How executives can turn fragmented CX efforts into enterprise-wide customer obsession - Interview with Ray Gerber

0:00Adrian Swinscoe:So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today I have Ray Gerber, who is the co-founder of the Institute for Journey Management and author of Journey to Customer Obsession, a blueprint for CX maturity and enterprise transformation. Now, there's about three of these books in the series and we're not going to talk about all of them because Ray's very kindly done a bit of an executive summary, which is another sort of outcrop of his work. but Ray I know we talked on the podcast recently about with you and Mark about the the the Institute for Journey Management and so welcome back congratulations on the books anything that well do you want to introduce yourself for people that are not familiar with that

0:41Raymond Gerber:yeah I you know I'm originally from South Africa if you can know by the accent and Adrian and I was just reminiscing about some some safaris in Africa which obviously is one of my favorites I say my happy place is halfway on the golf course and halfway on a safari. So I suppose it's not a bad happy place to be. But beside that, I've spent now 45 years in the technology industry. And the last 20 years primarily focused on transitioning from CRM into customer communications with a company called Thunderhead. And then transitioning into customer engagement. on the back of my knowledge at Pega Systems, where I was head of engineering and CTO at the company called Accordiant that was acquired by Pega, where my real focus was on next-to-action decisioning, which is now ends up being a really big part of the Pega revenue stream.

1:35Raymond Gerber:And we used that at a company called Thunderhead to really create beautiful experiences for business users that wanted to understand their customers better in the context of customer journeys. Sunred was acquired in 2022 by Medallia. I then went off and worked for two and a half years at Alteryx as a distinguished XM scientist. And during COVID, I obviously was caught, like everybody, remotely. And I started thinking about books and started writing a book. And after about six months, I realized that there's so much knowledge that can be conveyed that I split the book in two, the strategy book and then the operationalization book.

2:15Raymond Gerber:and um you know after rich semi-retiring in uh november 2024 i said well you know let me go finish things that are not finished and one of them was to publish the book so i self-published the book in september very excited about it i realized i'm not going to get rich especially on a technology book but i think it's just the the feeling of doing what you've wanted to do And hopefully the knowledge that I convey in the books will help some people get knowledge cheaper than it would cost me, which was 18 hour days, 17 years of my life, you know, and now you're off on retirement. So hopefully somebody can learn from what I find in my books.

2:58Raymond Gerber:And again, thanks for having me on, Adrian.

3:00Adrian Swinscoe:You're very, very welcome. Now, first of all, I'll just say congratulations on the books because I know how much effort it takes to kind of get these things out, to birth them, let's say. and as you say there is there's there's i got it wrong initially because i said there's three books then executive summary but actually there's two books i think and and then the executive edition the first one is this is more as you say a strategy book so the blueprint for cx maturity and enterprise transformation and then that's one is more about how do you operationalize it but yes there are some chunky there's some chunky works and i encourage people to go check them out but the the third one is this executive edition because actually as we know in all organizational contexts it's like getting leaders to you know to um to read books from cover to cover is hard but actually producing something which is a bit more not going to give them indigestion let's say is probably the right way to go so we want to talk about the executive uh edition so you know you've talked about how they came about and things i mean i wonder if you can i want to dig in to some of the things in the in the books because it particularly in the executive edition because you talk about things in stages because it's like it's a journey right we talked about customer journeys but people get organizations have to go on a journey and you split the book into different stages of that kind of journey and the book starts with i like nine stages in total.

4:29Adrian Swinscoe:And the first stage is awareness. Now, the thing I wanted to do, I mean, this is just to give people a flavor because we don't want to talk about all soup to nuts, obviously, because we want people to go and get it. But I wanted to ask you about something that you said in the executive edition where you say that organizations rarely stumble into awareness by accident. Something shakes them awake. Now, whilst that might seem self-evident to customers that are serving the front line, why is it such a big leak for many senior leaders?

5:05Raymond Gerber:Well, I think firstly, because of the promise of traditional CX is oversold. You know, they just go buy a Qualtrics or Medallia or, you know, whatever solution it is. And we're going to come up with these awesome scores called NPS and CSAT and stuff like that. That's going to change our lives. And, you know, three years into it, the CX budget has just increased and increased. But the company's not seen the return on investment from that perspective. So, you know, and I think that comes back to why I built the book based on the concept of a customer journey. Right. Because I think one of the issues is that CX, customer centricity, is perceived as a project.

5:52Raymond Gerber:Right. And, you know, on the journey side, it's kind of like when you look at touchpoint, individual touchpoints, it doesn't have valuable meaning to the customer because they don't work in touchpoints. They work in outcomes of journeys. And so very much like, you know, the book is focused on moving from touch points to journeys is the fact that organizations need to move from CX and journey management and customer centricity away from big projects to being part of the embedded in the business, operationalized on a day-to-day basis. That's the way they work. That's the way they feel. That's the way they measure themselves.

6:29Raymond Gerber:And I think what happens is why leaders don't stumble on it and suddenly they've seen that the budget in here is, yes, we invest 50 % more on CX. Our churn rate has not decreased. Our customer lifetime value has not increased. Why are we spending money on this? Right. And that's kind of where, okay, let's take a step back and saying, you know, is CX the right thing to do? But CX is in isolation. And then so the idea is then you start saying, okay, so how do we go about it? We need to be customer centric. We need to be obsessed about the customer. Are there better ways than doing that? Just taking voice of the customer programs and creating surveys and getting feedback and building NPS based course.

7:16Raymond Gerber:and that's kind of where the book is then saying, you know, is once you're at that point and you realize you have a problem, is how do you start thinking about the solution? And that's when the book takes the leaders on a journey, you know, across, okay, so if that's the problem, consideration is what do you do about it? You know, who are the vendors in this place? How do we operationalize, et cetera, across the nine stages that you mentioned.

7:41Adrian Swinscoe:Okay. And so the next stage is that you talk about once awareness has been generated the book moves on to the next stage which is like consideration a la sort of customer journeys and but it warns that you in that that particular stage you warn of one particular risk and that is the fastest way to lose credibility in the consideration stage and i wanted to ask you to explain that what what it is and and why it's important to

8:12Raymond Gerber:keep this in mind i think from the traditional days i grew up in the erp space you know implement erp it's going to solve all your problems you know and then implement crm is going to all solve your customer problems and then cx solve all your problems and the same thing with journey management solving your problems and so it becomes a point where solutions are over promised without truly understanding the effort that it takes to truly become an organization driven and operationalized in the context of being, you know, customer focused and customer centric. And so I think the thing is, you know, okay, CS didn't work.

8:53Raymond Gerber:So let's go buy a journey management solution because that solves the problem. You know, in 12 months, we're going to increase personal lifetime value, reduce turn, reduce costs, et cetera, et cetera. And then six months into the effort, you know, the company's not seen those significant efforts and it starts being shut down. I had the same thing where I was in Vietnam last year for three months where the company wanted to move from APS to transactional NPS. I said, well, if you want to do that, then you have to really understand your customer journeys. And we started deploying things and they expected overnight results.

9:24Raymond Gerber:You know, if you give feedback and you can understand the feedback, How will that change customer behavior? No, it doesn't work that way. And they continue asking me, what is the ROI? I said, I cannot tell you what the ROI is. We have to continue to assess customer behavior and customer feedback to see where there are opportunities for ROI. And I think it's the promise of front-end consultants to get the gig or technology company to sell the software over promise on the capability of CX, CJM, ERP, CRM solutions. And so consideration is really focused on making sure you understand what it takes to become a company that's customer obsessed from technology and operational or people perspective.

10:06Adrian Swinscoe:Right. And in that stage as well, you also talked about there's this non-negotiable output of consideration. And I'll have a little bit of non-negotiables. what's the what's the non-negotiable output then that you're that you outline in the um in that

10:23Raymond Gerber:that particular stage i mean i think it's it's to to come to use small pilots in this to have a small cross-functional pilots that show measurable improvement is is you know start is what's the english saying eating a whale one bite at a time or what's the word you know something like that and that's what i'm saying is is making sure that you take the bite you see the value you feel fulfilled so you can do the next and you start small. I'm actually working on my fourth book, which is really focused on how do you start? And that is really start one journey at a time. Find the simplest journey that has the highest impact on customer and on business and start looking at what are the opportunities or operationalization of that journey to embed it in employees' day-to-day life, um you know making sure the customer understand how what is happening is changing their life as well you know at thunderhead we had this concept of a customer value exchange where we want to make sure that the value the customer gets translates into significant or sufficient business value and vice versa because if you don't have a solid value of exchange there's an imbalance and one's going to lose out and you don't want that so yeah and then the next stage is commitment and that's

11:43Adrian Swinscoe:feels like a really important sort of like stage because it feels like that's where many companies when they're thinking about change you know they've done a bit of experimentation they've done some proof of concepts they've going to you know figure some things out then it's about about commitment i mean so here's my question is like if you're a cx leader i mean how will you know that you've got organizational commitment and once you see the signs

12:13Raymond Gerber:how best to sustain it i mean for me commitment comes into three things money moves right ownership ownership is assigned and ownership is assigned with authority not just accountability right and And then governance changes. And I think that it is the three of those that have to be continually assessed together. You can't say, okay, I have assigned this ownership with authority. But when hard times comes, you reduce your budget. That's not going to change. You can have as much ownership and authority with authority and accountability. but if governance doesn't change if that doesn't change internally the way the organization operates and works and measures success then that's not going to work you know and as soon as there becomes an imbalance between those three things you start having a problem right and so i

13:06Adrian Swinscoe:don't want to go through the um that all the stages kind of one by one because there's nine of them and we'll be here for a long time so i mean do you want to give me a quick flavor of like what the other stages are? Because we've had awareness, we've had consideration, we've had commitment. What are the other six? Are there anything that you'd highlight out of those six that are key things that people need to think about?

13:28Raymond Gerber:Well, obviously, I think we all come from the technology industry. And the next one is after you've made a commitment and the money is assigned is how you build the capabilities. And I love Graham Hill that always talks about, we just focus too much on technology. it's people as well. So for me, when you've made the commitment and the money is there, you've agreed to have authoritative journey owners. It is to do what we call the next stage's capability, which is focused on equipping people, platforms, and the way of working. I think that's really, really the key thing. And once that's in place, you move on to the use stage where the focus is on making journey management the default operating rhythm.

14:11Raymond Gerber:And it's not just a one-off thing. it's a continuous it's like that that what do you call those things it was on top of a piano oh like a metronome a metronome it's like a metronome it's continually you know it's a rhythm of an organization it's not just oh at peak season we're going to do this it's a continuous throughout the world um you know and then for me i think the crux is where over promising was an issue in consideration is the key one for me of the remaining six, the value realization. Proving ROI in language, finance trusts. It's not just, oh, my MPS is up. And I think when you look at some of the authors on LinkedIn, some of the posts on LinkedIn, how there's a tremendous amount of effort to pressurize technology companies in the CX and CGM space to find better ways to prove the value of the efforts that they have from a technology investment perspective, from a people investment perspective.

15:14Raymond Gerber:And I think if that's there, that becomes the need to support the next three, which is organizational alignment, transformation, and advocacy. So truly the concept of a journey. But again, in the context of the journey, you don't just go through the journey once. As you continue through the stages, you continue to have to go back and saying, how is what I've done make changes and become aware of other initiatives and opportunities and then continue to go through the cycle. So that's why I say it's an operational aspect. It's not just the one time I'm going to do this and deploy it. It's a continuously adaptive self-learning mechanism that the organization will understand what is happening, how we need to respond and change to be able to accommodate the change in customer behavior, the change in competitor behavior um you know and that's why i'm excited about the book because it really moves away from like i said touch points versus journeys it moves away from from projects to continuous rhythmic operational aspects yeah and so i mean it but it also feels

16:23Adrian Swinscoe:like a big job of work as well and i wanted to get without scaring people what sort of like timeframe are we talking about? Because I mean, we're talking about cultural change, structural change, all of those sort of things. I mean, what sort of timeframe are we talking about to go through all of the stages to develop this new kind of rhythm so we can get an idea of the, pardon the pun, the idea of the commitment that's required of how long that journey is going to be?

16:52Raymond Gerber:Yeah. I think the first thing to say, it's not a big bang transformation. I think that's the key thing. A lot of people go in, they think within six months or 12 months, we're going to have transformed the organization from where we are to be a customer-centric customer-centric organization that's operationalized. No, that's not true. You know, I think, as I said earlier, you take something small, and that's why I like to inherit value from the agile approach in the engineering space. You start small, but making sure that everything you deliver at a minimum delivers value to the customer and to the organization itself.

17:26Raymond Gerber:and then you grow through cycles, add more capabilities, add more features and stuff like that. So I've seen, you know, the 11 years I was at Thunderhead, I think the first impact value you see is six to 12 months. Right. When you look at the concept of customer journeys, a lot of that is focused still on insights. You know, I think when you get to really being mature, you're getting to a more maturity of orchestration, especially when you come to real-time orchestration. And that takes two to four years. I mean, just to be honest, the companies have to understand we have to find ways to not necessarily overload the budget in the beginning, you know, but find ways to negotiate with vendors to saying, we're going to start small, you know, we're going to take.

18:12Raymond Gerber:Now, the thing is you can't really take a department, but you have to find a journey that runs across departments. because if you just, again, if you, again, take a specific department and say I'm going to have a journey that's within customer support, you're having a problem because you're creating silos. You're creating a new platform on top of silos. So make sure that the journey you select, you know, that you firstly can understand what the issues are, how well I value and estimate and calculate metrics, track metrics that I can see tangible value to the customer and the business. And make sure that's small enough.

18:45Raymond Gerber:You could say, I want to see value in three months. We know it's going to happen in six months. That's just the way technology works. Everything takes two to three times that you say. So make sure that you find something conciseful, meaningful, and find opportunities where you bring a small core of people. I talk about journey pods or journey squads. And start taking one squad and coaching them, educate them, have a journey owner that can become the trainer of trainers within the organization. And the squad itself become the trainer of trainers. And then expand over time. But I would say don't expect full ROI value anywhere from two to four years.

19:20Adrian Swinscoe:And I think you just answered my next question because my final question on this was like, how should a leader in the team get started with all this? And it seems to be that you find a journey, but pick one that is not isolated, but one that kind of cuts across different silos. because an intrinsically important part of this is to get cross-functional collaboration and impact as well. Because then that's going to allow you to bring the right sort of people together as the right pods or right squads or whatever in order to, I guess, generate momentum.

19:54Raymond Gerber:I think the biggest challenge is the change of people traditionally having metrics within departments. I mean, you know, custom services. is how much time do a customer spend on the call? If it's low, the team has done well. If it's high, the team has done bad. But there is no relationship ever to what's the impact of the customer buying behavior post that call. You might have had a quick call, but the customer churned a week later because he was just upset with, I can't get answers. I'm just going to put the phone down. And so the biggest part of this challenge is that's why a cross-functional team is so important is the philosophical mindset is saying we are going to have organizational-wide metrics that measures not me as a person, as a department, but measure the experience of the customer over time and the impact that it has on the business as a whole, not just the cost that it introduced into the customer service center.

20:50Raymond Gerber:Because it might be that we find that if people spend longer on calls, that what I talk about positive friction sometimes translates into an increase in customer life and value and increase in loyalty.

21:03Adrian Swinscoe:Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I mean, hopefully that gives kind of some people an idea of this, like it says in inverted commas, you know, on an audio recording, that a flavor of the journey that you're going to try and take people on with this kind of one with the two books, the strategy and the operational kind of ones, the larger terms, but also the executive edition. It's like, this is a journey that you go in and trying to think about, help you think about what you need to do and how you educate yourself, how you build capability and stuff. But is there anything else that you'd like to highlight that we've kind of like missed out before I kind of, you know, I wrap up and let you get back to the golf course or make your plans to go to the golf course?

21:44Raymond Gerber:I mean, I think the biggest thing is that I have to emphasize that customer journeys are not diagrams, you know, they're management constructs. And I think that's a big thing. And I think the good thing for us, seeing through the Institute for Journey Management, which is really an institute of customer journey management, not an institute of customer journey mapping or even service design, we are seeing a tremendous effort by the founding members. They use the semanticas, the question pros, the, you know, form bricks, the journey tracks. They are really focusing on extending the capabilities beyond journey mapping into truly, you know, omnipresent customer journeys and continues improving customer journeys that goes beyond.

22:25Raymond Gerber:I think even we see Forrester with their latest customer journey management, Forrester Wave that's come out, is that they are starting to, I think, pressure through customer feedback is that these companies should do more than just mapping journeys. Because they have value, but their value is reduced. And I think with the event of AI, you know, I have this thing where I say in the past it took 80 % effort to map a journey and then they spent 20 % operationalizing it. I think with AI, the effort and the ease of mapping journeys through artificial intelligence is switching around. You have 20%. You can somewhat quicker create customer journeys based on using prompts and chat TPT and Claude.

23:10Raymond Gerber:So now the effort is going to suck. So what do we do with the journeys that just mapped? How do we operationalize? And that's why there's a whole switch from the 80-20 to the 20-80 perspective.

23:20Adrian Swinscoe:Awesome. Yeah, that's great. um so ray for just in a way of kind of wrapping up i've got some quick fire questions for you and the first one the first one is about your best advice and i've been asking people to complete a sentence i'm going to give you to as a way of sort of prompting you as it were to for your best advice and so what would be your best advice to someone listening in that wants to improve their customer experience and so the question is if you want to improve your customer experience ray says

23:50Raymond Gerber:do this manage journeys like assets not artifacts okay stop fixing touch points and start manning your journeys end to end awesome fantastic now the next one is a punk one obviously because

24:04Adrian Swinscoe:the punk cx podcast so what company or brand do you think takes a more punk approach to customer experience and why you're saying which brand yeah i would say the most impressive in my experience

24:18Raymond Gerber:was when I was at Thunderhead, I'm not allowed to use their name, but it's a utility company in Germany that had 20 million subscribers. And it just, what was amazing with them is we never met with one person. It felt to me that we met with the company. Right. When they were made the decision to use Journeys, we met with the company as a whole, you know? And what was nice about that, we felt that they were not really focused on how this is a solution, protecting jobs or their systems or their budgets. He was really focused on, they were tracking customer efforts, trying to understand trust. How do we build trust and how do we optimize the time that customers spend with that as a brand so those brands can have value.

25:06Adrian Swinscoe:Awesome. That's great. One final question. I've been asking people to tell me a good news story because it feels like the world is in a weird place and there's a lot of doom scrolling going on right now. And so if you will, tell me the most interesting, positive, exciting thing that you've seen the last week, or like, or even just something that you've gone, that's just made me smile.