Today I’m pleased to bring you another guest post by Sarah Simon.

This post marks another installment in my series on lessons from the high country.

Beautiful morning, what could go wrong?
It’s a beautiful June day in the rugged Indian Peaks of Colorado.  The snow pack lingering from the previous winter sits several feet deep in many spots as we hike toward the day’s objective.  At 12,814 feet / 3,906 meters, Mount Neva is not a particularly tall mountain by Colorado standards, but her northeast cirque is graced by numerous couloirs, ribbons of snow that tantalize the climber from her base to her summit.  Not long after passing Lake Dorothy (12,061 feet / 3,676 meters), the snow becomes constant, and we stop to don crampons.  Soon we stand at the apron to Juliet Couloir, ready to climb.  Surely mine wasn’t the only heart beating a little faster!

Exiting the couloir

Our team begins the steady climb up the couloir, breathing harder as the slope angle increases, taking turns on lead.  We fall into a steady, comforting kick-step rhythm – plunge the alpine ax into the snow, then kick right, kick left.  Repeat.  We continue this way, sweating in the spring sunshine, until at last a sudden steepening of the snow and bright sunlight indicate we’ve hit the top of the route.  One by one we pop out onto the summit plateau to wobble in blocky boots and crampons across the boulders to the summit of Mount Neva.  Though I’ve stood on the summits of hundreds of mountains, the elation for me of reaching the top is never diminished.  This is my high, what I live for, the reason I wake on weekend mornings before dawn to run myself to exhaustion by Monday.

Before long, we begin our descent down the face of the mountain.  Tiring of down-climbing blocky and potentially unstable large boulders, we opt as a team to traverse to a snow field.  Three team members successfully face-in downclimb the snow when suddenly the man to my immediate right just disappears from the slope! He tumbles and summersaults down the steep slope before skidding to a rest at the bottom where the snow levels out.  My heart is pounding.  Beside me, where once Stephen stood calmly waiting his turn to descend, I see only bare, smooth, wet rock.  Great.  This changes things for sure!

The three of us remaining on the mountainside ponder our options, and then decide to climb thin, steep snow above where Stephen was just whisked away.  As I face into the mountain for my short traverse and downclimb, the snow it seems is getting softer and less-supportive by the minute, and I remember thinking: This has got “stupid” written all over it.  Becoming convinced that the soft, rotten snow will give way, I briefly weigh my options: Downclimb on foot and wait to be surprised (like Stephen!) when the rotten snow goes out from under me, or voluntarily become one with the slope, sit down, and glissade.   I opt for what I intend to be a controlled slide on my back-side down the mountain.  Unfortunately, things get out of control quickly.  The ride gets bumpy and I pick up speed rapidly – in fact, my GPS later reveals my top speed during this incident in excess of 17 mph / 28 kph.  Training kicks in instinctually, and I promptly try rolling over and arresting my slide, but my ax is not going to stick; it slices through the early afternoon snow like a hot knife through warm butter.  One more time I try to self-arrest to no avail – the soft slush provides no purchase.  And so I resign myself to riding this out, zipping downhill so quickly that my sunglasses fly off my face.

Thrill of victory, agony of defeat

At the bottom of the slope, I come to a stop.  I am breathing heavily, but surmise that I’m fine.  I amble back up hill a few yards to retrieve my sunglasses, then return, laughing, to my team when I notice blood in the snow.  Blood?  Immediately, I think of Stephen and check on him – but he’s fine.  My climbing partners become agitated, pointing at me: Your arm!  Your arm!  I then see blood running from a deep cut to my left forearm.  A retired doctor and a nurse both rush to investigate.  “Don’t worry, honey, that’s just your fat cells sticking out of the cut,” the nurse remarks in a matter of fact tone.  Huh?  As my team tends to my wound, I slowly realize that things could have been much, much worse.  Hurtling out of control down a steep slope of softened snow with a sharp alpine tool in-hand is not a very good scenario, and I have, in fact, been quite lucky to have escaped worse injury.  I walk away with my team to return to the trailhead, sense of humor intact, grateful to have escaped getting badly hurt and resolved to apply the lessons learned today to future outings.

Crime scene diagram

 Applying this to Customer Experience
Despite our best intentions, things will “go sideways” in our customer experience initiatives. Sometimes we take every precaution, and things go wrong.  Other times we are rushed, poorly informed, or imprudent – and suffer the consequences.  Either way, no one – not even the most cautious and meticulous among us – can expect an incident-free customer experience effort.  Response rates to voice of customer surveys stubbornly stick in the single digits.  Colleagues question the validity of our insights.  A customer service hiccup devolves into a painfully-public social media conflagration.  A business unit owner refuses to buy-in to making the change necessary to improve his team’s performance.  A once-trusted colleague attempts to sabotage our efforts out of spite.  Our budget is cut.  We lose a valued team-member.  A key executive sponsor retires.

We cannot always control events that unfold and prevent bad things from happening, not even in our neatly-designed voice of customer and customer experience programs.  What matters most is how we react whe
n things do go wrong.  Do we panic, lash out, blame others, and let our efforts get derailed?  Or do we keep our focus, isolate and address the issue at hand, and promise to learn from the situation to apply hard-won lessons in the future, becoming a stronger professional in the process?

Customer experience initiatives are full of surprises, and many of us operate our programs with limited experience and no best practices to draw from.  By staying calm, keeping perspective, and even retaining our sense of humor, we can weather these inevitable problems we encounter when things seem to get out of hand.  Looking back, we’ll sense that what seemed like a CX / VoC disaster was really just a speed bump on our road to improving the customer experience.  Expect – and accept – the challenges that arise in this industry.  Things will go sideways.  It’s how you respond to these events that matters most.

Sarah Simon is a career insights professional with 16 years of experience in the feedback industry. Specialties include VoC architecture, journey mapping, developing linkages to business performance, reduction of customer defection, results analysis and communication, with expert survey design skills.  She is the survivor of a botched early-generation “big data mining” operation and is happy to live to tell about it. 

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