Connections featuring Lynn Hunsaker

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:03.92)
Thanks for joining another episode of Next in Queue. Today I've got Lynn Hunsaker, Next in Queue. How are you, Lynn?

Lynn Hunsaker (00:12.589)
Fantastic. So glad to be here, Rob.

Rob Dwyer (00:15.056)
I am glad to have you. I'm just going to set the stage. I posted something about Forester's 2024 CX index. You were lovely to jump in and add some very interesting insights to that conversation on LinkedIn. And I wanted to dig into that even further. And I've invited you to

Join me here today and do that. But before we get there, for those in the audience that don't know you and aren't familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about who you are?

Lynn Hunsaker (00:59.214)
Well, sure. I actually started interviewing customers all around the country as an intern in college, actually getting my MBA at Vanderbilt University. And then I joined that same company in their strategic planning department. And I was in charge of strategic information, which included the continuation of these types of customer interviews. We were using these customer interview data in our strategic planning formula for

pricing decisions, business models, competition, you know, positioning and that type of thing. And while I became voice of the customer manager there, when they formally set up total quality management as a company wide initiative, they asked me to lead a company wide task force, which we were in like a dozen countries and similar number of product lines. So we reached consensus on how we were going to measure customer.

satisfaction and what we're going to do with it. But I learned even more in my next job, which is in California. The first one is in South Carolina. The second one is in California in the corporate quality department. And they had a near crisis about a year before I got there where the largest customer CEO said to the, our executives, there's only one reason why we're buying so much from you. It's because

They're always first to market with the latest technology, especially after our cyclical downturns in the semiconductor industry.

You're really hard to do business with and you're really arrogant and we'd rather do business with your competitors. So looking forward to them being first to market. So that was actually the beginning of the first annual relationship survey that that company did. It was called Applied Materials. They're in Santa Clara, California near San Francisco. So I became the voice of the customer manager there, the first person to take it formally. But luckily I stepped into.

Lynn Hunsaker (03:05.326)
a situation where the senior leadership team had reviewed the relationship survey results at their offsite. So they were there at Pebble Beach, you know, looking out at the beautiful scenery, the ocean, and reading through the customer comments and hating it. They said, what day was this? What was the serial number for this? Who was the interviewer? How can this be true? And so the VP of customer sat who had

just been appointed right after this critical comment from the CEO of our customer. Our VP of customer set holds up the report and says, think of this as a mirror. It's showing that you've got hair sticking out, you've got your stuff in your teeth. It's really bothering the customer. It's so annoying. You don't care about it. You don't even know about that. But you need to be aware because that's what we have to manage to.

So luckily after lunch, this group of senior leaders thought about what works in our culture. They thought this is kind of a big investment that we're doing this survey. It's even a worse investment if we lose this customer and then there's a fallout because they're the largest in the industry. And, you know, all of our customers were quite larger than us. We were twice as big as our next competitor. So, you know, we probably were arrogant and hard to do business with.

So my role was really figured out that afternoon. And that meant that I needed to go around to every account team in Asia, Europe, and so on, and every product line, and then eventually the support functions, and engage each one in their own action plan to improve what they were causing as customer experience issues. How could we be easier to work with and less arrogant?

And so when I got back from those workshops, I met with people over in HR, all the different parts, rewards, performance reviews, training and development, onboarding, all this stuff, all the people over in marketing, modeling, positioning, messaging, internal messaging. So I was trying to help them see here's what all the groups are doing and here's what customers are saying.

Lynn Hunsaker (05:26.606)
How can we incorporate this into your stuff that you give to the company to run our business? You know, so I enrolled those guys into incorporating customer experience criteria in their templates and so on. And this is really the start of customer centered business management. Right. So it's a little bit of long introduction, Rob, but I think it's so pivotal in terms of.

Rob Dwyer (05:52.944)
you

Lynn Hunsaker (05:56.718)
understanding where I'm coming from when I'm looking at reports about our industry.

Rob Dwyer (06:03.696)
Yeah, it's fascinating. And what I love about it is you have literally made a career of listening to customers and not just the surveys, which we talked a little bit about before we started recording, but really talking with customers to understand exactly what's going on. And

Lynn Hunsaker (06:28.558)
Yeah, plant tours the whole bit.

Rob Dwyer (06:30.768)
Yeah, it makes a huge difference when you invite the conversation as opposed to, right, just tell me, give me a number, give me the stars or whatever the case may be. So this Forrester report came out, the 2024 CX index, just to give people the lay of the land. Can you just lay out the high level, the

Cliff's notes of the results that came out and then we can dig into that.

Lynn Hunsaker (07:02.222)
Yeah. So I paid attention to the Forrester study, not because I'm affiliated with anything about them. In fact, the Forrester study has always been about consumers. So for example, I saw that this year's results were based on 98 ,000 consumers interviewed or surveyed in Q1 and Q2 of 2024.

So the first results were published for Australia because Forrester has their annual conference in Australia in early June. And then in mid -June, they have their annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee. And so then they did the press release for that. So the reason why I paid attention to them 10 years ago or so is in 2010, I was the first person in the world

to ever do a global benchmarking study of business -to -business customer experience practices. See, I had been following studies all along, back in the 1990s, the early 2000s, and so on, and writing blogs about that and so on. But I noticed that there was never any global business -to -business. It was always telecom in the UK.

IT in India or something like that, you know. So I did that for five years until 2015. And I was comparing my business to business results with the Forrester consumer results and other studies just to see if there really was a difference. And frankly, there's not. People think that B2B customer experience is less mature than B2C because they're asking the wrong questions. They're wondering, hey,

Rob Dwyer (08:49.807)
Mmm.

Lynn Hunsaker (08:51.822)
Are you guys in B2B doing journey mapping? well, you're immature. Are you doing this and this and that? well, you're way behind B2C. Well, that's bogus because in B2B, you already have a built -in relationship management with your customer that's high touch. If you have a dedicated sales force that handles everything, which happened in both of the companies where I was leading customer experience company -wide.

We did not have an 800 number. We didn't have a contact center. We didn't outsource it or anything. The customer relationship was handled entirely by the account team, which was the reason why it was so important for every single account team and product line and support function to get it together in preventing issues in the first place. You do not want your dedicated salespeople to be bogged down

Rob Dwyer (09:25.616)
Right.

Lynn Hunsaker (09:50.83)
firefighting stuff, right? So that's my vision. My vision for customer experience is that nobody should ever have to call customer support unless they have some kind of weird situation. A new baby, address change, a hurricane happened or a flood or who knows what, right? But it should be the customer's fault that they have to call you. It should not be the company's fault.

Rob Dwyer (09:53.968)
Yeah, absolutely.

Lynn Hunsaker (10:21.614)
Now, is it ever really going to happen? No. But shouldn't we be aiming for that? I think it would make our life a lot better. In fact, Verizon VP, one of the Regents here in US gave a presentation at the CXPA conference a few years back saying, we noticed customers calling about some mundane account stuff quite a lot. And so we created a way for customers to self manage that through a portal.

And the day before we turned on the launch button for that, we took note of how many calls have been coming in about these topics during the past month. And then the next month we compared. And it was saving some millions of hours of consumers' time, or business to business people, for that one region in Verizon for one month.

So imagine how much more we could be doing in having a, you know, just wellbeing as a person or being productive in your business if you don't have to be spending time asking for support. But back to your question, I've gotten a couple of tangents there. Back to your question, Forrester was saying that in 2020 there was a dip in results.

Rob Dwyer (11:31.824)
Yeah.

Lynn Hunsaker (11:45.262)
2022, there was a dip that brought it back to 2020 level. Then in 2023, it was lower than 22. In 2024, it's lower still. Serenity climbed and they made a graph that showed a trend peaking in 2020 and then dipping ever since to 2024. So then people seeing that on LinkedIn were in an uproar because they're not seeing that. They're not feeling that.

Right? We have a lot of customer experience awards. We have a lot of achievements going on. We have a lot of net promoter surveys and whatnot, and people are feeling good about their work and they should. And so when they're seeing some criticism like that, they're in denial, just like the executive and Pebble Beach. What day was that? Who was the interviewer? How did they do the math? That can't be right. And I think that we're.

drunk with our own Kool -Aid in that response.

Rob Dwyer (12:46.608)
Yeah, it's interesting how much effort has been poured into customer experience through a variety of different industries. And some of that is with actual customer experience practices within larger companies. And then there are all kinds of tools to be used at companies of all sizes.

I wonder if we can talk about, though, how those CX scores are derived, because I think it's important to understand what are we really talking about when we're scoring? Can you give some insight into how indexes like Forester's are scored and what exactly they're looking at?

Lynn Hunsaker (13:41.038)
Well, every single index is unique. You need to find out what was the timing that they did it. So knowing that it was Q1 and Q2 of the year, and luckily it stays that every year. So then they have, you know, kind of an apples to apples comparison year by year. But if you were comparing it to another study that was done in the fall, well, then you might have election issues going on, holiday things, weather, who knows what, right?

So comparing isn't really fair unless you've found a point of commonality, right? That was very important to me when I was comparing the business to business study I was doing with the B2C. They had a much bigger sample, but there were certain questions that were similar and so on. So, you know, I carefully was looking at the statistical aspects of what was going on there to conclude.

that there wasn't really a significant difference between B2B and B2C. So it's always important before opining or jumping to a conclusion, and so immature really to fly off the handle, right, and say, you know, this and this and that. You haven't even looked to see what exactly is this data. It seems like a no -brainer for a customer experience person. We should be data.

driven, I guess you would say data. I hate the word driven because everything's driven, but you know, we should base our opinions and advice and so on, on data. So they, they do three questions about loyalty and they do three questions about quality.

Rob Dwyer (15:22.896)
Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Dwyer (15:29.744)
Okay.

Lynn Hunsaker (15:30.99)
And the loyalty questions are the ones that we typically are more familiar with in the customer experience management realm. The loyalty questions, you know, would you do business again? Would you recommend those types of things? The quality questions are more about, did you get it right the first time? Was it reliable? You know, like kind of repeatable, consistent, things like that. So.

In fact, if you're not asking your customers those same types of questions and you're comparing your own data trend with the Forrester data trend, you really have no business making that comparison. It doesn't matter, right? Maybe you should be asking the question about were things right the first time. So if you're relying on transaction surveys from your contact center, you have to be realistic.

Rob Dwyer (16:30.576)
Mm -hmm.

Lynn Hunsaker (16:30.894)
customers bought something because they bought into your value proposition. If they needed to contact your customer's support without it being their own fault, if something happened in their life or they changed their mind, but in fact, they were actually confused by your own communication or disappointed by something that they thought was going to happen that didn't. Well, guess what? That's a customer experience fail already.

So you cannot correlate that kind of data with an industry study that's asking about did you get stuff right the first time, because you weren't even measuring that. Okay, that's the beauty of a relationship study. Annual relationship study is better than transaction surveys in many ways because you aren't collecting data too often to overwhelm your managers.

You want your managers to focus on getting to the root cause of the key issues and actually making significant changes, not just following up with people every day. It's a hamster wheel. Right. So that's what the question.

Rob Dwyer (17:42.936)
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting to me that, as you mentioned, the questions that we ask, if we're asking different questions, we're obviously going to get different answers. And so it's incredibly important, number one, to know what questions that we're going to ask and be consistent over time if we want to measure progress. But two,

Looking at different data sets, certainly from an industry standard, or if we want to look at things holistically, we can get some different ideas. But when you get down into your own business, these surveys are not necessarily telling you a lot about your business unless you happen to be included in them. And there are obviously some very specific businesses included in them.

And that actually leads me to a question that I have about the questions that are being asked. And I just want your opinion on this. Obviously, you're not a Forrester person. You don't have any influence over this. But as I understand it, they have different categories. At the top of the scale is good and excellent. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong,

wrong on this, but only one company has scored in good, one or two companies, and no one's ever scored in excellent.

Lynn Hunsaker (19:17.902)
Yeah, as far as I know, because I don't actually get the reports, but I follow what people write, right? So somebody has written an article either from Forrester or some partner or an observer or a subscriber or whatever. I follow their press releases and things like that. from what I can tell, USA was the first company to pass over the okay line. Okay. So they, they use 90 to a hundred equals excellent.

80 to 90 or 80 to 89 equals good. Okay. And then 70 to 79 is okay. Then you have 60 to 69, which is poor. And then you have very poor, something like that. So nobody's ever gotten above 90. In fact, USA got like an 81 or maybe 82. And then Chewy was down there in that same.

Rob Dwyer (20:04.528)
Sure.

Lynn Hunsaker (20:17.134)
range this year so b minus it's barely above the c plus

Rob Dwyer (20:20.784)
So here's my question on that. If the best companies in the world from a customer experience standpoint are scoring basically barely above a C grade.

Rob Dwyer (20:42.128)
Is the measurement rubric off? I mean, there are companies out there that are renowned, right? I mean, Chewy is certainly one of those that comes up all the time when people talk about customer experience and kind of what their value prop is and what they offer. And I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything bad about Chewy. And normally what I hear are people talking about how amazing they are. And yet,

Right, Chewy is not considered excellent by this particular rubric. Do you see a potential flaw in that?

Lynn Hunsaker (21:20.174)
so it takes me back to when I was teaching college, I've taught 24 college courses at San Jose State University, UC Berkeley extension, and a couple of other institutions in the Silicon Valley. And, well, there's this idea of grading on the curve, right? So you take whatever the performance was of your class on the exam and you find the midpoint, right? The median or the mode.

And then you make a curve, a bell curve, and that's how people get graded. I was never a fan of that because coming from a business career, it wasn't like that. Customers have a certain expectation and you damn well better meet it. That's how it was in semiconductors. They're very demanding and very blunt. That CEO's con...

comment was not out of the ordinary for the transparency that was in our company and in the industry. So I always, I never graded on the curve. I never believed in it. I worked really hard if my students were not hitting the mark with the midterm, worked extra hard to try to be a better teacher so I could get.

people in the 90 percents and 80 percents for the final and all the stuff, you know, the last half of the term. That's what I think we should be doing. But somebody did can criticize my comments saying that all these studies are a bunch of BS because they don't really do proper adjustments like that.

I think that we as customer experience people are focused on the wrong things. And that's why I say, I don't believe Forrester really should be changing their rubric.

Lynn Hunsaker (23:27.086)
Here's what I posted yesterday on LinkedIn, and it's got about 100 likes already. I think it's not stopped yet, but it's just a simple table with five columns. It said customer centered business, touch point management, digitalization, customer support, and customer success. Okay. Five columns, five colors.

And the example of customer centered businesses strategy is CX equals EX equals money. The investor experience, it's all the same. Who's managing that? Who's actually living that today? Hardly anybody. Is USA or Chewy? Maybe not. Should they be? Apparently, anytime that I've seen in the past few years,

Something that says customer experience is employee experience or employee experience leads to customer experience, whatever. It's like gazillions of likes and reposts and on and on. People are extremely passionate about that concept, but they're not managing to it. How on earth can you make CX equals EX when your whole world about customer experience management is actually digitalization? Or your whole world about customer experiences, customer success.

which is essentially making up for premature product launches because of the minimally viable product where you're working very carefully with product development, taking customer feedback to make sure that the product is suitable for the renewals. So you need to hit a certain quota so that you can sell your software as a service business in three to five years. That's what the idea is customer success is. So I think we just need to be brutally honest about what's what.

and what your parameters are. If your world is that one column, customer service or customer support, and you think you're doing awesome with that, but Forester's Report is saying, and I beg to differ, don't get an uproar because that's apples and oranges. Let's be honest with ourselves. It doesn't mean you don't deserve a pat on the back for the good work you're doing, the awards you're getting.

Rob Dwyer (25:42.704)
Yeah.

Lynn Hunsaker (25:52.75)
You know, the certifications and so on, that's all valid, but you're just not seeing the whole picture. You're not managing the whole thing. Every single conference, the same stuff. my executives aren't supportive. How do we get senior leadership buy -in? How do we get internal engagement? Well, that's the customer -centered management part. The customer -centered business, the first column.

That's my specialty because I was thrown into it in my two roles, strategic planning and corporate quality. I became head of the whole customer experience thing for many years. And I learned a lot about the shortcuts of how do you actually get that to happen? How do you engage everybody in the company to do something so that you're multiplying your customer experience team's value exponentially? And by doing that, you don't have to do as many

journey maps, you don't have to do as many this and this and that and all this technology purchase, which actually puts more pressure on us to cut costs or, you know, get laid, let some people off or, I mean, it's just a, it's a rat race actually by managing in these silos of customer experience management rather than having a balance across all five.

Rob Dwyer (27:15.62)
Something else that I wanted to ask you about is.

In the CX industry, equating EX to CX happens a lot, right? I know you do this. I know other people do this. It's also something that seems very real to me. But I also, and I'm going to give a shout out to friend of the show, Neil Taff. We talk quite often about

how companies behave. And you see companies making record profits over the same time period that customer experience is declining per many of the studies that are out there. And so I wonder, do we as CX leaders and professionals, are we

Are we kidding ourselves about the ultimate goal for companies, which is to make money and maybe CX and profits aren't always aligned? What would you say to that?

Lynn Hunsaker (28:36.27)
I'd say that the companies that have been creating inflation and shrink inflation, it's going to come back to bite them. You can't continue to stick a knife in the stomach of your customer and twist it and then, you know, go on and on. As soon as there's an alternative that's better than you, you're going to be history like a lot of other brands. We've seen so many really awesome brands.

They're existing anymore.

Because they had a crazy business model that was always like, you know, trying to get discounts as the leader. I don't know, making decisions that weren't congruent with what your customer's aim was. Not keeping up with changes that happen. That's tough. Because sometimes changes happen pretty quick or just pretty wildly or in a way that it takes a while to get your...

Rob Dwyer (29:30.672)
Mm -hmm.

Lynn Hunsaker (29:38.19)
head wrapped around, but it's the brutal truth. Your brand doesn't always last. But here's the thing. Some companies have increased prices or shrunk their value, shrunk the size, shrunk the quality, whatever, just because they could. Everyone's doing it. And other companies have been forced to do that, so -called forced, because they had Jenga management.

Jenga management is where you rob Peter to pay Paul. You cut a corner, you just plow through to get something out there in the market and then decide, you know, support and success can handle that. And that's the model they're following. It's going to catch up to you. I just wrote an article, which is a little long because there's so much, you know, really awesome findings that I had.

20 citations in my article for Customer Think. It's called Connecting CX and EX ROI. It's part of a five -part series of what I'm called the CX ROI Handbook. Okay. So it's written in that format like a handbook, but it was saying that employee engagement or employee disengagement is costing us $8 .8 trillion worldwide. That's from

an article published by Gallup, I think, just this year.

Qualtrics also reported in April, I think, $3 .7 trillion is the cost to companies for poor customer experience. Meaning, here's evidence from surveys they've done or studies saying who bought less after a poor experience and who stopped buying altogether.

Lynn Hunsaker (31:37.166)
Now again, a lot of these studies are about B to C. They don't really cover B to B, right? They're just looking at consumers. But there was also a report by Valid, you know, on the news, there's a Validation Truths segment that they have saying that fast food in the United States has outpaced inflation.

I think it's like 21 % higher in these past 10 years, something like this.

Lynn Hunsaker (32:15.854)
Yeah, I guess in answer to your question, I don't think that you can manage that way and actually continue to be a winner. There's a lot of brands that I didn't go to for quite a while because of the pandemic. And then now that I've gone back, you know, with a little longer time than some people, I can't stand to go there anymore. And I don't because the quality is worse. The prices are way higher and I'm just not doing it.

Rob Dwyer (32:44.272)
I think certainly the pandemic is the type of event that changes consumer behavior possibly permanently, right? And specific to some industries, right? There are, I think I'm going to go by some anecdotal evidence, but I eat out far less than I ever did post pandemic.

And part of that is, you get forced into new habits when you can't do that. And so, okay, I spend more time cooking. I know that that's a common theme for a lot of people during 2020. That was absolutely a thing. Bread making, I didn't partake, but right, all these people doing these things. And so,

Our habits change a little bit as well, but then if we do go back, right, to a fast food or a restaurant experience, and then it doesn't live up to expectations, that can reinforce this new habit that we've developed, which is I'm not going to eat out. And that leads me to asking you about expectations.

Lynn Hunsaker (34:03.79)
Yeah, that's true for me.

Rob Dwyer (34:09.264)
and the role that expectations have on customer experience because our expectations change, do they not? And what does that do to customer experience and how we manage that over time?

Lynn Hunsaker (34:28.429)
Well, you've hit the nail on the head. You really need to do expectations VOC, which is nothing more really than qualitative research or looking through customer comments that the customers have already given you. For example, you can data mine or text mine, voice mine your customer comments that have come into customer support. And in fact, if you were really using those customer comments,

to the maximum level like, hey, here's some customer comments that show us that customers are aiming for this, not for that. Let's use this as the guideline for this next market entry. Let's use this as the guideline for this next product upgrade or new product launch. Why in the heck aren't we doing that?

Why aren't we using these customer guidelines for every savings endeavor, efficiencies, process improvement, cost containment? Don't just make some kind of, you know, out of thin air decisions. Your customers are the hand that feeds you. Investors are not the hand that feeds you. Investors reinforce what customers give you.

Okay, you may actually be a startup where you're saying, well, we aren't getting sales, so our investors actually are God. Well, that's not true. It feels like it, but it's not true because they expect that you're going to get revenue. It's going to pay them back many fold. And if you don't get that customer revenue, in fact, you're actually just going out and getting more loans or more investors to pay back those investors. It's a Ponzi scheme and it's not viable. So it's just an absolute myth.

Rob Dwyer (36:07.408)
Mm -hmm.

Lynn Hunsaker (36:21.102)
that your money comes from your investors and your senior executives thinking that way is wrong. And whose fault is that? Well, it's partly theirs and the media, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times. They don't really report about this type of thing. Whenever they do talk about customer experience, it's mostly customer support, consumer, blah, blah, blah. It's really not understood at all. It's ridiculous. Business schools and so on, all at fault.

the customer experience team is equally at fault because they are not doing the expectations VOC and then supplying those insights in useful, interesting ways, showing here's a pattern. Did you know that when this is happening, it's three times more likely that this or that, whenever this happens and that follows? Those are patterns. See, data informs managers that patterns inspire managers to act.

And so it's up to us as CX people to be collecting what we already have and finding those patterns to really catch the attention and the hearts and minds of our senior leaders so that we can't don't have these continual bellyaching at every conference. you know, my executives don't get me, but their executives don't get them either. And so kumbaya and I love going to the conference, but what did you really get out of it? Spending a lot of money and a lot of time.

going to these things and really just drinking from the same Kool -Aid. Some people don't understand the Kool -Aid story because it goes back to the 70s, I guess. But anyway.

Rob Dwyer (37:56.944)
It's a dark story for those of you that are too young to know what that is.

Lynn Hunsaker (38:05.166)
So the same thing really applies to employee experience. You need to be understanding what are your employees' expectations. Stop asking, do your employees support your values? Do they understand your values? Maybe that's like a secondary question. But the main thing you should be asking is, what are your values? What are you aiming for? Why are you working with us at this brand? Why did you choose this brand for your career? What are you trying to get done? And when you understand that,

Then you can figure out what do you need to do as a management team to cater to what they're trying to get done or figure out who needs to go and who needs to stay in terms of what's a sweet spot for your management. Same thing with customers. Stop just trying to get every warm dollar, warm body or whatever you want to call it, coming in and then creating so many crazy expectations for your operations to work with.

I just saw another post on LinkedIn this week where, you know, it was like 900 likes, maybe 9 ,000. I don't know. It's a huge amount. All it was was a bunch of post -its on the, on the wall with each one saying, when you're figuring out your ideal customer profile, you need to make sure that you're figuring out what do they read? You know, where do they go? Blah, blah, blah. Okay. Right. You kind of know that, right? I mean, anyone who's actually had a class in it or.

done it for a while, you know that. But it had a gazillion likes, and I said, you're still missing the most important question. And that is, who is the right person to serve? And nobody asked that in BinsDev. They're not holding them accountable. So this is the problem with these five columns that I mentioned for a customer experience management landscape. Nobody's thinking about the entire thing. We're not spending enough time on the first column. Customer -centered management.

Because when you get crystal clear about these expectations and you do a comparison with what's your sweet spot as a management team or as a business operational execution track record, why do we keep on bringing problem people in as customers or as employees or not managing their expectations proactively or not aligning ourselves, you know, getting those extra competencies to fill the gap?

Lynn Hunsaker (40:32.398)
Instead, we're content to have a kingdom, a whole chief customer officer in charge of just the success column or just the support column. And there was a conference in British Columbia in March, the CX West Conference, the takeaway, really wonderful article written in Fortune or Forbes, Forbes it was, saying what

customer experience leaders need now is more control. We need to be able to control the entire, you know, the touch points, the entire journey. That's just, that's ridiculous. There's no way that you can actually control the whole thing because there's reasons why certain parts are in certain other areas of the company. What you need to be doing is getting crystal clear about these expectations and get everyone on the same page with that.

And there's ways you can do it. I teach it in my mastermind sessions. They're only 90 minutes. And you walk away with a gazillion ideas that you never thought. It's not more on your plate. It's just a different way of talking to people so you engage them in doing their part better, more in alignment, stopping the gaps, getting off the treadmill.

finally, I just want to say that in my article for CX and EXROY, connecting those, customerthink .com, I came across a study by OC Tanner Institute out of Salt Lake City. It's the rewards company, right? If you get trophies and stuff, it's OC Tanner. But they've done a tremendous job in studying employee engagement.

And their study talked about nimble resilience. For the companies that were nimbly resilient versus other companies, it was like 600 % more engagement, 300 % more likely to be a promoter. It was just amazing how many business advantages were tied to this idea of being nimbly resilient. Do your employees see you as that?

Lynn Hunsaker (42:50.83)
as a management team. What are the secrets to becoming it? It's in my article, because I gleaned the nuggets for my handbook. And this is what I think that you can do if you're focusing on the expectations VOC for your employees and your customers and finding the connection and zeroing in on that. You use that to shape all of your decisions for how you do your ideal customer profile.

how you do your performance reviews, your whole metrics set up, your whole strategies, right? Every single group being aligned with your core customers' expectations, being aligned with your high potential employees' expectations. And what I don't mean like expecting this tactic and that tactic. I'm talking about their ultimate aim. What are they aiming for? How do you get them to get what they're really after? Okay. And you figure out the rest as you go.

So that model, as I've posted on LinkedIn, has also gotten about 300 or 400 likes in total, different posts I've done. So it's a hugely popular idea that CX equals EX equals money, but there's hardly anyone actually talking about it. I was reading through the Gallup reports, the Shurm reports, Society for Human Resource Management, all these articles that you could glean for

maybe putting into the CXROA handbook article. And hardly anybody was actually doing something new about customer engagement, employee engagement. It was always the same stuff. Well, the HR onboarding and the HR, this process and that process. Whereas what I saw, Gallup said in May, 2024, 70 % of employee engagement is dependent upon their direct supervisor.

Same thing I saw in 2021 when I wrote a similar article about trust in customer think. Every single level of management, top management, middle management, lower management, independent managers of independent contributors. Every single one said that they didn't feel that their direct supervisor really respected them, really awarded them or trusted them. Well, that hasn't gone away.

Lynn Hunsaker (45:19.758)
been the same thing in 2020, 2021, two, three, four, and what's going to change. I think that OC Tanner Institute has the right idea with this nimbly resilient concept. If we're nimbly resilient, it means that we're paying attention to expectations proactively and making our organizations and our people able to quickly pivot as needed.

to meet the changing situations. And if we're that, we'll never go out of business.

Rob Dwyer (45:57.808)
You hit on a couple of things, one of which I want to dive into, but I just have to say like investing in your leaders so that they can become good leaders is so critical. And probably the one thing that a lot of companies just don't do enough of that is a really relatively simple thing for them to do. Like find the time.

find the funds, and invest in your leaders because you're absolutely right. The employee engagement is mostly, how do I feel about my direct supervisor? And that goes every step of the ladder up. One of the things that I just want to ask when you talked about ideal customer profiles, and this is probably easier to do in a B to B

setting than a B to C setting depending on your sales channels.

Do companies not say no enough to non -ideal customers because they're looking at, hey, this is a revenue opportunity. And then, and then we have a difficult time meeting expectations because we should have said no, but we didn't. And we went ahead and said, yes, I'll provide this service. And we just go that route. And it's like, well, but you're really not the right fit.

Lynn Hunsaker (47:08.686)
Yeah. They're desperate. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Lynn Hunsaker (47:21.742)
Exactly.

Lynn Hunsaker (47:32.718)
Yeah, I attended a conference put on by a Customer Gauge in Silicon Valley a few years before the pandemic and Adam Dorrell, the CEO gave a very interesting presentation called Acquisition Addiction. So acquisition addiction is the idea that you're just continually acquiring because you're continually churning.

Rob Dwyer (47:59.056)
Right?

Lynn Hunsaker (48:01.198)
Most accurately, you're churning plus you have negative word of mouth out there that wasn't ever coming to customer support or loyalty program or whatever. It's just out there and it's damaging your marketing and sales. It's diluting all that, right? Plus you have huge costs in customer support, especially even more now because all the technology buys.

And now you have voice of the customer, technology buys and everything else, all these different digitalization, touch point management, which is basically your user experience, your engagement, endeavors and so forth in your support and your success, right? So all these silos of customer experience management actually adding a tremendous amount of cost that marketing and sales has to work harder month by month to hit a higher quota.

to satisfy the investors because investors want to see a continual upward trend, never flat, never lower. So the Jenga management is always going to come back and bite you. It's tremendously expensive. He actually calculated that the cost of churn in the United States for that one year was bigger than the gross revenue of Alphabet.

Rob Dwyer (49:03.376)
Yeah.

Lynn Hunsaker (49:26.446)
Google or Apple. It was actually bigger than a couple of countries combined, you know, European countries and so on. So that was very eye opening. I think that we are perpetuating a cycle that's stupid. We need to get off the roller coaster or the merry -go -round and...

get an alignment, like I said, the expectations alignment, and find a way to socialize that across the entire company so people are more aligned. It's these silos that are killing us.

Rob Dwyer (50:03.76)
Yeah. Well, Lin, you have given us a lot to think about. For those who have stuck around all the way through this and want to dig into some of these articles that Lin has referenced, just go to the show notes. You'll find links to those where you can learn even more about some of the topics that we've been discussing. But there's way more in there. There are things that we didn't even have a chance to get to today.

that I found intriguing. So I encourage everyone to go check out particularly this article you've got on customer think. There is a lot going on in there and it gives you something to think about. So Len, I want to thank you for joining Next in Q today. If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?

Lynn Hunsaker (50:57.294)
Well, probably LinkedIn is the easiest, just Lynn Hunsaker, linkedin .com slash n slash Lynn Hunsaker. You can always go to clearaction .com. Just think about seeing clearly what needs to be done and then taking action. So clearaction .com is my website and I'm always glad to talk with people.

Rob Dwyer (51:17.744)
Great. Well, we'll also have those links in the show notes. Lin, thank you so much for joining me today.

Lynn Hunsaker (51:26.158)
It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the invitation, Rob.