6 steps from journey maps to outcomes

Annette Franz, Founder at CX Journey, Chair of the CXPA

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I'm ecstatic to introduce this week’s Support Insights podcast guest: Annette Franz.

She’s been working in this space since before the words “customer experience” were a part of common business language.

Annette has held senior CX & VoC positions at companies like Medallia, CustomerSat, and Confirmit, and now is the Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association.

In short: she knows the customer experience landscape like the back of her hand.

Check out the list below to see all the topics we discussed, but my favourite part was Annette's strong argument for employee experience.

How you interpret 'employee experience' depends on its definition, of course.

Here, it's not about those little perks, like a football table or free Coke in the fridge, it's about your policies and processes, coaching, and your investment in the tools they need.

Your employees need to be enabled, empowered, and encouraged if you want your customer's to have a great experience.

A truly customer-centric culture is built on those tenets, because if you employees are bogged down with inefficient tools, don't feel connected to their work, and aren't feeling comfortable in their work environment...how can you expect them to bring customer empathy to their work?

We discuss this and much, much more.

In particular, we deep dived how Annette helps companies map their customer journey.

It's a neat, six step process that you can also read about here: '6 steps from journey maps to outcomes.'

In this interview we discuss:

  • Why has customer experience come into focus in recent years?
  • What’s the difference between a customer touchpoints map and a customer journey map?
  • Where do you start when doing a customer journey map? Which journey?
  • What techniques can you use to gather customer feedback?
  • 6 steps to mapping the customer journey
  • Common CX mistakes made in call centres
  • Why customer support is an important one of your customer feedback channels
  • NPS—is it any good?
  • Why employee experience is important to customer experience

Watch the Episode

In the next 5 years, customer experience is 45% of companies top priority. Investing in CX initiatives has the potential to double your revenue within 36 months. 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
  • In the next 5 years, customer experience is 45% of companies top priority.
  • Investing in CX initiatives has the potential to double your revenue within 36 months.
  • 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
Source: CX statistics

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6 steps from journey maps to outcomes

Annette Franz, Founder at CX Journey, Chair of the CXPA
Annette Franz, Founder at CX Journey, Chair of the CXPA
Join a community of 2139+ customer-focused professionals and receive bi-weekly articles, podcasts, webinars, and more!
← Browse other podcasts

I'm ecstatic to introduce this week’s Support Insights podcast guest: Annette Franz.

She’s been working in this space since before the words “customer experience” were a part of common business language.

Annette has held senior CX & VoC positions at companies like Medallia, CustomerSat, and Confirmit, and now is the Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association.

In short: she knows the customer experience landscape like the back of her hand.

Check out the list below to see all the topics we discussed, but my favourite part was Annette's strong argument for employee experience.

How you interpret 'employee experience' depends on its definition, of course.

Here, it's not about those little perks, like a football table or free Coke in the fridge, it's about your policies and processes, coaching, and your investment in the tools they need.

Your employees need to be enabled, empowered, and encouraged if you want your customer's to have a great experience.

A truly customer-centric culture is built on those tenets, because if you employees are bogged down with inefficient tools, don't feel connected to their work, and aren't feeling comfortable in their work environment...how can you expect them to bring customer empathy to their work?

AI for customer service ebook

We discuss this and much, much more.

In particular, we deep dived how Annette helps companies map their customer journey.

It's a neat, six step process that you can also read about here: '6 steps from journey maps to outcomes.'

In this interview we discuss:

  • Why has customer experience come into focus in recent years?
  • What’s the difference between a customer touchpoints map and a customer journey map?
  • Where do you start when doing a customer journey map? Which journey?
  • What techniques can you use to gather customer feedback?
  • 6 steps to mapping the customer journey
  • Common CX mistakes made in call centres
  • Why customer support is an important one of your customer feedback channels
  • NPS—is it any good?
  • Why employee experience is important to customer experience

Watch the episode

6 steps from journey maps to outcomes

Ben Goodey: Hi Annette, welcome to the On Hold Podcast.

Annette Franz: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I love it.

Ben Goodey: I thought instead of asking you to run through your whole background which is full of really interesting companies, I just ask you where was your most exciting place to work?

Annette Franz: Well, I love that. So, you know,  I've had two stints on the client-side, one at Mattel and one at Fidelity and the rest have been done on the, uh, vendor/ technology side, running, consulting services organizations within each of those companies.

And, Oh gosh, I would say that the period that I had the most fun or the place where I had the most fun was from 2000 to 2007 when I worked at a Customer Sat and Customer Sat no longer exists, they were acquired by Market Tools and Market Tools was acquired by Confirm It. But, it was 110% startup mode. It was, all of us pitching in doing whatever we needed to do.

Shortly, after I joined in 2000, we had the .com bubble and a few people lost their jobs. People took pay cuts, but we kept working, we kept, even though we took pay cuts and it took five years to even get back to where we had been in our salaries five years earlier, we all were working for a common cause and I think that's the fun part of working for a startup and working to build something is that you're all working together and I've, made a lot of friends, and still keep in touch with a lot of people, from that stint at Customer Sat. So that was probably, I would say one of the most, or if not, the most fun that I've had in my career.

Ben Goodey: That's so true I think is something about the nature of working in a startup that brings everyone together I think it's that just being naturally the underdog and being mission-driven.

So what did CustomerSat do?

Annette Franz: Customer Sat was probably one of the first, if not the first, definitely a pioneer in the online, customer feedback.

So enterprise feedback, voice the customer platform, in a nutshell, that's what it was. But, enterprise feedback management, the voice of the customer platform.

Ben Goodey: Oh nice, so one of the first kind of companies to help collect feedback online.

Annette Franz: Yeah. One of the pioneers in this space, for sure.

Ben Goodey: Sounds like fun. So were you part of it when it got acquired?

Annette Franz: No, I had just left, just a few months before that then had gone to Medallia.

Ben Goodey: Uh, cool. Wow. I would just interviewed someone on this podcast. Hasn't been released yet. Uh, whose company had just been acquired by Medallia, as well.

Annette Franz: They're on a, they're on an acquisition spree for sure.

Ben Goodey: I think that's a positive sign this space has just become so hot and exciting at the moment

Annette Franz: I agree.

Ben Goodey: So I have to ask because it's really rare to have someone like you, who was in this industry before we even called it customer experience, what have been the major changes that you've seen over that time?

Annette Franz: First of all, like I said, back in the day, we only talked about customer satisfaction and customer loyalty that was, because customer experience wasn't even a thing at that point, but,  and then when I started at Customer Sat during that stint is that when we started talking about customer experience. And during those days we talked about, what's the difference between VOC?

What's the difference between VOC and CX, right? how does voice of the customer different from customer experience? And there was a debate isn't CX or is it VOC?

You know, and so, over the years, obviously we landed on the fact that VOC is part of CX and part of your CX strategy, but, um, yeah.

And then, it was interesting then, in 2011, when, the CSPA, the Customer Experience Professionals Association started to validate the profession. So that was interesting to see. And now I'm the board chair of the CSPA and next year we'll be celebrating our 10th anniversary.

And so that's an, and that's an organization that supports and continues to validate the profession. And so I think that's a big part of it because so many people, Say, Oh, CX is just another fad. It's just another, like CRM or this or that. And it's no, it's, I believe it's here to stay.

And as long as we do the work and do the work, it will continue to evolve and be an integral part of how we do business. And I think that's the other part of customer experience that it has been really interesting to see evolve because back in the day it was, you know, the voice of the customer and it was about the metrics and those kinds of things.

Now it's become, this big strategy, it's become sort a part of the DNA of the organization. And now we talk about things like customer-centric cultures, and all of that and what it takes to be a customer-centric company and the CX strategy needs to be interwoven with all of that. So, it's grown up in a good way I’m putting it.

Ben Goodey: Yeah, I can definitely see that and it's around to stay and not just that but becoming more central like everyone is getting a customer experience manager fairly on in even startup growth and people are just beginning to be focused on how they can compete with their own customer experience

Annette Franz: Yep. Yeah. And I would view customer success as, under the umbrella of customer experience, right? Where customer experiences, is, if we holistically design and deliver a customer experience that is one that meets our customer needs across the entire customer life cycle, customer success and the work that the customer success managers do is a lot easier than if we don't have that customer experience foundation within the organization.

Ben Goodey: Yeah. So how long have you been on the board of CXPA?

Annette Franz: I have been the board chair just for 2020. I've been on the board for the last five years. I joined back in 2015 and I was the treasurer, the board treasurer for three years. And then last year I was the vice-chair and this year I succeeded in the chair position.

So next year I'll be immediate past chair. And then I’ll roll out of the association or out of the board, I should say.

Ben Goodey: Wow. So you're close to this profession about how a lot of what's going on. I don't know.

Annette Franz: I'm a huge advocate and you know, for me, my personal mission and my company's mission, really to help educate and help folks, No, what they need to do to design and deliver a great experience.

And so if we can keep the professionals informed and educated and working together and sharing best practices, that takes us that many steps closer to being able to do just that.

Ben Goodey: What is it in recent years, that has bought customer experience into focus?

Annette Franz: I think there's, it's an interesting question. And I think this year has answered that question for many of us. First of all, I guess I'll step back before I even talk about this year, right? First of all, why you are we in business, right? We're in business for, and because of the customer and, if we don't realize that and if we don't develop our strategies with that in mind, we're constantly spinning our wheels and spending more money and time and effort trying to grow the business than we really should and so I think that's an important thing to know, and to remember is that we're in business because of the customers. If we don't have customers, we don't have a business right.

So I think that's important, but I think this year was sort of that, sounding, the alarm sounded and, I saw it earlier in the year when the pandemic first hit that a lot of my friends who are CX professional were getting laid off or being repurposed or, furloughed or whatever.

And, pretty quickly a lot of them were rehired, whether it was at the same company or an, at another company, because what we saw was that executives were thirsting for customer insights why are customers doing that?  Why are we out of toilet paper what's happening here?

And so, so there was a real need for customer insights so that they could design the way that they were doing business, which products were selling and why they were selling and all of those kinds of things and So, suddenly this year companies woke up to the fact that A. Customers are pretty critical and be so our employees because customers are saying they don't want to shop as this they can't take care of their employees this year. So, it's a lot of good learning’s came out of this year. I just hope that they stick with businesses going forward.

Ben Goodey: Definitely. We've seen that in the fashion industry, like a few of the people who work with have been getting a lot of loyalty from customers who are looking at what their favourite brands are doing in terms of who they're looking after. Is it, you know, are they doing initiatives to look after their employees or the NHS? And like that is really what people care about in a situation like this.

I think it's interesting that you mentioned customer insights. Um, you know, I didn't know what it was like in the early two-thousands, but now, especially we have a lot of tools and a lot of data collection techniques that can get more actionable insight to a team. Do you think that's been a big help to the CX industry?

Annette Franz: Yes, absolutely and I like to say that data is at the heart of designing and delivering a great customer experience and the accessibility part is typically the most painful part of that, right? Because so many companies have these legacy systems, disparate systems there, they don't even know what data they have or where it is.

So I think that's a big,  a big problem, but the more accessible it can become, the more, the more it gets centralized, the more we're able to access it and do the analytics that needs to be done the better any experience we can design.

Ben Goodey: Definitely. I think that's a problem most companies have centralizing the data. Uh, it tends to exist in silos. And each team doing their surveys and that kind of thing. No, one's sharing it around the company. Is this kind of stuff that you would walk through with your clients?

Annette Franz: Yes, it is. As a matter of fact, I'm on right now in the middle of a huge project with a client who asked me to come in and do a feedback map or a data map.

So, we could find out A. who all within their entire organization is asking customers for feedback. That, I had no idea number one, number two, where does the data sit? And then number three, figuring out how to bring it all back together again, and, and doing something with it. And the other part of the project is also creating a touchpoint map, not a journey map, but a touchpoint map.

So, going through their entire customer life cycle and capturing and inventorying all the different touchpoints. Throughout the entire lifecycle and it's a massive project, I've interviewed some, it's a global company. I've interviewed so many people around the globe about, customer touchpoints and feedback and data and all of those different, aspects of this project.

And then now I'm in the process of doing some interviews with customers to validate, the touchpoints to validate that the touchpoints we've captured are all the touchpoints there are we missing anything? So again, it's a massive undertaking, but it's a lot of fun.

Ben Goodey: That sounds fun; it sounds very complicated as well what is the difference between a touchpoint map and a journey map?

Annette Franz: Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of people confuse them and use them interchangeably and call journey map, call it a journey map when it's a touchpoint map.

So, a touchpoint map is exactly what I said. We take a look at the life cycle stages for the customer within your organization and they capture, an inventory capture, all the different touchpoints and touchpoints can be, if you think about, for example, an airline experience, I'll just use that its signs. It's the TSA. It's your ticket. It's the app. it's the gate agent, the plane, the all of these different things are all different touchpoints, right? The pilot, the flight attendants, the, your seat, the magazine on the plane, all different touchpoints, all different ways that the customer touches the brand or the brand touches the customer.

So, that's a touchpoint map. A journey map is when we pick an interaction and we map the steps that the customer takes from the moment that there's a need to the moment that they complete whatever job they're trying to do. So for example, an interaction might be making a purchase, calling customer service, Oh gosh, downloading some information from your website, creating an online account, those kinds of things.

So a journey map always contains what the customer is doing or the customer's thinking and what the customer is feeling and if you don't, if you're not capturing those three things along with that experience, then it's not a journey map. You can see, you can capture other things as well, but those are the three main components of a journey map.

Ben Goodey: So, a touchpoint map is looking at those individual actions and or parts along that journey.

But a journey map goes into what they're thinking, feeling, doing at the time of that touchpoint.

Annette Franz: Yeah, it's more about the where and the different ways that you touch it doesn't capture.

So if you looked in, for example, in the consideration phase, the customer's already considering buying a certain brand, so they might be going to the website, they might download some brochures, they might look at online reviews, they might talk to friends those different kinds of things are, talking to friends may not be a touchpoint, but those different things are touchpoints.

But what we're not doing is capturing. Okay. So you went to the website. What did you do? How was that experience as you were searching on the website and how was it, downloading that information, so already, you know,  those kinds of things. So it's very specific.

Step-by-step what was the experience that you had as you were trying to achieve X? So calling customer service is a great example, right? So what was your experience? I had a problem. So I went to the website and when I went to the website, I looked for, answers to my question, they went to the knowledge base or whatever did the search like step-by-step what did you do, right?

Oh, I didn't find the answer. So then I looked for the phone number, so then I called customer service and I waited on hold and it's so it's very detailed step by step so that we can capture along the way again, what they're doing, what they're thinking, what their goals are at each step and how they felt along the way, because those emotions are, what's going to tell us where the pain points are, what needs to be fixed and what's going well.

Where do you start when doing a customer journey map

Ben Goodey: Cool, So, when you're starting a customer journey map where do you start because it could be vast this journey.

Annette Franz: Absolutely. Typically, I tell clients, let's start with the low hanging fruit, right? The low hanging fruit can be defined probably in two ways, probably more ways, but this is how I define it.

Number one, customers have already told you these are pain points. Number two it's a pain point cause you're losing money, you're losing customers or you've heard from customers that this is a pain point, right? So those are the places that you need to start. If you don't have that information, then you need to start by listening to your customers and hearing from them, what's going and what's not. And then when they tell you, what's not going, well, that's a place that you need to start digging in, but you're right there you could map hundreds and hundreds of journeys, but you have to it and you can be overwhelmed by all of that.

So you have to start with like I said, what I call the low hanging fruit and then work from there.

Ben Goodey: Yeah, that makes sense, the easy wins, and I guess most people will have kind of an understanding of where those low-hanging fruits are?

Annette Franz: I think most companies do have a cursory level of understanding of where that low-hanging fruit is.

And again, as I said, if you don't, then you need to go and ask your customers and listen to customers, whether it's surveys or your online reviews, or, however you get feedback from your customers.

Ben Goodey: So, could we go through an example of this in a call centre have you worked with through this exercise in a call centre before um what kind of journey maps you've seen in typical pain points of customers?

Annette Franz: Yeah, it varies by brand, it varies by customer, it varies by persona. So, different personas have different experiences and so it varies. I would say that there's no singular pain point, although probably in some instances there are like waiting on hold too long.

Why am I waiting on hold for as long as I'm waiting on hold? those kinds of things typically come up across the board. But there are other things that are specific to the way that, brands do business that, create pain points as well.

Ben Goodey: I find this idea of customers being on hold too long, so interesting because it's not like companies don't know that this is happening so why do they do it? Why don't they give more information?

Annette Franz: Yeah, exactly, Exactly. No, it's a problem and the other thing is, is that, and this is how we can help them solve for it too. In the work that I do is because of when I journey mapping, I have the six-step process. And one of the steps after the journey mapping workshop is to create a service blueprint.

And the service blueprint is all about what's happening behind the scenes, the people, the tools, the systems, the processes, the policies that create or facilitate the experience that the customer is having and so it really, it's a sort of a root cause digging in to figure out what are we doing? What are we doing to create that pain for our customers?

So that's a really important part of the entire journey mapping process.

Ben Goodey: Yeah, okay, so part of doing this journey mapping process is getting to know why that problem of they're on hold we will know about it we know it's a problem exists but it hasn't changed yet.

Annette Franz: Exactly to your point. They know, and here's the thing too. And you make a great point here is that when we're journey mapping, what we need to do is we need to bring that data into our maps as well.

So the journey mapping is not just about first and foremost, it's about the customer,  it's done with customers from the customers perspective always, but we also need to bring in some of the data that we have about the experience and some of that data could be that operational data, it could be the, um, the whole time, wait time, call volume, all of those kinds of things,  to help us identify, the why and the interesting thing, if you think about a journey map, going back to journey map versus touchpoint map journey map is a timeline of what happens, from the moment that the customer has a problem to the moment she gets an answered on the call with customer service.

And so that in that timeline, you can insert the data to draw out, oh, that’s what happened. We, we only had four reps when we should have had 40 or something those kinds of metrics to help you understand where and why the experience is breaking down.

What techniques do you use to uncover customer feedback?

Ben Goodey: So, what kind of techniques do you use to uncover this kind of customer feedback data?

Annette Franz: Yeah. So, before the dream mapping workshops, I typically interview the customers and get their feedback perspectives, understanding of the relationship with the brand as it stands today.

But then, I have them in the journey mapping workshops, the customers come into the workshop to create the maps. Again, that's the best way, because you've got customers, they're telling you their story of their experience. And so yes, so interviews, having the customer is in the room, bringing the voice of the customer data into the maps afterwards, so that it goes from qualitative to quantitative bringing, your operational metrics and operational data into the maps as well.

All of that helps to bring them out, to live, really inform the people who are using the maps as to why things are breaking down or why they aren't, they might be going well as well.

The six steps

Ben Goodey: So I'm sure, you just covered a bunch of them there, but can we just run through your six-step process for journey mapping

Annette Franz: So, step number one is planning, which includes, includes some of the things we just mentioned. One of the, one of the parts of planning processes who's gonna, who's gonna be in the workshop. And, that’s an important consideration. Who's going to be in the workshop and number one, it's going to be customers, but number two, it's going to be stakeholders.

You're going to get the right stakeholders in the room to listen, observe and at the end, they can ask questions about the experience that customers have. So, using the example of, the call centre and a customer service experience, I like to have in the room, folks from marketing, folks from the product, folks from product marketing, folks from, if it's if we depend on what issue we're mapping, if it's a billing issue, maybe somebody from accounting,  folks from sales.

And the reason that I like to do that is that when somebody is calling customer service, They're not calling, they're calling because there's a problem that happened with something that they're either physically holding in their hands, the product or something else. And that's something else happened upstream.

So I like to say, that, you know, marketing's messaging was off sales, so the dream product designed a product that was faulty, product marketing there, the documentation and the messaging and everything around the product was inaccurate or incomplete. Those kinds of things, if we can have these folks in the workshop, listening to the pain that the customer is feeling during the customer service experience, as a result of, something they did or did not do earlier on in the life cycle or the creation and design of, design and creation of the experience then we can help them understand it, reduce the issues or eliminate the issues so that it never even happened and that reduces call volume the call centre benefits, but especially the customer benefits because they never have to call.

So there's a real trickledown effect there. If we have the right people, the right stakeholders in the room to listen to what customers are saying about the experience. So the first phase is planning. The second phase is all about, the workshop itself.  And then the third phase is what I call Identify and that's where we bring the data into the maps, do the root cause analysis, identify, where the issues are happening and then create our project plans to make some tactical improvements at the moment, because what ends up happening. So step four is Introspect and introspect is all about the service blueprint and what's happening on the inside.

As I already mentioned, step five is Ideation and that's where we create the future state or we design the future state maps. We ideate with our customers and then ultimately design the future state experience and then step six is to implement. But, those last two steps take a long time, right? It takes longer to design and then deliver a new experience, a completely new experience versus doing some of the tactical stuff that we can do after the initial current state workshop to make some, fixes to improve some things today, that'll hold us over until we design an entirely new experience.

Ben Goodey: Cool. Well, I think that's a really clear six-step process, and I'm going to do some research around what you've released before and a bit more detail about those six steps, but add it into the blog associated with this podcast. For sure, so I asked you before about sort of common mistakes, common pain points that you've seen in the call centre and you said everything was everywhere, it was a bit different. But are there any commonalities I guess that you can identify beyond being on hold?

Annette Franz: Trying to think of some of the common pain points there's and some of them are the common things that we all hate.

Why does every, and this is one that I hear all the time. Okay, here the rep told me that the computer's frozen or the computer. What's happening there, why does every single time, I call on the customer service line the computer freezes? Is it me? the customers start to think about, is it me?

And then, ultimately we all find it it's not the customer, it's something happening within the organization one of the things that  I've found is,  agents who are not and this is a common pain point who are not,  there's no continuous training happening right.

There should be more training happening to keep them up to date on what's going on with the products or the service and just really keeping them in the know so that they can answer questions that, customers are having. So that's a, I think that's a big pain point. And so again, that goes to, the customer tells us there's a pain point.

I'm being transferred a lot or I on hold for, minutes and minutes on end or, an hour I've seen that happen as well why is that happening? Why? is it because I'm not with the right rep, is it not a qualified rep? Is it, you know, those kinds of things? I see that often as well, that there needs to be some better training, or it needs to be a better job of hiring the right people who are open to learning or willing to learn or who can learn or who retain or, or know what they're doing. I don't, I don't know what it is, there are different scenarios there, but yeah, those are some of the common pain points that we see is that I get transferred a lot why am I being transferred or why I'm on hold so long?

I think those are some of the big, some of the big ones that are very common.

Ben Goodey: I think definitely for me as a customer, giving a customer perspective, the getting transferred a lot thing is one of the most annoying things that you just can't understand from the outside that why this one person doesn't have the authority to just do everything? I guess that's how you scale training and departmentalize it

Annette Franz: Yeah, Yeah, and exactly. And one other one that I wanted to mention to you is the IVR. We hear a lot of complaints about the IVR too and why is it 17 clicks to get to a person?

Why can't I just type in zero, press zero and go and not every phone tree allows you, not every IVR system allows you to, just hit zero and go to speak to a person. So that's a frustration point as well.

Ben Goodey: Yeah, that's so true though. It's just definitely are not designed with the customer in mind. Are they?

One thing I wanted to go into next with you was to talk about customer conversation data from customer support as part of the voice of the customer program. We've already been chatting about this a lot internally and how this is just the untapped opportunity. For, gathering a ton of customer feedback without even the customer knowing about it. So how have you seen customers using their customer support data at the moment?

Annette Franz: It's such a rich source of data for companies to use. I often refer to this as, this is the real voice of the customer, but it can also be a voice of the customer through the employee because the employee needs to take that what they're hearing and share it with, with the right people in the organization and obviously if you're in a massive, organization, with hundreds of call centre reps and, 90,000 employees in the organization, you need a more efficient way then to, tap somebody on the shoulder and say, Hey, guess what? This customer just told me. So I advocate for, companies to, we've talked about this earlier that you've got to centralize the data, right?

So you have to have a way for that type of feedback that's coming in from customers during a contact centre interaction to be centralized and incorporated with the voice of the customer that you're getting from your surveys and other methods as well. I have one client in particular who automatically directs that type of feedback to their product department, so they've.

The reps are able to tag it, that it's a product issue or, whatever it is. And it automatically gets forwarded to, the product and product design folks to incorporate into the work that they're doing. So, yeah, absolutely, this it's such a rich source of data that everybody's got to use it.

Ben Goodey: Yeah, I could not agree more. I think centralizing a huge source of customer data could be a really powerful way to get the voice of the customer to the rest of the business. Um, and in large volumes and stuff that's coming in fresh every day.

So, what are the kind of, uh, methods of getting to know your customer do you go through? and I know we talked briefly about listening to them in a few different ways, but, what methods are you using to get that to listen to the voice of the customer?

Annette Franz: Yeah. So just to, I did talk about all three of them. So I talk about my book to you. I write about the three ways to understand your customers. So it's listing characterize and empathize. Listen is all about the different ways that we get feedback from customers and we've talked about many of those already, But, it's also about what I call the breadcrumbs of data that customers leave behind as they interact and transact with a brand and I think that's a really important part of listening to customers.

So taking, and then taking that feedback and taking that data, the breadcrumbs of data, putting it all together and analyzing that and it's such a great source of learning about your citations and meeting your expectations and delivering on that experience. The second one is characterize, which is all about developing personas.

Now personas are research-based personifications of like groups of customers, like groups in the sense that they all have the same, pain points problems to solve jobs, to be done. There are similarities there, we can't just use buyer personas to design a customer experience, right?

We need to talk to our customers. This is important. Don't sit around in a room and with a bunch of stakeholders and say, who do we think our customers are? No, we have to interview customers and talk to customers about pain point’s problems to solve jobs to be done, preferences, goals, needs, those kinds of things.

And so those are personas. Personas are typically the starting point for empathizing, which is the third way, which is, journey mapping and so we've spent a lot of time talking about journey mapping and the, and my six-step process there but those were the three ways to understand your customers.

If anybody else can come up with other ways to understand customers that don't fall into those three buckets. I'm happy to hear them, but in my experience over the last 30 years, those are three big buckets and ways to understand your customers. And then, the most important part is to not just understand but to do something with it.

I love this quote it's around, using your insights that are not used are just expensive trivia.

Ben Goodey: Yeah, I love that quote. Uh, I hadn't heard it before, but that's cool. That's I can imagine like anyone working in customer insights or we'll have that feeling of when they give insights that no one listens to across the company that just making up trivia.

Where do you fall on the NPS kind of debates? Whether that's has a lot of value or whether it's just a meaningless metric?

Annette Franz: That's a good question too. And I'm a fan of NPS in the sense that if you use the system, I'm not a fan of NPS if you just use it as a score. And there's a difference NPS, I think 2.0 was all about the system, but the problem is that so many people glommed onto the score because NPS 1.0 was all about the score and the one number.

And here's all we need to do is track this one number and first of all, that one number is not relevant to every industry. It doesn't make sense for every industry and second of all, when you talk about the score and you focus on the metrics and what it takes, move the needle with the metric, which is what a lot of companies do.

They, that's why they love this as how do we increase our NPS? The conversation should be, how do we improve our customer experience? Because if we focus on improving the customer experience and doing what it takes to improve the experience, we're doing different things and we do things differently than when we focus on the metric and moving the needle on the metric.

And that's why. NPS 2.0 is so important because they came back and they said, Oh shoot, we got to correct this. We got to fix this because we need people to look at it as a system and to listen and to act and to, really use what they're hearing, not just focusing on the metric and so that's my take on it, not a fan of the score because it just really ended up driving some bad behaviour.

And again, and because it's not necessarily relevant to every industry and every situation or every scenario, I'm a fan of the system because you've got to listen to your customers and do something with what you hear.

Ben Goodey: So, is that what NPS 2.0 is about is actually like taking away the…

Annette Franz: Yeah. They came out first and said, one is when they dubbed at one point afterwards, what is net promoter score? And then 2.0, when they suddenly realized that everybody just glommed onto the score was, Oh, NPS 2.0 is now, it's net promoter system.  

Ben Goodey: That's so weird. I've asked that question to so many people now, and no one has mentioned NPS system or NPS 2.0, so hopefully, this provides a little bit, um, and I'm going to look into that as well.

One final question if that's fine with you. I think, I would like to ask this question, cause I don't want to miss anything that is of a lot of value. So is there anything I have missed? I haven't asked you that can help people to improve their customer experience

Annette Franz: You didn't ask it specifically, but we talked about it at the very beginning and it's about the employee experience, right? I think that's such an important piece of the, what ultimately becomes the customer experience. If we take care of our employees, if we give them the tools, the resources, the processes are, they make sense the rules aren't, outdated or the policies aren't outdated and ridiculous. We give them the workplace and the workspace that they need. We give them all of those things in addition to, caring and communicating and making sure that they get feedback and they're coached and they've our communication and know-how their work matters and all of those kinds of things, then they will do a great job, and that comes from me interviewing hundreds and hundreds of employees across, my clients, companies who tell me that they don't have these things to serve their customers, and these are words from their mouth, right? Serve our customers the way that they deserve to be served. And so I think that's an important part of this is that we need to remember the employee and the employee experience because they come to work every day, wanting to do a great job. They don't come to work every day saying, Oh, I don't really care about, some maybe do, but for the most part, they'd come to work, wanting to do a great job and so we need to, make sure that they are, in Bob Chapman's words again, that they're cared for and can do a great job.  

Ben Goodey: I think that's such a good point and we had a very similar sort of sentiment from Augie Ray that you need to empower your employees to with the right tools if you expect them to deliver a great customer experience I think that's a key point

Annette Franz: Exactly.

Ben Goodey: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great talking to you.

Annette Franz: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. This has been a great conversation.

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