CX Matters is the Hello Customer podcast about what makes customers stay. In this episode, Michel Stevens, course director at CXM Academy, explains how leaders shape a customer-centric culture and how to make customer centricity mean the same thing on the front line and in the boardroom.
The conversation covers a garage reception where nobody looked up, a utility company whose customers could not find a form called a "document of abandonment", the three kinds of metrics a company needs to connect, and why AI makes the question "what makes us, us?" more urgent.
What you will take away
- Technology accelerates whatever culture already exists, so customer experience starts with what employees take for granted every day.
- Leaders change culture by correcting small lapses on the spot and by telling their strategy as a story people can relate to.
- Sitting with a utility's customer service agents revealed that customers kept calling because a form was named a "document of abandonment", and renaming it cut the calls.
- Customer centricity sticks when operational metrics, perception metrics such as NPS and outcome metrics such as revenue are woven into one picture.
- Telling employees that the customer is always right puts them in a no-win position, so leaders should explain both the emotional and the financial case for customer centricity.
- AI puts the average within everyone's reach, so the companies that already know what makes them unique will accelerate.
In this conversation
Michel StevensCX expert & course directorCourse director at CXM Academy, partner at goCX and host of the Table 7 podcast. Works with organisations across Europe on customer-centric transformation.
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Bram De VosCEO, Hello CustomerYour host of CX Matters, the webinar and podcast series powered by Hello Customer, where every episode looks at one idea: the way you treat your customers shapes the way your business grows.
LinkedInWhy culture decides customer experience
Why is a customer-centric culture more important than processes or technology?
Many B2B companies sell the same products as their competitors and struggle to stand out. Innovation helps at the margins. Beyond that, a company has two options: become the cheapest, a sport many organisations play, or become the one closest to its customers.
Being close to customers is easy for the butcher around the corner, who can remember who bought which steak among a few hundred regulars. The harder question, and the subject of this episode, is how to build that kind of relationship with thousands or millions of customers. The answer starts with culture.
Technology only accelerates what is already there
Couldn't technology solve the problem of knowing millions of customers?
Technology on its own has little value. It is a lever that accelerates whatever is already going on. Before choosing tools, a company needs to step back and ask what customers want from it, functionally, emotionally and socially.
A small scene at a garage shows what that means. Three customers walk in early for a car service, and the person behind the reception desk is too busy with important work to look up. Only after five minutes does someone from the back ask if they can help. Looking up costs nothing. It does require wanting to.
Culture is what we take for granted
Culture is the things we do that we take for granted.
Michel StevensCX expert & course directorDoes culture sit in the individual or in the organisation, and how do you change it?
Nobody gets up in the morning planning to do a bad job for the customer. People want to do right, inside a system or a culture, and anything that happens without anyone reacting will keep happening.
A letter sent to the residents of a retirement home during the COVID-19 pandemic shows how this works. Written under heavy pressure, possibly hours before a lockdown, it told elderly residents, in so many words, that they had lived through the war and this was much worse. The outrage focused on the person who wrote it. The deeper problem was that she thought this tone was acceptable, which points to a culture where such language had been allowed over time.
That is why leaders need to correct what they see in the moment, small things included. Alignment comes next: what customer-centric means in this organisation, which behaviour it wants to see and which it wants to encourage. Only once that new normal is in place does it make sense to refine processes and add technology.
Strategy only works as a story
How do you get people to internalise a new culture?
Leadership needs a good story. Strategy is often a placeholder for "we are at A and we are going to B". Told as a story, it explains how the company will get from A to B, what it will do and why.
The story also has to mean something to each person. Few people get excited about the next AI strategy or about "Strategy 2030" when nobody explains what it means for them. People ask what is in it for them, how it fits their own moral compass and what they see around them. Once that is clear, leaders can step aside and let people absorb it and do their part.
Go to Gemba: the document nobody could find
Where do you find the stories that change a culture?
By observation. Go to Gemba is a Lean Six Sigma principle: go to the floor and see what actually happens. Sitting with customer service agents at a utility company revealed a striking pattern. Many customers called about moving house, even though everything they needed was online. To find it, they had to search for a form called a "document of abandonment", named after the fact that the previous occupant had abandoned the building.
Customers searched for something like "moving document", found nothing and called. Agents then sent the form out one call at a time. Once the document was renamed to what people actually search for, far fewer calls came in.
Problems like this jump out at outsiders and stay invisible to insiders, and the only way to find them is to sit down and listen. As the saying goes, the last thing a fish discovers is the water it swims in.
Three languages of metrics
How do you make change worth it for everyone in the organisation?
Nobody likes change, and people are not wired for constant change. In business it is unavoidable, because competitors adapt and customers change, and a company that stands still will not survive. The task is to find a shared currency: a way to show that a change produces value.
CX professionals usually speak in customer metrics, such as a five-point rise in satisfaction or a higher NPS. Senior leaders follow those numbers, but they are judged on growth and savings. Front-line staff speak a third language: 3% more calls this week, 5% more transfers. Customer centricity sticks when these three types of metrics are woven into one fabric.
| Type of metric | What it describes | Examples | Who speaks this language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operational | How the process runs | Service level, transfer rate, first-time-right | Front-line staff |
| Perception | How customers experience it | NPS, customer effort score, sentiment | CX professionals |
| Outcome | What it means for the business | Customer lifetime value, revenue, churn, upsell | Senior leaders |
Customer experience metrics change behaviour only when people see how the three connect.
Treat people like adults
One of the worst things we can do is tell our people that the customer is always right.
Michel StevensCX expert & course directorWhat works best to get front-line employees on board?
Treat people like the adults they are. Every company needs to make money, and everyone knows it. Staff understand that value has to go to the business as well as to the customer, and it helps to make that link tangible: how does delivering value to the customer also deliver value to the organisation?
Telling staff that the customer is always right backfires. Everybody knows it is not true, because the company is paid in euros, not in smileys, so the phrase puts employees in a no-win position. It works better to explain both sides of customer centricity: the emotional one, about making customers happy, and the rational one, about making more money because of it.
Before any of that, people need to understand why change is needed. The reason is rarely that they did something wrong; customers and the environment change while the company stands still. The desire to change then has to come from the employees themselves, because they are the ones who will drive it.
The average of the internet
Everybody can attain that average. So the question becomes: what makes us, us?
Michel StevensCX expert & course directorWhich changes in customer experience matter most for the next few years?
The next decade will force companies to answer a few fundamental questions, and technology will only make them more urgent. The biggest one is how a company will make a difference. AI is sometimes described as the average of the internet, and that average is now within everyone's reach.
Organisations that think about that question, or already know the answer, will accelerate, because the answer has to do with trust and honesty. Clever companies use AI to shave off costs and go faster, and they also ask how it can help them do things differently. Bolting AI onto existing processes to make them faster and cheaper skips the real question: how can we make it better?
Seen that way, technology can help bring back some old values: authenticity, being outspoken, being clear about what you deliver and listening to what customers want. The more digital the world becomes, the more important the human being will be.
When in doubt, be human
What does "when in doubt, be human" mean in practice?
A complaint about a motorhome rental in the United States shows it. Unhappy with the rental and lying awake in a bed that was too small, the customer turned to AI, laid out the whole case and asked how to get even. The AI listed the options, the customer chose to go for the maximum refund, and a carefully argued complaint went out.
On the other side, a person could have read that well-built problem statement, understood what the customer was trying to achieve and solved it in about five minutes. Customer service stuck to the procedure and kept repeating what it had said before, and the case ended badly. When in doubt, be human.
This article is an edited summary of the conversation. For every word, watch the full episode in the video above.
Questions this episode answers
Why is culture more important than technology for customer experience?
Technology accelerates whatever already happens in an organisation, so it amplifies a good culture and a bad one alike. Customer experience depends first on what employees take for granted every day, and that is what culture is.
What are the three types of customer experience metrics?
Operational metrics describe what happened, such as service level or transfer rate. Perception metrics such as NPS and customer effort score describe how customers experienced it. Outcome metrics such as customer lifetime value, revenue and churn describe the business result.
What does "go to Gemba" mean in customer service?
Go to Gemba is a Lean Six Sigma principle: go to where the work happens and observe. In customer service it means listening to calls, which is how one utility company found that a badly named online form was causing many of its calls.
Why is "the customer is always right" a bad rule for employees?
Employees know it is not true, because the company has to make money, so the rule puts them in a no-win position. Explaining both the emotional and the rational case for customer centricity works better.
What does "when in doubt, be human" mean for customer service?
When a case does not fit the procedure, a person who listens and understands what the customer wants can often solve it quickly. Repeating the script, as in the motorhome rental case discussed in this episode, lets a solvable complaint end badly.