Today’s interview is with Michael Hinshaw, the founder and president of customer experience consultancy McorpCX. Michael joins me today to talk about the CX value model and why we should be linking experience to business outcomes, some key indicators of a successful customer-centric transformation, why your company might need an experience operating system (the XOS), what it is and what are the benefits.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leadership lessons from the winner of the 2023 CX Leader of the Year – Interview with Roxie Strohmenger of UKG – and is number 495 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with Michael:

• Got into customer experience as a business imperative over 20 years ago.
• Built a $300 million business grain trading in Canada but, originally, knew nothing about it.
• 50 % of CX programs are under threat of being downgraded or closed.
• You can’t have the soft side of customer experience without also being able to prove the business value of it.
• Understanding how to link value is one of the most critical things any customer experience leader and any business can do.
• We have a model that’s probably similar in format or structure to other models. We built this over about 12 years and we’re able to prove the linkages.
• The linkage is not super complicated conceptually. It is, of course, complicated in the doing of it because most organizations have got data all over the place.
• The value model is the ability of an organization to consistently track those things and be able to tell pretty quickly how the things they’re doing to customers affect their top and bottom line.
• Across organizations, business cases, in general, are difficult to do. It’s no different in customer experience.
• Good CX professionals are great storytellers but they don’t often apply those storytelling abilities to selling what it is they want to do.
• It’s very difficult to track customer-centricity-backed value without customer listening.
• I use the phrase experience operating system to describe things that organizations need to do consistently.
• An operating system brings everything together across an organization, gets people working together with clarity in mind about their roles and their responsibilities, as well as doing so within the context of the greater vision. And, you know, we call it the WIIFM (the what’s in it for me) so that you’re able to articulate that vision whether somebody’s a warehouse worker, a lawyer working on contracts, or a web designer, or salesperson, whether you have direct contact with the customer, whether you influence contacts with customers, or you have no contact with the customer at all, everyone’s got a role.
• An operating system essentially puts a framework in place around those things that allows everyone to point in the same direction and to be clear about what their role is in driving those results and what that’s going to give them.
• Engineering is all about the study of failure.
• We should celebrate the process of learning from things that go badly wrong.
• The great promise of AI through the lens of customer experience is the ability to more quickly, but more democratically, you know, aggregate, analyze and pull insights from huge quantities of data.
• Plus the obvious application of using AI to automate responses and things of that nature, and that’s AI chat.
• The employee experience is critical because employees need to know not only that the organization is looking out for them but that you are giving them the tools and support they need so they can do the jobs that they’re paid to do, that they want to do, and that they like doing?
• Michael’s best advice: Listen to your customer. regularly and often and take action on what you learn.
• Michael’s Punk XL brands: Patagonia and REI

About Michael

Michael Hinshaw is the founder and president of customer experience consultancy McorpCX, and recognized on over a dozen “Top Global CX Influencers” lists. He’s also co-author of the best-selling book Smart Customers, Stupid Companies: Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them, and has been published and quoted in dozens of publications ranging from Harvard Business Review and Fast Company to American Executive, Forbes and Time. His new book, Experience Rules! The Experience Operating System (XOS) and 8 Keys to Enable It, and co-authored with Diane Magers is slated for release Q1 of this year. A Teaching Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at The Haas School of Business, he has consulted for and advised executives at companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Biogen, Roche, Best Buy, and lululemon.

Check out McorpCX, the book: Experience Rules! : The Experience Operating System (XOS) and 8 Keys to Enable It, say Hi on X (Twitter) @McorpCX and @MichaelHinshaw and feel free to connect with Michael on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Mike Alonzo on Unsplash