Are Your Customers’ Calls Actually Important?

Are Your Customers' Calls Actually Important?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Recently, I wrote an article about the customer service farce. One of several examples I shared was the line we often hear when calling customer support: “Your call is very important to us.” When we hear it, we hope it’s true. We hope it means that the company is going to respect our time, that someone will pick up the call quickly (versus being put on hold for an unreasonable amount of time), and that the agent we talk to will have the knowledge and skills to answer our question or resolve our complaint, and we’ll not have to repeat our story again and again.

In our most recent customer service and customer experience (CX) research, we asked a number of questions about contact centers that convey the message, “Your call is very important to us.” The answers will make you smile – maybe even laugh. I’ve shared some of these findings from surveys from the previous year. Here are the latest with a couple of new ones:

Cleaning the Toilet: Nearly four out of 10 customers (39%) say they would rather clean a toilet than call customer support. (That’s gross!)
A Root Canal Is Better Than This: A third of U.S. customers (34%) would rather visit the dentist than call customer support. (That’s painful!)
Dinner with In-Laws: Half of the customers (53%) say they would rather have dinner with their in-laws than call customer support. (That could be painful, too!)
Glossophobia (The Fear of Public Speaking): Even though speaking in public is one of the greatest fears, often ahead of death, one in four customers (26%) would rather speak in front of an audience of 1,000 than call customer support. (Yikes, that’s scary!)

But seriously … as humorous as some of these findings are, there’s some truth behind them. Consider these three findings from this year’s report:

Half of U.S. customers (51%) say that when they call customer support with a question or to resolve a problem, the company does not value their time.
And speaking of respecting time, over half of the customers we surveyed (55%) say they stopped doing business with a company or brand because it kept them on hold for too long.
Six out of 10 customers (63%) say they have stopped doing business with a company because of the inability to connect with someone from customer support. </li?

It sounds like I’m being negative, but the reality is that this information gives me hope – for the companies that get it right. The more serious findings mean that more than half of customers are ripe to switch companies, and if you’re doing it right, they are hopefully going to switch to you.

Whether your company has just a few dedicated employees to support your customers or a large contact center, this information and the opportunities we take from it are applicable to you. Your customers deserve attention and respect. Don’t make them feel as if their call is NOT very important to you!

Image Credit: Pexels

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

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Freezing Light and Turning it into a Solid

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Freezing Light and Turning it into a Solid

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Imagine holding a beam of light in your hand, not as a fleeting shimmer, but as a tangible object. Sounds impossible, right? Yet, as an innovation thought leader, I’m constantly scanning the horizon for breakthroughs that shatter our perceptions of what’s possible. Few concepts ignite my imagination quite like the audacious idea of freezing light and transforming it into something akin to a solid or even a “super liquid.” This isn’t just theoretical musing; cutting-edge science is making incredible strides towards manipulating light in ways previously confined to science fiction.

Traditionally, light—composed of photons—is thought of as a wave that travels at the fastest speed in the universe, passing through everything without interaction. But what if we could make photons “stick” together? What if we could slow them down, halt them, and then coax them into entirely new states of matter? This seemingly fantastical endeavor is precisely what researchers are achieving, primarily by forcing photons into strong interactions with specially prepared atomic systems or engineered materials. It’s a fundamental redefinition of light’s behavior.

The “Solid” State of Light: Forming Photonic Molecules

Picture light behaving like a crystal, with photons not just propagating, but forming stable, bound structures. This remarkable feat is becoming a reality. Scientists have demonstrated situations where individual photons, usually independent entities, begin to bind together, acting like “molecules of light.” This binding occurs when photons are made to interact intensely within a specific medium. One groundbreaking method involves firing photons into an extremely cold cloud of rubidium atoms. Instead of simply passing through, the photons effectively transfer their energy to the atoms, which then relay that energy in a kind of quantum bucket brigade. This process dramatically slows the photons down, making them appear to navigate an incredibly thick, viscous substance. Crucially, when two such photons enter the cloud, they don’t just slow independently; they exit together, demonstrating a newfound “stickiness” – a strong interaction previously thought impossible for light in free space. This collective, bound behavior is what gives light a solid-like quality, where a collection of photons acts as a coherent, stable entity. Think of it like water molecules freezing into ice; here, photons are forming similar, if ephemeral, bonds.

The “Super Liquid” State of Light: Flowing Without Resistance

Now, let’s pivot from a rigid solid to something that flows with zero friction and perfect coherence – a superfluid. This incredible quantum phenomenon, often seen in ultra-cold helium, is also being explored in the realm of light. Scientists have successfully created systems where light behaves as a “superfluid of polaritons.” Polaritons are fascinating hybrid quasi-particles, a blend of light and matter, formed when photons strongly couple with electronic excitations within a material, often at extremely low temperatures. In these precise conditions, these polaritons can condense into a macroscopic quantum state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Once condensed, this “super liquid” light can flow without any resistance, and even sustain persistent currents indefinitely, much like a perpetual motion machine for light. This revolutionary state promises the potential for lossless transmission and manipulation of information, far surpassing the limitations of conventional electronics. It’s the ultimate expression of quantum coherence applied to light, enabling entirely new forms of optical circuitry and communication.

Practical Applications: Beyond the Bleeding Edge

This is where the true innovation potential of these discoveries comes into sharp focus. While currently confined to highly specialized laboratory environments, the ability to fundamentally manipulate light opens up staggering possibilities across numerous industries. We’re talking about fundamental shifts in how we store, transmit, and process information. The implications span across numerous industries:

Quantum Computing and Communication:

The ability to precisely manipulate individual photons and create stable, interacting light structures is a cornerstone for quantum computing. Imagine using qubits (the basic unit of quantum information) made of light, offering unprecedented processing speeds and inherent resilience to decoherence. “Frozen” or “solid” light could serve as quantum memory, storing delicate quantum states for extended durations, a critical bottleneck in current quantum computer designs. For quantum communication, super-fluid light could enable perfectly efficient, lossless transmission of quantum information over vast distances, potentially revolutionizing secure data transfer methods like quantum key distribution.

Ultra-Efficient Data Storage:

If we can reliably “freeze” and retrieve information encoded in the quantum state of trapped photons, we could witness the birth of optical data storage with capacities that dwarf anything available today. Instead of storing data as magnetic bits or electronic charges, imagine encoding petabytes of information in incredibly small, three-dimensional volumes using light itself. This could lead to storage devices with densities orders of magnitude greater than current technologies, transforming everything from cloud computing to personal devices.

Novel Sensing and Metrology:

The extreme sensitivity and unparalleled control over light at these quantum levels could lead to entirely new forms of sensors. Think about detectors capable of identifying single photons with near-perfect efficiency, or instruments that can measure incredibly subtle changes in magnetic fields, gravitational waves, or even biomolecules with unprecedented precision. “Solid” or “super liquid” light could also be used to create ultra-precise atomic clocks or quantum gyroscopes, significantly enhancing navigation systems, geological surveying, and fundamental physics experiments.

New Materials and Energy Technologies:

While more speculative, the principles behind creating light-matter hybrids and precisely manipulating photon interactions could inspire the development of entirely new classes of materials. Imagine materials whose optical properties can be dynamically controlled and even programmed, leading to advancements in everything from smart windows that adapt to light conditions to new forms of optical computing hardware. In energy, could we harness these light manipulation techniques to dramatically improve solar energy conversion, perhaps by “trapping” photons more effectively for enhanced energy transfer, or even creating new forms of light-driven power generation?

Challenges and The Innovation Horizon

Of course, the journey from these groundbreaking laboratory demonstrations to widespread practical applications is fraught with significant challenges. Maintaining the ultra-low temperatures required for many of these phenomena, scaling up these delicate quantum systems, and engineering robust, real-world devices are immense hurdles. Yet, these challenges are precisely what drive innovation.

As a human-centered change leader, I see not just technological advancements but a profound paradigm shift in how we interact with and utilize one of the most fundamental forces of the universe. The ability to control light at such an intimate, quantum level opens doors to innovations that are currently only limited by our collective imagination. The key to unlocking these future applications lies in continued, audacious investment in basic research, fostering deep interdisciplinary collaboration between physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, and embracing a culture of relentless experimentation. We need to empower the boldest thinkers to explore these frontiers, not just for the immediate return on investment, but for the profound and transformative societal impact they could bring. The future of light, it seems, is far from ethereal; it’s becoming increasingly tangible, solid, and incredibly fluid in its potential to reshape our world. 🚀

Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future applications of cutting-edge scientific research. While based on current scientific understanding, the practical realization of these concepts may vary in timeline and feasibility and are subject to ongoing research and development.

Image credit: Gemini

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure. Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used. You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success. You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.

So, where do you start?

Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them. But you are smarter than that. You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.

Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access

Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.

While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.

Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans. Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.

Start by asking:

Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?

Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions

If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.

Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.

Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.

Start by asking these questions:

Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?

Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes

Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.

Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.

When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true. They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.

Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.

Start by asking these questions:

How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?

Three Steps. One Outcome.

Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success. But they’re still not a guarantee.

Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.

Image credit: Pexels

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People Will Be Competent and Hardworking – If We Let Them

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People Will Be Competent and Hardworking - If We Let Them

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Go to just about any business conference these days and you’re likely to see some pundit on stage telling a story about a company — often Blockbuster, Kodak or Xerox — that got blindsided by nascent trends. Apparently, the leaders who rose to the top of the corporate ladder were so foolish they just weren’t paying attention.

These stories are good for a laugh, but they usually aren’t true. People who lead successful companies are, for the most part, competent, hardworking and ambitious. That’s how they got their jobs in the first place. There are, of course, exceptions. People who have a talent for self-promotion can get to the top too.

Still it’s much better to assume competence. That’s how we learn. The truth is that we all get disrupted sooner or later. It doesn’t only happen to silly people. Every square-peg business eventually meets its round-hole world. Smart, competent people fail all the time and, if we want to have a chance at avoiding their fate, we need to understand how that happens.

Mismanagement Myths

During Apple’s rise, Microsoft was considered to be big, slow and incompetent. Its CEO, Steve Ballmer, had foolishly dismissed the iPhone and the company never seemed to gain traction in the mobile world. It launched weak products, such as the Zune music player and the Windows phone. Its failed acquisition of Nokia just seemed to add insult to injury.

Yet still even accounting for Ballmer’s mobile missteps, Microsoft’s business continued to perform well, growing its revenues at double digit rates and maintaining high margins. How can that be? Most of Microsoft’s revenues don’t come from the consumer categories that business journalists tend to cover, but in selling B2B products and services to CIOs. While everyone was focused on gadgets, it was building a monster business in the cloud.

When you look more closely, the clever pundits often miss the real story. Blockbuster didn’t ignore Netflix, but executed a viable strategy and still failed. Kodak didn’t ignore the market for digital cameras, in fact its EasyShare line were top sellers. Unfortunately, selling digital cameras couldn’t replace the profits from developing film. Yes, Xerox PARC failed to successfully market the PC, but its invention of the laser printer saved the company.

The reason why pundits tell the caricatures rather than the real stories is that imagining CEOs to be fools makes us feel better about ourselves. After all, if only foolish people get disrupted, then we—assuming we are not fools—should be okay. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. Being smart and working hard won’t save you.

Why Do Smart, Competent People Fail?

There are many reasons why smart, competent people fail. A very common one is a category error. For example, Steve Ballmer didn’t think anyone would pay $500 for a phone, but the iPhone wasn’t just a phone, it was an entirely new business model and ecosystem. People would not only pay for it differently (through their mobile plan), they would also use it very differently than earlier phones.

That opens up a very different set of issues. How do we know if we’re making a category error? We put things into categories for a reason, to understand their relations to other things. For example, a plate is something that goes on a table. But sometimes, such as the case with a commemorative plate, they go on a wall. So when does a plate become commemorative?

Other famous failures ran into similarly thorny issues. The CEO at Blockbuster, John Antioco, developed a viable strategy and executed well, but failed to gain alignment among important stakeholders. Kodak marketed digital cameras, but they weren’t nearly profitable enough to replace developing film. Xerox PARC was designed to build the “office of the future,” not to market consumer products like the Macintosh.

What at first might seem like CEOs asleep at the wheel actually exposes some very thorny issues. How much alignment do we need before pushing an important strategy forward? What do you do when your cash cow dies? When you shoot for the moon, how should you hedge your bets?

These are tough problems with no obvious solutions. But notice that when we assume that the leaders were competent, it forces us to think about them much more seriously and, hopefully, learn something useful.

Seeing Competence All Around Us

I was recently talking to my friend Bob Burg, co-author of the Go-Giver series, and something he said reminded me of a short Borges essay I’ve long admired, called Borges and I, in which the acclaimed author writes about the challenges of balancing a public persona with a private one. I brought it up during our conversation and promised to send it to him.

The whole essay is just two short paragraphs of Borges comparing himself, who drinks coffee and walks the streets of Buenos Aires, to the famous author who will live on in posterity. “Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” he wrote.

Unfortunately, in sending Bob the essay, I screwed up. Because it was so short, I didn’t send a link but copy-pasted the text into the body of the email and, carelessly, didn’t include the title or the author’s name, which made the whole thing impossible to understand. Most people would have just written it off as something stupid. Bob did something different.

Instead of imagining me a fool, he humbly wrote me back, apologized for his inability to understand the essay and asked if I could explain it to him, which gave me the opportunity to correct my mistake. In doing so he did both of us a service. He got the small benefit of reading an interesting essay and I got the enormous gift of being able to redeem myself.

When we assume those around us are competent—not stupid or lazy—we do far more than give them the opportunity to be their best selves. People who feel validated actually tend to perform better too.

We Are Always Wrong

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes in our own story. Unlike others, we are witnesses to our internal process and get to observe our logic develop. So our thoughts makes perfect sense to us and it can be incredibly frustrating when others don’t see it as we do. Our inclination is to imagine them to be fools, simply incapable of grasping basic concepts.

That’s why pundits tend to tell such facile stories. Blockbuster wasn’t paying attention to Netflix. Kodak ignored digital photography. Xerox PARC invented breakthrough products, but neglected to market them. None of these stories are accurate, but it’s far easier to portray a failure as a silly blunder, than admit to ourselves how easily it could happen to us.

The hard truth is that we’re always wrong. Sometimes we’re off by a little and sometimes we’re off by a lot, but we’re always wrong. We succeed not by coming up with the “right” idea from the start, but by taking a Bayesian approach and becoming less wrong over time.

The best way to do that is to assume other people are smart, competent and hardworking. Lazy fools will make themselves obvious soon enough. But by seeking out intelligence and virtue, we are not only much more likely to find it, but also to identify and correct deficiencies in ourselves and our thinking.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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The Experience Nexus

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Integrating an XMO with Customer, Employee and Partner Advisory Boards

The Experience Nexus - Integrating an XMO with Customer, Employee and Partner Advisory Boards

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, merely meeting expectations isn’t enough; delivering exceptional experiences is the non-negotiable standard. Customers demand seamless, intuitive journeys. Employees seek engaging, meaningful work that fosters growth. Partners require transparent, collaborative relationships that drive mutual success. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I advocate for a truly holistic approach: the Experience Management Office (XMO). However, an XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards. This integration forms a dynamic “experience nexus” of feedback and action, ensuring that experience strategies are not just internally conceived, but genuinely co-created and reflective of the voices that matter most.

The Strategic Imperative of the Experience Management Office (XMO)

Historically, organizations managed customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and often partner experience (PX) in isolated silos. This fragmented approach frequently led to inconsistent experiences and missed opportunities for cross-functional improvements. The XMO emerges as the strategic orchestrator, unifying these disparate efforts under a single, cohesive umbrella. Its core mandate is to ensure consistency, proactively identify and eliminate friction points, and drive continuous improvement across all critical touchpoints for every stakeholder. An effective XMO establishes robust methodologies, deploys standardized tools, provides clear governance, and acts as a central repository for all experience data, translating raw insights into prioritized, actionable initiatives.

“An XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards.”

Amplifying Voices: The Power of Advisory Boards

While the XMO provides the essential strategic framework and operational discipline, advisory boards inject the authentic, ground-level voice of your critical stakeholders. They offer invaluable qualitative feedback that complements quantitative data.

Customer Advisory Boards (CABs): Comprising your most engaged and influential customers, CABs provide unfiltered feedback on product utility, service delivery, and overall brand perception. They offer a direct window into evolving customer needs, emerging pain points, and often highlight competitive shifts or significant unmet market opportunities. Their strategic input can be a game-changer for product roadmaps and service enhancements.
Partner Advisory Boards (PABs): For organizations deeply reliant on a robust ecosystem of distributors, resellers, integrators, or technology alliances, PABs are indispensable. They offer critical insights into channel effectiveness, the viability of joint go-to-market strategies, and operational friction points that directly impact mutual profitability and success. A strong PAB can foster greater collaboration and loyalty.
Employee Advisory Boards (EABs): Your employees are the living embodiment of your organization’s culture and processes. They are on the front lines, experiencing internal systems and customer interactions firsthand. EABs provide invaluable, real-time feedback on workplace culture, operational inefficiencies, the effectiveness of internal tools, and the direct impact of leadership decisions on morale, productivity, and retention. They serve as both early warning systems and fertile ground for grassroots innovation within the Employee Experience (EX).

The Experience Nexus: From Feedback to Breakthrough Innovation

The true magic of this holistic model is realized when the XMO functions as the intelligent central hub, systematically receiving, synthesizing, and acting upon the rich insights generated by these diverse advisory boards (the strategic spokes). This creates a dynamic, continuous improvement loop, and crucially, an engine for genuine innovation. The XMO’s role goes beyond just operational excellence; it becomes a powerful catalyst for change. By gathering and cross-referencing insights from all three boards, the XMO can identify truly breakthrough opportunities that a siloed approach would miss. It’s in the intersection of these diverse perspectives that the most profound insights for innovation emerge.

Structured Feedback Ecosystem: The XMO establishes formalized, yet flexible, processes for advisory boards to submit feedback. This ensures insights are consistently captured, meticulously categorized, intelligently prioritized, and seamlessly routed to the most relevant internal product, service, or operational teams.
Holistic Data Synthesis & Analysis: The XMO’s analytical capabilities are crucial here. It collates and cross-references qualitative insights from the advisory boards with quantitative experience data (e.g., NPS, CSAT, CES, employee engagement scores, churn rates, partner revenue contribution). This holistic analysis identifies systemic trends, uncovers root causes, and validates hypotheses across the entire experience landscape.
Actionable Insights & Strategic Prioritization: Armed with synthesized, validated data, the XMO plays a pivotal role in guiding leadership to prioritize experience initiatives. It ensures resources and effort are strategically allocated to areas that will deliver the most significant, cross-cutting impact across customer, employee, and partner journeys, driving maximum business value.
Innovation Acceleration: This is where the nexus truly shines. The XMO facilitates cross-functional “insight sharing” workshops, where product, engineering, and design teams are exposed directly to the synthesized feedback. For example, a common pain point from a Customer Advisory Board might be the lack of a specific feature, while an Employee Advisory Board highlights a related internal operational inefficiency, and a Partner Advisory Board reveals a similar competitive gap. When these three insights are combined, they don’t just solve a single problem; they can reveal a massive market opportunity for a new product, service, or business model. The XMO’s role is to identify and champion these “aha!” moments, channeling them directly into the innovation pipeline.
Transparent Closed-Loop Communication: Perhaps most critically, the XMO champions and facilitates regular, transparent communication back to the advisory boards. This demonstrates precisely how their invaluable feedback is being utilized, outlining the tangible progress of implemented initiatives, and celebrating the impact of their contributions. This transparency is vital; it builds deep trust, reinforces the perceived value of their participation, and encourages continued engagement.

Case Study 1: Global SaaS Provider – Unifying the Ecosystem Experience

From Fragmented Insights to Integrated Ecosystem Enhancement

A global B2B SaaS company faced challenges with inconsistent product adoption and suboptimal channel partner engagement. Their existing structure meant customer feedback was managed by the CX team, HR handled employee surveys, and the partner team conducted informal check-ins. This siloed approach led to fragmented insights and disjointed solutions, impacting their overall ecosystem health.

Recognizing the need for a unified strategy, they established a dedicated Experience Management Office (XMO) reporting directly to the Chief Operating Officer. The XMO’s clear mandate was to integrate and elevate all experience initiatives. Concurrently, they formalized their existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and launched a new, strategically focused Partner Advisory Board (PAB). The XMO developed a comprehensive quarterly insights report, meticulously combining feedback from the CABs, PABs, and internal employee surveys. A consistent, critical theme emerged from this integrated analysis: the onboarding experience for new customers and channel partners was clunky, inconsistent, and often frustrating across different product lines.

Leveraging this precise feedback, the XMO facilitated cross-functional workshops involving product development, sales, marketing, and customer support teams. This collaborative effort led to the rapid development and deployment of a unified onboarding platform and standardized, role-based training modules. The XMO rigorously tracked key metrics such as “time-to-first-value” for new customers and partner activation rates. Within 18 months, customer satisfaction scores related to onboarding surged by 25%, and partner-led sales increased by a remarkable 15%, demonstrating the profound, tangible benefits of integrating diverse external and internal voices through a centralized, action-oriented XMO.

Key Takeaway: A centralized XMO, fed by structured CAB and PAB insights, can drive enterprise-wide improvements in critical customer and partner journeys, leading to measurable business growth.

Addressing Inherent Challenges and Ensuring Success

Integrating an XMO with robust advisory boards, while incredibly powerful, is not without its inherent hurdles. Proactive mitigation strategies are essential:

Securing Executive Buy-in: This foundational step requires senior leadership to not only champion the XMO’s creation but also to genuinely value and act upon the feedback from advisory boards. Mitigation: Develop a compelling business case, demonstrate clear ROI by linking experience improvements directly to key business outcomes (e.g., revenue growth, cost reduction, retention), and involve executives directly in initial board meetings.
Resource Allocation: Establishing, staffing, and effectively maintaining both a strategic XMO and active advisory boards demands dedicated human and financial resources. Mitigation: Start small and iterate. Begin by focusing on the most critical experience touchpoints, prove incremental value, and then scale resources as the benefits become undeniable and quantifiable.
Preventing “Feedback Fatigue”: Advisory board members are busy, valuable individuals. Ensuring they feel their time is genuinely valued and their feedback consistently leads to tangible action is paramount. Mitigation: Maintain rigorous closed-loop communication, provide transparent updates on progress, celebrate their contributions publicly, and respect their time with concise, focused agendas and clear pre-reads.
Translating Insights into Action: Moving from qualitative feedback to concrete, measurable organizational actions can be complex and requires strong analytical and change management capabilities. Mitigation: The XMO must employ robust analytics, facilitate strong cross-functional collaboration to dismantle silos, and define clear ownership for implementing improvements.

Case Study 2: Regional Retail Bank – Synergistic Employee & Customer Elevation

Transforming Branch Operations Through Integrated Feedback

A prominent regional retail bank was grappling with a concerning decline in customer satisfaction related to in-branch service, compounded by alarmingly high employee turnover, particularly among its front-line tellers. Despite various internal initiatives, leadership struggled to pinpoint the true underlying root causes of these intertwined problems.

In response, the bank strategically established an XMO reporting within its operations department. Crucially, they simultaneously launched an active Employee Advisory Board (EAB), comprising a diverse cross-section of tellers, branch managers, and key back-office support staff. The EAB quickly identified several critical pain points: severely outdated core banking software leading to protracted transaction times, unclear escalation paths for complex customer issues, and insufficient, infrequent training for new product offerings. In parallel, the bank’s existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) provided consistent feedback echoing concerns about excessive wait times, perceived inconsistencies in service quality, and a lack of personalized interaction.

The XMO proved to be the indispensable bridge. It meticulously analyzed the EAB’s feedback on software inefficiencies and training gaps, cross-referencing it with the CAB’s complaints about wait times and service quality. This integrated analysis revealed a direct, causal correlation: internal operational friction points directly translated into poor customer experiences. The XMO then championed a high-priority, cross-departmental project to modernize the core banking software, streamline digital workflows, and introduce a comprehensive, tiered training program for all branch staff, directly based on EAB recommendations. Regular, transparent updates on progress were provided to both advisory boards, reinforcing their critical role. Within a single year, teller turnover decreased by a remarkable 20%, and customer satisfaction with in-branch service experienced a significant, measurable improvement, unequivocally validating the transformative power of integrating direct employee insights into holistic customer experience enhancements.

Key Takeaway: Integrating EAB insights with CAB feedback via an XMO reveals systemic issues, leading to co-created solutions that dramatically improve both employee and customer experiences.

Conclusion: The Future of Holistic Experience Leadership

The strategic integration of a proactive Experience Management Office with thoughtfully structured Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards represents the pinnacle of human-centered innovation and leadership. This powerful nexus creates a robust, empathetic, and continuous feedback ecosystem that not only informs and validates but also dynamically refines an organization’s entire experience strategy. It ensures that all strategic decisions and operational improvements are profoundly grounded in real-world perspectives, fostering deeper trust across all stakeholder groups, accelerating the pace of meaningful innovation, and ultimately driving sustainable, differentiated growth. For leaders aspiring to truly excel in the experience economy, this holistic, integrated approach is not merely an option—it is an undeniable imperative. It’s about orchestrating a diverse symphony of voices to create a harmonious, compelling, and continuously improving experience for everyone involved, building loyalty and advocacy from the inside out.

Contact me if you’re interested in working together to build or enhance your Experience Management Office (XMO).

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to shape the article and create the illustrative case studies.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Special eBook Offer – $13.99 for the Charting Change

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Unblocking Change

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Unblocking Change

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want things to change, you have two options. You can incentivize change or you can move things out of the way that block change. The first way doesn’t work and the second one does. For more details, click this link at it will take you to a post that describes the late Danny Kahneman’s thoughts on the subject.

And, also from Kahneman, to move things out of the way and unblock change, change the environment.

Change Blocker 1 – Metrics

When you measure someone on efficiency, you get efficiency. And if people think a potential change could reduce efficiency, that change is blocked. And the same goes for all metrics associated with cost, quality and speed. When a change threatens the metric, the change will be blocked. To change the environment to eliminate the blocking, help people understand who the change will actually IMPROVE the metric. Do the analysis and educate those who would be negatively impacted if the change reduced the metric. Change their environment to one that believes the change will improve the metric.

Change Blocker 2 – Incentives

When someone’s bonus could be negatively impacted by a potential change, that change will be blocked. Figure out whose incentive compensation are jeopardized by the potential change and help them understand how the potential change will actually increase their incentives. You may have to explain that their incentives will increase in the long term, but that’s an argument that holds water. Until they believe their incentives will not suffer, they’ll block the change.

Change Blocker 3 – Fear

This is the big one – fear of negative consequences. Here’s a short list: fear of being judged, fear of being blamed, fear of losing status, fear of losing control, fear of losing a job, fear of losing a promotion, fear of looking stupid and fear of failing. One of the best ways to help people get over their fear is to run a small experiment that demonstrates that they have nothing to fear. Show them that the change will actually work. Show them how they’ll benefit.

Eliminating the things that block change is fundamentally different than pushing people in the direction of change. It’s different in effectiveness and approach. Start with the questions: “What’s in the way of change?” or “Who is in the way of change?” and then “Why are they in the way of change?” From there, you’ll have an idea what must be moved out of the way. And then ask: “How can their environment be changed so the change-blocker can be moved out of the way?”

What’s in the way of giving it a try?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Transforming Metrics into Action

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Customer Experience (CX) Leaders At Verizon, Autodesk And Prudential Are Going Beyond NPS

Transforming Metrics Into Action

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Is Net Promoter Score (NPS) still relevant? How can you transfer insights and data into meaningful actions? And how do you hire the right people to meet your Keep Performance Indicators (KPIs) and success metrics? Those were the questions I asked a panel of esteemed executives at a LinkedIn Live interview.

The guests were Brian Higgins, chief customer experience officer at Verizon Consumer, Elisabeth Zornes, chief customer officer at Autodesk, and Abhii Parakh, head of customer experience at Prudential. Their answers are important to any leader making decisions that impact the customer experience.

NPS Is A Foundational Metric, But Its Role Is Evolving

NPS is a powerful metric when used properly. It’s a simple question that determines whether a customer likes you enough to recommend you. From that single question, a follow-up question could seek further insight or action can be taken to improve what’s not working and elevate what is working. So, the first question I asked was about using NPS as a primary metric.

Parakh led off by saying, “No metric is perfect. Whether it’s NPS or something else, it’s always about a combination of tactics and measurements to get the insights on what our customers and advisors want. … We run the numbers on how much more value is being driven by our promoters or passives versus detractors, and we see a very meaningful connection between the two.” He cited three key benefits: effectively tracking long-term relationships, correlation with growth metrics and providing actionable insights.
Higgins said that Verizon uses NPS to benchmark in two important places. He said, “I want to look at how we are benchmarking against the competition and then against ourselves.” He looks at three areas: one, is Verizon growing or churning? The second is measuring interaction, both digital and with their reps. The third is taking a look at the overall health of the business. And in addition to measuring customer satisfaction, Verizon also uses NPS for employee satisfaction. If employees aren’t happy, the customer is going to feel it.
Zornes uses the measurement to strike a balance between Autodesk’s long-term relationships and direct engagement. She explained, “NPS is a great, long-lasting customer impression measurement for services, solutions and products, but we are in the age of digital first engagements, so we, of course, also measure specific moments in the digital journey along with customer effort scores.” While NPS is a foundational metric at Autodesk, they also use the Deloitte Trust ID to assess transparency, capability, reliability and care.

Bring Numbers To Life Through Employees

Competition turns companies and their products into commodities. All three companies represented on the panel have competition. Assuming the products and services do what they are supposed to do and meet their customers’ needs, what differentiates them from competitors is experience. Often, that experience is driven by employees. The next question focused on the hiring criteria that align with CX KPIs.

Zornes said, “The internal team and culture are really what determines the customer experience for our customers. So it’s absolutely critical we bring the right talent on board and foster it accordingly.”
Higgins focuses on three big areas for hiring. First, Verizon wants a wide range of experience and knowledge. Second, they want employees to act as “CX detectives,” meaning they never let small details get by. Listen and pay attention to the customer feedback and recognize the power of the details. Third, and what Higgins says is most important, is empathy. “A little voice in the back of your head says, ‘I don’t know if the customer is right, but that doesn’t matter. You’ve got to believe in them and make it right for them.’”
Parakh says, “It’s super important for any customer-facing role. But I would also say that in addition to customer experience roles, I think that a customer-obsessed mindset is important for any business role. It’s not just the CX team. I think customer experience is everybody’s job. So, across the company, we need to be looking for folks who have empathy for the customer, a growth mindset and familiarity with CX, as well as business knowledge.”

Rethinking How Technology And People Support CX

As the CX landscape evolves with new technology, so do the roles of employees. How do these three iconic brands rethink talent development to support the team’s ability to deliver an exceptional experience?

Higgins kicked off with a call back to Parakh’s comment about CX being everyone’s job. “If everyone owns CX across the company, it also means they have to get comfortable with the new sets of tools we’re putting in place. I think about AI, gen AI and agentic AI. You have to make sure employees are comfortable with these new tools that are engaging directly with customers.”
Parakh emphasized the importance of keeping up and changing with the times. “You can’t survive for 150 years by doing what you’ve always done. We’ve been through multiple stock market crashes and multiple pandemics, and we’ve done that by constantly reinventing, so when it comes to talent, we have to have the same mindset. Everybody in the company, starting from the top leadership, has to understand where things are going because everything is changing so fast.”
Zornes believes that the future is now. “AI is not coming. AI is here. And with that, there is a huge opportunity to really convert those transactions that we might have done in the past to a more smooth and self-service experience. … Some of the profiles of what jobs looked like in the past, what they look like now and what they will look like in the future continue to evolve.”

The future of customer experience lies at the intersection of meaningful metrics, empathetic teams and evolving technology. As Higgins, Zornes and Parakh shared in their answers, success comes not from any single measurement tool but from creating integrated systems that consistently detect, analyze and improve the interactions customers have with the brand. And when you add the right people who are able to demonstrate empathy, curiosity and adaptability, you have a winning combination of KPIs, technology and people that gets customers to say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credit: Pexels

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all.

Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure.

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions. According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm.
Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose.
Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views:
Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Convinced that Strategic Foresight shows you a path through uncertainty? Great! Just don’t rush off, hire futurists, run some workshops, and start churning out glossy reports.

Activity is not achievement.

Learning from those who have achieved, however, is an excellent first activity. Following are the stories of two very different companies from different industries and eras that pursued Strategic Foresight differently yet succeeded because they tied foresight to the P&L.

Shell: From Laggard to Leader, One Decision at a Time

It’s hard to imagine Shell wasn’t always dominant, but back in the 1960s, it struggled to compete. Tired of being blindsided by competitors and external events, they sought an edge.

It took multiple attempts and more than 10 years to find it.

In 1959, Shell set up their Group Planning department, but its reliance on simple extrapolations of past trends to predict the future only perpetuated the status quo.

In 1965, Shell introduced the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool to predict cash flow based on current results and forecasted changes in oil consumption. But this approach was abandoned because executives feared “that it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”

Then, in 1967, in a small 18^th-floor office in London, a new approach to ongoing planning began. Unlike past attempts, the goal was not to predict the future. It was to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future.”

Within a few years, their success was obvious. Shell executives stopped treating scenarios as interesting intellectual exercises and started using them to stress-test actual capital allocation decisions.

This doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly embraced or even believed the scenarios. In fact, when scenarios suggested that oil prices could spike dramatically, most executives thought it was far-fetched. Yet Shell leadership used those scenarios to restructure their entire portfolio around different types of oil and to develop new capabilities.

The result? When the 1973 oil crisis hit and oil prices quadrupled from $2.90 to $11.65 per barrel, Shell was the only major oil company ready. While competitors scrambled and lost billions, Shell turned the crisis into “big profits.”

Disney: From Missed Growth Goals to Unprecedented Growth

In 2012, Walt Disney International’s (WDI) aggressive growth targets collided with a challenging global labor market, and traditional HR approaches weren’t cutting it.

Andy Bird, Chairman of Walt Disney International, emphasized the criticality of the situation when he said, “The actions we make today are going to make an impact 10 to 20 years down the road.”

So, faced with an unprecedented challenge, the team pursued an unprecedented solution: they built a Strategic Foresight capability.

WDI trained over 500 leaders across 45 countries, representing five percent of its workforce, in Strategic Foresight. More importantly, Disney integrated strategic foresight directly into their strategic planning and performance management processes, ensuring insights drove business decisions rather than gathering dust in reports.

For example, foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing (remember, this was 2012) and that consumers wanted more control over when and how they consumed content. This insight directly shaped Disney+’s development.

The results speak volumes. While traditional media companies struggled with streaming disruption, Disney+ reached 100 million subscribers in just 16 months.

Two Paths. One Result.

Shell and Disney integrated Strategic Foresight differently – the former as a tool to make high-stakes individual decisions, the latter as an organizational capability to affect daily decisions and culture.

What they have in common is that they made tomorrow’s possibilities accountable to today’s decisions. They did this not by treating strategic foresight as prediction, but as preparation for competitive advantage.

Ready to turn these insights into action? Next week, we’ll dive into the tools in the Strategic Foresight toolbox and how you and your team can use them to develop strategic foresight that drives informed decisions.

Image credit: Gemini

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