The Happy Employee and Customer Podcast: Recent Episodes
Nick Webb
The Happy Employee and Customer Podcast is a podcast dedicated to helping organizations build happy cultures for their employees and amazing experiences for their customers. The podcast features actionable takeaways for leaders on how to lead happy teams while delivering amazing customer experiences.
Hi, this is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of the happy thought club. You know, I spent a lot of time talking about insights, because one of the things that I learned as a successful inventor with over 40 patents is that when I developed a technology that was bad, and trust me, I created lots of those. I realized that there was a very painful lesson when you make a mistake like that, where you put so much time and passion and money into an invention. And then you send it out to the marketplace, and it flops it, it hurts at a level that's hard to really describe. And so it's really helped me sort of sharpen my saw, as it relates to the importance of understanding what a customer or an employee wants, right? It's I've developed systems that go far beyond these outdated voc and net promoter scores and surveys, and all these programs are really, in my view, completely outdated. And so it turns out, sort of like the old adage that the best treatment is a good diagnosis, the best treatment is a good diagnosis. And any physician will tell you that's so true that the best way to get somebody better is to know what's actually really wrong with them, not just at a symptomatic level, but at a actual epidemiological and physiological level, what's really wrong with this person, because we can't build out a treatment plan. And we can't create a curative effect if we really don't know what's broken. And most people that fail in customer experience and employee experience, they've done a really, really forgive the vernacular crappy job of understanding what their customers or their employees really care about. They're trying to use McDonald's conveyor belt systems, that are surveys that create beautiful graphs and charts and three ring binders and PowerPoint presentations. The problem is the data is junk, it's literally not usable. In fact, you can even argue in many cases, that using these approaches actually tell you what not to do more than what to do. If you really want to do this, right, you have to have far better insights. Insights are the foundational principle of a cure. They're the foundational principle of teaching us what we need to know about what to invent. I tell people all the time that inventing is easy. The hard part is knowing what to invent, making employees happy as easy. The problem is knowing what they hate. Making customers happy is easy. The problem is knowing what they hate. You would also want to add to that knowing what employees and customers love. Because when you know that you can eliminate what they hate, and you can double down on what they love. When you do that. It's an incredibly efficient and effective way to really, really move the needle in a very quick way. The problem is we ask the wrong questions, we get the wrong insights, and we make the wrong decisions. So I guess this podcast is all about trying to persuade you that there is nothing more important. In the process of customer experience, our employee experience, there's nothing more important than your ability to know that customer and that employee. Now. We don't serve a monolithic customer. We don't serve a monolithic employee, they're different. And we need to not just tolerate their differences and acknowledge their differences, we need to lean into their differences. And so we have to be really careful about the old fashioned ways in which we've built out personification. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is they do generational personification in our In other words, they're calling employees Millennials or Gen Xers or baby boomers. Well, that's just ridiculous. It's bizarre. It's, it's, it's horrible. Look, I'm 63 years old. I probably know more about technology than 99% of millennials. I live in technology every day I run an Artificial Intelligence Lab. So if you were to assume that I am technologically inept, you would be wrong. If you were to assume that I'm like most people my age, you would be wrong.
Hi, this is Nicholas Webb and welcome to another episode of the happy thought Club. Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite subjects. And that's customer experience and customer service. Well, this is an area that's so interesting to me. In my consulting practice, we've had the opportunity to mop up after dozens and dozens of failed customer experience initiatives. After writing my best selling book, what customers crave years ago, I discovered that the overwhelming majority of organizations are doing the same things that they were doing back in the 1960s, and 70s, that the area of customer experience really hasn't evolved much at all, yet the customer is living in the ether of hyper consumerism, they have unlimited choices, at any price at any quality to get anything they want it anytime with a few thumb movements, yet, we are still trying to deliver this same outdated, in many cases, customer punitive approaches towards customer experience. So there you go, we have to take a new approach. And what I found from mopping up after dozens of failed initiatives is that, first of all, the problem really the biggest problem was these companies started with surveys. Their whole world was orbiting net promoter scores and voice of the customer and Survey Monkey surveys. And that's all they did. They just got what they thought was insights. Now look, all of these tools can be useful for sure. By very limited, in my opinion, what I always do it with my clients, and it works really, really well is we begin with that sort of self assessment, because it turns out that 90%, or maybe as much as 95% of the problems you have, right now in the area of customer experience isn't living in the heads of your customer is living within the systems, the methods, the tools, the philosophies, the culture, all of the things that are happening within your organization, your customers are experiencing your policies and your procedures, and even the attitudes and levels of happiness of your employees. So if you really want to deliver on the promise of exceptional customer experience, please don't begin with surveys. And if you're using net promoter scores or other matrix C's and trying to baseline yourself against somebody else, forget it. If you want to lead your market, who cares what they're doing, who cares what they're doing, it's amazing how obsessed so many companies are to look at their data when compared to somebody else's, but if the data is wrong, and if it's not actionable, and if it's fractional, who cares, right? Look, there's a better way. So again, if you want to deliver on the promise of customer experience, here's a few tips. Number one, it begins always with a readiness assessment, it always has to begin with a readiness assessment, don't conduct surveys, until you've taken a look at where you currently are in terms of the necessary infrastructure for success in the way in which you deliver customer experiences. When we come into an organization, for an example, we often find really bad problems, I mean, just glaringly bad problems and the way in which they they care for and deliver experiences to their customers just wrong. And again, it's almost always punitive in nature, it's punishing the customer. Look at that area first. And then from that, from that baseline of real insights, by doing ideation and customer experience, hackathons, and by doing system and tool and process and automation audits, once you've concluded those analysis, then you can use surveys very surgically, we call them diagnostic surveys, in that we use them to provide greater levels of richness, to understand and to validate some of the findings from the readiness assessment. Once you do that, and only after you do that, you should build out a formal CX strategy.
Hi, this is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of the happy thought club. You know, today I want to talk about the philosophy and the ideology of happiness. Now, it's really important to understand these philosophical, psychological and practical principles around happiness, in order to make it a reality in your own life, or in the life of your employees or customers. You know, it turns out that if you look at maybe one of the best definitions I've ever heard, of the word happy, or happiness is, it's the process of being involved in the attainment of a meaningful purpose. Hmm, the process. You know, I recently did some work with a major corporation that was involved in an initiative called The Joy initiative. And their goal was to create joy within their organization. The problem was, is that joy is a rare and sporadic and a morphus symptom of happiness. Right? So it's hard to create a strategy around joy, because joy is something we experience every once in a while when we're happy. But happiness is a process. It doesn't mean that when I wake up every day, and I write books, and I give speeches, and I do the things that I love to do, doesn't mean that it's always easy. I mean, I'm always asking myself the question, do I hate traveling more than I love speaking, it's always pretty close. I love speaking a lot, but I really hate traveling. But you know what, it's why I'm here. Somebody once said that, speak like, God sent you. I love that. And you know, when you're doing things that make you happy, it's the reason why you're here. And even when it's hard, you're still happy. I know, that sounds hard to believe. But there is pain. And there is there is headwinds, and there is friction in happiness. And every once in a while. And frankly, often, there is also joy. So happiness is really around this sort of trifecta. Something I talk about in my book, hay day, is that when we're involved every day, and we put our feet down on the ground, getting out of bed, and we look at our feet, and we're pondering the day ahead of us, we're excited because we know that we have the great honor to be able to engage in meaningful purpose that really matters to us. In other words, we believe in our day's mission, we believe in our life's mission, it is in fact, a mission. That's happiness. But we also know that in the furtherance of this mission in the invention of these things, that these things invent us back. In other words, when we are creating, it is actually creating us it's part of our life evolution. Now, this may sound a little bit metaphysical, but it's true. When I write a book, the book writes me back, I'm a different person at the end of a book, when I invented technology, and I now have over 40 patents, when I invented technology invented me back, I am the subject of those innovations, they created me. So that when we live a life that is an important mission, leveraging our own unique and special gifts of creativity and creative power. And we focus on our own personal evolution in all areas of our life, our physical evolution, our mental evolution, our spiritual evolution, our relationship evolution, when we evolve in all areas of our life. We feel great. We're happy. But there's one other caveat to this trifecta. First, we have to have a mission that matters. Second, that mission has to be part of our own personal evolution. And thirdly, the only missions that really matter, are those missions that positively impact others.
Hi, this is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of the happy thought Club. Today we're going to talk about employee happiness. Now one of the questions I get most often is, okay, so where do you begin, especially in a larger organization? Where do you really begin to start the process of institutionalizing happiness? I mean, just the phraseology of institutionalization of happiness seems sort of oxymoronic, right? Can you make happiness, a system a tool machine? Well, yes, sort of. Look, we can support all happiness with a wide range of best practices. But before we really do that, the way we get started with organizational happiness, is a self assessment. Now, I can't emphasize the importance of this enough. Now, let's talk about the two biggest pitfalls. Before I explain why this is so important. The overwhelming majority of organizations begin their happiness, our cultural transformation journey, from the perspective of an employee satisfaction survey, he Ikes. I mean, it's just so wrong. Why do we do it? It's really simple. It's easy. Pushing out a survey monkey is so easy. And you get back really cool data. Oh, yeah. And then you can create graphs and charts, and you can put it in a PowerPoint presentation. And you can talk to your leaders about where you stand currently, with employee satisfaction. It's just so flawed. So here's the truth. If you want to lose weight, and get super fit, there's some pain associated with it. But once you develop the habit of a healthy lifestyle, then you enjoy the incredible benefits. The point I'm trying to make here is that fitness, like happy cultures, results in doing the heavy lifting early on, you have to start with the work. Now, I know that doesn't sound real appetizing. But if you take a look at the trajectory of a year, and you take a look at the return on the initiative, effort and money, your ability to get a return on the initiative lives within the heavy lifting, not within lame surveys, they just don't work. Now, a little caveat there, you can use diagnostic surveys after you've completed this first step. And I'm going to talk about in a moment. The second problem, in addition to this idea that we begin the journey of employee satisfaction with surveys is really the overarching philosophy. I find that organizations that we've worked with that have attempted to change their culture in order to attract and keep great talent, the the ones that failed, really failed, because they didn't really have it within their spiritual DNA, they didn't really believe in employee happiness, they didn't really feel like it was an enterprise priority. So my suggestion is, if it really isn't coming from the belly, if it really isn't something that is truly part of your organization's belief system, really, anything you do will be a waste of time. So avoid those two pitfalls. Don't start this journey with a survey. That doesn't work. And second of all, don't even begin the process of trying to author cultural transformation until you have the board of directors and the CEO and the true leaders on board with a philosophical shift. Because after all, that's what's required. Okay, so how do you get started, here is what I have discovered, after three years of deep research. And after having the opportunity to work with dozens of organizations that are going through the process of cultural transformation. And here before I even mentioned that, you know, keep in mind, this stuff works. And when it works, it's beautiful. You increase productivity, you increase presenteeism, you increase your ability to attract and keep that the best talent, you improve your glass door and other social ratings. You deliver on the promise of productivity, productivity, safety and quality. You can't really do any of those things because remember, everything that you want to do within your organization is truly people power.