Lendlease

Bradly Sax

Customer Experience Builder

Bradly possesses over three decades of experience in operational leadership and as a Customer Experience (CX) leader driving customer success and implementing operational excellence principles across diverse industries. Currently serving as Vice President of Customer Experience & Strategy at Lendlease, where he successfully launched a Customer Strategy and Experience function that has brought customer-centric initiatives across cross-functional teams which have significantly improved both customer and business outcomes.

Bradly's extensive career also includes over a decade of leadership as the Global Director of Customer Experience and Operational Excellence at Delaware North, where he spearheaded the development of a comprehensive customer experience strategy that impacted half a billion annual customer transactions. He has also served as a leading CX and OpEx consultant and is a frequent speaker on the Principles of CX.

Defining Customer Experience

The term “Customer Experience” is often used to describe customer-focused software, activities, or initiatives like voice of the customer (VOC) programs, customer relationship management (CRM) programs, or activities like customer journey mapping or other customer related individual initiatives.

The idea of a CX practice seems to have been a natural evolution from business concepts like “the customer is always right, “take care of your associates and they will take care of the customer,” and “putting the customer first.” These simple ideas have been the foundation of customer-centric organizations like Marriott, Ritz Carlton and Nordstroms for decades that drove how they operated their business. Demonstrating that CX is less about the activities we often associate with CX Management and more about how business leadership focusses on running an excellent, customer focused operation.

In some ways, CX became the buzzword of the day a few years back. Businesses jumped on the bandwagon, hiring CX teams, starting VOC programs and creating journey maps of how their customer interacted with their business. Unfortunately, today, I am noticing shrinking CX teams, questions about ROI and stagnant improvements to customer, associate and business outcomes at many organizations.

Not to mention the declines that are occurring in the United States in consumer satisfaction. Maybe, as some suggest it is the results of greater customer expectations, increasingly competitive competitors, or outdated customer success measurement methods? The truth remains that consumer satisfaction tanked during Covid, improved “post Covid” (it couldn’t get worse), but now consumer satisfaction is in a decline yet again. Is the cause the consumer or is it our practices? Or both?

A leadership approach that is obsessed with customer outcomes and operates at a level of excellence. These obsessed leaders constantly measure customer outcomes and OpEx metrics, they talk about them, live them, compensate based on them and lead every discussion and meeting with them.

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The Principles of CX Success are first, a focus on great LEADERSHIP across the organization especially those that supervise the teams on the front line. Your focus on practices to hire the right leaders, train them, give them the needed tools to succeed and entrust them to care for the customer and to do the right thing by the customer by empowering them are all key to supporting strong leadership.

A focus on ASSOCIATE and engaging them to the extent that they do more for themselves, the customer and the business is a key driving force to CX success. Investing in their development and growth, empowering them and holding leaders accountable for associate engagement is paramount to success. Your team member did not just show up one day with a uniform. It is the business that recruited them, interviewed them, hired them, trained them (or not) and prepared them for their work responsibilities, to support them and engages them in their work. A disengaged workforce is a result of poor leadership.

Creating WIN/WIN PATNERSHIPS is often neglected by executives. But it is also a key of success. Business leaders can’t just bully suppliers, vendors and partners with their buying power without care as to the outcome for the vendor? I can tell you a lot of organizations had a rude awakening when the supply chain issues of a few years ago popped up and their supplier decided that the little supply of widgets they had were going to your competitor.

After your focus on your leadership, associates, partnership and leading excellent operations dive deep into CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT (CXM) activities with a strong and capable CX team that understand that the best CX is running a great business - first. All the CX activity in the world can’t make up for a poorly run business. Understand how you can put CXM activities and practices into place that build on your great operation. Assess customer, associate and partner experiences with your organization, identify where gaps exist and then focus on corrective actions to make the experience better.

Technology has helped improve customer outcomes by advancing the ease at which CX teams can accomplish things like gaining customer feedback or journey mapping. In fact, most organization I speak with have more data than they know what to do with. Leading CX technology can focus on turning data into insights and insights into action.

Great business, customer, associate and partner outcomes are derived out of operating your organization from a place of centricity to and excellence for these cohorts. You may not get far in improving metrics if your teams are under-developed, underfunded and lack engagement due to poor leadership. As usual the success of business rest in its leaders, philosophies and principles. Don’t blame outside influences like staffing challenges, increasing consumer expectations, or tough competitors. Look inward. Is your business operating at its best with the best intentions and are you focused on the basic principles.