Jermaine Edwards: 0:00

If you don't have a clear Centricity practice, you're going to have a failing experience initiative. Because you need to be able to know how will you make decisions in the business around customers in order to know what it is you need to invest in.

Rick Denton: 0:21

You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode we’ll talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. Welcome back to another CX passport trip. Today we have got a fantastic guest with ideas you can use today. To build organizations your customers will never want to leave. Please welcome Jemaine Edwards, the founder and chief customer growth advisor at irreplaceable advisory group coming today to us from South Carolina, USA after having recently moved from the UK. With over two decades of experience in sales leadership and running six companies, Jermaine has witnessed the challenges of building and scaling businesses firsthand domains obsession, solving customer challenges that prevent good companies from becoming even greater. He's worked with small business groups and large organizations like Dell Technologies, London Business School and GE, unlocking new revenue, profits and partnerships first clients. In his current role, Jermaine teaches customer focused b2b, small business owners and their leadership, the new model to operationalize customer revenue and reputation growth. It's not just about retaining customers, it's about creating an environment where they say they quote, never want to leave. Apart from his advisory role Germaine wears multiple hats from being a board member at Capella University to serving as the clinician Centricity director at catalyst care group. He's also co founder of tech proz.io, a platform for senior IT and technology professionals. Now, even though today's chat brings a Chelsea supporter, and an arsenal supporter together, I'm sure that our shared love of customer experience will allow us to put our club allegiances to the side, Jermaine, welcome to CX passport.

Jermaine Edwards: 2:42

Hey, thanks so much for having me and great introduction that I need to take you on the road. Definitely.

Rick Denton: 2:48

Well, you can just just hit record and cut it out. And then you can just hit play whenever you want. When you're at a show. You know, Jermaine, it is no surprise that we were introduced by a former CX passport guest, Megan Basler, Episode 115. So Hi, Megan, it doesn't surprise me that she said we needed to meet because there's something about you that stuck with me when we first met. You've been a part of many companies where customer experience is discussed in the boardroom, and then met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Let's just start there. What did you observe? Why that skepticism?

Jermaine Edwards: 3:29

Yeah, what's interesting, so among boardrooms, clearly, we're in a room of people who are results orientated. They want to know what outcomes are present and how you get to those outcomes. And they want to know the how, why, what and when. And so when it comes to CSC x, it can be quite amorphous. You're talking about brand loyalty, you're talking about things that oftentimes are quite difficult to measure. But I think one of the big challenges actually came with the wave things are actually defined and definitions matter. And so I began to see it particularly in boardrooms CX described in non outcome based ways. And so what it created in the room was a measure of skepticism and displeasure, in the lack of ability to articulate an outcome. And to articulate in a way in which a particular executive or board could really understand how to make the investments, what kind of investments to make and why and what kinds of returns to expect. And so that by just by default, really creates an environment for CX professionals, particularly where you're constantly fighting to get the kind of respect and reputation you want within the business because of the way things are described. So that was the first thing that definitions matter. And the definitions weren't particularly useful or helpful to many, many people in the boardroom.

Rick Denton: 4:55

You You've, you've actually frozen me with The topic so I can see my brain kind of just going blank. Because this is something that I totally believe in, right, the idea of results. And I'm curious, I want to go, I want to talk about okay, how do we get there? How do we get to the right path? But what was it that do you think was driving some of that Miss identification, some of that? Miss definition? What was driving? If we sex people think that we were results oriented? Why was there that perception difference that you were observing?

Jermaine Edwards: 5:30

I think you're without bigger disparaging, I think it's still important is that we have a real difficulty in separating the activities of what we do, versus the outcomes of what we're producing. And so what tends to be the case is that we're talking about all these activities like, Okay, we need to connect these pieces, we need to look at these channels, we're not talking about the activities, we're not necessarily understanding the interconnectedness of how it all feeds into a business practice, and how it feeds into the production of an outcome. And so what I tried to do is I offer a different kind of definition for customer experience that allows for a much richer conversation to what I tend to do, and it kind of falls into two categories, that tend to say that it's the understanding of customer expectations at critical places in the business. So a customer gets more of what they want, so that you can apply the efficient amount of resource to achieving a higher return with your clients.

Your CX Passport Captain: 6:29

This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. <ding> While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Rick Denton: 6:58

That is making a lot of sense as to what we should be doing what we should be driving towards, right? Because a lot of us have seen that 2023 Was this and I've called it and others have as well. This isn't a Rick original, but this that it was a year of reckoning for the customer experience discipline. And some of that skepticism that you're describing, even had customer experience teams that were just gutted, or eliminated. And so take those misconceptions you described, take that ideal state that you're ever forgetting and ideal for a second, just the next step that we need to be driving towards. If I'm a company leader, forget whether I'm customer experience, it doesn't even matter. I'm just a company leader. Yeah, what should I be doing with customer experience?

Jermaine Edwards: 7:43

What Well, I think the first thing is really making a clear definition of terms. So when you're moving in, oftentimes there are these conflated things that move in together like Centricity and Service and Experience showing up in the same sentence when actually they're quite distinct in nature, and in discipline. So I think, first of all, is creating really clear being clear on what we mean by that for us in our business, not what McKinsey says, or any other big company out there. But any opinion report, what do we say it is, for our case, directly to having a defined term helps them within the business view to have a shared way to communicate what we need want and expect across the business.

Rick Denton: 8:29

So it starts definition. Oh, sorry, Jermaine. Go ahead. No, those

Jermaine Edwards: 8:32

are just thoughts. They're starting with the definition.

Rick Denton: 8:36

Yeah, that, you know, it's interesting. I, I haven't had a lot of conversation with folks about these definitions. And I do think you're right, that there's a lot of tripping up in that the definitions have been some of those barriers towards that result, generation that, and I'm going to kind of kind of take a yes. And I think it's the definitions. And I think it's this use of terminology and jargon, that ever the customer experience professional, I might be guilty. My peers, my colleagues may be guilty of throwing these words around like customer centricity like customer first. And these things, that if I'm a chief operating officer, or CFO, I don't really care about that. Am I more efficient? Or did I make more money? Right? Those kinds of things are what mattered to me in those disciplines. You said something else, when you're talking about how can we get this right, and you talked about considering this across all of the aspects of the business? I know that customer experience sometimes finds itself like any organization, we're not it's not unique to us. Yeah, somewhat siloed. How have you seen both? Maybe both either the failures or the successes of customer experience really being driven across the organization in a way that delivers the results that you're describing?

Jermaine Edwards: 9:50

Yeah, so I need to go back to these terms around Centricity service and experience that I just meant, okay. I love how

Rick Denton: 9:56

you're emphasizing definition like you won't even go until we would have Viners I haven't really Yes.

Jermaine Edwards: 10:01

So you're speaking to a business owner just as his last last week last Thursday. And he was wanting to improve or look at some improvement areas. And he said, he said this thing, he said, We need better customer experience, we need people to be more helpful across the business. So we have more consistency, all those things were good, he was right about the change, but not about what needed to change. And so if we're looking at Centricity for me, it's about the culture that shapes the decision making inside your business services about the responsibility we have in support of our customers. And CX is about that alignment of people, technologies and processes to the outcomes and relationships with our customers. And so you start with centricity. And you say, this is what we believe about how we serve our customers. And as a result, this is then what needs to happen in customer experience or customer service. Use then, as a business, then align rows to be attributed to measuring those things across across every single department. But because you have a customer experience department, and you have no clear Centricity that helps you as a business to make decisions to what it means for departments, you then have these conflicts of interests where somebody says, Well, I'm not measured on this, or that's not my focus, and therefore you have these dissenting conversations where nobody can find common ground. And so that's, that's, that's why the importance of definition is so important or important, sort of where you begin in the business. So I often say if you don't have a clear Centricity practice, you're going to have a failing experience initiative. Because you need to be able to know how will you make decisions in the business around customers in order to know what it is you need to invest in.

Rick Denton: 11:55

This is, this is tasty, that idea of what I'm hearing is a thread. And I may be kind of tying some things just in my own mind here. But that getting the definitions right, allows a company to know what they should measure in a unified way so that people are marching towards that same goal, right? The customer experience teams historically, and I'm railing against this now as well. I've been okay, NPS, we've raised NPS, who the bleep cares. But are we marching towards an efficiency goal? Are we marching towards a revenue goal are we might what is that business tangible business goal that we're driving towards? There is I do think that we're like shifting as a discipline to focus on results and that sort of stuff. And you've said something that really intrigues me. And this is a quote that I you have said to me, and it is customers aren't really looking for your experiences. They are look looking for an outcome. They just want it not to suck. I love that. I love the simplicity of what you said. It's pretty clear on the surface, right? We could just stop there. But I'm curious. Let's go deeper with it. How should our listeners and viewers take that and apply what you just said to their business today?

Jermaine Edwards: 13:03

Yeah, so I know, some people might be triggered by that statement. So let me offer an example to to, to bring that to bear. So I want you to imagine for a moment that you're walking into a coffee shop, let's say you're on your way to work walking into a coffee shop, and there's beautiful ambience, it smells great. They ask for your name. It's all personalized. But you're in a rush to work and it takes 25 minutes to get your coffee. Now, at that moment, what is most important thing to you, it's not the beautiful ambience is not great smell is not that they recognized your name. It's reasonable service in a reasonable time. Coffee is 10 minutes tops. A meal, you might wait 30 minutes. But this is where it comes down to understanding your client. And so this is why I say it's not experienced versus outcomes first, but on route to it. They don't want it to suck. So nobody wants to walk into a coffee shop that's cold that smells terrible. And doesn't feel like they care. However, they still want to be in and out in 10 minutes.

Rick Denton: 14:06

Yeah. Yeah, germane, that's really clear. And it obviously many of us when we think coffee, we go to the big global behemoth of Starbucks. And I remember there being an even myself a lot of angst when Starbucks went to mobile ordering. Because one of the things about Starbucks was the third place and the origin story and how it can be you got home, you got office and you got a third place. And it's a place to have a community and build and be there and experience it. And now I'm starting to realize with what you're saying there that mobile ordering was genius in a way of separating out those that wanted exactly what you just described. I don't want to be cold, I don't want to smell but give me my coffee and let me get the heck out of the store versus those that actually are there to stay for an experience and that mobile ordering. I don't know if there was an intentional thought behind that as opposed to just efficiency and like it's now separated that into where the kids customer can experience what they want to experience when they want to experience it. Exactly.

Jermaine Edwards: 15:06

And that's the distinction. And so I think is really important. I've often given these two examples, I've asked the question the or what is, what is what are what do you McDonald's and Ferrari have in common? Right. And so I've often said, I get a whole range of different kinds of responses. And I simply have a very simple answer. I said, they both have different customers. And they have phenomenal case studies that you could read on their specific customer service initiative, customer experience initiative. However, they make decisions based on their customers, and not somebody else's. And so when you're hearing case studies from other people, you have to ask yourself a very, very important question is, are we building this experience for a client we don't have? Or are we building it based on a very deep understanding of the clients we do have?

Rick Denton: 16:04

trumaine that was absolute. I never really thought about comparing Ferrari and McDonald's and it makes complete sense. I, I wonder, I wonder how much of their customer overlap there actually is, like, I'm imagining the person in the Ferrari pulling up at the McDonald's drive thru and having two different customer experiences. But that can be that's probably on somebody's tick tock real somewhere, something to entertain us. But I like that, that idea of hate as as different as they are, they're similar. If you focus on the customer, you're gonna want to take you in a totally different direction here. Let's take a little break here. Let's stop down and enjoy the first class lounge. We'll move quickly here, and hopefully have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Jermaine Edwards: 16:51

Bahamas

Rick Denton: 16:53

Ooh, well, and as someone who is now sitting in the Dallas, Texas area with a temperature and I'm not exaggerating, 12 degrees Fahrenheit, and there's snow on the ground, the Bahamas sound really delightful. What about Bahamas really drew you in is a dream travel vacation from the past

Jermaine Edwards: 17:08

was actually the first trip I took with a good friend of mine, and we took a cruise. And it was probably one of the most memorable experiences of my early 20s. And so that's why it's so really kind of clear and very race, putting in my mind that Oh, I

Rick Denton: 17:23

like that. And because it's early 20s, I'm not going to probe any further. Sometimes those records need to stay sealed. So we won't go any further. In early 20s stories. Neither you nor I want to share some of those. So let's look forward what is a dream travel location you've not been to yet.

Jermaine Edwards: 17:39

There is a particular deserted island that I can't remember the name of but it has a very, very particular set of vegetation there that is supposed to be quite rejuvenating for the body. interest interested in so if I find a name, I'll come back to you on YouTube. I can't remember the name right now. Yeah,

Rick Denton: 18:00

and I wonder a little bit if you're just being a little sneaky here and saying I don't remember the name. I want to keep this my deserted island. So I can see why you'd want to keep that to yourself. But yes, that would be one that we'd be interested in. If we have a chance. I'll dump it in the show notes as well. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat? It's

Jermaine Edwards: 18:19

actually a Jamaican dish. It's called curried goat and rice. And so in such a beautiful dish it's just if you have a bias of my mom making it she makes it the very early but that's my favorite. Yes. I

Rick Denton: 18:36

love that you brought mom into this because we might be making mom and happy with this question and it is unlike what you described there being very yummy What is something that you were forced to eat when you were growing up but you hated as a kid or liver

Jermaine Edwards: 18:55

was told all the promises that it wouldn't be something that was good for the body and and it will be skipped, but I don't get it. I had no benefit from it whatsoever.

Rick Denton: 19:06

There is something in the air something in my guest schedule over like now, and the most recent past, regular listeners will know why I chuckled liver has come up shockingly frequently in the last several episodes. I've had bad experiences with it as well. It's not my least favorite but my gosh, it's in that bottom five so I can understand why that is the case for you. Absolutely. We're gonna have to leave the lounge here but I want to ask before we leave what is one travel item that not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home without

Jermaine Edwards: 19:41

a notepad. There's a particular notebook that I use. That's the one I got to design myself. And so I ordered order one every few free months, and it's yeah, it holds all of my precious notes and thoughts and things that I write on often

Rick Denton: 20:05

Ooh, Jermaine, I'm intrigued by this designing your own note pad, I, let's talk about that and see and see if maybe I can steal from or be inspired from that design. I like that. We've talked a lot about results. And I want to go back to that results piece of it. Because in the intro, I mentioned in its very specific quote that I found from you, that you guide companies to, quote, operationalize customer revenue, and reputation growth. And so I'm going to give you the shortest question ever. How?

Jermaine Edwards: 20:39

Yeah, it's a good question. So here's what I've recognized over the years is that customers don't grow by departments, they grow by systems. And so the systems itself are the things that orchestrate and organize how anything in the business is done. Once a process is actually established, it moves into a system that allows for that then to be mechanized and sent out to other people. And so the moment you begin to recognize that all results are derivatives of a really solid system, you begin to look at the business very differently in regards to how departments respond. And so what we do is we help people to understand what the five big systems, you need to understand the business that allows you to have high degrees of certainty when you go out and get customer results. And that's what we help them to do in all those different categories.

Rick Denton: 21:29

That's it, you and I definitely have a very symbiotic spirit there in that I have I view 2024 Is this year, the process Renaissance for customer experience that is going to be this press in Asana, as I've said, which is a silly little phrase, but it is this return to that that execution. I like how you called it operationalize, and how it is not departments, but it's systems. When, when a company is going through that evolution, it sounds real simple, like you and I, we've got our notepad, and we're talking here about that. And how does a company kind of make that migration though? Even even culturally? Or just tactically? How are they going from perhaps more loosey goosey approach to this operationalizing of revenue and reputation growth? Yeah,

Jermaine Edwards: 22:19

nine other things are very sexy, nobody likes talking process. And so that's, that's the first difficulty, you have to kind of get past that first time. But I think from a leadership perspective, what I often will encourage leaders to consider is inviting people into a result and not a set of activities. And so if I'm talking about processes, talking about any new, new shift, or change in a system, or something that impacts how you do something, I always talk from the place of a result first, and then invite them into the result that happens to then come with a set of activities that we need to go and follow in order to produce it. And what I find is, that tends to be something that is much more well received than the other, which is we're making this change in Unity gonna change this now. It's about what I need you to do, rather than who we're trying to become.

Rick Denton: 23:15

Do you? Okay, yes. And I'm curious, do you find that getting to that result at the very beginning? Because yes, that makes sense. Let's start at the end, what do we want to achieve? And then figure out how to do it as opposed to here's the recipe and we'll figure out what the result is? Do you find that companies are struggling to even know what the result is that they want?

Jermaine Edwards: 23:35

So the answer is yes to that, in many regards. And I believe one of the reasons for the challenge behind not having a clear understanding of the result is because we don't have a clear understanding of who we want to become to our customers. Why so? You know, it's because we're very, very stuck in the production of the thing that we do. And so in a production thing that we do, it's not a bad thing. I mean, you need to deliver the service that you have to improve those services, you need to make investments into the product. So you can be constantly at the front and forefront of your particular industry. But the moment you get stuck in production, you lose perspective of the organization, you could be becoming relationally, also to your customer in that process. And so it's really important that an organization when you are thinking about the initiatives that you are choosing to invest time in, that it's really created around a vision, a customer vision, a vision of who you want to become to your customers. And that's a very, very specific kind of exercise I've often taken leaders through in terms of how we begin to vision out the thing that actually shapes why innovation happens and not What innovation happens?

Rick Denton: 25:02

Okay. And and getting to that, at why getting to that understanding? I'm glad that we got there because it, it sounds real simple. Okay. There's a business model or generically, as I've said profit cost cutting. That's not really what the result is that maybe kind of an objective. It's how it gets there. It is how a company is getting to there, and what is the experience that they want to deliver to achieve that result? You You had said something to me, where you said engagement matters more than retention? And I'm curious, I'll expand on that. What do you mean by that? And then how are they different? And why is engagement more important than retention?

Jermaine Edwards: 25:48

Yeah, so retention is a lag indicator. So for those who are unfamiliar with the term, it simply describes a result that happens after the fact that means you can't see retention until it happens until somebody stays or somebody leaves, you can't see what those two results are, what you can track are our engagements, which gives you an indication to the likelihood of somebody or a client leaving or not. So for me, engagement is the mutual interaction, this is a very, this is my own definition, you will not find it anywhere else. But engagement for me is the mutual interaction between you and your customers that shapes how what and when you act on something in the present or the future. I'll say it again, engagement is the mutual interaction between you and your customers, that shapes how what and when you act on something in the presence of a future that can be measured influence and change. So there are different forms of engagement, from relational to collaborative, the formal to procedural, but a very simple example is a survey, you send out a survey that is an input, you're asking client to engage, and you get no response, that no response still requires you to do something with it. And when you get a response, it still requires you to do something with it, it doesn't change the step of knowing how what and when you act on something in the present in the future, the data that you receive in that exchange, in that mutual interaction is going to influence something. And so the more of your understanding of the different things that influence between the influence between you and your client, the higher the level of understanding you have about what kind of engagement is most important?

Rick Denton: 27:33

I need to sit and steep on that a little bit. I'll have to have to edit my brain just processing that. Yeah, there's so many things to consider in there. You know, something that I really liked about what you were describing there is that mutual creation, a lot of times companies and I've talked about how the the contact center is where the co creation of customer experience happens. When we're in that context. And we're talking about that's such a goldmine of information, it's co created, do you find that companies are appreciating that sense of the mutual nature of experience creation? Or companies seeing it more as we the company create an experience that you the customer receives? How do you get them to that mutual state?

Jermaine Edwards: 28:25

Yeah, so I think there needs to be a clarification for what we do for customers and what we do with customers. And so there are certain obligations that you have as a company to do things for your customers based on a clear set of expectations, and what you're promising to the client. And then there's certain things you do with the client, that are based on mutual expectations of how you do things together in order to be successful. So I often give a very, very clear using surveys again, if you have clients that are constantly unresponsive to certain kinds of surveys, that is not their fault, it's yours. Because the reality is, is that most people, most clients when they come into your business, do not sign up to take service.

Rick Denton: 29:11

Amen. Amen. And

Jermaine Edwards: 29:13

so so unless it becomes an expectation, then why should you why should they hold anything to you in that particular regard? It doesn't mean they hate you. It doesn't mean they like you, it just means is not part of what we signed up for. And so in engagements, we have to be very, very clear on how we measure something why and its importance. So an example is if, if I'm a bank, and I have a whole bunch of pens, and I'm offering clients when they come in to sign papers, and they don't believe that they'll take the pins. Is that a reasonable place to engage engagement for me to determine how likely a client is to do business with us? We'll know it's a very silly one. Just because you don't take the time doesn't mean they don't like you So, so what what tends to happen is that we have all these different points of interaction, but we're waiting them, you're in on in very kind of, we don't have a good weighting system, I'd say for how we think about those engagements when they when we should have a clear definition of what engagements are more important to us than the others. And if they are important to you, then we should be asking whether or not they should be an expectation, or whether that should be something that we have as a relational contract later on inside, inside the business, something we do as part of a community of customers. So I think there are some some real conversations to be had there. Yeah.

Rick Denton: 30:46

And that was the community with our customers. I actually liked that phrase a lot as well. You have Jermaine, you've an even those of you that are watching the video can see that my brain is there's times that I get the furrowed brows. I'm really proud that you've got some really deep thoughts here. And I've enjoyed exploring those with you today. If others wanted to get to know you a little better. Learn a little bit more about your approach and have their brows furrowed and then unfold as you explain it and unpack that for them. How can they get to know a little bit about more about you or the are irreplaceable advisory group? What's the best way to get in touch?

Jermaine Edwards: 31:20

Yeah, so follow me on LinkedIn, because that's where all the updates are going to happen. There are some big changes and moves taking place over the next few weeks and months to come. Which will bring all of this stuff more to light as I've released some new services and products that are coming quite soon. So you look out for that LinkedIn is probably the best place if you are interested in just being part of the growth email community. Go to my website, Jermaineedwards.com, you can sign up there. But equally so I'd say just follow me on LinkedIn because that's the place where you'll probably get the most recent most relevant information. Awesome,

Rick Denton: 31:52

as always, that's going to be in the show notes, listeners viewer scroll down, you will have those links available and you can just click right there and connect with Jermaine. Start to follow him and get that wisdom Jermaine really enjoyed the conversation today. Again, there's some some thoughts that really need I need to chew on a bit and enjoyed chewing on with you today. It was a delightful trip with you Jermaine. Thank you for being on CX password.

Jermaine Edwards: 32:17

Appreciate it. Thanks for having

Rick Denton: 32:23

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. If you liked today’s episode I have 3 quick next steps for you Click subscribe on the CX Passport youtube channel or your favorite podcast app Next leave a comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and and enjoy CX Passport too Then, head over to cxpassport.com website for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience. Until next time, I’m Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.