Cx Leader Podcast With Steve Walker

A driving factor for any business to be successful is the ability to differentiate - setting your company apart from the competition by creating great experiences for your customers. Three ways to do that is with personalization, ease, and speed – and its the first of these three that our guest is going to talk about today. Host Steve Walker welcomes Marcus Hall, president and partner at California Closets, for a discussion about not only personalizing the product, but the experience as well.

There's never been a better time to be a CX professional, and today's episode explores the best the profession has to offer and why customer experience and experience management is critical to a businesses success. Host Steve Walker welcomes guests Sandy Mathis, Rosa Carbajal, and Johnathan Ruchman to discuss why they believe customer experience is such a great profession and how CX can be one of the best investments for a company.

Competitive retail electricity markets give consumers a choice of who will supply their electricity. Only 18 states in the U.S., including Washington D.C., have introduced these types of markets, giving consumers a choice in who generates their electricity. This, of course, has a significant impact on how a utility company approaches customer experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes guests Suzie Dieth and Scott Burns from Reliant Energy, an NRG company and electric utility headquartered in Houston, Texas, to discuss how customer experience works in a retail utility market.  

Educational institutions are beholden to a different type of customer: students. Discovering how students experience the education and services they receive from one of the largest community colleges in the nation requires a substantial experience program. Host Steve Walker welcomes guests Matt Ashcraft and Meredith Warner from Maricopa Community Colleges to discuss experience management within an educational institution and the differences between higher education and for-profit organizations.

Have you ever been at a business meeting with a client or colleagues and wondered, “should I order wine? What wine do I get? How many should I drink?” Mixing business with alcohol can be tricky and sometimes an awkward subject. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Jim Schleckser, author of the new book Professional Drinking: A Spirited Guide to Wine, Cocktails, and Business Entertaining," for helpful advice on how to keep it fun AND professional.

These past few years have seen some amazing changes in the customer experience space. And these past few months responding to the COVID pandemic has tested and proven the importance of CX. As our understanding of customers’ needs becomes more refined, experience management professionals are finding ways to innovate, setting trends that help further define how we approach customer experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Dutta Satadip, global head of customer success and operations at Pinterest, to discuss some of today's more prominent trends in customer experience.

In their latest report, "Next-Level CX for B2B Companies," Walker teamed up with the Qualtrics XM Institute to assess the current state of B2B CX. Host Steve Walker welcomes back guest Dr. Troy Powell to discuss the report, highlighting findings of low CX maturity in B2B companies, and how CX leaders can align CX programs and design truly exceptional customer experiences.

Each year on the first Tuesday in October, the Customer Experience Professionals Associate - or CXPA - encourages professionals and companies to take some time to recognize the importance of this practice and celebrate the ways they strengthen the customer experience within their own company. Host Steve Walker welcomes guests Gabe Smith and Derik Iverson of CXPA to discuss how companies can celebrate their accomplishments and customers on "CX Day."

Many businesses today use a customer relationship management platform, or “CRM” to help organize how they interact with their customers and prospects. But how customer-centric are these platforms, and do they truly help put the customer at the heart of your business? Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Jake Sorofman,  president of MetaCX, to discuss how his company plans to put the “customer” back into “CRM.” 

Empowering more people throughout the organization to help with CX strategies can be effective – especially when working with frontline employees that interact with your customers the most. Host Steve Walker welcomes Sue Brady, vice president of marketing and customer engagement at Hughes Network Systems, a global satellite broadband solutions and services company, and a provider of managed network services and applications, to discuss how they implemented a program to gather employee recommendations for improving the customer experience.

The concept of dashboards is probably nothing new to customer experience pros. We use them to help communicate data like NPS and Loyalty. But is your dashboard up to snuff? Is it showing you the data you really need and is it organized in a way that your employees or colleagues can glean from it the right information? Host Steve Walker welcomes data reporting expert Katie Hatch from Walker to discuss some key best practices in making certain your dashboards communicate the data you need.

Chatbot, A.I., customer service through social media... there are a vast number of ways in which customers can interact with companies, but is one method better than the other? In July of 2019, Genesys, a global customer experience and contact center technology company based in Daly City, California, commissioned several surveys in various countries to gather data on consumer opinions pertaining to automated customer experiences. Host Steve Walker welcomes Janelle Dieken, Senior Vice President for Product Marketing at Genesys, to discuss the results of the study and what CX professionals should glean from the results.

Experience management, or “XM”, is more than just a “buzzword.” It’s a holistic approach to experience across the organization that includes customers, employees, products, and brand. The Qualtrics XM Institute recently published a report on how XM is being adopted worldwide. Host Steve Walker welcomes Moira Dorsey, principle XM Catalyst at the Qualtrics XM Institute to discuss the findings of the report.

Customer experience is quickly gaining world-wide adoption. Companies around the globe are realizing the importance of providing the best experience possible for their customers. Understanding and empathizing with customers is a critical component to CX, and that includes understanding cultural differences and expectations. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Ian Golding, an influential consultant in CX with worldwide experience in several different industries to discuss CX across the globe.

As the CX industry continues to evolve, we learn more about the importance of a holistic experience across several aspects of the company – the new “experience management”, or “XM”, model. An important piece of XM is the relationship of how the employee experience drives the customer experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Shane Green, a keynote speaker, consultant, television personality, and author of “Culture Hacker: Reprogramming Your Employee Experience to Improve Customer Service, Retention, and Performance” for a discussion on how the employee experience affect the customer experience.

Moving is stressful, but relocating employees is sometime necessary. Now imagine you’re a company whose expertise is relocating employees for other companies: how does experience management work in that situation? Does your program focus on the company that hired you, or on the employee that is being relocated? Or do you focus on both? Host Steve Walker welcomes Kathryn Cassidy, President and COO of Altair Global, a full-service, global mobility services company, to discuss how they manage the experience from the perspective of both B2C and B2B relationships.

Larger companies can sometime pose unique challenges to customer experience programs. CX leaders often have to navigate complicated business structures and, of course, the ever-so-frustrating “silos” that can exist in organizations. And if a company grows through acquisitions, it can be a challenge to integrate the existing customer experience programs. But it’s not impossible to innovate – regardless of the company’s size or age. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Jen Zamora, Senior Global Director of Customer Experience & Employee Experience at Dow, the multinational materials science company, to discuss how a company the size of Dow manages CX and EX of their size and through corporate change.

Host Steve Walker welcomes back guest Dereck Mobley, associate vice president at Walker, to share some stores of companies that were proactive and innovative in their approach to customer experience as a response to the pandemic.

The customer experience space has experienced a "renaissance" in recent years but now there's a new practice that seems to be taking the spotlight: experience management. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Drew Hall, vice president of advisory services and certified customer experience professional, for a discussion on how experience management - or "XM" - is a more holistic way to view how the customer experience is affected by the experiences of ALL aspects of the organization. 

Producer Chris Higgins highlights some of the best "take home value" from guests during the COVID-19 series of podcasts, giving CX leaders advice they can put into practice right away, improving their customer experience.