Customerland

If CX Is Everyone’s Job, Who Leads?

• mike giambattista • Season 3 • Episode 44

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Forget shiny tools. The real power in customer experience comes from simple, disciplined execution that customers actually feel: reliable delivery, fast issue resolution, and clear communication. We sit down with Lee Kemp, former VP of CX at Veritiv, to unpack how a military-forged mindset translates into practical CX leadership across supply chain, sales, IT, and finance. Lee explains why technology should only amplify a solid foundation, and how asking the right “obvious” questions can reframe stubborn assumptions without triggering defensiveness.

We walk through building metrics that matter, starting with familiar signals to align executives, then tying them to operational outcomes like on-time performance, order accuracy, first-contact resolution, and proactive updates. Lee shares a playbook for change management that avoids heroics: sponsor the right projects, let stakeholders own the wins, and keep the mission visible so teams see their role in the outcome. When resistance shows up, executive sponsorship becomes the accelerant, but staying power depends on delivering growth that leadership can see and trust.

ROI often trips teams up, so we break it down to credible indirect signals: reduced churn after onboarding fixes, higher repeat order rates with better communication, lower expedite costs from reliability gains, and faster cash through cleaner processes. Show your work, quantify trends, and be honest when something misses. That integrity builds influence for the next move. If you’re building CX in a complex B2B world—or trying to defend it to a skeptical CFO—this conversation offers practical steps to simplify, measure, and lead change that sticks. Subscribe, share with your team, and leave a review with your best “measure what matters” tip.

SPEAKER_01:

And it's just important that we continue to reassure all our fellow CXers out there that it doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to be an expert in the space. You just have to be willing to try. And you just have to have curiosity and ask the right questions to drive a positive impact for the business.

SPEAKER_00:

Today on Customer Land, I'm with Lee Kemp, who is VP of CX at Veritive. And you may be wondering why we've got uh Veritive on this particular podcast when you really don't deal a whole lot with supply chain, shipping, packaging, and those kinds of things. The answer is, as you'll hear in a moment, uh Lee's particular remit, what he does and where he comes from. So with that, Lee, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01:

No, I appreciate it. Uh really look forward to the conversation. Appreciate the opportunity to talk about all things CX. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

This should be fun. So uh would you mind just for a few minutes, just setting some context with what Veritive is, what you do there, and then maybe we can talk into how you got into your role there.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Uh, and that's that's a that's a good one. There's uh some fun story uh background on that. Uh, but at Verative, uh, we are leading specialty distributor of packaging facility solutions and print services. Uh, and so uh you think about uh whether it's corrugated uh you know packaging or uh stretch wrap, uh film, whatever it may be, uh, but really uh it's great to be in the B2B space where uh I argue that CX has a dramatic effect on the business. And uh it's really fun to see in real time the impact you can have on the growth of the business and the experience for the customers. Um how I found myself here, uh, interestingly enough, uh, was actually in my prior role with my last company, also a distribution company, chemical distribu uh distribution, uh, and we were in the midst of COVID. Uh, we were in the middle of a massive organizational uh business transformation. We had acquired our second largest competitor and we were going through an ERP conversion. Uh and at that time, our CEO said, we've got to focus on the customer and gave the opportunity for myself and a sales counterpart for us to then uh take that company and and really refocus our strategy around the customer and develop an entire CX program. Uh the funny part of it though is when they came to us, I said, What is CX? I mean, I know customer service. I understand those.

SPEAKER_00:

We don't want to admit that, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's I think it's real. I think so many CX practitioners find themselves in that position. Uh, they do something else different today, right? Or tomorrow. And and so uh they they get this opportunity and they have to go and learn some of the basics. Get as familiar as you can around the CX discipline. What are the different tools and techniques and best practices? Uh but we we accomplished a lot in a very short period of time. And then fast forward to getting a phone call for an opportunity to come here to Verative that I simply couldn't refuse to uh not just influence the CX strategy, but also to have the muscle within the organization to be able to help run the business. Uh so here at Veritive, I'm now blessed with uh our customer solutions teams, uh, our customer success teams, as well as our onboarding and implementation, and have even stood up a CX operations group. So um, you know, again, to have that muscle uh to be able to drive more rapid change and not just influence without authority, but to be able to do the work uh has been a great experience and one that I'm very fortunate to be in.

SPEAKER_00:

I'd like to pull out a couple of things that surfaced during my exchange with your team leading up to this conversation. One, it's not even really a quote, it's probably more of a of a working theory. Uh but you said technology can enhance the experience, but only if the foundation is solid. The real challenge is that the stress isn't the strategy, it's the discipline to follow through, measure what matters, and align teams around shared values and KPIs. Um, I you can't tell because it's an audio medium, but we're both nodding in agreement on that. That there's a lot there. And I thought that's kind of where I'd love to camp out in this conversation. But I'd love to start that process by just talking through your early career because you spent some time in the military, and I'd love to hear how that informed your approach to what you're doing now.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it it was incredibly important, uh, absolutely foundational. Uh, and I think it all comes back to understanding that you may have your core job. You may be, for example, I was a chemical officer, uh, but I did very little of that. And so, in any unit, in any command, in any of uh in any organization you served in, you had to be able to do others' jobs. You had to be able to lead in any environment. Uh, you couldn't just say, well, I don't know how to do that. And so I think that is very applicable in CX. Uh, as a as a CX professional, uh, you have to understand supply chain. You have to understand IT, you have to understand finance, you have to understand sales. At any given time, you may be leading effort, sponsoring projects, driving change, right? Trying to deliver growth for the business in any of those fields, in any of those uh disciplines. And you don't get to just say, that's not my job, uh, because that's the quickest way to find yourself out of a job. Uh, and so if you're not delivering value in whatever the need is, whatever the opportunity is at the moment, um, then you're not you're not delivering value to the business. And I think that that was just so impactful for me from day one and throughout my military experience was you often had to work in a job, do something that you didn't necessarily know how to do incredibly well. But you had to go find the experts and you had to lead that uh that organization through that mission to get to the other side. I think another piece that's incredibly impactful is just understanding the mission. You have to have an insatiable curiosity around what is it you're trying to do. You have to not be afraid to ask the tough questions uh to go challenge the status quo. Uh and if you don't, you know, if you stop at the first answer you get, you're not going to get to the to the root cause or to the real truth. Uh and so, you know, something as simple as five lies, yeah, it's a basic, simple concept, but it's very different when you're having that conversation with someone who loves the job they're in in that moment and loves the process they're using and really likes the tools that they're using and thinks that everything is hunky-dory when in fact it's not. And you're coming in and, you know, who are you? And who do you think you are asking me these questions? Uh, you there's an art to that. Uh, and so I think that my early experience in the military definitely helped me hone some of those skills that have transferred very well into the CX space.

SPEAKER_00:

You said something a moment ago that it's about understanding the mission with relentless curiosity. Might be my words, but I think they were yours. Um, and I think that plays into a really important part of the original quote theme that we put out there, which is measuring what matters. And um, there are raging debates all throughout the CX space as to what really matters. What should we be going after? How do we build KPIs around that? But I'd love to hear in your world how you figured that out, not necessarily what they are now, but how you got to that, because that relentless curiosity can also get you into trouble if you don't know what you're doing with it.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And again, there's nothing that gets uh a senior leadership team or a CEO uh more riled up in the wrong direction, uh, maybe at the wrong person, than coming in and questioning the accuracy of metrics, the validity of KPIs. Uh and so it's uh you have to tread lightly uh a bit, right? But uh it's important that you do that. And again, I think it all comes down to asking questions. Uh I had a great uh boss uh who had perfected the art of asking questions. Uh, he would ask the most obvious questions in the middle of a meeting. And I'm thinking, he knows the answer. Why is he asking? And it was so that everyone had to say the answer out loud and recognize that the strategy we were advocating for, the direction we were going, may not actually be the right answer. Uh and so I think sometimes just by asking the right questions in the right way, uh, you can help those you're working with realize there might be a better approach. That maybe our metrics aren't all-encompassing, or maybe we're measuring the wrong thing. The other piece is uh none of the metrics matter if you're not measuring what actually matters to the customer. Not what matters to you. You know, I we all want to be innovators, we all want to be the best at what we do. But at the end of the day, what is uh the role of your company? What is the product or service that you're providing? And if you're not doing that well, uh then none of none of it matters. Uh, you can have all the greatest metrics out there, but if it's not delivering growth and delivering insurance experience for the customer, it doesn't matter. And so, to your point, a lot of raging debate around this, right? NPS is dead, and you know, you know, uh a lot of people saying, you know, stop, stop surveying customers and and all those kinds of things. We have to realize where we all are, where our company is in its maturity, uh, and where it's at within its market share, you know, are you delivering on the results that you've committed to? Are your customers happy or not? And if the the best way to spur that conversation with your senior leadership team is to talk about something as basic as NPS because they're familiar with it, then do it. Then love NPS, right? If that keeps people talking about the customer, do it. You know, I always say, you know, you do you, what whatever's going to work best for your business. The challenge is in solving for what that is and understanding how how hard can you push, how complex can you get. If you're in a far more mature business that's been using voice of customer and has a really solid CX strategy and you've invested things like customer journey mapping that is real, excuse me, really detailed, then fantastic. But you know, if you're not there, you know, we again we all have to recognize that uh a lot of our fellow CXers are with companies that are maybe just starting out in their CX journey. I hear that a lot when I talk to other CX practitioners. Uh, they're very early in the development of a CX strategy of talking about voice of customer. They're not gonna go get significant resources uh for whatever their latest crazy idea may be. They've got to focus on the basics. And so I think that's just where you've got to make sure it's the right KPIs that the business understands. You don't have to go reinvent the wheel. You don't have to come up with some fancy, you know, five, six-letter acronym for how to measure customer satisfaction. Uh, and I think that there's a lot of people who are trying to monetize their their space in CX. Uh I want to make it, I want to make it easier for everyone to be effective in CX. And I want to make sure that uh with you know, adveritative that anyone in my organization or any other leader in the business can easily talk about whatever it is we're doing in the CX space. If they can't, then I'm not doing a good job advocating for CX in a way that anyone else can go and advocate for while I'm not in the room.

SPEAKER_00:

There's an awful lot to unpack there. Um, one of the things that continues to strike me about conversations with folks in your position, is how much of your job description, maybe not written but assumed, has to do with the cross-departmental, cross-cultural efforts involved in change management, especially in CX, because because by nature, almost by definition, you're asking an organ organization to shift something, some things, some components of what they do. And change is hard. Um, leading change is especially hard. And I like to talk about that a little bit. Did, well, without getting too deeply into the weeds, at Veritiv, you've got a team there, you've got several teams. Um, assuming they're all marching in the right direction, following the way the direction they should go. But getting that early direction and momentum going can be really difficult. And I've talked to a number of CX practitioners who get stuck right there. So I'd love to hear from your standpoint. How do you how do you navigate that? How do you get the troops moving together in unison in the right direction?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, a few, a few things around that, you know, back to the the notion of job description, right? It's that, you know, all other duties assigned, that that magical bullet point at the end. Uh but if there's a job description out there around CX that isn't prioritizing change management, uh, it's not well written, right? It's missing the point. You know, I say all the time that CX simple leadership is hard. Uh, and it is very much that leadership. It is that change leadership. Uh you are often asking someone, you know, to move their cheese and they're not ready. Uh it does come down to the whiff'em, you know, what's in it for me. Uh, you've got to be able to communicate that, but also recognize that even then it's not going to get there. Uh, you know, you're still gonna have those that, uh, you know, as I always say, there's those that you could tell them they just won the lottery and they're still upset about paying the taxes, right? So there's there's nothing you can do to change that for some people. Uh and that's where it's important that you're you're a solid partner uh with your counterparts, uh that you are uh coming to help solve problems, right? Don't don't try to show up as the uh the knight in shining armor. Uh again, it's the subtle art of asking questions. It's helping them to realize the solution and then letting them run with it. Uh, if I'm doing my job well, we're not talking about me. Uh we're talking about what our frontline teams are doing. We're talking about the growth that our sales team is now delivering because we've gotten more off their plate. You know, we're talking about other things. Uh, and so again, same thing I was saying uh a short while ago around making sure that everyone else in the business can go and speak the same language, that they're talking about the same strategy as you are, even when you're not in the room. That's when you know you're making progress. Some of that is learned over time. Uh you know, I I I think back to we won't say years, just a number of years back. Uh, I can I can think back to my younger self and how would I have communicated that thing? It would have been different. Uh, but there is also some basic simple practices, again, asking the right questions, focusing on facts, bringing data, asking, is this data correct? When you look at this data set, what does it tell you? Where would you say we have the opportunities to improve? Uh, and and I think just by again bringing facts forward, asking questions around them, it makes others feel a little more comfortable. Uh, you know, in sponsoring projects, uh you have to help facilitate them. It doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be the leader. Sponsor the project, get the right stakeholders involved, and then just ensure that there is continuous, steady progress and that there are clear outcomes deliverables. Uh, but if you are always the one in the driver's seat, uh again, it's not going to be as effective as for that team to come to that realization on their own. So the job of the CX leader is to be that big leader, but doing so through a lot of other people. Uh, and if you're fortunate to have a team, uh making sure that you're always focused on developing that team, developing their leadership skills, empowering them to go out there and deliver results. You you need to make sure that you are not uh a speed bump to success, that everything's not dependent upon you and you being the speaker, the influencer, uh, the decision maker. Uh, you need to make sure that your team is empowered to go out there and execute on uh on the company's behalf, on the customer's behalf.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm thinking of uh one uh professional in particular. I spoke with him, this is about two years ago now, uh really well regarded, long history of success in the CX field, and he'd just been hired on by a major brand, storied, you know, almost a hundred-year-old brand, to um to start a CX effort there. And um, real bright guy. Again, I can't I can't overstate that because he's just he's and he's got uh a long history of successes behind him. But he ran up against um, I think it was it was the the great case of the um immovable object meets the unstoppable force. And in in that company's case, in his view, they were utterly immovable, intransigent. And for all of this guy's all the tools that he had in his tool belt and all the experience he had, there was just something that just wasn't gonna move. And uh, you know, after I think it was after about a year and a half, he moved on because he just wasn't seeing the successes there. All that to say that um that executive sponsorship, that kind of air cover, if you will, from the CEO or whoever it is in the C-suite that says we have to do this and they'll and we'll get behind this, that you mentioned in your prior position, seems to be the great enabling factor here. Do you see it that way, or am I overstating it?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I I think you're spot on. Uh, it's the first critical step, certainly. That there has to be an acknowledgement that we have to focus on the customer, but that's not enough. There then has to be the courage to move forward, even with some difficult changes uh in an effort to still focus on the customer while also delivering growth. Uh, I'm I'm often asked, well, how do I tackle this issue? My senior leadership team or my CEO uh just doesn't really buy into this. They don't want to measure voice of customer, you know, those kinds of challenges. Uh, and I'm gonna be provocative for a moment. I tell them you need to go ahead and find another company. The reality is that by the time somebody's reached CEO, they've formulated their opinion. You're not going to change their mind around whether or not it's beneficial to the business to focus on the customer and to look at data in a different way and to drive sometimes some difficult actions around that. Uh, I've been so fortunate, again, to have great leaders that are all in. Uh, and yeah, there are some challenging conversations. Uh, I I get sent back to the drawing board regularly. I go tweak your data. Have you looked at this? Are we considered a pilot? Um, and those are valid challenges. But when it comes to basic principle of we're going to prioritize the customer experience and we're going to measure it, and we're going to drive towards that as a pillar of our success. Um, I haven't had to question if that's real or not. Uh, you know, one of the things I always loved about my former CEO, we would go back to him asking all the time, like, hey, we need some resources. Can we, can I, can I get some people to do this or that? And he would say, No. You hold the mirror to the business. And and that just was always powerful to me to remember that sometimes the business isn't genuinely looking at itself enough. Sometimes we've got to pull it up. Uh, we've got to remind everyone that, hey, uh, we we've got some work to do here. So I think it is. It's it's that executive leadership team support. Uh, but you do still have to continuously reinforce the value that you bring. Uh you can go advocate for the customer all day long, but if you're not also delivering growth, real tangible growth in real time, uh you again, your stay will be short.

SPEAKER_00:

Anecdotally, we sponsored and put together, did the legwork for a report a couple of years ago now, um, trying to understand how customer-centric the fortune 50 were. And we don't have moles inside every company. So it was it was really difficult. What we decided we'd do was to go out to the company's annual reports, it's all public, or most of them are. Uh, look at their annual reports, their 10 Q's and 10K's, and look for language that would indicate, at least point to some sort of real, genuine customer centricity. Like, do they have a director of customer success? Do they have a head of CX? Do they have a chief customer officer? And those kinds of things. And uh, granted, not very scientific. We were just kind of looking at indicators. It's really interesting. Granted, this is a couple years ago, and I'm sure things have changed. Maybe we'll do it again. But um, less than 10% showed some sort of outward, which we would interpret as genuine um effort to become more customer-centric, to invest in their customer experiences. And um, and that was a real eye-opening finding for us. I mean, the idea of CX has been around for a long, long time. Everybody nods in accordance when you say, oh, yeah, customer centricity, we're customer first, but you know, very few companies we could see were actually putting dollars and public voices to that. And I'd love to know, you know, you speak with your counterparts all the time. We can for a moment just look outside of Varative, but when you're talking to folks like that, what's your impression? If you could kind of pull a an index number out of thin air, are the companies that your colleagues are working for, are they genuinely trying to become customer-centric?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh, it's a great question. I and I think uh it's uh it's a little bit of a complicated answer. What I would say is your data set, right? You said for your for yourself, right? It's a couple years back. It was a moment in time. If you were to go back and look at those same companies and now assess if they still have those roles, right? So you you I don't know that you can say that they're customer-centric because they have the role. The question is, how long do they have those roles? Uh, and you know, because that's what I hear from a lot of my counterparts, right? They're they're having to now go find a job somewhere else because that company has said, uh, times are rough, you know, that's the X guy, right? And so again, it goes back to are you adding value? Are you driving change? Are you helping to deliver growth? If you're not a part of that equation, um, you're either going to get replaced or your role is gonna be that one they're gonna say, here's how we can save some money. Right. Uh, and so I think it really is looking at the longevity of the role, the longevity of those in that position. Uh, maybe an interesting uh analysis would be what is the average tenure of that CX leader at that company? Uh, and see if you know, if we're staying the course or not. I you know, I like CX a lot. You know, I came from the operations side. I love being an operations leader again when asked to to take on CX, I'm trying to figure out what the heck is this CX thing. And what I quickly found is there is no more cross-functional role than CX. I completely agree. You get to affect all aspects of the business, right? From from front to back, from start to end, right? And so uh, but that's a massive responsibility as well. And and you have to understand the magnitude of that and recognize that the company is is is investing in you, uh, many companies as a trial program. Like I don't I don't know if this is really gonna deliver growth or not. You think back to the example that you gave, actually, right? A storied company 100 plus years, and now they've decided they're gonna try out this CX thing. Well, that's an interesting statement in and of itself. A company that's just now deciding to invest in CX that has been there a hundred plus years and sounds like a large successful business. So, what's the gap there? Why have they now said, well, we want to invest here, right? And then and then unfortunately to find that they weren't really truly uh invested in it outside of paying someone, right? And so I think uh there's a couple of different ways to look at that, but um, it it continues to be a challenge within the industry. And I think we do ourselves a disservice when we overcomplicate it. Uh we try to be fancy and innovative, we try to be provocative, uh, and uh we try to maybe sometimes over-leverage technology when again, are we are we doing the basics well? Are we taking care of our customers? Are we uh are we getting to their issues in a timely manner? Are we delivering on time to our commitments? Are we communicating frequently? Um, that's where that's where you build customer loyalty. You know, the greatest website in the world. And if you can't deliver on time, you you have a very expensive website that's not doing anything for you.

SPEAKER_00:

And a whole other, a whole different set of products, a project of problems, rather. You know, one of the things we're we advocate and um we crow about it a lot. We we try and facilitate the idea that everyone who's leading a CX initiative, a CX department, uh, a CX program should be thinking about the ROI of CX. And if you can prove out your ROI, then you have a direct line to your job security because your CFO is is is itching to find out if they've invested correctly. And and I'm still surprised how many CX operations have not defined if you can do it directly, wonderful, but even an indirect uh causal relationship to a return. And it's not it's not that difficult, but it seems for some reason like that's not those are not the core metrics that CXers think about. We think about the customer-facing metrics. And yet, I've talked to a number of people because you know we're in a in an economic transition right now. Um, and um, like you said, you know, it's real easy for the CFO to go, well, you know, the CX team, they're kind of a cost center for us, and we can't be doing that right now. See ya, guys. Um, on the other hand, it doesn't take a whole lot to figure out what the actual dollar value of the efforts are, but I'm surprised at how few people actually track that.

SPEAKER_01:

I think uh you said it best with the indirect statement, right? Uh you know, a direct ROI is a challenge. Uh you're not going to get to the same clarity as you may with a cell. Professional, right, in a territory. Um, but think about it, even a seller has an indirect impact as well as the direct ROI, right? They are supported by others, the entire company has to do their job for that seller to continue to drive growth. Uh, and so I think when you when you give yourself a little bit of a break and you say, well, let me at least try to come up with the indirect ROI. Uh, you know, these different projects that we have initiated, are we seeing other business indicators that do tie back to the work that we completed that are showing signs of improvement that we could then say equal X dollars of growth or you know, the the simple ROI? Uh I think that we we try to again overcomplicate it and we think that it's gonna be this fancy equation that you know is gonna be impossible to get after. And so my guess is a lot of leaders probably just avoid it. But you know, what I've seen has has been helpful is where we can say the different these different tasks that we are now doing differently, or this project we initiated has affected these teams or these territories or these products or services. And we can see a direct correlation to the improvements, or in some cases, unfortunately, a decline in performance. And I think that's the other key part of the ROI is as courageous as you may want to be around the positive ROI, you also have to have integrity and be honest when it's on the negative side. You you you've you can't be afraid to fail. You have to be honest about those failures, and you have to be honest at where we've invested somewhere or we tried something and it didn't work. And and if you can't be honest about that, you know, you're not gonna have credibility, you're not gonna be a trusted advisor to the senior leadership team or the CEO. Uh, and and you know, the reality is they're probably gonna find out you failed anyways. It's probably gonna be pretty obvious. And so just own it, right? Um, that goes a long way. Uh, and so I think it's just important that that you do the other side of the ROI as well. But I think the indirect piece that you started with uh gives people some room to understand it. It doesn't have to be this complicated algorithm to get there. You just have to be able to show your work and where you think it impacted the business that then had that secondary effect on the performance of the business. Uh and it's just important that we continue to reassure all our fellow CXers out there that it doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to be an expert in the space. You just have to be willing to try. And you just have to have curiosity and ask the right questions uh to drive a positive impact for the business. So I appreciate the opportunity to continue to advocate for that. Thank you. And uh let's do it again for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Let's totally do this again.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely.

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