Jeff Rosenblum is a co founder of Questus, a digital advertising agency that has worked with many of the world's most influential brands, including American Express, Apple, Capital One, Disney, The NFL, Samsung, Starbucks, Universal, Wyndham and Verizon. Jeff created a groundbreaking documentary about the advertising revolution called The Naked Brand and the book Friction which explained how passion brands are built.
Jeff has lectured at some of the top universities in the world, including Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and the London Business School. He has won some of advertising’s most prestigious awards, and presented at many of the industry's largest conferences.
Questions
Highlights
Jeff’s Journey
Jeff shared that he took a pretty unique path to where he’s at, he didn't necessarily go to some of the finest educational institutions in the world, he was a pretty crappy college student, to be honest with you. And when he graduated school, he had to beg his way into an internship at a research company and they gave him a three month shot and he applied a philosophy that he continued to apply every single day now three decades later, which is “First one in, last one out, every day.” First one in, last one out.
So eventually, that internship turned into a full time job and this was around the birth of the internet. And as a researcher, his job was to collect data and they had very traditional ways of collecting that data, it was through the mail and through the mall surveys and phone surveys, in focus groups. And his job was to figure out how he can collect the highest quality data possible at the lowest price. And then when the internet came along, he had this crazy idea, which was why can't we start collecting all of that data through the internet, which seems grossly obvious now. But really, nobody was doing it at that time, or very few people were doing it at that time.
So, he was lucky enough to be one of the few people pioneering the field of internet research. So, he’s still like a 25 year old zit faced kid, and next thing you know, he’s got Microsoft, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Walt Disney, Levi Strauss, all as his clients, because he was one of the very few people who knew how to collect data via the internet. But what was interesting is they didn't just want data, what they wanted was to understand the implications of the internet for their business. And what he quickly realized is that everything about business strategy was about to be revolutionized. And perhaps even more importantly, from his point of view, everything about advertising was about was about to go through a complete and total revolution.
So at that point, he realized he no longer wanted to simply collect the data and tell brands what to do with the Internet, what he wanted to do is actually do something about it, he wanted to blend the world of data and creativity under one roof and create the next generation of advertising agency. So, his college roommate was a world class artist, he had art gallery openings, celebrities, like Johnny Depp were buying his paintings and he had shifted a lot of his focus into the world of digital design. So the whole idea was to take a team of outsiders, him (Jeff) from the data and analytics background, ‘he’ from the creative background, and start an agency that's focused less on interrupting people through traditional media and more about empowering people through digital media.
Jeff’s Book Exponential: Transform Your Brand by Empowering Instead of Interrupting – What the Book is About – Who is the Book Geared Towards Helping
Me: Amazing. So, you really got into it. And you've been in it even before a lot of the organizations that are currently trying to tap into that feature, have been into it. Now you have a new book, Jeff. That's the things that really, really sparked my interest, your book and it is entitled, Exponential. I love the name. So, could you tell us a little bit about that book? I know subtitle for the book is Transform Your Brand by Empowering Instead of Interrupting. Could you tell us a little bit about what the book is about? Who is the book geared towards helping and what do you mean by empowering? And what do you mean by interrupting?
Jeff shared that he’s always been fascinated by brands that absolutely dominate the competition, brands that grow exponentially in size, in influence, in financial performance. Brands like Warby Parker and Sweetgreen, and Apple, and Google, and Amazon. So, really what he’s done is focused in on how advertising has gone through a revolution and we can no longer rely upon interruptions, meaning buying 30 seconds spots on TV ads, buying full page print ads in magazines, buying pop up ads, and banner ads, in pre rolls.
All of those tools are fine, there's nothing wrong with them, the data and the mathematic show that they work. And as an agency, they leverage the hell out of those techniques, those are very powerful techniques.
But what they drive are good results, they don't drive exponential results and what they realized is brands that move beyond just interrupting and expand into empowering people, improving their lives one small step at a time, giving them the content and the tools to move their lives forward, those are the brands that drive the exponential results. So, that's what the book is about is how data and creativity, how content and technology can be used to empower an audience and dominate the competition.
What Does Empowerment Mean in Practical Steps or Practical Implementation
Me: Now, you also have in the book that empowerment drives exponential bottom line results. For a business, empowerment, it embodies a lot of different things and I would just like for you to break down to our listeners, what does empowerment really mean in practical steps or practical implementation? When you say you empower your team members, what does that look like? Could you give us maybe one or two examples?
Jeff stated that that's a great question. Because empowerment really comes in two sides of the equation, how do you empower your customers in your target audience? How do you give them the content and the tools to make sure that they're getting more out of the products and the services that you create?
But also to the question, empowerment comes in the form of culture, how do we help people on our teams do the best work possible? And he thinks a lot of people have confused culture to mean fun. In Silicon Valley, where their headquarters are out in San Francisco, there was the trend of foosball tables and ping pong tables and bars and right in the office and there's nothing wrong with those ideas. Having music and some beers and some games is certainly fun. But that's not culture. And that's not empowerment.
And what they've realized is great culture is really just about putting people in position to do their best work, that's what people want. If you hire the right people on your team, what they really care about is how can they advance their career as effectively as possible? How can they advance their entire team as effectively as possible? So, great culture is really about giving people those tools, giving people the tools to do their best work.
Me: Amazing. So, we're giving our employees the tools to ensure that they're doing their best to work.
How Factors Like Culture and Transparency Help Companies Build Exponential Growth
Me: Now, you spoke a little bit about culture, and you made reference to the fact that a lot of organizations mistake the whole process of culture as being fun and as you said, pool tables and lots of other things that they may attach to the whole vibe of culture. How do factors like culture and transparency help companies to build exponential growth?
Jeff shared that the world is just much more complicated than it's ever been before, at one point you could get by by having some really good TV ads to drive awareness and interest and then you can have a good retail store with some good retail staff members to turn those people who are interested into customers. But the world just really exploded. Now, you don't have just those two critical channels and maybe a couple other channels, the world has literally dozens and dozens of channels where you need to not only communicate with your audience, but actually transact with your audience.
So think about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, your desktop website, your mobile website, your mobile apps, your retail stores, which should be connected to all those digital touch points, as well as all those traditional tools like TV, radio and print, and that's just a few. By the time we're done with this podcast, there's going to be three or four emerging new, great tools and channels.
So, for brands to really succeed, they need to be able to break down the silos that exist internally. You can't just have great creativity sitting in one silo to create a great 30 second spot. And then great salespeople in another silo who are converting folks.
You need technology and creativity and data and analytics, and project management and finance, all to work together seamlessly. And the only way to do that is build great culture, which is based upon safety of communication, which is built upon process with communication, which is built upon tools for communication, ultimately, breaking down those silos that exist, recognizing that the world is just so much more complex than it's ever been before.
And the target audience is more demanding than it's ever been before because although things get really complex in the way that we want to tell our brand story, in the ways that we can tell our brand story, the target audience ultimately, really wants simplicity, they will not stand for any friction in that purchase journey.
Recommendations for a Brand to be Active on Multiple Channels
Me: Now, you mentioned that there are multiple channels that exist nowadays. Let's say a brand is looking to be present on all channels, but they just don't have the resources to be active on all channels. What would your recommendation be to them? Because I find that a lot of brands are everywhere, but they're not responsive everywhere and of course, that will impact the whole journey if it is I'm trying to get in touch with you and it's just a dead end.
Jeff shared that that is a really great question. And that is the question that all marketers are going to be faced with in perpetuity. And it's why we also see this addiction to TV in other traditional forms of advertising, because it's just so much easier to say, “Look, all we need to do is be great at TV, and then maybe great at retail, and we're done.” But that's not consistent with the way that people shop nowadays, the way people conduct research, the way they interact with brands and obviously, much more so with a younger audience.
So to answer your question, it really does come back to that culture question, which is, are you breaking down silos so that you can communicate internally, share the data that you have internally, and ultimately, leverage the channels that are most effective for you.
So, the beautiful part of everything that we're doing right now is we've got more data than ever before, unprecedented and unparalleled levels of data.
The problem with data is you can really have information overload, you can really have paralysis by analysis.
So the key is to really streamline your data down to the key performance indicators, there's probably only one, two or three really critical KPIs that you need to track and through that have honest conversations about where you want to be and what's most important for your brand and your target audience.
There's really no reason to be mediocre at Facebook, mediocre at Instagram, mediocre at Twitter, mediocre at LinkedIn, when you can be really great at one or two of those channels.
So data is going to be the answer and understanding that target audience from not just a data standpoint, but also a qualitative standpoint so you understand what is your target audience really value and then couple that with the data to show what's driving your business results.
App, Website or Tool that Jeff Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without, Jeff shared that he doesn't know if he has one. But he'll tell you he thinks the key to their success is based upon a few things and one of them is education, they really preach collaboration, celebration in education.
So, he thinks the apps that enable them to get educated are probably the most important. And there are just a few content sources that he thinks are really powerful. He’s just a huge believer in reading the Wall Street Journal from cover to cover every single day, particularly in the world of advertising, where it's too easy for us to get caught up in Ad age, in Ad week and other stuff that really just talks about their own industry.
But he thinks as advertisers and marketers for them to be most effective, they need to step back and look at the overall business experience and the overall business strategy because that's what marketing really is. So, he thinks reading the Wall Street Journal cover to cover is one of the most important things that anybody can do. But there's also some great newsletters out there, he’s a huge believer in Allen Murray, from Time Inc., from Fortune, he has a world class, daily newsletter. But he thinks for anyone who's listening, you got to find two or three resources that you can go to, not occasionally, but virtually every single day so you can watch how these stories unfold and how these trends and metrics unfold. But you can never be too educated in a world that's as dynamic as it is today.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Jeff
When asked about books that have had an impact, Jeff shared that that's also a great question. He’s a pretty voracious reader, if he’s honest with business books, he very often will just hammer the first three chapters and find that books often get redundant so he doesn't make it all the way through. And that's one of the things they tried to do with Exponential, is treat it like the layers of an onion and make a key point, but have every chapter deal with a new topic as it relates to leveraging the consumer journey or leveraging culture so that the book continues to unfold.
And he thinks a couple of books that have been really influential for him is one of them, which was written by Bill Walsh, posthumously, meaning after he passed away, his family took his notes and the name of the book is, The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership. And he's one of the greatest football coaches ever; he was the single greatest coach ever until Bill Belichick came along. And his idea was really based upon the concept of putting the ball where the other team isn't, which really is a great business strategy, meaning don't follow what everybody else is doing, find that whitespace and let that dictate where your business strategy goes.
But the bigger thing about The Score Takes Care of Itself that you can get from the title is, he really focused in on culture and when he first took over the 40 Niners, before he won a bunch of Super Bowls, he was focused on all these little things like how do secretaries answer the phone? And everyone was like, “What are you doing your football coach? And why are you worried about how people answer the phone, that has nothing to do with what we're trying to accomplish here.” And he almost didn't make it, they almost fired him. But his point was like, “We're going to take care of all the little things, we're going to take care of the culture. And when we do that, per the title, the score will take care of itself.” And that's just an absolutely amazing book.
Another great book is a Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart, which has been really influential for him. And really what he gets down to is this point about culture. But culture really starts with one thing, which is hiring the absolute best human beings possible.
You can't really build culture, unless you first build a team of A+ players. And the point of the book is, if you want to get A+ players, there's a process that you can follow, it's not just a goal, it's not just a philosophy, there's a methodical process that can be used to find those A+ players. And to be honest with you, they don't always nail the process and you can never be too process oriented for things like that. But it was a real game changer for them in regard to how they approach recruiting and bringing on world class talent.
What Jeff is Really Excited About Now!
When asked what is one thing that he’s really excited about, Jeff stated that that's a great question. There's probably two things, the obvious and maybe the less obvious, but much more important, which is, from a business standpoint, this idea of marrying together data and creativity, this idea of building brands through empowerment, instead of interruptions, they started their agency 23 years ago based upon this principle, and now the whole world, the whole business world is really waking up to this is it, this is the model, this is how great brands are going to be built now and in perpetuity. In a lot of ways COVID didn't change business, he thinks in a lot of ways COVID expedited business and advanced it about seven years forward.
So one of the really exciting things for them is that tons of amazing brands are reaching out to them and they're in conversations with some of the biggest and the best brands in the world who are really excited about this concept of looking at the entire consumer journey, creating content and tools and empower people rather than just building brands through interruptions. But really, the less obvious, and perhaps even more exciting thing is, as their business grows and they take advantage of these opportunities, the exposure on getting to world class team members and the opportunities they're creating for their team members is probably the most rewarding and exciting experience he’s ever had in business, just watching young folks on their team take on bigger challenges, get promotions, do some of the best work he’s ever seen in his career, fundamentally and completely outperform him in every way, shape, or form, and then recruiting in new incredible team members who are starting that journey also, that to him is so incredibly rewarding, fulfilling and exciting.
Where Can We Find Jeff Online
Website – https://www.questus.com
Instagram - @thejeffrosenblum
Twitter - @JRQuestus
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jeff Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jeff shared that that's a great question. But no, not really, he doesn’t think there's any quote that he rely upon that becomes a mantra for life in general. It's, “If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.”
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Ethan Beute is the Chief Evangelist at BombBomb and he is a co-author of Rehumanize Your Business and of Human-Centered Communication, his newest book. He is also the host of The Customer Experience Podcast. Ethan Beute has spent the past decade helping business professionals be more personal and human through simple video messages.
Questions
Highlights
Ethan’s Journey
Ethan shared that he built a career in local television, so he ran local marketing teams inside local TV stations like your local ABC, or NBC or Fox station, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in Chicago, and out here where he is now in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And he was kind of bored of the work; he had been doing it for some time. And so, he started doing project work with a variety of different people that he knew, including the two co-founders of BombBomb and he just really liked what they were up to, he thought it was interesting. And so, he joined them as the first and only marketer over a decade ago as you were kind enough to mention in the introduction.
And in that time, just the growth in team size, customer base, revenue, it's been this dramatic journey of transformation and that's been happening at the same time that he’s been really in a front row seat of this movement to replace some of what is typically faceless typed out text, think about emails, social messages, text messages, Slack messages, all this faceless typed out texts that we rely on every day, replacing some of that with simple personal video messages.
And so, he’s done a lot of learning, teaching practicing, he’s sent more than 12,500 videos himself now, as you already mentioned. He’s written a couple of books on the topic. And it's just been a joy because as it says in the title of the first book Rehumanize Your Business, this really is about restoring some of the missing human elements that have been so useful to all of us for so long, that have gone missing as we've increasingly gotten digital and virtual.
Ethan’s Book Human-Centered Communication – What the Book is About – The Main Pillars the Book is Built on and How it Can Help Up Your Customer Service Game
Me: So, your most recent book, Human-Centered Communication, that was released in September, right?
Ethan shared that in October, they were definitely telling people about it a lot in September, and it started shipping in in early October.
Me: So, could you share with us maybe, I would say the main pillars that that book is built on? Like, who is the book for? What is the book about? And how can it really help you to UP your customer service game?
Ethan shared that if you rely on connecting and communicating in digital, virtual and online spaces, then this book is for you.
He knows that's really, really broad. But really, it is loaded with philosophy, and then more practically strategy and then more practically tactics to help anyone connect and communicate more effectively in the face of ever increasing digital noise and pollution.
So, we all know that these spaces that we operate in are noisy. Inboxes are overloaded, message boxes are overloaded, and we’re getting spam texts and spam calls now bleeding into pollution.
It's difficult to know who and what to trust, we feel some sense of overwhelm, just keeping up with all the notifications, but he’s in like five Slack channels and they always seem to be loaded with more new messages than he can possibly keep up with.
And so, this is obviously unsustainable for individuals and for organizations. And so, Steve, who is his long time friend and team member, their Chief Marketing Officer at BombBomb, his co author on Rehumanize Your Business, wanted to take this on directly.
Obviously video does play a role in it, we can get into the nuance there. It specifically helps fill in the void of the visual and emotional impoverishment of so much of our digital communication in addition to the layers that it adds in terms of communicating your identity and verifying it because it's you on the screen, there's no one that can fake being you, at least at this point.
And so, they roped in 11 of their expert friends, they have a number of sales and marketing leaders, they have a marketing futurist from Salesforce, they have an emotional intelligence expert with seven US patents in the analysis of facial coding data, they have just a number of different people that they brought into this conversation, to figure out how to make sure that the way they're reaching out and engaging people puts those people's needs and interests first in order to generate better results for everybody.
And so, that's what they're doing. They're blending human centered design with their daily digital communication, it does rely on Steve's and his (Ethan) expertise and experience, but they also involve many other people in the process. And the feedback so far has been very, very positive.
How Can a Company Be Customer Obsessed and Get Customers to Want to be Intrinsically Loyal
Me: Very nice. So, one of the terms that you use in your book, customer obsessed and cult followed. Apple came in at 7.8, the most human brands across all industries. And then you had USAA a nearly 100 year old financial services organization with a score of 9.4.
What does a company need to be to be customer obsessed and cult followed that people want to follow that brand?
And then I'd like you to also talk a little bit about loyalty. Because I know a lot of companies have loyalty programs, but to me, they're more like, I don't know, I just don't see them as true loyalty programs, because what they're doing isn't necessarily making me want to be loyal to them.
So how can you really get your customers to want to be intrinsically loyal to you?
Ethan shared that these are great questions. And the answers to both are remarkably similar. So, he'll put them together.
For folks who are listening, what Yanique is referring to is a study that he and Steve leaned on; he thinks it was in chapter two of this book. But it's the Lippincott Human Era Index or something like that.
And it was a survey of hundreds of company leaders and 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of consumers. And they were trying to identify the most human brand and he doesn't remember off the top of his head and he doesn't have the book. But they asked three particular questions. But really, he can answer both questions without listing those, is a really interesting study.
If you just search Lippincott Human Era Index or something, you'll find it, it's not hidden behind a gate, you don't need to type in an email address or anything to get it, it's a really interesting study.
It really comes down to how we make people feel.
And he’s going to go to Shep Hyken, who they featured in chapter 11 of Human Centered Communication, he's a customer service and customer experience expert. And one of the things he's been talking about lately is the difference between repeat business and loyal business. And the primary difference is the emotional connection that we feel.
Now, the emotional connection, one of the reasons that he thinks USAA that 100+ year old financial services business beat out companies like Apple or Southwest Airlines, or some of these brands that people really, really like, and respect and feel connected to, and would rank as human is that they, this is an interesting one, this isn't the only way to do it, but they answer their phone. He’s actually a USAA customer, their hours are pretty broad, so if he wants to call them at 6:00 am in the morning while he’s drinking coffee before he gets into the work of the day, or if he wants to call them in the evening or any point during the day, you can actually talk to somebody and they’ll answer your questions and they won't rush you off the phone and they're just very available and approachable online and on the phone etc.
They also have an interesting thing where the only way in to being a USAA customer and he say he’s getting a little bit too specific about their branding and positioning. But it's for US military and their families. Now, his father was in the Air Force, he (Ethan) has no military experience himself but because he is his direct descendant, he’s able to be a USAA customer. But they have this other layer of in and out and it doesn't have to be as clearly defined as being a military member for example, or a formal member of a group but the more you can create this kind of in group, out group scenario, the more people who are in feel like they're a part of something, the more you treat them as individual human beings as opposed to sources of revenue, the more you treat them as human beings rather than as numbers, customer numbers, account numbers, the less you make them restate themselves over and over again. The less you make them verify their identity over and over again, because they've already done at once.
There are a lot of things you can do to make people feel valued and appreciated, like you respect their time and attention and like you see them as a partner in success, whose questions you want to answer and problems you want to remove and opportunities you want to help them capitalize on.
It really comes down to how we make people feel, how we make people feel about themselves, how we make people feel about us, and our sales reps, or our service reps, or the other humans, they come into contact with, the way they feel about their problem or opportunity, the way they feel about our product or our service, the more we can keep in mind as we're making decisions as we're designing systems and processes. As we're designing messages and digital experiences, now he’s getting into kind of the what they take account in Human-Centered Communication, the more we can keep people's needs and wants and the way that we make them feel, the emotional resonance that they leave each of these individual experiences with, the better off we're going to be.
Indications in an Organization that Will Guide You to Know that You’re Truly Connecting with Someone
Me: Brilliant. So, that definitely answered both of my questions. And I'm so glad that you've been touching so much on emotional connection, and authenticity and just being really connected with another human being.
Are there maybe two or three indicators as a representative or a manager or an employee in an organization that will kind of guide you to know that you're truly connecting with someone?
Because I imagine connection looks different depending on each individual, it's not the same; you wouldn't connect with each person the same way. But is there maybe some guiding principles or triggers that you could use possibly as indicators to know that you're on the right track to connecting with this individual?
Ethan shared that a number of different people will do it in different ways. Some people do it through survey mechanisms and other feedback, NPS and going beyond just the number but getting to kind of the scores and the sentiment.
Some people use retention or expansion, or other financial measures to suggest loyalty. There's no foolproof answer to this, he wished he had something better and more concrete for you. But he will give you some concrete steps that he knows some people he really likes and respect are taking which big idea here, it is difficult to create customer loyalty. He will add it is difficult to create a remarkable customer experience without creating a remarkable employee experience and without employee engagement and employee loyalty.
So, something that he’s heard from a number of people is that they do some form of course, (a) being very thoughtful about what it's like to be on the team. What does it feel like to be a team member here? Do I feel valued? Do I feel appreciated? Do I feel like I'm making a contribution, not just to the world at large, but am I making a contribution day to day, week to week to the improvement of the business and to the improvement of customers lives.
And so, something that he’s heard really good, thoughtful, engaged managers and leaders doing is that as part of their meetings, let's just assume you have like a daily or a weekly stand up, or some kind of a team meeting.
They'll come up with different questions but they're all kind of around the idea of tell me a story that happened this week where you're able to solve a customer's problem or answer a customer's question. Or maybe where you broke the standard rules of the playbook, where you went a little bit out of your way, or where you got an amazing piece of feedback. And you know what you're looking for there isn't those amazing over the top surprise and delight stories. What you're trying to do is just create this culture where there's an ongoing internal conversation about putting other people's needs first, sometimes people are asking needs about helping out your fellow team members as well going out of your way to save someone time or to pick up where they left off or maybe a team member had a personal challenge or a personal crisis during the week and you filled in for them or covered for them or that kind of thing.
The more we can keep this top of mind by asking people to share stories, either in a one on one or a group setting, the more we're establishing that other people matter. And that the feedback people provides us matters, the way that we make other people feel matters. And so, it's a very simple practical thing to do.
And he thinks for maybe a hard driving, hardcore manager, it might feel like a waste of time, but he promise you, you will have a much more engaged team, one month, one quarter, one year into a habit that looks something like that.
Me: So, we really need to ensure that we are truly having those kinds of conversations that we can connect to people. And I love the fact that you mentioned that it's all about having a remarkable internal employee experience, because everything starts from within.
Why is Video so Impactful and What Kinds of Messages Can You Give With a Video?
Me: Video is something that is mentioned predominantly, of course, because BombBomb is all about video messaging. But let's say our listeners that have tapped into this episode didn't hear your previous episode with us last year and they're not too familiar with video messaging and how it really works.
I can attest, give a testimonial in this interview and say, each time that I interact with Ethan and I send him an email, he responds with a video message, and it blows me away every single time.
So Ethan, could you share with me why video is so impactful? How does it work? And what kinds of messages can you give with a video? Is it only for tutorial based kinds of conversations? Or can it just be simple responses and messages instead of actually written communication?
Ethan shared that this is a really good question. It's a big one, too. So he'll take it on. He'll start easy and try not to go too deep, and then let you redirect me as you would like. But in general, anyone listening can imagine how many times they receive or send a typed out message during the day. Usually, it's in the dozens or so. And so much of what we're trying to do, some of these are important and valuable messages and yet, we're restricting ourselves because it's just become normal to a form of communication that isn't ideal for many of those messages. And he’s talking again about faceless typed out text, the same black text on the same white screen that doesn't differentiate you, doesn't build trust and rapport and doesn't communicate nearly as well as when you simply look someone in the eye and talk to her or him.
And so, this video messaging movement is just looking for opportunities to record a simple video, it might be 27 seconds, it might be two and a half minutes, and sending it to one person or more people in order to do one of three things in particular.
One, establish or re- establish personal connection. So him and Yanique have never met in person, he hopes to one day. But in the meantime, you can feel a little bit like you know him, because he’s sending a full version of himself, the next best thing to being there in person. Because they don't communicate all the time, they've been privileged to communicate back and forth quite a bit over the past year or two. But it's not like they talk every day.
And so, it's been a while since you heard from me or since I've heard from you. So he’s going to initially establish and then now it's re-establishing some degree of psychological and emotional nearness, you feel a little bit connected to him. And this they can do this with their team members. So many people are working remotely; they can do this with their prospects and their customers. They can do it with their partners, their vendors, their suppliers, integration partners, all kinds of different people in their business ecosystem can feel like they know them before they meet them, or be reminded of what it's like to be with them. There's just a simple joy and benefit in that. So, number one is personal connection.
Number two is managing our emotion or our tone. There are so many things we try to do and typed out texts that are just really, really hard to do. Because text doesn't capture the richness of human communication, it doesn't connect; it doesn't capture subtlety or nuance. It doesn't capture excitement, or sincerity or gratitude, or concern or appreciation; all this kind of soft, wonderful human stuff, if we need to provide corrective feedback to a team member and we don't want to wait until the next one on one because that's scheduled four days from now, we need to provide that corrective feedback sooner than later.
So much better to do that when you can communicate it in a way that your intent and your sincerity and your interest cannot be confused. If you type out a message and send it to someone, it's up to them to determine, do you really mean it in a positive constructive way? Or does it come across passive aggressive, it doesn't really matter, you can try to control it the way that you write it, but it's really up to the other person to make the decision. When you send a video, there's no mistaking it. This is how humans have been communicating for millennia. We express emotions through our faces, and we read emotions from other people's faces. As a parent, or as a leader, or manager, you've probably had some version of this conversation with your child or with your direct report. No, it's not what you said, it's how you said it. And so, we all know that the way we say something matter. So, number two is emotion or tone.
And number three is detail or complexity, there are a number of things that we try to explain whether we're answering someone's question, whether we're just adding an attachment to the email, and pointing someone to page 12 to look for something in particular, we can break down detail or complexity, we can explain things in laypersons terms, we can show and tell with a screen reporting, we can walk with a screen recording where we can put ourselves in a little box or a circle and put a document or a report or a contract or a proposal on the screen, and walk and talk someone through it. And so, whether you're in sales, whether you're in marketing, whether you're in customer service, whether you're in account management, whether you're in leadership or management, no matter your role, or function, there are opportunities throughout your day, and throughout your week to do these things. You can still enjoy the benefit of the asynchronicity of digital communication.
He clears his inbox when it's convenient for him and some people are getting his message and engaging and responding immediately, some people are doing it an hour later or a day later, sometimes even a week later, whenever it's convenient for them. There are a number of benefits to all of this digital communication, but we need to look for the spots to restore the real human to human elements and the human to human qualities that make the communication, this is the key, more effective. This isn't about video for video sake; this is about using video because it's better at certain jobs, in terms of helping other people out, making ourselves clear, etc.
Me: Amazing. Love those three points that you brought across why video is so important and we will definitely have them highlighted and singled out in the show notes of this episode so our listeners can really gather and gain and feel the impact of what video messaging can really do for your business.
Ethan shared that simple, casual, conversational, this is just you and your webcam just like if you're getting on a Zoom call or a Skype call or a Microsoft Teams call or a Google Meet call, this isn't fancy, this isn't scripted, this isn’t edited.
This is just you talking to other people or kind of showing and telling what's on your screen, this is very approachable. You can do it in email, you can do it in LinkedIn messages, you can do it in Slack messages, you can do it in all kinds of different places. He just want to walk it down so that anyone that isn't familiar doesn't think, “Oh, I need fancy equipment, I need to edit video, this is going to be really slow and cumbersome.” This is just quick, easy, lightweight video communication for the benefits we already described.
App, Website or Tool that Ethan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Ethan shared there are a number of things that come to mind. Some of the easy ones that are kind of like layups, obviously email, he knows that's really old fashioned and it's silly to say, but there's just so many benefits to it and I find it so manageable. At some level, he uses it as a to do list at some level. He uses his phone as the screening tool, so he can swipe and delete the emails that aren't so important or that are there quick to deal with. And so, when he gets to his laptop, he only has the good ones. So that's kind of an old fashioned one.
LinkedIn is obviously super useful for meeting people and exploring ideas and even exploring your own ideas and creating conversations around them. In terms of a hot app or a hot tool, he’s not really a tech gadget app person so he’s not really looking to stay on the edge there. He keeps it pretty simple and whatever his team is using, he’ll wind up using. One of the tools they're using more and more is Miro. It's kind of a visual collaboration tool, think of it like a Google Doc or a Google Sheet but with a lot more different, unique, collaborative functionality. And again, it's a bit more visual, so that's one he'll offer.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Ethan
When asked about books that have had an impact, Ethan shared he reads a lot; he'll go with an old one and a new one. He doesn't remember what he mentioned the last time Yanique asked him this. So hopefully, the old one is not a repeat, but a book that he just absolutely loves; he found it in a used bookstore in the mid 1990s.
It was printed in 1973 and it literally fell apart in his hands finally. As he was doing the research for Human-Centered Communication, and this book is called Small Is Beautiful and the subtitle is Economics as if People Mattered. So, it's a human centered approach to economics in the financial system at large. It's actually a collection of essays by a gentleman named E.F Schumacher, Ernest Schumacher.
And he was writing in this era where people were really trying to figure out how do we evolve out of this industrial mindset of mass markets, mass production, and anonymity, inter changeability, standardization, a lot of dehumanizing work for the people executing it. And so, he found that really inspiring and informative. Again, he’s read it several times. But he reread it as he was doing the research for Human Centered Communication. So, that's an older one.
And then a much newer one is called Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data by Rishad Tobaccowala. And he gets into the same divide and he speaks to a really current tension that we would all recognize is what is the proper place of people? And what is the proper place of machines? How are we to work together?
It has echoes back into this kind of industrial revolution, industrial mindset that was dehumanizing. And of course, now, it's manifest again between robotics from a physical standpoint, automation and AI from a thought in an analytics standpoint. Just wrestling with what makes humans uniquely powerful, what brings humans to life? What do people find engaging both on the employee and on the customer side. And so, the more recent one is called Restoring the Soul of Business by Rishad Tobaccowala. And love that book, too.
What Ethan is Really Excited About Now!
Ethan shared that they're doing kind of a hard reset on a lot of their training. And so, right now he’s in this mental state where he’s taking this broad sweep of all the things that he’s learned and taught over the past decade at BombBomb. And it's a lot obviously, and it includes two and a half books. There's a half book in between these two, that turned out to lay out in about 128 pages and just updating it, making it more contemporary because this opportunity is for everybody as he already mentioned.
It's easier to do than most people think there, are 10s of 1000s, if not a couple 100,000 pioneers actively engaged in this and it brings him to life every day to know that he can help more people (a) Understand the opportunity. And then (b) Start going down this road where they actually try it, “Am I doing it right?” People don't seem to be responding or people are responding incredibly well and just getting people on the right track and moving them forward.
And so, he’s just kind of in this reflective review state in order to update and recreate, along with some team members, it's exciting and encouraging. And if anyone ever has any questions about any of this, he’d love to hear from them directly.
Where Can We Find Ethan Online
LinkedIn – Ethan Beute
Instagram - @ethanbeute
Twitter - @ethanbeute
Instagram - @bombbomb
Twitter – @BombBomb
Website – https://bombbomb.com/book/
Podcast - The Customer Experience Podcast
Email – ethan@bombbomb.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Ethan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Ethan shared he doesn’t have any, he probably shared a philosophy that they developed internally at BombBomb which is, “Be of value and abundance will follow.” This idea that the more we lead in a spirit of service and support and help, the rewards come subsequently.
Another one he’ll add, this is just a mantra sometime. He runs, walks and hikes a lot and often times he’ll listen to music or listen to a podcast but he will also take the airbuds out for extensive periods of time just to be with his own thoughts.
And sometimes he’ll just cycle on a mantra which is, “Being kind to myself and being kind to other people.”
He knows it seems simple, but it’s so easy to get caught up in what other people need, what other people want, the pressures you’re putting on yourself, different things that are on your calendar and your schedule. And things can feel busy and overwhelming and if we stop and think about why we’re really here, it is to be in a relationship with other people and he thinks leading with kindness is not a soft thing to do, it’s actually a very challenging thing to do and it is foundational to all good things.
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Fred Reichheld is the creator of the Net Promoter system of management, the founder of Bain & Company's Loyalty practice and the author of five books including The New York Times bestseller, The Ultimate Question 2.0. He is currently a Fellow and Senior Advisory Partner at Bain, where he has worked since 1977. Fred is a frequent speaker at major business forums and his work on customer loyalty has been widely covered in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Fortune, Businessweek and The Economist.
His upcoming article to be published in November marks his 15th contribution to the Harvard Business Review. In 2012, he became one of the original LinkedIn influencers, an invitation only group of corporate leaders and public figures who are thought leaders in their respective fields. In 2003, Consulting Magazine named Fred as one of the world's 25 Most Influential Consultants.
According to The New York Times, he put loyalty economics on the map. The Economist refers to him as the “high priest” of loyalty. Reichheld graduated with honors both from Harvard College (B.A., 1974) and Harvard Business School (M.B.A., 1978). He's based in Cape Cod and Miami.
Questions
Highlights
Fred’s Journey
Fred shared that early in his career at Bain & Company, he noticed companies similar to us all, some brand new, some quite mature, but they were all outperforming all of the things he learned at the Harvard. Some were crushing it and a good example was enterprise Rent-A-Car, who started out as a tiny little rental leasing agency in St. Louis, and has grown now to become the largest car rental company on Earth without ever having to tap public equity markets, it's still a private company. And you think, Gosh, what I learned at Harvard was a capital intensive business, low growth industry, low margins, there's no way that you could grow on internally generated cash.
So, when he went to meet with Andy Taylor, their CEO, he said, “Fred, there's no secret, there's only one way to grow a successful business sustainably.” And so, he was listening for this great secret. And he said, “You treat your customers so they come back for more and bring their friends.”
And that basic idea changed his world because that's what he now understands is the key to success. If your customers are coming back for more and bringing their friends, your economic flywheel will crush the competition.
What is the Net Promoter System and How Companies Can Use it to Yield the Best Results
Me: Amazing. So I had an opportunity to get an advanced copy of your book Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customer. I really, really love it. I haven't finished reading it as yet, but I've gotten quite far in it. And so, I just wanted you to share with us.
Fred, in the book, especially in the preface and the foreword, you kind of mentioned that you have this net promoter system, but people are not actually using it the way how you created it to be used. Could you explain to us what the Net Promoter system is and how companies should really be using it to yield the best results?
Fred shared that he’s long been troubled by the fact that financial accounting is how we run our businesses. And while financial accounting is very good at telling us when we've extracted a million dollars from our customers wallets, it does nothing in helping us understand when we've enriched a million customers lives or when our teams have done work that's meaningful and toward an important purpose.
And Net Promoter was his attempt at helping companies measure that important idea of all the lives you touch, how many are enriched? How many diminished? And that evolved into Net Promoter Score is based on one question, how likely you’d recommend us to a friend, 0 through 10.
And it turns out that when someone gives you a 9, and especially a 10, you've enriched their life, you've lived up to the golden rule of loving your neighbor.
And 0 through 6, you failed, you diminish their life. And so, this notion of Net Promoter Score is just keeping track of all the lives touched, how many enriched, how many diminished, and how many promoters, how many detractors, it's very practical for running a business because your promoters are your assets, who come back for more and bring their friends. But also, it's a little bit inspirational because putting your teams to work, and enriching lives and measuring that outcome and helping them learn how to do better, that's really helping them live the right kind of life.
The Contributing Drivers of Loyalty
Me: So, at the end of the day, we're all trying to build better relationships with our customers. Now, in your book, you also said that loyalty means investing time and resources in relationships.
Do you know maybe could you share with us maybe based on your experience and your research, you've definitely been in the thing way longer than I have; maybe two or three drivers that you think contribute to loyalty.
And this is loyalty in general, which I'm sure impacts business relationships, because I mean, loyalty is something that as human beings, we do link it to a person. For example, if you have an animal, your dog is loyal to you as the owner, in a relationship; you're loyal to the other person that you're in the relationship with, whether it's a personal or professional relationship. So could you share with us maybe two or three things that you believe are contributing drivers of loyalty?
Fred shared that he thinks it's quite poorly understood in this day and age when people are demanding loyalty and trying to get loyalty through gimmicks and marketing, so called loyalty programs. So, he thinks it does make sense to get back to basics.
He thinks loyalty is an investment from you and another person in a relationship. And you think, “Why would I invest in someone else?” Well, it's because they stand for what you believe in you.
You believe that they'll reciprocate and treat you reasonably and not abuse your trust and that you're in a position to actually do something to make their life better. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time.
A lot of people think about loyalty as, “Oh, I want them to be loyal to me.” He thinks the way to start is, “How can I invest in this relationship and love them, make their lives better?”
And that's what great companies’ do, that's what great leaders do, they inspire their troops to find ways to enrich the lives of customers sustainably, of course, profitably. But the whole goal in a business is making your customers lives better. Because when you do that, you’re investing in the right relationships, they come back for more, they bring their friends, they say great things about you, they become your public relations force, that's how great business works.
And he thinks we get drawn off center a little bit because the larger our company is, the more it’s run through financial mindset. It's our accounting numbers that we seem to view as the framework of success, when in fact, no, it's this golden rule ideas, it’s love thy neighbor as thyself. And when you do it, you'll see the results because when customers feel the love, they are loyal and that's at the core of loyalty, it's earning loyalty by enriching customers lives. And loyalty from employees, by putting them in a position to earn lives of meaning and purpose, by enriching the lives of customers that they touch.
Me: I like the fact that you mentioned that it's not just about loyalty in terms of you getting the person to be loyal to you, but it has to be earned and it's not something that can be bought. So I'm glad that you mentioned at the beginning that a lot of these loyalty programs and marketing initiatives that organizations have that they dub as loyalty programs are not actually programs that will make or even influence your customers to be loyal to you. So it's good that you identified for us that loyalty is something that is earned.
What Companies Should Look for to Enrich the Lives of Customers
Me: Now, in terms of showing your customers or enriching their lives regardless of the industry that you're in, whether you're a financial company, you sell insurance or you have credit cards, or you're a retail company, what are some things that companies should look at in trying to enrich the lives of your customers? Do they need to understand what type of customer they're serving and does the generation matter?
Fred shared that of course it does. And yet, he finds that the most successful businesses, whether dealing with teenagers today or octogenarians, it's understanding how to communicate effectively, how to always act in your customers best interest, to listen very carefully to how you're doing and what they need. Because at the core, a business is trying to solve the customer's problem, it's trying to turn a frown, into a smile, and the human process of understanding that, he doesn't think that's changed in thousands and thousands of years. Of course, the technologies we use, the innovative approaches, those open up wonderful new opportunities, but the basics, they haven't changed.
One of his colleagues at Bain, they joined about the same year, Scott Cook, who's the founder of Intuit, who has built TurboTax, and other very successful business, huge, huge success.
And he said, “Fred, you want a big business, solve a big problem for your customers.” And that's the right way to think about it, “I am going to be a reliable resource that is going to make a real difference in your life by turning that frown into a smile, and I'm going to measure my success that way.”
Obviously, profits are necessary but those who think of profits as the true objective, they're not going to grow a very big business very long because that's very selfish, “How much money can I extract from your wallet, get away from me, I'm not going to tell you anything about myself for what I need.” If he has someone who actually acts in a loving, caring way, they're a mutually beneficial relationship affair. But that's the kind of person he’s willing to actually share his information with and give constructive feedback to because he wants them to succeed, he wants them to succeed in helping him solve problems.
What is Customer Capitalism and How it Impacts the Consumer?
Me: So, while I was reading part of your book as well, I bucked up on a term, Customer Capitalism. Could you share with us what is that exactly? And how does that impact the consumer?
Fred shared that he thinks people have a framework in their heads about capitalism that's just dead wrong, that maximize shareholder value as the underlying concept. Through the years, whether it's Milton Friedman, or Adam Smith, there's an ancient and an out of date framework that people call capitalism, that without giving it this name, it's financial capitalism, because it's based on this idea of profits and shareholder and investor is the king. He thinks that has changed over the last few decades, at least, to where now, there's so much capital in the world; you can raise millions and millions if you have a good idea.
What there's not infinite amounts of are good people with good ideas who are willing to work together in a team framework to serve others.
And the real capital in that system, our customers, all the cash flow comes out of customers’ wallets.
So let's keep track of how many customers you have, how many are coming back for more, how many referrals you're getting, that was the basic, those are the keystone metrics in customer capitalism.
And more than anything, it's being clear about the purpose. If the purpose in the old school capitalism was maximizing profits and shareholder value, in customer capitalism, the purpose is to enrich the lives of your customers.
Bain did a survey of a couple 100 Senior Executives around the world, C suite executives and they found that only 10% believe that the primary purpose their business existed was to make customers lives better. They thought it was about profits or great place to work or balance duties to shareholders, stakeholders. He just thinks that is dead wrong. A good business, a sustainable business has to have a primary purpose of making their customers lives better.
Me: Amazing. One of the companies that you mentioned in your book when I was reading was Chick-fil-A and I absolutely love Chick-fil-A, both me and my daughter. But one of the things that I really love about Chick-fil-A was the fact that I remember I traveled a few years ago and my daughter wanted to get something from them on a Sunday and they're actually closed on Sundays and I thought that was awesome, from what I read that was a principle that their organization had and they've lived it up to this day and they've still been very successful even though they're closed on a day when they could be making more profit, as you mentioned.
Fred stated that the purpose of Chick-fil-A is certainly to enrich the lives that it touches. It's interesting, the founder, Truett Cathy was one of his early teachers in his business career, and they're totally different people. He's a Southern, he was a Southern Baptist, very, very conservative point of view. He (Fred) lives up in New England, Unitarian Universalist, you couldn't be more liberal in your religious thinking. And yet they had enormous overlap at the core, he picked a proverb from the Bible, that essentially, it says, “A good name is worth more than silver or gold.” Or in other words, your reputation is everything, which he thinks is so true.
And this notion of net lives enrich and Net Promoter Score, you think about when you enrich a life, you're living up to the golden rule, you're loving a neighbor, when you diminish your life, you're failing.
And so, the reason Chick-fil-A has been very interested and supportive of Net Promoter is because we're trying to achieve the same mission, this is back to Truett Cathy’s words, he was inspired to turn frowns into smiles on his customers’ faces and that is the purpose of the business.
So, then you mentioned Sunday, he asked him why he closed on Sundays and he said, “It's not a religious thing, Fred.” He's a very religious guy but he’s not preachy, their business does not put biblical quotes at the bottom of their cups, and they're not proselytizing in the parking lot. They try to be models; they try to help their people live up to this standard of loving your neighbor. And closing on Sundays, he just knew that you could not run a restaurant and have the manager there 7 days a week, you’ll kill yourself. And he said, “Given that, and I definitely want my store operator there running the place not delegating to an assistant.” He said, “We have to close a day and closing Sundays gives this signal that we care about our people, and we care about golden rule.”
As he said, “But you know, Fred, I go to other restaurants on Sunday, it's not like it's wrong to go out and eat at a restaurant on Sunday. It's just wrong for us to try and have our managers running a business 7 days a week.” And he thinks it's brilliant. And it is a signal. He thinks it reminds people that they're different. And you're right, their productivity, they have far higher sales per unit than any of the competitors. And those competitors are open 7 days a week. And it shows you when you get the purpose right; your business can crush the competition.
App, Website or Tool that Fred Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Fred shared that it's a new one for him, he discovered a company through one of his Bain partners, it's called BILT. The reason they were intriguing to him was their goal is to help their customers, their customers tend to be consumer brands, like Weber, who makes grills and place at manufacturers and so on. They try to help them build promoters among their customers, to create more promoters.
And what they've done is just taken one of the most painful steps in every customer's journey episode, which is assembly and first use, using paper instructions, which these paper instructions are horrible, let's be serious, they're written by engineers whose English is certainly their second language and they're just totally unintuitive.
So, BILT takes the 3D CAD drawing from the manufacturer, and then turns it into great little 3D instructions on how to assemble and use your product effectively and it's free to the consumer. So you go to a Home Depot or Costco and you'll start to see BILT on the packaging, and you know that you're going to get that home and you'll be able to put this thing together quickly and you'll feel great about yourself or Home Depot will have their faucets or ceiling fans, things that are really tricky to install, or garage door openers, and you go to BILT and you put the product in it and it downloads up to date information about how to put it together in a very intuitive way where you can zoom in and pinch out and rotate upside down and voice activated to help you guide you through your journey, it's just brilliant.
Me: Nice, very good. They obviously saw a need in the market, as you said, a problem that people were having challenges with and complaining about and created a product that would be applicable to make people's lives easier.
Fred stated that try ordering a bicycle online, you get it back to your driveway and then you try to put it together using paper instructions and he thinks you'll see why BILT is so successful.
Me: Yes, I can just imagine and my coordination of doing things like that are extremely poor, so I'm sure I'd benefit from using BILT.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Fred
Me: Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? I'm sure you have many because you've been around for quite some time and I'm sure you've had to read and engage with a lot of authors over the years that have definitely helped enrich your life and the lives of others. But is there maybe one or two that have definitely had a great impact on you over the years, maybe something you read a long time ago, or even something you read recently?
When asked about books that have had biggest impact, Fred shared that he read a lot of books. Actually, he listens to them now; his eyes are so strained from working at his computer and writing a book, he can't read in a relaxed way so he listens to Audible. Probably the most impactful book in the last 10 years was written by a guy who passed away, Clayton Christensen was a business school professor, who he got to know, he worked briefly at Bain and then worked at an entrepreneurial thing and ended up at Harvard.
He wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? And he (Fred) thinks he's just absolutely right. And the reason that helped him is, he thinks you do need to measure a life carefully, that's what a Net Promoter Score is, of all the lives he touched, how many enriched, how many diminished?
That's how you measure a life. And he thinks Clayton put this in very human terms, and thinking about that, not just in a business sense, but all of your relationships in life, how do you think about investing in those relationships and being loving and loyal in a way that's not just correct in your mind, but you know the other party felt the love, you have to get feedback on how you enrich their life. So, How Will You Measure Your Life is a big one.
There's a recent book by Adam Grant called Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, that he thinks is quite good. Adam is a guy that they must think along the same lines, because it was an earlier book that he wrote about it’s called Give and Take. And he just makes the case that the world is full of people; there are some people who are givers, there are people who are matchers, they want a relationship to be in balance and then there are takers. And he said, one of the keys to life is avoid those takers, they’re sociopaths, you can try and change them, but good luck.
And he thinks this is important and living a golden rule existence. Not all people want to be part of a community where people are treated with love and care, they'll abuse that community and he thinks if they can't be fixed, they have to be excluded. And then Think Again, Grant just says, we have these mindsets that are fixed, and he thinks of financial capitalism as a fixed mindset for 90% of the world and he needs to change the way people think about the purpose of business and how to enrich a life.
What Fred is Really Excited About Now!
Fred shared that he got the paperback galley of Winning on Purpose just a week ago and he can't take it off on his desk, but very pleased with the way it's come out. And that's going to be every day of his life for the next probably 90 days is how to get people to see the relevance of this book to their personal lives, not just their business lives because the subtitle of Winning on Purpose is “The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers.” And loving customers, it doesn't sound like it's a business book, he doesn't know what it sounds, just a little flaky but it’s not because this notion of loving thy neighbor as thyself is the core, it's the highest standard in human affairs. And what he’s arguing and Winning on Purpose is that, that is how you win.
When you enrich lives, you have to do it sustainably, and you have to do it profitably, but that's not the magic, accountants can do the profits for you. The magic is figuring out how using your energy and ingenuity to love your customers and have them come to trust you and come back for more and bring their friends but it goes so far beyond business.
So, the great challenge he’s got is getting people to recognize, he wrote this book for his granddaughters, infants who he wants them to see how you live the right life. And it sets out a way of measuring progress that he thinks is consistent with what Truett Cathy had in mind of building a reputation that you'll be proud of, and investing in relationships where you can earn people's loyalty.
It's probably a good rule of thumb anywhere to just don't spend time with a person unless you can figure out a way to make their life better. And by the way, the good news, chapter two and five of the book, demonstrate that companies that do this, they're the ones that get rich.
It's not clear from reading the Wall Street Journal, but every company, every industry, where they look at the Net Promoter Score, versus the competition, measured carefully, correctly, not just some self reported vanity metric, but real apples to apples.
It's the company with the highest Net Promoter Score who is growing faster and delivering better total shareholder value. And that's really good news.
But people are the mindset is fixed, they just don't get it. They say, “Oh, that's just some industries.” No, every time they're finding it, how did Andy Taylor grow to be the biggest car rental company on earth? How did Apple become one of the biggest companies on earth? Because they built a set of customers who are Promoters who are out there buying more stuff, and referring their friends and giving good feedback because they trust you, and making your employees feel special and loved, that's the flywheel that's going on. So, he’s trying to convince the world that business works in a very different way than they probably learned in business school, or if they read the Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
Me: And you know, one of the things that kind of came in my head just now when you're speaking in terms of what we were taught in school versus what is reality, the reality is, a business isn't a static thing, it's made up of people and without people in the business, there is no business and people are human beings with feelings and emotions. And you get more out of people when they feel loved, when they feel listened to, when they feel heard, as you said, when you enrich their lives. So, if you really do live that principle, I'm sure you'll win in all aspects of your life.
Fred shared that he’s worked at Bain & Company since 1977. So what is that 43 going on 44 years now. And they've been through good and bad times. For the last 10 or 20 years, it's been good times. If you look on Glassdoor, the place that rates businesses as great places to work, Bain, this year, it's the best in the world according to Glassdoor, it's always been one of the top several since Glassdoor started. And Bain hires lots of different kinds of people. But these are really ambitious, talented people. And even with that slice of ambitious people, when you look at what makes a person happy at work at Bain, they want to feel loved; they want to feel like they're a valued member of a team that wins with its customers. So it's an act of service and if you ask, remember he said the typical business person in the world, 10% of them think the reason their business exists is to enrich customer lives, at Bain, if you just ask everybody through the company, you find 60% to 70% of the people think the reason Bain exists is to make their clients more successful.
It's a servant culture where love is at the core, helping people succeed and putting smiles on faces and that's what makes it a great place to work.
And the irony is, he knows what makes, at least he thinks he knows what makes Bain a great place to work, it's that they are dedicated to helping their teams make a difference in their clients success, and be recognized and rewarded and part of a team that helps achieve that.
And it's financially successful but that's not the purpose, the purpose is making their customers lives better. And he thinks most great places to work lists, completely ignore that. They think it's refrigerators full of beer in the break room, pool tables and ping pong and cool fringe benefits, that's the fringe, the core is being on a team where you're playing a valued role at really making a difference in a customer's life.
Where Can We Find Fred Online
Website - https://www.netpromotersystem.com/
LinkedIn – Fred Reichheld
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Fred Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Fred shared that he wished he did. When he’s preaching to whether it's at the dinner table or elsewhere, he goes back to this idea of how important loyalty is. You got to understand what your life stands for, what is your purpose as an individual and then the way you live that purpose is to invest in relationships with other people who share that purpose. And it's how you can invest and help those people succeed that he thinks helps you achieve your mission. So, “Choose your loyalties wisely, they guide your life and they define your legacy.”
Me: Love it, choose your loyalties wisely, they guide your life and define your legacy. Amazing. Love it, absolutely love it. And I'm sure every person on the face of this earth that wants to do good, wants to leave a good legacy behind. So the only way to do that, I believe, as you had said was to try and live by doing those actions on a daily basis, do it consistently because that's the only way when you leave this world you'll be able to leave that legacy.
Fred stated that and measure, so many people would say, “Oh, I can't measure love.” And he would say, actually you can, you can get feedback from your customers in a systematic Net Promoter framework and understand how many lives you've enriched and that is your legacy. And then you should be measuring your way toward the kind of life you want to lead.
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Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Dan Gingiss is an international keynote speaker and customer experience coach who believes that a remarkable customer experience is your best marketing strategy. His 20-year professional career spanned multiple disciplines, including customer experience, marketing, social media and customer service. He held leadership positions at McDonald's, Discover and Humana.
Dan is the author of The Experience Maker: How To Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can't Wait To Share, which was released in September 2021. And he's also the author of Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media. He also hosts the “Experience This!” show podcast and “The Experience Maker Show.”
He earned a B.A. in Psychology and Communications from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.B.A. in Marketing from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Questions
Highlights
Dan’s Journey
Dan shared that he started out in a marketing role right after college, even though he had never taken a marketing class; he was a psychology and communications, undergraduate major. And he realized once he gets into marketing, that's basically what marketing is, it's psychology plus communication. So, it turned out to work out pretty well. And he held that job for about four years, he really liked it. But he ended up going to business school, where he really formalized the marketing learning. And he learned that everything he had been doing had names and frameworks and all that sort of thing.
And then he spent another 15 - 16 years in corporate America, in financial services, healthcare, and eventually McDonald's, learning all sorts of marketing channels, but also evolving into customer experience, and really falling in love with CX and its power to impact the bottom line, to obviously make customers happier. And so, the book is really a summary of everything that he’s learned, put into a simple framework that allows companies to create remarkable experiences for their customers without spending a lot of money.
“The Experience Maker, How to Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can’t Wait to Share” - The Pillars That The Book is Built On
Me: Amazing. So the book is really, really an awesome tool. So, for those of our listeners that are not familiar with Dan's book, it's The Experience Maker: How to Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can't Wait to Share. So, could you share with our listeners, Dan, a little bit about this book, maybe share with us maybe three to four pillars that the book is built on? And why a company would need a tool like this to enhance our customer experience?
Dan shared that he’s a believer as a marketer, that the single best way to do marketing today is to get our customers to do it for us. And it's called word of mouth marketing; it's usually been considered the holy grail for marketers, and something that's been on attainable until now.
And really, what we're finding is that the companies that create great experiences don't have to work so hard at marketing, because their customers are doing it for them, they're sharing these experiences, because people like sharing positivity. We know that people share both negative experiences and positive experiences, but what they don't share is an average experience. Nobody ever has said; “Let me tell you about the perfectly ordinary restaurant I went to last night.” That's not something we care to share. But man, we will talk about it if it was amazing, and we will talk about it if it was terrible.
And so, the idea of the book is to teach companies, how do you create those amazing experiences and how do you create them in such a way that customers can't help themselves, they reach into their pocket and grab their phone and take a picture and share it and say nice things about you.
So, the framework that he introduced is called WISER. And it's so that you become wiser than the competition when it comes to customer experience. The first four letters wise stand for Witty, Immersive, Shareable, and Extraordinary, which are four different elements that help to create the kinds of experiences that are remarkable or worthy of remark, worthy of talking about.
Now you can use one of them, or you can use more than one of them. And the more that you stack them, the more powerful they are. But even just using one is going to start to change how your customers perceive the experience with you.
The R in WISER then becomes about being Responsive. And when people are talking about us, especially on social media, we've got to be part of that conversation. After all, if somebody gives us a compliment, we ignore them in real life, that's pretty rude. They don't think really highly of us and yet brands do that all the time in social media, where customers are complimenting them, but the brand is nowhere to be found.
Me: So, one of the things I really liked about the section on Witty, so you kind of explained that a little bit for us, you indicated that it wasn't so much about being humorous, because not many brands can carry off humour, depending on what their brand, reputation or image is. But more so, being very clever and creative in the messaging that you put across. And there was one that really caught my eye in the book when I was reading; the gas station one where it said customer service is priceless and I thought that was really cool. Because at a gas station, typically, rates are not necessarily the best. So, that kind of caught my eye like if I did see two gas stations, as you suggested in the book and said customer service is priceless, I probably would go to the one that said that versus the one that didn't have anything that would have caught my eye. That was really cool.
Dan shared that one of the ideas there is that competing on price is a loser's game, and all you got to do is talk to that gas station owner because he's got his competitor right across the street selling a very similar product for the exact same price. So, competing on price isn't going to work for him. Now competing on product is also difficult because they're both selling gas and inside their stores, they're both selling basically the same convenience items. So, what's left is customer experience and if this particular gas station can differentiate based on the service that you're going to get, that is a reason to choose one over the other one across the street.
Example of Companies that Have Demonstrated an Immersive Experience
Me: So, the next part of your book talks about delivering an experience that is immersive. Could you maybe give us one or two examples of maybe companies that you know, that have demonstrated an immersive experience?
Dan shared that immersive is really about the continuity of the experience and creating something that is consistent and fluid in the customer’s eyes. And that's difficult as companies get bigger because they tend to have silos and everyone in each silo is responsible for one part of the experience, but nobody's responsible for connecting those experiences together.
So the poor customer ends up with this very choppy experience moving from part to part in your company. So, one of the examples that he shared in the book is about a company called Imperfect Produce. And they're a company that takes strangely shaped and sized fruit and vegetables that don't meet the cosmetic standards of a grocery store. And they box them into a subscription service that you can get a box every week at your doorstep.
And what they do is play on this idea that their fruits and vegetables sometimes look funny, they're sometimes too big or too small, or they're dented, or they're just shaped weirdly. And so, they actually lean into that and they have these characters that appear throughout the experience that are these vegetables and they have googly eyes.
And you see these characters in their marketing, on the box, really throughout the experience. The other thing that they really lean into is this idea that by buying their fruits and vegetables, which otherwise would have gone into the landfill, you're doing a good thing, you're saving waste from going to the landfill, you're saving water and CO2 because of the farmers not having to replant so often and they track this on the website.
So, every time he goes in to pick his fruits and vegetables, he’s reminded of how much he has saved from the landfill and he noticed the other day he just crossed 1200 pounds of produce that he’s gotten since he’s been a customer. And these are the kinds of things that keep people coming back for more because of the immersive nature of them; he’s much more tied into this brand than he would have been if they weren't immersive.
Me: It's almost like you feel like you're a part of their journey in whatever they're doing and because of that, it's much more difficult for you to walk away from them. And now it becomes a real relationship, because there's value being given on both ends of the spectrum.
How to Get Customers to Share Their Experiences With Us
Me: Now, you also mentioned that your experiences must be shareable. And I remember you used this word in the book, where you said customers have like a “Meh” experience, which is, I guess, just a mediocre one. I guess if we were to compare it to NPS, it would be like persons who scored seven and eight, because they're not really wowed, but they're not disappointed either, so they're kind of in the middle. So, what I really wanted to ask was, we have customers who we want to share our experiences and you mentioned that word of mouth is the best type of advertising for any business. “How can we get our customers to the point where they want to share their experiences with us and it's not just a “Meh” experience?”
Dan shared that the best example that he thinks really epitomizes this is the story that he tells in the book of taking his son for his birthday to a restaurant called Fleming Steakhouse.
And they walk into the restaurant, he had already told them ahead of time that it was his son's birthday, and the Maître d’ hands him a birthday card that is signed by the staff. And he was pretty impressed with that, he had not seen that before.
And they're sitting in eating our dinner and the discussion turns to and this may just happen in families where dad is a customer experience guy. But the discussion turns to his daughter actually brought up and said, “Hey, if they brought us a birthday card, I'll bet they're going to do something pretty special at the end of the meal.”
In the US, you often get a slice of cake and a candle when it's your birthday, and it's a very nice gesture, it's just that every restaurant does it, so it doesn't necessarily stand out.
And sure enough, Fleming's did not disappoint, they came out with a box of handmade chocolates that was sitting on a plate, where Happy Birthday was spelled out in cocoa powder. And instead of a candle, they had a sparkler and the sparkler is so much cooler than a candle.
Now, there are four people at the table and without being told to and without coordinating, everybody immediately grabbed for their phones. And they took a picture of this dessert.
And the parent shared it to Facebook, and the kids shared it to Snapchat or Instagram, and just like that, Fleming's had four different shares of an experience at their restaurant, all because they decided that a slice of cake and a candle while a nice gesture, is just not going to stand out enough for people to want to share it.
Now, he'll bet that box of chocolates and the sparkler doesn't cost them much more, it might even be around the same price. But the idea is that it's so completely different and it stands out in such a way that people can't help themselves, they want to take a picture of it.
And so, he uses that as a metaphor for companies to think about, “Where do you have a candle that you could turn into a sparkler?” Because that's the difference, that's what makes it shareable.
Me: That's amazing. That was really out of the box thinking that that restaurant did for your son. And you're right; every restaurant does just give a cake and a candle so if you're doing something different then I guess that's where the extraordinary in your wise acronym comes in because that experience was definitely extra ordinary, it was definitely out of the ordinary.
Dan stated that extraordinary just means a little bit better than ordinary, it doesn't have to be a private firework show and a Beyonce’ concert, that's extraordinary too.
But nobody has that kind of budget to do. And so, it's just about figuring out somewhere in your journey, where let's say you're doing something the same way that your competitors do it, that's a pretty good bet that that's an average experience, because your competitors are not delivering extraordinary experiences most of the time. So if you're doing it like everybody else is doing it, do it differently. And that's a great way to go from ordinary to extraordinary, make it stand out by being a little bit different and that is another element that causes people to want to talk about it.
Since the Pandemic, Do You Find That Customers Are More Sensitive to Customer Experiences?
Me: So Dan, a big part of customer experience now, I know it has definitely changed a lot. I know a lot of customers are paying so much more attention to it now since we're all going through this global pandemic. But have you found that customers expectations have changed somewhat, since the pandemic? Do you find that they're more sensitive to customer experiences, their expectations are higher? What has your experience been as a customer experience specialist in this area?
Dan stated absolutely. He thinks we as customers really took note, especially early on in the pandemic, of which companies were there for us when we really needed them, and which companies weren't.
And the truth is, is that a lot of companies did a very nice job at especially at the beginning of the pandemic, responding, reacting, and innovating. And then other companies really did not a good job of this. And basically checked the box, and didn't particularly do anything different.
So, an example of that is when the pandemic first started, most of us got a lot of emails from companies that were telling us about their enhanced cleaning procedures. And he loved that everybody called them enhanced cleaning procedures, they weren't ever better or improved, or anything other than the word enhanced because somebody started using the word enhance, and then everybody else copied that word.
And they also sent us, at least in the US, they would send us to the CDC website, which is the Center for Disease Control, he’s sure other countries have a similar organization. And what he found was that all these emails basically said the same thing, they were totally uncreative, unremarkable.
And then I got an email from his investment broker Charles Schwab and their email didn't say anything about cleaning procedures, or the CDC website. Instead, their email said, “We understand that you must be very nervous about a volatile stock market. And so, we want to make sure that you know all of these tools and benefits that you have available to you that you can use to help you through this difficult time.”
And for him, that was exactly what he needed from his investment firm. He didn't care about their cleaning procedure, that wasn’t important to him. But he certainly cared about a volatile stock market. So that's the difference between companies that cared, and that were really trying to deliver what customers needed at this difficult time, versus what everybody else was doing. And so, that is something that customers remember and they've seen lots and lots of customers switch brands during the pandemic, because they realized that the company they were doing business with just wasn't going to be delivering the experience that they wanted.
Re-Humanize The Customer Experience Even Though Using Digital to Support that Whole Transition and Make Things Easier for Customers
Me: Amazing. So, that's definitely some other ways that our customers’ expectations have changed. I think also Dan, since the pandemic, I get that digital transformation is super important and it definitely makes life that much easier for the customer and can create that effortless experience for them and seamless experience, especially seeing that you may not want to physically go to the business place. But I get a lot of questions from time to time from companies asking me questions like; “Do you think human beings are going to become obsolete totally in the whole realm of customer experience? And of course, my answer is always no. But in this whole digital transformation space that companies are going through, how do you think we can re humanize the customer experience, even though we're using digital to support that whole transition and make things easier for customers?
Dan shared that he totally agrees with Yanique, humans aren't going anywhere, we're not going to be replaced by robots.
And the reality is that customers today crave human interaction and the pandemic actually exacerbated that, especially the time that we were all stuck in our homes for so long, we wanted human interaction.
And so, there's a time and a place for both human engagement and technology engagement within the customer journey. There are times where we just want to self serve, and we just want to go online and see our balance or pay a bill or whatever and we don't want anybody to bother us, we just want to do it ourselves.
And then there are other times where we really need to talk to someone because we have a problem that we don't think we can solve by ourselves or that might have too many layers to it. And so, we don't, at that point, want to talk to a computer, we want to talk to a person.
And he thinks that companies that are getting it right are figuring out when do we deliver self service and when do we deliver human service. But those two things are always going to exist; one is not going to replace another.
App, Website or Tool that Dan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Dan shared that he would say right now it's actually LinkedIn and the reason for that is just that it is the place where he network, where he share content, where he consume other people's content. And where he meets people that want to do business with him. And he thinks that is the space right now online that he can't do without.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Dan
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Dan shared that one of his favorites is They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan. It's a marketing book and it teaches you how to create content around the questions that your customers ask you, or that your prospects ask you. And so, although it's a marketing book, it actually takes a lot of customer experience themes into it and he thinks it was one of the most valuable books that he has read, and has used in his own business and actually has used with clients as well.
Another one that he would pick, he’s going to go with one of Jay Baer’s books, because he loves him as well. He really loved Utility, but he’s going to go with Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers. And much like his (Dan) first book, being about social media, customer service, this is really a book that tells you to embrace complaints, and to learn from them and to treat them as gifts, because they can help you not only be responsive to customers, and maybe turn them from detractors to advocates, but also to go back to your business and find what's actually wrong and try to fix it for other people. So, Hug Your Haters is another one that definitely changed how he thinks about things.
What Dan is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Dan stated that you’re asking a guy that just spent nine months launching a book; he’s now kind of just coming off of that. But he'll say that he’s super excited to be back speaking on stages in person. He had two keynotes this week in two different cities, it was so nice to be with people again, yes, everybody's being safe and wearing a mask where appropriate. But there's just something as the speaker to talking to people in real life and seeing their eyes and seeing their reactions and hearing them laugh and clap and what have you that just doesn't happen on Zoom or in digital channels. And so, that's something he’s really excited about is the fact that live events are coming back and are back in some places. And he really looks forward to doing a lot more of those in 2022.
Me: That's brilliant, love that. So simple. And pre pandemic, we probably would have taken these very simple things for granted. I'm sure we never would have imagined a time when we were locked up in our homes and everything had to be digital. So now, as you said, we're getting back out there, and we're still being safe. But you really appreciate the very simple things in life that as I would say, we may have taken for granted; we wouldn't have realized how important or how valuable those kinds of experiences are.
Where Can We Find Dan Online
Website - https://dangingiss.com/
LinkedIn – Dan Gingiss
Twitter - @dgingiss
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Dan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Dan shared that this quote, believe it or not comes from a fortune cookie. He got this fortune that he was so excited about and he taped it up on to his camera right behind his laptop screen.
So, since the camera is always facing him, he can always see this. And it says, “Never mind tomorrow. Today is the day.” And he loves that because there are days where we want to procrastinate, or there are days where we just don't have the energy. And he likes reminding himself that today's the day and today is the day that he can move his business forward, he can help a customer out, he can do something nice for somebody, and you never know what tomorrow brings, or even if tomorrow brings and so that's a quote that's definitely stuck with him for a while.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Nathan Foy is founder and CEO of Fortis, nine-time Inc. Magazine honoree as one of America's fastest-growing companies. Fortis provides over 25,000 private, secure trips in 114 countries per year to clientele worth more than half a trillion dollars. These clients routinely ranked Fortis on Gallup surveys as the best in the industry. With offices in Greenville, South Carolina, and Hong Kong, Fortis offers ground transportation to more private jet owners than any other service in the world.
Nathan's first book, What Rich Clients Want: (But Won't Tell You), translates the Fortis experience into a replicable, scalable business model any service provider can recreate. Nathan lives in Greenville with his wife, Pam and their four children.
Questions
Highlights
Nathan’s Journey
Nathan shared that it was not intentional in its original conception. So, Fortis as a company began as a prepaid taxi cab card for college students. That was his original idea, was to create a card that students could use for transportation, this was in 2000 and this was the era when prepaid phone cards or prepaid meal cards were all the rage.
And so, he raised money from friends and family, he went up and down the East Coast, he built a network of taxicab companies. And their launch was for the Fall moving season of 2001, almost exactly 20 years ago. And it was going pretty well and then, unfortunately, 911 happened and everything changed. They ran out of money, people weren't visiting their kids for college anymore. And so, they started to adapt.
They sold their cab cards to companies. And then shortly after that, they found their first private jet company and they said they wanted chauffeured cars. And then they adapted into that really in the beginning of 2002. And that's really been their niche ever since.
Your Book, What Rich Clients Want - Strategy or Approach That You Take to Serve Rich Clients Versus Clients Who Are Not Rich
Me: So, in your bio, I read that you have this amazing book called What Rich Clients Want: (But Won’t Tell You). So, could you tell us a little bit about that book? Is there a particular strategy or approach that you take to serve rich clients versus clients who are not rich, you want to share with us how it is this book can be applied to everybody in business?
Nathan shared that it's really the result of 20 years of doing this and understanding that the most discerning clients that spend the most never actually tell you what they want, it's on you as a customer service person to discern that. And he thinks while this is a book that could be used to serve rich clients, he thinks the lessons here could apply to anybody in the service business.
So, what the book does is, it outlines basically that there's five steps that one has to proceed two, and two has to precede three. And if those are all there, then you can have a system of service that really leads clients into more than they expected they could get. And he thinks when you have that, then you can really create loyalty that lasts.
Me: Alright, you want to share with us what those steps are?
Nathan shared that the first step is “Professionalism.” And so, just kind of owning the introduction, owning the beginning of a relationship, the first impression is super important. And they give a lot of practical tips to that.
And then the second step is “Problem Solving.” So, actually taking a problem that they have, seizing it and acting as if it was your own and solving it so that they can see that you have competence in what you're doing.
The third step is “Concierge.” So, that's actually not just solving the problem, but anticipating even unspoken needs, so that you can see around a corner and make something happen proactively.
The fourth step is “Security.” So, having a layer of security that complements all of those things, but not at the expense of all of those things is very, very important. And these days, it's more about information, reputation, security, those kinds of things than it is physical security in most instances.
And then the fifth level, the highest level is really “Elite.” And that's when you start to begin to push out the boundaries on what's even possible. You'll know you're at this level when the client starts to refer to your company as a verb, they have clients that call them and say, “Can you just “Fortis” this, whatever that is that you do, can you just do that to this?” And that's a really good sign, they don't know the secret sauce, but they just want you to apply it to what's in front of them.
Me: I like that. I like the fact that you gave that analogy just now that they coined it as a verb. It's almost like Google, like before the age of the internet; Google wasn't even a word, let alone a verb. And now, when people want to find anything out there, like just Google it. I mean, it's just so amazing that 10 - 15 years ago, that word, it just didn't exist, it's just not something people would say.
Needs of Customers That Have Emerge That Customers Are Looking to be Even More Fulfilled Since the Pandemic
Me: Now customer service has been really impacted, customer experiences across different industries, across the entire world, all seven continents have definitely been impacted by the pandemic, can you share with us maybe what are maybe two or three things that you've seen emerge as needs that customers are looking to be even more fulfilled since the pandemic?
Nathan stated that the original environment of it, he thinks really led to us creating not just the standard things, masks and things like that, sanitization of surfaces. But we really tried to say, “Okay, what is kind of a level above that that might be unspoken, but that our clients might desire?”
And the thing that they arrived at was, particularly in the pre-vaccine environment, having a chauffeur contacted two or three days after the trip, for a principal, just to make sure that in the intervening time the chauffeur hadn't experienced any symptoms.
And so, the clients, there are many clients that said, I love that you do that, everybody's got testing, and everything, we've got temperature checks, and all those things. But the one thing is that the person could be asymptomatic and a day or two later get symptoms. And that's kind of next level.
And they had a lot of clients that really, really complimented them on doing that. Practically, another thing that they've implemented as partitions are just a much bigger thing in vehicles now than they used to be. And so, they wanted not only to provide that, but they had to kind of stand up, how do we do this so it doesn't look like you just ran to Home Depot and put it together and make that standard across the 1000 cities that they serve. So that was a fun challenge as well.
Professionalism and Problem Solving, How Can You Build Strengths or Strengthen the Competencies of Your Team to Ensure That They’re Demonstrating These Behaviours with the Customers
Me: Now, Nathan, one of the things that your book mentions as it relates to professionalism, you had mentioned the five tiers that are required for you to really deliver that supreme or extraordinary level of service. What are some of the, I would say approaches that organizations need to take maybe leaders, in order to ensure that your team members are practicing these behaviors or competencies, especially if it doesn't come naturally? Let's start maybe with the first two, professionalism and problem solving. How can you build strengths or strengthen the competencies of your team to ensure that they're demonstrating these behaviors with the customers?
Nathan shared that it's a great question. So, he would say before we get into the behaviours, it first begins with mindset. And the mindset has to be that you are honing your craft and not doing a job. And what he means by that is that if you want to make customer service into a career, then you have to make it uniquely yours and be a student of it so that the service Yanique offers is completely one of a kind over time, and only you can be you. But you also have to do that in concert with an overall brand that you're continuing to hone and refine to.
So, they have chauffer partners and they have conferences twice a year, they host them and go over kind of just aligning and making their services better. And that's one of the first things he does is just say, “Are you doing a job? Or are you doing a craft?”
Because, quite frankly, if someone's just doing the job, and this is just here to pay my school bills or this is just something I'm doing in between gigs, they don't really spend a lot of time with them. They don't really seek them out because they're not really going to want to ascend to elite status. So, he thinks that's a pretty important thing, just to begin with.
So, really practically professionalism, there's a lot of basics of how someone presents themselves with posture, appearance, confidence, handshake, eye contact, not just being early to do the job, but actually being early and ready to do the job early. Those are things that he would just say, they don't presume that people know and scold them if they don't know; they kind of assume that they don't know those things, and start training them on it. And that involves extensive use of checklists. And again, they're looking for people that are not offended by checklists, it's not saying you're incompetent, or you don't know what you're doing, it's just if you have the basics completely nailed down, that gives you the freedom to move up to higher levels and a checklists, especially the first level is essentially great for that.
If a client, especially a rich client doesn't like you, they're not going to tell you why they don't like you, they're just going to text their assistant and say, “I don't want to use this person again.” And you'll never know why. And so, the idea that you're going to be assessed on professionalism or clients going to give you input on how to be more professional, they don't have the time, they don't have the desire and it's really got to be on you to own that initial bit so that you can kind of get permission to move up to higher steps.
On problem solving, a real quick and easy way to begin with that is to just look for the most common problems that your clients encounter, and build systems for that so that you can be really ready when they have that. A quick example of that, they have a five star chauffeur for them in Miami.
And over the years, he's noticed people enter the airport, they want to go to a drugstore and then there's a core list of things that they're getting at CVS or Walgreens. And he's created what he calls his magic toolbox, but it's basically in his consoles. So, now when somebody lands and they say, “I just need to go to CVS.” He says, “Well, if you don't mind me asking, what is it that you need because I may just have it here.” And then they asked for one or two items, he has it. And he's immediately established competence with them that goes to a deeper level of trust. And now the whole world of what's open to the client, and what this person's capable of doing has really opened up.
Me: That's brilliant. I love that. That's like giving them what they need before they even know they need it.
How Nathan Stay Motivated Every Day
Me: So, could you share with our audience, how do you stay motivated every day? I can imagine that dealing in a business that is catering to clients who are rich, because of course, rich people clearly, yes, they have choices. But I'm sure their choice of business is a little bit different than a person who is probably on a budget. And so, with that in mind, maybe their demands are higher, their standards are higher and it can be frustrating sometimes I can imagine, especially when you're dealing with somebody who the average person would deem as difficult. So, in managing this business and running it for the many years that you've been in it, how is it that you stay motivated every day and you don't get discouraged by comments or just things that customers may see that makes you even wonder, I don't know if it crosses your mind. But do you ever get to the point where you say, “Why? Why am I doing this? Why am I serving all these spoiled, rich people?”
Nathan shared that a mentor of his once told him that if you're hard on yourself, the world is easy. And if you're easy on yourself, the world is hard. So, he would say it begins with the mindset of he’s his own biggest critic. And then they as Fortis are their own biggest critics. And they really lean into those challenges that clients give to them. And then every week they have a company meeting, and they gossip good news about each other, they do recognitions and they're saying not just good things that each of them has done, but really, they're kind of taking the time to go through each thing that's been done that they want to congratulate, and tie it to one of their five core values. And then that just helps to recenter them and “Oh yeah, we do value that. And that's an example of that. And I can learn from that. And if I did something like that, then I'm going to be recognized for that too.”
The second bit, he would just say is that he’s a firm believer in making your goals for the year, they actually break them up into six month periods, and making them known because every week or two weeks as a leadership team, they're going over their goals for the semester, it's a great way to just recenter you on, it's not about how he feels, or about this one service issue that they had. Overall, there are these big things that they're gunning for and they're doing that as a team.
App, Website or Tool that Nathan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Nathan stated that it's a good question. He would say for them LinkedIn has been extraordinarily valuable to connect with their partner chauffeurs and to their clients.
And so, particularly when there was just recently the COVID outbreak, that was a terrific way to communicate up to date information and then vice versa for them to get up to date information. And one thing they learned through that, which, he kind of already knew, but they found that it was even more true than he thought was their global network of service providers are some of the most important people in each location. So, people were like maybe thinking about travelling to Paris, and a phone call to a chauffeur security person in Paris would tell them way more than you could just get on the internet. So, staying connected through LinkedIn was really helpful for that.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Nathan
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Nathan shared that the summer after 10th, grade, he had knee surgery and he loved to play sports, he played a lot of basketball during the summers. And he had surgery right after school was out. And everybody told him, “Oh, it's going to be three to four weeks, and you'll be back on your feet.” And it more or less put him out for eight weeks or most of the summer. And so, he’s laid up in bed, this is pre internet and he’s getting tired of watching TV and just being lazy and thinking about all the things he’s missing out. And so, he got a book that's called Made in USA and it was by Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. And he just devoured that book. And he thinks that was the book that kind of sparked in him an interest in being an entrepreneur and actually understanding what that could look like and what that can be. And because he had a lot of time to think, set his mind racing that summer when he had nothing to do.
What Nathan is Really Excited About Now!
Nathan shared that he’s really excited about the book in the sense that he’s not pretending that any of the foundational things that he has in What Rich Clients Want are novel. In fact, he gave a huge amount of credit to Horst Schulze, who is essentially the founder of a lot of these concepts for Ritz Carlton he would say, especially level one and level two things. They lean a lot on the Ritz Carlton experience to learn from that. But then he thinks the neat thing is, is that over 20 years, having learned and distilled these things, and now being able to talk with them, with audiences like yours, he just find that really rewarding, really gratifying.
And in fact, tomorrow night, at their headquarters, they're having their book launch party and he’s got old team members driving in from other locations to come in and celebrate. So, it's fun to share the information and also celebrate the hard work that kind of went into making the book happen.
Where Can We Find Nathan Online
Website – www.fortis.co
Website – www.nathanfoy.com
LinkedIn – Nathan W. Foy
Twitter - @nfoyal
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Nathan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Nathan shared that there's a famous quote from Teddy Roosevelt that he will try to quote, but it says basically, “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who even if he fails, he fails while daring greatly, so that his place is not among those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Me: Lovely, I love it. And how does that quote help you?
Nathan shared that it tells him it's not about only winning; it's just being in the arena and if you're in the arena, you're going to get bloodied; you're going to have discouragements, you're going to have disappointments, but you are daring greatly. And that's something that he thinks is worth doing in our professional lives and in our lives in general.
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Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Becca Ribbing is the author of The Clarity Journal and has been a coach for over a decade. She's on a mission to help people break out of the cycles of uncertainty and struggle that hold them back. She helps women going back forth and with the big, seemingly endless question of what to do next so they can stop going around in circles and finally figure out what they truly want and create the clarity and momentum they crave.
So many people find themselves stuck and unsure of their direction. Using journaling prompts and helping people become more honest with themselves. She moves her readers forward gently and empowers them to embrace their strengths while letting go of any negative self-talk that has held them back in the past. She's been on many podcasts, including “What to Read Next” and “Say Yes.”
Questions
Highlights
Becca’s Journey
Becca shared that about 3 years ago, she was going back and forth about her next career move, she had just had her second son and she had been a coach for a while. And she had also been running a mindfulness website that she had to let go when her son was born, her son had a bunch of medical issues, none of them were huge, but they all were very time consuming.
And so, about 3 years ago, she was going back and forth with a friend of hers about what path she wanted to take next. And it was so funny, because she stopped her and finally she said, “Hey, Becca, you are a coach, you've been a coach for a long time, what would you tell your clients in this situation?” And she stopped, she was like, “Oh, what would I tell myself?” And she got off that call and she wrote down all of the questions she asks her clients to help them move forward.
And as she was writing these questions down and asking them of herself, she started getting more and more and more clear. And the thing that came up for her is that she really needed to get back into writing, even though it was difficult with the kids, writing was really truly what she loved doing. And so, this ended up becoming her first writing project. It was just so powerful to have the questions asked that she wanted to make sure they got out to the world.
Your Book, The Clarity Journal - Find the Clarity and Momentum You’ve Been Searching For! – How This Book Can Help Business Owner or Managers in Business
Me: So, your book, as we mentioned prior to the actual recording starting is entitled, The Clarity Journal - Find the Clarity and Momentum You've Been Searching For! So tell us, we have a lot of listeners who are business owners or managers in businesses, females, males, how would this book really help them? Because I know, for example, there are people who are in their 20s and their 30s, sometimes even in their 40s, who still have not figured out if what they're doing is what they really want to do. And so, where do you start? Do you start just by having a conversation with yourself in your head? Or do you find journaling helps more? And is there a scientific proof that supports that? Could you share with us just how this all comes together?
Becca shared that the main thing, is to start getting yourself out of the question and moving towards an answer. So, she finds a lot of times when someone comes to her and is really stuck, they are just constantly asking the same question over and over again, “What do I do next?” Or “What is my passion?” And they really just get so fixated on the lack of what they don't know, that they have a really hard time branching out from there.
And so, she would say she loves journaling, you can also hire a coach. She thinks that a lot of us get stuck and we don't even realize it though. We get stuck in this single train of thought where we're looping back over and over. And so, she would say that the very first step in her mind is recognizing when you are stuck, being mindful about being stuck and recognizing that you are not going to be able to really move yourself through it, doing what you've been doing up to date.
So, she believes journaling helps a lot, she thinks that hiring a coach helps a lot and some of your listeners may not be stuck about what they want to do, so much as like stuck about exactly how they want to do it, or exactly what the career path should look like for them.
And she runs into this a lot with entrepreneurs, especially very small business entrepreneurs, where they really aren't as clear as they think they are about their mission and what they are doing, and so it just muddies the water so much because every time they start something new, every time they go to do a blog post, or every time they start working on a new product, because they are not clear, they have a really hard time diving into it without an awful lot of second guessing at the very beginning.
And so, she doesn't really have scientific proof that journaling works, she can't off the top of her head think of a study and now after she gets off of this call, she’s going to go look and see what scientific studies there are for journaling. But she thinks the real trick of all of this is to just be honest with yourself about where you are.
Because we also oftentimes want to push away that indecision, push away the fear; push away whatever it is that's causing us discomfort. And so, if we don't actually shine a light on it, if we don't really look at it deeply, then we're going to be stuck in that same cycle and she thinks that really comes clear when she’s talking to her clients that are managers and are in this realm, because they aren't clear and they're muddying the waters for their employees. But also, a lot of times, they're not clear about what they want in terms of employees.
She runs into a lot where someone's been dealing with a bad employee for a very long time, and speaking of scientific studies, there is a really interesting study a couple of years ago, the statistic she’s going to be a little bit off on because she can't remember what exactly it was. But basically, if a team had a complainer on it, that the entire team's productivity went down by something like 30%. Isn't that shocking?
And so, really getting clear about what you want your management style to be, really getting clear about what it is that you need to be successful can also be extremely powerful.
Recommendations Persons Can Employ In Order to Be More Confident
Me: So, persons who suffer from like low self esteem, or their confidence is not as high as another person, what are maybe one or two things that you would recommend that they could employ in order to just be more confident or have a greater conviction or assertion in whatever they're thinking of doing or not doubting themselves or be so fearful?
Becca stated that that's a great question. She feels like a lot of times people don't really recognize their strengths. When we have a strength, it usually comes really easily to us and so we discount its value, because it's not hard.
And she finds especially people with low self confidence, they haven't really embraced the strength that makes them really unique and valuable, and so they're constantly using things that are actually their weakness at work.
And so, she would say that her first priority when she gets a new client is actually to help people see their own strengths because if you can't see it, then you're not going to try to design your life and your job around using your strengths.
When we're in school, all of our teachers and our parents usually do this thing, if we get a report card and we have an A in writing and a C in math, they don't focus on how great the A in writing is and what they could do with their life with the A in writing. What they do is they focus on that C in math, “Oh, you need to work harder; you need to work harder, like what is going wrong that you don't understand this?” And there's a lot of blame, and the kid feels bad.
And so, we have been trained as kids to focus on our weakness, to focus on fixing our weakness, to focus on what our weaknesses are and that she feels like really does not help you in the real world, because in the real world, the more you can bring in your strengths into work, the better off you will be.
So, if you were having low self esteem right now, you were actually trying to do this, one of the things that she would do is actually ask, if you have a really close friend who's a co-worker or even just your family or friends, the ones that are really positive and supportive, when you ask them, “Hey, what do you see my strengths as being?” really listen to what they say and try very hard not to discount it. Don't tell yourself, “Oh, well, everyone has that,” because they don't, not everyone has that strength. And the people that don't have that strength, that kind of means that it's a weakness of theirs, it's okay to value it even though it comes easy to you.
Me: It's so interesting that you brought that up that they focus on the negative it's so true. Even as a parent myself, I have to kind of retrain myself as an individual in terms of focusing where my daughter is concerned. I remember growing up, ever report that I got from I was in kindergarten come all the way up to university said, “Yanique is our great student, but she just talks too much.” I love to talk to this day, clearly. That's why I have a podcast and interview people. And that's why I'm a Customer Service Trainer and my voice is now how I express myself in so many different areas, like different platforms, and to contact and connect with people. So, I think you are right, you should focus on what your strengths are, and don't negate the fact that you're good at something, even if you're not so good at something else, because we all have strengths and some of them won't be similar. So, we all for example, can't be a lawyer or a doctor.
And then that's the next thing too Becca, I find that traditionally, especially here in Jamaica, we're not training our kids to do careers that are not the normal careers, because I'm sure that there are careers that have emerged since the pandemic, that if we were to ask somebody if they would go into that profession 5/10 years ago, they wouldn't, they would have been like, “No, that's probably never going to exist.” But so much has forced people to just do different things differently and technology has increased so much that professions that didn't exist, all of a sudden, because of the pandemic, and we're all forced into the digital so quickly, it just has really emerged. What are your thoughts on that?
Becca stated that having a career now versus say in 1950, just requires so much being willing to be flexible. And she thinks that one of the things that goes along with that is recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, because you will make better shifts if you can really analyze what it is you want to be using within yourself.
And she has to say, she laughed as Yanique was telling the story about everyone saying that you talk too much, because of course, it's actually a beautiful strength, it's just not a strength if they want you to sit still at school for 6 hours a day. She thinks that something that's been really hard for her is also what Yanique was talking about with the kids, because you want them to be persistent, you want them to try their best and you want them to really flourish. And the way that they're going to flourish is to like find their joys, find their strengths.
And so, when she’s working with people about, back to the original question about how do you do this going forward, the thing that she has noticed the most, especially with older clients, and we will all eventually be older is that they hit a certain age and they start not wanting to learn new things. And she should back preface for anyone who is like 50 or 60, 70 even, not everyone does this, but she does notice a big trend with older people where they're not going to learn the next app, they're not going to learn the new computer programme and they fall off a bandwagon at some point where they're not going to do anything new because it's not useful to them, it's too complicated, they just don't have the brain space.
And she would say that when you do that, you end up limiting yourself because as you start to insulate yourself from the new technology changes, you are inherently going to limit your potential 5 years from now because you didn't keep up with the times.
And she thinks that there's a lot to be said for that that happens a lot in business too where you have a slightly older manager and what's working right now is working and so we don't have the bandwidth as a company, especially as a small company to add something new. And then all of a sudden, what you have been doing has been working, and it might work for another year or two but you're going to end up running into a brick wall if you haven't been consistently changing with the times.
Me: So, really being adaptable and being flexible, and just being open to learning new things regardless of your age. And you are right, I do notice it myself but I don't think it's everybody. But I do believe that the older persons tend to be a little bit less willing to embrace something that they're not familiar with, or they feel like it's just out of their comfort zone. I remember my dad died about 3 years ago, and he was a business owner for many years. And of course, just to make deposits at the bank for his business or anything, he would still physically drive to the bank and have to stand up in front of a physical person even though the technology exists for online banking, or even just going to an ATM and using a debit card, he never had a debit card. If he needed cash from his account, he would go to the bank physically and stand in front of someone because that's what he was so accustomed to and it's just amazing. Even when you said to him, “It's so much easier, Daddy, you could try it this way.” It was just not something that he was willing to embrace. And then the flipside is I've met persons his age, and they're fully with technology, they probably use social media way more than me, I guess they have more time on their hands. And they really and truly embrace it. So I guess it depends on their headspace on how open they are.
Becca stated that also she’s actually run into it with younger people, too. She once had a client who was 24, who was a graphic designer who hated Adobe. And she was just like, you're fighting a losing battle, you're going to have to use Adobe in any job you have, you're a graphic designer. So, she doesn't want to stereotype too much but as we get older, it becomes easier to get into the status quo. And it's almost always going to hold you back.
App, Website or Tool that Becca Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business
When asked about an online resource that she cannot live without, Becca shared that she has been really loving this programme called Ommwriter. And it is this very streamlined writing software that has like this beautiful background and it has music that pipes in that flows, that's very flowy music and it also sounds like a keyboard, like a really nice old fashioned keyboard.
And she has found that when she’s using it, her writing speeds up, she probably writes about twice as fast as she normally do because something about it just helps her flow through and write really fast. The picture on it naturally draws your eyes to the bottom and she just feels like the whole UI is so great.
It's not great for editing so she usually copy and paste whatever she’s writing into a Word document to actually do the like the spell-check and the grammar check. But it is amazing. She thinks a lot of people have this experience, even if they are not writers, where they have to write an about page or a page for new sales for a new product or just even a really long and complicated email where just even getting it out is hard. And so, she knows a lot of people have actually switched back to pen and paper because of that. So she would say if you ever have a hard time or you're writing long length things and you find yourself getting stuck a lot, then definitely download it, it's only $7 or $8. Her new favorite toy.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Becca
When asked about books that have had a great impact, Becca shared that she is loving Burnout. It's called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski PhD. And it really speaks, she thinks, mostly to women but it is all about why we get overwhelmed, and why we get stressed out and frazzled, and very practical little steps you can take to help combat that. And she thinks that anyone listening to this, especially anyone with kids, or a really intense job can relate to feeling burnt out, and feeling stressed. And so, if you are in that space right now, she highly recommends the book.
What Becca is Really Excited About Now!
Becca shared that she’s working on her next book. So, she just got started on writing the next book, her kids just went back to school and it's been a little hard in the States, I assume in many other places where people are listening with COVID. So, the kids have been with her for a very long time.
Me: And what state are you in?
Becca shared that she is in Washington State, she’s in Seattle. And so, she’s working on her next book. And the working title right now is called Mindful Procrastination.
Me: When are you expecting and is that book going to be similar to The Clarity Journal, like a working book? Or is it more of a reading book?
Becca stated that it's a book, book, and she’s hoping that it'll be out within the next year. But this will be her first book, book so she’s cautiously optimistic that it will take her about a year once everything is said and done and the editing process is all finished.
Where Can We Find Becca Online
Website – www.beccaribbing.com
Twitter - @beccaribbing
Instagram - @beccaribbing
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Becca Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that she tends to revert to, Becca shared, “Be here now.” Very often times when she’s stressed out, it's because she’s thinking of 100 things and it helps really centre her on the one thing she needs to do right now. Whether that is family or work, it just helps clear out the clutter because yes, we all have 100 things on our to-do list, but you can only do one of them at a time.
Me: Very true. You really can only focus on one thing at a time. And I think many years ago, I read an article that said that it's not humanly possible for you to be doing two things at the same time and be doing both of them at 100%. So, it's like driving and talking on the phone or driving and eating, something is going to not be done at its highest level of efficiency because it's just humanly impossible for you to do both of them at 100% capacity.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Lucas Root is an accomplished speaker, entrepreneur, author, business success mentor, and founder of SGIC Consulting, which works with clients to build a high-performance strategy and implement that strategy across their businesses to achieve the maximum growth potential possible.
With over 19 years of success across banking, technology, investments, health and wellness, athletics, and interactive media (gaming), Lucas helps identify roadblocks to success and where his clients could be heading toward failure. He specialises in speaking to entrepreneurs and business owners on getting their strategy on track for success and massive growth.
Questions
Highlights
Lucas’ Journey
Lucas stated that he did what he thought what the normal person supposed to do, he went to college, and he got a good degree. And then as he was getting out of college, and this is two decades ago, at this point, as he was getting out of college, he got a degree in mechanical engineering and physics and he decided he didn't want to go wear a lab coat, then obviously, there are plenty of people that are engineers or physicists that don't but that was the picture he had in my mind. And so, he went to Wall Street instead.
And the critical thinking component of a science and mathematics based degree made it easy for him to move into the projects world on Wall Street, which very quickly turned into the mergers and acquisitions execution groups. So that's the team that puts together businesses on a merger. And so, he spent more than 17 years putting together businesses on the backside of a merger. And over the course of that time, he got really good at understanding what makes successful businesses work and what creates the opportunity for somebody else to gobble you up, which is what a merger is.
It's one successful company grabbing another company that maybe is less successful and there are significant opportunities for the bigger company to turn the smaller company into something great, or at least they think.
So, after 17 years, he figured he knew a thing or two and he decided to launch out into the world and share the thing or two that he knew. And the truth is now 6 years after launching his consulting business, he can tell you with that absolute certainty that learning really started after he left Wall Street.
He did know a thing or two, but really only a thing or two. But the journey has been incredible. Learning from amazing, incredibly smart, really successful business leaders on Wall Street set him up for the learning that he was going to do afterwards, the learning that he’s done since leaving as a consultant, as a business coach and as a mentor.
And he continued to learn with smart, talented, capable, hardworking, successful business leaders. And he’s delighted to say that among his clients is the Pokemon Company, which is the largest and longest relationship that he’s had as a consultant. So, he’s been with them since the beginning, 6 years now.
And he has 13 other companies of various sizes, ranging from a few 100,000 in annual revenue to 10’s of millions. And then, of course, there's the Pokemon Company which is much, much larger than any of the rest.
And his learning, again, the real learning started after he left Wall Street, when he started working with the Pokemon Company, when he started working with smaller businesses, he’s loved every step of it, and he’s come to experience the market in a very different way than what he expected.
Strategies to Ensure That Companies Are Increasing Their Earning Potential, Retaining Customer, Having Fans Spread Good News About Their Business
Me: Alright, so you work with businesses and strategy, just in terms of listening to you speak just now, in terms of how you describe the companies; you describe them based on the amount of revenue that they were earning.
So, our podcast is Navigating the Customer Experience and of course people listen to this podcast primarily to figure out what are some new innovative, different ways that they can utilise to ensure that you're retaining their existing customers, as well as attracting new customers, but actually getting customers who will remain loyal to them, because I think that's what every business ideally aims for, loyal customers who will spread great things about their business.
So, based on your experience as a consultant in the last 6 years working with these different range of companies, what are some of the key things that you have coached them on as it relates to strategy to ensure that they are increasing their earning potential, retaining their customers, having raving fans who will spread good news about their business, which will help them to save less money on marketing and advertising, because their customers are the ones who will be spreading that news about them, what's been your experience there?
Lucas shared that he loves the whole premise of this show, because he thinks people spend far too little time thinking about their customer experience and you're 100% right, that's the place people should be focused.
One of the reasons that he really enjoys the Pokemon Company is because of how focused they are on their brand, and on their customer, who their customer is, how they interact with their customer, what the customer wants out of the brand. One of his partners inside the Pokemon Company, his sort of most exciting story to tell on a daily, weekly, monthly basis is when he gets a customer service call of somebody who's dissatisfied and he can turn that person into a potentially a raving fan, he can take that unhappy customer experience, which doesn't happen very often, of course, and turn it into somebody who's absolutely delighted.
So number one, the first piece of the answer to your question is, make sure that your customer service, so when people call in, make sure that your customer service is absolutely top of the line. He started out with an answer from the Pokemon Company, but his smallest client is a few $100,000 in annual revenue and they told him a story last week, actually last week where a potential sale called in and they answered the phone.
And the first thing out of this guy's mouth was, “You're already a step ahead because you answered the phone.”Now, he doesn't know about you, but if somebody is calling him to buy from him, personally, his priority is to make sure that he answers the phone. If that was his response that tells him that other people in that area, in that industry were not answering the phone, he was being sent to voicemail.
Why would you send a person who's ready to buy from you now to voicemail? Why would you do that?
So, step one is make sure that you give your customers who are reaching out to you the best possible experience they can possibly have every single time, so it doesn't matter where they're reaching out to you chat, email, calling into your customer service, walking into your storefront.
He realised that the industry is pushing harder and harder to have everybody move into automated response scenarios. So, your emails are automated, your Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter responses are automated.
So, if somebody reaches out to you, they get an automated response and he understands why because in general, the customer service industry believes that him the customer wants an answer fast. But the truth is, that's not actually what he wants.
He’s here to tell you as both a consultant and a consumer, he’s both, he doesn't stop being a consumer as a consultant, he doesn't stop being a consumer as a business owner, as both a consultant and a consumer, what he wants is the right answer. And he wants the right answer with the minimum possible work from him to get there. The easier it is for him to get to the right answer, the more satisfied he’s going to be and he has yet to encounter an automated response line that gives him the answers that he wants easily.
So, number one, make sure that your customers are getting the best possible service they can and if your automated responses are not the best possible service, then move away from that. Counter to business strategy 101 in the world right now, and he understands that, but trust, big companies, small companies, every single person who is moving into automated responses are risking their customer relationship and the more that your customer believes that they themselves are unimportant to you, the more that you as a brand are going to become unimportant to them.
Number two, and he puts them in this order intentionally. Focus on what your brand delivers and be great at that. And this, again, goes back to his experience working with the Pokemon Company, if there is one thing that they do, and by the way, the Apple company does the same.
If there's one thing that Pokemon and Apple do that makes them exceptional in the world, it's that they're willing to say no to all of the potential distractions, so that they can stay super duper focused on what it is that their brand delivers and trying and continuing to improve what it means to them to be great at that. Right now, most people think in the reverse, be great at what the brand delivers, and then deliver a great customer experience, he doesn't agree. He worked with some of the largest companies in the world, be great at the customer experience first and then be great at what your brand delivers.
Me: Interesting, that theory. At the end of the day, a lot of times customers will I primarily believe your customers only reach out to you for two reasons. So, they're either calling because they have a problem and that could be a problem with an existing product or service that you deliver. Or they're calling because they're trying to make a request, it could be a request for additional services or products because they're an existing customer, or it could be a new customer who is trying to make a new request for a new product or service. So, other than that, people aren't calling to say, “Hey, Lucas, what's up? What are you doing? How's the sun going in your part of the world?” They're calling because they have a genuine need and I think all businesses go into business for a particular reason to solve a problem. I'm sure you became a consultant because you saw businesses having a need and you could help them solve a problem based on your years of experience and your expertise in a particular area.
Same for me, when I started this company as a Customer Service Trainer, customer service is very bad in Jamaica, and I really wanted to contribute to enhancing the quality of the experiences that we had. And I said, instead of complaining about it with everybody else, why not be a part of the solution and help organizations, both public and private sector to really enhance the quality of the experience that they've had. And I mean, since I've been in business, 12 years, I've seen great improvement, it's not where I want it to be, but it's definitely much better than where it was when I started. So, I think we're all solving a problem, every company, Pokemon is solving a problem, all of your other clients their businesses are solving a problem. So if you're solving a problem, then how do you want that experience to be for those problems that you're solving for customers?
Lucas stated that's 100% right. And do you want to be memorable or forgettable? And if you're memorable, what do you want them to remember? Because you could be memorable in a bad way, which is not what you want.
Advice for Business Owners Who Lack the Constantly Motivated Human Capital
When asked about advice he give to a business owner who lacks the constantly motivated capital, Lucas stated that that's a fun one. He treats it like customer service actually.
He thinks that most businesses have lost track of helping their employees connect to their mission, connect to the values that the company is working through to deliver the service.
And the more that people inside the business and remember, as a business owner, often you have employees and often your employees are the ones that are interacting with your customers.
So, previously, we talked about customer service, it's probably not you, the business owner who's answering the phone; you probably have somebody else answering the phone. Now, to some degree, they'll do what you tell them to do and that's cool. You tell them to smile while they're on the phone, and they will smile while they're on the phone. But at best, if they're in a situation where they're just doing what you tell them to do, at best, what they're going to do is somewhat mechanically execute your orders, and that's good.
But if you want great, you have to be better than just someone who can execute your orders, if you want great, what you need is someone who can execute your orders the way that you would if you were in their shoes, if you were in their, seat if you were the one on the phone.
And the only way to create that is by creating a culture that is connected to the mission of the company. Now, there are a lot of different ways to create a culture that's connected to the mission.
For better or worse, when you start trying to do this, you're going to find that some of the people that are employees right now and maybe even some of your better performers might decide they don't want to be connected to the mission and that might result in you making changes in your staff and that's okay. Because the end result of this and this isn't just coming from him, by the way, you can look up some of the top business strategy, speakers in the world like Gary Vee, who says the same thing. The culture that you create inside your company is the most important thing and it doesn't matter what you have to do to create the right culture and protect that culture.
So, in terms of creating the opportunity for motivation inside your company, for him, the most important thing you can do, the best thing that you can do is to give your employees the opportunity to connect with the mission, or the purpose of the company.
Now, maybe you haven't thought about what the mission or the purpose of your company is, now's a good time to start.
Think about what it is that you're trying to bring to the world through service. Because if you have a product or a service, you're trying to serve a customer, you're trying to serve somebody needs, you're not looking to just sell you're looking to serve. So get focused on what it is that you're trying to bring to the world through service.
Are you trying to bring smiles?
Are you trying to bring ease of transportation or ease of communication?
Are you trying to bring amazing meal experiences for your food service listeners?
Are you trying to bring incredible experiences throughout the islands for your travel listeners?
So, what is it that you're trying to bring to the world through service?
Is it experiences?
Is it satisfaction of needs?
Is it satisfaction of desires, like whatever that is connect to that.
And then spend time with your team, helping them connect to that because their primary job is to serve that need, is to serve that customer through that need.
App, Website or Tool that Lucas Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Lucas shared that these days it's Zoom.
Me: COVID has certainly changed our priorities.
Lucas agreed that it really has. Before Zoom, he would have said Microsoft OneNote, or for people who want to use a free version, both Google and Open Office, they both have a tool that's similar to Microsoft OneNote.
He uses OneNote for everything, truly, from keeping track of the things that he owes his employees on a daily basis. And yes, he said that intentionally. He worked for his employees as much as they worked for him.
So, keeping track of what he owes his employees, his sort of let's call it his management dashboard and by management, he means managing himself, keeping track of the different engagements like working with Yanique today, that all happens in OneNote and notes about what he’s doing and how he’s going to show up.
Keys, thoughts about what he needs to be thinking about while he’s going through this interview. His morning routine and things that he does in the morning, the things that he needs to accomplish throughout the day, week, month, all that happens in OneNote.
And he’s writing articles in OneNote, this is actually true. He’s writing a book in OneNote, his previous book, which you can find on his website, he wrote that in OneNote first, and then moved it into an editing tool like that one particularly was in Canva, but he wrote it in OneNote first, it's a simple, incredibly powerful tool. And he thinks he uses it fairly well.
Once he turned his wife on to it she actually has up levelled and uses it even better than he does because she speaks to it. He does everything typing, she actually speaks to it so she uses Microsoft speaks to text in her OneNote, so she'll take voice notes while she's working, she'll record things, OneNote is an amazing tool.
And before Zoom changed the world because of COVID, OneNote was his absolute number one go to tool anywhere ever. And now that we have to use Zoom to do business, or Skype or Go To Meeting, whichever one we're on Microsoft Teams, those are kind of ruling his day, but OneNote is still a very close second.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Lucas
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Lucas shared that he’s a big fan of the Dalai Lama. One of the lesser well known books that have come out of his writings is called The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he thinks is just an incredibly wonderful book. And it's on his annual reading list. So, he picked that up and touch up on it again, at least once a year, every year.
In addition to that, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss, he thinks that a fairly significant portion of what's in there was actually out of date before he even published it. So, the notion of being able to automate your way into a 4 hour workweek while you have a normal job, even when he published it was already reasonably out of date. But what he thinks that people missed in the book, and he’s read it several times now, that's really important, is thinking about your life that way. Thinking about what are the things that I can change the way that I do them, so that they have a less significant impact on my time, on my life, on my energy. And or what are the things that I want to be impacted by and I can change the way that I do them so that they have more impact on me.
So, things that people don't think about are things like a nap, he love naps, really love naps. And if he’s going to take a nap, he doesn't take a nap every day, but if he’s going to take a nap and because he loves them, he wants that to be impactful. And people don't think about a nap in terms of it being impactful but he likes his naps and when he takes them, he really enjoys getting into it, he enjoys taking the nap, he enjoys the way he feels when he’s done with it. He wants that to be an impactful experience.
And the way that he thinks about everything he does all day long, including the nap and the reason he brought that up is because he thinks most people like try to minimize the impact of their naps on their day and he disagrees. If you're going to take a nap, maximize the impact it has, again, enjoy it, get into it, savour it. The way that he thinks about that came out of reading The 4-Hour Workweek because that's the way that he puts together his thought process and he doesn't share it in that way, but that's what he took out of it is, think about the things that you're doing in terms of minimizing, or maximizing the impact that they have, so that the day feels the way you want it to feel.
What Lucas is Really Excited About Now!
Lucas shared that the first is he got involved with a not for profit at the beginning of the summer called the Jericho Centre for Medical Diplomacy, which is focused on bringing truly cutting edge, amazing medical technology to the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in Jordan because breast cancer right now is one of the biggest impact factors of cancer in that population.
So, he got involved in that because he’s deeply and passionately involved with creating and deepening the experience that he has and that women have around him in the world and supporting women and becoming a much more clean and balanced society with respect to the role that women choose to play.
And so, that's just this little piece of what he’s trying to do to open that up, open the world up. If a woman dies of breast cancer, she doesn't have a choice anymore, she can't play any role anymore, like that's done. And so, bringing really cutting edge medical technology to the Palestinians, which is a population that has limited access to medical technology in general and specifically for this stuff, is one of the things that he’s really excited about. And so, they did a couple of galas over the summer to raise some money and they're going to do a really big one in October or November to raise a lot of money and really start moving this forward in a big way. And that's something he’s very excited about.
And then the second piece, they're two totally separate things, but they're both like really exciting to him is, he’s working with the credibility nation, which is a brand that's trying to bring credibility to humanity. And he’s partnered in with them to do a five day challenge, which is in a week and a half. And for the listeners who want to hear more about this, they can find it on his socials. So, in a week and a half, they're going to do a five day challenge where they train the joiners on how to show up in the world with credibility and how to deepen their connection inside themselves with credibility.
Where Can We Find Lucas Online
Website – www.lucasroot.com
Instagram - @lucroot
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Lucas Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Lucas shared that he does and it's not just during times of adversity, he keeps this in the forefront of his mind more or less all of the time, as much as he can. “It's in the midst of chaos lies brilliance.” And to him, what that means is that the more that things get challenging, the larger the opportunity for something amazing to happen.
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Darin Dawson is the Co-Founder and President of BombBomb, a Human-Centered Communication Platform that enables users to use simple, personal video messages to leverage their best asset – themselves!
Darren leads all sales, marketing, customer success and product development at BombBomb, a fast-growing, Colorado-based software company. He's on a mission to re-humanize the planet and he wants to start with your business communication. He believes that human beings have intrinsic value and that every person deserves to be seen, heard and understood. That's why he co-founded BombBomb.
Questions
Highlights
Darin’s Journey
When asked about his journey, Darin shared that he feels like it may be a little bit non typical, so for instance, he never graduated the university, so he didn't go to college, he did but he didn’t graduated as his father said very good advice to him at that age, “Maybe college isn't for you.”
He was always entrepreneurial, he saw that in him and thought that he should pursue that and kind of get after doing his own thing. He grew up on a farm, hard working all his life, got given a good what they call there a Midwestern work ethic and ended up moving to Colorado in 1995 when he was 21 years old and have been there ever since.
So, then graduated school but then started this kind of painting business out in Colorado when he was young, he grew that business, it was actually successful. But then in the late 90s, early 2000s he started being interested in all things to do with internet marketing, Pay Per Click strategies, On Demand strategies, things like that and he got involved in the marketing business, was lucky enough to get ownership in that business, to sell that business and then do that again with another marketing company and then ended up working at a TV station actually running online, marketing the website salespeople for that, also content creators for that and he learned a lot about mass media marketing and really led him to think about what he didn't like about that led him to create BombBomb which he does today.
What BombBomb Does and How Can That Help a Business
Me: Now, we had the awesome pleasure of interviewing one of your employees, Ethan Beaute last year, we had him on our podcast as well as on a Facebook Live and I was supremely blown away by how he responded to my messages through video, I thought it was just brilliant. And so, of course when you reached out to me and I was like, “Oh my goodness, another person from BombBomb but even the person who created it, this is amazing.” So, could you share with our audience for those who may not have listened to Ethan's episode last year or never heard of BombBomb, what is it that BombBomb does and how can that help a business?
Darin shared that first of all, he loves that guy (Ethan). And actually Ethan is a dear friend and he convinced him to leave that TV station where they worked together and come to BombBomb with him.
And so, he's been there over 10 years, he couldn't have done it without him, he's fantastic, he's their Chief Evangelist, he's a good friend and a valued, valued person to him. He believes and we at BombBomb believe that all human beings has an intrinsic value, that we are special, that we are unique, how we communicate with each other is unique.
And the software that they enable you to use is sending video messages to the people who matter in your life, which could be the people in your life, personal life, it could be colleagues that you work with, it could be your prospects, it could be your existing customers.
So, you can send yourself video messages so they can see you, know you, and understand you in that way, so it's very simple to do, takes no time at all and they allow you to do in every message platform that you may be using.
So that could be your email, that could be in social media messenger systems, it could be in LinkedIn for example, so anywhere you're saying a message, they allow you to use a video as well.
Why We Should Use Video to Connect and Communicate Daily with People
Darin stated that if you believe, like he just mentioned that we are unique human beings, the way we talk is unique, then you should be considering video. And here's a very good example, if he was to ask 10 business owners:
“What is your most valuable asset in your business?”
He believes at least 9 out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10 would tell him that their people are their most valuable asset. But more often, what we're doing is we're hiding these best assets, the ones that we spent a long time interviewing, if you're interviewing a salesperson, you're trying to say, “Are they good with people? Are they good at presenting passion and enthusiasm for your product?” You're trying to assess all these things about people, and then we hire them and then we make them look like and feel like everyone else with text email, texting, phones, all that stuff, phone’s better.
But behind these technologies that we have chat, we're just like everyone else. He thinks we're removing the most uniqueness that we can bring in our people, our diversity, how they interact, and all the things that we want in our culture, in our business, we're withholding from our customers in a lot of ways when we don't put people in front of people more often.
What is Customer Experience and Why it Matters
Me: Now, as we talk about video, and connecting with people daily, and really seeing the intrinsic value in a human being, in your view, Darin, what is customer experience and why do you think it matters?
Darin shared that he believes the customer experience is every touch point that you have with either potential customers or existing customers, anything that could be an in person event, it could be a podcast, it could be a webinar, it could be when he calls your business, and what’s the experience he gets when that phone is picked up by someone who works there, that's it.
So, let him frame it this way. If there were two businesses that did the exact same thing, they sell the exact same service, for the exact same price, how do you decide which one to choose if they're very much the same?
He believes you choose the one you like and that could be for a lot of different reasons. But the experience that you bring ultimately becomes your unique selling proposition that is what makes us unique in a business.
He has a software business, he competes against people who do similar things to what he does, he has some features they don't have, they have some features that he doesn't have, but they are basically the same and at the end of the day, people are going to choose who they know, like and trust, he still believes that that's what they do.
So, in that case, his customer experience has to be better, he wants to deliver on that more over than anything else. It matters in the product, it matters in all these motions that we look at in a business, but to him, again, customer experience is your unique identifier.
Values that BombBomb is Built On
Me: I totally support everything that you just said. And I think a lot of businesses lose focus of that. Now, in trying to deliver that customer experience as you mentioned, is your unique proposition. I think it's important; the organization has to have a really good culture, because customer experience starts from within, how you deal with your employees, how responsive you are to them, how you support them in whatever initiatives they're trying to accomplish. And of course, all businesses came into existence because we're all trying to solve some problem for customers that have a need. And so, could you share with us maybe some of the values that BombBomb is built on that has helped BombBomb to really be able to realize fulfilling those needs for your customers? And why do you think an internal culture needs to be very impactful in order to execute a strong external culture?
Darin shared that they have five core values at BombBomb, they are Relationships, Humility, Flexibility, Service, and Fun.
So, those are five core values and he thinks that really, businesses need to give the people that work there a reason to work there, that's beyond money, that's beyond the work necessarily. Because you can go answer the phone anywhere, you can go do customer success service anywhere, you can do sales anywhere, you can run these teams anywhere now and from anywhere for that matter.
He believes that we want to give people a purpose behind why they do what they do at BombBomb. So, they do that in a few different ways. First of all, their book is called Re humanize Your Business and that's what they want to do with their product but their mission at BombBomb is to humanize the planet.
And this is what he means by it has to matter more than the word. And locally, they support a few organizations, one is called Dream Centers in Colorado Springs, it actually provides free health care for women and also it provides homeless families off of the streets of their city and into a safe place where they can thrive, where they can go to school, where the mothers can get an education.
They have the women's clinic and they have a thing called Mary's Home and they're fantastic. And those are two organizations they support and they support them financially, but they also support them with their time. So, every year they do a trunk or treat for the children at Mary's Home.
And another organization they support is called the Springs Rescue Mission and it's in Colorado Springs, and they support the homeless population, helping them to get out of homelessness, a cycle of homelessness, help them to get food to eat. Just last week, he took about 30 BombBomb folks down there and they did a barbecue where they cooked burgers, he smelled like Burger King when he got back.
They grilled like 300 burgers and hotdogs and they serve those people. So, it's beyond money, why do they do what they do?
Because they're humanizing your business but they're also trying to humanize the planet and that planet starts right their own backyard in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
What is Means to Re Humanize People
Me: You spoke a little bit just now about rehumanizing your business. And when we read your bio, a big part of BombBomb’s mission is to re humanize the planet. And so, could you explain to us in very layman terms, what does it mean to re humanize people? What are we lacking that we need re humanization? Could you share with us what does that really mean?
Darin shared that he thinks its two things in your business it may exist that he thinks participating right now in this insanely, it's like nuclear proliferation but it's different, it's this digital pollution.
So, after he gets off of this call, he will have no less than 30 unsolicited emails in his inbox, LinkedIn will have a few and people are just being bombarded. And so, we need to get back to building know, like and trust with the people that we want to work with.
We need to communicate in a way that solves problems for people we know that we can solve problems for. He thinks the problem right now in marketing and sales is that we're just holistically blasting everyone to kingdom come with unwanted, unsolicited messaging. And frankly, he doesn't even believe it's from real people anymore. So, all we're doing is we're desensitizing people, nobody believes that you actually wrote the email anymore, actually wrote the LinkedIn messenge, they thing it was written for you, sent by some sort of system and what that does is it takes away the idea of reciprocity on his part.
Five years ago, even three years ago, if you sent him an email even if he wasn't interested, the reciprocity effect says, “I'm going to respond to you even if I'm not interested.”
Now, we've made it so very easy to ignore everyone, everyone is complicit in this digital pollution that we're all participating in, we send too much of stuff that doesn't matter.
Therefore, the stuff that does goes by the wayside. So, he believes using personal video, personal messaging to people succinctly for them, to them, from human to human, to solve the problem that you very well solved for this type of business. So, you have to have that figured out. What's the problem I solve?
How do we succinctly solve it in 20 seconds, deliver a video for that person? Or in the customer experience, side, if it's retention. Don't make him feel like just another number of your business. How many customers do you have? Don't make him feel like number 569, make him feel like the only one.
And so, how do you do that, you do that by taking time and sending personalized communications whenever possible, doesn't have to be every time but he calls them “Moments That Matter.”
What are the very important moments that matter when he knows? Easy way to do this is to say to yourself, “Would this be better said face to face? If so, send a video.”
So, that's re humanizing your business. We’re re humanizing the planet or humanizing these things, he believes people have intrinsic value, he believes all over the world people are being dehumanized right now probably more than they ever have been, ever.
We have more slavery, we have more sex trafficking, we have more abuse, we need to get in front of that. And to him, we need to do our part here and so that's why, as he mentioned, they support these local organizations.
They actually even support a community in Africa, where some kids in Africa got to adopt BombBombers, it was amazing. So, the kids got to look at pictures of people who work here, choose them to be someone they want to communicate with and then, of course, they help the organization but they help with food and medical care and things like that. But he’s got to tell you, some of the best joy happens from these kids sending letters to people who work here. And that's a connection that they build.
So, they're now we're re humanizing the people of BombBomb by doing that, just as much as they are those kids in Africa. So, that's a big part of their mission. He just believes that the world we live in, if we just want to turn a blind eye to it, that's not responsible as a business owner.
App, Website or Tool that Darin Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Darin shared that it's a pretty generic one, but it's Spotify. What couldn't he live without; he can’t live without a podcast. He listens to podcasts like crazy, he got a bit of a commute, and he enjoys it. His kids play soccer 4 days a week, so when he’s waiting for them to be done; he’s on the podcast. So, he’s trying to build himself up to that. So, he’s going to say Spotify.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Darin
When asked about books that have the biggest impact, Darin shared that Seth Godin was a very much a part of the foundation of this business in early 2000s. He has read every Seth Godin book he’s ever written. And so, he’s just going say Seth Godin. So, Seth Godin Podcast, Seth Godin Books. The early ones, he thinks it was even Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable it was really transformational. Just about being unique and how you stand out. And I believe the book, he might get this wrong is 1000 true fans, it might have been one of his earlier books is the idea if you have 1000 fans, that you'll never have to work again. He thinks we're seeing this, he was an early projector of this, this influencer movement that we see very common today and that's exactly what he was talking about in that book. And that's how they thought about sending video messaging that you could be this influencer.
And then he’s going to say, Verne Harnish wrote a book called Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) and then Scaling Up 2.0 and it's about mastering the Rockefeller habits as he calls it. And these are just these business motions that has made them very successful at BombBomb, how to run the business, how to plan for the business, how to do stand ups in the morning, all these things are very fundamentally ingrained in who they are at BombBomb. So, Seth Godin and Scaling Up 2.0, those are his two recommendations.
What Darin is Really Excited About Now!
Darin shared that he’s really excited about this growth team that they have put together, he gets to lead, it's fantastic, it's a cross functional team many people coming from lots of different parts of the organization are focused on how do they get after better growth for the business? So, that means acquiring new customers, better keeping the customers that they have, making the product more aligned towards those things. So, it's been a lot of fun and he loves that team.
Where Can We Find Darin Online
Website – www.bombbomb.com
LinkedIn – Darin Dawson
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Darin Uses
When asked about quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Darin shared that it's Peter Drucker and the quote is, “Focus is the key to all economic success.” So, if he needs to get refocused, if his team does, he brings that out. Focus is the key. So, are we focused? Do we need to get more focused? Are there things that we should stop doing so we can start doing the right things?
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Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Michael Arnold is the author of the book, Slacking Off: A Successful Way to Work from Home and he wrote it especially for those who are considering to work or are working from home and are seeking a work life balance.
He has been a work from home entrepreneur for over 15 years and he's worked with major corporations such as Cox Automotive, Verizon Super Pages, and Major Commercial Finance companies. His journey wasn't a smooth sailing one since he is also human just like us and he made many mistakes along the way. But he has lived to share some wisdom from his own experience to help people on their work from home journey to create successful actions on their own.
Questions
Highlights
Michael’s Journey
Me: Even though we read a little bio about our guests, we always like to give them the opportunity to kind of just share with us a little bit about their journey. How is it in your own words would you describe how you got from where you are now to where you were before? How did you get to where you are today?
Michael shared that a lot of ups and downs and experimenting in different industries led him to be a work from home entrepreneur and a father and let's say, contributor to the community. And he thinks ultimately, like most of us, he started out trying to be everything he could be at a young age before he was 18.
Work normal jobs like McDonald's, Christmas tree lots, doing landscaping and lots of different things at a very, very young age. And still was looking to find what he enjoyed and that became understanding businesses really fast and sharing, whether it be speaking, or presenting or consulting and he thinks ultimately, when we learn from our mistakes, and we're better people for it, and we've survived the misses, the bullets that fly our way, metaphorically and can live to tell about it, he thinks that's essentially what's brought him here, is his ability to survive through all things or persevere, if you will.
Slacking Off: A Successful Way to Work From Home What is it About and Who is it Targeted for?
Me: So, in your bio, we read that you wrote a book and we were having a brief discussion about this prior to actually starting the recording. And so, for those of our listeners that didn't catch the name of that book, it's Slacking Off: A Successful Way to Work from Home. So, could you share with us maybe in five to eight or nine minutes, just what the book is about? Who is it targeted for? And how can it help our listeners.
Michael shared that he wrote this book because he’s been working from home for 15 years, and he’s worked for himself, he’s worked for other companies, major corporations, very large corporations that have 1000s and 1000s of employees. And he’s been mostly in either a sales role or a strategy role or a management role and what he found over the years is that basically people around him, including himself were struggling a lot with work life balance and usually the really successful guy or gal that's really good at work is missing out at home and very rarely are they balancing between the two and it doesn't necessarily mean these people don't exist, but it's just rare.
And a lot of times people who are putting themselves into work obsessively are successful, but again, not happy. And so, he created this book to help people who want to actually take that obsession which is amazing, it's not a bad thing; it's a great thing when you're doing it in the right ways.
And just get a little more time for themselves and help them invest more in themselves, whether that's with time and effort or even money.
Of course, if they find something that's good for them, because themselves, actually they are the most valuable product that exists, you can buy a car, you could buy a house, you can buy nice clothes, you can have all these things. But unless you're investing in yourself, it really isn't going to pay off as big as it would be if you did invest in yourself because that's what ultimately this book is to help you invest more time, effort into yourself and do it in a way that's unique. Pun intended.
Competencies or Behaviors Needed to Be Successful When Working from Home
Michael shared that he’s using his book as the foundation here for this question because this is exactly how he set this book up was exactly the things you need to know and the things that you should have in place when you work from home, whether you're experienced or not. And that is one; you should recognize what you do when you're not working.
It sounds so obvious, most people are like, “Yeah, of course, I know when I'm not working.” But do you really because what he found over the years is that even for himself, which he uses himself as the example here is that sometimes what he actually considers not working for himself is different from what he considers not working for somebody else.
And he'll just very lightly explain a little more in that so there's no confusion there, nebulousness. Basically, what he would look at you and say, you're working when you're doing this and not working when you're on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, versus him might be different.
He might judge himself less than he judges, or more or less than he judges you.
And so, what he did is he put himself up on the microscope and said how much scrutiny, all unbiasness, just straightforward, looking at himself, what's actually working, and what's not considered working.
Is being on Facebook for 5 minutes a problem, probably not that big of a deal in the middle of a work day.
But it's not technically working and it doesn't matter that your boss or your company or yourself, it doesn't matter what your employer says, what matters is actually how you feel and usually when people aren't doing a task as they are paid to do, eventually they start to, let's just say, have more problems, it starts very small.
So, ultimately, everybody starts off with what's called a slacking off day, which is you take one day and you just slack off, you actually avoid work the entire day, on purpose, and you just slack off, that's it.
And so, the only caveat or disclaimer to that entire thing is that you write down what you do, if it's reading a magazine, reading a book, on Facebook, watching TV, exercising, whatever it is you do to slack off, it's important to recognize that first and foremost, before you do anything.
Then you carry that into your work day and you have that list, whether it's digital or on paper in front of you to actually help you recognize when you're actually starting to slack off so that you (a) recognize that the next chapter of what you need to do, which is start to actually make time for yourself to slack off.
Why is it that some of us slack off? There's probably hundreds of reasons.
But he thinks fundamentally what the purpose and confidence that you need, or the let's just say consistency you need to have is being able to move throughout your day, and do it in a way that you're happy with. Do it in a way that keeps you going and if you have time to slack off in the morning or in the evening, or whenever, you'll probably slack off less during the times that you probably shouldn't be.
And so, ultimately you want to make sure that you recognize for yourself and keep yourself accountable because it doesn't matter if your boss is mean or not, doesn't matter if you're being watched or not, you're in an office or you're not in an office, the end of the day, the only person that judges you, is you and God. So, at the end of the day, you need to be right with yourself and God more than you need to be right with other people.
And of course, you should be respectful and ethical but that's kind of the gist, that's just a little piece. There's obviously a lot more but that should answer the question.
Changes in Customer Experience Since the Pandemic
Me: Could you also share with us as an entrepreneur yourself, there's a lot of things that have changed since the pandemic and you are a consumer yourself, you mentioned before we started recording that you were in an Uber for the first time in over a year. Have you seen customer experience change much since the pandemic as a consumer or even as a business owner?
Michael stated of course, it's consistently changing and something he wanted to say early on was that forgive him for not coming out with this book before the pandemic, because he started writing in 2019. But he thinks ultimately, it's a dream for most people to work from home, so, the fact that the businesses that are existing now are tailoring work from home experience and making it easier, it actually pushed a lot of people on the fence of making their employees work from home, making their businesses more work from home friendly, making their products more work from home friendly, and all the technology that comes with it.
There's a lot of reasons why working from home is beneficial and there's a lot of reasons why in certain jobs, they're not. But ultimately what we're finding, and please chime in here if you have something to say about it. But is that it's actually not as hard to work from home for a lot of these businesses, or even these services to provide work from home experiences as we thought.
Look at the weather channel people who are giving you the weather forecast from their home office, it's not that hard.
Me: I agree with you. But I think as you said, a lot of people were forced to embrace the whole work from home as the pandemic came, they were forced into it, if it was a choice that they had to make, and things were operating normal and we weren't going through a pandemic, I highly doubt that many companies would have even thought of implementing it.
I've met with many business owners, or even senior managers who when they look at their balance sheets, in terms of so much savings that they've made as an organization, productivity has actually improved with employees working from home. Of course, with everything there are advantages and disadvantages, because I'm sure there are some other things that may still suffer as a result. But it still doesn't mean that there are a lot of industries where people were working, that they couldn't have worked from home and been productive and created the same or even better results.
Michael shared that there are a couple reasons for him, but he’s curious, what's Yanique’s thought about why somebody who's working from home is producing more than somebody who's in the office?
Me: Well, I worked from home before the pandemic, so I'm not even sure if I could compare myself. But if I use persons who I know personally, I have a friend that works in an insurance company, he works in the pensions department and one of the things he said to me why he feels he's more productive is he works many times way past 5:00 pm, because I guess when you're at work, when it's 5:00 pm, you get up, you pack up your stuff, and you head home, but because he's home, he just keeps working and sometimes he works until 9:00 pm – 10:00 pm, it’s when he looks at the clock, he's like, “Oh, my I’m still working, it's time to shut the computer down and just kind of unwind.” So, I don't know if other people fall into that category but that was his experience. And I was like that wouldn't have happened if you were working in the office unless you were working on some special projects and it was required for you to stay back late. Ordinarily, people would just leave at the time that work ends and they go home.
Michael agreed and stated that that is exactly what occurs, we're our own worst critic and we're our biggest driver. So, it's like we're not only our own worst critic, but we're also our own motivator, that kind of leads into to what he was saying earlier, it's like that's exactly why he wrote this.
He wrote this for Yanique’s friend, he wrote this for him, because and of course, anybody else who is like so happy about working from home that they're starting to form these habits that they're not paying attention to of overworking to the point where eventually, it doesn't actually produce much.
Now, he wants to say something, he’s very much for somebody putting everything they got into something and he definitely don't advocate people being lazy. The point of the book being slacking off is actually to appeal to the person who is struggling because maybe they're slacking off too much or maybe because you want more time to yourself, but ultimately recognizing that it's okay to work 12 hours and 15 hours a day, it's actually not a problem.
He’s doing business 7 days a week and he still always use his own book as a tool and a roadmap for himself to make sure he maintains a work life balance. But ultimately, you just you want to make sure you're taking care of yourself and you want to make sure that you sustain properly, because at the end of the day, you cannot not invest in yourself whatever it's nutrition or exercise or reading.
There are 60 books a year are some of the top CEOs in the world, 60 books a year is what they read while managing their own work and life, and he’s sure they have their ways of doing it.
But ultimately, a year after doing that, working 9 hours a day until 10, o'clock at night, or whatever, eventually it becomes “Either I'm doing it because I'm great. Or I'm doing it for different reasons, or whatever.”
But as long as they don't have built in time for themselves, eventually, they're slaving away to a job and doing way more, and getting paid hourly, that's great. But it's like it may not be worth it.
He knows people, they get paid $1,000 to $2,000 an hour, and they work nonstop but they spend time with their family, they spend time for themselves and everybody's happy, or at least happy enough. And so, there's a difference.
So, that's really ultimately he thinks what's happening too which Yanique totally hit the nail on the head, what occurs we overwork ourselves, because we're like, that's what employers who are experienced in working from home, having worked from home people, that's what they know, they know that ultimately, you may get a lazy guy who will manipulate people or gal who manipulate people and you work very little but you'll get in majority people who will overwork.
How Michael Stays Motivated Every Day
Me: Could you share with our guests; how do you stay motivated every day? You work from home, what are some of the things that you do to kind of motivate yourself? Because the reality is we're human and even if you really enjoy what you do, which I do, personally. And so, there are days when physically, I may not feel as enthusiastic but there are little things that I'll do like maybe exercise or listen to some music to kind of just get my mood or energy up, what are some of the things that you do to kind of keep yourself motivated?
When asked about how he stays motivated, Michael shared that another part of his book is on this, he totally understands, some days you are less motivated than others. There's actually a lot of reasons for that. What he personally do is, he raises his purpose, if he’s feeling less motivated today for whatever reason, he increases his purpose. So, if his purpose and this is another chapter in his book is to have you look at the reasons you're doing what you're doing…
Why do you work?
“It may be paying my bills?”
Don't be general, let's be specific.
Why do you do it?
“I do it to pay for this, I do it to pay for that. I want to go on vacation. I want to do this, I want to have that. Oh, wow, I didn't realize I expect to have a raise in the next year, or whatever it is.”
But your purposes are what drive you and we forget about those purposes if we've been doing things for a very long time, unless we're so successful that we're building new purposes.
But a barrier, whether it's personal or outside of yourself is something that is raised up in front of you, it's anything, it's unmotivated, it's problems, it's lack of winning, whatever it is. He just increases his purpose.
He says something's holding me back. Listen, he’s facing something right now that's stopping him or attempting to stop him from doing things. He won't necessarily get into details, but he'll just say, every day he'll reach a point where it's definitely a little bit frustrating because he wants to go do one thing and he’s got all these other things trying to get in his way.
And all he remembers and know is that as a being, nothing stops him ever. The only thing that actually stops him is him, that's it.
There's no one and nothing that's ever truly ever stopped him from doing or getting what he wants ever.
But as a being, what you're talking about is motivation that does stop you.
So, just remembering like, if you can't figure out your reasons for why you're doing what you're doing, or you can't increase, add more reasons, add more things if you're unmotivated, that's what he does, he adds more things.
And he says, “Okay, I want all these things and that's why I do what I do. I now want double that, triple that.”
And he adds, he adds and he adds and he adds, give him more reasons why you do what you do. If you're unmotivated, add more reasons why you want to do more, you want more, you build more, not less.
A lot of people have a tendency to get lazy and downtrodden when they're not getting what they want himself included, and you just have to remind yourself, you're a producer and producing is what makes us happy when we're moving and shaking no matter what that is we're doing. So, increase your purposes is the simple answer.
App, Website or Tool that Michael Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Michael stated that he'd say just honestly, the calendar, Google Calendar, Apple. He uses the calendar a lot, he thinks if he didn't use it digitally, he would use a planner.
He thinks back in the old days, people used to use the book planners is just what they were with little calendars on them and that's how they wrote their appointments, and they look at their schedule.
Whether you're drawing it on a piece of paper, or you have it digitally, those calendars are everything. At the end of the day, time is all we got, that's really what we have, and we're either selling our time, or we're buying it. So, that should be the first thing that you teach your kid is about how to manage their time, that should be the number one thing other than obviously, how to survive of course.
But time is important, calendars are important for you, they are tools for you to use. He also wrote this book for the person that was like him, who, for years, refused to use a calendar, because he didn't want to be predictable, he did not want to be predictable for himself or anything.
He likes the adventure of spontaneous movement and things. He was that guy that would just barely make it to the deadline, but he wasn't ever late, he would just barely make it to the appointment, wasn't really late and he liked that and he could manage it very well. And he became very good at shooting from the hip and winning but when he actually started doing things on a calendar, goodness, then he was dangerous.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Michael
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Michael shared that there's a couple of books one he would say, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss, that's a great book on negotiating. He'll share 3. The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Grant Cardone. The 10X Rule, he was very surprised how good that was, he's a great guy (Grant Cardone), everything he stands for has been tremendous. And then there's another one called The Reluctant Messiah, which has been a really interesting book, it's more of a kind of a fictional. It's called the Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach. It's kind of a book that takes you on this journey of a guy trying to coach another guy to help him through his life and it's just very metaphorical. But man, is it huge, it's such a great book. And he’s not a big fiction guy, so when he looked at it, he was like, he read it, but it blew his mind. It was very, very cool.
What Michael is Really Excited About Now!
Michael shared that he’s really excited about Slacking Off, he’s excited about the book. Excited about getting this out to as many people right now during their work from home all over the world.
He created this book because he saw so many people having problems and becoming unhappy in their life and he created this to help those people, whether they looked at one chapter or all of them, it's a very simple, easy book, you can read it in like an hour and a half it's very, very simple, but it's full of stuff.
Other than that, he works currently in a medical technology field where he’s trying to help a company name ROM Technology, essentially just develop business with them and help them grow as a company and continue to just progress, he supports them through a lot of different efforts. But it's mostly focused to help people get better after surgery and rehab, their legs or knees or hips, so they don't necessarily have to leave their house to do a certain amount of rehabilitation.
It also helps lower narcotic usage so that we have less people taking pain pills, it gets them better faster. So, a lot of time is dedicated to that too and he’s very excited about it because it helps people and It costs less money and it drives down their narcotic usage, which he’s not a fan of people taking pain pills unless it's absolutely necessary. So, it's a really, really great product and great company and they have such a great team and there are so many people supporting, so many doctors of specialties that doesn't even have anything to do with rehab, love it, and are supporting it. And he’s been spending a lot of time trying to help them grow and do everything he can to play his part for sure.
Where Can We Find Michael Online
Facebook – SlackingOff
Twitter – @SlackingOffBook
Instagram – @slackingoffbook
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Michael Uses
When asked about quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Michael shared that he uses so many quotes. This quote came from Sir Winston Churchill, “Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.” Doesn't mean rebel against everybody but what it means is, do what you do and if you believe in something go for it. Doesn't matter if people say, don't go this way or you can't do this, or you can't create a podcast, you can't do your own business, do it. Do it, jump, take your risks and you'll surprise yourself, you'll very much surprised yourself.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Jason S. Bradshaw is a global strategic adviser to C-suite executives and start-ups, a keynote speaker on customer and employee experience, digital transformation and leading through crisis.
He has led transformative change with some of the most recognizable brands like Target, Fairfax and Volkswagen. Delivering phenomenal customer-centric growth including over 200% increase in lead generation, $36 million in e-commerce sales in year one, and decades of customer and employee metrics improvements.
He is a best-selling author on customer and employee experience, recipient of over 40 industry awards and voted 1 of 30 global gurus on customer service and experience.
Questions
Highlights
Jason’s Journey
Me: Even know we read your bio and it really does sum up all you've done in your lifetime. We always like to hear from our guests, in their own words a little bit about their journey, how they got to where they are today. And I have quite an idea because I've read about half of your book, it's all about CEX so I do know a little bit, but maybe you could just share that summary for us so that our guests can get a great understanding of who you are.
Jason shared that his journey started at the age of 14, like so many young teenagers, he wanted to buy stuff and he could have gone and worked at a local store or he could do something different, he went down the path of doing something different and started selling his own telecommunication and computer hardware and software.
And it really came about because he had this undying curiosity of this thing called business, his parents had side hustles, his grandparents had their own businesses and he just thought, there’s got to be a smarter way than just going to work at the local supermarket and getting minimum wage was not the fast track to get the nice shiny gadgets he wanted to buy.
So, it all started at that first business, but at the age of 12, he can remember saying to dad, “Can you buy me this business magazine?” And he looked at him like he was some crazy kid, but he did in a way. And when he was interviewed at 14 years of age, he said, “I can't compete on price, but I can compete on the service that I deliver.”
And that has been the hallmark of his career. For over 20 years, he’s worked with some of the world's largest brands, helping them significantly improve the experiences that they deliver through caring about their customers. And this is a journey, not a destination.
So, certainly over the 20 years, the way he talk about it, the things that he’s done and the results that he’s delivered has improved, but it all comes down to those very early days where he was curious about business and at the same time of having that curiosity, he wasn't just reading about how to sell stuff but he was reading people like Tom Peters and his book The Pursuit of Wow!: Every Person’s Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times, and about how you can differentiate yourself in more ways than just through product and price.
The Importance of Employee Experience and Customer Experience
Me: Now, as I mentioned earlier, I started reading your book, It's All about CEX!: The Essential Guide to Customer and Employee Experience. And I just want you to maybe share one or two examples of just experiences you've had either working in an organization where you saw that the employee experience is just as important as the customer experience or even in a capacity where you played a leadership role and you saw that it really played an impactful part. Because as you mentioned in the book, there are times when you said some senior leadership persons see customer experience as a feel good type of thing and they don't necessarily see the bottom line impact of it.
And you gave quite a few examples of if you take care of people inside of course, they will take care of external customers, and that will create loyalty and retention. But just give us maybe two examples that you've had, as I said, either as a leader or just working in an organization as an employee.
Jason shared that he can remember starting a job with a telecommunications company as the National Customer Service Manager of an enterprise team and he didn't know it at the time, but sometime after starting one of the people more senior than him said to him, “The reason we gave you the team that we gave you was because we figured it's been broken for so long, if you get it wrong, what's it matter?”
It's been broken for so long. And what he walked into was he thinks he would call it the departure lounge, because people were leaving the team, leaving the business just as fast as you could recruit them when he turned up. And you can imagine what that's like, you've got new people that are worried about getting through the trial period, of their probation period, you've got new people that absolutely have not got the skills or the ingrained training around what they're meant to be doing.
And then the only tenured people or the majority of the tenured people within the team are there because they're fearful that they can't get another job. And so, you don't necessarily have the talent, you have what you have.
And every metric and they were serving corporate customers, every metric that there was, was failed.
And wind forward just six months, and every metric was being achieved, they were no longer being referred to as the departure lounge, because they had some turnover when he first started, but that was intentional turnover as they rebuilt the team.
And rebuilding the team was about really being clear with their team members about what success looked like, about providing them with regular coaching bites. So, not expecting someone to know everything from day one, or trying to train them everything from day one, but consistently improve their skills.
And then the third thing was bringing humanity into the team. So, if someone made a mistake, not using that as a reason to chastise them, or belittle them, but rather using that as an opportunity to help them learn and grow.
Now, there is always a limit to that one, someone can't make a mistake, the same mistake every day for 50 days. But if you take it a genuine approach that people turn up wanting to do a great job, and you enable them to do so and when they have a misstep, you walk them through that, the results are phenomenal.
And like he said, in 6 months, in under 6 months, we went from meeting no metrics to being the only team meeting all the metrics. And those metrics, importantly, weren't just organizational metrics, they were every month judged by corporate performance of their customers.
So, the customers that they were serving had contractual service levels that were different to each other, and they had to meet them all. And so, he thinks that's a real testament to what can happen when you actually start caring about the employees.
And, of course, it's not just in contact centres where that may makes sense, it matters everywhere. And equally, not caring about your employees can have the opposite effect of what he was just explaining.
He worked for a company where there was a new senior leader joined the leadership team and that individual believed in one thing, cost cutting.
And if you had a conversation around, “Do we have the $2 biscuit or the $2.10 cent biscuit in the lunch room, in the break room?”
Well, then the first response was, “Can we get the $1.90 biscuit and we're going to limit the number of biscuits we put out each day because people can't have two biscuits.” And when you have someone come in and disrupt a culture in that respect, what ends up happening is a whole lot of inefficiencies because people spend their time talking and gossiping around how things have changed for the worse and inevitably start looking for work elsewhere as opposed to being focused on the mission of the company.
Areas Where Organizations Have Place Emphasis in Light of the Global Pandemic
Me: So, the employee experience is just as important as the customer experience. I know you're in Australia, I guess you could share a little bit about how COVID has impacted customer experience in your parts of the world. But are there some areas that you think organizations have had to maybe give a little bit more emphasis to, especially in light of this global pandemic?
I know a lot of people have to be working from home, have you seen any trends where people had to make a change or shift in terms of their approach to employee experience and customer experience since the pandemic versus pre pandemic?
Have people had to exercise a little bit more empathy and compassion towards people and is it a case where employees are less tolerant if organizations are not extending these types of behaviors to them, and does that impact the external customer?
How have you seen it playing out on your side of the world?
Jason shared that across Australia and North America where the majority of his clients are, the number one thing that he knows the pandemic has impacted organizations is the level of trust that they have in their employees.
And he means that in a really great way, think of the organizations 13/15 months ago would have never considered letting people work from home. And through necessity, they had to, and they had to also trust that their employees were going to do the right thing when they were working at home and he feels that that trust has been paid back 10 times by employees.
The real challenge now as different parts of the world open up again, is will that trust be extended, was it a situational trust?
Or was it really the turning point that led to trusting and we've certainly seen a lot in the media around different companies and how they're embracing or not embracing a flexible work environment.
But definitely, he sees that on the main there is a greater willingness to have that flexibility with employees, which ultimately leads to a better experience for customers and that's because if an employee feels empowered and trusted to do the right thing, then they're going to do the right thing more times than not.
The other thing that has occurred is and he loves the word empathy that Yanique mentioned, is that to an extent, customers have become certainly in the early parts of the pandemic, that they themselves have had more empathy towards who they were doing business with because everyone was in this together, nothing more like a common cause to bind people together, whether it be customers or employees.
The real challenge though is what companies have done and learned through the pandemic. So, at the very beginning of the pandemic, you had empathy from customers, because they were living the same pain that the people that were serving them were living them regardless of socio demographics, everyone's lives got disrupted, some more than others but everyone’s lives got disrupted. The real challenge though is that we're 18 months in some countries, we're 18 months into the pandemic and there are companies still using the pandemic as an excuse for bad customer service.
There's a telephone company that he won't name names, but the telephone company is a very large company and when you contact them today, whether it be via telephone, by web form, via online chat, the very first thing that they say to you is that, “Due to the pandemic, there we are experiencing significant delays.”
Now, they have a large outsourced operation that, yes, 18 months ago was having some problems, but they've also had 18 months to find a solution to that problem. And organizations need to move beyond the pandemic as a reason for not delivering a great experience for customers.
And the research is there to back that up, 30% of consumers will now leave a business after just one bad experience and it's easy for them to do so. There are companies that are doing things today that they just 2 years ago would have never thought they would be doing but they're doing it because they have to survive.
And that becomes the customer's new expectations, once you start doing home delivery because of the pandemic, as soon as your country opens up, or your city opens up, that doesn't mean the customers just suddenly doesn't enjoy the benefits of home delivery.
And so, he thinks the real challenges that we've had this is massive injection of empathy up front on every side of the coin but organizations are not taking the lead during the pandemic to reinvent, to fix their broken things that were broken in the beginning so that their customers don't have a reason to look elsewhere.
Me: So, those are really, really good things that you brought up and I'm happy that you were able to show us where it is that customers have been placing an emphasis on especially since the pandemic as well as where organizations have been putting their emphasis on.
App, Website or Tool that Jason Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resources that he cannot live without in his business, Jason shared that he’s going to say the Qualtrics Learning Network. Qualtrics is a large software company that provides research solutions in the experience management space.
And whether it's Qualtrics, or someone else, what he’s saying here is, and the reason he says Qualtrics is because there is almost every day new case studies, new thought leadership, new information to help individuals in small businesses or in large enterprises grow their practice, their intentional practice on delivering great customer and employee experiences.
And so, he thinks the best online resource for any entrepreneur out there or leader is one like the Qualtrics Learning Network where you can constantly get fed new thought leadership and new ways of doing things and not because you have to change what you're doing every week, but a healthy curiosity and openness to see what is class leading today will help inform your decisions and ensure that you continue to grow forward.
And he thinks that's the biggest challenge that most companies have, especially small businesses have is that they start with this really great ambition to be better than the store down the road and perhaps at first they are but they fail to continue to evolve and innovate so that they stay competitive and mindful that today their experiences that they're delivering are being judged not based on the last time he had his car serviced, or the last time he went to a bank, it's been judged on the best experience, his last best experience regardless of the industry. So, something like the Qualtrics website where you get exposure to the evolving nature of business globally he thinks is really great.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jason
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jason shared he’d already mentioned Tom Peters The Pursuit of Wow!: Every Person’s Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times, it was one of the very first business books he ever read, he thinks everything in that book still plays through today, anything by Tom Peters will certainly get you thinking. But let's move to today, there are three books:
He mentioned those three books because any of them will absolutely help you start to get clarity and start to move forward in creating a better experience for your customers and your employees. But here's the thing, none of those books are about hugging your customers, it's about making really strategic steps to improve the commercial viability of your business, while also differentiating your business through the experiences that you create and deliver.
Advice for Business Owners Who Lack the Constant Motivated Human Capital
Jason shared that the first thing piece of advice that he would give is ask your employees “When was the last time they had experienced achievement in your business?”
“And what's preventing them from having achievement more regularly?”
So, humans, employees, measure their experience and their engagement with us is really impacted across three lenses, did they have success or achievement in their day, everyone wants to go home or in their working day by feeling that they actually were useful, that they achieved something, that it wasn't just the same old, same old.
They of course, want things to not be handed to them on a silver platter, but they don't want things to be difficult for the sake of being difficult.
And the third thing is that they want to feel a human connection with their leadership and with their business.
So, if you ask your team members, “When was the last time you had achievement and tell me why you aren't having achievement more often?”
You will start to unearth the real challenges in your business and if you turn around and start taking action in small ways, and big ways to remove those barriers to achievement, your employees will start to see that you genuinely care, they'll start experiencing more achievement, because you're removing the roadblocks and through that, you'll build engagement and loyalty and motivation.
What Jason is Really Excited About Now!
Jason shared that the number one activity that he’s working on right now is finalizing his manuscript for his next book. So, he has a new book coming out in quarter 1 - 2022 and this book has completely changed in direction at least two or three times as a result of the pandemic.
And he’s really knuckling down to finish it off, because this book will really help organizations and leaders in businesses of all size, take their business to the next level, and be really practical, and filled with great case studies to help organizations in any industry move forward. And so, he can't wait to have it finished but he also can't wait for people to get it in their hands, and importantly, taking action as a result.
Where Can We Find Jason Online
Twitter – @jasonsbradshaw
LinkedIn - Jason S Bradshaw
Instagram - @jasonsbradshaw
Facebook - @jasonsbradshaw
Website – www.jasonsbradshaw.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jason Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jason shared, “The standard that you walk past is the standard that you accept.” We can all get so wrapped up in the busyness of the day, of the crisis, of the moment, but the moment we start walking past people in our organization, or start letting ourselves slip in our standards, and then we start to dilute the overall experience of our customers and employees. So, the standard that you will past as the standard you accept, let's lead by example and set the standard.
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Dr. Kaliym Islam is a former Wall Street executive where for over 20 years he led global learning businesses. New York Times best-selling author, Kevin Kurse (The e-Learning Guru describes him as a fresh voice among the usual author Guru crowd…, “who” …brings the credibility of someone who makes a living DOING, rather than TELLING.
Teams under his direction have been: 1. Named learning elite organizations by Chief Learning Officer Magazine. 2. Won International Society for Technical Communication (STC) awards for innovative learning content. 3. Cited by HR Futurist Josh Bersin as best practice learning organizations.
He's written thousands of industry and academic articles and a number of books that focus on leadership, strategy, organizational development, and training and development. His most recent book, The 12 Inch Rule of Leadership: Proven Strategies for Career Success highlights how leaders in industry, government, higher education, k-12 and entrepreneurship utilized a common framework (The 12 Inch Rule) to achieve career success.
He's currently an Assistant Professor of Practice at Southern Illinois University where he helps develop tomorrow's educational leaders.
Questions
Highlights
Dr. Islam’s Journey
Dr. Islam shared that he looks at his journey, he’s got to go ahead and cite his inner Steve Jobs, you can't connect the dots forward, you can only connect them backwards. So, if he looks at his journey, he would sort of summed up in two words or two phrases, innovation and taking chances.
So came out of the military, spent some time in the military after he screwed up in college for the first time and wanted to change the world. So, his plan was to change the world one child at a time.
So, he went into K-12 education and he started working, at that time, poor community of Bushwick, Brooklyn is now a destination place but at that time it wasn't. It was one of those neighborhoods where you see the car panned by, you see the burnt-out buildings and graffiti on the wall and you hear the statistics about single mothers and drugs and AIDS and these types of things.
And what he did, he started teaching school there and he brought his military background, he brought his college fraternal background, and his love for technology into the classroom. And at that time, his customers were essentially the students and the parents and the administration. So, they put all those things together, being innovative and taking chances. And then students who really had not been successful in their academic careers, but suddenly started to achieve success. They had tremendous improvement. I leveraged that success and started writing curriculum, helping teachers use technology in the classroom.
So, he left his technology background, he left the classroom because he realized that in the classroom, he can only help probably 30 students at a time but if he was in a more of an administrative position, he could impact policy which could impact more students. So, he took a job as an assistant principal at an alternative high school in Manhattan, overseeing their technology and basically migrating them from at that time was an Apple Mac environment into a PC environment.
So, his interests started getting more and more toward technology and how technology can help people learn. Well, it was about that time that his wife informed him that the salary of a school teacher did not afford her the life that she felt that she deserved.
So, he started looking at other opportunities and he actually went to Wall Street, initially to do some technology stuff and they were actually deploying a new technology system. And he was in a meeting, the teacher in him never left so he asked what was a dumb question back then, he said, “Well, what's going to happen on Monday morning, when you deploy a brand-new email system on Friday afternoon?”
And they said, “Well, we're going to get a lot of calls to the help desk, and there’s going to be problems.” And he said, “So are you positioned to support that?” Well, they said, “Well, look, No, we're not.” And he said, “Well, what should we do?” He said, “You should train people, you should give them an education program. What you should do is, rather than teach everyone at the same time, you rotate and bring one department into the training, while they're in the training, you deploy the software to their desktop. So right after having been trained on it, they can use it right away.”
Next question was who can develop the training?
He was a school teacher, had a degree in instructional design. So, he went home that weekend, wrote the training program, and they deployed and it was very successful.
Fast forward a few months later, they were deploying another software system, same situation occurred. He was in a meeting, they said they're going to deploy it, he asked a dumb question, “What's going to happen when you don't train people?” Same scenario occurred. He went home, built the training program and did the training, they had success. And then they had a third software system that they were deploying, everyone looked at him and said, “Kaliym, can you do the training?” He said, “Absolutely not. No way. No way, Jose.”
And they said, “Well, why not? You did it before.” He said, Yeah, but we're playing whack a mole here. We're just reacting, we need a more strategic approach to go ahead to doing this training. He literally went home that weekend that was refused writer, he wrote a strategic training plan for the company with, of course, him at the head of this technical training department. He walked in on Monday morning, gave the president of the company his proposal, he looked at him and said, “Well, start hiring your staff.” So, that was his full foray into sort of corporate supervision and corporate training.
So, they had a lot of success there, he had responsibility for employees. And then they realized that what they were doing for employees could be extended to clients. And so, they said, “Okay, Kaliym, you now have responsibility for customer training.”
And when he looked at the landscape, he realized that it really didn't make a lot of sense to build a staff of 50, 60, 100s of trainers to train customers, because when the need and you got to look back that was sort of late 90s, where people were just learning how to use Microsoft Word, learning how to use Excel, and all these other productivity programs.
So, they realized that okay, once everyone is taught, they don't need all these trainers. So again, in the spirit of innovation and taking chances, they started working with what at that time was called CD ROM training. So, they'd actually program the training on a CD ROM, you would send it out to the various locations and that's how people would take their training. So, he left there after doing some good stuff there, another company asked him to come in and oversee or bring in technology.
So that's what they did, they brought in technology for another firm. He just basically kept on sort of ascending up the ladder, and all these experiences, whether it was bringing in a new technology or different approaches or bringing in learning management systems. He always wanted to help people, so he would write about it in industry magazines and then he got started being asked to speak about things like that.
And at some point, after a bunch of years, and this is something that he’s neglected to say after his wife let him know that a school teacher didn't make the money that afforded her the life that she thought she deserved. Dr. Islam leaving education K through 12 education broke his mother's heart because she thought he had a gift. And he promised her, he said, “Mom, I promise I'll go back at some point.”
So, after 20 years of doing that, and having a lot of success, he said, it's time for him to fulfil his promise to his mother. And he left corporate America, and started doing what his mother asked him to do was going back into education. So, he took on a job as a professor at Southern Illinois University and opened up a small boutique educational consulting firm and now he’s sitting here having a great conversation with Yanique.
Summarizing Dr. Islam’s Book – The 12 Inch Rule of Leadership: Proven Strategies for Career Success and Who is it Really Targeted Towards
Me: Your book, The 12 Inch Rule of Leadership: Proven Strategies for Career Success, could you share with our listeners what that whole framework is about? I'm aware of the fact that it consists of time value, best performance of duty, perseverance, the worth of example, the virtue of patience, talent, expression, economic wisdom, the value of character, kindly attitudes and pleasure in work, and the worth of the organization and the dignity of simplicity. So, it's a lot but could you summarize for us in the best way possible, just for our listeners to get an idea of what this framework entails and who is it really targeted towards? Is it just for persons who are new and emerging leaders or people who've been in leadership roles for years? Is this something they could take on to maybe sharpen their leadership skills?
Dr. Islam shared that it's certainly something that anyone can take on to sharpen their leadership skills. So, the background with The 12 Inch Rule, he is a member of a historically black fraternity or sorority, Phi Beta Sigma. And he’s sure that all fraternities and sororities have these types of things where essentially, there are things that you have to learn to become a member, things you have to memorize.
And one of the things that he had to memorize when he was going through his process was The 12 Inch Rule, and that was close to 40 years ago. And like you said, The 12 Inch Rule time value, best performance of duty, perseverance, the worth of example, the virtue of patience, kind of expression, economic wisdom, the value of character, kindly attitudes, pleasure in work, the worth of organization, the dignity of simplicity, he can't tell you what he had for breakfast this morning. But after close to 40 years, he can rattle those things off like it's nothing. And what he started to observe over the years is that folks who joined this organization fell into two camps, those who, like him could remember it and rattle it off and those who would say, “Hey, that was a long time ago, I don't remember it.”
And what he observed was that the ones who remembered this rule, and these principles, the 12 principles of the rule, their career trajectory seem to be steep. Whereas the ones that didn't remember that I said it was a long time ago, not that they all didn't have successful careers, but their trajectory wasn't as steep.
So, the academic in him try to understand why is this happening. So, he actually set out to do an academic study, his plan was to do research and get this published in a peer reviewed journal to solidify his academic chops. Now, after about the third interview, it blew his mind. He said, oh, my God, the stories that he’s hearing from these members in terms of what they did, how they applied the principles and how it led to career success was mind boggling. And he said, “Well, I can't leave this in an academic journal, there's got to be more of a wider distribution of this information, because it can help a lot of people.” So, they became agile and they basically stopped on a dime and said, “Okay, listen, we're not going to write this in a language that's geared toward academics, we're going to write this in a language that's geared toward playing people who are trying to reach their full potential in terms of their leadership potential, who want to be able to communicate their value, who are tired of being looked over for promotion and who are trying to become better as leaders.” And that's what they did.
And they interviewed 14 different members in a variety of industries, from K-12, to higher education, to entrepreneurs, to people who are working in financial services, people who are working in government.
The tips and tricks and recommendations that they put out there was helpful to him, it reminded him of a lot, it taught him a lot, it helped him become a better leader. And he knows it's going to help other people.
Just tell one story. His son, he’s got a 21-year-old, who he can never get to read anything, ever. In fact, when he was a kid, he tried to pay him to read books, wouldn't happen. He picked this book up and said “Dad, wow, this is pretty good, this is going to be helpful for me, some of the recommendations that they're talking about in the book, I can use on my job.”
He gave it to some of his college friends. Now these are after millennials, Gen Z? They don't read anything, except Snapchat. But his son started sending him pictures of his friends that they were sending him pictures of them reading the book, because they were so excited by it.
So, to your question, he thinks no, it's not just the new and emerging leader, he thinks sort of old folks like him can learn from the book also. Younger folks who really haven't necessarily gotten to a position where they're supervising, he thinks they can get something out of it, he’s seen it from his son's friends. And he’s got a bunch of folks who in the middle, in between who have read the book and said, “This has really been helpful to me.”
A Breakdown of The 12 Principles
Dr. Islam shared that he’s going to do that but he wants to take a step back. So, the beauty of this is, is there are no operational definitions. So, time value, it's something you need to measure yourself by, but the fact that there's no operational definition really gives you the opportunity to apply it in a way that makes sense for you. So, time value as an as an example, it's just that valuing your time. So, if you show up late or his interpretation of it, if you show up late. Number one, you're not valuing the time of the person who you're supposed to have a meeting.
Number one, if you're not spending your time on the right things, okay, you're not valuing time. So, one of the contributors in the book, his name is Jean-Guy Lauture, and he's the Chief Learning Officer for the city of Bloomingdale or township of Bloomingdale in New Jersey. So, he tells a story about how when he showed up at the City Hall one day, and he was working on one problem, one technology problem that was happening while he was visiting.
Now, while he was there, he got wind that they had been experiencing some ransomware. So, some bad actor threw some ransomware on the computers of the township that will put a lot of other things in jeopardy. Now, the issue that he initially came to deal with was important, and that he initially expected to spend his time. But as soon as the other issue came up, he realized his time is better served addressing the ransomware issue and, on a dime, he shifted his resources. And all the people who contributed to the book have different stories about how you can value your time.
Number two is best performance of duty. It seems simple enough, but how do you do your best when you don't feel your best? That there in is the challenge. And he tells a story in the book, one of his experiences was, someone in his organization quit relatively quickly, they actually lost two levels in organization, and he had to step in, and basically perform as a technician and a project manager sort of well below his depth, out of his depth.
He’s more of a strategy guy, so that sort of level of detail really killed him. But if they didn't do a good job for the client, they were not going to take on some additional business. So, even though he hated the work, even though it was out of his depth, even though it was something he really, really, really did not like to do, he had to perform his depth, he had to perform his best at all time. So, that's just one story.
Perseverance, how do you keep fighting through when things get rough?
Me: And I think that's applicable to anybody. I mean, not even leaders, just human beings, because things don't stay easy all the time.
Dr. Islam agreed. That's the point. He tells the story in the book, there was a time when he initially came to Wall Street to do technology stuff and he was overseeing, at that time, they call it desktop support. So, this is before all this remote stuff where you can just take over someone's computer.
Back then you literally had to go to the person's desk and install the software and plug everything in. So, that was his job, he oversaw a team to do that.
And they had a project to install it in a place within financial services called the cashiers, they call it the king, that the terminology that if you're on Wall Street, because the only people that go into that department are the people that work there, they really don't get visitors.
So, if a strange person comes in, all conversation stops, it gets really quiet, and they watch as you walk across the floor. So, his job was to deploy some PCs to that organization and to do it, he had to get the blessing of the guy they call the King of the Cage, his name was Fred Quiñones, he was an executive VP there, worked his way up from the mailroom, and let everybody know that he enjoyed his position, he was the kingmaker. So, he sent an email to Fred trying to set up a meeting so they could schedule the deployment of the PCs, it went unanswered. Left a voicemail, went unanswered, so he did what he used to do back then. He would do what he calls a drive by, he would just stop by his office and start a conversation.
He walks into the cashiers and there's silence, everyone watches as he walked across the floor. And he gets to the corner office, and in front of Fred and he's got a glass office so you can see he's in there reading his newspaper, and in front of his office is his assistant, his gatekeeper, Ann Galante. And he introduced himself, and said he'd like to speak to Fred. She says, “Well, he's busy.”
Now mind you, he’s looking at the guy reading a newspaper. She says, “Well, he's busy, come back later.” So, he goes back, another email, another phone call.
He figured let him show up at a different time of day. So, he showed up maybe 12 in the afternoon, same scenario, get into the cashiers, noise stops, he walks across the hallway, or across the room, look at Fred reading his newspaper, he asked Ann if he could speak with him, “He's busy.”
So, this happened three or four times and now his boss is saying, “Hey, when are you going to get those PCs deployed?”So, he’s feeling some pressure. He said, let me just try one more time. So, he shows up again, same scenario, he’s walking back dejected and a gentleman pulls him aside.
He says, “Listen, you're disrespecting Fred. He's an important man, he's a busy man and you show up here in the middle of the day, he doesn't like it.” Fred shows up in the morning at 7:00 am, he likes jelly doughnuts and he likes his coffee sweet and light.
So, the next morning, he shows up at 6:45 am with jelly doughnuts and coffee, Fred walks in, he’s sitting outside of his office, Fred walks in and he said, “Hey, Fred, I hear you like jelly doughnuts and coffee.” He said, “Come on, Kaliym. Come on in.” He didn't even know he knew his name.
Long story short, they did the project, everything worked out well, they were successful. And at one point, during the middle of the day, he needed to meet with Fred, he couldn't wait till a 6:00 am jelly donut meeting.
So, he goes across the cashiers and by this time, no noise stops, everyone keeps working, they don't even notice him. He walks across the floor, Fred is in his office, obviously in a busy meeting, he’s looking at Ann saying, “I really need to meet Fred.”
Fred looks up, he walks out of his office, he says, “What do you need Kaliym?” He lets him know. He tells other people in the office, “I got to be with Kaliym.” And he kicks them out. So, the tide certainly changed. So, he’s walking out of the cashiers’ area and this guy Ron Kowalski, certain names you remember in your career. He says, “You know, Kaliym, most people stop after the second effort, I'm glad you kept going.” Perseverance.
The worth of example. They have Joe West and he's a Harvard trained epidemiologist in the book, and he runs a small boutique consulting firm, he happens to be African American.
And he tells a story of before the advent of the internet, we can just go online and see anyone's name, he was working on a deal with a client and things were working well. And he actually got the opportunity to go to the executive offices and meet with them.
So, he goes to the offices and Secretary puts him in the room and the executives come in and as soon as they walk in, he could see from the look on their face that they didn't expect that Dr. Joseph West from Harvard was an African American.
So, there's an awkward moment in the beginning, but then they start to make small talk and then they realize that Joe West, he likes a lot of the same things they do, he likes to golf, he likes to smoke cigars and guess what, he loves Ronald Reagan.
Long story short, Joe gets the job, his team does a phenomenal job for the client. And then the client asked him, “Hey, do you have any of the firms that are just like you who can do some other work for us?”
So, of course, Joe goes and recommends another firm, they happen to be African American also. So, he tells a story of how joyful he was when he came back to do a report for these executives and he sees the firm that he recommended in the hallway or outside by the Secretary is waiting to meet with the executives. And he believes it's because of the example that he set as a business owner and how he presented himself. The worth of example.
Next one is the virtue of patience. So, they have a story in the book, Michael Dove. And Michael Dove is an executive at PCSU, which is a financial services firm, he's actually located in St. Petersburg, Florida.
And he tells a story of how his team used to get frustrated because they would make recommendations to the executives and the executives wouldn't act on them.
And what he had to instill in his team was, if you have a good idea, that idea is going to remain good, you've got to be patient, don't discard everything that you've done, because they're going to come back around and they're going to use that idea.
So, what he did he, he made sure that anytime one of his team members made a recommendation that was rejected, that they kept all the documentation. And what they started seeing was that a lot of times they would make these recommendations and while they were initially rejected, sometime 4 or 5, 6 months later, they would be accepted.
And had they not learned to be patient, they might have gotten rid of all the documentation that was associated with some of those recommendations of those projects. And that's really about making sure folks understand what you can do, what you're capable of and sometime that's also tricky, because sometimes when you let people know what you're capable of doing, they look at it as bragging. But if you don't do it, it could cause some other issues.
In one of the organizations that he led, they had a woman who she was a documentation specialist, but she loved doing voiceovers and she did that on the side to make money.
And they were having a lot of trouble finding affordable voice over talent, they tried to outsource stuff to different countries, but the accents just didn't work out.
And he remembered one day in a skip level, he thinks was a two-down meeting, they're having some conversations about where she wants to go in her career and what she does when she's not in work and she mentioned, “Well, I do voiceovers.” “Like, wow, we need voiceover talent here for some of the work that we're doing.” So had she not spoken up and talked about what she's good at, she would never have had that opportunity, she parlayed that into a bunch of other great personal and business opportunities.
Economic wisdom. So, they have a story in the book, Nigel Coelho, and he works for the folks that make the coffee for Starbucks and these other sort of coffee houses. And he speaks to, “I always have to remember, hey, this isn't my money, this is the company's money.”
So, he has to look at it like that, he can't spend it in the wrong way. So, they had to make a decision at one point about whether they invest in a $50 million project, which was in one area versus a $30 million project, which was in another area, and the more expensive investment would have been great for his organization, but not for the company. So, using this economic wisdom, he made the decision to do what was best for the best for the company.
The value of character they have this individual, Reverend Dr. Tyree Anderson, and he tells the story of how he took over as the new Pastor of a church in Alabama. And the old Pastor would let anyone walk in at any time. He didn't want people walking in to cause disturbance with the sermon.
So, he implemented a rule that if you weren't there when the sermon started, there were certain times during the service where people could come in. And so, this was new to some of the older parishioners. So, there was a woman, when she was able to come in, they were having sort of meet and greet when he walks around and greet the new visitors, and she literally cursed him out as he was walking on the floor in the church, and he talks about how it took everything in him to maintain control and maintain good character, even though his character was being assaulted in front of everyone.
Kindly attitude. So, they have Kobina Thomas, who was an executive for UPS United Postal Services in New York. And he tells a story about how he had to let someone go but he had to do it in a way that maintained respect for the person who he was letting go and maintained respect for him.
Pleasure in work. They have a lawyer, Cedric Ashley, who is the editor of one of these legal associations, a Quarterly Journal. And he speaks to the importance of finding something in work that gives you pleasure or else it's all agony.
And he tells a story of helping a woman who was terminated unfairly and the joy that he got from doing that, not because she compensated him, and he did get compensated well, but just to see how relieved she was when the stress of everything was happening in her life, how he was able to take that off of her shoulder and the pleasure that he got in that. And he also speaks to that what you consider pleasure in work changes over the cause of your career. So, an 18-year-old who’s going to look at it differently than a 15-year-old in the workforce.
Then we have the worth of organization. They have Will Worley who is a principal at a school in East Orange, New Jersey, and he just tells a story about just being organized and making sure everyone is on the same page and how he was able to leverage that to provide educational services to his students and his community during COVID.
And then lastly, the dignity of simplicity. So, they have Jerome Evans, and Jerome is a former National Championship for the University of Florida Gators football team. But he's also an executive at a company that sells industrial materials to big construction firms.
And he just talks about the importance of treating everyone with dignity and speaking in a way not to show us how smart you are, but speaking in a way that people get it, and how he speaks the same way to his billionaire clients as he does to the people that clean his house and how that's impacted his leadership.
So, we've got a lot of stories. But again, these principles are ones that individuals can interpret and use in a way that works for them.
App, Website or Tool that Dr. Islam Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business
When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Dr. Islam shared that Basecamp is essentially a communication tool. So, he knows a lot of companies are going to sort of agile project management tools, whether it's monday.com or Plutio or Xero, those types of things.
But Basecamp, for him is a great tool for project communication so it allows any documents, you can upload it, if there's a communication, whether it's through email, or you type it directly into Basecamp, all the communication comes there. So, for him in terms of staying organized and knowing what's going on with projects that he’s working on, clients he’s helping, Basecamp is required.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Dr. Islam
When asked about books that have had an impact, Dr. Islam shared that he’ll give a couple. So, one is Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions by John Kotter, phenomenal book, most people are familiar with Who Moved My Cheese. And that book is about basically show up and things have changed, so you have no choice but to react to it. Our Iceberg is Melting is a story of a colony of penguins believe it or not, and this one penguin Fred, he's friends with everybody else, but he likes to go off and learn things. He likes to dive underneath the iceberg and at some point, Fred sees a bubble in the bottom of the iceberg and it hits him, “Hey, I think our iceberg must be melting.” Now, he doesn't have a lot of evidence and from the story, Fred is really a junior person. But he's got to now convinced the entire colony of penguins that they've got to change their way of life, because if they don't, they're going to die because the iceberg is melting. And he has to do that with just a little bit of evidence that's below the iceberg that's really inconclusive.
And to him, that's the job of a leader, that you can't just focus on the here and now, you have to be looking at what's going to happen, what are some things that may cause your business to demise?
Or what are some opportunities you need to take advantage of that's going to help your organization be successful and a lot of times you don't find those things at the surface, you got to dive underneath the surface to find those things. So, that book is tremendously important to him, has been helpful.
The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard, because that's all about supervision and communication, and doing it in a way that allows you to maintain first principle, 12 Inch Rule, time value.
Another one is Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow by Tom Rath, so rather than forcing people to do things they don't do well, why not put them in a position where they can spend most of their time doing the things that they're naturally good at? So, those are the three that he would share.
What Dr. Islam is Really Excited About Now!
Dr. Islam shared that what I'm really, really excited about now, he’s actually has a presentation scheduled in South Carolina for a large international organization, and they're doing a session on how do you take your organization from good to great. So, he’s really psyched up about that, they've sent out a bunch of surveys to get a sense of how individuals who are going to be at this conference, how they feel about it and after looking at these surveys, they're going to be really surprised that they're not as good as they think they are. So, he’s really excited about helping them figure out, “Okay, how do we take ourselves from where we are and get to the next level?” So, he’s really looking forward.
Where Can We Find Dr. Islam Online
Company Website – www.thetrainingproacademy.com
Personal Website – www.drkaliymaislam.com
Twitter - @thetrainingpro
LinkedIn - @thetrainingproacademy
LinkedIn – Dr. Kaliym Islam
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Dr. Islam Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Dr. Islam shared the term it comes from a poem that from Muhammad Ali is called, “Impossible is nothing.”
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The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
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Shep Hyken is a Customer Service and Experience Expert and the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepherd Presentations. He is a New York Times bestselling author and has been inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame for a lifetime achievement in the speaking profession. Shep works with companies and organizations who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he is the author of five books. He is also the creator of The Customer Focus™, a customer service training program which helps clients develop a customer service culture and loyalty mindset.
Questions
Highlights
Shep’s Journey
Me: So, I'm going to piggyback off of your last statement, “It's great to be back” because your new book is called “I'll be back.” And so, could you share a little bit about the book, what inspired you to write this book? How can this book help organizations? What are the core pillars or themes that the book is built on? Just give us in your own words what it's all about?
Shep shared that the full title is, I'll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again & Again. And he joked about the accent, but whenever people say I'll be back, they kind of tried to do that Terminator, Arnold Schwarzengger impression.
And originally, when he started writing the book, he hadn't even thought about that, the tie into the Terminator movie and then about three hours in the starting his outline, he’s going “Yeah, I'll be back. I bet I can play off of that.” So, while it really doesn't have anything to do with the Terminator, he does mention it a few times and the goal is to get your customers to say, I'll be back and you want them to not only say it, you want them to actually do it.
So, there's all kinds of tips, tactics, ideas, and strategies just for the idea of getting your customers to come back and understanding the difference between repeat customers, loyal customers, how to create a more customer focused culture that delivers that experience that gets customers to come back, so it's really about that.
And the really cool thing is, he believes, even with this crazy COVID variant going around, the Delta, he gets the feeling that a lot of the world is starting to feel like they're coming back. So, there's a double message in there that he didn't even anticipate was going to happen.
The Concept of Being Nice: The Behavior or Personality of a Customer Service Employee Versus the Technical Side
Me: Now you mentioned in the book, the concept of being nice. The behaviour or personality of a customer service employee versus the technical side, I wanted you to expand on that for us on what is the importance of that? And what does it really mean to be nice?
Shep stated that being nice is a foundational concept and there's a story behind it that's pretty funny. The idea behind it was, he was asked to do a speech and he was the closing keynote speaker, the last speaker of the day, he had to end exactly on time, because these people had to go to another event and they were all being picked up by buses. So, his client said, no matter what happens, you finish on time.
And ultimately, the speakers ahead of him went longer and longer and longer, and by the time it was his time to speak, there was two minutes left, not the 40 minutes that he was supposed to do. So, he said to the client, “Don't worry, I've got this.” And he gave him this weird look but he walked on stage and the first thing he said was, “Thank you for that wonderful round of applause. I realized that we have to be out of here in less than two minutes. And I promised everybody, the client especially that that would happen. So, we're going to start over and I'm going to give you the shortest customer service speech in the world.”
So, he’s introduced quickly, the applause is here, he’s now standing center stage. Are you ready? Here it goes. Be nice. Then he started to walk off stage and the audience, he stopped halfway through and he goes, “I know it's pretty easy, isn't it.” But think about it for just a moment, he’s still got about a minute or so left.
So let me tell you about being nice. Being nice is foundational, it's fundamental. If you're in a restaurant and they have great food, but the server is so mean to you, you're never coming back, it's that simple. But I want you to realize that being nice isn't always easy, it's simple, but it's not easy.
And you need to think about it because there's going to be times that you're going to be distracted that you're going to be busy that a customer or an internal customer, one of your own team members is going to come and talk to you and you're going to be interrupted, and you're going to be a little snappy, you can't do that.
Foundationally, you must be nice. Now, nothing's changed. He always joked about nothing's changed in customer service and they talked about that in the book. But really, that's a fundamental, people don't want to be treated the wrong way, they want to feel appreciated, they want to feel like it's a place that wants to do business with them.And if you aren't at least nice, well, think about you don't want to put yourself behind just because you weren't doing something as simple as being friendly and nice.
And by the way, they surveyed over 1000 consumers, and one of the most important top three qualities they want in dealing with somebody related to the areas of customer service, sales, whatever, is that they want somebody number one that's knowledgeable and number two, that's nice.
Me: So nice is like, good morning. Nice is, how are you doing today? Nice is the softer side of your personality.
Shep agreed and stated that it's just a soft skill and it is exactly that it is a skill. And sometimes you need to work on that skill, you need to be remembered, and it's a little bit of a smile, it's a little bit of a friendly attitude. And when you combine those together, that's what your customers want and expect from you. Doesn't that sound so simple.
And by the way, they don't spend a lot of time on this in the book, but it's important, he talked about foundation and really what is the underpinning of all the experience you want your customers to have.
And even if you're in the business of an eCommerce company that it's almost all automated, you still have to create this feeling that you're friendly, it's the images, it's the simplicity of how the website works and if they ever do, in fact, call you, if the customer ever does call you, it's how they're treated.
In a B2B environment, maybe business to business, they say is different than B2C and the reality of it is, it's not much different today, because your B2B customers are comparing you to the best service experiences they've ever had. And that could include a retail store, it could include Amazon, it could include a restaurant, it doesn't matter, it's the best service they've had and that's what they expect from everybody.
Me: What if you have an organization where it's just not in the character of the person that's interfacing with the customers to be nice. Generally speaking, in their own personal lives, they're just not nice people, they have a very unpleasant countenance, they're not very welcoming, or approachable, and you feel very uncomfortable around them because of their demeanour and your facial expressions. How do you get that person to be nice?
Shep stated that first of all, he wouldn't have hired that person. So, part of creating a culture that's customer focus is making sure the right people are on the bus and that means you've got to hire right. Now, there are some people, they can still be nice, but they're not cut out for being on the front line, great. Put them in another job somewhere else in the organization, they still have to be nice. But again, being introverted may be awkward for somebody, and we don't want to put anybody in that situation.
But he'll also add that if you've got somebody in the warehouse and their job is to pack boxes with product based on what the customer orders, and by the way, this is a little bit off of the concept of being nice, but that person has a great responsibility to the customer. Because if they receive that box, and it wasn't packed properly and the items inside are broken, or whatever, that's going to reflect on the entire company.
Now back to this employee that never sees the customer in the warehouse, in the accounting department, whatever. If you are going to create a culture that's focused on the customer, there has to be a personality to that culture and the people who are hired have to be in alignment with that personality.
Now, again, being nice means friendly, it doesn't mean overly friendly or overly gregarious, it is really about the fundamental concept of just being friendly and nice to your colleagues and your customers, not overly so that's why even behind the scenes, they still have to have a little bit of something going on there, they just don't have to be quite as dedicated to it as perhaps somebody on the true front line.
The Difference Between Loyalty Programs and Marketing Programs
Me: Now in the book you also mentioned to create real customer loyalty, we first need to understand the difference between loyalty programs and marketing programs. Can you explain to our audience what you mean by that?
Shep stated that let's just take frequent flyer miles for a moment, they call that a loyalty program, the airlines do and the reality is it's a miles program, it's a points program.
In other words, it's a marketing program. In a sense, it's kind of a discount, you buy enough airline tickets, and you fly in the airline long enough, you get a free flight, just like if you go to a restaurant and they punch your card five times, the sixth sandwich might be free.
So, his question is, and he doesn't know if Yanique fly a lot or not, but I talked to people all the time he goes, if the entire airline industry were to take away the miles program, would you still fly on the same airline that you're currently spending most of your time on?
Because most people will try to accumulate miles on one particular airline and he’s surprised it's split. He hasn't done a formal survey, but he’s going to say it's approximately 50/50 from the people that say, “Oh, I'd stay here.” or “You know what, I'd fly a different airline.” And it's that simple. The reason they're staying on the airline is because of the points, not because of the airline itself, take that away, and it's gone.
Now, the other thing they talked a little bit about related to repeat business versus loyal business, is that sometimes-repeat business is due to maybe it's a better price.
“Why do you love doing business with them? They have the lowest prices?”
“What if you found somebody with a lower price? Well, then I'd go do business with them.”
So, the customers loyal to the price, not the company. And the same thing with convenience.
“Why do you go to them? Well, they're the closest one.”
“What happens if a competitor moves closer? Well, I'll probably do business with them.”
So, what you need to do in those situations, if price is how you're competing, or convenience is how you're competing, make sure you deliver a level of service. And when given the opportunity, try to connect with that customer on some kind of an emotional level, make them want to not only do business with you, because of whatever reason they have in their mind, but also make them like doing business with you.
Me: Yeah, I totally agree. So, you're saying then that most loyalty programs or that they dub as loyalty programs are actually marketing programs. So, what really makes a customer loyal, as you said, is that emotional connection.
Shep shared that it often is, he will add that there are certain programs, like Nike has a loyalty program, it's actually a membership program, it has really nothing to do with points, it has to do with, “Hey, you're a customer and we're going to give you great information about what you're interested in.” So, if he just bought some golf shoes from Nike, and he’s never bought golf shoes from them and since that time, he’s received a couple of really interesting emails, not just about product, but about how he can improve his golf game, and what the new technology and the shoes are.
And so, he learned about these things and he thinks to himself, they know who he is. But what they don't send him is they don't send him information on soccer shoes or football as you might call it in other parts of the world, because they know that's not something he’s ever bought from them and he’s never indicated in the interest.
So, he considers that type of program more focused on gaining the customer in other ways than just giving them true incentives to buy.
So, he thinks that's an important delineation between membership programs and marketing. Now, one other thought before we jump off of this is that some people refer to the Amazon Prime program as a loyalty program and he even thinks Amazon refers to it as the Prime membership program, not a loyalty program and if they do, it's okay. But here's what happens when you're willing to spend $120 a year and it might be $129 a year, you want to get your money's worth out of it so you're going to try to use them as often as possible. That's the idea is give them, the customer, a reason to come back and that's because you spent money with them and you want to make sure you get good value for that.
Organizations Looking to Incorporate Digital Even More But Still Create An Amazing Experience
Me: Now, the book also mentions, it piggybacks a little bit on some of your principles from your previous book, The Convenience Revolution, that was such an awesome book. And it talks about self-service, technology, subscription delivery, access and reducing friction. And I've seen a lot of organizations clearly having to pivot over the last year and a half since the pandemic, trying to look at their customer journey, trying to incorporate digital even more, even those organizations that didn't have digital as part of their whole process. And sometimes in doing that, it actually creates a lot of confusion and friction for the customer because there are so many steps that you have to take, and you're so frustrated and a lot of times you'd want to serve yourself but you can't, you have to end up reaching out to somebody either through their contact center, or even physically visiting their location. What are your thoughts on organizations looking to do all those things, but still create that amazing experience?
Shep shared that there's a lot going on there, he wrote an entire book on the concept of convenience and there's no way he couldn't reference this in the new book, because this is what drives repeat business is frictionless, easy, the company that's often easiest to do business with is the one that wins that means it makes price a little less relevant, so that may not be as important to the customer when they say, it's so easy, it's worth paying for.
And he'll give a quick example of this. Prior to the pandemic, when he wrote the book, by the way, The Convenience Revolution, in his mind it was somewhat of a breakthrough in the thought process, nobody had ever written a book about this. There was an author, actually two authors together wrote a book titled The Effortless Experience, but it was all about the getting customer support and making that easy. This is about everything related to your business, now back then it was breakthrough, then it became trendy and now it's become an expectation, especially with COVID.
So, he’s thinking, well, that's the big change that's happened in this, so we've got to be more convenient. He doesn't spend a ton of time on it, he has two short chapters on number one, the self-service route, because that's what you're talking about is going digital and getting your customers to think digital first. How can I get the information that I need to have without having to talk to somebody, without having to wait on hold? And for the company, it's how can I make sure that our people are handling customer issues that are of a higher level rather than dealing with things that are so simple like, can you check on my order? Can you see if it was shipped? Can you see if the payment went through?
Insurance companies and banks, financial institutions are really making it easy for you to check balances and make claims and that type of thing. So by going digital first, if you do it right, you create this great, easy frictionless experience and when there's a problem, you need to make it seamless for the customer to transition to the human to human connection to get their help. And that's where a lot of companies fail, they actually fail in two areas.
Number one, they create a process that's not always intuitive to the customer and the good news is the design, the user experience, or the UX as they call it today. And that design is getting better and better and people are recognizing how easy it is.
Think about when you go on Netflix once you register and you're in how easy it is for you to find the different movies genres that you want okay. When you go to Amazon, the entire buying process, you have total control over and they make it so easy. So, they become like the poster children of what convenience and easy is about. And so, when you do that the right way, you create really a little bit more distance between you and your competition but he digress.
Back to what happened in the pandemic and why people are willing to pay for it. If you think about it, delivery is a great convenience. He used to have his food delivered from different restaurants, they never charge for it, once we got into the pandemic, they started charging. And he’s not saying we're completely out of it, but we're out of it enough that everybody's back to somewhat business is normal like it used to be. And guess what, they're still charging, and nobody is complaining, they're willing to pay for convenience.
Last year, they did a study and they looked at over 1000 consumers and they found that, he believes it was 60%, this year was just a titch different, but it was around 60% of people were willing to pay more, they want a great service experience but they'll pay even more for convenience. And that number goes up to almost 90% when delivery is actually part of that convenience.
Me: I think a big part of it also, well at least for me personally is safety, with the pandemic and people are so concerned about being exposed, especially as we're clearly going through another wave a lot of countries are going to another wave now, people want to be safe. So if that means I can stay in the convenience of my home and place an order and it can be delivered and the only exposure I'm having is to physically come to the door and just exchange money or if I paid through the app and it's just to get the bag from the delivery person, then I'll definitely rate you higher because I feel safer and I think safety has been definitely something that customers look for that is included in the whole convenience, all because of the pandemic, at least I view it as important. If I don't feel safe in an environment, it's highly unlikely that I'm going to return to the business unless I absolutely have no choice.
Shep shared that 100% safety is of the utmost concern of some people, and you know what it's like, “I'm going to order it, set it at the front door and leave. I'll pick it up when they're gone and they're not there anymore.” But you're right and the digital experience that companies are creating that are making customers feel better about doing business with them, he thinks is a really important piece of building that trust and creating a connection. He might have been doing business the old way with somebody and they knock on the door, and they'd say, “Hello” but if the new way requires or his desire is to have that door stay closed, yet they create a system that allows him to still get everything done easily, he’s still going to be appreciative that that company took the effort to make that happen.
Now, long term, you can't automate or digitize a personal relationship, you still need to create some type of connection. Just before they came on together and they're recording this, he got a call, he won't tell you the name of the airlines, but their initials are American Airlines, AA. And you know what they were doing, they were just calling to number one, say, “We saw that you flew last week and you've been flying a little bit more regular, we just want to thank you for that.” Every one of his flights is booked online, he put his boarding pass on his mobile phone. And other than dealing with flight attendants and people at the gate, he doesn't ever talk to anybody from American, they're losing that connection with him. So, what did they do? They picked up the phone and they made an outbound call just to check and say thanks for business, that's how you humanize the automated relationship.
Me: Amazing. And I'm happy you touched on that because that was actually a question I was going to ask because I get asked that question quite often, with technology and automation and artificial intelligence and chatbots and all of these things that companies are doing to enhance the customer experience. Do you feel that the human interaction is going to fade away?
And I always think, no, I think at the end of the day, human beings like to deal with human beings because at some point, that robot or automation can't answer your question. I've had the personal experience myself, it's like they're automated, they ask you a question, you log on, and they say, what's your name, and you put in your name, you put in your account number, and you tell him the issue that you're having and it seems like the robot is just regurgitating the same information to the point where I have to say, “I would like to speak with a representative.” Then it says, “I don't understand what you are saying.” then I change up how I say it, I say, “I would like to have an Agent.” And then it gets what I'm saying.
Shep shared that he gets it. And that's so frustrating and it should seamlessly take you there, there should be an easy way to get there. But that to your point, it's very difficult if all you are is a digital last company, you're not going to be able to compete with the people to figure out how to create the balance. And the magic happens in the balance and it's different from one industry to the next. And even from one company to the next but they figure it out.
App, Website or Tool that Shep Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Shep shared that that is a great question. He loves his travel apps, he travels so much, so it's very difficult. So, he’s looking at his phone going, what is it that he can't live without? He loves the communication apps, he’s on WhatsApp a lot and they do a Zoom. How about LastPass. LastPass, which is so important, he has a virtual workforce, and they all have access to different websites, yet they have no idea what his password is, he loves that.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Shep
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Shep shared that one of the books that is probably his favorite aside from I'll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again & Again by Shep Hyken and other books that he’s written. He loves The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by Joe Pine and James Gilmore, it's one of the greatest books written on customer experience. And even though it was written over 20 years ago, and they did come out with an updated version, he believes that it is as relevant today as it ever was. So, love that book. He loves the Tom Peters book from the 1980s In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. And even though many of those companies aren't around, which is by the way is one of the reasons he likes it, it shows how the most excellent companies, some of them are out of business, some of them were bought out, you cannot ever rest on your laurels but he loves the lessons that it teaches. That's a great book. So, he loves The Experience Economy, probably number one business book in his choice.
What Shep is Really Excited About Now!
Shep stated that he knows he sounds like a broken record but the book just came out, I'll Be Back. So very excited about that. But you know what else? He has a report, it's called the 2021 ACA Report Achieving Customer Amazement.
He did the 2020 last year. So, the 2021 he was going to put out earlier this year, but he felt they were still so deep in the COVID dealings that he thought you know what? He wanted to wait. So, he waited until June to do the research and they just came out with the report. So, just go to his website, www.hyken.com and you'll see the link to get the report.
Me: Awesome. I will definitely be accessing that. I thought the content that you put out last year from the 2020 report and I shared it with a few of my clients, I thought it was really, really great. So, I'm happy that you have an updated one this year.
Shep shared that his favorite stat is, again, by the way, he mentioned a couple of these stats before where they interviewed the consumers. They asked, “Would you rather go to the dentist or call customer support?” 48% of the people said, “I'd rather go to the dentist.” So, it's a great report, it's free. And he thinks there's a lot of great information that would compel a company or an individual to say, you know what, if I don't deliver service, I'm going to lose my customers. This is a reason that I need to keep at the top of my game.
Where Can We Find Shep Online
Me: So, our guests, our listeners would have tapped into this episode when it's released and they are super pumped about your book, I'll Be Back. How to get customers to come back again and again, because I think that's what every business wants, not just to do a one-time sale, but to actually have their customers come back over and over again for their lifetime of that product or service that they're using.
And so where can they find you online, they want to download this report, they want to tap into the book, they want to tap into your journey, see what you're up to? And just really be in touch with you. Where can they find you online?
Website – www.hyken.com
YouTube – ShepTV
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Shep Uses
When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Shep shared that this is one that he have come up with on his own. And he doesn't know if he’s ever shared this but “Bad days only last 24 hours.” And here's what happened. He took a daily pocket planner where you write out like what your plans are, it's a calendar. And instead of planning, he reflected at the end of each day, what happened today that was good, and on a weekday, it was business and personal and the weekend, it was pretty much just personal because he tries not to do too much business on the weekends. And he found that within a very short period of time, he realized that even on the worst days, good things happen. So, it was very, very motivational, inspirational, if you will. But it was really inspiring to realize that as bad as the bad day is, it's really not all that bad.
Me: True, very true. I do something very similar as well. But it's more like a gratitude journal, it’s digital actually. I just like have a note, I use the Notes app on my devices a lot, it's so amazing. And you can lock the note if you don't want other people to access it if they're on your phone. But I'll type out 10 things that I'm grateful for that happened in that day. And sometimes I have more than 10, I'll end up writing like 15 or 18, or 20. But then there are other times that I really have to like dig deep and things that I think are simple, I really have to give thanks for and it makes me just realize that, as you said, even if things didn't go your way, or you didn't get the contract you were looking for, maybe you weren't feeling well, or you weren't able to accomplish certain goals that you had set for yourself, there are other things that happened that makes you feel good, especially when you give thanks for them, or show gratitude for them because it really goes a very far away.
Shep agreed and stated that he likes that. It's an attitude of gratitude and that's part of what his little journaling does and you've experienced that same thing.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Ryan Beachum has sought to apply his knowledge of the hospitality industry to provide desperately needed solutions. Having previously worked with some of the largest developers in the industry, Beachum saw an opportunity to serve timeshare owners beyond what was offered and so he began building his business idea, ResortShare - from the ground up. In 2016, Ryan created HelloVacay and has consistently led the industry in independent resort marketing and resales. Now, in 2021 he is set to launch a subscription-based, wholesale-priced travel membership in partnership with the Priceline Group.
Questions
Highlights
Ryan’s Journey
Ryan shared that he did quite well, all the way up until 2008. And most people know what happened in the real estate industry in 2008. The second worst economy that the USA has certainly ever had. And he knows it was bad everywhere at that time, but the interesting thing was, he ran into a friend that he hadn't seen in years, actually, that he had grown up with that was working for the largest timeshare developer. And for those of you that don't know, timeshare is really interesting, in that it's kind of the combination of real estate and the hospitality industry.
So, although traditional real estate was not selling whatsoever in 2008, he found that people were still purchasing timeshare in spite of such a bad economy. So, it provided this interesting opportunity for him to at least look and learn about what is this timeshare product and as a by-product of that he ended up getting hired from that large developer and learning more about it. And it started this transition from real estate over to what is now fully in the hospitality industry.
What Does Timeshare, Subscription-Base, Wholesale-Price Travel Mean to the Average Person?
Ryan shared that his original transition was into the timeshare industry, which kind of got him into the hospitality industry. Their new platform is much broader for the hospitality industry as a whole. And so, they're not really focused so much specifically on one kind of sector of the hospitality industry, which is it timeshare, although in case you don't know, timeshare is really a deeded ownership, and it's an interest in a timeshare resort. So, that's really the first thing they started out in providing solutions for that industry. And then what's happened over the last year or so is they've pivoted to actually come up with a platform with Priceline that is really for everyone, not just for the timeshare industry.
Me: In building your business, approximately how many employees do you have in your company?
Ryan shared that there are inside the office and outside, there's roughly 10.
How to Motivate Your Team During a Pandemic
Ryan shared that that's a great question and a lot of that has been interesting because there's been a lot more time where people haven't been working inside the office so that's presented something different.
In terms of the technology they use, it's really easy, of course for what they do for it all to be web based and to communicate through the technology and all of that. But when people are working from home, he thinks it's really important that you have regular meetings, regular conversations with everyone, deliberate meetings that maybe you would not have if you were all in the office together just to at least connect every single day and discuss what's going on and discuss what you want to accomplish for that day, that week, that month. So, really, over the last year or so it's presented certain challenges but communication is key and he thinks as long as you're engaging with everyone on a daily basis, it makes a lot of difference.
Benefits and Opportunities in Using HelloVacay Platform
Me: So, as a customer who is looking for an opportunity to engage in HelloVacay, what are some of the benefits or opportunities that you think exists in this particular platform versus if they were to do another channel of hospitality, for example, like just book their own hotel or go through a travel agency, what are some of the opportunities that they get from utilizing your platform and doing the wholesale travel option?
Ryan shared that that's a great question. So, what they aim to do is to provide everyone with access to private travel rates that previously have not been publicly accessible. So, one of the things a lot of people don't know, if they haven't been in the industry, when they're going through to all these various online travel agencies that exists, some people may have noticed that if they're looking for a hotel or resort for certain dates, and they go and they hunt around to different online travel agencies, they may notice that all the rates for the same resort for the same dates are pretty close to being the same. And the reason for that is resorts and hotels have agreements with online travel agencies that they will not undercut any one given public online travel agency with lower rates on a competitive site. So, what happens is you have kind of a flattening across the board where all the prices are basically the same on the public online travel agencies and for people that have hunted around and looked, they likely have noticed that, and that's really, because the prices are the same that it’s felt that way. So those are public rates.
And then on the other hand, the other extreme is you've got the travel clubs, there's a lot of travel clubs out there where they may be expensive to get involved with the travel club and there's a long-term obligation, and they're paying maintenance fees, or membership fees every single year that are expensive. So, they're spending a lot of money to be a part of that travel club, they may have access to some kind of private rates through that travel club, but there's so much expense and so much long-term obligation.
So, what they want to do is they want to sit in the middle between the public online travel agencies, and then between the expensive travel clubs, and offer access, affordable subscription based, flexible access to private travel rates on the resorts and hotels unsold rooms, combining ultimately some of the benefits that you see with the travel clubs, but without the significant expense and long-term obligation of the travel clubs. So, their prices are legitimately up to 70% off all the public booking rates. So, it's kind of like Netflix style pricing, flexible, affordable, and then they can access all these private wholesale rates.
Me: Amazing. And this is for any type of hotel and does this apply to all aspects of hospitality? So, airlines, hotels, and car rentals, or is it just specific to different aspects of the hospitality industry?
Ryan stated yes, they provide all three through the membership, but he'll throw out a small disclaimer. Their hotels and resort deals are really unbelievable for people that are getting registered and getting on and looking at the rate comparisons and as they look at their rates when it says it's 47% off a hotel, you will see as you look at the other public sites, it's legitimately 47% off.
So, for the hotels and rental cars, the deals are phenomenal, on the airfare, he never tells any members or people that may want to be members that their airfare deals are so amazing, they're not. There’s a convenience for people, they are looking at ways that they can include big discounts on the airfare but the margins are very different on airfare and it's very tough to get those deals, they're going to work on it. But he doesn't want to tell the world that they have amazing deals on airfare when they do not, they're there for convenience for any members.
What Demographic Gravitates to the HelloVacay Package?
Ryan shared that their platform really can be a benefit to anybody that wants or needs to travel, including consumers, and businesses. With that said, they have a subscription-based model.
So, although anybody can benefit from huge discounts that they have on their platform, they believe that all the folks may be skewing a bit younger that are used to paying for a lot of different subscriptions. These days, that's really broadening to everyone, if you think about the streaming services Netflix and Hulu, and Disney Plus, and all these different things and everybody's really getting used to paying these subscriptions monthly but maybe even more so the younger generations, the Millennials, Generation Z are really in the habit of paying for subscriptions for a lot of various things. And so, they do think that they are a very good target audience for them.
Where do you see the Business Evolving to Within the Next 3-5 years?
Ryan shared that what they want to be, ultimately, is the world's most affordable, flexible travel club, with giving people access to private rates that they've never had before, that's what they want to be the most affordable, flexible subscription-based travel club.
And so, when he thinks about the long-term vision for HelloVacay, they really are looking at 3 different areas of what they can offer in terms of first, the inventory, they mentioned timeshare inventory, which is these multi room properties, for anybody that stayed at a timeshare, they're kind of like little apartment a lot of times, little kitchens, separate bedrooms, washer and dryer. So, for people that are traveling longer term, more than just a weekend, it's great to have separate bedrooms, and to have that privacy and all that. So, they worked in the timeshare industry, they have those relationships, they can start to include some of that inventory beyond just the hotels and all of that, that they get from their partner Priceline.
But also, in terms of the inventory, retreats, last minute deals, they are going to work on the flights on getting better deals on the flights, so that's the inventory. But also, they want to add in as many benefits as they can in terms of discounts on attractions, sightseeing, they want to look and see how affordably they can offer people concierge service, perhaps VIP lounge access, these are all things that they're working on to ultimately provide their members. He doesn't have a date for all of these benefits yet, these are all things that they're exploring right now beyond just the access to the private rates.
And then finally, beyond the different sources of discounted inventory and besides the benefits that they're working on providing, they really want to focus on building some interesting technology that they think is going to be really useful to consumers. Some people have heard of a kind of new emerging term they used called Conversational Commerce.
So, a lot of us are now seeing not only on sites, but sometimes on Facebook Messenger and things like that where companies are using more and more improved chatbot technology and those kinds of things, some of that technology is getting really good through using artificial intelligence and those kinds of things is able to really make a good customer service accessible using the technology.
Now, he would never in this day and age just rely on chatbots and that kind of thing for customer service, you got to have real humans backing that. He thinks you can provide a lot of easy access on multiple social media platforms, WhatsApp, all these different things where the Conversational Commerce, the chatbots have gotten very good. And they want to offer decentralized rewards for people and so there's a lot of interesting technology that they'd like to build as well. So, there's really 3 things for them, it's being an aggregate for various different sources of highly discounted inventory for people's membership, it's adding in benefits for people, and it's building world class technology for consumers.
App, Website or Tool that Ryan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Ryan shared that there's really a couple, but there's one that stands out to him as a business owner more than any other that organizes his brain and it's called Trello. He mentioned that he doesn't own any interest in Trello, he doesn't own any shares in their parent company or anything like that. But honestly, in recent years, for him, the style of service which is actually derived from Japan, it's a Kanban board. And for him in the way he thinks, it's huge in organizing his ideas and thoughts. And so, for people that haven't been exposed to Trello, and you have any kind of project or your business or even just for personal use, he highly recommends it, it's a series of columns where you move cards around. And so, for him, it's like putting his brain into a digital format, it's like he’s just moving around, all different thoughts he has and he doesn't know what he’ll do without it.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Ryan
When asked about books that have the biggest impact, Ryan shared that if he had to say that the one book that has had the biggest impact on his life, that to him is just a profound book and a lot of people know it and he's read it is a book called The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle. So, a lot of people are familiar with Eckhart Tolle now, he's. When he first read that a long time ago, not as many people knew who he was, or what that book was, but for him, the way that that book is delivered, he thinks is beautiful.
And of course, when you read it, it's really based around a lot of Buddhist philosophies and that kind of thing. But he believes, without getting too philosophical, he believes that the ability to have a high quality of consciousness and staying present, whether it's in your personal life, or whether you're working and having that presence is very important, because no matter what you do or how successful you are, if you're not present as Eckhart Tolle always puts it. Instead of us using our minds, we have gotten into a kind of disease of our minds using us.
So, it was meant to be that we use our mind as a tool, but our minds have kind of went on overdrive where we're overthinking everything and it's just kind of on autopilot. And what that does, he believes, is it reduces our quality of consciousness and of course, with that is people that are depressed and anxious because they're always either living in the past or they're living in the future. So, he loves that book, it's he'd have to say his favorite of all time.
What Ryan is Really Excited About Now!
Ryan shared that one of the things he wants to do and having this conversation is, of course, he wants to plug his business. But truly, that aside, yes, of course he wants to tell people about his business. But truly, he’s really excited about it, he doesn't know why this is, but he’s never seen another travel platform offer this product in this way in such an affordable way. So, as an entrepreneur that's had different products and services over the years, never has he been able to offer more value so affordably. People that have signed up for their service will pay $8.95 a month, or they're paying $79 per a year. Well, if someone pays $79 a year, they can save more than that booking just a weekend through their platform. So, to him, he’s really jazzed about that, he’s really excited about that right now because he’s never had a product offer to the world that had such tremendous value over what the price is, it's just very exciting to him.
Where Can We Find Ryan Online
Me: So, our listeners would have plugged into this episode and they are quite intrigued with HelloVacay, they want to learn more about it, they want to maybe connect with you, follow you on your journey. Where can they find you online? And how can they find HelloVacay online?
Website – www.hellovacay.com
LinkedIn – HelloVacay
Facebook - @HelloVacayWholesaleTravel
Ryan shared that the thing he wanted to do, he’s going to be on a few podcasts and only for the podcast he wanted to give anybody, any of the listeners, he wanted to offer them a free year, not a free week, not a free month, he wants everyone to just try this for a year over just using the public online travel agencies. So, what they've done here is they've set up a promotional page, and it's www.hellovacay.com/freeyear.
And so, all he’s asking people to do please is it'll give you some steps on there, this page is set up just for these podcasts, you will see a link to a post on there that you can share to either Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and if you just take a screenshot of it, it's got a little section on that page where you can upload a screenshot and once you upload the screenshot, it will redirect you and give you a free year. People are paying $79 every day for a year's access and he wants to just give it to everyone for free, he just asked that people just share, kind of spread the gospel. It’s a new platform so people are willing to do that for the promotional page. He thinks you'll really enjoy using it and if you plan on doing any traveling at all, it's going to save you a boatload of money.
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Ryan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Ryan shared that there's a lot of quotes that he really likes but one that he’s reflected on a number of times, especially when we think about the pandemic, and all that, and all the adversity that people go through is Winston Churchill, once said, “If you're going through hell, keep going.”
And he thinks that is a beautiful quote, because we all have trials and tribulations in life. And so, there are some people, unfortunately, that give up, and they're kind of stuck in that one place. And so, he thinks that's kind of a simple but profound way of saying, if you're going through hell, keep going and you'll come out the other side, and things will improve through your persistence.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Jason Ten-Pow's passion for customer experience was sparked as a teenager working behind the meat counter of a carnival-themed grocery store in Toronto. Today, Jason is the CEO and President of ONR, the CX consulting firm he founded in 2009. He has a B.A. in political science from the University of Toronto and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from York University. Jason lives in Toronto with his son Ronin.
Questions
Highlights
Jason’s Journey
Jason shared that it's interesting, it's been a long and sort of winding road to get here but it's been fascinating nonetheless and he’s learned a lot. It started out just being in customer experience and working customer experience in retail positions at a number of different companies early in my career, even in High School, he'd be looking and as he'd worked at these retail locations, he'd be seeing how different customers were treated and look at how customers responded to different treatment.
And you'd see certain customers that come in every week, and you wanted to know, what was it that got them there? Was it just force of habit? Was it all these other sort of things about their actual experience in the store that brought them back again, and again. And when he went into University, started to study public opinion, voting and decision-making theory and looking at how people made decisions. And it was really interesting to see, you'd always think that people are rational decision makers, that they would think, look at all the options and then choose the best option.
But as he went through a lot of these studies, what stood out for him was that there are just too many options out there and too many options available for individuals when making a decision. So many times, shoppers, or people who are making decisions are forced to take shortcuts. And what he found, what was fascinating is the shortcuts that most people take are ones that are steeped in emotion and it's these emotions that drive through decision making.
And as he did more and more research around that, he just found that that seemed to provide the key explanation as to how people make choices and how they make decisions, especially in today's very fast-moving world. And so, as he started working, he started working after graduate school, he did his graduate work in quantitative methods, which is a really cool name for math basically, and he tried to measure how people make decisions and trying to actually create an algorithm around how to measure the influence of decision making.
And so, his natural progression into the workplace was to actually follow in those footsteps. At first, he worked for a company that did a lot of market research, digital market research, and over time that evolved into really focusing on “Okay, what are the influences of this decision making that customers are making?” And then that naturally came back around 360 degrees and started looking at people's emotions, and what drives people emotions, and what drives them to make the decisions that they do.
And so, founded the company that really was focused on understanding the emotional underpinnings and how to establish and grow and deepen these relationships by delivering on the expectations of these customers. And a lot of these expectations were not sort of just the delivery of a product or service, but actually to make a connection and to deepen a relationship with them was through understanding their wants, needs and desires, and what are the emotional triggers that are associated with these things. And then how to capture their emotion and how to capture their attention, not just their awareness and to be able to build a relationship and to strengthen relationship and how to grow a brand and increase revenue and profits because most people think, falsely so that having good customer experience is just a feel-good movement, it doesn't actually have any sort of impact on the business, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
Great customer experience, actually, is what builds deeper relationships that drive revenue and profit. So, these are the things that they think about, and they talk about, and they help brands as they drive their strategy to deepen relationships with their customers.
The Book Unbreakable – What are the Key Themes and How Can the Book Help a Manager or a Leader in an Organization
Me: Amazing. So, I was lucky enough to get a copy of your book Unbreakable. I am in the process of reading it but I love it, it's been so intriguing since I started reading it last week, it's really, really got some great nuggets in there. So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about the book? What are maybe the key themes that are in the book? And how do you think this book can help a manager or a leader in an organization?
Jason shared that he'll talk a little bit about why he wrote the book and it's really interesting. There's this misconception as he just mentioned that customer experience is a feel-good investment, it has and it's not just a field, but what this book sort of walks through is the fact that it's not a feel-good investment, it's more than that. Only 6% of brands have actually reached the highest level of CX transformation, which means they're building unbreakable relationships with their customers.
So, he really wrote this book for the other 94% of organizations out there that are really looking to build these unbreakable relationships with their customers, and aspiring to crack the code of how to link these relationships with increase revenue, profits, efficiency, and employee satisfaction.
And finally, how to create a playbook to transform your organization from one that has in its interest, the prioritization of the customer to one that actually lives and breeds prioritization of the customer, and actually is able to see real dividends from deepening their relationships with customers.
Factors that Play an Integral Role in Making Decisions
Me: So, you spoke earlier when you were talking about your journey and how you got to where you are today, that emotions play a very integral role in customers making decisions. And you also mentioned expectations, which I think is so important. Could you share with us based on your research what are some of the things that influences customer’s expectations?
And then maybe also just touch on why do you think emotions plays such an integral role in somebody making a decision?
And are there other factors that come into play? And if other factors come into play, do emotions out-weigh those other factors? Or do emotions always take the greater portion of the decision-making process?
Jason shared that that's a really complex question. And he can give you a very logical and very easy to follow example. We go to the store every weekend to buy groceries and we make decisions all the time when we look at the shelf, about things that we want to purchase, things that we need to purchase and things we would like to purchase. What makes us take that extra step of actually going and picking up a product and putting it in the cart.
When we think about that entire process, a lot of it is steeped in emotion, it's like, “Oh, wow, this package looks a little bit more appealing than the next package.” Or “This is something I need today because I need to pick me up.” It's all about our state, we're human creatures, and human creatures, we have wants, needs and desires, but these wants, needs and desires are governed by our emotional state.
So yes, there are real practical implications around the decisions we make, “Hey, I need to buy mustard today but what brand of mustard I will purchase or what type I will purchase?” It's going to be influenced by something above and beyond that. So what is it? Is it I'm looking at all the different options on the shelf, there may be an entire shelf or row of different brands of mustards. Does my past experience play into it? Absolutely. But there's also that immediacy of, “Hey, this looks like an interesting product, this looks more visually appealing.” Those are all aspects of our motion.
Now, when we take that one step further, and think about when we go into a store to shop, if we're greeted at the front by a friendly face, now all of a sudden, you as an individual respond to that, you may be more open to buying. When you're at the checkout, and somebody asks you, how's your day going? How do you feel? Why do companies insist on doing that? Because they know that it plays into our emotional state. And if we're in a happy place, if we're in a good mood, we're more likely to make a splurge purchase. And so also, if we're hitting the right tone, our tonality, if we're talking to people in a certain way, if we're reassuring them, if we're making them feel wanted, needed and desired, then people respond positively to that.
Can you imagine someone makes you feel wanted, needed and desired? How many times will you dismiss them without even having a conversation with them or being thankful about it, it's very seldom that that happens. So as emotional creatures, we are bound, and influenced subconsciously by these sorts of feelings and emotions.
And we try to wrestle against sort of this rational state of being where we want to sort of look at all our options on the table and making sure we're making the right choice. But inherently, in today's day and age, with so many options available to us, we have to have shortcuts, or we could be spending hours, days, weeks, months, before we can actually do the research necessary to make the decision. And as with the way how fast the world is moving, we just don't have that time, time is our enemy.
So, we're always trying to figure out faster ways to do things, better ways to do things, more efficient ways to doing. And you know what, at the end of the day, because we're emotional creatures, those are the things that bubble up to the surface and help us create those shortcuts for decision making.
Me: Now, as it relates to us being emotional creatures, do you think gender plays our role, or better yet, even our culture? So, for example, Caribbean people versus people who are from North America versus people who live in the Middle East? Do you think those things contribute to people's decision making?
Jasons stated absolutely. Your tribe you belong to has a huge influence on not only what decisions you make, but what emotion govern your decision making. So, he thinks Yanique’s hitting on a conversation they can spend hours discussing how Caribbean people are different. They have different emotional triggers versus someone that's North America, South American, European, absolutely, those things absolutely are vitally important, that's what makes us special, that's what makes us unique. If you want to build a relationship with a customer, you have to understand what culture they belong to, what tribe they belong to, because today, more and more, those are the things that are having important impact on our decision making.
Me: Well, I've definitely seen it. As you know, as we were talking pre to the actual recording, you mentioned that you're from Guyana, and of course, I'm from Jamaica. But I've definitely seen that in Jamaica specifically, how we make our decisions is based on how we’re cultured and how we're socialized. And I find that it's different when I travel to other parts of the world. So, I can imagine how hard it can be for a business, who has customers that are multicultural, because it would mean then that their approaches have to be multifaceted, it can't be one size fits all, because everybody's going to have their unique approach and their unique preferences and set of wanting how something is done, versus just having one thing that's rolled out to everybody.
Jason agreed that Yanique is right. And that's why the approach to customer experience is so important. Many brands see customer experience as a problem that needs to be solved, again, very, very wrong approach.
Relationships are not a problem that needs to be solved, they're organic, they need to be nurtured and deepened by understanding the complexity of your customers, understanding who they are, where they come from, what their wants, needs and desires and then using that understanding to actually shape the way what you do and how you do it in order to better bring these folks into the fold, and that's a fundamental mistake that brands make today, because soon as you start with customer experience is a problem that needs to be solved, it takes you down a completely different road, around what matters and what's important and what you need to do to build relationships that are strong, unbreakable relationships with your customer.
App, Website or Tool that Jason Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Jason stated that he’s a little bit biased with this because their company has this product, the solution called Bespoke, and it's absolutely imperative in today's day and age, that you have a product like this, a solution like this, and what it does, it amalgamate, brings together all your different customer experience data into one location, helps you analyze it, and then helps you internally as an organization to build activities and things you can do to train your organization to be more a team to your customers wants, needs and desires. There are so many different tools, there's Eloqua, there's Adobe, you have your voice of customer over here data, but all of these things are in silos.
What Bespoke does, it brings pieces, or elements of all this data together to tell a complete story about the entire customer experience so that you can understand very quickly, and on an ongoing basis how your customer relationships are developing, what are the problems they're experiencing, and how for example, you can train certain types of behaviours amongst your customer service representatives, or how you need to change the journey the customer is taking through the website to make a purchase. All these things are encapsulated into one place so your team doesn't have to go and hunt for all this information around their organization, it's all in one place and it provides not only the data, but it provides recommendations about the actions you need to take in order to build these deeper customer relationships.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jason
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jason stated that there's been so many. Paul Snyderman, he's a UCLA, Berkeley, he's written a number of books on decision making, and how people take shortcuts from a sociological and psychological perspective to their decision making. And those have been obviously very influential.
We look around today, and we look at how culture plays such an important role and some of the people he spoke to are such great influencers for him in terms of this area as well, he doesn't want to start rattling off names of people. But those writers out there right now that are sort of talking about culture, and the influence of culture and how important it is not only to help us self-identify, but how to help us find our place in the world.
Those are really some of the great writings he thinks that are coming out today that are really sort of helping us to move away from this concept that one size fits all solution, as Yanique mentioned earlier, is not the way forward, it's actually a deeper understanding of that complexity that helps you to make better decision making.
What Jason is Really Excited About Now!
Jason shared that the thing that really excites him is helping people understand how important every word they say, every action they make has a greater cascading influence on the overall assessment of a brand than ever before. And one of the things as their company is doing right now is really spending a lot of time training and helping people to understand how important it is to develop deep relationships with their clients that they have in order to not only build firmer relationships, but to understand how unique each individual is, and understanding how each individual is, and taking the time to understand each person not as a sale, or as an opportunity to grow your business but as a human being, how important that is, you'll get to the end, you'll get to the end of that sale, but it's not the sale that you're really after, you're after that relationship.
And the more time you take to understand the other person before you start to talk about what you have, what solutions you bring to the table, you need to start spending time listening and understanding what the other party, what their wants, needs and desires are. Too many times today because we're inundated with so many advertisements that's pushing, you need this, you need this, you need this, nobody is stopping to take the time to actually listen to what people are saying about their wants and needs and desires and just the fact that you take the time to listen, immediately as a brand starts to set you apart.
And these are the things that are really going to allow you to be successful, to build those relationships and even internally, their organization is constantly working to nurture that type of learning, and to share that type of learning across their organization.
Me: All right, that sounds like an adventurous journey. And it can be super challenging because people are such complex characters for sure.
Jason agreed, it is very complex. They're not saying it's easy, but they're saying the ROI for your investment does pay off.
Where Can We Find Jason Online
Me: Our listeners would have tapped into this episode, and they're quite intrigued with you, they're going to buy your book Unbreakable: A proven process for building unbreakable relationships with customers, guy's head on over to Amazon, make sure you get a copy of this book. But more importantly, they want to follow you on your journey, they'd like to connect with you further, where can they find you online?
LinkedIn – Jason Ten-Pow
Twitter – @JasonTenPow
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jason Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jason shared that in the book he mentioned CSA (Collect, Share and Act). When you are unsure about the right decision you need to make, what you need to do is, first of all, make sure especially around customer experience, “Make sure you're collecting the right data, you're sharing that data across your organisation, and ensuring that you're taking actions that align with the knowledge you've gained from the data that you've collected.”
If you do those three things, you will guaranteed be better at building deep customer relationships. Why? Because this is the code that the top 6% of brands that lead the way in building unbreakable relationships, this is the code that they have cracked, it comes down to how well they do at collecting customer data, sharing that across their organisation not keeping it in one little silo but sharing it so everyone has this knowledge about who their customers are and what their wants, needs and desires are and make sure that when they're making important decisions and taking actions, they're actually using that knowledge to influence the decisions and the actions they take.
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Mahesh Ram is a serial founder and entrepreneur and he's currently the founding CEO of Solvvy, a leading SaaS provider of conversational self-service and automation solutions to leading global companies with over 550 million end users. Prior to Solvvy, he was the CEO of GlobalEnglish which pioneered online business English education for learners in over 120 countries. GlobalEnglish was later acquired by the Pearson PLC. He previously held CTO roles at Thomson Reuters.
Questions
Highlights
Mahesh’s Journey
Mahesh shared that he thinks the whole area of customer experience is one that always fascinated him, his entire career has been about automating complexity. And by taking very complex things and turning them into easier, better, more frictionless experiences and that's been true for whether that's online education or legal and tax compliance. But when he thinks about customer experience, it's the thing that impacts every single one of us, all of us have great experiences we can talk about with brands and we have those very poor experiences we talk about with brands and we make decisions based on those things. And he’s no different than everybody else, than their customers.
And so, when he saw the potential for the technology to truly deliver a better experience at scale, he was hooked. When he saw that the incredibly powerful PhD work that his co-founders had done that enabled the ability to deliver this incredible customer experience at scale, he just couldn't resist because as a CEO, he has often seen that they're just not good enough at this. So that's what motivated him and that's what excites him about what they're doing.
What is Solvvy About?
Me: All right. So can you tell us a little bit about Solvvy? I know you mentioned in your bio that you are currently at Solvvy and Solvvy is about CX automated platforms and basically powering customer experiences. Just in in real word terms so our listeners that are listening, whether they are managers, or business owners of small or medium businesses, they can get a better understanding of what you do could possibly influence what they do to enhance frictionless experiences for their customers.
Mahesh shared that there's a famous book called The Effortless Experience that he thinks described very nicely what they're trying to do, but at Solvvy, they built a powerful SaaS platform, it's a solution that takes machine learning and natural language processing, natural language understanding at its core, but delivers an end user or consumer experience that allows every one of us as consumers to interact with the brand in a way to get self-service automation sometimes, other times get the right journey, be able to get to the right agent at the right time. But the way they like to think about it is allowing any brand in the world at scale to deliver what they think of is like concierge level journey. Imagine if the system understood you, it knows what you want, you just talked to it and it tells you where you need to go. Sometimes it provides you an immediate answer, other times it has to ask you some follow up questions because it needs a little more information from you in order to pinpoint either the right answer or get you to the right agent.
And you can imagine how this can be scaled across a global footprint, across the world. Their customers are B2B and B2C companies that have hundreds and millions of end users. But they’re serving two customers, if you will, they're serving the companies that buy and implement them but ultimately, their end customer is their consumer, their end user and can they (Solvvy) deliver an intelligent solution like sometimes it's in the form of a chatbot, other times it's in the form of taking them on a journey and taking them to the right agent. But that's what they do. They made it really simple to implement something that's very complex under the hood, but it's very simple for companies to implement and it delivers an immediate ROI to the business and better experience for the user.
Me: Does your company primarily work with a particular type of industry like retail? Or is it more service based kind of organizations? Could you give an example of maybe one of your clients that has seen success as a result of this approach?
Mahesh shared that first of all they work across a wide number of verticals, both B2B and B2C. But he would say some of their strongest verticals are things like ecommerce, not so much pure physical retail, but oftentimes the ecommerce arm of a retail business, FinTech. So consumer FinTech and banking, a good example would be a consumer finance banking application stash, which many people have used, millions of users use them. They work with brands like Ring - the home doorbell, home alarm, home security company, which is now part of Amazon. These are some of the companies. So it's a wide spectrum of companies but typically it's a situation where he as an end user of a product or service, have adopted that product or service, but have questions about how to get the most out of it. And sometimes that can be simple, that can be he’s an ecommerce customer and he has ordered something and he wants to cancel something or he wants to see where it is, he’s wondering why there's a delay.
Other times, it might be something like he bought a device and he doesn't know how to make it work with his iPhone, we've all had that experience. And in both those situations, Solvvy can understand the issue as expressed by the user in everyday natural language, and then be able to connect the user to the right solution that could be a stepwise guide an answer, it could be in some cases, collecting more information and giving it to the agent who can then help you 3 to 10 times faster than they could. So that those are some examples of companies they work with, that it's a pretty broad spectrum. They even work in healthcare, they work with Calm, which is one of the leading meditation apps, many of your users, entrepreneurs may be using that to do meditation and peace of mind. Wonderful application, they support their end users. So it ranges across a wide range of industries.
What is Natural Language Processing?
Me: So a big part of artificial intelligence is natural language processing. And I know for the average person, that may sound like really high level, could you just break down what that really is to our listeners so that they can understand and maybe even get a better connection with maybe how this could work in their business?
Mahesh shared that the way to simplify the complex, obviously, natural language processing is a deep science and there's 10s of 1000s of research papers and PhD thesis on this, but he'll simplify it because he thinks at the end of the day, as consumers, it boils down to one thing is the ability to understand, in the customer experience space, it's the ability to understand when a user expresses an issue or what we think of as an intent.
So, you might say, “I bought the jeans last week, they don't fit me, please help.” And if you have enough data about prior examples of that, you can quickly learn, the machine learning can actually learn that the natural language expression in that case is likely a call to say, “Hey, can I return or exchange this?” Nowhere is the word return or exchange used. So he thinks natural language understanding in context of customer experience is about understanding how people in that business or in that problem area express issues, they often don't use the words that the companies use, they may not use the word return or exchange, they say, “I want to give this back.”
So NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is the technology that allows you to move away from that kind of keyword dependency and understand the core intent of what the user is doing.
And the way you do that is you actually train on the prior data, because chances are most businesses have had 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people asking similar questions before. And the machine learning can actually learn how real users express real issues and start to get better at detecting that as soon as they finish typing something in or speaking something.
And we're all familiar with Alexa, and it has a specific set of natural language understanding where you can ask what's the weather and it's been trained to understand those words, is it going to rain today? And it knows to answer you with an answer and tell you to take an umbrella. So that's an example of NLU that most people would understand but in the context of customer experience, it's very much about understanding that businesses specific natural language.
Tips for Implementing Automation in Your Business
Me: So let's say we have some listeners who their business, let me give you an example. Let's say for example, it is a pastry business and she or he may have an outlet where customers can come and pick up little pastries like cupcakes or a slice of bread pudding or whatever the case is. And they're really looking to try and find a way to have more automation in their business. What's maybe one or two things that you think they could start off doing if they're at ground zero, they have no automation. Where can they start to try to get their business on level one of trying to get automated and have their customers come on board?
Mahesh stated that he thinks the first thing he thinks if you think about foundational principles, it's first of all, let's make sure that we collect all that information in a place where you make sure that you answer it, that you keep track of it, that you have some history of what's happened with that user.
And so typically, you would use some sort of a simple support CRM business. They partner with companies like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and others. And those are pretty simple to implement, they don't really require a lot of deep technology to implement a simple implementation.
And that allows you to then say, “Okay, Yanique called me on Tuesday asking about the status of her pastry order. And I need to get back to her.” It keeps track of it and if you come back a week later, he might know that you asked about this last week. And so, he might start his conversation with you by saying, “Is this about the pastry order you placed last week?”, So he has some context.
So he thinks first thing is to put a simple system in place, there's lightweight systems, there's inexpensive systems, they don't cost a lot of money. And typically, you can scale up or down depending on how many resources you have. So that, he thinks is first things first.
Second thing is, he thinks a lot of businesses would just benefit from writing some simple content, and other things on their websites to be able to answer the most frequently asked questions. So pay attention, once you're starting to track what people are asking, you should then be able to go back and say, let me write an article about how do I customize a cake. Or if I order a bulk order of pastries, do I get a discount? These might be common questions that you see in the data that you see, after you see this is coming up over and over. So that would be like a starting point, you'd start with some sort of a knowledge base so people can find the answer for themselves because most people don't want to wait for your team, especially if you have a small team, it might take 24 hours for you to answer that question about a bulk order, well, you might have lost the order by that time.
So you're better off letting the customer get the help they need. And that goes to the third thing, which is then the third thing is they work with OpenTable. You're familiar with OpenTable, people make reservations at any restaurant, hundreds of 1000s of restaurants around the world. And they serve two audiences, as a consumer if you want to book a table at a fancy restaurant, perhaps in San Francisco, but also the restaurant owner who has to then control some of those back end tools. And they provide a whole range of tools.
But imagine an experience where that restaurant owner can interact with technology to be able to change their hours or modify frequently asked questions. So, that's where they often come in is that they end up giving brands a way to automate even more complex things.
So if you say, “Hey, I want to customize my cake.” the Natural Language Understanding can actually understand that or maybe you don't say customized, “I want to order a special cake for my niece. And I want it to say something very unique.” Something like that and nowhere would he use the word customized. I could come up to you and say, “Great, looks like you want to customize the cake. We have these options for you, which one do you want.”
And take you down the path and actually collect all that information and say, “I've got everything I need, somebody will get back to you within an hour with an ETA on when this cake will be ready for you. Does that make sense?”
And imagine that experience in 35-40 seconds, he might have actually gotten your order right. And he’ll still handed off to a human being because somebody still has to bake the cake. But at that point, he’s such a delighted consumer that maybe he’ll order a little extra. Maybe at that point, you present him with an offer and say, “If you want to order a dozen cookies for the other guests, there's a special offer 10% off right now.” So he thinks if you think about automation, it's not about putting a blocker in front of the user, it's about automating things that otherwise they'd have to wait too long for.
App, Website or Tool that Mahesh Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Mahesh stated that that's a great question. He thinks for them, because they've gone completely virtual right due to the pandemic, so everybody's virtual. So he thinks it would be tempting to say an online meeting tool like Zoom. But he actually thinks that the most indispensable tool is probably something like Slack because it's a communication vehicle for everyone to share information and ideas.
And what they've done which is nice with Slack is they've used some of the third party bots and applications inside Slack to do things like give praise to someone. It makes it easy to give praise and it shows up in Slack, everyone can read it, it also then writes it automatically to the performance management system. So it's a great way to motivate your employees or help people motivate one another for great work, “Hey, Yanique did a great job today on this, she made it possible for me to help this customer.”
It makes it easy to just go into Slack and give her praise. That's one example. You can share documents; you can even do video calls in Slack. So, it's a pretty powerful tool, he’s sure other people use other things like it. But that's one that he would say it's been very, very crucial for them.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Mahesh
When asked about books that had a great impact, Mahesh shared that one book is very personal. His grandfather lived in India, grew up in India, he had spent most of his career in the public service. But he's very interested in music and after the age of about 60, he decided to become a music and dance critic. And he started writing and then actually became a well-known critic and musicologist in one of the major newspapers of India.
And at the age of 88, his grandfather decided to write a book. He wrote a book on music and musicians and just his recollections and opinions. And it turned out to be a really, really well received book and got a lot of critical praise at the age of 88. He thinks that to him, it was less about the book and more about the fact that his lifelong passion for learning had never stopped. And so, it's as much the book as the writing of the book as the book itself, it's both. So that was one.
The second one, which he thinks has become more and more relevant as a book he has probably read three times. It's a three volume, very heavy, long trilogy called Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, written by a man named Taylor Branch, and it's kind of the entire lifespan of Martin Luther King and it's probably about 2000 pages total.
So it's not light reading. But it talks about all of the ups and downs of the civil rights movement, the great triumphs, and then of course, later in his life some of his regrets and so on, and so on. And he thinks it really comes home when you think about the events of the last couple of years and what's going on in the world, you realize that these struggles, the great struggles don't have easy answers and solutions don't just emerge and everything is great.
Things have a way of taking far longer and being much more difficult than you ever imagined when you started. Ideals are what carry you through but even, there's a lot of frustration you have to overcome whether that through in business or in social life. So those are two. And then for fun, he thinks one that he always like reading, it’s light reading is Calvin and Hobbes a cartoon strip, because he just thinks it reminds him that at the end of the day, we all take ourselves way too seriously.
Me: That's so true. And life is so short, we really have to enjoy laughter.
What Mahesh is Really Excited About Now!
Mahesh shared that they're working on so many incredibly exciting things in the business. He'll choose one or two that he thinks excites him the most. The first thing is what he calls the Omni-Channel experience. Take the example of the pastry shop, he thinks they're just now entering in the United States, the notion of a truly omni-channel experience where businesses have to meet consumers where they live.
It's no longer reasonable to expect customers to come to your website. They live in Instagram, they live in Snapchat, they live in WhatsApp and this has already happened in other markets like in China, you have WeChat and India WhatsApp is very, very strong. And if he wants to order a pizza from Domino's in India, he’s just as likely to use WhatsApp as I am to go to www.dominos.com.
But in North America, that's just now happening, it's just happening where brands have to be creating really strong presence but the problem is there isn't one thing. It isn't like he can just build for WhatsApp, on a Monday, he might choose to interact with the pastry shop mentioned on Facebook Messenger. On Tuesday, he might want to go into WhatsApp and place an order for a cake. On Wednesday, he might go to the store brand to the website and try to order it. And it could change if two users might have two different things.
So brands have to be in all these places. But he can't have different things going on in those sites. If he asked you what's the price to customize the cake, and you give him three different answers on three different channels, that's a real problem, consumers get really annoyed.
So he thinks what they're doing at Solvvy, which is really exciting, is they're making it possible for businesses to build the intelligent layer once in the platform, and then deliver on any of these channels they choose with the same consistency. So if you come in on a Monday and say, “I want to return the shoes that I bought on Facebook Messenger.” They’ll take you through that entire experience and get to get it returned and connect you to an agent. But on Wednesday, you come back and ask “Where's my order on the company's website?” They'll be able to answer that question just as accurately on that thing. So the consistency across platforms.
So it's consistent and personalized so it knows enough to ask Yanique for her email address and look it up and tell you exactly where your order is, that kind of personalization automated is critical.
And then he thinks that goes to the second piece, which is what excites him more than anything is the ability to deliver a truly personalized experience. Think about yourself or anybody in the audience, when you buy a product or service, the experience you have in the first week, maybe the first 10 days, maybe the first 30 days, if it's a piece of software is so crucial. How well you use it, how well you get acclimated to it, determines how happy you are with it. So they think at Solvvy, how do they enable brands to be able to deliver that kind of support and on boarding and guidance to say a first 30-day user, it's different than for a user who has been with the brand for 6 to 12 months and do that at scale, do that for millions of people.
So a good example would be they work with a very large meal kit delivery service, they deliver meals to your home. And he can deliver a different experience for someone who's ordering their very first meal, that's a little bit more hand holding, a little bit more like, “Hey, did everything come as you expected?” Because they're not used to some of the things about unpacking the ice and doing these things. But if somebody who ordered 12 meals in the last 2 months, he probably don't want to waste their time asking them if they know how to unpack the ice, he wants to ask them if they're looking for new recipes.
So the ability to do that at a massive scale, because you can't do that one by one, but technology allows you to say, I'm going to do that for everybody who's a first 30-day user is going to get this experience. So those are the kinds of things, so personalization and omni-channel are the two things that he thinks really, really excites him about the business.
Me: Two things came to mind when you were speaking just now. So the first thing you mentioned was omni-channel and I personally as a customer, I'm trying to wonder if there's no technology out there that let's say, for example, utilities is something we all have to pay every month, let's say our electricity bills, and you may talk to your electricity company, you may not talk to them very often, but there are times when you do have to interface with them. So let's say for example, you reach out to them on Twitter messenger because there was a power outage in your area and they communicated and said, okay, they've sent their engineers to sort it out and we should get service restored within X amount of time. And then four months later, you may need to contact them because you're trying to pay a bill, you're trying to use their platform to pay the bill, but you're having some challenges and when you call them on the phone, you can't get them, it would be good to know that they're able to connect those experiences. So they would say to you, “Oh, hi, Miss Grant, we haven't heard from you in four months, how have things been?” Because then it shows that they're paying attention to the last time someone was in contact with you, even if it wasn't the same agent that you dealt with four months ago. Is that possible?
Mahesh shared that it's not only possible, they're doing that all the time. There's kind of a divide in the middle, which is whether I know who you are, I don't right. Oftentimes, if you're going to an ecommerce site, you go to www.nike.com, you're probably not identifying yourself, and you may not want to identify yourself, you may not want them to know that it's Yanique.
But if you have an existing relationship with the brand, you still might come to the website of the utility company and not identify yourself but based on the type of question you're asking, they might say, “In order to help you, you'll have to identify yourself.” But he doesn't want to give that to you until he realizes you need that.
So, then he might say, “Can you please tell me the email address or can you log in?” And then based on the login, now he can come back and say, “Looks like you came in last week and asked this question. Are you asking about the same thing?”
And if you say no, then he can pop up and give you the more generic menus and say, “Hey, would you like to be able to do it?” So not only is it possible, they're doing it all the time with brands where they're personalizing the experience, this goes back to his notion of personalization is that sure it can understand prior interaction data and ask you if that's the case. Sometimes that can be intrusive, you may not care about something four months ago, it's not that.
But if you've called three times in the last week, chances are it’s about the same issue.
And so at that point, what he needs to do is two things. One is he needs to make sure that every single thing that you told him on the first call or the first technology interaction with Solvvy, for example, it's been recorded properly to the agent, so that the next agent picks who it up, your second call a week later has everything in front of them and that's the key.
The key is not to make you repeat yourself, not make you repeat yourself and that's what technology enables. He'll give you one example. In the example with the meal kit is if you come in and say “Hey, help my mind steak is spoiled. I'm really angry.” Well, first of all, you're probably pretty upset because your dinner just got ruined, that's not a good experience, you might stop using the brand. But if he immediately pop-up and say, “I'm sorry to hear you have a missing or spoiled ingredient, can you just give me the information, this and it pops up your meal and it says which of the ingredients is missing or spoil, tell me what's wrong with it.” And immediately, he'd say he could shoot a credit back to your account. And then you can still talk to the agent if you want and complain more. That's a really good experience.
Unfortunately, it doesn't feed you your meal that night, but it does make you feel like the brand is there for you and really cares about doing something right, they can make an offer and give you two free meals or whatever it might be. But again, even if he passed you to an agent in that case, the agent knows that you called because your steak was spoiled, the ice had melted, that you were expecting to get it with two side dishes and you only got one and they start the conversation with you knowing all this, they’re not asking you to repeat any of this. That's what they do.
Me: Brilliant. It's funny you mentioned the meal delivery service for home because I started using one recently and I find the young lady service to be so poor. When you call her she doesn't return your phone calls, when you send her a message on WhatsApp she takes forever to respond. She sends out her menus the week before like on a Friday and then you indicate to her how many days per week you wanted meals and which items you were interested in. And I think for last week I told her I was interested in the meal for Thursday. The meal wasn't delivered, I tried to call her on Thursday afternoon to ask her, “Weren't you supposed to deliver the meal today?” She hasn't responded to my WhatsApp. I called her twice, she hasn't responded to my call, frankly, I don't think I'm going to order from her again because either she's taken on more than she can chew or she's clearly not ready for this level of business because if you're dealing with people, and you're delivering meals to them and they've indicated to you what they want and when they want it, if you can’t manage the communication portion, then maybe you need to outsource that for the business.
Mahesh stated that he thinks that's a brilliant point. He thinks that oftentimes people take on more than they can handle but they lose sight of the customer. He thinks it goes back to the customer like how often does she talk to you and ascertain how well you like the service, did she check in with you? Does she have a survey?
Because if she loses you, the thing she probably doesn't grasp yet and he thinks some small business owners don't always grasp this is how expensive it is to acquire a customer, to get Yanique to try it for the first time is a really hard thing. And so losing you is much worse than acquiring two new people, because they already gone through the effort of convincing you and you've already done it.
So this does speak to something that he thinks a lot of entrepreneurs can do better, which is to survey and get feedback from customers, because you may well be sympathetic to her if she was talking to you. If she told you honestly, “Hey, look, I'm really struggling with this but I'm really trying to make it work. I'm an entrepreneur and I want to make this work. I'm so sorry about your meal. Let me see what I can do.” You were probably willing to give her the sun, the moon and the stars to get it right. But if you don't hear from her, you just assume that she doesn't care.
Me: I'm actually thinking of deleting her number out of my phone because I don't think I want to do business with her anymore. Her communication is extremely poor and her food, it's not amazing but it's good and it's healthy and it's a better choice than me having to go and have fast food for sure. But the challenge, as I said, is she needs to work out that aspect of it or she's going to lose more than one customer.
Mahesh agreed and stated that he thinks the other thing that he would say that technology allows us to do with a lot of the brands is to be predictive. So, if for example, Yanique is coming in frequently with questions about certain kinds of issue, they do something that they call category analytics for businesses, where they look at every single question that has ever been asked for that brand and they grouped them into big categories and so they can tell the brand, the food kit company that you're missing ingredient issues have spiked 23% in the last two weeks, something's up, they don't know what it is because they're not in their factory watching.
But they can drill in and they can tap into that, they can double click on it and they can see all the actual expressions by the user and they can do keyword searches, they can say show me everything with the word ice in it. So if the ice is melting, maybe they go back to the warehouse people and say, you need to package the ice better. So those are the kinds of insights that businesses often lack and it's very difficult to do because technology allows you to do it without having to have a human being looked at every single issue, it automatically categorizes all the questions.
Where Can We Find Mahesh Online
Website – www.solvvy.com
LinkedIn – Mahesh Ram
Twitter - @solvvyinc
Twitter - @rammahesh
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Mahesh Uses
When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Mahesh shared that he actually has a bunch of them. But the one that recently came up as he was reading the book by the very, very famous Roman Emperor, Philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, he had written a book 2000 years ago, so it's a long time. But everything in there so timeless because he's really does a lot of reflection on his life.
The quote that he said, which he thoughts was really great was, “Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you.” And he thought that was just such a nice sort of simple way of saying, we're all given something and it's up to us to make the most of it, we keep looking around for something better, chances are you're never going to find it and the people too. So he thought that was a really nice quote.
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The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Brad Dude has over 40 years and he has been in more than 30 territories and countries around the world. He has provided leadership training, organizational development, program evaluation, workforce training, coaching and project management services to US Government agencies, public and non-profit organizations and private sector enterprises. He specializes in training, group facilitation, process improvement, team building and strategic planning, especially for newly promoted team leaders, supervisors, managers and executives.
Brad brings a leadership and management background to his consulting having served as a senior staff member for the Peace Corps in Micronesia and Samoa. He has also worked in similar positions for other organizations in the Washington, DC area as well as New Orleans, where he now makes his home with his wife Sue. He has one son and three grandsons.
Questions
Highlights
Brad’s Journey
Brad shared that it is kind of a long journey, it gets longer every day, it seems like. He started out doing a management planning for the Peace Corps overseas in a variety of countries, mostly in the Pacific and then in the Middle East. And that got him into working for Westinghouse that brought him more into the middle East doing some project management for USAID projects and West Bank and Gaza. And that got him into the training more in the project management and coaching and counselling and they were doing a lot of executive coaching on management and leadership kinds of issues. Some colleagues of his started their own consulting firm in the DC area and that's where he got to go to Jamaica for the first time in kind of the middle to late 80s doing a management analyst course.
Ministry of Planning and they met that time and it was great. And so he got four different trips down to Jamaica and participants were some of the best he’s ever had all over the world. So as he got older and wanted to jot down some of the things that he would do that seem to be fairly successful with his participants and clients, he started to write books. And so he has now got six books, they're up on Amazon, mostly dealing with leadership and temperament and how new leaders view their world and try to help them out that way.
Brad’s Book “Quick!” What is it About?
Brad shared that his book, it's called Quick!: I Need to Be a Leader in 30 Days!. And it's a title that is focused on newly promoted or newly hired managers, supervisors and leaders. What he found, for example, the last 9 years, he has been teaching a leadership class for NASA, just outside of Washington, DC.
And he found that although when you're in the classroom, face to face, it's great and people seem to get things. But with training, training with organizations, even in government is often the first thing that's cut.
And so, participants might go through one 12-day course or something, and then don't hear from them again, and they maybe come back or write or ask for coaching and they felt there was a need to encapsulate in a handy guide of what somebody can do every day, because a lot of the questions are, “I have the title of leader or manager or supervisor, but what do I do?”
And so, he focused on what to do over a 30-day period and the idea was to help newly promoted folks hit the ground running so they can have some success. And I had Scott Blanchard, who is the now the President of the Ken Blanchard company. He wrote the foreword to their book, and he mentioned that over 50 million millennials are working in North America alone with 10 million in management, he estimates about 2 million new managers every year.
But the first year is very important and people usually don't get trained during their first year. So there's a lot of failure, failure by not meeting their own goals, expectations of their company aren't met. And they thought that's the time to really help them and have a guide to help them be successful. So they put together this book and basically said, how do you be a leader in 30 days?
Well, he has got four steps. First was to understand some of the basic principles of leadership and he subjectively picked the ones that he felt have been most successful for new managers and leaders. And then step two was to look at their followers, learn about who are those folks that are looking to you for guidance. Third step practical applications, you can't just read a book, put it on a shelf and say, “I'm a leader”, you got to go out and do something, and practice. So in his book, he has practical readings and exercises, and especially the fourth step, which is have some reflection and support time. And that means identifying a coach, whether it be your supervisor, or mentor, or a friend, or a colleague, or your minister, whoever that is that you can bounce some ideas off of. And ultimately, they can give you some feedback as well on how you're doing.
Me: Now, as it relates to who are your followers, if this is an employee in an organization, is it persons that look up to that person who now is the manager or leader? Is that what you mean?
Brad agreed. But it's more than that. Ken Blanchard says it the best, he says, “Lead from wherever you are in the organization.” So you don't necessarily have to have a title of manager, supervisor, leader to exhibit leadership behaviours. And so, whoever that is, and so, in the book, they are considering clients, people that report to you, people that you report to as well are all potential followers.
Me: Okay, so those are some really, really good strategies that you can employ for persons, as you mentioned, who are transitioning into that management/leadership role.
The Importance of Customer Experience
Me: Now, leadership is so critical to customer experience and there's a saying that I have “That mud flows from the top of the stream.” When you find something that's going awry in an organization, a lot of times, it's not at the tip of where you're looking at that the problem probably evolved from, but more so, you need to look at the leader and the structure of the organization and what's happening at the top.
And so I wanted to speak a little bit about that for us, what if we have an organization where the leader doesn't see the importance of customer experience, they're not able to connect the two, they're not able to connect the financial, because a lot of leaders, I think, still believe to this day that customer experience is just about making the customer feel good and they're just not able to see that translate into a very tangible and financial way. How as a leader, as a manager, as a business owner over the past couple of decades have you been able to get those leaders on board to recognize that customer experience is so important?
Brad shared that it's a challenge and there are many, many examples where leaders just don't get it, because they are trapped into the idea that their position power is what's important, and not so much their customers or their followers.
So they've done a lot of different ways, it depends on the openness of the leader. He worked with Department of Energy, their nuclear division for a while and they had a leader and oftentimes, these are political types who get in for whatever reason, not necessarily their leadership abilities. And they just don't see it, it's checking the box, “Oh, well, I've had a training. Check. I've had a meeting with a customer. Check.”
And things don't go the way they should. What he typically does is do a series of interviews with the direct reports of such a leader to start to identify what are the true challenges in the organization. He really likes the idea about modelling the way and trying to talk to the leader about trying to be more of an exemplary leader. But also he likes the idea about challenging the process.
They have in the book, this is the Kouzes and Posner five practices of exemplary leadership - Modelling the way, Inspiring a shared vision, Challenging the process, Enabling others to Act and Courage the heart.
He likes to do a lot of process improvement with folks and they get a whiteboard and actually start to draw a schematic of the customer service process and who's supposed to do what to whom. And he doesn't do it as a group, he usually brings in parts because people, oftentimes in such a process are doing it, if they say it's a five-part process, he brings in the folks who are doing part three, and let them do some drawings and say, “Oh, this is supposed to happen, that's supposed to happen.”
And they go away and they bring in people from the first group, for example. So they end up with kind of this gigantic map done by different groups. And what they find is they're in consistencies, expectations are off, somebody expects this group to be able to give them this kind of information, and it's not happening. So then you kind of try to bring that leader in to show him or her what kind of mess they're in and have some ideas, some strategies for helping them improve that process.
App, Website or Tool that Brad Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Brad shared that the website he likes the most it's called www.life-changingworkshops.com. And this is out of Chapala Institute. It's based on a new book come out by Ken Nelson and some others, a variety of authors on it called Designing and Leading Transformational Workshops. He thinks for a new leader, outside of his own books, he thinks that's a really good one and that's a great website that they have as well. Another one is called www.ascenddevelopmentgroup.com. And this is run by a friend of his, Jeff Whitehead, they both did training at NASA together. He does outdoor experiential leadership workshops and it's a very interesting website to show videos of how he interjects leadership into rope climbing and things like that.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Brad
When asked about books that have the biggest impact, Brad shared that there are several, one was called Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love by Dr. Helen Fisher. Brad is the co-author of a new model on looking at temperament called The Basic Elements of Temperament.
And a lot of their work, his late partner, Jim harden, they did that together. And Dr. Fisher kind of did similar kind of research, but on a larger scale dealing with some of the dating websites to look at how temperament influences the way we look at other people, the behaviours of others. Now, he and Jim, they’re not looking at dating, they're looking at how leaders look at their employees and their managers and their customers.
So that book, Why Him? Why Her? is a really good one by Dr. Fisher to kind of give some basics as well. He also likes John Kotter's work out of Harvard, “What Leaders Really Do.” He's written a number of books on leadership and he just loves those books that really gets him thinking about leadership more.
Advice for Business Owner to Have a Successful Business
Brad stated that the one piece of advice, it's hard to have one, but trust is a big issue and in his leadership courses that he has done in the past, trust is a big issue and that gets into a variety of things, including how to model the way and not making promises that you can't keep and being consistent and things like that.
But he probably would spend time with a leader talking about temperament. His experience has been the difficulties that folks have with being professional, being productive, has a lot to do with their experience with their manager or their supervisor when they're not getting along, when they feel they're not being listened to, that is a de-motivator.
And people leave organizations, they don't leave them because of the job or the work, it's usually because of the relationship with their manager or supervisor. But he would spend some time trying to talk about how they are viewing the world, how they look at their position power. There's three kinds of power, they have it in the book as well.
The lowest level of leadership is the position power; it's having that title. And it seems that's where everybody wants to be, “If I was only the boss, then I would solve all the problems.”
And then they get to be the boss and they realize, “Oh, it's not as easy as I thought.” But they'd say, now I'm there, now they’ve got to do what I'm telling them to do. So that means your followers are following you because of the negative consequences if they don't, that they could be fired, they could be assigned to lousy jobs, what have you. So it's the lowest level, and that's a power that doesn't stay with you, when that manager leaves the organization, that power doesn't go with him or her, it stays for the next person that's coming. So it's not even a power that you take with you.
So that's the lowest level. The second one is that power of competence. That's where followers follow you because of what you've done for the organization, because of what you've done for them. So that gets you into a mindset of “Gee, if I want to be competent, I need to be really sharp and look for opportunities to help my employees.”
And the third, the best kind of power that a leader can get is the power of positive reputation. And that's why no matter what your title is, people follow you because of who you are. They'll do whatever needs to be done if you ask them because of who you are, and what you stand for, and the values that you bring to the organization.
What Brad is Really Excited About Now!
Brad shared that during this pandemic, not a lot of training was going on, especially not a lot of leadership training, he has done a few zoom workshops over Zoom with 50/60 people. And there's just not as many as there used to be. So he has had a lot of time and so he’s writing a novel called “Finding Eden.” And it's based on kind of his travels throughout the Middle East and the issue about asylum seekers trying to find a better life. So he’s writing a novel, just about done. So he’s very excited about that right now.
Where Can We Find Brad Online
Website – www.braddude.com
LinkedIn – Brad Dude
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Brad Uses
Brad stated that he does have a quote, the one he kind of refers to now and then, not every day, but sometimes. It's says, “Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.” And that was written by Will Rogers. So the idea is, don't get bogged down with what you've done in the past. Today's a new day and we need to go head on into the future.
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Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Dave Sherwin is a certified fitness nutrition coach, entrepreneur and practitioner of mindfulness and meditation. His passion is helping grownups navigate real world business and live challenges to achieve their best health and wellness at any age.
He is also the creator and host of The Dirobi Health Show which covers everything to do with health and wellness, including the latest in nutrition, exercise, supplements, and clinical studies.
Questions
Highlights
Dave’s Journey
Dave shared that he’s always had a passion for fitness ever since he was young. He was very awkward and shy as a kid, he didn't make many friends and he didn't feel very talented. And one day in elementary school some kids were trying to dunk a small ball on a hoop, maybe it was a golf ball or some small size ball, he doesn't remember but they couldn't do it. And he was a little bit taller than the others and he was able to dunk this ball and they were so impressed.
And at the time, it was his first memory of doing something that other people thought was impressive and it started a passion for basketball. And through that he was able to build more confidence and finally work hard and make the high school team. He was never a great player but it gave him a lot more confidence. It really helped him in those early years and ever since then, he has just loved health and fitness. He continued to play basketball until he was 40, he played basketball three times a week, and he lifted weights three times a week. And that got him through to his 40th birthday in a very healthy way.
After that, he couldn't jump as high, couldn't run as fast or play as well as he wanted to after he turned 40, so he started doing endurance sports. He did a lot of triathalons and running races and bike races and swimming and that kept him going for eight years and then he moved into cross fit and just into general health and keeping up his strength and endurance through cross fit. And so, that was kind of his journey, kind of his fitness journey. And along the way he was a real student, he’s always loved learning about nutrition and fitness and everything to do with the human body fascinates him.
Health and Wellness Tips that will Impact the Quality of the Experience as an Employee and a Leader
Me: So this was your destiny, you've always had a dream and a passion for this. So that's good to know. So our show is Navigating the Customer Experience and I think one of the reasons why I was intrigued to have you on the show. Even though nutrition and exercise is not really directly related to customer experience, I do believe that your health and wellness will definitely impact the quality of the experience that you deliver to persons in any service industry, whether your industry is hospitality, or telecommunication or the financial industry. If you are not well physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, then clearly it's definitely going to impact your interactions with others, whether it be internally or externally.
I have a sister who is a dietician, she lives in Canada now and I've always thought that marrying nutrition and just being healthy and wealthy was a good way to really have an all-around wellness approach to customer experience. So you don't just talk about his soft skills, but you talk about all the things that will help you to deliver better soft skills. So I'm not sure if you have any corporate experience, but could you share with us maybe some things that you think are integral for you to be really impactful as an employee in an organization or even as a manager and a leader? What are some of the things that you need to do on the nutrition side or the exercise side that will help you to be able to really be your best self so that you can be able to have better relationships?
Dave stated that that’s a great question and to give a little bit of context here business wise. He has been an entrepreneur since 1993 and he has built and sold multiple businesses and have ran teams of salespeople and customer support and currently own three businesses.
And so, these are things that are near and dear to his heart. So he loves what Yanique mentioned about marrying the physical side with the business side, that's something that he does in his own life and he has had to navigate. And so, he does have a fair amount of experience in business and to this day, like he said, he has his own companies. And for him, I didn't get into the health space as a business person until 2009 when he finally had the epiphany that just kind of alluded to that what he really loves is health and fitness.
And so, why isn't he doing that for a living and he started his first supplement company in 2009. And it went crazy. And one of the reasons he thinks it went crazy is because he loved it. They were doing over US $100,000 a month in sales within 6 months. And it was the easiest business he has ever built and it was because he finally married the passions that he had.
Me: I think that's brilliant. I think it's good that you are able to see the correlation between both of them and you were able to now create that opportunity for others to tap into. And so I think a big part of what our listeners want to hear. We're going through a pandemic globally and I've had these thoughts about nutrition and exercise for a very long time. But I think it's even more important now that people, they're burnt out mentally, they're overwhelmed, they're working from home, they have to be balancing their family life as well as their business lives. And some of them are not adjusting very well to the new normal, for a better way of saying it.
And so, what has your experience been? What are some of the recommendations that you give them?
Sleep is important, how much hours of sleep should we be getting?
How much exercise should we putting in?
What's the best type of exercise?
As human beings working from home, especially for me, for example, you spend so much time seated, and as human beings, we weren't meant to be sedentary.
What's your recommendation in terms of just standing and moving around, should that be done every hour?
Should that be done once or twice per day?
We want your expert advice on how we can just be better overall.
Dave shared that his first answer is one that he'd love for people to get more information of and they give out some information on their website for free, you don't even need to enter your email address, just simple click on it, it’s a PDF, download it.
And he'd recommend two and he’s going to say them and then he’s going to talk about them. So for those of you who want to dive deeper and really get like a guide that you can sink your teeth into, go to dirobi.com and download the 10 page Un-Diet PDF and that's the best answer he has.
Now he’s going to go over the seven points of that here quickly. But he does want people to know there's a resource that they can get so they could just read it, again, you don't even have to enter your email, just grab it, download it and read that.
And the Virtuous Cycle is how to live a healthy 24-hour period. And it's very integrative of our physical, mental, spiritual, social emotional sides of how we live 24 hours in a very healthy way in between those two, those are some more in depth resources.
Now, he’s going to go through the seven health tips that they teach their customers and that he’s a huge fan of and that he currently lives by.
And that is number one, Focus on Water as your Primary Source of Food. Our bodies are made up primarily of water, we all know this but getting dehydrated is quite easy to do, it doesn't take very long without water to get dehydrated and too many people are drinking calorie rich and sugary drinks. So cut down or cut out on unhealthy drinks, even juices, a lot of people think fruit juice is healthy, it's really not, it's quite acidic and usually full of sugar. So, focus on water, drink plenty of water. And there are seven of these and so he wonder would you like him to list one and then give a chance to comment or do you want to just give you the whole list?
Me: I'm sure we can discuss on each level, so after you finish the first one if I have any comments I'll definitely jump in.
Dave stated so that is number one is water and especially for those of you wanting to lose weight.
Now, for some people in the pandemic, activity level has gone up because they're outside more often and they've taken to outdoor exercise as part of the whole social distancing thing and it's one of the things they can do to not go stir crazy.
Others unfortunately, their activity has gone down and so weight loss is currently a challenge.
So getting rid of drinking calories would be hugely helpful if you're wanting to lose some weight.
Number two, Eat All Your Food Slowly and Mindfully. This may not sound like a big and important health tip, but it's number two for a reason. According to multiple PhD scientists and nutritionists who study the human digestive system, we eat too quickly, our stomach is not like a hole in the bottom of our throat that we just dump food into and it just somehow magically gets processed, rather, it has folds and the food has to work its way through the folds.
And not only that, before it even gets to the stomach, we have to chew our food thoroughly working the enzymes to that food. And then it comes to our stomach and slowly works its way through.
When we eat too quickly, we don't give our digestive system a chance to operate correctly, we don't get all of the nutrients out of our food.
And not only that, but the hunger signals and the hormones like ghrelin that trigger fullness are not 100% accurate, they don't trigger our mind that we're full the second that we have enough food, rather, it can be delayed as much as 20 minutes.
And so, if you eat very slowly and mindfully, studies have shown that you also eat less and are less likely to put on weight. So that's number two.
Me: So stick a pin in there, Dave. So eat all foods slowly and mindfully, as you're talking, I actually went to your website and I'm on this document that you have. And so when I was growing up, I don't know if this is applicable to all persons but my mom used to say I'm to chew, I think it was 32 times. And I've tried that, I think by the time you're probably at chew number 16, the food in your mouth is completely liquid.
Just explain that whole concept to me and you're not really thinking about the food when you're chewing it because you're just thinking about, okay, I need to kind of just get eating and complete this activity really quickly, especially if you're on the go like you're driving and eating or maybe you're trying to eat in between meetings because you need to jump back onto a Microsoft Teams call with a client or you're doing a training session.
So how do you suggest persons to overcome this and train their mind because I guess it starts in the mind to be able to eat food slowly and mindfully as you've suggested?
Dave shared that Yanique made a great comment about what not to do, no one's going to do that long term, it's kind of a pain in the neck.
And the fact is that chewing until the food is about the consistency of applesauce is what we're shooting for and for some people, that happens quickly, others take a little more work but it's the whole experience.
Food is a pleasure of life. Now, we may not be able to do it always, there's always a time we have to rush to eat between meetings, as Yanique mentioned, but there are seven days in a week.
And all of us have many meals that we could slow down and be more mindful.
And so by mindful he means, the phone is away, if you're with other people, you're with other people, let's make eating a social experience as it has been for millennia with human beings.
And make it a time with your loved ones, whatever that is.
If you're alone, like he mentioned, try to avoid distracting yourself from the food rather than looking at your phone, or your computer, or a newspaper or whatever.
Instead, just take those few minutes to really enjoy the food, to eat it carefully, mindfully savour it, enjoy the smells, enjoy the taste. Too many people worry about what food is going to do to them, instead of thinking about how enjoyable food is and enjoying what they eat.
So it's a human experience that we've kind of lost. We've kind of let our busy lifestyles turn food into like putting gasoline in a car.
And it just is better, our life is better when we enjoy nutritious healthy food slowly and mindfully. So it's a matter of understanding this is not an all or nothing thing, we can’t always do it. But many meals a week we can if we’re just a little bit more thoughtful.
Dave shared that number three is Intermittent Fasting. We do really well when we eat in a certain window of time during the day. And a very practical one for a lot of people is about like nine o'clock in the morning to have their first meal and five o'clock in the afternoon to have their last or maybe it's 10 o'clock and six o'clock or 11 o'clock at seven o'clock, that's about a 10 hour window.
You can experiment with different lengths of window, everyone's different, everyone's at a different stage of life, everyone has a different activity level. But generally speaking, there's a magic that happens when you stop eating any food after dinner for one thing.
For example, once we quit eating, our body gets to digest that food fully before we go to sleep so our digestive system is now done and our body is able to focus on getting rid of pathogens, carcinogens, and getting rid of that food and developing up the hormones and replenishing the brain and doing all those healthy things that need to be done at night.
The hormones work correctly, when we stopped eating at dinnertime, the melatonin starts rising making us drowsy helping us get a better night's sleep. While we're sleeping, the HGH is rising, the oestrogen is rising, the testosterone is rising, and the blood sugar is dropping.
And we wake up in the morning and that's an ideal state for some of our best work. And so, he gives an example of this morning. As he mentioned, he’s an entrepreneur, he gets where you're coming from with the podcast.
And he was asked specifically how things changed with the pandemic?
Well, here's how one thing has changed and this goes also back to the comment Yanique made about standing and about making these adjustments.
So this morning, his workout consisted of four things. So today's a strength day for him and he has a pull up bar out his garage for pull ups, he has a dip bar in his office which is also half gymnasium, he’s got a rowing machine, he’s got some kettlebells and he’s got a dip bar.
And then he did step ups, that's where you have a box, and you just put your leg up on the box, and one leg at a time you very carefully and in a controlled manner, just lift yourself up and it's kind of like a squat, excepted, rather go down, you put one foot up on a box and lift yourself up, which you can also do in a chair.
And then his last one was some core exercises, lying on the floor, stomach work. So each of those he had to do six rounds of each one with a two-minute rest and so, what he did is he went out to the garage and he did the pull ups then he came back to his computer and he checked email.
He has his clock going and he has a little notepad checking off how many sets he’s done he has a terrible time keeping track of that he’s got to check it off, once the blood gets flowing and you got all this stuff going on, it's easy to forget where you're at.
So he’s got a little pad of paper for check marks on his desk, set of pull ups, do some email, set of dips, check email, set of pull ups, check his calendar and his daily MO.
He has what he calls it his daily MO sheet, which is his daily method of operation which has all his to do’s and everything on it.
And so he’s going back and forth, by the time he finishes this workout and this is kind of a long one, it took him an hour and a half. But there was a two-minute break between everything and by the time he gets done his workout, he'd been moving every two minutes for an hour and a half and he had gotten rid of every important email, he had his plan all laid out for the day and had accomplished two or three of his most important tasks.
Some people call those trigger workouts and these are things that you can do, either the way that he described it or on a set schedule.
Here's another one, for example. Many fitness experts do recommend that we get up out of our chair at least once an hour and that was part of the question asked earlier. Once an hour is a good standard.
Guess what if you're not exercising that much, and you want to incorporate exercise into a very busy entrepreneurial lifestyle, there are three workouts that are surprisingly beneficial that you can do during your work day.
One of them is squats, there's nothing like a good controlled, good postured deep squat. And if you had a timer, and after hour one, you simply stepped away from your computer, and did say two sets of 20 squats, the heart rate is going to go up, it feels pretty good, your brain gets kind of cleared after sitting for an hour and focusing on whatever you were doing.
And then you set the timer for another hour. And the next time you do push-ups. Push-ups are great exercise for the chest and strength of the arms, the triceps, the shoulders, and you do some push-ups.
And the third one is any type of core exercise that you like, it doesn't matter, it could be bicycles, it could be some crunches, it could be any type of leg lift, or mountain climbers, it doesn't matter, there's a lot of them.
But if you combine some push-ups and some squats and some core work into your day, by the time you're done and imagine you did some form of that or some little bit of exercise or maybe after you're kind of done enough squats and push-ups and core, after the next hour, you could go for a brief walk, maybe five minutes at a good pace.
If you work in a building, you could walk the stairs kind of aggressively, put something into it, put a little work into it to get the heart rate up a little bit. And so that is a wonderful way to get out of the chair, to get your workout in, even if you didn't get it done, you don't have to get up, you don't have to get dressed in your fancy yoga outfit to go to this, just whatever you're wearing, you just go ahead and do it. And so that's a great tip right there for keeping your fitness going.
Number four is Eat Healthy Macros - carbs, protein and fat are the three macros. And in addition, as part of those, we need to make sure to get five to nine servings of vegetables per day. Now too many people eat too many carbs, and not enough protein. And often the fats that we get are unhealthy. So tip number four is to make sure that you're getting a healthy form of macro - protein, carbs and fat with a serving of vegetables with every single meal as often as possible, breakfast, lunch, dinner, try to work in those all three at the same time to every meal. And if you can do that and by the end of the day, have eaten five to nine servings of vegetables, that's a really great routine. And you'll have phenomenal health if you do that. For most people, that will mean they'll eat less unhealthy carbs, more quality proteins, and higher quality fat.
Number five is Observe a Simple Supplements Strategy. The fact is that even if you eat really, really well, you're going to be deficient on some things, we know this from science, we know this from all the blood work that's being done on people right now.
76% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D. Similar percentages are deficient in things like chromium, many women are deficient in iron, and so on. And so we need to take a good quality multivitamin, a good quality mineral and trace mineral, supplement and those are the very basics. Ideally, you want to get a nutritional blood panel done once a year, he does one once a year, he has for about the last 5 years, they're getting less expensive. The first time he did it he thinks it was $500 for him to get a blood test done to find out his vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Now that $500 a year to him is well worth it but happily, it now costs about $200. By the way, these are available easily and quickly at Amazon, if you go to Amazon and just search for nutritional deficiency test or something like that and there's a variety, some of them you send hair samples, some of them are saliva, some of them are urine and they all have a different way of doing it, some of them is to prick your finger and get a little bit of blood.
And so depending on if you get the “heebie jeebies” about some of those, you pick the one that works best for you. So you just kind of determine how they do their sample and what you want to do and how accurate you want to do it and pay a little bit of money, send it in, and they'll tell you exactly what you're deficient in.
If you're taking the good quality multivitamin and mineral though, hopefully it won't be very much. They have a phenomenal one Mimi's Miracle Multi is specifically designed for what most adults are deficient in, that's why they designed it. And they have Mimi's Miracle Minerals that has over 70 trace minerals and so that's how they answered that for their clients, but those are the basics, a really good multi and a good mineral.
Number six is Exercise Everyday, seven days a week. Now again, this doesn't mean you have to get dressed in your fancy clothes and make a big deal of it and go out to the gym and spend a lot of time, you don't have to become a gym rat.
But what we're talking about as our society has become too sedentary, when he mentioned taking a break and going for a walk, that counts. This does not have to be difficult, our body though is not designed to sit not even for 24 hours, if we don't exercise in a 24-hour period, we're not doing ourselves a favour, we have multiple systems that we need to look after.
We need to look after our strength, our endurance, our general longevity, our balance, our speed, our accuracy, all of these things are part of how our body functions at its best. He’s 55 years old, he’s got grandchildren and he wants to have great grandchildren but he doesn't want to have them if he’s decrepit and unable to get out of the bed, that's not the vision he has.
And so, he knows that the way he takes care of himself now is going to affect how well he is if he’s going to be a healthy great grandfather. And that's true for all of us. What we're doing today is setting the groundwork for how healthy we are in the next decade, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Me: So in relation to move your body everyday, seven days a week, your sheet says make sure even your rest days involve light activity. Can you quantify that for me? Let's say, for example, I normally go to the gym four days a week, that's been my routine for the last maybe three months. So, I go to the gym four days a week, and on the days that I go, that I don't have any pressing meetings in the morning, I’ll also do a three mile walk at a field that's pretty close to my home, just as additional cardio and because I have a back injury, I don't typically do any form of what would you call now heavy impact, like jogging or running or anything like that. I just tried to brisk walk for the three miles as much as possible. That's four days but then there are other three days, now maybe two of those days, I'll do brisk walking alone, because obviously I wouldn't go to the gym. But then on that seventh day, are you suggesting that I do additional activities? And if so, for how long?
Dave stated that this is a great question and the answer is yes. Even if it's yoga, another walk, mobility of some sort, there's all kinds of great videos on YouTube.
Now, for example, if you go to YouTube, you have a back injury, he does as well, he has a condition in his back, actually, that gives him chronic pain and he has to deal with it and so he understands that.
However, he’s dealt with it much better than many other people have been able to do because of this routine. When his back is active and flexible, he has very little pain, it's when he’s not exercising, when he’s not taking care of himself that it flares up.
So if you go to YouTube and you search for exercises for back pain, that is a wonderful search, if you ever heard of foundation training, there's a really good 10-minute foundation training on YouTube for any of you that have back pain, it's fantastic, he highly recommends it.
And there's many others as we know, there's many, many workouts that are available for free on YouTube. So yes, we're talking about light exercise, whether it's working on a pre-existing injury that we have, whether it's just working on general flexibility and mobility to improve our quality of life over time because as we know, if we don't work on our flexibility, it gets worse and worse as we get older.
And as it gets worse, this is why people end up in a wheelchair often, that are otherwise healthy and that's what we're trying to avoid.
So, mobility, flexibility, yoga, very light, low impact exercise, find something that you can do on your non gym days that's very easy but you're still getting your heart rate up a little bit, you're still keeping yourself limber.
Me: And the length of time you recommend for that 20 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour.
Dave stated that he really doesn't recommend by time, it's really a personal thing. For example, Sunday is a very easy day for him. And he takes his dog, they are lucky to live near a lot of farmland and dirt roads and they'll just walk for an hour and he loves it and she (the dog) loves it. And there's nothing magical about the hour. And so, he would say make anything minimum 20 minutes, under 20 minutes, they know that it's not doing our heart near as much good as it could the American Heart Association encourage us to make sure our exercise is at least 20 minutes. So I'd say 20 minutes is a minimum and of course, there's not really a maximum as well. So, let's just say minimum 20 minutes makes a lot of sense.
And then the final one, Get Seven to Nine Hours of Sleep Per Night. This is what entrepreneurs don't like, a lot of people want to burn the candle at both ends. He’s been self-employed since 1993 and you got to ask yourself this question, “Is your lifestyle for your business or is your business to support your lifestyle?” This is a critical question. To him, when someone says, “Hey family, I'm going to work super hard for 10 years so that we can have a really great life.” To him, that is a terrible thing to ever say to a child or to think. Those 10 years are going to go and you're going to miss piano recitals and football games, and dances and the stuff. And his motto, when it comes to family, his family comes first, his family comes before his business, his health comes before his business. So without his health, he doesn't have a family or a business, he can't serve anybody else.
And the seven to nine hours sleep is foundational to our mind functioning at its best, our body functioning at its best. And so those temptations, when you're thinking, “Oh, if I just get this project done, then I can go to bed.” That's just a lie. As entrepreneurs, we are a personality go getting hustlers.
And we could work all the way up to the day of our divorce. No problem. Because we're wired for work but we got to just step back and understand.
Dave shared a principle that has absolutely changed his life. In your business, there's probably only one and maximum two mission critical things you have to do today.
If you ask this question, what is the one mission critical thing I have to do today, that if I got it done, and then I had a family emergency and had to go to a hospital for the rest of the day, my business would still survive?
That's extreme thinking but you get the idea.
Now, in his business, they use Basecamp, each of their employees, they have this principle baked in. Basecamp pings everyone at 9:00 am in the morning, it says, “What is your one thing?” Every single one of them has to plan their day around the one thing and do the one thing first. And they all have to tell each other what that one thing is.
So that someone else might say, “Oh, hey, did you forget about this? Because I kind of think that in our meeting, we talked about this project. And you're saying this is your one thing, I kind of feel like you ought to do this thing.”
So by having some accountability and having other people do that, it makes sure that each person or business knows what their mission critical, most important thing is, and they get it done first. Once you've done that, it's amazing how much pressure comes off. And then from there, you realize that come 4:00 pm, 5:00 pm, you really don't need to work anymore.
You're never going to get it all done, that's just not reality. There will always be something on your mind that you think is so important that you have to get done. The fact is, most of these things that feel so important, they're just not that important. There's usually just one or two.
Me: I think of all the ones that you've given so far, I talk the most about sleep. I'm a big, big, big supporter of sleep. I believe in the seven to nine hours of sleep. And I can't tell you how many customer service training sessions I've been on for leaders, for supervisors, for frontline staff, and people telling me they're surviving on three hours sleep or four hours sleep and their body doesn't need that much sleep, you only sleep that much when you're a baby.
And I'm like, No, no, like, there's scientific data out there that proves that sleep, your body needs sleep. The reality is, there is no cure for sleep, but sleep. There is no tablet for you to take to replace getting sleep, you have to sleep.
When your body says it's time to sleep, it's time to sleep. And so, I'm so happy that it's on your list and I'm so happy that it matches back with what I've been saying for years. And I just want you to reinforce it again for me, Dave, because I just think people just don't recognize the importance of getting sleep. And as you said, the seven to nine hours of sleep, so important.
Dave agreed and stated that one of the reasons why is because nutritional and fitness science has come so far in the last few years and sleep and intermittent fasting are two of the newest to hit the radar and because of that, many of us were raised to believe that to be successful, we had to burn the candle at both ends, that it was like some badge of honor to not get very much sleep.
There's these groups that were everyone gets on Twitter, like 3:45 am or 4:45 am in the morning or something like that and they feel so terrific because they're getting up earlier than everyone else and getting stuff done. And that's really great short term.
Long term, he doesn't want to be that person and he doesn't need to be that person. No one needs to be that person to be successful, whether with their health or with their business or in their relationships. As a matter of fact, as you mentioned, all the scientific data supports that we need seven to nine hours of sleep, that might be seven for you, it might be seven and a half, it might be eight, might be eight and a half, it might be nine, but don't think you're always the exception to the rule. There are very, very few exceptions to the rule.
So this is the other problem is everyone thinks that they're the exception and in health and fitness, it's usually a lie we tell ourselves, we all want to feel exceptional, that's wonderful.
At the same time, we should have some level of humility and accept scientific research that people do. As mentioned, I have the Dirobi Health Show and one of his favourite interviews was with Molly McLaughlin and her tagline is, sleep is a skill. And he had her on his show and she's just excellent.
And so, for those of you that want more on this, he'd recommend that interviewer that you just look her up, she's got some of the greatest cutting edge information on sleep and really up on all the studies. But the fact is, the other question that he'd ask people is why do you think that you don't need to spend that much time in bed?
What is it you're trying to accomplish exactly?
If you have to work 16 hours a day, the answers why, what are you working for?
What's your goal?
Again, business is supposed to support us, we aren't supposed to support our business. So you're doing something wrong.
In 2015, he took his family to Europe for 90 days. For 90 days, they spent time in Scotland, in England, in Wales and then they spent time in Paris and Brussels, and it was wonderful. And his business grew.
Some people may not believe that but from September to December 2015, his business grew while they were travelling for 90 days in Europe, because they'd created the systems, they had the staff, they had the ideas, they had this one thing concept.
And so, his whole business is designed to support his lifestyle.
He takes every Friday off, he loves to golf and every single Friday, he’s got his little golf group, and they go out and they golf.
And there's literally not been a Friday in the last three years that he can remember where his business took over that golf outing, it just doesn't happen because he doesn't let it happen.
He realizes not everyone loves golf, but you get the idea. If your business isn't supporting the lifestyle you want, change it, do it differently so that you can have the health you want, so you can have the relationships that you want, so you can have a wonderful life where you see the world and do all these exciting things that that life has to offer. And sitting at your desk is not it.
App, Website or Tool that Dave Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Dave shared that he would say the one kind of philosophy or book that has changed his life more than anything else is The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss. That book, it's a little bit dated now so don't use techniques when he talks about advertising, that type of thing. But the underlying principles of what he (Dave) just said about life and lifestyle and travel, that book teaches you how to create a business that can support a wonderful lifestyle. And he read it years ago, he read it in 2008. And as an entrepreneur, he'd say that book changed his life more than any other business book.
Me: So that would be a resource that definitely helped you to get to where you are today.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Dave
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Dave shared Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, he thinks is a basic self-development book that everyone should read. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, he believes is one of the best personal development and professional development books ever written. So if he backs up and talk about a resource, one of them would be the one he mentioned earlier, Basecamp. Basecamp is a very inexpensive tool, but he runs his whole business using Basecamp. And so that to him is an absolutely essential tool.
What Dave is Really Excited About Now!
Dave shared that the one thing he’s most excited about at the moment is a transformation programme that he’s doing for their customers. He’s been developing it for a while, it's where he’s getting to take all his years of experience and his health certification and put it into an app that he’s developed.
And they did their first run, it's called the Dirobi Transformation Programme, earlier this year. And it was his first chance to really kind of put together a programme that people took that involved all these principles they've been talking about where every single day they get a ping about a training and then accountability, did you follow the principles.
And for 90 days, they follow this health journey. So that's been something he envisioned years ago but the technology, he’s sure it was there, but he didn't know how to do it. And so finally, this year he was able to develop out a programme to really take his whole business and his customer base to the next level.
And the reason he’s so excited about it is because while he loves making a living in the dietary supplement industry, which is what he does, it's not about him selling bottles to people to make a living, it's about health transformation, it's about the success that they have, it's about filling in those deficiencies, it’s about them. So, for him, he’s never just wanted to be a guy who sells stuff in the health space, he wants to be a guy who helps people raise their quality of life in the health space and he’s been doing it since 2009.
But he feels like just this year, he’s actually getting to where his vision really has been leading him to where he’s able to create something that's more than just buy the bottles, but actually take the bottles, understand how to use them in the context of these principles that we're talking about and develop out the habits so people can go beyond weight loss, beyond yo-yo dieting, beyond thinking of health in terms of such simple measures as that and instead achieve their ideal body weight, great energy, feel their best, look their best in a way that makes sense and that they can do long term. So, that's it, he’s excited about it, it's still a work in progress like he said, he had one group go through it, from that he learned a lot and he’s improving it. And from here on out, he sees that being a real core part of their business.
Where Can We Find Dave Online
Website – www.dirobi.com
Instagram - @dirobihealth
YouTube – Dirobi Health Show
Facebook – @Dirobihealth
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Dave Uses
When asked about a quote he tends to revert to, Dave stated that he’s going to change the question a little bit. He has a practice, rather, it's not a quote or anything. But he’s a meditation practitioner, he goes to retreats, he meditates every single day in the morning.
And one of the things he does is walking meditation and there is a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh that he recites as he walks slowly. So, if he really needs to get centred, he goes for a walk and he recite the poem. And now that he’s under pressure, he hopes he can get it right but it's very simple.
It goes, “I have arrived. I'm home. In the here. In the now. I am solid. I am free, in the ultimate I dwell.”
And you simply breathe and walk slowly while you recite those words in your head.
And he’s been doing that for years. I did it just this morning and it's a unique kind of a practice, was very grounding. He talks about kissing the earth with your feet as you walk and recite this little poem or couplet. You just recite those words though as you walk very slowly and ideally outside. And it's incredibly grounding, that experience.
He’s walked for as much as 2 hours reciting that, probably sounds like the most boring thing ever to people listening. But keep in mind though, he started his meditation practice a long time ago and he was terrible. He couldn't sit still for like more than two minutes. His first meditations, literally didn't last more than two minutes, it took him two years to work up to 10 minutes of meditation. And then after going through his first retreat, he really broke through to where he was able to meditate for longer periods of time and generally be more meditative and more mindful in his general living. So, that's his best answer is walking meditation.
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Wayne McCulloch is one of the world's leading customer success experts and a Top 100 Customer Success Strategist, Wayne works with Google Cloud’s entire SaaS portfolio as the Customer Success Leader. He's a keynote speaker and the recipient of multiple industry awards with more than 25 years of experience in customer-focused roles.
Wayne began his software career at PeopleSoft and Vignette before becoming an SVP at Salesforce, the Chief Customer Officer at Kony, Inc., and the VP of the Customer Success Group at Looker.
Questions
Highlights
Wayne’s Journey
Wayne shared that it’s interesting when he looks back, because there's no possible way he could have created a plan to get to where he is today, which made him totally rethink how he thought when he was in the early 20s trying to think about what’s his career going to be? What is he going to do? Where is he going to be?
And it really, really is a journey that hasn't been planned in any way shape or form from a long term perspective, but just made up of a collection of opportunities that have presented itself. But he got into the world of software for a strange reason, it's because he was working in a sort of more traditional space and one of his friends got a job in software, and they said, it's amazing, they have Pop Tarts in the fridge and you can cook up and it's casual clothes, and it's like flexible work from home.
And this is back in the 90s when that was just so foreign to him working in a more traditional business environment. And so he joined a software company for reasons nothing to do with software, and yet it to become part of his life for the last 25 years.
And for him, he started off in the world of education, enablement, adoption of software in the B2B space and really love that for 15 years of his career and then realize that this whole customer experience, customer success movement, especially in the world of software with cloud and the way we can easily download apps and use any product very quickly, which is very unlike software in the 80s and 90s, he realized that that was a space he was very interested in is how to enable people to get success with these investments, with these software applications, and so moved into the world of customer success and that's where he’s been ever since.
Pillars That Business Owners or Managers Need to Focus On Emerging Out of a Pandemic
Me: So Wayne, you have this new book that was released recently. It's called “The Seven Pillars of Customer Success” so could you share with us what those pillars are and maybe if you were to pick maybe one or two of those pillars that a business owner or a manager in charge of customer experience or customer success in their business would need to focus on what would be maybe one or two of those things that you'd recommend they focus on, especially in the climate that businesses are currently operating in, just trying to emerge out of a pandemic.
Wayne stated that it’s a very unique time right now. As an author like Yanique, he has much more respect for people that write books than he did before he embarked on this journey 3 years ago. He was very motivated. It's similar to when you join a gym, you get really excited, you start working out and getting up early, and then you start missing a couple and then eventually you just stop going and writing a book for him was like that, he was so excited.
And then he’s like, “Wow, this is really hard. And it's not what I thought it would be.” But ultimately, they got the book done and launched as The Seven Pillars and it really was a collection of a lot of experiences.
But for him, The Seven Pillars wasn't anything ground-breaking, it was more how do we create or construct a framework by which we can base our business on how we service our customers, because there's lots of great books on why customer service and the customer experience is so critical for a customer's success.
And there's lots of great books on how to execute that as far as like sort of activities, things you need to be thinking about. But for him, he was missing a framework to pull it all together. He knows it's important. He knows there's really cool things about creating customer delight and all these other sort of tactical engagement type things but what he was missing for him to make customers successful was what's a framework that he can build that conflicts with his business as it grows or shrinks but can also accommodate a consistent sort of value proposition, a consistent theme, a consistent what he calls narrative when he’s speaking to his customers.
And so, the book for him was about constructing these seven pillars which really focused in on three main areas. The first one is your company. The second one is your customer. And the third one is sort of the people delivering that experience. And it's funny, he’s talked to people and like, “Why do you start with your company? If this is about customer experience and the customer success and servicing that customer, why do you start with your company?” and he said he has a saying it's, “Customer success equals employee success, and employee success equals customer success.” And it really starts with the employee or employees, and it starts with your organization, you need to build a foundation as a company or as a business that can sustain and deliver a great experience for your customers.
So it actually starts with your own organization. And so, he developed sort of 10 tools, very specific to the B2B world in software, but certainly applicable as a framework in other contexts, which is, how are you going to run your business at scale, having a consistent voice, having a consistent value proposition into the market and that's what the first pillar is all about.
The next 5 pillars are all about the customer’s journey with you as a company. And for him, it starts off with on-boarding.
On-boarding a new customer, a new consumer into your business, and how to go do that right. And he actually has a story in the book, it's about a hurdler in the 2016 Olympics and he was representing Haiti. And he was in the semi-finals so he’s super pumped because such a small sort of population of people can have someone at the Olympics at the highest level, potentially getting into the gold medal race and he was watching with great enthusiasm. And unfortunately, he tripped over the first hurdle fell down and didn't qualify. And he feels like that's kind of like customer service, it's kind of like running a business, if you trip over the first hurdle, it's really difficult to recover, really difficult to come back. And it doesn't mean you can't finish and it doesn't mean you can't have some success but it's really difficult to win. And so, for him, on-boarding was the first pillar.
And then there was the second pillar of the customer journey, which really focused in on the adoption of your product or service, like how do we get true adoption and by adoption they don't mean just using it, but they mean getting full value from it. How do we do that?
The third sort of pillar on the customer journey was really focused in on how do we cement that value proposition in that person's mind? So they've on-boarded well, they're using or leveraging the product in some way and now they're getting maximum value that it can provide because that leads you to the fourth stage, what he calls the fifth pillar, which is around the value expansion. How do we now give that consumer, that customer more value?
How do we create an experience for them even better than what we have done, whether it's through more of the same product or additional products and services?
And then finally, a really important one, which he hopes they talked about later is when Yanique mentioned what the most critical one would be around advocacy. How do we create advocates of our brand, of our products, of our services into the market because that is, in this day and age, one of the easiest, fastest and most scalable ways, certainly the most affordable in order to attract new business.
The final pillar, the seventh pillar is all about the people delivering on that promise, that value proposition, that great experience, and how do we invest in those people.
And he co-created a model with a friend of his, Shane Anastasi who also has written a book on the consulting side, and it's called The KSE Model, which is knowledge, skills and experience and if we think of our people at the frontline delivering service, we think of what knowledge do we give them? What skills can we have them acquire and then how do we give them the experience and the feedback in order for them to improve and be better? And so, that kind of rounds out the whole book, he jokes that no one needs to buy the book now, they almost have it all in a podcast.
Does On-Boarding Includes the Recruitment Process?
Me: So you started off by talking about on-boarding. Does on-boarding include the recruitment process? Or based on how you wrote the book, is the recruitment step before or do you have it all summed up as one with on-boarding?
Wayne stated that it's a great question. And it's funny, because to answer the question, it's after they've acquired the customer. But in the book, he actually has a secret eighth pillar. And it's funny because when he was writing the book and he was at 345 pages long, which is pretty big for a business book, and the publisher is like just get the book published, how much more can you put in there? And he’s like, another 345 pages, there's so much content.
And he said, he actually thinks there's an eighth pillar, potentially, he’s not sold on it yet, but he does believe it exists. And the publisher is like, you can't make it eight pillars of the books called The Seven Pillars and all the graphics and all that, all this work had been done around The Seven Pillars. But in actual fact, he talked about the fact that the eighth pillar is pre boarding, he calls it pre boarding, it’s like getting on a plane, it's called pre boarding which is, how do we set up the customer for success before they're a customer.
And even in this day and age defining what a customer is, is different because you might have a service that you give a free trial, well, they're not paying for the service, so they really not a customer of your business from a financial standpoint, but they're consuming the service, so they are a customer. But it's a trial, so this notion of pre boarding customers, getting them ready to engage with you is something that he definitely added into the book at the end.
Recruiting the Right People for the Right Organization
Me: So one of the things I think is so critical sometimes when we're dealing with customer experience, you definitely need to get the right customers, but you also need to get the right people internally. So, there's an internal customer service.
How do you ensure that in the recruiting process, getting the right people for the organization, it matches back with what you're trying to achieve on an organizational level, at the end because one of the things you spoke about was you want your internal and external customers to become your advocates, your evangelists, your word of mouth advertisers, but how do you know that the people you're hiring can actually love the company they work for so much that they literally walk and speak good things about the company all the time, even when things may not be going so well?
Wayne stated that this is a challenge facing every industry that has service professionals. And he calls them service professionals deliberately, he feels like when people talk about service industry, it's not referred to in a way that he thinks really highlights the importance that the role that service people play, it is so incredibly important to service professionals. The one thing that have been his experience where he’s had successes when he hires people, he doesn't hire for skills, he doesn't care if you're finished high school, he doesn't care if you have a Master's, it doesn't matter to him, in service that's relevant, it does not matter.
What matters is empathy, to him, that is all that matters. If he can find people that can demonstrate the capability of being empathetic, can show examples of how they're empathetic, then you have a winning service person.
And it doesn't matter if you're in a very technical field, if you're in the retail field or whatever, the person has to have that empathy. You can't really teach empathy, it's something that you have, you can amplify it and you can certainly improve through learning and experience.
But ultimately finding people with empathy because they don't just have empathy for the customer, which is so critical to delivering a great experience, but have empathy for your business.
They get it's difficult, they get there are tough times, they get the challenges are going to come that make it necessary to make tough decisions as a company, as a business.
And so empathetic people can work through that in a way that allows them to be comfortable and allows them to also be more appreciative of the environment they're in. And then other things like communication, sharing, listening, collaborate, all those things that we would want to make sure that we provide as an environment from our people are all important, he’s not saying they're not but to him, the critical skill is empathy.
He worked in a software company called Looker, one of the best companies he’s ever worked for, for culture. And there's probably one other company in his whole life called PeopleSoft in the 90s, they had just amazing culture.
And the founder of Looker has this phrase that he uses when he started the company. He said, “Great software is an act of empathy.”
In other words, if you're using software and you can't use it, it's frustrating, you get stuck at breaks, you are ruining that person's day potentially impacting their career. It goes beyond creating a great, in this case - application, it's about people being able to do their jobs and be successful. And so, great software is an act of empathy.
But they sort of built on that and said, “Great service is an act of empathy.” That's really what it's about, it's about putting yourself in the other person's shoes. And it's great when things are good, I want to buy something, I've got great experiences and that's great. And we should celebrate and service people with empathy that they lead with can enjoy that and can celebrate and make that a really unique, fun, positive experience for both the consumer and for the service person. But it's also when things are bad is when empathy shines through and that comes through in a genuine way.
We've all been there, he doesn't want to say that the cable company because they always get used. But let's just say we call someone and we get frustrated, we get moved around. “Sorry, that's not the right department, I can't help you.” And we get that in big companies. And that just means they haven't worked out how to intake the questions appropriately or you get a chatbot that just keeps asking you 50 questions.
And you just get frustrated, you're not getting someone who's empathetic, who's saying, “Look, I get it, your time is more valuable than ours. Time is all you have, you can't buy more of it. So every minute you spend trying to solve a problem with us that we've created in your life, a hassle, an issue or problem or difficulty, that's on us not on you. And yet you pay the price as the consumer.”
And so, people who are empathetic can empathize with that. And for him, that creates a different dynamic between people in your company. And then inside your own company. As he said, empathetic people get that sometimes things get tough and they're going to rally, they're going to support because they genuinely know that you as a business owner, or as a company, you believe in that customer centricity, it's not just a moniker, it's not just a mission statement, it's not just something painted on the wall, it's demonstrated by a group of empathetic people trying to make the best experiences possible for their customers.
Me: It's funny that that whole characteristic that you have to have as an individual, empathy, it really as you said, it's something that it just cannot be taught, it has to be something that you have from within. And just on your experience, Wayne, do you feel that as you grow older, especially like as a parent, because I believe empathy is one of those social skills that you should have, just general things like being polite, being courteous, empathy is something that should be a part of your socialization. But what I have found is that because it requires that you tap into your emotional intelligence, at what age do you think persons start to really exercise empathy, maybe in their teenage years to just get a better understanding of connecting with other people, maybe you have a friend who is going through something and you empathize with her, that way when you actually get into the work environment, well, I don't think you'd have mastered this skill, but you definitely would have had some exposure to it. What are your thoughts on that?
Wayne stated that he can be really frank here and say his answer is now different than what it was 5 years ago. Because 5 years ago, he had kids. And so, he was raised by his grandparents and so he was brought up in a more traditional environment when it comes to manners, when it comes to morals, we're talking people born in 1920.
So, the environment he grew up as a child was very polite and actually, in many regards, was very empathetic and so it enabled him to understand the impact that we have on other people when we meet them.
And so, now that he’s had children, he’s like, well, he wasn't born in 1920 and he certainly doesn't have all the morals and manners his grandparents had. Hopefully, he has a lot, hopefully, his grandma would say he still has some. But really, when it comes down to it, he thinks about how does he instill values? And how does he practice empathy with his children when they're in an environment that was very different to his, where he was able to hone that for him.
And it's simple things at Christmas time, is, you know, sponsoring a family that might have financial difficulties in buying presents for their children and so going shopping with your 5 year old kid and saying, “Hey, what would you like for Christmas?” And they're like, “Oh, I'd love this Barbie Set.” And he’s like, you know there's people out there that actually don't have this opportunity to pick out a toy. They're not lucky like we are, they're unlucky.
Does that make you sad that they can't have the fun things you have? And while he gets the comprehension is limited, it's starting to have a conversation and a dialogue, not everyone is on the same playing field, not everyone has the same opportunities, and we can make a difference because we can. And so let's pick up a toy, what sort of toy do you think a girl of your age would enjoy. And she might say, it's a Tonka truck or it might be a tennis racket or something. And so we'll go buy it and wrap it and go give that to a family.
And so, over time we look for opportunities to broaden the thinking of our children, our life, our world, what we have is not the only thing that exists because in the world of customer service, you're dealing with people that have lots of different backgrounds and lots of different challenges.
And having an appreciation that we’re just one more problem they're having to deal with if they're frustrated or one more opportunity to create delight for someone who might not have that. Everyone has that in their life to varying degrees, some worse than others. So in his mind, he thinks you can start exploring and understanding things like empathy as early as 5 years old, because that's where he’s starting. He’s not sure if it has an impact, he'll tell you in 15 years’ time. But he does think it's something we can explore with our children so that as they grow, they can have a broader understanding of how other situations people find themselves in, which in customer service, we touch everybody, from all walks of life, good and challenging.
Me: And it does cement also that there is research out there that says you do form your personality by age five. So it's good that you've started that conversation, because it means then as your kids get older, and you may not be the centre of influence in terms of information that you give them, because now they're exposed to the school system, they have teachers, they have friends, by the time they turn teenagers, what their friend said to them is of greater value than what their parents said to them. And so it's good those core things are built in from early.
App, Website or Tool that Wayne Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Wayne shared that for him, it's not really directly for his business, but he lives in LinkedIn. He’s noticed social media person, he’s not on Facebook, he doesn't have an Instagram account. He’s not a Twitter person, that's not for him. They're very private as a family and they'd like to keep it that way. But for him, from a professional and business sense, he finds that networking through tools like LinkedIn enables him to connect with people who have similar situations or been on similar journeys and that's super critical.
Because one thing he learned writing a book and talking to 50 Plus of his peers in the industry is none of us are as smart as all of us. Doesn't know who said that but he heard that one time when he was younger, and he really gets that. We've all faced different challenges and overcome them and have experiences and have had impacts and we can all learn from that. And then one thing that he’s learned on LinkedIn is by connecting with people and either mentoring or getting mentored by or just simply saying, “Hey, I really love your career, I love what you've done, I'd love to grab 30 minutes of your time just to talk about what you've learned, what I've learned.”
More often than not people like absolutely, like, this is great. I can learn from you; you can learn from me. And learning strategies and concepts and ideas and techniques from other people, for him is a powerful way to help the business. So, he would say something like that because it's such a unique way to find people with common backgrounds and explore experiences together which is cool.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Wayne
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Wayne stated that he read his book recently and he thought it was really good. He agrees with everything in the book. But there's a lot of great books out there. And in his book he actually referred to a book from the 80s that talked about moments of truth. And there was a more recent book from Chip Heath and Dan Heath, it was about the power of moments.
And one thing for him in understanding a customer journey, which is really all the touch points a customer will have with your brand, whether it's digital, physical, online, with you present or not like a website, the power of those moments are incredible. So there's a book called The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, which he thinks helps to highlight that when you're trying to create a great experience for a customer, you really have to understand what are the moments that really require that effort, because you could put a lot of effort into a moment that is not as impactful from an advocacy, a loyalty, a delight kind of experience. And so, understanding that he thinks is really cool. So, he felt like that book was pretty cool.
The other one he really liked, which was a recent book is called Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer. So, for him, that was really difficult concept because in your business, especially if you own your business, you love that like you love your children and that makes you a little irrational sometimes.
And so, when people complain or get upset, you immediately become defensive and because you know that that's either not true or this is not fair, or because you're kind of bias. But learning to hug your haters is great. He remembers watching and it was an Apple plus TV show called Ted Lasso, which is an incredibly different show, but wonderful at the same time. And there's a scene where one of the players sort of talks to the coach and basically tells the coach that he doesn't like him and really upset. And the coach, when the player walks away, the coach says to the assistant coach, “Well, he thinks he hates me now wait until he loves me.” And that phrase for him and then later in the show, that player ends up loving him and actually says, “You make it so hard to love you.” Because he's sort of frustrated at something. And then he's like, “Did you hear that, he loves me like.” And that to him is exactly how we view our customers, is when they're upset, like, here's my chance to make them love me. And so, that books great too. There's plenty of others. He can't consume all the books he wants to read just for time purposes but they're the two that have had impacts on him recently.
What Wayne is Really Excited About Now!
Wayne shared that he just released a book, which is very scary, because you're putting out there, this is what I believe, this is what I think, this is what I'm suggesting or advising people to do and that's really scary. And as you write the book, you're often asking yourself saying, “Well, do I believe what I'm saying here? Am I saying it because I read it in a book? Am I saying it because I experienced it? Am I saying it because I truly believe it.”
And so, when you finally put it all down, you send it out in the world. And so, what he’s doing now is he’s talking to people who read the book and saying, “What's missing? What did I leave out? What did I get wrong?” And for him, that's amazing growth opportunity, like, “Oh, did I get that wrong? Actually, you're right. I didn't think of it from that point of view. I don't know everything. I know a lot. And I want to share that but I don't know everything.” And so, that's what he’s working on right now is really uncovering the gaps in the book, the gaps in his knowledge, the gaps in his skills, maybe who knows, one day he'll do a new edition of the book and add some chapters in or make some modifications. But really, that's primarily what he’s focused on.
And he’s just started writing a second book with two other authors. So he’s going to do this with two other people, hopefully, it will make it easier. There'll be more information coming out about that end of the year. But it's really about the fourth industrial revolution and how we're going to displace a lot of workers through AI, ML, robots, that's accelerating. And so, how can we re-skill hundreds of millions of humans on new opportunities in a very coordinated way, which he doesn't think we're doing as a society right now. So it's a little heavier than the book he just wrote, but equally important.
Where Can We Find Wayne Online
LinkedIn - @waynemcculloch
Website – http://www.cspillars.com/
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Wayne Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Wayne stated that he does but will give a quick background. He went on something called an Outward Bound Standard course which is basically 28 days in the bush in Australia.
And literally you've got a piece of plastic, you pull your shoelaces out of your shoes every night, put a bit of grass in the corner of the plastic and you tie your shoelace around and tie that to a log and that creates this kind of tent they call it a BV whack around Australia and you really live outside for a month with no phone and no electricity, nothing. You're not allowed anything of that. And while he was there, you got one mail drop that sort of day 20. And one of his friends wrote, just literally he opened the letter and it was one piece of paper with this one phrase on it, nothing else, didn't have his name, didn't have “I hope all is well, here's what's happening.” All it had was this phrase, which was “Tough times never last, tough people do.”
And for him, that helps him get through when he’s feeling down, when he’s feeling like things are going to be difficult. He’s like, it won't last, we’ll get through it. And as long as we get through it, we get stronger and we continue. So that's something he always think about and refer to in his professional career as well as his personal life.
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Jonathan Byrnes is a founding partner and chairman of Profit Isle, a highly successful MIT spin-off SaaS software company that helps organizations increase profits by 10 – 30 percent using its profitability analytics and management process. A widely followed thought leader on profitable growth and innovative customer supplier relationships, Byrnes is a frequent speaker and writer who has advised over 100 companies and institutions. He earned a doctorate from Harvard and has been a Senior Lecturer at MIT for 30 years. In addition to his popular HBS column, “The Bottom Line,” he is the author of Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink, an Inc. Best Book for Business Owners.
Questions
Highlights
Jonathan’s Journey
Jonathan shared that he went to business school and he actually enjoyed academic business quite a lot. He was at Columbia in New York. Instead of taken a typical job on Wall Street or in a consulting company, he decided to get a doctorate. So he got up to Boston, he’s from New England. So he was happy to get back to Boston. And he went to Harvard, spent 6 years there and got a doctorate from Harvard Business School. And after that, he developed a consulting business where he helped a number of companies do very, very innovative things, which he found very satisfying.
After he had achieved a degree of success in consulting, he got very re-interested in academics, so he connected with MIT and they asked him to teach a course there and he has been doing that for 31 years now.
In addition, he continued his consulting business, but he shifted it over. When he was doing consulting, he was very unhappy with the way that profitability was measured in companies, the typical way is to sort of pile up all the revenues and pile up all the costs, and see which one is bigger.
And if revenues are bigger than then costs, you have the profit. And if the opposite, you have a loss. The problem is it tells you whether your profitability, whether you're profitable, but not where you're profitable.
And so, he couldn't really take a part a company and understand where it was making money. So he developed back in the 1980s, a new way to do this, he thought and thought about it and it seemed to him that this is a transaction.
So if he goes into a store and he buys 3 pencils, eraser and a ruler, that's three transactions. And if he could understand the profit and loss on each of those and he could characterize each one, then he had sort of a good starting point.
And so, they figured out a way to do a profit and loss statement on each of them with probably over 95% accuracy and then each one could be characterized, he knew the customer, he knew the product, he knew the store and so on. So he could put it into the database and figure out exactly where the company was making money and where it wasn't.
So when he did the first one of these back in around 1987, using very rudimentary computer and database programme, nowhere near what we have now and what he saw was about 10% of the company, this was a very successful company, making 150% of the reported profit. He couldn't believe it. And then he looked at where the losses were and about 20% of the company, the customers and the products were taking away at least half of that. He was really astonished and then the other half of the company was making no money. And he just couldn't believe it.
So he brought it back to his colleagues at MIT and said, “This is unbelievable and he doesn't believe it. But the numbers, he thinks are correct.” And so everybody said, they don't believe it either and they went through the numbers, and they said, but the numbers are right. And since then, he has done that with over a 100 Billion dollars in client revenues and it always shows the same pattern. So with that understanding, I did two things.
Number one, they took that rudimentary software and over the years made it better and better, so that they're now running on the Google Cloud with 10s of Billions of Dollars of client revenues every month under analysis and they always see the same thing.
And number two, he recently wrote a book called Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive, which will come out next week (May 11. 2021), where he talks to companies about how to focus on where they're making money, and how to integrate in the changes coming up in the environment from competitors like Amazon and others so that they know where they should head, and how to choose the right customers, align their resources and structure and manage the company, so that they can win in this new environment. Because if they go on with what used to be the success factor, which was having a lot of revenues that were a mishmash of everything to everybody, when highly focused competitors like Amazon are coming in, they're going to lose their shirts.
And in fact, that's the reason why so many companies have gone bankrupt, frankly in the past, 3, 4 or 5 years, because they couldn't adapt, they kept trying to be what they used to be 20, 30 years ago in the face of these much more focused competitors.
And he’s really here to say that by doing the right thing, even in the presence of Amazon, especially in the presence of Amazon, you can make a fortune but you have to figure out where you want to be and how you're going to get there. And you have to decide what you want to do and what you don't want to do. So that's basically, the long and short and uninteresting story of his life and how he got to where he is.
Tips for Navigating Customer Experience
Me: I'm so happy that you mentioned in your introduction that you wrote a book that's going to be released next week (May 11. 2021), Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive.
So of course, that was one of the things that piqued my interest why I was so intrigued to have you on our show, because as you can tell, we focus on how can we help managers, leaders, business owners in all different types of businesses across the world, navigate through their customer experience.
And so I wanted you to share with us maybe one or two things that you may have touched on in your book, I know it's not released yet, but you could probably give us a teaser of what are some things that based on your research and your experience that potential readers could look forward to if they should purchase this book that will help them to be able to navigate best through their customer experience, especially during this time that world is going through a global pandemic?
Jonathan stated that he’s going to separate out for the first bit about the pandemic, because that too will pass although he thinks with more difficulty than people think. But over the longer term, a lot of people ask him, “How can I compete with Amazon?”
And his answer is, don't. And if you try to be like Amazon, Amazon will run you over.
However, what's really important, and this is really the most important thing is that you can be like Amazon, you can't compete with Amazon where they are, but you can do what they did.
And what they did is very interesting. In the old days, say in the 1980s or so, you had companies that had a broad range of customers. So the example he would give is that in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, they had a big department store called G Fox and everybody went there for everything from shoes, to jackets, to skis, on and on and on. They had everything and they served everybody. The problem is that they focused on the big customers and their expensive products.
So it was easy to recognize and deal with big customers. But they had 1000’s of small customers, especially an industrial distributor, for example and they just didn't know how to get to them.
When the internet came along, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Wilkie, who's a former student of theirs (MIT), figured out that using the internet, they could get to customers all over the country. And they could do it actually from one central location in Seattle. And so they started doing this with books and then moved into some other products. And they figured out that they could look at the order patterns of customers and figure out who they are and then serve them the sort of products that they thought they'd like. So when he goes on to Amazon, it says, “Hi, Jonathan, here's what you ordered. And if you like that sort of thing, here are 5 books you might like.” And they're usually right.
So they were able to use the customer information to target the market and to break up this sort of monolithic, homogeneous market that G Fox used to serve. But Amazon only does one thing well, same thing with Google, Apple and all the rest of them. And that is they have arm's length services to small customers in a very smart, information rich, highly automated way.
So they took the customers that nobody wanted back in 20 years ago and they figured out how to make a science out of making them happy. And that's what Amazon did.
And he thinks anybody who tries to do that in competition with Amazon, unless they're Walmart, they're going to have a real problem.
However, that leaves a wide open playing field for other companies to do things that are more specialized and customized, typically somewhat higher service, he’ll give you two examples.
Number one, imagine that you're a small shoe store in his hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. They have Michaelson shoes, they would have trouble competing generally, but they became expert at working with marathon athletes, they have a lot of athletes in that area, fitting the shoes and giving them just what they needed and those people will never go to Amazon because they need some special attention. So that's a little local in town corner store that's competing as Amazon did, it figured out three things.
Number one, who are my customers, they chose the customers. Number two, they align their resources, all their information, all their advertising, to go after those customers and not be distracted by everybody else. And number three, they manage actually, at this point, a chain of stores where they're able to go after individual markets, in some markets it's swimmers and others it's runners. And they're experts and doing incredibly well.
A second area is a great big, enormous area in healthcare that's just really developing called Telemedicine. And that is that when you're in your home, you can have sensors on your body and your iPhone can be transmitting information to a doctor saying, What's your pulse? What's your this? What's your that. And it's sensitive to the point where they can actually diagnose schizophrenia from a distance in your home, and they can treat you in your home. So if you have let's say kidney stones, there's a small ultrasonic because this ultrasound unit that you can put in your home and press against your stomach, it'll break up your kidney stones.
And so more and more medicine is being transferred from the hospital to the home. And the other companion thing is called wellness management on something like what weight watchers does, but as an example, he did a session in Florida, this may hit close to home for you in Jamaica. So he did a session in Fort Myers, Florida for hospital CEOs and the head of the Mayo Clinic in Naples, Florida that's down in the south west port gave the companion talk and he said that they're biggest health problem in South Florida is little kids drowning, because everybody has a backyard pool. And number one thing they can do for community health, is to teach the little kids drown proofing, not swimming, but get to the side and get out. And that's more important than all the heart attacks and strokes in South Florida combined in terms of health outcomes.
So moving into that, he has a former student who just became president of a company that makes what are called infusion pumps. So if you need chemotherapy or pain medication, it'll drip the right amount into your body. And they are very software dependent because the amount that you drip is a function of how sick you are and how your body is responding, it's very complicated, but they have units that can be run to the home, and in the home.
And they've grown to about $100 Million Dollars self-funded in about 5 or 6 years. So there are tremendous opportunities if number one, you know your market and it's defensible. And number two, align your resource not to get distracted. And number three, manage the business so that you have what he’s called pounds per square inch of market power.
And it really means doing what Amazon did, which is figuring out a good place to be and sticking to your knitting. Think about great companies of our era.
Think about Walmart, think about Federal Express, Southwest Airlines think about JetBlue, they all did the same thing. They figured out who they were and they stuck with it and they just made it better and better and better.
Of course, you have to be a little bit careful because you're aiming in 5 years may not be as lucrative as it once was, there may be product developments and other sorts of things but you can factor that into your decision. So for him, that's the most important key to success. And companies that have tried to be everything to everybody and they can't turn down the $1 in revenues that doesn't fit, they're the ones who are going to have trouble.
App, Website or Tool that Jonathan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Jonathan stated that that's a little hard because they write all their own software. He'd say modestly, go to www.chooseyourcustomer.com and that's their book website and you have an introduction and a sample chapter that explain how to do what he just described. So that's the number one, he thinks beyond that, he reads the New York Times, the Washington Posts and the Boston Globe for sports about eight times a day. That's about it.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jonathan
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jonathan stated that that one is easy. Probably the most important one he has read is called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, he’s a Professor of Social Psychology at Harvard.
And when his younger son was at Harvard, he took his course that the students called Happiness 101. And he actually does a study of all the studies of what makes people happy. And that sounds like a crazy thing to do but it's really, really fascinating.
So, he has spoken in front of a variety of groups, and one group he speaks in front of nearly about once every year or two cancer patients, for family reasons. And what he says to them is that in this book, one of the studies that he's really cites is a study that says that if something really bad happens to you, you have a terrible car accident, you lose a relative, just imagine the worst things that you could imagine, you become quadriplegic, then you think the world's coming to an end.
Within three or four months, you're back to your base level of happiness. And that really is powerful, because it sort of says that everybody goes through episodes and they get all down about it as they should. But then, you basically can say one foot in front of the other, and I'm going through the valley of the shadow of death, but I will climb out of it. And I will be as happy as I ever have been.
And he thinks that for him, that's a very, very important and affirming thing to think about. And everybody, especially in this pandemic, has things that are very difficult and consuming and concerning but you will get over it.
The other one that he always goes back to and reread at least once a year, he’s done this since he was in graduate school, is a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, who was an Institute Professor at MIT, it’s the Historian of Science and he looked at the scientific method, basically, which says, you do an experiment, you get a result, you do an experiment, you get a result and that's how you develop knowledge.
And when he looked at some really important leaps forward in science, he said, “That's not the way it works at all.”In fact, what happens is what he called a paradigm, which is an explanatory model of how a particular part of science works, whether the sun rotates around the Earth or the Earth rotates around the sun or any scientific area. And there's a way that people think about it and if you come up with evidence that says that that's wrong, you don't throw it out, you ignore the evidence and you keep going as if it never happened. And what counts as good science is stuff that moves that basic idea forward.
And then every once in a while you have so much evidence, people still don't change but somebody will come up with a new theory that explains all the old results and explains all of these so called anomalies and then the paradigm flips but it doesn't happen all at once. People who are older embedded in the paradigm won't change, it's like wondering in the desert for 40 years and sooner or later it changes, and then you get the same progression.
So it's almost like step by step climbing a ladder and what's really important about that is that that's the way the businesses change, that's the way that people think about things.
So if you have a business that's operating in a certain way, as he described before, you have a company that's selling everything to everybody, especially if they've been successful, you can't just show them evidence that they're losing money here and there, they're going to keep trying to do it.
And that's why in a lot of industries, like retail, up to half of all the retailers in the country went bankrupt, because they just couldn't change. And then you have Amazon, a brand new company coming in and eating their lunch. He thinks that those are the two books that meant the most to me.
What Jonathan is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about asked about something that he’s really excited about, Jonathan shared that bringing the book out. The difficulty of this book is that it’s paradigm changing. In the Kuhn sense, is basically saying, if you try to do business in the old way and that's the way the business is taught in most business schools to this day, in marketing, you want to maximize revenues. Well, wrong.
Half of those revenues are probably unprofitable. You want to maximize profits, but you need a different way to measure it and a different way to go after customers and a different way to satisfy them.
And the challenge is getting the word out through the teaching and the book, they try to change the way the business is done, so that it's much more effective and better. As a professional business educator, with a lot of decades of experience, having business work right is the best way to do it.
And by the way for our country and for society at large, if half of all of businesses losing money, that's an unbelievable waste of resources and we have too many people who are underserved and poor and needy who need those resources. So it's not only a question of making more money, it's really a question of getting more good products to more people who really need it.
Where Can We Find Jonathan Online
Website – www.chooseyourcustomer.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jonathan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jonathan shared, “One foot in front of the other.” And sooner or later, you'll go back to your base level of happiness. If you are a happy person, you will get back there, if you're not a happy person, then you need to work on your happiness. One foot in front of the other until you get there.
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Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
David Friedman is an award-winning CEO, entrepreneur, author and renowned public speaker. In 2011, he published his first book, Fundamentally Different, which is based on the insights he learned and taught throughout his leadership career. And in 2018, he published his second book, Culture by Design, the definitive “how to” manual for building a high-performance culture.
His current company, High Performing Culture has helped hundreds of companies throughout North America to implement its culture operating system, CultureWiseä.
Questions
Highlights
David’s Journey
David shared that he lives in the Philadelphia area, he spent 27 years as the CEO of an employee benefits consulting company. And he grew that company from a couple of people to a little bit over 100 people and during the years that he was growing that company, they were very, very successful in almost every dimension you can look at, but the foundation of all of their success. Everything that made them successful was the culture that they had created in that company. And as the CEO of that company, he did a lot of things in a very intentional way to make that culture happen. He eventually sold the company to a large multi-billion-dollar company, ended up retiring from that industry. And he wrote his first book, which was called Fundamentally Different which was referred to before. And it was a book about the things he had done in his career that made them so successful, specifically around culture. And what ended up happening is people started reading that book and getting a lot of value from it and they started asking him if he would come to speak to their organizations about the things about which he had written. And so, next thing he knew he was travelling around the country giving talks to CEOs and people started hiring him to help them and next thing he knew he was in a new career. And so, over the last seven or eight years, he has given more than 500 workshops on this material, typically to CEOs and other leaders, worked with hundreds and hundreds of companies helping them do it. And has written three books on the topic. And so, it all comes from the experience that he had leading a company himself, and what he learned and what he now teaches people.
Other Core Fundamental Practices
Me: So your first book that you wrote Fundamentals, I know at the beginning of the conversation, you had mentioned that one of your fundamentals is quick response time, which was music to my ears. Could you share with our listeners what are some of the other things that is the core of your fundamental practices?
David stated that what he teaches people is that in any organization, he doesn't care of organization it is, the culture in that organization has an enormous influence over everything that happens from customer service to everything else that takes place.
And so, as leaders, we should be intentional about creating the culture that we want to have. One of the important elements and probably the most important element in creating a really great culture or any culture for that matter, is being clear about what are the behaviours that you say, “Boy, if we could get all of our people living to these behaviours, this is the kind of organization I want to have.” And he gives those behaviours a name, it's just his nomenclature, he calls them fundamentals because he thinks they're fundamental to success.
So they help organizations define their culture in terms of a set of very specific behaviours. In his particular company, and this is his company, it doesn't have to be the same for a different company. But in his company, some of their fundamentals, the one you're asking about a moment ago, is one that we called Be a Fanatic About Response Time.
Some of the others that he teaches in his own company are things like Honour commitments, Practice Blameless Problem Solving, Get Clear on Expectations, Be a Generous Listener, these are actions, they're things that people do, and you get people doing these kinds of things, you create a very different kind of organization. So those are just some samples of the fundamentals he teaches in his own company.
Me: Great. So, those are also in the book, right? Could you share with us why you think those things are critical to creating a culture where customer experience, of course, is at its utmost best because clearly, a lot of organizations have many challenges in trying to get their customer experience to be consistent.
How is it that you go into these organizations, I'm sure a lot of their issues is everybody's not doing what they're supposed to be doing, how do we get people to be passionate? How do we get them to operate like how we do? I wish I could clone myself and have 100 of me, but the reality is you can't. So how do we get everybody on the same page?
David shared that the foundation of the system that he teaches is, there eight steps to it, but let's just boil it down to its essence.
There are two things that are critical for success. And this is true, whether we're talking about customer experience, or we're talking about innovation, or we’re talking about anything, even a sports team, a family, you want to get a group of people to be consistent so that you can clone yourself, there are two things that are critical.
The first is what we were just talking about, we have to be crystal clear about the expectations. So frequently, he hears leaders frustrated that people aren't being the way they want them to be but they haven't been clear enough about what they expect, they're just annoyed that people haven't somehow, miraculously by osmosis figured it out themselves.
So the first step is absolute clarity about what is it that we expect of people. And when we talk about that clarity, one of the ways that companies try to do that and fail, is that the typical way of doing that is they create a list of core values and they look wonderful on the website, except most of the time, they're so broad, and so nebulous that they don't really bring enough clarity.
He makes a big deal about the difference between what he calls values and what he calls behaviours.
So a value is an abstract idea, quality, integrity, loyalty, service, teamwork, those are wonderful words, but they mean so many different things to different people, that they're very difficult to operationalize.
Behaviours are actions, they're things people do and because they're action oriented, they're a lot easier to be coaching people about, it's very difficult to coach somebody about their values, it's a lot easier to coach them about their behaviours.
So the first step is this defining with way more clarity, exactly what we expect, in terms of a set of behaviours or as he noted a moment ago, he calls fundamentals.
Now, once we have that, it's great to have them listed and have more clarity. But here's the real key step. And this is so simple. He calls it creating rituals.
So a ritual is a routine, a habit, something that we do all the time and the reason that rituals are so important, is that most people and you've seen this, most people aren't very good at sticking with things. We come up with all kinds of wonderful ideas. And then we get busy and life gets in the way and they fall by the wayside, so the company comes up with the big new programme and for three months or even three weeks, everybody's all excited about the new programme and then they fall by the wayside.
When something becomes a ritual or routine, it's not difficult to continue, it's just part of our routine. So he’ll give a simple example in another area and then take us back to this topic of service and business.
You wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, before a ballgame in the States the do the national anthem, there are just routines about how you operate. Some people before a meal, they say a prayer. When something is a routine like that, it's not hard to do. So the way we use that simple concept is we take these fundamentals as he calls them and they begin to focus on one fundamental every week through a series of rituals.
So week number one, everybody in the company all week long is thinking about working on focusing on fundamental number one, the week after that everybody in the company is on number two, and the week after that three, and they keep cycling through them.
So giving one simple example of a ritual to illustrate it for the listeners. So one of the rituals that he practices in his company, and all of their clients do this as well, is that every time they have a meeting in their company, whether it's a project team meeting, a department meeting, a virtual meeting, if they have a meeting in their company this week, every single one of those meetings, the first agenda item of the meeting is the fundamental of the week. And they spend the first few minutes of the meeting talking about this week's fundamental and what it means.
So his company's fundamental this week, he mentioned it before actually is called Practice Blameless Problem Solving. So every time they have a meeting anywhere in their company this week, the first agenda item is going to be a three or four-minute discussion about practicing blameless problem solving.
That gets them lots of chances to teach and teach and teach and teach. So if they start by defining really clearly the behaviours that are important in their organization, and then they have a structured systematic way to teach those behaviours over and over and over and over again, sooner or later, those behaviours are going to become internalized in their people and that's how you get yourself cloned. What most people do is they again, either aren't clear enough, or they put stuff out there and then they figure, “Okay, I talked about it once or it's on the wall, or it's on the website, how come everybody doesn't do it?” You need repetition, without repetition, we don't learn anything.
Me: That is so true. I say it in training so many times. When you're teaching children ABC, you don't just go to school one day and the teacher says, okay, this is the alphabet, ABCDEFG to Z and then they never say it again. It's like constantly being reinforced with the kids; they sing to it. They sing ABC songs to them, they read to them about ABC, they talk to them about ABC, they have pictures. So it's constantly being reinforced and as you mentioned, repetition and adults learn just like children.
David agreed that we do, it's how humans work. And yet somehow in most organizations, we think that people are just going to magically figure it out without that repetition. He’ll give a very good example of actually where he learned all of this originally, and it relates very directly to customer service.
So, one of the organizations that is world renowned for incredible customer service experiences is the Ritz Carlton Hotel chain. If there ever was an icon for extraordinary customer experiences, it would probably be Ritz Carlton. And many years ago, he had an experience at where he brought his company to a Ritz Carlton for a day of brainstorming about great service and knowing how great they were, he asked them if they could share during their lunch with them some of the things that they do, and they do a very specific thing that really became the foundation for the concept behind what he teaches.
At Ritz Carlton, they have 20 behaviours that they have articulated about delivering great customer experiences. And these behaviours are called their basics. The Ritz Carlton basics, and there are 20 of these.
And every day they have a ritual that's called the daily lineup and a daily lineup, what happens is in every Ritz Carlton property in the world, in every department and in every shift, the team members get together at the beginning of the shift, and they gather around for a 10 or 12-minute meeting known as the daily lineup. And the first thing they do in their daily lineup is they talk about the basic of the day.
So if today were day number one in every department, every shift people would be getting together and kicking off their shift with a brief meeting and they start the meeting talking about basic number one. Tomorrow, everybody would be on number two and the next day number three, and so on.
And at the end of 20 days, they go back to the beginning and they do it over and over and over again, every day of their entire career. And that's how they get people to absorb and internalize the things that lead to extraordinary experience. They don't do it by just hoping they're going to get really nice people and it will all work out, they teach these things every single day with repetition. Makes sense.
Me: And you're right. Ritz Carlton, that's the gold standard that everybody's aiming to achieve and sometimes people think, is it that they got really amazing people, but they probably have the same level or standard of people in terms of their recruitment. But as you said, their technique and their strategy in terms of what they're doing, it makes sense because it's being repeated, it's being reinforced, people are being held accountable and now it becomes almost a part of your DNA. Because if you're doing something over and over again, it becomes so a part of you. I remember when I went to high school, I went to a Catholic High School, we were not allowed to walk on the grass, it was completely forbidden. And I recently went on vacation with my daughter to Airbnb in Ocho Rios and she just walked across the grass and I had to walk on the path and go around. And the little light bulb went off in my head, and I said, “Yanique, why don't you walk on the grass?” And I said, “Because it's not allowed.” But it's something that I had to do for 7 years. And so, it actually became a part of me, I think it was like an unconscious behaviour because it was after I thought about what I did, that I was able to dissect and say, “Okay, that's the reason why I did it.”
David agreed and stated that to take that same thought and now let's apply that same exact thinking to customer service or any kind of thing that we're trying to get in our culture. If we want our people to be so unconscious, so automatic about how they deliver fantastic service, well, we have to tell them.
What are the behaviours, that if you were doing these things every day that would create amazing service experiences?
We have to be crystal clear about them.
And then just like the way you learn not to walk on the grass, we have to teach those things over and over and over and over again, with enough repetition so that they become internalized by our people.
And once they become internalized by our people, well, that's just the way we do things around here. It starts to happen and it's such a simple idea.
Me: Simple, yet profound, yet many people are not doing it.
Trends Organizations Need to Focus On
Me: You're in this industry teaching about culture, you’re teaching about behaviours. Can you share with us maybe one or two things, trends that you see emerging? We’re coming out of a pandemic, not sure if you've noticed anything in the States where you are from in your neighbourhood, if you've noticed anything that's different in terms of people's behaviours, have you found that customers have become more heightened to the quality of experience that they're expecting especially seeing that safety is now the new buzzword in terms of how safe you make your customers feel? Do you see any emerging trends in relation to things that leaders in organizations need to focus on more, even more now than before the pandemic probably for the next two or three years?
David stated that the first thing he would say that's very related to the pandemic is obviously, we have gone to people working remotely in a way that didn't exist before. And even as vaccines become more prevalent and the pandemic gets behind us. Certainly, almost everybody recognizes that we will continue to have a high number of people, never more than ever before that will continue to work remotely.
So some people will be back at the office, but there will be many, many people who will forever work remotely or in some hybrid kind of environment where some are in person and some are working remotely.
And that has enormous impacts, specifically as it relates to culture. That if your culture was mostly a function of people being together everyday, and somehow by example, your were people were figuring out, I guess this is how things happen around here. But there was no overt methodology for teaching, it was just leadership by example. “Well, if I'm not seeing you anymore because we're not physically together. Well, then you're going to have some real struggles if there's no other structured way to convey culture.”
And so, it's become more important than it ever used to be to be systematic about how we create our culture, because we can't rely on people being together anymore and he thinks that's a significant shift.
He would say the second shift that I see and he doesn't know that this is so much a function of the pandemic, as much as it is just a general societal business trend is certainly there's a trend toward more self-service, where there are many clients and many buyers who want to be able to access tools and resources on their own.
So the definition of what is great service means has changed, great service used to mean very high touch personal interaction and so in some cases, that's still true. But there are many other people, especially the younger generation, who their attitude about services, “Just give me the tools to do it myself, I don't want somebody pestering me, I don't want this intense personal relationship.”
And again, obviously, this varies with the person and the product. But in many things, especially the younger generation, “Just give me the tools to go online and do it myself and I'm a happy camper, I don't need anybody to be talking to me. In fact, I don't even want to talk to somebody, I just want to be able to do it.”
And so, he thinks that the implication of that trend is that businesses need to be able to provide multiple ways for people to get the service that they need. If I'm a customer that wants high touch, then I'm going to be frustrated if I can't find anybody to talk to. And so, you need to be able to provide that for me. But if I'm a customer who doesn't want to talk to somebody, you need to provide me with avenues to do self-service. So, he thinks responding to the variety of ways in which people want to receive service, companies need to have a number of different methods.
Me: Those are really, really good points. And you are right, self-service is definitely something that people want. I definitely have seen that as a higher emergence. As a matter of fact, locally, when I tried to reach out to my utility companies, I find I get through to them much quicker through the chatbots that they have on their websites than actually calling them on the telephone, you get through much quicker. You sit there on the phone for 56 minutes, 70 odd minutes, some ridiculous times, just listening to this awful music or recording that they have going on over and over again, but you go online and it's like there's more response, the response time is much faster and the person online is in a better position to assist you.
David shared that there's a great book called The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon. And that's a great book.
And one of the points they make in that book is that the challenge is mostly there are these different ways that people want to access service and the problem comes if the way that I want to do it doesn't work, if I have to switch methods.
So if I want to call somebody and I can't get through because I'm on hold for 45 minutes, I'm going to be really frustrated.
If I want to be able to go online and do it myself and I try it and it's too confusing and I have to give up and pick up the phone and call somebody, then I'm going to be frustrated too.
So I need to have different methods to respond to different customers’ desires and each of them has to work well.
If the way that I tried to get my service doesn't work and I have to switch to method number two, that's where you really frustrate your customers and they leave.
App, Website or Tool that David Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, David shared that he has found that in his whole career, that being well organized is an absolutely critical element of success, that if you don't have good systems for keeping on top of everything you need to do, things fall through the cracks and it's extraordinarily difficult to deliver great service to people.
It's hard to honour your commitments if you don't have a good way to track all your commitments.
It's hard to be a fanatic about response time if things slip through the cracks because you didn't keep track of at all.
So systems to keep track of everything you need to do are critical to him.
There's a system that he uses many years ago that was back then and then there's an updated version. But back then, he was a big Franklin planner user and a software version of the Franklin planner. A number of years ago switched to an Apple environment from a PC environment, Franklin planner never came out with an Apple version but there's a different company that created a product that is almost identical to what Franklin planner software was.
And it's called Opus One and it's basically a planning tool to allow you to keep track of task management, everything you need to accomplish in your life. And how does he keep track of it? How does he prioritize it? How does he make sure nothing is ever forgotten?
And he can't imagine how he would function without that, everything he needs to do in his life is there, he looks at it every day. And it's scary to think about what life would be like if he didn't have a tool like that.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on David
When asked about books that have had an impact, David shared that The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon was certainly one of them. He would say a book that he just finished rereading or actually more accurately listening to. He read it years ago and he just re-listened to it is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. He read that when it came out, it came out like 2002 and for some reason it just came across his attention recently and he listened to it on Audible.
And he really thinks it's a fascinating book and it gives him pause to think a lot about the things that they're doing. And for those listeners who may not have read or heard The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, the author looks at social epidemics, how does an idea all of a sudden take off and spread, whether it's a fashion, whether it's a product, whether it's a service, and all of a sudden something goes from nobody knows about this?
And then at a certain point, everywhere you look people are talking about that or reading about it or heard of it. And how does that actually take place? Where's the tipping point where all of a sudden, it goes viral? And why does that happen? What are the factors that contribute to something going viral? It's a fascinating book, highly recommend it.
What David is Really Excited About Now!
David stated that the biggest thing he’s excited about is the opportunity to scale what they're doing. And what he means by that is that the concepts that he teaches as you've heard, even just in a cursory way in this podcast, the idea that if we really want to drive the culture in an organization, it really comes down to two very simple things, define really clearly the behaviours that drive success and then create this structured systematic way to teach those over and over and over again.
And if you do that, you're going to be really successful and he calls that whole concept, he calls it the Power of Fundamentals, that when we have a set of fundamentals that driver our success and then we can have a way to teach it, it has an unbelievable impact.
So the Power of the Fundamentals is just such a powerful idea and such an impactful idea and he’s really excited and enthusiastic about the work that they're doing in their company to spread that idea so that not just hundreds or 1000s of people but ultimately millions of people can leverage those concepts and apply that to improve their families, their children, their companies, their sports teams, their churches, it applies in every walk of life.
And so, the opportunity to spread those ideas and give people tools that enable them to be more successful is just a very exciting and rewarding challenge.
Where Can We Find David Online
Website – www.culturewise.com
David shared that on the website are lots of simple videos that explain the concepts, really easy to understand material there. There's also links there to his books and you can also get them on Amazon or Audible. The most recent book, which was published this spring is an updated version of his original book called Culture by Design.
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity David Uses
When asked about quote or saying that he tends to revert to, David shared that he’s going to broaden that. And so yes, and it's a quote that is more related to organisations, but it's equally important individually. So for organizations as it relates to culture, the quote that he says often and really centres him is he says that, “Good companies have good cultures by chance. But world class companies have world class cultures by design.”
And what he means by that is that when he looks at those companies and those individuals who are most successful, they don't do anything that's so incredibly unusual, he sometimes says they do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency. They just are very purposeful about everything they do that reasonably moderately successful people naturally are gifted and they do a lot of things successful just almost by accident. But the most successful people, the most successful companies, it's by design, they're incredibly intentional about everything they do. So if he looks at his own work, it's about not just relying on instincts, but being really systematic and really intentional about practicing day after day after day, the things that lead to success.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Jonathan de Potter is the founder and CEO of Behold Retreats, and advocates for self-improvement and elevating consciousness as the most meaningful way to better the world.
Jonathan's priority is to raise education and awareness about plant medicines like Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, and guide others to maximize the potential benefits - ultimately leading him to launch Behold Retreats.
Questions
Highlights
Jonathan’s Journey
Jonathan shared that it all started for him personally, about 5 years ago, when he was living in Hong Kong. He was working as a Strategy and Management Consultant for Accenture, one of the big, big giant consulting firms, there 5 years in Hong Kong and he was working really long hours, usually about 12 to 16 hours a day and chasing big deals and chasing new clients and he was on a bit of a treadmill, and chasing the next promotion.
And after about 5 years of that, he thought to himself, there must be more to life and he was an atheist at the time, and didn't really believe in anything spiritual.
And so, he decided to take a year off and as part of that year, he travelled through South America and wound his way to a Ayahuasca retreat with two friends of his in Peru.
And fundamentally, that just opened the door to spirituality, taught him so many humbling lessons and over the past 5 years he kind of been learning about plant medicine and preparing for launching Behold Retreats, which is really focused on guiding people towards really high quality, psychedelic or plant medicine experiences, so that they can really get the most out of them and improve the quality of everyday life.
What is Ayahuasca and Psilocybin and the Impacts They Have?
Me: So I pronounced two mouthful of plants in our introduction, Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, could you share with us, I'm sure like our listeners, I have no clue what I just said and what it does, and how it impacts your life. So could you just enlighten us on those two?
Jonathan shared that Ayahuasca is a combination of two plants that are often found in Central and South America and brought together they combine in a powerful Ayahuasca brew that is very highly hallucinogenic.
And it can facilitate very powerful healing on the level of the mind, on the level of emotions and on the level of the spirit. And so, what we're looking to achieve through this work is to harmonize the subconscious mind with the conscious mind.
And so, what these powerful medicines do, for example, Ayahuasca or Psilocybin, which is the active compound in magic mushrooms, or psilocybe mushrooms. So what these powerful medicines do is they amplify what's happening in our subconscious mind and they give us greater access to what's happening in our subconscious minds.
And so, through that we're able to come face to face with some of the skeletons that you may say might be lying around in our closet and to begin to process the associated emotions in the approach associated limiting beliefs and limiting thought patterns that we have hanging out there in our subconscious minds. And as we do so then we can really make significant improvements to ourselves.
Approach or Strategy in Terms of Integrating Plant Medicine to Improve Customer Experience
Me: So as you know, this podcast is all about navigating your customer’s experience. So I would love to tie this into how is it that this particular approach or strategy in terms of integrating plant medicine into your life will allow individuals to improve on their customer experience? Could you maybe share one, two or three things that you've seen? Do you work with corporate entities; do you mostly work with individuals? How does this really tap back into the primary reason of our show?
Jonathan shared that there's probably a couple of layers to this that we could explore. So he'll share a few thoughts, and then you can guide the conversation and the direction that you think your audience will find most helpful.
He shared that the first is really in relation to our experience, so any customer experience that we might imagine, or design or develop, is a function of our own thinking. And so, these powerful medicines have highly creative potential to them because they really remove constraints from the way that we think, often we've been so programmed, or we've been so conditioned through our parents, through society, culture, etc. to think in a very particular way.
And so, when we think about and speak about things like customer experience, then those influences do find their way into the ways that we define design, any set of customer experiences. So he thinks as and when we peel away those layers of programming, then there's an opportunity there to enhance our creativity and be able to see significantly new ways to think about customer and think about design and think about the customer experience. So he thinks that's one.
And then the second that he would mention would be, he thinks honestly speaking, it's a little bit early for the B2B aspect of this work, he thinks it’s still rapidly gaining in popularity on the level of the individual. And so, they always say about their clients that the soul needs to be calling this is very deep and can be quite challenging work.
And so it's important that people individually feel ready to do the work. But there are certainly companies that are taking that next step and leadership teams coming together to try to re envisage their own strategy, their own vision for the company to really kind of set a very bold 10x or 100x vision for what the customer experience might be or what the outcomes that they're looking for, for the organization, and then using the plant medicine as a bit of an accelerator to just to removing the barriers to thinking, changing the paradigm to removing the ego, as often a limiter in terms of what's stopping a leadership team from working most efficiently together to achieve the vision that they're passionate about achieving together.
Using this Strategy or Approach to Manifest Better Things
Me: So, a few things popped in my mind just know when you were sharing those two points. One was, because I'm sure you have clients already that you've worked with, I'm sure there are some success stories out there. Maybe could you share with us maybe one or two things that from this type of strategy and approach on an individual level, the person was able to manifest better things in their lives, not just remove barriers, but there were results that were on a higher level, maybe with their business, whether it was a one man shop, or they were a manager in a business, or maybe even enhance the quality of their family life, maybe they had better relationships or just to see what are some of the results that an individual can really supremely achieve if they really commit to this process?
Jonathan stated that he should probably caveat his answer here by stating that plant medicine is a very powerful tool. So, a powerful tool can help you achieve the thing that you're trying to achieve but in of itself, it's not necessarily the answer, if that makes sense.
So, it's the person that builds the house, the hammer just helps us get it done is an analogy that comes to mind. And so, what he might share here, he believes that everything that's possible with plant medicine is otherwise possible say through meditation and through other means. So, he just wants to caveat that, he’s not saying this is some sort of a silver bullet in any way, shape, or form, it's a powerful tool. So yes, as Yanique alluded to, step one, he guesses, in relation to this work is often removing those limiting beliefs, kind of letting go of the past.
But step two, and kind of much more interesting and exciting than that is, “Okay, great, fantastic. But what are we bringing into our world?” And so, what is possible in relation to this is really up to the individual in terms of what they are? What is in alignment with what they can manifest it into the world?
There's is a very interesting paper that he came across about six months ago which is by the American CIA and what the paper describes is that the nature of the universe is a hologram of consciousness or a matrix of consciousness. And so, when we hear about books like The Secret, or when we hear about things like The Law of Attraction, the reason that that stuff works is that the nature of the universe is consciousness and so obviously, we are highly conscious beings. And so there's a relationship between the nature of the universe itself, and this very powerful tool that we have which is our consciousness and our imagination. And so, when you speak about what we're able to manifest, what we're able to attract into our lives, then virtually, he doesn't think that there's any limitation for anyone in terms of what they can manifest and attract into their lives.
Now, of course, there's a part of our brain, there's a part of our rational mind that immediately thinks, “Well, hang on. Well, that's not my experience of the world, I've got this 3D existence, and I've got taxes, and I've got people who depend upon me and a job and these other things. And so, I'd love to just be able to manifest whatever I want into my experience.” But it doesn't quite work like that.
But actually, it does and so what becomes very exciting is that as we begin to remove these limiting beliefs and negative thought patterns and dot, dot, dot, and I'm not good enough, and all of that, that we really can manifest whatever it is that we want in our life. So whether that means a new job, whether that means improvements of the quality of our health, whether that means great relationships, a loved one, more free time, whatever it is that we'd like to manifest into our experience, if we're very clear on that and we're very determined in the way that we approach that then his genuine, honest opinion is that we can manifest virtually anything into our experience.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jonathan
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jonathan stated that he'll share two books. The first is Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by Dr. David Hawkins. And that's a very simple book but it's such a powerful book and so what he teaches is the various levels of consciousness. So, from the lowest level emotions like shame, guilt, fear, apathy, grief, and then up to the higher level, but still negative emotions like desire, anger, pride, etc, up into the very higher states of consciousness, like peace, love, and joy. And so, he's mapped out these various stages of consciousness and also provides tools for people to, number one, understand where they are in relation to these levels of consciousness. But number two, also to begin to make steps towards letting go which is the key to being able to move to higher levels of consciousness. So, that's number one.
And then number two is very much in relation to what they were just talking about, which is manifestation. And it's a wonderful book by Kidest OM, she's a great author. She's got a bunch of books out there and as you might imagine, the book is about how to manifest Anything You Want.
What Jonathan is Really Excited About Now!
Jonathan shared that the first one that he’s excited about is they've just adopted two stray cats. And their existing cat is not particularly happy about that. So there's energetic dynamics in the house, as everything kind of evens out. But more broadly than that, there's two things that they’re involved in that he’s super excited about.
The first is bringing more spiritual knowledge into some of the psychedelic science. So they've got some really impressive science that's happening at Johns Hopkins University, at NYU, at Harvard, Yale, Imperial College in London, some of the leading academic institutions out there. But they're taking a very deterministic and science based approach to this work.
And so, some of the spiritual mentors that exists within Behold Retreats are bringing some more of this knowledge into the scientific world, which he thinks is very exciting and will prove its value and its ability to accelerate some of the scientific understanding. So, that's one piece that he’s very excited about besides the cats.
And then the second is, he’s just speaking to a couple of governments in the region, he’s based in Thailand. And they're trying to establish the first legal option for plant medicine in the region, because, as you may be aware that this work is illegal in the overwhelming majority of countries, which is why they do a lot of this work in Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Netherlands, and in soon Jamaica.
Me: Yes, I'm sure you'll get good support from Jamaica, because we do believe in natural approaches to dealing with our health in Jamaica, that’s part of our culture and our history. So, I think once you can provide justification as to how this will help you, if it's going to renew cells, cause rejuvenation, as I was mentioning earlier in the conversation, show results, people will definitely embrace it because it's a way better option than swallowing pills on a daily basis, which can’t be helpful for you.
Jonathan agreed and shared that what's interesting about this medicine compared to our Western paradigm, in our Western understanding of medicine, is that this medicine really requires a very highly capable practitioner alongside it, it's not that you can just take a couple of mushrooms or take some Ayahuasca and that your life improves, that's really not it, these, these plant medicines, or these psychedelics, in of themselves are not necessarily positive, it's how we use them and who were guided by that makes fundamentally the difference between a very high quality healing or growth experience and just, honestly, just taking some psychedelics, taking some drugs, if that makes sense.
Where Can We Find Jonathan Online
Instagram – @behold_retreats
Website – www.behold-retreats.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jonathan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jonathan stated that he does, a quote he really loves is “A ship is safe in harbour but that's not what ships are for.”
He applied to both the context of the individual as well as what a group of individuals may be achieved, trying to achieve together.
And so, in relation to that, we are all here individually to evolve ourselves and so it's very easy to stay at home and watch Netflix on a Friday night, but there's much more interesting and better things that we might be doing with our time and with our energy. And so, the way that he always interpreted that quote is, yeah, you can stay at home or you can limit yourself or there's many ways to be comfortable in life. But when you put yourself out there as a ship out of harbour then good things happen.
And yes, there are challenges but that's what this life is all about. It's about facing those challenges that we may encounter and seeing if we have it within ourselves to meet those challenges and potentially even to overcome those challenges.
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The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Steven Van Belleghem Show Notes
Steven Van Belleghem is a global thought leader in the field of customer experience. His passion is spreading ideas about the future of customer experience.
Steven believes in the combination of common sense, new technologies, an empathic human touch, playing the long-term game and taking your social responsibility to win the hearts and business of customers over and over again.
Steven is the author of multiple international bestselling books including ‘The Conversation Manager’, ‘When Digital Becomes Human’, ‘Customers the Day After Tomorrow’, ‘The Offer You Can't Refuse’ and a technology thriller called Eternal.
Questions
Highlights
Steven’s Journey
Steven shared that he started his journey in his childhood, his parents had a small photography store in Belgium, that's where he lives in Europe. And looking back to how they've run the business, he came to the conclusion later on that they were obsessed with their customers, they were always talking about their customers, they were always trying to find solutions and they were also very innovative in the way how they reached out to customers and he’s talking about the 1980s, so it's a long time ago. But they were working with database marketing already back then, they were they were working with personalized marketing and they were really trying to give people a smile on their face when they left their store.
And for him, that was like the most natural thing in the world. It's only when he grew up and when he went to other places that he started to learn how exceptional that was to be in a place where the customer is your most important inspiration and the reason why you get up in the morning.
So that's how he got basically almost injected with an obsession for customers in his DNA and in the way he was educated by his parents and he still believes that today.
If you look to the success or failure of a company, it is just linked to the fact how excited and how happy customers are, how well you have managed to exceed their expectations, how excited they become of what you've done for them, that defines your success or your failure. And then everything else that you do is a result of that and everything that you achieve is a result of how you treat your customers.
And he’s convinced that he’s obsessed with that, this is what his research is about, that's what he tries to do in his own businesses and it's a part of who he is.
The Concepts of the New Generation of Customer Expectations
Me: So in one of your more recent books, The Offer You Can't Refuse, you focus a lot on the importance of what you should focus on as it relates to the new generation of customer expectations. Three of things you mentioned are ultimate convenience, partner in life and save the world. So could you share with us just explain to our listeners, what that really means, explain those concepts to us and why it is, as a business owner those are some things that you should really be paying attention to.
Steven shared that in his latest book, The Offer You Can't Refuse, he tried to build a model with different components and each of those components bring value to the modern customer.
And the whole bottom line is actually just having a good product service and a competitive price and that's still of course, extremely important, without that you cannot make customers happy but it's the minimum the amount, it's not how you positively differentiate yourself.
And then in today's world, especially after the big digital jump forward that we've seen in the last 14 months, digital convenience has also become the new normal, it has become a commodity, if you have it fine, if you don't have it, your organization is suffering.
So digital convenience is seen as the most natural thing in the world, so it's not a positive differentiator anymore, it becomes a negative one when you're not playing that game. So that's not how you win, that's your ticket to get on board of the train but that's not how you win.
And then the question is how do you win?
And then he plays with those two components that Yanique mentioned, partner in life, which is about bringing positive change in the life of the customer. This is not about how can we sell more to our customers; this is how we can bring more value in their life. This is not about optimizing your customer journey, it's about optimizing their life journey of customers, and being part of their life journey in a way that you proactively bring value to them, that's what a partner in life is all about.
And then that last element, change the world, save the world, he recently talked about changing your world because if you're a small company in Belgium or if you're a small company in Jamaica, probably those companies cannot change the world but they do have the possibility to change their world, change your world, every organization has strengths, doesn't matter the size that they have, this even goes for an individual.
Everyone, every business has strengths that they can leverage to contribute to a better world. And to add value to society in a way that goes beyond sustainability, he’s also talking about social value, he’s talking about the ethics that you apply in your own community. And if you work with that, you can actually make a difference.
And there are more and more people who expect that from organizations, there are more and more people that want organizations to take the responsibility.
And then you have like four components, good product service price, as the lowest part of it, the digital convenience, partner in life, changing your world. And those four components individually, they bring value to a customer but if you figure out a way, how to bring that story as one storyline, as one experience towards your customers, where you connect those four elements, that's when you create what he calls the offer you cannot refuse for your customers.
The Changing of Customers’ Expectations Since the Pandemic
Steven shared that he believes that on the elements that he just talked about, he feels that we made a big jump forward that it almost feels like we stepped into some sort of Time Machine.
If you take digital for instance, the latest study that he has seen from McKinsey actually mentioned that we made a jump of seven years into the future in terms of behaviour, without a pandemic, it would have taken seven years to bring us where we are today so that is changing expectations, that obviously this is changing how we look at things and what we expect.
But also look at the top of the model, changing your world. He thinks the pandemic was for many of us a wakeup call, that we suddenly valued much more the things we had and that we used to take for granted. And more and more people are worried about the future of our planet, not just in terms of sustainability and climate change but also the increase in poverty that we've seen because of COVID unfortunately. The higher demand for health care solutions to deal with the next pandemic and how we can avoid that and how we can be more ready for that. Those are all questions that are now on top of our mind that wasn't so 15 months ago.
And the way that people look to organizations has changed in that perspective that they also understand how companies can bring value in their life, how companies can bring joy into their life and they expect these companies to keep on doing that and they expect these companies to proactively try to become part of the solution of some of those global challenges that we're facing.
And all of that was already happening before 2020 but it all stepped into a time machine. And many of the trends that people like you and me have been talking about in the last couple of years are now suddenly a reality. It's like the day after tomorrow became today, that's the feeling that he has.
Tips for Emerging Expectations of Customers Within the Next 3-5 Years
Me: Could you give us maybe one two or three tips that you recommend to our listeners who are business owners of small, medium as well as managers in different organizations, across different industries. Maybe one, two or three things that you think they need to pay attention to, that would be an emerging innovation or an emerging expectation of customers within the next three to five years. Because I know you said we've advanced digitally about seven years ahead of our time. But what are maybe other things in the customer experience realm that don't tap into digital, there's that human aspect as well that you think the organizations need to focus on that you think will become as an emerging need within the next three to five years?
Steven agreed and shared that the human part of the customer relationship will become more premium than before the pandemic.
We always thought digital would replace humans and he thinks the conclusion is that that will never happen.
There's this old economic law of scarcity and it learns us if something becomes scarce, it actually increases in value, well, the human part in a customer relation has never been lower than today.
And because of that, we value it more than ever, and being helped by a human in real life is more premium than ever before. He doesn't know how it is in Jamaica right now, but in Belgium, the restaurants are closed, they have to live from takeaway food or have to take care of their own stuff, and that's fine.
But sometimes you miss the hospitality of a restaurant, that there's a friendly human there that actually tries to give you a memorable time, a good time that you can enjoy life without having to worry about anything else, that's what humans do, that's not what machines does.
Machines will take care of the convenience and the efficiency in our life and that's fine. And if companies don't have that they're in trouble, but most of them understand that and are building that convenience.
But the winners, in terms of customer experience will be the ones that have most empathy in their organization. Because understanding what people want, how people feel, and anticipating to that, that will be the crucial skill that will make a difference in the next couple of years.
Me: So you touched on a topic that I get asked all the time when I have different training sessions, doesn't even matter what level they fall in the organization, whether they're level one frontline staff, or they’re level four, let's say you're a C suite type of individual in the organization, empathy.
What is empathy? In your own words, based on your own research. And can empathy be taught? Or is it something that you have to learn? Does it come as a learnt experience kind of thing? Because people ask me that question all the time, “These people lack empathy, I don't know what else to do. I put them through all of these different certification and training programmes, they're just not doing what we want them to do with our customers.” How do you get your team members to that point?
Steven stated that this is a crucial question, he gets it quite a lot as well. And the question is, is this the responsibility of the team members? Or is this the responsibility of the senior leader?
And first of all, there are a number of people who don't have any empathy whatsoever and they don't know how to work with other humans. And they're really bad in delivering a good customer service and that percentage of people, which he believes is a very small percentage, but they do exist, that percentage of people cannot be trained, they will never be capable of helping customers in a fantastic way.
So probably, they will have to look for another job where they're not involved customers, because they don't have the capabilities for that.
And then you have a small group of people that has a natural talent of doing these things wonderfully no matter which context they're in. The majority of us humans, we have the potential to listen to customers, to anticipate, to proactively help them and show a positive intent and that's what people really like to see, a positive intent.
Steven shared that that large group of people mainly behaves based on the leadership style that they have in their organization. He’ll take it to a completely different market.
Take soccer players, isn't it strange that sometimes the soccer player is scoring goals like crazy and is the best player in the team in Team A, and then that player gets sold to Team B, and it's a total disaster.
It seems like he cannot score any goal anymore. Is that the fault of that player? Or did that player lose his trust and capabilities because he arrived in a different context?
And he thinks this is what is crucial. He’s an optimist and he believes that the large majority of all people that are working in an organization want to help customers in a positive way, because that gives you positive energy back.
So the question is, why don't they do it? And the answer usually can be found in the fact that they don't feel safe in their own environment where they are not sure what the management is expecting them to do, where they're not sure if they are allowed to help that customer. Because the day before the senior leader said, “Yeah, you help the customer but that was very expensive for us to help that person. And now we have to pay $50 extra. Hopefully we have more clients, otherwise we're going to lose money.”
If an employee hears that, they think, “Oh, my God, if you help a client, we're losing money and my leader becomes really angry. So I'm not going to do that next time.”
So they change their behaviour based on what they hear and feel from senior leaders and the fact that you feel safe or that you don't feel safe, determines if you will show the behaviour that customers expect. So for all your business owners that are listening, the first step before blaming your employees is just look in the mirror and ask yourself, “How can I change my behaviour to make sure that my employees feel safer to act in a positive way towards customers?”
Me: Wow, that is a very, very, very good answer. And I like the way you framed it in terms of taking responsibility for what are you contributing to how that person is feeling and how that person is behaving rather than saying it's their fault, it’s their responsibility. Really, really a great response!
App, Website or Tool that Steven Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Steven shared that for him personally, that is probably WhatsApp. He uses WhatsApp all the time and he thinks it's so convenient to communicate. He uses it to communicate with his clients, of course his family and friends, but also with his clients.
He uses it to find jokes, but I use it to get inspiration and they have these inspiration groups that they share stuff with each other. So he thinks that's the one that he would miss most. He asked Yanique what’s the one app she cannot live without.
Me: The one app that I absolutely can't live without in my business? I asked that question all the time and I don't think I've ever had a guest ask me back that question. I guess for me, the one app that I probably couldn't live without is maybe the Notes app on my phone and my computer. I'm an Apple user, so all of my devices are synced across, my phone, my MacBook and my iPad, and you may go somewhere and you see something and you take a picture, or maybe it's just to reference maybe an article that I want to write or maybe a topic that I'm looking for a particular guest on this particular area. And it just allows me to consolidate all of my thoughts and all of the things that I want to jot down in one place and I don't need to go back to my computer after I'm on my phone at the supermarket, for example, or at the beach and then copy and paste that information because it already synced across all devices, so I can jump on to the next device and click on the note that I wrote there, and I'm able to reference it. So, it's made life more convenient and seamless for me. And I think that's one of the reasons why I am definitely a loyal Apple customer because I find that they're always finding ways to make people's lives easier.
Steven agreed and shared that that's what they do best. And he’s with her, he’s an Apple user as well and he also loves to use the Notes.
Me: And Notes has really evolved over the years, now you can like do scans in there and you can doodle with the Apple Pencil, or even a regular, one of those pens that has the tip that you can use on the phone. If you're an Apple user, let's say for the last five to seven years, and you see how they've evolved Notes, it's really has become a tool that is not just to jot things down, but you can, as I say, save pictures in there, PDF, signatures, write with your finger or with a pen, it has become so indispensable that you really value it very much. So I would say that's probably the one app that I absolutely couldn't live without in my personal or professional life.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Steven
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Steven shared that it's been a while but he thinks the book that has the biggest impact to really open up his point of view on how customers make decisions to buy something, at the decision making in their buying process. It was a book came out in the late 1990s from Geoffrey Moore it's called, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. And it's a book that speaks about the adoption cycle of customers. And one of the conclusions is that the marketing and the communication that you use to convince the innovators and early adopters in the market, and that creates the early success.
The communication that you use there should be completely different than the communication and the approach that you use to reach out to the early majority. Because this first group is excited about technology and new features and stuff like that. The early majority is the opposite, they're afraid of new things. So, they need to be convinced that everything is easy to use and safe, so they don't want to hear all the specs and everything like that, it's a different kind of communication.
And a lot of new products fail because the people who make them think that everyone is an innovator or an early adopter, and because of that, they just focus on that and they have an early success, they think, “Okay, we're on a roll,” and then they fail. And they fall into chiasm between this first and second group. And I read that in the late 90s and of course, if you would read the book today, the examples and stuff like that are completely outdated.
But he believes the theory, the model that is used in that story is still very relevant today. And that was like the first business book that he read that really had a big impact on him.
What Steven is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something he’s doing to develop himself or his people, Steven shared that it actually started last year, he had a hobby, a dream project that got a little bit out of hand.
It was always his dream to write a fiction book, a novel thriller. And Yanique mentioned it in the introduction in the beginning of the podcast. He wrote a thriller, it's called Eternal.
Unfortunately, it's only available in Dutch so far, that's his native language. But he got really excited about it and he was really scared because he has been writing business books for years, he has written five of them and he’s very thankful for the success that he had with them.
And he’s getting a little bit used to that whole process and how it goes, but then when he launched this new book, this fiction novel, he was scared to see what the reactions would be, he was so nervous. And now when the first reactions came in and they were positive and people were actually reading it and buying the book for Christmas gifts, he was really, really happy with that.
And then the publisher got really excited as well. And then they asked him, “We know that this is a hobby that got a little bit out of hand. But what do you think about the idea of writing three books in the series instead of one?”
And he’s currently working, he’s finishing the manuscript of the second one, he does that in the evenings, early mornings, I does that in the weekend, I does that in between, but he really loves the writing process. And it's given him a lot of pressure on the one hand, but on the other hand, he’s also enjoying that he can do something completely new. So he’s excited and still nervous about this project.
Where Can We Find Steven Online
YouTube – Steven Van Belleghem
Instagram – Steven Van Belleghem
LinkedIn – Steven Van Belleghem
Twitter – @StevenVBe
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Steven Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Steven shared that he one of those, it's a quote from Churchill actually, he’s a fan of Sir Winston Churchill and his quotes. And one of his favourite quotes is, “Success is the consequence of failure after failure after failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
Me: And that has definitely helped you over the years.
Steven said absolutely and he was very fortunate he had a good time so far, COVID was a challenge in the beginning but then he said they need to fight back and make sure that the business keeps on going. And that actually worked. And moments like that it really helps to be focused and to keep that mindset positive and motivated to keep on going even if you don't have short term results with that.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Will Laurenson is a customer value optimization consultant with 9 years experience optimising customer journeys to convert more traffic into customers, and retain those customers for longer helping companies achieve more profitable growth. He is also the host of the Customers Who Click Podcast, interviewing guests from across the marketing spectrum to give actionable insights into growth.
Questions
Highlights
Will’s Journey
Will shared that he actually started in a few start-ups. He started in one start-up, but his early career was start-ups, so he did a bit of everything, generally marketing but kind of covering a wide range of channels responsible for pretty much everything.
But what he found was, very often companies would kind of hand the marketing team a bunch of cash and say, “Go and acquire customers.” that was basically the job. And it doesn't work like that especially in the start-ups where the product is still a work in progress. So what he started to do was work more closely with product teams and development teams to actually take into account customer feedback and build out a better experience.
You're not going to convert people into customers or retain those customers for very long if your experience is rubbish. He has got quite a bit of experience in the subscription space, that tends to be where he works. And obviously, if it's a magazine, it's a bit different but if you're talking about a digital product, and actually one that he worked for was kind of like Netflix for magazines.
If the app experience is not very good, you're not going to keep people, they're not going to pay that monthly fee for something that they're not finding particularly convenient.
If they can't find the content they want to read, if it's not recommending them content, you're just not going to be able to keep people.
So, that's where he kind of went down this path of customer comes from value optimization. And it kind of stuck with him for the years, it's always something he was working on regardless of what his role was, and once or twice, he did specialize a little bit more in the marketing area in house, but it was always a focus on value. Like he said, if you can't retain those customers, you're not going to make much money off them.
And likewise, if you focus too much on the conversion side, you could raise the conversion rates really high, but you just damaged value, if you incentivize too much, give people loads of discounts and offers, you're obviously not making much money there. But you're convincing people to buy for the wrong reason. So, that's why his focus is customer value optimization. And I went solo basically, November 2019 to just work with direct to consumer businesses on this.
Brands Focusing on Customer Value Optimization
Me: Could you share with our listeners why you think brands need to focus on customer value optimization, not just necessarily from a subscription perspective, but just generally speaking, if you're a retail business, or if you're a service oriented versus product oriented, why is value optimization so important in delivering that great brand experience?
Will shared that at the end of the day, every business wants to make loads of money and wants to be profitable.
If you can only really do that, if you are optimizing the value of those customers and building up their value over time, as opposed to just acquiring new customers every day, every week, every month, you're going to have those acquisition costs associated with it.
A lot of the time businesses do give discounts to first time customers, so that drops the value of that customer. So if you focus purely on acquisition, you're just not very profitable with every customer. So you're going to have to spend more money and acquire more customers. Whereas, if you focus on retention and building up that value over time.
If Facebook or Google does something that affects your business, or as prices get more and more expensive to acquire customers, you're not going to be hurt by that so much because you're also focusing on the customers you've got and getting more and more value out of them. Plus, you tend to get better levels of loyalty. And kind of ambassadorship. If people really like your business and are happy to spend lots of money with it, they will probably also be happy to tell other people about it.
So you're not only getting that direct value from each individual customer, you're also getting them telling other people to come to you, which means you're getting a potentially better customer anyway, because it's someone who's been referred. So he generally sees it as a bit of an increase in value there. But also, you're not paying the acquisition cost for that customer as well.
Tips to Utilize to Get Better Customer Retention
Me: And I guess ideally, all companies aim to have a high customer retention. So maybe could you give our listeners maybe two or three tips that you think their companies could utilize to get better customer retention?
Will stated that the overall big tip, he would say is, give your customers value. So that's a term that's thrown around by marketers a lot, and it can be a bit meaningless.
But what he means is, always explain to them the value of that product or service to them, make sure you're not describing just the features and saying, “Yes, if you're looking for a bookshelf, this is a bookshelf, this is what it's made of, this is how many shelves it's got.”
You want to explain why that's going to be beneficial to someone and get them to really feel like this is actually the right product for them, it doesn't just meet those basic functional requirements, but it's actually going to kind of make them smile every time they see it or they're going to feel like their life's going to be better because they have that product.
And then that kind of that idea of giving value should be everywhere, really in the business. So whenever you send out email marketing, for example, you don't have to just sell, you don't have to be sending an email every week to customers, just saying, “Here are some new products.” You can give information, you can give tips, you can give advice.
He has got one client at the moment, and they're doing a series of emails which actually has no end points in mind. But basically, each email is just a research piece, it gets put into the form of maybe an infographic or some bullet points or something and it is just purely to explain what people need to be doing to feel better. It's kind of to do with how to sleep better, how to reduce pain.
So, it's just loads of tips and they get sales from those emails. So even though the email doesn't push products much, they're kind of there at the bottom, but the main focus on the of the email is that value and giving people information. And then people are happy with that, they see the value of it and then they go and buy the products.
So, kind of with that in mind, email marketing in mind, one thing that's so important is just is marketing automation. No matter what size the business is, marketing automation is just incredibly valuable, if you're a small business, you can get them set up and they will just drive revenue for you on autopilot and you don't have to be going in and manually building emails each week or every fortnight. So, it can really help with kind of resource issues as well, if you have a small team, you don't want to be wasting time doing that, when you could just set up a few email sequences and have that drive revenue for you forever, while you focus on other areas.
And if you combine that with that value piece, instead of just selling, they will just work really well for you. You can do abandoned cart emails, welcome series, post purchase, loads of different types of emails you can do.
And you can provide value at all of them. What most people tend to do with an abandoned cart is send you an email saying, “Here is the item you had in your cart, do you want to buy it?” Just a reminder, that's it.
But now, while some people will have abandoned the cart, because they got distracted or something came up and they had to deal with it, so they might come back. You've also got a huge number of people who are not fully convinced that that product is what they want to buy and that your business is the one they want to buy it from.
So, that abandoned cart email is a great way of dealing with those concerns depending on what your product is. If you're selling electrics like a washing machine or something, you could send out the manual or something or the manual for that product, something like that. So people can check all the details, all the specifications and be absolutely sure it's the right washing machine or dishwasher for them.
You can do some really simple things that don't really cost you anything to do, but could make that customer's life a lot easier, therefore more likely to convert. So, it's giving people value kind of all the time, email marketing, email automation, really, really important. And the final thing is make really, really good use of your customer service team.
So many businesses just see it as like a cost centre, it's a team that has to be there because people will contact the business so we need to pay some people to sit at a desk and just answer these emails all day.
But actually, there's so much that you can get from the customer service team, they can turn unhappy customers into happy ones, they can answer people's questions, and cause those people to actually then buy the product.
And even better, if you collect all that information and pass it on to the relevant teams, you can then make the website better, the emails better, your social media better, whatever, so that those questions actually disappear, they're no longer people coming into customer service for it, because you've actually fixed the problem and people no longer need to ask those questions.
So, he thinks there's so much value you can get out customer service and it's so easy, pretty much all you got to do is set some categories up, some tags in your customer service tool and tag each email that comes in.
And then on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on how big the business is, just review the queries that have come in. You'll pick an area once a month maybe and just pick one of the categories and just dig into what people have actually been asking, what's been going on, and then see where you can go fix that problem so that no one faces it.
App, Website or Tool that Will Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Will shared that he has quite a few. He’s got some like accounting things that are really useful. Dext is really handy, he just forward all his receipts onto it, takes care of all that.
And he thinks a really cool one is Otter.ai. So, Otter like the animal and ai. It's an AI transcription tool. So he actually uses it for his podcast, after the recording he loads the podcast episode into Otter.ai, it transcribes the podcast for him and then he can really easily pick out some quotes, pick out key points for the summary for social media posts and things like that.
He initially tried to use it to do an actual transcription of the podcast but he found that he had to do about an hour editing every single episode to tidy it up because it's not perfect, because AI is not there yet, so, he stopped doing that.
But he uses it to help him write the summary and things. It probably cuts a good 30 to 45 minutes out of the process each week. He guesses it doesn't sound much but he really likes it, he just finds it so useful.
Me: And of course, if you're cutting 30 to 45 minutes off of any activity, when you add that up, it makes a big difference.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Will
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Will shared that Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin is really, really good. It's all about standing out but being different. Having something to actually say that is unique and makes people pay attention to your business and not just view you as another website.
He thinks honestly, a lot of fashion sites are really bad at that. You've got the top tier brands which are fantastic. By top tier, he doesn't mean the publicly listed completely, the massive ones. You've got those the handful of companies that do it really, really well and stand out. But the majority of them even look almost identical on the website, there's nothing that makes them stand out. Major clothing is a little bit different, but most of them are pretty basic. So Purple Cow he would definitely recommend reading.
And the one that he read fairly recently was last year actually, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters by Joseph Sugarman, which is just absolutely fantastic.
When you look at it and you kind of read the name, you think it's going to be like a textbook or something or a workbook, it's not, it's kind of more written like a first person, almost like a story really. It's a bit like a course but not sure how to describe it, it's really, really good.
It's partly about copywriting but it's something you can take into so many other kind of aspects and areas of the business. It's all around, for example, the first sentence should make the reader wants to read the second sentence, that's the job of it, is to make you read the next bit and on and on and on, things like that.
And then there's quite a bit about kind of consumer behaviour and psychology which is really, really interesting. So, he really enjoyed that, that's just sits on his coffee table actually, quite well broken out in chapters. So it's pretty easy to just open up, read a quick tip, it takes two to three minutes, read a few tips, and then put it down. It's obviously not like a novel, where you probably want to keep up with it, quite a lot in order to make sure you don't forget the story.
What Will is Really Excited About Now!
Will shared that the one big thing that he’s super excited about at the moment is he’s actually selling his flat and buying a new place. He stated that that's not quite work related but that's all going on which is really cool. So, he’s getting a house, just kind of outside London in the UK.
But otherwise, he’s quite excited about the new direction that he’s taking his business in. He is leaking down into that subscription space, so everything he does will be more focused around subscription businesses because he likes working with them, he likes the business model, he likes the fact that you have to place that focus on retention as well and build up the lifetime value.
So, at the moment, he’s redoing his website a little bit, he’s creating some new content and new eBooks and things which will be available on the website. That's probably the big thing that's going on with the business right now. Just that slight repositioning, so that he has that purple cow moment really, he wants to stand out a bit more.
Where Can We Find Will Online
Email – www.customerswhoclick.com
Twitter – @WillLaurenson
LinkedIn – Will Laurenson
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Will Uses
When asked if he has a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Will shared that probably not to be honest, he’s not really that sort of person. One thing he finds himself saying a lot is, “We'll make it work.” Just applies to anything really.
It happens a lot when he’s cooking, he tends to forget ingredients or something and just say, “I will make it work.” Applies to the business as well, if he’s struggling with something, just got to find a way to make it work.
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The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Zach Blank is an entrepreneur, experience designer and technologist based in Portland, Oregon. As the CEO of Straightaway, Zach leads creative teams to think that the most inspired results are inevitable when design and technology conflict.
Zack has spent his career with product and experience designers, strategists, engineers, and creatives. Through these relationships, he has inspired and been inspired to push forward leading technology innovations.
Questions
Highlights
Zach’s Journey
Zach shared that like most entrepreneurs, his journey is a roller coaster and full of weird strange turns. And he likes to start back when he was in elementary school. He’s fond of the story of selling beaded necklaces and little things like that in front of his elementary school when he was in maybe the fourth or fifth grade. And that's when it all began. And obviously when you’re eight, nine years old, there's not much planning to what you're doing there. But the bug, what he was realizing was pretty intense.
And that stayed with him, he was always kind of on that hustle. It wasn't necessarily a motivation to make money; it was more maybe better described as a motivation to get reactions out of people. He was a one of those kids who acted out in class and he thrived the reaction from people and so to make something and build something and see people want to pay for that, he got a thrill out of that and a lot of pride.
So, that carried with him until now. A couple other key milestones were building an eCommerce, that was the first eCommerce rock climbing site back in the late 90s he thinks it was called Rock Air. And that was selling rock climbing equipment to rock climbing enthusiasts; he was a competitive rock climber at the time. And that was really spurred on by his dad, who was also an entrepreneur saying, “Hey, there's this thing, the internet that seems to be doing really well. And you seem to know a lot about rock climbing, there's nothing out there, let's do something.”
And that was the first real foray into it beyond the bead endeavour. And then fast forward to today, he runs a company called Straightaway that is really disrupting the logistics industry in a way that nobody else is really paying much attention to and he’s excited to explain a little bit more what he means about that.
What is Straightaway?
Zach stated that today Straightaway is a native iOS and Android application to help delivery drivers primarily be as effective and efficient with their routes. Imagine the Amazon or UPS, USPS, DHL, all of those really big carrier drivers; those people are doing up to 200 sometimes more stops a day. And first of all, that's really hard. It's hard to imagine, think for a second.
Me: When I have to make like 10 stops for the day to get work done, just a drop off and pickup it’s exhausting, much less that times 20 or 200.
Zach agreed and stated that he has never done it. He has done ride alongs with drivers, and the hustle and the tricks and all of these things that are really unimaginable. And now imagine people doing it, they're new to that job and they're looking at these 200 stop days, and maybe they know their city, maybe not, maybe they just moved there. It's near impossible.
And so they build the technology and tools to help them navigate that, that's what they are today. And what they're building currently is infrastructure to support local logistics. And that's something that there hasn't been a ton of investment in yet and something that they're very excited and bullish about.
Opportunities in the Logistics Market and Technology Being Applied
Me: So you are basically as you indicated in the logistics market, what opportunities do you see in the logistics market that probably are not existing today, especially in light of the pandemic that we're going through, have you seen that side of the business or that industry really vamped up since COVID? I'm sure, but how have you seen trends in that area? Has technology being applied more? Is there anything new that you think our listeners would benefit from based on your insights?
Zach shared that they're kind of a dark inflection point right now, there's a lot of disappointing news coming out about the treatment of drivers, it's not necessarily the overt treatment of companies setting out it's more the result. And it's the result of how the drive and demand and a pretty constant supply. So, he thinks it's easy to imagine that COVID has really disrupted and changed the logistics industry and package delivery more than anything else and food delivery is way, way up.
And there's been more delivery drivers, the infrastructure by and large hasn't changed though. So the result is, these drivers are busier than they've ever been before. And that's what they're looking at right now and they're looking at an industry that's really suffering, and one that's craving for change.
So what they're setting out to do, their focus is a little bit different. These other companies, the bottom line has nothing to do with the driver, they need to get packages delivered to customers and that's the objective. They believe that by focusing on the driver and focusing on that experience, and making that as good as it can be, then everybody will win. So the opportunity that exists right now is to instead of treating drivers like a commodity, to create tools and focus on them and empower them to be as effective in their jobs as they can be and that's their mission, and that's what they're going after.
Tips for a Driver to Deliver an Excellent Experience
Me: What are maybe one to three things that you think are critical for a driver to really deliver an excellent experience. Apart from the fact that he has to deliver the package, there's a softer side of it in terms of communicating with the customer, is it that the technology updates the customer as to where the driver is along the way almost like an Uber? Or is it a case where the driver actually makes those telephone calls, which I think is humanly impossible for him to be calling 200 different stops, two to three times throughout the day, that would probably make him go insane. But how can he add the softer side of it to enhance the customer experience so the customer feels that more a part of the process? I'm sure you know if people don't feel in the loop, it's like they don't know what's happening and that's when they get skittish and start to argue and complain.
Zach stated that there are a couple pieces to that. So, backing up a moment before getting into the driver customer interaction. The earlier part of the question, he thinks really talks to on the surface how simple the problem seems. And that's the most powerful tool we can give a driver is to get them to understand where they are, where they're going, and how to get there. And so, it's a mapping problem. And mapping problems are tough, they've gotten easier, and they continue to get easier but they're still tough when you take into account all of the shifting variables throughout the day. And by that he means traffic and road closures and other sorts of missed deliveries and change in deliveries and all those constraints that can change.
So, building the technology that can make sure a driver knows where they're going and how they're getting there. That's kind of the baseline.
And then getting into the interaction between the driver and their customer. You're absolutely right, it's a fine line, you don't want to open up a live line of communication between those two people. And that might seem counterintuitive with customer experience, generally speaking, transparency is a good thing.
In this case, it actually gets into security and safety concerns too, we don't want drivers bombarded with messages when they're driving, just simply, we don't want to distract them period.
The other is a big problem that they face is these drivers go to buildings that have security codes, entrance codes, access codes. When they can't get in the building to deliver the package, now their whole day is backed up, they're standing there, maybe they're trying to call the customer, they're trying to find a safe place to leave it, they don't want it to get stolen, they're trying to do the best thing that they can.
So, how do you build in a layer that can allow that communication? “Hey, I'm trying to get into your building to leave this package, but make sure that that code isn't accessible to bad actors and the wrong people.”
And so, they spend a lot of time thinking about that. Also, the first idea very naive from them was, well, what if we just put in a note system where one driver who gets the access code can leave it as an annotation on that stop for anybody else. Well, now as soon as someone downloads Straightaway, they can basically have a key to the city and they definitely don't want that.
Me: I never thought of it that way. But yes, that's crazy.
Zach shared that he interviewed a USPS driver a couple months ago talking about this problem specifically. And it was fascinating. He told him that, if you look hard enough at most apartment buildings or gated communities, anything that have an access like that, you'd look hard enough, you'll find the code written somewhere, he said, some will like scratch it on rocks, or like put a sharpie kind of underneath it kind of like hidden spots, but within the delivery industry, they know. And it highlights the problem and the security risk. And it's another one of those things they're super interested in solving but it's not easy to solve.
Me: Wow, that's crazy. Technology, then there are so many variables as you just indicated that are out of your direct control. Because as you said, if you indicated to the customer that you would need to have access to the building or the home or the business place in order to have the package delivered and the necessary things were not put in place, it really does push back the experience for other people who are waiting on their packages who may be home, because he or she is left stranded there trying to figure out what do I do with the package? And as a customer, you don't know some of those challenges, and most customers don't really care what you're faced with, they just want their item that they ordered. But the reality is, those are the challenges that the drivers face.
Me: What are some things that they try to do to overcome that? How do they compensate for situations like that, if they can't genuinely leave packages feeling that it's going to be safe? Because the company would now accept liability if something happens to the package if it was left in an unsafe environment?
Zach shared that the simplest thing to do is they just don't leave the package. And they take it back and the customer gets notification that it couldn't be delivered. And every company, he wants to be clear, every company has its own policy, and they don't operate on that level.
They provide the tools to allow drivers to be successful, how they operate their route, and their policies are up to them. But that's kind of the best case scenario. Worst case scenario, it gets left somewhere else where it's not supposed to and then it gets stolen. That’s just package stuff does a huge problem as most listeners know and hopefully haven't experienced, but I imagine many have. And that's what happens.
Tips for Building Strong and Efficient Teams
Me: What are some tips for building strong and efficient teams? Because I imagine even though the drivers are doing their deliveries, they have to kind of support each other. I imagine that maybe they may need to call on their co-worker for assistance, maybe accessing a location that maybe they're more experienced with. How do they ensure that they're really working collaboratively and cooperatively together versus in silos? Because “Okay, I'm just concerned with my deliveries, my truck, I'm not concerned about anybody else. Because if I help him, then I'm going to get pushed back and that's going affect my pay.” So how do you get them to work cohesively and collaboratively together?
Zach stated that if Yanique doesn't mind, he’s going to take that question and apply it to something else that he knows a little bit more about. Because he hasn't been a delivery driver on a team with years of experience, so he doesn't think he can answer that question with any authority from that perspective. But from the perspective of building technology, and building the tools that they're building for the drivers, he has a lot of experience and he can weigh in a little bit more there and some tricks that his team have employed recently that he found successful.
He considers himself a servant leader and he actually think it's the easier way of leadership, it's the more comfortable way of leadership and maybe that's just for him, but just so that everyone's on the same page, servant leadership is being there to serve your team rather than dictating orders, that's the very oversimplified version of it.
Now, taking that a step further, what he does with his team is he drives empowerment and ownership. So it's sort of like, he likes to use the example of inception. If there are ideas that they're trying to get across and it's his job to paint the vision, and then for the team to figure out and own how it is they're going to get there.
So it's his job, where are they going? And their job, how are they going to get there and then actually get them there.
And so, they break down distinct tasks and everyone on the team is an owner of that and is accountable to that and when they feel like it's their brainchild, they're much more likely and much more invested in, it's much more likely to be successful. And that's kind of a driving thesis that he focuses on a lot with his team.
App, Website or Tool that Zach Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Zach shared that this is a big plug for a partner of theirs. They use Intercom. intercom is a third party platform that enables communication with customers. So it's pretty unique within Straightaway. So they've integrated Intercom technology tool, and it allows live chat between them and all of their drivers. And when he says their drivers, it's a little bit unique, they're not their employees, they actually pay them Straightaway.
Straightaway is a subscription service, they pay them, they are their customers. And so, they have a two minute SLA to respond to anybody. If anyone is having trouble with their route, they can hit chat right in Straightaway and that's all powered by Intercom. And the other thing that that tool allows them to do is send very targeted messages to different people to help them improve their product. So we can do things like, let's send a message to all drivers who've been using Straightaway for 3 months who do on average 150 to 160 stops, do those within 9 hours, and are located in Georgia, for example. They can get very, very targeted and they can send them a message and be like, “Hey, we'd like you to try out this new feature and give us feedback.” For example. So sort of everything that they do around their customer experience is driven through Intercom. And they've been using the platform for two and a half going on three years now and it's just instrumental to their process.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Zach
When asked about books that have an impact, Zach shared that he sort of sped read Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr recently. It's a fantastic book. It's a really quick read. It explains what OKRs are which is a management framework, it stands for Objectives and Key Results and it is a goal setting framework.
And John Doerr, the author of it didn't invent it but he's probably one of the most, if not the most outspoken leaders about it. Andy Grove out at Intel, he invented it.
Anyway, the great part about it is it's all told from the perspective of all of these very, very notable companies that we all know and love, and how they implemented OKRs in their early days to be successful.
And these are companies like Google, which John Doerr was an early investor, and he was the one who brought OKRs to Google when they were still in a garage and got those up and running.
So, Measure What Matters is a fun read just if you're interested in nothing other than early day successful start-up stories, it's sort of fun. And then I think the tools in it are instrumental for building a team that's goal oriented.
He’s in Portland, Oregon, which is where Nike is from so he’s in Nike town. His wife works out there. He spent many years consulting in a previous life out there, he’s fond of the brand and he’s not done yet, but he’s pretty much through Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE which is Phil Knight, the founder’s memoir.
And that again, another fun story about how companies are built. The thing he loves about that book is Nike really started coming up in the early 70s and the stories that Phil tell in there, he could kind of equate to, if you want to be successful in business in the early 70s, all you have to do is lie.
It's a very fun read of the stories and the things that he said and how he stuck his neck out there. And some of the absurd situations and you look at it now it's like, wow, the success that Nike’s had, it's not even about humble beginnings, it's just the balls, the approach and he doesn't think that approach would work these days. And it's just fascinating to him. It's a really fun read.
What Zach is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something that he’s working on, Zach shared that it's very hard to choose one. He has so many personal ones coming up and he knows that's not the focus here. The team has been so focused in heads down on building out their fleet platform, which they have a go to market motion starting next month, he’s extremely excited about.
They're a customer obsessed organization, so everything that they build is from the focus of customers and feedback that they've gotten directly from them. So before they ever start designing, building ideating around something, they go and they talk to customers, and they throw out ideas and say, “Hey, will something like this be useful?”
So, they've been having those conversations around their fleet platform for a year now and they've been building for maybe the last 3 months on it, and another month ago before they really start getting it in the hands of their customers. And that's going to accelerate their business tremendously, up until now, they sell and have relationships direct with drivers, and that's fantastic.
And they're always going to focus on the driver but through the fleet platform, they're able to empower even more drivers in that scale, where entire fleets can onboard to Straightaway and use all of their features to not just transform the experience of one driver, but all of their drivers and thus their entire business.
Advice for Business Owners Who Lack the Constant Motivated Human Capital
Zach stated in other ways, “How do you keep your team motivated?”
He shared that it comes down to what he spoke about before, in its ownership. For the people that he works with, they're very, very passionate about what they do and that is often designing interfaces and writing code. And that can be applied to so many different problems.
So it's how do we keep them motivated on this problem, and it comes down to ownership. When people feel personally invested in something, they are going to fall asleep and wake up thinking about that. And that's how he operates anyway. And maybe it's a rosy picture that he thinks others operate that way. But he has put it into practice and he does see the results there.
Where Can We Find Zach Online
Email – zach@getstraightaway.com
Twitter – @zachianblank
LinkedIn – Zachary Blank
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Zach Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Zach stated that that's the hardest question he has gotten. He doesn't have a quote but he has a different tactic. He usually goes to motivational speakers on YouTube and he'll pull up a random clip and he'll sit there and he'll listen or he'll watch it. Some of his favourites, while polarizing, he still thinks he's a great guy is Gary Vaynerchuk.
Me: And Gary's awesome. Gary has his own podcast. Gary has quite a few books out there and he has a ton of free content that if you just need that extra oomph to get going, it will definitely provide that for you.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Robert Wallace is VP of Growth at Tallwave which works with companies like PayPal, Banner Health, and Lumin Digital on their products and customer experiences. Robert has 20+ years of experience in branding, marketing and communications programs to help drive the company's growth.
Questions
Highlights
Robert’s Journey
Robert shared that at the moment, he’s based in Scottsdale, Arizona, where his company Tallwave is located. But he’s from Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh and that is where he spent a lot of his formative years before he went to college and graduate school.
And after that, he started his professional career, jumped right into a fast growth company called Airwalk. Airwalk was a head to toe action sports manufacturer, they did everything from skateboarding shoes to head to toe snowboarding equipment, to BMX shoes, etc. And that's where he really got his first taste of what magic it is when a customer base and a brand really merge together and make that emotional bond because Airwalk had that bond at that time and they had seen some pretty meteoric growth as a consequence of that. And when he was there, he ran retail marketing.
So anything that happened at the point of sale, at the retail point of sale, and then he also put his toe in the water, he’s dating himself now but he opened up the Airwalk’s online store, which at the time was not an easy feat and was a very controversial endeavour as well, because this is back in later 90s when eCommerce wasn't as ubiquitous and there was a lot of worry about cannibalization and those type of things. But he ran all of the operations of the online business for Airwalk. And that's really how he sort of backed into to the technology world.
From there, he moved out to Boston and work for a couple startups. One was a very large eCommerce site called FarmandCountry.com where he really started his product and product meant side of his background.
And so, he ran the product there at FarmandCountry.com. And then he took that experience to a startup coming out of MIT called Afanova. They were, how would I call it, they used evolutionary algorithms that came out of MIT and they use that evolutionary algorithms to do high throughput consumer testing for brand packaging, logos, product designs, those type of things.
So think of it as an incredibly efficient, a marketing research and feedback tool. He was there early on and helped commercialize the product and the technology itself, taking it and pointing it at different markets, but the one that was particularly worthwhile at that point was the consumer packaging goods industry. So they sold into Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, Johnson and Johnson, Conagra, you name it, Nestle, the big CPG companies.
And from there he moved to Arizona and that's when he was early on in Tallwave - they’re a customer experience design company. And he was brought on early on to stand up the services side of the business, which has now grown, that was about 10 years ago. So it has grown to a much larger company where now and like as you mentioned, they work with companies as big as Amex and JP Morgan Chase all the way to well-funded startups and great up and coming companies like Lumin Digital, let's see, Emailage, Algolia, those type of startups that you may have heard of.
What he would say is the common thread in his career, he has done footwear, he has done farm equipment, he has done tech, and he has done crazy technology out of MIT and now he’s in a business that works with all sorts of companies.
But he would say the one common thread is a great brand doesn't really care about what industry you're in, it's about making that kind of emotional connection between the customer and the company itself.
And you do that by having an amazing experience from the beginning, you have a need as a customer all the way through, you bought product, use the product, maybe had to get some customer service from that company, all the way through being a repeat customer.
So thinking about all the touch points in there is a huge part of what excites him about brand experience and customer experience, which he’ll tip his hand in his bias, he thinks those two things are very close to the same thing, if not the same thing. But understanding the customer experience and what its impact can be is what he would say the common thread is through his marketing, branding and product management career so far.
Navigating Through the Customer Experience Design Space
Me: A very fullsome journey that has taken you to different industries and different touch points so you have a very diverse approach as it relates to these different industries. So, you span quite a few industries as you indicated in explaining your journey. I know you said your current organization is a customer experience design company and we are going through a global pandemic, how have you been able to navigate in this space as an organization? And have you found it difficult to get the strategy or the design across to your clients, or even to your own employees to relate to your clients, especially during this environment that we're operating?
Robert shared that they've been very fortunate, and the nature of their work, which is creative designers, marketers, consultants, those type of people, it wasn't a huge stretch for them to work remotely, so they were very fortunate in that regard.
And they were also very fortunate because they had a broad variety of clients and some were impacted more fundamentally than others during the pandemic, so that helped them as well. But they definitely have faced the customer experience situation both from their own standpoint, but also their clients. And if you think about, if you think customer experience broadly, they've almost become more acutely aware of the customer’s experience and the individuals customers experience more acutely than they ever have before because of the pandemic. So, companies have had no choice but to take a long, hard look at how they service and provide value to their customer base. And depending on the industry, of course, you've had to adjust accordingly. But he believes it hits all industries.
So they've seen what has happened in retail, for example, that everything that probably was on the customer experience roadmap so to speak, curb side pickup, buy online, pick up in store, touch less flooring, all of those things were probably on the roadmap already but the pandemic pushed it all forward by 5 years or so.
So, he thinks that's an easy one and a pretty straightforward one. But anytime you've had to think about how your customers are interacting with you, he thinks every company, and almost every person in that company has had to rethink how we do that effectively and how we provide value and where the value actually lies, versus necessarily just in person interactions.
Robert stated that Yanique had mentioned how do they actually deliver some of their work, like he said, it lends itself pretty well to a virtual world. They're able to shift a lot of their workshops online and there are some pretty cool tools that they've been using in order to do that. But he will say that that everybody's itching to have a little bit more human interaction.
Customer Experience Design From a Product Based Perspective Versus Service Based Perspective
Me: So tell us a little bit about customer experience design from a product based perspective versus service based perspective, could you share with us maybe one or two things that as a company, whether you're a big organization like let's say, a PayPal an Amazon versus a small company, because we do have quite a range of listeners that listen to this podcast, some of them hold very big positions in these large organizations and some of them who run their own business so they wear the hat on product development, marketing, social media, all of the different things. So if we were to look on it from that perspective, what are maybe one or two things that you think they really need to consider to really be above the rest as it relates to customer experience design.
Robert stated that the one thing that he would recommend regardless of whether you're a product company or a service company, and regardless of how big or small your company is, he thinks he would highly recommend that all companies look at and be very diligent and honest about what the actual customer journey is.
That is from the point that the customer realizes they have a need, and every step all the way through purchase, use, service, and repurchase, hopefully. So, every single touch point and then making sure that you understand who those user personas are that would be going through that journey.
And that's actually not demographic, per se at all, it's more behavioural when he says persona. So who are the types of people that are using your products or services, once you have really a good deal of empathy for who those personas are, and what they go through in terms of every step of the process around their customer journey, which may or may not have to do with your company specifically, but what is actually their journey as a customer.
He thinks from there, you're in a great position to see where the opportunities are, the opportunities might be, “Wow, there's a gap in the market in terms of how they are accessing our product and using it.” And in that case, you can do a lot of user experience exploration and redesign and see if you can remap how that looks in order to make the product part of that experience more seamless, easier to use, and generally more delightful for the customer.
Or if you're a services-based business, you may have a look at it and say, “Okay, how are we going to actually support all these interactions with our customers.” And knowing how they interact and the pains they're feeling, you can start to tailor what services you might provide to them, how you might provide to them, etc. So, speaking for Tallwave even so, he would say that the customer journey is the core component, the starting point he would say for any kind of company product or service.
App, Website or Tool that Robert Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Robert shared that there are a few that their company uses. But he’ll mention two and he would say that they're less do or die for him personally, but certainly for customer experience type work and the kind of work that their team does so well.
The first one is InVision, which is a design tool to make high fidelity mock ups and present them and interact with them with their clients. So they do a tonne of work in software and mobile app development and then they also do some web work as well and laying those out in InVision and then being able to show something that's high fidelity and in some cases even clickable to their clients and to even perhaps some validation work really helps them understand if they're on the right track and making sure that they're building a product that meets the market need.
The other one that he would say has really become pretty invaluable this year is a company called Miro. And that company, their tool allows them to do a whole plethora of interactive activities, from whiteboarding sessions to mind mapping to post it note work, where they put up business model canvases and interact. But it allows everybody to interact in the tool simultaneously as if they were in the room together doing that with physical post it notes and whiteboards like they used to pre pandemic.
So, every time he uses Miro, he’s very impressed with how well they've taken into consideration the users of that tool and the people that use whiteboards and workshopping and those types of things so often, like a lot of agency folks, design folks, consulting folks, that's a great example of a company that has really listened to who the personas are, what behaviour do they take place in, and then what is the journey that we go through to implement that, and they've built that into the product. So, he thinks they're actually a good example of what he was describing before.
What Robert is Really Excited About Now!
Robert shared that on a personal level, the more and more of the world keeps getting vaccinated, and he’s halfway home, meaning he got one of the two shots, so he'll soon be fully vaccinated and that is a relief, he’s sure to everybody that gets it for themselves and their loved one. So the things that come with that are more time and more quality time with family and friends. And so, that's probably his number one personal item.
On a professional level, he thinks it is when we all go through times like this, and the pandemic was unlike any other. He thinks when we come out of the other side, we've all transformed a little bit and he’s excited by what that transformation, as painful as it might have been, that transformation has opened up a lot of opportunities for all of us, especially in the business world.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Robert
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Robert shared that one he has read about 4 years ago, 5 years ago maybe, it's called Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. And he found it to be very useful and worthwhile for both his personal and professional life and it's really about identifying what really is adding value to the time that you're spending on something and when to say no, and why and being very deliberate about that. And in very simple terms, because he thinks most of us, at least at some point struggle with saying no, and being a little overburdened, but what really is important now is something that Essentialism definitely has taught him. So that's sort of a both a professional book.
And then he’s also reading a book that he’s finding fascinating, it's called Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke as in gambling bets, and it's written by a former professional poker player. And it's not at all about poker, it is about decision making, processes and using the mind-set that a professional poker player or gambler that they use and the processes they use in order to evaluate what they're doing. There's a lot of them that are very cool ways to think about the decision making we have to do in our professional lives day to day.
Where Can We Find Robert Online
Website – www.tallwave.com
LinkedIn – wallacera
Twitter - @Tallwave
Instagram - @tallwave
LinkedIn - Tallwave
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Robert Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Robert shared that it's a little long can I read it. It’s called The Man in the Arena by Teddy Roosevelt, one of their former Presidents. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
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