Today’s interview is with Liza Smyth, who is the SVP of Customer Experience at Formstack. Liza joins me today to talk about how EX and CX efforts in organizations are often handled separately, why you need to prioritize and foster a positive employee experience, the important role that Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging plays in this and what leaders should be thinking about and doing so they can merge their CX and EX efforts.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The killer combination: Customer success, happiness and the right technology – Interview with Prashanth Krishnaswami of Zoho – and is number 445 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.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Zoho for sponsoring my podcast this month and particularly the team at Zoho Desk.

Zoho Desk is trusted by over 50,000 businesses around the world to elevate their customer service and the team over there recently asked me to write a whitepaper for them that explores How focusing on employee happiness and customer success can drive business results.

The whitepaper is called: The Killer Combination: Customer success, happiness and the right technology.

Do check it out by following this link or by clicking on the whitepaper image.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Liza:

• Sometimes we make assumptions about our customers. So, it’s really important to engage with them to get their perspective on their needs and whether we are delivering to those needs.
• When you ask people to do repetitive tasks, you’re doing them a disservice.
• Customer and employee experience are often handled by different parts of the organization.
• But if different parts of the organisation feel that they’re accountable and it’s their remit then the two don’t often come together.
• You need to prioritise and foster a positive employee experience in the first instance.
• Apple made a decision a long time ago with their sales teams to remove commission and give a customer experience bonus instead. So, I had to implement a strategy around how we would evolve to that destination once the decision was made.
• To do that we built a whole programme around recognition, training, investment in their career and other things that would matter to them so that they didn’t attrit out of the business.
• The results saw our average handle times increase slightly but on the flip side we also our conversion rates increase.
• My experience at Apple was a really, really helpful baseline as it helped me understand more about the customer and their wants and needs.
• At LinkedIn I evolved this approach always starting with smaller teams, building and shaping them, testing ideas and iterating.
• It was also where I really recognised the importance of addressing eNPS as well as NPS.
• But, also of prioritisation. You need to realise you can’t address 60 different things. You need to distill it down into the biggest priorities and go after those.
• When you see that participation is low (in surveys), it’s a signal that they’re disengaged. So, encouraging participation and scheduling the time for them to participate means that they know it’s important.
• Also, have an open dialogue in your team meetings about the feedback received, identify the main themes and keep the conversation alive on those two or three main themes.
• Create tiger teams around those themes and provide weekly updates so people know that’s important, are kept updated on progress and everyone feels like they have ownership.
• Your people also have to be able to say their piece, particularly when it comes to free text responses, without fear of retaliation or of negative consequences.
• That is helped by really getting to know your people, what’s important to them and what is going on for them.
• This is a craft you need to develop ….to establish those relationships with your team.
• I worked with a team at Formstack where the employee engagement scores were in the 60% range and customer satisfaction scores were below four out of five. Within 18 months, with this type of strategy, we delivered an employee engagement score of 86% CSAT scores evolving to 4.5-4.8 out of five.
• There’s the correlation of the two things.
• The interesting about Formstack is this is the first company I’ve ever started with that was fully remote.
• Getting to really know people is harder and different. You have to take a different strategy. So, every single meeting for me it starts with the 1st 10 or 15 minutes asking about how folks are doing, what did they get up to over the weekend etc.
• It’s amazing what I’ve been able to learn in those 1st 10 or 15 minutes that can change the direction of the rest of the conversation and provide me with an insight that is helpful. They will share something about, you know, things they did in the past. And I’m like, That’s interesting because I feel like we could associate you with that project in the future.
• And so whilst I genuinely get a kick out of just getting to know people, it’s amazing how it informs me on things that help the business as well.
• I think people want to feel seen and they want to feel like they matter.
• Research shows that diverse companies perform to a higher degree.
• When you have diversity within your company, you can also represent your customers better because your customers are diverse.
• Representation matters. But it’s also what to do with the representation, which is why the B came into the conversation around belonging.
• Because you can hire me, you could invite me to the table for the conversation, I can give my perspective. But if I don’t feel like I belong here, like I could actually be my authentic self then I won’t stay, which is why attrition of diverse employees continues to remain high.
• It’s not good enough to just say it matters. You have to do something about it because people are waiting and watching and that contributes to how attractive you are as a company, both from an employee and a customer perspective.
• Two pieces of advice I would give to people:
  • Self education – Don’t put it on someone else to educate you. Educate yourself.
  • Know what it means to be an ally. If you actually truly want to be an ally that means advocating for, speaking up, leaning in and demonstrating support. It takes action. You can’t say it matters to you and then just sit there quietly on the sidelines. That is not being an ally.
• What showed up during the pandemic was that we had a model of leadership that operated in a face to face space but that didn’t really work in a fully remote context and now, increasingly, in a hybrid context.
• That’s a big gap and is something I think more and more companies will be paying attention to in the coming months and years.
• Liza’s Punk CX words: Challenge, Beautiful
• Liza’s Punk XL brands: Amazon, Sonos, Sutter Health, United
• One final thing: Formstack is holding a free CX webinar The Secret to Delighting Customers, Right Now on November 15 from 1-2 PM ET. Click the link to find out more.

About Liza

Liza Smyth is SVP of customer experience of Formstack, where she leads customer experience efforts, building a vision for delivering customer care and supporting the company’s 25,000 customers. Before joining Formstack, Smyth spent 15 years working for some of the world’s most prestigious tech companies, including Apple and LinkedIn. With experience throughout the customer journey—from international sales to growth and engagement—Smyth is a proven customer experience leader. In addition to Smyth’s passion for customer experience, she advocates for diversity, inclusion and belonging, and mental health leading Formstack’s DEIB Council. She is also a certified suicide prevention counselor.

Check out Formstack, say Hi to them and Liza on Twitter @Formstack and @lizasmyth and feel free to connect with Liza on LinkedIn here.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash