The Winning Intersection: Employee Experience and Customer Experience – Mary Poppen

[00:00:00] Nena Dimovska: Welcome to People Pulse. Today, we are thrilled to have Mary Poppen join us. Mary is a dynamic leader with a wealth of experience as a Chief Customer Officer, author, speaker, and advisor. She’s an expert in customer and employee experience, and one of the best individuals to speak on the critical connection between the two.

[00:00:22] Nena Dimovska: Mary’s thought leadership extends to her role as a faculty member, as at the Michigan State University, where she teaches in the Master’s Program for Customer Experience Management. As the author of Goodbye, Churn. Hello, Growth, she offers invaluable insights into driving business growth through enhanced experiences. Beyond her professional accomplishments Mary enjoys traveling, exercising, and wine tasting with friends. In today’s conversation, we’ll explore how to prioritize actions in employee experience programs, overcome key challenges, and discuss the emerging HR roles we expect to see by 2030. I hope you’ll enjoy this insightful discussion with Mary Poppen.

[00:01:02] Nena Dimovska: Welcome.

[00:01:03] Nena Dimovska: So when launching or scaling an employee experience program, what are some of the most common challenges in prioritizing action and driving changes that impact engagement? How can we effectively use data to create targeted action plans?

[00:01:19] Mary Poppen: So I love this question. When launching an employee experience program, the biggest obstacle that I’ve seen is when companies think it’s HR’s responsibility to make improvements. So the reality is HR can plan for, design and roll out the best engagement and experience programs around, right? But if leadership and managers aren’t part of the plan to take ownership for communication and action based on the feedback, then even the best program is sure to fail, right?

[00:01:53] Mary Poppen: Improvements and employee experience. It’s really a company wide responsibility. So all functions and levels. within the organization should play a role, including employees themselves, because they have a role, right? They gave feedback, they have a role to help kind of make it better. And that actually gets more buy in, you get greater champions that way too.

[00:02:15] Mary Poppen: But too often I hear it’s HR’s program, when in reality, it’s leadership’s responsibility to listen and take action on employee feedback. Another challenge is short sighted planning. So just rolling out a survey it’s not enough, right? Something has to be done with the feedback to create change or else people are going to stop filling out the survey or giving feedback, right?

[00:02:42] Mary Poppen: And then when they’re upset, you’re just going to start to see more, attrition. So once you get the ball rolling, you can’t stop. You have to focus on engagement and experience ongoing. Regarding the second part of your question, using data to create targeted action plans. I think effectively using data involves identifying key metrics like engagement scores, turnover rates and feedback trends to create targeted action plans. So data-driven insights can pinpoint specific areas needing improvement and validate the impact of interventions over time. And that’s really kind of the strategy that should be thought about. I do want to highlight and I’m really passionate about this. You probably hear me say it a few times. Is that action should be planned cross functionally versus in silos. So that’ll reduce inefficiencies and leverage resources optimally across the organization. But when a CEO says: okay, you know, sales take action on your results and customer success, take action on your results.

[00:03:52] Mary Poppen: And, you know, all the retail stores take action on your results. What happens is you duplicate action, super big inefficiencies, but also you’re missing out on the opportunity to really kind of share and capitalize on real transformational change for the company. That’s a lot.

[00:04:13] Nena Dimovska: Wow. Yeah. I love your viewpoint saying that it’s much broader than just HR. It’s leadership accountability. It’s company wide responsibility, as you say, if we can summarize it. I’m really appreciative of the fact that you’re saying it’s accountability from all levels. Every employee, too, has the space to give feedback, and then it’s up to HR and leaders.

[00:04:39] Nena Dimovska: What do you do with that feedback? Do you act on it? And how do you act on it? Just one thing that I wanted to ask. You said that one of the things that should be measured is feedback trends. Can you perhaps share what’s one, let’s say good way of how to measure these feedback trends?

[00:04:58] Nena Dimovska: What’s something that you’ve seen working?

[00:05:00] Mary Poppen: Yeah. There’s so many ways to think about the trends. Ideally, I go to having tons of data across the entire employee journey, but let’s just focus on engagement itself. So if you are doing an engagement survey twice a year to the entire company, and then you’re doing maybe some always on feedback opportunities for employees, focus groups, things like that. Collecting and analyzing that data in a way that you can look at improvements and trends, not only in scores, but in the qualitative or comment.

[00:05:34] Mary Poppen: Right. Analytics. That gives you the insight into where you are focusing action and where you’re making progress and improvements and where there’s still gaps. So, if you look at improvements in whether employees feel like they have the resources to do their job effectively, right, or they have what they need in a remote or a hybrid working environment to be successful.

[00:06:00] Mary Poppen: You look at the trend over time of those scores. You should see them moving up into the right. And that feedback is indicating that the organization is taking the right action. And so those are some of the things to watch for in the trends, not just scores, but the qualitative too.

[00:06:17] Nena Dimovska: Thank you. That was very, very useful. Now, back in 2022, you published a book titled- Goodbye Churn, Hello Growth which delves into how customer intelligence can revolutionize customer centric strategies.

[00:06:32] Nena Dimovska: And you know, I was intrigued by the reviews. Maybe perhaps you can tell us what are the biggest challenges with getting customer intelligence adopted?

[00:06:43] Mary Poppen: Yeah. So customer intelligence is really exciting. And the reason it’s different than, you know, kind of typical organizational data reporting or insights. Is that it’s looking at customer behavior and customer sentiment and the impact the organization is having on the customer experience. So it’s looking at all of these things holistically.

[00:07:09] Mary Poppen: So what the book was really trying to focus on with how do you establish the right kind of metrics, the right structure, the right data gathering? And then analysis of that, for key insights on customer behavior that you can ultimately use to predict what they’re going to need in the future. And then your customer teams, your employees can get ahead of that.

[00:07:33] Mary Poppen: Right? Making them look like heroes, giving them what they need to be successful. So there’s this great kind of synergy between the employee experience and the customer experience. The biggest challenges for companies that I’ve seen are that there’s too many data silos. Data is not shared across the organization.

[00:07:51] Mary Poppen: Even if you’re capturing amazing data in each function, it’s not being shared. You’re not capitalizing on the opportunity to really make improvements. Right. For your customers and for your organization also, resistance to change from traditional methods. You know, people are busy and introducing something new that they’re going to have to do that just adds work or they don’t understand, makes it hard also to adopt, kind of a new way of thinking and a new strategy.

[00:08:18] Mary Poppen: And this is a big one is the need for a cultural shift. Toward data driven decision making. That really starts at the top. You know, the leadership has to say that we’re going to use data to inform our decisions and make, you know, the right improvements in the right investments to move forward.

[00:08:37] Mary Poppen: So, successful adoption requires clear communication of the benefits. You know, what’s in it for employees, what’s in it for customers, what’s in it for the organization. Robust data integration strategies. That’s a big one. Companies have to have someone who can sort of streamline and centralize, a lot of the data. And then leadership’s commitment to driving a customer centric culture across the company.

[00:09:03] Mary Poppen: So one thing I will say, you don’t have to have a hundred data points to get started. You might be surprised to know that you could actually start with three. So if you have three data sources or more, you can start to find meaningful insights in the data. The key really is ensuring the data is accurate and consistent.

[00:09:24] Mary Poppen: And then you can add layers, you know, of insights and data over time. But just, for example, if you have customer satisfaction scores and you have product usage, if you’re a product company and customer spend, right? These are likely three variables that you have and that you’re collecting already.

[00:09:44] Mary Poppen: You can get started and look at the relationships across this data and look at the trends, look at the patterns, and you might find really helpful things like: customers who have a minimum of 40 percent adoption of their licenses purchased within the first six months tend to have three times the spend and two times higher customer satisfaction than customers who don’t have that level of adoption.

[00:10:11] Mary Poppen: That’s the kind of insight that will help really drive companies to the right decisions. You know, for the right audience at the right time.

[00:10:20] Nena Dimovska: Thank you. I’m now even more excited about reading the book as somebody who is, I would say, obsessed with data. And as you said, not just any data, but having consistent, reliable, qualitative data. I really love about what you said, you know, people sometimes might be resistant toward this cultural change out of fear. Once again, it also comes from the leadership. Getting that cultural change. So as we move towards a future that has limitless possibilities and in how and where we work, research has identified 13 emerging HR roles by 2030. Now, thesee focus on five key themes, to help leaders achieve success through human machine collaboration. We have: to cultivate AI literacy, to enable a work from anywhere culture, to strengthen the human machine partnership, to promote innovation and wellbeing, and to personalize the employee experience. Now, I think it’s safe to say that the HR role has never been more dynamic and subject to change. So, what’s your viewpoint around

[00:11:36] Mary Poppen: this?

[00:11:36] Mary Poppen: So I agree 100%. So the evolving nature landscape will focus on roles, definitely. That target integrating AI and personalizing employee experience. So it’s gonna be a dynamic shift. Requires HR leaders to adapt by cultivating AI literacy. Like you mentioned, they have to focus on how can we translate AI capabilities, into how our employees can use them effectively, right? Enablement, all of those things. Supporting remote work capabilities is going to need to continue, right? People have gotten used to working from home or a hybrid solution. And they’ve proven they can get results in a remote work setting. So HR is going to need to continue to think about supporting remote work and hybrid work capabilities.

[00:12:30] Mary Poppen: And then championing holistic employee well being strategies. So HR really continues to become even more and more strategic right? In the future, I think to do this, you have to have an understanding of how to leverage data to create cross functional priorities and alignment. That’s really going to be key.

[00:12:53] Mary Poppen: And I want to double click for a minute on personalizing employee experience as a target for the evolution of HR. Because more and more- this is so exciting! More and more, specifically AI, it’s going to help us shape an employee experience that can target unique needs by role, by location, by industry, by skill sets and individual characteristics that the company is aware of.

[00:13:19] Mary Poppen: So using insights from the data to predict what people need most is really not too far right, into the future. And I think that’s so key for retaining talent, improving customer and business outcomes. And ultimately, you know, I think prediction does become possible with AI and good data. Gotta specify you have to have the good data too, but this is going to be the foundation for differentiated employee and customer experiences.

[00:13:50] Mary Poppen: This is where organizations can really get competitive.

[00:13:54] Nena Dimovska: Yeah, well said. And, you know, obviously AI has the potential to revolutionize how we work. But, you know, many companies, especially large enterprises struggle with effective implementation in the change management process, which we briefly discussed about. You know, leaders are expected to prioritize value creation. To boost AI literacy, to ensure responsible AI practices. How would you advise leaders to fully leverage the value of AI into their organizations?

[00:14:30] Mary Poppen: I love this question, too. We could talk for hours, I think.

[00:14:33] Nena Dimovska: Yeah, I’m sure.

[00:14:35] Mary Poppen: Well, I like to divide AI into two categories. This is how I think about how organizations can optimize it. One is AI for analysis. And one is AI for scale. Just to be concise. AI for analysis is really around data science purposes. It’s focused on understanding what drives success for employees, for customers, for the company.

[00:15:01] Mary Poppen: And organizations that leverage that understanding are going to be able again to predict future needs and make strong business decisions. AI for scale is really more about leveraging generative AI capabilities to empower employees to do their jobs better and faster, right? Because they’re going to be able to provide them, you know, efficiencies in summarizing meetings and email drafts.

[00:15:30] Mary Poppen: Those are really, important foundational things that all organizations should be considering now to help scale and help empower their employees. But companies that are able to leverage both well, will differentiate themselves from the competition while scaling their operations. So, I think to fully leverage AI value, leadership, prioritize aligning initiatives with strategic goals.

[00:15:56] Mary Poppen: Fostering a culture of AI literacy. You know, what does that mean? You have to have guidance in a playbook for your employees to understand how to use it well. And establishing clear governance frameworks for responsible AI use. So kind of doubling down on the governance piece because this is going to help not only with adoption and scale, but it’s going also help avoid some security risks, right? So if employees are given the opportunity to just use AI however they want, you’re gonna have some really early adopters that get creative. And unfortunately, it can be used in a way that you know, may not be good for the organization ultimately. So I’d recommend putting an AI governance framework in place right away.

[00:16:44] Mary Poppen: If one doesn’t already exist and then identifying how the data is going to be gathered, analyzed and shared along with what processes can and should leverage AI. This is going to be key to sustain a successful AI strategy. So that’s my view.

[00:16:59] Nena Dimovska: Thank you so much for sharing. And what really resonated with me is that both of your perspectives on how it can be leveraged in the organizations is for the, improvement of the people. So the foundation is

[00:17:12] Mary Poppen: either

[00:17:12] Nena Dimovska: to predict better business needs or to, you know, scale.

[00:17:16] Nena Dimovska: So just to help people do their jobs in a better, more efficient way. So I think that if we are having that mindset across the organization, this transformation should come much easier. And thank you so much for the amazing perspective. Now, in your current role you focus on employee experience to enhance productivity, customer value, and agility across organizations. Can you tell us how do you measure the value and impact of the employee experience in initiatives and perhaps maybe share some key metrics that you found to be most useful in driving performance.

[00:17:57] Mary Poppen: Yeah, great question. And I get this a lot from our customers and from prospects. So some of the key metrics to pay attention to are employee engagement scores, productivity levels, retention rates of both employees and customers, customer satisfaction metrics, and revenue growth by customer.

[00:18:20] Mary Poppen: So these are kind of the key, top of mind metrics that I think of that every organization should be capturing. And actually most should already have access to. And there’s many EX and CX solutions in the market that are starting to consider how do we bring some of these things together in one place? But currently that’s not the case, right? So companies need to have internal analysts or leverage external consultants. Like us. Who can help understand the relationship across all of the data points. Because companies that really can put a focus on leveraging data and insights, understand where to put investments.

[00:19:04] Mary Poppen: And ultimately they’re able to enhance the competitive positioning and take their organizational performance to new levels. Without that, again, like cross functional data and streamlining the data and looking at the linkage of the metrics, you’re missing out on so much of that rich insight on where to take action.

[00:19:26] Mary Poppen: What’s working, what’s not, what do we need to do going forward?

[00:19:29] Nena Dimovska: Yeah, I guess it comes down to the fact that if that data is evaluated in silos, it doesn’t have as much power as if you’re looking at it more holistically across the organization. And I do understand that it requires a certain level of expertise. Experience to be able to understand and build system that work together great. And very importantly, how this mixtures with each other, how changing one impacts changing other. And I think this is where organizations can truly or HRs can truly make an impact and add value to the business.

[00:20:13] Nena Dimovska: Thank you, Mary, for sharing your insights on influent customer experience, AI, and the evolving HR landscape. I hope you found Mary’s advice on using data to drive lasting change as valuable as I did.

[00:20:26] Nena Dimovska: Thank you for tuning in to People Pulse. Subscribe for more industry insights, and together we’ve just unlocked another heartbeat of the workplace.

[00:20:35] Nena Dimovska: Until next time, keep investing in your people and driving change.