Frontline Magic Podcast

How do you become a top CX leader in 2023 like Alaska Airlines? It starts with leadership and building a culture for top customer experience.

Learn more strategy tips from Susanne Axelsson’s interview with Travis Gelbrich Managing Director of Guest Experience and Loyalty at Alaska Airlines.

Travis has spent his entire career leading customer service teams or focused on improving the customer experience. He is currently the Managing Director of Guest Experience & Loyalty at Alaska Airlines. This includes leading the company's efforts to improve the customer experience as well as Alaska's award winning mileage plan and credit card. In previous roles at Alaska Airlines, Travis has supported the company's >5,000 flight attendants and 1,400 contact center agents.

Prior to joining Alaska Airlines, Travis spent 20 years in the tech industry working for Microsoft. There he held leadership roles in customer service and customer advocacy. Travis is also a certified customer experience professional from the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).

Stacy Armijo is the Chief Experience Officer at Amplify Credit Union. She believes that reputations are built on experiences, not intentions. That's why she's passionate about tying together the promises we make as marketers, employers, and leaders with the experiences brands deliver to customers, employees and communities.

Follow Stacy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacyarmijo/

Tom DeWitt, Ph.D. is the Director of CXM@MSU at Michigan State University and a fixed-term faculty member in the Department of Marketing of the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. In that role, he is dedicated to advancing customer experience management globally by helping formalize and develop a framework for the field For more than a decade Dr. DeWitt has provided customer experience management solutions to organizations and audiences around the world through consulting, workshops and presentations. Prior to joining academia, Tom enjoyed a career in the hospitality industry, where he served in senior management roles in the USA and Asia.

Follow Dr. DeWitt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-dewitt-ph-d-5076093/

Meet Samantha Gadd a founder, business leader, and employee experience (EX) expert, based in New Zealand. For 10 years Samantha has been leading the way in EX thinking through growing the largest HR & EX consulting business in NZ, Humankind, and more recently launching EX Design School - a global community of EX Designers.

Having worked with hundreds of organisations, advising leaders on how to design compelling and meaningful EX to achieve better business outcomes, Samantha is an expert in how to use co-design as a way forward in today's world of work. It has never been harder to be a people and organisation leader - employees need & expect more from their workplaces. Samantha believes that using EX design is the only way to meet these needs while driving strong organisation outcomes.

Follow Samantha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samanthagadd/

Some key lessons Doug and Susanne dive into:

• The importance of frontline workers having a seat at the table.
• Showing appreciation and recognition to your frontline workers
• Approaching business like you're collecting friendships and then it doesn't feel like a job.

Some of Jill's awesome advice for CX leaders:

• The core of a great employee and customer experience is to transform what otherwise would be a cold transaction into an interaction in order to create those relationships.

• Try starting every single morning (before you do anything else) and answer these three questions. Today, I will focus on ___. I am grateful for ___. Today I will let go of ___.
• If you're not creating a connection culture, you're not gonna attract talent, you're not gonna be the employer of choice.
• Create leaders at every single level of your organization AND you do this by empowering them with a mix of education, engagement, entrusting and empathy.
• Make your people feel like they are truly a part of your organization and that they are responsible for your success or your failure by following the

Listen to the full interview for more advice and don't forget to join our community!

The BIG idea:

Emotional intelligence is a must-have skill for successful managers. Sandra talked both about what it is and why businesses who focus on it experience increased revenues and greater staff engagement, ultimately becoming industry leaders.

Let’s dive in:

You know the story well. A florist working late; a panicked call by a customer desperate for a bouquet to mark the occasion he’d accidentally forgotten about. In this particular instance, Sandra relates how the florist reassured the man that he wasn’t the only one who had rung up in a panic that day. She then presented a few clever options, including ringing around for a late-night delivery; delivering the next day; or even (if he needed her to) calling his partner and apologizing for forgetting to deliver the bouquet as ordered. After agreeing on next-day delivery, she went a step further and offered to make a note of all future special occasions for automatic floral delivery - taking care of any future relationship mishaps in one fell swoop.

She went the ‘extra mile’ - based on what’s known as emotional intelligence.

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