79 — The Human Touch in AI-Driven CX: Strategies for Success with Jeannie Walters

Lenny: 00:00:00

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Dig Insights. Using decision science Dig Insights helps researchers at the world’s most well-loved brands drive growth in crowded categories. Their work is supported by proprietary technology, including Upsiide, the only ResTech platform exclusively built to test and optimize innovation. Learn more at diginsights.com.

Karen: 00:00:36

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the GreenBook Podcast. I am Karen Lynch. Happy to be hosting this episode today and talking to one of my favorite people in the world, a person that I only met within the last year. I’m super excited to introduce to you all to Jeannie Walters. She is, again, a fast friend that I met at the Qualtrics event earlier this year. We were both in the media room talking to one another, and, within the first few minutes of us meeting, I realized I found a kindred spirit. We enjoyed not only the rest of the week together, but a lot of social time as well. I’m so excited to have her on this show. Jeannie, for those of you who have not heard of her yet—although thousands of you have—she is deeply immersed into the CX industry. She is the CEO of a company called Experience Investigators. She’s also their chief experience investigator, which really works to bring the world of customer experience to a lot of different people who are looking to change up either their approach to it, how they work with their own customers to improve the experiences from soup to nuts. Jeannie is also a LinkedIn Learning instructor. She has been a featured expert for NPR and the Wall Street Journal and kazillion other media channels. She is currently hosting a podcast herself called Experience Action. She has another podcast that—using her words—“the sun has gone down on now” called Crack the Customer Code. She is all that and a bag of chips. I’m going to let her tell you the rest of the details, but, Jeannie, welcome to our show.

Jeannie: 00:02:21

Oh, my gosh. I’m so happy to be here. I’m so happy to just spend more time with you, Karen and really share as much as I can with your audience. Yeah. It’s been a ride. I’ve been in the customer experience world for more than 20 years. I started this company in 2009.Part of what I was seeing was that a lot of customer experience was talk and not action. We really help our clients understand how to create the right mindset, strategy, and business discipline around customer experience so that they can see the business results that we want. We do a lot of that, and you mentioned the LinkedIn learning and speaking and different things like that. It’s a lot of fun.

Karen: 00:03:07

You have this great newsletter. If you all had seen us at the Qualtrics event, for example, when she had tweeted something out and they put it up live on the big screen, and I’m like, “I think she’s a big deal.” [Laughs] I’m thinking to myself, “I think I met somebody who’s a big deal.”

Jeannie: 00:03:22

I think I was sitting there in disbelief that it was my tweet, and you were elbowing me saying, “No. It’s you. It’s you.” [Laughs]

Karen: 00:03:29

[Laughs] “No. It’s you. It’s really you.” It was like we were on the megatron at a ballfield. Right? We’re looking up, and we’re pointing to ourselves on some level.

Jeannie: 00:03:35

That’s right. That was a surreal moment.

Karen: 00:03:37

Yeah. It’s fantastic. We’re like, “Stand up. Stand up.” Anyway, you shared something about yourself, too, when you—when you talked about—I had the same reaction as I had then when you said you’d been in the CX field for 20 years, because I have this—or had this—I’ve been on a learning adventure—had this disconnect as an insights professional saying you’ve been in that field. Isn’t that field a part of our field? Aren’t we all doing customer experience work on some level?I know there’s overlap with the user experience and the patient experience. I was really having this meta-moment of trying to understand what I didn’t know, and there you were. You were like, “Oh, Karen. [Laughs] You are very sweet. Let me tell you more.” Can you big-picture connect some dots to our audience, which is largely insights and analytics professionals?

Jeannie: 00:04:35

Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you everybody who’s listening for all the work you do, because it is absolutely critical to customer experience. Now, the way I define customer experience and the way I look at it as an industry, if you will, or a business is that customer experience is really about the entire end-to-end journey that a customer has with your brand. That’s everything from before they even become aware to all the—all the way through. Either they’re a customer for life, or they’ve left you—right—and they’re telling all their friends why. What we do is we really look at customer experience as a strategic part of any business. Typically, unfortunately, the way it’s been approached is there was this big movement towards customer feedback and collecting it, and that is absolutely vital, but you have to do something with that. A lot of times, there was a lot of emphasis on the collection but not the acting on it. You also have to figure out what is this doing for the business? Right?We are in the business of making money and getting results and all those things. We help our clients, and we have a framework, actually, that is around four areas of the customer experience. The first one is intentional success. How do you define success? Customer collaboration. That’s where you need that feedback. You need those metrics. You need all of that. Cultural commitment, because the employee experience and the culture has a direct impact on the external experience for customers. Then experiential innovation, and this is where I think most organizations never get to this, but the ones who do, they have been the disruptors of the last decade plus.It’s an exciting space. It’s a little more complicated than I think people give it credit for. I think of it as a mosaic. We have to put all of these pieces together to come up with that big picture and really drive the results and make sure we’re treating it like a part of business, because that’s exactly what it is.

Karen: 00:06:43

It seems to me—again, my current understanding now, largely thanks to you—is that insights can inform many of those initiatives. I feel like when I first started in this industry, for example, insights informed, maybe, marketing teams. Right? It was all about marketing research and maybe some of the strategic initiatives going on within an organization, maybe, but I think for companies that have solid CX programming in place where they’ve started to realize that there’s these touchpoints from pre-use to post-use—if there is a post-use—and insights really informs all of that. The world of CX is actually much bigger than the insights and analytics world, and I’ve found that one of my big “ah-has,” like, “Oh. That’s interesting.”

Jeannie: 00:07:33

I think you bring up a great point, because one of the first clients that we had when I started this business, they came to me—it was the leader of the customer insights team. She was like, “Listen. We know we’re getting great stuff. We have this great research department, all of this, but we can’t really figure out how to present to our leaders what do we do with all of this in a way that will drive action, drive results?”I think that there is this really—in research in general, you have to have quant and qual. Right? This is the same thing. You have to make sure you’re intentional about what you’re trying to do and then leverage those insights. I always tell my clients, too, we have some really wonderful partners on that, but we’re built differently. There are people who are wired really well for one and not for the other. You really need to build those collaborations with those insights teams. That is absolutely critical.

Karen: 00:08:33

Yeah. I know that there’s probably some of you, if you’re on one of the insights teams at a brand, and you’re listening right now, and you’re thinking, “But we don’t have a CX structure in place at our organization.” Many of the people who are charged with, “Well, we have to do our journey map, and we have to do some of that work to help tap into what the user or customer or patient or shopper or whoever it is.” That’s part of why you’re charged with a lot of these tasks. Lucky are the ones that have CX teams in place they can collaborate with, but they don’t always sit next to each other.

Jeannie: 00:09:06

No, they don’t. No, they don’t. Honestly, we talk about how there are CX change agents in these organizations who don’t have CX titles, who don’t—they are on the insights team. They’re sometimes part of HR or digital or whatever, and they’re looking around thinking, “There’s a better way to do this.” I think I said this at Qualtrics, because I did a panel there with some folks, and I said, “Every CX team has started with one CX change agent, somebody who is looking around saying, ‘Okay. It’s great that we’ve got all these pieces and all these teams. How do we make sure we’re putting them together and prioritizing the right efforts so that we can really deliver for the customers and then, ultimately, see those business results?’”

Karen: 00:09:51

Yeah, yeah. It’s really cool. Speaking of, I would like an education into one aspect of the CX world that I never even thought to ask you last year. Let’s talk about the acronym at the end of your name, the CCXP. Whenever I look at that, I’m like, “Okay. I understand it.” I’ve looked it up, and I’ve said, “All right. I get it.” Tell our audience what that certification is and what goes into getting that certification. What’s that about?

Jeannie: 00:10:18

Sure, yeah. Well, I am a charter member of an association called the Customer Experience Professionals Association, the CXPA. It really is for professionals who do this work with or without the title sometimes. Several years ago, they decided, “You know what? We need to make sure that we’re treating this as a discipline, we’re identifying best practices, all of those things.” They created this certification called the Certified Customer Experience Professional. Essentially, at the time, I think they had six competencies. I think that’s changed to five. It’s a proctored exam. You have to study for it. You have to go in and take it in a supervised way.It really is about understanding these different parts of customer experience: the strategic part, the measurement and metrics and insights, the cultural change that you have to make, how do you get leadership buy-in, all those different things. What I like about it—and the reason that I’m committed to continuing keeping that certification—is because it’s not about one kind of program, one kind of technology—because there are other certifications out there that are based more on brands—but this is the one that is more about the discipline of it. We actually started something at our company called Flight School, and that’s different than the CCXP, but it’s also to really empower people to take those first steps. Because I believe that if you don’t get that mindset strategy discipline as that foundational piece, everything becomes tactical.These leaders are told, “Hey. We need a journey map. You look like you know the customer. Come on in. Do a journey map. We need to improve our customer experience. Hey, Bob from marketing”—right—“you talk about the customer a lot.” A lot of these leaders are not in the greatest positions. Just as business people, we have not been taught to think this way. The example I use is that, a traditional business plan, it’s all about acquisition of customers in the beginning. It’s about marketing and sales, and then you literally turn the page and it’s all internally focused on operations.We forget the customer is there. We really do need to shift our thinking, because the best organizations, the ones that win no matter what, always invest in customer experience. We haven’t gotten there. People don’t understand it as part of the business, so what happens is these CX teams don’t define what success looks like. In a year they may have been collecting a lot of customer surveys, they may have been doing certain things, but in a year their leader looks at them and says, “Well, I don’t really know what this is doing. I guess CX doesn’t work,” which is ridiculous.

Karen: 00:13:14

Mmm. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. It is. Well, and what’s interesting about what you’re saying, I’m sure—I have a lot of friends in the qualitative research space, and we’ve often talked about the times when a client would come to us as researchers and say, “Hey. We need some research. We need a journey map.” They come to us to create the journey map based on some research that we can execute.This conversation is reminding me of the reason why it feels like a bit of a disconnect for us: because we can do it. We can do the work with the group of individuals that we talk with, but it seems like we’re missing pieces of the puzzle. Based on this current conversation, I’m like, “It’s because we are missing pieces of the puzzle.” Yeah. My mother always told me, “If it feels like you don’t have the full picture, it’s because you don’t have the full picture.”

Jeannie: 00:14:04

Wise advice. Yeah. I think you bring up a really interesting point, because research is often very defined. Right? We are looking at this part, or we are looking at this thing. That is really wonderful for that part of the journey, but what I love about journey mapping is it leads to more questions that we want answered. Then you can start defining where else do we need to dig in? Where else do we need to find this out? What happens if we make a change? How can we go back and verify that that was good for customers?All of that ties together. One of the big challenges about customer experience is that it’s really hard to say, “Hey. One team owns the customer experience.” You can’t say that. Every single person in the organization has an impact on it. I also bristle when people go, “Well, it’s everybody’s job.” I’m like, “When you say it’s everybody’s job, it becomes nobody’s job really quickly.” It’s this balance of really building those cross-functional collaborations and being really honest and open about here’s what we’re doing, here’s where I would love your expertise and your input and engagement, because that’s how you get the best information. Right? That’s by listening to all those points of input.

Karen: 00:15:23

Yeah. My brain right now is also exploding with personal insights for even a small business. Right? You think about a small business—I will call us out and say GreenBook, for example—I know that it’s easy to think that our sales team owns the customer experience, but our content team frequently interacts with our customers for—whether it’s about speaking or podcasts or webinars or whatever else we’re doing. Our events team certainly interacts with them, and our marketing team does too when it comes to webinar production and what have you. Even if you think about a small business, very small like ours, customer experience is really encompassing of everything that we do. I don’t know that even we have tied it all together that way. We don’t look at it that way. It’s not our approach, but it is an approach that’s relevant to all sizes.

Jeannie: 00:16:16

Right, right. Sometimes what I talk about with customer journeys, too, is we often, on the inside of the organization, create the journey—I call it “journey by org”—chart where we basically say, “Okay. If you’re going to go through the sales process, you’re going to—you’re going to be wooed. We’re going to be so nice to you, all these things.” Then the minute that they sign up, we’re like, “Here’s a contract that tells you all the horrible things you will—we will do if you don’t pay.” Right? The tone changes, and then we say, “Oh. You can’t talk to your sales person anymore. You’ve got to talk to your account manager, or you’ve got to use this,” or whatever.If it’s not really looked at from the customer’s perspective, it’s very easy to talk ourselves into like, “Oh, the process is working,” because it’s working on the inside. What we’re not seeing are all the customers we’re not even getting, because it’s not a great experience for them. We’ve all had these experiences as customers. Right? It’s a different way of thinking that most business people have not really seen as how to run a business.

Karen: 00:17:24

Yeah, yeah. I love that. Thank you so much. I’ll put a plug in for your newsletter at this point, because I love reading it. You cover this holistic—it’s—you cover a lot of a topics but with this holistic lens over all things. It really is business strategy, and I love it, so shout out. At the end, I’m going to ask you to share with people how they can get in touch with you and all that. We’ll include how they can sign up for this newsletter.One of the newsletters that you put out recently is so on topic and on trend, so we really do want to talk about it. We want to talk about AI a bit. Actually, you’ve had more than one recently, because I think I saw another one that you put out too. Obviously, AI is all the—all the buzz in the insights industry as it is elsewhere. Give us a little bit of perspective about what’s on your radar when it comes to AI and CX.

Jeannie: 00:18:13

Yeah. Well, I think there are two sides to this coin. One is what do we do on the inside of the organization to leverage AI the right way? Then on the other side of the coin is what will customers do in the future with AI, and what can they—how will that change the customer journey? On the inside of the organization, I’m actually very excited about the potential here, because part of what customers tell us is, “I want to seen and recognized for who I am and where I am on the journey.” I think we’ve all had that experience where you try to chat, and all of a sudden you realize you’re in this cycle, and you can’t get out, and, so, you just call, and you’re like, “Oh.” They have no idea that you’ve just been on that chat. They have no idea what you went through.I think when AI is going to be used well, it’s going to be, first of all, helping the humans who are serving customers have the right information at the right moment so that, if you did make that call, I could say, “Oh, Karen. I saw you were just on chat. That didn’t work. Let me help you,” so that there’s this immediate sense of reassurance. Then, also, we love when personalized experiences happen as customers. The way to do that is to really leverage AI to say, “You know what? It looks like you’re having trouble here. Here’s what I would do next,” or, “Wow. Those boots look great on you. How about these boots”—right—“for your next purchase?”I think the more that we can tap into that, the challenge that I’m seeing right now is that instead of starting with strategy and starting with the big question of, “What is the problem we’re trying to solve with AI?” people are just saying, “Let’s use AI. It’s so exciting.” That leads into not considering things like customer data privacy and allowing them the right information and transparency so they can control that in all sorts of things, so there’s a big thing happening there. Then, on the flip side, I think customers now are thinking, “Well, what could I do?” Right? “How can I use this?” We’re using AI to plan trips now. We’re using AI to find gifts for our spouses. All sorts of things.I think that organizations need to really think about that aspect of it and then meet the customer where they are there as well. It’s a big, huge, open thing, but I think we have to go in with an appropriate sense of caution and appropriate sense of let’s make sure that this is working before we roll it out everywhere. I also think that the expectations are there. Customers are expecting personalized experiences. They’re expecting things to take less time and to be when they want it available. There’s some cool stuff out there already, and I think now it’s a matter of evolving with intention.

Lenny: 00:21:07

We’re going to take a quick pause to highlight our podcast partner, Dig Insights. Have you listened to _Dig In_? It’s the podcast brought to you by Dig Insights, designed for brand professionals that crave innovation inspiration. Each week, Dig invites a business leader onto the podcast to spill the beans on the story behind some of the coolest innovations on the market. Search ‘Dig in’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Karen: 00:21:31

I love that so much, and I love thinking about the examples. You’re spot-on about the trips. “I’m on vacation in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. What should I do today?” Literally, I am a fan of asking ChatGPT a lot of ridiculous questions and—or not so ridiculous. “We’re in Amsterdam for 48 hours. What are the must-sees?” It has become a personal assistant to me, a person who wishes they could have a personal assistant but doesn’t live that kind of lifestyle. [Laughs]

Jeannie: 00:22:04

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah.

Karen: 00:22:04

[Laughs] If it could make me a cup of coffee, I think we’d be in business.

Jeannie: 00:22:09

[Laughs] You’re absolutely right, and I think the other part of that is that as customers get more used to it in that way, they’re going to move away from some of the more traditional things. A lot of clients come to me, and I say, “Well, how do customers discover you?” They say things like, “Well, they go to our website.” I’m like, “Well, no, they don’t start there.” Right? They’re starting with a question. They’re starting with something they want to do. They’re starting with a goal.The really fascinating part about looking at ChatGPT is people are starting there. They’re not searching in the same way. They’re starting with, “This is the outcome I want. How can you help me?” It’s a very different kind of conversation. That’s why customer education is so important right now. Make it easy for customers to use your products and services. Make it less intimidating. Make it effortless.I just did a keynote this week, and I talked about how Steinway, the piano company, they understand. You don’t go in on a whim and buy a $50,000 piano. Some of you might, but that’s not me. [Laughs] They realized that, and they realized that part of it was people were too intimidated to actually walk in, because they felt like, “I don’t even know about this.” They created all these buying guides like, “Here’s how you do it. Here’s what you’re actually purchasing. It’s an heirloom piece that you’re going to have forever. This is the history.” Whatever.It really did help people feel more comfortable to walk in the store. This whole combination of the digital and the real life, it kind of kills me when people are like, “We’re studying digital customers.” I’m like, “I don’t know anybody who walks around saying they’re a digital customer.” Right? We use what is most convenient in the moment situationally. We have to look at that omnichannel, holistic approach as well.

Karen: 00:24:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really cool examples. Interesting. Again, when we jostle back and forth between being consumers, users, whoever we are, the people that we are outside of our jobs, and then we put on our professional hat. I love that bounce back and forth, because I’m like, “Yes. I can totally relate to that.” Not the piano buying, although I have a sister—although I have a sister who is in the market for, probably, her third piano at this point. She’s a pianist. We could talk pianos almost any time, because she’s, anyway, something else.One of the questions that we have for you, actually, is—it’s still around this AI space. We’ll stay there for a few more minutes. In your newsletter, you posed the question, “What will drive selection and promotion within the AI landscape?” In some of the consulting that you’re doing with CX agents of change in organizations, how are you helping them through that—right—how they’re choosing, how they’re selecting, how they’re even researching, how they know where to start? What are your—some of the things that you’re doing to help people in that—in that area?

Jeannie: 00:25:11

Well, it’s funny. We through around the term “AI,” and it’s the—this huge ecosystem, and it means so many different things. I think the angle that I keep coming back to is, again, what are we trying to do? I was talking to a client who—they were trying to make things more convenient and easier for their customers, and, so, we talked about how—what does that mean for them? Well, they were a financial organization, and people had to call in and get their balance. Some people did that 10 times a week. What we realized was if we could use AI to improve that just a smidge, that was actually going to make things more convenient. We looked at voice AI, so instead of pressing the buttons or saying “check my account” and getting the robot, they had this natural language model that we could—somebody could call and say, “I want to check my balance,” without going through any sort of menu.It was great. It literally reduced the time of the calls, and, so, customers were very happy. It was much more efficient on the organizational level. I think that’s a good example of you have to start understanding what is it people are trying to do, and then meet them there. Then I think the other side of this is, like we talked about, customers will start using this for their own selection process. How do you show up in those queries? How do you make user that your content online is searchable for these models? Because if you want to be in front of customers, you have to make sure your data is out there. It’s this tightrope where you don’t want to give away too much, but you also need to be out there in a different way digitally so that the robots can get the content when they need it. I am so not—I don’t want to position myself as the person who’s coding AI, because I am not. [Laughs]

Karen: 00:27:11

[Laughs] Yes, no. I see that. Well, what’s interesting about that, also, is navigating this world. We track new product launches a lot. There’s several of us here who subscribe to Product Hunt, the newsletter that shares new products that are coming out all the time. I have frequently thought I need an AI platform to help me find the right AI platform right now. I’m like, “ChatGPT is not up to date.” Right?

Jeannie: 00:27:42

No, it’s not.

Karen: 00:27:43

For example, we as a—one of our production operation places is looking at content that is submitted to us for publication, and we already have a plagiarism checker in place, and one of the thoughts I had at one point was we need to get an AI checker to work with our plagiarism checker to make sure that we’re not getting articles authored by AI. I was like, “I need to know instantly all of the tools that are now doing that.” I’m like, “There is no AI to help me find the AI tool I need.” That’s a thing? Right? It feels real to me in this space that we don’t know what all the possibilities are.

Jeannie: 00:28:23

You’re so right. I think the other thing that I’m seeing—and I could be wrong on this—but a lot of the tools available today are simply built on top of ChatGPT. I think there’s going to be a big shakeout in the next few years, because there are so many who are—it’s like what happened when everybody was building their communities on platforms they didn’t own. Right? Then they changed the rules, and suddenly it’s like, “Whoa. We don’t have the access to people we thought,” or, “We don’t have as many people,” or, “They’re all bots,” or whatever. I think, with this, the same thing’s going to happen where there’s a lot of technology being built on the same foundational piece.That’s not going to be sustainable for many of them, and, so, there’s going to be a lot of mergers and acquisitions. There will be some that shake out, and I think right now there are some really smart people working on models that we can’t even imagine right now. Then there’s also the question of ethical data collection, and we’re going through that whole thing with voices. I brought up voices. There’s this whole discussion on you can’t really use AI to do children’s voices, because we don’t know where that is coming from. We don’t want to participate in that if it’s something that we wouldn’t participate it if it were not presented as AI. There are some big questions I think we’re grappling with, and I think that we’re going to see some shakeout on these tools in the next few years.

Karen: 00:29:52

Yeah. Really interesting to think about. It brings me back full-circle to one of the—one of the questions I often ask people in the beginning is how did you get to be a leader in your field? While I would love to go back to that for a minute, I also am putting that together with how is it that you also continue to grow your knowledge in this field? To me, the bigger question really is, Jeannie, what are some of the qualities you possess or some of the natural tendencies that you have that, A, brought you to be a leader in the CX space as it grew and then, also, are keeping you stay abreast and current right now? What do you think?

Jeannie: 00:30:31

Thank you for that. Yeah. I think a big part of—I’m curious. I think curiosity is a big part of what we need to grow. I’m sure you’ve run into this where somebody will be, maybe, even a—in the C-suite of a brand of a big organization for many, many years, and then you talk to them, and you realize they’re really far behind, because they don’t have to be current. They just have to execute. I feel like it’s my job for my clients to stay ahead. I think I’ve always been a writer. I started writing my blog right away, so there are hundreds of articles now, and we do videos. I think teaching is such a powerful way to learn, and, so, I’m always trying to figure out what do people need to know, and then that helps me really stay connected.I think the other thing—and this goes hand-in-hand with CX—I have to make big connections between things, and, so, I get fascinated by something like AI or something like—I look a lot at what are the employment trends? What’s happening in the employee market? Because that will impact the teams, and that will impact the experience that the customer has. I’m constantly looking for those things too. I have a funny story. A couple of years ago, somebody called me and said, “I want to be a thought leader in the space.” I had never thought of myself that way, and she said, “How did you do it?” I sat there for a minute, and I said, “Well, I guess I just shared my thoughts.” [Laughs]

Karen: 00:32:07

[Laughs] Oh, that is a excellent soundbite. Because we tell people when we offer them speaking spots at our events, for example, what we really want is your thought leadership. We do not want you to regurgitate your company’s features or benefits. That is not what we want. We want you to show that you think. That is not as intuitive as it seems to people like you and myself. It’s a struggle for a lot of people.

Jeannie: 00:32:33

It is, and I think sometimes we’ve put parameters or limitations on people in that regard. In some organizations they’re told they have to stay within that box, and that’s a shame, because I think we all learn from each other. The more you can be open and generous with it, I think it makes a better world. You’ve heard me say this, but the mission of my company is to create fewer ruined days for customers, and the reason is because I really feel like that makes a better world. If we can connect the dots and be open and share what we know, then everybody benefits. How cool is it?

Karen: 00:33:09

Everybody wins. I love it so much. Yeah, no. I think it’s such a great thing to think about, and as soon as you said it I, once again, put on my person hat, and I think, “Oh, it’s so true how an experience with a company, brand, service provider, or employer can ruin your day.” Life is too short to have a single day ruined.

Jeannie: 00:33:33

Amen.

Karen: 00:33:33

Anyway, it’s a big mission. If anybody wonders if their work has value, let’s give it value by not raining on anyone’s parade. Right?

Jeannie: 00:33:43

That’s right. That’s right. Letting them achieve exactly what they want to. Yeah. Yeah.

Karen: 00:33:47

Yeah. Oh, I love it so, so very much. [Laughs] That’s so cool. Let’s switch gears a little bit to you and what’s coming up next for you. What do you see either for yourself personally or your company or the bigger industry? What’s on the horizon?

Jeannie: 00:34:03

I wish I could say I was super optimistic about the industry, but I think a lot of companies still aren’t getting it, unfortunately. What we’re seeing is a lot of teams—and I’m putting air-quotes, which, of course, is great for an audio platform—but a lot of CX teams are really one person who is expected to do the work of a team. Success is not well-defined. All those things. That’s why I’m really excited about this CXI Flight School that we started, because it’s for those leaders. It’s for the leaders who don’t have the resources, don’t have the support, but really want to make change and empowering them and giving them tools to do that. I think that when I look to the industry, my hope is that the C-suite starts getting this more and understand how important it is. My other hope is that CX leaders feel empowered to say the hard truths. This is true for insights professionals too.If we’re collecting a lot of information, if we’re gathering those insights, and nobody’ s doing anything with them, that is a waste of time for the customer we’re asking and for the team that’s working on it. Let’s be honest about that and say, “What could we do?” Start there, because I see a lot of that spinning of wheels. Customers have more control. They are going to use AI to figure out different selection. They’re going to use AI to tell them what it costs to work with your competitor versus you. We have to be prepared for that, too, and really make sure that we are being transparent and honest with our customers as part of our ethos. Because if you try to say, “Yeah. We’re going to put something on the web and hope for the best,” but you don’t really believe it, that’s not going to work either. That’s what I hope is that people tuck this in their heart and want the best for everybody.

Karen: 00:35:59

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it’s so true, because the collective knowledge of all these—all of this information and these LLMs, that is going to do the talking for us also. You won’t make it into the consideration set if you are not actively working. That could be problematic for, I’m sure, a lot of businesses in general. For example, when I was looking at places to go in the White Mountains, it gave me a—I asked for only five. “Give me only five places to hike.” It gave me five. If I take that analogy and project it out to other industries or other factions where I might be seeking information, and I limit how much it can give me, it’s going to give me limited information.

Jeannie: 00:36:45

That’s right. That’s right.

Karen: 00:36:46

It’s an interesting challenge people have to really embrace and think about.

Jeannie: 00:36:48

Yeah, exactly. I think we also have to understand that AI’s not going to be correct or perfect all the time, and, so, in some ways, we’re already going to have to start realizing there’s misinformation out there. It might be about your brand. What do you do then? Having crisis management around that. There are so many big questions to grapple with, but I think the more that we can start now and really tackle them, then the better off we’ll all be.

Karen: 00:37:18

Yeah, yeah. That’s so cool. I love this whole—love this whole conversation. I’m reminded how much I like to talk to you. Look, we’re doing this without wine in our hands as well. [Laughs]

Jeannie: 00:37:30

I know. I know. Next time. [Laughs]

Karen: 00:37:32

We’re so healthy today. [Laughs] Jeannie, is there—thinking about wrapping up here, is there anything that you wish I had asked that I hadn’t asked you yet?

Jeannie: 00:37:42

Oh, great question. I think we covered a lot of ground here. No. I think it’s wonderful to make these connections between the insights professionals and those customer experience professionals and everything. I love your podcast. You’re doing a great job, so thank you.

Karen: 00:38:00

[Laughs] Well, thank you so much. Is there any topic, if you could—if I put you on the spot here and say, “You know what? Here’s a topic that I really need more information on. This is something that I am seeking to either learn more about or grow my knowledge,” anything come to mind for you that’s missing in your resources that are out there? What would you like to learn?

Jeannie: 00:38:22

Mmm. We do some work with employee experience stuff, but I would love to be more connected, I think, and understand what are the trends there, how are people hiring, how are they connecting that to the customer experience? That’s something I’m continuing to explore.

Karen: 00:38:40

Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting topic. I have been equally interested in topics of HR. Again, if you go back to the Qualtrics event that we were at and we had—oh, my gosh. What’s his name from SHRM? Johnny…

Jeannie: 00:38:55

Oh, yes. The CEO.

Karen: 00:38:58

Yeah. The CEO of the—his first name’s Johnny. I’m on a first-name basis with him, apparently, in my head. We’ll just leave it. Anyway, I don’t want to even get it wrong. I feel like it was Taylor, but I could have that way wrong. Anyway, that talk that he was doing about what new hires are looking for and what were new recruits—I think he called them—and this whole idea of how to be a better employer.I think that’s been really on my mind lately as I’m obviously in management here and lead teams. I’ve always been interested in leadership as well, so yeah. I think the idea of the employee experience and the—what leadership’s responsibility is for the employee experience. I think that is some—a really interesting space. Maybe we’ll go there next.

Jeannie: 00:39:42

Yeah, okay. Let’s do that. Let’s go to another conference.

Karen: 00:39:46

Yeah, let’s do that, please. No. It was such a great time, and I’m so glad to have been connected with you, because it broadened my knowledge base, which, again, when you’re growth minded, that’s what you seek. Right? I love the wisdom that you brought to me. Both wisdom and friendship, really. I could ask for very little more. [Laughs]

Jeannie: 00:40:04

Oh, I agree. We are forever connected now. [Laughs]

Karen: 00:40:10

How can our listeners reach you, find you, subscribe to your newsletter? Share all the good stuff at this point.

Jeannie: 00:40:15

Excellent. Well, thank you for that. Yeah. ExperienceInvestigators.com is the central hub of everything. You can find our flight school there. You can find the newsletter. You can find that.If you like podcasts, Experience Action is the name of the podcast. It’s like an old-time, call-in radio show, so feel free to leave me a voicemail. The way to do that is the link I say in every podcast. You leave me a voicemail, and I answer your question. Then LinkedIn is a great way to connect with me as well, and if you have a LinkedIn Learning account, I think I have six courses now. One is coming out later this year too. Yeah. It’s a lot of fun.

Karen: 00:40:52

It’s a lot of fun. Kudos to you on all of that, and I look forward to talking to you again very, very soon.

Jeannie: 00:40:59

Thank you. Thank you so much, Karen.

Karen: 00:41:00

You’re welcome. You’re welcome. When it comes to thank-yous, I want to thank Natalie, our producer for all of the work that you do behind the scenes. I want to thank Jamie, our audio editor for helping us sound so good. This episode is being sponsored by Dig Insights, so thank you for your sponsorship. Of course, all of our listeners, thank you for tuning into us week after week and listening to some of the insights that we can bring to you. You make it all fun by knowing that you’re out there. I will see you all in a week or so when it’s time for the next GreenBook Podcast. Bye-bye.