Highlights from Tuesday's Keynote: A New Era of CX: The Great Experience Convergence

Service is changing at a frantic, dizzying pace. It can be hard to keep up. Not only that, but it's keeping a lot of us up at night, as we collectively wonder at 3:17 a.m., "How are we going to lead our team through all these changes?"

During Tuesday's panel discussion at HDI's Service & Support World, Nate Brown of CX Accelerator, Lee Kemp of PCNA, Phil Verghis of The Verghis Group and Mary Cook, MBA of Slalom shared some leadership advice on how to navigate these (insert whatever adjective you'd like) times. And if all else fails, there's always melatonin.

Rethink your job title

"Whatever your job title is, regardless of the level, your job is to deliver growth for the company," Kemp says. "How do you deliver value today, tomorrow, or next week? You've got to get into that mindset."

Side note: Kemp spends 70% of his time doing one-on-ones with staff. "Invest your time in developing your future leaders. You need to free yourself from the burden of trying to fix everything."

Don't be afraid to push back

"We need AI! We need AI! WE NEED AI!"

Cook says she hears this all the time from enterprise clients. But she makes it clear they need to do two things first:

1. Clean the data
2. The Knowledge Base has to be up-to-date

"And when it comes to implementing any kind of AI tool or software, governance has to take the lead," Cook says. "You’ve got to put down the tracks before you send the train out. AI needs guardrails. You need to have the courage to tell someone, 'I don't think this is the right approach and here's why...'"

Remember the customer

"Everyone of you has two jobs," Verghis says. "The first job is what you're paid for. The second job is that awful job of doing all the workarounds to make up for the fact that you don't have the right things in your first job."

You know what he's talking about: the overhead, the escalations, the handoffs that happen because systems don't talk to each other and teams don't share a common view of the customer.

"When your work moves across streams, across another group, you silently hurt the customer," Verghis says. "Helping the customer becomes difficult because you don't have a common view of who they are."

The goal of good leadership, he says, is to eliminate that second job. This helps make it simple, even joyful, for your team to do the right thing for the customer the first time around.