Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a recent chat I had with Jeannie Walters, who is the Founder and CEO of Experience Investigators, an international keynote speaker, and an author. Jeannie and I caught up at a recent event we were both at, and I took the opportunity to have a chat with her about her new book: Experience is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations. We chat about the origin of the book, CX Foundations, the importance of mindset, four key questions that every CX leader should be asking, why they should also be thinking about what their organization and leaders need, and why it’s nearly impossible to deliver a great customer experience without creating a customer-first culture.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – The unstructured data revolution in CRM – Interview with David Roberts of SugarCRM – and is number 581 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Here are the highlights of my chat with Jeannie:
- Differentiate CX as Proactive vs. Customer Service as Reactive: Customer Experience must be intentionally designed and proactive, focusing on the entire customer journey and preparing for failure points. In contrast, customer service is reactive, only responding after a customer makes the decision to reach out when something is wrong.
- Anchor CX Strategy to Organizational Goals: Flip the script: do not start with customer feedback and try to gain buy-in. Instead, define your CX goals by starting with what your organization and leaders need (e.g., reduce service costs, gain market share), and then build your CX efforts around those organizational outcomes.
- Establish Alignment with an Explicit CX Mission Statement: Avoid making vague declarations like “we are customer-centric.” Instead, create a clear Customer Experience Mission Statement that every employee can internalize, ensuring consistent behavior across the organization and avoiding the creation of mistrust.
- Focus on Outcomes to Gain Respect and Influence: CX must be seen as a “serving function” that helps optimize performance for other departments. You earn respect and move things forward by focusing on organizational goals and showing what’s in it for the people trying to achieve them.
- The CX Blueprint: Mindset, Strategy, and Discipline: A successful, non-bottom-up CX approach requires three strategic parts: aligning the mindset (making the right decisions), building a real strategy (not just “be nice to customers”), and applying business discipline (prioritizing the right efforts).
- Continuously Refresh Your Organizational Assumptions: Though a CX mission statement should stand the test of time, you must be continually explicit and ready to adjust it as the “context window shifts.”
- Move Beyond Bottom-Up Feedback Collection: Many CX programs fail because they act as reporters “collecting information and kind of begging people to care.” If product teams or other groups aren’t held accountable for the feedback, they will focus on their approved roadmaps instead of customer insights.
- Start Where You Are to Build Credibility: Since no two organizations are the same, CX leaders should focus on making progress wherever they can, even if it’s just taking small steps to be more strategic and communicate in a way that helps them show up differently as a leader. This builds credibility and momentum.
- Jeannie’s Best Advice: Always Focus on Outcomes: The single most important action for improving customer experience is to Focus on outcomes.
- Jeannie’s Punk CX brand: Costco and especially their plan to build apartments and communities on top of new stores.
About Jeannie
Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CSP, is a certified customer experience expert, author, CEO, and international keynote speaker who does more than cite examples, she shows you how to implement strategies for real results.
As the Founder of Experience Investigators, she brings more than 20 years of impact across industries—from healthcare and regulated financial services to higher education, software, and hospitality. She has led transformative efforts for brands like JPMorgan Chase, SAP, BASF, PG&E, Orangetheory Fitness, Comcast, and more.
Her upcoming book, Experience Is Everything, reveals how leaders can boost performance and revenue by making customer experience their greatest competitive advantage.
Recognized as a top industry voice, Jeannie has reached more than half a million learners through her LinkedIn Learning courses and created CXI Membership™ to provide practical, guided CX support for busy leaders. Her insights, featured in Forbes, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, reflect her mission to help organizations make every moment count.
Check out the Experience Investigators website, say Hi to them on Instagram @jeanniewalters and @experienceinvestigators and feel free to connect with Jeannie on LinkedIn here.
Image credit: Photo by Jennifer Feng on Unsplash