CX Decoded Podcast With Diana Brown: CX Meets EX

The Gist

• Empower and engage frontliners. Employees, especially those on the frontlines, play a key role in serving the customers and can offer valuable insights into improving the customer experience. Therefore, it is important to empower and engage employees and make them feel valued and heard.
• Using technology to solve CX problems. Technology plays a crucial role in improving employee and customer experience. For instance, XPO uses technology to share real-time information about shipments across the network and to enable customer service representatives to quickly solve customer queries.
• Match employee and customer feedback. When sifting through employee feedback, it is important to match it with customer feedback to ensure that the insights are relevant to the company’s goals and priorities. Roundtable conversations with employees and leaders can provide a deeper understanding of feedback and help to prioritize data.
• The EX and CX link. Employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are interlinked and should be measured and monitored together. A high-quality culture can be created through recognition, rewards and development, and companies should ensure that employees have the necessary tools and training to be successful.

In a story that echoes the classic American dream, media mogul Oprah Winfrey started out working at a grocery store where she was forbidden to talk to customers, a move that left her feeling unfulfilled.

However, she soon found a job at a radio station where her talents for communication and engagement were allowed to flourish, leading her down the path to becoming a cultural icon with her own talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show. This raises an important question about the role of employee-customer interactions in creating a successful business.

In this episode of CX Decoded, Diana Brown, senior vice president of sales operations and customer experience at XPO, discusses the crucial link between employee experience and customer experience in the service industry. Drawing on both her experience at XPO and her previous experience as head of customer success for Amazon Business, Brown emphasizes that important changes often arise from employee feedback about the customer experience. She goes on to explain that XPO was able to improve its billing process after finance team members who worked in collections shared the difficulties customers were experiencing in paying their invoices. Brown underscores the importance of listening to both employees and customers in order to make meaningful changes in the service industry.

We caught up with Diana on the topic in this episode of CX Decoded. 

Editor’s note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Dom Nicastro: Hello again everybody, Dom Nicastro, managing editor CMSWire here with my co-host on CX Decoded. Michelle Hawley, senior editor and reporter over at CMSWire along with me. Michelle, how’s it going?

Michelle Hawley: Oh, it’s going great, Dom. How are you doing?

Dom: Good, another win for us because we got a practitioner doing the work of customer experience and employee experience, too. So we’re gonna get into that. I’m so happy to be with her today. Michelle, just let’s get right into it. No small talk. Tell our listeners, you know, me and my small talk urge. Just let’s get right into it. Who do we get on today?

Michelle: Yeah, today we have Diana Brown. Currently the senior vice president of sales operations and customer experience at XPO, a provider of less-than-truckload-freight transportation services. She’s got more than 20 years of experience building customer excellence teams, and one of those roles included Amazon Business where she was the head of customer success. Diana, thanks for joining us today on CX Decoded.

Diana: Thanks so much, Michelle. It’s great to be here.

Dom: So happy to have you, Diana. And and you know, before we get into the subject, we’re going to be talking about connected employee experience a customer experience such a huge topic for us at CMSWire. So thank you for that. Something caught my attention. I saw the word in your profile, your LinkedIn, I saw Amazon and customer success. I’m like, do we have a genius on the line here? What’s going on? And what, what were the big lessons here from your past experience in Amazon? I’d love a quick snapshot.

Diana: Yeah, absolutely. So I started off in professional services and helping customers adopt technology. And so when you work for a company like Amazon Business, you have to do everything at scale, which we’ll talk about today. That’s something that I think is super important. And there’s no company that’s more customer obsessed than Amazon. So I had a ton of fun working for Amazon Business, reinventing how small and medium businesses can purchase supplies on Amazon. So and doing it again at that scale, super important. So it was a great moment for me in my career. 

Connecting CX and EX in the Service Industry

Michelle: You talk about connecting CX and EX and starting with valuing the customer experience as a growth engine for the company, and with the customer themselves being embedded in the organization’s culture. Can you talk a little bit about how that looks in practice?

Diana: Yeah, absolutely. So for us, we’re a service industry. Right? And Michelle, I’m just going to take a moment to define less-than-truckload and what …

Dom: Oh nice. I was gonna ask you, I’m like, what is that? Is there an acronym associated with that to Diana like a little LTT?

Diana: Just LTL. Exactly less than, less-than-truckload and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Right? So, I need to ship but less than a full truckload, right? So I might have one, two or three pallets to ship. And I’m looking to find how I can move that across country, right? So your freight is actually shared spaces in our truck, right? So one truck might have freight from six or eight customers on it. 

And so when you’re a services industry, like we are, in my past, there’s been a lot of software and things like that. But here, it’s a service, we’re moving freight from one point to another, we’re moving through multiple service centers, we have customer service representatives, we have drivers, we have all of our employees that can be talking to our customers helping update them at any time. So the focus on customers has to start with employees, recognizing the importance of the customer to our organization, and how they are our engine of growth, whether it be grow with current customers, or grow new customers. So that’s one of the big things that we focus on here at XPO.

Related Article: Win-Win: Address Employee Experience for Better Customer Experience

Empowering Employees to Improve CX Through Innovative Tech and Engagement Strategies

Dom: You know, I went to Forrester conference last year and all the practitioners there, Diana and Michelle were talking about employee experience. It was nuts. Like I thought I was at a customer experience conference. And their primary thoughts were how are the call center agents? How are they feeling? Am I empowering them? And things like that. So I would love to start with sort of get a high level, who do you see as your primary stakeholders when it comes to employee experience? You’re a customer experience, leader, but who would you say are the employee stakeholders that you’re really targeting for strong employee experience?

Diana: I’m going to talk about two populations, Dom, that are really important in our business. The first is the customer service representatives themselves, right? So it is a hard job. And I think a job that folks don’t always understand the breadth, at least in our business, of questions that can come from a customer at any given time. Right. So we are always focused on the customer service representatives. How do we enable them in the same way so that they have consistent development and training, and we’re a technology based company. So we’re always trying to throw something new at them. 

And we’re trying to have a consistent experience across 270 of our main service centers, right. And so they’re the pulse of is our technology working for them? Are we giving them the tools they need to quickly solve customer questions, right? And then we, of course, use the typical customer service metrics. How many calls do we have at the sites? What are the types of inquiries? Are we answering fast enough? Because that gives us just a feel at any given time of what’s going on in our network? So the customer service representative, that’s a super important part of the engagement, right? Because they’re on the frontlines with our customers. 

But then second population is we’re moving freight through our network very quickly, right? So if you think about the dockworkers, they’re moving the freight, they’re seeing customers’ freight over and over. They have ideas about how we can better serve customers, might it be a packaging idea, or otherwise labeling some of those things? Right. 

So we’ve got dockworkers that are touching the freight all the time, they’re close to the frontend, and seeing what we can do to continue to improve the experience for the customers. So they’re super important too, right. And it’s been fun to as we focus more on the customers to see questions that they come up with and ideas for technology and other things that they bring to the table because they’re seeing freight every day, and a lot of it from our repeat customers. So they have great ideas as well.

Dom: And with those customer service reps, you know, you’re taking ideas from them. And I find a lot of times a lot of the problems are just communicated with each other, and they don’t share it with the movers and shakers that can actually help them. So in that regard, how do you sort of empower the customer service reps and the dockworkers, folks like that, to actually share their ideas? You know, sounds like you have to have an internal voice of the customer program, but it’s called voice of the employee, I guess, right?

Diana: Yeah, absolutely. So I will talk about a couple of things specific to the customer service rep. So let’s start there. We’re proud of the tenure of a lot of our customers as well as our employees here. So we’ve got a great group of employees that are the customer service mentors, right. Most of them have been with us over 20 years. They know freight movement, they know all the answers to customer questions, right? 

And anything new that we do, we need to engage them, whether it might be anything from taglines that we’re using for customers internally all the way to how’s this technology working for you? And what do we need to do differently? Because if you can get that feedback ahead of time, you know, you’ve won. You know, you’ve won when you’ve got a team of folks that says, yeah, absolutely, this works, this is going to help me do my job better, so that I can serve the customer better. 

And a lot of this is about sitting down and making sure we’re we’re meeting the needs of those internal end users, right, and so that they can share the information. And you talk about sharing information across our network. We are a fast velocity network, right? So we’ve got shipping lanes that move freight pretty long distances in two days and three days. And at any point, a customer could have a question about a shipment, where is it? Is it on track to meet the deadline? I know there’s been a winter storm, right? We’re in the thick of winter here. Right? So lots of questions coming in? 

Well, we know where the freight is. But lots of times there’s updates about appointments or you know, when it will move and those kinds of things. So we’ve designed our technology to share that information across the network. So folks, can, we have a pro number that identifies each shipment so that anyone can pick that up. So I sit in North Richland Hills, in Texas between Dallas and Fort Worth, and my team can use the applications to know what’s going on with a certain shipment in Denver or in New York and what’s going on and when it will go out because it’s very important to share that information. And so we’ve got to design the tools with that in mind. So I’d say that’s how we work very much with our customer service representatives. 

And then when it comes to the the actual team that’s managing the freight on the docks, one of the things that’s probably the most fun invention recently was just making sure that everyone’s holding each other accountable for how we move freight, and not damaging it. Because this is an industry where you’re moving freight fast. If it’s not packaged super well, you can have damages and or you’ve got a new driver of a forklift. And so it’s got a little gamification with the dock workers where they get to rate each other, and they get to rate loads that came in. So imagine that I’m a dock worker, and I’m rating a load, Dom, that you worked, right? And how do I think you did? And am I gonna give you three stars or five stars? And what kind of feedback and where can you get better and driving this kind of competition between the service centers, and ultimately, their leadership has been incredibly valuable. 

And it was technology that wasn’t even on our roadmap last year, not at all. It was something that an idea came up and said, We need to hold each other more accountable. We need to make sure that we’re putting our best foot forward and, you know, let’s rate each other. So the tech team did it real quickly, put it into the handhelds, which is how we deliver our technology out in our service centers and lots of requests very quickly to update the app, make it more fun, more engaging. But that’s been a real win for the end customer in terms of just a focus on quality. So that’s a fun piece of tech that we’ve deployed, I would say that really helps the dockworkers.

Match Employee Feedback to Customer Feedback to Inform Decision-Making

Michelle: When you’ve gathered all this employee feedback, and you’re sifting through it? How do you guys filter out the insights that you can then use to inform your decisions from the noise? 

Diana: Ah, great question. So there are a couple of things that we need to do when it comes to some of the employee feedback, right. So the first thing is, you always want to match it to what you’re hearing from the customer as well. Right? So I think one of the things that sets us apart is how we match employee feedback to our customer feedback, we’ve got several different mechanisms that we use to say, Are we seeing crossover here? Are we seeing things that are important from our customer? Or are we seeing things that are different? 

And so that’s probably, Michelle, the first thing that we do is just get a gauge for our customers as well, because I think a lot of people can have ideas that they think are super important. But it may not be what a customer wants, right? And you’ve got to continually get that feedback from the customers as well, so I would think that’s where it starts there. 

But then the next piece is going that level deeper, right? So we can do all kinds of surveys or polls and gather feedback, right? But you really need to have the roundtable conversations with those employees to understand that feedback. And to get to that next level. And I think that’s where companies fail sometimes right is to truly understand feedback, get to that next level of insights that can help you sift through, right, if you just leave it at that top categorization, you might miss things. 

And so we’re really good proponents here of having roundtable feedback from all of our employees, right, whether we sit down and talk to drivers, dockworkers, sales team members, right. And we also make sure that we bring in leaders of different parts of the organization to have a fresh perspective on what we’re hearing. And that can be from the employee experience or the customer experience. But those roundtables really help us get to the next level of detail and help us prioritize. 

Related Article: Is It Time to Combine Customer Experience and Employee Experience Programs?

How Employee Feedback Changed the Way Customers Paid Bill

Dom: Can you think of a recent example where voice of the employee feedback came to fruition? You know, there was a problem. And we heard from the employees through our technology platforms, and through those roundtables, and we fixed it. I think you’ve kind of mentioned the gamification thing was an example of like, collaboration. But was there something specific you remember about the employees speaking up lately?

Diana: So I’ll take a different tact here. And we’ll talk about paying invoices, right. And so it is a little bit old school in our industry in terms of, you know, there’s some ACH going on out there, right in terms of payment. But we hadn’t had an ability to pay online. And so when we had our finance team members hearing from customers over and over, why don’t you have an online pay portal, this would make my life so much easier, you would get your cash faster, right. 

And so I’d say that’s one of the things that last quarter was a big win for us being able to get that out there. So customers could come online and pay a freight bill just like you and I might go and do that. And that was really driven by the employee saying customers are asking for this. Customers are asking for this. And that’s a team that’s working on collections and isn’t typically at the forefront of the voice of customer, right. 

So it’s actually something that I wish we’d moved on sooner. Because it’s been a real, it’s been a really great win for our customers to be able to go easily pay us that way. And something that we probably should have had quite a while ago.

Dom: Yeah, that’s another example of something that’s not there. And your frontline person that deals with the customer has to pay the price for it. No pun intended. 

Diana: Exactly. 

Dom: Right. They, because of a missing piece, a key missing piece, you’re not up to date on things, they suffered. So their employees, they have to go home and say it was a bad day, customer kinda yelled at me a little bit. They were like, geeze, you guys are behind. So that’s a bad employee experience. So there you go.

Diana: That’s right. They can’t solve the problems for the customer. Right. And they feel like they’re on the hot seat. So that’s, I think, a good example there. 

Real-time Voice of the Customer Data to Improve CX and Drive Growth

Dom: Yeah. So establishing that VoC, that voice of the customer program, you know, very critical, obviously, for customer feedback. And then employees get better off because of it. Like the example you just showed, there’s so many ways to approach VoC, what you guys say you have like a central tool that really is your mothership, you know, for voice of the customer data, or is it a little bit siloed? And it’s like your job and other leaders to sort of bring it all together?

Diana: Yeah, I would say we have a few central tools, right. And, of course, you know, it’s still early in 2023. And everybody has goals and aims that we’re working on. So, you know, I have kind of my next level of the customer and what we’re looking to do here, but one of the things that has been super helpful is we run regular shipment surveys, right so we’ll send out invitations to anyone that there’s some logic here but anyone that shipped with with us last week that hasn’t responded in a quarter, right, that still is willing to give us feedback. How’d it go for you? Right? And so we asked that question, Howd it go we ask a few follow up questions, we’re, you know, how would you rate us on on time delivery? Damage free? How would you rate us on billing and invoicing? And then quality of customer support? Right? Those are the four things we’re always focused on to delight the customer. And then there’s an open-ended question of how can we improve? Right? 

So each week, Dom, we’re getting anywhere one-to-200, really real-time responses on how we’re doing, and that can be broken down by the type of customer. Alright, so we have channels, the way we look at our customers, a smaller local customer all the way up to our strategic enterprise customers. So we can look at the size of the customer we can look at, we asked them their role. And so we can match that and know, are they an end user? Are they you know, the transportation manager, so we can look at it that way. 

And then we can look at it by our region of the company in which like I said, can be important, right? So if you have all of these storms in a particular part of the United States in the winter, we know that we’re going to get a little more friction in the experience at that time, right. And so we can just make sure that we think through that appropriately. 

So I would say that’s the center. It’s a dashboard that anybody can go to at any time and can dive in and look at all of that. And we’re always reviewing that and weekly staff meetings. And so that’s widely available. But that’s a little bit of your real time, right? Not your strategic partnership. Where are you going next? Right. And so we also have formal interviews with our larger customers, where that’s a company that we have do this objectively, for us talk about the partnership, the expectations, how are we doing from a technology perspective? What else do they need from us? Right? 

So it’s that combination for us of the the tactical, how are we doing every day? What do we need to do to improve on those four key parts that I shared, as well as more the strategic partnership? And where do we go to grow XPO? Right. XPO is absolutely in growth mode we’re investing in in trailers and trucks and doors and our technology. And so those interviews with our larger customers are super important to us. And so we’ll look at the aggregate of those interviews on a quarterly basis to see how we’re doing and to help shape things like our technology roadmap, and just make sure that we’re making the right investments.

Related Article: Combining Self-Service, Chat and Phone Support: A Winning Strategy for Customer Service