Jim Tincher on the evolution of customer journey mapping and journey tech

Jim Tincher, Heart of the Customer

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[00:00:00] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody welcome back to another week of Be Customer Led I’m with a really interesting and amazing individual. Jim Tincher is founder, CEO and journey mapper in chief at Heart of the Customer. Now Heart of the Customer is Minneapolis based as Jim is, but they work with clients all over the U S as well as internationally.

[00:00:19] And Jim is one of those amazing people that has. One of the more interesting perspectives on not only journeys in their impact, but also customer experience broadly. So I’m super excited to have Jim on the show for you guys this week, Jim, welcome to Be Customer Led. It’s great to have you on.

[00:00:33] Jim Tincher: Thanks. So I’ve had the circle for a while in the virtual calendar.

[00:00:36] We’re looking forward to it. So yeah,

[00:00:38] Bill Staikos: I’m excited. So we’re going to get right into it. I ask every guest starting off, Jim, just. A little bit about your journey, how you started out then start your own business about eight years ago. What gave you that customer bug from early on and the sort of the spark for Heart of the

[00:00:52] Jim Tincher: Customer

[00:00:53] I don’t, I it’s hard for me to articulate what gave me the bug early on, but I really wasn’t informed a lot of my approach was 10 [00:01:00] years ago when I left.

[00:01:01] The world’s lamest customer experience program, and it was terrible. I got nothing done. I tried, I came into a large healthcare organization that never talked to customers. And when I talked to people about this, I said we don’t need to talk about. We’re customers. Yeah. The most oddball customers’ world.

[00:01:19] And one of the things we’ve led the nation in sales, which you know that for years, a lot of sense, what people didn’t notice is we also led the nation in percentage of people canceling [00:01:30] their accounts. And nobody saw that because there were so many new people coming in every year and healthcare is very annual insurances.

[00:01:38] And so I was leading efforts to try to improve things, but I failed. I totally failed. I. I had the world’s best business problem or worst bang look at it. And that we, you we’re leading the nation percentage of people, canceling accounts 14% of people didn’t we had, we were in the health savings account space.

[00:01:56] 14% of people didn’t open the account missing out on [00:02:00] hundreds of free dollars from their employers. And I wasn’t able to drive any changes by having two of the best business problems out there, largely because I didn’t talk about the business. I started with, oh, we got to listen to customers.

[00:02:13] Customers are frustrated. No customers aren’t frustrated yesterday are no, they aren’t. And I totally failed to drive any change.

[00:02:20] Bill Staikos: Yeah. Look at my sales numbers. How do you argue again? How do you argue that sometimes now fast forward a couple of years, harder of the customer.

[00:02:26] What gave you the idea? Especially if you’re like, Hey. I [00:02:30] haven’t been so successful. It sounds like it was more of a business problem than a Jim Tincher problem. But where did you get the idea for heart of the customer? And I love the name by the way. I don’t know if I’ve ever told

[00:02:38] Jim Tincher: you. I well, first of all, I think you can triangulate pretty clearly say the problem was me.

[00:02:44] I didn’t do well at best buy either. I got fired from Gallup. I got fired from ELICOS. There’s a consistency there. And I was working at a research organization about nine years ago and we were asked to do some work experience, work for a client and through [00:03:00] an intermediary, a digital firm.

[00:03:01] And they said, do a journey map what? What’s a journey map. And they said, here we’ll give you a. And probably what you expect. It was a PowerPoint slide with some bubbles on it. You put the bubbles up or down. Bam, people felt, and bill, I just got offended. I just, I know I can’t do this. He can’t take the richest of the customer experience representative with some bubbles on a PowerPoint slide.

[00:03:25] It doesn’t work. And at that time I had a blog. I actually had a blog. I [00:03:30] started a couple of years earlier. Cause I was so frustrated about trying to get the word out about listening to customers and started my blog. I know about 10, 12 years ago. And at that point I had 50 readers. My wife, my mom, it’s adorable.

[00:03:43] And I spent about a month thinking I want to do. How would I do it and I’d built a possible template and it went viral. When I got fired because they turned me into sales rep then fired because I couldn’t sell, I had 60,000 people viewing that site. And I realized when I came [00:04:00] home, I’m packing my bags, that my ugly little blog site was number one in Google for journey mapping.

[00:04:07] Oh, my gosh. How cool is

[00:04:08] Bill Staikos: that?

[00:04:09] Jim Tincher: Yeah. Yeah. This whole employee thing isn’t working for me. I think there’s a demand there to do it. And so two weeks later I had my first. And that was the Genesis of the work we do not harder. The customer is really bringing those best practices. We’re best known for journey mapping, but overall customer experience, it’s spend the time trying to understand how do great programs do it and then bring that to everybody [00:04:30] else.

[00:04:30] Bill Staikos: So we’re going to get into that and you’ve written some books on that and you’ve got another one coming up as well. So we’ll talk a little bit about that, I’m a big believer in. And why I like asking the journey question a little bit as well. For individuals I’m a big believer in just thinking about the past and how does that maybe affect and change the way you go forward in your strategy and how you’re thinking about driving change in an organization.

[00:04:53] I’m curious from your perspective, and you’ve seen if you’ve been through a few rodeos by now where do you, how far has customer experience come for you? I [00:05:00] feel like we’re still at this weird inflection point. And there’s so much out there like CX is failing. No, one’s doing a good job.

[00:05:06] You’ve got Forester writing stuff. Like one for, CX leaders are gonna lose their job last year and all this stuff. What are you seeing? Like how far has it come for you?

[00:05:15] Jim Tincher: It’s very inconsistent. It’s all over the place. And that’s not unusual with an area that’s growing. You know what I’ve seen on let’s start with the negative side.

[00:05:24] Is that in some organizations. Customer experience has created so of silo, [00:05:30] which, we’re supposed to be against silos. But I, one of the ways I define a silo is if you use your own metrics and your own definition of success and no other organization, I could think of relies entirely on a survey for their outcome and not, and great CX programs don’t either, but many do.

[00:05:46] Yeah. And that’s different credit outside. And we did these interviews, we talked about design, I’ve done last year, we did over a hundred interviews of people in customer experience to understand what is it that drives success. And one of the interviews I [00:06:00] remember is I start the interviews by saying, so pretend I’m interviewing you bill, which I did.

[00:06:05] First of all, how If I were to ask you what the experience is even better or worse, how would you ask that question then? The next one was, how would your CEO answer the question? And the third would, how was, how would your favorite finance person answer that question? And of course you had great answers for all three, but one person stopped me and said Jim, you’re making an assumption that I know somebody from finance key got me.

[00:06:29] You got me [00:06:30] there. I did make an assumption that you knew somebody from finance. And we find a lot of times that’s been hard for customer experience to create those connections. So the negative sides, when we did our journey mapping study for the first book, we found that 70% of the time customer experiences did not invite it to the journey mapping initiative.

[00:06:51] That’s just crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, the HR only 7% of the time even market research was [00:07:00] invited less than half the time they’re creating their own silent. And blew me away, but that’s something negative. Say on the positive side, we have these programs. I’m calling change-makers Roxy at UK G formerly ultimate software.

[00:07:15] We’ve got Jan over at Dow. Nancy had Haggerty and number of other great programs. We’re doing just amazing work. And, they are really breaking down those silos and really engaging overall. [00:07:30] One of my favorite stories of that would be Jen at Dow and Jen Zamora leads, customer experience at Dow 130 year-old company, 40 or 50,000 employees.

[00:07:43] And we help them map their complaints journey and their product availability delivery journey. And she turned that into a dashboard to show the health of the journey. And she had a thousand licenses on the dashboard and she ran out of license. [00:08:00] She had so many leaders looking at the data, imagine over, these like a thousand licenses, my dashboard.

[00:08:06] Okay. That’s fine. No problem. That’s essentially unlimited until it isn’t. And she created such compelling information that people from all over the organization, leaders from all over were logging in to see the current state of the product delivery journey. And she went to the point where her team is only eight people, but.

[00:08:25] Dow was five. I think it is. Or maybe six now business units hired the additional [00:08:30] 25 or 30 other people that report into the business. But Don blinded gent work full-time on customer experience. Their legal team has an identified Spock for customer expects. No other business,

[00:08:45] Bill Staikos: no other business I’ve thought of as their legal team thinking about customer experience.

[00:08:49] When I was at Freddie Mac, when we talked we were doing a lot around this and even building our own journey, analytics capabilities in house And that was in the hands of the product owners. And we were even thinking about turning that [00:09:00] outward. What would this mean if we actually show this to our customers?

[00:09:02] So if they’re sitting there pressing the Freddie button 50 times, and we noticed that maybe some training is involved, your people can be more efficient. So you know that I love the. I’d love journeys as a tool. I really love when he started pending sentiment, operational, behavioral, financial data to it, and really making them come alive.

[00:09:23] I’ve never been a huge fan of the static journey. So maybe the, maybe my mind is going to the bubble PowerPoint that you saw that [00:09:30] would insult me too. But nonetheless, I really love it. And I know that’s how you guys think about it too. Why are. Why are they such, such an important tool? I, you and I know this, but like there, there could be a lot of folks out there in podcast land that maybe aren’t using that, more thinking about it.

[00:09:45] Why in your experience, what are the benefits?

[00:09:47] Jim Tincher: First of all, journeys are the experiences your customer. And they don’t experience your end-to-end your net promoter score. They experience a specific journey, whether that’s onboarding or that’s buying, which by the way, not [00:10:00] enough customer experience, focus on whether it’s renewing, filing a claim.

[00:10:04] That’s how customers experiences you is through a journey. And if you don’t focus on that and instead focus on, for example, processes, we are typically sub-optimizing the results and your customer has to navigate between them. We worked with a hospital and this is in the book where we first asked them what their thoughts are, the journey called hypothesis mapping.

[00:10:26] And they thought it was all about scheduling issues. What we learned is [00:10:30] actually we followed customers through getting a cancer screening, CT scan, ultrasound, MRI as well. Yep. We found was that everybody in the organization did their job really well, but nothing. And so the customer would go ahead and register online and the person would say, do you have a pen Hawaii?

[00:10:52] Because I need to give you directions because it was their job just to get you scheduled. So then you get there. Now you have Google maps, you [00:11:00] get to the hospital. Fine. Yeah. But you get to the hospital and you don’t know where to go because it was nobody’s job. Yeah. We had all these patients were really anxious.

[00:11:09] There’s a cancer scan getting lost in the hospital because. The person who designed the site, the signage was in a rational state of mind. The cancer patient is not worried that they have cancer and we’d have all these patients who would see something like outpatient surgery and say I’m an outpatient.

[00:11:25] I’ll go there. No it’s radiology and getting lost. And [00:11:30] so they would finally get their way to scheduling that to registration. They would register and the registration person very kind friendly, but when they’re all done, they’re done. And so the patient goes in. And since this isn’t a hospital that served emergency patients, they could get bumped and nobody was nobody’s job to tell them you’ve been bumped.

[00:11:50] So they’d sit there watching HGTV for a while to finally say what happened? Then they go in, they get the scan, the technician very friendly, but technician does his or her [00:12:00] job. And then the patient leaves and realize, I don’t know what’s next. Yeah. And we filed the biggest challenge was. The hospital thought about things at a process level, they didn’t connect the processes into a journey.

[00:12:14] And so the patient had to do it herself. The patient who, by the way, is undergoing a screening to see if she has cancer, has to be the one to glue the organization together. That’s a really critical,

[00:12:29] Bill Staikos: that’s a [00:12:30] really fascinating story. I think it really brings home the the point on the importance of that.

[00:12:34] Gosh, I don’t think I’ve, you’ve shared that story. I hope I hope folks take that to heart in terms of in terms of, some good practices and bad practices. We’ve talked about the one in the PowerPoint, but what are some of the better practices or maybe some more.

[00:12:47] The poor practices you’ve seen from our journey mapping perspective. And what do you as a company, heart of the customer, try and bring into organizations who probably already have journey maps that they’re asking you to review maybe.

[00:12:58] Jim Tincher: It’s really [00:13:00] looking at what is the role of the journey map.

[00:13:02] If your goal is create a journey, map bad goal. It’s really, we look at it in two roles. First of all, it’s a diagnostic of your expense. Which is the starting, it helps you show where you need to focus. Second of all is as a change management tool. And that’s where I know you said you’re not a fan of the static map.

[00:13:19] Actually, we F we have highly designed maps because we look at that as a change management tool, to be able to show somebody what the problems are, but that’s an event. So the first thing we found is [00:13:30] really important is to bring in a broad cross-functional. We had a lot of people we talked to in the sales process say we want to keep the team small so we can get done quicker.

[00:13:41] If your goal is to create a map. Yeah. That’s the way to do it. But if your goal instead is to drive change, that’s not the way to do it. Now. I look at a different organization. This is not Dao. This is a life insurance organization. We mapped a claims journey. They embedded a legal representative as part of [00:14:00] the journey mapping team.

[00:14:02] And as a result, what typically happens. I know where I was worked at in health insurance, you would put together something, you throw it over the wall to complaints and legal, who then spit it back out and say, here are all the things you can’t do. It sounds like banking, but yeah. So she’s actually though in the room say you can’t do it that way, but here’s how you could.

[00:14:20] And right there as part of the team ideating. So the first thing is really involving a broad cross functional team. The second thing we found from our research and I hate that. I [00:14:30] have to say this, but I do is that if you want to create a customer journey map, then you have to involve customers. In the process.

[00:14:39] And I run across all the time organizations that say our employees know the customer. No, they don’t. Yeah. As mentioned earlier, we don’t need to talk to customers. We, our customers don’t know you’re not, you’re the most oddball customers ever. And when we do our hypothesis mapping, we ask an organization to give us the three most critical moments of the journey.[00:15:00]

[00:15:00] We did an analysis. The average client gives us eight points. Now we don’t specialize in marketing to companies that can’t count. It’s not that it’s, that every silo has their own idea of what matters marketing has. Their ideas. Sales is their ideas. It has theirs operations, but everybody is designed today against those assumptions of what matters.

[00:15:21] And so they give us 8.3 moments of truth. We bring into real moments, shoes to the customer we found is that even though they threw 8.3 against the wall, [00:15:30] They still miss two thirds of the critical moments because the organization knows too much. And then not really able to look for the customer. And that’s includes customer service.

[00:15:41] That includes sales. Everybody is too knowledgeable and you’ve got to bring in the voice of the customer and we find a lot of groups missing out at least two. The third, by the way we found was that taking time to select the right job. And we’ve gone a long time, but what is that right journey? But [00:16:00] tying it to something specific and what do we recommend is defined a business problem.

[00:16:05] And we end up, we have a lot of conversations, people that say how do I find that business problem? Which is, it goes back to the siloed issue. If you’re really tuned into the business, it shouldn’t be, it should be more of how do I choose which one to focus on? Not how do I find

[00:16:18] Bill Staikos: one? We’ve always given counsel for people, when there, because I’ve gotten that question like what’s journey, do I start with, and I’ve always said, find the area where you make the most.

[00:16:28] Yes. Yes. And start there [00:16:30] one, you’ll probably have revenue leakage that you’ll identify, which is a good thing. Number two is if you improve that and make that more efficient, you could actually increase revenues and that’s all tie that back. And your CFO and your CEO will be super happy as well, whether you’re eradicating leakage or increasing revenue.

[00:16:45] And I’m sure there’s probably some efficiency gains in there somewhere too. But that’s a business problem. Like we want to reduce costs. We want to drive revenue by X percent. How do we figure that out? By optimizing that journey?

[00:16:58] Jim Tincher: Exactly. And you can often find [00:17:00] cost savings at the same time, because you’re doing things that are unnecessary perhaps, and you are losing people through audit.

[00:17:06] And that comes back to earlier. I’m starting to see a change now where more customer experienced people are focused on pre-sales. Which is we should be focused on there. I realized they’re not a customer yet, but you can take those same skills. And the benefit of presales is it’s a lot easier to show impact.

[00:17:24] Sure. Cause you can look at the current loss, the leakage from the sales funnel and then look how you [00:17:30] improved

[00:17:30] Bill Staikos: it. We’ve talked about and in your book, you’re writing, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re talking you’re talking about journey owners and you’ve seen that and, top, let’s say 10, 15% or whatever the number is of companies that you’ve been speaking to have a journey owners.

[00:17:43] Talk, talk to us a little bit about what you are seeing. And what is differentiated from companies that have identified journey owners versus who may be still product centric as an example?

[00:17:54] Jim Tincher: First of all, it is still pretty rare to find them doing a few. I was leading a conference last [00:18:00] week in Canada and talking to fellow, we have some, they’re a lot more common over in UK and the rest of Europe.

[00:18:06] Do we still count UK as part of Europe? Anyway, that’s that relevance?

[00:18:12] Bill Staikos: I never I just thought they were completely separate, but growing up with parents who immigrated from Greece, UK was just very different. And I don’t know if I’ve met and I’ve lived in London and I never considered UK part of Europe.

[00:18:24] Maybe they maybe felt different now. I don’t know. It’s a funny question. So topic for another day to [00:18:30] see it

[00:18:30] Jim Tincher: happen. And what’s critical about that is it takes an investment of course, of a headcount. It allows you to be a lot more efficient. And so we look, and we’re actually looking to implement these at a software company we work at because today in most journeys, nobody’s in charge and you might have customer experience step in for a bit, but customer experience by its very nature is very broad.

[00:18:53] The definition of customer experience is all the interactions. A customer has with you. And so [00:19:00] CX tends to be a mile wide and inch deep. That’s not broken. That’s just the nature of the role, a journey managers, the opposite. They tend to be an inch wide, a mile deep and take on something like onboarding.

[00:19:12] I’m a big fan of onboarding because nobody typically owns onboarding or everybody does, which is essentially the same thing. And by allocating one person. And when we say owns, they don’t own the P and L they don’t have usually any authority, but they own the [00:19:30] process of getting everybody on the same page and being able to drive change.

[00:19:35] And we did a survey as part of the book along with Usermind about a year and a half ago. And we found that we first looked at who’s able to drive change, and then we analyzed everything against. And we found that some of those were not able to drive change, still had journey managers, but those journey managers were typically responsible for collecting feedback.

[00:19:59] And that was it. [00:20:00] And when we asked about their ability to drive change, they influenced the people who influence the leaders change. Whereas when we looked at the effective organization, Occasionally the journey manager action was able to mandate change. That was rare more often they were in the room with the leaders and had direct access.

[00:20:21] So at the less effective organizations, they were typically just gathering feedback and sending it on an email somewhere. Whereas the more effective ones, they had authority to talk [00:20:30] to the leaders who could make the decisions.

[00:20:32] Bill Staikos: That’s really interesting. I love that model, and that’s where we were headed at my prior employer as well.

[00:20:37] And it really there are a lot of people excited about the transformational change that was that, that was. Really interesting way to think about your business and people working in the business and what they could do. Technology is a big part of this. The text-based really well from a journey perspective.

[00:20:50] I’m curious to just gonna get your perspective on we’ve talked about are a lot of people adopting this some more than others. The pure tech journey, analytics and [00:21:00] orchestration. Do you think people are maybe slower to adopt it because it is still relatively new? Or do you think people are slower to the adopter because they’re still getting comfortable with journeys?

[00:21:08] Jim Tincher: I think customer experience is a bad software. I think it starts there. I we’re good at buying no Qualtrics and Medallia. Thank you very much. Yes. Yes, but not so good beyond that. ClearBridge a few others there, but I’ve I remember I was talking to a customer experience leader and she’s good.

[00:21:27] I like her a lot. And I was sharing with [00:21:30] her, the capabilities journey, orchestrations and analytics software, and she said, oh, quarter million dollars. We would never spend that kind of money on improving our journeys. A few months later, I found out another part of the organization had bought it and implemented already.

[00:21:46] And a, she didn’t know about it. And B she didn’t seem to think that’s something organization would invest in. Oh, wow.

[00:21:52] Bill Staikos: But that wasn’t even used leakage where they using it. Yeah,

[00:21:57] Jim Tincher: they were okay. But she just didn’t have [00:22:00] exposure to it because they weren’t using it on the surveys or they were using it as an operational tool.

[00:22:05] To improve results. And I believe so in that week and a half or whatever it was after CSG bought Cartwheel, but before Qualtrics bought Usermind. My talking points, there was that journey analytics, orchestration is going to become more of an operations tool. Operations could be a really good buyer for this to be able to improve some, the operational processes bringing in [00:22:30] communications.

[00:22:31] That’s one of the things I think by the way, most of the analytics and especially orchestration groups are missing is that communications layer. And that’s, it’s a great tool to understand what’s happening and send the right communication. So I’m a big fan of that. But then of course Qualtrics did by Usermind.

[00:22:46] Yep. And I had a chance to sit down with Michelle who’s the CEO of Usermind and her. Her vision for what they’re going to do together is phenomenal. We had her come to our team meeting, talk to us. It was funny because a lot of the [00:23:00] team members like I understood a third of the words, but those are really smart words.

[00:23:03] She’s got this great view of where it’s going on. And so I’m a little bit energized as well about the potential for CX become a journey analytics, orchestration buyer, because it can really improve our impact. But it does mean you have to be familiar with the business data. You have to understand the operational behavioral data in your business.

[00:23:26] And that is something that the best programs are doing, [00:23:30] but a lot of them are just not comfortable yet understanding their organization’s data. And that’s, what’s going to be.

[00:23:37] Bill Staikos: Yeah. And I guess if you think about, whatever it is, 60% of CX teams out there are still largely survey driven insights and reporting, reporting out.

[00:23:46] More than, Hey, let’s really understand fundamentally how to change and drive business. I was having a conversation with someone recently and they were like when you were talking about customer experience with your CEO, how were you talking about? I said I had three objectives. [00:24:00] I want to increase revenue.

[00:24:01] I’m going to reduce costs. I’m going to change. Yeah, the CX stuff is just a tool. It just, they’re just tools, just like lean is just like design thinking is it’s just a tool to get there. And if you’re not having that conversation with your CFO, with your CHR, with your CEO, then you’re not going to have the kind of impact that you hope and dream to have at some point.

[00:24:20] I really do think journey. Analytics plus orchestration. And I think, the Salesforce is the other world today are like doing it are doing a good job of the orchestration piece and [00:24:30] connecting that communication component, as you’ve mentioned, and they’re largely focused. But you’re right. A lot of the platforms that are standalone orchestration or analytics today don’t have necessarily that capability in there.

[00:24:42] So it’d be pretty interesting to see how that kind of pans out for everybody in the market. But I agree with you, the operational user, I think is a really interesting use case. If you can get it right and be able to build a platform that individuals in those roles can use versus.

[00:24:58] An analyst [00:25:00] somewhere in a CX organization or maybe elsewhere.

[00:25:02] Jim Tincher: Right. It’s got to get down to that business unit. Who can you business user who can start designing interventions that say let’s do some AB testing. Let’s try this message versus that text. See which one moves the overall

[00:25:12] Bill Staikos: results.

[00:25:13] Yeah. Yep. Totally agree. So beyond, beyond sort of journey analytics or opportunity, where do you think that space, where do you think the technology is going. I, you and I have chatted about this briefly before, it seems like after journey orchestration, I wonder I’m doing a lot of things about this.

[00:25:29] I was given where I [00:25:30] worked, but like, where do you think the next level of technology is going for me, it’s a lot of data and automation, but I’m just doing a lot of thinking of what does that mean from a technology stack? Personal. What things have to come together? I’m curious if you’ve thought about this, just your perspective there.

[00:25:45] Jim Tincher: The least talked about and probably most critical platform or technology out there is probably a CDP customer data platform, because otherwise you have Salesforce, you have all these other tools who are trying to stitch together all the different sources [00:26:00] of data and make sense of it. And it’s just it’s hard.

[00:26:03] It’s all done. Yep. We have other groups who try putting it all in Salesforce, which is now with Salesforce. It’s designed for I to try to make decisions there. And I think that’s something that it’s not glamorous and it’s really hard to show the direct cost benefit of the CDP, but it’s enabler. Yeah. And we’re working with an insurance company right now, probably and casually insurance company where they are all focused historically [00:26:30] on understanding the.

[00:26:30] And, bill, if you had a policy in two different sea of a beach house and you have how homes in two different states, they don’t know that’s right. They don’t know that decisions that made in this, in your primary house also impacts the beach house because they look at it at a policy level.

[00:26:46] And trying to do that through a data warehouse. So it’s just really tough. That’s where the CDP, and I’m not a techno guy, but my understanding, and I’m talking to Sean, our CTO, who is, but that’s a really key enable it to allow the analytics, the [00:27:00] orchestration and everything else to be more

[00:27:01] Bill Staikos: successful.

[00:27:02] Yeah we’ll see if other big platforms out there are going to start building CDPs and to their own. It could be interesting value prop. I know that the CDSB CDP space, excuse me, is getting at least over the last couple of years has been getting a lot more attention and more companies are getting into, I think last time I counted like 30 different players in the CD space, a low CPCs alone that are being ranked by the foresters and others.

[00:27:23] So a a lot going on there. Hey we’re getting late in the day. One question, where do you go for your inspiration gym?

[00:27:29] Jim Tincher: [00:27:30] That’s looking back to last year. I had the best time going out, interviewing customer experience leaders. Cause remember I’m a failure. I totally failed at my CX job back in the day.

[00:27:41] And I love sitting down with some of the folks know, like for example, Nancy at Haggerty, she talks about how she’s the VP of Lloyd. And she started out as customer experience and she learned that she talked about survey scores, nobody paid attention. Yeah. The eyes closed when she talked and said about loyalty and about retention [00:28:00] and by the way, and that’s loyalty is not a service score.

[00:28:03] Loyalty is retention and usage then. Then the executives listen and she became much more influential. And just hearing those stories from the peers who have figured it out, oh, I leave those times just amazed. I spent two days each with Roxy and gen Roxy at UK GE gen ed Dow, and I just left on a high just seeing what real people are doing and how they’re making a difference.

[00:28:28] That’s where I get inspired. I’ve always [00:28:30] wanted my blog to be less about. Yup. Pontificating and more about what real people are doing. And that’s what inspires me. Yeah.

[00:28:37] Bill Staikos: That’s partly why, frankly, I started this podcast because I didn’t want to read theoretical white papers from McKinsey. I really want to talk to people like yourself and others that I’m lucky enough to talk to every week about what they’re doing and the impact that they can have.

[00:28:49] Jim you. I know Tanya and cheek, you’re saying you’re a failure, but you’ve helped countless individuals and companies be successful. And the work that you do with heart of the customer tell us a little bit about the company,[00:29:00] wherever you, you guys have certainly taken a long way.

[00:29:02] Like w where do you want the company to go

[00:29:04] Jim Tincher: next technology space? We’re talking about, it’s really where I see us going. As I mentioned, we, we did these interviews and the surveys, we found four things matter. Start with the. Yeah, like everything you do to business failure, and then to enable that, get familiar with your data and technology, manage one emotion to create one emotional outcome and managing against that and practice change management.

[00:29:27] And so we’ve really built our practice around those principles that [00:29:30] didn’t come from us. And we actually sat down and said what we think matters. And then we did the interviews and none of what we thought mattered actually mattered. We went out and talked to the real people. And so then we built our practice around that two years ago, If you’d asked me about that dashboard, I’d say, yeah, they’re probably important.

[00:29:44] Yeah. I now realize how critical they aren’t getting the message out. And so we built a practice around that. So we’ve really taken journey mapping to be a diagnostic, but bringing in more about creating future visions of what the journey looks like using that, to inform the [00:30:00] technology stack and using change management, get everybody on board.

[00:30:03] And that’s really what we focused on. And we found that helps organizations have way more impact.

[00:30:10] Bill Staikos: Totally agree. I love that. I get inspired by you and our conversations cause I walk away completely enlightened every time we chat by the way. So I’m great. I’m grateful for that. Your blog, what’s your blog name?

[00:30:20] Just so listeners can check it out. Tired of the customer.com. And I knew that, but I wanted you to say when’s the book.

[00:30:28] Jim Tincher: Oh boy. I hope it’s [00:30:30] today. This is the 28th of September. I committed to my team. We choose a publisher by the end of the month. So I’ve got two days to do that. It’s probably going to be next summer by the time that it gets all edited everything.

[00:30:40] So we’ve got to hold on for a little bit, but I’ll be talking about in the meantime, I’ll be doing webinars and it’ll be out there.

[00:30:46] Bill Staikos: Cool. Maybe by next summer, we’ll have you back on the show and we’ll be talking about the book, which which I hope you’re open to coming back to.

[00:30:53] Jim Tincher: Definitely bill. I enjoyed this so much again.

[00:30:55] I learned a lot from you. I love your approach. I love how you start with that business [00:31:00] outcome and that’s, what’s

[00:31:00] Bill Staikos: critical really us. It served me well and no one’s told me to stop doing the work yet, so I might as well keep going. Jim, thanks so much for your time. Great to have you on. Great to see you by the way again.

[00:31:09] And really appreciate your.

[00:31:11] Jim Tincher: Thanks a lot. It’s

[00:31:11] Bill Staikos: been fun. All right, everybody. Great show Jim. Tincher Heart of the Customer. We’re out.