Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 5 Episode 3 - Sustained Employee Engagement with Shane Goldberg

Christopher Brooks' Customer Experience Superheroes podcast series explore the mindset, skillset and behavioural strengths needed to be a CX leader today. We discuss with experts in their field the superpowers needed to be among the elite achieving success from customer centricity. 

In this episode we catch up with Shane Goldberg, lead CX consultant at CustCore Ltd,  Melbourne, Australia. Shane is responsible for guiding clients through customer transformation programmes. In every instance he has recognised the importance of engaging employees who are a few steps removed from directly interacting with customers.

In discussion with global CX specialist, Christopher Brooks, the CX Superheroes podcast host, Shane generously shares ideals, ideas and practice advice for embedding deep rooted employee engagement. He talks about how to engage functions such as legal, finance and production, often overlooked with CX focussing on service and operations. And how to sustain that engagement. 

By listening, you will benefit from advice taken from several case studies and hear learnings from experts such as Colin Shaw and Nate Brown shared in the discussion. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome to the ship, customer experience, the podcast here, so we explore the characteristics, behaviors, and quite needed, the leaders in customer experience today. In conversation with experts covering a range of different areas of customer experience, we discover what those superpowers are. In this episode, we catch up with Shane Goldberg, principal consultant of US Corps in Australia. In this episode, Shane helps us understand how important it is to get your people to understand the role they play in delivering excellent customer experience.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

So we are here today speaking to Shane Goldberg. Good morning, Shane. Good morning. Good morning. Well, it's good afternoon for you, isn't it? We'll come to that in a minute. But thank you so much for joining us on the CX Superheroes podcast. Shane, we're going to talk about a really important topic today, which is about kind of getting your staff connected with the topic of customer experience. But before we do, you and I came together, kindly put your hand up very early on to become a captain for the Customer Experience World Games. Outside of that, you've got a very successful CX practice in Melbourne, Australia. So would you mind introducing yourself for the uh the listeners, please?

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Yeah, sure. So uh yeah, Shane Goldberg has mentioned, I run a company called Cust Core Consulting in Melbourne, Australia. So it's actually good afternoon, as you said. So we do customer experience consulting, everything from strategy development through a lot of customer insights work in interviews and surveys, a lot of process design and transformation, service design, and then more and more sort of cultural change and those sort of activities. Had Cuscor for years. Before that, I worked in a big telco here called Telstra uh for 12 years, uh, doing everything from product management to process improvement, and then finished in there and leading a big customer experience team. So I got my hands dirty in a big corporate and then left and set up my cut my own consultancy.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Excellent. So you started life in product?

SPEAKER_02 2:27

Product management, yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Right, so it's a different sort of perspective. Quite often you find people in CX come from service or marketing. But I've I've found actually if you have uh people who have come from change management or supplier or product management, you have a very different perspective on things. Have you found that?

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Yeah, I have. Uh as you said, most people that are now in customer experience have got that customer service background. Um, product management definitely gives you a different perspective, it gives you a more well-rounded perspective, I think, because you need to understand everything around financials and customer and everything like that when you're a product manager.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

And I and I do find if you come from a kind of service or marketing background, then people quite often feel that what they're doing is figuring out how to sell customer experience. You know, it becomes something you sell to customers. And I think if you're if you're in if you're in product or change or operations, it's actually something you provide to customers, which is a very small word, but a very big distinction. What's your view on that? Do you find customer experience is something that should be sold or is it actually something that's just should be done for customers?

SPEAKER_02 3:37

I think it's definitely something that should just be done. It should be part of the inbuilt culture of the company. They shouldn't have to sell it, it should just be something that people do because they really want to do it and they understand it and that they know why it's so important.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

We're in a time where we have a rush of digitalization because it's become almost the the only way to communicate and contact with many customers. And there's a a lot of talk about the importance of people in frontline interactions, but but we're going to go into the business. You want to talk about the importance of people in the business. So, do you want to do you want to launch this topic for us?

SPEAKER_02 4:19

Yeah, one of the things I've seen with many clients is that they kind of view customer experience as we need to improve the way our people interact with customers. When they are talking about that, they're talking about their frontline people. So people in store, people on the phones or live chat or something like that. What they actually forget is that behind those people and behind their website are other people. The work those people do is really important around customers and customer experience as well. So you talked about digital, for example. So the people that actually design the website, create the website, all those people need to have a customer perspective and a customer focus. Otherwise, the website's going to be terrible to use and customers won't use it. People in finance need to understand how what they do impacts on the customers. People in human resources need to understand. Every single group has an impact on either the customer directly or on someone that's serving the customers. And if that goes wrong, then those people serving the customers can't do a great job in actually dealing with the customers and giving them a great experience. So it's a perspective I've had for a while. It's one I share with many clients and one many clients struggle with, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Do you think there's quite often, as you say, sort of a rush to let's find the things that need fixing for our customers and just an assumption of it when we get there to fix those things, everyone will naturally think about them from the customer's perspective?

SPEAKER_02 5:53

Yeah, I think it's definitely a topic that is generally not approached, or if it is approached, it's a scary topic for many leaders. As you say, they often approach customer experiences, let's fix some processes or do some training or something like that, something tangible. What they really struggle with is let's change the mindset of our people, because that's really hard to do, but it's really, really critical. And it's it's scary for many leaders, especially leaders that have come up the ranks from, as you say, customer service or operations or anything like that, where they're really practical. Changing the mindset is a scary thing for them, and it's hard, so they avoid doing it. But I've I've had too many programs with clients where they make process changes and things don't actually change because the mindset hasn't changed.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

And and you talk about departments we're talking about here, ones that just well, unless unless you design it so they can, they'll never interact with the customer, such as finance or or legal, or um compliance, or or so how how do you engage those types of individuals in the value of customer centricity?

SPEAKER_02 7:03

I do a lot of work around what I call line of sight. That's not a term I created, it's in certain parts of customer experience, around getting them to understand their line of sight to customers. And what I mean by that is how what they do impacts indirectly on customers through those people that do serve customers. And it's doing a lot of work with them to understand that and to go into practical examples of how they impact on that sort of thing. So, for example, finance. Um, I've done work with the finance department in the past to understand how the finance decisions they make impact on contact centres of the company. And if they don't make the right decisions around the contact centres in terms of finance, then the customer experience is terrible.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

Someone was telling me that customers had a terrible experience when it came to refunds. And the reason was that finance, um, because it's it's kind of money and it's balanced in the books, when the organization was smaller, they they managed the refunds because they did them sort of manually. Now they're a much bigger organization, that responsibility still sat with them, but they treated it as an accountancy task that they had to do. And so the experience for the customer was just absolutely woeful. And and you know, so that the initial thing was, well, let's take it out of finance and give it to someone else. But uh, the person I was speaking to said, actually, why don't we try explaining to finance as almost as you know their line of sight so they can understand? And of course, they had the ideas. Well, you know, the ideas in terms of the improvements weren't the um ownership of uh people who are frontline, they they came up with a perfect solution for it. So to your point there, you've just got to help them understand the consequential impacts of their actions.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Another good example often where finance has control over a really important function is billing. I I've seen a lot of examples where finance do oversight billing, and and in some cases they do it really well, but in some cases not so well. But as I said, it's not just finance, it's any of those back of house roles or admin roles or people roles or or legal, as you mentioned. Lots of examples where, especially in B2B, legal make the customer experience really difficult, especially for new customers, because they make contracts really long, really complicated, really hard to sign up, all of those sort of things.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

And and I and I know certainly from working in the insurance sector and working with um the marketing teams and the legal teams, being independent of either, what became very evident was the concern legal had the marketing would oversell the policy. So therefore they needed to make sure it was belt and braces and they were covered. The customer didn't come up at all in any of the conversations. And you just realize if you know that voice of the customer is typically thought of from the frontline perspective, as you say. If you can get that voice of the customer to the back office, there's no reason compliance and legal and finance won't make the right decisions either. So uh so so how do you I mean is that is that an idea? Is getting the voice of the customer to those departments the the thing to do, or are there other things, Shane?

SPEAKER_02 10:09

Getting voice of the customer to those departments is really critical. And there are smart ways to do that. It depends obviously on the industry and the market and the company, but the way I've done that in the past is to get actual emails or survey feedback from customers and actually just share that with those departments and put in a process where they actually go through that every month, for instance, in team meetings or things like that, just so that they can hear the customer and in some cases actually hear the customers because we do call recording and those sort of things, um, so they can actually hear and see the customers. Other ways to get them to understand the customers more is to actually get them to go out to the front lines and spend some time with the front lines. Uh, that can be quite confronting for some of those people that may never have actually dealt with a customer. But I know, for instance, when I was in Telstra, I was in one of these teams. Uh, we don't I wasn't actually customer facing, but we were in the operations team at one stage of my career, and we actually went out to one of the contact centers. I actually got on the complaints line and dealt with complaints for half a day. That was really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

That interaction, it drives kind of a deep memory, doesn't it? It creates a connection. And I can imagine you probably, even if you were to kind of close your eyes, can still hear that customer's voice in your head, which, if you're a customer service rep, you won't be able to do that because you deal with customers all the time. But if you're working in the back office, those are really important moments for you that you you give you a chance to connect with a customer. Is that something you sort of encourage in the program work you do then to try and bring the back office staff into kind of either audio connection or physical connection with customers?

SPEAKER_02 11:54

Yeah, definitely. As much as possible, I encourage all my clients to think about how they can get anyone in a corporate center or back of house or whatever it is, more in front of customers. And it doesn't have to be directly dealing with customers, it can be um partnering with someone that does, so you like going into a contact center and doing audio jacking so you can hear the calls and those sort of things as much as possible. And one really important point is to get leaders to do it, so it's not just the team members, but the actual leaders of the groups. And I mean, I've talked about these backer house teams or admin teams. The other group that's often not quite far away from customers is the really senior leaders of a company. Um they may have come up the ranks and dealt with customers in their past, but it's often been quite a while since they've done it, and they're in their ivory towers in some cases, and haven't dealt with customers and actually spoken to them for a long time. So I work a lot with senior leaders to get them back out into the channels.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Great. And and you know, sort of how do you do? I mean, I've come across things like customer councils before where the senior leaders have customer information presented back to them, but it's quite putting customers into the room. Is that connection important or can you do it just with a with a report?

SPEAKER_02 13:12

You can start it with a report, but that's not the same as you say of actually having customers in the room, actually talking to them, as I'm saying. Uh I've I've had a couple of projects where the CEO and their leadership team have actually, with encouragement, decided to call customers and to speak to them about how things are going. Sometimes it's to respond to complaints, but not always. Sometimes it's just to speak to them, to talk about how things are going, what can be improved. And that has made such a difference to the way they think about how they actually manage the company, what they focus on, what they prioritize, everything like that.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

That's probably one of the most critical things, isn't it? Because if in the the town halls and the narrative that they're uh sharing with their their staff, if they can reference that interaction or paraphrase what customers have said, it creates such an important recognition that it's okay. We we communicate, we talk to our customers. And I I I think yeah, you you can't do that as you say if you kind of come off a report. I do remember uh because you jog my memory, someone telling me many, many years ago this was about an idea they ran, which was uh the board met in one room, they had a customers meet in another room, and they discussed the same topics. Obviously, nothing kind of you know, uh financial, nothing sensitive in there, but big things in there. The the the group who are running it then swapped the results over to each of the other groups in terms of the decisions that were made, and then they got together afterwards for for drinks. To their surprise, both groups actually pretty much gave the same answers, which which really helped the the board. And I think it was because I remember now that it was of some animosity that the board members were like our customers just wouldn't understand our business. So they proved yes, they would. They'd understand why you make decisions that you make, and it then created this really comfortable connection between the cut the senior leaders and the customers, which I thought was a a smart initiative at the time. A brave one, but a smart one.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Yeah, and it's a really interesting point, and that is a really smart initiative. And it's interesting to me how many clients I work with where the board or senior management are scared of customers, if I can put it that way. Yep. They actually are really worried about customers, don't really want to talk to them in case they're annoyed, that sort of thing, which is to me very strange, but I've seen it multiple times, so it's not a one-off.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

I've got a friend who's now a senior marketing director. We went out for uh dinner and he said, Oh, I'm into a focus group tonight, but I left myself a bit short, so I didn't go. And as we got talking, he didn't leave himself short, he didn't go because of imposter syndrome. So he he was he was actually worried that the customers would say, You don't know what you're doing. He was actually, you know, to your point scared was is the right word. And I just thought, I couldn't believe it. You know, he'd sit there talking to me about the strategies and everything else that they were thinking of doing, and it was very impressive. But the idea of standing in front of a customer and saying I'm responsible for the marketing really did make him feel quite uncomfortable that he couldn't do it. And we sort of agreed it was this imposter syndrome. I think some of it is that, isn't it? It's kind of it's just my god, real customers. Um, what do we do?

SPEAKER_02 16:24

Yeah, exactly. No, you are right. That imposter syndrome comes up in lots and lots of places. I think it's that. I think it's also that they are a bit worried about actually being held accountable in certain cases.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Yeah. Well, I think as customers, we assume whether we're talking to the CEO or we're tweeting um on social media, I've got a gripe it'll be dealt with now. And uh, you know, the the idea of landing uh and I think this is where um helping everyone understand the value of experience is so important because you know if you say to the CEO, I'm unhappy with this, you it's a bit like on the the the politicians on the doorstep, like we'll sort that, and then you know, when there's a policy not in place to change it, you're frustrated. But actually, worse than that is when a policy is put in place to change it, and then everyone is affected just because the the CEO didn't want to um lose face.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

That is a good point, and one of the things to be wary of sometimes with getting, especially senior leaders, to talk to customers, just something to be aware of is not jumping at every single issue that comes up. It might be a one-off issue and it causes a whole lot of work to solve where there's other priorities. So it's important for the leaders to talk to customers and to have the right process in place to prioritize what to do with the feedback.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

That's great advice, Shane. So we've spoken about leaders, we've spoken about some of the more functional back offices, and I can imagine that when you come in and run a program, all of these are component parts that you you make sure are covered, which I think, in fairness to you, a lot of others don't. They dive into the journey maps and they dive into the fixes and the improves. What about when you've left? How do you make it sustainable? How do you create that kind of deep-rooted natural way of thinking about customers throughout the organization? That's a bit of a big one. Sorry about that, Shane.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

No, that's a really good question. It's one of the huge challenges because if you can put in place as many processes that you want and it ties back to the culture. If you can't change the culture and make it really customer focused, then any short-term changes you make will just go back to what they were prior to those changes if you haven't changed the culture. That's why short-term improvement programs, I don't think, work. Real changes in customer experience take a long time because you have to change the culture. And culture is a big term, and lots of people talk about culture. But what you actually have to change is what we're talking about, the focus on the customer from people. It has to be ingrained in people that any decisions they make or anything they do, they've got to at least consider the customer and what the impact will be, as well as considering obviously business outcomes and people outcomes and everything like that. If that's not ingrained in people, then as soon as a consultant leaves the room, they'll go back and change back to the previous behavior, and that consultant will be coming back in a year to change things again.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

So here's an interesting question for you. When you were originally in product, did you think customer? Does it in the back of your head? Do you think customer or have you sort of developed that capability as as you've developed your career?

SPEAKER_02 19:27

I maybe thought a tiny bit about customer, but not a lot.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

But it was there, it was it was there.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

It was there, but it wasn't a big focus. I've built the customer focus in my career. I'm not sure how much you know about Telstra, but Telstra a while ago went through a very big customer experience transformation led by David Thhodie, who was the CEO at the time. There's a lot of people I've spoken to, including myself, who that was actually a career-changing experience because it made us just ingrained thinking about customers all the time. It was life-changing.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

The reason I asked that is because I'm thinking about from a HR perspective, you get to the point where you recognize a lot of staff who fully get this now, they're on board, their first thought is to be customer-led, but you end up with a group of staff who who, for whatever reason, it just doesn't matter to them. So from a HR perspective, can you recruit people who have that small amount of customer consideration from the outset? So, yeah, so I guess my question on this one is you know, can you can you train it into people or is it is it something you naturally have to be part of your kind of your DNA?

SPEAKER_02 20:38

I think it's actually both. I I actually encourage a lot of um HR departments to recruit for customer focus because it's a lot easier to bring someone in that has or that already has a customer focus than it is to train it, but you can train it. Um and you can train it as long as you're training it as part of a broader change program. If it's just if it's just a training program, that won't work. But if it's a part of a broader cultural change program, I I've seen that work. But if you can hire in people that have customer focus, that works done for you, and it's much, much easier. And to your point about you'll always have these people that just don't think about it or don't get it. I mean, that's true, and that's common with all change programs, and that's really where you either need to make a call, do you build the processes and leadership and capabilities around those people so that they have to be customer focused, even if it's not ingrained in their psyche, or do you move them on?

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Uh Nate Brown talks about it in terms of the the fence, you know, the the in or out sort of sitting on the fence, and uh um there is a group there that sort of sort of will will fall out. I I was uh overhearing uh Colin Shaw the other day, and he was talking about the importance of that initial induction. Those first few days with new employees being so important in terms of their understanding of the value of customer centricity. Have you found in the programs you work with that working with the HR functions is really important?

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Definitely. And Colin's right, induction of new employees is so critical around getting this right and including customer focus in there, but specifically including the customer focus in the way the company or the organization wants them to focus on customers because customer focus, like culture, is a big broad term, but there are different ways that different organizations want that focus to show up, and you've got to ingrain that in your new people and get that right. Because once they get out into the wild, they'll learn from other people which may not have that focus or anything like that. But if you can get to them at the start, they'll have that right focus from the start.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Excellent. So, Shane, if you were to bump into someone who's going through a customer transformation and they're kind of they're they're saying it, we're doing all the right stuff, you know, we're going through the processes, we're we're finding things we need to change, we've understood, you know, how to how to increase customer commitment, but I just don't, I think people are just going through the motions. What would be sort of your top three tips to people to actually start making it ingrained?

SPEAKER_02 23:18

Um, once again, a good question. So I would say top three tips would be first of all, get everyone in the organization to understand how what they do impacts on the customers. And you can do that through two basic questions. How many customers do you directly impact every week? And how many customers do you indirectly impact every week? And getting people to really think about that, almost everyone in the organization will actually realize that they indirectly impact a lot of customers. The second tip I would say is focus on leaders, get them really customer focused and get them driven. If you need to put in KPIs, put in KPIs, but do something to get your leaders really talking about customers, driving their people around customers. And the third one it ties to what I just talked about, which is the measures and KPIs. If you can get the right measures in place, people are driven by measures and KPIs. It's not, uh I mean, they are driven by um their mindsets as well. But if you need to take people on a journey, it helps if the KPIs and measures in an organization line up with that, because then you've got the emotions driving them, the measures driving them, the financials driving them, everything driving them towards that customer focus.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Brilliant. In terms of those measures, I mean, I think we're all very familiar with the the customer, you know, the customer perception measures like satisfaction and the outcome measures like you know loyalty. When it comes to employees, is that more challenging? Is that is that a softer thing, or are there some some clues you can lay down to say, you know, if this if this internal measure moves from here to here, we know we're going in the right direction?

SPEAKER_02 24:59

I'm a big fan of tying the operational internal measures to those outcome customer measures like NPS or customer SAT or things like that. That's often quite contextual for the organization as to which measures they need to tie to it. I mean, we talked about things like billing and returns and customer service. So, in those areas, you can tie operational measures to those things. Somewhere like legal, it might be a bit harder, but you can always find those kind of measures, or you can focus on embedding some of those customer measures in those areas.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

Great. A whole array of different ways. I guess it really does depend on the function and the organization, but um really good direction there. One of the things that has meant over the last few months, we've realized is that the sort of support that you provide is not something that is just restricted to uh your your geography. So I guess anyone around the world who's got a challenge in this space, they can get hold of you, I guess, and you know, you work internationally. You're comfortable with that?

SPEAKER_02 26:05

Yeah, definitely. So I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. You should hopefully be able to find me just by searching for Shane Goldberg, or you can go to my website, custcore.com.au.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Great. Well, we'll we'll put a link of that into the description uh for you. And when they're on the website, I guess they you've got some stuff, you've got posts and things on there for more of this type of information.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

Yeah, definitely. So that's on the website, that's on LinkedIn as well. So lots of stuff around all this.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Excellent. Well, look, um, Shane, it's been uh a delight talking to you about this really important topic. It certainly is um we talk about customer experience superheroes needing to have um superpowers, and and I think the ability to really impact, motivate, and change your staff is fundamental for sustainable customer experience transformation. So thank you so much for bringing that to light. Uh and on a personal note, thank you again for um raising your hand and being a captain for the Customer Experience World Games. You raised the standards, you you pushed the teams, and one of one uh uh one of the challenges uh yourself. So uh thank you very much for being a part of that. And and if it comes around again in 2021, are you up for it again?

SPEAKER_02 27:19

Yeah, definitely. Customer experience world games was a great experience. I definitely encourage anyone that is listening that gets a chance to participate. If it does come up again to take part, then I'd definitely put my hands up. And thank you, Christopher, for having me on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Oh, you're you're very welcome.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

Thank you.