The Vital Link Between Customer Experience, Employee Experience and Culture – The Augie Ray Interview

As a marketer much of my career has been focused on what Peter Drucker famously said was Marketing’s primary responsibility – “To create a customer”. Inevitably, as digital channels and applications became more vital in the marketing toolkit, the term “Customer Experience” birthed a myriad of new specialties and a host of new experts. No one would argue that a great customer experience was a vital component of whether you could attract and retain a customer. And a poor experience was how you’d inevitably lose one. My fascination with this topic has only deepened as many in my LinkedIn feed, and my other interviewees, call out that executing on – or failing at – great Customer Experience requires an organizational culture that does more than see the obvious value of this investment. It requires a culture that acts and makes hard, tough, often expensive decisions to genuinely put the customer at the center of the organization. I reached out to long time LinkedIn buddy Augie Ray, Vice President/Analyst Customer Experience at Gartner, to get his perspective. If you’re familiar with Augie, and you should be, you know that he holds nothing back. In this interview he was wonderfully brand consistent. Enjoy our chat below.     

HB: Augie, the intersection of Customer Experience, Employee Experience and Culture has been a frequent conversation in my LinkedIn feed for several years. As the most prolific and opinionated LinkedIn connections I have on the topic of Customer Experience I’ve been keen to interview you for a while. Delighted you could make the time and share your perspective.

AR: <Laughs> Prolific I’ll take. Opinionated? Well maybe but Customer Experience is certainly a topic I’m passionate about and have dedicated much of my career to.

HB: That’s a great segue into my first question. Can you give my readers a top line on you and your career? Perhaps specifically where CX became a focus or passion of yours?

AR: I blame Tom Peters frankly. Or more specifically his famous book “In Search of Excellence” which had a great impact on me. I immediately set my sights on going to work at the type of companies Tom referenced in his book. This was around the time the internet entered the business mainstream and I immediately saw it as a game-changer.  

The internet was going to change how people accessed information and the way they worked with brands, and the way we’d offer products and services. Initially I spent time at marketing services companies doing banner ads and SEO because, at the start, that’s what you did online. Then along came social media, and I got really enthused about that too. Again, this was going to change everything. It offered more transparency and an ability to lower barriers between brands and people. Sadly, I was disappointed again because I saw these technologies as a real opportunity to build a genuine relationship with customers, not just be a vehicle for more clicks, more eyeballs and more sales. Sales is obviously vital to any organization but the ability to really listen, learn and adapt to a customer's needs – a Voice of Consumer orientation – that’s where the opportunity truly lies.

I see this as a very simple Venn Diagram of where the business and the customer intersect. Specifically, around what’s good for both parties. Sure, I could give everything away for free – good for customers, not so good for the business. Equally I could exploit, lie and scam customers too – good for the business (in the very short term), not so great for customers. The intersection is where loyalty is earned and nurtured because both sides “win” and see the relationship benefit. For 30 years that’s what I focused my attention on and helping organizations deliver that experience.

HB: Tough to argue that Venn Diagram. Obviously the ability, or the desire, to deliver a great Customer Experience requires the organization to prioritize that in their strategy but also in their culture. Is that how it plays out in your work?

 AR:  I certainly agree with you Hilton. Unfortunately, what I see so often is that our CX discussions start because clients come with a tactical challenge. My conversions are low. I’m struggling to acquire new customers. I need more leads. I’ll sometimes joke and say if those are your CX challenges, what’s your Marketing team doing?

That’s where defining CX has always been important for me. Definitions help align teams – especially executive ones – around what CX really is and why investing in it is so vital.

At Gartner we define it as delivering customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

The point being we don't do that simply through project work or through digital improvements. Succeeding at this requires everyone in the organization to be more aware of customers and what the customer needs to be make better decisions.

That’s what we refer to as a customer-centric culture.

If it isn’t embedded, truly and deeply, in the culture then all you’re doing is running tactical projects.

HB: That makes perfect sense and I agree with the embedding it into the culture. That’s always been the sticky point in my experience. The often-large gap between what organizations say and what they do or deliver.

AR: Exactly right Hilton, which is why, at Gartner, we talk about CX and CX Management as two sides of the same coin. But they are two quite different things.

If CX is about delivering customer satisfaction, loyalty & advocacy then you could argue that it’s the responsibility of everyone in the company to do that. We all know that when something is everyone’s responsibility, then it’s no-one’s. Sure it sounds great to say that everyone needs to do everything to help satisfy a customer, but we aren’t really expecting the receptionist at headquarters to field customer calls and resolve customer issues are we? Again, definitions help, in my opinion, because they remove ambiguity.

Here’s Gartner’s definition of customer experience management - customer experience management is the discipline of understanding customers and deploying strategic plans that enable cross-functional efforts and customer-centric culture to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Okay it’s a mouthful but the key phrase is discipline in my mind. A focus on discipline means you’re building something scalable, something keenly measured, monitored and refined and something that is the accountability of someone to own and to improve. It would be lunacy to say lead conversion is everyone’s responsibility – no its Marketings – or that everyone is responsible for customer complaints – nope that Customer Service or Customer Success. To get CX done right, someone has to be accountable for the discipline – you have to have one throat to choke on CX.

Who that person, or "one throat", is at your organization makes for some of my more interesting client conversations. I’ll tell them repeatedly that somebody's got to be responsible for delivering on it and held accountable and blamed if it goes wrong and cheered if it goes right. That clarity of accountability and responsibility is so vital, particularly in large corporations, but without it I don’t think you can say you’re truly a customer-centric organization.

HB: Again, an excellent point on accountability. Ironically culture can suffer from the same “it’s everyone’s job and so it’s no-one’s job” reality too. Talking about customer experience, or employee experience, as being critical to an organization’s survival seems like a statement of the absurdly obvious. No-one will ever say customers aren’t important. Yet the horror stories and lawsuits continue.

Why is the gap between rhetoric and reality still seem so wide?

AR: Excellent question and one I wish I had a silver bullet answer for. There are some obvious ones I think we’d all agree on. Short-termism and being tied to a 90-day business cycle is one I’d suggest.

Customer experience is an investment today in a favourable outcome tomorrow. Satisfying a customer so they stay with your company over the long haul.

If you’re perpetually asking for the immediate ROI of CX then you’re not truly bought into the concept. It’s likely your people, processes and culture aren’t genuinely customer-centric either.

 Not to overly romanticize CX, but I think the leaders and the organizations that have a long-term vision for the organization – not just a maximizing shareholder value in the immediate term – are more likely to build truly customer-centric organizations. Jeff Bezos and Amazon famously held off being profit focused for several years as he built out an organization where customer experience was vital in how the organization operated. From my own experience, USAA is another organization with a similar member or customer experience obsession. In the USAA case, they’ve some luxury because they’re not a public corporation with stock on Wall Street, but there was no debate among that organization’s leadership that CX is a critical aspect of their long-term success.

The other factor that defines whether organizations are being customer-centric and doing CX right is around what the organization focuses on and what they measure. We try to delineate between attitudinal loyalty and behavioural loyalty in our client conversations. Behavioural loyalty is the easy one because its typically actions you can take to the bank. Deals closed (or lost), leads converted (or lost), market share gains (or losses) and so on. But these are lagging indicators because I only know I have them when the deal or sale is concluded.

That’s why I urge clients to focus on attitudinal loyalty which is a leading indicator of future purchase. NPS as a metric is certainly not infallible, but if clients are truly holding someone to account for measuring NPS vs Sales over time, you’ll start to see interesting correlations. Are we seeing attrition or retention of promoters or detractors? Is our margin capture across both groups different? Are we seeing that a lift in NPS correlates to a lift in sales or more margin deals? Again, without someone being held accountable for measuring and tracking these leading and lagging indicators, we’d never know.

Lastly, and this is an obvious one. People do what you pay them to do, not what you tell them to do. Again, that directly correlates to culture in my mind because it impacts how people make decisions or behave inside your organization. Call center utilization rates are the classic example of this. Measuring or promoting people based on call-time is the obvious one.  If you staff only for low call volumes, it only takes one product recall or collapse of your streaming service or ticketing engine to have hundreds of customers on hold listening to terrible music and a voice saying “Your business is very important to us. We’re experiencing higher than normal call volumes” These are classic choices and trade-offs but in customer experience work, you get what you pay people to do.

HB: So, against that backdrop, how do you tell organizations to start making the changes that will make their company and their culture more customer centric.

AR: An obvious one, and quite elegant I think, is to ask your people what’s getting in their way. What is impeding them from being customer-centric? It can be a system that’s not integrated into another system. It can be a process of approvals or escalations that makes quick decisions impossible. It can be a lack of information on what they can or cannot offer the customer as a solution. Some of those are often invisible to management or have grown 

The other, and this might be an unpopular view, is that there needs to be a balance of accountability and autonomy. Many conversations I’m involved in include discussions about democratizing decision making and pushing that all the way to the frontline employees. I get the appeal, and it certainly beats hamstringing that person who is dealing with a customer with piles of permissions and paperwork, but it’s a balance. Apple or Amazon wouldn’t have democratized decision making and been as successful in my opinion. They needed a Jobs or Bezos setting the course and the vision. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, leadership is the critical component. Leadership willing to visibly show, and role model, what customer-centricity means inside the company. Leadership that establishes some clear guardrails but gives some flexibility in how those are actioned.

Lastly, and this shouldn’t be a shock, but look hard at your hiring and talent practices. Customer service is, in many ways, an attitudinal thing. You can hire wicked smart people but if they aren’t team players or don’t relish helping other people out, then they’re not the sort of people who will have a customer-centric way of behaving. I share the story of a financial services client who did a deep dive into the employees who succeeded at their firm two or three years after they’d been hired.

The data showed that people with a prior hospitality background tended to thrive more than those from a financial services career. That hospitality attitude endeared those employees to their colleagues and to the customers they interacted with. Sounds obvious but I wonder how many organizations do the deep analysis on their employees and hire and promote accordingly.

HB: In our conversations you’ve spoken fondly about USAA as an organization that really got many of these fundamentals right. Can you talk a little bit about the organization and some of the things you learned there that others could consider implementing themselves?

AR: Of course, happy to. USAA is a unique organization in that it is focused on US military servicemembers, veterans and families and their financial needs like insurance, banking and retirement. The organization isn’t publicly traded, as I mentioned previously, so that does give them tremendous leeway in what they prioritize, the investments they make and the culture they’ve nurtured over the years. They are a classic “member owned” organization which, intuitively, means they’re more customer centric.

The USAA example really begins on your very 1st day with their onboarding or orientation. You don't start on the job. They don't just throw paperwork at you. It's a four-day deep orientation of what it means to work at USAA and to serve the people who have served their country and their families. Honest to God, I mean this truthfully, there wasn't a day in orientation where I didn't have, at some point, tears in my eyes. One moment stood out for me – and this is going back 13, 14 years and I still reflect on it. A service woman called into USAA from the Middle East to thank the company for saving her from losing her home. She was overseas and another bank was foreclosing on her, but USAA stepped in to help her refinance and save her home. She said through tears that she’d lost friends and people under her command, and she just couldn’t stand to think of losing her home, as well. So the impact of what we were doing there was made crystal clear from Day One and, every day after that, the culture reinforced it.

Another example which stood out for me, remember this is an organization solely focused on the military, was the “service” orientation of the employees. In one instance, we were given a persona of a service member about to be deployed overseas to a dangerous spot in the world. We were asked to consider a number of questions. The obvious ones were around the emotional side of deployment, but we rarely think about all the pragmatic questions, and that was eye-opening. Did the family still need two cars? Were any kids going to college while the family member was deployed abroad? Do family members know where all the important financial documentation can be found?

What all those moments and examples did was instil a deep pride in the work we were doing and a real eagerness to go help the USAA service members we were serving. That vision-based orientation at USAA something was so impactful it changed how we approached every interaction with our members. That’s how you get a truly customer-centric culture and organization. 

HB: Love those examples Augie. In closing I always ask my guests for the advice they’d give their peers – or clients – who are trying to build a customer-centric organization and culture. What advice would you share?

AR: Sure. I’m going to go quite high-level because getting into the specifics of CX management isn’t where I think executives need to put their attention initially.

First – listen more. We talk a lot about survey fatigue and how often we ask customers for feedback. I think we do a great job of asking and a poor job of listening. Listening, in my mind, is the art of deciding what actions to take from everything you’ve heard. And we need to do that just as much internally with our people too. As I shared earlier, listen to what’s getting in their way to help customers. The fatigue part is quite natural when the people you’re asking – customers or employees – don’t feel like you’ve truly listened to their input. Show that you’re listening.

Second – use your data wisely. We’re swimming in data, but most organizations still lack the means to interpret that for insights that support their customer centric ideas. If you’re the CX leader – the one accountable for the CX success of the organization – you need to deftly show how investments in building (long term) relationships with customers drive business success. Show the link between how the business is perceived by customers and business results, and you escape the narrow short-term discussion on ROI. If your customer conversations are solely around ROI, then I’d humbly suggest you’re not truly committed to customer-centricity.

Third – emphasize and demand collaboration across your organization. I said earlier that if customer success is everyone’s job then it is no-ones and I stick by that. However, CX does require a healthy and deep collaboration across all the moving parts of an organization. I tell clients that a customer-centric organization is one where everyone feels like they’re a hero for the customer. That feeling is important, but it needs to have structure – like governance and accountability – to make it really sing.

HB: Solid list Augie and, as I suspected, a great number of parallels with culture. I appreciate you taking time today to chat with me. If we don’t chat before the Holidays, my very best to you and yours.

AR: Thanks Hilton. Always a pleasure. My best wishes to your family too.

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