Developing Employee and Executive Programs to Drive Customer Empathy at H&R Block

Let's get going. Really excited to talk about developing employee and executive programs to drive customer empathy. Um as mentioned, I'm Kelsey Salisbury. I'm the director of the Customer Center of Excellence at H&R Block. Um that includes user experience research, customer experience research, and the customer experience uh survey or CX platform as well. Um always good to remind that you know, these are my personal views. They do not necessarily represent the views of my company, although I will talk quite a bit about what we are doing at H&R Block. When I first left grad school and I went to work my first job, I was actually a manager at a manufacturing plant in Leavenworth, Kansas. And I had grown up with this importance of philanthropy. So, one of the things that I did is I found uh a volunteer opportunity. And that was to work for VITA, which is Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, which is a program run by the IRS, where they partner with local communities to help provide free income tax support to the elderly and low-income folks in that community. You have to study quite a bit. You have to pass exams on tax law. And then I would work during the week, and then on Saturdays, I would be at the Leavenworth Public Library doing people's taxes all day. And it's really fascinating when you do people's taxes cuz you learn a lot about people when you know all about their financial situation. And once people have already shared their whole financial situation with you, they tend to share so much more about their lives than you might imagine. And as I think about empathy, this was my first moments of empathy thinking about people and their tax situation. So, at that time I was working for Hallmark Cards. And if you haven't met me before, I've also been at Schwan's and at Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic. But you can kind of see why I've come full circle to H&R Block and working back in tax preparation. I'm going to talk today about driving customer centricity, which is really important for us at H&R Block. A little bit of why empathy, which many of you probably know and have a lot of thoughts on that, but always just to ground there. I'm going to talk a bit about a big event that we do, and ours is called customer immersion month. Talking about the program we have with our executives where we do monthly sessions, and then what we're working on for kind of year-round ongoing opportunities to build customer centricity through empathy. If we think about the importance of empathy, um there's a great uh Harvard Business Review case study talking from the Zurich Insurance Group. They did a global survey of 12,000 consumers in 11 countries, you know, finding that consumers really do want empathy from the companies that they engage with. 79% said a brand's ability to demonstrate empathy influences their choices. Even higher than online reviews, which are very important to many of our brands. 78% said companies don't genuinely care, and 40% of the respondents reported leaving a brand because it failed to show empathy. So, Zurich then invested 46,000 hours in employee empathy training and resulted in a plus seven-point NPS increase, which is really remarkable. Cleveland Clinic is is another example from a case study perspective where they were always known for their world-class clinical care, but their patient experience tended to lag behind. So, similarly, they trained 43,000 employees in empathy and patient-centered care, and that really helped to move them into the top 10% in terms of hospital performance, and improved their employee engagement. It's pretty easy to find lots of articles that talk about this empathy advantage and why it's important for our businesses to think about empathy. There's actually a global empathy index and it shows that the top companies outperform their peers in the stock market by 50% over a 5-year period. Um KPMG did a 2024 US Customer Experience Excellent Report and again, the top companies are really leaning into empathy. At H&R Block, we have five key behaviors that we expect from all of our employees and one thing that makes me really proud to work at H&R Block, our number one behavior of five behaviors is customer centricity. So, this is from our behaviors at H&R Block. We delight our customers. The customer is the most important person in our organization, which is a quote from Henry Block, who's one of the found original founders of the company. Customer empathy and understanding drive our priorities. So, as a research professional, probably like many of you, it's really exciting to work for a company where this is the first behavior and the first value that we really want to lean into. But, to help the company lean into that customer centricity, this is where we'll talk a bit about the activities that we're doing to really help build empathy in particular across the company. Customer Immersion Month is our big event. Um this year our Customer Immersion Month was in its second year and it ran from February 9th to March 7th, 2026 and it had several key com- components that I will go into detail about each of these and kind of give suggestions if you want to do something similar. So, customer care listening sessions, we had some self-serve empathy type exercises and education. We repeated some of that in kind of a live meeting format. Videos and ability to watch folks do our online tax preparation or other virtual experiences and then opportunities to go in office to our H&R Block offices and observe our tax pros working with the clients. One thing you might be wondering is why is customer immersion month February 9th to March 7th? Like why didn't we just choose a month? As you might imagine, tax preparation is a very seasonal business and even within the tax season from the beginning of January through April 15th, there are certain times where we're busier than others. So, we have to specifically choose when we run customer immersion month as to when we want to send a lot of folks from corporate offices and in remote roles into our tax offices so that we don't disturb the business that's happening in those offices. So, that's why we've kind of got interesting timing on our side and why we run it from February 9th to March 7th. The customer care call listening is one of the key components of our program. We ran this past year, we did 50-minute sessions and we did those twice weekly, so different days to help people who could attend at different days. Each week we had two sessions for all four weeks of customer immersion month and we had new content each week. We also focused on a variety of calls across products. So, week one for instance would be about clients calling in who are using our online software to do their taxes themselves. The next week might be clients calling in to talk about some of our financial products and questions that they have. The third week might be focused on small business owners calling in who've got questions. So, getting a variety of call topics, but they're all top call drivers. So, we're not sharing any calls that are kind of unicorns or one-off. These are the most common types of calls that people call our customer care um to talk about. The calls are recorded. Um the key reason we do recorded calls instead of live calls one so that we can edit them for time. If you think about the last time you were on a call with someone for service at a company, there might be dead space where they say, "Hold on a moment. I've got to go and check something." So, we're able to kind of condense it down to the key parts of the conversation. Um we're also making sure that we redact or mask any of the personally identifiable information for the client and for the customer care agent. So, really making sure we remove all of the PII is important to us. When we do these sessions, I actually have someone from customer care lead the session, give a bit of background about the top call drivers, and then kind of do the recordings. And they'll pause periodically. At the same time, I have someone from my team, a researcher, really helping to moderate the chat, um asking questions. As we pause, they might ask questions, get reaction, really making sure that we're having more of a dialogue about what we're hearing in these calls, and really also keeping folks focused on understanding and empathizing with the client on the call, and not using it to judge the contact center agents. For the self-serve empathy, this is an example of maybe an empathy challenge we would have in a self-serve empathy program. Um I've used AI to kind of mask these a little bit, but these are the general ideas of things that that we do care about each in our block. So, small business owners, we do serve small business owners um with their tax preparation and other business services at H&R Block. So, there's many easy ways to have people, you know, get to know small business clients and owners in their local community. So, we set up information kind of reminding about who these folks might be. They might be gig workers, self-employed counselors, online sellers, um and they're around us all the day. So, really encouraging people, you know, talk to your Uber driver. If you have a daycare provider, talk to that person. If you have a contractor helping out. If there's a small boutique shop where you see a pop-up shop. And then providing people with ideas in terms of questions that you could ask small business owners to get to understand them better. You know, why did they get started? What's the best part about being self-employed, what's the worst part, and you know, what's keeping them up at night, and then and get into how do they file their taxes and and why do they choose what they choose, how are they tracking their expenses as small business owners, they have a lot of expenses. So, really giving guidance for people to go out and have some conversations and experiences on their own. So, all of these materials are on our company intranet. Um as we introduce them, we tend to do a short educational write-up. So, if you think about the example I just showed of small business owners, we would have a little bit of educational content from our research really just explaining maybe who our target audiences within small business owners and giving a little more detail about them. We may include a few short videos of some small business owners answering some of those questions that we're suggesting people go out and ask to people in their lives. And then that example of kind of go try it yourself, and then we'll have forms available so you can come back and share the experiences that you've had. When we think about the content that we do for this program, it tends to be very broad content because it want it we want it to be applicable for all employees. So, if you work in information security or you work in legal, you work in HR department, we want this content to be applicable for everyone across the company. So, we kind of have to keep it at a certain level versus sometimes your marketers or your product folks might be a lot deeper in some of these topics and we understand that. The target personas that we have as a brand, that's a common topic that we'll dig into kind of better understanding our different target personas, and we might dig into things like brands they like. We also tend to feature information on broad behavior that's relevant such as how do people think about their financial health. And then really a key part is really showing consumer reactions to our products and to our experiences. So, that's really the bulk of much of the content that we try to provide. So, we do tend to have lots of videos available for people to watch on their own. Um so, a conversation with, you know, a Block customer. Here we have assisted tax filers, so folks that go into an H&R Block office talking about why they really want to file with a tax expert instead of doing taxes on their own. I mentioned before the brand example. So, as we think about the target personas that we're going after from a marketing perspective as an example, we may also then list what are kind of the brands that they like besides our brand. Where do they kind of dig in? And then encouraging folks from an empathy challenge to go out and learn more about those brands. You know, choosing an audience segment, look at the brands, you know, immerse yourself in that brand's experience by exploring their touchpoints. You know, go to their website, download their app, go to a nearby location. You know, if you're a little later in your career like I am, and if you look at some of those um the brands at the bottom, which are more of our Gen Z type audience, they're into Afterpay or Cash App or Elf or Taco Bell. So, you know, interacting with those brands, if those aren't brands that you're as familiar with or reviews, it's like a great opportunity to do that. We also this year, as the second year of the program, we added some live empathy sessions where we took some of the same content we had self-serve, but we did it in kind of an interactive webinar um format. So, again, we gave a brief educational overview or setup. For instance, here's a little bit about this target persona, or here's a little bit about folks who work with a tax pro at H&R Block, but they don't actually want to go into an office. They just want to do everything via phone or or email. And then we show some videos of consumers interacting and reacting to our products or services. Um similar to what I mentioned for customer care, we find it works really well to have two people leading the session. So, one who's actively leading and another person really keeping the chat active and monitoring and helping with that. We also tend to try to in this type of a session have some poll questions or other ways to have some interactivity. And then across both, for instance, the customer care listening sessions and these sessions, we do end with a short survey for feedback on the format of the empathy, if people feel like they're really kind of better understanding our customers through these activities so that we can continue to improve each year. It's also important for us to have opportunities to kind of for folks to immerse themselves in our digital products. Um as you think about H&R Block, you can think about we've got a lot of offices, so yes, we can have you go into an office, but it's a little harder to go into someone's home and see them using an online software on their own time. Um so in this case, we do we do kind of more formal research, one-on-one interviews, or focus groups that dig in. So, for one-on-one interviews, we may do one-on-one interviews in terms of formal research and have people go through their income tax, and then we will have videos of that available for people to watch on their own time um to kind of understand that process of people going through and and doing their taxes or similarly a customer who chose to never go into an office but still worked with a tax pro. We may have interviews throughout that process in the journey, which can take weeks over time, but then piecing those together. One of the reason we also serve this up as videos on our internet site is again, it's important for us in at H&R Block to remove that confidential information. It's pretty hard to go online and have us watch you do your income taxes without you sharing personally identifiable information, so we really have to block out a lot of that information before we can share more broadly across the company. And then in office immersion, so this was really when we first were working on this program, this was one one the key things we wanted to do is wanted to get our corporate employees out into our tax offices to really experience and and what the clients are experiencing in our tax offices. So, getting folks out there has been really key. But, in order to manage this, we don't want folks just randomly going in. We do have to kind of keep an eye on this considering the confidentiality and various things that go along with with tax preparation. So, the way we run this part of the program is there is a request form. You do have to request that you want to go into an office. We do schedule you into a specific office. It will be located where you are. So, our home office is in Kansas City, Missouri. So, we certainly have a lot of folks going to various offices in Kansas City, Missouri. But, we are also a very remote first remote friendly company. So, we also have employees across the United States and they will visit near where they live. We make sure we've got people visiting in offices that are within driving distance. However, we actually don't want employees to go to an H&R Block office that's in their own neighborhood. We want them to kind of go to a different part of town and see kind of a different situation than where they live. So, we do have it within driving distance, but we do make you go a little bit out of the way. And then we developed a a video to help prepare you before you go in for your office visit. Um and this was a really important part of the preparation to making sure we were send or sending people in really prepared for this situation. That video included things like what to expect when you're going in. Sometimes if you're going in, you might be a little nervous going to an office you haven't been. You don't know the office staff in that particular office. So, kind of what to expect. We do have dress code regulations. So, how we want you to dress for going into the tax office. Really clarifying the do's and don'ts for the empathy situation. One thing the first year we we this that we didn't realize would happen. It was actually an accidental success, I would say. This video was created for our corporate employees to give these instructions before they went into the office. We actually ended up showing this same video to our office staff, and it really had this interesting way to calm our office staff down when we first proposed this program. The office staff were were worried. One, that folks coming to visit would be disruptive, and they were worried, too, that people were maybe coming to judge them as a tax pro or them as an office leader, and there was some anxiety around that. So, it was really helpful, actually, for our office staff to see the video and really realize, "Oh, they're really coming to understand all these things about our clients and about how this work really happens. Actually, wait, I really do want people from corporate to come out and learn all of these things." So, this really helped us to get a lot of buy-in from our office and field staff to have corporate employees come out to observe. We also provided the folks that went into the office uh a visit guide to help them with the observations. So, this again included some of those instructions that you see in the video. You know, beforehand, what are some things that that you might do? How do you get prepared? What do you do there? You know, reminding to observe, notice how people are interacting, you know, with that kind of paying attention. Um you know, again, very basic things that you can kind of put together. And then in our guide, really reminding people, you know, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? So, for those of you with heavier qualitative backgrounds, it's just pulling all of your great qualitative advice, but really laying it out in a format to help all of your employees know what they should maybe think about as they're in the office. This is an example of as well. We tried to have people think about their observations and take notes thinking about the different steps that happen when a client sits down with a tax professional and has their taxes prepared. So, this again is a little bit of a masked version, but for each step, we remind folks kind of what happens in that step, and then an opportunity for them to kind of take notes on what's working well and what could we be doing better. So, they're really be quite formal in what we'd like people to be observing and thinking about. When there's downtime in the office, we also do encourage folks to talk to the staff there and ask them questions, and then we do provide sample questions to help them with those conversations. How long have you been here? What's your role involved? What are your biggest challenges or pain points? You know, where do you think you provide the most value? So, just different questions to kind of help folks feel more comfortable interviewing the tax professionals or front office staff in the office that they're visiting. And then for us, we also really wanted to tie everything that we do to our five-year strategy. So, within our five-year strategy, we have kind of got three here, but we have five different growth areas or opportunities. So, in our official materials, we list each of those growth opportunities and also ask people to think about, you know, what did you hear today that helps you to really think about these opportunities and what we might do for the future. Afterwards, we do send a form. So, essentially, we do send If you go into an office visit, we're going to send you a form to do a survey to tell us about your experience in the office so we can continue to improve that, but also to take all those great notes you took and to give us that feedback and your reflections on the immersion, which really helps us to also gather insights. So, although we're doing this program to really help everyone build empathy, what a great way to also gather a ton of insight about what's happening live during the middle of tax season in our offices. If you're not going on a formal visit, we do also have opportunity if you're just getting your own taxes done. So, of course we know all of our employees also have to get their own taxes done. So, we do ask, you know, pay attention. You can use the guide as well, even if you're just doing your own taxes with a tax pro or on the online software, but think about these same questions for your own experience and provide that feedback. For a program like this, it's really important to partner with the internal communications team. Um we actually have them as part of our core team and put together a strategic plan of how we're going to communicate customer immersion month. One thing that's been really helpful is we've also had executive support. So, for instance, for year one, our chief product officer and our chief marketing officer partnered and they did a video podcast really kind of talking about customer immersion month at the beginning and when we first launched the program. This past year, our CEO gave a shout-out to customer immersion month at our town hall, which is one of our our twice annual get-togethers where everyone in the company is there to talk about what we're up to. Uh during customer immersion month, we did do a weekly email campaign. Um and then each week we talk about what's happening, what you can sign up for. So, this was a really great way to help kind of drive engagement for the program. We do have a corporate office, although a lot of people work from home, we do have a corporate office, so we also did marketing at the office um in the elevators. Although we had a fillable PDF for the office guide, it was also available in the break rooms if you wanted to grab that before or you went out. We have what we call block parties, so once a quarter we have kind of a celebration um at the office, so we had a booth for folks to kind of encourage folks to participate in customer immersion month. And during customer immersion month, our CEO Curtis Campbell also gave a shout-out on his LinkedIn page talking about the importance of customer immersion month and stepping in um listening to the stories of our customers and their perspectives. So, really great to have this kind of uh external shout-out from our CEO about the importance of this program for us. And then it doesn't end when it ends. There's still things to do in the after action. So, we really take pride in in tracking the engagement. So, our customer care listening sessions this year we had 351 attendees, which was up 145 from the previous year. Those self-serve activities and videos for empathy, the live sessions, we had 202 attendees. That those were a first-time event this year, so I think we'll figure out how to expand on that for next year. For our internet site visits for self-serve, we had 1,271 site visits, which was up 800. So, I will say we got a lot smarter about our corporate communication plan, which really helped drive that. And then we had 117 office visits. For office visits, that's about the number that we target in terms of what we feel like we can easily handle in our offices without being disruptive. And then insights, you know, we talked about there's kind of forms or surveys people fill out afterwards, so we use that to gather insights. And then we consolidate and synthesize that, and that is actually kind of another share-out that we're able to do back to teams. All of the insights we had from being in our offices during tax season. It's also important, you know, I debrief with the core team afterwards, you know, what worked, what do we want to improve? So, we always have incremental improvements for each component of the program. And then two of the bigger things from this past year, one of the things we noticed is that uh we see engagement go up if a particular vice president across the company is really promoting customer immersion month. We also we see higher engagement across their entire team. So, that's an area we're going to explore a little bit more next year. And then there's a lot of requests from the folks that participate that they really want to hear more about the impact and changes from everything that we're seeing and doing through this program. And that was something some feedback we were actually able to action yet this year. So in our we have a weekly news break block news break that we do each week. So a few weeks after customer immersion month with that feedback from all the employees who participated we actually were able to run a news article coming from our CEO really recapping the program and linking it back to our strategy. So really great to kind of help close that loop with employees as to the importance of what they're experiencing and how it ties to the future and where we're growing. Okay, so that's our big event customer immersion month and I'll talk a little bit about what we do specifically with our executives in monthly sessions. For our executive program this is kind of the charter for our executive program. Um we offer concise engaging opportunities for senior leaders to connect more deeply with our customers again fostering empathy understanding their experiences needs and challenges. The key components of our executive program is real voices. We want them to hear from customers in their own words. Interactive so it's how do we engage? How do we have some light interactivity? How do we have reflection? And then snackable so quick focused easy to absorb really designed for impact um in the midst of packed calendars. So last year I also tried to stand up an empathy program for executives and put a ton of work into it and because of the entire year we managed to have one session. And it was an hour-long session. It was great but we managed it only do it once. We kept getting kicked off the agenda. Oh we need the time for this. Oh we need the time for that. Was really really hard to engage. And then we flipped to what you're seeing here and this kind of real voices interactive snackable model has been much more executive effective in interacting with our executives. And so the topics that we've done for this program, so strategic topics, maybe financial health, target personas, clients of our products, customer care calls. So a lot of similar topics to what you see in our customer immersion month. And some of this content we actually use in both directions in both programs. As we think about the executives, and I will say this is similar to customer immersion month as well, we need to consider the audience and not assume and not everyone has the same context. So even for our executives who know a ton about our business, but our chief product officer is going to know a lot more about the details of some of our products than perhaps the head of HR or the head of legal or the chief marketing officer is going to know a lot about our target customers for marketing, but other folks may not. So we kind of have to keep that in mind as we develop that content. The real customer feedback, so real voices. This is really the whole star of the show. Um tend to do calls or videos under 2 minutes per call or video. So I just try to follow best practices um and keep these, you know, executives have the same short attention span all of us have from watching too much Tik Tok and YouTube and everything else that we're watching with short format video. So really keeping that the calls condensed. Um so multiple's better than too long. For our program it's really important that we're showing both positive and negative comments and experiences. And this is really the key part of the content that we're we're using with our executives. And I did have a video to show you some of the content, but I don't know that that's going to work considering the Zoom audio challenges. Miss Oakley working on my taxes with me this morning and we were able to get them done virtually in a very timely fashion. She is such a gem. She is kind and uh thoughtful. She's as a person. She made me feel comfortable. We just got home from H&R Block and we just wanted to say thank you. We like the um, the piece of mind audit protection and our tax professional was super friendly and she gave us tips and a lot of insight into different things. So, we're very happy that we went to H&R Block and we'll go back again next year. And I book my appointments early. I send all my documents over, um, upload it. I email ahead of time if I have any questions about what they might need. By the time I come in, he has almost everything prepared with the exception of a few questions and minor details and some advice for the future. Um, he's just extremely professional. I've seen him greet people at the door with some really complex situations that are just walking in stressed out. He's so calm, he's so professional. He's, you know, he says to them, "We're going to figure this out. Let's go one step at a time." >> Christina Correa and Block Advisors got me back so much money this year that I'm going to buy me a Harley-Davidson. Appreciate you guys. Thank you, Dre, for helping our family. So, always fun to hear directly from our customers. And again, if we're showing a positive video, we're also going to show a video of folks who went through our experience and didn't have as good of experience when we meet with our executives or in part of the program for the employees. So, that's really the the keystone is really showing the videos or listening to calls, but we also try to do some interactivities. That might be trivia or a poll question. We've done two truths and a lie, um, and making sure we've got plenty of discussion space and time for kind of discussion questions. With the executives, I find we actually don't need the discussion questions. They are really going to have their own kind of ideas of what they want to talk about and what they're really inspired about. Here's an example of the type of trivia question that we've done. So, how many new small businesses start each year in the US since the pandemic? I can't see the chat, but you are welcome to put your answer in if you if you'd like. Um so, these are different options. So, is it A, 250,000, B, 500, C, 3.5 million, D, 5 million, or E, 25 million? Actually, 5 million new small businesses have started each year on average since the pandemic, and this is actually a 41% increase over pre-pandemic. So, this might be an example of how we would set up um the topic of small business owners prior to kind of hearing from some small business owners who are clients of H&R Block. We've also done two truths and a lie. So, again, a little bit masked here, but you know, "I'm confident on my journey to X, I'm motivated by Y, I'm willing to pay for Z." And then asking our our executives to think about, you know, which of these are true and which of these are a lie, and then for each one kind of giving the answer and showing a video with clients talking about the situation. The Snackable was really the key unlock to get this program up and running and really helped a lot in the success. When we first started this program back in August of this past year, we started with 15 minutes. As I mentioned the year before, we were trying to do an hour session. I couldn't make it happen. I had a whole like one session in an entire year. We have been um every month we're able to do It was first it was these 15-minute sessions um starting with 6 to 7 minutes of content within the 15-minute session. So, I'd certainly recommend as any of your own program. Sometimes it's easier to ask for 15 minutes, and also fewer people are going to try to steal your time when it's only 15 minutes. So, that was really great. We've since expanded to 30 minutes. That is at the request of our executives. They were enjoying this program so much and felt that 15 minutes wasn't enough time for them to have the conversation that they wanted to have. So, you'll see we've expanded to 30 minutes, but we've only expanded the content that we prepare a tiny bit. That extra time is really more time for the executives to absorb what they're hearing and have a conversation with each other. I often have different folks on my team rotate presenting to executives cuz it's a great opportunity for them to be in front of executives. But, I do find a challenge for researchers is this is about empathy. It's not a research presentation. So, this isn't about as a researcher presenting. This is showing a bit of content, but really you're a facilitator. This is really about the letting the executives hear from the client and then have the conversation they want to have. So, again, that customer's the star and it's the inspiration for the conversation where the executives really lead the conversation. We're there and we're present, but we're facilitating. So, not a research presentation is one of my key pieces of advice. So, we've got the big event. We've now got monthly sessions with our executives. And now we're working on how do we kind of keep things going year-round with all of our employees. So, many of those um self-learning modules for education and empathy, we're working to see how do we add regular content that we can kind of add versus just what we have prepared for customer immersion month. We're working to take our customer care calls, again, always with PII redacted and finding a a home in locations so that those are available year-round and then adding new calls, adding new videos. Also done a great job, our customer experience survey program is really set up that anyone corporately can have access to to that both the data and the verbatim. So, So more people signed up for access and self-serve for that kind of information as well is another key thing we're working on year-round. And then of course there's still communication. So as we add new content, we'll do features in our weekly newsletter, which is also a great way to just have the customer be a more regular part of our weekly internal communication. So drive awareness, keeping that, you know, really living that customer centricity and keeping the customer top of mind. Another key thing and I I have used content from from teams in this way in many companies, but new hire onboarding is really another great place to lean in. So much of the content that we've developed, again, it's that very base great things to know about our customers, is also a great add-in to new hire onboarding activities. So we've got links into our new hire onboarding checklist, but this is another great way to to use that same content, but also help new hires really start and lean into that customer centricity from the very beginning. We also work to teach others um to keep this going year-round. So for instance, although in our customer immersion month program, we're asking our employees to kind of go in for half of a day, just one day um during the tax season, but we have certain teams. So for instance, we have a team that develops the IT systems that our tax pros use in the office. So that team in particular reached out and they really wanted to aspire to go have that entire team going into offices every week during tax season. But then how do they do that? What are best practices? So we actually developed workshop and materials to train them on, you know, how to how to observe, how to do interviews. We did that at the beginning of the tax season and then we checked in a month later to see how it was going. What are they learning? What could we be doing better? And continue to help them to build those skills. Again, I mentioned our customer experience survey program, really having that available. Also had workshops teaching people how to access that data, how to search through those open ends, how to look through those videos to find things of interest. So, workshops um with particular teams, with some modifications and custom based customization for those teams has been great. And then the guidelines that we develop, we have those in our library so that anyone has access to those. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention there's also the importance of compliance. So, as we're teaching others, we do bring up things that are relevant in terms of compliance and things that we need people to to keep an eye on. So, you've heard a bit about the empathy that we're doing for our program at H&R Block, whether it's our big event, Customer Immersion Month, our executive program, or what we're trying to do year-round. And then for me, um okay, I'm not doing anyone's taxes right now, but I want to continue my own empathy journey. So, I have actually gone through and done all the training to to be trained as a a front desk receptionist for our H&R Block offices, and I have worked the front desk, you know, interacting with clients, answering the phone, um getting helping people get their tax documents together and scanned so we can give them to the tax pros. So, even personally, also leaning into find ways that we can really really understand our customers and our clients through through empathy. So, really passionate about that. So, I will see. Okay, great. So, I think then we can open it up for questions or any comments from Amber. Yeah, we have a comment from the question from the chat. So, it says difficult question. I've been a 10-plus year H&R Block customer, but threw in the towel this year mid-tax prep after years of declining user experience in the tax prep application. How do you balance the optimism of wanting to listen and fix what is likely an overwhelming amount of customer experience challenges on such complicated tax topics, while also facing the reality of what must be a lot of architectural limitations and internal friction to get issues prioritized for design and development? And it's in a Q&A as well if you want to be able to like read it. I was going to try to look for it if I could. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, it's a long one. Well, first of all, well, thank you for being a customer in the past and I'm so sorry to hear. That's always um disappointing to to hear that things didn't go well. Um I think from reading perhaps um the person was using the as if it's the online software. Um Mhm. Yeah, yeah, probably online software. I think we're we're on a journey um for sure. We know we've got things that can improve and what I am ex- cited about is right now we've got a group of leaders who want to hear the negative stuff, not just the positive stuff. Um if many of you, you know, if you're in research backgrounds, sometimes you run into situations where people don't want to hear the negative stuff. So, we are hearing that. But I think there there is always challenges in like what's in the backlog and what makes it to the top. Um for our online program in particular, for the online software, we actually do um smaller scale, but fairly open um for employees. We actually just every single month we've got folks doing online taxes with us that we observe and look for issues to put into the backlog and into the friction logs. As kind of um for those of you kind of in the UX space, we do really try to lean into continuous discovery, but I think we're still on a journey. Um and we're on a journey in that um and some of it's with leadership changes a few years ago, they didn't want folks from corporate going into offices. So now we've changed 180 on that and a much bigger focus on how do we have all of our employees really listening to customers and really focusing on that. So I'm hopeful for the future. Um but there is a lot to prioritize, so there's certainly a lot of challenges and if I haven't exactly answered your question, please chime back in. I have a couple more questions for you, if that's okay. Yes, absolutely. So have you been obviously you've been having conversations, but have you been collecting any data or tracking metrics on the employee experience around being this empathy-first approach? Are they liking their job better? Are they enjoy especially these first like these front line employees, are they having an easier or a harder time adding in these trainings and you know, trying to be more empathetic working with customers? We do like many companies, we we have um employee engagement surveys that we do. We don't have anything specific to this program at this time. We do as we do the program, we do ask play after every session or every event, we we do have surveys, so we are at least contract the program year over year and see where we're improving things. So we do track that way and then we do track corporately overall where we do talk about customer centricity and client focus. Um I think what we see internally is actually our our front line employees feel very connected to our customers cuz they're out interacting with them each day. So they actually tend to score really high on how they feel about that cuz that's really where they are each and every day. I think what I'm observing right now, which is interesting but also normal, as we have made more of a focus on the client experience across the entire company, what we're also seeing and and then the conversations and comments, in some cases, although when we get feedback from our clients, although and again to the person, thank you again in the chat, we've got things to fix in our experience. We are seeing our metrics move up, our behavioral metrics and feedback from clients that the experience is improving. However, as the average employee, regardless of your job, learns more about the details of our experiences and we expose them to both the negative and the positive, we're all across the company, people are so much more aware of where it doesn't work. So, longer term, I think that helps us fix those, but shorter term, it makes people think, "Oh my gosh, there's a plenty of things we still want to fix." So, we've really got a spotlight on them right now in in the journey. Does Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And that's you have to start somewhere with it. Mhm. So, you know, it sounds like you're starting to kind of shine a light to these pain points, like what's going well, what's not going well, and it sounds like a lot of this is fairly new that you're developing. Are you able to actually point to something that has shifted for the customer experience? Like, oh, we're doing this better, we're doing that better, or is it still just or work shopping it and getting things off the ground? We've definitely made a lot of um we've had a number I'm also trying to think what I can share and not share. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Of course. Um we've we've definitely um worked a lot on the experience and that really for the past few years since I've joined the company, it has really been a focus um to really focus on the experience how do we specifically improve the experience. Um and then I think we continue to refine how we think about it when when we take a look. So, the when I the first year I joined, we really were digging into how do we think about how new customers experience this versus customers who've been with us a long time. Mhm. Cuz if it's the exact same experience, that still comes across different for someone who's new versus someone who's been there for a long time. So, that was a lens that we took um to really think about how do we make this better, particularly if you're someone who's brand new. Mhm. Um so, similarly each year we kind of have a different focus area of like how do we think about the experience in a slightly different way and improve in those kind of areas is is the way that I would say Mhm. we've been um tackling it. But, there's even when every you make progress, there's still folks who aren't having a great experience and that's definitely a major concern to us. And then I think there's also the upside of things that we're thinking about you weren't unhappy, but we're not doing these things that we know would make it great. So, also making sure we we aren't just closing the pain points, but thinking about the delighters as well. Mhm. Right. Okay, great. Um one last question for you and that is could you talk a little bit more about getting senior leadership buy-in for the program? You know, we talked about like snackable and getting on board and uh the videos were super cute with the little girls like I'm >> [clears throat and laughter] >> I'm all in. They won me over. Um but, you know, what did that look like? Did it take a a long time? Were they on board? You know, you talked about um what your founder, you know, always being like customer first person. Is that just already solidly in the structure of H&R Block. I I think it's both. It's been we've had some leadership It's always been a piece. So, a few years ago, like when I first joined the company, we had like eight behaviors. Mhm. And customer centricity was there. And now we've we've changed a bit. We have five behaviors. It's still there and it's number one. And most of the other behaviors are slightly different from what we had before. Mhm. So, it didn't go anywhere. And I'd say it's almost it's more important now that we have less to focus on. Um so, there's some in the DNA that we've really been focused there. Um in terms of some of this program though, I would say like much of the work we we do as researchers, you do kind of need to find like an executive sponsor. Find an executive who really is kind of interested and you can get on board. So, when the program started, we really first started with the customer immersion month and had better luck there getting both the chief product officer and the chief marketing officer on board as kind of executives. And then getting our head of retail involved. And then the success of that allowed us to kind of build for the future. And now it's just assumed, of course we're going to do it every year. Like what Of course Of course that's happening. Um similarly with the executive program, um was had an executive sponsor with the chief marketing officer, but the time was really a hold up. The the we'd be on the calendar, we'd be on the schedule, and we'd get dropped. And that would happen over and over. So, that was kind of the unlock was really that shift to 15 minutes. Mhm. The other unlock was really saying, "Well, let's let's we're saying we start with the customer, so literally let's do that." So, our executives meet in person 2 days a week per month. Mhm. So, what happens on day one, they grab their breakfast and say hello and say how they're feeling. First guest is me and my team with the customer centricity and the customer empathy. So, we are the first 15 minutes of the agenda. And now it's the first 30 minutes. So, I think also just being first on the agenda so that you're starting with the customer and literally reinforcing what's the first thing we do. We hear from our customers. Um so, I think those were things that really helped. But again, it's also building It started as 15 minutes and the move to 30 was because of the senior executives themselves. They're like, "Okay. 15's too short." But so, it's I think it's better and the buy-in, yeah. Yes, absolutely. Okay. Well, great. Thank you so much for sharing. Um we wish you all the luck with with your endeavors. And oh, I see we're starting to have our next presenters hop on. So, we can give everybody a minute to get a water, get a coffee, um stretch your legs before the next session. But thank you so, so much for sharing. Absolutely. Great.