30: Engage Customers and Employees With Stacy Sherman

30
Mar

Stacy Sherman is the founder and owner of Doing CX Right, a company devoted to refining customer experience and employee engagement. She is also the head of customer experience at Schindler Elevator and a customer experience advisory board member for leading colleges including the University of Richmond. We discuss why customer experience is crucial for business success and how leaders can improve customer satisfaction through employee engagement. 

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Engage Customers and Employees With Stacy Sherman

Our guest is Stacy Sherman, who is the founder and owner of Doing CX Right, a company that helps business owners get satisfied customers and engaged employees. Stacy is also the head of customer experience or CX at Schindler Elevator Corporation, deploying CX across 60 field offices all over the country. Previously, she was the CX and culture leader for Verizon, as well as doing digital marketing there. And she’s a blogger, a speaker, writer with Forbes, and CX advisory board member for leading colleges, including our very own Richmond, University of Richmond here in Richmond. So welcome to the show, Stacy.

Thank you, very happy to be here.

So awesome to have you. So tell me a little bit about this whole CX expertise. So how does one become a CX expert? How did you get here?

Well, how I got here is different than today. I got here by mistake in 2013. Today, it would be much more intentional and methodical. So what I mean by that is when I was working, my career has always been sales and marketing. And what happened was back in 2013, there’s always been customer service. That’s been forever. But that’s not customer experience. It’s one piece of customer experience. So customer service is when people need help. And that’s very important for brand reputation and keeping customers happy.

But customer experience is where you’re looking at an entire customer journey and really understanding the experiences of how people buy and learn and get their product or service and pay their bill, right? All these are examples of their journey. So I fell into it because when I was doing my marketing job, the company at the time well, we want you to own customer experience and this thing called voice of customer. We really want you listening to the customer and then help us define products, solutions, market messaging. So I figured it out in a more disciplined way and continued that momentum and fell in love with increasing satisfaction among customers and also employees, because happy employee leads to a happy customer. They pay it forward.

Customer experience is where you're looking at an entire customer journey and really understanding the experiences of how people buy and learn and get their product or service and pay their bill. Click To Tweet

That’s true. I’d like to understand it a little bit more. So how do you figure out the voice of the customer? Is the customer speaking to you? I mean, how do you get that voice and then what does it mean? Do you speak with the voice of the customer or you speak with a voice that’s credible to the customer? So what’s the thought process behind it?

Love that question. So the answer is there’s formal structured ways that people know surveys. You want to know something, you send a survey. That’s a structured way of getting qualitative feedback and quantitative feedback. But there’s also unstructured. So there is the social media, there’s ratings and review sites, there’s people that come to your website and they fill out a form. So the role of a CX practitioner is to take all those sources of solicited and unsolicited feedback, bring it together, really understand what are the customers telling you, where are their struggles, where’s friction, and where are you doing it right?

And then you take that and you work with your departments, even if you’re a small little company, you take the feedback and you share it with the different owners. Finance, is there a pain point in people paying their bills? People confused, people can’t get help when they need it. Well, what’s your customer care experience? So the answer is voice a customer is listening to all those different channels of where customers are really telling you what they feel and doing something with it.

Interesting. And then you also talk about the customer journey and creating a customer journey. So how do you turn that voice of customer and the information, the service, all that stuff into a customer journey map? What does that look like? What is the process?

The process done right is you start with your internal team representing different parts of the company and you bring everybody together and you walk in the customer’s shoes. What is the ideal experience? How should customers learn? Is it they would learn strictly from a sales force? Will they learn from your buying advertisements? Is it a retail store that somebody walks into so you define all the ways that they can learn? And then how do they buy? What’s the experience? Is it e-commerce? Is it other, right?

So you define and design all the touch points that a customer would go through. But where the magic happens is when you design it, you then need to validate it with real customers so that you could see what you created. Does it meet their expectations? Where are the gaps? And then you go back and redesign until you get it right. And then it’s an iterative process. So you’re never really done because needs change. Think about COVID.

And do the customers really know what they want or what they need? Can they figure this out for you or you have to figure it out for them? And here’s what’s behind my question. So there are certain products that we didn’t really have a need for it but someone came along and they created the product and actually turned out there is a need for it, like the iPod or the iPad, you know, are kind of great examples. But there are other products like electric cars. If someone didn’t create them, I didn’t know, I didn’t need one and, you know, people generally didn’t necessarily need it. But when it was there, someone decided that, yes, people need it, then they created the need. So, how does it work? Is it really the customer that tells you what they need or is it someone, an expert figures out what they need or is it in the middle or both? I’m confused on this.

Yeah, my answer is that internally, based on understanding customer pain points, you can come up with solutions, but before you invest money and build in it, what I highly recommend, and this is what best-in-class companies do, they’ll validate, they’ll do concept validation. So they’ll go to their target market and say, imagine if you had X to solve Y problem. What do you think of it? What’s your willingness to pay for it? Do you see the value in it? And that’s how you, it’s too much money to build and hope they come. It’s gotta be informed by the research, by the validation. That’s where I’ve seen products fail and products succeed. The ones that have, consider the customer needs, and yes, you’re right, they may not always know what they need, but you can definitely ask them if you had this, what’s the appeal? And that’s what you formulate your product development, but it’s got to be agile.

Right. So you basically, you do the research, you get all our information, then you synthesize it. Maybe this would solve the problem. And then you test it, focus groups, and then you get feedback and you refine it. And that’s kind of the agile process?

It’s a, yes, it starts with the outside in, create a prototype, concept validation, more testing, fix to adjust what they need. It’s that back and forth process. And that’s the formula so that when you launch, you have a higher probability that you’re going to get revenue and success because you built it based on real needs, not a guess that somebody wants it. All these great products that you talk about, I am certain that it was based on solving real customer pain points that came from somewhere.

All right. Got it. Switching gears a little bit here, one of the things I read on your website that you are really big on humanizing businesses because it creates a competitive advantage for businesses. What does it mean humanizing a business? What does it look like?

It means that while technology is advancing really fast, and technology is great, and I use it, embrace it, but it can’t replace the human elements. If you’re really, really frustrated, you bought something and you’re really frustrated, going online and getting a chat bot that continues to say, it just never get you go in a vicious circle and you can’t get to a human to address what you need That’s not okay

It’s not okay at all

So that’s what I mean all these different elements across the customer journey. There are elements that you can absolutely leverage technology. I love for example when Let’s say I bring my car in for service and then I’ll get a text that the technician’s almost done and everything looks good. I like that. I like that update notification. That’s technology, right? But if I had a problem and I couldn’t reach somebody for help, I mean, if I get more frustrated, I may never go back to that dealer. Okay. So- The balance. So it’s a balance.

Is it a balance between automating and making it more cost efficient and humanizing to bring back a little bit of the touch, the high touch element to kind of compensate for that digitalization? Is this this kind of process or it’s a different idea?

Yeah, so when you’re looking at your customer journey, you really examine where can automation work? Where is it scalable and where can it work to enhance customer experiences? But at the end of the day, we can’t put process over people. So it is a balance and often too many times, business leaders are only thinking about process and efficiency, but if a customer is unhappy, you’re going to lose them. So that’s why it’s the balance. So as you go through the journey, what are the right touch points that need a human element, a human picking up the phone, and where can it be the technology? That’s interesting.

So, can you paint the picture for me? So let’s say there is a roofing company, this is a very simple example. Roofing company contractors, they have customers that needs their roof replaced. They deal with insurance companies, and then they go on the roof, they replace the roof. How do you make a roofing company more humanized? What would that look like?

So first is the customer, they have the customer starting with the onboarding experience. Helping the customer understand what is going to happen and when, set expectations so that it’s very clear, the timing, what’s going to happen, when’s it going to be done, who’s there, what about them. The more you communicate upfront, you get only one chance to make a great first impression. Start with the onboarding. Secondly, continue the notifications. So, if the job is going to be delayed, don’t not communicate. If there’s supplies that are on order and there’s delays, let the customer know. You know, haven’t forgotten about you. You know, just letting you know that we’re behind because of why. Now, the customer might not like it, but they’ll be more forgiving when they’re told and their transparency. So, it’s just examples. There’s many more.

Okay. That’s interesting. So, basically, communication is really a way of keeping them, essentially, managing their expectations and keeping them secure that things are under control and it’s going to happen and it helps them not be surprised, which is like the worst thing. What about on the employee side? How do you get your employees more engaged? How do you humanize your employee experience?

Yes, so I let everybody I work with know and remind them over and over again, they have a CX job and they may not realize it. The frontline, of course, is the direct interface with the customer. So that’s a bit more obvious. But the back office absolutely affects the customer experience because without them, the front line can’t do what they need to do. And so everybody owns the customer experience. So it’s constantly helping everybody understand how they own the experience, why their role is important, and then engaging them and empowering them to do what’s right for the customer, even when their boss isn’t looking.

So, give me an example. How do I do that? I’m a business owner, I have 15 employees, maybe I’m a consulting business, I’ve got these employees, 10 of them are billing, so they are providing the consulting, I have five back office, how do I engage my employees? What do I do actually, practically, to make them engage?

Well, first of all, your front office staff or your admin, right, the ones maybe picking up the phone when the customer first calls to learn about your company. You bet how that person is on the phone and the way they come across is going to impact the perception of the person on the call about the company. So, think about a doctor office, right? Think about any service, that first interaction or any interaction. And then also, a lot of times I find that the communication between the internal departments suffers, and when that happens, the customer feels it.

So, how do I avoid it? How do I engage my employees so that they don’t mess up?

So a lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll get, I’ll collect customer feedback at different points in the customer journey. And then I’ll bring everybody together to go through what the customer said, the good and the not good. When there’s really good, I use that as opportunities to say thank you, show appreciation, show what great looks like. When the customer’s unhappy, we dive deep as a team into why, what happened, and what can be fixed. And when everybody’s involved in the process and sees it as coaching opportunities, not punishment, they feel more committed.

Okay, that’s interesting. And what does it mean leading from the heart? So one of the things that you mentioned in one of your writing is that it’s really important to lead from the heart. Is this a skill or is this a talent? So does it depend on a personality? I know that there are some people who are really warm and sociable and charismatic and magnetic. And I assume maybe it’s easier for them, but maybe it’s a skill. So can you talk to this a little bit?

Yes, it is, I believe, part of all human nature that we all are born with a heart or for those without a heart, but that we’re good people. And so taking that goodness and applying it to the workplace. So what that means is empathy, listening to your employees, listening to your customers, listening and understanding what’s said and not said, and responding based on really good listening. That’s where leading with a heart comes in because it’s not just this is the way we do it. This is the process. No, sometimes there’s real human factors or needs that need that the process doesn’t care for. It doesn’t consider. So as leaders, I believe that we’re in business to be profitable, but we also need to nurture relationships and empathy. It goes a long way.

Leading from the heart is empathy, listening to your employees, listening to your customers, listening and understanding what's said and not said, and responding based on really good listening. Click To Tweet

And how do you scale this? Is it scalable or I can be empathetic for 10 people around me, but if when I have 100 people, when I have 1,000 people, 4,500 people at Schindler, how do you scale that leading from the heart? Is it still one-to-one or is there ways of doing this one-to-many?

It’s culture. So just like anything else, I mean, our number one core value is safety. Everybody walks and talks safety. Same thing, you just layer on what’s really important as a core value and then people demonstrate it. And when they don’t demonstrate it, you call them out.

All right. So that’s how you lead them through the heart. So I wanted to ask a question which relates to one of the previous questions. So when you talk about customer journey, is there also an employee journey that you have to create? And if there is, what would that look like from the onboarding to the offboarding? What is an ideal employee journey in your mind?

So let me caveat by saying that that is a human resource department function, but I do believe that CX, customer experience leaders, work very closely and partner with HR, just like every other department. So, for example, I feel it is a responsibility to make sure that when there’s the interview process that the right questions are there so that we’re hiring any company, that you’re hiring customer-centric people. And how do they demonstrate that? So it’s part of the hiring process. It’s part of the onboarding training process.

So just as equally as you’re training them on benefits, you’re training them on best practices and the X ways that the company does business. So that’s why I say there’s a lot to the internal experience of how they even learn. You’re not even on-boarded. If there’s a recruiter and that recruiter provides a bad experience, that brand is going to be tarnished just even as an interviewee. Partnering with HR to make sure that the recruitment, the on-boarding, the time that employees are in place, that they have what they need to do their job and to be able to deliver customer excellence, all of that, measuring employee satisfaction, that’s huge.

And then what I like to do is partner with the teams to say, okay, well, if you have a local retail branch, for example, and you have, or sales branch, anything. What are those employees’ scores? And how do they correlate to the customer scores in that area? Do they match or not? Because more often than not, when there’s employees who love their job, the customer feels it and sees it. And those scores that they get are typically good.

So is it like a bottom-up that first make your employees happy and then they’re going to make your customers happy or you teach your employees how to make the customers happy and if they’re successful, that’s going to make them happy. So is it a bottom up or is it top down? Is it inside out or outside in?

Completely, it’s got to start at the top. They have to make it a core value. They have to make it an important metric just like revenue, but it’s got to be delivered by the bottoms up. So it’s both, 100% everybody owns CX.

That’s cool. It sounds like everyone is a salesperson, now everyone is a CX person, but maybe it’s the same thing, it’s the different sides of the same coin.

Well, hold on. I like that statement. I would say relationship and customer experience is the way you promote, is the way you engage customers, is the way you win customers. Old-fashioned selling is gone.

Relationship and customer experience are the way you promote, is the way you engage customers, is the way you win customers. Old-fashioned selling is gone. Click To Tweet

Yeah, pretty much. No one picks up the phone anymore. That’s true. That’s true. People want to see value and now it is so easy to get free samples of anything, of services. If they don’t get great value, then why should they buy? It comes down more to the value prop and marketing. That is true. But how do you measure, and this is an issue that comes up with my clients all the time. We like to measure things weekly. We have a weekly scorecard or scoreboard, which is kind of a real-time measurement.

When you have monthly measures, then by the time you get the numbers, two weeks after the end of the month, you’re six weeks behind the first week results. And if something goes off the rails, it’s impossible to bring it back. It’s too late to fix it. So we like to measure things every week. But one of the trickiest things to measure is employee satisfaction on a weekly basis because you have a limited number of employees and okay, you do an NPP, a net promoter score or NPS, but you can’t do that every week. Is there a way to measure that on a weekly basis?

Well, right now I ask the customer based on like a transactional moment and relationship surveys. So I’ll ask the customer and often they’ll mention people by name who service them or who help them. So I’m looking at it on a daily basis.

But as for customer experience, what about the employee? How do you measure the employee engagement and how happy your employees are when you have a limited number of employees?

Yeah, I misunderstood that. So no, it’s not an everyday, there’s no quantifiable way every day. It’s to me a constant, the manager every day shows up for the employee, supports the employee, helps them prioritize, because there’s always too much to do. And so it’s not a hard number every day, no, but it is a part of culture. And it’s part of culture of your little team, culture of the company.

And then how I measure it, is it through the customer feedback? So if the customers are happy, then our employees are probably happy. If I get negative customer experience, then I look at the employee happiness or is there a direct way to measure it on a regular basis, how engaged your employees are?

So there’s two answers to that. The hypothesis and proven data has shown that when employees are happy and love their job, there is a correlation to better NPS and customer satisfaction scores. But as far as employees, typically it’s getting their feedback. Most of the time, I see it twice a year, you could do it quarterly to benchmark. So I’d say depends on the size of your company and how much you’re, you know, you’re, you’re really needing to fix. So it’s not the same as customer, but even customer, you got to be careful not to bombard them with too much too. So yeah, I would say it’s more of the qualitative, more frequently and listening and directly asking, and then the quantitative once or twice a year for employees.

Got it. OK, so finally, I’d like to ask you this. If I’m a business owner and I want to improve, generally I want to improve the customer experience, 2021 is the year of the CX in my business. And I want to kind of do a total makeover of customer experience. What is my to-do list? So what are the things, other than hiring someone like you, obviously that’s the done for you solution. But if I just want to wrap my mind around what is it going to take, what would you say are the main steps on my menu for this year to do that?

So I’d say first, if you’re not already measuring customer satisfaction, if you don’t have, I mean, NPS is the easiest, most basic one. If you’re not doing an NPS survey, plan to institute it where there’s moments of, what I call moments of truth, and when there was an actual interaction with a customer. If you’re already doing NPS, then I would say to you, do more than NPS. NPS is one level of measurement, but it doesn’t really get into the why. Why is the customer happy or unhappy or will recommend? I love level of effort. I love to know from customers, what was the level of effort? are really easy to get help or to solve your issue. So, level of effort is my favorite.

Okay, so you ask your customers level of effort. What else can we do? Can we do something on our website? Can we do something in terms of training? Can we do something in terms of external communications? What other things are there? What are the low-hanging fruits?

So more low-hanging fruits is asking customers their feedback on either your current process or your current website. How easy or difficult is it to navigate? How easy or difficult is it to find what they’re looking for? Optimizing your digital experiences, I mean, that’s definitely low-hanging fruit. So A, B testing different experiences and seeing which one gets them to go where you want them to go. If it’s add to cart and shop online, that’s easy to measure. Right, so there’s so getting customer feedback ongoing is easy and so imperative to success.

And then when I have all the feedback, then what do I do? So what are the major areas in the company that I fix and what is number one, what is number two, what is number three? What are the top three areas where I need to take action to fix it when I got the information?

Right, so let’s talk about, because there’s so many different answers to this, so let’s just take the e-commerce standpoint. You have a website, customers come, it could be lead generation or buy online. Ultimately, you’re looking at all of your data points, your website traffic, your website analytics, but also asking customers. You can use certain ways to watch them and see. Example, you give someone instruction, where would you go to find the local office that you’re looking for or the local branch, local store? You give them a task, you watch them. If it takes them a long time to find it, you know you’ve got a problem.

And so then you go and give that information to the web developers, web designers to go make it a better experience. It’s just one example. If customers are saying, I can’t enter my credit card, I’m trying to check out. Well, then you gotta get that information to the people that own that part of the website experience, go fix it. So that’s what I mean. You get the feedback and then you go to the right people, stakeholders, who can do something about it. And then you go back to the customer again. Now sometimes there’s not an error that you see, but more of, let’s say, a lot of people are abandoning their shopping cart. Well, why? You can do these abandoned cart surveys. So you can do it proactively and reactively.

How long does it take to do a total makeover or turbocharging the CX for a company? What’s the range? What’s the quick thing? What’s the long thing? So for like a small business, maybe 25 employees, $10 million revenue, if I wanted to do kind of a total makeover and I hired your firm to do that, would it take three months, six months, two years? What does it look like?

So I would say to start to really feel change and transformation, I would say at least six months to really see the fruits of the labor. But there’s quick wins that you can easily implement. It’s just a cadence. It’s not a one and done thing. And you’re really never done because like I said, customer needs are changing as the world’s changing.

So maybe that’s a full-time job to always watch that and stay ahead of the curve.

Yeah, it is. But like I said, I believe in crawl, walk, run. So it’s just start.

What is the percentage of business owners that you feel or businesses that are really doing a good job, at least 80% good on customer experience, customer happiness, employee engagement, what do you see out there?

I see companies that think about the customer experience and design experiences before you even walk in the door.

But I mean, what is the proportion of companies that really do a good job? Is it 10% of them or 90% of them? What is your experience?

That’s a great question. My gut answer, my fast gut, 50%.

Okay, so that’s actually better than I thought. I guess you cannot stay in business without paying some attention to it these days.

No, and I think that it’s been a long time coming. I mean, like there’s Gartner studies and so many research that have been saying that customer experience gives you a competitive edge and it will differentiate your brand. This is like by X percent by 2021. They’ve been saying that for years. So here we are 2021. And I think that’s why, because there’s been these credible sources emphasizing this year after year with research.

Okay, that’s very cool. So if someone would like to learn more and maybe reach out to you to talk to you directly about their issues, where can they reach you?

Yes, I would love that. So my website is doingcxright.com, doingcxright.com. And I’m also on social media, I’m mostly on LinkedIn, but also Twitter under my name, Stacy Sherman, and Instagram, so I’m out there sharing tips every day.

Okay, well, if you want to engage your employees and make your customers happy, reach out to Stacy Sherman. And thank you, Stacy, for coming on and sharing the information. And to our listeners, stay tuned. There’s gonna be an exciting expert entrepreneur next week on the show. Thank you, Stacy.

Thank you so much.

 

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