CXA Podcast, Ep 7 - Lynn HunsakerHello and welcome to bring your own chair. A podcast by the cx accelerator community It's anon profit that is set up and designed to help cx professionals At any stage of their career togrow to expand and be at the top of their game.I'm sally mildren your host I'm the ceo and chief strategist of clarity px. We're a boutiqueagency that helps small and rural health care to really grow through aligned brand, Experienceand culture. We're so excited about today's message. We are talking today with our guest whohas a 30 plus year career in CX.And it started with a little old task of being chair of a 12 country Six division task force todesign the customer satisfaction methodology for that organization Whoo talk about a big firstproject, but she has deep expertise in cx in voice of the customer in customer satisfactioncorporate quality And leadership.And she provides amazing insights that will benefit anyone in CX. Lynn Hunsaker ClearAction,a customer experience consultancy that grows businesses by centering on the customer'swellbeing. In her work, she is aiming for automatic experience excellence. She's recognized asa seasoned customer experience thought leader and author.She's an educator, a transformationist, an R. O. I. Strategist and innovator. And we're reallythrilled to have you here today. Thanks for being with us today, Lynn. It's my pleasure. Thanksso much for inviting me.I like to ask this question to start with, with all our guests is what led you to CX? It's not,especially in 91. Yeah. It wasn't so common everywhere. So how'd you get here? Well, it wasactually more common than you think at that time, but, uh, I started my career after my MBA inthe strategic planning department as a strategic information manager.And part of that involved going out to our customers. Across North America and interviewingthem to find out how they viewed our performance versus our competitors versus theirexpectations as a bracket on each dimension of the experience and value. What, what was thevalue for the price paid? And based on all of that insight, uh, we adapted our corporatestrategy accordingly, which I think is kind of rare today.Wouldn't it be wonderful if more companies or every company did that? Right. So after acouple of years, they said, look, we're doing a total quality management, uh, initiative, and partof that is customer satisfaction. You're already doing that. Why don't you help us figure outexactly what it means in this context of TQM and lead a task force to figure it out.Because we were in a rural location, even though we were a fortune 250 company, they, uh,Wanted me to go and research what it means instead of just figuring it out and doing itbecause I'm a smart person, which was the way people do in Silicon Valley later on in mycareer, but I had the luxury of going to visit John Goodman, for example, in Washington, D. C.,who is very renowned for all these studies on, customer satisfaction, customer service, as wellas many other companies and providers. So that was really the start of it. And I beganspeaking at conferences in 1992, the second annual AMAS ASQ customer satisfactionconference, for example.That is awesome. I, there's so many ways we can go with this conversation. We talked a lotabout a lot of things and I thought, Oh, this could be a three hour episode, but we're trying notto do that today. One of the things in our setup conversation for this podcast. You talked a lot about how, um, listening to the voice of the customer and, you know, some of the work youjust described is, um, that sometimes we get it wrong.And there were a few things that stood out to me that I thought were so interesting. You saidthat when we're listening to the voice of the customer, particularly with, you know, anything,but now you're talking about. So cultural differences, geographic differences, all the things.Um, one of the things that you said before was that when we're going after the voice of thecustomer, we need to learn to ask more interesting questions and I loved that conversationbecause you talked about how we're asking the wrong questions when we're going afterfinding out what the customers really want or like or need and.Often it's more about us than about them. So can you talk about that a little bit and maybeshare some examples for us? That's how can we be more interesting? And what are, where arewe going wrong with that? So, right. I mean, the way that things started for me, the dynamicsin America were that we had very strong competition from Japan.Tony Walkman, for example, although consumer electronics were being taken over byJapanese brands as a preference of American consumers. Also, the American steel industry,semiconductor industry, automotive industries were facing. Really tremendous competitionfrom Japan. Essentially, we were just kind of getting too big for our britches here in America.The, the, uh, government as, as well started a national quality award...
