CX electricity was in the air last week as CXM@MSU hosted the Global CXM 360 virtual conference. There were over 30 speakers & hundreds of attendees from across the global. Here were my favorite takeaways:
✳Marisa Schwartz DNP, MBA & Leslie Pagel – taught us how to improve our listening skills - both micro level (person to person) & macro level (organizational wide). When listening to someone think of yourself as a trampoline – amplify, energize, & clarify their ideas (HBR article: What Great Listeners Actually Do).⚡
✳Susana Esteban & Percy Rose – walked us through how they activated HP’s customer experience strategy. Instead of starting with the company goals – they outlined their customers’ desired outcomes & centered their activities to deliver on those (knowing they would drive the company metrics). They used the Fusion Team concept from Gartner to breakdown silos & drive cross-functional collaboration.🏆
✳Karl Sharicz (CX-PRO, EdM) – gave us a master class in how to use systems thinking in our customer experience strategy. He pushed us to focus on: finding patterns amid chaos, looking at the whole process, identifying underlying dynamics, & being attentive to communication. Work at the operational level in the organization, because that’s where the connections take place. Don’t look narrowly at one part of the problem/or system, because you won’t know the downstream impacts of your decision.♻
✳Greg Kihlstrom – showed us how to incorporate AI into our CX strategy in a meaningful way. He encouraged leaders to build an AI philosophy – setting ground rules for how AI is used, partnering with your core & IT teams to co-create the implementation plan, & building a training plan to upskill your team on how to use AI on the specific use cases. Create a culture that welcomes experimentation in a controlled & non-customer facing space first & then after proper testing, ethical & legal checkpoints, & process mapping you can start to slowly introduce it into customer facing situations.🤖
✳Gary David – hosted an engaging session where he challenged us to integrate all of our customers’ experiences the same way our brains integrate our five senses together (we don’t experience a sight separately from a sound, etc.) – neither do our customers – they experience our company as a whole. We must collaborate across the organization to think about how the entire ecosystem fits together & how they impact one another. Try to evaluate the experience you’re currently delivering to customers, which category does it fit into? Mundane, mindful, memorable, or metaphorical.🧠
Thanks to Tom DeWitt, Ph.D. & all of the CX MSU faculty & speakers for sharing their expertise with all of us! It was great to be with so many CX practitioners & “nerd out” together. 🤩
Can’t wait for the MSU CX in-person conference Oct 8-9, 2024!