Cx Leader Podcast With Steve Walker

Hosts Steve Walker and Pat Gibbons present another frightful episode of CX Horror Stories - tales of customer experience gone bad. This year's scary offerings include healthcare, travel, and automotive repair. 

The Qualtrics XM Institute released their report “The State of Customer Experience Management, 2019” which assesses how companies are doing with their CX efforts. Guest host Pat Gibbons welcome Isabelle Zdatny from the XM Institute to discuss their findings and some of the key takeaways from the report.

With more companies moving to globalizing their business, it can be easy to overlook the implications of not considering cultural differences required for CX programs in different countries. Steve welcomes back Bob Azman, a CX professional with over 40 years of experience and founder and CXO of Innovative CX Solutions, to discuss why companies should consider the customer experience in the context of other countries and cultures.

Companies often hire implementation specialists to help get their customer listening technology up and running, but don't do the necessary preparation required to make the process happen smoothly. Guest host Pat Gibbons welcome Walker technology consultants Liz Wallshield and Charlie Rumsey to talk about some of the step companies should take to make the implementation process happen smoothly and on schedule.

It’s easy explaining how front-line employees directly influence the customer’s experience. But it’s more difficult for non-customer-facing to see how their contributions impact CX. Steve welcomes Maureen Cook, customer experience specialist at Ciena, to discuss the ways they show ALL their employees how they affect customer experience.

Customer experience isn't limited to simply how your employees interact with your clients - it plays a critical role in how products are developed and maintained. Steve welcome Arjan Vilkhu, senior manager of customer insights at Hill-Rom, a global medical technology company, to discuss how their CX program informs how their customers’ experience using their products can be improved.

B2B companies are beginning to move into more subscription-based services, another influence from the B2C space. Steve welcome Musa Hanhan, senior director of customer experience at Genesys, to discuss how subscription-based models impact the customer experience for B2B companies.

Like most professions, CX pros enjoy the benefits and support of an organization that provides resources and ways to network with other professionals. Steve welcomes the new CEO of the Customer Experience Professionals Association - or CXPA - Greg Melia for a discussion on the organization's benefits and future.

It's not easy moving toward a customer-centric mindset, and Steve's guest is concerned that companies too often forget the customer heterogeneity - the differences between their customers. Peter Fader, professor of marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of “The Customer Centricity Playbook,” discusses common mistakes and misperception in becoming “customer centric.”

Building customer empathy is an important aspect to your customer experience program and trying to teach that to your organization is not easy. Steve welcomes Serena Riley, the customer experience senior Manager at LLamasoft, to describe how she used immersive experiences to help employees understand the customer’s point of view within a phase of their journey.

Senior living is much more than simply providing a service to a customer. Families depend on the care and attention living facilities provide to their loved ones. Steve welcomes Jonathan Ruchman and David Pruett of Brookdale Senior Living to discuss how they manage a CX program that includes over 800 living facilities across 45 states.

Creating a meaningful journey map can be a lengthy and expensive process and it's tempting to cut corners. Steve's guest Jim Tincher, founder and mapper-in-chief of Heart of the Customer and co-author of "How Hard is it to Be Your Customer", explains why hastily created journey maps can give you a false picture of your customers.

Producer Chris Higgins blows the dust off the "way back machine" to revisit the take-home value from our CX experts in our "Industry" series of episodes.

It might sound like more work but sometimes building a CX program from the ground up has its advantages. Steve welcomes guest Roberta O'Keith of Murphy-Hoffman Company, a full-service truck dealership, to discuss how she started customer experience programs in companies that had no such efforts in place.

Customer experience professionals work with a ton of data, but often find that they don’t have time to read some of the most insightful sources of information: customer comments. Steve welcomes Joyce Gott, a marketing research manager at Anthem, Inc. for a discussion on the importance and value of bringing customer comments to life within your company.

Guest host Pat Gibbons welcomes Walker expert Dereck Mobley for a discussion on how customer experiences professionals can plan corporate events around customer feedback to bring better awareness of your company’s CX efforts to the organization.

Continuing the Best Practices series, Steve welcomes the chief customer experience officer for the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Alison Circle, for a discussion on CX within the not-for-profit space and how the organization has adapted to disruptions in the normal model for libraries.

For a discussion on how to move a not-for-profit organization from making decisions based on gut instinct to utilizing customer feedback, Steve welcomes Andrea Krohnberg, senior director of customer experience at the YMCA Twin Cities in Minneapolis. They discuss how she led the effort to make customer insights and data a key decision-making driver in the organization and how it improved their CX efforts.

Finding time and methods to communicate CX efforts across a company with 900+ employees can be challenging. Steve welcomes guest Mark Slatin to discuss how Sandy Spring Bank synchronizes all their CX efforts through an innovative educational program that includes cross-functional activities.

Continuing the series focusing on best practices, Steve welcomes Nick Frunzi, chief customer officer at Esri, a world leader in GIS mapping and spatial analytics software, to discuss the importance of empowering cross-functional teams with your company’s customer experience efforts.