Agility, Alignment and the Harder Parts of CX

What does it actually take for an organisation to move well (not just quickly) when customer expectations, technology and internal ways of working are all shifting at once?

In the latest episode of The CX Equation, Mark Clydesdale speaks with Greg Kihlström – consultant, author and host of The Agile Brand podcast – about the barriers to seamless customer experience and what organisational agility looks like beyond frameworks.

Greg start’s with an observation we’ve seen too: many organisations prioritise doing things more quickly, and in the process, become less coherent. If teams are moving at speed but headed in different directions, you’re just fast-tracking chaos, not making progress.

Greg and Mark (Chantelle couldn’t make this one) talk about:

• the relationship between alignment and autonomy
• customer-centric journey mapping
• why AI adoption is as much an organisational challenge as a technical one, and
• why sustaining new ways of working is often the biggest challenge of a platform migration project.

The organisations that are most coherent are defined by how well people, data, and processes point in the same direction. Building that often takes a different kind of effort to launching a new platform and it’s probably the more accurate description of what CX transformation really involves.

Catch the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you usually tune into your favourite podcasts.

[00:00:16] Mark: On today’s episode of the CX equation, we’ve got Greg Kilstrom joining us, consultant, advisor, author, speaker, and host of the award winning The Agile Brand podcast. Greg has spent his career at the intersection of marketing, technology, and customer experience, advising some of the world’s biggest brands while writing close to 20 books on the subject and hosting award winning podcasts. His work spans everything from personalization and journey orchestration to marketing operations and data transformation, and he’s become one of the go to voices for leaders trying to make sense of how all of these pieces fit together. Greg, it’s great to have you on. Welcome to the CX equation.

[00:00:56] Greg: Thanks so much. Looking forward to that conversation.

[00:00:59] Mark: Um, sadly, my co-host, Chantelle, couldn’t be here today, so you’re stuck with just me, I’m afraid. But I love Agile, so hopefully, we’ll have a good chat. And, uh, I’m gonna jump straight in and ask you, you know, you spent years helping organiSations navigate change and improve how they’re working, generally through agile and agility. How did you first get into that space?

[00:01:20] Greg: Yeah. I think started my career, you know, after a brief stint at a start up, I ran a a marketing agency, particularly in digital experience for a number of years. And and what I found was I didn’t know the word for it, but I knew that we needed to be nimble and yet not reactive. And so, you know, from my standpoint, I think agile often gets a lot of definitions kind of floating around, and there’s I think there’s a lot of misunderstandings. But to me, what it means is to be able to take a data driven approach to making better decisions and modifying an approach when it makes sense to do so, but not, again, being reactive and fly by night and all that stuff. And I think what I learned early enough in the agency days was we needed some fairly strict processes that guided our work, but also the world was changing – it was continually changing and continues to change -and so we needed a process to be able to say, okay. Our process is working the way they used to last year. Do we need to modify those as well? And so to me, when I started learning more about agile and adopting that, it really fit because it not only are you working together in a better way of working with teams, but you’re also taking a minute to look back on a retrospective and being able to say, well, how is the actual work getting done, and is it as effective as it was yesterday?

[00:02:51] Mark: Yeah. I love a retrospective. And you sometimes have to say the retrospective isn’t about looking at the results of the campaign or the initiative. It’s looking at the process. It’s looking at how well we were able to get the thing out there that we wanted to do. Right? And how do we it’s the idea of continuous evolution and optimisation, isn’t it?

[00:03:10] Greg: It’s the work about the work. They they sometimes call it. It’s we complain about it. Many of us, myself included, have complained about what we have to do, the repetitive tasks or whatever, but we rarely have the forum to do something about it. And so that’s what I like about the retrospective as well is it it’s kinda separates the, yes, the marketing campaign or the website or whatever it was that we were doing launched successfully or not, but how about how we work together as a team and and all that?

[00:03:40] Mark: So you’re right. The word agile does get thrown around a lot. How can you tell the difference between a business that genuinely is agile versus one that’s just using the word and saying it’s agile?

[00:03:51] Greg: I think when a team or a company pivots a lot I mean, that was the, like, startup y phrase that was used a lot, still is a bit. But when a company pivots too much too often, you’re not really being that’s something that’s maybe lack of direction or ill conceived strategy or not to throw anybody under the bus, but I worked for a company like that years and years ago, and and they pivoted themselves to laying off 75% of their workforce. So the back in the the startup days or whatever, but that’s the wrong way of doing it is just being reactive. Oh, okay. This isn’t working. Let’s change direction. Let’s do something better, different. Instead of being methodical and giving a test or an experiment enough time to either work or fail, but learning from that instead of just saying, oh, that doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s move on.

[00:04:46] Mark: Are there any particular misconceptions that you come up against time and time again?

[00:04:51] Greg: Some of it goes down to just what is a true test of whether something’s working or not. And I think this goes back to the scientific method. A lot some marketers that do a lot of testing, they know this stuff, but I’m always surprised at how few I work a lot in the marketing space and some in the CX space as well. I’m always surprised at how few people really understand what a true test is, and you have to define your hypothesis or what you believe to be true before you start, not halfway through, and you can’t revise that three quarters of the way through a test. Like, it’s either true or it’s not. Right? And so I think, again, I’m sure they mean well, and they’re doing their best, and they they need to move quickly or whatever. But I think that’s a misconception is that you can kinda make it up as you go instead of being very scientific and and methodical about this. And that doesn’t feel agile because it’s like, okay. We’ve gotta give this two weeks to run a week and a half into that. It doesn’t feel very agile to be waiting an extra three and a half days for the test to run, but in the long run, you’re gonna thank yourselves because you actually did a test, you performed it, and you could tell what really worked and what didn’t.

[00:06:06] Mark: And I find with the test as well, yes. You need the hypothesis. You need to know how you’re gonna measure the result. But I always think it’s good early stage as well to think about what is the action you’re actually gonna take when this test finishes. Because I see lots of people run tests, and then nothing actually changes as a result of them.

[00:06:23] Greg: That’s a great point. Yeah. Because, I mean, I have a million questions, and I would love to know the answer to all of them, but everything has a cost. Even with automation and AI, you know, there is a cost to every question that you ask. I’d like to think some of those things are going down over time, which is great, but there is still a cost, and it’s still, uh, uh, you’re directing attention from someone or someone’s or some platform even away from something to that. So is that thing that you’re directing attention away from or two, is that as strategic as the thing that was pointed to previously? You know? So it’s all you know, there’s you’ve gotta map it all out or else, yeah, you’re just asking a bunch of questions that are nice to know the answers to, but don’t move the needle.

[00:07:09] Mark: I think you said the word speed. Agile quite often gets lumped in with going faster. Right? But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. So why is pace wise speed alone kinda the wrong goal of agile?

[00:07:22] Greg: Yeah. I think to the one point about the tests need a certain amount of time to run, but also, yeah, it’s not simply about speed. I mean, I think we can be really fast but incoherent as an organisation. Everybody can be running, but they’re not running in the same directions or things like that. And so speed alone actually could lead to greater chaos. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that in particular, working on a book about this concept as well, this idea of speed is never going to go away. The world’s (they’ve been saying this for decades and probably centuries at this point) Things are not getting any slower. Right? So things will only increase, but that’s the speed at which the world moves! The speed at which your organisation moves, there’s got to be everybody moving in the same direction at the same pace, not moving as fast as the fastest individual can or else, again, it’s chaos. It’s incoherence as an organisation.

[00:08:22] Mark: I remember watching an engineering video about the Spotify model, and it was one of these hand drawn videos. And it’s great, they have a chart about autonomy and alignment. And you need them both. Right? And, uh, as you’ve just said, it’s great to empower everyone and let them go in and work the way that they want to do. But if they’re not aligned and they are in different directions, you’re not gonna get there at the end, and so you need to balance the autonomy and the alignment.

[00:08:45] Greg: Yeah. And that can feel limiting or that can feel slow, but if everybody you have to lowest common denominator. You know? You’ve all gotta be moving at the same speed. So some practice areas within a business like, legal needs to move slower than the rest of the organisation often. And, again, as a marketer, or as a business owner, so on and so forth, that can be annoying. Right? Because, you know, an entrepreneur wants to move at the speed of light all the time, but sometimes you need regulations and other things like that to or else they’re at least needed, and so you’ve got to factor them in.

[00:09:22] Mark: So do you tend to differentiate between, you know, Agile with the capital a and the manifesto and those things versus agility?

[00:09:32] Greg: Yeah. Definitely. And I I think what I’ve also experienced is there are some people that are you know, I have some Agile, like, scrum certifications and things like that. I think it’s helpful. I’ve trained teams. I I work as a coach sometimes for teams. I’ve met Agile-certified folks that are very, very rigid in their definition of how these things go, and I’ve spoken with others that have been successful at very large organisations, some smaller organisations. They have all told me, and I’ve experienced this too, is there is no one way to do this. So I think there’s the agile manifesto – there’s an agile marketing manifesto as well – and I look at those things as as guidelines, as principles of, and I think all of those things hold true. But not all of them apply to every practice area. You know, some of the agile manifesto things are more targeted towards software development, so they don’t apply as much to CX or to marketing or or other areas. But I think, overall, those principles apply. And so, you know, I I like to take those into whatever I do, but then there is the, what I would say, dogmatic, Scrum team who has to have these roles, and a retrospective has to last for this many minutes. And, again, those are guidelines, and I’ve used some of those to the letter. And then I’ve had other cases where it just that didn’t work. But so I think agility with a with a lowercase a, let’s try to apply some of those principles, and let’s do our best to do that. But let’s also do what makes sense because I think maybe that’s an unwritten rule in in all of those manifestos is if some of these things don’t directly apply, just use use your head. Like, do what makes sense for the org. And then when that’s been done, I’ve seen agile practices last a lot longer in organizations. When there’s a very rigid approach, it doesn’t last. You you have a few very dogmatic people that are they’re preaching the agile manifesto and scrum and and all this stuff, and then those people leave, and then it all falls apart. So, you know, a more flexible maybe a more agile approach to agile is the recipe.

[00:11:42] Mark: Is adaptiveness almost, like culture of adaptiveness? So you talked about customer experience and marketing. You’ve worked with and advised people across kind of retail, health care, finance, lots of different verticals. Are there what is it about organizations that helps them understand how to create great customer experiences?

[00:12:02] Greg: I think the first step was mapping across all of the teams what the customer is is experiencing. That sounds like a very simple thing. You know, journey mapping, we’ve been doing this for years. You’d be surprised how many organizations haven’t updated their view of that journey in a few months, years even. And, you know, I’ve worked with some pretty large ones. I think the other part is not making your customers experience your org chart. I started my career building websites, and, you know, that was one of our UX things that we had to coach all of our customers on is it doesn’t matter what your org chart looks like. Your customers need to be able to navigate a website. You know, that was one single channel, one single experience, but it was always something that we had to kind of discuss and, again, even with pretty sophisticated brands. So, you know, think about that from the omnichannel customer now. And I think all organizations know this. Intellectually, they know that they know that they can’t be siloed, and, you know, we’ve been talking about silos and all this stuff for years, but it’s one thing to say it and to put it in a PowerPoint. It’s another thing to actually make it happen and actually make it seamless. And and so what I find myself doing is is really there’s two main barriers to this, and one is the people in the processes that are siloed. They have different incentive structures and competing priorities and things like that. And the second is data. And particularly with AI, I think the race to adopt AI is making the data silos just readily apparent. I mean, they were always there, but right now, they are front and center. And so I find myself either working on, hey. How do our processes need to shift so that teams are even if they’re they continue to be technically siloed in an org chart, how do they work together better? And then, you know, second is how do we get the data from over here that this team has been working with so that this other team sitting over here can access it. So until those are solved, an organization can’t truly be customer centric and and really provide that seamless experience.

[00:14:16] Mark: Um, so are both of those things as easy hard as each other to get right, the the data and the people and processes, or is you where would you start?

[00:14:24] Greg: I think they’re both as easy or as hard to your point. I the not neither very easy. Uh, you know, I think, traditionally, people think of the more technical things like data or even, you know, or platforms as the more difficult thing. I I think behavior change is the more difficult thing to sustain. From a data or even a a platform. You know, there’s the concept of the three legged stool people process platform. I like to add a fourth leg to that, which is data, just because I think it’s such an important part of this. Once you make the data integrations, they’re done in a manner of speaking. I mean, there’s always gonna be new things to add and and new integrations to have, perhaps. But once a platform is implemented, once data is integrated, it’s there. I think on the people side of things, it’s hard to get new behaviors or good behaviors to stick. And I I think that’s where you know, even going back to the Agile conversation, you can get some people that are very strict about we gotta follow these processes, but then people do it for a little while, and then they go back to their old behaviors because they like it better. It’s easier for for whatever reason. So I think the behavior change, it takes a lot of time, and it takes careful planning to to do it and do it in a way that’s going to sustain.

[00:15:47] Mark: I fully agree. And it’s people get more emotional, I feel, about teams and structures and who do I report in to, and who’s my manager, and things. So I I think you said earlier something about it. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a reorganization, um, but it’s about who you go to work with. Right? If you can kind of embed that, yes. I know that you work for that guy and you work for that person, but day to day, you just need to work together more closely and find your own way of doing stuff.

[00:16:17] Greg: And I think doing the data integration, the platform integration better and doing it from a not only from an end customer perspective, but an employee and internal perspective, making those processes from a technical standpoint better can also help the behavior change and make people feel better about the change. So they they work together, but, again, not that data integration is is easy. I mean, if, you know, I’ve just come off a nine month engagement on something like that for a very large organization, nothing about it was easy, but it’s it’s done now. You know? And so now the behavior change needs to take hold and and stuff like that.

[00:16:58] Mark: We’ve kind of been talking about the theory of agility. Um, are you able to maybe bring it to life with an example from your consulting work? You know, tell us about a time where you embedded agility or improved agility, and it led to a real, uh, measurable outcome.

[00:17:14] Greg: Yeah. Sure. And, you know, without without naming names, I can talk about definitely, you know, I was brought in to work with an ecommerce team at a retail brand that had not been doing any agile practices at all. So very, very siloed teams even within the their space, which, you know, ecommerce, small part of a a much larger organization, but, you know, is brought in to first work with them to figure out, you know, does a in this case, they wanted to adopt scrum, and does this even make sense for them? You know, I I think because, again, trying to fit the wrong process onto the wrong team is is not gonna yield the best results. But, you know, it turns out there were a lot of things that they were doing where just some small shifts enabled them to think a little bit differently. They actually found the idea of they weren’t coming together at certain points where they really needed to. So the idea of building a team that met consistently talked about things, and then there was some autonomy still. They worked together. They worked they started moving towards a sprint based model. And all of a sudden, uh, well, maybe not all of a sudden. You know, a few months later, after working through this, they found that they were delivering more in a shorter amount of time because they were continuously delivering things instead of this kinda stop start mode of, okay. We’ve got this campaign here. You know, everything was being treated as a very different and very unique thing when working together as a team in a sprint based model actually allowed them to try to figure out, okay. Well, what are similar about all of these things that we do, and how can we start standardizing those? And then the other thing they were able to figure out is what they should be focused on or could focus on that actually benefited from some extra time. You know, the creative, the strategy, the customer specific angles of of all of these things. And so, again, within three to six months, they were actually able to deliver an additional campaign per quarter than they had been doing originally, and that’s a huge win. Now they’re able to test one more thing and get results from one more thing to improve and and be better.

[00:19:30] Mark: Great. And then was all of that just through process and ways of working, or are there any kind of technology tool elements to it as well?

[00:19:37] Greg: In that case, it was really just process, and they’re always adopting new tools and changing things and everything like that, but it was really just changing the way that they the way that they work together.

[00:19:47] Mark: And do you find that’s often the case, or are there ever times that, you know, find there are tools out there, Trello board and process management stuff that also helps?

[00:19:56] Greg: Most of the time when I’m brought in, it’s because there’s a new platform or technology or something that’s being adopted. So I will say I’m maybe a little biased in or my experience is a little that one case that I used, that’s really one of the few that I was really just brought in to change the process without any other platform adoption. But, yeah, most of the time, there’s some decision made whether, you know, we’re going all in on a larger platform or they’re sometimes they’re building their own internal platforms, and I’m brought in to help an organization figure out, okay. Well, you know, we used to do things this way with these three different platforms. Now we’re moving to these two. What does each team need to do differently? How and, ideally, how can we do it better? And that that’s what I’m often brought into. So, you know, I’d say in my experience, definitely, it’s they both kinda go hand in hand, but it can happen without.

[00:20:50] Mark: Do you ever struggle to get people to buy in to the need for the shift, like, particularly in the process space?

[00:20:56] Greg: Oh, always. There’s always the people that are very much like, yeah. This needs to change, uh, totally on board with the change. There’s some that are cautiously optimistic or, like, I’ll wait and see, and then there’s some that are just dug in, entrenched, and this is terrible. Like, why are you changing my job? The things worked fine, and so on and so forth. So you just kinda have to learn to work with all of them, and you can’t ignore you can’t roll your eyes at the skeptics or the people that are dug in. Like, they have real you know, talking with them, and this is where it really helps to have one on ones with people to really understand. Like, I worked with some pretty challenging situations, but talking with them, there were some really, really good reasons why they were dug into the current way of doing things. And in some cases, I’ll say they weren’t even against change at all, but they were against the change as they perceived it. And so part of it is, you know, in some cases, there’s the ability to modify things a little bit and make it a little more palatable. Sometimes there’s not. But understanding and empathizing, that’s where humans are still needed here. I don’t think we can get AI to do some of this stuff at least anytime soon is understanding, figuring out what the actual challenges are, and working through those. And in some cases, you’re gonna have to tell somebody, hey. Sorry. I get it, but this is still gonna have to change. Other times, you’re gonna say, you know, that’s really good feedback. I’m gonna bring that to the team, and let’s figure out how to solve at least part of this. And sometimes, I think people just like that they’ve been listened to, and they get a little more on board with it. And some, they’re skeptics by nature. They need to see it work, and they’re dug in at first. But then once they start using it, they’re like, oh, yeah. Okay. I could see how this could work. So it takes all kinds. Right?

[00:22:49] Mark: Great. You’ve mentioned AI. Obviously, we have to go every every podcast is gonna talk about AI at some point. Right? So so are you seeing AI already changing how businesses operate? Uh, and do you think it’s going to improve how agile businesses can be?

[00:23:05] Greg: AI is part of every conversation that I have. I think it’s making some positive impacts on how people spend their time and and what they’re able to do. There is still a lot to be discovered. There’s a lot to be worked out. There’s a lot of in most of the organisations I work with, they’re larger organisations. They have pretty detailed AI policies in place. All of those are there for a good reason. Some of those restrict what employees are able to do and and how they’re able to do it, and, you know, there’s certain sanctioned tools that teams can use. So depending on what those tools are, kinda depends on how much their employees can gain from AI. But it’s in every conversation. It’s in almost everyone that I work with is using it in some way. I think the first phase was experimenting, and everyone was experimenting and just throwing a bunch of stuff on the wall to see what sticks. I think we’re moving out of that. There’s still some organizations that are doing that, but those organizations that are still purely experimenting are already behind. So what I’m seeing is experiments are still happening, but we’re getting into a more mature phase where there’s some standardized ways that AI is being used across processes. And there’s already talks, and, you know, we’ve seen some very public layoffs and talk about reducing headcounts and and stuff. I would say the most common scenario that I’ve experienced is freezing hiring, freezing new positions, and things like that. I think in the best case scenario, we won’t reduce too many more jobs, but we’re probably not adding new headcount for any foreseeable time because AI can do so much. So now a lot of it is, okay. Well, how can we get our teams using these tools better so that they can do all the stuff that they weren’t able to get to? Because I I don’t think that again, I know there’s been very public, uh, job reductions and and things like that. Any teams that I work with, they have eighty hours a week of work to do. They just only have forty hours or, you know, maybe a a little more to to do it in. And so AI helps them with that reduce that eighty hours to maybe forty hours, and so they’re actually now able to get their jobs done. And and so I think I see enough positive in it. I I think there’s still some reckoning with with layoffs, and I I think there’s a reckoning after that where companies are gonna bring people back when they realize they cut too many, and AI is really good at some things, but not at all the things that it was kinda sold for.

[00:25:46] Mark: Indeed. Do you think there’s any areas that businesses are overestimating what AI can do? Certainly, maybe at this point in time, I think we know it’s moving fast. Right? But right now, you know, is there any areas that it’s it’s over-promising and under delivering?

[00:26:01] Greg: And some of this comes down to the the data silos and and some of the other things. Just connecting too many dots right now is just there’s some amazing tools that I’ve seen demos of that are able, you know, in theory to do great, you know, end to end campaigns and from start to finish all this stuff. But seeing it actually happen in in practice, it’s okay, you know, in in most cases. And that’s not even necessarily the AI’s fault, but whatever the fault, whether it’s things are not connected properly or connected enough or a tool is built with this ideal scenario in mind that didn’t actually factor in how companies are actually structured and and work, Whatever the case is, I think we’re being a little oversold on how much just pure end to end automation is gonna happen. As well as on the customer side, I do see customer agents being a big thing that starts happening sooner, you know, soon and and more and more so. But there are still gonna be customers that don’t wanna do that. They want as good and seamless as a experience as someone who types into Claude and is like, hey. Buy me a pair of socks, and I want them tomorrow. You know? There’s gonna be the same people that wanna manually you know, whether it’s walk into the store or go on to a site and have the same type of experience. So we don’t, like they don’t take things away. Print advertising and TV advertising is still very much alive. Like, they don’t take things away. They just keep adding more, and and the more now is this agentic this agentic stuff. Uh, but the other stuff doesn’t go away.

[00:27:39] Mark: Moving on to the to you then, I think you’ve written close to 20 books now. How do you decide what it is that you want to write about?

[00:27:47] Greg: Yeah. That’s a great question. I I, you know, I think whatever possessed me to write the first several, I kind of gotta always like to learn, and I found writing as a way to help me learn and just organise my thoughts about stuff. And then I decided, okay. Well, if I’m gonna write a few articles about this, why don’t I just put together a book about it? And I just kinda started down that path. But, yeah, I mean, I I tend to write about what I’m experiencing, what I’m focused on in my work. I have the podcast, and I write and and stuff, but I pride myself on also getting my hands dirty and, you know, doing the consulting work and, you know, actually being involved in in these projects. And I feel like that gives me a perspective on things in a in a real world scenario. And so I’ll experience something and and maybe see a trend or or something that I wanna dig into a little bit more and then see, oh, okay. Well, I don’t think a lot of people have tackled it from this angle. And then, you know, soon enough, I have a book outline together, and then I’m off to the off to the races, so to speak. So, you know, right now, the thing that I’m focused on is is just this idea of maintaining organizational coherence at speed. And so I’m working on something around that now because I I see it as to your earlier question on on point, it’s not just about speed. You know, if that’s the only goal we have, we’re just gonna have chaos. And and as things fragment and new things continue to get added to the mix, we risk just this very fast, very incoherent chaos as an organization and from the customer perspective. So yeah. So, you know, things like that just get in my head, and I’m I just wanna get it out.

[00:29:31] Mark: You work in an area that’s constantly evolving. Right? Does it make it easier to write more about, or does it make it harder because you’re almost outdating yourself sometimes?

[00:29:42] Greg: On the one hand, it’s a little crazy to think about writing books, and I and I think my the way what I write about and how I write about them has changed over time as well. And so, you know, I do a few different things. So I do try to think about what is a bigger theme that’s not gonna date itself as much anymore. And so that’s definitely been a challenge, particularly over the last few years. I mean, I feel like really I think one of the downsides of AI is that because it’s so much easier to create content, a lot more people are creating a lot of content, and it’s not necessarily It may be original content, but it’s not as original ideas or takes on topics. And so I am a lot more careful about that. That’s definitely something that I that I factor in. And some of those things that I feel like deserve a book, but maybe, at this point, I get other people to collaborate on on series with me of agile brand guides is is what they’re called on just topics like platform topics and and things like that. Uh, get a bunch of people to contribute chapters on you know, I did one on ecommerce, for instance, last year and got a bunch of people to write chapters for it. And, you know, I know that within a year or two, it’s gonna need an update, but they’re built by design to do that. So, you know, every couple years, I’m gonna update them. But other topics, I’m trying to think more timeless. I it probably is over. You know? I wish, but it it was. But, you know, more timeless. Let’s just put it that way. Okay.

[00:31:09] Mark: So to close out, I mean, you’re a customer yourself as we all are of many brands. Are there any brands out there that you could give an example where you feel they’ve been genuinely agile in how they’ve served you?

[00:31:21] Greg: I’m very loyal to a few brands, and some of that is I’m stubbornly loyal, and some of that is they’ve earned my my loyalty. Uh, you know, a few that I’ll mention that maybe fall in the the latter camp. I mean, you know, I think American Express is certainly one and that I’ve worked I’ve I’ve been an early adopter of some of their products before and actually appreciated just like my cable company just notified me that there was an Internet outage or whatever, but they worked with me, um, you know, very collaboratively, you could say, on on new ideas and better ways of of working and and stuff like that. So, you know, there’s ones like that and just others. You know, Marriott is another brand that I pretty loyal to, and, you know, everybody has travel issues. Right? So if you travel enough, you’re gonna have an issue. Right? But been very adaptive to some of the things that I’ve that I’ve needed or things like that. And so, you know, I think some of that just comes from some types of industries just have you know, I think the hospitality industry in particular has been thinking about customer experience in a deeper way than than some other brands and and industries have. But but still, the ability to adapt and continue to to learn about their customers and adapt experiences for individual customers, I think, is I’m still delighted by that.

[00:32:46] Mark: Great. Um, and if you had to leave our listeners or our viewers with just three essential takeaways in thirty seconds from this this episode, what would they be?

[00:32:55] Greg: There’s a key difference between agility and and speed, and I think it’s important to to understand that. And I think to understand the difference between why change can be difficult and breaking that down between the people, the process, and the the data and the platform components of that is incredibly important and will help you actually be more successful. And I think the last thing would just be organizations need to stop thinking in terms of their org chart when they’re trying to make a customer experience and really think, you know, instead of inside out, think outside in.

[00:33:35] Mark: Totally agree. Well, brilliant. Thank you very much, Greg. It’s been great having you as a guest. Thank you for joining us on the CX equation.

[00:33:41] Greg: Yeah. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

[00:33:50] Mark: The CX equation is brought to you by TapCXM. To find out more about what we do and how we can help you, visit tapcxm.com. And then make sure to search for the CX equation in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you usually find your podcast. Make sure to click subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.

[00:34:07] Mark: On behalf of the team here

[00:34:08] Chantelle: at TapCXM, thank you for listening.