Is experience management the new customer experience?

Episode topics

• 0:00 - Introduction
• 1:10 - What is driving the shift from CX to experience management?
• 2:47 - Why must employee experience be given equal priority to customer experience?
• 6:13 - How does experience management put humans at the center of everything an organization does?
• 8:33 - What makes experience management different from a single CX program?
• 10:06 - How can CX leaders implement experience management?
• 13:24 - Why do organizations need a framework for experience management?
• 21:09 - How can organizations measure experience management success?
• 30:47 - What role does customer feedback play in experience management?
• 33:46 - How will the evolution of experience management impact the future?
• 35:42 - Conclusion

Transcript

[00:00:00] Robert Zirk: Imagine you've called customer service. (tones of phone dialing)

[00:00:03] Have you ever sensed that the agent on the other end genuinely wanted to help but was hampered by clunky technology and siloed information?

[00:00:12] Customer service representative (on the phone): I'm so sorry for the wait.

[00:00:14] Robert Zirk: A great customer experience doesn't happen in a vacuum. You need people, processes and technology to deliver it.

[00:00:25] Our guests today challenge you, the CX leader, to shift from thinking about customer experience in isolation to the holistic view of experience management. Along the way, they'll share practical insights on how to operationalize an experience management approach throughout your organization. So today on Questions for now, we ask: Is experience management the new customer experience?

[00:00:58] Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital, where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

[00:01:10] Robert Zirk: For Ian Golding, founder and CEO of Customer Experience Consultancy and author of Customer What? The honest and practical guide to customer experience, experience management, or XM, represents a shift in approach.

[00:01:24] Ian Golding: This year, actually, I am going to very overtly change the way I articulate what I do as being not just about customer experience, but about experience management in general.

[00:01:39] Robert Zirk: It's a significant shift for Ian, a CX practitioner for more than 30 years who's built his career around customer experience. He emphasized that the customer experience is enabled by the real people who work for your organization — and their experience matters in the same way.

[00:01:57] Ian Golding: From day one, when I started to do all of this stuff, the way I would describe customer experience is that it represents everything an organization does that enable its customers to interact with its products and services. And every single employee has a role to play in the delivery of that experience in some way.

[00:02:18] It's only in very recent times — literally the last six, seven years or so — that people have even started to talk about employee experience in anger, so to speak, but employee experience is still very undefined. There are very few organizations that are actively thinking about the experience that their people are going through and connecting that to the customer experience.

[00:02:47] Robert Zirk: In a Harvard Business Review survey, 55% of business executives said they recognize customer experience success is only possible with a great employee experience. Yet, in that same survey, only 22% are prioritizing the employee experience among their organization's top five investments.

[00:03:08] Ian addressed this disconnect, reiterating that, for brands to succeed, employee experience must be given the same amount of thought as the customer experience.

[00:03:19] Ian Golding: The most customer-centric organizations on earth have always believed and known that you can't deliver great customer experiences until or unless you're delivering great employee experiences. The way you make your people feel is the way you want your people to make your customers feel.

[00:03:38] Robert Zirk: As Richard Bledsoe, vice president of customer experience innovation at TELUS Digital, points out in a recent article on contact center fundamentals, "If you can get employee experience right, you can get customer experience right." Ian mentioned that, historically, the hospitality industry was ahead of the curve in recognizing the value of the employee experience, citing the Ritz-Carlton as a prominent example.

[00:04:03] Ian Golding: There are a small number of organizations outside of the hospitality industry who have understood that concept. And it makes perfect logical sense.

[00:04:15] But how many actually do it? How many want to have an intentional approach to doing it? Right now there is no formal definition of what employee experience is. There is no "Employee Experience Association", there is no qualification for employee experience, it's just something that is talked about but is not yet defined.

[00:04:39] Too many organizations think that employee experience is about the onboarding of employees. That is not what it means, in my view.

[00:04:49] Employee experience is about exactly the same as customer experience. It represents the entire relationship that an employee has with an organization, end to end, from before they work with you to the point that they decide not to work with you anymore and everything that happens in between.

[00:05:05] Doing the right thing for your people will mean that they are happy in their work and, as a result, they will keep your customers happy.

[00:05:15] Robert Zirk: A Gallup survey on employee engagement not only reveals that engaged employees are more reliable, more dedicated to quality, and more focused on safety, but that business units with high levels of employee engagement outperform others by 10% percent in customer ratings and 18% percent in sales increases.

[00:05:35] A great employee experience delivers clear benefits, but Ian cautions that leaders should look to implement changes methodically and thoughtfully.

[00:05:43] Ian Golding: Like customer experience, it is not going to change overnight. And so whilst you need to be sincere and transparent, you also need to be realistic. You need to ensure that your people are part of it.

[00:05:57] With customer experience, too often it's being done to people rather than with them. Employee experience, it's even more important that this is done with them.

[00:06:07] Robert Zirk: So what is experience management and why is it beneficial for leaders to adopt this mindset?

[00:06:13]

[00:06:13] Ian Golding: Experience management is all about putting the human at the center of everything, creating the discipline and capabilities required for humans to deliver experience to humans.

[00:06:30] Humans are not just customers. Colleagues are humans too. Technology is an enabler in that. It's a capability that will ensure that the human remains at the center of everything that you do.

[00:06:46] I'm not suggesting that all CX professionals change their title to XM professionals. That's not what I mean, but what we need to be thinking about is the broader experience, not CX alone, but how we can bring all of this together.

[00:07:02] Robert Zirk: In speaking with Ian about his desire to speak to us about experience management, he recommended we speak with Diane Magers, founder and CEO of Experience Catalysts, and co-author of Experience Rules, the Experience Operating System (XOS), and 8 Keys to Enable It. And she agreed to share her insights with us on the show.

[00:07:22] Diane Magers: My goal here is to give you some hows and remove some obstacles.

[00:07:26] Robert Zirk: Diane recalled a time, early in her more than 25 year career, when customer experience was only just emerging as a discipline and how the difference in how leaders perceive CX could lead to much different outcomes.

[00:07:39] Diane Magers: We talked about the customer experience as a way to really begin to understand and measure the impact we were having because we knew that if we had positive impact that it was going to increase the value to our customers and therefore the value to the brand.

[00:07:54] Over time, however, I kept hearing people refer to it as "the program", "my program", and I talked with my leadership about it and they said "We don't think about it as a program, we think about it as a way of life. And if we do this right, that we're going to embed it in what we do." Ironically, that became my shift to experience management.

[00:08:14] Now, experience management is — I don't care whose experience it is, could be the shareholder or the board or a supplier or employees, importantly — we need to have that same rigor around those experiences because that ecosystem needs to be cared for, and so all those experiences are important if the brand is going to be successful.

[00:08:33] Robert Zirk: It's the difference between a single program led by a CX team, and the holistic discipline of ensuring great experiences for every stakeholder of, and within, the organization.

[00:08:44] And for that to work, Diane emphasizes that everyone in the organization needs to take ownership.

[00:08:51] Diane Magers: if you were putting on a play on a stage, you would have to have the music. You would have to have the props be ready. You would have to have the outfits. You'd have to have the actors know their lines. All those things would have to happen to make an experience come to life.

[00:09:04] It's no different for an organization. It's just not a muscle they have, typically. It's an art and a science to not only pull together the data and do the personalization, but also how you change the way the operations work in an organization and how this gets embedded into your product innovation. It gets embedded into the way you serve, how you build systems, how you market, how you sell. All of those pieces and parts of the organization have to adopt this in a way that's going to make it just the way we work around here. And so the importance of that is moving the organization forward and having a plan on how you do that.

[00:09:44] Robert Zirk: A TELUS Digital survey, in collaboration with Statista, revealed that 31 percent of CX leaders identified the silos between channels and teams as the biggest obstacle in achieving their CX goals.

[00:09:56] Ian stressed that the responsibility for experience management can't be contained in a CX department silo. It needs to be embedded throughout the organization.

[00:10:06] I asked Ian to clarify what role CX leaders play in the implementation of experience management strategies.

[00:10:13] Ian Golding: A CX professional's responsibility is to improve the ability of the organization to meet the needs and expectations of customers. You cannot make that happen without brilliant people, without great technology, without processes being aligned to the customer journey, so many different capabilities that need to come together.

[00:10:38] The CX professional is not responsible for all of those things, but what a CX professional has the ability to do is to put in place the rigor, the structure to enable the organization to understand what capabilities will enable experience management in general to have that impact on the customer, the colleague, and ultimately the shareholder. And I use shareholder very broadly because this applies obviously as much in non-commercially generating organizations as it does commercially generating ones.

[00:11:17] Every single stakeholder, from shareholder all the way down to frontline employees, support functions, everyone in the organization collectively are bringing the experience to customers. Customer experience is the responsibility of the entire organization. It always has been, it always will be.

[00:11:43] Experience management is a broader term that actually makes it possible to ensure that everyone understands that what they do is impacting experiences in some way, either for the external customer or for internal colleagues or for both. And so, we need everyone to have that common understanding of the role they play in delivering experiences.

[00:12:15] Robert Zirk: Ian views each role of every employee and stakeholder as a link in a chain representing the customer experience. If one link doesn't hold up — in this case, because a stakeholder doesn't understand how their role contributes to the success of the overall chain — the chain will break.

[00:12:33] Ian Golding: There are shareholders who don't realize this. So they are making demands of CEOs that are not in the interests of customers, of colleagues. And actually, whilst they think it's going to make them more money in the short term, it will actually negatively impact the sustainability of the business in the long term. So if they don't understand their role, it all falls apart. So that is for me the one major principle that everyone needs to understand. We all have a role to play. And if you don't know what that role is, that is a problem.

[00:13:10] Robert Zirk: One of the biggest challenges Ian highlights is that he's seen many organizations adopt a short-term approach to experience management, with a greater focus on delivering numbers and volume, rather than the engagement that leads to positive outcomes.

[00:13:24] Ian Golding: The theory is easy to understand. What is difficult is understanding how to operationalize that theory so it embeds itself in the way the organization works. To operationalize it, what cannot happen is organizations relying on their people to just do it. And what I mean by this is many organizations think they're delivering great experiences, but actually what they're doing is delivering experiences by accident.

[00:13:59] They are relying on the goodwill of their people to do whatever it takes and concluding that means that they're great at delivering customer experience. The problem is that only works if every single employee can be relied on to do whatever it takes and it doesn't matter what the organization is, you are not going to have 100 percent of your employees who feel that way, who will operate in that way. What that means is that, for the customer, it's a lottery. It depends who you interact with as to what the experience is going to be.

[00:14:35] Robert Zirk: And the lottery of who you interact with isn't just something the customer experiences.

[00:14:40] Ian Golding: It's also a lottery for the employee because it depends who their boss is, because if you've got a boss saying, "I don't care, just hit the numbers," then, if you're a particularly empathetic person who wants to do the right thing, but your boss is saying, "Don't care! I don't care how you make them feel. Just do it." That immediately causes a problem.

[00:15:00] Robert Zirk: So to foster team member engagement, leadership needs to ensure its values are clearly defined and in alignment with your organizational culture.

[00:15:09] Ian reinforced the need for organizations to develop a framework that outlines the intended experience while clearly defining everyone's role in supporting each touchpoint.

[00:15:20] Ian Golding: This is why I am obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with the need for organizations to have a framework, a structured approach that embeds itself into the way the organization works.

[00:15:35] There are many frameworks out there, but if an organization doesn't have a framework supported by a good governance model, clearly defining who is accountable for the different elements of the framework, from my experience over 30 years, it is exceedingly likely that the approach to customer experience will not sustain itself.

[00:16:01] Robert Zirk: And Ian reminds leaders that adapting to an experience management mindset isn't something that can be achieved and crossed off a to-do list, but rather an ongoing process. It requires a mindset of longevity and persistence, even as leadership and external factors change.

[00:16:20] Ian Golding: It's not a finite thing. It is about changing the nature of the way the organization works forever. And for legacy organizations to transform from product, sales-led businesses to customer-led businesses typically takes six to eight years.

[00:16:39] Now, what organizations need to then think about? "Okay, six to eight years." How many CEOs are in place for six years? So you're trying to adopt an approach, in better way of working, that takes a long time to bake into the organization.

[00:16:57] And if you've got a leader who thinks this is the right thing to do and starts that journey but then leaves and the person that replaces them has a completely different opinion, it all goes away again. And this is something I call the customer experience bungee effect because they've been talking about this for years, but it never seems to improve. They focus on it for a period of time, then there's a restructure, there's a change of leadership, there's a change of strategy and it all stops again.

[00:17:29] Unless your organization is prepared, and committed to sustain the focus on this in the long term, it's going to be very difficult to make this customer-centric ambition a reality.

[00:17:44] Robert Zirk: Diane has seen CX leaders implement some of the building blocks that support experience management principles, but notes that many face challenges in making those processes repeatable.

[00:17:55] In her book, she introduces the experience operating system as a framework to address these challenges.

[00:18:02] Diane Magers: We sometimes create our own issues because we are not being consistent and cohesive. One of the things I always tell people is, "Ask what happens five steps before the customer gets to you? And what happens five steps after they get to you?" So if you're building a chatbot, are they coming in from a different channel? Have they already looked on your website for the answer? What if it's not there, and then they have to go to chat?

[00:18:24] You have to be able to see the ecosystem because it's much like a sweater. When you pull one thread, pretty soon it continues and then it starts to deteriorate and then you've got a hole and then the hole gets bigger. If you don't have it buttoned up, designed, blueprinted, it becomes very difficult for people to understand what they need to do to be a part of that cohesive blueprint.

[00:18:47] It's like any blueprint. If you were building a house, you wouldn't have four different contractors — you might, but at least you would have a blueprint and a plan. "And here's the products we're going to use. And here's a sequence of things we're going to do." Organizations need that structure and they might have it in their silo, but they don't have it across the board.

[00:19:04] So that's one of the things when you think about the operating system, This ability to really embed experience management into the rhythm of the organization, into that DNA, into your operations allows you not only to put that view in place, but keep that view in place. It makes it so that you don't do these things in silos. You're working toward the right problem to solve. It just becomes the way things are done around here.

[00:19:32] Robert Zirk: Diane shared an anecdote about an organization where changes to the experience were being made without considering the voice of the customer, design or established baselines.

[00:19:42] Diane Magers: So we went to the PMO office, the project management office, and said, "Hey, you have stage gates people have to go through as they go through the project, right?" They're starting out. They need funding. They need a business case. They need to prototype, prove where they're headed before they launch.

[00:19:59] And what we found in going through that was there was nothing about the customer in any of those stages. They alluded to it a little bit, but it didn't say specific things like what's the customer evidence? What are your baselines before you measure? What are the current baselines against what's happening today? And how are you going to measure this experience from a value to the customer and a value internally, like a true business case around a change to the experience? Or, as you go through design, did you have a cross-functional team in the design? Have you checked with all the other channels' owners to make sure that the experience has been tested from their perspective? Have you used rainy day scenarios? What if this doesn't work? Or what if the website fails? What's the alternative? So that we're caring for that experience and we're embedding that to make sure, before a project goes forward, that's cared for in the experience.

[00:20:50] So when I say operationalization, that's what that means. It's just embedding it into the way you work so that people are accountable to that.

[00:20:57] Robert Zirk: Diane acknowledges that, while it can be difficult to implement new processes at first, everyone in an organization stands to benefit from the operationalization of experience management.

[00:21:09] Diane Magers: What happens is when they realize when they do those things, the product is better, it gets adopted faster, you've got alignment across the channels, there's not all this churn when it gets launched, launch is smoother, better adoption, better outcomes, they go, "Oh, we're going to do that again." So they begin to do it organically and that becomes, when you think about the Googles of the world or Sherwin-Williams or any of the brands that you admire, that's how they do it.

[00:21:34] It is not an additional thing. We have to care about CX.

[00:21:38] Robert Zirk: And the experience operating system Diane outlines in her book can help leaders to distill experience management principles into an action-oriented plan.

[00:21:48] Diane Magers: The operating system helps because it becomes something that's very tactical and not a theory or a framework or a concept.

[00:21:55] "I don't know what to do to be more experience-led. I think I'm doing it, but can you help me with, like, give me a checklist, give me something that says this is what we need to do." So aligning the organization is important. I believe that part of what the organizations are facing today is they are trying to be very agile and really don't have a roadmap for how they're going to align to be agile, and I don't mean agile from the practice. I mean Agile just in keeping up with change.

[00:22:23] So let's have a plan. Let's work the plan and be very specific about who, what, when, and where to align the organization to drive toward those goals because without that, you can't make progress. The rapid change is just accelerating the dysfunction. So if we don't solve it now, we're not going to be able to move forward.

[00:22:42] Robert Zirk: Technology can play a key role at different points of the experience, enabling team members to provide faster, more accurate customer experiences. But Ian cautions that, often, technology is leveraged without understanding how it impacts the customer journey.

[00:22:59] Ian Golding: Experiences are delivered through three organizational layers, the customer journey, process and technology. The customer journey has always existed, but there are still organizations to this day that don't even know they have one. Processes were created and implemented usually when an organization was created, so without knowing there was a customer journey, and very few organizations are revising their processes. So what that means is if you underpin the customer journey with everything that the business does every day, you'll have a realization that those two layers don't align, because the processes were put in place without knowing what the journey was, and the journey is constantly changing but processes stay the same. And this is why, very often, processes are crossing over each other, they're duplicating, that there are things that customers do where there's no process at all.

[00:24:01] But it gets even worse when you get to the third layer, which is the technology layer. Because like process, most organizations bought, designed and implemented technology without knowing there was a customer journey. So what most organizations did historically was they buy the technology, they put it in place, force processes into it and customers would get whatever they get. And that is still happening, right? It's happening right now with AI.

[00:24:30] Technology has to align to the journey. We shouldn't be trying to force customers and processes into the technology. What needs to happen going forward, and it always should have been the case, is you cannot start with the technology and work upwards. You've got to start with the journey and work downwards so you can better understand what technology you need that will better enable processes to do what your customers need you to do. So the need for understanding the customer journey is more important than ever before, but as a capability, many are mapping journeys not really understanding what I've just said, so that they're creating pretty pictures, but they're not really understanding of what they're supposed to do with the journey and how they're supposed to manage it.

[00:25:24] Robert Zirk: When CX leaders approach journey mapping, it's crucial to consider the entire experience. By mapping out an end-to-end journey, you can effectively highlight areas that need improvement, and identify the right combination of people, processes and technology required to deliver excellence at each touchpoint, as we do for our clients at TELUS Digital.

[00:25:46] This holistic approach to journey mapping can lead to significant improvements in customer satisfaction, retention and employee engagement metrics.

[00:25:55] Diane shared an example of a B2B software as a service provider that has aligned people, processes and technology in a way that ensures everyone is working together toward the common goal of an exceptional customer experience.

[00:26:10] Diane Magers: They bring together a group of people around employee, customer, brand, digital that coordinate their efforts and are influenced by each other so that they're building and they're cohesive in their messaging and their approaches and their design methodology and how they use data. So when we start to see those types of behaviors where people are working around and through all of these opportunities we have today, like AI, that tends to bring people closer and it creates less of this silo effect, which everybody struggles with, and more about how they're going to move forward.

[00:26:50] On the same bent, they're working on their brand itself, the brand experience, and what they want to be known for and how they want to be referred to in the marketplace and how they want their customers to feel and the value that's getting created for them. So much to that fact that they actually are looking at all their different types of customers within one of their clients: the decision maker, the purchasing agent, the person who administers and then, of course, the user and understanding the value that they're creating for them and what their targets are. And they're bringing that back to say, "How can we help that client and all the customers within it to achieve their goals? And how do we track ourselves to ensure we're holding ourselves accountable to make sure they get the value out of the product and the services that we offer?"

[00:27:39] Robert Zirk: When it comes to measuring the business impact of experience management, Diane notes that there is often an over reliance on tracking scores rather than articulating the business value of the experience.

[00:27:51] Diane Magers: The experiences people have drive business results. So you can think about any of your own experiences with a brand, whether they're good or bad, and you can probably equate an experience to you felt something about that experience, right? It was either "I'm truly angry or frustrated with what's going on," or "That was really easy. That was really wonderful." And human beings organically gravitate toward good experiences, but they actually spend more time avoiding bad experiences in human behavior. And so what we want to create is that way that if I am bringing people on board with great experiences, then they're going to buy more, they're going to refer us more, they're going to expand their product or relationship with us, they're going to stay longer. That impacts the business results.

[00:28:36] And so we often also find that organizations who can't tell the business case around experience changes for employees or customers often aren't able to make that traction or get that traction that they need because they're not really talking the language of the leadership. Leadership's talking about revenue, cost, profitability. And we're talking about Net Promoter and effort score. So there's a bit of a disconnect there.

[00:29:03] Robert Zirk: She referenced a past role with Sysco Foods, a logistics company that was looking to transform its experiences, and described how she worked with the leadership team to understand how the value generated by improved customer experiences directly influenced the company's business metrics and results.

[00:29:22] Diane Magers: One of the most critical components is I talked with each of the leaders about what they were trying to accomplish, how they build their business case, how dependent they were on employees and customers changing their behavior as a result of what we did. And I became best friends with the tech person and the CFO. The CFO, who has the ear of the CEO, was able to help me understand how to build a good business case and what I needed to do to bring the leadership along with "CX equals revenue" and not "CX equals Net Promoter Score".

[00:29:56] So it was very evident as we began to build out new experiences in this enterprise transformation that I started talking about costs and profitability and revenue. And I think it was a little surprising to them that, "Oh, we didn't really figure that's what it was. We thought it was just about building better systems or having different services." And so once we started to tell that business case story, the internal story changed and it forced me into doing that.

[00:30:21] Robert Zirk: A report from PwC shows that brands that focus on delivering top-tier experiences to both customers and employees can justify price premiums of up to 16 percent on their products and services. Diane reiterates that CX practitioners will have greater success in winning further investment when they can tell a story with measures that directly align with revenue, savings or productivity.

[00:30:47] Diane Magers: So if I can reduce the number of calls into a care center by using a chat, I'm going to avoid cost. If I can improve a process internally and help an employee do the work by giving him better data that took him five hours to find before and now it's down to 20 minutes, productivity and responsiveness to the customer. So there's this dual, "Hey, we're more responsive to customers. That's a benefit, but internally we're also making them more productive."

[00:31:15] That's where I started to build much stronger, richer business cases. So when I went to get investment, it was like, it's a no brainer cause it's going to yield all these things. If you're telling the business case story and people see the benefit of you're building collaboration, you're helping the organization work quicker, more agile and be focused more, rather than 20 investments, it's two or three. And you're bringing that business value and talking about employee and customer experience and process improvements all in one bucket, who's going to argue against that?

[00:31:46] Robert Zirk: And while measurements can be helpful for investment internally, Ian advises leaders to capitalize on customer feedback as a means of transparency and building trust. He notes that many brands are slow to act on feedback that they receive from customer surveys and this represents a missed opportunity. Instead, by operationalizing customer feedback, brands can tell the story about how they're not only listening but acting on what customers are asking for.

[00:32:17] Ian Golding: The best example I've ever seen anywhere in the world of an organization doing this well: Tata Steel, in the U.K., this is, it's a B2B. Once a year, they survey their customers, capture the feedback, analyze the feedback, create an action plan and then produce a video that explains what they found out, what they're going to do about it and the video is sent to every customer.

[00:32:43] Why doesn't every organization do that? That is best practice. That's what we need to be doing. And that's where you develop a relationship with your customers, where they know that "They really care. They mean it."

[00:32:55] Robert Zirk: Research from previous Questions for now guest Shep Hyken, in his Achieving Customer Amazement study, indicates that 67% of customers refused to complete lengthy surveys, and 23% said they would stop doing business with a brand altogether if there were too many survey requests.

[00:33:13] Ian Golding: We've got to a point where most consumers are not completing surveys now. "What am I going to do that for? What's the point? It's a waste of my time. Half an hour? You want me to give up half an hour of my time?" So you've got to show them that you're actually acting on it if you want them to give up their time to make your business better.

[00:33:32] Robert Zirk: Looking toward the future of experience management trends and what customer experience will mean to organizations, Ian noted that the speed at which CX changes as a discipline represents a continuous need for learning and adaptation.

[00:33:46] Ian Golding: Every year new methodologies come in, new approaches, new techniques, and we need to be open to all of those things to help organizations, shareholders, colleagues, customers have a better experience. As soon as we stop learning, that's where it all comes to an end. So the future of CX is undoubtedly technology-led, undoubtedly at the moment through AI, but what we've got to understand is not how can AI replace the human, but how can AI and other emerging technologies better enable our humans to deliver the experience to customers. We need a more mature understanding of the capabilities behind experience management for that to be effective.

[00:34:44] Those who just throw technology at their organization are not the ones that are going to succeed. It's the ones that align that technology to the customer journey and, ultimately, to the employee journey, they are the ones that are going to win. Because not only will they save a huge amount of money by eliminating things that colleagues shouldn't have to do, taking pain away from them that will then enable their colleagues to spend more time focusing on the things that really matter to the customer, developing those stronger, deeper relationships that will last a lot longer. And the better you manage the experience, the more likely it is that you will develop deeper relationships with customers over time.

[00:35:33] Robert Zirk: And for leaders who may not know where to start in operationalizing experience management, Diane encourages them to approach changes step by step.

[00:35:42] Diane Magers: Oftentimes when people say, "I don't know how you do that," it's just one step at a time. You're turning the light bulbs on everywhere all the time. And eventually people start to see the benefits of doing that. So you really do have a different position.

[00:35:55] Yes, you bring information in. Yes, you have all those skills, but every time you have a design lab, every time you're bringing data, you have to bring things with it that help them really use it and learn it. Insight generation techniques when you're bringing the data. Help them understand how to read it and use it. A journey mapping or a design lab. Tell them they're learning design thinking techniques. This can help benefit. Use these techniques in other parts of the organization. You really have to not only just serve it up and have activities, you have to think about how it's moving everybody forward.

[00:36:34] Robert Zirk: Thank you so much to Ian Golding and Diane Magers for joining me and sharing their insights today. And thank you for listening to Questions for now, a TELUS Digital podcast.

[00:36:46] For more expert insights on today's big questions in digital customer experience and beyond, be sure to follow Questions for now on your podcast player of choice to get the latest episodes as soon as they're released.

[00:36:58] I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all... for now.