Relentless Customer Leader Podcast

Dr Chris L. Brown (00:02.604)
Alright, fantastic. I'm here with Annette Frans and it's wonderful to see you Annette. It's been a while but great to see you again.

Annette Franz (00:09.425)
It has been a while. Great to see you as well. I look forward to catching up today.

Dr Chris L. Brown (00:13.014)
Yeah. Look, I thought what we could do to start with is really think about your early journey in terms of your own sort of business journey. And when you really became interested in this whole idea of customer experience and how it's evolved into employee experience and so on, do you have a moment in time that you recall that it all started?

Annette Franz (00:34.847)
I always say that it wasn't a sexy journey. Like it's not a fun story or anything like that. As a matter of fact, it dates me more than anything because I I had moved to California from Ohio and I was looking for a job and I was looking in the paper and there was an ad for JD Power and Associates. And I was like, great, I love math and I love writing. And that's really what market research entails, both of those. And so that's pretty much where it started. And you know, working for JD Power and Associates really,

I really loved it because to be able to make that connection between customers and how businesses treat those customers and if they improve, the business will succeed and all that kind of stuff. And even back in the day, I was one who kept telling clients too, because I was on the customer research side.

hey, you guys ought to listen to your employees too, not just your customers. And they would say, listen to employees later. Let's just do customer satisfaction and customer loyalty work now. And so here we are 30 years later. Yeah, that was fun for me. And I remember having sort of my elevator pitch, right? People would ask me like, what do you do there? We know who J.D. Powell is. He says, what do you do there? And was really sort of my punchy thing was response was,

Dr Chris L. Brown (01:37.506)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Annette Franz (01:54.611)
you know what, I work with businesses to help them figure out what they need to do to improve their processes and improve how they interact with customers. So, you know, they see better results. You know, I mean, that was pretty much it in a nutshell.

Dr Chris L. Brown (02:07.342)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, JD Power has got such a great reputation as being an organization that's really leveled up, you know, in terms of customer satisfaction and all of that and quality, right, in terms of delivering consistently. So it must have been a fantastic foundation for you there.

Annette Franz (02:20.476)
Absolutely.

Annette Franz (02:25.181)
Yeah, absolutely. I was there for five years and it really was. Met so many great people, worked with so many great clients, but it was a great foundation for where we are today. So yeah, absolutely.

Dr Chris L. Brown (02:29.292)
Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (02:36.524)
Yeah, well, you're onto your third book now. So customer understanding was the first one. And then built to win the second one around customer centric culture. And now we're talking about employee understanding, right? So it's sort of a journey that you've been going through. And I think probably to start with, when you think about the employee understanding book, you start that by saying that leaders really

Annette Franz (02:50.707)
Yes.

Annette Franz (02:54.26)
you

Dr Chris L. Brown (03:05.91)
still struggle to retain and engage talent, right? What sort of the blind spot do you think that they have around this whole area?

Annette Franz (03:16.191)
I think they just, they don't get it. I've had so many conversations with leaders in businesses over the years who've just, when I've talked about this connection between the employee experience and the customer experience and ultimately business outcomes, they kind of lean over in the meeting and they say, thank you for telling me about that. I didn't even know that. I mean, I don't know how many meetings I was in where they just didn't make that connection, which is...

so weird, you because you you think about it and you say, well, without employees, who's going to design and build and sell and service and do all of this. And if we don't take care of them, and if we don't make sure they have the tools and the training and everything they need to do their jobs, then, you know, customers will suffer and the business will suffer. So I think that's a, that's just such a big thing that I, you know, I, when I first launched the book back in March, I said,

I'm gonna dedicate this year to talking about the employee experience. And that's what I've done in my blog posts, in my LinkedIn posts. just try and everywhere social media, been out there just saying, this is what we gotta focus on. And here's the connection. Here's why it's a connection and those kinds of things. So I just think that, I thought we had learned a lot during COVID when suddenly every CEO and every leader out there was like, my gosh, we need to take care of our employees, employees, employees. And then, is that sort of...

dissipated the whole employee thing fell apart too and we're back to, know, hey, employees, whatever kind of things.

Dr Chris L. Brown (04:47.284)
Yeah, yeah. So sort of a combination probably of awareness. They're just not really thinking about this and just helping them connect the dots.

Annette Franz (04:51.604)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. And I have teased what my next book might be and I think it's going to be leadership understanding. And it's about understanding leaders, but also helping leaders understand the rest of it. So I got that one spinning around in my head, but it's kind of like where it needs to be. I've written about the customer, I've written about the culture, I've written about employees, but what's the linchpin or what's connecting all of these? And it really is.

leaders and leadership and why they don't understand and how do we understand what they're going through and what they're thinking. So there you go. I kind of teased that one already, but that one's ears down the road.

Dr Chris L. Brown (05:35.298)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. You talk about, and this is not not something I'd heard of before, but the Sunday Scaries test in the book. Can you tell me a bit more about what that is and how you think about that?

Annette Franz (05:46.052)
yes.

You know, it's that feeling on Sunday night when you're, when you just dread, my gosh, tomorrow's Monday, I have to go to work. I have all this work that you know, that piled up from last week or the stress or your burnout or the culture is miserable and you just don't even want to go there. You just don't even want to be there. And so Sunday night, it's that feeling in the pit of your stomach, like,

Jeez, I hope I wake up sick tomorrow morning so I can call in sick, right? That kind of thing. And it really is about the culture and this toxic environment that employees have to go to every day and don't wanna be a part of that. yeah, I didn't know that it had that term to it the first time I used it, or that name to it, but it totally makes sense.

Dr Chris L. Brown (06:19.66)
Yeah, yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (06:32.12)
Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (06:35.982)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.

Yeah. And I mean, that really kind of speaks to this idea of a toxic culture, right? An environment that is not an environment where someone wants to participate or really show up and deliver their best work. You know, that's a real challenge, right? So, I mean, there are many of these and certainly in my work, I've seen them. How do you think about sort of turning those situations around? I think, you we've all sort of

Annette Franz (06:56.412)
Absolutely.

Dr Chris L. Brown (07:10.422)
maybe seen that in different environments, but how do you actually do something about it and change it, do think?

Annette Franz (07:16.531)
Well, I think it's, I think it really does go back to the leader, right? It goes back to the CEO. It goes back to what leaders are doing and saying and modeling and reinforcing and rewarding. And, and you know it, you've said it and I've said it and we've heard it many times is that you get the culture you design or the one you allow. And when you allow that type of behavior and that type of, you know, when you allow employees to get

burned out and stressed and you have this environment that nobody's really taken control of and deliberately brought it back to where it should be to be a great culture, bad things happen, right? And so it really does, to me, it rests on the leader. The culture is truly the shadow of the leader. And so the leadership team has to take a look at it and just say, hey, things are going sideways. We need to step up and step in and turn this thing around.

Dr Chris L. Brown (07:55.512)
Yeah.

Annette Franz (08:12.095)
And it's the culture. It's taking a look at your culture and really doing an audit and saying, you you guys have the MRI, doing an audit like that, or doing some type of an assessment of the culture to figure out where things are breaking down, when they started breaking down, why they're breaking down, and bring it back to where you need it to be. But it's truly resting on the shoulders of the leaders.

Dr Chris L. Brown (08:36.108)
Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like this idea. I mean, it's a really challenging environment because often these leaders have, these are blind spots. don't think that they're micromanaging. They don't think that they're creating an environment that's toxic. They just are a bit confused as to why everyone's not doing what they should be doing. Right. And so, you know, it's a real challenge. And I think it's as external people, we have an opportunity to be able to

Annette Franz (08:53.405)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (09:04.504)
confront some of those things and bring those to the fore. I think there was a good phrase, you know, it's hard to tell the CEO that their baby's ugly, right? It's sort of, it's not a message that gets received well. But sometimes that's the only way, right? And then, you know, I think if they're not willing to do anything about it, there's not a lot that you can do because they're really the people that can shape this and engage employees and turn things around.

Annette Franz (09:13.843)
Right? It's so true. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Annette Franz (09:33.979)
Absolutely. Are you still, I have a question for you because I see this. I see leaders viewing culture as fluff and a lot of people viewing culture as fluff. Are you seeing that as well and how are you reacting or responding or what are some of the things that you tell them to convince them, no, it's not fluff. It's the foundation of your business.

Dr Chris L. Brown (09:43.022)
Mm.

Dr Chris L. Brown (09:52.846)
Yeah, look, I think what you have to do is really connect it to business performance and say, where are we actually performing to the best of our ability? And where there are gaps in that, clearly something's going wrong. And usually that's because we're not creating an environment for employees to do their best work and to be competitive, right? To be built to win, as you say in your book. We're not doing the things that are necessary to create.

high levels of performance. And so, you know, I've always thought about it, there's competency, there's the skill, the capabilities, but there's also then the passion and the heart, which drives those. that's, you know, people can talk about them as soft skills, but it's really creating an environment where people use those competencies to their absolute maximum. So, you know, I think that the two

There's a lot of good evidence that shows that people are motivated by their emotion, right? Their passion, where their energy is. And that's really what you're doing is managing the energy and managing the passion and helping them apply it in a way that's delivering an outcome. And where they're misaligned, that's where you've got lots of challenges, And yeah.

Annette Franz (10:57.759)
Yeah, absolutely.

Annette Franz (11:16.703)
That's it.

Dr Chris L. Brown (11:19.182)
And you see this, mean, people want to do great work for people that they have respect for and have personal relationships with too. You don't always need to like those people, but you can respect them for their consistency and you can see what it is that they're trying to drive for. And so, you know, that makes all the difference, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Annette Franz (11:39.401)
Right.

Annette Franz (11:44.457)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr Chris L. Brown (11:46.606)
So let's talk a little bit more about your framework. So you've got a three pillar framework here, a cultural alignment, employee insights, employee empathy. Tell me a bit more about those and how to tackle those pieces.

Annette Franz (11:49.937)
Okay? Yes.

Annette Franz (11:59.987)
Okay. So it's interesting when I started writing this book in the back of my head for probably the prior year, I said, well, I wrote this book, Customer Understanding, and there are three ways to understand the customer, know, listen, which is the, you know, surveys, feedback, feedback and data really, and then characterize, which is developing the personas and then empathize, which is journey mapping, service, blueprinting, and walking in their shoes, right? And then I kept thinking, you know what, I can just slap

you know, just do the, we can change customer to employee and we've got another book here. But the more I thought about it and the more, you know, as I've got Built to Win sort of in the middle there, I started to think about a framework that I had in Built to Win, which was, you know, culture's the foundation. And if you've got culture as the precursor to a great employee experience, and then the employee experience leads to a great customer experience. I was like, you know what? It's not really the same. It is the same. We have to do the same work.

Dr Chris L. Brown (12:35.085)
Yeah, yeah.

Annette Franz (12:58.771)
We do have to do the same work to understand our employees and design a great experience, but I feel like there's more to it. And I touched on culture. I did write about culture in customer understanding, but I didn't make it one of the pillars because I wanted to make sure that people understood, here's the work that needs to be done just in this box of designing a great customer experience. So when I came to employee understanding, I was like, okay.

It's the same work that we have to do, but there's more to it because culture really is the foundation. So I wanted that to be the first pillar. Absolutely. And there's a lot that goes with that, right? You know, it's like, okay, well, Annette, you talked about a customer-centric culture. You talked about an employee-centric culture. What does that mean? Like who's at the center of the business and really...

You know, it's a people-centric culture is what it is. And ultimately wrote about that in the book as well, is that that's what it becomes is you people have to be the heart of the business. And then the second pillar is around employee insights. And that's where I put, you know, the feedback, the data, the HR analytics, the persona developing, development, you know, those kinds of things, all the things that we need to do to really understand who our employees are.

Dr Chris L. Brown (14:10.736)
Mm.

Annette Franz (14:17.159)
and what we need to do to ensure that they have a great experience. And then in the third pillar, I call that one empathy. And I brought in a couple of different components. I did bring in the journey mapping and the service blueprinting, but I also brought in the leadership aspect. And I think this is a really important part of this. Again, leaders develop this, have to deliberately design this culture that puts people first.

But when it comes to empathy, really, you know, that's gotta come from your leaders. And one of the people that has inspired me over the year, you and I may have talked about him in the past, is Bob Chapman at Barry Waymiller. And, you know, his whole thing was, know, hey, we have all these employees that are in our span of care and they come to work for us eight, 10, 12 hours a day. We cannot send them home and...

worse condition than they arrived here this morning, because they're going to go home and they're going to yell at their kids and they're going to yell at their spouses or whatever. So we need to take care of them. And he really was the one who I was thinking about as I'm writing this third pillar about leadership or about empathy, specifically about leadership empathy and how we need to really take care of our employees. And the journey mapping is obviously to walking in their shoes and really understanding.

what they do day in and day out to do their jobs, to interact with each other and all of that. So the three pillars are different from the customer understanding book, but it involves and entails a lot of the same work as well.

Dr Chris L. Brown (15:49.358)
Yeah, it's similar processes, aren't they? And you've done a lot of work over the years in persona development, journey mapping, service blueprint, those great frameworks that are really designed to map out the way in which a customer interacts and using those in different ways. How have you found, I mean, things like persona development, how have you...

Annette Franz (15:57.567)
Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (16:18.444)
What's been your experience in using those in organizations and seeing them used, I guess, effectively across organizations? Do you have any that sort of stand out for you?

Annette Franz (16:24.447)
Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's really interesting because, so I'll talk about customer personas for a second and they typically are either non-existent or we've got buyer personas and we've got UX personas that are very specific. You know, the buyer personas that marketing does for, you know, they're part of the funnel there. And then the UX personas for very specific,

you know, product usage and those kinds of things. But there's nobody that, shouldn't say nobody, there are, but to think about sort of the bigger picture, the customer, the end-to-end experience and, you know, customer's needs and pain points and what they're trying to do when they're desired outcomes and those kinds of things. So very rarely have I seen people who are companies that have that full, you know, end-to-end thought process when it comes to developing those personas. But the ones that I have seen, get it.

and they use them correctly too. One of my favorite examples was years ago when Stanley, Black and Decker was, their headquarters were here probably about five minutes from my house. And I had gone in to meet with them and they had their personas in their hallways, not out front in the water or anything like that, but in their hallways and were constantly educating their employees about who their personas were and

why we need to use these and why we need to understand who they were. And one of my favorite things that they did was, you know, they had footsteps in on their hallways, just, you know, stickers on the floors with, you know, shoes, footsteps leading up to a persona on the wall. So you could read about who this person is and what their needs and pain points, et cetera. Another fun one was going to Airbnb and going to their headquarters and seeing how they, you know, they've got guests and they've got hosts, but.

going and seeing how the needs of their guests versus the needs of their hosts and really taking the time to understand those different, those are sort of bigger umbrella personas. So that was kind of fun. But when it comes to the employee side, I have to say I have not seen anybody do employee personas in all my years of working with clients. And employee personas are sort of twofold. There's the...

Dr Chris L. Brown (18:31.392)
Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (18:40.91)
Thanks.

Annette Franz (18:49.447)
employee persona, and then there's the internal customer persona. And these are the personas that we need to use to understand how employees interact with each other. And I, as somebody in marketing, have somebody in product who's my customer or somebody in research who's got product as my customer or engineering as my, you know, those kinds of things. so, so I haven't seen anybody who's really done a great job.

or has even developed the employee persona. So that's one that we gotta get going on.

Dr Chris L. Brown (19:20.918)
Yeah, yeah. mean, it's, it makes it real right, particularly in larger organizations where the big challenge is psychological distance from customers, like people work in the business and they're so far removed from them, that they don't actually really have a sense of who the customer is and what their experience is. And so it's a great tool for doing that. And similar to you, I think the best companies that I've seen really do a really great job of understanding who

Annette Franz (19:34.42)
Yes.

Annette Franz (19:40.925)
Agreed.

Dr Chris L. Brown (19:50.316)
that person is and bringing them to life inside the organization. And at a high level, that's very useful for people because they can understand then who we're serving and why the organization exists at the end of the day.

Annette Franz (20:04.189)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a, there's, you make an interesting point there too, is that folks in the back office think that they don't impact the customer because they're in the back office. They're on the front line. And so, you know, they think, the experience happens at the front line, but they're near back office impacts the experience just as much as, as your front line does.

Dr Chris L. Brown (20:26.156)
Yeah, I think one of the big, big skill sets that I see in really good customer centric leaders is just the ability to take different perspectives, right? It's perspective taking and that's kind of related to empathy, right? To put yourself in the shoes of someone else to say, how would I experience this? And what would I feel as a result of that experience? Is that something that I would be motivated by? Is it something that would

Annette Franz (20:40.191)
right. Yes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (20:54.55)
annoying me, whatever, and just helping people kind of think through that and get them situated there. And I think that's a big gap is that leaders and there's good evidence, unfortunately, as leaders move up in larger organizations, they have less empathy often. Right. And so it's a matter of sort of counteracting that force as they sort of climb the ladder or move up in an organization and not sort of lose that empathy.

Annette Franz (20:55.859)
business.

Yeah.

Annette Franz (21:02.291)
Yes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (21:23.63)
really become, remain grounded right in what's happening in the business. Yeah. So how have you, I guess, you one of the challenges here is, you know, yeah, businesses are driven by financial leaders often, and they're looking at, you know, how do we impact the financials of the business?

Annette Franz (21:28.969)
Yeah, absolutely agree.

Dr Chris L. Brown (21:49.102)
What sort of what have you seen as sort of good cases for connecting this work with business performance? Have you seen that done effectively?

Annette Franz (21:58.687)
There are, I'm working with a client right now that's doing just that, right? They're seeing, you know, getting the feedback, they're doing the journey mapping, they're making the changes and they're first of all going in and linking everything that they do, both the journey mapping and the work that comes out as a result of the things that they uncover from the journey mapping. You know, obviously they've got to get budget and approval for.

making any changes or anything. So there is definitely a very clear line between here's the work that we're doing and the outcomes for the business. I think that's really the only way that you can get ahead and get this work done and get people focusing on both the employees and the customers is to absolutely make that connection and make that linkage. So yeah, I've seen it and when they do it and when they make that connection, it's an immediate

yes, you're going to get the budget. And yes, you're going to get what you need to make this happen.

Dr Chris L. Brown (23:00.482)
Yeah, yeah. And it's really a matter I think of just needs to be really spelled out, doesn't it? So it needs to be sort of looked at in very clear detail around, you I think part of it is that these are blind spots and they're not easy to measure some of these things, right? So what's the impact of a customer or an employee having a bad experience and communicating that with others? What sort of

Annette Franz (23:05.638)
Yeah, absolutely.

Annette Franz (23:10.889)
Yes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (23:27.936)
impact does that have in terms of resistance? when it comes to customers, if they're talking poorly about a business and their experience with that, it creates a lot of headwinds for a company, right? Because those people that are here about that, they're of reticent to maybe engage with them. So certainly impacts, you new customer acquisition. And there are ways of modeling that

for different businesses. And it's a matter of whether there's the willingness to actually do the modeling because the work, there's some work involved in modeling those sorts of things, but it's very clear that it can be modeled and it's a little bit different for every business.

Annette Franz (24:07.207)
It's definitely that and it's frustrating for some folks to hear, some executives hear, what? We're not gonna see results on this for 12 months or 18 months or whatever it's gonna take. But yeah, it's gotta be done. I did a, and I love sharing this story, because this was probably from, gosh, 15 years ago or something, maybe even longer, 20 years ago. We was working with an insurance client and we set up a feedback loop where,

Dr Chris L. Brown (24:18.465)
it.

Annette Franz (24:35.871)
If there were detractors, the call center would follow up with them and identified these at-risk customers that they followed up with and they ended up saving, I think, I forget the exact number or percentage, but I think it was around 65 % of their at-risk customers and it totaled out to be $11 million that they saved for the year in terms of revenue from these at-risk customers by bringing them back in the fold.

Dr Chris L. Brown (24:56.462)
Mm.

Annette Franz (25:01.663)
It's there, it happens and there are ways to show that ROI so you can do more and more and get people, get those quick wins in place so that people will hang on for 12 to 18 months where for some of the bigger engagements or involvements or projects that they've got to do. But I always say when it comes to this is it's why are we in business? We're in business because and for the customer, right? And so if we make these changes and we focus on listening and making improvements,

Dr Chris L. Brown (25:07.925)
Mm.

Annette Franz (25:31.635)
that we're only helping ourselves, right? And we're helping customers, we're helping ourselves. We're gonna be doing things more efficiently and more effectively because we're doing them for the customer to solve problems for them and meet their needs. so I think that it's, I know that doesn't have that fun, sexy financial aspect to it, but I think that's a big part of it, right? Is we're gonna be doing things for the right reason and we're gonna be doing it more effectively because we're doing it for the customer.

Dr Chris L. Brown (25:35.424)
Mm.

Dr Chris L. Brown (25:52.171)
Yep.

Oops.

Dr Chris L. Brown (26:02.21)
Yeah, yeah. You know, I always, you know, I'm a big fan of what Amazon's been able to achieve over the years. And, you know, they've got positives and negatives, obviously, in their culture and in terms of how they do things. But I think what they've been able to do is recognise the fact that you've got to invest for the future, right? There's a longer term view that's involved. And so part of it is also recognising and rewarding employees that take that.

Annette Franz (26:32.361)
Yeah, agreed.

Dr Chris L. Brown (26:32.414)
on because it's not something that every employee will do. And often the incentives work against them doing anything longer term. And so just recognizing that, that actually they're incentivized just to deliver each month and not incentivized to build capability or to build the business for the future. And so that's something that you just recognize and say, we're either going to recognize that and

And that's okay. We're just going to be in a short term cycle or we're going to build the business over time. what I've seen is certainly a lot of the best executives that I've worked with are those that will take on some of these difficult projects that take longer time and some risk around, can I move the needle? Can I take it? But if you pull it off, then you become a leader in these organizations. So yeah.

Annette Franz (27:21.033)
Right.

Yep, absolutely.

Dr Chris L. Brown (27:28.43)
Another one that you pointed out in the book is Goodheart's Law, which I'm a big fan of, which is this idea that when you put a metric on something and you measure people on it, it ceases to become a good measure, right? It's this sort of irony, right? So once we start fracking NPS and so on, then people game it, don't they? And they work around it. Yeah.

Annette Franz (27:33.842)
Yes.

Annette Franz (27:43.177)
Right.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr Chris L. Brown (27:57.516)
What have you found in your experience, been a way to get around that? there other ways to sort of...

Annette Franz (28:06.807)
I've seen more people that focus on the metric and moving the needle. But again, it goes back to this education effort and really just helping people understand that and creating some quick wins and showing that if you focus on doing what it takes to improve the experience, the numbers are going to come right. But I have seen so many examples, bad examples of gaming over the years that it's just...

Like I said, I started my career at JD Power & Associates. So that's where I started to see some of that stuff where, know, especially in the car dealerships where, you know, hey, it's candy bars and oil changes and free this and free that. And I'll give you my first born. If you just rate me a 10, just give me 10. And you know what? mean, that just creates such a bad, bad environment for your employees that they have to be out there begging for, begging for.

you know, great scores. you know, I saw this with my kids. They both worked at the same restaurant over the last couple of years. They don't work there anymore. whenever their area manager would come in or be anywhere in the area, their GM would be like, hey, make sure every customer you ask them, they give us a five-star rating on Yelp kind of thing. it was just like, you know, begging for these five stars that, you know, customers aren't going to leave if the

Business isn't, if the business isn't clean, if they're not treated well, whatever it is, know, and we actually had a good friend who was like, yeah, I left him a five star review, but you know what, a couple months later I went in and it just, every time I went in it was dirty and it was this and it was that. He goes, I'm not going there anymore. So there you go. That's what happens when you're begging for these scores, You're moving the needle. You're not moving the experience, so.

Dr Chris L. Brown (29:50.35)
Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (29:56.259)
Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (29:59.98)
Yeah, yeah. mean, it's a real, it's actually works against, it actually creates the opposite impact that you're trying to create, right? So when someone's asking you for a score, then that actually, from a customer's point of view, it kind of works against, you know, the experience, right? Because it's, it should be intrinsic. It should be, yeah, I got great service. I want to, I want to give you a good score. Not, not, you don't need to ask for it, right?

Annette Franz (30:18.483)
Yes. Yeah.

Annette Franz (30:27.315)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it puts employees in a bad spot too, right? You've got them begging for this score and it's, you're not helping their employees either. You're not helping your employees, you're not helping your customer. And it's that kind of culture. It's that feedback culture that you haven't built because it's just a metric culture is what it is.

Dr Chris L. Brown (30:29.838)
And so.

Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (30:55.628)
Yeah, yeah. Look, they're band-aid fixes, aren't they? I think the, you know, and again, it serves executives well. I can look at the numbers and the numbers all look good, right? So the NPS scores up, everything looks good. So there's no problem. You know, and so this is why, and I think, you know, some good advice here is, you know, that the numbers can lie to you, right? So you need to get underneath them.

Annette Franz (30:59.775)
Bye.

Annette Franz (31:06.079)
Right. Absolutely.

Yep. Yep.

Annette Franz (31:23.647)
Yes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (31:24.916)
numbers and you need to actually experience what's actually going on firsthand and see those things. You had another great example in the book, this Yes Madam book, can you tell me a bit more about what happened there?

Annette Franz (31:28.539)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Annette Franz (31:35.933)
Yes. You know, this is another great example of, you know, a feedback culture that kind of just, you know, went sideways. You know, they had asked their, you know, employees for feedback and found out that, you know, a hundred of them or however many it was reported that they were stressed out and they fired, they fired the employees that said that they were stressed out. And, you know, they're in the book, I've included, you know, the emails that they sent to the employees to let them know.

that was not acceptable for you to be stressed out so you're no longer work here. And then came back and said, no, we didn't say that. We didn't do that. Yeah, they did. So, you know, that's not the right answer either, is to if you get negative feedback to punish your employees, that is not the way to go. Years ago, was working, when I was working at one of my previous employers,

Dr Chris L. Brown (32:10.348)
Yeah, yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (32:28.248)
Yeah.

Annette Franz (32:33.624)
I had a client that we had this feedback loop incorporated into the platform that they were getting their feedback from. each, it was a gym, a fitness franchise. And each gym, each location was getting their feedback, right? And they would, when the feedback would come in, they would respond to the, both the negative and the positive, but negative. If somebody had a problem, they wanted to respond to them. And I had to constantly go in there and remind them, don't take the feedback personally.

Don't go yell at the customer. Don't go yelling at your employees. Be gracious. Thank them for the feedback and tell them how you're going to fix it right. But to go and to fire your employees because they were stressed out, mean, that's just a priceless example of what not to do.

Dr Chris L. Brown (33:21.511)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's quite bizarre, isn't it actually, to think about that, but it does speak to the way in which some people see feedback too, right? We need to squash it. We need to get rid of that feedback. Okay, what's the solution here? Let's get rid of the people that are complaining. And so, you know, if you translate that,

Annette Franz (33:33.257)
Yeah. Yes.

Annette Franz (33:39.56)
Right. Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (33:45.728)
into customers, right? So you fire a bunch of customers that have been complaining or whatever, right? So not really good things for business and certainly not good things for people, right? And what it's doing also is reinforcing just a fear-based culture, isn't it? So the next time you try and find out what's going on in your organization, there's going to be, as we say down here in Australia, crickets, right? There's going to be no response at all, right? There's going to be nothing.

Annette Franz (33:52.681)
Yes.

Annette Franz (33:58.025)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Annette Franz (34:03.518)
Yes.

Annette Franz (34:10.303)
Crickets, yes. Yes, you know that phrase psychological safety has become I think a buzzword, but it's so true. Like if you don't feel safe to speak up and share your feelings and feedback and opinions about things, you know, that's and there's this fear of recourse every time you speak up. That's just not a great culture to be a part of.

Dr Chris L. Brown (34:37.474)
Yeah. And look, it's, I think it's an art too, isn't it? Because it's, it's about, listening and hearing feedback and then discerning whether or not that's something that can be dealt with effectively and what are the solutions to it. So it's not necessarily being able to solve everything, thinking through, is it something that we can do as a leadership team? Is there something that we can do about it? Can we actually affect something?

related to this, yeah. I think another point you make is this idea of sort putting lipstick on a pig.

Annette Franz (35:09.395)
Yeah, agree.

Annette Franz (35:17.471)
Yes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (35:20.398)
Are there any examples that come to mind in terms of fixing employee experience and actually making it worse?

Annette Franz (35:25.983)
Yeah, you know, I think that, I think, and this applies to both the employee experience and the customer experience. And this is why I, for both, you I say you can do journey mapping, but that's really not gonna get to the heart of the matter. You really need to get to the heart of the matter. So the full journey mapping process includes creating the service blueprint and the service blueprint is what's happening behind the scenes, right? The people, the tools, the systems, the processes that...

facilitate and support and help create the experience that the customer and the employer are having. And so what I've come to call lipstick on a pig is what most people do when they have, when they do these journey mappings or when they're just getting feedback from surveys or however else they're getting the feedback and not really getting at the root cause. So they're just sort of fixing it at a tactical level, one person, one respondent, one employee at a time, rather than stepping back and looking at the entire system.

the entire process, the entirety of it all and saying, okay, wait a second, we need to get to the heart of this so that we can fix the root cause and never let this happen again or make the process more efficient or make the policy a policy that makes sense for everybody and everything. So I've seen a lot of that where issues are reoccurring, the customers over time are still having the same problems or the experience is just as bad today as it was.

you know, six months ago because we fixed the issue for one customer. We fixed the issue for one employee, but we didn't look at the entire system or get to the root of the problem and the heart of the problem and fix that. So it never happens again. So root cause analysis, root cause analysis is not overrated.

Dr Chris L. Brown (37:07.933)
Yeah.

Dr Chris L. Brown (37:12.256)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a way of systemic problem solving, isn't it? And trying to think, we've seen this problem before. How do we actually rectify it so it's not a recurring problem that continues? we see many of those, don't we?

Annette Franz (37:24.115)
Yeah.

Annette Franz (37:31.557)
Absolutely.

Annette Franz (37:36.669)
Yeah, yes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (37:39.288)
What about, are there sort of some underrated listening activities that leaders maybe don't engage with that often that they could?

Annette Franz (37:46.687)
and

Annette Franz (37:50.175)
Yeah, I think everybody just falls on the survey sword, right? Let's do a survey, let's do a survey. And people are sick of surveys, right? And that includes employees. So when I'm working with my clients, I advocate for stay interviews. Stay interviews instead of exit interviews. Why ask people when they're leaving, why they're leaving and what's wrong? Why not ask them today? How are you doing?

Do you need anything? Are there any issues that we need to solve? Why are you staying? But not in those words, but just really understand what we can do to make things better while you're here. So stay interviews is a big one for me. The other one is doing these employee roundtables or listening tours and getting out there as executives. And I have a couple of clients that I've worked with over the years where they would

Dr Chris L. Brown (38:24.492)
Yep. Yep.

Annette Franz (38:46.879)
they'd look at their executive team, they'd split them up over the course of, let's say the team has 10 people, they split them up over the course of the year and figure out our two years, whatever it was, and make sure that every month a different executive went out to speak to a different group of employees. just, a two-part conversation, right? Part of the conversation is sharing what's happening in the organization, exciting news, things that maybe the employees don't.

hear about on a day-to-day basis, but hey, let's give you some little insights from the top kind of thing. But the bigger part of it is 80 to 90 % of the time is it's called listening tour for a reason, right? Listen to your employees and hear what they're saying and understand what the experience is today and where things are going well and where they're not, what they have and what they don't have, what tools they need, resources, training, those kinds of things. So that's a big one for me is to have these round tables or these listening tours.

for executives to get out there and actually talk to employees on a regular basis. Employee advisory boards. think, you we talk a lot about customer advisory boards, but employee advisory boards. I think that we don't employ those enough and it's very, it's the exact same thing as a customer advisory board, but you've got some employees, you've got the employee aspect and not the customer aspect. The other thing is, is that you have so much data in your HR system.

about your employees as well and making sure that you employ that as well. Use that data to understand your employees a little bit better. Marry it with some of the feedback that you're getting from employees. Use that to segment your employees. Use it for a bunch of different reasons, but it makes your analysis of the employee experience and employee feedback that much more robust. So there's our couple of examples.

Dr Chris L. Brown (40:39.86)
Yeah. You know, I think the other thing that's interesting is that we often, we'll often focus on sort of negative elements, right, or feedback or, you know, here's what's wrong, this is what's not working, those sorts of things. But I think balancing that out with what is working too, has been, my experience has been really useful to say, okay,

there's a lot of things going for us. We're doing a lot of things right. So really balancing that message so that it's not all sort of, and I think for leaders too, when they're going out to get feedback, they're looking for things that are going right as well and should be able to share that stuff as well. And I think where it can become probably

Annette Franz (41:22.239)
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr Chris L. Brown (41:30.954)
unattractive is when leaders think that they're just going to get barraged with all sorts of negative feedback, right? So I think that's part of the resistance because it can deflate the leadership too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Annette Franz (41:35.721)
Right, Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a great point. It's a great point. There are a lot of good things happening. Yes, there are bad things happening. You gotta fix those. But there are a lot of good things happening too, for sure.

Dr Chris L. Brown (41:52.686)
Yeah, You've got an open letter as you do in all of your books at the end of the book there to CEOs. And I think your open letter here is to modernize or fossilize. If you were sort of talking to a leadership team, what sort of single choice or what sort of what's something that they should start with, I guess, to

Annette Franz (41:58.249)
Yes.

Annette Franz (42:04.381)
Yes!

Dr Chris L. Brown (42:20.494)
initiate this change in your mind. What's the best place to start?

Annette Franz (42:23.165)
Yeah, I think the best place to start is to listen, right? To listen. Before that, you've got to have the right culture in place. But as long as you have the right culture in place, then the next thing you've got to do is just listen and hear what is being said and use it to celebrate or to fix, right? One or the other, you know, but definitely the most important place to start is to have the right culture in place because otherwise that's going to be a

as we've already talked about, it's the foundation, it's your operating system, it's the precursor to a great employee experience. But beyond that, listen to your employees.

Dr Chris L. Brown (43:02.35)
That's the key one. You talk a little bit about AI now. mean, we'll talk about this sort of offline before, the changes that are happening there. How do you think about AI yourself in terms of how this is going to influence, I guess, these issues related to employee experience, customer experience, that sort of thing?

Annette Franz (43:11.451)
yeah.

Annette Franz (43:26.887)
Yeah, I think that right now, think a lot of people, leaders, executives, businesses are fumbling through it, trying to figure out what, why, how, all of that. think part of the problem is that they need to take a step back and say, what problems are we going to, just like with any technology, what problems is this going to solve for us? And what problems do we have that we need to solve by using this particular technology? For me personally, I don't believe that

Dr Chris L. Brown (43:36.888)
Yeah.

Annette Franz (43:56.735)
AI will take over, know, take your job. I think that, you know, I think that there's always going to be this need for the human and maybe it's human in the loop, but I think people will always want that human connection when it comes to, you know, sales and service and support and those kinds of things is that they will always want to be able to talk to somebody and definitely have an out.

it's certainly not great yet. So we definitely want to have an app. But there are a lot of instances where we just want to have that human connection and be able to talk to another person about the issue that we're having or question that we have or whatever it is. so for me personally, I don't think it's going to take over the world like everybody thinks it is, at least not in the next 10, 20 years.

Dr Chris L. Brown (44:47.502)
Yeah, yeah. Is it something I was talking to Adrian Swinscoe, who's out of Scotland a few months ago, and he was saying that he'd seen an example where AI was being used to help turn on the phones again, essentially for a company, right? Where, you know, because many companies look at customer service and they say, well, that's just a cost center. It's something that we need to minimize. And, you know, there's some valid

Annette Franz (44:54.567)
yeah.

Annette Franz (45:07.039)
You're welcome.

Dr Chris L. Brown (45:17.024)
reasons for sort of looking at it from that perspective because, you know, it does cost money to make sure that customers are looked after. But this company had basically used it to automate a lot of the questions that customers had, the sort of easy questions, and then it allowed them to turn the phones back on so they could take phone calls and actually speak to customers. Have you seen other examples like that? Is that something that you're seeing in the market?

Annette Franz (45:42.439)
Yeah, absolutely. I've seen that where it's exactly that. It's use the AI to take over the menial tasks or to do the FAQs or the things that we know that customers are going to ask and they can get a quick answer for and don't necessarily, the easy things, right? The repetitive kinds of things, which then frees up the folks on the phone or whoever it is, whether it's service,

or success, whoever it is, to then spend time doing more of the value-add work and building the customer relationships and those kinds of things, which won't happen with AI. And that's exactly how I've seen it being used, is to just take those... The things that cause the burnout for a lot of employees, because they're like, gosh, not that again. So yeah, taking that off their plate and allowing them to...

Dr Chris L. Brown (46:34.349)
Yeah.

Annette Franz (46:40.403)
do something where they feel like they're really contributing enough.

Dr Chris L. Brown (46:44.066)
Yeah, yeah. Probably a last question for you. there's a couple more here that we could talk through, but something that I'm thinking about is are there companies for you that stand out that really do this this really, really well? I think you mentioned Delta Airlines as one. Was it? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me. Tell me more about them.

Annette Franz (46:50.786)
Okay.

Annette Franz (47:04.999)
Yeah, that was what I was going to say. They are my favorite. They really are.

Well, you know, they listen, they treat their employees well, they treat their customers well, they understand the connection between the employee experience and the customer experience and business outcomes and have shown that by taking their profits and giving back to their employees, know, those kinds of things. I mean, that's just a great example of where...

you make that connection. Great culture, great employee experience leads to great customer experience leads to outcomes that then, you know, pay back your employees. So I love that example. That's probably one of my favorite. Used to be Southwest was one of my favorite examples, but I feel like they've of late lost their way a little bit. So we'll see what happens.

Dr Chris L. Brown (47:56.002)
Yeah, yeah. And is that a delta that's been driven really by the CEO? that that really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's interesting, isn't it? Because it speaks to the reality of the fact that these are moving targets. So the culture moves up and down sideways. You know, it's not not something it's a living, breathing thing. And

Annette Franz (48:01.555)
Yeah, yeah, and Ashton. Yeah, he's he's absolutely. Yeah, yeah, it's got to be.

Annette Franz (48:22.019)
Yes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (48:23.214)
it can change and it can change for the better. It can also change for the worse. And that's why, you know, paying attention to it's kind of important as well, isn't it?

Annette Franz (48:31.731)
Yeah, yeah, so important to maintain, to sustain, scale, all of that, right? So yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Dr Chris L. Brown (48:38.478)
Okay. Well, Annette, where can people learn more about what you're up to and the great work that you're doing?

Annette Franz (48:48.765)
Yeah, thank you. On my website, cx-journey.com or, you know, LinkedIn. Connect with me on LinkedIn and follow me there. I'm posting every day and engaging in conversations, learning from other folks as well. So yeah, it's been pretty cool.

Dr Chris L. Brown (49:03.618)
Fantastic, fantastic. Well, it's been great to chat with you and thanks for sharing a great new book. And I'm sure a lot of people get great value from thinking this through and being able to apply some of these tools to the employee experience and making sure it's a great environment for everyone.

Annette Franz (49:07.411)
Yeah, likewise.

Annette Franz (49:21.331)
Yeah, ultimately that's what we wanna do, you and I both. Like get people to think differently about what it takes to get the outcomes that they want for the business. So yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Dr Chris L. Brown (49:30.968)
Thank you.