The Technical Content Benchmark Report 2024

You’ll learn:

- Great B2B salespeople have sincere service mentalities and strive to make deep connections with customers

- Organizations that understand loyalty may not always do right by internal policy but they will always do right by the customer

- CX shouldn’t be just about surveys and metrics, the discipline should also help solve the problems they identify

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‍Listen For:

‍[03:01] Creating deeper connections with customers

[05:16] Understanding self-service’s place in the CX equation

[07:38] Valuing doing right over being right

[11:52] Driving business outcomes AND great experiences

[15:40] Owning CX vs. being accountable to the customer

[20:11] Bill’s three CX objectives and how he measures them

[23:01] The next step CX people should be taking

[27:10] Bill’s CX rant

[32:18] Bill’s CX advice for CEOs

Bill Staikos:

I keep on hearing everyone owns CX and I think that is absolutely the wrong answer. Not everyone can own CX. I think everyone is accountable to the customer, whether you're in the back office producing reports for someone internal, you're still accountable to the customer. That customer's paying your salary. And you need to be thinking about, how does this report that I produce go to someone in the business that is going to use that to do something else that creates some value for the customer? And really understand that connection.

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Announcer:

Flourish CX, the only show helping CX leaders do one thing, empower their customers. Each episode democratizes best practices while leaving you feeling both inspired and equipped to take action. Let's get to it.

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Alon Waks:

Everyone in an organization needs to be able to draw the line for what they do on a daily basis to long-term business outcomes for customers. I'm Alon Waks, your host for this episode of the Flourish CX podcast. Bill Staikos, SVP, Evangelist and Head of Community Engagement in Medallia, says the way to create customer-led cultures is to be crystal clear on customer impact. When people understand they're accountable to the client, they're more likely to show up for them and engage with them. As you listen, ask yourself, is every last person in your company doing right for the customer? All right, folks, let's dive into this. Mr. Bill, welcome to the show.

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Bill Staikos:

It's so great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

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Alon Waks:

Why don't we ask you the typical Flourish question, which is, who and what would you be if you were not this CX influencer and SME guru of it all?

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Bill Staikos:

I think that if I wasn't doing this, as a kid, growing up I worked in my parents' diner. I'd probably be in the restaurant business. That's where I got a deep understanding of what it means to be not only a servant leader, but also have a service mindset. There was always an entrepreneurial spirit [inaudible 00:02:04] to me, so I'd probably say I'd have a restaurant or two probably in the New York City area where I grew up. At some point my father convinced me, "You don't want to be doing this business," and then I got into finance. So if I didn't read Joe Pine's book in the late nineties, Experience Economy, and didn't say, "I've got to go do this." I'd probably be working at one of the big banks, doing something in finance. I actually started off as a fixed income analyst and I couldn't read another bond indenture of like 300 plus pages. I was going to pull my hair out.

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Alon Waks:

I feel like the restaurant business, especially if you think about New York diners or very old school diners, are the epitome of service. Knowing your customers, understanding them, giving them the extra little perks. But also being there for them with that little joke and a bit of a laugh. Do you feel like that's less in the world today, in the world of customer service in general, there's no real intimacy knowing who the person is?

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Bill Staikos:

I think in B2B software, I think that the proliferation of teams like customer success have really come about to, I think drive some of that more. It still comes down to value realization of the platform for customer success, leaders and practitioners. But I think that the really good ones that I've seen are the ones that have gotten to know their clients and their clients' kids and go to weddings and go to big events. Or going over to their house for barbecues, et cetera. And the B2B software space, I think also the great sales people that not only have been salespeople for me when I was on the client side, but even where I am today, I think there is a high level of service mentality and a real wanting. Not just because it's going to make me more money, but a real wanting to make a deeper connection with customers.

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Bill Staikos:

One, truly understanding their business. Two, truly understanding who they are outside of the office and making those connections. A great case in point. When I was at Freddie Mac, my sales leader at Medallia, won't mention his name, but unbelievable guy. We connected on a couple different things outside of the office. It was just by accident we found out, but nonetheless, no matter where I am, I'll be friends with him. No matter what happens in my life, we will be friends. We will go to each other's homes when we're in each other's states, we'll have a beer. And I think that does exist. I think that it's just not everybody, I think it's your top 20% of performers truly believe in making a deep connection with that person, with the buyer outside of the software.

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Alon Waks:

To complement that, having a great relationship with your customers doesn't always mean high touch. How do you balance? Sometimes somebody just wants an answer or just wants to do things on their own, like we used to in our B2C world. Do you see that this is becoming common practice? The balancing between digital self-service, no relationship, let me just have a relationship with experience. Versus, I need to go to somebody to speak to them. Is that the best route, high-touch? Or is sometimes no-touch or low-touch the best route?

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Bill Staikos:

Again, it comes down to the individual and who's using the product. And don't take this in the wrong way, but if you're the person inside of a company who's using the platform day-to-day, you probably do not have time to have a long conversation. You want the answer and you want it quick, because you've got to deliver something for your boss or your boss's boss, et cetera. A little bit more transactional. So there, I think self-service is really critical because you don't have time to wait for someone to call you back or send an email back to you. And I think the day-to-day wrench turning of a platform or day-to-day operations of using a platform self-service is incredibly important. Where you do want to have more of that relationship and that conversation and not just I need the answer, is where you want to start thinking about strategy or roadmap or different use-cases in the organization that you can apply that technology to and get better.

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Bill Staikos:

So, I think it's much more situational. And I think that organizations should be thinking about the customer journey in a way that... And what are those multiple journeys? There's the, I just need basic technical expertise. I should be able to go find that on the site. I shouldn't have to call somebody for that. Versus, I want to be using this technology maybe in a different way, or to solicit different data or different value from it. That I think is not a self-serve, and I think that's understanding your customers. And it's a different persona that you're targeting at that point as well in saying, "It's self-serve, but we're going to bring together the resources of the company around you to help you understand this and think through your problem, solve it."

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Alon Waks:

Excellent. Let me take this to the next level. There's always the age old debate of contact center, customer services, cost center. The thing is, do you see now the focus not being cost to serve, but rather lifetime value and best relationship and experience for what the customer wants and needs at a specific journey phase. Versus, let's just treat everybody as quick as we can, first contact resolution AHD. That model seems to be a little bit odd for lifetime value. So, how do you balance that today if you're a customer executive?

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Bill Staikos:

I'll answer the first question in terms of what I see. Unfortunately, I still see the letter. Meaning this is a cost center, how do I reduce the number of calls? How do I reduce call handling time? How do I make this cheaper but still solve the customer's problem so they don't call back? And I avoid another $7 charge or whatever that cost per call is for your organization. It feels like 60 or 70% of organizations still think that way, big and small. That's just my general perception. The organization that have said, "No, the contact center could be a profit center for us. And we are not only going to empower our contact center agents to do something on their own..." Mike Weinbach who is the former CEO of Chase Home Lending, now he's at Wells Fargo, would always say, "Don't be right, do what's right."

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Bill Staikos:

Meaning, just because the policy says it's a $75 fee for this, Mr Staikos, but you know it's not the right thing to do, waive the fee. And that's okay, you won't be in trouble. And I think that organizations that understand loyalty and don't necessarily be right by the policy, but do what's right by the customer have changed that mental model to be much more, this could be a profit center. Number two is, I think the organizations that do understand that contact centers can be profit centers are also training their employees in different ways. And it's not, here's the call tag it, category, sub-category and get the customer off once you solved it. Or pass it on.

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Bill Staikos:

I think it really is scripting, training, using the right type of language and training them on the right type of language to listen, understand, engage. And really make sure that the client understands that you are here as an advocate for them, not as an advocate for the business and you're positioning things that way. And I think that's a really important distinction, and I think customers feel that distinction too on the phone. I've had great contact center calls and I've had really horrible ones too. It's clear when they want me off the phone, but it's also clear when they're there to say, "I'm here to help you. I am here on your behalf, that's why you've called me. I'm going to solve this and we're going to do this for you as quickly as possible."

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Alon Waks:

So to do that, it's case deflection and lowering total amount of cost to serve, overall for the person in charge is obviously the bank KPI. But am I hearing what you're saying? Lifetime value is more important than just case deflection, because reducing cases is okay but if you're getting lower lifetime value from your customer, it's not worth saving $7 because you might lose a customer that could be a million dollar lifetime value.

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Bill Staikos:

A 100%. And I think that, to your point, is I think that lifetime value is a really critical metric to understand, and to be able to give that information to your agents to see as well. And I think, back to your question around self-service, Alan, that's where self-service also comes in. That I think adds to lifetime value. If I'm using those self-service capabilities in the right way, my lifetime value by default is increasing. One, because you're deflecting the $7 call and I may have called seven times last year, but now that you've got great self-serve I haven't called any times. So automatically my lifetime value goes up by $49. But more importantly, my engagement and my understanding of how to use the technology and be better at using it and create value for the company that I'm working for. That Goodwill has a price tag. A little bit tougher to obviously quantify, you hope that it ends up being in bigger expansions, obviously in a B2B space, and bigger deals down the road. Also if I left and I go to another company, I'm bringing you in. It manifests there too.

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Alon Waks:

We're jumping around topics, I love it. The whole thing around self-service, do you see that most companies are looking at self-service as a strategic part of customer journey mapping? Or is it still being shoved down people's throat? Maybe a weird way to say it is, just use the bot. Okay, if you really want to shoot somebody, of course not seriously, then we'll escalate it and give it to an agent.

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Bill Staikos:

There are still conversations that I'm part of today, and not just in my role, talking to different leaders out there regularly. Where the conversation around digital is, we want omnichannel to work and we want the experience to be great across channels as long as we're using digital. That to me signifies that the mentality is still... Again, it's a cost thing. And years ago even, going back, let's say, 10 years when bots and different type of contact center platforms or different platforms were coming online. A lot of that value proposition was, you don't need half of your contact center. You don't need X team to be able to do this manually anymore. I think that even for solutions... Personally, I've never seen a contact center actually gets smaller because of a solution.

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Bill Staikos:

I think there's a lot of interest around that. And I think people generally say we can reduce costs and that I think companies are reducing costs in different ways. But the argument or the value prop really falls short. So, I think that self-serve piece still is unfortunately about lowering my cost to serve. I think people inherently want to deliver a better experience and they try to through design or whatever internal capabilities they're using. But again, it's trying to drive a business outcome versus, I can drive the business outcome, but I also can create a great experience. And I think that the companies that get it, from an experiential perspective, think in both ways. One is, I need to grow my revenues by 10%. How am I going to do that? I can create and design something that can help me participate in that growth. But I also should be doing this in a way that is helpful for our customers. Because if I lose them going out the door, what's the point in creating something that's going to help me grow 10%.

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Alon Waks:

I love it. I think there's two important things that we can rip on a bit more. One of them is, it's not about maintaining just cost because you want to reduce number of FTEs. That's a secondary item. We're looking at, especially in the B2B world and the Zoomin world [inaudible 00:13:35] a lot is, you're growing, your company's growing, you're increasing. So the number of support tickets or just inquiries, or the number of customers to serve is going to grow. You can maintain that and prioritize the time and the efficiency of support and success by doing the more important things and deflect the repeatable patterns by self-service. That's what we are seeing as the whole rationale for self-service. Is that the way you would look at it a bit?

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Bill Staikos:

Yeah. Look, you guys are an organization that are scaling, and you can't scale with people. That's impossible. So you need to create capabilities that help you scale in different ways or create the platform for the kind of scale that you want to create. So I think in a B2B space, I think that is a lot of the mentality in terms of, what capabilities do we need to put in place that create an environment that allow us to scale faster and grow faster? As we're growing, if people are calling in and we need to throw bodies at a problem, you're eating into your burn rate. There's a lot of costs associated with that. Your investors are not going to be happy. There's a whole lot of downstream ramifications. By creating self-serve capability, you're giving your contact center or those agents scale. And that scale supports other areas of growth and opportunity that the company wants to be able to capitalize on, obviously.

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Alon Waks:

I love it. Let's talk a little bit about this term CX very overly or [inaudible 00:15:03] use let's say, who owns customer experience in your view?

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Bill Staikos:

I've got a little bit of a different view on this than most. So, I keep on hearing everyone owns CX. And I think that is absolutely the wrong answer. Not everyone can own CX. I think everyone is accountable to the customer, whether you're in the back office producing reports for someone internal, you're still accountable to the customer. That customer's paying your salary. And you need to be thinking about, how does this report that I produce go to someone in the business that is going to use that to do something else that creates some value for the customer? And really understand that connection. I think that there needs to be a specific leader in the organization that owns CX. Owns it from the perspective of, I'm going to understand it. I'm going to create systems and mechanisms to be able to action on it. But the business, whoever owns that experience in the business is delivering on that.

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Bill Staikos:

So one is ownership and accountability, two is delivery. And those are really important distinctions. A lot of people are putting in like a chief experience officer, a chief customer officer, all C-suites positions, which I think are really important. And these individuals are bringing together multiple discipline, not only your core CX disciplines, insights, analytics, design. But also bringing change, bringing in transformation, bringing even marketing rolling up now into the CXO a lot more. Even contact center or customer facing operations reporting to these folks. You're creating an environment where you are saying that's CXO owns the experience, because, at the end of the day, they're the ones that are designing it. But the people in the business are responsible for delivering that. And there is where it gets muddy and oh, everybody owns CX. Yeah, but no, not really. So, I think it's important to be able to distinguish between ownership, accountability and delivery on those three levels.

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Alon Waks:

What does accountability mean? Is it an MBO? Is there a mechanism to make sure that your report or the collection or the financial bill also is customer friendly? How does a quarterback, like I call the CXO, CCO, whoever owns experience, help those other teams be accountable?

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Bill Staikos:

I think it's helping employees... Not just employees, but even folks who are there as consultants, understanding how what they do every day connects to business outcomes for the customer and the actions that a customer takes. I don't care if you're in the mail room, I don't care if you're the CEO, that connection needs to be created. And that to me is how customer-led cultures manifest and get created. If you are a mail room clerk and you say to yourself, "If I don't do my job, then the CEO doesn't get important correspondence and they can't do their job effectively, which will ultimately impact their ability to drive this organization." If that's your mentality going into that role every day, that to me, you are accountable to the customer. Because what you do helps someone else do their job, and it could be 10 layers.

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Bill Staikos:

But at the end of the day, that end layer is touching the customer somehow and is driving a business result, is driving a customer outcome. And you need to understand and appreciate that connection. So if you don't do your job, the next nine layers can't do their job effectively. And then there's a breakdown to customer. That is what a great CXO would do in any organization, is being able to make for everybody clear... And giving people the tools to do that, of course, as well, but making for everybody clear, here's how you impact, here's why you're accountable.

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Alon Waks:

Giving a platform or tool to have the right content in one place is one piece, but making the sense of pride and accomplishment of everybody saying, "Not only am I providing a company that's healthy, but I have a stake in making sure that the customers are seeing the value that we are driving in our mission statement." I think that's actually a cool way to explain it. Very nice. Let's jump to measurement, because CX measurement is always... I call it a Pandora's box, but that's well defined, so it's not even that. What are the measurements for CX? Is there one, is it a soup? What do you believe in?

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Bill Staikos:

Here's another thing, where I think that customer experience is too focused on customer satisfaction, NPS. And I love Fred Reichheld, he's a great guy, he's a hero of mine, customer effort. I think that these are all outcomes of something else indifferent. In any CX leadership role that I've had, Alan, I've told the CEO I've got three objectives, and these are my measurements. I'm going to drive revenue, I'm going to cut costs, and I'm going to improve culture. And you can measure culture, employee engagement, whatever that primary measure is. Those are my three metrics. CSAT or NPS or whatever the other metric was, was a derivative of those three somehow. Or ENPS as an example. And I think that CX as a discipline has been, for far too long, very survey and reporting driven. And has lost really the direction as a broader discipline to really hone in on their ability to drive business outcomes and be a critical partner to the C-suite no matter who it is in the C-suite.

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Bill Staikos:

And if you can change that view to say, "I'm not here to increase satisfaction scores, I'm being here to increase revenue, create happier employees, reduce costs or all three," hopefully all three. Then your actions become very different. And you get away from, here are the three things that are impacting satisfaction. Yes, I understand when prices are lower, customers are happy. I know that when service is better, customers are happy. I get all that stuff. But how do we drive revenue for the firm using the toolkit that you have access to? How do we reduce costs? And it's not just about deflecting calls into the contact center. So, I think that if you can dig in there and truly understand how you have impact on real business outcomes, that is CX measurement for me. And those measurements, those business outcomes could be different for any number of companies. But if you had three metrics to choose from, for me, revenue, cost and culture.

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Alon Waks:

When you look at those three, I'm going to be provocative, because it's fun, it's my podcast.

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Bill Staikos:

Go for it.

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Alon Waks:

Is it the challenge that CX doesn't really own any of them? CX doesn't own revenue. There's a machine that owns revenue. You can influence revenue. And CX's job is to identify the direct line of how you influence revenue. Is that the difficulty why the world of CX is having a hard time because it's not owning, it's not their number one KPI. It's not pipeline. It's not closed one. It's not expansion.

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Bill Staikos:

I just want to be careful what I said, I don't want to get too much into trouble. I think that the broader CX machine has been very survey and CSAT or NPS driven. I've set up an NPS system, you hear that a lot. That's a normal thing. Bain created it with Reichheld and it's wonderful. It's created a lot of value for a lot of companies and customers. But it's turned into, I'm just going to capture my NPS, I'm going to report on it to my CEO. Then here are the three, four things that are driving that score. And then it's somebody else's problem to go change that. That's where I think the discipline is falling short. They're not taking the next step to say, "Okay, pricing is an issue, but you can really..." With analytics, you can say, "If we charge $29 to this cohort, they won't buy."

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Bill Staikos:

"But if we charge 27, they will. To that cohort, if we just gave a discount of X and it looked like Y, they will buy." Really using data to help individuals, sales teams, other leaders in the organization achieve their objectives, that's what the CX toolkit is there to do and help with. It's not there to just say, "I'm going to run my report and I'm going to go deliver that. Now, Mr. Sales leader, go figure it out." You've got a bogie of growing revenue by 20% this year, I want to be able to help you figure out how to do that using the toolkit. Not your sales people need to be more friendly, or when they get high ratings on service, there's higher sales. Yeah, no kidding. Anybody can tell you that. But I think that's a trap that a lot of teams get into.

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Alon Waks:

What I'm hearing from you is, the true value of a customer experience leader or customer experience organization is not just to drive customer health. But also to go and identify root causes and places in the organization where you can become a true leader here in the company saying, "Here's the product gaps we've seen, here's the content that's not enabling you to adopt product that needs to be put in place." Because then customers will be adopting on their own more product efficiency.

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Bill Staikos:

But I think even more than that, Alan, I think it's taking it one step further to say, "Not just here are the product gaps, but here's what we need to fill them with." Because not only our customers telling us what they need, but thinking about the marketplace, thinking about changes in consumer needs. Really getting a 360 degree view of the business and the market that you operate in, not just your business. And coming with real recommendations to the table to say, "Here are three options. You own this business, I'm not going to make the decision for you. Here's our recommendation, what do you want to do?" I think that a lot of CX folks just stop before they even get there. And it's, even to your point, here are the gaps, you go figure it out. You know this business. Versus, I can go figure this out, because I'm talking to customers every day and I'm a student of this market, not just our company.

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Bill Staikos:

And I have a perspective on where demand is going or headed for this type of product and the capabilities and what the future tech around this looks like. So, I'm going to really give some deep thought around, what are the gaps that we need to fill? So I can go to my head of product and say, "Here are the gaps, here's what's happening in the marketplace. Here are some things for you to consider in terms of fulfilling those gaps, which ones are these? Because you know the technical side and you know the product much better, which one of these are feasible? I think this one has the longest term benefit, but is that even feasible?" I don't know. They would have to opine there. But I think it's really getting a full 360 view, not just from surveys and data, but really understanding the entire ecosystem around you and being able to have a view in terms of where things are going. And then bringing all that data together to make clear, actionable recommendations to people that they can take and put into practice. And that is measurable too.

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Alon Waks:

I love it. I think that's very powerful and really elevates the customer organizations versus just telling them go get net retention. We want to give you a little bit of power that you probably have yielded before, but we call this a superpower. Think about fairy dust, an X or like lightning, whichever God you want to choose. And tell us what is the thing that really annoys you in this world of customer experience. What's your rant, what's your vent? And then we'll give you the power to eradicate it. How would you?

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Bill Staikos:

Oh man, we're going to... This is way longer than a 30-minute show. I think the thing for me... And we'll start to see this, and I'll talk a little bit about how I think it's going to change. The thing for me is, as a discipline, CX is not focused on real measurement, business outcome measurement. Again, we talked about this. Very CSAT or NPS or customer efforts driven stuff. We don't do a good job of creating even a lifetime value calculation for customers or some other financial metric to be able to measure the effect and the impact of our work. And tie CX directly to real business outcomes. And I think that's a problem that a lot of CX teams have been facing for a long time. I think Forrester, two years ago, wrote a report that 25% of CX leaders are going to get fired because they can't do this.

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Bill Staikos:

That was a very provocative headline. 25% of CX leaders were not fired, obviously, but I think his point was spot on, that this really needs to happen. I think that what will happen ultimately is that, you will start to see the technology bake this in. We're already starting to see it today, whereby whether it's digital paths or digital journeys that people are taking or not taking, how they're falling out. You can start to attribute revenue lost by them falling out of a pipeline, and that's pretty basic stuff. But I think the ROI of CX is going to start to be baked into platforms, so it's automatically calculated based on your cost. As a case in point, contact center is a great example. In a past life at a bank, each call was $7. If it was a complaint, it was $125. If it went to the executive office, it was like $250. As the technology gets smarter and you have more automation and next-best journey's baked in, that capability is available today.

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Bill Staikos:

I think that we're going to start to be able to layer in our costs as an organization, directly into the platform. So the ROI is automatically kicked out, and you'll have real-time ROI. Same thing on the revenue side though, as well. And everything from what that looks like when the sales cycle is shorter and what are opportunities to shorten a sales cycle, to how do we sell better to different cohorts of buyers? I think a lot of that is going to start to get baked into the technology. And I think that companies are going to start demanding it more.

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Alon Waks:

So all that idea about value. What is value, time to value, lifetime value, all that. Do you feel like the challenge for the Forester two years ago headline is that because there isn't an off-the-shelf definition of value and there's no metric like pipeline like CSAT, which is just a standing point in time. Is that the challenge, that every company needs to define what value or health or customer benefit is? And if so, do you think there will be something like this?

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Bill Staikos:

I think the fact that many companies define value differently is part of the challenge, for sure. I think that though technology now in particular is at a place where you can create that customization capability and embed it in the platform. Whereby a company could call it whatever it wants to call it, whatever that metric is. And then do the calculation based off of whatever change happens. I think part of it is, to your point, around defining what that is. The other part is, are we putting that into the technology that we're creating? And I think that is also part of the problem. We haven't traditionally... Now that's changing. We haven't traditionally put in that ROI piece into the platform. And I think maybe it's because B2B companies traditionally said, "Too complicated, it's different for everybody. How would we ever execute against that?" But that doesn't exist anymore.

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Bill Staikos:

I think the capability of a platform perspective is such where you can create it generically enough where it can be customized, even self-serve by the client. They can put in the metrics that they want and tick and tie it to the outcomes that they drive, and still create that ROI. Because it's happening today. At Medallia, on our digital suite, we can calculate revenue attribution based on where clients come in or out of a funnel. So that's pretty generic, but it's there. The client has to supply the number, the cost, or the lost revenue, what that looks like. But at the end of the day, that is there. So, the capability to customize is there, I think it's just about really making a concerted effort to make it fully.

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Alon Waks:

Let's hope more and more of this gets adopted. And I think that transitioned us to the very important question of giving you real amazing lightning power. Let's say a CEO or founder comes to you and says, "Listen, we really want to invest in customer experience, in customer centricity, customer..." Or any words you want to use around the word customer that is very trendy. What would you tell them that maybe their new VP of support or their old VP of success are afraid or not able to strategically tell them? What would you guide them on?

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Bill Staikos:

Well, first of all, I'd ask him why does he want do that. What is the business goal that he's trying to drive? Or she, excuse me. Because if it's not rooted in business goals and strategy, it will never happen, it'll never work. And eventually that CEO will not pay much attention. So number one is starting with a why, and even understanding what is your purpose as an organization. Why are you here? What is your function and utility to society? Then why do you want to improve the customer or employee experience for that matter? And how do we connect those? And I think that's step one is, understanding what business objectives are behind this. How do we connect it to your company's overall purpose?

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Bill Staikos:

And then identify the foundational pieces to be able to deliver against that. Step one, very simple. It said simply, but it is a little harder than that. And I see that sometimes. And I've seen that even in past lives in companies that I've worked for, where a leader reads... I'm making this up, but something in HBR. This is why this is important. "We need a CXO, everyone's got a CXO. Hey, let's go get a CXO." Well, you already have a ahead of customer experience. What exactly do you want a CXO for? They cost a lot of money, by the way. "I've read this great article, they're focused on all this stuff, we're not focused where we are, but it's just spread across four different parts of the business."

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Bill Staikos:

Do you want to just bring the four different parts of the business together? Or do you want a CXO? Or do you want to go hire someone externally that doesn't know this business? So I think understanding the why is really important. And I think that, as leaders, we need to question ourselves much more openly and honestly behind the rationale for different decisions. And if people can answer that why with clarity and the objectives behind it with clarity, then I am more than happy to sit down and say, "Here are a couple of different models that I've been successful in the past that you might consider. From purpose and vision to CX strategy, to CX tactics, those foundational elements, and then deliver.

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Alon Waks:

Tying it all to business and making sure the rationale of the why behind it.

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Bill Staikos:

My previous employer, when I came in, someone said, "Oh, you're the new head of customer experience." I said, "Yeah." And they're like, "Oh, you're here to fix our surveys." And I said, "If that's what you guys are paying me all this money for, I'm laughing all the way to the bank, because I can fix this in three weeks. And then I'm going to go to the beach and coast." There it was really about setting something up completely scratch. An organization, had a couple people that were doing some things associated with CX and really helping the business understand the toolkit and the transformative power and really changing things. So yeah, I think it's really understanding the rationale behind it to really... And as a motivator, even for me, if the CEO then came to me and said, "You're going to fix our surveys." I would've been like, "You've hired the wrong guy. Pay me a consulting fee, I'm gone in three months and your surveys will be fixed."

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Alon Waks:

That's like taking me to say, "Let's optimize our website demo page conversion."

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Bill Staikos:

It's interesting, but that's not what they're paying you for.

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Alon Waks:

Mr. Bill, we are so happy to have had you on The Flourish podcast series, brought to you by Zoomin. We are all now better at being customer-led, and thank you for being a guest.

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Bill Staikos:

It's my pleasure. It's an honor to be here. And great conversation, great questions, Alon. Appreciate it.

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Alon Waks:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Flourish CX, to learn more head over to zoominsoftware.com/podcast and follow along wherever you get your audio.

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