Interview Mike Wittgenstein Measuring itself makes businesses better

Mike Wittenstein gets to the heart of customer experience. Here, the renowned speaker and customer experience pioneer talks to Questback about customer storytelling, proactive feedback, and removing the barriers to great CX.

Storytelling is a powerful tool for businesses today

Not only does it change how people feel about your product or service, but it also changes how customers feel about you. How they interact with you. And, most importantly – whether they come back to you.

Being able to create and tell your own story, then, should be high on your priority list.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Wittenstein of Storyminers – the godfather of customer storytelling.

In this interview, he shows you:

• Why it’s important to be authentic
• The business and personal barriers to a great customer experience
• The simple reason feedback should be proactive and not reactive
• Why you should never teach a pig to sing (yeah, you read that right).

Enter Mike…

Hey Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. You’re high up on the list of people our audience wants to hear from – it must feel great to have such an impact on the way so many people approach their customers?

That’s kind of you to say, and it does feel good, but I’m just one guy.

The real heroes are the tens and hundreds of thousands of front-line people touching customers, patients, guests, passengers, and clients every single day.

What happens on the front lines is what really gives birth to word-of-mouth and helps brands thrive. I’m really excited that customer experience is mainstream now.

When I started in 1999, it was just a faint idea; now it’s what everyone expects from the brands that serve them!

Your slogan is, „Gets to the heart.“ Do you think that’s something businesses don’t show their customers enough – the heart behind their brand?

You’re absolutely right.

Showing your brand’s authenticity (by letting your people show theirs) is part of it.

For that to happen, leaders have to get comfortable demonstrating this trait and not letting business processes punish people for being themselves. It’s easy to say and harder to do. I’m encouraged by the much greater number of companies that have taken on the challenge!

When it comes to client work, Gets to the Heart usually translates to creating more value for customers. That, in turn, fuels word-of-mouth, a brand’s reputation, and higher sales.

The other part of Gets to the Heart is about finding the right things to focus on. Choosing the right feedback tools can make a significant difference in how businesses gather insights and improve customer experience. Using the right feedback solution can drive measurable success.

What do you think the biggest challenges to ‚getting to the heart‘ are for businesses? And how can they overcome them?

In my opinion, the greatest challenge in getting to a customer’s heart is authenticity.

The brand has to communicate with a true and pure voice. It also has to make promises that the business can keep. Employees need to be ‚present‘ in the moment and establish quick and lasting connections with those whom they serve.

The business challenges include:

• Outdated processes that steal front-line employees‘ time, which they could be spending with customers
• A culture of sales before service (it should be service before sales)

Personal challenges include:

• Talking to customers instead of with them
• Not listening enough
• The inability to create a helpful context for answering customers‘ questions

One of the best ways to overcome all of these challenges at once is to use illustrators to draw pictures or professional actors to act out scenes of feasible experience scenarios.

This way, everyone can become involved, see for themselves how a designed experience comes across, and then offer their ideas on how to make it even better.

There’s a lot of mention in your work about storytelling. How does it impact the customer experience?

Sometimes, stories don’t just impact the customer experience. They are the customer experience.

Here’s what I mean:

When a customer enjoys the experience you offer them, they translate it into a story to share with their friends, colleagues, co-workers, family, etc. That story is based, in part, on the clues you have put into the experience and on the discoveries someone makes around them.

When the story is shared, clues intact, the friend or colleague receives it as an experience. They actually live in the experience you had through the story you share.

It’s important to design experiences with the right clues so that the stories get told well—and retold well. This is where a strategic approach to feedback solutions becomes essential, as choosing the wrong feedback system can lead to common pitfalls.

Do you think feedback—either customer or employee—can help refine a company’s story?

I think that feedback should be part of service design right from the start, not an afterthought.

I’m seeing more research businesses starting to offer near real-time, operationally actionable data (even advice) to their clients.

For example:

Atlanta-based VOC systems have a guest feedback system that lets people leave a message, about anything good or bad, to their hotel’s general manager.

The message is transcribed by software, checked for accuracy by a human, coded for emotion, and sent immediately to the person at the hotel who can handle the guest’s issue right away. This shift towards real-time, actionable insights is transforming how companies evaluate their return on investment (ROI) from feedback solutions, making it easier to assess the true value of feedback initiatives.

How do you think the impact you’re having on customers can be measured? Do you find Net Promoter Score to still be relevant?

In my opinion, debating which of the existing measurement tools is best will take us down a dead end.

Any business that measures itself honestly will get better.

What’s missing – and I hope someone is working on this – are measures of the value a customer gets from working with a company, organization, or brand.

Most corporate attention is on how much we made and how much we saved. But what about the customer? How much time did we save them? How much effort can they avoid wasting? Are they feeling more secure, hopeful, happy, or any number of other emotions?

Your company, Storyminers, has a history of experience and service design innovations. What are you working on now?

Human Prototyping™ is our latest offering.

Simply, it’s a service that designs other services and experiences. Clients are using it to discover, design, and refine their signature customer experiences (as well as new revenue streams and cost savings opportunities).

We’ve discovered a palpable magic when you mix experience/service designers with professional actors. Everything gets so real. Leadership teams that embrace transformation and innovation are paving the way for the future, as discussed in expert-led webinars on leadership transformation.

Mike, I really appreciate your time today. One final question—what’s the best piece of feedback you’ve ever been given?

Marge Bell was my boss when I worked one summer at Martin Marietta Aerospace. She taught me two things:

The first one was, „You can’t teach a pig to sing. It won’t work, and it will piss off the pig!“

The more important one was this—“Find out what it takes to make someone else’s job easier and do it.“

It took me several tries to truly understand the value of that, but it finally clicked. I’ve used that gold nugget ever since.