Jennie Weber on CX – Where We’ve Come From and Where We’re Going

Be Customer Led Jennie Weber Interview Audio V2 (1)

And for those of you under a small rock somewhere in a corner of the planet who don’t know what Best Buy is, it is an amazing technology retailer. If I can, if that’s the best way to describe you guys, Jenny, totally. I have been a consumer number of times, great place to go buy electronics and super smart, intelligent people about the electronics there.

Jenny, thanks for coming on the show. I’m so excited to.

And I wanna talk about that as well. But before we get started, we ask every guest on the show, Jenny, What is your story? What is your journey? You know, what do you think were the differentiating factors in your career? Maybe even like how did you get into, into design and insights to begin with? Sure.

I think some of the context to know about my career is a little bit about my life, so I will kind of start with that. Cause I have more of a zigzag career versus like straight up a corporate ladder. I was a really young mom and ultimately ended up being a single mom for a while, and that really shaped my career and how my perspective of work and what that all meant.

And so it’s just kind of like important context to understand where my head was at and what I was thinking about. I started in sales. I was an insurance broker. Uh, partly because my dad was in the insurance business and so what do you know, at 22? That’s right. Like you’re really ready to make that decision, right?

But that’s where I started of 40. I’m not, I’m ready to make right. I quickly found that I did not like doing cold calls at all, was not my thing, but I loved. The people when I got in, I loved it. I loved hearing what was going on in their business and learning about them and understanding what their challenges were.

So kind of knowing that, I was like, okay, well what is that? Like, what is that part of the job that I like? And it sort of landed me into marketing. And so I, I moved into the marketing field and really have spent most of my career in. , but interestingly not all in what I would call core marketing communications.

I tended to end up in sort of complex, challenging, dynamic spaces where the experience itself. Wasn’t necessarily always broken, but like needed love. Like it was more about what are we gonna go do to be effective before I start talking about it in marketing. And to do that I had to understand the customer Sure.

And understand like, what, what should this look like? And I think that really shaped a lot of, you know, where I went in my career. And ultimately I ended up, you know, coming over to Best Buy. Similar story like working in complex spaces. I worked in Geek Squad services. I worked in the mobile phone category, complex businesses where the experience truly matters.

And that being in that kind of work gave me a lot of leverage because it required that I put the customer at the center of what I was doing. And I actually think the very best marketing. Does that really well. Mm-hmm. and you can see it. And so, you know, I think that that was pivotal to my career and to the success that I, I’ve been able to have.

And it’s kind of what ended up leading me right into a customer experience leadership role at Best Buy. Because I think in a lot of ways I was doing. CX and I was doing human centered design type work. Mm-hmm. , I didn’t have that language for it. Nobody would’ve called it that necessarily, but that’s what I was doing.

And so now I lead a team of digital designers, physical space designers, uh, researchers and measurement team. And it’s like a perfect combination of the things I love to do. What I’m really great at. What the organization needs from me, the value that that Best Buy really needs from me. I

Not a lot of companies have the forethought, frankly, to do that. And it really has an impact on the experience. Cause the designers could be sitting somewhere way over in another part of the organization. They’re not close to their insights teams. I can’t tell you how many teams I’ve talked to, you know, insight teams, analytics teams.

How often do you meet with the designers and they’re like, we don’t meet with the designers. Why would we do that? I’m like, because they need what you’re selling pretty badly to, you know, to actually do the work. So good on you guys for bringing that together. I’m curious your perspective, just, you know, being in this role, coming outta marketing, I love that you came into sales too.

That’s so awesome. How do you think CX has evolved over the last, say, three to five years, and how is kind of the role, even from a Best Buy perspective, if you can talk. Maybe we keep it maybe a little more high level, but how do you see that work as evolved over the last couple years?

Five years ago we had pockets of incredibly talented designers, but they really were pockets, you know, in places doing. Unique work, maybe only in digital or a project here and there, where we wanted more strategic design thinking. Whereas today, and this was really intentional today we have a collection of teams that are all together in kind of what we call like a center of excellence.

Mm-hmm. . We’ve created a community of practice, so like-minded practitioners can work together, learn from one another. And in a lot of ways that ended up elevating the practice here at Best Buy, which does a few things. One, it sort of gives a little bit of power and teeth to experience design and putting that customer experience at the heart of what we’re doing.

And then two, it’s created much more awareness of what human centered design is so that now you hear other leaders talk about it and, and talk about design principles that they might. Otherwise talked about five years ago. Yeah. For no other reason than they weren’t aware. And so I think that’s the big evolution that we’ve seen, and I don’t think we’re uncommon in that.

I think that’s a, a pretty common journey across industries.

Not a lot of companies, even enterprise level like you guys are there yet. Well, it’s exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Good on you guys. Yeah. Let’s talk about sort of the,

Right? Um, so, and that’s really exciting part of the role being, being able to have those conversations across the spectrum. Let’s talk about the core tenants for you, for CX especially coming from a marketing and sales perspective. I don’t know, maybe that shape. Your philosophy and your thinking and the core tenants of customer experience, how do you, you know, what are those for you?

Do you flex more than others? I mean, what, what are some of the kind of, you know, those primary, you know, first principle type things that you guys come back to from a CX perspective?

Yeah. But you know, even as I say that, I think they are really aligned with human centered design principles or thinking about the customer. Mm-hmm. , for me, it starts with people. It’s people, people, people. It’s like that is the core of it. And. To me, that’s a huge part of leadership. It’s also how you’re meeting your customer.

It’s making sure you’re taking care of your employees, especially those that are working with customers every day. Mm-hmm. . And I think when I say that the things I think of are caring about people. Being really curious. Like, I wanna know what’s going on. Yeah. Like what’s happening in your life, like what’s, what’s cooking?

What drives you, what motivates you? What do you care about? And so having like a high level of curiosity and then, and really centering the work back to the human. And again, like to me that’s like a leadership thing, but also, yeah, that’s design. Like that’s where it starts. You have to think about the humans that are involved.

So I think I’d start. The second one is, you know, sort of the KISS philosophy. Keep it simple. Silly. I’m gonna use silly . Yeah, no, that’s all good. Um, keep it clean for the kids. And the reason I say that is I, I tend to think we overcomplicate things a lot. And if you think about the industry you’re in or you’re measuring experiences, there’s so much you can measure that you, you almost, it’s like you get lost in the sea of what’s out.

And that’s true across all the things that we look at, including insights and macro and the complexity of our business. Like how do we boil it down and take some of that complexity out so that people can make actionable decisions. And again, I try to do that as a leader, but I also think like that’s good design practice as well.

A hundred percent. Um, make it simple. Make it actionable for people to do something. So I think, you know, those are some of the core, core elements that I think about. And again, I think both from a leadership perspective and a design perspective, really,

I feel like I always have this conversation with other leaders in this space that sometimes we can’t get it out of our own way, out of our own jargon. Totally. You know, if you think and, and just the acronyms that we use and the, and just like, you know, I think we confuse the business and confuse ourselves sometimes as well.

And I think that’s something that, I don’t know when we’re gonna all get together from a customer experience perspective, but we need a kumbaya moment where we just say, here are the words we’re all gonna use. As in a just really quick example, I was in a, at a conference yesterday and someone asked me, what X are you?

And I’m like, , I don’t understand that question. I’m like, tell me a little bit more what you mean. And they were like, well, are you ux? Are you, you know, are you cx? Are you mrx? Are you bx? Are you px? And I’m like, oh my gosh, are there that many X’s? Like that’s just bananas. Yep. So I’m like, you know, I’m just customer experience.

And isn’t that what we all do at the end of the day anyway? Yeah. You know, anyway.

Especially if you’re talking to a CEO or a head of a business, they don’t understand this stuff. They can care less like, how are you helping me achieve business outcomes through whatever toolkit and expertise you’ve got. Right.

To make decisions, they need to know what they need to know. Mm-hmm. , they don’t need the extra, extra. Information. That’s right.

You know, tell us a little bit about how, you know, you think about technology. Not even, I mean, obviously even the design space, right? Technology has had a profound impact. How, how do you guys think about technology and is there any tech that you guys, you all are really excited about, uh, when you think about customer experience and whether that’s for the team or for the business?

Yeah, I, I’m curious to learn more there.

Like all of a sudden we’re virtual. How do you do co-creation sessions when you’re all over the place? I actually think some of those tools, Like they saved us one during that timeframe. Mm-hmm. . But now I can’t imagine rolling up a sheet of white paper with a bunch of post-its on it and shoving it in a corner and saying, oh, we need to keep that.

Like, I would never do that again. I think some of the collaboration tools have just been huge in moving us to, and we can include way more people, like now we can have co-creation sessions with so many more people like that. I just think. Practical basic, but has been a huge, huge thing for us. One of the other things that I’m excited about, because I sit with digital and physical design and the research team.

Mm-hmm. , we’ve been able to get really creative about how we test some of our design prototypes. And specifically for physical, because what we used to do is we’d build it or we would mock it up and then we’d bring customers in and see how they interact with it. As you can imagine, that is really expensive.

Yeah. And it takes way too much time. And so with, with augmented reality, what we’ve been able to do now is we can, you know, create something in an augmented way and still have really great customer feedback and. That’s pretty huge. You can test and try a lot of different concepts before you ever build anything, uh, to see how it works for a customer, uh, which is really exciting.

Um, we’re doing a lot of testing around, you know, what’s the right type of store, what’s the right kind of experience. And so instead of mocking it up in a prototype room, we can actually create it, create a virtual example of what we’re talking about, and have customers explore that virtually. And tell us what do you think about.

Whatever XYZ experience that we’ve made and get insights from them that way and to what you are talking about. We absolutely are using ar like we have a, a whole AR tool in the app that allows you to test different refrigerators in your kitchen, which is super important because if you order the wrong fridge size bill and we deliver it to you, it’s a terrible experience for you and us

Yeah. Um, and we were kind of testing those out and we create these like huge Lego branches and say, okay, here’s the new experience. Here’s how the flow works. . I love it. I love that you now do it digitally. That makes way more sense. By the way, let’s talk about culture a little bit. If we switch gears, Not every CX leader looks at themselves as an influencer of culture broadly across an organization outside of like their immediate kind of scope.

How do you approach or think about your role and its ability to drive culture change and be a much more sort of customer led organization? I know you guys went through a huge transformation couple years back. I mean, huge story. I think it was HBR if memory serves me right. Yeah. And obviously a lot of change.

How have you seen maybe the work that you and the team do really transform the way people think about the customer and their role in creating the experience?

You have to kind of pull it along and so you don’t have a choice. I think there’s a handful of things that we tried to do to move, move the culture. It, the first one is super practical. You’ve gotta have tools, just simple tools that, that people can use. I’ll give you the example that we did. We, we had something called customer led questions.

And we plastered them. In fact, I have ’em behind me here on my wall. We plastered them everywhere in the office, in conference rooms, uh, wherever. And they were basically like, what need are you solving? And how do you know? Those are not hard questions, but they’re like simple prompts for every conversation.

So we started with something like that. You have to have. Not just leadership alignment, that’s absolutely important. Not just leadership support, but leadership role modeling. And so you need the executive level leaders, your ceo, your cfo, your merchants. You need all of them using their platforms cuz they have ’em, right?

Like they’re the ones doing the big town halls, they’re talking to all the employees. You need them to leverage their platform. To talk about how important customer experience is, why it’s important to center around the customer, and then you need them role modeling that behavior. You need them asking the question of, is this really solving the need for our customer?

Is this the right experience? Like have we thought about the experience? And I feel like we’re really fortunate because our executive leaders, um, and specifically Corey Berry does that, she centers conversations around that. And I don’t think you truly change the culture without that. And then I think the last thing that I, I would call out is you need education and training.

Because, because to your point earlier around all the different language and mm-hmm. , who’s really thinking about it fully, People don’t do what they don’t know. And so if you want them to change their behavior and think differently, you’ve gotta create ways for them to learn and understand and sort of absorb what you’re talking about and that that takes some effort.

And I’m guessing that’s probably something that a lot of places skip over. And so I think those are some of the key foundational elements to driving those behavior changes in the culture.

Obviously training is a huge part of that, right? Yeah. But you are, you know, someone recently said people aren’t afraid of change. They’re afraid of being changed. Interesting. And I was like, well, that’s pretty deep. That was pretty good. That’s interesting. Yeah. I think people are generally afraid of change more around sort of, you know, again, how does this impact me, et cetera.

But yeah, but if you are not helping people understand, and you know what that change is, and you’re training them on that change, You’re absolutely right. You’re never gonna get the, the level of commitment or long term sustainability of that change, obviously, over

Trade off around, you know what you’re gonna prioritize, what you’re not gonna prioritize, and so you have to have sort of. Those teeth and that like leverage at the table to be able to counterbalance other points of view that might be there. Um, so today I think it’s really important and I think what I see potentially happening over time is that more of the leaders are sponsors of the customer.

And so then you maybe need some of that less. I think you’ll always have some type of customer officer, marketing officer, something like that at the table. What I’d love to ideally see is that you’ve got, you know, chief operators, chief merchants, chief finance officers also asking the question around, is this really solving the need for the customer?

Is this really our best foot forward in the experience? Much like all executives have a fiduciary responsibility. They all have a responsibility to the customer. And so I, you know, I think we’re seeing that transformation here at Best Buy and it’s really exciting. And I think to me that’s like, that’s the evolution.

When everybody owns responsibility for the customer, that’s when you really start to make a

Yeah. Sort of that, uh, in a. What are your thoughts on the future of cx? Like where do you see the discipline maybe going more broadly, do you think that similar to maybe that that CXO, where you have other C-suite leaders, it’s more embedded in their day to day. Do you see, do you see sort of customer being more embedded into the operations of the organization, not just sort of, you know, the customer facing folks.

Obviously they need to be flexing that muscle all the time. Do you see a need for a CX team in the. I know this is a tough one because you run a CX team, so I don’t want you to, don’t say anything like that’s gonna, your, your employees will listen. I don’t wanna work myself out

You got a family, you gotta pay the bills. I personally don’t think that we will ever get to a place where a formalized customer experience team and function and discipline it needed, but yeah. Okay. Curious to see, like, how do you see it evolving?

Like it is a, a very valued and I think a skill set that we’ll need into the future, maybe even more. So. What I do think is interesting, and we’ve been, you know, testing and trying all of this, is this idea of how do you take someone. Maniacally focused on the customer and have them almost embedded within those operational teams.

Mm-hmm. . And that’s been a huge unlock for us because it, again, it’s like kind of got a person in there with a seat at the table, helping other leaders think strategically. And while they’re doing that, those other leaders are starting to learn what that means to be customer centered and to use. Human centered design principles through their decision making.

And so I don’t, you know, I don’t know that you would ever completely break apart the teams, but I do think that there’s a model, especially in matrix organizations, where you’ve got people who are embedded and acting as if they’re part of a team that might be delivering, uh, a value proposition to the customer.

Mm-hmm. so that, you know, you, you kind of end up with multiple teams that you’re part of, but I think that’s okay. Like you, you got a team you come back to and you’re like, okay, this is maybe my home base with my other design friends. But then you’re going out and sort of bringing that, uh, experience of design to other people, which I think is super powerful.

Absolutely. One other thing. Yeah. We talked about it a little bit earlier when you were saying like, what x are you, like, which one of these are you? I do think one evolution that we’ll have to make, and I say we like all, all design thought leaders, we can’t be too precious about what we do. Like it’s not, it’s not an us or them thing.

Yeah. Like my way of doing it isn’t better than someone else’s way of doing it. And I think we’ll have to be careful of that because if we start to get really precious about like, design thinking is the only way. It’s so alienating and we, we really gotta bring people in. Like, I wanna wanna know what our operational leaders think They are super close to how it works.

Mm-hmm. , like they’ve got awesome insights, so bring ’em. I think we’ll have to be kind of, we have to be careful of that as we continue to build these teams.

That’s the way, that’s, that’s the process. The only way, well, you know, can you flex on that a little bit because, you know, getting executives in a room for three full days is not ideal. Right. You know, could you use the toolkit or could you marry the toolkit that you have with something a little bit more over there?

Right? So I love, and I love that you call it, don’t be so precious, that’s just perfect, but you’re a hundred percent right. Like at the end of the day, we have a toolkit. We should be able to flex with that toolkit to the needs of our internal customers, right? And you know, sometimes good enough is the right level of solution to you.

Totally.

I love asking this question cuz the, the responses are super varied. Where do you go for inspiration?

Mm-hmm. . So that’s one place I get inspiration. Another is less about inspiration and just more where I can do creative thinking. And this is gonna sound maybe kind of silly, but it’s going on walks. I mean literally like getting out of my house or getting out of the office. Yeah. And being outside one. I think nature is like such a rejuvenator, but going for a walk for some reason unlocks my head and I can hash through so many problems that way, be so much more creative when I’m doing that.

And so I use a lot of like walking time to do, to do think.

I’m really excited. We’re going on vacation a couple weeks and we’re driving south and it’s like a six hour drive. You’re gonna have so much time. I’m gonna have so much to think about. Like I love That’s awesome. Super quiet. I’m super. I’m in the car and, uh, probably drives my wife and my family crazy.

Like, just please talk to your family, .

So, yeah. Right. Exactly. So they’re pretty, they’re pretty quiet, which we bought from Best Buy, by the way. All right. I’ve got one final question for you, and this is by no means. Me being lazy as a podcast host, but I, I, I just started doing this, so I’m really curious to see how it’s gonna work out and people will play along.

You do not know who my next guest is. Okay. I will not divulge who the, who you are to my next guest, but what is one question I should ask my next guest?

What, what, what are the roadblocks that keep companies brands from really centering and making decisions that are truly in the best interest of the customer? Okay, that’s a great question. Cause we’re all facing ’em. So like absolutely we can all like commiserate together, learn from

Is writing a book on customer obsession to truly define. Cool. Yeah. So off camera, check it out. When we stop recording I’ll tell you who it is. Okay. But, uh, Jenny, thank you so much for coming to show. This has been an awesome conversation. I’m so glad that you agreed to come on and, you know, just share your perspective and your knowledge, and I know our listeners are gonna love this.

Thank you so much. I, I

Talk to soon