders to care is by presenting this information visually, and I use this with bowls and marbles, or jars of marbles and this has been very effective and something you might want to think about.  The idea behind this is to just create a mathematical equation around the volume and value of customer and bring in two bowls or jars of marbles to your leadership team.  The first jar, or bowl of marbles, is the equivalent value of your new customers: volume and value.  The next one is the equivalent value of your lost customers volume and value.  When we first did this for this one leadership team, the bowls of marbles were filled to the same volume, and so the leaders could see ‘we are standing still’, and what’s important here is if you use retention rates and not whole numbers it also gives you a false positive, because if you say 75%, you don’t think about all the customers you’re leaving.  Think about this, this is an example of an action lab and I also like to say, and you can also at the end of it say, ‘hey we lost our marbles’.

 

So, customers as assets is an attitude shift, not a dashboard.  It’s about getting your leaders in unison to care about customers lives; to care and drive the growth of the business; to earning the right to people staying and wanting to do business with you.  It’s caring about the why and, it’s about building that framework for earning the right to growth; starting the beginning of a sentence where we talk about customers’ lives.  Competency 2, where we’re going to focus today, really gives us a blueprint for how we organize the information and how we ultimately start driving the growth and the work of the business, for earning the right to that growth.  This gives leaders a framework for guiding the work of the organization, and it’s really about changing how you do work from the silo report out, for example, to having leaders agree on and talk about the stages of the customer’s experience, and I can tell you just getting a definition that people agree to of the stages, not in terms of your process, lots of times I’ll say to people, ‘do you have a customer journey map’, and they’ll say, ‘we do, it’s some prospect conversion sale resale’.  That is not what your customer is trying to accomplish, that’s what you’re trying to get from them.  Your journey map should be identifying the objectives your customer’s trying to achieve and then starting to unite your organization to figure out how you’re going to work together to enable your customers lives to be improved in each of those places along the journey where customers have emotions and objectives.  When you just do that first thing of building the stages, for example, it can immediately have impact, and over time the journey map becomes your business decision blueprint.

 

So the journey map and building a customer alignment to the customer’s lives does these four things: it will help you build accountability to customers’ lives, because we’re going to move ourselves from the silo based conversations to accountability to customer lives.  It creates a frame for decision-making because we’re going to move the organization again from saying, ‘if we’re trying to deliver this complete experience in this stage, what will we do and what should we never do’.  It unites the silos because today we’re all working hard, but our KPIs and our operational standards are based on achieving our own goals.  As we talked about in the airline example and the others, and just thinking about your own life, you know that’s not what the customer needs.  The customer needs us to unite in each of these stages to deliver a united and a complete experience, not and ‘it depends experience’, and not an experience that goes deep on one silo but not on others.  For example, think about billing.  In most companies, billing is a challenging area.  If you see you have billing channel challenges, for example, the CEO traditionally might say, ‘Bob, you run billing, can you work on that.  From a customer’s life stand ball point, billing is not just about the bill it’s about way before that e.g. how was the product sold to them, was it explained correctly, is there somewhere for someone to talk about.  When the bill comes, and the customer might have sticker shock, what happens?  How do we manage that situation?  It’s the bill itself in the promptness of the bill and the language on the bill, but experientially it must include multiple silos to create a complete billing experience.  Then finally it moves us to do what I just mentioned, to unite to experience focus, creating those memories that customers want to have again.

 

Throughout the book, there’s some really wonderful case studies, and one of those case studies and the people that I’m really excited to talk about with you, is Sameer Betar.  Sameer Betar is the Director of the office of visitor services, the very first person in this role at the Smithsonian Institute.  Many people have visited there, and they welcome over 30 million visitors a year.  They didn’t have a journey map, and so all of these many properties that are on the site of the Smithsonian, are all disjointed.  They’re not anymore, they now have a journey map to unite them but, for example, if you walked into the central rotunda prior to this work being done, there was not a central place to get questions answered.  Every silo had their own pocket of work, and it was quite confusing. However, by building a journey map, including the journey of the customers visit to the Smithsonian, what’s important to recognize is that this isn’t about just being at the Smithsonian.

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What companies very often miss is the part before where they can add value and be a beacon in customers’ lives and that’s where they consider going, and they organize the trip.  For you it might be trying to do research about health care, or figuring out if it’s time to refinance a home.  Things that are agnostic to perhaps selling something, but that are adding value to your customer and drawing them to you to find out information, to support them with information, to provide things that help your customers’ lives.  So, a journey map shows the journey all throughout the visit.  In the middle is experience, a building.  ‘Leaving’, what is the leaving experience, as you exit campus and back home?  I find this terrific and I think that it’s a great way to think about the fact that this isn’t overly complicated either.  The power of building this ‘stages of the experience’ and the touch points is to not boil the ocean.  I think what I want to encourage you to do is, know that if you inventory, the first piece of this work really is to simply inventory your touch points, to know by stage how many there are, but then to identify as the Smithsonian did, that there’s probably 10 to 15 that are the most

Important.  For example, one of the things that happens when we talk to people as they say they’ve mapped every touch point and visio and now what we have is a lot of maps in a binder sitting on a shelf somewhere, and people with visio-blindness.

 

Another big part of this work is to again continue to start to work by focusing on those stages as you define them.  One of the most amazing things that we do with clients and leaders is by stage of the experience, start to build that decision-making blueprint, bring your leaders together to do this first, but then bring your employees together to do this as well.  This is by ‘stage of the experience’; if we’re going to deliver those memories, if we’re going to create a positive experience that drives a desire for wanting to come back.  What will we always do by ‘stage of the experience’, you’ll see again we’ll keep on aligning customers’ lives.  What will we never do by stage of the experience?  This is what Ingrid Lindburgh does, for example, who’s been a chief customer officer many times, and she did this as prime therapeutic, she did this as Cigna, and she calls this, ‘do this, don’t do that interaction principles’ and her story is in the book.  I call it the code of conduct, you can call it whatever you want, but the idea is that this is the beginning of what I call the Vulcan mind-meld and uniting your leaders to recognize that this can’t be about the silos reporting out, but about delivering experiences memories by stage and to really organize the work starting with what we will and will not do to build that business decision blueprint.  So, competency 2, aligning around experience, is about uniting leaders and uniting their focus to focus on the things that matter most to customers’ lives, to use that framework as a business decision blueprint.  If it’s just a great day of touchpoint mapping and then it sits on a shelf, and some parts of the organization do it, but the company and leaders don’t go back and change their language and change their accountability, then it was a great day but not part of a transformation.

 

It’s also about uniting the organization to be accountable to customers’ lives.  Another great thing that you might want to do as you’re thinking about this customer experience journey, is by stage of the experience, bring your leaders in, and again do this with your employees as well, and what we like to do is to actually take your customer verbatim comments and don’t hand your people pages and pages to read because you may be like me, after about the fourth page of reading just straight verbatims, my eyes roll into the back of my head.  Cut them instead into what I call Chinese fortune cookie strips: one verbatim on each strip, and if you’ve got ten people at a table, pass out ten strips and have them read them out loud to each other for an individual stage of the experience, and then have your teams actually rate the stages of the customer experience.  So for the stage that they’re focusing on, is the delivery of the experience to your customer always 100% reliable?  Is the answer to reliability ‘it depends’?  It depends on the person, it depends on the time, it depends on the channel, or is this a challenging experience.  Don’t be surprised if at the beginning of this work you’re rating yourself somewhere between the red and the yellow, or deeply entrenched in the red.  For most of my clients, that’s where we start, because why wouldn’t we, because it’s silo-based operating models and everybody’s got them.  We aren’t uniting from a customer experience standpoint.

 

As I mentioned, this path, this customer framework also then creates the frame for building your customer listening feedback that you’re going to build in competency 2, ‘build a customer listening path’ and the flip here is, instead of presenting information and well-intended dashboards by question of the survey, instead aggregate multiple sources of information and present it by stage of the customer journey so you tell a balance story, which is a blend of qualitative and quantitative.  This means complaint trending is qualitative, but if you’ve got a lot of it and enough of it, and presented by stage you’re going to get trends.  For social media feedback, get an agreement on the categorization of issues so they’ll roll up.  Then also present your survey information, and then do another kind of listening that’s very critical.  I call it experiential listening, meaning having leaders and your company do what your customers have to go through so that you tell the story of customers’ lives.  In stage 3 we see there’s a spike of social media where customers aren’t unhappy here.  You can see in our call centre complaint trending, it’s occurring in the same way.  Before this meeting, we ask you to do the same issue which is downloading a trial, and how did that go?  You probably had some issues as well, and in our survey relating to this part of the experience, our results dropped by 30%.  See what I did there, I told a story of customers’ lives that didn’t start with the survey score.  It started with information that told what customers were going through.  Yes, we use that numeric, but we used it at the end to validate, so that we care more about the life, not starting with the score.  We need to earn the right to the improvement, not to go get a score.

 

Another thing you might do is, if, in this work a lot of companies like to call the important touch points ‘moments of truth’, what I found in very complicated business models, is to instead sometimes for example build what I call a defector pipeline.  This is something we did initially and it all stayed, and in a lot of my software to service clients, we’ve built defector pipelines.  These are those top 10 to 15 moments, but we call them the defector intersection points, meaning that if we don’t intersect deliberately with a customer at these moments we’re not going to earn the right to growth, we’re not going to deliver those desired memories.  So, in SAS it might be, follow-up to a request for information.  After onboarding, we know the way we onboard clients has everything to do with if they’re going to use the product.  After the contract in B2B, almost every client I have I say, ‘how is your contract experienced?’ and it’s usually not always an equal balance relationship.  If you notice inside of your data that customers are calling tech support more than an unusual number of times, the actual usage of the product, let’s say they’ve bought $5,000 in products or five million dollars in products but they’re only using 5% of that product, that means there’s value erosion going on.  You can see these other touch points if you use NPS, following up to depict attractors.  The idea here is, what we’ve now done is identified where we need to be deliberate in these interaction points that are most important to customers’ lives.

 

One of the last things I want to talk about that the customer journey enables, is bringing it all together, and something I call the ‘customer room’, which is really part of competency 5, but if you don’t have a journey map, you can’t enable this, and this is about organizing all that information as I mentioned before, starting with the story of customers lives.  In the past month or quarter or year, as a result of the experience we delivered to customers, here’s our new customers volume and value.  By stage of the experience, here’s the trending of complaints, here’s where social media occurred, here’s how we’re doing operationally, and here is where our survey is.  Then going through with leaders and circling the most important things and then agreeing on which key things we will focus on, and where we will attach resources, so we have a one company build out of this.  A client of mine, Mike Bennett who’s a senior vice president of operations at the Irvine Company, which is a master-planned part of Southern California, and they manage a lot of the experience of living and working in that part of the world, we’ve actually built their customer room and here is a rendering of what they do inside of the Irvine Company.  It does that exact purpose, and we’ve used that to really transform their business.  They are a b2b company, and so what’s important here is to know they’re b2b and b2c, this part of the Irvine Company is being a business-to-business, but what’s important that I wanted to make a point here, is that the customer room and these five competencies work equally well in b2b as well as b2c.

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So, use these five competencies, starting with the framework that you build in competency 2, align around experience to tell the story of your customers’ lives.  As a result of the experience we delivered, here’s how we earn the right to customers growing or departing our business.  By stage of our experience, we will now go through and orchestrate and talk about the experience we’re delivering to customers to understand why we did or did not earn the right to grow.  We will now walk you through what we heard and what customers feel by stage of the experience as well as how we’re performing in those key touch points that customers care about.  As a leadership team and organization will now focus on those things that mean the most to customers and enable our employees to deliver value by getting rid of the roadblocks and by enabling people to do what’s right from a customer standpoint, so we earn the right to customer driven growth.

Q&A

Jeanne Bliss: I want to thank you so much and that’s all that I wanted to present today I want to leave some time for questions, there are some information on how you can reach me right here and this is the home page of my new website.  

 

Sarah Chambers: Thank you so much for that Jeanne, that was really informative, I’m sure everyone is busy taking notes so now is the time to pop in any questions that you have into the GoToWebinar control panel.  We’ve got a few here to start with, actually I’ll start with one of mine, I’m sure everyone’s experienced the frustration that might come if you’re not necessarily as senior as a CCO, but you still want to start building that alignment and breaking down silos. What are some of the things that you can do as maybe a more junior person on staff to start bringing that alignment into the organization and maybe change the minds of the executive suite?

 

Jeanne Bliss: That’s a really great question, one of the things that I would encourage is connect with your finance team, for example, and whatever level and your finance team you have a relationship with and see if you can’t get together with a few other people in the organization to build your version of customer asset metrics, because even if again you’re starting small, it’s going to be powerful to start to shed a light on, are we losing or growing customers.  The other thing that’s interesting that you might be able to do is start to build your listening system so that we’re aggregating information and not waving what I call the bleeding heart letters which are the well-intended letters that we read at meetings, but with without a lot of volume and organized by operating area or more importantly by stage of the experience, the leaders are like this is great but how big of a problem is this?  So inside of the book there’s action labs, and you can actually start working on any of those action labs that are tactical from wherever you sit inside of the organization, and that’ll help you to start getting that foothold.

 

Sarah Chambers: That’s a really good brand, I really like the visual of the marbles and then Lusine art marbles, I think is that something that would be very powerful!

 

Jeanne Bliss:Losing your marbles!

 

Sarah Chambers: I’ve got a question here.  How long do these mapping rumor creation exercises generally take, so obviously it’s important, but you’ve got to do the day-to-day as well, are there tips for efficiency and productivity with putting this kind of time aside?

 

Jeanne Bliss: When I do coaching, and we do this with organizations, there’s a multi-faceted, it can’t be one and done.  So what we do is, and that’s why the commitment has to really be there, to put the time into it.  So we typically do, for example, I was just working with a large bank last week and we did two full days with their leadership team where we didn’t map the whole journey, we just focused at the stage level, and that’s the most important thing initially; let’s start realizing that we’ve got to reorient the work of the business to the stages.  So, there’s work there just to get agreement on the stages and to create the acceptance around the leadership team that the work is reliability by stage and to rate where we are today.  Then what we do is we actually will take this to a group of employees, and I do a full day, and we’ll do 45 to 60 employees, every silo is represented and these are the people working.  That takes a full day, but again you’re not done, that’s just starting to inventory it.  From there we have to cleanse it and really make it simpler and then we do several customer sessions with leaders in the room, just a few, and about 12 to 15 customers apiece.  We go around to multiple areas, there’s lots of information on my website that kind of walks through the process.  But it doesn’t end there, then we have to engage leaders to start using the communication in their language, which then finally gets us to the build-out of the customer room.  What we find is, from the beginning of the process to the first customer room is usually four to five months.

Sarah Chambers: Everybody wants the Silver Bullet but it’s not really there.

 – You can go faster, but because we’re engaging, you see we’re doing the work, so it’s not that nothing’s happening until four to five months because we’re doing all of the laying of the groundwork, and so things are starting to change.  After the first leadership meeting things start to change, after the employee meeting things starts to change.  Out of the first customer meeting we’re going to see the issues we can start working on, but you need to lay the groundwork.  So this isn’t a one and done thing, that’s why it can’t be just hire somebody to come in and do touch point mapping and you’re done because there’s all of this behaviour change and culture change and leadership behaviour change that has to happen.

 

Sarah Chambers: Difficult clients here decided to leave the company.  What methods do you use in a real situation when difficult clients, or maybe not your ideal customer, how do you attribute that into this alignment?

 

Jeanne Bliss:That’s a good question, and every organization has customers or clients and b2b that we breathe a sigh of relief when they decide to depart the business.  So when you talk about your customer asset volume and value, because we’re using whole numbers and not retention rates, we will make a point that three of the customers who left were A, B and C, and while they contributed this amount of volume, they cost the company this much in extra this, or that so that we give context to the departure.

 

Sarah Chambers: That’s really helpful, thank you so much again Jeanne for all of your insight and your experience it’s been lovely to talk to you.  So one last thing, we do have a book to give away and we’re going to be giving it to Lona Lona who was one of the askers of a question on GoToWebinar, so we’ll follow up with her for her address right after this so thanks Lona for asking your great question, and Jeanne again thank you, and everyone should definitely check out the book if they haven’t already.  If you have, spread the love because everyone should read it.  So we’ll continue the conversation on Twitter as well if you want to meet us at Kayako or #CCO20.

 

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