Customer Experience Conversations: The Morning Huddle

Tagged with: Leadership Training, Team Building

Customer Experience

Customer Experience is all about perception – how your customers are perceiving the way your company treats you, and how those perceptions affect their behaviors and drive their loyalty. So clearly, Customer Experience is critical to any company’s success, and to make a meaningful impact on the way your brand is perceived begins with conversations. Our guest today is David Avrin, and his new book -- The Morning Huddle: Powerful Customer Experience Conversations to Wake You Up, Shake You Up and Win More Business! is all about these conversations. Here, he explains:

  • The role of conversation in creating Customer Experience;
  • How companies benefit from frequent Morning Huddles;
  • The difference between "innovation" from "disruption"; and
  • A sample of his favorite conversation starters!


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The Morning Huddle

  • The Morning Huddle began as a video series that featured Mr. Avrin speaking on the changing business landscape, every Monday morning. 
  • Mr. Avrin has seen companies take advantage of the book’s content and utilize it in creative ways that allow multiple people to start and catalyze the conversation meetings and gain valuable leadership experience while doing so.
    • The Morning Huddle is meant to inspire leaders to take a deep dive into very specific points and is meant to be actionable.

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Conversation’s Role In Building Customer Experience

  • We create policies and procedures and a “customer journey” including how customers will learn about, intact with, research, and buy from our company.
  • This creates a level of predictability in the customer experience - but the problem with that is that it creates such a rigid process that it can often avoid leaving room for adjustment and growth.
  • With a conversational environment, employees are able to voice concerns that customers have had or concerns that have been brought up internally. 
  • Ongoing conversation is an extremely important part of customer experience as a whole.
    • Even if employees do not have any direct connection with customers, they are still part of the customer experience process when they are able to be a part of the conversation on how to improve the process.

How Morning Huddles Improve Customer Experience

  • Morning Huddles are all about “scheduling serendipity.”
  •  The overall goal is to guard against irrelevance and future-proof your business.
  • “Don’t wait for others to disrupt and shake up your industry - you do it!” 
    • Conversation sparks creative solutions and ideas to improve the customer experience and frequent Morning Huddles will allow that conversation to take place often.
  • Groups for Morning Huddles can vary in size from company to company.
    • Some only have two people, others may involve every employee and leader within a company, and others may have different branches/locations that all have their own morning huddles separately. 
  • The videos that Mr. Avrin publishes are typically only about 5-10 minutes long and they are meant to jumpstart the conversation within that group.
  • The book allows entrepreneurs who might not have others to meet with but still want to engage with the content.
  • A Morning Huddle should spark important conversations that positively impact customer experience processes.

Benefits Of Engaging In Frequent Morning Huddles

  • First and foremost, we engage our team.
  • Next, we are staying current.
    • There are many products out there that no longer exist today even though they were introduced recently.
    • The life cycle of products today is much shorter than ever before.
  • We should always be challenging ourselves to streamline business procedures and be innovative.
    • “Disruption happens to you, innovation you do to yourself”

Goals For Conversations

  • Mr. Avrin claims the benchmark he used for his video content was whether or not it passed the “duh” test. 
    • This meant that he was focused on creating content that was interesting, thought-provoking, and actionable rather than content that people would roll their eyes at because it was common knowledge - this keeps participants engaged and innovation top of mind. 
    • Topics also need to be relevant to the company and situation - creating the awareness for when a similar situation arises and understanding how to handle that in the future.
  • These conversations are not “touchy-feely,” they are specific and actionable discussions that should lead to improvements throughout the customer experience. 

How Long Should These Conversations Be?

  • It only takes about 8-10 minutes to read a chapter of the book or watch one of the videos, but the actual duration of the meeting depends on the company and situation. 
    • Some companies meet for 15 minutes, others meet for an hour. 
  • If the conversation becomes long and arduous, people will become disengaged and not want to participate.
  • Mr. Avrin leaves it up to leaders to decide how long their conversations go. 
  • Conversations can take twists and turns that lead to even better results than expected and can affect the length of the meeting for the better.

Great Conversation Starters

  • Some of Mr. Avrins favorite conversation starters include:
    • How often do we throw our coworkers under the bus?
      • If a mistake was made in the customer experience process by an individual, are we singling out that individual to the customer when it really does not matter?
    • How often do we see humanity in a transaction?
      • At the heart of all customer experience transactions, there is a person. Showing compassion is vital.
    • Are we conscious of the fact that someone is always watching?
      • Today, just about everything is being watched, recorded, or documented, so are we aware of that and acting accordingly?
  • All of these conversation starters look to improve the customer experience for not only the customer, but the internal employees as well.

Resistance To Customer Experience Conversations

  • In most cases, people are almost always resistant on the front end.
  • Motivation and understanding of the importance of these meetings comes from the leadership within a company.
    • These cannot be treated like “just another meeting.” They have to be stressed as being so much more important than that.
  • Early engagement will make a world of difference in these meetings gaining traction within the company.
  • This is a collaborative and productive setting where everyone should feel like their voice can be heard. 

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David Avrin Background

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