Today’s interview is with Jason Grier, the Chief Customer Officer of Reputation, a leading business-to-business online reputation management and customer experience management company. Jason joins me today to talk about cars, speedometers, experiencing your own experience, the (over)focus on metrics, the power of unstructured feedback and the report that Forrester that produced for them and some great advice for CX practitioners about what they should be prioritizing when it comes to improving the experience they deliver.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Employee experience, the war for talent and what to avoid in a back to the office strategy – Interview with Steve Lucas of iCIMS — and is number 391 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jason:

• Reputation was just named to the Forrester Wave.
• CX metrics is like a car speedometer. They can tell you how fast you’re going but they don’t tell you where to go.
• How do you navigate people away from focusing just on the score of the speedometer, so to speak, to really focusing on the process of building a culture of continual improvement and continually listening to what our customers have to say and then taking action. That’s the question.
• The lost child of CX is taking action.
• Insight comes from qualitative data.
• The qualitative and the unstructured data. That’s where the the gold is.
• There is a convergence of structured data and data in the wild.
• But, how do you make a a symphony out of what has become a cacophony.
• Check out the Forrester report: The Power of Unstructured Feedback. The study shows that while 84% of decision-makers see the value in unstructured data and consumer feedback, only 30% of data collected is unstructured, leaving behind a trove of direct consumer insights that could fuel business growth.
• I’ve been in this space for a while and I’ve yet to find a company that has great data.
• Story of a healthcare firm that had a marketing department that was focused on building a brand and a patient experience department that was focused on trying to improve their experience and how the two weren’t really talking. Reputation helped them take a crawl, walk, run approach so they could understand the world of structured and unstructured data and build on their existing survey program efforts. They introduced a reviews program and then a social program added sentiment analysis and then an integrated action tool that allows the assignment of specific follow up actions to specific people.
• People need to experience their own experience i.e. how many hotel staff have actually stayed in their hotel and have experienced the hotel as a guest?
• When it comes to CX, every company should be thinking about the mindset they have, their behaviors and the level of investment they are making to achieve their goals.
• Advice for the CX practitioner: Figure out what’s important, figure out what matters, understand the difference between the two and how they impact your customers experience.
• Jason’s Punk CX word: Goldilocks
• Jason’s Punk CX brand: Amazon and Evel Knievel

About Jason

Jason Grier leads Reputation’s customer loyalty and growth initiatives as executive vice president and chief customer officer. Jason is a former senior vice president of Global Support Operations and chief customer officer at McAfee, where he spent more than 10 years.

While at McAfee, Jason built a reputation as an industry leader in customer support and operations. His teams were honored with a number of awards, including the Intel Quality Award, a prestigious honor for outstanding quality and personification of Intel’s values and the highest team honor given at Intel. His teams also won two TSIA Star Awards, two Service & Support Professionals Association Awards, and a Stevie Award for innovation in action.

Before his time at McAfee Jason held executive-level positions at Sutherland Global Services and Covad Communications.

Jason holds a bachelor’s degree from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Pfeiffer University.

Check out Reputation, the Forrester report: The Power of Unstructured Feedback, say Hi to them and Jason on Twitter @Reputation_Com and @grierjk and connect with Jason on LinkedIn here.