Episode #56: CX rants, soapboxes, and wake-up calls
Guest: Nate brown
Nate Brown's passion for customer experience knows no bounds. As a CX executive and co-founder of the CX Accelerator, he relentlessly unleashes his expertise, boldness, and creativity on the challenges that prevent organizations from creating experiences that make people's lives better. Join us this week as host Shawn Nason sits down with Nate to wake up CX professionals, harness the voice of the customer, and challenge the status quo.
About Shawn Nason
shawn@mofi.co | ShawnNason.com | @manonfiresocial
Shawn Nason, founder and CEO of MOFI, best-selling author, and former Walt Disney Imagineer, lives his life with a commitment to create radical relationships with everyone he meets. Armed with the gift of discernment, he has the uncanny ability to walk alongside people and organizations as they struggle to connect with their deepest passions and engage their most debilitating demons. He challenges the world around him to be fully present, get real, and lead with empathy.
Prior to launching MOFI, Shawn was the chief experience & transformation officer for Healthways and served as the chief innovation officer for Xavier University. He also spent six years at The Walt Disney Company in various capacities within Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney Cruise Line. He’s an in-demand speaker and coach, the author of two books, Kiss Your Dragons: Radical Relationships, Bold Heartsets, & Changing the World (2021) and The Power of YES! in Innovation (2017), and the host of The Combustion Chronicles podcast.
About mofi
A human-obsessed, maverick-minded design firm ready to rethink your entire Experience Ecosystem™
hello@mofi.co | mofi.co | @mofisocial
Mavericks think differently. They challenge the status quo and speak up when people and systems need attention. They’re not afraid to dream big, stand up for what is right, and take a few risks along the way.
MOFI helps maverick-minded organizations and leaders reap the rewards of thinking bigger and bolder about experiences, innovation, and culture.
Are you ready to fuel new growth by thinking bigger? Let's talk.
What We Do:
Customer & Employee Experience—Increase your revenue and market share by aligning, equipping, and empowering the people in your Experience Ecosystem to create game-changing experiences.
Consumer-Centered Innovation—Move at the speed of your customers by harnessing the mindsets and processes of human-centered design to dream up, test, and launch fresh ideas into your business model.
Organizational Transformation—Position your organization for long-term sustainability by shifting the mindsets and heartsets of the people who represent your brand in the world.
Episode Takeaways
- People want to interface with organizations that value them, that create a holistic experience for them, and most importantly, that they can relate to.
- Good experience design requires a great network of people to encourage and infuse each other with that energy.
- Be wary of anyone who thinks they have the magic formula for customer experience. Instead, connect with people who have the ability to set the foundation, engage the voice of the customer, and then unify the organization around a change management methodology.
- Creating a circle of safety around the people in an organization frees them up to be able care more about colleagues and customers and become more creative, energized, and excited about their work.
- Companies can't be all things to all people. To solve for problems, CX designers need to put themselves where the customer is likely to experience a problem and then make it easier for customers to navigate that friction point.
- Companies who care about CX need to move away from a CYA training program (just making sure that their sexual harassment and ethics training is in place) towards equipping people to be better in their jobs, to treat one another better, and to care about the customers in ways that the organization values.
- It's better to set a clear expectation for customers and then deliver on it than to set an unrealistic expectation that can't be sustained over time. Doing this builds trust, which is critical to long-term customer loyalty.
- CX professionals continue to struggle to show a return on investment in the face of companies continuing to lose significant amounts of money due to poor customer experiences.
[Overheard on the Podcast]
"There's high burnout associated with [CX professionals]. So we need to be able to come into a safe place and encourage one another, spark ideas off one another to go back to the fire theme here, the combustion theme."
"A lot of times we develop a victim mentality pretty quickly in the work of customer experience. We develop this perception that we're set apart, that we're special because we're the ones taking care of the customer and nobody else gets it.... It's not our job to create the ecosystem in a vacuum of a CX team. What we're trying to do is wake up everybody else inside of the organization and get them to care and get them to want to serve the customers in the way that only they can inside of their role and inside of their team. It's only when we awaken and bring people together and unify them in the work of CX that we can be effective in our roles."
"When you're looking out against your coworkers and making sure you don't have a knife in your back, you can't think about your customers. If you're worried about your leaders ripping the carpet out from under your feet, you can't think about your customers. You can't serve well inside of that organization."
[Overheard on the Podcast]
"So anybody that thinks they have the magic formula, be wary of them. What you want is somebody that has the ability to set the foundation, to create the engine, the voice of customer insights that are going to get you the intelligence and then unify the organization around a change management methodology where you have the ability to enhance your customer's lives
"People want to interface with an organization that values them, that is creating a holistic experience for them, and most importantly, that they can relate to that company like a person because they've created this holistic experience that's consistent with a brand voice that they can interface with and get to know and trust and believe and ultimately know, 'Hey, if I go to this organization, I'm going to have this experience. This is worth my time and money.'”
"I'm a huge fan of put yourself where the customer is likely to experience a problem. You know where those friction points are because you've been doing voice of customer, and if not, then that's where you start, figuring out where those friction points exist, and then, 'Okay, does this need to be a phone call?' If yes, let's not throw people into our self-service environment. Let's not make them go through our live chat hoops. If we know that we need to talk them through this scenario, then let's do that. Let's lead with that."
[Overheard on the Podcast]
"When we create a circle of safety around our people, and win with the strength of our shields rather than the sharpness of our swords, then a magic thing pervades those interactions that you're describing, Shawn. I mean, suddenly, we care in a different way about the people around us because we know that as a team together if we can lift up our team members, we can all serve our customers better together. We can serve the organization better. We can be more creative. We can be more energized. We can enjoy our work experience together better and we can extend that out, that feeling, that excitement, we can extend that out to our customers."
"[The] heart of your training program should be how can we equip people to be better in their jobs, to treat one another better, and to care about the customers in the ways that we as an organization value and that we're looking to foster? I mean, the way that we think about our customers and the behaviors that we perpetuate towards our customers, that's what we want people to understand to unify them around those principles and to be on a very regular and very effective way, reinforcing that, reminding them of that."
"CX is a revolution that needs to take hold of people's mentality for the long term, and it's something where we need to grow this work over time in a sustainable fashion."
Selected Videos
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