Team, Tool, Process & Feedback – The 4 Pillars with Adrian Brady-Cesana – E86

Posted byCX GoalkeeperPosted inUncategorized

Episode released on: 08. August 2022

Team, Tool, Process & Feedback – The 4 Pillars with Adrian Brady-Cesana – CX GOALKEEPER – Customer Experience Goals

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Adrian Brady-Cesana

LinkedIn Headline: Customer Experience Executive, Author of The Four CX Pillars & Host of The CXChronicles Podcast

Highlights:

  • 00:00 Game Start
  • 00:38 Adrian’s introduction
  • 2:36 CX Chronicles
  • 05:53 Adrian’s Values
  • 11:04 The Team
  • 18:43 The tools
  • 25:12 The Processes
  • 32:32 The Feedback
  • 38:09 Adrian’s book suggestion
  • 40:03 Adrian’s contact details
  • 40:42 Adrian’s Golden Nugget

and much more

Adrian’s Contact Details:

His book suggestion:

Adrian‘s Golden Nuggets:

  • The power of focus is so critical. It’s really really easy to come up with 10, 15, 50, 100, different ideas, right? But you’ve got to be able to focus on the two or the three things that you can actually start taking action on today, with your team, with your department, with your leadership team, and with your customers by the way.
  • The minute that I started focusing on the power of focus, that’s when stuff started getting done on a regular basis. And that’s when action or calls to action started getting completed on a regular basis.
  • Make happiness a habit right. It’s just good for everybody: your team, your customers, and yourself.
  • Take some time to figure out how you can literally make happiness a habit in your business, it’s going to be a direct reflection on how you can improve your CX and how you make sure that your EX is taken care of because people want to work in cultures and environments that are positive, happy, contributing and collaborative.

Make happiness a habit right. It’s just good for everybody: your team, your customers, and yourself. @AdrianBradyCesa on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

The power of focus is so critical. It’s really really easy to come up with 10, 15, 100, different ideas, But you’ve got to be able to focus on the 2-3 things that you can actually start taking action on today @AdrianBradyCesa on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

The minute, I started focusing on the power of focus, that’s when stuff started getting done on a regular basis and calls to action started getting completed on a regular basis. @AdrianBradyCesa on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast

Transcription:

Gregorio Uglioni 0:00
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast. Your host, Gregorio Uglioni. Will have small discussions with experts, thought leaders, and friends on customer experience, transformation, innovation and leadership. I hope you will enjoy the next episode,

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight it’s a big pleasure. I have Adrian Brady Cesana with me, Hi Adrian, how are you?

Adrian Brady-Cesana 0:27
Hello there, Greg. Thanks for having me today, my friend.

Gregorio Uglioni 0:30
It’s really big, big pleasure. Thank you very much for accepting my invite. I think tonight, it will be really a nice discussion, because you are also a podcast, you have really successful podcast, we will come to it in a few seconds. But before we deep dive in, in the topic, team tool processes and feedback, I would wonder if you could introduce yourself

Adrian Brady-Cesana 0:54
100%. So number one, Greg, thank you so much for having me on the show. Super excited to be here today. My name is Adrian Brady-Cesana, as you mentioned, I am the founder and chief experience officer at CX Chronicles here in the United States. And Greg, we have the pleasure of working with a number of different customer focused business leaders and businesses across the world, helping them think about how they can optimize the four CX pillars in their business. Many of the customers that we work with Greg are venture capital backed startup companies. So we have the pleasure of working with a variety of different executive leadership teams. And really, Greg, for me, you know, I had the pleasure of living and working in New York City for about 10 years at a plethora of different venture capital backed startups and and basically the reason why I love this space. And the reason why I just like you, I think so much about customer experience and customer success. And customer centricity is I got to build a number of these teams from the ground up guys, and they got to build them in different businesses in different industries with different teams. And you know, Greg, I got very lucky man all along the way, I kind of kept adding chapters to my own personal playbook, if you will. And I kept learning new things. And I kept working with incredible co workers that would teach me all sorts of different ways of thinking about it. And today, we have the pleasure of of doing that, you know, for living and working with a number of different customers to do the exact same thing so they can build their customer experience and customer success teams as they scale their businesses.

Gregorio Uglioni 2:18
Thank you very much. And I think ladies and gentlemen, you need to see and feel the energy that Adrian is spreading. It’s outstanding. It’s really great. If and please introduce also your podcasts because it’s really good. This morning, I was outside jogging. And I was listening to one of your podcasts. And I watched on the timing. It was a great timing because I run really quickly and fast. It’s full of energy, it’s pumping up and therefore please share also some information about your outstanding podcast.

Adrian Brady-Cesana 2:50
Absolutely. So Greg, I think guys, part of why Greg and I hit it off. You know, when I started CX Chronicles, I full candor, I started it a bit backwards. I actually, I had this idea for a podcast and I, I was at the time, I was still a CX practitioner, I think I was still in New York City. And I was working at some of these companies and I, Greg kept struggling to find granular stories, granular paths, and just granular steps of wisdom around how to how to manage a customer experience in the customer success team. You know, there’s always high level customer centricity articles, and there was all these high level customer focused content out there. But I was like struggling with Wait a minute, how do you think about the team side? How do you think about the tool side? How do you build process and documented as you grow in the business? And then most importantly, you know how to get really good at collecting customer and employee feedback. So you can fuel innovation and fuel growth and fuel positive change, as your business really kind of expands into the future. So I started the sage Chronicles podcast. At this point, Greg, I think we’re nearing the 200th episode. So I we’ve had the absolute pleasure of listening, learning, connecting and meeting with some incredible customer focus business leaders from across the world. And similar to you, we have a bunch of awesome, Chief Experience officers, chief customer officers, chief executive officers, a number of incredible practitioners are VPs and SVP of customer experience of customer success. And frankly, we’ve catalogued how they think about the four CX pillars, and what are some of the things they do around, you know, thinking about their team and their tools in the process. And Greg, I’m not gonna lie to you, it was somewhere inside of the first 50 episodes, we started to figure out what the products and services and the managed service offerings that we wanted to bring the market at CSC because we kept hearing what people were needing help with what they needed support on what they were really kind of struggling with, or where they continue to kind of find limitations with their business. And we tried to build a suite of managed service offerings that can help them with that, and that can help to continue to promote, educate and inform customer focused business leaders about this ever evolving world of customer experience. So definitely check out the show. It’s on it’s on all of your favorite podcast player. airs in, we try to do weekly, weekly episode updates, Greg. So we’re always pumping out new content for our listeners.

Gregorio Uglioni 5:06
Thank you very much. And I think I offered to you the first penalty that you can score a goal, which to which on which website is your podcast, I will put it in the show notes.

Adrian Brady-Cesana 5:16
So feel free to check us out at CX chronicles.com. And you’ll be able to find more out about the podcast, you’ll be able to take a look at the knowledge base, we’ve got a just an abundance of different CX and CX focus plays for customer focused business leaders to really kind of dig into and bring back to their team. And we’re always pushing updates like this. And so obviously, like when we get the pleasure of coming on shows like yours, Greg, we were always sharing the updates, and always sharing the news for some of the different, you know, podcasts or webinars or speeches that we’re getting invited to. So check us out at the website, and you’ll be able to learn more about CXC.

Gregorio Uglioni 5:50
Great 1 – 0 for Adrian, and we start really well a bit more philosophical questions a bit difficult. But I think it’s something that it’s also interesting for for the CX professionals outside listening to this podcast, which values drive your life?

Adrian Brady-Cesana 6:09
So it’s, it’s an excellent question. I think, you know, for me, there’s a few different things. Number one, I talk about this a lot. But I think since I’ve been a kid, and certainly the entire time that I’ve been kind of progressing my professional career, you know, just this, this idea of having intense curiosity, Greg is a big one for me, I think, when people say, Hey, dude, how do you how did you get into this space? Or why are you why are you so good with it with the customer angle? I tell them, I’m like, Guys, I’m just just since I’ve been a young guy, it’s just like, I have this intense curiosity that drives to asking lots of questions, if you ask lots of questions. And you really, truly are trying to get to the bottom of understanding a person their needs, their challenges, their struggles. Number one, that’s where like, you get that candid, connected feeling or somebody knows that you’re not just asking these things to try to get a self gain, you’re asking them because you’re interested in union, you want to figure out how you can help and you want to figure out what what do they know, what do they not know, we’re going to help maybe point you towards some of the information sets that might help make your decision easier, right? So I’d say number one is definitely just this notion of being intensely curious and always being, thinking about what you can learn more about and how you can kind of dig into it. I’d say another big one. It’s really kind of this idea of constantly being on a learning journey, Greg, so part of the intense curiosity, if you’re not learning on a regular basis, learning something new every single day, every single week, every single month, whether it’s new podcasts, new books, new, just even new coworkers, go go get a go get a coffee with a co worker that’s at a totally different part of your team, and learn about a whole other space. But like that ongoing learning, it’s one of the easiest ways to self improve yourself, self improve your own performance, help your team. But lastly, it’s just like, you know, I’m a firm believer in the day that you stop learning about things, you’re kind of you start kind of starting to slow down a little bit, right. So there’s so many examples of this, Greg, but there’s, there’s all these different business leaders and even these historical figures, they learned until the day that they died. And I think that’s, that’s what I try to live my life with. I’m always trying to learn new things, try to meet new people and, and constantly trying to understand sort of what what’s out there. And then I’d say the last thing is, you know, as I’ve gotten a little bit older and a little bit a little bit wiser, Greg, I think that there is there’s, it’s not cliche, but when you hear people say, you know, how do you find success? Or how do you become really, truly successful at the things that you’re doing, you’ve got to have some passion in the work that you do. And you’ve got to be able to wake up each morning, and not look at work as like a daunting task or not look at work as if it’s a big, a big trouble, but you got it. Like I don’t know about you, but I am pumped every day, every day when I wake up, I’ve got I know what what the day in front of me looks like I know who I’m going to be having the pleasure of meeting with or working with or learning we’re learning from. And so as they get older, I know it’s cheesy and cliche, but you got to have passion, you’ve got to enjoy the stuff that you like, it’s what fuels your you’re coming back to the desk every single day and pounding. It’s what fuels that constant learning. And I think it’s what fuels that intense curiosity, people that really liked the things that they do, that it’s easy to come up with 100 different questions that you want to learn about somebody or or a business or or a client or anything that you’re doing. So there’s gonna be a couple, a couple of the major things that I try to try to try to head into each day with Greg

Gregorio Uglioni 9:24
and I think these are values that we have in common curiosity is extremely important. And and I think also learning something new every day. I moved into an annual industry six months ago, and it’s outstanding, the learning curve is incredible. And it keeps me young and try to always understand and my brain is back to working because it’s you need to make new connection, new relationship and I’ve I really love it. And what I really love it’s also the quality but also the simplicity of The pillars that you define because, you know, some content consultants come into the companies with 15 topics with 20 topics to check. And then you start speaking and discussing and you need an analysis of three months, you spent 1000s of dollars or francs or euros. And I really like the simplicity of your framework. It’s really team tools, process and feedback. And yes, we can start discussing this is missing, that is missing. But I think it’s really extremely important to help companies because at the end, now, you are a sixth expert, or specialist or thought leader, we are all interested, all the people listening to this podcast or to your show are partially at least interested in customers, but you are going into companies that they have to under different priorities, it’s financial priorities, the customer can be could be a priority, and other priorities, regulate regulatory priorities, and so on. And with a simple, simple framework as yours, you can really start the discussion in a simple way. And everybody can understand that. But I don’t need to explain it. Because if you have you on the show, then I leave it to you. And I think it makes sense to really quickly going to go through all the four pillars. And let’s start with the first one, the team what is exactly.

Adrian Brady-Cesana 11:20
So So number one, I think everybody has really kind of heard the whole notion of people process and product, right? Many executive teams, many, many, many business leaders across the world have always used that type of framework to kind of keep certain things in line, right. The problem that I was having, Greg was, it didn’t necessarily complete everything that I was seeing, as I was building out some of these customer experience and customer success teams in New York City, it was good. And it certainly allowed me to be able to manage up to the executive team or manage down to the ranks. But I kind of felt like it was like a wobbly stool. And, and really the four pillars that you just mentioned the team tools, process feedback, it added stability, it added consistency. And I’m glad to hear that you also agree there’s simplicity, simplicity to right, you can take a rather complex thing, customer experience customer success. It’s complex man. And especially depending on if an organization has people like me and you in it that are thinking about it every day, owning it every day socializing, learning to the findings every day. And then just constantly rinsing and washing, repeating a lot of businesses don’t really truly know that much about what sia can truly become for their business. Right. So with the first pillar of team, really it goes without being said, I think on the podcast, Greg 99% of the guests when we ask the question, you know, which of the four six pillars Do you tend to spend the most of your time on? Or do you value to the highest regard 99% of these guests talk about team, they say team is the number one pillar, because without having a super incredible, tight knit, well managed, well let experience team, all of your other pillars are a little bit wobbly, right, you might not pick the best tool, you might not build the best process, you might not know how to collect and act upon feedback. And so So team is really about just helping different businesses understand what goes into managing, leaving and scaling a customer experience in the customer success team. So the first pillar, thinking about ways that that businesses are actually hiring or training or retaining their team, right? Oftentimes, right people forget this, but you can see x and CS leaders, it’s almost the exact same way that you think about onboarding, your next customer, right? Like, the more time the more energy, the more information, the more assets that you give a brand new customer, typically, they’re going to adopt the product faster, they’re going to think that the time to value for working with your business is even greater, they’re going to view you as like a as an incredible strategic partner, because they’re immediately getting a gain from your product or your service. That’s the same thing when you bring on a brand new teammate, right? And on the CX and the CS side. These are the guys and gals that we’re gonna go have talking to your customers, arguably one of the most important positions that you could play on the field. Right and, and guys, similar to Greg, I love I love that I’m on the CX bookkeeper podcast because I am constantly using soccer analogy similar to Greg, it’s understanding, who do you have on the pitch? Are they playing offense? Are they playing midfield? Are they playing defense? Who’s moving the ball? If you’re the manager, who’s who’s calling the place? Who’s calling the tactics, what positioning or formatting? Are you playing? Are you up a goal? Are you down a goal? Like these are things that, you know, I think oftentimes executive teams, they discredit some of this or they think it will just be done, or they think it’ll just be managed, or they think because they’ve gotten to the point where they’ve got these VPs and they have directors, or these things will just happen. But that’s not necessarily the case and on the CX side of the business. You know, there needs to be clarity around how your customer experience and customer success teams fit into the rest of your organization. So for me, Greg most of the experience that I have in my background before Starting ch Chronicles, what I saw was CX and CS teams are almost like the hub of the wheel, they get a little part of everything, man, they’ve got their they’ve got their tentacles and marketing and sales, they got their tentacles in operations in product and analytics. And in the data sites are like they’re touching a little bit everything right. And typically, they’re the ones that are ensuring that a customer is having a phenomenal experience. Right? So helping helping to kind of think about what what the actual mission or the core values are of the team so that there’s clarity. And there’s I often call it, Greg, like, it’s almost like having your compass, right, building a compass for a team. So many of you might not have all the answers, you might not know where every single road or every single exit is. But your team has got to understand where when they’re going north versus when they’re going south, or when they’re going east. And when they’re going west. And frankly, part of the fun guys, as you’re building and scaling these businesses, and these teams, it’s about finding those answers out on the way right, and then we’ll get to it in process, but documenting them sharing the sharing the learning, sharing the findings, and then training the stuff in your day to day so people understand the expectation. Another big part of Team, Greg, that we’re always spending time with our clients, and certainly on the podcast talking with other incredible leaders about how do you drive the team, right? There’s a number of different ways this day and age that a given business can manage and lead to their customer experience and customer success teams. Some businesses are much further ahead than others, maybe they’ve already got fully robust portfolio management views, and they’ve got every single role fully identified. They know every role, they know every area of accountability, responsibility, and authority in the team, right. But a lot of companies that are that are building their business, building their brands, building their initial portfolio, they need help, even just understanding how do we want to drive this team? How do we want to lead this team into the future, because a big part of that, it will dictate some of the other tools or some of the other pillars of the of the forks, six pillars, but it also it creates clarity to make sure that you’re being super direct with which people you’re bringing onto the bus to make sure that people even want to be there in the first place. So constantly spending time thinking about how you’re going to drive and lead the team. And then some of the last areas are really just about how are you going to invest in the team. So Greg, I’ll be super honest with you, man, some of the some of the venture capital backed companies that I was part of, you know, it’s very common when you go out and you raise a ton of money to build a business and to try to disrupt the space and disrupted into an industry to kind of over hire and overspend and sort of not be really strategic or diligent with, with what type of bets you’re placing, but rather kind of over hire or get too many tools. And the reality is one of the most important parts of the first pillar of team is constantly thinking about how you’re going to be placing investments in that team, and constantly thinking about how you can improve the overall day to day management of the team. So just a few ideas on the first pillar team there for you,

Gregorio Uglioni 17:43
Greg, I love it. And quick comment on the on the last thing that you’re saying, because I think this is really key, it’s, it’s really extremely important to continue continuously train or educate people, employees, because it’s always when I speak with C suite, oh, but we train our contact center agent for eight weeks at the beginning. And afterwards, do they need now they get update via email, or they get an update? Short follow up as he saw, but it doesn’t make sense you spent for eight weeks to train them full time because your tools and we are coming to the tools are crap. And And then afterwards, you don’t spend time or invest in your interests doesn’t make sense at all. Therefore, I love what you’re what you’re saying. Let’s go to the to the next pillar. And it’s exactly tools. I already started a bit to shake the discussion. Tools, what what’s your definition? And also, what’s your learning? I think we are always speaking, there is this artificial intelligence to that you can use and you have self servicing and this and that. But at the end experiences are human. What’s your view on that?

Adrian Brady-Cesana 18:59
So number one, I think tools is probably one of the biggest hairiest things that most businesses have to think about when they’re when they’re really trying to focus on optimize their four CX pillars. I think, number one, I’ll just I’ll just set the stage with this. So one of the first things that we do inside of some of our CX managed services with our clients, we do tool audits, and we do toolkit assessments. And for example, just thinking about simple things here, Greg, for our listeners, like, number one, how many tools do you even have inside of your CX in your CS team? By the way, I think the highest that we’ve ever seen in CX C is in the 50s, or 60s. And then I think the lowest that we’ve ever seen is in the teens. So think about that for a second, some companies getting up to the fit 50 Plus tools, How is anybody going to be phenomenal at managing the two or three that they need to use every single solitary day? Even the teams it’s another one it’s like, even if you’re 13 14 15 tools? That’s a lot of different solutions. And it’s a lot of different potential contexts that you need your customer experience. to your customer success staff to be comfortable with to understand how to use to understand what they need to be utilizing to understand where certain parts of the customer journey even fall into that tool. But I think number one, really just ensuring that you have the technical conduit based on if you know your product, and you know, your service, and you know your customer, what’s the technology? What are the tools that are gonna be mandatory to make sure that they’re having an incredible experience with your brand or with your business. But the other part is this selfishly, let’s turn it internally for a second, having built and been a part of many of these CX and CS teams, that is where so much of the internal consternation comes from Greg, where business oftentimes is very common businesses don’t spend a lot of time on the training and the ongoing coaching, and ongoing management again, just to just to dive into another soccer analogy here. How often are the are the World Cup teams practicing? How often are the Champions League teams practice, these are the best players on planet Earth, and they practice every single solitary day of the week. And it’s like, so like, I don’t care how good people are at some of this stuff, or how good some business are at this. If you just use soccer and football as an analogy, the best players in the world are literally practicing their craft and practicing their trade every day of the week. Why isn’t every company doing that? Why isn’t every company taking time, every single week, every single month, minimally, every quarter, at least tell me you’re doing quarterly. But to make sure that people know what the tools are, understand what tools they’re using, understand which primary tools they’ve got, that are setting the minimum bar where they have to know how to use your CRM, they have to know how to use your ticketing solution, they have to know how to use your communication software, right? These are these are these are table stakes. These are the only way that we can manage and maintain incredible customer experiences and relationships. But some of the other things that we that we’re spending a lot of time at CSC with our clients on Greg, it’s really also thinking about not just the utilization but also some of the overlap. So in the in the growth in the growth focus company, we’re very, very common for different leaders in the business to selfishly marketing once, once, once, once once their tool and sales wants their pipeline management tool, or their CRM and customer success, what’s their experience management platform and operations has got their own business intelligence solution and analytics is reporting. And one of the first things we’re trying to do is, simplify it, pare it down, understand the customer journey number one, because if you understand the customer journey, you can literally map out which tools come into play at different points of the journey. But then the other thing too is you see where the areas of overlap can be intertwined, right. And then this is where you can start to get different executive teams to realize that instead of building in a silo, or instead of building in your own little camp, you should be investing and you should be spending time thinking about tools that can talk to each other tools that can integrate with one another tools that increases visibility or best yet, or even better yet, help to socialize learnings and findings across your business across your customer base and across your team. Right. So So tools is definitely fun. I think here’s the last the last big thing I want to I want to say about tools. I think what’s been amazing to me from all the incredible folks we’ve had come up with at ch Chronicles podcast, the sheer abundance of brand new CX and CS focus tools that are coming out to the market today. It’s mind blowing. I mean, I think last year, Greg, I’ve been telling people last year, just on the venture side alone, almost a billion dollars was invested in brand new customer experience, customer success, customer centricity, customer conversation, customer support based software solutions. Now on one hand, that’s phenomenal, because I think people like us are in great space where there’s clearly some huge bets being placed in our world. So that’s awesome. But on the other hand, like time and time again, I keep seeing the same type of tools coming to market or tools where there’s just a slight variation from a tool that’s already an 800 pound gorilla that works extremely well. And then the other thing that you see oftentimes in in growth focus companies, there’s tool overlap, where they’ve just bought two or three tools that technically do 80% of the same damn thing for each other. And it’s like, so like taking time to really make sure that your executive team is understanding what the primary needs are, and the primary use cases, both your team and your customers. And then the last part is just with tools, it blows my mind how many companies don’t include their customers for some of the external facing tools. So like, they’ll they’ll they’ll make all these big investments, these big bets, and they’ll spend all this time and energy building tools, but they don’t include the customer like and that’s like one of the easiest things that you can do, which is making sure that you’re using some of your strategic customer partners, people that are probably pioneer customers or people that have been just like there from the start. And then you’ve got a different type of relationship with make sure that you’re including your customers in terms of the tools conversation to make sure that you’re actually getting what you think that you should be getting from the tool. And more importantly, you’re thinking about this from a CX and an E X perspective because your people, the guys and gals that are working with our customers, they’re going to know about which tools work the best or work the worst better than anybody in the business.

Gregorio Uglioni 24:58
What you’re saying I Fully agree and not involved in customer but not also not involving employees, it means you have to prove that that tool that you think it’s perfect for the customer, but you forget that employees need to need to use it and need to live, to live with it with the processes and work on this on the processes depicted or created design in these tools. And I think we are coming also to the topic I want processes. Could you quickly share also your view on processes

Adrian Brady-Cesana 25:28
100%. So, okay, so if team is one of the most important things that most most customer focused business leaders agree upon, and tools is mandatory, because tools is where we’re able to apply theory to actual practicality where there’s a solution that can keep this stuff together, processes, the glue processes, the conduit processes, one of the most important pillars because it truly weaves all of these pillars together. But more importantly, processes is always changing, processes constantly evolving. And process always has new answers. These are not definitive things. Sometimes, when you come up with a process to say in year one of your business by year two, you have a totally different process because of growth because of change because of all the learnings in the lessons but processes and interests when I think with most of the work that we’re doing at CSC Greg, we break these into like there’s three or four primary process steps that we’re constantly working with our clients on. Number one is scorecards so as the world of CX and CS has continued to expand EX, by the way, because you can easily build the EX scorecards. But as this world has continued to expand as there’s been more and more information as there’s more shows like ours, more and more thought leaders, more executives really kind of come in front and center about why it’s mandatory that your business invests in customer experience, it became clear that a lot of even experienced customer leaders, they didn’t necessarily have a standardized way for thinking about how you can actually see how your process is performing. So scorecards is a simple way of starting right. So whether you’re building different metrics in different KPIs across your customer success across your customer support, maybe across your onboarding, onboarding is a whole other can of worms, frankly. And then And then lastly, as it’s become more and more common for modern CX and CS teams to really own the revenue or really, truly be a huge part of revenue optimization and revenue refinement, it’s imperative that you have simplified ways that you can count, measure and scorecard how you’re performing in different areas, right? So scorecards is an easy place to start in the process. One of the other big tools that we’re constantly working with our customers on it’s customer journey mapping, I know a lot of customer focus business leaders, they hear customer journey mapping, maybe they roll their eyes, maybe they think it doesn’t add a lot of value. But most of the companies that that we’ve worked with Greg, number one, if they don’t have a journey map already sitting there for their business and for the leadership team, there is an effect, no blueprint sitting there for what your customers are actually going through. There is also a tremendous amount of missing information or questions around who owns what or areas again, of accountability, responsibility and authority. And and, frankly, the there’s something about the exercise of bringing a bunch of subject matter experts from across your business around a table or into a conference room or unfortunately, over the last two and half years on a zoom call. And walking through the build out the documentation and the agreement of what your business’s customer journey map looks like. It’s one of the easiest places to start. The other thing too is again, I say blueprint, because when you’re done with that exercise, there’s almost like an agreement, there’s a literal picture or a literal image that people can take back to their own teams and their own departments and their own their own groups. And they could share that with right and it becomes a super easy way of having a singular picture of vision for what the business looks like what your customers are going through. And then along the way, by the way you start to in that process, you’re constantly finding milestone moments or areas that are prime for optimization that you can easily start to slide up your OKR set and prioritize

the last the last big one or two more big ones, but the next big one is living playbooks. So living playbooks are this ideas of knowledge bases or FAQ. This is huge guys. This is like if you’ve got one person in your business today, who is like the director of CX, or the senior CX manager, whomever it is, is really kind of running your CX and your sales efforts. What good is it to have all of the answers in those people’s heads and none of it written down into language where other people can read it, absorb it, think about it, add on to it and literally edit it, Greg almost like, like in a tribal type of fashion where the whole team feels that they’ve got ownership on on being able to, to build that playbook out. But here’s the other thing. The last two and a half years you showed us with so many companies across the world flipping through a hybrid and a remote model. You don’t have necessarily the same ability to shoulder tap a partner or just Shoulder tap a pod mate who’s someone who’s sitting right next to you? And ask 10 questions right now more than ever, companies have very quickly over the last two and a half years, they need answers in the cloud. They need answers that are searchable. They need articles and knowledge base plays that both work internally and externally, right? Because it’s not always about the customer facing team. There are more and more and more customers today who just want to go get the answer themselves, right. So if you can build some of those living playbooks to be able to really be geared towards your internal and your external users, you’re going to be way ahead of your competition. And then lastly, this is another E x bar, Greg, because some of the best companies and some of the best clients that we’ve worked with CSC, they leverage their A players to build this living playbook. This is not necessarily your chief experience officer or your chief customer officer or your VP as yet. These are the guys in the gals that know this stuff better than anybody in the business. And you’re giving them an opportunity to be co authors of your business’s playbook of the steps that you’re going to take a place that you’re going to run. So, so really easy place to make sure that you’re, you’re capturing this information. And then the last one last last major point of a process. It’s about this idea of really, truly investing and thinking about how you can build out your company’s version of a voice of customer report or a voice of customer dashboard. And, and I know that the whole topic of Voc reporting and voc taskforce has become more and more and more popular. And that’s great. But the bottom line is, is to keep it super simple. You need to have a group of individuals in your business that is constantly thinking about what the voice of customer is telling you. And what that drumbeat or that pulse of the customers needs. Looks like Right? And that’s super, super important. Because as your business is growing, and as your services are expanding, or your products expanding and evolving, you got to make sure that you’re actually building things that people want, I oftentimes, I oftentimes use the analogy of the Spaceland right, like if your customers just want lighting in the room, and all they want to do is pull the string and light up the room. They don’t want a space lamp, they never asked for his face that they don’t need the lasers in the bells and whistles. So building those things, build, build them the simple features that they want. And that’s going to keep them happy. And they will come to you when they do want to see some of those additional features brought to the mix. So so just a few ideas in terms of how we’re kind of thinking about process and some different tips and tricks for how people can really kind of get their teams cranked up in terms of how they can start optimizing some of the process flows inside of their own day to day.

Gregorio Uglioni 32:23
And then that’s great, because this is a masterclass this is something that you are sharing with, with my audience with your audience. And it’s really outstanding, because you are really covering the complete complexity of processes. It’s not only the execution, it’s not only the measurement, but it’s the complete flow. We still have some minutes. Let’s let’s talk about feedback. Could you please also share your thoughts on feedback?

Adrian Brady-Cesana 32:48
Sure. So feedback has, I think, selfishly become my favorite of the pillars. So like, I think as we got to somewhere around like the 100th episode, Greg, I think it became clear to me that I was fascinated by how these different customer focused business leaders, we’re leveraging both their customer feedback, and their employee feedback to fuel their growth. And it’s funny because like, we have a number of different examples on the show about times or about places or about examples, where certain points of feedback literally equaled a certain founders ability to build a new product, or to update the terms and conditions, or to change the pricing to the type of way that resonated with the market. So feedback is definitely one of my favorite of the pillars. I think it start with this feedback breaks into two camps, read customer feedback, and employee feedback. So we’ll start with the customer feedback side, most companies in the world have gotten really, really good because there’s again, there’s so many different tools out there. There’s so many different survey and customer insights and customer Intel types of solutions out there. That collecting feedback has, frankly become pretty easy, right? Whether it’s a Google form, or whether it’s a Survey Monkey, or whether using a type form, or whether you’re using Hotjar, whatever, whatever solution you’re using, building surveys, asking for information asking for feedback. Some of them might be qualitative, some of them might be quantitative, that’s become pretty easy, right? There’s literally 100 different tools out there that you can go download, right, the second to help your company get better at collecting customer feedback. What I think is really the next level or what’s what’s much more challenging, is number one, the compartmentalization and the assessment of the feedback. I mean, Greg, and you and I were talking about this the other day, but I mean, some of the biggest companies in the world, they have teams dedicated to doing nothing else. But feedback based assessment, right. So they’re coming up with tags, they’re coming up with buckets, they’re doing sentiment analysis, as some of this technology has gotten fancier. They’re doing really, really cool things with keyword indication and finding trends and themes across keywords or buzzwords. But the most important part of, of customer feedback, what are you going to it’s the so what it’s like what are you going to do with this stuff like If you’re gonna get really good at collecting it, and if you’re going to get really good at aggregating it and assessing it and sort of compartmentalize it, the hard part is how do you actually make positive change for your business? Right? How do you take that feedback to improve the team? How do you take that feedback to improve your tools? How to take that feedback and make your process cleaner, tighter, sharper? Or lastly, how do you take that feedback and literally get better better at your feedback game, because that’s the other thing. It’s funny, I’ve spent time working in all sorts of different businesses and all sorts of different industries. And even the feedback part can become a point of contention with some customers, right, where they, where they don’t like it, we’re, maybe we’re asking too much for feedback, maybe, maybe they call out the fact that they’ve provided feedback four times this year, and not one rep has gotten back to them to say, hey, customer, thank you for taking the time to fill out the survey. So on the customer feedback side, there’s a number of different things that you can really kind of think about, I think the other the other big part is just whether you’re building NPS or whether you’re building customer satisfaction, or customer effort, scoring or product satisfaction, you could go on and on, right, there’s so many different types of transactional and relationship based surveys that companies can be doing these days. So number one, just make sure you understand where you’re going to get the biggest gain. And then number two, make sure that you’re you’re creating feedback strategies that you actually can act upon as a business. So that’s the first part. The second big part, it goes directly to the employee feedback. I think, as I’ve gotten deeper into my career, Greg, I’ve realized customer feedback is gold. No doubt about it, it’s gold, gold, gold. But man, if you get really, really good on the effects side of your game of doing your E NPS, or your employee satisfaction, or your or your employee effort scoring, where you literally do the exact same type of conversions, but you point them internally, where you’re asking the people that typically know your customers better than anybody. They know, the they know, The Good, the Bad, and the ugly of your tools or your SaaS, if you’re a SaaS company, those people have to oftentimes, some of the best ideas and some of the best knowledge around where your key priority areas should be or where you should be really focusing over the next 30 days or over the next quarter. So taking time to to make sure that you’re getting your employee feedback is it’s going to be huge. It guys start simple, right, you can literally start with, with a quarterly survey, you can start with Anonymous based surveys where people feel comfortable giving candid feedback, right? Because if you do the game where like, you know, the boss is asking you a question and you know exactly who’s filling in, not everyone’s gonna give you candid feedback. So make sure that you’re also being creative with how you can protect some of that information and put put your employees in a safe zone. But then the last part too, is just where we see some of our biggest gains and some of our biggest value add errs on on our project work with CSC with our clients. When you start to see trends and themes across your customer feedback in your employee feedback, and they’re matching up, there’s like three key things that comes up on both sides. probably a pretty good place to start thinking about where you’re going to spend some of your time, money and energy.

Gregorio Uglioni 37:54
It’s totally makes sense. Thank you very much for this great intro introduction on the four pillars. It was really a blast, because you are you were covering all the relevant topic of customer experience. This is the summary of a masterclass, we are coming to an end of the game, but before you leave, I would like to ask three questions. And these are simple question with quick answers. The first one is, is there a book that helped you during your career or during your your life that you would suggest to the audience?

Adrian Brady-Cesana 38:25
So so excellent question. I think there’s a lot of I’m not gonna lie to you, I’d be happy to share share my audible list for anybody that’s interested, feel free to DM me because I’ve, I found Greg over the last three years man with the pandemic and everything, just the power of audiobooks and the power of being able to listen and to learn and to constantly and for me, personally, for busy people, it’s easier to kind of listen, but I’ve got a top you happen to share my audible library because there’s a ton. I think the one that sticks out to me though. It’s a book by Ben Horowitz called “what you do is who you are”. And, and the general idea of the book is really about the way that you build your company’s culture. It’s going to be how many of the many of your company’s decisions are made. And it’s going to be how your leadership transcends throughout the ranks, right. And so this is an awesome book that I really enjoyed. But I think the other thing for customer experience, and customer success leaders, regardless of what your favorite books are, and by the way, I think, Greg awesome idea. One of the easiest ways you can do some of that team pillar optimization, make sure that you’re giving your team some ideas for monthly book clubs or monthly podcast clubs or monthly webinar. Like there’s so much information out there right now. This is one of the greatest times to be a customer focused business owner because like, there is a raw abundance of incredible content out there for us to consume. But check out what you do is who you are. And then selfishly I’d say the second thing is, if you’re just getting started, check out check out check out my book, The four CX pillars how to grow your business now. It’s available on Amazon and basically we give you a much deeper dive into each one of the four CX pillars. And we walked through a number of different examples for how you can kind of leverage use the four CX pillars to help grow your business.

Gregorio Uglioni 40:09
It’s great, and it will be also in the show notes. Thank you very much. If and I’m quite sure that people will contact contact you what’s what’s the best way to contact you.

Adrian Brady-Cesana 40:19
So definitely, like I said earlier, check us out at CX chronicles.com. Feel free to get in touch with us there similar to Greg, I’m super active on LinkedIn. So check me out at Adrian Brady-Cesana at LinkedIn, always DMing with people always meeting new connections, always finding new awesome customer focused business leaders. So drop me a line there. And if anybody’s interested in some of the work that we’re doing for our clients, drop a note at Adrian at CX chronicles.com. And I will literally get back to you. You know, right away.

Gregorio Uglioni 40:46
Thank you very much. It’s really outstanding. And now we are coming right to the last question is Adrienne golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new that you would leave to the audience.

Adrian Brady-Cesana 40:58
Yes, there is. There’s two things, Greg, I think the one is, and it’s funny, I think my team is CXC and and certainly all of our clients, they would laugh if they heard this because they know they say it every single day. But I think the power of focus is so so critical. It’s really really easy guys to come up with 10 15 50 100 different ideas, right? But you’ve got to be able to focus on the two or the three things that you can actually start taking action on today, with your team, with your department, with your leadership team, and with your customers by the way. So I’d say the first one Power Focus, start thinking about it, start baking in your own versions to your team into your customer base, and really try to own it because the minute that I started focusing on the power of focus, that’s when stuff started getting done on a regular basis. And that’s when action or calls to action started getting completed on a regular basis. So number one is Power Focus. And then number two is you know, Greg, as you know, from from from the podcast and some of the work that we do CXC you guys got to make happiness a habit right because making happiness I have it in today’s world number one, it’s just good for everybody and it’s good for your team, it’s good for your customers, it’s good for yourself. But number two, we spend more time with our with our teammates and with our customers and with our our co workers than we do get to with our wives and our husbands and our children, right and our family and our friends so like take some time to figure out how you can literally make happiness a habit in your business, it’s going to be a direct reflection on how you can improve your CX and it’s absolutely going to be how you make sure that your EX is taken care of because people want to work in cultures and environments that are positive and are happy and are contributing and collaborative and and for people that are absolutely killing it and do a phenomenal job rewarding the A player so make happiness a habit.

Gregorio Uglioni 42:51
Thank you very much. It was outstanding and as usual and not allowing myself to comment your golden nuggets because it was Aidan golden nuggets – two golden nuggets. The only thing that I can say is thank you very much for your time. It was really a great discussion.

Adrian Brady-Cesana 43:06
Greg, thank you so much for having me. And guys, thank you so much for listening to the story today.

Gregorio Uglioni 43:11
It was really a pleasure. And I hope that the audience enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. It was really a great one full of energy. Thank you very much, Adrian. It was great. Grazie mille, arrivederci.

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