Clare Muscutt talks with Lynn Hunsaker about ‘smoothing the silos’ and the path to influencing customer focus in your organisation.
Episode #507 Show Notes:
Clare:
Welcome to the 7th episode of the fifth series of the Women in CX podcast – a series dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in Customer Experience. Listen in as we share our career stories, relive the moments that shaped us and voice our opinions as loudly as we like about all manner of CX subjects. I'll be your host, Clare Muscutt and in today's episode, I’ll be talking to an incredible community member from the United States. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest. She led company-wide customer experience transformation at B2B, Fortune 250 firms: Applied Materials and Sonoco Products, she was the first in the world to benchmark marketing operations practices, she’s an author of three handbooks, and is now the Chief Customer Officer at ClearAction Continuum. Please welcome to the show, CX sister, Lynn Hunsaker.
Clare:
Hi Lynn.
Lynn:
Hello, Clare.
Clare:
How are you doing?
Lynn:
Oh, fantastic! It's a great new year. I'm so excited about all the things that stand before us as great opportunities.
Clare:
Yes. Happy New Year indeed! And where are you joining us from today?
Lynn:
I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, which is nearby Los Angeles.
Clare:
Ah, California. Amazing. It's not California, is it? It's a different state. My geography is horrible. Well, let's just dive right in and just tell the listeners like how did you find your way into the Women in CX community and how's it going?
Lynn:
Well, I noticed the announcements from the very beginning during the early part of the pandemic. And I kept an eye on that. I had a lot of changes happening in my life during that time. And when I got settled, in late 2021, I decided, let me give a look at this. And so it's been impressive to see how supportive everybody is and how enthusiastic women and customer experience are. I've always known that the people in this field are so passionate, but it's great to see people supporting each other so much.
Clare:
Yeah. And it is been wonderful to have your contribution, you've already done one webinar and you've got another one coming up.
Lynn:
Yeah, I'm looking forward to interacting more with the members because this year as I've gotten things squared away, the aftermath of the whole 2020 fiasco has just been pretty long ranging. Yeah. But I think we're looking at a brighter side in 2023.
Clare:
Yeah. Let's hope so. I'm ready for some good stuff.
Clare:
But in the UK, it's kind of looking like it's going to be really challenging year ahead, economically. We've got energy crises, cost of living crisis kind of feels a bit pandemic-y again, or be it that we can go out of our houses and do whatever we want. The pressure that customers and employees are feeling right now in terms of psychological safety and security is going to have a continued long-ranging impact. But I suppose at least we know that from our experience of the pandemic, how adaptable we can be as individuals and-
Lynn:
Sure.
Clare:
Those businesses that really...
Lynn:
Yeah, it's a mixed bag for sure. But one of the things that I really am hopeful about is helping CX and CS and EX people know how they can help influence a rebound and resilience and rising above all of that fray, because it's always challenging. There's always something, there's always a war somewhere. There's always pressure somewhere. It's very rare that you just have a gangbusters economy and everything else. And even if you do, people are usually a little too exuberant and not really based on the customer and the employee. So I think that we always have the opportunity to stand up and do more to influence positivity in these times.
Clare:
Yeah. And critical, isn't it, at these times when customers and employees are experiencing challenges to really understand their needs and respond to them even more than in the good times and we saw that didn't meet from the pandemic, the companies that really made progress were the ones that did that really well. So yeah, I totally agree with you. It's an opportunity to influence and we're definitely going to talk much more about influencing later on in our conversation. So I'm sure our listeners would love to know what your career journey looks like and how did you end up where you are today?
Lynn:
All right. Well, I loved marketing when I was in college. Well, it wasn't quite clear from the very beginning, but I soon realised that was my huge passion and I got a degree in that and went on to get my MBA and added to its finance and international business. I happened to be going to a school in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University is close to where my mom grew up. And so I was interviewing with companies over there. I ended up in the strategic planning department of a Fortune two 50 company called Sunoco. In that role, they had me interviewing people, our customers, they could be plant managers, purchasing managers, and so forth across the whole of North America. And so I went to face-to-face interviews and had plant tours and all that. It was very educational. We used VOC in our strategic planning formula, and I think more companies should be doing that now.
So that was the start of it. And because I was doing that along with merger and acquisition analyses and things like that, when they set up TQM, they asked me to lead a company-wide VOC task force to figure out what is this customer satisfaction stuff and how do we make it work companywide. So that was a really great education. I went on from there to California in the semiconductor industry and was the voice of the customer manager at a company that had a kind of near-term crisis about a year before I started there. And what happened is the CEO of our largest customers stood up at one of those appreciation dinners and said, hey, I know we're buying a lot from you and frankly we would prefer buying from your competitors because you're really arrogant and hard to do business with, and I just want to be transparent with you.
So, our executives were quite worried about that and how many other customers are feeling that way. So, they decided, let's do a relationship survey, worldwide. It was the first time they'd done that, and when they got the results, they hated it. The executives thought, how can this be true? These customers must be talking about something else. Why are they so negative? Or, you know, I didn't know that they felt this way. And so the VP of customer sat, who had been newly appointed held up the report and said, you might not know it, but this is a mirror. This is how customers see us and we've got to manage it. So it was really fortunate for me and it set the whole trajectory for my career and who I am now and what I do, that what they did that afternoon, they figured out what's going to work in our culture for people to not react that same way and to actually embrace and act upon those survey results in very meaningful ways, to be less arrogant and easier to do business with in quick order.
So that was my mission when I joined as VOC Manager ran around the whole world to do these kinds of workshops readouts and action planning. We had over a hundred action plans going on at the same time and a lot of synergy within those, because you got people over in Taiwan and Scotland and different places having similar things. So we had organisational cross-pollination, you could say, and that was a big part of what my role was. And when I got back, I was meeting with all the different functional areas to show them, here's what our customers are saying, how can we adapt our hiring, our recognition, our marketing, internal messaging, all kinds of things, policies and so that's where I really come from is how do you make customer centricity and customer experience improvement part of your non-customer facing groups work and way of life. So I think it's a big difference from how most people have come into CX.
Clare:
Yeah. And I do notice from you, that kind of financial commercial acumen really comes through. So I think for anyone who's been in the trenches, done the job in highly commercial organisations really does stand in good stead, doesn't it? To be able to see customer experience from not only the customer and employee side, which most of us do, do but also the business and stakeholder side, and being able to figure out, you know, how do we create value for everybody, including the business rather than marching off on heroic missions that are purely customer or purely employee. And I think that's why quite a few people get unstuck. So thank you for sharing that story. I just had one question around that though. Were they male-dominated industries then? They typically...
Lynn:
Well, it was especially more male-dominated in the early nineties when I was starting out. And you had to figure it out, for example, you dress the part to not stand out or not to be a distraction. So I find that has kind of gone by the wayside over the years as women have been more accepted, but they're kind of getting in their own way, in some ways. We're very conscientious about our tone of voice and how we phrased things, and I did a lot of self-help stuff as well as got some coaching to propel my influence and career trajectory within four years, at that semiconductor company, I went from VOC Manager to Head of Corporate Quality. So I have to thank my MBA and all of that stuff for helping me do that. And the fact that I lived in Holland for a year and a half also helped because it showed me that I can speak up and be honest, be straightforward with people, and that was so important in a male-dominated environment.
Clare:
Yeah, absolutely! And thankfully times have changed, but there's still an awful lot of bias out there. And I know speaking to women in the community who are working particularly in tech and software which is still very male-dominated, there's still a lot of work to be done, to be able to show up as ourselves, however, we choose to show up and not have to modify or code switch as I know the further away you are from being exactly what that white, middle-aged male executive looks like, the harder it is but yeah, I think we're in a good place with our community to be championing and supporting one another to be able to show up and speak up. I think that was the word you used. Use your voice. And confidently articulate ourselves without fear of having to dumb things down or act in a certain way that's more acceptable or easier to tolerate or not too much. And I know I hear a lot of women talking about how difficult that still is today. So thinking about that amazing career journey, there must have been some pretty big barriers or challenges you've had to overcome along the way, can you think of like one big one that might be helpful to share with the audience, that helps shape you become the woman you are today?
Lynn:
Well, I think it stems from what we were just talking about because when I was growing up, I was quite shy, even when my grandparents would visit, I was so excited, but I couldn't look them in the eye, I would just say hi grandpa and my grandpa just loved to tell the story about that when I was five years old. Over the years. He just, he's never tired of it. But I was shy and I had a hard time allowing myself to speak up when I was first in the semiconductor company but I noticed the people around me were speaking up and they were getting props, you know, they were getting attention, they were getting assignments. And I noticed that if you weren't, you weren't right. It's kind of like the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lynn:
Also, we had layoffs quite often in the semiconductor industry almost every other year. And when the first one happened, I thought, oh my gosh, I've got to get a network so that if something happens to me, I have something to fall back on. So, I joined the American Marketing Association, and I decided I wanted to be a volunteer on a committee, and that way I'd have a badge at the events that says, you know, I'm somebody and I wouldn't be as nervous when people would say, what do you do? Or Who are you? It was more like, I had the permission now to be the hostess and say, well, tell me about yourself. And that really changed everything. I gave myself permission to speak up and to trust myself. Even though I am an introvert, I tend to think through my sentences even like right now I'm thinking through and I can't help it just in the background. So I think that was the main difference, and I've been speaking my mind ever since. I hope people appreciate me speaking my mind, and I try to welcome always feedback because also my personality sometimes gives the impression that when I say something that's my way or the highway. But I try really hard to always welcome feedback and ask for it.
Clare:
Yeah. And I know a lot of women in the community talk about this, the level of introversion and extroversion and trying to find the ways to feel comfortable, particularly like groups, scenarios and how difficult it can be to be the hostess when you're naturally introverted. So, a lot of respect that you manage to overcome your shyness, and also find that confidence. You're still involved in the American Marketing Association now, aren't you?
Lynn:
Oh, yeah, I'm still a member. I attend the CXPA, and AMA Phoenix events, and I'm actually the ring leader of CXPA local events here in Phoenix.
Clare:
Woo-Hoo! So there's a lot of community groups, associations that I do give a lot back to the industry groups that you're involved in.
Lynn:
You get out of it, what you put into it. And I look forward to putting more into Women in CX this year too.
Clare:
Thank you, and definitely we really appreciate you using your voice so long way it continues. So, thinking about our kind of CX topic of discussion today we said we were going to talk about something that keeps cropping up in the community. We can't get away from it, can we? The fact that one of the biggest barriers and challenges CX managers, professionals, and all levels of the organisation are facing, is the challenges of silos across the organisation and how to bust them and I know that you are an industry expert on this. I think you gave an amazing example of being able to do that on a global level with a very complicated, diverse organisation. So let's bring the audience up to speed, and could you give us a definition or explanation of what the biggest silos that affect customer and employee experience actually are? And our listeners can see if any of the notes resonate with their situation.
Lynn:
Well, silos usually are at the heart of whatever people are complaining about around the water cooler, so to speak or they get together with their colleagues and they say, such and such, so screwed up. Right. So a silo is anything that should be connected that isn't, and generally, we complained mostly about organisational silos. That can be as small as within your own department, that people aren't on the same page. The right-hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, but there are actually five operational silos and five execution silos that I've identified. Could be more, but it's good to work with these five as a model. The operational silos are the ones that are most obvious and the ones that people talk about the most. Channel silos, system silos, data silos, process silos, and organisational silos. So, these are things that people buy something, people embark on a project, or they create a process or procedure or policy, and they're not thinking of the whole picture. And they're not thinking as a customer. And so all of these things are what my friend calls PITA, you know this, PITA - the Pain In The -
Clare:
Pain In The A……
Lynn:
For employees and customers and for partners. And anytime you have a silo that is dysfunctional, then it's costly, it causes churn, it causes grief, and a lot of confusion and extra, extra worry and so forth. The execution silos are quite interesting. And I believe we talk about them as well, but we don't really label them as silos. Those are vision silos where different groups have a different ideas of how life is or what they're aiming for and the vision can be out of sync with customers. The vision can be out of sync with employees, I think that we're feeling both of those, these past few years. There are assumption silos. This happens with personal interactions as well as organisational and cross-functional gaps. And you have goal silos where one group is an incentive to do this and another group is an incentive to do that, or they have different objectives that maybe stab each other in the foot or the back. Then there are metric silos where you don't see the whole picture because you're measuring something, only at the beginning or only at the end; there are a lot of different reasons why certain metrics that we follow actually mask reality. And then handoff silos, I think are the most painful of all, but they're the result of the others.
Clare:
Yeah.
Lynn:
So, do you resonate with all 10 of those?
Clare:
Yeah.
Clare:
I was busy writing them down so I could play a few backs. Yeah. So, the interesting- kind of operational ones you really see when you start journey mapping, right? So when you get a group of people together from these different teams, which in themselves are quite often silos, you start to pick up where there are just complete gaps, disjointedness, so whether that's a team's designing something over here on the website, but there's no data integration or app or connectedness with like data or the channels or whatever else. And if they'd been able to think about that at the start as a holistic customer experience vision, this is what we're aiming for, for our customers who could ladder it all up to them, or roadmap at least, it would be totally different. And I'm a CX designer myself, that was like the thing that I love to do.
Lynn:
Big question, do people actually approach CX design with that in mind? We ought to.
Clare:
I do.
Lynn:
Elevating maturity. I think a lot of people do CX design... Well, not doing that.
Clare:
Yeah, no, totally, totally. Well, I guess for me, the podcast has heard me talk about this back a million times, but I evolved my own version for big corporate enterprise-level experiences. I worked in one of the UK's second-largest supermarkets, still one of the biggest retailers in the world that had a million silos and different kinds of customer routes in them and trying to articulate a target experience was the only way that you could help teams that were all going to be working on different things, try to get to something coherent and it was relatively simple to do that as this is what we want people to feel, see, experience, and do. And then they were like, right, great. That's the direction that I need to be able to do my bit over here, which is going to have a knock-on impact.
Clare:
And the executional aspects as well, kind of thinking back to the left hand not knowing what the right hand's doing or the handoffs, even bringing people together and doing some of these, like initial discovery journey mapping sessions. Having one guy from one team and one woman from another team going, oh! That thing that happens to customers, that pain point could be so easily solved if we just do this together as a process and then those things get fixed. But, but also the competing priorities that exist, what marketing and operations might be doing differently to finance what the transformation team might be aiming for. The sets of KPIs and measurements and metrics that we different teams are going after can often be quite vastly different. As you said, you've used the word shoot each other in the foot.
Lynn:
Yeah.
Clare:
You're creating a problem over here to achieve your own metrics. That creates a problem over here that damages someone else's metrics, but ultimately who loses the most? Usually, it's the customer and the employee. Right. But when you see that the business also loses, being able to bring-
Lynn:
Industrially.
Clare:
Yeah, exactly. Nobody wins, so yeah, totally resonates with me. And I just really like the way, that you simplified that into two categories of operational execution and the five points under each, that's really handy, a good way to describe it.
Lynn:
So there are actually a few tips and tricks with these with this list. It's not just you know a rave or a rant. Those five execution silos are at the heart of the five operational silos. Meaning that if you want to solve organisational silos or channel silos, then take a look at vision assumption, goals, metrics, and handoffs as the pathway to it. Okay, and that I think speaks to so much about our employee experience and mutual respect and conquering dysfunction rising above the fray, serving the greater good, all of that that we should be doing as mature adults, for heaven's sake but it's easier said than done. And what I think CX people can do is quite a lot to influence silos way more than we think at face value. What we can do to influence these silos is collect insights from employees, customers, and partners.
Clare:
Yes!
Lynn:
In ways that help people to see what the hell is going on, okay. From a holistic viewpoint and help them to see what they can do no matter what their role is. I think there's way too much of a trend in the past 10, 15 years to self-service among our internal customers as CX and CS people. We just want to collect stuff. We want to do the fun, you know... making things and whatnot. But the real work of excellent customer experience is smoothing out these stinking silos. If these silos were smoothed out, then why would we need to expand our customer service technology and staffing to the extent that we do today?
Clare:
Yes. You can get rid of the PITA.
Lynn:
Right? If you get rid of the pebbles in the customer shoe or the PITA for everyone, your investments in remedial customer experience, customer service, and customer success don't have to be linear with your month-by-month growth, your year-over-year growth, you can actually shrink back your investments in remedial efforts and be more proactive, which is much more fun. And you can also... I think have a lot of relief from the fact that you're always wanting a bigger staff, but never getting it. You're always wanting more budget, but never, you know, you can't get everything you want. But if you're doing things in a smarter way, it's not going to be as painful because you're realising, hey, I'm engaging everybody in the company to help. They are an extension of my CX team. You have to think that way because no matter how perfect the technology is, no matter how perfect your empathy is with customer touch-points and how wonderful all those touchpoints are you cannot guarantee a good customer experience unless you have smooth these silos.
Clare:
Yeah. Totally agree. And when I was working on the business side for those many, many years, it took me a long time to learn that. And I think I see a lot of frustrated CX professionals who may probably the same mistake I did, which was just to be focusing on one aspect. So what's the customer data, information, feedback telling us, but not, you know, asking employees why these problems exist and what could we do about them? And what would need to change to get rid of the PITA? But also talking to the leadership level stakeholders around what is your vision of customer experience, what do you define it as? What do you think the scope of this needs to be? What keeps you up at night, what are your big strategic objectives? And these days I counsel women to join the community that is getting stuck with influencing stakeholders to take the creative license to go and ask the right questions and just bring back a picture of where there is conflict or dissonance between, well, marketing's thinking this is what we're trying to do, and operations are thinking this is a priority.
Clare:
Their strategic objectives are this, and this team's strategic objective are that, that one shared we could use customer experience for improvement to actually drive that, because there isn't often anyone really looking across the entire customer experience or the organisation to be able to do that. And actually, you can create more value sometimes by taking a step back and coming at it from another angle than necessarily just continue to say, we still haven't read on this report over here, we still experience a downward trajectory. And being able to find those win-win wins, like what's going to make employees lives easier, that means we solve customer problems before they happen removes the issue. You can, as you said, you be able to make those economies in support and contact and actually help the business achieve its objectives. No one's going to say no to that, but so often they're going to say no to an investment in something independent just because customers are struggling with it. So yeah. Totally, totally agree with you, are there any other silos smoothing tips?
Lynn:
Yes, I have four universal tips. So all the time you're talking, the word that was coming to my mind is bingo.
Clare:
Is that a buzzword? Bingo.
Lynn:
Bingo! You've got it on the nose. Right? You've won the whole suite. So right, we need to broaden people's perspectives and we need to, first of all, before these four things, think of our roles and encourage executives to position us in CX and CS as a facilitator of company-wide alignment to customer, employee, and partner expectations and if they think, well, that's just too loosey-goosey or where the heck are you getting that idea? Well, what does marketing do? They set a unique value proposition. They have a brand promise and that sets the expectations for people joining the company of all types, employees, partners, and customers. You know, HR does that too, so actually the whole C-suite plays a role in that. And I think they're always thinking about what do shareholders expect.
Lynn:
What does the investment community expect? And so they're attuned to that, and we need to remind them it's not the shareholders that feed us, it's the customers that feed the shareholders. It's the customer's revenue that allows us to have salaries and budgets and returns for our investors. And so we need to put the horse before the cart. And frankly, I would venture to say that 95% of organisations put the cart before the horse and just what I said. So the first thing we can do as CX and CS people is to take the insights that we have and help people broaden their perspectives. So it's not just a score, it's not just something about touchpoints and public relations. It's what do we need to do to adapt to the continual evolution of the marketplace?
Lynn:
Customer insights, employee insights, and partner insights are so valuable to that, yet I don't see us rising to that. In fact, I see us kind of sliding away and we were doing much more of that in the 1990s than we are today. It seems, and I would love to hear stories about companies that are doing the things that I'm saying. I don't see, I would love to see those stories and talk about them. Yeah. Use them in articles and things like that. Really seeking that out, but help people to get out of myopic management. And especially in times like now where budgets are being squeezed, people are being let go or people are afraid about the supply chain and rising petrol gasoline costs and all that. We need to help people rally around our customers as the hand that feeds us and broaden their perspectives to not just what's on their plate, but the greater good, the hand that feeds you.
Second, we need to expand people's motivations, and that's by showing them what's in it for me. Now, my team viewed our internal customers as important as our external customers in terms of what's going on with them, what's changing, what's holding them back what are the things they're excited about? How do we tap into all of that? And so every six to eight weeks, we would close the blinds in the conference room and pull out our analysis pages from the shared drive that we had at the time. And we'd look at the stakeholder analysis, who are the laggards? Who are the early adopters or who's on track and what's at risk? And we did a number of these types of grids and things. And it really helped us to stay on top of it and to drive momentum and not let things stagnate or go off course.
It was the key to maximizing my bonus every year, regardless of whether it was a boom year or one of those layoff years, we were stuck in there. We maintained our programs and our relevance and indispensability. So you need to show people what's in it for them. And I got in the habit of being bold at the end of any report or article or any poster, anything that we would say about CX. If you're in engineering, you might do this. If you're in HR, you might do that, whoever the audience was, or just pick two or three to make a suggestion. And don't be scared if they say, no way, that's the stupidest idea I ever heard. You ought to do it this way! Awesome, mission accomplished. Right? You're great. Go ahead and do that! So that's really important. Now the third step is nurturing collaboration which means that you're trying to get people to work together. You're showing them the value of whether you're using journey maps as a visual aid or any other thing. In fact, I think that there are probably a dozen other ways that you can nurture collaboration besides journey maps.
Clare:
I just like the workshop experiences to bring, I think journey mapping is massively misused, but as a way to bring people together through a series of workshops to be able to see from all those different perspectives, broaden their own expert perspectives and expand their motivation around getting to be more customer focused. I thought it was- sorry, I cut you off there. Carry on.
Lynn:
No, it's alright.
Clare:
So nurturing collaboration?
Lynn:
I think the most influential of all was to set up self-reporting team recognition. And that means that you have a portal online that people can post, here's a project that we're working on, it's a grassroots or it's official or whatever, didn't matter, but it had to be a team of five minimum or eight minimum. Can't remember, year-by-year we made modifications, so based on feedback. But what happens when you announce, here are certain categories that we're going to be giving recognition for, and here are the scoring criteria for those categories? And in fact, if you have a problem statement, you get a point, right? If you have a customer-focused problem statement, like saying it in the customer's words to how the customer would say it, then you get like three points. Okay? If you- we showed all of these sequential things that help shape people's thinking and doing.
Clare:
Yeah, you shared this case study, didn't you, with the community? I remember you giving that example. And Amazon does something quite similar, don't they, in terms of their planning process by building into one very structured way of a brief, if you're going to go and do a project the way that you defend it includes, what problem are you solving for customers and how focused is that? And if it doesn't meet the criteria that are set out as this is the stuff that we want to be doing, if to contribute value, it doesn't go any further. So, I think you're right that kind of systemic level of thinking about even the generation of activity that's going to cost time, effort, energy, money, whatever, being able to ensure that it is as easy as possible to get it right, is a good point. But of course, not all initiatives are going to be customer-facing the right, not everything will be approached that way.
Lynn:
Well, if you get into it, you'll start to really drink this Kool-Aid, which I think is a healthy Kool-Aid.
Clare:
I was going to say, but see the employee experience
Lynn:
Everything actually ties back. Pardon?
Clare:
I was going to say, that there's likely always going to be a human impact. So whether that's a customer partner or employee. So it's been able to use that same thinking to address where's the human element of this, right?
Lynn:
That's right. When people did those action plans, those hundred action plans, part of my role in the workshops and afterwards was making sure that they were framing it from the customer's view, what's the problem statement from the customer's view. So we were helping people in numerous ways to get into the habit of this. And what you really want to be doing ultimately is helping your C team and board of directors frame everything that they say and decide in terms of why is this benefiting our customers. How is this going to encourage them to buy more from us, to buy only from us, to say good things about us, to prefer us, whatever? When you look at all of the strategic pillars, when you look at all of the things that your C-suite does as policies and decisions, they really should be couching it in terms of this is going to help our customers do X or this is going to help us do what for X for customers because that's really the whole secret behind getting more sales and having more profit.
Clare:
I hear you. So we've got to broaden our perspective, expand motivations, and nurture collaboration. I think there's one more. Did I miss one?
Lynn:
Yeah. The fourth one is building universality. So you can get into the habit yourself and set an example every time that you're starting something, every time you give an assignment or get an assignment, think who else cares? Who else needs to know or should know or has done something like this? Let's check-in. Now that we have things digital, it can be a lot faster than it was, 30 years ago when we didn't have all, these advantages. There are a lot of sharing technologies that we have in our organisations, but anyhow, make it possible to learn from each other and to do things more holistically. Like, people talk about buying an electronic device plug and play, you don't have to go assemble it or go get batteries and such.
Lynn:
We need to be thinking of our work like that. How do we do our things so that we don't have to worry about silos after the fact? So there are certain tools you can use to help instil this thinking such as what we call interrelationship diagrams. You can use fishbone diagrams, you can use other things that help people see the big picture and be more transparent, and have a more free flow, greater accountability, and more seamlessness built in unless selfishness and short-term stuff that just creates more silos. In fact, a lot of the things we do in CX management create more silos. And we need to be extra vigilant with ourselves to think through how do I prevent yet another silo?
Clare:
Yeah. Don't bring any new ones. I was laughing when you were talking because it just made me think back to the organisation that I mentioned earlier. I had 190,000 people working in it, so it was big and there's quite often I'd run into, we've tried that before or I think there's a team over there that's working on that or I'm pretty sure there's a project somewhere that also had the same goal and didn't manage to do it. And I was like, but where is this all recorded and where can I go and see what we've learned from trying to do that in the past? Because if it's come back up again, what can we take from the past and not have to learn that over again? And there were times that I uncovered, like things that had been tried in like two different poles of the business that we're trying to do the same thing in duplicating effort.
So that with the tools that exist today like sharing sites and better program management are reduced. But being able to capture learning and share learning and disseminate the failures, I think as much as the success is so important. And who knows if it was something that was tried and it didn't work because it maybe wasn't focused on the right need. There are still all those learnings that in a different project that's trying to achieve something else, that component, those learnings could be super valuable.
Lynn:
Baby out with the bathwater and your scepticism. Right?
Clare:
Yeah. So don't create new silos because you're building something that's got a malt round it of your own and ensuring that businesses are consciously and intentionally sharing the results, the successes, the failures, and somewhere they've been dialogue for it. That's all really important.
So we're at a time now. It's been wonderful chatting with you. I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed the way that you lay things down in really simple, easy-to-remember frameworks with keywords that you can refer back to think through. So I'm sure the audience really, really enjoyed this today, but if you were to leave our Women in CX audience with one nugget, a pearl of wisdom, a piece of advice, what would it be Lynn?
Lynn:
I think learning change management, how to analyse your stakeholders, positioning yourself as someone who is smoothing silos, and helping the C team to meet, and reach their goals. You're going to be as good or better off than doing the traditional CX programs if you focus on the types of things we've talked about today and become a master at influencing people internally.
Clare:
Couldn't agree more.
Lynn:
Making great experiences.
Clare:
Yeah. I think customer experience and what you talk it is one part of being awesome at CX and business has been great at CX, being able to understand and influence organisations and being able to confidently lead are these the two component parts. And if you don't have all three, people will continue to struggle and we'll keep seeing those head horrible headlines about customer experience, resources getting cut, and there is no role for customer experience in the future but I think it's a great time being around hundreds of women now who are now all sharing these stories and battle scars and helping by sharing their knowledge and insights collectively. I think it's time for a new blueprint for customer experience and I really, really enjoyed the operational organisational perspective that you brought today.
So that's it. Thank you so much for coming.
Lynn:
Thanks. It was a pleasure. Lots of fun!
Clare:
Thank you. Thank everybody who listened along at home as well. We’ll see you all next time. Bye for now, Bye.
Clare:
Thanks for listening to the Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the show, please drop us a like, subscribe and leave a review on whichever platform you're listening or watching on. And if you want to know more about becoming a member of the world's first online community for women in Customer Experience, please check out www.womenincx.community/membership.
Join us again next time when I’ll be talking to one of our community members from Australia about Employee and workplace experience capabilities for the future, see you again soon!