This episode features an interview with Paul Papas, Global Managing Partner of IBM’s Business Transformation Services. He has led the launch of IBM’s design and CX division called IBM iX as well as their Enterprise Strategy Consulting services. Paul has been named one of the world’s “Top 25 Consultants” by Consulting Magazine, among the world’s top 5 CRM influential leaders, and the “King of Commerce” by CRM Magazine. Before IBM, he was a Partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In this episode, Paul discusses providing value to customers first and foremost, incorporating agile and design thinking into CX, and getting clients hooked on the customer journey.
This episode features an interview with Paul Papas, Global Managing Partner of IBM’s Business Transformation Services. He has led the launch of IBM’s design and CX division called IBM iX as well as their Enterprise Strategy Consulting services. Paul has been named one of the world’s “Top 25 Consultants” by Consulting Magazine, among the world’s top 5 CRM influential leaders, and the “King of Commerce” by CRM Magazine. Before IBM, he was a Partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In this episode, Paul discusses providing value to customers first and foremost, incorporating agile and design thinking into CX, and getting clients hooked on the customer journey.
Quotes
“We're in the services business, myself and my team. We got into service to be of service to our clients. When our clients are doing any CX initiative, it's for them to be of better service to their customers. And when they live up to that ambition, and that calling, that's where you see great things happen.”
Time Stamps
*[0:15] Intro
*[1:15] Taking ownership of your CX
*[2:03] Interview begins
*[5:25] CX transformation initiatives
*[7:06] Helping big companies solve CX problems
*[8:21] Set your customer as your North Star
*[10:13] Keys to a successful CX transformation
*[18:31] How CX has evolved
*[29:01] Getting buy-in from the C-suite
*[34:12] Rebuilding trust when things go wrong
*[44:37] Quick questions
Bio
Paul Papas is the Global Managing Partner of IBM’s Business Transformation Services responsible for IBM’s Consulting, Design & Experience, Technology & Analytics, and Business Process Outsourcing services. He leads a 50,000 person global team that helps Fortune 1000 CEOs and other C-suite executives reinvent their businesses by leveraging the latest technology innovations.
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Phil: You can spend billions of dollars on your customer experience, while not taking complete ownership of it. So what does it mean to take absolute ownership over your CX? CX is not something you set and forget. It’s putting clients first, and making their problems your own.
It’s making a human connection, getting them excited about the vision and then being of service over their entire customer journey. It’s also taking accountability for the journey, and apologizing when things go wrong. CX is something you’re always looking for ways to improve. And above all, it’s about serving people. Let’s talk about making the customer your North Star.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to The Customer Experience Show! In this episode, we talk with Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner of IBM’s Business Transformation Services. Over his 30-year career, Paul has led the launch of IBM’s design and customer experience division called IBM iX, as well as the M&A process for several successful services acquisitions, and he’s been named one of the world’s “Top 25 Consultants” by Consulting Magazine.
In this episode, Paul discusses providing value to customers first, incorporating agile and design thinking into CX, and getting clients hooked on the customer journey. But first, a word from our sponsor.
Phil: Hello, everyone. And welcome again to another episode of The Customer Experience Show. I'm your host, Phil Dillard. And today I have the special pleasure of introducing you to Paul Papas, who is the global managing partner of IBM's business transformation services and responsible for IBM's consulting, design, experience, technology and analytics and business processes, outsourcing services. He leads a 50,000 person global team that helps Fortune 1000 CEOs and other C-suite executives reinvent their businesses by leveraging the latest in technology innovations. Paul, great to speak with you.
Paul: Wonderful to be here, Phil. Thank you.
Phil: The pleasure is mine. I encourage anyone listening to the show to make sure... you might just listen to the show, but make sure you take a look at the bio of Paul in the show notes, because it lets you know the extent of his significance in the IBM organization and the relevance of their team and his comments today. So we're really excited to start this conversation with him. So I'll start today like I start most of the time with an easy softball warmup questions. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your current role and what it involves?
Paul: Sure. And thank you for the softball, but talking about myself always makes me uncomfortable. So just by way of background, , I started my career in management consulting. So management and technology consulting. , Started as a entry-level graduate hire learn my craft, working with clients every day since I left university, , became a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers , as part of our consulting organization. And then in 2002, we sold our consulting business to IBM. So me and 35,000 of my closest friends became IBMers back in 2002. Since joining IBM, I've had a number of different leadership roles. And for the first part of my career, I really focused heavily on industry and then the life sciences industry, and I ran our life sciences business. And then about a little over 10 years ago, I had the opportunity to make a significant career shift. IBM was about to launch a new services business, focused on customer and customer transformation , with a heavy emphasis on e-commerce and digital marketing. And they asked me to launch that business globally , and then lead it , on the company's behalf. , Which I did. , And doing that led to there's a whole story behind that, you know, how we launched that business, how we scaled it globally. It led to then me creating what was known and what is known today as IBM iX, which is our digital transformation, digital consultancy, customer experience transformation part of our business. And then, from there, my responsibilities expanded where our CX transformation is still a big part of my portfolio and a big part of my core experience. But now, as you mentioned in the kickoff to my bio , there, that I'm also responsible for our broader range of services around business transformation. All of our supply chain and finance transformation services, our human resource transformation services, our talent transformation services in addition to our customer transformation services. So, have been really focused on CX and customer experience led transformation for quite a while here and super excited to be talking to you.
Phil: Yeah, that covers a lot of ground. And maybe we can break it down for people into some of the basics, right. Because I think people hear digital transformation and then they think some things, but I don't know if they know so much about customer experience transformation, but what would you say basically is a transformation initiative? Maybe we could start there.
Paul: Sure. Let's take a customer experience transformation initiative, So typically what that starts with is there's an opportunity, or there's a problem related to how a company is engaging with its customers. Maybe they're seeing, a retention issue or an acquisition issue. Maybe they're experiencing customer experience issues and their NPS scores are going down. They're finding people that are more interested in working with their competitors. So in those cases, what they're usually looking to do is examine the problem, unearth what the insights are, come up with a way that they can do things in a more personalized, impactful way with their customers, figure out the role that technology plays in all of that in enabling a vision, enabling a customer experience and a customer journey, and then implementing and then executing against it. And that's a lot of moving parts and a lot of times people get the sequences wrong or they don't include all the right parts. And there's a lot of lessons learned over the last 10 years , as a lot of people raced into CX initiatives and digital transformation initiatives. And, I've definitely seen a pattern from many years ago to what's different now.
Phil: Okay. That's really helpful. So, and in your organization, how do you refer yourselves to a client? I mean, I've heard people talk about themselves as a innovation Sherpas or trusted advisors. Do you have a, a description for that role that you play?
Paul: Yeah. So we're consultants. And when we use the word consultant, it embodied some of the words that you just use. We are trusted partners, trusted advisors to our clients. When our clients come to us, they're looking for someone that can help them solve the most complex problems. And when I think of our business, when I think of all of IBM as an example, I think we have a simple mission. We help people solve problems. And our job is to help some of the largest companies solve their most complex problems. And when we do that, we serve a noble cause in helping companies be healthy, helping them survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world. And when they do that, they're able to employ people who can then provide for their families and it creates a virtuous cycle. So for us, consultant is the term, it's the proud term that we use. But it really is the role of trusted partner , that I think is the space that we really occupy.
Phil: You know a true professional consultant when you would say, proudly consultants, right. And really talking about how to solve complex problems. Cause I think sometimes people don't understand the potential of really doing it well and they don't describe it in such an elegant way. So I really appreciate that. When I think about customer experience transformation, as the consultant, who's helping a company solve its most complex problems, how do you see the change that you drive through focusing on the customer experience?
Paul: So a big part is to start with actually that focus. And you'd be surprised that, that's not always the place that people focus. So you talk about customer experience. It's actually, one, you start with empathy and you think through the life of the person you're trying to reach, cause that's a customer. Think through the role that you play in the context of their life. So the customer and customer experience is the north star for everything that you're doing. And one of the things that I often advise my clients on is, to not rush into value from. In other words, oh, if we launch a new website, we can generate this much revenue. Or if we run this digital campaign, we could see this much lift in this segment of our business. That's value from. That's the value you get from doing something. Start always with value to. So what is the value that you'd be adding to your customers' lives? You'll be making life a little easier. You'd be adding a benefit, providing them a service of value, helping them. Always start with that and work your way back and engineer your way back. So if you start with value to, then you can go through the process of creating customer journeys and doing the journey mapping, and then doing the design thinking around those journeys, where you're looking at the empathy quotient here in terms of making sure that you understand what are people going to think, feel, say, and do when you enable an experience like this? So for me, the first rule of guidance is when you say CX, really put that focus on your target, which is your customer. And make sure that you're focused on adding value to them before you start, getting excited about the value that you might be able to drive from your initiatives.
Phil: Well, I love how you described that because you put empathy in a way that is very clear and tangible in the way you see it and the way you use it. And then give a practical guidance on saying, start with value to, right? Which is, which makes a ton of sense. And it sounds simple, but I'm guessing that it is probably kind of hard. Can you share something about some common challenges you've seen or some common ways to decode what the real problem is and people getting from looking at value from and shifting to value to?
Paul: Sure. So oftentimes you're starting with, a response to something, right. Then that's what triggers the value from type of thinking. We're falling behind, we're losing market share. We're seeing a competitor that's rapidly growing or rapidly doing something that's impacting our relationships with our customers or taking business away. So there's a sense of urgency, which makes people rush to make sure that they do something that will address those business metrics that are causing this rush to action. So, part of the process there is to do a quick pause. It's like, okay, yes, we will address those business metrics. And let us explain to you how to do that. And that's when you do the pivot to, so let's talk about the customer. Let's talk about what are they really seeking? What do we really understand about what our gaps in their current experience that they're getting with you and what are their desired experiences they want to get in a future state from you , and helping it to kind of frame it that way is definitely a big part of the initial challenge. The other part is making sure that you're engaging all the parts of the organization that play a role. And that's not just, the traditional, customer facing functions of marketing, sales, and service. I really believe the entire company top to bottom and front to back is all responsible for delivering customer experience. And when you're trying to do an initiative like this, you really need to make sure that you've thought about it holistically, not just from the experience that you want to deliver when you thought about you too, but from everyone, all the stakeholders inside the company that have to be part of the solution to this, and part of designing that future experience and feel a sense of ownership and pride in doing that.
Phil: Yeah, that's amazing. Right. It's really important to be clear on who owns experience. And if you're in a space where everyone owns experience, then how can they do it? And that engaging all parts of the organization seems to be a good way to get there. I'm wondering , you gave a really good , really good tips Or really good framework for how to think about it. So you could talk about internal or external tools or tips, but how do you learn that? Like, other than experience, are there good tips or practices or tools that you use? Have you developed something at IBM along the way? Or do you have any tips or tools or recommendations for somebody who's trying to start themselves down the path of being able to do this?
Paul: Yeah. So a few different tips , that I'm happy to share that may be secret sauce, or if they could be helpful to everyone , I'm super happy to share them, and a few things that we've done and learned along the way. And as you mentioned, rightfully, all born out of experience. , All starting with , our own experiences and working with clients and, you know, thank God we have the world's best clients, that have learned and grown with us and enabled us to learn and grow with them. , Which is always an honor for us to be of service to our clients. So a few things, , one, start with a multidisciplinary team, when you're trying to rethink a customer experience, you need different perspectives, you need diversity. And a lot of times we talk about diversity and inclusion in the corporate world. And we tend to think of like gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, things like that. But you know, for me, it's about diversity of thought. And one of the things that we've done in our IBM iX business, and as part of my BTS business is really started with diversity of thought through diversity of backgrounds and diversity of skills and capabilities. So when you're approaching a CX initiative, a lot of times people focus on the designers and the folks that are actually going to do the design work of an experience. And sometimes it gets really narrowly down to the user experience design, which was one click below customer experience design, which is a click below human experience design. But designers are one critical craft in designing a customer experience or doing a customer experience transformation. You need folks that can think through the business strategy side of things. You need folks that are versed in data and analytics and how to use data to deliver a more effective experience. And now that data and analytics is channeling and powering AI capabilities, you need folks that understand the technology involved from the very beginning so that you're not designing something that's beautiful art, but can't be rendered into a meaningful solution or a usable solution that can actually scale. And for our clients, scaling is a huge challenge because we work with some of the largest companies in the world. So when you think about the breadth of capabilities and the breadth of backgrounds , orchestrating that and having people working seamlessly together, one thing I love that in our studios, and we have 57 of them around the world when we were in studios before COVID , and now we do this virtually, , through a methodology that we have called IBM garage. But our clients get to interface with that exact type of multidisciplinary team. So a business strategist, who, in the past may have been comfortable going to work in a suit and a tie, who's sitting next to one of our, incredible experience designers who may be tattooed from his wrist or his neck, who's sitting next to one of our data scientists who's, popping open his Lenovo laptop and super excited because it's got the latest chip in it and, run some crazy kind of analysis that's going to dim the lights in the place who's sitting next to one of our technology implementers who knows how to bring this all to life. And they all work seamlessly together and they all have, been trained in agile. They've all been trained in common ways of working, , like design thinking. so it enables them to have a shared vocabulary and a shared way of working together and harness the power of those different backgrounds. Those are some of the key starting points. The other thing, and I just touched on them. Working in an agile mode and employing design thinking are also critical components , to getting an experience design and experience transformation right. For us at IBM, we've incorporated agile and design thinking into what we call our IBM garage method. So all of our folks work in this collaborative method of co-creating with our clients , using these techniques and tools, which we've been able to now transition to doing virtually. And fortunately they've been able to scale and work in a virtual world , seamlessly, which has been wonderful because we've done like 1500 garage workshops with our clients , as part of customer transformation initiatives around the world since the pandemic started. So those are a couple of key things that I think are important to getting a transformation right.
Phil: Well, those are awesome, right? Because you highlight the value of diversity in a critical way, how to get the scale and some technical approaches in terms of agile and design thinking to help people get there, which is super helpful, right? And we see this a lot in the early stage companies and people trying to figure it out in mid-size companies. So what would you say , I'm thinking about those listeners out there who might say, well, that'd be great. You know, IBM has all these resources, he's got all these people, but how am I going to do that? Right. So, what would you say are some of the biggest challenges for people to do it? Is it size? Is it culture? Is it access to resources? Or is it something different?
Paul: First of all, I do think this can be done well at any scale. And it takes a few different key ingredients. And some of them that I was mentioning. But the most important thing I think is listening. The ability to kind of listen to what are your customers telling you? Whether that's through their actions, whether that's through their feedback. What are they telling you? And what deep insights can you glean from what you are listening to and what you are hearing? And if you could start with that, start with a clear, dispassionate understanding of what you're hearing and not having an emotional reaction to, well, no, that's not right, we know that we know this about our customers. Or these non fact-based assertions about what someone thinks is going on, and really ground yourself in what is actually going on through active listening, through the analysis of data. One of the key things I think, that I probably should've mentioned before, key ingredient to all of this cause data , and being able to analyze the data, make sense of the data. Make sense of what you're hearing and learning , and then apply that into all the things that we were talking about before. So if you start off with that deep understanding, then you've got the makings of the beginning of a transformation. Because you'll at least have clarity on what problems you're trying to solve. And what opportunities are you trying to really get the most out of.
Phil: It's actually a great transition to shift into the, to the next phase because , wanted to get a little bit into the detail of like what you're seeing in customer experience as a field or as a practice. And I think I wanna I hone in on this listening piece. Because if I'm hearing you right at any scale, you can listen to somebody across the table or halfway around the world through some different type of technology. So if we draw back on that, can you tell me a little bit about how customer experience has changed over the past decade or so?
Paul: Yeah, so several years ago , when everyone started talking about digital transformation and becoming digital, it was going through such a hype cycle. I'll funily tell you that, I think it was back in like 2015, I had declared to my team, digital is dead. It's so over-hyped, I mean, my God, we are past this. The next wave will be coming soon. And sure enough it's 2021, and everyone is still talking about digital and digital transformation. So it gives you some insight in terms of my ability to predict the future. But one of the things that was happening was I think rather than listening to their customers, people were listening to the hype. And like, oh my God, everyone is doing something digital. We need to do something digital. And so the first wave of customer experience initiatives and experience led transformations were really what I would refer to as random acts of digital. They were just folks just, Hey, mobile is getting hot, everyone's doing something in mobile. We need to do something in mobile. Let's do this, let's implement this. Let's create an app for that. But it wasn't really grounded in that listening and that deep understanding of what customers needed. It was almost like a me too game. And that was the first wave. And while those initiatives definitely led to improvements and experiences, for the most part, though, they were limited in the value that they can deliver to customers and the value that a company could get from that. And that gave rise to the second wave. And the second wave has definitely been much more thoughtful. And this second wave has been now, okay, let's start with CX, but let's not just talk about just the digital enablement of an experience with our customers. Let's talk about that full integration into the entire organization and how the entire company plays a role in enabling that experience. And that's where digital transformation really became a C-suite topic. You know, the CEO is looking to make a fundamental transformation to their companies top to bottom front, to back in order to deliver on that new promise to customers. And that's what we've been seeing over the last several years after we went through that first initial wave of digitizing some customer touch points at the beginning, some randomly , some thoughtful, to now the thoughtful end-to-end integration of the entire company in service of a customer experience.
Phil: That makes a ton of sense. And it seems like these two chapters of a customer experience , are interesting theme. For those of us who have seen new buzzwords, new management approaches come to the market, we've seen this sort of flow happen before. But maybe people miss the nuance or for those who haven't seen it before, they don't have the pattern recognition to see what's going on. So if we can extend that a little bit, what's the "so what" behind that shift to your teams or to the C suite? You talk about it being a C-suite issue. What's the significance of it actually getting that attention at the C-suite when folks start building CXOs who are really thinking about that second chapter, can you talk a little bit about that?
Paul: Sure. So the significance is the value that you can unlock. So our view of this is we codify it as what we refer to as this gives rise to intelligent workflows. So the process of intelligent work that is much more seamlessly integrated across the enterprise and in this case in service of a customer experience. So as you talked about patterns and nuances over the years, so in the past, when someone was trying to do an initiative like this, let's say they would look at a process inside the organization that, Hey, this process is inefficient and it's getting in the way of us being able to deliver on this customer promise. So for example, like, oh, we just implemented a new app that lets people order stuff online, or we did our e-commerce site, but we didn't fix, you know, how we manage inventory. We didn't fix, how we track order fulfillment or how we're able to do this from any site, anywhere. In the case of retail, back in the day, it was buy online, pick up anywhere, buy online ship from anywhere, , turning stores into distribution centers. The digital touch point of all of that and allowing someone to go tap on a screen and place an order, that part's easy. The real heavy lifting is in transforming the entire operation, which, when you start making those types of transformations, now you've got different processes. You've got different technologies, you're touching different parts of the organization. People who have different responsibilities with your supply chain and your manufacturing and your order fulfillment and your distribution channels. And you've got to make them all work together seamlessly. You've got to deal with the people change elements of this. And then you've got to deal with the rewards and the incentives associated with all of that. And it gets wildly complex really fast. So why it becomes a C-suite issue is because it starts touching so many different parts of the organization that no one individual has that kind of span of control or span of responsibility until you get to the very most senior parts of the organization, sometimes all the way up to the CEO. So that's why it becomes a real C-suite issue. And the second part is the value part of this, which is if you take these, all the individual elements of that and just approach them individually, you get individualized types of benefits. So when we talk about transforming work into intelligent workflows, if you start with one process, you may get, a five to 10% benefit from either a cost takeout perspective or a process efficiency. And then when you start doing kind of multiple processes in a single business function, like we're going to optimize what we're doing in the marketing operations area, okay across marketing, now you start seeing maybe, there's 15, 20% types of business value benefits that you can get. But when you think of this end-to-end view of intelligent workflows, we start seeing benefits for our clients, in the 40 to 50% range and even higher than that. And that's why when it really becomes a C-suite level initiative and gets the attention of the C-suite when they see that, for companies of their size and their scale, that they can have that much of a business impact by making fundamental changes like that in enabling a transformation, like the ones we're talking about , it gets really exciting.
Phil: I get it. So, you know, you tackle some common pitfalls. You at first then get some independent business value benefits, but then some things that translate into end-to-end benefits. , Can you share any stories in here? I'm sure you have a great story on this, where there are other hidden benefits to the organization that extended beyond what was expected in solving the common pitfalls that they were trying to address in delivering a surface customer experience?
Paul: Yeah, I think, there's some interesting examples that led to a broader revisiting of purpose. So one of our clients, Yara , they're a fertilizer producer. And if they think of themselves through that lens, it's like, okay, they manufacture a product and they sell that product to farmers. But their view of this was, farmers don't just use this product. There's other ways that they could provide benefit to them. Value to. And what they came up with was a way to use digital. And, create a platform for farmers where they can start tracking and sharing lessons learned and using sensors and IOT capabilities to do things fundamentally different so that people can then increase, their crop yields through the better use of their own product. So they were helping their customers get better use and better results - value to - of using their products and then creating a community around this and then using digital to enable all of this. And that, to me, was a great example of really rethinking something that caused them to get into a business that they hadn't been in before. Right. They manufacture it and sell a product to now they're providing a platform and a service to their customers, which is unlocking incredible amounts of value for them and taking the value that they could have generated from just being a singular product maker to being a service provider and really a platform business. And I think that's a great example of someone who looked at this holistically, really stepped back, thought value to, and did a fundamental transformation.
Phil: Do you remember by chance where it started? Did it start in some sort of , of small part of the organization and grow over time?
Paul: I don't think of the specifics on it, but I know that an initiative like that started with exactly what you and I were talking about a few minutes ago. Started with listening. Listening to what the customers needed. Well, how can we help the farmers? What are the farmers? They need to increase crop yields. They need to manage their farms more effectively, more efficiently. And how can a company like theirs help in that mission? How can they be of service to them? That's the thing one of the things I love about CX and the work that my team and I do. We're in the services business, myself and my team, we got into service to be of service to our clients. And when our clients are doing any CX initiative, it's for them to be of better service to their customers. And when they live up to that ambition, and that calling, that's where you see great things happen. Like the example we were just talking about.
Phil: Is that part of the ethos of IBM iX?
Paul: Very much so. It's actually the ethos of IBM. It's for us to be of service. It's to make the world better through the use of technology. It's to make business smarter through the use of technology. And we all wake up every day thinking of how we can be of better service to our clients. It's a real calling. I know it's a calling for me and I know for everyone on my team, they share in that calling to be of service. And in order to be of service, you need a couple of key components. The first component you need is caring. You actually have to care about the people you're being of service to. I know I speak for my team, but I speak for myself. We love our clients. We live for our clients. We live to be of service to them. We live to help them. Our greatest day is when we've done our job and they've received a business benefit from our work. That is our single greatest day in all that we do.
Phil: I love this. Right? Because you actually just started going into something else that I was wanting to explore about: IBM iX. And because the phrase, "To make the world a better place through technology" and loving your clients, I think is a place where lots of companies would like to be able to be through whatever it is that they do. And whether there's people who have old school mentalities or people are just not bought in, maybe the person who's listening to this feels like they're on an island. They feel like they're trying to get started into this, trying to get more traction, trying to light a fire at their organization. Right. Because they see, I want to be like Yara, right? I want to be like, IBM iX. If you're talking to one of those people, how would you recommend to them to start selling this in their organization or start proving the value of this customer centric focus?
Paul: So a couple of things that I've learned about getting people rallied around something. And I do a lot of work related to diversity and inclusion. And one thing I've learned is that if you open someone's heart, you then have the ability to open their mind. And that's become like a learning for me over time. So if you're at a company and you're passionate about, we need to do something differently with respect to our customers, we need to serve them in a different way. We need to transform our customer's experience with us, or of us then, pour into that, bringing back to that topic of empathy from before and translate that into a story. So a story of a customer that, either didn't get the benefit that they should have gotten or had a problem because of the way things are currently done, that really negatively impacted them. And then paint a vision of what that experience could have been like. Imagine had we done this, imagine if we had done this differently or done this better, imagine a world where this is what our customers experience around. And that feeling of regret of not being able to deliver on a promise or failing on a promise, told through a real story of real customers and real people then contrasted with a clear vision for what a future could be. It's definitely a great starting point. Because a lot of times what people do is they'll just present facts and data and just try to sell an initiative internally or get support for something just through pure facts and data. And there's no human connection to it. You're trying to do something to reach someone's mind without reaching their heart first. That, I've found, is really difficult. And like I said, I've learned that lesson through a lot of the work I do in diversity and inclusion. That all started with me listening to stories. And stories from people who had experienced, discrimination or a horrible behavior from other people, people that I didn't know. And I would hear these stories and people that I knew that had never shared those stories with me, cause I'd never simply asked them the question. And it was that kind of heart changing experience for me that then opened my mind to taking more action and being more active in that space.
Phil: That's a super lesson. A lot of people, I think, believe if I just get the facts and data right, I can convince them. But you've shared it. Emotion makes people act. So I love that, like to recap, So translate into a story, paint a vision, make a human connection. And then actually then a lot of the work is probably done for you. So you don't even need to open their mind afterwards. That gets you to the starting line. Now you have to start the work of actually delivering on that vision and on that promise. And then how do you ensure that you keep everyone with you along the journey? So it's a continuous cycle, right? Once you kind of win hearts and minds, and get people excited about a future vision, then you've got to keep with them on the journey. So that's making sure that you're not trying to do too much in one shot, which can take too long and then people don't see benefits happening or incremental benefits happening along the way. So they start losing attention or start losing interest or feel that the promise will never get fulfilled. So there's a whole human change component of driving a transformation here. That's a critical part to ensuring its success. In addition to all the hard work that actually has to be done, from a technology and a business process perspective. And that's the one thing I failed to mention before when I talked about a critical component, to driving these initiatives is caring and being of service is caring. The other critical component to being of service to your customers, to your employees, to, to anyone , is capability. So, you know, you can care about someone and really want the best for them, but if you don't have the skill or competency to help them with a particular thing, if you have a medical condition and need surgery, I'll care deeply about you. And I want it to be a success and I want to be of help in any way I can, but I don't have the skill to perform the surgery, I don't have the skill to assist in the surgery. So that's where another critical component of, you want someone who cares and that has the skills and capabilities. And in the case of customer experience transformation, you're talking about a multidisciplinary team that works effectively together, that will have your best interests at heart will always put you first. At IBM, when we talk about putting our clients first, it's actually the first principle of what we call the IBM Way , is clients first. Clients first in everything that we do. It's our north star, so that no one in our organization ever loses sight of why we do what we do. It's the very first thing that we focus on clients first.
That sounds like a heck of a journey. If I'm someone who's somewhere on the path towards getting there, it seems like a heck of a journey. And there's a whole lot to dig into. And , where I'd like to go first is talking about being of service and talking about extending that IBM Way in two things on the care part, when you make a mistake and on the capability part, actually through partnerships. So let's just start with the first part, right? You can't go on a journey like that, doing all the different things you need to do, all the work you need to do to win someone's hearts and then put everything together for a transformation without something not going right. So how do you get through that when something doesn't go as expected?
Paul: So I think you've really focused on values. At the very beginning you asked me how would we describe ourselves? And I said, we're consultants, but what we really are is trusted partners. Well, that's something you have to earn. And that takes , takes time to earn. And that takes real experience that aren't , and it's something that you can lose in a nanosecond. You could lose someone's trust, literally in a nanosecond and never regain it. So part of that is when you're on the journey and you put your clients first and you take your client's issues as your own. , Being a consultant, I always feel like we're living two lives, right? We live with the lives and in our own organization, we live the lives in our client's organizations. So to your point, things are going to go wrong. These are large complex programs. There's a lot of moving parts, small things are going to go wrong. And sometimes big things are going to go wrong. The most important thing about that is, one, making sure that you've done everything in your power to mitigate, prevent, or address those issues before they happen. And then ultimately when they happen. They're going to happen, anyone who tells you that there's no issues, that they deliver programs without any issues, I'd love to meet them and I'd love to get on a spaceship and go to that planet. Cause that's not the real world that I've seen in over 30 years working with clients from all over the world. But I'll tell you this, one thing that I've learned , as part of this is, and I remember we had a situation with one of our clients who we delivered incredibly successfully for. But along the way, our team had really tripped up. We had a bunch of different dynamics. They were a client of mine in Australia , and we had people that changed on the team, the scope had changed on the project. There were just a number of issues. And I flew out and met our clients. And, he was justifiably really upset. And the first words out of my mouth, were I am sorry, and I apologized right out of the gate for the issues that they'd experienced. Whether they were our fault or the result of changes in the organization or different things that shouldn't have happened that, wait, you can't hold us accountable for this. I didn't care about any of that. I didn't care about who was assigning blame to whom and who was responsible for what. I didn't care about what was in the contract. I just cared about them. And they weren't getting what they expected from us. They weren't getting the benefit of what they expected from us. And from that point, I remember telling my client, I said, listen, we're going to make this situation right after I apologized to him sincerely and profusely. Then I made sure that one, that he knew that I was his partner in this. And we were going to make this right, which we did. Enormously successful with them. But I also committed to him that he and I would speak every two weeks. Because he knew I was getting on a plane. I don't live in Australia. But that he and I would stay connected every two weeks for however long he needed. And we spoke together every two weeks for the next two years. We turned the program around in a matter of, you know, several weeks, a few months, we had gone live , and really just made it an enormous success. But he and I maintained our personal connection to staying in touch, making sure the ongoing work, making sure future enhancements were going smoothly. And it was because of that principle of putting clients first , that they are our north star, they're the reason we exist and we live to be of service to them.
Phil: That's a wonderful story. And I've heard a couple examples of that from people who really are passionate about putting clients first and client service. And it just seems like trust repair has to be a personal thing. And I think the thing you didn't say in there that I really want to make sure that people hear, because that's me sounds like complete ownership, complete accountability, in a world where lots of people have lots of reasons and ability to make excuses and such, you stood up and said, Hey, you know, the buck stops here and we are going to make this right. I hope you're still in touch with him.
Paul: He's a friend, he's a friend and we stayed in touch. We stayed in touch for many years. But I'll also tell you another story, where we applied a similar principle in avoiding, in avoiding issues. And again, following that principle of, we own this, we're responsible for this. So in our business process, outsourcing business. Our clients depend on us, to, process, accounts payable, transactions, accounts receivable, manage procurement, manage employee services, do a whole bunch of stuff. And we do that and we employ a lot of people around the world. A lot of our folks in global delivery centers, in places like Dalian in China or in the Philippines or in India. Well, when the global pandemic hit last year, every one of those people, 99% of 350,000 IBMers had to go shift to work from home. And a lot of our folks in centers had never worked from home before. So this was something entirely new. And there were folks in the marketplace that were taking advantage of the situation, which is horrific, and they were going to our clients. And they were saying that, be careful with, all of your business process outsourcing providers, because they're going to look to get out of their contracts because of the pandemic. You know, they're going to invoke a force majeure clause or say that they're not responsible for delivering on the contractual commitments, on the service level agreements and all of that stuff. And I am enormously humbled by my team. I mean, I have the best team in the world, the best people in the world. I can honestly stand up and say that and they humble me. So we shifted in 10 days, 99% of our people to work from home. They were up and running instantly because we had already transitioned to working in agile, using design thinking, having common ways of working in a distributed model. We didn't exit a single client contract. We didn't invoke a single force majeure. Our team didn't miss a single service level agreement. And throughout COVID, because of that commitment, our NPS scores went up every month during the pandemic, in an environment where we couldn't be with our clients physically, we were virtually. We were still able to deliver for them and raise our NPS scores. And actually coincidentally or correlated to that, raise our employee engagement scores throughout the pandemic. So just like we were talking before what happens when something goes wrong, I also want them to share an example of what happens when you do things right to prevent something from going wrong.
Phil: That actually harkens me back to the military, my military experience. Right? You train for things that you hope to never be able to do, but when you do them I don't wanna say almost with muscle memory, but at least with having the competence of knowing how to do them, what you talked about is ownership, preparation, cult, and the culture of focusing on the customer, preparing you for the completely unexpected in a way that you were able to exceed not only external expectations, but internal expectations. And that's really a testament for people to say, all this work we put in was worth it and showcase that. That's a pretty amazing thing.
Paul: Yeah, I'm a big, I'm a big believer in putting the work in. There's no substitute. When you do it, you see it. It's real. Then when you see folks that haven't put the work in, you see the issues from that. You've talked about your military background. I've heard quotes along the lines of, do you rise to the level of the challenge? Do you fall to the level of your training? And it speaks to that, that purpose and preparation that you put in before you're in the middle of a challenge. So that it becomes almost autonomic because of how well you've trained and prepared.
Phil: Absolutely. That's amazing. So, we have one other quick question before we go to the lightning round, because I know we could keep this conversation going for a long time, but I know your time is in extreme demand and appreciate everything. So when you extend that to dealing with partnerships, you lead multiple strategic alliances, right? On the services side of the business. How do you extend your cultural commitment to a partner who may or may not have the same level of commitment or the same way to interpret that focus on the customer?
Paul: So working with ecosystem partners, partners like Salesforce, like Adobe , and so many others that we work with, SAP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft, all of our trusted and strategic and valuable partners, one is, it comes back to that same calling to be of service to our clients. So the experience that we deliver for our clients. And it comes with a humility that says in order for us to do that, we can't do that alone. We can't have the arrogance to believe that we alone can do everything for our clients. And it started with that mindset. And then that leads us to forming these strategic partnerships with the great companies that I just talked about, that are wonderful partners of ours and being of service to helping our clients, and that's where it all starts from. And we're blessed because the folks that we work with in each of those organizations, and when you talk about our customer experience organization, they're working with Salesforce, they're working with Adobe, they're working with SAP, particularly on the CX side. So we've got so many different partners that we work with in that space, but they share our values and they share that calling to be of service to their customers and who are our clients. And we serve them jointly together. And we do that seamlessly. , And a lot of times we're bringing the best of both of our organizations. Their technology platform with our services capabilities, coupled with some of our exponential technology capabilities where we're able to add AI , and other components of our IBM toolkit , to being of service to our clients in conjunction with them. So it all starts with that notion of being of service and delivering that customer experience for our clients, and then recognizing the need to do that in partnership with others, because that's the way that we can be of better service to them.
Phil: That makes a ton of sense. I would conclude then that for you, shared values and culture lead to partnership success. They're critical factors to it.
Paul: Absolutely. You know, We've grown mostly organically, through training, developing and hiring. , But we've also done several acquisitions in our CX business. And I could tell you, hands down, just the single most important quality for making an acquisition successful, partnerships successful is exactly what you just talked about. Shared values and shared culture. Hands down. Beyond anything else beyond all other things combined.
Phil: is really powerful and really important, , especially now. So, with that, I have to shift into the lightning round. These are just a couple of quick questions that I ask everybody. So, to hear what you have to say and just to compare it to other folks. So, first question as a consumer, can you share an example of one of your favorite experiences?
Paul: So there's a couple, there's a couple. , One, before the pandemic, Uber was one of my favorite experiences. I felt like I was constantly , in an Uber car and you know, people have asked me what are the core elements of a great customer experience? And I would always say trust, transparency, control and convenience. Those are four key components to any great experience. And back in the day, if you needed a car or a car service, you had none of those. You would call a car service. You weren't sure that it was actually going to arrive. You couldn't trust that the person was going to actually show up when they said they were going to show up. You had no transparency. You'd call the dispatcher. Where's my car? Oh, he's right outside. Don't you see him? Meanwhile, he's like 10 miles away. You have no control in this situation, you've started a process that you can't stop. You're waiting. And it's just absolutely awful. And there's zero convenience in it. And what I felt Uber provided was all of those components. I didn't have to worry about, is the car coming? I could see the car it's coming, it was completely transparent. On the trust side, in terms of payment, I didn't have to hand someone my credit card. And back in the day, they would swipe it with a manual thing or they taking my credit card, and I had issues with fraud or things like that. So trust was taken care of, transparency was there. I was in complete control. Car's on the way. Something changed, I need to cancel. I need to change where I'm going. Everything gets auto calculated. And it was enormously convenient. It was right there on my phone. So Uber, for me, it was one of those big ones. It addresses those four components. And when you don't have those components, you end up with bad CX. And I think of checking luggage with an airline as an example of those things. You don't trust that your luggage is going to get there. You have no transparency once it goes on the belt. You have zero control of the process, of stopping, or rerouting would change in the process. And it's wildly inconvenient. You have to go to another airport and then wait , at the end of another carousel, praying that your luggage is going to slide down and that you can get on with your day in your life. It's a great comparison, and I'm actually surprised that nobody's worked on the luggage experience yet because you have that anxiety all the time. So, I mean, those are great. those are great , components I'll borrow the trust, transparency control and convenience and give you a credit for it when I bring it back with people. So, I definitely want to get through the rest if you have a couple of other minutes. The second one is if there's one thing you could change about people's perception of the role of customer experience, what would it be?
It would be that customer experience is everything. It's the end all, be all. It's the north star. It's the goal. It's the destination. If you get that right, if you focus, if you live to be of service, and you deliver value to someone in the context of their lives, you're getting it right. And you're playing to the right goal. There's a million different things that you have to do to get the journey right. But if you start there, the customer experience is your north star, you're starting in the right place.
Phil: Helps you really focus. That's super. Okay. Great. Last question. For our listeners, what one lesson would you want them to look to take away from your experience as a leader inside IBM's global business services?
Paul: I think it would be caring. Caring I think the single most important thing and showing empathy as part of that. So when we do that for our clients, things go well. When we do that for our people, things go well. We're talking here on 15 months in sometimes close to 18 months into the global pandemic. For us, when it started , we all had to shift to working from home. We were on video, we're still on video all day, every day. We just instantly started feeling the effects of it. the video fatigue, the drain, it was different. And you mentioned, you've been a consultant. You know what the lifestyle is like. We're used to working crazy hours, flying all over the place, but this was different. It was really challenging for all of us. Everyone's lives and routines had been upended. We had a lot of our folks that they're parents , so they're attending to kids who are now home , their spouses and significant others and loved ones were also working from home. A lot of times you've got multi-generational families in a home where people were tending to elderly parents , or other individuals. And it was just such a difficult time and something we had never experienced before. And we just started with that caring and empathy in terms of how we were going to navigate through this. And I was proud. One of the things that I led with my team was the creation of IBM's work from home pledge. And it was a set of principles that we created for how we were going to work with each other and treat each other, recognizing that we're now showing up as guests in each other's homes. This is a different phenomenon. This is something we hadn't done before. So it was just a way for us to pledge , to be empathetic with each other, to support each other, to support each other when we weren't ready to be on camera, Or to support each other when we needed time off during the day for homeschooling or tending to elderly parents, or just getting groceries. When, if you remember kind of the craziness of the initial pandemic, where we couldn't even get basic, food and supplies in your house. So I think caring and starting with empathy, definitely one of the biggest lessons I've learned as a leader here in inside of IBM
Phil: And I guess that is the definition for finishing strong. Thanks for saving the best for last. I love that , showcasing of caring with empathy. And you said before that, that, that took off across the company, right?
Paul: Yeah, so it started off just a few members of my team and it started off with listening, right? So we were hearing from our people that, Paul, I can't be on a two hour WebEx in the middle of the day. I've got a school, my kids, and I can't do it piecemeal. I need to block that time off or Paul, I'm having this issue, I'm having this issue where, the calls are happening at times where I'm not camera ready, so I can't be on camera. And I don't want people pressuring me like, Hey, how come I can't see you? Or, Hey, it's turned camera on. So each one of those things started with listening and then, my team and I just started just crafting, what could we do? What would we each sign up for individually voluntarily? And we created this pledge and then I sent it out as an email to my entire team globally. It was one email and then we created a slack channel and we said, Hey, if people are interested in taking the pledge, you would go to this slack channel and you could read the pledge and then type in that I pledge to do this. I pledge to care for my fellow IBMers, I pledge to support, not camera ready times. I pledge to support, time for homeschooling and personal needs. I pledge to practice self care. I pledge to check in on my colleagues and make sure everyone's okay during the pandemic. So it was all of those elements, one email, we created a slack channel and then it went viral across IBM culminating with our CEO ultimately taking the pledge himself and posting it publicly on LinkedIn, his own pledge you know, doing the IBM work from home pledge. So it was wonderful example of doing something, starting with listening, practicing caring and empathy, and then seeing it go viral was one of the highlights of my career because it just made life a little bit simpler , for so many people during a time that it was enormously difficult.
Phil: That must feel so, so rewarding because it's such an important, unique time and an opportunity for people to come together and do something special for each other that clearly not only affected your team, the rest of the organization, 350,000 people, the CEO and all these other people who would look to see that and say, Hey, you know what? Maybe I should do something like that too. And that's an amazing thought of one customer experience focused action, having ripple effects over hundreds of thousands of people and possibly, implementing some thoughts on the future of work, and what it means. So and I will have to save that for the next time, hopefully we can get you back in a three or six months and be talking about, the future of work through customer experience or something exciting like that. I'm planting a seed. Cause I'd love to have the opportunity to speak with you again.
Paul: Fantastic. I feel exactly the same way. Thank you so much for a wonderful discussion. Really enjoyed the time today.
Phil: Thank you so much for your time. And for everyone listening, I hope you got as much out of it as I did. I got some extra notes to apply my world and I hope they see you all next time in our next episode of the customer experience show.
I love Paul’s idea of creating IBM’s Work from Home pledge. It’s a great example of really listening to people and caring about them. Developing a practice of treating employees with empathy will surely be reflected in how the employees treat clients. It all has a trickle down effect. And it’s literally how you build a culture of providing an excellent customer experience. Because even though you’re running a business, you’re still working to serve people. Like Paul said, the customers are the North Star, and the reason your business exists.