Tabitha Dunn: 0:00

I often get asked, I want to be a VP of CX. I want to be a chief customer officer like you someday. And if you want that, you're going to have to learn

Rick Denton: 0:07

customer experience wisdom, a dash of travel talk. We've been cleared for takeoff. The best

Unknown: 0:13

meals are served outside and require passport. What

Rick Denton: 0:17

would you think if I told you today's guest made me think of a pop song from the late 70s, early 80s. Remember that song, pop music by M Don't worry, I'm not going to sing it. You can thank me later, and I certainly don't have the budget to afford the royalties, so you're just going to have to imagine New York, London, Paris. Music. Everybody talk about pop music coming to mind? Well, I know that's what came to mind when today's guest Tabitha Dunn, a global CX leader who's built and led customer experience strategies and teams across some of the world's biggest companies, started sharing all of the places she'd worked, that song immediately came to mind Japan, London, Zurich, Germany, Sweden. Now can you see why it came to mind with that global experience, she's seen firsthand how CX plays out across different cultures and industries. Tabitha takes that variety and uses it to understand the unique challenges of each business, navigating roadblocks and making CX work in the real world. Right now, she's focused on the intersection of customer experience and resilience, how leaders adapt influence and push through obstacles to create real change. I want to know more. Tabitha, welcome to CX passport.

Tabitha Dunn: 1:33

Oh, thanks for having me, Rick. I'm glad

Rick Denton: 1:36

to have you here. Tabitha, I'm just gonna ask you, did that song come to mind at all for you when you're thinking about the world in which you've traveled,

Tabitha Dunn: 1:44

you know, it didn't, but now that you had mentioned it, it's going to be hard to get out of my head, that is for sure. I'm

Rick Denton: 1:52

glad to give you that gift of a little ear worm, and hopefully listen to viewers, that's an ear worm for y'all as well. Well, let's talk about all of that variety when you've been all around the world, what have you learned about the differences and the similarities of a customer experience approach in all of those destinations?

Tabitha Dunn: 2:12

So one of the things that I think helps is that I grew up as a military brat. Before I was 10, I lived more outside the US than I did inside the US. And so having that experience, having lived in multiple parts of the US, in the Midwest and the South East Coast, I was born on the West Coast, lived in two countries. My grandfather was a lock master on the Panama Canal, and I'd gone to visit him. Cool. It's sort of it is. It is pretty cool, but it means that you're very both, very portable. Yeah, it's also has a hilarious effect that depending on what country I was in when I learned that word, I sometimes say it based on where I learned the word or where I heard it, like maybe I heard it on British television. So it sounds a little more like that. And the reason I say that is because that's how experiences are. Let's say that you are serving customers in many different countries. You might want to think of them as a monolithic entity. And oh, the Japanese don't like to take surveys, so we can't do surveys there, or the Spanish tend to give very positive more maybe inflated scores. We might make those assumptions just on things like voice of customer, not even including the fact that service experiences are very different in each of those countries. But they're also not a monolithic entity, right? So that means that when you treat the experience there, you have to understand the broader cultural needs, but you also have to recognize it's not just Spaniards who live in Spain. It's many of us who are either, you know, imports for for a few years, or immigrants to the country. So it's not just a case of understanding those broader cultural intentions, but it's also recognizing that customers need to be treated as individuals with an expectation of what those needs are.

Rick Denton: 4:14

Boy. So we're talking about that in the context of global distribution of culture and geography. This is true when we're talking about inside of a company's understanding of its customer base. Have you how have you applied your experiences with that across the world into how you might when you're talking inside of a company and helping them understand, look, your customers are unique. How do you help them understand and act in a way that appreciates that uniqueness of their customers?

Tabitha Dunn: 4:51

I think a practical story is often the best way to explain it, because theory might feel like, Oh, well, how do I apply that to me? So I'll give an example that. But most companies who have a phone support model will do a lot to try and reduce the call volume to support, because every call you make to their support is expensive, correct, right? And there's the long running argument, if you should hide the phone number, or should you not hide it? Yep, see, I can feel you sighing already, right? And then people go through right? And what's interesting is they look at the problem entirely the wrong way. They look at it from we want a lower call volume, but of course, we're here to help our customers. That's generally the point of view. But instead of looking at it as the customers have certain behaviors, you solve in different ways and build the channel to that resolution, you'll actually reduce your call volume and increase customer sat. So a project to do this, where I've done this before, is you add a single question to your support survey. Ideally make your support survey like less than five questions. So this question gets answered and you say to them, You know what? I just need to know. One thing, did you try to solve this problem before contacting us? Yes or no, the idea being that everybody who said no, you should set that customer base aside, because that's a different problem to solve. However, the ones who said yes, you know all the problems they called in with already, what you should do is work with your support team to say, out of those, which ones are easy to solve, and we just need to work to better improve how we offer solutions to that and which ones of those are actually rather hard to solve. And by the way, if it's hard to solve, you should even open the top of the knowledge base entry with something like you can attempt the resolution below, but it'd be faster if you call us. Here's our phone number.

Rick Denton: 7:00

Whoa, whoa, whoa, you just blew my mind with that. I can't even imagine seeing at that at the top of a FAQ, like, hey, great question. Why are you reading this? Give us a call,

Tabitha Dunn: 7:11

right? I mean, you can, if you really want to. And my husband's super technical, so he'd be the one like, I got to give it at least a one job. But that means you've set it up for that, but you've already set the expectation. You could be frustrating yourself. If you try it, we could help you through it faster. It's it's thinking about human behavior and meeting them where they're at. And teaching a company how to do that is how you meet individual needs, but do them in like segments, in chunks. Yeah, customer needs

Your CX Passport Captain: 7:43

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: 8:09

Interesting. Okay, well, it that shows me that depth of understanding of customers as individual, unique pieces, right? That that global experience and just the general sense of, hey, this is an individual we're dealing with, not a persona, not a monolithic block or anything like that. You've had to bring that spirit into many customer experience teams, because you've built multiple teams from the ground up. I want to start with that beginning, Getting Started phase. How do you go about getting these teams off the ground, how do you sell the idea, and then how do you tactically get going with this?

Tabitha Dunn: 8:48

It often starts with a discussion with the leadership team. When I get hired in my first 100 days, I will interview probably 700 people across the company, as well as dive deep into customers, you need to start with what's working well and why is it working well. And the reason that's important is that might be a repeatable experience you can make right? Or when you fix things, you've got to make sure you don't break that. And it's amazing how many times that as CX experts, we end up focusing on everything that's broken and not thinking about, does it work right anywhere like and what? Why is that valuable to our customers and our people? Obviously, the second part is what's not working well and why? There's another question after that that people miss, which is when it goes wrong for the customer, what is the impact on them and their business? Okay, keep in mind, I work in B to B, yeah, if you work in B to C, obviously the question is the impact on you and your life when it goes wrong. And the reason that's important is because, if you're trying to measure. Or which problems to solve first. Sometimes you might solve you might think you're going to solve a problem that happens often, but if the impact to the customer is small, you might actually choose to solve a problem that doesn't happen very often, right? But when it does, the impact is huge. Or maybe you solve it because the impact small for the customer, for the impact for the company is huge, right? So understanding the impact when it goes wrong is a critical part of that problem solving path, because one of the things people go is, how do you even set priorities? That's how you start to set priorities, yeah. And the third piece is, I'm looking to find out, describe for me, what's the experience we want our customers to have, and then how far away do you think we are from that? Okay? And the reason that part of the conversation is so important, particularly at the leadership level, is if the leadership team is not aligned, I'm even describing what it should be, right? That's the problem, right? Because that means that if they if they care enough to have a description, and their descriptions are different, how could they be headed towards the same goal,

Rick Denton: 11:08

boy, and that gets into like things of brand promise, and do Do they understand even what the company is trying to be or deliver for the customer, the one that you were describing earlier, where It was not understanding the why or the impact. I feel like I see that a lot. I feel like that the response to decide what is the highest priority tends to be, what's loudest, what's most frequent. Why do you think companies are making that mistake? I think

Tabitha Dunn: 11:36

part of the challenge is it seems easy. There's an impression that you don't actually need someone who's an expert in this space, if you just know what the problems are and you go solve them, then why would you need a CX leader to do it? Okay? And part of it is that why, right? It's the ability to really balance out the whys and the impacts and be able to make much more strategic decisions. Because honestly, if all you do is fix the squeaky wheels, you'll never be done. You'll also never be sure if you're having the impact you want. And once you get a list of like, what you think are the most impactful things to fix from a pain perspective, then you have to do the ROI. You have to say, Well, gee, how expensive is it going to be to fix this problem? Because sometimes it might be that it is in the top 10 to get fixed, but the amount of time and money it would take to fix it, the return on the investment is quite low, or it's negative. Maybe we'll fix that later, because there are things that have a better return on investment now, and it's that ability to make those thoughtful, analytical decisions, along with the empathetic design of solutions, that really needs CX abitha, I

Rick Denton: 12:52

referenced resilience in the introduction. We know that some are born with that strength of the resilience. Others, well, they need to develop it, and I know that everyone, myself included, would benefit from growing that resilience. How have you built that in yourself and then, how have you guided others to build that resilience?

Tabitha Dunn: 13:15

I don't know whether I was born with it, but I do know that I had a tough childhood, and I would say that moving very often gave me the opportunity to recognize that even when something's bad, now it won't be bad forever, and that when something is difficult or it's emotionally challenging, which it can definitely be both at work at the same time, I have to be able to sit down and focus on, what can I change and what can I not change? And I think that those things if being able to separate those two out gives you the ability to have resilience, and it's often thinking sideways and around corners when it comes to solving problems that gives you resilience. Because I think what most people struggle with is they feel like they've hit a wall, and therefore there's no path forward. And I often describe CX as it's a journey to get people to the other side of the mountain. Every project I've ever started, there's a group of people, and we've got to get to that goal on that other side. And if you could build that straight through beautiful tunnel right through the middle of the mountain, that would get to the other side, it'd be the fastest, easiest, most repeatable way. But if you can't get 100% of the people with you to go that route, then you have to go up the mountain, down the mountain, circle the mountain 15 times, backtrack. You have to go the path that gets everybody with you along the journey. And so if you learn that like we, have to do the. Together, then you have to think about each individual, just like we think about our customers and say, wow. Why is it that when I try to work with finance, it seems like all I get is no. Well, you know what matters to the finance team? What matters to the CFO? How can I help them be successful. What problems can we solve for them that make us better partners? How do I better understand that if I'm going to ask them for money, they should trust me that that's going to be money well spent, and they should rather spend that money with me and my team than spend it anywhere else. So if I understand that, I'm facing struggles, but so is every one of the other leaders in the business that gives me the ability to recognize I'm actually not alone, and we can be resilient together. We just have to figure it out and

Rick Denton: 16:00

take a little break here. Join me in the first class lounge. We'll move quickly and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Tabitha Dunn: 16:09

Oh, goodness, that is difficult, because I was about age 10. At this point, she's 22 we wanted her to be able to spend more time with her cousins, so we did amazing trips, like staying in a tiny, little village in the south of France, which was an incredible memory. We had an amazing time when we went to Italy. It was both fascinating, because we went and explored the history there, but there was also like a fire and watching the resilience of the local area, like as they fought this forest fire for days, and it actually enabled us to really get to see the people. It's it's just every single one of them are family trips. That's the

Rick Denton: 16:53

theme we'll go with. Dream travel location from your past is one that involved family and brought the family to that experience. I knew that that would be a hard question for you. Well, this, this, this one might be hard to what's a dream travel location you've not been to yet.

Tabitha Dunn: 17:09

That is a that is a long list. In some cases, it's going back to places that we have been and seeing something we didn't get to see. Like my family and I are huge Disney fans. When we lived in Stockholm, COVID happened, so we missed out on the chance to do Disney Paris. Okay, like, if we go back to France, it's gonna be Disney Paris. My husband and I want to go back to Stockholm and see our friends, but I also have this abiding desire to do an amazing whiskey and Castle tour through Scotland, amen. Okay, yeah, right. And

Rick Denton: 17:44

if you need a porter, I'm right there with you,

Tabitha Dunn: 17:46

right? And I want to go drink real Guinness in Ireland and go and explore the country. I want to go to New Zealand. And, okay, I admit it, I'm a Lord of the Rings fan. I think we're sensing I'm a bit of a geek. And so, you know, I just it's, it's such an incredible list, like, the world is an amazing place. It's also all these places in the US that I haven't visited yet that I can't wait to go to. I get my

Rick Denton: 18:13

eyes open when I'm speaking to guests that are outside of the US, and frequently they'll mention a dream travel location that they've not been to yet. Is something inside the US, and we tend to whatever our country is. I don't think this is unique to us people. It's probably true to someone who's a Parisian, and they just think, well, this is just my town, whereas for many that would be a bucket trip. And so that idea, yeah, there's a lot of things that are amazing here you I'm just gonna keep pepper you with hard questions, even in what is supposed to be the softball section of the the episode, you've been all over the world. You've tasted the entire world. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Tabitha Dunn: 18:50

You know, I'm gonna have to say it's probably French food.

Rick Denton: 18:54

Okay? Hello.

Tabitha Dunn: 18:58

I mean, I love a fancy French food has its place, but I love, like, country French food, right? I'm probably if you give me an amazing Sauvignon Blanc or sense air and one of those big platters with, like, the different charcuterie and fromage and a great loaf of french bread, and I am your girl.

Rick Denton: 19:21

So I was a backpacker in 1995 on a 50 US dollar a day budget, so couldn't afford a whole lot when we were traveling there. And some of the best meals were at the French countryside random place. And it wasn't you ordered wine, it just whatever carafe was put on your table was what you'd be having. I imagine there's something in your list, in your past that you were forced to eat growing up, but you hated as a kid. What was that? So I think a

Tabitha Dunn: 19:43

lot of parents struggle to get their children to eat vegetables, right? I but I actually loved a certain set of vegetables when I was a kid, but for some reason, I've hated sweet potatoes my whole life. You and I are best friends, and it was, I think I was 11 or. 12, and it was Thanksgiving, and my mom comes from the Deep South, and she always said you have to have, like, a big spoonful of everything off the table, and you have to finish a plate before you can have dessert, right? And that year, she always made sweet potatoes, and she thought she made it better. She made the kind with the marshmallows on top. And I was just like, Oh, no. And so I fought her. I'm like, Look, I will have double helpings of every other. I just don't want the sweet potatoes like I was negotiating at 11. And she was like, Nope, you're gonna eat it. I put it on your plate. You have to eat it. Fell asleep at the table and I wouldn't leave. I did not eat the sweet potatoes, and I have not,

Rick Denton: 20:42

Tabitha, you and I are definitely best friends when it comes to sweet potatoes, and already best friends with the whiskey tour in Scotland and the Rio Guinness. So we're doing well here. Unfortunately, we're gonna have to leave the first class lounge. Tabitha, what is one travel item not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home without,

Tabitha Dunn: 21:02

I would have to say it's probably the thing that I don't ever leave home without, which is my Kindle. I read two or three books a week, and to leave without my Kindle would feel like somebody had chopped off my arm. So I can't imagine going without a book.

Rick Denton: 21:18

I Kindle. Love that. Love the ability to just stop down, no matter where you are in the world, and enjoy a little bit of reading. You know, in the customer experience world, there has been a ton of change over the last few years. What does the future look like for customer experience? How are the new trends that you're seeing at the leadership level influence that that future of work.

Tabitha Dunn: 21:47

There are two sides to that answer. I'll take the leadership side first, and I often get asked by people who are like, well, I want to be a VP of CX. I want to be a chief customer officer like you someday. And I'm like, Okay, that's fair, but if you want that, you're going to have to learn and have a background in running other parts of the business. Most senior leaders own multiple functions. They don't just own one single, smaller function. They have a larger footprint. And you know, in my last role, I had responsibility for technology, for global sales and marketing, and I did strategic planning for our big accounts. And prior to that, I own global sales operations. And so being able to own multiple functions and be that versatile leader, that's really what you need when you get to that level. If I take the actually the harder part, like, what is the future of CX for both us as a field, as well as, how will companies go about this? I think that in some ways, we've done ourselves a disservice because we've been so focused on what the customer voice is, and that if we're holding the customer voice sacred in some way, like we represent them, if we're representing the voice of the customer, therefore the business has to listen, and I think, for customer experience to really take its place as a predominantly important function in majority of the businesses across the globe, we have to be more purposeful. The results have to be not this is what the customers are saying. That's the first baby step. The results the business are looking for is, how are you going to make our business run better? If you are a CX professional today, and you are not a certified change management person, you are missing out, because that's the whole point of CX is successful and impactful positive change.

Rick Denton: 23:53

What I love is, when you started that answer, I was sitting there going, oh boy, the pitchforks and tortures are going to come out. You know, it's not about voice the customer. And he didn't say that exactly, but Right? And your point, though, and that's what I love, how you carried it forward into it's not just what the customer says, it's what you do with it, it's what the business results are. All of that is so good, and you're taking this forward. What's next for you? What vision do you have set for you for that next great customer experience adventure?

Tabitha Dunn: 24:19

For me, the next stage is, where is that next opportunity to help a company, the employees, the leaders and the customers, transform their culture, transform their business, and help them with that scale, that growth and that opportunity to transform in a customer centric way. We're

Rick Denton: 24:43

gonna end it right there. That's it like that is exactly I love that. That's sort of the last word, because what an ambition, what a vision. And that should be true of Tabitha, it should be true of almost anyone who is desiring to do something in that customer experience field. Tabitha, if folks. Wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, your approach to customer experience, your history. Share that distaste of sweet potatoes with you. How should they get in touch? What would be the best way for them to get to know more? It

Tabitha Dunn: 25:12

is easy to find me on LinkedIn. If you reach out, then I'm happy to reach back, awesome and talk.

Rick Denton: 25:18

I'll get Tabitha LinkedIn profile. Scroll down in the notes, and you will see Tabitha is LinkedIn profile Tabitha, I did appreciate the journey that you took me on today and our listeners that getting into the resilience the global reality that teaches us that even in spite of what we might think a culture is, there are individual customers inside of that and why that matters, not just for a global culture, but for a company as they think about their customer base and even this conversation around what is next for customer experience so valuable, I really appreciate it. Tabitha, thank you for being on CX passport.

Tabitha Dunn: 25:51

Thanks for having me.

Rick Denton: 25:58

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.