The one with the total experience - Robby Cloninger VP Consulting, Digital Experience at FPT Software E180

🎤🎞️Don’t focus on just one piece of the experience in “The one with the total experience” with Robby Cloninger Vice President of Consulting, Digital Experience for episode sponsor FPT Software in CX Passport Episode 180🎧 What’s in the episode?...

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction

3:03 Digital transformation and breaking silos to improve experience

9:31 Align internal and external communications

15:17 Prioritizing customer experience in technology initiatives

19:32 Cultural differences in CX and the importance of empathy in global initiatives

22:14 1st Class Lounge

27:18 Personalizing employee communications 

33:55 Bridging the gap between tech and business leaders for customer experience

36:45 Contact info and closing

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I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport

Thank you to FPT Software for your sponsorship of this episode.  

Episode resources:

FPT Software: https://fptsoftware.com/

Robby Cloninger LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbycloninger/

Robby’s Information Week article: https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/the-benefits-of-unifying-digital-experiences

CX Passport Show Sponsorship Philosophy: https://bit.ly/cxpassportsponsorship

Transcript

Robby Cloninger: 0:00

In order for them to have that experience that they're looking for as a brand, a prerequisite was ensuring that they improve the employee experience.

Rick Denton: 0:07

Customer Experience wisdom, a dash of travel talk, we've been cleared for takeoff. The best meals are served outside and require passport. Welcome back to today's CX passport episode listeners and viewers. Joining us on the flight today is Robbie Cloninger, Vice President of consulting digital experience at FPT. The sponsor for today's episode. based in Atlanta, Georgia, Robbie brings a wealth of experience in digital transformation and technology. Robbie bridges that gap between technologists and business leaders driving the innovation in customer experience. With a passion for solving complex business problems, he transforms ideas into tangible solutions. At FPT. America he's lead the US go to market strategy for CX and DX solutions, optimizing cost efficiency, and delivery quality with blended resource models. At FPT and Telenet. Robbie grew consulting headcount and led a variety of successful projects including a 30% increase in mobile e commerce transactions and a major data migration to Azure. His leadership and digital solutions and his ability to build effective consulting organizations made a significant impact on his clients. Folks, you heard some of my CX love languages in there, tangible solutions, clear business value, significant real impact. This is why I'm excited to talk with Ravi today. When I first talked with Robbie, he had just returned from a trip to Vietnam, the global headquarters of FPT. I've only had the chance to spend a few short days in Vietnam on a business trip over a decade ago. So I am especially excited to hear Robbie's travel stories and ideas, as well as a CX wisdom Robbie, welcome to CX passport.

Robby Cloninger: 1:55

Thanks, Rick. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rick Denton: 1:58

Thank you. Thank you for being here. Hope the Atlanta although as we were joking before we got on camera on mic. Hopefully you do see a little bit of rain today, but doesn't impact our recording. But we'll see what happens. Robbie's of folks, he's coming to us from Atlanta and mentioned that he is in the thick of a drought. We actually in Texas just got a bunch of rain yesterday. So Wow. Nice for us in summer, maybe we'll send a little bit of that your way. But after this episode, Robbie, Robbie, there was an article that you wrote, that really kind of got my brain thinking it was about it was an information week, and it was about digital transformation, there are a couple ideas that have triggered for me and listeners, viewers, I'll get that link to the article down in the show notes. Technology is often the focus for a digital transformation. You had in the article, you also describe elements that get overlooked beyond technology process and execution, employee training communication involving the front line. Tell me more about how you achieve that success along with the successful tactics delivered. What stories from that transformation stand out for you?

Robby Cloninger: 3:03

Well, so I wrote the article specifically about the idea of unifying your digital experience, right between the customer experience and the employee experience. And the benefits of having this unified, what we call total experience. And I refer to a specific, as you talked about a digital transformation that we did for actually a very large global quick service restaurant, chain and franchisor. And the experience of kind of going in and seeing their challenges. And having silos within the significant, you know, walls up between the different organised sub or, you know, business units within the organization, and then the corporate and then the franchise owners, and then the staff and each of the each of the stores, and how we saw their challenges, empathized with them, and then approached it and it required a comprehensive kind of point of view of, you know, what do you want your customers to experience? What are the challenges that they're facing today? And how in order actually, in order for them to have that experience that they're looking for, as a brand, that it required a prerequisite was ensuring that they improve the employee experience. And that was kind of the the customer experience was the outflow really, of improving the employee experience? And not you know, are the internal stakeholder experience is what I would refer to as so that's kind of the context of the article and, and then are kind of going through the process and how we achieved great results,

Rick Denton: 4:55

those silos and you mentioned total experience. I want to pull a little bit At that total experience that either inside of the context of that specific story, or just in general, it is sort of cliche almost to talk about, oh, corporate silos, we got to bust those down. But there's actual work that goes into that people naturally fall within their tribes within their corporate organizations. So tell me more about that total experience, and and how you go about that approach. And then I'd love to know how that ties to specific tangible business results. How can breaking those silos get to real honest to god results?

Robby Cloninger: 5:36

Yeah, so this, I'm gonna speak in generalities here. But typically, you know, businesses will have different groups that are responsible for the experience of the customer, and the experience of the employee, right. And so I'm going to double click down. And when I talk about experience, let's focus on content. Okay. So the the content being the the marketing engagement, the branding the the the information that a customer sees, it's typically owned by marketing, and the content that an employee or an internal stakeholders is typically owned by HR, or some internal communications department. And a lot of times there's because of that the information being given to customers may not always be in sync with the information given to employees. Right? Yeah. So when we talk about total experience, we're really talking about creating synergy between those two kind of experiences, right. So it's, I mean, the simplest example is like in a retail experience, which is where some, like a customer may come into a store, because they saw an advertisement with some kind of, you know, sale for something, they come into the store, and they present the coupon or the advertisement to the employee, and the employee says, I don't know anything about this. Right. Yeah. And, and the employee even goes back to the manager. Hey, we're sorry, we don't know anything about that, that, you know, that's something corporates doing that. We at the store level don't know anything about whatever, like, I I've actually experienced that walking into stores myself, right. 100%. Yeah. And right, there is a terrible customer experience. And it's not a great employee experience, either. Right. Right. If I, you know, when I, when I look at the example that referred to in the article, what's interesting about that is things get really broken down. When you talk about multilingual or multicultural. Yeah, doesn't Yes. Right. Where, where, in the case of this quick service restaurant, they operate in 140 countries, nine languages that they have to cover. And so part of the challenge they faced was that employees would go into their corporate intranet, and couldn't find any content in their own language. Yeah, right. Okay. So and so right there. It's like, that is a great example. Because it's so obvious where that breakdown is gonna be. Yeah, so if your primary language is Spanish, right, and I log into my corporate intranet, intranet, and, and, you know, HR and communications have put all this content, which is all English, right? There's gonna be a massive breakdown. Right? So, so total experience, I look at it as today, it's very common for something like cybersecurity. We know cybersecurity is a cross cutting concern. Right. So almost any initiative that you do has to be reviewed. For is it creating security holes, security gaps is opening, you know, doors, it like, there has to be some risk assessment whenever you do a transformation of any kind. And cybersecurity is just something that has to be looked at, right? It doesn't matter whether it's customer facing or internal, or whatever you're you, you need to review and I feel like we talked about experience. It's really a cross cutting concern. But it's rarely seen as such. It's rarely seen as a forethought. It's usually seen as an afterthought. You know, I may not be considered at all and, but I'm a big believer that it's cross cutting and that really, the best run organizations care a lot about experience, but they also care about experience inside and outside the organization.

Your CX Passport Captain: 9:29

This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. <ding> While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Robby Cloninger: 10:57

I think there's a couple of reasons. I think, number one is a lot of places don't have somebody who owns experience and is honorable for experience. People, obviously, business leaders own their area of the business, and they have the results that they want to achieve. And typically creating synergy across the business isn't one of those metrics that they're accountable for. Right? And the other is a lot of these systems, right? Whether it like the content management systems, the digital platforms, ERP systems, etc. A lot of these are, you know, they're built up over time. Yeah. And it's kind of organic, how they come about, right. And so it's to create a holistic experience, the leaders at the top have to believe that that's important. First off, right, they have to see the value in it. And then they have to give somebody purview over it, right to ensure that, that the experience is, is comprehensive, and you know, that everything you're standing up, internal and external is aligned with the brand. Right? But if you don't see any value, and honestly, I spend a lot of my time working with customers, dispelling the notion that customer experience is user interface design. That's, that's typically what people assume. And they think CX they think frequently true. Yes. And in reality, that's, that's the tip of the iceberg. And it's, it's really more about everything below the waterline. So I was in a, I remember a lunch that I was having one day, and I was listening to a couple people talk and one of them was a creative designer. And one of them was a technology architect, right, like a software developer architect. And they were debating what's more important, the front end or all the back end services, right. And, and these two individuals were siloed. Right. And and so it's an interesting debate. And yeah, I remember I mentioned this in one of my LinkedIn posts that I placed an order at an online retailer, and the user wouldn't, it could not have been any easier to find what I was looking for and place the order, right. So but when it was actually delivered, it was the wrong thing. I opened the box up, and I looked and I got the notification that hey, this has been delivered. I got a I got a photo of it on my doorstep. And when I opened it up, it wasn't what I had ordered. It was something completely different than what I had ordered. Yeah. Right. And to me, what's interesting about that, is it wasn't the user interface design, that that was neglected in that experience. Right? It was it was something behind the scenes, a back end order management service, right? Logistically that actually was the where the ball dropped.

Rick Denton: 14:07

That is now I alluded to it in the introduction, that is when you're singing my song, because process and execution is what I think is so vital to getting CX right today. And you describe Hey, the design was right. The product selection was right, the inventory may have even been right, but the supply chain execution or whatever, who knows where it actually it could have actually just been in the pack and ship, which is the takeaway supply chain. Okay. That is that overall, look at it, not just what a team might view as UX is what is all about CX or it's just the customer service or success, it's that overall. And I think that's something that you had mentioned to me earlier because you had talked about how your company's focus today is very system integration, data migration system upgrades. I would say that most listeners conventional wisdom would would not expect folks to see this through a Customer Experience lens, they're seeing technology system data migration. You though have said all, and you were pretty emphatic about that all initiatives should not only have this customer experience lens, but they should start with it. Why is that?

Robby Cloninger: 15:17

So the the idea, you know, customer experience initiatives done right start with understanding objectives. They emphasize measurement, right. So we understand where we're starting to understand what we're trying to achieve, we understand how to measure that achievement. For me, this, this really started in earnest about 10 or 12 years ago, for me this belief, and I had a mentor, who, who was kind of leading my business group in consulting at the time, and he was emphatic that everything we should do, everything we do should have a human centric. It should be centered around the human who would be using or impacted by what we're doing. And it didn't matter if it was a software engineering Initiative, or a Data Initiative. It didn't matter what industry it was, in that we needed that customer experience or human Centricity was the tip of the spear. And I have found, I've seen that play out that if we lead with that, we get better results. Right? So I've seen that one of the initiatives that I recently did was a very large data migration for a fortune 500 FinTech company, and we were moving all of their financial data from from on prem into the cloud, right. And so from an engineering perspective, you know, it's a lift and shift data transformations, pipelines, etc, you can look at that as a very engineering check box, move the data, etc. But you know, what they were really trying to achieve is they wanted to create better dashboards for their stakeholders so that they had more, they could get more meaning out of the data and make better decisions, it'd be real time, always accessible self service reporting, etc. So there were all these capabilities that were going to be provided by the cloud that were not provided by their current ecosystem. And the temptation, honestly, is a we're to look at this as a data engineering exercise. But in reality, it's let's start with what the business is trying to achieve with this, right? What are the what are the dashboards? What should they look like? Right? What kind of what kind of reports do they need access to? And then work backwards from there to say, Okay, well, now that's the experience they want? How do we provide them and move the data and transform the data and ensure that we can deliver that experience? And yeah, behind the scenes, it's a lift and shift and doing all this transformation and stuff. But you need somebody who understands that the real objective of this is to make somebody's life better? That's the real objective, right? Even if it's good, right. And if you don't look at it, that way, you really do run the risk of doing all this work, just for the end users to be complaining that they still don't have what they need.

Rick Denton: 18:20

This is that's really good. And that's that, that idea? These are obviously not my friends, heck, the book is sitting on the shelf there, right, but the outside in view of okay, let's not start with our internal objectives, which is to make our data more efficient, or it operates better in the cloud, or is more accessible, but rather, the why, you know, what is it that we're doing this for? What our customer pay for us to do this? And if so, why? What benefit are they getting out of that? And it does make sense that even in the technology layer, and I think maybe there needs to be more of that said that it's even inside of the technology layer, having that customer lens is so vital. Now, Robbie, I don't I can't miss this opportunity here. You did just get back from Vietnam. And while I've mentioned I was only there for a little bit, I found a beautiful food of spectacular, the chaos of who Shimon city was actually exciting. So is the piece of being on a boat on the river. I loved it in my few days, but you've had the chance to go there for work and spend some really good time there. Imagine a little bit of travel fun to what, what stood out to you, especially in the context of customer experience, anything you took home with you that you have now started to apply to your business and experience approach today.

Robby Cloninger: 19:32

Yeah, I think it's anytime you can travel to another culture. It's very, you know, the temptation is if you have business leaders in America and you're trying to build especially global applications, you know, the cultural distinction distinctive, the cultural differences between what's important to to like the Vietnamese culture versus what's important in the American culture and how they shop and how they, you know, how they do something as simple as pay for a taxi ride is, is very different. And you need that exposure. For me, it really doubled down on the on the idea that it's very difficult to be good at customer experience without being empathetic. Right? You can't, you won't know what the real need is right. And there's a lot of ideas, as we do certain initiatives on a global scale, right? We've done some things in Vietnam, and I'll have ideas. And my Vietnamese colleagues will say, No, that won't work in Vietnam. Right? Well, yeah, that's good to know. Right? Really? How do you know that unless you spent time there. And that would, that would be the same in any culture, right? So it's, it's very important to if you're, if you're going to build something, or try to do something that helps the people, again, we're talking about human being human centric, trying to help somebody trying to do an initiative that's at the end of the day going to benefit somebody's life, you really have to understand what their needs are and how they operate and the cultural differences. And that to me was, was really apparent in Vietnam, just seeing how some of the especially in the commerce space, how things are done, different and how things that may be valuable or important to American shoppers are not necessarily the same thing. Same to Vietnamese shoppers.

Rick Denton: 21:41

Robbie, that's brilliant. You're right, even just the basics, the basics of paying for something, whether it's I won't presume to know but right, we've certainly seen that other countries are way ahead of the US when it comes to digital wallets and some of that aspect of it. And what that might look like there are a couple things you loaded in there were the idea of, you know, you wouldn't know unless you asked someone or had experienced that culture. And there's even the whole thread of exactly build our teams with that global build our teams with that understanding of cultures that aren't mono culture, right. And so even having a team that is global, like that is so valuable, but it is time for us to take a break. And I would imagine when you flew over to Vietnam, there were times that you wished you had a break. And hopefully you did. I still remember the first class lounge in Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific Pacific spectacular. And so today, I want to invite you into a first class lounge maybe not as nice as Hong Kong. But the first class lounge today we'll move quickly and have a little bit of fun here. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Robby Cloninger: 22:41

So probably my favorite place in the entire world that I've been is not too far from home, but it's the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Oh, nice. Loved I grew up in North Carolina that I live in Atlanta now. That's the place we would vacation frequently. If you've seen the show. I don't think the show does the Outer Banks justice. But it is never nice. It is a stunning series of islands. And we you know, whenever I go to the Outer Banks, I visit multiple lighthouses and there's just a feel about it very quaint, great waves and just pristine beaches. So that's easily easy. It's an easy, easy question that the easiest

Rick Denton: 23:27

one you'll be asked today, maybe we'll get some more of these hard hitting questions, but how about a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Robby Cloninger: 23:37

So I would say the island of kawaii

Rick Denton: 23:41

Oh cool. Yeah. What is it that draws you to their

Robby Cloninger: 23:45

Jurassic Park? No, just No, actually, you know, I love hiking.

Rick Denton: 23:50

Yeah,

Robby Cloninger: 23:50

they have some of the best hiking trails in kawaii obviously the you know, the whole island atmosphere but I'd love to go to I haven't been to Hawaii actually in general but I'd love to specifically go to Hawaii and and experience some of the hiking there, waterfalls, etc. I

Rick Denton: 24:09

think that's what a lot of folks don't know about that island is that the it's it's got the Hawaiian Grand Canyon. Let me try to say that again, the Hawaiian Grand Canyon, and it caught me off guard. I joked that I made a mistake by taking us on our first anniversary trip to Hawaii. And so then I set the bar a little too high after the first trip. But I was blown away and did not realize how you think beaches. You think palm trees, the Grand Canyon, the hiking all of that brilliant. I hope that you get a chance to go there soon. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Robby Cloninger: 24:48

So speak, I guess sticking with the travel theme. When I was growing up, my mom would often make her like one of her go to dishes was steak, grilled steak with Angel Hair Pasta and pesto sauce. And, yeah, it's gonna go to Okay. When I was in between high school and college, I spent a summer in Australia. And when I called home and after the summer I was I was probably about a week from getting home. And my parents said, you know, we want to make you a special meal when you get home. You've been on the road for so long, etc. And, and what what would you like us to have for you? And I said, I'd like steak with Angel Hair, angel hair, pasta and pesto sauce ice, and they were kind of like, what, that's kind of a weird request. Right? But you know, to this day, it's still kind of one of my go twos. Is that, you know, a good fillet with Angel Hair, pasta and pesto.

Rick Denton: 25:53

Brown like I can assure you that not a lot of there's a lot of folks listen to it. That was the go to All right. Get it up a notch. I like that Robbie. Yeah, well, there had to be on the other side of this coin, though. So what is something that you were forced to eat growing up that you hated as a kid?

Robby Cloninger: 26:10

Definitely fish. Okay, and I don't I don't mean fish sticks from that would have been totally fine. No, but I really lacked an appreciation for you know, my dad would make a lake trout. Right. And I really lacked appreciation for for eating fish off the bone, you know, kind of thing. Right? Right. And now, I love trout, salmon, you know, etc. But but definitely back then that was the that was a challenge.

Rick Denton: 26:40

That is interesting how the things that we didn't care so much for kids we love now. And certainly with North Carolina, having plenty of great fishing both freshwater and saltwater. It's important for you to find that love of the fish. Well, we're going to have to exit the first class lounge. So I want to know what is one travel item not including your phone, not including your passport that you will not leave home without

Robby Cloninger: 27:03

a hat. For obvious reasons. I gotta have a hat.

Rick Denton: 27:18

Oh, Robbie, man, I love that answer I do and listeners if you aren't listening, okay, I think you probably are. If you are not watching, I think you got a pretty good idea as to why Robbie is saying that. And I like the self awareness. Robbie, I am one that is clinging to my scraps and just praying, spraying a lot of sunscreen on the thinning versus here. I actually I really don't mind losing my hair from a vanity perspective. I just don't want to have to deal with sunburn. So I guess a hat is about to be my reason as well. Hey, I want to go back to an example. The example you shared in the article, you talked about how it was done through franchisees, that adds an incredible level of complexity. Because you're talking about a separate company. Technically, the franchisee has a degree of freedom, a degree of independence, when you're trying to make this significant transformation before how did that complexity really get? How did it manifest in the digital transformation that you were a part of? And how did you overcome it?

Robby Cloninger: 28:20

Yeah, so that that definitely was a challenge. Because, you know, the staff at the store level? Didn't we're not really accountable to corporate entity, right. And so the franchisee could definitely stand as a wall. And so there was a, you definitely, we definitely needed to bring a solution to the table that the franchisee was bought into. Right It was it was not about force feeding, this is how we need to do this, etc. It was about really understanding the need. And then. So when you when you think about operating in 140 different countries, nine languages. We did a lot of we started with just doing a ton of interviews, getting people in all these different countries on the phone, going through a series of questions with them really understanding what their needs understanding, honestly, at this, we were trying to understand what type of content if this is about ensuring that we're passing communications effectively in training staff, effectively, right, then what kind of content is going to do that? What kind of content do the store people in the front line consume the most? Right and actually, what we found was part of the reason that they had not been effective is number one is every all the content that was being pushed down to the to the store level was in the form of documents, right like Like PDF documents that they were expecting people, especially young people working in the stores to read. Well, they don't they're not going to sit there and read document for that. Yeah. So. So you might say it's obvious, but we won't, yeah, determined through the interview process that the medium that people wanted to consume was videos. Yeah, that right, they're not going to read a training document, but they'll sit there and watch a training video. And so, as we learned, what kind of content would you be most likely to consume? You know, etc. We were able, it didn't take much convincing once we showed the results, and that the content we were providing was actually going to be effective that the franchisees were willing to kind of open the door to say, hey, we'll allow our our staff to come in and receive this content, right. So the other thing was, you know, you can imagine, typically, personalization, phrase personalization, right is very, very common in a customer experience marketing scenario, where, you know, you go to a store, and you've been browsing certain products, and all of a sudden, they know, that's what you're interested in. And so that's all you start seeing, and then you start receiving emails with those products, right? You go on social media, and you start seeing those products and videos about those products show up, right, that's personalization, you don't see or hear a lot about personalization, when it comes to the employee experience. And so a lot of times these employees, staff, etc, would log in to the corporate intranet, and would be inundated with content, which wasn't relevant to them, it was either in a wrong language, or it, it appealed to like training on things that they never did. Because the system didn't know who they were, what their role was. It couldn't, what they're interested in. So for instance, through it's the same kind of technology that we would standardly apply in a, in a customer facing scenario, you can apply to employees and to staff, etc, to make sure that we're delivering information which is relevant and timely, and in the correct language, and in the correct medium, that is most likely to drive the results that the business is looking for. And so we applied that, to this, and that, in doing this personalized approach, honestly, the the frame, the wall of the franchisee kind of came down because they saw the value in it. And they saw that it was actually by by allowing us to distribute effective content in a personalized way to their staff, that they were actually going increased their own store revenue by having more consistent, you know, customer experience it

Rick Denton: 32:50

what's almost it when I asked the question, I didn't think this but now that you've said it, I listened to your answer. And I realized it's just the disciplines of customer experience. The franchisee, in this case that you're describing is simply the customer. And what is it the customer needs, wants, desires? How do they operate and give it to them in the fashion that they want? And then guess what? They'll choose it and it's no longer a barrier. And so well, to your I love that you point out? Yeah, it's real simple for us to look back and say that, in the moment, though, it takes that discipline to look forward and say, Okay, what is the customer? Who is the customer? And what did they want Robbie, I'm cheating and looking at the clock here. And I can tell we're actually a little bit over time. But the info is so good. I want to go just a little bit long, because there's something that I wanted to ask you about that I extracted from your introduction, that you see your role as bridging that gap between the technologist and the business leader, and bringing the customer into the discussion. How would you advise someone who is getting into this space, someone new into the space on the best way to bridge that gap?

Robby Cloninger: 33:55

So I had the benefit of, you know, I have a computer science degree. I spent several years just doing software development. And so I started as an engineer, effectively, very technical. There was always a little bit of friction, though, because I found that I would work with a lot of people that didn't really care about the Y. You mentioned the Y earlier, right? There were a lot of people that weren't really interested in the Y they just wanted what are the requirements, check the box, write the code that meets the requirements, there was no real. What's the purpose of this? Right? Why are we building this in the first place? Right. And I had the experience of working with some executives. And it was through that experience, I began to understand what their communication style was, what their objectives were, and how they would make decisions on the technology stack based on the business drivers. Right? And they cared about the why and it kind of all of a sudden I started to get this point of view of Well, that's what's important to them. And the you know, it kind of convinced me that technology is just an enabler of what the business is trying to achieve. We shouldn't start with the technology. But as engineers, we kind of tend to always start with the technology, right? And so and then the customer came in, because oftentimes, when you're dealing with an executive, what do they care about? They care about the customer and acquiring new customers retaining old customers and loyalty. So that's what you Yeah, you hope you hope? The so, you know, my advice to somebody coming into the space is you, you cannot develop true empathy without spending time with these specific individual types, right? Like, the tech, the technologist, the people are interested in the technology and what makes them tick. The executives, what are their what are the outcomes, are they trying to achieve the customers, I spent a lot of time in each of those spheres, interviewing customers, spending time with executives, coming from a technology background. And here's the deal, a lot of people want to stay where they're comfortable, right. So if I'm a software engineer, I kind of want to live in that software engineering space, right. And if I'm an executive, I don't really understand the technology necessarily, and I don't really go there. And then understanding what the customer is looking for, you kind of have to embrace, not being the expert at times, and just living and absorbing, and really trying to say my goal here is to learn what you are trying to achieve. And what drives you. And I find when I talk about bridging, it's like, I want to be able to speak all those different languages, right?

Rick Denton: 36:45

Yeah, that is a brilliant nugget of advice to give of the idea of bridging all of that. Robbie, this has been a lot of fun talking with you today. One, just the overall customer experience insights and applying it to technology projects and how it's it look, you got to do this for all projects, it's just got to be that's the way it's got to be to understanding the value of understanding globalization, when you're talking about different cultures and recreating global solutions to perhaps the best description of the basic food item, the go to food item with the steak and the pasta, which I'm still going to be thinking about throughout the rest of my day. Robbie, if folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you your approach to CX, your approach to transformation, or to get to know a little bit more about FPT? Where should they look?

Robby Cloninger: 37:35

So for me, definitely my LinkedIn. And I'm am trying to make a concerted effort to put and post more content out there about my perspective, on total experience for FBT certainly go to our website, and, and has a wealth of information about all our vast awesome experiences.

Rick Denton: 38:01

Awesome. Well, I will get all of that into the shownotes. So folks, scroll down there, get to know a little bit more about Robbie, get to know a little bit more about FPT. And certainly thank you to FPT for sponsoring this episode. It was always appreciative. I always appreciate being able to partner with someone who values the X passport as much as the listeners and the viewers do Robbie. It was a lot of fun today. Enjoy the rest of your day for sure. And Robbie, thank you for being on CX password.

Robby Cloninger: 38:26

Hey, thank you, Rick. I appreciate it.

Rick Denton: 38:33

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. If you liked today’s episode I have 3 quick next steps for you Click subscribe on the CX Passport youtube channel or your favorite podcast app Next leave a comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and and enjoy CX Passport too Then, head over to cxpassport.com website for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience. Until next time, I’m Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.