Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety-five of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Nate Brown to talk about Fearless CX. Today, welcome back, Nate Brown. Nate, it’s lovely to have you back on the show after what I think we established for several years. Welcome back.
Nate Brown: 0:41
Thank you so much, Charlotte. It has been several years and it’s wonderful to see you.
Charlotte Ward: 0:45
Thank you so much for coming back. For the benefit of uh new listeners, would you please introduce yourself?
Nate Brown: 0:52
Sure. I am a student of this work of customer experience. I started in the world of selling postage meters in Jacksonville, Florida. Wasn’t great at that, but uh moved into a customer service role and just jumped in with both feet. I just loved serving customers all day, 100 tickets a day kind of scenario. Eventually took ownership of that team, Charlotte, and started thinking about customer experience. How can we do more than just taking tickets in this reactive mode? And that really became the thing that I would study and learn about for the next 15 years. And now, as an analyst in the space of customer experience, working with the amazing organization of Betrick Sherpa, I get to do exactly that. I get to help elevate this conversation around customer experience with solution providers and practitioners and anybody that will listen, uh, ultimately just trying to serve our customers better.
Charlotte Ward: 1:48
That, oh man, you you always infuse so effusively about customer experience. Whenever I speak to you, Nate, it’s just a pleasure just to hear you get kind of energized around it. So thanks for watching. Oh, thanks. uh yeah. um yeah, wow. So beginning selling postage meter. I don’t even know what a postage meter is. I know what those two words are, but I can’t put them together into a thing. What is a postage meter?
Nate Brown: 2:14
It’s this funky little device where if if you had a small office building and you needed to stamp your envelopes quickly, you would use this postage meter to weigh the envelope, know how much postage needed to be on it, and you would send it out the door. It would stamp it for you.
Charlotte Ward: 2:30
Wow. Wow. Times have changed. I doubt there’s much call for those anymore.
Nate Brown: 2:36
There wasn’t even at the time, Charlie. So it was a very hard sell. And uh I I was out there, I had no AC in my car. I was driving around 120-degree Jacksonville, Florida with a suit on. It was a wild time.
Charlotte Ward: 2:53
Wow, wow. I mean, what a way to get you in front of a lot of people, though, right? Potential customers in in those circumstances. But wow, wow. uh super cool. I have never met anyone who sold postage meters, and I didn’t even know that about you before. So uh thank you for that. um so um driving around, I don’t know anything about Florida except alligators, right? And uh a few other key facts that we won’t dwell on.
Nate Brown: 3:21
But um Well, there’s Disneyland and Swamp.
Charlotte Ward: 3:24
Disneyland and swamps, Disneyland, swamps, and alligators um of all types. um uh what strikes me about Florida is that you have to be um uh fairly brave to uh you know try and e particularly eke out existence selling postage meters down there, I would imagine. um fearless, one might say.
Nate Brown: 3:49
Clever transition, Charlotte.
Charlotte Ward: 3:51
You see what I did there.
Nate Brown: 3:54
I love it.
Charlotte Ward: 3:55
um so uh we are talking about not being fearless today in the swamps of Florinda trying to convince an alligator to buy a postage meter, but we are talking about fearless CX was the topic you proposed today, wasn’t it? Which um we we chatted about briefly a couple of days ago, and uh I just I I found this the way you broke it down for me really fascinating. But but let’s start with the headline. What is fearless CX in your mind?
Nate Brown: 4:22
Yes, it is a counter-cultural method in which we can operate and and do customer experience. With the of course, the definition of CX isn’t changing. I mean, that’s still the thoughts and perceptions that people have towards these great organizations that we get to serve. So if we’re trying to enhance people’s thoughts and perceptions, we’ve got to do a really good, consistent job of designing these experiences. And right now in the world, Charlotte, there is a phenomenon called insular thinking that is taking place. Where, uh, and this is coming from Edelman Trust Barometer and other sources, but ultimately people are sucking down and sucking into their comfort zones and only wanting to deal with situations and people and spaces where they’re very comfortable and people think and act just like them. In other words, where they don’t need to be fearless, where they don’t need to step out in faith, where they don’t need to be challenged, where they don’t need to be clashing with other perspectives and other individuals to forge something new and innovative. So it’s uh it’s a tough time right now to be a business leader of any kind.
Charlotte Ward: 5:31
Yeah.
Nate Brown: 5:31
But it’s a very hard time, Charlotte, to be a customer experience leader when we know that customer experience is an outcome that the business produces all together. It it requires entire enterprise collaboration to produce that outcome that the customer is going to be able to trust and know, hey, when I go to this organization and partner with them, they’re gonna honor my time and my resources, and they’re gonna give me the experience that I need and that I expect.
Charlotte Ward: 6:03
And that actually with so many organizations, you say it’s an outcome, but it’s not an outcome that is designed or even thought about necessarily in many, many organizations, right? Because the culture, to use your word there, is we’re in the business of selling, or we’re in the business of shipping product, or we’re in the business of, you know, um, you know, mm helping people eat food or whatever the thing is without designing the actual experience for those customers. You used um a really like hefty phrase there. You said counterculture. Yes. um and that’s the so that’s the culture that you’re talking about, this being the uh the the counter to is that culture of insular thinking, that culture of sameness and safeness.
Nate Brown: 6:48
Yeah, you know, right now Edelman is projecting that 70% of our global population is is kind of caught up in in a pretty high degree of of insular thinking. It’s really hard to lead a team, to, to collaborate effectively across an enterprise when that’s the state of the people that we’re dealing with. And the other element of the current state of affairs, and I’m not blaming this on a cultural output, but there’s just a lot of fear right now, Charlotte. And it makes sense that there would be. I mean, we have historical layoffs going on. We we have uh confidence in leadership is at an all-time low. And and of course, we’ve got this looming AI conversation that’s going on where nobody really knows how exactly that’s going to impact the economy and the work that we do. So these unknown variables produce a lot of anxiety.
Charlotte Ward: 7:46
Yeah, yeah. Someone, someone on LinkedIn who I hope is going to come on the podcast soon, call the AI factor a tsunami. Wow. Which I thought uh was very apt and uh really speaks to the levels of fear around that, around as well as everything else. I think it does feel if you if you aren’t prepared to link arms, it can feel overwhelming, right? So um, yeah, all of the change, all of the upheaval, all of the uncertainty. I’m not surprised people feel like they do. um and I I I suppose um one thing that I hadn’t really made the connection on uh until you talked about the team level there is this insular thinking, this comfort zone zone, the the safe space um where people behave the same, act the same, think the same really does happen at the team level as well, doesn’t it? And particularly when people are either unfortunately in an organization that doesn’t make them feel safe, or just in an industry that doesn’t feel safe right now because of that tsunami of AI. Like I mean, we hear it all the time about support. You know, everyone who’s in support right now feels like their role is under threat. And and that’s very natural and legitimate, I think, for some types, some some uh industries, etc. Some slices are definitely going to have to reshape or reform around AI. But so I think some of that fear is legitimate, but but inside the team, that inward looking um uh behavior and mindset that you’re talking about really does drive the silos and and prevent that connectivity across an enterprise, doesn’t it? Particularly at scale.
Nate Brown: 9:35
It sure does. And if we think about one of my favorite resources that is out there is called collective genius. And Linda R. Hill talks about managing a very real tension within a group of activated people. We don’t want people to feel unsafe. We want them to feel activated. We don’t want them to be comfortable in the sense of they’re caught up in inertia, where all they’re doing is just going through motions that don’t produce anything special or exceptional or or the output that we’re talking about with great customer experiences. What we want are activated individuals who are in a healthy tension with one another and ultimately elevating what everybody together is capable of.
Charlotte Ward: 10:19
Yes, yes, yes. It really is, and healthy tension that also feels safe. Like that is ultimately the definition of healthy, right? Is that you feel safe to have those discussions in the open to help each other, you know, reach a point of common understanding without uh potentially from different sides of the room, I think is really, really important. um and and really what you’re driving at uh in my mind. um, in um in your mind, is what is fearless CX? Is it a mindset? Is it a framework? Is it a process? Is it all of the above, none of the above?
Nate Brown: 10:57
Yeah, is as I think about fearless CX, Charlotte, it it’s really it’s it’s a way of doing customer experience in in a bold, courageous way that’s inviting people in and resulting in this in this good, solid, consistent outcome. So it starts with you as as a leader demonstrating these fearless principles, then it then it goes to the team, and it’s exactly what we were just discussing, Charlotte, in terms of that that collective genius concept. And then finally, it it’s how are we guiding our customers and extending that concept of fearless CX to our customers? And to me, that really starts with how you set up your voice of customer initiative.
Charlotte Ward: 11:42
So if uh if somebody is picking up that you know dusty old VOC binder that they found at the back of the uh cupboard in the office from an exercise that was done, you know, six years ago pre-COVID, or for a leader who’s sitting in the support team or you know, in a newly formed CX function, or even in product or in other parts of the business where they’re thinking primarily about customers, not about sales or finance or any of that, because that’ll follow. We have faith that if we serve our customers, those things will follow. um for individuals in those scenarios, either with the you know, the tired old VOC program, unloved, untouched, or newcomers building something new, how do you how do you begin to even approach this with a fearless CX mindset? How do you pick up a program like that and get going with that mindset?
Nate Brown: 12:37
That that’s a big conversation, Charlotte. And I’d love to have the fullness of moving a whole nother episode.
Charlotte Ward: 12:43
Let’s do a whole other episode. Give us the headline.
Nate Brown: 12:48
But what one of the things that I would tell that person is tap into what I’ve been calling wild sentiment. So wild sentiment is is how customers think and feel about you just out in the world. And organizations are still too dependent on structured channels. And and structured channels have gotten better, Charlotte. I mean, we’re not as dependent on surveys anymore, and there’s there’s a time and a place for a good survey.
Charlotte Ward: 13:16
uh-huh.
Nate Brown: 13:16
But we we have these elevated structured channels of our own community function that we’ve built, of a customer advisory board. You know, things like that are really effective. But even still, on average, like 80% of brand perception information, customer feedback that’s available is out in the wild, places like Reddit and YouTube and third-party communities and social reviews and conversations that are going on in an unstructured way. So, how, Charlotte, do we listen well to all these wild sentiment conversations so that we can really understand and know how our customers think and feel about it?
Charlotte Ward: 13:59
So, actually getting out there and maybe even uh um to your point, like uh not making a struct a structured approach, but just putting the legwork in, doing the equivalent of, you know, walking around the shop floor or whatever, the, you know, and just listening, listening, going right, going through forums, going through all of those freeform. Yeah.
Nate Brown: 14:21
But the courageous part is walking on somebody else’s shop floor. It’s no longer your shop floor.
Charlotte Ward: 14:27
Yeah, yeah.
Nate Brown: 14:28
If you think about Charlotte, I mean, think about how much different it is, the the front door to resolutions. If you think about when you have a problem now, like I’ve got this beautiful 5D Mark IV in front of me. Let’s say I’ve got a problem with it connecting my external flash to the camera, the lens isn’t connecting. Back in the day, I’d be I’d be going to the Canon website or I’d be doing a Canon live chat or or trying to call Canon to fix my problem with that camera. I’m not going to do that anymore. I I’m using an AI-enabled search engine. And what’s that’s giving me, it’s giving me user testimonials of how they’ve solved this problem. It’s giving me this wonderful video that I should watch. It’s giving me a step-by-step guide that it collected from five or six different sources, but it knows this is how I can ultimately solve that problem.
Charlotte Ward: 15:23
Yeah.
Nate Brown: 15:24
So, I mean, as a consumer, as a customer, I’m no longer going directly to the brand in many cases to resolve my problems. And in these same places, out there in the wild, this is where brand perception is being articulated. And we as VOC program managers, we’ve got to be out there capable of bringing that information back in, centralizing it with our structured data and being able to show the organization this is what our customers think and feel about us today. This is our biggest opportunity to improve the experience in a way that’s generally going to generate additional revenue for the business.
Charlotte Ward: 16:06
I’m glad that you said bringing that in alongside our structured data, because I’m a big fan of structured data. And so, so uh, you know, I I couldn’t agree more. Like getting away from the survey, getting away from the traditional channels, getting out there and listening, uh, that’s where you hear the truest sentiment. That’s where you hear the, you know, the uh the unsought uh opinions are the ones you really want to listen to more than anything, um particularly if they’re not in your presence. They’re just much more likely to be truthful, honest opinions. um, but bringing unstruck unstructured, you know, poorly formed um half-thoughts or uh, you know, um perhaps even like apocryphal information and like I the thought of bringing that in-house and trying to massage it into something that I can also work alongside my structured data with, um I wouldn’t even know where to begin, except I feel like the answer is going to be AI. Is the answer AI?
Nate Brown: 17:17
It certainly is a big part of it. I mean, if we look at what customer experience management platforms can do now in terms of harmonizing all of that customer feedback data across the entire journey in all these different formats, it’s amazing what we can do now to bring all that together to get real tags, real themes, real actionable insight, um, you know, sentiment across all of that. You know, the the type of metrics that we can compare from one part of the journey to another. Yeah, these these great customer experience management platforms with AI-enabled capabilities now give us that power. If we think about what we could do, Charlotte, as CX professionals even six, seven years ago, the type of VOC that I’m describing now right now was almost impossible.
Charlotte Ward: 18:08
Yeah, yeah. It would have needed an army. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. um, so having gone out into the wild, wrangled the alligators or wherever we are, um brought home some postage uh meters or something. I’m gonna stop. I’m gonna stop. I’m just trying, just trying to be too clever for my own good. um we brought back, we brought back some insights. We’ve wrangled it, we’ve got some insights. What does what does fearless CX look like on the inside?
Nate Brown: 18:43
So that that in my mind, let’s let’s start with the CX leader themselves. So this is an individual, and and Charlotte, as you and I prepared for this conversation, you use this amazing word a beacon.
Charlotte Ward: 18:56
Yes, yes.
Nate Brown: 18:58
And and right now, you know, an organization, which in my mind is a community of people that are working towards a like-minded purpose, but it’s still a community of people. So you’re you’re trying to activate them, and and in many cases, that community is a little bit in the dark right now.
Charlotte Ward: 19:15
Yeah.
Nate Brown: 19:16
They kind of got their heads in the sand, there, there’s a fear response that’s going on, and and we and there’s not the collective genius concept that’s going on. So it’s how do we as as a as a CX leader come and illuminate that and break this concept of fear in healthy ways where people are able to innovate and collaborate and get excited about the work that they’re doing? Well, there’s two words that come to mind there, and it it’s confidence, uh rather, rather, okay, confidence is a big is is is true, but the the two C words that really matter here are character and conviction. So this idea of proven character, Charlotte, and I just I watch leaders that are effective in the CX role, and they are so good at demonstrating proven character even in times of trial and tribulation. You can trust them to do the right thing, and you can trust them to help you to care about the right things. And and what are those things? Well, they’re they’re unlocking this ability for people to care about one another. You know, a great leader is is elevating peer-to-peer relationships, removing friction, removing barriers, removing fear impediments, and and helping people to align and to unite and and to break out of that insular thinking. uh so I mean this this remarkable individual is is capable of doing uh what Kim Scott would call radical gander. So I care so much about the mission of this organization, and I care so much about you, Charlotte Ward, as a person, that when we bring those two concepts together, we’re gonna do unbelievable things together because we trust one another. We care about each other as people, of course. We have that foundational human likeness that we get to build on, and then we we signed up for the same community. Right, the community workplace that we’re involved in has the same purpose that we both really care about with that anchor of trust and with a good leader who’s fueling that fire, oh my goodness, uh the things that we can achieve.
Charlotte Ward: 21:29
And I think I think this is where I might have used the word beacon the other day was uh you know, you started talking about in the darkness, but when you have a collective of people who are given agency, encouraged to innovate, um you can’t be the one holding the, you know, the the map and saying, These are the exact steps we’ve got to take to get over there. You just have to shine the way and and actually, you know. Have people head in the same direction because otherwise it’s a mess. But the achievement of those great things is when multiples of people head in the same direction. um, and that that was the beacon moment, I think, for me, like sort of to be the person who illuminates the way, makes it obvious.
Nate Brown: 22:21
Yeah, I think about I was at the QATC conference in Nashville, and there was these two young ladies in in the back of the room, and we were doing a session, and they were talking about they were caught up in a a trial and tribulation moment. They were in a moment of fear in their organization, and they had experienced some turnover. There was a lack of purpose that had creeped in, and people were just holding on for dear life. And then this new leader came in and she lit the beacon for them to be safe, to be activated, to be excited, to care about each other, to care about the piss the mission of the organization. This one leader came in and changed everybody’s mindset and gave them permission to move forward together. And they were talking about this wonderful moment in time when this one individual came in and and just and just lit is like a lighthouse. All of a sudden, this lighthouse illuminated all the rocks that had everybody stuck.
Charlotte Ward: 23:26
Yeah.
Nate Brown: 23:27
They could then board the ship and sail forward together.
Charlotte Ward: 23:30
Yeah. Wow, that’s it, that’s a metaphor. Yeah, yeah. um, does this does this leader always have to be, you know, uh a CCXP qualified, you know, chief customer experience officer, kind of a person? Or it can be anyone in the organization, I feel, is like it’s it’s really the answer. It can be your product leader, it can be your lowly support leader, it can be, you know, uh someone from sales or whatever, right? That just has the has the passion, has the vision, has, has that um conviction and character that you talked about.
Nate Brown: 24:07
You’re so right, Charlotte. And I’ve seen it at different levels. uh it is so much easier to be in a position of real influence and and to have the the hierarchical backing of the natural cadence of the organization to ultimately be able to set goals and have budget and and just the instant respect that comes from a title. Does that make things easier? Yes, it does. Does that prevent somebody else from from blazing the same path and earning that influence and bringing people along on the same journey? I have absolutely seen it happen from the middle of the organization, and it influenced people all the way up to the top, and it was a beautiful thing to witness.
Charlotte Ward: 24:53
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I I can believe that. Beautiful thing to witness. What what a uh what statement. I I I think I think that is um it I like I think at every level though, you’re right. uh just to see it happen inside a small team is quite something. And and then that team magnifies it, actually.
Nate Brown: 25:16
Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 25:17
Yeah. Yeah.
Nate Brown: 25:18
You know, there was uh I I remember like I I kind of lost my way, you know, as a customer service leader, and there was a a courageous young woman who um we we started making fun of our own customers. It it just kind of became a part of our culture, you know. It was it was a bunch of generally men who were trying to get on these construction job sites, and they were they were computer illiterate. And and so we we kind of had to form this really bad habit of of making fun of these guys um in their quest to to navigate this adult learning software and be able to get on the job site. And I was perpetuating this negative culture towards uh customers, and I’ll never forget in a team meeting, she spoke up and she goes, This isn’t right. This is who we’re here to serve. It doesn’t matter that they can’t. That’s why we’re here, is because they can’t do it themselves.
Charlotte Ward: 26:11
Yeah.
Nate Brown: 26:12
We we should be helping them and honoring them and talking positively about them. And my, I mean, my mind just broke and I just saw the truth for what it was. I was like, I I can’t believe that I allowed this to happen on my watch.
Charlotte Ward: 26:26
Mm-hmm.
Nate Brown: 26:27
But you know, that there’s moments like that where you have somebody who is fearless, that who’s endowed with that courage that comes from caring. And that that individual, regardless of where they sit in the organization, can can absolutely change the mentality of the leadership.
Charlotte Ward: 26:43
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That that’s I I thank you so much for telling me that little story because I think we’ve all been there. We’ve all been sat in those rooms where, you know, I I’ve seen it at every level in every organization for all three of my decades. And like there’s there’s there are pockets, and thankfully, generally they are, you know, um outvoiced, let’s say, eventually, one way or another. um there’s there’s there’s always someone who is going to go out on a limb and just say something negative that’s easily picked up by others in the room, and before you know it, um you’re in a kind of spiral until someone stops it, right?
Nate Brown: 27:25
Yeah, it happens quickly. You gotta you gotta be diligent about what you allow culturally to come in and impact the nature of your team, the way they think, the way they speak. Language has so much power.
Charlotte Ward: 27:41
Yeah.
Nate Brown: 27:42
We we don’t give it enough credit. I I remember reading the book Tribal Leadership, and it it opened my eyes to the power of language in terms of how it defines a group of people who are bound together by similar purpose. Language above all is what unifies that group of people.
Charlotte Ward: 28:00
Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. And you know, I I see that in the way we speak about each other as well as the way we speak about customers, you know, in a in an organization. It’s really important. Like I for for instance, one of the one of the um uh paradigms, I’m not sure of the word, all of a sudden. Having found some amazing words in my conversations with you, suddenly words escape me. um mindsets. Let’s just go with mindset, approach, mindset, something in there. um, that I really, really love and try to carry through to so many aspects of my um working day, my professional day is it’s just one of the very basic concepts uh from incident management, which is that when you do a post-mortem, you remain blameless. Like we’re here to solve the same problem, we’re here to look for the same opportunities. um, and so that you don’t ask, why did you do that or why didn’t you do that? You you’re asking, how did this happen? And what’s the opportunity here to stop this happening again? Those are the kind of questions you’re talking about, the things, not the people. And that instantly changes the dynamic. And I think it’s very similar, you know, to your story about talking about things in the right way, so that we’re actually on the same team effectively.
Nate Brown: 29:22
That that remains it reminds me of a book that I read last spring. It was The Fearless Organization, funny enough, uh, by Amy Edmondson, who who I would consider uh maybe the foremost thought leader on the reality of the circle of psychological safety and what it actually means. She she has unbelievable literature on that. And she talks about exactly what you’re describing, Charlotte. I mean, most people are paralyzed by a fear of being judged by their peers.
Charlotte Ward: 29:52
Yep. Yeah.
Nate Brown: 29:53
They’re paralyzed of that fear. So when you can when you can do a post-mortem like what you just described and actually have just honest expression, that that healthy tension that comes from collective genius, you’re in a special place culturally. That’s unusual.
Charlotte Ward: 30:10
Yeah, yeah. I I think it’s um I I think you know, it’s good training from having sat in so many burning rooms where, you know, the world’s on fire and we need to move forward. um, or the world was on fire and we just need to not be on fire again if we can at all help it. um so like having those kind of conversations, you can’t prevent those kind of big or and you can’t make uh, you know, meaningful improvements without those those safe conversations because otherwise we’re just gonna all sit and waste our time and try and protect ourselves and no one else.
Nate Brown: 30:44
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly right. I made I I made some critical mistakes you know early in my career. I was a data migration specialist for a period of time because we had a new safety science platform that had been developed, and it was my job to shepherd that this group of our legacy clients onto the new platform. And and there was it one time where I I uh I got a B in my bonnet of trying to be lazy. And I did an SQL script uh to to try and shortcut an operation in the migration process, completely overwrote their whole database.
Charlotte Ward: 31:23
Oh, we’ve been there. We’ve all been there. Nate, we’ve all been there. That’s all I’m saying.
Nate Brown: 31:27
I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget, you know, just the terror that entered it in what uh what have I just done? And uh the the grace that that most of my leaders at that time had and the and the patience. And uh, you know, of course, weeks later, they could make fun of me about it and I would smile and we would all say, that’s not a mistake you’re making again. And I’d be like, Yeah, you’re exactly right. And I never and I never made that mistake again.
Charlotte Ward: 31:54
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I think it’s um I I think actually it’s really important from a leadership point of view for leaders because they will have all made those mistakes themselves to be honest about the mistakes they’ve made in their past, because we turn up as leaders and we look well, I like to think I look accomplished and experienced and in control of the situation, but there’s been definitely points in my past where I have deleted a database or done something else, you know. And uh yeah, um we’ve all been there. And like for the for the the you know, newer tenured folks, the younger folks in our team who are still learning, we can make it safe by saying this is okay. I’ve done this.
Nate Brown: 32:34
Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 32:35
Yeah.
Nate Brown: 32:35
Yeah. The the time I get nervous, you know, as a leader when I’m on the other side of that, and you know, I’m I’m trying to, of course, you know, deal with that situation with grace and and with patience and and just and help to make it right for the customer. um, but you know, I’m always watching the response of the individual. And you know, if they’ve got a tip on their shoulder where they’re they’re basically saying, This isn’t my fault, yeah. Or if you know they’re they’re not really taking steps to learn or demonstrating any humility in the situation, I’m I’m always taking note of that. And and most of the time when when those attributes are present, you you’ve got somebody that’s gonna make that same mistake again or a worse mistake. Yeah. So as the young person, uh it’s okay. It’s okay. And demonstrate that humility, that vulnerability of wow, that this this I messed this up, and I’m going to learn from this. I’m going to do everything I can in this moment to make it right. uh, but not not everybody does that, Charlotte.
Charlotte Ward: 33:36
No, they don’t. And the best we can do is is shine the way, right?
Nate Brown: 33:41
Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 33:42
Yeah. Yeah. um, thank you so much for a super thoughtful conversation. As always, Nate. um, I I just love talking to you. You’re so enthusiastic about this. And there’s just so much to unpick in this topic. um, I do want you to come back and uh and we’ll talk about the VOC. um, like we’ll get deeper into that. You promised me that was a whole separate conversation. So I’m gonna hold you, gonna hold you up to that and hold you, hold you to account on that promise. I would love that.
Nate Brown: 34:09
I’ve got a VOC practical guide that’s gonna come out in a couple weeks, and it would be really fun to get your response on that, Charlotte. You know, I just I just I feel like right now is a time where organizations need to do more to properly understand what people are truly thinking and feeling about them so that they can activate their organization in the right ways. And there’s there’s too many assumptions being made right now.
Charlotte Ward: 34:34
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, 100%. Well, I look forward to that conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today as well. And uh uh yeah, just awesome. uh great to have you back, lovely to see you again, and we will do this soon.
Nate Brown: 34:48
You’re awesome, Charlotte. Thank you, everybody. Have a great day.
Charlotte Ward: 34:53
That’s it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two nine five for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.
