The Real Reason Your Customer Experience Is Broken (And It's Not What You Think)

So you think that our definition of experience is maybe kind of pulled away from the actual human experience at the heart of this. I hate pointing fingers, but I tend to blame vendors, especially technology vendors. If you remember back in the days where CRM came out, the idea was exactly that, customer relationship management. One of the nuances of the relationship expectation for each customer segment.

All the way to today, you can't say the word CRM without saying technology blank. And I think that over time that has happened with the idea of experience. It started out with a very simple idea that whether I'm doing something I don't want with an individual or with a company or with a brand, by experience, I mean the things that I do to get from point A to point B in a way that is functional, accessible, effective, and connected for me as an individual, right? But now, unfortunately, you say experience, people think methodologies, rating systems, technology for managing the customer experience or CX.

And we've lost a lot of the human component and what it means to heal real people. One of my favorite quotes is that expectations are the thief of joy. But today's guest might argue something a little bit different. He might argue that expectations are also your gateway to joy.

Joining me on Mike is JC Quintana, a long time customer experience leader, author and speaker who spent over two decades helping organizations rethink how they build relationships with their customers. His advice teams all over the world and today he shares what he's learned about human psychology that will dramatically transform how you think about experience building, expectation setting, and honestly just relationship building and human communication in general. I mean, there are literally things he shared in this episode that I'm simultaneously going to be applying to my business relationships, as well as my at home relationships with my partner with my kids with my family.

So there are so many gems in this episode that you're absolutely going to love. For those of you who are new here, you're watching Experts of Experience. I'm your host Lacey P's and we release new episodes every single month. So if you don't want to miss those episodes, be sure to hit subscribe and you'll get notified every time a new one drops.

Thanks so much for tuning in today and without further ado, here's JC Quintana. JC, welcome to Experts of Experience. Great to see you Lacey. Great to have you on.

It's the first interview of the year. So I'm so thrilled to be able to do this with you. It's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it and to the year as well.

I think 2020 is going to be great. I honestly feel like this conversation about the have is a great way for people to start the year when they're thinking about business. What assumptions have I been making about how my buyers think, how my employees think that I should maybe tear down before we even get into the year? That's true.

And you can be a great conversation for that. We don't like calling it that. We don't like calling it assumptions, but that's really what they are. Yes, yes, for sure.

So JC, you worked on a lot of different companies over the year. Whenever people come to you and say our customer experience isn't working or maybe even our employee experience is having some gaps, what do you first think is actually broken? The idea of what experience is itself or definition of experience, I think, is broken. And what I mean by that is that we've spent so much time and you have to give forester a lot of credit for going back to this very idea of what experience means.

And if you ask any company what experience means, they'll go through talk about touch points and customer interactions and how to make them better. But if you ask them, how are you doing that in a way that provides real functionality, reduces effort, increases accessibility, connects emotionally. A lot of people don't realize that that really is at the very core what an engineer or experience is. So you think that just like our definition of experience has maybe kind of pulled away from the actual human experience at the heart of this?

I agree. And I hate pointing fingers, but I think that I tend to blame vendors, especially technology vendors for that. Because if you remember back in the days where CRM came out, the idea of CRM was exactly that, customer relationship management. How do I manage the relationship?

What are the nuances of the relationship expectation for each customer segment? And then slowly, all the way to today, you can't say the word CRM without saying technology blank. That manages our contacts and that's right. I'm not going to advertise any given one of them, but you know the ones that I'm talking about.

For sure, yeah. And I think that over time that has happened with the idea of experience. It started out with a very simple idea that whether I'm doing something individually, I don't want one with an individual or with a company or with a brand, by experience, I mean the things that I do to get from point A to to point B in a way that is functional, accessible, effective, and connected for me as an individual, right? Or for my company, if it's a B2B situation, but now unfortunately, you say experience, people think methodologies, people think rating systems, they think technology for managing the customer experience or CX, and we've lost a lot of the human component and what it means to real people.

It feels like a lot of the times when we try to define something, we latch on to the how, like how I'm going to do it, how I'm going to measure things, not the actual what is it. So, Jay, see if you were to redefine customer experience, what would you say? I'm a little selfish here because as you know, I dive more into the psychology of how people manage expectations, how they set those expectations, negotiate them, etc, including not just the psychology, but the social aspects of managing expectations and the cultural aspects of managing expectations.

So, when I do my experience, I have to kind of throw that a little bit and I keep the very first part of what we've learned from Forcer over time, which is experience is what people expect from your company to get the value that they needed or want it from it or pay for it, based on the expectations that you mutually set for that outcome to happen. So, yes, experience is the very thing, the individuals, the collective assessment of how I felt, what I did, how I communicated, but it always has to be in context with what people expected from that experience because my experience as a economy class passenger is very different as the experience flying first class.

Why? Because of my expectations. Yeah, and this expectation versus experience mismatch, right? So, we see a lot of the times where the experience I'm getting doesn't match my expectation or it exceeds my expectation.

How delightful and wonderful is that when that occurs, right? So, this mismatch, where if we get kind of like too latched on to the experience component and don't think about what's the expectation that consumers coming in with initially, how does a company diagnose that there is this expectation experience mismatch going on? When a customer that you know that you've given them 100% of what the SOW or the contract says, and they still leave, you know that they're somewhere misalignment and expectations.

There's something that a lot of companies don't understand because we train our employees on how to talk about our product really well about aligning the expected experience between the user of the product or service and you know what they paid for, but we don't really talk about really ultimately what was their expectation. Not the alignment of what your product does with what it did, but the alignment of the expectations of what your product does with what they expected it to do and the outcome they expected it to deliver.

And that's a very, very different thing, very, very different thing. I relate this back to content. We make podcasts, obviously here at Mission, and there's this handy mantra that we think about, which is promise, proof, and then like delivery, right? Like that I actually deliver on this thing that I promised, right?

And the promise would be like if we think about a YouTube experience, right? I'm on YouTube, I see the title of the episode, I see the thumbnail, and that creates this promise of what I'm going to learn. I click in and I want proof within the first 30 seconds that I'm going to get whatever I, whatever I thought, right? And then the actual rest of the episode or piece of content that you consume me and hopefully delivers on that.

And if any three of those things misalign, then now you've lost a customer or a consumer or a viewer for life, right? Because they're not going to trust that you're going to actually deliver on the thing that you promised. So how does the role of the actual whole customer journey sort of near that, right? If you think about marketing, like marketing sort of makes a promise or sales makes a promise.

And then the actual delivery of that whatever experience it is, product, service, maybe it misaligns with that initial promise that that that person had. Like how do I think about this actual customer journey sort of mapping in that way? I'm a big believer in going back to the basics, and which by the way, I think we align very much in this listening to some of your podcasts and the idea of bringing it back to simplest possible explanation and also how do you connect it to a proven methodology, right?

So I try to break things down in that way. For a very brief period of time we talked about, I talked to you about teaching at first at Rodgers and then a program that is now part of, I'm blown away, 34 universities, right? And I remember my co-partner co-teacher, Carol Buren's and I sat down talking about, hey, you know, there's so many associations that already have a customer experience program. What are we going to do different at this Rodgers executive customer experience program that's going to kind of differentiate us from the other programs that kind of, you know, gets people to say, well, I already got my CXB certification, but what else is there that I can apply to my everyday experience as a customer experience practitioner and the one thing that really stood out in alignment to, you know, with what we're talking about today is that we kind of switch the learning from experience first and then gradually towards business to business first, the psychology of it and then talk about the experience because the foundation of whether or not we even have the ability to live on expected expectations goes back to our business model, right?

You know, the business model generation, all those that amazing work that that also Wilder has done and continues to do that says, there's very specific blocks. One of those blocks is the relationship, but you cannot make decisions about the relationship and the kind of experiences you're going to deliver until you figure out if your value proposition aligns with the right customer segments and whether or not you have the money, the people, the resources, the partnerships and the right activities that are going to allow you to deliver on the expected experience for that customer segment.

And we kind of, kind of like just fly right over that. We can escape right over that and we go to, oh my gosh, what should this experience feel like? What should this experience be like? What, you know, who's going to be in charge?

Should we need a CXO to be in charge of that and experience this and belong to the CXO or to the CX team experience belongs to all of us? So it's got to be first the foundation of understanding and I think it's so crude, right? But it's a reality. First the reality of what?

What can our business model really afford to do? Based on the expectations of the customer segments that we serve well, that best aligned with a value proposition, then you can start the experience engineering process. But to your question, I think that the biggest mistake we make today and what we've lost our way is that we made experience not an additive, but we made it the main ingredient. And that's not true.

Business, our business model is a main ingredient. And based on our business model, we can make determinations of experience as an additive and we can define what that experience means to each of the people that are that our value proposition is designed to serve. That makes total sense. And when I think about to the like especially bigger businesses, when we really get into this idea of like siloing information, right?

So like, marketing's over here, sales over here, product is over here, and now experience is all the way over here. You're like, okay, if we're not communicating across the board here on how these things work, there's really no point of having this whole experience team. They need to understand each of these steps. And truthfully, if these other departments are doing their jobs well, it does create already a great experience.

And so then you're really just building off of something that's already going well, right? You're not trying to artificially create a good experience post, you know, sale or post product creation. Yeah, very true. And I think that, you know, we all have a job in in the experience journey of our customers.

And it is holistic by definition, but not by by function. And what I mean by that is that it's not the job of every member of the company to deliver on the whole experience, but to deliver well on a very specific piece that feeds to the experience, right? And that's what we have to empower our, you know, our support people to be able to say, okay, my part of the experience should include helping make it right where someone else did not do the right thing in the experience journey.

If they fail in doing that or we were not accountable as we should have been to that experience, somebody else didn't do it. You know, who is it that is going to make it right? But yeah, we all have a piece that fits fits into the larger experience, but sometimes we take on a little too much and then fail altogether on the things that we should have delivered within our role. Or to your point earlier, we're focusing on sort of the wrong things like I'm looking over at the metrics and looking over all these strategies and these methodologies, but instead what I should be doing is maybe aligning my team on literally the definition of experience and on expectations across the board, right?

And I don't blame people, by the way. I don't blame people because I think that they are some fine lines between what is just a good human thing to do and what is part functionally of our customer experience program, right? For example, I should be nice to you because I make human being and kindness should be incorporated into the way we do business with everybody. But if I'm going, you know, as far as giving you a product for free, thinking that I'm kind, that I'm stepping over the objective of the customer experience of my company, which is helping the individual use the product as intended, making it more easy for them to do what they're using the product to do and then connecting them emotionally in some way, like making it easy and enjoyable.

And I think we can talk about that, right? What's the psychology you're doing things right? What is the psychology of managing expectations that our human expectations versus our objective to deliver experience for the customer? When do we separate it?

When we're are the lines that separate each of those things? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, and you mentioned you, you know, your teaching and one of the things that you've been teaching companies is something they call dialogue seven. And I would just love to hear from you what that is because I really do think it's a great framework for people to sort of start out their journey on this path of trying to understand expectations and how they actually impact business.

Yeah. So, you know, we talked a little bit about how people kind of put things backward, right? We tend to say, let's provide the best possible experience, but we kind of forget to define the expectations that people have. And so, the dialogue seven framework tries to get people thinking about the right conversations necessary to start that relationship correctly and then work towards defining what that experience should look like in that relationship.

You know, if you and I have met for the very first time within each other at all, we sat down at the table. If we knew nothing about each other or why we're sitting across from that table, the first question that we asked would not behave, what kind of experience would you like to have? The question you ask is, why are we here? Yeah.

What is the nature of this relationship? What defines it? What are its boundaries? What value do you expect from this relationship?

And then I'm going to tell you what value I expect. And then in the middle, we're going to negotiate what is the cost necessary to achieve that value? And so, the dialogue seven framework starts there. It is inclusive of social exchange theory and the basic idea that we are all in a social exchange to achieve our value expectations.

And the only reason why I will consider you values expectations or value expectations is whether or not it's going to cost me less or more to get my value expectations. Right? So, if I say, you know, let's define the relationship, which is element number one, definition. And I say, let's define what this relationship is about and what each part in the relationship expects out of it.

The first question I'm going to ask is in exchange for what? If it's a transactional relationship, then I define the value by saying, you're selling me a hammer. That hammer costs five dollars. That's a very inexpensive hammer.

You know, hammers can go for a lot more than that. A hammer for five dollars. That's a good deal. Lacey, here's my five dollars.

I get the hammer. But if in the process of you handing me the hammer and you handing you the money, you say, hey, hold on a minute. It's five dollars for me to hand you the hammer. It's a hundred dollars for me to come back and maintain the handle and keep it the handle and they head together.

Right? Now my valuation of five dollars goes in a very different direction. So, you know, in context with our conversation, our experience, we do that to people all the time. We say, this product is going to be only this much money or this service is only going to cost you this much in financial or monetary terms.

But we don't talk about the other costs, emotional costs that are necessary to discuss for me to assess whether this relationship, this exchange, is fair and whether the expectations are within the constraints of our relationship. So value always comes first. Culture always influences because, you know, if I say, here's a hammer and here's five dollars, my culture is going to say, hey, hold on just a minute. Let's just not do that.

As I put Reacon Latin mail, let's have a cup of coffee. Let's sit down. Tell me about your family. What kind of hammer is this?

Where did it come from? Right? Now, all of a sudden time and the expectations of time, the expectations of the inclusion of culture may be values because that's really why I wanted to know you better because those are my values. Now, all of a sudden, you have to add that cost of being inclusive of my value system, my beliefs, my culture.

So, culture is number two. And we call it centrity because in Latin centers, that's what we really, really what it means is what makes up the center of what something or someone is. So we assess the value. I didn't know that.

That's the very, very cool word. It's a medical jargon that when you think about the centers or something, you actually are talking about the very nucleus of what something is. And unfortunately, we also use that term incorrectly. We say customer centrity.

And we don't realize centrity is not about, you know, what a person does, but who a person is at the very, very core of who they are. I love that. I love that term. So if we can have a conversation of value, we can talk a conversation about the cost of centrity and being inclusive.

If we can move to the third conversation and say, great, what is the expected level of engagement to accomplish the value, right? What's the level of engagement? I could sit at the table with you, Lacey, with zero engagement. We could have an email that said the, the hammer is five dollars.

I have five dollars. We could have sat across for each other with zero engagement, other than look, and we could have just exchanged five dollars for hammer. But for most people, Facebook marketplace experiences, exactly. Or you could go marketplace and just sell it there and not even talk to a person.

But when you go back to, okay, how much engagement is going to be required for that? I'm going to call you every other day to ask you to give me support for the hammer. I'm going to have to, you know, maybe, maybe I'm a carpenter and I use the hammer as my primary hammer. And I want to call you every day to tell you about what amazing job I did after I finished, you know, a campaign project.

And so you may not have those expectations. And when I bring those expectations of engagement to the mix, what level of effort, what level of actual connection, what level of friction is going to be involved, then again, we're adding, we're adding costs to the value equation. And so the third conversation must be engagement. And of course, the other conversations are really more about the maintaining of the relationship and the exchange.

And you have to know what knowledge expectation is required. Maybe I've never used the hammer before. And it's going to cost you a lot of time just to teach me how to use the hammer. Maybe I have expectations that you know everything about hammers.

So the burden of proof is on you to teach me about hammers. And for you to have the knowledge of what a hammer is, you'll have to have the ability, right? It's not just about ability and knowledge is about accountability, which is a combination of those. So those two conversations, conversations four and five are about what are my expectations for knowledge and ability?

Are you willing to do it? Are you able to do it? Do you know how to do it? And you know, sadly, my experience working with companies, that probably is the number one thing that falls apart most of the time in conversations from which perspective the consumer not understanding or the business not explaining.

I think it's both both, right? It's like, it's, you know, back to the magic word that you use at the beginning, assumptions, assumptions. I am a salesperson and I sold you a million dollar contract for my technology products and services and you knew the product inside and out, but you have never used it. So that knowledge was missing.

So yeah, I had the ability to buy and you had the ability to teach me about the product to a certain degree, but now that I'm ready to start using it and apply it to me, I'm going to go back to the salesperson. They don't have the knowledge. I had to go back to different person. So did I know that?

Did people know, and this is where I'm talking about from both sides, sometimes it is the customer's fault because they go in making assumptions that not a long knowledge is required for me to use this product for what I need it. And then when I realize that much more knowledge is necessary, I go over to the company and they say we're not accountable for that. Right. We're not responsible.

Then now is your problem. So those conversations, expectations of how much do each party need to know to get the value and how accountable they are to the different, the value they promised is it's a marriage of two things that are extremely important. And then we'll wrap it up with the other two, which is things that you and I know about is, you know, we don't often talk about transparency. We talk about trust.

We tend to say, oh, you can trust this product. And I say, I don't want you to give me trust. I'm going to figure that out of myself. Product is an end result.

So the conversation that you and I need to have is not about product, trust expectations. The conversations that we need to have is about expectations of transparency. How much access do I need? How much transparency that you're willing to give me?

And what is it going to cost me? We keep going back to that cost. How much is it going to cost me to actually get through what I need to know to trust you? And when you say cost, you're not just speaking about actual financial costs, but like the cost of time, right, or the cost of the emotional effort that I need to put in because I backed my whole budget on this new product that I just bought.

And now I have to do XYZ thing. And my boss is looking at me like, hey, do you wanted that promotion? And now this isn't delivering. So there's so many different levels of cost.

It's not just that financial piece, right? Absolutely. We tend to think financially first because we're business people, right? But we forget that time is a cost.

Effort is a cost. Emotional real estate is a cost. The cost that we put on the emotional welfare of our employees is a cost. So yes, we have to have the conversations about what is going to cost us to be in a business relationship across many different factors that are going to take away from the value itself.

The last conversation, by the way, is experience. So at the very end, now we're talking about experience. And so after all these six conversations that have occurred, what does that seventh conversation about experience actually look like then? I go back and forth in the terminology and the book I call it staging.

And the reason why I call it staging is because when you go to a play, you don't just show up and how people go, now you're going to get whatever play we give you. You already came in with certain expectations about what that experience was going to look like because yeah, right? I go to certain concerts because that's the kind of music I like and I've heard the record and I know what kind of concert I want to get. We just, my wife and I just went to see postmodern jukebox.

Oh, I love them. They're amazing. But have you ever heard them add an underground cave in the months of Georgia, right? It's like, well, wait a minute.

Postmodern jukebox is amazing. I understand what experience I will probably get from a concert with them. But now they're in a cave. Wow.

Is that going to sound better? Is it going to sound worse? Yeah. So was it better?

Was it? How was it? It was incredible. By the way.

Oh, wow. I'm so jealous. Yeah. And it was based on my my base level experience of what I knew about them, right?

But the point that I'm trying to make about experience and the end up final conversation in the dialogue seven framework is you cannot start with experience. You cannot start and say, this is what this is how I'm going to treat you because I don't know about you. I don't know about your value expectations, your definition of value. I don't know about your culture.

I don't know about the level of engagement you expect knowledge and accountability issues. I don't know about the level of transparency is going to take. How can I go and define experience without understanding your expectations for those other things? You did mention the thing that companies missed the most, which was knowledge.

Was there anything else that like you see companies miss? When I initially wrote the book back in 2017, I was smack in the middle of all my doctoral work. And I decided that anything that I was going to study had to do with business because I didn't want to go and do clinical work. I wanted to stay in organizational psychology, doctoral organization psychology.

So I kind of picked a research topic that I had to do with what expectations companies bring when making decisions about technology purchases. And so we surveyed about a thousand different companies, which is where the seven things came came from. Overall, the results included descriptions of expectation misses or misalignments, or need for negotiation in certain expectation areas that use close to eleven hundred different words to talk about the same things. They all rolled off to the seven things.

Out of the seven things, engagement and understanding what engagement really meant and knowledge were the two things that really stood out. Third to that was culture, really understanding or acknowledging the influence that culture, both local culture, national culture have on how people manage expectations. But yeah, the first one was knowledge, but the second one was engagement. I use an analogy of gears all the time when I speak.

And I tell people that you may have seen a video. I posted a video recently about it. It's a simple idea that a gear requires connection, right? If you have one gear, one gear here, connection without connection, there's no movement.

But just because you've connected to something doesn't mean that you have the right amount of friction to make it move. And so I try to appeal to companies to understand that engagement is not just connection and it's not just communication. It's connection that compels movement. And for some people, the expectation is that you increase the friction.

And for some people, it requires that you decrease the friction. And friction is not about what right? Friction may require that we just press with enough friction to kind of get to a point, to get better understanding, to get more clarity. For those of us who love conflict and have the job of managing conflict, I love friction, right?

Friction emerges so many great discussions. So people are uncomfortable with it. Yeah, I've had discussions several times with different folks around the word friction specifically. And everyone's definition of that word definitely runs the gamut of what people think friction is.

And oh, it's always bad or it's actually can be a good thing because it creates like an investment from the customer in the process of them purchasing something, right? But I like the idea that it's definitely a neutral term, right? It can be good. It can be bad.

It just sort of depends on the situation and how we're leveraging friction. And also while you're saying that, Jay-Z, I am trying to teach my three-year-old how to ride a bike, a pedal bike. And it's the same thing like he's trying to push on the pedal and he just can't get the pedal to go. And so like, I'm like, okay, he needs more friction.

Or maybe we need to like, I don't know how pull him along a little bit. But the entire time we're talking, I was just thinking visually. I like my three-year-old trying to ride this pedal bike. That's true.

And you know, I even kind of found that analogy, right? It's like, what do people expect when they don't place the right amount of, you know, when there's not enough engagement between people, between functions, between organizations, I include the community as a stakeholder in that as well, right? What do you expect when you don't have expectation conversations about what engagement means and what is the depth and level and amount of engagement necessary based on the expectations that people bring?

I'm a highly engaging person, right? I like to engage with people at the deepest possible level because I know how you want to communicate based on what I know about you. Some people don't feel comfortable, some people rather, especially the younger generation, they rather you text and the rather you communicate with them via a mobile device on things to do with business, on things that have to do with personal things, which is what we tend to demonize millennials erroneously.

It's not that millennials don't like engagements. They just don't like engagements that waste their time. And they have found better ways to communicate certain things that traditionally we've used to, you know, to our meetings for. Yeah, yeah.

Could that meeting have been an email? Probably. That's right. Well, you know, you shared all these seven steps into the seven conversations.

Last one being actual experience. And when I hear you talk about these like seven different conversations that need to occur, what does that actually look like in action? Is this me actually like as a sales rep or, you know, or as a consumer of a product like trying to make sure I hit these seven topics or how do I practically do this to make sure that we are aligned on expectations before we move forward? The most ambitious thing in my head when I wrote the book and as I teach workshops and teach people this aspirationally, what I'm hoping people will do is be aware of them, right?

So that really is the first level. I think that being aware of the fact that you can't jump to experience and you can't just stay in value. You cannot start with number one and stay in number one and you cannot start with number seven unless you address the other six. So the awareness is the most important aspect of of my work and what I try to do.

And by that, I mean that if I sit down with you, I want to be aware that I understand expectations for our relationship based on those seven things. Ideally, I would love to walk in the door saying, okay, I know the value this person expects and the cost is going to take from a perspective of communication, engagement, culture, accountability, knowledge, transparency. And then based on that, I'm going to stage or or designing experience that allows them to get what they need without those other things costing them too much.

So awareness is number one. But in my work, it has taken a lot of different shapes. Most of the time, and it's kind of funny because when I wrote the book, I thought, oh my gosh, this book is going to sell thousands of copies by HR people and like chief people officers are going to buy the books for everybody. And it turns out that that's not really who started buying my book.

The highest sale on my book at any given event or company was for professional services companies. Because they themselves did not know how to manage expectations with their peers, with their company and with the client. Like project managers would come and say, well, my expectation is that we get this done on time and on budget. Well, one of the expectations of your peers to make that get the time and budget.

What are the experiences of your clients? Yeah. And I think you bring up a good point here too. It's not like the way that you can roll out this strategy isn't just I'm trying to make a good experience for my customer, but literally like human conversation is the hardest thing we do day to day.

We communicate with you, right? And and that happens every relationship at work whether it is with a client or it's with an internal employee is all about mismatched or expectations and hopefully trying to set expectations that are aligned. So I think that is a really valid point here is that this framework isn't just for I'm trying to sell you something and I want to understand all these things. It can also be like I'm a boss and I'm trying to have a conversation with my employee on what expectations we have about the job role that they're doing or vice versa.

The employees trying to figure out like what is my what's my CEO needing and how can I support them? Yeah, a lot of professional services team what they'll do is they know that they only have you know because time and materials but you're building for your time. So they know they only have maybe five 15 minutes with a customer. You can't have every single person in the project go talk to the customer and when you do have that talk to the customer you may only have 15 minutes.