“One of the things that I've always been focused on is not just the advent of CX but on making sure that customer earned growth and value are really embedded in driving the overall corporate agenda and culture in a meaningful way.”

This week's episode of Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos features Amy Shioji. Amy is the Senior Vice President for Analytics and Transformation and Chief Experience Officer at Strategic Education. Strategic Education facilitates economic mobility through education, where Amy is committed to fostering revolutionary customer growth and organizational focus in her current role.

[01:17] Amy's Background – Amy discusses her journey and the distinguishing factors that led to her current position. 

[03:36] Strategic Education - Amy outlines what "Strategic education" is and what it does, how it differentiates itself from other companies in the industry, and how her work there differs from her previous role. 

[08:48] Human Resources – Amy describes the opportunities and relationship between the corporate strategy and experience function and the HR division. 

[11:27] Message to CEOs – Amy covers some of the initial measures that CEOs can take within their organizations to integrate strategy and CX in a meaningful way. 

[15:13] Platforms and Tools – Amy explains the tools and platforms utilized by the strategy and CX teams. 

[19:38] Journey and Product – Amy addresses how organizations are now aligning themselves around journeys and not necessarily the product. In addition, she mentions the techniques they have been employing concerning this. 

[23:38] The Future – We examine how the integration of strategy and customer experience will evolve in the coming years.

[30:25] Inspiration - Amy talks about her sources of motivation and her role models.

Resources:

Connect with Amy:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amyshioji/

Amy Shioji on Combining Strategy and Customer Experience

[00:00:32] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to be customer led. I'm your host bill stakers. I am joined by Amy cog, who is SVP for corporate strategy and the chief experience officer at strategic education Inc. Now. So as you get education, Inc has a really cool mission. It is dedicated to enabling economic mobility through education.

[00:00:59] Amy Shioji: Thanks. No, I'm super excited to be here and I love your series. hopefully can share some wisdom and talk a little bit about, as you mentioned, what we're doing at our company.

[00:01:11] And just for, for folks who are not familiar with Amy, I've been a super fan for a long time. The stuff that you put out there on social media and other channels, Amy is like, Always so thoughtful, deep introspective and just, I walk away like, damn, why didn't I think of that? So like thank you for putting all this great stuff out there and I'm excited just to kind of get into it.

[00:01:42] Amy Shioji: Great question. Yeah, so like many, I started out in integrated marketing. Primarily in service to improving customer engagement, which I feel like many organizations sort of conflate with customer experience, but I think it became pretty apparent that there was more that we needed to do in terms of understanding and designing experiences for customers versus just purely to customers.

[00:02:29] CX like many has been more of a build from the ground up sort of endeavor in terms of helping organizations define both what CX should mean for the business, as well as how it's sort of meaningfully take hold in the company culture and its overall operating model. And I think where I found myself now, which is, as you said, sort of chief experience and strategy officer for strategic education.

[00:03:26] Strategic clarity and strategic direction for broader employee engagement, because we know that that ultimately is what creates that sense of purpose for employees. And it allows them to deliver against both your customer promise and your organizational goals.

[00:03:47] Like you guys have done it. You guys are clearly pioneers in this and yourself included and thinking that way and bring, and really combined. I want to get into it, but really for our international listeners and even maybe some domestic listeners who in the U S who are not familiar with the company, can you tell us a little bit about who strategic education is and what you're doing?

[00:04:28] we also have more recently an international institution, so Torrens university in Australia, and we also have a portfolio of non-degree offerings. So things like coding, boot camps, or general online education course programs.

[00:04:54] What are some of the differences? you mentioned some of the more traditional kind of CX functions that you see out there that you've been involved in. And I certainly have been involved in the past, like the Rasha, we've talked about this in the past, but the rationale to bring it together with which you kind of say before, but then like, what is that difference for, for you all and how are you bringing up together?

[00:05:48] And I think, while well-intentioned in terms of my own experience of what I see, I think many organizations treat CX as a discreet thing. So, here are additional metrics, additional tools that we want to use to represent the customer, but we haven't necessarily declared what the business should do with this, how they're ultimately accountable for it.

[00:06:35] Three levels. And so we'll talk a little bit about how we're structured, but also how this sort of works. So the first I like to think about is sort of organizational, and this is where sort of our traditional strategy team. So we do have a strategy part of the team as well as a CX team. But given that we're sort of all under one department, I think there is a lot of crossover and lots of information sharing that we do.

[00:07:16] The second is really functional. So do we have customer experience, goals and standards that are clearly clearly articulated as part of that broader strategy? And does that, how does that enable us to achieve. Meaningful experience improvements in satisfaction at scale. And this is where the CX team obviously plays a huge role in this.

[00:07:54] And allow them to really be in alignment to your customer promise. So there's a lot of work that the team has done on the CX side in terms of building that customer promise, those sets of behaviors that we model model in terms of being more customer focused, but also making sure, as you mentioned, in terms of our overall organizational vision and mission statement, we're defining who the customer is to us, whether that's, B to C students or industry or, or investor party, Too, you know how that needs to all come together.

[00:08:33] Bill Staikos: So that's really interesting. can I just follow up on that on the individual level specifically, there's so much conversation around there around CX and the X and the combination, both sides of same coin.

[00:09:01] Yeah,

[00:09:25] And one of the big quadrants for us in terms of what drives greater engagement and sense of purpose is this, this idea of strategic clarity and strategic direction. And so that's where there's a huge opportunity and partnership between the corporate strategy and experience, function, and HR in terms of sort of unpacking that and looking at how we need to be more thoughtful in the articulation right.

[00:10:08] As part of this work, what our, what our emphasis and what our commitment to customers ultimately is. And so it's been a really good partnership with HR to think about this. And we think about this from a talent perspective and just an overall engagement perspective. So it's very much a partnership between our two teams, but it's one that is, of real focus and priority for us in the organization.

[00:10:58] Your company has by bringing these two functions together in a really meaningful way, because some organizations don't even have a strategy function per se, that could sit in the CFO org or some teams don't even have formal CX teams. Right. But like for listeners, like what do you think are some of those first steps that they can start or questions that they can be asking maybe inside their company to start to meet or start to put in a similar structure perhaps today?

[00:11:43] I think the culture champion for a lot of this work should ideally come from the CEO and that's why in our organization, both CX, as you mentioned, and corporate strategy, Report up through the CEO in this role. And I think that's both an important signal and a Testament to the practice and the transformation that we're undertaking.

[00:12:28] Great. So if you follow that up to sort of say, and how does that happen? You'll you'll tend to get answers like, well, we need to, improve our products and our services. We need to think about the overall value in pricing. We need to think about culture, fabulous. So the next question, and how do you best enable.

[00:13:03] Is really a holistic way that they're talking about customer value. And so I think that's going to look different in every organization. Maybe it's aligned to some things like corporate strategy. It might be if you have some sort of a transformation office, depending on the size of the business and the change agenda for the company.

[00:13:51] And it's aligned to what the definition of success. Ultimately looks like for those executives and for that leader. And I think that's, what's really important regardless of where it formally sits is have people describe what it, what it sounds like, what it looks like, what success is, and that will help you sort of figure out what's the best way to align your resources and who needs to be part of that conversation.

[00:14:40] But that alignment using the same language as equally as. Are you using kind of it. So you've got two different, you've got a strategy team and a CX team. Are they using combine? Are you guys using combined tools like tools together, whether that's design thinking, personas, journeys, et cetera, or is the strategy team using their set of tools to create and think about strategy and the CX team using their cause that cross-functional partnership and being on the same platforms and tools, and really be understanding.

[00:15:13] Amy Shioji: Yeah. So there are some, not maybe as many as we probably should. I think it's given me some good ideas already, but we do. So some of the sort of design thinking methodologies frameworks are certainly a lot of the ways that both in terms of more traditional corporate strategic planning and in, in our design practice and our CX practice, we certainly use.

[00:16:00] So part of what we've done. Is really intimately understand and document all of the key student journeys. And for us, that's everything from, starting to think about education, to applying for the university, figuring out how you're going to finance your education, enrolling, taking classes, graduating, everything in between.

[00:16:46] In terms of the experience for our students. And so what you can do is click into those. Look at what the current state journey map is. You can click in and actually hear audio calls and transcripts that we're pulling from things like chat or our phone calls between our coaches, for example, our enrollment counselors and the student.

[00:17:31] I want to make changes to X. Let me better understand the landscape. where the customer's coming from, here's an example of a future state prototype. And also as we start to make these changes, this does have downstream implications to our chatbots that are connected through the same knowledge systems or the training and the scripting that we need to arm our, our coaches or our advisors on in terms of making this ultimate change.

[00:18:14] Particularly for our current culture, a really powerful way that we've been able to influence pulling this stuff together.

[00:18:41] Come alive. I think we had like 36 journeys under six overarching kind of experiences that I think is a really important piece that many companies still are missing. But has that driven you to be maybe not so product focused or are you thinking about going to more journey alignment as a result of that, of that work that you're doing?

[00:19:28] Amy Shioji: Exactly. And it's a really timely conversation and one that we're going through right now. So yes, I think the focus on this. And we've also learned this, just, I think in going through this and all of us have felt this as part of CX practitioners, when you come in, as far as this is the CX agenda, the CX team agenda, right?

[00:20:12] There are so many components to that. And so that's been a really good way to sort of open the door to having these types of conversations and bringing everybody in and understanding the complexity of an interconnectedness of all of these different groups and touchpoints. So one of the things that we have done more recently on the CX team related to, or even our voice of customer team, We used to have folks that were sort of specifically earmarked for each university or each institution, or even certain types of programs and things like that.

[00:20:59] To the student view. It's exactly the same. I mean, they want the same things. They want to feel the same things. They want the same sense of accomplishment. They need the same types of questions answered how that manifests might look slightly different depending on, on the university or the level of the degree program and things.

[00:21:55] The the, the function or the vertical or the product, which is such an internal view of, of the way that we need to organize

[00:22:12] Like when you think about even your product teams, you have. Product portfolio owners, just like multiple products or multiple journeys. Like those individuals can be journey owners, right? And certainly if there are multiple journeys inside a set of products, they can own those multiple journeys. But once you start thinking that way, it opens up a completely new set of possibilities and excitement.

[00:23:02] You see a lot more around the chief customer officer or chief experience officer, as you mentioned before, how do you see this? I'm a big fan of how you guys have done it, and clearly you, you all are successful, in part because of that, that structure, but where do you kind of see this going?

[00:23:22] Amy Shioji: It's a great question. And I think so first aid, certainly if there's organizations that do want to think about a chief customer officer, a chief experience officer. That's great. I think that's, that's a fabulous signal. That's an important role within the organization, but I still think you then need to have some way to align the C-suite because now you've got the CMO, the COO, the C2 CTO, now the CCO or CXO, and that's yet another agenda, sort of the customer agenda that needs to be reconciled as part of that.

[00:24:26] Is really powerful. And I think a lot of what I've described in terms of mechanisms, that have worked or how we've thought about those three levels of, of strategy and CX. A lot of that does sound like traditional corporate strategy. Your listeners might say, well, that strategy and I'm not in strategy and you're white, but I think at CX practitioners, we all know that one of the biggest hurdles to CX enablement is really goal or priority or resource misalignment.

[00:25:17] But I would say that what has been really nice and what. Now really started to understand and appreciate in terms of our own current structure. Is that not only does, having the representation as the CXO, have some, some great impact in terms of how we talk about and focus on CX, but I've also been able to marry that with saying now here's the CX agenda and broadly for the organization, the customer agenda.

[00:25:54] Bill Staikos: Very cool.

[00:25:59] Bill Staikos: So I think that there are, just kind of, given my seat these days, I get to see a lot of different models, which I'm really grateful for.

[00:26:39] And that is a very, very different model than even just say three years ago. Right? I mean, I think when Forrester first came out with their journey Atlas approach, I don't think that they maybe even thought about how this could be the evolution of just organizational structure at some point. And that's what it feels like it's starting to kind of turn into, which is really wonderful to see.

[00:27:20] They're focused on CX metrics and not business metrics and tying the two things. Now you can have a CX strategy and ladder that up, maybe to your corporate strategy. You don't need to necessarily bring the two teams together. Although the value is clear to do that. But still so many are focused on those customer metrics.

[00:28:00] And then, for the, let's say the bottom. 20% that aren't even there as much, survey driven, 8% of our customers are responding and, we're dry making some change based, based on the feedback or not, but still really just toe in the water. And you think like at this sort of stage in the game where there's so much out there, just information to be able to access that.

[00:28:47] I'm just trying to really see a separation in those companies. But even in that CXO role, I think the companies that do get it and are doing it well are saying, Hey. Thinking about McDonald's or Walmart, like we're going to embed marketing agile transformation brand contact center, like those, everything kind of, post-sale now rolling up into that CXO or CCO role.

[00:29:41] Amy Shioji: Absolutely. Well said.

[00:29:56] Amy Shioji: Yeah. So I guess where do I go for inspiration?

[00:30:19] So we've talked about this. I have two youngsters under the age of five and they ask so many questions and while it's really maddening in the moment, like my daughter will ask me things like, well, why is a banana not pink? And you're like, I don't know how to answer that. There's no good answer that will satisfy you.

[00:31:02] In terms of. Thought leadership and inspiration. I mean, I think I'm really fortunate. So I sit on the board of the customer experience professionals association, and there are so many just amazing practitioners, CX evangelists, people that I have come across working for that, through that organization that have been really phenomenal.

[00:31:44] And I think part of what's been really helpful for me is grounding myself and say, The CX discipline, the CX practice, I think we're starting to really formalize and standardize a lot of, of what those disciplines and mechanisms and tools need to be. But it is very interesting to see how that shows up culturally, within different types of industries, but also in different countries.

[00:32:38] The CX practice and the discipline on a global scale, which is something that is very much still evolving, as you say.

[00:33:03] Amy Shioji: Like Australia, New Zealand, for example, super advanced in CX, just as they are typical business management in general. So having that kind of representation is just really interesting in terms of where they're taking it, how they are structured, how they think about CX, what that even means. Yeah. Is really interesting.

[00:33:43] So I'm turning the questions around on them now. So it's a, it's a fun age where I get really interesting responses. We do that before bedtime and, it's a fun way to kind of end the day, get their creative juices going. And th the next day I'll typically. A question of, can I actually go make that, do you think I can go build that?

[00:34:18] Continue to drive growth for the company. So, thanks again. Thanks for the gift of.

[00:34:23] Bill Staikos: All right, everybody. What a great show we're out. That's it. I'll see you all next week. Talk to you sooner for

[00:34:37] 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.