Today’s interview is with Sue Duris, Principal Consultant of M4 Communications, a global CX consulting firm. Sue joins me today to talk about customer understanding, internal customers, being curious enough to care and why we can’t be digital-first and that we have to be customer first.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Tool time, task time and how ChatGPT will change everything in customer support – Interview with Des Traynor of Intercom – and is number 459 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.

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Here are the highlights of my chat with Sue:

• The CXPA has a list of five competencies (Customer Insights and Understanding, Customer Experience Strategy, Metrics, Measurements, and ROI, Design, Implementation, and Innovation and Culture and Accountability).
• They put customer understanding before customer experience strategy and that is the way to go.
• The two key traits that CX professionals have to have: 1. Empathy, and 2. Curiosity (being curious enough to care).
• Make them more successful and help them simplify their day.
• The C suite needs to understand why they’re doing customer experience, and they need to know who their customers are.
• If they can’t see what’s happening, they’re not going to be able to buy into it and champion it.
• But it’s not all about the C-suite. It has to be both top-down and bottom-up. That’s why we also have to involve our employees.
• Reference to habits of Maneesha Bhusal.
• As CX professionals, one of the things that we have to do is we have to understand our internal customers, which is the C suite and employees, as well as our external customers.
• You have, for example, a Chief Technology Officer, a Chief Marketing Officer, a Chief Financial Officer and each one of those people have their own agendas, their own language, their own things that motivate them, and if you can’t reach them and get them on your side, then you might fail.
• We have to get, at least, one person in the C suite to get the light bulb or the aha moment. That will then spread.
• The late Jack Springman (RIP): “Many people in the customer experience/service space talk about having empathy for their customers, but they lack empathy for their internal customers.”
• You have to invest the time to understand and take account of other people’s priorities and objectives in order to get the right level of support that you need.
• Technology is the glue that drives customer experience, but we can’t be digital-first. We have to be customer first.
• We need to remember that organizations are social entities.
• We need to make sure that we spend as much time thinking about the relationships that we build within and across our organizations if we want to try and give ourselves a better chance of success.
• But remember to build relationships, partnerships and allyships, and all these sorts of things takes time.
• Make sure you check out Sue’s Queen punk rock story.
• Sue’s Punk CX word(s): Ferocious
• Sue’s Punk XL brand: Apple.

About Sue

Sue Duris is Principal Consultant of M4 Communications, a global CX consulting firm. Sue received her BA at University of Colorado and MBA at University of California – Irvine. Sue has worked in the CX arena for more than 15 years and has built CX and VoC programmes for brands all over the world and advises brands how to be customer-centric. She’s customer-obsessed and loves aligning teams to help drive the CX vision across the organisation.

When she’s not doing that, she appears as a guest CX expert for publications and virtual and live events, serves as a CX awards judge, is a mentor to CX professionals, and is a leader at CXPA and non-executive director at Customer Institute. Check out her blog at m4comm.com/blog, read some of her articles at MyCustomer.com, say Hi to her on Twitter @SueDuris and feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn here.

Photo by Mark Autumns on Unsplash