Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne learned about humanity in business by watching her Dad in his Buster Brown shoe store in Des Plaines, Illinois. He “shoe’d” a generation of children, and their children’s children, and the memory of his care for not only for the tiny little feet, but for moms and legions of families he cared for over the years, earned him a place in the story of their lives. So much so, that when he retired a line of people THREE-BLOCKS LONG stood to tell him how buying shoes would never be the same. The foundation of “Experience” is MEMORY creation. The admired companies start here. They focus on how their people, actions and overall behavior of their company establishes how they’ll be remembered. Knowing how you want people to remember you, building how you will deliver those memories, and then living those characteristics and behaviors yields what Jeanne Bliss describes as prosperity of the human spirit and financial prosperity.

In this keynote the audience will learn both the art and science of delivering memories that will make people stand in line for your experience, your product and your people. Learn how to make memory creation the currency of your brand, and how to elevate your company to delivering moments that pull people toward you and make your people into MEMORY MAKERS.

Just HOW do you go about earning customer-driven growth? What’s different about leadership, motivation, communication and accountability in a transformed “customer” company….and how do they get there? This keynote will answer those questions and demystify that path for you. It is based on Jeanne’s 25 years as a Chief Customer Officer, her experiences coaching over 20,000 executives the content in her seminal book, Chief Customer 2.0 and her Podcast interviews with over 200 Global Chief Customer Officers.

In this keynote, Jeanne outlines her 5-steps necessary to successfully lead a customer experience transformation. She will guide you on embedding these competencies to get into action quickly with a united leadership team, outlining her five-competency framework that has launched and advanced the customer experience transformation in businesses around the world.

“Experience” without HUMANITY is just a bunch of tactics. This keynote is a fast-track lift-off for your customer experience efforts inspiring your audience to include the often-overlooked critical element of transformation: understanding the human at the end of your decisions. The most admired companies who earn ardent admirers and organic growth angst over who these people are, how they live their lives, and understand their goals. They build respect, honor and trust into their operating model and with their people. And they are celebrated for how they show up as people, and for the care, the thoughtfulness and the humanity that they have woven into their operating model.

In this keynote, adapted from Jeanne’s book, Would You Do that To Your Mother?!, you work with Jeanne in collaboration to customize your content for your audience. Together you select the case studies in each of the four areas that define the lives of their customers. As a result, your audience will receive a path for actions they can take immediately, often with very little investment, rather than a shift in attitude and commitment to act. This is a fast-paced and uplifting ride of the reality of the lives of our customers, blended with turning on “aha!” moments to get people motivated and moving.

“Experience” in its purest form…is Leadership BRAVERY. It is Leadership Bravery in making choices that enable your people to rise. It is clearly knowing and living conscience-led decisions about what you will and will not do, to grow. It is leaders who model behaviors honoring customers and employees – that everyone can model across your entire organization. And it is honoring customers’ lives in how you enable them to achieve their goals, make them feel honored and respected, and in the end…earn their admiration for how you conduct yourself in business, and for the kind of people you are. This yields what Jeanne Bliss calls “Admirable Growth.” This growth fuses people to you. It raises your employees and it elevates your company in the marketplace. It establishes the legacy for how you’ll be remembered.

In this keynote learn the 5 key acts of LEADERSHIP BRAVERY that drive this powerful type of growth few companies achieve. Travel with Jeanne as she guides your audience on a tour of the behaviors and actions of leaders where entire companies who are freed, celebrated and guided to follow a course that raises the spirit of their people and elevates them to do more and achieve more than their competitors. And learn how you can find your path to this type of admirable and prosperous growth and legacy.

Audiences love nothing more than authentic, transparent, real-time talk about the issues that are shaping their work and their lives. Since 2002, Jeanne has guided over 20,000 strategic conversations with leaders in almost every business vertical to better understand their customers’ experiences, and the value of knowing that improving lives should be at the core of every company’s mission. Bring your audience into this idea-rich conversation between Jeanne and one of your leaders, to explore the opportunities that each person in your organization has to improve the lives of your customers, and ultimately inspire customers to become the army that makes your organization known and beloved in the marketplace. If you are already doing a keynote with Jeanne, it’s her pleasure to add this in as her gift, time-permitting.

When Jeanne transforms her traditional keynote into a virtual experience, she breaks her content up into segments with variations for customer interaction between each segment. From an Experience Scavenger Hunt (on other company websites) to polling, to breakout rooms or collaborative workshopping, she is making sure that her content is mixed with engagement.

She can also pre-record her keynote presentation and then do a Live Deep Dive conversation to unpack the content further in real-time and truly engage the hearts and minds of the viewing audience. Here Jeanne can go deep on the topic and takeaways, or even blend the executive fireside chat after each segment to bring out what the company is doing for that segment. The key is no long stretches of just one-way speaking.

This program is designed with company leaders, and content is delivered in concert with company leaders to be able to go in depth on transformation, key initiatives to drive growth, culture and customer experience. Participants are sent to a customized landing page to take Jeanne’s quiz beforehand, the results of which are presented by company leaders in their portion of the virtual event. This program is between 2.5-3hrs and is a true deep dive experience that leaves viewers with an actionable Path Forward for truly remarkable customer experience opportunities. Jeanne delivered this program with great success for Arch Insurance in June 2020 and their Executive Vice President of Strategy and Distribution offered this praise: “Jeanne, thanks so much for your massive contributions to our session! I echo Simon’s comments about how meaningful your presence was and the impact it made on the conference (and I expect beyond the conference!). You look so comfortable with the virtual format and technology!”

This is a series of three one-hour session bundles that can be tied to Jeanne’s current content around the 5 Competencies to lead a Customer Experience Transformation, especially given the disruption that the global pandemic has caused in every business. These are valuable for both internal company efforts, as well as companies who want to add value to their clients by delivering thought leadership and direction direct to their clients. This is a value-add program because Jeanne basically applies her consulting thought leadership to guide these sessions. Many B-B companies do this quite successfully and this is the kind of program that Jeanne delivered with great success for SalesForce’s top clients in March of 2020 right as quarantine hit, and the program was so successful that they brought Jeanne back for additional sessions in July. SalesForce’s Senior Director of Executive Programs Jay Thayer offered this praise for Jeanne: “Jeanne is a truly incredible partner who trailblazed the shift to virtual executive engagement with us in the most collaborative way possible. Her ability to help customers navigate their business in these unprecedented times was both empathetic and empowering.”

This approach is quite successful as leaders are guiding their companies forward. Jeanne works with the leadership to plan an orchestrated conversation to show the very human, thoughtful and deliberate approach leaders have for guiding their employees and customers in this new reality we are all living in. This is a Fireside Chat that Jeanne moderates, which is invaluable given her consulting experience as well as her experience hosting over 200 episodes of her acclaimed Podcast: the Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape show, which features incredible C-Suite leaders sharing ideas about bold and successful customer experience strategies.