This episode features an interview with Kristi Langdon, Head of Customer Experience at Daimler Trucks North America. In this episode, Kristi talks about setting employees up for successful delivery of the customer experience, the importance of connecting every employee with your end customers, and how CX actually starts with LX, or leadership experience.
This episode features an interview with Kristi Langdon, Head of Customer Experience at Daimler Trucks North America. In this episode, Kristi talks about setting employees up for successful delivery of the customer experience, the importance of connecting every employee with your end customers, and how CX actually starts with LX, or leadership experience.
Quotes
*"Start by listening. You would be amazed at the frequency with which we forget to listen, that we forget to start with voice of the customer. Because oftentimes we make assumptions. We think we know the right way, but if you would just take the time to listen to the customer in the front end and really understand what their pain point is, you would then inform what is the right problem you're trying to solve. Too many times we make those assumptions and it leads us down the wrong path. And we end up solving something that never needed to be solved."
Time Stamps
*[5:43] Extending CX past the sale
*[8:14] Kickstarting your CX transformation
*[9:33] Accepting constructive feedback
*[16:58] Enabling and empowering employees to deliver your CX
*[18:33] CX starts with leadership
*[20:45] Addressing fear of change
*[23:00] Protecting your market share amid change
*[31:15] Encouraging your employees through success stories
*[39:08] Daimler’s CX model
*[42:47] Tech trends incoming to Daimler
*[45:03] Delivering on your brand promise
Bio
Kristi is the Head of the Customer Experience team at Daimler Trucks North America with 20 years of senior leadership experience in manufacturing, technology, banking and energy. Kristi started the first CX organization at DTNA and launched a “voice of the customer” program.
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Links:
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Kristi Langdon: Start by listening. Start by listening. And every problem we try to solve in every CX initiative that we pursue, you would be amazed at the frequency with which we forget to listen, that we forget that we forget to start with voice of the customer. And because oftentimes organizations such as Diamler believe that we, that we know, we make assumptions. We think we know the right way, but our customers, if you would just take the time to listen to them in the front end and really understand what their pain point is, you would then inform what is the right problem we're trying to solve? Too many times we make those assumptions and it leads us down the wrong path. And we end up solving something that, that never needed to be solved.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to The Customer Experience Show! Today we’re talking with Kristi Langdon, Head of the Customer Experience team at Daimler Trucks North America. Kristi started the very first customer experience organization at Daimler and launched a “voice of the customer program.” She effectively transformed DTNA to follow an outside-in business model and become a customer-centric company.
In this episode, Kristi talks about setting employees up for successful delivery of the customer experience, the importance of connecting every employee with your end customers, and how CX actually starts with LX, or leadership experience. But first, a word from our sponsor.
Phil Dillard: Traditionally, the customer experience journey stopped after the sale. And business-facing employees had no contact with clients. But that’s all changing. For Daimler Trucks Kristi Langdonis flipping customer experience on its head. She’s sending internal employees out into the field and extending the customer experience past the sale of the vehicle. She’s transforming the way Daimler defines their CX. Today we’re learning from her about the road to CX transformation.
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Customer Experience Show. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, here today with Kristi Langdon from Daimler trucks. How you doing today?
Kristi Langdon: I'm doing great. How are you Phil?
Phil Dillard: I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It's it's starting to turn into summer in San Francisco, which means it's time for kids to go back to school. But it's really great. Great to have you with us and so much looking forward to having a chat with you about what's going on with you. So, gosh, trying to figure out where to get started. I usually start with an easy question. How do you describe your current position? And how long have you been there?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah. So I have been at Daimler Trucks North America for about seven years. And I've been in my role as the Head of Customer Experience for about four and a half now. And the way I would describe my role is to help ensure that all of the stakeholders in our ecosystem are focused on the end customer experience and evolving that to a place that will never be perfect, but continuously focusing on improving that. And what we mean by that typically in our line of business, as the manufacturer and designer of large commercial vehicles is making it easier and easier for our customers to do business with us.
Phil Dillard: And how do you describe your customer?
Kristi Langdon: We are in the B2B to C space and our customers are w are businesses who are you know, typically carrying freight from point A to point B and or their customers who have, who are purchasing a commercial vehicle that have a job to do. Such as mining or waste management, et cetera. And we sell about half of our vehicles directly to our end customers. And then we sell half of our vehicles through our network of dealerships across Canada, U.S. and Mexico.
Phil Dillard: Got it. Okay. And these sound like pretty big pieces of of equipment and a, and an a, maybe even a pretty long sales cycle. So when you talk about making it easier and easier to do business with us, what is it that's changing that you're working hard to do this?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'll share with you a little bit about kind of historically how we've seen that and how that has changed over the course of the last five to 10 years or so. So historically we see ourselves as solely the, the manufacturing and engineering firm who is creating these vehicles. We, we have a lot of pride in what we make and we have the market share to back that up. We have about 40% market share. And so, you know, we are an engineering or a German engineering company. And with that, there's kind of a lot of, as I mentioned before, pride associated with it. Historically, we have seen ourselves as you know, okay, so we've sold the vehicle into the market and thank you very much, we're done. And what we've since learned, you know, as with, you know, our customers are shopping as consumers at Amazon and other at other very customer centric organizations. And so that has influenced the expectation that they have had in working with us. So. What that means is their expectation after they purchased the vehicle is far greater than it used to be. Right? So our customer journey begins with our customer saying, okay, I need to purchase a commercial vehicle and go navigating through that purchasing process. And then the delivery process. And then from there you know, then operating that vehicle in new, very digitized ways. And then eventually that vehicle needs a service and or repair. And then, you know, and then eventually they'll resell it. So for our customers that the, these $150,000 plus vehicles that they're purchasing from us are a tool to get a job done. And when that tool is not up and running, they're losing money. So our job in terms of making it easier to do business with us is, you know, not only having a great product and making sure that quality is at the, you know, the best possible quality, but it's in all of the other touch points after the sale of the vehicle as well.
Phil Dillard: Sure. And then that makes a lot of sense in dealing with machines. Once they get out the door, there's, if you're a provider of something, people like you bought it, you bought a widget, you need to put it in and off it goes. Right. But if you're saying that the consumerization has changed the relationship, so there's more and more that's built after the sale, and that leads into next, then the next sale. That's gotta be an interesting challenge at the organization itself because you described as being a German manufacturing company that has a history of doing things a certain way. So can you comment a little bit on, I mean, some of us, it sounds like, market changes, but also sounds like there needs to be culture changes in order for all your stakeholders to get on board in the same regard. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah, absolutely. I think the story that I'll share there is is that really very well indicates the need for culture change to become more customer centric in our organization is when we initially decided as an organization to do this, when I went into our operating committee and made the pitch that we, that there is a business case for tran transforming ourselves to become more customer centric our CEO at the time said, I love this idea. I see a real need for it. And I'd like to, just to kind of kickstart this customer centricity with a customer experience day, where all of our employees stop what they're doing and focus on customers. And so our first ever customer experience day, every single one of our locations, every single one of our employees was engaged in it at various locations. And at our headquarters location here in Portland, Oregon, we invited in a lot of customers to to share, you know, straight from their mouth, what it's like to do business with us. And in the audience, we had engineers, we had IT professionals, we had those from purchasing all throughout the organization, many of whom have never actually spoken to a customer. And so w you know, I recall one of our largest customers speaking that day. And at one point he said, and this quote has become somewhat famous or infamous within her organization. He said to the audience, you guys have great people. We love the people that we work with. You have an amazing product. But your processes, man, your processes, you've got some work to do. And I think, you know, it was in the context of that conversation, in which this audience full of engineers, you could literally watch their jaws drop to the floor, you know, as they were hearing this very constructive feedback about, wow we aren't maybe as, as great as we thought we were we, aren't thinking above and beyond just these beautiful vehicles that we're creating. And so thus began this transition this openness, this willing to listen and accept this feedback as not, you know, not in defensive mode, but instead as how can we leverage this feedback to get better? And so you could hear people begin to ask questions as we began to dialogue about this within the organization, like, well, who is our customer? Is it the dealer? Is it the, you know, is it the driver? Is it the purchase? Is it the person purchasing the vehicle and so on and so forth? Or what about those of us who don't directly interface with the end customer? Do we have customers? And so where we landed is that, you know, are the end customer the business who was purchasing this vehicle is our customer. But in addition to that, every single one of us, regardless of where you work in the organization, has internal customers or indirect customers. And so anybody that you're engaging with, you're collaborating with, you're you know, anybody who, you know who calls you on the phone at the office, They're your customer. So, and that all, and how you engage with you, you know, either directly or indirectly with internal customers, or end customers all impacts the overall customer experience. So that's kind of hopefully that, that, you know, addresses your question. That's kind of how we began to say, wow, this cultural element is so, so big in terms of how we begin to improve and transform ourselves.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, That sounds, it makes a lot of sense. It is some somewhat of a common thread of what I'm hearing people who are seeing a transformation say our culture needs to make a change. And you've done like a great example in the playbook right, of how to get people going. Because you have to get senior buy-in senior level buy-in you have to get people who are actually going to believe believe someone that this is an issue, that this is something that matters to them. And often the people who are distant from customers are either for like protected or insulated from customers or they are they don't believe some of the things that some folks are saying to them when they're relaying messages back from the customer. So hearing them directly from them is great. Oh, my question is like, how did you get to the, you said the operating committee, the senior at the senior level of, the organizations to get this sort of, sort of, buy-in? What opened that door. Cause that's often a difficult one to go through.
Kristi Langdon: Yeah, you know, That story is, kind of a serendipitous one. First of all, I was, when I came into the organization, I came from a banking background. And so I now in consumer banking and commercial banking. But I naturally had, I was more attuned to customer experience in that regard. So when I arrived and didn't see my, my first job at DTNA was to oversee a, an internal consulting unit that was responsible for overseeing and tracking strategic initiatives. And we reported out directly to our board or to our operating committee on the success of those. So I had that vantage point coming in that no, none of those strategic initiatives were customer service, were customer focused at all. They were all kind of efficiency focused. You know, how do we improve our pricing? Very kind of internally focused initiatives. So I was initially from day one, very curious why that was. And so over the course of my early days at DTNA, I was empowered to explore this topic a little bit. So I had some time, some runway and began to socialize this question of, should we become, is there value at DTNA and us becoming more customer centric? And as a small group of us began to socialize this, we engaged with some senior leaders and were kind of given the approval to go straight to our board and make this proposal. Now the serendipitous part is that coincidentally, our newly placed CEO at the time had just been on a whirlwind customer visit tour. His background was one of manufacturing rather than kind of more customer focused. And so he wanted to just, you know, touch and ask questions and better understand what that looked like. And when he went on that whirlwind tour, he was told very transparently, you've got some work to do. And so in I walk, unbeknownst to me, making this proposal that we should become more customer centric. The timing couldn't have been better. And so that really worked in our favor. And what I'll say about that is it the experience made me really realize how important, particularly in a large global bureaucratic, you know, siloed organization it is to have leadership support of an initiative such as this it's critical.
Phil Dillard: That's a really, that's a really important point, right? You have to have that support and has to be executed the right way. They have to be willing to listen to the customers, to the people that are saying things that are not traditional in their approaches. And then take some risks. It makes me wonder about either, well, part of me says, well, where did you see resistance to this? And how do you address when you see resistance to the change? But another part was, makes me think about what does the competition say? So I'll give you the option. You can go in their direction, right.
Kristi Langdon: Yeah.
Phil Dillard: You know, when they say, is it, how much is there a competitive factor or driving this versus just an awareness of listening to cut to customers, to maintain an advantage by driving hard, right? Some organizations made maintain by driving hard. What do you think about that?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah. Well, I mean, both are important questions to consider. I think from the, your first question about where did we, where have we seen resistance? All over the place. You know, I think it's interesting. A lot of departments within our organization think, well, I don't touch the customer, so I don't have a role to play. And so kind of fighting that battle is certainly a challenge. And I would say that bringing customers in and having their voice heard or getting those employees, those teams out to visit the end customer so that they can hear directly from them is a successful tactic. And you know, th the leadership component is also really important, I would say. In addition to that, work, one of the the other areas where we have found success in terms of that resistance is going in and workshopping within their departments, looking for opportunities for improvement and kind of helping them you know, apply design thinking to some of the ways in which they do business. You know, even with their internal stakeholders or their internal customers. There have been some aha moments, certainly in that as well. One of the things that he was really incredibly successful and eyeopening certainly for me is in one of our annual customer experience days, the theme was employee experience drives customer experience. And in short that, well, there were a lot of learnings from that. And in short, I would categorize those two learnings into areas of focus or areas of opportunity for us. One is enablement and one is empowerment. And what we heard from these employees who were resistant and fearful of change is that they didn't feel enabled with the right tools. Meaning like, hey, you want me to focus on customer experience? Number one, I don't even talk to customers. Number two, you've set me up with these archaic, like, like green screen technologies. You know, this is how these are the tools you've given me to be successful. No, thank you. I'm not going to play with you and your topic du jour, you know, this, all this talk of customer experience. So that was the first one, which we've been unpacking for some time. And then the second one is a topic of empowerment. And empowerment w what these employees meant by that, in terms of, you know, what's key what's what is that, what is that obstacle, that's keeping you from participating in CX? What they mean by empowerment or a lack thereof is their leaders might be kind of talking the talk, but they aren't walking the talk. They're leaders are set are kind of on the bandwagon of CX. And we understand that we have to empower you to do the right thing, give you the freedom, the bandwidth, the trust, all of these elements inherent in empowerment to do the right thing without micromanaging you. But behind closed doors, Phil, we heard these employees say that they didn't feel empowered. They didn't feel their leaders were really giving them that empowerment they needed, the freedom they needed to be successful in that space. And so what that led us to the, on the empowerment topic is engaging our leadership in some training. We actually worked with the Disney Institute to kind of talk about what are those leadership behaviors that will drive empowerment and trust and better communication and these elements that are inherent in the cultural component of CX?
Phil Dillard: Well, you've just jot down some really good points of wisdom here. Right? Cause I'm like, oh, how'd you fix that one? and I like the way you break it down between enablement and empowerment, I wonder the term, you know, fear word fear comes up a lot because humans fear change. And I'm curious if there is a mix of fear of success or fear of failure or both. I mean, where do you see reluctance to change come because you're coming from a very different environment from the bank banking into manufacturing different people are wired different ways about how they think about money, right? How they think about the financials and how they think about success. Can you comment a little bit on what you saw resolved in the space around fear?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah. I'll share with you, my opinion. I think, you know, I think that fear of change was really around w was really around failure. There's there is often at Daimler, you know, kind of, as I think I alluded to it before, like, you know, the program du jour. Like it's and if you, as an employee, if you're asking me to buy in to something and change my behavior, I need to also trust that you're going to do the same and that you're going to be, you're going to hold yourself accountable to, you know, ho holding to what you say that you will do, which is you know, this element of empowerment. And I think there's a fear that our leaders in our organization, aren't going to follow through with what they are saying they're going to do. I think there's an element of truth to that. I think that being part of a large global organization where politics are at play where there's a lot of tradition and history and, you know, kind of very, yeah, traditional ways of doing business. I think that all plays into that element of fear and distrust and I can understand it. I can understand it.
Phil Dillard: Sure because people who grew up making things that work, failure is not a good thing. They don't want to see wheels come off or pistons come out of engines or lines that don't stay where they're supposed to stay. And that concept of failure is like, it is, you know, you have one shot, right. And it's gotta get, gotta be right of a million times. Right. Versus something that is a little different. When you talk about experimenting with customers and there's also probably a perspective of people saying, why, right. Why do I need to change? It's one thing if I could hear it directly from a customer, then I started to feel, but I would expect some folks to look across the aisle and say, we're still number one. We're still top in market share. We're doing great. What, you know, it sounds nice, but if we keep making better products, this is gonna, this is gonna be better. Can you talk a little bit about the you know, looking at competition itself and does comp did competition help at all or does it, there was all intrinsic trinsic and internal?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah, I think in terms of the competition question, that's what really resonates with our senior leaders. Right, because there's this element of like, you know, if I'm the leader of this organization, we are not going to lose market share on my watch. You know, I, so is it going to be Tesla? Is it going to be you know, some other disruptive, you know, new, new organization in our space. Are we going to go the way of Blockbuster or Kodak or, you know, any of those other examples that we often cite in terms of you know, being disrupted and for us, you know, God, we are not fast movers and, you know, th the fear of some much more agile organization coming in and being able to kind of wipe away what we've built over a long period of time, it plays, looms large for them. And while historically we've always been very innovative in terms of our product development, we have been far from innovative in terms of, you know, what it's like to do business with us. So there's a lot of opportunity in our, on the CX front to kind of address all of those those elements of like, you know, in addition to the, all the progress that we've made on these amazing vehicles, we've got to have an experience that matches that. You can't have an amazing vehicle and then fall short on, on everything that comes after that. There, there is risk, there's competitive risk in that. And we know that from looking at some of the you know, some of the experiences, some of the digital capabilities that our competitors are putting into play. So...
Phil Dillard: Sure.
So, we've covered a lot about the strategic level. How about if we take a step down into a little bit more about how the transition looks like? So if you started the transformation about four years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about what that's looked like in terms of programs you start with and programs you, you grew over time or how the early successes or failures led to other successes or opportunities?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, and in hindsight, I think we've made some really great progress on the culture front, primarily because of that leadership engagement. As well as the voice of the customer, bringing that into our organization. One area that I wish that I had focused, that we had focused more on in the very early days is measurement. It's not to say we didn't focus on it. It's just I would have dedicated more resources to it because p w because of the type of organization that we are, we measure everything's about KPIs. And because that's kind of inherent in our organization we need something to hang our hat on, even though we, most of our, we all know our decisions are made emotionally, but w we, we need that piece of paper that, that kind of, that validates the logic behind that decision and that investment. And when I say measurement, I mean, you know, our voice of the customer we use Medallia is our voice of the customer platform. Kind of rolling that out more holistically sooner I think would be something that I would have would I, that I would have done differently. And In addition to that, we have very specific metrics on how we're performing on various CX metrics along the customer journey that I would have I would have better impressed on the organization. Th the challenge of some of those, though in the space of B2B at a manufacturing organization like us is that we are, the way we are organized is very vertical and the way our customers experience us, you know, from a journey perspective is very horizontal. And so for example, one of our key metrics is truck delivery, meaning delivering our vehicles on time. And if they're going to be late, communicating it. We do a really crappy job of that, believe it or not for various reasons. And the reason I cite that as an example is there's no one department in our organization because of how we are organized, that owns that. And so what that allows us to do is to kind of point fingers and say, no, my job that's, you know, that's the carrier's job. That's that department's job. And so it's If we had measured that and called that out sooner, I think we could have better addressed that obstacle to our operating committee and you know, created some better solutions and made more headway there.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It seems if no department owns it, then some people would say, well, then everyone owns customer experience. But if you're trying to make it a new thing and not give people, I don't want to say excuses, not create opportunities for something to fall between the cracks where you haven't defined how to solve that problem. That could be particularly challenging sounds like.
Kristi Langdon: Yup. Yup, absolutely. And you know, it requires a lot of collaboration. And we use that word a lot at Daimler, but when your performance goals are, very vertical, you know, you, sometimes collaboration just becomes a word that you use instead of a behavior that you operate with.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, and it's a stem, there's a structural challenge, right? Because you can, people can then be aware. They might be enabled. They might have the right tools. Right. But they may not necessarily be empowered to solve something that's outside of their, outside of the department or outside of their reach. And you've got to find something that reaches across the silos to do that.
Kristi Langdon: Yep. Yep.
Phil Dillard: So does that, is that then where you lead from the early stage programs to something that's more more, nuanced for the mid senior levels of the organization to cross that?
Kristi Langdon: You know, you're actually, it's interesting that you bring up the mid senior levels of the organization because that is where things tend to get stuck. Right. You know, it's easy. Well, I shouldn't say easy, but perhaps you understand what I mean? It's easy as the CEO where your vantage point is, let's all do what's in the best interest of the organization to kind of make decisions accordingly. It's very different when you're a mid-level manager in a silo department where, you know, you're just trying to get through the day and get through your inbox to to be open to collaborating with different departments where you don't maybe see the the immediate benefit of that from your vantage point.
Phil Dillard: Sure. I mean, if I'm trying to put myself in that person's shoes, I'd say, okay, first I have to do my basic job well. And something that happens upstream or downstream from me could cause a delay or cause a problem that I'm not really responsible for my, my, and the job that's in my description. It's in my employment agreement or whichever, or that I get evaluated on, but there's this, I have this intent to do better, but I don't necessarily know how, or I'm not empowered how, or, you know, I'm, I might have, or I've seen this in budget cycles before. I may not have, I may be resentful of department X that gets more dollars and attention than me and I'm like, I don't have the ability to maybe I don't even have the ability to do this. I've got to figure something out. Right. Do I have to take this out of hide? Why don't they give me something? Like, there could be a lot of conflicting interests, I guess that could be there. And have you found anything from the old, your old job or like something inherent in the culture that you could use to leverage to leverage people making a change? Or to embracing that risk, I guess is even better way to say it?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah, I think that the one, thing that or the most immediate things thing that comes to mind in response to that, Phil is probably just storytelling and citing example, success stories within the organization, giving people the freedom to you know, experiment. Giving them a kind of a path forward of, oh there's somebody, there's a great example of a mid level, mid to senior level manager in our accounting organization. And we've, we kind of came in and videoed him to kind of share him as a success story because the example he set was, Hey, look, I know we're a back office team, we don't really interface with the end customer, but he kind of brought together various collaborators, both within his organization, as well as those he partners with and workshopped and continuously improved. And they, there's some very kind of tangible improvements that they've made that indirectly improve the end customer experience. And so kind of citing that, you know, with my job as the lead of CX was, I saw as like, you know, propping him up, sharing him as a success story, giving people a better understanding of what exactly what bruh behavior we're looking for them to change. And sharing that, that he did it successfully all in the face of, you know, potential failure. And he even shared some initial first, early first starts where he did fail and kept at it. So w there are lots of those little stories. Throughout the organization. And we kind of almost like little investigative journalists go and flush those out and put a spotlight on them and share them as broadly as we can. And in, in different format, you know, we do a lot of, we have a social intranet internally, but we also have like large digital display boards for in-person sharing in the lobby of lobbies of our organizations and also at in-person events. So just continuously telling these stories and people like really, we get a lot of feedback from employees that they love that because I think CX is the, is one area that we do a lot of storytelling and that, that seems to have some sort of role in, in behavior change, I think.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, I would totally believe that. I think we like to often say that, you know, the people who tell the best stories win in the marketplace, and I think that's that whether it's an internal marketplace for attention and energy and ideas, or it's an external marketplace storytelling is a huge part. I'm curious about, did you ever get to the feeling of, what was the motivation of, this individual? Why did this person do, what they did and take take a risk that others might not.
Kristi Langdon: You know, some of that maybe is just the DNA of the individual. I th I think for the, if I look across at the people who were really highly engaged in CX I remain surprised at really who the topic resonates with. And as I mentioned, you know, who, who would have thought the head of accounting would be excited to participate in something like this. But I think it's people, I mean, the one common factor is it's people who are always looking to continuously improve things, and it crossed with people who are culture advocates who under really understand the value of culture, people who aren't just, you know, punch in at a time clock but really want to make a difference in the lives of the people that they're engaging with daily. Yeah.
Phil Dillard: Sure. Okay. So it sounds like people who are really bringing a passion to the work, people who buy into the story and who were then willing to make an effort to kind of, to to kind of, to the walk, right. To really live it.
Kristi Langdon: And I th and I, the only one more comment that I'll add on that, I think what the other thing that I've heard from employees in terms of CX is that they find that it has given them a greater sense of, purpose when they can connect themselves to the end customer, when they can somehow make something just even, just iteratively better for those that they work with or our end customer. And I find that to be pretty cool, you know, that it's given people a kind of a reason to have a skip in their step rather than, you know, the mundane task of doing something, you know, the same thing day in, day out, they're looking at ways to like, Hey, maybe I do need to give that, you know, return that email within the same day versus you versus returning the email with, by the end of the week, or like really thinking about how might my response time you know, have a direct impact on the end customer. I know that's a very simple, kind of small mundane example but it has forced people to think about, like, it does make a difference. What I do does difference.
Phil Dillard: Sure it does. You can have the right answer in an hour, in a day or in a week. Having the right answer is one part of the equation. How quickly you get the right answer is the other, and how you make that efficient or repeatable. I mean, that's gotta be a big deal for someone like that.
Kristi Langdon: Absolutely.
Phil Dillard: So, you know, it's interesting, it leads into a thread of, you talked about metrics and you talked about culture. How do you balance the quantitative and the qualitative? I mean, the quantity probably got down from some history, but the qualitative is probably emerging. How do you start to broach that part a way that enhances this culture?
Kristi Langdon: Yeah. I don't have a great answer. I feel like I, you know, I, how do you measure engagement? We have the various departments identify major initiatives that they would like to workshop on our annual CX days. And that, and we measure and track that and follow up on it. And we group it by senior executive and so forth. We also you know, w we also do interesting kind of qualitative metrics, like how many people participated in, you know, event X, Y, Z how I'm trying to think of w we have CX champions who are kind of our cultural change agents embedded throughout the organization. And so we do a lot of rewards and recognition. With them. We measure how many employees we have had engaged in our, what we call our day in the life program, which is getting employees out into the field and meeting with our end customers or even meeting with drivers. How. Many employees we have participate in what we call ride and drives. So many of our employees, for example, have never even been in a truck. And so getting them in there and giving them the opportunity to ride around in one and talk to some of the drivers. And so things like that where, you know, we count the number, but we also highlight the stories and we interview them the employees after they've had that experience to, to share what they've learned. And and then we broadcast that throughout the organization.
Phil Dillard: That's great. I love it. I love it. The very great part at the end. Right. We count the numbers. We tell the stories we broadcast across the organization. So you're touching it and a number of different levels, which is awesome. So, how then would you describe the vision for the future? What's the direction?
Kristi Langdon: I would say, so th they're there, there are kind of two mantras that we that we maintain. One is and I shared this with you when we chatted by phone a couple of weeks ago. Leadership experience drives employee experience drives customer experience. So LX drives EX drives CX, and that's really kind of that cultural element where we understand the correlation between each of those three components on the cultural front. On the front. From a CX, just external focused front. Our CX vision is simply just a list of five attributes. Because when our, when we talk to our customers, it really all boils down to this list and those include speed, simplicity communication, consistency, and innovation. And what we find as our customers share feedback with us is that on the innovation front, when it comes to product innovation, we get very high scores, but on all of those other four elements, we are, we score pretty poorly. You know, this transformation takes years, right? It's not it's not done overnight, but what, but we're making progress. Our, you know, our, one of the data. That we cite in our customer experience feedback is that it takes our customers an average of six attempts to reach out to us to get a problem solved. So, you that's not fast, that's not communicating well. You know, or simply. So I've recently had an experience. My partner and I had an experience with a very large rental car company. And it was, it really resonated for me in terms of you know, that, that simplicity and the communication. We left the rental car and boarded a plane in Chicago. However for days and days we're getting phone calls from this rental car company saying you still haven't returned your car. When are you going to return your car? Do you need an extension? And then they began to escalate and escalate, and we're calling and we're calling and we're not getting answers. And this person is saying, talk to this person and, oh, that's not my job. And oh, you need to talk to the center in Chicago, but it's closed. And you know, it's maddening and so on, in a similar way that's, you know what it has been like to do business with us when a customer has a problem that they need resolved or an outstanding question, there's not kind of one centralized streamlined way in which we manage that. We're in the process of addressing it. But but it's taking us quite a while to solve some of this. So anyway, those are, that's a long-winded answer to your question.
Phil Dillard: No it's but it's a great one though, because it highlights how you could take a personal story and use it to build empathy with someone on your team who cause if you had said, well, hey, you remember that driver on the column color, Jane, right. Remember that driver Jane that we rode along with on, you know, riding drive or, you know, on CX day? And you know, this is the type of experience that I'm happy that I've had, oh, you've had an experience like that. You know, they're dealing with this, but just in a slightly different way. And then it becomes personal. It becomes a ability for a person to touch onto that onto the experience in a different way, and then think about how they might address that, might be part of the solution, at least be a a little more willing. That's awesome. Last couple of questions before we go to the right lightning round, as you're going down that route. Are there any trends or technologies that you think, are going to be particularly helpful in helping the CX to the future and enhance your brand?
Kristi Langdon: I think I think self-service, and on-demand support will be big for us. So, kind of automating some of that and simplifying and streamlining some of the ways when a truck, when a vehicle breaks down or when when a customer just has an issue, they need resolved whether it's like warranty or service related giving them the opportunity to do that in an on-demand way will be really big. And that, you know, that touches on the topic of digital transformation and just how big that is within the CX realm. And what that means at an organization that is the size of Daimler is that business and IT have got to change the way that we work with each other. And you know, it's a really big challenge culturally, certainly because the way we're used to working together, is finger pointing, you know, the business throws over, hey, we need you to solve this. So figure out a technology and make it snappy. And and then IT comes back, you know, some months later and says, here you go. And the business says, that's not what we asked for. And so they're these mismatched community expectations and communication is poor. There's a lot of finger pointing, a lot of blame. And if we are going to remain competitive, speaking of you know, the competitive landscape that you brought up a while ago, we got to make a huge shift in that regard. And we're making baby steps but we got to move faster than we are.
Phil Dillard: Which probably needs to a bit of a power. I want to say power struggle, but it would be a shift in power or in relationships or dominance of the country. I would expect some well, i've seen. Some companies are dominated by engineering and some companies are dominated by marketing and brand. And some companies are dominated by sales. And if there's tectonic shifts in the power balance it becomes it becomes difficult for a number of different reasons. And this sounds like one of those, one of those examples.
Kristi Langdon: It is.
Phil Dillard: And so w what do you think, how do you think that the shift in customer experience though delivers to the brand itself, brand experience?
Kristi Langdon: Well, I mean, I think in my mind that, you know, a brand promise is, you know what you say you're going to do, right. And your customer experience is how you deliver on that promise. So, you know, our w you know, our, brand is really for all who keep the world moving. That's you know, kind of our we are in C w we're saying we are in service to everybody who's moving things around the world, whether it's Amazon or Walmart or Penske, or, you know, any truck you see on the highway. And if we can't and what we hear from those customers is we need you to keep us moving. Because when we are not we're not making money. And so if we don't deliver on the ability to help keep them moving, to keep, you know, what is, how quickly are we turning around their vehicles when they need a service? When there is a pair, a repair, when they're waiting for weeks upon weeks on a part that's coming from China, you know, all of those elements come into play. And when they are waiting on questions that or issues that need to be resolved, or there is a windshield wiper that on the last hundred and 50 vehicles that they bought from us, that's not working correctly. All of those things contribute to, you know, what we are promising. And if we can't deliver on that's poor CX.
Phil Dillard: And increasingly important to these consumers who have had their levels set, their expectations raised by other industries all around.
Kristi Langdon: That's right.
Phil Dillard: Amazing. So it is, it's crazy that the time has gone as quickly as it has. But we're onto the lightning round. We do this for, with everybody at the show. The last three questions are pretty much the same every time. And just want to see your quick responses to these. Are you ready?
Kristi Langdon: Okay. I'm ready.
Phil Dillard: Okay. All right. Question one as a customer, what's an example of one of your favorite customer experiences/
Kristi Langdon: I have kind of a boring answer to that. I love shopping at Nordstrom and I feel like every time I walk in there, they you know, there's some connections. Somebody is going to remember my name, remember what my preferences are. And that's both digital as well as in person. And I feel like I can, I feel like I can return something that's two years old, but is not holding up to my expectations and they will take it back and exchange it or just return it at no fee. And th so there's just a lot of trust that's an inherent in that. And I greatly appreciate that.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, I don't think it's boring at all. I think it's amazing to have a brand that does does as well as they do in doing exactly that, making everybody feel that way about, about shopping. They're so super. Number two, if there's one thing you could change about people's perception of the role of customer experience at a company, what would it be?
Kristi Langdon: I would immediately change the challenge that customer experience resides only in one department or only in customer, you know, customer facing roles. Yeah. Yeah. Our field teams say that, and our customer say, we love the people that we engage with. The, you know, the person that we engage with in, in person, your field team members. That the challenge resides when our field team members have to go back into the organization to get questions or problems resolved. That's where the weight exists. That's where the communication breaks down with, you know, all of the disconnects occur. And if every single individual in our organization understood that, you know, th the speed at which they return a call of somebody in the field, or you know, how they engage with those field team members, et cetera, makes a difference to the overall end customer experience. That would be a really amazing thing. And we would be transforming much faster.
Phil Dillard: No. That's the real transformation, right? From having a customer service department to a customer experience, ethos, right. That says everybody is in service to the end goal, the mission that the customer and whether it's a one-off thing or a systematic thing that they need to change. All those channels, all those changes and opportunities really matter.
Kristi Langdon: That's right.
Phil Dillard: Super. Okay. Last, but certainly not least. What one lesson for the listeners would you like them to take away from your experience as a CX leader?
Kristi Langdon: This one is going to sound overly simple. But I maintain it, you know, across the board. Start by listening. And every problem we try to solve in every CX initiative that we pursue, you would be amazed at the frequency with which we forget to listen, that we forget to start with voice of the customer. And because oftentimes organizations such as Diamler believe that we know, we make assumptions. We think we know the right way, but our customers, if you would just take the time to listen to them in the front end and really understand what their pain point is, you would then inform what is the right problem we're trying to solve? Too many times we make those assumptions and it leads us down the wrong path. And we end up solving something that, that never needed to be solved.
Phil Dillard: Sure. Sure. You know, one of the times when I'm talking to people and I try to get them clear on when they're making assumptions versus assertion of fact, I have to say something like what would have to be true for what you just said to be true, right. What's foundationally has to be true or that could change or be different for that to be true. Have you heard any key words from people responding to your, some of those questions that give you an idea that they're not listening, you know, that they're not starting with the voice of the
Kristi Langdon: Yeah. All the time. I mean, and they just, you know, when we work with the different departments throughout the organization on CX efforts, even after CX trainings, you know, and I've got, I've gotten to a point where I just, that's the first question I ask. And so many times, phil, you know, they'll stare back at me blankly and you know, and cause I'll say, okay, what's your voice of customer? And they'll say, well, I mean, we haven't, you know, and they kind of like hedge and they hem and they haw and it's like, nope, I don't even want to have this conversation until you have what that voice of the customer is. You got to start there. So,
Phil Dillard: Great. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. It's really been a great talking with you I always, we always pick up some really neat nuggets and then and then, some of the canon of things that like just work and I think you've covered a lot of that. And clearly you have are on away with this journey that you've a got at at Daimler. So.
Kristi Langdon: It's a lot of fun. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's always fun to, to chat with interesting people who are passionate about the same topics and to chat about CX in particular.
Phil Dillard: Absolutely. Well, it's great to have you here. Hopefully we can have you back sometime and hear about how things have progressed over time.
Kristi Langdon: Yeah. I would love that.
Phil Dillard: And with that, we'd like to say, thank you everybody for coming up and joining this episode. We'll see you next time on an episode of The Customer Experience Show. Bye for now.
Kristi’s last point is critical, and one we hear often on the show - start by listening to the customer. Use their voice to guide the way. Because making assumptions means you could bewasting time solving the wrong problem. And when your customers know you’re listening, they’ll be with you for the long haul.