A Profound Dialogue With CX Expert Debbie Levitt

Welcome to the breakfast leadership show where we interview global thought leaders on business leadership and life here's your host keynote speaker best-selling author and chief burnout officer of the breakfast leadership network michael levitt welcome back i've got debbie Leavitt on the line. Debbie, how are you? I'm all right. How are you, distant cousin? I am awesome. Really looking forward to this conversation.

So for those that don't know you, I want to share a little bit about you and then we're going to jump into this conversation. Yeah, sure. Hi, I'm Debbie Leavitt. No relation as far as I know to Michael Leavitt. And my company is called Delta CX. We're a full service CX and UX consultancy doing projects and training and help people be more customer-centric. I've been doing this for decades. My background is CX and UX and strategy and research and design.

And I'm just out there trying to get people critically thinking about what's going wrong in their organization and making it better. It's very important work. And this morning I was reading an article and it was geared more towards the nonprofit sector. And because it's, you know, it's time this recording close to your end. So a lot of nonprofits are looking for donations to wrap up their year and all of that. But the article highlighted this increasing lack of trust by people.

And we're seeing that in organizations, customer experiences and the user experience of products and services. People are just not trustworthy anymore because as we talked a little bit about in the pre-show and probably should hit record earlier before that.

But we're talking about, and there's so many different avenues we can go on this, but the first one I really want to highlight, because when you said it, it's like, aha, that's definitely one thing I want to bring up today, is the challenge of accountability. And that's got so many different flavors, but when it comes to customer experience, there's desperately a need for accountability, and we're not seeing it as much in businesses as we should. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. that.

Yeah, thanks for asking. I think that we're not seeing accountability. And I think it's really kind of it's the hub of the hub and spoke of a lot of our problems, a lot of our morale issues, a lot of our product and service failures, our experiment failures, not meeting sales or marketing goals. I think it all comes back to accountability. I've seen so many companies just try to go with old things we said about startups

15 years ago, go fast, release something fast, Fail fast. And we got really focused on fast and we forgot to be focused on good. And when it all comes to roost and we take a look at our profit or loss or what we spent on a project, and as you pointed out, the loss of customer trust where people might downgrade or leave or not come back. Where's that accountability? Who is going to say, you know what, this person made some key decisions here. These were poor decisions.

And I like to point out at some companies, these aren't mistakes. Let's not, you know, I want people to be given a little bit of leeway if they've truly made an unforeseeable mistake. We don't want to, you know, immediately fire them. But where people have made informed decisions to do something that especially we knew was probably going to backfire. We understood some of the risks. We understood the potential waste.

Where where is that? I remember one company I consulted for said, you know, we have a bit of a troublesome executive. You know, Woody, you do a little digging around here as an outsider. Let us know what we should do with that person. And I came up with two PowerPoint slides on why that person probably needed to be fired, if not severely disciplined, because of a variety of things they had done that had affected morale.

People were quitting because of this person. This person had wasted hundreds of thousands of insert currency here. And wouldn't you know, some months after I left, they promoted them. So what's the message to the workers? What's the message here? And so I think that while I don't want everyone fired immediately, there's so many flavors that accountability can take. And I think we have to bring that back if we want to really shepherd quality.

Quality is such an important thing. And I've talked about this in a lot of different ways.

And a lot of the work I do with organizations is around workplace culture, burnout recovery and prevention. And one of the things that I see when people aren't fully engaged or they're burned out or they're stressed out is the quality of their work drops off. And as you were talking, it reminded me of a story, and this was years ago, back when Ford Motor Company was still making the Ford Taurus. At the time, it was the number one selling car in the world.

So they were selling it all over the planet, just gangbusters. And then somebody had the bright idea of, hey, let's change the name of the car from the Ford Taurus to an old name that Ford used back in the 60s, the Ford 500. hundred. Well, all of a sudden people are like, what's that? It was the same car, same drivetrain, same, you know, all that stuff. They redesigned a little bit, but they just changed the name of it and sales

tanked. And of course they brought in a new CEO and the new CEO is like, what in the world were you thinking? This was the number one selling car in the world. You don't see Toyota Camry changing their name on their car. What are you doing? So they, you know, The next year they brought the name back, but it never recovered.

And it's just, and I'm sure, you know, those mistakes, those people were, you know, probably reprimanded, maybe fired, but again, they would get a nice little severance package. So it's one of those things, again, as we talked before. There seems to be incentive in a weird sort of way to fail. To fail. Yeah. And it's like, OK, if you fail, we're going to give you a big. It's like, what? Hooray.

Yeah. It's really strange. And I'm seeing, especially in my LinkedIn and some of the articles people send me, there's a lot of celebration of failure right now. It's like, oh, hey, we're failing 60 percent of the time, 90 percent of the time with our experiments or our product launches. This is great product management. because we're learning. And my thought is, this can't possibly be great product management.

And I did a little further digging and I found a former vice president from Airbnb, because one of the statistics was attributed to Airbnb, that 92% of their A-B tests were failing. And he was trying to make it sound like this was good. This is great product management. Look at how much we're learning. And then he also said that we were only doing A-B tests that we were we're highly confident in their success.

And that's where I come back to customer centricity and what do we really know about our target audiences because we clearly don't really know our users well if we're running experiments. A-B tests, product launches, service launches that we feel confident in and then they're failing, especially with that incredibly high rate of failure.

Something is really going wrong there. There's a huge disconnect between who we think the audience is and what they need and what we think they are and what we felt like building for them or creating for them. So who's accountable for that? And I think nobody wants to be. And that's why right now we're seeing a little trend of high failure rates are great. We celebrate welcome high failure rates because then if we say that this is business as usual, nobody can be in trouble.

Nobody's going to get their budget cut. Nobody's going to be put on a performance improvement plan. And I think that, you know, again, while I'm not looking for people to be fired, especially in this unfortunate economy, I do think that there is room for some tough conversations, some careful, more careful observation of budgets and things like this, because we shouldn't be failing that often, especially with A-B tests, because A-B tests means we know A wasn't that great.

We're trying to make it better with something we're calling B, But we know our customers so little that B is worse than A. Like, this should be an incredible waving flag of, holy cats, we don't know what we're doing. And we should just probably stop and do a lot of research and understand our customers and users better. But everyone goes, no, that's too slow. Yeah, they forget the story of the tortoise and the hare, and they always bet on the rabbit and the tortoise wins.

And I always tell people, you know, what's your favorite leadership book? Or someone asked me that. And that's one of the books I'll reference. And they look at me and I said, there's important lessons there. We're all in this fast pace, instantaneous. That's why you see TikTok so popular and short form videos because people want these little hits of information thinking that it's going to make them better.

It's like, oh, that's I'm going to run with that. And it ends up being shiny object disease. And they're doing 18000 things and none of them are right. They're not hitting their customers. In case in point for my show, you know, I, for the longest time, you know, I was looking at some stats that I was getting. I would see, okay, what's the audience makeup and all of that.

And then I started digging in a little bit more and I was looking at, you know, the audience demographics when it came to the size of organizations that these people work for. And I was surprised that a big percentage of them are from large organizations, 5,000 employees up. And for the longest time, I thought, okay, I'm dealing with solopreneurs, small businesses and whatnot, which there's a decent percentage of people that listen to the show from that.

But a big majority was larger organizations. So I'm thinking, okay, from that, what do I change? What do I alter to make sure that the content that I'm providing is what they want? But before I did that, I'm like, okay, let's change everything. I realized, wait a minute, those people are consuming and listening the content that I'm already doing. doing. I don't need to necessarily change anything.

I can do research and reach out to those organizations, say, you know, what topics would you like me to cover? What would you like me to change? All of those things. But.

Steady growth of the show thank you everybody including you know the you know friends and family that listen to it my brother doesn't listen my mom doesn't listen my my wife certainly doesn't listen she goes i get the live version of you why the heck would i want to listen to more of you so i get it it's one of those key things when you're a professional speaker so she's like enough i love her dearly though we get that at home here too yep it's all good but ultimately the point i'm trying

to make here is at the end of the day you need to understand what your customers want. And as simple as it sounds, you ask them. And some people like, that's the last thing that they do. They're like, we'll do this and do all these studies and all that, but they won't even just, hey, what do you like about our show? Or, hey, what do you like about our product or service?

So I'm going to poke you a little bit because coming from my research background, that is technically not the best question to ask somebody because what happens is you prime somebody with the word like, and then they're They're likely to try to find something. They'll say something positive. So I see this a lot where people say, oh, we'll call up a few customers. We'll ask them what they like and we'll ask them what they need. And this is actually not correct CX or UX research.

So actually the best, if you're only going to ask people one question, the best question is what can be improved? And that way, you're not saying, what don't you like, which primes people to feel negative. And then they feel like, oh, God, it's your show. I don't want to say anything bad to your face. But what can be improved is always the strongest question.

And I'm amazed how many product managers or other people who are not really researchers will call me as a customer and say, you know, what's our product missing? I go, well, that implies that I understand the full set of your features. And then I understand that there's a larger set of features and that I understand the difference between the features.

And so that's why I'm typically teaching people about task analysis and trying to make sure that your professional researchers are observing your customers and users' tasks. So like for you, what are the tasks that that your listening audience are trying to solve by listening to this? What are they trying to improve about their life, their work, their approaches to things?

And then when you can learn what that task is and where it's going right or wrong, then you're more likely to make some of the better changes, because I think, unfortunately, it's really common for people to feel like, yeah, I just have to call some people up and ask them, you know, what they like or don't like and what they're missing. I had another company say to me, product manager calls me up to do bad research and they said, have you ever had a problem in our system?

And I said, every day, but I've been a customer long enough where I know some workarounds. I said, but the best way is for you to not ask me that question. Why aren't you watching me use your product? If you were watching me using your product, you would see where I'm running into brick walls that I then have to become a temporary mason. Like, watching and observing is always much more powerful than asking.

Yeah. You've obviously been through some lean training at some point because that's, you know, go where the work's being done, watch it and see and observe.

It's even when I worked in software companies, you know, the software dev team would literally just sit down next to us because we would use our own software internally for a variety of things.

Things it was different it was modified a little bit but whenever we ran into some problems i said what's it doing this and i said just combine my cubicle let's let me walk you through it and so you can see and of course they understand the back code of what everything was going on and they will say okay it looks like it's breaking there and there and they go fix it and they realized wait this is actually broken a couple other places so indirectly it improved three or four things things that,

you know, very simple, like in your situation, a lot of customers were dealing with, but they weren't calling in about it because they figured out the workaround. It's like, I just do this and this and this. And it just, it's one of those things where just like in anything in life, you know, communication between your customers and yourself and internally within your teams seems to alleviate a lot of problems that we face. And it's also an accountability ability thing.

It's like we're being accountable for the product or service that we provide. And to make it serve the needs of our consumers and being open to suggestions and ideas and not taking it personally, I think goes a long way as far as strong leadership from every level within the organization. Yeah, I've got an example in my most recent book, which is called Customers Know You Suck.

And it's a story that came from someone in my community who was talking about how at the The company they were working at, which is a well-known company I won't name, and they were looking at some of the feedback they'd received from customers. I think it was either app reviews or a survey or, you know, just a traditional place where you get feedback. And they were reading out a lot of negative feedback. And the CEO's response was, well, they wouldn't say that to our faces.

And I think once you've pre-decided, made up reasons why these people can't possibly be telling you the truth or imagining all customers are liars or manipulators or just leaving people bad reviews, I think that that's certainly, let's not say empathy. We're so busy saying, oh, hashtag empathy. But we certainly don't have any empathy at that point.

That's just putting up walls and giving us reasons to ignore customer sentiment and customer feedback by imagining, well, if they were in this room, they wouldn't say that. Well, they might if you if you gave them the space to say that. It reminds me of a review that I gave for a restaurant and it was a really horrible experience. There was probably six or seven things that happened during, and it was a lunchtime visit. It wasn't like it was dinner. It was a lunchtime visit and it was bad.

And I, I felt the need because I, you know, I always leave majority of the time, very positive reviews and I'll highlight some things. If I remember, you know, the, the person that serves me name, I will, mention them in the review as well, because I know that gives some accolades and people love getting positive affirmations about doing a job really well.

But I remember writing the negative review and the owner had reached out and said, I'll give you, I forget what it was, some type of gift certificate if you remove the post. And I looked at it and like everything in that post It wasn't meant to be harmful. I was polite and personable about it, but I highlighted the challenges that we faced and I thanked them for the offer, but I wasn't going to remove the review because it's true and factual.

And I was not going to return to that establishment. Well, it wasn't isolated. They were having a lot of problems and ultimately they ended up closing because they didn't try to apologize and say, we're going to make it better. They just tried to basically give me a severance package to make it go away type of thing. And the amount of the severance package wasn't enough. If it would have been a stupid amount or something, then I would have considered it.

But then again, from an ethical standpoint. points. Right. Then you have to consider adding. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. I was going to say your story made me think of a restaurant review I recently left. And I generously left a two-star review for a local place. And the short version of this story is that within a half hour or an hour, someone from the restaurant had replied to the Google review, basically saying, you should have stayed home and had a can of tuna.

And so I edited my review to say, say, hey, everybody, take the restaurant's advice. Stay home and have a can of tuna. That's amazing. That is amazing. Yeah, it reminds me of a restaurant that's long been closed in a town in Florida where my parents used to live.

And I still giggle about this. And this was 25 years ago. Excuse me, getting all choked up thinking about it. But the restaurant on the the roof they had, it was kind of a slanted roof on the roof they had and letters, you know, eat here and then diet at home. You know, like, you know, just eat, you know, this is a great place, you know, eat food, you know, load up and all that stuff. You can, you can, you know, get back to your diet when you get home,

but here, you know, eat a lot. Well, a hurricane came through. Let's see where this is going. Yeah, it blew off the tea and diet. So yeah, eat here, die at home. And it took them a while to get that fixed. But of course, it was the running joke. And a lot of people are going, food quality? Should the food inspector maybe go take a peek there and see if there's anything going on? But they closed. I don't think it was because of the hurricane. I think just business decline and whatnot.

But it was the running joke in town for a long time. And it's, you know, they could have obviously played it up and, you know, done all kinds of different things. You know, they could have said, oh, here, here's, you know, ad for the local mortician. Here's a discount for the funeral home. They could have played it up from a marketing and branding standpoint, just to play fun with it, but they lost that opportunity on it.

But no, you know, I, that I think, and this is kind of a side note, I think when you leave reviews, if you get good service, please, if you can take the time to recognize it because Because it creates better opportunities. All of a sudden, that employee gets it and goes, okay, appreciated by customers and by company. And I'm going to do better work. And the owner is going to invest in the company and all of that stuff.

And we want great companies to continue being great and serve their community. And the bad ones, we want them to succeed. I didn't want that restaurant to go out of business, but I did want them to improve. And they chose just like the review you left with the eating tuna at home. That could have been an opportunity. We are so sorry. We're going to send you a gift certificate or a gift card, a visa one or something like that so you can spend it wherever.

Wouldn't even have wanted it. I mean, that food was beyond whatever's the word I'm looking for. I don't think repair is the right word for food. But I think the bottom line is, you know, customers know you suck, but are you listening to them? Because there's always an opportunity to do better.

Your business could be better. My business could be better. We can't ever get caught up in the complacency of, we're pretty good, or we've got a 4.6 on the App Store out of 5, or our NPS score was, insert number here. There's always opportunities to be better. And are we looking for them? Are we listening to them? Or when we get this negative feedback, are we saying, well, they can just call customer support? Sure, but customer support costs you money and can still lead to people leaving.

Posting angry stuff, etc. Like, none of these things fix the problem. Customer support, maybe your salesperson will help you, marketing will give you a discount code. These are just all band-aids on the problem. So companies need to do a lot more observing and speaking and listening because they know the complaints are out there.

But whenever I work with companies on this, they act like I had one company that was measuring NPS when their B2B customers signed a contract about halfway through the contract and when it was time to renew the contract. And they found that their NPS when people signed was about 50, which was pretty good since NPS is a negative 100 to positive 100. And when it was time to renew, the NPS was negative 25.

And I was like, oh, this is screaming to be an internal research investigation to figure out why we're making people so unhappy that they really don't want to renew their contract and where are we abandoning them or not serving them well. And they said, don't bother because the sales team is so good. They'll just find us new customers. And my thought was, but at what cost?

You know, is that really the smartest? Would they have taught me that in the MBA program to not worry about dissatisfying current customers because you'll always find new ones? It's amazing how many things we say in our internal meetings that get away with being excuses that we would probably not put in a book or teach in a course or advise anybody in private training or consulting.

It's alarming because they may not always get new customers, economic downturns, changes in design, or the product may not be the latest and greatest anymore. There's all kinds of things. And we all know that, you know, retaining a customer and making those customers happy is a long-term investment. You want your customers, instead of grimacing about that renewal, to say, you know what, I want to go long-term on this. Can we get maybe a little discount if we sign up for three years?

And you go, yes, of course. And you don't just say, okay, well, we can circle back with them in three years and not have to worry about it. No, they invested in you for a long time, then you invest right back in them and you nurture that relationship and you treat them as if they're your only customer, even if you've got tens of thousands of customers. You know, that that experience is so critically important.

And, you know, leading off with what I said earlier about, you know, a lot of people don't trust organizations or companies anymore. And it may not be specifically your company's fault per se. It just may be society right now. But change, you know, their opinion of you on that. Say, you know, yeah, everybody's out there is bad, but, you know, working with Debbie and her team, I love working with them and they do a great job.

And that is good because then you're like, okay, what are we doing with this customer that makes them love us so much? So we make sure that we're, you know, serving our customers needs the way that they want us to serve them. And when you do that, it just creates such an amazing environment. It's inspiring to be a part of a team like that because everything is just magical and energetic and you just love going to work.

You're anxious on Sunday afternoon about Monday, but not because, oh no, Monday, but you're like, I'm ready to get back in it and let's go to it. And you just, when you have that type of energy, you know, okay, this is a special place to work and we're creating great things for our customers, which is allowing them to create great things for their customers and just make society better. Yeah, it's hard right now for anybody to feel trust for anybody.

We've seen so many layoffs, and so the employees don't feel trust. And then, of course, just like you often speak about burnout, the people who are left behind, who didn't get laid off, usually have to do two or three times the work, which I always say is a one-way ticket to burnout city.

And then we have a lot of broken trust between companies and customers because companies have they talk about their values and their promises to the customer and they don't follow through on that all these company values of honesty and transparency and everybody say it with me empathy and and all these things we get promised and the companies don't follow through and and you're not fooling anybody we get it and the thing that i'm always amazed

at is that if you just think about you just as a consumer for a moment. And if you're listening and watching at home, if you think about yourself as a consumer, all day long, you're just bombarded with crap. The website sucks. It was hard to pay. You couldn't figure it out. The app stinks. You want to throw the phone out the window. The person you spoke to on the phone was a jerk. You can't believe you had to call that company. We're just surrounded by crap

and mediocrity all day. And then we go into our jobs and what do we do? We create that. We don't support the processes is that would let us slow down a little bit and make something better. We say, no, we have to be fast. We have to be fast because we think that's what agility is, or we have to be fast because we think that's what lean is. And that's not what agility and lean ultimately are.

They're about the balance of speed and quality, about creating that efficiency, but also creating quality and value. You're not agile and lean if you continuously release garbage.

So I want everybody listening to go into their companies, and especially if you're in leadership, and start asking some critical thinking questions. Why do we keep chasing these crappy KPIs? Why do we think that the best short or long-term plan is to manipulate users and push them around a chessboard and hold brainstorming meetings to make them do things they don't want to do? And then we go home and we hate when that's done to them. Okay, maybe we have no empathy, but let's have some sympathy.

I'll settle for sympathy. Get me some sympathy and realize that all the stuff you hate being done to you is probably what you at your company are bringing right now to your customers. It's up to you to break out of those cycles and those bad processes and start focusing on quality, value, and accountability. Amen to that. So, Debbie, I've loved this conversation. Probably could talk to you about this for about 20 hours at least.

Let's do it. There you go. Let me get some more tea. So where can people find out more about you and all this amazing work you're doing? Yeah, thanks. You can always stumble on me on LinkedIn. Debbie Levitt is D-E-B-B-I-E L-E-V-I-T-T. If you try to connect with me, please tell me you heard me on the podcast because I don't always add people. You can certainly check out our website at CustomerCentricity.com. And I hope people will give my book a glance, which is called Customers Know You Suck.

Yeah, definitely have all that in the show notes. So, Debbie, great again to talk with you. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate this work. Thank you. Thanks, Michael. Bye, everybody. buddy. Thanks for listening to the Breakfast Leadership Show, part of the Breakfast Leadership Network. Visit breakfastleadership.com for tips on empowering your business and your life.