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The Path Uncut is a podcast for bold leaders, forward-thinkers, and changemakers who are shaping the future of their industries. Hosted by Gregory Ng, this show takes you behind the scenes with trailblazers who are redefining leadership, innovation, and impact. Each episode dives into the experiences, methodologies, and challenges of today’s most inspiring visionaries—uncovering the strategies and mindsets that drive meaningful change.
00:00:04 - Trish Wethman
Customer experience is not just service. Oftentimes service is what happens when your customer experience has broken. I think the organizations that I've been a part of have had a broader, more holistic view of it. Customer experience has been a part of the strategy that is really where you are kind of getting to the next level of cx.
00:00:30 - Greg Ng
Welcome to the Path Uncut. I'm Greg Ng and this is the show where we spotlight bold leaders and forward thinkers trailblazers who are creating meaningful change in their organizations. Each episode we dive deep into the experiences, methodologies and impact of some of today's most inspiring change makers. It's a chance to explore their stories, learn from their successes and challenges and gain valuable insights to help you drive change in your own world. Today I'm joined by Trish Wethman, a customer experience leader, change maker and strategist who has spent the past 15 years driving transformation and customer advocacy across industries like insurance, pharmaceutical distribution and financial services. One of Trish's standout contributions to the field has been the creation of the Insights business partner role, a game changing approach to integrating customer insights into business strategy. We're going to dig into how and why she developed this role, the challenges and wins along the way, and how other organizations can implement similar strategies to make customer Insights a true driver of business success.
00:01:47 - Trish Wethman
I have been working in the customer experience and innovation space now for about 15 years across multiple industries. So I always like to say my through thread has been customer experience and I think about it really customer experience at the intersection of innovation and employee experience because all of these things really bleed into one another and fuel one another. So I've been doing that across industries such as insurance, pharmaceutical and most recently within financial services space both in fintech and credit union. So what I have found is that the language of definitely translates across all of those industries.
00:02:31 - Greg Ng
Yeah, and it's great. And, and what I love Trish is, you know, we've, we've known each other now for a couple of years and, and have been able to interact at many different events and certainly on, on LinkedIn and things like that. And what I love is it seems to me that you share a common core belief with me and that is every business is a people business. And yes, it's important to talk about CX customer experience, but the reality is that every single interaction that a brand has with every single end user or even employee is about experience. So I'd like you to kind of like tell me a little bit more about your thoughts around that, especially about when you Talked about employee experience and customer experience.
00:03:21 - Trish Wethman
Yeah. In my time in this profession and across industries, the people are always the most important element of what we do. And I'm not just talking about the customers or the consumers or the folks that are receiving the product, but it's really the people that are behind the scenes. In a lot of cases, your agents, your contact center are folks that are literally on the front line with your customers every day. But your folks in marketing, your folks in credit, your folks in strategy, all of those people and their experience is what they are bringing to the customer every single day. And so the more that they can understand what I like to call the needs hierarchy of the customers that they're serving, no matter what part of the organization that they're in, the better they're going to do in translating their part of the puzzle to the customer in an effective and meaningful way. And so you really can't, in my opinion, have an effective customer experience strategy if you're not bringing all of those pieces of the puzzle together, the employee experience as well as the customer experience.
00:04:29 - Greg Ng
We run into this all the time, right. Where maybe there is an executive leader like yourself who understands that at the end of the day, you're not in charge of all of those things, but you do need to leverage those things. How does someone solve that? Of course everyone's going to nod their head and say, yeah, of course. Every interaction with account holder, a customer, a member, whatever is important. Where do you even get started there? Let's say you're on one side of the coin, your own customer experience side, obviously your metrics, your goals, your team initiatives are all contributing towards moving that metric. But you have to play nice with everyone else. So how does one kind of navigate that?
00:05:16 - Trish Wethman
Yeah, it's a little bit of a cliche, but stakeholder engagement and stakeholder collaboration is everything. And yeah, for those of us that are in this every single day, it's just so obvious that doing the right thing for customers drives growth and it's going to drive the success of your business. But for folks that just don't necessarily have that in their DNA or it's just not part of their day to day, it's not such a natural leap like, oh, if we do the right thing for customers, it's going to affect my metrics positively. It's not always there. And so for me, I think the most important thing to do anytime that I've started at a new organization, the first thing that you have to do, I'd say call it your first 30 to 60 days is just getting out there and talking to all of those stakeholders that are going to be a part of eventually what becomes the ecosystem of customer experience in your organization. Those conversations will help you understand what are the priorities of all of these different parts of the business. How do I find an effective way to link customer and what we're doing around customer to those different parts of the business and to those metrics that they're driving and how do I help them understand the correlation between customer experience and business success? So it's talking to the cmo, your coo, the heads of your contact centers, folks in credit places. You wouldn't expect to be talking about customer. You need to be making people aware of why the customer experience is so critical. And so again, I think for folks that are just starting out in a new organization or in a new role, you have to take that time and build those relationships and have those conversations because that is going to be critical and foundational to anything you want to build going forward. Now that isn't going to solve it all and you are still going to have stakeholders that are not going to understand the connection. And so that's where you have to start accumulating quick wins, the low hanging fruit, so to speak. Here are things we can do right away that are going to help you understand this a little bit better.
00:07:28 - Greg Ng
Yeah. And I think that as, you know, as we're all humans, right, with interactions with brands all the time and feel that pain and maybe I'm interested to see whether you think this is a blessing or a curse. When I interact with brands and I'm like, why did I have to go through this actual experience when I know there's a better way? I will use an example. This literally just happened two hours ago. I had a problem with my mortgage. They made a miscalculation. I, it's with my bank. I had to call the bank. I fortunately have some priority level things. So I call the phone number and I talk to someone right away. And two things can be true at the same time. The interaction that I had, the person was very friendly, addressed me by name, made acknowledgment of my quote status, which whatever that means, just means I got a lot of money, a lot of debt with them. Right. But, and so of course I felt fine. Right. I felt at least somewhat valued. They asked me to confirm all my details. Great. But then they said, I'm sorry, I cannot help you here, I have to transfer you. Okay, I understand. Maybe different, different level of access, different Priority, they send me to a different person. I wait again, person greets me again, thanks me for my loyalty, thanks me for everything, asks me to validate my account. Again, the same thing, Trish. This went back four times. I talked to four people at four different departments. Now, I acknowledge that each one of those departments have certain goals to hit, certain standards to hit. I've gotten four surveys, by the way.
00:09:12 - Trish Wethman
Of course you have.
00:09:13 - Greg Ng
Yeah, right. And I understand that each person individually maybe gets bonused on those surveys or maybe gets certain things that advance their career. And I want to make sure I help out with them. But when you look at the overarching experience, for me as an account holder, a quote valued account holder, it's not efficient, it's not perfect, it is certain. It's. It's potentially damaging to the brand. So using that example, I know you've done work in financial services before. If someone came to you with, with that anecdote, how does one even get started in fixing? Where do you focus? Where you know, how do you prioritize?
00:09:52 - Trish Wethman
Yeah, well, first let me take a step back and just say that I always feel bad for every company that I interact with because I am coming at all of those things from the lens of I know what my expectations of a good customer experience are. I know what I hold my companies accountable to, not always successfully, but, you know, my husband, whenever we travel, he will be like, oh, here comes the CX person. Because I'll be talking about, oh, this is a bad customer experience. This is. This is a great customer experience. So, yeah, I think people don't realize that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And that is the essence of customer experience. Right? It's the impression that you're making on the customer. It's the perception that you are creating for that customer from the moment that you start speaking to them. And so in your example, I will be the first to admit I've sat on calls with agents and companies I've worked at and literally cringed as I've heard them say those things. And I think the thing that you have to start embedding right away is that friendly is great, helpful is great. It's not enough. It's not enough to be super polite. And sometimes it can actually be very agitating to a customer. If you keep apologizing or you keep saying, I'm so sorry, I hope I can help you figure this out, or let me see what I can do, those things can start to grate. When it's like the third Fourth, fifth time you've heard it from the same person. And so helping to empower the people that are helping your customers, that's really where you need to start. First call resolution is a metric that I hold near and dear, because if you help your customer through a situation one time, they're going to give you a lot of grace. And in fact, I'm sure you know this. Typically we haven't jumped into the metrics conversation yet, but typically you will get a higher NPS if you have helped a customer solve a problem than if they've had no problem at all, where it's just been a very standard sort of experience. If you have someone that actually helps the customer solve a problem, they are typically going to give you a higher score. Now, on the flip side of that, I just had a travel experience recently. I won't name names, but one of the things that I always call out right away is when you have your folks literally bribing customers to give them good scores. And it happens all the time.
00:12:21 - Greg Ng
Yes.
00:12:22 - Trish Wethman
Hey, by the way, after we finish, you're going to get a survey, and I would just love for you to give me a 10 on that survey. Well, you know what? That survey has now become meaningless because whether or not that customer had a 10 of an experience, if the agent was nice, they're probably going to give them a 10 because they know that it's tied to their bonus or it's tied to their compensation in some way. So you're already tainting those metrics that you're trying to collect and kind of diluting the experience a little bit. So I think empowering your people so that they can actually solve problems, number one priority. What does that mean? Giving the agents the information they need, Giving the folks that are dealing with the customer what they need to successfully solve their problems. Friendly, polite. All of those things are table stakes, in my view.
00:13:12 - Greg Ng
Yeah. And what I think the challenge is is in that case, with my bank this morning, I think all four of those departments, you know, in aggregate, are saying, great. Each one got a great score. The problem is they don't know that they were one of four. They are just viewing it as one of one. But if I were to get an overarching survey of how was your four full experience with the brand today? It would not be a perfect score. And I think that that is another example of how organizations will, with all the best intentions, want to measure their effectiveness and attribute their value. And if they don't think about it holistically, it's Actually somewhat, not only meaningless, it actually might be sending organizations down the wrong path. From your experience, who within that organization should then own that? Does that fall under customer experience? And does CX typically have the jurisdiction across all the necessary departments to actually make change there?
00:14:22 - Trish Wethman
Well, Greg, that's a great question because. And this is the painful answer, it depends on the organization and it depends on how you define CX within that organization. What I've seen in a lot of organization is that oftentimes they define customer experience as customer service. And it's something that I have conversations about all of the time. Customer experience is not just service. Oftentimes service is what happens when your customer experience has broken. So you really need as an organization to think about your customer experience as again, the customer's interactions from the moment they begin to interact with your brand through servicing, through when they're considering coming back to work with you again. Many organizations, again, view it as just that servicing piece. And so oftentimes that's sort of what they call customer experience within an organization. I think the organizations that I've been a part of have had a broader, more holistic view of it. Customer experience has been a part of the strategy. And when you embed your customer experience as part of your strategy now you have potentially a leader who owns customer experience, whether it's a chief customer officer, a head of experience, whatever you want to call it. But as long as that person's responsibility is not just about making sure that the servicing experience is great, but that you are doing all the right things from the customers, from that awareness, through reconsideration, that is really where you are kind of getting to the next level of cx because you're understanding that it's a virtuous cycle. Right? Everything you're learning about in servicing has to come right back to how you're designing those experiences right out of the gate, how you're designing your products, you're learning as you go. And all of that learning has to feed back into the process. And you need somebody that is sitting over that and ensuring that that learning and that integration into the business is happening.
00:16:19 - Greg Ng
I always feel like when it, when, when we, when we talk to fellow CX leaders, there is an underlying maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe this is just my own feeling. There's an underlying level of insanity that we all know what should happen. But in a lot of cases, organizationally, we are powerless to fix it or to actually make real change. Do you, do you agree with that?
00:16:47 - Trish Wethman
Yes, 100% insanity is a good way to define how it works sometimes because you're, you know, if you're doing this right, in my opinion, you are maybe at a 30,000 foot level where you're looking across the entire ecosystem of the experience. But often the leaders that you're working with, and by the way, rightfully so, that are responsible for certain, we'll call them silos and I'm sure we'll get into the whole silo conversation. But they are responsible for very specific metrics within those silos and oftentimes they are not incentivized. Another great topic to be worried about, the other silos that are adjacent to them or all the way on the other end of the experience. And so you're trying to convince people to do things that may be at odds with what they're literally being reward for in their role. And you know, I've run into this with, you know, colleagues in marketing, with colleagues, particularly in credit in financial services. Credit is almost always going to have some healthy tension with customer experience. But you know, those folks are being incentivized for different things. They're being given different objectives and directives. And you're trying to convince folks. No, no, no, no. Like you have to think about the big picture when they're being asked to focus on very particular parts of the journey. And that is, I think, the special sauce of a chief customer officer ahead of experience, somebody that can navigate across all of those silos and create the picture of what it looks like when this is all working optimally and we're creating this great experience. And again, finding the quick wins along the way to show people that it is going to benefit them ultimately to do the right thing for the customer.
00:18:32 - Greg Ng
Yeah, I mean, you have to have the quick wins. Right. Because we can't continue as an industry to conceptually say this is right and everyone nod their heads. Inevitably, it has to link to a business metric. Right.
00:18:45 - Trish Wethman
100%.
00:18:47 - Greg Ng
So I think that before we move off this topic, when you talked about when the, when the person that you're interacting with says, hey, you're going to get a survey. And I've even had it one step further way back when, when I bought a, when I actually bought a car from a car dealership, was the person that I worked with said, I do not get credit for this unless I get a 10.
00:19:15 - Trish Wethman
Yeah.
00:19:16 - Greg Ng
That level of manipulation is actually, I feel bad for people. I understand the intent. The intent is how do you be perfect for the customer? But my brain eventually moves to the real metric. In my opinion, should not be how many tens and perfect scores can someone have? You don't learn anything from that other than maybe your sales team is persuasive enough or connected enough with the customer and. Or the customer doesn't care. It doesn't bother them whether they give a 10 or a 1. Well, they'll probably give a 1. If they really are disparaged, they have a problem. But what I believe the real metric should be is not in the actual score, but the real metric should be the improvement of the true score over time. If I have a salesperson that is getting routinely sevens out of tension, that doesn't mean they're a bad salesperson. It might actually mean that they have a tremendous opportunity for growth. And what we should be measuring, in my opinion and bonusing their management on, is in the training and education to get that seven to an eight. You can't do that unless it's real, right?
00:20:29 - Trish Wethman
No. Yeah. And it's. I think when I have those experiences and they are all over the place, by the way, I see this across every industry. Hey, you know, I had somebody in my house yesterday that was saying the same thing. They were performing a service and they were saying, you're going to get a survey and I would love for you to give me tens. And you know, immediately my head goes to, you're manipulating the outcome. And by the way, you are not the only person that was a part of this experience for me. There was a person that I talked to about scheduling. There was going to the website and understanding how I had to go through this process to get this fixed. There's all these different elements and this person was just a part of that. Now, granted, a critically important part of it because they're delivering the service. But if I give them a 10, but you don't know about anything else across that journey that I just took with your organization. What are you going to do to drive action going forward? And this is where I feel like CX has become this sort of check the box like, oh, we got all 10. It's great. But you haven't learned anything and you haven't gleaned anything that you can then take back to your organization and say, this is how we can do it better next time. And to your point, that person misses the opportunity where you might now hesitate to say, actually it would have been a little better for me if you had done this. But you may not be inclined to have that honest exchange with them because now you feel like you're affecting their Compensation. And that's a personal thing, and we understand how important that is. So manipulation is such a good word, because there shouldn't be. If you are really trying to understand your customer's experience with your brand or with your organization, there shouldn't be any point across the journey where somebody's telling them how they should score the experience. That needs to be very organic, and you need to look at that as a learning opportunity for your org.
00:22:19 - Greg Ng
Yeah. Surveys are always a challenge. Right. When you're thinking about that. And I think that we talk a lot in the organizational transformation space about silent quitting, and really that happens all the time with consumers and brands. I use consumer loosely, obviously, but I don't make a big deal when I say, guess what? I'm not going back to that restaurant ever again. I might tell the person that I'm with, but I'm not going to proclaim it. The restaurant doesn't know any better. They just maybe see over time that they have less traffic or less sales and think about just what a huge opportunity loss because of that. Yeah, it's a fascinating space. So I know we talked about kind of, like, how that could be frustrating knowing the answer. And obviously we don't know all the answers, but we kind of know the playbook. Right. Because we're humans. We're the ones, actually. We're the audience. Right. We may not be as specific of a segment or Persona that our particular offerings provide, but we know the basic stuff, and let's face it, a lot of people don't even do the basic stuff correctly. I want to talk a little bit about silos, but in the context of. And for our viewers and listeners. Trisha and I had a great conversation. What was last December, actually, um, where you mentioned something in a conversation that I'd never heard before and was so excited to learn more about, and we even just scratched the surface then. So for all of our listeners, they'll actually get to hear the full, like, learning about it through this episode. So I. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna reveal it. I'm. I would like you to tell me.
00:24:14 - Trish Wethman
Drumroll.
00:24:15 - Greg Ng
Yeah. About. About the role you created and specifically what. What drove you to create that role.
00:24:22 - Trish Wethman
Sure. I love talking about this, and I loved that you were really interested in this, because to me, I think as I've talked to more folks and they've been like, huh, that's really interesting. It tells me that, you know, we're onto something. I'll take a step back to something that you just said, which is, you know, we don't all have the answers. And I think the power within a CX team is not in having the answers, it's in the questions that you're asking. And being able to ask questions across all of these different silos within the organization is a real challenge.
00:24:55 - Trish Wethman
One person can't do it. The other thing that doesn't work when you want to be curious and when you want to be learning a lot about the organization or the business that you're supporting, is taking a, what you call a customer experience team, an Insights team, whatever you want to call it, and putting them in a little box in the corner of the organization and basically having them throw things over the fence.
00:25:18 - Trish Wethman
That is a recipe for a team quiet quitting, to be honest, because you're going to run into a whole lot of frustration, a whole lot of things not being actioned, and a whole lot of people that are doing great work that's not going anywhere. So for me, that idea of how do we start to really understand what is important across all of these different areas of the business? What is important to our line of business leaders about their piece of the puzzle? And then how can we align our Insights efforts, our customer experience effort to their priorities while also keeping an eye on the big picture? Recently, I had a team that was comprised of both market research expertise as well as folks that were data analysts, but many of whom had come from different parts of the business.
00:26:15 - Trish Wethman
And we started basically whiteboarding out, like, what is it that we want to be for the organization? Understanding, of course, at the highest level, what the organization is trying to drive in terms of goals and objectives, what's going to make the business successful? So we did a lot of work, Greg, behind the scenes on understanding what was the purpose of the organization. And that's probably a whole separate conversation because understanding the purpose, the mission, the CX vision that is governing over what everyone should be doing is so critical to this.
00:26:47 - Trish Wethman
But once we had that in place, then the team began to whiteboard and think about how can we be more effective. We started talking about what was really most effective was when an insights person was partnered very closely with someone in the business and understood their objectives, their metrics, the things that make that part of the organization unique, and being able to then say, here are the things that we can learn about customers that can help them drive those specific goals.
00:27:19 - Trish Wethman
What this began to evolve to drumroll was this concept that we called an Insights business partner. Now, having had some experience in the Past driving culture and working closely with hr. Many organizations have this concept of an HR business partner. And so this was sort of fueling our thinking around this. And I started to think about what always made for a really great HR business partner was not someone that could rattle off all of the rules and regulations, but it was someone that could say, I really understand what's unique about your business.
00:27:53 - Trish Wethman
And then I bring that back and it fuels my recruiting, it fuels talent development, it fuels culture, work. And so I started thinking about that as a model and saying, how can we infuse some of that into our insights and customer experience work? And so again, we came up with this concept of an Insights business partner.
00:28:12 - Trish Wethman
So we had some capabilities within the Insights team that really did run across the organization. Things like competitive intelligence and market research and the ability to do AB testing and the ability to just have folks that have some very specific skills. But then we also had these folks that straddled the line between Insights and understanding the business in very unique ways. We took folks from our team and embedded them within teams across the organization to become this Insights business partner.
00:28:48 - Trish Wethman
Now, that didn't mean they forgot everything they knew about Insights. They still are bringing their very particular skill set and their focus on the customer to the teams that they're working with. But what was a little different and what that I hadn't seen before was that they became very well versed in the particular goals and objectives that that team was driving so that they could better align the learning that we were doing and the customer understanding to those particular metrics, so they never stop thinking about things like NPS and csat, their core CX metrics. That's a whole other podcast about the debate around CX metrics. But those things directionally are going to tell you a lot about your customers.
00:29:36 - Trish Wethman
But if you have somebody that's working with a line of business and you understand what's unique about the credit strategy for that line of business, what are the conversion metrics that they're driving towards, then you can really start to align your learning and what you're gleaning from customer feedback and from the research that we're doing and personalize it to that part of the business so that you are truly driving the outcomes that are meaningful to them, while at the same time improving the experience across the enterprise. So that was the thinking behind the Insights business partner role, and that was sort of the genesis of it.
00:30:14 - Greg Ng
I love it because it is from our experience, so needed it is. Again, it bridges the gap, in my opinion. At least partially the way there of saying this is what should be done and this is how it actually delivers value to the business. And understanding that alignment and collaboration is critical to actually getting things done. Let me ask you a little bit more about the tactical parts of that. So first off, where would that role typically sit? Like who do they report to and is it a specific role or is it a hat and responsibility that someone wears across a department?
00:30:59 - Trish Wethman
So I can talk a little bit about how we've done it. Again, I think this is where curiosity comes into play. If I were to go to a different organization and talk about an Insights business partner, there's a ton of work that I would have to do first to understand where is there a need to connect the dots between CX and the organization that would be a good place to embed a CX or an Insights business partner. So the way that we thought about it in our organization was it kind of goes back to what we already talked about. We wanted to have a team that was truly focused on the holistic experience. Holistic sometimes get overused, but it really is how you have to think about it. This is a team that is the connective tissue between all these different parts of the organization. I've seen it work very effectively when you think about it in that way. And those Insights business partners are almost dotted line to the functional lead or to the line of business lead, but they are reporting to the chief customer officer, in this case me, because again, there is a through thread across all of these silos or all of these functional areas of the business, which is the overall experience that we're creating for the customer. And we need to tie that back to the brand perception. And we need to also ensure that we are integrating what we're learning into the servicing experience. So in the most recent case where we've embedded this, those folks did have essentially dotted lines to their functional areas, but reported into me because we wanted to keep our eye on that overall experience as well as the individual parts. I think we probably still had work to do on figuring out what is the optimal reporting structure here. Because you may have an organization that doesn't have specific lines of business. With GMs, you may have a line of business or you may have a business that has a product organization and how does this work within a product organization? But it's not dissimilar, Greg, from a lot of product organizations that have a product structure where you have a product manager and in some places it's the three legged stool. In some Places, it's the four legged stool of technology and design and CX and the product manager. It's very similar to what you're doing there, which is driving the understanding. You really have to look at the lay of the land in terms of the organization and see again, where is it most important for us to be providing a customer understanding that's going to drive business value and that is where you embed an insights business partner.
00:33:38 - Greg Ng
So that's really helpful. The question I have, the follow up question I have for that then is the perspective of the chief customer officer makes total sense. It helps that person achieve what inevitably is the goal of being a chief customer officer. Right. But I also am understand that with organizations, especially large ones, it is not just an easy decision to say, oh hey, by the way, this person's gonna dot line to you, to your department. Did you run into any type of objections and politics and silos and all that stuff in order to run that?
00:34:21 - Trish Wethman
Yes. Objections, silos, Yes. I mean we ran into all of those. So. And again, you know, this, this was something that really evolved over time because going back to what I said earlier, you know, in some organizations I have been a part of a team that is off to the side. But if you have done your work going back to stakeholder engagement and building relationships, if you've done the work of really understanding how the organization functions in achieving goals and objectives, you're kind of 50% of the way there because you already know who are the key folks that you need to align with. And then I think what we did most recently was we had created some credibility even as a sort of separate team. We had collected some wins along the way and found some ways to show the value of having an insights person be a part of your project or your initiative. And so we had laid the foundation through that. And so it almost became a natural evolution in some cases where I had a GM or a business leader coming and saying, hey, I'd like to have more of so and so's time so that I can, you know, really get them up to speed with what my team needs. So it becomes, if you're doing it right, and you know, there's no sort of one way to do this Greg, except actually doing the work of relationship building and delivering meaningful insights to your organization. As that starts to happen, it almost becomes where the business leaders are coming to you and asking for more time.
00:35:55 - Greg Ng
Great.
00:35:56 - Trish Wethman
And that was what really helped us to say, hey, this person already has a super effective dynamic within that team. Let's make that official and let's really have them be the insights business partner for that part of the organization.
00:36:10 - Greg Ng
So almost a dedicated resource just for that.
00:36:13 - Trish Wethman
Right? A dedicated resource. And as you know, business leaders love to hear the word dedicated resource, particularly if it's not costing them anything.
00:36:20 - Greg Ng
Right. Until they have to pay for it. Right?
00:36:21 - Trish Wethman
Yeah, yeah. Now when they have to pay for it, it becomes a different story. But again, if you're showing the wins and you're showing where that partnership drives growth or drives meaningful change for your part of the business, that, you know, it becomes sort of a self fulfilling prophecy of why this is a model that works.
00:36:39 - Greg Ng
Right. And so then when you're talking also about departments and let's say, and I don't know if this is how this was structured in your organization, but I do know that in, you know, other large financial services and retail of which we have the most experience with, there are departmental types of breakdowns, but they're also like product line and channel and things like that. And I imagine that the reality of that value could be applicable at literally every strata. The question that I would have next is how critical is it then that all of those insight business partners communicate and collaborate together in addition to being deployed, if you will, to within their own industry? Because eventually there's always someone's personal, you know, trends and desires and you know, experience and, and excitement towards different parts of that experience. How do you ensure that it remains holistic? I know overusing that word, but, but because inevitably it's the same customer interacting with many different departments.
00:37:53 - Trish Wethman
Absolutely. So it is incredibly critical that that team also, and this is again, when you're thinking about how you organize this, it's why it is so important that they still have this concept of a separate team. So within our organization that group would get together at least on a weekly basis and talk about, hey, here's what we're learning, here's what my part of the organization is thinking about. Because oftentimes the, you know, I won't, I won't say this happens all the time, but occasionally goals are misaligned and you know, you're not all the time different parts of the organization are at odds or what they're trying to drive is literally hurting the potential growth of another part of the organization. So having them be able to come back together and rely on each other as a team to understand what are those hotspots, where are those areas where we are colliding and we need to be then in some cases, like raising that red flag to the business leaders and saying, hey, we have a conflict here and we need to figure out how we resolve that. Now you also talk about you've in, in the, in the organization where we recently deployed this, we had sort of a dual, you know, we had lines of business that were headed by GMs and we also had a product organization and everybody wanted Insights business partners. So how do you, when you have a finite number of people, how do you then start meeting all the needs of the business? And what we started to see was that our product pods where we did actually have folks from marketing, from Servicing, from data science, they were all working together within these pods that became another place where we could collaborate and really understand, like where are their collisions happening? Where are there things that we need to understand that could be affecting the customer. So you have to have a really special, really talented, smart person in this role that is able to navigate all of these different places where they have to be collaborating. So it's a unique, I call it a bit of a unicorn role. And not every Insights person is going to be a natural Insights business partner for sure. For sure. And so that is something that you have to consider if you want to start thinking about this within your organization. I'd say the first thing you need to do is sort of look at your team and say, do I have people that can actually do this?
00:40:19 - Greg Ng
Right. We at Blazor have a practice where we meet with organizations and we actually put them through what we call the keystone framework, which is a high performing teams framework. And what we found is that in some cases having a research, someone with a research background or a customer experience background is important, of course. But there are also hidden gems within lines of business, within functional product teams, within even teams that you might not closely regard with that with like it. And, and so we've actually developed a framework to identify who in that particular Persona we call the Catalyst. And the reason why we call it the Catalyst is it's not just about having an interest, it is also about having the curiosity. But the most critical, and this is where I think you were getting at, is that we found and how we try to identify is the person that understands where all the bodies are buried and also understands how to get what they need from every department that's needed.
00:41:39 - Trish Wethman
Oh my gosh.
00:41:40 - Greg Ng
You need to know that person, right? Yeah.
00:41:42 - Trish Wethman
I mean, I love the use of the word Catalyst in that framework because, you know, in all the different ways that you think about Catalyst, it is typically the thing that makes something happen and I think the most critical part of any insights function, set aside Insights business partner. If you are an insights team that is throwing things over the fence and nothing is happening, you are an ineffective insights team that is just never going to get the organization any roi and it is going to become a constant circle of having to prove yourselves. And so, yes, these folks have to be people that can go in and catalyze. They can go in and say, here's what we've learned. Oh, and here's also what I think we need to do with this. And they have to be thinking about what we know from a competitive perspective. They have to be thinking about what we've learned from a research perspective. Again, going back to having an insights team that has those critical enterprise functions interacting with these insights business partners, that is where the magic happens and the alchemy happens. To coin a phrase from one of my favorites, the alchemy is the gold comes from the learning coupled with the business expertise coming together to create what is truly an insight that's going to drive the business forward.
00:43:00 - Greg Ng
Right.
00:43:01 - Trish Wethman
I'll also say, Greg, spoiler alert. One of the things that I've learned is that our unicorns are often people that have been deeply embedded from an operations perspective. So someone who has been on the front line of operations strategy, who has been on the front line with customers, agents can be a goldmine. And people who are managing agents are a goldmine because nobody in your organization knows where the bodies are buried more than those folks. And so we've had a lot of success in really partnering with people from that part of the organization. Now, that's not to say we've had success with all of the different functions in terms of finding those people that really want to drive action. But the, the body's being buried. That is something that you often get from having had some operational expertise.
00:43:51 - Greg Ng
Yeah, yeah, it's. It's a. It's a. This is a critical nuance, though. It's. It is understanding where they are, but not accepting that there needs to be more. You know what I mean? And so I use a lot of baseball references, basically. I think how I'm interpreting what you just said is that, you know, really, you need to find the person that has the most at bats, they've seen the most pitches, they can understand what is a. An outlier and what isn't, and most importantly, how to navigate that. Because the reality, again, is everyone knows what is important. Everyone can shake their head and believe it. Not everyone understands or knows how to make that journey not customer journey, but the process of making this work within an organization. And it requires understanding what that path is. Right. It understands. Understanding where the markers are. And a little politicking, too, right?
00:44:53 - Trish Wethman
Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot of politicking involved in this work. And I actually have a great example. I think from a financial services perspective, one of the things from an experience perspective, from a compliance perspective, for the health of the business that you need to really think about is how to protect your consumers from fraud. Having somebody on our team that had been on the operational side of the fence that understood that there is such a thing as purposeful friction, and that is to help weed out where there's a possibility of fraud. And I've had a lot of folks on credit teams and operations teams talk to me about purposeful friction. And sometimes the experience is going to be a little painful so that we can prevent a consumer from experiencing fraud. And understanding that there are going to be parts of what you hear, there's going to be feedback that you hear from customers related to some of that purposeful friction, and knowing that it's not going to be beneficial to that part of the business to just be constantly telling them, here's what we're hearing from customers about this purposeful friction, understanding why it's there, and then being able to focus on other things, like how can we make it clearer to the customer why the experience is this way, or how can we create that clarity for them? How can we expedite them through that process, switching the, you know, pivoting to that different part of the experience that's gonna matter to that part of the business that comes from having the expertise to know why that friction exists in the first place.
00:46:28 - Greg Ng
Yeah.
00:46:28 - Trish Wethman
And so for me, that has been a big learning that there are gonna be times where there are just aspects of the experience that are not going to be stellar from a customer perspective and purposefully so in some cases. But how do you create clarity for them? And how do you expedite that so that you can get them through the other side where they almost forget about that friction? Because the outcome is positive.
00:46:53 - Greg Ng
And the clarity, I think, is a huge part of that. Right. Especially when it comes to finances or taxes or anything that every human understands and connect the dots of what true pain would feel like? I will jump through all those hoops if it's explained to me why I need to jump through this hoops.
00:47:13 - Trish Wethman
Exactly.
00:47:14 - Greg Ng
Right.
00:47:14 - Trish Wethman
Exactly.
00:47:15 - Greg Ng
Yeah. I had a funny example, and my kids are older teenagers, if not in their 20s, so they. They are now in that age group where they're willing to tell me when they think what I say is ridiculous.
00:47:32 - Trish Wethman
I have one of those too.
00:47:33 - Greg Ng
Yeah. Which is great. It keeps me honest and keeps me sharp. But we had a new restaurant open up down the street and they had a mobile ordering service. You still had to go and pick it up. Couldn't make the payment online. You were just ordering. And then it said, great, sign up for a, for an account. And when you sign up for that account, we can save all of your preferences. Okay, great. Awesome. But again, no money transaction, no delivery, nothing. No personal information other than like how I like my, my dish. Okay. They then forced me into a two factor authentication process and I was like, okay, that's interesting. Maybe they'll open up storing my credit card. Okay, then maybe it's worth it. Never did by the way, by the second time. And they were like, okay, every time you want to order now you have to go and type in a code that I texted you or to my email. I said, this is ridiculous. Right. My point though, and this is where my kids made fun of me. They said, the typical teenager, it's not that deep. Right. But the point I was trying to make to them is I get the value of that friction. Two factor authentication. I don't want my identity stolen and I'm not fearful that someone's going to understand my weekly order at this restaurant.
00:49:02 - Trish Wethman
You're okay with sharing that data?
00:49:03 - Greg Ng
I'm okay with sharing that data. They actually don't even know where I live. They don't know where I live. They don't know my credit card information. All they know is that at least once a week I'm ordering and it typically is the same meal. So I think that's a great example also of technology being integrated into these decisions, especially as we integrate AI and other types of things that are now past the trial proof of concept stage and, and organizations are embedding different technologies, maybe not for the right reason and maybe at the expense of customer experience. How would you view this role, this partner role playing? Like let's play that out. How would you view that partner role being able to provide the right type of insight to right size, that type of investment into the experience?
00:49:57 - Trish Wethman
So it's a great question and I think a lot of it comes down to again, for the particular consumer that you're dealing with, which it doesn't sound like the example that you just gave. It didn't sound like there was like a real purpose to the process. So I think what I've seen over time is that the better you understand your customer, the more you are able to sort of represent in these conversations, whether it's a decision about technology or decision to launch an app, you know, anything that's going to impact the customer, the more you are able to speak to what is important to them, the more that you are really clear on what is the hierarchy of needs for this customer and how are we meeting it, what are they coming to us to do? In your case, you're trying to use a convenient option. That's creating inconvenience. In my mind, an Insights business partner would be the person that would say, what are we doing here? What does the customer gain from this experience? And I think to your point, Greg, it is really critical right now with the just explosion of AI that's happening, particularly in the customer service space, understanding how your customers are going to react to that experience. What are they coming to you to solve for and how is the solution that you're implementing going to create clarity and expedite that experience for them? That is where an Insights business partner is going to be, the one that's going to say, before we launch this thing, before we partner, let's go and look at the research and see how we can take what we know about our customers through their feedback and our learning and apply that to what we're trying to do. It's a very human centered design approach in my mind, which really boils down to start with the customer, not the solution.
00:51:45 - Greg Ng
Right.
00:51:46 - Trish Wethman
It sounds like in your case or in your example, they started with a solution and didn't really think about how that experience landed or what the customer was going to gain from it. And I think in my experience, when it comes to data sharing and technology, customers are actually willing to share a lot with you if they believe they are going to get value for that sharing or for providing you with that information. If it's technology for technology sake or an app for an app sake and the customer doesn't get any value out of it, it will ultimately fail. And the Insights business partner is going to be the one that continues to remind you that let's get out and ab test this experience. Let's make sure they understand what, what they're doing and why they're going through this and how it's helping them. And that is what that role is going to do. It's going to continually reinforce. This isn't about launching a solution, it's about solving a problem.
00:52:45 - Greg Ng
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're seeing a Trend in the industry where a year ago, 18 months ago, two years ago, organizations were basically given a dictate, not a reason to believe or a reason to test a dictate. Integrate these new technologies. The cynical part of me says it's, you know, integrate it so that I have another bullet point at my earnings call. Right. But when we talk to actual practitioners, those who are operating and needing to find value in those technologies, in those tools, in those bolt in, bolt on other kind of features, they're struggling because they realize that they led with quote, innovation first without and then kind of retrofitting how that plays into the customer experience. When you use that example of that business part, insights business partner being able to raise their hand, it actually triggered something else for me. How important is kind of political and influence capital in that relationship? Right? Because it is one thing to say, hey, let's put this person to have these types of tasks, goals, missions, but inevitably a GM has to listen to that person. So what do you believe is needed for that person? Does it come down to personality? Does it come down to other things?
00:54:18 - Trish Wethman
Everything is political. Let's just start there. I mean, I have worked in many organizations that have led with we're not political. And I hate to tell everybody, but everywhere politics develops, it can be a positive, it can be a negative. I don't think the politics itself is a bad thing. I think it's like how it starts to become the fuel for decision making that helps you determine whether or not it's a good or a bad thing. So I won't sit here and say personality has nothing to do with it. I think you have to be able to develop a rapport. And that's again where you may have folks on your team that are pure insights analysts that want to sit and look at data and not really interact with people. That is a, that is a particular type of person and they have a very important role to play. But it may not be the perfect fit for this insights business partner role.
00:55:13 - Greg Ng
Right.
00:55:13 - Trish Wethman
You have to be able to advocate for what your team is doing. You have to be able to demonstrate the value. You have to be able to align what you are doing to how it's going to help them succeed. Succeed and how it's going to help them drive growth. And all of that is politicking. It is getting in and having the tough conversations and sometimes forcing the issue and sometimes going to another leader and saying, can you help me make a case here? Because I worked with you when we did this. So there is a lot of that involved. So again, this is not a role that you just take somebody that was formerly a CX analyst and plop them in. It is something that has to develop over time and it has to come from the fact that this person has built a certain level of credibility in doing their core function that they can now apply to your part of the organization in a really effective way. So yeah, politics exists and it is a part of this, but hopefully it is leveraging all of the best parts of that, which is understanding your constituents and influence, making action through influence and through understanding the problem that you're trying to solve.
00:56:21 - Greg Ng
What I love about this, Trish, is, and certainly my excitement has not waned when I first heard, after we talked about this in December, I messaged our entire team at Blazer and have been telling everyone about it. And the reason why is because it is very easy to say an organization needs to understand their customer and have insights. And it's also very easy to say and unfortunately it's like throwing over the fence historically for someone to say, great, yeah, I'm curious and that wouldn't that be great? But inevitably I need to move my money metrics. And we've always called it transferable insights because we believe that some customer insights actually get buried even within their little line of business. And so how do you ensure that a whole organization can benefit it? But really, this act, turning insights into action, the missing piece has always been how does it directly impact the business? And the reality is NPS is great, but every time we talk about nps, we talk about and how does NPS influence right revenue, right retention? How do we attribute NPS and the actions towards improving that towards business goals? So what I love is that intentionality of actually creating that role to fill that void. And the politics I get kind of my final question on this is if you were to then map this out five years from now, do you believe, and maybe there's a third option, but I'll give you two to think about. Do you believe that for the health of the organization, let's set aside the fulfillment of the individual, but for the health of the organization, do you believe that the right playbook, if they institute this type of insights, business partner, program or role, is for that same insight, business partner to stay within that line of business for the five years, or do you believe that they should move around the organization, should it be rotating or should it be going deep?
00:58:32 - Trish Wethman
Yeah, I think it's a great question and I think it's going to be very dependent on the individual, in some cases. There are some folks that get into a part or get into a role and they just find, like, this is where I want to be and this is, like, this is very meaningful for me. But I think if you're thinking about it from the success of the team, having these folks move around an organization and bring new perspectives and different ways of thinking about the customer to different parts of the organization, to me, I think that is going to be a really interesting evolution of the role. I also think this is a role that could eventually become a product manager, a senior product manager. They could become a gm, because in my mind, they've already checked the box on having that really pure and deep understanding of the customer, which is critical to success in any of those roles. So I think you could have a person that wants to stay in one part of the business and that may be okay. But I think for the success of the organization, having these people get out and bring what they know to different parts of the organization, I think that is where I would see this going. And I think more broadly too, if you look at the landscape right now, Greg, I don't think I've seen this much disruption in terms of how we're thinking about in the 15 years I've been doing it. As I've seen in the last year, for sure, this role is changing because When I started 15 years ago, it was literally sitting and pouring through verbatims on a spreadsheet and what are the themes? And put together a slide and tell us what the themes are that we're hearing from customers. And it was mostly from surveys. Today you've got the ability to do voice analysis, you've got the ability to do text analysis. You're pulling in chat, you're pulling in social. And AI is doing so much of the heavy lifting. The real world is going to be a person that can take all that learning, understand your core customer and all of the needs that we've talked about before and how what we're hearing translates to that. And then how does that translate to the business? How does that person become a catalyst for action and driving the change that's going to drive business growth? So, yeah, I think back to your original question. It's going to be really, really interesting to watch these folks move throughout an organization and bring a different lens to how different teams are thinking about it. I think it's critical from an innovation perspective to have these folks involved again. I think sometimes people think innovation is putting out new solutions and they're forgetting that the biggest part of innovation is identifying an unmet need. And that's where an insights team can really help. So these folks are going to be critical to driving innovation, critical to driving business growth. And I think the role can be whatever that person wants it to become. But ultimately, for the business, taking something like this and really running with it can be incredibly valuable.
01:01:32 - Greg Ng
I love that. Just a couple weeks ago, I was at a retail conference and I was speaking to a director of customer insight for a retailer. And one of the things that we were kind of brainstorming about is exactly that, that we see so much change and change for the better in the last year, last 18 months. And one of the things that we speculated is, and I think I agree with this, but I'd be interested in your take, is the ability to capture those types of data. Quantitative and qualitative has increasingly been easier, cheaper, better. And much like the quote, like, big Data boom of 10 years ago, right? It's like, how do we get as much data as possible? And then it was like, whoa, wait a minute, we have all this data, what are we going to do with it? And then, wait a minute, when we do things, what does it actually do, you know, influence the business? And certainly that is the same with insights in customer experience. What we speculate is, could it be that what's driving this, at least it's driving this with me as a consumer is that as late as 10 years ago, I was talking about the value of personalization, but now it seems like, and maybe it's because of our kids generation rising up, and there is a greater acceptability and comfort level to be marketed and advertised and communicated to by brands in a more personalized way than there was five years ago, 10 years ago. And I remember even reading and writing articles about saying, like, personal, we can do personalization way more than we can now, but the majority of people are like, ooh, too creepy. Why do you know this about me? And I, I speculate that now the world is. Has eased into this comfort level that there is. It's more nuanced, right? It's like, yes, of course you know this about me because I gave that to you. I'm not. It's not so magical anymore. It's not so mysterious. I believe that it's the comfort level of personalization that's actually driving why organizations are finally saying, wait a minute, this is how we get there is through really operationalizing these insights. I'm interested to hear your take on that.
01:03:59 - Trish Wethman
So I, yes to all of that. I Think the segment of one, you know, the concept of, you know, a really personalized experience is still, I think it's still a territory to be conquered. I don't think we're there yet. Some, maybe a handful of companies have got it down. But I think too many companies still think of personalization as, you know, slapping your name on an email and, you know, or, you know, we, we sent you in a piece of direct mail that's very specific, specific to your. Where you are in your life. And that's just not going to be differentiating enough as we go forward in this new world of AI and taking all of the data and really creating a compelling story. I think you've probably heard me talk about this a little bit. I think about insights as the coming together of a lot of different data. So you have operational metrics, you have behavioral information about your consumers, and then you have experience feedback, and none of these things independently create an insight. But when you take these three things and bring them together along with the context that you have about your customers, that is what truly creates insights, and that is what's going to allow organizations to create truly personalized experience experiences that feel meaningful to the consumers that they're serving and companies that value not just the metrics that I'd say we'll call it the quant part of the data, but also the context that you're able to put around that through real deep learning about your customers. And we're even starting to be able to create some quant around qual. With AI, we're going to be able to scale qual in many different ways. I've seen some really interesting examples of where we're able to go a little deeper with qual through an AI solution. And that's going to make it even more important for us to be able to then translate that into meaningful personalization for customers.
01:06:02 - Greg Ng
Right.
01:06:02 - Trish Wethman
I think that's the next frontier, honestly, is being able to really understand what creates an insight. And how do we turn that into, hey, what's the next best thing this customer can do? Or what's the next best thing we can do for this customer? That is the next frontier of CX in my mind. And I think in some cases we're there, and in some cases we're on the precipice.
01:06:23 - Greg Ng
Yeah. And I think what, you know, this is a whole, maybe this is episode two with you, we can talk about is, I think as a, as a person who, you know, certainly our organization offers qualitative research as well as quantitative services to better understand the customer. My, my always, my initial hesitation with using AI to scale qual is what is it feeding from? And if it's feeding from other like minded organizations, how does that directly conflict with the those who manage brand who say but we're not like all those other info, you know what I mean? And so like how does that at scale. Those are things that still need to be fixed, fixed. And that was just more like a. Wanted to, wanted to get like my point of view in there because I think that there are so many, there's so much opportunity for organizations in a very scalable way. The things that organizations, even medium sized organizations have at their disposal now, they would not have dreamed of being able to even afford, let alone have it and be responsive enough to deliver it three years ago, five years ago. So I think it really is a huge opportunity and the biggest part of that to me is how does that translate from this is curious and this is exciting and this is important. Isn't that cool to now we believe it's cool because it will move this needle, it will influence these, these metrics. So I really think that that's a huge, huge opportunity that we're embarking on together.
01:08:06 - Trish Wethman
And I'll say, Greg, I think one thing that we have to be really careful about in our industry and in the work that we do is the technology is going to enable amazing things. But I will stand by what I have always said, which is that there's no greater power from a CX perspective as talking to a customer of your organization. And some of the biggest shifts that I've seen from a culture perspective have come through putting customers in front of executives and letting customers talk about what's important to them and what their challenges are. And you can certainly use technology to enable that. But that meaningful connection that you make when you're looking in the eyes of one of your customers is something that I hope will not be displaced within our industry because it's just going to continue to be a critical aspect of understanding your consumers.
01:08:59 - Greg Ng
And even it supports that concept of people remember stories, not data. And so you have an executive literally sitting across the table or on a virtual conversation like this, you still put a face to a name and you understand those stories. And while it may not be at scale and statistically significant, it's certainly more memorable and can drive action. That culture action, right?
01:09:27 - Trish Wethman
Absolutely. It has been, it has proven to me to be one of the most effective ways to bring executives along on that journey by having them really. And again, I Think the thing like when we do storytelling, it is those moments where they've had those interactions with customers that they go back to again and again and it reminds them of, you know, what we're actually doing, what are these people coming to us to solve for and how are we helping them or in some cases, hindering them from solving those problems.
01:09:56 - Greg Ng
Right, right. Well, Trish, it has been a pleasure. I am so excited to hear and have you talk about more detail about this role and about your perspective on CX and certainly the exciting future that we have in front of us. Before I let you go, I'm going to ask you one more question, and that is, I know that you are a big fan of Disney. As a CX professional, what do you believe is the best thing that Disney does for customer experience and what do you think is an area of improvement?
01:10:33 - Trish Wethman
So I think the best thing, far and away, that Disney does is they have a strong purpose as an organization which they make every employee aware of and empowered to, to enact or to perform. So their purpose as an organization, and I've been fortunate to attend sessions at Disney, is to create happiness. It is purpose over task every day for Disney employees. And so whether you're a janitor or you're an executive at the highest level of the organization, your job is to create happiness for your customers. And I think the way that they have embedded that in every part part of their organization, it basically creates a platform through which CX is just enabled to thrive. And so I think that is the good thing that they've done. I think the danger with Disney, as with a lot of companies, is that they're spread across a lot of different types of experiences these days and maintaining that high bar, as many companies go through growth, it's hard to maintain that bar when you're getting into a lot of different areas. So I think for them, it's going to be really critical to stay true to that purpose and understand when they do an acquisition or when they bring a new company into the fold, that the expectation for customers is going to be to continue to live up to that purpose that they've set in the other experiences that customers have had. The mental model that customers have is high, the bar is high, and they're going to have to keep working towards hitting that bar.
01:12:12 - Greg Ng
Awesome. Well, on that note, Trish, thank you so much for joining. Looking forward to Greg.
01:12:18 - Trish Wethman
This was great.
01:12:19 - Greg Ng
Yeah, great. Great. And continuing this conversation. And like I said, we'll have to have you on for another episode. We can keep on talking about all the things cx, but I love it. Just thrilled to be able to have you here on the show and and thanks again for joining this episode.
01:12:35 - Trish Wethman
Oh absolutely, Greg. It's been my pleasure. I think you and I share a passion for this and that comes through in our conversation. So thank you so much for having me.
01:12:48 - Greg Ng
That's a wrap for today's episode of the Path Uncut. A huge thank you to Trish Wethman for sharing her insights on creating the insights business partner role, overcoming challenges and making customer experience a true driver of business transformation. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe, rate and leave a review. It helps other change makers find the show. And if there's someone you'd love to hear from or a topic you'd like us to explore, let us know. I'm Greg Ng. Thanks for tuning in. And remember, the path to meaningful change starts with bold ideas and courageous leadership. See you next time on the Path Uncut.