Experience for Client Services is different. Law firms, consultancies, engineering firms, management consultancies have to plan for and deliver experiences where the relationship is the core product. This keynote was delivered by Steven Keith from CX Pilots at CXPS 2017. It details what Client Services professionals need to thinking and doing to succeed in Professional Services today. It explores the difference between CX/CEM (customer experience) and Client Experience. Customer Experience: Customer Experience is the sum total of all feelings and interactions a customer has with a brand over time. It’s a volume concern. Lower incremental stakes. Sure, it’s about relationships, but it’s a lot more about removing friction from discrete interactions. Client Experience: Client Experience has a similar sum but it is far more concerned with longevity and depth of relationships.While discrete interactions are important, it’s more about qualitative relationships where highly-skilled services are the “product” delivered, personally.

1. Steven Keith
CXPS 2017

2. I’m Steven Keith. I work at CX Pilots.
@stevenkeith 2
24 15 10 240
/introduction
Hello.

3. @stevenkeith 3
/clients
This is where I learned to apply my Client Experience ideas and skills.

4. 4
You know there
are a 1000
things you can
do with CX.
Knowing what
to do first is
what makes all
the difference.
www.cxpilots.com
/introduction

5. 5
What is client satisfaction worth?
If you knew you could measurably
improve every client’s experience
with your firm, would you do it?
/introduction
experience

6. 6
If you knew you could measurably
increase every client’s satisfaction
with your firm, would you
/introduction

7. 7
Is your answer — “depends”
/introduction

8. 8
Depends on what we
have to do and how
much it will cost?
/introduction

9. 9
Depends on what
we have to do
and how much it
will cost?
/introduction
Depends on
how long we
want to remain
competitive?
or

10. 10
Depends on what we
have to do and how
much it will cost?
/introduction
Depends on how
long we want to
compete?
The average RETURN ON CX is 234%
Average program duration: 400 days.
Firms with mature CX programs
are on average 44% more
profitable.
The average successful CX program
is built from 60 mini-pilots each
which average $9,000.
$540K to yield $1.26 million.
Firms launching CX programs:
2013: 12% 2017: 66%
2014: 20% 2018: 75%
2015: 38% 2019: 80%
2016: 54% 2020: 91%

11. 11
Depends on what we
have to do and how
much it will cost?
/introduction
Depends on how
long we want to
compete?
SHIFT
APPENS

12. 12
The finest CX leaders
know that it all comes
down to complex
DECISIONS about change.
almost
right
probably
wrong ?
10 hours a day splitting the
difference between ‘almost
right’ and ‘probably wrong.’
/introduction

13. 13
The CX leaders we talk to aren’t interested in taking over the universe,
they’re just looking for the calm
in the storm.
/introduction

14. 14
Here’s what we understand
about Client Experience leaders
• strategy, we already have one
• balancing act, no net
• objectives, very ambitious
• resources, very limited
• to-do lists, the longest in the company
• priorities, they all are
• best practices, we’re using Forrester's
• funding, yea right!
• trust, we’ll see
• technology, wait… what?
So…
what the hell is going on?
/introduction

15. 15
WTF!
Why is it so
difficult?
Because
we let it be
that way.
/introduction

16. 16
We’re intimidated by what we
don’t know or understand.
What is our fist step? Is it the
right step? What if it doesn’t
work? What if we spend money
and it doesn’t pay off? Which
people do we need to make it
effective? What technology is
necessary? What if I have to ask
our clients more questions?
What if we take too long to
prove that it’s working? How
will this affect my reputation?
/introduction
What if we have to change
some of our core processes?
What if it indicates we have
to hire more people? What if
after getting into this its
cost spirals out of control?
From where in the firm
should it be operated? What
if it causes strife between
departments?
CLIENT: I wonder if I’m
working with the right firm?

17. 17
STOP WORRYING
ABOUT YOU.
/introduction
START THINKING
ABOUT THEM.

18. 18
Let’s talk about
some differences.
Customer Experience
/introduction
Client Experience
Customer Experience is the sum
total of all feelings and
interactions a customer has with a
brand over time. It’s a volume
concern. Lower incremental stakes.
Sure, it’s about relationships, but
it’s a lot more about removing
friction from discrete interactions.
Client Experience has a similar
sum but it is far more concerned
with longevity and depth of
relationships.
While discrete interactions are
important, it’s more about
qualitative relationships where
highly-skilled services are the
“product” delivered, personally.

19. 19
Beyond definitions…
/introduction
Client Experience
• longevity and depth of
relationships
• qualitative exchange
• highly-skilled services are the
‘product’
• personalize the delivery
Experience Ecosystem
• deepen client knowledge
• map client lifecycle
• increase value per interaction
• measure client lifetime value
BONUS: Develop eminence
through content, make it all
more predictable, tie it all to
revenue

20. 20
PRIYAL’S STORY

21. 21
Meet Priyal. She works at
a large engineering firm.
Last month she became
the third person to inherit
a struggling CX program.
(This is not her real name or picture, but it is her real story.)
/story
Her mandate?
25% increase in net revenue
from CX in 24 months.
$125 million from CX in 2 years.
Her palette?
$500 million company, 310
customers, 520 employees, three
bosses, 14 global locations, a son
with autism and a husband in
MBA school.

22. 22
At first, Priyal was
freaked out.
Then she began to
see an opportunity
of a lifetime.
/story
Instead of choosing to
continue along her
predecessor’s path, we
advised her to hit ‘RESET.’
Her first step? A comprehensive
assessment of where her
company’s CX program has been.
An effective ‘RESET,’ helps us
understand where previous
attempts had fallen short—to
prevent repeating them.
Priyal’s next big step?
Get her CEO involved—fast.

23. 23
RESET
If your company understands the
advantages of competing on the
basis of CX, but your CX program
is not where you’d like it to be,
your smartest first step may be
hitting ‘RESET’ and conducting a
Client Experience maturity
assessment.
/story
What Priyal’s assessment uncovered:
• No previous Client Experience maturity assessment
• Last two efforts were platform-centric and driven by IT. (Two
Adobe Experience Manager integrations totaling $5 million)
• Executive support for the program trailed off abruptly
• The CX program has been inadequately-funded
• No formalized client research
• No measurement/metrics methods or capabilities
• Marketing segmented ‘users’ on project basis only
• Content was solely focused on projects
• Internal communications was a Sharepoint disaster
• Impenetrable silos between Marketing, Sales, IT, Operations,
Project Management, R&D, Corporate, and Client Support
• Previous Herculean attempts tried to do everything at once
and were road-mapped with unrealistic completion dates
• A staggering amount of personal agendas and CYA12
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8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

24. 24
Four focused PRIORITIES
emerged from the CX
Maturity Assessment:
A more comprehensive understanding of the
company’s true CX baseline
The formation of the CX Center of
Excellence under her leadership
‘Pollinate’ CX through strategic internal
communications and custom immersive
workshops including executives,
leadership and employees
Execute the first several ‘quick win’ pilot
projects that get CX off the ground
1
2
3
4
/story

25. 25
What’s wrong with all the
CX Maturity assessments out
there today?
Most CX assessments are like art museum gift shops.
Each CX Platform offers their own simplified assessment, and
when you’re finished, it leads you out into their ‘gift shop'
where you can buy anything as long as it’s their platform.
When the exit to a CX Maturity assessment is the entrance to a
business case for another CX platform, it doesn’t help CX
leaders trying to diagnose their current state.
THE WRONG CX ASSESSMENT CAN
COST YOUR FIRM $MILLIONS
1 A more comprehensive CX baseline
How to assess CX Maturity the right way.
- Assess deeper context—not generically
through one person
- Create custom CX Maturity assessments—
other’s diagnostics won’t tell you what you
need to know
- Make your assessments a Trojan Horse—
enter as a learning tool, exit as a teaching
and collective ambition tool
- Expand assessments horizontally and
vertically to broader range of people
- Horizontally: (Marketing, CX,
Operations, HR, Finance, IT, Sales)
- Vertically: (executives, leadership,
frontline employees)
- Reassess on a bi-annual basis
- Only measure what you intend to improve
/story

26. 26
The CX Center of Excellence is the
new Command Center for your
organization’s CX.
2 Formation of a CX Center of Excellence
What is a CX Center of Excellence?
The nucleus of Client Experience effort. Essential to create a CX
COE when resetting a company’s Customer Experience program.
Modern CX COE’s have four layers:
MEASURE, BUILD, SUPPORT and IMPROVE.
Because Priyal’s mandate was tied
directly to a revenue expectation, we
developed a CX COE to accelerate
impacts from a mix of cost savings &
revenue generation.
Assess/Diagnose/Strategy
Research/Design/Transform/Implement
Ongoing Operational Support
Continuous Improvement/Governance
MEASURE
BUILD
SUPPORT
IMPROVE
Future
Readiness
Revenue
Optimization
Customer
Experience
Transformation
Operational
Excellence
Empower
Smart
Teams
Operations
Agility
Smart
Technology
Predictive
Analytics
Cross-sell
Up-sell
Loyalty/Advocacy
Management
Social
Media
Multichannel
Optimization
Customer Sat
& Call Quality
Closed-loop
Complaint
Management
Call Reduction
Smart Routing
Self-Service
Increase
Agent
Productivity
Global
Service
Delivery
Data
Management
As the leader of the CX COE, you have to start by asking,
“How well are we doing and what needs to change?” for
each of these areas.
/story

27. 27
An internal workshop plan that will
stimulate your Client Experience program:
3
‘Pollination’ of CX through immersive
workshops that includes executives,
leadership and employees
Workshops should be more than
excuses to escape cubicles.
Workshops are the best way to cultivate collective ambition
behind modern CX programs.
They should be designed to advance the awareness and
criticality of CX in your firm.
They should increase knowledge, build stronger peer networks
through collaborate ideation, design thinking and shared
accountability for the work that matters most.
Great CX workshops don’t inculcate, they empower.
CX and Executive Decision Making
How to Make Better CX Decisions with Confidence and Agility.
The Power of Better CX Assessments
How to Leverage CX Maturity Assessments to Gain Broader
Organizational Alignment.
CX Program Value
How to Build Economics into a CX Program and Tie it to Revenue.
Client/Employee Journey Mapping
How to find and understand relationships between people and needs.
Building Stronger CX Programs
How to build smarter CX methods into the organization.
CX Program Measures, Metrics & Analytics
How to measure everything that matters in CX.
CX Program Support & Governance
How to sustain advancements in CX when it stops feeling like an
initiative and starts felling more like business as usual.
/story

28. A modular approach to CX helps
leaders gain manageability and
predictability while taking greater
control over risk and cost.
4
Modularity of ‘quick win’ pilots that
spur momentum and collective ambition
Of the 30 ways to eat an
elephant, none of them involve
doing it in one bite.
Trying to accomplish too much at
once and not showing early
significant WINS to the org and
leadership is the #1 killer of CX
programs.
Effectively Adopting Modularity ‘Rule of Thumb’
Step One - Apply more strategic CX Maturity
assessments to find priority gaps.
Step Two - Map out range of “pilots” that can
provide the most effective and least invasive
“fix” in the shortest possible time frame.
Step Three - Adopt agile. Complete selected
priority pilots in 30-45 day sprints.
Step Four - Communicate accomplishments
with a steady drumbeat.
28
/story

29. 29
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC
Leading with an out-side-in mindset
while acting as a fierce advocate for the
client in the face of organizational
resistance to change.
This empathic attribute is critical to
direct the organizational shifts to better
understand and serve the needs of their
clients.
CONTENT-DRIVEN
Strategic content is under-used.
It’s necessary to tell the firm’s story
about its value, its clients, the efforts of
employees, the changes it needs to make
and the journeys along the way.
It’s how you build collective ambition.
DATA-MINDED
CX requires persistently finding the right
information for the right purposes and
quickly converting it into meaning toward
outcomes.
Successful CX programs use data as a
compass. They know how to re-orient.
They use it to increase confidence in
decisions.
CHANGE-FLUENT
Modern CX requires internal change
management applied to team structures,
processes, technologies and platforms and
to people’s ability to manage and work.
Understanding impact and how to elongate
key relationships in every change is
mission-critical.
BITE-SIZED & AGILE
Smaller, modular quick wins create
momentum and confidence in change.
Demonstrating a string of early successes
does wonders—not to mention they
require fewer resources and are
significantly easier to accomplish.
The key is to think in terms of “delicate
interventions” with an abundance of
prioritization and foresight.
EMPLOYEE-ENGAGED
Employees thrive when they feel an
increased sense of purpose, trust,
authority and autonomy to meet
expectations around accountability.
When organizations empower their
employees, they are significantly more
likely to put more into their work and get
more out of it as a result. Win-win.
/story - modularity

30. 30
CASE STUDY OUTCOMES
/tools

31. 31
Leadership values CX tied to revenue
Employees understood new priorities
34% increase in Employee satisfaction
Engagement in CX increased by 30%
Finance department partnered to install
Client Lifetime Value/CLV rose 14.5%
CX Center of Excellence governed change
Stream-lined client research, client
service / support, marketing and sales
Client Satisfaction (CSAT) improved by
23% and Net Promoter Score (NPS)
increased by 20%
Secured 250% increase in budget for CX
/outcomes
Priyal is well on her
way to meet her
aggressive goal of
25% net revenue
increase from CX.

32. 32
TOOLS & APPROACH
/tools

33. CX “Flight Check”
Strategic
Alignment
Awareness of
Client
Design
Practices
Governance
& Support
Client Channels &
Touch Points
Performance
Measurement
Client
Communications
Client
Culture
Platforms and
Frameworks
Know Your Organization’s Client
Experience Interaction Aptitude
Know Your Organization’s Client Experience
Delivery Aptitude
Know Your Organization’s Client
Experience Management Aptitude
/tools
33

34. Actionable intelligence to set the right direction and priorities
CX Flight
Check
Priority 1
Initiatives
Priority 2
Initiatives
Priority 3
Initiatives
Priority 4
Initiatives
Priority 5
Initiatives
Priority 6
Initiatives
Priority 7
Initiatives
CX Flight Compass: The Road Map to CX Optimization
Know Your Organization’s
Client Experience
Interaction Aptitude
Know Your Organization’s
Client Experience
Delivery Aptitude
Know Your Organization’s
Client Experience
Management Aptitude
/tools
34

35. Pragmatic & simplified
Quicker wins
Modular and manageable
1
2
3
4
5
6
Easily measurable
Engage employees
Create and sustain momentum
Pilot projects are deliberately smaller and quick-win-oriented. They are
modular and iterative interventions that accelerate success for building long-
term client experience gains
A brief note on “pilot” projects:
/tools
35

36. Low Resistance
Low Cost
High Resistance
High Cost
High
Client
Value
Low
Client
Value
Client Value
Adopt a systematic
approach forcing focus on
plotting quick wins that
help prioritize things that
matter most with the least
organizational resistance.
Mapping Your Client Experience Pilots
/tools
36
Organizational Value

37. CX Program Operations, COMPREHENSIVE Functional Roadmap
Measure &
Assess
Sales
Building a More CX-Responsive Organization
Client
Care
Digital/
e-Business
IT
Voice of
Client
Social
Listenting
Client
Support
Call
Center
People &
Teams
Process &
Workflow
Technology &
Platforms
Communications
& Support
INTERACTIONPILOTSMANAGEMENTPILOTSDELIVERYPILOTS
Marketing
CX Center of
Excellence
2015 Q3 Q4 2016 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q22017
P11
P33
P61
P12
P2
P121
P82
Establish
Learning
Lab
P2a P2b P2c
Interaction Pilot
Measure Pilot
Management Pilot
Delivery Pilot
P23 P26 P30
P29 P39
P74
P97
P181
P85
P98
P104
P132
P6 P126
P177
P142
P156
P110
P165
P108
P93
P106 P36
P138
P195
P160
P192
P198
P73
P17
P190
P147
P213
P44
P16 P207 P16a P121
P163 P20 P47 P53 P158 P88
P68
P200 P76
P7
P31 P178 P205
P219
P188 P184 P125 P58
P179
P10
P48
P74
P226
P35 P13 P105 P43 P103 P197 P157 P89 P107
P39a P39b P39c P39d
P86 P119 P75 P67 P4 P112 P93 P19 P38 P71 P79
P155 P171 P72
P10a
P238 P174 P88a
P80
P217 P102 P88b
P44a
P113 P117
P44d
P186 P210
P16b
P221 P69 P84 P99
P16c
P128
P16d
P160
P150 P172 P145 P90a P63 P90b
P30a
P63a P90c
P30b
P63b P90d
P30c P30d P30e P30f
P232 P60 P201 P60a P183 P60b P169 P60c P60d P60e P60f
P63c P90e P63d P90f
P12a P12b P12c P12d P12e P12f P12g
P135 P8 P88c
P235 P140 P130 P123 P14 P215 P115
P228 P202 P237 P77 P65 P50 P56 P41
P10b P10c
P44b P44c P44e
P16e
37
/tools
46
10
78
51
185

38. Measure &
Assess
Sales
Building a More CX-Responsive Organization
Client
Care
Digital/
e-Business
IT
Voice of
Client
Social
Listenting
Client
Support
Call
Center
People &
Teams
Process &
Workflow
Technology &
Platforms
Communications
& Support
INTERACTIONPILOTSMANAGEMENTPILOTSDELIVERYPILOTS
Marketing
CX Center of
Excellence
2015 Q3 Q4 2016 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q22017
P33
P12
P2
P82
Establish
Learning
Lab
P2a P2b P2c
Interaction Pilot
Measure Pilot
Management Pilot
Delivery Pilot
P23 P30
P29 P39
P74
P97
P181
P85
P104
P132
P126
P142
P93
P106
P195
P192
P17
P190
P16 P16a
P163 P53 P88
P200
P178
P219
P184 P58
P10
P48
P74
P13 P197 P89
P39d
P119 P67
P112 P93 P19 P71
P72
P10a
P88a
P44a
P113
P210
P16b
P221 P69 P84
P16c
P128 P160
P172 P145 P90b
P30a
P90c P63b
P30c P30d P30f
P60 P169 P60c P60d P60f
P12b P12e
P135 P88c
P235 P140 P130 P123 P215 P115
P202 P77 P50 P41
P10b P10c
P44b P44c P44e
P16e
38
/toolsCX Program Operations, TYPICAL Functional Roadmap
21
7
41
26
95

39. 39
Stalk your Finance Dept. Tie your CX to
revenue & measure w/ Client Lifetime Value.
Engaging employees is the magic bullet.
CX is just knowing clients better so that
you can serve them more intimately.
Centers of Excellence are the only common
element in every CX program I’ve seen.
Client data is currency, hoard it!
Funding for a CX program correlates to
your CEO’s understanding of its value.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew!
Always wear clean underwear.
/takeaways
If you only walk out of
here with one thing, I
hope it’s one of these:

40. CXPS 2017
Steven Keith
Thank you.