A Better Way to Predict and Boost Customer Loyalty That Most Leaders Overlook

Stacy Sherman: Hello, Isabel. Welcome to the Doing CX Right show.

Isabelle Zdatny: Hi. Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

Stacy Sherman: Oh, I am thrilled, excited, all those adjectives, all those emotions to have you here because we’re going to dive into phenomenal research by Qualtrics focusing on how to capture the untapped financial value of customer emotions.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yes.

Stacy Sherman: So before we dive into that topic. Please introduce yourself. Who are you?

What do you do for a living?

Isabelle Zdatny: Well, hi everyone. Uh, my name is Isabelle Zdatny. I’m head of thought leadership for Qualtrics XM Institute. for those of you who aren’t familiar with Qualtrics, we provide experience management software that helps organizations to understand and improve their customer and employee experience. and within that [00:01:00] broader organization, XM Institute operates.

Almost like a little think tank. Uh, so rather than focus on the technology piece of experience, our team is really focused on equipping, um, customer and employee experience, leaders with the insights, the practices, the tools, the guidance that they need to build those mature high impact experience management programs.

So. In my role, I lead our quantitative research, which we’ll be talking about quite a bit today. I also do quite a lot of, uh, qualitative interviews and work with companies to understand the state of their CX program. And then I share all those insights out through publications, speaking advisory work with the large organizations.

Stacy Sherman: All right, so we share in common a love around customer experience, and so this is the Doing CX Right show. So it’s appropriate for me to ask you, when I say doing customer experience, right, not just doing CX, but doing it right. What, what does that mean to you?

Isabelle Zdatny: It’s such a good [00:02:00] question. So, um, um, we actually define customer experience management as the discipline of systematically understanding and optimizing the experiences that customers have with an organization. In order to drive measurable business outcomes and build those lasting relationships. And I would say that every single word in that definition matters.

Um, and I think the gap between doing customer experience and doing customer experience right, really comes down to how many of those words you take seriously. Uh, and I would say this starts with that word discipline, right? CX is a discipline. It is not a survey or a technology. It is not a series of projects or a laundry list.

You can just check, check, check, and be done. Um, it is an organizational discipline. It’s a persistent set of capabilities that are embedded into how your organization operates that are woven into your company’s culture and its operating processes. So I see a lot of companies today mistake, um, CX tools and tactics for the discipline itself.

Um, and that is not [00:03:00] quite right. It really needs to be embedded just like finance or operations and be that, uh, systematic way of working that spans your whole organization.

Stacy Sherman: I also love that you mention every word matters because even in my own practice, it is a discipline. At the same time, I, I’m named Doing CX Right? Not thinking and pondering.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yes. Well, and I think that gets to like the other words, right, of the understanding piece. I think a lot of organizations today are actually quite good at collecting feedback and running surveys and building dashboards. Where they tend to fall short is that optimizing experiences piece, right? Taking meaningful action to improve customer experiences and change how the organizations operate based on what they learn.

So I love that it is all about the doing.

Stacy Sherman: doing. And then I have to also add that there is a right way, and that’s all about my framework. And we’re not gonna talk about that today. But please do know listeners, there is a [00:04:00] right way and you’re gonna hear some of it today, especially as we’re challenging a lot of belief systems and, and, Enforcing, reinforcing some of the right ways, which we will get to. So research.

Isabelle Zdatny: Research.

Stacy Sherman: So Qualtrics studied and please correct me if I don’t remember exactly correctly ’cause I want this precise. So Qualtrics studied over 300 brands across 22 industries over many years. I think it’s 14 years and found

Isabelle Zdatny: 15. Now we just got our new data in.

Stacy Sherman: Okay, so found that emotion predicts whether a customer comes back, trusts the brand, and recommends it more than any other factor.

Yet emotion is the lowest scoring dimension across every industry. Every year. Why? Why are companies consistently underlying, excuse, excuse me, recap, under delivering on the one thing that predicts where their customer stays.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, I think this actually gets back to what we were just talking about, [00:05:00] about the CX definition, where organizations have really heavily invested in the front end and have really dramatically under invested in the backend that optimizing. Measuring business outcomes. Um, we see a lot of programs today that are more measurement programs than management programs.

Um, and what that means is that organizations tend to remain in the very early stages of maturity, which makes success and effort issues a lot easier. To fix. Those are often, um, fixable with the capabilities organizations already have. Right? Your checkout page is broken. That’s a bug fix. Your hold times are too long.

That’s a staffing problem. Those tend to sit within a single team. The solution is often obvious. and emotion just doesn’t work like that, right? If you get feedback of like a customer’s feeling anxious during onboarding. That’s not a bug to fix. That requires meaningfully redesigning the experience across multiple touchpoints, uh, coordinating across departments, understanding emotional journeys, testing and iterating.

Um, it requires exactly the type of [00:06:00] capabilities that live on the back end of customer experience management, things like experience design and change management, and cross-functional orchestration. And those are the capabilities that most programs have not built yet. So I think the reason emotion has lagged behind success and effort, as you say, for 15 straight years, is not that it’s hard to measure. It’s that even when you do measure and understand it, which I’m sure we’ll talk about very few organizations do, it requires a level of organizational maturity that most CX programs don’t have yet. The emotion gap, I would say, is really an action gap in a lot of instances.

Stacy Sherman: At the same time, companies everywhere I’ve worked for, for 25 plus years, nobody was measuring emotions. They have NPS, right? NPS, CSAT and others. So therefore, why, if it’s so obvious and the research is proving that.

Isabelle Zdatny: I think, executives particularly, but kind of across the board, people tend to dismiss emotions as [00:07:00] very squishy and fluffy and hard to wrap your arms around. We know that that’s not the case, right? To pull in some, um, research from like Danny Kahneman and Amos Triky on how humans make decisions and form judgments.

We like to think that we make, uh, very rational judgments that are slow and methodical system two thinking when in fact we make most of our decisions and for most of our perceptions using system one thinking, which is fast and emotional and automatic, and often subconscious. Um, and so. Organizations tend to treat customers and understanding customers like customers are automatons or robots and not recognizing how they actually make decisions, form perceptions about their experience.

So I just think they haven’t taken it very seriously before or understood the role that emotions play in their relationships with their customers.

Stacy Sherman: Now robots you mentioned.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yes.

Stacy Sherman: they are here.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah. Yes,

Stacy Sherman: so [00:08:00] then it seems like, or what I believe is that as companies are designing a customer journey or optimizing the way a company, whether a customer is learning by get, use, pay, get help, we have to design for the human emotion.

Isabelle Zdatny: yes.

Stacy Sherman: where you insert the AI has to elevate that emotion, not turn it negative.

What? What, how do we blend that? What’s your view?

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, this is a great question. I think AI is making the emotional piece of the experience even more important. I think, frankly, it’s going to make the emotional gap worse for a lot of organizations. One of the things we’re seeing is that most companies right now are. Deploying AI to drive efficiency, right?

They’re focused on faster handle time and fewer support tickets and uh, lower cost per contact. And those gains are real, but they’re also gains that every single competitor is also chasing, right? They’re becoming table stakes. So AI is commoditizing a lot of the transactional parts of the [00:09:00] experience.

And if you are competing on speed, someone comes along who’s slightly faster, they’re going to win. If you’re competing on price. Someone comes along who’s a few cents cheaper, they’re going to win. Um, and in this environment, what doesn’t get commoditized is that human connection and trust. but what we’re seeing today is that most organizations are using AI as that gatekeeper between customers and the humans inside the company who can really make that emotional connection.

And so they’re trying to keep Humans, customers, away from humans, employees rather than using AI as a tool to really help people solve their problems. Um, another piece of research we did found that AI customer service. Particularly, um, where we see this as an acute problem has like the highest failure rate of any AI use case we looked at and those types of AI deployments.

When customers feel like, again, they’re a gatekeeper, not a helper, is eroding trust faster than I think it’s creating efficiency.

Stacy Sherman: I wanna talk about one of the research [00:10:00] findings that customers with high motion ratings are 5.7 times more likely to trust. 4.6 times more likely to forgive a mistake, and 11 times. More likely to recommend higher than any other functional metric they measure. Uh, I have to pause on this because 4.6 times more likely to forgive a mistake.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah.

Stacy Sherman: Think about that, that there’s so much out there around you have to create so many more positive experiences to make up for one bad.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah.

Stacy Sherman: Tell me a little bit about what you know and what companies need to do when mistakes happen so people don’t leave. And what does this all have to do with designing for the emotion?

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, it’s such a good question. So forgiveness, I think to some extent almost equates to like. Um, emotional equity that you’ve built up with the company. Uh, one of the things we see today is delivering consistently positive [00:11:00] emotions is really, really complicated. And inevitably something is going to go wrong, something is going to break.

Um, and so when you have that willingness to forgive. Customers will keep coming back. We’re also seeing relationships become increasingly transactional. That was another one of our key findings in our global consumers research. Um, so organizations need to earn loyalty, interaction by interaction, which means if something goes wrong, you need to acknowledge it, you need to.

Apologize for it, but then also very quickly move on to providing solutions, and making sure it doesn’t happen again. One of my. Favorite examples comes from, actually a while ago, a mortgage company in the uk, which trained their agents on how to identify four types of customer personas. One wanted more handholding was all about empathy.

One was very analytical and wanted to understand why something went wrong. another one just wanted a lot of apologies. but what they were able to do was [00:12:00] have these people in real time adjust their delivery to emotionally connect with what people wanted. So for example, I’m probably more of an analyzer type.

I don’t need a lot of empathy and handholding, and I’m sorry that we made a mistake. I want you to move very quickly onto solutioning and explaining to me why it won’t happen again, and when you are able to do that well. You are showing that you’re a reliable partner that has people’s best interests at heart, um, building up that trust and again, building up that emotional equity with those customers.

Stacy Sherman: Hmm. So emotional connection and emotional equity, can you define that in your own words? I know what it means, but listeners might be like, really pondering.

Isabelle Zdatny: Um, I had just made up emotional equity

Stacy Sherman: I like, but I like it. I agree.

Isabelle Zdatny: right here. Um, so what I was thinking there is that, you have certain types of relationships with companies that you feel more [00:13:00] emotionally invested in. Just to give you a quick example, I am obsessed with habanero cheese from Cabot. And there’s lots of different grocery stores I could go to buy this cheese.

Some of them are really convenient. We have one that’s a few minutes from the house. Um, instead actually I make my husband drive like 25 minutes out of his way to do the grocery store that is most aligned with our values, that has the best products, and we pay a higher price for that. It is less convenient, but we feel like it is. Um, more aligned with what we believe in. We feel good when we go there. There’s lots of flowers and plants, and so we have, they’ve earned higher emotional equity with us. If something goes wrong, we are more likely to forgive them than if I have a bad experience with, you know, you know, someone that’s two minutes down the road.

But I have, don’t actually care about them as a company and don’t feel emotionally invested in my relationship with ’em.

Stacy Sherman: That makes a lot of sense and so listeners get to. Again, really [00:14:00] dive into when we talk about journey management and journey mapping and the design of the experience, like all of that’s very intentional.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, huge. There’s, I mean, we can get into solutioning on emotions, but I think the design piece again, that, Well, I think there’s really three pieces if you’re going to deliver consistently good emotions, right? The first one I say is that you need to identify the explicit emotions that you want to elicit.

Like do not leave this to chance. So. Based on what your brand is, based on what your brand promises are. If you have them, you need to translate those into specific emotions. If your brand is about peace of mind, your target emotion should be things like relief or confidence, right? If you promise, inspiration, measure that.

If you promise, trustworthiness, measure that. Uh, a great example here is Porsche, who a few years ago looked at their MPS and csat. And decided, you know what? These generic metrics don’t fit our brand. Over 90% of our customers are sus, are, um, satisfied. That doesn’t mean that [00:15:00] they’re excited to come do business with us, that like higher emotional equity.

And so the company created a proprietary customer excitement score. Um, they trademarked it, they tied it to executive compensation. Uh, and so it’s based on simple question, did we exceed your expectations? Only the top responses count. collect that across every touchpoint, all their surveys throughout the year.

It’s linked to each customer’s unique Porsche id. They use AI to process open text comments. And so then they’re able to measure and track are they delivering on their brand promise. so I think that’s a really key first step people should take. As they start trying to figure out what do we do to turn emotions from, you know, this perhaps viewed as again, squishy, fluffy thing into tangible actions our business can take.

Stacy Sherman: I, about the, that’s a great example and. What also comes to mind is the values that you mentioned. The company has to start with their values and mission and communicate it to all the departments. Companies, everywhere I’ve worked are siloed

Isabelle Zdatny: [00:16:00] Yes. Extremely.

Stacy Sherman: extremely. So then what you’re saying and what Porsche did, how do you make that real?

Because silos exist.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah. Yeah. I think again, it starts at the top with defining it like as another quick example, right? Hyatt focuses on care. That’s their core emotion, which they define as empathy plus action, and they have articulated that in their purpose statement, which is we care for people so that they can be their best.

They built a listening strategy around that. But then that also spans every single department. This affects how they train their frontline staff. This affects how they’re doing proactive outreach to their loyalty members. So this is an underlying, again, back to the earlier conversation of CX needs to be a discipline.

operations or finance and say, Hey, we should really care for our customers and have them be like, what’s the ROI of that the whole company is aligned, that that is the mission of the company.

Using language from the same playbook, all rowing in the same direction. [00:17:00] So I think starting that way helps to deconstruct those silos. Um, I think you need to do the work of tying those specific emotions into the KPIs and business outcomes that each of those groups is held responsible for.

So it’s, again, not just altruistic, but actually has an impact on the things they care about. So how does customer confidence affect win rates? If you’re talking to sales, how does, um, you know, really making an emotional connection? In the early parts of a call help drive the support numbers that customer service cares about.

Um, so it also means doing the hard work of tying those emotions, uh, and experience outcomes to the business outcomes that each group is held accountable for.

Stacy Sherman: So when each group says, well, we are very we are, high intelligence, emotional intelligence, but what can leaders do from your perspective to to quality check that.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yep.

Stacy Sherman: And make sure from the [00:18:00] customer service department to each department has to be accountable for CX.

Isabelle Zdatny: Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. CX is everybody’s business, right? No matter what superstar your team is like, you are not gonna be able to improve every experience your organization delivers. so I think this starts with not just taking people’s word, that they are really emotionally intelligent, but actually going out and asking your customers, right?

So again. included on your survey questions, not just how satisfied were you, but to what degree did this interaction make you feel X one example I love here is a UK electronics retailer, sends a text after every customer support call asking customers to describe, their experience in a single word.

So just a single word. And then they categorize that as positive, uh, negative or neutral. Um, and they’re so strict that words like helpful actually count as neutral, not positive. It needs to be really positive. And then each advisor gets their own score that forms the basis for agent training. So again, you’re not just taking people’s words for [00:19:00] it.

Um, I would say too, there’s a lot of opportunities now for capturing behavioral signals, not just, solicited feedback. So organizations can increasingly capture real time signals and things like rage, click clicking, um, all caps typing, backtracking on phone calls, rising pitch, increased interruptions, right?

You can, capture those objective emotional responses in real time. Um, and then third. One of the things AI has been good for here, uh, is providing natural language processing to analyze speech and text as well. So you can also run an emotional analysis on things like open-ended text, social media comments, chat transcripts, call recording, that you’re not just relying on people’s, uh, promises that they are indeed emotionally intelligent, but you actually have some objective data to back that up.

Stacy Sherman: I am noticing a trend that we’re almost in a zero click economy whereby chat, GPT and others are looking at all the negatives and positives around the [00:20:00] web. And determining whether to recommend a brand and serve up, you can click and buy and all that good stuff. So therefore, if nothing else we’ve said so far makes sense around emotions, this is really proving that it, it’s powerful.

But what do you, what’s, what are you seeing in the way of AI and search and all that’s going on?

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, that’s a huge one. I think the only answer, at least right now until people figure out how to do the SEO equivalent of, affecting the answers from LLMs is to deliver consistently positive experiences, right? Because those reviews will amplify the bad. They will also amplify the good. They are not based on the story your brand wants to tell.

They’re based on people’s actual lived experiences that they are reporting out into the world. Uh, and so there’s no way to really cheat that system right now. You just have to be consistently excellent.

Stacy Sherman: Well, I had, my show, the other day, this executive from Trustpilot.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah.

Stacy Sherman: We dived into the fact like, you don’t actually want perfection. You, you need some negatives and positives and how the negatives [00:21:00] can actually boost your business if you handle them right.

Isabelle Zdatny: absolutely. well, and it makes it more believable, right? I think there’s a lot of skepticism now in the world and how we’re absorbing reviews and information. And if it’s, uh, too positive, I would think that someone’s gaming the system.

Stacy Sherman: Yeah.

Isabelle Zdatny: Um. So yes, I think, and again, there’s been research over the years that actually when people have a bad experience and you’re able to handle that with genuine empathy or care, it actually ends up building trust and more of that, again, emotional connection that we’ve been talking about.

Stacy Sherman: All right. I wanna get a little psychological here. Okay. And we are gonna probably go over time for my listeners. You usually know it’s about a 30 minute show, but I cannot stop. I love this so much. So stick with us here.

Isabelle Zdatny: Lots of good emotions.

Stacy Sherman: Yes. Yes. All right. So Qualtrics found that 95% of purchasing decisions happen below conscious awareness customers feel before they think.

Isabelle Zdatny: [00:22:00] Yeah.

Stacy Sherman: Tell us a little bit more about what that research is saying and what do business leaders need to be doing immediately because of that.

Isabelle Zdatny: So this is actually not Qualtrics research. This is from, uh, Zaltman who is out of Harvard Business, uh, school. He published it, I believe, around 2003. So it’s quite old. Some people can nitpick the research, but I think, again, going back to Kahneman and tra Ky, it’s pretty well understood that emotions do drive.

Decision making, right? If people have the emotional centers of their brains, eliminated for whatever reason, they actually really struggle to make decisions. So. We know that this is super important. Um, just to give you one of my favorite examples, asking about what companies can do about this, one of them is to design around behavioral economics principles, like the peak end rule, right?

So people. Judge their experiences based on the most emotionally intense moments and how that experience concluded not just the [00:23:00] overall average, which means that a mostly pleasant journey with a terrible ending is going to create, create worse memories and lower loyalty than a journey, uh, that maybe isn’t as good, but has a really positive conclusion.

And so as we’re thinking about how to go about designing for positive emotions, um. I would say start by mapping your critical journeys, right? Find those emotional highs, lows. Front end where there are painful steps like verification, um, create unexpected positive peaks through surprise moments of care, right?

Like the old Ritz-Carlton example where they’re empowered with $2,000 to, uh, surprise and delight customers. And then definitely make sure every experience ends on a high note. So I think there are a lot of learnings we can take from the world of behavioral economics to try to, Emotionally connect with customers design, recognizing that they’re making decisions using their unconscious and subconscious, uh, that are going to result in those deeper connections.

Stacy Sherman: I agree. I talk [00:24:00] a lot from the stage about an example of I went to get some blood work done at the lab and. Every single micro moment before I even got to the lab and got the blood work done, there was a series of these steps, some positive, mostly negative, and by the time I left the lab, which by the way included getting a survey in the parking lot before I even got into the lab asking me how was my experience, true story. So what I explain in, in my speech is that, and I asked the audience like, raise your hand positive or negative. Like, what? What do you think I’m feeling? And then we tallied it up.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah.

Stacy Sherman: At the end, there was significantly more negatives than positives. And what I explain is that that’s the lasting imprint in my mind.

So when I have multiple labs to go to in my area, that’s going to impact where I go and [00:25:00] what I’m going to say

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah.

Stacy Sherman: social media or among friends. And so you can’t ignore that, that emotional altitude.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah. Yeah. One of the, uh, global payments providers we work with actually split their call center recordings into like four quadrants, uh, four quarters. And then they looked at the sentiment analysis in each of those and they found that how people were feeling. In the last one. So how that experience ended was by far the most strongly correlated with the outcomes of like, were you satisfied?

Would you recommend this company, although don’t use NPS transactional experiences, um, but that they really, they figured out the peak end rule in real life. And so then trained their agents explicitly on how do you end calls on a positive note, making sure that everyone hangs up as happy as possible.

Stacy Sherman: That’s very interesting because if you think about an entire journey and we in experience management say it is managing the entire experience, not just customer [00:26:00] service. So if there is that end, uh, impact,

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah.

Stacy Sherman: yet we also say that you have to design for every micromoment for the positives. So is that controversial or a paradox?

Isabelle Zdatny: So a peak end rule. That’s the end part of the peak end rule. There’s also the peaks, which are those emotionally intense moments, which I think we in CFS would call the moments that matter. So it’s also identifying where are those moments that matter most, and then how are we making sure that we are delivering emotionally resonant experiences there.

Um, this is, you know, as again, we think about designing something to think about with AI is how are you making very conscious decisions about where you are encouraging that human connection? Uh, and where are the moments that maybe don’t matter as much that you can use AI for those low stakes emotional tasks, or maybe speed matters more like password resets or order tracking.

So [00:27:00] figuring out these are the moments that are going to most affect how people remember the experiences. And then how do we make sure that we are showing up. Being human, making those connections in those moments.

Stacy Sherman: Qualtrics tracked, I believe was 40 publicly traded companies over. Several years and found emotion leaders outperformed their industry peers by 10 points in stock returns while emotional laggards fell 26 points behind.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yes.

Stacy Sherman: So knowing that, nobody wants to be a laggard.

Isabelle Zdatny: Do not, that’s not a positive term.

Stacy Sherman: So if a listener says, well, you know what, I really wanna know more about what are the superstars the outperformers doing? Who, first of all, first of all, who who would be a couple brands to look at that you, that you studied in the research? And is there anything more you can shed some light on that?

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah. Yeah. This research was actually really interesting, so we did. We did this for, um, it’s a four year longitudinal study where we look at the 20 publicly traded companies who have the [00:28:00] highest emotion scores in our ratings, and the ones with the lowest from 2021. And we tracked their stock performance over four years and they started out at parody.

It’s indistinguishable. And then over the last four years, exactly as you said, the um, emotion leaders increased. Finish 10 points above their industry benchmarks, emotion, laggards. Finished 26 points below. the crazy thing is that we did that same research for overall CX leaders, um, which we look at the index of success, effort, and emotion.

And that gap is only 23 points, which I think tells you that emotion is driving an outsized share of CX leaders. Uh, financial advantage. Um, so in terms of companies who are doing this well, uh, we’ve already talked about a few of them. I would encourage you to read the article, um, ’cause there’s explicit examples in there.

I think, um, one of the ones that always comes to mind here is like. Chewy, uh, tends to score quite highly on CX indices, and they very [00:29:00] purposely do things like if your pet passes away, that they will send you flowers again, figuring out those emotional connection pieces. Um, I think, uh, historically brands like Costco, even Sam’s Club, have performed very highly.

And I think that comes down to having a clear value prop and brand promises to your customers, and then consistently delivering on that. You walk into any Costco, any Sam’s Club across the nation, maybe they’re not gonna give you, you you, you know. Champagne service like in Nordstrom, but you know exactly what you’re getting.

They’re building that trust, they’re delivering on their brand. Um, so I would definitely watch companies like that. Um, in terms of other, um, advice for designing around emotion. Um, I think the companies we see who are really successful are actually able to use emotion to help, um, illuminate where there might be unmet customer needs that offer them opportunities for innovation.

Um, so there’s one [00:30:00] nonprofit, uh, AARP who this was years ago now. Um, but realized that their onboarding process was creating a lot of anxiety and confusion in customers because they were getting lots of different, um, you know, a pamphlet here, an email there, and customers kept calling the contact center to say.

Am I a member yet? And so they redesigned this experience specifically asking how do we reduce anxiety and created this really joyful welcome box that gave people this wow moment right at the beginning of their relationship. Um, and also decreased, uh, calls into the contact center. So I think companies who are using emotions to, um, innovate around new products, new services, uh, it’s a really good.

Line into that. Build a relationship with your product team if you haven’t.

Stacy Sherman: And I would add that. You, I mean, you mentioned many metrics, so do a test, do a pilot, and then show those that data to your CFO team.

Isabelle Zdatny: yeah. Yes. And again. And again. [00:31:00] Figuring out. I like to think of CX. I just use the analogy of like that we should be Sam Wise, Gaji, not Frodo of like we are, we are not necessarily the hero of the story. We are there to help other teams do their job successfully and reach the top of Mountain Doom. And so really doing the hard work of.

What are the KPIs and the outcomes that your partners care about? And then how are we connecting experience outcomes, including emotions into those business outcomes, using language that they care about? Um, rather than just pushing out, you know, satisfaction or NPS or effort. That’s not gonna be clear to them what they should do with that information or why they should care about it or prioritize those insights over all the other things they have going on.

Um, so with emotions, with anytime you’re talking about experience, figuring out what your partners want, um, and then ensuring that you are connecting the dots between people’s experiences and the outcomes they care about.

Stacy Sherman: And let me say the obvious [00:32:00] here. ‘ cause people will say, well, I’m not sure what they want. I’m not sure what my internal partners want or my customers. And the answer is, go ask them.

Isabelle Zdatny: You have to. Part of being a successful CX professional, I think is being a savvy political operator. Find your friends, figure out and. I was just talking to a colleague the other day. He used to lead VOC at a large bank and she said one of the first things she did was. Figure out, um, what the OKRs, the objectives and key results for her executive team was.

And then went, um, layer by layer. She had a whole room where she had handwritten out. It looked like the, um, sunny, it’s always sunny in Philadelphia, uh, meme with like red, red strings around. What are all the objectives people have? Take them out for coffee, talk to them. That is the foundation of a strong CX program.

Stacy Sherman: So good. All right, we’re coming down to the end now. So rapid fire questions here. Number one. What is the most important takeaway you want people to remember and go do tomorrow [00:33:00] at work?

Isabelle Zdatny: yes. So I would say, again, pick one emotion your brand should stand for and start measuring it, not satisfaction, not NPS, that actual feeling you want customers to associate with you. Ask about on your next survey, track it over time, hold people accounta accountable to it, do regression analysis to see how it impacts the, uh, business outcomes you care about.

And I think starting with that single shift will, uh, change how your entire organization starts conceptualizing customer experience.

Stacy Sherman: And the key word here is the internal accountability, because it won’t happen otherwise if people are pointing to others instead of

Isabelle Zdatny: yes, absolutely.

Stacy Sherman: Leadership,

Isabelle Zdatny: Yes.

Stacy Sherman: leadership advice you’ve ever received or given?

Isabelle Zdatny: Yes. So Yes. So I actually started my career at Tempkin Group in 2013, which was founded by Bruce Tempkin, and he really taught me to choose certainty over uncertainty. So when there’s. Lots of chaos and things are changing [00:34:00] really fast, which it feels like is a constant state of being. Now, I think a lot of our instinct is to wait until we have more information, more data, a clearer picture.

Um, but that uncertainty has downstream negative consequences, right? Your team’s uncertain, so the people you work with are uncertain, and suddenly everyone is paralyzed. And so Bruce’s advice was always to be decisive, pick a direction and go. Even if it’s not perfect, you can always course correct. Um, but it’s much harder to do from standing still, and people respond much better to here’s what we’re doing and why.

Then, uh, hold on. We’re still figuring it out. So, uh, I think even bad news delivered with clarity is often easier to work with and no news delivered with ambiguity.

Stacy Sherman: Oh, for sure. I would also say that leadership needs to make sure that everyone has customer experience metrics tied to their objectives. Because I’ve been in situations where just my team had it, and then when I would go to these other teams and say, you gotta care. And [00:35:00] they said, oh sure, I’ll add it to my list.

And I’m like, no, no, no. At the top. And they’re like, no, I’ve got these other metrics first. And

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah. And they’re not being difficult, right? That’s what they’re measured and incented on. People respond to incentives and they’re just, you’re asking them to do a very hard thing if you are asking them to care about your priorities over their priorities when they already have a lot on their plate.

Stacy Sherman: Yeah. Huh. And then emotions do get heated.

Isabelle Zdatny: Yes.

Stacy Sherman: My last favorite question, I’ve asked over 200 people. If you could go back, no pressure at all, but if you could go back in time to your younger 20-year-old self, based on what you know now that you didn’t know, then what would you tell younger Isabel?

Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, I think I would say nothing is wasted if you’re paying attention. Um, I know sometimes I sit in meetings that feel completely irrelevant to my work, and I’m like. What am I doing here? I’m just wasting my time. Um, but if I look back on it, a lot of [00:36:00] those meetings taught me how other teams think, what their incentives are, what language resonates with them.

Um. That understanding, I think is what makes me effective today. It’s exactly like we’ve been talking about, right? Like that CX at the end of the day is about helping other teams succeed. Um, and you can’t do that if you don’t understand how they operate, what they’re measured on. And so every kind of irrelevant meeting or conversation was actually teaching me, I think something very.

About how the rest of the organization operates. Um, and I think the same holds true outside of work, right? Again, going back to Kahneman’s thinking fast and slow, I would say that fundamentally shapes how I think about customer experience. And it has nothing to do with CX on the face of it. So I read a ton of history.

I read a ton of fiction. I am constantly finding ideas from unrelated fields that end up being useful. And so. I think I would tell my 20-year-old self, you know, stop trying to optimize for the right learning and just try to stay genuinely curious and pay attention to everything. It all kind of starts [00:37:00] connecting eventually and often in ways you couldn’t have predicted.

Stacy Sherman: That’s called with age comes wisdom.

Isabelle Zdatny: That’s where wisdom comes from. We solved it.

Stacy Sherman: There it is. Well, thank you for being here and sharing your research and I’m gonna have a link to it in the show notes. And I love this conversation so much so to the listeners if you made it this so to the listeners if you made it this far. Thank you. Lots of gems here. And to be continued.

Isabelle Zdatny: Thank you. This was so fun. I really appreciate it.