Why Great Leaders Communicate Like Creators

You can tell a story with a single image, how can you compact what you're trying to say into something that's memorable, relatable, and actionable. Maybe there are three key words. Memorable, relatable, actionable. You've got to remember it.

You've got to know what it means to you and you've got to be able to do something about it. Otherwise, that's just noise. There's plenty of noise in companies today. If you need someone that can help you deliver that in podcast format, then you know where I am.

As soon as Microsoft invented PowerPoint slides, here we are. Just stuck. Right, because where's the follow-up? Have you captured that spark, some sort of inspiration?

The younger generations really resonate with authentic communication and they won't want to work at companies where they don't feel like they trust your leadership team. So the whole idea is that we make your CX strategy viral through the medium of podcasting. For the last 20 years, slide decks have been the go-to way we share information in business, but that's about to change and thank goodness it is. This week, I'm joined by Ben Phillips, the founder of CX Alive, to talk about what's broken and how we communicate inside companies and what we can do to fix it.

A huge part of a great customer experience starts at what the employee understands. So how you disperse information inside your business to teach your employee about CX is vital and helping them be able to deliver a great experience for the customer. And today's conversation with Ben, we get into why you should treat your employees like customers when it comes to making content for them, how to actually make data interesting, and why short-form video, even for just internal updates, is actually a secret weapon that more teams should be using.

Ben also puts on his myth-busting hat and busts the myth of NPS. It's something you're not going to want to miss and you absolutely must hear. And if that's not click BADY enough, we also talked about the death of the survey. So if your team uses surveys, which you probably do, and you love and cherish NPS, you should definitely tune in to hear what Ben has to say about that.

Ben and I also talk about what AI-powered feedback might look like in the future and how that's going to continue to change the necessity of surveys. But before we get over to the episode, hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, and as you're listening in, if there's any burning questions coming in mind, feel free to drop them in that comment box or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you. So without further ado, you're listening to Experts of Experience.

I'm your host, Lacey Peace, and here is Ben Phillips, the founder of CX Alive. Ben, welcome to Experts of Experience. Hello, how are you? I'm great.

Where are you calling in from? I want the listeners to know what time it is for you. Oh, well, okay. Well, this is sunny melt and keen, so if you've never heard of it, there's a kind of new build city smack in the middle of the United Kingdom, and it's by the clock 25 to 5 in the afternoon now.

Awesome. Yeah. So thank you so much for taking the time today with us. I'm really excited.

There is some really cool news that I am eager for you to share with our audience, which is that you have launched a new business. Could you tell us about CX Alive? Sure. I have.

Yeah. So 20 years in this industry has left me to think, you know, maybe it's time I give it a go on my own. So I've launched the business. That's right.

Yeah, we're called CX Alive, stylized with an explanation mark. And the fundamental business is a podcasting service for businesses. So it's a B2B service, if you like. But what we do is this, right?

So we take podcasting as a format, which appeals to anybody that has a short attention span, loves the quick fire, quick information, mobile format, watch anywhere, anytime, rewatch, repeat, and share. And we take business context information, put it into that format, and then share it across companies. So the whole idea is that we make your CX strategy viral through the medium of podcasting. So yeah, it's something I'm really passionate about.

And I've just started that. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations on launching the business.

Thank you. What were you seeing at some of the companies you've been working at before that made you say, hmm, this is something that's needed and something like, I'm really interested in solving. Well, I think combination of things, including the CX strategy is not all that relatable to people across the front line. Most CX strategies are designed for maybe 5% of the company than the other 95% are out doing their day jobs, right?

They're not necessarily connected to what the strategy really wants them to be able to do and deliver. It doesn't necessarily talk in their language. And until it becomes important to every colleague, then nobody really cares about it. Sorry to say CX professionals out there.

So I thought, well, how do we leverage the modern format, which is really designed for Gen Z and millennial colleagues coming through the business? Because in 5, 10, 15 years time, they're going to be running your company. So think ahead, right? Talk to them now when a format that works and appeals and that is accessible, rather than relying on that historic death by a PowerPoint, lengthy modular training courses, all the traditional ways of communicating stuff to people, which barely gets consumed, understood, or even acted on, because it's not in a format that people really readily consume.

So that's the reason I came up with a format. Yeah. So just for everyone to have complete clarity on what it is. So this would be a video that is produced for internal sharing, not necessarily like externally.

Here's, I'm explaining to the customer how X, Y, Z things works, but it's like, here's what NPS score is. Here's what this is. Here's our goal. Here's our strategy, but not just writing it out in a document or to your point, like a 50 page slide deck with much metrics that no one will remember.

You're trying to create something that's actually engaging and interesting to people that might have less time or shorter attention spans or need something that's going to actually stick in their brain. Yeah, I mean, let's say you had eight to 10 minutes to sit down and watch a quick video with the CEO, head of ops, head of marketing, head of IT, whoever the senior professional is that you want on the call, I'd be the host having that dialogue with them and we talk about the subject matter at the heart of the conversation, relaying that to all colleagues in a way that they can understand now what they need to go away and do with that information.

So it's all about the method of communication, the understanding and the call to action that's really the driver behind all this. You know what I love about podcasts and podcast is the intimacy factor, the authenticity factor, right? So like it's actually be able to hear your CTO, your CIO, your CEO, the CXO, whoever it is, on camera on, might explain something. Now suddenly I feel way more connected to my leadership team than if they had just sent over an email with some slides attached, right?

That's it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, so I love this format, but I kind of want to start with a little bit more of these problems that you had been seeing. You had a great story that you shared about your previous company where you had created kind of the first iteration of this and you had created a video that explained NPS.

Do you mind just walking our audience through that story? Yeah, so almost unintentionally, that's what led to CXO Live. But yeah, about two years ago, I was thinking, look, how do we distill information to colleagues in a way that's consumable, short, punchy, little bit different? You can insert or embed a link into a newsletter, company website, whatever.

So I thought, I think I've recorded just a few slides about what is net promoter score, because back in my last company for Jitsu, like many companies, we had a global survey program, as was annual relationship NPS that happened once a year, really important when the survey results landed. But you need to do a bit of pre-work to people to say, look, we're measuring this thing, but actually what is it? So I felt that it was necessary to do this one video to just tell people what's net promoter score, how should you use it, how should you think about it, where's it even come from?

So in two minutes, 59 seconds, hence the NPS in three minutes titles, see what I did there. I just recorded myself on clickchamp or something like that, few slides with me with a little sort of head shot floating in the corner of the screen, just sort of innocuously posted it on our company in Trinit, and it more or less blew up, and it got hundreds of views, I don't want to say thousands, I'm not quite sure, but it might be in those numbers now. And still was one of the most rewatched videos at the point where I actually did fidgets who just slightly earlier this year.

And the reason is because it's short, informative, speaks basic language, you know, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to get the whole thing about customer experience analytics or how NPS is calculated, it's not important. So yeah, that's that's the story behind that video and why it worked so well. No, I love that. And I think speaking in the language that anyone can understand is so important, because again, you mentioned at the top of this, like sure, one percent of your team who exists at this very high strategy level in CX would understand all the lingo metrics, etc.

But like if I'm trying to communicate with someone who's on the floor, maybe a customer service agent, and like actually you need to understand what this is and why it's important, they are not going to be able to understand all that, or maybe they could, but they just like it wouldn't stick in their brain the same way as if I had just like felt like I talked to Ben and he just explained it to me. Yeah, and there's all kinds of research you can do on learning methodologies, right?

So I think there's a whole thing around if you take an hour of learning, the human brain really only remembers the first and last 10 minutes, and all of that sort of noise in between is lost. So you might remember snippets, but what are the really punchy things that you want to cut through and make sure that people know? And actually, if you didn't digest it that well, then could you rewatch it? Well, yeah, I'll do that if it's a three minute video, but I'm not going to do it if it's an hour's intense training course again.

I don't have that time in my life. So that's another reason why this stuff needs to be repeatable, rewatchable, shareable, you know, all kinds of reasons. It keeps file sizes low. You know, it's a small part of everybody's day.

You know, there's all kinds of reasons why it's good to do it in short punchy format. And so talking more about that format piece, I mean, if we look back at the evolution of communication and business, right? I feel like we got so stuck in slide land. Like for just years, it's like as soon as Microsoft invented PowerPoint slides, here we are, just stuck.

So like, talk to me a little bit about how you've seen communication evolve, even in your career. And why you think it's so important right now that we make this shift. I used to joke some people would say, what would you do for a living? And I used to say, well, I do PowerPoints.

In some companies, the culture is everything is by PowerPoint. Send me your deck, send me your slides. And it's almost like it's not a thing if you don't have a deck about it. And in a way, you understand, because people, you know, have you sat down and thought about this?

If you articulated it clearly, if you strategized, if you pieced it together, can you tell me it in sequence storyboard format? So we know my PowerPoint has always been more successful. But I think it's someone like Steve Jobs once said, you know, don't send me a PowerPoint full of bullet points. And bullet pointed list is a shopping list, you know, eggs, bacon, lettuce, not business activity, business action thing you should know about.

So we've got lost in PowerPoint land over the years, because that's just how it's gone. So well down Microsoft on inventing that for us. I think that, you know, just as all I've said before, there's no way you're going to be able to capture because there's no cap on how many slides you should write someone, right? You get these decks of 50, 60.

How are you supposed to consume all that information? And nobody has the appetite to do it. I've seen it done at exact level. So if a results come in, well intentioned customer experience team, start churning out all this beautiful insight and it's amazing stuff.

But in the wrong format, it's much easier and much more effective to communicate that to someone verbally and visually. And we, you know, it's this whole memory recall stuff as well. You can do research on if you present, talk, articulate, animate, you know, very much like I'm doing now and do it with backup visuals that really emphasize a point that is way more effective and has a ton more recall value than bombard me with slides. We have this propensity to over tell the story when we have a blank sheet of paper in front of us, right?

We'll write 100 words when actually we could write 10. I think AI is getting good at helping us with that, you know, people who run their content through AI and say make it small, make it punch, make it distilled. We are getting better and that's helping us. But still there's there's too much.

It's also the opposite of that, right? Where it's like, I have this little short idea. Make it long and make it beautiful and make it really. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All my strategy for me if I'm just three words or something.

Yes. Yes. Right. I've seen, I'm sure everyone has seen this meme over and over again on LinkedIn, where it's like, look, AI helped me write this long email.

And then the person who gets long emails like, look, AI helped me summarize this into a short full of the list, right? So yeah, I think it's a great tool and it can certainly help us articulate our thoughts a bit better. But with anything, if you, as you mentioned, have this, like, uncapability to just keep writing more words or creating more slides without any idea of like, then he thought really of, how is this person going to consume it? What's their experience going to be of it?

And it's like a totally different skill set, right? To actually learn storytelling and how people's brains works versus, you know, I've been doing slides all through high school, through college, now I'm in my career and doing slides like that feels very comfortable. But to tell me that I need to now think about how someone's reading this. What's the story I'm telling?

Like, that's a totally different skill set that is hard to teach. So I'm kind of curious how you think about that with teams. Well, I have a few rules that I go by. Things like more white space is better.

That means you've probably managed to say what you're trying to say by using up less screen, what would they call it? Maybe screen real estate, right? So you're just using the pieces of the white space that you've, the blank canvas, if you like, that you've got in front of you to tell the story. I did an internal presentation on presenting about six months ago, and I remember you can tell a story with a single image, you know, a really good one that we use in businesses icebergs.

So you have to tip of the iceberg and then the water and then the huge ice as volume underneath. And that's users and analogy to say what you can often see is just this much, but actually behind the scenes, behind the curtain, backstage, back office, there's all this stuff going on in you really. So single images help tell stories. I'm a big fan of the power of free as well.

And this is a psychological thing in people, you know, we love something, something else and an alternative or a thing something else and then something in the middle or, you know, an opposite and opposite and under comparison. So there's a, there's a whole brain psychology around three part lists of three key actions, three key headlines, three things you should know, three numbers, you know, these are all really important in the way that we consume business data. But again, I think you can do that super effectively verbally because actually talking about three things is not overwhelming.

Talking about 15 insights from your latest round of customer experience results and that would be overwhelming. So that's another reason why it's important to keep it short and punchy. And I think too, it comes back to like, what is the core message or story I'm trying to craft or or goal I'm working towards, right? If I can put 30 different data points down, maybe only three of them are actually relevant to this thing that we're trying to march towards as a company.

It does require you to go the extra step of analyzing all the data and actually coming up with no like this stuff while interesting and like we'll take note of it and might influence some decisions down the line. These are the things that like my executive team needs to know. And separately, maybe there's something completely different that my teams that are on the ground, my customer service agents, the customer service reps need to know. And this is like what I'll share with them.

So it does require like understanding, yeah, who is who's the audience? How do I craft this specifically for them? Sometimes scaling means giving your people the backup they need to crush the big stuff. That's where Agent Force comes in.

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I don't know if there's any other like advice you have around taking like a big story and trying to condense and down to something that you can actually deliver to your audience. Someone said to me recently and reminded me that if you could take the default position of that if you try to make sure everything you say solves the problem versus just being apparently valuable, then you're probably doing much better than you would if you just thought that you were relaying valuable information.

There's a difference between informative information, valuable information. Informative is interesting. Good to know. Glad I do.

I feel there's no FOMO. I feel included. Valuable information is I might be able to take that and do something. But actually, I think the more you compress that information down into something very much distilled that solves a business problem, that's the difference between just listening to it and sitting up and taking attention because if your business problem you are trying to solve empathizes completely with your audience member, then there's no reason why they wouldn't pay attention to that.

They will listen. They will sit up and go, you're trying to solve the problem I have. Okay, I'm good now. I'm going to listen to what you have to tell me.

So start your default day by saying how many problems am I going to solve? What is the business issue you were trying to tackle? Not. I'm just going to tell everybody how wonderful we are.

Look at all this amazing insight that we generate. That's all good. Is it valuable? Is it relatable?

I've heard others talk about this where you start with the ending and then you write the rest of the book. This is where I'm trying to get to. This is the insight. This is the goal.

Then I can go back track and figure out how do we actually get there? I've got a good one on that very quickly. At Santander, we did this, mortgages. If you say to someone, what do you need a mortgage?

Oh, because I need a mortgage to be able to buy a house. That's not actually your goal. Your goal is, and here's where you inject the emotion to the story, you want a safe space where you can raise your family, or not if you don't have a family, but a roof over your head. It's your zone.

It's your place. It's where you want to be. It's where you want to live. The fact that you want a mortgage is incidental and actually is the means by which you can achieve your goal.

The mortgage itself is not the goal. Again, just think about what you're trying to do. Therefore, you can build all kinds of emotion around a mortgage product, which, frankly, is probably one of the most boring things in the world to get excited about. Now I'm attached.

Do you tell me this story? I'm like, oh, yeah. Suddenly it's okay to go through this entire process that's very annoying and long. You can bore it.

There's a reason. There's a reason you'll come into that much financial outlay, and you have to tap into the emotion of it, not just fixate on the product, which is why I think a lot of people in product and marketing land focus on it. How can we make them all get detractive? Think about the reason why someone wants one in the first place.

Why does someone want a car? Why does someone want that shirt? Why does someone want to buy something from Amazon? There's reasons behind it.

The reason is the whole purpose behind why the customers on the journey in the first place. I love you tying this back to emotions. We just had a great conversation with a gentleman who I was explaining that I think the definition of CX is just how do you make your customer feel? Like if we just keep it that most basic definition and wrap everything else around that versus like, oh, customer experience is these like these steps in the customer lifecycle and it's this thing and it's this way that they behave and this is how we guide them.

It's as simple as how do they feel? So keeping that in mind with the people that are consuming your content, how does my employee feel whenever they're watching this thing? I think that's really important. So it's interesting because what you're sharing isn't just applicable to customer experience.

And we're talking a lot about customer experience because that's what the core of the show is and that's the product you're providing. But all these lessons and storytelling are highly relevant for sales and marketing. I mean, it's not just the CX teams that are getting bombarded with PowerPoint slides. It's all the teams across the org.

Oh, yeah. And you see it everywhere, right? Again, it's like, what is the main tool by which I feel I can convey my story most effectively? And I just think maybe the weakest conversation in the world is, I just send me some slides, right?

Because where's the follow-up? Where's the engagement? Where's the, have you captured that spark of, you know, some sort of inspiration? Whether you're, you know, let you just set a salesperson, you're sending those slides to a prospect or, you know, you're trying to communicate from business teams to business teams.

These are not the methodologies by which we can do it. Something interesting I have seen started to happen. And I think this is probably a lot to do with AI generation as well. People are putting video content into things like CVs and online job applications, right?

So I saw a job the other day that a CEO of a company was advertising and he recorded himself on his own podcast describing what he thinks the ideal candidate for his position should be. And I thought, you know, it's hardly rocket science, but it's actually a really good thing to do because now I get the sort of much better articulated version of what you expect from your ideal candidate rather than reading bullet by bullet by bullet by bullet by bullet of sort of hiring criteria.

You know, ticking some off and going, oh, no, that's me and ticking others, crossing other ones off and going, oh, I better not apply to that. But when you get the emotional connection too of like, oh, do I like that CEO? Do I like how you're saying that? What's the emphasis on?

Yeah, that's great. I work for this person. And so that's now happening rather than you just reading a list and applying to a screen or a bit of paper. Yeah.

So again, you know, you said earlier, how is this content being used more? I mean, Millennial Gen Z generation are very much used to it already. There's a whole thing about how many seconds can I identify whether this is for me or not? And I think, you know, I've got it in my corporate slide decades about eight seconds.

That's about the average time it takes you to figure out, is this content relevant to me? That's not a lot of time that you've got to get an effective message across to someone. So you kind of have to have that sit up and watch me moment. Yeah.

In the first eight seconds or the brain's already diverted off into something. Is that eight seconds as related to business content, like an employee consumer content? Or is this as related to like social media scrolling? Well, actually, but you see those latter, it is the latter, but those rules apply now to content within business because of the former.

I mean, these are what we said, digital natives that are looking at this content, right? So it's a little bit like customer experience. You judge the customer experience you're about to have from the one that you just had previously. Well, if I have watch business content, I'm going to judge it based on the content I just looked at my lunch break on my mobile phone on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, whatever.

Right. So I'm going to judge how this information is related to me based on that. Now, if my preferred method of consumption is short, sound by tea, snappy, punchy stuff, then actually in order to engage my growing useful workforce, I'd better think as a marketing example, communication head or even an employee lead, how am I going to communicate business concepts to this cohort of colleagues effectively and in that way? So again, that's where this whole sort of mindset shift that I've had from traditional ways of learning and consuming information into this sort of methodology has happened now.

Yeah. Well, and I think it's not just younger generations. I mean, even everyone's getting affected by these algorithms, like how our brains work, our attention span, everything has changed across the board. So I think it's just the future of content consumption and creation.

It's all related to this regardless of age group, but it's especially for the younger age group that is constantly embedded with it. Talking a little bit more about the short attention spans, is there any other forms of content that you have seen work well besides like video? Well, I think it's the split between podcast and podcast that works really well. And if anybody watching this is not sure what the difference is, a podcast is a podcast, but with the video element.

And the reason why I have locked into that so much is because there's an uptick in terms of engagement and recall when you include the video element on top of the podcast element. But to answer your question, think about how consumable audio only is. I mean, again, you know, you commute on a train and if you can't get an internet signal, that's what people are doing. You know, they're sitting there listening to audio content stories, you know, pre-recorded podcast shows.

So there's actually probably some point in the evolution of my company, where I'll think about splitting the format between podcast and broadcast. But initially, I really like the video element just because of the way that you can see the natural use of it earlier authenticity happening between speakers. But I think podcasts are equally as effective. Do you think there's a place for internal podcasts?

I've talked to a few like Chiefs of Staff recently who are like, I would be really cool to have like my CEO, my CMO, my CTO be able to be on mic on a weekly basis to connect directly with our employees, you know, boost them around, kind of explain anything that might be a little crunchy in the organization right now. You know, it's difficult, though, because I feel like you still get the PR thing coming in and being like, well, we can't say that like so that you kind of do lose some authenticity if people like oversensor it and it makes it really hard to produce that on a weekly basis.

But yeah, I mean, I'm just curious if you think that's going to become more common, we're like, I have my own internal content that I get access to as an employee. Yeah. And the key word is authenticity, right? So we've all seen forward thinking CEOs do that kind of studio production version, like where they're standing up and it's clearly rehearsed, you know, scripted, they're looking at it on all and that's all been done by marketing for them.

So really they're just there to say what that says. Yeah. The authenticity element, though, I think is the difference between a colleague buying it and not buying it. And I'd much rather have some rule, maybe, you know, the odd mistake here in their fun-mold line, you know, make it real, make it more like a little bit of a natural conversation, inject that into your business communications.

And I think people will say, do you know what? That was really good. I'm going to tune into the next one when the reminder comes into my inbox in two weeks time. So yes, in our next question, I hope we're going to see a lot more people doing this.

And the more you and me do things like talking about it, the more companies will sit up and go, that's a good idea. No, yeah, I think it's going to become normal. Because I actually think that younger generations really resonate with authentic communication and they don't want to work at companies where they don't feel like they trust your leadership team. It doesn't matter how big the company is, right?

I also have been noticing interesting trend. I don't know if you've been seeing it as well with more audio voice messages. So even in my team, I send them more voice notes of, hey, can you do XYZ thing or a loom video, like a recording on my screen of, hey, can you go check this out for me versus typing up the really long, manifest email with all the tasks I need done. And I love getting that stuff because I feel so much more connected to my coworkers, especially for a remote team.

But yeah, have you seen that increase? I mean, I work in very small teams. So I don't know how this is growing or changing with like enterprise teams. I think you could probably draw up a really nice PowerPoint slide.

I'm kidding. That would say optimal channels of communication for different cohorts and populations based on favored method of communication. But that example of quick voice note by WhatsApp, say, for example, right, is really good for imagine you already a team manager department head and you want to reach out to your entire team and you've got a WhatsApp group set up. You can do that really, really easily in a 30 second voice note.

Or maybe with a graphic attached or something like that, just to embellish the point that you're trying to make. But what an effective way. And I mean, well, 10, 15 years ago, we were still using SMS. Who uses SMS now?

I don't even have it. So yeah, it's those sorts of formats where it's digital first, convenience, now the audio can be transcribed. So, you know, you have all of that sort of power that sits behind it as well. So yeah, I just think, I'll turn, think differently in terms of how you want to communicate, think punchy, think quick, think effective, and think accessible, natural, authentic.

You know, you're going to say much more authentic if you communicate in business via those sorts of channels. And I think people, you mentioned this earlier on our conversation, but I just people are going to be more, they're going to be starving for this. As AI content continues to increase, like, I don't even know if that's you on screen, like, I don't know, right? And you know, so it could be, you know, if I get that WhatsApp message, I'm like, oh, this is definitely my boss.

And this is how she speaks. And I hear her dog barking in the background and her kid, like over your crying, like I feel like you're definitely human. And yeah, I just think there's going to be a place for more and more content like that that can't be copied or or falsified. And people are just going to like love that and crave that and eat that up and keep searching for it.

Well, I can remember there wasn't ever a video a few years back of some guy on a business call and his kid comes into the room as he's on the business call because that daycare didn't stop the kid coming into the room. And we all at the time went, oh, no, yeah, I mean, they are even, I've been in meetings where my kids come and sit on my lap while we're talking business. So the cultural shift in terms of the acceptance of the way that we're doing this now, I mean, COVID's led to a lot of this, right?

We've had to think differently. And maybe this was a spark behind a lot of this, you know, we've had to think differently about how we're going to get key information across to people when we're not in the same room. Maybe that's a big reason for the explosion in PowerPoint that we've seen in the past few years. You know, you can exchange the file, but, you know, we've got teams, video, Riverside, Microsoft, all this stuff that we've got that we can use.

And that's the most effective format. So yeah, I mean, the whole culture behind this has changed in recent years too. Yeah, yeah. And I think to being able to have a tool that you have in place to communicate change quickly, because, you know, with AI, with new technologies constantly coming in, it's not like I can just teach my team member and then a year later, teach them again, and then a year later, teach them again, it's like, no, every month, we're going to need to touch base.

And every month, we might have a new metric we're looking at, and we're going to have a new tool that we're implementing. So having these systems in place where you can have that kind of like easy access to communication that people trust, people like, people maybe like laugh at and kind of look forward to and maybe talk to the co-workers like, hey, did you see, you see EO XYZ, like just sent over this message? I think it's going to become even more important. Yeah, me too, me too.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to get into metrics a little bit now that I do. Okay.

See that up slightly. We talked about this myth-busting that you've been doing, right? Oh, yes. Around myth-busting NPS.

So tell me, how are you myth-busting NPS? Oh, right. This is one of my favorites at the moment. So I'm actually flying to South Africa in about a week's time because I'm doing a keynote at the biggest customer experience event there called CEO in Africa.

And the reason I'm going is because my keynote is all around CX myths. And so again, right? So how do you do effective punchy business messaging in the 20-minute keynote that I've got? So I thought, well, I'm a big fan of bust in CX myths and the definition of that for me is, you know, there's a lot of information out there in the CX marketplace and the reason for that is because we've all come to this industry from different backgrounds.

So we've got a different preconceived ideas. There's no real moderation or policing of the industry as such. You know, we've got freedom of speech so you can say what you like. But the problem is a lot of mis-truths.

You know, well-intentioned. You know, I'm not I'm not implying this or some negativity going underlying bad toxic current going on here. There's a lot of misinformation which is leading to problems. And my favorite at the moment is on net promoter score and how the whole thing I do is do you agree with this statement?

Net promoter score is a measure of loyalty. So I last people, you know, do you think that's the case? A lot of people say, well, yeah, you know, cautiously, because I think I'm going to sort of... Is it your question?

Yeah, right. Very close. The answer, the very short version of this is it can't be a measure of loyalty because it's not actually a measure of anything. Net promoter score, when you look at the wording of the question says, how likely will you be to recommend this company?

Likely? Will you be? That's future tense. So therefore you can't measure something that hasn't happened because you're not measuring whether customer has recommended your organization.

You're asking them if they like you to. So that's why Fred Reicheltz, which is whole thing to earn gross concept a couple years ago. We've seen a lot in the industry about that. But I just think that's the type of thing that you can use to educate within an organization and say just be aware what you're doing with Net promoter.

It doesn't actually track a performance of any kind because the person that told you what their score was is just saying, yeah, I'm likely to go on and recommend. It doesn't mean they will. Doesn't mean they did. And it probably isn't likely that they did.

They're just telling you they like your service enough that they would if someone asked them or they had the opportunity to tell someone. So actually you can bust the whole NPS thing wide open, not to dismiss it at all and say stop measuring it, but to say, no, what it is for. It's a predictor. So don't put it in your nice balance scorecard of revenue, churn, customer attention, employee satisfaction.

Those are all hard measures. You've asked all you've got data on that stuff. NPS doesn't give you data on something that has happened because it hasn't happened yet. So just be aware of how you frame why measure it if you measure it.

Yeah, right. And I'm not, you know, one of these people that beats up NPS all day long and says, you know, oh, you're, you know, I've been doing NPS 20 years and companies and I still think there's some really great stuff you can get out of it. What I'm just trying to say is handled with caution. Yeah.

So for those companies that are paying bonus on it, rewarding and remunerating people just be aware that you're focusing on paying and compensating based on a measure of something that hasn't happened. So just have a think about that, you know, when you leave the office tonight and you're going to come back and see it the same way tomorrow, that's kind of the the thing I do. If not NPS, then what metrics are you looking at? So I'd be low to say go look at customer satisfaction again, because I did a whole CSAT RIP thing a few years ago.

That was based on the fact that CSAT whilst of a similar nature is a little bit more reliant on how the person feels and that's what it's measuring. It's not asking whether someone will do something, right? Saying, are you satisfied or you're not? The problem is with CSAT flatlines at 70 to 80% in every report you've seen.

It never moves and it's boring. We prefer NPS, don't we, right? Because every so often you'll get the spike. I thought the service was awful it and get this emotion.

Yeah. Well, then you get some people saying, I've delighted it and you hold that up as best practice so you get a lot more emotion in that promoter so you can see why people are more attracted to it. I really think if you want to measure something which is meaningful and you can then go do something with it, then things like effort and ease work really well because you're asking, you know, customer, did you have to put a lot of effort in to get out of our service today, what you were hoping to get out of it?

And people say, yeah, I did actually, but they can say, I did actually, but you know what? They didn't phase me that much. I'm cool. I'm fine with it.

I'm still happy. Now, that's a very different conversation than just thinking that someone's either going to promote your brand because they put 9 or 10 or are going to walk away and smash your brand because they put between 0 and 6. So you've got much more nuanced question going on with things like ease and effort. I still don't see them around as much.

I've read a few industry benchmark reports which do things like, you know, what is your main corporate KPI or metric for you know, 80, 90% of companies are using net promoter with a bit of CSAT by the side. And then these effort and ease questions seem to be almost incidental in the mix. So I do think that needs to be, you know, re looked at somehow. So you're kind of advising other folks like, hey, what if we flip this a little bit and looked at these other questions instead of NPS and CSAT?

Yeah, I would go harder on key drivers with any survey or any questionnaire, right? If NPS does a thing, if it performs as it does and I've got it and I'm lucky enough to get it a higher volume and until again, thousands, hundreds of thousands of responses, not tens or hundreds because it's still volatile at those levels. If you're lucky enough to get those sorts of volumes, then go for the first thing I would want to know is why? Why is my NPS behaving that way?

Yes, it's a future predictor. But so I want to know, oh, okay, this is what my customers are telling me they're going to go and do. Why are they doing it? So I go back to my key drivers.

So I'd spend much more time designing my research around the value of the key drivers to my organization and I'd probably think about the different personas in my company that I want to take this data to to help them improve the area of the business. That's how I design my research around them. We all expect fast service now, but inside most companies, speed is still a struggle. It's the approval chains, the handoffs, the who owns what debate.

Agent Force cuts through the mess and actually takes action. It talks to your customers, crushes tasks, and keeps things flowing, all based on prompts and rules that you set. So your customers aren't waiting and your team isn't stuck in the weeds. Speed isn't just a nice to have.

It's a competitive edge, and Agent Force helps you deliver it 24-7. Learn more at salesforce.com slash Agent Force. You mentioned surveys and I would like to talk more about surveys because I've talked to a few folks about this and I've gotten mixed opinions.

I think there might be a death to the survey, like if I'm going to go out there and say the click baity thing, because there's so many new tools now. With AI, I just can't imagine that we're not going to know how a customer's feeling in real time versus them having to tell me after the fact. I don't even feel those things out anymore. What do you think about surveys in the future?

I think I'm on that train for all the reasons that you've said. Again, there's data out there which says that when you survey, you're getting a response from 5% of your population. Your customer base, if you're lucky, 3-5% single digit. What you're doing in research speak is you're taking representative sample of what the whole of the customer base is really thinking.

But that isn't really very fair when you think of it ethnographically because what about the outliers who don't fit into that bucket? You're not really listening to customer stories. You're just taking an example and saying, so this is what we're going to do. You're making business decisions of 3% of your customer base.

I would say it's really biased. Don't you think it's really biased? I either had a great experience and I'm happy to share about it or I had a terrible experience and I want you to know. But those people that had the middle lane and they were just busy and they didn't want to fill out the form.

You don't ever hear from them. You're right. We could probably all think of situations where a company has changed something that we actually quite liked and when the PRs come out about it, they'll say something like based on customer feedback. I'm sitting there reading it thinking, who's feedback?

I didn't give you that feedback. I like to know how it was. Move the bomb back to where it was. Change the colour of the thing.

So that happens. So I'm already working with companies and talking to companies who are doing stuff like scraping and consuming unsolicited information. So non-survey based data. To aggregate that into feedback, you can then convert into a story internally.

Wouldn't that equally, if not more, be powerful than the structured survey data you're getting? Because a structured survey is staged. It's an invite that's been sent to someone. Who knows if it's a B2B scenario, the respondent may have already been warmed up to given a good response by the account exec.

So actually, if you're scraping unsolicited information, online reviews, unstructured data agent notes, voice transcriptions, you name it. It's all out there on the internet and in the online world. You can compile that, leverage AI analytics, actually, to convert that into meaningful insights within businesses. So short version of all of this is the traditional survey still has a place in formal and structured research and all companies think they need one and a CX platform on which to do their surveys report and present a dashboard.

So it's a little bit like PowerPoint world all over again in the digital format, right? Everybody's got one of these things. But again, three to five percent of the entire population probably access that dashboard and review the information. So who's it really for?

No, I totally agree. And I want to go down this rabbit hole a little bit deeper with you on AI. So like as we get into more AI agents, more AI tools, more AI analysis, more like real-time customer sentiment, what are you excited about in the AI world? And what are you all, what are you like the opposite?

And we're like, this is just overhyped and unnecessary. What, okay, I'll start with the overhyped. So I can end on a positive right. I like it.

Thank you for flipping that. That's all right. See, I'll have learned some things in my storytelling. So the overhyped element is if you ask someone today and I've seen this happen, you know, what's AI going to be doing for us in a year's time?

Apparently, AI is going to be running everything and transforming, transforming the world. It's going to transform agent experience. We'll be AI-agentic fully by that. Well, those questions were asked a year ago and those were the answers given and we're not there yet.

So I think I'm starting to see, and I'm glad I am because I am part of this group. It's in quite a bit of resistance to the key messaging around how AI is going to transform service because I think there's a whole, isn't there choices of consumer that you might want about whether you're served by AI or served by human? I only think your care if the standard of the service that you receive is noticeably different enough between the two. But I still think that's an important moral question that nobody seems to really started tackling or addressing.

Flipping that, what I am excited about with AI is how we can, and this is a big problem for companies, right? You don't need more data. You are swimming in data. Every company has got data coming out of their parts of their body I won't mention, but the point is is that then why do you need more?

Why do you need another platform to visualize it? Another survey to get more. It's almost having like ongoing feedback surveys. It's nonsense because have you had a chance to react to the stuff you saw before?

Probably not, right? So what I'm excited about is I know there's a whole carbon footprint issue around this, but if AI can help consume that colossal amount of information and distill down for us in a way that it would be impossible for humans or other types of analytical platforms to do, then that would be really valuable. And that's why the unstructured noise around customer feedback becomes the natural future replacement for your traditional market research customer feedback survey.

So I'm excited about that. Yeah, I think the data problem is one that literally everyone that's come on the pod is talked about where it's like we've got lots of data just sitting around waiting to be tapped into. I mean, I even don't want to name any brands here, but I was talking to someone who was sharing that they've got like a, you know, a place where customer leaves feedback and it goes off to like a notion board. And then it gets promptly forgotten about.

And then another customer leaves the same exact feedback and then it goes up to the notion board and like it's just this endless cycle where it's like there's not, you're not taking the time to actually take in and adjust like, okay, what do we change? How do we how do we do this? So, you know, there is a lot around, you know, we've got all this data. Even if we have AI helping us interpret it, we still have to take action.

So we still have to create systems in place in the company and like a culture that values action and not just keeps doesn't just keep you need to shacked with more data and insights. So do you have any advice for teams that are like trying to actually create a system where they can execute on these things? I mean, I've heard from people before like just having more meetings about it. Maybe it's more video podcasts.

Like, what is your solution for that problem where stuff just sits there? Vodcast is a way of communicating right effectively. But somebody asked me a similar question when I was doing a panel event. I was doing a forest or event about a month ago and someone said, you know, how would you change CX today?

And I think I said something like, well, I would probably stop surveying right now. Just stop surveying. Take a break. Listing is important.

But the point is to what you just said, Lazy, how can you even get on top of everything that you've already consumed to start executing change within your organization? I look at job descriptions to see X professionals these days. The companies want everything. You know, it's customer success, contact center management and oversight, marcons, customer experience, expertise, storytelling, border level engagement.

It's about 10 different jobs in one. And then want to pay you about $50 a year for it. You know, it doesn't, doesn't make sense. So again, I'll go back to my previous question.

AI is exciting because it might help the CX professional suddenly bundle all of this colossal amount of volume into some actionable stuff. But making it actionable is the hard part. So how do I get to my front line employee and help them understand that all those surveys that we just got are actually telling me something about how you should now do your job with the customer. And this is why it becomes a people job.

You know, some people are very, very protective about their roles. You know, they've been doing it a few years. You know, they came into their job and the system was bust and they built a whole new one and now it's much better. And then they got this person coming along from customer experience saying, that's not what our customers are telling us.

You need to change your process. People are super protective. So you have to kind, you have to win their trust and find a way of conveying that information into a way that's relatable to them. And you know, you want to work with them.

You're not telling them what to do. And you're not trying to get them to change something arbitrarily. You're doing this for a reason. So you know, you have to go to cause benefit outcome reason why we're doing it.

And then I think you win. Then I think you win hearts and minds. And doing that, again, via video, via audio message, just in person, like having that conversation, I'm so much gets lost in translation with email. My husband works for a large internet company and it's insane where he's sending something that's like friendly and nice, but the other person's interpreting it completely the opposite, right?

And then it comes back and then he's interpreting it in his own way. And I'm like, man, if you guys had just literally gone on a phone call or like you sent a video of explaining it and he saw your face and your demeanor, like we this wouldn't be an issue at all. So like as we continue to like have more of this remote work, just let's figure out ways to effectively communicate that actually make us feel human and not just these like our own human robots across the across the ocean, you know, emailing each other trying to figure out what's going on.

Very much agree. I always laugh at the phrase the tone of my email, you know, the tone is an audio thing. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So how can there be a tone in an email? And you you're misinterpreted, don't you? You read written word?

I always think it's funny when someone sends me a text message or a WhatsApp in capital letters. That means they're shouting. I know. I know.

And I know I grew up with like the age of emojis. So I'm like, if there's no emoji attached to something, how do I know how you feel? I don't know. Are you angry?

Are you happy? Are you laughing? I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, so from a from a team perspective as well, I wanted to get into like incentives a little bit because we talked about how some oftentimes, like your teams incentives that are directly incentivized to have a great NPS score or like survey results, like I literally have been told by customer servers or apps, like, please leave me a good survey so that my boss knows I did well, right? Like it's directly telling me that. So what's the future of incentives that actually make sense from like a business perspective?

So do you mean incentives for the employee or an incentive for the respondent in the example that you just gave for the employee, like from the actual, yeah, the business to the team that's executing on these things? Yeah. Well, interestingly, the example you just gave is what would you call that? Maybe a culture of fear, right?

In the, I need a good score so that I did just pass muster or that I am not reprimanded in my next performance review. Because if I get a bad score, then that's exactly what's going to happen. And of course, you know, some cultures, sad to say, even still fixate on the negative stuff rather than the positive stuff. For sure.

To incentivize the employee to know that customer experience is there because it's a business tool, I think is the key message to convey. Is this whole thing about why do they think we're surveying in the first place, right? The frontline agent might think we're surveying in the first place because it's a thing the company does and we're told to do it and you got to do it. And if you don't do it, you're in trouble.

That, that whole culture needs to be thrown out of the window. So again, right? You could do a podcast in three minutes to frontline employees that says, here's why we survey our customers and why we want you to be part of that process. First, we really want you to get first hand experience of what your service feels like to the customer you're providing it to.

That's going to come with the motion. That's going to come with genuine feedback, authenticity, all that really good stuff. Secondly, that vital business intelligence for our company. So once you've asked the customer to complete that survey and they have our customer experience team, however it is, consume that information in, analyze it and provide information out to the company as to the things that we need to do to change.

So you on the frontline are our first port of call to helping our customer give our company that feedback and we can't achieve our strategic objectives until you help us get there. The culture of everything that I just said and I made that up is a complete spin in three 180 format from ask a survey because if you don't, you'll be reprimanded and you'll be in trouble. If that whole culture is not why we do this, we're doing this hopefully for the reasons like I just gave you an example of.

So that's where I'd take it if that were me in that company running that process. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I'm bought in like I would sign up for your company right there. Like the way that you sign up that I was like, I'm emotionally invested.

Well, then this has been fantastic. Is there any like last piece of advice or any just take what you want to leave our audience with before we close out? Well, look, I'm on this five at the moment. I'd say, you know, think about your business messaging.

How can you compact what you're trying to say into something that's memorable, relatable and actionable? Maybe there are three keywords, right? Memorable, relatable, actionable. You've got to remember it.

You've got to know what it means to you and you've got to be able to do something about it. Otherwise, that's just noise, right? And there's plenty of noise in companies today. And if you need someone that can help you to deliver that in Vodka format, then you know where I am.

Awesome. And where can people find you is LinkedIn the best place to track it out? Yeah, LinkedIn. I've got a website now, um, cxhythonalive.

com so you can come visit there. Um, and yeah, so just get in touch and we'll see where things take us. Awesome. All right.

And for everyone listening, we're going to drop those links in the show notes so you can just click on through and check out Ben and spamming with all your questions. That's funny. Awesome. Ben, this has been fantastic.

Thank you so much for coming on. No problem. Really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot, Lacey.