April 17, 2025 • 38 mins
Join us for a compelling conversation with Bruce Temkin, a true pioneer in the world of customer experience (CX) and the co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), the founder of the XM Institute at Qualtrics, and now, head of Humanity at Scale. In this episode, Bruce shares his journey from shaping the foundations of CX to launching a bold new initiative focused on helping leaders drive sustainable success by putting people first.
We dive into Bruce’s unique approach to making “squishy” concepts like customer experience concrete and actionable, including the creation of the Temkin Experience Ratings and the importance of accessible, meaningful data. Bruce offers candid insights on the evolution of CX metrics, the limitations of traditional surveys and NPS, and why emotion is the most powerful driver of loyalty.
Discover how Humanity at Scale expands the conversation beyond CX, challenging leaders to rethink the false tradeoff between business success and human-centric leadership. Whether you’re a CX professional, business leader, or simply passionate about making organizations more people-focused, this episode is packed with practical wisdom and inspiration from one of the industry’s true thought leaders.
Meet Bruce
Bruce Temkin is an Experience Management (XM) visionary and is often referred to as the “Godfather of Customer Experience.” He leads Humanity at Scale and hosts the Humanity at Scale podcast. He most recently founded the Qualtrics XM Institute, which provides thought leadership and training to help organizations around the world and is also building a global community of XM professionals who are radically changing the human experience.
Prior to Qualtrics, Bruce led Temkin Group, which provided research, advisory, and training that helped many of the world’s leading brands build customer loyalty by engaging the hearts and minds of their customers, employees, and partners. He is also the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. Prior to Temkin Group, Bruce spent 12 years with Forrester Research during which time he led the company's B2B, financial services, eBusiness, and customer experience practices and was the most-read analyst for 13 consecutive quarters. Bruce has a mechanical engineering degree from Union College and a master’s in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Well, I am so excited today to have back on the show
Bruce Temkin. Bruce was, is the co
founder of the CXPA Customer Experience Professionals
Association. He also founded the XM
Institute that was part of Qualtrics. And now he's heading
up this thing called Humanity at Scale which we're going to dig into.
(00:22):
We're going to understand where it overlaps with customer experience management, where
it takes maybe new get new legs. And if you don't know Bruce where it
well, then you don't know cx because Bruce is the heart of CX and one
of, in my opinion, one of the Mount Rushmore figures on it. Bruce,
welcome back to the show. Well, thank you. And I, I feel like I'm two
steps towards my five step appearance on
(00:44):
the podcast where I get like a, a robe. Right. Don't you do that for
your fifth, fifth appearance? Yeah. You get the robe and then you get to 12
steps. You get a coin. Nice. Yeah. Saying you've
overcome whatever it is your issue is. And I have many.
Yeah, you. Me both. You, me both. Well, I'm so honored
and grateful to have you back on the show. You've been on a couple of
(01:06):
times before. Last time you were planning, you were in
transition, you were getting ready to leave what was a
great run at the X IM Institute and start. You
were doing a little bit of a pause and then you were going to relaunch
your, your new thing, which is humanity at scale for the audience
in case they're not familiar with the Ex IM
(01:27):
Institute and what you were brough in to do and
what that organization was able to accomplish. Could you
shed some light on that for some folks? Sure. So in
2018, my company, Temken Group, was acquired by
Qualtrics. We were like a research and advisory
company. Most of the people in the customer experience industry knew us
(01:50):
probably because of our published research. Right. We researched lots of data
and did a lot of ratings and
things. So we were acquired by Qualtrics for the goal
of creating an institute that would lead the
world in understanding experience management, which for
your listeners is sort of a combination of customer experience, employee
(02:12):
experience, so partner experience, all the experiential elements
tied to different audiences. So what we did is we
created what I believe was the most
robust institute of learning around
experience management. We published research, we published
thought pieces, we created certifications,
(02:35):
we created a high end
certification for professionals. We created a. What I would
call low end, probably isn't right, but introductory certification
for anyone who wanted to understand experience management. Certified
and it was a global institute that we
ran and had following in all the regions around
(02:57):
the world. And my team was also based around the world.
So the purpose which we fulfilled, I think really
effectively was to teach professionals and
executives around the world how to think about and
implement experience management, which from the sounds of it, really
does sound like a continuation of what I was doing at Temkin Group, which
(03:18):
was a continuation of what I was doing at Forester Research before that.
Yeah. And as one who benefited both from your work at Temkin and then
later on at XM Institute, lots of gratitude for CX
leaders who were trying to educate, inform
key stakeholders in their organization and kind of answer the
question, well, what is this and why do we need it? You know, both
(03:40):
Temkin and X IM Institute were incredibly great
resources for us based on all the hard work and research,
grunt work that your folks did to be able to come back with
something tangible. And I was in banking, so, you know, bankers
are looking for numbers and data and you were a great resource
for that. Thank you. One of the things I did early on
(04:02):
was two things that sort of
informed the content that I published and my teams published. The
first was I always thought of myself as a business leader. I was
never like a customer experience person. I didn't see.
I always like, I thought about business and how businesses operate
and what drives business. So I published things
(04:24):
that were interesting to me as a business person. It turned
out that those had wide appeal, which was good. So my
interests aligned with a lot of others. And the second thing I
tried to do is make squishy
ideas come to life with concrete models and
data. Right. There are lots of things that people
(04:47):
talk. I remember when people were starting to talk about Voice of the
Customer a couple decades ago, and they talk
generically about, you need to do the voice of the customer. And I can still
remember the first presentation I did
at. We had created the first ever Forrester
Customer Experience event. And someone asked me about
(05:09):
Voice of Customer and I said, okay, Voice of Customer is these four
things you listen, interpret, respond, and monitor. And
I talked about what those elements were. And I saw everyone in
the audience was like writing down
really quickly because what I had done in that moment
is giving them a structure to understand and think
(05:31):
about a concept that they cared about. And that's sort of what
I've always tried to do with the content we create, which is
give people a grounding and a deeper way to
understand a concept that they either should be
interested in or already are interested in. Yeah.
And, you know, there were several of those that I was able to pull
(05:53):
from, thanks to you. But is there one of those
metrics or measurements or models that you use that you maybe can
go back and point to and say, that was really good?
Yes, we had. There's so many of them.
But I'd probably go back to the Temken Experience Ratings. So
we were. When I was at Forrester, I created the Customer
(06:14):
Experience Index, which was looking at hundreds of
companies and looking at this experience
in three areas, pretty much success, effort, and emotion.
So I recreated that around the Temkin Experience
Ratings, but instead of
putting it behind a firewall, we gave it away for free.
(06:36):
So not only did we give, like a
synopsis of the research, we gave all of it to the public
at large. And that ended up giving lots of people
access to data around experience. And we
looked at, you know, I don't know, 3, 400 companies, and
that was really, really valuable in terms of
(06:59):
getting widespread access to
customer experience data out there. And so we did a
lot of analysis off of that data. But I would say that was the
coolest thing. And we started to get. And I'll say one of the cool things
about that was when USAA actually
started to do a couple of ads based on
(07:21):
our data. Right. Seeing, you know, the footnotes and
referencing our data. And so that was kind of cool. But to me,
it was all about how do we get not. Not how do we get
data, but how do we get data in the hands of people that can do
something with it that's valuable. Yeah. So a couple of points I want to double
click on there. For those listening who may not be familia, I think it
(07:43):
also became later on called the cxi. Yes. So we used it
at the bank. And success, essentially, correct me if I'm wrong here, success
is were you successful in what you aimed to do as a customer?
Pretty much. What was the effort
level that it took you? Was it hard? Was there a lot of friction around
you being able to do what you wanted to do and then emotional. How did
(08:05):
you feel about the experience as you went through it? Yeah. So I think
those are all right. And let me give you, like, a little color on each
of those. So success is pretty straightforward. Were you able to do the thing that
you wanted to do? Right. Interesting enough, there's been an
effort movement over the years. I started tracking effort
a decade before the effort movement came in and
(08:27):
people started talking about effort. And I think that the way that
we measured effort, while not Perfect was much better than
the effort metrics that came up afterwards. You know, there were
introduction like, you know, to what degree
was this thing, you know, difficult to do
or to what degree did you exert energy? All those types of
(08:50):
questions were crazy. Ours were very simple, which is, you know, on a scale
from very easy to very difficult, how did you find it? Right. And
that's been a pattern of the advice that I've given to companies
and the data that we've published is that measures should
reflect how, how human beings actually think about a
situation. Otherwise their answers
(09:12):
are meaningless. Right. If I ask you a question in a direction you
don't understand about a dimension that you can't
internalize, then you can give me a response, you can check a
box, but it's meaningless because it doesn't resonate
clearly to you. So our effort was from easy to hard. And then
emotion. Emotion is an interesting one. So we. Emotion is multi
(09:33):
dimensional. Right. And emotion is by
far the most important element of those three. We've done lots of research
that shows it ties to loyalty more. Right. But we picked
for our measure one level of loyalty, whether it
made, whether you were what I say it was sort of the happiness
measure. I forgot what the exact scale was. But if you think about
(09:56):
emotion over the years, if you think about a company, that
may not be the right measure. As a matter of fact, for many
companies, I've been advising them on the notion of
confidence, especially in banking. You come from banking.
I would say that one of the most important
emotions for a banking customer is confidence. Do I have
(10:18):
confidence in the bank? Do I have confidence in my money? Do I have
confidence in sort of my financial situation?
Those are probably more lasting and important
than whether you are happy or sad about an individual interaction.
Right. So it was interesting. So we did have to create a
single measure to create an index. Right. And so I think that
(10:40):
that emotion, one I would say was overly simplistic relative to
the other two in terms of what you should be measuring with customer. Yeah.
So I had, I had both at different times, Rob Markey
and Fred Reichelt on the show. And one of the things that they both said
is nobody does surveys any. So you know, my question is
going to evolve around. That was a survey, that was a survey that was asked
(11:03):
of customers, what loss in relevance, if
any, does that have in today's world? So I think that first
of all, people take surveys. Surveys aren't dead the same way bank
branches aren't dead when the ATMs came out. Right. They Morph into
different purposes and have different value. I think
the pressure on surveys is that the
(11:25):
idea and great. You talk about Rob Markey and Fred
Reicheld. Right. Because probably the most obsolete
Survey is an 11 point NPS survey.
Right. In today's world. And I had
Fred on my show and like Fred said, Fred, the notion
of promoters and detractors and passives is
(11:47):
still a really positive strong one. But there are better
ways to identify and to
to segment customers than asking an 11 point
question. And people get too hung up on the question. I think
that. So now we're going to go into like my view on the industry a
little bit, right? Where I think that CX has run into
(12:09):
problems, which is a lot of the people came into CX and
viewed CX as a market research
function or that market research is credible. So overly index
their learning and thinking about the tools they use to
collect data. Right. Instead of thinking I really need to know who
my promoters passives and detractors are so I can do
(12:32):
something different with them and I can learn from them. So much time was spent
on how do I create an instrument to ask a
survey question. So that, and by the way, I'm gonna go off on a rant
on nps. So on one hand what Fred and what
Rob Markey did at Bain with NPS made the
industry. So let's not lose that. The industry would not be where it is
(12:54):
without NPS driving awareness, driving
deployment and many companies were successful. However, having
said that, the idea that you ask an 11 point question, then you
randomly decide based on that scale who is a
detractor, who is a passive and who is a promoter
is kind of absurd when you could just ask that more
(13:16):
directly. Right. Like a lot of the issues there
are, okay, someone gave you an 8, that means they're not a promoter. But are
they a promoter? Someone gave it 9A program. So why not? If you're going
to, if you're going to segment customers into four buckets,
why not let them put themselves into those four buckets more
directly as opposed to this chaotic sort of
(13:38):
questioning on. All right, they're eight, are they a promoter? Well, I will
tell you that an 8 in Japan is a super promoter. A 7 in
Japan is a super promoter. So anyway, that's my rant. Yeah.
About their cultural differences in the way people grade. The
opposite is true in South Latin America. Right. They tend to score
higher. So appreciate the rant and a lot of it does make sense and
(14:01):
I think you know, you know the mps the way
MPS has been used has given both of those gentlemen
heartburn for people using it
incorrectly. And I think you're right. I do want to come back to
your outlook on the industry, on the profession, near the end. But
before that, let's talk about humanity at scale. So let's
(14:22):
talk about where it overlaps with customer experience, management
and where it takes, where it gets new legs, where it's maybe a little different.
So I would say it is completely
different. Support. They're both mutually supportive
of each other's direction when, when you know,
as I said, I Forrester, then Temkin Group, then Qualtrics
(14:44):
XM Institute, and in all those environments I was
helping organizations, mostly through
practitioners, to improve the companies.
What I realized after all those years is, well, first of all, I decided
I wanted to have a bigger impact on the world.
And I'll tell you, I felt like I had a
(15:06):
pretty big platform to help people when I was at
Qualtrics. So it wasn't a complaint. I just felt like I had more in
me. And so what I realized is the more in me was to
step back and help leaders think about
how they lead differently. Because a lot of
the problems with the CX movement and CX getting
(15:29):
prioritized and customer experience and employee experience
happening ends up being that it doesn't match up with the
perspective that leaders have about how they want to leave their
organization. So to me, humanity at scale is a much
broader topic than customer experience. And employee experience is getting
leaders to think about how they can succeed in
(15:51):
a sustainable way by focusing more on people and
recognizing that there isn't a trade off. It's a
false trade off to believe that you either succeed
as a leader or you focus on the needs of people. What I'm trying to
do is inspire and empower leaders to recognize that
the only path, the only path to sustainable
(16:13):
success is by focusing more and understanding and catering
to the needs of people, whether they're customers, employees, the
communities that you serve, or the broader sort of
world in which you live. And that's the only path to sustainable success. Now the
way they overlap is think about a leader that cares nothing
about human beings or has no understanding of human beings or
(16:36):
doesn't drive for a human centric organization, that type
of leader will be a difficult one for a CX
leader and a CX practice to thrive in. So
my feeling is that if I can get leaders to be more
human centric and I'll talk about where I'm going with that, but if I can
get leaders to be more human centric. That is much more
(16:57):
conducive to a CX tool set and CX leaders
in that environment. So I think they both work together. But I'm not out
trying to tell leaders they have to care about customer
experience. I'm out there trying to tell them they have to
better care about human beings who happen to be
customers, human beings who happen to be employees. And
(17:19):
the better you can understand those human beings, the more successful you can
be about whatever you want. You want to grow your business? Sure. You want more
profits? Sure. You want to get into new markets? Sure. So what
would, and this is probably going to be a softball question to you, I
admit, but what would you say to those CEO people in the C suite
who say, come on, Bruce, you know, I've got quarterly reports that
(17:41):
I have to provide to Wall street and shareholders and they're
looking for results from us. They're
looking for. So I've got a business to manage here. I've got social
responsibility, I've got integrity of the, of the data and the
information that we have of customers nowadays, of fear of breach,
security breaches. I've got, we've got auditors breathing down our neck.
(18:03):
I've got, you know, revenue growth. We're trying to keep up with the competition.
Share of, they're looking at things like share of market. You know, this idea
of humanity isn't that soft, touchy feely stuff. So I would,
I would say first of all, I'm not trying to keep you
from achieving those things, the quarterly results. I'm telling you, there's a
big better way for you to do it that leaves a trail of
(18:26):
sustainable success behind it. Right. You can, you can do all
those things and beat up your organization and sort of
make your customers unhappy and make
the environment much worse. And so great you make
your quarterly numbers, but you do it in a way where you trail
behind costs that you're going to have to pay at some point down
(18:48):
the road. What I'm saying is I don't believe that there's any trade off you
need to make in achieving those. If you focus on doing them in
a way that has a deep understanding and caring
for the people that you impact. So that's the fundamental
thing, which is like I want to break that belief
about a trade off that somehow you either are
(19:10):
human centric or you're delivering on these sets of
results that you, you like you just mentioned. And
the question about is it soft? Like generally deal with large
organizations. Those have been my career has been around, you know, the mega
organizations, the housing, tens of thousands of people. And
if you're leading that organization and you don't recognize
(19:32):
that everything that you do impacts hundreds
of thousands, if not millions of people, if you don't realize
that, then you're in trouble. So you have to realize that, then you have to
say, how can I be more effective with those hundreds of
thousands and millions of people? How do you not get to the point at
some point where you say, you know, I probably could hit my quarter
(19:54):
results without pissing off 75,000
customers and 22,000 employees and have the same
results. So that's one thing, I'll jump in another one, which is
I just, I also want to get leaders to think about
legacy. I think a part of the motivation that I'm going to push
for is for leaders to think about what it is
(20:16):
they're leaving behind. Because I do think that if I only care
about quarterly things, I can push my organization, I can push my
company in the short term to do almost anything. I can get them to comply
with where I want to go. But I do think getting people to
have more of a thought about who am I? What
is the legacy that I want to leave behind, both in the
(20:38):
organization and in the community? And I think people are open to that. I think
the world, you know, a lot of the world sucks right now. People like
hate each other, people are mean, people aren't
caring about each other. Right. We're fighting more than ever. I think this is a
perfect time for everyone in the world to say, I want to be a
kinder, gentler type of myself and find
(21:00):
a way to leave the world in a better place than when I found it.
And so that's another stream that I hope kicks in. Yeah, for me, when you
were sharing that, it was echoes of Jim Collins, good to
great and level five leadership. And in that book he talked about
sort of the contrast to that was Lee Iacocca at Chrysler who was
like, well, you know, after, after I leave, the organization's
(21:23):
gonna tank because I really was the star. Yeah, I think
that is not the mindset that I'm shooting for. It's more of
a selfless, you know, concerned about how the organization
will actually succeed even after I'm gone. So I would say that
part is selfless. The other part, which is not selfless,
which is that you will succeed better by
(21:45):
understanding and catering to those tens of thousands, hundreds of
thousands, millions of human beings who are in the
ecosystem that ultimately determine the long term success of your
organization. Bruce, can you share with us maybe a couple of different
strategies on how business leaders can live
out humanity at scale? Yeah. So I think that at a base
(22:07):
level, I think having leaders understand
how people, how human beings think, feel and behave
is critical. Right. Because I think that there's a
lot of things. So in a lot of my work, I'll be
propelling a lot of the core thinking around experience,
design. Right. And understanding human beings and motivating
(22:30):
them. So for instance, if a leader is going to have to have
a layoff. Right. We're in these environments. I'm not going to tell them they
don't need to have a layoff. They might. Right. Like you're running a
business, that might be something to do. But designing
the communications around that so that there's certainty
about when it's going to happen, that shows some empathy
(22:52):
along the way and is honest about the
situation can drive a different outcome,
long term outcome for the organization than if they did
that set of layoffs in a sort of crass
way that didn't understand the impact that it was going to have
on not only the people you're asking to leave, but the people you're asking
(23:14):
to stay and the people you may want to encourage to come join
your company in the future and the customers who hear about it.
Right. So that's an example of where I'm. I'm not
necessarily going to push a leader to do
anything different in the strategic decision they make.
Right. But the decision about how you implement it can
(23:36):
have radically different effect on your future
and the success that you have going forward. Yeah,
Bruce, when I had Fred on the show, he talked about, in its
simplest terms, the golden rule. Yes.
People talk about the Platinum Rule, treated others how they would want to be
treated versus how you'd want to be treated. But why do
(23:58):
so many leaders get this wrong? There's
nobody listening. I'm guessing there's nobody listening to
this episode who doesn't know somebody who hasn't lost their job
in the last six months. And I'm willing to bet that those
people listening, they've heard really bad stories about the
way that people were let go. And I'm not even talking about, you
(24:21):
know, recently, the doge and the massive government layoffs
before, even before that or in and in
parallel to that private corporation, they're doing it really
bad. Are they that out of touch? What is the reason
that they just don't get it? Yep. So I want to start with, I think
the golden rule is broken. I Don't. I don't think. I think
(24:43):
the, the golden rule is
a great way for religions
to have a generic view on how you treat people.
But that doesn't work in organizations. Think about it.
Does a
multimillionaire CEO, the way that that person,
(25:05):
and usually a white male does that white male
millionaire CEO, should that person be treating the
people they're letting go across the organization the way that he wants to be
treated? That's the golden rule. I don't buy that.
Right. Yeah, he should be the rule. The platinum rule
should be treat people the way that they should be
(25:27):
and deserve to be treated. And that means it's because
they're not in those shoes. They're so disconnected that they act differently.
Yes. Yes. Because a couple things. One is
that it's happen. First thing happens to all of us, right. We get
transactional, right. We, lots of things in front of us and
we got to do, we got to do, we got to do. And unless there's
(25:49):
an interrupt, then we keep being transactional without thinking
about people. So if you think about the whole, the whole practice of
like meditation and mindfulness. So we'll flip from
the leadership discussion to sort of
the humanistic discussion. Right. That the whole growth
of mindfulness and of meditation grew out of.
(26:12):
We live in a world that is chaotic and moving
fast. And if we don't take the time to
sit and think about how we want to be, who we want to be
and how we want to be perceived, then we continue to act
in a way that's inconsistent with how we want to be
seen. Even though it is inconsistent. Right. We don't
(26:34):
recognize the inconsistency. We don't step up and change
it. So I don't think that there are. The leaders
are mindfully deciding to do it in the non
humanistic way. I think that there's two things happening. One is
they don't understand the humanistic way well enough. That's part
of what I. So I want to, I talk about, I want to inspire and
(26:55):
empower them. Inspire is getting them to think about and wanting to do
it and taking a checkpoint and stopping and saying, you know, now's
the time. I want to be humanistic and empower them to figure out how to
do it. So I do think that if you got, if there
was a whole think about this way. If Harvard Business
School had a whole course and had all of their
(27:18):
leaders have to go through humanity centered training, which
is how do you make decisions that make the
most out of get the best impact from and utilize
human beings in the most effective way. Right.
Then that would become part of the core mindset of a
leader in how they approach problems and how they make
(27:39):
decisions. And that's what we need to get to in the short term.
We have to get them to take an interrupt and do some
mindfulness type things and say, all right, I may be in the middle of this
crazy thing. Let me take a moment and think about there are people involved.
How can I effectively interact with those
people and get the most out of them for
(28:02):
the long term? Bruce, let me double click on. You mentioned experience
design. And those of us who have maybe been
CX practitioners kind of get grasp that. But there may be others listening.
And since you're talking about it in terms of the way people
think, feel and behave, and that informs experience design,
can you share a little bit more about how that works? Yeah.
(28:24):
So if you're, if you're designing something for an
experience or a decision for a human being, ultimately
you're doing it because you want some outcome. You want them to behave
in a different way, you want them to think in a different way. Right.
So you have to be explicit about what is. I want
to. So for instance, if I'm. If I'm designing an experience, let's say for
(28:46):
an employee who I'm going to let go. Let's keep on this theme,
right? I'm designing experience and I'm like, oh, we have to think about, okay. I
mean, we're not going to make them happy. The goal isn't to make them happy.
We have to have some other goals. Goals could be make them have them
clarity on what's happening, provide them with as
much access, easy access to whatever resources we're
(29:08):
going to give them and communicate that we have
empathy for their situation even though we're letting them go. Right.
That might be the goal. So if we have some goals around the actions
and the attitudes that we want to leave them with, then
we say, okay, how do we then put in place the
steps? They're going to interact with them, they're going to leave them
(29:30):
that way. And so it sort of goes like that. And I will say that
the big thing to learn and experience design, especially for a leader who's
not going to be an experienced designer, Right. That's not the goal is that
human beings behave based on two different
systems. Right. There's the rational and the
intuitive. A rational is where we, you know,
(29:51):
we start and we think about every
decision in terms of what the pluses and minuses are.
For us. You know, you can think about if you're an ice cream stand
and you're trying to decide on an ice cream and you go, well, you
know, the vanilla I like because it doesn't make my
teeth colored, the raspberry I like. And then you could have this whole
(30:14):
set of reasons why you make a decision. But you tend to make decisions more
on the intuitive side, which is the cookie dough looks wonderful.
I want that. Right? And so part of the recognition is
that human beings, while we treat them like they're very rational and
they make rational decisions and behave and think rationally, they
actually think intuitively more often. So if we
(30:36):
can sort of create experiences that either trigger
or take advantage of those intuitive moments. So for
instance, one of the things we know, and Amazon realizes this,
right, that when you go to Amazon and you want to buy
something, you might be in a research mode, right, where you're going to look
through every option in every detail. But oftentimes
(30:59):
you make the intuitive decision to go with the best seller. Why do you go
with the best seller? Because it's just an intuitively easier
thing than me to like, look at every single option
I have and evaluate it on my own. So a lot, if you look at,
like retailers, they've recognized how do they trigger this
intuitive behavior much more effectively over time.
(31:21):
And so I think it really starts with an understanding back to
leaders and experience design of recognizing that human
beings respond in an intuitive way to many
situations. We have to think about what are the symbols and triggers
that we have of those intuitive reactions. Awesome.
Bruce, you have been giving back to the community,
(31:44):
to the CX community for years, for decades. What advice do
you have for CX professionals and for the industry in
general to lift the
industry and for people who are seeking out
careers in the industry? What advice do you have? So I, first
of all, come into the industry, join the industry,
(32:06):
change the industry for the better. I think that. And I'll give a pitch for
it right at the end of the day, there aren't many levers that an
organization has to succeed better than more
deeply understanding, catering to the needs of its customers. So
whatever it's called, there's always going to be a need of that. And if you
think about the alternative of that is how many organizations succeed if
(32:27):
they don't understand and don't cater to customers. So having said that, I do think
that if I think about the, you know, over the
last couple of years, I was at Qualtrics, I did a lot of
global trips by visiting Companies giving speeches
around the world. And most of my discussions were not
around the metrics of customer experience. They were
(32:50):
around change management and justifying the
focus. So instead of CX professionals
fighting that and trying to say, yes, CX is about the
metrics, yes, CX is about the data, they should lean into
it and say, all right, we need to help change the organization
and get better skill to understand. How do you do that? We've published a lot,
(33:12):
so there's a lot of resources of that. But think more. Your job is not
to try and push data onto the organization.
Your job is to help the organization evolve and change
using whatever insights you have. That's one thing I would push for.
The second thing is you had better understand AI.
(33:32):
You know, if you look at just some basic things, right, like
look at the call centers, there is no need to
do surveys of customers on an ongoing basis. Like,
in the long run, AI can extract whatever meaningful
insights there are in enough scale from those
conversations that whatever you may end up asking a
(33:54):
customer or asking someone who is just through, that should
always be additive to whatever you've just learned
because of the AI analysis of those conversations.
Right. So I'm not against surveys per se, but I'm
against surveys for core understandings that
you should be able to get and you need to be able to get from
(34:16):
other conversations. That's another thing. I understand AI.
And then the third thing I would do, and this is true for any change
agent, which is recognize you're a change agent. And change
agents fail more than they succeed. And so you have to
revel in your successes. You know, it's like a baseball
player, a good baseball player gets a hit one out of three times.
(34:37):
You have to really enjoy that one time and not worry about
those two times as much. Right. You really have to
recognize and celebrate the successes that you have. Yeah.
Well said, Bruce. I want to end the show with the question
that I ask all my guests based on the name of the show, which is
what delights you as a customer. So I really
(35:00):
like proactive service. So I like it
when I'm a big traveler, as you can tell, I told you, around the
world. So I'm a big client of Delta. I'm at their
highest non invitation level. There's an invitation level
that I'm not in. Yeah. And so I do appreciate
when every once in a while the, you know, someone
(35:21):
in the cabin, like a pilot will come back
and thank me for my, my loyalty.
I sort of like that. It's not necessary. I like non necessary,
proactive moves like that. And I will also say, if I'm on
Delta, while I like that, what I really like is when I get
upgraded. So that's probably the most
(35:42):
proactive customer thing I like is when, you know,
I'm not expecting it, although I do track where I am on the list.
But when I get that call, oh, my God, you've been upgraded. That's. That's a
wonderful thing. Well, shortly after we finish up here, I'll be reaching out
to Delta for sponsorship opportunities on the show.
Yeah. Bruce, thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's
(36:05):
always a thrill, and I always learn so much from you.
What an honor. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And thanks for doing
the show.
Well, I am so excited today to have back on the show
Bruce Temkin. Bruce was, is the co
founder of the CXPA Customer Experience Professionals
Association. He also founded the XM
Institute that was part of Qualtrics. And now he's heading
up this thing called Humanity at Scale which we're going to dig into.
(00:22):
We're going to understand where it overlaps with customer experience management, where
it takes maybe new get new legs. And if you don't know Bruce where it
well, then you don't know cx because Bruce is the heart of CX and one
of, in my opinion, one of the Mount Rushmore figures on it. Bruce,
welcome back to the show. Well, thank you. And I, I feel like I'm two
steps towards my five step appearance on
(00:44):
the podcast where I get like a, a robe. Right. Don't you do that for
your fifth, fifth appearance? Yeah. You get the robe and then you get to 12
steps. You get a coin. Nice. Yeah. Saying you've
overcome whatever it is your issue is. And I have many.
Yeah, you. Me both. You, me both. Well, I'm so honored
and grateful to have you back on the show. You've been on a couple of
(01:06):
times before. Last time you were planning, you were in
transition, you were getting ready to leave what was a
great run at the X IM Institute and start. You
were doing a little bit of a pause and then you were going to relaunch
your, your new thing, which is humanity at scale for the audience
in case they're not familiar with the Ex IM
(01:27):
Institute and what you were brough in to do and
what that organization was able to accomplish. Could you
shed some light on that for some folks? Sure. So in
2018, my company, Temken Group, was acquired by
Qualtrics. We were like a research and advisory
company. Most of the people in the customer experience industry knew us
(01:50):
probably because of our published research. Right. We researched lots of data
and did a lot of ratings and
things. So we were acquired by Qualtrics for the goal
of creating an institute that would lead the
world in understanding experience management, which for
your listeners is sort of a combination of customer experience, employee
(02:12):
experience, so partner experience, all the experiential elements
tied to different audiences. So what we did is we
created what I believe was the most
robust institute of learning around
experience management. We published research, we published
thought pieces, we created certifications,
(02:35):
we created a high end
certification for professionals. We created a. What I would
call low end, probably isn't right, but introductory certification
for anyone who wanted to understand experience management. Certified
and it was a global institute that we
ran and had following in all the regions around
(02:57):
the world. And my team was also based around the world.
So the purpose which we fulfilled, I think really
effectively was to teach professionals and
executives around the world how to think about and
implement experience management, which from the sounds of it, really
does sound like a continuation of what I was doing at Temkin Group, which
(03:18):
was a continuation of what I was doing at Forester Research before that.
Yeah. And as one who benefited both from your work at Temkin and then
later on at XM Institute, lots of gratitude for CX
leaders who were trying to educate, inform
key stakeholders in their organization and kind of answer the
question, well, what is this and why do we need it? You know, both
(03:40):
Temkin and X IM Institute were incredibly great
resources for us based on all the hard work and research,
grunt work that your folks did to be able to come back with
something tangible. And I was in banking, so, you know, bankers
are looking for numbers and data and you were a great resource
for that. Thank you. One of the things I did early on
(04:02):
was two things that sort of
informed the content that I published and my teams published. The
first was I always thought of myself as a business leader. I was
never like a customer experience person. I didn't see.
I always like, I thought about business and how businesses operate
and what drives business. So I published things
(04:24):
that were interesting to me as a business person. It turned
out that those had wide appeal, which was good. So my
interests aligned with a lot of others. And the second thing I
tried to do is make squishy
ideas come to life with concrete models and
data. Right. There are lots of things that people
(04:47):
talk. I remember when people were starting to talk about Voice of the
Customer a couple decades ago, and they talk
generically about, you need to do the voice of the customer. And I can still
remember the first presentation I did
at. We had created the first ever Forrester
Customer Experience event. And someone asked me about
(05:09):
Voice of Customer and I said, okay, Voice of Customer is these four
things you listen, interpret, respond, and monitor. And
I talked about what those elements were. And I saw everyone in
the audience was like writing down
really quickly because what I had done in that moment
is giving them a structure to understand and think
(05:31):
about a concept that they cared about. And that's sort of what
I've always tried to do with the content we create, which is
give people a grounding and a deeper way to
understand a concept that they either should be
interested in or already are interested in. Yeah.
And, you know, there were several of those that I was able to pull
(05:53):
from, thanks to you. But is there one of those
metrics or measurements or models that you use that you maybe can
go back and point to and say, that was really good?
Yes, we had. There's so many of them.
But I'd probably go back to the Temken Experience Ratings. So
we were. When I was at Forrester, I created the Customer
(06:14):
Experience Index, which was looking at hundreds of
companies and looking at this experience
in three areas, pretty much success, effort, and emotion.
So I recreated that around the Temkin Experience
Ratings, but instead of
putting it behind a firewall, we gave it away for free.
(06:36):
So not only did we give, like a
synopsis of the research, we gave all of it to the public
at large. And that ended up giving lots of people
access to data around experience. And we
looked at, you know, I don't know, 3, 400 companies, and
that was really, really valuable in terms of
(06:59):
getting widespread access to
customer experience data out there. And so we did a
lot of analysis off of that data. But I would say that was the
coolest thing. And we started to get. And I'll say one of the cool things
about that was when USAA actually
started to do a couple of ads based on
(07:21):
our data. Right. Seeing, you know, the footnotes and
referencing our data. And so that was kind of cool. But to me,
it was all about how do we get not. Not how do we get
data, but how do we get data in the hands of people that can do
something with it that's valuable. Yeah. So a couple of points I want to double
click on there. For those listening who may not be familia, I think it
(07:43):
also became later on called the cxi. Yes. So we used it
at the bank. And success, essentially, correct me if I'm wrong here, success
is were you successful in what you aimed to do as a customer?
Pretty much. What was the effort
level that it took you? Was it hard? Was there a lot of friction around
you being able to do what you wanted to do and then emotional. How did
(08:05):
you feel about the experience as you went through it? Yeah. So I think
those are all right. And let me give you, like, a little color on each
of those. So success is pretty straightforward. Were you able to do the thing that
you wanted to do? Right. Interesting enough, there's been an
effort movement over the years. I started tracking effort
a decade before the effort movement came in and
(08:27):
people started talking about effort. And I think that the way that
we measured effort, while not Perfect was much better than
the effort metrics that came up afterwards. You know, there were
introduction like, you know, to what degree
was this thing, you know, difficult to do
or to what degree did you exert energy? All those types of
(08:50):
questions were crazy. Ours were very simple, which is, you know, on a scale
from very easy to very difficult, how did you find it? Right. And
that's been a pattern of the advice that I've given to companies
and the data that we've published is that measures should
reflect how, how human beings actually think about a
situation. Otherwise their answers
(09:12):
are meaningless. Right. If I ask you a question in a direction you
don't understand about a dimension that you can't
internalize, then you can give me a response, you can check a
box, but it's meaningless because it doesn't resonate
clearly to you. So our effort was from easy to hard. And then
emotion. Emotion is an interesting one. So we. Emotion is multi
(09:33):
dimensional. Right. And emotion is by
far the most important element of those three. We've done lots of research
that shows it ties to loyalty more. Right. But we picked
for our measure one level of loyalty, whether it
made, whether you were what I say it was sort of the happiness
measure. I forgot what the exact scale was. But if you think about
(09:56):
emotion over the years, if you think about a company, that
may not be the right measure. As a matter of fact, for many
companies, I've been advising them on the notion of
confidence, especially in banking. You come from banking.
I would say that one of the most important
emotions for a banking customer is confidence. Do I have
(10:18):
confidence in the bank? Do I have confidence in my money? Do I have
confidence in sort of my financial situation?
Those are probably more lasting and important
than whether you are happy or sad about an individual interaction.
Right. So it was interesting. So we did have to create a
single measure to create an index. Right. And so I think that
(10:40):
that emotion, one I would say was overly simplistic relative to
the other two in terms of what you should be measuring with customer. Yeah.
So I had, I had both at different times, Rob Markey
and Fred Reichelt on the show. And one of the things that they both said
is nobody does surveys any. So you know, my question is
going to evolve around. That was a survey, that was a survey that was asked
(11:03):
of customers, what loss in relevance, if
any, does that have in today's world? So I think that first
of all, people take surveys. Surveys aren't dead the same way bank
branches aren't dead when the ATMs came out. Right. They Morph into
different purposes and have different value. I think
the pressure on surveys is that the
(11:25):
idea and great. You talk about Rob Markey and Fred
Reicheld. Right. Because probably the most obsolete
Survey is an 11 point NPS survey.
Right. In today's world. And I had
Fred on my show and like Fred said, Fred, the notion
of promoters and detractors and passives is
(11:47):
still a really positive strong one. But there are better
ways to identify and to
to segment customers than asking an 11 point
question. And people get too hung up on the question. I think
that. So now we're going to go into like my view on the industry a
little bit, right? Where I think that CX has run into
(12:09):
problems, which is a lot of the people came into CX and
viewed CX as a market research
function or that market research is credible. So overly index
their learning and thinking about the tools they use to
collect data. Right. Instead of thinking I really need to know who
my promoters passives and detractors are so I can do
(12:32):
something different with them and I can learn from them. So much time was spent
on how do I create an instrument to ask a
survey question. So that, and by the way, I'm gonna go off on a rant
on nps. So on one hand what Fred and what
Rob Markey did at Bain with NPS made the
industry. So let's not lose that. The industry would not be where it is
(12:54):
without NPS driving awareness, driving
deployment and many companies were successful. However, having
said that, the idea that you ask an 11 point question, then you
randomly decide based on that scale who is a
detractor, who is a passive and who is a promoter
is kind of absurd when you could just ask that more
(13:16):
directly. Right. Like a lot of the issues there
are, okay, someone gave you an 8, that means they're not a promoter. But are
they a promoter? Someone gave it 9A program. So why not? If you're going
to, if you're going to segment customers into four buckets,
why not let them put themselves into those four buckets more
directly as opposed to this chaotic sort of
(13:38):
questioning on. All right, they're eight, are they a promoter? Well, I will
tell you that an 8 in Japan is a super promoter. A 7 in
Japan is a super promoter. So anyway, that's my rant. Yeah.
About their cultural differences in the way people grade. The
opposite is true in South Latin America. Right. They tend to score
higher. So appreciate the rant and a lot of it does make sense and
(14:01):
I think you know, you know the mps the way
MPS has been used has given both of those gentlemen
heartburn for people using it
incorrectly. And I think you're right. I do want to come back to
your outlook on the industry, on the profession, near the end. But
before that, let's talk about humanity at scale. So let's
(14:22):
talk about where it overlaps with customer experience, management
and where it takes, where it gets new legs, where it's maybe a little different.
So I would say it is completely
different. Support. They're both mutually supportive
of each other's direction when, when you know,
as I said, I Forrester, then Temkin Group, then Qualtrics
(14:44):
XM Institute, and in all those environments I was
helping organizations, mostly through
practitioners, to improve the companies.
What I realized after all those years is, well, first of all, I decided
I wanted to have a bigger impact on the world.
And I'll tell you, I felt like I had a
(15:06):
pretty big platform to help people when I was at
Qualtrics. So it wasn't a complaint. I just felt like I had more in
me. And so what I realized is the more in me was to
step back and help leaders think about
how they lead differently. Because a lot of
the problems with the CX movement and CX getting
(15:29):
prioritized and customer experience and employee experience
happening ends up being that it doesn't match up with the
perspective that leaders have about how they want to leave their
organization. So to me, humanity at scale is a much
broader topic than customer experience. And employee experience is getting
leaders to think about how they can succeed in
(15:51):
a sustainable way by focusing more on people and
recognizing that there isn't a trade off. It's a
false trade off to believe that you either succeed
as a leader or you focus on the needs of people. What I'm trying to
do is inspire and empower leaders to recognize that
the only path, the only path to sustainable
(16:13):
success is by focusing more and understanding and catering
to the needs of people, whether they're customers, employees, the
communities that you serve, or the broader sort of
world in which you live. And that's the only path to sustainable success. Now the
way they overlap is think about a leader that cares nothing
about human beings or has no understanding of human beings or
(16:36):
doesn't drive for a human centric organization, that type
of leader will be a difficult one for a CX
leader and a CX practice to thrive in. So
my feeling is that if I can get leaders to be more
human centric and I'll talk about where I'm going with that, but if I can
get leaders to be more human centric. That is much more
(16:57):
conducive to a CX tool set and CX leaders
in that environment. So I think they both work together. But I'm not out
trying to tell leaders they have to care about customer
experience. I'm out there trying to tell them they have to
better care about human beings who happen to be
customers, human beings who happen to be employees. And
(17:19):
the better you can understand those human beings, the more successful you can
be about whatever you want. You want to grow your business? Sure. You want more
profits? Sure. You want to get into new markets? Sure. So what
would, and this is probably going to be a softball question to you, I
admit, but what would you say to those CEO people in the C suite
who say, come on, Bruce, you know, I've got quarterly reports that
(17:41):
I have to provide to Wall street and shareholders and they're
looking for results from us. They're
looking for. So I've got a business to manage here. I've got social
responsibility, I've got integrity of the, of the data and the
information that we have of customers nowadays, of fear of breach,
security breaches. I've got, we've got auditors breathing down our neck.
(18:03):
I've got, you know, revenue growth. We're trying to keep up with the competition.
Share of, they're looking at things like share of market. You know, this idea
of humanity isn't that soft, touchy feely stuff. So I would,
I would say first of all, I'm not trying to keep you
from achieving those things, the quarterly results. I'm telling you, there's a
big better way for you to do it that leaves a trail of
(18:26):
sustainable success behind it. Right. You can, you can do all
those things and beat up your organization and sort of
make your customers unhappy and make
the environment much worse. And so great you make
your quarterly numbers, but you do it in a way where you trail
behind costs that you're going to have to pay at some point down
(18:48):
the road. What I'm saying is I don't believe that there's any trade off you
need to make in achieving those. If you focus on doing them in
a way that has a deep understanding and caring
for the people that you impact. So that's the fundamental
thing, which is like I want to break that belief
about a trade off that somehow you either are
(19:10):
human centric or you're delivering on these sets of
results that you, you like you just mentioned. And
the question about is it soft? Like generally deal with large
organizations. Those have been my career has been around, you know, the mega
organizations, the housing, tens of thousands of people. And
if you're leading that organization and you don't recognize
(19:32):
that everything that you do impacts hundreds
of thousands, if not millions of people, if you don't realize
that, then you're in trouble. So you have to realize that, then you have to
say, how can I be more effective with those hundreds of
thousands and millions of people? How do you not get to the point at
some point where you say, you know, I probably could hit my quarter
(19:54):
results without pissing off 75,000
customers and 22,000 employees and have the same
results. So that's one thing, I'll jump in another one, which is
I just, I also want to get leaders to think about
legacy. I think a part of the motivation that I'm going to push
for is for leaders to think about what it is
(20:16):
they're leaving behind. Because I do think that if I only care
about quarterly things, I can push my organization, I can push my
company in the short term to do almost anything. I can get them to comply
with where I want to go. But I do think getting people to
have more of a thought about who am I? What
is the legacy that I want to leave behind, both in the
(20:38):
organization and in the community? And I think people are open to that. I think
the world, you know, a lot of the world sucks right now. People like
hate each other, people are mean, people aren't
caring about each other. Right. We're fighting more than ever. I think this is a
perfect time for everyone in the world to say, I want to be a
kinder, gentler type of myself and find
(21:00):
a way to leave the world in a better place than when I found it.
And so that's another stream that I hope kicks in. Yeah, for me, when you
were sharing that, it was echoes of Jim Collins, good to
great and level five leadership. And in that book he talked about
sort of the contrast to that was Lee Iacocca at Chrysler who was
like, well, you know, after, after I leave, the organization's
(21:23):
gonna tank because I really was the star. Yeah, I think
that is not the mindset that I'm shooting for. It's more of
a selfless, you know, concerned about how the organization
will actually succeed even after I'm gone. So I would say that
part is selfless. The other part, which is not selfless,
which is that you will succeed better by
(21:45):
understanding and catering to those tens of thousands, hundreds of
thousands, millions of human beings who are in the
ecosystem that ultimately determine the long term success of your
organization. Bruce, can you share with us maybe a couple of different
strategies on how business leaders can live
out humanity at scale? Yeah. So I think that at a base
(22:07):
level, I think having leaders understand
how people, how human beings think, feel and behave
is critical. Right. Because I think that there's a
lot of things. So in a lot of my work, I'll be
propelling a lot of the core thinking around experience,
design. Right. And understanding human beings and motivating
(22:30):
them. So for instance, if a leader is going to have to have
a layoff. Right. We're in these environments. I'm not going to tell them they
don't need to have a layoff. They might. Right. Like you're running a
business, that might be something to do. But designing
the communications around that so that there's certainty
about when it's going to happen, that shows some empathy
(22:52):
along the way and is honest about the
situation can drive a different outcome,
long term outcome for the organization than if they did
that set of layoffs in a sort of crass
way that didn't understand the impact that it was going to have
on not only the people you're asking to leave, but the people you're asking
(23:14):
to stay and the people you may want to encourage to come join
your company in the future and the customers who hear about it.
Right. So that's an example of where I'm. I'm not
necessarily going to push a leader to do
anything different in the strategic decision they make.
Right. But the decision about how you implement it can
(23:36):
have radically different effect on your future
and the success that you have going forward. Yeah,
Bruce, when I had Fred on the show, he talked about, in its
simplest terms, the golden rule. Yes.
People talk about the Platinum Rule, treated others how they would want to be
treated versus how you'd want to be treated. But why do
(23:58):
so many leaders get this wrong? There's
nobody listening. I'm guessing there's nobody listening to
this episode who doesn't know somebody who hasn't lost their job
in the last six months. And I'm willing to bet that those
people listening, they've heard really bad stories about the
way that people were let go. And I'm not even talking about, you
(24:21):
know, recently, the doge and the massive government layoffs
before, even before that or in and in
parallel to that private corporation, they're doing it really
bad. Are they that out of touch? What is the reason
that they just don't get it? Yep. So I want to start with, I think
the golden rule is broken. I Don't. I don't think. I think
(24:43):
the, the golden rule is
a great way for religions
to have a generic view on how you treat people.
But that doesn't work in organizations. Think about it.
Does a
multimillionaire CEO, the way that that person,
(25:05):
and usually a white male does that white male
millionaire CEO, should that person be treating the
people they're letting go across the organization the way that he wants to be
treated? That's the golden rule. I don't buy that.
Right. Yeah, he should be the rule. The platinum rule
should be treat people the way that they should be
(25:27):
and deserve to be treated. And that means it's because
they're not in those shoes. They're so disconnected that they act differently.
Yes. Yes. Because a couple things. One is
that it's happen. First thing happens to all of us, right. We get
transactional, right. We, lots of things in front of us and
we got to do, we got to do, we got to do. And unless there's
(25:49):
an interrupt, then we keep being transactional without thinking
about people. So if you think about the whole, the whole practice of
like meditation and mindfulness. So we'll flip from
the leadership discussion to sort of
the humanistic discussion. Right. That the whole growth
of mindfulness and of meditation grew out of.
(26:12):
We live in a world that is chaotic and moving
fast. And if we don't take the time to
sit and think about how we want to be, who we want to be
and how we want to be perceived, then we continue to act
in a way that's inconsistent with how we want to be
seen. Even though it is inconsistent. Right. We don't
(26:34):
recognize the inconsistency. We don't step up and change
it. So I don't think that there are. The leaders
are mindfully deciding to do it in the non
humanistic way. I think that there's two things happening. One is
they don't understand the humanistic way well enough. That's part
of what I. So I want to, I talk about, I want to inspire and
(26:55):
empower them. Inspire is getting them to think about and wanting to do
it and taking a checkpoint and stopping and saying, you know, now's
the time. I want to be humanistic and empower them to figure out how to
do it. So I do think that if you got, if there
was a whole think about this way. If Harvard Business
School had a whole course and had all of their
(27:18):
leaders have to go through humanity centered training, which
is how do you make decisions that make the
most out of get the best impact from and utilize
human beings in the most effective way. Right.
Then that would become part of the core mindset of a
leader in how they approach problems and how they make
(27:39):
decisions. And that's what we need to get to in the short term.
We have to get them to take an interrupt and do some
mindfulness type things and say, all right, I may be in the middle of this
crazy thing. Let me take a moment and think about there are people involved.
How can I effectively interact with those
people and get the most out of them for
(28:02):
the long term? Bruce, let me double click on. You mentioned experience
design. And those of us who have maybe been
CX practitioners kind of get grasp that. But there may be others listening.
And since you're talking about it in terms of the way people
think, feel and behave, and that informs experience design,
can you share a little bit more about how that works? Yeah.
(28:24):
So if you're, if you're designing something for an
experience or a decision for a human being, ultimately
you're doing it because you want some outcome. You want them to behave
in a different way, you want them to think in a different way. Right.
So you have to be explicit about what is. I want
to. So for instance, if I'm. If I'm designing an experience, let's say for
(28:46):
an employee who I'm going to let go. Let's keep on this theme,
right? I'm designing experience and I'm like, oh, we have to think about, okay. I
mean, we're not going to make them happy. The goal isn't to make them happy.
We have to have some other goals. Goals could be make them have them
clarity on what's happening, provide them with as
much access, easy access to whatever resources we're
(29:08):
going to give them and communicate that we have
empathy for their situation even though we're letting them go. Right.
That might be the goal. So if we have some goals around the actions
and the attitudes that we want to leave them with, then
we say, okay, how do we then put in place the
steps? They're going to interact with them, they're going to leave them
(29:30):
that way. And so it sort of goes like that. And I will say that
the big thing to learn and experience design, especially for a leader who's
not going to be an experienced designer, Right. That's not the goal is that
human beings behave based on two different
systems. Right. There's the rational and the
intuitive. A rational is where we, you know,
(29:51):
we start and we think about every
decision in terms of what the pluses and minuses are.
For us. You know, you can think about if you're an ice cream stand
and you're trying to decide on an ice cream and you go, well, you
know, the vanilla I like because it doesn't make my
teeth colored, the raspberry I like. And then you could have this whole
(30:14):
set of reasons why you make a decision. But you tend to make decisions more
on the intuitive side, which is the cookie dough looks wonderful.
I want that. Right? And so part of the recognition is
that human beings, while we treat them like they're very rational and
they make rational decisions and behave and think rationally, they
actually think intuitively more often. So if we
(30:36):
can sort of create experiences that either trigger
or take advantage of those intuitive moments. So for
instance, one of the things we know, and Amazon realizes this,
right, that when you go to Amazon and you want to buy
something, you might be in a research mode, right, where you're going to look
through every option in every detail. But oftentimes
(30:59):
you make the intuitive decision to go with the best seller. Why do you go
with the best seller? Because it's just an intuitively easier
thing than me to like, look at every single option
I have and evaluate it on my own. So a lot, if you look at,
like retailers, they've recognized how do they trigger this
intuitive behavior much more effectively over time.
(31:21):
And so I think it really starts with an understanding back to
leaders and experience design of recognizing that human
beings respond in an intuitive way to many
situations. We have to think about what are the symbols and triggers
that we have of those intuitive reactions. Awesome.
Bruce, you have been giving back to the community,
(31:44):
to the CX community for years, for decades. What advice do
you have for CX professionals and for the industry in
general to lift the
industry and for people who are seeking out
careers in the industry? What advice do you have? So I, first
of all, come into the industry, join the industry,
(32:06):
change the industry for the better. I think that. And I'll give a pitch for
it right at the end of the day, there aren't many levers that an
organization has to succeed better than more
deeply understanding, catering to the needs of its customers. So
whatever it's called, there's always going to be a need of that. And if you
think about the alternative of that is how many organizations succeed if
(32:27):
they don't understand and don't cater to customers. So having said that, I do think
that if I think about the, you know, over the
last couple of years, I was at Qualtrics, I did a lot of
global trips by visiting Companies giving speeches
around the world. And most of my discussions were not
around the metrics of customer experience. They were
(32:50):
around change management and justifying the
focus. So instead of CX professionals
fighting that and trying to say, yes, CX is about the
metrics, yes, CX is about the data, they should lean into
it and say, all right, we need to help change the organization
and get better skill to understand. How do you do that? We've published a lot,
(33:12):
so there's a lot of resources of that. But think more. Your job is not
to try and push data onto the organization.
Your job is to help the organization evolve and change
using whatever insights you have. That's one thing I would push for.
The second thing is you had better understand AI.
(33:32):
You know, if you look at just some basic things, right, like
look at the call centers, there is no need to
do surveys of customers on an ongoing basis. Like,
in the long run, AI can extract whatever meaningful
insights there are in enough scale from those
conversations that whatever you may end up asking a
(33:54):
customer or asking someone who is just through, that should
always be additive to whatever you've just learned
because of the AI analysis of those conversations.
Right. So I'm not against surveys per se, but I'm
against surveys for core understandings that
you should be able to get and you need to be able to get from
(34:16):
other conversations. That's another thing. I understand AI.
And then the third thing I would do, and this is true for any change
agent, which is recognize you're a change agent. And change
agents fail more than they succeed. And so you have to
revel in your successes. You know, it's like a baseball
player, a good baseball player gets a hit one out of three times.
(34:37):
You have to really enjoy that one time and not worry about
those two times as much. Right. You really have to
recognize and celebrate the successes that you have. Yeah.
Well said, Bruce. I want to end the show with the question
that I ask all my guests based on the name of the show, which is
what delights you as a customer. So I really
(35:00):
like proactive service. So I like it
when I'm a big traveler, as you can tell, I told you, around the
world. So I'm a big client of Delta. I'm at their
highest non invitation level. There's an invitation level
that I'm not in. Yeah. And so I do appreciate
when every once in a while the, you know, someone
(35:21):
in the cabin, like a pilot will come back
and thank me for my, my loyalty.
I sort of like that. It's not necessary. I like non necessary,
proactive moves like that. And I will also say, if I'm on
Delta, while I like that, what I really like is when I get
upgraded. So that's probably the most
(35:42):
proactive customer thing I like is when, you know,
I'm not expecting it, although I do track where I am on the list.
But when I get that call, oh, my God, you've been upgraded. That's. That's a
wonderful thing. Well, shortly after we finish up here, I'll be reaching out
to Delta for sponsorship opportunities on the show.
Yeah. Bruce, thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's
(36:05):
always a thrill, and I always learn so much from you.
What an honor. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And thanks for doing
the show.
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