July 14, 2024

Living the dream with Certified Experience Economy Expert, author, and the founder and CEO of ExPeers Diane Hopkins

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In this episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, host Curveball sits down with Diane Hopkins, the founder and CEO of Xperes. Diane is a marketing guru with extensive experience in marketing communications, customer design strategy, and is a certified Experience Economy expert. Join us as Diane shares her journey from a traditional marketing career to becoming one of the first chief experience officers in the healthcare industry in the U.S., and eventually founding her own consulting business.
www.expeers.net
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> Curtis Jackson>Welcome, to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. if you believe you can achieve Chee Chee, welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today we're going to be talking about customer experience and employee experience, as I am joined by Arthur and the founder and CEO of Xperes, Diane Hopkins.

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> Curtis Jackson>Diane has extensive experience.

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> Curtis Jackson>She's a marketing guru. She has extensive experience and marketing communications and customer design strategy.

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> Curtis Jackson>And she's a certified, experienced economy expert. So we're going to be talking to her about what that is and how, she helps with customer and employee experience. So, Diane, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Diane Hopkins>Thanks for having me and, being interested in my work.

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> Curtis Jackson>Well, why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Diane Hopkins>Well, I had a traditional career path in marketing, which expanded as time went on to include innovation strategy and customer experience strategy, mostly because anytime you're marketing a small business or a larger business, if you're spending money to promote the business, you better deliver what you're promoting.

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> Diane Hopkins>And so I saw early in my career that how we would position companies and their promises had to be aligned with what happened when the customer, called or showed up.

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> Diane Hopkins>So that kind of expanded my traditional career, and I was one of the first chief experience officers in the healthcare industry in the United States. And then, as, many people have had to do, as my parents started to age and have health issues, I decided to shift my focus from corporate world to my own consulting business. That allowed me to work with many different companies and care for parents at the same time.

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> Diane Hopkins>And during that time, I've been able to, write a number of books for businesses related to how to enhance employee experiences and customer experiences.

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> Curtis Jackson>Okay, so I've never heard this term before, a economy experience expert. So explain how you came up with that and what that means.

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> Diane Hopkins>Well, about 20 years ago, a groundbreaking book was published called the Experience economy by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, who are economists that kind of realize that, many businesses were missing. you could be a product, you could be a service, but if you really wanted to go further, you had to make your company and your offerings a true experience. And they had, again, a very groundbreaking book. And as years went on, they got a lot of feedback from people saying, oh, my goodness, this content is awesome, but how do I make it apply on Monday morning? What do I do, in my company and my culture to have this come alive? So they created a certification program. They only take, take ten people at a time, and it's a very intense six days and nights. they let different industries in there. So I was in the program with the beauty industry and the auto industry. So you're learning from other industries. And I think there's about 375 or so of us now that have gone through this certification. And once you've gone through the training and demonstrated that you're applying the tools, you're a certified experience economy expert.

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> Curtis Jackson>Wow, that's neat. Never heard of that before.

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> Curtis Jackson>So tell us about your company, why you decided to founded Xperes, and kind of tell us, you know, if I came to you, since I am a small business owner, and said, hey, Diane, how can your company experience help me? what would you say?

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> Diane Hopkins>So, experience. The name relates to experience and building peers that are expert in the topic of customer and employee experience.

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> Diane Hopkins>So I do, a few things. I'll work with a company to assess their current state. Where are you now in being truly customer centric and designing exceptional experiences for your customers and for your staff? So, to see what's really going on right now, or, if you have a specific challenge area, an area that's causing the company a lot of grief or a lot of dissatisfaction for your employees or staff members.

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> Diane Hopkins>I'm sorry. Or customers, I will, kind of try to do a deep dive to figure out with fresh eyes, outsider eyes, to figure out what's going on and what tools or what strategies might be recommended. And then I spend a lot of time training, building internal competencies in a company so that if you've got a health system with 11,000 employees and you think you're going to have three people in your patient experience department that are going to be able to handle, you know, 200,000 patients a year and 11,000 employees, it's not going to work. So the goal is to build the expertise throughout the company. And I do certain I have, content I use to certify people as, exceptional experience experts so that you've got those tools spread throughout the company. So it's, again, consultation on where you are now and assessing the current state, assisting with problem areas, or helping to build the skills within the company.

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> Curtis Jackson>Okay, kind of give us a brief overview of your three books that you've written, and then we'll kind of go deeper into them. Tell us about them and where we can get them.

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> Diane Hopkins>Great. well, they're all available on Amazon, so I guess I'll start with out the competition. That's the newest one that just came out a few weeks ago, and that's a french american collaboration. I co wrote that book with a president, of extends consulting in Paris. And we found each other by happenstance years ago. we have very different, backgrounds in customer experience and employee experience. And certainly he had is european view. I have my us view.

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> Diane Hopkins>And as we started to get to know each other and what we did, we saw lots of similarities, but we also saw ways we looked at things differently.

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> Diane Hopkins>So as we started to say, how do companies, no matter how big or small they may be, how do they refresh their strategy to make sure they're staying on point with being, letting the customer drive the priorities? And so as we shared research and shared our observations with our clients, we developed a model called the care model that's out care the competition. And we feel that those companies, that truly demonstrate that they will not only care, but care more than, their competitors for their customers and staff, will have sustainable high performance.

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> Diane Hopkins>And the care model stands for these four elements. Camaraderie. How strong are you in building camaraderie between your and your customers and amongst your employees? Authenticity, how trustworthy, is your company? Is your culture?

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> Diane Hopkins>Do you do what you say you're going to do? Do you meet your commitments?

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> Diane Hopkins>And, can people believe you?

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> Diane Hopkins>Reliability? Can people depend on you?

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> Diane Hopkins>Is your company safe? Are, ah, customers safe in your hands? Are employees safe?

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> Diane Hopkins>are your systems working the way they're supposed to be? And then the last is ease.

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> Diane Hopkins>Do you make it easy, low effort for your customers and for your employees so that people can be, satisfied and stay loyal and stay engaged? And all of my books, there's one premise, and that is none of us, whatever company we work for, want satisfied customers. Satisfied customers are mediocre. We want raving fans.

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> Diane Hopkins>We want people that even if we make a little mistake, they'll forgive us, because they're raving fans and they will endorse us to those they know.

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> Curtis Jackson>Well, let's talk about your book. It's hard to be easy because you've already answered the question about your new book. How does it be easy correlate with the customer and employee experience?

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> Diane Hopkins>Well, this book came and I did it during the pandemic. I had had many personal experiences and had recently, around that time, heard of other experiences where people were so frustrated trying to be a customer of different companies. And, you know, if it wasn't hard becoming a customer, it was hard staying a customer. Healthcare is notorious in this, that it's very hard to navigate.

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> Diane Hopkins>Sometimes it's hard to even pay your bill. there's so many steps or you're not sure what to do or where to go and what information you need. So I started to research, why companies make it hard for their customers. And I did informal research with people in many different industries, about 120 people. And the most common answer that I got, why do companies make it hard to do business with them, in one form or another, was stupidity that people in the company were not paying attention. They were being, in quotes, stupid about what was most important, about who pays the bills, really the customer does. And that they were basically not paying attention like they should. And so as that started to unfold that, you know, I started to dig a little deeper about that. And so all of us, again, doesn't matter what industry it is, doesn't matter if, if it's b, two B or b two c. We don't want to waste time. We don't want to have to go through a lot of barriers and boundaries to get what we want to do, especially to spend our money. And so it's hard to be easy. Focuses on all the different ways. First of all, you need to kind of look at your company and look at your systems to see how hard or easy it is. Sometimes you'll get that information through customer service or customer satisfaction surveys. But a lot of times, people, especially those that are very frustrated, they just leave. They don't even spend the time giving you the gift of feedback, on how you could do better. And so it's basically a book about taking a look at all your operations and your systems to figure out where might we do better in low effort, and eliminating effort. And sometimes for employee experience, that means taking ten steps out of a 50 step process. If there's steps that can come out and make the employee's life a little easier and a little better and lessen frustrating, let's do it. And let's all, and again, this work is never done. It's something you want to do, constantly looking at it.

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> Diane Hopkins>When you purchase new technology, there should be a breathing point before the technology is purchased and or implemented to say, wait a minute, what is this now going to do to our customer effort or our employee effort? And if it's going to cause a problem, fix it before you launch the technology.

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> Curtis Jackson>Well, you have this term called chief moment officer. So tell us what that means and how you came with that term.

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> Diane Hopkins>Yeah, it's called unleashing the chief moment officers. And that is a book that focuses mostly about all the frontline people that, have contact with your customers. Sometimes that's on the phone, in person, on an email, and I'm talking about live humans connecting with your customers, not robots or AI chat bots at this point. and the idea is that many frontline people, especially, I, was spending a lot of time with healthcare, many frontline people feel like they don't have much power in the company, and that's terrible. They know what the people in the boardroom don't know. They see what the people in the boardroom don't see because they're watching the customers and interacting with the customers in one way or another all day long. And I had, in one of my training programs years ago, an, employee raised her hand and she said, I don't have any power in this company. I don't know why I'm in this training program, because nothing I say ever turns into anything. So I have no influence. And that was when I realized, oh my goodness, they don't see how much power they have. And that's how I came up with the idea of chief moment officers, that they may not be in the c suite per se, as the chief, chief executive officer, but they are a chief of every moment with a customer. And so I developed content and observed people in these roles, to say, what do we need to do to make them feel like they do have influence and let them know the company needs their insights. And, so I have variety of training I do on that. but at the end of the day, the best way to create chief moment officers is to make a commitment to co creation. So as you develop a new service that you're going to offer a product or build a new building, or whatever it may be for the customers that you have, the frontline staff be part of the development of that. At the end of the day, whatever we create in any business is going to be delivered by someone that faces the customer. So they should be meaningfully involved in the design and the refinement of those experiences. Again, because they know things we don't know, they see things we don't see.

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> Diane Hopkins>So co creation means as you're getting ready to launch a new product, or you're getting ready to build a new building, or, expand on services you're already offering, that you bring the front line in early on and expose them to what the plans are and say, what do you think? If you were in charge, what would you want us to do, and you do it.

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> Diane Hopkins>You have to do it in a way that you mix different brains, because you don't want to just pick directors or just, vice presidents. You want people at every level. When I would do this in healthcare, in one co creation session might be 40, 30 people, and we do about three or 4 hours in these sessions, I might have a security guard, a heart surgeon, a vice president, a bedside nurse. I, want those diverse brains, diverse lenses from our company to come together. And of course, you have to teach them some of the experience design tools. most of these co creation workshops are very much fun to, and it's not something you normally get to do, but after the session is over, you have such a rich collection of concepts that, have come from various places in the organization. People with different lenses, different experience, different education, and then you blend those together to create a new plan going forward. And the other side benefit to that co creation approach is that the frontline staff, many of whom were never involved in these things, were never asked their opinion.

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> Diane Hopkins>They start to feel important. They start to feel that their lens really matters and that the company does value their opinion. And so you get that side benefit of added employee engagement, and you get a much better launch, plan for whatever it is you're launching.

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> Curtis Jackson>So I know you have a lot of extensive research and experience in this area.

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> Curtis Jackson>What should businesses, no matter how big or small, keep in mind when trying to attract new customers?

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> Diane Hopkins>Well, if you look at a customer experience, commitment overall, again, I don't care what kind of company it is. there's a few things that I would say should be non negotiable. One is there must be an actual deliberate and thoughtful customer experience strategy.

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> Diane Hopkins>It's not a side thing, you know, side on the side of marketing or, you know, a once in a while thing you do with operations. It should be a dedicated strategy, full on strategy with the associated resources to it. And, it needs to have, it doesn't have to have full time people responsible, but it needs to have diverse people throughout the company that are responsible and accountable for making sure that strategy is developed and it's maintained and it's refreshed, right, regularly.

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> Diane Hopkins>So first is, again, you must have a customer experience strategy. And I would say you should have a deliberate employee experience strategy.

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> Diane Hopkins>And the tools to make exceptional customer, experiences and employee experiences can be very similar. The second is that, again, it depends on what kind of a company you have and what you do. Is that your first commitment to an exceptional experience for staff or for customers is that that experience is safe. Now, if you, you know, if you're just an online business, the safety might be around their data not getting stolen. But if you're an in person business, certainly a healthcare business, a commitment to safety, is the most important first step in healthcare or anything associated with healthcare. you know, we can get you in and out fast. We can give you a warm cookie while you're waiting. But if we cut the wrong foot off, what's the point? So none of the rest matters. So, safety, whatever that applies to your industry, should be your first step as you design your experience strategy. The next is what I just talked about a minute ago, is that your company authentically commit to co creation.

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> Diane Hopkins>That stakeholders, whether they be internal stakeholders, staff members or customers or donors or students, depending, again, on your company, that you agree and commit to co create things so that people that know new things or different things about your offerings are involved, so that you can really refine what you offer with really smart input for people that already love you and already part of the company. So, co creation. Some people, balk at co creation because they think, oh, it takes so much more time. Well, it does take more time because you have to do co creation sessions and you have to recruit these people into tap into their knowledge. But it's all worth it in the end of the day because you're seeing new things, you're avoiding, hopefully, problems that could be costly later because you're tapping into smart brains and smart, experience from people all through the company. And then the last one is that exceptional experiences don't just happen magically.

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> Diane Hopkins>There's not a magic fairy that makes sure that happens.

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> Diane Hopkins>And so, again, whether you have ten employees or 10,000 employees, you need to commit to training them. And especially, you never know when you hire a new person if they're bringing good habits into your company and culture or bad habits into your company and culture. So how you orient new employees and how you welcome them in, and you explain the expectations around how they treat their co workers and how they treat customers, that needs to be on day one, and it needs to be extensive. And everybody that comes through new employee orientation should leave with a really good view of how to be a chief moment officer, how to make every single moment special, however and whenever you can. And that the company supports you in doing that. And so that commitment to training not only internal experts that will be all around the company, but also training, line employees and refreshing that training, throughout the year and encouraging throughout the year people to send feedback. You know, hospitals, as an example, are notoriously bad at sharing within the hospital. So the 12th floor, they may be doing something wonderful for patients and families that none of the other floors know about, and they don't typically share very well. So making sure that the wins and the, exceptional, you know, innovations that are coming through your company are shared broadly, as an extension of that commitment to education.

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> Curtis Jackson>So tell us about any upcoming projects or current projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

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> Diane Hopkins>Well, I am always, available through experience.net, to talk to people about what challenges they may have. And I've got different companies and industries that I work with on that.

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> Diane Hopkins>I do have a side project that also came out through the, pandemic. And it's a new book that again, just came out, but this one is not co authored. I did this one alone and it's partly, it was a fun, you know, a little different than my typical business book. It's called the gifted gift giver.

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> Diane Hopkins>And I started to do some research during the pandemic about gift giving. I've always been someone that loved to find gifts and wrap gifts and give gifts. And one of those lockdown days, I started to research it and realized how many billions and billions of dollars gift giving contributes to the economy all over the world. And so it's a book that kind of looks at the history of gift giving, cultural differences about gift giving, lots of gift ideas, unique gift ideas and things to think about. And it also includes a gifted gift giver quiz that you can take to see, you know, where you are in your style of giving.

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> Diane Hopkins>And it also includes some touching stories of people sharing their favorite gift they've ever received.

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> Diane Hopkins>So there is a little bit of, you know, customer service, theme, in there. but in addition to being a kind of a personal habit lifestyle book, there are some tips in there for companies that are in the retail space to try to look at ways to attract more gift giving revenue. So that's been fun.

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> Diane Hopkins>And that just came out to the gifted gift giver.

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> Curtis Jackson>Okay, well, you just gave out your website, which was my next question.

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> Curtis Jackson>Experience, close us out with some final thoughts, maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on, or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

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> Diane Hopkins>I guess, the biggest eye opener for me over the last 15 years of this journey is kind of what I talked about a minute ago how much there is rich knowledge and influence in the front line of any company people, that we might take for granted. That I remember. There was a time we had a, part time female security guard in a hospital that in most cases, she would never have been invited into a big planning meeting because, you know, we don't typically do that.

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> Diane Hopkins>And she came up with some of the best ideas that were actually implemented.

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> Diane Hopkins>So, through my work all these years, I would say that is the saddest thing that we haven't tapped into the eyes and ears and brains and hearts of people all throughout a company who know things. And maybe they are a little shy because they're not used to this, but we need to make them comfortable, to get their knowledge and their lens to help us succeed. So that would be the kind of parting thought that I would wish every company would pay attention to.

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> Curtis Jackson>All right, ladies and gentlemen, experience.net dot if you know of any businesses or business people that can benefit from this episode, please follow rate review and share. Jump on your favorite podcast app. Give us a review.

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> Curtis Jackson>Follow us. If you have any guest or suggestion topics, Curtis Jackson, 1978.

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> Curtis Jackson>Net is the place to send them. As always, thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Diane, thank you for joining us.

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> Diane Hopkins>It's been a pleasure. Thank you for your time and your interest. Curtis.

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> Curtis Jackson>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurvefall.com.

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> Curtis Jackson>until next time, stay focused on living the dream. Dream.