The answer to the question, “Would you recommend our company to your friends?” depends on whether your customers feel cared for and have a remarkable experience, not just satisfactory, and can see how experiences dealing with your company improved their lives? What mix of team inspiration, process and technology innovation, and caring leadership would it take to get an increasingly enthusiastic positive response from your customers in the new normal?

Contributor

• • David Seidl, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, Miami University
    

Transcript: Would you Recommend Our Company to Your Friends?

Sanjog: Hello and welcome to CTN, and to learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com and today’s topic is, ‘would you recommend our company to your friends?’

What do you do if you want others to recommend your company to their friends? It actually requires the person for you for that matter to feel special, to be cared for, you are the remarkable experience, not just satisfactory and also the thing which will have improved the way you do business or live your life.

All of those things have to come together for you to recommend a company, a service provider to your friends. What does it take if you want this to not just be a one-time thing or a fluke, but a regular phenomenal for other people to refer your company to their friends? To discuss this, I have David Seidl, Vice President for IT and CIO from Miami University, Hey David, how are you doing?

David: I’m doing well Sanjog, How about you?

Sanjog: Very good sir, thanks so much for joining, and in this day and age, getting a customer to keep coming back and bringing their friends along is actually a huge feat, and perhaps that’s the only way you can survive, otherwise, people are so fickle. So, when you look at a customer like their expectations, they have become demanding, they have become fickle and they have had more choices than ever before.

So, what would you say from an expectation’s standpoint, specifically the quirks, or are rightfully so the expectation shifts, which is going to force all of us to rethink how we are approaching and elevating the customer experience?

David: This is a question that I think is fascinating, particularly in my niche, which is higher education, the reputation and the feeling of a campus and institution is key to bringing in new students, but it’s also what keeps your alumni coming back. It’s what makes us who we are, that’s baked into the very DNA of every higher education institution.

But the last two years have seen a lot of changes, beyond the changes we were seeing in higher education before. We had a pandemic that changed how our higher education had to work with our students, what their perceptions of the institution would be, and we couldn’t just rely on a pretty campus and, some amazing faculty, we had to think about what the whole student experience was like. So, we not only saw expectations change, but needs change, going remote changed both what they need and how they want to receive it.

So, we saw a few things, we saw individualization continue to grow because people’s needs need to be met much closer to where they are rather than one size fits all.

We’ve seen things like cloud services change how people think about the tools that they use; cloud services change quickly; they require you to meet their interface design that could change very quickly. We’ve also seen mobile devices change how people think of how they interface with things, because you can set them up your way, it’s always with you, how you interact, it’s a lifestyle change for many people, and then we’ve also seen people who are under more stress and pressure, and they need us to be understanding of that.

So, we’ve had to shift all of how customer experience works to be able to meet these changing needs. From my perspective as a CIO, one of the things we did was we implemented services faster. We were, not a zoom campus before the pandemic, and about 30 days in, we were suddenly a zoom campus, which was one of the largest wide-scale implementations we’ve done in higher ed and my area ever.

We’ve moved forward in terms of how we meet our customers, so, we now talked to them in different ways. We communicate with them in different ways. We are personalizing our communications; we’re personalizing their experiences; all of those things have changed along the line.

Sanjog: Now, all of that you just mentioned, lot of expectations will have changed and will continue to change. So, is there some sort of preparation an organization can do to take care of or stay ahead of these changing expectations, especially because when we know that whatever you’re going to prepare and get ready for could also not be obsolete, but would not be so not enough because there will be more changes and even increasing expectations. So, how do you keep play catching up or can you ever get ahead of this and feel confident?

David: Every four years, our customer base is turning over entirely, and so that means we are constantly trying to change to meet those expectations. So, the first thing you have to do is you have to stay in tune with your customers, you have to have ways of getting to see things from their perspective.

One of the ongoing jokes in higher education is, our students who are 18 every year, feel a lot younger to us as we got older much faster than we feel like we’re getting older, but it means that we will very quickly be out of touch, if we only listened to ourselves. It is my experience over 20 years ago, as an undergraduate is very different from what a modern undergraduate’s experience will be, and it’s very different from the things they’ll demand. Their parents might have a lot in common with me, and I might be able to talk effectively to their parents, but I really need to be in a different head space to talk to our students.

So, we do a lot of things, one of those is, we have a lot of voice of the customer related items. We are listening to our customers as they come in, but we also listen to them through high school and we make sure that we’re listening to what our students say. Parents are customers too, and we engage with them, and a lot of places that they will find familiar, everything from Facebook to surveys, to direct interaction, and we listen to them all of the time. That doesn’t mean that we can do everything everybody wants, but we can start to make institutional shifts to meet them where they need us to.

The other thing that’s interesting is in higher education, you also have to be careful to care about your core organizational ethos, and I think this is true for every company. If you lose who you are, you will lose your distinctiveness, and so you have to balance every change you make against the things that make you a successful organization that are the heart and soul of your organization and make that still come true, and that balancing act is where success or failure can come for a lot of organization.

Sanjog: See, one is that you get into the listening mode and listen to your customers, and then when you bring that back, you’ve got to be able to translate that into something actionable. But then that action cannot be as effective if you did not know where you stood and where we got to go so that you take very specific surgical maneuvers, right, I see you agree with it, so now with that, while on one hand you wear your listening hat or your organization has specific people and specific processes and technologies to listen, but then you also have to do a kind of ongoing benchmarking on how well are you standing against this customer first mindset or the CX culture, some sort of a way for you to see how far have you come and has it degraded or you have to work further.

So, is this an art form or a science or your gut feel that you’re going to work with?

David: I am a fan of both the art and the science. I come from a risk assessment background and we like to talk about qualitative and quantitative measures, and I think if you only do one, you’re missing something really important, but if you do both and you pay attention to what they mean, you have a much better chance of succeeding.

So, a really (media 8:18) example for me is that we on a yearly basis survey all of our students about how their work with our technology on campus is going. So, we ask them, what do you think about the WIFI? What do you think about our learning management system? Do you have appropriate services that are working for you? We also asked them to define what they want versus what they receive versus what they could see somebody else providing them.

So, we’re basically figuring out where in the spectrum they are, where would they like us to invest? So, we’re able to do a measurement year on year and compare each year and see that change over time. We look at things like net promoter scores, and if you’re not paying attention to things like net promoter scores, where you figure out, whether people are supporting you or not, you’re probably not doing everything that you should around customer feedback, and then a lot of my job is getting out to our university community and listening and making myself available, and sometimes that feedback comes in forms you to expect, I will get an email, somebody will tweet at me, somebody will send something through our help desk and it will make it to the people who need to know about it, and sometimes it’s an unexpected way. An example is, last year as part of a fundraiser for one of our, campus, inner fraternal organizations, I was in a dunk tank and you’re going to say, David, why is a dunk tank related to campus feedback? Well, I had a student walk up and you could donate for a certain number of dollars, you could get softballs to throw out the dunk tank, a target, and the student bought the balls, set them on the ground, walked up to the tank where I was sitting and said, I am having a bad WIFI experience in my residence hall and then walked over the target and pushed the (door,-10:00) and I immediately went into the tank. Since you can’t see me on the podcast, I’m a person who wears glasses, so, I can’t see the student cause I’m in a dunk tank with no glasses on, but one of my staff members was standing nearby and actually follow the student to see if we could find out more about their personal experience.

So sometimes it’s the on the ground feedback, that’s just as important as all of the surveys and other feedback mechanisms so that you can go fix the real experiences for the people you work with.

Sanjog: Would you say there is a holy grail of a standard, which ones must pursue our strive to get to for us to say, okay, this is the place where we all have to go and let that become the vision, if you will, which will drive everyone, because you alone cannot pull it off anyway.

So, you want your whole crew and the business users and everyone along with it to make this happen. Is there something, a holy grail, which you can kind of articulate what would that look like?

David: That’s a really interesting question because I think it is different for every organization, what their holy grail is. It depends on the business that you’re in and how you interact with your customers and what you want their experience to be.

At Miami, we have a phrase that frequently we will say that that is, love and honor and that phrase, love and honor says a lot about how we want to interact with each other, how we want to interact with our students, how we want people to leave and remember Miami and what we want the rest of their life as Miami Alumni to be like, we want them to feel loved, cared about cherished to have that connection to Miami, to each other, to our community, and then honor really says a lot about how we treat each other, about the way we want to leave a mark on the world, and so when we think about our customer experience, we are grounded in something that’s more than a motto. It’s who we are, and it’s even something we use as a greeting and a sign off inside of our emails to remind us of what we’re doing. I don’t think that’s going to be a holy grail experience for everyone, I don’t think that’s going to be a consistent experience for everyone, but if you can step back and say, who are we? What do we want to be? How do we align to that, and are we on the path to achieving it? If you can do that, I think that you can achieve, at least success if not something pretty amazing.

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break listener, we’ll be right back, and let’s discuss the CX strategy, customer experience strategy. So, besides the fact that we are nice people and we really love our customers that sentiment, can it truly take you to where you want to get to?

That’s where perhaps the CX strategy comes into place, where you are fundamentally aiming before firing, but what does that look like? Have you ever thought of it? And if you have, what shape would take you in your specific situation or circumstances or environment to your true north, please stay tuned, we’ll be right back.

Sanjog: Welcome back, so David when you talk about CX right, customer experience strategy, a lot of people talk about it, someone can make good consulting fee, get good fee out of it, you can build a good document and couple of PowerPoint slides, but let’s talk about what it truly means and how should one go about defining it versus just, putting ink on the paper and what are specific important elements or tenants of such a strategy, which in this day and age, if properly defined, will at least give you the hope that when you implement such a strategy to realize it, it will take you in the right direction.

David: I think the first thing that comes to mind when you talk about a customer experience strategy is, is it truly strategic for your organization? Have you stopped and thought about what customer service being strategic means?

Can you describe to your organization why you’re doing it? Why it’s important, why you’re going to focus the resources to make it something that is a core part of what you do, and a lot of organizations will say customer experience matters and many of us have dealt with service providers or somebody that we call up and complain to about something that doesn’t work, where they tell you that the customer is something that matters, and we all know after that experience, we’re pretty sure that that’s not what actually happened.

So, the first thing that for me, that comes into a customer experience strategy is making sure people know that they’re responsible for customer experience, and in many organizations, you’ll have somebody who’s in charge of customer experience. In most organizations, you want almost everybody to have something about customer experience in their daily life and part of their work, and so we have people who are heavily aimed at customer experience, the people who support our service organization, the people who work with our help desk, people who do desk side support and our relationship managers who know that they are our frontline of customer experience on a day-to-day basis. My leadership team knows that the experience itself is a core thing. We have a member of our leadership team whose title includes customer advocacy, and he is at all of our leadership meetings to represent the customer and everything that we do, and his team ensures that we do that and that we communicate well about it. Then as you’re building that strategy, you have to think about providing the skill set and the capabilities that will allow you to have that amazing experience, in some cases that is, making sure that you actually have the skill sets for a UX design. So, is your user experience good?

On our campus, we have some great undergraduate program classes that actually involve user experience, and we will bring in user experience skilled undergrads to help us design our new interfaces for things before we roll them out or to test what we’ve got. A previous employer, we actually took the entire organizational management chain through a design thinking program, so that we would all be thinking about how we build things and what designs we put into place from that perspective. It doesn’t mean that design thinking was the only thing that we did, but we gave people additional skills sets with a focus on what the customer was going to experience, and then when you’ve got all of those wheels spinning, the last thing that you have to do is be able to step back and say, how do we know if we’re succeeding? Can we measure this? Can we see our impact? Can we see our year on year goal? That’s a long to toddle thing, so that you see year to year whether you make making that impact, because this doesn’t change quickly in a lot of cases. It’s also a momentary thing to make sure that the tone is right. If you make a big mistake, if you have a massive outage, you have to make sure that you’re actually doing the work to make your customer experience make up for that moment and that you’re not going to cause the same problem again. So, it’s a very much a whole package of putting all these things together and then maintaining it, and then you can get to your CX strategy, if you’ve done all those things to define it and make it work.

Sanjog: Now, when you do talk about these things and I’m sure you touched on the ROI part, but CX itself can get fuzzy pretty quickly and especially when you’re getting from the customers, you cannot directly connect to the numbers of dollars you’ve made or the annual value that you got from a customer or a lifetime value of a customer. Are we going and measuring it in numbers enough for us to say that wherever we are spending money, it’s going to really create a good business benefit, which is tangible?

David: That’s a difficult question on the best of days, I think the answer will be yes in pockets, I know exactly how much I spend on my help desk, I know exactly my customer service satisfaction response scores. I can point to investments in wireless capabilities and the overall perception of campus. In fact, between 2019 and 2020, we had something that happened that is rare on college campuses. Our faculty’s annual assessment report for us from our survey has positive scores instead of negative scores and faculty in general across campuses are not the most positive when they get a chance to provide feedback. So, we could see both quantitative and qualitative improvements. What I can’t tell you is how many students Miami maintains and retains year to year based on whether we’re providing excellent IT service, that’s not a thing that I’m going to get. So, I have somethings that I can see in a approve, I have some things that I can get some feedback on and I can see how people feel about them, which is why I really like the qualitative assessment, and then some of it, I just have to assume as part of my job to be successful and I have to look at that and say of the many things I need to spend people time and dollars and resources on are these the right thing, and for me a lot of the time that really does come back to aligning with that organizational ethos and our beliefs and the kind of institution that Miami wants to be and is, and making sure we maintain that.

Sanjog: So, if you have a bunch of different things going on, just putting a good help staff help desk in place, which you should anyways, it will contribute toward CX, but that’s not these sole ammunitions you will take to elevate the CX within an organization. So, when you are trying to look at the ROI formula, so there is benefit, there is risk, and then there is cost, how would you define the formula for CX in your organization? Where does the benefits is? To some extent looks obvious where the benefit is, but then hard benefit and all the other side, the cost and the risk. How would you define it?

David: Yes, so benefit in many ways for me comes down to a couple of things, one is the educational mission of the institution. So, are we successfully graduating our students with a preeminent undergraduate or graduate education? Are they getting what they need to for Miami and part of that is having what we think of as the Miami experience, which is where that customer experience is and I’m not the only owner of customer experience, in fact, I may be one of the least important owners of customer experience on campus on a lot of days. The folks who run the residence halls on some of that, the faculty own a lot of that, the people who make our housing and dining room, the groundskeepers, all of them own elements of the customer experience for our students and for our parents and for our alumni. So, the benefits, there are sometimes tangible, sometimes intangible, and sometimes you don’t see them for 20 or 30 years after somebody graduated and then they come back and they donate for a building on campus or they send their kids to Miami or they come back and they do a talk on campus that makes a meaningful impact on somebody’s life. So, all of it is part of what we are, we have a 200-year history and we have a future that is part of that, we have to invest to make sure that that brand and that core, that is Miami stays true. So, the risk side of things is going to be, what could go wrong and when we talk about that, we worry about what happens if we have a bad experience and if we don’t fix it, if we don’t get in front of it, if we don’t make the right kind of investments to make sure it’s not an ongoing issue. Then of course the cost side of things, what does it cost to provide that experience? That’s a whole bunch of different things, it may be staff time, it may be technology infrastructure in my case, it may be something as simple as making sure we communicate better, and so we try and look at those things and do an assessment on a per project basis about what the impact will be.

So sometimes somebody will come to me and say, we have a project, and the ROI on the dollar value does not meet what our requirements are. It will not pay itself off within three to five years just based on dollar costs and my job as a CIO is to look at that and say, yes, but this means a lot to our campus community, this is a user experience thing, this is a thing that will matter a lot to our students and when you do that, I put my thumb on the scale and say, we’re going to do this anyway, because it matters for reasons that are not just cost related or the cost is intangible, but if we don’t do it, we’ll feel it in other ways, it may not just be dollar aligned. That’s where some of the hardest leadership decisions come from, but also some of the most worthwhile leadership decisions are when you make the decisions that aren’t just based on a dollar cost, but look at the total cost of the institution in intangible and tangible ways.

Sanjog: What you’re trying to do here with CX, right, it cannot be an isolated initiative, what other foundational groups, departments, teams, Ivory tower leadership, what else should come together for you to say, hey, we have a CX initiative and we want to go after the CX ROI, these all things we’ll have to pivot or incrementally change?

David: The short answer is, if you’re successful, almost everybody needs to be playing together for that, but on a day-to-day basis, one of the most important people for our campus is our vice-president of university communications and marketing she sees the institution’s reputation, she sees the communications that we’re doing, and she sees the engagement that we see across all of those populations. At the same time my other peer, who I work with very frequently on customer experience is our vice president, president of enrollment management and student success and that is where we bring students in and we ensure that they are actually making it through graduation, and so the three of us frequently talk about, what we’re doing to make the customer experience better, and they do the same thing for other folks across campus, including the people who run campus, run our infrastructure, run the housing and dining run, the academic side of the house.

Those two are working with all of us to make sure we’re playing our part, and we will support the two of them on a day-to-day basis to make sure customer experience is where it needs to be. It means that they also have to listen to me, because there are days where I will need to go to them and say, in my area of expertise, this needs to be made better, or we need to invest here and I need your help to represent this because it’s in competition with other initiatives, or it is a thing that will take some effort to get us there.

We’re rolling out a new portal for campus and we’ve been running the same portal for a long time, and it’s a thing that every student and every faculty member and every staff member encounters as part of their normal work at Miami and so we spent time working with all of campus on each of those areas to get them invested in making sure that our portal adoption was going to be successful.

One of the things was we stopped running the portal as just IT running the portal and we actually democratized our portal, so each of those divisions can control their segments of the portal directly and they meet together as part of a working group to ensure that we’re governing that portal well.

So, everybody has a stake in the game for that part of customer experience. That’s a small part of it, but working together, is a habit and it’s also necessary to get what we need done.

Sanjog: When we are looking at the different ways to create, metrics, right, one is that you get people working, then you’ve got operational metrics, you’ve got financial metrics, all of those things have to fall in place, and for them to fall in place, they have to be defined properly first, so, the alignment of CX metrics to the operational and financial metrics is required, but would you say CX metrics when we say everything should be customer driven, should the CX metric come first and that should drive operational and financial metrics or the other way around that is, tail wagging the dog in today’s day and age?

Is that the right approach or the other way around the traditional approach is okay, and if the original one where the financial and operational metrics come, how do you prevent a conflict because many times what you do for a customer may not always be in the best interest of the business?

Let’s talk about it, a complex rather twisted question, but I think it’s worth answering.

Sanjog: We talk about proper meaningful CX metrics, which are aligned with operational and financial metrics that looks very business-like and nothing wrong with it, that’s how we should run it. But then we are in a way saying that, let us look at ourselves first, look at what we want to do as a business first and there’s nothing wrong with that again, but then trying to get CS metrics to align with the operational and financial metrics, whereas on the other hand, we say we are very customer centered or customer centric.

So, if you are customer centric, why would you have your first financial and operational metrics designed first, instead if you focused all your attention first on the CX metric and then have the operational and financial metrics kind of follow, you will eventually be a winner, at least it looks like a logical deduction. So, what do you think David, am I trying to disrupt the way business is done?

David: I think maybe sometimes you do need to disrupt how business is done. I think we’re seeing a world where you have to care about customer experience because there are other options, and when there are other options, if your experience is the lesser experience, and there’s not some other reasons that you would be driven there, why would you stay with that provider. There’s habit for a while, but eventually you’re going to get there and that’s one of the reasons why you see people in higher education, select certain schools, the customer experience, although we don’t tend to think of it as specifically customer experience, we tend to think of it as the Miami experience, is very meaningful to us.

So, when I step back and I think about how do you actually do your customer experience metrics? I have a few rules of thumb that I use the very high level to get there.

The first thing that I do is, I ask everybody to step back and let’s identify what’s important, and that’s a very broad thing, but it helps to get everybody thinking about why are we doing what we’re doing? What is meaningful? Sometimes that’s, I need you to have an amazing customer experience, sometimes it’s, I need to provide a good enough experience to everybody to ensure that we have equitable access, sometimes it’s, I need to make sure that we can meet a budget because if I don’t meet that budget, I will not be able to do any of the other things that I’m doing for the organization or for the institution.

So, we talk about what’s important and we make sure that we’re all on the same page about importance, because if we have people who are disagreeing about what’s important, we may go do all of the things and fail at most of them because we’re not focused where we need to be.

The second thing I do, I recommend is that we think about what’s measurable, you don’t have to be able to measure everything, but if you measure nothing, you will never succeed. So, you look for the things that can be measured, and then you say, what should be measured, because I’ve seen people get lost in KPIs that mean nothing and metrics, that mean nothing just for the sake of metrics.

Finally, I asked people to step back and consider what can’t be measured easily, but matters, and that’s where the heart and soul of this is where the human side of things is, and you have to find ways to accept and gather that input so that you can see the things that may not be immediately metric measurable, but that you can do something useful with.

Sanjog: So, what you just said, definitely about the metrics, but I kept thinking that while we are creating metrics, but we can get wound up in the numbers and I wanted to bring back the cultural aspect of it, the soft side, which means someone who’s a worker or a leader, doesn’t matter where, but in their heart of hearts, they should be wanting to take care of the customer.

David: Yes, and so that you also have to think about your culture, right? So, and that’s exactly what you’re saying, you need to find ways to make that culture meaningful, you also have to find ways to make that culture survivable in some ways, right?

So, I’ve been in cultures where we would do anything for a customer, and sometimes that was to our betterment, because sometimes the thing that the customer wants is not what the institution, the organization or the department can sustain, and sometimes the thing that they want would actually cause harm to other customers, and so we have to be cautious about where that is.

So, I like to empower people to make sure that you have customer expenses. If you ever get a chance to take one of the courses that, folks from Walt Disney world will offer, they’ll talk to you about what a Disney experiences and people at Disney are empowered to make lifetime memory experiences for their customers, and they also know that there are certain things that they will not do because that’s not a Disney experience.

When you think about your organization, you have to figure out what your organizational empowerment should be and what the experience people should have with your organization should feel like, and it may not be a Disney experience, but here it would be a Miami experience, and people will say a Miami experience should feel like this and if it’s not happening, we need to figure out why, and they know as individuals, as employees, as staff members, as faculty that there are things that they can do to make that experience better and that they are personally responsible for as part of our community.

The exception can’t be the rule, but we can make exceptions to make sure things go right and that is a very, very big part of empowering people to make that magic happen.

Sanjog: What do you do when something starts degrading and which can degrade, not because people suddenly are averse to taking care of their customers, but things could break down well, like that happened with the pandemic or there could be some other issues, whether it’s MNA?

David: Yes, watching for degrading is such an important part of this and it’s where those, measures and the qualitative assessments that we talked about earlier, come in, you have to watch for sliding, and sometimes it’s a momentary bump. In my organization, we recently had some WIFI issues and we took a beating and our student satisfaction surveys, and I’ll be showing that to our board of trustees, and I’m going to tell them why we have those issues.

I’m also going to show them what our path forward is to regaining the trust and regaining the stability that our institution is used to from that WIFI perspective and we know that that’s a momentary. The pandemic changed, how a lot of folks see higher education and what higher education should be like and going to remote instruction and online instruction, which are two very different things, mean that people have different concepts of the educational experience than they would have if they had been on campus for the entire time.

So that is one of those larger scale issues that we realized that we essentially have two or three groups of students who were especially having a freshman year experience, and we wanted the students to have a Miami experience so that they could have a lot of those high value interactions that freshmen normally get, they could build those connections they would have built in the residence halls.

They can build the community connections that make college, what it is, and a lot of ways for a lot of people, and so when you have a big change like that, you have to step back and say, what are the core important elements of that experience?

And how many of them can we provide in ways that don’t come across as artificial that come across as meaningful so that people get that and I think that level of intentionality is what makes an excellent organization versus an average organization, and an average organization will triumph over an organization that is failing by just bringing the intentionality to making sure that you’re moving those things to where they should be instead of where they are and watching for one that doesn’t work or does work in adjusting that’s needed.

Sanjog: Now, when we talk about taking care of the culture and eventually the customer, et cetera, there are some wise people who said, you take care of your people so that they take care of the business, which means, while we could remain customer centric but how about we take the formula of employees first customer second?

And if he did that, what would you have done as a foundational set of things, in terms of creating the environment for employees to of course feel good themselves before they start feeling good about taking care of their customers.

David: I think a lot of that comes down to who your organization feels like they are, if we took a member for our organization and said, who are we, would you hear a consistent story for years?

For years I told my staff, I actually have three rules that I bring to work with me and for people who want to work with me and I try to make sure that they go through any organization that I’m in and so my three rules for getting there are pretty simple.

The first one is do the right thing, and I believe the organizations that have a belief that they should do the right thing and that they are empowered to do the right thing, and if they see something that’s not the right thing being done, that they should change, it will be more powerful and people always say, well, what if we disagree on the right thing? I said, that’s what behind closed-door conversations are for, if you’re genuinely doing the right thing, I will back your play, and we’ll talk about it later if we need to.

The second thing that I believe that organizations need to be aware of to really be able to do this is that mistakes are okay. The worst organizations I’ve been in have been punitive about mistakes. The best organizations that I’ve been in have learned from them, and I’ve had a culture where we supported each other through making mistakes. So, if you can do the right thing and you can make mistakes, you’re going to have a pretty empowered organization and then my last thing that I believe is really, really important, and that you really want to make your organization be healthy and this is probably a David thing as well, I tell organizations my number three is have fun at work, because if you’re having fun, your customers will be having fun. The people you interact with will be having fun and you’ll have better connectivity across your entire organization.
So, we focus on elements of culture like that, to make sure that we’re taking care of our employees. The other thing that we focus on is community, so, we’ve got kind of our ethos. We talk about how we ensure that people who come in become part of Miami and that’s harder when you’re remote, how do you make sure people can feel what a gorgeous red brick campus in Southwest Ohio means if you can’t walk across campus, and so we focus on a lively community, inside of our slack channels, inside of our email communications, we do a weekly update that has a combination of useful information perspective, some terrible geek humor, all of these things that come together to build a community.

We’ve had people who joined us say that they saw something remarkable when they joined our community, they saw something that they wanted to take with them if they left, and so we keep track of how people feel about what our community is like when they join, and we make sure that we are maintaining that community for them through their time here. All really important the community and having an ethos are things that will get you through and make a customer experience great for everyone.

Sanjog: When you mentioned that people should have fun and they should really be singing kumbaya, and eventually in that process also take care of the customer, but we will always have people who are thinking me first versus we first. So where is the ball getting dropped?

Did we not hire the right people or somewhere their motivation levels dropped to a level where they started thinking either survival or say, I don’t care, and all of that in some form of fashion will create leakage or perhaps some negative impact and all the other initiatives that may be going on.

So what do you do with the people within and or if you’re using partners, what do you do in terms of selecting the right partners with the right expectations and even build good relationships with them so that they jump on the same bandwagon that, Hey folks, let’s get together, give customers experience of a lifetime.

If it doesn’t happen, why doesn’t happen, if you have to fix it, how to fix it? Please stay tuned, we’ll be right back.

Sanjog: You and I have all the intentions of building the best possible customer experience, and we are also banking on the people that we have. We will have a few stalwarts, some heroes, if you will, in the organization that we are proud of, but you would find that there are quite a few of them who may have the right kind of struggles, where you can be empathetic and deal with it.

But then there are some others who think me first, I have to somehow bide my time. I have to do a good project, but I’m not going to go out of my way to meet that metric that David created, that means, either we could never Kindle the fire within them, or they were not a fit for the company.

How does one determine when you’re in such a noble journey of making sure customer is treated very well so that they referring us to other, other customers or bring other people along, and here we are struggling with getting our own people to think about we versus me?

David: This is one of the hardest problems that we face on a day-to-day basis, because people are the most complex thing that we deal with, and you can walk into an organization and the person’s already there and may or may not be bought in, I took over an organization and one of my staff members said, I’ve outlasted every manager before you and I will outlast you, and so all I have to do is wait for you to go away, and I knew that we had some challenges in front of us, and so when I think about this, I think that there are a few categories of things we can do when you have one or more people who don’t want to buy in.

The first thing that I like to do is I like to say; can we change the problem? So, why is the person not bought in, is it because of their experiences? Is it because it’s just not who they are? Is it because they operate on a different reward perspective than I do? Is there something else that will make them feel rewarded? So, can we change the problem to a way that will work for them and for them to either at least engage or ideally come around to seeing why this is going to be the way we’re going to move forward together.

Sometimes we have to change the situation and sometimes changing the situation means that they’re not with the right leader, they’re not in the right team. they’re not in the right role, but we could change something about where they are at and either put them in a place where they will not cause active harm, where they may be more satisfied, where they may be more challenged, but change something about the situation they’re in and make that issue either less or go away.

The final and hardest thing, but one of the things that I think is so incredibly important in organizational leadership is sometimes you have to change the person, and frankly, sometimes we change ourselves because we’re not the right person for an organization, but we also have to own in leadership positions, not allowing an individual direct drive the organization down.
Everybody has run into somebody who is the poison pill for the team, the challenge that constant naysayer, and sometimes that fit is just so bad that you cannot work with them in the organization. The longer you maintain that status quo, the more harm you will do, and the other side of that is as leaders we also know that when we take one of those actions where somebody does leave the organization, the teams will say, well, what if it was me? It’s hard for them to deal with that, the individual is a human being. We care about them as an individual, they may not be a fit for an organization, you have to (percentile – 46:54). But if you take those three ideas, change the problem, change the situation, change the person you can solve some of these personnel situations, sometimes issues and then get back to your key focus.

If you’re only focused on that problem, you’re probably not putting the time into the other things that were more important, and that were way back to the first part of the conversation where we were talking about strategy, and if you’re deep in the trenches with the problems you’re not working on strategy, you’re working in spending all of your time on these specific issues.

Sanjog: So, if we are looking at leadership, you did talk about the leadership and one is that you might be at the top, but then there comes the mid management and mid-management is who that frontline worker works for, and they also join the company because they like the manager, or they also leave the company because suck as per them.

What do you do to make sure that the managers are immersed in that sentiment of CX, amazing, a compelling customer experience, so, they start believing and become passionate and that passion becomes contagious, so that they Kindle the fire within the frontline workers or the staff that reports to them for it to result, in the desired, overall a fact where your customers keep bringing back their friends, you doing things at leadership level at the top, or you doing at the frontline or a staff level, this mid-management can many times kill and or accelerate your path to Nirvana.

What do you do about this middle man?

David: Mid-level managers are where the rubber meets the road, absolutely and a lot of organizations, if you walk into them, you’re going to have a lot of managers that you’ve inherited, who may or may not have been given opportunities to grow.

One organization, a story was that a number of people were in a room, 20-30years ago, they said we need some managers and they picked four or five people in the room to become managers and that was all the management training they ever received, and they continued in the organization for the next couple of decades, basically, just because they’d been picked out of a room back then that doesn’t prepare people to be successful.

They may be successful because they’re remarkable individuals, but it doesn’t give them the rest of the things that you would equip them with. So, I think one of the first things to do is, to talk to your mid-level managers about, why they’re managers, how they’re managing and what your expectations are, and then offer them access to resources that will advance them, that will give them those skillsets. I’m a big fan of mentoring,

I really like equipping people with the mentor who’s a lot like them, and I like offering them a mentor who is very different from them because I want somebody who can celebrate their successes because they understand and grow because they understand the path and somebody who will challenge their worldviews and say, what if you did it differently? I also believe that it’s really important to get your managers together and communicating with each other because their experiences across an organization are often very different and one who’s stuck in the mud may not see the amazing things that the rest of the organization is doing, because what they’re doing at the moment may be more miserable or more challenging, and it helps to have that community built for them to talk to each other and support each other.

It also means that the people who are willing to come talk to you and tell you where there are problems are more likely to see them and come talk to you so that as a leader, your blind spots will be diminished.

I think that last bit is one of the most important things to be aware of is, you have to find ways to cover your blind spots.

Leaders cannot see through all of the nooks and crannies of an organization, and if you have really good mid-level managers, they will help you see those things. I treasure, I absolutely charged with the fact that people will walk into my office and say, David, here’s how my day is going and here’s some stuff that’s going on and I want you to see it because I know you do a better job because you have that, building a culture where that happens, can be a big part of the customer experience, and honestly, it’s a big part of me enjoying my job.

Sanjog: One last question, if you had to fix something in yourself to become a better leader, which will eventually help foster the kind of environment and the team that would come together to develop our culture and the customer experience so that those customers start bringing the friends along, what would be that thing that you will fix in yourself?

David: Challenging yourself to get better is probably one of the most difficult things we do as individuals, as leaders, and when I think about what I want to get better at and what I had to do to get better at, this is my first CIO position, and, I (frequently 51:54), I am the originally shy child of two librarians and it is a challenge at times to go put myself out in front of an organization and represent that organization on a large-scale stage, and so the first thing that I challenged myself to do when I got here was, to meet with everybody on campus, who I needed to build a relationship with within 90 days and listen to them and then ask them who else I should meet with until I ran out of people, and as an introvert and as somebody who knew that I couldn’t let my introvert nature stop me, I had to force myself to do that day in and day out and to focus on the skills that would let me build even more relationships than I had been able to build as a director who is running technology organizations, or as a direct report to a CIO who was running a big chunk of the organization, but was largely kind of in the building, working with the IT people.

So, I’ve worked on that myself and then, the next challenge now is being humble and going and asking what I’m not doing right now, because I’ve been at it for a while, and I’m sure I have new things to learn. So, the next round is to ask my peers, what would you like me to do differently? I’ll be asking that same group across campus, what else do you need from me? What else can I do to be a better partner? And my hope is I’ve built the trust that they’ll tell me so I can keep getting better.

Sanjog: Once again, thank you so much David, for sharing your thoughts and insights about how to create an environment where when we ask a customer, would you recommend our company to your friends? They will say, oh yeah, you bet. Thanks so much again David.

David: Sanjog, it’s been an absolute pleasure, I really appreciate the opportunity.

Sanjog: Great to have you, so the listeners hope you enjoyed, got some nuggets out of this, I did, so please connect with us on social media, subscribe to our podcasts, once again, thank you for so much for listening to CTN, this is your host Sanjog Aul, till next week take care and God bless.

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