Experts of Experience - #51 Connecting CX to Key Value Metrics

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

On this episode, Diya Sikka,  Director of NPSx, a start-up at Bain & Company, discusses the third wave of customer experience and the shift from surveys and insights to predictive analytics and data-driven value. She emphasizes the importance of not relying solely on a single metric like Net Promoter Score and highlights the need to connect CX to key value metrics. Diya also discusses the challenges of organizing and utilizing data for CX and recommends starting with use case driven approaches and leveraging existing technology.Key Insights:Relying solely on a single metric like NPS is not the right approach; it should be connected to key value metrics.Organizations should start with use-case-driven approaches and leverage existing technology to organize and utilize data for CX.Evaluating CX maturity can be done using the CX global standards framework, which assesses capabilities in culture, capability, and execution. Data management is a critical area that companies often overlook in creating a strong customer experience.CX leaders should go beyond surveys and understand sentiment across the entire customer base to unlock value.The role of the CX leader is to be a master coordinator and facilitator across teams, driving customer-centricity and connecting the dots.Recognizing and empowering employees is crucial in creating a customer-centered culture.Creating a closed-loop feedback system and actively listening to employees' suggestions and ideas is essential.Best-in-class companies prioritize the customer in executive meetings and leaders actively engage with customers.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Organizations do themselves a disservice if they hang their hat on a single metric. NPS in and of itself will mean nothing if it's not connected to key value metrics. If you can't tie NPS to how many customers are you retaining, what's retention, what's acquisition, how much do you cross-sell, up-sell, how can you grow, then the metric in and of itself doesn't mean much in the overall business context. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I am joined by Dia Sika, the director at NPSX, which is a startup within Bain & Company. We are going to dive into the hot topic of customer experience and NPS and what it looks like today, as well as how organizations can create an effective

CX strategy that carry their business forward. Dia, wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for having me, Lauren. Excited to be here and talk about CX, which I'm very passionate about. So, Dia, I'd love to kick it off by just understanding a little bit more about NPSX. What is it? So NPSX is a startup within Bain & Company. Now, Bain is a global strategy firm. It's been in the consulting space for decades and specifically in customer experience. So I think Bain, you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, Bain founded what we call the Net Promoter Score, which is a very commonly and widely used metric by organizations across the globe to measure sentiment.

They also introduced what we call the Net Promoter System, which is a way to listen, learn, and act on feedback. Now, NPSX was born of this idea or concept that Bain has decades of knowledge and customer experience. And we wanted to be able to share that experience more broadly with a larger set of organizations through digital tools and solutions that would help them accelerate their experience. So the idea was we have so much powerhouse, so much experience working with organizations in CX, we're thinking about what will benefit companies the most when it comes to really driving forward customer experience within their organizations. And how do you do that through the latest tools and technologies?

So NPSX was born from that sort of desire to bring CX to more organizations. And so that's how I got to be a part of the startup. Amazing. Well, we like this topic a lot, as you can imagine. And I'd love to talk a little bit about, maybe it's the elephant in the room, NPS. I feel like there's a lot of conversations going on on the internet, on LinkedIn, within boardrooms about is NPS the metric that we should really be using to measure customer satisfaction? And I'd love to get your thoughts on that, both in how the sentiment is changing and then also how organizations can effectively track customer sentiment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this has been a hot topic for a long time. I think the one thing I want to say is it is organizations do themselves a disservice if they hang their hat on a single metric.

I think that's just banking everything on one single metric is not the right approach. Two, relying solely on the metric is also not the right approach. I think when we introduced the Net Promoter Score at that time, there was a sore need in the market to understand how do we measure sentiment, right? How do we even think about how we compare to other organizations? And the Net Promoter Score was sort of, we came up with that because based on studies that we had done across the board from multiple organizations across industries, that one question that NPS is based off of, how likely are you to recommend,

is the strongest predictor or has the strongest correlation with actual customer behavior. So it truly represents how a customer is going to actually behave in terms of whether they purchase or come back more, increase their share of wallet, or refer the company to friends. And based off of that, we thought it was the strongest question

to help give us a proxy to measuring satisfaction. Now, what has happened across time is people have, what they've done is if solely sort of based everything on the metric, one, there's a lot of gamification happening. So they're all trying to solve for a high score on the metric. When the answer is not actually the metric, the question, the survey that you send out has another question, which is a verbatim sort of open-ended question. Why have you provided the score? And one of the, so when we did release, you know, the NetRemoter score, I think further and further with organizations, we said, you know, it's the score is great and it's a way to benchmark yourself over time. But what's more important is the feedback that customers are providing through the survey.

And how do you act on it? And so we the key part is to sort of take that take that information and then learn from it and drive improvements. Because if you just keep sending out surveys and if you do nothing with the feedback, your score is never going to change. I've had companies come to me and they'll be like, our NPS hasn't really changed. Our pain points are still the same. I'm like, it will be because you haven't gone and actually taken the feedback and done something about it. So yes, there is a like a, you know, people go crazy for metrics, but the metric is not the answer to the question. I think the other point I want to make here is NPS is a proxy for value. NPS in and of itself will mean nothing if

it's not connected to key value metrics. What do I mean by value metrics? If you can't tie NPS to how many customers are you retaining? What's retention? What's acquisition? How much do you cross sell, upsell? How can you grow? Then the metric in and of itself doesn't mean much in the overall business context. That's how I kind of view it and how most organizations should view it.

And that's why I think NPS kind of has a bad rap these days because a lot of organizations have been hanging their hat on that metric without looking at it in context, in the context of all the other metrics that are happening or that are going on. I mean, it's kind of obvious, but the real true metric is, is the customer coming back? Are they willing to, are they retained with your business? And we have to be looking at retention. And PS, as you shared, is helpful because it is a means for us to get more deeper insights into what is happening for that customer. And the hard part is that it requires you to go through every piece of feedback and process it, to look at it, to see what is the core issue that we can solve here with this information. And I think that's where a lot of people are frustrated with this metric is because it actually takes more work than just looking at the number to understand what is happening.

And I'd love to get your thoughts. How do you help organizations with this? This is fairly common because what some people do is, you know, when they look at the metric or the survey results, they'll just sort of scan through like themes and topics and come up with like broad categories of pain points. But the point is to get behind sort of root cause of, you know, the pain points. So for example, if somebody is saying, oh my God, it's really like difficult to pay my bill. But what is the problem? Is it difficult because it's taking too much time? Is it difficult because you have to fill 10 different documents? Is it difficult because something in taking too much time? Is it difficult because you have to fill 10 different documents? Is it difficult because something in the text wasn't clear?

Is it difficult because there were three different payment methods needed and nothing like actually worked for you? There could be five different reasons why it's difficult. And that's what we call root cause. And so you have to get to that piece of root cause. Now, the survey in and of itself is not going to solve. The survey is just going to guide you and tell you, oh, my God, like 80% of customers were talking about this issue. So it helps you narrow down where you need to focus. But then the uncovering is something you have to do with your data. And this is where I think CX leaders, CX teams in general, they are great at what they do, which is looking at surveys and

crafting insights from them, but they have to get closer to the data that sits more broadly in the organization and know exactly what all data is being collected about the customer, all the operational data, and have to start getting comfortable with that. If a CXO is not talking to a CTO or the chief data officer, those connections will be really hard to make. It is so essential. I mean, at the end of the day, customer experience is a cross-functional activity. It is not something that just sits in the CX team or the customer success team or the customer service team. It is truly something that every single person in the company touches, whether they are customer facing or not. I truly believe this. And it is difficult

because it means that we need to go across the silos that we've created. It means that there is no just one single owner of this concept. It's actually something that everybody has to own and think about when we are looking at our data and contextualizing all of it. So it is no small feat, but I'm really curious to understand a little bit of how you've seen CX as a concept change over time. I think we get to see in this seat that I'm in, I get to see how organizations have been really taking new approaches to customer experience. And I can only imagine the viewpoint that you have being as a part of Bain & Company. So tell me, what have you been seeing?

Happy to chat about that. I think we've started thinking through and we share with our clients as well. We're sort of on this journey. We're now in the third wave of customer experience. So the first wave, way back when, is what we spoke about, which is there was a need for organizations to understand what are my customers saying about me? How do I get that information? And so you launched, you know, voice of customer programs. You started collecting information. You started, you wanted a way to

measure customer sentiment. That's the birth of CSAT, the birth of NPS scores. The second way was about, okay, we're getting all this information. What do we do with it? And so a lot of companies now have started, and we've actually helped a lot of organizations set this up, but what we call closed-loop feedback systems, which is how do you take the information that you're getting and act on it to drive change

in the organization? It's this concept of listen, learn, act in the organization. And so that's the second wave. In the third wave, we're in this completely new era now where listening to customer feedback can happen in so many different ways. Social media, and it's just coming at you from different directions, right? That's not just the survey through which you collect data or focus groups. Customer listening is on at any given point of time, people are sending in their feedback, right? So these diverse channels through which feedback is coming, you have generative AI, which is changing the way you sort of process and use data. And suddenly you're in this space where you don't, where organizations are saying, okay, but like surveys, you know, how much response rate do you get from surveys?

You probably cover at most it's eight to 10% of your entire customer population. That's not enough. I want to know how everyone in my population or customer base is feeling, right? How do I get to that? Surveys are limited. You also want to stop bombarding your customers with like oversimplifying them or doing that. So how do you get to a place where you can actually utilize the data that you already have to in fact predict some of this, to go from a space of reacting to customer sentiment, to predicting and then taking proactive actions for all your customers. So there are a couple of different themes coming up in this third wave of CX, one of which is like, we want to move away from surveys. Surveys is one cornerstone, but there's more to it. How do we go from knowing what 10% of our base fields to what are 100% of our base fields? How do we know that in advance so that we can proactively react and make it personalized? Like how do I send Lauren

a very personalized sort of action or targeted messaging before even Lauren asks for it, you know, in that first setup? And then lastly, of course, is how do we really, really connect the values? So to the point of, as a CX leader, I want to know that this initiative is going to at least drive this much growth in revenue or this much upsell in the business, or reduce churn, you know, by this much percentage. How do I really make those connections? So we're seeing a couple of different sort of teams play up. And then of course, big, big generative AI sort of boom and how everybody's trying to understand, like, what are we supposed to do with this? Okay. Well, I have so many questions as a response to that, but the first one I want to double click on this concept of understanding your entire customer base, because I think this is also one of the

big pain points with NPS. And I know I have done this myself, where we're not getting the responses we needed in order to make it statistically significant or to make it actually something that we could trust because it was only such a small amount of people. And often it's the people who had a really great experience or a really bad experience and what's happening in the middle. And we'll spend tons of time and energy to get people to respond to these surveys, but it's not quite right. And so how do you guide companies to really be able to see the full scope of what their customers are experiencing? Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where predictive analytics plays a key role. And the most fundamental, or if you're building the pyramid of predictive analytics, the first thing you need to put into place

is data, a strong foundation of data, specifically operational data. So what I need to know is if say, you know, Lauren, you and I are, you know, customers of a company, I filled out the survey, you haven't, right? And so I want to know everything about your engagement and experience with that company. I want to know what communications you got. I want to know if any complaints that you made or registered, if you spoke to someone, how often you came, how did you use the platform, how many minutes you spent on the platform. I want to know the entire journey, your journey. And that data is captured by organizations. They do capture that information. And so based on that, if I know how Dia responds to a survey and you and I are similar customer profiles,

I can then predict how you would probably respond to the survey. So that's just a very simplistic way of saying that like based off of if you have that operational data that provides end-to-end how Lauren is engaging through an experience and you know how a typical promoter detractor passive would react and what their operational data is. You can easily predict your experience. So that's kind of the mechanics of how you go about it. But the fundamental drawback of that is having your data in data portion of the business. They don't own the lakes. They know about some pieces of data. Data is scattered everywhere. It's not connected. And what you need is a single view of customer.

We keep talking about this concept, but it's like one ID tied to like 100 to 100 different metrics for that one customer. And getting to that is step one. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also a huge undertaking that I know a lot of businesses, especially in the age of AI, we have this massive opportunity to use AI to help us understand our customers better, to personalize messages to our customers, to break down big problems, to communicate to customers on our behalf. But the core of it is having great data. And I think that it's something that especially the really established organizations who have data that needs to be improved and is a lot. I know

that that can be a huge undertaking. Do you have any recommendations for leaders who might be sitting in that place knowing we have so much data that needs to be organized in order for us to take advantage of generative AI? What would you say? I was actually talking to a client recently, it was literally, you know, we were talking about the same thing and she was like, oh my God, the data either doesn't exist. We haven't even collected it or it's scattered. How do I, how do I go about doing this? And I said, it's very hypothesis and use case driven. I would tell those organizations, okay, think about what are the five things,

the five or 10 things you think today would drive retention in the business or the data points that you think are most relevant to, you know, driving retention in the business. Do you capture those? Do you capture and track those for all your customers? Start there. And if you, and it may not be right, but even if you get those 10, 15 data points and you track those on a consistent basis, you can start to draw correlations and patterns in the data, right? So start on a use case based or hypothesis based level. Like don't try to solve everything. This is very true with Gen EI too.

I think so Bain and company hosts these forums every year where we bring together a lot of CX leaders to come and talk about generative AI. And the question every single time is, you know, what do we do? Where do we begin?

It's about find a use case, find one problem you are looking to solve. For example, I want to use generative AI to personalize some marketing information to my customers, like pick one use case and then backtrack and see, okay, what do I need to feed gen AI in order to make that personalization happen? The answer will come back to what is the type of data I need to feed the model, but start small and pick one use case that makes sense to make it less overwhelming. That is such helpful advice. And I think, on my own AI journey is I've been trying, okay, how do I use this tool? Having those use cases of, I'm going to try to create something that solves this specific problem and maybe try on different approaches, different technologies, different prompts, all of this to get there. But by kind of putting a topic into a Petri dish

and working on that one thing, not only will it help us to see the possibilities of generative AI and how to use it, but it will also start to incorporate it into our business so that we all become a little more comfortable with how it all works. Exactly. And the best way, like don't wait for your organization to go invest in an LLM and then set up your own, you know, sort of closed infrastructure around the LLM. Just use like literally use, you know, a chat GPD to kind of play around with some use cases, be agile about it. Like, I think Bain actually does a really good job where they've like thrown open generative AI to all the employees within Bain and ask them to come up with their own use cases. So people are empowered and, you know,

if something really lands well, it becomes like a tool that you can start to use. We have a portal where we have a ton of like documents stored on like point of views developed by teams, you know, cases, client work that we've done disguised. And it's all just lying like in this like portal. So someone went and created a generative AI application where you can just interact with that application and say, hey, I'm looking for a specific, you know, I'm looking to understand market size in this industry. What are the documents? And it'll like pull out documents and even figure out pages that you need to go to to look at, you know, where that information lies. Either way, it's a simple example of a use case that you just have to start building and

working with. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. Are there any technologies when we talk about processing data and not only bringing all the data together and gathering insights from it, but really visualizing what's happening. Is there any technology that you recommend to people? What do you use to, you know, bring it all together? So this is where I think, I don't think there's

one good tool or solution. I think what's happening is, you know, CFM, our customer feedback management providers, Qualtrics, Medallia, InMoment, the big three, they do a good job of like helping you visualize like survey insights data. I think a lot of companies tools like Power BI, Tableau for visualization. I don't think there's like the vision that we were moving towards or what we were trying to build at NPSX was a tool that would do just that. Like bring all this data and throw up a dashboard that says, let's do a retention analysis for you. Let's look at top drivers of retention.

How does that tie to CX customer experience? So I don't think that tool really exists. I think companies should go out there and sort of play with the visualization tools they already have in hand and then configure their dashboards. But I don't think there's one good answer to that question. Yeah. And I think when it comes to, I hear a lot of organizations and I just speak to a lot of leaders who are like, what's the new tool? What's the next thing? And the thing that I always recommend is look at the technology you already have and what else they've been adding. Like everyone is adding AI into the tools that they're creating. What exists already? Because there's also the fact of the cost of change, of changing

a new tool, training everyone on how to use it. It's a lot. And so path of least resistance, first step, see what it is that is available to you that you're not already using. And then if you figure out that you need something completely different, then go down that path. But there's so much new technology that every major player has been implementing into their tools. So starting there is a great place. I completely agree. And I've, again, I've seen a lot of companies like talk to us about switching and I'm like, like there's, it takes a lot from an organization to switch systems and tools and platforming. So it has to be a very thoughtful decision. At NPSX, you work with organizations to help them understand how advanced their CX function is.

I'd love to understand a little bit of how you really go about evaluating an organization's customer experience, maturity, and then I'll have more questions from there. I love this topic because we recently, by the way, this is a great plug for, we recently launched the CX Global Standards with Kantar and Qualtrics. You should see the announcement out there. The standards will be publicly released in October. I think it was in one of the forums where we were at a conference with a bunch of CX leaders and they're like, yeah, I don't think we have the roadmap or blueprint for what are the capabilities we need as a CX leader. Or I don't know how to say if I'm really advanced or not, like in my CX journey. How do I say for sure? Like the score can tell you how much

customers sort of like you, but it doesn't really say a lot about the internal capabilities you're building to help advance CX within the organization. And so the idea came about is how do we build this sort of framework or what we're calling standards? There are 60 standards, which basically, and it may seem like a lot, but they're across different, what we're calling standards, they are 60 standards, which basically, and it may seem like a lot, but they're across different, what we call different pillars of culture, capability, and execution. So they are the fundamental,

like what are the things you need to have in an organization as a CX function on a team to ensure that you're moving in the right direction on CX, like the fundamental pillars or pieces, so as you call it. And then on that, we sort of say, okay, how mature are you? And we developed a sort of, you know, akin to the Michelin star framework, we developed a three star, zero to three star kind of framework, which is three is like, you're best in class, you're actually doing things that a lot of other companies aren't even thinking about or doing versus you haven't even started building that capability.

So that's kind of the scale. And what we do is it's sort of I don't like calling it an audit, but it's kind of like that where you go in and we ask organizations to submit evidence or documentation or anything supporting that they're either working on those standards or they're building something across each of those standards. And based on that, we are able to assess their maturity. And from that, I think the most valuable thing that comes out of it is a roadmap. So you literally have this blueprint in front of you saying, I've done these 10 things or these five things I'm really good at, these five things not so good at, and these are like five things I need to focus on in the next year or two. So you come out of there with a very clear like roadmap and with examples of what best

in class sort of are doing to, you know, progress along that journey. And it also helps you understand, you know, a lot of the times I feel like the standards is more of an aha moment for people. Because when a CX leader first sees this, they're like, oh, I didn't realize I needed to look at employee experience or I didn't realize data management was something that was of concern to me. Or even like brand, you know, know in some cases if it's separately so there's this aha moment when you look at the standards like oh all of this is something that I should be concerned about and that is the most powerful piece of this is it needs to we wanted this to empower CX leaders to say my role is not just voice of customer and giving you insights every week on how NPS score is going up and down. It's more than that. It's about driving customer-centric

culture. It's about, we're the master coordinator or facilitator across teams to make sure experiences work. There's a lot more to it. So it's all of those things. Yes, totally. What are some of the most common areas that you see companies missing when it comes to creating a strong customer experience and customer-centric culture? I think the first one which we've been talking about a lot is data management.

So that's like huge. I think the piece that they consistently miss is that single view of customer needs to be built and they need to be continuously sort of coordinating with the chief data officer or the data teams or the tech teams to understand what data exists in the organization. And so CX leaders need to challenge themselves to go beyond just the data they are collecting through surveys to understanding how data sits within the organization. So that's one massive piece I think that needs to be solved. I think the second one is around value, which is again, something we said, which is most people

and CX teams today still stop at the point of saying NPS is much, great, or they have, you're going to run these six initiatives, but no one is able to clearly link or very few organizations are able to clearly link an initiative that the CX team has defined to how it impacts overall sort of metrics of the business top line, bottom line, right? Like what's that connection? Have to make that connection. Otherwise CX will continue to exist in a silo and it cannot. And so those connections have to be made. So value management

is what we call it, is that piece of the puzzle. I think there are a lot of like organizations that say that they're customer centric, that mission and vision may say that they're customer centric, but they'll never really walk the talk. And it's not about like a lot of companies will do like one big blast shout out, you know, every year saying we celebrate customers. But if you do not live and breathe it through day to day interactions and processes, it's never going to be a culture. Culture is like, really has to come through behavior change across the board, which means leaders have to show that they care. They have to start making decisions on a regular basis, which are pro-customer, which might sometimes mean sacrificing short-term benefits

for long-term customer gains, which Amazon is notoriously good at doing. So like day-to-day, you kind of really emphasize the customer. Leaders have to do it and employees need to feel empowered to make decisions for the customer. And it's not just a matter of saying you're empowered, right? It has to come through like actual incentives, rewards, mechanisms, training

that help employees get to that point where they feel like, you know, this customer-centric culture is truly being lived. So it's a hard one because culture change is never easy. I want to circle back to the metrics for a second, and then I'm going to come back to culture because I want to double click on everything that you just shared. When it comes to this very important point that you made about tying the CX metrics to overall business metrics, can you give us some tangible examples of what some of those business metrics might be and how to tie CX indicators to them? these correlations, basically, which is a 2%, you know, NPS point improvement can lead to whatever, 4% increase in like share of wallet or the amount we cross sell within an organization. So product hoardings increases. So correlations like that will help you better tie like, why am I trying

to increase my NPS score anyway by two points? Is it making a difference? Like, how does it tie to like those types of metrics that actually matter? So that's, you know, or like a three-point improvement in NPS can lead to a two-point reduction in churn. As simple as that. You need to start making that case. Because if you can't make that case, then the executive leadership will never view NPS as anything more than just, they're just going to give us teams and pain points and that's about it. I think it also helps us to connect other teams to CX initiatives as well. I mean, something I think about just as you're speaking is like customer effort and how that can also be seen as more of a CX number, but it also, I think just is how can we connect NPS

to customer effort, customer effort to propensity to buy, to be retained, all of this. We really need to be thinking. And then that's also something that the tech team and the product team can get a handle on as well. How many clicks are we making people? Yes. How many clicks does it take for them to get the outcome that they want? Okay, we see that there's a direct connection to more clicks, less buying. We need to make that change. And I think it's really difficult for us to go to the product team or the sales team or the marketing team to say, hey, we're getting this feedback about NPS score if we're not connecting it back to the metrics that they care about.

Exactly. So that we can really advocate metrics that they care about. Exactly. So that we can really advocate for that change. Very well put. That's exactly the point. And in fact, this brings to mind some of the work we were doing right now with a retailer where we were trying to help them establish, okay, operational metrics wise, if you click through the checkout process, you know, if you click, say, maybe nine times through the checkout process. If you click, say, maybe nine times through the checkout process versus 20 times, how does that change your ability, your satisfaction, and your retention

capability? So it's really getting down to those operational metrics. So actually, in fact, it's about not just saying, hey, what drives satisfaction is the number of minutes it takes to complete my application it's also zeroing down on the minutes like if i even bring this down from 15 minutes to 10 minutes you're gonna see a change and that is something the ops team can work with and they can target otherwise they don't have anything to work with they're like okay yeah we understand we need to go down faster but how much like how much faster do we make this and is it worth investing in bringing down time that much and you say yes it is because here's why i always say we have to look at our internal teams our counterparts our peers as customers as well How can we position what it is that we are trying to do in the way that makes it... What's in it for them? How do we drive customer experience in a way that is

actually benefiting the other teams instead of being this other thing that they need to think about? And it's really... I mean, it comes down to influence and marketing, but doing it with the people that we're sitting next to or the people that we're on Zoom calls with every day, we also have to think about what is it that they care about and what are the goals that they're working after and how can I position what it is that we need from a CX perspective to them in a way that makes them get excited about solving this problem with me. I see the CX leader as a master like coordinator, facilitator across teams. Like if they need to have the ability to just work with and integrate with across product teams, ops teams, service teams, because that is the

crux of what they do. They're connecting the dots in a way that no one else can, right? Or is able to. That's the true value of customer, of a CX leader. I could not agree more. It's really, we are the glue within an organization to really advocate for the customer, but not just say, the customer is saying this. It's like, how do we get people on board?

And that's where that culture piece comes in as well. And I think that CX also plays a role in really holding and facilitating that culture throughout the organization and making sure that everyone is thinking about the customer in everything that they do. And I'm curious to know, what are some of the best in class examples that you've seen in terms of creating a customer-centric culture? Yeah, I think so. Companies that do this really well are the ones where you have, say, at an executive level, they'll generally start every meeting with the topic of customer, not financial

metrics, or every executive meeting will have a topic on the customer um i know this is a very commonly cited example but jeff bezos and i don't know if he still does it but has a in his in the you know meeting room has an empty chair which symbolizes the customer and how we always need to like frame how the customer would take this decision into account when you're making decisions people you know come organizations have this decision framework where they're like, okay, what's the financial implication of this? What's the cost implication of this? But customer has to be a key factor in the decision criteria. And the decision cannot be made if that isn't taken in or accounted for, right? So that has to be critical. Leaders also need to be connected with the customer i think the companies where

leaders actually like some uh you know ceos of some companies who do this really well they'll actually sometimes um in call centers like get onto a call with the customer or like a feedback call like they'll tap in they'll do things like that where they find a way to connect and hear what the customer is saying so So they're not completely sort of sitting in a little bubble out there, not hearing and understanding. So there's that walking the talk on part of the leadership team that I see really, really drives customer centricity. And then I think on the culture side of things, employees, middle management. I think middle management is where that space empowering them and to drive customer centricity is important. One mistake people make, organizations make,

is tying individual employee incentives or something to NPS. Like that is just, that's a no-go. That's a no-go. You want to track NPS as an organization more broadly and you want to track nps as an organization more broadly and you want to track you can track you can sort of tack executive compensation to like it you know nps as a metric that you can do that's fine because you're holding the organization accountable for tracking on that but at a team level it can go so wrong creates bad incentives. And so I would strongly encourage

not to do that unless like absolutely necessary. There are definitely other ways to kind of drive that. No one person can impact NPS single-handedly. And we need to make sure that when we're creating incentives, that we're incentivizing the right things. And I've also been on teams where that has been either discussed or something that we were sunsetting because it wasn't working. And the reality is it just makes the people who are in those client-facing seats feel like the world is on their shoulders and they actually don't have the ability to make the changes necessary. So it doesn't really drive the right outcomes. But I'm curious, I love what you're

saying about this middle management layer, because something that I firmly believe having built in client-facing teams is that the way the employee experience, especially the client-facing team's employee experience directly impacts the customer experience. We build trust between humans. While a human may trust a brand when they have an interaction with another human, that is going to make or break your relationship with that brand. And so making sure that whether it is a customer service agent or a customer success manager or anyone who's client facing, we need to make sure that that team is feeling extremely empowered, that they have the skills

and the tools and the excitement necessary to really hold that customer's relationship and build upon it. And so I'm curious to know what you've seen in terms of how companies have really approached that employee experience part of things. Yeah, I think with employee experience, there are a few things that you can do that companies can do to really make it work. And this is not like a full list, but like one thing is rewards. But by that, I don't mean incentives tied to NPS. I mean, recognition. I think constantly recognizing someone who does something good for

the customer, whether it be, and it should happen across the board. So whether it be your team manager recognizing you, someone in a huddle every week, saying this person did something so good for the customer. It could be something very small, but that recognition is key. Up to leadership, recognizing teams and specifically employees who are performing really well for the customer, or they did something, you know, pulling out stories, sharing them broadly across the organization. You can have awards set up saying an award for for somebody who's customer-focused or oriented or just like that.

So there are this system of rewards, starting from leadership down to reinforcement on a regular basis. Companies who do that have a greater chance of seeing excited and more empowered employees about customer. I think the other piece of it is, I go back to the Listen, Learn, Act. So if employees feel that they are thinking of things that are good for the customer, but no one's listening to them and no one's doing

anything about it. So an employee is hearing customers say something and they're like elevating it up, but nothing is being done about it. There's going to be frustration and there's going to be a sense of, oh, how does it matter? Why should I even keep doing this? So really that closed loop feedback for an employee, which is to say a way for them to say, OK, you're what we've heard from the customer. Let's either solve for that in the team level, if we can. If we can't, we're going to elevate it into like a broader system. And whether it gets acted on or not, at least you know that someone is looking at it.

And there's that closed loop feedback. That's when you feel like, oh yeah, like this, it matters to them. And I understand why it's taking time to implement it, but they're listening. Right. And so I feel like I'm, I feel like I want to give more ideas and inputs. It's really incentivizing that innovation that people are naturally coming up with. When you were facing a client day in and day out, you have the most inspirational inputs into how you can solve their problems. You are seeing firsthand these problems happening, and we really need to create the space for those employees to be able to share what's happening and

give their suggestions. And I think that this is such a fine balance, and it's something I see so many leaders miss because we're focused on these big hurdles that we're tackling and the big boulders are trying to move away. But there's also so much gold kind of in in the lake bed that our teams are pulling out and we need to give them space to share that to be heard. And then either say, yes, we're going to move forward with this or we're not. And here's why. And it's just incentivizing that conversation by acknowledging people for the thoughts that they're bringing to the table and then either helping them to make it a reality or learn more about the business and why or why not something can happen in this moment. And an example of that I was just thinking was when I, one of my first projects, actually, which got me excited about customer experience was when I was with the retail bank in the US. And I was traveling out to San Francisco, and I was visiting bank branches. And we were trying to implement closed loop feedback. And it was just the most amazing

experience because I would go to these branches in remote corners of, you know, California, and I would join in these huddles that happened every day, you know, so every day they would have a huddle, people would gather together, and they'd be like, this customer said something about, they would use the survey results to start their huddle, and they'd celebrate, they're like, let's celebrate, this customer said we were so kind and thoughtful, so everyone would clap, you know, there was a feeling of excitement, then they would be like, let's celebrate. This customer said we were so kind and thoughtful. So everyone would clap, you know, there was a feeling of excitement. Then they would be like, this customer said, you know, queuing is a problem in our bank branch. And then people would try and think of like ways in the moment to solve it. And if there was an issue that was much bigger than them,

they'd rely on the manager to sort of elevate it up. But I saw this on a day in and day out basis. And it was such an energizing 10 minutes of the day, the 15 minute huddle. It was really great to see that happen. It's super energizing. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone wants to solve problems. Solving problems is fun and it's exciting.

And I know I've worked a lot in the startup space and typically we hire people who are very innovative, very open-minded, who want to solve problems. And there's always this balance of like, okay, we've solved enough problems. Now we need to just do the work. But people want to be solving problems and we need to give them some ability to be taking everything that they're learning and applying it to something that's generative for the

business and for the customers at large. So that's amazing. Well, Dia, I have two last questions for you that we ask all of our guests. And the first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was it? And it can be a brand, it can be a small business, it can be any business that you were interacting with. There's a client I have, it's an education institution based out of Florida. It's a high school actually. And as a brand, I'm completely blown away by the experience they deliver to the point when I wonder why do they, why are they looking for us to come and guide

them on customer experience when they're doing a phenomenal job. But I think it's just right from the get go, when you get to campus, there's just this level of passion and commitment, even from the people who are like, you know, the hotel we were staying at while we were there. And it's all interconnected experiences, right? So one person is kind of handing you over to the next, but in the smoothest manner possible. And everyone out there is so nice and committed to giving you a great experience. It sounds to me like there's a lot of passion amongst the people who are working there and they're passing that on to you. Yeah, definitely. And there's a desire to go, I would say, above and beyond. So for example, if I have a problem that's not related to, you know, I had an issue with some hotel related thing, but I was asking

one person from the athletics committee about it. Even if it's not within their scope or realm, they'll go out of their way to solve it for you and they won't just pass you over to someone else. And so I think that's critical, I think, because in a lot of organizations, the transfer game is, oh, I can't, I don't know how to do this. I'm going to transfer. Yeah, you are now the hot potato and that's the highway to frustration right there. How do you take accountability

even when you are unsure if you can solve the problem? Yeah. You can still take accountability for the customer experience. And I think that you're really highlighting right now the importance of the employee experience, because if employees feel like their employer has their back, they will do the same. And we really, I think a lot of the, there's a pitfall where a lot of leaders expect employees to have that trust and respect for their employer and to then pass that on to

the customer. But the employers also have to create it and create the environments for employees to really feel like, okay, you got my back, I got yours. And I'm not going to pass a customer on like a hot potato. I'm going to actually make sure that they have the full experience that they deserve to have as a part of, as working with this business. So I love that example so much. And our last question, or my last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Don't live in a silo. Don't live in that silo. Move on from surveys, please. Look, surveys are great and they should be used as a bedrock to gain insights.

Every CX leader, I encourage them to go beyond and start thinking about how do I understand sentiment across my entire customer base? How do I utilize the data that's sitting right there? It's untapped to unlock that across the business and work with other teams to do that. I think that's like a lot of CX leaders still today, companies that we talk to are still trying to boost their survey response rates. And I tell them there's going to be a limit to that. Beyond a certain point, you're not going to get more.

What are other ways in which you can really unlock value just expanding beyond the service universe? And what we had talked about earlier, I just want to underscore it that a CX leader, your role is to really facilitate the voice of the customer throughout the organization to make sure that every team is thinking about the customer and you're calling them into that conversation and having them share their data with you so you can all work together to make this better. The silos. Well, I think it's important that we have our own lanes because that creates clarity. This is one of those areas where it's important that we don't just stay in a silo with all of our juicy customer info for ourselves. We really have to broaden and work with other

teams to bring it all together for the sake of the customer at the end of the day. Well, Dia, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this incredible knowledge. It's really cool to see what NPSX is up to. And we really appreciate you coming on the show. It was great chatting with you, Lauren. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force, and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best.

To learn more about Salesforce CTOs, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.