digital cx

Connect with Sohaib on LinkedIn

enNovember 30, 2023

How to Create Raving Fans like a CX Rockstar with Craig Antonucci, CXO at Autocar

This episode features an interview with Craig Antonucci, Chief Experience Officer at Autocar, the only American truck manufacturer focused on trucks for severe-duty vocational applications. Craig brings 25 years of experience in building businesses large and small. He has a proven record of helping organizations grow as much as 1000%. He joined Autocar after spending 12 years at BPA Quality, where he designed customer experiences for many leading global companies. And in this episode, he discusses what it was like becoming the youngest Operations Director in the history of Vermont American, how he reached a critical turning point in his career and decided to start his own business, and turning data points into a customer journey.

Quotes

*”Pay attention to the details of what it is that your customer wants out of their experience. Because if you don't, then they're gonna notice it and you're gonna miss out.”

*”There’s an art of positioning yourself to help your customer understand the important things and not focus on the things that aren't really important.”

*”I'm also a musician. And there's no better feeling than having a great crowd. When you're playing and you have a bad crowd, it can drain you really quick. So you have to find those places where you can trade that energy with other people. That's a core principle of customer experience too, is how do you tap into that energy of the customer and turn it into a positive thing.”

*”A CX leader needs to know how to sell, whether you're a good salesperson or not. You have to know basic sales. You know the basics of communicating with people effectively, getting your message in short and quick, following up with them, paying attention to the verbal and body cues, and just everything that goes along with sales. If you don't have those skills, you're not gonna be a good CX leader.“

*”How many times have you found yourself in a meeting thinking about a deadline for another client that you have? That's just a terrible way to live as a person, but you're not gonna be very successful as a leader because if you're not focused in the moment, people are gonna pick up on it. And customers notice that too. They wanna feel important, they wanna feel like you're giving them every bit of attention that you would at that point in time.”

Time Stamps

[0:50] Introducing Craig Antonucci, CXO at Autocar

[2:18] How did Craig navigate imposter syndrome as the youngest Operations Director in the history of Vermont American?

[5:25] How did Craig get into Customer Experience?

[10:26] Hear about the one day that changed Craig's career trajectory.

[13:55] How did Craig get into teaching and mentorship?

[19:50] How did Craig's understanding of CX gel at JL and BPA Quality?

[24:30] How did Craig become Autocar's first CXO?

[29:02] What's a raving fan, and how do you create them?

[36:01] How does Autocar think about the customer experience?

[45:24] How did Craig's move to Birmingham, Alabama shape his perspective on CX?

Bio

Craig Antonucci is Chief Experience Officer at Autocar. He brings 25 years of experience in building businesses large and small. He’s well-versed in all functions of an organization and able to create, build, lead and manage and flourish in any complex team structure. He has a proven record of helping organizations grow as much as 1000%. He joined Autocar after spending 12 years at BPA Quality, where he designed customer experiences for many leading global companies.

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Learn more about Autocar

enJuly 27, 2023

Learn more about ChartHop

Designing the Blueprint for Lifelong Customers with Sarah Diegnan, VP of Customer Experience at ChartHop

This episode features an interview with Sarah Diegnan, VP of Customer Experience at ChartHop, a dynamic, visual, and actionable people analytics platform that helps companies manage and support their employees. Sarah leads ChartHop’s customer journey, partnering with customers from the first moments of onboarding through successful execution of all account goals to make sure customers get the most out of ChartHop. With a background in structural engineering, Sarah’s career has taken her from building cathedrals to building customer relationships. And in this episode, she discusses how to systematically design the customer journey, and how she drives value from day one, and how she creates that stickiness factor to get customers hooked on the ChartHop brand.

Quotes

*”You really have to think through: Who are my customers? What are they buying? Why do they need us? Why do they use us? I think sometimes we get caught in a little bit of a trap because we are the ones that have to define what value means for our product.”

*”At the end of the day, your customer journey is truly project management. I mean, it's customer management at that point. And so how I've always thought about customer journey in a lot of ways is, you're building a building, Like you start by digging the ground and building the foundation. And in a lot of ways, that's not the most attractive part of the building. But if you don't have a strong foundation, you don't have anything. And so that's what I always compare to your onboarding and your implementation. And so I do think there is correlation between building a building and the customer journey.”

*”I feel really strongly that the best experience that we can provide to our customers is the one that is rooted in process, and everyone follows the same process. And that's not to say that we treat everyone like a number. Every customer is gonna have their own unique style. Every customer is going to have their own unique use cases and challenges. And I welcome all of that. I want that. But the foundation has to be the same.“

Time Stamps

[0:52] Introducing Sarah Diegnan, VP of Customer Experience at ChartHop

[4:02] How Sarah started as a structural engineer, designing a cathedral

[9:47] Sarah’s “reckoning” where she pivoted to Customer Experience

[13:35] About Sarah’s journey to Opower

[24:33] How does Sarah apply her expertise to CX at ChartHop today?

[29:34] How does ChartHop use KPIs and metrics to tune into CX

Bio

Sarah Diegnan is the VP of Customer Experience at ChartHop. Sarah has over 10 years of experience in customer success and operations, having served in various leadership roles at companies such as Acuity Brands, Opower, and Adura Technologies. She is a results-oriented leader with a proven track record of building and scaling successful customer success organizations. She is passionate about driving value for customers and helping them achieve their goals.

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Connect with Sohaib on LinkedIn

enJune 22, 2023

Learn more about Amplify Credit Union

A PR Executive's Guide to CX Transformation: Stacy Armijo at Amplify Credit Union

This episode features an interview with Stacy Armijo, Chief Experience Officer at Amplify Credit Union. Amplify is a member-owned financial cooperative with more than 57,000 members and over $800 million in assets. They’ve been serving all 50 states since 1967. At Amplify, Stacy is in charge of Marketing, Communications and Social Impact. She also handles Retail, Payments & Operations, Human Resources and Training. She has over 20 years of professional experience in the industry. In this episode, Stacy explains how to build meaningful, impactful programs to create a job you love. She describes effective PR strategies, and what resources are most important for any company.

Quotes

*“I have a unique skill set in bringing the right words to the right ideas to make those ideas meaningful and impactful for others. And when I think about what combines all the things that I do, and the moments in my professional or personal world where I have felt like I really did something, like I really made an impact and it was unique and it was valuable, it can be boiled down to something sort of like that.”

*“I think so often people underestimate what they do well. They tend to focus only on what they don't do well and how can they mitigate the liabilities of what they don't do well as opposed to, ‘I do this really well, how can I lean into that and make that more effective?’”

*“In my career, I think about, ‘What is my current experience and does it satisfy all three Gs? Am I giving something? Do I feel like I'm contributing in a way that's meaningful and useful? Am I getting something? Is there something that I'm getting back in terms of what I'm learning and how I'm growing? And do I feel gratitude? Do I feel gratitude for the people I get to work with, for the compensation that I get to earn for all the opportunities that I have to be involved in things?’ And if I can say yes to all three Gs, I'm in the right place.”

*“In my opinion, someone who is an effective public relations professional is good at anticipating the point of view of the people that they're interacting with. Understanding the messages that have meaning for them. And expressing them in a way that gets somebody to move to action. In essence, that's what a good PR person can do. That's not different from what a good customer service person can do.”

*“I see an opportunity to be more authentic and to connect to something that's more real for people. And then to take the personality of the institution and carry that through.”

*“Money is not your most precious resource. It is attention. Attention is your most precious resource in an organization. And so to be able to say ‘great idea, not today,’ is something that I do all the time.”

Time Stamps

[00:03:17] Stacy’s elevator pitch

[00:11:39] How Stacy’s career started

[00:14:55] The overlap between PR and CX

[00:16:42] Making your work personal

[00:22:31] Making the most of your resources

[00:25:41] Designing online channels

[00:31:09] Prioritizing digital customer service

[00:35:23] The start of fee-free banking

[00:40:26] The future of CX

[00:47:08] Making the most of your strategy

Bio

Stacy is Chief Experience Officer with Amplify Credit Union, a $2B community financial institution based in Austin, Texas. At Amplify, her responsibilities include (1) Marketing, Communications and Social Impact; (2) Retail, including Branches, Contact Center, Wealth Management and Consumer Lending; (3) Payments & Operations; and (4) Human Resources and Training. She started her career in communications, having spent over 16 years at Pierpont Communications and working up from an account executive to EVP. She brings with her over 20 years of professional experience overall, and has also served as a Lecturer at the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations at UT at Austin. There, she taught “Strategies in Public Relations.”

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Check out HGS

CX Champions

enJune 01, 2023

customer experience

Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn

Embracing Change to Transform Your CX with Sarah Dekin of Hometap

This episode features an interview with Sarah Dekin, President and COO at Hometap, an equity-sharing company that invests in homes in exchange for a portion of the home's future value. Prior to her work at Hometap, Sarah served as CMO at Virgin Money and ZipCar as well as EVP of Strategic Marketing and Development for the House of Blues. And in this episode, Sarah shares what she’s learned about customer experience along her career path from the House of Blues to Hometap. She also talks about her key mentorships, knowing when to accept an opportunity, and how she’s blazing a trail in the homeowner experience at Hometap.

Quotes

*”I was working on strategy and planning, and we needed some help in business development. And business development is something I'd never done. And to be honest with you, negotiating in general is something that intimidated me a little bit. But it was probably because of that that I thought I should really take advantage of this opportunity and give it a try, even though it made me nervous. But I only did that because I knew that right behind me, [my mentor] Joe would be there. He wasn't gonna let me fail. And so I think for anyone who finds himself looking at an opportunity like that, definitely go for it.”

*”The first point of contact for most of our homeowners is the website. And we believe in very simple, very straightforward [language], as transparent as possible. No buzzwords, no jargon, easily understandable phraseology and very transparent demonstrations of how the pricing works and lots of FAQs so that people can self-serve to the extent that they want. We have a very easy to use but robust scenario planner tool where our homeowners can change [different factors]. I think there's nothing better than actually interacting with the scenario rather than, you know, reading a multi-page document.”

*”Whether it comes through in your digital experience or whether it comes through in the individuals with whom the homeowners interact, we do have a very homeowner-first mentality. We have homeowner values around respect, kindness, and empathy. And if you can have that as a core value not just for the frontline people, but for your product team, your designers, your engineers, and for your marketing team, those are going to mutually reinforce what will come out at the end as a very authentically kind and positive experience for the homeowner.”

Time Stamps

[1:40] Introducing Sarah Dekin, COO and President at Hometap

[3:37] What did Sarah learn about CX at the House of Blues?

[9:26] How did the House of Blues create its unique customer experience and build a name for itself in the industry?

[11:22] When did Sarah know it was time to move on from the House of Blues after 10 years?

[16:06] How did Sarah get involved with Zipcar, and how were they a disrupter in customer experience?

[22:32] How did Sarah leverage Zipcar’s dedicated member base to help make important decisions?

[24:20] How was Virgin Money pushing the envelope in online banking?

[27:48] What is Hometap? And how are they providing an entirely new financial tool to homeowners?

[34:42] Tell me more about the Hometap customer experience

Bio

Sarah Dekin is the current Chief Operating Officer at Hometap. Sarah was previously with The Greene Turtle Sports Bar & Grille, Sarah Dekin Growth Company Executive and Advisor, Virgin Money, Zipcar, and House of Blues. Sarah has over 25 years of experience in marketing and strategic planning. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California. Sarah has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Economics from Trinity College-Hartford.

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Learn more about Hometap

enApril 19, 2023

Introducing CX Champions!

Well, hello! We’re gonna guess that you opened your podcasts today and saw CX Champions. And you thought to yourself, “CX Champions? I didn’t subscribe to CX Champions.” And you would be right.

We took CX Detectives and are remixing it. We’re doing our OWN spin on customer experience. So welcome!

During the show, we’ll be interviewing disruptors in the CX space. People who aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo and get things done on THEIR OWN terms.

In each episode, you’ll hear deep insight into how they built their careers in CX by helping some of the most iconic brands in the world engage their customers.

CX Champions is an UNSCRIPTED masterclass on how YOU can stand out, think differently, and re-imagine what a Customer Experience could look like in a digital-first world.

So settle back, grab a drink, and get down with CX Champions on your podcast player of choice.

Links

CX Champions

enMarch 29, 2023

customer experience