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SPEAKERS
Michael Hinshaw, Taylor Fitzpatrick
Taylor Fitzpatrick 00:06
Hey Michael, welcome. So excited. You get to join me for a coffee chat today. You got your coffee?
Michael Hinshaw 00:12
I do morning, Taylor. I got little little coffee. You're
Taylor Fitzpatrick 00:16
perfect just enough. That's all you need is a sip, right? Well, I'm super excited to have you join me today we're going to talk about navigating challenges through customer experience and customer experience as a growth catalyst. which let's be honest, you're pretty pro in this space. But for folks who may not know you, maybe just a 32nd blip on who you are and why you can speak to this. Sure.
Michael Hinshaw 00:41
Hello, Michael Hinshaw here, I've been helping companies improve their customer centricity and profit from that for a little over 20 years. And I got into the space originally, because I started a business in a country I knew nothing about an industry I didn't nothing about. And I kind of brought but I realized in retrospect with the principles of customer experience management into that equation, and it was able to build a $300 million business in about three years, by essentially finding friction points and eliminating them that others weren't able to do. Wow, that's great.
Taylor Fitzpatrick 01:18
That is a perfect segue. And again, great exercise for us to talk about the challenges and strategy piece. So my first question for you is, what challenges do businesses face that really emphasize their need for a robust customer experience strategy?
Michael Hinshaw 01:33
Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty long list. In all honesty, even the start with the business reasons. You know, acquisition, how do you more effectively get more customers into your into your sales pipeline, b2b, b2c really doesn't matter. And once you get them into there, how do you progress them through to a point where they're ready to buy from you whether that by cycle is something happens very quickly, like an E commerce, or if it's something that requires interaction with the organization through Salesforce sales team, the experience that they have along the way, encourage them to either proceed towards the sale or to drop out of the process entirely and go to a competitor. So simplistically, acquisition, awareness, acquisition, sales. The other side of that is retention. So a lot of organizations have very robust marketing organizations spend a lot of time and effort energy building out highly effective touchpoints to drive customers into their brand. And they have sales teams and or algorithms wherever it is websites to actually drive those customers from getting their brand to purchase. But oftentimes, in business, business to consumer particularly, there's not as much effort put on the retention side, b2b, there's customer success, absolutely. Of what you know, which is often a subset of or on top of customer service. But at the end of the day, the degree to which you're able to help your customers meet their needs effectively, on both the pre purchase and post purchase side is going to drive increased lifetime value, greater greater purchasing from your existing customers, more positive word of mouth and new customers driven by that positive word of mouth and a whole bunch of other layers, oh, call standard business value outcomes, by delivering a great experience.
Taylor Fitzpatrick 03:29
I love that. So as we're talking about kind of that customer experience lens, how do you think like the perception around even customer experience has evolved? And what it was we look towards, like 2024? Like, what are some of those new dimensions or in business environment items that we should kind of consider? So we kind of know standard, but what does it look like looking forward? Well, there's
Michael Hinshaw 03:52
kind of to two tracks with this. The first is kind of, you know, looking forward, what is the businesses have to do kind of all up to deliver great experiences, you need greater personalization, greater relevance, less friction, and greater recognition of the fact that even though we did live in a digital first world, it's not digital only. So we need to be able to acknowledge and help our customers where they're at. If we have if they're primarily coming through digital channels, we need to be able to optimize that. But we also need to give them the ability to move to another channel quickly, seamlessly and easily if they need that connection. So greater personalization, more relevance, less friction, and the ability to have smooth handoffs between channels.
Taylor Fitzpatrick 04:44
They're a good example of that and like real life that you've seen that somebody does well, is that like my my target app, recognizing as I pull into the parking lot and sending me like a customized coupon or like, are there other examples of spaces where you've seen that done well?
Michael Hinshaw 04:59
That's a perfect example. I mean, you know what you just said, you pull up in a target, right? They get a notes like, oh my gosh, there's and this is something I've bought before because they know that and you have target app up. But some of the simpler example, or maybe a less technically complex example, is is as easy as the ability to move from online shopping cart, to customer service and have that person who answers your your call, or text or chat or whatever it might be, know who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and be able to quickly assess what your problem might be, or at least be able to ask you the right questions to get the bottom of it quickly.
Taylor Fitzpatrick 05:43
I love that. Yeah. If I didn't have to do all of that, like, who am I again, and again, when I'm on a phone definitely makes my experience better. So that's super helpful. Thank you.
Michael Hinshaw 05:51
Sorry, there's a this is a story that I tell them that it's a part of it the lived human experience in the world of dealing with companies, which we all do, you know, when I want to call on my internet provider, for example, or, or power company, or phone or some combination of those things. You never get to a person right away. You always get to the voice tree, right? The first thing that they ask you is what's your account number? Or what's your billing address or last for your social, whatever it might be? You punch those numbers in? And eventually, right, that looks at you into the system, and you still got to navigate through. When you finally do go to person? What's the first thing they ask you?
Taylor Fitzpatrick 06:32
Where are you?
Michael Hinshaw 06:33
What are your social? What's your account number? Because like I just told you, right? So that's the kind of thing not relevant, not personalized. After friction, you got to make all that stuff go away? The answer kind of from two perspectives, or two trends, the second, the second is there's there's broad recognition that customer experience is critically important to companies. I mean, depending on which study, you look at between 70 85% of CEOs say that CX is either the number one or one of the top three things that they need to get good at to compete. And then we're in the in the world ahead. Right? So the C suite gets it out. Broadly, they get the concept of it. Actually doing it is something else. So, you know, one of the in the last couple of years has been interesting in customer experience has gone from being when I started, like 90 People know what it was. And, and now everybody knows what it is. But no one agrees on exactly what it is or exactly how to do it. So this explosive growth of customer experience, and customer service professionals inside companies, has caused executives to start asking themselves, you know, three, four or five years down the road, saying, What are we getting for this? How are we getting value? What does that value look like? And, and so as part of that, in the last two, three years or so, we've seen that, in the industry, the customer experience industry, there's a lot of concern, a lot of talk about people losing their jobs, Forrester came out through a report, I think year and a half ago, two years ago saying 50% of customer experience programs will be defunded closed, you know, executives like go, all of which came to pass. But it was actually it was really higher back and other companies. But what's interesting, and as we see that is that those customer experience, practitioners, leaders, executives, that are able to link the value of customer experience to the value of the business, not only do they stay, they're moving up the ladder. So you've got people starting, as you know, CX leaders, they're moving to C suite adjacent that maybe they're reporting to marketing, and then they might be equal with marketing. And then they might be, you know, part of the C suite. And some of them are actually moving into the executive roles, the CEO roles today, which is a relatively new trend that we're seeing. So while in the short, as critical as CX is the biggest challenge that practitioners have that we see is the ability to link to value as as measured by what's important to the CEO, and and the C suite.
Taylor Fitzpatrick 09:14
I think that's really critical. Let's talk about what the some of the language you just use, which was around measurement and value. So what kind of indicators should organization prioritize, to measure experience and impact or measure the impact of their customer experience program?
Michael Hinshaw 09:30
Yeah. So there's there's no one answer to that every organization is different. So it's less about and, and so measurements and metrics are also two different things, they're conflated off often, right? But if you're if you're measuring how people people's willingness to recommend a business, that's the measure you're measuring that statement, are they willing to recommend? The metric is NPS Net Promoter Score, right, which is in theory a quarter for advocacy and, and voice of the customer, customer, recommendation driven new business. But whatever it is that you track as an organization, we believe it's critical to link it up and it kind of visualize a ladder. The bottom rung on that ladder is where you start. And the bottom rung in the ladder are the operational metrics that you as an organization, are able to track to say what you do to your customers and when, right, so just take a email, for example, you have a system that sends out an email, you have a call center, you get calls from customers, you know that your calls are handled in a short amount of time, they are able to either resolve an issue or not resolve an issue. But those are internal operational metrics that describe how you're touching your customers. Those interactions that occur now across touchpoints, across journey stages, across customer journeys, those interactions, unsurprisingly, make your customers feel certain ways. They feel good, they feel bad, they feel angry, they feel happy. They feel, right, it's it's about the fields, it lives between our ears, and our customers ears, and things that we do to them, or for them or with them, make them feel things about us, because they feel those ways. So So sorry, I'll go back to my ladder analogy. The bottom rung is operational master. So things you do. The next rung is how customers feel, what are their what do they perceive as a result of his interactions? Based on those perceptions, they do things, behaviors, so operations, perceptions, behaviors, what do customers do, they leave, not good. They buy more, that's good. Right? They tell their friends also good. But that behavioral understanding, it's linking what you do to how your customers feel to what your customers do as a result of how they feel. Those behaviors, what they do those linked directly to business metrics, right. So more more purchasing, that that drives additional customer lifetime value drives additional top line revenue, that drives additional product, penetration, etc. And almost all of these things are available in organizations today, what most organizations don't do is actually link those things up is to create a framework that says, here's our model for what we're gonna measure what the metrics are, that are important to us. And we're gonna link those things from the bottom to the top in ways that allow us to say to the CEO, or head of finance, or head of marketing, or whoever you're reporting to, to say what our customers do, this means we don't do this, or we're not customers through this means we get more of this. And that's something that you can build out. I'm not going to say simply because it is not simple. But this is like another another Michael isn't hypothetical. It's not simple, but it is straightforward.
Taylor Fitzpatrick 13:00
And how powerful a representation there because really, that could be applied across the organization, when you're looking at, you know, broader business strategies and other things that are trying to be accomplished, you're really able then to distill that down into those operational pieces and be able to kind of do that. And that is customer experience, right in that like the whole landscape of all of those different components. Because while businesses are in those silos, people aren't. And so I love that. Well, I know we are coming up on time here. But if there, is there any other last thoughts we want to share? Or you want to share with the group today or me today while we wrap up our chat? I mean,
Michael Hinshaw 13:36
I have to say, just in general, as I look at 2024, through the through the lens of a customer experience practitioner, and having been doing this for a long time, the industry is still I'll say, shaking out because there's still some lack of understanding how to prove that value. There's still some confusion around what customer experience actually is. And how is that different customer experience management? Is it different? Yes, the short answer, customer experience we described. That's what it's between our customers ears, the experiences, how they feel. Experience Management, is how we as practitioners, and how leaders inside brands inside organizations, manage the experiences that our customers have by using capabilities and tools to help your customers accomplish their goals and feel good about the process. Yeah.
Taylor Fitzpatrick 14:27
That's a really important distinction. And I think a helpful reminder for any of us in that space. And again, Michael, thank you so much for the time today. Thank you for the wisdom that you shared and really looking forward to 2024 and all that that will have to bring in the customer experience space. So enjoy your coffee. All right, Taylor. Thank
Michael Hinshaw 14:44
you, Ashley. I drank it all. We're on the phone so
Taylor Fitzpatrick 14:49
even better things. Bye for now.
