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2021 CX Challenges - CX Prioritization feat. Jeff Sheehan

Talking CX · 39 min

0:00--:--

Key moments - from our scoring

Substance score

44 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density9 / 20
Originality8 / 20
Guest Caliber11 / 20
Specificity & Evidence9 / 20
Conversational Craft7 / 20

Jeff Sheehan, author of the newly launched Customer Experience Management Field Manual, joins Robin and Graham to explore why CX prioritization ranks among the top three organizational challenges. Drawing on 25+ years in customer service and experience roles, Sheehan argues that prioritization difficulty stems primarily from three sources: organizations treating CX as a standalone technology play rather than a program aligned with business strategy; cultures that claim to value customers but lack operational backing; and disconnection between CX initiatives and organizational goals or brand promises. Graham Benson adds that executives struggle to decide what not to do amid competing constituencies and entrenched false beliefs. Using real examples - including an Irish telco losing customers through call deflection and a digital-first bank brand failing to deliver on its promise - Sheehan illustrates how misalignment between brand positioning and actual investment creates customer frustration. Both speakers emphasize that without clear organizational definition, prioritization frameworks, and governance structures, companies waste resources on initiatives disconnected from customer expectations and business outcomes. The conversation reveals that listening to the voice of the customer provides authority and clarity for CX leaders navigating internal politics and competing priorities.

Key takeaways

  • →CX programs must be defined operationally and aligned to specific business objectives and brand promises, not treated as standalone technology implementations like surveys and dashboards without business impact.
  • →Organizations struggle to prioritize because they excel at identifying what to do but fail at determining what not to do when resources and stakeholder demands compete for investment.
  • →Culture fundamentally enables or blocks CX success; companies that claim to love customers while operating on quarter-to-quarter financial pressures and internally-focused efficiency goals will damage customer relationships through misaligned initiatives.
  • →The voice of the customer through multiple channels provides authority for CX leaders to counter executive opinions and false beliefs that may have been valid 30 years ago but no longer reflect customer expectations in changing markets.
  • →Alignment failures manifest when brand promises (like a bank's "digital-first" positioning) don't match actual investment and governance decisions, resulting in half-measures that disappoint customers and erode competitive advantage.

Guests

Jeff Sheehan

Topics in this episode

Voice of the CustomerBusiness strategy alignmentCustomer Experience Management Field ManualCX prioritizationBrand promise fulfillmentCustomer service versus customer experienceDigital-first bankingCall deflection strategiesAI and chatbots for deflectionCustomer feedback frameworks

Questions this episode answers

What are the top three factors that make CX prioritization difficult for organizations?

Defining CX correctly for the organization rather than assuming it's just surveys and dashboards; establishing a truly customer-centric culture rather than just stating it in marketing; and aligning CX initiatives with business goals and brand promises instead of letting CX operate as a disconnected function.

How can organizations decide which CX initiatives not to pursue?

Graham Benson explains that many organizations struggle to say no to projects, especially when powerful internal constituencies lobby for them. Creating a clear North Star aligned to brand promise and business strategy, combined with governance processes that explicitly reject lower-priority work, helps teams determine what not to do.

Why do organizations buy CX technology and still see no ROI?

When organizations implement surveys and dashboards without first defining what CX means to them operationally and without connecting those metrics to business outcomes, they create reporting systems rather than programs - resulting in data collection with no business impact.

What does misalignment between brand promises and CX investment look like?

Sheehan describes a digital-first Irish bank with a "bank of you" brand promise that undertook many projects without prioritization against that promise, ultimately delivering half-measures on personalization and fintech capabilities customers expected, contributing to the bank's eventual exit from the market.

How can CX leaders gain authority to prioritize initiatives when they lack senior titles?

According to Sheehan, the voice of the customer - heard through multiple channels and speaking clearly about what customers want or reject - provides organizational authority that can counter executive opinions or internal politics around project selection.

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

9 / 20

There are a handful of genuinely useful practitioner observations - surveying without acting is not a CX program, voice of customer as political authority for under-titled CX leaders - but they are surrounded by significant padding, book promotion, and generic advice about culture and alignment that most B2B operators have already heard.

organizations just buy a piece of technology and they think surveys and scores is a CX program
if you're a CX leader today and you lack, let's say, the positional authority or the, you know, the title, et cetera, um, one of the sources for authority is the voice of the customer

Originality

8 / 20

The European-vs-US CX localization argument is a mildly fresh angle, and the observation that the Mark Twain quote itself illustrates the 'what you know that ain't so' phenomenon is a clever meta-point, but the episode largely recycles standard CX consulting wisdom about culture, alignment, and executive buy-in.

when you're using companies like Zappos and Amazon and Apple and USAA and Google, that's not going to fly. There's no equivalent for that in Hungary or France
it ain't what you know that'll get you. It ain't what you don't know that'll get you. It's what you know that ain't so. And what's particularly funny about that is it isn't actually a Mark Twain quote

Guest Caliber

11 / 20

Jeff Sheehan has genuine 25-year practitioner credentials and real in-market consulting experience in Ireland and Europe, and his examples come from actual engagements rather than theoretical frameworks; however, he is a mid-tier consultant/author rather than a senior operator who has run CX at meaningful scale inside a major enterprise.

I am, uh, an American living in Dublin, Ireland and uh, have been working in customer service customer experience roles for a little over 25 years
I worked at a bank here in Ireland, which is a very good bank, and sadly it's going to leave the Irish market in the next, uh, in the near future

Specificity & Evidence

9 / 20

There are a handful of concrete anchors - Musgrave named with a €9B revenue figure, specific American tech firms named in Dublin, an identifiable Irish challenger bank - but the most important examples (the telco, the challenger bank) go unnamed and lack any hard metrics on churn, revenue impact, or investment amounts, limiting their evidentiary value.

the biggest employer in Ireland is a private company called Musgrave. They, they have um, convenience stores and grocery chains and a few other businesses. Um, very focused on customer service. Family run, I think it's like a 9 billion euro enterprise
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, uh, LogMeIn, Airbnb, HubSpot. There's just so many

Conversational Craft

7 / 20

The hosts ask structured but largely soft questions, never push back on any claim Jeff makes, and spend a notable portion of the episode on book giveaway logistics and mutual compliments; follow-up questions tend to re-summarize rather than probe or challenge the guest's assertions.

Um, what do you see any differences between what happens in Ireland and what tends to happen in the US or just kind of what happens in the US in general
A, uh, big thank you to Jeff Sheehan and we are looking forward to seeing you next time. And in the meantime, do CXRight

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.

Share of words spoken

  • Speaker C53%
  • Speaker B31%
  • Speaker A15%

Most-used words

customer37book20prioritization19jeff18ireland18organization18market17point15first14experience14organizations13three12service12graham11voice11different11

Episode notes

We're excited to bring you the first of our 3 part series with CX consultant extraordinaire Jeff Sheehan to discuss the challenges around CX Prioritization, ROI, and Measurements. And we're celebrating this occasion by giving away 10 free copies of Jeff's new book ' The Customer Experience Management Field Manual'! Just be one of the first 10 people to request a free copy and we'll send it out to you. You can contact us at info@talkingcx.com. In Part 1 of this series Jeff shares his stories and experiences of how he's dealt with CX prioritization, and we explore some of the differences between how this is handled in Europe compared to the US. Find Resources Here

Full transcript

39 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Speaker A: Hi everybody and welcome to the Talking CX podcast. I'm here with Graham. Hi Graham, how are you doing?

Speaker B: Hi, uh, Robin. Doing great.

Speaker A: I'm really excited today that we have a guest here with us. His name is Jeff Sheehan and he has graciously agreed to do a, uh, three part series of podcasts with us. The first podcast is going to be about CX prioritization. The next one is going to be about CX prioritization as it relates to roi. And the third one is going to be about ROI and measurements and it uh, will relate that back to prioritization. Jeff, uh, has a new book that um, we're going to talk about here in a minute. So Jeff, I am really excited to uh, have you here. Uh, please go ahead and um, introduce yourself a little bit, tell everybody a little bit about your background and. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker C: Happy to. Thanks so much first of all, uh, Graham and Robin, for having me out, uh, on your, on your podcast. I really appreciate the invitation and uh, the time you made to do this, so thank you for that. Um, as you said, Jeff Sheehan, I am, uh, an American living in Dublin, Ireland and uh, have been working in customer service customer experience roles for a little over 25 years. And um, then before that I had spent 10 years in the US military, military after university. And um, as you mentioned, my book is, uh, it's just launched and it's titled Customer Experience Management Field Manual. Um, which is a bit of a combination of the two careers. Right? That little bit of military metaphor runs through the book. Um, but it's really about. The book is really designed to help people build and refine a customer experience management program. Um, and you know, when I was scratching my head wondering if I should even write one more CX book, uh, I went ahead and did this bit, um, of work over the last 18 months or so, um, because I really felt there was a bit of a gap in the literature of like a real practical desktop reference. How do I do this? How do I do that for cx? And I hope that this book, uh, treats that, um, the topic of creating the new CX program, um, as well as people would like it to.

Speaker B: It's great. Um, and by the way, having kind of run through the book, one thing is the field manual title, um, reminds me of the one to one field book that Don Peppers and Martha Rogers published in the 1990s, which was a, you know, a foundational piece of literature in the world of personalization and thereby, you know, in today's digital first but not digital only. Multi channel world. A foundational um, book in the, in the CX movement. So uh, it's really good stuff but I particularly like the Chasing Customer Expectations, um, stuff that you put in it and then a couple other things I really loved. One is you had the kind of listening, you know, feedback framework as listening, learning and acting rather than listening, analyze and acting, which I thought was very astute. And then you refer to special forces. So we for a long time in customer results have had this concept of a, of a SWAT team which is specialists with added tools for getting things done in other spaces. So uh, it's definitely there and we're going to buy um, ten copies of it. And thanks to the power of Amazon shipping anywhere in the world, we'll uh, we'll give those away to people who make comments on this podcast in the next, in the next few weeks. So.

Speaker C: Well, I got to say that's awesome. Thank you so much for that. That's great. And I appreciate your, your particular um, comments Graham because um, you know, it's a stab right? When you write something you make your position known and of course in this customer experience field there are a lot of books, there are a lot of um, um, well known uh, folks like yourself and so many others you mentioned Don Peppers and so many others who have written books. Um, and again what I was trying to do is also write in my own voice but at the same time, um, write ah, something that, or offer a book that was useful. That to me, the utility of it was really important to me. Um, not just platitudes or theories or strategies but real like if I need to write a CX strategic plan today, I could open this book and I could figure out how to do it with the help from this book. So that's, that's what I was going for.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you achieved that. By the way, chapters are short which I think is always a good thing.

Speaker C: Uh, thank you. Yeah, that's great to hear. Thank you so much. We love feedback.

Speaker A: I noticed that you have a lot of wonderful feedback on Amazon already on your book. So congratulations on that.

Speaker C: Yeah, thank you, thank you. Well, I have to say, ah, a very big thanks to a global community of CX professionals, both uh, folks like us who are either on a vendor side or a consultant side but, but also folks in organizations, practitioners in organizations. Um, in this process of writing a book I reached out to a number of people around the world for their feedback. So at a certain point in the manuscript I was sort of done I was sort of stuck, let's say, and I went out to the field to get feedback and so many people gave me some really great stuff and made it a much, much better product than it would have been if I hadn't done that. And um, the feedback you're referring to, Robin, is, is, um, from those folks who contributed, um, their notes and feedback in the writing process.

Speaker A: That's wonderful. So I guess when we're having our discussion here on CX prioritization, you're bringing a whole lot of people with you to have this discussion. So that's awesome. Um, and so let's talk a little bit about our topic today. As we've been doing here the last several podcasts, we've been, uh, discussing the 2021 top CX challenges based on the survey that customer results did earlier in the year. And so one of the top three is CX prioritization. It's a, uh, big challenge and I know that it's come up as we've discussed different CX topics between Graham and I, and I am always kind of interested in that part of it, like how do you figure out, you know, how you're going to prioritize this and how are you going to figure out what to do first and second and what's most important? And so, um, seeing it how it is, the uh, one of the top three challenges. Let's just talk a little bit about how critical to the success of an organization the CX effort is the ability to prioritize a CX initiative. How critical of a piece is that in your view, Jeff?

Speaker C: Well, um, I think it's contextual. I think the criticality can be, um, really, really huge, or it could be sort of modestly consequential. In my view, a CX program isn't a one size fits all proposition. You really have to understand what the organization means, how it defines customer experience management, and how it would operationalize customer experience management. So if you're a software as a service company, for example, and you want to do digital first self help, so your customers don't call, not because you don't want to talk to them, but because they have told you they don't want to call. Um, and so how do you, um, operationalize that and define that? So that's the CX program you're working under, right? And it's designed to achieve certain amount of business outcomes, certain amount of customer, uh, satisfaction outcome, and so forth. Um, and I would also say, and I talk about this quite a bit in the book is the alignment of a business strategy, a brand promise and the program being something that helps fulfill the business plans and the brand promises of the organization. So I don't see CX necessarily being its own standalone strategy that's um, uh, not connected to the bigger uh, strategies of branding and business objectives. Um, so I really think, to answer your question, companies really have to spend some time and discuss and define and decide what CX is going to look like in their organization because that's how you're going to define results. You're going to decide uh, where you make investments, what criteria you use for establishing priorities and so forth. Uh, here in Ireland, I'll give you an example, there's a telco that is very internally focused, very operationally efficiency focused and they're, they're big on deflecting customer calls which means they're implementing um, tools to like um, AI and chatbots, ah, and things like that. So that they're not using staff to respond to calls and they're trying to deflect calls. Um, but at the same time they're losing customers and losing top line revenue because customers are very frustrated with the service and are characterizing this poor service. So while they're very internally focused and they've thrown tools at um, the interaction with the customer to save money, um, they've annoyed the customer um, by not being accessible, uh, for things like problems with their bills or they want to add people to the plan or take people out of the plant. So um is a priority in that organization but they haven't figured out how to implement it. So that it's both consequential to the business and its goals and support of the customer.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's a uh, I mean that's a great point. I mean when we look at the annual CX Challenges survey that we do, you're kind of alluding to the prioritization challenge is mostly around initiative prioritization. So with audiences, communities, Persona increasingly becoming fragmented with different personalization goals, to your point, many different channels technologies like AI and machine learning. There's a, as my friend Michael Hinshaw, one of the, you know, leading lights of, of CX out of M Corp, CX says, you know, there's a thousand things you could do, a hundred things you should do, 10 things you must do. And I would argue in the era of COVID maybe 2, that you can actually do. And so the challenge is, you know, where do you place your bets? And to your point, if you place them wrong, you know, you can you can do some pretty serious damage to relationships with your customers that can be really hard to recover. So uh, yeah, I think there's just a lot of stuff going on.

Speaker A: So to follow up on your point, Graham, and what you've said, Jeff, uh, what I'd like to do is ask you your top three factors that contribute to CX prioritization being such a challenge. So we know that ROI is one of the other top challenges in the survey. And I know that ROI is uh, a really huge contributing factor to what makes CX prioritization a challenge. So we're going to talk about that in a little bit. But in addition to roi, Jeff, I'm going to start with you. Um, what do you think are the top three factors in making CX prioritization such a challenge?

Speaker C: Oh gosh. Um, besides roi, I would say, uh, going back to defining it really. You know, I've seen this so often where organizations just buy a piece of technology and they think surveys and scores is a CX program. And um, that's when you start bumping into this roi, um, issue where um, the business has said, okay, now that we've asked customers all these surveys and we've gotten all these results and we do these monthly, weekly, whatever, dashboards and reports, we're not making any more money. You know, we need to connect it to the business. And um, so I would say defining is definitely a priority. Understanding what CX means to the organization. Um, then I would say culture. Uh, I would say that so many organizations have a slide that says that they love their customers. It comes just before the slide where it says they love their employees and, and yet the culture doesn't really, it doesn't really operate that way. So culture being one of the most challenging things to tackle. But um, it's awfully hard to put customers first when you're a quarter to quarter financials focused organization. And your culture is driven by whether you're publicly traded or not, you're driven by financials. Um, so I would say culture is definitely, um, something that impacts cx, um, in a very profound way. And that. Was that two or.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's the third one.

Speaker C: Yeah, I would say back to a point I made earlier, um, aligning your CX program, however it is defined and characterized and staffed and equipped and so forth, but aligning that CX function to the business goals and uh, the brand promises. So a lot of organizations say we love our customers and we're easy to do business with, but you find out that they're Not. Or, um, the old saying that Henry Ford is attributed with, uh, you can have any car, any color you want, as long as it's black. Um, aligning the CX function to, um, fulfill the brand promises and that are part of the marketing strategy or brand strategy, and then also the business goals, I think is huge. Too often I think CX programs go off on their own and are disconnected from those key things.

Speaker A: Okay, so the three things defining CX correctly, the organizational culture and aligning CX with the organizational strategy. Um. Okay, Graham, what do you see as, uh, the top three factors?

Speaker B: I have a different top three, but I'd add two that we see organizations struggle with continuously. One is what not to focus on. So prioritization, by its very nature, is about not doing some things. And it's often easier to gather up ideas of what to do than it is to. To decide what not to do given limited resources. And then alongside that is untrue belief systems. So we have a little analogy we use a lot, right, which is a, uh, Mark Twain quote, which is, it ain't what you know that'll get you. It ain't what you don't know that'll get you. It's what you know that ain't so. And what's particularly funny about that is it isn't actually a Mark Twain quote. It's a, uh, quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American politician who attributed it to Mark Twain. So guess what? Even the quote is what you know, that ain't so. So, you know, the idea of kind of unwinding and some of. That's your culture thing, Jeff. But how do you unwind those foundational beliefs that may have been true for 30 years, but are, um, not true today in, you know, ever changing demographic shifts and audience shifts and experience shifts, and then aligned with that, uh, how do you feed that into some kind of prioritization process that allows you to. To not focus on things when, you know, there may be some pretty powerful constituencies in your organization screaming that they're the things that need to be done or need to be invested in. So that's really hard.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. And that, I would say that's a great point you make there, uh, Graham. That. And I would call that. I would put that under the special forces, right, Those invisible things, like, you know, the alpha, uh, personality who gets, uh, what they want, even though it isn't exactly the. The best priority to invest in for the organization, or. Or, um, the folks who don't tell, who don't challenge the boss who don't challenge the, the untrue thing, they just presume that it's, that it's, um, it's a limitation and they, they move around it.

Speaker B: So, um, yeah, and some of it's really hard. I mean, Robin and I had a conversation on our last podcast. If she doesn't yell at me on this. In the world of employee experience, how do you decide which employees are more important than other employees? Right. And that's a very, very politically volatile conversation.

Speaker C: And so, uh, no, I, I think that's great. And the, the quarantine has raised like, you know, is raised that question loud and clear. Especially the early days where, you know, wait a minute, uh, all of us have to work from home, but if I work at a grocery store, at a gas station, or I'm a nurse, you know, I'm considered a critical, um, worker. Right. Not just by an employer, but by a government, you know, where grocery store staff are now critical and were they so critical the year before? And that's a good, it's a very good point. And I think it was pronounced, uh, by this quarantine business.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Yeah. When you see Jeff, when you go into an organization as a consultant, how do you typically find organizations trying to prioritize CX initiatives? And then I'm assuming that they need help and that's why you're there. And so what is your first recommendation to them, usually when you go into an organization and see what the situation is and what they're doing?

Speaker C: Yeah, well, if it's clear, um, that's a great question, by the way. Uh, if it's clear to the customer, like say they've done a, some sort of audit, and so they're very clear about what they have for resources and how they've been, uh, using those resources that exist. Um, you know, then it can become a bit of a planning, uh, conversation around what they hope to accomplish and how to sort of repackage the resources to achieve the thing or things that they want from their CX program. But oftentimes, um, there isn't a consensus about what a CX program should do or what it should consist of or how it should be defined. Um, and so that's usually the starting point is, okay, what is it you hope to achieve with cx? Because some of the organizations, particularly in the middle market, sort of privately held, smaller kind of organizations, community banks and family, uh, owned businesses, you know, they, they, uh, they want to do cx, but they're not sure where to get started. It's kind of the starting point. So, so you're oftentimes defining things and coming up with terminology like customer centric. You'll hear that buzzword. And so if you can break it down into an operational definition for them, what does it mean to be customer centric, um, in their organization? So that's usually where it starts. It's just a good investment of time in getting a consensus point of view to the degree that a consensus is possible on what CX is to that organization and what they want it to accomplish.

Speaker A: Um, uh, how important is it for them to tie their CX program back into their organizational goals?

Speaker C: Oh, it's super important. Um, and I would say parallel to that, it's how is CX different? This is a question that comes up quite a bit. How is CX different than our customer service department? They already do that today. Why would we do cx? We're already doing that in our service group and having to explain. So there is an understanding and accepted understanding that customer experience is a horizontal, across from awareness, uh, customer awareness all the way through customer, uh, lifecycle support and customer buying something again and so forth. And that customer service is a touch point in that overarching, um, customer experience.

Speaker A: When we talked about the top three factors prevent organizations from prioritizing their CX correctly, the third one you mentioned was alignment. And I'd like to kind of go back to that and see if you'd like to expand on that a little bit. What does that look like when an organization doesn't align their, you know, overall goals and objectives with their, uh, prioritization?

Speaker C: Okay, okay. Um, it's a bit messy. I'll give you an example. Um, I worked at a bank here in Ireland, which is a very good bank, and sadly it's going to leave the Irish market in the next, uh, in the near future. But it was the brand promise was, or the tagline for the bank was the bank of you. And it talked about itself as a digital first bank. And when it first entered the market Here in Ireland 10 or so years ago, it was a challenger, uh, bank is how it described itself. So it had all this sort of sizzle around being a digital first bank of you. And you would have thought personalization and fintech and mobile apps that can do all the things customers want to do, whether it's split the bill at the restaurant or, you know, um, make it easy to pay with it with, with a contactless payment or, um, apply for a mortgage approval, uh, you know, on your phone or on a Website, et cetera. Um, but yet it didn't do those things by and large, or did those things very sort of in half measures because the culture embraced lots and lots and lots of projects without a lot of prioritization. There was sort of an ongoing governance process that picked, uh, projects to staff and budget. Um, a bit disconnected from the big, uh, the bigger picture of what the brand was trying to achieve in the market here in Ireland. And um, so it didn't achieve it. And that's one of the reasons why it's leaving, uh, the Irish marketplace. It had so much potential and it was on the right track, I think, for a long time. But when it came to prioritization and the investment behind those priorities, um, I think there were a lot of bets that were misplaced. Um, uh, and ultimately the bank has just said, well, we're going to leave the Irish market. Um, I won't go into Irish banking in Ireland so much so deeply. But, but that was probably my best example of how there were so many good bets to make. And I think to Graham's point earlier, they really didn't do a good job figuring out what not to do. And stay very true to like a North Star of where to make their investments that were aligned with their digital first, um, personality, so to speak, or their, um, bank of you brand promise.

Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, I love the North Star analogy. Um, yeah. So, Graham, I'm thinking you've seen this quite a bit too.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I, I'm. So we've, uh, we've kind of simplified the answer to this question specifically related to Covid, I think. And that is our answer to, you know, one, one thing, one thing you must do. And that's the inability of organizations to listen. And so I forget who it was, um, 6, 8, 12 months ago who told me that, you know, whenever we have a recession, and this one is global and more than just a recession, you know, the one thing we know with certainty is the customer experience expectations change dramatically in the financial services recession in the Western world. It was helped by those pesky people at Apple launching the iPhone in 2008 and then the iPad right in the middle. Um, but, you know, we're seeing massive shifts. I mean, as you mentioned, work at home, um, increasing digital for people, um, just lots of different things. And so our general definition is anybody who tells you they know what customer experience expectations are going to be in the middle of 2022 is either a fool or a highly paid visioning consultant. Um, maybe both. And, uh, and so what we See, organizations is the thing that they really need to feed into their prioritization strategies is the voice of the customer. And so, so many organizations are deaf as far as their customers are concerned. And so it's like, if you can only invest in one thing, you know, start by bringing the voice of the customer through every channel, you can get it into your business so that you can hear them screaming at you, telling you that you're doing the wrong things. Because many times the. The voice of the executive is so overwhelming, or the voice of the shareholder, in the case of public companies, that they just can't hear the customer screaming or applauding, whichever way. And so that's our, Our one thing answer, um, these days. It didn't used to be as clear two or three years ago. It used to be, it depends. Um, and I think all the things you're talking about, Jeff, are absolutely critical. Um, but if you can't hear your customers, nothing else will really matter.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think that, and I talk about this in the book. If you're a CX leader today and you lack, let's say, the positional authority or the, you know, the title, et cetera, um, one of the sources for authority is the voice of the customer. If you hear your customer speaking loud and clear about what they want or what they don't want, or responding to something you're offering, whatever that voice is saying, that is, in my view, uh, a source of authority to examine, uh, and get the attention, um, of that board or that, uh, C suite to, um, pay attention to, um, what your customer's talking about.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, Jeff, I really like your example for the one that you chose from Ireland. And I'm wondering, um, what do you see any differences between what happens in Ireland and what tends to happen in the US or just kind of what happens in the US in general, and not just Ireland, but Europe, which is one of your main areas that you work with.

Speaker C: Um, yeah, I would say, because I thought about this a lot, and I talk about this a lot, too, because I'm sort of a. I'm a very typical American when I go out into the marketplace and, you know, I expect service. When I go to a restaurant, I don't. I don't. Or when I go to a shop. And I think that's one of the things I've noticed is here in Ireland, it's a much smaller place. You know, there's only 5 million or so people here in the Republic. Um, there's a lot less competition, um, for anything. And uh, whether it's building materials or groceries or whatever it might be, there's just a lot less competition. Um, banking. In fact I mentioned uh, a bank is leaving. There's actually two banks leaving the Irish market. And those exits which haven't happened yet, but their forecast happened, are causing concern because there won't be enough competition in banking in Ireland. It gives you a sense of how small um, I find that the um, cultural difference between um, you know, I would say a sort of service oriented and a service expected American culture, um, and here it's just quite a bit different.

Speaker A: So do you see any difference between Ireland and Europe in general or is it pretty close to the same thing you just described?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think the sort of common uh, uh, denominator I would say across Europe there are much smaller markets. Um, I've joined a very new organization called the European CX Organization and we do talk about this. And part of what was uh, the reason for creating that organization was to sort of separate cx, the conversation around CX from the US model. And not because the US model isn't good or whatever, but when you're using companies like Zappos and Amazon and Apple and USAA and Google, that's not going to fly. There's no equivalent for that in Hungary or France or um, maybe even the uk. So the European CX organization is really um, addressing that localization for cx. But generally the markets are much smaller than certainly in the U.S. market. Um, and so they do deal with things like um, maturity. Uh, how do we go from being reactive with our CX and looking at um, the past to do something now to maybe becoming a bit more ah, predictive so that we can see root causes and we can fix those things and we can make improvements that are more forward looking. Um, those are big shifts in smaller markets than they might be in the

Speaker A: U.S. grant, what do you think? Have you seen any changes between the US and Europe when you talk to people there?

Speaker B: I mean there are uh, to Jeff's point, I mean the European, European market, not meaning the eu, but the European market is, is clearly much more fragmented than the, than the US market. Right. I mean there are differences between states in the U.S. but, but nowhere near the difference between say you know, Italy and Ireland or you know Estonia and, and Germany or whatever. So I think it's a. But I think, I mean I think the, the overarching piece and two things that we've definitely seen. One is just the US market in business specifically is just ferocious. I mean uh, with the exception of China and India, um, it is the largest contiguous marketplace, economic marketplace in the world. It's the place where um, everybody wants to come and play in thought leadership or in technology. And so um, you know, we just see the ferocity of the marketplace and then um, and I know a lot of people around the world who comment on this all the time. The US does tend to suffer from this idea that we believe we know how it should be done for everybody. Um, and uh, and I, I see in other countries, whether it's Ireland or Germany or Australia or China or India, there's, there's much less of that idea that the model that's, that's developed in that particular market is automatically applicable to everybody else. You know, it's uh, to your point Jeff, when you know, if you use Amazon and Zappos and USAA and, and, and, and as your examples, you know, increasingly, quite correctly, we see the eyeroll happen and we're doing, and we're, we're doing, we're actually doing business with a couple of massive American based companies who are, you know, I think probably four times a week the conversation comes up and it's, it's ended with the words. And then there's prc, right? And so there's kind of this recognition that China is so significant and so different in so many different ways that you know, it's the first time almost in 30 years of being in the US that I've heard, you know, almost every company come up with the same words. Right? And then there's brc. Um, I mean other countries are very different but they're not such a massive economic opportunity that people pay attention to it. I just think, you know, as I said, the ferocity of the market here is just, you know, a company, a company can make a few CX mistakes in the United states and a 50, 60 year old brand can be eviscerated. Um, whereas we see that being a lot more nuanced and a lot longer, longer tail in the European market specifically.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, I want to say there is a unique aspect to the Irish market here which is uh, probably due to the corporate tax, um, treatment that Ireland extends to companies that land here. But there's a lot of American companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, uh, LogMeIn, Airbnb, HubSpot. There's just so many. If I could take you through Dublin, uh, you'd see all these great big gorgeous glass buildings that are empty, but they're temples to the European headquarters of American companies. Um, and I do think that culturally, that customer experience, um, uh, thought leadership from the US Parent company makes its way into the Irish market by way of a lot of the, the U.S. uh employees or just that culture, uh, makes its way here. So there is that sort of other dimension of CX in Ireland, which is basically the import of American CX into um, the European headquarters that are based here. Um, so I do think you get a good sort of pollination. But for the organic Irish middle market company and the bigger company, I think the biggest employer in Ireland is a private company called Musgrave. They, they have um, convenience stores and grocery chains and a few other businesses. Um, very focused on customer service. Family run, I think it's like a 9 billion euro enterprise. It's huge, um, employs tens of thousands of people. Very, very focused on customer service, um, just as an organic Irish company.

Speaker B: Great. So thanks Jeff. That's perfect. We've heard the perspective of, you know, European perspective on how uh, is being practiced and how prioritization is somewhat unique in Europe and of course in uh, in Ireland as well, that great story about the uh, the Irish Challenger bank and even comparing and contrasting to the United States. And both uh, of us agree that not everything in the world has to be done the American way, which I think is absolutely perfect. And that's one of the things I think makes Jeff a very special voice in the CX movement, giving us that additional perspective.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really valuable thing to have. It's something that we don't hear very much and I'm really glad that we got to bring that into this podcast.

Speaker B: Yeah. Before we talk about where we're going from here, Robin, I did want to kind of jump in and again, in promotion of that very special voice that Jeff has and his exciting book, the Customer Experience Management Field Manual, uh, we're going to give away 10 copies of the book to uh, the first people to come to us and send us a message, make a provoking comment, uh, maybe even feed into something. We can feed into one of our other podcasts. But if you want to uh, contact us using our uh, little voice connector thingy, or you can send us an email, you know, the usual ways, then we will happily, uh, send you a copy of Jeff's book if you're one of the first 10 people to do that.

Speaker A: So the voice thingy that Graham is referring to is our recording microphone on our website that you can find by scrolling down to our contact page. You can contact us through there. You can contact us Through Twitter or LinkedIn or email, any kind of contact. Right. We'll be the right one to win that book.

Speaker B: Perfect. Can't wait to hear from you.

Speaker A: Yeah, that'll be great. And then let's talk a little bit about our next podcast coming up in our three part series.

Speaker B: Specifically our next, you know, this three podcast series looking at prioritization, looking at ROI and looking at measurement. Um, we're going to talk more deeply about, uh, CX return on investment and, and how CX ROI relates to the, uh, prioritization conversation we've just been having.

Speaker A: Great. A, uh, big thank you to Jeff Sheehan and we are looking forward to seeing you next time. And in the meantime, do CXRight and

Speaker B: do it right now.

Speaker A: Thanks, everybody.

Speaker C: Sa.

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