This episode features an interview with Bruce Temkin, Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute, the leading experience management platform in the world. Bruce is also known as the “Godfather of Customer Experience.” In this episode, Bruce discusses how to move from insight to action more quickly, focusing on sensing change, and how to thrive both personally and professionally in the year of agility.
This episode features an interview with Bruce Temkin, Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute, the leading experience management platform in the world. Bruce is also known as the “Godfather of Customer Experience.” In this episode, Bruce discusses how to move from insight to action more quickly, focusing on sensing change, and how to thrive both personally and professionally in the year of agility.
Quotes
*”What we realized is this year, and probably even going farther out into the future, the organizations that succeed are those that can do that faster, learn faster, propagate insights faster, adapt faster. And so that's why we called it the year of agility. And we've been helping the organizations and the people that follow us try and think about how they can build agility into everything that they do.”
*”Move away from an obsession of focusing on trending. A lot of the work happens in experience management and customer experience is around trending. How are you doing over the last year? And moving into an obsession with sensing. So what are you doing to listen and understand and sense those changes? That was a big shift.”
*”If you step back and go, ‘Our customers are going to be asking for things differently. We're going to have different segments of customers and we're going to have employees who have a different view of work.’ In that environment, it's ripe for disrupting through a really good experience design. So these are the moments when you want to step back and say, ‘Okay, we might have been successful. We might still be successful in this moment. But there's enough changing that we can take advantage of that change by doing something substantially different and new.’ And those are a couple of the practices I think come into play during the year of agility.”
*If we look at the business school, people trained in finance and people trained in making sure we hit our numbers, they're trained to be defensive. Like, demand shifts, so what do we do? We cut back our costs to reflect it. But this is a moment where offensive moves can be equally and maybe even more profoundly valuable.
*”I want leaders to spend less time asking about numbers and measurements. I don't care if you have a dashboard. I don't care if someone's coming to present numbers. I want you to ask two questions: What are you learning? And what changes are you making based on what you learned?”
*”Even when we're talking about technology in this space, ultimately we're doing it in the service of people. We can talk about data, we can talk about insights, we can talk about design. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is to create experiences for human beings that helps them achieve the thing that they want to achieve. And hopefully do it in a way that satisfies the goals of an organization. And so if we're not ultimately thinking about what it's doing to each and every human being there, then I think we're missing the point.”
*”How do we center ourselves so that we can be the best of who we are even in an environment of change? I think there's the organization stuff that's really important. But, you know, maybe even more important is how we think about ourselves as professionals and how we think of ourselves as human beings, and how we deal in that world of chaos that we're in.”
Time Stamps
*[0:09] The Case of Tackling the Year of Agility
*[0:31] Introducing Bruce Temkin, Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute
*[8:34] Evidence #1: Needs other ways to listen to customers
*[15:03] Evidence #2: Wants to shift internal culture, but worries about change management
*[24:34] Evidence #3: Doesn’t know how to adjust to change personally
*[30:32] Debrief
*[31:43] HGS Pub
Bio
Bruce Temkin is an Experience Management (XM) visionary and is often referred to as the “Godfather of Customer Experience.” He leads the Qualtrics XM Institute, which provides thought leadership and training to help organizations around the world master XM 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.
Thank you to our friends
This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.
Links:
Connect with Bruce on LinkedIn
Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn
Lyssa Myska Allen: Hi, happy you’re here. Come right in, we’ve caught a case. I got an interesting call from a client. Here, listen to this…
Client: Hey CX Detectives, I have maybe an unusual ask, because it’s not a problem exactly, at least not yet. I’m head of a SaaS company and things are going well, even amid the pandemic. But what if that changes? Like we’re in a period where anything could change at any time. What if we’re not ready? Can you help me build resiliency for these fast changing times?
Lyssa Myska Allen: For sure! And I know exactly who to team up with on this case: Bruce Temkin. Bruce is known as the “Godfather of Customer Experience.” What more could you want in a co-detective? He’s Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute where he’s helping organizations around the world master experience management. So that’s not just customer experience, but employee experience too. Together, we’re cracking the case of tackling the year of agility. Because we are CX Detectives. Real cases, solved. I’m Lyssa Myska Allen, VP and Global Head of Marketing at HGS. Let’s get started. Well, thank you so much for being here with me today, Bruce. I'm really excited to dig in with you and hear, um, how you became the godfather of CX. So why don't you tell me a little bit about your experience and how you got into it and tell me about you.
Bruce Temkin: Sure. So, um, if you're expecting to hear a real clear path between where I started and how I got called the godfather of customer experience, you're going to be sadly disappointed because I started my career as an engineer, building submarine missile systems. Um, yeah, so there, there's obviously no direct path that got me here and I'd bore the heck out of you if I gave you all the steps, but, um, probably the, the, the way I got here most was later in my career, um, after leading many, um, technology oriented startups and, um, running some business units, I ended up at Forrester research for 12 years where I, um, created its practice, its current practice around enterprise customer experience. I think that's probably where I most profoundly got into the customer experience. So I defined a lot of the basic principles. Like no one knew what, like a voice of the customer program was. So I defined probably the first definition of what that was and what it looked like, things like that. And then I, uh, started my own company. Temkin Group, where for eight years, we worked with many of the largest organizations on earth, helping them transform their relationships with customers and build better customer experience. And then we were acquired in 2018 by Qualtrics, and we created the XM Institute, um, XM, standing for experience management, uh, of which customer experience is a component of. So I've been, been focusing on helping mostly large organizations think about their customers and improve their relationships for, I guess, as long as you'd expect the godfather to have been doing that.
Lyssa Myska Allen: How do you define the difference between XM and CX? So experience management and customer experience. What's the difference?
Bruce Temkin: Great question. So I experienced management to me and the way we think about it is the underlying capabilities to continuously learn about what people are thinking and feeling, propagate those insights into the hands of some people across the organization, do something with it, and rapidly adapt based on those insights. So when you take that capability of XM and you apply it to customer relations, that's customer experience. But you can also take that same capability and apply it to employees. In which case it becomes employee experience. You can take it to your brand and start understanding prospects and everyone else touches your brand, in which case it's brand experience. So experience management is the underlying set of capabilties.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I love that some of the other guests we've had have talked about how almost everything is customer experience at that point. Right. And so you're differentiating though that experience management is encompassing a bunch of different areas that could feed into customer experience.
Bruce Temkin: Exactly. And I think so, um, this is probably worth, talking a little bit about my evolution to this. I started the focusing on customer experience and for the listeners, I, uh, architected and co-founded the customer experience professional associations. I believe in customer experience. But what I saw was that the underlying capabilities that were being created, defined and starting to be mastered a little in customer experience actually had more, um, opportunities than just beyond applying them to customers. So some people call that broadly customer experience. And I don't have any like issues with that, but I think it's hard to talk about customer experience when you talked about employees because employees deserve their own focus, uh, and their own, um, opportunity to shine in the light. So I think a lot of the practices started in customer experience. Right. They were nurtured there, but they, they have applicability in lots of other places.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Totally well, and employee experience impacts customer experience in that happy engaged employees create better customer experiences.
Bruce Temkin: Oh, you said you said that so beautifully. Can you, can you, can you say that again? Please. I think everyone should hear you say that again, because it is so true and so important. Please say it again.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Oh, we, I mean, you can even distill it down further and say happy employees, equal happy customers, right.
Bruce Temkin: Okay. It's the end of our discussion. You have just literally nailed the most important element of anything we're going to talk about today.
Lyssa Myska Allen: so, um, so what kind of customers is XM Institute or, and, or Qualtrics serving? What kind of people are you working with?
Bruce Temkin: Sure. So, um, those are a little bit two, two different audiences. So let me start with Qualtrics. Um, everyone should know Qualtrics is the leading experience management platform in the world. Um, that's not hyperbole that's by sales and size in any dimension you want. Um, and so it, Qualtrics has lots of different customers have customers in the world of academics and that's where it started. Right? Just about every university that has some research capabilities using Qualtrics. Right. Um, we have a lot of clients who are in the customer experience space. So those are everywhere from. Chief digital officer and their team or chief customer officer and their team, or head of customer service and success and their team. We have a bunch of HR clients, CHROs are our clients, right? They're doing the employee experience. We have a bunch of marketing people doing brands. And, and so those clients go from everywhere from you can think about a systems administrator who's working with technology or an individual researcher who's using the tool or the head of like a customer experience program who's looking over everything. So that's, that's custom, that's Qualtrics, a lot of the different clients. We also XM Institute, we serve, um, people around the world. Right. We have a community of over 6,000 members from just about every country. Um, but our sweet spot are the people who are running programs. So in customer experience, that might be a VP of customer experience, the director of customer experience in HR might be the head of employee experience, or even someone, people, people insights, um, people who are thinking about how they're using insights to drive change in an area. Um, and so we try to focus on the people that are driving change. Our XM Institute focuses on the people that are driving change in their organizations.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Now that we’ve got Bruce’s credentials, let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. Alright, we’re back! It’s time to get into the case. I want to go back to our client and hear more about their concerns for the future of their customer experience.
Client: So I’m definitely worried about competitors, or that we’ll stop meeting customer needs, lose touch with what customers are looking for, the list goes on. We do listen to customers through our tech support and call centers. We also put out surveys after a transaction. But I feel like we could be doing more. What would you suggest?
Lyssa Myska Allen: I have some ideas on this. But what would you say, Bruce? How can we help our client plan for the future, especially coming out of the pandemic? You’ve called 2022 “the year of agility.” Let’s start there. Can you elaborate on that for us?
Bruce Temkin: Yeah. I, um, as we started to think about what was going to be in store for the people, we focus on, those, those change agents that I mentioned a little earlier, right. What we realized is that no one was in a position to lock into clarity around what the future would hold. And this was even before Ukraine, right? Like even before Ukraine, we said this year is going to be full of things, cause we have supply chain issues. We have COVID. Workforce is changing. All of those things meant that the organizations that were going to succeed were not those that could somehow just establish a vision for where they wanted to be at the end of the year and go there. That success was going to be driven by the organizations that could sense all of the changes going on and make adjustments to what they were doing based on what they're seeing. So you can almost think about a much faster cycle of learning. You know, earlier I talked about experience management being about continuously learn propagating insights and rapidly adapt. Well, that can happen in slow cycles, or it can happen in fast cycles. So what we realized is this year, and probably even going farther out into the future, the organizations that succeed are those that can do that faster, learn faster, um, propagate insights faster, uh, adapt faster. Uh, and so that's why we called it the year of agility. And we've been helping the, certainly the organizations and the people that follow us, try and think about how they can build agility into everything that they do.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. So what are some of those ways to build agility into existing processes or how to accelerate those learning cycles? Like how can companies tackle that?
Bruce Temkin: Yeah. So I'll talk about a few. Um, so one of the things, and this is what we noticed during COVID over the last couple of years, right. That, um, the organizations that were able to deal most effectively with all of the stuff that happened during the pandemic were those that adjusted some of the ways they focused. And we'll talk about customer experience and employee experience a little differently, but they, they had sort of some of the similar patterns, right. That, um, what we saw was when customers either stopped buying, if you were a, a fast food restaurant or started coming to you more if you're a healthcare provider or a supermarket, right. Everyone had changes in their customer behavior. The organizations realize they needed to get away from these longterm surveys, like whether they use net promoter score or, you know, an annual or a semi-annual tool, that those were really ineffective, right. Because comparing themselves and what customers were thinking and doing to the previous year wasn't as valuable as pulsing them maybe every month, every week to find out, what are they willing to buy? What do they want to buy? What segments have changed? Right. So I think the move away from, um, an obsession of focusing on trending, right? A lot of the work that, that happens in experience management and customer experiences around trending. How are you doing over the last year and moving into an obsession with sensing. So sensing, what are you doing to listen and understand and sense those changes? That was a big shift. And I talked about in customers, but employees, we saw the same thing and it continues to be, right. It's not, we can't do annual surveys of our employees and think we understand what's going on. Right? They're, they're changing how they work. They're moving their locations. They're having different feelings, uh, about their job, their, you know, the great resignation or what I call the great onboarding, right. People are just in a mode where everything's changing. So that's one, is that signal sensing the law. The second one I'll talk about just quickly is the idea of experience disrupting. Um, a lot of what we do in organizations have, are focused on how do we keep the ship moving in the same direction, right? How do we incrementally get better at this? How do we fix this broken problem? You probably heard that thousand times, right? People come on the show and they talk about here's what we do to spot little problems and make fixes all over. That's great. And I'm not suggesting that people should stop doing that, but if you step back and go, our customers are going to be asking for things differently. Our customers are going to have, we're going to have different segments of customers and we're going to have employees who have a different view of work. In that environment it's ripe for disrupting through a really good experience design, right? So these are the moments when you want to step back and say, okay, we might have been successful. We might still be successful in this moment, but there's enough changing that we can take advantage of that change by doing something substantially different and new. And, and those are a couple of the practices I think come into play during the year of agility.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. It's like you get to use this moment in time that is intense and different. The pace of change is increasing in order to create your own change within the experience in the organization for customers and employees. It's a, it's a total opportunity. That's awesome.
Bruce Temkin: Yeah. And it's interesting, you talked about the opportunity, right? Because what happens is most people respond defensively, right. I would say if we look at like business school, people trained in finance and people trained in making sure we hit our numbers. Right. They're trained to be defensive, right. Like demand shifts, so what do we do? We cut back our costs to reflect it. Right. But this is a moment where offensive moves can be equally and maybe even more profoundly valuable.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. It's the opposite of the old saying, like, the best offense is a good defense. This is the opposite, the best defense here is good offense. I want to go into that more in a second. But let’s check back in with our client.
Client: You say it’s a great time to make an offensive move. If I decided to do that, it would be a big change for employees. How do I make that kind of cultural shift internally?
Bruce Temkin: So I think that one of the ways we have to do is we have to break our planning cycles. Right. If you think about the way most organizations operate, they have, you know, strategic planning once a year, right. And maybe they'll come back quarterly and say, how are we doing against that strategy? It never moves. So to me, one of the things I'd start right away is I would have a monthly strategy meeting where we ask the key questions about, are we doing the right things for the right customers and what do we need to change? So we, we build into our operating rhythm, the questioning of what we're doing. Right. As opposed to what we used to do is just measure ourselves against how well we are accomplishing the thing we said we were going to do in the past. So that, that has a little different pace and a little different agenda. The other thing that I, I really push and th this is a push for leaders, whether we're in a time of agility or not, but becomes more important for an agile environment, is I want leaders to spend less time asking about numbers and measurements. I don't care if you have a dashboard. I don't care if someone's coming to present numbers. I want you to ask two questions. And this is what I coach leaders on all the time. Ask just two questions. What are you learning? And what changes are you making based on what you learned? If we can get senior leaders just asking those two questions over and over and over again, that'll drive a lot of the cultural change we need for a more agile, um, operation.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's such an interesting perspective. I feel like in the last couple of years, there's been such a relentless focus on data-driven analysis. Data-driven experiences, CX, marketing, brands, employee experience, like harkening back to what you were saying earlier around customer surveys and using that data to try to track the trajectory of your business. I mean, I'm not saying that you're suggesting to throw data out the window, but you are suggesting to focus on, the pace of growth and, and learning rather than, um, the data which will then become hopefully an output of that. Right.
Bruce Temkin: Yeah. I'm from Qualtrics, right? So you might think that Qualtrics is out there going, oh, you have to use data and you just should collect more of it. Do more of it. That's not what we believe. We believe that ultimately the value that we provide as a platform. Right. And, and I believe this is what the value of XM is all about, is not about the data and the insights. It's ultimately about how that stuff is used for an organization to operate more effectively than its competitors. Right. And so one of the things we have to do is we have to say, all right, if you think about an executive meeting, for instance, just think about a senior leadership meeting. And let's say they have an half an hour on the meeting to review something around customer experience. Right. If they spend the whole half an hour talking about data, what does the data, how much does it say in that group? What is it down to here? What, what happens after that meeting? Well, they go on to the next, um, agenda item that they have and they start discussing that and nothing's happened. Right. So what we want to do is really recognize that the insights we're we're creating are only valuable when we put them use. And yes, that might mean that we present fewer insights. But we spend more time thinking about which of these insights are meaningful, which ones are actionable and what can we do about them? And if I think about the time spent in organizations, definitely has to be a shift away from the time we spend just thinking about data for the value of the data and insights and more time thinking about what does it mean and what can we do about it?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. absolutely. I love that. I want to ask you about technology. When we talk about leveraging data to actually turn into insights, there are technologies that empower that. Can you talk a little bit about the technology that empowers turning data insights?
Bruce Temkin: I think ultimately the technology is valuable. It's going to be really valuable, continues to be valuable if you layer the practices on top of it. And the better you get with the practices, the more value you get from technology. And definitely if I look forward right, as we are able to gather more and more what we would call experience data, so information, how people are thinking and feeling, as you're able to gather more of that and merge that with operational data, like what are customers buying and who are the customers, then as that flow of potentially valuable insights grows, you have to do something more with it than just do reports and try and look up and manually find things. So, um, we're going to see more and more automated analytics, right? Automated analytics that can look for and spot anomalies, like a segment of customers you never recognize was a unique segment before happens to start buying things in a different way than they were doing before. Right. That's the type of thing we're going to use analytics for. We're also going to have to use, start to have analytics trigger workflows. Right? So instead of necessarily having an analyst look through all of the data and decide that there is a broken piece of your online experience, maybe your credit card company, and you have, uh, an application process, and, you know, in the past, it might take weeks and weeks or months and months for an analyst to look at the data and say, this is broken, right? If we have a whole bunch of these digital properties, we ought to be able to have the analytics look at all the things going on, replicate what an analysts do and shoot out a message saying, Hey, this part of the online credit card application process is broken. It's impacting this many people. It should be a priority and start a ticket to get that fixed. Right. So I think we're going to start to see more and more of those automated analytics. And then the last thing I talk about is, you know, a lot of the experience data, um, comes from unstructured sources, whether they're calls into a contact center, chat, social media. And so our ability to mine those more effectively and in much more, I won't say real-time, real-time sort of a crazy term, but in a much more near term way. Right. So we can act on them. All of those are really about how do we spot and, um, insights and then move them along more quickly to an actionable stage? Um, and that's all consistent with the notion of agility as well.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. I love that. I mean, you, you can envision a future where a promo code doesn't work and so you see cart abandonment. You know, a bunch of times over. And, so then automatically it triggers that promo code to go up to an agent who can escalate it to get fixed, right. and, then you're making the employee life better. You're making the customer life better. You're getting things resolved much more quickly. and you're actually taking action that was, you know, automated and triggered through automation.
Bruce Temkin: Yeah. And, I mean, you can see how you start going down that path, and there's no reason why, if you don't go down that path, that some of those processes can be self-correcting, right. If the promo code doesn't work, there might be six reasons why it doesn't. If we know there are six reasons why it doesn't, we can have the system go in and look for it and fix it itself. Right, in the old days, what we would do is we would get data, we'd have some PowerPoint slides and maybe we'd find a couple of big insights from them. And then we'd work at it, um, over a year. Now we're talking about finding an insight from a handful of customers, um, that triggers a system that makes the problem go away before a human being even knows that there's a problem. Right. Before, even internally. And so we can, we, the notion of self-healing, is a potential once we are able to get those insights in an actionable form more quickly.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I love that term self healing, and it puts a little bit of humanity onto this, you know, this technology that we're trying to use in order to actually make experiences more human centric, more humane.
Bruce Temkin: Well, I, I'm glad you feel that way and, um, because I think that even when we're talking about technology in this space, ultimately we're doing it in the service of, of people, right. Or like the whole field of customer experience. Right. We, you know, we can talk about data, we can talk about insights. We can talk about design, right. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is to create experiences for human beings that helps them achieve the thing that they want to achieve. And hopefully do it in a way that satisfies the goals of an organization. And so if we're not ultimately thinking about what it's doing to each and every human being there then I think we're missing the point.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. Well, let’s hear from our client again and see if there’s anything else we can help them with.
Client: Yeah, one more thing. As much as this year has been challenging from an organizational standpoint, it’s also been challenging from a personal one. If you have any tips on taking on the year of agility personally, I’d love to hear it.
Bruce Temkin: The only thing I'd put out there is, um, As we think about the world being unpredictable and changing and all these things, we're going to do that from an organizational standpoint, let's not forget, and let's not neglect ourselves, that we as human beings have to prepare ourselves for a time of change. Right. And so that means both being able to thrive as a professional in an environment of change. Right? How do we, you know, recognizing that things are gonna shift at work and we're going to be doing new priorities and we're going to doing that, how do we prepare ourselves for that? But also we're human beings living in a world that is going to continue to change around us. How do we center ourselves so that we can be the best of who we are even in an environment of change? Um, so I think there's the organization stuff that's really important, but you know, maybe even more important is the, how we think about ourselves as professionals and how we think of ourselves as human beings and how we deal in that world of chaos that we're we're in and probably continues for a while.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, I think you saw some of that adaptability, um, surprise people even themselves throughout the last couple of years in ways that they could find, um, new experiences, new ways of looking at problems in order to solve a unique challenge in front of all of us with, with lockdowns and, um, changes in the way of work. And so I think that, again, going back to like this, being an opportunity to pivot, grow, learn faster, you know, organization that's encouraging the human to do that it's going to be a great experience for both the employee and the company.
Bruce Temkin: Yeah, because I, think that like If you were to ask me what I think the most profound change over the last couple of years has been, it's been a reconciliation of human beings, um, about how they think about the world they're in. But I think up until the last couple years, we sort of took the environment we were in for granted, whether it was as an employee or as a customer, as in like the world just existed. And we were able to do everything that we sort of wanted to do in the world. like nothing around us really mattered because we sort of just went about our way. I think we've become profoundly aware of the world around us, and of the constraints that that world has on the things that we may or may not want to do. And so I think that has huge impact on the way the future of the world's going to roll out. Right. Because I don't think all of us have been particularly happy with the choices that we may have made in the past, given this unconstrained world and we're forced to look at things, right? Like we're first to look at what's our work-life balance. We're forced to look at where do we want to live? What do we want to do? Um, we're forced to look at, you know, how important is family in our life? Right, because before we could neglect being with family, but two years of being away and not being able to hug people, we start to go, well, maybe that is more important than I thought. It starts to become a really big deal. And so I think that we, as human beings, are redefining our place in this world. And I don't know where all that's going to go, but I know it's unpredictable. So I know that I need to personally stay agile and that organizations need to as well.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's such a great perspective and it's, you know, taking some responsibility for the choices and the environment around you and with that creating ownership and the ability to create the change that you want in your own life, you know, that you have that agility. that's an encouraging positive outcome of this not great time.
Bruce Temkin: Yeah. And I th I think you mentioned something that's really important. Um, well, lots of things, but one thing that I didn't like I didn't touch on directly is the notion of ownership, right? In this environment of agility, right? The people who will thrive, the individuals who thrives are the ones that take ownership of themselves. Like, I always have like metaphors in my head. Right. And so I think about if we just had a hundred people and we said, okay, just walk. And we put them on a highway that was a hundred miles long and straight, and they just walked, the pace might be different, but everyone would continually going their direction. And maybe, eventually everyone would get where they want. But if we put everyone on that course, and then we introduced that there were choices and forks they needed to make, right, but they were all just sort of mindlessly going straight, none of them would end up in any place where they want to be. Right. So the more there is a need for adjustments, the more ownership an individual has to take in some of the choices they make. And so I think that this environment is conducive to, um, helping the people that sort of take ownership and proactively make those choices to being happier in the long run.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, let's all it's all get happier in the long run. That's a great outcome.
Bruce Temkin: Didn't you say that to begin with? Yeah. I mean like, I'm just going to circle around, right? You started this almost at the beginning by saying. Happy employees make happy customers. So you foreshadowed where we were going. That's amazing. You sort of focused on happiness from the beginning. You knew where we're heading I'm all for anything that focuses on happiness.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Well, before we take our happiness over to the HGS pub, let’s debrief.
First, build agility into everything you do. So you can learn faster, propagate insights faster, adapt faster. Do away with long-term surveys, from net promoter scores to annual or semi-annual tools. Check in with customers more often. And forget your obsession with trending. Instead get obsessed with sensing. See this moment as an opportunity to try something new and make that offensive move.
Second, start your internal cultural change with monthly strategy meetings. Ask the key questions, “Are we doing the right things for the customers?” And, “What do we need to change?” And as a leader, pay less attention to numbers. Instead, ask, “What am I learning?” And, “What changes am I making based on what I learned?” And don’t forget to harness tech tools that use automated analytics, triggering self-healing workflows.
And third, prepare yourself personally for change. Take ownership of your professional path and be mentally prepared for opportunities, obstacles and whatever the universe might throw at you.
Client: Thank you for all of the advice. I feel like I have some great actionable insights to work from now.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Of course! And I think it’s that time to stroll over to the HGS Pub to celebrate cracking this case.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Okay. You've got to tell me about your time as an engineer for submarine missiles. Did you ever live on a submarine? How was that experience?
Bruce Temkin: So, I never lived on a submarine. I did sleep over and spend a good amount of time in submarine. And I will tell you that I'm a little claustrophobic, but I didn't realize it until I was on a submarine. Um, because there are very tight, tight quarters. There aren't a lot of spaces to sleep in a submarine. It's not like you go there, there are rooms all over the place. so I slept on top of missile platform. Uh, so you know, the, the missiles are layered and you put it like a, uh, a very thin mattress on top. So it was a very odd for me. I, I am very happy for me that I was in the Navy, but as a civilian. Um, had I had a long-term, uh, deployment inside of a submarine, I think it would have been very, very difficult for me. Um, but it was a cool experience. So, um, yeah. And while one quick thing, so one of the things that, uh, that we built, so I worked on a couple of missile systems. I worked on a sub rock missile system and a Tomahawk missile system. And sub rock is an old, old version, sort of a ballistic missile. Um, one of the very early ballistic missiles, uh, submarine launch, ballistic missiles. And we had to, create a device for testing it. And so one of the design points was, which is pretty cool. You don't know as you get there cause you had to design this piece of equipment so if it, if people were, um, holding it and bringing it down into the submarine, that if fell, it would still work. So it was like, uh, you, can you think about it between levels, there are like ladders, so you go down ladders between levels. So you had to design it. So if someone was on the top of the ladder and happened to drop out and fell, it wouldn't break. Um, so early in my career, I won a design award for creating this sort of test system that was built in a box that had shock absorbers all over it. Um, and that was the last real heavy engineering that I did in my life.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Wow. That's awesome. what do you think about the engineering background or, you know, early foundation of your career contributed to the trajectory and kind of where you are now?
Bruce Temkin: So I am a complete left brain, person. Right. and so I'm an engineer. I think process, I think how things are going. And when I started to focus in this space, which wasn't called customer experience before, just in this general space, the other people either came from web design, web operations or some insights. My background and I went to business school, like ultimately I took my engineering and, um, ended up having a focus on like process re-engineering and then took that into a tech world. So I think process and strategy, process and strategy and people in it. So me being an engineer was unique in the space. Which allowed me to look at the whole customer experience space a little bit differently than everyone else did, more systematically. So anyway, like, I can't draw a line that says, that you should become an engineer because that's what leads you to customer experience. But, um, everything that I learned as an engineer has certainly been central to, I think, whatever success I've had to date in the CX and XM field.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's awesome. Well, thank you. again so much for being here with me. This conversation has been amazing. You have such great insights to share, and I really appreciate you sharing them with us.
Bruce Temkin: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. This has been, been fun to talk about. And, and my, my big takeaway is we both agree. It's all about happiness.
Lyssa Myska Allen: There you go. I love it.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Thank you for listening to CX Detectives, brought to you by HGS. If you liked what you heard today, tell a friend, a colleague, your friendly neighborhood submarine missile engineer. And don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Next time there’s a CX case to be solved, we’ll be there!