Hey Michelle, I’m excited to have this chat with you. Congratulations on your recent promotion to Director of Customer Experience.
Thank you. I’m happy to talk about it.
Tell me a little bit about what your career has been like so far.
I spent my early career at a medical device company in their IT department. So, I was doing a lot of technical work and not exactly loving it. My manager at the time saw they had a customer experience program. One day, he said, “This CX analyst role is opening up and I think you should apply for it.”
Wow, you had a great manager.
Right—I never would have thought of that. I didn’t know what CX was. I looked at the job description and was like, “Yeah, I think I could handle that and learn some things.” So, I took the CX role, and climbed from analyst to manager over the next five years, managing the company’s entire CX program. Then Flynn reached out to me.
So, this was your first ad agency experience. And how long have you been at Flynn?
Almost two and a half years.
Customer Experience Management seems rare in the agency world. We see this offered by consultants, but I haven’t seen many agencies that do it. Can you tell me why Flynn chose to double down on CXM?
Part of the reason we do it is because not many agencies do it. We know our competitors’ service offerings relate to what we do, but CXM isn’t often its own dedicated discipline. Everyone knows CX is important—we hear it at every conference we go to—but marketers don’t know where to start, or they can’t get funding to hire a team internally. The financial impacts of an improved customer experience can be hard for companies to quantify. So, we usually come in as a consultant and ideally partner with clients over years. It’s far more efficient to tackle CX with us than hiring a full department in-house.
When you tell your parents what you do, how do you talk about it? What do you say you do?
I usually say, “You know how you get surveys from companies? It’s kind of like that, but a lot more.” We help our clients understand what their customers think about them, and how they can improve to better meet customers’ needs and expectations. Learning more about our clients’ customers can help them develop different products and processes that we know will make their customers happy.
And when you make happier customers…
Exactly. You get more growth. But not just growth, accelerated growth. CXM is the internal engine that can refine and amplify a company’s performance in the outside world.
I know you work on multiple clients, but one of your larger clients is a global pharmaceutical leader. How have you seen the team’s work in CX impact their business over the past few years?
It’s hard being in the pharma industry with the strict regulations. Our client can’t necessarily know who their patients are or see any of that personally identifiable information. We had to figure out how to frame our findings in a way that kept us compliant while our client could understand the data.
We also set up their “voice of the patient” program across multiple brands and channels. We’ve been able to simplify and standardize how they talk about patient experience across the org, which is huge.
Okay, but how are you putting that data into action?
Because we were able to design this program from the ground up, we can now prove the value of CX with our client. They’re seeing areas of frustration or bright spots in their patient experience they weren’t aware of before. So now they can take this information and confidently say, “Okay, let’s improve this thing or focus on that.” It provides a prioritized map of jobs to be done so we can start to tie the company’s CX efforts back to quantifiable business impact.
What would you say your proudest achievement has been so far on the CXM team?
It’s probably setting up the program that we were just talking about because nothing existed before. It was extremely complex. We had to learn not only what their current state was, but then understand what we could legally do in a future state. We all learned the intricacies of the different groups within the company, all the politics, approval processes, all the inner workings—and of course, the patient journeys. Not every patient journey is the same. But we wanted to standardize the program so it could scale. So, we had to find those common areas across all the different types of patients.
Standing up something like that from nothing sounds like a huge amount of work.
It took probably two years to get it to where it is today. And now it seems to be running smoothly. Which is a testament to what can be achieved with multi-year agency partnerships. Big leaps forward take adequate time and investment, and our clients at this company fully recognize that.
How do you see your role evolving with this promotion?
In a way, it’s like I’m giving up some control, and I struggle with that. I have to trust my team to do more of the day-to-day work. I give them a project and know that they can run with it—and I fully trust that they can. This allows me as the department director to think more strategically about where we go as a team, what kinds of projects we take on, our suite of tools. Being more proactive, you know.
Is there a particular challenge you’ve always wanted to tackle that you haven’t had the chance to yet?
Yeah, the employee experience. All the same tools and methodologies that we use in CXM apply to the employee experience, and helping a client better identify the moments that matter to their workforce would be really rewarding. The data shows that this has a big impact on customer experience.
Are there other trends happening in CX that you think marketers should be paying attention to?
Something to watch out for is that because CX is becoming a more commonly used term, people are throwing it around more and saying they’re doing CX when they’re not. Or they’re doing it to some degree, but not going all the way. So, I’d caution companies to avoid “checking the box” on CX—show your customers you’re working on it and make real changes so they can see the impact.
What would you say people are most focused on right now in the world of CXM?
Quantifying the impact of it. It comes up in every conversation: what is the value of doing this? Clients want to know how to make that connection and correlate the experience data to the operational data, which includes business outcomes and financial data. It’s difficult to do, but it can be done. And every business is different. So, we really have to help clients drill down to what they’re trying to achieve in the business and work backwards from there.
If you could give yourself one piece of advice when you were first starting out, what would it be?
You don’t have to know everything going into a job. If you’re a good learner and you’re curious, the experience of doing the job is the best education you can get.
Great advice. Thanks for chatting with me, Michelle.
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Director of Relationship Development 585-719-5131 mdiamond@helloflynn.com
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