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My guest, Chris Hood, is a keynote speaker who specializes in merging customer success with digital strategy.
His background includes leading digital strategy at Google and innovating storytelling technologies at Fox and Disney. He offers a Fractional Chief Customer Officer practice to help organizations align closely with customer needs.
Additionally, Chris influences the Gaming and AI sectors, hosts 'The Chris Hood Digital Show,' and educates students at Southern New Hampshire University.
He is author of Customer Transformation and Customer Transformation for Nonprofits.
We talk about:
- The foundational “why” of customer transformation
- Defining the stakeholder
- How organizations should connect with and understand stakeholders
- Communicating organizational mission and values
- The goal of stakeholder loyalty when there’s nothing to “sell”
- The heart of effective innovation
- Anticipating and adapting to the needs of tomorrow
- Learn about Customer Transformation at https://chrishood.com
About today’s guest
Chris Hood, a keynote speaker, specializes in merging customer success with digital strategy. With over 35 years, he's a leader in fostering customer-centric cultures. The author of 'Customer Transformation,' Chris is recognized among the Top 30 Customer Experience Gurus in 2024. His background includes leading digital strategy at Google and innovating storytelling technologies at Fox & Disney. He offers a Fractional Chief Customer Officer practice to help organizations align closely with customer needs. Additionally, Chris influences the Gaming and AI sectors, hosts 'The Chris Hood Digital Show,' and educates students at SNHU on the fusion of business strategy and technology. Follow Chris on LinkedIn.
About the host
Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossromano
I also host Sideline Sessions, a podcast for coaches and parents of student-athletes. The show features conversations with coaches and performance experts in the NFL, NBA, NCAA, Olympics, and more. Listen here: https://bit.ly/3Rp0QGt
Creators & Guests
What is The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders?
Are you looking for proven ideas to increase your influence, hire and develop an excellent staff, build a stronger culture, lead meaningful change, and form a strong foundation for learning and leadership success? This is the podcast for you.
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Join leadership coach, storytelling strategist, and edtech advisor Ross Romano as he interviews the prominent education authors you already admire, up-and-coming voices, and experts from the worlds of business, personal development, and beyond — including Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Amazon bestsellers — to take a deep dive into their wealth of practical insights.
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody. You are listening to the Authority Podcast on the BE Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. And today, my guest is Chris Hood. Chris is a keynote speaker who specializes in merging customer success with digital strategy. His background includes leading digital strategy at Google, innovative storytelling technologies at Fox and Disney.
He currently offers fractional chief customer officer practice to help organizations align closely with customer needs. And additionally, he influences the gaming and AI sectors, hosts the podcast, The Chris Hood Digital Show, and educates students at Southern New Hampshire University. He's the author of a couple of books that go together.
It's Customer Transformation, and [00:01:00] then the follow up Customer Transformation for Nonprofits. So we're going to dig into that customer transformation process and a lot behind it here in this conversation Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Hood: Well, thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
Ross Romano: Let's start here. What is the foundational why behind customer transformation? Why do we need to trans transform, I guess, our relationships to customers? in this age, given I think the tools and means that are available to us.
Chris Hood: Sure. Well, it's a great way to start because I think, again, foundationally, part of the conversation is a recognition of what is the challenge. And the challenge is, is that we see today customers are more empowered than ever before. They have access to the technology. They can easily and quickly make decisions.
They also can easily and quickly go online and talk about you. and share their opinions across social media. And so that [00:02:00] power that they now have has to be a foundational part of how you how you align with them. And if you think about it, what is actually transforming, if we think about all of the technology and all of the areas of connections that we have with people and with the businesses that we want to engage with, really the entity that is transforming the most is the customer. And so what businesses have to understand is that as the customer transforms, the business is going to have to understand that and be able to then keep up with it. And a lot of this can be explained in the rapidness of that transformation or even in the disruption that happens that causes us to transform.
So even if we go back to, say, a couple years ago now with the pandemic, think about [00:03:00] schools. All of a sudden, they had to support remote learning, and that was completely a disruptive nature. And because of that, They had to then think about how they were going to adapt in different ways. And that's the essence as the custom, as the customer's needs and the way that they engage with you transform, you as an organization have to be able to keep up with it.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And I think another part that's so important about this is defining who is the customer and then who are other stakeholder groups. Maybe there's there's our indirect consumers, our influencers or our support audiences. But particularly we're talking here to schools and organizations who we're not selling a product, right?
So we may not typically use that word customer, but the concept needs to apply. I think about who are we serving? Who are, how are we designing [00:04:00] our offerings around their needs and delivering to them? But is there a definition you use particularly when you talk about nonprofits, right? A lot of them, I mean, some of them have.
products and services, but a lot of them don't but they still have a customer, right? Like, how are we defining who that audience is?
Chris Hood: Yeah, I think we can overly simplify it by saying you, you have an organization that is offering a service or a product, and then you have a consumer of that service or product. Now, the word could be any number of words. It could be customer, consumer, user, student, volunteer, teacher, right? There could be any number of words that we associate with that consumer role.
And especially when we think about B2B organizations, where I might be a business that is selling tools to schools or universities, that university then [00:05:00] becomes my consumer of my product. And then they may be regurgitating, reusing, reselling that service to their customers or their students. So there's a multifaceted way of looking at it, but at the end of the day, ultimately it's.
The organization has the service that they are providing, and then whoever the consumer of that service is what we would consider the customer.
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Ross Romano: What about in cases where there is more or less only one option for the consumer. It may be not technically so, but in the case of schools, for example, there might be a few different options, but there's also a lot of people for whom their local public school is pretty much where they're going to go.
There's other industries in which this is the case, right? There's one cable or internet provider available where you live, or there's one company that operates the trains, right? I guess, [00:06:00] for the organizations in that case. How do you challenge them to really be mindful and continuously engaged in understanding and meeting their customers needs and not just take for granted, well they're going to be our customer regardless because we're the only game in town here.
But that's an important point, right? And when there's. We still want to engender their loyalty their trust and understand that one, I mean, eventually you know, we can't take for granted that we're always going to be the only option, right? But two in service oriented organizations, mission driven organizations, There's a higher purpose here than just enrollment, right?
But how do we kind of challenge those mindsets? Because I think there are there's a tendency, right, to maybe not pay as much attention to certain elements of audience engagement when it's [00:07:00] not a competitive enrollment environment.
Chris Hood: Yeah, I think what's interesting about that is if we think about independent organizations or businesses that are in small communities that may only have, say, one branch. Like, I'm a mom and pop shop. That is sitting here at a bakery in a small town of a hundred. I am the only bakery in town, and my reputation is only based on that given area.
Then yeah, that's going to ultimately be a personal and individual and a business perspective. And if they choose to treat their customers poorly, there's really not much you can do about it, other than listen to the complaints of the local business owners. people who are going to complain. But what becomes really interesting, especially again in today's world, if you're thinking about it from, say, maybe they've got a broader reach, like typically cable companies, as you mentioned the [00:08:00] same cable provider is across multiple states, and although that's the only option in that small town, they still have a presence.
And what we are seeing is that Even bad reviews in a small little town will have national impact because of social media and technology. If it gets out that customer service is poor, and even if it only has just one option in that area, you'll still get the negative publicity. You'll still have an impact in areas that do have a choice, because If I'm a consumer and I have a choice and I go and I read the reviews and I say well wait a second I'm seeing all these bad reviews pop up for this one service and not for this other service, I'm going to select the other service.
So, the breadth and the range of information that is now available to [00:09:00] us is having impact where it may not have had the same level of impact, say, 10 years ago.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And so many ways, I mean, it makes your life easier and your job easier when your stakeholders have a positive impression of the work you do. Right. And ultimately, I mean, there's many there's collaborative ventures out there where we really work together. want people to want to increase their level of involvement, whatever that looks like.
That's volunteering their time, participating in events et cetera, that is much more likely to happen if they're feeling as though they are being treated the way they want to be, being accounted for that they're being communicated to proactively and with good information, right?
Chris Hood: Yeah, absolutely. Go, take, think the Baker example, like, I'm the only baker in town, but I treat my employees and my customers awful. And hey, I would like to do some sort of food drive and all of a sudden I can't get [00:10:00] any volunteers. Well, why? Because no one wants to volunteer with you because they don't like you, right?
So you can have these offset types of complications that arise. by even if you have a dedicated section of the country, you still have to treat people with respect. And ultimately, at the end of the day, whether it's a school or a university or a non profit or a business, we all want to be treated with respect.
And that goes a long way when you can implement that into your business.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Are there other things big picture? Because we'll get a little bit into some of the ways that organizations can really tap into and connect with and understand their specific stakeholders. But are there other general big picture things you mentioned wanting to be treated with respect, but also things that are related to just in this digital world, such as it is, right, given the different [00:11:00] technologies and tools that people use in their lives and the way that they typically want to interact with organizations that they that they do business with in some sense, whatever that may look like.
Are there things that they tend to expect, that they want that are different from the quote unquote traditional or 30 years ago, what people expected from a company or an organization or a school, et cetera.
Chris Hood: Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily about what specifically people are doing. It's really more about recognizing that you have to ask them what they want and listen to what they want, and then try to figure out how to implement that. Because again, I think too often we get complacent in our organizations.
And we think, well, I know what everybody wants. I don't need to ask them. I already know. And over a course of a time, you just don't know anymore. And you have to keep that as part of the regular activities. [00:12:00] You, whether it's say a survey or just some sort of way to capture that opinion and even social media and some of the other tools that are out there to be able to look at the reviews, to be able to look at what people are saying online.
All of that is part of actively listening to what consumers want. And it could be as simple as something like the grocery store has decided to stop taking ATMs and is only going to take cash. Is that what people are asking for? No, we typically see that people are starting to ask for more different types of technologies to be able to pay for their groceries.
So instead of ATMs, maybe now it's Apple Pay, right? Maybe it's Google Pay and Samsung. So if I'm looking at that, I'm saying, well, okay, now how do I start to implement this? Because I see that our customers that are, that the patrons are actually asking for it. And the worst thing to do is that complacency.
It's even [00:13:00] at schools, like if you think about a school, like here's what our registration process is. And we've been doing the same registration process for 15 years and it's manual and it's by paper and you have to come and you have to write a check and you have to do whatever it is. And at some point in time someone's like, why am I writing a check?
Why can't I just do this online? Why isn't this form digital? You know, why can't I log into a website and fill out the information for my child? And how do I update? the emergency contact information. Why do I have to go into the office to to change that, right? Those are the things that we typically start to just, oh, well, everybody does it, so everybody's happy with it.
That doesn't necessarily always correlate. So being able to stay on the pulse of what consumers and what people want by continuously asking them so that you can then integrate what they're asking for is probably the [00:14:00] easiest and broadest thing that you can do.
Ross Romano: You know, how, so what are some of the better ways of Connecting with stakeholders, ascertaining what they're looking for and how can most organizations reasonably do that? With enough frequency whether it's continue to. To really serve what they need. Right. I imagine that with how fast things change if you put out a poll once every five years, there's a lot that you're not necessarily capturing.
Right. But but not every organization, of course, has the resources to put humongous you know, money into it, but of course there's technologies and processes available. But what would that look
Chris Hood: Well, what's interesting about that is what is the average number of days in a school year?
Ross Romano: like? About 180.
Chris Hood: About
Ross Romano: days. [00:15:00] Yeah.
Chris Hood: Okay, so if I was to say to a principal, and I'd be curious if there's any principals listening to your show to chime in on, and I kind of guess what the answer would be, but if a principal called the parents of one student a day and asked them, how are things going?
How do you feel? What feedback do you have? How's your student doing? How's your child doing? Do they like their teacher, right? Operationally, how do you think? Any question, just have a conversation with and again, if there is 180 days in the school year and You were able to get to one student a day. I'm sure a lot of principals would sit there and say, ah, that's too much work.
And I would also argue that I actually don't think my principal, when I was in high school, called my parents at all, ever in four years, right? [00:16:00] And yet this is something really so simple and could help you better understand how your organization is doing by simply having the conversation with somebody.
And I coach CEOs and executives at large organizations, and I tell them all the time, your number one objective, no matter what you think it is, your number one objective is to satisfy the needs of your customers. So why are you not talking directly to your customers? And usually the response is, well, I have people that do that.
We've got teams and that's their responsibility, but you are the CEO of the organization. And so I think about it from say a principal's perspective, like why couldn't a principal reach out and maybe it's not one student a day, but maybe you say, you know what, I'm going to pick 10 families this month and I'm going to reach out to them.
I'm going to have a [00:17:00] conversation with them. Oh, well, no, we do that through our. Parent teacher conversations, or we have associations with the parents where we can get their feedback in real time. That's not the same, and so I would challenge people to think about it as to, It doesn't have to be a human less form online that you fill out.
There could be an actual connection and a real engagement with people through conversation to better understand how they're feeling, what they want, what they need, and then take that information and make decisions, or at least policy, or recommendations for policies that will address those challenges that you're presented with.
Ross Romano: Yeah. That's, and that type of idea that you presented is particularly important in a school context, not. uniquely to schools but certainly it's not the case with all organizations, that there [00:18:00] are a percentage, depending on the schools, a very high percentage sometimes, of underrepresented populations within that, who are, if you just having your PTA meetings or putting up some type of engagement survey that you may not get much representation from people who are making up a large part of your school, and certainly the the areas where you're more likely to need to try some new things to, to.
You know, change some of those status quo around inequities or under representation and so by being proactive and reaching out to people directly, showing that you value their perspective by having those one on one conversations understanding that From a statistics perspective, you can get a representative sample, right?
You might, even if you [00:19:00] can't get to everybody all the time, you can get more representation of of your overall student body and your family groups, if you're reaching out to people proactively versus waiting for people to come to you and more likely when it's informal to. to generate maybe some new ideas or some things certainly as far as what are the questions we don't know to ask when we do a survey, right?
If I'm just having a conversation with somebody informally, they're more likely to maybe bring up something we haven't thought about. And then an important part of this is I think closing the loop on it, especially when it's informal maybe when there's a specific Again, like if it was a municipal ballot measure a specific survey around what should we what should our new mascot be?
And okay, there's a vote. Okay, you voted for this and this is our new mascot. Okay, that's it. The loop is closed on that, but there's a lot of other decisions and initiatives that might be [00:20:00] made that are meant to serve feedback, ideas we've heard, the things we think our community wants that we're going to put into action.
It's really important to then communicate that out. Hey! Here's something we're doing, here's why we're doing it, because this is what we heard from you, and here's how it's in alignment with our mission, vision, and values, so here's all the reasons why this is going to be a good thing, and we need to be really clear about that, so that everybody then understands that and feels some level of involvement in that and ownership over it, because The decision was made with their interests based on their feedback.
And I think that's an area where there's not always follow through.
Chris Hood: Yeah, and if we go back to the conversation with the principal, if I'm having just a open conversation with you and you ask me a question and I don't necessarily have the [00:21:00] answer or that's something I should follow up on, Now imagine if I actually called you back in a week and I said, you know what, I just want to follow up on that question you asked me and I discovered whatever, whatever, whatever.
Or our policy is whatever, whatever, whatever. Just the fact that you followed up is enough for somebody to take note and say, Wow. You know, they didn't have to do that. That's, that's really cool. So I completely agree. Not only that feedback loop, but that ability to respond and to stay in touch and to continue to address whatever the questions are in some form of meaningful way, I think is just as critical.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And then those are the things that are easy to miss because there's always a lot happening. But that is going to certainly earn. Continued loyalty, engagement, and trust where, oh, I see the clear evidence that this organization is following through on the [00:22:00] things that they're asking about and what we're telling them when possible, it can be just as powerful and maybe even more important sometimes to follow up with the people who's You know, opinion you were not able to take that time, right, and to say, look, really appreciate that we had this conversation.
You brought up some good ideas. You know, due to X, Y, Z factors, this is the direction we had to go, but didn't didn't want to leave you hanging or feeling like, we didn't consider your ideas, right. That can be equally powerful to show people that we really are listening. We can't always do everything all the time, but when we have a good idea, we take it under consideration.
It might be something we're still thinking about doing at a later date. But. You're a valuable stakeholder, right? Like your input here is important. The same as with. a technology [00:23:00] company, right? Like the next feature we build is, can only be one thing at a time. So there might be 10 different ideas and it can't always be all of those things.
But what are our ways of showing our loyal customers, our early adopters, etc. Look, we're consistently trying to innovate based on what you want, what you're interested in, what you need and we are soliciting and then delivering feedback on the directions we're going and what that looks like so that you stick with us because eventually we want to build that thing or what if you've noticed that some other company, right, built the feature that you've been looking for from us, do you immediately jump ship or do you trust that.
That's coming here and we have a plan. But that communication piece is you know, equally critical to it and demonstrating that authenticity, I guess, of, look, we [00:24:00] really do want to know what you want. We really do want to give you what you want. And a hundred percent of the time is, we can't necessarily do that or do what everybody wants all the time.
But the second that. Your customers, your stakeholders, don't feel like you're authentically interested and that it's just something that you're doing because you're going through the motions. It's hard to re regain that trust once, once you've lost it. So, what other, well, related to this actually the risks of not doing so. I mean, so let's say we don't engage in this period and we're just kind of thinking we know what we need to do. We're the experts. We understand we've been doing this a long time, right? And so we're just kind of Going forth, believing that even if we're getting good results and then the [00:25:00] data shows that the results are good, right?
But we're not necessarily putting dedicated effort into customer engagement customer loyalty and all of that trust building. How does that catch up, I guess, with an organization, even when everything kind of looks good on the surface?
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Chris Hood: I don't know if there's a best worst case scenario, but you know, best case scenario is you continue to just do the things that you're doing and maybe you keep some of your business alive and maybe you have somewhat good expectations from your employees, maybe employee satisfaction is relatively low.
Maybe turnover is high because they don't really want to work for you. But you continue to just kind of survive all the way down to you just go out of business. You lose funding. You don't have any customers anymore. Some big new school opens up down the street. People [00:26:00] opt to go to that other school than for you.
Yeah. I mean, use a it's an overly used example, but we can use the example of Blockbuster, where most people actually believe, if you ask them, that Blockbuster went out of business because Netflix came. And that's actually not what happened. Blockbuster went out of business because they refused to listen to their customers.
And as a result, They got it into that complacent mindset where, well, we always do things this way. We've always had late fees and people like late fees. So we're just going to continue to charge late fees, even though people were saying, we don't want late fees anymore. And so it was an example of how the customer was transforming because they didn't want to go in to buy videos anymore.
They didn't want to mail delivery From Netflix was the first thing. But really it was just the arrogance that we know what we're doing and we're just going to continue doing what we want because it's clear that [00:27:00] consumers want to come to us. I would also argue that even though the data might show you one thing, data can still be read with a biased eye.
You could still look at the data and say, Oh, are customers like us? Well, yeah, if you're asking the questions in a way to get the response that you want to get, then yeah, your data might actually show that customers like you. For example, Domino's Pizza for a long time was giving away free pizzas if you took their survey.
So, yeah, So you would buy a pizza, you'd get a survey, you'd fill the survey out, you'd get a new pizza. What do you think the most common answer on those surveys were? Yeah, you're doing a great job. Free pizza! Right, so you were kind of theoretically paying for positive responses as opposed to Honest responses.
I went into a company actually three weeks ago to conduct a workshop, and while I was in this workshop, I [00:28:00] asked the entire audience, there was about 90 people in the room, how do you think your customers think about you? And they all said, our customers love us. That was the number one result. But then I did this exercise where I asked them questions from their own perspective related back to what customers think.
And every single person in that room said that basically they think more negatively about the overall customer experience. And somebody came back and they said this was actually a real eye opening exercise because We were so focused on what we think our customers are saying about us that we didn't actually take a moment to think about what we actually think our customers think about us.
And in that transition, they realized that they're not anywhere close to what the data is telling them. That's because the questions they're [00:29:00] asking are biased questions, and the responses are geared in a way to demonstrate that positive alignment. So it's this complacency that people get into. You know, the worst thing that any business could say is we've always done things this way.
Well, just because you've always done things that way doesn't mean they still work, which again goes back to the book with the recognition that consumers are transforming your Think about a bank, a traditional bank. This is another quick story. I was consulting with a bank. I went into the bank and they said, we are spending a ton of money and resources with re imagining.
how the bank branches work. And I said, what a waste of money. Now they got kind of upset with me and I said, do you even understand that your number one demographic, which is older people, are [00:30:00] basically dying away and the new demographic, younger generation, have not stepped foot into a bank branch? They understand how to deposit a check with their mobile phone, but they haven't actually gone to a bank branch.
So why are you focusing so heavily on bank branches when no one's actually going to be going to them soon? And after COVID, obviously that decreased, and now we're seeing bank branches basically close all over the place. Why? Because the consumer expectation and needs of how they want to bank has decreased.
has changed. And so if you can get around that concept of we have to pay attention to this evolution of our consumer base, and it's never going to be static, that's how you have to continuously think about the types of questions you ask, the type of data that you are looking at, and then the decisions of your products and services of how you're going to keep up with [00:31:00] that change.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to get into to innovation a little bit. And in kind of a lot of what you just talked about is making me think like it's a lot simpler than people make it out to be right. That to be a quote unquote visionary is often like in many ways the opposite of what it is. People think it is, right?
You think of it as you're hard headed you're single minded, and really, so much of it, it's about openness. It's about being willing to change what you're doing. It's about being the first person to ask people what they want and to try to deliver what they want. Even the Blockbuster example, right?
There were numerous They had numerous opportunities to be open to change when the internet and the delivery model first existed, they had an opportunity to develop their own version of it and they didn't. Then they had an opportunity to buy Netflix and they didn't. Then eventually they tried to develop a model and it was too late.
But it was [00:32:00] a lack of openness in that case that history could have been totally different, that it didn't require anybody there to have come up with the idea, or, but it required them understanding, okay, maybe there's something to this, maybe there is something people want and and what is that you can, I'm sure you give examples of like when they started Google, right?
What it, what was the issue with the early internet was like, it was just the Wild West. Where is everything? How do I find anything? If I, and you know, there were search engines and things, but it was like, how do I make this clean, organized, logical user friendly? And it was something that people may have known they wanted, even if they couldn't perfectly articulate it because they hadn't seen it before.
They didn't totally know what it was, but certainly based on. Yeah I want to basically make this internet feel like something that I [00:33:00] actually is useful. That's not just for you know, people who are experts at it, right?
Chris Hood: Oh yeah. I mean, to your point, innovation. Innovation is not lightning in a bottle. It's not coming up with some brand new idea that is just going to revolutionize everything. Innovation is being able to look at something differently and solve a consumer's problem in a different way. So we'll go back to Netflix.
Netflix originally started to mail movies. Was mail delivery innovative? No. All they did was, how can we get movies to people faster? That was the solve. And if I was to say somebody like Uber, do we think that Uber was an innovative company? Technology wise, there's not a single thing that Uber did with their application that was revolutionary.
But what they did do was solve a [00:34:00] problem of, how do I change the way that I can get from point A to point B? How do I change the way that taxi services work? The technology itself, was the same old technology we had been using for 10 years. But the interface of that technology to solve a problem is what we know as being innovative.
So it's not always about trying to build lightning in the bottle. It's just about looking at things differently. And then ultimately and most importantly, it's just how do I solve this problem and then figure out what kind of technology you can bring in to solve the problem.
Ross Romano: So in discussing the type of leadership in organizations that are going about this effectively, right? Transforming the customer experience, understanding who that is, and creating the internal [00:35:00] culture to be able to do that. You write about this culture of praise. What's that about?
Chris Hood: So the culture of praise is basically a recognition that your employees, your teams, have to be equally as satisfied as your customers. So we spend a lot of time, most organizations do, spend time talking with their customers and figuring out what the level of customer satisfaction is. That's why we have all of these surveys and results.
And anytime that you've called into a company and they said, If you would like to hold on to the call after we're finished to take a quick survey, we would love to include you, right? And it's usually some multiple choice questions to see if you were satisfied. And so we spent a lot of time focused on the satisfaction of our customers and make sure that the experience is good and that support good and reviews are good. But we don't ever seem to do the same thing for our employees. you [00:36:00] ever been at a company where, when you left work, they said if you could just take a quick moment to tell us how your day went before going home, that would help us better understand how your employee experience is. I think there are some companies that do poll their employees.
They do spend some time to better understand that. Google does that a lot with their employees. It's also why. Google is often looked at as one of the top companies to work for because they actually want to understand how to recognize and praise their employees. And so you have to think about the employee experience the exact same way you think about the customer experience.
And I argue, and I outlined it in my book, that really, they should be one in the same.
There's, there really shouldn't be a difference between the customer experience and the employee experience, other than maybe some information that is shared. And then there's a lot of areas that you can get [00:37:00] into to help you to achieve that employee satisfaction between recognition, between psychological safety.
in terms of how you lead and bring people together, professional growth, all of that is a part of that process. But what we do see is that employee satisfaction directly enhances consumers perception of your company. For example, if you've ever gone to a retail store say you've gone to Target, we'll call Target out, and you're trying to find something, and you're trying to find somebody to help you, and you can't find anybody, and then you find somebody, and you're like, hey, I'm just looking for this, and they're like it's over there somewhere.
And clearly they don't want to be there and they're not happy. Well, that is having an impact on now you, and you're like, Man, that was the rudest person that I've ever had to talk to. And now your experience at [00:38:00] Target is awful. And it's just this process. We've all seen it. I guarantee you. We've all seen it where we've gone into a store and the employee is not happy and they don't want to be there.
and that impact it has on us as being the consumer. So the more you can satisfy and enhance and make your team happy, the better off your customer experience is going to be. And so you've it's a critical part of building cultures that are going to be successful.
Ross Romano: Yeah. I mean, there really should be, there should be a symbiosis there, right? And particularly in mission driven, like organizations that are clear and consistent in those values that the, internal and external satisfaction levels should be reflecting each other because you should be representing similar goals, similar values to your customer.
We've talked about this you know, when we have these ongoing challenges around, okay, [00:39:00] how do we create better Student engagement. And one of the ways that I always point out is, well, we need to start with like educator engagement. And if we have teachers that are feeling burnt out, overworked sort of deflated, then that's what they're bringing to the classroom.
And that's what students are going to feel. So we need to address that. As you mentioned, anything that's You know, customer facing whether it's the hospitality industry, right? Like, what's the difference between a hotel or a restaurant where you're clear that everybody there is happy, they're, they have a strong culture, they're on the same page, there's consistency about it, and another one where that's not the case at all, and how does that change your experience independent of potentially whatever the main And the reason is that you think you're there.
How does the food taste? Or how comfortable is my room? Well, if all the people I'm interacting with are [00:40:00] clearly right, they're like not representing a strong culture and they're not super happy and they're not going to the next level. And also there's the opportunity cost of the lost innovation of people who are just like, you know what, I'm just going to, I'm going to do what's required.
But that's that's where kind of it ends. And so that's all important. And it's also important, right, that there needs to be follow through on that, that it's not just finding out what people think and then maybe saying, Oh we, I was at a You know, a company in the past, right, where there was, I mean, I think it was only once a year, annual, but like an employee engagement survey and the results would come back and it would say, These things that people were unhappy about or whatever.
And then sometimes I don't think much was done, but other times they might make certain changes, but it would be whatever somebody decided was right. Then it was, there wasn't a follow through after that to say, okay, here's the areas where we're seeing that we could have more [00:41:00] satisfaction. What are some ideas for how we can improve this?
Or how can we actually change it? Or here's some options. What do you think about these? Right. That you need to go to that extra step and say, all right, Now we need to actually determine how we're going to solve this, not just assume that we know the answer or you know, or just say, okay, great.
Now we know that, but
Chris Hood: Yeah the other part of this is that you talk about mission focused organizations, and yet. So many of those organizations will hire people that are not aligned with the mission. And so, if you think about those surveys then, it makes sense why you might get a bunch of feedback that says, I don't like this or we should change this or I don't agree with whatever.
And then when something doesn't change based on that feedback, it's because usually it doesn't align with the mission and [00:42:00] organizations often will get desperate. They'll be like, ah, we just lost somebody. We've got to replace them. We need them pretty quickly. You go through the process and you just hire somebody, you just have to fill that role, but taking the time to actually figure out if there's a cultural fit, if there's an alignment with values within the organization, and only bringing in people who align with those values, will substantially help you, and too often, too often, most organizations don't really care.
They say they have a mission, they say that this is what you're all about, but then they fill the organization with people that don't align with it. And that really is going to cause you more problems than, say, just not doing what people want you to do because you got a whole mix max bag of people in there.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And that's it [00:43:00] certainly, it starts at the top of like, are we consistently actually being consistent? Using these values to guide us. Are we authentic in how we're representing them? And then, yes, are, like, is this part of the criteria that we believe strongly in this? People that work here should?
The people that are in alignment with it? They're going to be happy here. They're going to make us better people who are not in alignment. They might have a lot of skills. They might have good values of their own, but they might just believe in something else. And this might not be the best place for them.
And it's and then you can have mutual accountability for that when you make that part of the discussion to have, hopefully, the conversation. those candidates identify, you know what, this might not be the best situation for me because there's just, it's just not in alignment with what I care most about or what's most important to me.
And that's totally fine, right? It's [00:44:00] individual, it's subjective. But it leads to much stronger organization. So in, in kind of getting toward the end here, I wanted to ask about the future, anticipating, adapting to the needs of tomorrow. How can organizations get better at that? You know, particularly looking ahead we're trying to have these discussions, conversations plug into our today's customer to figure out what they want now.
But how can we also kind of look ahead?
Chris Hood: Yeah, you have to do the research. You have to keep your pulse, keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening. And you can do that through any number of ways. You can watch the news and get a sense of what's happening. You can read more blog articles to get a sense of what's happening. I mean, I don't think it's any surprise right now that the word, the words, or the term AI is everywhere.
And so I'm sure that there's a lot of people starting to think, like, how do we introduce AI [00:45:00] into our schools? How do we leverage AI? What will AI mean for us? Do we use AI for grading papers? Do we use AI for validation. Do we restrict AI for writing papers? You know, there's so many areas where AI is now a big thing that I'm confident that most university schools, education you know, organizations are trying to think through what that is going to look like.
But let's put AI aside. What's after AI? What's next? You know, or is there another variation of AI that will come? And so, you're going to have to, if not you, yourself, somebody is going to need to continuously look at that. And you can't just say, Oh, well, that's Star Trek that's stuff of science fiction, that's stuff of the future.
We don't have time to worry about that right now. You could [00:46:00] still have some sort of repository or database that has, like, things that you find interesting, things that you think might come around. You could have regular annual technology summits. It's getting ready for summertime. I would say like even for schools, every single school and university in the entire country should be having some sort of technology day or technology event where they invite speakers to come in and share what they see happening in the future.
And just keeping aware of what's happening will help you not be surprised by it. Right? And I think if you cannot be surprised by something, that's really going to help you make better decisions. Like, I personally, as an example I was surprised by the pandemic. But I have been telling people [00:47:00] for a long time, figure out a way to get online because you never know if you're not going to be able to do this in person, right?
That's a simple construct of, we can be disrupting, so how can we do this more digitally? And so you can think about solutions and opportunities without necessarily knowing when or how or in what format that disruption or something is going to take form or take place. But you can't do that if you're not aware, if you're just going to ignore it.
Because obviously technology Can't be ignored. You know, it's going to be here. So continually talk about it, continually to engage with people who can help you along the way, continually read, watch videos, watch YouTube, get a sense of the trends. There are some great reports out there that show you trends in [00:48:00] technology that are predicting five, ten years out.
And you could just look at that and say, okay here's something that is going to happen predicted for the next five years. How does that impact education? That's how you have to think about this.
Ross Romano: Excellent. So listeners, you can learn more about Chris and his books on customer transformation at chrishood. com. Chris, yeah. What else are you working on? You also have a podcast. What's that about? Where can people find that?
Chris Hood: Yeah. Everything for me is on my website. So you just mentioned it, chrishood. com. You can find my books, you can find my podcast, you can find my blog where I talk about these types of topics all of the time. You can find my social media profiles. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, but everything is right there on chrishood.com.
Ross Romano: Excellent. Yeah. So anybody out there, if you're interested in better serving your stakeholders, new innovative ideas that work across a variety of different types of organizations and industries, if you're just interested in. Digital tools [00:49:00] and how to get better at using them in a variety of ways.
Check that out. It's Chris hood. com. We'll put the link below so you can make that easy for you. And please also do subscribe to the authority. If you have not already, wherever you are listening today or wherever you prefer to get your podcast for more in depth author interviews like this one Chris, thanks so much for being on the show.
Chris Hood: Absolutely.