Episode 45 – Customer Experience Futurist Blake Morgan Shares Her Insights

Episode 55 Show Notes  – Blake Morgan Discusses Customer Experience

Customer Experience expert Blake Morgan joins me on this episode and shares her thoughts on how companies can learn to embed CX into their culture.

Blake Morgan is a leader in customer experience. As a keynote speaker and customer experience futurist, she has worked with Accor Hotels, Accenture, Adobe, Parker Hannifin, Ericsson, Omron, Verizon, and many other organizations. She is also an adjunct faculty member of the executive MBA program at Rutgers Business School and a guest lecturer at Columbia University. Her first book is More is More: How the Best Companies Work Harder and Go Farther to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences. Blake contributes to Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Hemispheres magazine. Additionally, she hosts The Modern Customer Podcast and a weekly customer experience video series on YouTube.

The Customer Experience Mindset has Blake’s foremost attention currently.

She recently went to Amazon and realized how challenging it is to be customer focused. Every little decision needs to be based on the customer and employees. Many companies are so focused on the desires of the business leaders.

Blake stressed how important it is to help companies prioritize a customer-focused mindset before we talk about technologies and skills training.

Sometimes it’s hard to think big picture and remember the customer. Companies need to remember the decisions made impact someone on the receiving end of the experience being built. This needs to be forefront every single day.

Transformational Leadership

Airbnb gives their agents the ability to be hosts themselves to get the experience and to travel to learn the customer experience. They bring their experience firsthand knowledge as the host and customer gives them better empathy and better insight.

Most executives don’t take the time to leave their office and get out on the sales floor, drive around in the truck, work in the factory. You have to think obsessively how can we make both employee and customer’s lives better.

A transformational leader is going to step up and make things happen for the employees to do their jobs better. These leaders understand what it takes to be an employee in their company and focus on making that experience the best it can be.

Being adaptable is a critical component of CX and business. Blake explains how the Mexican Tetra Fish is a great example of this and how adapting as they did has served them better.

Adapting to technology

It takes the whole C-Suite coming together to make technology decisions, not just IT dept anymore. We need to think of solutions that work across the business, not just individual silos.

The e-commerce customer expects consistent experiences from the website to the store to the app. Unfortunately, we don’t have horizontal customer experiences allowing this to happen. Each silo is set up horizontally and presents many stops and gaps. Technologies and data aren’t shared across the business and cause many headaches.

Scaling and consistency of basic customer needs and expectations are so valued by customers and becoming the expectation.

Blake shows the ROI of CX is specific to each company. She gives the example of Sephora with Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty and Employee Experience. It’s so important to focus on the employee experience.

Companies don’t understand that treating people well are going to fall behind quickly. They only succeed because they are big, but are in danger of having someone who gets CX disrupt them down the road.

A strong strategy needs to see beyond the money quarter to quarter and understand that CX must be included long term. Consequently, two things Blake suggests all companies focus on right now are Leadership and Culture.

People don’t understand the power of leadership – humility, good listening skills, charisma, empathy, 

Culture – can be seemingly invisible, yet is so important for the CX. If employees feel connected to the work they’ll be excited to work and deliver the desired CX.

Blake stressed to remember… These changes take time. One person can’t move the big ship. It’s based on leadership support. Customer focused companies tend to be very employee focused.

To connect with Blake and learn more about her, please find her at BlakeMichelleMorgan.com