Guest: Lynn Hunsaker – CS Leaders as the Stewards of Customer Value

The Jasons Take On...
The Jasons Take On...
Guest: Lynn Hunsaker - CS Leaders as the Stewards of Customer Value
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Episode Description

Join us when we speak Lynn Hunsaker. Lynn Hunsaker is Chief Customer Officer of ClearAction Continuum. Lynn is joining us today to talk about CS leaders as the stewards of customer value.

Lynn recently wrote an important article for My Customer talking about shrinkflation and skimpflation, and how during times of economic downturns many companies make the mistake of reducing the scope, content, and value of their products and services. Lynn shares insights about how this can harm your company, brand and customers. She also shares ideas about what you can do instead.

Guest: Lynn Hunsaker - Chief Customer Office, ClearAction Continuum

Lynn Hunsaker is Chief Customer Officer of ClearAction Continuum. She led company-wide customer experience transformation for many years at B2B Fortune 250 firms Applied Materials and Sonoco Products. Starting out in the Strategic Planning department, her roles included VoC Manager, Customer Satisfaction Improvement Manager, Marketing Director, and Head of Corporate Quality.

 

Lynn is a past CXPA Board member and she is a CXPA Recognized Training Provider, Certified Customer Experience Professional, Professional Certified Marketer, Certified Quality Manager, and Certified MBTI Practitioner. She is past president of Silicon Valley American Marketing Association and Bay Area Association for Psychological Type, and past co-chair of several CXPA committees. She was the first in the world to benchmark marketing operations practices, and she also designed the first ever global study of B2B customer experience practices, which she conducted for 5 years.

 

Lynn is author of 3 Kindle handbooks, including Innovating Superior Customer Experience and Metrics You Can Manage for Success. She is one of five recipients of CustomerThink’s Hall of Fame Award. Lynn’s current passion, and life work repository, is the Experience Value Exchange subscription community, which she cofounded to help your extended CX team make CX a team sport across your company’s non-customer-facing groups, for a 1-to-1 ratio between your brand promise and customers’ realities.

 

CONTACT LYNN HUNSAKER

CX Team Sport Awards:  ClearAction.com/cx-team-sport-awards

Experience Value Exchange:  ClearAction.com/team-sport

Experts’ CX+EX+PX MasterClass: ClearAction.com/leader

CX Playbook: ClearAction.com/customer-experience-faq

LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/lynnhunsaker

Twitter: @clearaction

Facebook: Facebook.com/customerexperienceoptimization

CustomerThink: CustomerThink.com/author/clearaction

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good evening. Good afternoon. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode in the Jason’s take on podcast series with myself, Jason Noble here in London and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason. Hello, Jason. Thanks for joining us, everyone.

[00:00:13] Jason Noble: We, we are super excited to be back. I think we’ve had a break over the summer. Hope everyone had a good summer holiday but we are really excited today to have with. Lynn Hunsaker, who’s gonna talk to us about customer success leaders as the stewards of customer value. An article that she published recently that really resonated with myself and Jason, a lot of good stuff in there.

[00:00:35] Jason Noble: Welcome Lynn. I hope I’ve pronounced your surname. Your last name correctly. Yes.

[00:00:39] Lynn Hunsaker: Lynn Hunsaker. Glad to be here. Perfect.

[00:00:41] Jason Noble: Welcome. Really excited Lynn a quick introduction. I’ll give you on. Lynn is the Chief Customer Officer of Clear Action Continuum she’s also the co-founder of the experience value exchange subscription community.

[00:00:54] Jason Noble: Lynn spent, you’ve spent a number of years now leading customer experience, customer success, [00:01:00] transformation across some great companies. And you’ve also worked across a number of other key roles. I see you’ve been a marketing director, voice of the customer lead. So you’ve got a really extensive and I think really focused experience as well on what it means for costume.

[00:01:14] Jason Noble: In addition to all of this you’re a writer, you’re an author, you’re a publisher. You’ve got a number of books now that our listeners can find on Amazon that cover amazing topics like innovating customer success, customer experience. You’ve also run a number of trading courses on journey mapping, facilitation and one that I really like is customer centricity skills for founders and execs, which is.

[00:01:37] Jason Noble: Incredible. And I think a lot of these courses and books are being translated into other languages. So it’s really widespread this. So, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you with us for our listeners, even that don’t know you. I wonder if you could give us a, just give us in your own words, a brief introduction to your own work that you’re doing at clear action and your own journey really into the role of chief customer [00:02:00] officer there.

[00:02:01] Lynn Hunsaker: Sure. It’s all about closing the gap between what’s promised and what’s expected. What would people get? Marketing will put out a value proposition. The brand stands for something. People have an expectation based on what sales told them. And then, they get what they get and they use what they get and if they need to get help, then that’s usually a red flag that there’s a gap.

[00:02:30] Lynn Hunsaker: It wasn’t exactly what was promised. So this happens to all of us. I’m experiencing it in my own small company where people need help or something didn’t pan out. Nobody’s perfect, but we need to be striving toward closing that gap. And when we close the gap, we have a good experience. And I think we need to revisit that as marketers, customer experience people, customer success, service, and just executives of any.

[00:02:59] Lynn Hunsaker: It’s all about [00:03:00] closing that gap. And when we do that, we’re creating more trust. So how we got into this field was through strategic planning, a role in fortune two 50 company initially, where I was asked to go visit CU customers across north America and talk to their purchasing managers, general managers, about their perceptions of where we stood compared to, Value.

[00:03:24] Lynn Hunsaker: So what were they were getting for the price paid and our competitors. And then that turned into a voice of the customer role reporting into strategic planning, where we were using the VOC, both for our strategic planning formula and for total quality management and ISA 9,000. So I went from that packaging company in South Carolina to.

[00:03:48] Lynn Hunsaker: Voice of the customer role in California in the Silicon valley reporting into the corporate quality. And after about three or four years, I became head of corporate quality myself. [00:04:00] And in, so doing, I was responsible for making major change happen across more than 50 P and LS worldwide, but I had no direct authority over them.

[00:04:11] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. And so I learned a lot about organizational change and things like this, and that really flavored what I’ve brought to clear action continuum. First of all, seeing really clearly a strategic viewpoint, how it connects to business and investors, second taking action and being accountable. And then thirdly, continuing the momentum.

[00:04:36] Lynn Hunsaker: So being in Silicon Valley for Almost three decades. I I wrote innovating superior customer experience as a way to have a connection between, hey, I’m about keeping customers, but most of the people there about acquiring customers with the latest mouse trap. So that’s an eclectic mix that was generated over time.

[00:04:57] Lynn Hunsaker: I, I

[00:04:58] Jason Noble: love that journey and that [00:05:00] I think that kind of focus, as you said about keeping customers is this transition that we’re seeing. And I love the way you’ve come into this and all these different focus roles and this idea of kind of change. There is a lot of organizations that struggle with change and kind of, we’ve talked about it before and how I think even as custom success professionals and leaders, we’re offering change agents.

[00:05:23] Jason Noble: I think there’s a really good overlook there. You wrote an article recently, and this is how we came connected on the customer think site about how chief customer officers can stop. And I’ll say these correctly, shrink inflation and ski inflation. What I really liked about the article was how you described as customer success leaders with the stewards of customer value.

[00:05:43] Jason Noble: And this really, as we said, at the beginning, this resonates with both me and Jason, tell us a bit more about the article, what prompted you to write it and you’re thinking behind it?

[00:05:52] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. Going back to that first definition, if you think about customer experience, a good customer experience is nothing.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Lynn Hunsaker: Fancy then your ex, the realities meeting the expectations. Then when realities don’t meet expectations because we’re cutting corners, we’re, whether it be making the product smaller that’s shrink inflation, or making the product with lower quality that’s skim inflation, or even a service with lower quality and even inflation, just having to pay more for what you.

[00:06:30] Lynn Hunsaker: Last month or last year, it’s costing more. Now that’s wrong because it’s we’re supposed to be generating value, growing value for our investors, for our employees, our partners, and our customers who else in the company should be the. The key Stuckey for growing value, besides the customer experience leader, and then, affiliated with that marketing and employee [00:07:00] experience.

[00:07:00] Lynn Hunsaker: And strategic planning, it all, it actually starts to mushroom out to everyone really should be caring about creating. Additional value. And that’s why I say that customer experience is a team sport. And that’s how you really get to preventing ski inflation and shrink inflation. You need to be thinking about customer experience as a team sport, meaning that there is no extraneous player.

[00:07:26] Lynn Hunsaker: Every player on the field is necessary. Any player on the field that drops the ball, takes shortcuts. Didn’t get enough sleep the night before wasn’t paying attention. Can mess up the game. And that’s what happens here. You’ve got a promise to customers that you’re gonna deliver X, Y, Z, and then you don’t.

[00:07:48] Lynn Hunsaker: And so, then you have all this customer remedy need, right? That’s massive waste in. If we could stop the customer remedy need, [00:08:00] then you could re-channel that money into. Hey, we don’t have to shrink our product or skimp our service. So, I call this CX annuities. The whole concept of CU is customer experience annuities, where you’re getting to the root of those issues, where you’re creating waste and requiring remedies to prevent churn.

[00:08:25] Lynn Hunsaker: And get out of that rat race. Stop the insanity, get to the root of it. And then re-channel that. Investment that would’ve had to take, go on forever and ever into perpetuity, right? Is the more, you’re a adding customers. The more you have to actually add your remedy staffing and technology and remedies themselves, it’s crazy.

[00:08:49] Lynn Hunsaker: It’s an expensive way to run your business.

[00:08:52] Jason Whitehead: I love the concepts of shrink IFL and skin inflation particularly as it pertains to service, when you’re in the grocery store and you see the boxes and the [00:09:00] products and doing that, it’s pretty easy to re. I think it’s probably not as always fast to recognize when service that you’re receiving.

[00:09:07] Jason Whitehead: Can you give a couple of examples of that you’ve seen of people shrinking their CS or CX services so that our listeners might be able to recognize, oh, we’re doing this, or we’re thinking about doing this and here’s why it’s a bad idea. And here’s something we should do instead.

[00:09:22] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. I’ve heard about it quite a lot that because of the talent shortage, you know, Partly and because of all the remote Ole that companies had to go through over these past few years in the pandemic we had to ask customers for more patients.

[00:09:44] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah, we had to ask customers to plea B, please bear with us. Please listen carefully. These things have changed and this and that. Okay, let’s get over it. Let’s get back to normal or let’s get to, a new level of efficiency. [00:10:00] Surely, there’s been a logic, a lot of things, digitalized, there’s been a lot of streamlining and reengineering of processes and policies.

[00:10:10] Lynn Hunsaker: Why in the. Are things worse, not better haven’t we been through enough, but there are a lot of companies and managers who are just caving in to the idea that hope interest rates are rising and gas at petrol. Oil prices are higher and blah, blah, blah, be clever, be creative in my own company.

[00:10:36] Lynn Hunsaker: During the pandemic, I figured out how to shrink our costs. And expand our value greatly. The cost went down by about half the value went up two to three times as much of what we’re, what people get when they buy our things. Shouldn’t this be the way of the future that we’re always. Overcoming the odds to increase our [00:11:00] value to people.

[00:11:01] Lynn Hunsaker: We need it,

[00:11:02] Jason Noble: I think completely. And I love that cuz it shouldn’t just be happening now in a pandemic and particularly even now we’re still at the end of the pandemic we hope or coming towards the end, but we’ve got lots of new economic pressures. As you said, growing inflation, supply chain challenges, and these are global.

[00:11:20] Jason Noble: So, you shouldn’t just be focusing on these situations, but how do we do this ongoing I love what you were saying about how do you make CX kind of a companywide way of thinking. I and I’d love to get your thoughts on how do you do that? How do you go about ensuring that what we’re delivering to our customers as value is a companywide thing.

[00:11:41] Jason Noble: It’s not just a team. It’s not just a department. It’s not just one leader. How do you, what are some of the things that you’ve seen that can really help people. That organizational wide buy in and way of delivering. Cause it is, it’s a business wide way of working. It

isn’t

[00:11:56] Lynn Hunsaker: a team that’s right.

[00:11:58] Lynn Hunsaker: If you doubled or tripled [00:12:00] your customer service, customer success, customer experience, user experience, staff, whatever, digital CRM, if you double little tripled, the number of people you could hire into that and the company would say, yeah, ride on, we can afford it. Blah, blah. Would you be able to guarantee excellent customer experience?

[00:12:19] Lynn Hunsaker: No, absolutely not because the definition of a good experience is a one-to-one ratio. So that means that anybody in your company’s ecosystem, including your Alliance partners, your channel partners your suppliers, your legal team, your facilities managers, everybody really. Reliant the customer relies on them to not mess up the customer experience.

[00:12:53] Lynn Hunsaker: and, frankly, people don’t wake up in the morning thinking, oh, where can I cut some corners? Where can I create a [00:13:00] bad experience? Everyone’s trying their best. They just don’t know any better. So the onus is on the customer experience leaders to take all this precious insight that we’re collecting marketing, customer service, customer success, customer experience, digital management partner experience, employee experience are all collectors of great insights and we’re not using them like even a 10th of what the value could.

[00:13:30] Lynn Hunsaker: Companies could get 90% more value out of their

[00:13:33] Lynn Hunsaker: VOC, VOE, VO X, by making sure that they’re sharing it on a regular basis with all of the other groups, not just on some, precanned dashboard. That’s not good enough. You need to be translating these insights into the lingo and the cadences of these different groups.

[00:13:56] Lynn Hunsaker: So that’s what I did when I came into the [00:14:00] Silicon Valley company leading customer experience company wide. I was the voice of the customer manager and I created more than 50 reports. Back when we had Lotus 1, 2, 3 for heaven, six

[00:14:12] Jason Noble: I remember those days, that was a scary piece of enterprise software

[00:14:16] Lynn Hunsaker: that okay.

[00:14:18] Lynn Hunsaker: So, we were using like Excel spreadsheets, but we were creating more than 50 reports for, so that each group would have their own cut of the CX data. And then I got on a plane and I went around. Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, all through Europe, north America. Yeah. Every place that we have business.

[00:14:40] Lynn Hunsaker: And I did a readout so that they would understand here’s our corporate situation. And then here’s your cut, here’s what you own. And then the same day, we had a cross organizational workshop [00:15:00] where. All of the people that associated with that cut of the data. We had representatives from sales, finance, HR, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, supplier management, the whole nine yards.

[00:15:15] Lynn Hunsaker: So we would break into two groups and address two of the key drivers that group had toward loyalty. And so every group had two action plans going on now once a quarter. My team would collect their single page strategies for these two action plans. And we published these single page strategies in what we call the green book.

[00:15:40] Lynn Hunsaker: And we shared the green book with the senior leadership team every quarter, as they were preparing for the stock market analyst calls. So they had a blue book of operational data. They had a black book of financial data and a green book of customer experience, progress data. So we [00:16:00] were focusing people on the root causes that we did in the workshop was we figured out what was the root cause of the key drivers.

[00:16:09] Lynn Hunsaker: And we were rewarding people for their progress in working on the root cause. That’s how you create customer experience annuities. That’s how you create millions of hours of save time for customers, millions of dollars or euros of, or pounds of save money for customers. And on down the line, what precipitated this, how we got onto this trajectory was our largest customer was quite upset with.

[00:16:39] Lynn Hunsaker: And it was the largest customer in our industry, quite a bit larger than us and very influential. And the CEO of that company stood up in one of those appreciation dinners and said, we buy so much from you just because you’re always first to market with the latest technology, but I have to be very.

[00:16:59] Lynn Hunsaker: [00:17:00] Transparent with you. We’re looking forward to your competitors being first to market, because you’re really hard to do business with. You’re really arrogant. Wow. And so that was the Genesis of my role where I was brought in a few, some months later to take on the VOC role. And I was chartered to turn that around.

[00:17:20] Lynn Hunsaker: I love way

[00:17:21] Jason Noble: you talked about the kind of different books, you’ve got your financial book, your operational book, having. Having people think about we need something it’s as important as the business finances. Yeah. It’s the customer data. I and I don’t think enough organizations are doing it yet.

[00:17:37] Jason Noble: I love, initiatives, like what you’ve done, what you’re doing, but I just love more organizations to be starting to make that investment and realize they need to do it. But it is such a great concept. It is as important as your company financial.

[00:17:54] Lynn Hunsaker: Where do the finances come from?

[00:17:56] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah, absolutely. I just don’t understand this whole thing. I’ve [00:18:00] taught business. I have an MBA, and I just don’t understand why the wall street journal and the London time, whatever they do not put customers on the front-page stories. Even when you go to the money section, when they talk about customer whatnot.

[00:18:17] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. It’s never really about customer experience. Any story they have is about customer service few and far between never really linking that. The, where the heck you get your money is from a customer’s.

[00:18:31] Jason Noble: Why do you think that is then? What do you think’s missing? Why ?

[00:18:37] Lynn Hunsaker: First of all, it used to be so clear before we had the industrial revolution.

[00:18:41] Lynn Hunsaker: And then of course, people specialized in all their functional. Functional expertise. Yeah. And people have come to take for granted that, these functions exist just because every company has to have them. And we’ve gotten removed from the customer and viewing them as some [00:19:00] kind of voluminous.

[00:19:01] Lynn Hunsaker: Pain in the bum a thorn in your side, if we just didn’t have those customers, then everything would be nicer in our business.

[00:19:13] Lynn Hunsaker: those best people. Luckily, I I had so I think that, just finishing that thought is back in the seventies and eighties, there was quite a lot of Really interesting modeling done about inve investor value, right? Shareholder value. And so somehow in the seventies, eighties, it seems that the definition of business success became creating value for shareholders in 2019, I think it was 20.

[00:19:51] Lynn Hunsaker: 2018 or 2019. There was a, an organization called the business round table, which consists of [00:20:00] hundreds of leading CEOs. And they decided to issue a proclamation about the purpose of business and I can’t be more thrilled. Have you seen.

[00:20:14] Jason Noble: Not seeing it. No, I’m intrigued now. Absolutely intrigued.

[00:20:19] Jason Noble: What is the purpose of business according to the article?

[00:20:22] Lynn Hunsaker: The purpose of business is to create value for customers, employees communities, suppliers, and investors in that order.

[00:20:36] Jason Noble: It is it’s phenomenal that the word value is in there. And I we’ve said before, I think that the thing.

[00:20:43] Jason Noble: I feel privileged sometimes in the field that we’re in is that we’re, we are responsible for other people’s success and driving value from, and that’s not just our customers. It’s our team members, it’s external stakeholders. So that definition really rings true there. I love that. [00:21:00]

[00:21:00] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. When I teach a college class, I always move that chapter in the textbook from 13 or 18 or whatever about customer segmentation.

[00:21:09] Lynn Hunsaker: That’s what we talk about the first two weeks. We talk about customers as the source of salaries. Yep. Budgets and dividends or returns to your investors. Yeah.

[00:21:24] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. That only makes sense. Start there and follow the money. I love the story you were sharing about the customer saying, I’ve gotta be honest with you and if I’m a CEO receiving that com that direct feedback from a customer, I’m probably a bit worried about a lot of things at that point very quickly.

[00:21:44] Jason Whitehead: I’m curious. What advice would you give to our listeners who may find themselves as a head of CS or chief customer? Where they recognize and agree with a lot of things that you’re saying, but they’re struggling internally their own organization to create those Hals with CEOs, with the other leadership team or even the [00:22:00] border investors.

[00:22:01] Jason Whitehead: And what should they be doing, or could they be doing to try and trigger some of that awareness for folks so that their CEO doesn’t have to be on the receiving end of that conversation from a key.

[00:22:11] Lynn Hunsaker: We have a lot of reengineering still going on because of supply chain, talent remote or hybrid situations.

[00:22:21] Lynn Hunsaker: And this is a wonderful opportunity to step forward and say, Hey manager X you’re reworking something. Did you know that our customers and employees have made comments about things related to this? And it could be quite insightful as a guide. To minimize the waste to keep this organization lean and to generate higher value in the course of it, I saw that as a huge opportunity at the very beginning of the pandemic.

[00:22:54] Lynn Hunsaker: I was so pleased that to hear that people were saying, what’s going on with our customers in any functional [00:23:00] area, you know what’s happening? What could, what do we need to adjust to be to, to to, for the new things happening with our customers. You heard about that a lot in April and early may of 2020 huge opportunity, huge window there.

[00:23:17] Lynn Hunsaker: But very few customer experienced people. I’ve never heard of any customer experienced people who really, you know seized the day for that. And it’s a travesty, but it’s because we’re too. We’ve been drinking the lemonade or the Kool-Aid for too long and thinking about, oh, we just have to ask people if they would recommend us and we have to go and fix things that went wrong and we have to digitalize everything to be and make things, a profit center.

[00:23:46] Lynn Hunsaker: And it’s all a bunch of BS. Really. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about closing the ratio one to one ratio. Absolutely.

[00:23:57] Jason Noble: How do you see so that the role of [00:24:00] chief customer officer it’s, we’re beginning to see more and more organizations investing in that it doesn’t have to be that name necessary, but that C level exec role focused on the customer.

[00:24:12] Jason Noble: And it’s, even in Europe now we’re seeing a lot of organizations and even non-tech bonds, you’re seeing your. Foods food organizations, pharmaceuticals, airlines, even investing in these roles. How do you see that role evolving and what does the ideal team structure look like for a chief customer officer?

[00:24:31] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. So you should be aiming for almost automatic customer experience excellence, meaning that every group needs to understand their performance standards in a customer experience context. So what are, let’s just give the example of two banks here in America that have recently been called on the carpet.

[00:24:57] Lynn Hunsaker: One is recently as this year for the [00:25:00] business development group, creating phony accounts for their customers because their bonus goal over the year was to have higher number of accounts per customer on average, compared to the industry norm. The business development group, who would think that you need to include the business development group in customer centered thinking or customer experience not creating problems so that you should care about that because what happened in each of those case studies is that.

[00:25:36] Lynn Hunsaker: The stock price plummeted after people were outraged, the government got heavy handed and find them really heavy fines and other stipulations, a lot of paperwork and pain in the bum. This is this is damaging. The brand customer experience is really about. [00:26:00] Enhancing the brand.

[00:26:02] Lynn Hunsaker: So the main idea for a chief customer officer is to drive almost automatic CX excellence by helping the whole company become more customer centric. It doesn’t mean being a doormat. It means understanding your role in terms of the one-to-one ratio and generating more value. How do you do that?

[00:26:27] Lynn Hunsaker: You need to listen to what your customers are saying. Take a lot of you have a ton, a huge treasure trove of comments on hand that you could just be using text mining, voice mining, video mining. What have you. We have that technology now and distill all of that into a couple of camps of expectation sets.

[00:26:52] Lynn Hunsaker: Okay, so you, most brands will have two or three overall expectation sets. For example, in one company [00:27:00] that I worked with, they had a simplicity expectation set, and then there was another group of customers that was very keen about timeliness. Meaning like a two hour window or just, be exact with what you promise make it happen at that time.

[00:27:16] Lynn Hunsaker: Okay. And both of those camps of customers had quite huge consequences when things weren’t simple. Like even just introducing a new order entry system was like a huge headache for them because they were juggling so much the timeliness ones, if something was a little early or so, a little late, it was just astounding what the snowball effect was on their costs and their reputation and their productivity and they’re buying right.

[00:27:47] Lynn Hunsaker: They would buy a lot more from this brand if the timeliness or if the simplicity thing were kept within a certain. Range. So by just distilling it to two simple things [00:28:00] like that allows every group business development group, the legal group, the supplier management group, the engineering operations on down the line is this thing that we’re thinking about doing contributing to or detracting from simplicity and timeliness or whatever the theme is for your company.

[00:28:21] Lynn Hunsaker: Yep.

[00:28:22] Jason Whitehead: I like that. And I love the distilling it down to two things that, we often talk about our to-do list and how long it is. And I think people should just respe that the T O list and just, these are the two things we’re going to do. And just ,

[00:28:36] Jason Noble: I couldn’t agree more, Jason. I think that, that simplification there, as you’ve said in, is so critical and too many organizations are over complicating.

[00:28:46] Jason Noble: Really what it is, that, that simplification, I think makes it so clear. For everyone in your team, your whole business to understand what we’re about, what we’re trying to do.

[00:28:56] Lynn Hunsaker: That’s right. So I’ve also suggested in some of [00:29:00] my articles about a value quotient. Metric. Okay. So instead of, patting ourselves on the back where people might recommend us, but they might recommend five other brands at the same time, or they might not, , I just think, that’s just way over done.

[00:29:19] Lynn Hunsaker: Let’s shift our thinking to a value quotient, which means every time that we are contributing toward the timeliness and simplicity thing, or, whatever it is for your company, then you get a point in the numerator. Every time that you’re missing the mark in the simplicity or timelines goal, then you’re getting a Demer in the enumerator the denominator So it’s a very simple way to just keep a tally of, okay. Your handoffs. And you can do this as an internal customer satisfaction, internal customer experience thing, as well as external . So everybody can be [00:30:00] more consistent. And more aware of the instances where they’re creating grief internally and externally it by having a one-to-one ratio.

[00:30:16] Lynn Hunsaker: oh, you don’t wanna really have a one-to-one ratio on that. You wanna, but you wanna have like maximum numerator and yeah. Hardly any denominator on that. It grows trust. And trust is what people are really clamoring for. They’re just thirsting for it. In employee experience, partner, experience, and customer experience.

[00:30:37] Lynn Hunsaker: We’ve become so mercenary. And so superficial really in experience, we need to get back to what is it that people are trying to get done? How are we contributing to that or detracting from it? How do we stay true? How do we, how do. Demonstrate consistency and [00:31:00] growing people toward what they’re trying to get done in their life.

[00:31:07] Lynn Hunsaker: Wow.

[00:31:08] Jason Whitehead: That’s really great stuff. I’d love those ideas. And thank you so much for sharing all those with us. As we wind down here, we always like to throw out a bold challenge question and really this. And to be for our listeners, what sort of bold actions would you like them to take to have a dramatic impact very quickly?

[00:31:26] Jason Whitehead: So our question for you is what is the number one thing that CS leaders should be doing today to ensure that they’re delivering value to their customers when the external market challenges and pressures like we have today. And it sounds like you’ve already seen some bold action. You’ve seen some bold mistakes as well, too.

[00:31:42] Jason Whitehead: What is the thing you’d like to really challenge people to do, to have a tremendous positive impact in the organization and for their

[00:31:47] Lynn Hunsaker: customer? Yeah, I think that if you can cut corners and some of the administrative things that you’re doing that, or even operational things that you’re doing, that our [00:32:00] customers don’t want.

[00:32:01] Lynn Hunsaker: , that would be the place to cut corners, not in the product or the service. Not in, laying off your people. But be more aware of where you have you’re creating waste. What are the prevalent issues? I just published another article on customer. Think this week called six customer experience, spirit animals for the today’s imperative of trust And I would. I would hope that people will go to those spirit animals. And there’s several suggestions for the new way of customer experience leadership that I’ve been describing under each of the six animals. That would be my challenge. Excellent.

[00:32:44] Jason Noble: Excellent. Thank you so much. That’s where I’m gonna go after this call in.

[00:32:47] Jason Noble: I, I wanna see this article. I love the idea of that. in this conversation has been phenomenal. Really insightful. I’ve learned a lot. I think there’s a lot of great takeaways for our listeners [00:33:00] your style, your experience, I think lends so much to what, we’re all trying to. In the field of customer experience and customer success.

[00:33:08] Jason Noble: So again, a huge, thank you for joining us today. What we’d like to let you do before we go shameless. You’re gonna tell Jess, I didn’t forget this time. Shameless plug, please. For what you guys are doing for your organization.

[00:33:24] Lynn Hunsaker: We’re running right now, a customer experience team sport award.

[00:33:29] Lynn Hunsaker: Contest and it’s pretty simple. You just go to player action.com/cx hyphen team, hyphen sport, hyphen awards, CX team sport awards, and enter it’s really around those six spirit animals that I just mentioned. We have what’s called the experience value exchange, which is an online community that you can.

[00:33:55] Lynn Hunsaker: Subscribe to for your whole marketing department, your whole customer experience, customer success. What [00:34:00] have you, and what that does is it builds the competencies in these six areas of lifetime value mindset driving Root cause improvement based on customer experience insights, increasing value in your growth plans, through customer experience, insights and so forth.

[00:34:23] Lynn Hunsaker: So I hope welcome you to join the value exchange. Fantastic.

[00:34:27] Jason Whitehead: Fantastic. Thank you so much. And we’ll obviously include links to that and yeah. So, Lynn, thank you so much, really enjoyed it and look forward to keeping in touch.

[00:34:36] Lynn Hunsaker: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks Lynn. Take care. Take care.

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