Today’s interview is with Nick Webb, a world-renowned Strategist, Bestselling Author, and Futurist. Nick joins me today to talk about his new book, What Customers Hate, why he chose to focus on hate and not love, the TV show Undercover Boss, outdated customer experience best practice, the SOS Approach and why customer surveys may be your enemy amongst a bunch of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Having gone through 10 years of transformation in the past two years, how do we maintain momentum – Interview with Don Schuerman of Pega – and is number 426 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 Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

Pega is a low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation. It’s scalable architecture helps the world’s leading organizations work smarter, unify experiences, and adapt instantly – so they’re always ready for what’s next.

Check out the latest from Pega at their annual conference, PegaWorld iNspire, which will focus on how to address constantly shifting perspectives in an ever-evolving world, including guidance, strategies, and powerful tools to achieve resiliency in the face of rapid change. Agenda and registration details can be found at pegaworld.com. The event will be held virtually on May 24 from 9:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. EDT for the Americas and Europe and again on May 25 from 10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. AEST for Asia Pacific.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Nick:

• Check out Nick’s new book: What Customers Hate.
• I discovered about eight or nine years ago that if you look at the definition of innovation, it is the process of obtaining and creating novel real value that serves your organization and your customer. And, it turns out the same definition applies to customer experience. So, customer experience is very much an innovation activity.
• 90% of what it takes for somebody to be good at customer experience has to begin with an experiential triage.
• We have to get rid of the 10 things that we know customers hate first.
• There’s no point in in attempting to optimize until you’ve gone through and have addressed the gaping abdominal wounds that are going to kill you.
• Organizations suffer from experiential delusion.
• Customers hate you punishing them with additional and ridiculous fees and delays that make no sense.
• To identify those things requires the intelligence to be able to do what we call CX innovation safaris.
• The survey industry is a monster. It’s a online vending machine that dispenses erroneous information that makes leaders look better than they are.
• I think the biggest mistake with the so called customer experience best practices is that the worst organizations in the world have the most robust customer experience infrastructure and it turns out that that their experience is horrific.
• 20 years ago we were experiencing symmetrical innovation meaning that we knew what people wanted and we were able to deliver it to them in time because it wasn’t moving too fast and the nature of the things they wanted weren’t really that big of a change.
• About 10 years ago we started to move into disruptive innovation and this is where things got faster and bigger and many organizations were not able to cope and many became irrelevant.
• In 2022 and beyond, we’ve entered into a time of chaotic innovation where innovation and disruption is coming out of nowhere and that is really changing the way in which we deliver value to customers.
• Of course, COVID19 was the accelerant that put us into this current state of chaotic innovation.
• Most organizations really don’t know where they are at.
• Check out Nick’s book that came about when he wrote the chapter on employee happiness: Happy Work.
  
• There is a very unusual situation today where there are unemployed people and there are talented people but there are no unemployed talented people. So, if you want talented people you need to jack them from somebody else.
• And, the only way you do that, it’s not through pay, it’s not through benefits and all these other things. It’s about you having a community of existing employees that love your mission that know that it’s a place that’s authoring their evolution in a way that serves other people. And, when you can do this right, you have got 90% of customer experience nailed because you get better insights from your employees, you allow collaboration and co-creation.
• If we don’t create holistically good experiences to eliminate the hates which are the biggest problems for most organizations, we don’t have a shot at this.
• The biggest challenge right now and for the next 3 to 5 years is going to be staffing. The biggest challenge is not to fill seats but to fill seats with quality people.
• Nick’s best advice: Organise a CX Hackathon.
• Nick’s Punk CX word: Humanity
• Nick’s Punk XL brand(s): In-N-Out Burger, Dutch Brothers coffee and a few others that you’ll find out about in the podcast.

About Nick

Nick Webb is a world-renowned Strategist, Bestselling Author, and Futurist. As an Inventor, Nick invented one of the first wearable technologies, and one of the world’s smallest medical implants. He has been awarded over 40 Patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office for a wide range of cutting-edge technologies. Nick is the founding CEO of Leader Logic, LLC, a Management Consulting Firm that helps organizations drive a culture of employee and customer happiness. As an Advisor, he works with some of the top brands to help them lead their market in Enterprise Strategy, Customer Experience, and Innovation. Nick has served as a Chief Innovation Officer and an Adjunct Professor at a top medical school. Nick is the author of What Customers Crave, The Innovation Mandate, What Customers Hate, Happy Work, and his number one bestselling book, The Healthcare Mandate. Nicholas is also the Producer and Host of the Award-winning Documentary Film, “The Healthcare Cure”. As a Keynote Speaker with a humanistic, smart, and fun presentation style, Nick has also been listed as one of the top Keynote Speakers in the World.

Find out more about Nick at nickwebb.com, check out his new book: What Customers Hate, say Hi to him on Twitter @nickwebbcom and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to Brian Gratwicke on Flickr for the image.