“Communication is two-way. So it's much about listening to understand what matters to them, not just telling.”

This week on Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos, Amy Radin joins us for an insightful conversation. She is a member of the Global Board of Directors at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. In her corporate career, Amy championed the use of customer data and technology, devising novel solutions to create new sources of value. Her accomplishments include overseeing the digital transformation of Citi Cards, a $5BB P&L, driving five years of double-digit adoption growth, and establishing a corporate venturing unit to promote mobile peer-to-peer payments in anticipation of new trends. She also demonstrates her competence at AXA US by developing consumer data analytics and digital marketing strategies and rebranding the company.

[01:37] Board's Responsibility – Sharing her background, Amy discusses the board's responsibility in defining leadership and the customer experience they wish to give and the extent to which boards should delve into these topics. 

[08:59] Advice – Amy describes how she would advise them regarding board engagement if she were sitting down with a CXO or CCO. 

[15:28] Get Ahead – Amy discusses a few aspects of the customer and employee experience that boards or CEOs/founders may need to address in the next year or two. 

[22:23] Scale-up - Amy highlights what founders should consider in terms of customer or employee experience while transitioning from startup to growth and scalability. 

[25:55] Customer Feedback - Amy addresses whether more businesses and startups should pay closer attention to the numerous signals available, such as direct customer feedback.

[30:03] Customer-Focused Change - Amy explains her recommendation strategy for influencing senior-level decision-makers to create customer-centric change.

[33:56] Amy's inspiration – Amy mentions the leaders she admires and the sources of her motivation.

Resources:

Connect with Amy:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amyradin/

Amy's website: https://amyradin.com

Amy's Book Mentioned in the Episode:

The Change Maker's Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company: goodreads.com/book/show/38747877-the-change-maker-s-playbook?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=c5ypZrTTrF&rank=1

Amy Radin on CX for the CEO and in the Boardroom

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another week of be customer led. I'm your host bill. Staikos. I've got a really special guest for us this week. Amy Raiden is kind of one of those folks that you meet and like you immediately just want to just spend hours and hours with her. Cause she's done so many cool things and amazing things.

[00:01:13] I really appreciate you spending some time with us.

[00:01:39] So we're in the boardroom. And, but before we get into that topic, Amy, can you share just your background? You've gone through this amazing journey have, have worked at very, very senior levels, obviously, and at very large organizations. So tell our listeners a little bit about that journey because I know they'd love to hear it.

[00:02:22] So, a great place to start my career. I continued my career in the retail banking sector and, led the digital transformation. Of, the credit card business, that city, which at that point was a $5 billion P and L so significant transformation. A lot of bad experience ended up becoming city's first chief innovation officer and less there during the financial crisis.

[00:03:12] As a board member, as an advisor, as the author of an award-winning book, the changemaker playbook. So reconstructed a portfolio of activities that let me bring my expertise to a lot of companies, whether they're startups or major global enterprises.

[00:03:39] Would love to dig in more there with you at some point, let's talk a little bit about sort of, when you think about organizations you've worked with, you're an advisor as well, right? We, you just mentioned that even outside of the book, what should be the board's role in understanding, driving, or even defining and co defining with leadership, the customer experience that they wanted to deliver?

[00:04:04] Amy Radin: Right. So just as context, a couple of things to make clear about the board and the role of the board, the, the operating principle for a good board is, noses in fingers out. So boards are not operators, right? They, their role is to ensure that shareholder objectives are delivered upon and that as part of that, they focus on.

[00:05:02] Not only in terms of gender, people of color, but also people with more diverse backgrounds. So you're starting to see tech people on boards, HR because of the concerns with talent and even marketing people. So you have to keep in mind sort of the role of the board, what they are there to do, and who's in the room, but you're thinking about customers.

[00:05:56] Oh, they'll get a customer satisfaction score and it's thing to track it. Okay. That's sort of, okay. Let's check that box, right? The conversation often doesn't go deeper. I think I've certainly seen situations. boards will generally have some kind of an annual strategy meeting, at least with, the CEO will we'll chair at that conversation.

[00:06:48] So how does customer experience connect to financial performance? with risk management, with reputation, with regulatory concerns, I also see a huge role. on the horizon as ESG, environmental sustainability and governance becomes a, is really moving up the priority agenda in most boardrooms.

[00:07:35] Bill Staikos: So I, and you're definitely right in terms of Europe being further ahead on this than us in the states, the interesting thing, it just, and I think, the, the pandemic accelerated a lot of this as this sense of what is the company's purpose and what societal value are they creating and what are they doing to make the world a better place?

[00:08:18] Right. And McDonald's Walmart. I mean the major airlines, the list goes on. What advice do you have for these individuals and maybe how to engage the board for success? I mean, you mentioned one way as being able to connect well, not, I guess not only customer experience, but also employee experience on some level connect that to financial results, but that's hard work.

[00:08:51] Amy Radin: Listen, That was those dots, what gets measured gets done. And I'll tell you, Jeff, it's a little story.

[00:09:24] There was a lot of skepticism about whether we had to, really do what I say. And this was back in 2000, 2001. So you gotta really, right. You really gotta turn the, turn the page back and take a bath. There were people scratching their heads saying like, well, why do we need to do this? Things are fine.

[00:10:03] If you do this, that is what will happen to the levers of the PNL and the balance sheet that. The CFO and the CEO and ultimately shareholders care about, and it feels grueling, but it's inevitable. If he wants to really get attention and get the resources that you deserve. So make that investment don't stop deferring it.

[00:10:53] What are their needs? It's no different from the board. So you've got to understand what their goals are, what they're there to accomplish. What's their role is what are their needs, how do they operate? So make the effort to educate yourself on the role of a board at how they operate. Then think about how you can add value to solving their challenge.

[00:11:36] I think there's just almost endless opportunity. Start by understanding the board as your customer and what. You've got to have the CEO support, right? The CEO controls the boardroom agenda. And so you're going to want to have the discussion with your CEO to understand what connections they see might exist to the board agenda, or to start to influence that conversation.

[00:12:32] There they're very special group with very specific.

[00:12:52] And your point around just buy in from the CEO is absolutely critical. I mean, so much of the work around customer and employee experience is top down and bottoms up and. I love that such a critical player in that such a critical player in that if we can kind of flip that,

[00:13:17] And they manage their time in the boardroom very carefully. So whatever you take to the board has to be incredibly concise and. They're not going to listen to a two hour session on customer experience. it's going to be 30 minutes. I'd say you've got to really hit the nail on the head in a way that they say, wow, this is really important to my responsibility.

[00:13:46] Bill Staikos: I in a former life, Amy, I had a wish of bringing the board together and getting them into a design session, a design thinking session, right? And watch it just as observers and watching and having them observe how to use design, thinking to solve problems, whether big or small in the, in the business we never got there, but that was one of my goals is to be able to, we, we were successful in some ways, but that was sort of like the next thing for the next year is to be able to do that.

[00:14:22] Amy Radin: Who have an interest in going further, a good board member will take the time to really learn how the business operates. they may go on a listening tour as part of their onboarding. And so you'll see what question to ask your CEO, who on the board do you think would be interested in this topic?

[00:15:00] Bill Staikos: Great advice.

[00:15:24] Amy Radin: Yeah. Well, I got back to ESG because I think that is a big one. And I think the place to start, because ESG right now, it's kind of this big monster right yesterday. And especially in the near west, what's getting the most attention is. Well, I think that, the E part, but the S and the G are really important.

[00:16:23] So there are things in there, there, there are STTs about health and wellbeing. Decent work and economic growth, climate action, responsible consumption, and production reduce to inequality. So you could really go down that list and start to think about, well, where could customer experience and employee experience have meaningful impact on any of these goals?

[00:17:13] And so she just have to start to think about where can you have meaningful impact. And then socialize, start to socialize ideas with colleagues and influencers to pursue hypotheses and start testing and learning. But see if you can find some Hawks that influencers and leaders in the organization also think are important.

[00:17:58] Priorities.

[00:18:18] Amy Radin: right.

[00:18:26] Is it just because it's really hard or is it just because they haven't been. They don't have time to think about it. And maybe don't have mechanisms internally to think about it. Like what's your kind of perspective there.

[00:18:47] I think there's a whole question of how do you manage. The effectiveness. And actually in my role, as a director at the CPA, the accounting association, they have played their leadership have been playing a direct role in establishing global standards that organizations like the sec would take seriously to measure, have ESG be up there in the scorecard, along with the financial performance, that's going to take some time to play out and actually get implemented, but there has been significant progress.

[00:19:38] And so that's hard organizations probably lack the skills and capabilities. It's just like thinking back 20 years ago to when. Nobody knew about digital, but they thought it was important to actually get going. you just take an industry like fashion, one of the worst polluters and practitioners of poor sustainability in the world.

[00:20:42] Just on that one issue. Yeah. It's going to it's it's complex and it's gonna really take mindset change and behavior change and business model change. Got to do it.

[00:21:05] when you think about Amy, the companies that you are, so you're, you're an executive in residence with an organization called progress partners. When you think about some of the things that, and, or the conversations that you're having, having with these founders, what should founders be thinking about or considering to get past this sort of stage of startup, right into growth and into scale around customer or employee experience?

[00:21:33] Amy Radin: But that's a great question because there are many, many startups that have amazing concepts that they've validated. Yes. And they, they failed because they don't know how to scale. So I think the first thing I want to make sure they understand is that what works in a beta will not work at scale.

[00:22:20] So there's a whole lot of issues that I counsel them to look at in terms of people, process and technology have to challenge themselves, having sort of a realistic sense of what needs to change from the way they have operated at when they were testing and validate. So what has happened at scale? I mean, the founder may all over even be the right person,

[00:23:05] they suggested that there was an inconsistency in delivery that said to me, that said to me, like, you've got to look at your delivery processes, which would really be where problems would really be exacerbated at scale to the point where, in their case, because they were FinTech that could turn into regulatory issues in any regulated sector.

[00:23:41] So you, you cannot, you've got to run, get out in, in that business in pharma, in many, many businesses where you're affecting health and safety and people's livelihoods, you've got to run a zero defect operation. You've got to really understand your customer experience. And your infrastructure, everything about how you operate to make that leap.

[00:24:11] Bill Staikos: Interesting. Do you think a lot of startups are, are paying a lot of attention to feedback directly from customers or is that sort of a blind spot? Because they're so busy on the product and getting it to a place where they want to be, get it out there as quickly as possible and iterate it.

[00:24:41] Amy Radin: So I see a Ray, I know of one startup where I retained part of the executive meeting agenda is to read customer letters. They are brought into the, and I think that's fantastic.

[00:25:24] Yep. They got a price cause really learn it. startups don't have the budgets for fancy market research studies or to license, automated tools necessarily to help them. So they have to be out talking to customers and I find the better CEOs are doing that. They're they're making the routes.

[00:26:23] Bill Staikos: Interesting. Yeah, that's such good advice. I, I do some work with an organization in a similar, not, I'm not an executive in residence, but I have done some mentoring for startups. And one of the things that I've talked to a number of startups about is how are you getting, what mechanisms are you creating?

[00:26:57] I have to ask. And by the way, I re so as a city, as a long-time city customer, I mean probably 30 years, I remember actually the w the first. Digital or, or digital banking effort where I actually had to put a CD into my laptop to get the software from city onto the laptop so I can make the connection.

[00:27:36] It was pretty cool. And do other things for that matter as chief innovation officer at Citi cards, for, I mean, this is over 10 years ago, but, and you've had multiple senior level roles. One of the questions I get a lot is how do you influence organizations broadly? We've talked maybe a little bit about that throughout this, this conversation, but, and maybe you can't share specific stories around, w places you've been.

[00:28:26] Amy Radin: Yeah. And it's, it's a great question. And it's funny yesterday, I was in a rampage. Where the question was, why do you really successful innovation programs get shut down? And it was a call with, Sarah on the Roundtable where a lot of people who are currently a chief experience officers, chief innovation officers, type people.

[00:29:16] Especially the people who are the Panhell owners, because they are the people who ultimately will need to support and advocate for an, a, a fund and get out there for efforts that will take time to prove out, I think, understanding their pain points and their priorities. And. Make sure that you are testing and learning and to the CX areas that will help them meet their priority goals and solve their big problems.

[00:30:15] We need to get moving a third of them. Well, wow. This could be important. They were sort of open to the possibility, but sort of show me the money. And then a third of them are like, why do we need to bother where to and great. And yeah. Don't beat you, right? Is that you are not gonna win everybody over, but what's really important is you want to influencers to really be on board.

[00:31:06] Not just telling, in fact, I'd say it should be two thirds listening, one third telling that's. So that's my advice. And I think. It's going to be enduring advice. It's never going to go away. It's the things that you need to do to make this work, succeed and pick out a prize. But there were a lot of agendas,

[00:31:27] Good advice. And it's you're right. It's those things that are core to relationship building and development, and creating that trust at the end of the day, that's foundational stuff that gets people ahead. Get your job. Listened to and people saying, okay, I'm here to support and I'm here to act. And here's how it can make sense in my business.

[00:31:59] Amy Radin: look up to?

[00:32:32] So people who really lead with humanity, just someone I've known more recently from a far, but for a very long time, who I put very high on that list is, is catching up. Who was, who I saw a rise in the ranks from being, and I went inside office guy at American express to, to the CEO. And I got to work with him for a long time.

[00:33:10] And when he came into American express tower and, and these days, who last year, did not stand for re-election on the board of Facebook over reportedly over disagreements with soccer, Berg over. and so I would get a renin to that that, he saw what was happening and that that's not his cup of tea to be part of what's going on there.

[00:34:00] And so I chose he's, he recognizes that he can have an impact, but he was always this way throughout his career. And, as high success really, he's, he's a really exceptional.

[00:34:22] We the only two in the elevator and I'm a young professional, I'm literally just shaking in my shoes. Like here's the CEO. And he reaches out his hand and he says, hi, I'm Ken Chenault. What's your name? Right. I mean, it blew my mind. And unlike my name is bill steakhouse. He's like, well, where do you work?

[00:34:54] Bill Staikos: There've been other CEOs that I've sat next to on a plane have shared an elevator ride with not one of them has done that since. So I absolutely. Totally agree with you on Ken and everybody called him Ken in the company. I don't want to call it right. Like that was so such a great role model.

[00:35:21] Bill Staikos: And an amazing individual. Before we wrap up one more question. Where do you go for inspiration, Amy?

[00:35:47] I, my network. I'm really blessed to have a mat and develop relationships with so many people. and so many diverse people that sometimes I'll just reach out to have a one-to-one conversation, with people I admire to find out like, what are they up to? what are they thinking about? And it always amazes me.

[00:36:34] go for a walk, simple, simple things, anything that lets me clear my head. It's a, it's a pathway to inspiration.

[00:36:47] Amy Radin: Jersey shore please?

[00:36:56] Amy Radin: Beautiful.

[00:37:00] My in-laws had a house on Manasquan for a number of number of years. Yeah. Sandy D decided to change a lot of that for them, unfortunately, but, Manasquan and the Jersey shore has a very special place in my heart, so, yeah.

[00:37:19] So hopefully, hopefully it'll be protected cause it's definitely.

[00:37:40] I hope this isn't, our, our last COVID, I don't think it's going to be, but, I'm looking forward to the next one.

[00:37:52] Bill Staikos: All right, everybody. Another great show. We're out. Talk to you soon. The car

[00:38:00] We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we're doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time we're out.