The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show

Today's compilation features excerpts from two interviews: Christopher McShane, SVP of customer experience at Serta Simmons Bedding, and Jon Picoult, founder of Watermark Consulting. Both my guests speak on the importance of establishing an internal system to improve employee and customer experience. These are two great conversations which dig deeply into the processes and cultural considerations needed to truly change your organization's approach to driving experiences worth having. Enjoy!

As we head into the new year, I ask that you revisit this podcast episode, where you'll find many more valuable gems from my friend, Curtis Kopf. Your business—and your customers—will thank you. In my conversation with Curtis Kopf, the Chief Experience Officer at REI, we discuss thought processes and strategies that go into navigating successful CX transformations. Curtis is a seasoned leader and CX practitioner who's worked across a few different industries during his career. He has spent time at Amazon in the early 2000s, Microsoft, Alaska Airlines, and Premera Blue Cross. Curtis definitely knows a thing or two about how to develop a customer-first strategy.

In this conversation with Matt Baer—Chief Digital and Customer Officer at the longstanding, iconic retailer Macy's—shares key insights on the importance of getting the fundamental customer experience right before anything else.

How are you taking steps to deliver what you do? Are you willing to step outside the bounds of what everybody else does? And take an ADMIRABLE action in how you do it?

In order to move from where you are, you need to all agree on where you've begun. "One version of the truth" is critical. In this episode, I share an exercise you can do with your team to start the process of understanding your organization's experience reliability.

Doing customer math rallies your team not only to ask, "Did we earn more customers than we lost?" But it pushes everybody to care about the why. Find out why in this video.

In this conversation, Christopher McShane, the senior vice president of customer experience at Serta Simmons Bedding chats with me about how he helped his team understand weak points in their operations. We spoke about a 90-Day plan he implented and how to develop a plan to improve both the employee and customer experience.

What I know is that everybody needs a little pixie dust. When you do things that are unexpected for your customers, they remember you and it bonds you to them. So I want to share some of my favorite pixie dust moments back from my days at Lands' End.

A goal map starts with the goals your customer wants to achieve and shifts your KPIs. By measuring the things that your customer cares about, it transforms how you do work. Find the show notes and more information at customerbliss.com/whatiknow.

In a recent Linkedin Live conversation, I spoke with Natalie Petouhoff, a senior customer experience strategist and business consultant at Genesys. Her previous experience includes work with brands including Salesforce, Hulu, Marriott, General Motors, General Electric, and many more. Natalie believes we can imbue technology with our hopes and dreams for a future focused on bettering humanity. Natalie addresses some of the ways this can be operationalized in a book she co-authored, "Empathy in Action: How to Deliver Great Customer Experiences at Scale." During our conversation, we discuss the notion of blind spots in leadership, and how that affects customer and employee experience.

"Connect with people as humans, get to know them a little bit personally, so that you have a connection, so that when times become tough and you've got to challenge them, they feel like they're in a safe zone to do that," says Holly O'Neill in our recent LinkedIn Live conversation. She and I discuss CX consistency, accountability and metrics, and leadership bravery. Holly's extensive career at Bank of America spans more than 20 years, which has allowed her to refine her strategic thinking in terms of understanding the big picture then digging into the important details.

In this conversation, you'll hear from two leaders who have led transformative customer-centric initiatives at organizations that have global reach: Catherine Courage, VP of Consumer UX at Google and Darryl Speach, who at the time of our conversation was Chief Customer Officer of Greystone & Company. Darryl's prior experience at Disney and New York Life Insurance gave him plenty of insight regarding people-centered work, and Catherine's experience with human-centered design and UI gave her an advantage in terms of thinking through the customer's end-to-end experience.

Today's compilation features two brief segments from Raj Sisodia, co-author of The Healing Organization and Conscious Capitalism, and Bob Thomas CCO of YMCA of the North (the Y). Both leaders speak on the importance of connecting purpose to their work. This is a great episode in which we're able to really dig more deeply into the ways you can weave humanity into your business. Enjoy!