Seasoned CX leader and Customer Experience Design Partner with Verizon Business Group, Michelle Morris, shares insights from her rich and varied career in customer experience. Michelle helped shape one of the earliest formalized customer experience organizations in corporate America and has led CX teams at global brands from across a diverse array of industries. Michelle and show host, Julia, dive into the critical success factors for making CX change “stick”, approaches for calculating the ROI of CX including what Michelle calls the “4-R model”, and some ideas for those who are interested in pursuing a career in CX.  If you’re looking for some insight, inspiration and practical advice from an acclaimed CX leader who has been working in this field about as long as anyone can say they have, then this episode is for you.

Expert insights

Michelle is a Customer Experience Design Partner with Verizon Business Group.  In this role, she helps Verizon's business customers create better customer experiences for their customers. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) as well as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (LSSBB). Prior to joining Verizon, she led multiple CX organizations and has received many awards for her work in CX, including the esteemed CX Impact Award for Outstanding Practitioner in 2014, as well as the CX Innovation Award for her unique work titled, Pay It Forward – Improvements in CX through Employee Engagement. Her work has been cited in more than 20 industry publications including a featured case study by Forrester, "The CX Transformation Success Secrets of Crowe", May 22, 2019. Michelle is currently serving as a board member for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) board since January of 2020. Although her passion today is in Customer Experience, her roots as a Chemical Engineer with 6 patents adds innovation, creativity and passion to her work.

Michelle Morris, CCXPMichelle has been working in CX roles just about as long as anyone can say that they have. She established the CX organization at the laser printing and imaging company Lexmark in 2008, and went on to do award winning work at the accounting firm Crowe before moving to Verizon. It's a pleasure to hear insights from someone who has been leading formalized CX teams for as long as Michelle has. If you'd like to learn more about Michelle's work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights about customer experience, the CXPA, and much more.The key to customer-centric transformation

During her career, Michelle has seen the field of CX evolve, but the foundational critical success factors for meaningful CX change have remained a constant. CX transformation is still a lengthy process for most large or established businesses, and Michelle cited leadership support as one of three critically important components for the success of customer-centric transformation.

If your CEO, your board or the leadership of your company isn't really investing and caring about customer experience, then you're beating your head against a wall because you're not going to make a lot of progress.

Michelle added that it's possible to win over the hearts and minds of senior leaders, but that it can be incredibly time consuming. If embarking on a campaign to win hearts and minds, CX leaders need to bring in solid change management principles and understand what motivates leaders. Also, don't underestimate the power of a little peer pressure to help rally unified support.Michelle highlighted grassroots support for CX as a second key success factor. Everyone in the organization needs to believe in the mission that the organization is there to create great experiences for customers. Communication and employee education can be effective ways to get the message across, but there should also be mechanisms to engage employees and reinforce the right behaviors. While at Crowe,