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It's probably the number one question I get in presentations.

Someone will invariably ask, "How do I get my CEO to care about customer experience?" The person will go on to explain their CEO, or other executives, just care about the numbers.

I've struggled to provide a good answer to help get buy-in for customer experience (CX) when it’s not already obvious.

So I turned to CX pioneer and bestselling author, Jeanne Bliss, for some advice. Bliss shared some wonderfully practical tips in our interview and I'm really fired up to share it!

CX Pioneer and bestselling author, Jeanne Bliss. (Photo courtesy of Customer Bliss.)

Here are just a few topics we covered:

What metrics does your CEO truly care about?
Why are we losing customers?
What should be included in an executive dashboard?
How can silos obscure CX problems?
What is leadership bravery, and why do we need it?

You can watch the full, 22 minute interview or just skim the highlights below.

What metrics do executives care about?

You ultimately need to tie CX to the company's financials. Unfortunately, many common CX metrics fall short.

For example, a transactional survey score might tell you if customers were generally happy when they visited your store, called customer service, or tried out your latest product. But there's no direct connection to revenue.

Bliss recommends getting your CFO to help you answer the following questions:

What's the volume and expected value of customers we gained?
What’s the volume and expected value of customers we lost?
What's the net change in customer value?

It's important to gain consensus from the rest of the executive team on how new and lost customer numbers are calculated, along with their relative value.

You can then boil down the numbers to a metric your CEO will likely care about: net customer growth.

Bliss shared an example from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. In the past, a St. Jude leader might organize a fun run event to raise money, and report the percentage increase in participants. Now the organization reports the net increase in number of donors, and tracks what activities brought more donors in.

Bliss recommends reporting customer growth data in numbers of customers and expected dollar value, rather than just percentages. She suggests that a percentage can be too abstract to demonstrate a clear financial impact.

Calculating this number is the first step. Attaching it to a clear story is step two.

Why are we losing customers?

There’s a great moment in our interview where Bliss describes the utopia of a CEO pounding on the boardroom table and demanding to know why the company is losing customers.

“Why?! Why?! Why are we losing customers?!”

Finding the answer to that question requires us to reframe the stories we share to focus on your customers' goals. Focusing on your customers' goals makes it easier to draw a line of sight between net customer growth and customer experience.

Bliss shared the example of Bombardier Aerospace, which sells planes to high net worth individuals. Those buyers don’t care a lot about internally-focused data such as the sales process or how many spare parts are in stock.

Private jet customers have somewhere to go, and they need to get there fast. Bliss helped Bombardier reframe its customer stories to focus on how it would keep customers flying. That’s far more important to customers than a survey or the lead time on a needed part.

Bliss described how executive dashboards often contain red, yellow, and green dots to indicate key performance metrics that are doing well (green), in the danger zone (yellow), or failing (red). She said something that really stuck with me:

When you're measuring the wrong stuff, you're going to get a green dot for stuff that's a red dot for the customer.

Learn more from Jeanne Bliss

Did you skip all the way down here without watching the interview? Do yourself a favor and go watch the full interview here. Bliss is both insightful and entertaining.

You can see more videos from Bliss on her website, including her three principles for improving lives. I think you’ll also enjoy her description of the “find your three blocks long” concept.

Bliss has written a number of books, and I'm a big fan of Would You Do That to Your Mother? It describes how to navigate away from burning customers with "gotcha moments" to earning their loyalty through "we've got your back" moments.

Jeanne Bliss's new book would be a perfect addition to your company's customer experience book club.

The format of Would You Do That To Your Mother lends itself well to discussion. There are enough practical ideas for improving your customers' experience that you'll surely find something to implement.

The book asks you to imagine your mom as your customer. What type of experience would you want her to have? How can you apply lessons learned from Mom as a kid to make your customers' lives better?

A sign at Einstein Bagels encouraging customers to behave the way mom taught us.

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There are four principles described in the book. Each comes with clear descriptions and many examples of what Bliss calls "Make Mom Proud" companies that are using the principles to succeed.

Enable Employees to Thrive

This principle means hiring people who fit with your organization's culture, and then enabling them to bring their best self to work each day.

One example Bliss shares comes from Vail Resorts, a company that runs ski resorts. It has banned the words "Our policy is" and other trigger words that could make a guest angry in a tense situation. Employees are instead empowered to provide a variety of goodwill gestures to make things right such as free lift tickets or a complimentary meal.

Make It Easy to Do Business With You

The idea here is to remove friction between your customers and your business so it becomes easy to do business with your company.

If you don't already know this, removing friction is becoming a huge trend! It's the focus of Gopher Sport, winner of ICMI's 2018 Global Award for Best Small Contact Center. Shep Hyken's new book, The Convenience Revolution (October 2018), is written entirely around this concept as well!

Bliss gives the example of Casper's 100-day trial period for new mattresses. The company realized it's difficult to pick out the perfect mattress by lying on several options in a store for a few minutes each. So Casper gives customers 100 days to try return their new mattress for a full refund if they don't like it.

Help Your Customers Achieve Their Goals

The third principle is based on the concept that you are more likely to get what you want if you help other people get what they want.

In other words, Bliss describes "Make Mom Proud" companies as having a customer service vision. This is a shared definition of outstanding service (or an outstanding experience) that gives every employee a clear and unified purpose.

Ikea is a terrific example shared in the book. As a customer myself, I know how Ikea makes it easy to find functional, stylish furniture on almost any budget. Walk into any Ikea store and you can see evidence of this vision in nicely-appointed rooms decked out in incredibly low-priced furniture and accessories.

Establish a Balanced Relationship with Customers

The fourth principle focuses on companies sticking to their values. This helps customers learn to trust companies since they know what they stand for and can trust them to remain consistent.

An example that really stood out in this chapter is Lemonade Insurance. One of the values the company operates under is trust, and it has designed its insurance claim process to demonstrate that. Customers filing a claim can skip a lot of paperwork and audits and simply record a short video of themselves taking an honesty pledge.

I hadn't heard of Lemonade Insurance before reading Bliss's book, so I had to check them out. The story of the company processing and paying a claim in just three seconds is incredible.

The Bottom Line

Would You Do That To Your Mother? is a thought-provoking guide to giving your customers a better experience. The writing style easily lends itself to a company book club, where you can read a chapter, discuss the principles, and identify ways to implement the concepts in your own organization.

It's currently available on Amazon or get bulk discounts at 800-CEO-READ.