S3E1 The What’s Your Legacy Going To Be Edition with Jeanne Bliss

James Nathan 0:00 Hello and welcome to The Only One Business Show with me your host James Nathan, and I have another awesome guest for you today and I’m sure you’re going to love what she’s got to say. This lady helps companies and people become the best versions of themselves. She guides them to define, build and live the behaviors and the actions that will fuse customers to them, and ultimately create deep and memorable relationships. She’s had a singular mission of building these deeper relationships for over 35 years. First as the inaugural Chief Customer Officer at Lands End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate and Microsoft. Then since 2002, she’s been guiding leaders all over 20,000 around the world, to understand that improving their lives should be their most strategic and important vision. In a marketplace that values congruence of heart (what you knows right) and habit (how you act) the memory of how you make people feel is the greatest currency of your brand. Please welcome fondly known as the Godmother of Customer Experience, Jeanne Bliss. Jeanne, hi, how are you?

 

Jeanne Bliss 2:03 Hi, I’m so happy to be with you today Happy Holidays!

 

James Nathan 2:08 And happy holidays to you. Although, we’ll probably send this out in about January so maybe be happy new year.

 

Jeanne Bliss 2:17 It’s always funny when you record ahead of thing so I just messed up your timing but oh well….

 

James Nathan 2:24 Well nobody expects us to be live do they? You’re on the other side of the world to me and it’s so lovely for you to take some time. Thank you so much. You’re in Seattle today, is that right?

 

Jeanne Bliss 2:32 I am and it’s my pleasure to say hello to my friends across the pond and across the world. I know you get a lot of people listening to your conversations

 

James Nathan 2:41 From all over the place, which is which is absolutely great. And, you know, to talk to different people to get great ideas. It’s really very wonderful. I’ve just been looking at your new website Jeanne. Wow, that’s great. Have you spent….. you must have a huge amount of time getting that sorted out.

 

Jeanne Bliss 2:57 It was a year actually James, what’s interesting is that I really wanted to take the time and enjoy the process. And so I allowed myself something I don’t usually do, which is the breathing, the thinking, time and process to do it right. Not do it fast.

 

James Nathan 3:21 Right. Perfect. And so you given what looks like a huge amount of thought to how businesses develop as well through through looking at what you’re doing these days. When you started back in a little shoe shop. Was that where the story began?

 

Jeanne Bliss 3:36 It did. Thank you for that. Yes, I learned about humanity in business by as did all of my brothers and sisters. I come from a family of seven Italian children, you know, they procreate

 

James Nathan 3:50 That’s a bit Christmas party that really is.

 

Jeanne Bliss 3:52 Yes. So we learned about humanity in business by watching our Dad, Vincent Lombardo. He had a Buster Brown shoe store in a teeny little town near Chicago near the airport. And he sold children’s shoes Buster Brown shoes. And he became an iconic part of people’s lives because he was, you know, the first one to put a pair of shoes on a Mom holding a baby in her lap. And he became a part of the story of people’s lives. And the story that I tell on my new website is that when he retired a line of people three blocks long stood to say goodbye to him, including Mrs. McCaskey the mother of the Chicago Bears with a bears t shirt signed by all the Chicago Bears, and all these people just standing to say goodbye to him that he had become a part of the story of their life. And so I thought to myself, you know, this is the work that we’re really doing is about legacy. And you know, taking a note from my dad, what I’m nurturing, nudging people to do is to find their three blocks long. Live your legacy, how do you want to be remembered?

 

James Nathan 5:12 It’s a really simple concept though because like so many people talk about the here and now or what we’re doing in the next five years or, things like that, but actually how do you want to be remembered is a really lovely way to to look at the world. What was it that so special about your Dad that made people queue that far to come and say hello and goodbye?

 

Jeanne Bliss 5:30 You know, he was very human and real and authentic. He cared about the life more than making money and that’s actually what made him prosperous. You know, sometimes the Mom would want to pick out a shiny shoe with Jingle Bells or whatever on it and he said no need to put this fundamental, you know, 25% less money or whatever shoe on your little one’s feet and you know sometimes, see, I actually talked about him in one of my books, you know, I said, sometimes these young Moms would open up their pocketbook and they wouldn’t have enough money. And my Dad would say, get those shoes on your little ones feet, bring back the rest when you’re in town. And, you know, he couldn’t leave the store. So he had a hot plate in the back, and he’d make sausages and peppers and all my god, garlic. And if you showed up, he come from the back of the store with a fork of whatever for you to have as well. You know, and it was, it was just….. that’s why on this new website, especially at this point in my life in my career, I think it’s we connect with people. And we connect with people who show up as real and authentic and those are the people that we want to not just do business with, but be connected with. And he was like that. Yeah, I call him my version of Geppetto

 

James Nathan 6:57 Fantastic.

 

Jeanne Bliss 6:59 It was an honour and then for me also after my dad, I got to go to almost the same kind of leader but in a larger scale when I went when I went to Land’s End, so I had these really amazing, early and fundamental guideposts about how to behave in business.

 

James Nathan 7:22 You know, the first time I went to the States, I stayed with a friend of mine who was living in Denver at the time, and he said to me, you know, you got to get some shirts while you’re here. Get these Land’s End ones and, you know, coming out of England were at the time, it was a long time ago now, but you know, next day delivery stuff was just a, you know, it was something we dreamed of. And I remember ordering these things and it was all on the phone, and the process was so nice, so smooth, so easy. And it really got me thinking a lot about you know, why can’t we have this everywhere? And I guess that was that was you’re doing then?

 

Jeanne Bliss 7:57 Yes, I trained the phone operator. So what year was that?

 

James Nathan 8:01 Oh, goodness, now you’re asking. So that was probably around 2002…..

 

Jeanne Bliss 8:07 Yeah, so I was there in the very beginning from 1980 through to 1993. So we built all of the foundational things that you got to experience. We were the first company to have an 800 number. We were the first company that did so many things because we thought about the life for example, in my job after training, the phone operators was the first version of like a chief customer officer for Land’s End and Gary Comar, actually, the founder called me the conscience of the company, we were growing so fast. And you know, as you grow, you bring people into the business who may not have the same cultural ethos of the company that has gotten you to a point and so my job was to make sure that in a very gentle and caring way we help these people recognize and understand how we made decisions, which was very almost contradictory to how a lot of companies did. And one of the things that we did especially, you know, we’re not people won’t be hearing this in the holidays, but we’re in the in the heart of it right now, one of the things was, in the old days, you’d buy something from a catalogue, it would come in a plastic bag, and then you had to go to some store to find a box to put it in, and then ship it yourself. And I said to our guys, you know, we need to have a gift wrapping service. And they’re like you are out of your mind because everything is automated on these trolleys and the boxes come down in there. It’s all very automated. We have people who are packing but we had to take this stuff out of the plastic bags, we had to come up with very special UV coated boxes that could take our pick tickets without destroying it. And so we created the very, very first for example, boxing service in the catalogue industry so that it truly was seamless for you. And it was so much fun. We were just making everything up from scratch. Nobody had done so much of this stuff before.

 

James Nathan 10:06 And it’s stuff that you kind of take for granted these days. When you ask me what years I’m one of these terrible people you say how old’s your Son? What year was he born? I have to get my mind back in time. Because I was that was 96 when I did that. So it was it was because it was just pre internet really? Or pre the real internet.

 

Jeanne Bliss 10:24 Yes. You know, the whole thing on all the websites that says order by this date to get for Christmas delivery? Yeah, that was us. We came up with the first guaranteed dates. And in fact, we not only guaranteed the date, we said and this is some of the stuff I had to convince them to agree to. We said if you don’t get your order by Christmas, you can have it for free. Oh my goodness, like in….. you know, they were like, Oh my god, we’re gonna give away so many things. People aren’t gonna lie. I said people will not lie. The first year we did that. I think we gave away maybe a total $6,000 in free orders.

 

James Nathan 11:02 Okay, so I can imagine that the jaws dropping or people falling off chairs around the board table. But you know that when people talk about things like that, it always…. there’s always the the third party problem isn’t there that, you know, it’s all well and good guaranteeing delivery, but what if the, if the mailing service goes wrong or something else goes wrong, and I can see why people get stressed about it, but nowadays, it’s just, you know, Amazon come the same day, so why shouldn’t everybody be able to do that?

 

Jeanne Bliss 11:29 Right? But you know, this was, gosh, 1990, you know, the Dark Ages. And we were we were really…. it was how we did business anyways, which was trust, transparency. And that’s really going back to my website. So many of the conversations that are not being had as part of a customer experience, effort or transformation. We’re not thinking about, okay, who do we want to be as people? How do we want to show up in the world as a legacy? And then how will we then translate that into how we behave and operate and in our behaviours as leaders. And that to me is kind of the gauntlet I’ve taken up. Now, I believe that we, without that this work is really a lot of tactics but, but as soon as the zealot who’s driving it leaves the room, your company isn’t going to stay at that pace, it will, it will revert back to business as usual. So that’s really why I’m working on it the way I am and when you go to my website, why it looks so it doesn’t look like a business website. Right. It looks like a business about talking about human beings and people.

 

James Nathan 12:45 Yeah, absolutely. I was gonna ask you, you know, when you talk about humanity and business, because Are you talking about a lot, what does that mean?

 

Jeanne Bliss 12:51 Well, it means deciding how you’re going to treat people making the foundation of how you grow your business. Honouring people, respecting them, honouring your own people, and then translating that to your behaviours. You know, here’s what’s interesting and paradoxical. In a world of technology, right, where technology can be so important, we need to first start with the human that we’re building the technology for, versus getting so excited about the technology that that defines who we are. Right. And so for me, it’s, realizing and remembering, never forget human at the end of our decision. And then also making sure that in what we do, who we are as people becomes evident in how we act. Does that make sense?

 

James Nathan 13:52 Absolutely, it does. And you said something there that’s really interesting, you said never forget the human, but so many businesses do. Why do they do that?

 

Jeanne Bliss 14:01 I just think we’re on autopilot, James it’s it’s a lot of word. Quarterly inclined, we become very internally focused on our metrics and our key performance indicators. And what we need to get done or what we want to get or achieving our own red, yellow and green dots and we lose the forest for the trees. You know it on my new here page, it says, we’re focusing on the mechanics, not the meaning of our work. You know, so one of my favourite examples is REI, do you know REI? It’s a US based company, but maybe global too, not sure that.

 

James Nathan 14:45 No, I know them yeah.

 

Jeanne Bliss 14:47 So REI is a company that is about being outside and community and everything and you gotta live your legacy. Their legacy is about people and living outside and community and all of that and so they shuttered their doors of all their stores on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. And that is a leadership decision, very deliberate one, to live who they are, to live their legacy.

 

James Nathan 15:18 That’s fantastic. Cos’ that Black Friday thing, it’s so big in the US, obviously, it’s become a big thing here over the UK. And it seems to be driven from in my mind by just, you know, businesses just being extraordinarily greedy. You know, how can we make an extra buck out of people when, you know

 

Jeanne Bliss 15:38 It is interesting. I mean I…… and it’s hard. It’s very hard, what happens, you know, the engine of how the business is grown or run is built, right. And these are decisions to grow in a different way, and it takes a leader right? So I call it leadership bravery. It takes a brave leader to be willing to live through perhaps a bump down to pivot and bump back up, right? It because they’re growing in a different way they’re growing for their service and their experience and what they add to value in people’s lives and who they are as people versus the practices of what I call an everyday company. And so I think that that’s the risk. And this bravery isn’t…. it’s hard to practice this bravery. And this bravery doesn’t and won’t occur from some of the things that in a very well intended way are defining some of our experience works such as, even when we do journey mapping, we’re mapping for problems versus future or innovate, you know, inspiration around customer needs. Even though that’s they’re making those hard decisions around who we will be and how we will show up may or may not be part of the ultimate solution that’s arrived at, because leaders want to know, well, what’s the ROI of this? What’s the ROI of that? Some things take a while to earn the ROI on

 

James Nathan 17:24 Some things take a generation to run it, though. But this way, if I’m, sitting, listening now, listening in my business, I’m not a big business that I’m ambitious. Where do we start? I know you’re talking about competencies. Where does a leader start by looking to start to think about how do I make this bigger and better?

 

Jeanne Bliss 17:43 Sure. Yeah. I actually have a blog post coming out next week that that starts to frame how do you build your three blocks long and the first thing is you need to know it. So have clarity about what your purpose is and how what you do In the world, that will improve lives. Because a lot of companies don’t start there right there. What they do is the outcome of all their little pieces of the company or they’re on autopilot. So you need to really have clarity around that you need to know it. What do you do? And not only what you do, then how do you… how do you want the attributes of what you do to show up? How do you want the attributes of who you are as people to show up? Do you want to show up, caring, nurturing, transparent, fearless, you gotta know that. If you don’t know that, you’ll be all these different things at different times. The second thing so once you know that now then you say, okay, now I have to build that in my behaviour. So when somebody reaches you, reaches out to you for the first time, let’s say, a traditional company would think, Oh, it’s a sales funnel. And I’m going to do a bunch of stuff that is salesy. Well, if you’ve decided, instead, you’re going to be a company that is generous to a fault. You’re not going to start with a sales orientation, but with a giving orientation of, even if we never do work together, here’s all the things I want to provide you to help you decide what’s important to you, what you need, and figure out even what problem you’re trying to solve. I call that no strings attached giving, But every company doesn’t think that way, right? So you need to know it, then you need to build it into your operating plan. If you don’t know it, you can’t really build it. Does this make sense?

 

James Nathan 19:48 Absolutely it does. That give you know, the gift of giving is an important thing.

 

Jeanne Bliss 19:54 And maybe that’s not who you are. Maybe your thing is we’re going to be technology company that helps you be more efficient, you know, but just as long as you know it, know it give it and then the third part of it is live it. So you need to live it in your behaviours as a leader and in what you do. So you show people the behaviours they can model.

 

James Nathan 20:20 So what are those behaviours? Leaders are always growing, obviously leadership is something that takes time to develop, what are the those attributes that leaders should be trying to build those behaviours they should be trying to improve?

 

Jeanne Bliss 20:34 Well, so let’s say, let’s say you say you want to build trust, in your trusting company. But yet you don’t trust your front line, to make a call about exceptions for customers. Or you don’t trust your customers when they say something. You know, you forced them to do a whole bunch of things, or you say that you want to be….. So it’s really what I call congruence. Are you….. and you read it in my opening? Are you acting with congruence to what you say you are? You know we’re an advisory company but yet you send your sales people on so many sales calls to meet a quota that they can, it’s kind of like being in and out of a doctor’s office right? 10 minutes and you’re done. You’re like, well, how what was that? So, this word of congruence becomes really critical. Are you living? Are you living what you say you are? And are you making decisions about how to run the company in that manner, and then saying to the rest of your organization, the why…. we made this decision because and you can now do this too in your life.

 

James Nathan 22:02 So, the godmother of customer experience…. can tell, tell us about that story.

 

Jeanne Bliss 22:08 I did not name myself the godmother of customer experience.

 

James Nathan 22:12 I’m sure you didn’t.

 

Jeanne Bliss 22:13 That would be really creepy! I have been doing this work as I mentioned since 1983. And have kind of come up through the world as a practitioner, which I think is important to my community. I think they, they see me as somebody real who’s had that same rock strapped to their back that they have. And since 2002, I’ve actually been coaching and guiding leaders around the world on how to do this and then wrote the very first book in 2006 on the role of the chief customer officer, another book in 2009. Another book in 2015, another book in 2018. I’m also the co founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association and so I think that I call myself the old lady of the sea. I’ve been around for so long and I’m a giver. And so I think, through what I’ve written and how I’ve written it and you know, for example, my book that came out in 2015, Chief Customer Officer 2.0, I essentially wrote down my whole consulting methodology in a book, and a lot of people said, you know, you’re crazy, you’re going to lose clients, because you’re giving away your methodology. And I said, you know, I don’t see it that way. And it hasn’t been that way for me. So I think that it’s just that I’ve been a voice and also the manner in which I’ve given which is, you know, again, starting with my Dad and who I am as a person, and the Italianness is nurturing.

 

James Nathan 23:58 Well, there’s a lovely trait of Italian families…. My family is Jewish but it’s not wildly different

 

Jeanne Bliss 24:04 It’s very close, very much the same.

 

James Nathan 24:06 It’s looking after people and being the best possible person or the best the best person you can be.

 

Jeanne Bliss 24:13 I was just gonna say there’s a funny thing on my website, which I think you’ll be able to relate to. On the download section. I’m there actually holding a bag of groceries, and we were in an Italian deli. And what it says is, I’m Italian and you could just insert Jewish right I mean, it’s so much the same. If you’re Italian or have Italians in your life, you know we are givers and feeders. Whenever we go to anybody’s house, like family or friends. None of us can leave without a bag full of food or from someone’s pantry or plates of tin foil wrap food, and you’d better be careful if you complement what they’re wearing or something may own from a lamp on the table to the shirt on their back. It’s yours.

 

James Nathan 25:01 Yeah, it’s go home with you. I was just, I was just thinking, a really good friend of mine is English guy with Italian background, his family are near Naples and he was telling me a story recently of going back home to visit family and going from one Auntie’s house to the other and each of them say you’re hungry? No I’m not hungry. Yeah, I ate at her house. What did she make you? She made me this. Ahhh hers is no good. try mine. House to house, to house to house.

 

Jeanne Bliss 25:33 Yeah. In my keynote on my book called Would You Do That To Your Mother, I talk about my Grandma. My dad’s Mom, and I don’t think we ever saw her sit at a table, James, instead she would like hover behind us. It was a little scary. She was walking behind us with these huge bowls of food and she would just plop the food on your plate whether you want it or not. And then she would stare at you while you are Make sure you frickin finish that plane or she come and slap you on the side of your head. You know?

 

James Nathan 26:09 I know we’re diverging quickly but I had an Auntie Rushka who lived in Tel Aviv and whenever you went to her house if you turned your head for a moment, she would put something on your plate while you were looking. Absolutely fantastic. What is going to be your three blocks?

 

Jeanne Bliss 26:28 My three blocks long is I think helping companies, helping people it’s not about companies even. Helping people become the best version of themselves and making sure that I show up as the best version of myself. And it’s this generosity of giving, fearless giving, fearless giving to help people show up as the best version of themselves.

 

James Nathan 26:54 In a world that’s gone really silly internet, you know, it is the shop window for almost everything and you know all our customers are a click away. We talked before about Land’s End and that being a kind of phone process and, and I gotta tell you, I love that, I love telephone businesses. I love that human communication.

 

Jeanne Bliss 27:11 I call people all the time James like, I phone, I call it phone bombing because I just want to hear human voices.

 

James Nathan 27:19 It’s something that I struggle with, with a lot of my clients quickly with the younger clients trying to get them on the phone, rather get them away from keyboard, stop typing, stop tapping away, start talking to people. But when we do, you know, the world is as it is, and it’s not changing and we can feel it. You know, I feel like a fossil when I talk like this, but how do we make our communication, our digital communication more human?

 

Jeanne Bliss 27:42 Well, I think that, you know, what’s interesting is even in Twitter and chat and all of these online mechanisms. Again, it doesn’t take that much time, but it’s a deliberate decision about deciding what your vote voices and your tone is and working with the people who are doing and responding even in mechanical mediums, even on your paperwork. And you know there’s whole companies who can help you with this by the way, and tone and voice, and using real words not acronyms and businessy language becomes. It breaks through it like pierces the third wall, right? Let’s say, you know, you bring up a chat box, and instead of it saying, hello, how may I help you today? It says something like, how’s your day going? Or you know, I don’t know, whatever. Just something that feels like there’s life in it. Right? So I can’t sit here and tell you what the word should be. But I think that it only takes a little bit of thought to say okay, here’s here’s our tone, here’s our personality and then let’s just do that. You know it’s weird again I don’t mean to talk so much about Land’s End because Land’s End’s a different kind of company now than it was back then they’re trying to get your mojo back believe me. But you know the people on our phones you’ve talked to them James when the farm people, they got up at four in the morning and the fields and then you know, logged into our computers and talk to people and our whole deal was be yourself and take as much time as you need. So we need to say okay, even if you’re chatting or tweeting or whenever, be yourself, have a personality.

 

James Nathan 29:47 You’ve worked with some fabulous companies, companies that you know, if I even just looking at the list on your website, I mean, some of these names are such household things that it’s unreal and the one that I love is Zappos, you know, huge amounts of fabulous customer service stories that come from that business. Which of these businesses or which business did you work with where you were most surprised by something new that they were doing you hadn’t seen before?

 

Jeanne Bliss 30:17 You know Zappos, my relationship with Zappos I put I treasure you know, all my clients that you see on the website, I treasure, the relationships with them. What we’re seeing, which is really lovely, and very inspirational, our big business to business companies that are choosing to be human and grow that way. For example, one of my clients was a company called MSA. They are the world’s largest manufacturer of hardhats and safety equipment. And, one of the things for example, they realized was that they were inadvertently pending their sales people in, on rules around how much they could spend with a potential client. So they’d say, okay, you have $1,000 and the thousand dollars, you know, for sample hard hats or prototypes, or whatever it was, it was a flat rate where they didn’t have any money James let me correct myself, they had to ask for permission for anything. And you know, they have a potentially really big client and now they’ve got to tell the client hold on, I’ve got to go ask for permission if I could send you 30 hard hats instead of the five I’m given right? And so they created something really cool that’s grounded in trust called a virtual wallet, which is look, we know you’re the one having these conversations. We know you we trust you to spend what you need to earn the trust of this customer and earn the admiration so that we earn the business, and really brave thing to do. And so I’ve been really admiring clients like that, especially in b2b, I just did a keynote for DHL, the supply side of their business and they too, are doing fascinating things. I’m also really intrigued by some of the early early adopters in healthcare, Cleveland Clinic, I’m in a great admirer of Cleveland Clinic. There’s some other really wonderful things going on in health care in many areas. The Mayo Clinic for example, knows it and spend enough time thinking about it, that a testing equipment or whatever scares children, patients, so they hide it behind pictures and walls, you know, so it’s just this eruption of people being human and rethinking how they build buildings, how they bring a child into an operating room, how they…. there’s a there’s a whole movement in Canada where they’ve hired designers to redesign hospital gowns for really sick teenagers so that they can have some personality at a time in their life, of being who they are is really important to them. And a lot of these are in my book called Would You Do That To Your Mother? And I applaud that, I applaud the disruptive nature of what they’re doing to say, we can’t keep going on as business as usual.

 

James Nathan 33:47 There’s so much we can learn from each business and it’s often such a blinkered process when they don’t when you talk about things like that, I think well, you know, I was working with a law firm who had a lot of families coming in and one of the things I do is look after the kids. So we looked at how we did that you know, and learn learn from Pizza Express, a little book and some fresh crayons and a nice hat to wear makes a hell of a difference to a little kid. So much like that we can do isn’t there.

 

Jeanne Bliss 34:14 And then even in law firms, what we’re finding is even the mechanics of businesses like that, that have been so entrenched in how they write a contract and how they have conversations. So much of it is around the process of the law versus the goal of the human, right? And so we’re finding in those very…. they should be deep relationship businesses that have been overtaken with process. If you just switch it to start with the life and the goal, the process will still kick in but it feels completely different.

 

James Nathan 34:52 And that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the thing we talk about is how it feels to it’s not what we got from it.

 

Jeanne Bliss 34:57 That’s right.

 

James Nathan 34:59 We could talk or And I think if I let myself I probably will. I’d love you to leave us though Jeanne, with your one big thing, one big Golden Nugget, something that businesses could do today to make their businesses better for today and better for the years to come. What would that be?

 

Jeanne Bliss 35:16 You know, I think just put in your put in your mind, I’m going to give you two things, that you have the power to improve lives. That your work is to improve a life, to earn the right…. And that’s this other thing you need to earn it, you can’t go get it or take it. You need to earn the right for somebody to say, because I was with them, here’s how my life or my day was better. To help people evaluate where they are in how they’re being remembered. And in recognizing it’s not just about wacky modelling problems away but the behaviours and how you do your work. I have a quiz at the top of my website it says quiz. And it’s broken into the four categories of leadership. And so I’d encourage you to go on there and take that quiz and see where you are in improving lives.

 

James Nathan 36:13 Fantastic. And what are all the details if your links and what have you will be below this podcast file but it you know, it’s been so lovely talking to you. Thank you so, so much for your time and all the great thoughts you’ve given us too

 

Jeanne Bliss 36:27 Thank you and and it’s a pleasure to talk to you and all the best to you and your family and your clients and what a joy. Thanks so much for having me, James.