 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runways here at Moffett Field. Really cool place, a lot of fun toys and gadgets that I have not got to play with yet, but I got to do before I leave. But the conversation today is really about customer experience. We had a small panel this morning of experts talking about customer experience. What does that mean? How do we do a better job at it? And we're excited to have an expert brought in just for this conversation. She's Annette Franz, the founder and CEO of CX Journey. Annette, great to see you. Thank you, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Absolutely. It's been a fun morning. What did you think? What were some of your impressions of the conversation this morning? You know what, it's always great to sit in a room with so many people who have been living and breathing this customer experience journey. And so it was great to hear what Comcast is doing. It was great to hear from some of the other folks in the room, what are some of the latest trends in terms of data and technology and where customer experience is headed. Yeah, it was awesome. So customer experience, it's a little bit over. It's almost kind of digital transformation in a little bit. Everyone's like experience, experience, experience. And that's a big complicated topic. How do you help customers really kind of break it down, make it into something manageable, make it into something they can actually approach and have some success with? Yeah, so I spent a lot of my time working with clients who are brand new to this field. I had a former boss who said that they can't even spell CX, right? That's a problem. Yes it is. So yeah, so I go in there and I really listen and understand what their pain points are and what they need help with and then get them started on that journey. Basically soup to nuts CX strategy work. We typically start out making sure that the right foundation is in place in terms of the executives, that they're all aligned, that they're all committed to this work. The culture, we've got the right culture in place. We've got some feedback from employees and from customers of what's going well and what's not. And then from there we dive right into a phase that I call understanding. And that's listening to customers, listening to employees, developing personas so that we can really understand who customers are and who our employees really are. And then also journey mapping to really walk in their shoes to understand the experience that they're having today and then use that to design a better experience for tomorrow. So there's a lot of work that happens upfront to make the things that we talked about in there this morning happen. What's the biggest gap? Because everyone always talks about being customer centric and I'm sure if you talk to any CEO, of course we're customer centric and we see it with like Amazon, Andy Jassy and that team is just crazy hyper customer centric and they execute it with specific behavior. So what's the part that's usually missing that they think they're customer centric but they're really not? Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head with the word execute, right? So there's a stat out there that's been out there for forever and we know it. Every single company, every single business interviews or surveys us to death, right? So they have all this great feedback but they do nothing with it. They just don't execute, they just don't act on it and they've got such rich feedback and customers want to tell them, hey you're doing this well but hey this is not going so well so please fix it because we want to continue doing business with you. And so yeah, it's about execution. I think that's one problem. The other problem is that they focus on the metrics and not on actually doing something with the feedback from the experience. Do they just ignore it? Do they not have the systems to capture it? Are they kind of analysis paralysis? You just said they have all this great data and they're not doing anything about it. Why? Yeah, it is that too, analysis paralysis. Let's just beat the numbers to death and what's the quote about beating the number until they, beating the data until it talks kind of thing, you know? Don't know that one. Something I know I've just messed that up. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. But yeah, they don't have the system in place to actually then take what they learned and go do something with it. And I think a big part of it, and we talked about this in the room this morning too, was around having that commitment from the top, having the CEO say, listen, we're doing this and we're going to, when we listen to our customers, we're going to act on what we hear. So, but they don't, they don't have that infrastructure in place to actually go and then do it. Right, it's pretty interesting. You have a deck that you shared in advance, eight principles of customer centricity. Yes. And eight, three are people. People before products, people before profits, people before metrics. That sounds great, but it sounds contrary to everything we hear these days about measure, measure, measure, measure, measure, right? It's human resources. It almost feels like we're kind of back to these kind of time motion studies in trying to optimize people as if they're a machine as opposed to being a person. Yeah, well, it's not because we have to, the way that we think about it is we have to put the human into this. That's what customer experience is all about, right? It's about putting the human in the experience and it's interesting that you bring up that deck because when I open that talk, I show a commercial from Acura and it's, if you've never seen it, it's called The Test. If you can Google it and find the video and it's really about if we don't view them as dummies, something amazing happens. That's the tagline, right? And so it's really about people. The experience is all about people. Our business is all about people. It's why we're in business, right? It's all about the customer. It's for the customer and who's gonna deliver that? Our employees. And so we've got to put the people first and then the numbers will come. Right. Another one that you had in there I just have to touch on was forget the golden rule. Which I always thought the golden rule was, he who has the gold makes a rule. You're talking about a different golden rule, which is really treat others not the way you think they want that you want to be treated but treat people the way that they want to be treated. It's such a small nuance but it's so important. And I love this example that I share too. I just recently read a book by Hal Rosenbluth called The Customer Comes Second, right? And to most people, that seems counterintuitive but he's really referring to the employee comes more first, which I love. And the example that he gives is he's left handed and he goes into a restaurant. He frequents this restaurant all the time. And until I read the story, I never even thought about this and now that I go to restaurants I think about this all the time. The silverware is always on the right hand side but he's left handed. So this restaurant that he frequents, the waitress, he always seemed to have the same waitress. She caught on and so when he would come into the restaurant she would set the silverware down on the left hand side for him. That's treating people the way that they want to be treated and that's what customer experience is all about. Right, one of the topics that you talked about in the session this morning was the reputation in that service experience is really defined by the sum of all your interactions. And it's really important to kind of keep a view of that that it's not just an interaction, it's many, many interactions over a period of time. That sounds so hard to manage and then there's also this kind of the last experience which is probably over-weighted based on the whole. So how do people keep that in mind? How do they make sure that they're thinking kind of holistically about the customer engagement across a number of fronts within the company? Well you've got to think about it as a journey, not just touch points, not just a bunch of little touch points because if you think about just the last experience or just a touch point then you're thinking about transactions. You're not thinking about a relationship and what we're trying to get at is customer relationships and not just transactional. It's they're in, they're out, they're gone, right? But we want relationships. We want them to be customers for life and that's the only way that we're gonna do it is if we focus on the journey. Right, but about the challenge of that which was special suddenly becomes the norm and we talk a lot about kind of the consumerization of IT because as soon as I get great results on a Google search or I find exactly what I need on Amazon in two clicks and then to take that into whatever my B2B or B2C application is when now those expectations are not being driven by what I promise to deliver but they're being driven by all these third party apps that I have A, no control of and they're probably developing at a faster pace of innovation that I can keep up. How should people kind of absorb that, deal with it and try to take some lessons from that into delivery of their own applications? Yeah, so you brought up two things there which I want to address the first one too which was about the delighting customers. But to answer your question it's really about focusing on your customers and your customer's needs and that's why I talk a lot about customer understanding, right? It's about listening to your customers. It's about developing personas and really understanding who they are, what their pain points are, what their problems are, what needs are they trying to solve or problems are they trying to solve and then walking in their shoes through journey mapping and that understanding allows us to design an experience for our customers, right? For our customers. If we don't solve a problem for our customers they will go elsewhere and they'll get their problem solved elsewhere, right? So I think that's really important. The first part of your question was our point was around delighting our customers and you're absolutely right. We don't have to delight customers at every touch point. I know that's counter to what a lot of people might say or think but to your point once we delight at every touch point now it becomes the new norm. It's an expectation that has now been set and now delight, where does it stop? Delight is here and then it's here and then it's here and so it's a whole different, so my thinking on that is that most businesses cannot delight at every touch point and they certainly don't. I think we need to meet expectations and the only way that we can do that is to listen and to understand and then act on what we hear and most businesses are still very primitive even when it comes to that. Right. Okay, I'll give you the last word. Okay. What's the kind of the most consistent, easy to fix stumble that most customers are doing? When you get engaged and you walk in, what's that one thing that you know with 90% confidence factor that when you walk in this is gonna be one of these three or four little things that they should stop doing or that they should do just to get off the baseline? Yeah, I think it's, you know what? I think it's a combination of sort of speed and responsiveness. I'll give you an example. I won't name the company, but I thought, man, in this day and age, this shouldn't be happening, right? It was a company that I contacted. I was supposed to set up an account and they, and I couldn't for, it just wasn't working. I tried different browsers, just wasn't working. So I sent them an email. First I tried to call, but I got stuck in IVR hell and then I sent an email and the email that I got back was an auto responder that said we'll reply within five business days. I know, I should have. I'm like, really? Why didn't you just ask me to send a fax, right? So that's the kind of stuff that, seriously, when I saw that email, I was like, really, in 2019, we're still responding in five business days. That's just ludicrous. So I think that's one of the, and it doesn't cost anything to respond in a timely manner and to respond at all, right? You know, here it is. It's been, I haven't heard from them yet. So it's been like seven days now. So it's been like seven days now. So there's that. And next time just tweet at the CEO. I'm going to, yes. Hopefully the CEO tweets, it maybe doesn't tweet. I know, right? Yeah. Well, and that, you know, not the bad opportunity for you because this is not an easy, it's not an easy thing to do. It's hard to stay up with people's expectations and to drive new and innovative products when they don't necessarily even know how to engage with those things. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the field is wide open because like I said, there's still so many companies that are still just trying to get the basics right. So, absolutely. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and thanks for participating today. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. She's in that. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.