The one with the storytelling - Andrew Carothers CX OpenToWork E194

🎤🎞️This month’s CX #OpenToWork seeker in “The one with the storytelling” with Andrew Carothers in CX Passport Episode 194🎧 What’s in the episode?...

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction

1:58 Challenges and Solutions in CX

07:25 Building a Customer-Centric Experience 

11:33 Impact of Customer Experience on Business Results

13:36 Extra Legroom Section: Fun and Personal Insights

17:17 What are companies getting wrong about CX

19:21 Improving CX Understanding and Storytelling

24:04 Andrew's Vision for the Future of CX

29:50 Closing Remarks and Contact Information

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

Episode resources:

Andrew Carothers LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-carothers/

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

What am I trying to get this person or this audience to think, feel or do? And it's building out an effective story that then pops when told. When I'm delivering it, I'm delivering it with impact,

Rick Denton: 0:13

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 CX Passport travelers. This is only the second repeat guest that we've had on CX passport. I'd love all of my guests to come back for a second appearance. There just have been so many great new guests that I just haven't had the chance to see what comes after the first class lounge. Today we talk again with Andrew Carruthers. You may recall hearing him in an episode back in episode 150 the one with the CX. Teenage years, those years can be turbulent, and Andrew now joins the CX open to work community. There's also a ton of excitement in those years as well. With change comes opportunity, and I'm eager to learn more about Andrew's vision for that next opportunity. In addition to being a part of this month's CX open to work episode, Andrew gets to be the first person to join me in the extra legroom section, a new CX passport feature only for those coming on board for their second flight. Gonna be fun today, Andrew, welcome to CX passport. Thanks, Rick. It is great to be here. Really love coming back for a second time. What a treat, you know. And I never, I didn't know what conditions would create a scenario where folks would come back a second time. And here it's happened a couple times here in the last actually, the last couple weeks have created that, and I'm excited to have you be my guinea pig for this new experience that we'll have in the middle of the episode. But before we get there, I just want to ask you kind of that usual question that I like to ask. CX, open to work, folks, is what draws you to customer experience? What? Why is this important to you? That's a great question. Rick, when I think about it, there are really three things that draw me to customer experience. I come, I should say, I come to CX from a marketing background. So with that in mind, what, what sort of extends, then CX, beyond marketing, in my view, is the holistic nature of it. So writ large, CX is about the total of the perceptions a customer has about an organization. So by nature, then, to effectively provide a custom experience for customers, the CX professional has to work across every part of the organization. So it's working through silos and connecting with different different players in the organization. So I love the holistic nature in terms of the impact on the customer and the play across the whole organization. Yeah. The second thing that I really like about CX is the discipline of experience. What makes a good or effective experience? So that the you know, one where the customer wants to, you know, gets what they need and wants to come back for more. So that's sort of the discipline of what is a good experience. And then the third thing is, is the everyday blocking and tackling. I find that very energizing connecting of data and platforms and people, the the journey mapping, the mapping, the leveraging of AI, I find just the day to day work really energizing and exciting. I like how you brought me across all three of those threads there. I of course, started grinning perhaps the most when we started talking about the blocking and tackling aspect of it, because you know how much I care about process and execution when it comes to customer experience, what has been sort of a challenge with that blocking and tackling like you're excited about it, but I imagine that that's not the easiest thing to move forward. How have you really centered? If that's energizing to you, then I imagine you've solved some elements of that. How have you solved for that block? Right? So every day it's challenging, but that means every day is the opportunity to be a problem solver, and at its core, I guess, because that's what I love about it. So it's, it's the opportunity to bring people together who maybe aren't aligned, or maybe they're aligned, but they can't figure something out, and try to then understand sort of, what at its core do we need to be able to provide? Or what would we look to provide? What would we like to if we had more data or different type of data, right? So, sort of trying to look at the puzzle from different perspectives, and then being able to build a coalition of the willing to then to try to drive that problem to to solution. That's the part about it that I really enjoyed. Just just having a problem is not exciting, but working to solve the problem is i Okay? I've got a question here, and we can edit it out if you want, but you said coalition of the willing, and I forget whether it was theme. One. Theme too, but you talked about having to work with multiple groups across an organization. What if those multiple groups are only, what if only some of them are coalition of the willing? But there's a category that's the coalition of the unwilling, right? How do you overcome that? Well, I'll tell you how we overcame it at Cisco when we started up for 15 years ago, because that's exactly the what what we faced. There was a small group of us who founded the CX function, 100 people, 50 of whom were renewal managers who were doing the same thing on Monday in the new CX organization as they'd been doing the previous Friday in the sales organization. So really, there were 50 of us that were trying to create a new function, and we spent the first two or three years at a minimum focusing in on sort of data connectivity and evangelizing about the discipline of CX across the company. Some people got it right away. It's, you know, traditional bell curve. There were plenty of people who either didn't get it at this point. Remember, Cisco was a 30 year old hardware company that, yeah, you know, had never cared about CX. So there were plenty of people who'd never cared about it, who didn't think that it affected them, whether they were an IT or sales or whatever they were. So we overcame that by, you know, bit by bit, you know, meeting by meeting, bringing in external data to our conversation so that we could explain here's, here's what experience is and why it matters to you, whether you're in it or sales or marketing, whatever it might be. Don't take our word for it. Here are industry analysts or customers or partners. This was a very partner driven company, so we brought in respected outside sources to back up our story. We brought in data wherever we could that was at least directionally correct, and we were always upfront about that, and hopefully more you know, actual you know, specifically correct to be able to show the financial impact that we'd be able to have again on that person or that team's business as best we could and and then we also made sure to discuss examples, usually in a, b To C, world, that that our audience members would know, right? They would help them imagine what we're talking about. So companies like certainly Amazon, but peloton and ring, which both have hardware as well as software and multiple platforms, so connectivity of data was important. So that's how we put together the story and then spent a couple of years going around all across this massive company to start building a coalition of the willing that wasn't there on day one. Hey there, CX Passport travelers. I want to let you know about CX Passport Live. CX Passport Live helps brands amplify their event's impact with the power of live in-person, podcasting. Brands partner with CX Passport Live at their on-site event to help excite attendees, reward high value customers and convert potential customers. Bring a new level of energy and excitement to your event and amplify your brand's impact with CX Passport Live. Learn more at cxpassportlive.com Now back to the show. Like it? You inside of there. You talked about the storytelling. You talked about also the the results. I want to go back to the results here in a little bit, but first, just in general. So that was how you built that coalition of the willing from the unwilling. Overall, the objective was to create this experience that customers wanted. How have you created that experience that customers wanted in the past, be it Cisco or elsewhere? So this gets to really two sides to answering that question, and the two sides of the same coin, there's the customer facing, and then the sort of internal or the operational focus so on the customer facing, and I think that's the part that that people in CX, or our stakeholders in the C suite or elsewhere, they focus in on that, on that part. So what, what is the user experience going to be going to look like, whether this is UI in an app or what, you know, redo of a website. And so this is where we kind of get into the journey mapping and other parts of the CX profession that are more well known, where, I think then the so we did that, right? We did the we did the journey mapping. We went out and talked with customers and partners, figured out what they needed, you know, mapped out what that journey needs to look like with the moments that matter. Looked at the technology stack underneath it, and the connectivity and the data layers and all that that we need to pull together so all of that so that we could provide customers with at its core, a simple um. Personalized relevant to where the customers were in their journey, their adoption journey, the renewal journey at that time, so they're getting the information they need when they need it. And to do this consistently. And that sounds easy, but it's very hard to do, because then there's the operational side that be able to do all that we needed, to connect dozens and dozens of data sources and breakthrough organizational silos and connect different IT platforms, and be able to connect the digital experience with the agent experience and and then bring in the partner to that as well, since our partners are closer to our customers at Cisco than Cisco is so right, that operational stuff that, like the blocking and tackling internally, is the foundation to be able to have an effective customer facing experience that's so important to nail. And I think a lot of times that that operational element that you're describing either gets overlooked or it's not as sexy, or sometimes it's just assumed, and yet there's actual, tangible work that has to take place to make that come to fruition. It doesn't just happen with a magical snap. Let's talk about that. So that's creating that great experience. You mentioned business results as a way of influencing folks. Well, somehow this experience has to actually deliver and affect those business results. So how does the delivery of customer experience actually affect tangible, real, honest to God, business results? Yep, so when it's done well, it ties directly to the bottom line, both through growing revenue and through cost savings or cost avoidance. It grows revenue by directly growing renewals, and not only renewal rates, but renewal dollars. So it's adding revenue that way, and it also provides especially at the time of renewal, but also earlier. It provides the opportunity for upsell and cross sell dollars. So there's there's more revenue coming in that way. And I mean specifically offering customers the opportunity to upsell or add on, right? So, so that. So I mean that very specifically, not simply, sort of theoretically, well, if they adopt more, they'll be more loyal, they'll buy more so yes, and we specifically tee up opportunities for customers to cross sell and upsell themselves and to build their renewals as well. And then the other part that I think also gets kind of forgotten is the opportunity. By driving a digital experience with customers self serving, we can, we can avoid a lot of the calls into customer support, and those have a cost to them. Yeah, so figuring out jointly with the customer support team, with the CFO, with whomever else needs to be involved in the conversation, what is the cost of an average call into customer support and to be able to then figure out, how many of those calls are we deflecting by having the customer be able to get what they need on their own through an effective digital experience rather than calling in, then we can figure out what so then how much money are we saving and doing it that way? So, and that's an important metric to bring back to the stakeholders as well. Andrew, little change of pace here. Well, actually, I say that almost every episode this one's a big change of pace at this time, as it is the first ever extra leg room section for CX passport. We will move quickly here, hopefully have a little bit of fun, just like the first class lounge. So aisle or window aisle, gotta get up and move around. Really, yeah, I mean, I really I'm such a window guy, when? When am I ever going to be the bird that flies over the country? And I just can't stop staring out the window, although, as I've aged, Andrew the aisle is starting to become a little more appealing, as perhaps bio breaks need to take a little more often, or occur more often during a flight so I appreciate, yeah. Okay, all right, I got it crunchy or soft tacos?

Andrew Carothers: 14:24

Soft tacos all the way.

Rick Denton: 14:27

Why? Because crunchy, you don't want to answer that, because when I eat crunchy tacos, they fall apart on me and I make a mess. That doesn't happen with soft taco. Well, I'm Team crunchy. I like crunchy peanut butter and I like crunchy tacos, although, yeah, there's, there's a place for that good soft taco as well. What's on your refrigerator door? So there's only one thing on my refrigerator door. It is, it is. There used to be lots of things, pictures and. You know, magnets from trips and things like that. They all got cleared out when we remodeled our house. But there's one thing on there, and it is, it is a magnet version of my wife's business card. She joined a new company about a month ago. So, so that's the only thing that's on that's, you know, that's almost kind of a burn the shift moment. Yeah, we had all these beautiful memories of trips or whatever. Uh, bam, it's my wife's new business, and that's what we're going to focus on Exactly, okay, what is a special concert memory of yours? Oh, that is, that is so hard to to narrow in on just one, because I've got a couple. I'll mention two. I went to see the who, and that was phenomenal. The who was great. The Eagles were great. Fleetwood Mac was fantastic. But I'm a huge Springsteen fan. And it started with the first time I saw him. A friend of mine said, Hey, you want to go see Springsteen? I said, I don't know who you're talking about. He said, I've got tickets. And then I was hooked from there. So here in Springsteen, in LA at the, I think it was the civic center in the sports arena, yeah, fantastic. That's awesome. Okay, very nice. Well, it's time for us to I guess. I don't, I don't know. We're not leaving the lounge. You're not leaving the exit or the extra row seat. Maybe the plane is landing. I'll find a phrase as we do this segment more often, but as we close it out, what is a most treasured trip souvenir? I've had a lot of souvenirs, some some magnets on refrigerators, but my most treasured has to be the piece of the Berlin wall that I shipped off myself, so I know it's authentic. In 1996 months after the wall came down, my wife, then girlfriend and I went to went to East Europe, we went to Berlin and to be able to actually rent an ax from that capitalism going all right, chip away, you know, a good colorful chunk of it. I actually have it behind me on the bookshelf it. That's my that's my most treasured souvenir. Andrew, I can absolutely see why that would be a treasured souvenir. And I do love the capitalism element of it, that rather have you rent a pickax, you know, walls fallen, capitalism is here. Here we go. No, that's that's wonderful, that that's there. And what a special and, you know, we talk about, you know, by experiences, not objects. And it's very true, yet, there are times that those objects tie us back to those experiences, and it's so delightful. So delightful. So I'm glad that you've got that on the wall behind you, on the wall. I didn't even mean to say that you have a piece of the wall on the wall behind you, and that's great. Let's go back to talk about CX. What are companies missing in customer experience today, and how can they improve on that? Well, we've touched on a couple of them already. I think companies are missing on the understanding of what actually CX is. So this goes back to what we talked about in the earlier episode about CX and his teenage years. There's a there's an understanding that it's it's important. I know I need to have this in my in my business, but I don't really know what it is, which then leads to a lack of clarity around what needs to happen operationally and that business process improvement in order to be able to deliver the type of effective customer experience that that leads to those direct business results that we talked about. So I think that's one thing that companies are missing, is that is a real clarity around the what the function is, yeah, and the business impact that the other one is, then the direct business impact that it brings. Yeah, I want to pull at that a little bit more, because you said it's the lack of understanding of experience. I'm not going to have your quote memorized, but the idea, the lack of the understanding of what customer experience is that leads companies to fail on understanding the operational needs that come from delivering that. I don't usually hear that tied that way. I usually hear operations is what underpins the experience itself. I like what you said there. How can a company, if that's the problem, how can they improve on that? What does it take to improve on that thread? Well, I think, I think it's incumbent on the CX professionals at a company to tell an effective story that explains that and bringing in outside sources, whether it be customers or partners or peers or industry analysts or whomever it might be, it can't just be the CX professional or the CX team saying, trust me about CX. You know, I know how to do this, and I need more investment. It has to be the CX professional explaining, using visuals, using outside, credible sources, data points. Quotes, whatever it might be to be able to tell an effective story that convinces people, here's what it needs to be, here's the investment we need to make. Here's where that and this is critical, here's where that investment will go. Yeah, they're not just asking me for money. They're telling me what they're going to use it for, and they're telling me what the results are going to be, and they've convinced me by bringing in this outside data, that I will get those results. Because I think that's something that's plagued the profession over the last few years, as money and investment has gotten tight, and in fact, there's been a ton of layoffs and disinvestment in businesses. They've looked at CX as a cost center, because a lot of people don't have a clear understanding of just how it can be used to drive revenue. Okay? And I get that in the theoretical certainly, you and I are very aligned there, but let's get specific. How can you the unique skills that Andrew brings to the table? How can you help companies do what you're describing they need to do to improve on that experience? Well, that's okay. We're getting personal. So the authenticity of the CX passport open to work series. Well, I mean simply, I've, I've, I know what it takes, and I've done it before, right? So it's an understanding of how to tell stories in general. I'll break it down. It's an understanding of of storytelling. I'm the, literally, the child of a Hollywood screenwriter. So I learned at the pretty cool, yeah, we may come back to that. Keep going. I don't want to river flow, even though I just did, but what go on? And most of the time, my dad worked at home. When he was he was writing movies, he was writing TV shows and writing a play and a couple of plays. So he worked at home a lot, which meant I used to, I was able to pick his brain from the time I was a little kid, to older, to to sort of, sort of a similar concept here. Of people think of a movie and the script as kind of like this. I know what it is, I know it's words on the paper, but there's sort of this, this black magic, this arch to it. There's a distinct science to effective script, right? And I learned that from my dad, so and it's not just script writing, it's storytelling. So I understand the science and the art of effective storytelling. I also understand explicitly what CX can bring to the table and what you know, I know what questions to ask inside of an organization, to be able to tease out here's where investments are going to need to be made, here's where we're okay, here's the the here's where we're going to be able to deliver results, and how long it might take to deliver those roles, those results. And then so there's that understanding of of the content as well as the storytelling. And then I think what probably sets me apart from a lot of people is then the experience I've done this at Cisco. There were, as I mentioned before, there were only 50 of us in a company of, I don't know, 50,000 at the time, who then created a new function and convinced, team by team, organization by organization, Silo by silo, to join the coalition of the willing and to then build out a function across this major global organization. So I've done this, yeah, and that's, I like, how you're mixing both. A lot of have done it. That storytelling part of it. I said I was going to circle back, because you completely surprised me with that. I do want to ask you this so you saw that you learned what makes an effective storytelling. What could you share with me, with the listeners, even just like high level nuggets? Hey, this is how you tell an effective story. We've already established. Hey, storytelling is important to CX, but what if you're not a great storyteller? How can one get better at telling stories? Yeah, I've actually taught classes on this. Oh, good, yeah, listeners, you're getting this free. A couple things. One, you know, we know that we need to hook people, but there is a so and you need to hook people to be getting in fact, this is something I learned early on about script writing. You need to connect with your audience. In the first 10 minutes of a movie, if you're writing the script, not only connect with them, but introduce who the protagonists are, who the antagonists are, what you know, what the what the major point of friction is going to be, all that comes across in the first 10 minutes the rest of the movie is the playing out of that, that the story that you've laid that you've laid out up front. So when I'm trying to tell a story, when I'm teaching people how to tell a story, I I show them a tool that I have that is and it's not anything complex but, but it is story booking, right? And so it's. Figuring out, it's a different way to think about an outline, but figuring out, what do we need to say, sort of chapter by chapter and then, and that's almost, that's vertical on my sheet, and then horizontal is then that what goes into each chapter, and to be able to then move that around. So I use sort of a digital version of sticky notes. Years ago, it was a little sticky notes, yeah, be able to move those around so that I could get the story told in the most compelling way, with the best flow, and then once the structure of the story is in place, then bringing in what I call color spots. So this is, this is fun, facts, anecdotes, data points. It's beyond the it's what takes the structure a well structured story and really makes it pop with all of this extra point. And then once I have that now I can look at that and make some additional modifications. Is it too long? Is it too short? Am I telling too many stories? Is that story maybe going down a little bit of a garden path and not specific enough to what I need. So it's a way for me to see and build out a story that that does exactly what I need. It to do that starts off with with what am I trying to do in this conversation, whether it's over the phone, whether it is in a meeting with somebody in front of a large group, what am I trying to get this person or this audience to think, feel or do, or some combination of those three, and then building the story based on that? You know, am I just trying to inform somebody? Am I trying to influence somebody? Do I want them to invest in me? In which case I also want them to, that's what I want them to do, right? I also want them to think, Oh, this guy, or this team knows what he's doing, has the capability to do this, you know, etc. So it's the combination up front of, what's my purpose here, what do I want my audience to think, feel, or do? And then it's building out an effective story that then pops when told, and then when I have that. Now I can rehearse that just off this one sheet of paper that is my storyboard. I can rehearse that so that when I'm delivering it, I'm delivering it with with impact. I'm looking at my audience. I'm making a connection instead of staring at my slides, oh man, oh, that's so good. Oh, I'm glad. I'm so glad you dropped that little nugget there. I'm going to ask you a question, but I think I should say that if you don't want to answer this question, to say, No, Rick, I intend to go screenwriting. We're going to explore that, right? If you're just going to enter the world of writing, scripts and screenwriting. But what's next for you in the world of customer experience? Yeah, well, it will not be screenwriting, and that is a tough profession. Yeah, it's very specifically. Like, even more so like, right now it's incredibly difficult. Yeah, even back in the day I saw the stress my dad, yeah, not gonna do that. Um, so what's next for for me and customer experience is, I've built up this, this wealth of knowledge, having seen the the growth of the function inside a fortune 100 company, um, from, you know, from zero to to a major part of the organization, and having had a front row seat to that and And playing, you know, and helping to lead that and that, and the customer transformation, the customer centricity transformation within Cisco, at the same time that I've watched and had a front row seat to the growth of the discipline in the industry of CX as well. So I have this perspective that I bring, and this experience that I bring and I want to help another company build out their function, or if they already have the function, really help it mature. Help it mature through the type of things we've been talking about, heavy emphasis on digital. That's one thing we haven't talked about, is every customer wants a digital first experience. That's a change from even five years ago, but now even your largest customers want a digital first experience. May not be digital only, but it's digital first, right? I mean, I, you know, I love me some extra leg room, but I don't, I don't call up United Airlines to get it. I go online. I call you that airlines when something's gone wrong. So I want a digital first experience, and having been part of the digital team and one of its leaders at Cisco since the beginning, that's again, I think ties my experience dovetails nicely with the trends we're seeing in the CX world, which reflect the trends we're seeing in in the in the customer world, whether it be B to B or B to C. Well, that's awesome, and I'm glad you got a clear path or a clear vision of what that's going to look like. That certainly will help listeners and viewers. You. Think of All right, what's the opportunities that I can help connect Andrew to that next opportunity, or perhaps you're the company that's got the opportunity, like this guy, want to talk to him, if folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, your philosophy around CX and just connect with you. What's the best way for folks to get in touch? Best place to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn. I have a have a pretty active presence there. I love it when people connect with me. If you, if you have a, you know, as you just mentioned, you think that'd be great for your company. Or if you think you might be great for a company that you know of, please reach out. But also, if you just want to to, you know, talk shop and just connect. I'd love to have the opportunity to meet different folks in the CX world, connect with them on LinkedIn, and then some of us have had the opportunity to meet up in real life. We've still waiting for the opportunity with you on that Rick we have. It'll happen. I've done some sort of had the opportunity to then sort of share my, my knowledge and learning with folks who are, who are at other companies, just because we met and connected on LinkedIn, so please, that's the way to reach out to them. Well, I will get your LinkedIn profile URL in the show notes, click it, connect with Andrew and build that connection going forward. Andrew loved it. Loved getting to hear a different perspective, having you as a repeat guest. I certainly loved getting some of that specifics around storytelling, but also talking about the operational elements of experience and why it matters all of that. And thank you also for being the guinea pig for the extra legroom section. I had a good time with you on that one. Andrew, thank you for being on CX passport. My pleasure. Rick, 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.