3 Actions to Present to Your Executive Team Without “Calling Their Baby Ugly”

In my new Daily Dose video series, I explore the topics that chief customer officers must grapple with on a daily basis. Join me as I discuss what I’ve learned over the course of my 35-year career, so that you can more effectively do the work that needs to be done.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the video below.

There will be a day (or days) for all of us doing this work…that we will have to present some not so great depictions of the company’s customer experiences. It’s the “pushing rocks” up the hill part of our work.

It’s the HOW we do this delivery that can either unite…or even alienate leaders. In today’s “dose” I’ll outline three steps to finesse your delivery of these messages and engage your audience.

This quagmire we live in our work came up in my most recent podcast with Bob Buiaroski, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Manulife. In today’s “daily dose” I want to expound on that discussion.

We have all been in the situation where we are brought into an organization to help understand the life of the customer. Throughout our work elevating and improving customers’ lives we’ve got to tell these stories and share this information. And perhaps the most precarious of all the story-telling that we do – is at the beginning of our roles when we have our first delivery of what we’ve found as we’ve done our initial deep dive into the experience.

The question is: how do you take all of that listening and learning and understanding and bring it to the table of the leaders that you’ll be working with? And how do you showcase what you’ve learned and must often present to the people who, in many cases, created that customer experience in the first place? How do you avoid the “she’s telling us our baby is ugly!” outcome?

3 Actions to Present the Story

That’s why in this “dose” I want to walk you through three actions on how to present this story in a way that’s going to be received well by leaders, and move this work, and you with them, as a team, moving forward.

1. Ditch the deck.

It might seem really compelling to want to put all the information together on a spreadsheet, or a trending chart, or present a dashboard of the survey results, but resist that temptation.

2. Make your presentation experiential.

Instead, do number two, which is at the core of our work, which is to make the presentation experiential. Instead of presenting a dashboard, or a deck, walk them through the life of the customer. Play the calls. Show the screenshots. Share your conversations. Make it real. Bring the human off the spreadsheet, and have them understand the life.

Now here’s what’s important about that. When you make it human, the conversation won’t be about who created that, but what the customers are experiencing, and it will give the team the ability to check their silo at the door, check their ego, and their pride of ownership of the work at the door. And what’s more, you become the uniter of talking about the experience, and demonstrate what the conversations that you’ll be bringing to the table going forward will be like. It brings the shoulders down and it helps to unite you and them as a team, right off the bat.

Play the calls. Show the screenshots. Share your conversations. Make it real. Bring the human off the spreadsheet, and have them understand the life. Get your Daily Dose...of Reality with @JeanneBliss’ new videos. #CX #CustExp Share on X

3. Only pick a few things to talk about.

Please don’t go through the entire journey. Pick a few things. Walk through the most critical moments, those inflection points, where customers are vulnerable, where if you don’t deliver for them, you’re going to drive them away, or you’re going to lose the opportunity to create a bond for them.

So, let me summarize: Ditch the deck, tell the story, make it experiential, and pick a few. That’s it for me from today’s Daily Dose.

Want to see more videos from me? Follow me on LinkedIn or subscribe to the blog below.