What can CX Practitioners Take From the "Break-up" Movie?

I’ll admit that my wife and I love the 2006 Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn movie, “The Break-up”. We find ourselves watching it often and like that we can laugh and cry during the two hours more than once because of it. It may be the funniest sad movie or the saddest funny movie of all time, but that’s for another post.

There’s a particularly poignant scene when Brooke (Aniston) and Gary (Vaughn) are having an argument at home about their plans for reconciliation and were to have met that evening at the opera, only to have Gary not show up and leave Brooke there alone, defeated. During the argument that followed, Gary was emphatic with her that he “would have gone if it was that important to her” and in her response, Brooke said, “It wasn’t that you went or didn’t go. I wanted you to WANT to go to the opera with me.” Got it. Check. Her message was that it was at least as much in the optic of an expression of wanting the same thing as one another as it was in showing up.

As a CX practitioner, I have the privilege of working with all different types of companies as clients. One day it’s a B2B technology brand and the next it could be a law firm. Still, others include insurance firms, banks, travel, and hospitality companies, and more. It’s diverse and fascinating.

Of course, I advocate for a transformational mindset when thinking about customers and their experiences. I want to root any project, whether it’s a VoC refresh or a global cultural adjustment, that this can’t be lip service, or it’ll fail, and I would rather part company friends than fail with a client and if the client’s not prepared to invest with their culture and not just their checkbook I’ll likely move on and not engage.

All that said, VoC is at an interesting crossroads these days. What began years ago as an ambitious “measure everything under the sun” approach to customer feedback somehow morphed into a chase-the-metric mindset of just a higher NPS or OSAT or easier effort, but little if any attention and focus are being paid to the underlying causes of seeking to understand the underlying root cause. “Why are we an 8? Or a 3?, Or a 46?” and instead this somehow became little more than a dashboard that few people pay regular and ongoing attention to. The scores are flat, fluctuating on rare occasions up or down a blip, but for the most part, it seems like it’s devolved into a checkbox exercise for many. It stinks.

I work with an interesting B2B client who enjoys what they’d surely characterize as a close-knit relationship with their clients. The account teams should be always embedded into their accounts with a tight finger on the pulse of the client. “What would running a better feedback process give us we don’t already get? We know our customers well!” they’d say. I’m sure they do, but there’s so much more to it that it may be less obvious that I wanted to sit down and write this today in the belief they’d not be the only company who thinks this way. “Why do we need to listen ‘better’?” seems to be one of the big payoff questions in all CX nowadays.

I want this client to understand and hopefully come to appreciate that like Brooke’s argument with Gary, this is as much about the optic as it is about the measure. Let’s unpack this a bit.

There are obvious benefits to a modern and thoughtful VoC capability. Gathering trustworthy and actionable insight is a clear outcome we’re chasing, but have you considered the very act of being thoughtful in how they engage their clients and ask for feedback without overdoing or underdoing so, and more so, tweaking the process, personalizing it somewhat for each client of theirs and avoiding a one-size-fits-none cookie-cutter approach will send a message to the client that the company truly cares about their thoughts and wants to hear them and is not sleepwalking through a dashboard building exercise?

I have seen proof positive that showing a client that the company cares enough about what the client feels, thinks, wants, dislikes, etc. and then who demonstrates an eagerness to address the gaps and shortcomings with a willingness to sacrifice some sacred cows even, along the way is what will, itself, make for a better and more collaborative relationship? It in effect brings the client and company to the same side of the bargaining table and forms a start to a collaborative partnership, breaking down the buyer-seller stigma that is often the basis of a bunch of missed opportunities. Of course, the company must be willing to activate the feedback in ways that show clear signs of WANTING to make things better and to align more closely. Closed-loop fundamentals need to be followed like a religion and not just dogma. The organization must rally around the clients and their feedback, bring it back to the forefront and expose the blemishes back to those who shared it in constructive ways and not hide behind a “keep it inside the Kimono” corporate policy.

If we are transparent, willing to engage deeper than ever, take a collaborative, tailored, and thoughtful approach to customer engagement and feedback, move our mindset from that of a KPI on a dashboard to a means of bringing out customer concerns therapeutically I believe the gains will be clear and obvious and the clients will appreciate the process and not just pay it lip service about “would have taken the survey” while in fact, they blow it off.

None of this takes much more time, energy, staff, or money to do well, but it does take a bit of a “flip-the-script” mindset about the reasons for it and a willingness to consider a new and different approach. Everyone will win in the end.

Mandel is a VoC SME and Sales Director at Concentrix Corporation and is based in Raleigh North Carolina. These views, however, are his own.