Cyndi Lyon is the VP of Customer Experience and Strategy at Otava. She’s a Certified Customer Experience Professional and earned her Master of Science in Customer Experience Management from Michigan State University. In this episode, she broke down some of the key barriers that get in the way of building a successful customer experience management practice and offered some actionable ways to overcome them.
In this episode Cyndi answered these questions and more:
- Do You Have a Clear Vision and Plan for Your Organization? Cyndi underscores the importance of having a clear roadmap for your organization’s future. It’s not just about the big picture—breaking it down into manageable, actionable steps that employees and stakeholders can understand and support is crucial for long-term success.
- Are You Iterating and Celebrating Small Wins? Cyndi believes that even the best plans will fall short without iteration. Starting small and making adjustments along the way allows for steady progress. By breaking long-term strategies into smaller, achievable milestones, you not only keep teams engaged but also create momentum by celebrating each victory.
- Is Your Approach Employee- and Data-Centric? Cyndi highlights the power of linking CX metrics to business data and effectively communicating these insights to stakeholders. She emphasizes the importance of understanding who owns the data and engaging champions within the organization to propel the CX strategy forward.
Meet Cyndi!
CYNDI LYON, CCXP
With nearly 30 years of industry experience, Cyndi Lyon is a trailblazer in the realm of customer experience (CX). As the Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy at OTAVA, she is leading a transformative shift towards a customer-centric model, ensuring that the customer is always at the heart of every strategy through relentless focus on continuous improvement and operational excellence.
Cyndi’s dedication to CX is unparalleled. Recently, she earned her Master’s in Customer Experience Management from Michigan State University, marking her as a pioneer in this evolving field. Her expertise spans creating exceptional customer experiences, operationalizing CX strategies, drive continuous improvement and fostering a customer-centric culture that permeates every aspect of business operations. For Cyndi, the cornerstone of every successful business is a deep understanding and genuine appreciation of the customer.
Cyndi’s career spans product management, technology operations, professional services, marketing, and more. This breadth of experience fuels her passion for delivering top-notch customer experiences. Her drive for enriching product and service delivery is realized through innovation, collaboration, process improvement, and organizational development.
Since joining OTAVA in 2018, Cyndi has built a legacy of success, leading the company’s product, marketing, and business strategy, and heading the operations team to streamline processes and systems. Her ability to build and inspire teams, coupled with her strategic foresight, has been instrumental in OTAVA’s growth and customer satisfaction.
Outside of her professional life, Cyndi is a proud wife and mother of two teenage daughters. She holds the prestigious CCXP certification and enjoys regularly participating in half marathons and spending quality time with her family in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Mark Slatin:
Well, I am so excited to have on my show today, Cyndi Lyon. Cyndi is a friend. Cyndi is a colleague. Cyndi is a CX expert. And what I’m so excited about today is she’s going to walk us through how she found success in leading a CX initiative. I don’t like to call them programs. They’re disciplines, they’re practices, but programs have a beginning and an end. CX is something that’s ongoing. So without further ado, let me welcome you to the show. Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast, Cyndi.
Cyndi Lyon: Hi, Mark. So thankful to be here. It’s nice to be on your podcast and talk about my journey.
Mark Slatin: Excellent. So tell us a little bit about where you work now, what you’re doing, and what that role entails.
Cyndi Lyon: For sure. So currently I serve as the VP of customer experience and strategy. It’s a relatively new role at our organization that was aligned to our focus and our plan to transform our business into a customer centric organization. And so right now I’m hyper focused on embedding customer centricity into all aspects of our organization. Um, right now we’re focused in the year one of our five year plan, working on refining our customer success management program, how we engage with our customers, but also implementing a comprehensive VOC program and how we listen to our customers. And most importantly, pulling all that data together and sharing that with our teams and acting on that and responding to that feedback with our customers to build our program.
Mark Slatin: Okay. And, um, and so you, what a great time if you’re someone who’s in the earlier stages of your journey and you’re wondering how someone goes about building the foundation, thinking ahead about the vision for the program and laying out the building blocks for the program. Um, because Cyndi is an, an excellent resource and we’re going to talk a little bit more about that today. If you don’t mind, share a little bit about, I know you’ve had some credentials in the world of CX. Would you mind sharing some of those with us?
Cyndi Lyon: Oh, for sure. Recently graduated with my master’s in customer experience management from the great Michigan State University, of which you were a professor there. Very excited to be a part of that. I happen to be part of the first cohort. And that was part of what was so intriguing to me is finally putting a framework and methodology and discipline behind what our professionals do every day in this field. And I’m also recently certified, got my certification from the CXPA as well, along with my master’s degree. So I feel like I’m ready to conquer the world now.
Mark Slatin: And excellent. And I heard a rumor that you have a trusted guide digital badge.
Cyndi Lyon: I absolutely do. Um, and I have been applying that with all of my academic learning and practical experience. I’m really pivoting our, my approach, um, as a CX professional and really going from that hero to guide. Um, it’s been interesting how I’ve been able to operationalize that in my day to day and taking that different perspective.
Mark Slatin: Okay. And for our audience, let me just, uh, just step back just a bit on Otava. So could you share with us like the value proposition, what makes it unique?
Cyndi Lyon: For sure. At Otavo, we provide secure, compliant, multi-cloud solutions for B2B, basically. And really what that relates to is all things data, data storage, data protection, data backup, data recovery, all within a secure framework to really help our businesses do what they do best. You know, go be a doctor, go be a lawyer, go be a retail business, and we protect your most valuable asset, which is your data.
Mark Slatin: Excellent. OK. All right. So one of, I think, a common And you tell me if I’m right on this thinking, a common misconception that people outside, particularly outside of CX, who are thinking about how do I make the customer experience better, and just thinking it’s like one thing, one, maybe one kind of magic bullet, or isn’t it simple? Don’t we just treat customers well? I heard someone recently say, just be nice to customers. And so the topic that we’re going to be talking about today is leading a successful CX practice one step at a time. And that implies that there’s some, I guess, some incrementalism, there’s some strategy around it. Share with us what your thoughts are on that.
Cyndi Lyon: Yeah, so I have to chuckle because you’re right. I hear that all the time. You know, isn’t this easy? Just be nice. It’s not that hard, right? Just pay attention to your customers. But there really isn’t a magic bullet or a single thing that you do. So that misconception that it’s just one thing where it’s a project, oftentimes, CX is seen as an initiative, or maybe it’s a business unit. Customer experience and your customer centricity permeates your entire organization. It needs to become part of your DNA. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can do that. The first thing that I have always looked at is really having a clear plan and a vision of where you want to go. You kind of got to start with the big picture and then pull it back into incremental chunks that folks can rally behind. Like, how does this relate to me as an employee or me as a business? It’s important to tie the financial for your business leaders and your decision makers, but also the employees. They have to understand what they’re executing on and why. And while we think it’s easy to be nice to your customers, it can be challenging. If you’re in a support role and you’re dealing with 100 tickets or 100 calls a day, you get fatigued, right? And you can lose sight of the mission where you’re going. And the challenge is really to break those down into incremental steps so folks can see the wins and see the impact of their effort, which ultimately leads to greater customer satisfaction and positive feedback. And of course, what we all love and experience is loyalty and referrals, right? That’s what we’re looking for from our customers.
Mark Slatin: Yeah, so why should I care about really doing more than just, I don’t know, hand-waving at this or saying, we could just do it with the resources we have. Why might we want to dedicate a person like you to this effort and not just have everybody just do their part?
Cyndi Lyon: That’s a great question. Because customer experience isn’t just a buzzword. And I know this is going to sound a bit cliche when I say it, but it really is a differentiator in today’s competitive marketplace. Senior leadership across an organization really needs to invest in it because customers’ expectations are changing continually. Every day it’s something different. And they compare you, like we’re in B2B, but they compare us against B2C. They want their delivery experience in our environment when they buy a product or service for us to emulate the experience they get on Amazon. So you have to be able to translate what’s going on in the ecosystem of your customers, what’s going on with their emotions, and how do you apply that across your organization to your processes and your procedures. A well-implemented strategy doesn’t just enhance customer satisfaction. It drives revenue, retention, and long-term customer loyalty, which are the metrics that your business and your shareholders want to see. It increases shareholder value. I think recently, a recent guest of yours for the Walker study just came out and again showed that companies that invest in customer experience provide a greater shareholder value, which is really what we’re driving at. Oftentimes, CX leaders, I think, make the mistake of focusing on the metrics. Well, our NPS score is X or our CSAT is Y. Well, great. That’s nice. You’ve moved it up or down. But what does that mean to me? What does that mean to the business? It’s really about tying it to those metrics that matter. It’s not a silver bullet. You can’t just focus on CX as the silver bullet to fix all things. Some businesses that focus on CX aren’t successful. And they’re not successful because they fail to tie it to the business metrics on how does it improve the bottom and the top line.
Mark Slatin: So what I heard you say, I want to pull out a couple of gems, uh, here, because when guests come on, they can. Roll through it pretty quick. And I want to make sure that listeners don’t miss. Um, one of the things I heard you said was really good, good CX when, when executed well delivers on business performance metrics, like continued repeat business, loyalty of customers, obviously revenue growth, uh, if it’s done well, lower cost to operate. right business. And, and so that that that that’s a huge deal for companies. One of the one of the questions I have as a follow up, Cyndi is, what makes it so difficult to, to actually deliver those experiences? Like what gets in the way? What are some of the barriers? Isn’t it just simple? Everybody in the, everybody on the boat wants to deliver what’s best for the customer. Like, why is it such an issue?
Cyndi Lyon: Oh, there’s multiple reasons. Um, there’s only three that I’m going to cover on primarily that I see, particularly as I’m building this new program. Um, the first is resistance to change and kind of a lack of understanding what is experience because people automatically default to, well, just be nice, just serve them well. Well, who are you serving well and what are you serving them well with? And your idea of good service could be very different than my idea of good service right so there’s getting standardization and process and getting folks behind why a consistent delivery is important so it’s that change management and consistent delivery of what the program is. I would also say another barrier that I’ve encountered is, again, lack of connecting the CX experience and metrics to the business. So a barrier to that can be the lack of accessibility to data. As a CX professional, it’s really important you understand where the data lives within your organization, who owns the data, so how do you get access to it, and how do you align the business data to the CX metrics. If it sits in an island by itself, it can’t be successful. It just becomes a vanity metric of, hey, we have these scores. Let’s rally behind a number. But it’s not improving the business. And what I’ve learned, a way to overcome that is to get close with the folks that own the data, your CFO, your director of finance, your development team, folks that have data, you want to marry it to that to overcome some of those barriers and show the wins.
Mark Slatin: So there’s another gem for anyone that you just shared, which I think is really critical is get closer to the people who have the data. And you shared a couple of examples, um, when you said finance, but then you’ve got like people like it, who have operational customer data, they’re different sets of data. Um, but CX leaders need to tell the story of what’s going on for the customer and how that relates to what’s going on for the company. Right. So, so you’re talking about operational metrics, you’re talking about financial metrics. And of course, you’re talking about customer metrics that have to do with customer sentiment, which we’ve, we can easily fall into the trap of getting in love with, uh, improvements in, in customer sentiment metrics like NPS and customer satisfaction. But, um, we, it often comes just across as jargon to your bit, your C suite leaders, And, you know, I like to, I like to use the admonition, don’t make them have to connect the dots between customer metrics and what they’re used to looking at. What are your thoughts about that?
Cyndi Lyon: I think that’s the role of your CX professional at an organization. So you have your vision and your strategy of where you want to go. And then there is that art. of being able to tell the story. And you do that through data. And you want to speak to the decision makers in your organization in their love language. When I speak to the CFO at our organization, it’s very different than when I speak to my CEO or when I speak to my head of product or my head of IT. They need a different slice of the data. It’s the same story and the same vision, but you’re connecting it to a way that resonates with them so that they can then rally behind it and become champions. And that’s what I’ve really learned about a successful program. You have to cultivate champions throughout the organization. And that’s not a small task. You know, when we talk about, you know, the biggest misconception is that it’s a silver bullet. It’s just customer experience. Be nice. It’s one thing. It’s not. It’s many things and many layers of things. It’s data, it’s relationships, it’s storytelling. And then it’s empowerment. How do you empower your team members and the organization to be successful at delivering the best experience they can?
Mark Slatin: Yeah, so there’s two things. Another gem there. Um, one of which I want to come back to and dig into a little bit because you threw out something that actually has a lot more meaning and I would love to take a little bit of a diversion and bring that analogy. into the forefront for the listener, which is love language. There’s a whole story behind that. So I’d love to dig into that. If you’re familiar with it, then hopefully you’ll enjoy hearing it again. But if you’re new to it, you’ll see why there’s an analogy. And what you’re talking about there is really this whole idea of empathy, right? Putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. We do it, it’s kind of, well, we should be doing it from a customer standpoint is what the whole idea of research and listening is to understand what’s going on for the customer, how they feel about their experience, what they would like to see, what they’re not seeing. But also internally, in your point about change, and you said change is hard, and there was a recent, maybe in the last couple of years, McKinsey study that talked about 70% of change management initiatives fail to reach their goals. They fail to reach their goals. So to your point, change is difficult. we didn’t even get into the whole personalities and politics and silos, right, which are part of that, part of that reason. And you can elaborate on that. But I do want to I do want to talk about this love language thing, because there was a book by Gary Chapman, I think it was. And he talks about, And this has to do with empathy. And it does connect to your story about making building champions around your journey and trying to bring people on board. And you have to get yourself out of your own seat. So can you and I’m happy to fill in the blanks, because I love this analogy. But can you share a little bit more about the love languages with the audience?
Cyndi Lyon: Yeah, so I say love language a little bit tongue-in-cheek because I’m a big proponent of that in my personal life, really understanding what motivates folks and how do you connect with them. I do it corporately in a different way, kind of jokingly, folks tell me that my love language is PowerPoint. My CFO’s love language is Excel. So for me, it’s not only about understanding what they need to hear, but how they need to have it delivered. My operations manager, he has to have everything in Miro. Whatever I do has to be in a process and flowchart. So it’s really about taking their personality and understanding what drives them. Maybe it’s small wins and accolades of, you’re doing this well, or here’s the win that we’re seeing, or it’s black and white, here is something that we’ve done. But it’s kind of connecting the person to the medium to, again, get that championship. And really what it does, I found, is when you can connect to folks at that human level and that emotional level, you create an ally. And going back to your course and the Trusted Guide, It’s about getting on the same side and having the same villain opposite, right? Like how do you work together to fight that villain or that that? Project or that milestone that you need to go over as an organization If you’re aligned at that emotional level and you’ve connected you have that support to do that Excellent Well, I i’m gonna i’m gonna um explore this with you
Mark Slatin: because it relates. I’m just going to spend a minute. I normally don’t do this, but I’m going to divert into this because it’s so interesting. For couples, this book I think originally was written for couples. So the idea of love languages, I guess they did a study and they broke down five ways that we like to receive love. And I’m not going to get, I don’t know if there’s an order to them or not. And hopefully I can get them all, all five of them. But there are this physical touch, there’s words of affirmation, There’s quality time. There’s gifts. And what’s the fifth one? All right, it’ll come to me. So part of the idea, you ask yourself, and there’s descriptors for each one of these, and you ask yourself, what’s my love language? Some people love to get roses, or a card, or a gift wrapped, and oh my gosh, and that’s their love language. And for other people, it’s like, I just want to spend time with my spouse, or my loved one, or whatever. The point, part of the point of it is, is that the trap for us is to, we tend to want to give love in the way we receive, like to receive love. And the idea there in the book is to understand your partners or your loved ones or your child, whoever it is, what’s their love language and deliver the love in the fashion that they like to receive it, right?
Cyndi Lyon: And it works. I mean, it works corporately as well. Outside of your, your close intimate relationship, you can apply that in the business world. And I find that’s where you get the most success is just connecting with folks. And we did use that quite a bit.
Mark Slatin: Um, but one of the things you said was another gem, which is, uh, it’s been six years you’ve been there. Um, so it’s been kind of a slow journey. Uh, and I would say everything’s relative, but the message there is that if you think if you’re, Leadership and you’re hiring a CX leader and you think they’re gonna turn the world around in one year Think again It take it takes a while to build that out, right?
Cyndi Lyon: It does take a while. It does take a while and One of the things I want to share in that in my own personal journey. I do a lot of just professional growth and development It’s really important to me to stay Not only current in my field but also in my leadership path and I spend a lot of time looking at the writings of John Maxwell And I really have to relate building a CX program to two of his laws, the law of connection and the law of buy-in. right? You’ve got to connect with the people, right? And you’ve got to get buy-in. And I think John Maxwell says, you have to touch a heart before you ask for a hand. And to me, when I think of CX and implementing a strategy, that quote kind of sums it up. Like, you’ve got to connect first. They have to believe in you, the person, the leader, before they’re going to buy into your plan. People don’t follow a plan, they follow a leader. And in order to get that buy-in, you have to communicate well, be very clear, set your objectives, but also understand it’s that human component that goes into really the success. You need that support from the organization. One person cannot do it in an organization. You can call them whatever you want to call them, but if they don’t have the support and the buy-in and that clear vision, they’re not going to be successful in a year, two years or 10 years.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. Great, great point. I love that. Um, you have to touch a heart before you can ask for a hand, ask for a hand, another gem. Um, so there are several strategies that I heard you lay out here. I want to make sure we didn’t miss any, but one, one I heard is you need to get clear on what your vision is, uh, as an organization to, I heard is you need to listen to customers and employees before you start executing. On them and um in three, um, and you probably showed more was that we need to speak in the language of the c-suite And not in cx speak Because they’re not going to know what that means and and quite frankly, they’re not going to care correct Yeah, what else are there any other strategies that um that that I missed or that you want to share?
Cyndi Lyon: I would love to keep it to three but um, I would say I would add in there. You have to start small and iterate The best laid plans will fail if you don’t iterate you start you create a starting place and you iterate and you start small so you break it down into chunks that are relevant to the teams and you share your victories and your wins. So part of the nice thing about what we did with our on the road again campaign is we use that to inform our five year strategy. But then we also dug a little deeper and looked at the themes across our customers and our employees, so we could take the five-year plan and break it down into one-year chunks. We were able to prioritize customer success in VOC was the most important for year one. Year two, we’re going to be moving into onboarding and automation. We laid out based on customer feedback and employee feedback, how we were going to take our vision and break it down, and we’ve been able to iterate. While we started with customer success in VOC, We’ve gotten feedback. So now we’re going to be pivoting just a little bit. What we’ve heard, we started with a framework of a plan for customer success. We’ve gotten feedback. We’re going to do a little pivot, right? So a little quarter turns gets you to where you want to be versus, oh, we’re going to throw it all out. We’re going to start over. No, we’re going to make a small iteration and continue to improve. Continuous improvement is a big part of a successful strategy for CX.
Mark Slatin: Excellent. And so there were, There are four things at least that you shared now that are great tips. What was I going to dive into? I wanted to ask you specifically if you could share, earlier you mentioned the villain in I know we covered that in the Trusted Guide Roadmap in the second section when we talked about becoming a guide, and we talked about breaking down, deconstructing a story. So is there an example that you can share? Because you talked about earlier about getting on the same side of the table by having a common villain. What was maybe a villain that you could identify that you may share with your leadership?
Cyndi Lyon: So this is probably a little bit on the fringe case, but we recently completed our NPS survey. And so we had metrics, right? And there we go, we got metrics, again, you know, who your promoters and your detractors are in your passives? Why do we care? Right? What does that mean? So it was, there was a process of taking that data and aligning it to, to revenue, like who’s in which of those buckets? What does it mean? How do we focus? And what are they saying? And using that, so identifying from our customers, there’s a pain point in one of our product features, right? So being able to take that to the product team and saying, hey, here’s where we’re aligned. We want the scores to go up. We want improvement. We see our customers are here. How do we band together to improve this feature, right? For this subset of customers, because we could see potentially an improvement in revenue and in loyalty, if we could correct this problem. So it’s like taking all those pieces and getting on the same side of the customer issues versus saying to the product team, Hey, the customers are mad. You go fix this. No, the customers are dissatisfied, but let’s understand how it impacts the business. And should we focus our effort here?
Mark Slatin: Yeah. And that’s great example. And the villain, you know, villain has three levels of problems, internal, external, and philosophical. And the physical philosophical one, which sounds like what you, you really nailed is, the way things ought to be or should be. And the customer, you know, we should be able to, you know, not have them go through this friction. Right. And what a great way to make the business case. And as you said, connect with them emotionally, you know, touch the heart. So let’s say you have to touch the heart before you can ask for a hand.
Cyndi Lyon: Yep.
Mark Slatin: There you go. All right. That’s that’s my phrase for the day. Cyndi, I’d love to continue talking all day long to you. You’ve done an amazing job at Otava and can’t wait to hear how that progresses. Would you share with us what, the question I like to ask all my guests, what advice would you give to your 20 year old self?
Cyndi Lyon: There’s so much. There’s so much. For this purpose, for me, the advice I’d give my 20-year-old self is to be deliberate and intentional about the people you connect with, because every relationship matters. Who you surround yourself with, what you learn from them, and ultimately how you serve them. changes and can influence your continual growth and development, right? So you can have the best laid strategies, but again, it’s those people and the people that are around you that help you fulfill your dreams and allows you to succeed. It’s by leveraging others.
